I think the major point being made is that there is no compelling reason to upgrade - especially in light of the fact that you will most likely need to invest in additional hardware such as a new video card, memory, etc. That pushes the cost of vista close to that of a brand new machine with an OEM version of Windows (not to mention the fact that upgrading system components is beyond the ability of many users. Heck - they have enough problems just hooking a printer up!)
I have no problems with an OS providing basic functionality like media players, anti-virus technology, DVD recording and such. This still leaves room for other companies to provide enhanced capabilities. I DO have a problem however when bundled functionality ignores standards or attempts to push new proprietary "standards" (IE and WMP being two major examples.)
PuhLEEZE.... I'm not talking "love the homosexuals" here. I'm talking "put up with little Johnny's abusive / antisocial behavior because he has a hard homelife - his parents both work and make $350K/yr. We should relish in Johnny's unique gifts." Fuck that.
You are right on one aspect, I don't use facebook. On another, you are naive to the extreme if you think that ONLY people in your "private" circle of friends will ever see the stuff you write. Ever hear of cut and paste?
In my school district the superintenent's husband is on the payroll. His position went from being a teacher in one of two alternative education classes in the distric, to principal of two alternative education SCHOOLS each with 5 classes (this during a time of district-wide declining enrollment - lost 50% of our students over the past 20 years and it's projected to decline even further.) His pay went from 48K to 120K. It's all perfectly legal, but corrupt as all hell with a large number of students suffering because of it.
If you have a 90K janitor in a private school, you better be able to justify it to the board and the parent's paying tuition out of their own pockets (BTW, fraudulent over-billing is very different than having that rate as normal salary. One is legal, the other is not.)
If schools were run more like businesses, we would get our kids educated better for less money. For example: we would expect teachers to get results or be fired (it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to fire a bad teacher with tenure.)
BTW, you are not 100% accurate. Some schools ARE businesses (private schools) and so are some churches (scientology comes to mind, as are many "televangelism churches" despite claims to the contrary.)
Vouchers would eliminate the badly run government "defacto" monopoly we have on education. EVERYTHING the government does is loaded with fraud, politics, costs more, takes longer, and the final result is worse.
When you take out of the public school budget the costs for "special needs" kids (to make a valid comparison) the private school I send my child to offers a better education (WAY better test scores) in a safer and more caring environment at ONE HALF the cost per student of public school. I can only imagine how good that school would be if they were funded at the same level public school was... Worse, the public school has a massive number of half-days (always Wednesdays and sometimes other days too) that count as full days as far as the government is concerned - it works out that a K-6 student get 1/2 YEAR less education after those 7 years of school.
IMHO, public schools have gotten a LOT worse since I went. Much more PC "tollerance" crap, and tollerance of poor behavior that used to get kids expelled. We had the police chief announce at a city council meeting that they were being efective in the school and confiscated something like 10 guns, and HUNDREDS of knives in the last year (he actually had them on display at the meeting which I attended.) Despite state law that requires suspension / expulsion, there were NO expulsions and only a handful of suspensions.
No, I have no use for public schools at all. Time for them to go.
It's too bad most young people have such a hard time figuring this out, or accepting these facts.
While facebook proclaims "closed" networks, being "closed" doesn't help when your info gets copied and pasted, and sent around to others outside your "closed network". The reality is that it's not as private as people would like to believe. In fact, it's not private at all.
as has been pointed out numerous times before, there's a difference between publicly accessible and publicly announced
I really think many people don't really "get" the internet.
There are these things called search engines and spiders out there that scrape information from public places constantly. It matters not what Facebook does or does not have for functionality. They are not the only gatherer and publisher of information on their site.
If it's on the internet and publicly available, it's public. If you don't want something public, to everyone, forever, don't put it on the internet in a publicly available place. It really is that simple. Teens and other young adults frequently post wacky / private crap about themselves or their friends all the time. Do you REALLY want a future potential employer "Googling" you and finding all this stuff? How about a potential boyfriend / girlfriend / husband / wife? Hell, I can still find posts of mine from the late 80's via google - and google didn't even exist when I wrote them! I can also find via the internet archive copies of my web site from 7 years ago.
You can't put something out there, publicly, and then scream when someone you don't want reading it, reads it. That's sheer stupidity. Publishing a blog or having conversations on social networking sites such as myspace / facebook in open forums is no different than publishing it in the New York Times or broadcasting on CNN. You have publicly announced the information. You like to THINK that you have a tight little private group, but that's just an illusion.
Scratch tickets, bingo, the lottery, all those damn indian casino's, horse racing, raffle tickets, etc. It's quite pervasive. Just like not EVERYONE consumes alcohol, not everyone buys lottery tickets or participates in other less common forms of gambling - but from everything I've read, it is as widespread, or even more so, than consuming alcohol. In many cases, gambling is promoted by government (unlike drinking.)
True, but I wasn't advocating that. I'm comparing the work done to make basic sidewalks usable via wheelchairs versus sidewalks usable via Segway. It's quite common to have a power pole in the middle of a sidewalk without enough room for a wheelchair to get around, a lack or ramps, seriously degraded pavement that is nearly impassable, etc. The US alone has spent BILLIONS on that effort and has very little to show for it. I would serioulsy doubt that more than 25% of sidewalks are usable on average. In my area, it's more like 5%.
Then you have issues like cars / trucks blocking sidewalks, massive throngs of people at an intersection, etc.
My point is that if we have done so badly with wheelchairs, we have no hope at all for Segways or other electric scooters on sidewalks. "Redesign a city?" Nonsense. Never gonna happen - even if the desire was there.
Keep in mind that most cities still miserably fail at handling wheelchair traffic despite many many more years working on it. Hell, I STILL see brand-new sidewalks that don't have ramps. The stupidity of that is astounding. Keep in mind that the ratio of wheelchair users to Segway users is something like 500,000 to 1.
I don't bother with wep at all. My AP is wide open, and connects to a dedicated interface on my gateway server. Similar to your setup, the only ports open on that interface are for VPN - other than that it's stealth. No point in the additional encryption that just slows things down without proividing any real security.
The military probably already has similar cheaper devices
Oh, not so sure about the military, but you know the FBI / NSA / CIA have them - BUT I bet they are not cheaper. EVERYTHING the government does costs more. After all, it's not like they guys buying shit are using their own money now... Network General has been making network sniffers for years, but their $20K boxes really don't do much more than a cheap laptop running ethereal(wireshark) and other misc open source tools.
Actually, there is a "dark fiber" glut. The downside is that it costs a fortune to light up that fiber. A lot of fiber is lit up with lower speed technology too.
I have a friend that works in a Verizon CO. They have been battling DSL bandwidth issues for our main CO for months (rebalancing traffic over non-optimal routes even) due to lack of lit-up circuits. That was finally fixed yesterday and I notice the improvement (I have a biz DSL line.)
I'm not convinced that the only way to handle it is tiered pricing.
Classification of traffic with QoS allows bandwidth utilization to be maximized without degrading interactive / non-bulk traffic. The number of ISP's that actually IMPLEMENT QoS (especially on peering links) is near zero at the moment which would need to change. Now that torrent and other bulk traffic is as high as it is, they need to make these changes. Hell - savvy users have been asking for QoS for YEARS already!
I want the ability to play music and movies I've purchased for the rest of my life, and pass my music and movies down to my kids, just like I can a book, and allow them to use them for the rest of their lives. This means that any technological restrictions MUST NOT inhibit my ability to migrate the content to a new storage media in order to hear that music or watch that movie on any "player technology" in the future.
For example: I want the ability to move a DVD or HD-DVD to a "$5 100G SD card" 15 years from now when they no longer make DVD / blue-ray / whatever players. Unlike a book, the technology needed to utilize material stored in a digital form changes. Some publishers want you to re-purchase all your content in such cases which is an unreasonable demand. A good example is "books on tape." Does any auto manufacturer sell cars with cassette players anymore? I think they have all moved to CD's. Cassettes don't have DRM so you can easily move the content to a CD.
So am I one of the "responsible" anti-DRM forces or not?
Just because the kernel has this tuning feature does not mean everyone has to muck with it. Having the capability to tune / customize is what makes linux flexible enough to use on devices from watches to supercomputing clusters / mainframes. If you don't want to make your own Linux Myth PVR, get a Linux based TIVO that doesn't require any mucking around at all. Linux, the kernel, has been in the mainstream for YEARS.
It's all relative. The best *current* laptop drive is still slower than a fairly low-end *current* desktop drive. A current laptop drive however is much faster than a high-end desktop drive from just a couple years ago however.
If the laptop hard drive powers down, then it gets REALLY slow.:-) You really don't want to be swapping on a laptop or your battery life goes to shit. Note that the high-performance notebook drives are not so good for battery life in general - that's one of the big tradeoff's.
But that's the ONLY way to fully answer the question.
The old guideline of swap size = 2X RAM size still holds as RAM usage (application bloat) / system memory increases automatically mean swap space increases. But that was a general purpose guideline, and the guidance has ALWAYS been to set your swap space size to what you need based on actual usage. your only other option is to just set it to a ridiculously high number.
If you are concerned about something yet are unwilling to spend 10 minutes educating yourself on how to deal with your concerns, then you have to live with the current situation or pay someone to handle your concerns for you. There is no magic bullet.
On the flip side, take cal-train to san francisco from the south bay. Try to get on a bus - they are so full you sometimes have to wait for several in order to get on (this was a few years ago now...) That and the caltrain / bus thing took nearly twice as long as driving. Tried driving to the closest bart station, but couldn't get a parking space even at 6am. Fudge that.
I don't mind public transportation when it works. Unfortunately, it too often doesn't work well.
Yeah - I remember playing with mercury when I was a child. Always rolling it around in my hand. Dentists used to give some to kids to play with to keep them occupied.
Now some kid breaks a thermometer in a school and it's evacuated for a week while the hazmat team goes in - and the kid gets charged with a terrorist act.
There has to be sanity in here somewhere, just don't know where.
You need to understand "Fair use". Note that with DRM, you can't excersize your Fair Use rights. Educators make extensive "Fair use" of copyrighted material in classrooms. Things just are not as black and white as you (and the pigopolists) would like them to be.
The GP is forgetting a major issue. He doesn't have a problem listening to his music TODAY. What about 10 years from now? How about 30? What if MS totally fails in the marketplace for music players and subscription services, and you can't buy hardware / software that supports that particular format of DRM'ed music anymore?
I have albums over 50 years old that I can still play, and due to the lack of DRM I can easily convert them into OGG / MP3 and play them on the latest music players. I can keep converting them and enjoy my DRM free music for the rest of my life. It's VERY VERY unlikely that the GP will have that same ability.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - it's too bad they never released an SP5, or at least another security rollup. I think we are up to 50 "critical" updates to win2ksp4.
I think the major point being made is that there is no compelling reason to upgrade - especially in light of the fact that you will most likely need to invest in additional hardware such as a new video card, memory, etc. That pushes the cost of vista close to that of a brand new machine with an OEM version of Windows (not to mention the fact that upgrading system components is beyond the ability of many users. Heck - they have enough problems just hooking a printer up!)
I have no problems with an OS providing basic functionality like media players, anti-virus technology, DVD recording and such. This still leaves room for other companies to provide enhanced capabilities. I DO have a problem however when bundled functionality ignores standards or attempts to push new proprietary "standards" (IE and WMP being two major examples.)
PuhLEEZE.... I'm not talking "love the homosexuals" here. I'm talking "put up with little Johnny's abusive / antisocial behavior because he has a hard homelife - his parents both work and make $350K/yr. We should relish in Johnny's unique gifts." Fuck that.
You are right on one aspect, I don't use facebook. On another, you are naive to the extreme if you think that ONLY people in your "private" circle of friends will ever see the stuff you write. Ever hear of cut and paste?
In my school district the superintenent's husband is on the payroll. His position went from being a teacher in one of two alternative education classes in the distric, to principal of two alternative education SCHOOLS each with 5 classes (this during a time of district-wide declining enrollment - lost 50% of our students over the past 20 years and it's projected to decline even further.) His pay went from 48K to 120K. It's all perfectly legal, but corrupt as all hell with a large number of students suffering because of it.
If you have a 90K janitor in a private school, you better be able to justify it to the board and the parent's paying tuition out of their own pockets (BTW, fraudulent over-billing is very different than having that rate as normal salary. One is legal, the other is not.)
If schools were run more like businesses, we would get our kids educated better for less money. For example: we would expect teachers to get results or be fired (it's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to fire a bad teacher with tenure.)
BTW, you are not 100% accurate. Some schools ARE businesses (private schools) and so are some churches (scientology comes to mind, as are many "televangelism churches" despite claims to the contrary.)
Vouchers would eliminate the badly run government "defacto" monopoly we have on education. EVERYTHING the government does is loaded with fraud, politics, costs more, takes longer, and the final result is worse.
When you take out of the public school budget the costs for "special needs" kids (to make a valid comparison) the private school I send my child to offers a better education (WAY better test scores) in a safer and more caring environment at ONE HALF the cost per student of public school. I can only imagine how good that school would be if they were funded at the same level public school was... Worse, the public school has a massive number of half-days (always Wednesdays and sometimes other days too) that count as full days as far as the government is concerned - it works out that a K-6 student get 1/2 YEAR less education after those 7 years of school.
IMHO, public schools have gotten a LOT worse since I went. Much more PC "tollerance" crap, and tollerance of poor behavior that used to get kids expelled. We had the police chief announce at a city council meeting that they were being efective in the school and confiscated something like 10 guns, and HUNDREDS of knives in the last year (he actually had them on display at the meeting which I attended.) Despite state law that requires suspension / expulsion, there were NO expulsions and only a handful of suspensions.
No, I have no use for public schools at all. Time for them to go.
It's too bad most young people have such a hard time figuring this out, or accepting these facts.
While facebook proclaims "closed" networks, being "closed" doesn't help when your info gets copied and pasted, and sent around to others outside your "closed network". The reality is that it's not as private as people would like to believe. In fact, it's not private at all.
as has been pointed out numerous times before, there's a difference between publicly accessible and publicly announced
I really think many people don't really "get" the internet.
There are these things called search engines and spiders out there that scrape information from public places constantly. It matters not what Facebook does or does not have for functionality. They are not the only gatherer and publisher of information on their site.
If it's on the internet and publicly available, it's public. If you don't want something public, to everyone, forever, don't put it on the internet in a publicly available place. It really is that simple. Teens and other young adults frequently post wacky / private crap about themselves or their friends all the time. Do you REALLY want a future potential employer "Googling" you and finding all this stuff? How about a potential boyfriend / girlfriend / husband / wife? Hell, I can still find posts of mine from the late 80's via google - and google didn't even exist when I wrote them! I can also find via the internet archive copies of my web site from 7 years ago.
You can't put something out there, publicly, and then scream when someone you don't want reading it, reads it. That's sheer stupidity. Publishing a blog or having conversations on social networking sites such as myspace / facebook in open forums is no different than publishing it in the New York Times or broadcasting on CNN. You have publicly announced the information. You like to THINK that you have a tight little private group, but that's just an illusion.
Not so sure about that...
Scratch tickets, bingo, the lottery, all those damn indian casino's, horse racing, raffle tickets, etc. It's quite pervasive. Just like not EVERYONE consumes alcohol, not everyone buys lottery tickets or participates in other less common forms of gambling - but from everything I've read, it is as widespread, or even more so, than consuming alcohol. In many cases, gambling is promoted by government (unlike drinking.)
Huh. In my experience it's usually at least SP2, which if history is a guideline won't be out until spring / summer 08.
True, but I wasn't advocating that. I'm comparing the work done to make basic sidewalks usable via wheelchairs versus sidewalks usable via Segway. It's quite common to have a power pole in the middle of a sidewalk without enough room for a wheelchair to get around, a lack or ramps, seriously degraded pavement that is nearly impassable, etc. The US alone has spent BILLIONS on that effort and has very little to show for it. I would serioulsy doubt that more than 25% of sidewalks are usable on average. In my area, it's more like 5%.
Then you have issues like cars / trucks blocking sidewalks, massive throngs of people at an intersection, etc.
My point is that if we have done so badly with wheelchairs, we have no hope at all for Segways or other electric scooters on sidewalks. "Redesign a city?" Nonsense. Never gonna happen - even if the desire was there.
Keep in mind that most cities still miserably fail at handling wheelchair traffic despite many many more years working on it. Hell, I STILL see brand-new sidewalks that don't have ramps. The stupidity of that is astounding. Keep in mind that the ratio of wheelchair users to Segway users is something like 500,000 to 1.
I don't bother with wep at all. My AP is wide open, and connects to a dedicated interface on my gateway server. Similar to your setup, the only ports open on that interface are for VPN - other than that it's stealth. No point in the additional encryption that just slows things down without proividing any real security.
The military probably already has similar cheaper devices
Oh, not so sure about the military, but you know the FBI / NSA / CIA have them - BUT I bet they are not cheaper. EVERYTHING the government does costs more. After all, it's not like they guys buying shit are using their own money now... Network General has been making network sniffers for years, but their $20K boxes really don't do much more than a cheap laptop running ethereal(wireshark) and other misc open source tools.
Actually, there is a "dark fiber" glut. The downside is that it costs a fortune to light up that fiber. A lot of fiber is lit up with lower speed technology too.
I have a friend that works in a Verizon CO. They have been battling DSL bandwidth issues for our main CO for months (rebalancing traffic over non-optimal routes even) due to lack of lit-up circuits. That was finally fixed yesterday and I notice the improvement (I have a biz DSL line.)
I'm not convinced that the only way to handle it is tiered pricing.
Classification of traffic with QoS allows bandwidth utilization to be maximized without degrading interactive / non-bulk traffic. The number of ISP's that actually IMPLEMENT QoS (especially on peering links) is near zero at the moment which would need to change. Now that torrent and other bulk traffic is as high as it is, they need to make these changes. Hell - savvy users have been asking for QoS for YEARS already!
I want the ability to play music and movies I've purchased for the rest of my life, and pass my music and movies down to my kids, just like I can a book, and allow them to use them for the rest of their lives. This means that any technological restrictions MUST NOT inhibit my ability to migrate the content to a new storage media in order to hear that music or watch that movie on any "player technology" in the future.
For example: I want the ability to move a DVD or HD-DVD to a "$5 100G SD card" 15 years from now when they no longer make DVD / blue-ray / whatever players. Unlike a book, the technology needed to utilize material stored in a digital form changes. Some publishers want you to re-purchase all your content in such cases which is an unreasonable demand. A good example is "books on tape." Does any auto manufacturer sell cars with cassette players anymore? I think they have all moved to CD's. Cassettes don't have DRM so you can easily move the content to a CD.
So am I one of the "responsible" anti-DRM forces or not?
I know you're just trolling, but...
Just because the kernel has this tuning feature does not mean everyone has to muck with it. Having the capability to tune / customize is what makes linux flexible enough to use on devices from watches to supercomputing clusters / mainframes. If you don't want to make your own Linux Myth PVR, get a Linux based TIVO that doesn't require any mucking around at all. Linux, the kernel, has been in the mainstream for YEARS.
not all laptops have slow hard drives
:-) You really don't want to be swapping on a laptop or your battery life goes to shit. Note that the high-performance notebook drives are not so good for battery life in general - that's one of the big tradeoff's.
It's all relative. The best *current* laptop drive is still slower than a fairly low-end *current* desktop drive. A current laptop drive however is much faster than a high-end desktop drive from just a couple years ago however.
If the laptop hard drive powers down, then it gets REALLY slow.
But that's the ONLY way to fully answer the question.
The old guideline of swap size = 2X RAM size still holds as RAM usage (application bloat) / system memory increases automatically mean swap space increases. But that was a general purpose guideline, and the guidance has ALWAYS been to set your swap space size to what you need based on actual usage. your only other option is to just set it to a ridiculously high number.
If you are concerned about something yet are unwilling to spend 10 minutes educating yourself on how to deal with your concerns, then you have to live with the current situation or pay someone to handle your concerns for you. There is no magic bullet.
On the flip side, take cal-train to san francisco from the south bay. Try to get on a bus - they are so full you sometimes have to wait for several in order to get on (this was a few years ago now...) That and the caltrain / bus thing took nearly twice as long as driving. Tried driving to the closest bart station, but couldn't get a parking space even at 6am. Fudge that.
I don't mind public transportation when it works. Unfortunately, it too often doesn't work well.
Yeah - I remember playing with mercury when I was a child. Always rolling it around in my hand. Dentists used to give some to kids to play with to keep them occupied.
Now some kid breaks a thermometer in a school and it's evacuated for a week while the hazmat team goes in - and the kid gets charged with a terrorist act.
There has to be sanity in here somewhere, just don't know where.
You need to understand "Fair use". Note that with DRM, you can't excersize your Fair Use rights. Educators make extensive "Fair use" of copyrighted material in classrooms. Things just are not as black and white as you (and the pigopolists) would like them to be.
The GP is forgetting a major issue. He doesn't have a problem listening to his music TODAY. What about 10 years from now? How about 30? What if MS totally fails in the marketplace for music players and subscription services, and you can't buy hardware / software that supports that particular format of DRM'ed music anymore?
I have albums over 50 years old that I can still play, and due to the lack of DRM I can easily convert them into OGG / MP3 and play them on the latest music players. I can keep converting them and enjoy my DRM free music for the rest of my life. It's VERY VERY unlikely that the GP will have that same ability.