There's not much point in advertising an item that customers won't be able to buy for another few months. The people who have preordered don't need an advertisement to convince them to buy a PS2.:)
So you're claiming that not having credit cards is being in debtors prison? Wow. Do you realize that this is how the world worked for a very long time. Most people used this unusual (for today) thing called savings.
The original poster messed up. It's a C-90, air cooled. Not a Y-MP. I've seen it. It's big, yellow, and pretty in that industrial way. If I was setting up an evil lair to take over the world, I'd definitely one one in the background.
I don't know about the Y-MP, but many crays came with the option of air or liquid cooling. The PSC usually used air-cooled machines. Maybe they had some volkswagen enthusiasts in the purchasing group.
Global average temperatures are rising and will continue to rise even if we stopped pumping oil today.
You're correct. The reason: we're still coming out of an ice age. If we do nothing to pollute, and had done nothing to pollute for the last few centuries, global average temperatures would still be rising.
Global warming exists, but it has very little to do with polution. Look into the environmental propaganda of the 1970s. They were afraid that CFCs would cause massive global cooling. That was obviously wrong, so CFCs remained the enemy, but now they cause warming. Maybe they do, but the slow rise in global temperature that we're seeing is more a result of our leaving an ice age than of any pollutants.
I'm really glad that Akamai seems to be saying no to the people who want them to censor. I'd like to contact them, thank them, and find a way to support them if possible. Unfortunately http://www.akamaitech.net didn't work. It looks like http://www.akamai.com is the place to go.
This could have one important side-effect: AOL could make self-booting CDs. A user could literally turn on their machine and be runninng AOL off of the CD. Forget about installation problems, OS corruption, or anything else. AOL could even use their own distribution if they wanted. This would be a tech support dream: Doesn't work? Boot a new CD.
If it were not for his zeal and his amazing drive, we would all still be using commercial software, without the source, without any hope of openness, without ANYTHING.
I'm going to try to be gentle here, but if you ask a lot of people, particularly some the BSD people who were working for open source long before Stallman got into it, Stallman set back the open source movement with his zealotry.
Things like gcc and emacs succeeded because most of the people who thought that Stallman was a crackpot also understood how important it is to avoid dividing a small community.
For a long time, corporations were afraid of dabbling in open source because the most prominent voices were revolutionaries like RMS, who have a definite anti-commercial-software attitude. It was something that no company could really afford to be seen encouraging, despite what us ordinary people were doing.
The BSDs and the non-FSF open source types like Raymond deserve much more credit for making open source seem compatable with business.
Unfortunately, trademarks apply to specific areas, or trades. The Who has prior use of Pinball Wizard as a song title. Apogee can claim a trademark on Pinball Wizard as the name of a computer game, and if I wanted to, I could open my own line of Pinball Wizard sperm banks without infringing on anyone else's trademark.
C'mon, you've never used a piece of placeholder code? Ever?
Probably not. Many of the biggest defenders of the GPL are students or academics. In other words: people who've never had to notice a direct connection between their coding and their income.
I suspect that much of this zealotry is caused by insufficient experience with the real world. That's probably true of most zealotry, though.
I like linux. I'm running it at work and at home on my desktop machines.
Why, though, would you want this in a handheld device? A standard unix startup includes device initialization, filesystem integrity checks, etc. and then login. In other words, it's designed to set up everything, then allow the user to work. In a handheld, I want to be able to work NOW. Initialize the IR port when I want to use it. Don't waste my time (and battery life) initializing it before I can work. When I'm done, shut it down as soon as possible.
This just-in-time device management is something that linux doesn't really have. While the device might be good for linux if it make that kind of management possible, I'm not sure that I believe that linux is good for a handheld device right now.
Microsoft is so worried about the windows cash cow that they do everything in their power to make it impractical to use a CE machine without syncing it to a desktop. They distribute drivers and updates as.exes that have to be run from the desktop and encourage other developers to do the same. They've been extremely reluctant to add basic features that'd reduce desktop dependence, including things like printing. (okay, you can print to a PCL printer, but nothing else -- any guesses about who's one of the biggest CE developers?) They include "Pocket PowerPoint", but there's no way to create presentations -- you have to import from the desktop.
The sad part is that CE's actually a decent product. It's really nice to have a machine with a power-on and power-off time of a second. It crashes, but far less than windows -- although this may be related to the lack of complicated applications. I'd love to have a larger CE machine (like the Jornada 820) as a laptop replacement. Unfortunately, Microsoft realizes that too, so they've cripped CE so that it doesn't compete with their other OSs.
Elias Levy seems to be saying that security through obscurity does work, because he thinks that everyone is lazy/dumb.
I don't know where you gathered that assumption, but I don't think that it was what the author intended.
Security through obscurity does work, simply because it increases the difficulty involved with the effort to circumvent it. Adding bits to a key works the same way.
The difference, though, is that the additional protection from obscurity is lost once it's broken and published. "Netscape engineers are weenies!" no longer keeps the frontpage passwords safe, but it did for a long time.
You could claim that security through obscurity works because of laziness, but by that logic, you'd have to claim that longer key lengths work because of laziness too.
Does anyone know why it takes an OpenBSD machine 20 minutes to copy a disk image to floppy disk when other OSs take 2 or 3 minutes? I'm guessing that there's a valid reason related to caching or verification, but maybe the driver's just lousy.
I know, sort of offtopic, but you can see the tumbleweeds blowing through here (first post 17 hours after the original article?), and I'm curious.
While skins are simply obnoxious most of the time, they are finally making UI designers consider flexibility. I find it depressing that so many UIs rely on their own hard-coded interface, especially when that interface sucks.
Take, for example, the humble web page. Assume the existance of a user who has figured out that the monitor is not a piece of paper and would prefer white text on a black background. Now, see how long that user can survive in a web where stupid designers set background color to white while allowing the user to keep their preferred font color (which is white, in this case.)
Many programs make this assumption. MS Word uses your preferred background, while forcing a black font, going for a HGTTG-style black-on-black interface. Ghostview for unix used to do this too.
Skins are usually annoying, but if a designer is considering skins, they're far more likely to use the appropriate UI toolkits and implement the extendability properly. This, in my opinion, is better for everyone.
Basically, it's a government standard for computer security. Most free unixes don't even come close.
This is partly because, as security increases, convenience decreases. A and B rated systems require hardware that's designed for security, and PC hardware isn't.
This is such a bad tecnology that only the really clueless will buy it.
And yet, Microsoft thrives.
Flamebait aside, companies have nothing to lose by implementing this. The customers and people who connect to them are screwed, but for many companies, the extra information gleaned about customers may be a worthwhile exchange for the extra technical hassle.
IBM (and others) have found problems with the default linux thread handling. IBM went so far as to send a patch to the kernel folks to correct it. The patch wasn't implemented because the patch fixes problems under high load (where it's most needed, IMO), but may decrease performance under low loads.
We did in fact pay $20 a month for ethernet access which came to around $9600 a month that a dorm would pay for something like ResNet. This most certainly facilitates the kind of bandwidth that the students would be using up with programs like Napster.
Universities usually do things "properly" -- contractors paid "progressive" wages, room for future expansion, good quality materials, etc.
Maintaining the physical infrastructure (wires, conduits, routers) is expensive.
The "wet" infrastructure (aka "people who take care of the network") has to be paid, and their offices have to be provided.
Finally, the bandwidth has to be paid for. While this has been going down a lot, T1's still aren't cheap.
All of these things add up to substantial costs -- far more than $20/month.
I suspect that if your university provided no connection to the outside internet and only offered a connection to the internal network, it'd still cost at least $20/month. They're probably subsidizing the cost considerably, and making people pay $20/month as a way to limit the number of people asking for connections.
Most of the DDoS tools that I've seen work best from Solaris or Linux. I've never seen a Stacheldraht attack from anything but a solaris box -- though it's supposed to run under Linux, IIRC. Linux, in turn, is the favorite personal OS of script kiddies and packet monkeys.
(And please, turn your flamethrower off. I know that there are plently of legit linux users. I'm one of 'em.)
Uhh... If they got those numbers from the NFL, then they're faulty.
A few years ago, someone was trying to figure out how the NFL could claim that 90% of the viewers were from other countries. It turned out that the NFL took the percentage of TVs tuned to it in the US, applied that percentage to the total number of TVs in the world, then threw in a few million for good measure.
The truth is that much of the world cares very little for american football, despite the wishes of the NFL.
Not to be a smartass, but it has seating to provide a place to sit. Really.
Machine rooms are generally filled with lots of expensive equipment, and managers tend to want to remove things like chairs that could scratch, bump, or break the equipment. In the machine room for the place I used to work, there were no chairs within a good 30 meters of the crays and other expensive machines. When it was necessary to work in that part of the room, we had to stand or drag a chair across the room.
Add up federal, state, and local taxes. Now, throw in sales tax and the (substantial) hidden corporate taxes and tariffs that raise the price of items on the shelf.
I don't make that much, but if I could pay a flat 40% in exchange for eliminating all other taxes, I'd be getting a good deal.
Slashdot Mirror
There's not much point in advertising an item that customers won't be able to buy for another few months. The people who have preordered don't need an advertisement to convince them to buy a PS2. :)
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While I believe that the NYT has a right to require registration to read their articles, there are times like now when it's funny.
We have to provide personal demographic data to read an article about how the government wants to misuse our personal demographic data.
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The original poster messed up. It's a C-90, air cooled. Not a Y-MP. I've seen it. It's big, yellow, and pretty in that industrial way. If I was setting up an evil lair to take over the world, I'd definitely one one in the background.
I don't know about the Y-MP, but many crays came with the option of air or liquid cooling. The PSC usually used air-cooled machines. Maybe they had some volkswagen enthusiasts in the purchasing group.
--
You're correct. The reason: we're still coming out of an ice age. If we do nothing to pollute, and had done nothing to pollute for the last few centuries, global average temperatures would still be rising.
Global warming exists, but it has very little to do with polution. Look into the environmental propaganda of the 1970s. They were afraid that CFCs would cause massive global cooling. That was obviously wrong, so CFCs remained the enemy, but now they cause warming. Maybe they do, but the slow rise in global temperature that we're seeing is more a result of our leaving an ice age than of any pollutants.
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--
This could have one important side-effect: AOL could make self-booting CDs. A user could literally turn on their machine and be runninng AOL off of the CD. Forget about installation problems, OS corruption, or anything else. AOL could even use their own distribution if they wanted. This would be a tech support dream: Doesn't work? Boot a new CD.
--
I'm going to try to be gentle here, but if you ask a lot of people, particularly some the BSD people who were working for open source long before Stallman got into it, Stallman set back the open source movement with his zealotry.
Things like gcc and emacs succeeded because most of the people who thought that Stallman was a crackpot also understood how important it is to avoid dividing a small community.
For a long time, corporations were afraid of dabbling in open source because the most prominent voices were revolutionaries like RMS, who have a definite anti-commercial-software attitude. It was something that no company could really afford to be seen encouraging, despite what us ordinary people were doing.
The BSDs and the non-FSF open source types like Raymond deserve much more credit for making open source seem compatable with business.
--
Unfortunately, trademarks apply to specific areas, or trades. The Who has prior use of Pinball Wizard as a song title. Apogee can claim a trademark on Pinball Wizard as the name of a computer game, and if I wanted to, I could open my own line of Pinball Wizard sperm banks without infringing on anyone else's trademark.
--
Alice is a lot of fun, and a useful learning environment, but it tends to make your system unstable.
Q: "My machine's messed up, and I don't know why."
A: "Try uninstalling Alice"
is a somewhat frequently heard snippet of conversation around CMU.
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Probably not. Many of the biggest defenders of the GPL are students or academics. In other words: people who've never had to notice a direct connection between their coding and their income.
I suspect that much of this zealotry is caused by insufficient experience with the real world. That's probably true of most zealotry, though.
--
I like linux. I'm running it at work and at home on my desktop machines.
Why, though, would you want this in a handheld device? A standard unix startup includes device initialization, filesystem integrity checks, etc. and then login. In other words, it's designed to set up everything, then allow the user to work. In a handheld, I want to be able to work NOW. Initialize the IR port when I want to use it. Don't waste my time (and battery life) initializing it before I can work. When I'm done, shut it down as soon as possible.
This just-in-time device management is something that linux doesn't really have. While the device might be good for linux if it make that kind of management possible, I'm not sure that I believe that linux is good for a handheld device right now.
--
Microsoft is so worried about the windows cash cow that they do everything in their power to make it impractical to use a CE machine without syncing it to a desktop. They distribute drivers and updates as .exes that have to be run from the desktop and encourage other developers to do the same. They've been extremely reluctant to add basic features that'd reduce desktop dependence, including things like printing. (okay, you can print to a PCL printer, but nothing else -- any guesses about who's one of the biggest CE developers?) They include "Pocket PowerPoint", but there's no way to create presentations -- you have to import from the desktop.
The sad part is that CE's actually a decent product. It's really nice to have a machine with a power-on and power-off time of a second. It crashes, but far less than windows -- although this may be related to the lack of complicated applications. I'd love to have a larger CE machine (like the Jornada 820) as a laptop replacement. Unfortunately, Microsoft realizes that too, so they've cripped CE so that it doesn't compete with their other OSs.
I don't know where you gathered that assumption, but I don't think that it was what the author intended.
Security through obscurity does work, simply because it increases the difficulty involved with the effort to circumvent it. Adding bits to a key works the same way.
The difference, though, is that the additional protection from obscurity is lost once it's broken and published. "Netscape engineers are weenies!" no longer keeps the frontpage passwords safe, but it did for a long time.
You could claim that security through obscurity works because of laziness, but by that logic, you'd have to claim that longer key lengths work because of laziness too.
Does anyone know why it takes an OpenBSD machine 20 minutes to copy a disk image to floppy disk when other OSs take 2 or 3 minutes? I'm guessing that there's a valid reason related to caching or verification, but maybe the driver's just lousy.
I know, sort of offtopic, but you can see the tumbleweeds blowing through here (first post 17 hours after the original article?), and I'm curious.
While skins are simply obnoxious most of the time, they are finally making UI designers consider flexibility. I find it depressing that so many UIs rely on their own hard-coded interface, especially when that interface sucks.
Take, for example, the humble web page. Assume the existance of a user who has figured out that the monitor is not a piece of paper and would prefer white text on a black background. Now, see how long that user can survive in a web where stupid designers set background color to white while allowing the user to keep their preferred font color (which is white, in this case.)
Many programs make this assumption. MS Word uses your preferred background, while forcing a black font, going for a HGTTG-style black-on-black interface. Ghostview for unix used to do this too.
Skins are usually annoying, but if a designer is considering skins, they're far more likely to use the appropriate UI toolkits and implement the extendability properly. This, in my opinion, is better for everyone.
Basically, it's a government standard for computer security. Most free unixes don't even come close.
This is partly because, as security increases, convenience decreases. A and B rated systems require hardware that's designed for security, and PC hardware isn't.
And yet, Microsoft thrives.
Flamebait aside, companies have nothing to lose by implementing this. The customers and people who connect to them are screwed, but for many companies, the extra information gleaned about customers may be a worthwhile exchange for the extra technical hassle.
IBM (and others) have found problems with the default linux thread handling. IBM went so far as to send a patch to the kernel folks to correct it. The patch wasn't implemented because the patch fixes problems under high load (where it's most needed, IMO), but may decrease performance under low loads.
Okay, perhaps it should be:
"Nothing like using a rehash of a rehash of a 30-year old OS to emulate a 20-year old OS."
UNIX begat Minux.
Minux begat Linux.
- Universities usually do things "properly" -- contractors paid "progressive" wages, room for future expansion, good quality materials, etc.
- Maintaining the physical infrastructure (wires, conduits, routers) is expensive.
- The "wet" infrastructure (aka "people who take care of the network") has to be paid, and their offices have to be provided.
- Finally, the bandwidth has to be paid for. While this has been going down a lot, T1's still aren't cheap.
All of these things add up to substantial costs -- far more than $20/month.I suspect that if your university provided no connection to the outside internet and only offered a connection to the internal network, it'd still cost at least $20/month. They're probably subsidizing the cost considerably, and making people pay $20/month as a way to limit the number of people asking for connections.
Most of the DDoS tools that I've seen work best from Solaris or Linux. I've never seen a Stacheldraht attack from anything but a solaris box -- though it's supposed to run under Linux, IIRC. Linux, in turn, is the favorite personal OS of script kiddies and packet monkeys.
(And please, turn your flamethrower off. I know that there are plently of legit linux users. I'm one of 'em.)
Uhh... If they got those numbers from the NFL, then they're faulty.
A few years ago, someone was trying to figure out how the NFL could claim that 90% of the viewers were from other countries. It turned out that the NFL took the percentage of TVs tuned to it in the US, applied that percentage to the total number of TVs in the world, then threw in a few million for good measure.
The truth is that much of the world cares very little for american football, despite the wishes of the NFL.
Why does it have built in seating?
Not to be a smartass, but it has seating to provide a place to sit. Really.
Machine rooms are generally filled with lots of expensive equipment, and managers tend to want to remove things like chairs that could scratch, bump, or break the equipment. In the machine room for the place I used to work, there were no chairs within a good 30 meters of the crays and other expensive machines. When it was necessary to work in that part of the room, we had to stand or drag a chair across the room.
Okay, I'll bite...
Add up federal, state, and local taxes. Now, throw in sales tax and the (substantial) hidden corporate taxes and tariffs that raise the price of items on the shelf.
I don't make that much, but if I could pay a flat 40% in exchange for eliminating all other taxes, I'd be getting a good deal.
Not that I'd like paying that much...