Degrees do not in any way correlate to intelligence or mechanical aptitude.
Case in point, a literally brilliant European educated PhD ME who was on the faculty at a respected engineering school. I respect the heck outta anyone that can work through pretty much any problem from first principles, but you could never let him touch the equipment. In fact, he once told me, "I hate monkey wrenches - monkey wrenches are for monkeys!" (It was a Crescent we were talking about, actually.) When I asked him why, his completely serious reply was, "because they always break when you hammer on them." From then on, I understood why it was best to keep him from actually working on equipment, even though he was a gifted designer.
On the other hand, anyone who repeatedly reminds you of their credentials or capabilities is probably best avoided. This goes double for interviews. I will say that the absolutely most useless people I've known have been the most educated, just because they find it easier to keep going to school than deal with anything approaching the real world. Invariably, they fare poorly when they finally venture out into it.
I'm not at all opposed to advanced degrees, but I've found that their holders work out much better if they had several years of real work somewhere between their latest degree and their first.
On the other hand, you have a point, modern university degrees are so content-free as to be nearly meaningless, and the big-name schools are among the worst offenders.
Wasn't it Lucas radios that got the last Mars mission in trouble?
{grin - I'm *joking* you British car guys, put down your spanners. I'm an Italian car addict (it *is* a sickness), and Marelli isn't a whole heck of a lot better...]
You have a point, but I'm not sure it's true that this is the first time length of copyright has exceeded the life of the media.
We are losing countless numbers of books each year simply because they were printed on acid paper, and I'd argue that loss is far more substantial in the long run than the loss of performace art, but that's simply because text has a much higher thought density. I dragged some books back from my mother-in-law's house last week, and there are a lot of things only 50-60 years old that are rapidly disintegrating.
It would be nice if the Library of Congress or someplace else would archive everything, but that isn't likely to happen. (I'm not sure how things are *supposed* to get into the LoC - are publishers supposed to submit a copy? Are congressmen responsible? (For this, not in the general case, we know they're not generally responsible!)
Researchers today admitted that they're swimming upstream in their attempt to build a computer based on salmon sperm DNA, but vowed to spawn a working computer or die trying.
Adds a whole new meaning to "my computer died" now doesn't it? Since resurrection is unheard of recently, I suppose if your computer catches a cold and dies, you're just out of luck and have to buy a new one.
And those computer viruses could now become *really* nasty. People might be more careful about hanging around in IRC and Usenet for fear of catching something. Worse yet, you might catch something from your computer!
You have to laugh at the futurists that push views like this - they're right up there with autopiloted atomic-powered flying cars. Seriously, folks, it would take a LOT of work to build an immune system to keep this thing running. We'll need them to guide the antigravity cars, though.
Oh, and make sure it's got plenty of antioxidants and all the complex machinery required to repair DNA, whih we are only barely starting to understand...
While the right to make archival recordings is well-established, this is largely a digital phenomenon: No one would say that I have the right to make duplicates of out-of-print vinyl albums simply because they're not available any more.
Now that copying is trivial, we all of a sudden see it as our right and duty? Please.
Personally, I think anything that has been out of print for an extended period of time should be fair game, but that's not likely to happen.
See the spirited discussion that's taken place on thejudys.com (a great 80's band that barely had a presence in the record stores to start with, and so very hard to find) for more on the issue of whether it's OK to copy even things that are flat impossible to get hold of.
I prefaced my comments with the disclaimer that I am not an expert on the Microsoft programming world - in fact I appear to know just enought to get me into trouble on occasion.
On the interfaces issue, it appears I was simply misinformed.
As for the DLL issue, you are right that this *can* be worked around, but must be done at compile/link time and this is not normally done. If you're dealing with a vendor app and the vendor didn't take the care to ensure conflicts were avoided, you're out of luck. As for who at Microsoft said this, it was several top Microsoft SEs working to evaluate the feasibility of switching a *very* large company's Unix shop over to NT (I was a consultant on this evaluation.) All of the MS experts agreed that this was *not* possible, and was one of the principal reasons they didn't manage to squash Unix in that company then and there. Believe me, they wanted to say they could do it, but they couldn't - they all said it was possible in theory, but completely impractical and that they could not guarantee that the OS would "do the right thing" when running two different versions of the same app. I don't pretend to fully understand (or even care about) this issue, but I do report the facts as I observed them.
As for why you'd need to run two versions simultaneously - it's an absolute requirement in the real world where you want to validate the new code (especially for designing life-critical systems) alongside the proven code for a while to make sure the answers match. If you can't support both a test and production version, it's very hard to do that. (Also, it's common in complex engineering projects for this process to take months, so one group may cut over to a new version much earlier than another group working on something different, which may require more extensive testing.) This is very much a real world requirement.
Finally, the overhead of the JVM is a red herring: it wastes no more than the bloat of all the GNOME services that duplicate its functionality. And there is still a real benefit to being able to dynamically determine where code will run based on the capabilities of the client/end node device. Only Java or some other platform independent binary distribution method can really support this . I stil would like to know if Miguel thinks that's important - it's pretty clear that Microsoft does, given the capabilities of their new setup. You really have only two choices here: interpreted code, or p-code/bytecode. Until the software industry is completely dead, that means only the latter is a real option, due to IP concerns.
Oh, as a final aside, ad hominem attacks aren't called for, especially when someone goes out of their way to state that thier comment is not based on extensive or first-hand knowledge. Thanks for your response.
I'm far from a Microsoft programming expert, but I think I'm correct in stating that although these interfaces have indeed remained static up to now, this is more due to a design flaw than by design.
One of the real weaknesses of the MS way is that (as it has been explained to me), there is no way to extend a COM interface - any new functionality requires creating a completely new interface that exists alongside and is (usually) a superset of the old one. Of course, you must still support the old interface for backward compatibility, but this isn't always done. (This really makes some sense, since the alternative is code bloat, but it breaks things, especially if app vendors "update" a MS-supplied DLL.)
The DLL hell problem is quite serious, and has some significant and largely unknown side effects - here is one big reason why even W2K isn't up to enterprise duty: The DLL problem prevents running test and production versions of the same application simultaneously. Of course, this is something the Unix folks have handled forever simply by starting in another directory and/or tweaking the search path variables for executables and libraries. (For those of you MS folks that think it can be done, I have it on good authority (Microsoft's) that it cannnot be. It is possible to tie a particular DLL version to a particular app, but there is no way of ensuring that you will get the right DLL if another version of the same DLL has already been loaded into memory by another application (or another version of the same application.))
This sort of behaviour *MUST* be avoided at all costs!
As an aside, although I'm starting to be quite impressed with GNOME and it's rate of improvement (although it's an inexcusable resource pig), I still wonder how much farther we might be if this had all been done in Java, leveraging all those other components that are already built? (And yes I realize the freedom issues of a year or two ago. I also think they're almost totally fixed and/or irrelevant today - there are a lot of alternative implementations out there.)
It just pains me to see so much effort thrown at reinventing the wheel yet again, but without the benefit of portable binaries and the attendant abilty to automatically and dynamically define the client/server(s) split point(s). This ability will eventually make Java or something like it the winner, since you can only pull that trick off with binary code that runs wherever you decide to send it...
Miguel, if you read this, I'd be interested in your take on this latter point in particular. And keep up the good work, you may convert me yet...;-)
Sorry, but wind power is one of the most ecologically atrocious power sources known, and is very strongly opposed by the Sierra Club (which calls windpower windmills the "Cuisinarts of the air") and the Audubon Society among others.
Fact: A 1992 study commissioned by the CEC (California Energy Commision) "conservatively" estimated that 39 golden eagles were being killed at Altamont Pass each year, a significant figure given a total population of 500 breeding pairs. On a percentage basis, the mortality rate per year at Altamont Pass under the estimate is eight times greater than the bald eagle kill from the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, and it recurs every year.
It isn't some big government conspiracy that keeps alternative energy sources from flourishing, but simply that their efficiency and "greenness" isn't nearly what their promoters would have you believe.
There are substantial ecological drawbacks to many alternative/"renewable" energy schemes, including wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, geothermal, and even conservation-based "negawatss". These drawbacks are often completely ignored by the proponents of these schemes, who usually stand to make a good pile of money themselves if they can get the government to fund their "green" proposal - such funding is required because none of these options can currently stnad on its own merit economically.
Again, this is a complex issue, but for a great review of the ecological dangers of wind in particualr and some others as well, read the very thorough Cato report Renewable Energy - Not Cheap, Not "Green" (Source of the fact quoted above, includes thier source for the information.)
If you're worried about Cato's rightward tilt, notice the number of environmentalist sources they use to make their argument, including a 1995 expose in SF Weekly.
Actually, most of your "most scientists" aren't even qualified to render an opinion on the issue!
The various entities backing the global warming scare have done a great job of attracting numerous "scientists" to weigh in on the issue, but most of them are speaking well outside their area of expertise.
A quick look at the facts about the thoughts of scientists on this issue:
Over 17,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine petition which states in part "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
Of this 17,000+, over 2,100 are physicists, geophysicsts, climatologists, meteorologists, and environmental scientists who are especially well-qualified to evaluate the effects of CO2 on the Earth's atmosphere. Another 4,400 signers are scientists qualified to comment on CO2's effects on plant and animal life.
A competing petition urging "immediate action" to counter global warming was signed by only 2,600 scientists, over 90% of whom lacked the credentials to speak with authority on the issue. Only one of this entire 2600 was a climatologist!
Over one hundred climate scientists signed the 1996 Leipzig Declaration, which stated in part, "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever."
A survey of 36 state climatologists found that 58 percent disagreed with the statement, "global warming is for real," while only 36 percent agreed. A remarkable 89 percent agreed that "current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures caused only by man-made factors."
Source: http://www.heartland.org/studies/ieguide.htm#1 (includes references to their sources, too)
Not to mention that there is still no particularly valid scientific reason to presume that global warming even exists. Or maybe, the idea is simply that the project will generate tons of greenbar printouts that can be used to "conclusively document" the terrible global threat we face.
Seriously, global warming is taken as gospel truth in so many places, but it's really quite likely that it does not exist and isn't happening - remember the same experts warning of global warming now warned of catastrophic mini-ice ages at the first earth day in 1970. They're no more likely right now than they were then, but they're just as ideologically driven as ever.
Take a good look at this primer on global warming (pay particular attention to the "seven things you should know about global warming" and globalwarming.org for more information. Then do your own more detailed research.
This is a complex issue and the evidence is not yet conclusive either way. In general, though, I am more convinced that this is a political ploy for control "to save the earth" than any sort of real phenomenon. The data I've looked at leave it quite unclear that there is any global warming trend at all - in particular, the satellite data, which is generally recognized as the most accurate, shows a slight cooling trend over the past 18 years. Even if a slight warming trend does exist, there is certainly no reason for alarm, as it is almost certainly a natural phenomenon. (As always, the chief human failing of hubris causes us to overestimate our importance and impact on the world around us - the fact is, we don't really make much difference.) The earth is not static, and it is not reasonable to expect it to be.
Oh, don't be ridiculous. The US has had probably the "cleanest" power on the planet since the 1930s, when the entire country was converted over to 60 Hz. (The entire Los Angeles basin ran on 50 Hz until that time.) Both voltage, and especially, frequency, have been very tightly regulated at the generating plant since that time. (If freq. wasn't, all those synchronous electric clocks you used to see all over wouldn't have kept time. They did.)
As for those from the continent advocating 220V as somehow better, no thanks - I'd rather not have to deal with huge plugs, and safety switches for each outlet to avoid getting fried, thanks...
Motorola didn't lose their lead to Nokia because of technology, but because of marketing blunders, greed, and colors. Go back a few years and you'll easily find that the following pretty accurately sums up how Nokia displaced Mot:
The tech edge was solidly with Motorola: they has just developed the breakthrough "Captain Kirk" StarTAC phone, and it was clearly the most sought after piece of personal electronics on the planet, and far more advanced than anything else out there for years. But Motorola decided that since the StarTAC was in such demand (which they couldn't meet anyway, despite its astronomical price), they'd use it to prop up the rest of their line which was something less than stellar. Mot decided to force its dealers to carry *and sell* the entire Mot line in order to get any of the coveted StarTACs. The dealers/carriers understandably balked, since this was in effect a quota to sell obsolete goods in order to get some modern ones.
Enter Nokia, which had two things going for it: it was aggressively trying to penetrate the US market at the right time and was willing to deal, and it offered a vital aesthetic differentiation almost as cool as the StarTAC: colored faceplates! The fortuitous timing and the fact that Nokia's product was so easily identifiable for some time made it the logical choice for dealers and carriers looking to spike Mot for their heavy-handedness - Nokia sales took of like a rocket. Note that at this stage, Nokia didn't have the small leading-edge phones they sport today - in fact, their performance and quality was pretty middle of the road - but it was good enough, and they quickly capitalized on their good launch to send their market share into orbit. Motorola burned out and has never really recovered from this cosmic mistake, but they really have no one but themselves to blame.
Funny how snobbish "geeks" can be against things purely because of their preconceived notions about them.
I love a nice quality mechanical watch (and the good ones generally come in gold cases, which are not the expensive part of the watch!). That's not because I'm trying to impress anyone (I'm not), but because I'm a mech hacker, too, and I appreciate the elegance of a really nice mechanical hack like that required to do a nice watch.
Have a look at the Jeager-LeCoultre Reversos with hands on both sides (keeping in mind that the hands on the opposite side must run "backwards") and tell me that's not a neat hack - remember, there are a *lot* of great hacks going on outside computers - some of which are at least 2000 years old. (Look up "Antikythera Mechanism" on your favorite search engine for the oldest documented hack of this kind.)
That said, I don't wear a gold Swiss watch every day, in fact, at the moment, I have on a nigh indestructible Timex Indiglo analog watch, which takes with aplomb the daily thrashing I give it without undue concern for scratches, water, and the like. (I do have to say that I despise digital watches with a passion: analog is better, and mech analog better still: after all, seconds aren't atomic, so watches *should* have true sweep-second hands rather than the ridiculous goose-stepping horrors the Japanese have foisted on us...)
Actually, there are enough good office tools for other OSes that that's no longer the limiting factor.
Visio, on the other hand is pretty indispensible, is now owned by MS itself, and has nothing even remotely like competition. I mentioned this in postings several years ago, but it's still a huge hole in the Linux app space - we really need to plug this one.
That and a decent browser are the *only* things keeping Win98 alive for me. (And yes, I torture myself with Netscape, it's weak, but it's far faster and more stable under 9x than Linux - sigh...)
We are getting *much* closer to being able to do everything on Linux, though: I installed Mandrake yesterday and it's the first OS other than Win98 to correctly work with my hardware (which is pretty normal) out of the box. Even sound - I'm amazed, as I had come to regard sound support in Linux as a chimerical legend, since it has never worked on any of my three sound-capable computers, regardless of distro or painful manual incantations, modules, or alternative sound subsystems like ALSA. My Red Hat's off to the Mandrake folks - I have a new favorite distro.
Now if GNOME just weren't such an inexcusable pig...
Oracle over NFS to a NetApp Filer would work fine on a Sun or such. But despite HJ's valiant efforts, Linux's NFS isn't there yet. Linux is getting there, but there are still real good reasons to go buy those Suns if you've got a big, mission-critical problem.
Just when i was getting bummed about Mozilla, you show me this. This is quite simply the slickest integration of web and command line functionality I've ever seen. Moderate up Babar's post, and check out xmlterm.com. I'm not easily impressed, but the potential for this sort of integration is staggering. Maybe Mozilla isn't dead - but I sure wish they'd get it finished.
The Mozilla team just bought themselves another couple of months with me - maybe this thing is embeddable enough to make a difference...
Most of the sites developing microsofty crap are ones that I dont wana visit - mostly ecommerce and intranet stuff. Somehow I doubt that my interest areas (free software, geeky artistic development) are going to be taken over by microsoft only development.
You just have to laugh at this! Sure they won't touch your precious geeky sites, but for most of the world, "e-commerce and intranet stuff" are the only web sites that matter. Your argument is a perfect example of winning a meaningless battle and losing the war. Unfortunately, I expect this one's already lost. Microsoft is quite likely to have a usable standards-based browser before Netscape/Mozilla, since their enterprise customers *are* asking them to comply with standards.
I hate IE with a passion, and I resent like hell the way MS rammed it down our throats (I had to manage introducing the pile of crap when I was at Dell), but even I am starting to question whether each progressively more unstable release of Netscape is able to meet my browsing needs. If IE had support for a reasonable bookmark managment system and could use roaming profiles like Netscape (without a local AD server), I'd have a hard time finding any reason not to switch.
We've lost this one, folks. Microsoft controls the only UI that matters and is likely to continue doing so for the next several years. This does not bode well for the embedded Linux devices crowd, most of whom will need a small, fast, reliable browser compatible with it's larger desktop cousin. I'm afraid the browser issue may ultimately be the wedge that allows CE to triumph in this critical space as well. If that happens, it's "game over, man!"
The really funny thing is, even many of the vorec researchers I've spoken with don't get it:
They're working on VUIs as a completely separate alternative to the GUI, or at best, some sort of voice augmentation to allow GUI functions.
Really making voice valuable requires a completely different type of interface, one that wil by its very nature, be pretty incompatible with the GUIs we have today. The reason for that is the way we use speech in intereacting. Pay attention to what you say *and do* when working in front of a computer screen with another person: What you'll find is that speech recognition alone is of little benefit unless coupled with some sort of gestural recognition system as well. In other words, even in a proper voice-enabled GUI, the GUI will need significant modification to be able to deal with the concept of "this" as indicated by a combination of the recognized word and pointer location. (Note what this implies for touchscreens. Personally, I think the touchscreen is one of the key reasons for the success of the Palm Pilot over other PDA concepts - pointing directly is just the natural way to interact.) Further, there's a lot of assumed knowledge that goes into good vorec - that knowledge has to live somewhere, and be created somehow (possibly by learning, possibly by manual priming or copying another's setup and biulding on that.) Take the "Play U2" command someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread. That's pretty ambiguous, even if you understand that U2 is the name of a band and that the user wants to play some music files with that attribute. But which files? Any at random? Just Rattle and Hum, in album order? Or just With or Without You over and over, the song that's starting to mend your recently broken heart? That knowledge has to exist somewhere, and although it's not strictly part of the VUI, a voice interface can't have much value without it.
Until this sort of integration happens, so that the GUI and voice recognition work together, niether UI will reach anything like its full potential, and no one is likely to implement them piecewise, simply beause they don't provide sufficient value that way. Interestingly, it may well turn out to be the deep pocketed outfits like Microsoft that will make all this happen at once. I hate to say it, but I'd bet they pull good voice integrated interfaces off before the open source guys do, simply because of the nature of the problem and its solutions. The bazaar probably won't cut it for this sort of thing, and I think that's why we see MS pouring all those R&D dollars into the sorts of problems that are best addressed by a wholistic (some might say dictatorial) approach. I'm not saying the open source folks couldn't make this happen, just that they won't make it happen without significant changes to the way things are done.
(Note to the IBM guys, if you're reading this: I'm already an IBM employee and would love to work on vorec, if you can deal with someone in Austin...)
Actually, the official line is that it's not even as clean as you say, although that's a usable approximation.
Solaris is the set of packages making up the "distro" and including things like the Window Manager/GUI, various system tools (DiskSuite, AutoClient), and SunOS. So although there is a one-to one mapping of SunOS to Solaris version numbers, it's not stricly accurate to consider then equivalent, since SunOS is a subset of Solaris.
On the other hand, it doesn't really mater, and only a few really anal people at the division formerly known as SunSoft ever cared. For all practical purposes you're right, and I think even Sun has stoped making the distinction, although I know marketing materials still sohwed SunOS as a component of Solaris at least through 1996/97, about the time I left Sun.
I've heard good things about the AltaVista tunneling software from some people who were looking at a very similar situation. It appears to be abandoned, although it may just be hiding.
I found links to it on Tom Dunigan's VPN page, which has a number of good links for the problem at hand.
A link to AltaVista tunnel info that does work is found on this Digital link in Russia, which is oddly, in English.
Again, I haven't tried this myself, so caveat emptor.
Ya know, all this SUV pontificating is getting silly. In Texas we know exactly why there are SUVs (we were the market that created them): A pickup truck fitted out with four doors and a big honkin' air conditioner just makes sense - you get the best features of both a car and a truck.
Suburban: The National Car of Texas From Chevy/GMC ad of the 1980's (and a takeoff on Lone Star's "National Beer of Texas" ads), before the rise of all these wimpy and effete SUV wannabees, which deserve all the scorn we can heap upon them. How can anyone respect drivers of those ridiculous Lexus or BMW SUV's? (Or for that matter, an Escalade or Navigator?)
If you don't feel comfortable throwing half a ton of hay, sod, or a bunch of camping gear and a couple of deer carcasses in the back, it's not a *real* SUV!
Maybe the reasons SUVs are so popular is simply because Detroit stopped building the big rear-wheel drive cars we want? If we could still buy those cars, there wouldn't be so many SUVs sold, I'm sure.
You burn clean, but you burn a lot of a resource we only have another 20-40 years left of.
This is the usual environmentalist bunk. (I am for a clean environment, but consider myself a conservationist rather than an environmentalist - the difference is that the former places a value on truth, while the latter is simply ideologically driven.)
The simple fact is that we've gotten *much* better at finding oil in the past few years. I can't find the citation right now ot I'd link to it, but I read somewhere recently that we found more oil in the past decade than we knew existed previously. Given what I've seen happening in the exploration business, I don't find that hard to believe at all. Not to mention that directional drilling, MWD, etc. are busily making all that oil more accessible than it's ever been before.
We may run out someday, but it will be a very long time. taht's very good, because it should give us enough time to fix some of the technological problems that make the alternatives so uneconomical. One thing that should resonate with the crowd here: Like Linux, the important thing about internal combustion engine technology isn't its current state, but the fact that it's improving far faster than anything else out there...
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Degrees do not in any way correlate to intelligence or mechanical aptitude.
Case in point, a literally brilliant European educated PhD ME who was on the faculty at a respected engineering school. I respect the heck outta anyone that can work through pretty much any problem from first principles, but you could never let him touch the equipment. In fact, he once told me, "I hate monkey wrenches - monkey wrenches are for monkeys!" (It was a Crescent we were talking about, actually.) When I asked him why, his completely serious reply was, "because they always break when you hammer on them." From then on, I understood why it was best to keep him from actually working on equipment, even though he was a gifted designer.
On the other hand, anyone who repeatedly reminds you of their credentials or capabilities is probably best avoided. This goes double for interviews. I will say that the absolutely most useless people I've known have been the most educated, just because they find it easier to keep going to school than deal with anything approaching the real world. Invariably, they fare poorly when they finally venture out into it.
I'm not at all opposed to advanced degrees, but I've found that their holders work out much better if they had several years of real work somewhere between their latest degree and their first.
On the other hand, you have a point, modern university degrees are so content-free as to be nearly meaningless, and the big-name schools are among the worst offenders.
Wasn't it Lucas radios that got the last Mars mission in trouble?
{grin - I'm *joking* you British car guys, put down your spanners. I'm an Italian car addict (it *is* a sickness), and Marelli isn't a whole heck of a lot better...]
You have a point, but I'm not sure it's true that this is the first time length of copyright has exceeded the life of the media.
We are losing countless numbers of books each year simply because they were printed on acid paper, and I'd argue that loss is far more substantial in the long run than the loss of performace art, but that's simply because text has a much higher thought density. I dragged some books back from my mother-in-law's house last week, and there are a lot of things only 50-60 years old that are rapidly disintegrating.
It would be nice if the Library of Congress or someplace else would archive everything, but that isn't likely to happen. (I'm not sure how things are *supposed* to get into the LoC - are publishers supposed to submit a copy? Are congressmen responsible? (For this, not in the general case, we know they're not generally responsible!)
Researchers today admitted that they're swimming upstream in their attempt to build a computer based on salmon sperm DNA, but vowed to spawn a working computer or die trying.
Adds a whole new meaning to "my computer died" now doesn't it? Since resurrection is unheard of recently, I suppose if your computer catches a cold and dies, you're just out of luck and have to buy a new one.
And those computer viruses could now become *really* nasty. People might be more careful about hanging around in IRC and Usenet for fear of catching something. Worse yet, you might catch something from your computer!
You have to laugh at the futurists that push views like this - they're right up there with autopiloted atomic-powered flying cars. Seriously, folks, it would take a LOT of work to build an immune system to keep this thing running. We'll need them to guide the antigravity cars, though.
Oh, and make sure it's got plenty of antioxidants and all the complex machinery required to repair DNA, whih we are only barely starting to understand...
While the right to make archival recordings is well-established, this is largely a digital phenomenon: No one would say that I have the right to make duplicates of out-of-print vinyl albums simply because they're not available any more.
Now that copying is trivial, we all of a sudden see it as our right and duty? Please.
Personally, I think anything that has been out of print for an extended period of time should be fair game, but that's not likely to happen.
See the spirited discussion that's taken place on thejudys.com (a great 80's band that barely had a presence in the record stores to start with, and so very hard to find) for more on the issue of whether it's OK to copy even things that are flat impossible to get hold of.
I prefaced my comments with the disclaimer that I am not an expert on the Microsoft programming world - in fact I appear to know just enought to get me into trouble on occasion.
On the interfaces issue, it appears I was simply misinformed.
As for the DLL issue, you are right that this *can* be worked around, but must be done at compile/link time and this is not normally done. If you're dealing with a vendor app and the vendor didn't take the care to ensure conflicts were avoided, you're out of luck. As for who at Microsoft said this, it was several top Microsoft SEs working to evaluate the feasibility of switching a *very* large company's Unix shop over to NT (I was a consultant on this evaluation.) All of the MS experts agreed that this was *not* possible, and was one of the principal reasons they didn't manage to squash Unix in that company then and there. Believe me, they wanted to say they could do it, but they couldn't - they all said it was possible in theory, but completely impractical and that they could not guarantee that the OS would "do the right thing" when running two different versions of the same app. I don't pretend to fully understand (or even care about) this issue, but I do report the facts as I observed them.
As for why you'd need to run two versions simultaneously - it's an absolute requirement in the real world where you want to validate the new code (especially for designing life-critical systems) alongside the proven code for a while to make sure the answers match. If you can't support both a test and production version, it's very hard to do that. (Also, it's common in complex engineering projects for this process to take months, so one group may cut over to a new version much earlier than another group working on something different, which may require more extensive testing.) This is very much a real world requirement.
Finally, the overhead of the JVM is a red herring: it wastes no more than the bloat of all the GNOME services that duplicate its functionality. And there is still a real benefit to being able to dynamically determine where code will run based on the capabilities of the client/end node device. Only Java or some other platform independent binary distribution method can really support this . I stil would like to know if Miguel thinks that's important - it's pretty clear that Microsoft does, given the capabilities of their new setup. You really have only two choices here: interpreted code, or p-code/bytecode. Until the software industry is completely dead, that means only the latter is a real option, due to IP concerns.
Oh, as a final aside, ad hominem attacks aren't called for, especially when someone goes out of their way to state that thier comment is not based on extensive or first-hand knowledge. Thanks for your response.
I'm far from a Microsoft programming expert, but I think I'm correct in stating that although these interfaces have indeed remained static up to now, this is more due to a design flaw than by design.
;-)
One of the real weaknesses of the MS way is that (as it has been explained to me), there is no way to extend a COM interface - any new functionality requires creating a completely new interface that exists alongside and is (usually) a superset of the old one. Of course, you must still support the old interface for backward compatibility, but this isn't always done. (This really makes some sense, since the alternative is code bloat, but it breaks things, especially if app vendors "update" a MS-supplied DLL.)
The DLL hell problem is quite serious, and has some significant and largely unknown side effects - here is one big reason why even W2K isn't up to enterprise duty: The DLL problem prevents running test and production versions of the same application simultaneously. Of course, this is something the Unix folks have handled forever simply by starting in another directory and/or tweaking the search path variables for executables and libraries. (For those of you MS folks that think it can be done, I have it on good authority (Microsoft's) that it cannnot be. It is possible to tie a particular DLL version to a particular app, but there is no way of ensuring that you will get the right DLL if another version of the same DLL has already been loaded into memory by another application (or another version of the same application.))
This sort of behaviour *MUST* be avoided at all costs!
As an aside, although I'm starting to be quite impressed with GNOME and it's rate of improvement (although it's an inexcusable resource pig), I still wonder how much farther we might be if this had all been done in Java, leveraging all those other components that are already built? (And yes I realize the freedom issues of a year or two ago. I also think they're almost totally fixed and/or irrelevant today - there are a lot of alternative implementations out there.)
It just pains me to see so much effort thrown at reinventing the wheel yet again, but without the benefit of portable binaries and the attendant abilty to automatically and dynamically define the client/server(s) split point(s). This ability will eventually make Java or something like it the winner, since you can only pull that trick off with binary code that runs wherever you decide to send it...
Miguel, if you read this, I'd be interested in your take on this latter point in particular. And keep up the good work, you may convert me yet...
Sorry, but wind power is one of the most ecologically atrocious power sources known, and is very strongly opposed by the Sierra Club (which calls windpower windmills the "Cuisinarts of the air") and the Audubon Society among others.
Fact: A 1992 study commissioned by the CEC (California Energy Commision) "conservatively" estimated that 39 golden eagles were being killed at Altamont Pass each year, a significant figure given a total population of 500 breeding pairs. On a percentage basis, the mortality rate per year at Altamont Pass under the estimate is eight times greater than the bald eagle kill from the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, and it recurs every year.
It isn't some big government conspiracy that keeps alternative energy sources from flourishing, but simply that their efficiency and "greenness" isn't nearly what their promoters would have you believe.
There are substantial ecological drawbacks to many alternative/"renewable" energy schemes, including wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, geothermal, and even conservation-based "negawatss". These drawbacks are often completely ignored by the proponents of these schemes, who usually stand to make a good pile of money themselves if they can get the government to fund their "green" proposal - such funding is required because none of these options can currently stnad on its own merit economically.
Again, this is a complex issue, but for a great review of the ecological dangers of wind in particualr and some others as well, read the very thorough Cato report Renewable Energy - Not Cheap, Not "Green" (Source of the fact quoted above, includes thier source for the information.)
If you're worried about Cato's rightward tilt, notice the number of environmentalist sources they use to make their argument, including a 1995 expose in SF Weekly.
The birds thank you!
The various entities backing the global warming scare have done a great job of attracting numerous "scientists" to weigh in on the issue, but most of them are speaking well outside their area of expertise.
A quick look at the facts about the thoughts of scientists on this issue:
Source: http://www.heartland.org/studies/ieguide.htm#1 (includes references to their sources, too)
Not to mention that there is still no particularly valid scientific reason to presume that global warming even exists. Or maybe, the idea is simply that the project will generate tons of greenbar printouts that can be used to "conclusively document" the terrible global threat we face.
Seriously, global warming is taken as gospel truth in so many places, but it's really quite likely that it does not exist and isn't happening - remember the same experts warning of global warming now warned of catastrophic mini-ice ages at the first earth day in 1970. They're no more likely right now than they were then, but they're just as ideologically driven as ever.
Take a good look at this primer on global warming (pay particular attention to the "seven things you should know about global warming" and globalwarming.org for more information. Then do your own more detailed research.
This is a complex issue and the evidence is not yet conclusive either way. In general, though, I am more convinced that this is a political ploy for control "to save the earth" than any sort of real phenomenon. The data I've looked at leave it quite unclear that there is any global warming trend at all - in particular, the satellite data, which is generally recognized as the most accurate, shows a slight cooling trend over the past 18 years. Even if a slight warming trend does exist, there is certainly no reason for alarm, as it is almost certainly a natural phenomenon. (As always, the chief human failing of hubris causes us to overestimate our importance and impact on the world around us - the fact is, we don't really make much difference.) The earth is not static, and it is not reasonable to expect it to be.
Oh, don't be ridiculous. The US has had probably the "cleanest" power on the planet since the 1930s, when the entire country was converted over to 60 Hz. (The entire Los Angeles basin ran on 50 Hz until that time.) Both voltage, and especially, frequency, have been very tightly regulated at the generating plant since that time. (If freq. wasn't, all those synchronous electric clocks you used to see all over wouldn't have kept time. They did.)
As for those from the continent advocating 220V as somehow better, no thanks - I'd rather not have to deal with huge plugs, and safety switches for each outlet to avoid getting fried, thanks...
Motorola didn't lose their lead to Nokia because of technology, but because of marketing blunders, greed, and colors. Go back a few years and you'll easily find that the following pretty accurately sums up how Nokia displaced Mot:
The tech edge was solidly with Motorola: they has just developed the breakthrough "Captain Kirk" StarTAC phone, and it was clearly the most sought after piece of personal electronics on the planet, and far more advanced than anything else out there for years. But Motorola decided that since the StarTAC was in such demand (which they couldn't meet anyway, despite its astronomical price), they'd use it to prop up the rest of their line which was something less than stellar. Mot decided to force its dealers to carry *and sell* the entire Mot line in order to get any of the coveted StarTACs. The dealers/carriers understandably balked, since this was in effect a quota to sell obsolete goods in order to get some modern ones.
Enter Nokia, which had two things going for it: it was aggressively trying to penetrate the US market at the right time and was willing to deal, and it offered a vital aesthetic differentiation almost as cool as the StarTAC: colored faceplates! The fortuitous timing and the fact that Nokia's product was so easily identifiable for some time made it the logical choice for dealers and carriers looking to spike Mot for their heavy-handedness - Nokia sales took of like a rocket. Note that at this stage, Nokia didn't have the small leading-edge phones they sport today - in fact, their performance and quality was pretty middle of the road - but it was good enough, and they quickly capitalized on their good launch to send their market share into orbit. Motorola burned out and has never really recovered from this cosmic mistake, but they really have no one but themselves to blame.
Funny how snobbish "geeks" can be against things purely because of their preconceived notions about them.
I love a nice quality mechanical watch (and the good ones generally come in gold cases, which are not the expensive part of the watch!). That's not because I'm trying to impress anyone (I'm not), but because I'm a mech hacker, too, and I appreciate the elegance of a really nice mechanical hack like that required to do a nice watch.
Have a look at the Jeager-LeCoultre Reversos with hands on both sides (keeping in mind that the hands on the opposite side must run "backwards") and tell me that's not a neat hack - remember, there are a *lot* of great hacks going on outside computers - some of which are at least 2000 years old. (Look up "Antikythera Mechanism" on your favorite search engine for the oldest documented hack of this kind.)
That said, I don't wear a gold Swiss watch every day, in fact, at the moment, I have on a nigh indestructible Timex Indiglo analog watch, which takes with aplomb the daily thrashing I give it without undue concern for scratches, water, and the like. (I do have to say that I despise digital watches with a passion: analog is better, and mech analog better still: after all, seconds aren't atomic, so watches *should* have true sweep-second hands rather than the ridiculous goose-stepping horrors the Japanese have foisted on us...)
Actually, there are enough good office tools for other OSes that that's no longer the limiting factor.
Visio, on the other hand is pretty indispensible, is now owned by MS itself, and has nothing even remotely like competition. I mentioned this in postings several years ago, but it's still a huge hole in the Linux app space - we really need to plug this one.
That and a decent browser are the *only* things keeping Win98 alive for me. (And yes, I torture myself with Netscape, it's weak, but it's far faster and more stable under 9x than Linux - sigh...)
We are getting *much* closer to being able to do everything on Linux, though: I installed Mandrake yesterday and it's the first OS other than Win98 to correctly work with my hardware (which is pretty normal) out of the box. Even sound - I'm amazed, as I had come to regard sound support in Linux as a chimerical legend, since it has never worked on any of my three sound-capable computers, regardless of distro or painful manual incantations, modules, or alternative sound subsystems like ALSA. My Red Hat's off to the Mandrake folks - I have a new favorite distro.
Now if GNOME just weren't such an inexcusable pig...
Oracle over NFS to a NetApp Filer would work fine on a Sun or such. But despite HJ's valiant efforts, Linux's NFS isn't there yet. Linux is getting there, but there are still real good reasons to go buy those Suns if you've got a big, mission-critical problem.
WOW!
Just when i was getting bummed about Mozilla, you show me this. This is quite simply the slickest integration of web and command line functionality I've ever seen. Moderate up Babar's post, and check out xmlterm.com. I'm not easily impressed, but the potential for this sort of integration is staggering. Maybe Mozilla isn't dead - but I sure wish they'd get it finished.
The Mozilla team just bought themselves another couple of months with me - maybe this thing is embeddable enough to make a difference...
Most of the sites developing microsofty crap are ones that I dont wana visit - mostly ecommerce and intranet stuff. Somehow I doubt that my interest areas (free software, geeky artistic development) are going to be taken over by microsoft only development.
You just have to laugh at this! Sure they won't touch your precious geeky sites, but for most of the world, "e-commerce and intranet stuff" are the only web sites that matter. Your argument is a perfect example of winning a meaningless battle and losing the war. Unfortunately, I expect this one's already lost. Microsoft is quite likely to have a usable standards-based browser before Netscape/Mozilla, since their enterprise customers *are* asking them to comply with standards.
I hate IE with a passion, and I resent like hell the way MS rammed it down our throats (I had to manage introducing the pile of crap when I was at Dell), but even I am starting to question whether each progressively more unstable release of Netscape is able to meet my browsing needs. If IE had support for a reasonable bookmark managment system and could use roaming profiles like Netscape (without a local AD server), I'd have a hard time finding any reason not to switch.
We've lost this one, folks. Microsoft controls the only UI that matters and is likely to continue doing so for the next several years. This does not bode well for the embedded Linux devices crowd, most of whom will need a small, fast, reliable browser compatible with it's larger desktop cousin. I'm afraid the browser issue may ultimately be the wedge that allows CE to triumph in this critical space as well. If that happens, it's "game over, man!"
The really funny thing is, even many of the vorec researchers I've spoken with don't get it:
They're working on VUIs as a completely separate alternative to the GUI, or at best, some sort of voice augmentation to allow GUI functions.
Really making voice valuable requires a completely different type of interface, one that wil by its very nature, be pretty incompatible with the GUIs we have today. The reason for that is the way we use speech in intereacting. Pay attention to what you say *and do* when working in front of a computer screen with another person: What you'll find is that speech recognition alone is of little benefit unless coupled with some sort of gestural recognition system as well. In other words, even in a proper voice-enabled GUI, the GUI will need significant modification to be able to deal with the concept of "this" as indicated by a combination of the recognized word and pointer location. (Note what this implies for touchscreens. Personally, I think the touchscreen is one of the key reasons for the success of the Palm Pilot over other PDA concepts - pointing directly is just the natural way to interact.) Further, there's a lot of assumed knowledge that goes into good vorec - that knowledge has to live somewhere, and be created somehow (possibly by learning, possibly by manual priming or copying another's setup and biulding on that.) Take the "Play U2" command someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread. That's pretty ambiguous, even if you understand that U2 is the name of a band and that the user wants to play some music files with that attribute. But which files? Any at random? Just Rattle and Hum, in album order? Or just With or Without You over and over, the song that's starting to mend your recently broken heart? That knowledge has to exist somewhere, and although it's not strictly part of the VUI, a voice interface can't have much value without it.
Until this sort of integration happens, so that the GUI and voice recognition work together, niether UI will reach anything like its full potential, and no one is likely to implement them piecewise, simply beause they don't provide sufficient value that way. Interestingly, it may well turn out to be the deep pocketed outfits like Microsoft that will make all this happen at once. I hate to say it, but I'd bet they pull good voice integrated interfaces off before the open source guys do, simply because of the nature of the problem and its solutions. The bazaar probably won't cut it for this sort of thing, and I think that's why we see MS pouring all those R&D dollars into the sorts of problems that are best addressed by a wholistic (some might say dictatorial) approach. I'm not saying the open source folks couldn't make this happen, just that they won't make it happen without significant changes to the way things are done.
(Note to the IBM guys, if you're reading this: I'm already an IBM employee and would love to work on vorec, if you can deal with someone in Austin...)
Actually, the official line is that it's not even as clean as you say, although that's a usable approximation.
Solaris is the set of packages making up the "distro" and including things like the Window Manager/GUI, various system tools (DiskSuite, AutoClient), and SunOS. So although there is a one-to one mapping of SunOS to Solaris version numbers, it's not stricly accurate to consider then equivalent, since SunOS is a subset of Solaris.
On the other hand, it doesn't really mater, and only a few really anal people at the division formerly known as SunSoft ever cared. For all practical purposes you're right, and I think even Sun has stoped making the distinction, although I know marketing materials still sohwed SunOS as a component of Solaris at least through 1996/97, about the time I left Sun.
The roots of the paperclip as Bob still show: Ask office help about "Bob" and it takes you right to the "Office Assistant" entries...
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like they better be careful with the DoJ - it would be "interesting" to see many of their patents invalidated for antitrust reasons.
I've heard good things about the AltaVista tunneling software from some people who were looking at a very similar situation. It appears to be abandoned, although it may just be hiding.
I found links to it on Tom Dunigan's VPN page, which has a number of good links for the problem at hand.
A link to AltaVista tunnel info that does work is found on this Digital link in Russia, which is oddly, in English.
Again, I haven't tried this myself, so caveat emptor.
Ya know, all this SUV pontificating is getting silly. In Texas we know exactly why there are SUVs (we were the market that created them): A pickup truck fitted out with four doors and a big honkin' air conditioner just makes sense - you get the best features of both a car and a truck.
Suburban: The National Car of Texas
From Chevy/GMC ad of the 1980's (and a takeoff on Lone Star's "National Beer of Texas" ads), before the rise of all these wimpy and effete SUV wannabees, which deserve all the scorn we can heap upon them. How can anyone respect drivers of those ridiculous Lexus or BMW SUV's? (Or for that matter, an Escalade or Navigator?)
If you don't feel comfortable throwing half a ton of hay, sod, or a bunch of camping gear and a couple of deer carcasses in the back, it's not a *real* SUV!
Maybe the reasons SUVs are so popular is simply because Detroit stopped building the big rear-wheel drive cars we want? If we could still buy those cars, there wouldn't be so many SUVs sold, I'm sure.
You burn clean, but you burn a lot of a resource we only have another 20-40 years left of.
This is the usual environmentalist bunk. (I am for a clean environment, but consider myself a conservationist rather than an environmentalist - the difference is that the former places a value on truth, while the latter is simply ideologically driven.)
The simple fact is that we've gotten *much* better at finding oil in the past few years. I can't find the citation right now ot I'd link to it, but I read somewhere recently that we found more oil in the past decade than we knew existed previously. Given what I've seen happening in the exploration business, I don't find that hard to believe at all. Not to mention that directional drilling, MWD, etc. are busily making all that oil more accessible than it's ever been before.
We may run out someday, but it will be a very long time. taht's very good, because it should give us enough time to fix some of the technological problems that make the alternatives so uneconomical. One thing that should resonate with the crowd here: Like Linux, the important thing about internal combustion engine technology isn't its current state, but the fact that it's improving far faster than anything else out there...