Having dpkg available, with cygwin as the sources, will allows them to distribute the XFree files as a single task, making the job of installing them that much easier as well as keeping them up-to-date.
Wouldn't it have been easier to zip the files and create a GUI installer using one of the various tools available for doing just that?
So instead, we'll give kids laptops that they can learn to use comfortably, and then get out in the real world and try to get a job, and go "right mouse button? What's that?"
Wow, it's great to see a project like this in a small town like Prague, Oklahoma!
Re:What is important in technology?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Take today's conflict for example. You have marines in the ground in Kandahar. These are a small number of units that should produce high returns. If you can enhance their strength and protection at the same time, without restricting their ability to operate independantly (unlinke tanks that you can't fit inside an undeground cave), you gain something valuable.
Yes; a valuable target. Today, it's not worth it to develop a missile that can target those individual troopers, because they're worth less than the missile in cold, harsh, absolute financial terms.
Powered armor would change that.
Furthermore, with enhanced strength you have the ability to carry a whole lot more firepower than a regular joe.
Which just increases how much you're worth, and how worthwhile it is to take you out with a missile.
In fact if this wasn't a desired technology, why is DARPA and several other DoD agencies spending tons of your tax dollars in researching this?
The military already has classified patents on powered armor. But they don't equip the troops with it. Why? Because even if the missile costs $20,000 or $200,000, it's cheaper than the powered armor and the specialized training to use it, so it's more cost effective to equip the troops with those to take out the enemy powered armor.
Besides, military is not the only useful application for Mech Armors. Think factories. Right now you need one of those expensive lifters (or whatever you call them) that lift heavy boxes, but can only operate in very standard environments (right box sizes, righ shelf sizes, right distance between shelves, etc.). If the cost of one of these armors is at least equal to those lifters, you have a winner since you save money elsewhere (Think the armor from the end of Alien 2).
If you've got the technology to make a mecha, you've got the technology to make the fork lift more accurate, and for the fork lift you don't need gyroscopic stabilization and sophisticated "fly-by-wire" controls. So you still don't build a mecha, because it gains you nothing toward fixing the problem that can't be fixed better and cheaper without one.
Again you're just showing a lack of vision similar to other posts that don't see value for some technology for them or their immedate surroundings, and automatically assume it's not valuable for anybody else.
No, I'm showing the vision to be able to look BEYOND the gee-wiz technology into the actual solving of actual problems.
Mecha are visually appealing, and I cheered like everybody else when they showed up on Andromeda, but it's fiction. We could build practical mecha now. We don't, because any technology you can build that lets you put more armor on a walker lets you put even MORE armor on a tank. Any technology you can build that lets you give an exosuit powerloader arms lets you give a forklift articulation. Any technology that lets you put powered armor on a Mobile Infantry trooper lets me build a guided missile to take him out, and I don't have to put my guy through six months of training to drive the thing; I can give him a cartoon explaining how to shoot you.
Re:What is important in technology?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
Think about how close this is to making a full blown mech armor.
We have the technology to build everyone a personal helicopter, too, but we don't. Why? Because it's a bad idea.
Ditto for mecha. You build something that is more expensive than a tank, and more vulnerable, and you run into the principle that says "the more expensive the tank, the more cost-effective it is for a foot-soldier with a $200 missile to take it out."
We can't build a tank that can reliably take a hit from the best hand-held missile, we damn sure can't build a mecha that will. And it'll be easier to detect and hit than a nice squat tank.
I just find it interesting that when I mentioned they were using Linux in the last LotR story, I got modded down as off-topic and got a "who cares?" response, but then we have a whole story devoted to it...
Or, I mean this is an insane idea, but we could actually try feeding and educating our poor people.
Gee, I wonder why nobody ever thought of that before. Feed and educate the poor. What a novel idea.
Public schools nearly all suck, because people don't value things they're given for free. Same reason why public housing sucks.
Poor people tend to eat BAD food. Short of knocking them down and feeding them vegetables, that's going to be a little difficult to fix, since it's cultural, not economic.
Nobody starves in America unless they want to. Nobody goes without schooling in America unless they want to.
Or were you just knee-jerk blasting out a neo-Socialist partyline motto?
Of course, the US government will probably preemptively outlaw this just like Bush is trying to do with human cloning, thereby guaranteeing another area in which the US falls behind in research like we started to do with encryption for a while, and are soon to do with security post-DMCA.
What will happen when the wealthy really are smarter than average folk?
That's already true. The wealthy tend to be better-nourished, which encourages brain development, and tend to be better-educated, which develops the facilties inherent in every meaningful definition of intelligence.
The only way to "fix" this "problem" would be to outlaw good food and school. Then everybody'd be equally stupid. I don't see that as a good end.
Technology has been improving man since we invented writing and agriculture. Anybody who wants to reverse that trend for themselves is welcome to retreat to a pastoral life in the woods, but leave the rest of us out of your Luddism.
Use HP-UX for a while and you'll understand - you can install, remove, commit, rollback, and test packages.
A good point, but then again, I've never had RPM get halfway through a package upgrade, decide it didn't like the file, and just crash leaving the system in an unusable and unbootable state. HP-UX did that to us last week. HP recommended recovering from backup. All we were doing was installing a security patch to a non-kernel service, but it managed to hose a system library.
Ok, I've been telling you guys for a couple years now that cable modem companies couldn't make money at $40 a month, that they'd break even closer to $50 a month.
Now, we have a cable modem provider charging $40 a month, and losing $6 million a week from 4 million customers.
That means they'd break even if they were taking in an extra $6 a month per subscriber. Assume 33% for income tax, it comes out to $9 more per month per subscriber.
In other words, somewhere between $46 and $49 a month, they break even...
Gee, imagine that.
Meanwhile, RoadRunner is charging around $45 to $50 a month, if you also have cable TV, which is where they make all the money, and they're not going out of business. All you @Home folks who were bragging 'cause you were paying less, and especially those of you who were bitching that $40 a month was unreasonably high, congratulations; you priced yourself back into dialup.
Interesting. They're losing $6 million a week, and they have 4 million customers.
That means if they were charging $1.50 more per week, or about $6 more per month, they'd be breaking even.
Work in income taxes, and you're looking at charging $50 a month to break even.
Now compare to the statements I've been making about how the folks charging $40 a month are losing money, and the ones charging $50 a month are probably breaking even...
As an @Home subscriber I just have to wonder: How can they have a 45% market share AND charge $39.95 per month and still not make money?
I have been telling you people this for years; at $39.95 a month, they're LOSING money on every subscription.
If you're losing money on every sale, you can't make it up in volume. If they'd had a much smaller market share they'd probably still be here.
The cable modem companies have shot themselves in the foot; everybody is charging too little for the service, and nobody can raise rates to fix it because clueless consumers already bitch about the price.
The only ones that are going to survive this are those that make the money back on other services. Time Warner, for instance, is in the position of having most of their customers also purchasing overpriced cable TV services. Plus they charge more for the cable modem service, in most places. At $50 a month they're almost breaking even, I'll wager.
So YOU were the one that took your toys and went home, and HE was the one you consider PETTY.
That's like calling an abused wife who leaves her husband a quitter.
He got tired of being abused, and he left. Theo was asked to do something pretty damn simple; promise not to abuse people anymore. If you can't promise not to do that, there's something wrong with you.
I was wondering where the EMACS/ed comparison itself came from...
An example of how one person's frippery is another's functionality.
GUI administration interfaces make the difference between me getting paged in the middle of the night and telling an Operator "do this", and me getting paged in the middle of the night and having to get up, log in, and do it myself. I actually got paged during sex last night, with a mandatory 7-minute response time, so I really appreciate shorter calls.:-)
GUI installation interfaces serve similar purposes, but more importantly, they sell CDs. More people using the software leads to more hardware vendors supporting the software, which is A Good Thing. Since OpenBSD sometimes puts sales ahead of proliferation (otherwise they'd make their ISOs downloadable), clearly this is a goal that's not on the bottom of the priority scale.
Obviously you don't live in the U.S. and are not a lawyer, otherwise you would know that in the U.S., you cannot be forced to reveal any passwords you have that may ultimately incriminate yourself, as the 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States mandates.
I live in the US and majored in pre-law. But more importantly, I can READ. You should at the very least pop on over to the Rubberhose web page and read the legal analysis there.
Fifth Amendment protection does NOT extend to things you have already uttered. Unless the passphrase itself incriminates you, the 5th amendment does not protect you.
Further, by extending you transactional immunity for the passphrase, they eliminate your 5th amendment options entirely.
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Having dpkg available, with cygwin as the sources, will allows them to distribute the XFree files as a single task, making the job of installing them that much easier as well as keeping them up-to-date.
Wouldn't it have been easier to zip the files and create a GUI installer using one of the various tools available for doing just that?
So instead, we'll give kids laptops that they can learn to use comfortably, and then get out in the real world and try to get a job, and go "right mouse button? What's that?"
Why go through the hassle of porting it, when you can just run it on any OS you like using VmWare...???
Because once you've ported it, the expense involved in using it is over and done with, and you've got every possible piece Open-Sourced.
VMWare is even more expensive than Windows and is closed-source.
I can just see the advertising slogan now:
"I'm a Nancy boy. Wouldn't you like to be a Nancy boy too?"
But there will never be a product that hits the personal sector first and then gety acquired by the military.
:-)
Microwaveable TV dinners.
Sorry, dude, you went and said "never".
Gee, No One, don't have the guts to post with your nick?
Wow, it's great to see a project like this in a small town like Prague, Oklahoma!
Take today's conflict for example. You have marines in the ground in Kandahar. These are a small number of units that should produce high returns. If you can enhance their strength and protection at the same time, without restricting their ability to operate independantly (unlinke tanks that you can't fit inside an undeground cave), you gain something valuable.
Yes; a valuable target. Today, it's not worth it to develop a missile that can target those individual troopers, because they're worth less than the missile in cold, harsh, absolute financial terms.
Powered armor would change that.
Furthermore, with enhanced strength you have the ability to carry a whole lot more firepower than a regular joe.
Which just increases how much you're worth, and how worthwhile it is to take you out with a missile.
In fact if this wasn't a desired technology, why is DARPA and several other DoD agencies spending tons of your tax dollars in researching this?
The military already has classified patents on powered armor. But they don't equip the troops with it. Why? Because even if the missile costs $20,000 or $200,000, it's cheaper than the powered armor and the specialized training to use it, so it's more cost effective to equip the troops with those to take out the enemy powered armor.
Besides, military is not the only useful application for Mech Armors. Think factories. Right now you need one of those expensive lifters (or whatever you call them) that lift heavy boxes, but can only operate in very standard environments (right box sizes, righ shelf sizes, right distance between shelves, etc.). If the cost of one of these armors is at least equal to those lifters, you have a winner since you save money elsewhere (Think the armor from the end of Alien 2).
If you've got the technology to make a mecha, you've got the technology to make the fork lift more accurate, and for the fork lift you don't need gyroscopic stabilization and sophisticated "fly-by-wire" controls. So you still don't build a mecha, because it gains you nothing toward fixing the problem that can't be fixed better and cheaper without one.
Again you're just showing a lack of vision similar to other posts that don't see value for some technology for them or their immedate surroundings, and automatically assume it's not valuable for anybody else.
No, I'm showing the vision to be able to look BEYOND the gee-wiz technology into the actual solving of actual problems.
Mecha are visually appealing, and I cheered like everybody else when they showed up on Andromeda, but it's fiction. We could build practical mecha now. We don't, because any technology you can build that lets you put more armor on a walker lets you put even MORE armor on a tank. Any technology you can build that lets you give an exosuit powerloader arms lets you give a forklift articulation. Any technology that lets you put powered armor on a Mobile Infantry trooper lets me build a guided missile to take him out, and I don't have to put my guy through six months of training to drive the thing; I can give him a cartoon explaining how to shoot you.
Think about how close this is to making a full blown mech armor.
We have the technology to build everyone a personal helicopter, too, but we don't. Why? Because it's a bad idea.
Ditto for mecha. You build something that is more expensive than a tank, and more vulnerable, and you run into the principle that says "the more expensive the tank, the more cost-effective it is for a foot-soldier with a $200 missile to take it out."
We can't build a tank that can reliably take a hit from the best hand-held missile, we damn sure can't build a mecha that will. And it'll be easier to detect and hit than a nice squat tank.
I just find it interesting that when I mentioned they were using Linux in the last LotR story, I got modded down as off-topic and got a "who cares?" response, but then we have a whole story devoted to it...
Yeah, and full compatibility with Word "is coming" to Star Office.
"Is coming" is meaningless unless it's a synonym for "in beta".
Or, I mean this is an insane idea, but we could actually try feeding and educating our poor people.
Gee, I wonder why nobody ever thought of that before. Feed and educate the poor. What a novel idea.
Public schools nearly all suck, because people don't value things they're given for free. Same reason why public housing sucks.
Poor people tend to eat BAD food. Short of knocking them down and feeding them vegetables, that's going to be a little difficult to fix, since it's cultural, not economic.
Nobody starves in America unless they want to. Nobody goes without schooling in America unless they want to.
Or were you just knee-jerk blasting out a neo-Socialist partyline motto?
Of course, the US government will probably preemptively outlaw this just like Bush is trying to do with human cloning, thereby guaranteeing another area in which the US falls behind in research like we started to do with encryption for a while, and are soon to do with security post-DMCA.
What will happen when the wealthy really are smarter than average folk?
That's already true. The wealthy tend to be better-nourished, which encourages brain development, and tend to be better-educated, which develops the facilties inherent in every meaningful definition of intelligence.
The only way to "fix" this "problem" would be to outlaw good food and school. Then everybody'd be equally stupid. I don't see that as a good end.
Technology has been improving man since we invented writing and agriculture. Anybody who wants to reverse that trend for themselves is welcome to retreat to a pastoral life in the woods, but leave the rest of us out of your Luddism.
Use HP-UX for a while and you'll understand - you can install, remove, commit, rollback, and test packages.
A good point, but then again, I've never had RPM get halfway through a package upgrade, decide it didn't like the file, and just crash leaving the system in an unusable and unbootable state. HP-UX did that to us last week. HP recommended recovering from backup. All we were doing was installing a security patch to a non-kernel service, but it managed to hose a system library.
Ok, I've been telling you guys for a couple years now that cable modem companies couldn't make money at $40 a month, that they'd break even closer to $50 a month.
Now, we have a cable modem provider charging $40 a month, and losing $6 million a week from 4 million customers.
That means they'd break even if they were taking in an extra $6 a month per subscriber. Assume 33% for income tax, it comes out to $9 more per month per subscriber.
In other words, somewhere between $46 and $49 a month, they break even...
Gee, imagine that.
Meanwhile, RoadRunner is charging around $45 to $50 a month, if you also have cable TV, which is where they make all the money, and they're not going out of business. All you @Home folks who were bragging 'cause you were paying less, and especially those of you who were bitching that $40 a month was unreasonably high, congratulations; you priced yourself back into dialup.
Interesting. They're losing $6 million a week, and they have 4 million customers.
That means if they were charging $1.50 more per week, or about $6 more per month, they'd be breaking even.
Work in income taxes, and you're looking at charging $50 a month to break even.
Now compare to the statements I've been making about how the folks charging $40 a month are losing money, and the ones charging $50 a month are probably breaking even...
...it's good to see I had the estimates close.
As an @Home subscriber I just have to wonder: How can they have a 45% market share AND charge $39.95 per month and still not make money?
I have been telling you people this for years; at $39.95 a month, they're LOSING money on every subscription.
If you're losing money on every sale, you can't make it up in volume. If they'd had a much smaller market share they'd probably still be here.
The cable modem companies have shot themselves in the foot; everybody is charging too little for the service, and nobody can raise rates to fix it because clueless consumers already bitch about the price.
The only ones that are going to survive this are those that make the money back on other services. Time Warner, for instance, is in the position of having most of their customers also purchasing overpriced cable TV services. Plus they charge more for the cable modem service, in most places. At $50 a month they're almost breaking even, I'll wager.
So YOU were the one that took your toys and went home, and HE was the one you consider PETTY.
That's like calling an abused wife who leaves her husband a quitter.
He got tired of being abused, and he left. Theo was asked to do something pretty damn simple; promise not to abuse people anymore. If you can't promise not to do that, there's something wrong with you.
they're just not worth buying because they contain no bonus features to speak of.
Being able to watch the whole movie instead of just a chunk of the middle of the screen is a pretty compelling bonus feature.
Being able to watch the movie several times without it looking worse every time is a nice bonus feature.
Being able to fit all the movies into the space half of them would consume on VHS is a nice bonus feature.
Hell, just the difference in picture quality is nice, if you've got a 50" TV.
If I remember correctly, they're using all Linux for their rendering these days.
I was wondering where the EMACS/ed comparison itself came from...
:-)
An example of how one person's frippery is another's functionality.
GUI administration interfaces make the difference between me getting paged in the middle of the night and telling an Operator "do this", and me getting paged in the middle of the night and having to get up, log in, and do it myself. I actually got paged during sex last night, with a mandatory 7-minute response time, so I really appreciate shorter calls.
GUI installation interfaces serve similar purposes, but more importantly, they sell CDs. More people using the software leads to more hardware vendors supporting the software, which is A Good Thing. Since OpenBSD sometimes puts sales ahead of proliferation (otherwise they'd make their ISOs downloadable), clearly this is a goal that's not on the bottom of the priority scale.
Mine is also shorter. :-)
:-)
Now there's something you don't see men bragging about often.
Obviously you don't live in the U.S. and are not a lawyer, otherwise you would know that in the U.S., you cannot be forced to reveal any passwords you have that may ultimately incriminate yourself, as the 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States mandates.
I live in the US and majored in pre-law. But more importantly, I can READ. You should at the very least pop on over to the Rubberhose web page and read the legal analysis there.
Fifth Amendment protection does NOT extend to things you have already uttered. Unless the passphrase itself incriminates you, the 5th amendment does not protect you.
Further, by extending you transactional immunity for the passphrase, they eliminate your 5th amendment options entirely.
That's why you should have a password such as "I was the grassy knoll rifleman who shot JFK."
And then they give you immunity from anything you say in the passphrase, which the court will NOT extend to what's in the documents revealed by it.