I failed to renew my free dyndns.com domain on time and on Saturday someone using the U.K. host "Real International Business Corp." (which Google shows to be a host for all kinds of scam websites) stole the domain. It wasn't just someone grabbing an unused domain - they put up a copy of my front page (though the links led nowhere).
They were even loading images, like I do, from my ISP's webspace. For a while I had changed the image to a big "WARNING!", but they noticed that yesterday and removed all links and images from their copy. A DMCA takedown won't work since they're in the U.K. and from what I've read of the hosting service, ethics aren't exactly their strong suit. So I've got to just learn from experience here. Oy.
The Treo line have user-replaceable batteries; you don't even need to remove a screw, the cover just slides off. I've been pretty pleased with my Treo 650. I started with a IIIxe, moved to a Handera330 (CF and SD slots...), and finally got the 650. It works very well, and because it's my phone, my wife can't complain that I take my PDA everywhere. It's not quite as stable as I'd like, but I haven't lost any information and I can do all kinds of things that even the Handera couldn't do - like voice navigation with a Bluetooth GPS.
(Even the stability issue isn't a big deal - I let the kids watch movies on it, and something they do makes the thing reboot when I leave TCPMP. Ah, well, I can deal with that.)
Wait, back up. People have attempted to give religious justifications for ethics, but that doesn't mean that ethics depends upon religion or anything like that. See, e.g., here.
It was pushing some uranium-mining company in Canada or something. No real contact info on it. Lord knows how I got on that list - probably one of the e-merchants I bought laptop parts off of in the last few weeks.
See here. Development of agriculture is a stretch - it requires the right environment, the right stock to start from, and a long period of 'unconscious breeding' (by picking the best/tastiest/largest examples and, like birds, spreading the seeds around, etc.) to turn that wild stock into something that can actually be planted and managed to support a population.
You look at, say, modern wheat and thing, "sure, any idiot can see how useful it is". But it only became that after a long period of development from wild stock. Try to live off the wild stuff and you'll either switch to hunter-gatherer or starve.
I put OO in my wifes laptop a few months back and was surprised when she said to me this morning "I like this open office. Its better than word"
Sadly, my wife wasn't so impressed with OpenOffice. And she wasn't happy with the way MS Office ran on Linux, even under Crossover. Office was the only sticking point, though. She uses Firefox and Thunderbird, so that was no problem. So we picked up the cheapest possible Dell desktop for her (well, okay, I upped it to 1GB RAM, but other that that it's stock).
Unfortunately, that was before they'd let you 'downgrade' to XP. The thing is slow and apparently getting slower. I'm going to have to wipe it and install XP soon. I wish I could just stick Linux on it, but my wife is hooked on MS Office.
My parents, though... at least they're very happy with Ubuntu. I only have one user I have to do Windows tech support for now, thankfully.
I have little enough time to play games as it is, and the time I have is intermittent and scattered. Waiting through a cutscene (or worse, a startup logo) that I've seen a dozen times already is exceedingly frustrating and means I buy fewer games.
Hardware support is getting better, and old stuff like your soundblaster is totally covered, but printer and scanner support sucks, and wireless cards often require ndiswrapper.
I guess I'm just really lucky, because even the el-cheapo wifi notebook card I bought this weekend (Trendnet TEW-441PC) worked just fine in Linux. Our HP printer/scanner works flawlessly in Linux and the Linux drivers don't take up 800MB (yes, eight hundred megabytes) of disk like the XP ones...
What exactly is grandma tilly going to do when an update messes up X and she's stuck in console mode until she runs dpkg-reconfigure or fixes her modelines or some such.
She'll do like my parents do - call one of her relatives who 'knows computers' to fix it. That's what my nephew did this weekend when XP on his laptop stopped booting thanks to a bad DIMM. It came up with a "STOP 0x00000024" error in ntfs.sys. Booting with the install CD failed the same way. Do some Googling on that issue - trying to fix that with Windows would have meant pulling the drive and sticking it into a computer with a working XP install, or tracking down a Win2K install CD, or even more byzantine procedures.
I used my Ubuntu 7.06 install CD to run memtest86 and found the bad RAM chip and pulled it. Then I booted into the Ubuntu partition I'd put on the laptop before and ran 'ntfsfix/dev/sda1'. Fixed the problem in ~5 seconds. XP ran a chkdisk on next boot, but it's working... as well as XP ever did.
My parents are running Ubuntu happily. It works for them. When I visit, I just start the software updater and let it run, and I actually have time to talk them. This is a marked change from when they were running Windows.
Windows needs expert maintenance, period. Linux is at least on a par with Windows in terms of maintenance and is far ahead of Windows in terms of software installation.
Does this perhaps we will unlock the mystery of time travel and be able to move about in it much as we do 3D space?
Well, when you consider that one second ago is one light-second awa - i.e. abut 300,000 kilometers - then getting to one second ago would be about as difficult as getting to the Moon from Earth...
In other words, we possibly could move about in time "much as we 3D space" - but we don't move around in that all that well, either. At least when compared to the speed of light...
To quote from Wikipedia: "It is often claimed that the coelacanth has remained unchanged for millions of years but in fact the living species and even genus are unknown from the fossil record. However, some of the extinct species, particularly those of the last known fossil coelacanth, the Cretaceous genus Macropoma, closely resemble the living species. The most likely reason for the gap is the taxon having become extinct in shallow waters. Deep-water fossils are only rarely lifted to levels where paleontologists can recover them, making most deep-water taxa disappear from the fossil record. This situation is still under investigation by scientists."
Yeah, installing mac software is a royal pain. I have to download it, and then drop it into whatever location I want it to live. It's insanely difficult.
Unless it's stuffed in a disk image or something. I ran into that when trying to set up a compiler on my aunt's Mac to test the portability of some code I wrote. On Ubuntu, installing the compiler takes a couple of minutes (and most of that's download time). On her Mac, it took me about an hour, learning the "intuitive" Mac way of doing things.
Don't get me wrong, the Mac is way ahead of Windows, and software installation on a Mac can be that easy. But it's really really easy on Linux these days.
...the lack of compatibility is slowing Linux adoption greatly, which also results in no native ports.
Sure, Linux is betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, but emulating the other platform only helps short-term and hurts badly long-term. It's eating the seed corn. Making better alternative apps is indeed harder, but it's the only way that'll work long-term. Fortunately more critical apps are becoming cross-platform - Firefox and Thunderbird are already cross-platform and make migration from IE/Outlook as simple as it can possibly be. OpenOffice is steadily gaining capability and helps migration a great deal as well, though it's not all the way there yet. The more people on Windows use open-source apps, the less reason there is to run Windows at all.
No, I'm not predicting the imminent (or even long-term) demise of Microsoft, but I think the trends are in Linux's favor long-term.
we'd really need wine to be easier to handle and more feature-complete to satisfy those users too.
Nope, that's a trap. OS/2 was essentially 100% Windows 3.1 compatible, and what happened? Developers thought, "Why bother writing an OS/2 native app when I can just write a Windows app and be compatible?" So OS/2 never got any apps to speak of. And we know where it is today.
Linux needs those alternative, native (or at least cross-platform) apps.
That's right, any more than there was a "Year of the Linux Server". Linux's presence in the server area just kept growing, until now it's just one more tool to be used when appropriate.
Everybody I have asked to edit some configuration file has loathed the idea.
I know what you mean! My elderly parents have no problem navigating to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and tweaking a REG_SZ value, but ask them to open up Gedit...
"for people whose needs are so basic that they will never need anything other than the bundled software"... translates to not for me for the average person, being neither a geek nor wanting to have the self-image of being 'basic'.
Of course, the article itself already stated:
"An Add/Remove function actually makes finding programs easier with Linux than it is for Mac and Windows. Without having to go to Web sites, it lets you browse through categories of software. It took me only seconds to find several additional music players, a PDF reader and other programs. In addition to downloading the software, this feature installs it and finds any necessary additional files."
It's a holdover from Windows/Mac, where installing software can be hard and requires some technical knowledge. The author still subconsciously thinks of installing software as 'difficult' even though they've actually seen the evidence that on Linux it's not. On any modern desktop Linux, software installation is no more complicated than "I want this program. Gimme."
I remember a test (late 1980s) where you could use a calculator. The first (halfway affordable) programmable calculators had come out, and I had one. I'd put together a program to generate determinants of 3x3 matrices, and one of the questions was: "Calculate the determinant of this matrix." I just plugged in the numbers, wrote down the answer, and moved on. Even at the time, I was thinking, "They're either not going to allow calculators much longer, or else change the questions."
You could squeeze cheat sheets into those things, too, though the memory was a bit limited...
If you make a show about Geek people, you'll have an hour of some guy sitting in a dark room staring at a computer screen reading/.
Doesn't have to be. "2001" and "The Abyss" got their (human) science pretty well right. Sure the aliens did magic stuff - they're supposed to be more advanced than us - but everything the humans did was either known to be possible or were plausible extensions of existing technology. And they were good movies, too.
Of course, just getting the tech (mostly) right isn't any guarantee of good entertainment. E.g. "Antitrust", which even used real I.P. addresses (the satellites are on a private 10.x.x.x subnet) but failed in the plot and characterization area.
Good science fiction assumes one impossible thing, or extends current trends to logical limits, and explores what happens then. You have to get, as the GP suggests, the characterization right - but with science fiction, you also have to get the tech right, and mostly they don't bother. It's a shame, too, because much of the time it doesn't have to be that way.
None of the additional restrictions in Vista are markedly greater than those in XP.
MCA didn't have that many restrictions for users either. For manufacturers, though... just like OEMS today are being pushed hard to move to Vista, and they are digging in their heels. See this story from today/.
GP: ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI).
P: No, PCI's *substantial* superiority to ISA (and VLB) *plus* the fact that ISA was becoming limiting, was the driving force behind PCI adoption.
I probably could have phrased that more clearly. I meant "people stuck with [ISA] until there were open alternatives [to MCA; i.e.] (PCI)". PCI was definitely much superior to ISA, MCA came well before PCI, and the first PCI was not definitively superior to MCA. Still, people limped along with ISA (and VLB) until something roughly as good as MCA - but open - came around.
"New technology" that no one really sees as worth the upgrade, with lots of extraneous restrictions (Windows Genuine Advantage, for example) that make it difficult to work with. Dell had to back down and start offering machines with XP again because people didn't want Vista. ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI). XP is still around, but MS can't afford to put much effort into it or it'll continue to undermine Vista. So XP'll stagnate - and the competition isn't sitting still.
How is UAC "broken" ? Why is it the backwards compatibility that's responsible ?
Because Windows apps muck around with all kinds of things they shouldn't because Windows grew up from a single-tasking OS with no memory protection. Windows has supported good finegrained security since NT but in practice nobody actually used it because the apps didn't support it, and MS didn't insist. The old techniques still worked because MS never closed the holes. They finally got around to it in Vista, but (a) they are fighting decades of culture they themselves fostered, and (b) they reimplemented a half-ass sudo, but you run into it for all kinds of things because apps insist on doing things they shouldn't. (And that's after they've done a bunch of behind-the-scenes work to lie to applications about what their actual privileges are, so they think they are running with full privs.)
Compare to Unix, where apps are written not to use elevated permissions unless they actually need it. Aside from installing software, I never run into a sudo prompt on my Ubuntu box because the apps behave themselves.
How many people remember when IBM was pushing their PS/2 systems, with "Micro Channel" that was going to take over everything? It was better than ISA, self-configuring, etc. - but totally controlled by IBM. People had started buying a lot more clones and not "genuine IBM" PCs. IBM wanted to wrest control of the PC market back from the cloners.
So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EISA and VLB and such until PCI came around, and by then
IBM was very much an also-ran in the PC market.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities. I think MS's reach is exceeding its grasp here. It happened to IBM (which *owned* computing) and it's starting to happen to MS. Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility (which is why UAC is so broken) and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped
at all - years late).
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They were even loading images, like I do, from my ISP's webspace. For a while I had changed the image to a big "WARNING!", but they noticed that yesterday and removed all links and images from their copy. A DMCA takedown won't work since they're in the U.K. and from what I've read of the hosting service, ethics aren't exactly their strong suit. So I've got to just learn from experience here. Oy.
(Even the stability issue isn't a big deal - I let the kids watch movies on it, and something they do makes the thing reboot when I leave TCPMP. Ah, well, I can deal with that.)
Wait, back up. People have attempted to give religious justifications for ethics, but that doesn't mean that ethics depends upon religion or anything like that. See, e.g., here.
Not always. For example, see psoup, Tierra, and Avida.
For weather simulations to be truly predictive, the algorithms would need to condense out of the atmosphere.
For traffic simulations to really work, they would need to pave little digital roads and build little digital cars.
For nuclear physics simulations to really be nuclear, they would have to require lead shielding around the computer.
It was pushing some uranium-mining company in Canada or something. No real contact info on it. Lord knows how I got on that list - probably one of the e-merchants I bought laptop parts off of in the last few weeks.
You look at, say, modern wheat and thing, "sure, any idiot can see how useful it is". But it only became that after a long period of development from wild stock. Try to live off the wild stuff and you'll either switch to hunter-gatherer or starve.
Sadly, my wife wasn't so impressed with OpenOffice. And she wasn't happy with the way MS Office ran on Linux, even under Crossover. Office was the only sticking point, though. She uses Firefox and Thunderbird, so that was no problem. So we picked up the cheapest possible Dell desktop for her (well, okay, I upped it to 1GB RAM, but other that that it's stock).
Unfortunately, that was before they'd let you 'downgrade' to XP. The thing is slow and apparently getting slower. I'm going to have to wipe it and install XP soon. I wish I could just stick Linux on it, but my wife is hooked on MS Office.
My parents, though... at least they're very happy with Ubuntu. I only have one user I have to do Windows tech support for now, thankfully.
There are ways to drastically reduce 'lift costs' that don't involve a space elevator.
I have little enough time to play games as it is, and the time I have is intermittent and scattered. Waiting through a cutscene (or worse, a startup logo) that I've seen a dozen times already is exceedingly frustrating and means I buy fewer games.
I guess I'm just really lucky, because even the el-cheapo wifi notebook card I bought this weekend (Trendnet TEW-441PC) worked just fine in Linux. Our HP printer/scanner works flawlessly in Linux and the Linux drivers don't take up 800MB (yes, eight hundred megabytes) of disk like the XP ones...
She'll do like my parents do - call one of her relatives who 'knows computers' to fix it. That's what my nephew did this weekend when XP on his laptop stopped booting thanks to a bad DIMM. It came up with a "STOP 0x00000024" error in ntfs.sys. Booting with the install CD failed the same way. Do some Googling on that issue - trying to fix that with Windows would have meant pulling the drive and sticking it into a computer with a working XP install, or tracking down a Win2K install CD, or even more byzantine procedures.
I used my Ubuntu 7.06 install CD to run memtest86 and found the bad RAM chip and pulled it. Then I booted into the Ubuntu partition I'd put on the laptop before and ran 'ntfsfix /dev/sda1'. Fixed the problem in ~5 seconds. XP ran a chkdisk on next boot, but it's working... as well as XP ever did.
My parents are running Ubuntu happily. It works for them. When I visit, I just start the software updater and let it run, and I actually have time to talk them. This is a marked change from when they were running Windows.
Windows needs expert maintenance, period. Linux is at least on a par with Windows in terms of maintenance and is far ahead of Windows in terms of software installation.
Well, when you consider that one second ago is one light-second awa - i.e. abut 300,000 kilometers - then getting to one second ago would be about as difficult as getting to the Moon from Earth...
In other words, we possibly could move about in time "much as we 3D space" - but we don't move around in that all that well, either. At least when compared to the speed of light...
No change? Gee, except for the fact that the fossil were freshwater fish and the modern ones live in the ocean.
To quote from Wikipedia: "It is often claimed that the coelacanth has remained unchanged for millions of years but in fact the living species and even genus are unknown from the fossil record. However, some of the extinct species, particularly those of the last known fossil coelacanth, the Cretaceous genus Macropoma, closely resemble the living species. The most likely reason for the gap is the taxon having become extinct in shallow waters. Deep-water fossils are only rarely lifted to levels where paleontologists can recover them, making most deep-water taxa disappear from the fossil record. This situation is still under investigation by scientists."
Unless it's stuffed in a disk image or something. I ran into that when trying to set up a compiler on my aunt's Mac to test the portability of some code I wrote. On Ubuntu, installing the compiler takes a couple of minutes (and most of that's download time). On her Mac, it took me about an hour, learning the "intuitive" Mac way of doing things.
Don't get me wrong, the Mac is way ahead of Windows, and software installation on a Mac can be that easy. But it's really really easy on Linux these days.
Sure, Linux is betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, but emulating the other platform only helps short-term and hurts badly long-term. It's eating the seed corn. Making better alternative apps is indeed harder, but it's the only way that'll work long-term. Fortunately more critical apps are becoming cross-platform - Firefox and Thunderbird are already cross-platform and make migration from IE/Outlook as simple as it can possibly be. OpenOffice is steadily gaining capability and helps migration a great deal as well, though it's not all the way there yet. The more people on Windows use open-source apps, the less reason there is to run Windows at all.
No, I'm not predicting the imminent (or even long-term) demise of Microsoft, but I think the trends are in Linux's favor long-term.
Nope, that's a trap. OS/2 was essentially 100% Windows 3.1 compatible, and what happened? Developers thought, "Why bother writing an OS/2 native app when I can just write a Windows app and be compatible?" So OS/2 never got any apps to speak of. And we know where it is today.
Linux needs those alternative, native (or at least cross-platform) apps.
That's right, any more than there was a "Year of the Linux Server". Linux's presence in the server area just kept growing, until now it's just one more tool to be used when appropriate.
I know what you mean! My elderly parents have no problem navigating to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and tweaking a REG_SZ value, but ask them to open up Gedit...
(Yes, this was sarcastic.)
Of course, the article itself already stated:
It's a holdover from Windows/Mac, where installing software can be hard and requires some technical knowledge. The author still subconsciously thinks of installing software as 'difficult' even though they've actually seen the evidence that on Linux it's not. On any modern desktop Linux, software installation is no more complicated than "I want this program. Gimme."
You could squeeze cheat sheets into those things, too, though the memory was a bit limited...
We could surely have built a few of these...
Doesn't have to be. "2001" and "The Abyss" got their (human) science pretty well right. Sure the aliens did magic stuff - they're supposed to be more advanced than us - but everything the humans did was either known to be possible or were plausible extensions of existing technology. And they were good movies, too.
Of course, just getting the tech (mostly) right isn't any guarantee of good entertainment. E.g. "Antitrust", which even used real I.P. addresses (the satellites are on a private 10.x.x.x subnet) but failed in the plot and characterization area.
Good science fiction assumes one impossible thing, or extends current trends to logical limits, and explores what happens then. You have to get, as the GP suggests, the characterization right - but with science fiction, you also have to get the tech right, and mostly they don't bother. It's a shame, too, because much of the time it doesn't have to be that way.
"New technology" that no one really sees as worth the upgrade, with lots of extraneous restrictions (Windows Genuine Advantage, for example) that make it difficult to work with. Dell had to back down and start offering machines with XP again because people didn't want Vista. ISA was inferior to Micro Channel but "good enough" and people stuck with it until there were open alternatives (PCI). XP is still around, but MS can't afford to put much effort into it or it'll continue to undermine Vista. So XP'll stagnate - and the competition isn't sitting still.
Because Windows apps muck around with all kinds of things they shouldn't because Windows grew up from a single-tasking OS with no memory protection. Windows has supported good finegrained security since NT but in practice nobody actually used it because the apps didn't support it, and MS didn't insist. The old techniques still worked because MS never closed the holes. They finally got around to it in Vista, but (a) they are fighting decades of culture they themselves fostered, and (b) they reimplemented a half-ass sudo, but you run into it for all kinds of things because apps insist on doing things they shouldn't. (And that's after they've done a bunch of behind-the-scenes work to lie to applications about what their actual privileges are, so they think they are running with full privs.)
Compare to Unix, where apps are written not to use elevated permissions unless they actually need it. Aside from installing software, I never run into a sudo prompt on my Ubuntu box because the apps behave themselves.
So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EISA and VLB and such until PCI came around, and by then IBM was very much an also-ran in the PC market.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities. I think MS's reach is exceeding its grasp here. It happened to IBM (which *owned* computing) and it's starting to happen to MS. Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility (which is why UAC is so broken) and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped at all - years late).