It would pay to remember that the initial discussion was discovery versus invention as it relates to mathematics, the important parts of which are useful abstractions. To my understanding, it centers around whether or not an abstraction existed independently before the first human to had that insight (whether discovery or invention).
A useful abstraction has the property that it virally transmits from one brain to another.
I would contend that brains are not mystical, that they work in a mechanical fashion. I.e. they are composed of neurons in a chemical bath, so to speak, capable of wiring themselves based on sensory input and computation based on that sensory input and perhaps initial wiring states. Some evidence for this is that you can take parts out of a functioning brain and it will cease being able to do certain operations, sometimes permanently.
So what then is an abstraction in that context? An abstraction is a very real wiring of our brains in a certain way. These certain wirings, referred to as "abstractions", have a viral property in that the best wirings get virally propagated amongst receptive brains, the more powerful the "abstraction" or wiring, the more virally it propagates or the more likely it is to displace other competing wirings.
I also contend that there are a (finite?) set of mathematical ideas/abstractions (brain wirings) within the sphere of all possible abstractions. This should be self-evident, as many "bad" ideas do not propagate. For example, say that you start propagating the idea that "there are no pennies". The idea may take hold in an abstract way among a few philosophy students, but at the end of the day that idea will not become common currency, (not even truly among those philsophy students) as the rest of the world knows that if you cease counting pennies (or anything of value) eventually you will become penniless and not be able to afford food.
So, the idea that there are pennies and that it is useful to be able to count them is a good idea and will displace competing ideas. There are other ideas that sweep the world from time to time (e.g. calculus, notion of forces, energy etc) that didn't exist before and spread virally once they come into being.
I would contend that if we weren't predisposed/receptive to accepting such good new ideas, they would not take hold. So in the sense that the predisposition for that particular wiring of brain existed all along, mathematics is discovered (i.e. existed before) and not invented. The discovery is of this predisposition, which has to exist otherwise the particular brain wiring that someone tries to propagate simply won't take hold.
So yes, an abstraction is a figment of our imagination. Our imagination is a property of a very real brain, and somewhere in there that brain is waiting for an inherently good idea (relative to that brain), much like a firecracker awaits a spark.
"Let's make no joke of it people. Napster raped the music industry. "
For most of the rubbish they've promoted over the years coupled with their dodgy business practices, I'd call it even.
Hard work and monetary reward are orthogonal. For all of history, artists have had to kowtow to the wishes of those with money/power (or themselves have gotten their own money/power) in order to do what they want full time and be fed. Yes, even in the last 100 years. Free software is another example - excellent results of hard work, delivered for no monetary reward.
It's quite conceivable that in a global die-off situation where we have less energy than required to run our civilization, we'll be lucky to eat let alone make money and get groupies doing what we love.
You make the assumption that the universe is not a simulation (i.e. programmed according to a specific set of rules), or that it does not follow a specific set of rules without having a programmer as such*. If that is true, then all those rules are essentially sitting there waiting to be discovered by whatever emergent intelligent life inhabits such a system.
In that situation, saying that we "invent" mathematics makes as much sense as saying an ant "invents" a spill of soda somewhere on the ground. Even a mathematical technique is in a way a discovery, because it allows our brains to work a certain way with the wiring that is common to enough people. I.e. it is an emergent property of the system and our brains, which are in turn an emergent phenomenon of the universe. The brains were wired the same way all along, it just took someone to explore enough search space to find the new efficiency.
Of course, this is one of those things that cannot really be "known" as such by our sensory apparatus. It's a lot like God. I don't believe the existence of God can be proven conclusively one way or another. However... if the universe was not a system that worked according to a specific set of rules, then there'd be a heck of a lot of engineers and scientists out of work. Put my neck under a guillotine pending on the outcome? No way. Put my money on the outcome? You bet.
The reason why science progresses the way it does is because simpler models provide some benefit. Complex models provide increasing benefit, but the returns are diminishing. For example, I might play a FPS. I make a rough mental model - learn what weapons work best against what targets, learn the map by playing it, etc. It stands to reason that anyone who studies the source code can make a better model... by investing a lot of work. They can see exact damage counts for each weapon, know exact times and locations for respawning, etc. It is a better model and given the same skill level will make them a superior player most probably. But... by no means did they invent anything, they merely discovered what was already in the source code.
*Note that the existence of quantum mechanical "God playing dice" type effects does not mean that we aren't in such a system. I don't see why God can't make calls to a random number generator. Or why his random number generator can't be perfect, since he operates outside this universe. Or maybe everything does operate according to mechanistic rules, and it is impossible to directly observe such things from within the system.
I agree. They have chosen to lie and say that they have more bandwidth than they have. So their only real option is to do something illegal but plausibly deniable. Unless stopped, their superior money extraction practices will ensure that they cannibalize the other operators until there are none left who do not shape.
Somehow humanity managed to make it to the industrial revolution without wholesale use of fossil fuel. Beyond the 1800s, many countries still managed to avoid the energy use associated with the industrial revolution. It's not particularly hard, it just takes discipline. Unfortunately discipline for most people is applied by circumstances, not internally.
In hindsight, expenditure of that energy on infrastructure that would last and be useful for a thousand years seems much more sensible than spending it on transferring people around, mostly because of laze.
A better analogy for our current situation is someone who lives on a small plot of land sufficient to feed one person. He then discovers a huge underground store of food. Rather than work any of the surrounding land, he builds a gym over his plot of land and starts pumping iron and shooting roids until he consumes all of the best tasting food, while only having 3% bodyfat. He looks pretty buff, but he needs to eat more than a small family to stay that way.
Halfway through he wonders whether having the lifestyle depicted on an action DVD was really worth it, in the end, and what he's going to do now the beef jerky has run out.
Centralizing things in such a way would be every authoritarian's wet dream. Your efficiency argument would be one of those used to achieve it. No sooner than achieving it, parts of it would start dropping down the memory hole.
It makes as much sense as having a few centralized cutlery libraries, since after all our knives and forks are only used a few minutes out of each day. Think of the efficiency!
No thanks. I like to OWN my information thankyouverymuch. Looks like I am far from alone.
You are the ISP customer equivalent of the 200kg guy who wears an overcoat with 10 deep pockets and starves himself all day before wandering into an "All you can eat!" buffet. I think it was only a matter of time before either truth in advertising started happening or the 'devil customers' as one commentor called them started getting the short end of the stick.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own comment, but the "order of magnitude" reference was to the cost of a printed summary of wikipedia, which I would estimate to be around the $50 mark.
I must confess I wonder what would happen if an accident happened to the various chip fabs, how far that would set us back technologically. I hope that they aren't all in East Asia.
Perhaps what is necessary is a book containing the bare minimum to enable us to recover digital information. I suspect that flash would have remarkable longevity if you only write once, and store it in an enclosed nitrogen atmosphere with a dessicant sachet. Sandisk looks to be bringing out some sort of 100 year archival quality flash. It's not 1000 years, but it's a step closer.
If we had a collection of books detailing exactly how to go from stone-age to creating keyboards, monitors, computers (even a primitive computer), and then everything else is stored on flash, I suspect that could be useful. An alternative might be storing a few LCD screens, a few keyboards, a few completely solid state computers and a few solar panels in your basement for just such an occasion, and put ALL the info onto digital. That way if TSHTF you just put up your solar panels. Maybe you'd need a book detailing how to make a generator for when the solar panels eventually fail, which you could then hook up to a water mill.
A major concern with printed word is density. Libraries are large and vulnerable. It's rare to discover a forgotten library as such. It's much more common to uncover a scroll or book. I'd suggest that my "civilization in a suitcase" would be much more useful, fairly inexpensive and likely to survive barbarians if there was enough redundancy. I think the cost would not be much more than an order of magnitude though. An Eee PC, an airtight bottle, a few 16Gb flash disk, some dessicant, a generator construction manual, some solar panels... probably not more than $600. You'd probably have to resolder solid-state caps on the board though.
"Might be a waste of trees, also might be a great idea if the world has an unfortunate energy crisis looming..."
Is it that expensive (in energy terms) to manufacture most of the means of storage such as HDD and flash? Even so, the energy involved with producing a library of congress versus storing one on HDD would be in favor of the HDD.
The methods of reading are getting smaller (read: use less energy in the manufacturing) and less power intensive to run. At the moment, the only problem with the miserly power consuming PCs is putting up with slower speed. That will change over the next ten years as technology improves.
Not to say that paper isn't useful. Barring fire and bugs, failure is fairly graceful and very slow as opposed to digital. But I'd be surprised if the energy crisis caused us to dispense entirely with digital.
This has to be one of the best posts I've ever read on slashdot. I'll add a few:
Cycling is costing the oil and car industries $7.6 gazillions. The clothesline is costing the coal industry $520 billion. The backyard garden is costing the farming industry $75 billion.
"What we really need to spend some money on is people: we need to attract and keep competent officers and soldiers in the Army (or the USMC, if you've given up on the Army), we need to pay these people what they're worth, give them decent benefits, and raise personnel standards throughout. That would take a lot less money than our current high-tech fixation, and would buy us a lot more security. But it's not about security, is it?"
The military industrial complex works because it channels massive amounts of public money towards ostensible military projects at a considerable margin. This margin lines the pockets of politicians, generals and defense contractors. Until the military industrial complex perceives an existential threat, they are not going to keep funneling themselves pork and not act in the interests of their own country. Meanwhile the military will continue to be "just good enough".
"We will not make any headway on this, as a profession, until we stop making rudimentary mistakes such as the ones Ranum has identified, along with a few others that are worthy additions to that list."
This is one of those things that is only understood by following the money. There is no money to be found in cures, there is only money to be found in temporary fixes. One has an income stream, the other doesn't. This is a sad fact of life.
There will be a few companies who see the advantages in running a leaner business with lower ongoing costs and do their research wrt security(e.g. reading Ranum's article). They will be successful, but they won't provide much of an income stream to lots of people wanting to be security professionals.
"But I can imagine that if actual information loss was involved, instead of just formatting or whatever, then a government that was looking for a standard to store their documents in would bork at OOXML."
If any government were inclined to bork at OOXML, the Swedish government would be first on the list.
"Fixing your own mess is an apology, not a pardon. If you deliberately direct the problem into a corner from which there is no pleasant escape, you cannot claim innocence in the hardship it produces getting free of the problem, claiming helplessness that now "there's no other choice". "
In general, I agree with your point although I'm not sure that I can totally blame MS for this one. A lot of those changes were made for the sake of ease of use for the consumer. It was a choice made at the time on the basis of desired marketshare.
MS had the security model for living in a 100 person town somewhere in Finland (i.e. none), where Unix has always had a security model more appropriate to a life in Harlem. The thing is, if you live in that Finnish small town you don't want to be triple deadbolting your door and even considering whether or not you actually need a car, let alone whether you leave it unlocked. All that stuff is work.
Once Ubuntu had caught up to MS (at least as far as I was concerned) in the usability stakes, I made the choice to suck it up and learn how to get ease of use and the security necessary to operate in an interconnected world. I'm not sure I can blame Microsoft, I think even Gates was a little late in predicting such a world. Of course, he's not getting my money any more even if he claims he has fixed the product, I want something that is designed secure from the ground up.
And I realize that Ubuntu might not be a panacea for security. Perhaps one day I will have to switch to something like OpenBSD. At least then I will have several years of Unix experience to ease the transition. And OpenBSD will have more heavily audited functionality than before, and more funding.
"old hardware could enjoy an extended life with open source drivers"
It could, and this used to be the thing to do before about 2004 or so. But if you are needing something of modest performance there is almost always something that uses next to no electricity to do it... and weighs a fraction as well (hence less total resource use). It's probably better to retire the hardware to a scrap metal dealer than cause more coal burning at the other end of your wall outlet.
Landfills are already being mined. As our remaining resources are located further beneath the earth's crust and require more energy to be expended in pulling them out, the value of the resources will increase and those landfills will be picked through more intensively. In fact, if you have attic space it can't hurt to keep the old hardware for a day when it's worth more.
"Don't expect fair apportion of credit, adherence to some glowing paragon of scientific method, or even basic integrity to abound. Most beliefs that outsiders hold about academia are false. In general, I'd advise going into the process with a healthy dose of cynicism."
"The linear storage we've seen to date has been like the Formula One race track of development, and people have come up with some very clever techniques to squeeze every scrap of use out of it, but really, we've been locked in two dimensions for all this time. Adding a third dimension is watershed stuff."
"Also note that the people who tend to use Linux are power users, and power users probably make up 5-10% of the population. Linux hasn't even got half of them, further making this statistic fairly pointless."
Since it is power users who are able to install an OS on machines owned by other plebs (both in business and in the personal sphere), they are indeed important. If you take 7.5% as the population of power users, Linux just jumped from 13% to 26%.
"Linux is in business networks today because of the same mavericks and early adopter mindset that saw more than a toy in the microcomputer. But that doesn't lead to the mainstream. As centralized IT environments pick up Linux, the rank-and-file of the business world will be exposed to it. If it meets their approval at work, it's more likely to show up at home. Although... in today's environment... it's also possible Linux already exists at home as Junior may have already started delving in to it."
That was an excellent post. I think that a lot of the young hackers/engineers grow up with linux and ask "why not?" when it comes to the corporate environment.
Youth as a general rule tend to be cash poor and time rich. For software that means either one of two things: cracked or FOSS. FOSS has a lot of advantages over cracked.
FOSS downloads instantly as opposed to a potentially long or endless search for a crack and the original install that goes with the crack. Increase this for as many times as you want to try the different commercial offerings.
FOSS involves no trojans, there is no worry about compromising your system that there is with various cracks.
There is also the community that springs up around FOSS offerings that tends to outclass the community for commercial software.
Last but not least, there is the aspect that using cracked software gives you ethical and legal worries.
So how would someone familiar with the FOSS world manage to bring in FOSS (including Linux)?For business use the exciting thing about FOSS is that once you have something working, your profit margin is going to be that little bit better than every other business paying various providers for services. That means in tough economic times you are still profitable and grow.
Another possibility is to fund development of an existing FOSS app needed by your business until it meets or exceeds commercial standards with an eye to selling support in the future as a spinoff business. I'm not sure if this has been done before, but the idea has always had an appeal to me. The classic examples would be payroll, accounting and other typically generic business applications.
"A delusional anecdote. That is not part of the average Windows home user's experience."
How right you are. Usually they just learn to live with popups and a multitude of anti-malware apps slowing down their PC. It's only the advanced or connected home users who know enough to do a complete reinstall.
Slashdot Mirror
It would pay to remember that the initial discussion was discovery versus invention as it relates to mathematics, the important parts of which are useful abstractions. To my understanding, it centers around whether or not an abstraction existed independently before the first human to had that insight (whether discovery or invention).
A useful abstraction has the property that it virally transmits from one brain to another.
I would contend that brains are not mystical, that they work in a mechanical fashion. I.e. they are composed of neurons in a chemical bath, so to speak, capable of wiring themselves based on sensory input and computation based on that sensory input and perhaps initial wiring states. Some evidence for this is that you can take parts out of a functioning brain and it will cease being able to do certain operations, sometimes permanently.
So what then is an abstraction in that context? An abstraction is a very real wiring of our brains in a certain way. These certain wirings, referred to as "abstractions", have a viral property in that the best wirings get virally propagated amongst receptive brains, the more powerful the "abstraction" or wiring, the more virally it propagates or the more likely it is to displace other competing wirings.
I also contend that there are a (finite?) set of mathematical ideas/abstractions (brain wirings) within the sphere of all possible abstractions. This should be self-evident, as many "bad" ideas do not propagate. For example, say that you start propagating the idea that "there are no pennies". The idea may take hold in an abstract way among a few philosophy students, but at the end of the day that idea will not become common currency, (not even truly among those philsophy students) as the rest of the world knows that if you cease counting pennies (or anything of value) eventually you will become penniless and not be able to afford food.
So, the idea that there are pennies and that it is useful to be able to count them is a good idea and will displace competing ideas. There are other ideas that sweep the world from time to time (e.g. calculus, notion of forces, energy etc) that didn't exist before and spread virally once they come into being.
I would contend that if we weren't predisposed/receptive to accepting such good new ideas, they would not take hold. So in the sense that the predisposition for that particular wiring of brain existed all along, mathematics is discovered (i.e. existed before) and not invented. The discovery is of this predisposition, which has to exist otherwise the particular brain wiring that someone tries to propagate simply won't take hold.
So yes, an abstraction is a figment of our imagination. Our imagination is a property of a very real brain, and somewhere in there that brain is waiting for an inherently good idea (relative to that brain), much like a firecracker awaits a spark.
"Let's make no joke of it people. Napster raped the music industry. "
For most of the rubbish they've promoted over the years coupled with their dodgy business practices, I'd call it even.
Hard work and monetary reward are orthogonal. For all of history, artists have had to kowtow to the wishes of those with money/power (or themselves have gotten their own money/power) in order to do what they want full time and be fed. Yes, even in the last 100 years. Free software is another example - excellent results of hard work, delivered for no monetary reward.
It's quite conceivable that in a global die-off situation where we have less energy than required to run our civilization, we'll be lucky to eat let alone make money and get groupies doing what we love.
You make the assumption that the universe is not a simulation (i.e. programmed according to a specific set of rules), or that it does not follow a specific set of rules without having a programmer as such*. If that is true, then all those rules are essentially sitting there waiting to be discovered by whatever emergent intelligent life inhabits such a system.
In that situation, saying that we "invent" mathematics makes as much sense as saying an ant "invents" a spill of soda somewhere on the ground. Even a mathematical technique is in a way a discovery, because it allows our brains to work a certain way with the wiring that is common to enough people. I.e. it is an emergent property of the system and our brains, which are in turn an emergent phenomenon of the universe. The brains were wired the same way all along, it just took someone to explore enough search space to find the new efficiency.
Of course, this is one of those things that cannot really be "known" as such by our sensory apparatus. It's a lot like God. I don't believe the existence of God can be proven conclusively one way or another. However... if the universe was not a system that worked according to a specific set of rules, then there'd be a heck of a lot of engineers and scientists out of work. Put my neck under a guillotine pending on the outcome? No way. Put my money on the outcome? You bet.
The reason why science progresses the way it does is because simpler models provide some benefit. Complex models provide increasing benefit, but the returns are diminishing. For example, I might play a FPS. I make a rough mental model - learn what weapons work best against what targets, learn the map by playing it, etc. It stands to reason that anyone who studies the source code can make a better model... by investing a lot of work. They can see exact damage counts for each weapon, know exact times and locations for respawning, etc. It is a better model and given the same skill level will make them a superior player most probably. But... by no means did they invent anything, they merely discovered what was already in the source code.
*Note that the existence of quantum mechanical "God playing dice" type effects does not mean that we aren't in such a system. I don't see why God can't make calls to a random number generator. Or why his random number generator can't be perfect, since he operates outside this universe. Or maybe everything does operate according to mechanistic rules, and it is impossible to directly observe such things from within the system.
If we are prevented from using cheesy pretexts in the post September 11th world, the terrorists win.
I agree. They have chosen to lie and say that they have more bandwidth than they have. So their only real option is to do something illegal but plausibly deniable. Unless stopped, their superior money extraction practices will ensure that they cannibalize the other operators until there are none left who do not shape.
Somehow humanity managed to make it to the industrial revolution without wholesale use of fossil fuel. Beyond the 1800s, many countries still managed to avoid the energy use associated with the industrial revolution. It's not particularly hard, it just takes discipline. Unfortunately discipline for most people is applied by circumstances, not internally.
In hindsight, expenditure of that energy on infrastructure that would last and be useful for a thousand years seems much more sensible than spending it on transferring people around, mostly because of laze.
A better analogy for our current situation is someone who lives on a small plot of land sufficient to feed one person. He then discovers a huge underground store of food. Rather than work any of the surrounding land, he builds a gym over his plot of land and starts pumping iron and shooting roids until he consumes all of the best tasting food, while only having 3% bodyfat. He looks pretty buff, but he needs to eat more than a small family to stay that way.
Halfway through he wonders whether having the lifestyle depicted on an action DVD was really worth it, in the end, and what he's going to do now the beef jerky has run out.
Centralizing things in such a way would be every authoritarian's wet dream. Your efficiency argument would be one of those used to achieve it. No sooner than achieving it, parts of it would start dropping down the memory hole.
It makes as much sense as having a few centralized cutlery libraries, since after all our knives and forks are only used a few minutes out of each day. Think of the efficiency!
No thanks. I like to OWN my information thankyouverymuch. Looks like I am far from alone.
You are the ISP customer equivalent of the 200kg guy who wears an overcoat with 10 deep pockets and starves himself all day before wandering into an "All you can eat!" buffet. I think it was only a matter of time before either truth in advertising started happening or the 'devil customers' as one commentor called them started getting the short end of the stick.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own comment, but the "order of magnitude" reference was to the cost of a printed summary of wikipedia, which I would estimate to be around the $50 mark.
I must confess I wonder what would happen if an accident happened to the various chip fabs, how far that would set us back technologically. I hope that they aren't all in East Asia.
Perhaps what is necessary is a book containing the bare minimum to enable us to recover digital information. I suspect that flash would have remarkable longevity if you only write once, and store it in an enclosed nitrogen atmosphere with a dessicant sachet. Sandisk looks to be bringing out some sort of 100 year archival quality flash. It's not 1000 years, but it's a step closer.
If we had a collection of books detailing exactly how to go from stone-age to creating keyboards, monitors, computers (even a primitive computer), and then everything else is stored on flash, I suspect that could be useful. An alternative might be storing a few LCD screens, a few keyboards, a few completely solid state computers and a few solar panels in your basement for just such an occasion, and put ALL the info onto digital. That way if TSHTF you just put up your solar panels. Maybe you'd need a book detailing how to make a generator for when the solar panels eventually fail, which you could then hook up to a water mill.
A major concern with printed word is density. Libraries are large and vulnerable. It's rare to discover a forgotten library as such. It's much more common to uncover a scroll or book. I'd suggest that my "civilization in a suitcase" would be much more useful, fairly inexpensive and likely to survive barbarians if there was enough redundancy. I think the cost would not be much more than an order of magnitude though. An Eee PC, an airtight bottle, a few 16Gb flash disk, some dessicant, a generator construction manual, some solar panels... probably not more than $600. You'd probably have to resolder solid-state caps on the board though.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/27/sandisk-secretly-concocting-read-only-memory-for-archival-use/
"Might be a waste of trees, also might be a great idea if the world has an unfortunate energy crisis looming ..."
Is it that expensive (in energy terms) to manufacture most of the means of storage such as HDD and flash? Even so, the energy involved with producing a library of congress versus storing one on HDD would be in favor of the HDD.
The methods of reading are getting smaller (read: use less energy in the manufacturing) and less power intensive to run. At the moment, the only problem with the miserly power consuming PCs is putting up with slower speed. That will change over the next ten years as technology improves.
Not to say that paper isn't useful. Barring fire and bugs, failure is fairly graceful and very slow as opposed to digital. But I'd be surprised if the energy crisis caused us to dispense entirely with digital.
This has to be one of the best posts I've ever read on slashdot. I'll add a few:
Cycling is costing the oil and car industries $7.6 gazillions.
The clothesline is costing the coal industry $520 billion.
The backyard garden is costing the farming industry $75 billion.
"What we really need to spend some money on is people: we need to attract and keep competent officers and soldiers in the Army (or the USMC, if you've given up on the Army), we need to pay these people what they're worth, give them decent benefits, and raise personnel standards throughout. That would take a lot less money than our current high-tech fixation, and would buy us a lot more security. But it's not about security, is it?"
The military industrial complex works because it channels massive amounts of public money towards ostensible military projects at a considerable margin. This margin lines the pockets of politicians, generals and defense contractors. Until the military industrial complex perceives an existential threat, they are not going to keep funneling themselves pork and not act in the interests of their own country. Meanwhile the military will continue to be "just good enough".
"We will not make any headway on this, as a profession, until we stop making rudimentary mistakes such as the ones Ranum has identified, along with a few others that are worthy additions to that list."
This is one of those things that is only understood by following the money. There is no money to be found in cures, there is only money to be found in temporary fixes. One has an income stream, the other doesn't. This is a sad fact of life.
There will be a few companies who see the advantages in running a leaner business with lower ongoing costs and do their research wrt security(e.g. reading Ranum's article). They will be successful, but they won't provide much of an income stream to lots of people wanting to be security professionals.
"But I can imagine that if actual information loss was involved, instead of just formatting or whatever, then a government that was looking for a standard to store their documents in would bork at OOXML."
If any government were inclined to bork at OOXML, the Swedish government would be first on the list.
"Even then, if 5000 MS coders blatantly write and approve each other how would you propose to handle it?"
Exactly. The GP advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting corruption....
"Fixing your own mess is an apology, not a pardon. If you deliberately direct the problem into a corner from which there is no pleasant escape, you cannot claim innocence in the hardship it produces getting free of the problem, claiming helplessness that now "there's no other choice". "
In general, I agree with your point although I'm not sure that I can totally blame MS for this one. A lot of those changes were made for the sake of ease of use for the consumer. It was a choice made at the time on the basis of desired marketshare.
MS had the security model for living in a 100 person town somewhere in Finland (i.e. none), where Unix has always had a security model more appropriate to a life in Harlem. The thing is, if you live in that Finnish small town you don't want to be triple deadbolting your door and even considering whether or not you actually need a car, let alone whether you leave it unlocked. All that stuff is work.
Once Ubuntu had caught up to MS (at least as far as I was concerned) in the usability stakes, I made the choice to suck it up and learn how to get ease of use and the security necessary to operate in an interconnected world. I'm not sure I can blame Microsoft, I think even Gates was a little late in predicting such a world. Of course, he's not getting my money any more even if he claims he has fixed the product, I want something that is designed secure from the ground up.
And I realize that Ubuntu might not be a panacea for security. Perhaps one day I will have to switch to something like OpenBSD. At least then I will have several years of Unix experience to ease the transition. And OpenBSD will have more heavily audited functionality than before, and more funding.
"old hardware could enjoy an extended life with open source drivers"
It could, and this used to be the thing to do before about 2004 or so. But if you are needing something of modest performance there is almost always something that uses next to no electricity to do it... and weighs a fraction as well (hence less total resource use). It's probably better to retire the hardware to a scrap metal dealer than cause more coal burning at the other end of your wall outlet.
Landfills are already being mined. As our remaining resources are located further beneath the earth's crust and require more energy to be expended in pulling them out, the value of the resources will increase and those landfills will be picked through more intensively. In fact, if you have attic space it can't hurt to keep the old hardware for a day when it's worth more.
"Don't expect fair apportion of credit, adherence to some glowing paragon of scientific method, or even basic integrity to abound. Most beliefs that outsiders hold about academia are false. In general, I'd advise going into the process with a healthy dose of cynicism."
Oh yes. Before anything, please read:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
It will explain everything you need to know.
"The linear storage we've seen to date has been like the Formula One race track of development, and people have come up with some very clever techniques to squeeze every scrap of use out of it, but really, we've been locked in two dimensions for all this time. Adding a third dimension is watershed stuff."
Whoa, whoa -- slow down, egghead!
"Also note that the people who tend to use Linux are power users, and power users probably make up 5-10% of the population. Linux hasn't even got half of them, further making this statistic fairly pointless."
Since it is power users who are able to install an OS on machines owned by other plebs (both in business and in the personal sphere), they are indeed important. If you take 7.5% as the population of power users, Linux just jumped from 13% to 26%.
"Linux is in business networks today because of the same mavericks and early adopter mindset that saw more than a toy in the microcomputer. But that doesn't lead to the mainstream. As centralized IT environments pick up Linux, the rank-and-file of the business world will be exposed to it. If it meets their approval at work, it's more likely to show up at home. Although... in today's environment... it's also possible Linux already exists at home as Junior may have already started delving in to it."
That was an excellent post. I think that a lot of the young hackers/engineers grow up with linux and ask "why not?" when it comes to the corporate environment.
Youth as a general rule tend to be cash poor and time rich. For software that means either one of two things: cracked or FOSS. FOSS has a lot of advantages over cracked.
FOSS downloads instantly as opposed to a potentially long or endless search for a crack and the original install that goes with the crack. Increase this for as many times as you want to try the different commercial offerings.
FOSS involves no trojans, there is no worry about compromising your system that there is with various cracks.
There is also the community that springs up around FOSS offerings that tends to outclass the community for commercial software.
Last but not least, there is the aspect that using cracked software gives you ethical and legal worries.
So how would someone familiar with the FOSS world manage to bring in FOSS (including Linux)?For business use the exciting thing about FOSS is that once you have something working, your profit margin is going to be that little bit better than every other business paying various providers for services. That means in tough economic times you are still profitable and grow.
Another possibility is to fund development of an existing FOSS app needed by your business until it meets or exceeds commercial standards with an eye to selling support in the future as a spinoff business. I'm not sure if this has been done before, but the idea has always had an appeal to me. The classic examples would be payroll, accounting and other typically generic business applications.
"A delusional anecdote. That is not part of the average Windows home user's experience."
How right you are. Usually they just learn to live with popups and a multitude of anti-malware apps slowing down their PC. It's only the advanced or connected home users who know enough to do a complete reinstall.
Thank you for so eloquently stating the situation.
Of people I know who have shifted away from Windows, the most common I've seen is malware requiring constant reinstalls.
They asked the operator.