1) That all works just fine on Linux, too. Has for years. If you take a look back in shared IP (aka NAT) history, you'll find Linux has understood alot of ways to do that longer than Windows. Though some complicated things may be easier to set up under Windows now than on Linux, I'd be surprised if, stacking the latest Windows against the latest Red Hat / Gentoo / Mandrake / SuSE, there was anything related to networking that Windows can do that Linux can't. Problem solved:)
2) The average consumer is stuck on IPv4 accessories and applications right now. Of course IPv6 rolling out tomorrow won't help them today. The average consumer never makes use of a new technology immediately. The idea is to make it -possible- so that the average end user will get benefit from it in the future.
3) IPv6 doesn't have to make it easier for trolls to evade IP bans as long as there is a standardized block size made available to individual users -or- as long as some form of CIDR-like registration is used.
Perhaps this is a new tool someone should create. A system that lets you look up what size an IPv6 block is. It should probably point back to the ISP / company that owns the "master" block. In other words, it doesn't need to have any personal information about the person who is using that block (assuming a smaller block is assigned to it), just the range that is owned by that user so that allow / deny rules can be written properly.
An ISP who sets up individual user accounts could have a standard size, so that they simply go in and set up in advance the information rather than having to add it each time they get a new user. If a sub-block does not show up, then people write bans against the entire ISP block, which encourages participation:)
Coming from someone who used to have to assign and re-assign subnet ownership for an ISP, they already do work like this... this system could be a much simpler one than what exists now for IPv4 while retaining it's value. I know of a couple of times I've had to look up a block of addresses to ban a user and this would also be valuable for things like spam-holes, etc.
That is, assuming that routing doesn't go back to the ways before of users aquiring netblocks and then having their ISP route them (instead of ISPs aquiring netblocks and subnetting them to customers). However even if that is eventually the method (and I believe that was part of the idea behind having so many addresses in IPv6) that just makes it easier to look up block owners and ban entire blocks.
As long as you don't mind a little bit of heavy handedness.
IPv4 will eventually be phased out or so broken that something like IPv6 will take the place of it. This is not because of the inherent problems in IPv4 like DDoS attacks or routing problems. It is because it will, eventually (whether it's 5 years, 50 years or more), run out of address space.
If IPv6 -never- runs out of address spaces, or doesn't for many millenia, then the main thing that has driven the evolution of the Internet Protocol will have been killed off. That means innovation will start to suffer.
Should we limit IPv6 address space articifially? No, that's plain silly.
However, more work needs to go into making the protocol more capable of future incremental changes as the plausibility of another massive overhaul has been greatly diminished.
Perhaps a new layer or sub-layer that allows for policy such that a host that still has an outdated mechanism is not allowed onto the network until that behavior has been updated and/or routing of all of that older machines networking through a proxy that can correct the deficiency. Perhaps an abstracted language to describe each behavior of the protocol. Machines could detect the protocol version as older and then set up firewall rules to confirm that it is behaving properly and/or deny based on such.
All of these could be circumvented in networks without the proper checks and balances, but a "proper" network would be able to verify everything and once standardized this additional layer could be added to appliances like today's linksys-style home gateways.
Some of this is already discussed, but to my knowledge the idea of protocol versioning is not in the spec. There needs to be -some- protocol layer method of modifying the protocol in the future once a complete overhaul is no longer feasible (and it is only barely feasible today).
Will Lego continue their educational branch, and if so, will it still have a robotics product?
I'm 32 and still play with and occasionally buy Mindstorms stuff. I was the first person, to my knowledge anyway:), in Alabama (where I lived at the time) to buy a Mindstorms set and drove 2 hours to get there at midnight to buy from a friend the day they hit the shelves.
My last 2 projects involved cheating at games. 1 was made to automatically mash a button on a PS2 controller when it sensed a lightning flash in Final Fantasy X. The other jiggled my wife's Pikachu2 minigame until it was at it's happiest state. This isn't to point out how to cheat but rather how Mindstorms can be adapted to TONS of applications. I am looking forward to what my someday future children might do with them.
I definitely see them as educational toys for the teenage crowd and I don't know of anything in the same price range (which means I would pay more) with the same flexibility.
I understand Lego going back to the basics, I agree with many that they nearly specialized themselves into oblivion. I won't miss the movie tie-ins (my wife WILL miss the Harry Potter clutter though) and Bionicles was just too much to collect in the end (I tried). However, I really hope Mindstorms and the Technics line live on somehow.
Perhaps Lego needs to branch an adult-focused (ahem, not -that- kind) company so that the 2 lines (3 if you count their educational branch) can work autonomously and not pull each other down but still partner when it makes sense.
Thanks, it is not a subject I have any need to take the time for since I own a different brand portable, but I will now correct the sales people when they mispeak if I hear it again. One of my more insipid vices:)
While invalidating alot of my angst:) you haven't changed the fact that the word is simply not out there among the masses.
I'll retract my original statement with glee, I'm always happy to see good ecological practices. However, Apple needs to edumuhcate the sales forces at their various retail outlets since as long as the word is out that batteries can't be replaced, the units will continue to be thrown away.
Perhaps allowing the retail outlets to
A] Use the battery program and then resell used units (to give the retail outlet a bit of recompense for not getting to sell the extra units that this myth has propogated) if the owner wishes to upgrade, creating a "swap" program
and/or
B] be allowed to upsell the cost of replacement to something like $120 for people who don't want to have the hassle of dealing with the program (sadly, I would be one of those people who would much rather drop something like that off for an extra $20 and pick it up from the same store a week or two later rather than have to track the shipping and insurance... I hate that stuff).
and/or
C] run a few "spiffs" that will give bonuses to the stores who have some form of highest battery replacement ratio:sales for a couple of months. Say, give away 50 iPods (enough that theoretically one could go to each state... not sure how well the iPod sells out of the states and to be honest, I would trust a non-U.S.A. sales chain to know more about the recycle/replace policies).
Would be enough to get the outlets educated properly. I see similar problems as far as sales force education from things like TiVo, etc, and most can be solved with just a little extra effort from their internal marketing and sales departments. I guess I get more frustrated by it since I've seen such programs work well in the past.
Naturally there will always be the "New Guy" or the "One Who Makes It Up To Get A Sale" (though there would be fewer of those with a spiff program or an upsale program), nothing will magically educate everyone, but it would be a start. Had these compu-shops been in a techno un-savvy area I might not think twice, but both were in Broomfield/Boulder area of Colorado and I know that one of the sales people is an ex-tech person from a prior conversation and that he has owned an iPod in the past (he didn't understand why I might be interested in a Neuros instead of an iPod about a year ago when I was shopping around).
There are posted methods for either permanently replacing the firmware (but possibly frying it if you do it wrong) or simply overwriting it in RAM and if you reboot simply reloading it without risk of messing up the factory defaults.
You don't even need the sources from Linksys, you can cross-compile.
Linksys may not have -intended- this, for instance you do need an older firmware than is probably shipping on new units, but it is quite feasible.
I use a WRT54G for my home router along with a WET11 bridge to connect to my ISP and have been quite happy with the combination (side note for other WISP users: the WET11 will take a more powerful 802.11b PCMCIA radio card... I have a WET11 with a 200mW card in it from Demarctech that has the correct antenna connectors for the WET11).
What I would like to see in the default standard PC BIOS is remote control via ethernet. Be able to reboot a machine remotely and get console access from the moment the machine powers up, without an add-in board.
Already exists in a lot of server machines. I know that the Intel server motherboards (used in the Sun V60x and V65x for instance) support this. I'm pretty sure Dell, IBM and others support this. There are reasons why x86 servers are more costly than desktop machines. If you really need such functionality I would be surprised if you couldn't find it in some of the high-end motherboards and simply make yourself a custom system.
Apple knows the same thing that the rest of the computer industry does (as well as most car manufacturers)... if you make a product with a great feature set but limited life span, you make more money as people return to buy another. You just have to balance how long the life of the product is so that it is -just- long enough not to make the product seem "cheap".
I was in 2 different compu-shops this season buying gifts. In one shop a lady was yelling at the salesman because she could not get anyone to replace her old iPod's battery and it only held 1/3rd it's original charge. In another, I listened to a sales person -explain- to a husband and wife that when the battery on the iPod they were considering died they would have to buy a new one. There were lots of decent portable music player alternatives. In -both- cases I noticed the people in the check-out line a few minutes later with new cheaper-but-not-cheap 10GB iPod.
If you think about it for a bit, it is nasty. That's alot of chemicals going into the dumpster after they opened their new iPods and junked the old ones. Apple quite purposely made a disposable product with a life just long enough to keep people barely happy enough to buy again. As with computers, I think such products should have a government mandated company paid-for disposal program.
A simple way to replace the battery would fix the problem, but would lose Apple money.
The IBM Thinkpads I service (a 570, a X20 and an A31) all have had "OS Neutral" versions of the BIOS updates that creates a DOS bootable floppy with the BIOS on it. They of course also have Windows-based updater versions as well, but as long as I have a "neutral" method I don't begrudge this (too much:).
Of course, this is about the only time I attach a floppy to these machines. Therefore a bootable CDROM image, Linux or not, would be alot future-proof and could contain more information. Since bootable CDs can emulate bootable floppies, this should be quite doable to any company out there that is large enough to be able to afford to be in the MoBo market.
Switching from Mozilla mail to Evolution (unfortunately necessary for my job) made me notice just how much I like threading and how much Evolution (at least 1.4) still needs to work on. When you look to emulate the feel of an app, often you get the -bad- things, too.
I thought that NFSv4 was also supposed to support local caching of files?
I REALLY wanted to use Intermezzo for my home setup where I have a central server and some nomadic (as in all over the country, not just house) laptops but after trying it and participating briefly in the mailing list, I agree with the poster, it is just too stuck in development. The version of Intermezzo that most people have in their distros often is the older version that isn't even compatible anymore.
AFS was too much for my personal needs. I think for now I'll just be doing manual syncs using one of the various non-filesystem sync tools, but I really would like to see something like Coda or Intermezzo fully mature to an end-user I-feel-safe-with-my-data level.
Ok, so we all know there is at least a chance of having a Jackson directed "Hobbit" later.
My hope is that after that he (or others with talent and equal respect for Tolkien's intents) gets the ability to turn some of the Silmarillion into a set of mini-movies. HBO has a terrific history of well directed series' over the last few years. I think it would work out quite well.
The first one could even be the scourging of the the shire, even though it's from the trilogy, or Tom Bombadil, then move on to the bigger stories from the Silmarillion.
Maybe even take some of the stuff from the Chris Tolkien additions to the Silmarillion as a prequel to the movies, though I would hope that would be as feature movies.
This could go on for quite some time... the key is quality.
I would really like to see another developer buy the rights to and finish Fallout 3, hopefully hiring the same developers.
Any word from the devs or any other companies as to this possibility? If done in the same vein as the first 2 Fallout games it could be big enough to -make- a new company.
Whether you like "looking glass" or not (and I've gotten to play with it directly and did like what I saw for a very early alpha) one thing that I haven't seen mentioned is proper credit.
The ideas and java coding behind the first versions of "looking glass" were all the brainchild of Hideya Kawahara (aka Dan). The fact that it is taking a life of it's own will hopefully give him the resources to complete it. He is a software engineer for Sun and came up with the idea on his own then brought it to management where everyone was floored.
Which should also show prior art since as of (I believe) Netscape 2.0 you've been able to launch browser windows with no "chrome" (decorations, sidebar, status bar, menu, etc) and IE was still catching up at that point and hadn't yet gained that capability. Someone with a better chronological memory confirm this for me? Maybe IE had "kiosk" mode by this time but I don't seem to remember it until around the IE3/Netscape3 timeframe.
I spent 5 years as a Unix/Windows (mostly Unix, but Windows was creeping in) Admin at ISP in Alabama (HiWAAY).
I switched jobs in 1999 and now I work in the Linux/Unix software market and one of my duties is to keep the product in line with what the market needs.
The needs of the admins are not the problem. The ability to coordinate large software projects (StarOffice, Java Desktop System being the two I see the most on) and have enough resources to tackle it in a sparse economy are the problem.
It's not that the software devs don't want to do it, it's not that the admins don't need it (or don't know what they need and ask for the wrong thing, though that does happen sometimes), it is that today's economy has drained the software dev's resources, putting more strain on them from their bosses to do more with less, while at the same time forced a downsizing of the admin staffs, giving them the same strain from their management.
The two have met in the middle and are blaming each other. In the meantime the management is seeing the high value of "first world" currencies and instead of working to help either side of this battle are simply dodging the problem and outsourcing to help their bottom line.
Don't blame the admins.
Don't blame the devs.
Blame the people who made and make the bad (for us) money decisions... especially in this "please the shareholders at all costs" environment.
Or maybe you need to blame the shareholders... but the admins are only asking for software to help them manage the extra load they are under.
For years my family has habitually put commercials on mute and either used the time to talk, go to the restroom, or grab something to eat (and no, never all three simultaneously;). Yes, I FF through commercials with TiVo instead of sitting there and ignoring them, but that doesn't mean TiVo has made me watch fewer commercials.
In fact, I may be paying -more- attention to the commercials I'm interested in as at least once every couple of days I see something that catches my eye and I rewind and watch the commercial.
Not to mention the studies that show that people who FF through commercials (which means you have to closely watch the screen to see when the show has come back on) show the same level of retention of commercial contents after 1 hour. I'm too lazy to look up the URL of the study but I found it from a long past/. article.
In other words, TiVo hasn't damaged commercials, it has just given the large corporations a way to get big discounts from the networks and/or more insidiously get their products inserted into the program content like a close-up on a can of a specific soda brand, etc.
Amazing how you can aspire to take one culture's historically bad sense of family and assume that it applied to everyone from that time. And even then your examples are acutely pessimistic. Are you trying to tell me that before 1701 there wasn't a single father or mother in western society who paid attention to their children and loved them for their own sake instead of for some ascribed selfish desire?
Revisionist at best. And all of the things you mention as having existing before the 18th century still exist today in pretty much all cultures to some degree. Those selfish nasty actions don't invalidate the love that many families share.
I see your point, but it's a very very small point that mostly illustrates why I'm glad my viewpoint of the world isn't any more cynical than it is. Your view is quite depressing.
Which post are you referring to and what did you consider to be wrong? You're an AC, so you probably won't ever see this, but it would be nice to know what you took offense to.
Or if you want to be a privacy nut, they -could- just turn on a transparently caching IRC server and log every channel that way. No bots needed, just need 1 node willing to let you plug in.
Personally, I don't want to see Google caching or searching anything on IRC, both from an IRC using perspective -and- from a Google signal:noise perspective.
If Google wanted to setup their own informationally focused IRC network and caching/search -that-, no problem, and it might just have enough clout to take off.
In any event, I would expect Google to post a list of the nets and/or net:channels that they had any form of visibility into. I'd like to know what to avoid if I'm planning on having a conversation I don't want monitored.
The article only says that Bruce is calling for it to be Debian because he helped design it. That's not enough support for the argument to spit at.
Debian may be superior in some respects, but it doesn't change the fact that businesses are already getting used to RPM based distros like Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
If he wants a sea change in the business view of Debian, there has to be better support for it than that.
I agree with the idea of having a core distribution with variations for specific tasks. I think alot of other people do to based on the mild success of the LSB and the -ideas- behind things like United Linux.
I think Red Hat leaving their free distro market to the Fedora project will either give support to Fedora becoming that core distro -or- will give up any chance Red Hat has of being such a core distro (or both depending on whether you view Fedora to Red Hat as the same relationship as Mozilla was to Netscape -or- as being completely 3rd party and a cold shoulder to the idea of free distros as some do).
Either way, it's going to take a lot for a business to even consider a Debian distro. Educational books, live cd's, RPM compatibility, LSB compliance and lots and lots of gruntwork.
How does it make the poster look -any- worse than the people who regularly patent software?
In a perfect world, you're right, anyone making such a comment should be looked at with scorn.
In the real world it is just evidence of someone considering a possibility that is worth investigating. He didn't say "do it do it do it" he said "maybe".
And while I'm not concerned with making Mr. Gates view a few more pop-ups, I think it may be a valid thing to do so long as it is done right. I certainly don't think I'd be writing this message in Mozilla if MS had come up with the web browser before anyone else as they would have patented the whole bloody thing. I probably wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box, either, since for me my introduction to Linux was through Netscape and it's cross-platform abilities, not the other way around.
In my mind the -best- thing would be for an Open Source-style patent policy (Open Patents?) whereby Mozilla (the organization) could claim a patent and make it free to all freely available products. Companies who wish to sell a commercial product incorporating that patent would then pay royalties back to the developers.
Seriously... do you think Microsoft would have ad blocking today if not for Mozilla (or whoever did it first, I'm not saying there isn't prior art before Mozilla)? Yet Microsoft is going to make money off of it. No, I doubt anyone is going to buy Longhorn because it has ad blocking, but by having ad blocking some people will stick with Windows (and upgrade) who might have otherwise gotten fed up with IE and discovered Mozilla. Some of those will thereby been introduced to the idea that they don't -have- to run Windows to use their new favorite browser. If Microsoft or anyone else gains monetary benefit from that possibly patentable function, shouldn't the developers get the benefit?
I would much more enjoy being able to see actual video out of the front of the cockpit ("pilot's eye view"). I fly frequently and am always wishing I could see that view, and perhaps a wide-angle down view, while craning my neck out the window.
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1) That all works just fine on Linux, too. Has for years. If you take a look back in shared IP (aka NAT) history, you'll find Linux has understood alot of ways to do that longer than Windows. Though some complicated things may be easier to set up under Windows now than on Linux, I'd be surprised if, stacking the latest Windows against the latest Red Hat / Gentoo / Mandrake / SuSE, there was anything related to networking that Windows can do that Linux can't. Problem solved :)
:)
... this system could be a much simpler one than what exists now for IPv4 while retaining it's value. I know of a couple of times I've had to look up a block of addresses to ban a user and this would also be valuable for things like spam-holes, etc.
2) The average consumer is stuck on IPv4 accessories and applications right now. Of course IPv6 rolling out tomorrow won't help them today. The average consumer never makes use of a new technology immediately. The idea is to make it -possible- so that the average end user will get benefit from it in the future.
3) IPv6 doesn't have to make it easier for trolls to evade IP bans as long as there is a standardized block size made available to individual users -or- as long as some form of CIDR-like registration is used.
Perhaps this is a new tool someone should create. A system that lets you look up what size an IPv6 block is. It should probably point back to the ISP / company that owns the "master" block. In other words, it doesn't need to have any personal information about the person who is using that block (assuming a smaller block is assigned to it), just the range that is owned by that user so that allow / deny rules can be written properly.
An ISP who sets up individual user accounts could have a standard size, so that they simply go in and set up in advance the information rather than having to add it each time they get a new user. If a sub-block does not show up, then people write bans against the entire ISP block, which encourages participation
Coming from someone who used to have to assign and re-assign subnet ownership for an ISP, they already do work like this
That is, assuming that routing doesn't go back to the ways before of users aquiring netblocks and then having their ISP route them (instead of ISPs aquiring netblocks and subnetting them to customers). However even if that is eventually the method (and I believe that was part of the idea behind having so many addresses in IPv6) that just makes it easier to look up block owners and ban entire blocks.
As long as you don't mind a little bit of heavy handedness.
Which in some ways -detracts- from IPv6.
IPv4 will eventually be phased out or so broken that something like IPv6 will take the place of it. This is not because of the inherent problems in IPv4 like DDoS attacks or routing problems. It is because it will, eventually (whether it's 5 years, 50 years or more), run out of address space.
If IPv6 -never- runs out of address spaces, or doesn't for many millenia, then the main thing that has driven the evolution of the Internet Protocol will have been killed off. That means innovation will start to suffer.
Should we limit IPv6 address space articifially? No, that's plain silly.
However, more work needs to go into making the protocol more capable of future incremental changes as the plausibility of another massive overhaul has been greatly diminished.
Perhaps a new layer or sub-layer that allows for policy such that a host that still has an outdated mechanism is not allowed onto the network until that behavior has been updated and/or routing of all of that older machines networking through a proxy that can correct the deficiency. Perhaps an abstracted language to describe each behavior of the protocol. Machines could detect the protocol version as older and then set up firewall rules to confirm that it is behaving properly and/or deny based on such.
All of these could be circumvented in networks without the proper checks and balances, but a "proper" network would be able to verify everything and once standardized this additional layer could be added to appliances like today's linksys-style home gateways.
Some of this is already discussed, but to my knowledge the idea of protocol versioning is not in the spec. There needs to be -some- protocol layer method of modifying the protocol in the future once a complete overhaul is no longer feasible (and it is only barely feasible today).
Will Lego continue their educational branch, and if so, will it still have a robotics product?
:), in Alabama (where I lived at the time) to buy a Mindstorms set and drove 2 hours to get there at midnight to buy from a friend the day they hit the shelves.
I'm 32 and still play with and occasionally buy Mindstorms stuff. I was the first person, to my knowledge anyway
My last 2 projects involved cheating at games. 1 was made to automatically mash a button on a PS2 controller when it sensed a lightning flash in Final Fantasy X. The other jiggled my wife's Pikachu2 minigame until it was at it's happiest state. This isn't to point out how to cheat but rather how Mindstorms can be adapted to TONS of applications. I am looking forward to what my someday future children might do with them.
I definitely see them as educational toys for the teenage crowd and I don't know of anything in the same price range (which means I would pay more) with the same flexibility.
I understand Lego going back to the basics, I agree with many that they nearly specialized themselves into oblivion. I won't miss the movie tie-ins (my wife WILL miss the Harry Potter clutter though) and Bionicles was just too much to collect in the end (I tried). However, I really hope Mindstorms and the Technics line live on somehow.
Perhaps Lego needs to branch an adult-focused (ahem, not -that- kind) company so that the 2 lines (3 if you count their educational branch) can work autonomously and not pull each other down but still partner when it makes sense.
Thanks, it is not a subject I have any need to take the time for since I own a different brand portable, but I will now correct the sales people when they mispeak if I hear it again. One of my more insipid vices :)
:) you haven't changed the fact that the word is simply not out there among the masses.
... I hate that stuff).
... not sure how well the iPod sells out of the states and to be honest, I would trust a non-U.S.A. sales chain to know more about the recycle/replace policies).
While invalidating alot of my angst
I'll retract my original statement with glee, I'm always happy to see good ecological practices. However, Apple needs to edumuhcate the sales forces at their various retail outlets since as long as the word is out that batteries can't be replaced, the units will continue to be thrown away.
Perhaps allowing the retail outlets to
A] Use the battery program and then resell used units (to give the retail outlet a bit of recompense for not getting to sell the extra units that this myth has propogated) if the owner wishes to upgrade, creating a "swap" program
and/or
B] be allowed to upsell the cost of replacement to something like $120 for people who don't want to have the hassle of dealing with the program (sadly, I would be one of those people who would much rather drop something like that off for an extra $20 and pick it up from the same store a week or two later rather than have to track the shipping and insurance
and/or
C] run a few "spiffs" that will give bonuses to the stores who have some form of highest battery replacement ratio:sales for a couple of months. Say, give away 50 iPods (enough that theoretically one could go to each state
Would be enough to get the outlets educated properly. I see similar problems as far as sales force education from things like TiVo, etc, and most can be solved with just a little extra effort from their internal marketing and sales departments. I guess I get more frustrated by it since I've seen such programs work well in the past.
Naturally there will always be the "New Guy" or the "One Who Makes It Up To Get A Sale" (though there would be fewer of those with a spiff program or an upsale program), nothing will magically educate everyone, but it would be a start. Had these compu-shops been in a techno un-savvy area I might not think twice, but both were in Broomfield/Boulder area of Colorado and I know that one of the sales people is an ex-tech person from a prior conversation and that he has owned an iPod in the past (he didn't understand why I might be interested in a Neuros instead of an iPod about a year ago when I was shopping around).
So go to this page from Seattle Wireless and start modifying your WRT54G to your heart's content.
... I have a WET11 with a 200mW card in it from Demarctech that has the correct antenna connectors for the WET11).
There are posted methods for either permanently replacing the firmware (but possibly frying it if you do it wrong) or simply overwriting it in RAM and if you reboot simply reloading it without risk of messing up the factory defaults.
You don't even need the sources from Linksys, you can cross-compile.
Linksys may not have -intended- this, for instance you do need an older firmware than is probably shipping on new units, but it is quite feasible.
I use a WRT54G for my home router along with a WET11 bridge to connect to my ISP and have been quite happy with the combination (side note for other WISP users: the WET11 will take a more powerful 802.11b PCMCIA radio card
Already exists in a lot of server machines. I know that the Intel server motherboards (used in the Sun V60x and V65x for instance) support this. I'm pretty sure Dell, IBM and others support this. There are reasons why x86 servers are more costly than desktop machines. If you really need such functionality I would be surprised if you couldn't find it in some of the high-end motherboards and simply make yourself a custom system.
You do? I don't.
... if you make a product with a great feature set but limited life span, you make more money as people return to buy another. You just have to balance how long the life of the product is so that it is -just- long enough not to make the product seem "cheap".
Apple knows the same thing that the rest of the computer industry does (as well as most car manufacturers)
I was in 2 different compu-shops this season buying gifts. In one shop a lady was yelling at the salesman because she could not get anyone to replace her old iPod's battery and it only held 1/3rd it's original charge. In another, I listened to a sales person -explain- to a husband and wife that when the battery on the iPod they were considering died they would have to buy a new one. There were lots of decent portable music player alternatives. In -both- cases I noticed the people in the check-out line a few minutes later with new cheaper-but-not-cheap 10GB iPod.
If you think about it for a bit, it is nasty. That's alot of chemicals going into the dumpster after they opened their new iPods and junked the old ones. Apple quite purposely made a disposable product with a life just long enough to keep people barely happy enough to buy again. As with computers, I think such products should have a government mandated company paid-for disposal program.
A simple way to replace the battery would fix the problem, but would lose Apple money.
The IBM Thinkpads I service (a 570, a X20 and an A31) all have had "OS Neutral" versions of the BIOS updates that creates a DOS bootable floppy with the BIOS on it. They of course also have Windows-based updater versions as well, but as long as I have a "neutral" method I don't begrudge this (too much :).
Of course, this is about the only time I attach a floppy to these machines. Therefore a bootable CDROM image, Linux or not, would be alot future-proof and could contain more information. Since bootable CDs can emulate bootable floppies, this should be quite doable to any company out there that is large enough to be able to afford to be in the MoBo market.
Switching from Mozilla mail to Evolution (unfortunately necessary for my job) made me notice just how much I like threading and how much Evolution (at least 1.4) still needs to work on. When you look to emulate the feel of an app, often you get the -bad- things, too.
I thought that NFSv4 was also supposed to support local caching of files?
I REALLY wanted to use Intermezzo for my home setup where I have a central server and some nomadic (as in all over the country, not just house) laptops but after trying it and participating briefly in the mailing list, I agree with the poster, it is just too stuck in development. The version of Intermezzo that most people have in their distros often is the older version that isn't even compatible anymore.
AFS was too much for my personal needs. I think for now I'll just be doing manual syncs using one of the various non-filesystem sync tools, but I really would like to see something like Coda or Intermezzo fully mature to an end-user I-feel-safe-with-my-data level.
Ok, so we all know there is at least a chance of having a Jackson directed "Hobbit" later.
... the key is quality.
My hope is that after that he (or others with talent and equal respect for Tolkien's intents) gets the ability to turn some of the Silmarillion into a set of mini-movies. HBO has a terrific history of well directed series' over the last few years. I think it would work out quite well.
The first one could even be the scourging of the the shire, even though it's from the trilogy, or Tom Bombadil, then move on to the bigger stories from the Silmarillion.
Maybe even take some of the stuff from the Chris Tolkien additions to the Silmarillion as a prequel to the movies, though I would hope that would be as feature movies.
This could go on for quite some time
I would really like to see another developer buy the rights to and finish Fallout 3, hopefully hiring the same developers.
Any word from the devs or any other companies as to this possibility? If done in the same vein as the first 2 Fallout games it could be big enough to -make- a new company.
Whether you like "looking glass" or not (and I've gotten to play with it directly and did like what I saw for a very early alpha) one thing that I haven't seen mentioned is proper credit.
:)
The ideas and java coding behind the first versions of "looking glass" were all the brainchild of Hideya Kawahara (aka Dan). The fact that it is taking a life of it's own will hopefully give him the resources to complete it. He is a software engineer for Sun and came up with the idea on his own then brought it to management where everyone was floored.
Congrats Kawahara-san
Which should also show prior art since as of (I believe) Netscape 2.0 you've been able to launch browser windows with no "chrome" (decorations, sidebar, status bar, menu, etc) and IE was still catching up at that point and hadn't yet gained that capability. Someone with a better chronological memory confirm this for me? Maybe IE had "kiosk" mode by this time but I don't seem to remember it until around the IE3/Netscape3 timeframe.
I spent 5 years as a Unix/Windows (mostly Unix, but Windows was creeping in) Admin at ISP in Alabama (HiWAAY).
... especially in this "please the shareholders at all costs" environment.
... but the admins are only asking for software to help them manage the extra load they are under.
I switched jobs in 1999 and now I work in the Linux/Unix software market and one of my duties is to keep the product in line with what the market needs.
The needs of the admins are not the problem. The ability to coordinate large software projects (StarOffice, Java Desktop System being the two I see the most on) and have enough resources to tackle it in a sparse economy are the problem.
It's not that the software devs don't want to do it, it's not that the admins don't need it (or don't know what they need and ask for the wrong thing, though that does happen sometimes), it is that today's economy has drained the software dev's resources, putting more strain on them from their bosses to do more with less, while at the same time forced a downsizing of the admin staffs, giving them the same strain from their management.
The two have met in the middle and are blaming each other. In the meantime the management is seeing the high value of "first world" currencies and instead of working to help either side of this battle are simply dodging the problem and outsourcing to help their bottom line.
Don't blame the admins.
Don't blame the devs.
Blame the people who made and make the bad (for us) money decisions
Or maybe you need to blame the shareholders
For years my family has habitually put commercials on mute and either used the time to talk, go to the restroom, or grab something to eat (and no, never all three simultaneously ;). Yes, I FF through commercials with TiVo instead of sitting there and ignoring them, but that doesn't mean TiVo has made me watch fewer commercials.
/. article.
In fact, I may be paying -more- attention to the commercials I'm interested in as at least once every couple of days I see something that catches my eye and I rewind and watch the commercial.
Not to mention the studies that show that people who FF through commercials (which means you have to closely watch the screen to see when the show has come back on) show the same level of retention of commercial contents after 1 hour. I'm too lazy to look up the URL of the study but I found it from a long past
In other words, TiVo hasn't damaged commercials, it has just given the large corporations a way to get big discounts from the networks and/or more insidiously get their products inserted into the program content like a close-up on a can of a specific soda brand, etc.
We'll always be stuck with advertisements.
Red Hat has found out that they can -make- money by selling Linux and doing service value-adds.
SuSE was worth $210 million to Novell for doing the same thing.
Both of those points -validate- the free software model, they don't prove it is dead at all.
Do us a favor, don't have kids. My post wasn't the pedantic one.
Hey, I wasn't defending RPM as a technology, but nothing you've written counters anything I wrote.
Amazing how you can aspire to take one culture's historically bad sense of family and assume that it applied to everyone from that time. And even then your examples are acutely pessimistic. Are you trying to tell me that before 1701 there wasn't a single father or mother in western society who paid attention to their children and loved them for their own sake instead of for some ascribed selfish desire?
Revisionist at best. And all of the things you mention as having existing before the 18th century still exist today in pretty much all cultures to some degree. Those selfish nasty actions don't invalidate the love that many families share.
I see your point, but it's a very very small point that mostly illustrates why I'm glad my viewpoint of the world isn't any more cynical than it is. Your view is quite depressing.
Which post are you referring to and what did you consider to be wrong? You're an AC, so you probably won't ever see this, but it would be nice to know what you took offense to.
Or if you want to be a privacy nut, they -could- just turn on a transparently caching IRC server and log every channel that way. No bots needed, just need 1 node willing to let you plug in.
Personally, I don't want to see Google caching or searching anything on IRC, both from an IRC using perspective -and- from a Google signal:noise perspective.
If Google wanted to setup their own informationally focused IRC network and caching/search -that-, no problem, and it might just have enough clout to take off.
In any event, I would expect Google to post a list of the nets and/or net:channels that they had any form of visibility into. I'd like to know what to avoid if I'm planning on having a conversation I don't want monitored.
The article only says that Bruce is calling for it to be Debian because he helped design it. That's not enough support for the argument to spit at.
Debian may be superior in some respects, but it doesn't change the fact that businesses are already getting used to RPM based distros like Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
If he wants a sea change in the business view of Debian, there has to be better support for it than that.
I agree with the idea of having a core distribution with variations for specific tasks. I think alot of other people do to based on the mild success of the LSB and the -ideas- behind things like United Linux.
I think Red Hat leaving their free distro market to the Fedora project will either give support to Fedora becoming that core distro -or- will give up any chance Red Hat has of being such a core distro (or both depending on whether you view Fedora to Red Hat as the same relationship as Mozilla was to Netscape -or- as being completely 3rd party and a cold shoulder to the idea of free distros as some do).
Either way, it's going to take a lot for a business to even consider a Debian distro. Educational books, live cd's, RPM compatibility, LSB compliance and lots and lots of gruntwork.
How does it make the poster look -any- worse than the people who regularly patent software?
... do you think Microsoft would have ad blocking today if not for Mozilla (or whoever did it first, I'm not saying there isn't prior art before Mozilla)? Yet Microsoft is going to make money off of it. No, I doubt anyone is going to buy Longhorn because it has ad blocking, but by having ad blocking some people will stick with Windows (and upgrade) who might have otherwise gotten fed up with IE and discovered Mozilla. Some of those will thereby been introduced to the idea that they don't -have- to run Windows to use their new favorite browser. If Microsoft or anyone else gains monetary benefit from that possibly patentable function, shouldn't the developers get the benefit?
In a perfect world, you're right, anyone making such a comment should be looked at with scorn.
In the real world it is just evidence of someone considering a possibility that is worth investigating. He didn't say "do it do it do it" he said "maybe".
And while I'm not concerned with making Mr. Gates view a few more pop-ups, I think it may be a valid thing to do so long as it is done right. I certainly don't think I'd be writing this message in Mozilla if MS had come up with the web browser before anyone else as they would have patented the whole bloody thing. I probably wouldn't be writing this on a Linux box, either, since for me my introduction to Linux was through Netscape and it's cross-platform abilities, not the other way around.
In my mind the -best- thing would be for an Open Source-style patent policy (Open Patents?) whereby Mozilla (the organization) could claim a patent and make it free to all freely available products. Companies who wish to sell a commercial product incorporating that patent would then pay royalties back to the developers.
Seriously
I would much more enjoy being able to see actual video out of the front of the cockpit ("pilot's eye view"). I fly frequently and am always wishing I could see that view, and perhaps a wide-angle down view, while craning my neck out the window.