Has Valve somehow managed to erect barriers to entry into the market, or in any way block competitors from starting a competing service? Is there in fact anything unethical or unfair going on?
Valve pioneered this area. Now they are reaping the rewards. Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to start up their own, competing service.
But hey, he's entitled to complain about it if it makes him feel better. That's less work that trying to compete with Valve.
The government simple cannot and should not "roll over" for business. That has simply got to stop.
Okay. Please name several instances where the Washington state government has "rolled over" for Microsoft; please provide references so I can check up on them.
I am not aware of any "rolling over" by the state government. Microsoft is a Washington company. It pays its Washington business tax, its various real estate taxes (and those are freaking huge because Microsoft drove up all the property values remotely close to its headquarters), and the employees of Microsoft live and shop in the state, thus paying real estate taxes, sales taxes, and restaurant taxes. In short, Microsoft has brought a whole bunch of money into Washington state's coffers. I'm sure the state would like some more, but Microsoft is not illegally evading taxes, as far as I know.
And I don't hold it immoral for Microsoft to game the system in exactly the same ways that every other company does. As others have noted, how many companies are incorporated in Delaware?
If Microsoft had to move, it would be EXTREMELY painful and it would probably be an active news story for the next months following that.
You cannot use that particular threat forever; eventually the company gets tired of it, and actually moves.
Case in point: Boeing. Boeing did finally get fed up with Washington state, and they moved their headquarters to Chicago. Airplanes are still assembled in Washington, at least for now. Boeing executives publicly claimed that they wanted to be in a different time zone, but I don't believe that; for years, Boeing had been negotiating with the Washington state government, trying to get a better deal, without success; Illinois offered them enough to make it worth the move.
Boeing actually moving their headquarters was a big shock here, and I would not be surprised if Washington state would be willing to do a certain amount of "rolling over" if Boeing threatened to move the airplane assembly as well. That also goes for Microsoft: I'll bet the state government would do quite a lot of "rolling over" if that is what it took to stop Microsoft from leaving the state.
Let'm go...if they actually would go. Other states will see this and, if they manage to grow a pair, will also tax them...
I'm afraid that's not how it works. Other states would go "OMFG we have a chance to get freaking Microsoft in our state" and they would start thinking about all the tax revenues that would be shifting from Washington to their state. They would start offering deals to Microsoft.
And it is just as legal for Microsoft to shop around for the best state to move to, as it is for you to shop around for where you want to live. I, and no doubt many other people, prefer living in Washington state rather than Oregon because Washington doesn't have a state income tax, and Oregon does. Am I a bad person for not moving to Oregon and paying Oregon income tax? Am I somehow cheating Oregon out of the taxes they could have had if only I had moved there? Is Microsoft a bad company for legally shifting money to another state where the tax situation is more favorable?
This could be turned around, of course: black hats can find vulnerabilities in Apache much easier because the source code is available for analysis, and they still won't share the ones they find.
On balance, though, the security consequences are a win for open source. If it's easier for white hats to find and close holes, the product can be more secure.
But you can't be more secure than 100%, and in theory a closed-source system could be 100% secure, so in theory both open and closed source could be equally secure. But I still view the open development of Apache and Linux as an advantage.
Also, did anyone actually do a full security audit of Apache 2.x? I know that OpenBSD guys did one for 1.x, and even then only for their own fork of it.
I'm not sure. I'm not any kind of security expert, just an opinionated guy.
I dare say that discrepancy between IIS/Win and Apache/Linux might have more to do with the fact that the latter is free, while the former costs quite a bit.
Well, of course. But the cost of your site being 0wned would exceed the savings, so I doubt anyone would deploy Apache if it were insecure.
If you ask me, the only combo I would really trust is OpenBSD, and the Apache 1.x fork that comes in the base system for that.
No doubt about it, if you want the most secure system you can possibly get, use OpenBSD. But Linux is secure enough for me, just as IIS 7 seems to be secure enough for you.
Copyright issues have become increasingly difficult for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago, but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
Copyright issues would become easy again if copyrights ever expired and the copyrighted material entered the public domain. Of course, Hollywood has worked to try to keep that from happening. The lesson Hollywood will take away from this is: get Congress to overhaul copyright law so that nothing ever expires.
Or did they already manage that, and the Kirby properties are only expiring because they are old?
I know that copyrights used to need to be registered, and could be renewed only once, and the total life of a copyright was thus limited. Now copyright is automatic and lasts for the life of the creator of the work plus 95 years. (Likely this will be extended again, right around the time Mickey Mouse would enter the public domain... 2023, I think.)
[IIS7] has 2 vulnerabilities in its entire lifetime, and only one of those is remote.
Well, 2 vulnerabilities that MS has acknowledged. IIS is still a closed-source app, so third-party security researchers can't audit it and announce vulnerabilities as they can with Apache. Meanwhile, the black hats don't share the ones they find.
IIS7 is no doubt better than IIS6 and perhaps is decent. But if I wanted to run a web server, I'd run Apache 1.x on Debian Stable; I don't trust the combination of Windows+IIS as much as I trust Linux+Apache. And it looks like actual web sysadmins agree with me, because according to Netcraft, in August 2009, Apache had twice the server share as Microsoft (46% vs. 23% if I read that chart correctly; it looks like the ruled lines represent 8% increments, which seems strange).
Greg K-H's public comments about the code being abandoned had the desired effect: people at Microsoft got in touch with him again. The same thing happened with code contributed by several other companies:
Although not hesitant to point a finger at Microsoft, Kroah-Hartman refused to name these other companies, claiming it would be "rude" to disclose private e-mail information.
"But what's the big deal here?" he asked. "This is the normal development process happening, and a company learning how to deal with it. It happens every single day with all companies who are new to the Linux kernel development process. Sure, some do it better than others, but in the end, it's all good."
This is Microsoft (and other companies) learning how to deal with kernel development. Greg K-H has a good attitude about it, so let's not build a mountain out of this. Perhaps Microsoft will do better next time.
Not everything and everyone associated with Microsoft deserves abuse and scorn. Save it for their next DRM initiative or something.
Dude, you didn't even READ the X-33 article did you?
I skimmed it.
"NASA had invested $912 million in the project before cancellation and Lockheed Martin a further $357 million."
thats around around 1/8th of what NASA has spent so far on this new 40 billion dollar jaunt.
Yes, I agree that approximately $1 billion is about 1/8th of approximately $8 billion. I'm not sure what your point is, though. $1 billion or $8 billion, if it's wasted, it's wasted.
Also, I would say that part of the cost was opportunity cost: NASA didn't work on anything else at the time, and we have no Shuttle replacement right now.
Considering that the prototype was over 80% complete, with aerospike engines tested and everything, I would *hardly* call that nothing to show for.
Then I strongly disagree with you. The program was cancelled as a failure, after a long series of technical difficulties including flight instability and excess weight. It was supposed to lead to a replacement for the Shuttle; it did not do this. Yes, some new technology was successfully developed, but I rather wish that flying hardware actually in service now had been developed.
NASA snubbed the Delta Clipper program, which was actually flying a prototype. Phase I of the DC/X program cost $12 million, and Phase II cost $60 million; add that up, and the DC/X had spent less than one-tenth of a billion dollars, and was flying a prototype.
NASA never liked the DC/X, and refused to spend $50 million to build another DC/X prototype after the only DC/X prototype was destroyed (and I blame NASA for destroying it). NASA claimed "funding constraints" were the reason they could not build another DC/X, which is why I'm so angry that they spent almost a billion dollars on X-33, only to cancel it with absolutely no flying hardware.
What would have happened had the DC/X program been given a billion dollars? I think we would have had our "space pickup truck" long before now.
the program cancellation was controversial (and in my mind stupid) considering that they were well over 80% of the way there.
I trust you can agree with me that it failed to provide an actual replacement for the Shuttle. I refuse to count that as anything other than a failure.
This is why I'm proposing a bounty that is paid only on success, not on sincere plans, or prototypes that were 80% of the way to flying.
I'll bet that the $8 billion they have spent on new launch systems must have lead to some improved technology somewhere, and there will be some benefit from it. But $8 billion has been spent and yet the future of NASA's manned spaceflight looks bleak. So, what should we do now? (My answer is not "just give NASA a whole bunch more money and hope that this time they get it right.")
Not quite. According to Henry Spencer, what we lost was not the plans, but the know-how to turn the plans into hardware.
There is a whole lot of undocumented know-how. Suppose you want to build some part. What kind of heat treatment was used on the metal? Are you certain you know the exact alloy used, or what might change by using a slightly different alloy? How did the master machinist shape the part... did he have some sort of custom jig, and if so, what did it look like? It's too late to ask him; that was 40 years ago, and you probably can't find him now.
We could, with great effort and cost, recover all this missing know-how, being certain to test everything at every step to make sure we know what we are really doing. And if we did all that, the end result would be a 40-year-old design. We know more now, and we could improve on the design; and the amount of time and money it would cost to reproduce the Saturn V is probably similar to what it would cost to develop a new launch system.
In any event, what we really need is not another Saturn V. We need a cheap and reliable way to put small payloads into orbit over and over and over. A "space pickup truck" if you will. You can do almost everything by sending up modules and assembling them in orbit, and anything you can't do, you could handle with a few heavy-lift launches; and then use the pickup truck to send fuel, supplies, and crew up.
First, I believe it is possible to go to the moon and return, because it was done about 40 years ago. Are you with me so far? If you aren't sure, consider that technology has actually improved just a little bit since then, and the laws of physics are about the same.
Second, I believe that 20 billion dollars is still kind of a lot of money. The Ansari X Prize was only 10 million, and it accomplished its goal of getting privately-built launch vehicles into space.
Third, various companies are already working on launch systems. The existence of a lucrative bounty ought to help motivate them and/or help them get funding, and very well might cause new ones to form. In addition to the value of the prize itself, the publicity surrounding the project ought to increase the chances a company can get funding.
Political ideology?
If you want to call it that... I do believe that the private sector can still innovate and produce new things, and I do believe that competition is more productive than a giant entrenched bureaucracy.
There, I have answered your questions. My turn:
Do you believe that private organizations cannot build launch systems? Do you believe that the NASA bureaucracy can get things done faster than an assortment of competing organizations? Do you believe that the only good engineer all work for NASA or that NASA has some sort of secret knowledge that nobody else has?
Now, consider that all the money NASA spent on X-33 was wasted; the X-33 was canceled as a total failure. Do you believe that private organizations would do worse than that?
NASA has spent almost $8 billion of a planned $40 billion to develop systems for a return to the Moon.
Yeah. And, when NASA spent all the money on the X-33 they ended up with nothing to show for it.
Post-Apollo, NASA has a poor track record of developing new launch systems. I'm certain there are many bright and dedicated engineers at NASA, but as a collective organization, NASA just sucks at developing new launch systems.
I propose we take the remaining $32 billion that NASA hasn't spent yet, and deposit it in a bank somewhere. The first American company that lands human beings on the moon, keeps them there for one day, and returns them to Earth can collect $20 billion. The second company that does this can collect $10 billion. The third can have the last $2 billion.
No money will be paid for designs or plans, no matter how sincere. Only results will be paid.
It would be even better still if there were bounties for a useful space station (with fuel tanks and other infrastructure) to encourage solving the problem in a long-term way, rather than an Apollo-style pure race to the moon. These bounties should all be tax-free, of course.
I am 100% confident that bounties like this would result in America developing manned spaceflight capability. If we keep giving money to NASA bureaucrats to spread around to the military-industrial complex, I am less than 100% confident.
Finally, HR 3200 embodies what is commonly known in software engineering as a "big bang" approach to systems development. In other words, HR 3200 attempts a massive and ill-understood (and/or ill-specified) modification to the nation's health care system (roughly 1/6th of the economy) in one fell swoop. As such, it really represents the worst excesses of the waterfall development lifecycle, with deployment being hard or impossible to reverse.
Heh. HR 3200 "represents the worst excesses of the waterfall development lifecycle"? I love it.
It's a valid point, though. I am deeply suspicious of "big bang" plans in either software development or legislation.
So, how do we apply "agile" software development practices to legislation? All I can think of is: develop a new system in the small (pick one or a few states to try it) and establish a time box, and evaluate whether the legislation accomplishes its goals, then decide whether to spread it to more states, scrap it and start over, or what. That seems like a great idea to me.
President Obama has promised that, if passed, this will simultaneously expand health care coverage to everyone; improve the care everyone gets; and lower costs for everyone. Once a few states have adopted this and all those promises prove out to be true, then everyone will see how well it works and there won't be a bitter political battle to adopt it.
Unless of course it turns out that the promises are not in fact kept, and it doesn't work as planned. Then we will have been spared from putting 1/6 of our economy through a disaster.
So Vim isn't the ideal editor today -- it was designed around limitations of earlier computers and when you remove those limitations you can get rid of stuff like modality that's not really necessary when you have a mouse.
Sorry, but no. vim is modal because it is a version of vi. vi is modal, not because it was somehow necessary, but because it was designed that way, for good reasons.
Emacs is not modal, and it's about as old as vi. So being modal was not necessary in an editor.
The reason vi editors are modal is to make it possible to do a whole bunch of editing just by hitting comfortable keys. It's trivial to flip back and forth between editing mode and command mode, and vi users do it without thinking.
When you are entering text, you are entering text, and you don't need much in the way of editing; and even in text entry mode, vi editors do give you some simple commands (such as backspace to erase previous character). vi has also always allowed you to bind keys in text entry mode to run arbitrary commands using macros (although original vi had no macro language, just keystroke sequences).
When you are in command mode, you can do huge amounts of editing without ever hitting the Ctrl or Alt keys. For example, you can transpose two characters by hitting the 'x' key and the 'p' key. As a touch-typist, I love the fact that I don't need to hit "chords" involving Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9 or whatever.
Is it better to be modal or modeless? There is no objective answer. Emacs users would probably say that being modeless is a virtue; vi users would probably say they prefer a modal editor. I've already given my answer: the modes in vi make it easier and faster to enter editing commands, so I prefer vi to Emacs.
So lots of people get attached to modality and hjkl navigation because they spent time learning them, just like people get attached to the emacs OS, even though neither are, today, what anyone designing a new editor would make.
I'm here to tell you that I like modality and hjkl navigation because I like them, not because I want to somehow validate the time I invested in learning them. If we ever had a sort of race where the goal is to edit a bunch of documents in the least time, I'll bet I could do pretty well, because I'm a fast typist and I grok the vi command set at a deep level.
I'm not sure I'd agree that nobody could possibly design a new editor like vi or Emacs. If they were trying to design a GUI editor, they would probably follow the Human Interface Guidelines for their chosen GUI environment; but if someone were designing a new editor with the goal of running on any dumb terminal or terminal emulator, they very well might follow a similar design to one of vi or Emacs.
I'll concede there must be people out there who stick with vi or Emacs out of horrible inertia, not informed preference, but don't think that all or even most vi or Emacs users are like that.
I don't think either is very Unixy -- they're each platforms unto themselves at this point.
Personal opition as to whether they qualify as Unixy. vi has the ability to shell out, run a program, and slurp in the results into an editing buffer; or pipe part or all of an editing buffer through an external filter. vi has a small set of core commands that snap together like lego blocks, each core command doing one thing well, and the combination being hugely powerful. Seems Unixy enough to me.
Example of the "lego blocks": transposing two characters isn't a command in vi. 'x' deletes the character under the cursor, but anything deleted is put on a sort of clipboard (the "delete buffer"). 'p' inserts the delete buffer at the cursor. So, "xp" deletes a character, then inserts it after the character that followed it; transposing two characters. Not only do you not need to memorize a special command for transposing, but you can extend the same principle to transpose two words, two lines, two sentences, two paragraphs...
I'm not sure if this is a great idea or not, but I have to say that if they do it right, a digital library would make it easier to find things through serendipity. Consider digital music.
Before the Internet, the way to find new music were limited: magazines, word-of-mouth, or hearing it on the radio. If you went to cool record stores with cool people working there, they could tell you about cool new music; or maybe you could listen to a radio show with a DJ who would find new stuff and share it with you. Well, those ways still exist, but now we have the Internet, and I'm finding way more new music than I ever used to. Rhapsody and Pandora have found me a ton of new stuff that I would never have found back before the Internet. And I can flip through the tunes quickly; if I just hate a song, I stop listening to it and find another one, which drives up my hit rate on stuff I actually like (compared with radio, where the DJ is going to play the whole song whether you like it or not).
Even Amazon.com can be a way to find new stuff. "Customers who bought this also bought..."
So, imagine a crazy Web 2.0 sort of card catalog, with "People who checked out this book also checked out..." Imagine the card catalog having user reviews.
One major way I have found new books is the "our staff recommends" shelf. Well, in a paper books library, they can only put four or five books there, and the books change regularly; with some sort of web recommendation page, you could click on a link and go back to see other books previously recommended by the same librarian.
And every library can have a complete collection of every public-domain book. (Now if we could only modify the copyright system so that stuff starts going into the public domain again...)
The biggest down-side I would see in this would be DRM. Paper books just don't have a DRM issue. If you want to make a photocopy of a page under fair-use, you can just do it. Of course DRM doesn't actually work, other than to let people sue you under the DMCA; if we can't get the DMCA repealed, it would be cool if we could get an amendment to it that specifically allowed defeating a DRM system in order to have fair-use of the material.
Also, don't forget that you don't need a Kindle to read an ebook. Any portable device with a decent screen could be used. I read most of my books on my ancient battered Palm PDA. (For reading in bright summer sun, or for long plane flights, I have an even-more-ancient Handspring Visor; still works great for reading books.) It probably won't be long before everyone is walking around with a phone that can be used as a book reader.
You may object that you love the feel of paper in your hands, the sound as you turn the pages, the smell of the library dust, or some other part of the paper experience that ebooks just won't give you. That's fine, and I'm not proposing to destroy all the paper books. But I'll point out to you that with digital books, the library would never need to get rid of old books to make room for new books, and even a small library could have as many books as a big library. For me, books are about the content, not about the paper.
To the extent that ebooks keep people from accessing the content of the books, I'm against them. So I'm against Draconian DRM, and I'm against funky proprietary formats that require you to buy a $500 reader. But overall I like ebooks.
When Windows 95 was released, there really was a whole bunch of crazy hoopla. Stores were having midnight sales, where they would open at midnight just to sell Windows 95 as soon as they were legally permitted. People were standing in lines outside the stores. (Heck, I read in the newspaper that one guy stood in the line and bought Windows 95, without even owning a computer. He just wanted to join in the hoopla!)
When I read this, my first thought was: they are trying to gin up the Windows 95 excitement again. And my second thought was: good luck with that. The world is a different place now; Windows 7 looks like a nice upgrade to Windows, but it's really hard to imagine people getting really excited about it. And many of the people who could potentially get excited by the improvements in Windows 7 have been running Mac OS X for years now. I predict the hoped-for tidal wave of excitement won't materialize.
You know, though, I have friends who work at Microsoft. If they can get some free goodies by having a "Windows 7" party, and if they invite me, I'll go. Any excuse for a party with my friends is good enough for me. I'll still run Linux on most of my computers, just like I do now, but why wouldn't I go to a party? (In addition to the whole computer thing, we could watch movies! An obvious choice: Se7en.)
There's a lot of "if's" between today and cargo on orbit.
Point well taken.
The minor impact of that and the handful of DoD missions where the DoD used the Shuttle instead of buying a booster from private industry, is long over.
I do wish I had simply said something like "The more competition, the better I'll like it" and left it at that. That wasn't one of my more useful comments.
We have no fewer than three private companies flying things to orbit in the US alone - Boeing, Lockmart, and Orbital Sciences. Prices to orbit haven't noticeably budged.
Give it time. Several of the new private companies are working on reusable launch systems. When someone develops a launch system where they can reuse the same vehicles over and over (without man-years of labor to overhaul them between flights) to the point where fuel costs become the major expense of space travel, that will change things completely.
As long as we are flying expendable rockets, it will be difficult to really reduce launch costs; a rocket has to fly perfectly on its very first (and only) flight, and then is completely used up. This is not a recipe for low cost. How much would air travel cost if every 747 flew only once and was destroyed in the process?
Plus you'd have to have the cost of launches come down a LOT to make dozens of rockets cheaper than one or two expensive ones.
That's just it. I'm saying that the cost of launches is going to come down a LOT.
Besides, it would be really, really hard to do an Apollo-style Mars mission, where you just build one freaking huge rocket and it carries everything up. It would be much better to use a heavy-lift launcher to put some kind of Mars travel spacecraft into orbit, then lots of cheap small launchers to ferry up fuel and supplies for it.
I'd really like to see us return to the moon this way, too. Build an Earth/Moon shuttle, fuel it up, and have it travel back and forth from the moon, never itself landing. Once you have that reusable shuttle, you can amortize its cost over multiple trips... eventually going to the moon could become routine and inexpensive.
By all means, I'm cheering for SpaceX to have great success, but them doing so doesn't accelerate the timetable for manned Mars missions, IMHO.
Not just SpaceX. Cheap access to space, caused by the innovations of SpaceX and the other companies; and even by the competition between those companies. I think cheap access to space is a game changer, and I expect the game to change dramatically before that proposed 2037 launch date for a Mars mission.
I apologize for unclear writing. I didn't mean to imply that NASA was still trying to handle all launch needs. I was referring to the dark days before the Commercial Space Launch Act:
From the beginning of the Shuttle program until the Challenger disaster in 1986, it was the policy of the United States that NASA be the public-sector provider of U.S. launch capacity to the world market.[4] Initially NASA subsidized satellite launches with the intention of eventually pricing Shuttle service for the commercial market at long-run marginal cost.
Clearly private launch is not killed now, given that SpaceX is taking over resupply of the ISS! But it would have been rather difficult to get SpaceX funded in 1983 or so, would it not?
My first-ever conversation with Geoffrey Landis and it's about my vague, unclear writing? Pardon me, I need to go weep in a corner.
I'm happy to read that SpaceX will be taking over resupply. We should encourage private launch companies.
Having NASA handle all launch needs was putting all our eggs in a single basket, and killed any chance for private launch. It's already expensive and hard to develop a new space launch system; to do it when NASA is offering launches at cut-rate prices was impossible. (NASA has always been embarrassed by how expensive the Shuttle actually was, and never charged anywhere near a profitable amount for flying things on the Shuttle.)
Once we have several private companies flying things to orbit, we can expect the cost to orbit to come down drastically. And once you are in orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.
NASA is talking about a return to Mars 30 years from now. That's crazy; once we have cheap launch, we can assemble a Mars mission in pieces, rather than launching the whole mission on one giant rocket (as we did the Apollo missions). If you can cheaply and reliably launch dozens of launch vehicles, each ferrying up a tonne of fuel, you could make a Mars mission with lots of gear, lots of fuel, lots of safety margin. steveha
It remains to be seen when this will prove to be economical. It's not economical today, but if they start working on it today, maybe we will have many profitable powersats orbiting Earth within, say, 30 years. (Just in time for nuclear fusion, right?)
The good thing about this is that it doesn't require any new technology. We can do this with just some engineering. The biggest problem with this is that launch costs are currently astronomical to send anything to orbit; but I think that we are going to see a renaissance in space launch systems. Surely one of the private space companies (Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.) will get a practical reusable launch system to work; and that will completely change the game for launch costs.
If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware it's Nintendo.
I'm not sure this is true. Isn't the console market sort of a "not much profit on the razor but huge profit on the razor blades" sort of market? In other words, given that the Wii has been a huge smash success, aren't they cleaning up on game licensing revenues? Given how many units they have out in the market, do they really care if sales slow down a bit?
[Microsoft may] move heavily towards digital distribution.
Yes, everyone will. A problem, though, is that if DVDs aren't big enough for a game in the next few years, then downloading that game will take forever with most available broadband.
They could go to a Steam-like system where a game can trickle down the wire over the course of weeks, but that implies getting customers to pre-order the games for download delivery, and the customers leaving their video games powered up and connected to broadband. It will happen someday, but I don't think Microsoft can afford to leave an optical drive off the next gen. Maybe the gen after that...
They probably don't want to put a Blu-ray drive in their next machine as it increases the cost and justifies Sony's position.
Increases costs? Yes, but if they are limited by DVD capacity, it's the only solution.
Justifies Sony's position? Perhaps, but if they need it, they need it. Microsoft rarely makes "cut off nose to spite face" decisions.
I don't foresee Microsoft using a PPC chip in their next console either
Now that's the most interesting comment you made. Why not? On what do you base this comment? Have developers expressed dissatisfaction with PPC? If not PPC, then what? Does Microsoft want to start buying Intel?
From what you are saying, you are a lawyer who wants to get work done with a computer; you just want it to work. That argues for Mac OS X or Linux, IMHO.
If you buy a Windows laptop, it will come with all the drivers you need, pre-installed, and dialed in perfectly. It will also likely come with a whole bunch of useless junk helpfully pre-installed. It will also come with antivirus and antispyware software, and that is essential. So you can ignore the useless junk or strip it off, and make sure to keep your virus definitions updated. In Windows, everything you install has its own update manager, so from time to time Windows Update will need to run, the antivirus updater will need to run, Java (if you have it) has a really annoying updater... And Heaven help you if your machine does get some sort of malware that copies confidential data off your computer. And, it's getting harder to get old reliable XP; if you want to run Vista, you need a seriously powerful computer. (It is probably possible to turn off some background processes and strip out some cruft to make Vista better; and Windows 7 may be better; but for now, Vista can make a decent computer run slow.)
Note that the worst case scenario for Windows is a laptop being carried around and used in lots of different locations (coffee shops via WiFi, etc.) without a hardware firewall; that is the most likely way to get your computer infected with malware. Do you do this? If so, that argues against Windows.
With Mac OS X, you pay a bit more but everything Just Works. Fit and finish are mostly excellent. Lots of little things annoy me, so it hasn't seduced me away from Linux; for example, the fonts seem blurry to me, the Finder doesn't seem as friendly as the file manager I'm used to (Nautilus in GNOME), etc. But if you want a computer that Just Works, and especially if you don't have good tech support, this is a great way to go.
With Linux, once the computer is correctly set up and working, you can just use it and use it and it Just Works. It may be some effort to get it there. But my wife is very much a non-techie, and she is perfectly content with her Ubuntu desktop that I set up for her. It really does Just Work.
So, if you are interested in Linux, one way to go would be to buy a complete computer with Linux pre-installed and supported by some company. For example, if you want a laptop, you could buy one from Emperor Linux. (I haven't bought from them, but they have been around for years, so they must be doing something right.)
The thing I like about Linux is that it always keeps getting better. It can be a rocky process (PulseAudio has had some serious growing pains, especially in my favorite distribution, Ubuntu) but overall it's working. Linux isn't getting slower as it improves; it stays the same or gets better, overall. (A modern distribution should run anywhere XP will run, and probably faster.)
So, get Linux if you like the way it looks and works (I find the GNOME desktop to be quite soothing and efficient and I love the virtual desktops feature). If you are a busy non-techie, get a turnkey pre-configured system, even if you need to pay more.
Get Mac OS X if you like the way it looks and works. It's not that much more expensive and it Just Works.
Get Windows if you don't mind having to do a lot of administration work (updating virus definitions, running virus scans, etc.). You are definitely swimming with the currents if you adopt the most popular OS available; you can get help and support anywhere. (But you are more likely to need that help and support, IMHO. I have friends and family who come to me with computer problems, and I don't much enjoy cleaning malware off an infected Windows computer, but I've had to do it plenty.)
I have a serious question about diesel cars in general. My understanding is that diesels take longer to warm up than gasoline engines; and in fact you can leave a diesel parked and idling for hours without it warming up significantly. (If you drive it, it warms up in 15-20 minutes.)
Note that the above is what I have read; I have not tested this myself.
My question is: if I bought a diesel (say, a Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen), would I have trouble defogging the windows in the morning? I live in the Seattle area, and there are several months in a row where the temperatures will be cold while the humidity is high, and the windows will be completely fogged. I'm interested in buying a diesel, but I'm seriously worried about this issue.
Volkswagen diesel cars generally come with heated seats, and heated windshield washer fluid. These would be all you need in a truly cold place, where all the water froze out of the air and there is no fog on the windows (only, possibly, snow and ice). Or if you lived in a truly warm place, like southern California, it would rarely get cold enough to fog windows. Or if you park your car in a garage, that might be enough to keep the windows from fogging.
But, parking my car outside in the Seattle area winters, I worry that a diesel is not for me. It's a little bit silly, because for most of the year this won't be an issue, but I'm worried about this.
If they put electric heaters in the blowers that defog the windscreen, that would sort this right out. But I don't think anything like that is available.
I'm sorry; I had typed in a long list of places with explanations, and then something happened, the UPS beeped, and the computer shut down. Just as I was about to post it. Heck darn. I had hit "preview" several times, so there's a copy in Slashdot's database until it expires, but I don't think it's possible for me to recover it. (Slashdot editors, a feature suggestion: when we are editing an article, give us a unique URL; when Firefox comes back up, our article will be pulled back out of Slashdot's database instead of being orphaned.)
All I can do for you right now is just type in the bare list. Google will find them and you can read about them.
Columbus, Ohio: Center of Science and Industry (COSI)
Monterey, California: Monterey Bay Aquarium
Berkeley, California: Lawrence Hall of Science
San Francisco, California: Exploratorium
Portland, Oregon: Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)
Seattle, Washington: Pacific Science Center
And in Canada:
Vancouver, B.C.: Science World
Victoria, B.C.: Royal BC Museum (awesome natural history museum) (and while you are there, Victoria Bug Zoo)
Edmonton, Alberta: Telus World of Science (maybe not worth going all the way over there)
Not exactly what you asked for:
Eatonville, Washington: Northwest Trek (I really love this place)
I love the idea of your trip, and I hope you have a great time!
Google can now use On2 codecs such as VP8 in YouTube, for free. No more royalties. But the royalties are not that expensive so this isn't likely a big deal for them. (Google could save more money by using smarter settings on their H.264 encoder.)
Do you think Google will seriously try to make money by selling codecs? I don't. $100 million is small change to Google, and if that's all it cost to buy On2, then the On2 revenue stream must be trivial by Google's standards.
So, Google won't save much money and won't make much money by buying On2. I think they are up to something else.
What I think is more interesting is the possibility that Google will give On2's latest technology to the Theora guys. Just as Sun started giving away OpenOffice.org after buying StarOffice, it's likely that Google will give away some or all of the On2 technology.
Despite being based on technology that is nearly a decade old, Theora is already fairly competitive for web video. (Theora is better than H.263, which has actually been used for years, so it's difficult to argue that Theora is not usable for web video.) Now imagine that Theora gets the best technology bits from a modern On2 codec, and integrates those, such that Theora really is as good as H.264, or even better.
Now imagine that this improved Theora is bundled with Google Chrome and Firefox, bundled with Android, and bundled with Google Chrome OS. Within a few years, Theora could become firmly established everywhere as a baseline standard that anyone can use.
Google likes things that make it easier for Google's customers to use Google's services. They like their customers not being locked into proprietary technologies not owned by Google. It will be impossible for Google to take the market away from H.264, but it is very possible that they could make sure their customers can always easily access their services.
Note that this scenario utterly depends on the new Theora being free software. Google could try to sell a proprietary On2 codec and gain a significant market share; well, if they try it, all I can say is "good luck with that." It's hard to push out an established standard; to do it, you need to be significantly better, not just a little bit better. Better technology, with Google behind it, completely free (and with no need to even keep track of how many codecs you ship out) might succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Has Valve somehow managed to erect barriers to entry into the market, or in any way block competitors from starting a competing service? Is there in fact anything unethical or unfair going on?
Valve pioneered this area. Now they are reaping the rewards. Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to start up their own, competing service.
But hey, he's entitled to complain about it if it makes him feel better. That's less work that trying to compete with Valve.
steveha
That's all I really need to know. It looks interesting, it might be cool, but I'll never buy one.
steveha
The government simple cannot and should not "roll over" for business. That has simply got to stop.
Okay. Please name several instances where the Washington state government has "rolled over" for Microsoft; please provide references so I can check up on them.
I am not aware of any "rolling over" by the state government. Microsoft is a Washington company. It pays its Washington business tax, its various real estate taxes (and those are freaking huge because Microsoft drove up all the property values remotely close to its headquarters), and the employees of Microsoft live and shop in the state, thus paying real estate taxes, sales taxes, and restaurant taxes. In short, Microsoft has brought a whole bunch of money into Washington state's coffers. I'm sure the state would like some more, but Microsoft is not illegally evading taxes, as far as I know.
And I don't hold it immoral for Microsoft to game the system in exactly the same ways that every other company does. As others have noted, how many companies are incorporated in Delaware?
If Microsoft had to move, it would be EXTREMELY painful and it would probably be an active news story for the next months following that.
You cannot use that particular threat forever; eventually the company gets tired of it, and actually moves.
Case in point: Boeing. Boeing did finally get fed up with Washington state, and they moved their headquarters to Chicago. Airplanes are still assembled in Washington, at least for now. Boeing executives publicly claimed that they wanted to be in a different time zone, but I don't believe that; for years, Boeing had been negotiating with the Washington state government, trying to get a better deal, without success; Illinois offered them enough to make it worth the move.
http://money.cnn.com/2001/03/21/companies/boeing/
Boeing actually moving their headquarters was a big shock here, and I would not be surprised if Washington state would be willing to do a certain amount of "rolling over" if Boeing threatened to move the airplane assembly as well. That also goes for Microsoft: I'll bet the state government would do quite a lot of "rolling over" if that is what it took to stop Microsoft from leaving the state.
Let'm go...if they actually would go. Other states will see this and, if they manage to grow a pair, will also tax them...
I'm afraid that's not how it works. Other states would go "OMFG we have a chance to get freaking Microsoft in our state" and they would start thinking about all the tax revenues that would be shifting from Washington to their state. They would start offering deals to Microsoft.
And it is just as legal for Microsoft to shop around for the best state to move to, as it is for you to shop around for where you want to live. I, and no doubt many other people, prefer living in Washington state rather than Oregon because Washington doesn't have a state income tax, and Oregon does. Am I a bad person for not moving to Oregon and paying Oregon income tax? Am I somehow cheating Oregon out of the taxes they could have had if only I had moved there? Is Microsoft a bad company for legally shifting money to another state where the tax situation is more favorable?
steveha
This could be turned around, of course: black hats can find vulnerabilities in Apache much easier because the source code is available for analysis, and they still won't share the ones they find.
On balance, though, the security consequences are a win for open source. If it's easier for white hats to find and close holes, the product can be more secure.
But you can't be more secure than 100%, and in theory a closed-source system could be 100% secure, so in theory both open and closed source could be equally secure. But I still view the open development of Apache and Linux as an advantage.
Also, did anyone actually do a full security audit of Apache 2.x? I know that OpenBSD guys did one for 1.x, and even then only for their own fork of it.
I'm not sure. I'm not any kind of security expert, just an opinionated guy.
I dare say that discrepancy between IIS/Win and Apache/Linux might have more to do with the fact that the latter is free, while the former costs quite a bit.
Well, of course. But the cost of your site being 0wned would exceed the savings, so I doubt anyone would deploy Apache if it were insecure.
If you ask me, the only combo I would really trust is OpenBSD, and the Apache 1.x fork that comes in the base system for that.
No doubt about it, if you want the most secure system you can possibly get, use OpenBSD. But Linux is secure enough for me, just as IIS 7 seems to be secure enough for you.
steveha
Copyright issues have become increasingly difficult for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago, but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
Copyright issues would become easy again if copyrights ever expired and the copyrighted material entered the public domain. Of course, Hollywood has worked to try to keep that from happening. The lesson Hollywood will take away from this is: get Congress to overhaul copyright law so that nothing ever expires.
Or did they already manage that, and the Kirby properties are only expiring because they are old?
I know that copyrights used to need to be registered, and could be renewed only once, and the total life of a copyright was thus limited. Now copyright is automatic and lasts for the life of the creator of the work plus 95 years. (Likely this will be extended again, right around the time Mickey Mouse would enter the public domain... 2023, I think.)
steveha
[IIS7] has 2 vulnerabilities in its entire lifetime, and only one of those is remote.
Well, 2 vulnerabilities that MS has acknowledged. IIS is still a closed-source app, so third-party security researchers can't audit it and announce vulnerabilities as they can with Apache. Meanwhile, the black hats don't share the ones they find.
IIS7 is no doubt better than IIS6 and perhaps is decent. But if I wanted to run a web server, I'd run Apache 1.x on Debian Stable; I don't trust the combination of Windows+IIS as much as I trust Linux+Apache. And it looks like actual web sysadmins agree with me, because according to Netcraft, in August 2009, Apache had twice the server share as Microsoft (46% vs. 23% if I read that chart correctly; it looks like the ruled lines represent 8% increments, which seems strange).
steveha
Greg K-H's public comments about the code being abandoned had the desired effect: people at Microsoft got in touch with him again. The same thing happened with code contributed by several other companies:
This is Microsoft (and other companies) learning how to deal with kernel development. Greg K-H has a good attitude about it, so let's not build a mountain out of this. Perhaps Microsoft will do better next time.
Not everything and everyone associated with Microsoft deserves abuse and scorn. Save it for their next DRM initiative or something.
steveha
Dude, you didn't even READ the X-33 article did you?
I skimmed it.
"NASA had invested $912 million in the project before cancellation and Lockheed Martin a further $357 million."
thats around around 1/8th of what NASA has spent so far on this new 40 billion dollar jaunt.
Yes, I agree that approximately $1 billion is about 1/8th of approximately $8 billion. I'm not sure what your point is, though. $1 billion or $8 billion, if it's wasted, it's wasted.
Also, I would say that part of the cost was opportunity cost: NASA didn't work on anything else at the time, and we have no Shuttle replacement right now.
Considering that the prototype was over 80% complete, with aerospike engines tested and everything, I would *hardly* call that nothing to show for.
Then I strongly disagree with you. The program was cancelled as a failure, after a long series of technical difficulties including flight instability and excess weight. It was supposed to lead to a replacement for the Shuttle; it did not do this. Yes, some new technology was successfully developed, but I rather wish that flying hardware actually in service now had been developed.
NASA snubbed the Delta Clipper program, which was actually flying a prototype. Phase I of the DC/X program cost $12 million, and Phase II cost $60 million; add that up, and the DC/X had spent less than one-tenth of a billion dollars, and was flying a prototype.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/dc-x.htm
NASA never liked the DC/X, and refused to spend $50 million to build another DC/X prototype after the only DC/X prototype was destroyed (and I blame NASA for destroying it). NASA claimed "funding constraints" were the reason they could not build another DC/X, which is why I'm so angry that they spent almost a billion dollars on X-33, only to cancel it with absolutely no flying hardware.
What would have happened had the DC/X program been given a billion dollars? I think we would have had our "space pickup truck" long before now.
the program cancellation was controversial (and in my mind stupid) considering that they were well over 80% of the way there.
I trust you can agree with me that it failed to provide an actual replacement for the Shuttle. I refuse to count that as anything other than a failure.
This is why I'm proposing a bounty that is paid only on success, not on sincere plans, or prototypes that were 80% of the way to flying.
I'll bet that the $8 billion they have spent on new launch systems must have lead to some improved technology somewhere, and there will be some benefit from it. But $8 billion has been spent and yet the future of NASA's manned spaceflight looks bleak. So, what should we do now? (My answer is not "just give NASA a whole bunch more money and hope that this time they get it right.")
steveha
we lost all the plans for Apollo and the Saturn 5
Not quite. According to Henry Spencer, what we lost was not the plans, but the know-how to turn the plans into hardware.
There is a whole lot of undocumented know-how. Suppose you want to build some part. What kind of heat treatment was used on the metal? Are you certain you know the exact alloy used, or what might change by using a slightly different alloy? How did the master machinist shape the part... did he have some sort of custom jig, and if so, what did it look like? It's too late to ask him; that was 40 years ago, and you probably can't find him now.
We could, with great effort and cost, recover all this missing know-how, being certain to test everything at every step to make sure we know what we are really doing. And if we did all that, the end result would be a 40-year-old design. We know more now, and we could improve on the design; and the amount of time and money it would cost to reproduce the Saturn V is probably similar to what it would cost to develop a new launch system.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/
In any event, what we really need is not another Saturn V. We need a cheap and reliable way to put small payloads into orbit over and over and over. A "space pickup truck" if you will. You can do almost everything by sending up modules and assembling them in orbit, and anything you can't do, you could handle with a few heavy-lift launches; and then use the pickup truck to send fuel, supplies, and crew up.
steveha
What gives you this confidence?
What an odd question.
First, I believe it is possible to go to the moon and return, because it was done about 40 years ago. Are you with me so far? If you aren't sure, consider that technology has actually improved just a little bit since then, and the laws of physics are about the same.
Second, I believe that 20 billion dollars is still kind of a lot of money. The Ansari X Prize was only 10 million, and it accomplished its goal of getting privately-built launch vehicles into space.
Third, various companies are already working on launch systems. The existence of a lucrative bounty ought to help motivate them and/or help them get funding, and very well might cause new ones to form. In addition to the value of the prize itself, the publicity surrounding the project ought to increase the chances a company can get funding.
Political ideology?
If you want to call it that... I do believe that the private sector can still innovate and produce new things, and I do believe that competition is more productive than a giant entrenched bureaucracy.
There, I have answered your questions. My turn:
Do you believe that private organizations cannot build launch systems? Do you believe that the NASA bureaucracy can get things done faster than an assortment of competing organizations? Do you believe that the only good engineer all work for NASA or that NASA has some sort of secret knowledge that nobody else has?
Now, consider that all the money NASA spent on X-33 was wasted; the X-33 was canceled as a total failure. Do you believe that private organizations would do worse than that?
steveha
Yeah. And, when NASA spent all the money on the X-33 they ended up with nothing to show for it.
Post-Apollo, NASA has a poor track record of developing new launch systems. I'm certain there are many bright and dedicated engineers at NASA, but as a collective organization, NASA just sucks at developing new launch systems.
I propose we take the remaining $32 billion that NASA hasn't spent yet, and deposit it in a bank somewhere. The first American company that lands human beings on the moon, keeps them there for one day, and returns them to Earth can collect $20 billion. The second company that does this can collect $10 billion. The third can have the last $2 billion.
No money will be paid for designs or plans, no matter how sincere. Only results will be paid.
It would be even better still if there were bounties for a useful space station (with fuel tanks and other infrastructure) to encourage solving the problem in a long-term way, rather than an Apollo-style pure race to the moon. These bounties should all be tax-free, of course.
I am 100% confident that bounties like this would result in America developing manned spaceflight capability. If we keep giving money to NASA bureaucrats to spread around to the military-industrial complex, I am less than 100% confident.
steveha
From the article:
Heh. HR 3200 "represents the worst excesses of the waterfall development lifecycle"? I love it.
It's a valid point, though. I am deeply suspicious of "big bang" plans in either software development or legislation.
So, how do we apply "agile" software development practices to legislation? All I can think of is: develop a new system in the small (pick one or a few states to try it) and establish a time box, and evaluate whether the legislation accomplishes its goals, then decide whether to spread it to more states, scrap it and start over, or what. That seems like a great idea to me.
President Obama has promised that, if passed, this will simultaneously expand health care coverage to everyone; improve the care everyone gets; and lower costs for everyone. Once a few states have adopted this and all those promises prove out to be true, then everyone will see how well it works and there won't be a bitter political battle to adopt it.
Unless of course it turns out that the promises are not in fact kept, and it doesn't work as planned. Then we will have been spared from putting 1/6 of our economy through a disaster.
Agile law development for the win.
steveha
So Vim isn't the ideal editor today -- it was designed around limitations of earlier computers and when you remove those limitations you can get rid of stuff like modality that's not really necessary when you have a mouse.
Sorry, but no. vim is modal because it is a version of vi. vi is modal, not because it was somehow necessary, but because it was designed that way, for good reasons.
Emacs is not modal, and it's about as old as vi. So being modal was not necessary in an editor.
The reason vi editors are modal is to make it possible to do a whole bunch of editing just by hitting comfortable keys. It's trivial to flip back and forth between editing mode and command mode, and vi users do it without thinking.
When you are entering text, you are entering text, and you don't need much in the way of editing; and even in text entry mode, vi editors do give you some simple commands (such as backspace to erase previous character). vi has also always allowed you to bind keys in text entry mode to run arbitrary commands using macros (although original vi had no macro language, just keystroke sequences).
When you are in command mode, you can do huge amounts of editing without ever hitting the Ctrl or Alt keys. For example, you can transpose two characters by hitting the 'x' key and the 'p' key. As a touch-typist, I love the fact that I don't need to hit "chords" involving Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9 or whatever.
Is it better to be modal or modeless? There is no objective answer. Emacs users would probably say that being modeless is a virtue; vi users would probably say they prefer a modal editor. I've already given my answer: the modes in vi make it easier and faster to enter editing commands, so I prefer vi to Emacs.
So lots of people get attached to modality and hjkl navigation because they spent time learning them, just like people get attached to the emacs OS, even though neither are, today, what anyone designing a new editor would make.
I'm here to tell you that I like modality and hjkl navigation because I like them, not because I want to somehow validate the time I invested in learning them. If we ever had a sort of race where the goal is to edit a bunch of documents in the least time, I'll bet I could do pretty well, because I'm a fast typist and I grok the vi command set at a deep level.
I'm not sure I'd agree that nobody could possibly design a new editor like vi or Emacs. If they were trying to design a GUI editor, they would probably follow the Human Interface Guidelines for their chosen GUI environment; but if someone were designing a new editor with the goal of running on any dumb terminal or terminal emulator, they very well might follow a similar design to one of vi or Emacs.
I'll concede there must be people out there who stick with vi or Emacs out of horrible inertia, not informed preference, but don't think that all or even most vi or Emacs users are like that.
I don't think either is very Unixy -- they're each platforms unto themselves at this point.
Personal opition as to whether they qualify as Unixy. vi has the ability to shell out, run a program, and slurp in the results into an editing buffer; or pipe part or all of an editing buffer through an external filter. vi has a small set of core commands that snap together like lego blocks, each core command doing one thing well, and the combination being hugely powerful. Seems Unixy enough to me.
Example of the "lego blocks": transposing two characters isn't a command in vi. 'x' deletes the character under the cursor, but anything deleted is put on a sort of clipboard (the "delete buffer"). 'p' inserts the delete buffer at the cursor. So, "xp" deletes a character, then inserts it after the character that followed it; transposing two characters. Not only do you not need to memorize a special command for transposing, but you can extend the same principle to transpose two words, two lines, two sentences, two paragraphs...
Anyway, the short version is:
I'm not sure if this is a great idea or not, but I have to say that if they do it right, a digital library would make it easier to find things through serendipity. Consider digital music.
Before the Internet, the way to find new music were limited: magazines, word-of-mouth, or hearing it on the radio. If you went to cool record stores with cool people working there, they could tell you about cool new music; or maybe you could listen to a radio show with a DJ who would find new stuff and share it with you. Well, those ways still exist, but now we have the Internet, and I'm finding way more new music than I ever used to. Rhapsody and Pandora have found me a ton of new stuff that I would never have found back before the Internet. And I can flip through the tunes quickly; if I just hate a song, I stop listening to it and find another one, which drives up my hit rate on stuff I actually like (compared with radio, where the DJ is going to play the whole song whether you like it or not).
Even Amazon.com can be a way to find new stuff. "Customers who bought this also bought..."
So, imagine a crazy Web 2.0 sort of card catalog, with "People who checked out this book also checked out..." Imagine the card catalog having user reviews.
One major way I have found new books is the "our staff recommends" shelf. Well, in a paper books library, they can only put four or five books there, and the books change regularly; with some sort of web recommendation page, you could click on a link and go back to see other books previously recommended by the same librarian.
And every library can have a complete collection of every public-domain book. (Now if we could only modify the copyright system so that stuff starts going into the public domain again...)
The biggest down-side I would see in this would be DRM. Paper books just don't have a DRM issue. If you want to make a photocopy of a page under fair-use, you can just do it. Of course DRM doesn't actually work, other than to let people sue you under the DMCA; if we can't get the DMCA repealed, it would be cool if we could get an amendment to it that specifically allowed defeating a DRM system in order to have fair-use of the material.
Also, don't forget that you don't need a Kindle to read an ebook. Any portable device with a decent screen could be used. I read most of my books on my ancient battered Palm PDA. (For reading in bright summer sun, or for long plane flights, I have an even-more-ancient Handspring Visor; still works great for reading books.) It probably won't be long before everyone is walking around with a phone that can be used as a book reader.
You may object that you love the feel of paper in your hands, the sound as you turn the pages, the smell of the library dust, or some other part of the paper experience that ebooks just won't give you. That's fine, and I'm not proposing to destroy all the paper books. But I'll point out to you that with digital books, the library would never need to get rid of old books to make room for new books, and even a small library could have as many books as a big library. For me, books are about the content, not about the paper.
To the extent that ebooks keep people from accessing the content of the books, I'm against them. So I'm against Draconian DRM, and I'm against funky proprietary formats that require you to buy a $500 reader. But overall I like ebooks.
steveha
When Windows 95 was released, there really was a whole bunch of crazy hoopla. Stores were having midnight sales, where they would open at midnight just to sell Windows 95 as soon as they were legally permitted. People were standing in lines outside the stores. (Heck, I read in the newspaper that one guy stood in the line and bought Windows 95, without even owning a computer. He just wanted to join in the hoopla!)
When I read this, my first thought was: they are trying to gin up the Windows 95 excitement again. And my second thought was: good luck with that. The world is a different place now; Windows 7 looks like a nice upgrade to Windows, but it's really hard to imagine people getting really excited about it. And many of the people who could potentially get excited by the improvements in Windows 7 have been running Mac OS X for years now. I predict the hoped-for tidal wave of excitement won't materialize.
You know, though, I have friends who work at Microsoft. If they can get some free goodies by having a "Windows 7" party, and if they invite me, I'll go. Any excuse for a party with my friends is good enough for me. I'll still run Linux on most of my computers, just like I do now, but why wouldn't I go to a party? (In addition to the whole computer thing, we could watch movies! An obvious choice: Se7en.)
steveha
There's a lot of "if's" between today and cargo on orbit.
Point well taken.
The minor impact of that and the handful of DoD missions where the DoD used the Shuttle instead of buying a booster from private industry, is long over.
I do wish I had simply said something like "The more competition, the better I'll like it" and left it at that. That wasn't one of my more useful comments.
We have no fewer than three private companies flying things to orbit in the US alone - Boeing, Lockmart, and Orbital Sciences. Prices to orbit haven't noticeably budged.
Give it time. Several of the new private companies are working on reusable launch systems. When someone develops a launch system where they can reuse the same vehicles over and over (without man-years of labor to overhaul them between flights) to the point where fuel costs become the major expense of space travel, that will change things completely.
As long as we are flying expendable rockets, it will be difficult to really reduce launch costs; a rocket has to fly perfectly on its very first (and only) flight, and then is completely used up. This is not a recipe for low cost. How much would air travel cost if every 747 flew only once and was destroyed in the process?
steveha
Plus you'd have to have the cost of launches come down a LOT to make dozens of rockets cheaper than one or two expensive ones.
That's just it. I'm saying that the cost of launches is going to come down a LOT.
Besides, it would be really, really hard to do an Apollo-style Mars mission, where you just build one freaking huge rocket and it carries everything up. It would be much better to use a heavy-lift launcher to put some kind of Mars travel spacecraft into orbit, then lots of cheap small launchers to ferry up fuel and supplies for it.
I'd really like to see us return to the moon this way, too. Build an Earth/Moon shuttle, fuel it up, and have it travel back and forth from the moon, never itself landing. Once you have that reusable shuttle, you can amortize its cost over multiple trips... eventually going to the moon could become routine and inexpensive.
By all means, I'm cheering for SpaceX to have great success, but them doing so doesn't accelerate the timetable for manned Mars missions, IMHO.
Not just SpaceX. Cheap access to space, caused by the innovations of SpaceX and the other companies; and even by the competition between those companies. I think cheap access to space is a game changer, and I expect the game to change dramatically before that proposed 2037 launch date for a Mars mission.
steveha
I apologize for unclear writing. I didn't mean to imply that NASA was still trying to handle all launch needs. I was referring to the dark days before the Commercial Space Launch Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_spaceflight#American_deregulation
Clearly private launch is not killed now, given that SpaceX is taking over resupply of the ISS! But it would have been rather difficult to get SpaceX funded in 1983 or so, would it not?
My first-ever conversation with Geoffrey Landis and it's about my vague, unclear writing? Pardon me, I need to go weep in a corner.
steveha
I'm happy to read that SpaceX will be taking over resupply. We should encourage private launch companies.
Having NASA handle all launch needs was putting all our eggs in a single basket, and killed any chance for private launch. It's already expensive and hard to develop a new space launch system; to do it when NASA is offering launches at cut-rate prices was impossible. (NASA has always been embarrassed by how expensive the Shuttle actually was, and never charged anywhere near a profitable amount for flying things on the Shuttle.)
Once we have several private companies flying things to orbit, we can expect the cost to orbit to come down drastically. And once you are in orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System.
NASA is talking about a return to Mars 30 years from now. That's crazy; once we have cheap launch, we can assemble a Mars mission in pieces, rather than launching the whole mission on one giant rocket (as we did the Apollo missions). If you can cheaply and reliably launch dozens of launch vehicles, each ferrying up a tonne of fuel, you could make a Mars mission with lots of gear, lots of fuel, lots of safety margin.
steveha
I see that someone tagged this story "fried". Well, no.
The microwave beam from a solar power satellite is not strong enough to fry things. It's stronger than sunlight but not scary strong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Safety
The land used for a power-receiving rectenna can still be used for raising cattle, without the cattle becoming super-powered mutants or getting cooked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Earth-based_infrastructure
It remains to be seen when this will prove to be economical. It's not economical today, but if they start working on it today, maybe we will have many profitable powersats orbiting Earth within, say, 30 years. (Just in time for nuclear fusion, right?)
The good thing about this is that it doesn't require any new technology. We can do this with just some engineering. The biggest problem with this is that launch costs are currently astronomical to send anything to orbit; but I think that we are going to see a renaissance in space launch systems. Surely one of the private space companies (Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.) will get a practical reusable launch system to work; and that will completely change the game for launch costs.
steveha
If anyone needs to come out with a new piece of hardware it's Nintendo.
I'm not sure this is true. Isn't the console market sort of a "not much profit on the razor but huge profit on the razor blades" sort of market? In other words, given that the Wii has been a huge smash success, aren't they cleaning up on game licensing revenues? Given how many units they have out in the market, do they really care if sales slow down a bit?
[Microsoft may] move heavily towards digital distribution.
Yes, everyone will. A problem, though, is that if DVDs aren't big enough for a game in the next few years, then downloading that game will take forever with most available broadband.
They could go to a Steam-like system where a game can trickle down the wire over the course of weeks, but that implies getting customers to pre-order the games for download delivery, and the customers leaving their video games powered up and connected to broadband. It will happen someday, but I don't think Microsoft can afford to leave an optical drive off the next gen. Maybe the gen after that...
They probably don't want to put a Blu-ray drive in their next machine as it increases the cost and justifies Sony's position.
Increases costs? Yes, but if they are limited by DVD capacity, it's the only solution.
Justifies Sony's position? Perhaps, but if they need it, they need it. Microsoft rarely makes "cut off nose to spite face" decisions.
I don't foresee Microsoft using a PPC chip in their next console either
Now that's the most interesting comment you made. Why not? On what do you base this comment? Have developers expressed dissatisfaction with PPC? If not PPC, then what? Does Microsoft want to start buying Intel?
steveha
The best choice for you depends on what you want.
From what you are saying, you are a lawyer who wants to get work done with a computer; you just want it to work. That argues for Mac OS X or Linux, IMHO.
If you buy a Windows laptop, it will come with all the drivers you need, pre-installed, and dialed in perfectly. It will also likely come with a whole bunch of useless junk helpfully pre-installed. It will also come with antivirus and antispyware software, and that is essential. So you can ignore the useless junk or strip it off, and make sure to keep your virus definitions updated. In Windows, everything you install has its own update manager, so from time to time Windows Update will need to run, the antivirus updater will need to run, Java (if you have it) has a really annoying updater... And Heaven help you if your machine does get some sort of malware that copies confidential data off your computer. And, it's getting harder to get old reliable XP; if you want to run Vista, you need a seriously powerful computer. (It is probably possible to turn off some background processes and strip out some cruft to make Vista better; and Windows 7 may be better; but for now, Vista can make a decent computer run slow.)
Note that the worst case scenario for Windows is a laptop being carried around and used in lots of different locations (coffee shops via WiFi, etc.) without a hardware firewall; that is the most likely way to get your computer infected with malware. Do you do this? If so, that argues against Windows.
With Mac OS X, you pay a bit more but everything Just Works. Fit and finish are mostly excellent. Lots of little things annoy me, so it hasn't seduced me away from Linux; for example, the fonts seem blurry to me, the Finder doesn't seem as friendly as the file manager I'm used to (Nautilus in GNOME), etc. But if you want a computer that Just Works, and especially if you don't have good tech support, this is a great way to go.
With Linux, once the computer is correctly set up and working, you can just use it and use it and it Just Works. It may be some effort to get it there. But my wife is very much a non-techie, and she is perfectly content with her Ubuntu desktop that I set up for her. It really does Just Work.
So, if you are interested in Linux, one way to go would be to buy a complete computer with Linux pre-installed and supported by some company. For example, if you want a laptop, you could buy one from Emperor Linux. (I haven't bought from them, but they have been around for years, so they must be doing something right.)
The thing I like about Linux is that it always keeps getting better. It can be a rocky process (PulseAudio has had some serious growing pains, especially in my favorite distribution, Ubuntu) but overall it's working. Linux isn't getting slower as it improves; it stays the same or gets better, overall. (A modern distribution should run anywhere XP will run, and probably faster.)
So, get Linux if you like the way it looks and works (I find the GNOME desktop to be quite soothing and efficient and I love the virtual desktops feature). If you are a busy non-techie, get a turnkey pre-configured system, even if you need to pay more.
Get Mac OS X if you like the way it looks and works. It's not that much more expensive and it Just Works.
Get Windows if you don't mind having to do a lot of administration work (updating virus definitions, running virus scans, etc.). You are definitely swimming with the currents if you adopt the most popular OS available; you can get help and support anywhere. (But you are more likely to need that help and support, IMHO. I have friends and family who come to me with computer problems, and I don't much enjoy cleaning malware off an infected Windows computer, but I've had to do it plenty.)
Hope this helps.
steveha
I have a serious question about diesel cars in general. My understanding is that diesels take longer to warm up than gasoline engines; and in fact you can leave a diesel parked and idling for hours without it warming up significantly. (If you drive it, it warms up in 15-20 minutes.)
Note that the above is what I have read; I have not tested this myself.
My question is: if I bought a diesel (say, a Volkswagen Jetta TDI Sportwagen), would I have trouble defogging the windows in the morning? I live in the Seattle area, and there are several months in a row where the temperatures will be cold while the humidity is high, and the windows will be completely fogged. I'm interested in buying a diesel, but I'm seriously worried about this issue.
Volkswagen diesel cars generally come with heated seats, and heated windshield washer fluid. These would be all you need in a truly cold place, where all the water froze out of the air and there is no fog on the windows (only, possibly, snow and ice). Or if you lived in a truly warm place, like southern California, it would rarely get cold enough to fog windows. Or if you park your car in a garage, that might be enough to keep the windows from fogging.
But, parking my car outside in the Seattle area winters, I worry that a diesel is not for me. It's a little bit silly, because for most of the year this won't be an issue, but I'm worried about this.
If they put electric heaters in the blowers that defog the windscreen, that would sort this right out. But I don't think anything like that is available.
steveha
I'm sorry; I had typed in a long list of places with explanations, and then something happened, the UPS beeped, and the computer shut down. Just as I was about to post it. Heck darn. I had hit "preview" several times, so there's a copy in Slashdot's database until it expires, but I don't think it's possible for me to recover it. (Slashdot editors, a feature suggestion: when we are editing an article, give us a unique URL; when Firefox comes back up, our article will be pulled back out of Slashdot's database instead of being orphaned.)
All I can do for you right now is just type in the bare list. Google will find them and you can read about them.
Columbus, Ohio: Center of Science and Industry (COSI)
Monterey, California: Monterey Bay Aquarium
Berkeley, California: Lawrence Hall of Science
San Francisco, California: Exploratorium
Portland, Oregon: Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)
Seattle, Washington: Pacific Science Center
And in Canada:
Vancouver, B.C.: Science World
Victoria, B.C.: Royal BC Museum (awesome natural history museum) (and while you are there, Victoria Bug Zoo)
Edmonton, Alberta: Telus World of Science (maybe not worth going all the way over there)
Not exactly what you asked for:
Eatonville, Washington: Northwest Trek (I really love this place)
I love the idea of your trip, and I hope you have a great time!
steveha
Google can now use On2 codecs such as VP8 in YouTube, for free. No more royalties. But the royalties are not that expensive so this isn't likely a big deal for them. (Google could save more money by using smarter settings on their H.264 encoder.)
Do you think Google will seriously try to make money by selling codecs? I don't. $100 million is small change to Google, and if that's all it cost to buy On2, then the On2 revenue stream must be trivial by Google's standards.
So, Google won't save much money and won't make much money by buying On2. I think they are up to something else.
What I think is more interesting is the possibility that Google will give On2's latest technology to the Theora guys. Just as Sun started giving away OpenOffice.org after buying StarOffice, it's likely that Google will give away some or all of the On2 technology.
Despite being based on technology that is nearly a decade old, Theora is already fairly competitive for web video. (Theora is better than H.263, which has actually been used for years, so it's difficult to argue that Theora is not usable for web video.) Now imagine that Theora gets the best technology bits from a modern On2 codec, and integrates those, such that Theora really is as good as H.264, or even better.
Now imagine that this improved Theora is bundled with Google Chrome and Firefox, bundled with Android, and bundled with Google Chrome OS. Within a few years, Theora could become firmly established everywhere as a baseline standard that anyone can use.
Google likes things that make it easier for Google's customers to use Google's services. They like their customers not being locked into proprietary technologies not owned by Google. It will be impossible for Google to take the market away from H.264, but it is very possible that they could make sure their customers can always easily access their services.
Note that this scenario utterly depends on the new Theora being free software. Google could try to sell a proprietary On2 codec and gain a significant market share; well, if they try it, all I can say is "good luck with that." It's hard to push out an established standard; to do it, you need to be significantly better, not just a little bit better. Better technology, with Google behind it, completely free (and with no need to even keep track of how many codecs you ship out) might succeed.
steveha