Compatibility has nothing to do with being open source or not.. Porting to and from an open source system is just as hard as porting to and from proprietary systems.
The reason your GNU plot works on non unix systems is either because the code was designed to be win32 and VMS and conditionally compiles in the platform specific segment, or you were using a compatibility environment. This is not a problem solved by open source. A closed source developer would do the same thing, but they would ship you the binary instead of making you compile it yourself. If you get a disk, from say blizzard, adobe, or any of the other cross platform proprietary vendors this is exactly what they do.
Open source is a good development model, but it is not a magical cure all for development woes.
>Big boon? Short-sighted users and developers may think so. It is difficult to get hardware documentation from >some major vendors (NVIDIA, for instance), and embracing binary drivers certainly does not help at all.
Is that there will never be documentation for every little hardware device on the market. *Not* *ever*. Seriously, if they had to document ever feature, some devices just wouldn't be made. Today people write drivers by walking down the hall to the guy who made the hardware and asking him how you do various things.
Obviously, I'm not talking about ATI cards here, but there are plenty smaller devices that can't have documentation released.
Also, as far as NVIDIA and ATI cards go, let me clue you in. No one using them cares whether the binaries are open source or not. If ATi is willing to release decent binary drivers, then that's what users will use. If ATI only puts out decent binary drivers for one platform, that sucks, but if there's a workaround to get those to work, there's no reason not to use it.
Seriously, why else has Japan dumped all this money into robotics and AI over the past 30 years? It's because everyone there grew up on Gigantor http://www.gigantor.org/ and Gundom, that's why. They are going to make giant fighting robots if it kills them.
Really though, this is all just trying to fill a void after the death of Godzilla in the late 60's. Substituting one giant stompy thing for another.
If you want to learn more about the life and times of gozilla and natures other lovable giant scamps, then I suggest you check out "Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah - Gaint Monster All Out Attack an A&E biography."
know if non admin users capabilities in Vista have been improved? As many of us are aware, limited users are pretty much broken in XP and server 2003 for development purposes. Debugging of ASP.NET and installing of numerous third party applications just won't work without admin access. This is partially the fault of third party developers, who often force installation in the Program Files directory, or who actually check to see if the user is admin before allowing installation, even though this is a totally artificial constraint.
Realistically, many users and developers especially have specialized tools that they must install, from a perl binary to something as innocuous as an instant messaging client. On linux, this is easy since configure scripts almost always allow install directories to be specified, and processes that don't need root access never request it. On windows, many programs assume admin during install, even though they don't need it, and balk if they user tries to install without it. At my school, we get around this by giving everyone admin, but having all the windows dev machines copy their image from a hidden partition on boot.
Developers might get away with this non admin boxes, but it certainly wouldn't fly for test. Testers aren't going to want to call support every time they want to test against a different version of the nvidia drivers...
if it has happened before. There have been numerous scripting exploits in word...
Also, predicting a security vulnerability in ANY piece of software is like predicting rain. It is *going* to happen, it is not impressive at all, and proves nothing when it happens.
It would in fact probably stop the flow of viruses if most computers all ran different operating systems (if there was no 90% majority of any system), software etc. I think this is fairly obvious.
One thing to consider though is that it would also have additional costs associated training for most companies. Also, in terms of operating systems, no majority platform makes it more difficult for developers to make a profit since everyone is feeding off a tiny segment off the market.
The unices have survived by adopting source level compatibility to broaden their effective market share, and above all by specializing. Apple has also survived by pandering to specific markets (education, graphics artists, home users) at the expense of other markets (business). The problem with having no majority operating system is that you can no longer build a general purpose computer that does everything. Instead one must dual boot, which is what linux users have done for a long time and what mac users are doing now that they can. Now, multi booting isn't the worst thing in the world, but it is an inconvenience.
The last and most problematic issue of having no majority operating systems is drivers. One might think that hardware manufacturers would be most likely to be forced to write their drivers for multiple systems, instead of just windows as they do now, but this is not realistic. A no majority operating system is going to be an environment with lots of highly specialized operating systems. Makers of uncommon hardware are still going to only support one platform, the one on which their hardware is used. If you need to use two specialized gadgets, you are probably going to need to set up two different computers, or dual boot.
Possibly multiple operating systems could adopt the same driver model, but I have to ask why that isn't happening right now when it is already advantageous for linux and others. Right now the only operating capable of using foreign drivers that I know about are freedos and reactos (using DOS and windows NT drivers respectively of course). Frankly, it would be a big boon for the desktop market and others if linux or freebsd could use stock windows drivers... but I suspect there are some technical problems with this. Linux developers have always quoted as a reason for not maintaining binary compatibility with drivers that they didn't want to impose arbitrary restrictions in the kernel. My suspicion is that compatibility with windows drivers, if technically feasible at all, would have performance issues for linux. Would someone more familiar with the kernel and the windows driver model care to comment?
Ticket prices will go up initially... but I suspect that in the long run this will give a shot in the arm to theaters, which have been doing poorly and ending up doing a lot of annoying advertising. If this works out well for them, they will end up building more theaters and the initially high prices may drop...
What does worry me is that they will try to game the system. With anonymous bidding run by ticketmaster it would be pretty easy for ticketmaster to bid on its own tickets to boost the price, then if they accidentally win just award the ticket to whatever real bidder bid the highest.
If they did that, would it actually be illegal? Otherwise, it seems like something they almost should do to boost profits. They are beholden to their shareholders after all.
Realistically, if few players are going to support this interface anytime soon, agreement or no agreement, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to release videos that downgrade video that doesn't go over the interface.
My guess is that people buying videos won't know anything about he technologies involved just like now, but they *will* notice if some of their DVDs look like crap. A studio that puts out crappy looking videos is going to hurt their bottom line. People will figure, hey, why not just get the DVD cheaper instead of the HDDVD since it doesn't seem to be much better quality?
All this noise that the studios make about implementing these technologies with end to end encryption is pretty rediculous. The market at large is not concerned one way or the other with their anti piracy initiatives, but they do notice when the their equipment isn't compatible. There's already so little incentive to buy some new expensive DVD player that only makes a difference on HDTVs that no one has anyway that the industry fiddling with the standard at the last minute like this might kill HDDVD and HDTV altogether.
The public at large could easily forget about upgrading to the next generation. The current tv format has lasted a long time and could last much longer. That really doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me... I'm really pretty iffy on how dropping a couple of grand on the new equipment would improve my life in any measurable way.
>>But free software is a license to freedom No... That's just nonsense. You are vastly oversimplifying the issue.
It is a license that gives you rights to modify and redistribute the source code for software. That source code is someone else's property even under an open source license, you have just been granted specific rights to it via the license. It is great if a developer chooses to give you that right, but he doesn't have to if he doesn't want to. It isn't your right to use someone else's property until you are granted that right.
If you have no right to something, it isn't a restriction of your freedom to not let you act as if you do. You don't have a right to my physical property, and I'd doubt you'd argue that is a restriction of your freedom.
Most people call free software open source because that's what it really is. Freedom isn't about giving you the rights to other people's property, but about giving you the rights to your own property. You have freedom when you have all your natural rights, and your property is one of them.
While there are many benefits to open source software, you should be careful not to be brainwashed by a few catch phrases.
A lot of people have dismissed the Wii price point announcement, saying that console price isn't important when you consider all the games that people purchase in the long run.
This ignores the purchasing patterns that people have. Even if the overall price (with games) of the Wii was *more* expensive then the competition, the lower initial console price would still cause purchases in their favor.
This happens for the same reason that people buy things on credit cards and then pay them off over time. If people don't need to pay for something immediately, then they don't think about it.
Furthermore, there's the issue of Christmas, birthdays etc for children. A lot of parents raising children are on a pretty tight budget, and you can be sure they will balk at a console that costs 50 to 100 dollars more than the competition, let alone a console like the PS3 that's going to cost as much as 3 times the competition. Christmas is going to be huge for nintendo at their price point.
I remember begging my parents for an original NES then on christmas opening up a game that consisted of a video cassette of a race, and a little toy car that attached to the front of the tv and moved horizontally from a little electric motor.
Right now, a lot of parents are in those shoes. It may be true that the economy overall has picked up, but wages definitely have *not* and the wall mart shoppers of america are in even worse straights then they generally are.
Most people in the tech sector are pretty well off, and even if they aren't tend to be hard core gamers and see their game expense as a non negotiable expenditure in their budget. In the past game companies pandered to them exclusively because they were willing to burn a lot of money, and not a lot of people outside that group played video games at all. What they need to realize is that increasingly they are not the only gamers in the market. Nintendo has picked up on this, and effectively has been making their prices cheaper and cheaper over the years by keeping them the same and let inflation make that same price less. Sony and microsoft on the other hand seem to be competing entirely for early adopters with cash to burn, which is a lucrative but small demographic.
>What next, are they going to refuse to include the linux *kernel* because it doesn't use the latest >version of the GNU license? >>Why would they do that. The kernel is free software whereas Java never has been anything like free >>software. It's called an analogy. It isn't the *same* situation, but a *similar* situation meant to highlight certain attributes of this situation.
Specifically, in both the concrete of red hat refusing to include sun java, and the hypothetical situation of red hat refusing to include the linux kernel, red hat is excluding a critical piece of software from their distro and including a shoddy substitute in order to strongarm a developer into releasing software under a license more to their liking.
>>If I was a shareholder, I would punish them severely for this nonsense, as it doesn't serve any kind >>of business end that I can see, and is more reminiscent of the behavior of the FSF than a for profit >>company. Someone needs to remind them that they are obligated to pursue the ends of their users >>and their shareholders before anything else. >Of course, and by the same logic, they really should be packaging Visual Basic, instead of Java in the >first place.
That is a total misrepresentation of what I just said.
No, by that logic, they would not package Visual Basic with their linux distro because Microsoft Visual Basic is a windows application that does not run on linux. Furthermore, there isn't much call from customers for any kind of basic on linux.
By my logic, if their customers actually had a demand for visual basic, and it could run on linux, then yes they would be obligated to include it in their distro. Obviously there are other problems with that since VS costs money, but that is beside the point since we are actually talking about java which is free of charge.
Do you have some particular hatred of Microsoft products and loath the idea they might be included in your distro? Many do. However, if that is the case, consider that your argument is in bad faith on another level. It is essentially an argument where you compare what your opponent's position to some position that Hitler held since you know that people generally think that Hitler is a bad guy, and that the mere association with your opponent will make people more likely to disagree with him.
For example: Guy #1: Milk is good for you. It strengthens your bones. Guy #2: You know who else liked milk? Hitler! He fed gallons of milk to his super soldiers, and that got super strong bones and used them to beat up jews.
Now, I think it is quite clear here that Guy #2 is just being a jackass and not because he made up the thing about milk. Even if the thing about milk was true, he'd still be making a bad faith argument because it in no way refutes that milk is good for you, or that it strengthens your bones.
When you come up with an example to disprove something, please make sure it is a valid counter model and not just a veiled ad hominem. Arguments should not make people *want* to agree or disagree with you, but should rather make them *compelled* to agree or disagree with you by force of logic and empirical evidence.
>So fucking what? MS is giving away MS Windows Media Encoder for free - does it make it anyway more >free? Free as in beer contrasted to free speech - simple as that.
We all know the difference between free as in beer software and free as in speech software. It is fairly obnoxious to hear it pointed out it every conversation as if it were something quite novel.
Complaining too much to someone who has been generous to you, is called ingratitude. If you actually use this "MS video encoder," you should in fact feel grateful that it was given to you free of charge (arguably it was not given to you free of charge since you paid for the operating system it runs on, but I digress).
Demanding that you be given even more rights to something that you gave nothing in return for is just plain rude.
>>> Red Hat and others should consider themselves lucky that it gets to >>> sell software that it didn't even write in the first place.
>Maybe, just, please, consider that they (RH) don't sell software?:) They sell service. Welcome to 21st >century.
Yes, the ability to sell services is an amazing innovation of our century. How barbaric it must have been to live in the era when men could also sell goods.
Well, I'm saying the "service" the provide to their customers could use some improvement if they expect customers to pay for it. Now, there's no reason anyone has to buy their service, but if people don't buy their service, red hat's shareholders will be unhappy. If red hats shareholders are unhappy, the people running red hat have done something very wrong, as they work for their shareholders.
What next, are they going to refuse to include the linux *kernel* because it doesn't use the latest version of the GNU license? Maybe they will throw in some crappy hurd kernel, then make their users go compile the linux kernel themselves if they want that... Then they can complain about how much linus is hurting open source software by not using the license they want.
Where do they get off demanding that sun or any company release its software under any particular license? Sun is *already* giving away their software for free. Red Hat and others should consider themselves lucky that it gets to sell software that it didn't even write in the first place. The people that are acting to *prevent* anyone from getting access to java are the linux distro makers who refuse to put java in.
This is nothing but an inconvenience for users. Who seriously does not go ahead and install sun java anyway? Who is not inconvenienced by the fact that most distros refuse to integrate it into their package management scheme?
There's literally no reason that red hat, ubuntu and others couldn't package sun java. They only do it out of a desire to strongarm sun into using a different license which will not provide any benefit to their user base. If I was a shareholder, I would punish them severely for this nonsense, as it doesn't serve any kind of business end that I can see, and is more reminiscent of the behavior of the FSF than a for profit company. Someone needs to remind them that they are obligated to pursue the ends of their users and their shareholders before anything else.
Your specific arguments asking why ants hadn't developed intelligence, speech, etc, is a rediculous. You might as well ask why humans haven't evolved blowholes and the ability to hold our breaths for hours. Ants are already perfectly well adapted to their environment, and in most respects have been vastly more successful than humans. Natural language would add nothing to a species that already communicates so effectively.
>Something is very unique about humans and the evolution model >does not seem to explain us very well.
Really, your arguments could be simplified without losing anything substantive to saying that you object that humans could have come about by the same means that other animals, which seem to lack intelligence, language, art, and other things we tend to associate with human *dignity*.
You say that evolution doesn't seem to provide a model for the development of say art. This isn't true. What is true is that art isn't a direct adaptation to the external environment. To say that this makes art supernatural or magical, means not that you don't understand evolution, but that you don't understand art.
Not everything we do is to promote our own survival (some people believe this, but they are silly). Evolution provided us with a framework, a mind, a body, but it does not set our goals. You are right to say that we have goals that other animals do not. Humans are not particularly rational agents compared to other animals in the sense that we do not as often pick the correct action to achieve our goals. However, we have more sophisticated goals.
Ants are essentially reflexive agents, and can determine the correct action from their inputs (they don't need to check memory, or apply any learned behavior whatsoever). This doesn't work for all animals though. Mammals generally must be capable of some amount of learning. Animals that must learn their behavior generally cannot respond in a rational manner to situations which have no annalogue in their personal memory. Animals with genetically ingrained reflexes essentially have the experiences of the entire species at their disposal (figuratively, not literally. they of course can't remember specific events in their species past, but their reflexes are shapped to be a proper response to them).
Why have learned behavior at all then, when the learning experience is likely as not to kill you? The answer is that much behavior is too sophisticated to be encoded in any other way. Behavior in response to "I am hungry" is pretty simple, but rational behavior in response to "my herd is being stalked by a predator" cannot really be encoded in reflex. If that behavior were encoded purely in reflexive actions, a rational predator could predict reflexive actions, and manipulate the prey into a situation where the reflexive actions would no longer be rational behavior.
In fact, there are some reasons to think that predator prey relationships are the driving factors in the evolution of human intelligence. If you think about it, a competitive multi agent game is the sort where a more and more sophisticated intelligence pays off. There's some dispute as to whether humans where on the predator or prey end of things when we were developing our intelligence, but the results seem to be the same.
Anyway, once you have something like powerful general intelligence and sympathy (the basic faculty to understand and predict the motives and actions of other agents), it sure seems like general questions about art go away. Art may very well be of no particular benefit to our survival, but merely a side effect of our intelligence, which certainly is necessary to our survival in a competitive environment.
The same could be said of human dignity in general. The degree that we are "put above" other animals. We are obviously not superior to other animals in our ability to be happy or content, certainly animals can be and often do have better lots in life then humans in terms of physical pleasure, contentment, and most of the other
is that they are in the same position microsoft was in with the xbox. They are late to the market, with a console that is reputed to be only moderately better than the competition if that.
I think sony is in a bad spot, and will probably lose out on the first generation games. However, before you say the ps3 is dead, consider that they have only the disadvantages that the xbox had (high price, late to market) and several advantages doesn't.
For one, they have backwards compatibility with both ps2 and ps1 games to offer. Remember that the ps2 was successful initially primarily because of ps1 compatibility.
Second, even after all of the money microsoft has spent buying out studios to get xbox exclusives, the ps3 will still probably have more exclusives in terms of japanese video games. They will probably win the japanese market by default, and frankly that's a pretty big chunk of the market to get by default. Also, last time I checked there were plenty of americans who played japanese rpgs.
Third, what's almost certainly boosting their price the most is the blu-ray disk. This is also probably the most likely component to become dirt cheap in a couple of years if the format is successful. Now, that's a big IF, but if it does happen, they might very well be a position to undercut the xbox360 in terms of price like they did in the last generation, or at least bring them into the same price range.
Also, the cell processor was originally hyped as something that sony was going to put in all of their electronics. Does anyone know if they are coming out with anything else with the same processor like they promised? If they do, the increased volume would also potentially help them reduce long run prices.
I believe that multicast support is turned off on most routers... and that you'd need end to end multicast for it to work any more efficiently than the current system.
Also, multicast would only really help on the content provider end of things... which might actually hurt the isps, since it would allow broadcasting to however many users on your dsl connection.
Is there anyone more familiar with multicasting that can comment more intelligently? This seems like an interesting question to me, but I fear I don't have all the facts.
Well, first off, you have to consider that we have other objectives in mind than just employing a lot of people and giving them good health benefits... Those things are both important, especially health benefits since for some dumbass reason we still haven't adopted socialized health care, but as far as our national and personal objectives go those aren't in the center.
One thing that small businesses can do that large ones cannot is innovate. Now, you may think to yourself that most of the new innovative technologies that come out you ultimately buy from a large company that has the resources to mass produce them. That's absolutely true! However, those large companies often as not get their technology from smaller companies, either from buying the technology directly, or as is more common in software where development teams are important just buying out the smaller company all together.
Microsoft and Apple are good examples. A huge portion of their respective product lines were purchased from smaller companies, everthing from itunes to virtual pc. OSX itself comes from the purchase of NeXT.
Smaller companies can take risks and if they fail, which they usually do, they won't take down a huge corporation and cause thousands of jobs to be lost.
Overall I'd say, to the extent that we think "as a society," which we honestly just don't do that often, we value the economic power that being an innovator lends us. As individuals, I'd say that many people want the freedom to take risks. Playing it safe in a big company guarantees you won't lose your job... but it also pretty much guarantees you won't get rich, and it certainly hampers your ability to try new things. If I have to choose between being a well paid middle manager at a huge company who has to do everything by the book, or the head of a small company where I'm making much less money and have no health care where I get to do pretty much whatever I want, I would find option 2 pretty tempting.
until fusion power can be put into production? I know a lot of advances have been made in the last few years, small scale fusion using pyroelectric crystals and such, but really how far are we from the goal? Can anyone in the know comment?
I know its pretty unreasonable to ask "when is technology x coming out," but a rough order of magnitude (are we talking 10 years? 100?) has got to be doable.
Also, if we do get large scale fusion, is it really going to be cleaner and safer than modern fission plants?
>Many of you may scoff at Michael Crichton (or worse, judge him based on the horrible movies that his >books become) but you cannot deny that the man takes the time to do real, intensive research when he >writes about topic X. His are just about the only works of fiction that have bibliographies longer than >many works of fact
As someone who *has* read many of his books, I can say that although he may do research to get his ideas, the ideas he expresses in his books are mostly psuedoscience. He misrepresents issues to make for a compelling story, and sometimes gets things plain wrong, and I don't fault him for it. He is a science fiction writer, not a science writer.
To the extent that he helps educate about important issues, or emerging technologies, it is because he draws attention to them, and gets them mentioned in the national media. However, you shouldn't take State of Fear as educating you about the global warming issue any more than you should take Jurassic Park as educating you about the ethics of cloning.
You should consider that his book needed a villain, and putting environmentalists in that spot was a nice twist on the usual big oil companies as bad guys theme.
Also, you may enjoy Michael Crichton books, and south park, but that doesn't mean you should abdicate critical thought to them. South park brings up important social issues in their show and a lot of the time I agree with their take on things... but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go around saying that global warming doesn't exist just because they said so. There are better resources online and off that you should actually be using to look into this...
People already must install numerous pieces of proprietary software on their linux systems. Who uses *desktop* linux without any proprietary drivers or software? Even ignoring drivers, what about Java? None of the Java clones are nearly as good as Sun Java... yet linux distros fail to include Sun Java, forcing nearly everyone using java for any serious purpose to replace it immediately at some unnecessary inconvenience.
By taking the hardline "only OSS" stance at the distro level, we're just pushing installing the non OSS software onto the users. It's just an annoyance that accomplishes nothing.
As far as Linux being locked into unchangeable kernel schemes... maintaining binary compatibility for drivers is something they should be doing anyway. It is something that every other kernel I know of does, and it is just plain annoying that I can't swap out the drivers from one linux install to another because of driver breaks between kernel versions. At the very least, driver compatibility should be guaranteed between minor version numbers.
seriously. Saying "won't people please write a microkernel, they are so awesome" isn't particularly compelling.
The fact is, we have kernels right now that do what users want them to do. The things that Tannenbaum talks about are nice, but even *ignoring* the performance issue, it isn't worth throwing out the linux, osx, or windows kernel to get them.
The fact is, the place where hardware with crappy drivers exists is in the places where we care the least, the desktop market. Stability was a big issue for me when my desktop crashed more than once a day, under os9/windows 9x, but now that I'm seeing a genuine kernel panic maybe once a year, I could care less. An improvement on that would be totally lost on me.
Now, I suppose you could write a kernel specifically for systems that actually need incredibly long uptime, but what are those systems? Servers? Well, people using those systems typically pick their hardware pretty carefully, either that or they come up with fault tolerant designs like google.
A more compelling promise, is that moving more stuff out of kernel mode will increase security.. Even then, we're talking about targeting a much smaller demographic than "everyone that uses a computer." Probably the best people to write such a kernel, would be IBM, or Sun... but last I heard they had already invested heavily in other operating systems.
So, in summary, it sounds like nice technology, but the market *really doesn't want it right now*. Probably the idea, if it is at all still relevant, will be incorporated as a matter of course into the next series of operating systems that come out... 10 or 20 years from now. It would be nice if Tannenbaum was still around to see that, but the guy can't force the market forward by himself.
an online poll? Seriously, where'd they get that information. Many americans don't even have consistent internet access. Think people living in rural areas... Unless this was done by random calling over a geographically diverse area, I would not consider it representative of all americans.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows Vista "Not so bad"
Windows Vista "Almost as good as XP"
Windows Vista "Several new themes"
I think microsoft has a winner here
Compatibility has nothing to do with being open source or not.. Porting to and from an open source system is just as hard as porting to and from proprietary systems.
The reason your GNU plot works on non unix systems is either because the code was designed to be win32 and VMS and conditionally compiles in the platform specific segment, or you were using a compatibility environment. This is not a problem solved by open source. A closed source developer would do the same thing, but they would ship you the binary instead of making you compile it yourself. If you get a disk, from say blizzard, adobe, or any of the other cross platform proprietary vendors this is exactly what they do.
Open source is a good development model, but it is not a magical cure all for development woes.
In any case, none of his helps for drivers.
>Big boon? Short-sighted users and developers may think so. It is difficult to get hardware documentation from
>some major vendors (NVIDIA, for instance), and embracing binary drivers certainly does not help at all.
Is that there will never be documentation for every little hardware device on the market. *Not* *ever*. Seriously, if they had to document ever feature, some devices just wouldn't be made. Today people write drivers by walking down the hall to the guy who made the hardware and asking him how you do various things.
Obviously, I'm not talking about ATI cards here, but there are plenty smaller devices that can't have documentation released.
Also, as far as NVIDIA and ATI cards go, let me clue you in. No one using them cares whether the binaries are open source or not. If ATi is willing to release decent binary drivers, then that's what users will use. If ATI only puts out decent binary drivers for one platform, that sucks, but if there's a workaround to get those to work, there's no reason not to use it.
GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS
Seriously, why else has Japan dumped all this money into robotics and AI over the past 30 years? It's because everyone there grew up on Gigantor http://www.gigantor.org/ and Gundom, that's why. They are going to make giant fighting robots if it kills them.
Really though, this is all just trying to fill a void after the death of Godzilla in the late 60's. Substituting one giant stompy thing for another.
If you want to learn more about the life and times of gozilla and natures other lovable giant scamps, then I suggest you check out "Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah - Gaint Monster All Out Attack an A&E biography."
know if non admin users capabilities in Vista have been improved? As many of us are aware, limited users are pretty much broken in XP and server 2003 for development purposes. Debugging of ASP .NET and installing of numerous third party applications just won't work without admin access. This is partially the fault of third party developers, who often force installation in the Program Files directory, or who actually check to see if the user is admin before allowing installation, even though this is a totally artificial constraint.
Realistically, many users and developers especially have specialized tools that they must install, from a perl binary to something as innocuous as an instant messaging client. On linux, this is easy since configure scripts almost always allow install directories to be specified, and processes that don't need root access never request it. On windows, many programs assume admin during install, even though they don't need it, and balk if they user tries to install without it. At my school, we get around this by giving everyone admin, but having all the windows dev machines copy their image from a hidden partition on boot.
Developers might get away with this non admin boxes, but it certainly wouldn't fly for test. Testers aren't going to want to call support every time they want to test against a different version of the nvidia drivers...
never mind
if it has happened before. There have been numerous scripting exploits in word...
Also, predicting a security vulnerability in ANY piece of software is like predicting rain. It is *going* to happen, it is not impressive at all, and proves nothing when it happens.
It would in fact probably stop the flow of viruses if most computers all ran different operating systems (if there was no 90% majority of any system), software etc. I think this is fairly obvious.
One thing to consider though is that it would also have additional costs associated training for most companies. Also, in terms of operating systems, no majority platform makes it more difficult for developers to make a profit since everyone is feeding off a tiny segment off the market.
The unices have survived by adopting source level compatibility to broaden their effective market share, and above all by specializing. Apple has also survived by pandering to specific markets (education, graphics artists, home users) at the expense of other markets (business). The problem with having no majority operating system is that you can no longer build a general purpose computer that does everything. Instead one must dual boot, which is what linux users have done for a long time and what mac users are doing now that they can. Now, multi booting isn't the worst thing in the world, but it is an inconvenience.
The last and most problematic issue of having no majority operating systems is drivers. One might think that hardware manufacturers would be most likely to be forced to write their drivers for multiple systems, instead of just windows as they do now, but this is not realistic. A no majority operating system is going to be an environment with lots of highly specialized operating systems. Makers of uncommon hardware are still going to only support one platform, the one on which their hardware is used. If you need to use two specialized gadgets, you are probably going to need to set up two different computers, or dual boot.
Possibly multiple operating systems could adopt the same driver model, but I have to ask why that isn't happening right now when it is already advantageous for linux and others. Right now the only operating capable of using foreign drivers that I know about are freedos and reactos (using DOS and windows NT drivers respectively of course). Frankly, it would be a big boon for the desktop market and others if linux or freebsd could use stock windows drivers... but I suspect there are some technical problems with this. Linux developers have always quoted as a reason for not maintaining binary compatibility with drivers that they didn't want to impose arbitrary restrictions in the kernel. My suspicion is that compatibility with windows drivers, if technically feasible at all, would have performance issues for linux. Would someone more familiar with the kernel and the windows driver model care to comment?
Ticket prices will go up initially... but I suspect that in the long run this will give a shot in the arm to theaters, which have been doing poorly and ending up doing a lot of annoying advertising. If this works out well for them, they will end up building more theaters and the initially high prices may drop...
What does worry me is that they will try to game the system. With anonymous bidding run by ticketmaster it would be pretty easy for ticketmaster to bid on its own tickets to boost the price, then if they accidentally win just award the ticket to whatever real bidder bid the highest.
If they did that, would it actually be illegal? Otherwise, it seems like something they almost should do to boost profits. They are beholden to their shareholders after all.
Realistically, if few players are going to support this interface anytime soon, agreement or no agreement, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot to release videos that downgrade video that doesn't go over the interface.
My guess is that people buying videos won't know anything about he technologies involved just like now, but they *will* notice if some of their DVDs look like crap. A studio that puts out crappy looking videos is going to hurt their bottom line. People will figure, hey, why not just get the DVD cheaper instead of the HDDVD since it doesn't seem to be much better quality?
All this noise that the studios make about implementing these technologies with end to end encryption is pretty rediculous. The market at large is not concerned one way or the other with their anti piracy initiatives, but they do notice when the their equipment isn't compatible. There's already so little incentive to buy some new expensive DVD player that only makes a difference on HDTVs that no one has anyway that the industry fiddling with the standard at the last minute like this might kill HDDVD and HDTV altogether.
The public at large could easily forget about upgrading to the next generation. The current tv format has lasted a long time and could last much longer. That really doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world to me... I'm really pretty iffy on how dropping a couple of grand on the new equipment would improve my life in any measurable way.
>>But free software is a license to freedom
No... That's just nonsense. You are vastly oversimplifying the issue.
It is a license that gives you rights to modify and redistribute the source code for software. That source code is someone else's property even under an open source license, you have just been granted specific rights to it via the license. It is great if a developer chooses to give you that right, but he doesn't have to if he doesn't want to. It isn't your right to use someone else's property until you are granted that right.
If you have no right to something, it isn't a restriction of your freedom to not let you act as if you do. You don't have a right to my physical property, and I'd doubt you'd argue that is a restriction of your freedom.
Most people call free software open source because that's what it really is. Freedom isn't about giving you the rights to other people's property, but about giving you the rights to your own property. You have freedom when you have all your natural rights, and your property is one of them.
While there are many benefits to open source software, you should be careful not to be brainwashed by a few catch phrases.
A lot of people have dismissed the Wii price point announcement, saying that console price isn't important when you consider all the games that people purchase in the long run.
This ignores the purchasing patterns that people have. Even if the overall price (with games) of the Wii was *more* expensive then the competition, the lower initial console price would still cause purchases in their favor.
This happens for the same reason that people buy things on credit cards and then pay them off over time. If people don't need to pay for something immediately, then they don't think about it.
Furthermore, there's the issue of Christmas, birthdays etc for children. A lot of parents raising children are on a pretty tight budget, and you can be sure they will balk at a console that costs 50 to 100 dollars more than the competition, let alone a console like the PS3 that's going to cost as much as 3 times the competition. Christmas is going to be huge for nintendo at their price point.
I remember begging my parents for an original NES then on christmas opening up a game that consisted of a video cassette of a race, and a little toy car that attached to the front of the tv and moved horizontally from a little electric motor.
Right now, a lot of parents are in those shoes. It may be true that the economy overall has picked up, but wages definitely have *not* and the wall mart shoppers of america are in even worse straights then they generally are.
Most people in the tech sector are pretty well off, and even if they aren't tend to be hard core gamers and see their game expense as a non negotiable expenditure in their budget. In the past game companies pandered to them exclusively because they were willing to burn a lot of money, and not a lot of people outside that group played video games at all. What they need to realize is that increasingly they are not the only gamers in the market. Nintendo has picked up on this, and effectively has been making their prices cheaper and cheaper over the years by keeping them the same and let inflation make that same price less. Sony and microsoft on the other hand seem to be competing entirely for early adopters with cash to burn, which is a lucrative but small demographic.
>What next, are they going to refuse to include the linux *kernel* because it doesn't use the latest
>version of the GNU license?
>>Why would they do that. The kernel is free software whereas Java never has been anything like free
>>software.
It's called an analogy. It isn't the *same* situation, but a *similar* situation meant to highlight certain attributes of this situation.
Specifically, in both the concrete of red hat refusing to include sun java, and the hypothetical situation of red hat refusing to include the linux kernel, red hat is excluding a critical piece of software from their distro and including a shoddy substitute in order to strongarm a developer into releasing software under a license more to their liking.
>>If I was a shareholder, I would punish them severely for this nonsense, as it doesn't serve any kind >>of business end that I can see, and is more reminiscent of the behavior of the FSF than a for profit >>company. Someone needs to remind them that they are obligated to pursue the ends of their users >>and their shareholders before anything else.
>Of course, and by the same logic, they really should be packaging Visual Basic, instead of Java in the
>first place.
That is a total misrepresentation of what I just said.
No, by that logic, they would not package Visual Basic with their linux distro because Microsoft Visual Basic is a windows application that does not run on linux. Furthermore, there isn't much call from customers for any kind of basic on linux.
By my logic, if their customers actually had a demand for visual basic, and it could run on linux, then yes they would be obligated to include it in their distro. Obviously there are other problems with that since VS costs money, but that is beside the point since we are actually talking about java which is free of charge.
Do you have some particular hatred of Microsoft products and loath the idea they might be included in your distro? Many do. However, if that is the case, consider that your argument is in bad faith on another level. It is essentially an argument where you compare what your opponent's position to some position that Hitler held since you know that people generally think that Hitler is a bad guy, and that the mere association with your opponent will make people more likely to disagree with him.
For example:
Guy #1: Milk is good for you. It strengthens your bones.
Guy #2: You know who else liked milk? Hitler! He fed gallons of milk to his super soldiers, and that got super strong bones and used them to beat up jews.
Now, I think it is quite clear here that Guy #2 is just being a jackass and not because he made up the thing about milk. Even if the thing about milk was true, he'd still be making a bad faith argument because it in no way refutes that milk is good for you, or that it strengthens your bones.
When you come up with an example to disprove something, please make sure it is a valid counter model and not just a veiled ad hominem. Arguments should not make people *want* to agree or disagree with you, but should rather make them *compelled* to agree or disagree with you by force of logic and empirical evidence.
>So fucking what? MS is giving away MS Windows Media Encoder for free - does it make it anyway more >free? Free as in beer contrasted to free speech - simple as that.
:) They sell service. Welcome to 21st
We all know the difference between free as in beer software and free as in speech software. It is fairly obnoxious to hear it pointed out it every conversation as if it were something quite novel.
Complaining too much to someone who has been generous to you, is called ingratitude. If you actually use this "MS video encoder," you should in fact feel grateful that it was given to you free of charge (arguably it was not given to you free of charge since you paid for the operating system it runs on, but I digress).
Demanding that you be given even more rights to something that you gave nothing in return for is just plain rude.
>>> Red Hat and others should consider themselves lucky that it gets to
>>> sell software that it didn't even write in the first place.
>Maybe, just, please, consider that they (RH) don't sell software?
>century.
Yes, the ability to sell services is an amazing innovation of our century. How barbaric it must have been to live in the era when men could also sell goods.
Well, I'm saying the "service" the provide to their customers could use some improvement if they expect customers to pay for it. Now, there's no reason anyone has to buy their service, but if people don't buy their service, red hat's shareholders will be unhappy. If red hats shareholders are unhappy, the people running red hat have done something very wrong, as they work for their shareholders.
What next, are they going to refuse to include the linux *kernel* because it doesn't use the latest version of the GNU license? Maybe they will throw in some crappy hurd kernel, then make their users go compile the linux kernel themselves if they want that... Then they can complain about how much linus is hurting open source software by not using the license they want.
Where do they get off demanding that sun or any company release its software under any particular license? Sun is *already* giving away their software for free. Red Hat and others should consider themselves lucky that it gets to sell software that it didn't even write in the first place. The people that are acting to *prevent* anyone from getting access to java are the linux distro makers who refuse to put java in.
This is nothing but an inconvenience for users. Who seriously does not go ahead and install sun java anyway? Who is not inconvenienced by the fact that most distros refuse to integrate it into their package management scheme?
There's literally no reason that red hat, ubuntu and others couldn't package sun java. They only do it out of a desire to strongarm sun into using a different license which will not provide any benefit to their user base. If I was a shareholder, I would punish them severely for this nonsense, as it doesn't serve any kind of business end that I can see, and is more reminiscent of the behavior of the FSF than a for profit company. Someone needs to remind them that they are obligated to pursue the ends of their users and their shareholders before anything else.
Your specific arguments asking why ants hadn't developed intelligence, speech, etc, is a rediculous. You might as well ask why humans haven't evolved blowholes and the ability to hold our breaths for hours. Ants are already perfectly well adapted to their environment, and in most respects have been vastly more successful than humans. Natural language would add nothing to a species that already communicates so effectively.
>Something is very unique about humans and the evolution model
>does not seem to explain us very well.
Really, your arguments could be simplified without losing anything substantive to saying that you object that humans could have come about by the same means that other animals, which seem to lack intelligence, language, art, and other things we tend to associate with human *dignity*.
You say that evolution doesn't seem to provide a model for the development of say art. This isn't true. What is true is that art isn't a direct adaptation to the external environment. To say that this makes art supernatural or magical, means not that you don't understand evolution, but that you don't understand art.
Not everything we do is to promote our own survival (some people believe this, but they are silly). Evolution provided us with a framework, a mind, a body, but it does not set our goals. You are right to say that we have goals that other animals do not. Humans are not particularly rational agents compared to other animals in the sense that we do not as often pick the correct action to achieve our goals. However, we have more sophisticated goals.
Ants are essentially reflexive agents, and can determine the correct action from their inputs (they don't need to check memory, or apply any learned behavior whatsoever). This doesn't work for all animals though. Mammals generally must be capable of some amount of learning. Animals that must learn their behavior generally cannot respond in a rational manner to situations which have no annalogue in their personal memory. Animals with genetically ingrained reflexes essentially have the experiences of the entire species at their disposal (figuratively, not literally. they of course can't remember specific events in their species past, but their reflexes are shapped to be a proper response to them).
Why have learned behavior at all then, when the learning experience is likely as not to kill you? The answer is that much behavior is too sophisticated to be encoded in any other way. Behavior in response to "I am hungry" is pretty simple, but rational behavior in response to "my herd is being stalked by a predator" cannot really be encoded in reflex. If that behavior were encoded purely in reflexive actions, a rational predator could predict reflexive actions, and manipulate the prey into a situation where the reflexive actions would no longer be rational behavior.
In fact, there are some reasons to think that predator prey relationships are the driving factors in the evolution of human intelligence. If you think about it, a competitive multi agent game is the sort where a more and more sophisticated intelligence pays off. There's some dispute as to whether humans where on the predator or prey end of things when we were developing our intelligence, but the results seem to be the same.
Anyway, once you have something like powerful general intelligence and sympathy (the basic faculty to understand and predict the motives and actions of other agents), it sure seems like general questions about art go away. Art may very well be of no particular benefit to our survival, but merely a side effect of our intelligence, which certainly is necessary to our survival in a competitive environment.
The same could be said of human dignity in general. The degree that we are "put above" other animals. We are obviously not superior to other animals in our ability to be happy or content, certainly animals can be and often do have better lots in life then humans in terms of physical pleasure, contentment, and most of the other
is that they are in the same position microsoft was in with the xbox. They are late to the market, with a console that is reputed to be only moderately better than the competition if that.
I think sony is in a bad spot, and will probably lose out on the first generation games. However, before you say the ps3 is dead, consider that they have only the disadvantages that the xbox had (high price, late to market) and several advantages doesn't.
For one, they have backwards compatibility with both ps2 and ps1 games to offer. Remember that the ps2 was successful initially primarily because of ps1 compatibility.
Second, even after all of the money microsoft has spent buying out studios to get xbox exclusives, the ps3 will still probably have more exclusives in terms of japanese video games. They will probably win the japanese market by default, and frankly that's a pretty big chunk of the market to get by default. Also, last time I checked there were plenty of americans who played japanese rpgs.
Third, what's almost certainly boosting their price the most is the blu-ray disk. This is also probably the most likely component to become dirt cheap in a couple of years if the format is successful. Now, that's a big IF, but if it does happen, they might very well be a position to undercut the xbox360 in terms of price like they did in the last generation, or at least bring them into the same price range.
Also, the cell processor was originally hyped as something that sony was going to put in all of their electronics. Does anyone know if they are coming out with anything else with the same processor like they promised? If they do, the increased volume would also potentially help them reduce long run prices.
I believe that multicast support is turned off on most routers... and that you'd need end to end multicast for it to work any more efficiently than the current system.
Also, multicast would only really help on the content provider end of things... which might actually hurt the isps, since it would allow broadcasting to however many users on your dsl connection.
Is there anyone more familiar with multicasting that can comment more intelligently? This seems like an interesting question to me, but I fear I don't have all the facts.
Well, first off, you have to consider that we have other objectives in mind than just employing a lot of people and giving them good health benefits... Those things are both important, especially health benefits since for some dumbass reason we still haven't adopted socialized health care, but as far as our national and personal objectives go those aren't in the center.
One thing that small businesses can do that large ones cannot is innovate. Now, you may think to yourself that most of the new innovative technologies that come out you ultimately buy from a large company that has the resources to mass produce them. That's absolutely true! However, those large companies often as not get their technology from smaller companies, either from buying the technology directly, or as is more common in software where development teams are important just buying out the smaller company all together.
Microsoft and Apple are good examples. A huge portion of their respective product lines were purchased from smaller companies, everthing from itunes to virtual pc. OSX itself comes from the purchase of NeXT.
Smaller companies can take risks and if they fail, which they usually do, they won't take down a huge corporation and cause thousands of jobs to be lost.
Overall I'd say, to the extent that we think "as a society," which we honestly just don't do that often, we value the economic power that being an innovator lends us. As individuals, I'd say that many people want the freedom to take risks. Playing it safe in a big company guarantees you won't lose your job... but it also pretty much guarantees you won't get rich, and it certainly hampers your ability to try new things. If I have to choose between being a well paid middle manager at a huge company who has to do everything by the book, or the head of a small company where I'm making much less money and have no health care where I get to do pretty much whatever I want, I would find option 2 pretty tempting.
until fusion power can be put into production? I know a lot of advances have been made in the last few years, small scale fusion using pyroelectric crystals and such, but really how far are we from the goal? Can anyone in the know comment?
I know its pretty unreasonable to ask "when is technology x coming out," but a rough order of magnitude (are we talking 10 years? 100?) has got to be doable.
Also, if we do get large scale fusion, is it really going to be cleaner and safer than modern fission plants?
>Many of you may scoff at Michael Crichton (or worse, judge him based on the horrible movies that his
>books become) but you cannot deny that the man takes the time to do real, intensive research when he
>writes about topic X. His are just about the only works of fiction that have bibliographies longer than
>many works of fact
As someone who *has* read many of his books, I can say that although he may do research to get his ideas, the ideas he expresses in his books are mostly psuedoscience. He misrepresents issues to make for a compelling story, and sometimes gets things plain wrong, and I don't fault him for it. He is a science fiction writer, not a science writer.
To the extent that he helps educate about important issues, or emerging technologies, it is because he draws attention to them, and gets them mentioned in the national media. However, you shouldn't take State of Fear as educating you about the global warming issue any more than you should take Jurassic Park as educating you about the ethics of cloning.
You should consider that his book needed a villain, and putting environmentalists in that spot was a nice twist on the usual big oil companies as bad guys theme.
Also, you may enjoy Michael Crichton books, and south park, but that doesn't mean you should abdicate critical thought to them. South park brings up important social issues in their show and a lot of the time I agree with their take on things... but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go around saying that global warming doesn't exist just because they said so. There are better resources online and off that you should actually be using to look into this...
sooo fast
yeaaahhh
People already must install numerous pieces of proprietary software on their linux systems. Who uses *desktop* linux without any proprietary drivers or software? Even ignoring drivers, what about Java? None of the Java clones are nearly as good as Sun Java... yet linux distros fail to include Sun Java, forcing nearly everyone using java for any serious purpose to replace it immediately at some unnecessary inconvenience.
By taking the hardline "only OSS" stance at the distro level, we're just pushing installing the non OSS software onto the users. It's just an annoyance that accomplishes nothing.
As far as Linux being locked into unchangeable kernel schemes... maintaining binary compatibility for drivers is something they should be doing anyway. It is something that every other kernel I know of does, and it is just plain annoying that I can't swap out the drivers from one linux install to another because of driver breaks between kernel versions. At the very least, driver compatibility should be guaranteed between minor version numbers.
http://www.mklinux.org/
seriously. Saying "won't people please write a microkernel, they are so awesome" isn't particularly compelling.
The fact is, we have kernels right now that do what users want them to do. The things that Tannenbaum talks about are nice, but even *ignoring* the performance issue, it isn't worth throwing out the linux, osx, or windows kernel to get them.
The fact is, the place where hardware with crappy drivers exists is in the places where we care the least, the desktop market. Stability was a big issue for me when my desktop crashed more than once a day, under os9/windows 9x, but now that I'm seeing a genuine kernel panic maybe once a year, I could care less. An improvement on that would be totally lost on me.
Now, I suppose you could write a kernel specifically for systems that actually need incredibly long uptime, but what are those systems? Servers? Well, people using those systems typically pick their hardware pretty carefully, either that or they come up with fault tolerant designs like google.
A more compelling promise, is that moving more stuff out of kernel mode will increase security.. Even then, we're talking about targeting a much smaller demographic than "everyone that uses a computer." Probably the best people to write such a kernel, would be IBM, or Sun... but last I heard they had already invested heavily in other operating systems.
So, in summary, it sounds like nice technology, but the market *really doesn't want it right now*. Probably the idea, if it is at all still relevant, will be incorporated as a matter of course into the next series of operating systems that come out... 10 or 20 years from now. It would be nice if Tannenbaum was still around to see that, but the guy can't force the market forward by himself.
an online poll? Seriously, where'd they get that information. Many americans don't even have consistent internet access. Think people living in rural areas... Unless this was done by random calling over a geographically diverse area, I would not consider it representative of all americans.