With Terrabyte external disks costing 100 dollars these days, what's the advantage of Holographic storage? Extreme conditions where traditional magnetic media couldn't survive? Faster random access?
$1,270 is two day's wages for a qualified in-house technician. It's also the lost productivity for 1 hour of downtime in an office of 20 people.
You should always test your cable, commercially purchased or not. Whether this particular tester is overkill is an exercise left to the reader. But buying commercial cable does not excuse you from testing it all.
We didn't need fast computers for everyday use and then we wanted them to actually boot Windows 9 in less than 5 minutes. Sure, sure, hybernate. That's fine if a half-million separate updater applications weren't rebooting the damned thing every two minutes. And I'm sure with Microsoft's cosy relationship to Intel we'll see operating system versions taking up less and less resources to do the same things. Thanks to that, we'll soon need a nanowired quantum state machine to run the latest DOS.
Wait, what? Modern piracy of SNES and NES games didn't hurt their sales at all. Copy protection in those days was the fact that you couldn't make a copy of a cartridge (disk systems excluded). You made your money, and things worked. NES piracy was rampant by the time the N64 was ready, and they still didn't care enough to make a serious attempt to copy protect those cartridges.
The industry was and is focused on *current* copy protection, as everyone is well aware that all systems will eventually be cracked or emulated. The Dreamcast was rather well protected against this for a while. It used GD-Roms, which could only be copied to smaller CDs if you removed most of the content. And even then CD's only ran through a loophole in a system to facilitate magazine demos. The PS1 and PS2 both required hardware hacks of increasing sophistication to get around copyprotection schemas.
Really, the industry is so focused on selling a game next month, that they hardly think about ten years down the line when emulation catches up. Short-term protection is the name of the game.
5) It's not really *shocking news* to western news outlets when we do it?
6) We're a bit less subtle about it. We've already admitted to Echelon, extensive wiretapping at the carrier level, etc. We've also got Gitmo, prisoner torture, and two wars going for us. Simple spying barely registers.
Right, but Brass Knuckle stores are all illegal. Many knives have significant non-illegal use. Some don't, and so are banned. Bittorrent itself is not illegal, because it has significant legal usages. But creating a search engine specifically for illegal material (Pirate's Bay?) doesn't have significant legal usages.
It's like Paul Reiser's case. There was a statistical possibility that he was innocent, so we all jumped to his defense. But the Law deals with lots of greys. Sure, The Pirate's Bay might have possibly have been used for things other than software and video piracy, but let's not be willfully ignorant here about what they did.
If they did this, their old XP codebase would be competing with new Vista / Vista 2 sales. Given full options, most companies wouldn't open them to the community. Most companies would erase all previous installs, burn all install disks, and sell upgrades left and right.
Also, I severely doubt any commercial project as large as XP has the rights to open all of their code.
You could run Outlook under Wine on Linux. You could run Open Office and Firefox on OSX. Personally, I run TheBat! and Opera on Vista.
The operating system is not the application suite. If you tie those two together, people will never merge away from Outlook / I.E. Switching entire operating systems is a lot bigger of a hurdle than simply installing another application. Heck, you can install Firefox and Thunderbird on a person's windows PC, and yet leave Outlook and I.E. on there so that they can return if they ever choose to.
IME not all tech people do the same, but I personally take time to explain alternatives to them... Most non-tech people come to me with complaints like yours, and walk away happily with a nice little Thunderbird install.
In other words, please make an effort not to perpetuate that misconception.
Outlook is not Vista. Outlook is a horribly written pile of junk that Microsoft should be ashamed of. Outlook crashes regularly, can't be run for long, and exhibits weird behaviors that any sanely written program wouldn't have the slightest problem with. Every new version of Outlook appears to have been written by applying a new wrapper around the previous version, until the entire thing is a buggy, bloated, unstable, unmanageable mess of a dog.
Vista, by comparison, isn't nearly as bad. Bloated, yes, with years of kruft. But at least it is stable.
Do we know what 75MBps as a percentage of total site traffic is? It seems like if that number is 1% or less, there would be more important areas to optimize. A little slack can be more valuable than bandwidth in a complex system.
Cats predict their feeding time pretty well. Ours freak out when luggage comes out, because they know that preceeds a move or an extended period where we're away.
Quite frankly, the only reason this is news is because it further chips away at our flimsy excuses to treat intelligent animals so poorly. Koko knew frick'in sign language for crying out loud, yet there are still people who argue that they are not intelligent enough to feel pain.
* No standard OS-level file container, to keep the file system from becoming a sewer of random program bits. * file-heirchy driven linking, thereby preventing any applications from being re-organized. * The Registry
And don't get me started on the information heirchy choices. Setting Outlook mail clients via control panel? And only when Outlook is closed? Really?
Since someone picked the rest of this apart, I need to do the math.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those [Windows 95] applications were written decades ago and will still work.
Today = 2009 1 decade ago = 1997 2 decades ago = 1985 3 decades ago = 1973
The only option available to a bank in "decades" ago computing would be DOS, some variant of UNIX, IBM punch cards, or one of several other computer lines that are no longer with us. Windows 95 still isn't old enough to drive a car.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
If you go to Microsoft's page on older windows compatibility, they use such terms as "in most cases" and ends with "If your program does not run correctly after testing it with the Program Compatibility Wizard, check the Web site of the program's manufacturer to see if an update or patch is available." That doesn't sound like a given. The compatibility between 95 and Vista is even worse... Heck, the compatibility between XP and Vista is pretty bad.
Okay, here's an "artificial barrier": You're an IT administrator for a bank. You support about 35 mission-critical applications that go to a mainframe. Why keep the mainframe? Because it's the only thing that's gone through the laborous process of being documented, audited, and certified for use. Those certifications could run into the tens of millions of dollars, plus another fifty million to retool your existing infrastructure, minimum. All those applications were written for Windows 95.
Your mainframe runs Windows 95? Windows 95 has: 1. A hard limit of 500 MB of memory 2. A disk limit of 32 GB 3. No journaling in the FAT file system 4. Zero user access and other security controls 5. A propensity towards needing to be rebooted daily
Assuming we're talking about raw number-of-supported-users, you should be able to support between 8 (RAM limited) to 30 (Disk Limited) times as manu users on a more modern desktop OS configuration used as a server. On a real server configuration, you should be able to serve hundreds or thousands of more users. That alone should be enough to validate the cost of certification.
Further, if this is truly as mission-critical as it sounds, that would add journaling file systems, support for RAID configurations, user protections... Oh, and an OS whose security support wasn't end-of-lifed back in 2002.
But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with the latest and greatest.
As mentioned, Win 95 was EOL'ed in 2002, about 7 years after launch. Earlier versions of Linux, on the other hand, still have active security patches issued. If you wanted to roll out 400 more Win 95 seats, you simply couldn't do it legally. If you wanted 400 more linux 2.4 kernel servers, it would be easy to do.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term. And that costs money, time, effort, and yes... it's a MUCH higher standard to reach for.
You remember back when something like 50% of the ATM's in the US caught a worm, because they were all still running on an old, no-longer-supported version of Windows? Yeah, those were good times.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and will still work.
As a Vista user, I assure you that Windows applications do break. They break with about the same frequency as OSX or Linux applications break (95 to 98 was a big one. 98 to 2000 was too. A little bump with 2000 to XP. Another huge bump with XP to Vista). One big difference that another poster pointed out is that there are still supported older versions of linux kernel getting security patches, but the same can't be said for Windows 95.
But one way or another, your app will break or will need to be run under a virutal compatibility layer. Apple is very good about emulation layers, while Linux is better at virtualization.
In the end, if you didn't write your mission-critical application in the most general and platform-agnostic way possible, upgrading to a new OS in the same line will eventually bite you.
Our economy is broken in more ways than just the financial system. Our Car companies have been mismanaged for years, our healthcare system is derided worldwide for being incredibly expensive and backwater, our education system is a joke.
What we need to get out of any economic downturn is higher per-capita productivity. Health Care has been a big drain on our economy for years, and a distributed automated health records system is long overdue. My Mechanic has better records of the work done on my car than My Doctor. I've seen doctors prescribe to my grandmother treatments that had serious interactions with drugs she was already taking, and treatments that she was simply allergic to.
We need growth and efficiencies, and this is one area where a little expenditure would save a lot of lives. And I hate to sound this crass, but saving lives cheaply is good for the economy.
If there was an oven that was instantly ready to cook, would you be tempted to switch? If you were replacing your old oven with a new one, would you find that feature appealing?
I don't know about you, but my radar range gets a lot of use simply for that convienience, despite the fact that the food comes out tasting worse.
Anyway, I have no interest in footing the bill with my tax money to pay for something that is a net drag on energy. If they can't afford to make it commercially viable on their own, they shouldn't look to do it on the taxpayer dime.
If you check the article, they're referring to the cost of batteries. The cost of batteries is currently rather high, in no small part because we've more or less stopped doing R&D the way we used to in this country, and instead left it all to private entities who horde knowledge. Japan on the other hand is investing quite heavily in advanced battery research.
So we're left with a problem. If battery research pays off, and we don't do anything about domestic development, Toyota and other Japanese car manufacturers will continue to dominate our vehicle landscape. In that case, domestic car manufacturers are probably doomed. If we do help fund research by subsidizing advancements in vehicle technology, we may avoid major costs later when GM, Ford, and Chrystler still can't compete. Or it may be all a red herring, and Diesel (which we're also not investing in) takes over from Europe.
In the grand scheme of things, I think we should let the economy recover a bit, get positive growth going, then take the US car companies out back and shoot them. But if that's not an option, we do need to invest in their future.
hilarity of pirating your own music aside,there is just something about an anti-piracy crusader who has never actually pirated before. It's sort of like prohibitionists who have never had a drink, anti-drug crusaders who have never been high, or marrige councelors who are virgins. Their statements ring false.
I think people picked up on that in the past. Piracy may be wrong, but the message coming from someone who hasn't done it first hand rings false.
Hopefully this helps raise the level of discourse all around.
Lots of bands that play poorly live sound great on their CD's, and vice-versa. I'd go as far as to say that *most* of the bands that I've liked listening to live have sounded terrible when laid down, and vice-versa.
It's the musician's dillema. Focus on the tricks that make a recording sound good, or focus on the aspects that make a live performance sound good. They're very different sounds.
Of course, I'd guess that the major impetus for getting a click track to the drummer has not been the relentless march of soulless digitization, but simply ticked off guitarists. Sure, we might call it the natural ebb and flow of music, but on stage it is called the drummer screwing everyone else up.
Unless it is specifically "art" or "media," generally for physical objects in film purposes you have to worry about trademark questions rather than copyright. You don't think that everything on television is made from scratch, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
With Terrabyte external disks costing 100 dollars these days, what's the advantage of Holographic storage? Extreme conditions where traditional magnetic media couldn't survive? Faster random access?
$1,270 is two day's wages for a qualified in-house technician. It's also the lost productivity for 1 hour of downtime in an office of 20 people.
You should always test your cable, commercially purchased or not. Whether this particular tester is overkill is an exercise left to the reader. But buying commercial cable does not excuse you from testing it all.
We didn't need fast computers for everyday use and then we wanted them to actually boot Windows 9 in less than 5 minutes. Sure, sure, hybernate. That's fine if a half-million separate updater applications weren't rebooting the damned thing every two minutes. And I'm sure with Microsoft's cosy relationship to Intel we'll see operating system versions taking up less and less resources to do the same things. Thanks to that, we'll soon need a nanowired quantum state machine to run the latest DOS.
Wait, what? Modern piracy of SNES and NES games didn't hurt their sales at all. Copy protection in those days was the fact that you couldn't make a copy of a cartridge (disk systems excluded). You made your money, and things worked. NES piracy was rampant by the time the N64 was ready, and they still didn't care enough to make a serious attempt to copy protect those cartridges.
The industry was and is focused on *current* copy protection, as everyone is well aware that all systems will eventually be cracked or emulated. The Dreamcast was rather well protected against this for a while. It used GD-Roms, which could only be copied to smaller CDs if you removed most of the content. And even then CD's only ran through a loophole in a system to facilitate magazine demos. The PS1 and PS2 both required hardware hacks of increasing sophistication to get around copyprotection schemas.
Really, the industry is so focused on selling a game next month, that they hardly think about ten years down the line when emulation catches up. Short-term protection is the name of the game.
Judging by the news in the past few weeks, the new piracy is... piracy.
5) It's not really *shocking news* to western news outlets when we do it?
6) We're a bit less subtle about it. We've already admitted to Echelon, extensive wiretapping at the carrier level, etc. We've also got Gitmo, prisoner torture, and two wars going for us. Simple spying barely registers.
Right, but Brass Knuckle stores are all illegal. Many knives have significant non-illegal use. Some don't, and so are banned. Bittorrent itself is not illegal, because it has significant legal usages. But creating a search engine specifically for illegal material (Pirate's Bay?) doesn't have significant legal usages.
It's like Paul Reiser's case. There was a statistical possibility that he was innocent, so we all jumped to his defense. But the Law deals with lots of greys. Sure, The Pirate's Bay might have possibly have been used for things other than software and video piracy, but let's not be willfully ignorant here about what they did.
Federal Budget for 2005
What here is sticking out?
If they did this, their old XP codebase would be competing with new Vista / Vista 2 sales. Given full options, most companies wouldn't open them to the community. Most companies would erase all previous installs, burn all install disks, and sell upgrades left and right.
Also, I severely doubt any commercial project as large as XP has the rights to open all of their code.
They threw it open to an internet vote. They're lucky it's not called Goatse.
You could run Outlook under Wine on Linux. You could run Open Office and Firefox on OSX. Personally, I run TheBat! and Opera on Vista.
The operating system is not the application suite. If you tie those two together, people will never merge away from Outlook / I.E. Switching entire operating systems is a lot bigger of a hurdle than simply installing another application. Heck, you can install Firefox and Thunderbird on a person's windows PC, and yet leave Outlook and I.E. on there so that they can return if they ever choose to.
IME not all tech people do the same, but I personally take time to explain alternatives to them... Most non-tech people come to me with complaints like yours, and walk away happily with a nice little Thunderbird install.
In other words, please make an effort not to perpetuate that misconception.
At the risk of sounding like "640KByte is enough for everyone", I have to ask why you think why you need 16GB to check your email next year.
Ever edit a home movie on your computer?
Outlook is not Vista. Outlook is a horribly written pile of junk that Microsoft should be ashamed of. Outlook crashes regularly, can't be run for long, and exhibits weird behaviors that any sanely written program wouldn't have the slightest problem with. Every new version of Outlook appears to have been written by applying a new wrapper around the previous version, until the entire thing is a buggy, bloated, unstable, unmanageable mess of a dog.
Vista, by comparison, isn't nearly as bad. Bloated, yes, with years of kruft. But at least it is stable.
Do we know what 75MBps as a percentage of total site traffic is? It seems like if that number is 1% or less, there would be more important areas to optimize. A little slack can be more valuable than bandwidth in a complex system.
Cats predict their feeding time pretty well. Ours freak out when luggage comes out, because they know that preceeds a move or an extended period where we're away.
Quite frankly, the only reason this is news is because it further chips away at our flimsy excuses to treat intelligent animals so poorly. Koko knew frick'in sign language for crying out loud, yet there are still people who argue that they are not intelligent enough to feel pain.
* No standard OS-level file container, to keep the file system from becoming a sewer of random program bits.
* file-heirchy driven linking, thereby preventing any applications from being re-organized.
* The Registry
And don't get me started on the information heirchy choices. Setting Outlook mail clients via control panel? And only when Outlook is closed? Really?
Since someone picked the rest of this apart, I need to do the math.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those [Windows 95] applications were written decades ago and will still work.
Today = 2009
1 decade ago = 1997
2 decades ago = 1985
3 decades ago = 1973
The only option available to a bank in "decades" ago computing would be DOS, some variant of UNIX, IBM punch cards, or one of several other computer lines that are no longer with us. Windows 95 still isn't old enough to drive a car.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term.
If you go to Microsoft's page on older windows compatibility, they use such terms as "in most cases" and ends with "If your program does not run correctly after testing it with the Program Compatibility Wizard, check the Web site of the program's manufacturer to see if an update or patch is available." That doesn't sound like a given. The compatibility between 95 and Vista is even worse... Heck, the compatibility between XP and Vista is pretty bad.
Okay, here's an "artificial barrier": You're an IT administrator for a bank. You support about 35 mission-critical applications that go to a mainframe. Why keep the mainframe? Because it's the only thing that's gone through the laborous process of being documented, audited, and certified for use. Those certifications could run into the tens of millions of dollars, plus another fifty million to retool your existing infrastructure, minimum. All those applications were written for Windows 95.
Your mainframe runs Windows 95? Windows 95 has:
1. A hard limit of 500 MB of memory
2. A disk limit of 32 GB
3. No journaling in the FAT file system
4. Zero user access and other security controls
5. A propensity towards needing to be rebooted daily
Assuming we're talking about raw number-of-supported-users, you should be able to support between 8 (RAM limited) to 30 (Disk Limited) times as manu users on a more modern desktop OS configuration used as a server. On a real server configuration, you should be able to serve hundreds or thousands of more users. That alone should be enough to validate the cost of certification.
Further, if this is truly as mission-critical as it sounds, that would add journaling file systems, support for RAID configurations, user protections... Oh, and an OS whose security support wasn't end-of-lifed back in 2002.
But you go with Apple, or Linux and what do you get? Every five years, maybe ten if you're lucky, you have to rebuild and redesign everything to make it work with the latest and greatest.
As mentioned, Win 95 was EOL'ed in 2002, about 7 years after launch. Earlier versions of Linux, on the other hand, still have active security patches issued. If you wanted to roll out 400 more Win 95 seats, you simply couldn't do it legally. If you wanted 400 more linux 2.4 kernel servers, it would be easy to do.
Microsoft delivers what businesses want: Reliability. Long. Term. And that costs money, time, effort, and yes... it's a MUCH higher standard to reach for.
You remember back when something like 50% of the ATM's in the US caught a worm, because they were all still running on an old, no-longer-supported version of Windows? Yeah, those were good times.
Now, Microsoft is a safe bet because you know those applications were written decades ago and will still work.
As a Vista user, I assure you that Windows applications do break. They break with about the same frequency as OSX or Linux applications break (95 to 98 was a big one. 98 to 2000 was too. A little bump with 2000 to XP. Another huge bump with XP to Vista). One big difference that another poster pointed out is that there are still supported older versions of linux kernel getting security patches, but the same can't be said for Windows 95.
But one way or another, your app will break or will need to be run under a virutal compatibility layer. Apple is very good about emulation layers, while Linux is better at virtualization.
In the end, if you didn't write your mission-critical application in the most general and platform-agnostic way possible, upgrading to a new OS in the same line will eventually bite you.
Along these lines, never buy anything dirty from Amazon.com.
Umm... That's what someone told me.
Our economy is broken in more ways than just the financial system. Our Car companies have been mismanaged for years, our healthcare system is derided worldwide for being incredibly expensive and backwater, our education system is a joke.
What we need to get out of any economic downturn is higher per-capita productivity. Health Care has been a big drain on our economy for years, and a distributed automated health records system is long overdue. My Mechanic has better records of the work done on my car than My Doctor. I've seen doctors prescribe to my grandmother treatments that had serious interactions with drugs she was already taking, and treatments that she was simply allergic to.
We need growth and efficiencies, and this is one area where a little expenditure would save a lot of lives. And I hate to sound this crass, but saving lives cheaply is good for the economy.
If there was an oven that was instantly ready to cook, would you be tempted to switch? If you were replacing your old oven with a new one, would you find that feature appealing?
I don't know about you, but my radar range gets a lot of use simply for that convienience, despite the fact that the food comes out tasting worse.
Anyway, I have no interest in footing the bill with my tax money to pay for something that is a net drag on energy. If they can't afford to make it commercially viable on their own, they shouldn't look to do it on the taxpayer dime.
If you check the article, they're referring to the cost of batteries. The cost of batteries is currently rather high, in no small part because we've more or less stopped doing R&D the way we used to in this country, and instead left it all to private entities who horde knowledge. Japan on the other hand is investing quite heavily in advanced battery research.
So we're left with a problem. If battery research pays off, and we don't do anything about domestic development, Toyota and other Japanese car manufacturers will continue to dominate our vehicle landscape. In that case, domestic car manufacturers are probably doomed. If we do help fund research by subsidizing advancements in vehicle technology, we may avoid major costs later when GM, Ford, and Chrystler still can't compete. Or it may be all a red herring, and Diesel (which we're also not investing in) takes over from Europe.
In the grand scheme of things, I think we should let the economy recover a bit, get positive growth going, then take the US car companies out back and shoot them. But if that's not an option, we do need to invest in their future.
hilarity of pirating your own music aside,there is just something about an anti-piracy crusader who has never actually pirated before. It's sort of like prohibitionists who have never had a drink, anti-drug crusaders who have never been high, or marrige councelors who are virgins. Their statements ring false.
I think people picked up on that in the past. Piracy may be wrong, but the message coming from someone who hasn't done it first hand rings false.
Hopefully this helps raise the level of discourse all around.
Lots of bands that play poorly live sound great on their CD's, and vice-versa. I'd go as far as to say that *most* of the bands that I've liked listening to live have sounded terrible when laid down, and vice-versa.
It's the musician's dillema. Focus on the tricks that make a recording sound good, or focus on the aspects that make a live performance sound good. They're very different sounds.
Of course, I'd guess that the major impetus for getting a click track to the drummer has not been the relentless march of soulless digitization, but simply ticked off guitarists. Sure, we might call it the natural ebb and flow of music, but on stage it is called the drummer screwing everyone else up.
Unless it is specifically "art" or "media," generally for physical objects in film purposes you have to worry about trademark questions rather than copyright. You don't think that everything on television is made from scratch, do you?