RFC1149 is the obvious approach one would take. Though there is some packet loss, the packets can be sufficiently large to transmit entire messages without fragmentation.
Something I wrote a few years ago after meeting Wozniak:
Saw Steve Wozniak speak at a local college this past weekend. He's one of my heroes and someone I have consciously emulated throughout my life and career. It's not every day that one gets to meet an icon. Few will disagree that Wozniak started the personal computer revolution....
Technology seems to be about stretches of incremental progress interspersed with head-wrenching forward lurches. Sometimes it is not so much the brilliance of one person, but the Muse bestowing an honor upon some lucky individual. Serendipitous discovery pushes science forward perhaps more often than dogged determination or even genius. It's as if the world was primed for a Newton or Leibniz, a Darwin or Wallace and the shock is not that two individuals discovered something revolutionary within relative moments of each other, but that the entire world did not perform a collective slap on the forehead and exclaim, "Aha!"
But we know it's not so simple. Sure, at the time that Wozniak started tinkering with transistors and those early micro-processors, there was already a buzz. Things, wonderful things, were percolating, getting ready to explode. And you could argue that if it wasn't Wozniak, then maybe Galkowski or Ng or Jackson or any one of the hundreds of geeky young science students would have realized the potential of a personal computer and spent days and nights fashioning one from bits and pieces salvaged from neighborhood garages. But they didn't. And if not for Wozniak, maybe the computer revolution would have taken another decade or two. After all, the world had gotten by without computers for millenia.
As IT folks the idea that technology is something wondrous, the equivalent of Guttenberg's inky little machine for our modern era, is sometimes lost because we are daily bombarded by New Stuff. It's so easy to become dispassionate about the latest silicon wonders; they've become tools and adjuncts to our Professions. But imagine that, from your easy chair in front of the TV, you can communicate with a farmer in New Delhi or a goatherd in Katmandu! Imagine that you can conceive a notion, a thought, maybe a novel approach to understanding NP completeness or an insight into Deconstructionist Dynamics in the writings of Dr. Seuss and within moments share it with the world. The personal computer -- technology -- made this possible. And Woz ushered in the personal computer revolution.
I'm getting really annoyed with all these call for greater market share. It' almost as if someone has discovered your awesome fishing spot and decides that it would be a great idea if they built an interstate highway next to it so everyone can fish there. I'm not against greater market share, but market share as a goal is dumb.
DirecTV was BY FAR the most persistent and annoying telemarketers. They would call, when I said "hello" they'd pretend to be a friend.. "Hey man, how's it going? What have you been doing with yourself?"
Or
"Yo, wazzup! Thought I'd lost your number."
The funny thing was that they sometimes transposed my first and last names, or screwed up the pronunciation badly... Even after the initial, "No thank you, not interested," they'd continue their spiel...
Sometimes I'd just hang up... sometimes, being polite, I'd continue with "no thank yous"..
They'd ask for sympathy: "Look, I really need to get four subscriptions or else I lose my job. You can cancel after a month."
They'd call me dumb: "What do you mean? You don't want to save money on your cable bill? You must be rich."
Or they'd just keep on reading no matter what I said... You needed to be careful here because they would do things like: "OK, so I'm just going to go ahead and send this offer out to you. I'll need to verify your home address." Then eventually, "And now I need a major credit card for identification."
. Most H1B holders are the types of people we want living and innovating in our country.
You can't make blanket statements about H1B holders. I've met some really good ones. Smart, hard working, innovative. I've also met some really bad ones who went through some IT mill and were foisted on companies looking for a particular skillset.
Indeed, I don't see any difference between H1B holders and local talent. For every great one there's a really horrible one. There are lots of mediocre ones too.
This is just begging for someone to make a working version.. but maybe in tcl/tk... One button that says in bold letters, "TRACK IP". Then grab the output of a traceroute or tracert then beep and boop every single character as the output is played back to the screen.
I agree.. Though BSG is my favorite show, it does have some flaws. Sometimes it's ok, even necessary, to make a judgment even if it puts you on the wrong side of history. War is not always evil. Killing is not always evil. In fact, someone could argue that non-violence and respect for feelings is weakness.
I enjoy that they do acknowledge the issues though.
But they killed of Dualla. That's just WRONG.
Maybe she'll turn out to be another Cylon and she did it to be resurrected elsewhere...
I've run both OpenLDAP and Fedora DS. Both are relatively easy to setup, but I'd give the nod to FedoraDS which is easier to manage and easier to get replication working. FedoraDS also seems to be more compliant, but that was just my impression based on some limited experience with the schemas.
Getting Windows to authenticate was relatively simple as there are lots of HOWTOs. If you have Linux clients, it's also relatively easy. CentOS/RedHat, for example, just needs a couple changes via system-config-authentication. You'll also need to configure things like posix groups and host/service based authentication.
However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning.' I guess it's finally time to reformat my/home partition..."
From what I understand, there's no need to reformat. Similar to how EXT3 was layered on top of EXT2, EXT4 should just be another mount option as long as the kernel supports it.
I have a couple EXT4 partitions I'm testing... It's been rock-solid so far...
I wonder what Win7 is supposed to fix. I'm probably in the minority, but I actually like the Vista GUI. It's cleaner, a little "Tonka Toy" in areas, but seems more polished than XP. What I don't like about Vista are the problems with wireless, power, CPU utilization, random disk storms, and some strange memory issues when running large JVMs. If Win7 fixes the non-gui related issues then I won't mind using it.
Strangely enough, on my Linux desktops I prefer a very minimal GUI such as fluxbox or xfce4. I turn off almost everything except for a gkrellm monitor. I did play with compiz and beryl for a while, and it was interesting at first, but quickly became annoying.
I've been reading Dr. Dobbs for a few years.. Same with Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, SysAdmin magazine. Though I enjoy thumbing through the magazine while I'm - uhh - busy, keeping the back issues is a pain. They're not easily searchable, take up a lot of space, are not cut/paste friendly, etc..
The era of the print computer magazine is in its last throes. I raise a glass to Compute!, Antic, Byte, SysAdmin, and all the others that entertained me through the years.
I went to school with Anonymous Coward. He's driven by shame. I knew AC as a friend and witnessed the same vitriol and hatred he put up with from others who did not understand him. Users often openly mocked him, especially after he posted comments about Apple Computer.
His escape came from posting. He noticed he had a particular knack for it. He'd sometimes post a thousand times a day to Slashdot (just check the logs and you can verify this for yourself). If you know others like him (such as Anonymous Howard, Eponymous Dotard, Androgynous Blowhard), please do not euthanize him in his cromulent fears.
Lots of the improvements to 2.6 have probably been added to 2.4, but many come "native" to 2.6 so no outside patches are required. For example, kernel pre-emption, better scheduler, etc.. There are other intangibles too such as development time, testing, new toolchain, etc.., but you're already moving to a new processor and you'd have to do that anyway.
Sometime last year I was rebuilding some antique MIPS-based Linux from a 2.4 to a 2.6. Almost everything in the userspace was effortless (though much of it was based on Busybox); the main issue was related to some in-line assembler that took a while to figure out what it was doing. Once I did, I googled it and realized someone else had already solved a year or so ago.
So in short, no real benefit to sticking with 2.4 IMHO.
I once worked IT for a company in Miami. One day I was sitting in the data center checking tape status. The super-high priced consultant admin walked in. She sat down in front of a Sun E6500 serial console, logged in, then started doing some work. After a few minutes, she got up, turned off the console, then started to leave. For non-Sun folks, turning off the main console shuts down the machine. I immediately asked, "What did you just do!?" She looked at me and told me she was pushing some NIS files. "You turned off the machine," I said. She looked at me like I was an idiot. "No, I just turned off the terminal."
The short story is that she normally connected from a terminal at her desk. This time she connected from the main console. It took another couple hours to fix what she'd screwed up.. All the while she was insisting that turning off the console wouldn't shutdown the machine.
Microsoft has some good and bad things going for them.
Good stuff includes a large bank account, established market share, some measure of trust in some organizations (yes, heavily qualified but true), some interesting technology on the horizon.
The things going against them are formidable though: 1) They are the market leader; or rather, they hold the lion's share of the market. The market leader traditionally bears the brunt of costs to develop new technology. This is not just coding costs, but intangibles like pushing standards that have significant up-front costs and barriers to acceptance. With the heterogenous mobile computing environment, their previous strategy of closed "standards" no longer work.
2) Their traditional cash cows (OS, Office) are becoming commodities. Everyone and their little sister seems to be putting out OSes with enough functionality to be "good enough". Microsoft now has to fight for the niche markets. This is more expensive than appealing to the masses. In contrast, startups can target the niche easily. For MS, it could be death by a thousand cuts as they bleed money going after tiny markets. (Sound eerily like the Republican Party???)
3) Barrier to entry for new markets is getting very expensive. Google has built an infrastructure on search and Internet connectivity. To enter this market is difficult. In fact, many people think that Google is purposely developing throw-away technology knowing that Microsoft is going to jump/react and try to match it.
4) Vista sucks. Their next revision may be a lot better, but Vista missed a critical salvo. Windows is not going to die anytime soon, but the problems with Vista has tarnished an already battered image.
Not exactly genetic engineering, but a couple years ago I started growing mold. Seriously. It started out accidentally as some mold in a carafe of coffee left for a few days. After reading up on it, I then was able to get some molds to grow on some lemon peels and on lemon juice. I didn't learn a whole bunch, but it was actually a lot of fun checking each day to see what had sprouted. Once it "sprouts" the mold catches pretty quickly.
What I find fascinating about garage science is that it allows complete laymen like me to try out what real scientists are doing. I feel the same way as when I got a unix prompt on my PC and was able to run a compiler to run some Newton-Rhapson solvers from my college texts. Back in college it required scheduling an hour in the lab to input and then run your programs. Now those tools are available whenever I want...
My primary desktop is a CentOS 5.2 machine. My secondary desktop is XP and sometimes Vista.
I agree somewhat with your comment, but oddly enough, I actually like some of the changes that Vista is making. In general it is cleaner and I can understand some of the design decisions as far as the user interface is concerned.
My biggest gripe is their implementation. No matter how well designed the interface is, if it doesn't perform well then it will get in the way of using the machine.
For example, I like the fact that Vista takes steps to power down the power-hungry wireless card. But I hate the fact that it powers it down WHILE I'M USING WIRELESS. That's just dumb.
I like that executables require confirmation on launch. I hate that the confirm dialogs take over the machine. I hate the number of confirms required.
I like that it will try to optimize shared library access. I hate that it does it at seemingly random intervals.
It also seems bizarrely disjointed in some security measures. For example, if I try to drag and drop multiple MP3s from a network share to a local application (e.g., foobar2000 or MediaPlayer) it will often return an error about permission denied. However, dragging them two at a time will work fine.
Vista has been completely stable for me too, as long as I don't try to do too many things at once. For example, launching the MediaPlayer and browsing at the same time can lead to a crash. I also try not to open up any Explorer windows to remote shares, especially when I'm connecting via wireless, or else it becomes unstable.
In Vista's defense, I thought that my machine had locked because any keypress would return a beep. It turns out that a share was unreachable to some dialog box had popped up. Unfortunately the dialog box was behind everything else. So my screen had greyed and I could not confirm the dialog. But luckily I was able to CTL-ALT-DEL and bring up the task manager to kill the explorer process.
You also don't want to do anything else when you're burning CDs.
Also, if you're used to closing your laptop before disconnecting from an external monitor, stop doing that. It's better to go into the Settings panel, disable the second head, then go close the laptop if you want to make sure that it wakes up properly. Though you could just close the lid with XP, it's not that big a deal.
Also, wireless disconnects in Vista quite often. If you search Google you'll find thousands of hits about it. It's not that big a deal, because I just connect via the wired Gigabit interface. I don't really need to be in bed when I'm browsing anyway.
I really like the Vista security too. Not only will it prompt for the initial launch of, say, an installer application, but it will also prompt for every child process. So installing new software from a web page will lead to a confirm on saving the exe, a confirm on launching the exe, a confirm on running the exe, a confirm on running the uninstaller for the previous, and if it's a stub installer, a confirm when the actual installer runs.
Vista memory management is awesome too. I also enjoy that it will kick of superfetch and other optimization programs in the afternoon. I used to try just working through it, but because the disk gets pegged, I find that I just take a 15 minute break at those time anyway.
You can run the VIC (VMWare Infrastructure Client) against the VMware Server 2.0 product. It works for me, though I understand that some more esoteric features are not available. I also didn't like the web console at first, but have grown to prefer it over the VIC.
I've been trying out VirtualBox for a while. VMWare had recently updated to v2.0 and had some annoying problems with the new tomcat based web front-end. It was unusable and drove a lot of people to other options. This was why I'd looked at VirtualBox.
It is easy to install and runs most OSes as a host. I tested the last two versions on CentOS 5.2 on 64bit and 32bit. The 32bit version running on my Inspiron E1505 laptop had issues with CPU utilization. No matter what was running (or not running) in the guest, it would completely spike the machine to 99% utilization. Fiddling with the CPU virtualization settings and other BIOS features had no effect.
Anyhoo, VMWare released an update that fixes the Tomcat issues. Xen is running great. Right now I don't have a lot of reason to switch, but VirtualBox does look very promising.
I know why I stopped subscribing to the Miami Herald. They were schizophrenic in their standards and stories. For one, they started catering to all these niche interests that they lost site of the average person. And I'm decidedly pedestrian in most of my activities. For example, though I'm as tolerant as the next guy, I really don't care much about the socialite nigthclub scene or what Madonna ate on South Beach last night. I'm not being intolerant, just that I have as much interest in these topics as Kevin Smith has in how well my Xen domU partition serves iSCSI LUNs. But day after day I saw columns devoted to these subcultures but scant little on stuff that amuses me.
Their arts converage dwindled, for example. At one point they would have writeups on local openings. This changed and became writeups on Castro's health. Sure, there's a sizeable Cuban population in South Florida, but have some balance, editors.
So, cool, right? Cater to the niche is not a bad thing. But then their comics pages were so damn boring. Hey, Charles Schultz was a great guy, but Peanuts is one BORING comic strip. So was Garfield. So was Cathy. If there's a place in your newspaper where it pays to be edgy, it's the comics pages.
Then there was the victim mentality throughout the paper. Every story was about how [insert your sub-culture here] was being victimized, whether it was some ethnic group or religious group or trans-gender Key West Ernest Hemingway lookalike singers. In years I'd never seen Pitts or Hiaasen say something positive. Maybe they have, but in years I hadn't seen one. Reading the Herald was damned depressing. Come on, folks, the cool edginess of the cynical writer is a fiction handed out by graying English teachers/news reporters trying to get some from young co-eds.
And maybe I care more than I should about the passing of this particular newspaper. I'm more annoyed than sad, but maybe that's better than apathy.
Instead of using water vapor, another scientist proposed building a massive umbrella system spanning 5000 square miles each. This umbrella system will shade the earth and prevent global warming.
The brilliant minds there have also designed sun shades.. These are massive sets of sunglasses that will shield the more populated regions of earth. An added benefit is that it looks awesomely cool from space. "That Earth is one hoopy frood" aliens will say.
Slashdot Mirror
RFC1149 is the obvious approach one would take. Though there is some packet loss, the packets can be sufficiently large to transmit entire messages without fragmentation.
Something I wrote a few years ago after meeting Wozniak:
Saw Steve Wozniak speak at a local college this past weekend. He's one of my heroes and someone I have consciously emulated throughout my life and career. It's not every day that one gets to meet an icon. Few will disagree that Wozniak started the personal computer revolution....
Technology seems to be about stretches of incremental progress interspersed with head-wrenching forward lurches. Sometimes it is not so much the brilliance of one person, but the Muse bestowing an honor upon some lucky individual. Serendipitous discovery pushes science forward perhaps more often than dogged determination or even genius. It's as if the world was primed for a Newton or Leibniz, a Darwin or Wallace and the shock is not that two individuals discovered something revolutionary within relative moments of each other, but that the entire world did not perform a collective slap on the forehead and exclaim, "Aha!"
But we know it's not so simple. Sure, at the time that Wozniak started tinkering with transistors and those early micro-processors, there was already a buzz. Things, wonderful things, were percolating, getting ready to explode. And you could argue that if it wasn't Wozniak, then maybe Galkowski or Ng or Jackson or any one of the hundreds of geeky young science students would have realized the potential of a personal computer and spent days and nights fashioning one from bits and pieces salvaged from neighborhood garages. But they didn't. And if not for Wozniak, maybe the computer revolution would have taken another decade or two. After all, the world had gotten by without computers for millenia.
As IT folks the idea that technology is something wondrous, the equivalent of Guttenberg's inky little machine for our modern era, is sometimes lost because we are daily bombarded by New Stuff. It's so easy to become dispassionate about the latest silicon wonders; they've become tools and adjuncts to our Professions. But imagine that, from your easy chair in front of the TV, you can communicate with a farmer in New Delhi or a goatherd in Katmandu! Imagine that you can conceive a notion, a thought, maybe a novel approach to understanding NP completeness or an insight into Deconstructionist Dynamics in the writings of Dr. Seuss and within moments share it with the world. The personal computer -- technology -- made this possible. And Woz ushered in the personal computer revolution.
I'm getting really annoyed with all these call for greater market share. It' almost as if someone has discovered your awesome fishing spot and decides that it would be a great idea if they built an interstate highway next to it so everyone can fish there. I'm not against greater market share, but market share as a goal is dumb.
DirecTV was BY FAR the most persistent and annoying telemarketers. They would call, when I said "hello" they'd pretend to be a friend..
"Hey man, how's it going? What have you been doing with yourself?"
Or
"Yo, wazzup! Thought I'd lost your number."
The funny thing was that they sometimes transposed my first and last names, or screwed up the pronunciation badly... Even after the initial, "No thank you, not interested," they'd continue their spiel...
Sometimes I'd just hang up... sometimes, being polite, I'd continue with "no thank yous"..
They'd ask for sympathy: "Look, I really need to get four subscriptions or else I lose my job. You can cancel after a month."
They'd call me dumb: "What do you mean? You don't want to save money on your cable bill? You must be rich."
Or they'd just keep on reading no matter what I said... You needed to be careful here because they would do things like:
"OK, so I'm just going to go ahead and send this offer out to you. I'll need to verify your home address." Then eventually, "And now I need a major credit card for identification."
. Most H1B holders are the types of people we want living and innovating in our country.
You can't make blanket statements about H1B holders. I've met some really good ones. Smart, hard working, innovative. I've also met some really bad ones who went through some IT mill and were foisted on companies looking for a particular skillset.
Indeed, I don't see any difference between H1B holders and local talent. For every great one there's a really horrible one. There are lots of mediocre ones too.
This is just begging for someone to make a working version.. but maybe in tcl/tk... One button that says in bold letters, "TRACK IP". Then grab the output of a traceroute or tracert then beep and boop every single character as the output is played back to the screen.
I agree.. Though BSG is my favorite show, it does have some flaws. Sometimes it's ok, even necessary, to make a judgment even if it puts you on the wrong side of history. War is not always evil. Killing is not always evil. In fact, someone could argue that non-violence and respect for feelings is weakness.
I enjoy that they do acknowledge the issues though.
But they killed of Dualla. That's just WRONG.
Maybe she'll turn out to be another Cylon and she did it to be resurrected elsewhere...
I've run both OpenLDAP and Fedora DS. Both are relatively easy to setup, but I'd give the nod to FedoraDS which is easier to manage and easier to get replication working. FedoraDS also seems to be more compliant, but that was just my impression based on some limited experience with the schemas.
Getting Windows to authenticate was relatively simple as there are lots of HOWTOs. If you have Linux clients, it's also relatively easy. CentOS/RedHat, for example, just needs a couple changes via system-config-authentication. You'll also need to configure things like posix groups and host/service based authentication.
Dean Kamen - Segway inventor - not as much business acumen, but some interesting ideas.. Good RDF too :P
Woz - probably not at all interested, but I'd buy a Mac in a moment if he was back with Apple product development
VMWare product president -- would be helpful getting Apple into corporate environments
However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning.' I guess it's finally time to reformat my /home partition..."
From what I understand, there's no need to reformat. Similar to how EXT3 was layered on top of EXT2, EXT4 should just be another mount option as long as the kernel supports it.
I have a couple EXT4 partitions I'm testing... It's been rock-solid so far...
I wonder what Win7 is supposed to fix. I'm probably in the minority, but I actually like the Vista GUI. It's cleaner, a little "Tonka Toy" in areas, but seems more polished than XP. What I don't like about Vista are the problems with wireless, power, CPU utilization, random disk storms, and some strange memory issues when running large JVMs. If Win7 fixes the non-gui related issues then I won't mind using it.
Strangely enough, on my Linux desktops I prefer a very minimal GUI such as fluxbox or xfce4. I turn off almost everything except for a gkrellm monitor. I did play with compiz and beryl for a while, and it was interesting at first, but quickly became annoying.
Ahh, memories.
Back in the 80s it was the height of geek couture to have an ASCII printout of Princess Leia adorning your wall.
I've been reading Dr. Dobbs for a few years.. Same with Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, SysAdmin magazine. Though I enjoy thumbing through the magazine while I'm - uhh - busy, keeping the back issues is a pain. They're not easily searchable, take up a lot of space, are not cut/paste friendly, etc..
The era of the print computer magazine is in its last throes. I raise a glass to Compute!, Antic, Byte, SysAdmin, and all the others that entertained me through the years.
I went to school with Anonymous Coward. He's driven by shame. I knew AC as a friend and witnessed the same vitriol and hatred he put up with from others who did not understand him. Users often openly mocked him, especially after he posted comments about Apple Computer.
His escape came from posting. He noticed he had a particular knack for it. He'd sometimes post a thousand times a day to Slashdot (just check the logs and you can verify this for yourself). If you know others like him (such as Anonymous Howard, Eponymous Dotard, Androgynous Blowhard), please do not euthanize him in his cromulent fears.
Lots of the improvements to 2.6 have probably been added to 2.4, but many come "native" to 2.6 so no outside patches are required. For example, kernel pre-emption, better scheduler, etc.. There are other intangibles too such as development time, testing, new toolchain, etc.., but you're already moving to a new processor and you'd have to do that anyway.
Sometime last year I was rebuilding some antique MIPS-based Linux from a 2.4 to a 2.6. Almost everything in the userspace was effortless (though much of it was based on Busybox); the main issue was related to some in-line assembler that took a while to figure out what it was doing. Once I did, I googled it and realized someone else had already solved a year or so ago.
So in short, no real benefit to sticking with 2.4 IMHO.
OT, I know, but God I hate manager speak.
Why do they say "negatively impacts" when "harms" is a better word?
Software piracy harms local economic growth.
I once worked IT for a company in Miami. One day I was sitting in the data center checking tape status. The super-high priced consultant admin walked in. She sat down in front of a Sun E6500 serial console, logged in, then started doing some work. After a few minutes, she got up, turned off the console, then started to leave. For non-Sun folks, turning off the main console shuts down the machine. I immediately asked, "What did you just do!?" She looked at me and told me she was pushing some NIS files. "You turned off the machine," I said. She looked at me like I was an idiot. "No, I just turned off the terminal."
The short story is that she normally connected from a terminal at her desk. This time she connected from the main console. It took another couple hours to fix what she'd screwed up.. All the while she was insisting that turning off the console wouldn't shutdown the machine.
Microsoft has some good and bad things going for them.
Good stuff includes a large bank account, established market share, some measure of trust in some organizations (yes, heavily qualified but true), some interesting technology on the horizon.
The things going against them are formidable though:
1) They are the market leader; or rather, they hold the lion's share of the market. The market leader traditionally bears the brunt of costs to develop new technology. This is not just coding costs, but intangibles like pushing standards that have significant up-front costs and barriers to acceptance. With the heterogenous mobile computing environment, their previous strategy of closed "standards" no longer work.
2) Their traditional cash cows (OS, Office) are becoming commodities. Everyone and their little sister seems to be putting out OSes with enough functionality to be "good enough". Microsoft now has to fight for the niche markets. This is more expensive than appealing to the masses. In contrast, startups can target the niche easily. For MS, it could be death by a thousand cuts as they bleed money going after tiny markets. (Sound eerily like the Republican Party???)
3) Barrier to entry for new markets is getting very expensive. Google has built an infrastructure on search and Internet connectivity. To enter this market is difficult. In fact, many people think that Google is purposely developing throw-away technology knowing that Microsoft is going to jump/react and try to match it.
4) Vista sucks. Their next revision may be a lot better, but Vista missed a critical salvo. Windows is not going to die anytime soon, but the problems with Vista has tarnished an already battered image.
5) Competition is much fiercer.
Not exactly genetic engineering, but a couple years ago I started growing mold. Seriously. It started out accidentally as some mold in a carafe of coffee left for a few days. After reading up on it, I then was able to get some molds to grow on some lemon peels and on lemon juice. I didn't learn a whole bunch, but it was actually a lot of fun checking each day to see what had sprouted. Once it "sprouts" the mold catches pretty quickly.
What I find fascinating about garage science is that it allows complete laymen like me to try out what real scientists are doing. I feel the same way as when I got a unix prompt on my PC and was able to run a compiler to run some Newton-Rhapson solvers from my college texts. Back in college it required scheduling an hour in the lab to input and then run your programs. Now those tools are available whenever I want...
My primary desktop is a CentOS 5.2 machine. My secondary desktop is XP and sometimes Vista.
I agree somewhat with your comment, but oddly enough, I actually like some of the changes that Vista is making. In general it is cleaner and I can understand some of the design decisions as far as the user interface is concerned.
My biggest gripe is their implementation. No matter how well designed the interface is, if it doesn't perform well then it will get in the way of using the machine.
For example, I like the fact that Vista takes steps to power down the power-hungry wireless card. But I hate the fact that it powers it down WHILE I'M USING WIRELESS. That's just dumb.
I like that executables require confirmation on launch. I hate that the confirm dialogs take over the machine. I hate the number of confirms required.
I like that it will try to optimize shared library access. I hate that it does it at seemingly random intervals.
It also seems bizarrely disjointed in some security measures. For example, if I try to drag and drop multiple MP3s from a network share to a local application (e.g., foobar2000 or MediaPlayer) it will often return an error about permission denied. However, dragging them two at a time will work fine.
Vista has been completely stable for me too, as long as I don't try to do too many things at once. For example, launching the MediaPlayer and browsing at the same time can lead to a crash. I also try not to open up any Explorer windows to remote shares, especially when I'm connecting via wireless, or else it becomes unstable.
In Vista's defense, I thought that my machine had locked because any keypress would return a beep. It turns out that a share was unreachable to some dialog box had popped up. Unfortunately the dialog box was behind everything else. So my screen had greyed and I could not confirm the dialog. But luckily I was able to CTL-ALT-DEL and bring up the task manager to kill the explorer process.
You also don't want to do anything else when you're burning CDs.
Also, if you're used to closing your laptop before disconnecting from an external monitor, stop doing that. It's better to go into the Settings panel, disable the second head, then go close the laptop if you want to make sure that it wakes up properly. Though you could just close the lid with XP, it's not that big a deal.
Also, wireless disconnects in Vista quite often. If you search Google you'll find thousands of hits about it. It's not that big a deal, because I just connect via the wired Gigabit interface. I don't really need to be in bed when I'm browsing anyway.
I really like the Vista security too. Not only will it prompt for the initial launch of, say, an installer application, but it will also prompt for every child process. So installing new software from a web page will lead to a confirm on saving the exe, a confirm on launching the exe, a confirm on running the exe, a confirm on running the uninstaller for the previous, and if it's a stub installer, a confirm when the actual installer runs.
Vista memory management is awesome too. I also enjoy that it will kick of superfetch and other optimization programs in the afternoon. I used to try just working through it, but because the disk gets pegged, I find that I just take a 15 minute break at those time anyway.
There's so much I love about Vista.
You can run the VIC (VMWare Infrastructure Client) against the VMware Server 2.0 product. It works for me, though I understand that some more esoteric features are not available. I also didn't like the web console at first, but have grown to prefer it over the VIC.
I've been trying out VirtualBox for a while. VMWare had recently updated to v2.0 and had some annoying problems with the new tomcat based web front-end. It was unusable and drove a lot of people to other options. This was why I'd looked at VirtualBox.
It is easy to install and runs most OSes as a host. I tested the last two versions on CentOS 5.2 on 64bit and 32bit. The 32bit version running on my Inspiron E1505 laptop had issues with CPU utilization. No matter what was running (or not running) in the guest, it would completely spike the machine to 99% utilization. Fiddling with the CPU virtualization settings and other BIOS features had no effect.
Anyhoo, VMWare released an update that fixes the Tomcat issues. Xen is running great. Right now I don't have a lot of reason to switch, but VirtualBox does look very promising.
I know why I stopped subscribing to the Miami Herald. They were schizophrenic in their standards and stories. For one, they started catering to all these niche interests that they lost site of the average person. And I'm decidedly pedestrian in most of my activities. For example, though I'm as tolerant as the next guy, I really don't care much about the socialite nigthclub scene or what Madonna ate on South Beach last night. I'm not being intolerant, just that I have as much interest in these topics as Kevin Smith has in how well my Xen domU partition serves iSCSI LUNs. But day after day I saw columns devoted to these subcultures but scant little on stuff that amuses me.
Their arts converage dwindled, for example. At one point they would have writeups on local openings. This changed and became writeups on Castro's health. Sure, there's a sizeable Cuban population in South Florida, but have some balance, editors.
So, cool, right? Cater to the niche is not a bad thing. But then their comics pages were so damn boring. Hey, Charles Schultz was a great guy, but Peanuts is one BORING comic strip. So was Garfield. So was Cathy. If there's a place in your newspaper where it pays to be edgy, it's the comics pages.
Then there was the victim mentality throughout the paper. Every story was about how [insert your sub-culture here] was being victimized, whether it was some ethnic group or religious group or trans-gender Key West Ernest Hemingway lookalike singers. In years I'd never seen Pitts or Hiaasen say something positive. Maybe they have, but in years I hadn't seen one. Reading the Herald was damned depressing. Come on, folks, the cool edginess of the cynical writer is a fiction handed out by graying English teachers/news reporters trying to get some from young co-eds.
And maybe I care more than I should about the passing of this particular newspaper. I'm more annoyed than sad, but maybe that's better than apathy.
Instead of using water vapor, another scientist proposed building a massive umbrella system spanning 5000 square miles each. This umbrella system will shade the earth and prevent global warming.
The brilliant minds there have also designed sun shades.. These are massive sets of sunglasses that will shield the more populated regions of earth. An added benefit is that it looks awesomely cool from space. "That Earth is one hoopy frood" aliens will say.