The AK-47 was obsoleted in 1961, and it was a standard 7.61mm weapon. You are probably thinking about AK-74, which (as the year suggests) was a USSR's response to M-16 (after the M-16 had shown itself as a worthy weapon). In any case, AK-74 is not a high rate of fire weapon (10 rounds per minute), there are plenty of special purpose weapons with much higher performance. This one was developed for a foot soldier. See here .
Loading speed doesnt really matter as people get more ram and faster harddrives
I second that. On this Athlon 1.4 GHz box Mozilla is as fast as I want it to be, and even if it were faster I would not need that extra speed anyways.
It is like an expensive purchase: you pay money once (and soon forget about that), but the thing that you bought stays around and serves you all the time.
WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux being effectively pulled after the initial production run [...] the few users they did manage to sell their Linux products to were "newbies" rather than Linux veterans, who don't seem to buy software at all
Linux people do buy software. Myself, I recently bought Eagle and Qt (commercial license).
The problem is with products themselves. It is virtually out of question to buy WP into an office that is built around MS Word or StarOffice formats. CorelDraw may be good, I used it very long time ago, but Corel is dwarfed by rows and rows of Adobe products; basically Adobe Illustrator is the #1 in vector graphics, while Adobe Photoshop became a de-facto standard (and a platform) for raster images. Corel lost the market on its own, and Linux sales, targeting new customers, only reflect that.
Yeah, but how many K-6 or -8 grade kids do you know who can program?
"Programming" here is not necessarily C++ or Perl. It can be just a map design for Unreal Tournament or whatever. As long as it is a design, it is a programming - and it is as creative as any other art form.
90% of MS-brainwashed CIOs want Windows. Blame them all you want, but they have the budgets, and they don't ask you or me what to buy.
Win2K on Alpha is dead (see Compaq's Web site). In fact, WinNT on anything but IA32 never *really* existed, from consumer point of view. Did you ever see any commercial app compiled for Alpha or MIPS?
Alpha is not a mass market platform. Itanic will be (or at least Intel hopes so).
Alpha has no x86 compatibility, Itanic promises some. Big deal for legacy apps - many can't even be recompiled with modern tools!
This is the opportunity to get your 64-bit computing in a beige box instead of a proprietary system. Supposedly, it will be cheaper, easier to use, and mainstream. For most people, one killer argument is "Does it run Windows?" - and you can't natively run Windows on Sparc or HP/UX... (whether you can run Win64 on Itanic is another story;-)
This, if implemented, would be a great reason to legalize DVD backup solutions. Right now, the DVD is virtually not wearing out. But if it does, the consumer can argue all kinds of standard consumer protection arguments in favor of his right to watch the DVD *as the content is licensed*, like once, but to use the content when he is ready. It will be tough defense for the DVD people because there will be very legitimate reason to back it up.
The CVS limitation does not lie in how many KLOC or number of revisions it can handle.
The size of the code is a pretty good estimate how many people work on it, how many branches they maintain, and how much of merging they do. So if you know how large your code is, you can tell whether this or that revision control system (or any other tool, to that matter) is appropriate for the job.
The *BSD projects seem to meet those criterion and are all using CVS.
That is fine; but the most important problems would be absence of changesets (so you can't undo related groups of patches), and absence of tiered repositories (everyone goes to the same, single, central CVS server). It all can work, and it does work as we know, but the more code you write the more difficult the maintenance becomes. Like it or not, CVS is an old software, unchanged for years and full of kludges, and BK is one of new designs.
CVS is not as powerful as BK, and definitely not as scalable. It lacks very many key features; for example, it doesn't have native changesets, and they are essential when you work on a large project and accept lots of patches from lots of people.
I use CVS all the time, but I know its limitations. Linus was right when he decided not to use CVS, it simply is not reliable enough. But don't blame CVS, it is a good and useful tool; but every tool has its safe zone of "recommended use", and Linux kernel is way beyond that. I say, any project above 50 KLOCs and with 100 revisions on average would be pushing the limits.
The device has USB ports, and usb-storage module is fairly stable. The USB 1.1 is not very fast, but 1 MBps should be enough for this little webpad...
They also say that you can connect keyboard and mouse through the USB too; this makes it a decent portable system, not a notebook but something like Palm Pilot with cradle, keyboard, charger etc. etc.
This surely can be used in vertical markets, but no vertical market will want this *consumer* device. In real world (on factory floor, in shipping etc.) the portable terminals must be much more rugged to survive the abuse. This one has *no chance*, and I worked in that industry. A terminal usually must survive 10 hours fully submerged in water (while turned on and working), or work after 4 feet drop on concrete, or work at minus temperatures for freezer use, etc.
The most likely user I can think of is a lazy geek who ate so much pizza that he can't get to his computer!
Life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality.
Indeed, not many people would want to revert to neanderthals even if they could. We don't know how to run, how to hunt, how to do all those wild things... Furthermore, the human body wears out in about 40 years -- and after that, for many, only modern medicine can keep the life bearable.
It is quite obvious to me that humans *already* evolved past the mere physical shell. Our mind is more important than our body, that's why we refuse to "live healthily" when it conflicts with our internal Universe. That's why they say "one who doesn't smoke and doesn't drink will die in perfect health".
So indeed, this is a philosophical question - what are you? Without answering it first we can not say what behavior is or is not proper.
Vision problems are not acquired anymore than they can be fixed by exercise
This is irrelevant because it assumes a proper, healthy behavior - which, if present, would have prevented problems in first place.
Many students damage their health during the *incredibly lengthy* school years. Can they avoid that? Sure; read 30 minutes per day, and sit in the class 30 minutes per day (because they will be getting back problems), and roam free the rest of the time. Is it even possible? I don't think so.
The bigger problem is that *all parts* of the society are unhealthy today, not only students. We live in polluted, crowded cities, drink water with heavy metals, sit 10 hours per day in an office chair under flickering fluorescent lights, staring at the monitor in a foot from our noses, then go home and eat pizza... all that is unhealthy.
It is a well known fact that if you have an island where resources are plentiful and people's needs are few, then that particular culture will never develop a significant economy, much less develop any appreciable technology [...] Along these lines, it is impossible for the economy of Star Trek to ever come into existence, where all money is eliminated, and everyone contributes to society for only the joy of self improvement.
The idea of Star Trek economy (a.k.a. communism) is that nobody cares if *you* fly to stars to trade, or just sleep under a palm tree. Infinite energy resources and replicators allow anyone to have anything, within reason.
The question is: how many people, on average, will choose to work and how many will choose to do nothing? I think it does not matter. All the science and technology is driven by personal interest (of scientists and engineers), curiosity, joy of discovery, and they will work regardless of salary (that's how it is even now). The rest (workers, machinists etc.) can sleep, they do not advance anything, and their functions can be easily replaced by robots.
But even the laziest person on the planet can not do nothing for his entire life! It would be too boring. People will be always doing something. My personal expectation is that they will be bombing each other, though...
Look around sometime and notice how many people are wearing glasses or contacts. I'd bet that as little as 200 years ago the numbers were less than 10% of what we have now.
Most of vision problems are acquired in school, where children have to read lots of books, often in bad lighting conditions. Human eyes are not designed for reading, they were meant to look far. But in modern society your only chance to still have good eyesight by the graduation date is to read as little as possible, and run on streets as much as possible (i.e. being a "bad boy", as opposed to "honorary student"). This is fairly easy to spot - most scientists have bad eyesight, most lumberjacks have perfect vision.
In other words, requirements of the modern society are outright unhealthy, unnatural and cause all sorts of deevolution. Humans are the only species that "evolve the environment" around them instead of adapting to existing one. If this continues, we will have the society of half-alive, mostly immobile and absolutely sick people, kept alive only with wonders of technology. Maybe eventually humans will evolve themselves into cyborgs. I would vote for that any day.
Ximian. They seem to be focusing on staying two steps behind Microsoft (Evolution, Mono, Gnumeric...)
Two steps behind a leader is much better place to be than right in front of the last man running:-) What Ximian makes is needed not to geeks but to common folk (a.k.a. lusers). That's who wants Evolution. Without Windows-like apps Linux will see much more resistance everywhere. I am personally very glad that Ximian works on all that unneeded fluff and eye candy, so I can focus on some serious work.
Myself, I am very happy with Mutt, and though I tried Evolution and I have it installed... it crashes sometimes, and it is not as flexible as Mutt is. Evolution also has some codepage-related quirks which Mutt (and iconv that it uses) doesn't have.
I assume they didn't have too many *external* contributors to this very pre-alpha project. All internal contributors (the 50 programmers mentioned in the article) apparently signed license change agreements.
I strongly believe that the stronger "they" push for more control over our lives, the worst things will get in terms of "their" profits or whatever, because people will want to work around.
Absolute majority of computer users (probably 99.99% at home and 99% at work) don't know, don't want to know and don't care about software or computers in general: It is flashy? Good! I like flashy thingies! When I tell them about spyware the universal response is I don't care, I don't do anything bad and Let them have it if they want it, as long as I am getting my free whatever...
Some people (/., for example) will indeed not want to use this software... unless they are forced to, or convinced to. But even if every single computer scientist on the planet rebels against this very foggy threat, nobody will listen to them anyway. Majority rarely listens to minority - "might makes right", and we see examples of that just everywhere.
So if 0.5% of population refuses to run spyware-laden apps, who cares? Majority of people just want to get some work done, they don't want to know what's going on inside their computers. As long as spyware-infected app works and does what the user wants, the app and the parasites will be successful.
Is it really that resistant to interference? We're using so many frequencies at one time, can they really not clash?
Yes. Spread Spectrum works now by switching frequencies in a pseudorandom sequence. Receivers that are not on the same sequence cannot hear the transmission.
But since UWB transmission exists on all frequencies during the time slot, the SS system loses all its advantages. I am sure many users (like military) would not want that.
It would seem to be a reasonable thing to do -- send over technically-trained guards
Even a perfectly trained engineer can't see through the sealed components, and most of components are like that - tested and sealed at the factory. The guards would have to be present at hundreds of companies instead of just one Boeing. For example, it would be trivial to add the surveillance circuitry to some existing electronic component, and there are so many of those on an airliner that you can't tell which one was altered. The $5000 TV, for example, could double as a bug and who can tell why this or that chip is inside and what is it doing...
It appears US hired a lot of card-trick magicians or something to pull that off.
How would a guard tell what is in that little metal cube - a relay for the cabin lights or a bug? Even assuming that the guard looked over the shoulder of the technician.
The TV in its earlier days was informative and delivered unique content. Exactly as radio was before that, and as newspaper was before that... and all these technologies had their high points, and they passed them.
What would one read in a newspaper today, yesterday's news? Opinions of illiterate or unqualified journalists? Ads? Same happened with radio; rare a song now is played from start to end because radio people just love to mix and match the bait^Wsong with ads and useless chat that is not even worth the battery to tune to. TV is not far behind; ads drip from every little pause in content, and the content itself is of very low value, targeting lowest common denominator in the society.
Is there something better than TV? Sure, and it is already here. One can have his movies on tapes, VCDs, DVDs or just in big.avi files, just click of a mouse to order at online shop (or Usenet). The one-way pipe (from fools on that end to fools on this end) is now being replaced with tons of chat/messaging software, from rocket-scientist's IRC to uncle Joe's Yahoo boards, where people can actually *talk* to each other, instead of being fed with corporate propaganda.
The TV is losing its appeal, especially (for now) among people who know how to get better information from Internet. Joe Sixpack still uses TV; however he does so not because he loves it but because it is there. He loves beer much more, and if he can get his football elsewhere, he will. If he can't tape his play he would be mad, and the TV would be useless to him.
In any case, there is no free market in broadcasting, and as such the monopoly (made out of several sister TV companies) is free to abuse the viewer in any way it wants. The only remedy is to stop using their services. They are not worth much anyway, and if a movie is good you can always buy it, free from ads, squishing, logos and other fluff.
Slashdot Mirror
s/minute/second/ :-)
The AK-47 was obsoleted in 1961, and it was a standard 7.61mm weapon. You are probably thinking about AK-74, which (as the year suggests) was a USSR's response to M-16 (after the M-16 had shown itself as a worthy weapon). In any case, AK-74 is not a high rate of fire weapon (10 rounds per minute), there are plenty of special purpose weapons with much higher performance. This one was developed for a foot soldier. See here .
I second that. On this Athlon 1.4 GHz box Mozilla is as fast as I want it to be, and even if it were faster I would not need that extra speed anyways.
It is like an expensive purchase: you pay money once (and soon forget about that), but the thing that you bought stays around and serves you all the time.
Linux people do buy software. Myself, I recently bought Eagle and Qt (commercial license).
The problem is with products themselves. It is virtually out of question to buy WP into an office that is built around MS Word or StarOffice formats. CorelDraw may be good, I used it very long time ago, but Corel is dwarfed by rows and rows of Adobe products; basically Adobe Illustrator is the #1 in vector graphics, while Adobe Photoshop became a de-facto standard (and a platform) for raster images. Corel lost the market on its own, and Linux sales, targeting new customers, only reflect that.
"Programming" here is not necessarily C++ or Perl. It can be just a map design for Unreal Tournament or whatever. As long as it is a design, it is a programming - and it is as creative as any other art form.
This is the opportunity to get your 64-bit computing in a beige box instead of a proprietary system. Supposedly, it will be cheaper, easier to use, and mainstream. For most people, one killer argument is "Does it run Windows?" - and you can't natively run Windows on Sparc or HP/UX... (whether you can run Win64 on Itanic is another story ;-)
This, if implemented, would be a great reason to legalize DVD backup solutions. Right now, the DVD is virtually not wearing out. But if it does, the consumer can argue all kinds of standard consumer protection arguments in favor of his right to watch the DVD *as the content is licensed*, like once, but to use the content when he is ready. It will be tough defense for the DVD people because there will be very legitimate reason to back it up.
The size of the code is a pretty good estimate how many people work on it, how many branches they maintain, and how much of merging they do. So if you know how large your code is, you can tell whether this or that revision control system (or any other tool, to that matter) is appropriate for the job.
That is fine; but the most important problems would be absence of changesets (so you can't undo related groups of patches), and absence of tiered repositories (everyone goes to the same, single, central CVS server). It all can work, and it does work as we know, but the more code you write the more difficult the maintenance becomes. Like it or not, CVS is an old software, unchanged for years and full of kludges, and BK is one of new designs.
Well, at least he runs Linux...
I use CVS all the time, but I know its limitations. Linus was right when he decided not to use CVS, it simply is not reliable enough. But don't blame CVS, it is a good and useful tool; but every tool has its safe zone of "recommended use", and Linux kernel is way beyond that. I say, any project above 50 KLOCs and with 100 revisions on average would be pushing the limits.
They also say that you can connect keyboard and mouse through the USB too; this makes it a decent portable system, not a notebook but something like Palm Pilot with cradle, keyboard, charger etc. etc.
This surely can be used in vertical markets, but no vertical market will want this *consumer* device. In real world (on factory floor, in shipping etc.) the portable terminals must be much more rugged to survive the abuse. This one has *no chance*, and I worked in that industry. A terminal usually must survive 10 hours fully submerged in water (while turned on and working), or work after 4 feet drop on concrete, or work at minus temperatures for freezer use, etc.
The most likely user I can think of is a lazy geek who ate so much pizza that he can't get to his computer!
Life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality.
Indeed, not many people would want to revert to neanderthals even if they could. We don't know how to run, how to hunt, how to do all those wild things... Furthermore, the human body wears out in about 40 years -- and after that, for many, only modern medicine can keep the life bearable.
It is quite obvious to me that humans *already* evolved past the mere physical shell. Our mind is more important than our body, that's why we refuse to "live healthily" when it conflicts with our internal Universe. That's why they say "one who doesn't smoke and doesn't drink will die in perfect health".
So indeed, this is a philosophical question - what are you? Without answering it first we can not say what behavior is or is not proper.
This is irrelevant because it assumes a proper, healthy behavior - which, if present, would have prevented problems in first place.
Many students damage their health during the *incredibly lengthy* school years. Can they avoid that? Sure; read 30 minutes per day, and sit in the class 30 minutes per day (because they will be getting back problems), and roam free the rest of the time. Is it even possible? I don't think so.
The bigger problem is that *all parts* of the society are unhealthy today, not only students. We live in polluted, crowded cities, drink water with heavy metals, sit 10 hours per day in an office chair under flickering fluorescent lights, staring at the monitor in a foot from our noses, then go home and eat pizza... all that is unhealthy.
The idea of Star Trek economy (a.k.a. communism) is that nobody cares if *you* fly to stars to trade, or just sleep under a palm tree. Infinite energy resources and replicators allow anyone to have anything, within reason.
The question is: how many people, on average, will choose to work and how many will choose to do nothing? I think it does not matter. All the science and technology is driven by personal interest (of scientists and engineers), curiosity, joy of discovery, and they will work regardless of salary (that's how it is even now). The rest (workers, machinists etc.) can sleep, they do not advance anything, and their functions can be easily replaced by robots.
But even the laziest person on the planet can not do nothing for his entire life! It would be too boring. People will be always doing something. My personal expectation is that they will be bombing each other, though...
Most of vision problems are acquired in school, where children have to read lots of books, often in bad lighting conditions. Human eyes are not designed for reading, they were meant to look far. But in modern society your only chance to still have good eyesight by the graduation date is to read as little as possible, and run on streets as much as possible (i.e. being a "bad boy", as opposed to "honorary student"). This is fairly easy to spot - most scientists have bad eyesight, most lumberjacks have perfect vision.
In other words, requirements of the modern society are outright unhealthy, unnatural and cause all sorts of deevolution. Humans are the only species that "evolve the environment" around them instead of adapting to existing one. If this continues, we will have the society of half-alive, mostly immobile and absolutely sick people, kept alive only with wonders of technology. Maybe eventually humans will evolve themselves into cyborgs. I would vote for that any day.
Two steps behind a leader is much better place to be than right in front of the last man running :-) What Ximian makes is needed not to geeks but to common folk (a.k.a. lusers). That's who wants Evolution. Without Windows-like apps Linux will see much more resistance everywhere. I am personally very glad that Ximian works on all that unneeded fluff and eye candy, so I can focus on some serious work.
Myself, I am very happy with Mutt, and though I tried Evolution and I have it installed... it crashes sometimes, and it is not as flexible as Mutt is. Evolution also has some codepage-related quirks which Mutt (and iconv that it uses) doesn't have.
I assume they didn't have too many *external* contributors to this very pre-alpha project. All internal contributors (the 50 programmers mentioned in the article) apparently signed license change agreements.
Absolute majority of computer users (probably 99.99% at home and 99% at work) don't know, don't want to know and don't care about software or computers in general: It is flashy? Good! I like flashy thingies! When I tell them about spyware the universal response is I don't care, I don't do anything bad and Let them have it if they want it, as long as I am getting my free whatever...
Some people (/., for example) will indeed not want to use this software... unless they are forced to, or convinced to. But even if every single computer scientist on the planet rebels against this very foggy threat, nobody will listen to them anyway. Majority rarely listens to minority - "might makes right", and we see examples of that just everywhere.
So if 0.5% of population refuses to run spyware-laden apps, who cares? Majority of people just want to get some work done, they don't want to know what's going on inside their computers. As long as spyware-infected app works and does what the user wants, the app and the parasites will be successful.
My Handspring Visor was always very easy to use, with both serial and USB cradles. To install something you do pilot-xfer -i.
But since UWB transmission exists on all frequencies during the time slot, the SS system loses all its advantages. I am sure many users (like military) would not want that.
Even a perfectly trained engineer can't see through the sealed components, and most of components are like that - tested and sealed at the factory. The guards would have to be present at hundreds of companies instead of just one Boeing. For example, it would be trivial to add the surveillance circuitry to some existing electronic component, and there are so many of those on an airliner that you can't tell which one was altered. The $5000 TV, for example, could double as a bug and who can tell why this or that chip is inside and what is it doing...
How would a guard tell what is in that little metal cube - a relay for the cabin lights or a bug? Even assuming that the guard looked over the shoulder of the technician.
What would one read in a newspaper today, yesterday's news? Opinions of illiterate or unqualified journalists? Ads? Same happened with radio; rare a song now is played from start to end because radio people just love to mix and match the bait^Wsong with ads and useless chat that is not even worth the battery to tune to. TV is not far behind; ads drip from every little pause in content, and the content itself is of very low value, targeting lowest common denominator in the society.
Is there something better than TV? Sure, and it is already here. One can have his movies on tapes, VCDs, DVDs or just in big .avi files, just click of a mouse to order at online shop (or Usenet). The one-way pipe (from fools on that end to fools on this end) is now being replaced with tons of chat/messaging software, from rocket-scientist's IRC to uncle Joe's Yahoo boards, where people can actually *talk* to each other, instead of being fed with corporate propaganda.
The TV is losing its appeal, especially (for now) among people who know how to get better information from Internet. Joe Sixpack still uses TV; however he does so not because he loves it but because it is there. He loves beer much more, and if he can get his football elsewhere, he will. If he can't tape his play he would be mad, and the TV would be useless to him.
In any case, there is no free market in broadcasting, and as such the monopoly (made out of several sister TV companies) is free to abuse the viewer in any way it wants. The only remedy is to stop using their services. They are not worth much anyway, and if a movie is good you can always buy it, free from ads, squishing, logos and other fluff.