They are all different, but they all grew from the same roots. Due to this common heritage, many things (especially from the user perspective, not as much so from a developer perspective) work the same, look the same, are in the same place, etc. Just as a user can get by for most tasks with a generic SVR4 reference on just about any SVR4 variant, a user with a fairly generic BSD reference should be able to deal with most of the BSDs.
This is similar to the arguments surrounding traffic stops. In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it.
On your point about engineer integrity, this is a really tough question for a lot of people who work on such things. Personal beliefs and convictions are a hard thing to overcome; perhaps these engineers sincerely believe that they are working in the best interests of their fellow man. The too-happy and annoying church people that knock on my door from time to time do something that I could not do within my ethical outlook, but from their perspective the privacy violation is justifiable by the chance to save my soul or something along those lines.
The difference to most people is simple...the primary use of a car is transportation. The primary use of a gun is to lodge a projectile in a target, causing damage. The nature of the gun is significantly more malicious than a car. You can use a car to kill someone, but that's not the normal operational nature of a car.
In my opinion, there should not be a difference. If you leave a loaded weapon around and someone uses it to commit murder, there is one person to blame: the person who picked up the gun. Now, if you left the gun there specifically for another to pick it up and use it for a crime, then you're an accessory, but that's a whole other situation.
I don't know if it will always remain a novelty. It'll just happen much slower than overnight. More and more, there are certain bits of technology that people want around themselves all the time. Take mobile phones for example...10 years ago, I rarely saw anyone with one. Nowadays, when I walk into a restaurant, I'd say 50% or more of the adults in the restaurant have a phone on their belt. It didn't happen all at once, and it won't happen fast for general computing devices either. In fact, it will probably be quite a while before we see widespread use of wearable general-use computers. It won't start happening till enough people find themselves constantly carrying several electronic devices that could be replaced with a single computer.
When a significant portion of the population has a cell phone, handheld, and 3 or 4 other whizbangs that they can't stand to be without, then we'll see true wearable computing arise.
If you'll read the article carefully, it makes clear mention of a 2-inch lens with several tiny hydraulic pistons. Once the person's eye has been mapped, the lens is adjusted and the person looks through it.
Hmm...my guess would be a separate transmitter...I've seen plenty of Everest climb specials on PBS and the like, I've only ever seen them use radios for communication back to the base station.
Speaking of the whole "toy" aspect, you CAN be tracked down by your mobile phone's signals...and a lot of people do use those as toys. Of course, when this became widely known, the companies said, "We'll just use it to locate you when you call 911 for an emergency!" Yeah. Right. And JoeSchmoeInternetCo just wants my email address to send me the rare special offer...
You know where you are, but they do not know where you are. The receiver figures out where you are by the signal coming from the nearest few satellites.
You'd be surprised...a rather large number of my comapny's clients have the random SCO server sitting around. They really do have a lot more installations than a lot of people think. I've noticed this to be especially true for small government clients. It's probably in part due to exactly what the quote says...most of these installations were done by resellers who sell SCO along with their own SCO-based tax/payroll/billing/whatever software.
A lot of Microsoft employees own Microsoft stock. In the event of a breakup, they will probably split the stock between the two companies for each stockholder. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the employees with stock in both companies to keep the status quo as it is now.
There will be just little enough obvious cooperation between the two companies to avoid collusion charges.
"as soon as their machines were better than their bodies" is the key phrase here. Clarke's not talking about the crude machines and computers we have today. By our standards, our technology is wonderfully advanced, but in the grand scheme of things we've only scratched the surface. When we can make a body that is more durable, more reliable, and more capable than our own, then I see little problem with moving over.
The Lynx was cool, but my favorite handheld is currently the Sega Nomad. Beautiful screen, takes normal Genesis games (which can be had for very cheap at thrift stores). Plus you can plug in a second controller and hook it to a TV when you want some multiplayer.
The equipment in spacecraft already knows how to handle all the "little stuff" as far as space weather goes, so they only really watch for the big things like solar flares and such. Last time I checked, we do have pretty good systems in place on Earth for tracking hurricanes, storm fronts, etc.
As far as needing an umbrella, I like to remember a saying my dad often used when I was little: "You will not melt and you will eventually dry out."
That would probably be harder to do...a lightsaber is basically a cylinder...very easy to do on-the-fly video processing to determine its angle and such. The batleth (I don't know the real spelling either) is all curvy and stuff, can be used to attack with either end and the middle, etc.
Maybe that's not as much of a problem these days...video processing/image recoginition stuff has never been my strongpoint.
Smirnoff is not the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff (like Taaka or McCormick). At the same time, it's not ridiculously expensive. It is a decent compromise between vodka that outright sucks and vodka that costs too much to give away free at a tradeshow.
It's all about your frame of reference...you've worked with macs a lot, you've worked with windows a lot. You know the general design concepts. You know how the OS "thinks". The Unix world is very different.
If you had had the sort of luck I had early on, landing a random summer job setting up SCO Unix boxes as a teenager, you might not feel that the Unix way is all that bad. The installer would make more sense because the terminology and general moethods would already be there. Setting various things up would use concepts that you had already been exposed to.
To put it in perspective, this past weekend I put 2 more FreeBSD boxes on my home network. Installed both of them over the network from another FreeBSD box in about 1 hour. Installed the applications I wanted off the FreeBSD ports collection (and packages from the cd on some of the ones that take too long to download) and got them set up how i like then in another 2 hours. Boom...3 hours, 2 boxes.
And when I decide I want to go to the latest stable release of FreeBSD, I just kick off a cvsup job on each one before going to bed. In the morning, I cd/usr/src; make world and go to work...by the time I get home the boxes are ready for me to compile a new kernel and reboot.
On the mechanic quote...if I was a professional mechanic, I would probably fix it myself. I'm not, though...I'm a systems administrator. My car goes to the mechanic, but I fix my boxes myself.
The statement makes perfect sense...this product will be sold, but the availability of a free (and legally unchallenged) DVD plater for Linux will be hampered now that there is a solution for playing them...kinda puts some holes in the pro-DeCSS argument of "well, the industry wouldn't make the software, so we did."
Well, we could always just do it for FreeBSD instead...
WHY must there be so many different distributions of Linux?
WHY are there so many SVR4 variants?
Us UNIX geeks like to have variety, I suppose. Maybe it's not always in the best interests of solidarity and progress, but having the choices there is a nice feeling.
I use OpenBSD not because I necessarily like or agree with everything Theo has done that may be controversial over the years. I use OpenBSD because, all things considered, it's a damn good OS. The developers work hard with a primary goal of producing the best code, not just code-that-works-and-supports-latest-doohickey.
As I said in a previous OpenBSD thread, I don't care if the project lead eats children for breakfast and pushes old people out of wheelchairs for fun; if it works and I like it, I'll damn well use it.
It is a quote from the movie "Pi". Great film...see it if you get a chance. In the movie, the main character did indeed stare into the sun for a very long time.
This has been discussed a few times already, but...
NASA's track record isn't nearly as bad as the media would have you believe. The news outlets, as with many other things these days, report NASA failures more heavily than the successes. A probe or ship doing exactly what it is supposed to do isn't considered newsworthy enough for a long spot on the national evening news. A probe or ship that gets lost or otherwise malfunctions, complete with an inquiry and all that rot into why it failed? Now that's news! You'll hear little spots about it for weeks. Just like you'll hear about Columbine for months and months and months, and never hear for more than a second about a school that is doing well.
Things that go right just don't get as much attention as things that go badly.
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They are all different, but they all grew from the same roots. Due to this common heritage, many things (especially from the user perspective, not as much so from a developer perspective) work the same, look the same, are in the same place, etc. Just as a user can get by for most tasks with a generic SVR4 reference on just about any SVR4 variant, a user with a fairly generic BSD reference should be able to deal with most of the BSDs.
This is similar to the arguments surrounding traffic stops. In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it.
On your point about engineer integrity, this is a really tough question for a lot of people who work on such things. Personal beliefs and convictions are a hard thing to overcome; perhaps these engineers sincerely believe that they are working in the best interests of their fellow man. The too-happy and annoying church people that knock on my door from time to time do something that I could not do within my ethical outlook, but from their perspective the privacy violation is justifiable by the chance to save my soul or something along those lines.
The difference to most people is simple...the primary use of a car is transportation. The primary use of a gun is to lodge a projectile in a target, causing damage. The nature of the gun is significantly more malicious than a car. You can use a car to kill someone, but that's not the normal operational nature of a car.
In my opinion, there should not be a difference. If you leave a loaded weapon around and someone uses it to commit murder, there is one person to blame: the person who picked up the gun. Now, if you left the gun there specifically for another to pick it up and use it for a crime, then you're an accessory, but that's a whole other situation.
I don't know if it will always remain a novelty. It'll just happen much slower than overnight. More and more, there are certain bits of technology that people want around themselves all the time. Take mobile phones for example...10 years ago, I rarely saw anyone with one. Nowadays, when I walk into a restaurant, I'd say 50% or more of the adults in the restaurant have a phone on their belt. It didn't happen all at once, and it won't happen fast for general computing devices either. In fact, it will probably be quite a while before we see widespread use of wearable general-use computers. It won't start happening till enough people find themselves constantly carrying several electronic devices that could be replaced with a single computer.
When a significant portion of the population has a cell phone, handheld, and 3 or 4 other whizbangs that they can't stand to be without, then we'll see true wearable computing arise.
If you'll read the article carefully, it makes clear mention of a 2-inch lens with several tiny hydraulic pistons. Once the person's eye has been mapped, the lens is adjusted and the person looks through it.
Hmm...my guess would be a separate transmitter...I've seen plenty of Everest climb specials on PBS and the like, I've only ever seen them use radios for communication back to the base station.
Speaking of the whole "toy" aspect, you CAN be tracked down by your mobile phone's signals...and a lot of people do use those as toys. Of course, when this became widely known, the companies said, "We'll just use it to locate you when you call 911 for an emergency!" Yeah. Right. And JoeSchmoeInternetCo just wants my email address to send me the rare special offer...
You gonna carry your keyboard to the office, to you're friend's house, to wherever besides its normal location?
Didn't think so. I wouldn't either.
Since such a system would only be practical for single-system use anyway, why not just use...hrm...the mac address?
They RECEIVE. They do not transmit.
You know where you are, but they do not know where you are. The receiver figures out where you are by the signal coming from the nearest few satellites.
You'd be surprised...a rather large number of my comapny's clients have the random SCO server sitting around. They really do have a lot more installations than a lot of people think. I've noticed this to be especially true for small government clients. It's probably in part due to exactly what the quote says...most of these installations were done by resellers who sell SCO along with their own SCO-based tax/payroll/billing/whatever software.
Unless they've changed the offer, isn't the free Solaris thing only for noncommercial/educational use?
Your assumption has some potential holes here.
A lot of Microsoft employees own Microsoft stock. In the event of a breakup, they will probably split the stock between the two companies for each stockholder. Therefore, it is in the best interests of the employees with stock in both companies to keep the status quo as it is now.
There will be just little enough obvious cooperation between the two companies to avoid collusion charges.
"as soon as their machines were better than their bodies" is the key phrase here. Clarke's not talking about the crude machines and computers we have today. By our standards, our technology is wonderfully advanced, but in the grand scheme of things we've only scratched the surface. When we can make a body that is more durable, more reliable, and more capable than our own, then I see little problem with moving over.
The Lynx was cool, but my favorite handheld is currently the Sega Nomad. Beautiful screen, takes normal Genesis games (which can be had for very cheap at thrift stores). Plus you can plug in a second controller and hook it to a TV when you want some multiplayer.
The equipment in spacecraft already knows how to handle all the "little stuff" as far as space weather goes, so they only really watch for the big things like solar flares and such. Last time I checked, we do have pretty good systems in place on Earth for tracking hurricanes, storm fronts, etc.
As far as needing an umbrella, I like to remember a saying my dad often used when I was little: "You will not melt and you will eventually dry out."
Just to clarify, FreeBSD does not currently support 68k. NetBSD and OpenBSD do, though.
That would probably be harder to do...a lightsaber is basically a cylinder...very easy to do on-the-fly video processing to determine its angle and such. The batleth (I don't know the real spelling either) is all curvy and stuff, can be used to attack with either end and the middle, etc.
Maybe that's not as much of a problem these days...video processing/image recoginition stuff has never been my strongpoint.
Smirnoff is not the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff (like Taaka or McCormick). At the same time, it's not ridiculously expensive. It is a decent compromise between vodka that outright sucks and vodka that costs too much to give away free at a tradeshow.
It's all about your frame of reference...you've worked with macs a lot, you've worked with windows a lot. You know the general design concepts. You know how the OS "thinks". The Unix world is very different.
/usr/src; make world and go to work...by the time I get home the boxes are ready for me to compile a new kernel and reboot.
If you had had the sort of luck I had early on, landing a random summer job setting up SCO Unix boxes as a teenager, you might not feel that the Unix way is all that bad. The installer would make more sense because the terminology and general moethods would already be there. Setting various things up would use concepts that you had already been exposed to.
To put it in perspective, this past weekend I put 2 more FreeBSD boxes on my home network. Installed both of them over the network from another FreeBSD box in about 1 hour. Installed the applications I wanted off the FreeBSD ports collection (and packages from the cd on some of the ones that take too long to download) and got them set up how i like then in another 2 hours. Boom...3 hours, 2 boxes.
And when I decide I want to go to the latest stable release of FreeBSD, I just kick off a cvsup job on each one before going to bed. In the morning, I cd
On the mechanic quote...if I was a professional mechanic, I would probably fix it myself. I'm not, though...I'm a systems administrator. My car goes to the mechanic, but I fix my boxes myself.
The statement makes perfect sense...this product will be sold, but the availability of a free (and legally unchallenged) DVD plater for Linux will be hampered now that there is a solution for playing them...kinda puts some holes in the pro-DeCSS argument of "well, the industry wouldn't make the software, so we did."
Well, we could always just do it for FreeBSD instead...
What, you want me to put my REAL email address on here? Yeah...right. I've managed to make my life nearly spam-free, and I plan to keep it that way.
WHY must there be so many different distributions of Linux?
WHY are there so many SVR4 variants?
Us UNIX geeks like to have variety, I suppose. Maybe it's not always in the best interests of solidarity and progress, but having the choices there is a nice feeling.
I use OpenBSD not because I necessarily like or agree with everything Theo has done that may be controversial over the years. I use OpenBSD because, all things considered, it's a damn good OS. The developers work hard with a primary goal of producing the best code, not just code-that-works-and-supports-latest-doohickey.
As I said in a previous OpenBSD thread, I don't care if the project lead eats children for breakfast and pushes old people out of wheelchairs for fun; if it works and I like it, I'll damn well use it.
It is a quote from the movie "Pi". Great film...see it if you get a chance. In the movie, the main character did indeed stare into the sun for a very long time.
This has been discussed a few times already, but...
NASA's track record isn't nearly as bad as the media would have you believe. The news outlets, as with many other things these days, report NASA failures more heavily than the successes. A probe or ship doing exactly what it is supposed to do isn't considered newsworthy enough for a long spot on the national evening news. A probe or ship that gets lost or otherwise malfunctions, complete with an inquiry and all that rot into why it failed? Now that's news! You'll hear little spots about it for weeks. Just like you'll hear about Columbine for months and months and months, and never hear for more than a second about a school that is doing well.
Things that go right just don't get as much attention as things that go badly.
I don't think anyone forces you to read any particular article on Slashdot.