It's interesting to me how we can have people devote their lives to a cause - Animal Rights, Gender Rights, Pollution Cleanup, whatever... Then we have folks whose careers focus on one major project (e.g. the B-52 that has been in service for 70 years, or the ALCM that has been around for 30... to say nothing of design and development for either). And here we have people who devote a few years planning and building, then may never get to see the results. I'd imagine something as big as a probe to do X would have more than it's fair share of greybeards on board to figure out trajectories, contingencies, etc... 20 years is more than enough time for someone who was 40 at the start to be in or considering retirement.
The fact that it took 20 years to get Cassini into position is itself amazing. We are talking using technology from 2 decades ago. That's the difference between the N64 and the Switch, (or ps1 and ps4). That's Pentium 2 (almost 3) era technology, CPU's were roughly 600 MHz. Now we have quad-core 1.2 GHz in our pockets.
English is a language comprised of a 26 character alphabet, assorted punctuation, and has 171,476 words (according to a google search and Oxford dictionary). Many of those words are synonyms with very subtle differences depending on context. We also have a fair share of homonyms to add to the confusion. Combine that with our penchant for creating new words by manipulating our languages underlying prefix-base-suffix rules.
In English, order matters, subject verb agreements matter, punctuation matters, inflection matters. English is one of the hardest languages to learn, yet many countries do it because the biggest powers- past and present- in the world (U.S.A. and Greatest Britain) speak it. If that shift of power changes, the dominant language will too.
My ex worked at Intel and had brought a Wintel phone home (windows 8, low-power Atom chip). It was actually a very responsive, nice phone. Being x86 it could have handled a lot of different tasks. Unfortunately it didn't quite have the battery life it needed, the form factor was too blocky (think Nokia with less rounded edges) and plagued by Windows CE/8 Mobile (~5 years ago).
I would have bought one if the kinks had been worked out. And I had one of the old windows CE phones that was painful to use. The one that you had to open up task manager periodically to kill all the background apps eating up the battery.
The defendants were extorting someone, that someone came forward with evidence of the extortion, and now the police want to gather all the evidence - including whatever was stored on the iPhones. The Judge made the right call here. If those phones have evidence of any other illegal activity (e.g. drugs or whatever), then that is inadmissible in court (with a properly written warrant).
The 5th Amendment is about self incrimination, these folks already have evidence against them. If the *only* evidence was on the defendants phones and it was a "he-said, she-said" situation, then I would agree that the Judge overstepped his authority.
Exactly this. The Japanese diet has a lot of rice and fish, many vegetables, and chicken/eggs to a smaller extent. Greek diets have a lot of green veggies, lamb and chicken. American diets have McDonalds/Wendy's/Taco Bell - much more fatty protein, loaded with salt and/or butter.
The reason restaurants like Chile's food tastes good? They cook *everything* in butter. Steaks. Steamed vegetables (covered in butter). Fish. You name it.
Eating habits start young and are learned from parents and the environment. If we as parents eat healthier, our kids will too. If we are garbage disposals, our kids will be too.
Those walled gardens can only exist through DRM mechanisms. They were created specifically to make DRM more pervasive on the computing platform. Apple, for example, wants to be the only company that can authorize applications to run on iOS.
With that comes the ability to skim 30% of each and every sale for those platforms. Own the platform, own the distribution, leech off sales.
This entire idea is ludicrous, and anyone thinking that it's a great idea does not know much about physics.
You can say that Apple stumbles with it too... not accounting for a users hand/fingers interrupting antenna reception. Apparently the phone is awesome, if you didn't hold it.
You seem to be confusing "consumer" with "critical" applications.
You can have that however you have to accept a few things:
1) Costs are going to go way up. You aren't going to pay $50 or $100 for a software package, it'll be 5 or 6 figures. You'll be paying for all the additional testing, certification, and risk.
Only for critical software. You know, things like banks, hospitals, etc... Those guys should be making damn sure that their environments and software are secure and work as advertised. We're talking peoples lives here.
2) You won't get new stuff. Everything you use will be old tech...
This isn't much of a change from today. ATM's and EKG machines running Windows XP (or older).
3) You will not be permitted to modify anything. You will sign a contract (a real paper one) up front that will specify what you can do with the solution, and what environment it must be run in. Every component will have to be certified, all software on the system, the system itself, any systems it connects to, etc. No changes on your part will be permitted, everything will have to be regression tested and verified before any change is made.
CEO's probably would balk at this, but it's arguably necessary. It may even already be done to some extent, medical equipment must be certified. I'm assuming financial software is in the same boat. Why wouldn't the same be said about what OS that software is running on?
4) There will be no FOSS. If there's liability for losses, nobody will be willing to freely distribute their work. They aren't going to accept liability for no payment, and aren't going to accept that if their code was used by someone else they might be liable.
DoD Weapon systems already have these long, drawn-out deep testing and certification processes. Why? Because peoples lives are at stake! The reason the B-52 has flown for 70+ years is due to all of the strict requirements on the hardware and (more recently) software. The plane must survive in it's operational environment and keep it's crew safe. The same can be said for Navy Ships, missiles, bombs, and soldier's radios. Everything our soldiers touch has gone through loads of testing.
Microsoft, Redhat and so on already have enterprise licenses, it wouldn't be a huge stretch for them to offer variations for health care or finance. Health Care and Finance are multi-billion dollar industries unto themselves and have a vested interest in making sure their data is protected and processed according to applicable laws. The only remaining problems properly designing, testing, and deploying to the required specifications for each industry.
Make the vendor responsible for losses in critical applications.
If MS had to cough up millions for every bank hack, you could be damn sure they would refine their code for such applications. Or, you know, go bankrupt. Either way, people win!
Who the hell is still using operating system software that hasn't been patched since October 2008?
ATM's still run Windows XP, many Point of Sale systems too. If you've ever paid close attention in a doctor's office, the computer they are running is very likely XP, maybe Vista or 7. Hardware-controlling computers may even go back to Windows 98 due to their ability to read/write directly to hardware and do in-line controlling with ease.
It's just not feasible to keep medical equipment up-to-date with the latest OS for various reasons, not the least of which is it's bundled as a unit and costs many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars. Cost becomes non-trivial real quick.
To be fair, Stephen Elop has a track record of driving a business into the ground so MS can buy it and finish digging the hole. He's more of a hired goon in the embrace->extend->extinguish chain than an actual CEO.
Exactly this. People don't realize their wallets have the power. Sure, there's going to be the occasional time when you *need* that free 2-day shipping for whatever reason. Most of the time you can shop around. Between Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and a handful of others you can find most anything you would need.
Shop around, find the best price/delivery that works for you, and keep these assholes in competition with one another.
If teenagers were offended by the color of a text message, maybe your daughter shouldn't be considering them friends. Anybody that petty doesn't deserve the attention.
It's interesting that people kept working. I've run into a number of people that would stop working entirely if given the opportunity. Hell, I know some people now that do the bare minimum to get by, often living off of Ramen or the cheapest fast food they can dig up, and living with family or as cheap of place as they can find. These are people with next to no ambition, who find the greatest enjoyment sitting in front of a TV letting the world pass them by.
I have no idea what the distribution in work ethic is, or even how it could be accurately measured, but if it's anything like a bell curve then there's going to be a not insignificant number of people just riding the (thin) gravy train.
Steve is remarkably common. Why I was in a meeting with 2 of them a few months ago. I was also on a project where the PM, the Tech Lead, and the IT support were all "Steve". The other two main contacts on that contract were honorary Steves too.
The real question is why didn't people notice Steve until now? Did slashdot really need to run a front-page story to get us to notice Steve?
Free software is winning. What is the most popular OS kernel? Is there a modern computer or mobile device that doesn't run GNU software? Do you think companies like Google would open source their software if free software was losing?
Android itself is not open source. There is the Android Open-Source Project which, last I checked, was more than a few version behind what the latest flagship phone ships with. Google appears to be slowing down with the contributions to AOSP, which is why Cyanogenmod started in the first place.
Sure GNU/Linux runs on damned near anything, but it is still a bit niche. Android being the exception, most people don't know or care that Linux is running on that webserver, or that router, or their TV.
I don' t keep up with what Google has open-sourced... but their primary revenue source (us, ads specifically) and their search algorithms are still proprietary. Have they published the bottom-to-top design and software of their search system? Their datacenters?
What about the internet? It was all proprietary, closed systems before free software and protocols set us free.
There's a difference here. Open protocols vs open software. Internet explorer uses an open protocol, but is not free (as in speech) itself. If Microsoft had the pull to force everyone to use their own proprietary protocol/format, you can bet your ass they'd monetize it. Just look at the ODF/OOXML battle a few years back. Microsoft wanted to keep office document formats locked into their own MS Office format.
Netflix will give us DRM one day. They would do it now I think, if it were not required for licencing the material they offer.
Netflix already has DRM. They have since day one. Their original web player used MS Silverlight because it could handle DRM and was more difficult to hack than Flash (the bar was low). Now with HTML5 supporting DRM, they can move away from the defunct Silverlight, while maintaining that control over distribution and keeping the MAFIAA happy.
Think how much worse things would be without free software.
I have no doubt that things would be worse without free software. I think the GPL has done some great things and kept companies honest about using great, freely available software. There has even been government (Munich, some others) action to move away from vendor lock-in, and those guys are routinely the hardest to break away from the status quo. Unfortunately, the masses don't really *care* if the software is free, non-malicious, openly inspect-able and modifiable. Ask any Apple fanboi why they chose Apple, and the answer is probably "It just works. I can buy other Apple stuff and it all just works together". The truth is 90+% of the population don't want to tinker with stuff, they just want to get whatever job done.
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It's interesting to me how we can have people devote their lives to a cause - Animal Rights, Gender Rights, Pollution Cleanup, whatever... Then we have folks whose careers focus on one major project (e.g. the B-52 that has been in service for 70 years, or the ALCM that has been around for 30... to say nothing of design and development for either). And here we have people who devote a few years planning and building, then may never get to see the results. I'd imagine something as big as a probe to do X would have more than it's fair share of greybeards on board to figure out trajectories, contingencies, etc... 20 years is more than enough time for someone who was 40 at the start to be in or considering retirement.
The fact that it took 20 years to get Cassini into position is itself amazing. We are talking using technology from 2 decades ago. That's the difference between the N64 and the Switch, (or ps1 and ps4). That's Pentium 2 (almost 3) era technology, CPU's were roughly 600 MHz. Now we have quad-core 1.2 GHz in our pockets.
Oh, and get off my lawn.
Because nobody has escaped a VM before. It may be difficult, but to say "impossible" is only challenging the hackers of the world.
English is a language comprised of a 26 character alphabet, assorted punctuation, and has 171,476 words (according to a google search and Oxford dictionary). Many of those words are synonyms with very subtle differences depending on context. We also have a fair share of homonyms to add to the confusion. Combine that with our penchant for creating new words by manipulating our languages underlying prefix-base-suffix rules.
In English, order matters, subject verb agreements matter, punctuation matters, inflection matters. English is one of the hardest languages to learn, yet many countries do it because the biggest powers- past and present- in the world (U.S.A. and Greatest Britain) speak it. If that shift of power changes, the dominant language will too.
I'm reminded of a quote:
"If it looks fun, tax it until it isn't"
I may be misremembering, and can't find the original... but you get the idea.
What's funny is they did most of this years ago.
My ex worked at Intel and had brought a Wintel phone home (windows 8, low-power Atom chip). It was actually a very responsive, nice phone. Being x86 it could have handled a lot of different tasks. Unfortunately it didn't quite have the battery life it needed, the form factor was too blocky (think Nokia with less rounded edges) and plagued by Windows CE/8 Mobile (~5 years ago).
I would have bought one if the kinks had been worked out. And I had one of the old windows CE phones that was painful to use. The one that you had to open up task manager periodically to kill all the background apps eating up the battery.
All I've had to day is like 6 gummy bears. And some scotch.
The defendants were extorting someone, that someone came forward with evidence of the extortion, and now the police want to gather all the evidence - including whatever was stored on the iPhones. The Judge made the right call here. If those phones have evidence of any other illegal activity (e.g. drugs or whatever), then that is inadmissible in court (with a properly written warrant).
The 5th Amendment is about self incrimination, these folks already have evidence against them. If the *only* evidence was on the defendants phones and it was a "he-said, she-said" situation, then I would agree that the Judge overstepped his authority.
Exactly this. The Japanese diet has a lot of rice and fish, many vegetables, and chicken/eggs to a smaller extent. Greek diets have a lot of green veggies, lamb and chicken. American diets have McDonalds/Wendy's/Taco Bell - much more fatty protein, loaded with salt and/or butter.
The reason restaurants like Chile's food tastes good? They cook *everything* in butter. Steaks. Steamed vegetables (covered in butter). Fish. You name it.
Eating habits start young and are learned from parents and the environment. If we as parents eat healthier, our kids will too. If we are garbage disposals, our kids will be too.
I don't remember being forced to eat school lunches, even though I did really like pizza day.
Sure, not everyone will have the luxury of time/money to pack lunches for their kids. Those that can, probably should.
Those walled gardens can only exist through DRM mechanisms. They were created specifically to make DRM more pervasive on the computing platform. Apple, for example, wants to be the only company that can authorize applications to run on iOS.
With that comes the ability to skim 30% of each and every sale for those platforms. Own the platform, own the distribution, leech off sales.
This entire idea is ludicrous, and anyone thinking that it's a great idea does not know much about physics.
You can say that Apple stumbles with it too... not accounting for a users hand/fingers interrupting antenna reception. Apparently the phone is awesome, if you didn't hold it.
You seem to be confusing "consumer" with "critical" applications.
You can have that however you have to accept a few things:
1) Costs are going to go way up. You aren't going to pay $50 or $100 for a software package, it'll be 5 or 6 figures. You'll be paying for all the additional testing, certification, and risk.
Only for critical software. You know, things like banks, hospitals, etc... Those guys should be making damn sure that their environments and software are secure and work as advertised. We're talking peoples lives here.
2) You won't get new stuff. Everything you use will be old tech...
This isn't much of a change from today. ATM's and EKG machines running Windows XP (or older).
3) You will not be permitted to modify anything. You will sign a contract (a real paper one) up front that will specify what you can do with the solution, and what environment it must be run in. Every component will have to be certified, all software on the system, the system itself, any systems it connects to, etc. No changes on your part will be permitted, everything will have to be regression tested and verified before any change is made.
CEO's probably would balk at this, but it's arguably necessary. It may even already be done to some extent, medical equipment must be certified. I'm assuming financial software is in the same boat. Why wouldn't the same be said about what OS that software is running on?
4) There will be no FOSS. If there's liability for losses, nobody will be willing to freely distribute their work. They aren't going to accept liability for no payment, and aren't going to accept that if their code was used by someone else they might be liable.
DoD Weapon systems already have these long, drawn-out deep testing and certification processes. Why? Because peoples lives are at stake! The reason the B-52 has flown for 70+ years is due to all of the strict requirements on the hardware and (more recently) software. The plane must survive in it's operational environment and keep it's crew safe. The same can be said for Navy Ships, missiles, bombs, and soldier's radios. Everything our soldiers touch has gone through loads of testing.
Microsoft, Redhat and so on already have enterprise licenses, it wouldn't be a huge stretch for them to offer variations for health care or finance. Health Care and Finance are multi-billion dollar industries unto themselves and have a vested interest in making sure their data is protected and processed according to applicable laws. The only remaining problems properly designing, testing, and deploying to the required specifications for each industry.
Wait, he wasn't talking about iTunes? Does Apple have some other end-all-be-all media store/player that isn't iTunes?
I thought they started down this movie/TV/media road some 15 years ago?
Make the vendor responsible for losses in critical applications.
If MS had to cough up millions for every bank hack, you could be damn sure they would refine their code for such applications. Or, you know, go bankrupt. Either way, people win!
oh you mean like the RHEL enterprise license my work has?
Who the hell is still using operating system software that hasn't been patched since October 2008?
ATM's still run Windows XP, many Point of Sale systems too. If you've ever paid close attention in a doctor's office, the computer they are running is very likely XP, maybe Vista or 7. Hardware-controlling computers may even go back to Windows 98 due to their ability to read/write directly to hardware and do in-line controlling with ease.
It's just not feasible to keep medical equipment up-to-date with the latest OS for various reasons, not the least of which is it's bundled as a unit and costs many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars. Cost becomes non-trivial real quick.
To be fair, Stephen Elop has a track record of driving a business into the ground so MS can buy it and finish digging the hole. He's more of a hired goon in the embrace->extend->extinguish chain than an actual CEO.
Exactly this. People don't realize their wallets have the power. Sure, there's going to be the occasional time when you *need* that free 2-day shipping for whatever reason. Most of the time you can shop around. Between Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, and a handful of others you can find most anything you would need.
Shop around, find the best price/delivery that works for you, and keep these assholes in competition with one another.
If teenagers were offended by the color of a text message, maybe your daughter shouldn't be considering them friends. Anybody that petty doesn't deserve the attention.
It's interesting that people kept working. I've run into a number of people that would stop working entirely if given the opportunity. Hell, I know some people now that do the bare minimum to get by, often living off of Ramen or the cheapest fast food they can dig up, and living with family or as cheap of place as they can find. These are people with next to no ambition, who find the greatest enjoyment sitting in front of a TV letting the world pass them by.
I have no idea what the distribution in work ethic is, or even how it could be accurately measured, but if it's anything like a bell curve then there's going to be a not insignificant number of people just riding the (thin) gravy train.
Depends on the Steve.
First the former, then the latter. Free health bonus!
Steve is remarkably common. Why I was in a meeting with 2 of them a few months ago. I was also on a project where the PM, the Tech Lead, and the IT support were all "Steve". The other two main contacts on that contract were honorary Steves too.
The real question is why didn't people notice Steve until now? Did slashdot really need to run a front-page story to get us to notice Steve?
I'm gonna go ahead and channel my inner RMS:
Free software is winning. What is the most popular OS kernel? Is there a modern computer or mobile device that doesn't run GNU software? Do you think companies like Google would open source their software if free software was losing?
Android itself is not open source. There is the Android Open-Source Project which, last I checked, was more than a few version behind what the latest flagship phone ships with. Google appears to be slowing down with the contributions to AOSP, which is why Cyanogenmod started in the first place.
Sure GNU/Linux runs on damned near anything, but it is still a bit niche. Android being the exception, most people don't know or care that Linux is running on that webserver, or that router, or their TV.
I don' t keep up with what Google has open-sourced... but their primary revenue source (us, ads specifically) and their search algorithms are still proprietary. Have they published the bottom-to-top design and software of their search system? Their datacenters?
What about the internet? It was all proprietary, closed systems before free software and protocols set us free.
There's a difference here. Open protocols vs open software. Internet explorer uses an open protocol, but is not free (as in speech) itself. If Microsoft had the pull to force everyone to use their own proprietary protocol/format, you can bet your ass they'd monetize it. Just look at the ODF/OOXML battle a few years back. Microsoft wanted to keep office document formats locked into their own MS Office format.
Netflix will give us DRM one day. They would do it now I think, if it were not required for licencing the material they offer.
Netflix already has DRM. They have since day one. Their original web player used MS Silverlight because it could handle DRM and was more difficult to hack than Flash (the bar was low). Now with HTML5 supporting DRM, they can move away from the defunct Silverlight, while maintaining that control over distribution and keeping the MAFIAA happy.
Think how much worse things would be without free software.
I have no doubt that things would be worse without free software. I think the GPL has done some great things and kept companies honest about using great, freely available software. There has even been government (Munich, some others) action to move away from vendor lock-in, and those guys are routinely the hardest to break away from the status quo. Unfortunately, the masses don't really *care* if the software is free, non-malicious, openly inspect-able and modifiable. Ask any Apple fanboi why they chose Apple, and the answer is probably "It just works. I can buy other Apple stuff and it all just works together". The truth is 90+% of the population don't want to tinker with stuff, they just want to get whatever job done.
If only someone could explain to them it's a series of tubes...