kde and genome are applications running on top of an operating system, they are not part of it.
much as windows has tried to make us believe otherwise there is a fairly rigidly defined boundary between 'user space' and the operating system proper.
with proper design (microkernels) that boundary can be pushed back another step and that will open up a whole new world of possibilities at a fairly small performance penalty, and a system that feels subjectively much faster.
good point, but I wonder if you meant to make it, interoperability with what ?
A mono culture of a cheap reliable and highly useable os would quite possibly do more for the image of computing as we know it than what passes for production grade systems these days.
Interoperability issues, the multitude of different windowing environments and the enormous amount of work duplication in the IT branch would better be concentrated on doing it once and doing it well than everybody just doing their own thing because they can.
Some 14 years ago I did a bunch of contracting on a Canadian built system called QNX, and I'm still amazed at the level of quality (stable, fast, easy to program for) and productivity we achieved.
If I compare that system (which is now marketed almost exclusively to the embedded systems market) to what I can get on my desktop today (and that includes Linux, which I'm writing this on) then we haven't moved at all in the last decade or two.
If MS would spend a % of their cash reserves on developing a *real* os instead of the load of junk they ship (no, this is not a troll, this is an observation) we'd have a one-shot amazing piece of software that would set a new standard for useability and reliability.
unfortunately they spend that cash on marketing....
hehe, it probably will. On another note, think about how nice it would have been if DRM would have been existant throughout history. Try to imagine archeaology with a past that had used DRM, encrypted scrolls, dutch masters that you can only see with the right kind of glasses, statues that desintegrate after being viewed more than three times on the same day by the same people.
It's telling that our culture seems to put emphasis on how shortlived it really is, instead of thinking of the future and how we can best preserve our legacy for those that will come after us.
I'd hate to be in the shoes of a 23rd century researcher trying to play back a 2005 issue SONY drm'd compact disc or the last copy of a tune surviving on some ancient file server in encrypted apple iTunes format.
At least make it mandatory that media have to be deposited in DRM free format with some agency to make sure that the future will have access to todays cashcows (cash mice ? Mickey comes to mind), just in case congress at some remote point in the future decides that Walts estate has earned enough dough.
What's that got to do with the price of tea in China ? If local businesses have to lock their doors at night it's *not* because you grandma will come and steal at night, it's because someone a bit more enterprising will drive up with a semi and 'move house' for them. Most people (at least most people that I know, you speak for yourself) have a fairly strong sense of decency and honor.
Billions (count 'm) of users would gladly tap in to a library of any song ever produced for a reasonable (read significantly users directly will make artists richer, users happier even if half of the music got pirated (which is a very very large proportion compared to the number of honest people out there).
I *hate* drm, and the distrust of the end user that comes with it.
I'm working on a daz.com site that will hopefully solve that problem once and for all.
It is my nsho that record companies are dinosaurs that just don't quite realize they're already extinct and it will be my great pleasure to help nail shut the coffins.
Check out Janis Ian vs the RIAA to see how bad it really is.
spot on, but for technology people like you (and hopefully me) this is obvious. The problem is that the 'general public' is absolutely clueless about this and it will probably cause them great harm in the long run.
Just like credit bureaus started out collecting stuff just for the heck of it they are now causing a very large problem for a very large portion of the population. Europe has much stricter privacy laws and as far as I know there is no way for your insurance company, your employer or anybody else for that matter to lift your data without your explicit consent. And if you tried to do it without consent you'd be surprised at the level of punishment that goes with privacy invasion.
So a law to protect a user of a search engine's privacy would go a long way towards making the perceived level of privacy closer to the actual level of privacy.
google was implied (at least for me), they're the no.1 search company by a long stretch, and California would be a bad state to lose for any hightech company.
no, not really the traffic passes through points located in California.
Also, right now:
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
Please contact contact-admin@google.com 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043
US
they're pretty well represented there, and moving house is also not cheap (not to mention relocating all your employees) and all that just to avoid abiding by the law.
You might as well set up shop in Afghanistan if that's you attitude:)
the government is at odds with itself over this, there is privacy protection and then there is the 'war on terror' bs that says that we will track everything everywhere all the time (carnivore and such).
I'm pretty sure that privacy protection (of which there is precious little in the US to begin with) is going to lose out on this one. The right thing for GOOG, AOL, MSN and so on to do would be of course to unilaterally stop keeping track of peoples searches in such a way that they can be attributed to a particular person.
Then the government would have to mandate that such queries be kept and we can all see the emperor again. As it is the big search companies do the governments bidding because their goals are fairly strongly aligned.
Keep everything -> more control over the population in terms of dollars spent or people on file.
the main reason for keeping searches anonymous is that you have no idea where that data will end up. You've looked up something about aids recently ? Your insurance just went up.
Tried to find out how to make TNT ? Off to Guantamo bay with you.
Finding out about the origins and local chapter of the KKK ? Better buy a new set of windows.
and so on.
Search queries are a private thing because like calling the help hot line for being suicidal if you can not guarantee privacy you end up causing real life damage.
Marketeers wet dreams and bottom lines only go so far, it's perfectly possible to run a search engine without profiling and still make a buck.
Maybe not quite as many bucks, and maybe you'd have to work a little harder to 'monetize' but to unconditionally hold hostage an individuals entire search history for an indefinite amount of time is a serious breach of privacy.
It would be like the phone company keeping a record of all your CONVERSATIONS, not just the numbers that you have dialled.
I'm working on a little contest, the prize will be 2500 euros for the first person to match up 100 real life identities with the search profiles, stay tuned.
(it took a while to get all the data correlated, but the main tables are all ready to go)
It is my firm belief that search engines should VOW not to keep search profiles on their users, nobody has yet seen an increase in quality from keeping person bound search records (even anonimized like aols were). Search records are 'radio active' in a sense because they'll always be of some value in the future which would possibly cause you damage. If you think that's not true think about this: would you consent to having all your searches of the last 5 years made public during ANY possible lawsuit filed against you (wrongful or not) and to have your opposition cherry pick your searches for 'proof' of their contentions ?
how about the opteron ? X64 is where it's at, I'm running a whole bunch of them and nothing intel will sell you at a reasonable price comes even close.
they're cool running, very stable and debian etch runs like a charm on them (I had to fiddle a bit to get sarge running on them, especially mysql).
you hit the nail right on the head. I spent some time before the fall of the wall in Poland and Eastern Germany and that is *exactly* how it was.
People marching in lockstep to the beat of the drum just so they don't stand out. Of course there is no risk to you, but everybody knew somebody that had had some doings with the Zomo's or the Vopos or whatever the local variety is called and that was enough. Less than 1% in either country ever had direct dealings with them but everybody was very afraid and nobody would speak their mind, not even to their closest family.
well, when they'll pick *you* up they won't be offering you any of those goodies either, and therein lies the problem.
The war on terror is not a real war, it's a pretext. Terrorism is a media driven 'statement', not a war, you can't fight terrorists in the same way that you can fight a nation state and anybody that says it works that way is trying to sell you something. If you want to get rid of terrorism you strive for situational change, not regime change. Democracy is not something you can impose, especially if your own country isn't democratic to begin with. Beam, splinter and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
an anonymous coward that calls on moderators to moderate away a 20+ post discussion, interesting
I wonder how much time mr. AC spent in OS architecture class to get this far in life.
kde and genome are applications running on top of an operating system, they are not part of it.
much as windows has tried to make us believe otherwise there is a fairly rigidly defined boundary between 'user space' and the operating system proper.
with proper design (microkernels) that boundary can be pushed back another step and that will open up a whole new world of possibilities at a fairly small performance penalty, and a system that feels subjectively much faster.
good point, but I wonder if you meant to make it, interoperability with what ?
A mono culture of a cheap reliable and highly useable os would quite possibly do more for the image of computing as we know it than what passes for production grade systems these days.
Interoperability issues, the multitude of different windowing environments and the enormous amount of work duplication in the IT branch would better be concentrated on doing it once and doing it well than everybody just doing their own thing because they can.
Some 14 years ago I did a bunch of contracting on a Canadian built system called QNX, and I'm still amazed at the level of quality (stable, fast, easy to program for) and productivity we achieved.
If I compare that system (which is now marketed almost exclusively to the embedded systems market) to what I can get on my desktop today (and that includes Linux, which I'm writing this on) then we haven't moved at all in the last decade or two.
If MS would spend a % of their cash reserves on developing a *real* os instead of the load of junk they ship (no, this is not a troll, this is an observation) we'd have a one-shot amazing piece of software that would set a new standard for useability and reliability.
unfortunately they spend that cash on marketing....
my dad did a lot of recovery of old photographic processes and I think the one you are referring to used potato starch as the photo sensitive medium.
I wasn't aware of the 78 rpm work, thanks for that !
that move would make America one of the technological backwaters of the globe.
Amazing they even discussed that proposition...
It's telling that our culture seems to put emphasis on how shortlived it really is, instead of thinking of the future and how we can best preserve our legacy for those that will come after us.
I'd hate to be in the shoes of a 23rd century researcher trying to play back a 2005 issue SONY drm'd compact disc or the last copy of a tune surviving on some ancient file server in encrypted apple iTunes format.
At least make it mandatory that media have to be deposited in DRM free format with some agency to make sure that the future will have access to todays cashcows (cash mice ? Mickey comes to mind), just in case congress at some remote point in the future decides that Walts estate has earned enough dough.
What's that got to do with the price of tea in China ? If local businesses have to lock their doors at night it's *not* because you grandma will come and steal at night, it's because someone a bit more enterprising will drive up with a semi and 'move house' for them. Most people (at least most people that I know, you speak for yourself) have a fairly strong sense of decency and honor.
Billions (count 'm) of users would gladly tap in to a library of any song ever produced for a reasonable (read significantly users directly will make artists richer, users happier even if half of the music got pirated (which is a very very large proportion compared to the number of honest people out there).
I *hate* drm, and the distrust of the end user that comes with it.
I'm working on a daz.com site that will hopefully solve that problem once and for all.
It is my nsho that record companies are dinosaurs that just don't quite realize they're already extinct and it will be my great pleasure to help nail shut the coffins.
Check out Janis Ian vs the RIAA to see how bad it really is.
well, as an omnipotent entity you have little to fear :)
spot on, but for technology people like you (and hopefully me) this is obvious. The problem is that the 'general public' is absolutely clueless about this and it will probably cause them great harm in the long run.
Just like credit bureaus started out collecting stuff just for the heck of it they are now causing a very large problem for a very large portion of the population. Europe has much stricter privacy laws and as far as I know there is no way for your insurance company, your employer or anybody else for that matter to lift your data without your explicit consent. And if you tried to do it without consent you'd be surprised at the level of punishment that goes with privacy invasion.
So a law to protect a user of a search engine's privacy would go a long way towards making the perceived level of privacy closer to the actual level of privacy.
google was implied (at least for me), they're the no.1 search company by a long stretch, and California would be a bad state to lose for any hightech company.
no, not really the traffic passes through points located in California.
:)
Also, right now:
Registrant:
Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
Please contact contact-admin@google.com 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043
US
they're pretty well represented there, and moving house is also not cheap (not to mention relocating all your employees) and all that just to avoid abiding by the law.
You might as well set up shop in Afghanistan if that's you attitude
the government is at odds with itself over this, there is privacy protection and then there is the 'war on terror' bs that says that we will track everything everywhere all the time (carnivore and such).
I'm pretty sure that privacy protection (of which there is precious little in the US to begin with) is going to lose out on this one. The right thing for GOOG, AOL, MSN and so on to do would be of course to unilaterally stop keeping track of peoples searches in such a way that they can be attributed to a particular person.
Then the government would have to mandate that such queries be kept and we can all see the emperor again. As it is the big search companies do the governments bidding because their goals are fairly strongly aligned.
Keep everything -> more control over the population in terms of dollars spent or people on file.
kiss your privacy goodbye.
the main reason for keeping searches anonymous is that you have no idea where that data will end up. You've looked up something about aids recently ? Your insurance just went up.
Tried to find out how to make TNT ? Off to Guantamo bay with you.
Finding out about the origins and local chapter of the KKK ? Better buy a new set of windows.
and so on.
Search queries are a private thing because like calling the help hot line for being suicidal if you can not guarantee privacy you end up causing real life damage.
Marketeers wet dreams and bottom lines only go so far, it's perfectly possible to run a search engine without profiling and still make a buck.
Maybe not quite as many bucks, and maybe you'd have to work a little harder to 'monetize' but to unconditionally hold hostage an individuals entire search history for an indefinite amount of time is a serious breach of privacy.
It would be like the phone company keeping a record of all your CONVERSATIONS, not just the numbers that you have dialled.
I'm working on a little contest, the prize will be 2500 euros for the first person to match up 100 real life identities with the search profiles, stay tuned.
(it took a while to get all the data correlated, but the main tables are all ready to go)
It is my firm belief that search engines should VOW not to keep search profiles on their users, nobody has yet seen an increase in quality from keeping person bound search records (even anonimized like aols were). Search records are 'radio active' in a sense because they'll always be of some value in the future which would possibly cause you damage. If you think that's not true think about this: would you consent to having all your searches of the last 5 years made public during ANY possible lawsuit filed against you (wrongful or not) and to have your opposition cherry pick your searches for 'proof' of their contentions ?
Jacques.
second that. added to that do not require other countries to implement ideas you have not yet implemented yourself (such as democracy)
the rules of entry in the us used to be defined by the natives, not the current imports.
Also, there is no war, afaik congress did not declare war.
If you can back up your statement that America is at war then please show me the declaration of war.
logic != flamebait.
how big a %age of voting age Americans actually voted ?
how about the opteron ? X64 is where it's at, I'm running a whole bunch of them and nothing intel will sell you at a reasonable price comes even close.
they're cool running, very stable and debian etch runs like a charm on them (I had to fiddle a bit to get sarge running on them, especially mysql).
you hit the nail right on the head. I spent some time before the fall of the wall in Poland and Eastern Germany and that is *exactly* how it was.
People marching in lockstep to the beat of the drum just so they don't stand out. Of course there is no risk to you, but everybody knew somebody that had had some doings with the Zomo's or the Vopos or whatever the local variety is called and that was enough. Less than 1% in either country ever had direct dealings with them but everybody was very afraid and nobody would speak their mind, not even to their closest family.
And we're getting there.
well, when they'll pick *you* up they won't be offering you any of those goodies either, and therein lies the problem.
The war on terror is not a real war, it's a pretext. Terrorism is a media driven 'statement', not a war, you can't fight terrorists in the same way that you can fight a nation state and anybody that says it works that way is trying to sell you something. If you want to get rid of terrorism you strive for situational change, not regime change. Democracy is not something you can impose, especially if your own country isn't democratic to begin with. Beam, splinter and so on.
passing through to other countries.
Makes you wonder how many people have decided that and how many airlines will go bust as a
result.
welcome to vmware, where nothing is as it seems, and there's a place for everything.
china doesn't need to attack the US, it already owns it ;)