Especially if you can power the base stations using solar cells or a wind turbine (together with some batteries to handle when there isn't enough light and/or wind).
Even with batteries, I'm dubious that you could make solar or wind power reliable enough to keep a cell tower on the air. Technologies like these really need to be part of a bigger infrastructure to work. Windmills, in particular, need to be really big to generate a meaningful amount of power. I suspect most, if not all, off-grid towers rely on diesel generators.
Fees like this are always based on what they can get away with, not what their services cost. Banks charge you $20 for a bounced check that costs them $5 to process, and even more for a late credit card payment that costs them nothing. Cable companies, on top of their high rates, charge you $50 for not returning your set-top box, even if it's an ancient model that costs them to dispose of!
The difference between us and the developing world is the deepness of consumer pockets, not the cost of technology.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if half the human race did have cell phones. In the developing world, they're actually more practical than landlines, because they require less physical infrastructure. Plus, in some countries, cell phone rates are structured so that people with very little money can afford them, provided they use them only for texting.
You're full of it. I find it very interesting that the Wii phenomenon is still happening. I'd been under the impression that it was finally over.
I'm not a serious gamer, and I'll probably never own one. But it does make me feel all warm and fuzzy that Nintendo took a chance, tried something new and original, and cashed in big.
You've just explained the whole phenomenon in a nutshell. The Wii was designed to appeal to people with no previous interest in video gaming, and that design decision seems to have paid off beyond Nintendo's wildest dreams. And in hindsight, it makes sense: there are a lot more "ordinary" people than there are gaming nerds. I thought maybe the phenomenon was tapering off when Sony finally passed up Nintendo in monthly sales. But maybe not.
Does anybody still think that Nintendo isn't manufacturing these boxes as fast as they can?
I was googling voyager and vger and discovered that there was a video game, the premise of which was that vger created the Borg. Barf!
When TOS was canceled it was a major tragedy in my pathetic little adolescent life. But ever since it came back I've been dreading every encounter with it. ST has become this big stinking magnet for formulaic hack writing and pretentious dweeb storytelling. Worse, it's surviving every attempt to put it out of our misery. It's the Franchise That Would Not Die! It's a culture eating zombie! Somebody save us!
Ah, the annoying johnny-come-lately slashbot who likes to make clever snide remarks about what other people say but usually can't articulate an opinion of his own. You obviously haven't looked at my posting history.
Yeah yeah, I'm the one who misread the story. I got the copying direction backwards. My apologies.
If there is no copyright claim by the original author then I don't see what the problem is.
Ah, the inevitable self-taught legal expert. Your advice is full of bad legal logic, but that doesn't matter, because you didn't read the question very carefully. This is not published source code. The guy doesn't specifically say that it's from a closed-source product, but it's pretty clear that's what he's talking about.
and the vast majority of replies were programmers arguing the merits of.ini files-- while utterly ignoring the initial list of reasons they aren't ideal.
Sounds like most of my discussions on/. That's not Ludditism, that's just plain mental laziness. As a matter of fact, I've been ambivalent about.ini versus registry for a long time. But that's probably just because I don't do enough programming to seriously consider the matter. Chen does make two arguments I find compelling: registries prevent race conditions and provide better security. Microsoft's support and documentation for registries could use some work, though.
I've come to really dislike the term "Luddite". It reduces opponents of a technology to a fanatical stereotype. In the real world, people always have reasons for opposing a technology that make sense to them, though they may be less compelling to other people. The original Luddites are a good example: they were unemployed textile workers whose jobs had been lost to mechanization. Economics guaranteed that they wouldn't win, but that's no excuse for ignoring their real motivation in favor of a simple-minded fanatic cartoon.
Stereotyping your opponents is never productive. Proponents of nuclear power love to talk about the ignorance of anti-nuke people. (I'm not sure I've heard "Luddite" used in this context, but it comes to much the same logic.) There are certainly knee-jerk no-nukes types who fit this stereotype. But harping on them does nothing to answer legitimate questions about plant safety, waste disposal, and WMD proliferation.
Back to.ini files. Last time I heard a rant on the subject, it was from a fellow technical writer. It would be hard to call her a Luddite: she had two PhDs and many years in the computer industry. Her real problem was that she was burnt out and fatigued, and keeping up with new technology was wearing her down. So she ranted against every innovation that came along, and opposed my attempts to update our ancient documentation process.
Much as I disliked her obstructionism, I knew where she was coming from. Keeping up with new technology is hard. If I had more of a personal life, I'd probably resent the strain on my mental resources!
I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written... At least for me.
OK, fine, stick with your leather-bound quartos if that's what gets you off. But what about newspapers? Magazines? Cheap disposable paperbacks? Technical books? (Which I've almost stopped buying since my company got a Safari site license.) Are these essential to your literary aesthetic?
Me, I love to read, but don't prize the books themselves. It's the words, not the artifacts, that I care about. Hardback fiction I consider a ripoff, and paperbacks go to the local library when I'm tired of them. I bought a tablet computer mainly because it's nice for reading in bed.
And then there are books that are decades, even centuries, out of print. (Read any good neolatin lately?) Getting a physical copy can cost you thousands of dollars — and then you can't actually sit down and enjoy it, because you're afraid you'll damage it. Why bother, when you can get the same content online for free?
And what about those poor students who have to schlep around hundreds of pounds of textbook? (When did education get so freaking massive?) Don't tell me that they're tied to using physical books!
I've been hearing the "I want real books" argument since the early 80s, which was when people first started to talk about ebooks. Always made by somebody who hadn't really tried the alternatives. What's keeping people away from ebooks isn't some silly aesthetic. It's cost, limited content (publishers hate the idea), and the clumsiness of the necessary technology. Someday soon these factors will improve to the point where people will make the switch and stop talking nonsense. We're not there yet, but we're getting awfully close.
Actually, the justice department did fire a whole bunch of prosecutors for "incompetence". Unfortunately, their definition of "incompetence" was "not helping keep the Republican party in power."
If we did elect this guy, he'd be screwed up by the same system that screws up most other elected officials. U.S. Federal Judges are able to do politically unpopular things precisely because they're not elected. Once appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, they serve for life, and cannot be removed except by impeachment. Depending on your POV, that's either judicial tyranny or a useful safeguard against mob rule. Though given the number of rabid right-wing ideologues that the Republicans have managed to put on the federal bench, it's no longer much of either, most of the time.
No, but I do work for a company that manufactures and sells stuff. Not my area of expertise, but I've sat through more operations and marketing meetings than I care to think about.
Really, all your complicated arguments come down to one simple claim: Amazon might be lying. And that's perfectly true. It doesn't even require the kind of machinations you describe. You just stop taking orders after 5.5 hours and claim you're sold out.
But that doesn't mean it's true. In this case, to believe it, you have to ignore a lot of precedent, and you have to believe that a biz company is going to waste a lot of time and money to mess with your head. Believing such conspiracy crap requires both ignorance and ego. As usual, neither is in short supply.
You're a cynic. No, wait, you're not. You're just stuck in the usual conspiracy mindset, combined with the also-usual ignorance of economics.
When you manufacture a mass market item, you're not in a position to say, "Let's just make 100 of them for our first manufacturing run, so we can boast that it sold out in a few hours." There's a fixed cost to starting up and shutting down a manufacturing line, and that means there's a minimum number of items you have to make if you want to make them at a reasonable cost. If you shut down the run before you reach that point, you end up saving little or no money.
So what you do is make some kind of estimate as to how many you're likely to sell during an initial period. (Obviously, if that estimate is lower than the manufacturing minimum, you've got another Foleo on your hands.) That estimate has to be be pretty low for a new e-book reader, a product with a really dismal track record. It's probably not much more than the minimum manufacturing run.
This device has some features that may or may not cause it to break away from the pack. The big one is that you don't need any kind of network access to download content; it has a built-in EVDO device that you can use without a monthly fee — network charges are included in the cost of the stuff you buy. (That's the main reason I considered buying one.) On the negative side, the thing's pretty expensive (the main reason I'm didn't) and a little bulky. In that kind of situation, the smart thing to do is do a short initial manufacturing run and see if the product develops a following. And in this case it has. Standard business practice, no Machiavellian scheming required.
I have to say it again: we're all hi-tech geeks here, and hi-tech doesn't work without economies of scale. Yet nobody on Slashdot seems to grasp the concept. Pretty sad.
Filesystems lack transactions. I call that "broken", because it is dangerous to not only lose new data, but corrupt the old data in the process.
Your argument seems to be "if there's any chance at all that a system will corrupt data or lose data, then the system is broken." By that definition, all computer systems are "broken" and always will be.
In the real world, you don't demand absolute safety, because that's not achievable. You simply do your best to determine how much safety you can achieve at an affordable cost.
You raise a lot of good points, most of which I can't provide an intelligent answer to. I'd need to read up on ZFS and Unix security settings, among other things, and I don't have time to do that. But I have to differ with your use of the word "broken". Software isn't broken just because it lacks a particular feature. It's just not appropriate for tasks that include that feature. I've been bitten by the 2GB limit in FAT32 (while backing up a system prior to reinstalling the OS) but I still keep all my portable drives in that format. This is not to say that FAT32 is a good file system, but it works well enough 99% of the time, and switching to other file systems has both portability and reliability problems.
You should reserve "broken" for software where even the core functionality has dangerous problems, such as not being reliable, or having an excessively complicated design. I think the appropriate word for the Posix file API limitations (assuming you're correct about them) is "outdated".
I think you're confusing cynicism with doublethink. Someone like O'Reilly may be motivated by the desire to satisfy his followers' prejudices, but that doesn't mean he doesn't believe most of his own BS. I've met too many people with the same psychology to believe that it's all a show.
Your logic is sound, but it doesn't really apply to programs like Access, which are meant to be general-purpose database applications, not frameworks for creating database applications.
So what? You think there's no connection between security and profit? Next you'll be telling me that Ford's goal is profit, not reliable cars. Of course, nowadays they have neither...
This whole discussion is based on a faulty premise, that MS is leaving its Access users without a fix. They have a fix, and they've had it for some time: stop using MDB format and convert your databases to a data engine that isn't a POS. They've deprecated MDB and Jet Engine. That means they're telling their customers "Don't use that stuff any more, it's faulty." The fact that they continue to support customers who ignore the deprecation doesn't change that.
There is the little detail that Access itself is a POS. But that's designed in — not much they can do about that.
Just to make your point a little clearer: "auto" here means "self" not "automatic". Auto-immune diseases are ones where the immune system attacks the very cells it's supposed to protect.
Slashdot Mirror
Fees like this are always based on what they can get away with, not what their services cost. Banks charge you $20 for a bounced check that costs them $5 to process, and even more for a late credit card payment that costs them nothing. Cable companies, on top of their high rates, charge you $50 for not returning your set-top box, even if it's an ancient model that costs them to dispose of!
The difference between us and the developing world is the deepness of consumer pockets, not the cost of technology.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if half the human race did have cell phones. In the developing world, they're actually more practical than landlines, because they require less physical infrastructure. Plus, in some countries, cell phone rates are structured so that people with very little money can afford them, provided they use them only for texting.
Cheaper? Did you forget that cell phones have a recurring cost?
"Likely" more useful? How? Can you use it to read a book? Do your homework? Write software? The OLPC does all these things.
You're full of it. I find it very interesting that the Wii phenomenon is still happening. I'd been under the impression that it was finally over.
I'm not a serious gamer, and I'll probably never own one. But it does make me feel all warm and fuzzy that Nintendo took a chance, tried something new and original, and cashed in big.
You've just explained the whole phenomenon in a nutshell. The Wii was designed to appeal to people with no previous interest in video gaming, and that design decision seems to have paid off beyond Nintendo's wildest dreams. And in hindsight, it makes sense: there are a lot more "ordinary" people than there are gaming nerds. I thought maybe the phenomenon was tapering off when Sony finally passed up Nintendo in monthly sales. But maybe not.
Does anybody still think that Nintendo isn't manufacturing these boxes as fast as they can?
I was googling voyager and vger and discovered that there was a video game, the premise of which was that vger created the Borg. Barf!
When TOS was canceled it was a major tragedy in my pathetic little adolescent life. But ever since it came back I've been dreading every encounter with it. ST has become this big stinking magnet for formulaic hack writing and pretentious dweeb storytelling. Worse, it's surviving every attempt to put it out of our misery. It's the Franchise That Would Not Die! It's a culture eating zombie! Somebody save us!
Yeah yeah, I'm the one who misread the story. I got the copying direction backwards. My apologies.
I've come to really dislike the term "Luddite". It reduces opponents of a technology to a fanatical stereotype. In the real world, people always have reasons for opposing a technology that make sense to them, though they may be less compelling to other people. The original Luddites are a good example: they were unemployed textile workers whose jobs had been lost to mechanization. Economics guaranteed that they wouldn't win, but that's no excuse for ignoring their real motivation in favor of a simple-minded fanatic cartoon.
Stereotyping your opponents is never productive. Proponents of nuclear power love to talk about the ignorance of anti-nuke people. (I'm not sure I've heard "Luddite" used in this context, but it comes to much the same logic.) There are certainly knee-jerk no-nukes types who fit this stereotype. But harping on them does nothing to answer legitimate questions about plant safety, waste disposal, and WMD proliferation.
Back to
Much as I disliked her obstructionism, I knew where she was coming from. Keeping up with new technology is hard. If I had more of a personal life, I'd probably resent the strain on my mental resources!
Me, I love to read, but don't prize the books themselves. It's the words, not the artifacts, that I care about. Hardback fiction I consider a ripoff, and paperbacks go to the local library when I'm tired of them. I bought a tablet computer mainly because it's nice for reading in bed.
And then there are books that are decades, even centuries, out of print. (Read any good neolatin lately?) Getting a physical copy can cost you thousands of dollars — and then you can't actually sit down and enjoy it, because you're afraid you'll damage it. Why bother, when you can get the same content online for free?
And what about those poor students who have to schlep around hundreds of pounds of textbook? (When did education get so freaking massive?) Don't tell me that they're tied to using physical books!
I've been hearing the "I want real books" argument since the early 80s, which was when people first started to talk about ebooks. Always made by somebody who hadn't really tried the alternatives. What's keeping people away from ebooks isn't some silly aesthetic. It's cost, limited content (publishers hate the idea), and the clumsiness of the necessary technology. Someday soon these factors will improve to the point where people will make the switch and stop talking nonsense. We're not there yet, but we're getting awfully close.
Now they'll never know about my purchase of "WMDs for Dummies" and "Terrorism for Beginners".
Actually, the justice department did fire a whole bunch of prosecutors for "incompetence". Unfortunately, their definition of "incompetence" was "not helping keep the Republican party in power."
If we did elect this guy, he'd be screwed up by the same system that screws up most other elected officials. U.S. Federal Judges are able to do politically unpopular things precisely because they're not elected. Once appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, they serve for life, and cannot be removed except by impeachment. Depending on your POV, that's either judicial tyranny or a useful safeguard against mob rule. Though given the number of rabid right-wing ideologues that the Republicans have managed to put on the federal bench, it's no longer much of either, most of the time.
Really, all your complicated arguments come down to one simple claim: Amazon might be lying. And that's perfectly true. It doesn't even require the kind of machinations you describe. You just stop taking orders after 5.5 hours and claim you're sold out.
But that doesn't mean it's true. In this case, to believe it, you have to ignore a lot of precedent, and you have to believe that a biz company is going to waste a lot of time and money to mess with your head. Believing such conspiracy crap requires both ignorance and ego. As usual, neither is in short supply.
When you manufacture a mass market item, you're not in a position to say, "Let's just make 100 of them for our first manufacturing run, so we can boast that it sold out in a few hours." There's a fixed cost to starting up and shutting down a manufacturing line, and that means there's a minimum number of items you have to make if you want to make them at a reasonable cost. If you shut down the run before you reach that point, you end up saving little or no money.
So what you do is make some kind of estimate as to how many you're likely to sell during an initial period. (Obviously, if that estimate is lower than the manufacturing minimum, you've got another Foleo on your hands.) That estimate has to be be pretty low for a new e-book reader, a product with a really dismal track record. It's probably not much more than the minimum manufacturing run.
This device has some features that may or may not cause it to break away from the pack. The big one is that you don't need any kind of network access to download content; it has a built-in EVDO device that you can use without a monthly fee — network charges are included in the cost of the stuff you buy. (That's the main reason I considered buying one.) On the negative side, the thing's pretty expensive (the main reason I'm didn't) and a little bulky. In that kind of situation, the smart thing to do is do a short initial manufacturing run and see if the product develops a following. And in this case it has. Standard business practice, no Machiavellian scheming required.
I have to say it again: we're all hi-tech geeks here, and hi-tech doesn't work without economies of scale. Yet nobody on Slashdot seems to grasp the concept. Pretty sad.
That's not as mind-boggling as the fact that you can even access somebody's MD5 hash. Even UNIX no longer considers salting to be adequate protection.
In the real world, you don't demand absolute safety, because that's not achievable. You simply do your best to determine how much safety you can achieve at an affordable cost.
You raise a lot of good points, most of which I can't provide an intelligent answer to. I'd need to read up on ZFS and Unix security settings, among other things, and I don't have time to do that. But I have to differ with your use of the word "broken". Software isn't broken just because it lacks a particular feature. It's just not appropriate for tasks that include that feature. I've been bitten by the 2GB limit in FAT32 (while backing up a system prior to reinstalling the OS) but I still keep all my portable drives in that format. This is not to say that FAT32 is a good file system, but it works well enough 99% of the time, and switching to other file systems has both portability and reliability problems.
You should reserve "broken" for software where even the core functionality has dangerous problems, such as not being reliable, or having an excessively complicated design. I think the appropriate word for the Posix file API limitations (assuming you're correct about them) is "outdated".
I think you're confusing cynicism with doublethink. Someone like O'Reilly may be motivated by the desire to satisfy his followers' prejudices, but that doesn't mean he doesn't believe most of his own BS. I've met too many people with the same psychology to believe that it's all a show.
Your logic is sound, but it doesn't really apply to programs like Access, which are meant to be general-purpose database applications, not frameworks for creating database applications.
In that sense, there is no auto-immunity. Slashdot is a U.S.-centric board.
This whole discussion is based on a faulty premise, that MS is leaving its Access users without a fix. They have a fix, and they've had it for some time: stop using MDB format and convert your databases to a data engine that isn't a POS. They've deprecated MDB and Jet Engine. That means they're telling their customers "Don't use that stuff any more, it's faulty." The fact that they continue to support customers who ignore the deprecation doesn't change that.
There is the little detail that Access itself is a POS. But that's designed in — not much they can do about that.
The fact that it's a feature makes it a bug!
Just to make your point a little clearer: "auto" here means "self" not "automatic". Auto-immune diseases are ones where the immune system attacks the very cells it's supposed to protect.