But it's not that Windows and Linux are flawed, it's that they need better video codecs, appplications, cameras, etc.
About 10 years ago MP3's hit and overnight computers went from devices where music was hard, scarse and alien to the place where all music came from and went to (at least for me). Video is still alien, hard, and scarse on computers. A revolutionary free codec becoming widely adopted could go a long way to fixing this but it will take the right mix of bandwidth, processing power, storage capacity, capture ability and codecs for video to really hit.
The problem is there are now powerful forces alligned to prevent those things from happeneing.
One of our bigest sources of video these days is DVD and the efforts to keep people from accessing the content on a DVD the way the user wants as opposed to how the publisher wants have gone all the way to purchasing votes of senators and congressman and slamming the DMCA down our throats.
Most of our content comes not from DVD's though but from cable tv. These days, a lot of it even comes encoded digitally but they wont let you anywhere near that MPEG2 stream.
Cable companies are similarly the biggest source of broadband (the only one where I live) and they treat upstream bandwith like a necessary evil, limiting it as much as possible. They want people to consume content, not provide it. Providing content is *their* job.
Video codecs are big business and have been for ages. The struggle to get MP3 (an officially open standardized format) free, didn't work as people scrambled to assert control over what started as an apparently open format. Once it's money making potential became apparent, pattents were generated that closed the open format and allowed a company to capitalize on it's success. The same land grab exists pre-emptively now in the video world which will make it hard for a new free standard to take hold. An Ogg Theora like open source codec seems like our best hope but there is so much inertia behind the current standards and the companies that produce them that it's hard for outside formats to get any traction.
All these things are lined up to prevent video from being easy, convenient, controlable and they are all fighting to keep customers from doing things that they want to do and are *willing to pay for*. Every industry who fights to prevent their customers from doing what they want eventually relises the spectacular waste of effort and missed oportunity. It will happen for the *AAs and it will happen for the cable companies, probably about the time Verizon or some Google powered internet TV device steals all their customers.
I never understood the whole pebble bed concept. Why scatter tons of potentially deadly, potentially world-destroying nuclear fuel through densely populated areas?
I'm all for nuclear power but, please, make giant super-sites with 20 huge reactors far from population centers that can be efficiently secured and guarded and where economies of scale can allow maintainance and monitoring to be top-notch and yet still cost less. And build an airforce base next to it (or it next to a base) to provide full military defense capabilites.
It's worth the extra 10% or so transmission loss to centralize reactors.
Except of course mine which I didn't find listed: Killer Robots.
Due to the political fallout of people's children dying the military replaces humans with small, cheap, modular killing machines and just gives thousands of "Military" personell control of one and lets them run around slaughtering people with no risk to themselves. Now imagine it isn't your country that did this, but instead it's the country that's currently invading yours. Frightening?
God IS in the gaps. He always has been. The gaps are just perpetually shrinking as science fills the gaps with explanations that prove things behave deterministically.:)
So, after tacking on the Fairtax, you actually won't have to pay any more than you're paying now, but you will be keeping more of your paycheck, so it will actually increase your purchasing power.
No. Your purchasing power stays the same. In practice, it will go down for most people because they would be paying more tax.
Busineeses need to be exempted or the tax will end up hitting products multiple times. I have a personal small business that needs a computer to operate. No tax on that purchase.
A company laptop which is broken and "worthless" is "thrown out" into a guys laptop bag.
I fly to Mexico, Canada, etc and vacation there for a few weeks.
The international waters shopping mall.
Company car.
My summer home in Italy where most of my purchases are made.
etc.. Consumption taxes are many many times easier to get around than income taxes, especially for the wealthy.
Good thing americans on average have $8,000 in credit card debt. So it's appropriate to punnish those who do?
How is this more complicated than the current IRS system?
Money needs to be collected from every single non-business purchase you ever make and funneled to the federal government. Rules need to be put in place to determine what consitutes business and non-business purchases and a system needs to be created to audit those. Not exactly easy. That's assuming the tax is completely flat and isn't adjusted like income is. Of course, if income taxes were done that way they'd be mind-bogglingly simple in comparison. One form with 1 piece of math to do once per year, the same math for everyone. Like I said before, just un-screw up the perfectly good system we have now if you want to solve the problem correctly.
I use IMAP for that functionality. HTTP is a second rate email access protocol. IMAP is better suited for it and the clients are better suited for reading and composing emails than web browsers are. A combination of the two is nice though. IMAP when you can, Webmail when you need to.
If I have $100,000 in the bank I already payed tax on it. If I go to spend it after a 50% sales tax goes into effect I can only buy $66,000 worth of stuff (assuming I'm stupid and don't find a way around paying the tax) so esentially you just took $33k away from me.
Sales taxes can only be fair if all the possible loopholes are plugged so people pay exactly the same amount of money as they payed with an income tax which is esentially impossible. Why completely retool your tax system to a much more complicated, much easier to defraud, much more overhead intensive way to pay the same amount of money? The only benefit I can see is the the number in your bank account will eventually ends up higher while having exactly the same buying power as it did before.
Rich people pay less tax. This is a huge thing that I had NO idea about until recently. There are a few taxes that are capped and simply stop at a certain point. This is worth noting since we always talk about our tax system as "Progressive" and as if rich people are somehow overtaxed. They simply arent! If a company shells out $200,000 per year for you you keep a higher percentage of that than if they shelled out $100,000 per year. That's wrong.
It's easy to trumpets sails taxes (Consumption taxes to those trumpeting) as the most fair awesome thing ever. "Its entirely volentary!" they say, as if buying things was optional. What else is money useful for? The problem is sales taxes are regressive, they have huge overhead costs, they are easy to cheat and they are absolutely 100% evil.
People hear no income tax and think "ooh.. how nice, I'd only have to pay that little bitty sales tax instead of my huge painful income tax". This is incorrect. Unless they cut spending you have to pay just as much, just in a different form. Since the tax is regressive a higher tax rate would be needed on most people to raise all the money. In order to average 1/3rd (which is about what income taxes average) it would need to be around 50%. That means that nice things like that new $100 video card would now cost you $150. The $600 one you dream of, now a cool $900. No thanks.
It's basically a cheap way of cutting everyone's saving in 2/3rds. Savings are now post-tax (for the most part.) You pay the tax, then you put the money in the bank. Doing this switches it to pre-tax which basically makes everyones savings double-taxed reducing them by 30% or so.
Sales taxes should be banned permanently. They are evil and unfair and ineffcient and I hope to never live in a state with one.
The answer is simple and hard:
Cut spending. Talk about tax cuts/increases are just smoke and mirrors to distract you from the reall issue of spending.
Eliminate Deductions. A deduction for one group is simply a tax on everyone else. Simple systems are the most fair and easiest to implement. Tax forms should be simple enough for 99% of the population to do their own easily and tax laws should be simple enough so that 99% of the population can understand all the laws that apply to them.
No need to throw everything out, just un-screw up the system that used to work.
A warranty is a good measure of how reliable a manufacturer EXPECTS a drive to be, not how reliable it actually is. The deathstars, for example, were much more failure prone than IBM expected. There is no way to know about issues like that from warranty information. MTBF numbers usually given out are the same thing, not based in actual data but based on engineering estimates.
To know how reliable a drive is, you have to know actual failure rates. Only the manufacturer is typically in a position to accurately measure those and they pretty much never give it out without an NDA or court order. We on the outside are left manually piecing together the data using methods like The storage review drive reliablity survey:
which attempts to gather accurate statistics from large samplings from users. This seems like a lot of work but hopefully it will pry the window open and convince manufacturers that it won't be the end of the world if people know how reliable their drives actually are.
Sorry but you don't have physical access to computer inside the ATM machine. It's locked in a steel box, designed to prevent access and aleart authorties when you try to gain access.
there is really no such thing as a system that can withstand an attacker who has physical access regardless of what OS you're running.
This is false on it's face. People have physical access to ATM machines all the time. Many of them run Windows now. There are tons of ways to secure machines from physical attack and make the game far from over. Granted it's not Windows thats doing it but it *is* Windows that is being secured.
Take for example Betamax vs VHS. That was very good thing. Oh wait, no, the other thing. A major catastorphy. It caused consumers tons of pain, cost everyone tons of money and set the industry back years.
Competition is good. Standards are good. Competition between standards: very bad.
"And we go round and round and round in the circle game."
If it's your machine, buy it, build it, make it exactly what you want for a good price. If it's for a company and you may or may not be working for when it needs support I'd say buy from someone where it has a model number. It makes it a lot easier to know what it is.
If you are comfortable building *and supporting* the machines through their life and there really isn't anything out there that's pre-built and has the right price and features it might be worth building. There are times when the market falls behind what is capable with current technology and nobody is configuring machines in a way that's both possible and useful. I'd only build your own if you fall into this category. Otherwise, Dell can often build stuff cheaper than you can. There are exceptions though. I find them incapable of selling a good storage subsystem for a reasonable price. It's been a while but the last time I tried to find something with a good 4 drive SATA raid5 configuration I found nothing reasonable.
As far as "white" box goes, I never skimp on the box. A lot of the stability of a machine is dependant on the power supply and cooling so its a good idea to go with good stuff. The other key to a good system is a well designed and tested motherboard. Gamer and desktop motherboards are getting a lot better than they used to be but are still a bit on the flakey side (new ones are still arguably better than old server class motherboards used to be though). Often, when you price things out using high quality components you see why the server class machines end up costing so much and the benefit of building your own goes away.
HTML is for markup, not page layout
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
HTML was originally desigend to allow for marking the different types of text as the type they were so the USER could pick how they were displayed. This is a code snippet, this should be fixed width, this is preformated text, etc.
This delegation of display style was and is a great idea empowering browsers to make things look good and users to pick the fonts they liked the best on "their" machines. It has since been undemined by a flood of additions giving authors the ablity to choose font names for text which most web sites employ (not slashdot though.. thanks guys!) set widths of pages (your new layout sucks arstechnica), pop up new windows without address bars (who was the moron at netscape that decided that was a good idea?) and other fine grained page-layout style things added since.
HTML was and is an excellent tool for making web sites. It scales all the way from <b>HI</b> to google. It's because it was so very very good at doing what it does that the web is now in the position of global general purpose use and these kids are whining about how hard it is.
The problem, as the article states, isn't email but a "powerful email application" aka Outlook replacement with calendaring and groupware support.
This has been a big hole for 5 years now. There are a many hurdles to be overcome before Microsoft's stranglehold on corperate infrastructres is loosened. It's nice to see some attention called to this, one of the biggest.
Huge rise in people addicted to communicating! People spend hours talking on telephones, meeting in meetings, spending time one on one. The spread of diseases caused by people touching and being close to each other kills tens of millions every.....
Give me a friggen break. I'm adicted to breathing, eating, walking, sleeping, and yes... communicating with other people. Everyone is. Everyone always will be. It's part of being human. These people need to go do something productive with their lives.
If a Lego set costs $99 at the store but $1 to make, how much did this guy really steal... was it $200,000 worth of product or $2,000. And if he paid more than $2,000 for it (which it sounds like he did) is it really stealing at all?
Let's just call him the Robin Hood of Lego Land and move on with our lives.
Nuclear power had its chance and it failed miserably.
I disagree. We didn't stop building nuclear plants because they weren't economical. We stopped building them when 3 Mile Island happened. I don't know much about the costs of generating nuclear power vs other fuel but I suspect the cost has more to do with the fear of the substance than the actual cost of generating power.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not that Windows and Linux are flawed, it's that they need better video codecs, appplications, cameras, etc.
About 10 years ago MP3's hit and overnight computers went from devices where music was hard, scarse and alien to the place where all music came from and went to (at least for me). Video is still alien, hard, and scarse on computers. A revolutionary free codec becoming widely adopted could go a long way to fixing this but it will take the right mix of bandwidth, processing power, storage capacity, capture ability and codecs for video to really hit.
The problem is there are now powerful forces alligned to prevent those things from happeneing.
One of our bigest sources of video these days is DVD and the efforts to keep people from accessing the content on a DVD the way the user wants as opposed to how the publisher wants have gone all the way to purchasing votes of senators and congressman and slamming the DMCA down our throats.
Most of our content comes not from DVD's though but from cable tv. These days, a lot of it even comes encoded digitally but they wont let you anywhere near that MPEG2 stream.
Cable companies are similarly the biggest source of broadband (the only one where I live) and they treat upstream bandwith like a necessary evil, limiting it as much as possible. They want people to consume content, not provide it. Providing content is *their* job.
Video codecs are big business and have been for ages. The struggle to get MP3 (an officially open standardized format) free, didn't work as people scrambled to assert control over what started as an apparently open format. Once it's money making potential became apparent, pattents were generated that closed the open format and allowed a company to capitalize on it's success. The same land grab exists pre-emptively now in the video world which will make it hard for a new free standard to take hold. An Ogg Theora like open source codec seems like our best hope but there is so much inertia behind the current standards and the companies that produce them that it's hard for outside formats to get any traction.
All these things are lined up to prevent video from being easy, convenient, controlable and they are all fighting to keep customers from doing things that they want to do and are *willing to pay for*. Every industry who fights to prevent their customers from doing what they want eventually relises the spectacular waste of effort and missed oportunity. It will happen for the *AAs and it will happen for the cable companies, probably about the time Verizon or some Google powered internet TV device steals all their customers.
I never understood the whole pebble bed concept. Why scatter tons of potentially deadly, potentially world-destroying nuclear fuel through densely populated areas?
I'm all for nuclear power but, please, make giant super-sites with 20 huge reactors far from population centers that can be efficiently secured and guarded and where economies of scale can allow maintainance and monitoring to be top-notch and yet still cost less. And build an airforce base next to it (or it next to a base) to provide full military defense capabilites.
It's worth the extra 10% or so transmission loss to centralize reactors.
I'd like to vote for Daniel Gilbert's peice "The idea that ideas can be dangerous" as my favorite: http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8.html#gilbert
Ideas shouldn't be thought of as dangerous.
Except of course mine which I didn't find listed: Killer Robots.
Due to the political fallout of people's children dying the military replaces humans with small, cheap, modular killing machines and just gives thousands of "Military" personell control of one and lets them run around slaughtering people with no risk to themselves. Now imagine it isn't your country that did this, but instead it's the country that's currently invading yours. Frightening?
God IS in the gaps. He always has been. The gaps are just perpetually shrinking as science fills the gaps with explanations that prove things behave deterministically. :)
Allow people to feel free to be themselves and not have to put on an act of phony ass-kissing professionalism.
If you have to put on a phony act to be porfessional, maybe a professional position isn't for you. You can be professional while disdagreeing.
I agree with everything else in your post.
So, after tacking on the Fairtax, you actually won't have to pay any more than you're paying now, but you will be keeping more of your paycheck, so it will actually increase your purchasing power.
No. Your purchasing power stays the same. In practice, it will go down for most people because they would be paying more tax.
I don't see loopholes
Then you aren't looking!
Busineeses need to be exempted or the tax will end up hitting products multiple times. I have a personal small business that needs a computer to operate. No tax on that purchase.
A company laptop which is broken and "worthless" is "thrown out" into a guys laptop bag.
I fly to Mexico, Canada, etc and vacation there for a few weeks.
The international waters shopping mall.
Company car.
My summer home in Italy where most of my purchases are made.
etc.. Consumption taxes are many many times easier to get around than income taxes, especially for the wealthy.
Good thing americans on average have $8,000 in credit card debt.
So it's appropriate to punnish those who do?
How is this more complicated than the current IRS system?
Money needs to be collected from every single non-business purchase you ever make and funneled to the federal government. Rules need to be put in place to determine what consitutes business and non-business purchases and a system needs to be created to audit those. Not exactly easy. That's assuming the tax is completely flat and isn't adjusted like income is. Of course, if income taxes were done that way they'd be mind-bogglingly simple in comparison. One form with 1 piece of math to do once per year, the same math for everyone. Like I said before, just un-screw up the perfectly good system we have now if you want to solve the problem correctly.
I use IMAP for that functionality. HTTP is a second rate email access protocol. IMAP is better suited for it and the clients are better suited for reading and composing emails than web browsers are. A combination of the two is nice though. IMAP when you can, Webmail when you need to.
I don't get your savings argument.
If I have $100,000 in the bank I already payed tax on it. If I go to spend it after a 50% sales tax goes into effect I can only buy $66,000 worth of stuff (assuming I'm stupid and don't find a way around paying the tax) so esentially you just took $33k away from me.
Sales taxes can only be fair if all the possible loopholes are plugged so people pay exactly the same amount of money as they payed with an income tax which is esentially impossible. Why completely retool your tax system to a much more complicated, much easier to defraud, much more overhead intensive way to pay the same amount of money? The only benefit I can see is the the number in your bank account will eventually ends up higher while having exactly the same buying power as it did before.
Simply a horrible idea.
Rich people pay less tax. This is a huge thing that I had NO idea about until recently. There are a few taxes that are capped and simply stop at a certain point. This is worth noting since we always talk about our tax system as "Progressive" and as if rich people are somehow overtaxed. They simply arent! If a company shells out $200,000 per year for you you keep a higher percentage of that than if they shelled out $100,000 per year. That's wrong.
People hear no income tax and think "ooh.. how nice, I'd only have to pay that little bitty sales tax instead of my huge painful income tax". This is incorrect. Unless they cut spending you have to pay just as much, just in a different form. Since the tax is regressive a higher tax rate would be needed on most people to raise all the money. In order to average 1/3rd (which is about what income taxes average) it would need to be around 50%. That means that nice things like that new $100 video card would now cost you $150. The $600 one you dream of, now a cool $900. No thanks.
It's basically a cheap way of cutting everyone's saving in 2/3rds. Savings are now post-tax (for the most part.) You pay the tax, then you put the money in the bank. Doing this switches it to pre-tax which basically makes everyones savings double-taxed reducing them by 30% or so.
Sales taxes should be banned permanently. They are evil and unfair and ineffcient and I hope to never live in a state with one.
The answer is simple and hard:
No need to throw everything out, just un-screw up the system that used to work.
If these morons want a war with thier customers, I say lets go! I'm betting we'll win since all their money and power comes from us.
A warranty is a good measure of how reliable a manufacturer EXPECTS a drive to be, not how reliable it actually is. The deathstars, for example, were much more failure prone than IBM expected. There is no way to know about issues like that from warranty information. MTBF numbers usually given out are the same thing, not based in actual data but based on engineering estimates.
g in
To know how reliable a drive is, you have to know actual failure rates. Only the manufacturer is typically in a position to accurately measure those and they pretty much never give it out without an NDA or court order. We on the outside are left manually piecing together the data using methods like The storage review drive reliablity survey:
http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_lo
which attempts to gather accurate statistics from large samplings from users. This seems like a lot of work but hopefully it will pry the window open and convince manufacturers that it won't be the end of the world if people know how reliable their drives actually are.
Sorry but you don't have physical access to computer inside the ATM machine. It's locked in a steel box, designed to prevent access and aleart authorties when you try to gain access.
Exactly
there is really no such thing as a system that can withstand an attacker who has physical access regardless of what OS you're running.
This is false on it's face. People have physical access to ATM machines all the time. Many of them run Windows now. There are tons of ways to secure machines from physical attack and make the game far from over. Granted it's not Windows thats doing it but it *is* Windows that is being secured.
Take for example Betamax vs VHS. That was very good thing. Oh wait, no, the other thing. A major catastorphy. It caused consumers tons of pain, cost everyone tons of money and set the industry back years.
Competition is good. Standards are good. Competition between standards: very bad.
"And we go round and round and round in the circle game."
If it's your machine, buy it, build it, make it exactly what you want for a good price. If it's for a company and you may or may not be working for when it needs support I'd say buy from someone where it has a model number. It makes it a lot easier to know what it is.
If you are comfortable building *and supporting* the machines through their life and there really isn't anything out there that's pre-built and has the right price and features it might be worth building. There are times when the market falls behind what is capable with current technology and nobody is configuring machines in a way that's both possible and useful. I'd only build your own if you fall into this category. Otherwise, Dell can often build stuff cheaper than you can. There are exceptions though. I find them incapable of selling a good storage subsystem for a reasonable price. It's been a while but the last time I tried to find something with a good 4 drive SATA raid5 configuration I found nothing reasonable.
As far as "white" box goes, I never skimp on the box. A lot of the stability of a machine is dependant on the power supply and cooling so its a good idea to go with good stuff. The other key to a good system is a well designed and tested motherboard. Gamer and desktop motherboards are getting a lot better than they used to be but are still a bit on the flakey side (new ones are still arguably better than old server class motherboards used to be though). Often, when you price things out using high quality components you see why the server class machines end up costing so much and the benefit of building your own goes away.
HTML was originally desigend to allow for marking the different types of text as the type they were so the USER could pick how they were displayed. This is a code snippet, this should be fixed width, this is preformated text, etc.
This delegation of display style was and is a great idea empowering browsers to make things look good and users to pick the fonts they liked the best on "their" machines. It has since been undemined by a flood of additions giving authors the ablity to choose font names for text which most web sites employ (not slashdot though.. thanks guys!) set widths of pages (your new layout sucks arstechnica), pop up new windows without address bars (who was the moron at netscape that decided that was a good idea?) and other fine grained page-layout style things added since.
HTML was and is an excellent tool for making web sites. It scales all the way from <b>HI</b> to google. It's because it was so very very good at doing what it does that the web is now in the position of global general purpose use and these kids are whining about how hard it is.
The problem, as the article states, isn't email but a "powerful email application" aka Outlook replacement with calendaring and groupware support.
This has been a big hole for 5 years now. There are a many hurdles to be overcome before Microsoft's stranglehold on corperate infrastructres is loosened. It's nice to see some attention called to this, one of the biggest.
Huge rise in people addicted to communicating! People spend hours talking on telephones, meeting in meetings, spending time one on one. The spread of diseases caused by people touching and being close to each other kills tens of millions every.....
Give me a friggen break. I'm adicted to breathing, eating, walking, sleeping, and yes... communicating with other people. Everyone is. Everyone always will be. It's part of being human. These people need to go do something productive with their lives.
An actuall comment I put in my code may years ago before I understood that consisely and clearly describing things was important and valuable:
#Talk about your complicated data structures. It would take a book
#to describe this one. If you can figure it out, good. If not, tough.
I dislike comments mostly but one thing I do like commenting is complex data structures.
smartd will monitor disks and email reports of pending failures if configured to do so.
I am unaware of any web interfaces to SMART alghough I'd be surprised if one doesn't exist.
If a Lego set costs $99 at the store but $1 to make, how much did this guy really steal... was it $200,000 worth of product or $2,000. And if he paid more than $2,000 for it (which it sounds like he did) is it really stealing at all?
Let's just call him the Robin Hood of Lego Land and move on with our lives.
and (most important of all) reduced consumption
Be realistic. Consumption will only increase.
Nuclear power had its chance and it failed miserably.
I disagree. We didn't stop building nuclear plants because they weren't economical. We stopped building them when 3 Mile Island happened. I don't know much about the costs of generating nuclear power vs other fuel but I suspect the cost has more to do with the fear of the substance than the actual cost of generating power.