As inane as the question is, I can think of a pretty good answer: ask if they like PowerShell!
It tests several things that someone from a UNIX background would want to see in a Windows administrator: it shows that they like CLI and automation, it shows that they're up-to-date with Windows technology, and it shows that they prefer the "UNIX way". That last may seem counter-intuitive, but PowerShell follows the UNIX philosophy better than any flavor of Linux or UNIX I've ever seen. A Windows administrator that likes PowerShell is the kind of administrator that a UNIX administrator can get along with!
We have solar flux and real estate here, at 1/1000th the cost.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
- Temperature differences = energy
There are no significant temperature differences that can be exploited, and no cooling water or air either. You're thinking of the temperature swing between the day and night side.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
- A shallow gravity well = easy to ship things out
So what? There's nothing there worth shipping anywhere. It's just rocks.
- Low gravity may = easier life for those weak due to medical conditions = retirement
Doubtful. All evidence collected so far indicates that it would make things worse, not to mention the huge risk of living on the Moon and the drop in the quality of life. There's no parks and stuff outside to take a stroll in on a nice sunny day!
- Dark side = potential astronomy sites
Idiotic beyond belief. It's no darker than anywhere else -- it's just a name for crying out loud. Space telescopes are placed into orbit or Lagrange points for a reason: no vibration, no gravity, minimal temperature variations, and 24/7 seeing. The Moon has none of those things.
- As closest planetary body from which vacuum based engineering such as asteroid mining and space habitats could be tested and based.
You can do vacuum based engineering in Earth orbit, which is far more convenient. Not that this has been shown to be useful in any way, because we can produce vacuums down here on the surface just fine. What we can't produce is microgravity, which Earth orbit has, but the Moon does not.
- Close enough that robotic operations can be monitored and directed in real time
Just because it's practical to do things there doesn't actually provide a reason to be there. Not to mention that the 3 second round-trip delay makes "real time" a bit of a stretch.
- Far enough that it is a good place for dangerous things like reactors, super particle accelerators and self-assembling nanolife construction bots.
Nuclear reactors have killed fewer people in their entire history than coal mining has this year alone. Particle accelerators aren't dangerous at all. Nanolife is wishful thinking.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
Got any ideas that belong in reality instead of fantasy?
Assumes too much about future technology which doesn't even exist yet.
For example, ion drives are the best developed for deep-space exploration, and require only relatively small quantities of exotic substances such as mercury or xenon. Lifting a few tons of either into orbit is not a problem, and way cheaper than lifting an entire refinery all the way to the Moon!
1. Rare Earth elements. 2. (Potentially) Clean water 3. Raw materials that are in limited supply on earth, e.g. Copper
All three are available here, at 1/1000th of the cost, right now. Rare earth metals aren't that rare, water is everywhere and at most needs desalination, and copper is both easy to obtain and easy to recycle.
You would have to propose non-physical magic technology to enable any of those things to be shipped from the Moon to the Earth cheaper.
He-3 is preferable for a fusion fuel since it's aneutronic--no radiation to deal. It comes that way from the moon, the path to producing it on earth does everything but avoid radiation.
Even the "aneutronic" fusion reactions have side-reactions that produce neutrons. While a lower neutron flux helps with materials engineering from a longevity standpoint, it still makes the reactor wall materials radioactive. That's the real problem, and He-3 doesn't fix it.
He-3 is useful as an advanced fuel in rocket propulsion
a) Requires technology that is currently at the wishful-thinking stage of development. b) Rockets don't require aneutronic fusion, because fusion engines would be most useful in deep space, where radiation is not a problem. c) He-3 fusion isn't entirely aneutronic anyway. d) He-3 fusion is harder than D-T fusion.
Power can be produced in space and beamed down to earth
Has nothing to do with the Moon, or an orbital tether.
There is no realistic source of power that either exists only on the Moon, or would be cheaper to produce on the Moon.
Many of those rocks we have down here on Earth resulted from really big rocks from space slamming into us. Might be good idea if we have technology, infrastructure and humanity already in space before we're in need of it.
A tether on the Moon won't help you solve this problem. If this comes up, robotic space-probe technology will be all we need, and we have that already. Stop watching Hollywood sci-fi where brave men have to go deal with the problem in a giant space ship. The real solution will likely be as simple as coating one side of the incoming object with soot.
Putting multi-trillions of dollars into the vacuum is preferable to craters into the middle-eastern sand. The same jobs are created but at the end of the day at you have something far more impressive to show for it and far fewer lives expended.
[citation needed]
Things aren't that simple in the real world. As cold and sad as it is, the lives of brown people in a distant desert just aren't worth much to anybody in the United States, unlike the oil they live on top of. By some calculation it was worth it to invade. Thanks to various mistakes, the cost ended up spiralling out of control, but even so the wars are probably a better investment than going to the Moon.
He-3 is worthless, because it doesn't achieve aneutronic fusion, just slightly-less-neutronic fusion. So then, what's left on the Moon that's worth a multi-trillion investment?
Seriously, name one thing that's on the moon that you think is worth trillions of dollars, keeping in mind that its surface is entirely covered in rocks.
Except that it's not economical: all current plans for fusion power intend to breed the required fuel isotopes from lithium, which is several orders of magnitude cheaper than mining anything from space.
So, that leaves what? Nothing. There is nothing on the Moon even remotely worth the multi-trillion-dollar expense. It's just rocks in a vacuum. We've got plenty of rocks here!
Version 1.0 and 2.0 were "me too" products that weren't mature. Nobody in their right mind would use them for anything serious. Some people did, of course, but only because of some non-technical manager deciding they wanted "all Microsoft" or some-such nonsense.
Read the technical whitepapers on the 2012 release, it looks like someone at Microsoft finally "got it". It doesn't just have feature parity, it has some interesting new ones too that nobody else has, like good support for >10Gbps Ethernet. Apparently they took the zero-copy and low-latency network stack from the old HPC edition of Windows Server, and bolted it onto the generic server editions. Supposedly it can do 40 Gbps for a single TCP stream without special tuning! For comparison, it's hard to find a Windows server that can do more than 3 or 4 Gbps in loopback, let alone across the wire for a single stream. Combined with Microsoft fixing most of the issues with SMB2, it looks like using plain file server clusters might be not just a viable replacement for a low-end SAN, but a serious performance upgrade. For small business or workloads without critical data, this is going to massively reduce costs.
To continue the car analogy, what Microsoft and Apple want is the "Plan C", where the if the car that you bought no longer "just works", you can't take it down to your local friendly mechanic, because the diagnostics computer interface is encrypted to lock out anyone but the car manufacturers' approved mechanics.
I can't claim that there is a scientific germ theory equivalent for the practices I listed...
I could skip replying to the rest of your comment, because you admitted my point, but you seem to have misunderstood my finer points, so I may as well...
First off, I understand TDD and I know the difference between TDD and Unit Testing. I love refactoring, and when IntelliJ IDEA was first released, I thought it was like the light of God shining down from heaven upon me. I've done pair programming. I get it. What I'm saying is that none of those can or should be applied without knowing when to apply them, which you can't do. I can't do it. Nobody can.
No amount of explanation of how a buzzword works will make my point invalid. It's still not scientific, and doesn't always apply. Until it is a science, it is snake oil, as far as I am concerned.
Go back in time a little bit. Remember when Object Oriented was the buzzword of the day? The purported advantages of OO sounded an awful lot like the advantages of popular project methodologies: OO would help prevent code breaking, because new code would not change existing working code. OO would help big teams work together by defining interfaces. OO would help encapsulate code to prevent bugs creeping in due to excessive cross-dependencies. Etc...
Now, go and tell Linus Torwalds that he's an idiot for using a non-OO procedural language on one of the biggest and most successful programming projects of all time. I'd love to see you have that conversation.
This is a lot like you saying that every programmer should be using Agile, even though there are enormous and wildly successful projects out there were produced without Agile.
I've heard more than a few anecdotes of Agile not working, and resulting in major problems. Sure you say, maybe they just didn't apply Agile the right way? Maybe they didn't get it? That's a lot like saying the priest just didn't pray hard enough, that's why his church was struck by lightning. He should pray harder! He should pray the right way! No? How about penance? Maybe even self-flagellate, see if that works?
This means that full TDD results in 100% passing unit tests with full code coverage at all times.
Code coverage != testing for everything that needs testing. That's one of my points.
Yes, or even tripling the amount of code. But if you still measure productivity in any relation (positive or negative) to lines of code written then I'm not sure we have much else to talk about.
There's an awful lot to talk about, because time is money. Tripling the LOC could send many projects over budget, and hence into failure. Just because the code passes tests, doesn't mean the project is a success. Which do you think businesses care about most?
Actually, refactoring (including test refactoring) is a significant part of the effort...
You misread what I said. I assumed refactoring is a given. Based on that, a TDD project will also require changes to the tests. A non-TDD will not, saving time. Some refactoring processes are 100% safe, and TDD just adds pure overhead. I'm thinking of the type of refactoring done by IntelliJ IDEA or Visual Studio, where the refactoring is automated and done on a statically typed language.
TDD is not unit testing.
It isn't, but it's a superset. I was talking about test-based development methodologies in general, not just TDD specifically.
I've used TDD with C++, Java, Objective-C, C and Pascal.
You've just named 4 unsafe languages, and one that has type erasure and is typically littered with casts from "object" which is functionally equivalent to "void*". Mmm... safe.
Try using C#, F#, Haskell, or a similarly modern languages with proper type safety, extensive use of templates, and higher-order programming.
They are hackers in the most pejorative sense of the word. Think of a surgeon. If a surgeon fails to wash her hands before operating, she is failing as a professional. These agile engineering practices are like surgeons washing their hands.
Washing of hands is based on the scientific germ theory, which is backed by mountains of evidence.
Every buzzword you just listed is a mere whim. A preference. A particular style that works for some teams, and not others, mostly for mysterious and unknown reasons.
What you just said basically amounts to some priest admonishing a fellow man of the cloth for not properly anointing the bust of Christ with scented oil. He's doing it wrong, doesn't he know?
I've seen these software development fads come and go, and without exception they fail at being scientific, they fail at consistently achieving their goals, and eventually get replaced with a shiny new method which is just as un-scientific.
Okay, enough waffle, let me give you a concrete example: test-driven development. Sure, it sounds great. You write tests, they pass, and if you break something then the test will tell you. Except that it's not so simple:
- You can't predict unexpected problems. - Expected problems aren't really problems, are they? - Tests can give a false sense of security by reporting 100% success despite the prolific presence of bugs not tested for. This can result in major scheduling issues when the software fails unexpectedly. - It is impossible to write quick & simple tests for a HUGE range of things one would most want to test for: ACID compliance, memory leaking, safe multi-threading, security, etc... Some of these things just have to be done exactly right the first time, like a maths proof. - Tests take time to write. In many cases, doubling the amount of code written. - Changes to the code like refactoring often require changes to the tests, potentially doubling the cost of maintenance. - Tests are usually written in the same language as the code being tested. Gotchas with the language like Javascript's and PHP's "==" vs "===" are likely to be repeated in the tests too, leading to false results. - Someone who doesn't know how to write code correctly probably won't know what tests to write to really put their code through its paces. Programmers who do know how to write code correctly, probably won't benefit quite so much from testing. - Tests are most popular with developers using languages with weak built-in protections, like weakly-typed or dynamic languages. Where's the study comparing the relative merits of dynamic languages plus tests vs using a statically-typed language on its own? Nowhere. - If a test fails for the wrong reason (badly written, test engine issue, etc...), then time may be wasted fixing a bug where none really exists.
That's just off the top of my head.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that test-driven development is bad -- far from it -- but what I'm saying is that it's not always the best approach, and NOBODY knows when it is or isn't the best approach. Neither you, nor anyone else, can give me a convincing argument of when it is right and when it isn't, because there is no evidence either way. There is no "theory" of project management that can be applied, like germ theory. There's just guesswork, and rules of thumb, and blind application of a rule that worked for one project to another where it may not actually apply. All I ever hear are anecdotes: "Oh, TDD worked great for my PHP website written by beginner programmers, you'd be an idiot not to use it". Meanwhile, I'm a veteran, write code in a safe and statically-typed language, and rarely if ever find bugs in my code after it ships. When I do, it's something obscure that tests would not find, like the incorrect use of case-insensitive collation in a SQL sort statement.
Same thing goes for refactoring, or pair programming, etc...
Lets assume for a second that it is important to be able to trade a hundred times a second, which isn't even an exaggeration of what's already happening.
Then, logically, one would expect the entire financial world collapse every night when the markets close for hours.
Oh wait, nothing happens, and everything continues like normal the next morning!
Hence, the assumption that high-speed trading is vital is clearly false.
It's one thing to have a high volume of real trades, but it's entirely another thing to have a ludicrous volume of very small meaningless trades by third-parties that neither want to buy nor sell, but just want to "play the game" and skim off the top.
I have a theory for this based on my observations of older computer users, especially those that started in the DOS era.
Back in those days, two things were significantly different to now:
1) Software came with printed manuals written in a "tutorial" style. These days, most software comes with electronic help files at best, usually written in a "reference" style with no theory or explanations. 2) A few very popular products at the time like Norton Disk Doctor had a radically different UI style that actually explained things, and this helped people learn as they went.
I remember my father reading through the Corel Draw manual end-to-end, and he ended up learning how to use it completely. He's not a graphic artist by any means, but I've seen him develop fantastically complex multi-layer vector art for use in embedding in documents back when DOS 6 was new. These days, I'm shocked when I see vector art in a Word document. It just doesn't happen because it's "too complex" for most users, even though vector drawing programs have gotten better and easier to use!
It's the second one that I'd like to see make a come-back the most. Norton at the time was a fanstastic product, because its author realized that everyone else was doing UI design wrong. Nobody has picked up on his insight, and everybody still does it wrong.
Ask yourself this: How many times have you seen a dialox box pop up on the screen demanding an immediate response to a scary question with no explanation? Things like:
This could damage your system! Are you sure? Yes or No?
Think about it for a second. How is the poor user expected to respond to this? What the fuck is "this"? What kind of "damage"? Should he press "yes"? Or "no"? Why? Why not? On what basis should he decide?
Practically all software is like this. Operating systems like Windows literally barrage users with prompts that are exactly like that, dozens of times a day. The prompts never give any useful information, even for Administrators, let alone a non-technical user. Users learn only to click "OK" to everything and pray. No understanding is gained.
For comparison, Norton Disk Doctor had full screen dialog boxes with paragraphs of text explaining things like: - What triggered this message - A detailed explanation of what the question means - What will happen if you press 'yes' - What will happen if you press 'no' - The risk to your data for both cases
I saw users who were still at the stage where they could only type with one finger confidently making complex technical decisions because they were informed. The explanations thought them something, and they learned, and got better at using computers.
I haven't seen a product like that since, by any vendor. Coupled with the combination of manuals becoming a rarity, it's no surprise that users aren't learning anything.
The memory requirement of Office includes operating system overhead and caters for extremely large documents. You know, like the stated memory requirements of every other piece of software out there. It's not like Microsoft seriously expects Office applications to regularly use 1 GB just to launch and edit a letter!
I just opened a 78 page, 14.5 MB Word DOCX technical document with the 64-bit edition of Word 2010, and it's using a whopping 36.3 MB of memory. Also, it used a grand total of 240 milliseconds of CPU time to load.
Clearly, it's a bloated pig of an app, and we should all go back to using edlin to save those precious bytes of RAM.
That's great, but this time, have they gotten around to fixing any of the bugs & quirks from the older versions that we've all learned to love to hate?
I mean seriously, it's 2012 already, and in Word 2010 SP1 I still struggle with issues like these:
- Can't use a font with a PostScript outline and export to PDF. Because of a ~7 year old buy in Word, it gets converted to a bitmap! MOST third-party fonts have PostScript outlines, including practically all of the Adobe Pro fonts. Printing to a "PDF Printer" strips out all the metadata and hyperlinks, so that's not a solution either. - Still can't use advanced font features like the OpenType small caps. - Table padding and outlines are added to the cell content. This makes it impossible to create a table that is exactly as wide as a normal paragraph, because a table that is 100% wide is actually 100% + some extra wide, just for laughs. The only solution I've seen is complex macros that recompute the width of each table to some horrific fractional size to compensate for the padding. - Certain style formats need to be left on "default" (e.g.: inherit from parent style) to prevent downstream formatting issues. However, once set, most style properties can't be unset back to defaults. Short of editing the XML by hand or possibly resorting to macros again, I don't see how this is fixable.
From reading the forums, most such problems have been present since forever, and will never be fixed.
Disclaimer: I'm Australian, so this affects me directly.
First of all, unlike some of the equivalent three-letter American agencies, ASIO is allowed to spy on Australian citizens. I personally disagree with this, but that's what the current constitution, the law, and their mandate allows. There are certainly cases where domestic spying may be useful. Uncovering trafficking, terrorist cells, counter-espionage, etc...
Now, given that what they're doing is legal and may in some cases be useful, what they are requesting actually makes some sense. Not all of it is a good idea, mind you, but some of it sounds like a genuine effort to reduce paperwork and inefficiencies.
For example: "The current provisions in the ASIO Act do not enable a warrant to be extended."
That just sounds stupid to me. I bet all sorts of other similar police warrants can be extended if required. Extending a warrant is basically the same thing as having ASIO just re-do all the paperwork from scratch and ask for a whole new warrant, but more efficient. If they're going to spy on citizens, at least they should be doing it without killing an undue number of trees, don't you think?
Of course, what they are asking for as a whole is just eroding our freedoms further. Australia already has a substantially weaker constitution that guarantees far less freedom to our citizens than some other countries. This feels like we're going in the wrong direction.
You've got that the wrong way around. Microsoft has a dependency on Intel! Last time I checked, Linux runs just fine on Intel processors, and that combination powers a big chunk of the web. Some of the most important network appliances are BSD based, and run on Intel processors. Intel processors are also commonly used in systems like SAN and NAS arrays.
Some eight years ago a laptop and desktop came to have the capabilities almost anybody needs.
Citation needed.
I heard the exact same quote when I purchased my 20Mhz 486 SX back in the day.
For one, a typical desktop PC from 2004 probably can't play back 1080p HD video without GPU acceleration.
The innovation should have turned on that day to making the thing thinner, lighter and smaller; to making it run all day - but it didn't.
That's exactly what happened. You have to realize that "performance" and "battery life" are interchangeable. Increased performance at the top end allows underclocked low-voltage processors that still perform OK but draw a fraction of the power. Most of the last decade of transistor development has been about operations-per-watt. Either you get more operations per second at 100W, or it lets you stay at a constant level of operations per second while reducing watts.
The laptop that practically re-defined what it means to be light-weight and thin is the Apple MacBook Air, which is... wait for it... Intel based.
Instead Windows became more bloated (as it always has) to drive new product sales for Intel and GPU vendors to make ever more powerful systems to give us more beautiful chrome. That worked for a while. It was great for sales and margins back in the day.
On the contrary. While Windows comes with a larger installer package these days, that's mostly frameworks and drivers that aren't actually in use most of the time. Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 can outperform Windows XP on the same hardware in many cases!
You have to understand that the kernel is still pretty much the same thing, except that later versions have finer-grained locks, smarter schedulers, and revised driver models that allow more parallelism. None of this is "bloat". For example, "win32k.sys" on my Windows 7 SP1 64-bit operating system is just 3 MB in size. The closest comparison is Windows 2003/XP 64-bit, which has a 4.5 MB kernel. Hence, if anything, it's been shrinking!
They came out with the iPhone, and then the iPad. They gave us what we had long craved.
Walled gardens that don't even have a use accessible filesystem. Now, don't get me wrong, I have an iPhone and an iPad, but you're going to have to pry my PC from my cold dead hands.
The iPhone is great to have in my pocket, but I'm never going to sit at my desk pecking away at that thing when I could use a PC instead.
Right about seven years ago ARM systems became "good enough" to do this and Apple released the iPod Touch - an innovative product that struck a chord with us. In 2007 came the iPhone. In 2008 Android. Ever since 2007 Intel has fiddled while Rome burned, producing "mobile" chips that burn multiple watts.
What enabled ARM to do that is not some magic non-Intel or non-Windows approach, but reduced transistor sizes. Intel has been reducing transistor sizes too, and they're far better at it than the competition. The reason that Intel hasn't previously concentrated on the embedded market is not because they don't have the technology -- they do -- but because they saw it as a low-profit market that wasn't worth their trouble when they can be selling chips in the server market for $2,000 each. ARM's board would probably sell some of their limbs (hah!) for that market, which is why you've been seeing so many articles on Slashdot recently about ARM making inroads into the server space.
I can't tell if this is serious or a troll, but I'll bite...
Proper Spelling and Grammar does have its place.
Proper spelling and grammar do have their place.
That's an amazing four errors in the first sentence alone! I get the impression that "jellomizer" deserved that scolding from the English teacher. That, or he's a brilliant troll. You decide!
The reason is has not happened yet is sheer momentum, and the basic fact of human nature that people resist change.
It's not that at all, at least, not in this case.
A lot of foolish people assume that "new" means that everything else automatically becomes "old", and hence "bad". Now, in some cases, this is one hundred percent true, but such examples are the exception, not the rule.
We still wear cotton, several thousand years after it was first used, and a hundred years after synthetic fibres were invented. We have more sheep here in Australia -- raised mostly for wool -- than people! Is this simply "sheer momentum" or perhaps a conservative tendency in the general population? I think not: my grandparents were born decades after the invention of synthetic fibres! Electricity has been around for about as long, but I still cook with gas... you know... fire. Like the cavemen did.
When I was starting out in computing, I looked at mainframes with the same cocky arrogance that you have. "Pfft... dinosaurs," I thought. I assumed that they'd only be around until their technical specialists retired, and then we'd all be using Linux or Windows pizza-box servers exclusively. This year, I replaced a redundant I/O module in a blade system that was dedicated to serving applications via terminal services to thin terminals. At that point, I suddenly realized that I had become one of those mainframe engineers too. Sure, the technology I was using was not called that, but it's practically the same thing.
I like my iPad and my iPhone, I really do. I like having the Internet in my pocket. I like reading the morning paper at breakfast on the tablet. But the fingerprint smudges on the screens are a perpetual irritation, the keyboards are unusable for significant data entry, and even the iPad -- one of the largest tablets on the market -- is way too small to properly enjoy a HD movie. Sure, I could plug the tablet into a docking station, attach a a full-sized monitor, a proper keyboard, a mouse, and some speakers. However, at at that point, the tablet will be effectively indistinguishable from a low-powered luggable PC. Just like with mainframes, we're back to square one.
Similarly, the whole concept of simplified touch user interfaces will last right up until the point when people will want to get some work done with them instead of just consuming content. Feature creep will set in, and the tablet operating systems will have extras added onto them until they are just as complex as PC operating systems are today. Nothing will have actually changed.
It's worth pointing out that laptops still haven't replaced desktop PCs entirely, despite being nothing more than mobile versions PCs. So then, why would you expect something that is only slightly more mobile (try carrying an iPad in your pocket) but nowhere near full-featured to completely replace the PC?
I groan every time I see a reference to Win32 as the "legacy" API on the Microsoft.com site. That's just... ugh... no! It's not legacy! It's the current desktop API, and WinRT is not a replacement. Of course, thanks to the myopic vision of Microsoft's upper management, they're going to drop all Win32 development, and focus exclusively on WinRT. We're going to have another lost decade of computing, just like we did after IE6 stopped web development dead because some dumbass thought that.NET and XAML was going to replace HTML on the web!
Believe me, this isn't conservatism on my part. I've been ahead of the curve of technology adoption by at least half a decade my whole life. For example, in the last couple of years I've read something like a hundred books electronically and only a handful on paper. Chances are that soon I'll donate all of my remaining paper books to the local library, because I just don't need them any more. I know it's hard to go back in a user's comment history, but I was making comments here about e-books replacing paper years before the mainstream opinio
Reminds me of desktop SOE "cutovers" on a weekend. We'd send out mass emails to everyone a week before the cutover, a day before, and then leave printed-out "cheat sheets" with key information on each keyboard on the Friday night.
Come Monday morning, there's always at least a dozen managers on the phone to helpdesk complaining that they weren't notified of the changes. Not the ordinary workers, they always handle the changes just fine, technical teething issues aside. It's always the managers.
You really need to read up on digital signatures! Archival formats too. I'm not talking about computer programs, I'm talking about data. Just about anything that would be relevant to a court case could be easily converted into something like PDF/A. While you're at it, keep going and read about trusted timestamping as well before you accuse others of ignorance.
You're thinking of a digital copy as a "fancy" paper copy, and hence you're confusing the pure digital data (an abstract mathematical description of something), with the medium it is stored in (disk, flash, computer, program, whatever). It's not "electronic paper" I'm talking about. Digital data has properties that are totally independent of the medium it is stored in. In fact, the medium doesn't matter at all, and that's the beauty of it.
If someone gives provides me with, say, a 1TB hard disk full of data -- any data -- and I get a checksum of it with a cryptographic hash like SHA-2, then there is literally no practical way for anyone to make any change whatsoever to that data without me being able to detect it later. It would be borderline impossible. The wrong-doer would literally have to revolutionize discrete mathematics first, and then would probably still require a computer the size of the entire planet. The properties of the specific disk drive are irrelevant. The same bits could have been originally stored on tape, or thumb drive, or be sent via email. Bits are just numbers, and numbers don't change because of the material they are written down onto.
It doesn't matter if the data was then circulated through thirty seedy servers in formerly communist countries for months before the trial. If it matches the checksum, then it is the same data. Exactly the same. Down to the last bit. If it doesn't match, then it has been altered. End of story. No need for a chain of custody, no need for oversight, no need for anything at all but a short number.
This is how Bittorrent works, by the way. You don't have to trust your peers! They can send you as many virus-infected blocks of data as they want, but it won't matter, because the Bittorrent client can verify the data it receives against a checksum and reject altered blocks. This is how a huge network of unknown people can work towards a common goal (sharing files), despite active attackers desperately trying to bring the system down from the inside.
Meanwhile, with paper, you have to trust people. People cheat. People make mistakes. People get bribed to do all sorts of nefarious things. Not only that, but the process of copying things with paper is glacially slow, slow enough to give wrongdoers plenty of time to alter things. For comparison, instead of months of "discovery", it would be quite practical to get a complete copy of all of the data a corporation has in a matter of minutes (their backup tapes), and then checksum it all in a few hours. Just printing it out would take weeks, months, or even years.
Print is trivially forge-able. Literally, children can do it! Haven't you ever heard of some snotty kid altering their grade report so they wouldn't get punished by their parents?
Meanwhile, a digital signature can be made so robust that nothing short of revolutionary new mathematics could be used to alter the data in any way.
On top of that, there are entirely new kinds of things that can be done with digital data, that's just impossible with print.
For example, escrow: It would be possible for a defendant to collect everything, and I mean *everything* that they have, encrypt and sign the data, and then hand it over. This ensures that the prosecution has a snapshot available at a point in time, before the defendant has had time to create forgeries. Then, based on the Judge's rulings, sections of the data can be unlocked and verified by providing the private keys for those sections at a later point. The prosecution, or the Judge, or whoever, can hold the data in escrow, without the defendant having to disclose anything unless required. However, no matter how long the legal process takes, the defendant won't have weeks or months to alter the originals, because they already handed over a snapshot at the very beginning.
Digital is not just "not inferior" to print, it's vastly superior in every way. It's cheaper to store, cheaper to copy, and trivial to search. I can be digitally signed, encrypted, and timestamped. None of that is possible with print.
I bet many people in the legal profession are smart enough to understand this. I bet that all of those in that subset are also smart enough to realize that they can continue to charge their exorbitant fees if they keep using antiquated dead-tree methods instead of modernizing.
The fix is just to check if the names are the same if they're both lcase'd
Bzzt... also wrong.
Comparing two strings after converting both to lower case is not the same as comparing with a case-insensitive comparison. Upper-casing strings to normalize them for comparison is somewhat more reliable, but still not as good as just using the correct API in the first place. Take a look at the casing rules for the Turkish language, for an example of how this kind of naive assumption can result in subtle bugs.
Either way, you'd want to use exactly the same comparison as whatever the filesystem expects, and that's hard, because NTFS is not the only filesystem supported by Windows. There is still FAT32 support, xFAT, and various unpredictable remote filesystems.
The real WTF is using system folder names as display names in a GUI -- it is guaranteed to cause a few bugs like this.
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As inane as the question is, I can think of a pretty good answer: ask if they like PowerShell!
It tests several things that someone from a UNIX background would want to see in a Windows administrator: it shows that they like CLI and automation, it shows that they're up-to-date with Windows technology, and it shows that they prefer the "UNIX way". That last may seem counter-intuitive, but PowerShell follows the UNIX philosophy better than any flavor of Linux or UNIX I've ever seen. A Windows administrator that likes PowerShell is the kind of administrator that a UNIX administrator can get along with!
- Real estate covered in solar flux = energy
We have solar flux and real estate here, at 1/1000th the cost.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
- Temperature differences = energy
There are no significant temperature differences that can be exploited, and no cooling water or air either. You're thinking of the temperature swing between the day and night side.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
- A shallow gravity well = easy to ship things out
So what? There's nothing there worth shipping anywhere. It's just rocks.
- Low gravity may = easier life for those weak due to medical conditions = retirement
Doubtful. All evidence collected so far indicates that it would make things worse, not to mention the huge risk of living on the Moon and the drop in the quality of life. There's no parks and stuff outside to take a stroll in on a nice sunny day!
- Dark side = potential astronomy sites
Idiotic beyond belief. It's no darker than anywhere else -- it's just a name for crying out loud. Space telescopes are placed into orbit or Lagrange points for a reason: no vibration, no gravity, minimal temperature variations, and 24/7 seeing. The Moon has none of those things.
- As closest planetary body from which vacuum based engineering such as asteroid mining and space habitats could be tested and based.
You can do vacuum based engineering in Earth orbit, which is far more convenient. Not that this has been shown to be useful in any way, because we can produce vacuums down here on the surface just fine. What we can't produce is microgravity, which Earth orbit has, but the Moon does not.
- Close enough that robotic operations can be monitored and directed in real time
Just because it's practical to do things there doesn't actually provide a reason to be there. Not to mention that the 3 second round-trip delay makes "real time" a bit of a stretch.
- Far enough that it is a good place for dangerous things like reactors, super particle accelerators and self-assembling nanolife construction bots.
Nuclear reactors have killed fewer people in their entire history than coal mining has this year alone. Particle accelerators aren't dangerous at all. Nanolife is wishful thinking.
Also, energy THERE is not as good as energy HERE.
Got any ideas that belong in reality instead of fantasy?
Assumes too much about future technology which doesn't even exist yet.
For example, ion drives are the best developed for deep-space exploration, and require only relatively small quantities of exotic substances such as mercury or xenon. Lifting a few tons of either into orbit is not a problem, and way cheaper than lifting an entire refinery all the way to the Moon!
1. Rare Earth elements.
2. (Potentially) Clean water
3. Raw materials that are in limited supply on earth, e.g. Copper
All three are available here, at 1/1000th of the cost, right now. Rare earth metals aren't that rare, water is everywhere and at most needs desalination, and copper is both easy to obtain and easy to recycle.
You would have to propose non-physical magic technology to enable any of those things to be shipped from the Moon to the Earth cheaper.
Forming those rocks into a stepping stone.
To what? More rocks?
He-3 is preferable for a fusion fuel since it's aneutronic--no radiation to deal. It comes that way from the moon, the path to producing it on earth does everything but avoid radiation.
Even the "aneutronic" fusion reactions have side-reactions that produce neutrons. While a lower neutron flux helps with materials engineering from a longevity standpoint, it still makes the reactor wall materials radioactive. That's the real problem, and He-3 doesn't fix it.
He-3 is useful as an advanced fuel in rocket propulsion
a) Requires technology that is currently at the wishful-thinking stage of development.
b) Rockets don't require aneutronic fusion, because fusion engines would be most useful in deep space, where radiation is not a problem.
c) He-3 fusion isn't entirely aneutronic anyway.
d) He-3 fusion is harder than D-T fusion.
Power can be produced in space and beamed down to earth
Has nothing to do with the Moon, or an orbital tether.
There is no realistic source of power that either exists only on the Moon, or would be cheaper to produce on the Moon.
Many of those rocks we have down here on Earth resulted from really big rocks from space slamming into us. Might be good idea if we have technology, infrastructure and humanity already in space before we're in need of it.
A tether on the Moon won't help you solve this problem. If this comes up, robotic space-probe technology will be all we need, and we have that already. Stop watching Hollywood sci-fi where brave men have to go deal with the problem in a giant space ship. The real solution will likely be as simple as coating one side of the incoming object with soot.
Putting multi-trillions of dollars into the vacuum is preferable to craters into the middle-eastern sand. The same jobs are created but at the end of the day at you have something far more impressive to show for it and far fewer lives expended.
[citation needed]
Things aren't that simple in the real world. As cold and sad as it is, the lives of brown people in a distant desert just aren't worth much to anybody in the United States, unlike the oil they live on top of. By some calculation it was worth it to invade. Thanks to various mistakes, the cost ended up spiralling out of control, but even so the wars are probably a better investment than going to the Moon.
He-3 is worthless, because it doesn't achieve aneutronic fusion, just slightly-less-neutronic fusion. So then, what's left on the Moon that's worth a multi-trillion investment?
Seriously, name one thing that's on the moon that you think is worth trillions of dollars, keeping in mind that its surface is entirely covered in rocks.
Except that it's not economical: all current plans for fusion power intend to breed the required fuel isotopes from lithium, which is several orders of magnitude cheaper than mining anything from space.
So, that leaves what? Nothing. There is nothing on the Moon even remotely worth the multi-trillion-dollar expense. It's just rocks in a vacuum. We've got plenty of rocks here!
Yes, really, Hyper-V 2012 might be usable.
Version 1.0 and 2.0 were "me too" products that weren't mature. Nobody in their right mind would use them for anything serious. Some people did, of course, but only because of some non-technical manager deciding they wanted "all Microsoft" or some-such nonsense.
Read the technical whitepapers on the 2012 release, it looks like someone at Microsoft finally "got it". It doesn't just have feature parity, it has some interesting new ones too that nobody else has, like good support for >10Gbps Ethernet. Apparently they took the zero-copy and low-latency network stack from the old HPC edition of Windows Server, and bolted it onto the generic server editions. Supposedly it can do 40 Gbps for a single TCP stream without special tuning! For comparison, it's hard to find a Windows server that can do more than 3 or 4 Gbps in loopback, let alone across the wire for a single stream. Combined with Microsoft fixing most of the issues with SMB2, it looks like using plain file server clusters might be not just a viable replacement for a low-end SAN, but a serious performance upgrade. For small business or workloads without critical data, this is going to massively reduce costs.
To continue the car analogy, what Microsoft and Apple want is the "Plan C", where the if the car that you bought no longer "just works", you can't take it down to your local friendly mechanic, because the diagnostics computer interface is encrypted to lock out anyone but the car manufacturers' approved mechanics.
I can't claim that there is a scientific germ theory equivalent for the practices I listed...
I could skip replying to the rest of your comment, because you admitted my point, but you seem to have misunderstood my finer points, so I may as well...
First off, I understand TDD and I know the difference between TDD and Unit Testing. I love refactoring, and when IntelliJ IDEA was first released, I thought it was like the light of God shining down from heaven upon me. I've done pair programming. I get it. What I'm saying is that none of those can or should be applied without knowing when to apply them, which you can't do. I can't do it. Nobody can.
No amount of explanation of how a buzzword works will make my point invalid. It's still not scientific, and doesn't always apply. Until it is a science, it is snake oil, as far as I am concerned.
Go back in time a little bit. Remember when Object Oriented was the buzzword of the day? The purported advantages of OO sounded an awful lot like the advantages of popular project methodologies: OO would help prevent code breaking, because new code would not change existing working code. OO would help big teams work together by defining interfaces. OO would help encapsulate code to prevent bugs creeping in due to excessive cross-dependencies. Etc...
Now, go and tell Linus Torwalds that he's an idiot for using a non-OO procedural language on one of the biggest and most successful programming projects of all time. I'd love to see you have that conversation.
This is a lot like you saying that every programmer should be using Agile, even though there are enormous and wildly successful projects out there were produced without Agile.
I've heard more than a few anecdotes of Agile not working, and resulting in major problems. Sure you say, maybe they just didn't apply Agile the right way? Maybe they didn't get it? That's a lot like saying the priest just didn't pray hard enough, that's why his church was struck by lightning. He should pray harder! He should pray the right way! No? How about penance? Maybe even self-flagellate, see if that works?
This means that full TDD results in 100% passing unit tests with full code coverage at all times.
Code coverage != testing for everything that needs testing. That's one of my points.
Yes, or even tripling the amount of code. But if you still measure productivity in any relation (positive or negative) to lines of code written then I'm not sure we have much else to talk about.
There's an awful lot to talk about, because time is money. Tripling the LOC could send many projects over budget, and hence into failure. Just because the code passes tests, doesn't mean the project is a success. Which do you think businesses care about most?
Actually, refactoring (including test refactoring) is a significant part of the effort...
You misread what I said. I assumed refactoring is a given. Based on that, a TDD project will also require changes to the tests. A non-TDD will not, saving time. Some refactoring processes are 100% safe, and TDD just adds pure overhead. I'm thinking of the type of refactoring done by IntelliJ IDEA or Visual Studio, where the refactoring is automated and done on a statically typed language.
TDD is not unit testing.
It isn't, but it's a superset. I was talking about test-based development methodologies in general, not just TDD specifically.
I've used TDD with C++, Java, Objective-C, C and Pascal.
You've just named 4 unsafe languages, and one that has type erasure and is typically littered with casts from "object" which is functionally equivalent to "void*". Mmm... safe.
Try using C#, F#, Haskell, or a similarly modern languages with proper type safety, extensive use of templates, and higher-order programming.
They are hackers in the most pejorative sense of the word. Think of a surgeon. If a surgeon fails to wash her hands before operating, she is failing as a professional. These agile engineering practices are like surgeons washing their hands.
Washing of hands is based on the scientific germ theory, which is backed by mountains of evidence.
Every buzzword you just listed is a mere whim. A preference. A particular style that works for some teams, and not others, mostly for mysterious and unknown reasons.
What you just said basically amounts to some priest admonishing a fellow man of the cloth for not properly anointing the bust of Christ with scented oil. He's doing it wrong, doesn't he know?
I've seen these software development fads come and go, and without exception they fail at being scientific, they fail at consistently achieving their goals, and eventually get replaced with a shiny new method which is just as un-scientific.
Okay, enough waffle, let me give you a concrete example: test-driven development. Sure, it sounds great. You write tests, they pass, and if you break something then the test will tell you. Except that it's not so simple:
- You can't predict unexpected problems.
- Expected problems aren't really problems, are they?
- Tests can give a false sense of security by reporting 100% success despite the prolific presence of bugs not tested for. This can result in major scheduling issues when the software fails unexpectedly.
- It is impossible to write quick & simple tests for a HUGE range of things one would most want to test for: ACID compliance, memory leaking, safe multi-threading, security, etc... Some of these things just have to be done exactly right the first time, like a maths proof.
- Tests take time to write. In many cases, doubling the amount of code written.
- Changes to the code like refactoring often require changes to the tests, potentially doubling the cost of maintenance.
- Tests are usually written in the same language as the code being tested. Gotchas with the language like Javascript's and PHP's "==" vs "===" are likely to be repeated in the tests too, leading to false results.
- Someone who doesn't know how to write code correctly probably won't know what tests to write to really put their code through its paces. Programmers who do know how to write code correctly, probably won't benefit quite so much from testing.
- Tests are most popular with developers using languages with weak built-in protections, like weakly-typed or dynamic languages. Where's the study comparing the relative merits of dynamic languages plus tests vs using a statically-typed language on its own? Nowhere.
- If a test fails for the wrong reason (badly written, test engine issue, etc...), then time may be wasted fixing a bug where none really exists.
That's just off the top of my head.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that test-driven development is bad -- far from it -- but what I'm saying is that it's not always the best approach, and NOBODY knows when it is or isn't the best approach. Neither you, nor anyone else, can give me a convincing argument of when it is right and when it isn't, because there is no evidence either way. There is no "theory" of project management that can be applied, like germ theory. There's just guesswork, and rules of thumb, and blind application of a rule that worked for one project to another where it may not actually apply. All I ever hear are anecdotes: "Oh, TDD worked great for my PHP website written by beginner programmers, you'd be an idiot not to use it". Meanwhile, I'm a veteran, write code in a safe and statically-typed language, and rarely if ever find bugs in my code after it ships. When I do, it's something obscure that tests would not find, like the incorrect use of case-insensitive collation in a SQL sort statement.
Same thing goes for refactoring, or pair programming, etc...
I've tried both. I like refactoring, but again, i
Market liquidity is extremely important.
Lets assume for a second that it is important to be able to trade a hundred times a second, which isn't even an exaggeration of what's already happening.
Then, logically, one would expect the entire financial world collapse every night when the markets close for hours.
Oh wait, nothing happens, and everything continues like normal the next morning!
Hence, the assumption that high-speed trading is vital is clearly false.
It's one thing to have a high volume of real trades, but it's entirely another thing to have a ludicrous volume of very small meaningless trades by third-parties that neither want to buy nor sell, but just want to "play the game" and skim off the top.
They're in good company, like: www.nortel.com, www.juniper.com, www.alcatel-lucent.com
If some of the world's biggest network equipment manufacturers don't have IPv6 enabled, why would you expect a mere "news" site to be any better?
Well put.
I have a theory for this based on my observations of older computer users, especially those that started in the DOS era.
Back in those days, two things were significantly different to now:
1) Software came with printed manuals written in a "tutorial" style. These days, most software comes with electronic help files at best, usually written in a "reference" style with no theory or explanations.
2) A few very popular products at the time like Norton Disk Doctor had a radically different UI style that actually explained things, and this helped people learn as they went.
I remember my father reading through the Corel Draw manual end-to-end, and he ended up learning how to use it completely. He's not a graphic artist by any means, but I've seen him develop fantastically complex multi-layer vector art for use in embedding in documents back when DOS 6 was new. These days, I'm shocked when I see vector art in a Word document. It just doesn't happen because it's "too complex" for most users, even though vector drawing programs have gotten better and easier to use!
It's the second one that I'd like to see make a come-back the most. Norton at the time was a fanstastic product, because its author realized that everyone else was doing UI design wrong. Nobody has picked up on his insight, and everybody still does it wrong.
Ask yourself this: How many times have you seen a dialox box pop up on the screen demanding an immediate response to a scary question with no explanation? Things like:
This could damage your system! Are you sure? Yes or No?
Think about it for a second. How is the poor user expected to respond to this? What the fuck is "this"? What kind of "damage"? Should he press "yes"? Or "no"? Why? Why not? On what basis should he decide?
Practically all software is like this. Operating systems like Windows literally barrage users with prompts that are exactly like that, dozens of times a day. The prompts never give any useful information, even for Administrators, let alone a non-technical user. Users learn only to click "OK" to everything and pray. No understanding is gained.
For comparison, Norton Disk Doctor had full screen dialog boxes with paragraphs of text explaining things like:
- What triggered this message
- A detailed explanation of what the question means
- What will happen if you press 'yes'
- What will happen if you press 'no'
- The risk to your data for both cases
I saw users who were still at the stage where they could only type with one finger confidently making complex technical decisions because they were informed. The explanations thought them something, and they learned, and got better at using computers.
I haven't seen a product like that since, by any vendor. Coupled with the combination of manuals becoming a rarity, it's no surprise that users aren't learning anything.
The memory requirement of Office includes operating system overhead and caters for extremely large documents. You know, like the stated memory requirements of every other piece of software out there. It's not like Microsoft seriously expects Office applications to regularly use 1 GB just to launch and edit a letter!
I just opened a 78 page, 14.5 MB Word DOCX technical document with the 64-bit edition of Word 2010, and it's using a whopping 36.3 MB of memory. Also, it used a grand total of 240 milliseconds of CPU time to load.
Clearly, it's a bloated pig of an app, and we should all go back to using edlin to save those precious bytes of RAM.
That's great, but this time, have they gotten around to fixing any of the bugs & quirks from the older versions that we've all learned to love to hate?
I mean seriously, it's 2012 already, and in Word 2010 SP1 I still struggle with issues like these:
- Can't use a font with a PostScript outline and export to PDF. Because of a ~7 year old buy in Word, it gets converted to a bitmap! MOST third-party fonts have PostScript outlines, including practically all of the Adobe Pro fonts. Printing to a "PDF Printer" strips out all the metadata and hyperlinks, so that's not a solution either.
- Still can't use advanced font features like the OpenType small caps.
- Table padding and outlines are added to the cell content. This makes it impossible to create a table that is exactly as wide as a normal paragraph, because a table that is 100% wide is actually 100% + some extra wide, just for laughs. The only solution I've seen is complex macros that recompute the width of each table to some horrific fractional size to compensate for the padding.
- Certain style formats need to be left on "default" (e.g.: inherit from parent style) to prevent downstream formatting issues. However, once set, most style properties can't be unset back to defaults. Short of editing the XML by hand or possibly resorting to macros again, I don't see how this is fixable.
From reading the forums, most such problems have been present since forever, and will never be fixed.
Disclaimer: I'm Australian, so this affects me directly.
First of all, unlike some of the equivalent three-letter American agencies, ASIO is allowed to spy on Australian citizens. I personally disagree with this, but that's what the current constitution, the law, and their mandate allows. There are certainly cases where domestic spying may be useful. Uncovering trafficking, terrorist cells, counter-espionage, etc...
Now, given that what they're doing is legal and may in some cases be useful, what they are requesting actually makes some sense. Not all of it is a good idea, mind you, but some of it sounds like a genuine effort to reduce paperwork and inefficiencies.
For example: "The current provisions in the ASIO Act do not enable a warrant to be extended."
That just sounds stupid to me. I bet all sorts of other similar police warrants can be extended if required. Extending a warrant is basically the same thing as having ASIO just re-do all the paperwork from scratch and ask for a whole new warrant, but more efficient. If they're going to spy on citizens, at least they should be doing it without killing an undue number of trees, don't you think?
Of course, what they are asking for as a whole is just eroding our freedoms further. Australia already has a substantially weaker constitution that guarantees far less freedom to our citizens than some other countries. This feels like we're going in the wrong direction.
But they have a rather serious Windows dependency
You've got that the wrong way around. Microsoft has a dependency on Intel! Last time I checked, Linux runs just fine on Intel processors, and that combination powers a big chunk of the web. Some of the most important network appliances are BSD based, and run on Intel processors. Intel processors are also commonly used in systems like SAN and NAS arrays.
Some eight years ago a laptop and desktop came to have the capabilities almost anybody needs.
Citation needed.
I heard the exact same quote when I purchased my 20Mhz 486 SX back in the day.
For one, a typical desktop PC from 2004 probably can't play back 1080p HD video without GPU acceleration.
The innovation should have turned on that day to making the thing thinner, lighter and smaller; to making it run all day - but it didn't.
That's exactly what happened. You have to realize that "performance" and "battery life" are interchangeable. Increased performance at the top end allows underclocked low-voltage processors that still perform OK but draw a fraction of the power. Most of the last decade of transistor development has been about operations-per-watt. Either you get more operations per second at 100W, or it lets you stay at a constant level of operations per second while reducing watts.
The laptop that practically re-defined what it means to be light-weight and thin is the Apple MacBook Air, which is... wait for it... Intel based.
Instead Windows became more bloated (as it always has) to drive new product sales for Intel and GPU vendors to make ever more powerful systems to give us more beautiful chrome. That worked for a while. It was great for sales and margins back in the day.
On the contrary. While Windows comes with a larger installer package these days, that's mostly frameworks and drivers that aren't actually in use most of the time. Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 can outperform Windows XP on the same hardware in many cases!
You have to understand that the kernel is still pretty much the same thing, except that later versions have finer-grained locks, smarter schedulers, and revised driver models that allow more parallelism. None of this is "bloat". For example, "win32k.sys" on my Windows 7 SP1 64-bit operating system is just 3 MB in size. The closest comparison is Windows 2003/XP 64-bit, which has a 4.5 MB kernel. Hence, if anything, it's been shrinking!
They came out with the iPhone, and then the iPad. They gave us what we had long craved.
Walled gardens that don't even have a use accessible filesystem. Now, don't get me wrong, I have an iPhone and an iPad, but you're going to have to pry my PC from my cold dead hands.
The iPhone is great to have in my pocket, but I'm never going to sit at my desk pecking away at that thing when I could use a PC instead.
Right about seven years ago ARM systems became "good enough" to do this and Apple released the iPod Touch - an innovative product that struck a chord with us. In 2007 came the iPhone. In 2008 Android. Ever since 2007 Intel has fiddled while Rome burned, producing "mobile" chips that burn multiple watts.
What enabled ARM to do that is not some magic non-Intel or non-Windows approach, but reduced transistor sizes. Intel has been reducing transistor sizes too, and they're far better at it than the competition. The reason that Intel hasn't previously concentrated on the embedded market is not because they don't have the technology -- they do -- but because they saw it as a low-profit market that wasn't worth their trouble when they can be selling chips in the server market for $2,000 each. ARM's board would probably sell some of their limbs (hah!) for that market, which is why you've been seeing so many articles on Slashdot recently about ARM making inroads into the server space.
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I can't tell if this is serious or a troll, but I'll bite...
Proper Spelling and Grammar does have its place.
Proper spelling and grammar do have their place.
That's an amazing four errors in the first sentence alone! I get the impression that "jellomizer" deserved that scolding from the English teacher. That, or he's a brilliant troll. You decide!
The reason is has not happened yet is sheer momentum, and the basic fact of human nature that people resist change.
It's not that at all, at least, not in this case.
A lot of foolish people assume that "new" means that everything else automatically becomes "old", and hence "bad". Now, in some cases, this is one hundred percent true, but such examples are the exception, not the rule.
We still wear cotton, several thousand years after it was first used, and a hundred years after synthetic fibres were invented. We have more sheep here in Australia -- raised mostly for wool -- than people! Is this simply "sheer momentum" or perhaps a conservative tendency in the general population? I think not: my grandparents were born decades after the invention of synthetic fibres! Electricity has been around for about as long, but I still cook with gas... you know... fire. Like the cavemen did.
When I was starting out in computing, I looked at mainframes with the same cocky arrogance that you have. "Pfft... dinosaurs," I thought. I assumed that they'd only be around until their technical specialists retired, and then we'd all be using Linux or Windows pizza-box servers exclusively. This year, I replaced a redundant I/O module in a blade system that was dedicated to serving applications via terminal services to thin terminals. At that point, I suddenly realized that I had become one of those mainframe engineers too. Sure, the technology I was using was not called that, but it's practically the same thing.
I like my iPad and my iPhone, I really do. I like having the Internet in my pocket. I like reading the morning paper at breakfast on the tablet. But the fingerprint smudges on the screens are a perpetual irritation, the keyboards are unusable for significant data entry, and even the iPad -- one of the largest tablets on the market -- is way too small to properly enjoy a HD movie. Sure, I could plug the tablet into a docking station, attach a a full-sized monitor, a proper keyboard, a mouse, and some speakers. However, at at that point, the tablet will be effectively indistinguishable from a low-powered luggable PC. Just like with mainframes, we're back to square one.
Similarly, the whole concept of simplified touch user interfaces will last right up until the point when people will want to get some work done with them instead of just consuming content. Feature creep will set in, and the tablet operating systems will have extras added onto them until they are just as complex as PC operating systems are today. Nothing will have actually changed.
It's worth pointing out that laptops still haven't replaced desktop PCs entirely, despite being nothing more than mobile versions PCs. So then, why would you expect something that is only slightly more mobile (try carrying an iPad in your pocket) but nowhere near full-featured to completely replace the PC?
I groan every time I see a reference to Win32 as the "legacy" API on the Microsoft.com site. That's just... ugh... no! It's not legacy! It's the current desktop API, and WinRT is not a replacement. Of course, thanks to the myopic vision of Microsoft's upper management, they're going to drop all Win32 development, and focus exclusively on WinRT. We're going to have another lost decade of computing, just like we did after IE6 stopped web development dead because some dumbass thought that .NET and XAML was going to replace HTML on the web!
Believe me, this isn't conservatism on my part. I've been ahead of the curve of technology adoption by at least half a decade my whole life. For example, in the last couple of years I've read something like a hundred books electronically and only a handful on paper. Chances are that soon I'll donate all of my remaining paper books to the local library, because I just don't need them any more. I know it's hard to go back in a user's comment history, but I was making comments here about e-books replacing paper years before the mainstream opinio
Reminds me of desktop SOE "cutovers" on a weekend. We'd send out mass emails to everyone a week before the cutover, a day before, and then leave printed-out "cheat sheets" with key information on each keyboard on the Friday night.
Come Monday morning, there's always at least a dozen managers on the phone to helpdesk complaining that they weren't notified of the changes. Not the ordinary workers, they always handle the changes just fine, technical teething issues aside. It's always the managers.
It's not always so straight-forward.
For example, Terminal Servers may have 48 GB of memory or more, but each user only has 200-400 MB of that allocated for all applications.
In environments like those, being memory efficient is suddenly critical!
You really need to read up on digital signatures! Archival formats too. I'm not talking about computer programs, I'm talking about data. Just about anything that would be relevant to a court case could be easily converted into something like PDF/A. While you're at it, keep going and read about trusted timestamping as well before you accuse others of ignorance.
You're thinking of a digital copy as a "fancy" paper copy, and hence you're confusing the pure digital data (an abstract mathematical description of something), with the medium it is stored in (disk, flash, computer, program, whatever). It's not "electronic paper" I'm talking about. Digital data has properties that are totally independent of the medium it is stored in. In fact, the medium doesn't matter at all, and that's the beauty of it.
If someone gives provides me with, say, a 1TB hard disk full of data -- any data -- and I get a checksum of it with a cryptographic hash like SHA-2, then there is literally no practical way for anyone to make any change whatsoever to that data without me being able to detect it later. It would be borderline impossible. The wrong-doer would literally have to revolutionize discrete mathematics first, and then would probably still require a computer the size of the entire planet. The properties of the specific disk drive are irrelevant. The same bits could have been originally stored on tape, or thumb drive, or be sent via email. Bits are just numbers, and numbers don't change because of the material they are written down onto.
It doesn't matter if the data was then circulated through thirty seedy servers in formerly communist countries for months before the trial. If it matches the checksum, then it is the same data. Exactly the same. Down to the last bit. If it doesn't match, then it has been altered. End of story. No need for a chain of custody, no need for oversight, no need for anything at all but a short number.
This is how Bittorrent works, by the way. You don't have to trust your peers! They can send you as many virus-infected blocks of data as they want, but it won't matter, because the Bittorrent client can verify the data it receives against a checksum and reject altered blocks. This is how a huge network of unknown people can work towards a common goal (sharing files), despite active attackers desperately trying to bring the system down from the inside.
Meanwhile, with paper, you have to trust people. People cheat. People make mistakes. People get bribed to do all sorts of nefarious things. Not only that, but the process of copying things with paper is glacially slow, slow enough to give wrongdoers plenty of time to alter things. For comparison, instead of months of "discovery", it would be quite practical to get a complete copy of all of the data a corporation has in a matter of minutes (their backup tapes), and then checksum it all in a few hours. Just printing it out would take weeks, months, or even years.
That's just totally false.
Print is trivially forge-able. Literally, children can do it! Haven't you ever heard of some snotty kid altering their grade report so they wouldn't get punished by their parents?
Meanwhile, a digital signature can be made so robust that nothing short of revolutionary new mathematics could be used to alter the data in any way.
On top of that, there are entirely new kinds of things that can be done with digital data, that's just impossible with print.
For example, escrow: It would be possible for a defendant to collect everything, and I mean *everything* that they have, encrypt and sign the data, and then hand it over. This ensures that the prosecution has a snapshot available at a point in time, before the defendant has had time to create forgeries. Then, based on the Judge's rulings, sections of the data can be unlocked and verified by providing the private keys for those sections at a later point. The prosecution, or the Judge, or whoever, can hold the data in escrow, without the defendant having to disclose anything unless required. However, no matter how long the legal process takes, the defendant won't have weeks or months to alter the originals, because they already handed over a snapshot at the very beginning.
Digital is not just "not inferior" to print, it's vastly superior in every way. It's cheaper to store, cheaper to copy, and trivial to search. I can be digitally signed, encrypted, and timestamped. None of that is possible with print.
I bet many people in the legal profession are smart enough to understand this. I bet that all of those in that subset are also smart enough to realize that they can continue to charge their exorbitant fees if they keep using antiquated dead-tree methods instead of modernizing.
The fix is just to check if the names are the same if they're both lcase'd
Bzzt... also wrong.
Comparing two strings after converting both to lower case is not the same as comparing with a case-insensitive comparison. Upper-casing strings to normalize them for comparison is somewhat more reliable, but still not as good as just using the correct API in the first place. Take a look at the casing rules for the Turkish language, for an example of how this kind of naive assumption can result in subtle bugs.
Either way, you'd want to use exactly the same comparison as whatever the filesystem expects, and that's hard, because NTFS is not the only filesystem supported by Windows. There is still FAT32 support, xFAT, and various unpredictable remote filesystems.
The real WTF is using system folder names as display names in a GUI -- it is guaranteed to cause a few bugs like this.