> in the past when building your own computer was cheaper, there were a lot of people who the $200 difference > in adding an OS would have simply opted to have no computer at all.
Well, depending on the specs you're shooting for, you can still build something somewhat cheaper today, but alas WITHOUT Windows. Once you add (even an OEM copy of) Windows into the mix, the whole equation collapses. I must say though that MS have succeeded pretty handily in souring the Windows "pirating" experience with the whole Genuine Advantage thing, "pirating" in many cases consisting of installing one purchased copy on multiple home computers. While there might be workarounds, installing SPs can be such a PITA that it seriously makes one consider alternatives. And frankly, for many of the extra computers a geek might find useful in the home, which often tend to be in some sort of server role, Windows doesn't really hold a lot of advantages over Linux. As soon as you don't need to run Windows-only desktop productivity apps on a particular machine, Linux can easily become the preferred choice.
> Not one of them strongly prefers metric - several hate it with a passion. Odd.
Yeah, I'm sure all of them also really gave it a fair shake.
Look, there's really no point belaboring this with someone that chastises others for finding it awkward to add mixed denominator numbers in their head while trying to perform another task. You can lead a horse to water, but you sure can't make it drink.
> With SI, on the other hand, many divisors are problematic. What's a third of a metre? [...] What's a twelfth of a litre?
Those are extremely popular and somewhat contrived examples to prove the superiority of the imperial system. Yet what's so special about easy division by three or by 12? When you happen to need it, that's fine, but more often than not you will find yourself having to divide by four instead: estimating the amount of material needed for the circumference of a rectangle (amount of fencing, sheetrock, etc). For division by four neither system is vastly superior.
Where the imperial system is mind-numbingly and idiotically inadequate is in day-to-day length measurements. If you have have ever done any carpentry work and encountered the endless fractional "standard" sizes such as thicknesses of 5/8" or 31/32", and then tried to add those together while holding a bunch of nails between your lips, a 2x4 in one hand and a hammer in the other, you know what I'm talking about. Yes, it is a contrived example, but not by much. Addition of lengths with fractions of differing denominators is so common in everyday life that the imperial system is pretty much untenable for that reason alone. And please spare me any erudite counter examples showing how some sophisticated fractional magic actually makes it EASIER, because no carpenter or contractor I've ever met knows and uses those--they all fudge the fractions by "gut feeling" and consider accuracy to half an inch or so "good enough".
Metric makes the life of a carpenter infinitely easier. Except for fine woodwork the millimeter is the highest accuracy you need on a construction site, and you can measure and add together lengths of centimeters and millimeters all day long in your head without any loss of accuracy or confusion. Try it sometime. Incidentally, you don't really need a unit between the meter and the centimeter. While the decimeter is not explicitly used much, implicitly people have a good feel for it. Seeing a measurement of 0.3m you don't have to perform mental gymnastics to know that it's 30cm, and people intuitively have a very good feel for the length of 10cm (about the width of a hand), so they can easily visualize fractions of a meter.
> Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google
If you'd RTFA or even just the/. article you'd know that Germany is actually OPPOSED to the idea of a government driven search engine, that's why the pulled out. More often than not it's the French that are in love with gargantuan government projects.
Great statement of the facts, should be required reading for any middle and upper management. Sadly, this scenario is extremely common in enterprise environments, where there are tons of unattended custom gateway and batch processing type applications running on various servers, transferring data from one system to another and manipulating/massaging it while doing so. Typically these apps are either boot time services or stand-alone apps that get kicked off at boot time, without any user intervention. As such, their security scenario is exactly what you described: completely unattended execution yet needing authenticated access (more often than not using simple user id/password combinations) to production systems such as databases, file servers, FTP servers, EDM systems, etc.
It can be very hard to impossible to impart to management the notion that this scenario is inherently insecure and insecurable: since the applications can obtain the credentials in completely automated fashion from plainly readable data (i.e. embedded in the executable or in a config file), any third party can perform the same computations to obtain the credentials. The request is invariably always: ok, so encrypt the credentials. Argh!!!
One theoretically reasonably secure approach would be to prompt for credentials at application startup, so cracking would at least require access to the machine's RAM, but this approach is quite unrealistic in large installations that often involve nightly unattended reboots. The next best approach seems to be to use NT based authentication for access to resources that allow that sort of authentication (e.g. file shares and such that can limit access to domain authenticated users), and configuring the apps to run under an authorized account. This approach doesn't work for all resources though, since many require simple user id/password authentication. A work-around would be to store credentials in files on NT authenticated file shares, as long as communication is not in plain text. But this leads to extra configuration tedium and also to a single point of failure, which sends many people into convulsive fits.
For many apps credentials storage is approached in quite pragmatic fashion: store them in a config file using some basic obfuscation (e.g. XORing against a reproducible pad), which eliminates the vast majority of "attacks" (in a "secure" enterprise environment mostly accidental discovery by semi-authorized personnel such as various admins that shouldn't all have access to that resource). Use OS access restrictions to the application and config file location. If possible, also implement host-based authentication. Run the whole thing in an intranet environment that is as physically secure as possible. Lastly, say your nightly prayers to your most trusted deity, preferably in a secure and sound-proofed location.
Right, and even if you want a high gain screen, the GrayWolf II with a gain of 1.8 can be had for well under $200. The main problem with these is that they don't work very well with a ceiling mounted projector, which is where most permanent projectors end up. With reflector screens most of the light is reflected back to the source, so you as the potato on the couch are well off-axis wrt the projector up on the ceiling. A better approach for good blacks would be to get--or paint--a gray screen and a higher lumen DLP projector with still decent blacks such as the Mitsu HD1000U. That way, dark scenes will be darker because of the gray screen, but bright scenes will still be punchy because of the higher output of the machine.
PS I realize you probably know all this, I'm just adding it for the benefit of the crowd that seems to have gathered in this thread by the look of all the +5 Insightful moderation.
Actually, we're talking front projection, not RPTV. I think there is a niche for digital RPTVs in the 50+ size range, but below that an LCD or plasma direct view will look better in my opinion. Once you reach 60+ inches though, I see little reason not to go with FP, especially with the main home theater display. For day-to-day viewing get a smaller LCD, who wants to watch the evening news at 100" anyway?!
Yeah, they don't seem to touch on that. Most likely any such space plane will need two sets of engines, one for take-off and to reach hypersonic speed, and then the scramjets. A sweet solution would be to develop a hybrid multi-mode engine that incorporates some sort of conventional jets with variable bypass ratio--with increasing speed the bypass increases and feeds into the scramjet until that reaches operational speed, at which point the conventional jet is completely bypassed and the entire airflow is funneled straight into the scramjet. As usual, the devil is in the details, and would most likely involve some novel variable geometry system.
> Companies charge whatever the market will bear. If movie studios think they can get $10 out of an American audience to watch a movie, that's what they'll charge.
Well, that's all great economics theory and all, but it doesn't seem to apply to the music industry. If it did, it would mean that declining CD sales would lead to lower prices, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead of adapting to the market, the industry appears to look for other reasons for the decline in sales, leading to legal and political machinations to preserve its old market at the old prices. It almost appears like the industry would prefer to go bankrupt than to follow established market principles.
> anyone with access to the View Source command can steal your work and throw it on their own site as theirs
Don't flatter yourself. As any halfway experienced developer will realize, that would only be true of the most trivial code, or perhaps some fancy algorithm that calculates the meaning of life in five lines of code or less. Most larger real world applications that do something useful are more tedium than brilliance, and are so problem domain specific that code "stolen" from them would be all but useless to most people or projects. You're welcome to all the thousands of lines of JS code our company produces, where would you like me to mail it to?
> [...] I spend most of my time on site at large customers. A lot of them are excited by the features in it
I'm really having a hard time understanding Microsoft's urgency to push it out to corporate customers first. In my experience (and reaffirmed by countless posts in this thread) large customers are practically never on the leading edge of new software, especially OS software. If anything, Microsoft should concentrate on consumers, they're usually the early adopters of the new and shiny. But what do I know...
> but is an absolute must for companies moving their CAD workstations to Windows.
You're making it sound like 64-bit is REQUIRED for CAD use. Perhaps SOME products out there, but countless companies are doing their AutoCAD business on 32-bit quite happily, and have been doing it for well over a decade.
That was my thought exactly. The pieces I used to play with in the 70s and early 80s had seams so tight you could rarely see through. The ones I buy my kids now are a far cry from that, and it hasn't been just in the last year or so, it's been quite a few years. You can see light through all seams now, with many you can even squeeze a sheet of paper in. It also looks like the pieces are not as flat anymore, many having slight indentations and dimples on smooth surfaces, almost like the plastic isn't thick or hard enough and the piece distorted while cooling. While Megablocks are still total crap compared to Lego, it sadly seems that the difference is shrinking in the direction of Megablocks.
I had to go check on tuples again, it's been a while since I've touched Python. It seems the main differentiator of tuples from lists is that they're immutable. As such, JS does not offer an equivalent--nothing in JS is in fact immutable, it does not even offer consts (at least the version in current browsers) or data hiding, except through closure tricks. Some of these are features introduced in new versions of JS, but can really not be counted on yet.
> The lack of proper threading is a real killer, for example.
Having true multi-threading would be awesome and would make me muy happy, but would also complicate matters enormously for the js4validation crowd, potentially leading to highly unstable web apps, unless browsers can sandbox the threading mechanism really well.
> I don't know about you, but the Javascript I've been doing lately is 99% DOM manipulation, 1% form verification.
And I think that's where the crux of the problem lies at the moment. Current browsers range from fair to abysmal in their DOM performance. It's pretty pathetic when one has to resort to setting the outerHTML property on a SELECT element to load a large list of items because using the DOM literally takes minutes. At the moment one has to navigate a complex flowchart of which things to do using the DOM, and which things to hack in various other ways, at least in some (ahem!) browser environments.
And JS has--the same. Don't get me wrong, I do like Python, but I've really started to like and appreciate the power of JS since using it more intensively.
You obviously haven't seen any of his material then. Claiming that all these people were either in on the joke or were leading Cohen on is just lame. Andy Rooney really did make an ass of himself with Ali G, and so did many of the other more or less famous people he interviewed. The real genius is that he can completely stay in character through some of the most incredible situations, while at the same time finding new material to goad his subjects with.
> I'm saying that perhaps that barrier is blocking people we don't need or want.
I see, I'm glad you clarified that. Frankly, I'm not sure why you even bothered posting anything in this thread then, since the entire point of the original article was to examine what it would take to bring these people into the Linux fold, not whether we want them or not.
Even more frankly, I consider this attitude insulting myself. I've been using Linux on and off since the Slackware 0.9 days (20-odd floppies), but it is not my primary system. Every time I do another install of a supposedly user-friendly system I have to go digging through reference arcana when the CD or USB stick auto-mounter doesn't do jack when sticking in the respective media. Each individual step in getting things done on Linux is not necessarily rocket science, but given the volume of arcane knowledge required and the frequency with which it is required, it all amounts to a major bother. I'm a developer, not a sysadmin, I take no particular joy in getting a system to the state I'm interested in, and yet Linux consistently forces me to spend way more time and energy on those stages of maintenance.
> Even compiling and installing a driver or two isn't rocket science.
Holy cow, are you even hearing yourself saying this? Most of the people I know that are not in the computer biz have a hard time just wrapping their mind around the concept of a directory hierarchy and the difference between a file and a folder. And then tell these people to cd into folder x and type "make", and then insmod the compiled module? Or explaining to them why some drivers are in the kernel, while others are installable modules, right after explaining what a kernel is and what it's good for? This attitude is exactly what the original article is addressing.
Hardly. This is good for rough manipulation as shown in the video, but quite useless for finer control--the highest pointing accuracy it can achieve is the half inch square under your fingertip. I always get a yawn when I hear that some new interface technology will replace everything before it. These technologies tend to be more cumulative, adding to a richer interface when taken together--mouse, keyboard, touch screen and microphone together can lead to a much more sophisticated interaction when each one is used for its strengths rather than exclusively.
It's strange to hear us liberals all of a sudden yearn for the good old days of Small Government, while under a "Small Government" (wink, wink) administration.
Slashdot Mirror
> in the past when building your own computer was cheaper, there were a lot of people who the $200 difference
> in adding an OS would have simply opted to have no computer at all.
Well, depending on the specs you're shooting for, you can still build something somewhat cheaper today, but alas WITHOUT Windows. Once you add (even an OEM copy of) Windows into the mix, the whole equation collapses. I must say though that MS have succeeded pretty handily in souring the Windows "pirating" experience with the whole Genuine Advantage thing, "pirating" in many cases consisting of installing one purchased copy on multiple home computers. While there might be workarounds, installing SPs can be such a PITA that it seriously makes one consider alternatives. And frankly, for many of the extra computers a geek might find useful in the home, which often tend to be in some sort of server role, Windows doesn't really hold a lot of advantages over Linux. As soon as you don't need to run Windows-only desktop productivity apps on a particular machine, Linux can easily become the preferred choice.
> Not one of them strongly prefers metric - several hate it with a passion. Odd.
Yeah, I'm sure all of them also really gave it a fair shake.
Look, there's really no point belaboring this with someone that chastises others for finding it awkward to add mixed denominator numbers in their head while trying to perform another task. You can lead a horse to water, but you sure can't make it drink.
> With SI, on the other hand, many divisors are problematic. What's a third of a metre? [...] What's a twelfth of a litre?
Those are extremely popular and somewhat contrived examples to prove the superiority of the imperial system. Yet what's so special about easy division by three or by 12? When you happen to need it, that's fine, but more often than not you will find yourself having to divide by four instead: estimating the amount of material needed for the circumference of a rectangle (amount of fencing, sheetrock, etc). For division by four neither system is vastly superior.
Where the imperial system is mind-numbingly and idiotically inadequate is in day-to-day length measurements. If you have have ever done any carpentry work and encountered the endless fractional "standard" sizes such as thicknesses of 5/8" or 31/32", and then tried to add those together while holding a bunch of nails between your lips, a 2x4 in one hand and a hammer in the other, you know what I'm talking about. Yes, it is a contrived example, but not by much. Addition of lengths with fractions of differing denominators is so common in everyday life that the imperial system is pretty much untenable for that reason alone. And please spare me any erudite counter examples showing how some sophisticated fractional magic actually makes it EASIER, because no carpenter or contractor I've ever met knows and uses those--they all fudge the fractions by "gut feeling" and consider accuracy to half an inch or so "good enough".
Metric makes the life of a carpenter infinitely easier. Except for fine woodwork the millimeter is the highest accuracy you need on a construction site, and you can measure and add together lengths of centimeters and millimeters all day long in your head without any loss of accuracy or confusion. Try it sometime. Incidentally, you don't really need a unit between the meter and the centimeter. While the decimeter is not explicitly used much, implicitly people have a good feel for it. Seeing a measurement of 0.3m you don't have to perform mental gymnastics to know that it's 30cm, and people intuitively have a very good feel for the length of 10cm (about the width of a hand), so they can easily visualize fractions of a meter.
> Germany and the EU may well demand that there is an EU equal to Google
/. article you'd know that Germany is actually OPPOSED to the idea of a government driven search engine, that's why the pulled out. More often than not it's the French that are in love with gargantuan government projects.
If you'd RTFA or even just the
Great statement of the facts, should be required reading for any middle and upper management. Sadly, this scenario is extremely common in enterprise environments, where there are tons of unattended custom gateway and batch processing type applications running on various servers, transferring data from one system to another and manipulating/massaging it while doing so. Typically these apps are either boot time services or stand-alone apps that get kicked off at boot time, without any user intervention. As such, their security scenario is exactly what you described: completely unattended execution yet needing authenticated access (more often than not using simple user id/password combinations) to production systems such as databases, file servers, FTP servers, EDM systems, etc.
It can be very hard to impossible to impart to management the notion that this scenario is inherently insecure and insecurable: since the applications can obtain the credentials in completely automated fashion from plainly readable data (i.e. embedded in the executable or in a config file), any third party can perform the same computations to obtain the credentials. The request is invariably always: ok, so encrypt the credentials. Argh!!!
One theoretically reasonably secure approach would be to prompt for credentials at application startup, so cracking would at least require access to the machine's RAM, but this approach is quite unrealistic in large installations that often involve nightly unattended reboots. The next best approach seems to be to use NT based authentication for access to resources that allow that sort of authentication (e.g. file shares and such that can limit access to domain authenticated users), and configuring the apps to run under an authorized account. This approach doesn't work for all resources though, since many require simple user id/password authentication. A work-around would be to store credentials in files on NT authenticated file shares, as long as communication is not in plain text. But this leads to extra configuration tedium and also to a single point of failure, which sends many people into convulsive fits.
For many apps credentials storage is approached in quite pragmatic fashion: store them in a config file using some basic obfuscation (e.g. XORing against a reproducible pad), which eliminates the vast majority of "attacks" (in a "secure" enterprise environment mostly accidental discovery by semi-authorized personnel such as various admins that shouldn't all have access to that resource). Use OS access restrictions to the application and config file location. If possible, also implement host-based authentication. Run the whole thing in an intranet environment that is as physically secure as possible. Lastly, say your nightly prayers to your most trusted deity, preferably in a secure and sound-proofed location.
Right, and even if you want a high gain screen, the GrayWolf II with a gain of 1.8 can be had for well under $200. The main problem with these is that they don't work very well with a ceiling mounted projector, which is where most permanent projectors end up. With reflector screens most of the light is reflected back to the source, so you as the potato on the couch are well off-axis wrt the projector up on the ceiling. A better approach for good blacks would be to get--or paint--a gray screen and a higher lumen DLP projector with still decent blacks such as the Mitsu HD1000U. That way, dark scenes will be darker because of the gray screen, but bright scenes will still be punchy because of the higher output of the machine.
PS I realize you probably know all this, I'm just adding it for the benefit of the crowd that seems to have gathered in this thread by the look of all the +5 Insightful moderation.
Actually, we're talking front projection, not RPTV. I think there is a niche for digital RPTVs in the 50+ size range, but below that an LCD or plasma direct view will look better in my opinion. Once you reach 60+ inches though, I see little reason not to go with FP, especially with the main home theater display. For day-to-day viewing get a smaller LCD, who wants to watch the evening news at 100" anyway?!
> Theatre? Plasma.
/. most likely yes.
Nah, projector. Cheaper and much larger picture. Not for everyone, but if you're on
Yeah, they don't seem to touch on that. Most likely any such space plane will need two sets of engines, one for take-off and to reach hypersonic speed, and then the scramjets. A sweet solution would be to develop a hybrid multi-mode engine that incorporates some sort of conventional jets with variable bypass ratio--with increasing speed the bypass increases and feeds into the scramjet until that reaches operational speed, at which point the conventional jet is completely bypassed and the entire airflow is funneled straight into the scramjet. As usual, the devil is in the details, and would most likely involve some novel variable geometry system.
Just Wow!
> Companies charge whatever the market will bear. If movie studios think they can get $10 out of an American audience to watch a movie, that's what they'll charge.
Well, that's all great economics theory and all, but it doesn't seem to apply to the music industry. If it did, it would mean that declining CD sales would lead to lower prices, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead of adapting to the market, the industry appears to look for other reasons for the decline in sales, leading to legal and political machinations to preserve its old market at the old prices. It almost appears like the industry would prefer to go bankrupt than to follow established market principles.
> anyone with access to the View Source command can steal your work and throw it on their own site as theirs
Don't flatter yourself. As any halfway experienced developer will realize, that would only be true of the most trivial code, or perhaps some fancy algorithm that calculates the meaning of life in five lines of code or less. Most larger real world applications that do something useful are more tedium than brilliance, and are so problem domain specific that code "stolen" from them would be all but useless to most people or projects. You're welcome to all the thousands of lines of JS code our company produces, where would you like me to mail it to?
> [...] I spend most of my time on site at large customers. A lot of them are excited by the features in it
I'm really having a hard time understanding Microsoft's urgency to push it out to corporate customers first. In my experience (and reaffirmed by countless posts in this thread) large customers are practically never on the leading edge of new software, especially OS software. If anything, Microsoft should concentrate on consumers, they're usually the early adopters of the new and shiny. But what do I know...
> but is an absolute must for companies moving their CAD workstations to Windows.
You're making it sound like 64-bit is REQUIRED for CAD use. Perhaps SOME products out there, but countless companies are doing their AutoCAD business on 32-bit quite happily, and have been doing it for well over a decade.
That was my thought exactly. The pieces I used to play with in the 70s and early 80s had seams so tight you could rarely see through. The ones I buy my kids now are a far cry from that, and it hasn't been just in the last year or so, it's been quite a few years. You can see light through all seams now, with many you can even squeeze a sheet of paper in. It also looks like the pieces are not as flat anymore, many having slight indentations and dimples on smooth surfaces, almost like the plastic isn't thick or hard enough and the piece distorted while cooling. While Megablocks are still total crap compared to Lego, it sadly seems that the difference is shrinking in the direction of Megablocks.
I had to go check on tuples again, it's been a while since I've touched Python. It seems the main differentiator of tuples from lists is that they're immutable. As such, JS does not offer an equivalent--nothing in JS is in fact immutable, it does not even offer consts (at least the version in current browsers) or data hiding, except through closure tricks. Some of these are features introduced in new versions of JS, but can really not be counted on yet.
> The lack of proper threading is a real killer, for example.
Having true multi-threading would be awesome and would make me muy happy, but would also complicate matters enormously for the js4validation crowd, potentially leading to highly unstable web apps, unless browsers can sandbox the threading mechanism really well.
> I don't know about you, but the Javascript I've been doing lately is 99% DOM manipulation, 1% form verification.
And I think that's where the crux of the problem lies at the moment. Current browsers range from fair to abysmal in their DOM performance. It's pretty pathetic when one has to resort to setting the outerHTML property on a SELECT element to load a large list of items because using the DOM literally takes minutes. At the moment one has to navigate a complex flowchart of which things to do using the DOM, and which things to hack in various other ways, at least in some (ahem!) browser environments.
> Python has dicts, arrays, and tuples
And JS has--the same. Don't get me wrong, I do like Python, but I've really started to like and appreciate the power of JS since using it more intensively.
>> And for those wondering, the splash screen of three women in distress isn't our contributor's stab at a knee-slapper.
I'm not so sure they're in distress--it looks like the one on top is squirting the one on the bottom...something.
Well, at least it's not Pie Jesu.
You obviously haven't seen any of his material then. Claiming that all these people were either in on the joke or were leading Cohen on is just lame. Andy Rooney really did make an ass of himself with Ali G, and so did many of the other more or less famous people he interviewed. The real genius is that he can completely stay in character through some of the most incredible situations, while at the same time finding new material to goad his subjects with.
> I'm saying that perhaps that barrier is blocking people we don't need or want.
I see, I'm glad you clarified that. Frankly, I'm not sure why you even bothered posting anything in this thread then, since the entire point of the original article was to examine what it would take to bring these people into the Linux fold, not whether we want them or not.
Even more frankly, I consider this attitude insulting myself. I've been using Linux on and off since the Slackware 0.9 days (20-odd floppies), but it is not my primary system. Every time I do another install of a supposedly user-friendly system I have to go digging through reference arcana when the CD or USB stick auto-mounter doesn't do jack when sticking in the respective media. Each individual step in getting things done on Linux is not necessarily rocket science, but given the volume of arcane knowledge required and the frequency with which it is required, it all amounts to a major bother. I'm a developer, not a sysadmin, I take no particular joy in getting a system to the state I'm interested in, and yet Linux consistently forces me to spend way more time and energy on those stages of maintenance.
> Even compiling and installing a driver or two isn't rocket science.
Holy cow, are you even hearing yourself saying this? Most of the people I know that are not in the computer biz have a hard time just wrapping their mind around the concept of a directory hierarchy and the difference between a file and a folder. And then tell these people to cd into folder x and type "make", and then insmod the compiled module? Or explaining to them why some drivers are in the kernel, while others are installable modules, right after explaining what a kernel is and what it's good for? This attitude is exactly what the original article is addressing.
Hardly. This is good for rough manipulation as shown in the video, but quite useless for finer control--the highest pointing accuracy it can achieve is the half inch square under your fingertip. I always get a yawn when I hear that some new interface technology will replace everything before it. These technologies tend to be more cumulative, adding to a richer interface when taken together--mouse, keyboard, touch screen and microphone together can lead to a much more sophisticated interaction when each one is used for its strengths rather than exclusively.
It's strange to hear us liberals all of a sudden yearn for the good old days of Small Government, while under a "Small Government" (wink, wink) administration.