>> Speaking of eye candy and reliablity/faithfullness- reminds me of my wife, although she is neither...
> Huh? Are you saying that your wife is neither reliable nor faithful, or not eye candy? I don't get it.
I just want to elaborate on eno2001's point...
AFAIK, with AND taking a higher precedence than OR, e.g.: (eye candy && (reliability || faithfulness), you're definitely right. Since OR short-circuits, the implication is:
She's not eye candy (given). AND
( - She's not reliable OR
- She's not faithful )
Good point, eno2001. So, the question remains to the parent poster (this post's grandparent): Which is it? Reliability or faithfulness?
If the telescope defect was detectable before launch, whomever was responsible for making that check should have lost their job due to the telescope being out of focus.
Forgive my bluntness--I think you need to be a bit more mindful of the fact that launching something into orbit is a lot different from rolling a new vehicle off an assembly line. For that matter, the same goes for building these devices; for all we know, the chain of responsibility likely doesn't end at NASA but at another company.
If I recall correctly from an earlier release about Deep Impact's camera, it was incorrectly calibrated which lead to it being out of focus. This probably wasn't the result of a hardware defect but over a miscommunication; if it were a hardware defect, can you justify firing someone over something like this? To quote your own link (did you read it?), it's not as if the telescope is really the most important piece of data-collecting hardware:
The Deep Impact spacecraft has four data collectors to observe the effects of the collision: a camera and infrared spectrometer comprise the High Resolution Instrument; a Medium Resolution Instrument (MRI); and a duplicate camera on the Impactor Targeting Sensor (ITS).
Tell me again why you want someone to be fired over a miscalibration of one device? These latter four components are by far much more important, and on the timescale NASA was likely given (launch window, fabrication time, etc.), it's sometimes a miracle everything works on these satellites as well as they do.
I often wonder if the only reason the public at large--such as yourself--vocalizes such concerns so loudly is because of the public nature of NASA. I can guarantee you there isn't nearly the level of accountability in privately held corporations. Case in point: compare the Columbia disaster to your average airline crash. The public was largely supportive of firing O'Keefe over this--yet you don't hear nearly the same sort of complaints regarding, say, Boeing or Airbus. No one demands their CEOs step down over a wreck.
So, here's a good reality check: Things happen, space is a dangerous place, people die, and hardware breaks. The best thing we can do is learn from what happened and pray to God that NASA officials listen to the next Richard Feynman rather than pining over public opinion such as this.
As to criticizing out of context, I still hold the opinion that the main of my post criticizes the great-grandparent (grandparent of your post =)) mostly in context with what he was trying to say.
Quite true, I'm sure I afforded him more of the benefit of the doubt than strictly necessary. (I'lll confess that I took the post out of context slightly in order to prove my point.)
I will agree that words can be very hurtful--perhaps more so than physical actions, which is probably what you were infering. Without some sort of social accountability, the situation can grow quickly out of control. But, I suppose that's looking through the spectacles of Western thought, where anti-political commentary doesn't get one executed.
Anyway, apologies for my bluntness ex postfacto; I step on toes periodically when making points.:-)
People are afraid to say things in person because they know those are wrong things to say and they know they could be held accountable in person, but not online.
Not quite, though your post has some merit to it.
The reason I would disagree is because your comment is incredibly biased toward Western thinking--actually, I'm wrong. It's incredibly biased in favor of nations whose rulesets encourage free speech. I can disprove the statement rather simply: In China, people are afraid to say things in person because they fear punishment from the government, not because they know them to be wrong. (Conversely, I suppose you could argue that they know certain things are wrong because it might solicit punishment from the government.)
So I encourage you to think carefully about the context of the post. There are plenty of cases where someone may be afraid to say something truthful because of the social implications attached to it. (E.g. Woman: Does this dress look okay? Man: Erm... sure, honey.) Just because someone is afraid to say something doesn't necessarily make it wrong! I think this was the intent behind the parent post (grandparent to this one); be careful when criticizing someone, particularly when the criticism is taken out of context.
Pointing the finger and crying troll doesn't mix well with the mostly ad hominem commentary. Explain how this line is an answer to value_added's rather pointful observations:
All of these can be done from the command line (except reading docs) and most of them can be done remotely.
What is the Windows CLI mail reader? How about changing Outlook's configuration on the fly with nothing more than the CLI? Granted, tools like netsh are fairly useful, but there is a limitation to the Windows' philosophy that everything should be GUI-first, CLI-second.
it's been the default for about 4 years, where have you been?
You do know how long Windows 98 was still in use after the release of Win2k--after the release of WinXP? Hell, you had to install DOSkey in order to have up-arrow-style command history! AFAIK, I don't remember command-line autocompletion being the default with Win2k (Pro, don't recall the default in server)--though I think it is the default in XP Pro. Being as I have tweakui installed, I can't remember whether it was or was not the default.
Now that we have this sorted out, riddle me this: What is Windows' equivalent of top? No--put your mouse down! We're talking a text-mode top processes list that's updated automatically. Bonus points if you can find one--without installing Cygwin.
[gridlock-vi:home]$ cd c: [gridlock-vi:c]$ cd Documents\ and\ Settings/
Or:
[gridlock-vi:home]$ cd c:/Documents\ and\ Settings [gridlock-vi:Documents and Settings]$
The only problem with the latter option is that directories spanning drive letter assignments cannot be tab-completed. However, it's generally a lot less typing than going through/cygdrive/*. You can actually cd to individual drive letters (this works for anything, CD- and DVD-ROM drives included: cd e:).
Microsoft has provided basic scripting via batch files for years. If you want more than that, they've provided WSH for years
...and we all know how much of a wonderful success WSH is. batch files are rather queer in their design, simply because they are more useful for setting the environment or creating a shortcut to launch an application. Beyond that, they're pretty much useless. WSH is a tremendous failure, IMO, because of the proprietary syntax. With as long as WSH has been available, I don't see it in as wide-spread use (outside trojan/worm exploitations, of course) as more powerful languages.
The advantage of Monad is precisely that it isn't just another CLI with a few twiddles. It can, for example, be tied into the.Net framework, and thus drive all the automation features that might be provided by any.Net-based application.
As could anything else. Python has provided interfaces to the win32 environment for years, and I'm sure.NET is no different. Just because a CLI offers this sort of flexibility doesn't make it much more innovative than adding this same support into the interactive interpreter of a language like Python. (Although I think iserlohn put it best when he illustrated exactly why MSH is a ridiculous idea.)
MSH has some merit to it but it is neither innovative nor a bash/sh/et al killer. bash and family are powerful precisely because of their simplicity. Complex features and functionality is passed off to the userland. Integrating features and functionality directly into the shell is a recipe for disaster.
[...] snip Ships with every Windows post 2000, I think.
Okay, I'll confess that I was wrong about the lack of a kill command. I just looked this up through the ridiculously idiot-centric help system and noticed:
Taskkill is a replacement for the Kill tool.
Great. What was so wrong with "kill" that it had to be replaced by "taskkill?" I understand the intent to create a more self-descriptive tool, but I also think that my mistake has proved my point in a somewhat circular manner.
What I mean by this is that the architecture of the default Windows CLI is absurd. I still stand by my claim that it is also anemic. The point of having a CLI is that commands can be dispatched to the system quickly and efficiently--increased verbosity in the terminology and syntax just requires more typing, which might be an attempt to further discourage users/administrators from using the CLI. The help system is also very awful--in spite of my apprehension toward manpages when I was first introduced to them, I now believe they are much easier and more effective to use than Windows' help.
Admittedly, I don't use cmd.exe at all, or at least I try to minimize my usage of it to something far less painful. On my Windows install, the MS command prompt is replaced with a shortcut to rxvt in turn running bash. What this proves to me is that Microsoft's reinventing the wheel isn't really going to accomplish much; part of the point of my original post was to comment on this. Your correction of my error just proves this--taskkill is no more intuitive than kill and there is no good reason to replace the latter with something twice as many characters in length. I'm also fairly certain that a majority of Windows admins probably have no idea about the utility (I didn't--but I don't run Windows as a server, either, only for games), opting to use the Task Manager instead.
In either case, the premise of the debate is still fairly well-proved. There aren't a lot of people who use cmd.exe in the first place because it lacks all the features of a decent shell. Additionally, what's the point of a userland utility like taskkill or tasklist when MSH is going to simple replace it with a get-process or other purportedly more intuitive commands? There is a reason you and I both install cygwin--and it's because of the power of bash/proven shells.
(I also dislike the net command--but that is more of a personal preference. The idea has merit but the command and its structure are far too monolithic.)
Why do the unix zealots always dismiss ANY attempt to make the user experience more high-level / semantic-oriented (especially if it comes from Microsoft) ?
Extracting the Microsoft-centric marketing jargon from your post (computing isn't a job, it's an experience!) so that I can get to the meat of the issue might be a bit difficult but here goes.
For about ten years since the dawn of Windows 95, Microsoft has spent a fortune downplaying the power of a CLI in favor of the all-powerful GUI. After all, why is it that cmd.exe and family are so incredibly anemic? There is no clear way to interface with the system, such as with kill -SIG PID (granted, this is because Windows is void of a kill binary); the intent behind this is likely the design philosophy of Windows. Everything must interact with the GUI, leaving only limited functionality to the shell.
So the upshot is that Microsoft is taking a step forward by moving a few steps back. Now that they're implementing a shell with something vaguely resembling real scripting, they have to somehow correct all of the marketing they have done over the years to mitigate the impact a lack of any decent shell in their operating systems. I know what will happen, too--Windows zealots will praise Microsoft for inventing the shell... never mind the fact that scriptable shells are older than I am.
Now for my next question. Why do you seem to believe this is innovative? The notion of a shell that interfaces with the system by way of core userland utilities (ps, ls, kill, et al) has been around since the inception of Unix. The fact that Microsoft has just now caught on to the usefulness of a powerful CLI is nothing innovative. Like the topmost post suggested, perhaps they are reinventing Unix--poorly. Perhaps, too, they should save themselves the headache and scrap the entire Windows source and start with something covered by a BSD license. They left the copyright in ftp.exe, after all--why not borrow the rest of the system?
Ultimately, I think MSH is just going to be a rotten hack, hyped up by Windows administrators who probably have no real understanding of what a powerful CLI can do. The shell is one thing--but what about all the other userland binaries that really make the shell useful? All the scriptable support in the world isn't going to save them no matter how bash-like it is--because without simple commands that can interact with running processes, the file system, and generally everything else (not those implemented within the shell, but ENTIRELY SEPARATE, which I don't think MS will do since they have a strange affinity for monolithic applications) what good is it really? Or is this innovation in the traditional Microsoft-marketing-department sense, where innovation is the capacity to strip all usefulness from an application to limit potential confusion, thereby increasing the end user's experience in a positive, fluffy-bunny environment?
For the sake of making my own biases clear, I do believe that IQ tests do a passable job of measuring something. Also, my hat size is 7 5/8. Bow before me!
I'll bet you're real popular with the ladies, too.
...and uses only electricity to power vaccum inducing suction turbines
Not to be picky with regard to the article summary, but what the hell else did they think it was going to be powered with? Hamster wheels?
Imagine that! It uses only electricity! Our former model tried the hamster wheel approach, connected directly to the suction turbines. But this one is new and improved!
Ah, but let's be honest here--how many average users use Windows Update unless it downloads and installs the updates automatically? Furthermore, how many of those individuals get fed up with this mysterious spoon-feeding because it interrupts their game of solitare or forces a reboot when they're typing up a brownie recipe?
While I understand the merit of your post, the point is that wide spread adoption will still have to wait until people begin purchasing new computers with Longhorn preinstalled. I think one of the best examples of this sort of wait and see approach comes from a previous reply to my original post. Therein, I think the author perfectly illustrates a few of the problems Microsoft is facing. Their decision to drop software support for older systems (in the author's case, the Alpha), the fact that most technically savvy individuals are already using alternate browsers (relenting to IE only when strictly necessary for their particular set up), and the issue that you highlighted--Microsoft won't be supporting anything earlier than Windows XP.
Again, your post has merit. But I personally believe that web developers shouldn't jump to any conclusion here. IE7 will very likely not become widely used for at least a year or two after it release, regardless of how much spoon feeding Microsoft does through Windows Update.
Let's not jump the gun here. There's been no beta released yet and honestly how long is it going to take for everyone who is using IE6 to adopt IE7? To illustrate my point, let us step back a few years...
Do you remember the rendering bugs in IE4? What about IE5? Then came IE5.1, 5.5, and 6. The only reason IE6 is now a majority market share browser is because most average computer users are using Windows XP. I dare say, but it really wouldn't surprise me if there are still a number of 5.x installs in use by those who are using Windows 2000. IE7 adoption won't hit a majority of the market until Longhorn is released and even then, how many people are going to be purchasing new computers right away? I remember when XP came out--the number of people still using IE5 two years after the fact was pretty incredible.
So before anyone gets incredible excited over this, take a moment to realize that the adoption of IE7 (assuming it actually does fix the bugs that have plagued IE before) is at least a year or two away. This isn't going to be an overnight thing--people have to buy new computers if they're not technically inclined and even then a very small minority of the almost-but-not-quite technically inclined will bother to upgrade. So, unless the upgrades are enforced by ISPs (through hand out discs, pre-configured packages, etc.), I encourage web developers to sit this one out.
The upshot? Don't plan on using PNGs with an alpha channel until 2007 or later. (Unless Longhorn is pushed back again, which means we could be waiting another FIVE years. Ah, and if you didn't detect it, yes that was mild sarcasm.) Remember, even CMSs like Plone still have CSS work arounds for Netscape 4.x--and how old is that?
Keep the stone tablets, my friends, this new "paper" thing is still buggy.
Actually, this is an amazingly brilliant ploy: You lose a memory card to your camera, some idiot picks it up and decides to post its content on the 'net, you find out, submit the story to Slashdot, and suddenly the perpetrator's bandwidth costs skyrocket and (maybe) the site goes down!
I dunno, if you look at the site in his.sig, the dog seems pretty clever. It looks as if it's rescuing a dildo. Maybe it's suggesting something about the human population?
The Department of Labor says that their job numbers are inaccurate anyway.
That's something I find rather hilarious about most of the outrageous, emotionally-backed arguments perpetrated by those who tend to believe that anyone with an "R" next to their name is automatically evil and anyone with a "D" next to it is automatically good. Few people (and I suppose this goes on both sides of the isle) bother to check the information of many of these organizations--usually special interest groups, but never mind that--and instead opt to take it as gospel.
The Department of Labor seems to be the most logical choice for the real data and more appropriate, too. I noticed the narrow-minded nature of the link; look at job loss versus job gain without regard to other, external factors. Sept 11 was much more responsible for a large scale loss of jobs and even then, the only number cited was a loss of 0.7% under President Bush. Seven tenths of a percent is really not bad, all things considered.
But again, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's much more entertaining for the emotionally strained among us to wildly cite meaningless numbers alone without any additional data to back them up. It's a shame so many are guilty of this, though.
Depends on the news source you're listening to. Considering foreign news agencies refuse to report the *entire* story, comments such as yours are hardly surprising. Many Iraqi towns were without any sort of infrastucture prior to the ousting of Hussein; now that international companies are able to infiltrate and actually create these infrastuctures, I should think this to be beneficial to all. Maybe Iraq will have broadband, too. Possibly even before some rural areas here in the States.
I think that should be our new slogan. We invade so you can connect.
The problem as I see it is that most posters complaining about the State of US broadband are taking incorrect approaches. For starters, most of them probably don't even live here. Sure the US has a lot of population centers, but it also has plenty of wide open spaces. I have to drive 80+ miles one-way to get to anything that resembles a city--and the population there is only 80K. If you want to get to a city with 100K people or more, you'll spend all day driving to the northern part of the State.
Infrastructure costs money. Laying cables/fiber/whatever costs money. Multiply money by distance and sometimes these costs are prohibitively high (not to mention labor unions, environmental impact studies, and numerous other factors). The US is behind not because we can't afford it or because we are unable or unwilling to spend the money--we're behind because of distance. Canada is probably a more fair comparison than Sweden or South Korea (as several other posts pointed out) but even then, I know a few Canadians who are still on 56K.
I'm assuming your intention was to cite the amount of "waste" we place on our military budget. It's rather interesting then that we're developer 3rd and probably 4th generation stealth technology when most nations are still struggling with 1st generation technology. Sure you can poke fun at the US military and some of our FUBARS (first generation patriot system comes to mind), but until you actually witness the capabilities of that military, understanding what $399 billion dollars gets is very, very, very difficult. For anyone eager to cite US military failures, I'd suggest searching for some of the test videos for various US military hardware (I'm sure you could find some on bunker busters and General Dynamics has plenty of videos on hardware such as the Abrams--the new version that doesn't have the filtration problems with dust that earlier models did). But, as the parent pointed out... $399 billion in a GDP of over $10,000 billion is just a drop in the bucket.
The question shouldn't be directed at the "waste" in programs such as defense, if that's what you were implying. The question should be: what should the US do? We already subsidize rural telecommunications providers so that they can afford to upgrade the existing antiquated systems and provide broadband access. Actually, one of the local telcos in this part of the State provides more broadband solutions to more people than Qwest--and Qwest's territory extends over several States, not counties like the local provider. To me, that just sounds like bureaucratic wastage and with Qwest that wouldn't really surprise me.
The problem is much more complex than most people--including the authors of the articles realize. Square mileage, telecommunication territories, distance between population centers, and the list goes on. So to answer your question: $150 billion might not even fix the problem. It isn't that $150 would be enough, it's bureaucracy--and if you are mindful of American politics, you are probably already aware that our notion of "speed," that is dealing with national problems in a timely fashion, is measured on the order of months, not days. We can afford it, we just don't have politicians who are willing to address it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to elaborate on eno2001's point...
AFAIK, with AND taking a higher precedence than OR, e.g.: (eye candy && (reliability || faithfulness), you're definitely right. Since OR short-circuits, the implication is:
She's not eye candy (given). AND
( - She's not reliable OR
- She's not faithful )
Good point, eno2001. So, the question remains to the parent poster (this post's grandparent): Which is it? Reliability or faithfulness?
Forgive my bluntness--I think you need to be a bit more mindful of the fact that launching something into orbit is a lot different from rolling a new vehicle off an assembly line. For that matter, the same goes for building these devices; for all we know, the chain of responsibility likely doesn't end at NASA but at another company.
If I recall correctly from an earlier release about Deep Impact's camera, it was incorrectly calibrated which lead to it being out of focus. This probably wasn't the result of a hardware defect but over a miscommunication; if it were a hardware defect, can you justify firing someone over something like this? To quote your own link (did you read it?), it's not as if the telescope is really the most important piece of data-collecting hardware:
Tell me again why you want someone to be fired over a miscalibration of one device? These latter four components are by far much more important, and on the timescale NASA was likely given (launch window, fabrication time, etc.), it's sometimes a miracle everything works on these satellites as well as they do.
I often wonder if the only reason the public at large--such as yourself--vocalizes such concerns so loudly is because of the public nature of NASA. I can guarantee you there isn't nearly the level of accountability in privately held corporations. Case in point: compare the Columbia disaster to your average airline crash. The public was largely supportive of firing O'Keefe over this--yet you don't hear nearly the same sort of complaints regarding, say, Boeing or Airbus. No one demands their CEOs step down over a wreck.
So, here's a good reality check: Things happen, space is a dangerous place, people die, and hardware breaks. The best thing we can do is learn from what happened and pray to God that NASA officials listen to the next Richard Feynman rather than pining over public opinion such as this.
I'm going to regret this... but:
"In Soviet Russia, Slashdotters are dying imagining a beowulf cluster as their new overlord owning you, Netcraft confirms..."
Quite true, I'm sure I afforded him more of the benefit of the doubt than strictly necessary. (I'lll confess that I took the post out of context slightly in order to prove my point.)
I will agree that words can be very hurtful--perhaps more so than physical actions, which is probably what you were infering. Without some sort of social accountability, the situation can grow quickly out of control. But, I suppose that's looking through the spectacles of Western thought, where anti-political commentary doesn't get one executed.
Anyway, apologies for my bluntness ex postfacto; I step on toes periodically when making points.
Not quite, though your post has some merit to it.
The reason I would disagree is because your comment is incredibly biased toward Western thinking--actually, I'm wrong. It's incredibly biased in favor of nations whose rulesets encourage free speech. I can disprove the statement rather simply: In China, people are afraid to say things in person because they fear punishment from the government, not because they know them to be wrong. (Conversely, I suppose you could argue that they know certain things are wrong because it might solicit punishment from the government.)
So I encourage you to think carefully about the context of the post. There are plenty of cases where someone may be afraid to say something truthful because of the social implications attached to it. (E.g. Woman: Does this dress look okay? Man: Erm... sure, honey.) Just because someone is afraid to say something doesn't necessarily make it wrong! I think this was the intent behind the parent post (grandparent to this one); be careful when criticizing someone, particularly when the criticism is taken out of context.
In that case, the king is the man sitting on the porcelain throne. He's also the only one who gives a shit.
What is the Windows CLI mail reader? How about changing Outlook's configuration on the fly with nothing more than the CLI? Granted, tools like netsh are fairly useful, but there is a limitation to the Windows' philosophy that everything should be GUI-first, CLI-second.
You do know how long Windows 98 was still in use after the release of Win2k--after the release of WinXP? Hell, you had to install DOSkey in order to have up-arrow-style command history! AFAIK, I don't remember command-line autocompletion being the default with Win2k (Pro, don't recall the default in server)--though I think it is the default in XP Pro. Being as I have tweakui installed, I can't remember whether it was or was not the default.
Now that we have this sorted out, riddle me this: What is Windows' equivalent of top? No--put your mouse down! We're talking a text-mode top processes list that's updated automatically. Bonus points if you can find one--without installing Cygwin.
Seriously--can anyone read that description and not laugh, given the context of previous posts...?
"My monads experience the world from a particular point of view. It's usually very dark, of course, but sometimes they can come to light."
Everytime I see sl, I can't help but think of this.
As could anything else. Python has provided interfaces to the win32 environment for years, and I'm sure
MSH has some merit to it but it is neither innovative nor a bash/sh/et al killer. bash and family are powerful precisely because of their simplicity. Complex features and functionality is passed off to the userland. Integrating features and functionality directly into the shell is a recipe for disaster.
[...] snip
Ships with every Windows post 2000, I think.
Okay, I'll confess that I was wrong about the lack of a kill command. I just looked this up through the ridiculously idiot-centric help system and noticed:
Taskkill is a replacement for the Kill tool.
Great. What was so wrong with "kill" that it had to be replaced by "taskkill?" I understand the intent to create a more self-descriptive tool, but I also think that my mistake has proved my point in a somewhat circular manner.
What I mean by this is that the architecture of the default Windows CLI is absurd. I still stand by my claim that it is also anemic. The point of having a CLI is that commands can be dispatched to the system quickly and efficiently--increased verbosity in the terminology and syntax just requires more typing, which might be an attempt to further discourage users/administrators from using the CLI. The help system is also very awful--in spite of my apprehension toward manpages when I was first introduced to them, I now believe they are much easier and more effective to use than Windows' help.
Admittedly, I don't use cmd.exe at all, or at least I try to minimize my usage of it to something far less painful. On my Windows install, the MS command prompt is replaced with a shortcut to rxvt in turn running bash. What this proves to me is that Microsoft's reinventing the wheel isn't really going to accomplish much; part of the point of my original post was to comment on this. Your correction of my error just proves this--taskkill is no more intuitive than kill and there is no good reason to replace the latter with something twice as many characters in length. I'm also fairly certain that a majority of Windows admins probably have no idea about the utility (I didn't--but I don't run Windows as a server, either, only for games), opting to use the Task Manager instead.
In either case, the premise of the debate is still fairly well-proved. There aren't a lot of people who use cmd.exe in the first place because it lacks all the features of a decent shell. Additionally, what's the point of a userland utility like taskkill or tasklist when MSH is going to simple replace it with a get-process or other purportedly more intuitive commands? There is a reason you and I both install cygwin--and it's because of the power of bash/proven shells.
(I also dislike the net command--but that is more of a personal preference. The idea has merit but the command and its structure are far too monolithic.)
Why do the unix zealots always dismiss ANY attempt to make the user experience more high-level / semantic-oriented (especially if it comes from Microsoft) ?
Extracting the Microsoft-centric marketing jargon from your post (computing isn't a job, it's an experience!) so that I can get to the meat of the issue might be a bit difficult but here goes.
For about ten years since the dawn of Windows 95, Microsoft has spent a fortune downplaying the power of a CLI in favor of the all-powerful GUI. After all, why is it that cmd.exe and family are so incredibly anemic? There is no clear way to interface with the system, such as with kill -SIG PID (granted, this is because Windows is void of a kill binary); the intent behind this is likely the design philosophy of Windows. Everything must interact with the GUI, leaving only limited functionality to the shell.
So the upshot is that Microsoft is taking a step forward by moving a few steps back. Now that they're implementing a shell with something vaguely resembling real scripting, they have to somehow correct all of the marketing they have done over the years to mitigate the impact a lack of any decent shell in their operating systems. I know what will happen, too--Windows zealots will praise Microsoft for inventing the shell... never mind the fact that scriptable shells are older than I am.
Now for my next question. Why do you seem to believe this is innovative? The notion of a shell that interfaces with the system by way of core userland utilities (ps, ls, kill, et al) has been around since the inception of Unix. The fact that Microsoft has just now caught on to the usefulness of a powerful CLI is nothing innovative. Like the topmost post suggested, perhaps they are reinventing Unix--poorly. Perhaps, too, they should save themselves the headache and scrap the entire Windows source and start with something covered by a BSD license. They left the copyright in ftp.exe, after all--why not borrow the rest of the system?
Ultimately, I think MSH is just going to be a rotten hack, hyped up by Windows administrators who probably have no real understanding of what a powerful CLI can do. The shell is one thing--but what about all the other userland binaries that really make the shell useful? All the scriptable support in the world isn't going to save them no matter how bash-like it is--because without simple commands that can interact with running processes, the file system, and generally everything else (not those implemented within the shell, but ENTIRELY SEPARATE, which I don't think MS will do since they have a strange affinity for monolithic applications) what good is it really? Or is this innovation in the traditional Microsoft-marketing-department sense, where innovation is the capacity to strip all usefulness from an application to limit potential confusion, thereby increasing the end user's experience in a positive, fluffy-bunny environment?
</rant>
For the sake of making my own biases clear, I do believe that IQ tests do a passable job of measuring something. Also, my hat size is 7 5/8. Bow before me!
I'll bet you're real popular with the ladies, too.
Oh... wait... hat size.
Yeah, but those engines 25 years ago were altogether much more exciting.
...and uses only electricity to power vaccum inducing suction turbines
Not to be picky with regard to the article summary, but what the hell else did they think it was going to be powered with? Hamster wheels?
Imagine that! It uses only electricity! Our former model tried the hamster wheel approach, connected directly to the suction turbines. But this one is new and improved!
Sheesh...
Remember, Google doesn't own the patent on innovation.
The USPTO is already reviewing Microsoft's patent application on innovation as we speak...
Ah, but let's be honest here--how many average users use Windows Update unless it downloads and installs the updates automatically? Furthermore, how many of those individuals get fed up with this mysterious spoon-feeding because it interrupts their game of solitare or forces a reboot when they're typing up a brownie recipe?
While I understand the merit of your post, the point is that wide spread adoption will still have to wait until people begin purchasing new computers with Longhorn preinstalled. I think one of the best examples of this sort of wait and see approach comes from a previous reply to my original post. Therein, I think the author perfectly illustrates a few of the problems Microsoft is facing. Their decision to drop software support for older systems (in the author's case, the Alpha), the fact that most technically savvy individuals are already using alternate browsers (relenting to IE only when strictly necessary for their particular set up), and the issue that you highlighted--Microsoft won't be supporting anything earlier than Windows XP.
Again, your post has merit. But I personally believe that web developers shouldn't jump to any conclusion here. IE7 will very likely not become widely used for at least a year or two after it release, regardless of how much spoon feeding Microsoft does through Windows Update.
I am so happy to hear this.
Let's not jump the gun here. There's been no beta released yet and honestly how long is it going to take for everyone who is using IE6 to adopt IE7? To illustrate my point, let us step back a few years...
Do you remember the rendering bugs in IE4? What about IE5? Then came IE5.1, 5.5, and 6. The only reason IE6 is now a majority market share browser is because most average computer users are using Windows XP. I dare say, but it really wouldn't surprise me if there are still a number of 5.x installs in use by those who are using Windows 2000. IE7 adoption won't hit a majority of the market until Longhorn is released and even then, how many people are going to be purchasing new computers right away? I remember when XP came out--the number of people still using IE5 two years after the fact was pretty incredible.
So before anyone gets incredible excited over this, take a moment to realize that the adoption of IE7 (assuming it actually does fix the bugs that have plagued IE before) is at least a year or two away. This isn't going to be an overnight thing--people have to buy new computers if they're not technically inclined and even then a very small minority of the almost-but-not-quite technically inclined will bother to upgrade. So, unless the upgrades are enforced by ISPs (through hand out discs, pre-configured packages, etc.), I encourage web developers to sit this one out.
The upshot? Don't plan on using PNGs with an alpha channel until 2007 or later. (Unless Longhorn is pushed back again, which means we could be waiting another FIVE years. Ah, and if you didn't detect it, yes that was mild sarcasm.) Remember, even CMSs like Plone still have CSS work arounds for Netscape 4.x--and how old is that?
Keep the stone tablets, my friends, this new "paper" thing is still buggy.
Actually, this is an amazingly brilliant ploy: You lose a memory card to your camera, some idiot picks it up and decides to post its content on the 'net, you find out, submit the story to Slashdot, and suddenly the perpetrator's bandwidth costs skyrocket and (maybe) the site goes down!
Alas, the bittersweet taste of vengeance.
Reduced demand leads to reduced supply.
.sig, the dog seems pretty clever. It looks as if it's rescuing a dildo. Maybe it's suggesting something about the human population?
I dunno, if you look at the site in his
The Department of Labor says that their job numbers are inaccurate anyway.
That's something I find rather hilarious about most of the outrageous, emotionally-backed arguments perpetrated by those who tend to believe that anyone with an "R" next to their name is automatically evil and anyone with a "D" next to it is automatically good. Few people (and I suppose this goes on both sides of the isle) bother to check the information of many of these organizations--usually special interest groups, but never mind that--and instead opt to take it as gospel.
The Department of Labor seems to be the most logical choice for the real data and more appropriate, too. I noticed the narrow-minded nature of the link; look at job loss versus job gain without regard to other, external factors. Sept 11 was much more responsible for a large scale loss of jobs and even then, the only number cited was a loss of 0.7% under President Bush. Seven tenths of a percent is really not bad, all things considered.
But again, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's much more entertaining for the emotionally strained among us to wildly cite meaningless numbers alone without any additional data to back them up. It's a shame so many are guilty of this, though.
We've seen this before and it goes without saying that bringing unidentified samples of space-stuff back to Earth is, of course, 100% safe. Good thing it's Utah and not Piedmont, Ariz., right?
;-)
Maybe Genesis is a perfect name?
Depends on the news source you're listening to. Considering foreign news agencies refuse to report the *entire* story, comments such as yours are hardly surprising. Many Iraqi towns were without any sort of infrastucture prior to the ousting of Hussein; now that international companies are able to infiltrate and actually create these infrastuctures, I should think this to be beneficial to all. Maybe Iraq will have broadband, too. Possibly even before some rural areas here in the States.
I think that should be our new slogan. We invade so you can connect.
You can look at the numbers that way.
Umm, I think the parent just did.
The problem as I see it is that most posters complaining about the State of US broadband are taking incorrect approaches. For starters, most of them probably don't even live here. Sure the US has a lot of population centers, but it also has plenty of wide open spaces. I have to drive 80+ miles one-way to get to anything that resembles a city--and the population there is only 80K. If you want to get to a city with 100K people or more, you'll spend all day driving to the northern part of the State.
Infrastructure costs money. Laying cables/fiber/whatever costs money. Multiply money by distance and sometimes these costs are prohibitively high (not to mention labor unions, environmental impact studies, and numerous other factors). The US is behind not because we can't afford it or because we are unable or unwilling to spend the money--we're behind because of distance. Canada is probably a more fair comparison than Sweden or South Korea (as several other posts pointed out) but even then, I know a few Canadians who are still on 56K.
I'm assuming your intention was to cite the amount of "waste" we place on our military budget. It's rather interesting then that we're developer 3rd and probably 4th generation stealth technology when most nations are still struggling with 1st generation technology. Sure you can poke fun at the US military and some of our FUBARS (first generation patriot system comes to mind), but until you actually witness the capabilities of that military, understanding what $399 billion dollars gets is very, very, very difficult. For anyone eager to cite US military failures, I'd suggest searching for some of the test videos for various US military hardware (I'm sure you could find some on bunker busters and General Dynamics has plenty of videos on hardware such as the Abrams--the new version that doesn't have the filtration problems with dust that earlier models did). But, as the parent pointed out... $399 billion in a GDP of over $10,000 billion is just a drop in the bucket.
The question shouldn't be directed at the "waste" in programs such as defense, if that's what you were implying. The question should be: what should the US do? We already subsidize rural telecommunications providers so that they can afford to upgrade the existing antiquated systems and provide broadband access. Actually, one of the local telcos in this part of the State provides more broadband solutions to more people than Qwest--and Qwest's territory extends over several States, not counties like the local provider. To me, that just sounds like bureaucratic wastage and with Qwest that wouldn't really surprise me.
The problem is much more complex than most people--including the authors of the articles realize. Square mileage, telecommunication territories, distance between population centers, and the list goes on. So to answer your question: $150 billion might not even fix the problem. It isn't that $150 would be enough, it's bureaucracy--and if you are mindful of American politics, you are probably already aware that our notion of "speed," that is dealing with national problems in a timely fashion, is measured on the order of months, not days. We can afford it, we just don't have politicians who are willing to address it.