Actually, you've put your finger on something there. The key assumption behind most of the UK government's recent legislation is that, if someone disapproves of a given activity, it should be made illegal. (That way the government gets the votes of those who disapprove).
But there are very few things indeed that someone, somewhere, doesn't disapprove of. So increasingly, a quiet unimprisoned life in the UK depends on not drawing the attention of the authorities.
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".
- H. L. Mencken
If "Microsoft hatred" is a disease, it is clearly one that is very widespread and easily aught. That's hardly surprising, considering the number of vectors it has: PowerPoint, Steve Ballmer, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, PowerPoint, Windows 98, Windows 95, Steve Ballmer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outhouse, Internet Exploder, PowerPoint...
Fortunately we now have some very promising treatment regimes, such as Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. Indeed the steady progress of FOSS holds out the promise that one day Microsoft, like [fill in disease of your choice], may be only a distant memory.
"Vista is an extremely stable OS that performs quite acceptably on systems with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz single-core CPU..."
Ah yes, I see what you did right. If you had 6 GB of RAM and a 4-core CPU your performance might have been substantially worse. I installed my copy of 64-bit Vista clean, avoided Norton and its ilk religiously, yet have endured months of hangs, complete freezes, and the occasional BSOD.
It's annoying when the fundamental reason for poor (and sometimes non-existent) performance is that your computer is too powerful.
SMP may have been rare when the original Windows was designed. But the crew from DEC (led by David Cutler) that Gates hired to write Windows NT knew SMP back to front. During the 1980s DEC software engineering learned more and more about SMP and how to nurse the best performance out of SMP servers and even desktop clients.
So Microsoft has had the know-how to fix this type of problem for over 15 years.
Aha! Thanks for explaining, at a stroke, why my i7 system has been hanging and locking up for months. I've been looking at Task manager, seeing the idle process running 98% of the time and 5GB of free RAM (plus pagefiles) - and yet the damn thing was completely ignoring my keystrokes and mouse movements.
Logically, I knew it had to be some basic design error in the OS, but I thought it was just dreadful scheduling. An artificial resource constraint from the 1980s - yes, that makes better sense.
The rules have changed. It is now illegal to "export" ITAR data, that is "sensitive" defense technology to foreign persons. However, this data is not classified. You can tell it to any and every US Person: your friends, family, neighbors, convenience store clerk. SO long as they are a US Person and also know not to tell it to Foreign National, they can know it.
However, telling it to a Canadian can get you sent to prison.
The rules have changed. And it's damaging to critical industries and research institutions.
How about telling it to a person with dual US and foreign nationalities?
My friend went out and got another insurance guy. He started off by telling the guy, "I want every thing I own covered. Never mind the price -- cover everything. Just know that you are never, EVER to tell me something isn't covered. If you do, I will come after you personally and beat the living holy shit out of you and I'm big enough to do it thoroughly and well."
So what was his premium? $10 million a month??
Insurance doesn't work the way your friend (or any of us other mug punters) would like it to. Like banking and government, it aims to make a reliable, consistent net profit regardless of what happens. Its attitude to risk is to transfer the biggest risks from the individual mug punter to the aggregate mass of mug punters, while it stays high and dry on a risk-free island in midstream.
And of course assaulting an insurance company employee because you were foolish enough to sign an agreement that didn't suit your needs would just get you locked up for a year and a day (or maybe even longer).
Welcome to the Land of the Free to Make Unlimited Profits.
'In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses"...'
Wrong already! Software does the work - the "what" of solving problems. Hardware, while of course necessary too, is basically a fungible commodity - the "how". To use a counter-intuitive but revealing analogy, software is like the car while hardware plays the role of fuel.
Good software is still fairly rare, whereas state-of-the-market hardware can be cheaply and plentifully obtained from several alternative sources. So the article has it exactly the wrong way round: it's software that is important, and hardware that plays the supporting role.
You are wrong, mind-numbingly, disturbingly, incomprehensibly wrong. It's as though you just commented in all seriousness that the sun and the moon are the same thing. Not only are you wrong now, but you are wrong in the past and almost certainly the future. You are wrong on so throughly, so completely, that whenever I try to write a cohesive rebuttal my mind falls dizzyingly lurches into a dark chasm where the word "What?" echoes endlessly into the void.
The fact that you have been modded +5 insightful is a thought too painful to bear. I think I need to go lie down.
This boils down to "You are wrong" (without the slightest attempt at justification or explanation). Since when did telling someone "you are wrong" very forcefully and repetitiously merit being modded up to "5 Insightful"? More specifically, where is the insight?
Ironically, the only explanation I can think of is "mob mentality" on the part of the moderators. They agreed with the poster, so modded his reply Insightful for no other reason.
...if linking to copyrighted material were made illegal, I would *stop* reading newspaper articles. I only ever see those to which I link through Google News.
As usual, the judge has got it backwards. Linking is what the Web is all about. If your copyrighted material is so precious you don't want anyone linking to it, your remedy is perfectly simple. Don't post it on the Web.
Then surely it's a very weak password indeed? How many very rude words are there, after all? (Even if you include those in different languages such as "Ai caramba" and "espece de Zouave")
Unfortunately we have different communication technologies overlapping here, each with its traditional pricing structure. They don't fit.
The Internet has always been free to the end-user, thanks to the generosity (and perhaps intelligent self-interest) of parties like the US federal government, owners of the many servers that forward packets to us all, and - let's not forget - even telcos. Where I live, in southern England, I can buy ISP service for about $20/month upwards. That gets me continuous Internet access using ADSL, over a telephone wire designed for speech only, with a maximum bandwidth of about 2Mbps (because I live 3 miles from the exchange). On a good day I might get 2.8 Mbps, on a bad day (and perhaps due to contention) down around 1.5 or even less.
Now this is perfectly adequate for almost everything I want to do. I use email (and have since 1980); download with ftp; browse the Web; and other such traditional activities. The only time I bump my head on the ceiling is when I have to download a really big file, or (occasionally) watch some streaming video that I can't download in its entirety first.
Where it breaks down completely, of course, is if I want to download (or worse stream) movies, watch live sporting events in full glorious technicolour on a large screen without graininess or intermittent motion; or watch TV. That's because the Internet was never intended for those activities, most of which are better adapted to the plain ol' steam TV set (complemented by a video player, DVD player, etc.) Why on earth would thousands (potentially millions) of individuals download high-bandwidth material over separate, contending, low-bandwidth links, when much of that same material is freely broadcast through the air they breathe? It doesn't make very good engineering sense. More to the point, it doesn't make good economic or business sense. Movies, TV, sport, music and other live entertainment have traditionally been things you had to pay for - whether by buying a ticket, subscribing, or just watching tedious commercials.
AFAIAC, the really important aspect of this whole thing is that the Internet itself should remain free - as in speech and as in beer (apart from content-neutral ISP fees). Unfortunately, there are pople like this http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19552&tag=nl.e539 who reckon otherwise. We have got to make sure they don't get their way.
Having struggled with two Vista PCs for many months, I am perpetually on the lookout for a better solution. (I've even considered running XP in a VM under SuSE Linux). I have a pretty powerful desktop machine, with a 2.9MHz 4-core i7, 6GB of fast RAM, two Velociraptors and an SSD. This machine is very sluggish running 64-bit Vista SP2, and I am sick and tired of seeing everyday applications like Firefox flagged "Not Responding" (and living right up to that) for as much as minutes on end - while Task Manager shows the idle process running 85% of the time. My laptop, a ThinkPad T61 with 2GB RAM, shows similar symptoms but (oddly enough) doesn't tend to stay out to lunch quite as often or as long.
So I glommed right on to this review, hoping to see some impressive figures. But it seems to me they aren't. Improvements in disk read performance of around 10% might not change overall user responsiveness enough for you to notice it.
Why can't Microsoft simply produce a scheduler that understands the key principle: when the user wants to do something, everything else must get out of the way? Their trouble is that they just don't agree with what seems to obvious to me. It's MY computer, not theirs. I paid for it, I own it, I use it. So I want it to pay attention to ME, first, last, and foremost. Not some unnecessary housekeeping task that seem Microsoft developer or marketing chum decided to impose on me. It's ironic that an IBM mainframe should be so much more responsive than a supposedly end-user-centric "personal" computer whose OS is completely dominated by its UI.
"If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
That all depends on the nations involved.
1. If the USA attacks another nation's military base, any response whatsoever by the foreign nation would be illegal. Trying to shut down the US power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control, banking, etc. systems would obviously be downright terrorism and quite inexcusable.
2. If another nation attacks a US military base (even on that other nation's own soil), any response whatsoever by the USA - up to and including the use of nuclear weapons - would be perfectly natural and entirely justified. Shutting down other nations' power grids, hospital systems, air traffic control, banking, and other critical infrastructure such as roads, railways, water supplies, etc. is what the US armed forces routinely do as a matter of course. For example against Serbia and Iraq, neither of which had attacked a US military base nor committed any other hostile action.
I can just imagine a Far Side strip with two of those amiable bears picking their teeth companionably as they devour the remains of a human body.
"Of course they don't feel pain!" says one of them. "These creatures are just like insects - driven by a few simple reflexes. When you jump out of the bushes at them, they only ever do one of three things: try to climb a tree, run away, or freeze rigid. Of course none of those does them any good, so how can they possibly be intelligent?"
I sense a certain amount of discomfort in discussions like these. If you are religious, it is hard to understand why a creator God would think up a world in which every interestingly complex creature has to eat other creatures to survive - often causing them excruciating unbearable pain in the process. (I'm thinking of flesh-eating bacteria and haemorrhagic viruses here as well as bears and weasels).
Our civilisation has isolated us so successfully from the cruel realities of life that more and more people simply cannot face these facts honestly. They have to explain them away somehow.
But you can't run away from the facts. The movie "The Edge" has a scene that rams them down your throat. The survivors of a plane crash in the frozen North are huddled round a camp fire one night when a grizzly bear walks up to them, grabs one guy, and rips his arm off. Then the bear calmly sits down to eat the arm while the unfortunate man is screaming his head off (and presumably quickly dying of shock and blood loss). The bear is absolutely unconcerned about the man's suffering - neither happy about it, nor upset, nor guilty. As far as it's concerned, it's just found some fresh meat and is satisfying its hunger. Presently, if it's still hungry, it may eat some more of him, whether he's still alive or not.
That was a brilliant scene, because it distilled into a few ghastly seconds the truth of "Nature red in tooth and claw". That sort of scene plays itself out billions of times every day, but we humans mostly manage to ignore it.
No, no, no! You've got it all wrong. Looking at CP images makes you a pervert if you are a bad person. It's quite all right if you are a good person. The IWF - like the government, of course - are good people, so there's no problem.
This is strictly analogous to the logic whereby terrorists who kill people are irredeemably wicked (and usually "mindless"), while governments who kill thousands of times as many people are good (although maybe a tad careless).
That would account for some anomalous recent election results. We've been asking ourselves, "What kind of electorate would choose XXXX to run their affairs?" If you postulate that the decision was actually made by the nation's pets, the outcome suddenly makes more sense.
The internet isn't nearly as bulletproof as the DoD would like and there isn't much they can do about it short of laying new fiber that skips over the vulnerable points.
Yes, the DoD certainly couldn't afford to lay new fibre. Do you know how much that stuff costs? The DoD's whole annual budget of $515 billion would only pay for a billion kilometres or so of the stuff. That's just barely enough to get to Mars and back (with ten thousand circuits of the Earth thrown in as small change), or one-way to Jupiter.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you've put your finger on something there. The key assumption behind most of the UK government's recent legislation is that, if someone disapproves of a given activity, it should be made illegal. (That way the government gets the votes of those who disapprove).
But there are very few things indeed that someone, somewhere, doesn't disapprove of. So increasingly, a quiet unimprisoned life in the UK depends on not drawing the attention of the authorities.
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".
- H. L. Mencken
If "Microsoft hatred" is a disease, it is clearly one that is very widespread and easily aught. That's hardly surprising, considering the number of vectors it has: PowerPoint, Steve Ballmer, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, PowerPoint, Windows 98, Windows 95, Steve Ballmer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outhouse, Internet Exploder, PowerPoint...
Fortunately we now have some very promising treatment regimes, such as Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. Indeed the steady progress of FOSS holds out the promise that one day Microsoft, like [fill in disease of your choice], may be only a distant memory.
"Microsoft has greatly approved their testing process..."
I don't doubt they have greatly "approved" it. Whether they have improved it is another matter.
"Vista is an extremely stable OS that performs quite acceptably on systems with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz single-core CPU..."
Ah yes, I see what you did right. If you had 6 GB of RAM and a 4-core CPU your performance might have been substantially worse. I installed my copy of 64-bit Vista clean, avoided Norton and its ilk religiously, yet have endured months of hangs, complete freezes, and the occasional BSOD.
It's annoying when the fundamental reason for poor (and sometimes non-existent) performance is that your computer is too powerful.
SMP may have been rare when the original Windows was designed. But the crew from DEC (led by David Cutler) that Gates hired to write Windows NT knew SMP back to front. During the 1980s DEC software engineering learned more and more about SMP and how to nurse the best performance out of SMP servers and even desktop clients.
So Microsoft has had the know-how to fix this type of problem for over 15 years.
Aha! Thanks for explaining, at a stroke, why my i7 system has been hanging and locking up for months. I've been looking at Task manager, seeing the idle process running 98% of the time and 5GB of free RAM (plus pagefiles) - and yet the damn thing was completely ignoring my keystrokes and mouse movements.
Logically, I knew it had to be some basic design error in the OS, but I thought it was just dreadful scheduling. An artificial resource constraint from the 1980s - yes, that makes better sense.
The rules have changed. It is now illegal to "export" ITAR data, that is "sensitive" defense technology to foreign persons. However, this data is not classified. You can tell it to any and every US Person: your friends, family, neighbors, convenience store clerk. SO long as they are a US Person and also know not to tell it to Foreign National, they can know it.
However, telling it to a Canadian can get you sent to prison.
The rules have changed. And it's damaging to critical industries and research institutions.
How about telling it to a person with dual US and foreign nationalities?
My friend went out and got another insurance guy. He started off by telling the guy, "I want every thing I own covered. Never mind the price -- cover everything. Just know that you are never, EVER to tell me something isn't covered. If you do, I will come after you personally and beat the living holy shit out of you and I'm big enough to do it thoroughly and well."
So what was his premium? $10 million a month??
Insurance doesn't work the way your friend (or any of us other mug punters) would like it to. Like banking and government, it aims to make a reliable, consistent net profit regardless of what happens. Its attitude to risk is to transfer the biggest risks from the individual mug punter to the aggregate mass of mug punters, while it stays high and dry on a risk-free island in midstream.
And of course assaulting an insurance company employee because you were foolish enough to sign an agreement that didn't suit your needs would just get you locked up for a year and a day (or maybe even longer).
Welcome to the Land of the Free to Make Unlimited Profits.
'In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses"...'
Wrong already! Software does the work - the "what" of solving problems. Hardware, while of course necessary too, is basically a fungible commodity - the "how". To use a counter-intuitive but revealing analogy, software is like the car while hardware plays the role of fuel.
Good software is still fairly rare, whereas state-of-the-market hardware can be cheaply and plentifully obtained from several alternative sources. So the article has it exactly the wrong way round: it's software that is important, and hardware that plays the supporting role.
You are wrong, mind-numbingly, disturbingly, incomprehensibly wrong. It's as though you just commented in all seriousness that the sun and the moon are the same thing. Not only are you wrong now, but you are wrong in the past and almost certainly the future. You are wrong on so throughly, so completely, that whenever I try to write a cohesive rebuttal my mind falls dizzyingly lurches into a dark chasm where the word "What?" echoes endlessly into the void.
The fact that you have been modded +5 insightful is a thought too painful to bear. I think I need to go lie down.
This boils down to "You are wrong" (without the slightest attempt at justification or explanation). Since when did telling someone "you are wrong" very forcefully and repetitiously merit being modded up to "5 Insightful"? More specifically, where is the insight?
Ironically, the only explanation I can think of is "mob mentality" on the part of the moderators. They agreed with the poster, so modded his reply Insightful for no other reason.
...if linking to copyrighted material were made illegal, I would *stop* reading newspaper articles. I only ever see those to which I link through Google News.
As usual, the judge has got it backwards. Linking is what the Web is all about. If your copyrighted material is so precious you don't want anyone linking to it, your remedy is perfectly simple. Don't post it on the Web.
"My password is a very rude word..."
Then surely it's a very weak password indeed? How many very rude words are there, after all? (Even if you include those in different languages such as "Ai caramba" and "espece de Zouave")
Unfortunately we have different communication technologies overlapping here, each with its traditional pricing structure. They don't fit.
The Internet has always been free to the end-user, thanks to the generosity (and perhaps intelligent self-interest) of parties like the US federal government, owners of the many servers that forward packets to us all, and - let's not forget - even telcos. Where I live, in southern England, I can buy ISP service for about $20/month upwards. That gets me continuous Internet access using ADSL, over a telephone wire designed for speech only, with a maximum bandwidth of about 2Mbps (because I live 3 miles from the exchange). On a good day I might get 2.8 Mbps, on a bad day (and perhaps due to contention) down around 1.5 or even less.
Now this is perfectly adequate for almost everything I want to do. I use email (and have since 1980); download with ftp; browse the Web; and other such traditional activities. The only time I bump my head on the ceiling is when I have to download a really big file, or (occasionally) watch some streaming video that I can't download in its entirety first.
Where it breaks down completely, of course, is if I want to download (or worse stream) movies, watch live sporting events in full glorious technicolour on a large screen without graininess or intermittent motion; or watch TV. That's because the Internet was never intended for those activities, most of which are better adapted to the plain ol' steam TV set (complemented by a video player, DVD player, etc.) Why on earth would thousands (potentially millions) of individuals download high-bandwidth material over separate, contending, low-bandwidth links, when much of that same material is freely broadcast through the air they breathe? It doesn't make very good engineering sense. More to the point, it doesn't make good economic or business sense. Movies, TV, sport, music and other live entertainment have traditionally been things you had to pay for - whether by buying a ticket, subscribing, or just watching tedious commercials.
AFAIAC, the really important aspect of this whole thing is that the Internet itself should remain free - as in speech and as in beer (apart from content-neutral ISP fees). Unfortunately, there are pople like this http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19552&tag=nl.e539 who reckon otherwise. We have got to make sure they don't get their way.
Why on earth would anyone use bang in India anyway? (Or anywhere else for that matter).
Sorry everyone, just showing my age... 8-)
Having struggled with two Vista PCs for many months, I am perpetually on the lookout for a better solution. (I've even considered running XP in a VM under SuSE Linux). I have a pretty powerful desktop machine, with a 2.9MHz 4-core i7, 6GB of fast RAM, two Velociraptors and an SSD. This machine is very sluggish running 64-bit Vista SP2, and I am sick and tired of seeing everyday applications like Firefox flagged "Not Responding" (and living right up to that) for as much as minutes on end - while Task Manager shows the idle process running 85% of the time. My laptop, a ThinkPad T61 with 2GB RAM, shows similar symptoms but (oddly enough) doesn't tend to stay out to lunch quite as often or as long.
So I glommed right on to this review, hoping to see some impressive figures. But it seems to me they aren't. Improvements in disk read performance of around 10% might not change overall user responsiveness enough for you to notice it.
Why can't Microsoft simply produce a scheduler that understands the key principle: when the user wants to do something, everything else must get out of the way? Their trouble is that they just don't agree with what seems to obvious to me. It's MY computer, not theirs. I paid for it, I own it, I use it. So I want it to pay attention to ME, first, last, and foremost. Not some unnecessary housekeeping task that seem Microsoft developer or marketing chum decided to impose on me. It's ironic that an IBM mainframe should be so much more responsive than a supposedly end-user-centric "personal" computer whose OS is completely dominated by its UI.
Didn't The Decider already give us the necessary algorithm?
Was this outside Iraqi airspace? If within, as a sovereign nation Iraq had every right to fire on foreign military aircraft invading its territory.
What would the USA do if foreign military aircraft overflew its territory?
And please don't bring the UN into it! If you find that an unreasonable request, then ask yourself:
What would the USA do if foreign military aircraft overflew its territory with UN permission?
"If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
That all depends on the nations involved.
1. If the USA attacks another nation's military base, any response whatsoever by the foreign nation would be illegal. Trying to shut down the US power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control, banking, etc. systems would obviously be downright terrorism and quite inexcusable.
2. If another nation attacks a US military base (even on that other nation's own soil), any response whatsoever by the USA - up to and including the use of nuclear weapons - would be perfectly natural and entirely justified. Shutting down other nations' power grids, hospital systems, air traffic control, banking, and other critical infrastructure such as roads, railways, water supplies, etc. is what the US armed forces routinely do as a matter of course. For example against Serbia and Iraq, neither of which had attacked a US military base nor committed any other hostile action.
And that is why it is generally a lot safer to call it "climate change".
I can just imagine a Far Side strip with two of those amiable bears picking their teeth companionably as they devour the remains of a human body.
"Of course they don't feel pain!" says one of them. "These creatures are just like insects - driven by a few simple reflexes. When you jump out of the bushes at them, they only ever do one of three things: try to climb a tree, run away, or freeze rigid. Of course none of those does them any good, so how can they possibly be intelligent?"
I sense a certain amount of discomfort in discussions like these. If you are religious, it is hard to understand why a creator God would think up a world in which every interestingly complex creature has to eat other creatures to survive - often causing them excruciating unbearable pain in the process. (I'm thinking of flesh-eating bacteria and haemorrhagic viruses here as well as bears and weasels).
Our civilisation has isolated us so successfully from the cruel realities of life that more and more people simply cannot face these facts honestly. They have to explain them away somehow.
But you can't run away from the facts. The movie "The Edge" has a scene that rams them down your throat. The survivors of a plane crash in the frozen North are huddled round a camp fire one night when a grizzly bear walks up to them, grabs one guy, and rips his arm off. Then the bear calmly sits down to eat the arm while the unfortunate man is screaming his head off (and presumably quickly dying of shock and blood loss). The bear is absolutely unconcerned about the man's suffering - neither happy about it, nor upset, nor guilty. As far as it's concerned, it's just found some fresh meat and is satisfying its hunger. Presently, if it's still hungry, it may eat some more of him, whether he's still alive or not.
That was a brilliant scene, because it distilled into a few ghastly seconds the truth of "Nature red in tooth and claw". That sort of scene plays itself out billions of times every day, but we humans mostly manage to ignore it.
No, no, no! You've got it all wrong. Looking at CP images makes you a pervert if you are a bad person. It's quite all right if you are a good person. The IWF - like the government, of course - are good people, so there's no problem.
This is strictly analogous to the logic whereby terrorists who kill people are irredeemably wicked (and usually "mindless"), while governments who kill thousands of times as many people are good (although maybe a tad careless).
You know....it sounds even more basic to me.
NEVER cooperate with the cops. If you are about to get in trouble, clam up...get lawyered up.
Once you start to cooperate a little, it appears....you can start to give up rights you have.
But then, they will say "He's obviously guilty - an innocent person would want to help the authorities clear this up".
Catch-22.
That would account for some anomalous recent election results. We've been asking ourselves, "What kind of electorate would choose XXXX to run their affairs?" If you postulate that the decision was actually made by the nation's pets, the outcome suddenly makes more sense.
The internet isn't nearly as bulletproof as the DoD would like and there isn't much they can do about it short of laying new fiber that skips over the vulnerable points.
Yes, the DoD certainly couldn't afford to lay new fibre. Do you know how much that stuff costs? The DoD's whole annual budget of $515 billion would only pay for a billion kilometres or so of the stuff. That's just barely enough to get to Mars and back (with ten thousand circuits of the Earth thrown in as small change), or one-way to Jupiter.
Be reasonable.