I can see your point, but embedded applications don't need the same type of function/appearance as the desktop. But I don't see the desktop/laptop going completely away, because the 'general purpose machine' is just too compelling as a working model. It may well shrink, but I predict that the desktop/laptop will not shrink below 25%-50% of where it is, today.
To make significant inroads into the desktop market, we need to learn how to make it so substance and style don't conflict, so we can have *both* at the same time.
Re:Hype = Good (sometimes)
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Along this line, I really *liked* the threat from NT7. Given the timeframe, we really could have done something about it and probably averted the disaster. Even counting the usual government piddling and lollygagging we would have had time.
But now we've decided *this* one wasn't really a threat, so we don't have to worry. So we haven't even begun the work needed to protect ourselves for the day when it isn't.
But on the other hand, even unfettered by competition I'm sure Microsoft would get NT7 out before 2019. Wasn't Win2k NT5 and WinXP NT6? Having the Earth threatened by a version of NT was an interesting place to be.
... I didn't say that dropping the IA-64 price was going to be easy, did I. I agree with all of the fundamentals you've mentioned. Plus, we already know some of Itanium's dirty little secrets, we've just become somewhat innured to the power, compiler difficulties, etc.... I have this ugly feeling that the marketplace no longer cares about open vs proprietary, just some people out on the Geek Fringe on places like/. and the like.... Of course there are, and it's probably way more than two. Pretty much any big company becomes that way after its Charismatic Leader leaves, if not before. But as for "driven by the engineers", I wouldn't necessarily give it that moniker. IMHO no engineer would have come up with a chip like that under his/her own judgement. Your own words, "IA-64 is a beast. It's a HUGE chip that drinks power." In some ways, it looks like an academia project that got Major Management Approval.
But it's driven by Intel, and this is the marketplace that complains about Microsoft's products, then turns around and sends their profits and stock prices up.
But it's an even bigger problem with IA-64. At least Hammer will do a good job of running IA-32 code, which IA-64 doesn't. All Hammer needs is a 64-bit OS that can load both X86-64 and IA-32 code, and it's off and running. For that matter, all it really needs is to be available, because it'll simply look like a faster Athlon with no other changes.
There's a horse-race happening, because IA-64 is here and X86-64 isn't. But IA-64 is currently stuck squarely in the high-end server market where HP and Sun live. The real horserace is between price drops on IA-64 and announcement, availability, and uptake on X86-64. X86-64 is a natural for the workstation market, but it's got to get there and move into an unfamiliar setting dominated by boxmakers more familiar with Intel than AMD before IA-64 prices drop enough to make it viable, there.
We have another piece of legislation at some point, guaranteeing that non-DRM content ALWAYS be playable on systems capable of playing similar DRM content. Or possibly remove ALL watermark power from the ??AA, so they become customers of the Watermark Police *just like me*. Actually getting that last clause implemented is one thing that gives me reservations about the whole idea.
Let the ??AA keep their old model. Let them make it as onerous as they want. More power to them, let them make it absolutely obnoxious to use their content. Let them make it illegal to watch it anyway except *precisely* the way they intended.
But just keep the door open to competition, some way for the small guy to "publish."
My original wording was "get published," but that can't be, because the small guy could probably always "get published" so by signing away all rights, and letting the small guy keep rights is part of what this is about.
Or read "The Forge of God" by Greg Bear, or the Galactic Center series by Greg Benford. The hazards of becoming visible. Maybe everyone else knows better.
parent Hiro Protagonist reference needs modding up
on
Virtual Sword Fighting
·
· Score: 2
I was cruising at +3 almost 4 hours after the story hit, and hadn't seen a Hiro Protagonist reference. I was about to add one, but first I dropped Score back and found this one, with no mod points. Has/. lost its core literacy?
Perhaps a better question, does/should Neal Stephenson constitute core literacy for a Geek crowd?
E. E. "Doc" Smith used to preach Capitalism through "Enlightened Self Interest." Problem is, it looks nothing like what we're having now, which appears to be unfettered greed. There are a couple of underlying issues, here.
First I'll invoke David Brin, in his book "Earth." He attempted to come up with a culturally-neutral definition for sanity, and wound up with three criteria. The first was the ability to be satiated, to say, "enough." Obviously this applies to food, but there's a sensible argument that it applies to other things, as well.
Second, I imagine that Secret Club that rules the world, and they sit there in an uneasy compromise between skimming the best and trying to keep the whole place from flying apart. Honestly, I can see some value to not letting the middle class get too much money, because that would spark inflation. In some ways, stratifying money into the Super-Rich is kind of like the Earth storing CO2 in calcium carbonates. You need enough free-flowing money to keep an economy running, but not so much as to overheat it. Kind of like what Greenspan was trying (unsuccessfully) to do during the dot-com boom. Unfortunately, some of that Super-Rich have lost track of the balance, and are taking SOOOO much money that the remaining economy is fragile/brittle. In my worse moments, I feel that they've practically dismantled the economy. My brother thinks they're trying to turn the USA into a third-world country for cheap labor, and then export the goods when the natives can't afford them.
But of course that one has been changing. The worst seems to be past us, because while the WinModem drivers for Linux aren't open sourced, and neither are the drivers for nVidia cards, at least Matrox and ATI have opened their hardware somewhat.
Then of course Palladium appears poised to finish closing hardware specs.
Microsoft's every effort is to make sure their products are not commoditized, and that the rest of the industry's are. (where it helps them)
What I find most amazing, and downright stupid is that:
No sooner had the computing industry cast off the yoke of the IBM monopoly, they took on the yoke of the Microsoft monopoly. They didn't learn.
This bothers me in another way, to compare it with politics. In the US we've had a culture of democracy that has survived for a long time. Hopefully the current challenge posed by money will be rebuffed again, like at the last turn of the century. But in other nations where there hasn't been a culture of democracy, they're having a difficult time adopting on. Indeed countries seem to keep falling back to strong-men ruling.
The computing industry grew up under the thumb of IBM. After casting off IBM, it promptly got under the thumb of Microsoft. The computing industry has *never* existed in a normal, fully competitive marketplace. Let's say we're getting ready to cast off Microsoft in the next few years. Intel has been second-fiddle to Microsoft as part of the WinTel duopoly for years, so is it now time for Intel/HP to take the driver's seat? Have we still not learned?
1: They're manipulating their balance sheets. Under-reporting is as bad as over-reporting, neither is "transparent". (the new accounting buzzword) Besides, last I heard, and I admit I can't currently substantiate this, they were "revenue smoothing", under-reporting on very good quarters, and holding that around to over-report on lean quarters. The net effect was to always meet/beat projections, which helps the stock keep going up. And isn't this where it all started, with "opaque" accounting practices being used to inflate stock value.
2: Stock options counted as a business expense for tax purposes, but not counted against revenue. Though recently S&P and TIAA-CREF have called for this to change market-wide.
That's because the schools want to catch up with Lake Woebegone, MN.
On a more serious note, corporate America is at least partly to blame. The Fortune Nxx pretty much won't hire below 3.5. Colleges get at least some rating on jobe placement, so there's very real pressure for grade point inflation. The highest GPA in the house I lived in at school didn't have a lick of common sense, either. So the excessive emphasis on grades isn't good.
Aside from a cutesy cultural reference,.NET and DRM offer the ultimate customer lock-in.
It really annoys me how one can see a black lining to ANYTHING Microsoft does. It annoys me even more that historically, this attitude seems to be justified.
When the kids' last sitter graduated and went off to college, we got a beeper. They were too old to break in a new sitter, old enough to stay home alone when we have enough neighbors around that we are friends with, but a little lacking in the self-confidence to be home alone. The beeper supplied the necessary confidence. It turned out to be quite useful, sometimes for simple conveyance of binary information, as in beep me once for this, beep a second time if you really want me to call.
The beeper died, and for about the same price (up-front and monthly, both) we got a pay-by-the minute cellphone. Nobody knows the number but the kids, and occasionally it's just plain handy.
But it is so constrained as to not be an annoyance. Choose the technology you accept, and think about the uses you make of it.
As I walked through the instructions, at some step or other it became apparent that the LIDS build process was wanting to modify the machine it was currently running on, or at least it sure looked that way. Since the build machine wasn't the target machine, I immediately stopped, and haven't ever had time to fiddle with it, again.
I'll also have to check out the sample SELinux security policies another responder mentioned. That is, once I get that increasingly rare commodity called "time" again. The dishwasher went on the fritz tonight and leaked, so after a little work tonight, tomorrow night will be repair, then some bin and paint in the basement ceiling after that. Then back to the scheduled home projects backing up.
I'd looked on and off at LIDS for a while, and one day decided to go for it. Brought it down to my desktop and began following instructions. The intent was to build the LIDS kernel and utilities on the desktop, and then scp them over to the firewall.
Except that LIDS seems to want to be built on the machine where it's going to be run. So what if your firewall doesn't have a compiler, build environment, etc?
Perhaps I should have RTFM further, but the available time ran out.
I've also read a little about SELinux, but there appears to be one common thing about all of these security enhancements: They make it possible to have tight enforcement of a security policy, but it appears that none of them ship any sort of policies. It would be nice to have a few to choose from, and begin learning. How about a policy that's very little more secure than the pre-LSM box, with a bunch of commented options to tighten down the screws. I guess I've seen some of that with GRSecurity.
But trying to evaluate and use any of these packages for a home system turns into a massive time-sink to do properly. WIBNI Bastille would add LSM to what they already do so well? (I know, join and do it, myself. Maybe when the big-time real world projects are in control.)
IMHO, if he is arrested and jailed, it may well be as good as if he wins, outright.
Right now, the closest all of this copyright mess gets to the American public is Napster, but at least that is something Joe 6pak understands. Now take a look at the current outrage against high-level corporate greed, and it isn't difficult at all to apply that to the media industries. In other words, in today's climate it isn't difficult at all to smear the sh*t of Enron and Worldcom on the RIAA and MPAA, too.
So now we have Bruce Perens carefully defining and orchestrating a challenge to a law that helps keep the RIAA and MPAA filthy rich. If he's arrested and wins, he's chipped away and circumscribed the DMCA a little. If he's arrested, loses, and is sent to jail, we have Big Media harrassing an ordinary citizen for "no reason at all." (After all, Joe 6pak can't understand the fine points of the DMCA, right?)
Maybe Perens wins, maybe he's an American prisoner in the American Bastille. (Maybe this is all wishful thinking, too.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can see your point, but embedded applications don't need the same type of function/appearance as the desktop. But I don't see the desktop/laptop going completely away, because the 'general purpose machine' is just too compelling as a working model. It may well shrink, but I predict that the desktop/laptop will not shrink below 25%-50% of where it is, today.
What's a "deltic"?
To make significant inroads into the desktop market, we need to learn how to make it so substance and style don't conflict, so we can have *both* at the same time.
Along this line, I really *liked* the threat from NT7. Given the timeframe, we really could have done something about it and probably averted the disaster. Even counting the usual government piddling and lollygagging we would have had time.
But now we've decided *this* one wasn't really a threat, so we don't have to worry. So we haven't even begun the work needed to protect ourselves for the day when it isn't.
But on the other hand, even unfettered by competition I'm sure Microsoft would get NT7 out before 2019. Wasn't Win2k NT5 and WinXP NT6? Having the Earth threatened by a version of NT was an interesting place to be.
... ... /. and the like. ...
I didn't say that dropping the IA-64 price was going to be easy, did I. I agree with all of the fundamentals you've mentioned. Plus, we already know some of Itanium's dirty little secrets, we've just become somewhat innured to the power, compiler difficulties, etc.
I have this ugly feeling that the marketplace no longer cares about open vs proprietary, just some people out on the Geek Fringe on places like
Of course there are, and it's probably way more than two. Pretty much any big company becomes that way after its Charismatic Leader leaves, if not before. But as for "driven by the engineers", I wouldn't necessarily give it that moniker. IMHO no engineer would have come up with a chip like that under his/her own judgement. Your own words, "IA-64 is a beast. It's a HUGE chip that drinks power." In some ways, it looks like an academia project that got Major Management Approval.
But it's driven by Intel, and this is the marketplace that complains about Microsoft's products, then turns around and sends their profits and stock prices up.
Me, too. I figured /.ters would get it.
Read both, heard about the movie, hope they do all, well. Generally follow Bear's works, anyway.
But it's an even bigger problem with IA-64. At least Hammer will do a good job of running IA-32 code, which IA-64 doesn't. All Hammer needs is a 64-bit OS that can load both X86-64 and IA-32 code, and it's off and running. For that matter, all it really needs is to be available, because it'll simply look like a faster Athlon with no other changes.
There's a horse-race happening, because IA-64 is here and X86-64 isn't. But IA-64 is currently stuck squarely in the high-end server market where HP and Sun live. The real horserace is between price drops on IA-64 and announcement, availability, and uptake on X86-64. X86-64 is a natural for the workstation market, but it's got to get there and move into an unfamiliar setting dominated by boxmakers more familiar with Intel than AMD before IA-64 prices drop enough to make it viable, there.
We have another piece of legislation at some point, guaranteeing that non-DRM content ALWAYS be playable on systems capable of playing similar DRM content. Or possibly remove ALL watermark power from the ??AA, so they become customers of the Watermark Police *just like me*. Actually getting that last clause implemented is one thing that gives me reservations about the whole idea.
Let the ??AA keep their old model. Let them make it as onerous as they want. More power to them, let them make it absolutely obnoxious to use their content. Let them make it illegal to watch it anyway except *precisely* the way they intended.
But just keep the door open to competition, some way for the small guy to "publish."
My original wording was "get published," but that can't be, because the small guy could probably always "get published" so by signing away all rights, and letting the small guy keep rights is part of what this is about.
But now with digital technology this year's messages can be inserted into those reruns.
and no doubt they'd blame it on PVR and Internet piracy, and call for more/stiffer DRM legislation.
Or read "The Forge of God" by Greg Bear, or the Galactic Center series by Greg Benford. The hazards of becoming visible. Maybe everyone else knows better.
I was cruising at +3 almost 4 hours after the story hit, and hadn't seen a Hiro Protagonist reference. I was about to add one, but first I dropped Score back and found this one, with no mod points. Has /. lost its core literacy?
Perhaps a better question, does/should Neal Stephenson constitute core literacy for a Geek crowd?
And here I thought the giant weather baloon we normally call the "Moon" was for people to go looking for renegade androids and robots.
I'll be this means there aren't androids and robots amoung us either, doesn't it. And I thought sure I'd run into some, too.
E. E. "Doc" Smith used to preach Capitalism through "Enlightened Self Interest." Problem is, it looks nothing like what we're having now, which appears to be unfettered greed. There are a couple of underlying issues, here.
First I'll invoke David Brin, in his book "Earth." He attempted to come up with a culturally-neutral definition for sanity, and wound up with three criteria. The first was the ability to be satiated, to say, "enough." Obviously this applies to food, but there's a sensible argument that it applies to other things, as well.
Second, I imagine that Secret Club that rules the world, and they sit there in an uneasy compromise between skimming the best and trying to keep the whole place from flying apart. Honestly, I can see some value to not letting the middle class get too much money, because that would spark inflation. In some ways, stratifying money into the Super-Rich is kind of like the Earth storing CO2 in calcium carbonates. You need enough free-flowing money to keep an economy running, but not so much as to overheat it. Kind of like what Greenspan was trying (unsuccessfully) to do during the dot-com boom. Unfortunately, some of that Super-Rich have lost track of the balance, and are taking SOOOO much money that the remaining economy is fragile/brittle. In my worse moments, I feel that they've practically dismantled the economy. My brother thinks they're trying to turn the USA into a third-world country for cheap labor, and then export the goods when the natives can't afford them.
But of course that one has been changing. The worst seems to be past us, because while the WinModem drivers for Linux aren't open sourced, and neither are the drivers for nVidia cards, at least Matrox and ATI have opened their hardware somewhat.
Then of course Palladium appears poised to finish closing hardware specs.
Microsoft's every effort is to make sure their products are not commoditized, and that the rest of the industry's are. (where it helps them)
What I find most amazing, and downright stupid is that:
No sooner had the computing industry cast off the yoke of the IBM monopoly, they took on the yoke of the Microsoft monopoly. They didn't learn.
This bothers me in another way, to compare it with politics. In the US we've had a culture of democracy that has survived for a long time. Hopefully the current challenge posed by money will be rebuffed again, like at the last turn of the century. But in other nations where there hasn't been a culture of democracy, they're having a difficult time adopting on. Indeed countries seem to keep falling back to strong-men ruling.
The computing industry grew up under the thumb of IBM. After casting off IBM, it promptly got under the thumb of Microsoft. The computing industry has *never* existed in a normal, fully competitive marketplace. Let's say we're getting ready to cast off Microsoft in the next few years. Intel has been second-fiddle to Microsoft as part of the WinTel duopoly for years, so is it now time for Intel/HP to take the driver's seat? Have we still not learned?
Ya know, biology has a term for a part of the body that keeps growing at an uncontrolled rate:
Cancer
I've heard the human race called a cancer to the Earth before, but this is the first time I've heard Microsoft called a cancer to the economy.
How about "software to connect your income to our bottom line."
Two reasons to begin with:
1: They're manipulating their balance sheets. Under-reporting is as bad as over-reporting, neither is "transparent". (the new accounting buzzword) Besides, last I heard, and I admit I can't currently substantiate this, they were "revenue smoothing", under-reporting on very good quarters, and holding that around to over-report on lean quarters. The net effect was to always meet/beat projections, which helps the stock keep going up. And isn't this where it all started, with "opaque" accounting practices being used to inflate stock value.
2: Stock options counted as a business expense for tax purposes, but not counted against revenue. Though recently S&P and TIAA-CREF have called for this to change market-wide.
That's because the schools want to catch up with Lake Woebegone, MN.
On a more serious note, corporate America is at least partly to blame. The Fortune Nxx pretty much won't hire below 3.5. Colleges get at least some rating on jobe placement, so there's very real pressure for grade point inflation. The highest GPA in the house I lived in at school didn't have a lick of common sense, either. So the excessive emphasis on grades isn't good.
All your data are belong to us.
.NET and DRM offer the ultimate customer lock-in.
Aside from a cutesy cultural reference,
It really annoys me how one can see a black lining to ANYTHING Microsoft does. It annoys me even more that historically, this attitude seems to be justified.
When the kids' last sitter graduated and went off to college, we got a beeper. They were too old to break in a new sitter, old enough to stay home alone when we have enough neighbors around that we are friends with, but a little lacking in the self-confidence to be home alone. The beeper supplied the necessary confidence. It turned out to be quite useful, sometimes for simple conveyance of binary information, as in beep me once for this, beep a second time if you really want me to call.
The beeper died, and for about the same price (up-front and monthly, both) we got a pay-by-the minute cellphone. Nobody knows the number but the kids, and occasionally it's just plain handy.
But it is so constrained as to not be an annoyance. Choose the technology you accept, and think about the uses you make of it.
>What sort of problem were you having?
As I walked through the instructions, at some step or other it became apparent that the LIDS build process was wanting to modify the machine it was currently running on, or at least it sure looked that way. Since the build machine wasn't the target machine, I immediately stopped, and haven't ever had time to fiddle with it, again.
I'll also have to check out the sample SELinux security policies another responder mentioned. That is, once I get that increasingly rare commodity called "time" again. The dishwasher went on the fritz tonight and leaked, so after a little work tonight, tomorrow night will be repair, then some bin and paint in the basement ceiling after that. Then back to the scheduled home projects backing up.
I'd looked on and off at LIDS for a while, and one day decided to go for it. Brought it down to my desktop and began following instructions. The intent was to build the LIDS kernel and utilities on the desktop, and then scp them over to the firewall.
Except that LIDS seems to want to be built on the machine where it's going to be run. So what if your firewall doesn't have a compiler, build environment, etc?
Perhaps I should have RTFM further, but the available time ran out.
I've also read a little about SELinux, but there appears to be one common thing about all of these security enhancements: They make it possible to have tight enforcement of a security policy, but it appears that none of them ship any sort of policies. It would be nice to have a few to choose from, and begin learning. How about a policy that's very little more secure than the pre-LSM box, with a bunch of commented options to tighten down the screws. I guess I've seen some of that with GRSecurity.
But trying to evaluate and use any of these packages for a home system turns into a massive time-sink to do properly. WIBNI Bastille would add LSM to what they already do so well? (I know, join and do it, myself. Maybe when the big-time real world projects are in control.)
IMHO, if he is arrested and jailed, it may well be as good as if he wins, outright.
Right now, the closest all of this copyright mess gets to the American public is Napster, but at least that is something Joe 6pak understands. Now take a look at the current outrage against high-level corporate greed, and it isn't difficult at all to apply that to the media industries. In other words, in today's climate it isn't difficult at all to smear the sh*t of Enron and Worldcom on the RIAA and MPAA, too.
So now we have Bruce Perens carefully defining and orchestrating a challenge to a law that helps keep the RIAA and MPAA filthy rich. If he's arrested and wins, he's chipped away and circumscribed the DMCA a little. If he's arrested, loses, and is sent to jail, we have Big Media harrassing an ordinary citizen for "no reason at all." (After all, Joe 6pak can't understand the fine points of the DMCA, right?)
Maybe Perens wins, maybe he's an American prisoner in the American Bastille. (Maybe this is all wishful thinking, too.)