Mobile phones are heavily subsidised by the carriers, a long shelf life, and and have high sales floors, again thanks to the carriers. PDAs have atrociously high retail profit margins built into their prices, like MP3 players (look at the $400 ipod!). The result is that the overfeatured PDA is an unsellable product at its current price-performance point.
If Sony and friends swallowed their pride and sold them cheap, under $50, they might restart the market. The new digital paper displays may give Sony a chance to create such a cheap category.
First to the guy who says I am a non-coder - why would I have been a Unix in 1983 as a non-coder ? Besides, as a total non-coder I would have found getting my Ph.D in computer science a bit challenging.
To the guy who called me an idiot because Linux has/proc and loadable kernel modules and Berkeley Unix did not - frankly, operating systems technology must have been stalled if that is all the progress we got in 20 years. Even Multics had multi-processor support, and it came before Unix!
To the reasonable parent of the present reply - I bemoan the fact that all the open-source programmer time goes on cloning - even if the clones are important bricks. Sooner or later Microsoft and friends will buy enough congresscritters to make cloning illegal - what then ?
And yes, I am still using a text editor most of the time, and a C compiler occasionnaly. This is what computer "scientists" do. This is where basic algorithms come from - thought and a small amount of programming. Think of me as the guy who develops the raw material for those important bricks. And I stopped using emacs, it's too complicated for my needs.
We had a clone (gcc) of the proprietary (Bell Labs) C language, a clone (Linux) of the proprietary (Bell) Unix system.
Now the leading OS of the day is this lousy Microsoft stuff, and Open Source developers are "giving" us clones of the horrible Microsoft software.
Pretty please, could we have something new, or at least something pleasant to use ? More Microsoft interface clones do not in my book make the world a better place.
And yes, I know you will class this as a troll, but frankly as a beta-tester of Berkeley Unix back in 1983 I got exactly the same functionality then as I get from Linix now. Your moderation will not make this sad truth go away.
Linux vendors need to understand that they are not selling the possibility that you can recompile and fix an issue, they are selling the fact that THEY have recompiled and fixed the issue for you.
Geeks are using a lot of Powerbooks because the hardware is supported seamlessly for sleep, DVD play etc: Apple has recompiled bsd for you:)
I would have sent you a message of commiseration except I cannot figure out how to send messages.
The average IQ of Slashdot is now close to the average of the web, so you had better learn group-think or go elsewhere.
Don't expect a first submission of something to be accepted. With so many roving readers out there, group think is more safely vindicated when *several* slashdotters send in an item. Then it gets accepted.
Look, you can tell people to drive more carefully, AND move to mandate crash-helmets or seatbelts. YES, maintenance of the boxen by knowledgeable sysadmins will reduce the issues, but in practice at least 70% of the boxen out there are not maintainable by patching. HOWEVER, as long as we keep sayingthat any wormed machine is the user's fault, Microsoft has no reason to implement a different security model. Last, not least, viruses/worms are now VERY fast-acting, with a large number of machines contaminated within 1 hour of an outbreak. Is every user supposed to have a patch made-up and applied within 1 hour of the outbreak occurring ? Is anyone left on Slashdot with an IQ of more than 95 ?
I suggest remote backup instead of file-sharing. And remote security testing instead of cracking. Makes it sound like you are doing a company a favor when you remotely test their security, or determine their bandwith limitations.
The whole test/patch paradigm is wrong, regarding security: The patches can only be issued when the problem becomes visible, which is doubtless too late for many out there. Also, a significant fraction of users are unskilled, or simply leave their machines unattended, and cannot patch in time.
Sadly, security problems were already better dealt with by Unix when it was designed, more than thirty years ago, than by Windows now, but the large number of Linux boxen that get rooted shows that the Unix model is now hopelessly out of date. It is time to catch up on the basic issues, separate the programs from the data more effectively, provide PCs with effective data backup, and maybe freeze some essential functionality in firmware so that it cannot be overwritten.
Exactly how many Joe Users are going to recompile the kernel to improve their scheduling ? This is a typical Linux answer: There is a way to do X, for the technical specialist,so we don't need to change the default behavior of the system.
May I give a counterexample ? Joe, your local garage mechanic goes into Walmart and buys a Linux box for $300 for his grandma, and tacks on some old monitor he had in his house. When the grandma plays DVDs, the system stutters because Fred Developer in his wisom believes that a Linux box is probably a MySQL web server, and builds in a database scheduler as default. Is Joe supposed to learn to recompile the kernel? Would Joe recognize a kernel if it bit him in the ass ?
When the kernel went 1.2, I think it was RedHat 2.X at the time, I remember discussing that with people on Usenet: Half of us complained about interactivity - the other half said "but the benchmarks are better". There was clearly some subjective issue which the benchmarks missed.
A good example of interactive fluidity is what happens when you resize a browser window when the system is under load - does it move immediately ? Does it move smoothly ? If it "waits" for several seconds before resizing, your user-interface analogy breaks down completely.
This said, the user experience is not really improving as far as I know. Bloatware is killing Linux a Gigabyte at a time. The only way to get faster reactivity seems to be:Upgrade your hardware while freezing the software version:( ------------> Microsoft firmly believes its system designs are stable and secure. Apple believes its systems are good value for money. Linux people believe their systems are designed for user friendliness.
Desktop Linux needs a scheduling policy specific to interactivity. I guess this may happen the day a decent interface gets slapped on the Linux base. Until then, we dance the same dance - every release is faster than the previous one by the benchmarks, and feels more horrid than the previous one.
Surprise, the Mac has the same reactivity problem now thanks to its Unix (Mach) kernel, while the previous Mac OS 9 crashed regularly, couldn't multitask, but has a much snappier user-experience. Apple has been adressing this issue - which they recognize- for 2 years now, and have almost but not quite fixed it with their current Panther release.
It is time we found a way to benchmark a user experience in order to prevent over-optimisation for number-crunching.
Most of my posts get marked down as trolls - think hard: How can you solve a problem if you refuse to admit it exists ?
I was talking about blocking *information*, not sites. Of course, you can block sites. But people have a tendency to copy information, which then moves around. They also have a tendency to "reformat" it in various ways. If there were a way expunge stuff from the net, the RIAA would probably mandate it in the US:)
It is technically very hard to block information on the net, without dropping connectivity. Of course, attempting it might provide a major impulse to AI research:)
RFIDs are a wonderful antiterrorist tool. They allow tracking of any individual, any currency bill he owns, any means of transport he uses. How can anyone oppose the use of such technology ? A day will come when every child will be implanted with an RFID chip, and a remote-disable spinal tap at birth, and all law and order problems will be moot. I just hope America has the wisdom to use this technology first: I don't live there.
MATSUSHITA drives eg. the infamous UJ-815 and UJ-816 DVD-R drives found in Powerbooks will not read data off the disk if region codes do not match. This unfortunately prevents you from ripping; it prevents you from using decss.
More info to be found on the rpc1.org forums, by the people who disassemble and patch firmware. If Slashdot is anything to go by, your average hacker has more knowledge than your average open source coder these days.
Well, I have a Ph.D in comp sci, lots of publications in AI, and extensive software reviewing experience. When you compare Desktop Linux to Mac OS X (which is sold for $100) it is so bad most users won't take it even if you give it to them. Of course people like me or you use it daily for our work, but we are *techies*. I guess anyone who says anything negative about Linux is a troll. No one listens to the, so the Linuxuser experience, which could be cleaned up in 1 year of hard work, never improves.
For 10 years the Desktop Linux user experience was so bad you literally couldn't give it away to anyone outside the industry. It seems that the hackers finally got the point. Better late than never !
Post corrected to 10 years - although, frankly the Multics interface, the original Unix and the X-Windowed Sun stuff wasn't much better.
For 20 years the Desktop Linux user experience was so bad you literally couldn't give it away to anyone outside the industry. It seems that the hackers finally got the point. Better late than never !
Think of it as a luxury mall selling lockpicks: for a few millions of dollars a foreign government can buy software to encrypt and authentify its records. for a few hundreds of millions of dollars the department of homeland security can buy software to audit any foreign records.
The source for Subversion is in a Subversion archive, so the usual supect who build binaries cannot check it out because they themselves haven't built Subversion yet:)
Yes, MS has serious security issues. Does this mean no one else has any problems ? For every exploit known to the script kiddies, how many in Linux known to the people who exploit for a living ? Does no one remember that even rootshell.org got ownzored ?
Slashdot Mirror
Mobile phones are heavily subsidised by the carriers, a long shelf life, and and have high sales floors, again thanks to the carriers. PDAs have atrociously high retail profit margins built into their prices, like MP3 players (look at the $400 ipod!). The result is that the overfeatured PDA is an unsellable product at its current price-performance point.
If Sony and friends swallowed their pride and sold them cheap, under $50, they might restart the market. The new digital paper displays may give Sony a chance to create such a cheap category.
First to the guy who says I am a non-coder - why would I have been a Unix in 1983 as a non-coder ? Besides, as a total non-coder I would have found getting my Ph.D in computer science a bit challenging.
/proc and loadable kernel modules and Berkeley Unix did not - frankly, operating systems technology must have been stalled if that is all the progress we got in 20 years. Even Multics had multi-processor support, and it came before Unix!
To the guy who called me an idiot because Linux has
To the reasonable parent of the present reply - I bemoan the fact that all the open-source programmer time goes on cloning - even if the clones are important bricks. Sooner or later Microsoft and friends will buy enough congresscritters to make cloning illegal - what then ?
And yes, I am still using a text editor most of the time, and a C compiler occasionnaly. This is what computer "scientists" do. This is where basic algorithms come from - thought and a small amount of programming. Think of me as the guy who develops the raw material for those important bricks. And I stopped using emacs, it's too complicated for my needs.
We had a clone (gcc) of the proprietary (Bell Labs) C language, a clone (Linux) of the proprietary (Bell) Unix system.
Now the leading OS of the day is this lousy Microsoft stuff, and Open Source developers are "giving" us clones of the horrible Microsoft software.
Pretty please, could we have something new, or at least something pleasant to use ? More Microsoft interface clones do not in my book make the world a better place.
And yes, I know you will class this as a troll, but frankly as a beta-tester of Berkeley Unix back in 1983 I got exactly the same functionality then as I get from Linix now. Your moderation will not make this sad truth go away.
Edmund
Linux vendors need to understand that they are not selling the possibility that you can recompile and fix an issue, they are selling the fact that THEY have recompiled and fixed the issue for you.
:)
Geeks are using a lot of Powerbooks because the hardware is supported seamlessly for sleep, DVD play etc: Apple has recompiled bsd for you
I would have sent you a message of commiseration except I cannot figure out how to send messages.
The average IQ of Slashdot is now close to the average of the web, so you had better learn group-think or go elsewhere.
Don't expect a first submission of something to be accepted. With so many roving readers out there, group think is more safely vindicated when *several* slashdotters send in an item. Then it gets accepted.
Look, you can tell people to drive more carefully, AND move to mandate crash-helmets or seatbelts. YES, maintenance of the boxen by knowledgeable sysadmins will reduce the issues, but in practice at least 70% of the boxen out there are not maintainable by patching. HOWEVER, as long as we keep sayingthat any wormed machine is the user's fault, Microsoft has no reason to implement a different security model. Last, not least, viruses/worms are now VERY fast-acting, with a large number of machines contaminated within 1 hour of an outbreak. Is every user supposed to have a patch made-up and applied within 1 hour of the outbreak occurring ? Is anyone left on Slashdot with an IQ of more than 95 ?
I suggest remote backup instead of file-sharing. And remote security testing instead of cracking. Makes it sound like you are doing a company a favor when you remotely test their security, or determine their bandwith limitations.
The whole test/patch paradigm is wrong, regarding security: The patches can only be issued when the problem becomes visible, which is doubtless too late for many out there. Also, a significant fraction of users are unskilled, or simply leave their machines unattended, and cannot patch in time.
Sadly, security problems were already better dealt with by Unix when it was designed, more than thirty years ago, than by Windows now, but the large number of Linux boxen that get rooted shows that the Unix model is now hopelessly out of date. It is time to catch up on the basic issues, separate the programs from the data more effectively, provide PCs with effective data backup,
and maybe freeze some essential functionality in firmware so that it cannot be overwritten.
Exactly how many Joe Users are going to recompile the kernel to improve their scheduling ? This is a typical Linux answer: There is a way to do X, for the technical specialist,so we don't need to change the default behavior of the system.
May I give a counterexample ? Joe, your local garage mechanic goes into Walmart and
buys a Linux box for $300 for his grandma, and tacks on some old monitor he had in his house. When the grandma plays DVDs, the system stutters because Fred Developer in his wisom believes that a Linux box is probably a MySQL web server, and builds in a database scheduler as default. Is Joe supposed to learn to recompile the kernel? Would Joe recognize a kernel if it bit him in the ass ?
When the kernel went 1.2, I think it was RedHat 2.X at the time, I remember discussing that with people on Usenet: Half of us complained about interactivity - the other half said "but the benchmarks are better". There was clearly some subjective issue which the benchmarks missed.
:Upgrade your hardware while freezing the software version :(
A good example of interactive fluidity is what happens when you resize a browser window when the system is under load - does it move immediately ? Does it move smoothly ? If it "waits" for several seconds before resizing, your user-interface analogy breaks down completely.
This said, the user experience is not really improving as far as I know. Bloatware is killing Linux a Gigabyte at a time. The only way to get faster reactivity seems to be
------------>
Microsoft firmly believes its system designs are stable and secure. Apple believes its systems are good value for money. Linux people believe their systems are designed for user friendliness.
Desktop Linux needs a scheduling policy specific to interactivity. I guess this may happen the day a decent interface gets slapped on the Linux base. Until then, we dance the same dance - every release is faster than the previous one by the benchmarks, and feels more horrid than the previous one.
Surprise, the Mac has the same reactivity problem now thanks to its Unix (Mach) kernel, while the previous Mac OS 9 crashed regularly, couldn't multitask, but has a much snappier user-experience. Apple has been adressing this issue - which they recognize- for 2 years now, and have almost but not quite fixed it with their current Panther release.
It is time we found a way to benchmark a user experience in order to prevent over-optimisation for number-crunching.
Most of my posts get marked down as trolls - think hard: How can you solve a problem if you refuse to admit it exists ?
I was talking about blocking *information*, not sites. Of course, you can block sites. But people have a tendency to copy information, which then moves around. They also have a tendency to "reformat" it in various ways. If there were a way expunge stuff from the net, the RIAA would probably mandate it in the US :)
It is technically very hard to block information on the net, without dropping connectivity. Of course, attempting it might provide a major impulse to AI research :)
I wonder what the blacklist equivalent of a googlebomb is ?
How much do you have to pay to get your favorite "friend " listed ?
RFIDs are a wonderful antiterrorist tool. They allow tracking of any individual, any currency bill he owns, any means of transport he uses. How can anyone oppose the use of such technology ? A day will come when every child will be implanted with an RFID chip, and a remote-disable spinal tap at birth, and all law and order problems will be moot. I just hope America has the wisdom to use this technology first: I don't live there.
MATSUSHITA drives eg. the infamous UJ-815 and UJ-816 DVD-R drives found in Powerbooks will not read data off the disk if region codes do not match. This unfortunately prevents you from ripping; it prevents you from using decss.
More info to be found on the rpc1.org forums, by the people who disassemble and patch firmware. If Slashdot is anything to go by, your average hacker has more knowledge than your average open source coder these days.
Well, I have a Ph.D in comp sci, lots of publications in AI, and extensive software reviewing experience. When you compare Desktop Linux to Mac OS X (which is sold for $100) it is so bad most users won't take it even if you give it to them. Of course people like me or you use it daily for our work, but we are *techies*.
I guess anyone who says anything negative about Linux is a troll. No one listens to the, so the Linuxuser experience, which could be cleaned up in 1 year of hard work, never improves.
For 10 years the Desktop Linux user experience was so bad you literally couldn't give it away to anyone outside the industry. It seems that the hackers finally got the point. Better late than never !
Post corrected to 10 years - although, frankly the Multics interface, the original Unix and the X-Windowed Sun stuff wasn't much better.
For 20 years the Desktop Linux user experience was so bad you literally couldn't give it away to anyone outside the industry. It seems that the hackers finally got the point. Better late than never !
Think of it as a luxury mall selling lockpicks: for a few millions of dollars a foreign government can buy software to encrypt and authentify its records. for a few hundreds of millions of dollars the department of homeland security can buy software to audit any foreign records.
The source for Subversion is in a Subversion archive, so the usual supect who build binaries cannot check it out because they themselves haven't built Subversion yet :)
Exactly why does a properly designed language need core revisions every year ? I thought that was what libraries were for!
Is the gpl a text that says "if you change a word of this text you shall be excommunciated from the religion of Free Software, Stallman prophet ?"
They had an airseal intergrity failure during reentry in the 70s
Yes, MS has serious security issues. Does this mean no one else has any problems ? For every exploit known to the script kiddies, how many in Linux known to the people who exploit for a living ? Does no one remember that even rootshell.org got ownzored ?