Laptops are pretty good these days, but they're still a lot more expensive than an equivalent desktop, and less expandable. USB hubs have helped equalize the expansion capabilities, though.
But for $500 plus about $150 for a 19" CRT you still get a lot more bang for your buck with a desktop in terms of hard disk capacity, screen size, cost of a DVD/CD combo drive, etc. Not to mention better keyboards, though once again a good keyboard for a laptop is just a USB port away.
Also, laptops are not as reliable as desktops, in part because they are made of smaller and more delicate components and in part because if something fails, you pretty much have to send the whole thing in for repair. With a desktop, you can much more easily replace the hard disk, display, modem, or other components.
I suspect that laptops are actually an endangered niche. Desktops are so convenient and expandable that they're not going away soon, though they are certainly shrinking and becoming more appliance-like (e.g. late model Apples). Handhelds are encroaching on laptop territory, and pretty soon I think smart phones with web and email access and semi-VGA screens are going to pretty much replace laptops for many away-from-the-office purposes.
Just anecdotally, I'd love to replace my dead Compaq Presario with an updated laptop, but I probably won't; my Palm T3 plus my bluetooth phone gives me instant email and web access on the road, and my palm keyboard lets me write stuff almost as easily as on a laptop. My need for a functioning laptop has virtually disappeared, and I'm thinking of getting a cheap modern Dell desktop instead.
Yes, my company priced DB2 versus Oracle and DB2 was much cheaper. Microsoft's SQL Server is cheaper still. Oracle is the premium database product on the market.
IBM hardware is a separate question; DB2, like Oracle, is multiplatform and can run on Linux, Sun, AS/400, etc. Doubtless, IBM midrange and mainframe hardware is the high end compared to Sun and Intel servers, but Sun is not exactly cheap.
Sun machines today are a premium product when compared to Intel/Linux servers, but probably they address different markets. Sun is for very large organizations that probably already have some Sun hardware infrastructure, support contracts, in-house trained staff, cozy sales relationships, etc.
How do you get that Villasante is right about anything he said in that article?
Villasante says "Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today."
Is the Mozilla project a complete mess? Is OpenOffice.org a complete mess? Is the Linux kernel? I don't think so. Millions of people are getting their work done every day with these superb tools, two of which were donated to the open source community by big evil American software companies that Mr. Villasante likes to villify: Sun spent millions of dollars to acquire and market Star Office and turn it into a major open source project, and AOL/Netscape launched the Mozilla project which has spawned Firefox and Thunderbird, two best-of-breed internet tools that are now threatening Microsoft.
Linux itself has been aided immeasurably by paid programmers from IBM and HP and elsewhere who have added "big iron" features to the kernel to make it an enterprise class OS. We have all benefited tremendously and Microsoft is being threatened in its core growth business.
This article is nonsense. It's just another anti-American EU bureaucrat trying to say something meaningful on a panel and ending up totally putting his foot in his mouth. He even admits that he's really just worried about the flagging European software industry.
Sure, there are instances of private companies stealing open source work and trying to sell it, but they get caught from time to time, and the big guys actually are pretty conscientious about procedures. Why would IBM steal from the open source world after spending a billion dollars to promote and enhance Linux?
Re:Europeans go on strike (Score:0)
by rtb144 (456739) on Monday May 23, @07:05PM (#12618351)
Having grown up in "Europe" (Austria and Germany), I am very familiar with the "law". From my experience the "law" governs every part of your life from what you can eat to how long you work and what type of toilet paper you wipe your ass with. America is slightly better in most of these regards.
Look at the double digit unemployment in most of the countries in continental Europe and tell me how much the "law" is helping most of them.
Most of these strikes remind me of an Onion article where the French are striking against low productivity.
A strike might win you short-term concessions, but as most American auto workers are finding out, the union is cutting their throats in the long run with decreased competitive ability.
Yes, your final point is quite valid and relevant to this news article and discussion, and all you get for it is one "overrated" moderation. These slashdot political "discussions" bring into sharp focus the flaws of the moderation system. Well, I'm off to metamoderate and hope I find a live one.
Mozilla.org was started by AOL's Netscape division, as I recall. Are they now independently supported, or will they go under when AOL does?
The great irony is that AOL, rather than go head to head with MS, continued to use internet explorer browser even after they bought Netscape. The world said "Huh?" Then they supported and continued Netscape's early experiment with open-sourcing the browser and we now have the very successful Mozilla and Firefox browsers, esp. Firefox, that may be eating away at MS's share of the browser market.
Maybe T-W should hang on to Mozilla.org and keep it going, and realize the original goal of merging their powerful media content with the web, like creating a Firefox online movie channel or some such. Why not? They wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in the AOL merger so now they can spend a few million on a reasonable system like Firefox, thunderbird, etc.
Actually, # is a pretty safe bet for comments in most Linux config files, including fstab. It's a legacy of unix, so the advantage is that unix hackers can get up to speed on Linux pretty quickly. There are lots of newer programs that use XML for their config files; OpenOffice and Gaim come to mind. The world is moving in that direction, but rather slowly.
But contrast all this with what you have to put up with in Windows: the registry. While it's nice to have all configuration centralized (officially speaking; some apps still maintain their own config files), it's also a pain to edit. The thing's full of these godawful keys and repetitious sections. You can export the thing to ascii text and edit it there but it's still a very weird little world and tends to accumulate lots of cruft over time. And there's no facility for leaving comments that I know of--I guess you can kludge comments by adding string keys, but omg what a hack.
These days, there's been so many FAQs asked about linux that you are pretty much guaranteed to find out how to configure it with a quick Google search.
Regarding fonts, yeah, it's a pain, but the "new" system used in RH/FC is pretty simple. And really, you only need to set up fonts once, then you can just use'em.
China's population is about 1.3 billion (see the CIA World Factbook on China). The United States' population is about 295 million (see same source). Therefore China is closer to 4x the US population. Interestingly, while China's one-child policy would cause a population implosion around 2050 if maintained, the U.S. may grow to 500 million if the current trends in immigration continue.
Your contention that China's effect on the world should be similar to that of the U.S. based on its middle class population has some merit, but China also is in a different economic situation. Unlike the U.S., which is a mature industrial and post-industrial economy, China is in a high growth industrialization stage and in addition is offloading industrial production from Japan and the West. Therefore their IT needs may grow faster than those of the U.S. and they may indeed achieve some sort of dominance over software standards.
Whether this is a good thing is another question. Because laws in China are drawn up by technocrats and passed by fiat, they tend to represent a top-down view of how things should work. In the U.S. and other countries, standards are set by industrial consortia based partially on collective needs and partially on who's the biggest and richest on the committee. Whichever system prevails has yet to be seen.
The Chinese view the big Western companies as "hegemonist", especially the ones headquartered in the U.S., so they tend to reflexively oppose American-developed standards. Culturally, the Chinese have always been the "central kingdom" with their own language, history, technology and science stretching back thousands of years. They therefore tend to have a "not-invented-here" rejectionist mentality toward foreign ways. This is not to say that they don't copy stuff, but they try to sinicize it as quickly as they can, to translate it and get it to feel more palatable. It's quite likely that they're more comfortable with developing their own standards that may be based on IEEE, w3.org and so forth, but they will extend on them and make them work natively. The rest of the world can either go along and accommodate them or ignore them. Either way, we are in for some interesting times.
If you have a library card, your local library may grant you free online access to the New York Times archives, among other things. At least, they have it in the Massachusetts public library system. You can access it from a home computer.
I find it ironic that NYT has decided to charge for their editorial section. I find their editorial pages to be ridiculously slanted, loose with the facts, and partisan; they seem to just call it wrong on so many issues that I don't even waste the time reading them anymore. I like a well reasoned argument, but NYT doesn't seem to know how.
On the other hand, I find the Wall Street Journal more down to earth and evenhanded, so I gladly pay the $75/year online subscription.
If a consensus develops as to the usefulness of municipal wi-fi, then it will happen, much as consensus has justified all the roads, sewers, traffic signs and lights, firefighting systems, crime fighting systems, snow plowing and ice salting in wintry climates, publicly funded K-12 schools, and public libraries.
I agree with you that government is not the most efficient agent to implement something as complex as wi-fi, but there are real benefits to be realized by universal access that may transcend the inevitable corruption and inefficiencies that would accompany it.
Just imagine if everyone, and I mean everyone, in a twenty-square mile area could IM each other, quickly check a restaurant's hours and menu and reservations, access global positioning info while on the road, be warned of accidents or obstacles on their route via "push" messages, and basically be totally connected.
It would be bad for companies like Verizon and Comcast who obviously want to monopolize broadband services, but on the other hand these companies would likely get fat contracts to implement and manage a lot of the infrastructure. It would be great for companies that market cheap wireless gadgets.
Regarding the topic of streaming audio, it would empower basically everyone to broadcast their own shows. You would have hundreds if not thousands of little "radio" stations, each spewing its own take on affairs of the day, music (somehow regulated for royalties), and whatever creative applications people come up with.
It seems to me the plusses will outweigh the minuses.
1) The JRE is NOT freely redistributable. Therefore I can't legally add it to my OOo CD's that I pass on to customers and I have to make them download it first.
The whole point of the JRE is to allow developers to ship a runtime environment with their products, should a customer require it. If it were not freely distributable, few would develop for Java because there would be no guarantee that a customer would wish to download the JRE separately.
Regarding adding the JRE to OOo CD's that you pass on to customers, some people have done just that; google for this and you will find examples of people adding a JRE folder to the OOo iso.
Why would Sun restrict the distribution of JRE along with OpenOffice.org? It would be shooting themselves in the foot.
It's like saying that Linus is going to patent Linux and stop everyone from using it for free. That's simply not going to happen. I think we're pretty safe in going with Java, certainly safer and more cross-platform-compatible than the C#/DOTNET thing Microsoft is foisting on the world.
So Java's not open source; who cares. Out in the real world, no one cares whether Java is open source or not. Anyone can quickly obtain it with a couple of mouse clicks. If it enhances the functionality of OOo then why not use it?
The only worrisome thing is if Microsoft were to buy Sun and start slowly tightening the screws on Java. That would be awful and disastrous, but it's highly unlikely to occur given past history of anti-trust suits and such.
Now, what I'm really keen on is a version of OOo for PalmOS. That would be sweet. Why doesn't Sun cook that up while they're at it. Of course then they'll have to create a JVM for PalmOS as well. Also, we'll need Ghostscript, ghostview, xpdf, and a few other goodies to round out the Palm offerings. But with 600Mh processors, gigabyte-plus storage, and larger RAM, how hard can all this be to achieve?
Gee, that sounds rather awful. You have to pay a one time nonrefundable $10 fee, and they reserve the right to ban you from future participation for something as trivial as telling an "old" joke? No thanks; I'll spend my money elsewhere. I'm not quite that desperate for community.
Actually there are plenty of specialty forums out there that are reasonably well moderated and free of idiots. Slashdot does seem to have a large number of idiots but the moderation system more or less keeps them out of the mainstream. The problem with Slashdot is that they let idiots become moderators, and then perfectly innocent comments get modded down just because the moderator disagreed with the poster. So I tend to read at -1 to make sure I don't miss a relevant comment.
I don't think this is a good trend at all. These web sites need to have a real service to offer. If it's a user-contributed knowledge base then they are biting the hand that feeds them. When the Motley Fool forum (www.fool.com) went private, I stopped reading it. It didn't seem right to me that after contributing my comments for a couple of years, some of which received high ratings and helped stimulate a few interesting discussions, I suddenly had to pay, on top of having to wade past banner ads and such. Sure, it's a fairly high quality forum, but I already waste too much time online; why should I add yet another subscription fee to my load so I'll feel even more guilty if I don't use it every day?
I pay for services that seem like a good cause, such as sourceforge.net and lwn.net, and for excellent content providers such as the Wall Street Journal online (wsj.com). I don't subscribe to Slashdot because, oddly enough, I like to see the ads.
The Director General of CNNIC, Mao Wei, said, "We have already established a framework of registrars nationwide in China, and we and our registrars have been very active in assisting corporations in China, in particular the small and medium enterprises, to understand the need to claim their domain name resources that are completely in Chinese characters.
I suspect that the submitter was implying that by creating their own government-managed "framework" of registrars, the Chinese government can track everyone who registers a domain name domestically, or anyone else who uses these new names, for that matter.
The article did not state that they were going to use this as a means of control, but rather (as you suggested) as a means of empowering English-challenged domestic businesspeople.
I'm a bit suspicious of their motives, because business people in east Asia, including now the PRC, simply have to know English. It's not like the rest of the world is about to learn Chinese characters, though that is a very fine aspiration that I wholly support and approve of (I was a Chinese major and did a master's degree in Chinese history).
Keep in mind that the registrar can turn you off if they don't like you. Just snip and you're offline. It's one simple step from there to banning the domestic registration of English language domain names. The Chinese government is a pretty dastardly organization; I would not put much past them. The Chinese people deserve much better but it looks like it's gonna be a lot of years before much changes.
The uses are almost endless. Anyone can build a home H2S chamber and just shut themselves down for days at a time. I can envision a time when people are freed of the need to wait for anything. Spiderman 7 coming out in 15 days and you just can't wait? Hop in the chamber, dial it up for 14 days and 23 hours, and just "chill out".
The cool thing is that since metabolic activity cease, your cells would stop dividing, and therefore the aging process would cease as well. Opportunistic viruses would not multiply since they require cellular mitosis, and most bacteria would also take a nap.
I would, however, worry about anaerobic bacteria, especially the kind that thrive on sulfur gases; they'd literally eat you for lunch while you were out like a light. If even one of those suckers got inside, then when someone opened your chamber six months from now you'd be pretty much a skeleton with a mass of oozing, smelly residues--ewwwww!
I would also wonder about undigested food sitting in your stomach and small intestine for days or months, not to mention feces still in the colon. You want to move that stuff through before you shut down the system. On second thought I think I'll wait before trying this one out.
> 'Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house > > I knew I was expecting too much from my cell phone company. > > And what does this have to do with Wi-Fi?
Well, it was in the article, so it's on topic. I think the Verizon CEO was trying to say that customers have this unrealistic "wireless everywhere" expectation. I guess he's a bit nervous that wireless everywhere may come true but not because of Verizon.
My Verizon cell phone did not work in my house. We solved that problem by switching to a $50 family plan from T-Mobile, and now our cell phones work pretty well at home, plus unlimited talk time within the family.
Your arguments would be stronger without the tiresome Bush-bashing that always seems to enter any discussion of social, scientific, or political affairs of the day.
Bush's administration has only been in power for four years (elected 2000, took office early 2001); that's hardly enough time to affect the vast education system in the United States in any significant way.
Sure, they could potentially wreak some havoc, but I see them merely influencing it in petty ways such as increased federal support for parochial schools and voucher systems and reduced federal support for teachers' unions. None of which are particularly awful things to do, in fact; the unions seem to be opposed to every change and innovation that comes down the pike except for higher salaries.
Now, cutting innovative programs at the federal level and federal science budgets such as that of NIH and DARPA, that's bad stuff that will hurt the U.S. in the long term. However even so, U.S. spending on science and technology is still very high, higher than anywhere else even today.
As for this China-India rapprochement, I think it's a mere political ploy. India needs Chinese manufacturing right now, but India is definitely gunning for the hardware market and would love to undercut China. Indeed it's been widely reported that China is beginning to experience some labor shortages that may drive up factory wages there. Google for "china worker shortage" to find many articles about this issue.
These two countries are natural competitors with no love lost between them. Mao's invasion of Assam in 1962 and the 1987 border skirmish are pretty recent events, well within the memory of most adults now alive. Clearly this announcement is just a way for China to intimidate the U.S. and rack up a few diplomatic points at little cost, and a way for India to annoy Pakistan (and remind the U.S. that India is an important country in the region).
Well, there are times when there's no choice, such as when one is on the road or in a motel with no internet access or on site at a client's place of business where it's a security risk to touch their intranet terminals. Also, when at a factory, gas station, restaurant, rest stop on the highway... the list goes on and on. So, the suggestion of "just view the sites on a regualr [sic] computer" doesn't apply in every situation where one might need to access the world wide web.
I'm at the very low end of access speed; I've just started using my Palm T3 with a bluetooth phone to access web sites, with mixed results. To my surprise, the sites I have used (/., Y!News, Y!Quotes, dictionary.com, NE Journal of Medicine, google.com, etc.) have been pretty "format-friendly" so far. Vonage.com--forget it; the whole site's Flash.
I have found that by far the fastest way to browse is to ssh to my linux account and run lynx. This relieves the handheld of the responsibility to download tons of html formatting and graphics placeholders. Now if only this bluetooth phone-dialup ISP connection weren't so godawful slow it would be more useful. But, it's better than nothing.
Anyway, clearly there needs to be some more consciousness on the part of web site designers as to different screen sizes, but my experience has been not too bad.
Well, it's been postulated that the anaerobic bacteria which exist in hot, sulfurous ocean floor vents resemble the earliest life. The original life on earth, probably bacteria or similar single cell prokaryotic (lacking in nucleus) organisms, existed in an atmosphere lacking in oxygen. It was only a few billion years later that oxygen-producing organisms began to exist, and the anaerobic life had to adapt or die.
Basically any film that features this kind of life will by definition be flaunting the theory of evolution in all its glory. This, presumably, offends or threatens the creation literalists.
People are saying it's a shame that fundamentalists are attacking science in this country. I would add that it's a shame that these idiots have hijacked religion. The bible as allegory is brilliant and holds many lessons in morality with bits of history and culture sprinkled in. The bible as literal word is nonsense that flies in the face of all evidence. To deny evolutionary theory makes about as much sense as claiming the world is flat.
It's like Moore's law; every few years these robots will double in intelligence and capabilities until they exceed that of ordinary humans. They can already outplay us in chess. How much longer before they can replace your average bank teller or telemarketer or front line tech support? What about a restaurant table busser or dishwasher? Soon there will be nothing but robots in the workplace, plus a few human management types.
In fact I can foresee a time when robots will be the managers. Unlike (some) humans they will have no compunctions about firing people who are inefficient, and they will not be compromised by, for example, sexual favors.
Such a policy might have the unpleasant consequence of discouraging individuals from filing patent applications at all, since obviousness is in the eye of the beholder.
Maybe better for patent examiners to hire people who are more computer savvy, who can see these ridiculous claims for what they are. In the U.S. at least, patent examiners tend to be engineers and other types of highly educated people, but apparently software engineers are not yet in evidence in their ranks.
It gets worse. This pat-rights outfit has retained some patent lawer:
Mr. Joseph J. Zito, demanding Apple a reasonable license fee, 12% of gross sales of iTunes music tracks and iPods, and Apple will have to accept it in 21 days. Mr. Zito is a well-experienced patent counsel, and has actively engaged in intellectual property litigation in District and Appellate Courts.
Well, a search on Attorney Zito reveals that he was the patent attorney for some guy who has patented gravity! Talk about an all-encompassing patent. So this is the nut they've hired to enforce their patent. Somehow, I suspect Apple doesn't have a whole lot to worry about from these opportunists.
Your hesitation about bureaucracy is understandable, but we already rely on publicly built and subsidized physical networks such as roads, highways, bridges, and subway and commuter trains. If only private enterprises were allowed to build these things, they would probably all be for-fee services that would cost considerably more. A public toll road is a form of regressive taxation, since the poor and working class have to use the same facilities as the middle and upper income classes.
I would argue that municipal internet as an optional service would be great; it would create a level playing field for all sorts of services ranging from banking to entertainment to traffic updates. It would be a lowest common denominator for communications. If service providers paid a fee for space on the network, it would probably help to pay for itself and without the need for a profit. I would take that over a monopoly any time.
Regarding reliability and efficiency, it's hard to imagine a government-run internet access service being much worse than Verizon DSL, which seems to have outages and interruptions several times a week, and whose level-1 technical support staff are totally script-driven and lacking in any real technical training. It's always annoying when there's an outage and their first question is, "What version of Windows are you running?" "Fedora who? We don't support that."
Humans are the best biosensors yet made, with dogs perhaps a close second. Intelligent, intuitive, experienced humans can scan someone's face, question them, trip them up in inconsistent statements, and otherwise sniff out intruders and frauds. Dogs can literally smell or otherwise somehow sense nervousness in people and make excellent guards. They ID people by scent and they don't forget scents quickly.
If we focussed on human intelligence we would perhaps be able to avert more catastrophes, such as the series of missteps that allowed the 9/11 hijackers to get on board their planes despite some rather suspicious behavior.
Computers are always going to be only as good as the programs that control them, and there are always going to be workarounds for people clever enough to find them. Insiders will create back doors in biosensor systems, or they will sell passwords to outsiders. A team of Japanese researchers already cracked a fingerprint biosensor a couple of years ago, so where's the security in using one? I would imagine even a DNA sample can be faked; just get someone's DNA, replicate it in a test tube using E. coli, and coat your hands with it. Standard laboratory biology.
No one can steal your identity at the low-tech neighborhood store where you shop once a week and the clerks know you (if only this were always the case). The humans at the store will look at your credit card, then at the face that does not match yours, and they'll go in the back and call the police. A machine will simply pass the buck, leaving the owner to dispute the theft with the credit card company.
The Israelis for decades have relied on human intelligence and it has stood them in good stead, with zero airline hijackings. They have very smart people who look at everyone before they board. We in the U.S. are just beginning to wake up to this level of need and we have a lot to learn.
He had over 13 previous convictions for theft and this time, caught red handed, he got a whole 11 months. I would say, fast justice is not as good as fair justice. This idiot should be put away for a few years at least.
The Kyoto treaty is an attempt to grapple with a perceived major problem, that of human-influenced weather shifts. The underlying science that purports to prove the human connection has been
challenged quite recently, but there can be no doubt that in the northern hemisphere, winters are becoming milder and weather patterns more extreme, which climatologists agree is indicative of global warming.
Whether or not it chooses to sign a particular treaty for trading carbon dioxide output shares, the United States should take a leadership role in reducing pollution and energy consumption. Other countries do tend to follow the U.S. lead when it makes sense, despite a lot of America-bashing in these forums and the mass media. I would argue that Ukraine's recent presidential election is a good example of that.
According to an architect in California (I've forgotten the exact reference), their electricity shortage a couple of summers ago could have been averted had they simply painted the roofs of all state buildings white, to reduce air conditioning use.
Rather than lament this state of affairs, we should take this as a very positive sign that there is a lot of energy savings to be harvested even without technological advances. The United States should invest more heavily in alternative energy research, including safer nuclear fission approaches such as "pebble" reactors. It should offer home builders and commercial building developers significant tax breaks for installing passive energy systems using solar and wind. "Green" cars should be greatly encouraged, methanol and hydrogen fueling stations incentivized and perhaps made mandatory for government fleets, and more electric car charging outlets provided for all those sub-50 mile commuters.
The U.S. should also consider a crash program (no pun intended) to build and renew public transportation systems. Cities that have it should improve it, and cities that lack it should get into the game.
Lead by example. Get the U.S. out of the Middle East by taking away the strategic national interest of protecting their oil. Build the windmills and solar power cells on scales large enough to bring the costs down, and ultimately the investment will repay itself both through the manufacturing and export of technical innovations, reduced health issues from pollution, and of course less need to invade oil-rich countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Laptops are pretty good these days, but they're still a lot more expensive than an equivalent desktop, and less expandable. USB hubs have helped equalize the expansion capabilities, though.
But for $500 plus about $150 for a 19" CRT you still get a lot more bang for your buck with a desktop in terms of hard disk capacity, screen size, cost of a DVD/CD combo drive, etc. Not to mention better keyboards, though once again a good keyboard for a laptop is just a USB port away.
Also, laptops are not as reliable as desktops, in part because they are made of smaller and more delicate components and in part because if something fails, you pretty much have to send the whole thing in for repair. With a desktop, you can much more easily replace the hard disk, display, modem, or other components.
I suspect that laptops are actually an endangered niche. Desktops are so convenient and expandable that they're not going away soon, though they are certainly shrinking and becoming more appliance-like (e.g. late model Apples). Handhelds are encroaching on laptop territory, and pretty soon I think smart phones with web and email access and semi-VGA screens are going to pretty much replace laptops for many away-from-the-office purposes.
Just anecdotally, I'd love to replace my dead Compaq Presario with an updated laptop, but I probably won't; my Palm T3 plus my bluetooth phone gives me instant email and web access on the road, and my palm keyboard lets me write stuff almost as easily as on a laptop. My need for a functioning laptop has virtually disappeared, and I'm thinking of getting a cheap modern Dell desktop instead.
Yes, my company priced DB2 versus Oracle and DB2 was much cheaper. Microsoft's SQL Server is cheaper still. Oracle is the premium database product on the market.
IBM hardware is a separate question; DB2, like Oracle, is multiplatform and can run on Linux, Sun, AS/400, etc. Doubtless, IBM midrange and mainframe hardware is the high end compared to Sun and Intel servers, but Sun is not exactly cheap.
Sun machines today are a premium product when compared to Intel/Linux servers, but probably they address different markets. Sun is for very large organizations that probably already have some Sun hardware infrastructure, support contracts, in-house trained staff, cozy sales relationships, etc.
How do you get that Villasante is right about anything he said in that article?
Villasante says "Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today."
Is the Mozilla project a complete mess? Is OpenOffice.org a complete mess? Is the Linux kernel? I don't think so. Millions of people are getting their work done every day with these superb tools, two of which were donated to the open source community by big evil American software companies that Mr. Villasante likes to villify: Sun spent millions of dollars to acquire and market Star Office and turn it into a major open source project, and AOL/Netscape launched the Mozilla project which has spawned Firefox and Thunderbird, two best-of-breed internet tools that are now threatening Microsoft.
Linux itself has been aided immeasurably by paid programmers from IBM and HP and elsewhere who have added "big iron" features to the kernel to make it an enterprise class OS. We have all benefited tremendously and Microsoft is being threatened in its core growth business.
This article is nonsense. It's just another anti-American EU bureaucrat trying to say something meaningful on a panel and ending up totally putting his foot in his mouth. He even admits that he's really just worried about the flagging European software industry.
Sure, there are instances of private companies stealing open source work and trying to sell it, but they get caught from time to time, and the big guys actually are pretty conscientious about procedures. Why would IBM steal from the open source world after spending a billion dollars to promote and enhance Linux?
Mozilla.org was started by AOL's Netscape division, as I recall. Are they now independently supported, or will they go under when AOL does?
The great irony is that AOL, rather than go head to head with MS, continued to use internet explorer browser even after they bought Netscape. The world said "Huh?" Then they supported and continued Netscape's early experiment with open-sourcing the browser and we now have the very successful Mozilla and Firefox browsers, esp. Firefox, that may be eating away at MS's share of the browser market.
Maybe T-W should hang on to Mozilla.org and keep it going, and realize the original goal of merging their powerful media content with the web, like creating a Firefox online movie channel or some such. Why not? They wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in the AOL merger so now they can spend a few million on a reasonable system like Firefox, thunderbird, etc.
Actually, # is a pretty safe bet for comments in most Linux config files, including fstab. It's a legacy of unix, so the advantage is that unix hackers can get up to speed on Linux pretty quickly. There are lots of newer programs that use XML for their config files; OpenOffice and Gaim come to mind. The world is moving in that direction, but rather slowly.
But contrast all this with what you have to put up with in Windows: the registry. While it's nice to have all configuration centralized (officially speaking; some apps still maintain their own config files), it's also a pain to edit. The thing's full of these godawful keys and repetitious sections. You can export the thing to ascii text and edit it there but it's still a very weird little world and tends to accumulate lots of cruft over time. And there's no facility for leaving comments that I know of--I guess you can kludge comments by adding string keys, but omg what a hack.
These days, there's been so many FAQs asked about linux that you are pretty much guaranteed to find out how to configure it with a quick Google search.
Regarding fonts, yeah, it's a pain, but the "new" system used in RH/FC is pretty simple. And really, you only need to set up fonts once, then you can just use'em.
Enjoy!
China's population is about 1.3 billion (see the CIA World Factbook on China). The United States' population is about 295 million (see same source). Therefore China is closer to 4x the US population. Interestingly, while China's one-child policy would cause a population implosion around 2050 if maintained, the U.S. may grow to 500 million if the current trends in immigration continue.
Your contention that China's effect on the world should be similar to that of the U.S. based on its middle class population has some merit, but China also is in a different economic situation. Unlike the U.S., which is a mature industrial and post-industrial economy, China is in a high growth industrialization stage and in addition is offloading industrial production from Japan and the West. Therefore their IT needs may grow faster than those of the U.S. and they may indeed achieve some sort of dominance over software standards.
Whether this is a good thing is another question. Because laws in China are drawn up by technocrats and passed by fiat, they tend to represent a top-down view of how things should work. In the U.S. and other countries, standards are set by industrial consortia based partially on collective needs and partially on who's the biggest and richest on the committee. Whichever system prevails has yet to be seen.
The Chinese view the big Western companies as "hegemonist", especially the ones headquartered in the U.S., so they tend to reflexively oppose American-developed standards. Culturally, the Chinese have always been the "central kingdom" with their own language, history, technology and science stretching back thousands of years. They therefore tend to have a "not-invented-here" rejectionist mentality toward foreign ways. This is not to say that they don't copy stuff, but they try to sinicize it as quickly as they can, to translate it and get it to feel more palatable. It's quite likely that they're more comfortable with developing their own standards that may be based on IEEE, w3.org and so forth, but they will extend on them and make them work natively. The rest of the world can either go along and accommodate them or ignore them. Either way, we are in for some interesting times.
If you have a library card, your local library may grant you free online access to the New York Times archives, among other things. At least, they have it in the Massachusetts public library system. You can access it from a home computer.
I find it ironic that NYT has decided to charge for their editorial section. I find their editorial pages to be ridiculously slanted, loose with the facts, and partisan; they seem to just call it wrong on so many issues that I don't even waste the time reading them anymore. I like a well reasoned argument, but NYT doesn't seem to know how.
On the other hand, I find the Wall Street Journal more down to earth and evenhanded, so I gladly pay the $75/year online subscription.
If a consensus develops as to the usefulness of municipal wi-fi, then it will happen, much as consensus has justified all the roads, sewers, traffic signs and lights, firefighting systems, crime fighting systems, snow plowing and ice salting in wintry climates, publicly funded K-12 schools, and public libraries.
I agree with you that government is not the most efficient agent to implement something as complex as wi-fi, but there are real benefits to be realized by universal access that may transcend the inevitable corruption and inefficiencies that would accompany it.
Just imagine if everyone, and I mean everyone, in a twenty-square mile area could IM each other, quickly check a restaurant's hours and menu and reservations, access global positioning info while on the road, be warned of accidents or obstacles on their route via "push" messages, and basically be totally connected.
It would be bad for companies like Verizon and Comcast who obviously want to monopolize broadband services, but on the other hand these companies would likely get fat contracts to implement and manage a lot of the infrastructure. It would be great for companies that market cheap wireless gadgets.
Regarding the topic of streaming audio, it would empower basically everyone to broadcast their own shows. You would have hundreds if not thousands of little "radio" stations, each spewing its own take on affairs of the day, music (somehow regulated for royalties), and whatever creative applications people come up with.
It seems to me the plusses will outweigh the minuses.
1) The JRE is NOT freely redistributable. Therefore I can't legally add it to my OOo CD's that I pass on to customers and I have to make them download it first.
This is an utterly uninformed statement. The JRE is indeed freely redistributable.
The whole point of the JRE is to allow developers to ship a runtime environment with their products, should a customer require it. If it were not freely distributable, few would develop for Java because there would be no guarantee that a customer would wish to download the JRE separately.
Regarding adding the JRE to OOo CD's that you pass on to customers, some people have done just that; google for this and you will find examples of people adding a JRE folder to the OOo iso.
Why would Sun restrict the distribution of JRE along with OpenOffice.org? It would be shooting themselves in the foot.
It's like saying that Linus is going to patent Linux and stop everyone from using it for free. That's simply not going to happen. I think we're pretty safe in going with Java, certainly safer and more cross-platform-compatible than the C#/DOTNET thing Microsoft is foisting on the world.
So Java's not open source; who cares. Out in the real world, no one cares whether Java is open source or not. Anyone can quickly obtain it with a couple of mouse clicks. If it enhances the functionality of OOo then why not use it?
The only worrisome thing is if Microsoft were to buy Sun and start slowly tightening the screws on Java. That would be awful and disastrous, but it's highly unlikely to occur given past history of anti-trust suits and such.
Now, what I'm really keen on is a version of OOo for PalmOS. That would be sweet. Why doesn't Sun cook that up while they're at it. Of course then they'll have to create a JVM for PalmOS as well. Also, we'll need Ghostscript, ghostview, xpdf, and a few other goodies to round out the Palm offerings. But with 600Mh processors, gigabyte-plus storage, and larger RAM, how hard can all this be to achieve?
Gee, that sounds rather awful. You have to pay a one time nonrefundable $10 fee, and they reserve the right to ban you from future participation for something as trivial as telling an "old" joke? No thanks; I'll spend my money elsewhere. I'm not quite that desperate for community.
Actually there are plenty of specialty forums out there that are reasonably well moderated and free of idiots. Slashdot does seem to have a large number of idiots but the moderation system more or less keeps them out of the mainstream. The problem with Slashdot is that they let idiots become moderators, and then perfectly innocent comments get modded down just because the moderator disagreed with the poster. So I tend to read at -1 to make sure I don't miss a relevant comment.
I don't think this is a good trend at all. These web sites need to have a real service to offer. If it's a user-contributed knowledge base then they are biting the hand that feeds them. When the Motley Fool forum (www.fool.com) went private, I stopped reading it. It didn't seem right to me that after contributing my comments for a couple of years, some of which received high ratings and helped stimulate a few interesting discussions, I suddenly had to pay, on top of having to wade past banner ads and such. Sure, it's a fairly high quality forum, but I already waste too much time online; why should I add yet another subscription fee to my load so I'll feel even more guilty if I don't use it every day?
I pay for services that seem like a good cause, such as sourceforge.net and lwn.net, and for excellent content providers such as the Wall Street Journal online (wsj.com). I don't subscribe to Slashdot because, oddly enough, I like to see the ads.
The article did not state that they were going to use this as a means of control, but rather (as you suggested) as a means of empowering English-challenged domestic businesspeople.
I'm a bit suspicious of their motives, because business people in east Asia, including now the PRC, simply have to know English. It's not like the rest of the world is about to learn Chinese characters, though that is a very fine aspiration that I wholly support and approve of (I was a Chinese major and did a master's degree in Chinese history).
Keep in mind that the registrar can turn you off if they don't like you. Just snip and you're offline. It's one simple step from there to banning the domestic registration of English language domain names. The Chinese government is a pretty dastardly organization; I would not put much past them. The Chinese people deserve much better but it looks like it's gonna be a lot of years before much changes.
The uses are almost endless. Anyone can build a home H2S chamber and just shut themselves down for days at a time. I can envision a time when people are freed of the need to wait for anything. Spiderman 7 coming out in 15 days and you just can't wait? Hop in the chamber, dial it up for 14 days and 23 hours, and just "chill out".
The cool thing is that since metabolic activity cease, your cells would stop dividing, and therefore the aging process would cease as well. Opportunistic viruses would not multiply since they require cellular mitosis, and most bacteria would also take a nap.
I would, however, worry about anaerobic bacteria, especially the kind that thrive on sulfur gases; they'd literally eat you for lunch while you were out like a light. If even one of those suckers got inside, then when someone opened your chamber six months from now you'd be pretty much a skeleton with a mass of oozing, smelly residues--ewwwww!
I would also wonder about undigested food sitting in your stomach and small intestine for days or months, not to mention feces still in the colon. You want to move that stuff through before you shut down the system. On second thought I think I'll wait before trying this one out.
> 'Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house
>
> I knew I was expecting too much from my cell phone company.
>
> And what does this have to do with Wi-Fi?
Well, it was in the article, so it's on topic. I think the Verizon CEO was trying to say that customers have this unrealistic "wireless everywhere" expectation. I guess he's a bit nervous that wireless everywhere may come true but not because of Verizon.
My Verizon cell phone did not work in my house. We solved that problem by switching to a $50 family plan from T-Mobile, and now our cell phones work pretty well at home, plus unlimited talk time within the family.
Your arguments would be stronger without the tiresome Bush-bashing that always seems to enter any discussion of social, scientific, or political affairs of the day.
Bush's administration has only been in power for four years (elected 2000, took office early 2001); that's hardly enough time to affect the vast education system in the United States in any significant way.
Sure, they could potentially wreak some havoc, but I see them merely influencing it in petty ways such as increased federal support for parochial schools and voucher systems and reduced federal support for teachers' unions. None of which are particularly awful things to do, in fact; the unions seem to be opposed to every change and innovation that comes down the pike except for higher salaries.
Now, cutting innovative programs at the federal level and federal science budgets such as that of NIH and DARPA, that's bad stuff that will hurt the U.S. in the long term. However even so, U.S. spending on science and technology is still very high, higher than anywhere else even today.
As for this China-India rapprochement, I think it's a mere political ploy. India needs Chinese manufacturing right now, but India is definitely gunning for the hardware market and would love to undercut China. Indeed it's been widely reported that China is beginning to experience some labor shortages that may drive up factory wages there. Google for "china worker shortage" to find many articles about this issue.
These two countries are natural competitors with no love lost between them. Mao's invasion of Assam in 1962 and the 1987 border skirmish are pretty recent events, well within the memory of most adults now alive. Clearly this announcement is just a way for China to intimidate the U.S. and rack up a few diplomatic points at little cost, and a way for India to annoy Pakistan (and remind the U.S. that India is an important country in the region).
Well, there are times when there's no choice, such as when one is on the road or in a motel with no internet access or on site at a client's place of business where it's a security risk to touch their intranet terminals. Also, when at a factory, gas station, restaurant, rest stop on the highway... the list goes on and on. So, the suggestion of "just view the sites on a regualr [sic] computer" doesn't apply in every situation where one might need to access the world wide web.
I'm at the very low end of access speed; I've just started using my Palm T3 with a bluetooth phone to access web sites, with mixed results. To my surprise, the sites I have used (/., Y!News, Y!Quotes, dictionary.com, NE Journal of Medicine, google.com, etc.) have been pretty "format-friendly" so far. Vonage.com--forget it; the whole site's Flash.
I have found that by far the fastest way to browse is to ssh to my linux account and run lynx. This relieves the handheld of the responsibility to download tons of html formatting and graphics placeholders. Now if only this bluetooth phone-dialup ISP connection weren't so godawful slow it would be more useful. But, it's better than nothing.
Anyway, clearly there needs to be some more consciousness on the part of web site designers as to different screen sizes, but my experience has been not too bad.
How is it offensive?
Well, it's been postulated that the anaerobic bacteria which exist in hot, sulfurous ocean floor vents resemble the earliest life. The original life on earth, probably bacteria or similar single cell prokaryotic (lacking in nucleus) organisms, existed in an atmosphere lacking in oxygen. It was only a few billion years later that oxygen-producing organisms began to exist, and the anaerobic life had to adapt or die.
Basically any film that features this kind of life will by definition be flaunting the theory of evolution in all its glory. This, presumably, offends or threatens the creation literalists.
People are saying it's a shame that fundamentalists are attacking science in this country. I would add that it's a shame that these idiots have hijacked religion. The bible as allegory is brilliant and holds many lessons in morality with bits of history and culture sprinkled in. The bible as literal word is nonsense that flies in the face of all evidence. To deny evolutionary theory makes about as much sense as claiming the world is flat.
It's like Moore's law; every few years these robots will double in intelligence and capabilities until they exceed that of ordinary humans. They can already outplay us in chess. How much longer before they can replace your average bank teller or telemarketer or front line tech support? What about a restaurant table busser or dishwasher? Soon there will be nothing but robots in the workplace, plus a few human management types.
In fact I can foresee a time when robots will be the managers. Unlike (some) humans they will have no compunctions about firing people who are inefficient, and they will not be compromised by, for example, sexual favors.
I'm afraid.
Such a policy might have the unpleasant consequence of discouraging individuals from filing patent applications at all, since obviousness is in the eye of the beholder.
Maybe better for patent examiners to hire people who are more computer savvy, who can see these ridiculous claims for what they are. In the U.S. at least, patent examiners tend to be engineers and other types of highly educated people, but apparently software engineers are not yet in evidence in their ranks.
It gets worse. This pat-rights outfit has retained some patent lawer:
Well, a search on Attorney Zito reveals that he was the patent attorney for some guy who has patented gravity! Talk about an all-encompassing patent. So this is the nut they've hired to enforce their patent. Somehow, I suspect Apple doesn't have a whole lot to worry about from these opportunists.
Your hesitation about bureaucracy is understandable, but we already rely on publicly built and subsidized physical networks such as roads, highways, bridges, and subway and commuter trains. If only private enterprises were allowed to build these things, they would probably all be for-fee services that would cost considerably more. A public toll road is a form of regressive taxation, since the poor and working class have to use the same facilities as the middle and upper income classes.
I would argue that municipal internet as an optional service would be great; it would create a level playing field for all sorts of services ranging from banking to entertainment to traffic updates. It would be a lowest common denominator for communications. If service providers paid a fee for space on the network, it would probably help to pay for itself and without the need for a profit. I would take that over a monopoly any time.
Regarding reliability and efficiency, it's hard to imagine a government-run internet access service being much worse than Verizon DSL, which seems to have outages and interruptions several times a week, and whose level-1 technical support staff are totally script-driven and lacking in any real technical training. It's always annoying when there's an outage and their first question is, "What version of Windows are you running?" "Fedora who? We don't support that."
Humans are the best biosensors yet made, with dogs perhaps a close second. Intelligent, intuitive, experienced humans can scan someone's face, question them, trip them up in inconsistent statements, and otherwise sniff out intruders and frauds. Dogs can literally smell or otherwise somehow sense nervousness in people and make excellent guards. They ID people by scent and they don't forget scents quickly.
If we focussed on human intelligence we would perhaps be able to avert more catastrophes, such as the series of missteps that allowed the 9/11 hijackers to get on board their planes despite some rather suspicious behavior.
Computers are always going to be only as good as the programs that control them, and there are always going to be workarounds for people clever enough to find them. Insiders will create back doors in biosensor systems, or they will sell passwords to outsiders. A team of Japanese researchers already cracked a fingerprint biosensor a couple of years ago, so where's the security in using one? I would imagine even a DNA sample can be faked; just get someone's DNA, replicate it in a test tube using E. coli, and coat your hands with it. Standard laboratory biology.
No one can steal your identity at the low-tech neighborhood store where you shop once a week and the clerks know you (if only this were always the case). The humans at the store will look at your credit card, then at the face that does not match yours, and they'll go in the back and call the police. A machine will simply pass the buck, leaving the owner to dispute the theft with the credit card company.
The Israelis for decades have relied on human intelligence and it has stood them in good stead, with zero airline hijackings. They have very smart people who look at everyone before they board. We in the U.S. are just beginning to wake up to this level of need and we have a lot to learn.
He had over 13 previous convictions for theft and this time, caught red handed, he got a whole 11 months. I would say, fast justice is not as good as fair justice. This idiot should be put away for a few years at least.
;)
11 months is practically a slap on the wrist.
Anyway, I want that guy's webcam software.
The Kyoto treaty is an attempt to grapple with a perceived major problem, that of human-influenced weather shifts. The underlying science that purports to prove the human connection has been challenged quite recently, but there can be no doubt that in the northern hemisphere, winters are becoming milder and weather patterns more extreme, which climatologists agree is indicative of global warming.
;-)
Whether or not it chooses to sign a particular treaty for trading carbon dioxide output shares, the United States should take a leadership role in reducing pollution and energy consumption. Other countries do tend to follow the U.S. lead when it makes sense, despite a lot of America-bashing in these forums and the mass media. I would argue that Ukraine's recent presidential election is a good example of that.
According to an architect in California (I've forgotten the exact reference), their electricity shortage a couple of summers ago could have been averted had they simply painted the roofs of all state buildings white, to reduce air conditioning use.
Rather than lament this state of affairs, we should take this as a very positive sign that there is a lot of energy savings to be harvested even without technological advances. The United States should invest more heavily in alternative energy research, including safer nuclear fission approaches such as "pebble" reactors. It should offer home builders and commercial building developers significant tax breaks for installing passive energy systems using solar and wind. "Green" cars should be greatly encouraged, methanol and hydrogen fueling stations incentivized and perhaps made mandatory for government fleets, and more electric car charging outlets provided for all those sub-50 mile commuters.
The U.S. should also consider a crash program (no pun intended) to build and renew public transportation systems. Cities that have it should improve it, and cities that lack it should get into the game.
Lead by example. Get the U.S. out of the Middle East by taking away the strategic national interest of protecting their oil. Build the windmills and solar power cells on scales large enough to bring the costs down, and ultimately the investment will repay itself both through the manufacturing and export of technical innovations, reduced health issues from pollution, and of course less need to invade oil-rich countries.
My two cents'.