it was just easier to deal with the warez version than the big tumor of dongles hanging off the back of their computers
And once you have to get the warez version anyway because the vendor has broken the legal version, it becomes pretty easy to forget to buy the next upgrade.
I don't buy it.
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A photodetector at the edge of the CD turns the drive's laser light into electrical pulses, which travel to the embedded smart card and request the key.
I suppose it's conceivable that this might be possible with a CD-RW drive. But with a regular CD-ROM drive? I think that's bullshit, plain and simple. It's not like there is any command for sending data to the laser of a read-only drive. Do they send the request in morse code by turning the drive off and on again?
I think this is just more snake oil being peddled by folks who know the can make an easy buck off of nervous media executives. My guess is, it'll work fine during the dog and pony sales presentation, it'll cause endless support headaches for paying customers, and be trivially bypassed by the warez folks.
I swear, I don't know where they finds the folks who sign on to these deals. Have a problem with piracy? Make your product less attractive than the warez version by saddling it with a bunch of flakey 'copy protection' technology. That'll help your market share!
And what if I want the SACD quality at home, but want to be able to make MP3's for my portable player? Oh yeah, just buy TWO copies of the music. Please explain to me how that's not just bending the consumer over?
Wow. Did you read the part about the integrated system management software, complete with SSL webserver and dedicated ethernet ports? Am I correct in thinking that they've replaced the BIOS with an entire OS? I don't know if I should be awed or terrified.
What happens to the family when a new RAM interface comes along?
You'd just drop in a new memory controller. Keep in mind that new memory interfaces don't come around all that often. You might get speed bumps like PC100/PC133 and the various flavors of DDR. But a single model of controller can often handle multiple speeds. Think about how many flavors of PIII/Celeron came out that used the PC66/PC100/PC133 SDR memory interface.
If this gives AMD a big performance boost, which it should, it's a good move.
The biggest problem is that children are supposed to learn restraint as they're growing up, right around the time that we introduce them to a bunch of murder simulators and virtual deliquency via gaming consoles and inappropriate discussions and imagery via the Internet
And the fact that teen violence is at a thirty year low is explained by this? Shouldn't it be rising? I think your sig says it best:
When illogic prevails, reason gives way. -- Japanese proverb
there are no "Soup-uters" out there that allow you to make unlimited, perfect copies of your can of soup and instantly deliver the soup to millions of people around the globe for free. If there were, you can bet Campbells would be very interested in controlling what you did with your can of soup.
And suppose there was? Suppose we had a way to make an infinite amount of food almost for free? A machine which can produce any meal you desire for a zero additional cost? I suppose you would want to outlaw it, or at least regulate it. Because after all, corporate profit is more important than feeding people right?
You might think this is a totally spurious argument, but it's not. Right now, the official US gov't stance is that corporate revenue from AIDS fighting drugs is more important than saving lives in Africa. When it comes down to saving lives vs. corporate intellectual "property" rights, the corporations want to let people die.
And in the future, when corporations decide that libraries are just piracy conduits, they will want to ban those too. Because corporate profits are more important than educating people. In the eye's of a corporation, profits are the single most important thing above all else. Feed the poor? Not if we don't get our cut. Fight an epidemic? Not if you can't pay for the patent rights. Educate the poor? Not if they can't afford the license for their books.
Man, I'm glad they weren't doing that when I was a student there. I would've been pissed. I thought it was bad I had to keep buying books by Reingold for my classes. Come to think of it, I never had single class which involved anything Microsoft. But that was '89-'93 when Redmond hadn't even figured out that a TCP/IP stack was a good idea.
Disks are as unreliable as ever and are not close to following moore's law in speed up.
Well, Moore's law was actually about the number of transistors on a die and not about speed at all. While drives have not gotten significantly faster over the years, their density has grown by an unbelievable amount. The first hard drive I ever used was on a Mac. That was probably 15 years ago, and was a 20MB drive. I can now go buy a 200GB drive (10,000 times bigger!) for less money in a smaller case. And the fact that you can even build a system which can hold a hundred gigs speaks wonders for the reliability of hard drives. Can you imagine the uptime on a drive farm of 10,000 drives? Do you know how many would fail every hour? It would have been a challenge to build a 200GB data farm at any price in 1985. It is a shame about the speed though. Seek times are what, like 10% of what they used to be?
Actually, they are developing hydrogen producing bacteria. Check it out. More accurately, people are working on using existing bacteria to produce hydrogen. But eventually genetic engineering will probably be used to up the efficency of the process. Once you have the hydrogen, producing electricity from it is pretty trival (burn it in a turbine or fuel cell).
NCSA has been making good progress on developing this. The million bucks of SGI hardware has of course been replaced by a rack of Linux PC's. Instructions are actually on line. It's not trivial to build, though. And using LCD projecters does have real downsides. If you buy a dozen identical projectors, they won't have the same brightness and color saturation. Actually, they aren't even consistent from edge to edge. So your display isn't perfect, and you can definitly see the tile edges. Not to mention the fun of building a usable support structure which lets you get all the alignments right. If you don't need it to take up an entire wall, I think the IBM T221 display is a cheaper way to get super high-res output. But of course your high-res Quake won't be lifesize either.:-)
It's my opinion that autopilot for your car is an inevitable development. It will become the only way to keep highways scaling. Adding more lanes to add capacity works to a point, but doesn't work forever. I don't think it's feasable to expect a human to navigate a twenty or thirty lane highway. And the density of traffic which an existing highway can carry is limited by the poor driving ability of humans.
I think eventually high-capacity highways will require the use of an autopilot. Doing so would allow the cars to be run with inter-car gaps which would be suicidal with a human behind the wheel. Most stop-n-go situations are due to bad planning on the part of drivers. They speed up too much when traffic clears ahead, zoom up on the cars in front, and then have to slow down to avoid an accident. This type of driving creates waves of congestion which travel backwards down the highway, and is due entirely to poor coordination among drivers. But there is no reason that under computer control rush hour can't cruise along at 60 miles an hour with a car length or less between cars. I bet you could easily triple the maximum capacity of a highway, not to mention getting everybody to their destination faster and with better fuel economy to boot. The R&D will be expensive, but like any electrics the hardware will be practically free once developed. Compared to the cost of expanding existing freeway's, it will make sense finacially too. I figure it's maybe 10 years out.
American's are not likely to give up their cars for any sort of public transportation, no matter how impractical cars become with rising fuel costs, increasing travel times due to congestion, increasing insurance rates, etc. Most Americans have convinced themselves that they enjoy sitting in stop and go traffic, as long as it's in a car and not a bus. But if we could figure out a way to let them keep their cars, reduce pollution, reduce accidents, let them safely talk on their cell phones, and not have to build mile-wide highways I suspect a lot of us might go for it.
I have a $25 Oregon Scientific clock that synchronizes via radio (WWVB, I think) to an atomic clock in... well, in Colorado anyway. (It's very puzzling... some of the atomic clock companies say the atomic clock is in Fort Collins, some say Boulder. I suspect the truth is that they synchronize to WWVB in Fort Collins which, in turn, is controlled by an atomic clock in Boulder.)
You are correct, the clock is in Boulder and the signal is transmitted from outside Fort Collins. And now you can ditch that old quartz watch, as you can get WWVB-sync'd wrist watches now. I can't imagine the reception is very good, but I'd like to try one.
Like I said, I eventually got over it. Pretty much all of the computers I work with now are x86 based, which is a switch from a couple of years ago when I had Sparc on my desk at work and PPC on my desk at home.
Curiously about x86, it seems to be that clock speed is most closely correlated with market share. CISC vs. RISC. Old and crufty vs. new and clean. Doesn't seem to matter. It's clock speed that determines market share. Or market share that determines clock speed. Kinda funny, isn't it?
Jerry and Bill talked while you were out.
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 2
Bill (Gates) announced that Microsoft(tm) would support Opteron. Jerry (Sanders) gave nice pro-Microsoft(tm) testimony at the anti-trust trial. Funny how Microsoft(tm) seems to encourage competition in the x86 market. Oh well. I'm not complaining if it keeps AMD and the x86 market viable.
No one's making you buy one.
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you want a "fresh" architecture that isn't full of old junk, buy an Alpha. Or for that matter a MIPS, SPARC, or Power4. All of which are 64-bit and have either always been 64-bit, or at least had their original 32-bit designs planned around 64-bit expansions.
Personally, I think it's amazing how much old crap has been piled onto x86. It's really remarkable it runs at all, and it's even fast! I used to turn up my nose to the x86 given how they piled all the 32-bit extensions on the old 16-bit core. It's really a travesty. And the actual instruction set and register set looks like a damn train wreck compared to MIPS or PPC. But they are soooo cheap I eventually got over it, and just try to avoid thinking about any level lower than 'C' now so I don't go insane.
In general, it is not possible to get a "perfect" result from any voting system. The best that we can do is accept our imperfect knowledge and stand behind the result that most reasonably appears to be true.
The problem seems to be that some people in power have shown no interest in making the election results believable. There needs to be an expectation that reasonable steps are being taken to reduce potential fraud and mistakes. However, the use of "self-auditing" (which really means un-auditable) voting machines is clearly a step in the wrong direction when it comes to instilling faith in the system.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
Basic economics will tell you that this is not true. If the public had a need for growing bandwidth, the public would find a way to pay for it. I think part of the problem is that there isn't a need for growing bandwidth, which means that those companies that are financially structured such that they need growth are basically screwed.
Think about it, how does a little company like Worldcom buy a giant like MCI? By borrowing a shitload of money, that's how. How does get a loan that big? By borrowing against future revenues. Revenue which needs to be much larger than current revenue. Personally, I was amazed that Worldcom was able to buy MCI. I was amazed the regulators, bankers, etc. allowed it to happen.
I think Worldcom was doomed from the minute they bought MCI. It was a stupid deal which never should have been allowed to happen. The accounting frauds were only delaying the inevitable. The debt load on the combined Worldcom-MCI was so high that only in a perfect world where nothing went wrong and every financial projection was met would the company have survived. Meanwhile, in the real world where economic downturns happen, debt-laden companies like Worldcom are going to go down the tubes. Qwest will probably go down too for the same reasons, and I wouldn't be suprised to see AOL-TimeWarner go also. A lot of the big mergers and buyouts we saw in the last five years resulted in fragile, debt-laden corporations which aren't likely to last.
It's not just the individual pixels which are made with polymers. It's the individual traces also. In fact, the whole field of polymer semiconducters is starting to ripen and bear fruit. The sheets of plastic they print won't only have light emitting portions, it can include power traces and even decoding logic! There might be a copper ribbon cable to connect the entire display to whatever external source provides data and power. But the entire display will be made from polymers.
This really is amazing technology. The circuitry is basically printed out using ink jet style heads. Actually, one of the article says that it actually plots the traces out ala a good old fasioned plotter as opposed to line-by-line like a printer. It's not hard to imagine that this stuff will lead to a rebirth of the homebrew electronics hobbyist. Even if you couldn't afford to buy your own plotter, a prototyping shop which owned one should be able to produce custom circuits to your own design in an extremely fast and cheap manner. Imagine a semi-conductor Kinkos! Could be cool stuff.
Even if Apple switches to x86 procs, their hardware will still be proprietary. Why? Because they would go broke in a heartbeat if they tried.
1) Apple is largely a hardware company, and one with fat margins to boot. If they tried selling PC clones with similar margins Dell would take them to the cleaners. Hell, Dell would probably take them to the cleaners even if they charged slim margins.
2) That stable as a rock feature your brother enjoys? The almost seamless integration of most hardware into the OS? Those are features of the tight control that Apple can exercise over their hardware. If you think you would get these same features running on generic PC hardware you are sorely mistaken. Most vendors don't bother writing OSX drivers now, despite the fact that all PCI, AGP, and USB devices will plug right into a Mac. What makes you think they'll bother writing OSX-x86 drivers? Or were you just going to use the high quality BSD 3d acceleration video drivers? The world of PC hardware is a tar pit of cheap hardware, poorly documented interfaces, and Windows-only drivers. Hardware detection and configuration has never really been one of Unix's strong points. Why do you think OSX would be much better?
And don't let the fact that PIV's have almost 3x the clock of a Mac fool you into thinking it has 3x the performance. The PIV is first and foremost a high speed oscillator circuit. It is designed to have a high clock speed because most people are stupid and think it means fast. Meanwhile, Intel's highest performing chip at FP (the new Itanium's) is clocked slower than a Mac. So is it slower than a Mac? (Not that I'm arguing a PM is faster than a PIV, I just don't think it's a factor of three slower.)
Besides that, I don't think that kde should be hard-coding any settings for a particular user anyway.
Well, root is a special case for a lot of things. Many programs need to behave differently depending on whether or not they are running as root. For that matter, they even need to worry about whether they are actually root, or just SUID root (comparing the UID vs. the EUID). Take ping. It has to be SUID so it can open a raw socket to craft the ICMP packets on. But it has to check and see if it's really root running the program to determine if certain options (flood pinging for example) are allowed.
On the other hand, maybe the only special code KDE should put in is a block in kdm which prevents root from logging in. As you stated, it's not an especially good idea.
This is a good point, especially in the era of free software. With commercial software, if you are running it you probably know what it does. At least I hope you had some idea before you paid for it. But with free software, you might have hundreds of programs installed that you've never heard of. And since half the GUI apps out there look essentially the same, with some menus, a toolbar on the top, maybe a palatte on the left and some sort of workspace taking up the balance of the window. A short paragraph saying what the program does, and what makes it special would be nice.
Take editors. My system has three apps under the Editor item on my Kmenu: Kate, KEdit, and KWrite. Here's what how they describe themselves:
"KWrite - Leightweight Kate" "Kate - KDE Advanced Text Editor" and the winner for least information: KEdit "A KDE Text Editor"
A few sentences describing what makes each one special or unique would be helpful. I don't want to have to scrub thru all the menu's trying to figure out what differs. Oh well.
Actually, I don't think that's what he's recommending. He's talking about the desktop context menu, and whether or not it should include a "Quick Browser" item like the KMenu does. He thinks that a normal user should have his home directory available there, and root should have / available there. Both of which seem quite reasonable. Being able to open a new window to any directory with a right click on the desktop is a feature I use a lot in BeOS. It's not unreasonable to reduce clutter by only have ~ there for normal users. They can still get to / thru other means if they need to.
Yeah there is. You fight back. No holes barred type of fighting too. If you can catch him in the act, do shit , like ping floods. It's effective in cutting bandwidth 1 way.
No josh, don't do this. It makes you both a criminal and and asshole. Ping floods do not specifically target the misbehaving person. They target everyone who happens to share a pipe with that person. And by the time you are flooding enough packets to take out your intended target, you are probably taking out hundreds or thousands of innocent people.
Your other ideas are spot on. But drop the DoS ideas. It will not have the effect you want. And as somebody who has been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night because some DDoS script kiddie is taking down connectivity for tens of thousands of people, I will personally kick anyone who admits DDoSing in the balls at the first available opportunity.
Slashdot Mirror
it was just easier to deal with the warez version than the big tumor of dongles hanging off the back of their computers
And once you have to get the warez version anyway because the vendor has broken the legal version, it becomes pretty easy to forget to buy the next upgrade.
A photodetector at the edge of the CD turns the drive's laser light into electrical pulses, which travel to the embedded smart card and request the key.
I suppose it's conceivable that this might be possible with a CD-RW drive. But with a regular CD-ROM drive? I think that's bullshit, plain and simple. It's not like there is any command for sending data to the laser of a read-only drive. Do they send the request in morse code by turning the drive off and on again?
I think this is just more snake oil being peddled by folks who know the can make an easy buck off of nervous media executives. My guess is, it'll work fine during the dog and pony sales presentation, it'll cause endless support headaches for paying customers, and be trivially bypassed by the warez folks.
I swear, I don't know where they finds the folks who sign on to these deals. Have a problem with piracy? Make your product less attractive than the warez version by saddling it with a bunch of flakey 'copy protection' technology. That'll help your market share!
And what if I want the SACD quality at home, but want to be able to make MP3's for my portable player? Oh yeah, just buy TWO copies of the music. Please explain to me how that's not just bending the consumer over?
Wow. Did you read the part about the integrated system management software, complete with SSL webserver and dedicated ethernet ports? Am I correct in thinking that they've replaced the BIOS with an entire OS? I don't know if I should be awed or terrified.
What happens to the family when a new RAM interface comes along?
You'd just drop in a new memory controller. Keep in mind that new memory interfaces don't come around all that often. You might get speed bumps like PC100/PC133 and the various flavors of DDR. But a single model of controller can often handle multiple speeds. Think about how many flavors of PIII/Celeron came out that used the PC66/PC100/PC133 SDR memory interface.
If this gives AMD a big performance boost, which it should, it's a good move.
The biggest problem is that children are supposed to learn restraint as they're growing up, right around the time that we introduce them to a bunch of murder simulators and virtual deliquency via gaming consoles and inappropriate discussions and imagery via the Internet
And the fact that teen violence is at a thirty year low is explained by this? Shouldn't it be rising? I think your sig says it best:
When illogic prevails, reason gives way. -- Japanese proverb
there are no "Soup-uters" out there that allow you to make unlimited, perfect copies of your can of soup and instantly deliver the soup to millions of people around the globe for free. If there were, you can bet Campbells would be very interested in controlling what you did with your can of soup.
And suppose there was? Suppose we had a way to make an infinite amount of food almost for free? A machine which can produce any meal you desire for a zero additional cost? I suppose you would want to outlaw it, or at least regulate it. Because after all, corporate profit is more important than feeding people right?
You might think this is a totally spurious argument, but it's not. Right now, the official US gov't stance is that corporate revenue from AIDS fighting drugs is more important than saving lives in Africa. When it comes down to saving lives vs. corporate intellectual "property" rights, the corporations want to let people die.
And in the future, when corporations decide that libraries are just piracy conduits, they will want to ban those too. Because corporate profits are more important than educating people. In the eye's of a corporation, profits are the single most important thing above all else. Feed the poor? Not if we don't get our cut. Fight an epidemic? Not if you can't pay for the patent rights. Educate the poor? Not if they can't afford the license for their books.
Man, I'm glad they weren't doing that when I was a student there. I would've been pissed. I thought it was bad I had to keep buying books by Reingold for my classes. Come to think of it, I never had single class which involved anything Microsoft. But that was '89-'93 when Redmond hadn't even figured out that a TCP/IP stack was a good idea.
Disks are as unreliable as ever and are not close to following moore's law in speed up.
Well, Moore's law was actually about the number of transistors on a die and not about speed at all. While drives have not gotten significantly faster over the years, their density has grown by an unbelievable amount. The first hard drive I ever used was on a Mac. That was probably 15 years ago, and was a 20MB drive. I can now go buy a 200GB drive (10,000 times bigger!) for less money in a smaller case. And the fact that you can even build a system which can hold a hundred gigs speaks wonders for the reliability of hard drives. Can you imagine the uptime on a drive farm of 10,000 drives? Do you know how many would fail every hour? It would have been a challenge to build a 200GB data farm at any price in 1985. It is a shame about the speed though. Seek times are what, like 10% of what they used to be?
Actually, they are developing hydrogen producing bacteria. Check it out. More accurately, people are working on using existing bacteria to produce hydrogen. But eventually genetic engineering will probably be used to up the efficency of the process. Once you have the hydrogen, producing electricity from it is pretty trival (burn it in a turbine or fuel cell).
NCSA has been making good progress on developing this. The million bucks of SGI hardware has of course been replaced by a rack of Linux PC's. Instructions are actually on line. It's not trivial to build, though. And using LCD projecters does have real downsides. If you buy a dozen identical projectors, they won't have the same brightness and color saturation. Actually, they aren't even consistent from edge to edge. So your display isn't perfect, and you can definitly see the tile edges. Not to mention the fun of building a usable support structure which lets you get all the alignments right. If you don't need it to take up an entire wall, I think the IBM T221 display is a cheaper way to get super high-res output. But of course your high-res Quake won't be lifesize either. :-)
It's my opinion that autopilot for your car is an inevitable development. It will become the only way to keep highways scaling. Adding more lanes to add capacity works to a point, but doesn't work forever. I don't think it's feasable to expect a human to navigate a twenty or thirty lane highway. And the density of traffic which an existing highway can carry is limited by the poor driving ability of humans.
I think eventually high-capacity highways will require the use of an autopilot. Doing so would allow the cars to be run with inter-car gaps which would be suicidal with a human behind the wheel. Most stop-n-go situations are due to bad planning on the part of drivers. They speed up too much when traffic clears ahead, zoom up on the cars in front, and then have to slow down to avoid an accident. This type of driving creates waves of congestion which travel backwards down the highway, and is due entirely to poor coordination among drivers. But there is no reason that under computer control rush hour can't cruise along at 60 miles an hour with a car length or less between cars. I bet you could easily triple the maximum capacity of a highway, not to mention getting everybody to their destination faster and with better fuel economy to boot. The R&D will be expensive, but like any electrics the hardware will be practically free once developed. Compared to the cost of expanding existing freeway's, it will make sense finacially too. I figure it's maybe 10 years out.
American's are not likely to give up their cars for any sort of public transportation, no matter how impractical cars become with rising fuel costs, increasing travel times due to congestion, increasing insurance rates, etc. Most Americans have convinced themselves that they enjoy sitting in stop and go traffic, as long as it's in a car and not a bus. But if we could figure out a way to let them keep their cars, reduce pollution, reduce accidents, let them safely talk on their cell phones, and not have to build mile-wide highways I suspect a lot of us might go for it.
I have a $25 Oregon Scientific clock that synchronizes via radio (WWVB, I think) to an atomic clock in... well, in Colorado anyway. (It's very puzzling... some of the atomic clock companies say the atomic clock is in Fort Collins, some say Boulder. I suspect the truth is that they synchronize to WWVB in Fort Collins which, in turn, is controlled by an atomic clock in Boulder.)
You are correct, the clock is in Boulder and the signal is transmitted from outside Fort Collins. And now you can ditch that old quartz watch, as you can get WWVB-sync'd wrist watches now. I can't imagine the reception is very good, but I'd like to try one.
Like I said, I eventually got over it. Pretty much all of the computers I work with now are x86 based, which is a switch from a couple of years ago when I had Sparc on my desk at work and PPC on my desk at home.
Curiously about x86, it seems to be that clock speed is most closely correlated with market share. CISC vs. RISC. Old and crufty vs. new and clean. Doesn't seem to matter. It's clock speed that determines market share. Or market share that determines clock speed. Kinda funny, isn't it?
Bill (Gates) announced that Microsoft(tm) would support Opteron. Jerry (Sanders) gave nice pro-Microsoft(tm) testimony at the anti-trust trial. Funny how Microsoft(tm) seems to encourage competition in the x86 market. Oh well. I'm not complaining if it keeps AMD and the x86 market viable.
If you want a "fresh" architecture that isn't full of old junk, buy an Alpha. Or for that matter a MIPS, SPARC, or Power4. All of which are 64-bit and have either always been 64-bit, or at least had their original 32-bit designs planned around 64-bit expansions.
Personally, I think it's amazing how much old crap has been piled onto x86. It's really remarkable it runs at all, and it's even fast! I used to turn up my nose to the x86 given how they piled all the 32-bit extensions on the old 16-bit core. It's really a travesty. And the actual instruction set and register set looks like a damn train wreck compared to MIPS or PPC. But they are soooo cheap I eventually got over it, and just try to avoid thinking about any level lower than 'C' now so I don't go insane.
they don't believe installing MS Project on every computer is really stealing.
Fortunately for free software, Microsoft(tm) is going to use product activation to teach those little crooks a lesson.
In general, it is not possible to get a "perfect" result from any voting system. The best that we can do is accept our imperfect knowledge and stand behind the result that most reasonably appears to be true.
The problem seems to be that some people in power have shown no interest in making the election results believable. There needs to be an expectation that reasonable steps are being taken to reduce potential fraud and mistakes. However, the use of "self-auditing" (which really means un-auditable) voting machines is clearly a step in the wrong direction when it comes to instilling faith in the system.
Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?
Basic economics will tell you that this is not true. If the public had a need for growing bandwidth, the public would find a way to pay for it. I think part of the problem is that there isn't a need for growing bandwidth, which means that those companies that are financially structured such that they need growth are basically screwed.
Think about it, how does a little company like Worldcom buy a giant like MCI? By borrowing a shitload of money, that's how. How does get a loan that big? By borrowing against future revenues. Revenue which needs to be much larger than current revenue. Personally, I was amazed that Worldcom was able to buy MCI. I was amazed the regulators, bankers, etc. allowed it to happen.
I think Worldcom was doomed from the minute they bought MCI. It was a stupid deal which never should have been allowed to happen. The accounting frauds were only delaying the inevitable. The debt load on the combined Worldcom-MCI was so high that only in a perfect world where nothing went wrong and every financial projection was met would the company have survived. Meanwhile, in the real world where economic downturns happen, debt-laden companies like Worldcom are going to go down the tubes. Qwest will probably go down too for the same reasons, and I wouldn't be suprised to see AOL-TimeWarner go also. A lot of the big mergers and buyouts we saw in the last five years resulted in fragile, debt-laden corporations which aren't likely to last.
It's not just the individual pixels which are made with polymers. It's the individual traces also. In fact, the whole field of polymer semiconducters is starting to ripen and bear fruit. The sheets of plastic they print won't only have light emitting portions, it can include power traces and even decoding logic! There might be a copper ribbon cable to connect the entire display to whatever external source provides data and power. But the entire display will be made from polymers.
This really is amazing technology. The circuitry is basically printed out using ink jet style heads. Actually, one of the article says that it actually plots the traces out ala a good old fasioned plotter as opposed to line-by-line like a printer. It's not hard to imagine that this stuff will lead to a rebirth of the homebrew electronics hobbyist. Even if you couldn't afford to buy your own plotter, a prototyping shop which owned one should be able to produce custom circuits to your own design in an extremely fast and cheap manner. Imagine a semi-conductor Kinkos! Could be cool stuff.
Even if Apple switches to x86 procs, their hardware will still be proprietary. Why? Because they would go broke in a heartbeat if they tried.
1) Apple is largely a hardware company, and one with fat margins to boot. If they tried selling PC clones with similar margins Dell would take them to the cleaners. Hell, Dell would probably take them to the cleaners even if they charged slim margins.
2) That stable as a rock feature your brother enjoys? The almost seamless integration of most hardware into the OS? Those are features of the tight control that Apple can exercise over their hardware. If you think you would get these same features running on generic PC hardware you are sorely mistaken. Most vendors don't bother writing OSX drivers now, despite the fact that all PCI, AGP, and USB devices will plug right into a Mac. What makes you think they'll bother writing OSX-x86 drivers? Or were you just going to use the high quality BSD 3d acceleration video drivers? The world of PC hardware is a tar pit of cheap hardware, poorly documented interfaces, and Windows-only drivers. Hardware detection and configuration has never really been one of Unix's strong points. Why do you think OSX would be much better?
And don't let the fact that PIV's have almost 3x the clock of a Mac fool you into thinking it has 3x the performance. The PIV is first and foremost a high speed oscillator circuit. It is designed to have a high clock speed because most people are stupid and think it means fast. Meanwhile, Intel's highest performing chip at FP (the new Itanium's) is clocked slower than a Mac. So is it slower than a Mac? (Not that I'm arguing a PM is faster than a PIV, I just don't think it's a factor of three slower.)
Besides that, I don't think that kde should be hard-coding any settings for a particular user anyway.
Well, root is a special case for a lot of things. Many programs need to behave differently depending on whether or not they are running as root. For that matter, they even need to worry about whether they are actually root, or just SUID root (comparing the UID vs. the EUID). Take ping. It has to be SUID so it can open a raw socket to craft the ICMP packets on. But it has to check and see if it's really root running the program to determine if certain options (flood pinging for example) are allowed.
On the other hand, maybe the only special code KDE should put in is a block in kdm which prevents root from logging in. As you stated, it's not an especially good idea.
This is a good point, especially in the era of free software. With commercial software, if you are running it you probably know what it does. At least I hope you had some idea before you paid for it. But with free software, you might have hundreds of programs installed that you've never heard of. And since half the GUI apps out there look essentially the same, with some menus, a toolbar on the top, maybe a palatte on the left and some sort of workspace taking up the balance of the window. A short paragraph saying what the program does, and what makes it special would be nice.
Take editors. My system has three apps under the Editor item on my Kmenu: Kate, KEdit, and KWrite. Here's what how they describe themselves:
"KWrite - Leightweight Kate"
"Kate - KDE Advanced Text Editor"
and the winner for least information:
KEdit "A KDE Text Editor"
A few sentences describing what makes each one special or unique would be helpful. I don't want to have to scrub thru all the menu's trying to figure out what differs. Oh well.
Actually, I don't think that's what he's recommending. He's talking about the desktop context menu, and whether or not it should include a "Quick Browser" item like the KMenu does. He thinks that a normal user should have his home directory available there, and root should have / available there. Both of which seem quite reasonable. Being able to open a new window to any directory with a right click on the desktop is a feature I use a lot in BeOS. It's not unreasonable to reduce clutter by only have ~ there for normal users. They can still get to / thru other means if they need to.
Yeah there is. You fight back. No holes barred type of fighting too. If you can catch him in the act, do shit , like ping floods. It's effective in cutting bandwidth 1 way.
No josh, don't do this. It makes you both a criminal and and asshole. Ping floods do not specifically target the misbehaving person. They target everyone who happens to share a pipe with that person. And by the time you are flooding enough packets to take out your intended target, you are probably taking out hundreds or thousands of innocent people.
Your other ideas are spot on. But drop the DoS ideas. It will not have the effect you want. And as somebody who has been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night because some DDoS script kiddie is taking down connectivity for tens of thousands of people, I will personally kick anyone who admits DDoSing in the balls at the first available opportunity.