That *does* seem to attract new people? I.e. *if* you think there are newcomers that would hypothetically be drawn to OS-level function that are somehow uninterested in the linux kernel, what do people see them go for?
I would theorize that there simply exists a large majority of young developers that are at the least disinterested to downright intimidated by low level workings of platforms. They are taught at an increasingly abstract level, where little things like explicitly freeing memory just aren't part of their vocabulary. I don't know what the course load is today, but when I went through, we were forced to take 'software engineering' (I still have a large degree of doubt over the value of that class, it seemed far too susceptible to fads) sorts of classes that focused on what the market seemed to be demanding at the time, but also chip-level engineering and assembler classes to not view most of the stack as a scary, untouchable black box. I would be fearful the latter parts (arguably less 'practical' for 99% of the career field) would risk being omitted.
Given their company's operating philosophies, they already have a modus operandi for open source.
btrfs exemplifies it the best. They need the state of filesystems to advance. They know they have little to no hope of turning a profit on a filesystem, especially not without compromising a goal of having it get enough credibility to be ubiquitous. They also don't want to invest a lot of resources to do it, but also see a very eager and capable community ready to go with just a catalyst of steering and technical contribution required. So they invest just a bit in development and hosting, and reap the rewards of a near certain chance of displacing ext2/ext3/ext4 with something providing the capabilities they want to leverage in other efforts to make money. There are other business models that work well with open source, but this is Oracle's, and they make it work for Oracle.
MySQL is a political grenade to have landed on their lap. Whatever 'damage' MySQL had done to Oracle has been done that cannot be undone. On the other hand, doubts of MySQL's future drive the community to the PostgreSQL half and reduce fragmentation and consolidate behind a project with zero vested interest in self-limiting to protect Oracle's bottom line. Oracle may have been able to salvage MySQL, but their positioning is seemingly so dubious that everyone can't help but to imagine the sort of internal struggle over that and what bad things it means for MySQL.
OpenSolaris is simply not going to go anywhere of value for them. Sun had years of that effort to try and displace some linux mindshare and cultivate a community, but came up relatively dry. Sun's thrashing about with their Solaris platform seemed to do about the same thing as thrashing about in quicksand did, it simply muddied the issues and sent a non-trivial amount of Solaris marketshare to AIX. Solaris, AIX, HP-UX all cater to a certain sensibility, and only AIX seems to have retained that sensibility. It's not a significant growth market by any means, but it is profitable and well worth milking while it persists. Oracle is positioned to handle this well, but without credibility I doubt it will pan out (think the Oracle acquisition actually sent *more* to AIX). They can try to treat Solaris as it was before and accept the revenue as IBM accepts the AIX revenue, at the same time participating in the Linux half of the coin in an entirely different manner. Perhaps even encourage some ZFS experience to officially look at btrfs. I would have said license ZFS GPL, but I think btrfs has some fundamental architectural advantages over ZFS approach now that make ZFS less appealing as a base to start from.
Java I think easily falls into the btrfs category. There would be no reason for Oracle to reneg on the community direction of Java and everything to lose if it slips into irrelevance because.NET captures the market on Microsoft and Python and the like capture much of the rest of the world.
The languages don't have features that tend to make bad programmers. I have heard arguments that features saving a programmer from things like tracking the lifetime of data structures beyond the scope of its usefulness makes them lazy, but those arguments fail to realize those bad developers didn't do that correctly and just wrote bad C programs. They were still lazy, and the ones to suffer were the users of their programmers.
What makes flash developers or java developers bad as a rule of thumb is they represent the popular languages for large scopes of the industry at a time when the industry is appealing. Namely, the legacy of the 'dot-com' days are still with us. In the late-1990s to 2000 or so, programming was perceived as a relatively accessible get-rich-quick industry. In that day, the thought was for non-web programming, Java was *the* language, and for Web programming, Flash was the important technology to incorporate. Masses of people with little to not talent or inherent interest in the industry latched on and became armies of unskilled labor with only Java or Flash barely under their belt. The 'Web 2.0' craze resurrected a fair amount of the Flash people (despite all the successful Web 2.0 endeavors having all their good stuff in server-side components or javascript and involving little to no flash).
Either way, I'm fairly certain Apple's agenda is not as benevolent as you want to believe. If they didn't want crappy apps, they already have a mechanism for precluding that result. What they do see is Android rapidly closing on (by some metrics beating) their share. They see these cross-platform environments allowing iPhone developers to start targeting Android at low incremental cost. To try to mitigate the flow of Android apps, they are trying to raise the cost of development so that hopefully some development places can't avoid to do both and presuming that they will only choose Apple if they can't afford both. They want a captive development audience without having to pay for it themselves, like a lot of companies do with open source software but with a much tighter control on the results.
I personally think this is the beginning of the end for iPhone as it is today. iPhone is not that far ahead of Android in the market, so ignoring Android represents a large missed opportunity for developers. Also, they see exactly the sort of relationship they have with Apple and see more control over their own destiny with Android. Even if they can only afford one and iPhone strictly speaking represents more revenue opportunity in the short term, I predict many shops selecting Android simply to help shift the market in the direction that benefits them more long term.
All this said, I like WebOS the best. I wish Android had been developed with the multitasking interface and SDL interface of WebOS (just as I wish Palm had been sane about camera access for SDL). I personally like Palm's platform for the moment (pretty open out of desperation probably) and advocate it, but it seems clear that Android is going to be the premiere platform in the market.
It seems Oracle is explicitly disinterested in Java, so IBM may get the one thing they would have wanted on the cheap, a chance at the people behind Sun's Java as they leave/are forced out of Oracle.
While I won't agree that it may have been better for Sun fans for IBM to acquire, realistically speaking, there is a lot of functional overlap between Sun and IBM offerings. Oracle bought capabilities they didn't have. IBM would have just been buying customers. IBM would have had to consider Solaris v. AIX, Sparc v. POWER, MySQL v. DB2. The primary element that would have been interesting would have been Java offerings to beef up their Rational segment, but I suspect Java isn't much of a growth market nowadays, so I'm not sure how much would have been extracted for one, and for another there is an open Java infrastructure that IBM could invest and exploit more cheaply than acquiring Sun.
That said: -IBM isn't as a whole comfortable with open source. IBM is a very large beast with parts of it making good use of and contributing to open source, and other parts fearing it like the plague and doing whatever it takes to mitigate the efforts of the parts of IBM that do open source. Given, their track record is better than Oracle, but worse than some (though the big ones I can think of are pure software companies). -IBM may make the most money on services, but second most on software. A lot of those services directly relate to software. IBM loves selling locked in solutions, it's just that they haven't been as successful at that in a long time so few know it. -I will say that IBM invests more in research than most typical companies. They view patent licensing income as a huge contributor to their bottom line, so innovation is a product worth investment. -I can't say I've seen IBM takes the approach you laid out, though they do things like threaten patent litigation against the hercules s/390 emulator. If they have patents, they will use them. If they don't have patents, it seems they try to ignore an open source competitor and hopes it goes away.
I think I agree with you that making it easy for hobbyists mitigated their efforts to design something that would have inevitably be used for unauthorized copies.
On that philosophy, their locking down access to the GPU was a critical mistake, because PS3 loses a lot of flexibility without that.
If the platform were fully open in all capabilities, with game-elected DRM, I suspect the DRM would have lasted much longer than it will.
While I don't disagree, I do think it is kind of sad. They've built up an impressive offering and have corrected mistakes. Android in practice is being deployed by the same handset makers that have always required phones to be locked down. The platform may be open, however you still have people struggling to 'jailbreak' Android handsets, whereas in Palm, they simply let you have at it. Luna may not be open source (and maybe no large reason for it not be be), but the layers below and above are very open to tinkering.
Funnily enough, I don't think I'd mind those, but I don't have android, I have a WebOS device.
1. The apps (other than games, which always like to be distinct regardless of platform) use identical widgets and styling for the most part.
2. The WebOS multitasking paradigm seems fine in the casual user sense. I think one complaint I had seen was out of the box, it's non-trivial to 'close' an application rather than background it. WebOS got this right.
3. I tried it once, it seemed ok, I typed search and found everthing I wanted. Granted, a desktop interface for searching makes sense. I haven't looked for one in WebOS yet, it may be missing.
4. I suspect any thing at scale will incur this in the comments.
5. I'm on the fence here. Obviously WebOS doesn't suffer this problem, but there is also no horizontal slider competitor in their portfolio, so they have a gap. For advanced users who are willing to understand things, the flexibility of not being tied to one vendor is compelling. Maybe if Marketplace made it easy to filter by supported/tested device lists (maybe it does, who knows).
The good things about Android mostly exist in WebOS (they could use some faster paths to phone/microphone to get some app equivalents that are missing, like usable barcode readers). I can, for free, get root on my phone without fighting for it. Poke around a shell, run things from the community, sideload, or ignore the whole community and get a more closed system experience. I think Palm hasn't gotten enough credit for making a respectable platform. They had some mistakes (they should have had direct APIs out of the gate, and only recently embraced them) and still have some (they really need a horizontal slider model with an enhanced screen, though I prefer the Pre form factor, I think a large segment of the population prefers horizontal sliders).
In the first, content providers have explicitly opted to broadcast it. Incidentally, I don't think sharing a recording you make is considered ok.
In the latter, content is being acquired and redistributed without permission.
A more direct comparison would be suing people for saving youtube videos to home storage that the publisher uploads. I don't think I've heard of someone saying they want to go after youtube users for things like youtube-dl.
News story is that computers are faster and have more memory than they were 3 years ago, so they need fewer of them. They bought APC enclosed systems to avoid having a hot isle due to open air cooling (of course, that means they paid a non-trivial amount for that).
Support Ubuntu 10.4. ALSA and pulse audio for audio. Other distros would probably work for free, even without an 'official' declaration of support. In terms of 'on what hardware?' the QA process is no more convoluted than Windows. Some bitching and moaning might be had for not explicitly embracing various pet distros, but ultimately the communities do a good job of covering any technical gaps between officially supported platforms and their own distribution.
FYI, quake3 binary from years ago still execs on modern distributions.
I meant my system, usually in a meeting or a person walking by my desk wants to check something using my system instead of either walking back to their desk or bothering to open their laptop.
I mentioned HTML5 as one of the technologies that was meaningful to get out of this (parent poster had described HTML5 as VRML-like hype along with WebGL). Unfortunately, it will be a tad longer before HTML5 is viable for a large audience website can adopt exclusively (without flash) given the subset of browsers that currently implement HTML5 as well as how slow the general populace is to update browsers.
HTML5 also provides powerful primitives to build 2D games, but 3D is missing. I personally appreciate the sensibilities of 2D games, but there are some experiences that are worthwhile that come with 3D.
I don't see this as a technology to dominate the web experience, but rather to enable things like running a first-person-shooter or other games, or perhaps other special-purpose applications, but games would be the broader case.
WebGL/RT/HTML5 are not fundamentally stupid. VRML hype mistakenly centered around a 3D navigation model for most of the web replacing 2D textual interaction with some image content, which was stupid.
However, richer multimedia content is a fact of life now with increased bandwidth. If it were not, then flash wouldn't persist (overuse of flash was a fad that has abated a bit in favor of javascript/css mechanisms, but flash persists for video and games without viable alternatives). Various video streaming sites that are relegated to flash today for games and videos would be freed from Adobe's whims as the embedded video, canvas, and 3d capabilities are expressed in industry standard terms.
I've been taking to SimpleNX, though no actual packages have been released. I checked out the git repository. Basically, it simplifies starting a rootless NX session without all the mess of an NX user and such.
That view is as unscientific and biased as the studies claiming a causal relationship. It's what many of us want to think, but there isn't a very good scientific basis for either view at this point.
I would not be surprised for them to show an objective correlation between people who gravitate towards exceptionally violent video game activity and those who gravitate toward violent real world behavior. For whatever reason (that probably can't be reasonably tested, therefore we are left with speculative, unprovable hypotheses like this 'study' declares), I wouldn't be surprised that people who gravitate toward a more violent lifestyle in general would include violent video games in that. If the violent video games didn't exist, I'm not sure that would have any impact one way or another, these people may well still be violent. Conversely, if someone is innately uncomfortable with video game violence, I would be very surprised if they brought themselves to commit real, violent acts.
The problem with Network/USB is that it is too open ended. Serial has the benefit of being only a point-to-point streaming technology with an unbelievably simplistic physical layer. All sorts of things in a system can break driver wise and still serial controllers and requisite software driving them will still work. Not to mention the interface is a matter of cents to add over nothing at all. When I plug a cable into a serial port, I never have to further think about overly open ended addressing situations (often, I have to try 2-3 common baud rates, them I'm off, unlike IP where I have 2**32 (or worse, 2**128) possible values for what the logical identity of my peer is. mDNS can mitigate that, but again, we are describing a system orders of magnitude more complex than good old serial signalling without significant real benefit for the application.
Frankly, console ports should either be network or USB ports and I favor network ports
Given that nearly all equipment that has a serial console has nearly full management capabilities over an IP interface already, I don't see the need to ditch the console port. A serial port and network management are not mutually exclusive propositions.
While the complexity of a web console would make them more expensive, things are still evolving and make them less expensive. Web consoles can be accessed by any number of devices and made to work in any number of ways not the least of which is remotely from very long distances.
Of course, web interfaces are a royal pain in the ass to manage at scale, they simply are not scriptable. Also, while I'll accept that a web interface *can* work well over poor performing connection, the web interfaces tend to be more 'marketable' with nice looks that come at a price of network overhead for the sake of aesthetics. I also know that much modern web design makes it more feasible as the data and presentation are segregated, but a script to process XML/JSON data is more trouble to write than a simple expect script for a CLI. In both cases, the scripts will trend towards one-offs (making alternatives such as IPMI and SNMP more attractive for reusable code, depending on the equipment being managed), but the CLI ones are so trivial that having it disposable isn't horribly painful.
(This also brings about security concerns, I know... that's another discussion.)
It's sufficiently critical issue that it can't be dismissed.
Telnet would be more simple in many respects, but http is a much more available client protocol.
telnet is the simplest protocol, available to anyone on any OS. http as a protocol is pretty much ubiquitous. However, sufficient variations in the presentation layer will create a lot of development costs (supporting every browser and platform) and potential administrator headaches. Security issues are definitely worth considering ssh instead, however. Either way, a CLI is scriptable, a web ui is generally not reasonably scriptable.
In terms of your thoughts on USB, I agree that ultimately as it stands today such a thing would present itself as serial or network, so it has limited benefit compared to the current method or an ethernet jack. One could make the case for multiple devices presented over a single connection (network, serial console, and mass storage), which has some functional appeal, but the additional complexity I fear could potentially go very much against the 'works when nothing else does' property of good old serial ports.
Look carefully. Sure, most don't use DE9 as it is a huge connector, but they will have the pins required for RS-232 signalling. A popular choice is RJ-45 (with frustratingly varying pinouts, requiring multiple RJ45 to DB9 conversion cables for a heterogeneous environment). Some use a mechanically mini-usb port that is actually RS-232 (Nortel comes to mind). I've even seen some equipment that did RS-232 signalling over 3.5 MM jack. I've also seen a number of wacky one-off form factors, whatever they can do to save real-estate and at least get transmit, receive, and ground lines out (5 pins if hardware flow control is desired).
That has no bearing on comparing logout/login vs. staying logged in. Yes, the very very first handshake can be bad (there are methods to mitigate, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion), but once you establish that trust, logging out does not break it.
You can find the solutions from the internet? That is problem solving and ability to find information: it will probably benefit you at work too.
In the context of homework, the source of that information will never know or care that you used what they provided without permission, so the student blindly copying never considers whether the entity being copied cares. In the professional world, someone blindly getting code from the internet could quickly deal great harm to their commercial codebase by blindly ignoring license restrictions, opening up their company to potentially severe legal consequences.
I doubt your friends will be friends for a long time if they have to provide you with all the answers so most likely you are taking some turns
That presumes that contexts of college life are similar to professional life. Copying could be done any number of reasons, because you left your assignment out and you happen to live with a cheater, because you are willing to help the person who gives you a lift to various places because you have no car, because the one copying is considered attractive by the one allowing the copying and they think it's a shot at romantic gratitude, or any number of similar stupid reasons that either evaporate or greatly diminish when you become settled in life and stop living in close proximity with the people you 'work' with. I think it the exception rather than the rule for copying to be done in an ultimately 'equitable' manner.
Slashdot Mirror
That *does* seem to attract new people? I.e. *if* you think there are newcomers that would hypothetically be drawn to OS-level function that are somehow uninterested in the linux kernel, what do people see them go for?
I would theorize that there simply exists a large majority of young developers that are at the least disinterested to downright intimidated by low level workings of platforms. They are taught at an increasingly abstract level, where little things like explicitly freeing memory just aren't part of their vocabulary. I don't know what the course load is today, but when I went through, we were forced to take 'software engineering' (I still have a large degree of doubt over the value of that class, it seemed far too susceptible to fads) sorts of classes that focused on what the market seemed to be demanding at the time, but also chip-level engineering and assembler classes to not view most of the stack as a scary, untouchable black box. I would be fearful the latter parts (arguably less 'practical' for 99% of the career field) would risk being omitted.
Given their company's operating philosophies, they already have a modus operandi for open source.
btrfs exemplifies it the best. They need the state of filesystems to advance. They know they have little to no hope of turning a profit on a filesystem, especially not without compromising a goal of having it get enough credibility to be ubiquitous. They also don't want to invest a lot of resources to do it, but also see a very eager and capable community ready to go with just a catalyst of steering and technical contribution required. So they invest just a bit in development and hosting, and reap the rewards of a near certain chance of displacing ext2/ext3/ext4 with something providing the capabilities they want to leverage in other efforts to make money. There are other business models that work well with open source, but this is Oracle's, and they make it work for Oracle.
MySQL is a political grenade to have landed on their lap. Whatever 'damage' MySQL had done to Oracle has been done that cannot be undone. On the other hand, doubts of MySQL's future drive the community to the PostgreSQL half and reduce fragmentation and consolidate behind a project with zero vested interest in self-limiting to protect Oracle's bottom line. Oracle may have been able to salvage MySQL, but their positioning is seemingly so dubious that everyone can't help but to imagine the sort of internal struggle over that and what bad things it means for MySQL.
OpenSolaris is simply not going to go anywhere of value for them. Sun had years of that effort to try and displace some linux mindshare and cultivate a community, but came up relatively dry. Sun's thrashing about with their Solaris platform seemed to do about the same thing as thrashing about in quicksand did, it simply muddied the issues and sent a non-trivial amount of Solaris marketshare to AIX. Solaris, AIX, HP-UX all cater to a certain sensibility, and only AIX seems to have retained that sensibility. It's not a significant growth market by any means, but it is profitable and well worth milking while it persists. Oracle is positioned to handle this well, but without credibility I doubt it will pan out (think the Oracle acquisition actually sent *more* to AIX). They can try to treat Solaris as it was before and accept the revenue as IBM accepts the AIX revenue, at the same time participating in the Linux half of the coin in an entirely different manner. Perhaps even encourage some ZFS experience to officially look at btrfs. I would have said license ZFS GPL, but I think btrfs has some fundamental architectural advantages over ZFS approach now that make ZFS less appealing as a base to start from.
Java I think easily falls into the btrfs category. There would be no reason for Oracle to reneg on the community direction of Java and everything to lose if it slips into irrelevance because .NET captures the market on Microsoft and Python and the like capture much of the rest of the world.
The languages don't have features that tend to make bad programmers. I have heard arguments that features saving a programmer from things like tracking the lifetime of data structures beyond the scope of its usefulness makes them lazy, but those arguments fail to realize those bad developers didn't do that correctly and just wrote bad C programs. They were still lazy, and the ones to suffer were the users of their programmers.
What makes flash developers or java developers bad as a rule of thumb is they represent the popular languages for large scopes of the industry at a time when the industry is appealing. Namely, the legacy of the 'dot-com' days are still with us. In the late-1990s to 2000 or so, programming was perceived as a relatively accessible get-rich-quick industry. In that day, the thought was for non-web programming, Java was *the* language, and for Web programming, Flash was the important technology to incorporate. Masses of people with little to not talent or inherent interest in the industry latched on and became armies of unskilled labor with only Java or Flash barely under their belt. The 'Web 2.0' craze resurrected a fair amount of the Flash people (despite all the successful Web 2.0 endeavors having all their good stuff in server-side components or javascript and involving little to no flash).
Either way, I'm fairly certain Apple's agenda is not as benevolent as you want to believe. If they didn't want crappy apps, they already have a mechanism for precluding that result. What they do see is Android rapidly closing on (by some metrics beating) their share. They see these cross-platform environments allowing iPhone developers to start targeting Android at low incremental cost. To try to mitigate the flow of Android apps, they are trying to raise the cost of development so that hopefully some development places can't avoid to do both and presuming that they will only choose Apple if they can't afford both. They want a captive development audience without having to pay for it themselves, like a lot of companies do with open source software but with a much tighter control on the results.
I personally think this is the beginning of the end for iPhone as it is today. iPhone is not that far ahead of Android in the market, so ignoring Android represents a large missed opportunity for developers. Also, they see exactly the sort of relationship they have with Apple and see more control over their own destiny with Android. Even if they can only afford one and iPhone strictly speaking represents more revenue opportunity in the short term, I predict many shops selecting Android simply to help shift the market in the direction that benefits them more long term.
All this said, I like WebOS the best. I wish Android had been developed with the multitasking interface and SDL interface of WebOS (just as I wish Palm had been sane about camera access for SDL). I personally like Palm's platform for the moment (pretty open out of desperation probably) and advocate it, but it seems clear that Android is going to be the premiere platform in the market.
It seems Oracle is explicitly disinterested in Java, so IBM may get the one thing they would have wanted on the cheap, a chance at the people behind Sun's Java as they leave/are forced out of Oracle.
While I won't agree that it may have been better for Sun fans for IBM to acquire, realistically speaking, there is a lot of functional overlap between Sun and IBM offerings. Oracle bought capabilities they didn't have. IBM would have just been buying customers. IBM would have had to consider Solaris v. AIX, Sparc v. POWER, MySQL v. DB2. The primary element that would have been interesting would have been Java offerings to beef up their Rational segment, but I suspect Java isn't much of a growth market nowadays, so I'm not sure how much would have been extracted for one, and for another there is an open Java infrastructure that IBM could invest and exploit more cheaply than acquiring Sun.
That said:
-IBM isn't as a whole comfortable with open source. IBM is a very large beast with parts of it making good use of and contributing to open source, and other parts fearing it like the plague and doing whatever it takes to mitigate the efforts of the parts of IBM that do open source. Given, their track record is better than Oracle, but worse than some (though the big ones I can think of are pure software companies).
-IBM may make the most money on services, but second most on software. A lot of those services directly relate to software. IBM loves selling locked in solutions, it's just that they haven't been as successful at that in a long time so few know it.
-I will say that IBM invests more in research than most typical companies. They view patent licensing income as a huge contributor to their bottom line, so innovation is a product worth investment.
-I can't say I've seen IBM takes the approach you laid out, though they do things like threaten patent litigation against the hercules s/390 emulator. If they have patents, they will use them. If they don't have patents, it seems they try to ignore an open source competitor and hopes it goes away.
I think I agree with you that making it easy for hobbyists mitigated their efforts to design something that would have inevitably be used for unauthorized copies.
On that philosophy, their locking down access to the GPU was a critical mistake, because PS3 loses a lot of flexibility without that.
If the platform were fully open in all capabilities, with game-elected DRM, I suspect the DRM would have lasted much longer than it will.
Palm is irrelevant.
While I don't disagree, I do think it is kind of sad. They've built up an impressive offering and have corrected mistakes. Android in practice is being deployed by the same handset makers that have always required phones to be locked down. The platform may be open, however you still have people struggling to 'jailbreak' Android handsets, whereas in Palm, they simply let you have at it. Luna may not be open source (and maybe no large reason for it not be be), but the layers below and above are very open to tinkering.
Funnily enough, I don't think I'd mind those, but I don't have android, I have a WebOS device.
1. The apps (other than games, which always like to be distinct regardless of platform) use identical widgets and styling for the most part.
2. The WebOS multitasking paradigm seems fine in the casual user sense. I think one complaint I had seen was out of the box, it's non-trivial to 'close' an application rather than background it. WebOS got this right.
3. I tried it once, it seemed ok, I typed search and found everthing I wanted. Granted, a desktop interface for searching makes sense. I haven't looked for one in WebOS yet, it may be missing.
4. I suspect any thing at scale will incur this in the comments.
5. I'm on the fence here. Obviously WebOS doesn't suffer this problem, but there is also no horizontal slider competitor in their portfolio, so they have a gap. For advanced users who are willing to understand things, the flexibility of not being tied to one vendor is compelling. Maybe if Marketplace made it easy to filter by supported/tested device lists (maybe it does, who knows).
The good things about Android mostly exist in WebOS (they could use some faster paths to phone/microphone to get some app equivalents that are missing, like usable barcode readers). I can, for free, get root on my phone without fighting for it. Poke around a shell, run things from the community, sideload, or ignore the whole community and get a more closed system experience. I think Palm hasn't gotten enough credit for making a respectable platform. They had some mistakes (they should have had direct APIs out of the gate, and only recently embraced them) and still have some (they really need a horizontal slider model with an enhanced screen, though I prefer the Pre form factor, I think a large segment of the population prefers horizontal sliders).
I'm sure Apple will release an update of the product called 'Max iPad' that will *really* be interesting.
I found the interface, joke or no joke, to be exceedingly awesome from a functional standpoint.
I want MORE websites with a design like this.
In the first, content providers have explicitly opted to broadcast it. Incidentally, I don't think sharing a recording you make is considered ok.
In the latter, content is being acquired and redistributed without permission.
A more direct comparison would be suing people for saving youtube videos to home storage that the publisher uploads. I don't think I've heard of someone saying they want to go after youtube users for things like youtube-dl.
News story is that computers are faster and have more memory than they were 3 years ago, so they need fewer of them. They bought APC enclosed systems to avoid having a hot isle due to open air cooling (of course, that means they paid a non-trivial amount for that).
Support Ubuntu 10.4. ALSA and pulse audio for audio. Other distros would probably work for free, even without an 'official' declaration of support. In terms of 'on what hardware?' the QA process is no more convoluted than Windows. Some bitching and moaning might be had for not explicitly embracing various pet distros, but ultimately the communities do a good job of covering any technical gaps between officially supported platforms and their own distribution.
FYI, quake3 binary from years ago still execs on modern distributions.
I meant my system, usually in a meeting or a person walking by my desk wants to check something using my system instead of either walking back to their desk or bothering to open their laptop.
As someone who uses dvorak, it's a great deterrent to people who frequently need to borrow other keyboards for a moment...
Not to mention the amusement of watching them type something, look confused, repeat a few times before they say something.
In terms of speed, I don't know about that, but dvorak does leave me a bit more comfy as I leave the home row less.
I mentioned HTML5 as one of the technologies that was meaningful to get out of this (parent poster had described HTML5 as VRML-like hype along with WebGL). Unfortunately, it will be a tad longer before HTML5 is viable for a large audience website can adopt exclusively (without flash) given the subset of browsers that currently implement HTML5 as well as how slow the general populace is to update browsers.
HTML5 also provides powerful primitives to build 2D games, but 3D is missing. I personally appreciate the sensibilities of 2D games, but there are some experiences that are worthwhile that come with 3D.
I don't see this as a technology to dominate the web experience, but rather to enable things like running a first-person-shooter or other games, or perhaps other special-purpose applications, but games would be the broader case.
WebGL/RT/HTML5 are not fundamentally stupid. VRML hype mistakenly centered around a 3D navigation model for most of the web replacing 2D textual interaction with some image content, which was stupid.
However, richer multimedia content is a fact of life now with increased bandwidth. If it were not, then flash wouldn't persist (overuse of flash was a fad that has abated a bit in favor of javascript/css mechanisms, but flash persists for video and games without viable alternatives). Various video streaming sites that are relegated to flash today for games and videos would be freed from Adobe's whims as the embedded video, canvas, and 3d capabilities are expressed in industry standard terms.
I've been taking to SimpleNX, though no actual packages have been released. I checked out the git repository. Basically, it simplifies starting a rootless NX session without all the mess of an NX user and such.
That view is as unscientific and biased as the studies claiming a causal relationship. It's what many of us want to think, but there isn't a very good scientific basis for either view at this point.
I would not be surprised for them to show an objective correlation between people who gravitate towards exceptionally violent video game activity and those who gravitate toward violent real world behavior. For whatever reason (that probably can't be reasonably tested, therefore we are left with speculative, unprovable hypotheses like this 'study' declares), I wouldn't be surprised that people who gravitate toward a more violent lifestyle in general would include violent video games in that. If the violent video games didn't exist, I'm not sure that would have any impact one way or another, these people may well still be violent. Conversely, if someone is innately uncomfortable with video game violence, I would be very surprised if they brought themselves to commit real, violent acts.
The problem with Network/USB is that it is too open ended. Serial has the benefit of being only a point-to-point streaming technology with an unbelievably simplistic physical layer. All sorts of things in a system can break driver wise and still serial controllers and requisite software driving them will still work. Not to mention the interface is a matter of cents to add over nothing at all. When I plug a cable into a serial port, I never have to further think about overly open ended addressing situations (often, I have to try 2-3 common baud rates, them I'm off, unlike IP where I have 2**32 (or worse, 2**128) possible values for what the logical identity of my peer is. mDNS can mitigate that, but again, we are describing a system orders of magnitude more complex than good old serial signalling without significant real benefit for the application.
Frankly, console ports should either be network or USB ports and I favor network ports
Given that nearly all equipment that has a serial console has nearly full management capabilities over an IP interface already, I don't see the need to ditch the console port. A serial port and network management are not mutually exclusive propositions.
While the complexity of a web console would make them more expensive, things are still evolving and make them less expensive. Web consoles can be accessed by any number of devices and made to work in any number of ways not the least of which is remotely from very long distances.
Of course, web interfaces are a royal pain in the ass to manage at scale, they simply are not scriptable. Also, while I'll accept that a web interface *can* work well over poor performing connection, the web interfaces tend to be more 'marketable' with nice looks that come at a price of network overhead for the sake of aesthetics. I also know that much modern web design makes it more feasible as the data and presentation are segregated, but a script to process XML/JSON data is more trouble to write than a simple expect script for a CLI. In both cases, the scripts will trend towards one-offs (making alternatives such as IPMI and SNMP more attractive for reusable code, depending on the equipment being managed), but the CLI ones are so trivial that having it disposable isn't horribly painful.
(This also brings about security concerns, I know... that's another discussion.)
It's sufficiently critical issue that it can't be dismissed.
Telnet would be more simple in many respects, but http is a much more available client protocol.
telnet is the simplest protocol, available to anyone on any OS. http as a protocol is pretty much ubiquitous. However, sufficient variations in the presentation layer will create a lot of development costs (supporting every browser and platform) and potential administrator headaches. Security issues are definitely worth considering ssh instead, however. Either way, a CLI is scriptable, a web ui is generally not reasonably scriptable.
In terms of your thoughts on USB, I agree that ultimately as it stands today such a thing would present itself as serial or network, so it has limited benefit compared to the current method or an ethernet jack. One could make the case for multiple devices presented over a single connection (network, serial console, and mass storage), which has some functional appeal, but the additional complexity I fear could potentially go very much against the 'works when nothing else does' property of good old serial ports.
Look carefully. Sure, most don't use DE9 as it is a huge connector, but they will have the pins required for RS-232 signalling. A popular choice is RJ-45 (with frustratingly varying pinouts, requiring multiple RJ45 to DB9 conversion cables for a heterogeneous environment). Some use a mechanically mini-usb port that is actually RS-232 (Nortel comes to mind). I've even seen some equipment that did RS-232 signalling over 3.5 MM jack. I've also seen a number of wacky one-off form factors, whatever they can do to save real-estate and at least get transmit, receive, and ground lines out (5 pins if hardware flow control is desired).
That has no bearing on comparing logout/login vs. staying logged in. Yes, the very very first handshake can be bad (there are methods to mitigate, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion), but once you establish that trust, logging out does not break it.
I could name at least 7 people who have degrees at "real" universities because I did _all_ their course work.
Why in the world did you do that?
You can find the solutions from the internet? That is problem solving and ability to find information: it will probably benefit you at work too.
In the context of homework, the source of that information will never know or care that you used what they provided without permission, so the student blindly copying never considers whether the entity being copied cares. In the professional world, someone blindly getting code from the internet could quickly deal great harm to their commercial codebase by blindly ignoring license restrictions, opening up their company to potentially severe legal consequences.
I doubt your friends will be friends for a long time if they have to provide you with all the answers so most likely you are taking some turns
That presumes that contexts of college life are similar to professional life. Copying could be done any number of reasons, because you left your assignment out and you happen to live with a cheater, because you are willing to help the person who gives you a lift to various places because you have no car, because the one copying is considered attractive by the one allowing the copying and they think it's a shot at romantic gratitude, or any number of similar stupid reasons that either evaporate or greatly diminish when you become settled in life and stop living in close proximity with the people you 'work' with. I think it the exception rather than the rule for copying to be done in an ultimately 'equitable' manner.