There is something that is routinely running in the background in Windows that isn't usually running in the background on OS X or Linux: virus checkers. Those aren't supposed to add up to much, but considering what they do, it wouldn't surprise me if they make it harder for the software to put the hardware to sleep for prolonged periods.
Supposed to or not, the virus checkers stomp the excrement out of pretty much every Windows system I come across, especially those that are routinely powered up and down, as every power-up seems to immediately launch a scan that makes the system almost (and sometimes more than almost) unusable for 5 minutes or more after booting. On a battery-powered device, that initial hit is enough to really front-end load the power drain to the point that even if normal operation was more power-efficient than other OS's, the savings would be negated.
I see you spoutin' off the same damn "math is harddddd" bullshit further upthread. If you don't know what you're talking about, just get out.
Just because we weren't magically gifted with the source for some code by the open source unicorn doesn't mean that these things can't be analyzed. It just takes a bit more determination to pin things down.
There's people out there that do that sort of thing, some for a living, some as a perverse hobby. Just because you don't understand how it can be done doesn't mean it's impossible.
Fortunately, you're right.
Unfortunately, most of us don't have time, inclination, and sometimes access rights to do that.
Yes, but they're doing *neat* things that we like them to be doing.
Windows is just doing... "things"....
Unfortunately, it's true. Obscenities like rundll32 and svchost mean you can't really tell what's chewing up your machine without installing special tools that can tell what the generic services are actually running.
At least with stuff like Java and python under Linux you can still get some idea of what app the vm is running with a simple "ps" command.
If you can't tell that I'm reading email, or surfing the web while interacting with others, that's a good thing. I don't want things intruding into my presence unless I ask for them though.
I realize that no technology is going to be flawless, but I can see some ways that our toys can be a little more considerate with the aid of a rule-based system.
First, I'd posit the definition of categories of importance: in-laws, boss, spouse, friends, pop-up reminders, emergency community services, and so forth.
Then I'd add another dimension: urgency. "I'm bored, amuse me", "By the way/FYI", "Don't forget the milk", "got no time for that", "Impending metor strike", etc.
Add in location: nowhere special, among friends, in transit, Funeral (someone else's), Intensive Care, Funeral (your own), TSA security line.
And on top of that, alert mechanisms: flash, vibrate, audible (quiet), audible to others.
Now link them all up. A little AI training, perhaps. Modulate with some Miss Manners for the socially clueless.
the question is, what is all that data being shared among multiple agencies? how fucking hard is it to verify the vast majority for eligibility? ssn? check. native born? check. irs can do that with one simple check with ssa. paid taxes? check. for others eligible, e.g. naturalized citizens and resident aliens, one more simple check with state or justice. done. it can all be done on income tax return. once verified, only need to check with ssa each year to make sure the covered persons are still alive. don't file? not eligible. easy. irs can do everything, so simple, even send out the 'insurance cards' every year..... if we had a simple, common sense, single payer system.
America is fast losing friends if this trend is continuing.
Not that long ago, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, North Koreans were painted as EVIL because America said so ~ and the world (mainly Europeans, plus many third world countries) generally subscribe to that view because the United States of America supposed to be trustworthy
Is America anymore trustworthy than the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, or North Koreans ?
There are those who paint Snowden as a traitor who has harmed the security of the USA for leaking information about the excesses of the NSA. Snowden, however, was not the first to speak up, nor is he likely to be the last. He was just the snowflake that triggered the avalanche. It WOULD have come out sooner or later - I forget if it's Ben Franklin or an old Russian adage that "3 men can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead", but sooner or later, truth leaks out. Just ask Richard Nixon.
The greatest enemy to the security and integrity of the USA hasn't been Snowden. He was just one of many messengers. The real enemy was the NSA itself. Had they simply done what they said they were doing, well it's an ugly business, but a necessary one. By grossly exceeding their mandate like a horde of rampaging Mongols, however, they have damaged the credibility and the moral authority of the USA in ways that will take a long, long, time to repair. If ever.
The deadliest words ever spoken in IT: "All You Have To Do Is..."
It's compounded by the fact that they're not only spoken by clueless users and pointy-haired bosses, but by the software people themselves. Who should have learned better at some point.
One of the most perverse things I've discovered over the years is the parts of the project that incur the bulk of the time, pain, and suffering aren't the arcane complex gnarly things. They're almost always easier and less trouble than expected. But entire days can be lost on something as simple as a misplaced comma.
Erh... that was the original idea of stock companies. You can't afford to build $huge_project, I can't and there's nobody who can. Hell, even we together cannot. But if we can find a few hundred or a few thousand people who're willing to invest a few bucks, we can pull it off.
It doesn't have to be that huge. I invested in a corporation that only had 7 shareholders and we didn't need that much money to start it. Just more than any one of us could comfortably part with.
Also, some very large privately-held corporations have less than a dozen shareholders, not being publicly traded.
He wasn't a third rate science fiction author though. Read his book Final Blackout, about the war in Europe. In 1939, he correctly predicted which country would use the first nuclear bomb in warfare. (Spoiler, it was the US.) Back in the heyday of scifi, he was one of the biggest names.
Also, if you consider he knew enough about the human mind, as well as society, that he created a really crazy set of beliefs and got people to accept them. There are plenty of crackpot false messiahs out there. Not many build a system like his, and have it survive so well after the messiah's death.
He built a fictional world, and got others to believe in it. That's what writers do. So, please, don't consider him to be just another third-rate science fiction author.
You don't have to be a good author to make an occasional accurate prediction. Some really bad books have done as much. And how much of his fame was due to a talent for self-promotion I don't know; I never considered him one of the "big names" in SF.
Actually, I've only read one of his works, which was a Battlefield Earth volume I chanced to pick off the library shelf years ago. The main character reminded me of how the power figures often behave in Phillip K. Dick novels: corrupt, venal, self-serving, not very competent and prone to panic when their little worlds fall apart. But usually one can identify with the villains in a PKD story. LRon's nemesis was just an idiot. I don't even remember what the book was about, beyond an alien warlord tasked with softening up the Earth for invasion but actually wasting time feathering his nest.
So I'd have to call his writing third-rate. Forgettable.
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
The last sentence here is the important one. And it means that, if you are either wealthy, or have a good job and no preexisting conditions (especially the kind that would stop you working for a bit) then you're better off in the USA. Or, to put it more cynically, US health insurance is a great deal, right up until the point where you need to make a claim.
You can delete the "no preexisting conditions" part of that. That evil Kenyan Socialist America-Hating Scum Obama already stole the right to refuse insurance for preexisting conditions as part of the earlier phases of ObamaCare.
A sure sign that the End Times are nigh. Or at least that's what certain congressthings were claiming this week.
The first computers were humans. There was no first programmer.
In terms of being a pioneer of formalizing and proving a nontrivial algorithm from axioms, Euclid can't get enough credit for his work like computing greatest common divisor. He was like the Knuth of the ancient world.
The term "computer" used to refer to humans, We can thank Babbage and Lovelace (among others) for turning it into a word meaning "computing machine".
Ah yes, I remember when I used to spend whole days at libraries, way back in the 20th century, before the World Wide Web existed.
Seriously, we have these things called computers, and books are on them now, including works of fiction for your reading pleasure.
Without free Internet access, libraries today would be nothing more than useless repositories of books that no one wants to read. Libraries don't even have a monopoly on free Internet access, either: many coffee shops also offer free Wi-Fi.
I've got to admit that I don't hit the library as often as I used to since I got an e-reader. But occasionally I want a book that's not a century old (Gutenberg) and I don't want to buy it. So I wander into the library and pick up something from the Dead Tree collection (DON'T speak to me about Overdrive!)
But libraries aren't just books and never were. I checked out a lot of records when I was in high school. More recently, I've checked out DVDs of movies. RedBox and Netflix can offer similar services, but I still scan the library shelves. Never know what may catch my eye.
Does the American Constitution prevents spying foreign countries?
I doubt it. I think we probably had foreign spies even while the Constitution was being written. Spying on citizens, however, probably wasn't something they would have approved of.
Then again, what the NSA is doing isn't spying, it's trawling.
It is, or will be, both, in this case. This is nothing new, even if it is pushed as "news." The way it works, if a company has records about you, those records do not belong to you.
I would argue that ANY information about me is as much or more mine as it is the company's. After, all, if I didn't exist, the information would be fictitious, and I no more expect to routinely give up full title to information because it's part of a business transaction than I would give up copyright because I shared information (an original work) with someone else.
Outside the intelligence sector, this has even been given some legal weight, in the form of the privacy notice requirements and opt-out rules.
For historical precedent, one W. Shakespeare: "He who steals my purse, steals trash..."
Next time, wait to use a manned line. Once you're through, complain about the long wait time to a manager.
That's not productive if my goal is to save time.
Instead, when it's convenient to do so, I shop at a different grocery store that hires enough staff that I don't have to wait in line. It's further from my home, though, so it only saves time if I am already in that area.
Whatever. When you go to Wal-Mart, you have to give up time while the security guard reviews the purchase anyway. Something I don't have to do because I don't shop in stores where customers are all considered thieves and the distance between the cashier and the door is considered an opportunity for Grand Larceny.
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There is something that is routinely running in the background in Windows that isn't usually running in the background on OS X or Linux: virus checkers. Those aren't supposed to add up to much, but considering what they do, it wouldn't surprise me if they make it harder for the software to put the hardware to sleep for prolonged periods.
Supposed to or not, the virus checkers stomp the excrement out of pretty much every Windows system I come across, especially those that are routinely powered up and down, as every power-up seems to immediately launch a scan that makes the system almost (and sometimes more than almost) unusable for 5 minutes or more after booting. On a battery-powered device, that initial hit is enough to really front-end load the power drain to the point that even if normal operation was more power-efficient than other OS's, the savings would be negated.
dude, do you even reverse-engineer?!
I see you spoutin' off the same damn "math is harddddd" bullshit further upthread. If you don't know what you're talking about, just get out.
Just because we weren't magically gifted with the source for some code by the open source unicorn doesn't mean that these things can't be analyzed. It just takes a bit more determination to pin things down.
There's people out there that do that sort of thing, some for a living, some as a perverse hobby. Just because you don't understand how it can be done doesn't mean it's impossible.
Fortunately, you're right.
Unfortunately, most of us don't have time, inclination, and sometimes access rights to do that.
Yes, but they're doing *neat* things that we like them to be doing.
Windows is just doing ... "things" ....
Unfortunately, it's true. Obscenities like rundll32 and svchost mean you can't really tell what's chewing up your machine without installing special tools that can tell what the generic services are actually running.
At least with stuff like Java and python under Linux you can still get some idea of what app the vm is running with a simple "ps" command.
"such as thermostats cannot believe they have free will while humans can."
Do thermostats really believe things?
That depends on which model you bought from Sirius Cybernetics.
If you can't tell that I'm reading email, or surfing the web while interacting with others, that's a good thing. I don't want things intruding into my presence unless I ask for them though.
I realize that no technology is going to be flawless, but I can see some ways that our toys can be a little more considerate with the aid of a rule-based system.
First, I'd posit the definition of categories of importance: in-laws, boss, spouse, friends, pop-up reminders, emergency community services, and so forth.
Then I'd add another dimension: urgency. "I'm bored, amuse me", "By the way/FYI", "Don't forget the milk", "got no time for that", "Impending metor strike", etc.
Add in location: nowhere special, among friends, in transit, Funeral (someone else's), Intensive Care, Funeral (your own), TSA security line.
And on top of that, alert mechanisms: flash, vibrate, audible (quiet), audible to others.
Now link them all up. A little AI training, perhaps. Modulate with some Miss Manners for the socially clueless.
It would be interesting to see how it worked.
the question is, what is all that data being shared among multiple agencies? how fucking hard is it to verify the vast majority for eligibility? ssn? check. native born? check. irs can do that with one simple check with ssa. paid taxes? check. for others eligible, e.g. naturalized citizens and resident aliens, one more simple check with state or justice. done. it can all be done on income tax return. once verified, only need to check with ssa each year to make sure the covered persons are still alive. don't file? not eligible. easy. irs can do everything, so simple, even send out the 'insurance cards' every year..... if we had a simple, common sense, single payer system.
Oh yes, I recognize you.
"All You Have To Do Is..."
Sadly the feds are probably more likely to listen to oracle.
Oracle wouldn't even exist if if wasn't for the Federal Government.
Of course the Feds will listen. Oracle has made an art form out of saying exactly what the Feds want to hear.
Who will be next ?
America is fast losing friends if this trend is continuing.
Not that long ago, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, North Koreans were painted as EVIL because America said so ~ and the world (mainly Europeans, plus many third world countries) generally subscribe to that view because the United States of America supposed to be trustworthy
Is America anymore trustworthy than the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Iranians, or North Koreans ?
There are those who paint Snowden as a traitor who has harmed the security of the USA for leaking information about the excesses of the NSA. Snowden, however, was not the first to speak up, nor is he likely to be the last. He was just the snowflake that triggered the avalanche. It WOULD have come out sooner or later - I forget if it's Ben Franklin or an old Russian adage that "3 men can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead", but sooner or later, truth leaks out. Just ask Richard Nixon.
The greatest enemy to the security and integrity of the USA hasn't been Snowden. He was just one of many messengers. The real enemy was the NSA itself. Had they simply done what they said they were doing, well it's an ugly business, but a necessary one. By grossly exceeding their mandate like a horde of rampaging Mongols, however, they have damaged the credibility and the moral authority of the USA in ways that will take a long, long, time to repair. If ever.
What exactly are you concerned about them loosing? Maybe some horrible monster they've been keeping in their basement? Or a bio-genetic plague?
Why can't you just tow the line and give him free reign? It passed the spell checker, isn't that all that counts?
You don't think you'll be able to turn it around in 20 years?
Not with this Congress..
With this Congress, the best thing that could happen to the planet would be a direct impact on Capitol Hill!
The deadliest words ever spoken in IT: "All You Have To Do Is..."
It's compounded by the fact that they're not only spoken by clueless users and pointy-haired bosses, but by the software people themselves. Who should have learned better at some point.
One of the most perverse things I've discovered over the years is the parts of the project that incur the bulk of the time, pain, and suffering aren't the arcane complex gnarly things. They're almost always easier and less trouble than expected. But entire days can be lost on something as simple as a misplaced comma.
Erh... that was the original idea of stock companies. You can't afford to build $huge_project, I can't and there's nobody who can. Hell, even we together cannot. But if we can find a few hundred or a few thousand people who're willing to invest a few bucks, we can pull it off.
It doesn't have to be that huge. I invested in a corporation that only had 7 shareholders and we didn't need that much money to start it. Just more than any one of us could comfortably part with.
Also, some very large privately-held corporations have less than a dozen shareholders, not being publicly traded.
He wasn't a third rate science fiction author though. Read his book Final Blackout, about the war in Europe. In 1939, he correctly predicted which country would use the first nuclear bomb in warfare. (Spoiler, it was the US.) Back in the heyday of scifi, he was one of the biggest names.
Also, if you consider he knew enough about the human mind, as well as society, that he created a really crazy set of beliefs and got people to accept them. There are plenty of crackpot false messiahs out there. Not many build a system like his, and have it survive so well after the messiah's death.
He built a fictional world, and got others to believe in it. That's what writers do. So, please, don't consider him to be just another third-rate science fiction author.
You don't have to be a good author to make an occasional accurate prediction. Some really bad books have done as much. And how much of his fame was due to a talent for self-promotion I don't know; I never considered him one of the "big names" in SF.
Actually, I've only read one of his works, which was a Battlefield Earth volume I chanced to pick off the library shelf years ago. The main character reminded me of how the power figures often behave in Phillip K. Dick novels: corrupt, venal, self-serving, not very competent and prone to panic when their little worlds fall apart. But usually one can identify with the villains in a PKD story. LRon's nemesis was just an idiot. I don't even remember what the book was about, beyond an alien warlord tasked with softening up the Earth for invasion but actually wasting time feathering his nest.
So I'd have to call his writing third-rate. Forgettable.
If I hadn't already commented, I'd give you +1 Funny for using the future tense when describe when the system is going to get owned.
And I'd mod the whole thread ironic, considering the number of zero-day exploits that have come up for Windows 7 and 8.
For society as a whole, we single payer countries tend to see better results. But per person, the healthcare in the US is the best. Assuming you have a good health insurance plan.
The last sentence here is the important one. And it means that, if you are either wealthy, or have a good job and no preexisting conditions (especially the kind that would stop you working for a bit) then you're better off in the USA. Or, to put it more cynically, US health insurance is a great deal, right up until the point where you need to make a claim.
You can delete the "no preexisting conditions" part of that. That evil Kenyan Socialist America-Hating Scum Obama already stole the right to refuse insurance for preexisting conditions as part of the earlier phases of ObamaCare.
A sure sign that the End Times are nigh. Or at least that's what certain congressthings were claiming this week.
Well <quack>Government doesn't create jobs</quack> so obviously all those people not working are imaginary.
But what if the rich investor^^W^WRupert Murdoch disagrees with something that his pet publication^W^W^W Fox News releases into the world?
Or let's go further back, since we're referencing Citizen Kane: How about Randolph ("Reefer Madness/Remember the Maine!") Hearst?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Give_a_Mouse_a_Cookie
But if you teach a mouse to make cookies...
The first computers were humans. There was no first programmer.
In terms of being a pioneer of formalizing and proving a nontrivial algorithm from axioms, Euclid can't get enough credit for his work like computing greatest common divisor. He was like the Knuth of the ancient world.
The term "computer" used to refer to humans, We can thank Babbage and Lovelace (among others) for turning it into a word meaning "computing machine".
Ah yes, I remember when I used to spend whole days at libraries, way back in the 20th century, before the World Wide Web existed.
Seriously, we have these things called computers, and books are on them now, including works of fiction for your reading pleasure.
Without free Internet access, libraries today would be nothing more than useless repositories of books that no one wants to read. Libraries don't even have a monopoly on free Internet access, either: many coffee shops also offer free Wi-Fi.
I've got to admit that I don't hit the library as often as I used to since I got an e-reader. But occasionally I want a book that's not a century old (Gutenberg) and I don't want to buy it. So I wander into the library and pick up something from the Dead Tree collection (DON'T speak to me about Overdrive!)
But libraries aren't just books and never were. I checked out a lot of records when I was in high school. More recently, I've checked out DVDs of movies. RedBox and Netflix can offer similar services, but I still scan the library shelves. Never know what may catch my eye.
the powers that be aren't going to let us go to war. It's bad for business.
Don't be silly. Going to war is great for business.
Just ask Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and Blackwater.
Does the American Constitution prevents spying foreign countries?
I doubt it. I think we probably had foreign spies even while the Constitution was being written. Spying on citizens, however, probably wasn't something they would have approved of.
Then again, what the NSA is doing isn't spying, it's trawling.
It is, or will be, both, in this case. This is nothing new, even if it is pushed as "news." The way it works, if a company has records about you, those records do not belong to you.
I would argue that ANY information about me is as much or more mine as it is the company's. After, all, if I didn't exist, the information would be fictitious, and I no more expect to routinely give up full title to information because it's part of a business transaction than I would give up copyright because I shared information (an original work) with someone else.
Outside the intelligence sector, this has even been given some legal weight, in the form of the privacy notice requirements and opt-out rules.
For historical precedent, one W. Shakespeare: "He who steals my purse, steals trash..."
The employees were probably only engineers, historically the "profession" with the least professional protection.
That's because you're talking about people too anti-social to form a professional organization and too "white collar" to consider unionizing.
Next time, wait to use a manned line. Once you're through, complain about the long wait time to a manager.
That's not productive if my goal is to save time.
Instead, when it's convenient to do so, I shop at a different grocery store that hires enough staff that I don't have to wait in line. It's further from my home, though, so it only saves time if I am already in that area.
Whatever. When you go to Wal-Mart, you have to give up time while the security guard reviews the purchase anyway. Something I don't have to do because I don't shop in stores where customers are all considered thieves and the distance between the cashier and the door is considered an opportunity for Grand Larceny.