I think most of the people didn't even report to Sony.
True. It was the geek recourse from us on slashdot and digg that got this thing known.
An interesting true story. Some company sold a relatively inexpensive paint sprayer or something like that, and a friend of mine got one as a gift for fathers day or something like that.
After storing this thing for some time, he then wanted to use it and found out it was a piece of crap. He called the manufacturer and after some poking around he found out that all of these sprayers of that particular model from the manufacturer are worthless because of a poor design, but the manufacter still sold them at a low price point because people would buy them (often as a gift), not use them for a period of time, and then if they used them at all, they would find out after it was too late or too lazy to return the thing.
The person said, that these things were a great product for the manufacturer because they were sold cheap enough that nobody really cared if they worked or not, and the returns were so low in number that it simply wan't worth the manufacturer's time to make a working model. This broken POS was profitable as is.
Same here. My algorithm is "If government owes me money, file taxes ASAP, else if I owe government money, file taxes as close to April 15th as possible".
"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key..." How is this different from attracting women to become math majors by moving emphasis away from being able to do math problems?
Good question. A question that I have, is what difference does it make if computer science is done by men, women, or none of the above?
Computer science should attract people interested in computer science. I mean one of the top computer scientists was a top computer scientist as a man and a woman. He/She rose to the top of the field twice -- first as a man, and then as a woman.
Given that piece of anecdotal evidence, it seems as though the field of computer science should want to attract men who question their gender over women.
While i generally agree with your post, you are REALLY wrong with your "50 years" estimation.
Seriously. Maybe 20 years, but not much more.
Sure, I could be wrong, but there is no technology beyond tapes/disks that can store massive amounts of data _without power_.
Personal computers are now typically in the hundreds of gigabytes today. "Enterprise" computing is commonly in the terabyte range. Research/scientific computing is commonly in the petabyte and beyond.
It was only recently that tapes and disks replaced paper. To replace tapes and disks, there needs to be a radical change in storage technology. Nanotechnology? Ferroelectrics/Piezoelectrics? I don't know. Nobody does.
I only have trouble with seeing people quote the "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote all the time, as if it were some kind of gospel and enlightenment from The Great Wizard himself. When in practice Tesla's quote there pretty much spelled it out that it was only lack of technical skill that made so much perspiration necessary in the first place.
AFAIK, the Edison quote is real (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Alva_Edison), and Tesla, Edison's arch rival, said something like "If Edison were smarter, he wouldn't have to perspire so much".
I've worked with some very smart/educated people in my lifetime, and there are two camps here. There are people that are simply brilliant, and brilliant stuff comes from them. There are people that are less than brilliant, but they work their asses off, fail most of the time, but from their shere tenacity, they do come up with great things from time to time.
The thing is that regardless of the origins, coming up with great stuff is great. Edison is simply more popular than Tesla with the masses. Its pretty much common knowledge that Tesla was smarter than Edison, but Edison did come up with some great stuff (or his subordinates did).
My point is that there is room for both brute force innovation and intelligent innovation. Neither is better, because the end result is the same. Actually, in my experience, there is a balance between the two. I've seen some really smart people do seemingly stupid stuff or very brute force/hackish kind of stuff where the method was not pretty, but the end result was great. Results matter, and more often than not, the means of acquiring those results do not matter.
taking credit for his employees' inventions as if he personally and singlehandedly came up with them.
Sure, geeks like to bust on Edison. Real geeks prefer Tesla over Edison anyday. But either implicitly or explictly taking credit for people that work for you is common.
Someone that lives in a custom home says they built it, but odds are they did not drive a single nail. The owner of a construction company can show you all of the building he "built", but again, odds are he did none of the physical construction himself.
Publications like books and journals have "authors" on them where the "author" frequently did not write a word.
Henry Ford is falsly attributed to inventing the automobile, but he actually brought the automobile to the masses via mass production that he got from the meat packing industry.
Nothing is more primitive, to my mind, than spinning a disk platter in 2007 -- but there's still nothing better, and the technology shows no sign of dying.
In working with large numbers of computers over the years, here are my informal statistics for failure. 1) hard drives 2) power supplies 3) other, almost at the noise level
And look at what the industry adds redundancy for in computers. 1) hard drives and 2) power supplies.
Sure, anyone that thinks about it will agree that spinning disk platters in 2007 is primative, but these things currently solve the magical equasion involving the variables of price, performance, longevity, and capacity. In 2007, simply nothing comes close to matching spinning platters with respect to these variables. Whats even funnier, is that in 2007 if you want more storage than a spinning platter can provide, then the thing for you is even more primative. A series of magnetic tapes with a robot to fetch them for you! And with those, you lose a number of things like random access within a file, large latency to retrieving a certain file, and all that.
Personally, I don't see a paradigm shift in storage for 50 years or so. The thing is that tapes and spinning platters keep improving, and people's data storage requirments keep increasing. And in turn, there is a need for faster processors and networks to process and move all this data around.
Once an inexpensive, relatively fast, persistant storage technology hits the market at about 18-64 gigs of space, then servers will snatch that up to be used for paging and for the OS image. There really is a market for that today. But then we are still stuck with spinning platters and magnetic tapes for "data" until something else comes along.
What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)
Kinda reminds me of Altavista or some other older search engine (or eBay today) where you search for _ANYTHING_ and you can buy it online.
Glaucoma -- find it for cheap on eBay!!!!
Sure, marketing is a part of business, and frankly, I feel as though it has become too large of a part of business, and it seems to be increasing over the years. TV used to be watchable, radio used to be listenable. I heard some statistic the other day (probably made up), but it said that the average American is bombarded with something like over 6,000 marketing attempts per day.
Personally, I'm skeptical of over-hyped, and over-marketed items, because if they were that good, I would hear about these things "in the wild". Sure, there are goods and services that don't do well via word of mouth, but there are plenty of goods and services where demand simply outweights supply (think illegal things here).
Oh, and basic behavioral psychology will tell you that the best predictor of future behavior is based on past behavior. And if someone is already a regular customer for X, does X need to be pushed on that person?
Diamonds are things made by God, and we can copy them.
Regardless of there being a God, brains, humans, birds, or diamonds, to be honest we don't want to create a brainlike computer.
Human brains can do amazing things, but one thing we like about computers over human brains is that human brains, even the best ones, are simply wrong from time to time, and our goal with "brainlike computers" is not to recreate these mistakes, but rather to overcome them.
With respect to our senses, again, they are amazing, but then again they are fooled much of the time. There are perceptual errors, optical illusions, selective memories (ask 10 eye witnesses and get 10 different accounts), and all of that.
Today, computers are great at being calculators, and for storing and retrieving digital data. They suck at making "decisions". Even seemingly trivial ones like telling the difference between an apple and an orange is difficult for a computer today.
Take a look at much more mature technologies, like flying. For ages, humans tried to make flying machines like birds, and now we have a handful of flying technologies that can fly faster than the speed of sound and can go beyond the earth's atmosphere. But we still can't fly like a bird with flapping wings, and I don't remember a time in my life where I saw a headline saying "Building Birdlike Planes".
That is one of the major problems with PV showcases like the Australian solar race. they push efficiency more than $/watts which is my the winning cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I agree and disagree at the same time.
Yes, in the long term $/watts is desireable, but in the short term efficiency and the like are more important. Upfront, R&D and manufacturing costs are expensive, but over time the R&D and manufacturing costs go down with mass production. Newer technologies are always expensive when they are newer. Cars, mobile phones, computers, televisions, microwaves, DVD players, everything is very expensive when its brand new technology, and then the price hits a commodity level.
I know every business wants to do this cheaply and half-assed; it's the American Business Way. To do it "right" would probably take SecurID's or somesuch other token, which would get ugly for the customer after accumulating a couple of dozen different ones.
The stupid thing is that they already have given me one of these things. My bank has given me credit cards and debit cards that have 2 factor authentication already in them. It takes 1) the card and 2) a PIN to use said card. (Yes, I know that the magnetic info on credit/bank cards is not secure, but...)
The thing that sucks is that there is no standard 2 factor thing that interfaces with computers yet.
Things like smart cards, have been around for over a decade. They come in the same form factor and look like tokens we use every day, and we can use them in tons of ways, but just not yet.
The deceit here is the same as before, there are just more hoops (for the customer, not the phisher). The problem with authentication here is that the banks want their customers to be able to log in from anywhere in the world. You simply can't properly authenticate a computer out in the wild without some additional device, like secureid.
The deceit is simply a man in the middle attack, and we all know this is not a new thing.
I'm a BOA customer, and I've been upset with their security for years, but it keeps getting better, which is kindof a problem in itself.
Some history here. BOA's main website: http://www.bankofamerica.com/ was only recently redirected to a https server. In fact, until recently if you even typed https://www.bankofamerica.com/ you got an error message. Before doing the basic thing like moving the http server to a https server, they introduced this site key junk.
OK, here are the problems. How am I supposed to trust a website to be the site I am intending to go to when a) its not on a https site, and its asking for my username/password, and I cannot verify via the certificate or anything that I did not type http://bankfoamerica.com/ by accident? b) how am I supposed to trust a website that is different almost every time I interface with it.
When I go to a supposedly real BOA branch on say Main Street in YourTown, USA, there are a number of things that makes me believe its real. There are other people in there, many of which are wearing BOA nametags, and the BOA logos and stuff are all over the outside and inside of the place. Also, its expensive and difficult to put up a fake BOA storefront, and the liklihood that a fake one will generate any profit w/o getting caught is about zero (otherwise they would exist!)
Now, how much would it cost me to put up a bankfoamerica.com site? How about 15-20 of them with different typos? How much easier is it being that they can exist anywhere in the world or even outside of the world on a sattelite in space even? How hard is it to generate all of these things that look exactly like the real site w/o a secure certificate behind them to boot? Now, being that BOA changes the website all the time, AND its not on a secure server, how am I supposed to know that I'm even dealing with the same people each time?
My problem is not with BOA identifying me, its with me identifying them. So, they add site-key and all of this crap, which puts the burdon of identifying them on me, which is backwards, especially when they keep changing the rules.
When I worked in a hospital, they talked repeatedly about "universal precautions" with respect to things like AIDS and whatnot. There needs to be a set of universal precautions for doing secure transactions on the internet, and there are none.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
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The End is Nigh for XP
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Where is the API to hook into the Windows Update to check for my own updates??
One of the things I found lacking when I was a Windows developer was the inability for Windows to handle 3rd party addons.
For example, Visual Studio was OK. It was even cool that I could hook vim into it, so a plus point there for 3rd party additions. But for the important stuff, there were no hooks for 3rd party addons.
For example, in UNIX/Linux, I can add a man page or an info page (shutter) for 3rd party libraries, applications, etc, and they would just work as the vendor privided ones. The same tools worked the same way with the vendor stuff vs the addon stuff. I thought MSDN was pretty nice, and the documentation for MFC and all that was pretty good, but there was no way (at least at the time) for a 3rd party package to integrate their documentation into MSDN.
Also, in UNIX/Linux there is/usr/local (or/opt -- shutter again). This is a very simple way to say, hey people, this is stuff that will work on your system, but it did not come from the vendor, this is locally added stuff here. There is no/usr/local in Windows. All of the applications are expected to go in the same place as the programs that come with the OS and to complicate things a little more, much of the "3rd party" applications for Windows comes from a company called Microsoft. By this, I mean things that do not come with Windows, but are so common that they assumed to be part of Windows. I'm talking about things like Office, Project, Access, etc.
My point with all of this, is that sucessful computer technologies welcome and are sucessful because of 3rd party addons. Things like Perl, python, C, Linux/UNIX, C++, Apache, etc. All of these products are great by themselves, but their real power is in their ability to be extended. I can add a module for Perl and it will "just work" as if it came with Perl itself. In fact, a number of the now standard Perl modules used to be standalone ones, but they became so popular that they got incorporated into Perl.
Now, in 2007, to my knowledge there is no OS (or even the technologies I just mentioned) that has good hooks into having one updating mechanism for things that come with the OS as well as 3rd party addons. This seems like the next logical step in computing.
Termination fees and contract lengths make sense to me. I agree that in some cases it can be anticompetitive
They do not make sense to me. Well, at least from a consumper point of view, I don't see where they every make sense.
I've never worked at a place where there was any kind of contract either way regarding a time that I was supposed to work. I've litterally been thrown out the door of a couple of jobs in my lifetime, and the others I left without any fear of recourse.
I refuse to do business with cell phone prividers because of my first experience with them. A) the coverage sucked in my area at the time, which was unknown to me before agreeing to a 1 year contract and B) I got a bill over $400 one month because I went over my minutes. C) the phone got damaged, and worked less reliably than it did when I first bought it. As soon as I could get rid of the phone, I gladly paid what BS payment was required for the beneifit of getting rid of my cell phone, and never looked back. Paying to get out of the contract seemed really stupid, but I looked at it as though it was cheaper than keeping the phone, and I just wanted out of the thing.
As of this writing, I have zero contracts for services in my life. I can call up today and cancel any of them at any time without any exit fees or whatever. This is how it should be. Agreeing to a contract does _nothing_ to benefit me. Sure, they can make it _look_ like it benefits me by offering a contractless service at an outragously overpriced amount, but that is just extortion so that you go with the contract offer instead.
Contracts with extra fees associated with them to break said contract is a setup for failure for the end user, and a buffer and insurance plan for the provider so that they don't have to provide a competitive service in terms of cost or reliability, and in my opinion this is against a free market economy.
I know it was a joke, but I fear that, by replacing air by oil, the weight of a server rack might be a problem if it is not located in the basement.
Housing large numbers of computers comes at a great expense and a juggling act to balance the variables involved.
The variables are price, performance, power efficiency, cooling, weight, cabling, floor space, and all of these variables change again when the density of the machines change. And wait a few months, and all of the variables change again.
Messing around with these things in large numbers is almost as much as an art as it is a science. Sometimes, you just have to say this is good enough, and hope that is a true statement.
BTW, the Chicago Police already use an Oracle based data mining system to produce crime forecasts for the city that they use to decide how to deploy forces from day to day.
And now for our 5 day forcast:
Wednesday, overcast with a slight chance of a mugging. Thursday, mostly clear with a chance of a small time drug deal in the afternoon. Friday, partly cloudy, then rain likely in the afternoon. Chance of prostitution 95 percent. Saturday, mostly cloudy with showers likely. Chance of prostitution 99 percent. Sunday, partly sunny. No chance of crime for today.
You hit on one of my pet peeves -- web sites that break a single article into multiple pages. I rarely go beyond the first page, and I only read the first page of this self-serving article. If I knew ahead of time that this was one of those articles, I would have skipped it entirely.
The same is true for articles in newspapers and magazines that are discontinuous. People often lose interest and give up vs trying to find the page that the continued article is on.
I think that advertising has completely gotten out of hand. It used to be that TV shows were sponsered by one or two products, and I dare someone to watch Comedy Central late at night w/o recording the show first. The Girls Gone Wild ads never seem to stop. The same is true with the college basketball tournament. I don't watch the stuff, but my parents do, and I was floored at the same ads over and over and over again. There is a threshold, and advertisers are going beyond that threshold all the time.
I turn off flash for 2 reasons. 1) ads 2) I don't like flash. Although I've pretty much been popup free since 2001 or so, there are still websites that do these popups and unders all the time. WTF? Are the margins so thin in business that you can't compete without that extra couple of cents that comes from a pile of ads under your web browser that you notice when you _are done surfing the web_??? Oh, I forgot to go to that porn site! Thank god that ad is left here for me to remind me!!
I have to open my snail mail beside a trashcan, and I sometimes miss real mail because about 90% of my mail is trash.
I have to close email accounts from time to time once they get sold to the right spammers.
And all of these ads aren't enough. Sometimes when I drive home, I have to go around this slow truck that has multiple ads all over it that cycle between them _while I'm trying to drive down the road_. This thing is slowing down traffic and potentially causing wrecks due to the motion and sayings all over the thing, and do you really expect me to want to do business with a company that is that desparate for business that they are willing to do this kind of thing? Would I actualy remember the ads on the truck when I get somewhere so that I can acutally use them? Or am I supposed to stop driving right then and do a business transaction?
I'm sick of all of these ads, and I will do what is necessary for my sanity and well being to avoid them at all cost.
Can you be paying attention to security and not be paranoid at the same time?
Yes. Acording to wikipedia -- Paranoia is an excessive anxiety or fear concerning one's own well-being which is considered irrational and excessive, perhaps to the point of being a psychosis.
I don't think locking your car in a parking lot is paranoia, but it does mean you are paying some attention to security. Although paranoia and attention to security might be on the same continuum, its commonly believed that paranoia is abnormal and attention to security is normal. YMMV.
Why is this tagged Linux? Linus already indicated that Linux will not be under GPLv3.
OK. Maybe I'm just behind the times or something, but what was "wrong" with GPLv2?
I've glanced at the side-by-side comparisons between the two, and I see the changes, and I've heard many people gripe about GPLv3, so why is there a push for it?
Anyone noticing that the RIAA and their associated music companies (keep in mind that their name is supposed to be hated, we're not supposed to hate sony/universal/emi and warner) tend to do things to piss off the most educated people, while the least educated don't notice? Also notice that the least educated people tend to listen to rap "music", and the associated pop music that these companies churn out?
Unfortunately, it appears to be human nature for those that are higher up in the social hierarchy to maintain and exploit said status by exploiting those of lesser status.
The government does it via things like drug laws, lotteries, taxing the lower class more, etc, etc.
Also, most of the consumer market is geared towards those in the middle to lower end of the IQ/socioecomic bell curve because a) there simply are more of them and b) they are easy targets.
But wait, there's more! Order NOW! and we will double your order! (plus $15.95 shipping and handling).
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason.
I leave my Linux box at work on so that I don't have to reopen windows and whatnot every morning. That is my reason, but I'm also upset that my work did not buy me a Mac like I have at home. It goes to sleep, and only uses a few watts of power and takes seconds to wake up.
My point is that in 2007, computers should be viewed as appliances, and that power management should be part of the OS.
Most servers need to be on 24/7, but workstations should utilize power management. I can't comment on Windows because I'm clueless about that OS, but OS X is great for power management, and Linux as great as it is, is still predominantly a server/embedded OS, and little has been done to improve power management on desktop systems and low power systems like laptops.
Oh, and my Mac boots very quickly as well, but I only boot it a handful of times a year.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In my experience, being a bit messy can improve productivity by shunting unimportant tasks away from your center of attention. For example, if I receive a bunch of fluff memos, they're going in the kill-file pile until I get around to reading them in detail. (Which may never happen.) But I haven't disposed of them yet, so I can still retrieve them if necessary.
I agree with most everything said, but to add my 2 cents, I believe that moderate messyness is good because it works like a cache and a priority queue.
If I am a neat freak and put everything away, then its a waste of time to continually get and put away what I'm working with. Think of this like a cache.
Now for the priority queue, when I'm a little messy, the important stuff floats to the top. As the mess gets higher and deeper, after a while the stuff on the bottom becomes unimportant, and can then be cleaned up (similar to garbage collection).
The problem is that if you let the mess grow too large, it *WILL* impact your ability to operate efficiently. So every once in a while you need to do a house cleaning of your different paper stacks, your email, your desktop files, and whatever other info you use on a regular basis.
So true. Again with my computer analogy, this is when you have TLB misses, or cache misses, or you are thrashing your swap. All of those things are OK if its not a chronic problem, but if it is a chronic problem, well then, its a chronic problem.
MS spends about $1 billion a quarter in R&D. Over the last five years, all they've managed to do is to produce an OS that in my opinion, a woeful copy of OS X. It's not that they don't have good people and that their people don't work. It's that the direction of the company is lacking.
I've heard that Microsoft's R&D is one of the best places to work in the world if you are into that kind of stuff. Its just that there is such a disconnect between the R&D word and the "real world". The same can be said of other R&D places from Universities, or even private companies like IBM. Heck, UNIX was a R&D effort by a phone company, so was C++, and the current WIMP GUI design that we use today came from the 70s by a photocopier company.
My point is that there is and always will be a large disconnect between R&D and the mass market. I mean, even if Vista is a 5 year development effort that created a half implemented version of OS X, it will still sell tons more copies than OS X ever will.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most of the people didn't even report to Sony.
True. It was the geek recourse from us on slashdot and digg that got this thing known.
An interesting true story. Some company sold a relatively inexpensive paint sprayer or something like that, and a friend of mine got one as a gift for fathers day or something like that.
After storing this thing for some time, he then wanted to use it and found out it was a piece of crap. He called the manufacturer and after some poking around he found out that all of these sprayers of that particular model from the manufacturer are worthless because of a poor design, but the manufacter still sold them at a low price point because people would buy them (often as a gift), not use them for a period of time, and then if they used them at all, they would find out after it was too late or too lazy to return the thing.
The person said, that these things were a great product for the manufacturer because they were sold cheap enough that nobody really cared if they worked or not, and the returns were so low in number that it simply wan't worth the manufacturer's time to make a working model. This broken POS was profitable as is.
Sometimes capitalism has its flaws.
Personally, I did mine back in February.
Same here. My algorithm is "If government owes me money, file taxes ASAP, else if I owe government money, file taxes as close to April 15th as possible".
"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key..." How is this different from attracting women to become math majors by moving emphasis away from being able to do math problems?
Good question. A question that I have, is what difference does it make if computer science is done by men, women, or none of the above?
Computer science should attract people interested in computer science. I mean one of the top computer scientists was a top computer scientist as a man and a woman. He/She rose to the top of the field twice -- first as a man, and then as a woman.
Given that piece of anecdotal evidence, it seems as though the field of computer science should want to attract men who question their gender over women.
WTF?
While i generally agree with your post, you are REALLY wrong with your "50 years" estimation.
Seriously.
Maybe 20 years, but not much more.
Sure, I could be wrong, but there is no technology beyond tapes/disks that can store massive amounts of data _without power_.
Personal computers are now typically in the hundreds of gigabytes today. "Enterprise" computing is commonly in the terabyte range. Research/scientific computing is commonly in the petabyte and beyond.
It was only recently that tapes and disks replaced paper. To replace tapes and disks, there needs to be a radical change in storage technology. Nanotechnology? Ferroelectrics/Piezoelectrics? I don't know. Nobody does.
I only have trouble with seeing people quote the "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote all the time, as if it were some kind of gospel and enlightenment from The Great Wizard himself. When in practice Tesla's quote there pretty much spelled it out that it was only lack of technical skill that made so much perspiration necessary in the first place.
AFAIK, the Edison quote is real (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Alva_Edison), and Tesla, Edison's arch rival, said something like "If Edison were smarter, he wouldn't have to perspire so much".
I've worked with some very smart/educated people in my lifetime, and there are two camps here. There are people that are simply brilliant, and brilliant stuff comes from them. There are people that are less than brilliant, but they work their asses off, fail most of the time, but from their shere tenacity, they do come up with great things from time to time.
The thing is that regardless of the origins, coming up with great stuff is great. Edison is simply more popular than Tesla with the masses. Its pretty much common knowledge that Tesla was smarter than Edison, but Edison did come up with some great stuff (or his subordinates did).
My point is that there is room for both brute force innovation and intelligent innovation. Neither is better, because the end result is the same. Actually, in my experience, there is a balance between the two. I've seen some really smart people do seemingly stupid stuff or very brute force/hackish kind of stuff where the method was not pretty, but the end result was great. Results matter, and more often than not, the means of acquiring those results do not matter.
taking credit for his employees' inventions as if he personally and singlehandedly came up with them.
Sure, geeks like to bust on Edison. Real geeks prefer Tesla over Edison anyday. But either implicitly or explictly taking credit for people that work for you is common.
Someone that lives in a custom home says they built it, but odds are they did not drive a single nail. The owner of a construction company can show you all of the building he "built", but again, odds are he did none of the physical construction himself.
Publications like books and journals have "authors" on them where the "author" frequently did not write a word.
Henry Ford is falsly attributed to inventing the automobile, but he actually brought the automobile to the masses via mass production that he got from the meat packing industry.
Such as life.
Nothing is more primitive, to my mind, than spinning a disk platter in 2007 -- but there's still nothing better, and the technology shows no sign of dying.
In working with large numbers of computers over the years, here are my informal statistics for failure. 1) hard drives 2) power supplies 3) other, almost at the noise level
And look at what the industry adds redundancy for in computers. 1) hard drives and 2) power supplies.
Sure, anyone that thinks about it will agree that spinning disk platters in 2007 is primative, but these things currently solve the magical equasion involving the variables of price, performance, longevity, and capacity. In 2007, simply nothing comes close to matching spinning platters with respect to these variables. Whats even funnier, is that in 2007 if you want more storage than a spinning platter can provide, then the thing for you is even more primative. A series of magnetic tapes with a robot to fetch them for you! And with those, you lose a number of things like random access within a file, large latency to retrieving a certain file, and all that.
Personally, I don't see a paradigm shift in storage for 50 years or so. The thing is that tapes and spinning platters keep improving, and people's data storage requirments keep increasing. And in turn, there is a need for faster processors and networks to process and move all this data around.
Once an inexpensive, relatively fast, persistant storage technology hits the market at about 18-64 gigs of space, then servers will snatch that up to be used for paging and for the OS image. There really is a market for that today. But then we are still stuck with spinning platters and magnetic tapes for "data" until something else comes along.
What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)
Kinda reminds me of Altavista or some other older search engine (or eBay today) where you search for _ANYTHING_ and you can buy it online.
Glaucoma -- find it for cheap on eBay!!!!
Sure, marketing is a part of business, and frankly, I feel as though it has become too large of a part of business, and it seems to be increasing over the years. TV used to be watchable, radio used to be listenable. I heard some statistic the other day (probably made up), but it said that the average American is bombarded with something like over 6,000 marketing attempts per day.
Personally, I'm skeptical of over-hyped, and over-marketed items, because if they were that good, I would hear about these things "in the wild". Sure, there are goods and services that don't do well via word of mouth, but there are plenty of goods and services where demand simply outweights supply (think illegal things here).
Oh, and basic behavioral psychology will tell you that the best predictor of future behavior is based on past behavior. And if someone is already a regular customer for X, does X need to be pushed on that person?
Diamonds are things made by God, and we can copy them.
Regardless of there being a God, brains, humans, birds, or diamonds, to be honest we don't want to create a brainlike computer.
Human brains can do amazing things, but one thing we like about computers over human brains is that human brains, even the best ones, are simply wrong from time to time, and our goal with "brainlike computers" is not to recreate these mistakes, but rather to overcome them.
With respect to our senses, again, they are amazing, but then again they are fooled much of the time. There are perceptual errors, optical illusions, selective memories (ask 10 eye witnesses and get 10 different accounts), and all of that.
Today, computers are great at being calculators, and for storing and retrieving digital data. They suck at making "decisions". Even seemingly trivial ones like telling the difference between an apple and an orange is difficult for a computer today.
Take a look at much more mature technologies, like flying. For ages, humans tried to make flying machines like birds, and now we have a handful of flying technologies that can fly faster than the speed of sound and can go beyond the earth's atmosphere. But we still can't fly like a bird with flapping wings, and I don't remember a time in my life where I saw a headline saying "Building Birdlike Planes".
That is one of the major problems with PV showcases like the Australian solar race. they push efficiency more than $/watts which is my the winning cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I agree and disagree at the same time.
Yes, in the long term $/watts is desireable, but in the short term efficiency and the like are more important. Upfront, R&D and manufacturing costs are expensive, but over time the R&D and manufacturing costs go down with mass production. Newer technologies are always expensive when they are newer. Cars, mobile phones, computers, televisions, microwaves, DVD players, everything is very expensive when its brand new technology, and then the price hits a commodity level.
I know every business wants to do this cheaply and half-assed; it's the American Business Way. To do it "right" would probably take SecurID's or somesuch other token, which would get ugly for the customer after accumulating a couple of dozen different ones.
The stupid thing is that they already have given me one of these things. My bank has given me credit cards and debit cards that have 2 factor authentication already in them. It takes 1) the card and 2) a PIN to use said card. (Yes, I know that the magnetic info on credit/bank cards is not secure, but...)
The thing that sucks is that there is no standard 2 factor thing that interfaces with computers yet.
Things like smart cards, have been around for over a decade. They come in the same form factor and look like tokens we use every day, and we can use them in tons of ways, but just not yet.
The deceit here is the same as before, there are just more hoops (for the customer, not the phisher). The problem with authentication here is that the banks want their customers to be able to log in from anywhere in the world. You simply can't properly authenticate a computer out in the wild without some additional device, like secureid.
The deceit is simply a man in the middle attack, and we all know this is not a new thing.
I'm a BOA customer, and I've been upset with their security for years, but it keeps getting better, which is kindof a problem in itself.
Some history here. BOA's main website: http://www.bankofamerica.com/ was only recently redirected to a https server. In fact, until recently if you even typed https://www.bankofamerica.com/ you got an error message. Before doing the basic thing like moving the http server to a https server, they introduced this site key junk.
OK, here are the problems. How am I supposed to trust a website to be the site I am intending to go to when a) its not on a https site, and its asking for my username/password, and I cannot verify via the certificate or anything that I did not type http://bankfoamerica.com/ by accident? b) how am I supposed to trust a website that is different almost every time I interface with it.
When I go to a supposedly real BOA branch on say Main Street in YourTown, USA, there are a number of things that makes me believe its real. There are other people in there, many of which are wearing BOA nametags, and the BOA logos and stuff are all over the outside and inside of the place. Also, its expensive and difficult to put up a fake BOA storefront, and the liklihood that a fake one will generate any profit w/o getting caught is about zero (otherwise they would exist!)
Now, how much would it cost me to put up a bankfoamerica.com site? How about 15-20 of them with different typos? How much easier is it being that they can exist anywhere in the world or even outside of the world on a sattelite in space even? How hard is it to generate all of these things that look exactly like the real site w/o a secure certificate behind them to boot? Now, being that BOA changes the website all the time, AND its not on a secure server, how am I supposed to know that I'm even dealing with the same people each time?
My problem is not with BOA identifying me, its with me identifying them. So, they add site-key and all of this crap, which puts the burdon of identifying them on me, which is backwards, especially when they keep changing the rules.
When I worked in a hospital, they talked repeatedly about "universal precautions" with respect to things like AIDS and whatnot. There needs to be a set of universal precautions for doing secure transactions on the internet, and there are none.
Where is the API to hook into the Windows Update to check for my own updates??
/usr/local (or /opt -- shutter again). This is a very simple way to say, hey people, this is stuff that will work on your system, but it did not come from the vendor, this is locally added stuff here. There is no /usr/local in Windows. All of the applications are expected to go in the same place as the programs that come with the OS and to complicate things a little more, much of the "3rd party" applications for Windows comes from a company called Microsoft. By this, I mean things that do not come with Windows, but are so common that they assumed to be part of Windows. I'm talking about things like Office, Project, Access, etc.
One of the things I found lacking when I was a Windows developer was the inability for Windows to handle 3rd party addons.
For example, Visual Studio was OK. It was even cool that I could hook vim into it, so a plus point there for 3rd party additions. But for the important stuff, there were no hooks for 3rd party addons.
For example, in UNIX/Linux, I can add a man page or an info page (shutter) for 3rd party libraries, applications, etc, and they would just work as the vendor privided ones. The same tools worked the same way with the vendor stuff vs the addon stuff. I thought MSDN was pretty nice, and the documentation for MFC and all that was pretty good, but there was no way (at least at the time) for a 3rd party package to integrate their documentation into MSDN.
Also, in UNIX/Linux there is
My point with all of this, is that sucessful computer technologies welcome and are sucessful because of 3rd party addons. Things like Perl, python, C, Linux/UNIX, C++, Apache, etc. All of these products are great by themselves, but their real power is in their ability to be extended. I can add a module for Perl and it will "just work" as if it came with Perl itself. In fact, a number of the now standard Perl modules used to be standalone ones, but they became so popular that they got incorporated into Perl.
Now, in 2007, to my knowledge there is no OS (or even the technologies I just mentioned) that has good hooks into having one updating mechanism for things that come with the OS as well as 3rd party addons. This seems like the next logical step in computing.
Termination fees and contract lengths make sense to me. I agree that in some cases it can be anticompetitive
They do not make sense to me. Well, at least from a consumper point of view, I don't see where they every make sense.
I've never worked at a place where there was any kind of contract either way regarding a time that I was supposed to work. I've litterally been thrown out the door of a couple of jobs in my lifetime, and the others I left without any fear of recourse.
I refuse to do business with cell phone prividers because of my first experience with them. A) the coverage sucked in my area at the time, which was unknown to me before agreeing to a 1 year contract and B) I got a bill over $400 one month because I went over my minutes. C) the phone got damaged, and worked less reliably than it did when I first bought it. As soon as I could get rid of the phone, I gladly paid what BS payment was required for the beneifit of getting rid of my cell phone, and never looked back. Paying to get out of the contract seemed really stupid, but I looked at it as though it was cheaper than keeping the phone, and I just wanted out of the thing.
As of this writing, I have zero contracts for services in my life. I can call up today and cancel any of them at any time without any exit fees or whatever. This is how it should be. Agreeing to a contract does _nothing_ to benefit me. Sure, they can make it _look_ like it benefits me by offering a contractless service at an outragously overpriced amount, but that is just extortion so that you go with the contract offer instead.
Contracts with extra fees associated with them to break said contract is a setup for failure for the end user, and a buffer and insurance plan for the provider so that they don't have to provide a competitive service in terms of cost or reliability, and in my opinion this is against a free market economy.
I know it was a joke, but I fear that, by replacing air by oil, the weight of a server rack might be a problem if it is not located in the basement.
Housing large numbers of computers comes at a great expense and a juggling act to balance the variables involved.
The variables are price, performance, power efficiency, cooling, weight, cabling, floor space, and all of these variables change again when the density of the machines change. And wait a few months, and all of the variables change again.
Messing around with these things in large numbers is almost as much as an art as it is a science. Sometimes, you just have to say this is good enough, and hope that is a true statement.
BTW, the Chicago Police already use an Oracle based data mining system to produce crime forecasts for the city that they use to decide how to deploy forces from day to day.
And now for our 5 day forcast:
Wednesday, overcast with a slight chance of a mugging.
Thursday, mostly clear with a chance of a small time drug deal in the afternoon.
Friday, partly cloudy, then rain likely in the afternoon. Chance of prostitution 95 percent.
Saturday, mostly cloudy with showers likely. Chance of prostitution 99 percent.
Sunday, partly sunny. No chance of crime for today.
WTF? Is this real?
You hit on one of my pet peeves -- web sites that break a single article into multiple pages. I rarely go beyond the first page, and I only read the first page of this self-serving article. If I knew ahead of time that this was one of those articles, I would have skipped it entirely.
The same is true for articles in newspapers and magazines that are discontinuous. People often lose interest and give up vs trying to find the page that the continued article is on.
I think that advertising has completely gotten out of hand. It used to be that TV shows were sponsered by one or two products, and I dare someone to watch Comedy Central late at night w/o recording the show first. The Girls Gone Wild ads never seem to stop. The same is true with the college basketball tournament. I don't watch the stuff, but my parents do, and I was floored at the same ads over and over and over again. There is a threshold, and advertisers are going beyond that threshold all the time.
I turn off flash for 2 reasons. 1) ads 2) I don't like flash. Although I've pretty much been popup free since 2001 or so, there are still websites that do these popups and unders all the time. WTF? Are the margins so thin in business that you can't compete without that extra couple of cents that comes from a pile of ads under your web browser that you notice when you _are done surfing the web_??? Oh, I forgot to go to that porn site! Thank god that ad is left here for me to remind me!!
I have to open my snail mail beside a trashcan, and I sometimes miss real mail because about 90% of my mail is trash.
I have to close email accounts from time to time once they get sold to the right spammers.
And all of these ads aren't enough. Sometimes when I drive home, I have to go around this slow truck that has multiple ads all over it that cycle between them _while I'm trying to drive down the road_. This thing is slowing down traffic and potentially causing wrecks due to the motion and sayings all over the thing, and do you really expect me to want to do business with a company that is that desparate for business that they are willing to do this kind of thing? Would I actualy remember the ads on the truck when I get somewhere so that I can acutally use them? Or am I supposed to stop driving right then and do a business transaction?
I'm sick of all of these ads, and I will do what is necessary for my sanity and well being to avoid them at all cost.
Can you be paying attention to security and not be paranoid at the same time?
Yes. Acording to wikipedia -- Paranoia is an excessive anxiety or fear concerning one's own well-being which is considered irrational and excessive, perhaps to the point of being a psychosis.
I don't think locking your car in a parking lot is paranoia, but it does mean you are paying some attention to security. Although paranoia and attention to security might be on the same continuum, its commonly believed that paranoia is abnormal and attention to security is normal. YMMV.
Why is this tagged Linux? Linus already indicated that Linux will not be under GPLv3.
OK. Maybe I'm just behind the times or something, but what was "wrong" with GPLv2?
I've glanced at the side-by-side comparisons between the two, and I see the changes, and I've heard many people gripe about GPLv3, so why is there a push for it?
Anyone noticing that the RIAA and their associated music companies (keep in mind that their name is supposed to be hated, we're not supposed to hate sony/universal/emi and warner) tend to do things to piss off the most educated people, while the least educated don't notice? Also notice that the least educated people tend to listen to rap "music", and the associated pop music that these companies churn out?
Unfortunately, it appears to be human nature for those that are higher up in the social hierarchy to maintain and exploit said status by exploiting those of lesser status.
The government does it via things like drug laws, lotteries, taxing the lower class more, etc, etc.
Also, most of the consumer market is geared towards those in the middle to lower end of the IQ/socioecomic bell curve because a) there simply are more of them and b) they are easy targets.
But wait, there's more! Order NOW! and we will double your order! (plus $15.95 shipping and handling).
These hairless apes are funny animals.
A generalization here. Anytime I can take the existing configuration and duplicate that configuration into a new setup is a Good Thing (TM).
MySQL does this. Postgres does this. versions of fdisk can do this. Solaris tools can do this. The list goes on.
Basically, this is all a sign of maturity in an application.
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason.
I leave my Linux box at work on so that I don't have to reopen windows and whatnot every morning. That is my reason, but I'm also upset that my work did not buy me a Mac like I have at home. It goes to sleep, and only uses a few watts of power and takes seconds to wake up.
My point is that in 2007, computers should be viewed as appliances, and that power management should be part of the OS.
Most servers need to be on 24/7, but workstations should utilize power management. I can't comment on Windows because I'm clueless about that OS, but OS X is great for power management, and Linux as great as it is, is still predominantly a server/embedded OS, and little has been done to improve power management on desktop systems and low power systems like laptops.
Oh, and my Mac boots very quickly as well, but I only boot it a handful of times a year.
As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In my experience, being a bit messy can improve productivity by shunting unimportant tasks away from your center of attention. For example, if I receive a bunch of fluff memos, they're going in the kill-file pile until I get around to reading them in detail. (Which may never happen.) But I haven't disposed of them yet, so I can still retrieve them if necessary.
I agree with most everything said, but to add my 2 cents, I believe that moderate messyness is good because it works like a cache and a priority queue.
If I am a neat freak and put everything away, then its a waste of time to continually get and put away what I'm working with. Think of this like a cache.
Now for the priority queue, when I'm a little messy, the important stuff floats to the top. As the mess gets higher and deeper, after a while the stuff on the bottom becomes unimportant, and can then be cleaned up (similar to garbage collection).
The problem is that if you let the mess grow too large, it *WILL* impact your ability to operate efficiently. So every once in a while you need to do a house cleaning of your different paper stacks, your email, your desktop files, and whatever other info you use on a regular basis.
So true. Again with my computer analogy, this is when you have TLB misses, or cache misses, or you are thrashing your swap. All of those things are OK if its not a chronic problem, but if it is a chronic problem, well then, its a chronic problem.
There's even a proof!
Even better, there is an RFC for it as well: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2795.html
MS spends about $1 billion a quarter in R&D. Over the last five years, all they've managed to do is to produce an OS that in my opinion, a woeful copy of OS X. It's not that they don't have good people and that their people don't work. It's that the direction of the company is lacking.
I've heard that Microsoft's R&D is one of the best places to work in the world if you are into that kind of stuff. Its just that there is such a disconnect between the R&D word and the "real world". The same can be said of other R&D places from Universities, or even private companies like IBM. Heck, UNIX was a R&D effort by a phone company, so was C++, and the current WIMP GUI design that we use today came from the 70s by a photocopier company.
My point is that there is and always will be a large disconnect between R&D and the mass market. I mean, even if Vista is a 5 year development effort that created a half implemented version of OS X, it will still sell tons more copies than OS X ever will.