It's a lot more than the lack of USB, firewire and common APIs.
Let's take a quick look at some of the things that are missing:
Power management that works. This is increasingly important not only for laptops, but servers as well. It's been *years* now and we still don't have decent ACPI support, which handles much more than power.
Support for laptops that goes beyond, "Hey I got it to not fall over for an hour at a time!" This would include things like hot-plugging and hot-docking to docking staitons and cradles, as well as intermittent connections to multiple networks (something MS doesn't do well, either...)
Some reasonable way to manage the configuration of machines and user auths, permissions, etc. AD is a train wreck compared to real enterprise directories like NDS, but at least it sort of works. Linux offers NOTHING as a reasonable alternative, shutting us out of the enterprise, and on good grounds.
Finally, the Linux community has failed to come to grips with the fact that MS controls the hardware playing field with their Windows Logo standards for hardware. The big OEMs will *always* dance to the MS tune here because if they don't, the OS license cost goes through the roof (more than enough to wipe out the entire profit margin on a PC! The open source community needs to recognize this fact, and be on the cutting edge of supporting new hardware, not three years behind, like we are now.
Back when NT 4.0 was about to come out, I was working at Sun and we received a briefing on the capabilities of NT4 vs. Solaris.
One of the PowerPoint slides I remember consisted of the following words: "Printing: They can."
It's maddening to realize that not much has changed since then. There are many of us that have *really tried* to use Linux/Unix on the desktop, but sadly, the tools available in the Unix space for this sort of thing remain third-world primitive and five years behind. People who only code (and are light-duty browser users) may be able to get by with Linux, but not the rest of us.
And no, before you flame me, I'm NOT anti-Linux, but I've been saying this same thing here on/. for years now, and it hasn't changed: There's always some possible challenger that may become usable at some point in the future if the open source development model ever actually started to work for things like this. That, too is not a flame, but a valid observation: the open source model has had its successes, but they tend to be geek-ware infrastructure rather than user code.
I think really this points up a fundamental weakness of the open source development model: without strong central control and authority, no one wants to write the really hard stuff, and there's not enough coordination to ensure it can be done piecewise. It's taken us *years* just to get to the point that we have some services that might be good enough to build apps on, but those apps are even harder than what's already been done, and the starting points are pretty bleak. Just try doing non-trivial spreadsheet work in *any* open source app and compare the functionality gap to Excel. For all Excel's warts (and it has them, believe me), it winds up being the best tool I can find for most what-if/analysis tasks. (Remember Excel is the whole reson Windows even exists: for those of you too young to remember or those not paying attention at the time, Windows came about only because MS wanted to put its wildly successful Mac spreadsheet (Excel) on PCs, too.
This problem cannot be fixed with the current open source development model, and I'm not sure there can be enough of a profit motive to support alternative models, as Eazel so poignantly illustrates.
Like many I've talked to in the community, I've given up - none of my "main" desktop machines now boot into Linux as the default anymore, and I find I spend less and less time there, especially as W2K, for all its faults, is increasingly "good enough" and allows me to accomplish the work I need with less hassle.
I have only one gripe with the article - Linux was never even in the game on the desktop, and most likely never will be, unless it manages to establish a beachhead in embedded devices. That scenario is looking increasingly likely, and Qt/KDE has a shot there, but Gnome continues to sap the efforts that could result in a real, workable alternative...
Why Dumb networks are better
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Smart Routers
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· Score: 2
"For years, Cisco and Juniper have been stuck in the "smart fringes, dumb core" view of routers and the Internet.
This just shows this guy doesn't have a clue about the lessons that countless thousands have learned the hard way about where complexity can be economically exploited in large scale networks.
Those of us who have had to deal with the inane complexities of "smart" networks (like, for example, OSI and ATM) recognize that the original Internet philosophy of pushing the intelligence to the edges is the *only* way to build networks that have any staying power.
Both the Internet Protocol itself and Ethernet have succeeded far beyond what most "experts" predicted specifically because they embody the dumb network idea. Although I don't expect many people here on/. to realize it, we've tried all these grand ideas before, and they've failed miserably each and every time they've been tried.
There are *really good reasons* why dumb networks are better - I don't have time for the whole rundown, here are a few of the biggies:
1) Pushing the intelligence to the edge puts it where it can be most easily and flexibly be changed. This is a huge win, and it allows each node to accomodate its own needs, as well as adapte reasonably to meet ongoing needs. Smart networks are, almost by definintion, static networks. They *may* be appropriate in 100 years when the Internet has a mturity level similar to the switched telephone network. (Of course, that network will then have long been replaced by IP telephony, so you're never really safe, are you?)
2) It's orders of magnitude cheaper to put these capabilities at the hosts than to put them in the network. Yes, you pay a little performance penalty for that, but remember, we've got Moore's law on our side: CPU cycles to burn, and increasingly intelligent network adapters at the volume prices that make the whole thing work. This is the whole reason why nearly all of us use the "simple, stupid" Ethernet almost exclusively and the elegant smart and complex networks like Token Ring, FDDI, and ATM will be footnotes on the ash heap of history. Because the intelligence of these networks was very expensive and in the wrong place (the core), they were not able to effectively compete with a standard that has evolved from 3 megabits/second to 10 gigabits/second, and will nearly certainly move to terabit speeds in the next few years. (For you flamers out there, I realize that 10Gb Ethernet isn't standardized yet, but the IEEE 802.3ae working group is making good progress on it and some vendors (Foundry for one) are already selling "pre-standard" 10 Gb products. It's likely we'll see a 100 Gb working group formed in the next several months...)
3) Putting the intelligence in the cheap stuff at the ends is the best way to "future-proof" the network. Centralized planning only works if you have both a crystal ball and a perfect plan, perfectly executed (ask the former Soviet Union.) The real world is (and should be) messier than that, and we *want* networks (well, everyone but the RIAA/MPAA) that accomodate serendipitous re-use.
Bottom line: History clearly shows that "Dumb" networks are in almost every case far preferable to "Smart" ones. They definitely work better in the real world, with real world economic considerations, and support the freedom to "misuse" the network by using it for things that were not foreseen by the inevitably short-sighted designers of the smarts...
Tottenville is illuminated by electric "suns" suspended from arms on steel towers 200 feet high.
Oddly, what he's describing here sounds virtually identical to the "Moonlight Towers" that were popular from the 1880s to the turn of the century in many cities. Austin is one of the few places where they are sill in operation - there a probably a few dozen left, including the big one they use to make the Christmas tree in Zilker Park every year...
Mozilla is *not* really good. It's not even marginally acceptable to serious browser users:
Here's a list of what was still broken when I tried it again a couple of weeks ago:
1) Still can't handle reasonably populated mail files. I have many files/mailboxes that have a couple of thousand messages in them. Mozilla shows they have only a few dozen. I've had previous versions corrupt the mailfiles, too, something I can never forgive. (And yes, I know it's not done yet, but I don't expect it to corrupt my mailfiles after so many years in development...)
2) It's still completely incapable of handling serious bookmark files. (A quick wc -l on my bookmarks file returns 2516. I've yet to have a version of Mozilla that won't scrog the bookmark file within a few hours, and most of them I've tried can't even load the whole thing. Mozilla also seems to have real problems in parsing many levels of bookmark folders, too. Basically, it's bookmark capabilities are useless to me.
3) On top of all that, it still doesn't support roaming profiles, so I'm forced to going back to managing bookmark files separately on every computer I own or use, or dealling with half-assed methods like unison or other file sync programs.
Note that all of these complaints apply equally to Netscape 6 as well as Mozilla. Neither is really up to supporting anything other than a lightweight user of the tool. Netscape 4.x, for all its warts, at least has the cojones to do the job. I've never found any other tool that can... (No, IE doesn't count, because it doesn't integrate mail that can use a standard non-binary, non-proprietary mailbox format. Not to mention it's bookmark capabilites aren't even as good as Mozilla's...)
So far as I can tell, there is NO ALTERNATIVE AT ALL to Netscape 4.x, nor is there likely to be one anytime in the near future. (Oh, and anything I use must run as well or better on Win32 also, since unfortunately, that's where I need to spend 90% of my desktop time...)
"Programmers should program and make schedule estimates. Managers should make business decisions. Customers should choose the features they want and rank them by importance."
If this is truly the way that XP will be implemented, and I don't doubt that in most cases, it is, it is a recipe for near useless software dripping in chrome.
The fundamental problem is that customers don't know what they want, and if they do, they envision it within a very narrow context rather than what is possible and do-able. This in no way devalues their input, but the key to a really good software design is vision. The scenario described above has compartmentalized vision as outside the scope of all three groups of players. This is why we need software architects that can bridge the gap and have some idea of what is possible.
Case in point: A few years back, I pitched a proposal to a title compnay that had an extremely advanced workflow system that was extremely well-tuned to their needs, and gave them a cost structure and response time *much* lower than their competitors. Unfortunately it was based on an old non-Y2K-compliant version of NeXTstep, so it had to be rewritten or replaced. Even though they had a system in house that met their business needs perfectly, they were not able to adequately define their needs. Also, they were concerned about document file formats, since the documents need to remain usable for decades. I realized that what they really wanted was thier current system modified to protect them from file format horrors, and we proposed a OO re-write of the existing code to include TeX or SGML-based document formats.
The point is this: Neither the programmers, the business people, or the customer knew what was really wanted or required - it took a vision of how the entire thing should work to come up with the solution that all three agreed was what they *really* needed.
Finally, it seems to me that XP is still doomed as a way to write breakthrough apps simply because it generally pushes big developmet groups and flies in the face of Bill Joy's smallness principle: Good software is never written by more than about six people. You can have a bunch of others testing and whatnot, but all the design decisions need to be made by a small group, or you're toast...
Exactly how DO you make a lightbulb shine by microwaving it in a cup of water???
I haven't tried it with an incandescent bulb (I wouldn't expect that to work), but it's quite easy with a neon bulb, with or without the water. (I suspect the water was just added to ensure that the magnetron had some significant energy sink while the class filed past and looked through the window in the door - otherwise you could burn it out fairly quickly...)
As elegant as this sounds, it's a feedback loop. Think about it... as more patents are issued, the term shortens, forcing companies to innovate faster (and potentially produce bullshit "innovations") to protect their profits, causing a shorter term, and so on. Eventually, you end up with patents that last about five hours.
First, you obviously didn't read down to the part where I said the lower bound of protection should be something that's still economically reasonable, like 3-5 years.)
Secondly, the system is somewhat self-correcting in that it will tend to prevent people from filing if they can't realize a return on their investment within the shorter time frame. (Why would a company spend $15,000 on a patent if it wasn't going to make back many, many times that much before it expired? Granted, this assumes markets are rational - generally but not always true.) Most likely, this would actually cut down on BS patents. There will be more incentive to file when the term is longer, less when it's shorter, unless the short term is still valuable because the innovation is in a fast-moving technology space, in which case that's OK, as it's still the result we want...
Re:It's the responsibility of the importer
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Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
IANAL, but I think the offending company would still be liable if they are based or operate in the US. Those that operate entirely outside the country might not be subject to US patent law - but there is also some significant reciprocity in patent laws between nations that could produce liability under US law even if all infringing activity took place outside the US.
Most of this sort of thing is governed by the Paris Convention, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the European Patent Office/European Patent Convention, and the Pan American Convention. (Source: Chapter 12 of David Pressman's excellent Nolo Press book, Patent it Yourself.)
If you really need to know this stuff, get a good book on it, or pay a patent attorney - it's rough terrain for some of us engineering types, and the penalty for doing it wrong can be severe, especially considering how much more expensive it is to seek overseas patents...
I didn't say innovation wouldn't happen, just that without the ability to exclusively profit from innovations (real ones, not the MS kind), the pace of innovation *will* slow to a crawl.
The only problem with the US patent system (which is far and away the best in the world, and a primary driver behind American technological leadership over the past couple of centuries) is that it is blind to the huge differences in economic timescales across disciplines. I think 17 years should be enough for anything (if it can't be capitalized on in that timeframe, it's not *ready* for a patent!) Areas where innovation is more rapid should have shorter terms. I'm all for software patents, but I don't think they should be valid for more than five years.
So here I present Dublin's simple but excellent patent reform proposal: The length of patent terms can and should be self-regulating: Make the length of term for new patents in each patent category (mechanical device, electronic hardware, software, etc.) inversely proportional to the average number of patents issued in the previous two quarters. (Note: that's "issued", NOT "applied for" - this discourages artificial manipulation.) This would automatically produce shorter terms as patent activity heats up (with a quick response time), and then lengthen them again once the pace of innovation slows, matching the growth patterns of the associated industries. Also, it ensures that the IP behind innovations is more quickly available freely in fast-moving areas. This tends to prevent the formation of long-term dynasties unless there is real and continual innovation to back it. (We might expect to see more innovation like that of Dyson in the UK and other companies *really* pushing the state of the art under such a plan.) Interestingly, this could make patents (especialy early and really innovative ones, which will have longer terms) *more* valuable than they are today, while still making technologies more rapidly and readily available for society at large.
Reasonable upper and lower limits should apply to the patent terms: I'd argue for 17 years upper and 5 years lower (although I could perhaps be persuaded to consider 3 or 4 years as a lower bound in extraordinary circumstances - nothing shorter makes any economic sense.)
This relatively simple and straightforward change would fix the aspect of the patent system that most vexes its foes, while still retaining all the best features of a system that has proven its inestimable value over the past two centuries. In other words, it only fixes what's broken, which is a very good thing. I can envision no alternative type of patent reform that has such advantages for the inventors, for the creation of vibrant markets, and can ensure that a proper balance is struck between protecting the innovator and freeing the innovation for the use of all in a reasonable timeframe.
Software rental is a bad idea for the same reason ASPs are a bad idea: you're giving up control of something fundamental to someone who has interests other than yours.
Self-terminating software licenses (a category I'd argue is differetn than "software rental") are indeed a bad thing, but I don't think that ASP's necessarily are: ASPs have some different interests, but they also have a compelling interest in looking out for their clients' interests as well, if they plan to retain clients and be viable over the long haul.
I've chosen to use ASP's for several critical business systems. ASPs are an extremely powerful tool for levelling the playing field for small companies which otherwise couldn't afford the purchase, much less the care and feeding of best-of-breed enterprise support systems. Careful selection of ASPs will include makin sure that you can always suck all your data out in some sort of reusable format whenever you want to. (Not all ASPs allow this, the better ones do, so caveat emptor...)
Whether ASPs will take off for more ordinary uses is up for debate now, but for basic use, there are a few solutions out there that aren't too bad - I use thinkfree office as a virtual alternative where I don't have to worry about the config of any borrowed computer so long as it has an Internet connection and a Java-capable browser. (In fact, I think thinkfree is the best implementation I've seen of a Java-based office suite...)
Go buy Adrian Cockroft's book on Sun Performance Tuning. It's a wealth of information about how to make Solaris dance to a number of different tunes...
Sun makes and sells Solaris, but they do not actively support Linux. Period.
Oh, really? I guess you're just ignoring Cobalt, which has the leading market share in dedicated small linux servers. A quick visit to see rack after rack of blue slices at any convenient internet data center should convince you, if you must see to believe...
As an aside, I like Linux (a lot), but honestly, there is still not a lot of overlap in what Linux and Solaris are good for, although that's changing some over time. If you want a big SMP box, Solaris or True64 are far and away the best choices on the planet (although I'm a dyed in the wool Sun guy, I think Compaq has the best Unix anywhere right now). Linux has a LONG way to go before it's really able to do SMP with these big boys. (On the other hand, if Linux fits the problem, a single CMOS mainframe makes a lot more sense than all those silly Cobalt boxes, as more and more people are figuring out...)
1) Magnequench does in fact hold four patents on the manufacture of the type of magnets in question.
2) Our current patent laws correctly grant them a limited period in which they can profit from the sweat of thier brow by preventing others from simply copying thier invention. (BTW: if you're opposed to this sort of protection, prepare to go back to a pre-industrial revolution timescale for innovation.)
3) Magnequench obviously feels that it's pretty easy to prove that the devices in question really do infringe on its patents.
The only questionable aspect of this is suing the OEM end users rather than those actually infringing, although I suspect that's a practical matter since the infringers are likely in a foreign country where IP is not well-protected.
If the patents were actually violated, I'm all for Magnequench on this one, and I hope they win big. Compaq and HP are not actually responsible for the violations in question, but they have the only economic power that will make the violators sit up and take notice.
Only an absolute fool would do an install this way, which is one reason I haven't tried the last few versions of Gnome on my own machines.
And, no, for the record, this post is not a troll - think about it: is is really reasonable to willingly grant full root-level shell access to *any* site out on the net? Especially without even the most basic encryotion or security against spoofing?
I've really been amazed at the double standard of the community. If you doubt for an instant there's a double standard, just think about what would happen if Microsoft tried this. (Oh, that's right, Windows Update does do that, but Microsoft takes some steps to provide security, unlike Gnome...)
...it really is remarkable how Eazel managed to blow through $13 million on a file browser. All of KDE 1 and 2, even including Qt, didn't cost that much or require that many paid developers. By comparison, Konqueror has one paid developer, David Faure. (Who admittedly is really, really good.) Yes, there are some TrollTech people working on khtml, but since Nautilus uses Gecko, they don't count for this comparison.
Now THAT'S insightful - I actually hadn't thought of it from this angle before, but when comparing the amount of usable (quality, reliable, reasonably performing) code per dollar, KDE wins by a mile.
Of course, given how badly Konqueror kicks Mozilla around the field, it might be appropriate to handicap the Gnome folks for choosing to use that turkey. Oh, and CORBA, and, uh...
It really makes you wonder what the KDE guys could have done with that kind of backing.
Only slow ones. You'll find that any GPS receiver you can buy will cease working once it realizes its moving over 600 MPH.
As for your second question, I think the US could only benefit from improved culture and entertainment if someone flew a 1000 lb. bomb into the 2002 Oscars...:-)
Easy - because as the article said, they're making sure this thing qualifies as a "model airplane" - this limits them to 11 pounds total weight.
Think about that for a second - that's 11 pounds (5 Kg to those in less enlightened parts of the world) for airframe, powerplant, GPS navigation, computer control systems, radio gear, servos, batteries, and oh yeah, enough fuel to fly across the Atlantic ocean.
This is a "righteous" hack - my hat's off to these guys. I only wish I were part of their team...
As someone who started out in computers by building robots to build composite airplanes, I can tell you that balsa has some remarkable properties. Its only real problem is that as you scale up to larger structures, natural defects in the material become more problematic, which is why it's so darn difficult to get large pieces of mil-spec structural balsa.
There are cases where balsa is notably superior to other materials though - I can give you two right off the bat from modern airplanes: The cargo load floors in some military cargo planes are a sandwich of aluminum skins bonded to a balsa core. Balsa is an ideal core material here, even though it's heavier than alternatives like aluminum or nomex honeycomb, it's also many times tougher and more resistant to the damage that you can imagine the floor of a cargo plane takes, and also makes the floor puncture-resistant. Another example is the wing tank structure in the A-7 fighter jet, another aluminum/balsa composite structure that provides properties unobtainable by using other materials.
If there were more aerospace grade balsa available (and there are people working on genetic improvements to eliminate grain defects and even grow "square" trees), we would see it used much more often. Many natural materials are far, far better than our best synthetic substitutes, but they're not always in a readily usable form. (Take spider silk fibers as an example - we know they're they're much stronger than anything we can make, but we can't figure out how to make them...)
I'll give up my ADM-3A when you pry my cold dead fingers from its vi-labelled keyboard...:-)
(Really, the thing has little vi cursor arrows on the h, j, k, and l keys, among some other interesting stuff. Surely you wouldn't want me to give this sort of clearly advanced technology up in favor of Windows, would you?
FTP has been effectively replaced by HTTP which is more efficient than FTP for any transfer - with the sole exception of the rarely used ability to initiate a third party transfer.
Not sure what you're smoking, but FTP is considerably more efficient for data transfer than HTTP. (Just try timing downloads of something like, say GNOME using both FTP and HTTP - you'l find that FTP will almost always win...) In fact, it's generally acknowledged among protocol jocks that HTTP is one of the major things limiting what we can do in the future. It's a horrible protocol, and it's a real shame it got so widely used before it got fixed. Have a look at Marshall Rose's BXXP (a.k.a. BEEP) protocol for an idea of how a general purpose replacement for something like HTTP should work.
BTW: Only a few of us are old enough (well in Internet time, anyway) to remember this, but there was a very good reason that FTP was designed to require the creation and destruction of a TCP connection for each file transferred: The DoD realized (wisely) that it was very important to the long-term viability of the ARPAnet/Internet to build code that was good at creating and destroying TCP connections. FTP is intentionally designed the way it is so that it would force the TCP stacks to mature much faster than they would have otherwise...
There really isn't a good (as in fully satisfying) answer to your question.
I don't know why, but no one has yet seen fit to produce what you're looking for - I've been looking for several years for the same thing.
One option is some of the Internet-enabled "web phones" - I have several of the ones Philips ad Lucent built a few years ago, but never released. They're potentially impressive ARM CPU, VGA color touchscreen, PCMCIA slots, wireless IR keyboard, nice speakerphone, cool case, etc., but hobbled by running Inferno. It should be possible to put Linux on them, but I haven't had the time to really try. I still have several if you're interested, but we forewarned the hack will take some effort unless you're already an ARM wizard.
Other options include the ePods One, which is sort of like what you're looking for, but runs only CE right now, so it's not much better - and there's no kiosk mode in the dain-bramaged CE version of IE.
Sorry, but there's just no acceptable solution to this at the moment...
1) The word is "hobbyist", not "hobbiest" - this may be on of the most consistently misspelled words on slashdot. Sorry for the gripe, but I just couldn't take it any more...
2) There's no grand conspiracy, and your enthusiasm for wire wrap tells me you haven't really done all that much with it. It's easy, but also fraught with problems, and pretty much useless with today's speedy hardware. Many of us have all too many war stories about hardware debugging from hell. An inordinate number of these stories involve wire wrapping...
I use wire wrap wire all the time, but I haven't actually used it for wire-wrapping in years.
It looks to me like you may actually be asking two questions, not just one: That is, how to get *connected* to the net, and how to have a *presence* on the net. You may be best served by using separate providers for each of these.
In general, I'd recommend ditching dial-up if you really want to use the Internet as a serious tool. That means check into cable and DSL services in your area. These usually include at least some minimal ISP services: a few mailboxes and maybe a personal web page of some kind. Depending on your needs, this could be all you need, but since it looks like there's a business presence needed here, the bundled stuff probably won't cut it.
In that case, you'll need a hosting provider for web and mail as well. There are many of these, and quality and service vary tremendously, but one that I've found to be cheap, reliable, and professional is burlee.com. I have no relationship with them other than as a satified customer. They still can't do *everything* I want (they don't offer Zope hosting, for instance), but they do have a very nice offering of you choice of Linux or NT servers and web environments (IIS/ASP or Apache/PHP), and competent(!) tech support. Thier prices are very reasonable as well - so reasonable that this wound up being cheaper (not to mention easier) for one of my recent domains than even hanging an Linux box off a T1 volunteered by a friend.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot more than the lack of USB, firewire and common APIs.
Let's take a quick look at some of the things that are missing:
Power management that works. This is increasingly important not only for laptops, but servers as well. It's been *years* now and we still don't have decent ACPI support, which handles much more than power.
Support for laptops that goes beyond, "Hey I got it to not fall over for an hour at a time!" This would include things like hot-plugging and hot-docking to docking staitons and cradles, as well as intermittent connections to multiple networks (something MS doesn't do well, either...)
Some reasonable way to manage the configuration of machines and user auths, permissions, etc. AD is a train wreck compared to real enterprise directories like NDS, but at least it sort of works. Linux offers NOTHING as a reasonable alternative, shutting us out of the enterprise, and on good grounds.
Finally, the Linux community has failed to come to grips with the fact that MS controls the hardware playing field with their Windows Logo standards for hardware. The big OEMs will *always* dance to the MS tune here because if they don't, the OS license cost goes through the roof (more than enough to wipe out the entire profit margin on a PC! The open source community needs to recognize this fact, and be on the cutting edge of supporting new hardware, not three years behind, like we are now.
Second Final Word: printing.
/. for years now, and it hasn't changed: There's always some possible challenger that may become usable at some point in the future if the open source development model ever actually started to work for things like this. That, too is not a flame, but a valid observation: the open source model has had its successes, but they tend to be geek-ware infrastructure rather than user code.
Back when NT 4.0 was about to come out, I was working at Sun and we received a briefing on the capabilities of NT4 vs. Solaris.
One of the PowerPoint slides I remember consisted of the following words: "Printing: They can."
It's maddening to realize that not much has changed since then. There are many of us that have *really tried* to use Linux/Unix on the desktop, but sadly, the tools available in the Unix space for this sort of thing remain third-world primitive and five years behind. People who only code (and are light-duty browser users) may be able to get by with Linux, but not the rest of us.
And no, before you flame me, I'm NOT anti-Linux, but I've been saying this same thing here on
I think really this points up a fundamental weakness of the open source development model: without strong central control and authority, no one wants to write the really hard stuff, and there's not enough coordination to ensure it can be done piecewise. It's taken us *years* just to get to the point that we have some services that might be good enough to build apps on, but those apps are even harder than what's already been done, and the starting points are pretty bleak. Just try doing non-trivial spreadsheet work in *any* open source app and compare the functionality gap to Excel. For all Excel's warts (and it has them, believe me), it winds up being the best tool I can find for most what-if/analysis tasks. (Remember Excel is the whole reson Windows even exists: for those of you too young to remember or those not paying attention at the time, Windows came about only because MS wanted to put its wildly successful Mac spreadsheet (Excel) on PCs, too.
This problem cannot be fixed with the current open source development model, and I'm not sure there can be enough of a profit motive to support alternative models, as Eazel so poignantly illustrates.
Like many I've talked to in the community, I've given up - none of my "main" desktop machines now boot into Linux as the default anymore, and I find I spend less and less time there, especially as W2K, for all its faults, is increasingly "good enough" and allows me to accomplish the work I need with less hassle.
I have only one gripe with the article - Linux was never even in the game on the desktop, and most likely never will be, unless it manages to establish a beachhead in embedded devices. That scenario is looking increasingly likely, and Qt/KDE has a shot there, but Gnome continues to sap the efforts that could result in a real, workable alternative...
"For years, Cisco and Juniper have been stuck in the "smart fringes, dumb core" view of routers and the Internet.
/. to realize it, we've tried all these grand ideas before, and they've failed miserably each and every time they've been tried.
This just shows this guy doesn't have a clue about the lessons that countless thousands have learned the hard way about where complexity can be economically exploited in large scale networks.
Those of us who have had to deal with the inane complexities of "smart" networks (like, for example, OSI and ATM) recognize that the original Internet philosophy of pushing the intelligence to the edges is the *only* way to build networks that have any staying power.
Both the Internet Protocol itself and Ethernet have succeeded far beyond what most "experts" predicted specifically because they embody the dumb network idea. Although I don't expect many people here on
There are *really good reasons* why dumb networks are better - I don't have time for the whole rundown, here are a few of the biggies:
1) Pushing the intelligence to the edge puts it where it can be most easily and flexibly be changed. This is a huge win, and it allows each node to accomodate its own needs, as well as adapte reasonably to meet ongoing needs. Smart networks are, almost by definintion, static networks. They *may* be appropriate in 100 years when the Internet has a mturity level similar to the switched telephone network. (Of course, that network will then have long been replaced by IP telephony, so you're never really safe, are you?)
2) It's orders of magnitude cheaper to put these capabilities at the hosts than to put them in the network. Yes, you pay a little performance penalty for that, but remember, we've got Moore's law on our side: CPU cycles to burn, and increasingly intelligent network adapters at the volume prices that make the whole thing work. This is the whole reason why nearly all of us use the "simple, stupid" Ethernet almost exclusively and the elegant smart and complex networks like Token Ring, FDDI, and ATM will be footnotes on the ash heap of history. Because the intelligence of these networks was very expensive and in the wrong place (the core), they were not able to effectively compete with a standard that has evolved from 3 megabits/second to 10 gigabits/second, and will nearly certainly move to terabit speeds in the next few years. (For you flamers out there, I realize that 10Gb Ethernet isn't standardized yet, but the IEEE 802.3ae working group is making good progress on it and some vendors (Foundry for one) are already selling "pre-standard" 10 Gb products. It's likely we'll see a 100 Gb working group formed in the next several months...)
3) Putting the intelligence in the cheap stuff at the ends is the best way to "future-proof" the network. Centralized planning only works if you have both a crystal ball and a perfect plan, perfectly executed (ask the former Soviet Union.) The real world is (and should be) messier than that, and we *want* networks (well, everyone but the RIAA/MPAA) that accomodate serendipitous re-use.
Bottom line: History clearly shows that "Dumb" networks are in almost every case far preferable to "Smart" ones. They definitely work better in the real world, with real world economic considerations, and support the freedom to "misuse" the network by using it for things that were not foreseen by the inevitably short-sighted designers of the smarts...
Tottenville is illuminated by electric "suns" suspended from arms on steel towers 200 feet high.
Oddly, what he's describing here sounds virtually identical to the "Moonlight Towers" that were popular from the 1880s to the turn of the century in many cities. Austin is one of the few places where they are sill in operation - there a probably a few dozen left, including the big one they use to make the Christmas tree in Zilker Park every year...
Mozilla is *not* really good. It's not even marginally acceptable to serious browser users:
Here's a list of what was still broken when I tried it again a couple of weeks ago:
1) Still can't handle reasonably populated mail files. I have many files/mailboxes that have a couple of thousand messages in them. Mozilla shows they have only a few dozen. I've had previous versions corrupt the mailfiles, too, something I can never forgive. (And yes, I know it's not done yet, but I don't expect it to corrupt my mailfiles after so many years in development...)
2) It's still completely incapable of handling serious bookmark files. (A quick wc -l on my bookmarks file returns 2516. I've yet to have a version of Mozilla that won't scrog the bookmark file within a few hours, and most of them I've tried can't even load the whole thing. Mozilla also seems to have real problems in parsing many levels of bookmark folders, too. Basically, it's bookmark capabilities are useless to me.
3) On top of all that, it still doesn't support roaming profiles, so I'm forced to going back to managing bookmark files separately on every computer I own or use, or dealling with half-assed methods like unison or other file sync programs.
Note that all of these complaints apply equally to Netscape 6 as well as Mozilla. Neither is really up to supporting anything other than a lightweight user of the tool. Netscape 4.x, for all its warts, at least has the cojones to do the job. I've never found any other tool that can... (No, IE doesn't count, because it doesn't integrate mail that can use a standard non-binary, non-proprietary mailbox format. Not to mention it's bookmark capabilites aren't even as good as Mozilla's...)
So far as I can tell, there is NO ALTERNATIVE AT ALL to Netscape 4.x, nor is there likely to be one anytime in the near future. (Oh, and anything I use must run as well or better on Win32 also, since unfortunately, that's where I need to spend 90% of my desktop time...)
"Programmers should program and make schedule estimates. Managers should make business decisions. Customers should choose the features they want and rank them by importance."
If this is truly the way that XP will be implemented, and I don't doubt that in most cases, it is, it is a recipe for near useless software dripping in chrome.
The fundamental problem is that customers don't know what they want, and if they do, they envision it within a very narrow context rather than what is possible and do-able. This in no way devalues their input, but the key to a really good software design is vision. The scenario described above has compartmentalized vision as outside the scope of all three groups of players. This is why we need software architects that can bridge the gap and have some idea of what is possible.
Case in point: A few years back, I pitched a proposal to a title compnay that had an extremely advanced workflow system that was extremely well-tuned to their needs, and gave them a cost structure and response time *much* lower than their competitors. Unfortunately it was based on an old non-Y2K-compliant version of NeXTstep, so it had to be rewritten or replaced. Even though they had a system in house that met their business needs perfectly, they were not able to adequately define their needs. Also, they were concerned about document file formats, since the documents need to remain usable for decades. I realized that what they really wanted was thier current system modified to protect them from file format horrors, and we proposed a OO re-write of the existing code to include TeX or SGML-based document formats.
The point is this: Neither the programmers, the business people, or the customer knew what was really wanted or required - it took a vision of how the entire thing should work to come up with the solution that all three agreed was what they *really* needed.
Finally, it seems to me that XP is still doomed as a way to write breakthrough apps simply because it generally pushes big developmet groups and flies in the face of Bill Joy's smallness principle: Good software is never written by more than about six people. You can have a bunch of others testing and whatnot, but all the design decisions need to be made by a small group, or you're toast...
Exactly how DO you make a lightbulb shine by microwaving it in a cup of water???
I haven't tried it with an incandescent bulb (I wouldn't expect that to work), but it's quite easy with a neon bulb, with or without the water. (I suspect the water was just added to ensure that the magnetron had some significant energy sink while the class filed past and looked through the window in the door - otherwise you could burn it out fairly quickly...)
As elegant as this sounds, it's a feedback loop. Think about it... as more patents are issued, the term shortens, forcing companies to innovate faster (and potentially produce bullshit "innovations") to protect their profits, causing a shorter term, and so on. Eventually, you end up with patents that last about five hours.
First, you obviously didn't read down to the part where I said the lower bound of protection should be something that's still economically reasonable, like 3-5 years.)
Secondly, the system is somewhat self-correcting in that it will tend to prevent people from filing if they can't realize a return on their investment within the shorter time frame. (Why would a company spend $15,000 on a patent if it wasn't going to make back many, many times that much before it expired? Granted, this assumes markets are rational - generally but not always true.) Most likely, this would actually cut down on BS patents. There will be more incentive to file when the term is longer, less when it's shorter, unless the short term is still valuable because the innovation is in a fast-moving technology space, in which case that's OK, as it's still the result we want...
IANAL, but I think the offending company would still be liable if they are based or operate in the US. Those that operate entirely outside the country might not be subject to US patent law - but there is also some significant reciprocity in patent laws between nations that could produce liability under US law even if all infringing activity took place outside the US.
Most of this sort of thing is governed by the Paris Convention, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the European Patent Office/European Patent Convention, and the Pan American Convention. (Source: Chapter 12 of David Pressman's excellent Nolo Press book, Patent it Yourself.)
If you really need to know this stuff, get a good book on it, or pay a patent attorney - it's rough terrain for some of us engineering types, and the penalty for doing it wrong can be severe, especially considering how much more expensive it is to seek overseas patents...
I didn't say innovation wouldn't happen, just that without the ability to exclusively profit from innovations (real ones, not the MS kind), the pace of innovation *will* slow to a crawl.
The only problem with the US patent system (which is far and away the best in the world, and a primary driver behind American technological leadership over the past couple of centuries) is that it is blind to the huge differences in economic timescales across disciplines. I think 17 years should be enough for anything (if it can't be capitalized on in that timeframe, it's not *ready* for a patent!) Areas where innovation is more rapid should have shorter terms. I'm all for software patents, but I don't think they should be valid for more than five years.
So here I present Dublin's simple but excellent patent reform proposal:
The length of patent terms can and should be self-regulating: Make the length of term for new patents in each patent category (mechanical device, electronic hardware, software, etc.) inversely proportional to the average number of patents issued in the previous two quarters. (Note: that's "issued", NOT "applied for" - this discourages artificial manipulation.) This would automatically produce shorter terms as patent activity heats up (with a quick response time), and then lengthen them again once the pace of innovation slows, matching the growth patterns of the associated industries. Also, it ensures that the IP behind innovations is more quickly available freely in fast-moving areas. This tends to prevent the formation of long-term dynasties unless there is real and continual innovation to back it. (We might expect to see more innovation like that of Dyson in the UK and other companies *really* pushing the state of the art under such a plan.) Interestingly, this could make patents (especialy early and really innovative ones, which will have longer terms) *more* valuable than they are today, while still making technologies more rapidly and readily available for society at large.
Reasonable upper and lower limits should apply to the patent terms: I'd argue for 17 years upper and 5 years lower (although I could perhaps be persuaded to consider 3 or 4 years as a lower bound in extraordinary circumstances - nothing shorter makes any economic sense.)
This relatively simple and straightforward change would fix the aspect of the patent system that most vexes its foes, while still retaining all the best features of a system that has proven its inestimable value over the past two centuries. In other words, it only fixes what's broken, which is a very good thing. I can envision no alternative type of patent reform that has such advantages for the inventors, for the creation of vibrant markets, and can ensure that a proper balance is struck between protecting the innovator and freeing the innovation for the use of all in a reasonable timeframe.
Software rental is a bad idea for the same reason ASPs are a bad idea: you're giving up control of something fundamental to someone who has interests other than yours.
Self-terminating software licenses (a category I'd argue is differetn than "software rental") are indeed a bad thing, but I don't think that ASP's necessarily are: ASPs have some different interests, but they also have a compelling interest in looking out for their clients' interests as well, if they plan to retain clients and be viable over the long haul.
I've chosen to use ASP's for several critical business systems. ASPs are an extremely powerful tool for levelling the playing field for small companies which otherwise couldn't afford the purchase, much less the care and feeding of best-of-breed enterprise support systems. Careful selection of ASPs will include makin sure that you can always suck all your data out in some sort of reusable format whenever you want to. (Not all ASPs allow this, the better ones do, so caveat emptor...)
Whether ASPs will take off for more ordinary uses is up for debate now, but for basic use, there are a few solutions out there that aren't too bad - I use thinkfree office as a virtual alternative where I don't have to worry about the config of any borrowed computer so long as it has an Internet connection and a Java-capable browser. (In fact, I think thinkfree is the best implementation I've seen of a Java-based office suite...)
Go buy Adrian Cockroft's book on Sun Performance Tuning. It's a wealth of information about how to make Solaris dance to a number of different tunes...
Sun makes and sells Solaris, but they do not actively support Linux. Period.
Oh, really? I guess you're just ignoring Cobalt, which has the leading market share in dedicated small linux servers. A quick visit to see rack after rack of blue slices at any convenient internet data center should convince you, if you must see to believe...
As an aside, I like Linux (a lot), but honestly, there is still not a lot of overlap in what Linux and Solaris are good for, although that's changing some over time. If you want a big SMP box, Solaris or True64 are far and away the best choices on the planet (although I'm a dyed in the wool Sun guy, I think Compaq has the best Unix anywhere right now). Linux has a LONG way to go before it's really able to do SMP with these big boys. (On the other hand, if Linux fits the problem, a single CMOS mainframe makes a lot more sense than all those silly Cobalt boxes, as more and more people are figuring out...)
Look, this is pretty cut and dried:
1) Magnequench does in fact hold four patents on the manufacture of the type of magnets in question.
2) Our current patent laws correctly grant them a limited period in which they can profit from the sweat of thier brow by preventing others from simply copying thier invention. (BTW: if you're opposed to this sort of protection, prepare to go back to a pre-industrial revolution timescale for innovation.)
3) Magnequench obviously feels that it's pretty easy to prove that the devices in question really do infringe on its patents.
The only questionable aspect of this is suing the OEM end users rather than those actually infringing, although I suspect that's a practical matter since the infringers are likely in a foreign country where IP is not well-protected.
If the patents were actually violated, I'm all for Magnequench on this one, and I hope they win big. Compaq and HP are not actually responsible for the violations in question, but they have the only economic power that will make the violators sit up and take notice.
(BTW: More detail on my position on patents can be gained from a letter I wrote to LWN a while back.)
Only an absolute fool would do an install this way, which is one reason I haven't tried the last few versions of Gnome on my own machines.
And, no, for the record, this post is not a troll - think about it: is is really reasonable to willingly grant full root-level shell access to *any* site out on the net? Especially without even the most basic encryotion or security against spoofing?
I've really been amazed at the double standard of the community. If you doubt for an instant there's a double standard, just think about what would happen if Microsoft tried this. (Oh, that's right, Windows Update does do that, but Microsoft takes some steps to provide security, unlike Gnome...)
...it really is remarkable how Eazel managed to blow through $13 million on a file browser. All of KDE 1 and 2, even including Qt, didn't cost that much or require that many paid developers. By comparison, Konqueror has one paid developer, David Faure. (Who admittedly is really, really good.) Yes, there are some TrollTech people working on khtml, but since Nautilus uses Gecko, they don't count for this comparison.
Now THAT'S insightful - I actually hadn't thought of it from this angle before, but when comparing the amount of usable (quality, reliable, reasonably performing) code per dollar, KDE wins by a mile.
Of course, given how badly Konqueror kicks Mozilla around the field, it might be appropriate to handicap the Gnome folks for choosing to use that turkey. Oh, and CORBA, and, uh...
It really makes you wonder what the KDE guys could have done with that kind of backing.
Here is the link to support this project:
http://www.dc-rc.org/STAR.HTM
They're looking for donations to help defray the cost of equipment, supplies, travel for the team, etc.
Only slow ones. You'll find that any GPS receiver you can buy will cease working once it realizes its moving over 600 MPH.
:-)
As for your second question, I think the US could only benefit from improved culture and entertainment if someone flew a 1000 lb. bomb into the 2002 Oscars...
Easy - because as the article said, they're making sure this thing qualifies as a "model airplane" - this limits them to 11 pounds total weight.
Think about that for a second - that's 11 pounds (5 Kg to those in less enlightened parts of the world) for airframe, powerplant, GPS navigation, computer control systems, radio gear, servos, batteries, and oh yeah, enough fuel to fly across the Atlantic ocean.
This is a "righteous" hack - my hat's off to these guys. I only wish I were part of their team...
As someone who started out in computers by building robots to build composite airplanes, I can tell you that balsa has some remarkable properties. Its only real problem is that as you scale up to larger structures, natural defects in the material become more problematic, which is why it's so darn difficult to get large pieces of mil-spec structural balsa.
There are cases where balsa is notably superior to other materials though - I can give you two right off the bat from modern airplanes: The cargo load floors in some military cargo planes are a sandwich of aluminum skins bonded to a balsa core. Balsa is an ideal core material here, even though it's heavier than alternatives like aluminum or nomex honeycomb, it's also many times tougher and more resistant to the damage that you can imagine the floor of a cargo plane takes, and also makes the floor puncture-resistant. Another example is the wing tank structure in the A-7 fighter jet, another aluminum/balsa composite structure that provides properties unobtainable by using other materials.
If there were more aerospace grade balsa available (and there are people working on genetic improvements to eliminate grain defects and even grow "square" trees), we would see it used much more often. Many natural materials are far, far better than our best synthetic substitutes, but they're not always in a readily usable form. (Take spider silk fibers as an example - we know they're they're much stronger than anything we can make, but we can't figure out how to make them...)
I'll give up my ADM-3A when you pry my cold dead fingers from its vi-labelled keyboard... :-)
(Really, the thing has little vi cursor arrows on the h, j, k, and l keys, among some other interesting stuff. Surely you wouldn't want me to give this sort of clearly advanced technology up in favor of Windows, would you?
FTP has been effectively replaced by HTTP which is more efficient than FTP for any transfer - with the sole exception of the rarely used ability to initiate a third party transfer.
Not sure what you're smoking, but FTP is considerably more efficient for data transfer than HTTP. (Just try timing downloads of something like, say GNOME using both FTP and HTTP - you'l find that FTP will almost always win...) In fact, it's generally acknowledged among protocol jocks that HTTP is one of the major things limiting what we can do in the future. It's a horrible protocol, and it's a real shame it got so widely used before it got fixed. Have a look at Marshall Rose's BXXP (a.k.a. BEEP) protocol for an idea of how a general purpose replacement for something like HTTP should work.
BTW: Only a few of us are old enough (well in Internet time, anyway) to remember this, but there was a very good reason that FTP was designed to require the creation and destruction of a TCP connection for each file transferred: The DoD realized (wisely) that it was very important to the long-term viability of the ARPAnet/Internet to build code that was good at creating and destroying TCP connections. FTP is intentionally designed the way it is so that it would force the TCP stacks to mature much faster than they would have otherwise...
There really isn't a good (as in fully satisfying) answer to your question.
I don't know why, but no one has yet seen fit to produce what you're looking for - I've been looking for several years for the same thing.
One option is some of the Internet-enabled "web phones" - I have several of the ones Philips ad Lucent built a few years ago, but never released. They're potentially impressive ARM CPU, VGA color touchscreen, PCMCIA slots, wireless IR keyboard, nice speakerphone, cool case, etc., but hobbled by running Inferno. It should be possible to put Linux on them, but I haven't had the time to really try. I still have several if you're interested, but we forewarned the hack will take some effort unless you're already an ARM wizard.
Other options include the ePods One, which is sort of like what you're looking for, but runs only CE right now, so it's not much better - and there's no kiosk mode in the dain-bramaged CE version of IE.
Sorry, but there's just no acceptable solution to this at the moment...
Two comments:
1) The word is "hobbyist", not "hobbiest" - this may be on of the most consistently misspelled words on slashdot. Sorry for the gripe, but I just couldn't take it any more...
2) There's no grand conspiracy, and your enthusiasm for wire wrap tells me you haven't really done all that much with it. It's easy, but also fraught with problems, and pretty much useless with today's speedy hardware. Many of us have all too many war stories about hardware debugging from hell. An inordinate number of these stories involve wire wrapping...
I use wire wrap wire all the time, but I haven't actually used it for wire-wrapping in years.
It looks to me like you may actually be asking two questions, not just one: That is, how to get *connected* to the net, and how to have a *presence* on the net. You may be best served by using separate providers for each of these.
In general, I'd recommend ditching dial-up if you really want to use the Internet as a serious tool. That means check into cable and DSL services in your area. These usually include at least some minimal ISP services: a few mailboxes and maybe a personal web page of some kind. Depending on your needs, this could be all you need, but since it looks like there's a business presence needed here, the bundled stuff probably won't cut it.
In that case, you'll need a hosting provider for web and mail as well. There are many of these, and quality and service vary tremendously, but one that I've found to be cheap, reliable, and professional is burlee.com. I have no relationship with them other than as a satified customer. They still can't do *everything* I want (they don't offer Zope hosting, for instance), but they do have a very nice offering of you choice of Linux or NT servers and web environments (IIS/ASP or Apache/PHP), and competent(!) tech support. Thier prices are very reasonable as well - so reasonable that this wound up being cheaper (not to mention easier) for one of my recent domains than even hanging an Linux box off a T1 volunteered by a friend.
HTH