As for technology fixing the problem... How do you know it won't? 100 years ago, they could have said the same... And been wrong. Nuclear was invented after that. No. 100 years ago the believed in divine right to "subjugate" the land. The world was seen to have boundless resources.
Every generation seems to think this is 'as good as it gets' and every generation has been proven wrong. No generation has been facing global environmental catastrophe and the decline of pretty much every major resource.
Our technology is still advancing faster than ever. Moore's law is expected to expire in 2019, and there's no new fabrication technology to replace cmos, and quantum computers are still a long ways off. Multicore and parallelism isn't a complete replacement.
Technology isn't a replacement for resources. It can help you make more efficient use of the resource you have, but it doesn't create them. As a global society, we (and here I mean the entire human race) is going to have to change the way we live, and it's going to be painful. Why? Because we're too lazy to make the very modest needed changes needed years ago, or even today. We wait until it's too late, and then we have to make a dramatic adjustment.
In my darkest days, I suspect the human race has 5,000 years left, 10,000 tops.
Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. You mean like... umm... I don't know... this entire universe of resources out there? Hate to break it to you, but even the entire universe doesn't have an infinite amount of resources. The universe will eventually run out of energy. Granted you have to wait until 10^150 years, but it will happen. By definition, that means that resources are unlimited, even given a perfectly efficient extraction method, which can't exist thanks to the second law of thermodynamics.
Now that the pedantic answer is out of the way, let's move on to more practical issues, like cost-effective and time tractable extraction of these Sagans of Joules of energy. When you come up plan to strip mine Andromeda or even Epsilon Eridani let me know.
What time is it where you are now? If it is dark enough, with few clouds, you might see a giant fuckin' chunk of those resources right up there in the sky. Its kinda hard to miss. Its big and shiny. People call it "The Moon". If the moon is so resource rich, how come we aren't mining it today? We can get there. We got there almost 40 years ago. The bookshelves are filled with how-tos on establishing a permanent presence on the moon. So why aren't we there now? How about the brutal fact that the moon doesn't have the resources we need.
Moon mining is about three things.
Making concrete
We have plenty of it already.
Extracting oxygen
We have plenty of it already.
Extracting Helium-3
Don't need it. Sure, if we had a fusion generator, then maybe, but we also already have a several rich terrestrial source of hydrogen, so why we would need to import Helium-3.
What do we need? Well right now, hydrocarbons. Can we get those from the moon? Nope. Sorry. The moon does not have a liquid center of sweet crude.
Sure. We should get off of our 19th century energy economy and move to something more sustainable and less ecologically destructive, but the sad truth is, we're still not close to doing that. Fusion is still a pipe dream. The newest fusion reactor is a whopping 8 megawatts, and can only run for 20 seconds. To call it, "not ready for primetime" would be a vast understatement. Other renewables still can't meet our energy needs, and those don't even require going to the freakin' moon.
Perhaps you should really stop and think before you say something, rather than just spouting off about your favorite 60 year old pulp scifi cliche, that was created as part of an "old west meets rocket ships" meme. You'd think the future would have moved beyond bulk extraction of non-renewable resources, but apparently not.
So if you are worried about stopping 9/11 again don't. That is pretty well taken care of. You're absolutely right. Before the modus operandi of a hijacking was to fly out of the country, sit on the tarmac for a few days, and then they'd either give up, or the plane would be stormed. If you were a passenger, just stay calm, sit back, and everything was going to eventually work out. After 9/11 the predominate thought, is "They're going to kill us all." Expect a lot more Shanksvilles when it comes to airline hijacking attempts.
Funny you mentioned that it's hard to sneak a weapon on the plane. If I remember correctly, the 9/11 hijackers used box cutters specifically because these types of knives were cleared through security. Which of course was a giant security hole that no one noticed. Of course now if you eat at an airport restaurant, you'll get a plastic knife and and a metal fork (DFW I'm looking at you!). Good thing forks aren't pointy.
If I was a terrorist wanting to strike the United States, or anywhere really, I'd go with a classic. Explosive belt. Granted it doesn't have the theatrics of 9/11, but you get to kill and maim infidels and there really isn't a way to defend against it. If there was, you'd think Israel would have found it by now.
California takes your right thumbprint when getting a driver's license, yet I've never been asked for my thumbprint at a traffic stop. So why is it needed?
You can't tell me that my thumbprint isn't in the Bat Crime Computer.
I also have very long extremely long and complex random password for my wpa wlan. Why? Because I'm paranoid that there's a guy in the apartment next door with machine that runs 24 hours a day just attempting to guess the network password. Why would I even think about this as a possibility? Because there was a point in my life when I would have done that very thing.
The guy that wrote the article about the C=64 obviously never used one. First off, the whole computer was the keyboard. That was a selling point. The extra symbols? They were there for graphics programming. The extra keys? They were there for programming.
All these "problems" and the guy misses the undeniable mistake of the C=64 keyboard. The punctuation marks were in nonstandard locations! Shift 2? quotes. Key right to the L? colon (shift colon? left bracket.
Yeah, and when you go from one user to two users you have 100% market gain. What's you're point?
Oh. You're trying to say that Linux is right around the corner. Well comeback when you've got something besides a zero to the left of the decimal point, like it's been for... well... ever.
Not exactly. They also care about ease of use, and Linux is not, nor has it ever been, easy.
I can hear the cries now. "Bbbut Linux is easy! You just have not use all the hardware that's available, and perhaps patch some things, but really, it's not that hard, and anyway linux is for people that LIKE TO LEARN!!111!eleventy-one!11"
No. If the average user has to learn the system administration details of their OS in 2008, that OS sucks.
On the other hand, Apple not only putting out a stylish machine that comes preloaded with full versions of software that does 90% of what 90% of all users do along with (mostly) convinently located Apple stores where you can simply walk in, get you machine fixed while you wait, and then walk out. That's a good system.
Apple has the total experience. Something that Microsoft doesn't have since they're OS is sold through a hodge podge of differing vendors, and Linux will never touch except in an antithetical sense.
You're right that people care about cost. But they care about the total experience more than anything. In other words, you can't sell crap. As Walmart found out by trying to sell Linux machines. (Yeah yeah. The first shipment sold out. What about that second huh? Unlike a bonafide hit like the Wii, those machines are still there.)
Newshour is a good show. Keith Olberman's countdown is good, but then he does do that "Keeping Tabs" segment with the loser from the Village Voice making snide comments about celebrities.
You're right that people just don't care. It's the same reason why HDTV has been slow on the uptake. People don't care. I have a 1080p hdtv, and yeah you can tell a difference between SD and HD content on it, but you know what? It's an LCD. A lot of it is artifacts from not running at the natural resolution. There's noise in the signal you can see. And you know what? Run that same signal on a CRT SD set, and you don't notice it. The phosphors mask the noise by their slower refresh rate, and the phosphors blur together enough that the screen looks fine.
An SD signal on an LCD looks like crap. SD on a CRT, which let's face it, is what it was designed for, looks perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that signal.
This whole HDTV migration has reeked of a scam from the very beginning. If people wanted to the new format, they wouldn't need the government to coerce them into spending hundreds of dollars on a new tv. They'd do it themselves. Just like how people switched from black and white to color sets, or from AM to FM radios, or landline to cellphones.
The 20th century was terrible and right now its near impossible for people with a disability or age (gray hairs) to find work due to the threat of lawsuits.
Your statement doesn't even make any sense. You can't discriminate in hiring, nor in firing. This is a good thing. One can not avoid a discriminatory lawsuit by discriminating!
You've bought into the idea that that it's somehow the the mom and pop store on the corner that is the most threatened by lawsuits for illegal behavior, when this simply isn't true. There's a reason why it's the insurance companies and the major corporations pushing for tort "reform." All they have to do is comply with the law. And since when is standing up for your rights a bad thing? Oh that's right. Since when the perpetrators hired a PR firm.
I know you mocked yourself but the threat of lawsuits can seriously damage a companies profitability. If you owned an airline and a few employees got in the paper for having a drunken lesbian orgy at an airport bar offduty what would you do? That was a real case where a few off duty airline attendents were arrested for drinking heavily and one woman foundling another women's breasts.
Well sexual assault and disorderly conduct are crimes, and criminal behavior has long been established "just cause" for termination. This hardly the same thing as firing people for lawful behavior on their own time that you disapprove of. In other words: Your example is completely irrelevant.
The airline could still be sued for sexual harassment because they were salaried and everyone knew they worked for Delta or whoever the airline was.
This statement is simply untrue. An employer only has control over the workplace and officially sponsored events outside the workplace. An employer does not own his employees, no matter what people want you to believe.
You really need to kind of read up about how the law works and who exactly are trying to undermine it.
If I'm employing a salaried worker, then they're never "off the clock." When they're thinking about work, that's work I'm employing them to do. I own their ideas because they are my employee, and that's how work-for-hire works.
People know who works for who, and so my employees' actions reflect on the company. I have to protect the image of my company. Firing someone for having a drunken binge and then gloating about it online reflects poorly on the professionalism of my company, and therefore could result in a loss of revenue, and that could result in a stock holder lawsuit. So you see, even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest.
If potential employees didn't like this behavior, then they wouldn't interview or accept offers from my company. That's just how the free market works, and since people do work for me, that shows they don't have any problems with this arrangement. The free market works again! And anyway, they posted the things online, so they gave up any privacy, so they should just accept the consequences.
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
* * * Of course, I was being sarcastic, but I fully expect there to be multiple posts that reiterate these ideas, only for real. There are plenty of people in today's America that want to essentially repeal the 20th century. I strongly suspect because there are people that for whatever reason, never saw power they didn't like, because they have the delusional belief that someday they will have that power.
Employers can read your email because they own the network. However they can't listen into your phone calls, even though they own the phones. The difference? One law was passed in the 30s or 40s. The other in the 90s.
The lassie faire free market capitalism is model. Nothing more. It's an ideal model, not unlike ideal wires in electrical engineering. They don't exist. The perfect market doesn't exist, because it hinges on perfect information, which doesn't exist. The market doesn't capture lots of things, namely pretty much everything that doesn't have a directly quantifiable cost. Even if you could assign a cost to these things, which you can't, the market doesn't necessarily work fast enough.
The older software is, the more mature it is and the fewer bugs it has. Sure, if there's new hardware to take advantage of or some new radical shift in methodology then there might be a reason to go back to the drawing board, Absolutely correct.
but 9 times out of 10 if you're implementing something in closed source, you're duplicating something that's already available in open source and more mature to boot. I call bullshit.
Open source has been built on clones of commercial software from the very beginning. Even the legendary printer driver RMS wrote that lead to the creation of FSF was a clone of an existing driver because the original had some bug. GCC was originally a clone of CC. BSD and Linux are clones of AT&T Unix. Definately better than the original, but they're not the original. Samba? Clone of windows shares. Open Office? MS Office. GNOME and KDE? The windows shell (whether it makes sense or not(!)) Mono?.Net. And this is just off the top of my head.
The dirty open secret about the "open source community" is that it produces lots and lots of clones. Original new ideas? Not so much. Is this a problem with the license? Not really. The vast majority of people are lazy and unoriginal. Coming up with original ideas is hard, and so they don't. The thought process isn't "Hey what would make a good foo? What are the problems with the current foos? Let's make something better than the current foos." It's "I want X's implementation of foo," and so they clone it. Warts and all since "That's what X's implementation of foo does."
This isn't a problem of licensing. It's a problem of human nature. The problem is just exacerbated in open source since there's no motivation of differentiate yourself from the competition.
Not only does closed source end up making poor copies of open source functionality half the time, HA!
but one of the number one reasons to use open source is that you can hire people off the street who have extensive experience in whatever you're using. Try doing that with closed source technology. No. This is a reason why you should use established tools. You wouldn't have had this problem if you were using ClearCase or Microsoft's Visual Source Safe. The license is completely irrelevant in this case. The fact that you made your own and so there were perhaps 20 people in the entire world that knew how to use it is the core problem.
You say your closed source clone was inferior. No shit. The copy is almost always inferior to the original, regardless of the license of either. I call straw man on this, because you're comparing your build system, which is maintained as pretty much an afterthought since it's not your main product, to a a group who is creating/maintaining a build system for their primary purpose. The fact that your group even decided to dedicate significant resources to something outside of your core focus was not well advised.
Well here's a little question I ask to the person saying this is gonna take off. What happens when I send some modified data to the your server farm to process and it's actually a replicating virus. I say thanks for the DOS headquarters, guys. And don't anyone dare say "oh, well they'll 100% protect it so only their code can run" cuz that's not gonna happen.
It's called proof signed code. It's been around. Read up, and get a clue.
Let's say MS Office 2010 lets you process your huge customer excel sheet mail merges and someone at the server place decides hmmm I'm gonna record everyone's data and sell it to spammers!
It's called virtualization. It's been around. Read up, and get a clue.
I can think of like 10 other ideas why this is the stupidest software idea on Earth but I'm sick of typing.
You're right that microsoft's solutions are over engineered. Or more accurately, engineered for the wrong problem. Apple has the idea with simple dumb parts that work together seamlessly. (iTV is dumb though. No record? And YouTube? Geez, that's lame.) The software isn't quite right though. Apple has the right hardware, but not the right software. Microsoft has neither.
I don't think people prefer to build things themselves. Yes, there's masochists that do, but most people don't. MythTV is cool because it's a dvr that let's me actually do whatever it is i want to with the stored shows, as opposed to tivo. But do I really want to dwell over a bunch of hardware that I don't know if its supported and how well? Hell, I don't even like doing that with a desktop. (wlan cards and wpa anyone?) Yeah I know there's a reference system but it's big, ugly, and two years old.
Windows Home Server was DOA, like every other MS in the home idea except the xbox, and even that has never moved passed the initial hook of being a gaming platform.
there's a timeout. you basically have two bootable partitions, the current and the backup. The last thing the current does is check to see if all the services started. If they didn't it reboots to the backup partition. The backup partition notices that it was booted and sends a distress signal.
The whole, "if I can't start, reboot" trick is standard in embedded systems.
You have to know how a server works now, but you shouldn't. To throw up your hands and say, "Well you just have to be a sysadmin!" is not answer. I am not a sysadmin. I do not enjoy sysadmining. Screw that. I want to use my things, not babysit them. I'm not the only one with that attitude. This attitude is why NASes have become popular. Turn them on, they autoconfig and now you have a file storage server.
You should not have to know anything other than where the plug is. Sensible defaults. Simple config options. Autorepair and update maintenance scripts. I don't have to keep track of what to patch on my laptop. It does. It says, "A new security update has become available. Reboot to install," and I do. If it's a server, have to download and reboot at 3am. If the server doesn't come back up, then it rollbacks the packages and sends an email to both the owner and whoever made the security update.
There is no reason why my home server should not make out going network connections. My home server should not accept any connections except from those within the same subnet. These are reasonable defaults.
A home server is just a NAS with some autobackup software and perhaps some backend media software. That's all you need.
No. It just means that no one has created a decent home server setup.
There's plenty of reasons to run a home server. Backing up your laptop without having to remember to plug in some external drive is one. Having a real htpc setup is another. People have lots of data, and a home server is the way to manage that. However there aren't any good home server tools for it.
Maybe I should make one in my copious free time. Of course I have said Linux could blow me.
It's hardly "incredibly short" (took me 8ish hours), and every game ever made (except some RPGs) is linear. You can hardly bash Halo 3 for being what 90% of games are, buddy.
Umm... Eight hours is incredibly short. If you can beat a game in a single day, it's too short. Eight hours is shorter than Gears of War, and I consider GoW to be very short.
Common sense has lost numerous times to law, from the burglar who sues for millions from an injury he received breaking into someone's house Sorry dude. That never happened. You can not sue when you were injured while committing an illegal act. However, this does not mean you can "set a trap." Setting traps are an illegal act as well. So if set big cartoon bear traps out, and Hamburgler steps in one, Big Mac will take you to jail, but Hamburgler doesn't get to sue you.
Now in all fairness to the post office, mail volume has dramatically increased in the 150-200 years since.
London also had multiple mail deliveries in the 19th century. I think pretty much every major city had at least 5 deliveries. London I think had like 9 deliveries at one point. It seems like in Ada Lovelace's papers there are copies of letters that where she carried out conversations over the course of the day via the mail. Not unlike email threads today.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology isn't a replacement for resources. It can help you make more efficient use of the resource you have, but it doesn't create them. As a global society, we (and here I mean the entire human race) is going to have to change the way we live, and it's going to be painful. Why? Because we're too lazy to make the very modest needed changes needed years ago, or even today. We wait until it's too late, and then we have to make a dramatic adjustment.
In my darkest days, I suspect the human race has 5,000 years left, 10,000 tops.
Now that the pedantic answer is out of the way, let's move on to more practical issues, like cost-effective and time tractable extraction of these Sagans of Joules of energy. When you come up plan to strip mine Andromeda or even Epsilon Eridani let me know. What time is it where you are now?
If it is dark enough, with few clouds, you might see a giant fuckin' chunk of those resources right up there in the sky.
Its kinda hard to miss. Its big and shiny. People call it "The Moon". If the moon is so resource rich, how come we aren't mining it today? We can get there. We got there almost 40 years ago. The bookshelves are filled with how-tos on establishing a permanent presence on the moon. So why aren't we there now? How about the brutal fact that the moon doesn't have the resources we need.
Moon mining is about three things.
Making concrete We have plenty of it already. Extracting oxygen We have plenty of it already. Extracting Helium-3 Don't need it. Sure, if we had a fusion generator, then maybe, but we also already have a several rich terrestrial source of hydrogen, so why we would need to import Helium-3.
What do we need? Well right now, hydrocarbons. Can we get those from the moon? Nope. Sorry. The moon does not have a liquid center of sweet crude.
Sure. We should get off of our 19th century energy economy and move to something more sustainable and less ecologically destructive, but the sad truth is, we're still not close to doing that. Fusion is still a pipe dream. The newest fusion reactor is a whopping 8 megawatts, and can only run for 20 seconds. To call it, "not ready for primetime" would be a vast understatement. Other renewables still can't meet our energy needs, and those don't even require going to the freakin' moon.
Perhaps you should really stop and think before you say something, rather than just spouting off about your favorite 60 year old pulp scifi cliche, that was created as part of an "old west meets rocket ships" meme. You'd think the future would have moved beyond bulk extraction of non-renewable resources, but apparently not.
Funny you mentioned that it's hard to sneak a weapon on the plane. If I remember correctly, the 9/11 hijackers used box cutters specifically because these types of knives were cleared through security. Which of course was a giant security hole that no one noticed. Of course now if you eat at an airport restaurant, you'll get a plastic knife and and a metal fork (DFW I'm looking at you!). Good thing forks aren't pointy.
If I was a terrorist wanting to strike the United States, or anywhere really, I'd go with a classic. Explosive belt. Granted it doesn't have the theatrics of 9/11, but you get to kill and maim infidels and there really isn't a way to defend against it. If there was, you'd think Israel would have found it by now.
California takes your right thumbprint when getting a driver's license, yet I've never been asked for my thumbprint at a traffic stop. So why is it needed?
You can't tell me that my thumbprint isn't in the Bat Crime Computer.
Played with an OLPC last weekend. The verdict from everyone at DevHouse:
Keyboard is too small for serious use by adults.
A bit slow.
OLPC isn't a serious laptop for adults. Great for the niche it's designed for though.
I also have very long extremely long and complex random password for my wpa wlan. Why? Because I'm paranoid that there's a guy in the apartment next door with machine that runs 24 hours a day just attempting to guess the network password. Why would I even think about this as a possibility? Because there was a point in my life when I would have done that very thing.
The guy that wrote the article about the C=64 obviously never used one. First off, the whole computer was the keyboard. That was a selling point. The extra symbols? They were there for graphics programming. The extra keys? They were there for programming.
All these "problems" and the guy misses the undeniable mistake of the C=64 keyboard. The punctuation marks were in nonstandard locations! Shift 2? quotes. Key right to the L? colon (shift colon? left bracket.
J
A sluggish response of a Republican government.
Corel still exists? Wow. Who knew?
Yeah, and when you go from one user to two users you have 100% market gain. What's you're point?
Oh. You're trying to say that Linux is right around the corner. Well comeback when you've got something besides a zero to the left of the decimal point, like it's been for... well... ever.
Not exactly. They also care about ease of use, and Linux is not, nor has it ever been, easy.
I can hear the cries now. "Bbbut Linux is easy! You just have not use all the hardware that's available, and perhaps patch some things, but really, it's not that hard, and anyway linux is for people that LIKE TO LEARN!!111!eleventy-one!11"
No. If the average user has to learn the system administration details of their OS in 2008, that OS sucks.
On the other hand, Apple not only putting out a stylish machine that comes preloaded with full versions of software that does 90% of what 90% of all users do along with (mostly) convinently located Apple stores where you can simply walk in, get you machine fixed while you wait, and then walk out. That's a good system.
Apple has the total experience. Something that Microsoft doesn't have since they're OS is sold through a hodge podge of differing vendors, and Linux will never touch except in an antithetical sense.
You're right that people care about cost. But they care about the total experience more than anything. In other words, you can't sell crap. As Walmart found out by trying to sell Linux machines. (Yeah yeah. The first shipment sold out. What about that second huh? Unlike a bonafide hit like the Wii, those machines are still there.)
Newshour is a good show. Keith Olberman's countdown is good, but then he does do that "Keeping Tabs" segment with the loser from the Village Voice making snide comments about celebrities.
You're right that people just don't care. It's the same reason why HDTV has been slow on the uptake. People don't care. I have a 1080p hdtv, and yeah you can tell a difference between SD and HD content on it, but you know what? It's an LCD. A lot of it is artifacts from not running at the natural resolution. There's noise in the signal you can see. And you know what? Run that same signal on a CRT SD set, and you don't notice it. The phosphors mask the noise by their slower refresh rate, and the phosphors blur together enough that the screen looks fine.
An SD signal on an LCD looks like crap. SD on a CRT, which let's face it, is what it was designed for, looks perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that signal.
This whole HDTV migration has reeked of a scam from the very beginning. If people wanted to the new format, they wouldn't need the government to coerce them into spending hundreds of dollars on a new tv. They'd do it themselves. Just like how people switched from black and white to color sets, or from AM to FM radios, or landline to cellphones.
Your statement doesn't even make any sense. You can't discriminate in hiring, nor in firing. This is a good thing. One can not avoid a discriminatory lawsuit by discriminating!
You've bought into the idea that that it's somehow the the mom and pop store on the corner that is the most threatened by lawsuits for illegal behavior, when this simply isn't true. There's a reason why it's the insurance companies and the major corporations pushing for tort "reform." All they have to do is comply with the law. And since when is standing up for your rights a bad thing? Oh that's right. Since when the perpetrators hired a PR firm.
The "horror" stories that are put out are often filled with half truths. Take this story about a basketball party place sued out of existence by the bad ol' cripple mafia and the ADA. Turns out, that story isn't entirely true. Their landlord didn't renew the lease because they didn't want to spend $25,000 on a $4.5 million to bring it into compliance. This isn't an ADA case. It's a standard landlord-tenant dispute.
Well sexual assault and disorderly conduct are crimes, and criminal behavior has long been established "just cause" for termination. This hardly the same thing as firing people for lawful behavior on their own time that you disapprove of. In other words: Your example is completely irrelevant.
This statement is simply untrue. An employer only has control over the workplace and officially sponsored events outside the workplace. An employer does not own his employees, no matter what people want you to believe.
You really need to kind of read up about how the law works and who exactly are trying to undermine it.
If I'm employing a salaried worker, then they're never "off the clock." When they're thinking about work, that's work I'm employing them to do. I own their ideas because they are my employee, and that's how work-for-hire works.
People know who works for who, and so my employees' actions reflect on the company. I have to protect the image of my company. Firing someone for having a drunken binge and then gloating about it online reflects poorly on the professionalism of my company, and therefore could result in a loss of revenue, and that could result in a stock holder lawsuit. So you see, even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest.
If potential employees didn't like this behavior, then they wouldn't interview or accept offers from my company. That's just how the free market works, and since people do work for me, that shows they don't have any problems with this arrangement. The free market works again! And anyway, they posted the things online, so they gave up any privacy, so they should just accept the consequences.
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
* * *
Of course, I was being sarcastic, but I fully expect there to be multiple posts that reiterate these ideas, only for real. There are plenty of people in today's America that want to essentially repeal the 20th century. I strongly suspect because there are people that for whatever reason, never saw power they didn't like, because they have the delusional belief that someday they will have that power.
Employers can read your email because they own the network. However they can't listen into your phone calls, even though they own the phones. The difference? One law was passed in the 30s or 40s. The other in the 90s.
The lassie faire free market capitalism is model. Nothing more. It's an ideal model, not unlike ideal wires in electrical engineering. They don't exist. The perfect market doesn't exist, because it hinges on perfect information, which doesn't exist. The market doesn't capture lots of things, namely pretty much everything that doesn't have a directly quantifiable cost. Even if you could assign a cost to these things, which you can't, the market doesn't necessarily work fast enough.
Open source has been built on clones of commercial software from the very beginning. Even the legendary printer driver RMS wrote that lead to the creation of FSF was a clone of an existing driver because the original had some bug. GCC was originally a clone of CC. BSD and Linux are clones of AT&T Unix. Definately better than the original, but they're not the original. Samba? Clone of windows shares. Open Office? MS Office. GNOME and KDE? The windows shell (whether it makes sense or not(!)) Mono?
The dirty open secret about the "open source community" is that it produces lots and lots of clones. Original new ideas? Not so much. Is this a problem with the license? Not really. The vast majority of people are lazy and unoriginal. Coming up with original ideas is hard, and so they don't. The thought process isn't "Hey what would make a good foo? What are the problems with the current foos? Let's make something better than the current foos." It's "I want X's implementation of foo," and so they clone it. Warts and all since "That's what X's implementation of foo does."
This isn't a problem of licensing. It's a problem of human nature. The problem is just exacerbated in open source since there's no motivation of differentiate yourself from the competition. Not only does closed source end up making poor copies of open source functionality half the time, HA! but one of the number one reasons to use open source is that you can hire people off the street who have extensive experience in whatever you're using. Try doing that with closed source technology. No. This is a reason why you should use established tools. You wouldn't have had this problem if you were using ClearCase or Microsoft's Visual Source Safe. The license is completely irrelevant in this case. The fact that you made your own and so there were perhaps 20 people in the entire world that knew how to use it is the core problem.
You say your closed source clone was inferior. No shit. The copy is almost always inferior to the original, regardless of the license of either. I call straw man on this, because you're comparing your build system, which is maintained as pretty much an afterthought since it's not your main product, to a a group who is creating/maintaining a build system for their primary purpose. The fact that your group even decided to dedicate significant resources to something outside of your core focus was not well advised.
It's called proof signed code. It's been around. Read up, and get a clue.
It's called virtualization. It's been around. Read up, and get a clue.
And I'm sure they're all as informed as these.
You're right that microsoft's solutions are over engineered. Or more accurately, engineered for the wrong problem. Apple has the idea with simple dumb parts that work together seamlessly. (iTV is dumb though. No record? And YouTube? Geez, that's lame.) The software isn't quite right though.
Apple has the right hardware, but not the right software. Microsoft has neither.
I don't think people prefer to build things themselves. Yes, there's masochists that do, but most people don't. MythTV is cool because it's a dvr that let's me actually do whatever it is i want to with the stored shows, as opposed to tivo. But do I really want to dwell over a bunch of hardware that I don't know if its supported and how well? Hell, I don't even like doing that with a desktop. (wlan cards and wpa anyone?) Yeah I know there's a reference system but it's big, ugly, and two years old.
Windows Home Server was DOA, like every other MS in the home idea except the xbox, and even that has never moved passed the initial hook of being a gaming platform.
there's a timeout. you basically have two bootable partitions, the current and the backup. The last thing the current does is check to see if all the services started. If they didn't it reboots to the backup partition. The backup partition notices that it was booted and sends a distress signal.
The whole, "if I can't start, reboot" trick is standard in embedded systems.
Don't be an idiot. No one gives a shit about some loser playing a speed game.
You have to know how a server works now, but you shouldn't. To throw up your hands and say, "Well you just have to be a sysadmin!" is not answer. I am not a sysadmin. I do not enjoy sysadmining. Screw that. I want to use my things, not babysit them. I'm not the only one with that attitude. This attitude is why NASes have become popular. Turn them on, they autoconfig and now you have a file storage server.
You should not have to know anything other than where the plug is. Sensible defaults. Simple config options. Autorepair and update maintenance scripts. I don't have to keep track of what to patch on my laptop. It does. It says, "A new security update has become available. Reboot to install," and I do. If it's a server, have to download and reboot at 3am. If the server doesn't come back up, then it rollbacks the packages and sends an email to both the owner and whoever made the security update.
There is no reason why my home server should not make out going network connections. My home server should not accept any connections except from those within the same subnet. These are reasonable defaults.
A home server is just a NAS with some autobackup software and perhaps some backend media software. That's all you need.
No. It just means that no one has created a decent home server setup.
There's plenty of reasons to run a home server. Backing up your laptop without having to remember to plug in some external drive is one. Having a real htpc setup is another. People have lots of data, and a home server is the way to manage that. However there aren't any good home server tools for it.
Maybe I should make one in my copious free time. Of course I have said Linux could blow me.
Now in all fairness to the post office, mail volume has dramatically increased in the 150-200 years since.
London also had multiple mail deliveries in the 19th century. I think pretty much every major city had at least 5 deliveries. London I think had like 9 deliveries at one point. It seems like in Ada Lovelace's papers there are copies of letters that where she carried out conversations over the course of the day via the mail. Not unlike email threads today.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.