I count more than two guys here who claim to have run it. I'm one of those guys. So the other guy must have posted under multiple accounts more than the five times I did?
I ran OS/2, coded in it, bathed in it, loved it. It was the future, but it was not to be. I then picked up BeOS, another ahead of it's time sophisticated OS, but that failed too.
I wonder if I'm cursed to marry myself to OSes that eventually fail into an obscure nostalgic fan base?
Beer is not free, unless you brew it yourself, scam on some rich cougar, or steal it. Free as in beer is a better analogy for piracy or convincing your drunk boss he hasn't yet bought a round, despite having done so, thrice, at friday drinks.
One advantage of password expiry is that it garuntees stupid easy to input passwords dished out by a service desk that may remain in use for a while get wiped out every cycle, should a user not be forced to change it at the time. It does ensure, at a minimum, that Password1 isn't access all areas for your corporate LAN.
A drawback is that, after 90 days, the same user may call back the helpdesk and recieve Password1 again.
Just last night I fixed my parents computer in one of those long fixes that turns out to be the most fundamentally trivial things. This is why this is not my main occupation.
Basicly they had a reccently built custom Windows 7 + Ubuntu PC that had begun randomly shutting down, often minutes after it had been powered up.
Ok first thing, any obvious errors or cicumstances? No, it would just randomly power off. Windows event logs showed kernel power events, no specific driver, service or app crashing anywhere. Linux was the same. Not a thermal issue cpu + gpu temps nominal and stress test din't immediatley cause a crash.
Suspecting a power or a motherboard issue, first checked and re-seated things internally. It still occured.
Removed extraneous cards, connectors and drives. No result. It would even happen sitting in BIOS setup. Have ruled out a number of problems.
Checked for electrical shorts, poor voltage etc.
Dying power supply? Overloading or shorting? Nope, all voltages nominal, and it was brand new.
I was about to try a spare power supply and a thought occured to me..
It's almost as if the reset switch was being hit, but it wasn't even close to being knocked at any point and the switch otherwise worked fine. Then I knocked the case and the system reset. Yep, the reset switch was faulty, jolting it even slightly would reset. Who needs a reset switch since Vista anyway? Unplugged it from mainboard. Solved.
I decided not to even joke about charging my Dad for two hours of my time.
Chances are if he paid someone to do it they wouldn't necessarily have found the fault that quickly, and he'd be hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
The lesson in troubleshooting? Um... I'm not sure.
Android is more about tinkering and spec sheets and more nerdy goods
Disagree. Android is about actually *doing* stuff with your phone. I have modified Android on my phone also, and it's very much all about usability, I use it heavily. I found I didn't actually *do* much with my old 2G iPhone, despite the fact I did enjoy it. I now can't live without Multi-tasking on a phone!
Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake.
Many would consider Google's user experience is generally pretty good. At least better than certain competition (*cough*Windows Mobile*cough*). It could do with a bit of shiny iLook, but that is all it is lacking. Android is rather good, especially now Google is no longer affraid of Apple and we're seeing multitouch on the platform.
It seems you can actually have a open platform and also good right-brain thinking in user experience design. I guess it's about keeping developers and designers at arms length.
A Linux world ... would it really be that secure?
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
If at most a handful of major linux distros were on 90% of the worlds computers, we would still have a ecosystem of viruses, malware, scareware and phishing. Yes criminals will have a harder time of it, and we'd see vulernabilities patched much faster thanks to the way OSS works. But this would merely mean the bad guys would raise their game. Yep just the same arms race.
Harder time of it as in: "Please enter your admin password to see the dancing bunnies" rather than merely "click here" and your box is pwnzerd.
Windows 7 would *seem* secure due to the low gross number of incidents, in the same way that OSX does now (yet both seem to fall down equally at pwn2own style competitions).
Nevermind the unfixible meatspace vulnerabilities with *any* software.
You're saying a dual boot system shouldn't count as a user?
Depends on if Canonical is happy with that. If they consider it counts as one for each, neither or only on which gets majority use.
I own a wii. It's been unplugged for over a year and I play the 360 every day, but I am still a wii owner.
Thats a hard one to call, you own, but do not use
Similarly, it seems to me if you have a dual boot system with ubuntu and windows, you're still an ubuntu user. Maybe there are ubuntu purists out there who would look down on you for that and would care to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
Linux purists generally look down on non-purists so, yes...:)
I'd wonder more about the second part you hinted at:
I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops.
Would you count as 3 users for this number? This article mentions that fedora counts unique IP addresses, if it said how the ubuntu number was found, I missed it.
I have three users (me, one agnostic, one mac diehard) behind my one IP. So again, it's hard. The nature of IPv4 is that Fedora's estimate could be understated. But it still doesn't give a clue how many meat popsicles are utilising fedora as their main workspace.
Windows is usually tied to a physical machine, and it's usually clear if that machine is a desktop or a server function. In this way looking into Linux market share is very very murky at best.
I have many problems with these numbers, how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows? I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops. Ubuntu is the kind of thing I muck around with alot, people such as myself drag up the stats if they are trying to work it out from downloads, respository use stats.
On the upside the total number of machines that have at least one linux distro on them must be rather higher than typical market share stats suggest.
Because we learnt to program for a single threaded core with it's single processing pipeline since way back, using high level languages that pre-date the multi-threaded era, and it involves re-thinking how things are done on a fundamental level if we're ever to make proper use of 32, 64, 128 cores. Oh and we all know how many programmers are 'get off my lawn' types, myself included.
If I still coded much anymore it would drive me to drink.
Don't these researchers at least look at trip reports from the Internet? Going further one has to question their credentials, their lack of first hand experience with hallucinogenic drugs implies they never really went to university.
If drugs can induce NDEs and indeed some even more fantastical experiences than your basic Im-dead-tunnel-of-light-OMG-aw-crap-im-back fare, this kind of shuts down any proof of a afterlife possibly presented in NDEs. It's at once depressing - oblivion after all - and kind of exciting... I'm going to visit my dealer now.
How did they explain the out-of-body visions experienced by people who were born blind (and then actually saw things when their heart stopped beating)?
Blind people are quite capable of 'seeing' things. A blind persons brain may be more re-wired to take input from the other senses but indeed the visual parts of their brains are still intact.
I have a family member, blind from birth, who believes what she 'sees' in her imagination to be what sight would be like. Indeed she thinks she sees colors in her dreams, and can give a good verbal description of colors and what objects would be that color. Usually quite to the surprise of a sighted person assuming a blind persons world is all black.
You point suggests that the science here can't account for that anecdotal evidence, but anecdotally... blind people see colors on LSD and other halluciogens.
In much the same way being hypnotized once made me realise just how tenuous our grasp on reality is, my personal experiences of hallucinogens (er 100% legal of course) means I dismiss near death experiences out of hand.
It's a game of whack-a-mole. My concern is the same is the real game of whack-a-mole. One game I played as a kid (sharks not moles), the better you did, the more the game speed up until it was impossible to win.
The internet is all about copying, it's fundamental, and it's never easier. It's what Turing machines do. Consider Streaming even, there is not such thing as streaming, it's still downloading, however renamed to keep rightsholders from realising what it really is.
Theoretically it's possible to create a file sharing service that is incredibly difficult perhaps almost impossible to monitor and trace. Onion routing works pretty well, there are robest methods of key exchange, and it seems encrypted links are good enough to protect online banking.
All the while bandwidth, computational capacity and digital storage is getting better, faster and cheaper. If one thought piracy was at an all time high now and the tide will start to turn against it, then one is like a luddite before the industrial revolution.
Maybe Big Content does end up shutting down P2P faster than it can pop back up, and even win some candy floss in the process. Piracy will just move back to untraceable anonymous physical media. You see, one underestimates the bandwidth of a portable hard drive or USB stick moving from A to B.
What about ACTA border searches of your iPod and laptop? Considering the size of a 32gb MicroSDHC Card now,, (I was amazed when these things came out at 2gb!) it becomes possible to move 40+ VCD movies in something as big as your fingernail which a data smuggler could stitch into clothing for gods sake.
Still don't get what I mean? A high end 32gb SDHC card costs alot, but so did a $10 4gb card once upon a time. What happens when these things hit 500gb, 1000gb? Become so cheap that you give them away like we do with burned CD/DVD-Rs now?
Another example, my entire music collection (legit) took up most of my expensive 80gb harddrive in 2003/2004. Today that same price point, buys me a 1.5TB drive, with change. My music collection that has only grown a little suddenly has a trivial footprint.
A hypothetical pirated movie collection of hundreds of 700mb VCD-quality movies now fills up a good chunk of ones hypothetical 1TB drive.
In six years that will be nothing on my $100 50TB drive.
By the end of the decade you could afford to have a desktop computer with every major movie of the last 50 years stored on it with room to spare.
Repeat.
Yeah so you were thinking maybe we are seeing the end of piracy, but it's only just getting started. Suddenly Big Content seems like a bunch of luddites tearing down the machines of the revolution, failing to see the precipice of change coming.
If HTML5 is a potential competitor to Adobe Flash, and it will be widely supported out of the box in browsers, it would make sense for Adobe to move towards inclusion in browsers. This is an [anti-]competitive move to ensure continued use of flash.
Silverlight may follow suit for this reason also. However for this reason, I imagine Internet Explorer would be the last browser to have flash built-in.
Listen carefully to all of the advice you get given by people on job hunting. Because that's what you should duly ignore.
I can't think how much conflicting advice I've had from know it alls on getting a job, but every time I've nailed a job interview I've done it with merely good enough resume and showing up on time in a shirt and tie. There are a couple of points that make the difference however:
1. I've actually been a good fit for the job, known that, and sincerely wanted it, but was not recklessly optimistic and bubbling self-deluded enthusiasm. You know what I mean, try not to be one of those twits who can't sing in Idol auditions, be one of the cool-headed polite folk who can actually hit a note.
2. I've not come accross as a stuck-up wuckfit in the job interview. Don't reherse, you'll sound rehersed. Don't over-prepare, you'll sound over-prepared. If you can't just sit there and naturally answer questions off the top of your head then you're probably not right for the job.
If you are being interviewed by people you are going to be working for, you need to get on with them comfortably.
That's a huge one.
If your a cultural fit for the workplace you are likely to be hired. I believe this applies very strongly to IT. Infact ignore my advice too.
What if they someday find a "gay gene" (or even just those for various intersex conditions) and cure those?
"Would you like to be heterosexual, just like everyone else?"
(The interesting thing about that is that you can piss off both sides of that debate. What if, in the future, being gay or not was indisputably a choice thanks to medical science? Would those who chose to cure themselves be seen as traitors or...?)
Offering the choice is not the same as shoving it down everyones throat.
Add in that the opposite choice would be true, the technology might allow one to be made gay.
"Would you like to be gay, bisexual or asexual, unlike everyone else?"
People can go to great lengths to modify themselves to not be like everyone else, to stand out.
Bisexuality would double your dating prospects, you can bet some would opt for it if there was a inexpensive treatement.
Slashdot Mirror
I count more than two guys here who claim to have run it. I'm one of those guys. So the other guy must have posted under multiple accounts more than the five times I did?
I ran OS/2, coded in it, bathed in it, loved it. It was the future, but it was not to be. I then picked up BeOS, another ahead of it's time sophisticated OS, but that failed too. I wonder if I'm cursed to marry myself to OSes that eventually fail into an obscure nostalgic fan base?
This implies Windows 7 and Ubuntu will fail soon.
Beer is not free, unless you brew it yourself, scam on some rich cougar, or steal it. Free as in beer is a better analogy for piracy or convincing your drunk boss he hasn't yet bought a round, despite having done so, thrice, at friday drinks.
One advantage of password expiry is that it garuntees stupid easy to input passwords dished out by a service desk that may remain in use for a while get wiped out every cycle, should a user not be forced to change it at the time. It does ensure, at a minimum, that Password1 isn't access all areas for your corporate LAN.
A drawback is that, after 90 days, the same user may call back the helpdesk and recieve Password1 again.
Just last night I fixed my parents computer in one of those long fixes that turns out to be the most fundamentally trivial things. This is why this is not my main occupation.
Basicly they had a reccently built custom Windows 7 + Ubuntu PC that had begun randomly shutting down, often minutes after it had been powered up.
Ok first thing, any obvious errors or cicumstances? No, it would just randomly power off. Windows event logs showed kernel power events, no specific driver, service or app crashing anywhere. Linux was the same. Not a thermal issue cpu + gpu temps nominal and stress test din't immediatley cause a crash.
Suspecting a power or a motherboard issue, first checked and re-seated things internally. It still occured.
Removed extraneous cards, connectors and drives. No result. It would even happen sitting in BIOS setup. Have ruled out a number of problems.
Checked for electrical shorts, poor voltage etc.
Dying power supply? Overloading or shorting? Nope, all voltages nominal, and it was brand new.
I was about to try a spare power supply and a thought occured to me..
It's almost as if the reset switch was being hit, but it wasn't even close to being knocked at any point and the switch otherwise worked fine. Then I knocked the case and the system reset. Yep, the reset switch was faulty, jolting it even slightly would reset. Who needs a reset switch since Vista anyway? Unplugged it from mainboard. Solved.
I decided not to even joke about charging my Dad for two hours of my time.
Chances are if he paid someone to do it they wouldn't necessarily have found the fault that quickly, and he'd be hundreds of dollars out of pocket.
The lesson in troubleshooting? Um... I'm not sure.
Android is more about tinkering and spec sheets and more nerdy goods
Disagree. Android is about actually *doing* stuff with your phone. I have modified Android on my phone also, and it's very much all about usability, I use it heavily. I found I didn't actually *do* much with my old 2G iPhone, despite the fact I did enjoy it. I now can't live without Multi-tasking on a phone!
Google's model will always compromise user experience when developer flexibility is at stake.
Many would consider Google's user experience is generally pretty good. At least better than certain competition (*cough*Windows Mobile*cough*). It could do with a bit of shiny iLook, but that is all it is lacking. Android is rather good, especially now Google is no longer affraid of Apple and we're seeing multitouch on the platform.
It seems you can actually have a open platform and also good right-brain thinking in user experience design. I guess it's about keeping developers and designers at arms length.
If at most a handful of major linux distros were on 90% of the worlds computers, we would still have a ecosystem of viruses, malware, scareware and phishing. Yes criminals will have a harder time of it, and we'd see vulernabilities patched much faster thanks to the way OSS works. But this would merely mean the bad guys would raise their game. Yep just the same arms race.
Harder time of it as in: "Please enter your admin password to see the dancing bunnies" rather than merely "click here" and your box is pwnzerd.
Windows 7 would *seem* secure due to the low gross number of incidents, in the same way that OSX does now (yet both seem to fall down equally at pwn2own style competitions).
Nevermind the unfixible meatspace vulnerabilities with *any* software.
Security is a war never won.
Nah, this is clearly about control, and forcing people to develop for iPhone and only for iPhone, rather than single app for multiple platforms.
You're saying a dual boot system shouldn't count as a user?
Depends on if Canonical is happy with that. If they consider it counts as one for each, neither or only on which gets majority use.
I own a wii. It's been unplugged for over a year and I play the 360 every day, but I am still a wii owner.
Thats a hard one to call, you own, but do not use
Similarly, it seems to me if you have a dual boot system with ubuntu and windows, you're still an ubuntu user. Maybe there are ubuntu purists out there who would look down on you for that and would care to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
Linux purists generally look down on non-purists so, yes... :)
I'd wonder more about the second part you hinted at:
I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops.
Would you count as 3 users for this number? This article mentions that fedora counts unique IP addresses, if it said how the ubuntu number was found, I missed it.
I have three users (me, one agnostic, one mac diehard) behind my one IP. So again, it's hard. The nature of IPv4 is that Fedora's estimate could be understated. But it still doesn't give a clue how many meat popsicles are utilising fedora as their main workspace.
Windows is usually tied to a physical machine, and it's usually clear if that machine is a desktop or a server function. In this way looking into Linux market share is very very murky at best.
I have many problems with these numbers, how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows? I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops. Ubuntu is the kind of thing I muck around with alot, people such as myself drag up the stats if they are trying to work it out from downloads, respository use stats.
On the upside the total number of machines that have at least one linux distro on them must be rather higher than typical market share stats suggest.
Does the ejector seat work in the F-104? Would be logical to retain it. Even on a salt bed it's unlikely to survive a high speed crash.
Someone write up a warning about the [ProductName], I heard it's a Killer App!
How to play: substitute ProductName for iPad, Android, JooJoo etc
Because we learnt to program for a single threaded core with it's single processing pipeline since way back, using high level languages that pre-date the multi-threaded era, and it involves re-thinking how things are done on a fundamental level if we're ever to make proper use of 32, 64, 128 cores. Oh and we all know how many programmers are 'get off my lawn' types, myself included.
If I still coded much anymore it would drive me to drink.
Many many things already pointed out so far.
This is naughty even, TFA & TFS indirectly claim something that the data does not support.
Next you'll be trying to tell us God doesn't exist.
And we all 'evolved from apes'.
And the iPad is a game-changer.
Only two of those correct.
Don't these researchers at least look at trip reports from the Internet? Going further one has to question their credentials, their lack of first hand experience with hallucinogenic drugs implies they never really went to university.
If drugs can induce NDEs and indeed some even more fantastical experiences than your basic Im-dead-tunnel-of-light-OMG-aw-crap-im-back fare, this kind of shuts down any proof of a afterlife possibly presented in NDEs. It's at once depressing - oblivion after all - and kind of exciting... I'm going to visit my dealer now.
How did they explain the out-of-body visions experienced by people who were born blind (and then actually saw things when their heart stopped beating)?
Blind people are quite capable of 'seeing' things. A blind persons brain may be more re-wired to take input from the other senses but indeed the visual parts of their brains are still intact.
I have a family member, blind from birth, who believes what she 'sees' in her imagination to be what sight would be like. Indeed she thinks she sees colors in her dreams, and can give a good verbal description of colors and what objects would be that color. Usually quite to the surprise of a sighted person assuming a blind persons world is all black.
You point suggests that the science here can't account for that anecdotal evidence, but anecdotally... blind people see colors on LSD and other halluciogens.
In much the same way being hypnotized once made me realise just how tenuous our grasp on reality is, my personal experiences of hallucinogens (er 100% legal of course) means I dismiss near death experiences out of hand.
It's a game of whack-a-mole. My concern is the same is the real game of whack-a-mole. One game I played as a kid (sharks not moles), the better you did, the more the game speed up until it was impossible to win.
, (I was amazed when these things came out at 2gb!) it becomes possible to move 40+ VCD movies in something as big as your fingernail which a data smuggler could stitch into clothing for gods sake.
The internet is all about copying, it's fundamental, and it's never easier. It's what Turing machines do. Consider Streaming even, there is not such thing as streaming, it's still downloading, however renamed to keep rightsholders from realising what it really is.
Theoretically it's possible to create a file sharing service that is incredibly difficult perhaps almost impossible to monitor and trace. Onion routing works pretty well, there are robest methods of key exchange, and it seems encrypted links are good enough to protect online banking.
All the while bandwidth, computational capacity and digital storage is getting better, faster and cheaper. If one thought piracy was at an all time high now and the tide will start to turn against it, then one is like a luddite before the industrial revolution.
Maybe Big Content does end up shutting down P2P faster than it can pop back up, and even win some candy floss in the process. Piracy will just move back to untraceable anonymous physical media. You see, one underestimates the bandwidth of a portable hard drive or USB stick moving from A to B.
What about ACTA border searches of your iPod and laptop? Considering the size of a 32gb MicroSDHC Card now,
Still don't get what I mean? A high end 32gb SDHC card costs alot, but so did a $10 4gb card once upon a time. What happens when these things hit 500gb, 1000gb? Become so cheap that you give them away like we do with burned CD/DVD-Rs now?
Another example, my entire music collection (legit) took up most of my expensive 80gb harddrive in 2003/2004. Today that same price point, buys me a 1.5TB drive, with change. My music collection that has only grown a little suddenly has a trivial footprint.
A hypothetical pirated movie collection of hundreds of 700mb VCD-quality movies now fills up a good chunk of ones hypothetical 1TB drive.
In six years that will be nothing on my $100 50TB drive.
By the end of the decade you could afford to have a desktop computer with every major movie of the last 50 years stored on it with room to spare.
Repeat.
Yeah so you were thinking maybe we are seeing the end of piracy, but it's only just getting started. Suddenly Big Content seems like a bunch of luddites tearing down the machines of the revolution, failing to see the precipice of change coming.
It must be insult to injury to get sued over an Uwe Boll film. Not only did they watch it, but they got sued for doing so. Nobody needs that!
It's like getting kicked in the balls after consuming a large meal consisting entirely of broken glass bottles.
That would describe watching a Uwe Boll film only.
If HTML5 is a potential competitor to Adobe Flash, and it will be widely supported out of the box in browsers, it would make sense for Adobe to move towards inclusion in browsers. This is an [anti-]competitive move to ensure continued use of flash.
Silverlight may follow suit for this reason also. However for this reason, I imagine Internet Explorer would be the last browser to have flash built-in.
Listen carefully to all of the advice you get given by people on job hunting. Because that's what you should duly ignore.
I can't think how much conflicting advice I've had from know it alls on getting a job, but every time I've nailed a job interview I've done it with merely good enough resume and showing up on time in a shirt and tie. There are a couple of points that make the difference however:
1. I've actually been a good fit for the job, known that, and sincerely wanted it, but was not recklessly optimistic and bubbling self-deluded enthusiasm. You know what I mean, try not to be one of those twits who can't sing in Idol auditions, be one of the cool-headed polite folk who can actually hit a note.
2. I've not come accross as a stuck-up wuckfit in the job interview. Don't reherse, you'll sound rehersed. Don't over-prepare, you'll sound over-prepared. If you can't just sit there and naturally answer questions off the top of your head then you're probably not right for the job.
If you are being interviewed by people you are going to be working for, you need to get on with them comfortably. That's a huge one.
If your a cultural fit for the workplace you are likely to be hired. I believe this applies very strongly to IT. Infact ignore my advice too.
What if they someday find a "gay gene" (or even just those for various intersex conditions) and cure those?
"Would you like to be heterosexual, just like everyone else?"
(The interesting thing about that is that you can piss off both sides of that debate. What if, in the future, being gay or not was indisputably a choice thanks to medical science? Would those who chose to cure themselves be seen as traitors or...?)
Offering the choice is not the same as shoving it down everyones throat.
Add in that the opposite choice would be true, the technology might allow one to be made gay.
"Would you like to be gay, bisexual or asexual, unlike everyone else?"
People can go to great lengths to modify themselves to not be like everyone else, to stand out.
Bisexuality would double your dating prospects, you can bet some would opt for it if there was a inexpensive treatement.
Hell no. Seriously who would want that?
Needs infrared *at least*
I'd be interested in the model with Terahertz spectrum imaging (see through clothes, heh heh heh)
But what about the second generation who did not ask to have their genes altered!! WHY WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?
They would demand to be given gene therapy to get the colorblindness back!
GTA gets lots of flak for volence. But it's nothing new.
But no one remembers Carmageddon, obviously.