WOW. Talk about OFF-TOPIC. But let's cover what is perhaps the most salient point of your ramble:
People don't want to consider the possibility that their well-meaning thoughts are a joke and that a $200 truckload of rice would be of more use than Wi-Fi in the middle of nowhere.
Eh, that's a negative. If you want to see what foreign subsidies for basic items like food can do for (to) a local economy, one need look no further than Haiti.
Remember that the basis of economy is in commodities like food, clothing, and the like. These are the foundations of economy; everybody needs these items. And conveniently enough, they require very little economic infrastructure to develop. You plant seeds in wet soil to grow food. You spin fibers and cure hides to make clothing. Neither requires anything beyond 10th century technology to develop.
But subsidies short-circuit this basic economy. Your $200 truck full of rice (delivered for free) is cheaper than locally developed food. So, the very basics of the economy are devastated. Even such basic acts as growing a goat and feeding it garbage becomes not worth doing. The end result!? Nobody grows food, the population becomes less capable, they never develop the wealth necessary wealth to move into more advanced economy, and the area is now permanently depressed.
Take your $200 truck full of rice and cram it up your backside.
The OLPC provides the following REAL BENEFITS to the local economies:
1) It doesn't devastate the basic economy by its presence. Local folks can still grow food, dig ditches, and make basic clothing free of charge.
2) Due to its connection to the Internet, it becomes a replacement for an unlimited number of text books and reference material. Wikipedia, anyone?
3) Today's economy is not based on mass-based wealth, it's based on information flow. OLPC allows for the lowest-cost participation into this incredible world economy.
4) It provides the "disparity of wealth" scenario necessary for the impoverished to see that things can be better. Bill Clinton once commented on this: People who grow up in an "only-poor" neighborhood stay poor. The kids never see that there even is a world that's better, or at least, never see that they could ever have a part in it. Since they aren't exposed to it, well-off neighborhoods might as well be on the moon.
Children who are raised in a mixed neighborhood, with both poor and wealthy see the economic disparity, and are exposed to the culture of wealth. They have opportunity to better consider their position, and will realistically evaluate the costs of becoming wealthier. They are far, far more likely to decide that they don't want to be poor as adults and exert the appropriate effort necessary to make this happen.
By exposing the 3rd world to the Internet, where the wealthy are more accessible, more of the poor will not only decide on a better life, they'll have the means to do it, too.
Only history will tell if this project will really, ultimately succeed. But it's already succeeded at one thing: It's brought the cost of access to the most powerful information processing system ever devised to the lowest point it's ever been. The ripples of this will affect mankind for generations.
Right, because developing a cross-platform application that works with Mac OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, and Server 2003, and Linux requires intimate knowledge of UAC, on this thing called "MSDN", for something that worked wonderfully in every version of Windows prior to this one...
It's not that Microsoft has broken retro-compatibility, they've just enhanced forward incompatibility! Of course! Why didn't I figure that out before?!?!?
I like how your linked website downloads random binary files. I'd guess that this is a MALWARE site... (running the GNU "file" command on the binary indicated it as "data" - unknown)
What I find most funny is a lot of/. has fallen in love with XP in their fight against Vista.
Don't confuse "falling in love" with "choosing the lesser of two evils". For all the nasty, ridiculous, and lame qualities that XP manages to invoke, Vista is simply far, far, worse. As a software vendor, Vista has been a TRAIN WRECK for us, despite fairly extensive testing with Vista B2. It's as though the O/S is specifically engineered to prevent you from actually doing *anything* with it. For example, it requires some SEVEN "Yes, I approve" clicks to install our application from the website.
Yes. SEVEN. "I agree to download the executable". "I agree to save the executable". "I agree to run the program" "I know it's an installer and might install something". "Yes, I'd like to install everything." "Yes, I agree to let the installer install something in Program Files" "Yes, I agree to let the installer update the registry".
Only ONE of those prompts is ours, the "I want to install everything". This is not security. This is teaching your users to frustratedly click "OK" on every dialog box they see without reading them.
Which then worsens problems for us. We now find many of our tech support calls involve users complaining about a problem that has a fix they've already been notified about.
Example: User calls, having problem claiming attendance, saying that "they get an error" and that's it. The error that they saw briefly and clicked "OK" on as quickly as possible (without reading) said something like: "You set the enrollment dates incorrectly in your program, and so we cannot find the school calendar to claim attendance on. Please check the student's enrollment date and try again.".
Training your users to ignore notice boxes by throwing lots of meaningless ones up does not improve security, it increases human/machine interface tension and results in frustrated, ineffective users.
Porting our application to OSX originally took us a month. Porting it over to Leopard was done in a day, with no complaints. The only change since 10.3 for us has been that Leopard removed the requirement to call X11 expressly. Now actually EASIER to write X11 apps for OSX, our application bombed after hunting for X11 binaries and not finding them.
Once we can stop spam from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner.
Way to go, Captain Obvious!
This goes down in history with other sayings of similar caliber, such as
1) "Once we can stop scams from being profitable, we will finally see them go away. But no sooner."
2) "Once we can stop prostitution from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner."
3) "Once we can stop theft from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner."
Somehow, despite having 4,000 years of civilization to work on these ills, the appropriate technology to eradicate these plagues has never been concocted. I'd wager that spam is not a technical problem, it's a human problem. And so long as we have A) money and B) an Internet, there will be spam.
See, there is no clear definition of spam. If I send you a direct, personal, business email that you are expecting while we're on the phone when you ask me for a quote, that's clearly not spam. And if I write a program to send out 100,000 "P3niz Pil1z" emails, that's clearly spam. But there are a MILLION shades of grey in between the two.
A) I could personalize the Peniz pil1z so that they have your name at the top.
B) I could randomize the text in the Peniz pil1z email. I could restrict the list of recipients to only those who have, at some point in the distant past, looked at a porn site.
C) I could send emails to clients of email lists in clear areas of interest to my email. EG: Send an email pronouncing my new electronic pilot gadget only to registered pilots and/or plane owners.
With each modification, we move further away from "pure" spam, towards "legitimate" commercial email.
D) I could send a quote to people who have called or contacted people in my business, even though they didn't ask for anything like my quote.
E) I could send the quote to people who have contacted my business, who didn't ask for the current quote, but have asked about something similar.
F) I could send the quote to you persuant to a conversation, even though you didn't ask for it, if/when you have asked about something similar.
G) Finally, we're over to the other extreme. You are a pilot, you want my gadget, and you are asking me for a quote, which I send you.
And there's no sharp line between the two extremes. I get emails I don't mind too much from G down to around D without personally minding too much. I get annoyed at C and anything below that is below my line. But there are plenty of people who get offended at anything below G!
In the real world, we have real, physical rules that determine what we, the "users" have to live with. Cops and the like work within those rules but since they don't make the rules of the universe itself, represent (at best) a 2nd-rate answer.
That cops can't enforce the law 100% is due to the fact that they didn't make the universe; that onus belongs to either God or a random Higgs field.
Here, however, the programmers are god-like. They make the rules of the universe. All of it. Therefore, the onus DOES fall on them. If they take money for goods that then get taken in a universe they otherwise control, shame on them.
It's little different than if you were a merchant and sold somebody a widget that was then stolen before delivery. Regardless of the mugger, you're still obligated to deliver the sold widget or return the money. The store you own is "your universe" and you are obligated to perform as expected within it.
Now, if, within the rules of the game, somebody swindles somebody else, then that onus belongs on either the sucker (buyer beware!) or the swindler (cradle-to-grave) but that's more of a political decision between the users of the game since the universal law of the universe/game has not been broken.
And throwing up your mp3s on the band web site is trivial when you're a local hit and expecting a couple thousand downloads; it's not quite the same when you're hoping for millions of downloads.
I guess you haven't heard of Bit Torrent which does a remarkably effective job of scaling to massive sizes without linear increases in bandwidth usage? Yes, that big, oppressive black thing is the rock you've been hiding under - get out!
At one point, suprnova.org related traffic accounted for something like 40% of all the traffic on the Internet. Yes, 40%, internationally. You can be quite certain that they had nowhere near that kind of hosting capacity directly...
Up to the connection/process limits of the server, BitTorrent allows you to serve 1000 clients with virtually no increase in total bandwidth usage over serving maybe 2-5 clients with HTTP.
No, it's not quite the same as Deezer's "on demand" music system but it still allows for massive distribution of material at minimal cost.
> "As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as good as the real thing."
Yeah, most of my pet spywares fail to run correctly under wine.
Actually, I get the distinct feeling, with Vista, the Wine is really, really close to a tipping point. Wine is an example of Microsoft losing control of their API. Go ahead, read the linked article, then re-read this post.
Assume that:
1) Microsoft's core strength is their Win32 API, with massive investments by business and companies the world over in it.
2) Microsoft is losing the ability to alter their own API. Much like Intel trying to "clean up" the i386 architecture with the Itanic (I mean, Itanium) only to be slapped back by AMD's Opteron chipset,
3) As Microsoft's implementation of the Win32 API becomes increasingly hassle-prone, their apparent value will drop while re-implementations of the Win32 API (Read: Wine) continue to improve.
Already, most software works or "mostly works" with Wine. I routinely run IE with Flash on my Fedora Core 6 laptop in Wine. How long before Wine becomes a "target platform" for software vendors who are otherwise locked into the Win32 API?
I'm guessing that day is within 5 years, maybe as little as two years, if Apple gets in on the act as well. I mean, what Windows-based software vendor ISN'T going to make sure their Win32 applications don't work under Apple/Wine if it's officially blessed by Apple?
sounds like there is a business selling physically destructable drives - a drive witha an easy open case, and a method to physcially damage the platter
I bought one a year or two ago. I love it. It's the size of my thumb, runs on a single AAA battery for days, plays mp3s and radio, has a mic so I can record whatever, stores 1 GB of songs (enough for a good jog, which is what I primarily use it for) and I can use it like a flash thumb drive with a simple 8" cable.
It cost me $75 when a 1 GB Nano was costing $250. Oh, and my wife has a Nano. It sucks. The UI for itunes is counter-intuitive and crash-prone on Windows. Once you get the songs onto it, it does a good job of shuffling and managing, but it doesn't play the radio, and you can't record anything at all with it.
You need to move upscale. Forget "fixing das 'puter" - move into "information management services", where $150/hour is cheap. If you can't easily differentiate yourself from the neighbor's "smart teen" then you don't offer much of value. Change careers - you are doomed in the one you are in.
If you have trouble differentiating your services, then get better at differentiating your services, or move into a market where you can make obvious your differences!
We won't know that there is competition in the marketplace until another monopoly has replaced Microsoft's monopoly.
Wha.. you're kidding, right?
Who does all our searching, all our mapping, all our email, pictures, all our website ads, all the products for sale, all the books we might want to buy, and now, all our alternative power?
If you thought of a company whose name rhymes with "moogle" I'd say you are right on the mark. Google has grown to incredible dominance in an incredibly short period of time. If they continue to play their cards right, they will definitely end up as the unseating monopoly.
The amount of power being amassed by the Googleplex makes Skynet look like an underachiever...
If I hadn't checked the UID of the poster, I'd swear I wrote this.
PHP is a WONDERFUL language for development. It's very flexible, fast, easily developed, and has so many extensions to it you can solve just about anything. And it scales very, very nicely. (I use PHP to process tens of thousands of student records in California - it does the job nicely, reliably, 24x7)
The only difference is that I use PHP4 for just about everything, and haven't made the switch to PHP5, yet. (I have a very, very VERY large code base and all our servers are based on RedHat/CentOS 4, which comes with PHP4)
Since PHP4 is now EOL'd as of this winter, we'll be making the switch to PHP5 probably sometime before next summer if all goes reasonably well...
And now our lack of vision as a nation and bureaucratical hassles have pushed the date even beyond that. It's a sad time to be an American. If only we had the drive of the Apollo era.
It's in a bold step of aggressive direction that the 'Prez has led us to this great vision of greatness, to reach Mars sometime in about 15 years! Children not even born yet will be in Junior High when we make it!
Er, not.
This is just political posturing. The lame-duck President gets kudos for being "visionary" without actually doing anything but talking out his arse. NASA gets some (much needed) press, and the Chinese get a message that maybe we aren't completely out of the race to space round II.
But it means nothing, the administration will change, priorities will change LONG before we even get a prototype ANYTHING constructed, and the "vision of the trip" to Mars is half-hearted, even if its proponents aren't.
But most people think of NASA as this huge, labyrinthine gubbmint agency with nearly unlimited dollars. But when you look at it, we spend 200 times as much money killing people as we spend putting anybody in space.
And yet, space projects have had an amazing ROI. For example, the amount of money spent deploying the GPS system is dwarfed by the taxes earned by all the products and services based on the GPS system, notwithstanding its original military-oriented benefits. Research that went into solar panels, rechargeable batteries, materials research, etc. continue to provide incredible economic benefits today, year after year.
It's like somebody upstairs is intentionally shooting us all in the collective foot - just pisses me off to no end.
Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely f-BEEP-k up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?
I'm with you on this one. (as I type away on my Mac-mini) I would be UTTERLY LIVID if a Windows update horked my grub bootloader, Apple deserves no less rage for this shenanigan. Apple, are you listening?
I have a problem with them dictating what I can and can't do with their stuff, especially when they'd previously indicated that I can do this. And no, I don't have boot camp. I don't care about boot camp. I have computers running Linux, Windows, and MacOS all throughout my house. (I'm a CTO / Software engineer, I have about a dozen computers in my house right now)
When you buy a product, ANY product, there's an implied agreement. I don't expect to run OSX on any old computer - it has to be an Apple; but in exchange for this limitation I expect drivers and such to be more or less a non-issue, which it pretty much always has been. (The latest OSX doesn't work on my ancient cherry 400 Mhz PPC iMac anymore... ugh) OSX is the most closed OS around - it's locked to specific hardware, there are no drivers that I can download anywhere, and it works how it works or I load in binary hacks that jeopordize the stability of the system.
Windows, on the other hand, is more open. In exchange for a bit of roughness around drivers and such, I get the opportunity to run it on anything X86. (Even newer Macs!) I don't get to modify the OS per se, but there are plenty of ports for drivers, software, etc. that extend, tweak, and refine the operations of the OS.
Linux is the most open. Everything is available to me, including sources. But I'm in the wild-wild west if I should do *anything* unusual. I can literally create my own Operating System from the ground up, line-by-line if I desire, with Linux. This degree of openness is really more than I can handle, so I make a subsequent deal with a distributor (in my case, Red Hat) to box-up the Operating System and provide a consistent experience so that I can rely on various things to be present, including drivers and such.
Counter-intuitively, the support structure for Linux is most like Macintosh - I have to make sure I have supported hardware, and if a particular piece of hardware hasn't been blessed by your particular distro, you have to resort to some weird hacks and custom-compiled software, but within that, management is a dream, and usually "just works".
For example, to load a CentOS/RedHat system from install to completely updated requires just a load, a single up2date (or yum -y update) command, and a single reboot. Raw hardware to fully updated in under an hour. MacOS is very similar. Windows takes 2 days of updates, driver downloads, and reboots. I can only use CentOS/Ubuntu with hardware on their HCL, unless I want to pull up the sleeves and spend an afternoon dickering. These qualities are much like MacOS.
From a management perspective, RedHat/Ubuntu == Apple.
Smooth, frankly, after rockstar got caught lying to the ratings boards with GTA:VC, they should at the very least be treated very harshly.
I'm sorry? What are you referring to? The only thing I'm aware of is the scandal around "Hot Coffee" for GTA:SA. And although the content was technically "on the disk", it wasn't accessible in any form without downloading and installing a mod. Functionally not any different than not including it at all.
PLUS who, after rockstar's recent history of incompetence, would start going round attacking the reputation of others? This smacks of the whole childish nature of the company.
"History of incompetence"? Meaning what - producing fun, interactive games that people like? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Rockstar produces great games that are fun to play. If you call their stuff "porn" then you really need to get acquainted with Google's "SafeSearch" feature...
Facebooks' policy is, and has always been, "It's better to ask forgiveness, than permission" with regards to policy.
Who cares about this? What's important is the long-term trend. Computers are networked. They are growing in power and complexity at an exponential rate. The algorithms for data processing and pattern-recognition software are being worked out at lightning speed.
Computers are sharing information. And, once leaked, it's basically impossible to contain it. And once leaked, this information is available for an indeterminate period of time - forever?
Why forever? Since storage capacity is growing exponentially, the need to purge old data is dropping exponentially, too. I have, on DVD, a hard disk image of my entire computer at around 1999. It's about 1 GB of data, and was a real hassle to get together back when I made it. But now, I've got a copy in a folder in my home directory on my Laptop, which has 160 GB HDD. It's not enough space for me to care - my disk usage is floating around 75% now, including my entire MP3 collection. (which dwarfs my old HDD)
I'm probably going to keep that old disk image, along with its ancient copy of freecell.exe forever. Not because I care at all about freecell.exe, but because the cost of actually deleting that file is far greater than the cost of keeping it around.
And so it is with leaked, marginally valuable information - the cost of leaving it "hanging around" is lower than the cost of identifying exactly what it is and deleting it. So this leaked information tends to "stick around" forever, and we have pattern recognition, AI, and search algorithms improving rapidly, which dramatically reduces the cost of identifying and reprocessing this marginal information. The end result is a human/machine meta-creature, a sort of swarm-like social animal like ants but with a common, shared intellect, lots like the GAIA from (you guessed it!) Asimov's Foundation series!
"Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."
Uh huh... Nuclear reactions are not chemical in nature... spokesperson without a clue.
But on a side note, am I the only one who thought of Asimov's Foundation series, when the Foundationers had nuclear reactors the size of walnuts???
Seriously, predicting traffic is pretty much a black art. Even if you build out for what you thought would be enough, you still could get caught flatfooted.
Hear Hear! This man speaks wisdom!
A year ago, I purchased a number of 1u 4-way servers in anticipation of rising demand. Based on rough guess of processing speed and current workload, I made an estimate of how long these servers would handle the load.
Now, a year has gone by, and the load has only risen slightly, despite a dramatic increase in traffic! Bandwidth has risen sharply, yet the server load still floats at around 3-5% all day long, while based on my past estimates, would should be routinely hitting 25% and spiking to 200% from time to time.
It's rare that it ever hits 20%. But disk usage is out through the roof - now at about 3x initial guess. Our customers are USING THE CRAP out of our services, but apparently refinements in the software over the past year (caching, etc) have all but completely negated any performance hit from the increased load.
Ok, gotcha now. This is pretty !@# kewl. Now, picture that helicopter at 100% real size. Now picture yourself as a passenger in said aircraft. Then it's more like whoh, just WEARFGH.. BLEHWHAHAH...
The stunts themselves aren't particularly eye-catching. The first (landing the chopper on the slope) is similar to what I was taught as a pilot for emergency landing procedure on an upslope - approach on the fast side, then "pull back" to climb up the slope as close to the ground as you can without touching. As you climb, your airspeed will drop unusually quickly, and you'll "drop" onto the upwards slope.
The latter stunt is proof that when you connect a very large engine to a very light airframe, you can do some "funny" stuff. It's basically hanging on the prop at 100% vertical. You can only do this when you burn 4-10x the fuel per hour that your average airplane does. There's a *reason* planes don't take off like this! (damned expensive!) But if you want to see what this looks like with a real pilot (instead of some model) go ahead and check it out!
What's amazing here is that these stunts are being performed using NO PILOT and it's not remote controlled. It's a computer doing this!
Is is just me or we're slowly going back to square one? That is, to the days when all you had was a terminal connected to a time sharing system you paid to rent resources from?
It's just you. We aren't heading back to "square one" - the world where you had a terminal connected to a time-sharing system you paid to rent resources from. But that original world still exists, and in certain situations, still makes lots of sense.
1) Accessing applications online with vendors on their systems means that support costs are dramatically reduced - since the vendor controls the ultimate application execution environment, the possibility of conflicts with strange situations and other software is reduced to near zero.
2) The "time sharing" system called "slashdot.org" is what you typed your post into. So is "http://maps.google.com". Are you moving "backward" by posting? In other words, it's not a step "backwards", but it might be a step "towards".
3) Your browser isn't a dumb terminal. You can "do it yourself" if you can do a better job. But if you can't, and the remote application provider can, you'll lose. Get used to it... it's called competition.
If you want to *own* it, you better have it to begin with. Until then, find somebody who has what you need and pay them. Even when you "buy" software, it's only good for a while until the O/S updates and your version is no longer usable/compatable.
Sure. I just have a hard time believing that he actually has people making image files routinely in the fashion he/she describes, without inadvertently giving some actual detail that would indicate its truth.
I used to really like Microsoft products. I used to look forward to when they came out with new products. I also used to like Monsanto for their *engineering*. Reality is they both have too much in common.
Reality is that $EVIL_CORPORATION==$CORPORATION. Corps have their ups and downs. If it wasn't for corps, (or some other similar social mechanism) you couldn't possibly have your $20 Nike shoes or your safe, reliable car.
Corps are a logical extension of biology, where a group of people come together and function like a single organism. Like cells coming together to make a new, more powerful organism, corporations have to compete with other organisms for resources to survive. Unlike biological organisms, a corporation can grow to any size, and has no definite lifespan.
The "food" of a corporation is money. And a corp has no soul, has no "ethic" and is only restrained by the rule of enforced law. If it can do it to make money, it pretty much will. And if law restricts that, it will frequently find a way around it. Welcome to resource management in a day in the life of a corp.
Open Format is truly what is needed to create competition. As long as the documents are interoperable across applications, then the applications will have to compete on best of breed, not best of lock in. And, as a bonus if the formats are open, then the worry of data loss due to format loss or is much lower. How many times I have had to pull something from an archive in the Microsoft world only to find none of the current tools can open a document that old (happens in law and finance).
I don't think we need to worry too much about ODF. Yes, it's important, but it's also pretty much inevitable. Products and services have a long-standing tendency to transition from closed to open (or at least, more open) formats. Copyrights (eventually) expire, telephones were once completely closed and owned by the phone company and there used to be no choice in picking one, cable companies used to own everything up to the tv, etc.
That is one of the reasons everyone I have worked with keeps digital images of their documents. They are still human readable, though it does defeat several of the strengths of digitally stored documents.
I call BULL5H1T!
Sorry if I have a little trouble buying this one, unless it's merely an indication that you haven't worked with *anyone*. You're saying that *everyone* that you have worked with keeps digital images (EG: JPEGs) of their documents? Not PDF or something open and *intended* to be an open, readable archive format? While the rest of your post seemed reasonably well thought out, I just can't swallow this bit...
What do you all think? Will Microsoft go for the long term takeover or try to force the issue now (and why do you think so)?
Uh, it will try to force the issue (kill ODF) now so that can go for the long term takeover. It will either fail immediately or fail within 5 years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
WOW. Talk about OFF-TOPIC. But let's cover what is perhaps the most salient point of your ramble:
People don't want to consider the possibility that their well-meaning thoughts are a joke and that a $200 truckload of rice would be of more use than Wi-Fi in the middle of nowhere.
Eh, that's a negative. If you want to see what foreign subsidies for basic items like food can do for (to) a local economy, one need look no further than Haiti.
Remember that the basis of economy is in commodities like food, clothing, and the like. These are the foundations of economy; everybody needs these items. And conveniently enough, they require very little economic infrastructure to develop. You plant seeds in wet soil to grow food. You spin fibers and cure hides to make clothing. Neither requires anything beyond 10th century technology to develop.
But subsidies short-circuit this basic economy. Your $200 truck full of rice (delivered for free) is cheaper than locally developed food. So, the very basics of the economy are devastated. Even such basic acts as growing a goat and feeding it garbage becomes not worth doing. The end result!? Nobody grows food, the population becomes less capable, they never develop the wealth necessary wealth to move into more advanced economy, and the area is now permanently depressed.
Take your $200 truck full of rice and cram it up your backside.
The OLPC provides the following REAL BENEFITS to the local economies:
1) It doesn't devastate the basic economy by its presence. Local folks can still grow food, dig ditches, and make basic clothing free of charge.
2) Due to its connection to the Internet, it becomes a replacement for an unlimited number of text books and reference material. Wikipedia, anyone?
3) Today's economy is not based on mass-based wealth, it's based on information flow. OLPC allows for the lowest-cost participation into this incredible world economy.
4) It provides the "disparity of wealth" scenario necessary for the impoverished to see that things can be better. Bill Clinton once commented on this: People who grow up in an "only-poor" neighborhood stay poor. The kids never see that there even is a world that's better, or at least, never see that they could ever have a part in it. Since they aren't exposed to it, well-off neighborhoods might as well be on the moon.
Children who are raised in a mixed neighborhood, with both poor and wealthy see the economic disparity, and are exposed to the culture of wealth. They have opportunity to better consider their position, and will realistically evaluate the costs of becoming wealthier. They are far, far more likely to decide that they don't want to be poor as adults and exert the appropriate effort necessary to make this happen.
By exposing the 3rd world to the Internet, where the wealthy are more accessible, more of the poor will not only decide on a better life, they'll have the means to do it, too.
Only history will tell if this project will really, ultimately succeed. But it's already succeeded at one thing: It's brought the cost of access to the most powerful information processing system ever devised to the lowest point it's ever been. The ripples of this will affect mankind for generations.
Right, because developing a cross-platform application that works with Mac OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, and Server 2003, and Linux requires intimate knowledge of UAC, on this thing called "MSDN", for something that worked wonderfully in every version of Windows prior to this one...
It's not that Microsoft has broken retro-compatibility, they've just enhanced forward incompatibility! Of course! Why didn't I figure that out before?!?!?
I like how your linked website downloads random binary files. I'd guess that this is a MALWARE site... (running the GNU "file" command on the binary indicated it as "data" - unknown)
What I find most funny is a lot of /. has fallen in love with XP in their fight against Vista.
Don't confuse "falling in love" with "choosing the lesser of two evils". For all the nasty, ridiculous, and lame qualities that XP manages to invoke, Vista is simply far, far, worse. As a software vendor, Vista has been a TRAIN WRECK for us, despite fairly extensive testing with Vista B2. It's as though the O/S is specifically engineered to prevent you from actually doing *anything* with it. For example, it requires some SEVEN "Yes, I approve" clicks to install our application from the website.
Yes. SEVEN. "I agree to download the executable". "I agree to save the executable". "I agree to run the program" "I know it's an installer and might install something". "Yes, I'd like to install everything." "Yes, I agree to let the installer install something in Program Files" "Yes, I agree to let the installer update the registry".
Only ONE of those prompts is ours, the "I want to install everything". This is not security. This is teaching your users to frustratedly click "OK" on every dialog box they see without reading them.
Which then worsens problems for us. We now find many of our tech support calls involve users complaining about a problem that has a fix they've already been notified about.
Example: User calls, having problem claiming attendance, saying that "they get an error" and that's it. The error that they saw briefly and clicked "OK" on as quickly as possible (without reading) said something like: "You set the enrollment dates incorrectly in your program, and so we cannot find the school calendar to claim attendance on. Please check the student's enrollment date and try again.".
Training your users to ignore notice boxes by throwing lots of meaningless ones up does not improve security, it increases human/machine interface tension and results in frustrated, ineffective users.
Porting our application to OSX originally took us a month. Porting it over to Leopard was done in a day, with no complaints. The only change since 10.3 for us has been that Leopard removed the requirement to call X11 expressly. Now actually EASIER to write X11 apps for OSX, our application bombed after hunting for X11 binaries and not finding them.
Once we can stop spam from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner.
Way to go, Captain Obvious!
This goes down in history with other sayings of similar caliber, such as
1) "Once we can stop scams from being profitable, we will finally see them go away. But no sooner."
2) "Once we can stop prostitution from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner."
3) "Once we can stop theft from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner."
Somehow, despite having 4,000 years of civilization to work on these ills, the appropriate technology to eradicate these plagues has never been concocted. I'd wager that spam is not a technical problem, it's a human problem. And so long as we have A) money and B) an Internet, there will be spam.
See, there is no clear definition of spam. If I send you a direct, personal, business email that you are expecting while we're on the phone when you ask me for a quote, that's clearly not spam. And if I write a program to send out 100,000 "P3niz Pil1z" emails, that's clearly spam. But there are a MILLION shades of grey in between the two.
A) I could personalize the Peniz pil1z so that they have your name at the top.
B) I could randomize the text in the Peniz pil1z email. I could restrict the list of recipients to only those who have, at some point in the distant past, looked at a porn site.
C) I could send emails to clients of email lists in clear areas of interest to my email. EG: Send an email pronouncing my new electronic pilot gadget only to registered pilots and/or plane owners.
With each modification, we move further away from "pure" spam, towards "legitimate" commercial email.
D) I could send a quote to people who have called or contacted people in my business, even though they didn't ask for anything like my quote.
E) I could send the quote to people who have contacted my business, who didn't ask for the current quote, but have asked about something similar.
F) I could send the quote to you persuant to a conversation, even though you didn't ask for it, if/when you have asked about something similar.
G) Finally, we're over to the other extreme. You are a pilot, you want my gadget, and you are asking me for a quote, which I send you.
And there's no sharp line between the two extremes. I get emails I don't mind too much from G down to around D without personally minding too much. I get annoyed at C and anything below that is below my line. But there are plenty of people who get offended at anything below G!
It's entirely a personal, subjective decision.
In the real world, we have real, physical rules that determine what we, the "users" have to live with. Cops and the like work within those rules but since they don't make the rules of the universe itself, represent (at best) a 2nd-rate answer.
That cops can't enforce the law 100% is due to the fact that they didn't make the universe; that onus belongs to either God or a random Higgs field.
Here, however, the programmers are god-like. They make the rules of the universe. All of it. Therefore, the onus DOES fall on them. If they take money for goods that then get taken in a universe they otherwise control, shame on them.
It's little different than if you were a merchant and sold somebody a widget that was then stolen before delivery. Regardless of the mugger, you're still obligated to deliver the sold widget or return the money. The store you own is "your universe" and you are obligated to perform as expected within it.
Now, if, within the rules of the game, somebody swindles somebody else, then that onus belongs on either the sucker (buyer beware!) or the swindler (cradle-to-grave) but that's more of a political decision between the users of the game since the universal law of the universe/game has not been broken.
And throwing up your mp3s on the band web site is trivial when you're a local hit and expecting a couple thousand downloads; it's not quite the same when you're hoping for millions of downloads.
I guess you haven't heard of Bit Torrent which does a remarkably effective job of scaling to massive sizes without linear increases in bandwidth usage? Yes, that big, oppressive black thing is the rock you've been hiding under - get out!
At one point, suprnova.org related traffic accounted for something like 40% of all the traffic on the Internet. Yes, 40%, internationally. You can be quite certain that they had nowhere near that kind of hosting capacity directly...
Up to the connection/process limits of the server, BitTorrent allows you to serve 1000 clients with virtually no increase in total bandwidth usage over serving maybe 2-5 clients with HTTP.
No, it's not quite the same as Deezer's "on demand" music system but it still allows for massive distribution of material at minimal cost.
> "As Wine proves, any reimplementation of the Win32 API is inevitably not going to be as good as the real thing."
Yeah, most of my pet spywares fail to run correctly under wine.
Actually, I get the distinct feeling, with Vista, the Wine is really, really close to a tipping point. Wine is an example of Microsoft losing control of their API. Go ahead, read the linked article, then re-read this post.
Assume that:
1) Microsoft's core strength is their Win32 API, with massive investments by business and companies the world over in it.
2) Microsoft is losing the ability to alter their own API. Much like Intel trying to "clean up" the i386 architecture with the Itanic (I mean, Itanium) only to be slapped back by AMD's Opteron chipset,
3) As Microsoft's implementation of the Win32 API becomes increasingly hassle-prone, their apparent value will drop while re-implementations of the Win32 API (Read: Wine) continue to improve.
Already, most software works or "mostly works" with Wine. I routinely run IE with Flash on my Fedora Core 6 laptop in Wine. How long before Wine becomes a "target platform" for software vendors who are otherwise locked into the Win32 API?
I'm guessing that day is within 5 years, maybe as little as two years, if Apple gets in on the act as well. I mean, what Windows-based software vendor ISN'T going to make sure their Win32 applications don't work under Apple/Wine if it's officially blessed by Apple?
sounds like there is a business selling physically destructable drives - a drive witha an easy open case, and a method to physcially damage the platter
Actually, they already exist. They require an accessory that costs about $50.
As long as it plays music and fit in your pocket, cheap people (who happen to outnumber those interested in being hip) will flock to it.
Orly?
How do you account for this product's relative failure?
I bought one a year or two ago. I love it. It's the size of my thumb, runs on a single AAA battery for days, plays mp3s and radio, has a mic so I can record whatever, stores 1 GB of songs (enough for a good jog, which is what I primarily use it for) and I can use it like a flash thumb drive with a simple 8" cable.
It cost me $75 when a 1 GB Nano was costing $250. Oh, and my wife has a Nano. It sucks. The UI for itunes is counter-intuitive and crash-prone on Windows. Once you get the songs onto it, it does a good job of shuffling and managing, but it doesn't play the radio, and you can't record anything at all with it.
For 4x the money. WTF?
You need to move upscale. Forget "fixing das 'puter" - move into "information management services", where $150/hour is cheap. If you can't easily differentiate yourself from the neighbor's "smart teen" then you don't offer much of value. Change careers - you are doomed in the one you are in.
If you have trouble differentiating your services, then get better at differentiating your services, or move into a market where you can make obvious your differences!
Until we perfect that whole zombie thing, you're SOL, no matter how crazy Best Buy goes on their $13/hr technicians.
Do they pay them that much? I'd figured on slightly over half that....
We won't know that there is competition in the marketplace until another monopoly has replaced Microsoft's monopoly.
Wha.. you're kidding, right?
Who does all our searching, all our mapping, all our email, pictures, all our website ads, all the products for sale, all the books we might want to buy, and now, all our alternative power?
If you thought of a company whose name rhymes with "moogle" I'd say you are right on the mark. Google has grown to incredible dominance in an incredibly short period of time. If they continue to play their cards right, they will definitely end up as the unseating monopoly.
The amount of power being amassed by the Googleplex makes Skynet look like an underachiever...
If I hadn't checked the UID of the poster, I'd swear I wrote this.
PHP is a WONDERFUL language for development. It's very flexible, fast, easily developed, and has so many extensions to it you can solve just about anything. And it scales very, very nicely. (I use PHP to process tens of thousands of student records in California - it does the job nicely, reliably, 24x7)
The only difference is that I use PHP4 for just about everything, and haven't made the switch to PHP5, yet. (I have a very, very VERY large code base and all our servers are based on RedHat/CentOS 4, which comes with PHP4)
Since PHP4 is now EOL'd as of this winter, we'll be making the switch to PHP5 probably sometime before next summer if all goes reasonably well...
And now our lack of vision as a nation and bureaucratical hassles have pushed the date even beyond that. It's a sad time to be an American. If only we had the drive of the Apollo era.
It's in a bold step of aggressive direction that the 'Prez has led us to this great vision of greatness, to reach Mars sometime in about 15 years! Children not even born yet will be in Junior High when we make it!
Er, not.
This is just political posturing. The lame-duck President gets kudos for being "visionary" without actually doing anything but talking out his arse. NASA gets some (much needed) press, and the Chinese get a message that maybe we aren't completely out of the race to space round II.
But it means nothing, the administration will change, priorities will change LONG before we even get a prototype ANYTHING constructed, and the "vision of the trip" to Mars is half-hearted, even if its proponents aren't.
Personally, this hurts all involved since NASA will end up with ANOTHER black eye of "Well, you didn't get us to Mars, either, did you!" while the real underlying problem, which is that NASA gets about 1/2 of 1% of the budget that the US Military gets.
But most people think of NASA as this huge, labyrinthine gubbmint agency with nearly unlimited dollars. But when you look at it, we spend 200 times as much money killing people as we spend putting anybody in space.
And yet, space projects have had an amazing ROI. For example, the amount of money spent deploying the GPS system is dwarfed by the taxes earned by all the products and services based on the GPS system, notwithstanding its original military-oriented benefits. Research that went into solar panels, rechargeable batteries, materials research, etc. continue to provide incredible economic benefits today, year after year.
It's like somebody upstairs is intentionally shooting us all in the collective foot - just pisses me off to no end.
Can you imagine if a Windows update made your computer unable to boot if you had it set up to dual-boot into Linux? Why do people rush to the defense of Apple when they completely f-BEEP-k up and make a mockery of their cheesy "it just works" phrase?
I'm with you on this one. (as I type away on my Mac-mini) I would be UTTERLY LIVID if a Windows update horked my grub bootloader, Apple deserves no less rage for this shenanigan. Apple, are you listening?
I have a problem with them dictating what I can and can't do with their stuff, especially when they'd previously indicated that I can do this. And no, I don't have boot camp. I don't care about boot camp. I have computers running Linux, Windows, and MacOS all throughout my house. (I'm a CTO / Software engineer, I have about a dozen computers in my house right now)
When you buy a product, ANY product, there's an implied agreement. I don't expect to run OSX on any old computer - it has to be an Apple; but in exchange for this limitation I expect drivers and such to be more or less a non-issue, which it pretty much always has been. (The latest OSX doesn't work on my ancient cherry 400 Mhz PPC iMac anymore... ugh) OSX is the most closed OS around - it's locked to specific hardware, there are no drivers that I can download anywhere, and it works how it works or I load in binary hacks that jeopordize the stability of the system.
Windows, on the other hand, is more open. In exchange for a bit of roughness around drivers and such, I get the opportunity to run it on anything X86. (Even newer Macs!) I don't get to modify the OS per se, but there are plenty of ports for drivers, software, etc. that extend, tweak, and refine the operations of the OS.
Linux is the most open. Everything is available to me, including sources. But I'm in the wild-wild west if I should do *anything* unusual. I can literally create my own Operating System from the ground up, line-by-line if I desire, with Linux. This degree of openness is really more than I can handle, so I make a subsequent deal with a distributor (in my case, Red Hat) to box-up the Operating System and provide a consistent experience so that I can rely on various things to be present, including drivers and such.
Counter-intuitively, the support structure for Linux is most like Macintosh - I have to make sure I have supported hardware, and if a particular piece of hardware hasn't been blessed by your particular distro, you have to resort to some weird hacks and custom-compiled software, but within that, management is a dream, and usually "just works".
For example, to load a CentOS/RedHat system from install to completely updated requires just a load, a single up2date (or yum -y update) command, and a single reboot. Raw hardware to fully updated in under an hour. MacOS is very similar. Windows takes 2 days of updates, driver downloads, and reboots. I can only use CentOS/Ubuntu with hardware on their HCL, unless I want to pull up the sleeves and spend an afternoon dickering. These qualities are much like MacOS.
From a management perspective, RedHat/Ubuntu == Apple.
Smooth, frankly, after rockstar got caught lying to the ratings boards with GTA:VC, they should at the very least be treated very harshly.
I'm sorry? What are you referring to? The only thing I'm aware of is the scandal around "Hot Coffee" for GTA:SA. And although the content was technically "on the disk", it wasn't accessible in any form without downloading and installing a mod. Functionally not any different than not including it at all.
PLUS who, after rockstar's recent history of incompetence, would start going round attacking the reputation of others? This smacks of the whole childish nature of the company.
"History of incompetence"? Meaning what - producing fun, interactive games that people like? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Rockstar produces great games that are fun to play. If you call their stuff "porn" then you really need to get acquainted with Google's "SafeSearch" feature...
Facebooks' policy is, and has always been, "It's better to ask forgiveness, than permission" with regards to policy.
Who cares about this? What's important is the long-term trend. Computers are networked. They are growing in power and complexity at an exponential rate. The algorithms for data processing and pattern-recognition software are being worked out at lightning speed.
Computers are sharing information. And, once leaked, it's basically impossible to contain it. And once leaked, this information is available for an indeterminate period of time - forever?
Why forever? Since storage capacity is growing exponentially, the need to purge old data is dropping exponentially, too. I have, on DVD, a hard disk image of my entire computer at around 1999. It's about 1 GB of data, and was a real hassle to get together back when I made it. But now, I've got a copy in a folder in my home directory on my Laptop, which has 160 GB HDD. It's not enough space for me to care - my disk usage is floating around 75% now, including my entire MP3 collection. (which dwarfs my old HDD)
I'm probably going to keep that old disk image, along with its ancient copy of freecell.exe forever. Not because I care at all about freecell.exe, but because the cost of actually deleting that file is far greater than the cost of keeping it around.
And so it is with leaked, marginally valuable information - the cost of leaving it "hanging around" is lower than the cost of identifying exactly what it is and deleting it. So this leaked information tends to "stick around" forever, and we have pattern recognition, AI, and search algorithms improving rapidly, which dramatically reduces the cost of identifying and reprocessing this marginal information. The end result is a human/machine meta-creature, a sort of swarm-like social animal like ants but with a common, shared intellect, lots like the GAIA from (you guessed it!) Asimov's Foundation series!
Asimov was a visionary in more ways than one...
Guess I'm rambling. I'll stop now.
"Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."
Uh huh... Nuclear reactions are not chemical in nature... spokesperson without a clue.
But on a side note, am I the only one who thought of Asimov's Foundation series, when the Foundationers had nuclear reactors the size of walnuts???
Seriously, though I remember something similar made in Japan that would power a remote city in Alaska for 30 years without pollution.
Yay! Go Nukular!
Seriously, predicting traffic is pretty much a black art. Even if you build out for what you thought would be enough, you still could get caught flatfooted.
Hear Hear! This man speaks wisdom!
A year ago, I purchased a number of 1u 4-way servers in anticipation of rising demand. Based on rough guess of processing speed and current workload, I made an estimate of how long these servers would handle the load.
Now, a year has gone by, and the load has only risen slightly, despite a dramatic increase in traffic! Bandwidth has risen sharply, yet the server load still floats at around 3-5% all day long, while based on my past estimates, would should be routinely hitting 25% and spiking to 200% from time to time.
It's rare that it ever hits 20%. But disk usage is out through the roof - now at about 3x initial guess. Our customers are USING THE CRAP out of our services, but apparently refinements in the software over the past year (caching, etc) have all but completely negated any performance hit from the increased load.
Ok, gotcha now. This is pretty !@# kewl. Now, picture that helicopter at 100% real size. Now picture yourself as a passenger in said aircraft. Then it's more like whoh, just WEARFGH.. BLEHWHAHAH...
Woah. Just, woah.
The stunts themselves aren't particularly eye-catching. The first (landing the chopper on the slope) is similar to what I was taught as a pilot for emergency landing procedure on an upslope - approach on the fast side, then "pull back" to climb up the slope as close to the ground as you can without touching. As you climb, your airspeed will drop unusually quickly, and you'll "drop" onto the upwards slope.
The latter stunt is proof that when you connect a very large engine to a very light airframe, you can do some "funny" stuff. It's basically hanging on the prop at 100% vertical. You can only do this when you burn 4-10x the fuel per hour that your average airplane does. There's a *reason* planes don't take off like this! (damned expensive!) But if you want to see what this looks like with a real pilot (instead of some model) go ahead and check it out!
What's amazing here is that these stunts are being performed using NO PILOT and it's not remote controlled. It's a computer doing this!
Is is just me or we're slowly going back to square one? That is, to the days when all you had was a terminal connected to a time sharing system you paid to rent resources from?
It's just you. We aren't heading back to "square one" - the world where you had a terminal connected to a time-sharing system you paid to rent resources from. But that original world still exists, and in certain situations, still makes lots of sense.
1) Accessing applications online with vendors on their systems means that support costs are dramatically reduced - since the vendor controls the ultimate application execution environment, the possibility of conflicts with strange situations and other software is reduced to near zero.
2) The "time sharing" system called "slashdot.org" is what you typed your post into. So is "http://maps.google.com". Are you moving "backward" by posting? In other words, it's not a step "backwards", but it might be a step "towards".
3) Your browser isn't a dumb terminal. You can "do it yourself" if you can do a better job. But if you can't, and the remote application provider can, you'll lose. Get used to it... it's called competition.
If you want to *own* it, you better have it to begin with. Until then, find somebody who has what you need and pay them. Even when you "buy" software, it's only good for a while until the O/S updates and your version is no longer usable/compatable.
Sure. I just have a hard time believing that he actually has people making image files routinely in the fashion he/she describes, without inadvertently giving some actual detail that would indicate its truth.
Reality is that $EVIL_CORPORATION==$CORPORATION. Corps have their ups and downs. If it wasn't for corps, (or some other similar social mechanism) you couldn't possibly have your $20 Nike shoes or your safe, reliable car.
Corps are a logical extension of biology, where a group of people come together and function like a single organism. Like cells coming together to make a new, more powerful organism, corporations have to compete with other organisms for resources to survive. Unlike biological organisms, a corporation can grow to any size, and has no definite lifespan.
The "food" of a corporation is money. And a corp has no soul, has no "ethic" and is only restrained by the rule of enforced law. If it can do it to make money, it pretty much will. And if law restricts that, it will frequently find a way around it. Welcome to resource management in a day in the life of a corp.
Open Format is truly what is needed to create competition. As long as the documents are interoperable across applications, then the applications will have to compete on best of breed, not best of lock in. And, as a bonus if the formats are open, then the worry of data loss due to format loss or is much lower. How many times I have had to pull something from an archive in the Microsoft world only to find none of the current tools can open a document that old (happens in law and finance).
I don't think we need to worry too much about ODF. Yes, it's important, but it's also pretty much inevitable. Products and services have a long-standing tendency to transition from closed to open (or at least, more open) formats. Copyrights (eventually) expire, telephones were once completely closed and owned by the phone company and there used to be no choice in picking one, cable companies used to own everything up to the tv, etc.
That is one of the reasons everyone I have worked with keeps digital images of their documents. They are still human readable, though it does defeat several of the strengths of digitally stored documents.
I call BULL5H1T!
Sorry if I have a little trouble buying this one, unless it's merely an indication that you haven't worked with *anyone*. You're saying that *everyone* that you have worked with keeps digital images (EG: JPEGs) of their documents? Not PDF or something open and *intended* to be an open, readable archive format? While the rest of your post seemed reasonably well thought out, I just can't swallow this bit...
What do you all think? Will Microsoft go for the long term takeover or try to force the issue now (and why do you think so)?
Uh, it will try to force the issue (kill ODF) now so that can go for the long term takeover. It will either fail immediately or fail within 5 years or so.