Is it stopping people from using Windows as a desktop OS? Well, not really.
I personally know of at least three people who dead out refuse to use anything other than Windows, even in -spite- of the flaws that it has. It's their belief that security problems that pop up will be fixed, and that they're perfectly safe in the intermission between them. They don't believe that Microsoft's security model is fundamentally flawed -- in fact many of them, smart though they may be, aren't even aware of Microsoft's security model (or even what a security model entails). I doubt they're the only ones in the world with that opinion.
You've accurately described the mindset of most Windows users. And as long as Microsoft's security woes remain an occasional nuisance, that attitude will dominate. But it will change very quickly when the user sits down to a workstation totally crippled by spyware. There are systems out there infested by thousands of spyware programs!
OK, you probably have a point. But as I said, there are a lot of reasons for SGI's failure.
Come to think of it, without all that Wall Street money, would they have entered the Supercomputer market at all? Which they did mainly by acquiring Cray, a company whose very history illustrates your thesis of HPC as a high-prestige, low-profit business.
Well, SGI's collapse (don't say "demise", they're still in business) has many causes. But I don't think your Clark theory exactly conflicts with my Toxic Money theory. If SGI had had less cash, they might not have been so overconfident about competing head-to-head with Wintel boxes.
At the same time SGI was rushing in to the supercomputing market which isn't a market that has ever or will ever sustain a fast growing company.
I don't agree with your picture of the Supercomputer market, especially since I think it should just be considered the high end of the High Performance Computing market. But it doesn't matter to SGI, which lags way behind IBM and Sun in HPC sales. It's not the market, it's the company.
They've got enough cash in the bank to run the business for decades if they never made another cent...
Which means nothing to a publically held business. If you start to screw up badly, having a lot of cash actually works against you. Your investors are not going to let you squander your assets on a business plan that isn't working. If you're a small company, your investors may well shut you down, since your assets are worth more liquidated than they could ever be as a long term investment.
Of course, Microsoft is too big for that to happen. But "collapse" doesn't necessarily (or even usually) mean total disappearance. It more often means mass firings, loss of market share, plummeting stock price. As happened at SGI.
Speaking of SGI, I worked there during their waning days as a graphic workstation powerhouse. When people talked about where the company went wrong, a common theme was this: Wall Street fell in love with SGI and threw money at the company. All that cash helped them avoid measuring risks carefully or look for efficient ways to do things. By the time money ran short and it was obvious SGI had to reform, it was too late to claim a permanent place in key markets.
That's different from Microsoft, of course, since MS's pile of cash comes from their tithe on every PC sold. But the effect on corporate culture is the same. Cash can be toxic to a good organization.
Has anyone tried cross-compiling under both operating systems?
OK, this has me scratching my head. Presumably you need to run your code after you've compiled it. (I'll resist the temptation to nitpick "compile" in connection with assembly language.) A cross-compiler can give you object code for a machine you don't have, but if you don't have the machine, where do you run it?
Good suggestion. And although you can find plenty of shell account providers, it might make sense to open a web hosting account on a geek-friendly provider. Such a provider would almost certainly be using Linux servers and offer shell access. Probably cost not much more than a simple shell account, and give you a web presence in the bargain.
Sourceforge sort of falls into this last category -- and their toolset is unsurpassed. Unfortunately, you can't just pay a fee and an account. You have to come up with an open source project for them to host for you.
When a lion eats an antelope, that's natural. When the desert drifts and destroys an oasis, that's natural.
Is the implication that we shouldn't worry about dead antelopes and dying osases? Not true. In general, you do want natural processes to take their course. But very often natural processes have been so distorted by human intervention that you can't count on the result.
Let's talk about predators and prey, like your lion and antelope. In an untouched wilderness, there's a nice balance between predators and prey. But no wilderness is completely untouched. Obviously you should rely on natural predation as much as possible. But suppose you have too many predators and not enough prey? (Usually the problem is the other way around, since humans tend to look at predators as threats and/or competition. But we're talking general principles here.) And suppose that the prey species is on the verge of extinction?
You might argue that the prey species has just run out of time and we should let nature take its course. But it's probably not nature that pushed the prey species to the brink. More likely it's loss of habitat to human uses, or some other artificial thing. The loss of this species is anything but natural, even if the final event happens to be natural predation.
Now let's look at your oasis example. Suppose that particular oases has a species that you're likely to lose if you let the oasis disappear? Again, you can argue that this extinction is natural and shouldn't be interfered with. But again there are probably unnatural factors in the species decline: construction on other oases, climate change, exhaustion of subterranean water sources, etc.
I've avoided specifics because I'm no ecological expert, and I can't claim to have all the answers. But I do think that "Let nature take its course" is an answer that ignores how much we've changed nature.
That's a silly quibble. This cause of the damage may be natural, but you still have natural structures destroyed, habitats disrupted, etc. Presumably natural forces will repair the damage eventually, but calling it anything except "damage" is just dumb.
I have some issues with your other statements. but I don't feel like a nitpick war. Instead, I'll just address what I perceive to be your basic argument. It's a common one: "Change and evolution are a part of nature. Nature is capable of fixing itself. Let's leave it to do that, and get on with business." It's true that nature will respond somehow to all the changes being forced on it -- extinct species eventually replaced by new speciation, destroyed environments eventually get replace by new environments, etc. But the key word here is "eventually". As the species that does more than any other species (or natural force) to change the environment, we can't afford to sit back and wait for Nature to strike a new balance. Aside from the sheer waste of watching thousands of species slide into extinction, we have to consider our own survival. Which requires keeping an eye on the total environment, in addition to mitigating the damage we do ourselves.
The Home Office server (where the powerpoint file is hosted) seems to be crawling along. (Dumb of them not to convert the presentation to web pages, though.) But the Southhampton University and Royal Navy web sites are totally Slashdotted. I just hope that Commander Bond doesn't decide that this is a DDOS attack!
If municipalities insisted cable could be laid under the condition a cable company will sell, at a reasonable price, bandwidth on their cable to competitors, would we be paying such huge prices?
That's not technically feasible, since no cable system has extra bandwidth they can sell. Which is a pity. We need to do something to break the cable monopolies. Probably a good start would be appointing FCC commissioners who know that "monopoly" is more than a board game.
That being said, I think it's important not to get too excited about it... it's hard to say if it will live up to everything that people have written about it.
That's a reasonable attitude towards any new technology. There's always a difference between how something will perform on paper and how it will perform in the real world. And that's assuming that we have a serious innovation, like this one, rather than the vague hype that's much more common.
Still, we can hope. In computing, change and innovation seems to be the only constant. Predicting which innovations will catch fire is the hard part.
... or does it bug other people that mitochondria have their own DNA and reproduce asexually? It's like we have this second species living inside our cells. We're utterly dependent on them, but they're just coasting along, evolution wise. I predict trouble, 4 billion years from now. Ok, maybe 5.
That's an interesting idea, but they don't need to host the Wikipedia to do that.
My theory is that they're just showing enlightened self-interest, since Wikipedia helps keep them in business. Besides, Wikipedia's storage and bandwidth requirements are so tiny (by Google's standards) that they serve it up with almost no cost to themselves.
Just thought of another theory: somebody at Google has decided that MediaWiki is something they can build more cool Google projects on, and they want to "buy" it. They can't buy it literally, of course, since its open source. But they can hire a lot of people and donate their time to MediaWiki. That not only ensures that MediaWiki developes more quickly, but that it does so in ways that are useful to Google. And if they plan to become MediaWiki's biggest backer, it only makes sense that they let them have a few servers and a little bandwidth.
I like it how it is; only BSD specific stuff shows up in BSD, and stuff like this usually makes it to the front page anyhow.
Good point. The sections are mainly there to help people drill down to stories they're interested in. And few Slashdotters have more than a casual interest in Unix, except for some specific manifestions: Linux, BSD, OS X, etc.
As a technical communicator, I squirm every time I look at Slashdot's disorderly section and topic structure. But that disorder probably suits most Slashdotters very well.
Kind of looks to me like Russia is planning to go it alone when the U.S. gives up on the ISS and the shuttle.
"Go it alone," is kind of the wrong way to put it, since Russia is a minor partner in the ISS: they have a lot of space technology and experience, but they're too broke to do anything with it unless somebody else fits the bill.
And who will that be? The U.S., of course. Our own manned space program is a total disaster, yet we're totally committed to a huge presence in space. Even if that's just the ISS, the Kliper will have a lot of American passengers. And even if you're skeptical of Bush's plans for Lunar and Martian exploration (I know I am) you have to wonder if the availability of cheap Russian space craft might push those projects closer to reality.
This should have been put in the BSD section as well, for obvious reasons. I'd add the Unix section, except there isn't one. Come to think of it, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to have a single section for Linux and Unix (including BSD)? The distinction between Linux and Unix is more legal than technical.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, without all that Wall Street money, would they have entered the Supercomputer market at all? Which they did mainly by acquiring Cray, a company whose very history illustrates your thesis of HPC as a high-prestige, low-profit business.
Say what? Google has been profitable -- absurdly so -- for 4 or 5 years now. I don't recall when SGI was profitable -- if it every was.
Of course, Microsoft is too big for that to happen. But "collapse" doesn't necessarily (or even usually) mean total disappearance. It more often means mass firings, loss of market share, plummeting stock price. As happened at SGI.
Speaking of SGI, I worked there during their waning days as a graphic workstation powerhouse. When people talked about where the company went wrong, a common theme was this: Wall Street fell in love with SGI and threw money at the company. All that cash helped them avoid measuring risks carefully or look for efficient ways to do things. By the time money ran short and it was obvious SGI had to reform, it was too late to claim a permanent place in key markets.
That's different from Microsoft, of course, since MS's pile of cash comes from their tithe on every PC sold. But the effect on corporate culture is the same. Cash can be toxic to a good organization.
...in one day! Repent!
Sourceforge sort of falls into this last category -- and their toolset is unsurpassed. Unfortunately, you can't just pay a fee and an account. You have to come up with an open source project for them to host for you.
Let's talk about predators and prey, like your lion and antelope. In an untouched wilderness, there's a nice balance between predators and prey. But no wilderness is completely untouched. Obviously you should rely on natural predation as much as possible. But suppose you have too many predators and not enough prey? (Usually the problem is the other way around, since humans tend to look at predators as threats and/or competition. But we're talking general principles here.) And suppose that the prey species is on the verge of extinction?
You might argue that the prey species has just run out of time and we should let nature take its course. But it's probably not nature that pushed the prey species to the brink. More likely it's loss of habitat to human uses, or some other artificial thing. The loss of this species is anything but natural, even if the final event happens to be natural predation.
Now let's look at your oasis example. Suppose that particular oases has a species that you're likely to lose if you let the oasis disappear? Again, you can argue that this extinction is natural and shouldn't be interfered with. But again there are probably unnatural factors in the species decline: construction on other oases, climate change, exhaustion of subterranean water sources, etc.
I've avoided specifics because I'm no ecological expert, and I can't claim to have all the answers. But I do think that "Let nature take its course" is an answer that ignores how much we've changed nature.
And you can sleep with the devil!
I have some issues with your other statements. but I don't feel like a nitpick war. Instead, I'll just address what I perceive to be your basic argument. It's a common one: "Change and evolution are a part of nature. Nature is capable of fixing itself. Let's leave it to do that, and get on with business." It's true that nature will respond somehow to all the changes being forced on it -- extinct species eventually replaced by new speciation, destroyed environments eventually get replace by new environments, etc. But the key word here is "eventually". As the species that does more than any other species (or natural force) to change the environment, we can't afford to sit back and wait for Nature to strike a new balance. Aside from the sheer waste of watching thousands of species slide into extinction, we have to consider our own survival. Which requires keeping an eye on the total environment, in addition to mitigating the damage we do ourselves.
The Home Office server (where the powerpoint file is hosted) seems to be crawling along. (Dumb of them not to convert the presentation to web pages, though.) But the Southhampton University and Royal Navy web sites are totally Slashdotted. I just hope that Commander Bond doesn't decide that this is a DDOS attack!
Still, we can hope. In computing, change and innovation seems to be the only constant. Predicting which innovations will catch fire is the hard part.
... or does it bug other people that mitochondria have their own DNA and reproduce asexually? It's like we have this second species living inside our cells. We're utterly dependent on them, but they're just coasting along, evolution wise. I predict trouble, 4 billion years from now. Ok, maybe 5.
Lame. But it gives me an excuse to mention a movie that tackles both the student privacy issue and the missing body parts issue.
My theory is that they're just showing enlightened self-interest, since Wikipedia helps keep them in business. Besides, Wikipedia's storage and bandwidth requirements are so tiny (by Google's standards) that they serve it up with almost no cost to themselves.
Just thought of another theory: somebody at Google has decided that MediaWiki is something they can build more cool Google projects on, and they want to "buy" it. They can't buy it literally, of course, since its open source. But they can hire a lot of people and donate their time to MediaWiki. That not only ensures that MediaWiki developes more quickly, but that it does so in ways that are useful to Google. And if they plan to become MediaWiki's biggest backer, it only makes sense that they let them have a few servers and a little bandwidth.
...when you can't remember where you left a cadaver?
As a technical communicator, I squirm every time I look at Slashdot's disorderly section and topic structure. But that disorder probably suits most Slashdotters very well.
I tried that one. Bandwidth sucks. Latency is unbelievable. Not to mention packet loss...
And who will that be? The U.S., of course. Our own manned space program is a total disaster, yet we're totally committed to a huge presence in space. Even if that's just the ISS, the Kliper will have a lot of American passengers. And even if you're skeptical of Bush's plans for Lunar and Martian exploration (I know I am) you have to wonder if the availability of cheap Russian space craft might push those projects closer to reality.
This should have been put in the BSD section as well, for obvious reasons. I'd add the Unix section, except there isn't one. Come to think of it, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to have a single section for Linux and Unix (including BSD)? The distinction between Linux and Unix is more legal than technical.