This idea won't work unfortunately. Even if the installation process was as simple as 'Insert the installation CD and turn on your computer', this would still be too scary and complicated for many users. 50%* of people would put the CD in the wrong way round (the others just got lucky). A computer should be fully working when you buy it.
Except that the computer is usually *not* fully working when one buys it. You need to unpack and to connect the cables. I saw people mix up and plug speakers into a microphone port and then wonder why the sound does not work.
One of the biggest reasons why Linux has not reached a wider audience is the difficulty of installation and configuration, which involves partitioning, potentially compiling drivers, and other things that can take some time. It also requires a decent amount of technical knowledge. If Linux came pre-installed, casual users would be a lot more inclined to give it a try.
This is an extremely good point - which makes the fact that Windows XP is sold in boxed versions just so much more astonishing.
Last time I was installing Win XP on a newly assembled computer it went part way through the installation and refused to continue because it could not find my hard disk. Can you believe it ?
But that's not all. The manufacturer supplied the driver on a floppy (which I could not read since I did not have any floppy drives), but I downloaded it from the web and copied to a USB stick. Second attempt - windows does not see the driver on the stick. I tried burning it to CD (and tried manufacturer CD as well) - no luck.
Ended up buying a floppy drive just to install the damn thing.
And, of course, once you install windows the computer is almost bare - no compilers, no scripting languages, no office suite. I can understand that they cannot install Adobe Photoshop because it is made by a different company, but would it kill Microsoft to include cygwin, gimp and OpenOffice on the same disk ?
Perhaps the right antimonopoly measure against MS is to prohibit pre-installation and require the systems be shipped with a clean drive, OS install CD and have the installation protocol fully documented. This would decouple the OS from the hardware.
I've said it before, but I really think the FSF needs to do more than just fund reverse engineering efforts. While ATI may hate these efforts, they make ATI products more valuable and ultimately help ATI. A concerted campaign to raise capital to start a rival graphics card manufacturer strikes me as a better solution if this is possible. I'm aware of open source graphics card efforts (involving programming FPGAs et al) but I think the next step needs to be taken. I would invest in it.
Having some experience with writing free software drivers for ATI cards I must (sadly) concur.
The problem is that it takes up to a year to make a half-way usable 3d driver - with the specs. Which means the developers should get specifications at least 6 months before the release of the new card for the drivers to be of relevance.
The reality is that we are lucky to get specifications 1 year after the release has happenned.
With regard to open hardware this is a great idea for many reasons beside the availability of specs.
For example, I would really, really, not mind paying extra $5 so that the graphics card does not lockup the moment it receives a slightly malformed command. Or so that it has a timeout and does not hang the PCI bus forever on a wrong address. The general-purpose CPUs have got this for ages - they just throw an interrupt and go on.
(Joking, joking. I know some people like KDE, though I have never been able to figure out why. Still, to each their own.)
I do try gnome each time major version comes out, but so far KDE seems to have more features that I care about - in particular fish: (ability to browse remote folders via ssh), konqueror and general integration between applications.
What do you find you like better in Gnome vs KDE ?
KDE is gone - practically erased from the experience. There is a QT4 interface control panel, and a few mentions of Kthis and Kthat, but you hardly ever see it. YaST (GUI) is GTK2/Mono, the Zen software manager is Mono, the Desktop is Gnome.
Ehh.. What are you talking about ? I am running 10.1 right now and have KDE desktop.
Energy is the first thing needed for manufacture. Most (all ?) of the manufacturing processes we have are energy constrained first and foremost.
First of all, not everything is made out of metal. Space technology isn't a 50s sci-fi film where every space vehicle is basically a tin can. I doubt that the space shuttles are made out of nickel, iron, silicon oxygen, and methane. What do we use in modern life that is metal, beside the panels of cars and frames for buildings? Just think of all the things we use today that are made out of plastic. Plastic is derived from oil. That means that a great amount of the raw material of daily life is a result of billions of years or organic life.
FYI, methane - CH4 - is just natural gas and there is a known process to make heavier hydrocarbons out of it (and oil if you want that particular form). This process requires lots of energy though.
Ceramics can be produced purely out of silicon oxide (sand) - you can get glass panels, glass fibers and silica gel which is a great insulator. And, of course, the usual solar panels and computer chips. Couple that with metal armature and parafin (produced from methane and used for radiation shielding) and you get all the major components you need. Btw, shuttle engines are made out of steel and the frame is aluminum - it was designed to be titanium, but the US was too cheap to do it for real. Btw, the original design needed the fuel tank for flights to the moon - but since aluminum frame is too heavy it needs it just to get into LEO.
Note that these elements are in abundance - a lot of trace elements like palladium or iridium are also present and extraction of those is largely a matter of energy consumption.
And then to support human life, you need a wide array of chemicals to grow food.
The major chemicals you need is water and CO2 - which are easily obtained out of methane and sand. Next you would need sodium, magnesium, nitrogen and iron - iron is no problem, all other can be obtained as trace elements (one does not need that many) and by recycling.
Or there could be a cheap source I do not know about (Venus and Mercurium atmospheres ?).
As far as 'processing', have you ever looked at a factory or any environment where they build something? There's a lot more going on than simple heating, which is what you would get if you slignshot a payload around the sun.
Yes I have. As far as material processing we either have mechanical action - i.e. drill press, works in space just as well, chemical reactions - often using lots of heat (as in steel production), direct energy application - i.e. laser drill, or electrolysis - gobs of power (both aluminum and titanium are produced by electrolysis of molten rock which has catalyst added to lower the melting temperature).
Aside from coming close to the sun (a useful technique to burn out oxygen out of silicon or iron oxide) one can simply build a huge mirror (say a few km in diameter) and focus it on whatever you want. I am sure this has been discussed before, look on the internet.
Keep in mind that what I am talking about is brute force, current knowledge only techniques. People who are working in the particular disciplines can come up with much neater methods.
I think that I have plenty of imagination, and a strong sense of realism.
Good ! Here is an exercise:
Imagine a spherical asteroid 10km in diameter.
On one end, 1km deep there is a dwelling 500m in diameter.
On the other end there are three spherical indentations 1km in diameter and 500m deep. They are lined with steel. One moves the asteroid by exploding a hydrogen bomb in the center of one of the indentations.
Estimate amount of energy to change the velocity vector by 1m/sec and express it in megatons of TNT.
How powerful the bomb needs to be if one assumes 1% efficiency of converting its energy to mechanical motion ? 0.1% efficiency ? How much radiation would penet
Space is mostly just that -- space. There's nothing out there that we need. The fact that we haven't justified the cost of space expeditions by mining or retreiving tells you something about the value of raw materials out there. Even if there were, say, a pocket of mineral in some asteriod, one mineral does not satisfy the various material needs of human civilization.
Oh come on, you must have more imagination that this..
There is plenty of metals (in particular nickel and iron), plenty of silicon and oxygen and plenty of methane (carbon and hydrogen). What else do you need ?
For bulk material processing just put what you want into a capsule and put it on a orbit that gets as close to the Sun as needed. Catch on the way back and (optionally) wait a few decades for the radiation to cool off. Crude, but cheap and effective.
The fact that we haven't justified the cost of space expeditions - is because the cost of getting off the Earth is too high. And even then it is not *that* high.
I wonder what would the ratio of the price of Columbus's ship to a median salary at that time be ?
Birthcontrol, ween of dependence on high energy consumption and colonise the solar system, because we sure aren't going to get along forever on this rock alone.
You got one right out of three - congratulations !
No, I do not see colonization of anything without high energy consumption. Most things you do in space would require gobs of power - whether it comes from your own nuclear source or Sun is immaterial.
As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area.
If you're running raid5 it's probably in an enterprise setup. If so, why aren't you running a dedicated controller? The CPU should have little to no impact on the raid subsystem...
This test is interesting for two reasons:
Cheap cluster nodes or desktops - one might not want to shell out $300+ for a dedicated controller
RAID code basically just munches data around. If software RAID performance is bad, it is likely that the performance of interpreted and bytecode/JIT languages (such as perl, python, tcltk, java, etc) suffers as well.
This would be a good reason to avoid the cpu completely. I really hope this is just some sort of driver issue and not an inherent cpu weakness.
I buy very few things. My appartment has one bed, 3 chairs (a gift, I didn't buy those,) a notebook computer, an old filing cabinet (another gift,) a couple of kettles, a frying pan, a steaming pot, some drinking glasses, an oscilloscope, a 3 way power transformer, a digital CPU programmer, an unfinished 3D printer, a few small tools, a VEX robot set with some addons, some clothing, a vacuum cleaner and a few normal household appliences (washer/dryer/fridge/stove/microwave oven/dishwasher.)
Amazing, you are not me from a parallel universe or something ?;)
I don't have a vacuum cleaner, but I bought the two chairs myself, and I have a frequency counter instead of your programmer.
Another interesting tidbit that you might not know, is that Soviets never made their own ballpoint pens - they had quality issues with the size of the small metal ball that goes into one.
Instead, the balls were manufactured in East Germany (which was under communists not as long as Russia).
Even then, one sometimes had to file away a little metal at the end of the tube so it does not scratch paper when writing. This got resolved with time - either they fixed the process or (just as likely) switched to imports.
While I believe that free, open source software is very good and should be used more widely, this is an example of where corporate solutions can prevail.
Bonkers
Had FreeDB used a similar hierarchy (which they may have had, but it just fell apart), this might have been avoided. The programmers/engineers would dispute something, and the project lead/lead engineer would hear both sides and say "This is this, and that's that."
And what happens, when they still disagree ? Bad enough that they want to quit ? If these people are essential to the company, it will fold *and* lock up the data.
Now, if you suggested a distributed way of maintaining the database (so a few people would not have to bear all the pressure), that would be useful and insightful.
Could Microsoft simply offer a voluntary addition that, prior to installation, says "By installing this software, you agree to the following alterations to your End User License Agreement"?
They could, but the user should be allowed to refuse such agreement without compromising existing functionality.
I'm not so certain about the legitimacy of a class action suit over this. Why?
It is basically a question of ability to amend EULAs and change the terms of the contract.
When Windows XP was bought there was nothing about having to run some program (or apply updates) in order to be able to use it. For example, I stopped doing any updates a month ago to production servers and intend on keeping them this way. They do not go to the net and they are behind a firewall.
If Microsoft is allowed to tack on conditions on usage of Windows XP (or any other product), this is very questionable. For example, what is to prevent them to require you to subscribe to their antivirus service as a requirement to run Windows ? What if that service is pay-for ?
FOSS is what it is. In some ways, it's capitalist, in others, it's communist, in others, it's volunteerist. That's really the beauty of the movement; you get out of it what you want to get out of it, and you put into it what you want to put into it.
FOSS is Star Trek - money is just not the main factor.
Sure, they're efficient, and the product is relatively cheap, but do we want to support the ways these companies treat their workers, even if it's "okay" with the workers?
There is a also a practical side to this. Allowing humans to be treated like parts of a machine slows down technological development. Why bother understanding what goes wrong or developing a robot when you can get 10 humans to do the same job at a fraction of the cost ? Humans might be slower than a good robot, but their cognitive abilities cannot be matched yet (especially those of young humans with good eyes) and they don't require a precise algorithm to do their job.
Abusing cheap labor slows down progress both in technology and society.
I am sorry, but I would not call NTFS "lean and mean". If anything it is bloated and slow.
I regularly have to copy 150Gig of (large) files from one machine to another. Each time the target machine is badly fragmented afterwards and read speeds are abysmal until defrag is run.
Before the copy that target has at least 200Gig free space. This is simply silly.
And don't get me started on read speeds as compared to ext3.
This is an honest question, I'm not trying to be a troll here but seriously... Is SUSE really relevant anymore? I mean this may be a case of I don't use it so no one must but I don't know anyone who is using it, or has even tried it. What is its "killer app"?
SUSE is the other very well known (because of Novell) corporate choice besides Redhat.
This alone is attractive - yes, one could have used Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware, but it is a lot easier to explain to business people that you go with Novell, if you don't want to use Redhat (my personal grudge is too many convoluted setup scripts, messing with kernel and gcc - I hope this changed for the better in the year or so I was not watching).
Good point - I agree that penetration would suffer. On the other hand one could make some easy shells with a wand-like instrument which has slots for emitting microwaves. By dipping it (carefully) into the liquid it would solidify it at some distance from the wand and the intensity of the microwaves emanating from the slot would define how far the wall is - in essence projecting shape out of the wand, which can be easily removed after the process.
Or were you joking too and I'm going to get flames for responding to this?:)
I think the other guy does not know how to combine his humor with his logic. Who ever spoiled the joke with a technical comment ?
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the computer is usually *not* fully working when one buys it. You need to unpack and to connect the cables. I saw people mix up and plug speakers into a microphone port and then wonder why the sound does not work.
This is an extremely good point - which makes the fact that Windows XP is sold in boxed versions just so much more astonishing.
Last time I was installing Win XP on a newly assembled computer it went part way through the installation and refused to continue because it could not find my hard disk. Can you believe it ?
But that's not all. The manufacturer supplied the driver on a floppy (which I could not read since I did not have any floppy drives), but I downloaded it from the web and copied to a USB stick. Second attempt - windows does not see the driver on the stick. I tried burning it to CD (and tried manufacturer CD as well) - no luck.
Ended up buying a floppy drive just to install the damn thing.
And, of course, once you install windows the computer is almost bare - no compilers, no scripting languages, no office suite. I can understand that they cannot install Adobe Photoshop because it is made by a different company, but would it kill Microsoft to include cygwin, gimp and OpenOffice on the same disk ?
Perhaps the right antimonopoly measure against MS is to prohibit pre-installation and require the systems be shipped with a clean drive, OS install CD and have the installation protocol fully documented. This would decouple the OS from the hardware.
Having some experience with writing free software drivers for ATI cards I must (sadly) concur.
The problem is that it takes up to a year to make a half-way usable 3d driver - with the specs. Which means the developers should get specifications at least 6 months before the release of the new card for the drivers to be of relevance.
The reality is that we are lucky to get specifications 1 year after the release has happenned.
With regard to open hardware this is a great idea for many reasons beside the availability of specs.
For example, I would really, really, not mind paying extra $5 so that the graphics card does not lockup the moment it receives a slightly malformed command. Or so that it has a timeout and does not hang the PCI bus forever on a wrong address. The general-purpose CPUs have got this for ages - they just throw an interrupt and go on.
A parent post somewhere above said that this new SUSE distribution uses GNOME.
I do try gnome each time major version comes out, but so far KDE seems to have more features that I care about - in particular fish: (ability to browse remote folders via ssh), konqueror and general integration between applications.
What do you find you like better in Gnome vs KDE ?
Ehh.. What are you talking about ? I am running 10.1 right now and have KDE desktop.
It is not a game, it is a screensaver !
First of all, not everything is made out of metal. Space technology isn't a 50s sci-fi film where every space vehicle is basically a tin can. I doubt that the space shuttles are made out of nickel, iron, silicon oxygen, and methane. What do we use in modern life that is metal, beside the panels of cars and frames for buildings? Just think of all the things we use today that are made out of plastic. Plastic is derived from oil. That means that a great amount of the raw material of daily life is a result of billions of years or organic life.
FYI, methane - CH4 - is just natural gas and there is a known process to make heavier hydrocarbons out of it (and oil if you want that particular form). This process requires lots of energy though.
Ceramics can be produced purely out of silicon oxide (sand) - you can get glass panels, glass fibers and silica gel which is a great insulator. And, of course, the usual solar panels and computer chips. Couple that with metal armature and parafin (produced from methane and used for radiation shielding) and you get all the major components you need. Btw, shuttle engines are made out of steel and the frame is aluminum - it was designed to be titanium, but the US was too cheap to do it for real. Btw, the original design needed the fuel tank for flights to the moon - but since aluminum frame is too heavy it needs it just to get into LEO.
Note that these elements are in abundance - a lot of trace elements like palladium or iridium are also present and extraction of those is largely a matter of energy consumption.
And then to support human life, you need a wide array of chemicals to grow food.
The major chemicals you need is water and CO2 - which are easily obtained out of methane and sand. Next you would need sodium, magnesium, nitrogen and iron - iron is no problem, all other can be obtained as trace elements (one does not need that many) and by recycling. Or there could be a cheap source I do not know about (Venus and Mercurium atmospheres ?).
As far as 'processing', have you ever looked at a factory or any environment where they build something? There's a lot more going on than simple heating, which is what you would get if you slignshot a payload around the sun.
Yes I have. As far as material processing we either have mechanical action - i.e. drill press, works in space just as well, chemical reactions - often using lots of heat (as in steel production), direct energy application - i.e. laser drill, or electrolysis - gobs of power (both aluminum and titanium are produced by electrolysis of molten rock which has catalyst added to lower the melting temperature).
Aside from coming close to the sun (a useful technique to burn out oxygen out of silicon or iron oxide) one can simply build a huge mirror (say a few km in diameter) and focus it on whatever you want. I am sure this has been discussed before, look on the internet.
Keep in mind that what I am talking about is brute force, current knowledge only techniques. People who are working in the particular disciplines can come up with much neater methods.
I think that I have plenty of imagination, and a strong sense of realism.
Good ! Here is an exercise:
Imagine a spherical asteroid 10km in diameter.
On one end, 1km deep there is a dwelling 500m in diameter.
On the other end there are three spherical indentations 1km in diameter and 500m deep. They are lined with steel. One moves the asteroid by exploding a hydrogen bomb in the center of one of the indentations.
Oh come on, you must have more imagination that this..
You got one right out of three - congratulations !
No, I do not see colonization of anything without high energy consumption. Most things you do in space would require gobs of power - whether it comes from your own nuclear source or Sun is immaterial.
As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area.
This test is interesting for two reasons:
Amazing, you are not me from a parallel universe or something ? ;)
I don't have a vacuum cleaner, but I bought the two chairs myself, and I have a frequency counter instead of your programmer.
Is your power supply TekPower or Elenco ?
Instead, the balls were manufactured in East Germany (which was under communists not as long as Russia).
Even then, one sometimes had to file away a little metal at the end of the tube so it does not scratch paper when writing. This got resolved with time - either they fixed the process or (just as likely) switched to imports.
Bonkers
Had FreeDB used a similar hierarchy (which they may have had, but it just fell apart), this might have been avoided. The programmers/engineers would dispute something, and the project lead/lead engineer would hear both sides and say "This is this, and that's that."
And what happens, when they still disagree ? Bad enough that they want to quit ? If these people are essential to the company, it will fold *and* lock up the data.
Now, if you suggested a distributed way of maintaining the database (so a few people would not have to bear all the pressure), that would be useful and insightful.
They could, but the user should be allowed to refuse such agreement without compromising existing functionality.
It is basically a question of ability to amend EULAs and change the terms of the contract.
When Windows XP was bought there was nothing about having to run some program (or apply updates) in order to be able to use it. For example, I stopped doing any updates a month ago to production servers and intend on keeping them this way. They do not go to the net and they are behind a firewall.
If Microsoft is allowed to tack on conditions on usage of Windows XP (or any other product), this is very questionable. For example, what is to prevent them to require you to subscribe to their antivirus service as a requirement to run Windows ? What if that service is pay-for ?
FOSS is Star Trek - money is just not the main factor.
Download Linux instead!
There is a also a practical side to this. Allowing humans to be treated like parts of a machine slows down technological development. Why bother understanding what goes wrong or developing a robot when you can get 10 humans to do the same job at a fraction of the cost ? Humans might be slower than a good robot, but their cognitive abilities cannot be matched yet (especially those of young humans with good eyes) and they don't require a precise algorithm to do their job.
Abusing cheap labor slows down progress both in technology and society.
I am sorry, but I would not call NTFS "lean and mean". If anything it is bloated and slow.
I regularly have to copy 150Gig of (large) files from one machine to another. Each time the target machine is badly fragmented afterwards and read speeds are abysmal until defrag is run. Before the copy that target has at least 200Gig free space. This is simply silly.
And don't get me started on read speeds as compared to ext3.
Looking at the older maps, it is curious how much space that was occupied by proprietary software got replaced with GNU based offerings.
That's because people enter through the windows.
SUSE is the other very well known (because of Novell) corporate choice besides Redhat.
This alone is attractive - yes, one could have used Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware, but it is a lot easier to explain to business people that you go with Novell, if you don't want to use Redhat (my personal grudge is too many convoluted setup scripts, messing with kernel and gcc - I hope this changed for the better in the year or so I was not watching).
Or were you joking too and I'm going to get flames for responding to this? :)
I think the other guy does not know how to combine his humor with his logic. Who ever spoiled the joke with a technical comment ?