I've had serious doubts about the actual advantages of Intel's obsession with putting everything on high-clock serial busses, rather than lower-clock paralell busses that seem to provide the same bandwidth with less heat, interferance, and latency.
However, optical fiber would eliminate interferance, which seems to be the main barrier on clock speed. Heat would likely be reduced also, and cranking up the clock-speed would likely eliminate the latency issues. Not to mention the cool-factor inherent in optical.
What would be really cool would be to replace firewire and USB with fiber. There are hybrid fiber coax systems that could provide whatever power you're mouse/keyboard/etc would need, up to a certain point anyway. It probably wouldn't be enough to power an external drive.
That's contrary to every story I've heard. Not saying it isn't true, though.
The way I heard it, Multics had an accounting system that logged processor time for billing as it was pay-per-use. The researchers at Bell Labs got addicted to a game (Lunar Lander I think it was called) and the accountants noticed that it was costing them about $70 every time somebody played this game. Since part of their charter was OS research, they (specifically Ken Thompson) got to work designing a new one. Ken decided to call it Unix, not realizing the joke potential of the name. Denis Ritchie did, however. When Ken told him he laughed histerically and said something like "That's a perfect name, because you've castrated Multics!"
I hate the comparision, but this 'war on terrorism' is starting to feel a lot like the 'war on drugs'... and open-ended, make it up as you go sort of deal with no clear goals and lots of shady undercurrents.
Oddly, both are direct results of the CIA meddling in the affairs of other countries.
For those who don't know, Osama was trained by the CIA, and that training was financed with money made from selling herion on the streets of America, heroin made from opium poppies grown by the Medajeen (sp?). All this was acceptable because the Medajeen and other Afghan terrorists were fighting the Soviets. Anythings better than Communism! Right?
Other places the CIA has used drugs to fund terrorist armies: Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) and South America. Check out this book for the full story. One thing I should point out about the book, by court order the author could only print what he could prove (for some strange reason certain federal agencies didn't want it publishhed...)
Macrovision depends on a specific type of automatic gain control which isn't used on professional grade or pre-macrovision consumer grade video equipment. The higher speed AGC was put in macrovision compatable VCRs specifically for macrovision compatability. The high speed AGC provides no benefits to the end user over the low speed ones, which is why your TV still uses the low speed kind (some TVs still have problems with macrovision BTW, that's what the "curling" you sometimes see at the top of the screen is).
The implementation of macrovision had nothing to do with consumer choice. If you bought a new VCR you got macrovision. Could you buy a VCR without macrovision? Sure, but you had to give up stero, 4-heads, and flying erase, or you paid an extra $3k. Not much of a choice there, and nobody even thought to make it anyway since macrovision was mislabeled as "Quality Protection".
Blind reliance on the Free Market ideal for consumer protection is naive at best. The fact is that Capitalism and the Free Market are directly opposed, since the aim of the true Capitalist is to establish and maintain a monopoly. Capitalism is about profit, and profit is restricted, not bolstered, by competition. Profit is what "copy-protection"* schemes are all about. The MPAA and RIAA are using DRM to maximize their profits, and they are backing it up with the DMCA and other legislation, in other words they are trying to legislate themselves out of the law of supply and demand. They've managed to squeeze even more profit out of it already through CSS licensing fees, and once their position has solidified all the DVDs you "purchase" will likely be pay-per-view. Notice the repeated appearance of legislation. The law makes consumer choice irrelevant.
* I put "copy-protection" in quotes because it only prevents casual and fair-use copiers. All of the schemes being used today can be circumvented by the truely motivated fairly cheaply and easily. However, there is potential for truely effective DRM if it is implemented in the actual hardware of the storage media. That's what's so bad about ideas like CPRM, you can't get to the data at all without going through the DRM.
...lies with hardware manufacturers, in my opinion. The only reason macrovision works for VHS is because hardware manufacturers support it, and I think the same will ultimately be true of all forms of DRM. It will be a sad day when I have to pay extra for a hard drive that will allow me to access my data however and whenever I want to, and I think the chances of that day coming are about 50-50. That balance will be upset by judicial decisions made in the DeCSS and Skylarov cases (the Napster case recently threw an interesting curve-ball, we'll have to see how that plays out), and given the apparent pro-Corporate slant of the current judiciary I don't have high hopes.
...until somebody starts proof-reading the articles!
I generally stay out of the Katz-bashing, most of the time I find his articles interesting. I find this one interesting too, but at times it was positively hard to read. Seriously, Jon, go to your local community college and take a class in composition. You write about interesting things, but the presentation is lacking.
That said, I've considered the net to be a more reliable source of news than more traditional media for a few years now, and I agree that these last few weeks have really been the net's time to shine in that respect. TV news is controlled by corporations, and is becoming more and more biased in that respect while at the same time it is become more about entertainment than information. The saving grace of the net is that it can't compete with TV on an entertainment level, so it has to compete with information.
Of course, you do still have to be careful who you trust on the net, but at least there are trustworthy sources!
Print media is a whole different story, of course. The Christian Science Monitor is still the best source for unbiased global news (if you haven't checked it out, don't let the name put you off). There is a whole lot of crap in print media of course, but that gets back to the whole entertainment v. information issue. I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive, but I've yet to see evidence to support that theory.
It really isn't as common as you think that teachers put their materials online, and even if they do you still have to know where to look. From my breif look at the site, what MIT is doing is a lot more than just a prof posting the syllabus on his home page. As for what you describe as the norm at your school, that is exceptional, and I applaud your school and/or it's professors for their efforts. What they are doing really is rare, even in Computer Science.
In 2 dimensional space it's the same as perpendicular, but in 3 dimensions "perpendicular" is technically insufficient to describe the relationship. As you add dimensions orthogonality gets progressively more complicated, hence the addition of "mutually". It could be redundant depending on the situation, but better safe than sorry...
I don't know how much of a problem particle collisions are for photons, and it's probably a rare occurence, but it seems like the probablility would increase with the frequency...
IANAPE (I am not a photonics expert), but that was the first thing that popped into my head.
SuSE has a huge number of developers though (for an OSS company) and it is a KDE centric distro. Since the were specifically talking about plug-ins to Kmail, it would seem logical to go to SuSE. SuSE being a German company is really more of a happy coincidence.
I noticed there was no mention of SuSE in the story, which seems odd. If I was German and looking for Linux with KDE, SuSE is where I would start.
Kind of makes me doubt the validity of it. As another poster mentioned, perhaps the German government is just trying to get a better deal from MS...
Don't need/want a webpad but...
on
Webpads, Anyone?
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...with basic word processing and/or a drawing program I could toss those paper notebooks I use for all my classes. I thought about getting a laptop, but the ability to whip out a quick sketch is essential for physics/engineering classes, and that's difficult for me on a laptop. I keep all my notes for future reference, and it would be really nice to just back them up on CD instead of having a bunch of tattered old paper notebooks cluttering up my bookshelves, and with handwriting recognition it shouldn't be too hard to put all that info into cross-referenced searchable documents. I'd still have to print stuff out for open note tests probably, but I think I could live with that.
The real obstacle would be convincing my wife that I need it...
...and it was a travelstar that somebody dropped on concrete.
I have 2 75GXPs in my home box (20G and 30G) and they have both been great. I've also installed another 5 or 6 75GXPs in other peoples computers and they've been totally reliable. I've also had a few older IBM drives that have been passed on to other family members. I've had such great experiences with IBM drives that I haven't bought any other brand (for myself or anyone else) in over a year.
Kind of a glowing endorsement, I know, but we tend to find what we're looking for. If you're looking for problems with a particular manufacturer you will most likely find what seems to be an inordinate number of them. How do the complaints you're finding for IBM stack up in comparison to other manufacturers?
Also, could it be a heat problem? I always make sure that any hard drive I install has at least one adjacent empty bay for air circulation, preferably one on each side.
With that many drives in a row going bad, I would suggest that the drives aren't the problem. I had a friend who rebuilt/upgraded his computer several times last year because he was having weird stability problems. He went through 3 mobos with 2 Athlons, 2 mobo's with 2 P3s, 2 video cards, 2 sound cards, 3 hard drives, 3 IDE controller cards, and God only knows how many cables/connectors before he finally figured out it was the power supply that was the problem.
Of course, at every step he would sell the "bad" hardware to somebody at about 1/3 what he paid for it and they would have no problems with it (which is how I got my Athlon, mobo, the 20G 75GXP, and a RAIDed Promise Ultra66 without being murdered by my wife;)
One of those folks I mentioned works in tech support for Earthlink. Apparently Earthlink had some special deal for new iMac owners, and it was discovered that he knew as much about Macs as anyone else there. It was like they'd found his personal room in hell...
I never said that mac users are clueless. In fact I specifically allowed for clueful mac users in my origional post and further clarified my comment here. I did say that mac ads are targeted towards clueless users and people who are intimidated by technology. In short, not the kind of people who should be saddled with the kind of bad security described in the parent post.
I agree with your assessment of the average computer user, but the difference is that wintel and *nix vendors are not actively and directly courting the clueless user market like Apple has been for the last few years.
The fact still stands, though, that I have never met a clueful mac user (I do know a couple of mac-haters who know macs fairly well, but I felt it would be inflamatory to mention them before).
not syaing they don't exist, just that I don't know any
Savvy mac users are few and far between. I would wager that there is a higher percentage of savvy mac users than savvy wintel users in terms of base population, but the base user population for the mac is so much smaller that finding a savvy user is extremely difficult, especially for someone who is not a member of the mac community.
Apparently you haven't seen any of the Mac TV ads. The unfortunate truth is that Macs are marketed towards people who don't know anything about computers and don't want to know anything about them. Mac's are currently being marketed as appliances, just plug it in and go. The target market for these ads are not people who will muck about in user permissions, which is why it's so horrible that they would have such bad default security settings.
I wish I did know a savvy Mac user in my area. I'm not one and I feel bad when my Mac using friends need help.
I'm sorry you find the truth about Apples advertising strategy inflamatory.
There have been a lot of posts saying that "savvy users will disable this" and "they'd have to be logged on as admin". I can honestly say that I don't know any savvy Mac users (not syaing they don't exist, just that I don't know any), and unfortunately the Mac isn't marketed towards savvy users. Your post has basically confirmed my worst fears. None of the Mac users I know would change their user accounts from admin to user. Even if they knew how, it would be inconvenient, and therefore unacceptable. It's kind of sad, really.
I would expect Netscape 6 to work. Our CFO had a similar problem connecting to the bank when I updated everyone to IE 6. Since MS makes it so easy to roll back an update, the solution that worked for us was to install Netscape 6. I haven't used Netscape 6 on Linux, so I haven't verified that it works.
As far as the fsck, though, why not use reiserfs? And if the menu layout of the desktop is confusing, change it. It sounds to me like IS just threw default installs out there and left the non-techs to sink-or-swim. Honestly, my wife and my mother both managed to figure out KDE with no help from me other than showing them how to log on, and they are easily the least technical people I know. Of course, neither of them were business majors, either, so maybe that gives them an advantage;)
I can understand the dislike for the office packages though. Would you mind sharing what it is that they didn't like about them?
On a (somewhat) related note, what about WINE? Will it run IE? I had this crazy idea about using a single MS box as a.dll server for a linux network. Has anyone tried such a thing? Is it viable?
I remember that too, and for some reason my memory is telling me that it was dropped.
I also remember Hillary Rosen basically laughing at such accusations about a year ago, saying that the record industry goes through that fairly regularly and has always come out on top.
This lesson was already allegedly learned with VHS. The media companies dropped the prices down to where the consumers felt was reasonable, and piracy dropped off sharply. I certainly don't bother to pirate movies I can buy for $10-15 ($15-20 for DVD), add $5 to either of those price ranges and I will almost certainly try to pirate it. Right or wrong, that's how consumers think. Producers will never be able to change that, they can only wear themselves out trying to fight it.
Currently music CD prices seem to be running $17-20. The evident rampant piracy, based on the above "learned lesson", is the consumers way of telling the producers that their prices are too high. I certainly balk at paying those prices. $12-15 is just fine, though it still bugs me that I could buy a cassette for $8-10 even though the CD is actually cheaper to manufacture.
In other words, if they want their sales to go back up they should drop their prices by $2-3. It seems small, but it makes a huge difference in the consumers willingness to purchase the product. I can't feel sorry for an industry that uses legislation to try and free itself from the basic laws of supply and demand.
They have the absolute worst customer service of any company I've ever dealt with. I have vowed to never again purchase a Panasonic product. BTW, for any of you unfortunate enough to be stuck with some Panasonic equipment, those drivers you've been looking for are most likely hidden away on their Canadian website.
The LinuxDA's Palm compatability refers to hardware, not software. I assume that means you can use Palm accessories such as those cool folding keyboards.
That could explain why my DSL connection at home has been so screwed up the last couple of days. As far as I know everything on my home machine is current (within a week or two anyway, can't remember when exactly I last updated). The odd thing though, is if that's the case then I should be able to boot to linux and have no problems, right? Unfortunately that isn't the case. Konqueror seems to be having more problems than Netscape, but both seem to be unable to connect to DNS after a short period of time.
With the first example, that should have exposed both the government and the competing company to significant civil liability, and those government officials to criminal indictment. What they did was already illegal, and I would argue that the government of France merely enacted a policy change in order to limit their own liability. The problem was not that government officials obtained the information, but that they used that information illegally. The use of the information is a legitimate gripe, but I don't think the obtaining of the information in the first place is.
The second example gets into another issue I think, that of the Government Agency as Black Box. This post should make my feelings on that clear to some extent. However, I have to say that email isn't secure anyway, even with strong encryption, and I wouldn't use it in such a sensative situation. The best I can hope to acheive with encryption is to slow down whoever is trying to read my email. At least with other channels I have the chance of noticing that it's been tampered with.
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However, optical fiber would eliminate interferance, which seems to be the main barrier on clock speed. Heat would likely be reduced also, and cranking up the clock-speed would likely eliminate the latency issues. Not to mention the cool-factor inherent in optical.
What would be really cool would be to replace firewire and USB with fiber. There are hybrid fiber coax systems that could provide whatever power you're mouse/keyboard/etc would need, up to a certain point anyway. It probably wouldn't be enough to power an external drive.
The way I heard it, Multics had an accounting system that logged processor time for billing as it was pay-per-use. The researchers at Bell Labs got addicted to a game (Lunar Lander I think it was called) and the accountants noticed that it was costing them about $70 every time somebody played this game. Since part of their charter was OS research, they (specifically Ken Thompson) got to work designing a new one. Ken decided to call it Unix, not realizing the joke potential of the name. Denis Ritchie did, however. When Ken told him he laughed histerically and said something like "That's a perfect name, because you've castrated Multics!"
That's the story as I heard it anyway...
Sort of...
Actually, that's what led to the invention of Unix. It replaced MIT's Multics, which had some sort of pay-per-use license.
That's the way I remember it anyway...
Oddly, both are direct results of the CIA meddling in the affairs of other countries.
For those who don't know, Osama was trained by the CIA, and that training was financed with money made from selling herion on the streets of America, heroin made from opium poppies grown by the Medajeen (sp?). All this was acceptable because the Medajeen and other Afghan terrorists were fighting the Soviets. Anythings better than Communism! Right?
Other places the CIA has used drugs to fund terrorist armies: Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) and South America. Check out this book for the full story. One thing I should point out about the book, by court order the author could only print what he could prove (for some strange reason certain federal agencies didn't want it publishhed...)
The implementation of macrovision had nothing to do with consumer choice. If you bought a new VCR you got macrovision. Could you buy a VCR without macrovision? Sure, but you had to give up stero, 4-heads, and flying erase, or you paid an extra $3k. Not much of a choice there, and nobody even thought to make it anyway since macrovision was mislabeled as "Quality Protection".
Blind reliance on the Free Market ideal for consumer protection is naive at best. The fact is that Capitalism and the Free Market are directly opposed, since the aim of the true Capitalist is to establish and maintain a monopoly. Capitalism is about profit, and profit is restricted, not bolstered, by competition. Profit is what "copy-protection"* schemes are all about. The MPAA and RIAA are using DRM to maximize their profits, and they are backing it up with the DMCA and other legislation, in other words they are trying to legislate themselves out of the law of supply and demand. They've managed to squeeze even more profit out of it already through CSS licensing fees, and once their position has solidified all the DVDs you "purchase" will likely be pay-per-view. Notice the repeated appearance of legislation. The law makes consumer choice irrelevant.
* I put "copy-protection" in quotes because it only prevents casual and fair-use copiers. All of the schemes being used today can be circumvented by the truely motivated fairly cheaply and easily. However, there is potential for truely effective DRM if it is implemented in the actual hardware of the storage media. That's what's so bad about ideas like CPRM, you can't get to the data at all without going through the DRM.
I generally stay out of the Katz-bashing, most of the time I find his articles interesting. I find this one interesting too, but at times it was positively hard to read. Seriously, Jon, go to your local community college and take a class in composition. You write about interesting things, but the presentation is lacking.
That said, I've considered the net to be a more reliable source of news than more traditional media for a few years now, and I agree that these last few weeks have really been the net's time to shine in that respect. TV news is controlled by corporations, and is becoming more and more biased in that respect while at the same time it is become more about entertainment than information. The saving grace of the net is that it can't compete with TV on an entertainment level, so it has to compete with information.
Of course, you do still have to be careful who you trust on the net, but at least there are trustworthy sources!
Print media is a whole different story, of course. The Christian Science Monitor is still the best source for unbiased global news (if you haven't checked it out, don't let the name put you off). There is a whole lot of crap in print media of course, but that gets back to the whole entertainment v. information issue. I don't think the two have to be mutually exclusive, but I've yet to see evidence to support that theory.
In 2 dimensional space it's the same as perpendicular, but in 3 dimensions "perpendicular" is technically insufficient to describe the relationship. As you add dimensions orthogonality gets progressively more complicated, hence the addition of "mutually". It could be redundant depending on the situation, but better safe than sorry...
IANAPE (I am not a photonics expert), but that was the first thing that popped into my head.
Kind of makes me doubt the validity of it. As another poster mentioned, perhaps the German government is just trying to get a better deal from MS...
The real obstacle would be convincing my wife that I need it...
I have 2 75GXPs in my home box (20G and 30G) and they have both been great. I've also installed another 5 or 6 75GXPs in other peoples computers and they've been totally reliable. I've also had a few older IBM drives that have been passed on to other family members. I've had such great experiences with IBM drives that I haven't bought any other brand (for myself or anyone else) in over a year.
Kind of a glowing endorsement, I know, but we tend to find what we're looking for. If you're looking for problems with a particular manufacturer you will most likely find what seems to be an inordinate number of them. How do the complaints you're finding for IBM stack up in comparison to other manufacturers?
Also, could it be a heat problem? I always make sure that any hard drive I install has at least one adjacent empty bay for air circulation, preferably one on each side.
With that many drives in a row going bad, I would suggest that the drives aren't the problem. I had a friend who rebuilt/upgraded his computer several times last year because he was having weird stability problems. He went through 3 mobos with 2 Athlons, 2 mobo's with 2 P3s, 2 video cards, 2 sound cards, 3 hard drives, 3 IDE controller cards, and God only knows how many cables/connectors before he finally figured out it was the power supply that was the problem.
Of course, at every step he would sell the "bad" hardware to somebody at about 1/3 what he paid for it and they would have no problems with it (which is how I got my Athlon, mobo, the 20G 75GXP, and a RAIDed Promise Ultra66 without being murdered by my wife ;)
I agree with your assessment of the average computer user, but the difference is that wintel and *nix vendors are not actively and directly courting the clueless user market like Apple has been for the last few years.
The fact still stands, though, that I have never met a clueful mac user (I do know a couple of mac-haters who know macs fairly well, but I felt it would be inflamatory to mention them before).
not syaing they don't exist, just that I don't know any
Savvy mac users are few and far between. I would wager that there is a higher percentage of savvy mac users than savvy wintel users in terms of base population, but the base user population for the mac is so much smaller that finding a savvy user is extremely difficult, especially for someone who is not a member of the mac community.
I wish I did know a savvy Mac user in my area. I'm not one and I feel bad when my Mac using friends need help.
I'm sorry you find the truth about Apples advertising strategy inflamatory.
As far as the fsck, though, why not use reiserfs? And if the menu layout of the desktop is confusing, change it. It sounds to me like IS just threw default installs out there and left the non-techs to sink-or-swim. Honestly, my wife and my mother both managed to figure out KDE with no help from me other than showing them how to log on, and they are easily the least technical people I know. Of course, neither of them were business majors, either, so maybe that gives them an advantage ;)
I can understand the dislike for the office packages though. Would you mind sharing what it is that they didn't like about them?
On a (somewhat) related note, what about WINE? Will it run IE? I had this crazy idea about using a single MS box as a .dll server for a linux network. Has anyone tried such a thing? Is it viable?
I also remember Hillary Rosen basically laughing at such accusations about a year ago, saying that the record industry goes through that fairly regularly and has always come out on top.
Currently music CD prices seem to be running $17-20. The evident rampant piracy, based on the above "learned lesson", is the consumers way of telling the producers that their prices are too high. I certainly balk at paying those prices. $12-15 is just fine, though it still bugs me that I could buy a cassette for $8-10 even though the CD is actually cheaper to manufacture.
In other words, if they want their sales to go back up they should drop their prices by $2-3. It seems small, but it makes a huge difference in the consumers willingness to purchase the product. I can't feel sorry for an industry that uses legislation to try and free itself from the basic laws of supply and demand.
The LinuxDA's Palm compatability refers to hardware, not software. I assume that means you can use Palm accessories such as those cool folding keyboards.
The second example gets into another issue I think, that of the Government Agency as Black Box. This post should make my feelings on that clear to some extent. However, I have to say that email isn't secure anyway, even with strong encryption, and I wouldn't use it in such a sensative situation. The best I can hope to acheive with encryption is to slow down whoever is trying to read my email. At least with other channels I have the chance of noticing that it's been tampered with.
Flame on ;