I was thinking about this for a while.
On the one hand, the themes in this case are used by computer savvy folks (likely Linux or BSD folks) who know the difference between a Mac and PC. They will not be confused.
On the other hand, there are a lot of folks who are new to computers and don't realize that a Mac is not the same as Windows is not the same as PowerPC is not the same as Linux. So Apple spends a lot of money to design a case; someone comes along and copies that case and puts them in stores. A new computer user sees lots of Apple ads, runs over to his local computer store and sees an e-machine or some other knockoff. Will he/she know the difference, or will they think it's the easy-to-use iMac?
Again, we know the difference, but many people think FreeBSD is some new Windows application to put their homepage on the Internet.
Themes are arguably different than a case design. But look at it this way: regardless of which OS you choose, the user interface is becoming similar. Someone mentioned that Windows appropriated elements of the Mac GUI. Well, enlightenment, the gnome and KDE desktops, and all manner of window managers have similar features. How does Apple differentiate itself? By its look-and-feel and themes.
I don't mean (or want) to defend Apple, but I still remember how the Linux and BSD communities reacted when MS released features in NT2000 that had long been available in Unix.
The reason I use tapes is because they are a proven technology. I archive to CDs occasionally, but at 700meg each, it would take many CDs to archive what I can do on one tape (which means no one has to babysit the backup process). For a personal machine, backing up to a second drive is fine. In an enterprise system though, you'll need offsite storage, more ruggedness, faster backup speeds, low media cost and high capacity. A single 40GB might backup a day or so, but you'd have no way to go back a week or more. You also don't have anything like a tape robot to have terabytes of capacity.
Of course. No language can survive if it doesn't change.
You've hit it. The languages that don't change are dead languages. There are a bunch of language bigots who feel that is not as dignified or as rich as their native tongue. Heck, down here in Miami lots of folks complain about the creeping of Spanish words into English (hmmm, maybe this is what caused the voter comfusion).
When I saw this on MSNBC it seems to imply that it's a Linux virus (sic), not an MS trojan. So to downplay the fact that this affects Windows platforms, they spin it to be "Linux Virus".
When travelling through old places, I've always felt a certain eeriness. I'm not talking about your grandmother's little cottage or the turn-of-the-(19th)-century state capitol, but the ancient places that reek of age. I had a chance to visit some archeological sites in Florida and Georgia. It's *eerie* looking at a fragment of bone or some shard and realizing that someone long ago existed, perhaps had similar questions about their existence, and eventually died.
So they find evidence that life is a lot older than we first believed... Did DNA spring magically from some primordial ooze when lightning added the spark of *life*? Did DNA hitch a ride on a meteor or comet from a departure gate in another star system? Did That-Which-Is-Nameless breathe upon the waters and spark this madness?
Gods. 2.6 billion years. Though I daily work with exponential quantities, the reality of 2.6 BILLION years boggles my mind. How powerful must its life spark be if it could survive for 2.6 billion years.
Hmmm. I wondered if it would taste like truffles if I ate it. And would it give me super powers?
Points for Exchange...
1) It is trivial to set up. By this I mean the default (insecure) configuration can be running in about fifteen minutes.
2) It works well with Microsoft clients (i.e., Windows).
3) Good support for calendaring/scheduling applications.
Points against Exchange...
1) It's difficult to secure. I could take up a few pages listing the problems with viruses, attachments, and suchlike, but it would be far better if you looked at SecurityFocus for yourself. Some things cannot be secured except with client-side modifications or zapping usefulness like e-mail attachments.
2) Stability. I can't offer much except my experience with Exchange vs. Sendmail. The Exchange server required weekly reboots -- I'm not certain if this was the fault of the underlying OS (WinNT4) or Exchange, but my perception was that it was unstable. When we got hit with a ILOVEYOU variant, the script that MS provided would crash the entire box. Sendmail ran forever until once when the CPU usage peaked and sendmail's threshold limit was exceeded. This took over twenty minutes to figure out with technical assistance.
3) Exchange does not work well (or at all) with non-MS clients.
4) Cost is high in comparison.
5) More difficult to integrate with non-MS servers.
Miami has a proud history of voting irregularities. We have dead people voting (several times), local politicians paying the homeless for their vote, polls running out of ballots, ballot boxes missing, the elderly in nursing homes being TOLD who to vote for. Our honorable politicians and city officials defend their honor with fisticuffs at local radio stations. They write checks to family members. They get arrested for drunken driving.
Miami makes me so proud.
I admit that when lawsuits were filed against other sites I didn't really care. I don't download much from Napster, don't watch too many DVDs on my PC, etc. However, math is one of my only enjoyments and I've visited Eric's page almost every other day. I would like to learn what is the basis of this lawsuit, and if it is nonsense I will help fight in whatver way I can this time.
"Also, from a lower level manager standpoint, how the heck are you going to review someone if you don't know what they do, can't possibly do it yourself, and have no plans to learn how to do it? KLOCS?"
Easy. I trust my employees to do a good job. I look at their finished product, look at the quality, look at how long it took. If you read the original post you'll realize that I never said anything about not knowing what my employees do. I know exactly what they do. I leave the "how" up to them. The details of their work is irrelevant to me, as long as the quality is there. It's called trust. For example, if a PC is not working I could really care less about how my technicians fix the problem. If fifty PCs have the same error I will get involved, but twiddling with IRQs or knowing the intricacies of the network drivers is not related to my work. It is related to their work and they do a very good job of fixing PCs. To learn their craft would take me lots of time. If I took this time to learn their craft I would have less time to improve mine.
In the case of sysadmins I do know their jobs and can do everything that they do. Two programmers report to me, but I don't intend to learn Visual Basic anytime soon. I also don't intend to learn anything about fiber technology, though I understand its advantages and the wiring team lead reports to me.
The real world is rarely full of absolutes as your post would suggest.
Can someone answer this question for me?
To create sound on a PC requires that data is sent to the sound card. This data can be read and recorded by some sort of "shim" between the decoder application and the sound interface. This shim will grab pure data (i.e., not a conversion from the analog). How can an application prevent something like this from occurring? Is it even possible?
I can see your point but disagree. Some of the worst managers are those that want to get into every detail of your work. I have managed people whose work I would not and could not do. That's why they were hired -- because they possessed skills that I did not. At the same time, remaining completely aloof from the technology is just as bad.
This was not the only problem. A Linux/Netscape browser could not even get to the page to vote. If you clicked on "Complete Story" nothing would happen. The only was I was able to vote for Linux was to access it from an IE browser. In other words, the poll prevented non-IE users from participating. This fact is a lot worse than ballot stuffing because the latter could be blamed on users.
This is a really basic way to check what ports are open on a Linux box:
Open/etc/inetd.conf and look for lines that do not begin with a hash (#). These are the services that inetd is listening for. Do not use the
"grep -v '^#' inetd.conf" way of checking , as this won't alert you if the # is not the absolute first character on the line.
Ideally you should run nmap against your machine. Inetd will listen on the ports configured in the inetd.conf file. Other services may be listening directly to the port (apache, for example). There is a front end called nmapfe that automates the procedure. Run it against your local machine.
You could also try looking at https://grc.com then doing the scan network tests. This site is geared to Windows services but the probe is useful. Do not trust what the guy says in his FAQ because it's meant to sell his firewall product. He has some wrong information in there.
Once you realize that your machine is wide open, how do you disable those services? First, edit the inetd.conf file and then comment out the lines for services you don't need. Then restart inetd by doing a killall -HUP inetd. Go into LinuxConf and disable the other services. For now I'd suggest completely disabling wu-ftpd and rpc.statd until the fixes have been tested for a while.
As for any security, don't trust your box to this minimal information. There are lots of other ports open that I didn't address here. Do some reading!
Models, when flawed, can really hinder breakthroughs (the celestial sphere models come to mind). This was not only true then, but now, as even current elemtary and middle school science classrooms still present the atom as miniature solar systems. Models of electric current are also often wrong, as they try to show it as water flowing (the direction is wrong).
You're very correct. Many so-called adherents to the doctrine think that Zen is only a mindset, a way of approaching the world. As you say, this fits in easily with their comfortable lifestyle. Zen is hard. It is waking up every morning before the dawn to practice the form and doing so until the night.
So are deep-lore programmers Zen? Are they taoists? When they can write code and *know* that it works, are they akin to the Tao archer that lets his arrow loose and does not check the target because he *knows* that it struck true?
Realizing that both ways hold truths, maybe a Seeker looks to some Eastern tradition and finds comfort in a religion that accepts all gods. It accepts the Tao as easily as Yama and YHWH and Jehovah. The outward representations of its faith become apparent in intricate mathematical mosaics and is conducive to the programmer occupations, not just for the math, but for the meditative sessions required for both.
I've heard these statistics before but have yet to see the studies. A similar argument about the scientific discoveries that NASA provided also exists. They both miss the point.
For one, it would be better to invest directly into products for earth than to get peripheral benefits from an expensive mission. I strongly believe that we could have discovered Tang without the moon missions and for far less cost. More tangible results also come from investment into schools and child programs.
However, I do believe strongly in Mars missions. I was glued to the Internet and to the television during the rover mission. We need NASA's mission to help re-kindle the scientific energy and excitement of the Apollo years. We need NASA so kids won't think that major league football or a rock career is a viable career choice for millions of school kids.
Math is hardly robotic and soulless.
Your post reminds me of the countless English (or rather, grammar) teachers and art instructors who knew nothing of mathematics and condemned it as soulless. Except for one, none had progressed beyond algebra. Mathematics is not rote calculation of formulas, but like the creation of a new melody or new music phrasing, it is a foray into undiscovered realms. Without knowing mathematics it is prejudice to decry it.
On the same token, mathematics takes passion. I believe that it was Rousseau who said (to paraphrase) that passion was the essence of reason. Certainly a computer can extract formulas and integrate, but so can it take the Allegro Maestoso and swirl it to something new. This is not the essence of mathematics, as surely as melody helper software is the soul of music.
To say that music is not math, and math not music would be to rob both of part of their nature. Look at the octave scale -- the base8 numbers are discernible. Picture the chaotic syncopation of a jazz improviso graphed on paper and Gleick's papers emerge.
Though I think that emulation technology is really interesting, I'm concerned that cool OSes like Be, Linux, or BSD will strive for compatibility rather than breaking new ground. In some cases, touting emulation is actually a hindrance. Does anyone remember PC-Ditto for the Atari ST? SoftPC for the Mac? It was geek euphoria to see the C:> prompt on my little TOS screen. Same thing with the CP/M emulators. However, the implementations were so slow and unstable that they were unusable. Trying to demonstrate flexibility with these tools was embarassing. Wine, Mame, and VMWare can actually be pretty useful, but I would rather see some new features than mimicry. BTW, features I want to see in an OS (I don't have enough experience to implement these myself): 1) CVS type filesystem for large drives. No worries about changing a file ever again. 2) Filesystem not based on filename but on document attributes. I.e., users won't have to remember what WORK_ECOMFN0012000 contains, but can query on the contents. The desktop metaphor of many OSes fall apart here because I often have multiple documents of the same name on my physical desk, which is difficult/impossible with current systems. 3) Better interoperability with different media. Everything now is proprietary. XML based documents would be cool 4) Better screen drawing technology that will take advantage of the wide variations in displays. E.g., automatic palletes for lower bit depth screens. Postscript-like screen drawing...etc. 5) Better input devices/metaphors. Voice recognition/language parsing. Vocabulary can be limited to a few commands, but make those commands versatile. "Go to slashdot.org" opens a website. "Go to my games folder." etc.. 6) Crashing. Why can one errant application still bring down my Windows box (don't answer that).
I don't agree with this. There have been many times that applications have crashed because another program misbehaved. For example, if my TV player crashes in Windows98 it will bring everything down. Same card (Ati All in Wonder 128) is perfect under Linux. If it crashes, nothing else even notices. So, even though the actual apps may not be better coded on Unix, they at least appear to be more stable. Oddly enough, I can consistently get X to lock up if I try to run Windows Chessmaster 5000 under Wine. I can ctl-alt-f1 and kill the wine processes, and sometimes need to telinit 5.
Sometimes moving among the various flavors of unix is as simple as typing make. For developers, it's not a question of "why", but of "why not?". If a sizable market is suddenly opened up with relatively little code modification (compared to porting to NT) then it's good business sense.
Coca-Cola is water, sugar, CO2, some flavoring and some coloring. Without constant marketing many people would not but Coke. When Coca-Cola decided to save a little money by scaling back some of its advertising, it saw a decrease in sales. The lesson was that advertising, not taste, actually drove the sales of this soft drink. A similar thing occurs in the music industry. They spend millions promoting artists, none of which have any better talent than your neighborhand bands, and watch as millions buy their CDs. If you think about your favorite mainstream bands you may realize that many sound pathetic. "What were you thinking?" you might ask yourself (Who is this beautiful wife?). There was a time in high school and college when I listened to music not for their music, but because no one else listened to them. It's eerie to see people revering these plastic renditions of bands, and thinking that they are somehow rebellious, full of insight into teen angst and depression, or enlightened in some way. It's a marketing machine, folks. This is why it's easy to ban the RIAA. If you want an MP3 fix, browse over to pages that allow *artists* to play their music, not some middle-aged executive looking to cash in on the billions in allowances and fast-food minimum wages.
It certainly is within the capabilities of any modern SQL engine. The reason for the high cost is that a database of 30 gigs probably contains lots of critical data. Likely, your enterprise may need guaranteed uptime which includes good hardware, stable software, constant power, and the ability to upgrade or fix without downtime. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Linux when it comes to databases of this size: Current 2.2 kernel does not support raw disks. This is the ability of the database engine to manage the disks, rather than adding an OS filesystem layer. This gives added speed and reliability. I believe that the newer kernel will support raw disks but it may take short while for the major vendors to support it.
Hot swap ability/redundancy - Lots of good stuff, some bad. Various clustering solutions are being developed that can work with large databases. Linux may be a little weak when it comes to support for hot swap drives (don't know the current state).
In any case, 30 gigs doesn't really say a whole lot about what sort of data you're storing. To be really optimal, you'll need to know how you will be accessing it, estimated number of hits, etc..
I'm not sure if this is all that new. When I played D&D circa 1982-85 there were all sorts of folks who would have +6 longswords, magical armor, etc.. Quite often we'd meet individual players who had crafted their characters by writing in their stats. I.e., STr 14 is too low, erase and make it 18+2. They'd get upset if we told them that they couldn't play their characters. I also remember the Ultima series on Apple II's and Ataris and how easy it was to boost characters. Of course, these games weren't multiplayer then. Your open source and free software comment was a joke, right? Here's a little substitution game: [blank] causes declining morals and the end of civilization. a) Dungeons and Dragons (1980's) b) Heavy Metal Music (Tipper Gore) c) The Internet (Bush) d) DeCSS (mpaa) e) Catcher in the Rye f) Jazz Music g) Television Damn. I must be morally corrupt and on the way to hell.
I'm starting to think that such a system may soon be necessary, even for the home user. As we start doing more and more of our work on the computer, and as it starts augmenting the television and radio, we need some way to keep track of where in the filesystem it's located. For example, I sometimes archive realaudio broadcasts by saving the link. However, the filename is usually a machine-readble index, and rarely has any information about the actual broadcast. Regardless of my filing system, there is still no easy way to search the actual broadcast for an interesting comment. I have a similar problem at work with the "paperless" (Hahahaaaa) image solution that was implemented on a filesystem. Remember the old commercial line "Roaches check in but they don't check out." That's sort of how our document filing system works. We can check images into it and get a document number. However, without that document number there is no way to search the image catalog. We have maybe 100 vendors we use. 8 of these are major vendors and searching on their name returns thousands of entries. OCR may help eventually, but given the quality of our invoices (many printed on carbon copy, many bent, folded, spindled and mutilated) it's not a workable option. Also, an ideal filesystem would have some sort of revision control a la RCS/CVS. Because we have so much *space*, it may not even be necessary to delete files, merely show the latest version with the option to always recover an earlier version, regardless of the application.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking about this for a while.
On the one hand, the themes in this case are used by computer savvy folks (likely Linux or BSD folks) who know the difference between a Mac and PC. They will not be confused.
On the other hand, there are a lot of folks who are new to computers and don't realize that a Mac is not the same as Windows is not the same as PowerPC is not the same as Linux. So Apple spends a lot of money to design a case; someone comes along and copies that case and puts them in stores. A new computer user sees lots of Apple ads, runs over to his local computer store and sees an e-machine or some other knockoff. Will he/she know the difference, or will they think it's the easy-to-use iMac?
Again, we know the difference, but many people think FreeBSD is some new Windows application to put their homepage on the Internet.
Themes are arguably different than a case design. But look at it this way: regardless of which OS you choose, the user interface is becoming similar. Someone mentioned that Windows appropriated elements of the Mac GUI. Well, enlightenment, the gnome and KDE desktops, and all manner of window managers have similar features. How does Apple differentiate itself? By its look-and-feel and themes.
I don't mean (or want) to defend Apple, but I still remember how the Linux and BSD communities reacted when MS released features in NT2000 that had long been available in Unix.
The reason I use tapes is because they are a proven technology. I archive to CDs occasionally, but at 700meg each, it would take many CDs to archive what I can do on one tape (which means no one has to babysit the backup process). For a personal machine, backing up to a second drive is fine. In an enterprise system though, you'll need offsite storage, more ruggedness, faster backup speeds, low media cost and high capacity. A single 40GB might backup a day or so, but you'd have no way to go back a week or more. You also don't have anything like a tape robot to have terabytes of capacity.
Of course. No language can survive if it doesn't change.
You've hit it. The languages that don't change are dead languages. There are a bunch of language bigots who feel that is not as dignified or as rich as their native tongue. Heck, down here in Miami lots of folks complain about the creeping of Spanish words into English (hmmm, maybe this is what caused the voter comfusion).
When I saw this on MSNBC it seems to imply that it's a Linux virus (sic), not an MS trojan. So to downplay the fact that this affects Windows platforms, they spin it to be "Linux Virus".
Apparently.
And I thought I would make a difference somehow.
When travelling through old places, I've always felt a certain eeriness. I'm not talking about your grandmother's little cottage or the turn-of-the-(19th)-century state capitol, but the ancient places that reek of age. I had a chance to visit some archeological sites in Florida and Georgia. It's *eerie* looking at a fragment of bone or some shard and realizing that someone long ago existed, perhaps had similar questions about their existence, and eventually died.
So they find evidence that life is a lot older than we first believed... Did DNA spring magically from some primordial ooze when lightning added the spark of *life*? Did DNA hitch a ride on a meteor or comet from a departure gate in another star system? Did That-Which-Is-Nameless breathe upon the waters and spark this madness?
Gods. 2.6 billion years. Though I daily work with exponential quantities, the reality of 2.6 BILLION years boggles my mind. How powerful must its life spark be if it could survive for 2.6 billion years.
Hmmm. I wondered if it would taste like truffles if I ate it. And would it give me super powers?
Points for Exchange...
1) It is trivial to set up. By this I mean the default (insecure) configuration can be running in about fifteen minutes.
2) It works well with Microsoft clients (i.e., Windows).
3) Good support for calendaring/scheduling applications.
Points against Exchange...
1) It's difficult to secure. I could take up a few pages listing the problems with viruses, attachments, and suchlike, but it would be far better if you looked at SecurityFocus for yourself. Some things cannot be secured except with client-side modifications or zapping usefulness like e-mail attachments.
2) Stability. I can't offer much except my experience with Exchange vs. Sendmail. The Exchange server required weekly reboots -- I'm not certain if this was the fault of the underlying OS (WinNT4) or Exchange, but my perception was that it was unstable. When we got hit with a ILOVEYOU variant, the script that MS provided would crash the entire box. Sendmail ran forever until once when the CPU usage peaked and sendmail's threshold limit was exceeded. This took over twenty minutes to figure out with technical assistance.
3) Exchange does not work well (or at all) with non-MS clients.
4) Cost is high in comparison. 5) More difficult to integrate with non-MS servers.
So are they all, all honorable men...
Miami has a proud history of voting irregularities. We have dead people voting (several times), local politicians paying the homeless for their vote, polls running out of ballots, ballot boxes missing, the elderly in nursing homes being TOLD who to vote for. Our honorable politicians and city officials defend their honor with fisticuffs at local radio stations. They write checks to family members. They get arrested for drunken driving.
Miami makes me so proud.
I admit that when lawsuits were filed against other sites I didn't really care. I don't download much from Napster, don't watch too many DVDs on my PC, etc. However, math is one of my only enjoyments and I've visited Eric's page almost every other day. I would like to learn what is the basis of this lawsuit, and if it is nonsense I will help fight in whatver way I can this time.
"Also, from a lower level manager standpoint, how the heck are you going to review someone if you don't know what they do, can't possibly do it yourself, and have no plans to learn how to do it? KLOCS?" Easy. I trust my employees to do a good job. I look at their finished product, look at the quality, look at how long it took. If you read the original post you'll realize that I never said anything about not knowing what my employees do. I know exactly what they do. I leave the "how" up to them. The details of their work is irrelevant to me, as long as the quality is there.
It's called trust.
For example, if a PC is not working I could really care less about how my technicians fix the problem. If fifty PCs have the same error I will get involved, but twiddling with IRQs or knowing the intricacies of the network drivers is not related to my work. It is related to their work and they do a very good job of fixing PCs. To learn their craft would take me lots of time. If I took this time to learn their craft I would have less time to improve mine.
In the case of sysadmins I do know their jobs and can do everything that they do. Two programmers report to me, but I don't intend to learn Visual Basic anytime soon. I also don't intend to learn anything about fiber technology, though I understand its advantages and the wiring team lead reports to me.
The real world is rarely full of absolutes as your post would suggest.
Can someone answer this question for me?
To create sound on a PC requires that data is sent to the sound card. This data can be read and recorded by some sort of "shim" between the decoder application and the sound interface. This shim will grab pure data (i.e., not a conversion from the analog). How can an application prevent something like this from occurring? Is it even possible?
I can see your point but disagree. Some of the worst managers are those that want to get into every detail of your work. I have managed people whose work I would not and could not do. That's why they were hired -- because they possessed skills that I did not. At the same time, remaining completely aloof from the technology is just as bad.
This was not the only problem. A Linux/Netscape browser could not even get to the page to vote. If you clicked on "Complete Story" nothing would happen. The only was I was able to vote for Linux was to access it from an IE browser. In other words, the poll prevented non-IE users from participating. This fact is a lot worse than ballot stuffing because the latter could be blamed on users.
This is a really basic way to check what ports are open on a Linux box: /etc/inetd.conf and look for lines that do not begin with a hash (#). These are the services that inetd is listening for. Do not use the
"grep -v '^#' inetd.conf" way of checking , as this won't alert you if the # is not the absolute first character on the line.
Open
Ideally you should run nmap against your machine. Inetd will listen on the ports configured in the inetd.conf file. Other services may be listening directly to the port (apache, for example). There is a front end called nmapfe that automates the procedure. Run it against your local machine.
You could also try looking at https://grc.com then doing the scan network tests. This site is geared to Windows services but the probe is useful. Do not trust what the guy says in his FAQ because it's meant to sell his firewall product. He has some wrong information in there.
Once you realize that your machine is wide open, how do you disable those services? First, edit the inetd.conf file and then comment out the lines for services you don't need. Then restart inetd by doing a killall -HUP inetd. Go into LinuxConf and disable the other services. For now I'd suggest completely disabling wu-ftpd and rpc.statd until the fixes have been tested for a while.
As for any security, don't trust your box to this minimal information. There are lots of other ports open that I didn't address here. Do some reading!
Models, when flawed, can really hinder breakthroughs (the celestial sphere models come to mind). This was not only true then, but now, as even current elemtary and middle school science classrooms still present the atom as miniature solar systems. Models of electric current are also often wrong, as they try to show it as water flowing (the direction is wrong).
You're very correct. Many so-called adherents to the doctrine think that Zen is only a mindset, a way of approaching the world. As you say, this fits in easily with their comfortable lifestyle. Zen is hard. It is waking up every morning before the dawn to practice the form and doing so until the night.
So are deep-lore programmers Zen? Are they taoists? When they can write code and *know* that it works, are they akin to the Tao archer that lets his arrow loose and does not check the target because he *knows* that it struck true?
Realizing that both ways hold truths, maybe a Seeker looks to some Eastern tradition and finds comfort in a religion that accepts all gods. It accepts the Tao as easily as Yama and YHWH and Jehovah. The outward representations of its faith become apparent in intricate mathematical mosaics and is conducive to the programmer occupations, not just for the math, but for the meditative sessions required for both.
I've heard these statistics before but have yet to see the studies. A similar argument about the scientific discoveries that NASA provided also exists. They both miss the point.
For one, it would be better to invest directly into products for earth than to get peripheral benefits from an expensive mission. I strongly believe that we could have discovered Tang without the moon missions and for far less cost. More tangible results also come from investment into schools and child programs.
However, I do believe strongly in Mars missions. I was glued to the Internet and to the television during the rover mission. We need NASA's mission to help re-kindle the scientific energy and excitement of the Apollo years. We need NASA so kids won't think that major league football or a rock career is a viable career choice for millions of school kids.
Math is hardly robotic and soulless.
Your post reminds me of the countless English (or rather, grammar) teachers and art instructors who knew nothing of mathematics and condemned it as soulless. Except for one, none had progressed beyond algebra. Mathematics is not rote calculation of formulas, but like the creation of a new melody or new music phrasing, it is a foray into undiscovered realms. Without knowing mathematics it is prejudice to decry it.
On the same token, mathematics takes passion. I believe that it was Rousseau who said (to paraphrase) that passion was the essence of reason. Certainly a computer can extract formulas and integrate, but so can it take the Allegro Maestoso and swirl it to something new. This is not the essence of mathematics, as surely as melody helper software is the soul of music.
To say that music is not math, and math not music would be to rob both of part of their nature. Look at the octave scale -- the base8 numbers are discernible. Picture the chaotic syncopation of a jazz improviso graphed on paper and Gleick's papers emerge.
Though I think that emulation technology is really interesting, I'm concerned that cool OSes like Be, Linux, or BSD will strive for compatibility rather than breaking new ground.
In some cases, touting emulation is actually a hindrance. Does anyone remember PC-Ditto for the Atari ST? SoftPC for the Mac? It was geek euphoria to see the C:> prompt on my little TOS screen. Same thing with the CP/M emulators. However, the implementations were so slow and unstable that they were unusable. Trying to demonstrate flexibility with these tools was embarassing.
Wine, Mame, and VMWare can actually be pretty useful, but I would rather see some new features than mimicry.
BTW, features I want to see in an OS (I don't have enough experience to implement these myself):
1) CVS type filesystem for large drives. No worries about changing a file ever again.
2) Filesystem not based on filename but on document attributes. I.e., users won't have to remember what WORK_ECOMFN0012000 contains, but can query on the contents. The desktop metaphor of many OSes fall apart here because I often have multiple documents of the same name on my physical desk, which is difficult/impossible with current systems.
3) Better interoperability with different media. Everything now is proprietary. XML based documents would be cool
4) Better screen drawing technology that will take advantage of the wide variations in displays. E.g., automatic palletes for lower bit depth screens. Postscript-like screen drawing...etc.
5) Better input devices/metaphors. Voice recognition/language parsing. Vocabulary can be limited to a few commands, but make those commands versatile. "Go to slashdot.org" opens a website. "Go to my games folder." etc..
6) Crashing. Why can one errant application still bring down my Windows box (don't answer that).
I don't agree with this. There have been many times that applications have crashed because another program misbehaved. For example, if my TV player crashes in Windows98 it will bring everything down. Same card (Ati All in Wonder 128) is perfect under Linux. If it crashes, nothing else even notices. So, even though the actual apps may not be better coded on Unix, they at least appear to be more stable.
Oddly enough, I can consistently get X to lock up if I try to run Windows Chessmaster 5000 under Wine. I can ctl-alt-f1 and kill the wine processes, and sometimes need to telinit 5.
Sometimes moving among the various flavors of unix is as simple as typing make. For developers, it's not a question of "why", but of "why not?". If a sizable market is suddenly opened up with relatively little code modification (compared to porting to NT) then it's good business sense.
Coca-Cola is water, sugar, CO2, some flavoring and some coloring. Without constant marketing many people would not but Coke. When Coca-Cola decided to save a little money by scaling back some of its advertising, it saw a decrease in sales. The lesson was that advertising, not taste, actually drove the sales of this soft drink.
A similar thing occurs in the music industry. They spend millions promoting artists, none of which have any better talent than your neighborhand bands, and watch as millions buy their CDs. If you think about your favorite mainstream bands you may realize that many sound pathetic. "What were you thinking?" you might ask yourself (Who is this beautiful wife?).
There was a time in high school and college when I listened to music not for their music, but because no one else listened to them. It's eerie to see people revering these plastic renditions of bands, and thinking that they are somehow rebellious, full of insight into teen angst and depression, or enlightened in some way. It's a marketing machine, folks.
This is why it's easy to ban the RIAA. If you want an MP3 fix, browse over to pages that allow *artists* to play their music, not some middle-aged executive looking to cash in on the billions in allowances and fast-food minimum wages.
It certainly is within the capabilities of any modern SQL engine. The reason for the high cost is that a database of 30 gigs probably contains lots of critical data. Likely, your enterprise may need guaranteed uptime which includes good hardware, stable software, constant power, and the ability to upgrade or fix without downtime. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of Linux when it comes to databases of this size:
Current 2.2 kernel does not support raw disks. This is the ability of the database engine to manage the disks, rather than adding an OS filesystem layer. This gives added speed and reliability. I believe that the newer kernel will support raw disks but it may take short while for the major vendors to support it.
Hot swap ability/redundancy - Lots of good stuff, some bad. Various clustering solutions are being developed that can work with large databases. Linux may be a little weak when it comes to support for hot swap drives (don't know the current state).
In any case, 30 gigs doesn't really say a whole lot about what sort of data you're storing. To be really optimal, you'll need to know how you will be accessing it, estimated number of hits, etc..
I'm not sure if this is all that new. When I played D&D circa 1982-85 there were all sorts of folks who would have +6 longswords, magical armor, etc.. Quite often we'd meet individual players who had crafted their characters by writing in their stats. I.e., STr 14 is too low, erase and make it 18+2. They'd get upset if we told them that they couldn't play their characters.
I also remember the Ultima series on Apple II's and Ataris and how easy it was to boost characters. Of course, these games weren't multiplayer then.
Your open source and free software comment was a joke, right? Here's a little substitution game:
[blank] causes declining morals and the end of civilization.
a) Dungeons and Dragons (1980's)
b) Heavy Metal Music (Tipper Gore)
c) The Internet (Bush)
d) DeCSS (mpaa)
e) Catcher in the Rye
f) Jazz Music
g) Television
Damn. I must be morally corrupt and on the way to hell.
I'm starting to think that such a system may soon be necessary, even for the home user. As we start doing more and more of our work on the computer, and as it starts augmenting the television and radio, we need some way to keep track of where in the filesystem it's located. For example, I sometimes archive realaudio broadcasts by saving the link. However, the filename is usually a machine-readble index, and rarely has any information about the actual broadcast. Regardless of my filing system, there is still no easy way to search the actual broadcast for an interesting comment.
I have a similar problem at work with the "paperless" (Hahahaaaa) image solution that was implemented on a filesystem. Remember the old commercial line "Roaches check in but they don't check out." That's sort of how our document filing system works. We can check images into it and get a document number. However, without that document number there is no way to search the image catalog. We have maybe 100 vendors we use. 8 of these are major vendors and searching on their name returns thousands of entries. OCR may help eventually, but given the quality of our invoices (many printed on carbon copy, many bent, folded, spindled and mutilated) it's not a workable option.
Also, an ideal filesystem would have some sort of revision control a la RCS/CVS. Because we have so much *space*, it may not even be necessary to delete files, merely show the latest version with the option to always recover an earlier version, regardless of the application.