Perhaps if we ('we' in my particualr case being the US) didn't have slashdot we would be incarerating Japanese born US citizens, or hosing down black civil rights protesters!
Or locking people up on an army base in Cuba to sidestep your constitution?
Do you think the total time saved by all the processes which ever run on the L4-HURD on any machine anywhere will ever be larger than the time taken to switch from MACH to L4?
100 years from now, our fascination with space-planes will be seen as a great folly of the later 1900's.
Look at the shuttle on the launch pad and then look at one of the early railway carriages where they just took a stagecoach and strapped it to the top of some railway wheels.
hence why our bridges have the arches at the top rather than at the bottom.
A suspension bridge is just a rope bridge on steroids, and so I don't think it would have supprised the Roman. Of course the materials we have to make the `ropes' would make him drool.
I think the bridges which would really make our Roman's chin hit the floor are the simple two uprights and a flat bed concrete ones which are now the standard way of building road networks. That is a design which goes back to stonehenge and beyond, but no concievable development of concrete as the roman knows it would make such bridges possible, because concrete is so amazingly bad in tension. Stressed reinforced concrete is pretty amazing stuff.
Hoo-ray? In a sense it seems like a giant step backwards to 1960s technology.
No, to 1960s design rather than technology. There is nothing wrong with this if the 1960s design turns out to still be the best anyone has come up with. You do the same kind of design with more modern technology and get the best available solution to the problem.
Just because Buck Rogers had space planes, that doesn't mean they are actually the best engineering solution, silver jump suits are not practical streetwear either.
Look at bridges, the fundamental designes of modern bridges are really nothing a Roman would be supprised by, it's the details of the technology applied to the basic designs which makes them better.
Linux update is the best on most distros. It can update your kernel and *almost*every*program* on your computer
But normal consumers don't want to update the kernel, and anything else is not `linux update'. If consumers wanted a way to update whatever freeware they have on their Windoze machines, it would exist (and does, for instance, with cygwin). Real consumers don't want it, basicly because few of them install significant amounmts of such software, and of those who do, fewer are interested in keeping at the cutting edge.
Commercial software houses make their own choices. I have no idea why the big games houses haven't gotten together to create a unified update mechanism, presumably ferrets-in-a-sack issues, but they would be unlikely to act differently on Linux.
The author doesn't bother explaining that Linux is free,
To a consumer-user Linux is not free, they would want to get it in a nice supported package, not a download form some obscure place on the internet. So they'd be paying for a box in a shop.
that updates to Linux are free
Er, unlike Windows Update? Or the MacOS-X update system which keeps changing how Safari is broken this week?
It doesn't supprise me that some airhead on some Linux web site doesn't know that, but you'd think/. editors would have a clue. Now and again. Just to supprise us all.
The fact that some programs are badly coded enough that you need to run as Admin to use them isn't Windows' fault, it's shoddily coded software.
That will depend case by case on whether the application can be sanely created without privileges given windows security model.
However, sine I was talking about a Microsoft application, they get bitten as not giving a damn in either case.
I presume this all derrives from the game in question wanting to save under \Program Files\, which is what Microsoft encouraged right back to Win95 at least. It was stupid then and it's stupid now and it's a big neon sign saying Microsoft Are Clueless About Multi User Systems.
Add in the fact that NT has this file system permission system about which there are whole courses you can take, and which is probably more than turing equivalent, and so anything imaginable could be arranged to work if they could be arsed.
Mind you, the fact that they intentionally broke that system for the XP Home edition probably doesn't help. The worst of all possible worlds, a massively over complicated system with a massively under powered control system. Like steering the space shuttle with a bit of string.
OS X takes as long to boot and has as much pointless eye candy, and the same brain dead one-thing-at-a-time GUI
some examples would be nice. OS X rarely needs rebooting.
I didn't say it had to be rebooted as often, just that it was dog-slow. I've heard that the latest version is faster.
No Eye Candy is pointless
I'd rather have the cycles. I'd really rather have the deveopment resources gone into something which makes my life better.
Bundle that with expose, the ability to effect windows without losing focus of the current window(hold the cmd button down when using the mouse),
Why should I have to fight to read something different from what I'm writing on? My desk and paper allows me to do that trivially. I thought we were supposed to have had a desktop metaphore for a couple of decades. And what about having to switch focus to another application just to get at some trivial menu related to it? Why all this extra work? Because they're stuck with a GUI which was designed to work around an 8 inch screen and programmers who could't update overlapping windows properly?
Too many simple things require keyboard and mouse coordination, or going around the houses. Even Windows is less irritating, which is saying something. At least the icons don't bounce at me like derranged, well, paperclips.
Mind you, the Mac Mini plus a real mouse would make a nice VNC terminal. A bit expensive, but pretty.
Yes, they finally made the great leap forwards into the 1970s. But we were talking about Apple's history.
Also, before you speak poorly of a platform, you should at least make a solid attempt at using it.
Er, how do you think I got so pissed off about having to reboot every time the web browser hung? The fact that after each such crash qit took half an eon for MacOs 9 to boot up on the iMac I was using did a lot to confirm my opinion of their priorites too. Clearly the eye candy was more important that actual practical usability.
OS X takes as long to boot and has as much pointless eye candy, and the same brain dead one-thing-at-a-time GUI, but needs to be rebooted much less often. Might even be enough to get me to use a Mac for real work rather than just cross paltform testing if I end up with one in the room anyway.
My point still stands - it's the Game Publisher Microsoft that's at fault, not the Operating System Developer Microsoft.
But the game publisher and the OS developer are part of the Microsoft whose head is being interviewed and is talking about a commitment to security.
The reason nearly every game needs administrator access is that the game publishers' "nifty" protection tricks need to hook into the more advanced features of the CD-ROM drivers.
Actually, in the case I was rememberring (Dangerous Creatures?) I believe the game ran perfectly except when you wanted to load or save. It was just a case of them not botherring to get the permissions right. No deep technical problem, just `we don't give a shit because everyone should run as administrator anyway'.
Windows is prone to a lot of problems due to the default "administrator" account.
Once you've seen a child having to become adminstrator to play a Microsoft game, you quickly realise just how serious Microsoft are about security and usability.
Geek factor.. even tho I hate the term geek, nerd is much better. I prefer to build my own machines, even tho it's not very exciting anymore as I've done it a billion times, I prefer to chose every piece that is going into it.
Geek factor II.. Apple put a lot of effort into the interface and the pretty plastic case, but bugger all into the OS itself. MacOS 9 was still an embarassment from an IT POV, single processing, no useful memory management. Nothing like having to reboot because my web browser got in a knot to convince me I was using a toy, not a computer.
Because when your grandmother uses Windows, she clicks the left and the right button at the same time.
Well, your grandma may be a moron, but mine never seesed to have any problem operating cookers and TVs and a radiogram which looked like a mad whittler's reworking of mission control huston. Strangely, all of them had more than one button.
Since they have spent decades in the real world, I'd back the average grandmother's mechanical aptitude against that of the average graphic designer -- the real drag of the Mac GUI -- any day.
No, they just flood the stupid drop down menus, which, not being context sensitive, just grow like topsy into s twisty maze of little drop-downs, all alike.
I never understood this. why do you have to go 9km/s to escape the Earth's gravity?
You don't. However, if you want to throw something and have it escape, that is how fast you have to throw it. If you are prepared to keep pushing you can go as slowly as you like.
The escape velocity is a reflection of how much energy you need to put in. If you do it all in one bang, the energy is equivalent to a fixed velocity because the mass of the object cancels out of the equation (more massive objects need more energy, but will have more energy at a given speed).
Consider pushing your car across a car park. You could either provide a steady push, just a little more than needed to overcome friction, or you could run into the back with another vehicle to give it a shove and watch it roll. If you choose to do the latter there will be a minimum size of thump which will get it far enough, and that will mean a minimum initial speed for your particular car. If friction were just dependent on mass rather than all the complex things it does depend on, there would be a carpark escape velocity common to all vehicles.
Yet you can take any kind of crap, label it "herbal" or "homeopathic" and sell it directly to gullible consumers.
Well, I can't really see the harm. If it's clearly labeled as, at best, worthless then who can complain when it makes their hair fall out and doesn't cure their cancer?
Of course, we could demand that any claims made for effectiveness be backed up by proper evidence from controlled tests. It would be worth putting the idea forward just to see the medical professions and drug companies shitting themselves:-).
I can see one case where patents are perhaps justified in the 21st century, that is where we, through our agent the state, substantially increases the costs and risks of work in some area, and patents can offset that.
The obvious candidate is pharmaceuticals, where (quite reasonably) we impose a massive regulatory load and delay development for years, and so make it much harder for someone to exploit a discovery or invention before it just becomes common currency.
Obviously IT has no such problem.
At the very least I think that the protection against independent reinvention should be reduced to some small, standard licencing fee. That would remove the more or less unbounded risk we are all taking every day now from the fact that some obscure and possibly insane patent might, properly interpreted, give someone else ownership of our work. That would seem to be a small, bounded change to the law which could be done quickly and nail 90% of the acute problem.
I'm sure there are better topics in submission queue.
Let's see, here is a story which has direct implications for the livelihoods of nerds everywhere. OTOH, there are such important stories as `intel launches what we knew they were going to launch and someone has some pictures of laptops which look just like every other laptop you ever saw'. Or there is the 2.5 year old science story which presumably exists because National Geographic has some space to fill, my god, that one made me glad I check/. in the morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Or locking people up on an army base in Cuba to sidestep your constitution?
Do you think the total time saved by all the processes which ever run on the L4-HURD on any machine anywhere will ever be larger than the time taken to switch from MACH to L4?
Look at the shuttle on the launch pad and then look at one of the early railway carriages where they just took a stagecoach and strapped it to the top of some railway wheels.
[Tell that to people fighting the effects of SP2.]
Fighting it? If it caused any problems, they can uninstall it.
If they are lucky, but my point was that it is not a small addition.
If somebody can't be bothered to run a certain company's upgrade-checking program, can they even be bothered to run the game?
So, you're now saying that unified updateing systems are useless?
A suspension bridge is just a rope bridge on steroids, and so I don't think it would have supprised the Roman. Of course the materials we have to make the `ropes' would make him drool.
I think the bridges which would really make our Roman's chin hit the floor are the simple two uprights and a flat bed concrete ones which are now the standard way of building road networks. That is a design which goes back to stonehenge and beyond, but no concievable development of concrete as the roman knows it would make such bridges possible, because concrete is so amazingly bad in tension. Stressed reinforced concrete is pretty amazing stuff.
No, to 1960s design rather than technology. There is nothing wrong with this if the 1960s design turns out to still be the best anyone has come up with. You do the same kind of design with more modern technology and get the best available solution to the problem.
Just because Buck Rogers had space planes, that doesn't mean they are actually the best engineering solution, silver jump suits are not practical streetwear either.
Look at bridges, the fundamental designes of modern bridges are really nothing a Roman would be supprised by, it's the details of the technology applied to the basic designs which makes them better.
Can't wait for the optional RedHat module and the optional Suse module and... but that's silly, they'd have to franchise out... er...
Tell that to people fighting the effects of SP2.
Linux update is the best on most distros. It can update your kernel and *almost*every*program* on your computer
But normal consumers don't want to update the kernel, and anything else is not `linux update'. If consumers wanted a way to update whatever freeware they have on their Windoze machines, it would exist (and does, for instance, with cygwin). Real consumers don't want it, basicly because few of them install significant amounmts of such software, and of those who do, fewer are interested in keeping at the cutting edge.
Commercial software houses make their own choices. I have no idea why the big games houses haven't gotten together to create a unified update mechanism, presumably ferrets-in-a-sack issues, but they would be unlikely to act differently on Linux.
To a consumer-user Linux is not free, they would want to get it in a nice supported package, not a download form some obscure place on the internet. So they'd be paying for a box in a shop.
that updates to Linux are free
Er, unlike Windows Update? Or the MacOS-X update system which keeps changing how Safari is broken this week?
It doesn't supprise me that some airhead on some Linux web site doesn't know that, but you'd think /. editors would have a clue. Now and again. Just to supprise us all.
That will depend case by case on whether the application can be sanely created without privileges given windows security model.
However, sine I was talking about a Microsoft application, they get bitten as not giving a damn in either case.
I presume this all derrives from the game in question wanting to save under \Program Files\, which is what Microsoft encouraged right back to Win95 at least. It was stupid then and it's stupid now and it's a big neon sign saying Microsoft Are Clueless About Multi User Systems.
Add in the fact that NT has this file system permission system about which there are whole courses you can take, and which is probably more than turing equivalent, and so anything imaginable could be arranged to work if they could be arsed.
Mind you, the fact that they intentionally broke that system for the XP Home edition probably doesn't help. The worst of all possible worlds, a massively over complicated system with a massively under powered control system. Like steering the space shuttle with a bit of string.
some examples would be nice. OS X rarely needs rebooting.
I didn't say it had to be rebooted as often, just that it was dog-slow. I've heard that the latest version is faster.
No Eye Candy is pointless
I'd rather have the cycles. I'd really rather have the deveopment resources gone into something which makes my life better.
Bundle that with expose, the ability to effect windows without losing focus of the current window(hold the cmd button down when using the mouse),
Why should I have to fight to read something different from what I'm writing on? My desk and paper allows me to do that trivially. I thought we were supposed to have had a desktop metaphore for a couple of decades. And what about having to switch focus to another application just to get at some trivial menu related to it? Why all this extra work? Because they're stuck with a GUI which was designed to work around an 8 inch screen and programmers who could't update overlapping windows properly?
Too many simple things require keyboard and mouse coordination, or going around the houses. Even Windows is less irritating, which is saying something. At least the icons don't bounce at me like derranged, well, paperclips.
Mind you, the Mac Mini plus a real mouse would make a nice VNC terminal. A bit expensive, but pretty.
Yes, they finally made the great leap forwards into the 1970s. But we were talking about Apple's history.
Also, before you speak poorly of a platform, you should at least make a solid attempt at using it.
Er, how do you think I got so pissed off about having to reboot every time the web browser hung? The fact that after each such crash qit took half an eon for MacOs 9 to boot up on the iMac I was using did a lot to confirm my opinion of their priorites too. Clearly the eye candy was more important that actual practical usability.
OS X takes as long to boot and has as much pointless eye candy, and the same brain dead one-thing-at-a-time GUI, but needs to be rebooted much less often. Might even be enough to get me to use a Mac for real work rather than just cross paltform testing if I end up with one in the room anyway.
But the game publisher and the OS developer are part of the Microsoft whose head is being interviewed and is talking about a commitment to security.
The reason nearly every game needs administrator access is that the game publishers' "nifty" protection tricks need to hook into the more advanced features of the CD-ROM drivers.
Actually, in the case I was rememberring (Dangerous Creatures?) I believe the game ran perfectly except when you wanted to load or save. It was just a case of them not botherring to get the permissions right. No deep technical problem, just `we don't give a shit because everyone should run as administrator anyway'.
Once you've seen a child having to become adminstrator to play a Microsoft game, you quickly realise just how serious Microsoft are about security and usability.
Geek factor II.. Apple put a lot of effort into the interface and the pretty plastic case, but bugger all into the OS itself. MacOS 9 was still an embarassment from an IT POV, single processing, no useful memory management. Nothing like having to reboot because my web browser got in a knot to convince me I was using a toy, not a computer.
Well, your grandma may be a moron, but mine never seesed to have any problem operating cookers and TVs and a radiogram which looked like a mad whittler's reworking of mission control huston. Strangely, all of them had more than one button.
Since they have spent decades in the real world, I'd back the average grandmother's mechanical aptitude against that of the average graphic designer -- the real drag of the Mac GUI -- any day.
BTW, the slow and steady method was most famously used by the Grand Dutchie of Fenwick for their moon shot.
You don't. However, if you want to throw something and have it escape, that is how fast you have to throw it. If you are prepared to keep pushing you can go as slowly as you like.
The escape velocity is a reflection of how much energy you need to put in. If you do it all in one bang, the energy is equivalent to a fixed velocity because the mass of the object cancels out of the equation (more massive objects need more energy, but will have more energy at a given speed).
Consider pushing your car across a car park. You could either provide a steady push, just a little more than needed to overcome friction, or you could run into the back with another vehicle to give it a shove and watch it roll. If you choose to do the latter there will be a minimum size of thump which will get it far enough, and that will mean a minimum initial speed for your particular car. If friction were just dependent on mass rather than all the complex things it does depend on, there would be a carpark escape velocity common to all vehicles.
Well, I can't really see the harm. If it's clearly labeled as, at best, worthless then who can complain when it makes their hair fall out and doesn't cure their cancer?
Of course, we could demand that any claims made for effectiveness be backed up by proper evidence from controlled tests. It would be worth putting the idea forward just to see the medical professions and drug companies shitting themselves:-).
The obvious candidate is pharmaceuticals, where (quite reasonably) we impose a massive regulatory load and delay development for years, and so make it much harder for someone to exploit a discovery or invention before it just becomes common currency.
Obviously IT has no such problem.
At the very least I think that the protection against independent reinvention should be reduced to some small, standard licencing fee. That would remove the more or less unbounded risk we are all taking every day now from the fact that some obscure and possibly insane patent might, properly interpreted, give someone else ownership of our work. That would seem to be a small, bounded change to the law which could be done quickly and nail 90% of the acute problem.
People with jobs?
I'm sure there are better topics in submission queue.
Let's see, here is a story which has direct implications for the livelihoods of nerds everywhere. OTOH, there are such important stories as `intel launches what we knew they were going to launch and someone has some pictures of laptops which look just like every other laptop you ever saw'. Or there is the 2.5 year old science story which presumably exists because National Geographic has some space to fill, my god, that one made me glad I check /. in the morning.
I like Terry Pratchett's comment that there is no racism on the Diskworld, because speciesism is so much more satisfying.