The iPhone doesn't need a killer app. It's not targeting the "laptop replacement" market that full-bore smartphones like Palm and Pocket PC are going after. It's targeting the much bigger "not really a smartphone" market that's looking for a phone, first.
This is a 'mild' direct side effect of the 'copy on write' feature of the FS and ALL FS technologies that have true 'copy on write' abilities.
Even if you don't use this feature you still have significant fragmentation problems on NTFS.
And there's all kinds of situations where you don't want to use snapshots and versioning.
Like file-level caches, such as Internet Explorer and other browsers on Windows use extensively, and which turn into huge fragmentation sources on NTFS.
UFS doesn't need frequent defragmenting. Yes, some fragmentation will occur, but it's a minor problem, one you don't have to take special care to recover from. A multi-gigabyte file in half a dozen fragments is not a file that needs to be defragmented... even the NT defragmentation tool won't call for defragmentation in that case. Calling it a "mild side effect" on Windows, when it's always been a common problem for virtually all users, when even moderate sized files commonly end up in scores of fragments, when Vista has one of its innumerable daemons doing nothing but background defragmenting, is pure spin control.
"a solid FS like ZFS that FINALLY competes with NTFS in performance and features"
It's a pity that NTFS still doesn't compete with UFS for stability and reliability. Vista STILL has to defragment the damn thing. Oh, it's got lots of bells and whistles, but the main advantage of bells-and-whistles file systems is application lock-in... and that's an advantage for the vendor, not the customer. That's part of the VMS legacy in NT, and not something to be proud of.
Speaking of bells and whistles, it's a pity that Apple uses that funky HFS+ and implements features at the file system level instead of the vnode level... which would make things like spotlight file-system agnostic.
I have no dog in this hunt. My desktop operating system of choice has a variety of security features that restrict applications from blithely changing settings, and has had since before Windows was a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye. I'm just noting the existence of an existential tension in the commentary on Slashdot.:)
If applications were restricted from using the full functionality of the phone, then people would complain about that.
Either you trust your applications, or you don't. If you don't trust them, you run them in a sandbox. If you trust them, and a third-party application does something you don't like, blame the application.
Or would you go along with the committee who decided that an election was valid... despite some people actually dying of injuries sustained in the course of getting to the polling place... because "a man of normal courage" was still able to vote?
Pseudonymity, perhaps, is enough in many cases... but the alternative in an increasingly transparent society is finding yourself picking your dancing partners based on whether you think your boss would approve.
I'm only assuming that some sort of computer is being used for coursework of some kind - presumably it's the kid's computer.
The kid is not actually required to own a computer, or even have one available outside the classroom, period. So it's none of the teacher's bloody business.
Heck if I had a room of 30 kids asking me anything I might start sending illogical, angry letters all over the place.
If a teacher had that reaction, they wouldn't last the first week in any real classroom.
I know English is a difficult language, but I believe the correct conjugation you were looking for is 'were'.
No, I mean "are". And I mean "OK", not "good".
They used to manage good UIs that also looked good, but this hasn't been the case for a while.
Apple's UI has never struck me as being particularly good. They're OK. The best thing about them is the consistency... for software you're supposed to use on our desktop, even in their worst UI excesses they have been far more consistent than most. Front Row diverges from the usual UI model, but it's designed for use from the couch on a lower resolution screen. The iPhone UI is different, but self-consistent.
But this is like they put the Front Row team on the UI, without thinking about whether it made the slightest bit of sense.
The most fun things were games. There are some very simple games that you can write programs for relatively easily.
If you can get ahold of an old book that got ME interested in programming in the '70s... David Ahl's 101 Basic Computer Games... it will have a lot of examples of games that are readily implemented. Don't worry about the code, of course, but consider the games themselves as exercises.
Apple's user interfaces are generally... OK, and at least consistent. Time Machine's user interface is bloody awful, useless, and (of course) completely inconsistent with everything else in the system including Dashboard, Spaces, and Expose... the previous trio of user-interface standards busters that at least seemed to be moving towards a common meta-interface.
TimeSlider is much better. No big fancy 3d interface, just a slider in a folder you can drag forward and back... without abandoning the desktop. And the way Apple *implements* Time Machine that functionality would be rather easy to implement.
Oh well. Apple never forgives someone making them look bad, and they never back down on bad UI, so we won't see this in Snow Leopard.:p
Before Open Source, before the GNU Manifesto, there was "Open Systems". Systems built around open APIs, interfaces, and protocols. UNIX was really the big push for Open Systems. If your software used the UNIX APIs, it would run on hardware from just about anyone, with less work than you might expect to do porting it from one release of an operating system to the next. Thanks to efforts like the SOftware Tools VOS, and emulation platforms like Eunice and Phoenix, it would even run on other operating systems like VMS.
It's nice that the iPhone is based on an Open Systems OS, but until you can write software to open APIs to run on it without jumping through hoops it doesn't really matter that much whether the kernel is Darwin, Linux, or Windows PE. THe iPhone is really irrelevant to open source and open systems, and it's a really expensive way to get a bare phone to run Linux on.
You're right, Open Source isn't needed, Open Systems are.
I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but...
But it was an accidental discovery:
While testing a high-frequency transformer at our engineering lab in San Francisco last June, another transformer located across the lab began to smoke profusely, melting a grounding lead placed across its primary winding. Normally this might not be interesting, except that the transformer responsible for this misdeed was physically disconnected from any source of power. Unable to explain what had just happened, we set up a series of experiments to determine the cause.
Read what she did when the IT guy told her it was against policy and showed her how to do it correctly. She told him she'd definitely do the same thing again and demanded he charge her.
If a kid wants to play with Linux and learn about how the computer works then s/he should do it, but if it prevents the computer from working properly with coursework or software provided by the school, then that could be a problem.
Where exactly does it say that the software was being installed on school computers?
the student's email is directly covered by exception 2(b) of the School's own bulk emailing policy
ORLY?
2. Permitted uses for broad cross-University mailing. Bulk e-mailing may be used only by University offices to send communications necessary to the normal course of business and which typically require some official action be taken individually by recipients. Such permitted uses include:
Even without flashblock, Flash doesn't have the kind of fundamentally insecure and inherently unfixable design that Microsoft has been pushing as their preferred plugin technology for the past decade. Microsoft has given me far more reason to distrust their designs than Adobe has.
Re:Story was corrected. It was an iPod.
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
·
· Score: 1
Umm...you're not depending on it, you're using it for your movies.
Don't be picky. If you need it for material you've paid for, you're depending on it for that purpose.
Do you also keep Flash off your boxes?
Adobe's track record for security and reliability is not perfect, by any means, but their basic design is not inherently insecure, andI have flashblock so I can control what flash components are given an opportunity to execute.
Microsoft's track record for security and reliability in this area is so bad that it borders on criminal negligence. They still haven't fixed the inherently insecure parts of the design after over a decade. I am reluctant to believe they've changed.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone doesn't need a killer app. It's not targeting the "laptop replacement" market that full-bore smartphones like Palm and Pocket PC are going after. It's targeting the much bigger "not really a smartphone" market that's looking for a phone, first.
Forgive me but PSION devices *had* proper keyboards
So long as you were two feet tall.
This is a 'mild' direct side effect of the 'copy on write' feature of the FS and ALL FS technologies that have true 'copy on write' abilities.
Even if you don't use this feature you still have significant fragmentation problems on NTFS.
And there's all kinds of situations where you don't want to use snapshots and versioning.
Like file-level caches, such as Internet Explorer and other browsers on Windows use extensively, and which turn into huge fragmentation sources on NTFS.
UFS doesn't need frequent defragmenting. Yes, some fragmentation will occur, but it's a minor problem, one you don't have to take special care to recover from. A multi-gigabyte file in half a dozen fragments is not a file that needs to be defragmented... even the NT defragmentation tool won't call for defragmentation in that case. Calling it a "mild side effect" on Windows, when it's always been a common problem for virtually all users, when even moderate sized files commonly end up in scores of fragments, when Vista has one of its innumerable daemons doing nothing but background defragmenting, is pure spin control.
From this article I wrote in 2004...
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/3dworld.html
Are open source games doomed to be limited to only ones that were completely and totally rejected by their original copyright holders?
That's what people say about Open Source as a whole, even though there are exceptions.
So far the only exception I know of in the game area is Second Life, but I can see other service-based games following the same model.
"a solid FS like ZFS that FINALLY competes with NTFS in performance and features"
It's a pity that NTFS still doesn't compete with UFS for stability and reliability. Vista STILL has to defragment the damn thing. Oh, it's got lots of bells and whistles, but the main advantage of bells-and-whistles file systems is application lock-in... and that's an advantage for the vendor, not the customer. That's part of the VMS legacy in NT, and not something to be proud of.
Speaking of bells and whistles, it's a pity that Apple uses that funky HFS+ and implements features at the file system level instead of the vnode level... which would make things like spotlight file-system agnostic.
I have no dog in this hunt. My desktop operating system of choice has a variety of security features that restrict applications from blithely changing settings, and has had since before Windows was a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye. I'm just noting the existence of an existential tension in the commentary on Slashdot. :)
If applications were restricted from using the full functionality of the phone, then people would complain about that.
Either you trust your applications, or you don't. If you don't trust them, you run them in a sandbox. If you trust them, and a third-party application does something you don't like, blame the application.
Or would you go along with the committee who decided that an election was valid... despite some people actually dying of injuries sustained in the course of getting to the polling place... because "a man of normal courage" was still able to vote?
Pseudonymity, perhaps, is enough in many cases... but the alternative in an increasingly transparent society is finding yourself picking your dancing partners based on whether you think your boss would approve.
That still doesn't excuse the horrible user interface.
I'm only assuming that some sort of computer is being used for coursework of some kind - presumably it's the kid's computer.
The kid is not actually required to own a computer, or even have one available outside the classroom, period. So it's none of the teacher's bloody business.
Heck if I had a room of 30 kids asking me anything I might start sending illogical, angry letters all over the place.
If a teacher had that reaction, they wouldn't last the first week in any real classroom.
I know English is a difficult language, but I believe the correct conjugation you were looking for is 'were'.
No, I mean "are". And I mean "OK", not "good".
They used to manage good UIs that also looked good, but this hasn't been the case for a while.
Apple's UI has never struck me as being particularly good. They're OK. The best thing about them is the consistency... for software you're supposed to use on our desktop, even in their worst UI excesses they have been far more consistent than most. Front Row diverges from the usual UI model, but it's designed for use from the couch on a lower resolution screen. The iPhone UI is different, but self-consistent.
But this is like they put the Front Row team on the UI, without thinking about whether it made the slightest bit of sense.
The most fun things were games. There are some very simple games that you can write programs for relatively easily.
If you can get ahold of an old book that got ME interested in programming in the '70s... David Ahl's 101 Basic Computer Games... it will have a lot of examples of games that are readily implemented. Don't worry about the code, of course, but consider the games themselves as exercises.
Apple's user interfaces are generally... OK, and at least consistent. Time Machine's user interface is bloody awful, useless, and (of course) completely inconsistent with everything else in the system including Dashboard, Spaces, and Expose ... the previous trio of user-interface standards busters that at least seemed to be moving towards a common meta-interface.
TimeSlider is much better. No big fancy 3d interface, just a slider in a folder you can drag forward and back... without abandoning the desktop. And the way Apple *implements* Time Machine that functionality would be rather easy to implement.
Oh well. Apple never forgives someone making them look bad, and they never back down on bad UI, so we won't see this in Snow Leopard. :p
Before Open Source, before the GNU Manifesto, there was "Open Systems". Systems built around open APIs, interfaces, and protocols. UNIX was really the big push for Open Systems. If your software used the UNIX APIs, it would run on hardware from just about anyone, with less work than you might expect to do porting it from one release of an operating system to the next. Thanks to efforts like the SOftware Tools VOS, and emulation platforms like Eunice and Phoenix, it would even run on other operating systems like VMS.
It's nice that the iPhone is based on an Open Systems OS, but until you can write software to open APIs to run on it without jumping through hoops it doesn't really matter that much whether the kernel is Darwin, Linux, or Windows PE. THe iPhone is really irrelevant to open source and open systems, and it's a really expensive way to get a bare phone to run Linux on.
You're right, Open Source isn't needed, Open Systems are.
I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but ...
But it was an accidental discovery:
Read what she did when the IT guy told her it was against policy and showed her how to do it correctly. She told him she'd definitely do the same thing again and demanded he charge her.
OK, that's literally "asking for it".
If a kid wants to play with Linux and learn about how the computer works then s/he should do it, but if it prevents the computer from working properly with coursework or software provided by the school, then that could be a problem.
Where exactly does it say that the software was being installed on school computers?
Don't forget to wear your daemon shirt to the school.
400 messages is fairly small for a spam run these days, but it's definitely enough that it qualifies as "bulk".
Should she be suspended? No, I don't think so. It doesn't sound like she realized that 400 messages was unreasonable.
They probably didn't expect 400 messages.
the student's email is directly covered by exception 2(b) of the School's own bulk emailing policy
ORLY?
Even without flashblock, Flash doesn't have the kind of fundamentally insecure and inherently unfixable design that Microsoft has been pushing as their preferred plugin technology for the past decade. Microsoft has given me far more reason to distrust their designs than Adobe has.
URL?
Umm...you're not depending on it, you're using it for your movies.
Don't be picky. If you need it for material you've paid for, you're depending on it for that purpose.
Do you also keep Flash off your boxes?
Adobe's track record for security and reliability is not perfect, by any means, but their basic design is not inherently insecure, andI have flashblock so I can control what flash components are given an opportunity to execute.
Microsoft's track record for security and reliability in this area is so bad that it borders on criminal negligence. They still haven't fixed the inherently insecure parts of the design after over a decade. I am reluctant to believe they've changed.