Yes.:-) I went to college with him, and his login name on the school's Unix cluster was "macintsh", and we had many a flamewar there over OSes. But he is also a very intelligent and educated guy, and thoughtful enough that the term "bigot" shouldn't really be applied to him. (If you care to do a bit of searching, you'll find he's written a good number of articles on things Macintosh.)
There's no way watching/experiencing something non-chemical can actually halt the development of your mind.
Please engage your mind before posting, OK? How do you think children learn language? It gets chemically infused into them in a lab? Or try this simple experiment: cover a kitten's eyes when it is born; leave the covering on for six months, then take it off. The kitten will never be able to see, despite the fact that its eyes are physically normal - the visual center of its brain has never developed. Chemicals only, huh? Geez...
A lot of computer admins and support people forget that their customer is the end-user...not the company they work for.
I've worked tech support (never 1st level, thank Crom) and I'm now a sysadmin, and I think you've got it bass-ackwards. What the user wants is often as not destructive to the ends of the company. The user wants to install games on his desktop. Whose interests should we be considering? The user wants to keep huge files in his home directory on the server. Is he going to pay for your time when you get paged at 2:30am because the disk filled up? The user wants to be able to ftp stuff into work from any internet cafe he happens to be at. Is he going to have to explain to everyone else when the server gets cracked and a day is wasted restoring from backups?
When I'm hired for a job, I regard my first responsibility as being to the company as a whole, secondly to the systems I maintain, and lastly to the individual users. Let's face it, if we were administering spacecraft instead of computer systems, the users would be coming to us saying
"Turn up the oxygen! It's stuffy in here!" "If I turn up the oxygen, we'll eat into our reserve, which could put us at risk if something unexpected happens."
"So what? That's not my problem. It's still stuffy in here. Turn up the oxygen!"
So the top priority is to make them happy. My servers could be barely getting by, but if the users are happy I'd still have a job. Flip that around, if my servers were flying along with full backup and great performance but the users weren't happy and had problems I'd be fired.
Frankly, I think your boss has his priorities wrong if this is his attitude. Wait until something crashes and you have to tell him there are no recent backups because you were too busy keeping the users happy...which doesn't bring the money in.
Regarding the phone analogy, I think it's amazing that any business analyst thinks that the phone system is really a better model than the Internet. Yeah, the phone system is highly reliable. It's also stagnant and boring as hell (as far as business plans and the common user go - no offense intended to the phreaks).
What's the most exciting use of the phone system you know of (that doesn't involve breaking the "dumb client, smart network model")? Phone sex lines? That movie thing (which is clearly so motivating I can't even remember exactly what it is, and which is coming damn close to breaking the model)? 24-hour phone lines you can order stuff from? Whoopee-do.
It's a simple one: Deter.... It won't stop stuff from happening, but it will lessen it...
Making threats is already a crime, and hate mail may or may
not be, depending on where you live. If those being illegal
don't deter people, why will a new law? As for the plain old
nuisance mail - well, it sucks, but I hope you're not suggesting
that it should be illegal!
So if 999/1000 people say that pi equals 3, does that make it
so? If they say "turbocharger" when referring to a
supercharger, are they the same thing? If they say "URL"
when they mean hostname, are they interchangeable? The
layman's misunderstanding of a(n admittedly technical) term
does not make the misunderstanding correct. I'm afraid I
have to put myself on the side of the language lawyers here,
because the other way lies "It means X because it means
what I want it to mean", which leads us to
Ministry of Truth.
Something very similar has already been done. Search for the "GNU superoptimizer" : "GSO is a function sequence generator that uses an exhaustive generate-and-test approach to find
the shortest instruction sequence for a given function."
...if they have this, anyway. At the same time, I have a feeling this will last until somebody blows out his knee throwing a wild kick at midair and sues the manufacturer. I'd love to have a training simulator for karate - any number of opponents you like, any skill level, any build! - but watching a screen to see where your opponent is while throwing punches at the air doesn't sound like a great UI to me. I think, unfortunately, that we'll have to wait for immersive VR for these things to get really good. And even then, it's not the same if you can't _feel_ the impact of a block.
I don't think it is all that widespread. Can it be slow?
Sure, no doubt about it. As the quip goes, the first thing you
notice when you get broadband service is how slow the
rest of the Internet is. Last night www.furnitureporn.com,
among other sites, seemed pretty poky. But at work - which
is a hell of a lot better wired than my apartment is! - things
can often be surprisingly slow too. I wouldn't be too quick to
pin things on cable.
(A strange thing to say on/., I know, but...) It seems to me like the US military is getting too reliant on neat technological toys. They might be workable in very low-intensity conflicts (which, yes, the military thinks will be more important than ever in the coming century), but I'd really like to know how they plan to keep all this stuff working in the face of the abuse of pitched battles, bad supply lines, etc.
OK. The ACLU argued that the Ohio state motto ("With God, All Things Are Possible") is unconstitutional. Read it in their own words here. Who cares about that Drug War stuff, about property seizure or gun banning or police brutality, when there's important stuff like state mottoes! to fight over, huh? Now do you understand why people think they're a joke? There are a lot of real causes they could be fighting for, and they waste their time and money on crap like that.
Thank you! I do wonder how people can whine "I can't remember w@ltz3r without writing it down, it's too hard!" but they can remember a ton of people's completely arbitrary phone numbers.
Of course, I'm reminded of a manifesto which said something to the effect of "If we wanted to make the crappiest communications protocol imaginable, we'd give people random numeric addresses and force them to be at a specific physical location to send or receive messages..."
NFS-mounted root? Hmm...I'm envisioning the sexiest X-terminal in the world...a three-inch aluminum cube with an SGI 1600SW.:^) As Apple has shown the world, it isn't the technology inside your boxen that counts, it's how much the outside makes people drool.
VNC is a bandwidth hog? Your experience is very different than mine...I run it over a 10MB half-duplex network, and it's not bad. Seriously, if you/had/ to upgrade to 100MB, what the hell were you doing? Playing full-screen movies? Running Napster on the same unswitched network? Here's an experiment: start up VNC. Kill off anything that requires frequent updates (xdaliclock, xosview, whatever). Use only flat colors in your windowmanager (and that includes the background!) You'll see the performance increase tremendously.
"the next version wil be a lot less *nix-y". Uh. Not likely, they've pinned their future on OS X and its BSD foundation.
Remember your history! Apple has a track record of getting into the Unix arena and then losing interest and getting out again. Frankly, I agree with the original poster, although I think his phrasing was a little inflammatory.
Most Mac faithful won't care about the Unixy nature of OS X - if they did, they presumably wouldn't be Mac faithful, the Unix market isn't going to be much swayed by one more (immature, commercial) variant, and OS X doesn't offer the Wintel folks much that they didn't already have access to.
I agree with you that it was time for a fundamental change in the MacOS architecture, and I don't think they're going to abandon what they've done with the internals, but I/do/ think they're going to lose interest in supporting the explicitly Unixy features of the OS.
Actually, it kind of did. Years ago I saw a story about Lenat and Cyc in which it was mentioned that the designers would tell it things during the day, and at night it would mull over what it had been told and come up with questions or with statements it would suggest to the designers. One morning it said "Most people are famous." The designers told Cyc, no, most people are not famous, where did you get that idea? And it revealed its reasoning to be, roughly: you have told me about 954 individuals, 720 of them are famous, ergo, most people are famous. I hope the "common sense" of the machine has improved a little since then...
Yes! I wanted to make more or less the same point - whether they bash the GPL, Linux, Open Source community, etc., and what they say about it doesn't really matter. What matters is that we're starting to control the terms of the debate. Four years ago, would Microsoft have ever mentioned this stuff? They didn't have to.
BTW, I also knew right off the bat this was going to be a typical Gates interview. Just read the first question and answer, and you see the entire Gates MO at work.
Q:Some people have said that Microsoft...
A:Oh yeah? What about this? What about that, huh? Should we not have done this? Huh, wise guy? Huh? You gonna cry now?
Everything is just attack, attack, attack...which tells you a lot about why MS is the way it is, I think.
I would love to know how you do that, since I've always heard that SMP is incompatible with power management. Are you sure this has anything to do with ACPI, and isn't just the HLT instruction?
Actually, people have been worrying about this for about as long as they've been shooting things into orbit. Google for "space law" and it'll come back with a ton of results. My personal favorite is http://www.spacelaw.com.au - a space law firm! Seriously, it is a pretty good site.
Not surprisingly, most existing space law is highly government-centric and not very friendly to individual or commercial use of space. The Moon Agreement, in fact, was implicitly communist - the Moon is the common property of all mankind, an international body to be formed to determine the distribution of profits from the Moon, developing nations to be given special consideration in the distribution of Moon profits regardless of whether they'd made any direct contribution to the effort, etc.
This reminds me of an experience with a coworker. He, a staunch republican, noted just how phony environmentalist concerns were. "A while ago, everyone was complaining about how CFC's would destroy the world by now. But see? Everything is perfectly fine." I said, "Well, yah; That's because you are forbidden to produce CFC's now, save in a few developing countries who's time is almost up." I suspect the same sort of thing going on here.
Well, there's no shortage of "elephant whistle" cases around, too. To paraphrase:
"Elephants are about to rampage through downtown Calgary and kill us all!"
"No they aren't!"
"YES THEY ARE! Quick, everybody blow these magic elephant-repelling whistles to keep them away!"
*tweet* *tweet*
(Elephants fail to appear.)
"Whew! Looks like we saved the city, and just in time, too!"
"BUT THERE WEREN'T ANY ELEPHANTS..."
"YES THERE WERE! SHUT UP AND BLOW YOUR WHISTLE!"
Now, I'm not saying that either environmental concerns or RSI/carpal tunnel are hoaxes, but there are an awful lot of cases out there that bear a strong resemblance to elephant whistles...
I agree; the author seems more politically than technically motivated. So Unicode doesn't contain EVERY glyph ever created by humans. So what? Try typing "naive" correctly on your US keyboard. Somehow we've managed to survive this horrible cultural imperialism...
The author allows his enthusiasm to carry him away more than once. For example,
"[Hangul] was designed from the start to be able to describe any sound the human throat and mouth is capable of producing in speech..."
Yes, Hangul is a remarkable invention, but try asking a Korean to say "Flushing" some time.
"[Hangul] can be written with clarity, in a 24 X 24[dot-per-inch] space."
Who cares? What does that have to do with Unicode, which has absolutely nothing to do with the physical representation of the glyph?
"...the phrase, "Personal Computer"...is now 'PersaCom' in Japan.
"PersaCom"? I've never seen or heard it rendered that way, and I really doubt that "persacom" is technically considered pronouncable Japanese. (I've always seen it rendered "pasokon".) And it still has nothing to do with Unicode. And printer manufacturers really made 8-pin printers so they could print hiragana and katakana, and they invented modes so they could print more complex characters but they sold them to Americans as "graphics modes", and, and, and...a whole flood of undocumented irrelevance.
Actually, some older versions of Unix permitted users to give away their files, so it's not impossible. Whether any of those versions understood -R or the user:group syntax, I don't know. (Also, it doesn't make any sense for "chown us yourbase" to be giving away your own files, but oh well...)
...get a Sandisk Flashdrive. No moving parts and they connect to a standard IDE connector...
...and they only come in tiny sizes and their transfer modes look like something out of 1994. I'm not really trying to knock them - I own one - but you have to be aware of their limitations. If you have the idea that you're going to replace your main drive with one of these, think again. They have their very nice features, like incredible shock resistance, absolute silence, and very low "seek time" (since there are no spinning platters and no heads to move), but all the speed you gain from the low seek time, you lose back because of the stupidly low transfer rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Please engage your mind before posting, OK? How do you think children learn language? It gets chemically infused into them in a lab? Or try this simple experiment: cover a kitten's eyes when it is born; leave the covering on for six months, then take it off. The kitten will never be able to see, despite the fact that its eyes are physically normal - the visual center of its brain has never developed. Chemicals only, huh? Geez...
When I'm hired for a job, I regard my first responsibility as being to the company as a whole, secondly to the systems I maintain, and lastly to the individual users. Let's face it, if we were administering spacecraft instead of computer systems, the users would be coming to us saying
Frankly, I think your boss has his priorities wrong if this is his attitude. Wait until something crashes and you have to tell him there are no recent backups because you were too busy keeping the users happy...which doesn't bring the money in."Turn up the oxygen! It's stuffy in here!"
"If I turn up the oxygen, we'll eat into our reserve, which could put us at risk if something unexpected happens."
"So what? That's not my problem. It's still stuffy in here. Turn up the oxygen!"
What's the most exciting use of the phone system you know of (that doesn't involve breaking the "dumb client, smart network model")? Phone sex lines? That movie thing (which is clearly so motivating I can't even remember exactly what it is, and which is coming damn close to breaking the model)? 24-hour phone lines you can order stuff from? Whoopee-do.
So if 999/1000 people say that pi equals 3, does that make it so? If they say "turbocharger" when referring to a supercharger, are they the same thing? If they say "URL" when they mean hostname, are they interchangeable? The layman's misunderstanding of a(n admittedly technical) term does not make the misunderstanding correct. I'm afraid I have to put myself on the side of the language lawyers here, because the other way lies "It means X because it means what I want it to mean", which leads us to Ministry of Truth.
Something very similar has already been done. Search for the "GNU superoptimizer" : "GSO is a function sequence generator that uses an exhaustive generate-and-test approach to find the shortest instruction sequence for a given function."
...if they have this, anyway. At the same time, I have a feeling this will last until somebody blows out his knee throwing a wild kick at midair and sues the manufacturer. I'd love to have a training simulator for karate - any number of opponents you like, any skill level, any build! - but watching a screen to see where your opponent is while throwing punches at the air doesn't sound like a great UI to me. I think, unfortunately, that we'll have to wait for immersive VR for these things to get really good. And even then, it's not the same if you can't _feel_ the impact of a block.
I don't think it is all that widespread. Can it be slow? Sure, no doubt about it. As the quip goes, the first thing you notice when you get broadband service is how slow the rest of the Internet is. Last night www.furnitureporn.com, among other sites, seemed pretty poky. But at work - which is a hell of a lot better wired than my apartment is! - things can often be surprisingly slow too. I wouldn't be too quick to pin things on cable.
(A strange thing to say on /., I know, but...) It seems to me like the US military is getting too reliant on neat technological toys. They might be workable in very low-intensity conflicts (which, yes, the military thinks will be more important than ever in the coming century), but I'd really like to know how they plan to keep all this stuff working in the face of the abuse of pitched battles, bad supply lines, etc.
OK. The ACLU argued that the Ohio state motto ("With God, All Things Are Possible") is unconstitutional. Read it in their own words here. Who cares about that Drug War stuff, about property seizure or gun banning or police brutality, when there's important stuff like state mottoes! to fight over, huh? Now do you understand why people think they're a joke? There are a lot of real causes they could be fighting for, and they waste their time and money on crap like that.
Of course, I'm reminded of a manifesto which said something to the effect of "If we wanted to make the crappiest communications protocol imaginable, we'd give people random numeric addresses and force them to be at a specific physical location to send or receive messages..."
NFS-mounted root? Hmm...I'm envisioning the sexiest X-terminal in the world...a three-inch aluminum cube with an SGI 1600SW. :^) As Apple has shown the world, it isn't the technology inside your boxen that counts, it's how much the outside makes people drool.
VNC is a bandwidth hog? Your experience is very different than mine...I run it over a 10MB half-duplex network, and it's not bad. Seriously, if you /had/ to upgrade to 100MB, what the hell were you doing? Playing full-screen movies? Running Napster on the same unswitched network? Here's an experiment: start up VNC. Kill off anything that requires frequent updates (xdaliclock, xosview, whatever). Use only flat colors in your windowmanager (and that includes the background!) You'll see the performance increase tremendously.
Most Mac faithful won't care about the Unixy nature of OS X - if they did, they presumably wouldn't be Mac faithful, the Unix market isn't going to be much swayed by one more (immature, commercial) variant, and OS X doesn't offer the Wintel folks much that they didn't already have access to.
I agree with you that it was time for a fundamental change in the MacOS architecture, and I don't think they're going to abandon what they've done with the internals, but I /do/ think they're going to lose interest in supporting the explicitly Unixy features of the OS.
Marines taking an NT administration class? What, they have NT admin coloring books now? ;^)
Actually, it kind of did. Years ago I saw a story about Lenat and Cyc in which it was mentioned that the designers would tell it things during the day, and at night it would mull over what it had been told and come up with questions or with statements it would suggest to the designers. One morning it said "Most people are famous." The designers told Cyc, no, most people are not famous, where did you get that idea? And it revealed its reasoning to be, roughly: you have told me about 954 individuals, 720 of them are famous, ergo, most people are famous. I hope the "common sense" of the machine has improved a little since then...
BTW, I also knew right off the bat this was going to be a typical Gates interview. Just read the first question and answer, and you see the entire Gates MO at work.
Q:Some people have said that Microsoft...
A:Oh yeah? What about this? What about that, huh? Should we not have done this? Huh, wise guy? Huh? You gonna cry now?
Everything is just attack, attack, attack...which tells you a lot about why MS is the way it is, I think.
I would love to know how you do that, since I've always heard that SMP is incompatible with power management. Are you sure this has anything to do with ACPI, and isn't just the HLT instruction?
Not surprisingly, most existing space law is highly government-centric and not very friendly to individual or commercial use of space. The Moon Agreement, in fact, was implicitly communist - the Moon is the common property of all mankind, an international body to be formed to determine the distribution of profits from the Moon, developing nations to be given special consideration in the distribution of Moon profits regardless of whether they'd made any direct contribution to the effort, etc.
"Elephants are about to rampage through downtown Calgary and kill us all!"
"No they aren't!"
"YES THEY ARE! Quick, everybody blow these magic elephant-repelling whistles to keep them away!"
*tweet* *tweet*
(Elephants fail to appear.)
"Whew! Looks like we saved the city, and just in time, too!"
"BUT THERE WEREN'T ANY ELEPHANTS..."
"YES THERE WERE! SHUT UP AND BLOW YOUR WHISTLE!"
Now, I'm not saying that either environmental concerns or RSI/carpal tunnel are hoaxes, but there are an awful lot of cases out there that bear a strong resemblance to elephant whistles...
The author allows his enthusiasm to carry him away more than once. For example,
Yes, Hangul is a remarkable invention, but try asking a Korean to say "Flushing" some time. Who cares? What does that have to do with Unicode, which has absolutely nothing to do with the physical representation of the glyph? "PersaCom"? I've never seen or heard it rendered that way, and I really doubt that "persacom" is technically considered pronouncable Japanese. (I've always seen it rendered "pasokon".) And it still has nothing to do with Unicode. And printer manufacturers really made 8-pin printers so they could print hiragana and katakana, and they invented modes so they could print more complex characters but they sold them to Americans as "graphics modes", and, and, and...a whole flood of undocumented irrelevance.Actually, some older versions of Unix permitted users to give away their files, so it's not impossible. Whether any of those versions understood -R or the user:group syntax, I don't know. (Also, it doesn't make any sense for "chown us yourbase" to be giving away your own files, but oh well...)