The SPARC and x86 versions of Solaris had their source trees merged a number of years ago. Only the device-specific parts are different. This is one reason why porting nearly any Solaris SPARC program to x86 is as simple as moving the source to the x86 box and typing "make".
Solaris has a LOT to offer, and the people here on/. generally don't realize what an excellent job Sun has done on many of the hard bits. (Oddly enough, while leaving some of the easier bits mostly undone - like, say, NIS+ management tools)
Maybe I should clarify what I meant by "too large or too small":.001" is an increment that can be readily easily measured with reasonably inexpensive instruments. Halving that makes them far more expensive.
As pointed out in other posts here, the same problem applies at a larger scale (ugh) when dealing with machinist's rules and scales: You can easily purchase scales with a resolution of.01", but a tenth of a millimeter is impractical, as the hash marks are too close together, which is why the most accurate metric scales commonly available have only.5 mm resolution.
The limit is one of cost effectiveness and human perception. For this purpose, english units are superior on a small scale such as this. Obviously, it doesn't make any real difference which you use, but one can legitimately be easier and more useful than another in a particular situation. (And there are instances in which metric units are clearly easier and more useful...)
I noticed this the hard way a few years back when I bought an Alfa Romeo 164S (awesome) that had a digital climate control, switchable from english to metric.
It became obvious fairly quickly that switching to "F" just twiddled the display, and the thing was still using Celsius to decide what to do. This is a big problem, because Celsius degrees are just simply too big to use for controlling the temperature if human comfort is what you're after. (Each Celsius degree is nearly twice as large (9/5, actually) as each Fahrenheit degree.)
It does seem that many "foreign" thermostats use Celsius degrees, giving them about half the resolution of American thermostats... Still, if I could buy a new Alfa here, I would - I loved that car!
That's exactly my point. They DIDN'T say what was or was not in the curriculum. They simply said, quite properly, that it was inappropriate for the state to mandate any point of view on the issue!
It turns out that a thousandth of an inch is an extraorinarily usefully sized increment when dealing with machined parts. (Not to mention that when you need to check clearances, a one mil shim/feeler gauge is as close as the cellophane cigarrette wrapper from the nearest smoker - try it for yourself. No idea what thickness foreign cigarrette wrappers are, but I'd chortle if they're.001"!)
By comparison, metric units tend to be either too large or too small: A millimeter is huge (39 thousandths), a tenth of a millimeter is still way too big (3.9 thousandths) but a hundredth of a millimeter is overkill at.39 thousandths, and makes accurate dial calipers, etc. more difficult and expensive. This also results in a unit that does not line up well with engineering notation, where exponents are multiples of three to help avoid errors - to fix this you either need to write.001" as.0254 mm or 25.4um (micrometers) - difficult because it's notoriously difficult to type the proper "mu" on non-greek keyboards, and micrometers are both little bitty and the device you use to measure small things with. On top of that, all of these folks "think" clearances and allowances in thousandths, their suppliers provide all their engineering information primarily in English units, and parts, tools, etc. are much more available (and cheaper) in English units than in Metric. Not to mention that everything they need to hook up to is English, so they can't just switch over.
Most machinists and designers are proficient in both, but it's a pain. From what I've seen, the vast majority of US design engineers prefer to design in english and if the design has to go overseas for fabrication, they'll then convert and let the other guys deal with the horribly odd numbers that result.
With computers to help us, there's no real reason to HAVE to change anymore. Seriously, it's still a hassle to convert, but it's much less trouble now than it used to be. Converting would be very expensive, cause many more NASA-type foul-ups, and offer little or nothing in return. It makes about as much sense for the US to convert to Metric units as it does for the rest of the world to adopt the English language. Sure, it makes things easier, but is it worth the trouble? And the cultural issues ARE similar.
Finally, there's still a very real stigma attached to using the effete and wimpy Metric units in many US industries. I'll never forget the withering look I got a few years back when explaining to an oil tool executive that a gap was "about two millimeters" as he rejoindered, "MILLIMETERS? What the HELL?"
FWIW, I think both systems are wrong and we should base length on "Dublins" (where the Dublin would be defined as the distance between a yard and a meter at which the acceleration due to earth's gravity is exactly 10 Dublins/s^2)! THAT would make life easier for a lot of people, and is easier than changing the second, which after all is perfect at 1/86400 of a day! [grin]
Oh, and we'd have to build houses out of 5.08x10.16's (2x4's) that actually measure a nominal 4.445x8.890 (1.75x3.5)??
I think the decision of whether or not you want one box or two is mostly dependent on whether or not you always carry both. I do, and for that reason I would love a Qualcomm pdQ, but since (a) Sprint doesn't have them yet, and (b) they cost a LOT, especially for last generation Palm technology, I decided for now on a Qualcomm Thin Phone as an adjunct to the trusty Palm Pro. The biggest downside to this approach is that you really can't carry both in your jeans pockets. (The rectangle worn on the left front pocket of my jeans is the geek equivalent of a Copenhagen ring on the back pocket of a kicker's jeans...)
Bluetooth will solve the two-box problem just after improved microelectronics make it irrelevant (at least in this context) by shrinking phone and PDA components to the curent size of a Palm V.
Why doesn't anyone build a CDMA phone (no cancer for me, please - GSM is, of course, a US plot to destroy Europeans) that will just let me snap in a Palm device? (Or maybe a CDMA phone plug-in for the Handsring Visor?)
For Sprint users: This phone has a built-in web browser, which isn't supposed to work yet, but does, at least here in Austin.
***The thing that strikes me most about using a phone-based text web browser is what an incredibly bad job the phone.com (WAP/HDML) folks have done at reinventing gopher!***
What we have here is a proprietary, hacked-up (in the uncomplimentary sense) web markup language that is *less* optimized for text browsing that the simplest gopher client. What were these people thinking? I won't be browsing with it much, that's for sure, but the CDMA IP connection may come in quite handy with the PalmPilot when I can buy the data cable for the ThinPhone (due soon.)
This was tried a few years ago. There was a company offering net notary services (I think they were actually called NetNotary) that would do a hash of what you sent them and notarize it. Daily (or weekly, I forget which) they took a hash of all the hashes they'd done for that period and published it in the Wall Street Journal.
So far as I can tell, they went out of business - I can't find them now...
Sorry, I still don't think even the snazziest of these techno-dreams adequately captures what makes paper work well. Take something simple, like physical pages. While they can be quite limiting at times (and certainly a good electronic document should not be rigidly constrained by pagination except when it is actually printed), they also provide a very good and intuitive navigation mechanism.
If you're reading criticaly, one of the things you do frequently is flip back a few pages to review what was said there or see how it fits with what you just read, or perhaps you obviously missed a point back there. With paper, this is easy, and there is a natural and intuitive feel for how many pages back something is. It's not perfect, but it works well - much faster than searching, and it's fairly easy to mark your place at several locations at once, at least until you run out of fingers!
This is really the point of my criticism of the state of reading software: we could build good readers, but we haven't yet. Even the basics of navigation within a document don't work well yet. Unfortunately, the best thing out there so far is possibly Acrobat reader, and it only works because it lamely imitates paper. We can and should do much better.
OK, I can't resist doing a quick little back-of-the envelope analysis on this one.
I think most of us would like to use electronic versions more than we do. As with most things we talk about here, there are two problems: Hardware and Software. Both are big ones here. In order, then:
Hardware:
The bandwidth of even a really good screen is at best a tiny fraction of a *single* sheet of paper.
Do the math: At 600 dpi (the most common printer resolution these days) and assuming.5" borders around the page, you get a resolution of 30 Megapixels on a single A-size sheet:
600 dpi x 600 dpi = 360,000 dots/in^2 8 in x 10.5 in = 84 in^2 Pixel equivalent of page, then is: 360,000 x 84 = 30,240,000 (!)
Even at 300 dpi, it's still 7,560,000 pixels! (84 in^2 x 90,000 dots/in^2 = 7.56 Megapixels)
Even with the most sophisticated HDTV monitor (1920x1280? = 2,457,600 Megapixels) you've still got only a fraction of the real estate that a mediocre printer provides, at a price point that puts them well out of reach. Granted, some of that resolution (particularly at 600 dpi) is not strictly necessary, but it does serve to reduce the strain of reading bitmapped fonts, which is another reason people prefer paper.
This has a secondary consequence which leads to the software considerations: We are all effectively working through portholes. This is a major reason the desktop UI metaphor doesn't work as well as we initally think it should: The area of your virtual desktop is a very tiny fraction of that of your real desktop. I currently have over a half-dozen pages of paper on my desk that I'm working on. (Actually, way over, but I'll leave it at 6 for those of you neat enough to have only that many...) The equivalent resolution of my real desktop then, is substantially in excess of the 300 dpi equivalent (for 6 pages) of 45 Megapixels!
In reality, counting the papers on the reference table behind me and the things I have pinned up on the wall, my immediate work area (the "real" desktop) has an equivalent resolution at 300 dpi of probably around a gigapixel. Oh, and many of the documents are in full color, too, so triple or quadruple that if you really want to build the Sun "Starfire" wraparound workstation that Bruce Tognazzini did a UI film for a couple of years back. It's no wonder we want eight virtual desktops and that still doesn't work!
Software:
This problem is every bit as recalcitrant as the hardware. Bottom line (because I'm running out of time and the envelope must be getting quite full now): we don't have any good software for reading. Some of the posters here have mentioned the PalmPilot and its Doc format readers. While considerably more awkward than real paper, they are much better readers than are available for PCs. Most PC software is optimized for writing - precious little consideration has been given to reading! (I haven't tried the RocketBook or eBook gadgets, since I can't see toting such weight and complexity simply for reading.) The ability to quickly "flip" pages (gee, that would allow true browsing!) is vital. People will continue to use paper instead of screens until it's not a PITA to read on a screen.
Oh and there's one more thing: Books and paper don't need batteries or recharging, they have indefinite shelf life, they rarely if ever require bckups, they survive incredible physical abuse, and I haven't yet run into a file format incompatibility that wasn't rooted in an insufficiency in the training of the warmware.
Bottom Line: Without MAJOR improvements in hardware AND software, screens aren't even in the game. I've found that only a very few people are capable of dealing effectively with large amounts of electronic documentation. This is not just a cultural issue - I've expressed here fundamental reasons why it's just not reasonable to expect people to prefer screens to paper anytime in the near future.
At the Open Source Forum here in Austin a couple of months ago, we briefly spoke about the impact of Open Source on the price of commercial software. We both agreed that Open Source software is driving the cost of commercial software down to something closer to its "true" value than its current benefits-based valuation in the marketplace.
At the same time, "free" (in the beer sense) does not adequately reflect the amount of effort required to develop and test software, particulary software that is thinly used (attractive to a limited user base), and hence would not likely be able to generate a sufficient base of Open Source developers. A few questions:
Is there a "Natural Value" of software to which the Open Source pressures are driving commercial software prices?
Can Open Source development efforts be adequately encouraged in vital but thinly populated user bases?
Fianlly, although Linux and other Open Source projects are improving more rapidly than their commercial counterparts, they tend to lack significantly (and not surprisingly) in areas which require an overall architecture. (An example would be the apparent lack of an Open Source *equivalent* (there are subsets) to Microsoft's Active Directory, which, regardless of one's view of Microsoft, is a pretty impressive piece of technology.) What part(s) of the Open Source community do you foresee as being able to step up to the plate and address the "big picture"?
(I'll air my own views if these questions are chosen...)
NO!, the correct plural (even for "techies", sorry to burst your bubble - no dictionary I've ever seen draws a distinction by occupation) for "box" is quite clearly "boxes".
"Boxen" is never correct, although it is not incorrect (and pretty much irrelevant now) to refer to a plurality of DEC VAX computers as "Vaxen". Still, even in heavy-duty DEC shops, (and I've worked in several, one was 100% DEC when I arrived), "Vaxes" is the favored usage over "Vaxen", just because "Vaxen" sounds so stupid.
Direct flames to/doc/OxfordEnglishDictionary at your nearest library. (Natural languages have docs for a reason, too, you know...)
Actually, current airliners are safety nightmares. And what passes for safety "precautions" are ludicrous. According to the link below, flaoting seat cushions have been used *once* and have not been proven to save lives.
The link celow has some good information, but is not academically rigorous (to say the least) in its presentation. (Honestly, this is why I'm posting this as AC...)
Also, it should not be visited by conspiracy buffs, because at times, the owners of this site drop into "they're out to get us all" mode.
Still there's some very interesting stuff here: www.aircrash.org
*** Previous comment: OK, we don't have the option to slap a cd in the cdrom drive and let it install at once (afaik) -- but that's one less source of trojans / viri as far as i'm concerned. *** OK, folks, THINK before you post! [grin]
Most modern distro CDs are bootable, so this does indeed work as it should. (I know for sure Caldera's will autorun the install program in two ways: boot and run Lizard if booted raw, or launch the Windows installer if just slapped into the drive with Windows running.)
As for trojans/viruses, if you've got those on a distro CD you do indeed have a big problem, but not booting from the CD isn't likely to change that much, now is it?
OK, folks, time to clear the air: ALL the Kansas law did was to leave the decision of what to teach to the local school districts. This is the type of local, distributed decision-making that the/. community normally favors.
Check it out for yourself, the Kansas law didn't mandate the teching of creation only, or even creation also, but simply said that it wasn't something the state should decide at all. That's it.
(Source: http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/09-11-99/cover _1.asp and whether or not you agree with their perspective, one has to admit that World's jouralistic product is incredibly accurate and correct. When they are wrong, they PROMINENTLY post the corrections, something too rare even in our supposedly "open" circles...)
OK, let's draw the important distinction here about what's digital and what's not:
Everyone is running around calling these things "digital" [VCRs|video recorders|somesuch], but although they *do* store digitally, their inputs and outputs are analog only. They still cannot take a direct digital MPEG stream (from your digital settop, digital satellite dish reciever, or anything else) and store that. What they do is take an *analog* signal (which may have been digital only inches ago), and run it through the MPEG veg-o-matic again to stuff that on a hard disk.
The reason they aren't truly digital is simple: The studios/networks will try very hard to never let this happen. This is the same reason that although IEEE 1394 should by all logic be the connection for video streams between tuners/settops and displays or storage devices such as these, it never will be, and may die on the vine as a result. They're not going to let *anyone* grab an unencrypted MPEG stream. Ever.
Even in the analog realm, the studio types are already worried: Boxes like this are currently under fire because they do not regenerate the Macrovision sync-hosing pulses when playing back content that was originally Macrovision encoded, meaning it's too easy to record the analog output of a Tivo on a regular VCR. (If you're looking for a good way to completely remove Macrovision pulses, this is it, for the time being...)
If Sony's involved here, it's more likely to be to protect its content "rights" than to promote the technology.
On the other hand, this idea makes too much sense to die - even if the studios succeed in killing off these devices (likely, I'd say), there isn't much short of legislation outlawing high-quality MPEG encoders and/or PC frame grabbers (and this *is* a possibility, given their clout) to stop people from rolling their own. (What we really need is a good PCI "digital settop card", but the FCC won't get off the dime and standardize on subscriber authentication, so dream on. Even so, it wouldn't be able to deal with encrypted streams, which will be just about everything very soon.)
I predict 1TB disks will be common in the next couple of years to give people someplace to put all their multimedia content. (How many of us already have big drives stuffed with MP3s? You'll have your camcorder content and video library on there next. And don't ask me how you recover from a hard disk crash of that magnitude! RAID/SAN solutions may be the cheapest backups in the long run.)
And if you thought the RIAA was fighting MP3, you ain't seen nothing yet!
Sorry, but this is SO wrong I feel it needs a reply. This is what really happened. I don't think anyone will substantively argue the facts below:
You obviously weren't using browsers a few years ago, or you'd know that originally, all browsers were free (NCSA Mosaic, Viola, Lynx, Tim Berners-Lee's orginal NeXT browser, etc.)
Then some of the leading Mosaic developers formed Netscape, and wrote the next-generation graphical browser everybody really wanted. Commercial browsers up to that point were generally repackaged Mosaic or worse, but sold because they had integrated TCP/IP stacks - important back in the Win 3.X days when PCs didn't have IP, and making the pieces work was a pain even if you knew what you were doing (sounds like Linux [grin]) It was free only for personal use - commercial use required paying a license fee, nominally $35/copy, IIRC. Netscape raised the bar and obsoleted all other browsers of the time.
Microsoft began to see Netscape as a threat and decided they needed a "modern" browser, too. MS contracted with Spyglass, which was the officialy blessed licensing arm for the original NCSA Mosaic source, to pay them a percentage of the revenue from every copy of IE. Then MS decided, right or wrong, to play hardball and shut down Netscape's revenue stream, so they gave away IE **even for commercial use**. Spyglass didn't make much.
Netscape soon bowed to MS' competitive pressure (it IS hard to compete with free) and began to give away thier browser, which at the time accounted for a fair-sized portion of their revenues. Had this not happened, AOL would likely not have been able to afford to buy Netscape a couple of years later.
Finally, as was pointed out above, it's only illegal to give away a product at a loss when you do so to either acquire or maintain a "monopoly" position. Microsoft may be a monopoly (the lawyers are still arguing), Sun almost certainly is not.
As Paul Harvey would say, "Now you know - the REST of the story."
This is a concept that some of us have been thinking about for some time - as networks get faster, there's a growing "latent" (pun intended) storage capacity in the bits that are in transit.
Do a little math: On a gigabit network with a quarter second latency (a reasonable assumption for a "nationwide" network), there is over 30 MB of storage in the link itself (one-way). At terabit and petabit speeds (and/or tremendous latencies), the buffer becomes quite sizable.
So far as I know, no one really makes direct use of the network as a storage buffer, but it could be done fairly easily, so long as you don't care a whole lot about getting your data back!
The closest thing to this in real use is the BFS (broadcast file system) used by cable headends to make files available to their digital settop boxes - they just dedicate a channel to continuously broadcasting the contents of the filesystem. Of course, three's a limit to how large such an FS can be as a practical matter, but settop boxes are small and stupid, so it works well for now. This is how things like the program guide and such are delivered in digital satellite TV systems, too.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems much of the debate about RRLFNs ultimately collapses to the age-old (in internet years) controversy over whether or not TCP keepalives are a good thing. (LFNs, pronounced "elephants" are Long Fat Networks - todays high latency networks - this wording is from the applicable RFCs, 1323 and its ilk. RRLFNs are Really, Really LFNs, something I just made up.)
I'm all for engineering notation here (scientific notation with the exponent forced to multiples of 3 - makes real world transformations much less error-prone, which, after all is why it was developed.)
The *correct* meaning of "Giga" is completely unambiguous: it's 1 x 10^9. Why is it that the traditional CS "computer twit" types insist on the sorts of ridiculous abbreviations and approximations that the rest of us know will sooner or later land them in trouble? 2^10 != 10^3, and it never has. This is just plain lazy usage - the terms "kilo", "mega", etc. should NEVER have been twisted in this way. Let's just toss base-2 nomenclature for good NOW while we can.
e.g.: Why is Y2K an abbreviation? Isn't that the tinking that got us into this mess in the first place? (I'm all for at least five digit year fields, or maybe ints, or maybe even long ints... [grin])
This article was quite enlightening. I have always argued that censorware did no good. Therefore the only way to protect children from the filth that these days runs unfettered through my personal mailbox and the web at large is simply to prohibit Internet access completely.
(It was once true that you had to go looking for porn and other offensive content to find it - that's no longer true. Now it arrives in neatly packaged daily doses of spam - I got one the other day with a gross (even by/. standards) porn photo as a top level MIME body part. What if the kids had been around? A SpamCop report got the guy's e-mail and web site accounts yanked and a $2000 ISP abuse charge on his Visa card - yes!)
I know this seems unthinkable, but, really, will education suffer in the least without the Internet? We managed to educate people 100 years ago far better than we educate people today, and we did it without any high technology. The web is easy, but very shallow. I really don't even think it's a very valid tool for research of the k-12 kind. Teach kids the importance of primary sources and how to use a library and they'll truly have learned something useful.
There are times I am truly thankful I send my children to a school that doesn't even have a computer lab, much less access to the Net. I've been in the IT business for a long time, and was one of the first computer students in public schools, and I can assure you that real literacy is far more important than "computer literacy" - something that is easily borne out in the most casual session of reading/.!
Just say NO to Internet access in schools. There's really nothing to lose (except higher tax bills for a bunch of overpriced, obsolete computers), and our children to save.
Even though I'm a Sun bigot (and came by it honestly), this could well be the death knell for StarOffice, and if StarOffice falls, Linux chances become much slimmer.
Doesn't anyone remember that Sun already bought a world-class OO office suite about two years ago, and then proceeded to completely bury it? (They bought Lighthouse Design, which had some very nice office apps for NeXT.) In principle, it should not have been that difficult to port the Objective C code to Java, producing the first real Java office suite, but for whatever reasons, the opportunity was bobbled and all Sun has to show for the LD purchase is an OO modeling tool.
Lighthouse Design's excellent code is now but a footnote in history, and there's little reason to hope the same fate won't befall StarOffice if they can't find a way to remain independent.
I like Sun, but I do NOT trust them to follow through on this, or devote anywhere near the level of resources required to make StarOffice a real competitor. Never forget that Sun has lots of really bright people, but they are a poor software development house - their business model insists that business units be instantly profitable, leading to bone-headed business decisions in an attempt to generate unreasonable amounts of cash. Java is an abberation. Look at the fate of Sun's other software products (SunNet Manager, the NFS client, etc.) to see how software really fares at Sun. The company starved those products, and the same is likely to happen to StarOffice, which will require even more money to support.
On annother note, StarOffice is not written in Java, but there is a Java version (port) of it, which can be run from JavStations or other network computers. (Sun is finally realizing that a local disk is a really good thing, even if only for cache - networks will never be fast/good enough to make no local storage a good architectural choice, especially with the increasing importance of mobility.)
If I were at Microsoft, I would throw a party if Sun completes this purchase...
I sure wish they would chase that common file format initiative mentioned in another post, though - that's the way to really make a difference!
So far, this has brought up allusions to several sci-fi portrayals of these things:
1. Edison Carter's SatCam in Max Headroom (my all-time favorite sci-fi show, but a bit too close to reality for the network folks, I suppose...)
2. the Gargoyles from Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash (maybe I'll have to read that someday...)
3. The vid-capture things that were shown in the Star Trek movie where Admiral Kirk returns to the bridge of the Enterprise.
I'd like to add fourth, which certainly predates all three: the "newstapers" as described in Larry Niven's Future History Series (I don't recall which book, but possibly one or more of the Ringworld series.)
Just tought I'd inflame a few of the hate-mongering anti-Christian crowd by pointing out that Tolkien's The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy are (and were clearly intended to be) works of *Christian* literature. This is amply documented in Tolkien's contemporary writings, including his discussions and correspondence with the famous "Inklings" which included notables such as C.S. Lewis (a Christian who was formerly an atheist), and Charles Williams.
Of course, I suppose now we'll have a backlash against Tolkien, now that the cat's out of the bag!
Although it's not fashionable to talk about it, there are many, many geeks who are devout Christians. (I'll argue, all the ones that have really done their homework as a true geek would to get to the bottom of an important issue!) Our culture is still largely Christian - even those of you who do not believe yourselves (and it is my fervent hope that you will) cannot understand the history (especially the founding) of the U.S. without a good working understanding of what Christians believe.
Although these links will soon point to something different, I urge/. readers to listen to R.C. Sproul's excellent dicussion of this yesterday and today. I think even the most agnostic and atheistic among you will realize that Sproul has taken your position into account - he expresses very clearly why Chrisitanity is true - and why it must be true.
You claim to be open-minded: have you really tried to understand Christianity?
"The evidence for Christian truth is not exhaustive, but it is sufficient. Too often, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting -- it has been found demanding, and not tried."
- John Baillie
Suppose Christianity is not a religion but a way of life, a falling in love with God, and, through Him, a falling in love with our fellows. Of course, such a way is hard and costly, but it is also joyous and rewarding even in the here-and-now. People who follow that Way know beyond all possible argument that they are in harmony with the purpose of God, that Christ is with them and in them as they set about His work in our disordered world. If anyone thinks this is perilous and revolutionary teaching, so much the better. That is exactly what they thought of the teaching of Jesus Christ. The light He brought to bear upon human affairs is almost unbearably brilliant: but it is the light of Truth, and in that light human problems can be solved. - J. B. Phillips, When God Was Man
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The SPARC and x86 versions of Solaris had their source trees merged a number of years ago. Only the device-specific parts are different. This is one reason why porting nearly any Solaris SPARC program to x86 is as simple as moving the source to the x86 box and typing "make".
/. generally don't realize what an excellent job Sun has done on many of the hard bits. (Oddly enough, while leaving some of the easier bits mostly undone - like, say, NIS+ management tools)
Solaris has a LOT to offer, and the people here on
Maybe I should clarify what I meant by "too large or too small": .001" is an increment that can be readily easily measured with reasonably inexpensive instruments. Halving that makes them far more expensive.
.01", but a tenth of a millimeter is impractical, as the hash marks are too close together, which is why the most accurate metric scales commonly available have only .5 mm resolution.
As pointed out in other posts here, the same problem applies at a larger scale (ugh) when dealing with machinist's rules and scales: You can easily purchase scales with a resolution of
The limit is one of cost effectiveness and human perception. For this purpose, english units are superior on a small scale such as this. Obviously, it doesn't make any real difference which you use, but one can legitimately be easier and more useful than another in a particular situation. (And there are instances in which metric units are clearly easier and more useful...)
I noticed this the hard way a few years back when I bought an Alfa Romeo 164S (awesome) that had a digital climate control, switchable from english to metric.
It became obvious fairly quickly that switching to "F" just twiddled the display, and the thing was still using Celsius to decide what to do. This is a big problem, because Celsius degrees are just simply too big to use for controlling the temperature if human comfort is what you're after. (Each Celsius degree is nearly twice as large (9/5, actually) as each Fahrenheit degree.)
It does seem that many "foreign" thermostats use Celsius degrees, giving them about half the resolution of American thermostats... Still, if I could buy a new Alfa here, I would - I loved that car!
That's exactly my point. They DIDN'T say what was or was not in the curriculum. They simply said, quite properly, that it was inappropriate for the state to mandate any point of view on the issue!
It turns out that a thousandth of an inch is an extraorinarily usefully sized increment when dealing with machined parts. (Not to mention that when you need to check clearances, a one mil shim/feeler gauge is as close as the cellophane cigarrette wrapper from the nearest smoker - try it for yourself. No idea what thickness foreign cigarrette wrappers are, but I'd chortle if they're .001"!)
.39 thousandths, and makes accurate dial calipers, etc. more difficult and expensive. This also results in a unit that does not line up well with engineering notation, where exponents are multiples of three to help avoid errors - to fix this you either need to write .001" as .0254 mm or 25.4um (micrometers) - difficult because it's notoriously difficult to type the proper "mu" on non-greek keyboards, and micrometers are both little bitty and the device you use to measure small things with. On top of that, all of these folks "think" clearances and allowances in thousandths, their suppliers provide all their engineering information primarily in English units, and parts, tools, etc. are much more available (and cheaper) in English units than in Metric. Not to mention that everything they need to hook up to is English, so they can't just switch over.
By comparison, metric units tend to be either too large or too small: A millimeter is huge (39 thousandths), a tenth of a millimeter is still way too big (3.9 thousandths) but a hundredth of a millimeter is overkill at
Most machinists and designers are proficient in both, but it's a pain. From what I've seen, the vast majority of US design engineers prefer to design in english and if the design has to go overseas for fabrication, they'll then convert and let the other guys deal with the horribly odd numbers that result.
With computers to help us, there's no real reason to HAVE to change anymore. Seriously, it's still a hassle to convert, but it's much less trouble now than it used to be. Converting would be very expensive, cause many more NASA-type foul-ups, and offer little or nothing in return. It makes about as much sense for the US to convert to Metric units as it does for the rest of the world to adopt the English language. Sure, it makes things easier, but is it worth the trouble? And the cultural issues ARE similar.
Finally, there's still a very real stigma attached to using the effete and wimpy Metric units in many US industries. I'll never forget the withering look I got a few years back when explaining to an oil tool executive that a gap was "about two millimeters" as he rejoindered, "MILLIMETERS? What the HELL?"
FWIW, I think both systems are wrong and we should base length on "Dublins" (where the Dublin would be defined as the distance between a yard and a meter at which the acceleration due to earth's gravity is exactly 10 Dublins/s^2)! THAT would make life easier for a lot of people, and is easier than changing the second, which after all is perfect at 1/86400 of a day! [grin]
Oh, and we'd have to build houses out of 5.08x10.16's (2x4's) that actually measure a nominal 4.445x8.890 (1.75x3.5)??
Give me a 384 Kbps wireless link any day, but PLEASE don't make me go to the mall to use it.
I don't like shopping much anyway, but malls are the pits...
I think the decision of whether or not you want one box or two is mostly dependent on whether or not you always carry both. I do, and for that reason I would love a Qualcomm pdQ, but since (a) Sprint doesn't have them yet, and (b) they cost a LOT, especially for last generation Palm technology, I decided for now on a Qualcomm Thin Phone as an adjunct to the trusty Palm Pro. The biggest downside to this approach is that you really can't carry both in your jeans pockets. (The rectangle worn on the left front pocket of my jeans is the geek equivalent of a Copenhagen ring on the back pocket of a kicker's jeans...)
Bluetooth will solve the two-box problem just after improved microelectronics make it irrelevant (at least in this context) by shrinking phone and PDA components to the curent size of a Palm V.
Why doesn't anyone build a CDMA phone (no cancer for me, please - GSM is, of course, a US plot to destroy Europeans) that will just let me snap in a Palm device? (Or maybe a CDMA phone plug-in for the Handsring Visor?)
For Sprint users: This phone has a built-in web browser, which isn't supposed to work yet, but does, at least here in Austin.
***The thing that strikes me most about using a phone-based text web browser is what an incredibly bad job the phone.com (WAP/HDML) folks have done at reinventing gopher!***
What we have here is a proprietary, hacked-up (in the uncomplimentary sense) web markup language that is *less* optimized for text browsing that the simplest gopher client. What were these people thinking? I won't be browsing with it much, that's for sure, but the CDMA IP connection may come in quite handy with the PalmPilot when I can buy the data cable for the ThinPhone (due soon.)
This was tried a few years ago. There was a company offering net notary services (I think they were actually called NetNotary) that would do a hash of what you sent them and notarize it. Daily (or weekly, I forget which) they took a hash of all the hashes they'd done for that period and published it in the Wall Street Journal.
So far as I can tell, they went out of business - I can't find them now...
Sorry, I still don't think even the snazziest of these techno-dreams adequately captures what makes paper work well. Take something simple, like physical pages. While they can be quite limiting at times (and certainly a good electronic document should not be rigidly constrained by pagination except when it is actually printed), they also provide a very good and intuitive navigation mechanism.
If you're reading criticaly, one of the things you do frequently is flip back a few pages to review what was said there or see how it fits with what you just read, or perhaps you obviously missed a point back there. With paper, this is easy, and there is a natural and intuitive feel for how many pages back something is. It's not perfect, but it works well - much faster than searching, and it's fairly easy to mark your place at several locations at once, at least until you run out of fingers!
This is really the point of my criticism of the state of reading software: we could build good readers, but we haven't yet. Even the basics of navigation within a document don't work well yet. Unfortunately, the best thing out there so far is possibly Acrobat reader, and it only works because it lamely imitates paper. We can and should do much better.
OK, I can't resist doing a quick little back-of-the envelope analysis on this one.
.5" borders around the page, you get a resolution of 30 Megapixels on a single A-size sheet:
I think most of us would like to use electronic versions more than we do. As with most things we talk about here, there are two problems: Hardware and Software. Both are big ones here. In order, then:
Hardware:
The bandwidth of even a really good screen is at best a tiny fraction of a *single* sheet of paper.
Do the math: At 600 dpi (the most common printer resolution these days) and assuming
600 dpi x 600 dpi = 360,000 dots/in^2
8 in x 10.5 in = 84 in^2
Pixel equivalent of page, then is:
360,000 x 84 = 30,240,000 (!)
Even at 300 dpi, it's still 7,560,000 pixels!
(84 in^2 x 90,000 dots/in^2 = 7.56 Megapixels)
Even with the most sophisticated HDTV monitor (1920x1280? = 2,457,600 Megapixels) you've still got only a fraction of the real estate that a mediocre printer provides, at a price point that puts them well out of reach. Granted, some of that resolution (particularly at 600 dpi) is not strictly necessary, but it does serve to reduce the strain of reading bitmapped fonts, which is another reason people prefer paper.
This has a secondary consequence which leads to the software considerations: We are all effectively working through portholes. This is a major reason the desktop UI metaphor doesn't work as well as we initally think it should: The area of your virtual desktop is a very tiny fraction of that of your real desktop. I currently have over a half-dozen pages of paper on my desk that I'm working on. (Actually, way over, but I'll leave it at 6 for those of you neat enough to have only that many...) The equivalent resolution of my real desktop then, is substantially in excess of the 300 dpi equivalent (for 6 pages) of 45 Megapixels!
In reality, counting the papers on the reference table behind me and the things I have pinned up on the wall, my immediate work area (the "real" desktop) has an equivalent resolution at 300 dpi of probably around a gigapixel. Oh, and many of the documents are in full color, too, so triple or quadruple that if you really want to build the Sun "Starfire" wraparound workstation that Bruce Tognazzini did a UI film for a couple of years back. It's no wonder we want eight virtual desktops and that still doesn't work!
Software:
This problem is every bit as recalcitrant as the hardware. Bottom line (because I'm running out of time and the envelope must be getting quite full now): we don't have any good software for reading. Some of the posters here have mentioned the PalmPilot and its Doc format readers. While considerably more awkward than real paper, they are much better readers than are available for PCs. Most PC software is optimized for writing - precious little consideration has been given to reading! (I haven't tried the RocketBook or eBook gadgets, since I can't see toting such weight and complexity simply for reading.) The ability to quickly "flip" pages (gee, that would allow true browsing!) is vital. People will continue to use paper instead of screens until it's not a PITA to read on a screen.
Oh and there's one more thing: Books and paper don't need batteries or recharging, they have indefinite shelf life, they rarely if ever require bckups, they survive incredible physical abuse, and I haven't yet run into a file format incompatibility that wasn't rooted in an insufficiency in the training of the warmware.
Bottom Line: Without MAJOR improvements in hardware AND software, screens aren't even in the game. I've found that only a very few people are capable of dealing effectively with large amounts of electronic documentation. This is not just a cultural issue - I've expressed here fundamental reasons why it's just not reasonable to expect people to prefer screens to paper anytime in the near future.
At the Open Source Forum here in Austin a couple of months ago, we briefly spoke about the impact of Open Source on the price of commercial software. We both agreed that Open Source software is driving the cost of commercial software down to something closer to its "true" value than its current benefits-based valuation in the marketplace.
At the same time, "free" (in the beer sense) does not adequately reflect the amount of effort required to develop and test software, particulary software that is thinly used (attractive to a limited user base), and hence would not likely be able to generate a sufficient base of Open Source developers. A few questions:
Is there a "Natural Value" of software to which the Open Source pressures are driving commercial software prices?
Can Open Source development efforts be adequately encouraged in vital but thinly populated user bases?
Fianlly, although Linux and other Open Source projects are improving more rapidly than their commercial counterparts, they tend to lack significantly (and not surprisingly) in areas which require an overall architecture. (An example would be the apparent lack of an Open Source *equivalent* (there are subsets) to Microsoft's Active Directory, which, regardless of one's view of Microsoft, is a pretty impressive piece of technology.) What part(s) of the Open Source community do you foresee as being able to step up to the plate and address the "big picture"?
(I'll air my own views if these questions are chosen...)
NO!, the correct plural (even for "techies", sorry to burst your bubble - no dictionary I've ever seen draws a distinction by occupation) for "box" is quite clearly "boxes".
/doc/OxfordEnglishDictionary at your nearest library. (Natural languages have docs for a reason, too, you know...)
"Boxen" is never correct, although it is not incorrect (and pretty much irrelevant now) to refer to a plurality of DEC VAX computers as "Vaxen". Still, even in heavy-duty DEC shops, (and I've worked in several, one was 100% DEC when I arrived), "Vaxes" is the favored usage over "Vaxen", just because "Vaxen" sounds so stupid.
Direct flames to
Actually, current airliners are safety nightmares. And what passes for safety "precautions" are ludicrous. According to the link below, flaoting seat cushions have been used *once* and have not been proven to save lives.
The link celow has some good information, but is not academically rigorous (to say the least) in its presentation. (Honestly, this is why I'm posting this as AC...)
Also, it should not be visited by conspiracy buffs, because at times, the owners of this site drop into "they're out to get us all" mode.
Still there's some very interesting stuff here: www.aircrash.org
*** Previous comment:
OK, we don't have the option to slap a cd in the cdrom drive and let it install at once (afaik) -- but that's one less source of trojans / viri as far as i'm concerned.
***
OK, folks, THINK before you post! [grin]
Most modern distro CDs are bootable, so this does indeed work as it should. (I know for sure Caldera's will autorun the install program in two ways: boot and run Lizard if booted raw, or launch the Windows installer if just slapped into the drive with Windows running.)
As for trojans/viruses, if you've got those on a distro CD you do indeed have a big problem, but not booting from the CD isn't likely to change that much, now is it?
OK, folks, time to clear the air: ALL the Kansas law did was to leave the decision of what to teach to the local school districts. This is the type of local, distributed decision-making that the /. community normally favors.
r _1.asp and whether or not you agree with their perspective, one has to admit that World's jouralistic product is incredibly accurate and correct. When they are wrong, they PROMINENTLY post the corrections, something too rare even in our supposedly "open" circles...)
Check it out for yourself, the Kansas law didn't mandate the teching of creation only, or even creation also, but simply said that it wasn't something the state should decide at all. That's it.
(Source: http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/09-11-99/cove
OK, let's draw the important distinction here about what's digital and what's not:
Everyone is running around calling these things "digital" [VCRs|video recorders|somesuch], but although they *do* store digitally, their inputs and outputs are analog only. They still cannot take a direct digital MPEG stream (from your digital settop, digital satellite dish reciever, or anything else) and store that. What they do is take an *analog* signal (which may have been digital only inches ago), and run it through the MPEG veg-o-matic again to stuff that on a hard disk.
The reason they aren't truly digital is simple: The studios/networks will try very hard to never let this happen. This is the same reason that although IEEE 1394 should by all logic be the connection for video streams between tuners/settops and displays or storage devices such as these, it never will be, and may die on the vine as a result. They're not going to let *anyone* grab an unencrypted MPEG stream. Ever.
Even in the analog realm, the studio types are already worried: Boxes like this are currently under fire because they do not regenerate the Macrovision sync-hosing pulses when playing back content that was originally Macrovision encoded, meaning it's too easy to record the analog output of a Tivo on a regular VCR. (If you're looking for a good way to completely remove Macrovision pulses, this is it, for the time being...)
If Sony's involved here, it's more likely to be to protect its content "rights" than to promote the technology.
On the other hand, this idea makes too much sense to die - even if the studios succeed in killing off these devices (likely, I'd say), there isn't much short of legislation outlawing high-quality MPEG encoders and/or PC frame grabbers (and this *is* a possibility, given their clout) to stop people from rolling their own. (What we really need is a good PCI "digital settop card", but the FCC won't get off the dime and standardize on subscriber authentication, so dream on. Even so, it wouldn't be able to deal with encrypted streams, which will be just about everything very soon.)
I predict 1TB disks will be common in the next couple of years to give people someplace to put all their multimedia content. (How many of us already have big drives stuffed with MP3s? You'll have your camcorder content and video library on there next. And don't ask me how you recover from a hard disk crash of that magnitude! RAID/SAN solutions may be the cheapest backups in the long run.)
And if you thought the RIAA was fighting MP3, you ain't seen nothing yet!
Sorry, but this is SO wrong I feel it needs a reply. This is what really happened. I don't think anyone will substantively argue the facts below:
You obviously weren't using browsers a few years ago, or you'd know that originally, all browsers were free (NCSA Mosaic, Viola, Lynx, Tim Berners-Lee's orginal NeXT browser, etc.)
Then some of the leading Mosaic developers formed Netscape, and wrote the next-generation graphical browser everybody really wanted. Commercial browsers up to that point were generally repackaged Mosaic or worse, but sold because they had integrated TCP/IP stacks - important back in the Win 3.X days when PCs didn't have IP, and making the pieces work was a pain even if you knew what you were doing (sounds like Linux [grin]) It was free only for personal use - commercial use required paying a license fee, nominally $35/copy, IIRC. Netscape raised the bar and obsoleted all other browsers of the time.
Microsoft began to see Netscape as a threat and decided they needed a "modern" browser, too. MS contracted with Spyglass, which was the officialy blessed licensing arm for the original NCSA Mosaic source, to pay them a percentage of the revenue from every copy of IE. Then MS decided, right or wrong, to play hardball and shut down Netscape's revenue stream, so they gave away IE **even for commercial use**. Spyglass didn't make much.
Netscape soon bowed to MS' competitive pressure (it IS hard to compete with free) and began to give away thier browser, which at the time accounted for a fair-sized portion of their revenues. Had this not happened, AOL would likely not have been able to afford to buy Netscape a couple of years later.
Finally, as was pointed out above, it's only illegal to give away a product at a loss when you do so to either acquire or maintain a "monopoly" position. Microsoft may be a monopoly (the lawyers are still arguing), Sun almost certainly is not.
As Paul Harvey would say, "Now you know - the REST of the story."
This is a concept that some of us have been thinking about for some time - as networks get faster, there's a growing "latent" (pun intended) storage capacity in the bits that are in transit.
Do a little math: On a gigabit network with a quarter second latency (a reasonable assumption for a "nationwide" network), there is over 30 MB of storage in the link itself (one-way). At terabit and petabit speeds (and/or tremendous latencies), the buffer becomes quite sizable.
So far as I know, no one really makes direct use of the network as a storage buffer, but it could be done fairly easily, so long as you don't care a whole lot about getting your data back!
The closest thing to this in real use is the BFS (broadcast file system) used by cable headends to make files available to their digital settop boxes - they just dedicate a channel to continuously broadcasting the contents of the filesystem. Of course, three's a limit to how large such an FS can be as a practical matter, but settop boxes are small and stupid, so it works well for now. This is how things like the program guide and such are delivered in digital satellite TV systems, too.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems much of the debate about RRLFNs ultimately collapses to the age-old (in internet years) controversy over whether or not TCP keepalives are a good thing. (LFNs, pronounced "elephants" are Long Fat Networks - todays high latency networks - this wording is from the applicable RFCs, 1323 and its ilk. RRLFNs are Really, Really LFNs, something I just made up.)
I'm all for engineering notation here (scientific notation with the exponent forced to multiples of 3 - makes real world transformations much less error-prone, which, after all is why it was developed.)
The *correct* meaning of "Giga" is completely unambiguous: it's 1 x 10^9. Why is it that the traditional CS "computer twit" types insist on the sorts of ridiculous abbreviations and approximations that the rest of us know will sooner or later land them in trouble? 2^10 != 10^3, and it never has. This is just plain lazy usage - the terms "kilo", "mega", etc. should NEVER have been twisted in this way. Let's just toss base-2 nomenclature for good NOW while we can.
e.g.: Why is Y2K an abbreviation? Isn't that the tinking that got us into this mess in the first place? (I'm all for at least five digit year fields, or maybe ints, or maybe even long ints... [grin])
This article was quite enlightening. I have always argued that censorware did no good. Therefore the only way to protect children from the filth that these days runs unfettered through my personal mailbox and the web at large is simply to prohibit Internet access completely.
/. standards) porn photo as a top level MIME body part. What if the kids had been around? A SpamCop report got the guy's e-mail and web site accounts yanked and a $2000 ISP abuse charge on his Visa card - yes!)
/.!
/dev/null.
(It was once true that you had to go looking for porn and other offensive content to find it - that's no longer true. Now it arrives in neatly packaged daily doses of spam - I got one the other day with a gross (even by
I know this seems unthinkable, but, really, will education suffer in the least without the Internet? We managed to educate people 100 years ago far better than we educate people today, and we did it without any high technology. The web is easy, but very shallow. I really don't even think it's a very valid tool for research of the k-12 kind. Teach kids the importance of primary sources and how to use a library and they'll truly have learned something useful.
There are times I am truly thankful I send my children to a school that doesn't even have a computer lab, much less access to the Net. I've been in the IT business for a long time, and was one of the first computer students in public schools, and I can assure you that real literacy is far more important than "computer literacy" - something that is easily borne out in the most casual session of reading
Just say NO to Internet access in schools. There's really nothing to lose (except higher tax bills for a bunch of overpriced, obsolete computers), and our children to save.
Send flames to
Even though I'm a Sun bigot (and came by it honestly), this could well be the death knell for StarOffice, and if StarOffice falls, Linux chances become much slimmer.
Doesn't anyone remember that Sun already bought a world-class OO office suite about two years ago, and then proceeded to completely bury it? (They bought Lighthouse Design, which had some very nice office apps for NeXT.) In principle, it should not have been that difficult to port the Objective C code to Java, producing the first real Java office suite, but for whatever reasons, the opportunity was bobbled and all Sun has to show for the LD purchase is an OO modeling tool.
Lighthouse Design's excellent code is now but a footnote in history, and there's little reason to hope the same fate won't befall StarOffice if they can't find a way to remain independent.
I like Sun, but I do NOT trust them to follow through on this, or devote anywhere near the level of resources required to make StarOffice a real competitor. Never forget that Sun has lots of really bright people, but they are a poor software development house - their business model insists that business units be instantly profitable, leading to bone-headed business decisions in an attempt to generate unreasonable amounts of cash. Java is an abberation. Look at the fate of Sun's other software products (SunNet Manager, the NFS client, etc.) to see how software really fares at Sun. The company starved those products, and the same is likely to happen to StarOffice, which will require even more money to support.
On annother note, StarOffice is not written in Java, but there is a Java version (port) of it, which can be run from JavStations or other network computers. (Sun is finally realizing that a local disk is a really good thing, even if only for cache - networks will never be fast/good enough to make no local storage a good architectural choice, especially with the increasing importance of mobility.)
If I were at Microsoft, I would throw a party if Sun completes this purchase...
I sure wish they would chase that common file format initiative mentioned in another post, though - that's the way to really make a difference!
So far, this has brought up allusions to several sci-fi portrayals of these things:
1. Edison Carter's SatCam in Max Headroom (my all-time favorite sci-fi show, but a bit too close to reality for the network folks, I suppose...)
2. the Gargoyles from Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash (maybe I'll have to read that someday...)
3. The vid-capture things that were shown in the Star Trek movie where Admiral Kirk returns to the bridge of the Enterprise.
I'd like to add fourth, which certainly predates all three: the "newstapers" as described in Larry Niven's Future History Series (I don't recall which book, but possibly one or more of the Ringworld series.)
Are there any that predate Niven's work?
Here is a good link discussing the role of Christianity in the works of Tolkien and the other Inklings.
Just tought I'd inflame a few of the hate-mongering anti-Christian crowd by pointing out that Tolkien's The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy are (and were clearly intended to be) works of *Christian* literature. This is amply documented in Tolkien's contemporary writings, including his discussions and correspondence with the famous "Inklings" which included notables such as C.S. Lewis (a Christian who was formerly an atheist), and Charles Williams.
Of course, I suppose now we'll have a backlash against Tolkien, now that the cat's out of the bag!
Although these links will soon point to something different, I urge /. readers to listen to R.C. Sproul's excellent dicussion of this yesterday and today. I think even the most agnostic and atheistic among you will realize that Sproul has taken your position into account - he expresses very clearly why Chrisitanity is true - and why it must be true.
You claim to be open-minded: have you really tried to understand Christianity?