I sure hope that this is a joke on that fellows part.
You want to know why those who are not technologicly gifted are afraid of Linux? Things like this. Silly, immature, and asinine elitism.
To punish people because of the mail client they use is pointless. Does the various versions of Outlook have problems? You bet. You don't like it. Fine. DON'T RUN IT.
Things like this destroy the credibility of the Linux community in general. You want businesses and government to think that the Linux community is serious, focused, and can provide better products. Stupid stunts like this do not give a good impression.
You know, MS has pulled this kind of thing before and have been left unpunished by the general public. They are so confident of their position that they do not FEAR public backlash. Their market share is SO dominant that this kind of this is merely shrugged off and ignored by MS.
THIS is the kind of thing that should tell the doubters that MS is a monopoly. If any other company had done this, the "mea culpa" would have been posted at the bottom of the news story. What has MS done? Nothing, ignored it, becuase they feel that they cannot be impacted by it.
I used to work for a company that would send out emails, encouraging us to write our representitives when a law that was going to hurt the company was coming up for a vote. No matter that the law might be good for the employees or the public at large.
Companies have learned since the eighties, that nothing can touch them, but other companies. The public has no rights, and employees have no rights. Companies are free to pursue thier own best interests, regardless of the dubious moral nature of the actions, or the impact on the public in general.
Many many fear big government, but I fear Big Business more. At least in government I have the illusion of a say.
If it could do what the Turtle Beach Audiotron is doing and be my PVR too, that would be way cool. I view this with guarded optimism, they don't actually mention attaching broadband via USB. They just mention video on demand via broadband. Those could be seriously different things the the final shakedown. Still, its cool to see.
There doesn't seem to be any real numbers as to how often this happens. In the 15-24 year old crowd, perhaps there will be more of this kind of thing. I own my own house, and while I can see this kind of thing happening if my close friends happen to live right next to me, I don't see it happening any other way. Mind you, I don't live in a big city, where perhaps a majority of people live in multi-tenant units. Here in the Midwest, there will be very little this kind of thing. We simply don't live in each other's laps that way.
While I consider my neighbors friends, I don't see Suzy Divorcee on my right, Bob Treecutter behind me and and the extremely procreative couple and thier many kids across the road from me forming an evil pact to bilk my cable provider out of money.
This is another example of a preceived problem that has no research to back it up. You can theorize all you want, but until you show me a definitive study showing that this is common, you can forget it.
Ahh, but the rub is that because of the shared nature of the wireless medium. You only really get about 4-5mb out of an 11mb wireless connection. You don't get full "wire speed" (ironic, isn't it) because you can't switch wireless like you can a wired system. Thus there is a "is the medium clear?" kind of traffic.
I think you will also find that FC is going to be the disk-of-choice for enterprise systems in the future, but not for the interconnect. iSCSI over Ethernet will replace FC as the interconnect. Especially when you consider 10gb Ethernet that will hit the market next year.
FC is good tech, but it's hard to use, interoperability is a HUGE issue and the familiarity of server admins with Ethernet will make them inclined to use Ethernet.
For x86 based graphical workstations, such as multiprocessor Dell machines, there is AGP slots. There are, however, generally not AGP in full-blown file servers. Usually they come with a small, cheap embedded ATI or some other video chip. There is no need for graphical power on a server.
As far as video cards in the 66/64 or 33/64 format, I do not know of any.....but in the big, wide world, there might be some, but I think that if there is, they are few and far between.
There is already a 66mhz 64 bit bus. Many servers have it already.
This 64bit technology will probably never come to the PC. Its too expensive and is limited by price to servers. Even 33mhz 64bit will not happen on consumer class PCs. PCI-X falls into the same category.
What you will see, is a generational leap to NGIO or Hypertransport or some other bus technology. Intel is not planning on putting PCI-X or 66/64 on consumer PCs, and those boys really set the standards there.
With new processors, how much are you REALLY giving up in processor useage? This was only a problem on Pentium and 486 processors.
On the Fibre Channel front, FC is used for external disks. FC has a maximum distance of, someone correct me if I misremember, 2 kilometers, on optical fiber. The controllers are very expensive. The drives are expensive. The entire point of FC was to get over the 15 drive limit of SCSI and to get over the distance limitations of SCSI (3 meters) and Diff. SCSI (15 meters).
I am not aware of any internal FC implementations on standard server hardware, but as a rule, its an external JBOD application.
You can get information on Serial ATA at serialata.org. You will find that these new ATA controllers break the 4 drive limitation, and have a very small cable, as opposed to the air-flow-blocking current ATA cables.
Another mini-rant I have to get out of the way, is about the psychotic SCSI user blaming ATA for keeping SCSI from becoming a real force in desktop computing.
Guess what, if the SCSI manufacturers would have brought the price down to reasonable levels, this would not have happened. Is SCSI better? In servers, heck yes. On the desktop? No, not really. Even on small servers, the advantages do not outweigh the extra cost of SCSI. The folks in the SCSI industry made a concious decision to stay in the server. Price DOES matter on desktops, and there is NO technology that can beat ATA for price/performance. Thats what ATA is for. Bleating that its' "technically inferior to SCSI" is stupid. They are not intened to do the same things. SCSI=Server Fibre Channel=Server ATA/Serial ATA=Desktop
As a Road Runner user, I can verify the fact that they pretty much don't support anything. No home networks is a big one. The only thing about them is that they have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about home networks. If you call for support they will make you hook the cable modem directly to one PC for trouble shooting.
Their service has been pretty good, but this is unsurprising, and somewhat suspect "news".
I am not sure that the hardware abstraction is moving ahead, but I would also argue that that still is a long way off. There seems to be a great deal of incompatibility out there.
Case in point would be the the recent release of Tribes 2. Tribes 2 is an OpenGL game that experienced a LOT of hardware issues on PC platform. I certainly don't want development on PC platforms to cease.
There will always be platform specific issues. These will continue to pose a problem. It's not neceessarily the overriding factor but, it is a factor. PC hardware varies too widely and changes too rapidly to ever really be completly extracted from the developer. IMHO.
One of the things I didn't see mentioned is that a lot of developers are writing for the console only.
Consoles have a lot of advantages. They are stable same-same environments. Not a lot of variance, since there is only one manufacturer for each one. There have been some companies that have questioned making games for PCs entirely becuase of the wide variance in the hardware, let alone the operating system.
Many companies make two versions now, one for their console-of-choice and another for Windows/Intel PC platform.
Guess which one is the support nightmare. Pretty easy when you have to support several different video card manufacturers, even ones that don't exsist any more like VooDoo. Yet, the small, vocal, they-will-get-my-VooDoo-when-they-pry-it-from-my-c old-dead-hands crowd clamors for support and then whines when they can't get it.
Different versions of Windows, cheap, God-awful systems from Best Buy and Circuit City, poor white box mail order, you name it, and its a problem on the PC platform.
So, is it a Windows vs Linux thing? Not really. Unless Linux becomes the dominant desktop environment, or at lest has double digit percentage numbers, its a useless question. Developers don't REALLY want to develop on the PC to begin with because of the high support cost, and they are certainly NOT going to develop for a low desktop marketshare OS like Linux.
Think about this anyway: If they did, they would only support it on Red Hat anyway,(market share and mind share again) and then you would bitch about that. This community will only be happy if there are NATIVE Linux games that work on every distro. Ain't gonna happen. Be happy there is still a market for PC games at all.
As a Wisconsinite, I can say that I am proud to have this man as our Senator. While Russ and I may not agree on ever issue, I have found him to be a decent and honorable man.
All you folks out there who thinks his single "no" vote was unpatriotic, need to check in. When the FBI kicks down your door because you --==might==-- be a terrorist, you are not going to be so rightous.
I am a strong supporter of our country. I didn't vote for Mr. Bush, but I am behind him. I don't agree with him politically on a great many issues, but I support him during these trying times. I can support our government and critisize it at the same time.
Kudos to Senator Feingold for standing up for whats right, and looking beyond the current military action at the effect this kind of legislation will have down the road.
Here is something that Benjamin Franklin said that I like to quote:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."--Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Sanitizing the Past and Demonizing the Future
on
The Hypermedia Hazard
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While I think that hypermedia is an issue, I don't think it was necessary to pontificate THAT much on it.
People have to learn to be smart about what they read in the popular news media, and to speak up when they are spouting a line of BS. I am also offended by the sanitation of the past that occured in Mr. Katz's commentary. Sure, people only got news once or twice a day. It does NOT mean that coverage was good, well thought out or even accurate. There were media barons back then, just as there are now. For some reason we seem to think that the media barons were defeated.
Guess what, they were not. They just learned to keep a lower profile. Yellow journalism and outright lies were the order of the day 100 years ago. We went through "self-correcting" phase after that, and journalism got better. News reporting got better. We will self-correct again, now that some news is not as good.
One of the things to remember is that while errors occur in our hyper-fast news, corrections appear just as fast.
People need to use there heads. Question authority, and question what you are told. Have a skeptical eye. A healty dose of skepticism makes the world a better place.
Its the blind believers that cause panics. Its people who do not even begin to TRY to find out what is going on. Its ignorant commentary and a reliance on "common sense" that cannot be sensible due to lack real information. The only thing true about "common sense" when it comes to news is that it is is COMMON. Meaning that every ill-informed, ignorant fool who has seen a 5 minute video clip has an expert opinion.
If people do not educate themselves about issues that they care about, they will be decieved and deceive themselves about what news organizations present.
Take for example the E-mail that has been going around about former President Clinton and his promises to "get the terroists and make them pay" and the "common sense" failure to do so.
While I am not a big Clinton supporter, do you REALLY think that there was enough outrage in the public or in Congress to justify an invasion of another country over a couple of embassy attacks and the attack on the USS Cole, all spaced out over eight years?
Guess what, there wasn't. We all went about our merry little lives, and so did Congress. Had Clinton gone to war, he would have been decried as doing it for political reasons. He couldn't do it, so he didn't.
But yet we get ignorant, uninformed, badly thought-out email about it. For God's sake Paul Harvey even read the thing on the air. Common sense says that email is right. Examine your own attitudes about military action AT THAT TIME. Now is it REALLY right? Try to see through the fog of patriotism.
Be skeptical! Don't believe everything you read or hear. Look it up! Study it! And don't offer an opinion on something until you understand both sides of the issue.
RAM drives are a great idea, the problem is the IDE or SCSI bus. Seek times and retriveal times can be greatly reduced, but the total bandwidth is still a limitation.
Seagate had developed years ago a standard called IPI, I think. It was for the 30 and 40 megabyte RAM drives that had developed. I know it never took off, but it was specificlly for static RAM drives.
What would be really cool, would be RAM storage with an Infiniband interface. Its possible to use it for storage or for regular memory.
I have read most of the books on the Hugo list posted earlier by some thoughtful gentleman, and while I agree that Harry Potter does not have the metallic tang of hard science fiction, they were good books.
Somewhat simplistic? Yes. However that is not always a bad thing. Just because a book does not require you to go dig out your old science texts to understand does not mean that its not an outstanding piece of writing.
We are occasionally ill served by our distain for anything that the general public likes. Do we "poo poo" Harry Potter because our Mom's liked the book and that kind of dumb guy at work liked it too? Is the negative reaction to a Harry Potter book that I am seeing here a form of intellectual elitism?
Is it that because more than the 'in' Sci-Fi crowd liked and 'got' this book we feel threatened? Are we worried if our favorite geeky things become mainstream, that we will no longer be special? No longer be smart?
We need to understand that just because the mainstream likes something, it does not necessarily make it evil. I am sure that I missed the post comparing Rowling to Gates and her publisher to Microsoft, just as I am sure that its there somewhere.
The Harry Potter books are good. Well written, thoughtful, and fun. Lets just congratulate Rowling, and forget about weather or not her work is "real".
Bluetooth is an interesting technology. When you start looking into it, the possibilities are enormous. A lot of people were bitten by the Bluetooth bug, and it's understandable why. It would be VERY cool if it worked out.
One of the huge problems is that people keep comparing 802.11b (WI-FI) to Bluetooth.
They are NOT the same thing. Go read the Bluetooth spec. Bluetooth is a cable replacement technology that can, if necessary, do some ad-hoc networking. 802.11b is wireless Ethernet. Not the same thing, not intended to do the same thing.
There have been a couple of companies that have been deliberately muddying the waters about this. Bluetooth is NOT an acceptable replacement or even a good substitute for 802.11b. Bluetooth is limited to 1megabit per second, which means throughput of about 650k to 800k real, depending on conditions. 802.11b is 11megabits max, and about 5megabits in the real world. (Shared bandwidth, retransmissions, and Ethernet overhead)
Bluetooth is staggeringly bad at providing traditional Ethernet services, just as 802.11b is awful as a cable replacement technology. 802.11b has too much power usage, and dependency on Ethernet for cable replacement. It was NOT designed to replace the cable going from your cell phone to your headset. Bluetooth was. It was just overly hyped and generally misunderstood. Too bad, it could have been cool.
You raise some interesting points about publication outfits that are owned by technology companies. Reporting on a product sector that your parent company is in generates a conflict of interest.
I myself do not worry about it for a couple of reasons.
1. My personal ethics keep me from owning stock in technology companies.
2. CMP has never offered me stock options, and as far as I know has no plans to.
3. CMP is actually owned by a large British publishing company, United News and Media, thus avoiding any conflict of interest with technology companies.
It is the individual journalist's responsibility to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
Ultimately, every journalist must make the decision: Do I do the right thing? I do and I hope and encourage all other technology journalists to do the same.
Good comments, and an interesting discussion on these topics....
This is just paranoia. I work for a large publishing company, CMP Media. I am a technical writer on staff for Network Computing. We are a pretty good-sized publishing company. Do you people REALLY think that because we have been sucessful we cannot be objective. Does Slashdot's association with VALINUX tilt their coverage? I don't think so. It is the same for print publications.
In my job I have zero contact with our sales area. There is a deliberate separation between sales and editorial. We in editorial like it that way. You would be amazed at how much editorial control we writers really have. There is no "corporate censor" or anything else like that. We have never altered or prevented an article from running in the publication in the interest of advertising. Period.
Small independent hardware sites are actually more vulnerable to advertising and "free gift" pressures. Don't get me wrong, I love most of the indy sites. I have been reading Toms Hardware, AnandTech, and Ars for years. But most of these sites have been started out of the goodness of someone's heart, not out of the deepness of their pocketbook. If my publishing company loses an advertising account, I don't even know about it. If any indy loses advertising, it hits him right in the pocket book.
I will admit that there are some dodgy publications out there. There are some dodgy indy sites too. Those of us who do this kind of technical writing for a large corporation are honest. When I write, I write for our reader. Please understand that the majority of technology journalists, big or small, are honest guys, doing their best. The paranoia shown by some here is simply unjustified.
Perhaps we should give control of our private lives over to the government too. We have obviously failed at our own morality. That is the real root of the problem when it comes to crime and terrorism.
Perhaps the government should install cameras, so it can watch us, for our own good. Just until they fix our morality problem.
Do you REALLY want the same people who pay $250.00 for a hammer to "take back" the internet and "fix" it? The same people that run the IRS?
Another little fact to consider; Its the WORLD WIDE Web. Don't you think that other countries will be a little annoyed at our government's attempts to "fix" the internet?
These kind of doom and gloom predictions serve NO purpose. Is the internet perfect? Heck no! Will it eventually shake out? Heck yes!
Try to use your logic on the discoverers of fire.
Did the fire burn a few people before they knew how to handle it? You bet. Did the fire go out a few times before they learned how to tend it? You bet.
Did naysayers want to go back into government funded damp cold caves without fire becuase of all the difficulties? You bet!
Gedvondur
This article by Art Wittman of Network Computing might help shed some light.....BTW by experiance is that NDS is WAY ahead of active directory....
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1116/1116f1.html
Give it a try
Gedvondur
I would think that human communication would be one of the hardest things to get an AI to do. The nuances and slang would present a great challange and no doubt consume a great deal of computing power. There must be a better application to develop AI for than IRC. Intelligent farm machinery, house cleaners (ducts, vents, ect...). I saw quite a while ago a neat application of AI that had small robots plucking harmful bugs from plants, killing them, and putting them into a container. This would be a much better areana from development of AI than IRC. Just MHO...
Slashdot Mirror
I sure hope that this is a joke on that fellows part.
You want to know why those who are not technologicly gifted are afraid of Linux? Things like this. Silly, immature, and asinine elitism.
To punish people because of the mail client they use is pointless. Does the various versions of Outlook have problems? You bet. You don't like it. Fine. DON'T RUN IT.
Things like this destroy the credibility of the Linux community in general. You want businesses and government to think that the Linux community is serious, focused, and can provide better products. Stupid stunts like this do not give a good impression.
You know, MS has pulled this kind of thing before and have been left unpunished by the general public. They are so confident of their position that they do not FEAR public backlash. Their market share is SO dominant that this kind of this is merely shrugged off and ignored by MS.
THIS is the kind of thing that should tell the doubters that MS is a monopoly. If any other company had done this, the "mea culpa" would have been posted at the bottom of the news story. What has MS done? Nothing, ignored it, becuase they feel that they cannot be impacted by it.
I used to work for a company that would send out emails, encouraging us to write our representitives when a law that was going to hurt the company was coming up for a vote. No matter that the law might be good for the employees or the public at large.
Companies have learned since the eighties, that nothing can touch them, but other companies. The public has no rights, and employees have no rights. Companies are free to pursue thier own best interests, regardless of the dubious moral nature of the actions, or the impact on the public in general.
Many many fear big government, but I fear Big Business more. At least in government I have the illusion of a say.
If it could do what the Turtle Beach Audiotron is doing and be my PVR too, that would be way cool. I view this with guarded optimism, they don't actually mention attaching broadband via USB. They just mention video on demand via broadband. Those could be seriously different things the the final shakedown. Still, its cool to see.
There doesn't seem to be any real numbers as to how often this happens. In the 15-24 year old crowd, perhaps there will be more of this kind of thing. I own my own house, and while I can see this kind of thing happening if my close friends happen to live right next to me, I don't see it happening any other way. Mind you, I don't live in a big city, where perhaps a majority of people live in multi-tenant units. Here in the Midwest, there will be very little this kind of thing. We simply don't live in each other's laps that way.
While I consider my neighbors friends, I don't see Suzy Divorcee on my right, Bob Treecutter behind me and and the extremely procreative couple and thier many kids across the road from me forming an evil pact to bilk my cable provider out of money.
This is another example of a preceived problem that has no research to back it up. You can theorize all you want, but until you show me a definitive study showing that this is common, you can forget it.
Ahh, but the rub is that because of the shared nature of the wireless medium. You only really get about 4-5mb out of an 11mb wireless connection. You don't get full "wire speed" (ironic, isn't it) because you can't switch wireless like you can a wired system. Thus there is a "is the medium clear?" kind of traffic.
I think you will also find that FC is going to be the disk-of-choice for enterprise systems in the future, but not for the interconnect. iSCSI over Ethernet will replace FC as the interconnect. Especially when you consider 10gb Ethernet that will hit the market next year.
FC is good tech, but it's hard to use, interoperability is a HUGE issue and the familiarity of server admins with Ethernet will make them inclined to use Ethernet.
No, not really. Pentium II, III, and IV servers.
For x86 based graphical workstations, such as multiprocessor Dell machines, there is AGP slots. There are, however, generally not AGP in full-blown file servers. Usually they come with a small, cheap embedded ATI or some other video chip. There is no need for graphical power on a server.
As far as video cards in the 66/64 or 33/64 format, I do not know of any.....but in the big, wide world, there might be some, but I think that if there is, they are few and far between.
There is already a 66mhz 64 bit bus. Many servers have it already.
This 64bit technology will probably never come to the PC. Its too expensive and is limited by price to servers. Even 33mhz 64bit will not happen on consumer class PCs. PCI-X falls into the same category.
What you will see, is a generational leap to NGIO or Hypertransport or some other bus technology. Intel is not planning on putting PCI-X or 66/64 on consumer PCs, and those boys really set the standards there.
I can answer two of your questions.....
With new processors, how much are you REALLY giving up in processor useage? This was only a problem on Pentium and 486 processors.
On the Fibre Channel front, FC is used for external disks. FC has a maximum distance of, someone correct me if I misremember, 2 kilometers, on optical fiber. The controllers are very expensive. The drives are expensive. The entire point of FC was to get over the 15 drive limit of SCSI and to get over the distance limitations of SCSI (3 meters) and Diff. SCSI (15 meters).
I am not aware of any internal FC implementations on standard server hardware, but as a rule, its an external JBOD application.
You can get information on Serial ATA at serialata.org. You will find that these new ATA controllers break the 4 drive limitation, and have a very small cable, as opposed to the air-flow-blocking current ATA cables.
Another mini-rant I have to get out of the way, is about the psychotic SCSI user blaming ATA for keeping SCSI from becoming a real force in desktop computing.
Guess what, if the SCSI manufacturers would have brought the price down to reasonable levels, this would not have happened. Is SCSI better? In servers, heck yes. On the desktop? No, not really. Even on small servers, the advantages do not outweigh the extra cost of SCSI. The folks in the SCSI industry made a concious decision to stay in the server. Price DOES matter on desktops, and there is NO technology that can beat ATA for price/performance. Thats what ATA is for. Bleating that its' "technically inferior to SCSI" is stupid. They are not intened to do the same things. SCSI=Server Fibre Channel=Server ATA/Serial ATA=Desktop
As a Road Runner user, I can verify the fact that they pretty much don't support anything. No home networks is a big one. The only thing about them is that they have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about home networks. If you call for support they will make you hook the cable modem directly to one PC for trouble shooting.
Their service has been pretty good, but this is unsurprising, and somewhat suspect "news".
I can see your point.
I am not sure that the hardware abstraction is moving ahead, but I would also argue that that still is a long way off. There seems to be a great deal of incompatibility out there.
Case in point would be the the recent release of Tribes 2. Tribes 2 is an OpenGL game that experienced a LOT of hardware issues on PC platform. I certainly don't want development on PC platforms to cease.
There will always be platform specific issues. These will continue to pose a problem. It's not neceessarily the overriding factor but, it is a factor. PC hardware varies too widely and changes too rapidly to ever really be completly extracted from the developer. IMHO.
Sensible, reasoned reply, with realworld economics taken into consideration.
Kudos.
One of the things I didn't see mentioned is that a lot of developers are writing for the console only.
c old-dead-hands crowd clamors for support and then whines when they can't get it.
Consoles have a lot of advantages. They are stable same-same environments. Not a lot of variance, since there is only one manufacturer for each one. There have been some companies that have questioned making games for PCs entirely becuase of the wide variance in the hardware, let alone the operating system.
Many companies make two versions now, one for their console-of-choice and another for Windows/Intel PC platform.
Guess which one is the support nightmare. Pretty easy when you have to support several different video card manufacturers, even ones that don't exsist any more like VooDoo. Yet, the small, vocal, they-will-get-my-VooDoo-when-they-pry-it-from-my-
Different versions of Windows, cheap, God-awful systems from Best Buy and Circuit City, poor white box mail order, you name it, and its a problem on the PC platform.
So, is it a Windows vs Linux thing? Not really. Unless Linux becomes the dominant desktop environment, or at lest has double digit percentage numbers, its a useless question. Developers don't REALLY want to develop on the PC to begin with because of the high support cost, and they are certainly NOT going to develop for a low desktop marketshare OS like Linux.
Think about this anyway: If they did, they would only support it on Red Hat anyway,(market share and mind share again) and then you would bitch about that. This community will only be happy if there are NATIVE Linux games that work on every distro. Ain't gonna happen. Be happy there is still a market for PC games at all.
As a Wisconsinite, I can say that I am proud to have this man as our Senator. While Russ and I may not agree on ever issue, I have found him to be a decent and honorable man.
All you folks out there who thinks his single "no" vote was unpatriotic, need to check in. When the FBI kicks down your door because you --==might==-- be a terrorist, you are not going to be so rightous.
I am a strong supporter of our country. I didn't vote for Mr. Bush, but I am behind him. I don't agree with him politically on a great many issues, but I support him during these trying times. I can support our government and critisize it at the same time.
Kudos to Senator Feingold for standing up for whats right, and looking beyond the current military action at the effect this kind of legislation will have down the road.
Here is something that Benjamin Franklin said that I like to quote:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."--Benjamin Franklin, 1759
While I think that hypermedia is an issue, I don't think it was necessary to pontificate THAT much on it.
People have to learn to be smart about what they read in the popular news media, and to speak up when they are spouting a line of BS. I am also offended by the sanitation of the past that occured in Mr. Katz's commentary. Sure, people only got news once or twice a day. It does NOT mean that coverage was good, well thought out or even accurate. There were media barons back then, just as there are now. For some reason we seem to think that the media barons were defeated.
Guess what, they were not. They just learned to keep a lower profile. Yellow journalism and outright lies were the order of the day 100 years ago. We went through "self-correcting" phase after that, and journalism got better. News reporting got better. We will self-correct again, now that some news is not as good.
One of the things to remember is that while errors occur in our hyper-fast news, corrections appear just as fast.
People need to use there heads. Question authority, and question what you are told. Have a skeptical eye. A healty dose of skepticism makes the world a better place.
Its the blind believers that cause panics. Its people who do not even begin to TRY to find out what is going on. Its ignorant commentary and a reliance on "common sense" that cannot be sensible due to lack real information. The only thing true about "common sense" when it comes to news is that it is is COMMON. Meaning that every ill-informed, ignorant fool who has seen a 5 minute video clip has an expert opinion.
If people do not educate themselves about issues that they care about, they will be decieved and deceive themselves about what news organizations present.
Take for example the E-mail that has been going around about former President Clinton and his promises to "get the terroists and make them pay" and the "common sense" failure to do so.
While I am not a big Clinton supporter, do you REALLY think that there was enough outrage in the public or in Congress to justify an invasion of another country over a couple of embassy attacks and the attack on the USS Cole, all spaced out over eight years?
Guess what, there wasn't. We all went about our merry little lives, and so did Congress. Had Clinton gone to war, he would have been decried as doing it for political reasons. He couldn't do it, so he didn't.
But yet we get ignorant, uninformed, badly thought-out email about it. For God's sake Paul Harvey even read the thing on the air. Common sense says that email is right. Examine your own attitudes about military action AT THAT TIME. Now is it REALLY right? Try to see through the fog of patriotism.
Be skeptical! Don't believe everything you read or hear. Look it up! Study it! And don't offer an opinion on something until you understand both sides of the issue.
Gedvondur
RAM drives are a great idea, the problem is the IDE or SCSI bus. Seek times and retriveal times can be greatly reduced, but the total bandwidth is still a limitation.
Seagate had developed years ago a standard called IPI, I think. It was for the 30 and 40 megabyte RAM drives that had developed. I know it never took off, but it was specificlly for static RAM drives.
What would be really cool, would be RAM storage with an Infiniband interface. Its possible to use it for storage or for regular memory.
I have read most of the books on the Hugo list posted earlier by some thoughtful gentleman, and while I agree that Harry Potter does not have the metallic tang of hard science fiction, they were good books.
Somewhat simplistic? Yes. However that is not always a bad thing. Just because a book does not require you to go dig out your old science texts to understand does not mean that its not an outstanding piece of writing.
We are occasionally ill served by our distain for anything that the general public likes. Do we "poo poo" Harry Potter because our Mom's liked the book and that kind of dumb guy at work liked it too? Is the negative reaction to a Harry Potter book that I am seeing here a form of intellectual elitism?
Is it that because more than the 'in' Sci-Fi crowd liked and 'got' this book we feel threatened? Are we worried if our favorite geeky things become mainstream, that we will no longer be special? No longer be smart?
We need to understand that just because the mainstream likes something, it does not necessarily make it evil. I am sure that I missed the post comparing Rowling to Gates and her publisher to Microsoft, just as I am sure that its there somewhere.
The Harry Potter books are good. Well written, thoughtful, and fun. Lets just congratulate Rowling, and forget about weather or not her work is "real".
Actually, 802.11a IS the 54Mbps 5GHz standard....Not sure what the other one is called....never heard of it.
Bluetooth is an interesting technology. When you start looking into it, the possibilities are enormous. A lot of people were bitten by the Bluetooth bug, and it's understandable why. It would be VERY cool if it worked out.
One of the huge problems is that people keep comparing 802.11b (WI-FI) to Bluetooth.
They are NOT the same thing. Go read the Bluetooth spec. Bluetooth is a cable replacement technology that can, if necessary, do some ad-hoc networking. 802.11b is wireless Ethernet. Not the same thing, not intended to do the same thing.
There have been a couple of companies that have been deliberately muddying the waters about this. Bluetooth is NOT an acceptable replacement or even a good substitute for 802.11b. Bluetooth is limited to 1megabit per second, which means throughput of about 650k to 800k real, depending on conditions. 802.11b is 11megabits max, and about 5megabits in the real world. (Shared bandwidth, retransmissions, and Ethernet overhead)
Bluetooth is staggeringly bad at providing traditional Ethernet services, just as 802.11b is awful as a cable replacement technology. 802.11b has too much power usage, and dependency on Ethernet for cable replacement. It was NOT designed to replace the cable going from your cell phone to your headset. Bluetooth was. It was just overly hyped and generally misunderstood. Too bad, it could have been cool.
Gedvondur
You raise some interesting points about publication outfits that are owned by technology companies. Reporting on a product sector that your parent company is in generates a conflict of interest.
I myself do not worry about it for a couple of reasons.
1. My personal ethics keep me from owning stock in technology companies.
2. CMP has never offered me stock options, and as far as I know has no plans to.
3. CMP is actually owned by a large British publishing company, United News and Media, thus avoiding any conflict of interest with technology companies.
It is the individual journalist's responsibility to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
Ultimately, every journalist must make the decision: Do I do the right thing? I do and I hope and encourage all other technology journalists to do the same.
Good comments, and an interesting discussion on these topics....
Steven J. Schuchart Jr.
This is just paranoia. I work for a large publishing company, CMP Media. I am a technical writer on staff for Network Computing. We are a pretty good-sized publishing company. Do you people REALLY think that because we have been sucessful we cannot be objective. Does Slashdot's association with VALINUX tilt their coverage? I don't think so. It is the same for print publications.
In my job I have zero contact with our sales area. There is a deliberate separation between sales and editorial. We in editorial like it that way. You would be amazed at how much editorial control we writers really have. There is no "corporate censor" or anything else like that. We have never altered or prevented an article from running in the publication in the interest of advertising. Period.
Small independent hardware sites are actually more vulnerable to advertising and "free gift" pressures. Don't get me wrong, I love most of the indy sites. I have been reading Toms Hardware, AnandTech, and Ars for years. But most of these sites have been started out of the goodness of someone's heart, not out of the deepness of their pocketbook. If my publishing company loses an advertising account, I don't even know about it. If any indy loses advertising, it hits him right in the pocket book.
I will admit that there are some dodgy publications out there. There are some dodgy indy sites too. Those of us who do this kind of technical writing for a large corporation are honest. When I write, I write for our reader. Please understand that the majority of technology journalists, big or small, are honest guys, doing their best. The paranoia shown by some here is simply unjustified.
Steven J. Schuchart Jr.
Perhaps we should give control of our private lives over to the government too. We have obviously failed at our own morality. That is the real root of the problem when it comes to crime and terrorism. Perhaps the government should install cameras, so it can watch us, for our own good. Just until they fix our morality problem. Do you REALLY want the same people who pay $250.00 for a hammer to "take back" the internet and "fix" it? The same people that run the IRS? Another little fact to consider; Its the WORLD WIDE Web. Don't you think that other countries will be a little annoyed at our government's attempts to "fix" the internet? These kind of doom and gloom predictions serve NO purpose. Is the internet perfect? Heck no! Will it eventually shake out? Heck yes! Try to use your logic on the discoverers of fire. Did the fire burn a few people before they knew how to handle it? You bet. Did the fire go out a few times before they learned how to tend it? You bet. Did naysayers want to go back into government funded damp cold caves without fire becuase of all the difficulties? You bet! Gedvondur
This article by Art Wittman of Network Computing might help shed some light.....BTW by experiance is that NDS is WAY ahead of active directory.... http://www.networkcomputing.com/1116/1116f1.html Give it a try Gedvondur
I would think that human communication would be one of the hardest things to get an AI to do. The nuances and slang would present a great challange and no doubt consume a great deal of computing power. There must be a better application to develop AI for than IRC. Intelligent farm machinery, house cleaners (ducts, vents, ect...). I saw quite a while ago a neat application of AI that had small robots plucking harmful bugs from plants, killing them, and putting them into a container. This would be a much better areana from development of AI than IRC. Just MHO...