TFA reads less like a comparison of two OS's than an Ubuntu sales pitch. Funny, after reading the comments here about popup ads, I thought it sounded like it would read (... yes, I haven't read it:) like a pro-Linux article posted to Slashdot to try to get some cheap easy hits for their ad campaigns!
I liked the initial viewing of large quantity of hi-res images and the smooth zoom. The aggregation of many thousand flickr images of the Notre Dame (including one of a poster on a wall) into a 3-D image was fantastic. Yeh - but now I'm scratching my head wondering how they do that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm blown away by the impressiveness of it, but I want to know (even roughly) how it's done. I can't for the life of me figure out how you can take random photos of the internet, throw them into some software, and have it churn out a 3d map based on nothing more than the photos.
Seriously, it's so awesome that I almost can't believe they really did it. I would love to even just get a vague idea of what they're doing to make it happen.
Re:It's here! Web 2.0 is HERE!!!
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Photosynth Demo
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This is basically exactly how I felt when I saw Google's StreetView thing. I can't believe it's been trumped by Microsoft. Nice to see them innovating with some really seriously impressive stuff.
Sorry Taco, but Tags are boring and useless now. Bring back the old ones or do away with these. It's a really interesting example of a web feature that deviated massively from its original purpose into something that the community of the site found useful and neat (well, you and me, anyway - I quite liked the way it used to work as well).
Rather than build on that they decided to tweak the system (for understandable reasons) so it started working more as it was originally intended - as a way to tag/classify stories at a high level.
I thought it was always interesting/entertaining - it basically summarised the comments (which is why I read slashdot in the first place) in a way that made it easy to see what the general community feel for a story was. That's more useful to me than keywords in the story, personally.
Thanks for taking the time to express your concern to Dell in a constructive and calm manner.
I am quite confident that if you had been the typical rabid Internet using jerk (I do a lot of support work so am familiar with the type), your inquiry would have been carelessly tossed aside and it probably would have massively affected the speed it took to resolve this issue.
I am personally going to be buying a Linux Dell as soon as they're available in Australia (maybe they are already?) as I think it's simply awesome to see consumer-type computers shipping with this as an option now.
... and, here's a link to the story source - at least they referenced it in the article, but essentially its a rewrite of the treehugger item submitted as blogspam.
While I'm whining, is there a template for stories about huge technological advances in energy production? Like "A startup has developed a new form of [insert name of your favourite green energy production system here]. It takes the existing process of [current way to produce power] and optimises it by [super high level technical details of magical new system], resulting in an efficiency improvement of [insert random number greater than 1 here, without citing details about how it was measured or what the costs of the new procedure are]. Read more about it on [insert link to your blog].
Parallels and Bootcamp don't exist for die hard Macintosh users. As you say, for decades you haven't cared.
You're missing the point of these tools entirely - they exist for people like me: die hard Windows/Linux users that have always been disdainful of the Mac for various reasons (for me it was gaming and learning curve, for others it was legacy application support, for others it was hatred of a one button mouse, etc).
Now there's a way I and the zillions of others who are now jaded with Microsoft can buy a sweet Apple computer that are all the rage now - all the kids are using them and they're all over the TV, so they must be good, right!? - with the confident knowledge that I can still boot to Windows if I need to, or use Parallels to run my games, or whatever.
I've been a die hard PC user since XT days but now the Macintosh is appealing to me specifically because of these features. I'm a lot closer to spending my $$$ on a Macintosh now than ever before, and many of my PC using friends have already made the switch.
You and the rest of the Mac guys don't have to pay any attention to it and can smugly assume superiority, but you might as well wait until everyone like me has already switched over!
the report faults Vista for "providing no improvement in virus protection vs. XP," but of course Windows Vista does not ship with antivirus software I thought the big issue everyone had with Windows products were that they needed AV products in the first place because they were fundamentally insecure?
Shipping Vista with an AV package would have practically been admitting that they can't make secure products and the only thing left to do is have a separate layer in the OS to try to intercept stuff before it caused problems (or clean up after it), rather than blocking the holes in the first place - which is, I believe, part of the point of Vista's entire security model (DON'T RUN THINGS AS ADMINISTRATOR, JERKS).
Interestingly the copyright on some of the SF photos (at least the ones I've looked at near the Golden Gate Bridge) belongs to Google, so maybe they did take at least some of the pictures themselves.
Ahh, ok - I just figured it was apache because I assumed it would have closed the port or something when it had hit MaxClients, so I thought it was dealing with it by leaving the port open and accepting requests and just processing them later on a first come first serve basis, but what you're saying makes sense.
So I guess what could also happen is you could exhaust the operating system's ability to handle connections, right? So if you hit MaxClients early and you have thousands and thousands of users trying to get to the site, I assume that must be consuming some operating system resource to manage all those connections - and if it is set really high, perhaps it could cause some other problem to arise.
Yes, that stops it killing your server, and instead it rejects requests. It does nothing to actually fix the problem. It doesn't actually rejects them (unless you configure it to do so) - by default it just queues them somehow internally in apache (so when one of the clients disconnects freeing up a connection, one of the queued connections waiting for a free spot nabs it).
I assume this behaviour is documented somewhere, but I haven't seen it.
I don't hate McBride. Not even Steve or Bill. I hate people who see their business model crumble and try to keep it up by instilling FUD in their customers, so they stay with them out of fear, not because they have the better product. I hate people who hamper progress and development for their personal gains. I hate people who want to keep their customers shackled by threats rather than offering them the better product. What a great summary of most of the stories that we get to read these days.
Instead of great new product announcements or enhancements to existing product ranges (hi Google), we simply see nebulous legal threats (SCO's bizarre attempts, Microsoft's recent patent-portfolio assault on Linux and open source), people getting taken to court (as the RIAA/MPAA attempt to criminalise copyright infringement), laws getting changed by media companies to protect their golden egg-laying goose, the copyright cashcow (you name it), and more.
Hopefully a few massive, spectacular failures (like the SCO thing is shaping up) will make corporations less likely to try to sue to stay alive in evolving markets and more likely to try to innovate.
Swim or sink, but please stop pissing in the pool.
Moreover, I like the idea of police actions being recorded at all times. Me too. In fact, when I read the subject that's what I thought this article would be about. I think being able to record offenses is merely a nice incidental bonus.
The problem is that Microsoft is charging too much for their software. Maybe, but that's not what the GP was saying, and not what I was replying about.
Expecting people in Australia to pay more than $100 for a Windows license appears unreasonable too, because most people I know don't have legitimate copies of Windows.
If you don't like what people are charging for something, I don't think you can tout piracy as the solution for it. I don't really care if people DO it, but I don't think you should make a big deal out of it and use it as a soapbox cause for Windows pricing reform. Especially for operating systems when there are decent, free, open source alternatives to what most people use a PC for these days.
Imagine if Indian retailers starting shipping Ubuntu-only systems in response to this instead of trying to justify piracy. 1 billion people in India all using Linux sounds pretty awesome to me.
Going after people who develop WMV codecs for instance, can only hurt Microsoft, and in my opinion this is an interoperability issue, Microsoft doesn't have a right to bitch about people coding for a platform they refuse to support. Well, they do - that's presumably the entire reason they patent stuff in the first place - to force users into their platform to use their services and products.
MPEG4 on the other hand i consider to be a standard at this point, and licensing should not be necessary. MPEG-LA is well supported already and it does them no good to go after open source codecs, it does however hurt the format. My point was really that it could potentially be lucrative for MPEG-LA to let companies get comfortable with using open source software (eg, Google with FFMPEG), wait until its entrenched into their processes, and then hit them with licensing fees.
They buy one or two more of 'em and people will stop starting them Weird, I think the opposite - the more things Google buy, the more incentive people have to start things in the hope they'll get bought out.
Of course, the converse might be true - if they do include a way to auto-install codecs it might piss off the people that own the patents for these various media types.
mp3 and mpeg4 video are the first that come to mind. Given Microsoft's recent declaration that they're going after patent violators it seems only a matter of time before MPEG-LA and other media licensing organisations think they should start going after people that are using legally questionable media software like ffmpeg, mplayer, xvid, lame, etc.
Bruce Schneier has already commented on this and the effectiveness of such a measure. He's written about things like this before - it's interesting, once you start thinking about security related issues (especially if you read his blog, I guess:), you read an article like this and go "well, gee, I guess now The Evil Terrorists know this one particular method won't work, they can just cross it off their project plan for this particular event and focus on other more effective measures".
Also, hopefully noone has an actual emergency while this thing is going past. I'd hate for someone to have a heart attack or be trying to call in a fire or something and not be able to use their cell phone. Or dial for the police in case they see suspicious people near the motorcade. You know, like people with beards.
I wonder what the health implications are of something that is broadcasting a signal strong enough to block all mobile phone calls in that sort of radius? I'm sure the most likely explanation is that it's no different from all the other electromagnetic stuff that's sloshing through the air but it seems that this might be a little more powerful?
So the big issue though is are they going to go after software developers that use patented stuff in their code - or the end users that end up using the software?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong, I'm blown away by the impressiveness of it, but I want to know (even roughly) how it's done. I can't for the life of me figure out how you can take random photos of the internet, throw them into some software, and have it churn out a 3d map based on nothing more than the photos.
Seriously, it's so awesome that I almost can't believe they really did it. I would love to even just get a vague idea of what they're doing to make it happen.
This is basically exactly how I felt when I saw Google's StreetView thing. I can't believe it's been trumped by Microsoft. Nice to see them innovating with some really seriously impressive stuff.
Rather than build on that they decided to tweak the system (for understandable reasons) so it started working more as it was originally intended - as a way to tag/classify stories at a high level.
I thought it was always interesting/entertaining - it basically summarised the comments (which is why I read slashdot in the first place) in a way that made it easy to see what the general community feel for a story was. That's more useful to me than keywords in the story, personally.
Thanks for taking the time to express your concern to Dell in a constructive and calm manner.
I am quite confident that if you had been the typical rabid Internet using jerk (I do a lot of support work so am familiar with the type), your inquiry would have been carelessly tossed aside and it probably would have massively affected the speed it took to resolve this issue.
I am personally going to be buying a Linux Dell as soon as they're available in Australia (maybe they are already?) as I think it's simply awesome to see consumer-type computers shipping with this as an option now.
... and, here's a link to the story source - at least they referenced it in the article, but essentially its a rewrite of the treehugger item submitted as blogspam.
While I'm whining, is there a template for stories about huge technological advances in energy production? Like "A startup has developed a new form of [insert name of your favourite green energy production system here]. It takes the existing process of [current way to produce power] and optimises it by [super high level technical details of magical new system], resulting in an efficiency improvement of [insert random number greater than 1 here, without citing details about how it was measured or what the costs of the new procedure are]. Read more about it on [insert link to your blog].
Parallels and Bootcamp don't exist for die hard Macintosh users. As you say, for decades you haven't cared.
You're missing the point of these tools entirely - they exist for people like me: die hard Windows/Linux users that have always been disdainful of the Mac for various reasons (for me it was gaming and learning curve, for others it was legacy application support, for others it was hatred of a one button mouse, etc).
Now there's a way I and the zillions of others who are now jaded with Microsoft can buy a sweet Apple computer that are all the rage now - all the kids are using them and they're all over the TV, so they must be good, right!? - with the confident knowledge that I can still boot to Windows if I need to, or use Parallels to run my games, or whatever.
I've been a die hard PC user since XT days but now the Macintosh is appealing to me specifically because of these features. I'm a lot closer to spending my $$$ on a Macintosh now than ever before, and many of my PC using friends have already made the switch.
You and the rest of the Mac guys don't have to pay any attention to it and can smugly assume superiority, but you might as well wait until everyone like me has already switched over!
Shipping Vista with an AV package would have practically been admitting that they can't make secure products and the only thing left to do is have a separate layer in the OS to try to intercept stuff before it caused problems (or clean up after it), rather than blocking the holes in the first place - which is, I believe, part of the point of Vista's entire security model (DON'T RUN THINGS AS ADMINISTRATOR, JERKS).
Heh, a similar thing happens in Niven and Pournelle's book Footfall. Earth is invaded by aliens and the US government calls in the sci-fi writers.
Interestingly the copyright on some of the SF photos (at least the ones I've looked at near the Golden Gate Bridge) belongs to Google, so maybe they did take at least some of the pictures themselves.
Ahh, ok - I just figured it was apache because I assumed it would have closed the port or something when it had hit MaxClients, so I thought it was dealing with it by leaving the port open and accepting requests and just processing them later on a first come first serve basis, but what you're saying makes sense.
So I guess what could also happen is you could exhaust the operating system's ability to handle connections, right? So if you hit MaxClients early and you have thousands and thousands of users trying to get to the site, I assume that must be consuming some operating system resource to manage all those connections - and if it is set really high, perhaps it could cause some other problem to arise.
I assume this behaviour is documented somewhere, but I haven't seen it.
Instead of great new product announcements or enhancements to existing product ranges (hi Google), we simply see nebulous legal threats (SCO's bizarre attempts, Microsoft's recent patent-portfolio assault on Linux and open source), people getting taken to court (as the RIAA/MPAA attempt to criminalise copyright infringement), laws getting changed by media companies to protect their golden egg-laying goose, the copyright cashcow (you name it), and more.
Hopefully a few massive, spectacular failures (like the SCO thing is shaping up) will make corporations less likely to try to sue to stay alive in evolving markets and more likely to try to innovate.
Swim or sink, but please stop pissing in the pool.
Expecting people in Australia to pay more than $100 for a Windows license appears unreasonable too, because most people I know don't have legitimate copies of Windows.
If you don't like what people are charging for something, I don't think you can tout piracy as the solution for it. I don't really care if people DO it, but I don't think you should make a big deal out of it and use it as a soapbox cause for Windows pricing reform. Especially for operating systems when there are decent, free, open source alternatives to what most people use a PC for these days.
Imagine if Indian retailers starting shipping Ubuntu-only systems in response to this instead of trying to justify piracy. 1 billion people in India all using Linux sounds pretty awesome to me.
Of course, the converse might be true - if they do include a way to auto-install codecs it might piss off the people that own the patents for these various media types.
mp3 and mpeg4 video are the first that come to mind. Given Microsoft's recent declaration that they're going after patent violators it seems only a matter of time before MPEG-LA and other media licensing organisations think they should start going after people that are using legally questionable media software like ffmpeg, mplayer, xvid, lame, etc.
Laws like, "you should pay money for other people's work, if that's how they want to provide it"? What's stupid about that?
If you don't like Microsoft, fine - but saying that the laws are stupid because they want to charge for their work seems a little bit silly.
The official site is up now too, with screenshots and movies.
(blatant plug: mirrors of the movies available here (Australian mirror))
Bruce Schneier has already commented on this and the effectiveness of such a measure. He's written about things like this before - it's interesting, once you start thinking about security related issues (especially if you read his blog, I guess :), you read an article like this and go "well, gee, I guess now The Evil Terrorists know this one particular method won't work, they can just cross it off their project plan for this particular event and focus on other more effective measures".
Also, hopefully noone has an actual emergency while this thing is going past. I'd hate for someone to have a heart attack or be trying to call in a fire or something and not be able to use their cell phone. Or dial for the police in case they see suspicious people near the motorcade. You know, like people with beards.
I wonder what the health implications are of something that is broadcasting a signal strong enough to block all mobile phone calls in that sort of radius? I'm sure the most likely explanation is that it's no different from all the other electromagnetic stuff that's sloshing through the air but it seems that this might be a little more powerful?
Awesome trick! Very handy stuff.
So the big issue though is are they going to go after software developers that use patented stuff in their code - or the end users that end up using the software?
Of course the alternative is likely too - storm smacks down phone lines leaving landlines useless! As you suggest, best option is redundancy.