Nah; it isn't, and it can't ever be. The explanation is straightforward.
If you look through this or any other discussion of "Is linux ready for the Desktop?", you'll quickly see that the only test is: Can a Windows user start using linux with no learning period, and find that everything is familiar?
Now, not that this isn't something that is required of Microsoft. If a W98 user goes to buy a new workstation or laptop, they'll find that they can't buy it with W98 any more. They'll have to get Vista (or maybe XP). They'll have to spend a bunch of time learning the bizarre (to them) new Windows GUI. They'll grumble, but they'll do it. And they won't ask "Is Vista ready for the Desktop?"
The reason is that, like such terms as "Personal Computer", "Windows", and "Office", the term "Desktop" now has a specific meaning. Thus, "Personal Computer" first meant a computer owned and used by one person, but when the Microsoft/IBM partnership got into the act, "Personal Computer" quickly came to mean a computer owned and used by one person, and which runs Microsoft software. Similarly, "Windows" first means a GUI that presented info in those rectangular areas on the screen. Then Microsoft finally implemented windows, and "Windows" means a screen that was controlled by Microsoft software that presented info in those rectangular areas on the screen.
Way back in the olden days, "Desktop" meant a computer interface (display, keyboard, and eventually mouse) that sat on your desk's top and interacted with a computer (which may have been on the floor next to your desk or in another room down the hall). But now "Desktop" clearly means that gadgetry sitting on your desk's top, and is running a GUI that's exactly like the one that Microsoft has sold to their customers.
And here's where the problem comes for non-MS vendors. Microsoft has in fact sold dozens of different "Desktop" systems, each with its own peculiar way of interacting with a user. If linux is to be accepted as a "Desktop" system, it must act exactly the way a user's previous Windows system acted. Without the user telling it which Windows he/she has been using. Without any learning on the user's part.
Short of hardware (and a linux-compatible driver;-) that reads a user's mind and transmits the user's expectations to the Desktop software, this is clearly not feasible. I'm pretty sure we'd have all heard of mind-reading hardware, if it was in development. Without such hardware, there's no way that a linux system can know what a user expects to see on the screen, or how to use it. And visiting Windows users can be guaranteed to see something that they don't like, because it's different from what their Windows screen shows.
This whole "Desktop" thing is a euphemism for what in procurement circles is called a "drop dead" requirement. That's for when you've decided on the vendor that is going to supply what you want, but you are required to request bids from other vendors. You make up a requirement list that includes things that your chosen vendor can do exactly as described right now. You carefully phrase the requirements so that the other vendors' products are different in small ways from what you've written. That way, you can quickly point out that only the one vendor actually satisfies the requirements. The tiny details in the other products are "wrong", and unacceptable. Your chosen vendor gets his sale, you get your kickback, and everyone's happy.
If the linux crowd wants to horn in on Microsoft's territory, they'll have to abandon this "Desktop" metaphor, because that has been thoroughly hijacked by Microsoft. They'll have to find some other language. Maybe persuading users to upgrade to a higher-quality, cheaper system from vendors that won't sue them for reasonable use of their software. That has a chance of succeeding.
But taking over "the Desktop" on Microsoft's terms ain't gonna happen. It's not possible for linux or any other system to emulate all previous Microsoft GUIs without any user training. And that's what has to be done to take over the Desktop.
I had similar problems a few years ago. The database had a lot of data in a compact format, and I wrote some retrieval pages that would extract the data and run it through any of a list of formatters to give clients the output format they wanted. Very practical. Over time, the list of output formats slowly grew, as did the database. Then one day, the machine was totally bogged down with http requests. It turned out that a search site had figured out how to use my format-conversion form, and had requested all of our data in every format that my code delivered.
Google wasn't too bad, because at least they spread the requests out over time. But other search sites hit our poor server with requests as fast as the Internet would deliver them. I ended up writing code that spotted this pattern of requests, and put the offending searcher on a blacklist. From then on, they only got back pages saying that they were blacklisted, with an email address to write if this was an error. That address never got any mail, and the problem went away.
Since then, I've done periodic scans of the server logs for other bursts of requests that look like an attempt to extract everything in every format. I've had to add a few more gimmicks (kludges) to spot these automatically and blacklist the clients.
I wonder if google's new code will get past my defenses? I've noticed that googlebot addresses are in the "no CGI allowed" portion of my blacklist, though they are allowed to retrieve the basic data. I'll be on the lookout for symptoms of a breakthrough.
Its not unusual for people with "nothing to hide" getting their rights violated in the name of protecting this country.
In particular, even if you have nothing to hide, you can be in bad trouble if your name somewhat resembles a name on any of various government-agency suspect lists.
This has come out fairly clearly in the TSA "protection" at airports. Quite a lot of people have found themselves on the "No Fly" list simply because their name was the same as or similar to a name on the list. The treatment you get when they decide you're one of those suspected terrorists can sorta ruin your day.
The use of "name lists" like these is an old story in the government surveillance industry. It means that many people with "nothing to hide" are routinely treated as criminals or subversives on the basis of name similarities. These days, that can mean that you are spirited off to some other country, held incommunicado for years, and "interrogated" until you confess (or they realize they've got the wrong person). If you survive, they dump you off in some other country and pretend they've never seen you.
So don't be so smug about having nothing to hide. That won't protect you.
So what's the "Daddy's got your nose" game? I've seen a few references to it here and there, but I've never seen or read an explanation. Am I missing something?
You gotta pwn his home BSD box. It works every time.
Heh. I once did something that was even more effective. I was a contractor on a project at a major vendor (who shall remain unnamed), and despite the fact that I was working on networking stuff that required kernel builds, they took the common approach of not telling me the root password on my own workstation. That's supposed to increase security, I suppose. But in a case like this, it's just a silly management impediment to getting the job done efficiently. In a sensibly-run development lab, the kernel-test machines always have their passwords on a note taped to the box.
But I kept cool about it, and delivered a bunch of stuff that worked anyway. Then one day, with a number of other management types present, my boss asked if it would help if I knew my root password. I just replied "Nah; no need. I made my own superuser login, so as not to interfere with the ordinary 'root' user." Stunned silence. Then someone asked how I did that. I walked over to my boss's workstation, typed about a half dozen chars, hit Return, and got a root prompt. More stunned silence. I made some offhand comment about how that exploit was described in the online "literature" several years ago, and they still hadn't fixed it.
They did tell me the root passwords to the machines that I needed to work on. And I noticed that they didn't call my bluff by asking about any other exploits that I might know of. Actually, I hadn't tried any others, since the first one I tried worked, and that gave me the access I needed to do my system builds and debugging. Occasionally, I've wondered which of the others might have worked.
For some reason, I got a lot more respect (and cooperation) from the others around me after that little incident.
I judged a state science fair recently and came upon a bridge project which hand one reference listed--Wikipedia. I asked the kid why he had only used these five different types of bridges and he said because that's what was listed on Wikipedia. I pretty much gave him a horrible score based on that and pointed out that the Army Corp of Engineers provides all its publications free and recommended he check that out if he wanted better information.
Or you could have given the kid some more general advice: The wikipedia editors strongly encourage the section at the bottom of an article called "External Links". That's where you'll find links to lots of other sites with much more detailed information. I just checked the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge page, and while it doesn't link to a Corp of Engineers site, it does have a number of links to other sites on the topic (and at least one of them links to the Corp of Engineers;-). Tell him that next time, you expect that he will have followed those links, to a depth of 3 or 4, and gotten a much more thorough basis of knowledge of the topic.
In fact, within 3 or 4 hops of most wikipedia pages, you can often find lots of "primary" documentation. On popular topics, you might need to dig deeper, of course. But there are lots of wikipedia pages where there are technical and research papers within only a few hops. So just using the wikipedia info amounts to laziness in the extreme.
OTOH, to really understand something like bridges, you will first need a firm founding in math and physics. That's easy enough to find online these days, but it'll take you more than a few hours to absorb and understand what you need to build a bridge that won't collapse under the traffic or in severe weather.
I fail to see where an expired patent makes money for its inventor, licensees or any patent agents.
Actually, a number of historians have recently written about this topic, and described various cases where exactly this happened.
One well-documented case is James Watt's improvements on the steam engine. It seems that he made very little money from it for the duration of his patent. The problem was that there were several other patents on other improvements that were needed for a practical engine. One such was the linkage that converted between linear and circular motion, so that a piston engine could turn a wheel with constant speed. There were decades of mutual lawsuits between Watt and other patent holders, and the court cases effectively blocked development.
Then, after the patents ran out, Watt found himself in a position of having some of the best engineers as employees. As a result, he could profit from their expertise and start selling the engines that finally made him wealthy and gave him a place in the history books.
These days, economists sometimes talk about "human capital" for cases like this. Having control of an idea via a patent is in itself not very useful. What you need is a group of people with the knowledge of how to use the ideas. If you have a team with that knowledge, you can profit, even if your monopoly ownership of the ideas has run out. Without the knowledgeable people, monopoly control of an idea is often not profitable, because your customers won't buy ideas, they'll only buy products.
Of course, sometimes the companies with patents are willing to license them for reasonable prices. Watt wasn't willing to do this. He wanted ownership of steam engine production, and wouldn't license his patents to others, while expecting them to license their patents to him. Unfortunately, this is the usual way that corporations handle their patents. The result is that patents only occasionally lead to improved products while the patents are in effect. Mostly the function of patents is to block such improvements by others.
And, as others have described, patent licensing fees are often so high as to make the products (especially medicines) so expensive that few people can afford the price. In medicine, this is sometimes known as the "Your money or your life" method of patent use.
Better than losing that information forever, right? Think about it - he or his son or his grandchild dies before that information is transferred. This would mean that this information is lost forever.
Actually, medical researchers have lamented such losses on many occasions. There is ongoing funding of investigation of "folk" medicines, and such studies regularly turn up useful new drugs. But in some cases, the medicines are lost before the investigators can learn about them.
One of the main complaints of these researchers is that previous field researchers, usually botanists and occasionally zoologists, will do species surveys of an area, but fail to record the local people's uses of their local species. Later on, a medical researcher decides to investigate a species for possible medical use (perhaps because it's related to other species that are known to produce useful medicines). It turns out that the local people remember some use that a previous local doctor had made of the species, but that fellow has died, and the current people don't know anything about the details. If the previous botanist had recorded the local medical usage in his notes, the medical investigators might have appeared on the scene earlier, before the local doctor died, and learned of the medicine.
There's a lot of inefficiency in how we handle such things. In this case, the compartmentalization of specialties results in botanists not being concerned with how local people use a species. The only concern is in documenting the species in enough detail to make it identifiable to other botanists, and recording basic info about its habitat. Human use of a plant is Someone Else's Problem.
The above local doctor's story isn't at all unusual, and shows a sort of inefficiency that's quite common: Medicine has been historically organized into local "guilds" that tend to be secretive about their knowledge. This was true in the West until the past couple centuries, and is still part of how Western commercial medicine operates. The fellow's attitude may be quite rational from his viewpoint, since telling others about his cure is likely to result in strangers coming in and ending part of his business. We have a patent system that protects corporations from such losses, but it doesn't work for individuals like this doctor.
We all suffer as a result of such social inefficiencies. But we don't seem to know how to fix the problems. And many people continue to support things like the patent system and corporate secrecy, which mostly just continue the problems (while occasionally making a very few people rich).
Heh; Microsoft may be a real bad example here, but they're hardly the only ones deserving of criticism.
Thus, I happen to be typing this on my 5-year-old Mac Powerbook. When I got it, half a gig of memory was a moderately big machine, and more that it really needed. Now, 5 years and uncounted upgrades later, it really could use more memory. The footprint of most of the tools, including non-Apple apps like Firefox and Opera, are significantly bigger than they used to be. Much of this is due to the growing use of memory-hungry modules like javascript and flash, of course; only part of the bloat is due to the base code. Multi-megabyte web pages are a lot more common now than they were 5 years ago.
I also have a linux box from around the same time, and it has seen the same bloat. So Microsoft isn't the only culprit, only the most notorious.
I wonder how many of those scientists made their own concoctions?
As a marginal case study, I'll mention that as a grad student, I helped pay my way by being the computer guru for a collection of bio (botany, zoology) researchers. It was common practice at the department's social events to have several bowls of drinkables that contained significant amounts of clinical ethanol. This was an "off label" use of the ethanol, of course, since it was purchased on research grants, and no liquor tax was paid. The ethanol wasn't denatured with bad-tasting chemicals, of course, since that would interfere with lab use. The general estimate was that roughly half of the purchased ethanol went into drinks (though I doubt if anyone kept records of such use).
This was done quite openly, and nobody even considered that someone might report them to the authorities. This has obviously gone on for a very long time, without any repercussions. This implies that there's no serious objection to such illegal use by anyone, not even from the people who only drank the non-alcoholic drinks (which were clearly labelled). I'd guess that the legal authorities are often aware of this practice, but it's such a small use (by a high-profile, respected population) that it's probably not worth their bother to challenge it.
A funny thing about clinical ethanol is that it has no taste. Drinking it undiluted isn't recommended, as ethanol in high concentration can seriously damage skin cells. Since it can't be tasted in mixtures, people have no idea how much they've consumed.
I'd guess that the legal authorities are often aware of this practice, but it's such a small use (by a high-profile, respected population) that it's probably not worth their bother to challenge it. Dealing with the much larger student population on Friday and Saturday nights is probably a much more attractive prospect (to politicians and police administrators) than dealing with a handful of researchers in their labs who divert part of their lab supplies to non-research use.
I didn't know of any creation of other psychoactive compounds in those labs, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened on occasion. As long as it wasn't a commercial operation, I doubt that the departments would have cared.
A more akin example is if cocaine were a miracle-mind drug. If researchers were consuming that instead, would that be ok?
Yes. But it isn't. So it's illegal.
Actually, we have some evidence that many, possibly most scientists would consider this irrelevant, and would cooperate with such drug use when it enhances (or doesn't interfere with) research.
Consider Paul Erdös, widely considered one of the top mathematicians of the 20th century. All the biographies mention his frequent use of stimulants much more powerful than caffeine, all of them illegal. His colleagues didn't just accept this; many of them actively assisted his access to his drugs when he came visiting. You'd have great difficulty finding any mathematicians who'd voice more than a mild criticism of his drug use. His results were just too valuable for people to object to his methodology. The laws against such drug use just discredits the lawmakers, not the users who benefit from the drugs.
Paul said that he once decided to try going without drugs for a summer, to see what it was like. That summer, he produced almost no new mathematical results. He decided to never try that experiment again. Most mathematicians react to this story with a grin.
I'd predict that other scientific communities will respond the same way. I also wouldn't be surprised if people in a few other fields follow up with similar stories about other researchers. I've read that a number of bio field researchers in South America adopted the local use of coca leaves, and their colleagues didn't report them to the police. (But I don't recall their names.;-)
philosophically speaking, you lose some of your identity when you self-enhance. if you don't buy my argument, i have two words for you: barry bonds. the guy was a great athlete and probably would have made a huge impact on baseball without steroids. now you tell me what his legacy is.
Good example, but perhaps not directly applicable to the case at hand. The reason for such rules in athletics is that we want to explicitly know what the athletes can do with their own bodies. Any runner could increase their speed tremendously by just using a machine such as a bicycle, motorcycle, or airplane. Some do, and we don't actually reject them. We just consider what they're doing to be different sports than running. Their "sport" lies in their ability to control their machines, not in what they can do with their own body.
But this doesn't apply to scientific research. Nobody criticizes Galileo or Newton for using mechanical enhancements (telescopes) to augment their research abilities. Bio researchers routinely use microscopes of all sorts to allow their eyes to see things that couldn't be seen otherwise. Everyone uses cameras that are sensitive to photons outside our visual range. And nearly everyone uses computers to increase their calculating ability, something that was considered a sign of intellectual power a century ago but is a mere mechanical ability now. We even use rockets to "throw" things much farther than Barry Bonds ever could, into various orbits, or even outside the Solar System, and it's not considered cheating.
The difference is that scientists want only the results. They don't (or shouldn't) compete with each other to demonstrate their brain power. They are supposed to cooperate to study the world around them. All sorts of physical enhancements have been developed to increase scientists' observing powers. Computers are now routinely used to radically speed up reasoning and calculating powers. Rockets have been developed to toss things places that our arms could never reach. There have been few if any objections to this from any quarter.
Augmenting scientists' intellectual ability via drugs isn't really materially different from augmenting those abilities via machinery. It's just introducing "machines" that are very much smaller, and interact directly with the scientists' nervous systems rather than indirectly via hands, eyes and ears. So we shouldn't expect much serious objection to this sort of enhancement, from scientists or from funding agencies.
We will, of course, have "moral" objections from our moral guardians. But that crowd has always objected to science, so we'll probably just continue to ignore them as we have for centuries.
But laws are never repealed. In my town, it is illegal to whack the heads off of snakes downtown. See, 100 years ago,...
This has been a reliable source of humor for some time, and a number of collections of goofy laws have been published. I've recently run across a claim that in many US states (and probably various other countries), there are still laws on the books restricting vehicles to 5 or 10 mph. There's also supposedly one state (Kansas?) in which by law a motor vehicle must be preceded by a rider on horseback to warn the population.
Even more fun are the laws with unintended consequences, typically due to some detail of the wording. My favorite was the Oregon town that, a few years ago, passed a law that outlawed all sex. The intent was to outlaw public sex, i.e., exhibitionism. The wording outlawed all sex "visible from any place public or private". That pretty much covers it, with the possible exception of how it applies to blind people.
Another fun one that is probably still on the books: A few years ago, Florida had a law against "nude bathing" which didn't exempt bathing nude in your own bathroom. People did point out that nude showers were still legal in the state.
Such laws are fun to bring up when people are insisting that all laws should be obeyed. Some laws just beg to be broken (and challenged in court if necessary).
The software guys are already busy working on software upgrades that will counteract that processor speed so that the software is even slower than the current release.
I think it's a neat calculation. We've all lost track of what fast actually means for a modern CPU.
I think it's a dumb calculation. No human has a "feel" for the speed of light, or for the time it would take for light to move a centimeter or three.
Also, note that "knuckle" is ambiguous. When I hold my hand up, I see that each finger has three knuckles, and their distances from the finger's tip ranges from 25mm to 110mm.;-)
I did first think that the "task" referred to a machine instruction, but on second thought, I suspect that's not true. It could mean any of various actions, each much smaller than an instruction. At the hardware level, a "task" could mean moving a charge (a bundle of electrons or photons) from one component to the next.
But I suppose we shouldn't expect data any more precise than this from someone representing IBM.
I told you the world wasnt going to end, i told you it would be MUCH worse. Here we face a HOT future with NO BEER!
But we do have good historical evidence that, when the beer supply is at stake, people are often willing to go to great lengths to ensure its continued availability.
One example: Back when the genocidal war was going on in Rwanda, NPR had a couple of interesting articles about a group of people who were driving around the country wherever they wished, and were never attacked. They were beer truck drivers. The article went on to explain that in Rwandan society, even in the very upper crust, beer was the overwhelming drink of choice. Beer is always served with every meal. So when a truck with a beer logo showed up, nobody cared about the ethnicity of the driver; all they cared about was that the beer be delivered with minimal interference. People knew not to attack or rob beer trucks, because the beer distributors might halt deliveries to their neighborhood.
So, even when many people were willing to kill a member of group X on sight, they were willing to forgo their desire to kill when beer delivery was at stake.
Once this news gets spread by the MSM (MainStream Media), we can expect that the politicians will be falling all over themselves to DSAI (Do Something About It). Some of them might even do something relevant.
(Hmmm... I wonder how they can work "Think of the children" into it?;-)
Corn is ideal because we already had the infrastructure in place to integrate corn-based ethanol plants into the supply chain with virtually no cost (money or energy).
That depends on where you live. It may be true in the US's Midwest or other farming areas with well-established grain crops. In other parts of the world, there are already commercial crops of Jatropha curcas, a dryland shrub whose seeds contain oil that can be burned directly by diesel engines without refining. There's also a tropical tree, Copaifera langsdorffii, which is tapped much like sugar maples, and whose sap also qualifies as diesel fuel. Google finds lots of info on both of them.
These two plants have only recently been domesticated, so there's a lot of research and breeding going on in the areas where they grow. J. curcas has potential to be a major crop the American southwest and southern Europe, as it's cold tolerant and needs only around 250 mm of rain per year to keep it happy. But the cultivation is rather different from corn, so you wouldn't expect corn farmers to immediately succeed with it, and it may not be a competitive crop for areas with more rainfall. C. langsdorffii isn't feasible outside the tropics, and is a medium-sized tree, so it has only been used for small-scale local fuel production so far, and will probably take some time to become a practical crop plant.
Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) has gotten some attention in the US, where it's a native plant with a lot of potential. Even President Bush has heard of it. But its cultivation, harvesting, and processing into fuel would be something new for corn farmers. Sugar cane growers would probably be better prospects, as the process would be familiar to them -- except for the final fermentation stage, which you'd want to hand over to the rum producers;-). A problem here is that sugar cane (and rum) is a (sub)tropical crop, while switchgrass is better suited to temperate zones, so we'll either need to educate some farmers (and brewers), or persuade the sugar-cage people to move to places where it gets cold.
There are a number of other plants undergoing serious research for fuel production. Of course, each species will require educating farmers and development of infrastructure for its use. That's part of why so many people have been suggesting that we should be doing the R&D now, rather than wait until our fuel-supply problems grow even more serious.
I don't think you'll need to. You seriously think writing off 1 in 4 visitors to your site is acceptable business sense?
Well, I've done that intentionally, and been happy with the results.
You've gotta consider that some "businesses" don't want to maximise their visitor count; they want to maximise the number of visitors who want something that the site provides.
The example I'm thinking of is a site that I manage that provides several useful services to musicians. It also includes a mailto: link to let users tell me about problems. My problem was that I was getting lots of confused messages from visitors who were baffled by their inability to find any musical recordings on the site. This was, of course, not what the site was about. Even with a canned reply, telling them this was a significant time sinkhole on my part. And part of the problem is that the English language has some serious bugs in its musical terminology, so that pretty much any google search for music-related keywords will bury the sites you're looking for among large number of sites that are selling recorded music. This is partly because the sites that sell recordings generally list all known music-related terms as keywords, to bring in eyes. This is a disservice to musicians who are looking for stuff involved in making music, but there's not much we can do about it.
So what to do? What I did was put a prominent box on my front page telling visitors that there are no recordings on the site, and if they don't understand how you can have a music site without recordings, they're at the wrong site. This cut my hit count in half, and freed up the time that I'd spent dealing with email from people looking for something that the site didn't provide. It also lightened the load on my server somewhat, though not by much because visiting musicians tend to stay around for a while. It didn't affect income from the site at all, since it was warning away people who would never have been customers anyway.
A well-designed web site should not only make itself easily available to the people that want what it provides; it should also (subtly or not) let other people know that "You won't find what you want here". Unless, of course, you're running one of those sites that just tries to trick people into visiting so they'll see your ads. I can understand your motives for that, of course, but I do what I can to prevent you from wasting my time.
It's not just list stuff that's missing. I don't seem to see moderations anywhere any more. I looked at a couple of my messages yesterday that were moderated, and all I saw was the number; the list of moderations was nowhere to be seen.
I looked on several browsers on my Mac, including SeaMonkey, FireFox, Safari and Opera, and none of them showed the moderations.
I mean, how am I to get upset and indignant about a "troll" rather than the "funny" that I expected, when I can't see the actual moderation?
I still can't even figure out why Microsoft would want them other than to just make them go away.
Bingo!
The only motive here is the elimination of a competitor. Price is no matter; Microsoft wants Yahoo! destroyed because it's one of the two barriers in the way of Microsoft owning the search business.
It's similar to back when Microsoft decided that Netscape had to die. It rapidly became clear that the leaks were true: Bill and Steve had decided that they would lose whatever money they had to lose to own the browser market. They succeeded, and although they've made no money from IE at all (i.e., they've sunk the entire cost of developing it), they are now firmly in control of what the majority of eyes see on the Web. Sinking a few hundred million into IE was a small price to pay for that power.
Their goal now is to control what all those eyes see when they search the Web. Their problem is that most people think either "google" or "yahoo" is what you type to do a search. Not even MS fanboys like MS's search. They understand that they can't compete in the search arena on quality. So they're going to use their huge pile of money to destroy their remaining competitors. Yahoo is the easiest target, so they're going after it first. And they'll lose whatever they have to lose to kill it.
So, essentially, comcast sucks so hard that they have to break their network to save it. They're fucked; find a new ISP.
Not very useful advice for most Comcast customers. As others have pointed out, in most of its market area, Comcast is a legal monopoly. In the few areas where they aren't, their only "competition" is DSL via a phone company like Verizon, which is even worse.
The only real solutions are to end such legal monopolies, or to reinstate strict regulation as a condition for the monopoly. But with the current political situation here in the US, neither is likely to happen any time soon.
To figure out if your connections are getting screwed, you need to watch your network interface speed (UL/DL) and be able to throttle it to 50% (not SYN/ACK).
I'd love to, but I don't have a clue as to how to do that. Are there any tools around that will do the job?
(And no, I won't tell you what sort of system I'm using. I want to see answers that are usable by other readers who'd like to follow your advice, but have different systems than mine.;-)
Think it would be cool if every Slashdot reader listed the open source project they have released along with the Sourceforge, Freshmeat or or repo address.
Well, I would, but there's an annoying problem: I haven't been able to update the sourceforge copy of my project for a couple of years now. I just get incomprehensible error codes that neither I nor google seems to be able to find explanations for. Meanwhile, I occasionally get email from people who have picked up the code from SF, and talk about possible extensions. Often, I've already made them, but I can't get them into SF. So I try to get the news out that the SF copy of my code is badly out of date. But of course most people never see my comments; they only see the code on SF.
Anyone know how to get out of this mess? Is there some way to wipe out a SF project that can't be updated, and restart it from scratch? I've totally failed to find that info in the docs.
I have a couple of other things I'd like to put into SF, but I'm a bit leery of creating a new account to do that, when my old account is still there as a read-only, non-updatable zombie. It'd be really annoying to just create more zombies with outdated code.
..., but what good is throttling their users if the users can just disable it?
Hey, an easy one!
The ISPs don't exactly advertise this. They don't even mention it to customers. They rely on the fact that most customers will have no idea such a "feature" exists, much less how to find where it's hidden in the ISP's web site. Only a small crowd of geeks will know about it.
And, as some other semi-paranoid writer mentioned earlier, the ISP could well use your opting out for throttling as evidence that you intend to "abuse" their service. It's likely that their CS guys will know which customers have disabled throttling, and this will affect the sort of service you get.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is technically ready for the desktop.
;-) that reads a user's mind and transmits the user's expectations to the Desktop software, this is clearly not feasible. I'm pretty sure we'd have all heard of mind-reading hardware, if it was in development. Without such hardware, there's no way that a linux system can know what a user expects to see on the screen, or how to use it. And visiting Windows users can be guaranteed to see something that they don't like, because it's different from what their Windows screen shows.
Nah; it isn't, and it can't ever be. The explanation is straightforward.
If you look through this or any other discussion of "Is linux ready for the Desktop?", you'll quickly see that the only test is: Can a Windows user start using linux with no learning period, and find that everything is familiar?
Now, not that this isn't something that is required of Microsoft. If a W98 user goes to buy a new workstation or laptop, they'll find that they can't buy it with W98 any more. They'll have to get Vista (or maybe XP). They'll have to spend a bunch of time learning the bizarre (to them) new Windows GUI. They'll grumble, but they'll do it. And they won't ask "Is Vista ready for the Desktop?"
The reason is that, like such terms as "Personal Computer", "Windows", and "Office", the term "Desktop" now has a specific meaning. Thus, "Personal Computer" first meant a computer owned and used by one person, but when the Microsoft/IBM partnership got into the act, "Personal Computer" quickly came to mean a computer owned and used by one person, and which runs Microsoft software. Similarly, "Windows" first means a GUI that presented info in those rectangular areas on the screen. Then Microsoft finally implemented windows, and "Windows" means a screen that was controlled by Microsoft software that presented info in those rectangular areas on the screen.
Way back in the olden days, "Desktop" meant a computer interface (display, keyboard, and eventually mouse) that sat on your desk's top and interacted with a computer (which may have been on the floor next to your desk or in another room down the hall). But now "Desktop" clearly means that gadgetry sitting on your desk's top, and is running a GUI that's exactly like the one that Microsoft has sold to their customers.
And here's where the problem comes for non-MS vendors. Microsoft has in fact sold dozens of different "Desktop" systems, each with its own peculiar way of interacting with a user. If linux is to be accepted as a "Desktop" system, it must act exactly the way a user's previous Windows system acted. Without the user telling it which Windows he/she has been using. Without any learning on the user's part.
Short of hardware (and a linux-compatible driver
This whole "Desktop" thing is a euphemism for what in procurement circles is called a "drop dead" requirement. That's for when you've decided on the vendor that is going to supply what you want, but you are required to request bids from other vendors. You make up a requirement list that includes things that your chosen vendor can do exactly as described right now. You carefully phrase the requirements so that the other vendors' products are different in small ways from what you've written. That way, you can quickly point out that only the one vendor actually satisfies the requirements. The tiny details in the other products are "wrong", and unacceptable. Your chosen vendor gets his sale, you get your kickback, and everyone's happy.
If the linux crowd wants to horn in on Microsoft's territory, they'll have to abandon this "Desktop" metaphor, because that has been thoroughly hijacked by Microsoft. They'll have to find some other language. Maybe persuading users to upgrade to a higher-quality, cheaper system from vendors that won't sue them for reasonable use of their software. That has a chance of succeeding.
But taking over "the Desktop" on Microsoft's terms ain't gonna happen. It's not possible for linux or any other system to emulate all previous Microsoft GUIs without any user training. And that's what has to be done to take over the Desktop.
I had similar problems a few years ago. The database had a lot of data in a compact format, and I wrote some retrieval pages that would extract the data and run it through any of a list of formatters to give clients the output format they wanted. Very practical. Over time, the list of output formats slowly grew, as did the database. Then one day, the machine was totally bogged down with http requests. It turned out that a search site had figured out how to use my format-conversion form, and had requested all of our data in every format that my code delivered.
Google wasn't too bad, because at least they spread the requests out over time. But other search sites hit our poor server with requests as fast as the Internet would deliver them. I ended up writing code that spotted this pattern of requests, and put the offending searcher on a blacklist. From then on, they only got back pages saying that they were blacklisted, with an email address to write if this was an error. That address never got any mail, and the problem went away.
Since then, I've done periodic scans of the server logs for other bursts of requests that look like an attempt to extract everything in every format. I've had to add a few more gimmicks (kludges) to spot these automatically and blacklist the clients.
I wonder if google's new code will get past my defenses? I've noticed that googlebot addresses are in the "no CGI allowed" portion of my blacklist, though they are allowed to retrieve the basic data. I'll be on the lookout for symptoms of a breakthrough.
Its not unusual for people with "nothing to hide" getting their rights violated in the name of protecting this country.
In particular, even if you have nothing to hide, you can be in bad trouble if your name somewhat resembles a name on any of various government-agency suspect lists.
This has come out fairly clearly in the TSA "protection" at airports. Quite a lot of people have found themselves on the "No Fly" list simply because their name was the same as or similar to a name on the list. The treatment you get when they decide you're one of those suspected terrorists can sorta ruin your day.
The use of "name lists" like these is an old story in the government surveillance industry. It means that many people with "nothing to hide" are routinely treated as criminals or subversives on the basis of name similarities. These days, that can mean that you are spirited off to some other country, held incommunicado for years, and "interrogated" until you confess (or they realize they've got the wrong person). If you survive, they dump you off in some other country and pretend they've never seen you.
So don't be so smug about having nothing to hide. That won't protect you.
So what's the "Daddy's got your nose" game? I've seen a few references to it here and there, but I've never seen or read an explanation. Am I missing something?
You gotta pwn his home BSD box. It works every time.
Heh. I once did something that was even more effective. I was a contractor on a project at a major vendor (who shall remain unnamed), and despite the fact that I was working on networking stuff that required kernel builds, they took the common approach of not telling me the root password on my own workstation. That's supposed to increase security, I suppose. But in a case like this, it's just a silly management impediment to getting the job done efficiently. In a sensibly-run development lab, the kernel-test machines always have their passwords on a note taped to the box.
But I kept cool about it, and delivered a bunch of stuff that worked anyway. Then one day, with a number of other management types present, my boss asked if it would help if I knew my root password. I just replied "Nah; no need. I made my own superuser login, so as not to interfere with the ordinary 'root' user." Stunned silence. Then someone asked how I did that. I walked over to my boss's workstation, typed about a half dozen chars, hit Return, and got a root prompt. More stunned silence. I made some offhand comment about how that exploit was described in the online "literature" several years ago, and they still hadn't fixed it.
They did tell me the root passwords to the machines that I needed to work on. And I noticed that they didn't call my bluff by asking about any other exploits that I might know of. Actually, I hadn't tried any others, since the first one I tried worked, and that gave me the access I needed to do my system builds and debugging. Occasionally, I've wondered which of the others might have worked.
For some reason, I got a lot more respect (and cooperation) from the others around me after that little incident.
I judged a state science fair recently and came upon a bridge project which hand one reference listed--Wikipedia. I asked the kid why he had only used these five different types of bridges and he said because that's what was listed on Wikipedia. I pretty much gave him a horrible score based on that and pointed out that the Army Corp of Engineers provides all its publications free and recommended he check that out if he wanted better information.
;-). Tell him that next time, you expect that he will have followed those links, to a depth of 3 or 4, and gotten a much more thorough basis of knowledge of the topic.
Or you could have given the kid some more general advice: The wikipedia editors strongly encourage the section at the bottom of an article called "External Links". That's where you'll find links to lots of other sites with much more detailed information. I just checked the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge page, and while it doesn't link to a Corp of Engineers site, it does have a number of links to other sites on the topic (and at least one of them links to the Corp of Engineers
In fact, within 3 or 4 hops of most wikipedia pages, you can often find lots of "primary" documentation. On popular topics, you might need to dig deeper, of course. But there are lots of wikipedia pages where there are technical and research papers within only a few hops. So just using the wikipedia info amounts to laziness in the extreme.
OTOH, to really understand something like bridges, you will first need a firm founding in math and physics. That's easy enough to find online these days, but it'll take you more than a few hours to absorb and understand what you need to build a bridge that won't collapse under the traffic or in severe weather.
I fail to see where an expired patent makes money for its inventor, licensees or any patent agents.
Actually, a number of historians have recently written about this topic, and described various cases where exactly this happened.
One well-documented case is James Watt's improvements on the steam engine. It seems that he made very little money from it for the duration of his patent. The problem was that there were several other patents on other improvements that were needed for a practical engine. One such was the linkage that converted between linear and circular motion, so that a piston engine could turn a wheel with constant speed. There were decades of mutual lawsuits between Watt and other patent holders, and the court cases effectively blocked development.
Then, after the patents ran out, Watt found himself in a position of having some of the best engineers as employees. As a result, he could profit from their expertise and start selling the engines that finally made him wealthy and gave him a place in the history books.
These days, economists sometimes talk about "human capital" for cases like this. Having control of an idea via a patent is in itself not very useful. What you need is a group of people with the knowledge of how to use the ideas. If you have a team with that knowledge, you can profit, even if your monopoly ownership of the ideas has run out. Without the knowledgeable people, monopoly control of an idea is often not profitable, because your customers won't buy ideas, they'll only buy products.
Of course, sometimes the companies with patents are willing to license them for reasonable prices. Watt wasn't willing to do this. He wanted ownership of steam engine production, and wouldn't license his patents to others, while expecting them to license their patents to him. Unfortunately, this is the usual way that corporations handle their patents. The result is that patents only occasionally lead to improved products while the patents are in effect. Mostly the function of patents is to block such improvements by others.
And, as others have described, patent licensing fees are often so high as to make the products (especially medicines) so expensive that few people can afford the price. In medicine, this is sometimes known as the "Your money or your life" method of patent use.
Better than losing that information forever, right?
Think about it - he or his son or his grandchild dies before that information is transferred. This would mean that this information is lost forever.
Actually, medical researchers have lamented such losses on many occasions. There is ongoing funding of investigation of "folk" medicines, and such studies regularly turn up useful new drugs. But in some cases, the medicines are lost before the investigators can learn about them.
One of the main complaints of these researchers is that previous field researchers, usually botanists and occasionally zoologists, will do species surveys of an area, but fail to record the local people's uses of their local species. Later on, a medical researcher decides to investigate a species for possible medical use (perhaps because it's related to other species that are known to produce useful medicines). It turns out that the local people remember some use that a previous local doctor had made of the species, but that fellow has died, and the current people don't know anything about the details. If the previous botanist had recorded the local medical usage in his notes, the medical investigators might have appeared on the scene earlier, before the local doctor died, and learned of the medicine.
There's a lot of inefficiency in how we handle such things. In this case, the compartmentalization of specialties results in botanists not being concerned with how local people use a species. The only concern is in documenting the species in enough detail to make it identifiable to other botanists, and recording basic info about its habitat. Human use of a plant is Someone Else's Problem.
The above local doctor's story isn't at all unusual, and shows a sort of inefficiency that's quite common: Medicine has been historically organized into local "guilds" that tend to be secretive about their knowledge. This was true in the West until the past couple centuries, and is still part of how Western commercial medicine operates. The fellow's attitude may be quite rational from his viewpoint, since telling others about his cure is likely to result in strangers coming in and ending part of his business. We have a patent system that protects corporations from such losses, but it doesn't work for individuals like this doctor.
We all suffer as a result of such social inefficiencies. But we don't seem to know how to fix the problems. And many people continue to support things like the patent system and corporate secrecy, which mostly just continue the problems (while occasionally making a very few people rich).
Heh; Microsoft may be a real bad example here, but they're hardly the only ones deserving of criticism.
Thus, I happen to be typing this on my 5-year-old Mac Powerbook. When I got it, half a gig of memory was a moderately big machine, and more that it really needed. Now, 5 years and uncounted upgrades later, it really could use more memory. The footprint of most of the tools, including non-Apple apps like Firefox and Opera, are significantly bigger than they used to be. Much of this is due to the growing use of memory-hungry modules like javascript and flash, of course; only part of the bloat is due to the base code. Multi-megabyte web pages are a lot more common now than they were 5 years ago.
I also have a linux box from around the same time, and it has seen the same bloat. So Microsoft isn't the only culprit, only the most notorious.
I wonder how many of those scientists made their own concoctions?
As a marginal case study, I'll mention that as a grad student, I helped pay my way by being the computer guru for a collection of bio (botany, zoology) researchers. It was common practice at the department's social events to have several bowls of drinkables that contained significant amounts of clinical ethanol. This was an "off label" use of the ethanol, of course, since it was purchased on research grants, and no liquor tax was paid. The ethanol wasn't denatured with bad-tasting chemicals, of course, since that would interfere with lab use. The general estimate was that roughly half of the purchased ethanol went into drinks (though I doubt if anyone kept records of such use).
This was done quite openly, and nobody even considered that someone might report them to the authorities. This has obviously gone on for a very long time, without any repercussions. This implies that there's no serious objection to such illegal use by anyone, not even from the people who only drank the non-alcoholic drinks (which were clearly labelled). I'd guess that the legal authorities are often aware of this practice, but it's such a small use (by a high-profile, respected population) that it's probably not worth their bother to challenge it.
A funny thing about clinical ethanol is that it has no taste. Drinking it undiluted isn't recommended, as ethanol in high concentration can seriously damage skin cells. Since it can't be tasted in mixtures, people have no idea how much they've consumed.
I'd guess that the legal authorities are often aware of this practice, but it's such a small use (by a high-profile, respected population) that it's probably not worth their bother to challenge it. Dealing with the much larger student population on Friday and Saturday nights is probably a much more attractive prospect (to politicians and police administrators) than dealing with a handful of researchers in their labs who divert part of their lab supplies to non-research use.
I didn't know of any creation of other psychoactive compounds in those labs, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened on occasion. As long as it wasn't a commercial operation, I doubt that the departments would have cared.
Actually, we have some evidence that many, possibly most scientists would consider this irrelevant, and would cooperate with such drug use when it enhances (or doesn't interfere with) research.
Consider Paul Erdös, widely considered one of the top mathematicians of the 20th century. All the biographies mention his frequent use of stimulants much more powerful than caffeine, all of them illegal. His colleagues didn't just accept this; many of them actively assisted his access to his drugs when he came visiting. You'd have great difficulty finding any mathematicians who'd voice more than a mild criticism of his drug use. His results were just too valuable for people to object to his methodology. The laws against such drug use just discredits the lawmakers, not the users who benefit from the drugs.
Paul said that he once decided to try going without drugs for a summer, to see what it was like. That summer, he produced almost no new mathematical results. He decided to never try that experiment again. Most mathematicians react to this story with a grin.
I'd predict that other scientific communities will respond the same way. I also wouldn't be surprised if people in a few other fields follow up with similar stories about other researchers. I've read that a number of bio field researchers in South America adopted the local use of coca leaves, and their colleagues didn't report them to the police. (But I don't recall their names.
philosophically speaking, you lose some of your identity when you self-enhance. if you don't buy my argument, i have two words for you: barry bonds. the guy was a great athlete and probably would have made a huge impact on baseball without steroids. now you tell me what his legacy is.
Good example, but perhaps not directly applicable to the case at hand. The reason for such rules in athletics is that we want to explicitly know what the athletes can do with their own bodies. Any runner could increase their speed tremendously by just using a machine such as a bicycle, motorcycle, or airplane. Some do, and we don't actually reject them. We just consider what they're doing to be different sports than running. Their "sport" lies in their ability to control their machines, not in what they can do with their own body.
But this doesn't apply to scientific research. Nobody criticizes Galileo or Newton for using mechanical enhancements (telescopes) to augment their research abilities. Bio researchers routinely use microscopes of all sorts to allow their eyes to see things that couldn't be seen otherwise. Everyone uses cameras that are sensitive to photons outside our visual range. And nearly everyone uses computers to increase their calculating ability, something that was considered a sign of intellectual power a century ago but is a mere mechanical ability now. We even use rockets to "throw" things much farther than Barry Bonds ever could, into various orbits, or even outside the Solar System, and it's not considered cheating.
The difference is that scientists want only the results. They don't (or shouldn't) compete with each other to demonstrate their brain power. They are supposed to cooperate to study the world around them. All sorts of physical enhancements have been developed to increase scientists' observing powers. Computers are now routinely used to radically speed up reasoning and calculating powers. Rockets have been developed to toss things places that our arms could never reach. There have been few if any objections to this from any quarter.
Augmenting scientists' intellectual ability via drugs isn't really materially different from augmenting those abilities via machinery. It's just introducing "machines" that are very much smaller, and interact directly with the scientists' nervous systems rather than indirectly via hands, eyes and ears. So we shouldn't expect much serious objection to this sort of enhancement, from scientists or from funding agencies.
We will, of course, have "moral" objections from our moral guardians. But that crowd has always objected to science, so we'll probably just continue to ignore them as we have for centuries.
But laws are never repealed. In my town, it is illegal to whack the heads off of snakes downtown. See, 100 years ago, ...
This has been a reliable source of humor for some time, and a number of collections of goofy laws have been published. I've recently run across a claim that in many US states (and probably various other countries), there are still laws on the books restricting vehicles to 5 or 10 mph. There's also supposedly one state (Kansas?) in which by law a motor vehicle must be preceded by a rider on horseback to warn the population.
Even more fun are the laws with unintended consequences, typically due to some detail of the wording. My favorite was the Oregon town that, a few years ago, passed a law that outlawed all sex. The intent was to outlaw public sex, i.e., exhibitionism. The wording outlawed all sex "visible from any place public or private". That pretty much covers it, with the possible exception of how it applies to blind people.
Another fun one that is probably still on the books: A few years ago, Florida had a law against "nude bathing" which didn't exempt bathing nude in your own bathroom. People did point out that nude showers were still legal in the state.
Such laws are fun to bring up when people are insisting that all laws should be obeyed. Some laws just beg to be broken (and challenged in court if necessary).
The software guys are already busy working on software upgrades that will counteract that processor speed so that the software is even slower than the current release.
I think it's a neat calculation. We've all lost track of what fast actually means for a modern CPU.
;-)
I think it's a dumb calculation. No human has a "feel" for the speed of light, or for the time it would take for light to move a centimeter or three.
Also, note that "knuckle" is ambiguous. When I hold my hand up, I see that each finger has three knuckles, and their distances from the finger's tip ranges from 25mm to 110mm.
I did first think that the "task" referred to a machine instruction, but on second thought, I suspect that's not true. It could mean any of various actions, each much smaller than an instruction. At the hardware level, a "task" could mean moving a charge (a bundle of electrons or photons) from one component to the next.
But I suppose we shouldn't expect data any more precise than this from someone representing IBM.
I told you the world wasnt going to end, i told you it would be MUCH worse.
... I wonder how they can work "Think of the children" into it? ;-)
Here we face a HOT future with NO BEER!
But we do have good historical evidence that, when the beer supply is at stake, people are often willing to go to great lengths to ensure its continued availability.
One example: Back when the genocidal war was going on in Rwanda, NPR had a couple of interesting articles about a group of people who were driving around the country wherever they wished, and were never attacked. They were beer truck drivers. The article went on to explain that in Rwandan society, even in the very upper crust, beer was the overwhelming drink of choice. Beer is always served with every meal. So when a truck with a beer logo showed up, nobody cared about the ethnicity of the driver; all they cared about was that the beer be delivered with minimal interference. People knew not to attack or rob beer trucks, because the beer distributors might halt deliveries to their neighborhood.
So, even when many people were willing to kill a member of group X on sight, they were willing to forgo their desire to kill when beer delivery was at stake.
Once this news gets spread by the MSM (MainStream Media), we can expect that the politicians will be falling all over themselves to DSAI (Do Something About It). Some of them might even do something relevant.
(Hmmm
Corn is ideal because we already had the infrastructure in place to integrate corn-based ethanol plants into the supply chain with virtually no cost (money or energy).
;-). A problem here is that sugar cane (and rum) is a (sub)tropical crop, while switchgrass is better suited to temperate zones, so we'll either need to educate some farmers (and brewers), or persuade the sugar-cage people to move to places where it gets cold.
That depends on where you live. It may be true in the US's Midwest or other farming areas with well-established grain crops. In other parts of the world, there are already commercial crops of Jatropha curcas, a dryland shrub whose seeds contain oil that can be burned directly by diesel engines without refining. There's also a tropical tree, Copaifera langsdorffii, which is tapped much like sugar maples, and whose sap also qualifies as diesel fuel. Google finds lots of info on both of them.
These two plants have only recently been domesticated, so there's a lot of research and breeding going on in the areas where they grow. J. curcas has potential to be a major crop the American southwest and southern Europe, as it's cold tolerant and needs only around 250 mm of rain per year to keep it happy. But the cultivation is rather different from corn, so you wouldn't expect corn farmers to immediately succeed with it, and it may not be a competitive crop for areas with more rainfall. C. langsdorffii isn't feasible outside the tropics, and is a medium-sized tree, so it has only been used for small-scale local fuel production so far, and will probably take some time to become a practical crop plant.
Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) has gotten some attention in the US, where it's a native plant with a lot of potential. Even President Bush has heard of it. But its cultivation, harvesting, and processing into fuel would be something new for corn farmers. Sugar cane growers would probably be better prospects, as the process would be familiar to them -- except for the final fermentation stage, which you'd want to hand over to the rum producers
There are a number of other plants undergoing serious research for fuel production. Of course, each species will require educating farmers and development of infrastructure for its use. That's part of why so many people have been suggesting that we should be doing the R&D now, rather than wait until our fuel-supply problems grow even more serious.
Well, I've done that intentionally, and been happy with the results.
You've gotta consider that some "businesses" don't want to maximise their visitor count; they want to maximise the number of visitors who want something that the site provides.
The example I'm thinking of is a site that I manage that provides several useful services to musicians. It also includes a mailto: link to let users tell me about problems. My problem was that I was getting lots of confused messages from visitors who were baffled by their inability to find any musical recordings on the site. This was, of course, not what the site was about. Even with a canned reply, telling them this was a significant time sinkhole on my part. And part of the problem is that the English language has some serious bugs in its musical terminology, so that pretty much any google search for music-related keywords will bury the sites you're looking for among large number of sites that are selling recorded music. This is partly because the sites that sell recordings generally list all known music-related terms as keywords, to bring in eyes. This is a disservice to musicians who are looking for stuff involved in making music, but there's not much we can do about it.
So what to do? What I did was put a prominent box on my front page telling visitors that there are no recordings on the site, and if they don't understand how you can have a music site without recordings, they're at the wrong site. This cut my hit count in half, and freed up the time that I'd spent dealing with email from people looking for something that the site didn't provide. It also lightened the load on my server somewhat, though not by much because visiting musicians tend to stay around for a while. It didn't affect income from the site at all, since it was warning away people who would never have been customers anyway.
A well-designed web site should not only make itself easily available to the people that want what it provides; it should also (subtly or not) let other people know that "You won't find what you want here". Unless, of course, you're running one of those sites that just tries to trick people into visiting so they'll see your ads. I can understand your motives for that, of course, but I do what I can to prevent you from wasting my time.
It's not just list stuff that's missing. I don't seem to see moderations anywhere any more. I looked at a couple of my messages yesterday that were moderated, and all I saw was the number; the list of moderations was nowhere to be seen.
I looked on several browsers on my Mac, including SeaMonkey, FireFox, Safari and Opera, and none of them showed the moderations.
I mean, how am I to get upset and indignant about a "troll" rather than the "funny" that I expected, when I can't see the actual moderation?
I still can't even figure out why Microsoft would want them other than to just make them go away.
Bingo!
The only motive here is the elimination of a competitor. Price is no matter; Microsoft wants Yahoo! destroyed because it's one of the two barriers in the way of Microsoft owning the search business.
It's similar to back when Microsoft decided that Netscape had to die. It rapidly became clear that the leaks were true: Bill and Steve had decided that they would lose whatever money they had to lose to own the browser market. They succeeded, and although they've made no money from IE at all (i.e., they've sunk the entire cost of developing it), they are now firmly in control of what the majority of eyes see on the Web. Sinking a few hundred million into IE was a small price to pay for that power.
Their goal now is to control what all those eyes see when they search the Web. Their problem is that most people think either "google" or "yahoo" is what you type to do a search. Not even MS fanboys like MS's search. They understand that they can't compete in the search arena on quality. So they're going to use their huge pile of money to destroy their remaining competitors. Yahoo is the easiest target, so they're going after it first. And they'll lose whatever they have to lose to kill it.
Then it'll be google's turn in the crosshairs.
So, essentially, comcast sucks so hard that they have to break their network to save it. They're fucked; find a new ISP.
Not very useful advice for most Comcast customers. As others have pointed out, in most of its market area, Comcast is a legal monopoly. In the few areas where they aren't, their only "competition" is DSL via a phone company like Verizon, which is even worse.
The only real solutions are to end such legal monopolies, or to reinstate strict regulation as a condition for the monopoly. But with the current political situation here in the US, neither is likely to happen any time soon.
To figure out if your connections are getting screwed, you need to watch your network interface speed (UL/DL) and be able to throttle it to 50% (not SYN/ACK).
;-)
I'd love to, but I don't have a clue as to how to do that. Are there any tools around that will do the job?
(And no, I won't tell you what sort of system I'm using. I want to see answers that are usable by other readers who'd like to follow your advice, but have different systems than mine.
Think it would be cool if every Slashdot reader listed the open source project they have released along with the Sourceforge, Freshmeat or or repo address.
Well, I would, but there's an annoying problem: I haven't been able to update the sourceforge copy of my project for a couple of years now. I just get incomprehensible error codes that neither I nor google seems to be able to find explanations for. Meanwhile, I occasionally get email from people who have picked up the code from SF, and talk about possible extensions. Often, I've already made them, but I can't get them into SF. So I try to get the news out that the SF copy of my code is badly out of date. But of course most people never see my comments; they only see the code on SF.
Anyone know how to get out of this mess? Is there some way to wipe out a SF project that can't be updated, and restart it from scratch? I've totally failed to find that info in the docs.
I have a couple of other things I'd like to put into SF, but I'm a bit leery of creating a new account to do that, when my old account is still there as a read-only, non-updatable zombie. It'd be really annoying to just create more zombies with outdated code.
..., but what good is throttling their users if the users can just disable it?
Hey, an easy one!
The ISPs don't exactly advertise this. They don't even mention it to customers. They rely on the fact that most customers will have no idea such a "feature" exists, much less how to find where it's hidden in the ISP's web site. Only a small crowd of geeks will know about it.
And, as some other semi-paranoid writer mentioned earlier, the ISP could well use your opting out for throttling as evidence that you intend to "abuse" their service. It's likely that their CS guys will know which customers have disabled throttling, and this will affect the sort of service you get.
"Up to *Mb/s"
Indeed. Whenever I read "up to" in anything at all commercial, I always mentally translate it to "less than". That makes their intents much clearer.
OTOH, I have occasionally, when reading code aloud, read '' as "up to". Sometimes this gets big grins from others in the vicinity.