Yeah, like getting thousands of dead people to the polls in Chicago on a regular basis. Oh, wait, that's the Democrats.
Let's see, I'll try again. Like sending Federal agents in to blast loud heavy metal at a compound in Texas full of civilian American women and children, then burn it to the ground with the people inside? Oh, wait, Democrats again.
Hmmm... What about bombing a Chinese embassy because they couldn't be bothered to put people on the ground long enough to confirm a target? Wait, wait, that was a Democrat, too.
Damn, I'm not doing so hot at proving all bone-headed criminal stuff is done by the party you despise, am I?
Heh. My sister sold enough subscriptions to Grit to get the Coleco? Pong one-trick console. Two paddles, two nine-volt batteries, a select button, and a start button were about all it had. No cartridge slot at all, just Pong. The 2600 was a leap forward from hooking different boxes up to the RCA jack on our slide-switching adapter box attached to the antenna screw posts for different games.
Then, impressed with what we'd gotten out of the 2600 (actually, a Sears VCS) we bought a 600 XL as the family's first non-console computer. Too bad we never had any drives for it. Typing in the whole text of a program into the ROM Basic got a little old. Imagine thinking of DOS 5 on a 286 with 1 meg of RAM, 40 megs of hard drive, and an EGA video system being another huge leap. And yet obviously it was over the things that came before.
The thing is, games are doing the same thing computers in general have done. They're coming to the masses instead fo drawing the masses to themselves. Tetris, Bejeweled, little Flash games on websites, and that style of simple to pick up game driven by a fun mechanic and upbeat music rather than a story and realistic graphics are what non-gamers play when they do play games. More computers are being put into homes all the time, and the old ones get pitched or come to collectors of old and interesting computer hardware like me. That doesn't mean more people are savvy enough to do things in DOS, CP/M, a Unix command line, or any of the other more involved systems. It just means that GUIs and programs for them have become simplified enough that people can pick them up with less effort It's the same thing, really.
I'm not a physicist either, but I think I spotted a couple of flaws in your solution.
You don't really want either the inside or the outside to gather heat. If you were dealing with radiated broad-spectrum light that got transferred as heat once it hit a surface on both the inside and the outside, then ideally you'd have it reflective on the outside and transmissive on the inside. There are a few issues with that solution still, though:
That's probably not a material you'd use to make a shipping container. Steel or aluminum are, and it's pretty easy to make the outside reflective with those either by polishing them or by painting them white. You don't want them polished too smooth of course, because then they'd be mirrors, but think polished brushed stainless like a DeLorean.
You probably don't want people seeing the equipment inside anyway, which is what a transmissive material would allow (unless it's translucent and partially transmissive).
The exterior color is more important, because you don't want to pick up additional heat by gathering the energy radiated in sunlight. You've already got the heat on the inside of the container, so getting it out requires ventilation or plumbing. Just capturing it on the ceiling and walls isn't going to cool the interior. The computers are not radiating their heat as light to be trapped by a surface and reconverted into heat. Well, not if you still have a data center instead of a smoldering scrapheap, anyway. There are hot surfaces surrounded by metal, air, or possibly something more exotic like glycol or vegetable oil. You need to not just keep from capturing the heat, but actively move the heat away from the components generating it in order to cool your systems.
Check Apple's SEC filings. They bill themselves as a computer company that adds value with software, not a software company that also happens to sell hardware. They're more than happy to have both OS X and Windows, and even Linux running on their computers. They just want to make sure it's their computers that are running it.
They also had about $6 billion in gross margin over the three months ending June 30th on about $17 billion in sales, and at that time about $7 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Over the course of one year, they've added more than $4 billion in total assets from just over $17 billion to well over $21 billion. Most of this increase is in the "current assets" category.
If anyone wants to blame Steve Jobs for hurting Apple, they could only possibly make a case through his time spent at Pixar and Disney instead of paying more attention to Apple. He may be crazy, but he's not stupid. It seems the more attention Apple gets from Jobs or whoever he has looking over things for him the better the company gets.
I'd heard the 90% within 100 miles statistic before, but I wasn't sure how recent it was (nor, truthfully, if it was entirely accurate or some hyperbole).
They have lots of artificial lighting in Canada. It's plain on the picture. The farthest north reaches just don't have that many inhabitants. Much of Canada's population lives just north of the US border.
As for the horizontal line across Asia, I'm going to guess that's Russia's Trans-Siberian Railroad and all the settlements along it. Even in the more heavily lit region around the Caucasus, one can pick out a line. It appears to run directly from the Baltic near St. Petersburg to the east then south a bit around th Chinese border to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. That's about the route of the TSR.
You're right, of course. I didn't address whether or not it's a good idea to focus on doing it. I was simply clarifying what the OP was saying. Anything that takes you away from actually running your business can kill a startup.
BTW, for having a nickname of "ClosedSource", you present a very balanced view of proprietary and OSS software. That's quite refreshing.
He said he wants to pay someone to do the programming because he knows about point-of-sale systems and not about programming. He's what some software teams call the "domain knowledge contact", or what a freelance programmer would call a "client". Outside of "scratch my itch" projects, a lead programmer is rarely the domain expert on a project, and the domain expert on the project is rarely a programmer. That's what interface specifications and client use scenarios are for.
If you're having issues with the concept, pick up a book or a short net article on Extreme Programming. While reading it, note how much time the authors spend explaining how to communicate what's desired by the customer to the programmers and what's feasible in the budget and time constraints from the programmers to the client. XP is not the only methodology out there that addresses this, but it addresses it clearly, voluminously, and in recent, easily located resources.
I'm not sure whether your comments mean you don't think proprietary POS software isn't out there or if you think the stated price range doesn't count as "expensive". Trust me, $2000 is expensive for a new startup that's self-funded. People do need POS software. You don't go into a store and see people using a notebook and a pencil to check out shoppers.
A retail store isn't exactly the place for running most online shopping cart packages from a kiosk, either. People want you to scan the items, give them a total, take their payment, and be done. They don't want to have to give you an email address, postal address, credit card or PayPal info, and select shipping options. One could shoehorn a ZenCart or something into the POS role, but it'd be better handled as a different package. It would preferably be one that can integrate and track prices and inventory in sync with an online store, though.
The OP isn't counting on selling the POS software as his business model. He's opening a business that needs POS software and doesn't want to drop $200o to $5000 on a proprietary solution. That was stated.
His interest is apparently in using $2000 to $5000 to pay other people to do a GPL-licensed POS software system so his money won't be locked up in some unresponsive closed-source POS software vendor's accounts. He's trying to be a good business and OSS citizen by competing on the core of his business and cooperating in the portions that are ancillary and supportive. The POS software one uses is rarely a competitive advantage in retail. Pricing, customer service, marketing, location, and potentially how you tie your POS and warehouse systems together are much more important than the POS software itself.
Of course, supporting the software might turn into a secondary revenue stream, or it might be the kernel of a start-up for someone else.
That's probably in addition to other factors and not in lieu of them, right? Very small eukaryotes with short life spans tend toward faster rates than larger species, too, right? Wouldn't for example, the green algae be expected to have a higher rate than the modern plants?
Another poster mentioned the population size, and this seems to be yet another factor for bacteria. There are far, far more of them than of us, so that's likely to be a factor, too I'd think.
Separate or mostly separate populations of a species tend to accumulate more genetic variation than populations that reproduce sexually in a well-connected graph, too. Intercontinental travel has likely slowed the rate of evolution for humans and migratory birds. IIRC in Germany a few years ago there was talk of raising sections of highway to improve the interbreeding of certain small animals such as voles. Reduction in fitness due to inbreeding was a short-term concern, and in the long-term parapatric speciation was the worry.
When did proper version tracking of shared libs happen on Windows? That's right, it didn't. The application vendors put the DLLs they need in the application's directory and use extra disk space and memory. That's not a shared library any more, is it? Avoiding the problem by taking a step back in time is not the same as solving it. The.NET framework tracks its own libraries that applications based on it use, and that alleviates some of the pain as well.
If NTFS has gotten as good as ReiserFS and ext3 at recovering from crashes, I've missed it somewhere. It's a far leap past FAT (12, 16, or 32), but it still has some way to go AFAICT. It's pretty close I guess, but I'm not sure I'd say it's in the same boat. Maybe in the same harbor. When was the last time you crashed a Windows box with a RAID 5 array and didn't at all worry about it cleaning up after itself? I as a matter of fact kicked the power loose on a Linux box with a RAID 5 data mount this morning, being my clumsy self. No problems at all.
I'm not a Linux freak who won't touch other OSes. I use XP and Linux both every day. I also use OS X semi-regularly. I have Amiga OS, OS/2, DOS, NetBSD, and a few other OSes on my collection of older and unusual hardware. Windows is one of the best OSes out there for the desktop, regardless of application availability. I don't think it's _the_ best, and I'm not sure it ever will be. The applications sure help its case, though. Windows definitely isn't in my top 5 for server OSes, and it might not be in my top 10 if I took the time to make the list. I'd put it in the top three or four desktop OSes, but I still don't think it's any easier to troubleshoot than, say, Ubuntu, Mandriva, or PCLinuxOS. Easier than Gentoo or Slackware, sure, but those are not valid comparisons for mainstream desktop use.
more cell division, shorter lifespan, and more more abundant reproduction. All of these mean mutations collect in the population faster. Bacteria evolve much faster than mice, BTW, and they're not warm-blooded since they have no blood. Yet, they reproduce at a much faster rate and the mutations add up faster.
I didn't read TFA, but TFS tells us nothing common sense and a basic high-school understanding of biology couldn't predict as a hypothesis. That someone has gathered evidence to support the hypothesis empirically is pretty cool, though. Even what seems apparent should be tested, or it's not really science.
Also, if you think troubleshooting Windows is easy, you probably haven't done it much. Try installing WordPerfect Suite, Corel Draw, Photoshop, Crystal Reports, PowerTerm Pro, Lotus Notes, and PagePlus on 10 PCs. Crash half of them by cutting power. Then, troubleshoot the DLL hell and disk corruption that results.
Troubleshooting Windows may be easier for you than troubleshooting Linux. That's not an objective measurement. I'd say both have their strengths and weaknesses in troubleshooting. One of Linux's biggest strengths is that so many production server machines so rarely need troubleshooting in the first place. I've never had a Windows server run for three months without downtime, let alone a year or two.
Desktops of both kinds are more likely to need troubleshooting than servers, because you have more finger-poking happening. A well-administered Linux desktop is safe from lots of this, while most Windows desktops still have to be run as administrator to get real work done. Microsoft is making progress on the limited account front, though. On Linux at least you can remove and reinstall a particular package without trashing the libraries in use by other programs, and without rebooting to release any libraries still in use by other programs. Microsoft's registry is probably a really good idea for the OS, but making it a central repository for every application is a mess./etc is a much better solution, and is easier to fix when something goes wrong.
Of course pirates are violent. You think cargo freighter crews just give up the goods for fun?;-)
When is someone going to call this bitch and tell her that root-kitting computers is a computer-related crime which equates to trespassing and invasion of privacy, that selling audio CDs that aren't Redbook compliant is fraud, and that trying to force people to pay $60 for another copy of a game or be sued because they can't keep their damn discs from scratching against the console's drive is extortion and racketeering?
Theft? Heh. Sony is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act itself. They are guilty of installing software on people's computers without their consent which circumvents the computer owner's ability to control access to the copyrighted works on his or her computer.
Seriously (as seriously as possible, anyway -- imagine I'm keeping a straight face), if you're wearing Faraday pants, you probably aren't concerned about the cage the pants produce. You'd be thankful to have them to keep all the nasty acrylic-cased gamer PCs from messing with your junk.
I'd say anything below 3 doesn't count, either. It's the Internet if it gets to your through Ethernet, Token Ring, PPP, SLIP, Arcnet, PLIP, or X.25 so I don't think Layer 1 or Layer 2 matter at all.
Plus, don't forget TCP's little brother, UDP. Much of the Internet's woes would be much worse if the applications suited for UDP all used TCP instead. Some of what's currently done with TCP would probably scale better with UDP too. It's a valid choice for lots of tasks, but TCP's better when more reliable delivery is needed.
In general, yes. However, I fail to come up with a common day-to-day reason to have a Faraday cage meant to keep radiation out near one's groin for hours on end. The post to which I was responding claimed concern in that specific context. I'm guessing the Faraday cage in question is a steel or aluminum computer tower case kept on the floor under a desk.
If these people have ever seen an arcade game with guns or crossbows. Silent Scope comes to mind, as does Beachhead 2000. Nintendo had a light gun for the NES home system. Games as far back as at least the first Star Wars arcade game used controls that simulated the actual controls used for killing your enemies up to a point. After Burner had a sit-down version with a flight stick, throttle, trigger, and thumb button which pitched and rolled with the plane on-screen. Battlezone drove with two joysticks like many tracked vehicles really do. Is the problem that knives and garrotes are more personal than ranged weapons?
Apart from video games, there are lots of other simulated killing actions. People have been fencing for centuries, and that's considered a respectable sport. The SCA features swords, maces, flails, and more. People doing civil war reenactments use rifles, cannon, swords, and bayonets. Paintball players are shooting guns and lobbing grenades at one another. Hell, the stores still sell water guns and water balloons for kids, don't they? I see them all the time, and I can't imagine they're in the toy section just to sit there. We used to play cops and robbers or CIA vs. KGB as kids.
Security is not a package. Say it with me now, "Security is not a package".
Security is a process. You make the effort needed to crack or crash a system beyond the value to the attacker, and they won't attack.
There's simply no need of SELinux in a coffee pot or an MP3 player. It's overkill. Linus is concerned with all the targets of the kernel, and not just the Sewper Seekret Survur next to the dresser in some kid's room.
Now _you_ might be using Linux to keep millions of credit card numbers or to process satellite intelligence for some national government, but that's not what everyone does with it. So long as there are reasons to focus more or less on security and different needs among those focusing on it, pluggable security models make sense.
For the vast majority of Linux targets, SELinux in particular is probably overkill. The scheduler effects everyone. If your main goal is security at all costs, use SELinux (it's not hard) or use OpenBSD instead of Linux.
If a Faraday cage is doing its job, there's not much to worry about. The purpose of the cage is to keep the radiation in. If you've ever heated something in a microwave oven and stood close by, it's the Faraday cage that kept your water molecules from being vibrated, too.
Wikipedia has a nice entry on Faraday cages. If you're posting to Slashdot as a logged-in user, I shouldn't have to provide a link for you to figure out how to use Wikipedia, but here's one anyway: Wikipedia article on Faraday cages
Oh, and yes, it's true that you're often right next to one, or even inside one. Your monitor, microwave oven, TV, stereo, and lots of other things have Faraday cages. A typical Slashdotter's PC often has several. Each hard drive and optical drive has one. A TV tuner often has one and so do some video cards. The power supply has one, and the main case often is one. Many parts come in a Faraday cage when shipped.
Your house might act as a Faraday cage and your office is likely to be one as well.
So once http://212.12.47.19/~joebob/projects/bsd/whatsit/foo isn't found any longer and the only fork is inside Windows, how exactly is that "available to everyone forever"? The GPL enforces that "to everyone forever" through the law, while JoeBob would need to make plans to have his stuff mirrored. It's true that this type of problem is increasingly rare these days with all the cheap hosting and project sites out there, but it's not gone quite yet.
The GPL and the BSD are two different things with two different ideas behind them. The fact that the word "freedom" is bandied about for both of them doesn't mean it's the same freedom or that one guarantees more or less freedom than the other. When we talk about the BSD and the GPL, we're talking two different sets of freedoms and two different sets of promises.
One thing the GPL doesn't do when BSD code gets released as GPL is force additions and bug fixes to the BSD code to be released under the GPL license. It just creates a GPLed fork, some parts of which might also go back to the BSD branch. For all the fuss the BSD folks make over it, one might think people were taking away the BSD freedoms.
IMHO, releasing BSD code under the GPL does increase the freedoms associated with the code in some ways, but it also diminishes the freedoms associated with it in other ways.
Unfortunately, you can't pop the cover off of most PCs, pull something out of a PCIe slot, and swap in a spare while the system is running. You can do that to a failed drive on lots of SANs. Perhaps someone will develop a way to have these hot-swappable too.
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Yeah, like getting thousands of dead people to the polls in Chicago on a regular basis. Oh, wait, that's the Democrats.
Let's see, I'll try again. Like sending Federal agents in to blast loud heavy metal at a compound in Texas full of civilian American women and children, then burn it to the ground with the people inside? Oh, wait, Democrats again.
Hmmm... What about bombing a Chinese embassy because they couldn't be bothered to put people on the ground long enough to confirm a target? Wait, wait, that was a Democrat, too.
Damn, I'm not doing so hot at proving all bone-headed criminal stuff is done by the party you despise, am I?
Heh. My sister sold enough subscriptions to Grit to get the Coleco? Pong one-trick console. Two paddles, two nine-volt batteries, a select button, and a start button were about all it had. No cartridge slot at all, just Pong. The 2600 was a leap forward from hooking different boxes up to the RCA jack on our slide-switching adapter box attached to the antenna screw posts for different games.
Then, impressed with what we'd gotten out of the 2600 (actually, a Sears VCS) we bought a 600 XL as the family's first non-console computer. Too bad we never had any drives for it. Typing in the whole text of a program into the ROM Basic got a little old. Imagine thinking of DOS 5 on a 286 with 1 meg of RAM, 40 megs of hard drive, and an EGA video system being another huge leap. And yet obviously it was over the things that came before.
The thing is, games are doing the same thing computers in general have done. They're coming to the masses instead fo drawing the masses to themselves. Tetris, Bejeweled, little Flash games on websites, and that style of simple to pick up game driven by a fun mechanic and upbeat music rather than a story and realistic graphics are what non-gamers play when they do play games. More computers are being put into homes all the time, and the old ones get pitched or come to collectors of old and interesting computer hardware like me. That doesn't mean more people are savvy enough to do things in DOS, CP/M, a Unix command line, or any of the other more involved systems. It just means that GUIs and programs for them have become simplified enough that people can pick them up with less effort It's the same thing, really.
You don't really want either the inside or the outside to gather heat. If you were dealing with radiated broad-spectrum light that got transferred as heat once it hit a surface on both the inside and the outside, then ideally you'd have it reflective on the outside and transmissive on the inside. There are a few issues with that solution still, though:
Check Apple's SEC filings. They bill themselves as a computer company that adds value with software, not a software company that also happens to sell hardware. They're more than happy to have both OS X and Windows, and even Linux running on their computers. They just want to make sure it's their computers that are running it.
They also had about $6 billion in gross margin over the three months ending June 30th on about $17 billion in sales, and at that time about $7 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Over the course of one year, they've added more than $4 billion in total assets from just over $17 billion to well over $21 billion. Most of this increase is in the "current assets" category.
If anyone wants to blame Steve Jobs for hurting Apple, they could only possibly make a case through his time spent at Pixar and Disney instead of paying more attention to Apple. He may be crazy, but he's not stupid. It seems the more attention Apple gets from Jobs or whoever he has looking over things for him the better the company gets.
I'd heard the 90% within 100 miles statistic before, but I wasn't sure how recent it was (nor, truthfully, if it was entirely accurate or some hyperbole).
They have lots of artificial lighting in Canada. It's plain on the picture. The farthest north reaches just don't have that many inhabitants. Much of Canada's population lives just north of the US border.
As for the horizontal line across Asia, I'm going to guess that's Russia's Trans-Siberian Railroad and all the settlements along it. Even in the more heavily lit region around the Caucasus, one can pick out a line. It appears to run directly from the Baltic near St. Petersburg to the east then south a bit around th Chinese border to Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. That's about the route of the TSR.
You're right, of course. I didn't address whether or not it's a good idea to focus on doing it. I was simply clarifying what the OP was saying. Anything that takes you away from actually running your business can kill a startup.
BTW, for having a nickname of "ClosedSource", you present a very balanced view of proprietary and OSS software. That's quite refreshing.
He said he wants to pay someone to do the programming because he knows about point-of-sale systems and not about programming. He's what some software teams call the "domain knowledge contact", or what a freelance programmer would call a "client". Outside of "scratch my itch" projects, a lead programmer is rarely the domain expert on a project, and the domain expert on the project is rarely a programmer. That's what interface specifications and client use scenarios are for.
If you're having issues with the concept, pick up a book or a short net article on Extreme Programming. While reading it, note how much time the authors spend explaining how to communicate what's desired by the customer to the programmers and what's feasible in the budget and time constraints from the programmers to the client. XP is not the only methodology out there that addresses this, but it addresses it clearly, voluminously, and in recent, easily located resources.
I'm not sure whether your comments mean you don't think proprietary POS software isn't out there or if you think the stated price range doesn't count as "expensive". Trust me, $2000 is expensive for a new startup that's self-funded. People do need POS software. You don't go into a store and see people using a notebook and a pencil to check out shoppers.
A retail store isn't exactly the place for running most online shopping cart packages from a kiosk, either. People want you to scan the items, give them a total, take their payment, and be done. They don't want to have to give you an email address, postal address, credit card or PayPal info, and select shipping options. One could shoehorn a ZenCart or something into the POS role, but it'd be better handled as a different package. It would preferably be one that can integrate and track prices and inventory in sync with an online store, though.
The OP isn't counting on selling the POS software as his business model. He's opening a business that needs POS software and doesn't want to drop $200o to $5000 on a proprietary solution. That was stated.
His interest is apparently in using $2000 to $5000 to pay other people to do a GPL-licensed POS software system so his money won't be locked up in some unresponsive closed-source POS software vendor's accounts. He's trying to be a good business and OSS citizen by competing on the core of his business and cooperating in the portions that are ancillary and supportive. The POS software one uses is rarely a competitive advantage in retail. Pricing, customer service, marketing, location, and potentially how you tie your POS and warehouse systems together are much more important than the POS software itself.
Of course, supporting the software might turn into a secondary revenue stream, or it might be the kernel of a start-up for someone else.
That's probably in addition to other factors and not in lieu of them, right? Very small eukaryotes with short life spans tend toward faster rates than larger species, too, right? Wouldn't for example, the green algae be expected to have a higher rate than the modern plants?
Another poster mentioned the population size, and this seems to be yet another factor for bacteria. There are far, far more of them than of us, so that's likely to be a factor, too I'd think.
Separate or mostly separate populations of a species tend to accumulate more genetic variation than populations that reproduce sexually in a well-connected graph, too. Intercontinental travel has likely slowed the rate of evolution for humans and migratory birds. IIRC in Germany a few years ago there was talk of raising sections of highway to improve the interbreeding of certain small animals such as voles. Reduction in fitness due to inbreeding was a short-term concern, and in the long-term parapatric speciation was the worry.
When did proper version tracking of shared libs happen on Windows? That's right, it didn't. The application vendors put the DLLs they need in the application's directory and use extra disk space and memory. That's not a shared library any more, is it? Avoiding the problem by taking a step back in time is not the same as solving it. The .NET framework tracks its own libraries that applications based on it use, and that alleviates some of the pain as well.
If NTFS has gotten as good as ReiserFS and ext3 at recovering from crashes, I've missed it somewhere. It's a far leap past FAT (12, 16, or 32), but it still has some way to go AFAICT. It's pretty close I guess, but I'm not sure I'd say it's in the same boat. Maybe in the same harbor. When was the last time you crashed a Windows box with a RAID 5 array and didn't at all worry about it cleaning up after itself? I as a matter of fact kicked the power loose on a Linux box with a RAID 5 data mount this morning, being my clumsy self. No problems at all.
I'm not a Linux freak who won't touch other OSes. I use XP and Linux both every day. I also use OS X semi-regularly. I have Amiga OS, OS/2, DOS, NetBSD, and a few other OSes on my collection of older and unusual hardware. Windows is one of the best OSes out there for the desktop, regardless of application availability. I don't think it's _the_ best, and I'm not sure it ever will be. The applications sure help its case, though. Windows definitely isn't in my top 5 for server OSes, and it might not be in my top 10 if I took the time to make the list. I'd put it in the top three or four desktop OSes, but I still don't think it's any easier to troubleshoot than, say, Ubuntu, Mandriva, or PCLinuxOS. Easier than Gentoo or Slackware, sure, but those are not valid comparisons for mainstream desktop use.
more cell division, shorter lifespan, and more more abundant reproduction. All of these mean mutations collect in the population faster. Bacteria evolve much faster than mice, BTW, and they're not warm-blooded since they have no blood. Yet, they reproduce at a much faster rate and the mutations add up faster.
I didn't read TFA, but TFS tells us nothing common sense and a basic high-school understanding of biology couldn't predict as a hypothesis. That someone has gathered evidence to support the hypothesis empirically is pretty cool, though. Even what seems apparent should be tested, or it's not really science.
Also, if you think troubleshooting Windows is easy, you probably haven't done it much. Try installing WordPerfect Suite, Corel Draw, Photoshop, Crystal Reports, PowerTerm Pro, Lotus Notes, and PagePlus on 10 PCs. Crash half of them by cutting power. Then, troubleshoot the DLL hell and disk corruption that results.
Troubleshooting Windows may be easier for you than troubleshooting Linux. That's not an objective measurement. I'd say both have their strengths and weaknesses in troubleshooting. One of Linux's biggest strengths is that so many production server machines so rarely need troubleshooting in the first place. I've never had a Windows server run for three months without downtime, let alone a year or two.
Desktops of both kinds are more likely to need troubleshooting than servers, because you have more finger-poking happening. A well-administered Linux desktop is safe from lots of this, while most Windows desktops still have to be run as administrator to get real work done. Microsoft is making progress on the limited account front, though. On Linux at least you can remove and reinstall a particular package without trashing the libraries in use by other programs, and without rebooting to release any libraries still in use by other programs. Microsoft's registry is probably a really good idea for the OS, but making it a central
repository for every application is a mess.
Of course pirates are violent. You think cargo freighter crews just give up the goods for fun? ;-)
When is someone going to call this bitch and tell her that root-kitting computers is a computer-related crime which equates to trespassing and invasion of privacy, that selling audio CDs that aren't Redbook compliant is fraud, and that trying to force people to pay $60 for another copy of a game or be sued because they can't keep their damn discs from scratching against the console's drive is extortion and racketeering?
Theft? Heh. Sony is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act itself. They are guilty of installing software on people's computers without their consent which circumvents the computer owner's ability to control access to the copyrighted works on his or her computer.
Four more words: taped into a loop
Especially if you beat them at Space Chess.
Wow. That's hilarious. I wish I could mod it.
Seriously (as seriously as possible, anyway -- imagine I'm keeping a straight face), if you're wearing Faraday pants, you probably aren't concerned about the cage the pants produce. You'd be thankful to have them to keep all the nasty acrylic-cased gamer PCs from messing with your junk.
I'd say anything below 3 doesn't count, either. It's the Internet if it gets to your through Ethernet, Token Ring, PPP, SLIP, Arcnet, PLIP, or X.25 so I don't think Layer 1 or Layer 2 matter at all.
Plus, don't forget TCP's little brother, UDP. Much of the Internet's woes would be much worse if the applications suited for UDP all used TCP instead. Some of what's currently done with TCP would probably scale better with UDP too. It's a valid choice for lots of tasks, but TCP's better when more reliable delivery is needed.
In general, yes. However, I fail to come up with a common day-to-day reason to have a Faraday cage meant to keep radiation out near one's groin for hours on end. The post to which I was responding claimed concern in that specific context. I'm guessing the Faraday cage in question is a steel or aluminum computer tower case kept on the floor under a desk.
If these people have ever seen an arcade game with guns or crossbows. Silent Scope comes to mind, as does Beachhead 2000. Nintendo had a light gun for the NES home system. Games as far back as at least the first Star Wars arcade game used controls that simulated the actual controls used for killing your enemies up to a point. After Burner had a sit-down version with a flight stick, throttle, trigger, and thumb button which pitched and rolled with the plane on-screen. Battlezone drove with two joysticks like many tracked vehicles really do. Is the problem that knives and garrotes are more personal than ranged weapons?
Apart from video games, there are lots of other simulated killing actions. People have been fencing for centuries, and that's considered a respectable sport. The SCA features swords, maces, flails, and more. People doing civil war reenactments use rifles, cannon, swords, and bayonets. Paintball players are shooting guns and lobbing grenades at one another. Hell, the stores still sell water guns and water balloons for kids, don't they? I see them all the time, and I can't imagine they're in the toy section just to sit there. We used to play cops and robbers or CIA vs. KGB as kids.
Security is not a package. Say it with me now, "Security is not a package".
Security is a process. You make the effort needed to crack or crash a system beyond the value to the attacker, and they won't attack.
There's simply no need of SELinux in a coffee pot or an MP3 player. It's overkill. Linus is concerned with all the targets of the kernel, and not just the Sewper Seekret Survur next to the dresser in some kid's room.
Now _you_ might be using Linux to keep millions of credit card numbers or to process satellite intelligence for some national government, but that's not what everyone does with it. So long as there are reasons to focus more or less on security and different needs among those focusing on it, pluggable security models make sense.
For the vast majority of Linux targets, SELinux in particular is probably overkill. The scheduler effects everyone. If your main goal is security at all costs, use SELinux (it's not hard) or use OpenBSD instead of Linux.
If a Faraday cage is doing its job, there's not much to worry about. The purpose of the cage is to keep the radiation in. If you've ever heated something in a microwave oven and stood close by, it's the Faraday cage that kept your water molecules from being vibrated, too.
Wikipedia has a nice entry on Faraday cages. If you're posting to Slashdot as a logged-in user, I shouldn't have to provide a link for you to figure out how to use Wikipedia, but here's one anyway: Wikipedia article on Faraday cages
Oh, and yes, it's true that you're often right next to one, or even inside one. Your monitor, microwave oven, TV, stereo, and lots of other things have Faraday cages. A typical Slashdotter's PC often has several. Each hard drive and optical drive has one. A TV tuner often has one and so do some video cards. The power supply has one, and the main case often is one. Many parts come in a Faraday cage when shipped.
Your house might act as a Faraday cage and your office is likely to be one as well.
So once http://212.12.47.19/~joebob/projects/bsd/whatsit/foo isn't found any longer and the only fork is inside Windows, how exactly is that "available to everyone forever"? The GPL enforces that "to everyone forever" through the law, while JoeBob would need to make plans to have his stuff mirrored. It's true that this type of problem is increasingly rare these days with all the cheap hosting and project sites out there, but it's not gone quite yet.
The GPL and the BSD are two different things with two different ideas behind them. The fact that the word "freedom" is bandied about for both of them doesn't mean it's the same freedom or that one guarantees more or less freedom than the other. When we talk about the BSD and the GPL, we're talking two different sets of freedoms and two different sets of promises.
One thing the GPL doesn't do when BSD code gets released as GPL is force additions and bug fixes to the BSD code to be released under the GPL license. It just creates a GPLed fork, some parts of which might also go back to the BSD branch. For all the fuss the BSD folks make over it, one might think people were taking away the BSD freedoms.
IMHO, releasing BSD code under the GPL does increase the freedoms associated with the code in some ways, but it also diminishes the freedoms associated with it in other ways.
Unfortunately, you can't pop the cover off of most PCs, pull something out of a PCIe slot, and swap in a spare while the system is running. You can do that to a failed drive on lots of SANs. Perhaps someone will develop a way to have these hot-swappable too.