It's a pity the original poster felt a need to tell us that a kilometer was 0.62 mile. Are Americans so unaware of metric units that even slashdotters need to be reminded of the conversion back to English units? With most of the rest of the world using the MKS (metric) system, it's just a shame that Americans have been too stubborn and incapable of adopting it as well.
Red Hat has succeeded at becoming the largest Linux company. This isn't an accident. They have (wisely, IMHO) chosen to pursue large corporate customers by offering a well-supported, well-tested, reliable distribution. They realize that if they are going to get in the door of any Fortune 500 companies, they need to talk the talk and walk the walk.
We do want Linux used by big companies, right? Because if the answer is "no", then Linux isn't really going anyway profitable.... So when Red Hat succeeds, we should at least supply a small applause whether or not we personally use their distro. The more PCs that run (any version of) Linux, the less there are that run Microsoft. Isn't that a good thing?
I'm a former Solaris software developer and sysadm. I use Windows systems and a Red Hat 7.3 system at my home office. I can handle pretty much all the Linux speedbumps that newbies have to contend with. But I feel I still need most of my systems to be Windows, in spite of my strong distaste for it. Why?
The main reasons are:
Virtaully all the hardware and software that you can buy at a large consumer electronics store like Fry's or Best Buy will install and run with no problems on Windows. Much of it will work on Macs. Precious little will work on Linux. This isn't to say that there aren't great alternatives (software anyway) for Linux. Indeed there are, and in many cases the free Linux software is better than commercial. But what doesn't exist is simple plug-and-play for things like MFC printers, USB 2 disks, Adobe Photoshop. For sure, there are, to some extent, alternatives. But in many cases they either aren't easy to find, or don't work on any but the latest Linux. In some cases (e.g., Microsoft Project, some IPSec VPN clients, Musicmatch) there aren't good options, including WINE.
This is sort of a catch 22, because vendors won't develop software & hardware for Linux until at least one Linux distribution gets at least as many end users as Apple's Macintosh. With the Linux market being so fragmented, it's unlikely that will happen soon, UnitedLinux notwithstanding.
Another major stumbling block is that even a GUI like KDE that most Linux savants would consider really simple is still way to complex for non technical users. One company, Lindows, is trying to address this and may have some luck. But until there is a way to make "the linux GUI" as "simple" and familiar as the MS one, people will remain gun shy.
Sorry, but this is just the way things are. I love Linux and personally prefer command line work over point & click. And I thrive on technical challenges. But 99% of *real* home users don't, and in the work world, no CIO is going to propose switching his company to Linux on the desktop until it's a *lot* simpler to user (by end users) and manage (by the IT support group).
Sorry. This is not a tragedy. The attacks on the WTC were a tragedy. The genocides in Africa were a tragedy. This is a setback. The DMCA will eventually be overturned or supplanted by less restrictive legislation. DeCSS is still available is some nooks and crannies of the Internet. Eventually a stronger case will emerge, and hopefully a new president will be appointing less right wing judges. But for now we need to accept this decision as a defeat, a setback to be sure, and move on.
The only thing that has a hope of reducing SPAM is punitive legislation. This would be legislation that imposes heavy fines on people who send out mass amounts of unsolicited commercial email. Unfortunately, Congress, at least this Congress, will never pass such laws. It's likely that no future Congress will either as the Direct Mail Marketers, close cousins to SPAMMERS, have too strong a lobby. Therefore, the best defenses will remain the technological ones: individual filters, procmail, products that intercept SPAM before users receive it, and anti SPAM forwarders like www.despammed.com.
Enron will be running NASA. The Shuttle will be covered with advertisements and astronauts will have to carry coins to purchase oxygen from an onboard dispenser.
Risk-Assessment Expert Explains
The Danger of U.S.'s Terror Fight
By MARC CHAMPION
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
LONDON -- Suppose that, courtesy of a time machine, you happened to be standing on the beach where the first fish struggled on to dry land from the ocean about 200 million years ago, and you clobbered it over the head. Mankind might never have existed.
"That fish might have been an unprepossessing brute, but think of the extraordinary potential that would have been lost," says Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal and one of the world's leading authorities on the development of the cosmos, which he calls evolution before Darwin.
Lately, this kind of question has been occupying Sir Martin's thoughts a lot. In his opinion, the risk that mankind could soon send itself into extinction or regression is rising fast -- no time machine required. The University of Cambridge professor finds that the current focus on the war against international terrorism and on threats posed by the kinds of terrorist groups that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on America are about the most obvious danger that Western society faces.
[[go to world economic forum]]
"What really worries me is that in 10 or 20 years, the kind of thing that can be done by terrorist cells now will be in the power of single, technically proficient weirdos," Sir Martin says in an interview. He explains that this will be the result of the rapid democratization of scientific information through the Internet, combined with advances in microbiology and genetics. He thinks that thousands or even millions of people could soon have access to technologies capable of causing mass epidemics, a proliferation as difficult to eliminate as the illegal drug trade.
The 59-year old mathematician and astrophysicist is so worried by this prospect that he is working on new a book called "Our Last Century? The 50/50 Chance of Survival." His previous six books and 500 research papers have dealt more with the nature of cosmological phenomena such as black holes.
Sir Martin will bring his pessimistic take on future risks to the World Economic Forum in New York this week. There, on Friday, he will help lead a workshop -- "Science: A Source of Security or Vulnerability?" -- together with a nuclear physicist and a specialist in artificial intelligence among others. It is Sir Martin's hope that world leaders will take action to reduce the risks he plans to outline.
Sir Martin admits that dealing daily with a big picture that spans billions of years "does give one a different perspective." But before condemning him to history's long list of disappointed doomsayers, it is worth looking at Sept. 11's events from an astrophysicist's point of view.
As Sir Martin explains in a recently published book -- "Our Cosmic Habitat" -- about 13 billion years ago there was nothing but hydrogen and energy. Then, at some instant there was the "big bang" from which expanded, in a vast burst of heat and energy, all the stars and planets that eventually would form the cosmos we are familiar with today. About four billion years ago, as the surface of our planet was cooling, the first living monocellular organism appeared. It then took another three billion years to produce the first tiny multicellular organism, the basic building block of complex life. In other words, it seems to have been extremely difficult and wholly unpredictable that life should have begun and developed as it has.
By comparison, if thousands of people should in 10 or 20 years time have access to the technology needed to build weapons of mass destruction, the odds look high that one or more deranged loners, cultists, mischief makers or terrorists might use it.
"Risk calculations are changing all the time," Sir Martin says at the rambling 18th-century farmhouse where he lives amid peaceful fields that tumble down to the Cam river. "For example, before Sept. 11, anyone wanting to work out the probability that a jumbo jet would land on top of a nuclear power station would have come to someone like me, who would have figured out how often jumbo jets crash, how big the area is and so on. They would likely have come up with a probability of less than once every million years. The knowledge that someone may do it on purpose has changed all that. You'd have to be an optimist now to come up with a probability of less than once in 100 years."
For all its unpredictability and horror, Sept. 11 wasn't the cause, but a symptom of what concerns Sir Martin. It was April of last year, when he first tried to find a publisher for "Our Last Century?" -- months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He recalls that it was a miserable, gray day; the London Underground was on strike; and foot-and-mouth disease was ravaging livestock across Britain's countryside. He found no publishers interested in the book. "They didn't think anyone would read it, because it was just too depressing," Sir Martin says.
However, the events of Sept. 11 have changed perceptions. Sir Martin now has a publisher for his book and hopes that even though he can't see a solution to the risk of future calamities, governments can take action in order to minimize them.
These actions wouldn't include rolling back technological progress, the Internet or globalization. "I think it is inexorable that we will learn more and that the benefits will outweigh the risks," Sir Martin says. But there is still plenty that Western governments, and the U.S. in particular, can do.
They could get serious, if belatedly, about helping Russia to dismantle its nuclear weapons and protect its stockpile of fissile material, Sir Martin says. They could do more to alleviate extreme inequalities of wealth between and within nations, which he believes contribute to a climate of desperation and resentment that fosters terrorist groups and disaffected loners. Furthermore, they could create and enforce strict regimes to regulate and inspect biological weapons, as well as the use of experimental biotechnology.
There are other implications to draw from Sir Martin's vision of expanding risk created by the proliferation of technology. For example, U.S. President Bush's administration's focus on nuclear-missile defense makes little sense to Sir Martin. A "dirty" bomb, created by wrapping radioactive material around explosives, is in his view a far more likely threat, because almost anyone could deliver it and do so anonymously.
Similarly, he believes that Sept. 11 will liberate the West from the dangerous illusion that Western values are universal, and that people around the globe are motivated primarily by economics, rather than religion or other cultural imperatives. "Western society is quite atypical," says Sir Martin. "It is the only society where the most grandiose buildings are economic -- banks and corporate headquarters and the like," Sir Martin says.
If saving Western civilization from possible harm isn't enough of an imperative to motivate the policy makers who will be attending this year's World Economic Forum, then Sir Martin can offer another reason why governments should put aside narrow interests to address the risks that he believes the world now faces. "What if we are unique?" asks Sir Martin, who describes himself as undecided on the issue of whether we are alone in the cosmos.
Given how difficult it was for complex life to emerge on Earth, it is quite possible that we are alone and therefore unique to the universe. "In that case we do not have to take our cosmic modesty too far," says Sir Martin. "The future of life on earth and beyond in the universe would depend on what we do in the next century."
The statement was neither racist nor unfounded. While there is certainly high quality software that has come from Europe, both commercial and GNU/FSF, I'd be willing to bet that at least 80 - 90 per cent of the software that runs on the world's servers and desktops originated in the US. And some software that didn't technically originate in the US, e.g., the "original" CERN browser, was developed by a US citizen working in Switzerland, and was later commercialized in the US by Netscape.
So, I'm claiming that a large majority of the world's most important and creative software has been developed in the US; I'm not slighting the European community or any country where creative software developers live and work. There's lots of software from Europe that I use and love, but the fact is that most of what's on my desktops and servers at home and at work is "made in the US".
Software development moving "offshore" to India and now China is repeating a pattern that has occured in several other US industries. One closest to software is microelectronics. In the 1970s into the mid 1980s, major US firms like Intel, Motorola, and National Semiconductor were making lots of memory chips. The Japanese, Taiwanese and eventually South Koreans essentially took that business away by being able to learn the technology and develop less expensive manufacturing processes (in part using lower paid staff). Now Intel, AMD, National Semi, and the rest manufacture only the most complex chips domestically, i.e., CPUs and other specialized designs. Even Japan has ceded some of the memory chip market to the Koreans and Chinese.
If there's a moral here, it's that the highest paying jobs are those that involve the most creativity, intelligence and freedom, and can only exist in a stable political and economic environment. Right now, recent events not withstanding, that's still by and large the US (and some European countries). [Still cosidering outsourcing that software development project to India when they are close to war with Pakistan?] So, if the US (and Europe) is to maintain its current position, we all need to get smart and keep smart and keep pushing for public and privately funded activities that foster and reward creativity and prevent established monopolies (won't mention any names here!) from dominating markets and stiffling innovation.
Safeweb performed a nice service, but it was hardly free. Safeweb was a major "cookie spammer". Anyone who visitied Safeweb got an enormous amount of cookies, all leading to the loss of privacy that Safeweb was allegedly protecting!
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pity the original poster felt a need to tell us that a kilometer was 0.62 mile. Are Americans so unaware of metric units that even slashdotters need to be reminded of the conversion back to English units? With most of the rest of the world using the MKS (metric) system, it's just a shame that Americans have been too stubborn and incapable of adopting it as well.
Red Hat has succeeded at becoming the largest Linux company. This isn't an accident. They have (wisely, IMHO) chosen to pursue large corporate customers by offering a well-supported, well-tested, reliable distribution. They realize that if they are going to get in the door of any Fortune 500 companies, they need to talk the talk and walk the walk.
We do want Linux used by big companies, right? Because if the answer is "no", then Linux isn't really going anyway profitable.... So when Red Hat succeeds, we should at least supply a small applause whether or not we personally use their distro. The more PCs that run (any version of) Linux, the less there are that run Microsoft. Isn't that a good thing?
I'm a former Solaris software developer and sysadm. I use Windows systems and a Red Hat 7.3 system at my home office. I can handle pretty much all the Linux speedbumps that newbies have to contend with. But I feel I still need most of my systems to be Windows, in spite of my strong distaste for it. Why?
The main reasons are:
Virtaully all the hardware and software that you can buy at a large consumer electronics store like Fry's or Best Buy will install and run with no problems on Windows. Much of it will work on Macs. Precious little will work on Linux. This isn't to say that there aren't great alternatives (software anyway) for Linux. Indeed there are, and in many cases the free Linux software is better than commercial. But what doesn't exist is simple plug-and-play for things like MFC printers, USB 2 disks, Adobe Photoshop. For sure, there are, to some extent, alternatives. But in many cases they either aren't easy to find, or don't work on any but the latest Linux. In some cases (e.g., Microsoft Project, some IPSec VPN clients, Musicmatch) there aren't good options, including WINE.
This is sort of a catch 22, because vendors won't develop software & hardware for Linux until at least one Linux distribution gets at least as many end users as Apple's Macintosh. With the Linux market being so fragmented, it's unlikely that will happen soon, UnitedLinux notwithstanding.
Another major stumbling block is that even a GUI like KDE that most Linux savants would consider really simple is still way to complex for non technical users. One company, Lindows, is trying to address this and may have some luck. But until there is a way to make "the linux GUI" as "simple" and familiar as the MS one, people will remain gun shy.
Sorry, but this is just the way things are. I love Linux and personally prefer command line work over point & click. And I thrive on technical challenges. But 99% of *real* home users don't, and in the work world, no CIO is going to propose switching his company to Linux on the desktop until it's a *lot* simpler to user (by end users) and manage (by the IT support group).
Sorry. This is not a tragedy. The attacks on the WTC were a tragedy. The genocides in Africa were a tragedy. This is a setback. The DMCA will eventually be overturned or supplanted by less restrictive legislation. DeCSS is still available is some nooks and crannies of the Internet. Eventually a stronger case will emerge, and hopefully a new president will be appointing less right wing judges. But for now we need to accept this decision as a defeat, a setback to be sure, and move on.
The only thing that has a hope of reducing SPAM is punitive legislation. This would be legislation that imposes heavy fines on people who send out mass amounts of unsolicited commercial email. Unfortunately, Congress, at least this Congress, will never pass such laws. It's likely that no future Congress will either as the Direct Mail Marketers, close cousins to SPAMMERS, have too strong a lobby. Therefore, the best defenses will remain the technological ones: individual filters, procmail, products that intercept SPAM before users receive it, and anti SPAM forwarders like www.despammed.com.
Enron will be running NASA. The Shuttle will be covered with advertisements and astronauts will have to carry coins to purchase oxygen from an onboard dispenser.
Risk-Assessment Expert Explains
The Danger of U.S.'s Terror Fight
By MARC CHAMPION
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
LONDON -- Suppose that, courtesy of a time machine, you happened to be standing on the beach where the first fish struggled on to dry land from the ocean about 200 million years ago, and you clobbered it over the head. Mankind might never have existed.
"That fish might have been an unprepossessing brute, but think of the extraordinary potential that would have been lost," says Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal and one of the world's leading authorities on the development of the cosmos, which he calls evolution before Darwin.
Lately, this kind of question has been occupying Sir Martin's thoughts a lot. In his opinion, the risk that mankind could soon send itself into extinction or regression is rising fast -- no time machine required. The University of Cambridge professor finds that the current focus on the war against international terrorism and on threats posed by the kinds of terrorist groups that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on America are about the most obvious danger that Western society faces.
[[go to world economic forum]]
"What really worries me is that in 10 or 20 years, the kind of thing that can be done by terrorist cells now will be in the power of single, technically proficient weirdos," Sir Martin says in an interview. He explains that this will be the result of the rapid democratization of scientific information through the Internet, combined with advances in microbiology and genetics. He thinks that thousands or even millions of people could soon have access to technologies capable of causing mass epidemics, a proliferation as difficult to eliminate as the illegal drug trade.
The 59-year old mathematician and astrophysicist is so worried by this prospect that he is working on new a book called "Our Last Century? The 50/50 Chance of Survival." His previous six books and 500 research papers have dealt more with the nature of cosmological phenomena such as black holes.
Sir Martin will bring his pessimistic take on future risks to the World Economic Forum in New York this week. There, on Friday, he will help lead a workshop -- "Science: A Source of Security or Vulnerability?" -- together with a nuclear physicist and a specialist in artificial intelligence among others. It is Sir Martin's hope that world leaders will take action to reduce the risks he plans to outline.
Sir Martin admits that dealing daily with a big picture that spans billions of years "does give one a different perspective." But before condemning him to history's long list of disappointed doomsayers, it is worth looking at Sept. 11's events from an astrophysicist's point of view.
As Sir Martin explains in a recently published book -- "Our Cosmic Habitat" -- about 13 billion years ago there was nothing but hydrogen and energy. Then, at some instant there was the "big bang" from which expanded, in a vast burst of heat and energy, all the stars and planets that eventually would form the cosmos we are familiar with today. About four billion years ago, as the surface of our planet was cooling, the first living monocellular organism appeared. It then took another three billion years to produce the first tiny multicellular organism, the basic building block of complex life. In other words, it seems to have been extremely difficult and wholly unpredictable that life should have begun and developed as it has.
By comparison, if thousands of people should in 10 or 20 years time have access to the technology needed to build weapons of mass destruction, the odds look high that one or more deranged loners, cultists, mischief makers or terrorists might use it.
"Risk calculations are changing all the time," Sir Martin says at the rambling 18th-century farmhouse where he lives amid peaceful fields that tumble down to the Cam river. "For example, before Sept. 11, anyone wanting to work out the probability that a jumbo jet would land on top of a nuclear power station would have come to someone like me, who would have figured out how often jumbo jets crash, how big the area is and so on. They would likely have come up with a probability of less than once every million years. The knowledge that someone may do it on purpose has changed all that. You'd have to be an optimist now to come up with a probability of less than once in 100 years."
For all its unpredictability and horror, Sept. 11 wasn't the cause, but a symptom of what concerns Sir Martin. It was April of last year, when he first tried to find a publisher for "Our Last Century?" -- months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He recalls that it was a miserable, gray day; the London Underground was on strike; and foot-and-mouth disease was ravaging livestock across Britain's countryside. He found no publishers interested in the book. "They didn't think anyone would read it, because it was just too depressing," Sir Martin says.
However, the events of Sept. 11 have changed perceptions. Sir Martin now has a publisher for his book and hopes that even though he can't see a solution to the risk of future calamities, governments can take action in order to minimize them.
These actions wouldn't include rolling back technological progress, the Internet or globalization. "I think it is inexorable that we will learn more and that the benefits will outweigh the risks," Sir Martin says. But there is still plenty that Western governments, and the U.S. in particular, can do.
They could get serious, if belatedly, about helping Russia to dismantle its nuclear weapons and protect its stockpile of fissile material, Sir Martin says. They could do more to alleviate extreme inequalities of wealth between and within nations, which he believes contribute to a climate of desperation and resentment that fosters terrorist groups and disaffected loners. Furthermore, they could create and enforce strict regimes to regulate and inspect biological weapons, as well as the use of experimental biotechnology.
There are other implications to draw from Sir Martin's vision of expanding risk created by the proliferation of technology. For example, U.S. President Bush's administration's focus on nuclear-missile defense makes little sense to Sir Martin. A "dirty" bomb, created by wrapping radioactive material around explosives, is in his view a far more likely threat, because almost anyone could deliver it and do so anonymously.
Similarly, he believes that Sept. 11 will liberate the West from the dangerous illusion that Western values are universal, and that people around the globe are motivated primarily by economics, rather than religion or other cultural imperatives. "Western society is quite atypical," says Sir Martin. "It is the only society where the most grandiose buildings are economic -- banks and corporate headquarters and the like," Sir Martin says.
If saving Western civilization from possible harm isn't enough of an imperative to motivate the policy makers who will be attending this year's World Economic Forum, then Sir Martin can offer another reason why governments should put aside narrow interests to address the risks that he believes the world now faces. "What if we are unique?" asks Sir Martin, who describes himself as undecided on the issue of whether we are alone in the cosmos.
Given how difficult it was for complex life to emerge on Earth, it is quite possible that we are alone and therefore unique to the universe. "In that case we do not have to take our cosmic modesty too far," says Sir Martin. "The future of life on earth and beyond in the universe would depend on what we do in the next century."
The statement was neither racist nor unfounded. While there is certainly high quality software that has come from Europe, both commercial and GNU/FSF, I'd be willing to bet that at least 80 - 90 per cent of the software that runs on the world's servers and desktops originated in the US. And some software that didn't technically originate in the US, e.g., the "original" CERN browser, was developed by a US citizen working in Switzerland, and was later commercialized in the US by Netscape.
So, I'm claiming that a large majority of the world's most important and creative software has been developed in the US; I'm not slighting the European community or any country where creative software developers live and work. There's lots of software from Europe that I use and love, but the fact is that most of what's on my desktops and servers at home and at work is "made in the US".
Software development moving "offshore" to India and now China is repeating a pattern that has occured in several other US industries. One closest to software is microelectronics. In the 1970s into the mid 1980s, major US firms like Intel, Motorola, and National Semiconductor were making lots of memory chips. The Japanese, Taiwanese and eventually South Koreans essentially took that business away by being able to learn the technology and develop less expensive manufacturing processes (in part using lower paid staff). Now Intel, AMD, National Semi, and the rest manufacture only the most complex chips domestically, i.e., CPUs and other specialized designs. Even Japan has ceded some of the memory chip market to the Koreans and Chinese.
If there's a moral here, it's that the highest paying jobs are those that involve the most creativity, intelligence and freedom, and can only exist in a stable political and economic environment. Right now, recent events not withstanding, that's still by and large the US (and some European countries). [Still cosidering outsourcing that software development project to India when they are close to war with Pakistan?] So, if the US (and Europe) is to maintain its current position, we all need to get smart and keep smart and keep pushing for public and privately funded activities that foster and reward creativity and prevent established monopolies (won't mention any names here!) from dominating markets and stiffling innovation.
Safeweb performed a nice service, but it was hardly free. Safeweb was a major "cookie spammer". Anyone who visitied Safeweb got an enormous amount of cookies, all leading to the loss of privacy that Safeweb was allegedly protecting!