Yes, we've made the air in Oklahoma more humid, too, I'm told. I was speaking very loosely in that original post. It's well-known that cities have temperatures slightly above the surrounding countryside. This has been true, I gather, as long as we have been able to measure temperatures. That, and Egypt and Oklahoma are examples of changes to smaller or larger microclimates. By the way, most of North Africa was farmland two thousand years ago, when it was the bread-basket of the Roman empire. I've heard several stories about what happened. One holds that plowing ruined the soil and allowed desertification, another holds that the rainfall patterns changed. I suspect that there is something to both those ideas. I'm not sure how much of this recent change is due to Aswan and other irrigation projects, and how much is due to shifting rainfall patterns. I've never looked into it.
Back to what I set out to say, there are many temperature series out there. Some of them go back over one hundred years. Reliable global temperature series don't seem possible in the pre-satelite era. Yes, many European cities have temperature series going back way further than that, and we have cores from the Greenland icecap which give us hints about the local-to-Greenland weather for hundreds of thousands of years. There is still some controversy about the conclusions to be drawn from them.
Here are a couple of links:
National Ice Coring Lab This has some ice core data sets, and some perspective on them.
This is a fellow who seems to take it as given that the temperatures have increased (I'm still not convinced), but isn't sure about why.
Here is a site put up by some folks who aren't convinced by the popular press coverage of global warming.
I know I've found some much more usefull links in the past, but I can't stumble over them right now. One thing that you want to keep in mind is that ( according to researchers I've talked to) being trendy is vital to getting grant money. If the politicians and the bureaucrats they fund are convinced that global warming is politically significant, you base your grant proposals on the idea that global warming is real, even if the really interesting questions start from another premise. Or, you don't get funded. So while I won't say that anyone is whoring for grants, I will say that the scientific debate might be on rather different terms if it weren't for politics.
Before we get our knickers all twisted, let's recall that we're comparing data from the 50' and 60's to the present. That's a (roughly) 40-year sample! That's nothing; the earth has been here for 4(10^9) years, the Arctic ocean has had its present form for something on the order of 100(10^6) years, and we have 40 years of data, starting about 40 years ago. We know nothing about what might reasonably be called normal up there.
Here are some things we do know: the earth used to be a lot warmer, a thousand years ago. That's when the Norse were farming in Greenland, where there is permafrost and desolation today. The earth has been a lot colder than it is now. Think about the Ice Ages. The earth was a lot colder than it is now just 500 years ago. Today they call that the mini ice age, and it's what killed off the Norse colonies in Greenland and North America. As recently as 200 years ago, the canals in Holland were freezing over every winter. That hasn't happened for a long time, now. We seem to be coming out of that mini ice age, but slowly and with steps backwards.
There is no reason to think that humanity has had any affect on the weather. If there is a warming trend today, it is most likely a return to the between-ice age conditions of 1000 years ago.
We agree with plaintiffs and the Court that the authority of the copyright owner is a matter of law, not a matter of fact.
A matter of law must be decided by a judge, a matter of fact must be decided by a jury. Agreeing with the plaintiff here means that they aren't asking for a jury's verdict on the authority of the copyright holder. Thus, they're agreeing that the judge's opinion is all that matters.
If there is some hole in that statement, perhaps someone who is a lawyer can fill it?
I think that we could say everything that you have said about the FBI about the KGB, and with equal plausibility. The KGB is an arm of a recognized government, why would the harm the very serfs^H^H^H^H^Hcitizens who support them?
Government monitoring is nothing new. Hitler's Gestapo did it, Pol Pot's gangs did it, and Mao's whatever, and Stalin's GRU, and Nixon's burglers, and Clinton's FBI, and each of these organizations believed that they were doing the right thing. Sometimes, all of them were doing things we'd approve of. Usually they were not.
Your messages may well seem trivial to the FBI. Every government uses trivial people to make examples of, to keep the rest in line. You're as good as any to persecute for some trivial act which our government has chosen to demonize. Do you smoke pot? Do you tell people we should leave pot smokers alone, even though they smell bad? Have you ever carried cash across town pay for a used cars? Harmless people who represented no threat to society have been persecuted for these activities, recently, in the US.
Law enforcement organizations indoctrinate their (usually stupid) employees with the mindset that there are three sorts of people: cops, suspects and convicts. If they haven't found a way to frame you yet, they should try harder. The US Fish and Wildlife cops are usually NOT considered to be corrupt or politicised. A friend of mine was cook on one of their enforcement boats in the gulf of Alaska. He was shocked to find that the two topics of conversation (other than cheating on their wives) were "how we framed so-and-so" and "how we'll plant evidence on this next guy we want to get". He quit after one trip; the cops were too disgusting to live around, morally at least.
One last point: did mail monitoring really stop the unibomber? I thought it was the fact that some newspaper published one of his diatribes, which was recognized by a brother.
In conclusion, I believe that law enforcement is vitally important. Allowing them to work in secret only helps them to become worse than the people they are supposed to protect us from: worse in the same way that the mafia is worse than a bunch of disorganized crooks. Corrupt government is the worst possible threat to law abiding citizens, and secrecy breeds corruption, just as does power.
I'm curious: what can you do that would warrent a 1GHz processor? It must take _lots_ of operations on just a little data? It seems to me that just about everything will be bound by the need to get stuff into/out of the processor when you're running the processor that fast. With a multiplier of about 8 (mentioned in Tom's article), you'll need to have a pretty good hit rate on the cache if you have much data.
I'm not familiar with the applications you mentioned. These must involve doing the same thing over and over to a fairly small data set? Maybe a larger cache might be more to the point, if it would let you run code and data in the cache? I wonder if something like the Altivec unit in a G4 would adapt well to this sort of thing? I think that the Motorola CPU's come with larger caches than the Intel CPU's. And I know that the Sparcs do, but I think their cost-benefit ratio is worse than Apple's.
All my stuff is large data, with a reasonable number of operations on each element (linear regression, non-linear regression, etc.), so I've never really thought about this before. I seem to need a faster harddrive and faster RAM _way_ more than I need a faster CPU.
I wonder if you have considered SMP? Would this be more cost effective than a single, fast processor for your kind of use? I should think that running multiple cellular automata might parallelize well, at least.
I seem to recall that Linus said at some public appearance something along the line of: "...why do we need to give games access to the hardware under linux? We already have Windows..."
For a game system running nothing important for a single user, a well executed version of windows which would run the games and the associated Windows drivers without paying tribute to Redmond seems like a Good Thing. Impossible, perhaps, but it _would_ be nice.
I agree with some of your points about Windows being ill thought-out for anything I would want to use a computer for. But the part about the OS assuming it's smarter than the users? Well, for some folks that's true. I've reached the point I can keep my linux box running fairly well. Some folks are willing to give up a lot of flexibility and convenience to avoid having to learn.
I guess my point is that there _is_ a place for this sort of operating system, though it's no place I'd like to be. Whether they can pull it off and duplicate Windows I have no clue, but I think that a lot of manufacturers would be happy to bundle a fully functional, free Win98 clone with their cheap pc's this year. Next year, of course, the trendy, buzz-word-compliant software from Microsoft won't run on Win98, if these guys have succeded. I think _that's_ the weakest point of the whole plan: If their effort succeds, it will be like CPM: an anachronism. Microsoft will see to that.
Two final thoughts: First, Microsoft has been able to keep its users on the upgrade treadmill by not supporting the old versions, discouraging hardware manufacturers from building drivers for the old versions, and so on. If this were ready _now_, I think that a lot of people might see this as a way to step off the upgrade path, and stick with a familiar evil. You could still get bugfixes for GNU-Win98 after "WinMillenium" comes out, at least.
Second, I have to wonder: how many of the technically sophisticated people who program at these very low levels for fun will _really_ want to spend their hobby hours slavishly imitating Windows? Will this ever attract a critical mass of programmers?
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but... It seems to me that one unintended side-effect of eliminating IP laws could be to FORCE the Gov't to greatly lessen the burden on the drug companies of approving a medicine. You're right, the medicines won't make themselves. The current regime makes it possible for drug companies to support an enormous deadweight loss from regulation. We might well see a large improvement in social welfare out of this. It's an angle I hadn't thought of before.
Here's a game: a desktop, with folders on it, and some of them open up when you click on them. The object is to do "work", in spite of the interference from talking paper clips, and absence of serious productivity applications like grep, emacs and latex. The major obstacle to success is that the whole system will periodically undo everything you have not saved...don't forget to save often!
Of course, no-one would ever make anything as silly, tedious and pointless as this, let alone play it. Would they?
Are you sure about this? Microsoft was using a click-through non-disclosure. GPL does NOT use click-through, and the GPL is NOT a non-disclosure agreement. Code released under GPL is copyrighted, and you are granted a license to use it only under the terms of the GPL. This is a slightly different matter: without regard to copyright, Microsoft sleazily released this with a click-through non-disclosure. If you never get a chance to click through, you haven't agreed to the non-disclosure. There is still the issue of copyright. "Not covered by non-disclosure" is not the same as "public domain", as another poster mentioned. It seems that, having avoided the non-disclosure agreement, it would be acceptable to summarize/implement/report/etc the contents, but not acceptable to publish them verbatim in any country with copyright laws. Get busy, overseas!
, by opening it under emacs. There is some boilerplate by Verisign, and not much else that's easily readable. I expect that there'll be a mirror for the plaintext somewhere in a few days (hint, hint... get busy, overseas!). I can't do much with it easily, I'm on AIX.
I agree, there isn't any charitable explaination for this, but it's hard to explain any other way, either. Are they doing this so that when it is spread around they can say "look what happens when we try to be open... we'll never do that again!"?
Perhaps the best reply to this is to declare that any program which will interact with microsoft is broken... don't let them on your system.
Why not QNX, for that matter? I'm sure they thought about all those possibilities.
Linux takes up a whole CD because it's a lot more than an operating system. The typical distribution has latex, and tex, and 12 editors and several wordprocessors and countless games and spreadsheets, and pretty much all the applications you need for scientific computing,and a server, and not one but 7 or 8 window managers, and on and on and on... I'll bet that most of that won't be on a PDA. Unlike WINCE and the kernel of QNX, you can take any little bits you want from the open source stuff: one line of code up to the whole thing. Linux can fit on a floppy, almost, if you don't want all the bells and whistles.
As far as standard and easy to use, Linux is non-standard only if windows is THE standard. So is the Mac, by that logic. Yes, there are many different user interfaces possible in Linux, and a typical distribution uses most of them. It doesn't have to be that way; you could create a distribution which uses a consistant interface. I gather that most folks haven't thought it worth while. Then there's easy to use. I'm a user on a rather nice unix system (AIX, actually) right now, and that's easy. Everything works, no fiddling about with "can't install this because it's dlls conflict with that, and oh no, it corrupted my registry, and can't set preferences because you'll screw it up for the rest..." I find being a user on this system far less painful than being a user on a windows network. Part of the problem with the windows network that I could have access to is that it's poorly administered. I don't work in the field, but I gather that it's harder to find competent help who will work with windows. Part of that may be that windows is more difficult to administer well. Back to the topic at hand, Linux on a PDA can be exactly what you decide to make it. It can have its config files in eeROM (probably not a good solution), and the user can point and click with abandon, or with his stylus. One of the characteristics of unix is that once set up, the user can't screw it up, and it just runs and runs and runs. That's why my children us a Linux system at home: they can screw up windows. I think Linux sounds pretty good for PDA's, too.
You mentioned GNOME. That isn't the GUi, of course. I prefer KDE, although I haven't tried GNOME lately. I find KDE to be astonishingly similar to windows. Most of the differences are for the better. It has a strong unix flavor, of course; I can use highlighting and the middle mouse button to cut and paste, and so on. I don't believe that windows is easy to use, and neither is KDE and GNOME. Most folks who use computers find windows devilishly difficult and counter-intuitive. Most folks who use computers have gotten over the steepest part of the hump with windows, so it seems easy, now. That's why I like KDE; I can use all the knowledge I gained from windows. There's also afterstep, based on nextstep. I liked the next desktop, and I may try switching back to afterstep this summer.
In summary, the flexibility of Linux (and the *BSD's) are probably the star attraction. You don't have a manufacturer breathing down your neck, insisting that you not screw up the purity of their style. I hear that Microsoft is bad, that way. You don't get manufacturer support and funding, either, I suppose, but the lack of licensing fees should go a long way to make up for that if your product is successful. And who would plan a product if they didn't think it would succeed?
I'm interested in having my computer work, and having bugs squashed fast. That doesn't happen under windows, and it won't happen with these drivers under linux, for the obvious reason. Certainly this is better than nothing. If I had one of these boards, I'd be happy about this. But I'll go out of my way to not have an nvidia. I want to be able to use my hardware, and upgrade linux, and still use my hardware. With these closed drivers, if I decide that I'd be better off with a newer version of xfree86, I'll quite possibly have to wait until nvidia gets around to updating their drivers. If this happens after the next generation card comes out, that will probably be never. No thanks.
I don't think that nvidia is evil, but stupid I wouldn't bet against. They could have had these drivers written for them, free! Why wouldn't they want that? I had to sign a non-disclosure once, to get some schematics (computer industry, but a different part of it), and when I saw them, I saw why. They must have been ashamed of their work, and afraid that the world would find out just how bad their design was. It was full of text-book no-no's. I figure that you only hide things you are ashamed of. Any competitor who's serious could buy a board, take the chips apart in a clean room, and so on... I can't imagine that they really think that they're protecting themselves.
So, I'm not going to buy an nvidia board until I see open source, accelerated drivers for it. Not because of ideology, not because I hate nvidia, but just because I want my machine to work, today and next year, and the year after that.
I'm not criticising nvidia, nor suggesting that releasing these binary drivers is bad. But I can't get excited over this. It's not good enough news to get me to trust them to deliver working software, when I need it. If someone with the resources of Microsoft can't deliver that, little nvidia never will.
You know, I agree with that fellow, though I don't like the way he said it. It does look bad, and there's no reason for it. That sort of shortcut really irritatates my eye, and interrupts my reading.
This kind of thing is what editors are for. It's hard to spot your own mistakes. You slashdot authors really should start editing each others submissions. Helping others with their writing will make you a lot more aware of the quality of your own, too, I think. Nels
The "offset" cuts accuracy to something less than a quarter mile, I think. Civilian GPS receivers counteract that to get us back within plus or minus 100 feet. That's plenty close for a handgrenade, let alone a nuke. I would also suggest that if you have the ability to build or steal a nuke, and a missile, you can make or steal a military GPS.
When the military first announced their "selective availability", I thought that it was a remarkably stupid idea. The Russians would simply steal the plans for the military receivers, and the plans for the factory that made them, and then the US would give them a loan and technical assistance to build it, and so on. Over the years since, I think that the idea has proven itself to be at least as stupid as I thought. The only reason Congress hasn't been beseiged by a campaign to end selective availability is that it just doesn't matter; to us or to the terrorists. If the military moved to end it on their own, they'd have to admit they were wrong.
Back to the topic at hand: I agree with you, barrage jamming would be tough to beat. But have you seen some of the recent adaptive filtering work? Pretty impressive stuff, and might make this a lot harder.
Until about 200+ years ago, starting in North America, freedom was only for the sovereign, and those who could buy his favor. Outside of North America, that's still largely the case. This idea of freedom for the commoners is very novel. We shouldn't be surprised that Japan is more than 200 years behind us culturally; so's most of the rest of the world. Israel outlawed torture just last year, and some parts of the world still haven't eliminated slavery.
So, it seems that I could set up a magnet site outside the US for kiddies, collect their info, destroy any info from non-US kiddies, and sell the resulting mailing list to US companies. On the surface, at least, this looks safe: not "violating" the privacy of any of the locals, so the local cops won't have any excuse to hassle me, if I've chosen my local wisely. And I'm not doing anything inside the US, so I'm certainly safe there too. The only thing which could screw this up is a US law forbidding US companies from using such data. Try enforcing that one!
This sounds like "ok, kiddies, we've used that opensource hype for all it's worth... time to get back to business as usual." As an earlier poster pointed out, the existence of a license does not make a product proprietary. This might be deliberate distortion by Mr. Love, but more likely, it's an example of our horrible education system at work. I suppose that this should give us all hope: you don't have to be well educated run a large company.
On a separate issue, his proposal to remotely manage systems sounds very interesting. Who cares how difficult Linux is to manage! For a low monthly fee, you to can be care-free and buzzword-compliant! (Three year contract and service charges mentioned only in the fine print...) The interesting part here isn't the possiblity of a new business plan, making money by administering small office and home systems remotely. The interesting part lies in the privacy and free-speech issues which might arise. Think about the recent flap in England about private restraint of speech via libel laws. If you have controversial material on a home-page on your own computer, might the remote sys-admin have to take it down to shield himself? Or just drop your contract, and not tell you the root password? If you hire out the sys-admin job, and the managing company finds something they think is porn on your harddrive, are they obligated to report it to the sheriff? Should they, even if the law doesn't require it? I recently heard of a mother being prosecuted for having pictures of her naked child developed. That's (the prosecution... ok, the mother too) very weird.
Of course, hiring out the sys-admin job to Corel, or any company raises all sorts of issues about ownership and access. Here's one: of course it's your system, but the management software running under Linux is our propriatary code... if you don't renew our contract, we will have to remove it. It includes the password file. And we encrypted the filesystem. We won't format the drives when we leave, but we'll take the only software which can read them. It's all for your safety. Here's another. A sys-admin company might use your email address book to search for new customers, and so on. It's your data, and they probably wouldn't use it in any way that could get them caught. But that leaves a lot of latitude.
I wonder how far this idea will go? If Linux administration gets just a bit easier, and the major distributions start including a home computer installation option which is reasonably secure out of the box, probably not too far.
I had a professor tell me once that "an empty bowl is more useful than a full one.". His reasoning was that you can put something into the empty one (and thus render it less useful...). By that logic, the blank harddrive option should cost at least as much as the full. (Now I have to say something bad about Microsoft.... hmmm) The manufacturers who subtract nothing for not loading windows are deducting the value of windows, not the cost.
Seriously, I agree with you; it's great to see the option, and great to see it priced where it ought to be. Now if they would just make a non-intel, non-apple version with a G4 cpu! That's another sort of choice I'd like to see more of.
I guess that the short answer to your question, how would the open source model develop an airtraffic control system is "quickly and cheaply", at least compared to the numbers you quoted.
A fairer answer would require a fairer comparison. How many of those $4Billion you mentioned are going to overhead, such as administration, demonstrating equal opportunity compliance, paying for bonding, and so on? How much of it is being spent because the government has repeatedly changed it's mind about the hardware, the definition of the system, and on and on and on, causing most of the work to be scrapped each time?
None of this is a criticism of the contractor! My point is that the government model of getting things done is the most expensive model known (to me at least). If you are a government contractor, you WILL use the government model. If you are a free software developer, you will work on a project which interests you, and if a large body of people develop an interest in hobby air traffic control, I think that they could make better software cheaper, in their spare time.
I've been following the FAA's fiascos in this from a long distance, and it seems that they've developed a sinkhole that all of our dollars put together can't fill. That doesn't mean that ATC systems are inherently expensive, it means that the government is screwing up again. That doesn't mean that any random non-beaurocracy would make the same mistakes.
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law work for a semiconductor plant in Taiwan (Dong-Yuen, I think; it's Japanese). He is a quality control inspector, she was too, but has quit to be a mommy. They have never complained about mistreatment, though my brother-in-law had a boss who wouldn't reccomend him for a promotion because he was too valuable... that was eventually resolved. Taiwanese companies in general seem to treat their workers about the way US companies do, modulo the different expectations they have (they don't want time off for Christmas, do want time off in February for new years...). That is to say, it's a real mixed bag. My relatives seem fairly contented with their jobs, including my brother-in-law, the pharmcist who works for Hoechst (sp?) and most of the rest of them. THe standard of living there is close to ours, and life seems to be pretty good.
is perpetrated by the service provider. In the grand old tradition of the McNemara era ("We had to burn the village in order to save it."), they're going nuts.
I'm not familiar with the problem, since I never use those networks. Still, I find it hard to imagine that one more DoS will improve things. I guess this is a sign of desparation, rather than a reasoned response? If someone who is responsible for this decision reads this column, I hope you'll enlighten us.
It works under AIX, anyway... after doing that, I went to www.userfriendly.org and clicked on the doubleclick banner ad. After I came back here, I double-checked: no doubleclick cookies (I edited my cookies file to get rid of all the doubleclick cookies first!).
If I want to accept a cookie, I'll have to undo that temporarily, I suppose.
I could put that same statement on my web site, too. Don't you think that Coca-Cola'$ opinion just might be biased? I think that all their claim on their website tells us is that they claim it, not that they have any right to it in this particular instance. And we already knew that they claim it; that's what this whole thread is about.
I'm offering this up as an example of an open-source project which has achieved documentation!
Let me give an example of an open-source project which has fairly good documetation. The R language has documentation which you can check out on the web here I think that good doc's means run-able examples, reasonably organized information, with cross-referencing, and source code. The R language has that, mostly. Its documentation makes linux doc's look pretty shabby. I think that one reason for this is that most of the contributions are by Ph.D. statisticians, who are accustomed to technical writing. Another reason is that documentation is a standard part of an R package: if you want to make a contribution, you document it.
Let's see now... the software is free? That means that my big budget might just shrink! I'd be less important; we can't have that! More seriously, these decisions have a lot of factors.
Any product you choose must be safe (for you, not for the end-user). If there is any chance you might be criticised for your choice, it's not worth the risk, even if it's free. The upside, if any, won't help you, the down-side certainly will hurt you.
First cost is important:savings which don't show up in this budget cycle are generally meaningless. Ongoing costs are important too, in a perverse way: a purchase which requires a large, continuing expense is job security for the administrator who has gotten it approved into his budget. If you then tell this administrator that you have a solid alternative which is free to buy and far lower cost to operate, do you think he'll be happy? You've made him look like a fool, and shrunk his budget. That's how civil service underlings get fired.
Other than the all-important issue of keeping the budget as big as possible, money really doesn't matter. It's not your money, it's yours to spend! That's very different. And the greatest sin of all is letting the fiscal year end without having used up your entire budget. That makes it plain that you didn't need such a big budget in the first place. That makes everyone unhappy (except the taxpayers, but screw them, they have no influence that matters to government employees)
The questions we ask in the private world include:
Does the product work? Is it the best there is? Does it fill your needs adequately? Is it good value?
None of these things really matter in government service. There the important points are:
Am I covered? Will the boss be mad? Is there something in here which can be an excuse to ask for a bigger budget next fiscal year?
Microsoft is safe today, and expensive, just as IBM was safe and expensive twenty years ago. If you put together a superior product, expect to see it used by school clubs, and so on, who weren't getting any funding, anyway. Don't expect it to make great inroads anywhere things go out for bid, even though the price is $0.00. There are legal ways to turn down the low bidder, if you've written your spec's right. Nels
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, most of North Africa was farmland two thousand years ago, when it was the bread-basket of the Roman empire. I've heard several stories about what happened. One holds that plowing ruined the soil and allowed desertification, another holds that the rainfall patterns changed. I suspect that there is something to both those ideas. I'm not sure how much of this recent change is due to Aswan and other irrigation projects, and how much is due to shifting rainfall patterns. I've never looked into it.
Back to what I set out to say, there are many temperature series out there. Some of them go back over one hundred years. Reliable global temperature series don't seem possible in the pre-satelite era. Yes, many European cities have temperature series going back way further than that, and we have cores from the Greenland icecap which give us hints about the local-to-Greenland weather for hundreds of thousands of years. There is still some controversy about the conclusions to be drawn from them.
Here are a couple of links:
National Ice Coring Lab This has some ice core data sets, and some perspective on them.
Global Climate Perspectives System These guys have some models and some data up on the web.
Global Temperature Anomolies" This is a NASA site...
This is a fellow who seems to take it as given that the temperatures have increased (I'm still not convinced), but isn't sure about why.
Here is a site put up by some folks who aren't convinced by the popular press coverage of global warming.
I know I've found some much more usefull links in the past, but I can't stumble over them right now. One thing that you want to keep in mind is that ( according to researchers I've talked to) being trendy is vital to getting grant money. If the politicians and the bureaucrats they fund are convinced that global warming is politically significant, you base your grant proposals on the idea that global warming is real, even if the really interesting questions start from another premise. Or, you don't get funded. So while I won't say that anyone is whoring for grants, I will say that the scientific debate might be on rather different terms if it weren't for politics.
Here are some things we do know:
the earth used to be a lot warmer, a thousand years ago. That's when the Norse were farming in Greenland, where there is permafrost and desolation today.
The earth has been a lot colder than it is now. Think about the Ice Ages.
The earth was a lot colder than it is now just 500 years ago. Today they call that the mini ice age, and it's what killed off the Norse colonies in Greenland and North America. As recently as 200 years ago, the canals in Holland were freezing over every winter. That hasn't happened for a long time, now. We seem to be coming out of that mini ice age, but slowly and with steps backwards.
There is no reason to think that humanity has had any affect on the weather. If there is a warming trend today, it is most likely a return to the between-ice age conditions of 1000 years ago.
A matter of law must be decided by a judge, a matter of fact must be decided by a jury. Agreeing with the plaintiff here means that they aren't asking for a jury's verdict on the authority of the copyright holder. Thus, they're agreeing that the judge's opinion is all that matters.
If there is some hole in that statement, perhaps someone who is a lawyer can fill it?
Nels
Government monitoring is nothing new. Hitler's Gestapo did it, Pol Pot's gangs did it, and Mao's whatever, and Stalin's GRU, and Nixon's burglers, and Clinton's FBI, and each of these organizations believed that they were doing the right thing. Sometimes, all of them were doing things we'd approve of. Usually they were not.
Your messages may well seem trivial to the FBI. Every government uses trivial people to make examples of, to keep the rest in line. You're as good as any to persecute for some trivial act which our government has chosen to demonize. Do you smoke pot? Do you tell people we should leave pot smokers alone, even though they smell bad? Have you ever carried cash across town pay for a used cars? Harmless people who represented no threat to society have been persecuted for these activities, recently, in the US.
Law enforcement organizations indoctrinate their (usually stupid) employees with the mindset that there are three sorts of people: cops, suspects and convicts. If they haven't found a way to frame you yet, they should try harder. The US Fish and Wildlife cops are usually NOT considered to be corrupt or politicised. A friend of mine was cook on one of their enforcement boats in the gulf of Alaska. He was shocked to find that the two topics of conversation (other than cheating on their wives) were "how we framed so-and-so" and "how we'll plant evidence on this next guy we want to get". He quit after one trip; the cops were too disgusting to live around, morally at least.
One last point: did mail monitoring really stop the unibomber? I thought it was the fact that some newspaper published one of his diatribes, which was recognized by a brother.
In conclusion, I believe that law enforcement is vitally important. Allowing them to work in secret only helps them to become worse than the people they are supposed to protect us from: worse in the same way that the mafia is worse than a bunch of disorganized crooks. Corrupt government is the worst possible threat to law abiding citizens, and secrecy breeds corruption, just as does power.
Nels
I'm not familiar with the applications you mentioned. These must involve doing the same thing over and over to a fairly small data set? Maybe a larger cache might be more to the point, if it would let you run code and data in the cache? I wonder if something like the Altivec unit in a G4 would adapt well to this sort of thing? I think that the Motorola CPU's come with larger caches than the Intel CPU's. And I know that the Sparcs do, but I think their cost-benefit ratio is worse than Apple's.
All my stuff is large data, with a reasonable number of operations on each element (linear regression, non-linear regression, etc.), so I've never really thought about this before. I seem to need a faster harddrive and faster RAM _way_ more than I need a faster CPU.
I wonder if you have considered SMP? Would this be more cost effective than a single, fast processor for your kind of use? I should think that running multiple cellular automata might parallelize well, at least.
Nels
For a game system running nothing important for a single user, a well executed version of windows which would run the games and the associated Windows drivers without paying tribute to Redmond seems like a Good Thing. Impossible, perhaps, but it _would_ be nice.
I agree with some of your points about Windows being ill thought-out for anything I would want to use a computer for. But the part about the OS assuming it's smarter than the users? Well, for some folks that's true. I've reached the point I can keep my linux box running fairly well. Some folks are willing to give up a lot of flexibility and convenience to avoid having to learn.
I guess my point is that there _is_ a place for this sort of operating system, though it's no place I'd like to be. Whether they can pull it off and duplicate Windows I have no clue, but I think that a lot of manufacturers would be happy to bundle a fully functional, free Win98 clone with their cheap pc's this year. Next year, of course, the trendy, buzz-word-compliant software from Microsoft won't run on Win98, if these guys have succeded. I think _that's_ the weakest point of the whole plan: If their effort succeds, it will be like CPM: an anachronism. Microsoft will see to that.
Two final thoughts: First, Microsoft has been able to keep its users on the upgrade treadmill by not supporting the old versions, discouraging hardware manufacturers from building drivers for the old versions, and so on. If this were ready _now_, I think that a lot of people might see this as a way to step off the upgrade path, and stick with a familiar evil. You could still get bugfixes for GNU-Win98 after "WinMillenium" comes out, at least.
Second, I have to wonder: how many of the technically sophisticated people who program at these very low levels for fun will _really_ want to spend their hobby hours slavishly imitating Windows? Will this ever attract a critical mass of programmers?
I certainly wish them luck.
Nels
Nels
Here's a game: a desktop, with folders on it, and some of them open up when you click on them. The object is to do "work", in spite of the interference from talking paper clips, and absence of serious productivity applications like grep, emacs and latex. The major obstacle to success is that the whole system will periodically undo everything you have not saved...don't forget to save often!
Of course, no-one would ever make anything as silly, tedious and pointless as this, let alone play it. Would they?
Are you sure about this? Microsoft was using a click-through non-disclosure. GPL does NOT use click-through, and the GPL is NOT a non-disclosure agreement. Code released under GPL is copyrighted, and you are granted a license to use it only under the terms of the GPL. This is a slightly different matter: without regard to copyright, Microsoft sleazily released this with a click-through non-disclosure. If you never get a chance to click through, you haven't agreed to the non-disclosure. There is still the issue of copyright. "Not covered by non-disclosure" is not the same as "public domain", as another poster mentioned. It seems that, having avoided the non-disclosure agreement, it would be acceptable to summarize/implement/report/etc the contents, but not acceptable to publish them verbatim in any country with copyright laws. Get busy, overseas!
, by opening it under emacs. There is some boilerplate by Verisign, and not much else that's easily readable. I expect that there'll be a mirror for the plaintext somewhere in a few days (hint, hint... get busy, overseas!). I can't do much with it easily, I'm on AIX.
I agree, there isn't any charitable explaination for this, but it's hard to explain any other way, either. Are they doing this so that when it is spread around they can say "look what happens when we try to be open... we'll never do that again!"?
Perhaps the best reply to this is to declare that any program which will interact with microsoft is broken... don't let them on your system.
Linux takes up a whole CD because it's a lot more than an operating system. The typical distribution has latex, and tex, and 12 editors and several wordprocessors and countless games and spreadsheets, and pretty much all the applications you need for scientific computing,and a server, and not one but 7 or 8 window managers, and on and on and on... I'll bet that most of that won't be on a PDA. Unlike WINCE and the kernel of QNX, you can take any little bits you want from the open source stuff: one line of code up to the whole thing. Linux can fit on a floppy, almost, if you don't want all the bells and whistles.
As far as standard and easy to use, Linux is non-standard only if windows is THE standard. So is the Mac, by that logic. Yes, there are many different user interfaces possible in Linux, and a typical distribution uses most of them. It doesn't have to be that way; you could create a distribution which uses a consistant interface. I gather that most folks haven't thought it worth while.
Then there's easy to use. I'm a user on a rather nice unix system (AIX, actually) right now, and that's easy. Everything works, no fiddling about with "can't install this because it's dlls conflict with that, and oh no, it corrupted my registry, and can't set preferences because you'll screw it up for the rest..." I find being a user on this system far less painful than being a user on a windows network. Part of the problem with the windows network that I could have access to is that it's poorly administered. I don't work in the field, but I gather that it's harder to find competent help who will work with windows. Part of that may be that windows is more difficult to administer well.
Back to the topic at hand, Linux on a PDA can be exactly what you decide to make it. It can have its config files in eeROM (probably not a good solution), and the user can point and click with abandon, or with his stylus. One of the characteristics of unix is that once set up, the user can't screw it up, and it just runs and runs and runs. That's why my children us a Linux system at home: they can screw up windows. I think Linux sounds pretty good for PDA's, too.
You mentioned GNOME. That isn't the GUi, of course. I prefer KDE, although I haven't tried GNOME lately. I find KDE to be astonishingly similar to windows. Most of the differences are for the better. It has a strong unix flavor, of course; I can use highlighting and the middle mouse button to cut and paste, and so on. I don't believe that windows is easy to use, and neither is KDE and GNOME. Most folks who use computers find windows devilishly difficult and counter-intuitive. Most folks who use computers have gotten over the steepest part of the hump with windows, so it seems easy, now. That's why I like KDE; I can use all the knowledge I gained from windows. There's also afterstep, based on nextstep. I liked the next desktop, and I may try switching back to afterstep this summer.
In summary, the flexibility of Linux (and the *BSD's) are probably the star attraction. You don't have a manufacturer breathing down your neck, insisting that you not screw up the purity of their style. I hear that Microsoft is bad, that way. You don't get manufacturer support and funding, either, I suppose, but the lack of licensing fees should go a long way to make up for that if your product is successful. And who would plan a product if they didn't think it would succeed?
Nels
I don't think that nvidia is evil, but stupid I wouldn't bet against. They could have had these drivers written for them, free! Why wouldn't they want that? I had to sign a non-disclosure once, to get some schematics (computer industry, but a different part of it), and when I saw them, I saw why. They must have been ashamed of their work, and afraid that the world would find out just how bad their design was. It was full of text-book no-no's. I figure that you only hide things you are ashamed of. Any competitor who's serious could buy a board, take the chips apart in a clean room, and so on... I can't imagine that they really think that they're protecting themselves.
So, I'm not going to buy an nvidia board until I see open source, accelerated drivers for it. Not because of ideology, not because I hate nvidia, but just because I want my machine to work, today and next year, and the year after that.
I'm not criticising nvidia, nor suggesting that releasing these binary drivers is bad. But I can't get excited over this. It's not good enough news to get me to trust them to deliver working software, when I need it. If someone with the resources of Microsoft can't deliver that, little nvidia never will.
This kind of thing is what editors are for. It's hard to spot your own mistakes. You slashdot authors really should start editing each others submissions. Helping others with their writing will make you a lot more aware of the quality of your own, too, I think.
Nels
When the military first announced their "selective availability", I thought that it was a remarkably stupid idea. The Russians would simply steal the plans for the military receivers, and the plans for the factory that made them, and then the US would give them a loan and technical assistance to build it, and so on. Over the years since, I think that the idea has proven itself to be at least as stupid as I thought. The only reason Congress hasn't been beseiged by a campaign to end selective availability is that it just doesn't matter; to us or to the terrorists. If the military moved to end it on their own, they'd have to admit they were wrong.
Back to the topic at hand: I agree with you, barrage jamming would be tough to beat. But have you seen some of the recent adaptive filtering work? Pretty impressive stuff, and might make this a lot harder.
Until about 200+ years ago, starting in North America, freedom was only for the sovereign, and those who could buy his favor. Outside of North America, that's still largely the case. This idea of freedom for the commoners is very novel. We shouldn't be surprised that Japan is more than 200 years behind us culturally; so's most of the rest of the world. Israel outlawed torture just last year, and some parts of the world still haven't eliminated slavery.
So, it seems that I could set up a magnet site outside the US for kiddies, collect their info, destroy any info from non-US kiddies, and sell the resulting mailing list to US companies. On the surface, at least, this looks safe: not "violating" the privacy of any of the locals, so the local cops won't have any excuse to hassle me, if I've chosen my local wisely. And I'm not doing anything inside the US, so I'm certainly safe there too. The only thing which could screw this up is a US law forbidding US companies from using such data. Try enforcing that one!
On a separate issue, his proposal to remotely manage systems sounds very interesting. Who cares how difficult Linux is to manage! For a low monthly fee, you to can be care-free and buzzword-compliant! (Three year contract and service charges mentioned only in the fine print...) The interesting part here isn't the possiblity of a new business plan, making money by administering small office and home systems remotely. The interesting part lies in the privacy and free-speech issues which might arise. Think about the recent flap in England about private restraint of speech via libel laws. If you have controversial material on a home-page on your own computer, might the remote sys-admin have to take it down to shield himself? Or just drop your contract, and not tell you the root password? If you hire out the sys-admin job, and the managing company finds something they think is porn on your harddrive, are they obligated to report it to the sheriff? Should they, even if the law doesn't require it? I recently heard of a mother being prosecuted for having pictures of her naked child developed. That's (the prosecution ... ok, the mother too) very weird.
Of course, hiring out the sys-admin job to Corel, or any company raises all sorts of issues about ownership and access. Here's one: of course it's your system, but the management software running under Linux is our propriatary code... if you don't renew our contract, we will have to remove it. It includes the password file. And we encrypted the filesystem. We won't format the drives when we leave, but we'll take the only software which can read them. It's all for your safety.
Here's another. A sys-admin company might use your email address book to search for new customers, and so on. It's your data, and they probably wouldn't use it in any way that could get them caught. But that leaves a lot of latitude.
I wonder how far this idea will go? If Linux administration gets just a bit easier, and the major distributions start including a home computer installation option which is reasonably secure out of the box, probably not too far.
Seriously, I agree with you; it's great to see the option, and great to see it priced where it ought to be. Now if they would just make a non-intel, non-apple version with a G4 cpu! That's another sort of choice I'd like to see more of.
A fairer answer would require a fairer comparison. How many of those $4Billion you mentioned are going to overhead, such as administration, demonstrating equal opportunity compliance, paying for bonding, and so on? How much of it is being spent because the government has repeatedly changed it's mind about the hardware, the definition of the system, and on and on and on, causing most of the work to be scrapped each time?
None of this is a criticism of the contractor! My point is that the government model of getting things done is the most expensive model known (to me at least). If you are a government contractor, you WILL use the government model. If you are a free software developer, you will work on a project which interests you, and if a large body of people develop an interest in hobby air traffic control, I think that they could make better software cheaper, in their spare time.
I've been following the FAA's fiascos in this from a long distance, and it seems that they've developed a sinkhole that all of our dollars put together can't fill. That doesn't mean that ATC systems are inherently expensive, it means that the government is screwing up again. That doesn't mean that any random non-beaurocracy would make the same mistakes.
Nels
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law work for a semiconductor plant in Taiwan (Dong-Yuen, I think; it's Japanese). He is a quality control inspector, she was too, but has quit to be a mommy. They have never complained about mistreatment, though my brother-in-law had a boss who wouldn't reccomend him for a promotion because he was too valuable... that was eventually resolved. Taiwanese companies in general seem to treat their workers about the way US companies do, modulo the different expectations they have (they don't want time off for Christmas, do want time off in February for new years...). That is to say, it's a real mixed bag. My relatives seem fairly contented with their jobs, including my brother-in-law, the pharmcist who works for Hoechst (sp?) and most of the rest of them. THe standard of living there is close to ours, and life seems to be pretty good.
is perpetrated by the service provider. In the grand old tradition of the McNemara era ("We had to burn the village in order to save it."), they're going nuts.
I'm not familiar with the problem, since I never use those networks. Still, I find it hard to imagine that one more DoS will improve things. I guess this is a sign of desparation, rather than a reasoned response? If someone who is responsible for this decision reads this column, I hope you'll enlighten us.
chmod 400 .netscape/cookies
It works under AIX, anyway... after doing that, I went to www.userfriendly.org and clicked on the doubleclick banner ad. After I came back here, I double-checked: no doubleclick cookies (I edited my cookies file to get rid of all the doubleclick cookies first!).
If I want to accept a cookie, I'll have to undo that temporarily, I suppose.
Nels
I could put that same statement on my web site, too. Don't you think that Coca-Cola'$ opinion just might be biased? I think that all their claim on their website tells us is that they claim it, not that they have any right to it in this particular instance. And we already knew that they claim it; that's what this whole thread is about.
So, I'm afraid that link isn't very enlightening.
I'm offering this up as an example of an open-source project which has achieved documentation!
Let me give an example of an open-source project which has fairly good documetation. The R language has documentation which you can check out on the web here I think that good doc's means run-able examples, reasonably organized information, with cross-referencing, and source code. The R language has that, mostly. Its documentation makes linux doc's look pretty shabby. I think that one reason for this is that most of the contributions are by Ph.D. statisticians, who are accustomed to technical writing. Another reason is that documentation is a standard part of an R package: if you want to make a contribution, you document it.
Hope this helps.
Any product you choose must be safe (for you, not for the end-user). If there is any chance you might be criticised for your choice, it's not worth the risk, even if it's free. The upside, if any, won't help you, the down-side certainly will hurt you.
First cost is important:savings which don't show up in this budget cycle are generally meaningless. Ongoing costs are important too, in a perverse way: a purchase which requires a large, continuing expense is job security for the administrator who has gotten it approved into his budget. If you then tell this administrator that you have a solid alternative which is free to buy and far lower cost to operate, do you think he'll be happy? You've made him look like a fool, and shrunk his budget. That's how civil service underlings get fired.
Other than the all-important issue of keeping the budget as big as possible, money really doesn't matter. It's not your money, it's yours to spend! That's very different. And the greatest sin of all is letting the fiscal year end without having used up your entire budget. That makes it plain that you didn't need such a big budget in the first place. That makes everyone unhappy (except the taxpayers, but screw them, they have no influence that matters to government employees)
The questions we ask in the private world include:
None of these things really matter in government service. There the important points are:Microsoft is safe today, and expensive, just as IBM was safe and expensive twenty years ago. If you put together a superior product, expect to see it used by school clubs, and so on, who weren't getting any funding, anyway. Don't expect it to make great inroads anywhere things go out for bid, even though the price is $0.00. There are legal ways to turn down the low bidder, if you've written your spec's right.
Nels