Before anyone falls into the trap I almost fell into, please note that the Core Duo is not the 64-bit capable Core2 Duo.
Thanks for the heads up.
I find the "PC" world funny. I've used higher end equipment for quite some time, and I've found myself back into "commodity" land and its pretty confusing.
The summary says "AMD, which introduced 64-bit CPUs early". Huh?
DEC Alpha chips were introduced in 1992 and were 64-bit. SPARC went 64-bit in 1995. MIPS went 64-bit in 1991. PA-RISC in 1996.
AMD came out with 64bit/32bit hybrid chips in what? 2002-2003?
How is this early?
Also, Intel introduced the Itanium, a pure 64-bit chip in 2001. They had a strange i860 chip in the late 80s that was 64-bit.
I've been running 64-bit linux for about 10 years plus or minus 6 months.
To me, I find the x86_64 stuff to be a hack and late to the game. The only reason its remotely interesting is that its cheap, but calling this new or interesting is completely wrong.
Because of the openness of the GPL, I was able to get a career in IT through reading code, learning how to code, and how computers work by example.
I'm a firm believer in open source, which is very similar to guitar tablature. Oh, and BTW, http://www.olga.net/ has received a takedown message. (Not sure if this was in the original article or not...)
No one demands that you share anyone else's biases or tastes. Obviously there is a significant group of the population that gets off on the misery of others.
So, why don't you all get together, in some remote location, and make each other miserable. That way you'll all be happy!
Its not about happy or miserable, its about domination and pecking order.
Testosterone is an important chemical in human dominance. Once someone displays being angry relative to another person, then they lose the dominance game, and the other guy wins.
One of many silly charactersistics of the human animal.
Also, its worth noting that the study said that the higher testosterone levels in both men and women followed this pattern. Pretty interesting study me thinks.
Now you just know the advertisers are gonna get a hold of this technology and slap animated ads on cereal boxes or something.
Fortunately, I think your wrong here. First, e-ink stuff is not designed to be a motion display. Its special in that it takes power to produce an image, but that image is retained when the power is cut.
However, the most likely market initial for these kinds of displays is in the retail and marketing sector. Odds are, everything that is printed in a store will be of a display like this. Think shelf price tags, sale displays, and the like. Large retailers spend many thousands of dollars on printing semi-disposable displays that end up in landfills or at best recycled, whereas a display technology like this could eliminate the printer, the paper, and the ink.
I expect these kinds of displays will be everywhere in 10-20 years or whenever the technology is good enough and the price is right.
Imagine having this in your house. You could hang this stuff on your walls and change the pictures any time you want. That would be pretty cool.
as of last year i read somewhere that in the USA portable CD players (discmans) still outsold digital music players something like 5:1. not sure where they are going, i feel like i see digital players of some flavor everywhere i look.
Yeah, and the most popular bras are not the sexy ones worn by Victoria Secret model hotties either. They are Wal-mart specials that could double as a hammock.
I havn't checked to see if Solaris 10's vi is any better, but up through version 9 it would yell at you if the lines were too long in a normal text file like a log file.
WTF?
I welcome Sun making Solaris less early 90s like. To use a dumb car analogy, Solaris is great under the hood, but its ugly as hell and the ride is rough.
All of the standard UNIX commands need to be updated, or just install the GNU ones and call it good enough. You know, update the commands to have standard error messages. For example, tail says "tail: cannot open input" if the file is not found or if the permissions are wrong. GNU tail says permission denied, file not found, and it even includes the filename in the error message. Solaris cat says: "cat: cannot open FILENAME". So, this is a little better than tail because it actually says the filename, but it still does not differentiate between permissions and the file existing or not. It also sucks that the error message is different than what tail's error message.
Personally, I think Solaris' service management facility (SMF) stuff is over engineered. Some of it is because its new, but some of it is just an overkill to overcompensate for Solaris being slack in its service initialization files for years. For some reason, they thought that the/etc/init.d/* scripts should not include a restart option. Now, they automagically restart via a dependancy hierarchy configured via very complex xml files. The SMF stuff may get better in Solaris 11 because its basically a 1.uhoh version now, but I still think its a little bit of an overkill, but there are parts of it that are pretty cool too.
To be honest, I've been thinking that all *NIX variants should update everything in userland from init on up. After reading about Microsoft's new PowerShell, it really makes *NIX seem like a dinosaur. The OOP quailities of the PowerShell are _VERY_ cool. Its something that is really in the right direction for the times.
Personally, I think all of *NIX should adopt an OOP shell environment, and go more towards a RDMS type filesystem with builtin replication, redundancy, and failover. Get away from the everything is a file paradigm, and more towards everything is a datatype paradigm. This is 10-20 years out, so I'll just have to wait...
How about a way to "rate" ads. Was this ad helpful? Did it provide information you actually wanted?
Advertising is simply strange. Great ads from the consumers POV often have little to do with the effectiveness of the ad to generate revenue for the company. Back with the Suzuki lying car ads or whatever they were, they were percieved as great ads. Everybody loved them, but they simply didn't sell many cars.
Take the "greatest ad of all time". The Apple 1984 SuperBowl commercial. We still talk about it almost 20 years later, but does it sell Mac Mini's today?
Sure, marketing is _part_ of business. But even great businesses with great products fail and so does great marketing. I simply wish they would tone down the hype a bit. Believe it or not, there are many things more important than buying crap.
Also, because of the most stupid thing Sun ever did, people tend to deliberately close the JVM after that first initiation. Why? Cause Sun puts a stupid little Java icon into the systray. It immediately draws attention to the fact that the JVM is in memory and people think they might get a speed boost or something by closing it.
And then from the summary:
Does this really spell the end of AJAX? I sincerely hope so. Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs.
Personally, I believe the dumbest thing Sun ever did was to strongarm Netscape into renaming JavaScript into JavaScript. They have nothing to do with one another, and they confuse the heck out of people. JavaScript has become an official part of the web. Java is just another plugin, like flash, that is NOT part of the web.
It's not that the OSS model is "unsustainable," but that business managers just don't understand the mindsent behind, say, Debian. They don't understand how it can be that someone would write an app or maintain a distro because they find it enjoyable or gratifying, and so they don't find that model predictable, much less harnessable. And if they can't harness it, it must be suspect, inferior, useless, or about to die.
All of this is true. Most people in business don't care about their business or product per se, but rather the power, competition, and the process of business itself. There are exceptions, but I believe this to be true for the majority of people high up in business.
To these people, doing something that you love because you love it, and not looking for social status and power is a parse error for their thought process. With respect to Linux, I would imagine that most people who know would say that Debian or Gentoo are as good if not better than RedHat or Suse, but RedHat and Suse fit more into the corporate mindset, and in business those two are almost 100% of the marketshare.
Its also interesting that the business manager's "mindset" is also a minority in our culture, but for some reason most people blindly think that mindset is better than their mindset.
2005 was 2 years ago, and she's 27 now, that makes her 25 in the photo...how is this underage drinking again?
Wrong. The cup was clearly full of liquid LSD, which is a federal felony.
I just don't get the human race. It just seems clear that no matter what century it is, there is some kind of witch hunt or persecution of somebody for something. Is there anybody that has read something about this human phenonemon? Is there going to be a time when humans just don't do this kind of thing?
Too many people look at insurnace as a charity, and that everyone should be entitled somehow to cheap insurance. That's not what it is. There are two reasons to take out insurance. (1) if you believe the odds of cashing in on policy x the value of the policy exceeds the cost of the loss x the chance of the loss, or (2) if the harm caused by the event uninsured is unacceptable regardless of the low odds of it occurring. We take out auto insurance for the second reason, not because we believe we are going to run into someone, but because they could sue us for $2M and that would financially ruin us.
Insurance is charity for the insurance companies and drug companies. The doctors don't directly benefit from insuance.
The reason we buy car and home insurance is because although the probability of losing the house or car is low, the loss is very great. Paying a nominal fee to ensure that I will have a roof over my head and a car so that I can keep said roof over my head is worth the expense. I don't pay insurance on my tennis shoes because even if something happened to them, I can easily buy another pair. The odds of something happening to my tennis shoes is greater than my car or house, but the expense is so much less that it is not worth insuring them.
There are people that insure their specific body parts because losing them would cost a bundle (think sports and model people).
Now, with health insurance, no young healthy individual (a vast majority of people under 50) would ever pay for health insurance because it makes no sense. In a free economy, this would never happen. Well, maybe if the insurance would pay big bucks in the event that you were to be diagnosed with something bad (that is how life insurance works, which is in a free economy environment).
This is exactly the case for nationalized health care. Insurance companies are about mitigating risk. Once you've tested positive (at least for some conditions), you're no longer a risk. A rational insurance company would then set your rates at the cost of treatment.
If my rates are at the cost of treatment, then why not just pay for my treatment?
In a free economy, it makes no sense for a healthy, financially secure individual to pay for health insurance, but it actually seems to be the case that the higher probablility of an individual having health insurance in the US is someone that is more healthy and more financially secure.
Socialism and capitalism are not a duality, a mix between them seems to make sense. Nobody complains about socialism with respect to the roads and fire departments. In fact, fire departments were private comanies much like our current medical system is today, but the only difference is that the private fire departments quickly failed.
The real issue with laptops in schools is... what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve?
Support.
Its pretty clear that a student "needs" a computer, and being that laptops are somewhere about 50% of the computers sold today probably much higher than that for a college student, it would seem logical that having a bulk purchase of one model of notebook that should be a little cheaper for the student to buy than if they bought one on their own, and then the university can standardize and streamline their support system.
I'm not saying this has worked or is a good thing, but this is where the university is coming from.
"This is definately something I can stand behind regardless of which party it comes from."
I have to 2nd that!! I'm still VERY open minded to this next election...and this just put a big "+" mark next to his name so far.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is so special about a presidential debate that it needs to be copyrighted in the first place?
I guess I've never applied or know anybody that has applied for a job that where the interview process involved copyright.
I'm not trying to troll, but I've seen transcripts and whatnot of presidential speeches, addresses, and these things broadcast on TV and radio, and I've never noticed or heard of copyright before (unlike sports, movies, TV programs, etc).
So, is this a real issue? Should I start copyrighting my job interviews?
Unless MS rewrites all of their other commands to accept STDIN/OUT, Monad will never surpass the shells.
There are other things that make *NIX commands kick but.
Standard exit values from the programs. 0 on success, and other things on error. Also, there is STDERR.
Don't get me wrong, compiled code and scripting languages have rolls too, but the *NIX shell, ascii text configuration files, and all of that jazz just makes *NIX work.
In 2007, operating systems have come down to basically 2 flavors. *NIX and Windows. And every year, Windows gets a little more *NIX-like. Now, does it seem strange that in 2007 we are still stuck with a late 1960s early 1970s implementation of how to interface with a computer? Sure it does. But I simply don't know of a better way to interface with a computer, and apparently nobody else does either -- yet.
Granted, I haven't seen Vista, but I'm sure I'll click around in it at a public computer or something some time in my life, but it just seems like yet another version of Windows, so I'm not interested. To be honest, I'm not that interested when a new OS X, Linux, Solaris or whatever new *NIX variant comes out either, but I know I can take one of those OSes and figure out their subtle differences, and move on. At work, some people still use Windows, and its a big deal when Vista or whatever comes out. It takes planning and meetings and money and validation and all of this jazz, but when a new *NIX comes around, we just install it, tweak a few things, and life goes on. Its no big deal.
I would love for someone to come up with something better than *NIX, but I simply haven't seen anything come close enough to warrant any change.
They just switched to Intel chips less than two years ago!
And before that they switched to the G4/5, before that PowerPC, before that 6800.
This proposal is one of the dumbest ideas that I've heard. Apple is an integrator. Their software integrates the hardware, so they make that. The hardware is disposable. Buying AMD would severely limit Apple to innovate in the future.
No electronics integrating company that I know of ties themselves to such a specific piece of hardware. None.
In older times, this was called a union. Its kindof a bad word today, but in order for artists to get around the RIAA and Tickemaster and any new incarnation of the same, a union may actually be something that can protect their rights.
The summary and the FA were short on information, but here is my stab at this.
How about we just keep our private information private? The increase in the amount of personal data that is attempted to be acquired by private companies is increasing, and remind me how my giving of my personal data to Pets-R-Us is going to benefit me?
I paid cash for a car, and the people wanted my social security number. Why?
A health club near me wants my social security number to lift weights and stuff. Why?
Oh, and don't get me started with those so-called "Privacy Agreements" that some of these comanies give out to you. All of those end with the clause "we can change our mind at any time w/o notifying you", so how is this any kind of agreement? By signing one of those I am agreeing to nothing.
So, I think that the laws should say that there are 2 kinds of personal information. One kind is something that can clearly identify me. My address, phone number, ssn, name, etc. And none of that should be shared with anyone. Abstract data for marketing reasons is OK. My age, sex, or whatever they can get from me that does not directly tie the information to me is OK.
Linux really doesn't need a new process scheduler. What it could really do with is I/O prioritisation. Windows now has it, so there's no excuse.
I dunno. Linux has has some changes recently in the scheduling department, and an O(1) process scheduler can only be "a good thing". Recently, the I/O block layer got a new scheduler (linky http://kerneltrap.org/node/7637). Regarding other I/O prioritization, I can't say with authority that this is needed or not.
Maybe all of these things are related, but in my selfish world, I want Linux to scale better. Scaling well beyond 64 CPUs or cores, but I believe this is a much greater task than ~60 hours of coding. It took a while before Linux got SMP clean, and today SMP is normal, not something that reserved for servers. The monolithic high clockrate CPU is dead, and this has been overtaken by multi-core processors, and more than one of them inside of one box. In my eye, this is where all OSes should be focusing their attention.
Many businesses have been getting printers they way for a long time.
Xerox is doing the same thing. IBM is doing the same thing, different way.
We are in a post-industrial world. The industrial revolution brought us dirty factories and practically slave labor and goods for cheap. For the most part, industry is done in China now. However, some goods are still made here in the US because its cheaper to make them here than to ship them here for things like cars, but most of the doodads you buy are made in china or some other asian country.
The big to do is not in making things, but the service sector. IBM, Xerox, now HP are all moving in that direction. Heck, even GM now makes more money off of financing than they do off of making cars. To me, its strange. It proves to me that humans are becoming more worthless by the minute by their own smartness and laziness in getting stuff done.
A little over 100 years ago, most people worked in producing food. Now, nobody really does that. In fact, many farmers are paid not to produce food. Then it was industry. Now that is done, and moved overseas, now we just do services, but what in the world are we going to service? Food production? Industry? Those things are not here, I guess we can service service? Seems strange to me.
Re:I'll see your girlie 81 and raise you 1000
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IT's Big Spenders
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"R&D spending doesn't guarantee business success" - New study reveals that there is no relationship between R&D spending and sales growth, earnings, or shareholder returns.
I can agree that R&D spending does not guarantee business success. Business is a risk. Luck and timing is involved, but w/o R&D, where would we be today?
Xerox's R&D gave us the GUIs that we use today. Bell gave us the OSes we use today. R&D gives us portable pocket cell phones instead of the car phones from years ago, and phones where you had to call the operator to get through to the other person.
R&D does not guarantee business success, but most every sucessful business does R&D. Microsoft has an excellent R&D department, but their ability to put their research into products is abismal. Just about every successful business or person has to continually learn new developments and technologies.
I havn't done a formal R&D study on this, but I would agree that R&D does not guarantee business success, but for most businesses, I would say that the lack of R&D spending or at least keeping up with newer technologies will almost certainly gaurantee business failure.
The differences between these boycotts and an RIAA boycott is that the successful ones were more tied to ethical reasons.
Nobody really wants to boycott the RIAA's artists. The problem is simple. We simply want a different product, but the RIAA people are so stuck into pushing expensive plastic disks on us that we have to then take home, possibly illegally rip them to a usable format. Trash the stupid tracks that we paid for, and then contend with issues like labeling the tracks correctly and getting the relative gain right between different tracks.
The thing that sucks is that there is a clear market for a new method of music distribution and playback, but the asshats that control the content to make this market happen are a decade behind the market, and the only thing they can think of to satisfy the new market is to sue people into submission and force a decade old technology onto willing and potential customers for a new product.
Imagine if the RIAA was suing people for using CDs in the 90s, and only selling LPs, cassettes, and 8 tracks?
That is what they are doing today. CDs in the 90s had advantages over other technologies, and the consumers voted with their dollars to have that format as the dominant one. Today, customers want digital files so they can have more variety in a smaller space than CDs can provide.
The market has spoken, and I don't recommend quitting downloading and buying of RIAA music, but rather I recommend downloading the stuff as you please. I cannot recommend buying a plastic CD, taking it home, and wasting your time to convert the thing so you can play it on your computer and/or digital music player. If you are happy with the CD format, then by all means don't change. But I have hundreds of CDs that I simply don't listen to anymore because they are too much of a PITA to use. I've gone digital with my music, but I am still dissapointed in the effort it takes to get the labeling and the relative track volumes correct, and getting the album art, and all that.
Even "stealing" music for me takes a bunch of my time that I would rather not have to do vs just buying a product or service, but nobody will sell me those, so I'll keep doing what I'm doing.
This kind of copy protection scheme was used back in the days of the Apple I/II and Comodore computers (possibly early IBM and compatibles as well).
Back then, software companies actually sold defective disks, but when the disks were "played" normally, they would skip the defective parts on the disks, but disk copying software would just copy the disks byte by byte (or sector by sector) and the software would fail when they hit the defective part of the disk.
Same crap, different year. Different PHBs saying the same thing, and we geeks keep saying "If you can play it, we can record it".
Even the older Macrovision is similar to the HDCP crap we have today (which is basically the same as the defective disk crap as well). Macrovision used to inject high frequency crap into the signal that was detected by a recording device and that recording device would record a noisy copy of the signal. To defeat Macrovision, one must just use a low pass or notch filter on the signal to get rid of the garbage that was injected by the Macrovision.
I seriously doubt that any of this stuff ever has any significant effect on decreasing pirated copies or increasing sales, but someone keeps thinking this stuff is important, and people think its worth their time and effort to get around these things for many reasons. These reasons vary from proving that it can be done, to simply wanting to make backup copies, to outright piracy. All three will always exist, and someone will always find a workaround to satisfy their needs. Legal/illegal, moral/immoral, right/wrong, this is just how it is.
I emailed Fox about the logic of putting their "Piracy Is A Crime" video at the front of every DVD (a video which is impossible to skip through)
I find tons of box sets (or even regular DVDs) to simply not be worth their price because of "features" like this. Non-skipable commercials for other products, propaganda, threats that I will be fined, jailed, or worse if I don't watch the thing correctly, and all that.
Personally, I find that "pirated" TV shows and DVDs are simply better than the ones you can buy in a store because they are more versatile and they don't come with the annoyances that the "legal" versions come with.
Sure, piracy might be a crime, but supply and demand will always prevail so long as the punishment and liklihood of being punished for said crime is low enough. See alcohol prohibition and the current "war on drugs" as a reference.
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Before anyone falls into the trap I almost fell into, please note that the Core Duo is not the 64-bit capable Core2 Duo.
Thanks for the heads up.
I find the "PC" world funny. I've used higher end equipment for quite some time, and I've found myself back into "commodity" land and its pretty confusing.
The summary says "AMD, which introduced 64-bit CPUs early". Huh?
DEC Alpha chips were introduced in 1992 and were 64-bit. SPARC went 64-bit in 1995. MIPS went 64-bit in 1991. PA-RISC in 1996.
AMD came out with 64bit/32bit hybrid chips in what? 2002-2003?
How is this early?
Also, Intel introduced the Itanium, a pure 64-bit chip in 2001. They had a strange i860 chip in the late 80s that was 64-bit.
I've been running 64-bit linux for about 10 years plus or minus 6 months.
To me, I find the x86_64 stuff to be a hack and late to the game. The only reason its remotely interesting is that its cheap, but calling this new or interesting is completely wrong.
Great post!
Because of the openness of the GPL, I was able to get a career in IT through reading code, learning how to code, and how computers work by example.
I'm a firm believer in open source, which is very similar to guitar tablature. Oh, and BTW, http://www.olga.net/ has received a takedown message. (Not sure if this was in the original article or not...)
No one demands that you share anyone else's biases or tastes. Obviously there is a significant group of the population that gets off on the misery of others.
So, why don't you all get together, in some remote location, and make each other miserable. That way you'll all be happy!
Its not about happy or miserable, its about domination and pecking order.
Testosterone is an important chemical in human dominance. Once someone displays being angry relative to another person, then they lose the dominance game, and the other guy wins.
One of many silly charactersistics of the human animal.
Also, its worth noting that the study said that the higher testosterone levels in both men and women followed this pattern. Pretty interesting study me thinks.
Now you just know the advertisers are gonna get a hold of this technology and slap animated ads on cereal boxes or something.
Fortunately, I think your wrong here. First, e-ink stuff is not designed to be a motion display. Its special in that it takes power to produce an image, but that image is retained when the power is cut.
However, the most likely market initial for these kinds of displays is in the retail and marketing sector. Odds are, everything that is printed in a store will be of a display like this. Think shelf price tags, sale displays, and the like. Large retailers spend many thousands of dollars on printing semi-disposable displays that end up in landfills or at best recycled, whereas a display technology like this could eliminate the printer, the paper, and the ink.
I expect these kinds of displays will be everywhere in 10-20 years or whenever the technology is good enough and the price is right.
Imagine having this in your house. You could hang this stuff on your walls and change the pictures any time you want. That would be pretty cool.
as of last year i read somewhere that in the USA portable CD players (discmans) still outsold digital music players something like 5:1. not sure where they are going, i feel like i see digital players of some flavor everywhere i look.
Yeah, and the most popular bras are not the sexy ones worn by Victoria Secret model hotties either. They are Wal-mart specials that could double as a hammock.
Have you used old versions of vi?
/etc/init.d/* scripts should not include a restart option. Now, they automagically restart via a dependancy hierarchy configured via very complex xml files. The SMF stuff may get better in Solaris 11 because its basically a 1.uhoh version now, but I still think its a little bit of an overkill, but there are parts of it that are pretty cool too.
You mean one like that Sun ships with Solaris?
I havn't checked to see if Solaris 10's vi is any better, but up through version 9 it would yell at you if the lines were too long in a normal text file like a log file.
WTF?
I welcome Sun making Solaris less early 90s like. To use a dumb car analogy, Solaris is great under the hood, but its ugly as hell and the ride is rough.
All of the standard UNIX commands need to be updated, or just install the GNU ones and call it good enough. You know, update the commands to have standard error messages. For example, tail says "tail: cannot open input" if the file is not found or if the permissions are wrong. GNU tail says permission denied, file not found, and it even includes the filename in the error message. Solaris cat says: "cat: cannot open FILENAME". So, this is a little better than tail because it actually says the filename, but it still does not differentiate between permissions and the file existing or not. It also sucks that the error message is different than what tail's error message.
Personally, I think Solaris' service management facility (SMF) stuff is over engineered. Some of it is because its new, but some of it is just an overkill to overcompensate for Solaris being slack in its service initialization files for years. For some reason, they thought that the
To be honest, I've been thinking that all *NIX variants should update everything in userland from init on up. After reading about Microsoft's new PowerShell, it really makes *NIX seem like a dinosaur. The OOP quailities of the PowerShell are _VERY_ cool. Its something that is really in the right direction for the times.
Personally, I think all of *NIX should adopt an OOP shell environment, and go more towards a RDMS type filesystem with builtin replication, redundancy, and failover. Get away from the everything is a file paradigm, and more towards everything is a datatype paradigm. This is 10-20 years out, so I'll just have to wait...
How about a way to "rate" ads. Was this ad helpful? Did it provide information you actually wanted?
Advertising is simply strange. Great ads from the consumers POV often have little to do with the effectiveness of the ad to generate revenue for the company. Back with the Suzuki lying car ads or whatever they were, they were percieved as great ads. Everybody loved them, but they simply didn't sell many cars.
Take the "greatest ad of all time". The Apple 1984 SuperBowl commercial. We still talk about it almost 20 years later, but does it sell Mac Mini's today?
Sure, marketing is _part_ of business. But even great businesses with great products fail and so does great marketing. I simply wish they would tone down the hype a bit. Believe it or not, there are many things more important than buying crap.
Also, because of the most stupid thing Sun ever did, people tend to deliberately close the JVM after that first initiation. Why? Cause Sun puts a stupid little Java icon into the systray. It immediately draws attention to the fact that the JVM is in memory and people think they might get a speed boost or something by closing it.
And then from the summary:
Does this really spell the end of AJAX? I sincerely hope so. Nothing built on Javascript will ever achieve the security, cross-platform reliability, and programmatic friendliness that Web 2.0 needs.
Personally, I believe the dumbest thing Sun ever did was to strongarm Netscape into renaming JavaScript into JavaScript. They have nothing to do with one another, and they confuse the heck out of people. JavaScript has become an official part of the web. Java is just another plugin, like flash, that is NOT part of the web.
It's not that the OSS model is "unsustainable," but that business managers just don't understand the mindsent behind, say, Debian. They don't understand how it can be that someone would write an app or maintain a distro because they find it enjoyable or gratifying, and so they don't find that model predictable, much less harnessable. And if they can't harness it, it must be suspect, inferior, useless, or about to die.
All of this is true. Most people in business don't care about their business or product per se, but rather the power, competition, and the process of business itself. There are exceptions, but I believe this to be true for the majority of people high up in business.
To these people, doing something that you love because you love it, and not looking for social status and power is a parse error for their thought process. With respect to Linux, I would imagine that most people who know would say that Debian or Gentoo are as good if not better than RedHat or Suse, but RedHat and Suse fit more into the corporate mindset, and in business those two are almost 100% of the marketshare.
Its also interesting that the business manager's "mindset" is also a minority in our culture, but for some reason most people blindly think that mindset is better than their mindset.
2005 was 2 years ago, and she's 27 now, that makes her 25 in the photo...how is this underage drinking again?
Wrong. The cup was clearly full of liquid LSD, which is a federal felony.
I just don't get the human race. It just seems clear that no matter what century it is, there is some kind of witch hunt or persecution of somebody for something. Is there anybody that has read something about this human phenonemon? Is there going to be a time when humans just don't do this kind of thing?
Too many people look at insurnace as a charity, and that everyone should be entitled somehow to cheap insurance. That's not what it is. There are two reasons to take out insurance. (1) if you believe the odds of cashing in on policy x the value of the policy exceeds the cost of the loss x the chance of the loss, or (2) if the harm caused by the event uninsured is unacceptable regardless of the low odds of it occurring. We take out auto insurance for the second reason, not because we believe we are going to run into someone, but because they could sue us for $2M and that would financially ruin us.
Insurance is charity for the insurance companies and drug companies. The doctors don't directly benefit from insuance.
The reason we buy car and home insurance is because although the probability of losing the house or car is low, the loss is very great. Paying a nominal fee to ensure that I will have a roof over my head and a car so that I can keep said roof over my head is worth the expense. I don't pay insurance on my tennis shoes because even if something happened to them, I can easily buy another pair. The odds of something happening to my tennis shoes is greater than my car or house, but the expense is so much less that it is not worth insuring them.
There are people that insure their specific body parts because losing them would cost a bundle (think sports and model people).
Now, with health insurance, no young healthy individual (a vast majority of people under 50) would ever pay for health insurance because it makes no sense. In a free economy, this would never happen. Well, maybe if the insurance would pay big bucks in the event that you were to be diagnosed with something bad (that is how life insurance works, which is in a free economy environment).
Can I buy insurance offshore, in say, London, excluding AIDS and allowing genetic tests, to get a lower rate?
In a free economy, yes.
However, in the US, it is illegal for individuals to buy healthcare goods and services in the global free market.
This is exactly the case for nationalized health care. Insurance companies are about mitigating risk. Once you've tested positive (at least for some conditions), you're no longer a risk. A rational insurance company would then set your rates at the cost of treatment.
If my rates are at the cost of treatment, then why not just pay for my treatment?
In a free economy, it makes no sense for a healthy, financially secure individual to pay for health insurance, but it actually seems to be the case that the higher probablility of an individual having health insurance in the US is someone that is more healthy and more financially secure.
Socialism and capitalism are not a duality, a mix between them seems to make sense. Nobody complains about socialism with respect to the roads and fire departments. In fact, fire departments were private comanies much like our current medical system is today, but the only difference is that the private fire departments quickly failed.
The real issue with laptops in schools is ... what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve?
Support.
Its pretty clear that a student "needs" a computer, and being that laptops are somewhere about 50% of the computers sold today probably much higher than that for a college student, it would seem logical that having a bulk purchase of one model of notebook that should be a little cheaper for the student to buy than if they bought one on their own, and then the university can standardize and streamline their support system.
I'm not saying this has worked or is a good thing, but this is where the university is coming from.
"This is definately something I can stand behind regardless of which party it comes from."
I have to 2nd that!! I'm still VERY open minded to this next election...and this just put a big "+" mark next to his name so far.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is so special about a presidential debate that it needs to be copyrighted in the first place?
I guess I've never applied or know anybody that has applied for a job that where the interview process involved copyright.
I'm not trying to troll, but I've seen transcripts and whatnot of presidential speeches, addresses, and these things broadcast on TV and radio, and I've never noticed or heard of copyright before (unlike sports, movies, TV programs, etc).
So, is this a real issue? Should I start copyrighting my job interviews?
Unless MS rewrites all of their other commands to accept STDIN/OUT, Monad will never surpass the shells.
There are other things that make *NIX commands kick but.
Standard exit values from the programs. 0 on success, and other things on error. Also, there is STDERR.
Don't get me wrong, compiled code and scripting languages have rolls too, but the *NIX shell, ascii text configuration files, and all of that jazz just makes *NIX work.
In 2007, operating systems have come down to basically 2 flavors. *NIX and Windows. And every year, Windows gets a little more *NIX-like. Now, does it seem strange that in 2007 we are still stuck with a late 1960s early 1970s implementation of how to interface with a computer? Sure it does. But I simply don't know of a better way to interface with a computer, and apparently nobody else does either -- yet.
Granted, I haven't seen Vista, but I'm sure I'll click around in it at a public computer or something some time in my life, but it just seems like yet another version of Windows, so I'm not interested. To be honest, I'm not that interested when a new OS X, Linux, Solaris or whatever new *NIX variant comes out either, but I know I can take one of those OSes and figure out their subtle differences, and move on. At work, some people still use Windows, and its a big deal when Vista or whatever comes out. It takes planning and meetings and money and validation and all of this jazz, but when a new *NIX comes around, we just install it, tweak a few things, and life goes on. Its no big deal.
I would love for someone to come up with something better than *NIX, but I simply haven't seen anything come close enough to warrant any change.
They just switched to Intel chips less than two years ago!
And before that they switched to the G4/5, before that PowerPC, before that 6800.
This proposal is one of the dumbest ideas that I've heard. Apple is an integrator. Their software integrates the hardware, so they make that. The hardware is disposable. Buying AMD would severely limit Apple to innovate in the future.
No electronics integrating company that I know of ties themselves to such a specific piece of hardware. None.
This is absolutely silly.
We need a blue-collar musician class.
In older times, this was called a union. Its kindof a bad word today, but in order for artists to get around the RIAA and Tickemaster and any new incarnation of the same, a union may actually be something that can protect their rights.
The summary and the FA were short on information, but here is my stab at this.
How about we just keep our private information private? The increase in the amount of personal data that is attempted to be acquired by private companies is increasing, and remind me how my giving of my personal data to Pets-R-Us is going to benefit me?
I paid cash for a car, and the people wanted my social security number. Why?
A health club near me wants my social security number to lift weights and stuff. Why?
Oh, and don't get me started with those so-called "Privacy Agreements" that some of these comanies give out to you. All of those end with the clause "we can change our mind at any time w/o notifying you", so how is this any kind of agreement? By signing one of those I am agreeing to nothing.
So, I think that the laws should say that there are 2 kinds of personal information. One kind is something that can clearly identify me. My address, phone number, ssn, name, etc. And none of that should be shared with anyone. Abstract data for marketing reasons is OK. My age, sex, or whatever they can get from me that does not directly tie the information to me is OK.
Linux really doesn't need a new process scheduler. What it could really do with is I/O prioritisation. Windows now has it, so there's no excuse.
I dunno. Linux has has some changes recently in the scheduling department, and an O(1) process scheduler can only be "a good thing". Recently, the I/O block layer got a new scheduler (linky http://kerneltrap.org/node/7637). Regarding other I/O prioritization, I can't say with authority that this is needed or not.
Maybe all of these things are related, but in my selfish world, I want Linux to scale better. Scaling well beyond 64 CPUs or cores, but I believe this is a much greater task than ~60 hours of coding. It took a while before Linux got SMP clean, and today SMP is normal, not something that reserved for servers. The monolithic high clockrate CPU is dead, and this has been overtaken by multi-core processors, and more than one of them inside of one box. In my eye, this is where all OSes should be focusing their attention.
Many businesses have been getting printers they way for a long time.
Xerox is doing the same thing. IBM is doing the same thing, different way.
We are in a post-industrial world. The industrial revolution brought us dirty factories and practically slave labor and goods for cheap. For the most part, industry is done in China now. However, some goods are still made here in the US because its cheaper to make them here than to ship them here for things like cars, but most of the doodads you buy are made in china or some other asian country.
The big to do is not in making things, but the service sector. IBM, Xerox, now HP are all moving in that direction. Heck, even GM now makes more money off of financing than they do off of making cars. To me, its strange. It proves to me that humans are becoming more worthless by the minute by their own smartness and laziness in getting stuff done.
A little over 100 years ago, most people worked in producing food. Now, nobody really does that. In fact, many farmers are paid not to produce food. Then it was industry. Now that is done, and moved overseas, now we just do services, but what in the world are we going to service? Food production? Industry? Those things are not here, I guess we can service service? Seems strange to me.
"R&D spending doesn't guarantee business success" - New study reveals that there is no relationship between R&D spending and sales growth, earnings, or shareholder returns.
I can agree that R&D spending does not guarantee business success. Business is a risk. Luck and timing is involved, but w/o R&D, where would we be today?
Xerox's R&D gave us the GUIs that we use today. Bell gave us the OSes we use today. R&D gives us portable pocket cell phones instead of the car phones from years ago, and phones where you had to call the operator to get through to the other person.
R&D does not guarantee business success, but most every sucessful business does R&D. Microsoft has an excellent R&D department, but their ability to put their research into products is abismal. Just about every successful business or person has to continually learn new developments and technologies.
I havn't done a formal R&D study on this, but I would agree that R&D does not guarantee business success, but for most businesses, I would say that the lack of R&D spending or at least keeping up with newer technologies will almost certainly gaurantee business failure.
Here is a list of successful product boycotts: http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successfu
The differences between these boycotts and an RIAA boycott is that the successful ones were more tied to ethical reasons.
Nobody really wants to boycott the RIAA's artists. The problem is simple. We simply want a different product, but the RIAA people are so stuck into pushing expensive plastic disks on us that we have to then take home, possibly illegally rip them to a usable format. Trash the stupid tracks that we paid for, and then contend with issues like labeling the tracks correctly and getting the relative gain right between different tracks.
The thing that sucks is that there is a clear market for a new method of music distribution and playback, but the asshats that control the content to make this market happen are a decade behind the market, and the only thing they can think of to satisfy the new market is to sue people into submission and force a decade old technology onto willing and potential customers for a new product.
Imagine if the RIAA was suing people for using CDs in the 90s, and only selling LPs, cassettes, and 8 tracks?
That is what they are doing today. CDs in the 90s had advantages over other technologies, and the consumers voted with their dollars to have that format as the dominant one. Today, customers want digital files so they can have more variety in a smaller space than CDs can provide.
The market has spoken, and I don't recommend quitting downloading and buying of RIAA music, but rather I recommend downloading the stuff as you please. I cannot recommend buying a plastic CD, taking it home, and wasting your time to convert the thing so you can play it on your computer and/or digital music player. If you are happy with the CD format, then by all means don't change. But I have hundreds of CDs that I simply don't listen to anymore because they are too much of a PITA to use. I've gone digital with my music, but I am still dissapointed in the effort it takes to get the labeling and the relative track volumes correct, and getting the album art, and all that.
Even "stealing" music for me takes a bunch of my time that I would rather not have to do vs just buying a product or service, but nobody will sell me those, so I'll keep doing what I'm doing.
I think I've seen these before, incidentally.
This kind of copy protection scheme was used back in the days of the Apple I/II and Comodore computers (possibly early IBM and compatibles as well).
Back then, software companies actually sold defective disks, but when the disks were "played" normally, they would skip the defective parts on the disks, but disk copying software would just copy the disks byte by byte (or sector by sector) and the software would fail when they hit the defective part of the disk.
Same crap, different year. Different PHBs saying the same thing, and we geeks keep saying "If you can play it, we can record it".
Even the older Macrovision is similar to the HDCP crap we have today (which is basically the same as the defective disk crap as well). Macrovision used to inject high frequency crap into the signal that was detected by a recording device and that recording device would record a noisy copy of the signal. To defeat Macrovision, one must just use a low pass or notch filter on the signal to get rid of the garbage that was injected by the Macrovision.
I seriously doubt that any of this stuff ever has any significant effect on decreasing pirated copies or increasing sales, but someone keeps thinking this stuff is important, and people think its worth their time and effort to get around these things for many reasons. These reasons vary from proving that it can be done, to simply wanting to make backup copies, to outright piracy. All three will always exist, and someone will always find a workaround to satisfy their needs. Legal/illegal, moral/immoral, right/wrong, this is just how it is.
I emailed Fox about the logic of putting their "Piracy Is A Crime" video at the front of every DVD (a video which is impossible to skip through)
I find tons of box sets (or even regular DVDs) to simply not be worth their price because of "features" like this. Non-skipable commercials for other products, propaganda, threats that I will be fined, jailed, or worse if I don't watch the thing correctly, and all that.
Personally, I find that "pirated" TV shows and DVDs are simply better than the ones you can buy in a store because they are more versatile and they don't come with the annoyances that the "legal" versions come with.
Sure, piracy might be a crime, but supply and demand will always prevail so long as the punishment and liklihood of being punished for said crime is low enough. See alcohol prohibition and the current "war on drugs" as a reference.