I fail to see the any point at all in your entire posting. This article seems to try to make something out of a dispute amongst a bunch of very talented but very stubborn geeks over an algorithm that's inside a kernel that's inside most Free Software operating systems. This specific dispute has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the appeal of Linux-based OSes to the end user. Sure, perhaps one scheduling algorithm works better in high-performance clusters and servers, whilst the other is more "well-rounded" and thus more consistent for desktop use. So what? What does that mean to "Joe NotaGeek" anyways? 3 FPS faster animation on a 3D shooter game? OO.o opens 200 ms faster?
Sorry, I fail to see the connection between the "great scheduler debate" and "the future path of Linux-based OSes as we know them". Plugging in another scheduler is not an issue anyone but kernel geeks will get emotional about. Period. "Libre" free graphics drivers, GPL versions, design changes in GNOME and KDE, uptake of standards like LSB for distribution-neutral packaging,.deb vs..rpm...now THOSE are issues MUCH more visible to the end user. The outcome of THOSE kind of issues can affect whether I can install a package, whether it runs, whether it breaks if my OS is upgraded and whatnot. This scheduler debate is an academic debate--it's not like they're making wholesale changes to the kernel APIs. The moves from kernel 2.0 to 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.6 were far more significant. The move from a.out to ELF was huge. While the content of your post might be something that should be discussed it has nothing to do with the debate over the scheduler.
It's like arguing over whether Ford could make the Fusion more appealing to the biggest market segment of car buyers by employing an Intel 8049 or a Siemens 80535 micro-controller to run the fuel injection module in the ECU. For 99.99 percent or more of potential buyers they WON'T EVEN CARE and wouldn't notice the difference. For the two dozen people in the world who DO care they'll have their little spat and move on, and perhaps both alternatives will exist in the market for a long time...and only those two dozen people will notice. It is the same thing with the kernel. Even if the scheduler was to fork and some distros use one and others use the other, neither fork is going to break compatibility with the other and consumers won't notice and won't care. It's all GPL anyways so they'll look at each other's stuff and make sure they both remain compatible at the API level, and we won't have the big mess the commercial UNIXes had in decades past.
The story you describe is still all too common, and I think that is the case because, though you make some appropriate observations you actually miss some very important conclusions as well. Primarily you have concentrated on the poor technical choices and neglected the flaws in project management and execution.
While you are right in stating that in IT projects one must proceed with caution at times when choosing to implement new technologies, you have placed an over-emphasis on sticking with what is "mature", "well tested", "traditional". There are pitfalls to sticking with what works as well--in the form of missed opportunities to improve efficiency and competitiveness. The key is in WISELY choosing new technologies, and that very much involves employing real engineering principles and effective project management (all to often the latter seems to be an oxymoron, because there are too few effective software/IT project managers out there--the field is really still quite new).
You start to key in on the root cause of this disaster when you suggest "get user feedback on software early and often". If you wait until there is software for them to give feedback on you are ALREADY TOO LATE. Before one single line of code is written, or one single software licens is bought, or even one single computer purchased, you must involve the end users in a formal "requirements gathering" process. If the project is a replacement of existing infrastructure you must observe the legacy system carefully. Not only is is it important to see what functionality needs replacing, it is also important to try and pull out of the end user what they don't like about a system and to carefully observe when users are compensating for a system's shortcomings. No mattter how efficient and reliable the old system is, in my experience there are ALWAYS shortcomings that can be addressed with new technologies. Some observations I've made that are signs a system could be improved:
* The use of Microsoft Excel in normal information management processes. This is by FAR the biggest, most obvious sign that there may be a systems integration issue. Excel is a fine spreadsheet for most people so don't take it as a slight against that product itself. However, EINAFDB and EINAFRE (Excel is not a f'ing database and Excel is not a f'ing reporting engine). The same could be said if it was OO.o Calc or Gnumeric being used the same way. Hell, it is even OK to let the abuse of the desktop spreadsheet slide from time to time. The key is, are the SAME spreadsheets used ALL the time and are a part of "normal operating procedures", and to they involve little to no numerical analysis (ie. they are "data entry forms" or "data tables")? In those cases, their systems are probably sub-optimal. A spreadsheet is for crunching numbers--doing elabourate calculations--and presenting those numbers in an "all at once", interactive fashion. It can occasionally be used for ad-hoc reporting/data processing (though that is a minor abuse, it is an acceptable one). Otherwise it is like using a butterknife as a screwdriver or your shoe as a hammer--it might work "just well enough" but it can be done a lot better.
* Manual data entry, especially from data sources that were obviously sourced from electronic systems. Do the users "cut and paste" from one screen to another a lot, or sit in front of an emulated terminal and type numbers from a dot-matrix printout or a printed report faxed from another department? It is time to ask where the data originates and the nature of that originating system. Also, keep in mind that manual entry can include "semi-automated" processes. Are they manually opening an MS Office file and launching macros to complete a step in a process? After identifying those sources of data, look at data entry from handwritten, verbal or visual sources. Does the data come from a paper recording chart, clipboards carried by operators, reading instrumentation on an old control panel? If the info is really important to the client,
In the name of DRM, we have CDs equipped with rootkits, we have personally-identifiable information being sent over international borders, we have music players phoning home to say what they're playing or storing...of COURSE DRM technology can collect private data. If the implementors of Digital Rights Management want to MICRO-manage those rights they obviously have to know exactly who's rights they're managing. That obviously means having to demand a certain level of disclosure from end users.
To say DRM and privacy are not at least related is naive. DRM might only be tracking your usage of digital media so it can allow or deny access, but it's still tracking you, and that leaves the technology open to abuse by people who wish to turn DRM into something more than it was intended to be.
Just because DRM isn't going anywhere doesn't mean the law should yield to it. DRM schemes are largely broken on many levels (technologically, legally, etc). That's not saying that DRM is unfixable (though I think the idea itself id flawed), but the correct thing to do is fix the technology, not the law.
Privacy laws, in Canada at least, apply to a much broader scope than digital media, and as such they shouldn't be tailored to it. Furthermore, privacy laws are most likely tied to constitutional rights (charter of rights and freedoms). Collection and distribution of personal information itself is not illegal, however doing so without disclosure or consent of the person involved is probably more than illegal--it would probably be ruled unconstitutional by our judiciary. Therefore, if the laws were relaxed to accommodate DRM they'd most likely be suspended by the courts if challenged.
Citadel (or, Citadel/UX specifically, see citadel.org homepage) might be worth looking at as an integrated mail/calendar system. It is already integrated and very simple to install and maintain.
If you are old enough to remember the heady days of BBSes in the 1980s, yes this is the same Citadel that you remember running many popular BBSes of the day (well one of them anyways--there were many clones and forks. The present Citadel originated in the mid 1980s as a port/rewrite of the original Citadel system written for CP/M to UNIX). Citadel is/was known for its "floors and rooms" model of navigation amongst its forums. The primary/native client is still the familiar text/terminal interface, however it is more commonly accessed and administered through the "webcit" web-based client.
In the past two decades it picked up SMTP, POP and IMAP support--email is treated like a special kind of message and your inbox and folders are types of rooms (ie. they are stored and handled largely like the BBS forum posts). Some time later Citadel got calendaring functionality, including CalDAV interoperability (IIRC, calendar events are simply specially structured messages within a special "room" as well). Also, the address book became LDAP-enabled and also supports the vCard standard and there is chatroom capability.
Since Citadel now knows POP, IMAP, vCard, CalDAV it could possibly be a good server for Thunderbird/Evolution/Kmail clients. Besides supporting the above standards they are also GPL3-licensed and fully publish the internal/native protocol used by the original citadel and webcit clients (much of it is recognisable from what was used in the pre-WWW days--it is compact and works quite well). You could in fact create your own servers and clients that interoperate with Citadel with relative ease.
The other great thing that Citadel carried over from the BBS days is horizontal scalability so that multiple Citadels on many hosts can join into a net and keep in sync (this came from the way BBSes on dialup had to transport messages between them as Fidonet etc. were known to do). In fact, Citadel has the potential of handling enterprise-wide email/groupware needs.
Perhaps this new "code name MailCo" corporation might do well to work with the Citadel people or others in an effort to build a TOTAL email/groupware solution (client AND server). The IT world could really use something to offer up against IBM Bloated Goats and Microsoft Derange Server.
Work has been underway for quite a long time. R200 specs were released quite awhile ago and R200-based cards are somewhat workable with #D-accelerated desktops. R300 specs until now were not released and a substantial effort was underway to reverse-engineer the platform. The same goes with NVidia--the Nouveau project has been very active in the past year adding Free 3-d acceleration support to their drivers and has collected a lot of data for reverse engineering purposes.
The money's ALWAYS been where our mouths are, it's just that reverse-engineering these cards is a pretty monumental task (many orders of magnitude more work involved than what was involved in reverse-engineering the entire IBM PC platform in the 1980s). For reasons completely unrelated to technical issues or even market demand, we end up having to settle for using previous-generation hardware on Linux systems because of the time it takes to wade through "trade secrets".
This news from ATI is great news for the entire community. Perhaps with NVidia being the last holdout of the big graphics hardware players they'll finally succumb to "peer pressure" and drop their unreasonable stance regarding the release of specs. I've seen the remarkable progress made by the Nouveau team despite NVidia's stonewalling. With ATI actually showing signs of cooperation I think Free ATI driver development will advance extremely quickly. Furthermore, this may have implications beyond the Linux community--in everything from embedded uses to the Windows community. If the interface spec for ATI hardware is public it means that the quality of open AND closed drivers for all platforms has the opportunity to improve, as those outside ATI will be able to give more constructive input on found bugs.
Hopefully this is an early sign of an overall trend towards opening hardware. I've been worrying lately that as open software gains traction that big companies will try to cling to their old business models by making hardware more closed.
That they don't have any funky algorithms does not mean that the firmware is not a trade secret.
Then what DOES make something a trade secret? The mere fact the software is compiled and/or programmed onto a chip? An EULA? An"anti-circumvention device" as defined by the DMCA? Seriously, where should we draw the line with "trade secrets" when it comes to protective legislation? The only "trade secret" revealed here is the fact that the manufacturer in question embedded alpha-quality software in a product released to production. That sort of a "trade secret" is generally considered willful negligence or fraud.
It still takes significant engineering/test/validation effort to get to a working device.
It is apparent that little to no such QA was done on this particular device, which to me sounds like a grave mistake considering the device is trusted to keep drunk drivers off the road. Keep in mind that this device is theoretically able to report just as many false negatives as false positives, do not only would it be possible for a sober driver to be falsely charged with a DUI (as this lawyer claims) it is also possible that countless drunk drivers falsely blew UNDER the limit and were allowed to continue on their way and put others in harms way. That could be considered criminal negligence on the part of those who engineered this device.
Just because it takes effort (in time and money) "to get a working device" even when there is nothing novel in its functionality does not mean that those putting forth the effort should be able to hide from scrutiny behind a "trade secret". The systems I work on are sometimes involve safety interlocks. My employer subjects their software division's development practices to audits from government agencies. Our clients often stipulate that they must have access to source code (though since we are a closed-source shop we never grant redistribution rights). Even if there are novel implementations or "trade secrets" there are legal instruments to accommodate for them and still remain accountable.
These "breathalyzer" devices used in the field are far from trade secrets--I remember plans for one in Radio Electronics years ago that was said to be quite reliable as a preliminary measurement device (didn't report a specific value, but had a "traffic-light-interface" of 3 LEDs). The "trade secret" excuse is flimsy and shameful. It is worse than the whole Diebold voting machine debacle because it can directly affect a person's safety and well-being.
...and muscles only heal and rebuild themselves when given time to rest.
A lot of people go to the gym and over-do it with the weights and do not rest enough. Generally you get better results if you only exercise any given muscle group no more than every other day, with rest days in-between. For example, work arms one day, then legs the next, etc. Plus take weekends off entirely. Of course, this depends on what you want to achieve--if you want to look like a scarecrow/extreme-marathon-runner then go ahead and do intense cardio all week.
Anyways I KNOW that works from personal experience--lifting weights doesn't make you have muscles, it only causes muscles to rebuild more during the rest days. No rest, no big improvements in strength. The same goes with injured muscles--you can't train through such an injury and expect it to heal very quickly.
I'n mo doctor, but I can guess the heart, being composed largely of a type of muscle tissue, responds in the same way. The problem is, the heart can never get any rest or we'd die--it always has to be pumping and working at a certain level. It isn't that the heart CANT heal, it just can't do it well if it can't get rest (athletes that train and compete through injuries end up with chronic problems later in life, after all). These ventricular-assist devices take a great deal of load off the heart and allow it to heal better and with less scarring or other permanent damage.
It's almost like he intentionally trolls his readership by stating the most outrageous possible point of view
Dvorak can say some off-the-wall stuff sometimes, but DUH, that's his raison d'etre is it not? How many people REALLY read a columnist and think "you know, this guys has some really conventional, mainline opinions and backs them yup with 100 percent logic and technical specs...how wonderfully boring--I think I'll read all his articles!"
But you know what? Sometimes Dvorak really does call it. Remember his "outrageous" prediction that Apple will get tired of the challenges it faced with its powerPC architecture and would switch to Intel? What CPUs do all the latest Macs now? Dvorak was dismissed as a kook, even though the possibility was very plausible because the first development builds of MacOS X were on the Intel platform and it was only ported to PowerPC later.
The same thing applies here--Dvorak gives a somewhat kooky, contrarian opinion on "software as a service" and a number of people get upset or laugh out loud, but give it some thought--is his "reverse timeline" scenario all that silly? It sounds quite sensible to me, since that is nearly exactly what the scenario was in the 1970s (it seems far too many/. readers are at an age or experience lever where they consider anything before Win95 ro be pre-historic). I've actually seen some of the marketing material, magazine articles, etc. from the early days of computing--when it was the "eighters vs. the sixers" (referring to the Altair/IMSAI/ProcTech/Other-S100-bus vs. TRS80/PET/AppleII religious wars). Much of what Dvorak mentions were the reasons/hype that made those early machines so appealing. No longer did you have to worry about the lines being busy, expensive CPU cycles on timeshare systems, power-tripping sysadmins--you had your very own system with total control--you could keep your own data on your own tapes or discs, etc.
Seems to me tht "software as a service" as being pushed by the bigwigs like Microsoft is almost a regression to the days of the timeshare-and-dumb-terminal days--works great in some situations, at a certain scope (such as a corporate environment), but PERSONAL computers, used in the home for PERSONAL tasks are stil popular because they offer PERSONAL control. People are going to be (and should be) very wary about giving up ther own storage space, their own computing resources and control over their computing experience.
This doesn't mean I'm against web-based technology or service-oriented architecture, because in fact when used in the right way it has the potential to revolutionise the computing experience. Think about how people are interacting using Facebook and MySpace and so forth--grat concept but it is flawed in that it is still too centralised, with the potential of central control and central point of failure. This technology could be used to create a more DISTRIBUTED architecture, where many residences are equipped with their own servers, controlled by those who live there rather than a central company/gov't/organisation.
Of course, there isn't money in it for the AT&T's, Microsoft's and so forth, and thus far "personal servers" are not to the point where they are easily maintained by consumers. However it would certainly be great if that could ever happen. I know from having my own servers in my nome to handle my email, personal website, firewalls, file archives, etc. that it can be VERY nice to have control over my internet service (I can control how spam asassin filters out junk at the server, attachment limitations, DNS entires/config, databases, etc.) If I run out of space I get another drive--If someone uses up their space at MS or Google or Yahoo, tough sh!t, delete it or pay up for more--and pay again and again every month to keep that space, not just once for new hardware.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
I don't see the irony in this particular case. Consumers want REAL choice, and that means interoperability. We have quite a choice in automobiles, for example--we can buy anything from a Smart ForTwo to a Hummer H3. The vehicles are all very different and are tailored to bery different wants and needs. However they all run on the same petroleum fuels and operate on the same system of public roads. Thus there is interoperability. Pure electrics, fuel cell power and compressed methane and propane powered cars are by far less common because there is less fuel delivery infrastructure for those vehicles, which is why flexible fuel vehicles and hybrids have fared much better...this just enforces the point.
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD do not interoperate so it is really a false choice. Consumers don't give a rats arse about the laser frequencies used, or how the data is laid out or encoded, or whether Java is used to program navigation--by picking one format or the other you reduce the REAL choices--the selection of player hardware and the content (movies) to use with the player. Competing *NON-COMPATIBLE* formats are not choices at all, thus both formats will continue to languish forever until one or more of the following happens:
* studios stop playing the exclusivity market-manipulation game and release everything in both formats (yeah, right--since when is THAT industry about fairness?)
* HD content players that support both formats become widespread (both formats are the same physical dimensions after all so it is easier done and has been done--they just need to be perfected and more models released, however being bigwigs like Sony and Toshiba are firmly in one camp or the other it presents challenges)
* one of the formats finally dives up and dies (it's a toss-up right now because the HD video market is so small and new--it's a toss-up between the blu-ray's higher capacity and a bit more studio-friendly DRM vs. simpler and lower-cost hd-dvd and the percieved continuity in technology from present DVDs due to the similar name).
It is YOUR friends list. YOU created it, not Facebook or MySpace. They are providing the tools and storage for you to create it, but it is YOUR data. You could already manually keep lists in sync and they can't do anything, so what is the problem with coming up with an automated means?
It's not like you hacked their site and made a mash-up facebook clone website that basically called facebook and presented the whole website as your own with some reformatting--you are only managing your own personal data.
The problem is that most Web Developers suck. If your data store for your web-app is good, then you can EASILY create a Facebook front end.
It isn't so much that web developers suck, it is that there is no consensus on the data store. Even if the data store is stellar, if it is not in an open, agreed-upon standard format and it isn't universally accessible then even the very least-sucky web developer will struggle to give users a seamless social-networking experience.
The days of a "single HTML interface" are now over. You need a mobile version, an iPhone version (possibly, we'll see adoption rates), and now a Facebook version.
The days of a "single data store" are numbered as well. You might post articles at Blogspot, have albums in Flickr and a large friends list on Facebook. You might also have a presence at competitor sites as well (Blogger, Shutterfly, Myspace...). Now you have to have multitudes of interfaces/transformations to handle countless combinations of desktop/mobile/facebook/myspace/blogger...it becomes unmanageable for everyone (developers and users alike).
collect my photos in iPhoto on my Mac. I upload them to Facebook via an iPhoto plug-in to show my friends. I upload them to Shutterfly via an Export Plugin (well, did until they haven't supported iPhoto '08 yet), so my extended relatives can buy pictures.
I have other friends that are into photography, they use Flickr. However, there is a Flickr "interface" for Facebook, so their Flickr Albums are viewable on Facebook.
So that is three plug-ins required to achieve a single purpose (basically photo album meta-data). Is that really an ideal end-user experience? Would it not be better to have some base-level of functionality implemented in a standard so that instead of having to deal with Flickr and Shutterfly and iPhoto and whatever-else plugins you just put your photos in one place and have a single "photo album" extension in Facebook (or Myspace or whatever--each could have a single set of tools/plug-ins/extensions for a single set of tasks). This frees developers from having to be "slaves to Facebook", but it also helps makes Facebook's job easier--it wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel to make itself interoperate with every other site, nor would there be a need for users to suffer through a gazillion plugins that do the same thing but connect to different sites.
Open APIs will let US aggregate OUR data, not have one site steal it from others.
Exposing APIs to enable the ability to create plug-ins is only part of the solution, because without consistency and true openness users will have to suffer with a big confusing crapload of plug-ins to achieve interoperability. The situation on Facebook is already sub-optimal IMHO. To go the rest of the way there ultimately needs to be open STANDARDS (whether they come about through committees or originate as de-facto standards). Wouldn't it be nice to have a standards-based system to allow for a "finger on steroids" protocol (or set of protocols) that let anyone, through any application, access your information globally on your terms? Right now we are pretty far from that day.
One of the comments on the "block Firefox" page was:
If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more.
To which I'd reply:
* Ad blockers are widely available for IE and many proxy servers as well (which block ads to ALL browsers--our corporate proxy blocks all sorts of content, including nearly all adservers). Yet all these adservers and crappy ad-laden websites continue to exist...unfortunately.
* There are "Thousands of websites" (I'd say MILLIONS actually) that SHOULD be wiped out because their net contribution to the 'net is negative. If ad-blockers give consumers the ability to decide which sites those are then they perform an important public service.
I'd also offer this argument: pushing excessive ads to my computer is theft of my processor time and bandwidth. I pay for my computer and for the monthly internet access so I can use them for what I wish. I am a reasonable person and expect that a lot of content is ad-supported and would find a reasonable amount of advertising to be acceptable. I am used to commercials consuming about 30 percent of TV programming time, and TV has survived on that for a long time. However, in recent times I have found that many sites literally devote MORE THAN HALF of their real-estate to advertising.
The advertising is getting far too distracting as well: I regularly encounter pages with multiple flash and/or video-clip ads, and ads that play sound without asking or warning. Advertisers go out of their way to create workarounds to pop-up blockers and use AJAX, Java and Flash technology to make ads that dance all over your screen, obscure the real content and generally annoy the user as much as possible.
The rights of corporate advertisers must be balanced with the rights of individual consumers, and, sorry to say Mr. Ad Exec, individual rights trump those of corporations. If you wound back a bit and limited your ads to 1/3 screen real-estate or relied on more considerate techniques like interstitial ads that played their message and politely got out of the way so the real content can be enjoyed, then the popularity of ad-blocking would be reduced substantially.
By the way, would you like to know why your precious ad servers are blocked at our corporate proxy, listed right alongside things like myspace and horse porn? It is because they started generating so much traffic on our corporate WAN that the ads actually had a noticeable impact on overall intranet performance. That's right...big, responsible corporations are committing "mass theft" because they are tired of their bandwidth being stolen by aggressive advertisers!
I'm not sure what makes soap "physics" rather than "chemistry". Soap is what happens when an alkali metal ion bonds with a fatty acid molecule called stearate. The "soapy" part of soap is generally potassium stearate or sodium stearate. Early soap was created using a solution made from the ashes of cooking fires combined with meat tallow. "Potash" gets its name from that original source, though mining is the most common method of producing potash today, and it provides the potassium hydroxide (lye) when put into solution. Obviously the tallow is an abundant source of fatty acids.
Potassium Stearate is an odd molecule--it is a hydrocarbon chain "tail" that is hydrophobic attached to hydrophilic potassium "head" on one end. Oil and water don't mix on their own, but the "tail" of the soap molecule attracts oil and the "head" attracts water molecules, allowing oily dirt to be carried away by water. Sounds like a pretty chemical process to me. It might disrupt lipid membranes but by no means is household soap meant to kill bacteria--it is meant to attach to it and allow it to be carried off by water--to be an effective antibiotic it would have to be too harsh to use for washing yourself. So I'd say it isn't how the microves are killed because regualar soap doesn't kill that many at all--it is what is done with the bacteria.
The real issue here is that antibacterial "soaps" (they are generally far from being "pure" soap) DO kill the bacteria rather than just wash them out of the way. The problem is that nothing is perfect--they all kill "99.9 percent" of bacteria. That leaves 0.1 to hang around, a large part of which are naturally resistant varieties and some of which are slight mutations of more benign bacteria that can reproduce into a "superbug" strain.
These rather un-soapy antibacterial cleansers are sometimes less effective at REMOVAL of bacteria tan regular soap, and sometime people who use these products do not use them as vigourously as they would normal soap because of the false sense of security they get fromthe "antibacterial" label. The net result is that there is very little benefit with antibacterial cleansers over plain soap--the former kills most bacteria but washes less away and the latter kills far less bacteria but washers more down the drain.
Soap, however, present less long-term risk in most situations because the bacteria left behind is still 1000-to-1 normal-to-harmful ratio, whereas antibacterials leave behind a much higher concentration of the more harmful kind. When they are that far outnumbered the "killer bugs" have to compete and have far less chance of thriving.
I like to restrict how much antibacterial cleaning product I use personally. I'd like to keep my resistance to infection thank you very much.
The bacteria-digestion of sugars and cellulosic matter into fatty acids described here is pretty novel, but the conversion into gasoline is actually pretty easy--probably easier than the transesterfication process used to make biodiesel. I imagine that onec the digestion process is perfected the manufacturing cost would be more in the range of $3.50/gal than $3500. Since it costs me the equivalent of US$4/US gallon to buy gasoline right now that makes it cost competitive.
They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints.
This is a tired argument already. Soybeans are an important feedstock, and have long been used heavily in the production of non-foodstuffs such as plastics, waxes, industrial lubricants, etc. The same thing goes for oilseeds like Canola. Just because it is edible doesn't make it a sin to use it for non-food purposes (it might be considered a good thing, as we know its toxicity is limited). As long as we explore a multitude of energy sources there isn't really a problem with *edible* energy sources (after all, our bodies are mechanisms powered 100 percent by edible energy sources;-). This all stems from the fallacy that there is a global food shortage--there is no shortage of or threat to capacity to feed the world's population. Sadly, famine today is almost 100 percent due to politics and logistics. Untold volumes of grain have been burned, buried or dumped in the ocean while children starve in Africa in the name of global trade agreements, market manipulation and so forth. It is tragic but agricultural commodity markets are are amongst the least-free, most-manipulated markets out there.
After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons.
Well, pretty much ANYTHING we grow gets the bulk of its carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis so I'd say that problem is gotten around pretty well if we can use plant matter as fuel (well, plant matter that hasn't been trapped underground since dinosaurs roamed the earth anyways).
Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better
Ultimately even conventional oil is "solar conversion", albeit inefficient since we are releasing soalr energy that was collected, stored and converted underground by natural processes over millions of years. Anyways, what man-made technology we have to collect solar energy totally sucks when compared with the efficiency of photosynthesis. Then there is the question of storage. In much of the world, much of the time, solar energy is most abundant when energy consumption is the lowest, so storage is very important. How do you store solar energy? You can't really store light, and storing heat on a large enough scale is very difficult as well (drill deep into the ground, or store it as huge tanks of hot water, etc). Large-scale storage of kinetic energy is difficult too. Then there is electricity--besides the fact that solar cells are very inefficient the batteries contain environmental toxins and all batteries "leak" to some degree (lose charge).
If we let mother nature collect the solar energy and help it along (through biotechnology) to convert it to petroleum then we can take advantage of a storage and delivery infrastructure that has been gradually built up over more than a century, and the challenges remain the same (efficient release of the stored energy).
All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean.
Don't underestimate the ability of humans to mess up the ecosystem. Humans have already messed up out ocean-bound feedstock--that being the fisheries. Wouldn't there be some consequence to growing crap on the surface of the ocean? I'd imagine that might deprive sea life at shallower depths of needed sunlight.
That said, the ocean definitely has a much less limited capacity to supply our energy needs. There is the capture of kinetic energy using big wave-riding mechanical "snakes" already. There is also a LOT of kelp and plankton that is in and under the water that could be used by this bacterial process. Better to dilute our impact on the ecosystem through the entire volume of the ocean and use multiple means of collecting energy, rather than concentrate it on the surface of the ocean where its effects would be felt more acutely.
The reason why it is a bad idea to use your face as a password is that everyone can see your freakin' face.
I've heard of image processing techniques that take 2-D photos and extrapolate 3-D information based upon shading, info about light sources, etc. Might it not be possible to create a "fake face" that is close enough to fool facial recognition systems? It really IS like taking a Jiffy marker and writing your PIN on your forehead.
Perhaps you could make facial recognition systems strict enough to detect such a fake, but if you did that then you'd get too many false positives. What would happen, for example, of RMS decided he was finally going to get a shave and a haircut? He'd be frozen out of his bank accounts! I can tell you from personal experience with fingerprint systems that they royally SUCK because they are too damn picky (it isn't a nice experience after an afternoon at West Edmonton's World Waterpark to be denied access to your towel, streetclothes, wallet and car keys because your fingerprints have shrunken just enough from the water to keep you out of your locker). I would NEVER want this sort of technology to keep me from my cash at an ATM!
Another issue is that using biometric info as a PIN is that it makes it impossible to follow the advice your bank always gives you--that is to use a different PIN for each account. It's not like I can just switch faces from one moment to the next.
It didn't suck enough. Stuff works with it, it's secure enough, it's no longer costly, it uses a fraction of the firepower recommended for Vista.
I actually think XP sucked TOO MUCH. In my opinion it ranked only slightly above WinMe in quality. It was Win2k with a Fisher-Price theme and a bunch of cruft that slowed down a 2001-era PC more than it had to. It also had all the same critical security bugs that let worms crawl in from the internet literally within minutes if you didn't have the foresight to keep a well-configured NAT router/firewall in front of it. It was a step BACK from Win2k.
So why does XP look so successful now? Because it was the first NT-based OS with a "home" edition, and NOTHING sucked more than the Win Me it replaced. It was also not different enough to break as many apps designed for the previous versions of the OS (Win2K pro) the way Vista does, so it coexisted in the enterprise better and therefore was accepted sooner in the business world (especially since employers were using the "great" new XP Home).
Furthermore, XP was so horribly sucky and broken that MS was forced to make "service pack 2" as free update. SP2 was such a major enhancement to the OS that in the past it would've been considered another release (that is, an upgrade users needed to pay for). However, XP was so defective that many consumers would've revolted. They also let the bundled browser stagnate so much that they were pushed to back-port IE7 to XP.
So you should say that XP *DOESN'T* suck enough...now. The originally released XP in many respects was a piece of garbage. MS was forced to offer free incremental upgrades over time that added up over time to significant improvements, and hardware improved over that time too. Today, XP looks pretty snappy and indeed is "good enough". And, we are now conditioned to "incremental improvements" being free and many feel that Vista, from a user perspective, is like "XP SP3", unless you have a snazzy new machine that can run the new aero glass interface well (and what PRACTICAL use does that offer anyways?).
There are other reasons why businesses ignore firefox - application compatibility.
BY FAR the biggest show-stopper compatibility-wise nowadays is due to the (ab)use of ActiveX controls. The use of VBScript instead of Java/ECMAScript is second. CSS rendering issues constitute a lot of incompatibility iss ues, but they are largely NOT show-stoppers, rather they are cosmetic in most cases.
I'm sure there are a lot of IT people in business that would like to move away from IE to Firefox, but it would just be too damn expensive to redevelop critical software to remove the IE-only components.
That depends on how much the company values security. Sometimes the expense is justified.
Some corporations I've encountered have in fact endorsed or even mandated Firefox in the name of security, to contain the security threat posed by ActiveX and VBScript. Those who mandate the use of IE often strictly curtail the use of ActiveX controls. I've encountered situations where legacy technology of my employers' products has to be disabled or re-engineered to work around the concerns the IT managers have with ActiveX. As a side effect the end solution becomes basically cross-browser capable (aside from a small number of cosmetic rendering issues).
The same thing is happening with Microsoft Office formats--it is slowly but surely working against the binary formats right now. Most technical people know that.doc and.xls formats basically are "core dumps" (at least that is how they literally started out as--a raw binary image dump of the data segments of the applications). The convoluted binary nature of these files, along with the past security threats of macro viruses, there is a growing number of email servers out there set up to block.doc and.xls attachments. My own employer's policy is to prefer the use of PDFs over.doc for external correspondence for those reasons among others.
Now, I'm seeing more spam and other suspicious attachments described as PDF files. I think that XML formats will end up becoming more popular in order to get around these security issues. I know PDFs aren't strictly binary and are open after a fashion, however Adobe massively dominates the viewer/editor market for PDFs, just as MS dominates with.doc and.xls. With XML, there are a LOT of standard processing tools from many different vendors that can be used to filter XML, and therefore many more defences against malicious use of these formats. Even a convoluted, overly complex and bloated spec like OOXML can be scraped with these tools.
However ODF is technically better, it is open in the real sense and not at the mercy of a single vendor, so if it is marketed and managed properly it has the most potential as a standard. I still fear it may go the way of Beta, however OOXML is stll better than MS' "core dump" binary formats.
most SUVs made today are probably more efficient and environmentally friendly then the 25 year old delorean.
You'd be wrong on that part. The Delorean used Renault's L engine--a 2.8 litre 90-degree V6, lifted largely from the Renault R30 and R25 (A version of the R25 was built in Canada and sold there and in the US as the Dodge Monaco and Eagle Premier). Renault and Citroen used the design from the 70s to the late 1990s for various midsize and large cars. Volvo used the same block for their V6 models in the late 70s through the 80s as well.
The boxy old Dodge Monaco from the early 1990s had performance and efficiency matching other mid-to-large sedans currently being sold today: For example, the similar-sized 2006 Ford 500, with a similar-sized 3.0L V6, gets the same 10L/100km range (low to mid 20s in US MPG units) as the 1992 Dodge Monaco. When you compare to SUVs the Monaco they obviously fare even less well.
Since the Delorean and the 1992 Dodge Monaco use the same engine, and the Delorean is lighter and more aerodynamic, I'm sure it could compete with contemporary models in terms of fuel economy and overall environmental impact.
Since the 1980s when the Delorean was made there has been virtually ZERO progress in overall fleet fuel efficiency of ANY major auto manufacturer. However I'd contend that reliability and performance have improved. If you were unfortunate enough to own a pre-1990 R25/Premier you know what I'm taking about with reliability (Monaco debuted in 1990 and didn't suffer from most of the problems). If you owned a Honda Civic before 1990 you'd also know that though that while the drive-train kept going and going the car built around it would quickly dissolve over a few years, leaving behind it a glorious trail of iron oxide.
I'm not sure where these people are coming from, but todays Hyundais and Chryslers and Renaults are significantly more dependable vehicles than even the best Toyotas and Mercedes of the 1980s and are more fun to drive to boot. If ONLY we had more super-fuel-efficient *affordable* options today. Pickings are pretty slim and highly overrated. The Smart forTwo is tiny but heavy and expensive for example--it weighs much more than the original VW beetle, costs thousands more than a Toyota Yaris or Suzuki Swift and gets not much better fuel economy either. A TDI-engine equipped new Beetle actually gets BETTER mileage than the Smart car and is more practical. What about the Prius? Unless you are a taxi driver who sits in city traffic a lot the Prius is overrated too--it is expensive and gets inferior mileage to the VW as well if you have to use it for highway commutes.
Maybe the new Delorean company can apply modern technology to give the car a facelift not only in appearance and performance but efficiency as well, because the major automakers truly are only paying lip service right now.
Henry Chesbrough is Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). He is an authority on open innovation, open business models, and more open approaches to intellectual property management.
'twas a masterful troll Mr. Chesbrough. Jonathan Swift would be proud.
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I fail to see the any point at all in your entire posting. This article seems to try to make something out of a dispute amongst a bunch of very talented but very stubborn geeks over an algorithm that's inside a kernel that's inside most Free Software operating systems. This specific dispute has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the appeal of Linux-based OSes to the end user. Sure, perhaps one scheduling algorithm works better in high-performance clusters and servers, whilst the other is more "well-rounded" and thus more consistent for desktop use. So what? What does that mean to "Joe NotaGeek" anyways? 3 FPS faster animation on a 3D shooter game? OO.o opens 200 ms faster?
.deb vs. .rpm...now THOSE are issues MUCH more visible to the end user. The outcome of THOSE kind of issues can affect whether I can install a package, whether it runs, whether it breaks if my OS is upgraded and whatnot. This scheduler debate is an academic debate--it's not like they're making wholesale changes to the kernel APIs. The moves from kernel 2.0 to 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.6 were far more significant. The move from a.out to ELF was huge. While the content of your post might be something that should be discussed it has nothing to do with the debate over the scheduler.
Sorry, I fail to see the connection between the "great scheduler debate" and "the future path of Linux-based OSes as we know them". Plugging in another scheduler is not an issue anyone but kernel geeks will get emotional about. Period. "Libre" free graphics drivers, GPL versions, design changes in GNOME and KDE, uptake of standards like LSB for distribution-neutral packaging,
It's like arguing over whether Ford could make the Fusion more appealing to the biggest market segment of car buyers by employing an Intel 8049 or a Siemens 80535 micro-controller to run the fuel injection module in the ECU. For 99.99 percent or more of potential buyers they WON'T EVEN CARE and wouldn't notice the difference. For the two dozen people in the world who DO care they'll have their little spat and move on, and perhaps both alternatives will exist in the market for a long time...and only those two dozen people will notice. It is the same thing with the kernel. Even if the scheduler was to fork and some distros use one and others use the other, neither fork is going to break compatibility with the other and consumers won't notice and won't care. It's all GPL anyways so they'll look at each other's stuff and make sure they both remain compatible
at the API level, and we won't have the big mess the commercial UNIXes had in decades past.
The story you describe is still all too common, and I think that is the case because, though you make some appropriate observations you actually miss some very important conclusions as well. Primarily you have concentrated on the poor technical choices and neglected the flaws in project management and execution.
While you are right in stating that in IT projects one must proceed with caution at times when choosing to implement new technologies, you have placed an over-emphasis on sticking with what is "mature", "well tested", "traditional". There are pitfalls to sticking with what works as well--in the form of missed opportunities to improve efficiency and competitiveness. The key is in WISELY choosing new technologies, and that very much involves employing real engineering principles and effective project management (all to often the latter seems to be an oxymoron, because there are too few effective software/IT project managers out there--the field is really still quite new).
You start to key in on the root cause of this disaster when you suggest "get user feedback on software early and often". If you wait until there is software for them to give feedback on you are ALREADY TOO LATE. Before one single line of code is written, or one single software licens is bought, or even one single computer purchased, you must involve the end users in a formal "requirements gathering" process. If the project is a replacement of existing infrastructure you must observe the legacy system carefully. Not only is is it important to see what functionality needs replacing, it is also important to try and pull out of the end user what they don't like about a system and to carefully observe when users are compensating for a system's shortcomings. No mattter how efficient and reliable the old system is, in my experience there are ALWAYS shortcomings that can be addressed with new technologies. Some observations I've made that are signs a system could be improved:
* The use of Microsoft Excel in normal information management processes. This is by FAR the biggest, most obvious sign that there may be a systems integration issue. Excel is a fine spreadsheet for most people so don't take it as a slight against that product itself. However, EINAFDB and EINAFRE (Excel is not a f'ing database and Excel is not a f'ing reporting engine). The same could be said if it was OO.o Calc or Gnumeric being used the same way. Hell, it is even OK to let the abuse of the desktop spreadsheet slide from time to time. The key is, are the SAME spreadsheets used ALL the time and are a part of "normal operating procedures", and to they involve little to no numerical analysis (ie. they are "data entry forms" or "data tables")? In those cases, their systems are probably sub-optimal. A spreadsheet is for crunching numbers--doing elabourate calculations--and presenting those numbers in an "all at once", interactive fashion. It can occasionally be used for ad-hoc reporting/data processing (though that is a minor abuse, it is an acceptable one). Otherwise it is like using a butterknife as a screwdriver or your shoe as a hammer--it might work "just well enough" but it can be done a lot better.
* Manual data entry, especially from data sources that were obviously sourced from electronic systems. Do the users "cut and paste" from one screen to another a lot, or sit in front of an emulated terminal and type numbers from a dot-matrix printout or a printed report faxed from another department? It is time to ask where the data originates and the nature of that originating system. Also, keep in mind that manual entry can include "semi-automated" processes. Are they manually opening an MS Office file and launching macros to complete a step in a process? After identifying those sources of data, look at data entry from handwritten, verbal or visual sources. Does the data come from a paper recording chart, clipboards carried by operators, reading instrumentation on an old control panel? If the info is really important to the client,
...but they're both quadrilaterals.
In the name of DRM, we have CDs equipped with rootkits, we have personally-identifiable information being sent over international borders, we have music players phoning home to say what they're playing or storing...of COURSE DRM technology can collect private data. If the implementors of Digital Rights Management want to MICRO-manage those rights they obviously have to know exactly who's rights they're managing. That obviously means having to demand a certain level of disclosure from end users.
To say DRM and privacy are not at least related is naive. DRM might only be tracking your usage of digital media so it can allow or deny access, but it's still tracking you, and that leaves the technology open to abuse by people who wish to turn DRM into something more than it was intended to be.
Just because DRM isn't going anywhere doesn't mean the law should yield to it. DRM schemes are largely broken on many levels (technologically, legally, etc). That's not saying that DRM is unfixable (though I think the idea itself id flawed), but the correct thing to do is fix the technology, not the law.
Privacy laws, in Canada at least, apply to a much broader scope than digital media, and as such they shouldn't be tailored to it. Furthermore, privacy laws are most likely tied to constitutional rights (charter of rights and freedoms). Collection and distribution of personal information itself is not illegal, however doing so without disclosure or consent of the person involved is probably more than illegal--it would probably be ruled unconstitutional by our judiciary. Therefore, if the laws were relaxed to accommodate DRM they'd most likely be suspended by the courts if challenged.
Citadel (or, Citadel/UX specifically, see citadel.org homepage) might be worth looking at as an integrated mail/calendar system. It is already integrated and very simple to install and maintain.
If you are old enough to remember the heady days of BBSes in the 1980s, yes this is the same Citadel that you remember running many popular BBSes of the day (well one of them anyways--there were many clones and forks. The present Citadel originated in the mid 1980s as a port/rewrite of the original Citadel system written for CP/M to UNIX). Citadel is/was known for its "floors and rooms" model of navigation amongst its forums. The primary/native client is still the familiar text/terminal interface, however it is more commonly accessed and administered through the "webcit" web-based client.
In the past two decades it picked up SMTP, POP and IMAP support--email is treated like a special kind of message and your inbox and folders are types of rooms (ie. they are stored and handled largely like the BBS forum posts). Some time later Citadel got calendaring functionality, including CalDAV interoperability (IIRC, calendar events are simply specially structured messages within a special "room" as well). Also, the address book became LDAP-enabled and also supports the vCard standard and there is chatroom capability.
Since Citadel now knows POP, IMAP, vCard, CalDAV it could possibly be a good server for Thunderbird/Evolution/Kmail clients. Besides supporting the above standards they are also GPL3-licensed and fully publish the internal/native protocol used by the original citadel and webcit clients (much of it is recognisable from what was used in the pre-WWW days--it is compact and works quite well). You could in fact create your own servers and clients that interoperate with Citadel with relative ease.
The other great thing that Citadel carried over from the BBS days is horizontal scalability so that multiple Citadels on many hosts can join into a net and keep in sync (this came from the way BBSes on dialup had to transport messages between them as Fidonet etc. were known to do). In fact, Citadel has the potential of handling enterprise-wide email/groupware needs.
Perhaps this new "code name MailCo" corporation might do well to work with the Citadel people or others in an effort to build a TOTAL email/groupware solution (client AND server). The IT world could really use something to offer up against IBM Bloated Goats and Microsoft Derange Server.
Work has been underway for quite a long time. R200 specs were released quite awhile ago and R200-based cards are somewhat workable with #D-accelerated desktops. R300 specs until now were not released and a substantial effort was underway to reverse-engineer the platform. The same goes with NVidia--the Nouveau project has been very active in the past year adding Free 3-d acceleration support to their drivers and has collected a lot of data for reverse engineering purposes.
The money's ALWAYS been where our mouths are, it's just that reverse-engineering these cards is a pretty monumental task (many orders of magnitude more work involved than what was involved in reverse-engineering the entire IBM PC platform in the 1980s). For reasons completely unrelated to technical issues or even market demand, we end up having to settle for using previous-generation hardware on Linux systems because of the time it takes to wade through "trade secrets".
This news from ATI is great news for the entire community. Perhaps with NVidia being the last holdout of the big graphics hardware players they'll finally succumb to "peer pressure" and drop their unreasonable stance regarding the release of specs. I've seen the remarkable progress made by the Nouveau team despite NVidia's stonewalling. With ATI actually showing signs of cooperation I think Free ATI driver development will advance extremely quickly. Furthermore, this may have implications beyond the Linux community--in everything from embedded uses to the Windows community. If the interface spec for ATI hardware is public it means that the quality of open AND closed drivers for all platforms has the opportunity to improve, as those outside ATI will be able to give more constructive input on found bugs.
Hopefully this is an early sign of an overall trend towards opening hardware. I've been worrying lately that as open software gains traction that big companies will try to cling to their old business models by making hardware more closed.
That they don't have any funky algorithms does not mean that the firmware is not a trade secret.
Then what DOES make something a trade secret? The mere fact the software is compiled and/or programmed onto a chip? An EULA? An"anti-circumvention device" as defined by the DMCA? Seriously, where should we draw the line with "trade secrets" when it comes to protective legislation? The only "trade secret" revealed here is the fact that the manufacturer in question embedded alpha-quality software in a product released to production. That sort of a "trade secret" is generally considered willful negligence or fraud.
It still takes significant engineering/test/validation effort to get to a working device.
It is apparent that little to no such QA was done on this particular device, which to me sounds like a grave mistake considering the device is trusted to keep drunk drivers off the road. Keep in mind that this device is theoretically able to report just as many false negatives as false positives, do not only would it be possible for a sober driver to be falsely charged with a DUI (as this lawyer claims) it is also possible that countless drunk drivers falsely blew UNDER the limit and were allowed to continue on their way and put others in harms way. That could be considered criminal negligence on the part of those who engineered this device.
Just because it takes effort (in time and money) "to get a working device" even when there is nothing novel in its functionality does not mean that those putting forth the effort should be able to hide from scrutiny behind a "trade secret". The systems I work on are sometimes involve safety interlocks. My employer subjects their software division's development practices to audits from government agencies. Our clients often stipulate that they must have access to source code (though since we are a closed-source shop we never grant redistribution rights). Even if there are novel implementations or "trade secrets" there are legal instruments to accommodate for them and still remain accountable.
These "breathalyzer" devices used in the field are far from trade secrets--I remember plans for one in Radio Electronics years ago that was said to be quite reliable as a preliminary measurement device (didn't report a specific value, but had a "traffic-light-interface" of 3 LEDs). The "trade secret" excuse is flimsy and shameful. It is worse than the whole Diebold voting machine debacle because it can directly affect a person's safety and well-being.
...and muscles only heal and rebuild themselves when given time to rest.
A lot of people go to the gym and over-do it with the weights and do not rest enough. Generally you get better results if you only exercise any given muscle group no more than every other day, with rest days in-between. For example, work arms one day, then legs the next, etc. Plus take weekends off entirely. Of course, this depends on what you want to achieve--if you want to look like a scarecrow/extreme-marathon-runner then go ahead and do intense cardio all week.
Anyways I KNOW that works from personal experience--lifting weights doesn't make you have muscles, it only causes muscles to rebuild more during the rest days. No rest, no big improvements in strength. The same goes with injured muscles--you can't train through such an injury and expect it to heal very quickly.
I'n mo doctor, but I can guess the heart, being composed largely of a type of muscle tissue, responds in the same way. The problem is, the heart can never get any rest or we'd die--it always has to be pumping and working at a certain level. It isn't that the heart CANT heal, it just can't do it well if it can't get rest (athletes that train and compete through injuries end up with chronic problems later in life, after all). These ventricular-assist devices take a great deal of load off the heart and allow it to heal better and with less scarring or other permanent damage.
It's almost like he intentionally trolls his readership by stating the most outrageous possible point of view
/. readers are at an age or experience lever where they consider anything before Win95 ro be pre-historic). I've actually seen some of the marketing material, magazine articles, etc. from the early days of computing--when it was the "eighters vs. the sixers" (referring to the Altair/IMSAI/ProcTech/Other-S100-bus vs. TRS80/PET/AppleII religious wars). Much of what Dvorak mentions were the reasons/hype that made those early machines so appealing. No longer did you have to worry about the lines being busy, expensive CPU cycles on timeshare systems, power-tripping sysadmins--you had your very own system with total control--you could keep your own data on your own tapes or discs, etc.
Dvorak can say some off-the-wall stuff sometimes, but DUH, that's his raison d'etre is it not? How many people REALLY read a columnist and think "you know, this guys has some really conventional, mainline opinions and backs them yup with 100 percent logic and technical specs...how wonderfully boring--I think I'll read all his articles!"
But you know what? Sometimes Dvorak really does call it. Remember his "outrageous" prediction that Apple will get tired of the challenges it faced with its powerPC architecture and would switch to Intel? What CPUs do all the latest Macs now? Dvorak was dismissed as a kook, even though the possibility was very plausible because the first development builds of MacOS X were on the Intel platform and it was only ported to PowerPC later.
The same thing applies here--Dvorak gives a somewhat kooky, contrarian opinion on "software as a service" and a number of people get upset or laugh out loud, but give it some thought--is his "reverse timeline" scenario all that silly? It sounds quite sensible to me, since that is nearly exactly what the scenario was in the 1970s (it seems far too many
Seems to me tht "software as a service" as being pushed by the bigwigs like Microsoft is almost a regression to the days of the timeshare-and-dumb-terminal days--works great in some situations, at a certain scope (such as a corporate environment), but PERSONAL computers, used in the home for PERSONAL tasks are stil popular because they offer PERSONAL control. People are going to be (and should be) very wary about giving up ther own storage space, their own computing resources and control over their computing experience.
This doesn't mean I'm against web-based technology or service-oriented architecture, because in fact when used in the right way it has the potential to revolutionise the computing experience. Think about how people are interacting using Facebook and MySpace and so forth--grat concept but it is flawed in that it is still too centralised, with the potential of central control and central point of failure. This technology could be used to create a more DISTRIBUTED architecture, where many residences are equipped with their own servers, controlled by those who live there rather than a central company/gov't/organisation.
Of course, there isn't money in it for the AT&T's, Microsoft's and so forth, and thus far "personal servers" are not to the point where they are easily maintained by consumers. However it would certainly be great if that could ever happen. I know from having my own servers in my nome to handle my email, personal website, firewalls, file archives, etc. that it can be VERY nice to have control over my internet service (I can control how spam asassin filters out junk at the server, attachment limitations, DNS entires/config, databases, etc.) If I run out of space I get another drive--If someone uses up their space at MS or Google or Yahoo, tough sh!t, delete it or pay up for more--and pay again and again every month to keep that space, not just once for new hardware.
...INTEROPERABILITY!
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
I don't see the irony in this particular case. Consumers want REAL choice, and that means interoperability. We have quite a choice in automobiles, for example--we can buy anything from a Smart ForTwo to a Hummer H3. The vehicles are all very different and are tailored to bery different wants and needs. However they all run on the same petroleum fuels and operate on the same system of public roads. Thus there is interoperability. Pure electrics, fuel cell power and compressed methane and propane powered cars are by far less common because there is less fuel delivery infrastructure for those vehicles, which is why flexible fuel vehicles and hybrids have fared much better...this just enforces the point.
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD do not interoperate so it is really a false choice. Consumers don't give a rats arse about the laser frequencies used, or how the data is laid out or encoded, or whether Java is used to program navigation--by picking one format or the other you reduce the REAL choices--the selection of player hardware and the content (movies) to use with the player. Competing *NON-COMPATIBLE* formats are not choices at all, thus both formats will continue to languish forever until one or more of the following happens:
* studios stop playing the exclusivity market-manipulation game and release everything in both formats (yeah, right--since when is THAT industry about fairness?)
* HD content players that support both formats become widespread (both formats are the same physical dimensions after all so it is easier done and has been done--they just need to be perfected and more models released, however being bigwigs like Sony and Toshiba are firmly in one camp or the other it presents challenges)
* one of the formats finally dives up and dies (it's a toss-up right now because the HD video market is so small and new--it's a toss-up between the blu-ray's higher capacity and a bit more studio-friendly DRM vs. simpler and lower-cost hd-dvd and the percieved continuity in technology from present DVDs due to the similar name).
It is YOUR friends list. YOU created it, not Facebook or MySpace. They are providing the tools and storage for you to create it, but it is YOUR data. You could already manually keep lists in sync and they can't do anything, so what is the problem with coming up with an automated means?
It's not like you hacked their site and made a mash-up facebook clone website that basically called facebook and presented the whole website as your own with some reformatting--you are only managing your own personal data.
The problem is that most Web Developers suck. If your data store for your web-app is good, then you can EASILY create a Facebook front end.
It isn't so much that web developers suck, it is that there is no consensus on the data store. Even if the data store is stellar, if it is not in an open, agreed-upon standard format and it isn't universally accessible then even the very least-sucky web developer will struggle to give users a seamless social-networking experience.
The days of a "single HTML interface" are now over. You need a mobile version, an iPhone version (possibly, we'll see adoption rates), and now a Facebook version.
The days of a "single data store" are numbered as well. You might post articles at Blogspot, have albums in Flickr and a large friends list on Facebook. You might also have a presence at competitor sites as well (Blogger, Shutterfly, Myspace...). Now you have to have multitudes of interfaces/transformations to handle countless combinations of desktop/mobile/facebook/myspace/blogger...it becomes unmanageable for everyone (developers and users alike).
collect my photos in iPhoto on my Mac. I upload them to Facebook via an iPhoto plug-in to show my friends. I upload them to Shutterfly via an Export Plugin (well, did until they haven't supported iPhoto '08 yet), so my extended relatives can buy pictures.
I have other friends that are into photography, they use Flickr. However, there is a Flickr "interface" for Facebook, so their Flickr Albums are viewable on Facebook.
So that is three plug-ins required to achieve a single purpose (basically photo album meta-data). Is that really an ideal end-user experience? Would it not be better to have some base-level of functionality implemented in a standard so that instead of having to deal with Flickr and Shutterfly and iPhoto and whatever-else plugins you just put your photos in one place and have a single "photo album" extension in Facebook (or Myspace or whatever--each could have a single set of tools/plug-ins/extensions for a single set of tasks). This frees developers from having to be "slaves to Facebook", but it also helps makes Facebook's job easier--it wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel to make itself interoperate with every other site, nor would there be a need for users to suffer through a gazillion plugins that do the same thing but connect to different sites.
Open APIs will let US aggregate OUR data, not have one site steal it from others.
Exposing APIs to enable the ability to create plug-ins is only part of the solution, because without consistency and true openness users will have to suffer with a big confusing crapload of plug-ins to achieve interoperability. The situation on Facebook is already sub-optimal IMHO. To go the rest of the way there ultimately needs to be open STANDARDS (whether they come about through committees or originate as de-facto standards). Wouldn't it be nice to have a standards-based system to allow for a "finger on steroids" protocol (or set of protocols) that let anyone, through any application, access your information globally on your terms? Right now we are pretty far from that day.
One of the comments on the "block Firefox" page was:
If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more.
To which I'd reply:
* Ad blockers are widely available for IE and many proxy servers as well (which block ads to ALL browsers--our corporate proxy blocks all sorts of content, including nearly all adservers). Yet all these adservers and crappy ad-laden websites continue to exist...unfortunately.
* There are "Thousands of websites" (I'd say MILLIONS actually) that SHOULD be wiped out because their net contribution to the 'net is negative. If ad-blockers give consumers the ability to decide which sites those are then they perform an important public service.
I'd also offer this argument: pushing excessive ads to my computer is theft of my processor time and bandwidth. I pay for my computer and for the monthly internet access so I can use them for what I wish. I am a reasonable person and expect that a lot of content is ad-supported and would find a reasonable amount of advertising to be acceptable. I am used to commercials consuming about 30 percent of TV programming time, and TV has survived on that for a long time. However, in recent times I have found that many sites literally devote MORE THAN HALF of their real-estate to advertising.
The advertising is getting far too distracting as well: I regularly encounter pages with multiple flash and/or video-clip ads, and ads that play sound without asking or warning. Advertisers go out of their way to create workarounds to pop-up blockers and use AJAX, Java and Flash technology to make ads that dance all over your screen, obscure the real content and generally annoy the user as much as possible.
The rights of corporate advertisers must be balanced with the rights of individual consumers, and, sorry to say Mr. Ad Exec, individual rights trump those of corporations. If you wound back a bit and limited your ads to 1/3 screen real-estate or relied on more considerate techniques like interstitial ads that played their message and politely got out of the way so the real content can be enjoyed, then the popularity of ad-blocking would be reduced substantially.
By the way, would you like to know why your precious ad servers are blocked at our corporate proxy, listed right alongside things like myspace and horse porn? It is because they started generating so much traffic on our corporate WAN that the ads actually had a noticeable impact on overall intranet performance. That's right...big, responsible corporations are committing "mass theft" because they are tired of their bandwidth being stolen by aggressive advertisers!
I'm not sure what makes soap "physics" rather than "chemistry". Soap is what happens when an alkali metal ion bonds with a fatty acid molecule called stearate. The "soapy" part of soap is generally potassium stearate or sodium stearate. Early soap was created using a solution made from the ashes of cooking fires combined with meat tallow. "Potash" gets its name from that original source, though mining is the most common method of producing potash today, and it provides the potassium hydroxide (lye) when put into solution. Obviously the tallow is an abundant source of fatty acids.
Potassium Stearate is an odd molecule--it is a hydrocarbon chain "tail" that is hydrophobic attached to hydrophilic potassium "head" on one end. Oil and water don't mix on their own, but the "tail" of the soap molecule attracts oil and the "head" attracts water molecules, allowing oily dirt to be carried away by water. Sounds like a pretty chemical process to me. It might disrupt lipid membranes but by no means is household soap meant to kill bacteria--it is meant to attach to it and allow it to be carried off by water--to be an effective antibiotic it would have to be too harsh to use for washing yourself. So I'd say it isn't how the microves are killed because regualar soap doesn't kill that many at all--it is what is done with the bacteria.
The real issue here is that antibacterial "soaps" (they are generally far from being "pure" soap) DO kill the bacteria rather than just wash them out of the way. The problem is that nothing is perfect--they all kill "99.9 percent" of bacteria. That leaves 0.1 to hang around, a large part of which are naturally resistant varieties and some of which are slight mutations of more benign bacteria that can reproduce into a "superbug" strain.
These rather un-soapy antibacterial cleansers are sometimes less effective at REMOVAL of bacteria tan regular soap, and sometime people who use these products do not use them as vigourously as they would normal soap because of the false sense of security they get fromthe "antibacterial" label. The net result is that there is very little benefit with antibacterial cleansers over plain soap--the former kills most bacteria but washes less away and the latter kills far less bacteria but washers more down the drain.
Soap, however, present less long-term risk in most situations because the bacteria left behind is still 1000-to-1 normal-to-harmful ratio, whereas antibacterials leave behind a much higher concentration of the more harmful kind. When they are that far outnumbered the "killer bugs" have to compete and have far less chance of thriving.
I like to restrict how much antibacterial cleaning product I use personally. I'd like to keep my resistance to infection thank you very much.
The bacteria-digestion of sugars and cellulosic matter into fatty acids described here is pretty novel, but the conversion into gasoline is actually pretty easy--probably easier than the transesterfication process used to make biodiesel. I imagine that onec the digestion process is perfected the manufacturing cost would be more in the range of $3.50/gal than $3500. Since it costs me the equivalent of US$4/US gallon to buy gasoline right now that makes it cost competitive.
They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints.
;-). This all stems from the fallacy that there is a global food shortage--there is no shortage of or threat to capacity to feed the world's population. Sadly, famine today is almost 100 percent due to politics and logistics. Untold volumes of grain have been burned, buried or dumped in the ocean while children starve in Africa in the name of global trade agreements, market manipulation and so forth. It is tragic but agricultural commodity markets are are amongst the least-free, most-manipulated markets out there.
This is a tired argument already. Soybeans are an important feedstock, and have long been used heavily in the production of non-foodstuffs such as plastics, waxes, industrial lubricants, etc. The same thing goes for oilseeds like Canola. Just because it is edible doesn't make it a sin to use it for non-food purposes (it might be considered a good thing, as we know its toxicity is limited). As long as we explore a multitude of energy sources there isn't really a problem with *edible* energy sources (after all, our bodies are mechanisms powered 100 percent by edible energy sources
After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons.
Well, pretty much ANYTHING we grow gets the bulk of its carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis so I'd say that problem is gotten around pretty well if we can use plant matter as fuel (well, plant matter that hasn't been trapped underground since dinosaurs roamed the earth anyways).
Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better
Ultimately even conventional oil is "solar conversion", albeit inefficient since we are releasing soalr energy that was collected, stored and converted underground by natural processes over millions of years. Anyways, what man-made technology we have to collect solar energy totally sucks when compared with the efficiency of photosynthesis. Then there is the question of storage. In much of the world, much of the time, solar energy is most abundant when energy consumption is the lowest, so storage is very important. How do you store solar energy? You can't really store light, and storing heat on a large enough scale is very difficult as well (drill deep into the ground, or store it as huge tanks of hot water, etc). Large-scale storage of kinetic energy is difficult too. Then there is electricity--besides the fact that solar cells are very inefficient the batteries contain environmental toxins and all batteries "leak" to some degree (lose charge).
If we let mother nature collect the solar energy and help it along (through biotechnology) to convert it to petroleum then we can take advantage of a storage and delivery infrastructure that has been gradually built up over more than a century, and the challenges remain the same (efficient release of the stored energy).
All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean.
Don't underestimate the ability of humans to mess up the ecosystem. Humans have already messed up out ocean-bound feedstock--that being the fisheries. Wouldn't there be some consequence to growing crap on the surface of the ocean? I'd imagine that might deprive sea life at shallower depths of needed sunlight.
That said, the ocean definitely has a much less limited capacity to supply our energy needs. There is the capture of kinetic energy using big wave-riding mechanical "snakes" already. There is also a LOT of kelp and plankton that is in and under the water that could be used by this bacterial process. Better to dilute our impact on the ecosystem through the entire volume of the ocean and use multiple means of collecting energy, rather than concentrate it on the surface of the ocean where its effects would be felt more acutely.
...so why on earth is MS pulling this stunt!
Works is crapware even WITHOUT the ads! Works should be given a quick, painless death and MS should move on.
This only makes the Apple ad more true.
The reason why it is a bad idea to use your face as a password is that everyone can see your freakin' face.
I've heard of image processing techniques that take 2-D photos and extrapolate 3-D information based upon shading, info about light sources, etc. Might it not be possible to create a "fake face" that is close enough to fool facial recognition systems? It really IS like taking a Jiffy marker and writing your PIN on your forehead.
Perhaps you could make facial recognition systems strict enough to detect such a fake, but if you did that then you'd get too many false positives. What would happen, for example, of RMS decided he was finally going to get a shave and a haircut? He'd be frozen out of his bank accounts! I can tell you from personal experience with fingerprint systems that they royally SUCK because they are too damn picky (it isn't a nice experience after an afternoon at West Edmonton's World Waterpark to be denied access to your towel, streetclothes, wallet and car keys because your fingerprints have shrunken just enough from the water to keep you out of your locker). I would NEVER want this sort of technology to keep me from my cash at an ATM!
Another issue is that using biometric info as a PIN is that it makes it impossible to follow the advice your bank always gives you--that is to use a different PIN for each account. It's not like I can just switch faces from one moment to the next.
It didn't suck enough. Stuff works with it, it's secure enough, it's no longer costly, it uses a fraction of the firepower recommended for Vista.
I actually think XP sucked TOO MUCH. In my opinion it ranked only slightly above WinMe in quality. It was Win2k with a Fisher-Price theme and a bunch of cruft that slowed down a 2001-era PC more than it had to. It also had all the same critical security bugs that let worms crawl in from the internet literally within minutes if you didn't have the foresight to keep a well-configured NAT router/firewall in front of it. It was a step BACK from Win2k.
So why does XP look so successful now? Because it was the first NT-based OS with a "home" edition, and NOTHING sucked more than the Win Me it replaced. It was also not different enough to break as many apps designed for the previous versions of the OS (Win2K pro) the way Vista does, so it coexisted in the enterprise better and therefore was accepted sooner in the business world (especially since employers were using the "great" new XP Home).
Furthermore, XP was so horribly sucky and broken that MS was forced to make "service pack 2" as free update. SP2 was such a major enhancement to the OS that in the past it would've been considered another release (that is, an upgrade users needed to pay for). However, XP was so defective that many consumers would've revolted. They also let the bundled browser stagnate so much that they were pushed to back-port IE7 to XP.
So you should say that XP *DOESN'T* suck enough...now. The originally released XP in many respects was a piece of garbage. MS was forced to offer free incremental upgrades over time that added up over time to significant improvements, and hardware improved over that time too. Today, XP looks pretty snappy and indeed is "good enough". And, we are now conditioned to "incremental improvements" being free and many feel that Vista, from a user perspective, is like "XP SP3", unless you have a snazzy new machine that can run the new aero glass interface well (and what PRACTICAL use does that offer anyways?).
After all, everyone knows that for any mission critical MIDI work it is a MUST to be equipped with an adequate number of Atari workstations ;-)
There are other reasons why businesses ignore firefox - application compatibility.
.doc and .xls formats basically are "core dumps" (at least that is how they literally started out as--a raw binary image dump of the data segments of the applications). The convoluted binary nature of these files, along with the past security threats of macro viruses, there is a growing number of email servers out there set up to block .doc and .xls attachments. My own employer's policy is to prefer the use of PDFs over .doc for external correspondence for those reasons among others.
.doc and .xls. With XML, there are a LOT of standard processing tools from many different vendors that can be used to filter XML, and therefore many more defences against malicious use of these formats. Even a convoluted, overly complex and bloated spec like OOXML can be scraped with these tools.
BY FAR the biggest show-stopper compatibility-wise nowadays is due to the (ab)use of ActiveX controls. The use of VBScript instead of Java/ECMAScript is second. CSS rendering issues constitute a lot of incompatibility iss ues, but they are largely NOT show-stoppers, rather they are cosmetic in most cases.
I'm sure there are a lot of IT people in business that would like to move away from IE to Firefox, but it would just be too damn expensive to redevelop critical software to remove the IE-only components.
That depends on how much the company values security. Sometimes the expense is justified.
Some corporations I've encountered have in fact endorsed or even mandated Firefox in the name of security, to contain the security threat posed by ActiveX and VBScript. Those who mandate the use of IE often strictly curtail the use of ActiveX controls. I've encountered situations where legacy technology of my employers' products has to be disabled or re-engineered to work around the concerns the IT managers have with ActiveX. As a side effect the end solution becomes basically cross-browser capable (aside from a small number of cosmetic rendering issues).
The same thing is happening with Microsoft Office formats--it is slowly but surely working against the binary formats right now. Most technical people know that
Now, I'm seeing more spam and other suspicious attachments described as PDF files. I think that XML formats will end up becoming more popular in order to get around these security issues. I know PDFs aren't strictly binary and are open after a fashion, however Adobe massively dominates the viewer/editor market for PDFs, just as MS dominates with
However ODF is technically better, it is open in the real sense and not at the mercy of a single vendor, so if it is marketed and managed properly it has the most potential as a standard. I still fear it may go the way of Beta, however OOXML is stll better than MS' "core dump" binary formats.
most SUVs made today are probably more efficient and environmentally friendly then the 25 year old delorean.
You'd be wrong on that part. The Delorean used Renault's L engine--a 2.8 litre 90-degree V6, lifted largely from the Renault R30 and R25 (A version of the R25 was built in Canada and sold there and in the US as the Dodge Monaco and Eagle Premier). Renault and Citroen used the design from the 70s to the late 1990s for various midsize and large cars. Volvo used the same block for their V6 models in the late 70s through the 80s as well.
The boxy old Dodge Monaco from the early 1990s had performance and efficiency matching other mid-to-large sedans currently being sold today: For example, the similar-sized 2006 Ford 500, with a similar-sized 3.0L V6, gets the same 10L/100km range (low to mid 20s in US MPG units) as the 1992 Dodge Monaco. When you compare to SUVs the Monaco they obviously fare even less well.
Since the Delorean and the 1992 Dodge Monaco use the same engine, and the Delorean is lighter and more aerodynamic, I'm sure it could compete with contemporary models in terms of fuel economy and overall environmental impact.
Since the 1980s when the Delorean was made there has been virtually ZERO progress in overall fleet fuel efficiency of ANY major auto manufacturer. However I'd contend that reliability and performance have improved. If you were unfortunate enough to own a pre-1990 R25/Premier you know what I'm taking about with reliability (Monaco debuted in 1990 and didn't suffer from most of the problems). If you owned a Honda Civic before 1990 you'd also know that though that while the drive-train kept going and going the car built around it would quickly dissolve over a few years, leaving behind it a glorious trail of iron oxide.
I'm not sure where these people are coming from, but todays Hyundais and Chryslers and Renaults are significantly more dependable vehicles than even the best Toyotas and Mercedes of the 1980s and are more fun to drive to boot. If ONLY we had more super-fuel-efficient *affordable* options today. Pickings are pretty slim and highly overrated. The Smart forTwo is tiny but heavy and expensive for example--it weighs much more than the original VW beetle, costs thousands more than a Toyota Yaris or Suzuki Swift and gets not much better fuel economy either. A TDI-engine equipped new Beetle actually gets BETTER mileage than the Smart car and is more practical. What about the Prius? Unless you are a taxi driver who sits in city traffic a lot the Prius is overrated too--it is expensive and gets inferior mileage to the VW as well if you have to use it for highway commutes.
Maybe the new Delorean company can apply modern technology to give the car a facelift not only in appearance and performance but efficiency as well, because the major automakers truly are only paying lip service right now.
by offering a strOfBribes to nVendors to successfully fnDominateMarket.
The police pFinger at MS for performing an illegal operation, however MS contends that bAllegations == False.
Because it's a troll, not a trap... I only noticed after posting an indignant comment here.
Honestly though, it's not like MS hadn't already set that trap years ago.
..it pays to R past the end of TFA sometimes:
Henry Chesbrough is Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). He is an authority on open innovation, open business models, and more open approaches to intellectual property management.
'twas a masterful troll Mr. Chesbrough. Jonathan Swift would be proud.