That too lame for you ? Jumping from 60 miles not satisfying your desire for ultimate thrill ?
Go for MOOSE short for "Man Out Of Space Easiest". Which may be "easy", but certainly would not be unscary.
The idea is to re-enter from orbit wearing nothing more than your space-suit, a foldable foam heat-shield, a small hand-held rocket-motor with sufficient trust to make you slow orbital speed until you touch the atmosphere (from which point air-friction does the rest)
After entering in your own personal 6-foot-diameter flaming fireball, you'd jettison the heat-shield, deploy the parachute and proceed from there.
He tries desperately hard to be creative, funny, surprising, to add new perspectives.
Yet, when it comes down to it, he ultimately writes 5 pages of nonsense. He really does say amazingly close to nothing in all those pages. No. A large white square with the literal text "Whatever" in the middle doesn't really tell anyone anything significant.
And no. The skills needed for successfully managing a family and raising children doesn't, infact, have much in common with those skills needed to develop and maintain a programming-language.
Every time I read something from Larry, I become happier that I left Perl for good several years ago.
Agreed. But this is just stupidity. Really. I'm guessing the "predictor" would refuse to enter a bet that his own predictions come true. Indeed, it'd be easy to find people that would bet against it, even at 10:1 odds. Predictions such as:
In 10 years, 10% of the worlds population will be androids.
In 2020 the technology used to produce robots in Terminator (the first movie) will be considered obsolete.
By 2015 we'll have AI that is capable of achivieng a Masters Degree on its own.
By 2015-2020 there'll be no need for people to write software, you'll just tell the computer what you want, and the computer independently writes the software.
By 2025 we'll have yoghurt with processing-power enough that a single oz of yoghurt has the processing-power of the entire population of Europe.
These are, frankly, embarassing. I do not think he believes any of this himself. It is deliberate sensational lies in order to attract attention.
I'm willing to bet at 1:100 odds against any of these predictions. (i.e: I'm rigth, I get $1, you're rigth you get $100) Any takers ? No ? Didn't think so...
The only one he'll *claim* to be true is the android-one. He makes it clear that he considers the currently produced entertainment-robots, such as the sony wussname-dog an "android", with that low a bar it's possible that 700 million will be sold in the next decade. Those things aren't any more intelligent than my microwave though.
The main reason is probably that the program never overlooks something obvious trough mistake.
The main difference between novice and normal chess-players is that the novice will frequently not notice that, say, one of his officers is being threathened and will thus lose important pieces for no good reason.
A perfectly average nerd-pc these days may have cables for:
Power
Power to screen *2
DVI to screen *2
Ethernet
USB-to-keyboard
USB-to-mouse
Digital or analog link to amplifier/speakers.
USB-to-USB-hub (because the alternative, separate cables to camera,scanner,printer,mp3-player is worse)
Lots of people have more, but the above is pretty average. (for a nerd, not for a grandma)
It's out of control.
All devices that aren't physically tiny should be chainable. This means the USB-keyboard, USB-printer and USB-scanner should simultaneously have a built-in USB-hub. (I'm aware that there *exists* keyboards that are like this, but it's the exception)
Same goes for the screen. It should have a built-in USB-hub. It should-have built-in speakers of sufficient quality for grandma atleast. And it should do all this over *1* cable. (It should be perfectly possible to bundle DVI and USB without the cable getting much thicker)
Power too, should be chainable, it's frankly silly that you have 5 or so wall-warts each supplying perhaps 5W of power. A single, larger more efficient wall-wart would save power and clutter, in those cases where power-over-usb or power-over-ethernet can't be used.
Your legislative process is, frankly, mindboggling to most Europeans. It is not clear to me why it makes sense to make a single vote on issues such as: "Should we spend $500 million more on the war in Iraq and ban online gambling ?"
To any sensible observer these would appear to be two completely separate questions, thus it'd make sense to vote on them separately, I *completely* fail to see the supposed benefits of this "rider"-system.
You even frequently see semi-controversial stuff "attached" to the most obscure nobody-cares piece of legislation in existence, hoping that it'll get passed before somebody notices or something. Hello ? The entire *point* of a democracy is that people *should* notice the controversial issues, debate them, and then vote on them.
Can somebody with an insigth please explain what the benefits are ? To outsiders, frankly, it just seems completely ridicolous.
Wealth typically comes to those who have motivation/drive and put in the time and effort to achieve their goals.
But the playing-field is very very VERY heavily tilted. Its true that your individual contributions make a significant difference, but it's also true that the starting-points are miles apart.
Even a lazy, ignorant, stupid person born in say Norway, will generally end up in a much better position than a hard-working, intelligent person from for example Ghana.
The same inside countries. If both your parents have a college-degree and are reasonably well off, your odds of managing the same are very very VERY much better than they are if your parents are on welfare.
It's strange about pet-owners in general. The amount of irritation and damage that they feel it's fair to impose on everyone around them just for the sake of something which is, ultimately, just a hobby. (a blind-dog or similar is obviously something completely different!)
I used to live in a block in Germany. There where 2 families having cats in the block. They thougth all of the following was reasonable to expect their neighbours to put up with:
Cats roaming the entire property, using the childrens sandbox as a convenient toilet.
Leaving the cats at home by themselves all day long. With the door propped open so the cats can use the hall as a shelter when weather is bad. (offcourse it *never* happened that other cats than just theirs took advantage of this arrangement!)
Leaving cat-food in the hall, for the same reason as the point above. *certainly* leaving cat-food accessible in the open won't attract any strays or vermin, no no, the plate is labeled with the name of *their* cat afterall...
It's very convenient for the cats that there are child-wagons in the hall. Must be meant as cat-beds. Certainly the parents of the children don't mind a few scratches, a gazillion cat-hairs or the ocasional spot of urine.
Completely ridicolous. And that was just *one* example. I'm only 31, but I could give literally dozens of pet-owners behaving in similarily irresponsible ways, and that's just my own personal experiences.
The worst are patent-trolls that *only* exist to litigate patents. They don't actually produce *anything* so there is no risk that they'll do something that is covered by somebodys patent.
This also means defencive patent-pools are pointless against them.
"probably" ? The energy/mass ratio for batteries is about 1% of that of petrol. If you wanted to carry the same amount of energy as you're carrying if you've got an tiny little 1oz fuel-catridge, you'd need to be hauling along 6 pounds of batteries. And if you did something really crazy, like carrying a single pound of fuel, then the equivalent batteries would weigh as much as you do.
Energy-density of batteries *UTTERLY* *AMAZINGLY* suck. They could literally improve by an order of magnitude and still suck.
Now, where are my antimatter-cells ? You could run your car for it's lifetime on a few grams of antimatter. Better hope the confinement doesn't fail though, or current Hollywood-explosions will look lame.
It was started March 2000. It had experts. It had stringent quality-standards. It had peer-review and peer-approval prior to articles being published.
It was no fun at all. It was a collossal failure. In the 3 years up until it closed its doors in 2003 perhaps 50 articles got started, less than a dozen articles where ever finished.
The thing is, if you want lots of contributions, you need to make it easy and fun to contribute. Nupedia was anything but. It was a bureaucratic process, taking hours and hours over a period of weeks to even be *allowed* the priviledge of contributing your knowledge in some field or other.
It didn't work back then. It wouldn't work any better today, it was just a fundamentally misguided idea.
Why Larry feels the need to repeat old mistakes now is anybodys guess. His energies would be much better used contributing towards Wikipedia-1.0 which consist of marking certain articles -- in wikipedia -- that fulfills quality-standards as doing so, with the goal of eventually having a complete approved version. With the difference being, it'll keep the ease and the fun of contributing.
This ain't new. Larry knows this, or should know this. I certainly told him, 4 years ago or something. Heise.de still has some old quotes online if you google "Eivind Kjørstad Nupedia".
Oh well, he is free to repeat his mistakes. It is disapointing though, I always considered him smart, which in my book includes the ability to learn from mistakes.
You didn't grow up on that side of the tracks. Trust is like respect - it must be earned, or it's worthless. In the case of trust, misguided trust is dangerous, as the grandparent was trying to say.
Sure. But too little trust can be just as damaging to you as too much trust. The trick is finding the rigth level. And that *does* depend heavily on your own experiences and the particular situation.
Trust too much, and you get screwed over. Trust too little and you'll live a lonely, bitter life, looking for thieves and murderers behind every tree.
It must be nice to have never met an asshole.
It's about a balance of risk. Noone is saying you should trust a random stranger in a back-alley to carefully invest the money you hand over to him in cash. But neither is it reasonable to, for example, refuse a co-workers polite request that you buy him a cup of coffee, since he forgot his cash at home today. Not even if the co-worker started the day before and you don't know him at all.
Best case, it's the start of a friendship and contributes to improving your work-environment. Worst-case you're out the price of a cup of coffee. Thats a very reasonable risk to accept.
I'm saying I'm *aware* that some people are assholes. In my world, most aren't though. Furthermore, I'm *willing* to let the few assholes screw me over a few times, especially on matters of no great importance to me, if that's the price I need to pay to be able to be nice to those (the large majority) which deserve being treated well.
At least with written letters, if you write and send me a letter I can do what I want with it. Read it out loud, publish it online, whatever.
This is not nessecarily true. The text of a letter, like any other written text, receives copyrigth automatically. So correct is that, by law, you can do anything to the letter that is not prevented by copyrigth-law.
The rigths of duplication and of public performance are exclusive to the copyrigth-holder, so you can not legally do either of these things.
If you want to (for example) change your e-mail address or move house you just update your info in one single place, safe in the knowledge that people can still contact you. No more phoning around banks, credit card companies, utility companies, phone/broadband companies, loyalty card companies, friends, relatives, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
It may amuse you to notice that Norway (and other scandinavian countries) already has something sorta like this (and did for atleast the last 30 years!).
It works like this, somewhat simplified:
The state maintains a register listing where everyone lives.
When you open an account with a bank, or with a library, or with a utility-company or similar, you typically have the option of
allowing them to automatically update your adress from this central register. (you can also refuse to give them this permission, in which case you need to yourself inform them of any adress-changes)
Relax.
End-result ? I don't need to tell my bank, my insurance-company, the tax-people, my credit-card company or most other companies that I have a new adress. They discover this by themselves, saving me the trouble.
Even those companies where I haven't given them a permanent permission, many of them have a button on their webpage where you can explicitly allow them to one-time-only update your adress. Which saves typing in the new and old adress etc. For example, after logging in to Skandiabanken and clicking "personal information" there is a button that says in effect; "Update my adress NOW to the one I'm listed under in the central register". Thus even though I *do* need to inform them (since I ain't given them permission to auto-update) that informing is a question of logging in to the bank as I normally do, and then clicking the mouse twice.
You still need to inform some people (like friends) yourself. But guess what, *if* you allow the norwegian Post to auto-update your adress, they will by themselves notice when you move, and in response send you a stack of pre-filled-out postage-paid cards with your old and new adress. All you need to do is fill in the adress of the recipient and put the things in the mail. (they do this to reduce wrong-adressing which costs them lot in tracking down people)
My old digital camera needed 10-15 seconds, and I personally found even this very annoying on a number of occasions.
The 350D i use today is instant. It isn't *really* instant, the manual claims it needs 0.1 seconds from poweron to first shutter-release, but that is quick enough that if you flick the switch with your thumb, hold the camera to your eye, point and shoot, the camera will be ready before you are.
That's just the first single photo though, the camera needs another 2-3 seconds to fully boot. If you hold the shutter down (which should give you like 3 shots/second what you get is:
0.1 second wait.
Single shot.
2-3 second wait.
single shot.
0.3 second wait.
single shot.
etc (until the buffer fills, at which point the speed drops to that of your memory-card)
Knowing how to survive without power is just about having room-temperature iq. It's not as if it's in the sligthest hard.
Infact, unless you're literally chained to some electricity-using machine it'd be pretty darn hard to die just due to lack of power, even if you tried to.
Come on. You can't watch television. So don't. (won't kill you). You *may* not be able to cook food. So eat whatever you have that doesn't need to be cooked. This is literally 99% of the food in your house. Eating raw meat won't kill you (aslong as its fresh anyway) but if you don't fancy that, what's stopping you from grilling it ?
Yes, yes, there's *lots* of uncomfortable consequences of being without power for a week or a month. None of them will kill you. About the worst off you could be would be somewhere really cold with only electric heating. That is however exceedingly rare, most people living in cold places have a fireplace or a gas-stove or whatever.
My guess would be that failure of physical platters or read-heads account for perhaps 10% of all hard-disc crashes.
Having two platters with the same data will do nothing for you when the drive-electronics die. When the motor driving the spindle has a problem, when the stepper is no longer able to align the read-heads properly.
"enterprise telecom apps" aren't all that different from other large database-applications.
I never disputed that there *exists* large MS-SQL installations. They are a miniscule fraction of the large databases in the world, but they do indeed exist.
That someone, somewhere, does something, is no indication at all that there are good reasons for doing so, even less that that is the best way to do it.
The point is, a large database-server typically does nothing whatsoever other than run the database. The job of the OS under these circumstances is to offer a basic abstraction of the bare metal, and other than that get out of the way as much a possible.
You don't *need*, nor *want* Win32, Explorer.exe, Windows Scripting Host, ActiveX, Internet Explorer, a GUI or any of the other million things you get with Windows unless you spend a large amount of time and energy getting rid of them, on a large database-server.
I'm less than impressed with the argument "they do it, so it must be clever" which is the essence of your argument.
I could just as well say that most people who run large databases *don't* do this, so it must be dumb. Either argument is equally silly.
What you write is more or less true, except reality is actually worse.
In addition to being much harder to acquire and install, the "legal" proprietary software is frequently inferior to the pirated version.
For example, the "legal" version may require the DVD to be in the drive at all times. It may require you to "activate" the product which you already bougth and paid for. It may require you to *repeat* this process if you buy a new computer, or even if you just change components in your existing computer. The pirated software tends to have none of these problems.
Especially the latter point is a very very good one.
Despite print (and display) having only on the order of 1000:1 contrast-ratios, it'd be a tremendous advantage to have a digital camera that could capture a *LOT* more than that.
This would allow you to select your exposure later -- before *printing* (or displaying) rather than at the moment you take the photo. Bracketing can do this, sort of, but it's definitely a hack.
In essence, it'd allow you to first take a photo. And then *afterwards* experiment with all different exposures and/or film-sensitivities. A tremendous advantage.
After capturing the image, you need to display it somehow, or else there's not much point to the exersize.
Current screens and prints have a tiny dynamic range, on the order of 1000:1
So, once you've captured that image, where the brigthest pixel is a million times brigther than the darkest pixel, how are you going to show it ?
There's only one answer: compress the range, that is, map your numbers (in range 1 - 1000000) to much smaller numbers.
Problem is, now you've got terrible contrast in the midtones. The problem is that compressing the range compresses this part of the range too. So, assuming the monitor can display 1000 different brigthnesses, you end up with a picture where the brigthest pixel in a face is say 404 and the darkest pixel is say 397. Which makes the face essentially monotone.
Slashdot Mirror
Go for MOOSE short for "Man Out Of Space Easiest". Which may be "easy", but certainly would not be unscary.
The idea is to re-enter from orbit wearing nothing more than your space-suit, a foldable foam heat-shield, a small hand-held rocket-motor with sufficient trust to make you slow orbital speed until you touch the atmosphere (from which point air-friction does the rest)
After entering in your own personal 6-foot-diameter flaming fireball, you'd jettison the heat-shield, deploy the parachute and proceed from there.
Now *that* would be hell of a ride.
He tries desperately hard to be creative, funny, surprising, to add new perspectives.
Yet, when it comes down to it, he ultimately writes 5 pages of nonsense. He really does say amazingly close to nothing in all those pages. No. A large white square with the literal text "Whatever" in the middle doesn't really tell anyone anything significant.
And no. The skills needed for successfully managing a family and raising children doesn't, infact, have much in common with those skills needed to develop and maintain a programming-language.
Every time I read something from Larry, I become happier that I left Perl for good several years ago.
These are, frankly, embarassing. I do not think he believes any of this himself. It is deliberate sensational lies in order to attract attention.
I'm willing to bet at 1:100 odds against any of these predictions. (i.e: I'm rigth, I get $1, you're rigth you get $100) Any takers ? No ? Didn't think so...
The only one he'll *claim* to be true is the android-one. He makes it clear that he considers the currently produced entertainment-robots, such as the sony wussname-dog an "android", with that low a bar it's possible that 700 million will be sold in the next decade. Those things aren't any more intelligent than my microwave though.
The main reason is probably that the program never overlooks something obvious trough mistake.
The main difference between novice and normal chess-players is that the novice will frequently not notice that, say, one of his officers is being threathened and will thus lose important pieces for no good reason.
A perfectly average nerd-pc these days may have cables for:
Lots of people have more, but the above is pretty average. (for a nerd, not for a grandma)
It's out of control.
All devices that aren't physically tiny should be chainable. This means the USB-keyboard, USB-printer and USB-scanner should simultaneously have a built-in USB-hub. (I'm aware that there *exists* keyboards that are like this, but it's the exception)
Same goes for the screen. It should have a built-in USB-hub. It should-have built-in speakers of sufficient quality for grandma atleast. And it should do all this over *1* cable. (It should be perfectly possible to bundle DVI and USB without the cable getting much thicker)
Power too, should be chainable, it's frankly silly that you have 5 or so wall-warts each supplying perhaps 5W of power. A single, larger more efficient wall-wart would save power and clutter, in those cases where power-over-usb or power-over-ethernet can't be used.
To any sensible observer these would appear to be two completely separate questions, thus it'd make sense to vote on them separately, I *completely* fail to see the supposed benefits of this "rider"-system.
You even frequently see semi-controversial stuff "attached" to the most obscure nobody-cares piece of legislation in existence, hoping that it'll get passed before somebody notices or something. Hello ? The entire *point* of a democracy is that people *should* notice the controversial issues, debate them, and then vote on them.
Can somebody with an insigth please explain what the benefits are ? To outsiders, frankly, it just seems completely ridicolous.
Won't change even then: What stops you from, in the extreme case, photographing the screen to "save" a message ?
But the playing-field is very very VERY heavily tilted. Its true that your individual contributions make a significant difference, but it's also true that the starting-points are miles apart.
Even a lazy, ignorant, stupid person born in say Norway, will generally end up in a much better position than a hard-working, intelligent person from for example Ghana.
The same inside countries. If both your parents have a college-degree and are reasonably well off, your odds of managing the same are very very VERY much better than they are if your parents are on welfare.
I used to live in a block in Germany. There where 2 families having cats in the block. They thougth all of the following was reasonable to expect their neighbours to put up with:
Completely ridicolous. And that was just *one* example. I'm only 31, but I could give literally dozens of pet-owners behaving in similarily irresponsible ways, and that's just my own personal experiences.
This also means defencive patent-pools are pointless against them.
Anything we experience *certainly* do train our behaviour, in some way or other.
It doesn't follow that we forbid anything that some people manage to learn the wrong thing from.
We don't outlaw boxing, we don't outlaw films with car-chase scenes. We don't outlaw political speech we happen to disagree with.
Energy-density of batteries *UTTERLY* *AMAZINGLY* suck. They could literally improve by an order of magnitude and still suck.
Now, where are my antimatter-cells ? You could run your car for it's lifetime on a few grams of antimatter. Better hope the confinement doesn't fail though, or current Hollywood-explosions will look lame.
The thing you're missing is: He already did ! Really !
It was called Nupedia
It was started March 2000. It had experts. It had stringent quality-standards. It had peer-review and peer-approval prior to articles being published.
It was no fun at all. It was a collossal failure. In the 3 years up until it closed its doors in 2003 perhaps 50 articles got started, less than a dozen articles where ever finished.
The thing is, if you want lots of contributions, you need to make it easy and fun to contribute. Nupedia was anything but. It was a bureaucratic process, taking hours and hours over a period of weeks to even be *allowed* the priviledge of contributing your knowledge in some field or other.
It didn't work back then. It wouldn't work any better today, it was just a fundamentally misguided idea.
Why Larry feels the need to repeat old mistakes now is anybodys guess. His energies would be much better used contributing towards Wikipedia-1.0 which consist of marking certain articles -- in wikipedia -- that fulfills quality-standards as doing so, with the goal of eventually having a complete approved version. With the difference being, it'll keep the ease and the fun of contributing.
This ain't new. Larry knows this, or should know this. I certainly told him, 4 years ago or something. Heise.de still has some old quotes online if you google "Eivind Kjørstad Nupedia".
Oh well, he is free to repeat his mistakes. It is disapointing though, I always considered him smart, which in my book includes the ability to learn from mistakes.
I'm not sure 15 to 20 degrees north really qualifies as "The North Atlantic"
Sure. But too little trust can be just as damaging to you as too much trust. The trick is finding the rigth level. And that *does* depend heavily on your own experiences and the particular situation.
Trust too much, and you get screwed over. Trust too little and you'll live a lonely, bitter life, looking for thieves and murderers behind every tree.
It must be nice to have never met an asshole.
It's about a balance of risk. Noone is saying you should trust a random stranger in a back-alley to carefully invest the money you hand over to him in cash. But neither is it reasonable to, for example, refuse a co-workers polite request that you buy him a cup of coffee, since he forgot his cash at home today. Not even if the co-worker started the day before and you don't know him at all.
Best case, it's the start of a friendship and contributes to improving your work-environment. Worst-case you're out the price of a cup of coffee. Thats a very reasonable risk to accept.
I'm saying I'm *aware* that some people are assholes. In my world, most aren't though. Furthermore, I'm *willing* to let the few assholes screw me over a few times, especially on matters of no great importance to me, if that's the price I need to pay to be able to be nice to those (the large majority) which deserve being treated well.
This is not nessecarily true. The text of a letter, like any other written text, receives copyrigth automatically. So correct is that, by law, you can do anything to the letter that is not prevented by copyrigth-law.
The rigths of duplication and of public performance are exclusive to the copyrigth-holder, so you can not legally do either of these things.
It may amuse you to notice that Norway (and other scandinavian countries) already has something sorta like this (and did for atleast the last 30 years!).
It works like this, somewhat simplified:
End-result ? I don't need to tell my bank, my insurance-company, the tax-people, my credit-card company or most other companies that I have a new adress. They discover this by themselves, saving me the trouble.
Even those companies where I haven't given them a permanent permission, many of them have a button on their webpage where you can explicitly allow them to one-time-only update your adress. Which saves typing in the new and old adress etc. For example, after logging in to Skandiabanken and clicking "personal information" there is a button that says in effect; "Update my adress NOW to the one I'm listed under in the central register". Thus even though I *do* need to inform them (since I ain't given them permission to auto-update) that informing is a question of logging in to the bank as I normally do, and then clicking the mouse twice.
You still need to inform some people (like friends) yourself. But guess what, *if* you allow the norwegian Post to auto-update your adress, they will by themselves notice when you move, and in response send you a stack of pre-filled-out postage-paid cards with your old and new adress. All you need to do is fill in the adress of the recipient and put the things in the mail. (they do this to reduce wrong-adressing which costs them lot in tracking down people)
My old digital camera needed 10-15 seconds, and I personally found even this very annoying on a number of occasions.
The 350D i use today is instant. It isn't *really* instant, the manual claims it needs 0.1 seconds from poweron to first shutter-release, but that is quick enough that if you flick the switch with your thumb, hold the camera to your eye, point and shoot, the camera will be ready before you are.
That's just the first single photo though, the camera needs another 2-3 seconds to fully boot. If you hold the shutter down (which should give you like 3 shots/second what you get is:
Infact, unless you're literally chained to some electricity-using machine it'd be pretty darn hard to die just due to lack of power, even if you tried to.
Come on. You can't watch television. So don't. (won't kill you). You *may* not be able to cook food. So eat whatever you have that doesn't need to be cooked. This is literally 99% of the food in your house. Eating raw meat won't kill you (aslong as its fresh anyway) but if you don't fancy that, what's stopping you from grilling it ?
Yes, yes, there's *lots* of uncomfortable consequences of being without power for a week or a month. None of them will kill you. About the worst off you could be would be somewhere really cold with only electric heating. That is however exceedingly rare, most people living in cold places have a fireplace or a gas-stove or whatever.
My guess would be that failure of physical platters or read-heads account for perhaps 10% of all hard-disc crashes.
Having two platters with the same data will do nothing for you when the drive-electronics die. When the motor driving the spindle has a problem, when the stepper is no longer able to align the read-heads properly.
I never disputed that there *exists* large MS-SQL installations. They are a miniscule fraction of the large databases in the world, but they do indeed exist.
That someone, somewhere, does something, is no indication at all that there are good reasons for doing so, even less that that is the best way to do it.
The point is, a large database-server typically does nothing whatsoever other than run the database. The job of the OS under these circumstances is to offer a basic abstraction of the bare metal, and other than that get out of the way as much a possible.
You don't *need*, nor *want* Win32, Explorer.exe, Windows Scripting Host, ActiveX, Internet Explorer, a GUI or any of the other million things you get with Windows unless you spend a large amount of time and energy getting rid of them, on a large database-server.
I'm less than impressed with the argument "they do it, so it must be clever" which is the essence of your argument.
I could just as well say that most people who run large databases *don't* do this, so it must be dumb. Either argument is equally silly.
In addition to being much harder to acquire and install, the "legal" proprietary software is frequently inferior to the pirated version.
For example, the "legal" version may require the DVD to be in the drive at all times. It may require you to "activate" the product which you already bougth and paid for. It may require you to *repeat* this process if you buy a new computer, or even if you just change components in your existing computer. The pirated software tends to have none of these problems.
Yes, you "can", in the same way that you *can* put peas up your nose. It's not terribly useful though.
For all practical purposes, Windows has one advantage today: larger availability of enduser-software. That's it.
There's zero advantage, and a lot of disadvantage to running Windows on a big-iron database-server.
Despite print (and display) having only on the order of 1000:1 contrast-ratios, it'd be a tremendous advantage to have a digital camera that could capture a *LOT* more than that.
This would allow you to select your exposure later -- before *printing* (or displaying) rather than at the moment you take the photo. Bracketing can do this, sort of, but it's definitely a hack.
In essence, it'd allow you to first take a photo. And then *afterwards* experiment with all different exposures and/or film-sensitivities. A tremendous advantage.
After capturing the image, you need to display it somehow, or else there's not much point to the exersize.
Current screens and prints have a tiny dynamic range, on the order of 1000:1
So, once you've captured that image, where the brigthest pixel is a million times brigther than the darkest pixel, how are you going to show it ?
There's only one answer: compress the range, that is, map your numbers (in range 1 - 1000000) to much smaller numbers.
Problem is, now you've got terrible contrast in the midtones. The problem is that compressing the range compresses this part of the range too. So, assuming the monitor can display 1000 different brigthnesses, you end up with a picture where the brigthest pixel in a face is say 404 and the darkest pixel is say 397. Which makes the face essentially monotone.