Hey, I'm not going to complain. U.S. companies like Dell should keep their jobs within the country so they can provide more US citizens with jobs and in turn those people can buy their products - improving the economy (as much as they can).
Hint: No American would buy a computer that was domestically built because of price. Dells would increase in price approximately 2x if they were fabed in the US.
Now, with the outsourcing of call centers, aka service in a service economy. Does not make sense.
We have gone from agricultural to industrial to, err, nothing, I mean service. Food production and manufactured goods are pretty much old hat now. Its all about doing lunch and fixing broken crap and human to human interaction that is now important. Having someone across the Pacific to make goods is OK, but talking to these people over fading out sat links and cheap low quality VOIP is not going to cut it with people that don't natively speak English to boot isn't going to cut it either.
There is a lot to be said for feelings, even for a head oriented geek like me.
Thats right. A modest laptop, with 7 common applications running at one time has 162 threads. To me, 8 cores seems a little low with 20 threads/core, and I'm not even stressing my computer right now...
Any programmer can write code to fill up a 1GB hard drive, but effectively using 8 cores usually requires talented programmers who have mastered multithreaded programming.
Not necessarily. Some code is "embarrassingly parallel" by nature, but this is not very common in desktop apps. However, one thing that could make 8+ cores possible w/o all apps having talented programmers who have mastered multithreaded programming is multitasking and a multitasking core aware OS. Its common for "power users" to get frustrated by having something resource intensive going on in the background and bringing either their system to a crawl for doing something else or at worse even impossible to do something else.
Currently on my lower end laptop, I have about 100 threads running, but only one core to handle these.
I don't doubt an "8 core" desktop will exist in the near future. Then again he has a point... we won't likely need it.
My crystal ball is not always crystal clear, but I believe that 8+ cores will exist and are needed in the near future, at least for desktop systems.
History here. I'm an HPC admin which translates into I run beowulf stuff where pretty much OTS computers are connected together to work as one big computer. I'm also a desktop computer user who is anal retentive about having realtime info regarding the status of my computer with respect to CPU utilization and whatnot.
Now, in the many years of running desktop systems and being anal retentively monitoring them, I've noticed that CPU utilization is very often bursty. Meaning that its common for the CPU to hover around zero, and spike up with doing something like rendering a webpage, printing, compiling code, etc, etc. But most of the time (> 90% or well more if including when I sleep and stuff), the CPU is doing nothing.
So, what is my point? Give me cores out the wazoo, and let them completely power down when not needed and crank up to all 8 or more when needed. This will greatly improve power requirements and improve performance at the same time. Evidence of similar stuff in either nature or in other technologies are plentiful. 1) Hybrid gas/electric cars. They use both for higher performance when needed, and then back off and oscillate between the two when its optimal for efficiency. 2) Animal tissue like muscles and nerves. Muscles are pretty much idle most of the time, and only use a few fibers when doing a light contraction, but all of the available fibers become active when exerting maximum effort. Similar, but different with nervous systems. 3) Human workloads. There are certain industries that are not really a constant, and even the seemingly constant ones also have bursts as well, but lets think of things like seasonal things like retail, taxes, or things like seasonal vacation spots. These kinds of jobs bring in more human bodies to handle the peak loads, and let them go when the peaks are over. Its nuts that in many places in the US, seasonal vacation spots are frequently employed by people from half way across the world!
Now, is my 8+ core pipe dream going to happen tomorrow? No. But I believe this is where computing is going. Another thing that will have to change is that RAM should not be as random. In other words, memory, like CPU cores, should go dormant when not needed in order to conserve power as well, and of course there is the memory bandwidth issue as well.
Apparently, blind people also experience deja vu, which makes the theory unlikely.
And people without left hands have their left index finger itch from time to time.
I dont quite see the need to go to complicated explanations for deja vu; the human brain is one huge neural network, false positives and random matches should be expected. Without a certain fuzziness in temporal recognition, we'd be unable to ever recognize any repetetive event as every repeat would cause slightly differing levels of synaptic activation, depending on the totality of sensory input and internal state.
The amazing thing is rather that it functions as well as it does, minimizing both false positives and negatives, although perhaps erring a bit more on the negative side for the average person.
Phenomena like deja vu are still pretty interesting and these things do bring the marriage between science and religion.
Personally, I have not really experienced deja vu, but I have had things where I've met people and they have met me and they feel as though we have met before. I've had epiphanies. I've experienced really weird stuff under the influence of psychedelics. Twins and close family members have reported memories or visions at a distance kind of stuff.
I don't really know what is real sometimes or if it really matters. I can lie to people and get a huge emotional response as if the lie was true, so it appears as though its real, its real I guess. Its also interesting that many people don't want to know what is real vs an illusion or whatever. We remove the price tags from stuff when we give something to somebody. We tell white lies all the time. We have to beat around the bush about something where everybody else knows the facts but one guy.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff.
True and untrue.
Google is different than any other company that I know of in that they started as a research kind of project and still focus on that but they also seem to be able to be a publicly traded company that can put out profitable products and services almost as a by product of said research.
They have not been bought nor have they put their research in the back room, but as a forefront of what they do.
Bell labs did amazing stuff, same with Xerox PARC, etc. But AFAIK, the research was not their focus. Bell came out of telephones. A new technology at the time, but (again AFAIK) they were focused on furthering this invention. Xerox started with copiers, again a new technology, and furthered that with research.
Google, although their products are not really innovative, their method of making their products is. Searching is nothing new. Email is nothing new. Maps, directions, advertising, none of this is new. But their focus on the pure geek factor of being obsessed with how to make this stuff better, giving away tons of stuff for free or at least free of charge, and collecting profits from their popularity as an afterthought.
Their primary activity is searching. A seemingly trivial activity on the surface. But it has coined a word (Google as a verb) like Xerox (as a noun) did for a copy of something, but the difference is that Xerox copies were new to the world and were horrible by any modern standards today. The first Xerox copies took like 5 or 10 minutes or so per page (all of this is from memory), then came out wet and could be smeared. And people were grateful! Thus the word Xerox was born.
But Yahoo!, Altavista, and other search mechanisms of the day existed, but none of them became synonymous with the word search like Google has.
On most UNIX systems, if there is no more memory to give then malloc() fails (returns NULL) and you can then try freeing memory elsewhere and trying again, or go into some recovery mode (typically make sure everything is saved and then quit).
On Linux, if there is no more memory to give, then a random process is terminated.
Actually, on most UNIX systems (and Linux) today, this is not true. Recently, I have only seen malloc() return NULL when there are explicit resource limits on the memory that a process via limit or ulimit or some other way to ensure that a process does not go beyond an arbitrary amount.
What I have seen is that malloc() will return a pointer, and the OS will not actually give the memory to the app until its actually needed. And in the event of the machine running out of memory, the OS will slap the application with an OOM exception.
Sure, there are similarities and differences between using a cell vs a radio, but I believe that the current cell implementation is much, much worse.
Similarities, people can be distracted while fiddling with cells and radios. More so with changing a CD than changing the station. But it pretty much stops there.
Cell phone conversations while driving seem to be increasing and the radio is pretty much a constant. Cell phone users while driving often appear (and statistically are similar) to drunk drivers. Actually, they drive worse because drunk drivers are more careful because they are scared of being caught. They often drive below the speed limit and/or speed of traffic. They make erratic and impulsive turns. They don't stay in their lanes. They are more engaged in their conversation than driving. The list goes on.
I would bet that my cell phone driver vs drunk driver detection skills have a ratio of about 10:1 probably closer to 50:1.
Now, with the new Google offering. Close but no cigar.
I've been talking about a new p2p user contributed realtime traffic, police, roadblock, etc monitoring system with a good UI that "just works".
To me, that would be excellent, and will happen. Kinda like the CBs of yesteryear, but more 2006ish.
Tried to get a gym membership lately? Oh wait..this is Slashdot..anyway..They try to lock you into these multi-year contracts at a very high price. Imagine having to pay $50 a month for three years. Can you honestly say that three years from now you'll live in the same area and still be making the most out of their services?
What about a cell phone? Most of them have massive early-termination fees.
OK. I'm looking at renting for a while vs home ownership for various reasons. I'm a little upset because you can't "rent", but rather lease with the option to get screwed. But then, I realized two things. 1) Leases are there to benefit the leaser. 2) Leases do have provisions to get out of them, one is getting a job in another area.
So, in the past I have done things before at great PITA and whatnot to get around these leases and whatnot. Believe it or not, there are circumstances in life that do not happen around arbitrary dates. So, what I recommend is simply finding out exactly what is required to satisfy breaking a lease or otherwise good for them and bad for you "agreements", and doing what they want to benefit you.
On my next lease, I will simply ask ahead of time that I'm looking at relocating for my job and asking them if that were to be the case, what I could do to break the lease. Usually, there is a window of notice that they want, like 30-60 days or similar. I'm going to follow their instructions to a tee, but the only catch, is that the company I may be working for simply does not exist yet.
Is this moral? Well, about as moral as I have done where I moved out at the end of my lease and put my junk in storage and shacked up with friends for a while at their inconvenience. Are they going to check with the nonexistent company? Nope. Have the leasers benefitted in the past and will they in the future by people's lease agreements? Yup.
There are many things in life that are variable. I'm a clean, quiet person that pays his bills on time, and I have had leasers tell me that I was a great tenant. I understand why they have these lease things, but I also don't like how rigid they are on 12 month cycles when few other things in life, especially having a place to live is that regular. So, I have no qualms being a good tenant, and then modifying a 12 month lease into a 15 one or 10 if it suits me better and I follow their rules. If I had more money just to throw away at rules and I enjoyed that, then I would. But I don't.
Oh, now with cell phones NEVER sign more than a month agreement with them. Go prepaid or shop around. I know of no other business that rips people off for substandard quality of service (Can you hear me now????) on 1-2 year contract basis. Gym memberships and leases are manageable, and they often have other options like going month-to-month at a slightly higher rate, but with cell phones, you simply lose. I get pissed off at people that succumb to their whims because the thing is that it is telling businesses that people are willing to agree to substandard quality with the option to get screwed in the end.
NEVER EVER agree to a contract where there is no semi-immoral way to get out of it. It makes no sense.
Damn misleading headlines! I thought this was a 12-step plan to recover from using Microsoft products!
1) We admitted we were powerless over competition, laws, and other people - that everyone's lives had become unmanageable without our software.
2) Came to believe that trying harder would perpetuate the insanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our back on God as we understood him.
4) Made a searching and scary inventory of our competition.
5) Admitted to God to ourselves and to the human race where the competition was wrong.
6) Were entirely ready to eliminate said competition.
7) Proudly asked the world, "Where do you want to go today?"
8) Made a list of how all competition has hurt us and became willing to defeat them all.
9) Bought, FUDed, or destroyed all competition wherever possible except when to do so would benefit them, ourselves, or anybody else.
10) Continued to take the competition's inventory, and when they were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to improve our bottom line.
12) Having taken over the world and eliminated all possibilities of competition and well-being, we tried to keep up the good work, but succumbed to our own greed and stagnation.
Operating systems need to by default deny the right to execute.
Hmm. Like Linux/UNIX that does not store executable permissions on email attachments w/o user intervention? Like OS X's behavior to ask the user the first time they run an associated file with an app for the first time? Like viruses are a Microsoft problem, and not a feature of other OSes?
I can't ever seem to type the last question here on/. without getting slammed, but when are people going to give up the drama and just use an OS that suits their wants and needs or shut the fuck up and deal with viruses, crashes, lagging development and features, horrible UI, and all that.
No, there are no battered OS user shelters like battered wife shelters. No, there is not MA (Microsoft Anonymous), but today in 2006, OSes are almost a dime a dozen like microwaves and everything else. I've been MS free for quite some time, but I'm in the process of taking over a PC at work that has 2000 on it and it had mysterious popups, firefox would not work with the HP print server I was playing with (java issue or something). The admin of the box said that you still basically have to log in as Administrator to do anything. Just for fun, I clicked on the adaware icon, and it found 70-80 or so things on it. In order to get TCP/IP printing to work, you had to configure a local printer to look like a networked printer or something bassackwards like that.
I mean, this was my first MS OS adventure in over 5 years, and within a couple of hours I was reminded of why I simply do not go there. Aside from the specific issues I mentioned, sure I was able to click on crap and view the web and read email, but how tough is that to do on any computer today?
Before I started borrowing internet access from my kind neighbors, I implemented the following "security" measures. (In reality, they were obscurity measures).
1) Did not broadcast my SID.
2) Only allowed specific MACs to my WAP.
If I were to set up my own WAP in the future, I would leave it wide open like my friendly neighbors do today. They have taught me that its OK to share.
Not broadcasting a SID is a PITA sometimes. Adding new/guest computers to my WAP is a PITA. Using my neighbors wide open WAP for free? Priceless.
Suppose a known sex offender began moving child porn over YOUR wireless network.
And the ISP has no problem with this, and if you have some issues with this over YOUR wireless network AND you enabled encryption that was hacked, it would be probably more difficult to defend yourself than having a wide open WAP.
Brilliant business plan. I'm sure Microsoft, Sun, RedHat, and every other computer related company shares this belief but believes that the bottom line of $$$ outweighs the pimply faced mentality of l33715m.
Step 3: Call customer support and/or complain around the water cooler about how crappy the WAP from company XYZ is.
WAP companies are in the business of selling WAPs. Security is only provided to increase sales for those that care, they could care less about your data or connection being secure. Wireless phones offer zero encryption AFAIK because there is no business model for it.
Personally I would like a waterproof bulletproof encrypted free telephone, but nobody will give me one.
We found at one point that we had almost double the number of registered users on our network, simply because people had open WAPs. Rather than having a bunch of non-tennants using the internet for free, we just enforced encryption policies. Mostly it just made more work for me...
As far as I know, this is the point of the article, but the parent post and the company (s)he/it works for took it upon themselves to ensure their business vs going to the legislators.
My point, is that the taking care of it oneself is the proper way of doing things. I believe there should be laws and regulations out there, but I also believe that they should be as general and non-specific as possible. Laws against theft, infringement, trespass, etc are general. Securing a WAP via XYZ encryption when a.b number of people are in c.d distance from said WAP to protect business G is not a law that benefits anybody besides G for some unspecified time limit and the legislators. Basically, everybody else loses, and rinse and repeat when a new technology comes out.
I'm proudly posting this via one of many unsecured WAPs around me. About 100% of the reason I'm doing this is because my previous broadband provider screwed up and I lost my internet access when I canceled cable TV. I also pay these people extra every month for an unlisted phone number so I don't get phone spam, and these people paid a company across the country to spy on me via the phone under the guise of an independent marketing survey group, where they asked like two generic stupid questions (Have you ever had broadband internet?) and then asked me "Why did you cancel your broadband connection with company X?" I got furious and I feel 100% justified to borrow internet from the same people for free for a while at the inconvenience of a little slower access due to dropped wireless packets and having to pick the best open WAP for the weather and time of day or whatever variables make me switch around.
Business is strictly supply and demand. I demand something more at this time to pay for internet access, and I'm content doing what I'm doing at this time, and the poor broadband company is losing because of things they have done. This is a business matter, not a legal one.
I'm all against DRM as the next guy, but how long will the fad of just buying crap because its DRM free last?
Kinda like selling air or water, but hey, water is more expensive than soda at a fast food place, so somebody must know something I don't.
OTH TV is free, and people pay for cable because of the better reception, number and variety of channels, etc. I can already get gigs of DRM free MP3s with little to no effort right now. Its just that the quality and selection does not appeal to me, and neither does a $2 pop track.
WTF? Being a good slashdotter, I did not read the article before checking out the posts, and then I read the parent post and had to check this out for myself.
So, for $2 I can have my name embedded somehow in a music file of Jessica Simpson? Maybe having her titties embedded in my face, I might throw down $2, but after reading the two links, I still don't see what the extra $1 gives me over a standard $1 track.
I'm all for the token statement against DRM. Its dead on. Yes, DRM free stuff is sold every day. Yes, its still practically illegal or at least easier and better to get MP3s the old fashioned way that are free of DRM. But I have no clue what the point of this Yahoo! thing is besides a slashvertisement astroturfing or whatever you call marketing today.
How many people went through the 80's with a blinking 12:00 clock on the VCR because it was "too hard to set"?
Not fair.
Why did the lazy designers have the thing blink 12:00? My microwave does a solid ":" when the power goes out, and it "too hard to set" being that I have a battery powered analog clock* on the wall that is clearly a better clock than my microwave.
Now the lazy designers got the clock thing right on my DVR. It automatically synchronizes itself, and I can record stuff without tapes, all episodes across channels of a certain show, all kinds of goodness. I probably recorded less than 50-100 hours of stuff on a VCR, and often I did not watch the stuff because I was too lazy. Now with my DVR, I always have about 80 hours of stuff on the box at a time, but I still don't watch all of it, but I have the choice, and new stuff keeps coming on it.
* actually its quartz digital with an analog display
"he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide somethin'"
I give up. Where??
One common example:
So he hid it, in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass. Five long years he wore this watch, up his ass. Then, just before he died of dysentery, he gave me the watch. I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.
Said by Captain Koons (Cristopher Walkan) in Pulp Fiction.
But I agree with the other comments that find it silly to blame the iPods.
Theft is kinda interesting. The key features of theft are 1) ease of stealing said object 2) "street value" and "time to market" of said object and 3) frequency of object occurring "in the wild". 4) visibility of said object.
I don't have the data available, but the likelihood of a car stereo is much more likely than a home stereo being stolen. Cars are more likely to be stolen than houses. Car stereos in things like boats are less likely than a car stereo in a car. Also, thieves are pretty lazy. They are much more likely to steal something in their 'hood or where they go about their normal travels vs commuting to a place where the goods are better and actually easier to steal.
Value of things is very relative. iPods are to some degree "to blame" for these street crimes because they fit all 4 of my criteria for a hot item.
Why is being murdered with a gun somehow worse than being murdered by having your brains smashed out of your skull with a blunt object?
Actually, being murdered with a gun is usually better than being murdered by a blunt object. Guns are quicker, less painful, and all that. Its a fairly nice way to be murdered.
In all seriousness though, the societal differences are all skewed towards the old fashioned way of murder, blunt objects. Why?
Blunt objects require close proximity for the murder to happen.
Its much easier to defend yourself against a blunt object, especially if the person holding the thing is smaller, slower, and or/weaker than you.
For many reasons, the death to desire to kill ratio when a gun is involved vs a blunt object is very skewed towards the gun.
Guns are nice to have around for things like revolutions though. Blunt objects just don't "cut" it anymore.
Hmm, I never considered prison "help". DWI, which is a part of alcoholism, is a felony and/or death sentence in many states/countries in the world. Timothy Leary, who was able to clear the drug laws in the US because of their original unconstitutionality, has been arrested for smoking a cigarette. http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/94q2/leary.html
Gamblers and crackheads are stigmatised as criminals, and help is not nearly so easy to come by.
Nobody likes a crackhead, even a crackhead. I don't understand gambling even though I have an addictive personality. Its the physical part that is the bitch for me to get over. Not gambling will not kill you. Stopping drinking can and does kill people.
Oh, and gamblers have ripped off alcoholics method of getting a better life as well as people that fuck too much, do drugs, cocaine, and even those that are 'addicted' to hanging out with such people.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I'm not going to complain. U.S. companies like Dell should keep their jobs within the country so they can provide more US citizens with jobs and in turn those people can buy their products - improving the economy (as much as they can).
Hint: No American would buy a computer that was domestically built because of price. Dells would increase in price approximately 2x if they were fabed in the US.
Now, with the outsourcing of call centers, aka service in a service economy. Does not make sense.
We have gone from agricultural to industrial to, err, nothing, I mean service. Food production and manufactured goods are pretty much old hat now. Its all about doing lunch and fixing broken crap and human to human interaction that is now important. Having someone across the Pacific to make goods is OK, but talking to these people over fading out sat links and cheap low quality VOIP is not going to cut it with people that don't natively speak English to boot isn't going to cut it either.
There is a lot to be said for feelings, even for a head oriented geek like me.
Thats right. A modest laptop, with 7 common applications running at one time has 162 threads. To me, 8 cores seems a little low with 20 threads/core, and I'm not even stressing my computer right now...
Any programmer can write code to fill up a 1GB hard drive, but effectively using 8 cores usually requires talented programmers who have mastered multithreaded programming.
Not necessarily. Some code is "embarrassingly parallel" by nature, but this is not very common in desktop apps. However, one thing that could make 8+ cores possible w/o all apps having talented programmers who have mastered multithreaded programming is multitasking and a multitasking core aware OS. Its common for "power users" to get frustrated by having something resource intensive going on in the background and bringing either their system to a crawl for doing something else or at worse even impossible to do something else.
Currently on my lower end laptop, I have about 100 threads running, but only one core to handle these.
I don't doubt an "8 core" desktop will exist in the near future. Then again he has a point... we won't likely need it.
My crystal ball is not always crystal clear, but I believe that 8+ cores will exist and are needed in the near future, at least for desktop systems.
History here. I'm an HPC admin which translates into I run beowulf stuff where pretty much OTS computers are connected together to work as one big computer. I'm also a desktop computer user who is anal retentive about having realtime info regarding the status of my computer with respect to CPU utilization and whatnot.
Now, in the many years of running desktop systems and being anal retentively monitoring them, I've noticed that CPU utilization is very often bursty. Meaning that its common for the CPU to hover around zero, and spike up with doing something like rendering a webpage, printing, compiling code, etc, etc. But most of the time (> 90% or well more if including when I sleep and stuff), the CPU is doing nothing.
So, what is my point? Give me cores out the wazoo, and let them completely power down when not needed and crank up to all 8 or more when needed. This will greatly improve power requirements and improve performance at the same time. Evidence of similar stuff in either nature or in other technologies are plentiful. 1) Hybrid gas/electric cars. They use both for higher performance when needed, and then back off and oscillate between the two when its optimal for efficiency. 2) Animal tissue like muscles and nerves. Muscles are pretty much idle most of the time, and only use a few fibers when doing a light contraction, but all of the available fibers become active when exerting maximum effort. Similar, but different with nervous systems. 3) Human workloads. There are certain industries that are not really a constant, and even the seemingly constant ones also have bursts as well, but lets think of things like seasonal things like retail, taxes, or things like seasonal vacation spots. These kinds of jobs bring in more human bodies to handle the peak loads, and let them go when the peaks are over. Its nuts that in many places in the US, seasonal vacation spots are frequently employed by people from half way across the world!
Now, is my 8+ core pipe dream going to happen tomorrow? No. But I believe this is where computing is going. Another thing that will have to change is that RAM should not be as random. In other words, memory, like CPU cores, should go dormant when not needed in order to conserve power as well, and of course there is the memory bandwidth issue as well.
Apparently, blind people also experience deja vu, which makes the theory unlikely.
And people without left hands have their left index finger itch from time to time.
I dont quite see the need to go to complicated explanations for deja vu; the human brain is one huge neural network, false positives and random matches should be expected. Without a certain fuzziness in temporal recognition, we'd be unable to ever recognize any repetetive event as every repeat would cause slightly differing levels of synaptic activation, depending on the totality of sensory input and internal state.
The amazing thing is rather that it functions as well as it does, minimizing both false positives and negatives, although perhaps erring a bit more on the negative side for the average person.
Phenomena like deja vu are still pretty interesting and these things do bring the marriage between science and religion.
Personally, I have not really experienced deja vu, but I have had things where I've met people and they have met me and they feel as though we have met before. I've had epiphanies. I've experienced really weird stuff under the influence of psychedelics. Twins and close family members have reported memories or visions at a distance kind of stuff.
I don't really know what is real sometimes or if it really matters. I can lie to people and get a huge emotional response as if the lie was true, so it appears as though its real, its real I guess. Its also interesting that many people don't want to know what is real vs an illusion or whatever. We remove the price tags from stuff when we give something to somebody. We tell white lies all the time. We have to beat around the bush about something where everybody else knows the facts but one guy.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
-- Albert Einstein
I'm still not sure though that I would put Google into the same category as the old research companies of the Cold War era. Google's stuff is good, and it's definitely innovative, but in many cases it looks less like actual new knowledge development than just new and different ways of recombining existing stuff.
True and untrue.
Google is different than any other company that I know of in that they started as a research kind of project and still focus on that but they also seem to be able to be a publicly traded company that can put out profitable products and services almost as a by product of said research.
They have not been bought nor have they put their research in the back room, but as a forefront of what they do.
Bell labs did amazing stuff, same with Xerox PARC, etc. But AFAIK, the research was not their focus. Bell came out of telephones. A new technology at the time, but (again AFAIK) they were focused on furthering this invention. Xerox started with copiers, again a new technology, and furthered that with research.
Google, although their products are not really innovative, their method of making their products is. Searching is nothing new. Email is nothing new. Maps, directions, advertising, none of this is new. But their focus on the pure geek factor of being obsessed with how to make this stuff better, giving away tons of stuff for free or at least free of charge, and collecting profits from their popularity as an afterthought.
Their primary activity is searching. A seemingly trivial activity on the surface. But it has coined a word (Google as a verb) like Xerox (as a noun) did for a copy of something, but the difference is that Xerox copies were new to the world and were horrible by any modern standards today. The first Xerox copies took like 5 or 10 minutes or so per page (all of this is from memory), then came out wet and could be smeared. And people were grateful! Thus the word Xerox was born.
But Yahoo!, Altavista, and other search mechanisms of the day existed, but none of them became synonymous with the word search like Google has.
On most UNIX systems, if there is no more memory to give then malloc() fails (returns NULL) and you can then try freeing memory elsewhere and trying again, or go into some recovery mode (typically make sure everything is saved and then quit).
On Linux, if there is no more memory to give, then a random process is terminated.
Actually, on most UNIX systems (and Linux) today, this is not true. Recently, I have only seen malloc() return NULL when there are explicit resource limits on the memory that a process via limit or ulimit or some other way to ensure that a process does not go beyond an arbitrary amount.
What I have seen is that malloc() will return a pointer, and the OS will not actually give the memory to the app until its actually needed. And in the event of the machine running out of memory, the OS will slap the application with an OOM exception.
Sure, there are similarities and differences between using a cell vs a radio, but I believe that the current cell implementation is much, much worse.
Similarities, people can be distracted while fiddling with cells and radios. More so with changing a CD than changing the station. But it pretty much stops there.
Cell phone conversations while driving seem to be increasing and the radio is pretty much a constant. Cell phone users while driving often appear (and statistically are similar) to drunk drivers. Actually, they drive worse because drunk drivers are more careful because they are scared of being caught. They often drive below the speed limit and/or speed of traffic. They make erratic and impulsive turns. They don't stay in their lanes. They are more engaged in their conversation than driving. The list goes on.
I would bet that my cell phone driver vs drunk driver detection skills have a ratio of about 10:1 probably closer to 50:1.
Now, with the new Google offering. Close but no cigar.
I've been talking about a new p2p user contributed realtime traffic, police, roadblock, etc monitoring system with a good UI that "just works".
To me, that would be excellent, and will happen. Kinda like the CBs of yesteryear, but more 2006ish.
Tried to get a gym membership lately? Oh wait..this is Slashdot..anyway..They try to lock you into these multi-year contracts at a very high price. Imagine having to pay $50 a month for three years. Can you honestly say that three years from now you'll live in the same area and still be making the most out of their services?
What about a cell phone? Most of them have massive early-termination fees.
OK. I'm looking at renting for a while vs home ownership for various reasons. I'm a little upset because you can't "rent", but rather lease with the option to get screwed. But then, I realized two things. 1) Leases are there to benefit the leaser. 2) Leases do have provisions to get out of them, one is getting a job in another area.
So, in the past I have done things before at great PITA and whatnot to get around these leases and whatnot. Believe it or not, there are circumstances in life that do not happen around arbitrary dates. So, what I recommend is simply finding out exactly what is required to satisfy breaking a lease or otherwise good for them and bad for you "agreements", and doing what they want to benefit you.
On my next lease, I will simply ask ahead of time that I'm looking at relocating for my job and asking them if that were to be the case, what I could do to break the lease. Usually, there is a window of notice that they want, like 30-60 days or similar. I'm going to follow their instructions to a tee, but the only catch, is that the company I may be working for simply does not exist yet.
Is this moral? Well, about as moral as I have done where I moved out at the end of my lease and put my junk in storage and shacked up with friends for a while at their inconvenience. Are they going to check with the nonexistent company? Nope. Have the leasers benefitted in the past and will they in the future by people's lease agreements? Yup.
There are many things in life that are variable. I'm a clean, quiet person that pays his bills on time, and I have had leasers tell me that I was a great tenant. I understand why they have these lease things, but I also don't like how rigid they are on 12 month cycles when few other things in life, especially having a place to live is that regular. So, I have no qualms being a good tenant, and then modifying a 12 month lease into a 15 one or 10 if it suits me better and I follow their rules. If I had more money just to throw away at rules and I enjoyed that, then I would. But I don't.
Oh, now with cell phones NEVER sign more than a month agreement with them. Go prepaid or shop around. I know of no other business that rips people off for substandard quality of service (Can you hear me now????) on 1-2 year contract basis. Gym memberships and leases are manageable, and they often have other options like going month-to-month at a slightly higher rate, but with cell phones, you simply lose. I get pissed off at people that succumb to their whims because the thing is that it is telling businesses that people are willing to agree to substandard quality with the option to get screwed in the end.
NEVER EVER agree to a contract where there is no semi-immoral way to get out of it. It makes no sense.
Damn misleading headlines! I thought this was a 12-step plan to recover from using Microsoft products!
1) We admitted we were powerless over competition, laws, and other people - that everyone's lives had become unmanageable without our software.
2) Came to believe that trying harder would perpetuate the insanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our back on God as we understood him.
4) Made a searching and scary inventory of our competition.
5) Admitted to God to ourselves and to the human race where the competition was wrong.
6) Were entirely ready to eliminate said competition.
7) Proudly asked the world, "Where do you want to go today?"
8) Made a list of how all competition has hurt us and became willing to defeat them all.
9) Bought, FUDed, or destroyed all competition wherever possible except when to do so would benefit them, ourselves, or anybody else.
10) Continued to take the competition's inventory, and when they were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to improve our bottom line.
12) Having taken over the world and eliminated all possibilities of competition and well-being, we tried to keep up the good work, but succumbed to our own greed and stagnation.
Operating systems need to by default deny the right to execute.
/. without getting slammed, but when are people going to give up the drama and just use an OS that suits their wants and needs or shut the fuck up and deal with viruses, crashes, lagging development and features, horrible UI, and all that.
Hmm. Like Linux/UNIX that does not store executable permissions on email attachments w/o user intervention? Like OS X's behavior to ask the user the first time they run an associated file with an app for the first time? Like viruses are a Microsoft problem, and not a feature of other OSes?
I can't ever seem to type the last question here on
No, there are no battered OS user shelters like battered wife shelters. No, there is not MA (Microsoft Anonymous), but today in 2006, OSes are almost a dime a dozen like microwaves and everything else. I've been MS free for quite some time, but I'm in the process of taking over a PC at work that has 2000 on it and it had mysterious popups, firefox would not work with the HP print server I was playing with (java issue or something). The admin of the box said that you still basically have to log in as Administrator to do anything. Just for fun, I clicked on the adaware icon, and it found 70-80 or so things on it. In order to get TCP/IP printing to work, you had to configure a local printer to look like a networked printer or something bassackwards like that.
I mean, this was my first MS OS adventure in over 5 years, and within a couple of hours I was reminded of why I simply do not go there. Aside from the specific issues I mentioned, sure I was able to click on crap and view the web and read email, but how tough is that to do on any computer today?
Before I started borrowing internet access from my kind neighbors, I implemented the following "security" measures. (In reality, they were obscurity measures).
1) Did not broadcast my SID.
2) Only allowed specific MACs to my WAP.
If I were to set up my own WAP in the future, I would leave it wide open like my friendly neighbors do today. They have taught me that its OK to share.
Not broadcasting a SID is a PITA sometimes. Adding new/guest computers to my WAP is a PITA. Using my neighbors wide open WAP for free? Priceless.
Suppose a known sex offender began moving child porn over YOUR wireless network.
And the ISP has no problem with this, and if you have some issues with this over YOUR wireless network AND you enabled encryption that was hacked, it would be probably more difficult to defend yourself than having a wide open WAP.
As a potential hacker I launched 4 viruses and downloaded 4 gigs of MP3's using your network.
All traceable back to you.
I spoofed my mac address
So?
I did the same thing from the coffee shop that had a big sign out front that said "Free Wireless Internet!"
And I spoofed your mac address.
They shouldn't be using computers at all.
Brilliant business plan. I'm sure Microsoft, Sun, RedHat, and every other computer related company shares this belief but believes that the bottom line of $$$ outweighs the pimply faced mentality of l33715m.
Step 3: Call customer support and/or complain around the water cooler about how crappy the WAP from company XYZ is.
WAP companies are in the business of selling WAPs. Security is only provided to increase sales for those that care, they could care less about your data or connection being secure. Wireless phones offer zero encryption AFAIK because there is no business model for it.
Personally I would like a waterproof bulletproof encrypted free telephone, but nobody will give me one.
We found at one point that we had almost double the number of registered users on our network, simply because people had open WAPs. Rather than having a bunch of non-tennants using the internet for free, we just enforced encryption policies. Mostly it just made more work for me...
As far as I know, this is the point of the article, but the parent post and the company (s)he/it works for took it upon themselves to ensure their business vs going to the legislators.
My point, is that the taking care of it oneself is the proper way of doing things. I believe there should be laws and regulations out there, but I also believe that they should be as general and non-specific as possible. Laws against theft, infringement, trespass, etc are general. Securing a WAP via XYZ encryption when a.b number of people are in c.d distance from said WAP to protect business G is not a law that benefits anybody besides G for some unspecified time limit and the legislators. Basically, everybody else loses, and rinse and repeat when a new technology comes out.
I'm proudly posting this via one of many unsecured WAPs around me. About 100% of the reason I'm doing this is because my previous broadband provider screwed up and I lost my internet access when I canceled cable TV. I also pay these people extra every month for an unlisted phone number so I don't get phone spam, and these people paid a company across the country to spy on me via the phone under the guise of an independent marketing survey group, where they asked like two generic stupid questions (Have you ever had broadband internet?) and then asked me "Why did you cancel your broadband connection with company X?" I got furious and I feel 100% justified to borrow internet from the same people for free for a while at the inconvenience of a little slower access due to dropped wireless packets and having to pick the best open WAP for the weather and time of day or whatever variables make me switch around.
Business is strictly supply and demand. I demand something more at this time to pay for internet access, and I'm content doing what I'm doing at this time, and the poor broadband company is losing because of things they have done. This is a business matter, not a legal one.
Make your vote!!!! Buy this shitty song.
I'm all against DRM as the next guy, but how long will the fad of just buying crap because its DRM free last?
Kinda like selling air or water, but hey, water is more expensive than soda at a fast food place, so somebody must know something I don't.
OTH TV is free, and people pay for cable because of the better reception, number and variety of channels, etc. I can already get gigs of DRM free MP3s with little to no effort right now. Its just that the quality and selection does not appeal to me, and neither does a $2 pop track.
From the last line in the article:
The removal of San Andreas from most retailers' shelves followed by a re-rating of the title resulted in a loss of nearly $25 million.
Ouch!
Re:please explain
I second the motion.
WTF? Being a good slashdotter, I did not read the article before checking out the posts, and then I read the parent post and had to check this out for myself.
So, for $2 I can have my name embedded somehow in a music file of Jessica Simpson? Maybe having her titties embedded in my face, I might throw down $2, but after reading the two links, I still don't see what the extra $1 gives me over a standard $1 track.
I'm all for the token statement against DRM. Its dead on. Yes, DRM free stuff is sold every day. Yes, its still practically illegal or at least easier and better to get MP3s the old fashioned way that are free of DRM. But I have no clue what the point of this Yahoo! thing is besides a slashvertisement astroturfing or whatever you call marketing today.
How many people went through the 80's with a blinking 12:00 clock on the VCR because it was "too hard to set"?
Not fair.
Why did the lazy designers have the thing blink 12:00? My microwave does a solid ":" when the power goes out, and it "too hard to set" being that I have a battery powered analog clock* on the wall that is clearly a better clock than my microwave.
Now the lazy designers got the clock thing right on my DVR. It automatically synchronizes itself, and I can record stuff without tapes, all episodes across channels of a certain show, all kinds of goodness. I probably recorded less than 50-100 hours of stuff on a VCR, and often I did not watch the stuff because I was too lazy. Now with my DVR, I always have about 80 hours of stuff on the box at a time, but I still don't watch all of it, but I have the choice, and new stuff keeps coming on it.
* actually its quartz digital with an analog display
I give up. Where??
One common example:
Said by Captain Koons (Cristopher Walkan) in Pulp Fiction.
But I agree with the other comments that find it silly to blame the iPods.
Theft is kinda interesting. The key features of theft are 1) ease of stealing said object 2) "street value" and "time to market" of said object and 3) frequency of object occurring "in the wild". 4) visibility of said object.
I don't have the data available, but the likelihood of a car stereo is much more likely than a home stereo being stolen. Cars are more likely to be stolen than houses. Car stereos in things like boats are less likely than a car stereo in a car. Also, thieves are pretty lazy. They are much more likely to steal something in their 'hood or where they go about their normal travels vs commuting to a place where the goods are better and actually easier to steal.
Value of things is very relative. iPods are to some degree "to blame" for these street crimes because they fit all 4 of my criteria for a hot item.
Why is being murdered with a gun somehow worse than being murdered by having your brains smashed out of your skull with a blunt object?
Actually, being murdered with a gun is usually better than being murdered by a blunt object. Guns are quicker, less painful, and all that. Its a fairly nice way to be murdered.
In all seriousness though, the societal differences are all skewed towards the old fashioned way of murder, blunt objects. Why?
Blunt objects require close proximity for the murder to happen.
Its much easier to defend yourself against a blunt object, especially if the person holding the thing is smaller, slower, and or/weaker than you.
For many reasons, the death to desire to kill ratio when a gun is involved vs a blunt object is very skewed towards the gun.
Guns are nice to have around for things like revolutions though. Blunt objects just don't "cut" it anymore.
Alcoholics and nicotine addicts can get help.
Hmm, I never considered prison "help". DWI, which is a part of alcoholism, is a felony and/or death sentence in many states/countries in the world. Timothy Leary, who was able to clear the drug laws in the US because of their original unconstitutionality, has been arrested for smoking a cigarette. http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/94q2/leary.html
Gamblers and crackheads are stigmatised as criminals, and help is not nearly so easy to come by.
Nobody likes a crackhead, even a crackhead. I don't understand gambling even though I have an addictive personality. Its the physical part that is the bitch for me to get over. Not gambling will not kill you. Stopping drinking can and does kill people.
Oh, and gamblers have ripped off alcoholics method of getting a better life as well as people that fuck too much, do drugs, cocaine, and even those that are 'addicted' to hanging out with such people.