Your city must have a pretty big police force in relation to its size. Mine does not.
And no, it's not a cash cow, despite the conventional wisdom that the only purpose of traffic tickets is to coin money. Put all your cops on one street, and people quickly learn to drive carefully — on that one street. Meanwhile, conditions on other streets get worse.
That page is a marketeer inventing buzzwords to help them sell the product. The logic here is that BOCH, which doesn't emulate the full CPU is an "emulator" while software that does emulate the full machine is a "native virtualization". Whoever wrote that doesn't know what "emulation" means and hasn't read the very Wikipedia article they're pointing to.
So we're supposed to say that VirtualBox doesn't "emulate" the x86_64 instruction set, it "virtualizes" it! That's nonsense. Marketeers are excessively fond of these naming games. Creates much confusion.
VirtualBox is a hardware emulator. If it emulates the x86_64 instruction set properly, there's nothing to prevent you from running any 64-bit application under it. You'll take a performance hit, since those 64-bit "hardware" instructions are really running in software, but that's true for any emulation.
Oh please. Somebody who needs to know something like this can find it in five seconds with Google. Everybody else could care less. Let's try to limit the Wikipedia notion that knowledge and trivia are the same thing.
I did RTFA. People are planting bogus photographic evidence. From that, you seem to jump to the conclusion that all photographic evidence is invalid.
People who drive around with bogus license plates will get busted eventually. End of problem. We're still left with the dimwitted attitude that the "injustice" of a "unfair" traffic ticket (and who thinks that their traffic ticket is fair?) is more important than the little detail of people getting killed.
Sometimes speed bumps and other "traffic calming" measure help. And in fact the city where I live spends a lot of money on them. But they have their own problems: fire departments don't like them, and put in the wrong place they can actually cause accidents. They probably would on my street, which attracts speeders because it's near a major offramp. People would cut onto the street and hit the speedbumps before they saw them and had a chance to react to them.
Sometimes the only solution is law enforcement. But while people are all for enforcement of other laws, somehow making you slow down or not race read lights is a "perversion of justice."
Actually, by 500 AD, Christianity was the official religion in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. Your analogy works better at 100 AD. When most educated people actually did look at Christianity as a superstitious cult.
Which was just a measure of the prejudices of the time. And that tells us that "cult" is kind of a useless label. It's just a convenient way to dismiss the beliefs of people we don't want to make the effort to understand. That's especially a mistake with Scientology, which is quite capable of being despised on its own terms!
"Perversion of justice"? You have a crime, you have evidence of crime. The accuser is the person who set up the camera. If a burglar shows up on a security camera, do we toss the evidence because there was nobody else in the building?
Traffic laws, unlike other laws, seem to be hemmed in with silly technicalities. I guess people feel they have a fundamental right to drive to fast. Which is why people shortcut through the street I live on (houses on one side, elementary school on the other) at 50 MPH. The city tried to fight it with traffic cameras. No! You have to have a witness! So the city hired people to sit in the camera vans and be the "witness".
But that got challenged too. Somebody convinced the courts that only cops can issue traffic citations. City can't afford to have that many cops just sitting around. No more traffic cameras.
So I have to be darned careful crossing my own street. I also have to be careful where I park my car, to avoid getting sideswiped. Meanwhile, people speeding on surface streets kill themselves and pedestrians with depressing frequency. How's that for "perversity"?
Yes, you're right. Tools are wholly secondary to the content.
That's not at all what I said. Good do tools make the job easier, and the less unnecessary work you do have to do, the more attention you can spare to write better content. So tools do matter. I'm only warning against giving too much priority to finding "the right tools".
After all, when was the last time you read a book and though "Wow, the page layout in this book *rocks*?". Good technical books have a well-thought-out structure, have something vital to say, and explain their material clearly. It's the content, not the tools. Every hour spent tweaking that TeX macro (or fighting with the word processor, etc.) is an hour you should have spent thinking about structure of the the book, the text, or the (often forgotten) intended reader.
That's true, but unfortunately some warfare with your tools is unavoidable. As I said before, most word processors are not well designed for technical writing. But using a word processor you're comfortable with may have less martial overhead than writing with an XML editor, even though XML is fundamentally better for technical content.
Which makes your comment about layout kind of off the mark. One reason to use XML instead of a word processor is to force yourself to pay more attention to content and less to presentation issues like layout.
I write technical content for a living, so I ought to be exactly the kind of person who can answer your question. Alas, no. In fact, there may not be a simple answer!
The crucial thing with technical content (especially manuals, which is most of what I write, but also techie books) is that it gets revised and repurposed a lot. So "the right tool" needs to support structured content, which cuts down on the human effort of revision and repurposing. And all the "best" writing tools that support structured content use XML. (Or SGML, which is almost the same thing.)
But here's the problem with XML: you need a lot of infrastructure to support it. Unless you're willing to be your own XML software hacker (and a lot of writers are) that makes XML out of reach for a freelance tech author.
(Hell, it puts XML out of reach for most writers of any kind. Most companies that produce a lot of technical content still use very old-fashioned non-structured tools. Investing in all that infrastructure is too scary for most managers. It costs them in the long run, but how many business decisions have anything to do with the long run?)
So what's the alternative? Stop worrying about tools. Or at least no more than you really want to. If you're willing to become an XML nerd, then fine, download all the OSS XML tools that are available, and start training yourself. But if you just want to sit down and start writing, you should just use whatever tools you're most comfortable with.
And that can be Word. It's not PC to say so, but Word (or any other common word processor) is perfectly capable of doing a well-structured document. It just takes more discipline on the part of the writer. That means you don't do a lot of low-level formatting, even though word processor GUIs tend to encourage it. Use a styles, not low-level formatting, to indicate things like section breaks, bullet lists, and computer output. Word processors usually have obvious buttons for doing this, but they almost always use low-level formatting (begin indented paragraph with bullet type 3) not styles (item paragraph).
It can also be LaTex. You'll get lots of people telling you that LaTex is your only choice. Not true. It has its advantages if you need to to finely tweak the presentation of things like equations and charts. But for most content, you should only use LaTex if it's the format you're most comfortable with.
But more important than the specific tool is structure. Together with structure. And don't forget structure. A maintainable technical document is as carefully structured as maintainable source code. Good writing tools make it easier to write well structured documents, just as good programming tools make it easier to write well structured code. But in both cases, the writer or programmer is ultimately responsible for creating and enforcing the structure.
It's interesting that such silly comments keep getting modded up. Some weird beliefs about how business works have an absurd amount of credibility.
Let's put this in ordinary, non-business terms. Suppose you make $30K a year. You get a bill for $1K, and for one reason or another, you can't just ignore it. (If you make more than $30K, multiply that $1K accordingly.) Even if you can afford to pay it, that's enough money to hurt. Suppose further, that this bill is somehow job related, and if your boss finds out that you spent $1K in the way you spent it, he might well fire you. You may or may not be aware of this.
Choices: (a) grit your teeth and pay the bill (b) challenge the bill, risking your job, though you may not realize that your job is at risk. Would you really do (a)?
I already know your answer: you're going to say "yes" because you have a pet theory that you're in love with and will keep defending it no matter how lame your arguments sound. But most people would say "no". Actually, just about anybody.
My paid taxes (and those of my parents) have more than covered anything I've gotten back from government in my lifetime.
I'm assuming you're just talking about obviously quantifiable things, like education and roads. But how much is crime suppression worth to you? Public health?
One of the biggest government expenses is the military. Depending on what wars you think were necessary and which weren't you may or may not think you're getting your money's worth. But I think it's kind of hard to define a cost-benefit relationship for the military's most basic job: keeping us from getting invaded.
You sort of answer your own question in the last sentence of your post. Yes, Solaris is a superior server OS. But, by itself, that's not enough to get IT managers to choose Solaris over Linux or Windows. There has to be a big pool of developers with Solaris expertise. Otherwise those IT managers won't be able to hire the in-house Solaris experts, or buy Solaris applications from ISVs. Sun's strategy here is to get Solaris into the hands of as many budding software geeks as possible, hoping that they'll turn into those Solaris experts.
That doesn't really answer your question, which is asked from the point of view of the person buying the laptop, not from Sun. And the answer there is: because you're a hacker. As a hacker, you often swim against the economic tide if it allows you to have more fun. If that weren't true, there wouldn't be any laptops running anything except Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep hearing that one in the blogosphere. But the only "proof" offered is links to other blogs.
Yeah, I guess I need to lighten up when it comes to Wikipedia issues....
Your city must have a pretty big police force in relation to its size. Mine does not.
And no, it's not a cash cow, despite the conventional wisdom that the only purpose of traffic tickets is to coin money. Put all your cops on one street, and people quickly learn to drive carefully — on that one street. Meanwhile, conditions on other streets get worse.
When I talk about "the Wikipedia notion" I refer to the attitude of most Wikipedia editors, few of whom seem to have read those articles.
That page is a marketeer inventing buzzwords to help them sell the product. The logic here is that BOCH, which doesn't emulate the full CPU is an "emulator" while software that does emulate the full machine is a "native virtualization". Whoever wrote that doesn't know what "emulation" means and hasn't read the very Wikipedia article they're pointing to.
So we're supposed to say that VirtualBox doesn't "emulate" the x86_64 instruction set, it "virtualizes" it! That's nonsense. Marketeers are excessively fond of these naming games. Creates much confusion.
VirtualBox is a hardware emulator. If it emulates the x86_64 instruction set properly, there's nothing to prevent you from running any 64-bit application under it. You'll take a performance hit, since those 64-bit "hardware" instructions are really running in software, but that's true for any emulation.
Oh please. Somebody who needs to know something like this can find it in five seconds with Google. Everybody else could care less. Let's try to limit the Wikipedia notion that knowledge and trivia are the same thing.
I did RTFA. People are planting bogus photographic evidence. From that, you seem to jump to the conclusion that all photographic evidence is invalid.
People who drive around with bogus license plates will get busted eventually. End of problem. We're still left with the dimwitted attitude that the "injustice" of a "unfair" traffic ticket (and who thinks that their traffic ticket is fair?) is more important than the little detail of people getting killed.
Sometimes speed bumps and other "traffic calming" measure help. And in fact the city where I live spends a lot of money on them. But they have their own problems: fire departments don't like them, and put in the wrong place they can actually cause accidents. They probably would on my street, which attracts speeders because it's near a major offramp. People would cut onto the street and hit the speedbumps before they saw them and had a chance to react to them.
Sometimes the only solution is law enforcement. But while people are all for enforcement of other laws, somehow making you slow down or not race read lights is a "perversion of justice."
Actually, by 500 AD, Christianity was the official religion in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. Your analogy works better at 100 AD. When most educated people actually did look at Christianity as a superstitious cult.
Which was just a measure of the prejudices of the time. And that tells us that "cult" is kind of a useless label. It's just a convenient way to dismiss the beliefs of people we don't want to make the effort to understand. That's especially a mistake with Scientology, which is quite capable of being despised on its own terms!
"Perversion of justice"? You have a crime, you have evidence of crime. The accuser is the person who set up the camera. If a burglar shows up on a security camera, do we toss the evidence because there was nobody else in the building?
Traffic laws, unlike other laws, seem to be hemmed in with silly technicalities. I guess people feel they have a fundamental right to drive to fast. Which is why people shortcut through the street I live on (houses on one side, elementary school on the other) at 50 MPH. The city tried to fight it with traffic cameras. No! You have to have a witness! So the city hired people to sit in the camera vans and be the "witness".
But that got challenged too. Somebody convinced the courts that only cops can issue traffic citations. City can't afford to have that many cops just sitting around. No more traffic cameras.
So I have to be darned careful crossing my own street. I also have to be careful where I park my car, to avoid getting sideswiped. Meanwhile, people speeding on surface streets kill themselves and pedestrians with depressing frequency. How's that for "perversity"?
So, how many arms do you have?
Yes, you're right. Tools are wholly secondary to the content.
That's not at all what I said. Good do tools make the job easier, and the less unnecessary work you do have to do, the more attention you can spare to write better content. So tools do matter. I'm only warning against giving too much priority to finding "the right tools".
After all, when was the last time you read a book and though "Wow, the page layout in this book *rocks*?". Good technical books have a well-thought-out structure, have something vital to say, and explain their material clearly. It's the content, not the tools. Every hour spent tweaking that TeX macro (or fighting with the word processor, etc.) is an hour you should have spent thinking about structure of the the book, the text, or the (often forgotten) intended reader.
That's true, but unfortunately some warfare with your tools is unavoidable. As I said before, most word processors are not well designed for technical writing. But using a word processor you're comfortable with may have less martial overhead than writing with an XML editor, even though XML is fundamentally better for technical content.
Which makes your comment about layout kind of off the mark. One reason to use XML instead of a word processor is to force yourself to pay more attention to content and less to presentation issues like layout.
I write technical content for a living, so I ought to be exactly the kind of person who can answer your question. Alas, no. In fact, there may not be a simple answer!
The crucial thing with technical content (especially manuals, which is most of what I write, but also techie books) is that it gets revised and repurposed a lot. So "the right tool" needs to support structured content, which cuts down on the human effort of revision and repurposing. And all the "best" writing tools that support structured content use XML. (Or SGML, which is almost the same thing.)
But here's the problem with XML: you need a lot of infrastructure to support it. Unless you're willing to be your own XML software hacker (and a lot of writers are) that makes XML out of reach for a freelance tech author.
(Hell, it puts XML out of reach for most writers of any kind. Most companies that produce a lot of technical content still use very old-fashioned non-structured tools. Investing in all that infrastructure is too scary for most managers. It costs them in the long run, but how many business decisions have anything to do with the long run?)
So what's the alternative? Stop worrying about tools. Or at least no more than you really want to. If you're willing to become an XML nerd, then fine, download all the OSS XML tools that are available, and start training yourself. But if you just want to sit down and start writing, you should just use whatever tools you're most comfortable with.
And that can be Word. It's not PC to say so, but Word (or any other common word processor) is perfectly capable of doing a well-structured document. It just takes more discipline on the part of the writer. That means you don't do a lot of low-level formatting, even though word processor GUIs tend to encourage it. Use a styles, not low-level formatting, to indicate things like section breaks, bullet lists, and computer output. Word processors usually have obvious buttons for doing this, but they almost always use low-level formatting (begin indented paragraph with bullet type 3) not styles (item paragraph).
It can also be LaTex. You'll get lots of people telling you that LaTex is your only choice. Not true. It has its advantages if you need to to finely tweak the presentation of things like equations and charts. But for most content, you should only use LaTex if it's the format you're most comfortable with.
But more important than the specific tool is structure. Together with structure. And don't forget structure. A maintainable technical document is as carefully structured as maintainable source code. Good writing tools make it easier to write well structured documents, just as good programming tools make it easier to write well structured code. But in both cases, the writer or programmer is ultimately responsible for creating and enforcing the structure.
It's interesting that such silly comments keep getting modded up. Some weird beliefs about how business works have an absurd amount of credibility.
Let's put this in ordinary, non-business terms. Suppose you make $30K a year. You get a bill for $1K, and for one reason or another, you can't just ignore it. (If you make more than $30K, multiply that $1K accordingly.) Even if you can afford to pay it, that's enough money to hurt. Suppose further, that this bill is somehow job related, and if your boss finds out that you spent $1K in the way you spent it, he might well fire you. You may or may not be aware of this.
Choices: (a) grit your teeth and pay the bill (b) challenge the bill, risking your job, though you may not realize that your job is at risk. Would you really do (a)?
I already know your answer: you're going to say "yes" because you have a pet theory that you're in love with and will keep defending it no matter how lame your arguments sound. But most people would say "no". Actually, just about anybody.
Oh shut
More time than they can spare from playing lesbian sims, I reckon.
Maybe you're rich enough to ignore a $50K phone bill. Most people are not.
That cliche may make sense to a movie star. To a security "expert", publicity about bad security is definitely bad publicity.
Oh, right. "Wait, there's a $50K charge on my phone bill! Ouch! But I better not report it in case it's my fault."
You didn't say "I've paid my share". You said, "I've paid more than I've gotten back."
My paid taxes (and those of my parents) have more than covered anything I've gotten back from government in my lifetime.
I'm assuming you're just talking about obviously quantifiable things, like education and roads. But how much is crime suppression worth to you? Public health?
One of the biggest government expenses is the military. Depending on what wars you think were necessary and which weren't you may or may not think you're getting your money's worth. But I think it's kind of hard to define a cost-benefit relationship for the military's most basic job: keeping us from getting invaded.
He's reporting a $50,000 fraud. Exactly how does one go about keeping that out of the news?
You sort of answer your own question in the last sentence of your post. Yes, Solaris is a superior server OS. But, by itself, that's not enough to get IT managers to choose Solaris over Linux or Windows. There has to be a big pool of developers with Solaris expertise. Otherwise those IT managers won't be able to hire the in-house Solaris experts, or buy Solaris applications from ISVs. Sun's strategy here is to get Solaris into the hands of as many budding software geeks as possible, hoping that they'll turn into those Solaris experts.
That doesn't really answer your question, which is asked from the point of view of the person buying the laptop, not from Sun. And the answer there is: because you're a hacker. As a hacker, you often swim against the economic tide if it allows you to have more fun. If that weren't true, there wouldn't be any laptops running anything except Windows.
I feel bad for Microsoft.
Not too bad, I hope. Despite the bad economy, their income last quarter was about $15 billion, up $2 billion from the same quarter in 2007.