The trouble with asteroids is that while the risk may be great (we are reasonably certain it's led to mass extinctions before), the risk in any given time period -- say, a human life of 75 years -- is rather small. This leads to an underappreciation of the overall risk.
Nobody needs to lose sleep over this; the largest impact we've seen this century is Tunguska, and the odds are still rather small that a Tunguska event will strike a populated area. On the other hand, the odds are higher that an impact tsunami will cause widespread coastal destruction and loss of life. Our only chance is to have sufficient warning time. By definition, an undiscovered object could strike with warning time == zero. It's estimated that we know of maybe 10% of the large-enough-to-hurt-sized rocks that cross the earth's orbit, so the job of finding them isn't trivial.
The good news is that there is modest funding for a hazardous objects search.
The NASA Impact Hazards site has lots more info, including the search project called "Spaceguard".
My take on this is not so much worry that something might happen, as sardonic awareness that it would be Really, Really Stupid to finally figure out this is a problem (last 20 years) and then have our civilization wiped out. Especially if we really are the only intelligent one around...
Maybe they don't sell dial-up access commercially, but they most certainly were acting as an ISP in providing the website. What's YOUR definition of "ISP", exactly?
Exactly, the critical words are "Title IX" -- for non-USAns, this is a 1972 law providing for gender equality in educational spending. It eventually (after many court cases and reluctant enforcement) became applied to spending in athletic programs in all colleges and universities that receive any federal money for virtually any reason, even if it's not for the athletic program.
One popular argument against it is that it limits "profitable" sports like American football, which brings in not only ticket (and sometimes TV) money, but keeps the alumni happy and proud and leads to more money given to the school down the road. Of course, the argument for giving athletes scholarships is suspect to begin with, but I see the value not only in keeping strong athletic programs but in promoting competition and goal-oriented students. One can argue that the latter values are just as important in women, and one can even argue that promoting women's athletics in this way will, long-term, lead to many goal-oriented women athletes succeeding in business and giving money to the school.
I, too, wish there were more academic scholarships. I wish there were more opportunities like the robot-building challenges, a kind of "sport" that's more entertaining to me than football.
As noted above, sometimes private groups can dole out scholarship money without the pesky oversight of the federal government.
The Society of Women Engineers already has a strong program in place, including CS scholarships. They may well be open to a "Slashdot Endowment" to expand their program. Alternatively, youse guys could just give it out yourselves (which would probably be the only way to allow you to limit it to your alma mater). Nothing wrong with a business-supported scholarship (counts as a charitable deduction).
I believe strongly in merit scholarships -- I received some myself -- but that shouldn't rule out other kinds of scholarships.
Needs-based scholarships, for example, based on family income, ability to pay, number of kids, et cetera, are very important in opening up educational opportunities to all. This is especially important now, as college costs soar and more students (according to recent studies) get their undergraduate degrees in five years, not four, simply because they're working the whole time.
And classification-based scholarships are absolutely nothing new. Ever hear of Rotary clubs giving out scholarships to local students, just based on where they live? What about churches? I got money just for being a member of my church. These are all legitimate. There are even scholarships just based on the intended field of study, sometimes an easy choice, other times something very strange and merely a product of the endower's quirky interests.
Universities, especially public ones, are more constrained these days; scholarships offered through the school are likely to be subject to various anti-discrimination laws (like Title IX, see discussion). But beyond that there are $millions available in private scholarships that are virtually free of any discrimination laws.
I think a women's CS scholarship is a great idea. If there's a problem with the school doing it, then find an organization that can handle it privately.
> Given that you can produce nanomachines, how the hell do you tell them what to do?
Well, put simply, this is the wrong question. Nanotech machines aren't like PCs, in that they have a bunch of different tools and sensors and a microchip 'brain' that can be programmed. Nanos are usually very single-purpose and very narrowly useful for just that one thing.
It's not that "the code will be embedded", it's that the machines will be programmed only insofar as their mechanical design allows them to perform a specific function. Even a relatively complex nanomachine with multiple gears and sensors and so forth will probably be controlled only by its own mechanical design.
I couldn't agree more. At my advanced age of 35 (I think that puts me in the oldest 2% of/. readers, heh) I've seen more flamewars than I care to recall. None of them accomplished anything.
The beauty of Linux and Open Source are that they allow dramatically practical contributions by the little guy. I wish that half the energy expended on flames were put to good use instead. As we've seen with the Mindcraft debacle, there were good reasons that Linux "lost" this head-to-head; who contributed more to Linux, the people who wrote idiotic flames either here, on Usenet, or directly into Mindcraft's email server.... or the people who immediately began work on kernel enhancements that would help Linux get an edge in the next round?
Now, obviously, we all aren't kernel programmers. I wonder if some people aren't actually intimidated by that prospect and resort to flammage as compensation... well, maybe that's just too Freudian for the 90s.:-S (Interpret subtle meanings there as you please...) On the other hand, all this flaming existed before with other OS wars (not to mention editor wars) and the same equation didn't apply. So I'm left to conclude that it's largely the adolescents -- irrespective of physical age -- who are doing the flaming, as opposed to the adults.
I know that half of/. readers are barely out of high school, let alone college, so they don't have the experience with the real world that teaches you that sometimes there are other, more complicated answers to the questions you once thought were simple. Like, for instance, why corporate America goes along with an OS/office suite monoculture despite many clear drawbacks. These youngsters jump on people who say even one nice word about Windows NT or W2K as if only a Microsoft employee could ever say such a thing.
Well, the truth is, some of us have economic interests in the Windows world, so perhaps we are beholden to it in some form; but it's more complicated than that. Windows just happens to be the flavor of the moment, and it's turned into a very long moment. That flavor could change, and I hope it will, but I don't make all those decisions. The only way I can influence them is by working at the coalface -- putting together solutions that work, or don't, and keeping my customers mindful of the reasons why. If Linux is ever to make serious permanent inroads in corporate America, it won't be because of columnists... neither unsophisticated journalists nor certified insiders like Metcalfe. It will be because of the practical successes that the OS racks up.
>Quite frankly, I don't want Linux to smash Windows, or the MacOS. I want the various >parties to concentrate on themselves, and interoperability. Linux isn't for everyone, >neither is Windows, or the MacOS. Making progress on interoperability should be >the real goal.
Agreed. How so many people can use the monoculture argument against Windows, then turn around and ignore the same argument as applied to Linux, is amusing. The diversity of a world where one can use BeOS or MacOS or NeXT (!) without penalty should be the real goal.
Plus, I agree that W2K is a good step in the right direction -- I have to support it as part of my job and it looks like we'll be installing it on a number of customers' networks. Well, it ain't any worse than the status quo. It does seem more stable -- the biggest problem I have with NT isn't the stability per se, but the compromises in performance necessary to maintain stability. (I guess that makes me a sorry-ass M$oft shill in some eyes, but I don't take those opinions seriously -- probably teenagers who haven't had to deal with the Real World (tm) yet.)
Meanwhile I push Linux and Perl-based solutions within my company where I can. It all depends on whether you're in it for the long haul or not. I don't know that Linux will win (q.v. Metcalfe) -- but I don't know that Microsoft will win either. Maybe ten years from now we'll all be using SmithOS, which is in kernel version 0.84 in some guy's guest bedroom right now. Open Source represents a lot of good things we want to see happen; we shouldn't be depending on one solution to deliver them all -- isn't that what got us in this situation in the first place?!
I don't think so. More likely, this will hasten the day when we see a "desktop" version of WinCE. Perhaps a Cassiopeia in a bigger box, modem built in, and a flexible video output (monitor/TV). This isn't a shot across the bow of Microsoft's desktop OS group -- it's a shot across the bow of WebTV, and that's about it.
>As for Cryptonomicon, I actually had it in my hand the last time I was at a bookstore, >but balked at the price.
So did I, being disinclined to pay for hardcover simply based on liking the author's previous works ever since I nearly threw Niven/Pournelle's The Gripping Hand across the room for being so indescribably awful.
I was by B&N to purchase a hardcover of the LotR trilogy, and went looking for the Stephenson. No luck in Best Sellers, New Fiction, or SF. Then there was one forlorn copy on a discount shelf. The clerk said it wasn't discounted, but I wasn't about to pay full price, since it had been pawed through and the pages had a strange warp to them. He offered a 30% discount... which I took! And the warp disappeared. The slipcover isn't in pristine condition, but it wouldn't be after I finished anyway.
To be perfectly fair, the recent viral infections (Melissa, Worm.Explore) have had little to do with NT security and a lot to do with Exchange/Outlook/Office/VBasic interoperability.
And viral spread has a lot to do with monoculture computing environments, so it's not simply that NT or Office have holes; it's that the software with holes is everywhere. Macs aren't popular right now so aren't good viral targets. (And if there were an Outlook98 and Office97 for the Mac, they would be just as vulnerable on several key fronts.)
I know there were other projects that came out of that, but how detailed was ESR's comment?
DOOM certainly pioneered the idea of games with free "add-ons" like third-party maps, which extended the game's viability many times long past the usual four-to-six-month lifecycle in the industry. If he was speaking in a more general sense, perhaps this is what he really alluded to. I certainly think the maps contributed more to that success than the individual enhanced game products, simply in terms of number of users reached.
Well, if you understood that as "Free software and non-sucky software are mutually exclusive", you certainly gave it a different reading than I.
It sounds like just the opposite to me! i.e. "People would rather make free, non-sucky software precisely because non-sucky is more important to them than non-free", or put another way, people would rather make good software than get paid for making crap.
As I noted elsewhere, this talk wasn't about "converting" all Microsoft drones by proving them wrong every time they breathe out. It was about opening the lines of communication, and by the accounts here, it was a success.
I mean, really -- is ESR being persuasive gonna induce Msofties to give up their stock options and start another company building "open source windows"? No. Even if you place the bar as low as getting Redmond to back off its FUD and embrace/destroy tactics, basically just to be a polite competitor interested in succeeding on its merits (which do exist:-S), well, there will still be hardcore people who will never be convinced. Especially when their livelihood is centered around the success of a different model!
I didn't see the talk, but from the reports here it sounds as if he was asked to explain open source in as fair a spirit as would be expected anywhere, by Microsoft employees who are not personally involved in or beholden to the overall strategic plan. If they sought to prove that all Microsoftians don't think alike, they succeeded. For ESR's case, by accepting the invitation in the same spirit, he proved that not everyone on his side of the aisle was closed-minded, either. Another success.
"Effective" doesn't have to mean shutting down everyone's objections, a la Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.
And you'd use that extra bandwidth for... what, exactly? Running a porn site in the basement?
I'm a power user, and I can't imagine that my upload bytes are more than 10% of my download bytes. Even if I include my web page at my ISP, it's perhaps 20%. So if you host your own website, maybe you'll need symmetric, but probably not. And if you're hosting a business website, then you're not a "home user" and your plea is misdirected.
As for the internet being a broadcast medium, dude, that doesn't depend on the technology. That depends on the customers. Most of whom are not going to be broadcasters themselves. The "modest" interactivity of chat, e-mail, etc. is plenty for them.
Besides, as I used to tell people before they'd really heard of the internet, The Internet is just a wire. What you can do with it depends entirely on what you choose to try to do with it.
Face it, I think that "modem" is going to be the term of choice for the hardware that interfaces computers to external internet services.
Yes, G.lite doesn't modulate/demodulate like every analog modem since the days of ARPAnet, but it's such a useful term that I doubt it will disappear. Who besides a slashdot geek will want to use a term like Adaptive Transceiver Unit/Remote? Sounds like technobabble from Star Trek to most people.
"Sir, the aliens have interfered with our Adaptive Transceiver Unit, remotely!" "Red Alert!"
Especially for something going to the retail market, it's important to have a Name for the Thing. It's already been extended to "cable modems" and "ISDN modems". And if real analog modems (and the POTS they depend on) are living on numbered days, why not steal the term?
This is the way languages evolve...
(By the way, thanks for the first-person tale of working with Rhythms, I have been giving them a very close look!)
It's not so much that they "have to" ship in a new hard drive; it's that with Windoze, it's just a lot easier to set up a "bulletproof" configuration in the home office, and ship it out. It's a huge hassle in certain ways -- like making sure that ALL the network settings are correct BEFORE it leaves, especially when you can't test it that way -- but the tools are there to let you manage it, and FedEx is cheaper than sending a person there for one day.
When I worked for Zenith Data Systems, if customers' laptops got a screwed up Windows config, we just sent them a new hard drive. It was cheaper and easier than spending hours on the phone troubleshooting driver configuration. In the same way, vendors like Compaq just have you re-image their system from CD-ROM, rather than reinstall individual components.
(By the way, the old hard drives most likely go back to HQ and get re-imaged...)
Well, there's a big difference when the customer base is in the hundreds of thousands. If the cumulative effect of one day's aggravation is a million customer-days of aggravation -- you've got a problem.
Also, you're thinking that the only people on eBay are like some people casually wandering into an antiques store with grandpa's wardrobe cabinet. Nope, often the people on eBay are the antiques dealers, and you'd be surprised how many people already make their living off of selling stuff on eBay.
It's like my current ISP's authentication problems. Yeah, I can log on 70% of the time on the first try; but the cumulative effect of a 30% first-try failure rate is that they get fired. Net inconvenience to me, measured in perhaps a couple of hours after several weeks of this -- but not tolerable.
>The justification for anonymous remailers has been for protecting whistle-blowers >and people who *need* their privacy protected, i.e. people talking about their own >abuse experiences.
That's all well and good, but there's no legal justification for it. Whistle-blowers are legally protected in other ways; their anonymity may be helpful, but in the face of a subpoena, what justification is there for retaining it? Abuse survivors and others may want their privacy, but they don't need it.
Remember, we're not talking about the end of privacy in general, simply whether established privacy rights extend to protection from defamation (and other) lawsuits. There is (as the phrase goes) a *compelling need* for the state to require someone to appear in a lawsuit against them. That's what legal tools like subpoenas have always been used for -- and since you have to get a judge to issue one, they don't exactly fall from trees.
>a judge that believes that such people don't deserve protection on the basis that >protecting our masters in corporation and government is more important than any >possible right to personal privacy. It is my opinion that such a judge has no >place on the bench.
Whoa! This is not about personal privacy (it isn't even about free speech, since defamation is by definition not protected speech). It's about abusing the privacy laws to shield oneself from legal remedies -- whether the plaintiff is a corporation or an individual. If the statements made do not amount to defamation, the lawsuit will fail, and the plaintiff will have to pay court costs. If the statements DO amount to defamation... gee, too bad. Shoulda kept yer mouth shut.
>The biggest problem is that we have politicians and judges making decisions on >high-tech issues that have literally never seen a C: prompt and think that all the >Internet is some sort of online porn shop. The solution is to GET RID OF THEM
Are you sure this is a high-tech issue? What is fundamentally different here, legally, from someone distributing anonymously-printed leaflets? Just because it happened "on the internet" does not mean it breaks new ground within our legal system. I don't think the internet throws slander and libel laws out the window. I don't subscribe to the adolescent idea that free speech is "absolute"; there have always been exceptions, and this is one of them, and the internet should not change that.
First, this suit is about public defamation, not whistleblowing in the legal sense, so it doesn't really apply.
Whistleblower protection is intended to permit someone to report illegal activities to authorities without facing retaliation from their employer. I don't think anyone ever envisioned remaining anonymous as part of that protection.
Beyond that, I don't think there is any public good in allowing internet anonymity to shield someone from otherwise complying with the laws and appearing in court. If what you post is serious enough to bring on a lawsuit, you should be ready to appear in court about it. (And don't bring up harassing lawsuits; there are other ways to handle that problem.)
Put simply, if anonymity protects one from lawsuits, then nobody can ever be sued for what they say on the internet. That's wrong.
Actually, Bafful, I think he did see why other journalists engage in this typecasting. You'll note that he links to the PC Computing ranking of various OSes, where they seriously marginalize BeOS.
It's actually good that he didn't himself engage in stereotyping other tech journalists as clueless -- instead of coming out swinging, he simply offers positive arguments for the other point of view. It's a quite eloquent defense of BeOS; I'm suddenly giving it more thought myself.
And the last time you had a VCR repaired was ... ?
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Consumer electronics don't get repaired, they get tossed out. VCRs, boomboxes, and now cheapie computers in the $500 range. Face it, electronics don't "break down" all that often; either they fail in the first week of use, or they last three to five years. More than enough time to get the value back.
Hot rods and compaqs ... er, compacts.
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Lots of pooh-poohing of these designs going on. Gosh, they're not upgradable, the monitor's built in, et cetera. Seems there's a cultural divide here.
Can we all agree that slashdotters want hot rods for themselves? All of us probably know what a standard PC looks like inside, at the very least. Most of us can upgrade one; maybe we can do it in the dark. Maybe we leave our case covers off so we can do it with less hassle. The latest graphics card; the most efficient EIDE controller. Overclocking. Ultracooling. One more operation per microsecond is worth an afternoon's twiddling.
But for mom... well, when mom wants a car she gets a compact that will let her pick up her groceries. It has a reliable Japanese engine that will go 100,000 miles as long as you go to Jiffy Lube every other month. Mom never opens the hood; face it, Mom doesn't want to open the hood. Even if you're a mechanic, she'd rather not have to depend on your being around if it seizes up. She just wants to pick up the groceries.
That's what these computers are.
And you care about this, why?
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I'm sure all those gajillions of AOL users are really, truly concerned with the frame rate of their graphics card, and the megaFLOPS they get with floating point operations.
Gimme a break! So what if people buy computers because they "look cool" (I bet the ease of setup and use of the Mac also had something to do with it, no matter what your friends said). It's not your computer.
Are you the kind of egotist who tells your friends what kind of car to drive? No? Then why are you telling them what kind of computer to buy?
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with asteroids is that while the risk may be great (we are reasonably certain it's led to mass extinctions before), the risk in any given time period -- say, a human life of 75 years -- is rather small. This leads to an underappreciation of the overall risk.
...
Nobody needs to lose sleep over this; the largest impact we've seen this century is Tunguska, and the odds are still rather small that a Tunguska event will strike a populated area. On the other hand, the odds are higher that an impact tsunami will cause widespread coastal destruction and loss of life. Our only chance is to have sufficient warning time. By definition, an undiscovered object could strike with warning time == zero. It's estimated that we know of maybe 10% of the large-enough-to-hurt-sized rocks that cross the earth's orbit, so the job of finding them isn't trivial.
The good news is that there is modest funding for a hazardous objects search.
The NASA Impact Hazards site has lots more info, including the search project called "Spaceguard".
My take on this is not so much worry that something might happen, as sardonic awareness that it would be Really, Really Stupid to finally figure out this is a problem (last 20 years) and then have our civilization wiped out. Especially if we really are the only intelligent one around
Maybe they don't sell dial-up access commercially, but they most certainly were acting as an ISP in providing the website. What's YOUR definition of "ISP", exactly?
Exactly, the critical words are "Title IX" -- for non-USAns, this is a 1972 law providing for gender equality in educational spending. It eventually (after many court cases and reluctant enforcement) became applied to spending in athletic programs in all colleges and universities that receive any federal money for virtually any reason, even if it's not for the athletic program.
One popular argument against it is that it limits "profitable" sports like American football, which brings in not only ticket (and sometimes TV) money, but keeps the alumni happy and proud and leads to more money given to the school down the road. Of course, the argument for giving athletes scholarships is suspect to begin with, but I see the value not only in keeping strong athletic programs but in promoting competition and goal-oriented students. One can argue that the latter values are just as important in women, and one can even argue that promoting women's athletics in this way will, long-term, lead to many goal-oriented women athletes succeeding in business and giving money to the school.
I, too, wish there were more academic scholarships. I wish there were more opportunities like the robot-building challenges, a kind of "sport" that's more entertaining to me than football.
As noted above, sometimes private groups can dole out scholarship money without the pesky oversight of the federal government.
The Society of Women Engineers already has a strong program in place, including CS scholarships. They may well be open to a "Slashdot Endowment" to expand their program. Alternatively, youse guys could just give it out yourselves (which would probably be the only way to allow you to limit it to your alma mater). Nothing wrong with a business-supported scholarship (counts as a charitable deduction).
I believe strongly in merit scholarships -- I received some myself -- but that shouldn't rule out other kinds of scholarships.
Needs-based scholarships, for example, based on family income, ability to pay, number of kids, et cetera, are very important in opening up educational opportunities to all. This is especially important now, as college costs soar and more students (according to recent studies) get their undergraduate degrees in five years, not four, simply because they're working the whole time.
And classification-based scholarships are absolutely nothing new. Ever hear of Rotary clubs giving out scholarships to local students, just based on where they live? What about churches? I got money just for being a member of my church. These are all legitimate. There are even scholarships just based on the intended field of study, sometimes an easy choice, other times something very strange and merely a product of the endower's quirky interests.
Universities, especially public ones, are more constrained these days; scholarships offered through the school are likely to be subject to various anti-discrimination laws (like Title IX, see discussion). But beyond that there are $millions available in private scholarships that are virtually free of any discrimination laws.
I think a women's CS scholarship is a great idea.
If there's a problem with the school doing it, then find an organization that can handle it privately.
> Given that you can produce nanomachines, how the hell do you tell them what to do?
Well, put simply, this is the wrong question. Nanotech machines aren't like PCs, in that they have a bunch of different tools and sensors and a microchip 'brain' that can be programmed. Nanos are usually very single-purpose and very narrowly useful for just that one thing.
It's not that "the code will be embedded", it's that the machines will be programmed only insofar as their mechanical design allows them to perform a specific function. Even a relatively complex nanomachine with multiple gears and sensors and so forth will probably be controlled only by its own mechanical design.
I couldn't agree more. At my advanced age of 35 (I think that puts me in the oldest 2% of /. readers, heh) I've seen more flamewars than I care to recall. None of them accomplished anything.
.... or the people who immediately began work on kernel enhancements that would help Linux get an edge in the next round?
... well, maybe that's just too Freudian for the 90s. :-S (Interpret subtle meanings there as you please...) On the other hand, all this flaming existed before with other OS wars (not to mention editor wars) and the same equation didn't apply. So I'm left to conclude that it's largely the adolescents -- irrespective of physical age -- who are doing the flaming, as opposed to the adults.
/. readers are barely out of high school, let alone college, so they don't have the experience with the real world that teaches you that sometimes there are other, more complicated answers to the questions you once thought were simple. Like, for instance, why corporate America goes along with an OS/office suite monoculture despite many clear drawbacks. These youngsters jump on people who say even one nice word about Windows NT or W2K as if only a Microsoft employee could ever say such a thing.
... neither unsophisticated journalists nor certified insiders like Metcalfe. It will be because of the practical successes that the OS racks up.
The beauty of Linux and Open Source are that they allow dramatically practical contributions by the little guy. I wish that half the energy expended on flames were put to good use instead. As we've seen with the Mindcraft debacle, there were good reasons that Linux "lost" this head-to-head; who contributed more to Linux, the people who wrote idiotic flames either here, on Usenet, or directly into Mindcraft's email server
Now, obviously, we all aren't kernel programmers. I wonder if some people aren't actually intimidated by that prospect and resort to flammage as compensation
I know that half of
Well, the truth is, some of us have economic interests in the Windows world, so perhaps we are beholden to it in some form; but it's more complicated than that. Windows just happens to be the flavor of the moment, and it's turned into a very long moment. That flavor could change, and I hope it will, but I don't make all those decisions. The only way I can influence them is by working at the coalface -- putting together solutions that work, or don't, and keeping my customers mindful of the reasons why. If Linux is ever to make serious permanent inroads in corporate America, it won't be because of columnists
>Quite frankly, I don't want Linux to smash Windows, or the MacOS. I want the various
>parties to concentrate on themselves, and interoperability. Linux isn't for everyone,
>neither is Windows, or the MacOS. Making progress on interoperability should be
>the real goal.
Agreed. How so many people can use the monoculture argument against Windows, then turn around and ignore the same argument as applied to Linux, is amusing. The diversity of a world where one can use BeOS or MacOS or NeXT (!) without penalty should be the real goal.
Plus, I agree that W2K is a good step in the right direction -- I have to support it as part of my job and it looks like we'll be installing it on a number of customers' networks. Well, it ain't any worse than the status quo. It does seem more stable -- the biggest problem I have with NT isn't the stability per se, but the compromises in performance necessary to maintain stability. (I guess that makes me a sorry-ass M$oft shill in some eyes, but I don't take those opinions seriously -- probably teenagers who haven't had to deal with the Real World (tm) yet.)
Meanwhile I push Linux and Perl-based solutions within my company where I can. It all depends on whether you're in it for the long haul or not. I don't know that Linux will win (q.v. Metcalfe) -- but I don't know that Microsoft will win either. Maybe ten years from now we'll all be using SmithOS, which is in kernel version 0.84 in some guy's guest bedroom right now. Open Source represents a lot of good things we want to see happen; we shouldn't be depending on one solution to deliver them all -- isn't that what got us in this situation in the first place?!
I don't think so. More likely, this will hasten the day when we see a "desktop" version of WinCE. Perhaps a Cassiopeia in a bigger box, modem built in, and a flexible video output (monitor/TV). This isn't a shot across the bow of Microsoft's desktop OS group -- it's a shot across the bow of WebTV, and that's about it.
>As for Cryptonomicon, I actually had it in my hand the last time I was at a bookstore,
... which I took! And the warp disappeared. The slipcover isn't in pristine condition, but it wouldn't be after I finished anyway.
>but balked at the price.
So did I, being disinclined to pay for hardcover simply based on liking the author's previous works ever since I nearly threw Niven/Pournelle's The Gripping Hand across the room for being so indescribably awful.
I was by B&N to purchase a hardcover of the LotR trilogy, and went looking for the Stephenson. No luck in Best Sellers, New Fiction, or SF. Then there was one forlorn copy on a discount shelf. The clerk said it wasn't discounted, but I wasn't about to pay full price, since it had been pawed through and the pages had a strange warp to them. He offered a 30% discount
To be perfectly fair, the recent viral infections (Melissa, Worm.Explore) have had little to do with NT security and a lot to do with Exchange/Outlook/Office/VBasic interoperability.
And viral spread has a lot to do with monoculture computing environments, so it's not simply that NT or Office have holes; it's that the software with holes is everywhere. Macs aren't popular right now so aren't good viral targets. (And if there were an Outlook98 and Office97 for the Mac, they would be just as vulnerable on several key fronts.)
Of course, there can only be one answer.
Free copies of Microsoft Bob (tm)!
I know there were other projects that came out of that, but how detailed was ESR's comment?
DOOM certainly pioneered the idea of games with free "add-ons" like third-party maps, which extended the game's viability many times long past the usual four-to-six-month lifecycle in the industry. If he was speaking in a more general sense, perhaps this is what he really alluded to. I certainly think the maps contributed more to that success than the individual enhanced game products, simply in terms of number of users reached.
Well, if you understood that as "Free software and non-sucky software are mutually exclusive", you certainly gave it a different reading than I.
It sounds like just the opposite to me! i.e. "People would rather make free, non-sucky software precisely because non-sucky is more important to them than non-free", or put another way, people would rather make good software than get paid for making crap.
As I noted elsewhere, this talk wasn't about "converting" all Microsoft drones by proving them wrong every time they breathe out. It was about opening the lines of communication, and by the accounts here, it was a success.
I mean, really -- is ESR being persuasive gonna induce Msofties to give up their stock options and start another company building "open source windows"? No. Even if you place the bar as low as getting Redmond to back off its FUD and embrace/destroy tactics, basically just to be a polite competitor interested in succeeding on its merits (which do exist :-S), well, there will still be hardcore people who will never be convinced. Especially when their livelihood is centered around the success of a different model!
I didn't see the talk, but from the reports here it sounds as if he was asked to explain open source in as fair a spirit as would be expected anywhere, by Microsoft employees who are not personally involved in or beholden to the overall strategic plan. If they sought to prove that all Microsoftians don't think alike, they succeeded. For ESR's case, by accepting the invitation in the same spirit, he proved that not everyone on his side of the aisle was closed-minded, either. Another success.
"Effective" doesn't have to mean shutting down everyone's objections, a la Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.
And you'd use that extra bandwidth for ... what, exactly? Running a porn site in the basement?
I'm a power user, and I can't imagine that my upload bytes are more than 10% of my download bytes. Even if I include my web page at my ISP, it's perhaps 20%. So if you host your own website, maybe you'll need symmetric, but probably not. And if you're hosting a business website, then you're not a "home user" and your plea is misdirected.
As for the internet being a broadcast medium, dude, that doesn't depend on the technology. That depends on the customers. Most of whom are not going to be broadcasters themselves. The "modest" interactivity of chat, e-mail, etc. is plenty for them.
Besides, as I used to tell people before they'd really heard of the internet, The Internet is just a wire. What you can do with it depends entirely on what you choose to try to do with it.
Face it, I think that "modem" is going to be the term of choice for the hardware that interfaces computers to external internet services.
...
Yes, G.lite doesn't modulate/demodulate like every analog modem since the days of ARPAnet, but it's such a useful term that I doubt it will disappear. Who besides a slashdot geek will want to use a term like Adaptive Transceiver Unit/Remote? Sounds like technobabble from Star Trek to most people.
"Sir, the aliens have interfered with our Adaptive Transceiver Unit, remotely!" "Red Alert!"
Especially for something going to the retail market, it's important to have a Name for the Thing. It's already been extended to "cable modems" and "ISDN modems". And if real analog modems (and the POTS they depend on) are living on numbered days, why not steal the term?
This is the way languages evolve
(By the way, thanks for the first-person tale of working with Rhythms, I have been giving them a very close look!)
It's not so much that they "have to" ship in a new hard drive; it's that with Windoze, it's just a lot easier to set up a "bulletproof" configuration in the home office, and ship it out. It's a huge hassle in certain ways -- like making sure that ALL the network settings are correct BEFORE it leaves, especially when you can't test it that way -- but the tools are there to let you manage it, and FedEx is cheaper than sending a person there for one day.
...)
When I worked for Zenith Data Systems, if customers' laptops got a screwed up Windows config, we just sent them a new hard drive. It was cheaper and easier than spending hours on the phone troubleshooting driver configuration. In the same way, vendors like Compaq just have you re-image their system from CD-ROM, rather than reinstall individual components.
(By the way, the old hard drives most likely go back to HQ and get re-imaged
Well, there's a big difference when the customer base is in the hundreds of thousands. If the cumulative effect of one day's aggravation is a million customer-days of aggravation -- you've got a problem.
Also, you're thinking that the only people on eBay are like some people casually wandering into an antiques store with grandpa's wardrobe cabinet. Nope, often the people on eBay are the antiques dealers, and you'd be surprised how many people already make their living off of selling stuff on eBay.
It's like my current ISP's authentication problems. Yeah, I can log on 70% of the time on the first try; but the cumulative effect of a 30% first-try failure rate is that they get fired. Net inconvenience to me, measured in perhaps a couple of hours after several weeks of this -- but not tolerable.
>The justification for anonymous remailers has been for protecting whistle-blowers
... gee, too bad. Shoulda kept yer mouth shut.
>and people who *need* their privacy protected, i.e. people talking about their own
>abuse experiences.
That's all well and good, but there's no legal justification for it. Whistle-blowers are legally protected in other ways; their anonymity may be helpful, but in the face of a subpoena, what justification is there for retaining it? Abuse survivors and others may want their privacy, but they don't need it.
Remember, we're not talking about the end of privacy in general, simply whether established privacy rights extend to protection from defamation (and other) lawsuits. There is (as the phrase goes) a *compelling need* for the state to require someone to appear in a lawsuit against them. That's what legal tools like subpoenas have always been used for -- and since you have to get a judge to issue one, they don't exactly fall from trees.
>a judge that believes that such people don't deserve protection on the basis that
>protecting our masters in corporation and government is more important than any
>possible right to personal privacy. It is my opinion that such a judge has no
>place on the bench.
Whoa! This is not about personal privacy (it isn't even about free speech, since defamation is by definition not protected speech). It's about abusing the privacy laws to shield oneself from legal remedies -- whether the plaintiff is a corporation or an individual. If the statements made do not amount to defamation, the lawsuit will fail, and the plaintiff will have to pay court costs. If the statements DO amount to defamation
>The biggest problem is that we have politicians and judges making decisions on
>high-tech issues that have literally never seen a C: prompt and think that all the
>Internet is some sort of online porn shop. The solution is to GET RID OF THEM
Are you sure this is a high-tech issue? What is fundamentally different here, legally, from someone distributing anonymously-printed leaflets? Just because it happened "on the internet" does not mean it breaks new ground within our legal system. I don't think the internet throws slander and libel laws out the window. I don't subscribe to the adolescent idea that free speech is "absolute"; there have always been exceptions, and this is one of them, and the internet should not change that.
First, this suit is about public defamation, not whistleblowing in the legal sense, so it doesn't really apply.
Whistleblower protection is intended to permit someone to report illegal activities to authorities without facing retaliation from their employer. I don't think anyone ever envisioned remaining anonymous as part of that protection.
Beyond that, I don't think there is any public good in allowing internet anonymity to shield someone from otherwise complying with the laws and appearing in court. If what you post is serious enough to bring on a lawsuit, you should be ready to appear in court about it. (And don't bring up harassing lawsuits; there are other ways to handle that problem.)
Put simply, if anonymity protects one from lawsuits, then nobody can ever be sued for what they say on the internet. That's wrong.
Actually, Bafful, I think he did see why other journalists engage in this typecasting. You'll note that he links to the PC Computing ranking of various OSes, where they seriously marginalize BeOS.
It's actually good that he didn't himself engage in stereotyping other tech journalists as clueless -- instead of coming out swinging, he simply offers positive arguments for the other point of view. It's a quite eloquent defense of BeOS; I'm suddenly giving it more thought myself.
Consumer electronics don't get repaired, they get tossed out. VCRs, boomboxes, and now cheapie computers in the $500 range. Face it, electronics don't "break down" all that often; either they fail in the first week of use, or they last three to five years. More than enough time to get the value back.
Lots of pooh-poohing of these designs going on. Gosh, they're not upgradable, the monitor's built in, et cetera. Seems there's a cultural divide here.
... well, when mom wants a car she gets a compact that will let her pick up her groceries. It has a reliable Japanese engine that will go 100,000 miles as long as you go to Jiffy Lube every other month. Mom never opens the hood; face it, Mom doesn't want to open the hood. Even if you're a mechanic, she'd rather not have to depend on your being around if it seizes up. She just wants to pick up the groceries.
Can we all agree that slashdotters want hot rods for themselves? All of us probably know what a standard PC looks like inside, at the very least. Most of us can upgrade one; maybe we can do it in the dark. Maybe we leave our case covers off so we can do it with less hassle. The latest graphics card; the most efficient EIDE controller. Overclocking. Ultracooling. One more operation per microsecond is worth an afternoon's twiddling.
But for mom
That's what these computers are.
I'm sure all those gajillions of AOL users are really, truly concerned with the frame rate of their graphics card, and the megaFLOPS they get with floating point operations.
Gimme a break! So what if people buy computers because they "look cool" (I bet the ease of setup and use of the Mac also had something to do with it, no matter what your friends said). It's not your computer.
Are you the kind of egotist who tells your friends what kind of car to drive? No? Then why are you telling them what kind of computer to buy?