While it's true that a one time pad may be as hard to transfer securely as an original message, you only have to do it once and then you can transfer as many other original messages, in complete security, as you want (until you use up the pad).
And you may not even have to transfer the whole pad if you can both (again, by secure channel) agree on some commonly available text to serve as the one time pad (which has the advantage to looking innocuous if you're subjected to physical search.)
Consider that pressings (from the same master) of, say, a music CD would make a great ~650 Mb worth of one-time pad.
Look at the original design for the Space Shuttle's zero-G toilet. It uses suction to keep things moving in the appropriate direction, and rotating "slinger blades" to help fling the stuff to the container walls where (hopefully!) it'll stick until they dry it by venting the thing to vacuum.
Yep, in the Shuttle toilet, the shit is supposed to hit the fan.
I have a NEC 6x4 that works just fine, in that I can mount any of the 4 CDs, but only one at a time. To switch discs, you have to umount, eject -c , mount. (See the man page for eject.)
A few years back I was doing systems integration for an info-on-CD-ROM company where some of the databases comprised several hundred CDs, and we had some massive jukeboxes. There were (and no doubt still are) a couple of commerical packages that made all that transparent (lets face it, the jukebox still has to go through those steps whether or not the end user is aware of it.)
The general technique was to cache (on disk) the directories of all the CDs and the first block or so of every file. The cache filesystem was "magic" and required adding drivers to the kernel (this on a SunOS box). For routine stuff like 'ls', 'find' and even 'file', just hitting the cache was all that was necessary. For a read, the cache filesystem served up what was in the cache while finding and loading the appropriate CD-ROM, so that subsequent reads came directly from it (it also did some pre-reading and buffering). Of course, if you did an lseek() you were going to have to wait. This is much simpler on a readonly filesystem (like CD-ROM), but I think they supported writeable (eg CD-RW, Magneto-optical, etc.) It also could treat multiple CD drives as part of a single filesystem. (E.g. one jukebox I got this working with had room for over 1000 ROMs and could mount six simultaneously.) Fast, transparent access to everything on a whole mess of CDs. (Mind, if you're physically changing discs alot, i.e. you have more than the jukebox will hold, you have the hassle of rebuilding the cache whenever you manually swap discs in and out of the changer.)
Seems to me it wouldn't be too hard for some filesystem/kernel hackers to come up with something like this for Linux, at least on a level that would support small changers like the NEC. (Just don't ever try reading from two CDs simultaneously in a changer like that -- you'll wear out the changer mechanism:-)
Speaking of the first stored-program computer, turns out I have a connection to it I didn't know about. It turns out that both Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams, who built the Mark I, worked (and first met) at TRE, the Telecommunications Research Establishment (actually, they did radar research) in Malvern. Which happens to be where my parents worked (and first met) during the same period, my dad also doing radar research.
Windows 95 is a 32-bit shell on top of a 16-bit extension of an 8-bit OS written for a 4-bit CPU* by a 2-bit company that doesn't like 1 bit of competition.
(*) Remember the Intel 4004? Or as one wag put it, inside every Pentium is an i4004 trying to get out.
Bunnypeople are mutant teletubbies!
on
Cool PC Cases
·
· Score: 2
Think about it. Same colorful if somewhat shapeless forms. Same prancing about meaninglessly. Same telescreens (although moved up from the tummy to the face area with the bunny people). Hmm, and 'Intel bunny', 'tele-tubby' (the 'n' and 'b' keys are right next to each other on the keyboard). Coincidence? I don't think so.
Although the Intelebunnies seem to have had their antennae amputated.
The Sony decoder supports DSS/USSB (DirecTV), not Echostar (DISH). The high end of the line on Echostars' receivers (also by JVC) support the same range of features that the Sony does, such as the UHF remote control. They're also remotely software-upgradeable from the satellite, a nice feature. (For example, a few months back Echostar upgraded the "display information about this channel" feature from an opaque to a transparent background, so you can see the TV signal behind it. Magically appeared one day as the receiver software was remotely updated.) The top-of-the line JVC receiver (IIRC) includes a built-in VCR, which is nice, although I find the IR-blaster in my not-quite top end machine works just fine. (This feature means you don't have to program your VCR to record a later program. There's a high-power infrared port on the front of the receiver which, when the time comes for the show you've selected, blasts out the appropriate IR signal to start your VCR recording, and similarly stops it when done. The signal just bounces off the opposite wall of the room into your VCR.) Nice feature. I should use it more, say to tape those early early morning reruns of the old "Lost In Space" TV series...:-)
Sure. Three is a bit trickier than two, but do-able. Depends how much money you're willing to spend:-)
what would be the best/cheapest service?
Probably comparable. A base package rate plus a small surchage for each additional receiver (you'll need three).
what would be the cost/setup(meaning would I need two dishes or what)?
You can do it with one dish that has a dual LNB (and two cables from the dish to the receivers). Satellite signals come in two polarizations for each wavelength, the LNB needs to be switched to the correct polarization for the channel you want. You need a dual if you want each receiver to be able to watch a different channel.
The trick is on that third receiver. Normally with a dual LNB/dual reciver setup you just run one cable to each receiver.
In theory, you could split the two cables and run both to the third receiver, with a (mechanical or electronic) switch to switch that receiver between cables so that you can pick the one that happens to be on the correct polarization for the channel you want. (This assumes you want all three TVs tuned to three different channels simultaneously.)
In practice, though, it's probably a lot less headache just to get a second dish, going for the low-end with just a single LNB. The package price for a less expensive receiver and single LNB dish isn't much more than for the receiver alone.
After that if you want to get creative you can point the two dishes at different satellites and have switches at each receiver to choose which satellite it's looking at (bearing in mind that the single-LNB dish will only support one channel at a time).
If you'll only ever want to watch two of the three TVs simultaneously, you don't need the second dish. You may not even need a third receiver if you wire two TVs to one receiver (with a long video cable, or a a retransmitter). Some of the satellite receivers use a UHF remote as well as IR, so the remote will work through walls.
Yes, if you live in a place with a big yard and a decently wide view of the sky, a big dish is a nice-to-have. There may well be better integrated packages these days, but when I looked at it, it meant a lot of separate agreements and bills with different providers on various satellites. But you can get stuff that the small digital dishes don't give you.
The nice thing about the pizza-size dishes is that they'll mount just about anywhere, and they're the only thing you can use from an apartment or take on the road with you. (My in-laws spend half their time in Ohio and half in Florida, they just take the dish with them. A temporary mount works well enough.)
The big dishes require a permanent mount and are subject to much higher wind etc. loads, so need a much stronger mount. If you can accomodate that, great. (In my yard it'd be marginal, since there are a lot of high trees around. That's why I went for a roof mount of the small dish. In theory you can roof-mount a big dish, but that requires major structural considerations to keep it from ripping out of the roof in a high wind.)
I've had no problems with them, the service is good, the channel line-up is (for me) better than DSS/USSB's. Bought the (JVC branded) receiver at Sears. My father-in-law has DSS, and he's had problems with customer service, but then he always seems to have problems.:-) (Another reason I went with DiSH rather than Direct is that the latter is owned by Hughes, and I didn't particularly want to reward a company that gave away/sold launch technology to the Chinese.)
Go with a dual LNB setup (I went with the 4xxx series), as that gives the option of adding a second receiver (for another TV) to the same dish. (Installing the dish yourself is not hard if you're at all handy, just don't do what I did: spend several hours on the roof on a sunny June day in shorts with no sunscreen. Ouch.)
I went with the basic ("Top 40") package, about $20/month (plus any pay-per-view movies, usually $2.99 each), because we don't watch much TV. Mostly Sci-Fi, Discovery, Learning Channel, etc. If you're more of a TV watcher you might go with the more inclusive next higher package, and one or more of the movie channel (HBO, Showcase, etc) packages if that's your thing. If/when we do get a second receiver I'll probably get another package that includes a dish, to aim the second dish at one of EchoStar's other satellites (mostly international programming).
Says right there on the licenses that my VHS movies are licensed for home viewing. No restriction on how many people are watching it in my home, just so long as I'm not charging them money and I'm not showing it in public.
Don't try to assuage your concience with the "everyone does it" defense, that gets real old real fast. And if you are gonna use it, at least get your facts straight.
How about a conferencing system? (I always viewed a BBS as a conferencing system wannabe:-)
Way back in the Dark Ages (mid 80s) I wrote the Unix-based CoSy system that (among other things) serves as the basis for BIX (Byte Information Exchange), (also NIX in Japan and CIX in the UK). A while back I started in on a Java version of CoSy (with some added features I've been wanting to do), and its largely complete but has been on the back burner for a while now.
However, some Bixen recently have expressed some interest in it, and there seems to be some interest here, so I'll put the stuff up on my web page as soon as I get a chance (I need to check the files and add appropriate copyright/GPL notices, etc. Maybe (maybe) over the weekend.
(I'd love to be able to release the C source for the original CoSy but I don't have the rights. It was originally developed at U. of Guelph and the rights later sold to some Vancouver-based company who don't seem to have done anything with it in the last few years. The Web eclipsed it to a degree.)
A lot of good reasons and partition schemes mentioned above, but nobody seems to have mentioned a separate partition for swap.
Sure, ideally you have enough RAM that you never swap. But if you are swapping, performance will be a heck of a lot better if the swap space has its own partition rather than messing with the filesystem. Some commercial databases like to have their own partition for data too, for similar reasons.
On a mostly single-user machine (ie my personal workstation) I'm not much worried about overflowing/var or/tmp, so I generally have one partition for the relatively invariant stuff (the OS and apps, ie/var/tmp and/usr all on the same fs as/) and one for data, user files, etc. (Plus a swap). And then another partition for each OS if I want multi-boot.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995)
Oh, come on! Did he really write that?
(What's his problem? I can factor large prime numbers in my head. (As long as you guarantee me it's prime.))
Incidentally, it has to be a firm composed of your Open Source buddies.
Not at all. There's nothing in the world preventing, say, Microsoft from going into the Linux (etc) support business, so long as any mods they make to the code are released.
Mind, with Microsoft's reputation for support, they may not get many takers.
"Buying Protection" is nothing new. "Protection Rackets" have been defining the 'rules of the road' for centuries, then extracting their fees from the potential victims.
True, and that's exactly the angle that Microsoft seems to be adopting when they spread FUD about support for e.g. Linux. "Gee, nice OS ya got here, but it'd be a shame if those protocols were to break."
It's a pretty sad commentary on society if it's true that "the most widely recognised symbol of honour is probably the Klingons". Of course most of the Klingon concepts are borrowed from various cultures, e.g. the Samurai, but that's an aside.
It used to be that the most widely recognized symbol of honour was probably the Boy Scouts, followed by (in some circles) the Marines.
Concepts such as telling the truth, and keeping your word, even when inconvenient. Placing the good of the (however defined) group above that of self (think Spock in Wrath of Kahn if we must have Star Trek comparisons).
Certainly none of the above concepts seem to bear much in common with certain large, commercial, closed-source OS vendors.
Yes, "integrity" is certainly part of honour, part that seems pretty consistent across cultures, whereas other details may vary. But it isn't quite the whole concept.
if they believe that the computer is a willful, uppity, unreliable magical device, understood only by those who have sold their soul to it
Yep, and there's nothing to make them believe that better than a flaky, closed-source OS like Windows.
Linux counters this on two fronts: (1) the source is open, even those that don't program understand that it's there for them to look at if they wanted to take the time to learn it (i.e., the hood is not welded shut); and (2) odds are they know somebody -- a family member, the kid down the block, a coworker -- who has or could have worked on Linux (or other open source/free project), so it has a human face. For most folks outside the Seattle area the coders in Redmond may as well be gnomes.
As I recall, the real Diogenes went looking for an honest man.
D106ene5 just went trolling.
No, Java was not invented "to kill Microsoft". Actually the original intent was as a language for embedded but downloadable apps, such as in set-top boxes, cell phones, etc. These can have all sorts of different processors, so portability is an issue. Yes, open source makes portable executables less of an issue in the desktop/server environment, but no settop box user is going to recompile the latest rev to the software that just downloaded from the cable or satellite link.
IBM doesn't use Java "to fight Microsoft". THey use it because they have a half dozen different architectures to support (PCs, RS/6000, AS/400, System/390, etc.) and because it's a damn good development language in its own right.
> "Building apps in Java since the v0.9xxx days".
Okay, so you can type "javac" or "make". That's a little different from actually designing and coding software.
For tons of Java apps, take a look at Gamelan (nb three syllables, not 'game LAN' - it's a Javanese musical instrument). That's a directory of both free and non-free Java software.
I might buy them as the only place you can enter the matrix, (just as you always 'enter' Adventure at near the wellhouse for a small stream), but not for leaving it. Hell, it's never adequately explained why they couldn't just say (via cell phone, say) "I want out, unjack me" (or even "beam me up, Scotty"). Don't see how that would be any more mentally traumatic than disappearing into a telphone.
Of course, you lose a lot of dramatic tension if bailing out is that easy. It's just like the transporters always breaking in the original Star Trek -- if they work, it's too easy to just beam out when you're in trouble.
Some (somewhat geeky) friends of mine saw it the first weekend it opened, and I asked them about it given the hype the early reviewers had given it. "Ho hum, it's an old idea" was the gist of their response. Enjoyed the SFX, not impressed by the story.
But hell, geeks don't go to movies for the story we go to movies for the technical effects. If we want story, we'll read a book.
Yes, "The Matrix" had a few cool effects. The basic premise was pretty old. (Consider Harlan Ellison's 1960's story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" -- of which one scene in particular is reminiscent but the basic theme borrows from.)
But there are logical inconsistencies that you could drive an Alcubierre warpship through that any true geek will have caught. (We just willingly suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the cool SFX).
I mean, humans as batteries? Rather wasteful, fuel cells are much more efficient. You need a (simulated, virtual) landline to get in or out of virtual space but cellphones work for talking to/from virtualspace? Who wrote that into the program? A city at the center of the Earth? A "hovercraft" built like a battleship? (Heavy, dude.)
Personally, I liked "Johnny Mnemonic" better, despite the lame ending. (Mind, that's not saying much.)
Slashdot Mirror
While it's true that a one time pad may be as hard to transfer securely as an original message, you only have to do it once and then you can transfer as many other original messages, in complete security, as you want (until you use up the pad).
And you may not even have to transfer the whole pad if you can both (again, by secure channel) agree on some commonly available text to serve as the one time pad (which has the advantage to looking innocuous if you're subjected to physical search.)
Consider that pressings (from the same master) of, say, a music CD would make a great ~650 Mb worth of one-time pad.
Look at the original design for the Space Shuttle's zero-G toilet. It uses suction to keep things moving in the appropriate direction, and rotating "slinger blades" to help fling the stuff to the container walls where (hopefully!) it'll stick until they dry it by venting the thing to vacuum.
Yep, in the Shuttle toilet, the shit is supposed to hit the fan.
I have a NEC 6x4 that works just fine, in that I can mount any of the 4 CDs, but only one at a time. To switch discs, you have to umount, eject -c , mount. (See the man page for eject.)
:-)
A few years back I was doing systems integration for an info-on-CD-ROM company where some of the databases comprised several hundred CDs, and we had some massive jukeboxes. There were (and no doubt still are) a couple of commerical packages that made all that transparent (lets face it, the jukebox still has to go through those steps whether or not the end user is aware of it.)
The general technique was to cache (on disk) the directories of all the CDs and the first block or so of every file. The cache filesystem was "magic" and required adding drivers to the kernel (this on a SunOS box). For routine stuff like 'ls', 'find' and even 'file', just hitting the cache was all that was necessary. For a read, the cache filesystem served up what was in the cache while finding and loading the appropriate CD-ROM, so that subsequent reads came directly from it (it also did some pre-reading and buffering). Of course, if you did an lseek() you were going to have to wait. This is much simpler on a readonly filesystem (like CD-ROM), but I think they supported writeable (eg CD-RW, Magneto-optical, etc.) It also could treat multiple CD drives as part of a single filesystem. (E.g. one jukebox I got this working with had room for over 1000 ROMs and could mount six simultaneously.)
Fast, transparent access to everything on a whole mess of CDs. (Mind, if you're physically changing discs alot, i.e. you have more than the jukebox will hold, you have the hassle of rebuilding the cache whenever you manually swap discs in and out of the changer.)
Seems to me it wouldn't be too hard for some filesystem/kernel hackers to come up with something like this for Linux, at least on a level that would support small changers like the NEC.
(Just don't ever try reading from two CDs simultaneously in a changer like that -- you'll wear out the changer mechanism
Um, .c, .cpp and .asm files are hardly Microsoft Office files, unless you happen to have source...
:-)
.xls, not .sls, is the usual Excel file extension, but that's probably a typo.)
They are, respectively, C program, C++ program, and assembler program source files. Not nice at all.
But my Java programs are safe
(Oh, and
Speaking of the first stored-program computer, turns out I have a connection to it I didn't know about. It turns out that both Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams, who built the Mark I, worked (and first met) at TRE, the Telecommunications Research Establishment (actually, they did radar research) in Malvern. Which happens to be where my parents worked (and first met) during the same period, my dad also doing radar research.
:-)
I guess I come from a long line of nerds
/* Insert "16-bit player" joke here */
How does that go?
Windows 95 is a 32-bit shell on top of a 16-bit extension of an 8-bit OS written for a 4-bit CPU* by a 2-bit company that doesn't like 1 bit of competition.
(*) Remember the Intel 4004? Or as one wag put it, inside every Pentium is an i4004 trying to get out.
Think about it. Same colorful if somewhat shapeless forms. Same prancing about meaninglessly. Same telescreens (although moved up from the tummy to the face area with the bunny people). Hmm, and 'Intel bunny', 'tele-tubby' (the 'n' and 'b' keys are right next to each other on the keyboard). Coincidence? I don't think so.
Although the Intelebunnies seem to have had their antennae amputated.
Don't step in the tubby custard!
The Sony decoder supports DSS/USSB (DirecTV), not Echostar (DISH). The high end of the line on Echostars' receivers (also by JVC) support the same range of features that the Sony does, such as the UHF remote control. They're also remotely software-upgradeable from the satellite, a nice feature. (For example, a few months back Echostar upgraded the "display information about this channel" feature from an opaque to a transparent background, so you can see the TV signal behind it. Magically appeared one day as the receiver software was remotely updated.) :-)
The top-of-the line JVC receiver (IIRC) includes a built-in VCR, which is nice, although I find the IR-blaster in my not-quite top end machine works just fine. (This feature means you don't have to program your VCR to record a later program. There's a high-power infrared port on the front of the receiver which, when the time comes for the show you've selected, blasts out the appropriate IR signal to start your VCR recording, and similarly stops it when done. The signal just bounces off the opposite wall of the room into your VCR.) Nice feature. I should use it more, say to tape those early early morning reruns of the old "Lost In Space" TV series...
is it possible?
:-)
Sure. Three is a bit trickier than two, but do-able. Depends how much money you're willing to spend
what would be the best/cheapest service?
Probably comparable. A base package rate plus a small surchage for each additional receiver (you'll need three).
what would be the cost/setup(meaning would I need two dishes or what)?
You can do it with one dish that has a dual LNB (and two cables from the dish to the receivers). Satellite signals come in two polarizations for each wavelength, the LNB needs to be switched to the correct polarization for the channel you want. You need a dual if you want each receiver to be able to watch a different channel.
The trick is on that third receiver. Normally with a dual LNB/dual reciver setup you just run one cable to each receiver.
In theory, you could split the two cables and run both to the third receiver, with a (mechanical or electronic) switch to switch that receiver between cables so that you can pick the one that happens to be on the correct polarization for the channel you want. (This assumes you want all three TVs tuned to three different channels simultaneously.)
In practice, though, it's probably a lot less headache just to get a second dish, going for the low-end with just a single LNB. The package price for a less expensive receiver and single LNB dish isn't much more than for the receiver alone.
After that if you want to get creative you can point the two dishes at different satellites and have switches at each receiver to choose which satellite it's looking at (bearing in mind that the single-LNB dish will only support one channel at a time).
If you'll only ever want to watch two of the three TVs simultaneously, you don't need the second dish. You may not even need a third receiver if you wire two TVs to one receiver (with a long video cable, or a a retransmitter). Some of the satellite receivers use a UHF remote as well as IR, so the remote will work through walls.
Yes, if you live in a place with a big yard and a decently wide view of the sky, a big dish is a nice-to-have. There may well be better integrated packages these days, but when I looked at it, it meant a lot of separate agreements and bills with different providers on various satellites. But you can get stuff that the small digital dishes don't give you.
The nice thing about the pizza-size dishes is that they'll mount just about anywhere, and they're the only thing you can use from an apartment or take on the road with you. (My in-laws spend half their time in Ohio and half in Florida, they just take the dish with them. A temporary mount works well enough.)
The big dishes require a permanent mount and are subject to much higher wind etc. loads, so need a much stronger mount. If you can accomodate that, great. (In my yard it'd be marginal, since there are a lot of high trees around. That's why I went for a roof mount of the small dish. In theory you can roof-mount a big dish, but that requires major structural considerations to keep it from ripping out of the roof in a high wind.)
I've had no problems with them, the service is good, the channel line-up is (for me) better than DSS/USSB's. Bought the (JVC branded) receiver at Sears. :-)
My father-in-law has DSS, and he's had problems with customer service, but then he always seems to have problems.
(Another reason I went with DiSH rather than Direct is that the latter is owned by Hughes, and I didn't particularly want to reward a company that gave away/sold launch technology to the Chinese.)
Go with a dual LNB setup (I went with the 4xxx
series), as that gives the option of adding a second receiver (for another TV) to the same dish.
(Installing the dish yourself is not hard if you're at all handy, just don't do what I did: spend several hours on the roof on a sunny June day in shorts with no sunscreen. Ouch.)
I went with the basic ("Top 40") package, about $20/month (plus any pay-per-view movies, usually $2.99 each), because we don't watch much TV. Mostly Sci-Fi, Discovery, Learning Channel, etc. If you're more of a TV watcher you might go with the more inclusive next higher package, and one or more of the movie channel (HBO, Showcase, etc) packages if that's your thing.
If/when we do get a second receiver I'll probably get another package that includes a dish, to aim the second dish at one of EchoStar's other satellites (mostly international programming).
But I guess registering in the .com domain is cheaper than the .ac (Ascension Island) domain.
Says right there on the licenses that my VHS movies are licensed for home viewing. No restriction on how many people are watching it in my home, just so long as I'm not charging them money and I'm not showing it in public.
Don't try to assuage your concience with the "everyone does it" defense, that gets real old real fast. And if you are gonna use it, at least get your facts straight.
Java BBS
:-)
How about a conferencing system? (I always viewed a BBS as a conferencing system wannabe
Way back in the Dark Ages (mid 80s) I wrote the Unix-based CoSy system that (among other things) serves as the basis for BIX (Byte Information Exchange), (also NIX in Japan and CIX in the UK).
A while back I started in on a Java version of CoSy (with some added features I've been wanting to do), and its largely complete but has been on the back burner for a while now.
However, some Bixen recently have expressed some interest in it, and there seems to be some interest here, so I'll put the stuff up on my web page as soon as I get a chance (I need to check the files and add appropriate copyright/GPL notices, etc. Maybe (maybe) over the weekend.
(I'd love to be able to release the C source for the original CoSy but I don't have the rights. It was originally developed at U. of Guelph and the rights later sold to some Vancouver-based company who don't seem to have done anything with it in the last few years. The Web eclipsed it to a degree.)
Seals eat penguins, don't they? (Or is that just killer whales (orca)?)
I wonder what the artist was thinking...
A lot of good reasons and partition schemes mentioned above, but nobody seems to have mentioned a separate partition for swap.
/var or /tmp, so I generally have one partition for the relatively invariant stuff (the OS and apps, ie /var /tmp and /usr all on the same fs as /) and one for data, user files, etc. (Plus a swap). And then another partition for each OS if I want multi-boot.
Sure, ideally you have enough RAM that you never swap. But if you are swapping, performance will be a heck of a lot better if the swap space has its own partition rather than messing with the filesystem. Some commercial databases like to have their own partition for data too, for similar reasons.
On a mostly single-user machine (ie my personal workstation) I'm not much worried about overflowing
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995)
Oh, come on! Did he really write that?
(What's his problem? I can factor large prime numbers in my head. (As long as you guarantee me it's prime.))
Incidentally, it has to be a firm composed of your Open Source buddies.
Not at all. There's nothing in the world preventing, say, Microsoft from going into the Linux (etc) support business, so long as any mods they make to the code are released.
Mind, with Microsoft's reputation for support, they may not get many takers.
"Buying Protection" is nothing new. "Protection Rackets" have been defining the 'rules of the road' for centuries, then extracting their fees from the potential victims.
True, and that's exactly the angle that Microsoft seems to be adopting when they spread FUD about support for e.g. Linux. "Gee, nice OS ya got here, but it'd be a shame if those protocols were to break."
It's a pretty sad commentary on society if it's true that "the most widely recognised symbol of honour is probably the Klingons". Of course most of the Klingon concepts are borrowed from various cultures, e.g. the Samurai, but that's an aside.
It used to be that the most widely recognized symbol of honour was probably the Boy Scouts, followed by (in some circles) the Marines.
Concepts such as telling the truth, and keeping your word, even when inconvenient. Placing the good of the (however defined) group above that of self (think Spock in Wrath of Kahn if we must have Star Trek comparisons).
Certainly none of the above concepts seem to bear much in common with certain large, commercial, closed-source OS vendors.
Yes, "integrity" is certainly part of honour, part that seems pretty consistent across cultures, whereas other details may vary. But it isn't quite the whole concept.
if they believe that the computer is a willful, uppity, unreliable magical device, understood only by those who have sold their soul to it
Yep, and there's nothing to make them believe that better than a flaky, closed-source OS like Windows.
Linux counters this on two fronts: (1) the source is open, even those that don't program understand that it's there for them to look at if they wanted to take the time to learn it (i.e., the hood is not welded shut); and (2) odds are they know somebody -- a family member, the kid down the block, a coworker -- who has or could have worked on Linux (or other open source/free project), so it has a human face. For most folks outside the Seattle area the coders in Redmond may as well be gnomes.
As I recall, the real Diogenes went looking for an honest man.
D106ene5 just went trolling.
No, Java was not invented "to kill Microsoft". Actually the original intent was as a language for embedded but downloadable apps, such as in set-top boxes, cell phones, etc. These can have all sorts of different processors, so portability is an issue. Yes, open source makes portable executables less of an issue in the desktop/server environment, but no settop box user is going to recompile the latest rev to the software that just downloaded from the cable or satellite link.
IBM doesn't use Java "to fight Microsoft". THey use it because they have a half dozen different architectures to support (PCs, RS/6000, AS/400, System/390, etc.) and because it's a damn good development language in its own right.
> "Building apps in Java since the v0.9xxx days".
Okay, so you can type "javac" or "make". That's a little different from actually designing and coding software.
For tons of Java apps, take a look at Gamelan (nb three syllables, not 'game LAN' - it's a Javanese musical instrument). That's a directory of both free and non-free Java software.
Also check out the open source Java web ring for, well, open source Java apps.
Sorry, I don't buy your argument about landlines.
I might buy them as the only place you can enter the matrix, (just as you always 'enter' Adventure at near the wellhouse for a small stream), but not for leaving it. Hell,
it's never adequately explained why they couldn't just say (via cell phone, say) "I want out, unjack me" (or even "beam me up, Scotty"). Don't see how that would be any more mentally traumatic than disappearing into a telphone.
Of course, you lose a lot of dramatic tension if bailing out is that easy. It's just like the transporters always breaking in the original Star Trek -- if they work, it's too easy to just beam out when you're in trouble.
Exactly, exactly.
:-)
Moderators, give that post another point!
Some (somewhat geeky) friends of mine saw it the first weekend it opened, and I asked them about it given the hype the early reviewers had given it. "Ho hum, it's an old idea" was the gist of their response. Enjoyed the SFX, not impressed by the story.
But hell, geeks don't go to movies for the story we go to movies for the technical effects. If we want story, we'll read a book.
Yes, "The Matrix" had a few cool effects. The basic premise was pretty old. (Consider Harlan Ellison's 1960's story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" -- of which one scene in particular is reminiscent but the basic theme borrows from.)
But there are logical inconsistencies that you could drive an Alcubierre warpship through that any true geek will have caught. (We just willingly suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the cool SFX).
I mean, humans as batteries? Rather wasteful, fuel cells are much more efficient. You need a (simulated, virtual) landline to get in or out of virtual space but cellphones work for talking to/from virtualspace? Who wrote that into the program? A city at the center of the Earth? A "hovercraft" built like a battleship? (Heavy, dude.)
Personally, I liked "Johnny Mnemonic" better, despite the lame ending. (Mind, that's not saying much.)