If you wrote a webmail client in "PHP-GTK", could I drag&drop a file into the email window to attach it to the email?
Yes.
Until you can, web-apps will never be of the same quality as regular applications.
PHP-GTK apps are not "web" apps. They are scripts that can be downloaded. They don't need to be compiled - they are scripts. PHP is usually used for server-sided website processing. But it also works very well as a shell or client script, comparable to Java or Python in many ways.
If I'm writing an email in your hypothetical "PHP-GTK" client, and I correct a misspelled word by saying "Add to Dictionary," will it add it to the OS X system-wide dictionary?
Can - but you have to be careful. Is your application going to focus on being cross-platform, or on being tightly integrated? There's a new saw at work: A) cross-platform, B) cheaply developed, or C) tightly integrated with the O/S. Pick any two.
Outlook/Exchange has a nice online webmail client, but do you know anybody who uses it instead of Outlook when sitting at their desk at work? No, because actual Outlook is quicker, more integrated with the OS, can pop up reminders in the system tray when your meeting is coming up, etc... it does more than a web-app does, and it does it faster and easier.
Except that, increasingly, software, especially web-based software, is being used to coordinate the enterprise organization cohesively. In this environment, the advantage gained by this coordination can quickly and easily outweight the advantages of drag and drop or having a dictionary that integrates with the O/S.
And don't think that "enterprise organization" means some megacorp. "Enterprise" today can mean your local school district, fire department, or your local newspaper. All of these have numerous and consistent requirements for coordination, and all of these can benefit from the appropriate use of centralized information technology.
You don't use a hammer to drive screws, and a drill is worthless with nails. Each has their set of advantages and disadvantages. We'll continue to see the evolution of both technologies.
I won't expect a web-based first-person shooter anymore than I expect a client-side auction site.
I think that history will point to the Massachusetts move to require an open format as the watershed moment, where Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry began to falter. Because that poor IT director who lost his job in the noise and tumult pointed out to the world that the Emporor, indeed, was not wearing any clothes. Generations from now, ODF will most likely be the standard for public document archives, and the culture and technicalities of documents drawn from our generation will still be available, thanks to the guts and drive of a single man who (ironically) lost his job for accurately identifying one of the most significant problems of the decade.
The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database.......which would then get loaded into the 'official' campus address book for use by faculty and other students.......
Yep, folks - somebody else has discovered the purpose of LDAP! Seriously, I wouldn't want a temporary university address, why would anybody else? I only use my work email address for related work. I've owned my own domain names for years simply to guarantee the consistency of my email address, which has remained unchanged for over 8 years now.
But anybody and everybody can register a freebie account at gmail or hotmail or cia.com.
If you think back, way back when Windows 95 was out people were making the same prediction that web-apps would replace OSes and in the future the only OS would be the web-browser. It didn't happen then, and it won't happen now-- because web-apps suck. The only solution is to write a new internet protocol (not HTTP) designed specifically to run apps from a server... but by that point, you might as well just run the Windows app over a fileshare because it's the same thing.
Don't confuse "didn't" with "shouldn't" or "couldn't", as in "Web apps didn't obviate the need for an Operating System".
I write applications in PHP-GTK. The PHP-GTK libraries are (in package form) about 15 MB. The application code for the program I work on takes about 1.5 MB total. With DSL speeds making this download trivial, why wouldn't this be a perfectly good platform for web-app development?
Java came close with a similar model. It can happen - but the environment needs to be better standardized to make this happen. Methinks this is inevitable, just a question of time.
I have two Macs (1 Intel Mac mini, one PPC iMac) and 1 Dell laptop. But the situation is very unbalanced. See, I need TWO Macs to be able to support the Mac platform with my software (based on PHP-GTK) but the Dell allows me (with VMWare) to support all flavors of Windows, as well as Linux and BSD.
Yeah, I could do Parallels on an Intel Mac, but I prefer RH/KDE over OSX for my host O/S. So the whole situation seems somewhat out of whack. I certainly get ALOT more out of my Dell than either Mac.
That said, I've certainly warmed up to the Mac since I've had to support it, and when people start bitching about their computer viruses and worms, I end the conversation with "Get a Mac. Seriously.". That usually ends the conversation, because the idea of doing something, you know, DIFFERENT to fix the problem rather than just deal honestly doesn't seem to occur to most folks.
So here's a word to the wise: if you don't want people bitching about their computer to you, just tell them to get a Mac. And then they'll leave you alone.
Oh, and the idea that the Mac is about to take a commanding lead in the home computer space is... BULLSHIZNIT. Come on. Macs work, but everybody wants to be the "computer guru". Knowing all the quirks of a crappy O/S therefore appeals to the redneck wannabe who gets IDE cables with blue and yellow LED lights. Granted, they couldn't explain the difference between a MAC address and an IP address, they still manage to spout enough technical terminology to impress. Since they are (apparently) admired by the clueless who think the Control Panel is beyond them, Windows becomes the defacto standard for another round.
On a side note, since I'm obviously rambling, has anybody noticed that Windows as a gaming platform is rapidly dying off? Go to your local games/software store, and notice how much rack space is devoted to Windows - in my local uber mall, it's down to a single rack! Windows dying as a gaming platform really means that Macs and *nix really do become a more viable contender for what's left of "the desktop"...
I did something similar - everybody in my house was watching TV/YouTube and weren't doing their homework.
So I killed youtube.com with a simple DNS entry. If you're worried about "rogue" DNS setups, just block outbound traffic to UDP port 53 from any but the designated DNS server.
Big companies do jack on their own these days, its (almost) all hired out consultants, and for good reason. Consultants are competitive, when you put an order out for bid a consultant will shave every dollar they can off the price to make sure they get the contract.
Where are these consultants you speak of? The ones I know tend to be slow, expensive, and lethargic, caught up in excessive red tape. Oh, and they charge $200/hour to manipulate contract requirements.
In my experience, consultants are called in when an administrator wants to do something unpopular, and doesn't want all the staff mad at him/her. They hire a consultant to do the dirty work, pay them very nicely, and when the dirty stuff (firings/reorganization, etc) is all done, they can "fire" the consultant, make everybody happy, and get on with it.
At this, they can be a frightfully good deal at $200 per hour.
If I wanted to concentrate on a job over things like family and a social life, I would go to med school.
You're kidding here, right?
Med school?
Is it possible that you aren't aware of the sometimes ridiculous hours and circumstances that doctors and nurses frequently have to put up with?
For that matter, is there a profession that doesn't come with either low pay or stressful/uncomfortable working circumstances? Let's see...
1) Airline pilot - once a great career, it's now marginal. Pilots have largely lost their once prestigious retirements, and it's difficult for even a well-trained and papered pilot to get over $50,000 per year or so.
2) Lawyer - I know a couple. They are great people, and I know them as friends. They're struggling. One of them gave up lawyering to become a teacher, and they really get sick of "he-said, she-said" family law, even though that's what pays the bills.
3) Grocery clerk - great job. Frequently has benefits, the job requires very little training, and is generally pretty low stress. Wave the groceries over the laser, take money. Bugger the terrible pay.
Take a look. Economics has an amazing tendency to level the playing field. That's the job of economy - distribute wealth - and it works well at that. Jobs that are really cool and entail lots of personal passion (EG: flying, teaching, musician) also tend to pay poorly. Jobs that pay well tend to suck for some other reason. (intense training requirements, lousy job conditions)
Ever wonder how much your garbage man gets paid? Check it out - you might be surprised!
Then there is the fact that video is not the only information that eats bandwidth for breakfast. Static content - PDFs and other large documents - also devour any surplus capacity. So all an ISP needs to do is run a copy of Squid on each incoming line. How hard is that? It takes - what - all of 10 minutes to configure securely and fire up. You then forget about it.
I agree. It's stupid that ALL bandwidth is being distributed END TO END. We solved the problem of distributing content efficiently long ago with usenet. Usenet is a distributed hosted protocol with intrinsic content caching. So why aren't we using it more?
Get into our offices and it is a different story. We have dual t1s coming in and only 60+ employees, but we are constantly saturated. Combine that with the fact that Cisco Pixes have horrible throttling support and you end up with times when I can't even access basic websites very quickly. The issue here is that T1s and DS3s are freakin expensive compared to a simple cable modem. We have been tempted to get Comcast bussines ( which makes me shiver a bit ) because I can get larger down pipes for general internet surfing. We only host a few services such as email here so it isn't like we need megs of up bandwith.
What kind of traffic are you seeing the most? What kind of traffic is high vs low priority?
You might consider going ahead with that Comcast DSL and routing all the low-priority and bandwidth-sucking traffic out that pipe, while leaving the important stuff on the dual-bonded T1.
I could cook something up with an old P3, two $6 NICs, and a CentOS Linux CD using IPTables and NAT, with a few custom rules, YMMV.
I did something similar at a local ISP. Believe it or not, they used SBC DSL for their internal staff, and hosted a few thousand dinky websites on a dual-bonded T1. Websites were all served on the T1, but the internal staff got to everything but their own servers on the DSL line. Worked great.
Saying there's real competition in the wireless industry is like saying that because Sony, BMG, and Warner all make CDs, there's "real competition" in that industry.
I guess you don't live in Northern California, then. Here there's Metro PCS which offers unlimited plans starting at just $30/month. (and often cheaper, if you call when they're running ads)
They started in Sacramento, CA and the San Fransisco Bay Area, and quickly moved into my area. (Chico, CA) Just checked their coverage, and they've got areas all over the country. Not "full nationwide", yet, but certainly on their way...
This always makes me wonder about the courtroom. How do they prove that pictures and video are genuine?
They don't. At least, in California. Here, the picture is considered part of testimony.
A picture or video is almost worthless without somebody saying that it is an accurate depiction of what happened. With that, it's considered as part of the witness' testimony, sorta like a memory or recollection, only in color.
So, here, at least, a video or picture is considered as more detail in a personal statement of what happened - they are not evidence unto themselves.
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
No. But our limits of acceptability have changed. As processing power has gotten cheaper, developers (myself included) have focused more on getting features out to market faster, rather than application performance.
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
That's always been correct. We care more about how many features are available at what cost, so long as performance isn't noticably bad on commodity hardware.
Do you remember when c was considered a "high level language"? What about the debates on how slow programs written in c were? I do. Times have changed....
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well.
I don't know about that. Perhaps you don't remember loading DOS programs like PC-Write on an 8086 processer with 512K RAM? That was my word processor of choice, and it got slower the longer your document was. By the time you passed 100k, it was a dog.
Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
I sure do. I also remember the care with with I never hit the two space bars together in a graphics program. (That would universally crash my computer). It shared TEXT ok, but anything graphical was another mess entirely.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
If you don't mind me asking, what would you RATHER be writing?
There could be intelligent life inside 10 light years from us, and we wouldn't know it now; hell, we could be living on a planet seeded with life by an advanced society and we wouldn't know it...Maybe the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer. =P
Making an ignorant comment like this indicates that you have no clue what you're talking about.
Assuming that the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer, how do you explain:
1) That dinosaurs are based on the exact same system of recombinant DNA as we are?
2) That the muscular and skeletal structure of dinosaurs have, in many cases, clear and direct analogs in your very body?
3) That the small, mammalian critters (sorta like mice) that we evolved from already existed at the time of the dinosaurs' extinction?
4) That the small mammalian critters (sorta like mice) themselves have a documentable evolutionary path that carries on before the dinosaurs' extinction?
When you say "Hell, we don't know", what you're really saying is "Hell, I don't know"... please be clear on that point. You'll get much further along in your understanding of the world around you when you can recognize your own lack of knowledge.
But the sort of power you are looking at to charge batteries at that rate is enormous. Figure it out. If you have a battery that can, say, deliver 50KW for one hour, then to charge it in five minutes will require to deliver about 20% more than you get out (conversion efficiency) or a charge rate of 720KW. That's nearly 1000 horsepower in Library of Congress units. You aren't going to be passing that through a handy, easy to use electrical circuit any time soon.
Assume a "gas station". (energy station?) Assume that, in 24 hours, it can "refuel" 1,000 cars. That means that, over a 24 hour period, it must get and transfer the power to move 1,000 cars.
Now, your average 15 amp circuit has nowhere near the juice to sustain this kind of load. But there are high-voltage circuits that do. And there are hand-held insulators and the like that can make this work.
The trick is to essentially put a high-capacity capacitor at the fueling station. It can "refuel" cars in a burst, while drawing a continuous amount of power from the grid, like a large water tank with highly variable output at the spigot.
This can work, if the storage of energy is compact and efficient enough. If the actuality is anywhere close to what they claim, this solution just might be.
The fallacy is that the price of any single commodity can be used as a metric to determine the "real" cost of everything else.
Gold? Diamonds? Lattes?
All of these have monetary prices that rise and fall against other commodities as their demand and supply rise and fall. The value of real estate shot thru the roof the last 5 years. Is that because there is suddenly less of it?
No. Demand rose, caused partly by a flagging stock market which motivated investors to invest put money in real estate rather than stocks and/or mutual funds.
And adjusting for inflation is not the only factor! The total wealth of the average American has more than doubled in the last 30 years. Thus, even commodities that have not significantly risen or fallen in price over the past 30 years have gotten "cheaper" simply because the ability of the average Joe is much more able to afford it.
Most of this additional wealth comes in the form of intellectual property. Take THAT to the bank, fella...
I sure do! My own lifestyle is well supported by my role as a software engineer - 6 figures, 3000 Sq ft home, 5 happy, well-fed children (plus 2 foster children), etc. and this is all because of intellectual property that I create in large quantities...
Is this sudden abundance of oil because suddenly Exxon found a huge oil reserve under the caribou-mating grounds of the arctic? Not a chance. The reason we've got a lot of oil all of a sudden is because they can charge 3 bucks a gallon for it. See? Eighty cents a gallon and there's a shortage. Three bucks a gallon and there's abundance.
Actually, gas was MORE EXPENSIVE at $0.80 per gallon in the 1970s than it is at $3.25 per gallon today. There's this thing called "inflation", which along with its close cousin "deflation" cause the value of money to rise and fall.
Now how did that work? These "crises" are the corporate strategies for turning the usual laws of supply and demand on their head. The guys in the record business are knocking their heads against the wall trying to figure out a way to create a music crisis, right?
The reason why you see those Lincoln Navigators (shudder) along the Kennedy Expressway is that the average American is far wealthier than in the 1970s. Gasoline thus represents a much smaller percentage of total income, so the higher gas prices have less effect.
Think about it: how many $4 lattes were there in 1970? Oh wait, you probably weren't there, were you?
No thanks, I'll just use my work's DNS servers from anywhere I go, since we're not douchebags and don't want to make more income by hijacking other people's surfing.
A human working flat out is only good for a few hundred watts.
My thoughts exactly. The amount of power possible is just minute - enough to run a few LED lights and maybe a micro-radio. (and then only as long as you don't broadcast)
Whoopie!
It's like the guy who wanted to generate power from the falling water in his rain gutters....
It is probably possible to do exactly as you describe - I'm a Fedora/Red Hat user, so I don't know about Ubuntu enough to say.
But I think a major point is being missed, here. How come producers of binary packages aren't supplying their own public repos? Here we are, we've produced this whiz-bang neato set of tools from either the Debian (and the.deb derivatives) front or the RedHat (and it's RPM-based derivatives) camps, and the binary drivers aren't available in a repo of any kind.
If ATI, NVidia, AMD, Intel, etc. were to build/maintain THEIR OWN repos and provide the settings to be included in Debian/RedHat, it would greatly improve their image, make our lives much easier, without costing them much at all.
Yes, licensing concerns prevent RedHat from *distributing* the sources to these binary files. But, they wouldn't be distributing these binary drivers.
It just seems to me like there's a deal that should be made with the community: Vendors should either:
1) Work with us so that we can develop drivers for their stuff in an open forum, or
2) Provide their own binary drivers in such a way as it can integrate with our already very sophisticated and functional software distribution network(s). (EG: yum and apt)
I get it. Things like clean air, habeus corpus, and logging-free federal forests aren't worthwhile. I was wondering why they were passing away...
You, sir, are a retard.
Clean air? Cleaner now than 200 years ago. Look up London, in the 1700s. It was FILTHY with wood/coal smoke. I'll give on Habeas Corpus, but logging-free federal forests NEVER EXISTED. Logging has (rightly) always been part of the us Dept of Forestry's mission. If logging-free federal forests never existed, how could they go away?
Remember that we fight forest fires, which nature does not. Thus, trees that would naturally burn, don't. The amount of board-feet of wood in U.S. forests today are actually higher than at any other point in the last 200 years.
You will find that the Fairplay cracks were published with the goal of allowing customers who _paid_ for their music use that music without the disadvantages of DRM, and _not_ in order to allow them to make illegal copies.
The whole idea of a "goal" behind publishing or selling X or Y is just stupid. Sorry. How many gun manufacturers would there be today if they admitted publicly that ANY of their guns were manufactured to satisfy the needs of criminals? How many tobacco companies had the goal of killing their clientelle?
If it's published or sold, it's a tool. It's not necessarily a tool for any specific purpose - you can easily use a lock pick to clean your fingernails. It's the people who USE the tool who determine its "goal". And then, it's not the tool, it's the user who is to blame.
An example is copyright. A social tool with the "goal" of ensuring the rights of content creators to profit from their works at the expense of content consumers. But, since any tool is just a tool without any explicit goal, the CopyLeft license turns the "goal" of copyrights on its ear by making the content consumers also copyright holders.
So having a "goal" behind DRM crack distribution is just pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
If you wrote a webmail client in "PHP-GTK", could I drag&drop a file into the email window to attach it to the email?
Yes.
Until you can, web-apps will never be of the same quality as regular applications.
PHP-GTK apps are not "web" apps. They are scripts that can be downloaded. They don't need to be compiled - they are scripts. PHP is usually used for server-sided website processing. But it also works very well as a shell or client script, comparable to Java or Python in many ways.
If I'm writing an email in your hypothetical "PHP-GTK" client, and I correct a misspelled word by saying "Add to Dictionary," will it add it to the OS X system-wide dictionary?
Can - but you have to be careful. Is your application going to focus on being cross-platform, or on being tightly integrated? There's a new saw at work: A) cross-platform, B) cheaply developed, or C) tightly integrated with the O/S. Pick any two.
Outlook/Exchange has a nice online webmail client, but do you know anybody who uses it instead of Outlook when sitting at their desk at work? No, because actual Outlook is quicker, more integrated with the OS, can pop up reminders in the system tray when your meeting is coming up, etc... it does more than a web-app does, and it does it faster and easier.
Except that, increasingly, software, especially web-based software, is being used to coordinate the enterprise organization cohesively. In this environment, the advantage gained by this coordination can quickly and easily outweight the advantages of drag and drop or having a dictionary that integrates with the O/S.
And don't think that "enterprise organization" means some megacorp. "Enterprise" today can mean your local school district, fire department, or your local newspaper. All of these have numerous and consistent requirements for coordination, and all of these can benefit from the appropriate use of centralized information technology.
You don't use a hammer to drive screws, and a drill is worthless with nails. Each has their set of advantages and disadvantages. We'll continue to see the evolution of both technologies.
I won't expect a web-based first-person shooter anymore than I expect a client-side auction site.
I think that history will point to the Massachusetts move to require an open format as the watershed moment, where Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry began to falter. Because that poor IT director who lost his job in the noise and tumult pointed out to the world that the Emporor, indeed, was not wearing any clothes. Generations from now, ODF will most likely be the standard for public document archives, and the culture and technicalities of documents drawn from our generation will still be available, thanks to the guts and drive of a single man who (ironically) lost his job for accurately identifying one of the most significant problems of the decade.
The wise thing to do in my opinion is provide some sort of email service (outsourced is fine) for the small percent of students who actually use it, and allow student's to submit their own email addresses to the campus database.......which would then get loaded into the 'official' campus address book for use by faculty and other students.......
Yep, folks - somebody else has discovered the purpose of LDAP! Seriously, I wouldn't want a temporary university address, why would anybody else? I only use my work email address for related work. I've owned my own domain names for years simply to guarantee the consistency of my email address, which has remained unchanged for over 8 years now.
But anybody and everybody can register a freebie account at gmail or hotmail or cia.com.
If you think back, way back when Windows 95 was out people were making the same prediction that web-apps would replace OSes and in the future the only OS would be the web-browser. It didn't happen then, and it won't happen now-- because web-apps suck. The only solution is to write a new internet protocol (not HTTP) designed specifically to run apps from a server... but by that point, you might as well just run the Windows app over a fileshare because it's the same thing.
Don't confuse "didn't" with "shouldn't" or "couldn't", as in "Web apps didn't obviate the need for an Operating System".
I write applications in PHP-GTK. The PHP-GTK libraries are (in package form) about 15 MB. The application code for the program I work on takes about 1.5 MB total. With DSL speeds making this download trivial, why wouldn't this be a perfectly good platform for web-app development?
Java came close with a similar model. It can happen - but the environment needs to be better standardized to make this happen. Methinks this is inevitable, just a question of time.
My situation is not dissimilar.
I have two Macs (1 Intel Mac mini, one PPC iMac) and 1 Dell laptop. But the situation is very unbalanced. See, I need TWO Macs to be able to support the Mac platform with my software (based on PHP-GTK) but the Dell allows me (with VMWare) to support all flavors of Windows, as well as Linux and BSD.
Yeah, I could do Parallels on an Intel Mac, but I prefer RH/KDE over OSX for my host O/S. So the whole situation seems somewhat out of whack. I certainly get ALOT more out of my Dell than either Mac.
That said, I've certainly warmed up to the Mac since I've had to support it, and when people start bitching about their computer viruses and worms, I end the conversation with "Get a Mac. Seriously.". That usually ends the conversation, because the idea of doing something, you know, DIFFERENT to fix the problem rather than just deal honestly doesn't seem to occur to most folks.
So here's a word to the wise: if you don't want people bitching about their computer to you, just tell them to get a Mac. And then they'll leave you alone.
Oh, and the idea that the Mac is about to take a commanding lead in the home computer space is... BULLSHIZNIT. Come on. Macs work, but everybody wants to be the "computer guru". Knowing all the quirks of a crappy O/S therefore appeals to the redneck wannabe who gets IDE cables with blue and yellow LED lights. Granted, they couldn't explain the difference between a MAC address and an IP address, they still manage to spout enough technical terminology to impress. Since they are (apparently) admired by the clueless who think the Control Panel is beyond them, Windows becomes the defacto standard for another round.
On a side note, since I'm obviously rambling, has anybody noticed that Windows as a gaming platform is rapidly dying off? Go to your local games/software store, and notice how much rack space is devoted to Windows - in my local uber mall, it's down to a single rack! Windows dying as a gaming platform really means that Macs and *nix really do become a more viable contender for what's left of "the desktop"...
I did something similar - everybody in my house was watching TV/YouTube and weren't doing their homework.
So I killed youtube.com with a simple DNS entry. If you're worried about "rogue" DNS setups, just block outbound traffic to UDP port 53 from any but the designated DNS server.
Randomly CAPITALIZING posts like THIS ON Slashdot makes me WANT TO jail whomever TORTURES ME with something that SO HARD to read.
Seriously. Trying too hard to EMPHASIZE everything tends to DISTRACT from your POINT.
That said, yay Canada!
Big companies do jack on their own these days, its (almost) all hired out consultants, and for good reason. Consultants are competitive, when you put an order out for bid a consultant will shave every dollar they can off the price to make sure they get the contract.
Where are these consultants you speak of? The ones I know tend to be slow, expensive, and lethargic, caught up in excessive red tape. Oh, and they charge $200/hour to manipulate contract requirements.
In my experience, consultants are called in when an administrator wants to do something unpopular, and doesn't want all the staff mad at him/her. They hire a consultant to do the dirty work, pay them very nicely, and when the dirty stuff (firings/reorganization, etc) is all done, they can "fire" the consultant, make everybody happy, and get on with it.
At this, they can be a frightfully good deal at $200 per hour.
If I wanted to concentrate on a job over things like family and a social life, I would go to med school.
You're kidding here, right?
Med school?
Is it possible that you aren't aware of the sometimes ridiculous hours and circumstances that doctors and nurses frequently have to put up with?
For that matter, is there a profession that doesn't come with either low pay or stressful/uncomfortable working circumstances? Let's see...
1) Airline pilot - once a great career, it's now marginal. Pilots have largely lost their once prestigious retirements, and it's difficult for even a well-trained and papered pilot to get over $50,000 per year or so.
2) Lawyer - I know a couple. They are great people, and I know them as friends. They're struggling. One of them gave up lawyering to become a teacher, and they really get sick of "he-said, she-said" family law, even though that's what pays the bills.
3) Grocery clerk - great job. Frequently has benefits, the job requires very little training, and is generally pretty low stress. Wave the groceries over the laser, take money. Bugger the terrible pay.
Take a look. Economics has an amazing tendency to level the playing field. That's the job of economy - distribute wealth - and it works well at that. Jobs that are really cool and entail lots of personal passion (EG: flying, teaching, musician) also tend to pay poorly. Jobs that pay well tend to suck for some other reason. (intense training requirements, lousy job conditions)
Ever wonder how much your garbage man gets paid? Check it out - you might be surprised!
Then there is the fact that video is not the only information that eats bandwidth for breakfast. Static content - PDFs and other large documents - also devour any surplus capacity. So all an ISP needs to do is run a copy of Squid on each incoming line. How hard is that? It takes - what - all of 10 minutes to configure securely and fire up. You then forget about it.
I agree. It's stupid that ALL bandwidth is being distributed END TO END. We solved the problem of distributing content efficiently long ago with usenet. Usenet is a distributed hosted protocol with intrinsic content caching. So why aren't we using it more?
Get into our offices and it is a different story. We have dual t1s coming in and only 60+ employees, but we are constantly saturated. Combine that with the fact that Cisco Pixes have horrible throttling support and you end up with times when I can't even access basic websites very quickly. The issue here is that T1s and DS3s are freakin expensive compared to a simple cable modem. We have been tempted to get Comcast bussines ( which makes me shiver a bit ) because I can get larger down pipes for general internet surfing. We only host a few services such as email here so it isn't like we need megs of up bandwith.
What kind of traffic are you seeing the most? What kind of traffic is high vs low priority?
You might consider going ahead with that Comcast DSL and routing all the low-priority and bandwidth-sucking traffic out that pipe, while leaving the important stuff on the dual-bonded T1.
I could cook something up with an old P3, two $6 NICs, and a CentOS Linux CD using IPTables and NAT, with a few custom rules, YMMV.
I did something similar at a local ISP. Believe it or not, they used SBC DSL for their internal staff, and hosted a few thousand dinky websites on a dual-bonded T1. Websites were all served on the T1, but the internal staff got to everything but their own servers on the DSL line. Worked great.
Saying there's real competition in the wireless industry is like saying that because Sony, BMG, and Warner all make CDs, there's "real competition" in that industry.
I guess you don't live in Northern California, then. Here there's Metro PCS which offers unlimited plans starting at just $30/month. (and often cheaper, if you call when they're running ads)
They started in Sacramento, CA and the San Fransisco Bay Area, and quickly moved into my area. (Chico, CA) Just checked their coverage, and they've got areas all over the country. Not "full nationwide", yet, but certainly on their way...
Yeah, competition exists.
This always makes me wonder about the courtroom. How do they prove that pictures and video are genuine?
They don't. At least, in California. Here, the picture is considered part of testimony.
A picture or video is almost worthless without somebody saying that it is an accurate depiction of what happened. With that, it's considered as part of the witness' testimony, sorta like a memory or recollection, only in color.
So, here, at least, a video or picture is considered as more detail in a personal statement of what happened - they are not evidence unto themselves.
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
No. But our limits of acceptability have changed. As processing power has gotten cheaper, developers (myself included) have focused more on getting features out to market faster, rather than application performance.
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
That's always been correct. We care more about how many features are available at what cost, so long as performance isn't noticably bad on commodity hardware.
Do you remember when c was considered a "high level language"? What about the debates on how slow programs written in c were? I do. Times have changed....
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well.
I don't know about that. Perhaps you don't remember loading DOS programs like PC-Write on an 8086 processer with 512K RAM? That was my word processor of choice, and it got slower the longer your document was. By the time you passed 100k, it was a dog.
Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
I sure do. I also remember the care with with I never hit the two space bars together in a graphics program. (That would universally crash my computer). It shared TEXT ok, but anything graphical was another mess entirely.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
If you don't mind me asking, what would you RATHER be writing?
There could be intelligent life inside 10 light years from us, and we wouldn't know it now; hell, we could be living on a planet seeded with life by an advanced society and we wouldn't know it...Maybe the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer. =P
Making an ignorant comment like this indicates that you have no clue what you're talking about.
Assuming that the dinosaurs were killed off by an automated terraformer, how do you explain:
1) That dinosaurs are based on the exact same system of recombinant DNA as we are?
2) That the muscular and skeletal structure of dinosaurs have, in many cases, clear and direct analogs in your very body?
3) That the small, mammalian critters (sorta like mice) that we evolved from already existed at the time of the dinosaurs' extinction?
4) That the small mammalian critters (sorta like mice) themselves have a documentable evolutionary path that carries on before the dinosaurs' extinction?
When you say "Hell, we don't know", what you're really saying is "Hell, I don't know"... please be clear on that point. You'll get much further along in your understanding of the world around you when you can recognize your own lack of knowledge.
But the sort of power you are looking at to charge batteries at that rate is enormous. Figure it out. If you have a battery that can, say, deliver 50KW for one hour, then to charge it in five minutes will require to deliver about 20% more than you get out (conversion efficiency) or a charge rate of 720KW. That's nearly 1000 horsepower in Library of Congress units. You aren't going to be passing that through a handy, easy to use electrical circuit any time soon.
Assume a "gas station". (energy station?) Assume that, in 24 hours, it can "refuel" 1,000 cars. That means that, over a 24 hour period, it must get and transfer the power to move 1,000 cars.
Now, your average 15 amp circuit has nowhere near the juice to sustain this kind of load. But there are high-voltage circuits that do. And there are hand-held insulators and the like that can make this work.
The trick is to essentially put a high-capacity capacitor at the fueling station. It can "refuel" cars in a burst, while drawing a continuous amount of power from the grid, like a large water tank with highly variable output at the spigot.
This can work, if the storage of energy is compact and efficient enough. If the actuality is anywhere close to what they claim, this solution just might be.
Current trends rarely continue. Be it world population, transistor density, climatology, and especially at the blackjack table.
Except that current trends have continued for 30 years in the case of Moore's law.
The fallacy is that the price of any single commodity can be used as a metric to determine the "real" cost of everything else.
Gold? Diamonds? Lattes?
All of these have monetary prices that rise and fall against other commodities as their demand and supply rise and fall. The value of real estate shot thru the roof the last 5 years. Is that because there is suddenly less of it?
No. Demand rose, caused partly by a flagging stock market which motivated investors to invest put money in real estate rather than stocks and/or mutual funds.
And adjusting for inflation is not the only factor! The total wealth of the average American has more than doubled in the last 30 years. Thus, even commodities that have not significantly risen or fallen in price over the past 30 years have gotten "cheaper" simply because the ability of the average Joe is much more able to afford it.
Most of this additional wealth comes in the form of intellectual property. Take THAT to the bank, fella...
I sure do! My own lifestyle is well supported by my role as a software engineer - 6 figures, 3000 Sq ft home, 5 happy, well-fed children (plus 2 foster children), etc. and this is all because of intellectual property that I create in large quantities...
Is this sudden abundance of oil because suddenly Exxon found a huge oil reserve under the caribou-mating grounds of the arctic? Not a chance. The reason we've got a lot of oil all of a sudden is because they can charge 3 bucks a gallon for it. See? Eighty cents a gallon and there's a shortage. Three bucks a gallon and there's abundance.
Actually, gas was MORE EXPENSIVE at $0.80 per gallon in the 1970s than it is at $3.25 per gallon today. There's this thing called "inflation", which along with its close cousin "deflation" cause the value of money to rise and fall.
Adjusted for inflation, the only time gasoline has been more expensive than now is during the oil embargo in the early 1970s.
Now how did that work? These "crises" are the corporate strategies for turning the usual laws of supply and demand on their head. The guys in the record business are knocking their heads against the wall trying to figure out a way to create a music crisis, right?
The reason why you see those Lincoln Navigators (shudder) along the Kennedy Expressway is that the average American is far wealthier than in the 1970s. Gasoline thus represents a much smaller percentage of total income, so the higher gas prices have less effect.
Think about it: how many $4 lattes were there in 1970? Oh wait, you probably weren't there, were you?
No thanks, I'll just use my work's DNS servers from anywhere I go, since we're not douchebags and don't want to make more income by hijacking other people's surfing.
If you are able to do this, your work's DNS servers are misconfigured. A quick Google search leads you to this informative article about the problem and what to do about it.
Oh, and why your work DNS servers are misconfigured, threatening the safety of MY Internet connection...
A human working flat out is only good for a few hundred watts.
My thoughts exactly. The amount of power possible is just minute - enough to run a few LED lights and maybe a micro-radio. (and then only as long as you don't broadcast)
Whoopie!
It's like the guy who wanted to generate power from the falling water in his rain gutters....
It is probably possible to do exactly as you describe - I'm a Fedora/Red Hat user, so I don't know about Ubuntu enough to say.
.deb derivatives) front or the RedHat (and it's RPM-based derivatives) camps, and the binary drivers aren't available in a repo of any kind.
But I think a major point is being missed, here. How come producers of binary packages aren't supplying their own public repos? Here we are, we've produced this whiz-bang neato set of tools from either the Debian (and the
If ATI, NVidia, AMD, Intel, etc. were to build/maintain THEIR OWN repos and provide the settings to be included in Debian/RedHat, it would greatly improve their image, make our lives much easier, without costing them much at all.
Yes, licensing concerns prevent RedHat from *distributing* the sources to these binary files. But, they wouldn't be distributing these binary drivers.
It just seems to me like there's a deal that should be made with the community: Vendors should either:
1) Work with us so that we can develop drivers for their stuff in an open forum, or
2) Provide their own binary drivers in such a way as it can integrate with our already very sophisticated and functional software distribution network(s). (EG: yum and apt)
Pick one.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
-Albert Einstein
I get it. Things like clean air, habeus corpus, and logging-free federal forests aren't worthwhile. I was wondering why they were passing away...
You, sir, are a retard.
Clean air? Cleaner now than 200 years ago. Look up London, in the 1700s. It was FILTHY with wood/coal smoke. I'll give on Habeas Corpus, but logging-free federal forests NEVER EXISTED. Logging has (rightly) always been part of the us Dept of Forestry's mission. If logging-free federal forests never existed, how could they go away?
Remember that we fight forest fires, which nature does not. Thus, trees that would naturally burn, don't. The amount of board-feet of wood in U.S. forests today are actually higher than at any other point in the last 200 years.
You will find that the Fairplay cracks were published with the goal of allowing customers who _paid_ for their music use that music without the disadvantages of DRM, and _not_ in order to allow them to make illegal copies.
The whole idea of a "goal" behind publishing or selling X or Y is just stupid. Sorry. How many gun manufacturers would there be today if they admitted publicly that ANY of their guns were manufactured to satisfy the needs of criminals? How many tobacco companies had the goal of killing their clientelle?
If it's published or sold, it's a tool. It's not necessarily a tool for any specific purpose - you can easily use a lock pick to clean your fingernails. It's the people who USE the tool who determine its "goal". And then, it's not the tool, it's the user who is to blame.
An example is copyright. A social tool with the "goal" of ensuring the rights of content creators to profit from their works at the expense of content consumers. But, since any tool is just a tool without any explicit goal, the CopyLeft license turns the "goal" of copyrights on its ear by making the content consumers also copyright holders.
So having a "goal" behind DRM crack distribution is just pointless.