Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
I think this depends on what sort of programming you do.
I'm not saying that it's not male-dominated by any means, but there are certain types of development work that seem to have more women in them than others.
At least where I've worked, there seem to be a lot more women in database systems programming than in other areas. I have no idea why this is, and it could have had more to do with the projects and companies involved than the work itself, but that was my experience.
In general, the projects where I have seen more women in development roles were the ones that were of longer duration and where hours/work-environment was more flexible. In particular, maintainance-phase projects (aka "Never-Ending Projects") with predictable workloads had a lot of older programmers with kids in school, both men and women. Most of the "death marches" that I've worked on were either all- or nearly-all male, and mostly unmarried or married but without kids.
we give out very little monetary humanitarian aid to other countries
This might have something to do with how "giving money away" is less politically popular in the U.S. than defense spending is.
Any politican that gave away billions or trillions of dollars to another country would find themselves in all likelihood less popular than one who spent the same amount fighting a war against the same country. It's easy to forget now, that when the U.S. went into Iraq, it was quite popular. It's only since things have slowed down and the coverage on TV isn't as impressive, and the American death toll has increased, that public support has flagged. But when it was non-stop "watch Arabs get the shit bombed out of them" on Fox News, there was close to 80% support for it.
During peacetime (or rather, "not-currently-at-or-just-following-a-war-time"), defense spending is quite popular, and cash assistance to foreign governments is not. The political reality is that Americans would rather have their tax dollars given to the local Electric Boat, General Dynamics, or Northrop Grumman facility, than be given to foreign governments in support of something resembling a cohesive foreign policy. Then, when a foreign-policy problem does pop up, it's quite easy to look for the obvious solution ('well, heck -- what are we paying for this gigantic military for?').
Call me cynical, but look across the recent history of the United States and you'll see that we have ourselves "A Splendid Little War" about every decade or so, and then go home and lick our wounds and engage in some introspection for a while until we decide to have another go. This is not the result of any military-industrial complex conspiracy (not that they don't profit handsomely from it), but rather of the desires of the voters themselves.
and their payload is limited, though quite imposing.
I disagree with this point.
You can put far more ordnance on a ballistic missile submarine than you can practically put on a satellite, and they are more survivable. Each Ohio-class submarine, if loaded completely (and currently they are not; treaties require that each missile carry a reduced number of warheads than they are designed for), can carry enough megatonnage to pretty much wipe out the continent of your choice, or at least glass its major cities over. Each submarine has 24 missile tubes, each missile capable of 8 independently-targetable 475-kt warheads, so that's 192 warheads per submarine (totaling about 91.2 MT gross yield). It would take either a large constellation of armed satellites (difficult to hide) or a smaller number of very large ones, to give you the capability of each submarine. By virtue of being underwater they are both difficult to detect and track, and almost impossible to wipe out in a first strike -- the ocean is a pretty good absorber of radiation and energy. Satellites in space, even "stealth" ones, would be easier to track and destroy.
As a nuclear launch platform submarines are as close to a perfect first-strike or retaliatory weapon as you could want; and as they're crewed by human beings they have a level of intelligence that would be difficult to replicate using remotely-controlled satellites.
While I think there might be a few advantages to a satellite launch platform, as simply another way of dropping weapons onto a target, there's not enough to justify the expense.
If you want to see why the U.S. is interested in putting nukes in space for military reasons, you have to look elsewhere than just at launch capabilities. The real reasons for wanting weapons up there is as an ICBM defense; if you want National Missile Defense, you need satellites as another layer in addition to ground and air-based interceptors. The U.S. doesn't need nukes in space simply to be able to wipe out a theoretical enemy's cities, but it does need it in order to build up "defense in depth" against missiles, and to engage in anti-satellite and EMP warfare. There's no real point in spending billions on yet another method of ground-attack, a capability that we already have in spades.
Some of them send you software firewalls on the "signup kit" CD, but I don't know of any that will send you a hardware firewall/router, except as part of an occasional special promotion.
I think that Comcast Broadband's "CD 'o Crap" includes a software firewall on it, ZoneAlarm or similar, but that won't do you much good if your computer is already compromised; I assume most rootkits will just disable a firewall from inside if you install one after you've been attacked. So they're pretty much useless to anyone who's not installing the software on top of a virgin Windows installation and which has never been connected to the 'net.
Plus, I'm not convinced that a software firewall is really that great anyway; most people will just click that "Allow" button for just about any reason, and that pretty much defeats the entire purpose of having it.
So okay- a naked machine may have an issue but this is really a non-issue if you spend an extra 20 bucks for an inexpensive router with a built in firewall.
And that's $20 that the average computer user doesn't understand why they should "waste" on a funny box. I mean, they already use one of those surge-strip thingies, doesn't that mean that they're protected?
ah yes... nothing underlines the superiority of Linux better than an XP user having to hide behind a Linux based "Hardware" firewall/router...
Actually, these days they're not Linux, they're VxWorks -- unless you special-order the "WRT54GL" version, which most people wouldn't do because you can't buy them at BestBuy and they cost more.
I guess this goes into the realm of "to each his own," but before I bought an iPod, I had a mass-storage type MP3 player. (Pontis, if anyone cares.)
I hated it. I thought having to actually manipulate the files directly was a giant pain in the ass, and I jumped ship from that whole organizational scheme to iTunes with the first version that was released. I actually stopped using that MP3 player because I started to use iTunes, and went back to using a CD player.
As far as I'm concerned, anything that requires you to touch the files directly is obnoxious. There's just no reason for it. Unless you have a file manager that can display and sort by arbitrary metadata (like the BeOS's could), the file manager just isn't going to be as good at working with MP3 files as a dedicated library management package is.
Cramming all the metadata into the file name is a kludge at best; it reeks of inelegance and if there's one thing I can't stand, that's it. I would much rather have an automatic system tag everything on import, manage and organize it on the back-end, and sync it all to the portable player without me ever having to look at the files. How exactly it organizes things in the back end doesn't really matter to me, except perhaps in how easily it allows me to go in and pick out a particular file to email it (which is simple in iTunes -- "Show song in Finder"), or find the files so I can back them up.
I guess this is a matter of personal preference, but I just find it very surprising that anyone would actually want to go back to the days of folders full of [Track#]-[ArtistName]-[AlbumName]-[SongName].mp3 that you have to work with directly. In my opinion, the iTunes way -- that is, using the metadata embedded in the files to organize, manage, and present a single interface to the user for importation, playback, and portable device syncronization -- is the way to go. I don't ever want to go back to having to deal with files directly (unless it's through some type of a file manager which can parse the metadata). I didn't much like it in 1997, and I like it even less now that I've seen the alternative.
There are certainly things I don't like about the iPod -- a microphone, line input, and FM tuner would be great, for starters, and bi-directional sync would be nice, too -- but anything that doesn't allow me to just drop the player into its cradle and have the software sync it with my library, without any interaction whatsoever, is a huge step backwards.
Actually, I think Microsoft is scared of everyone.
Well, yeah. I mean, they're standing atop the marketshare hill -- they have to be scared of everyone. There's no place to go but down; it's not a question of winning anymore, it's a question of hanging on to the top spot for as long as they can. History has shown that such situations don't last forever, but they're going to try and play it for all it's worth. (As anyone in their situation would.) To survive, Microsoft has to constantly be looking for the new competitor that's going to unseat them.
IBM, Kodak, Standard Oil, U.S. Steel -- all of these companies were once the untouchable masters of their respective domains, but all fell from grace eventually. Microsoft knows that it too shall fail eventually, but it's going to prolong it as best it can, and that means they have to be paranoid of everyone and everything that could possibly, at any point in the future, harm their position.
This is true. However, when the "fad of the white earbuds" ends, I'm not sure that audio players in general will fade away.
Certainly the obnoxiously rich teenagers of the world will move on and find a new status symbol to demonstrate how much money mommy and daddy have, but that doesn't mean that the technology will be any less useful or desired. I can think of a bunch of things which started off as expensive fads, and have since trickled down and become commonplace parts of daily life. Lots of household appliances were this way to begin with: having a "Radar Range" was at one point something reserved for the very rich, or at least those willing to blow a lot of money on something; today it seems a bit odd to invite your neighbors over to show off your microwaved food.
I suspect this is what will happen to portable audio players. The fad will end right about the time that everybody can own one (which we're probably getting very close to right now). Having those white earbuds isn't cool when it doesn't signify your wealth/status/hipness/whatever. So the popularity of the fad, in essence, is the engine of its own demise. But the demise of the fad isn't the demise of the technology -- the opposite, in fact, because the ending of the fad means that the device has reached a widespread audience and acceptance into society at multiple levels.
That is where I see audio players going. Until perhaps the entire category of devices is subsumed into some "convergence" technology (which I am not too convinced of, in the immediate future at least), they'll just become a staple consumer product. Like the dishwasher and the microwave and the cell phone, what was once a status symbol becomes commonplace.
The risk for Apple is that, like the Radar Range or the Frigidaire, their association as a "premium" brand could hurt them and drive them into obscurity later, as the market becomes one dominated by the hoi polloi and not the elite.
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of the iPod, but the DRM one I don't particularly understand. Okay, so the iPod supports DRM. It doesn't require it. There is nothing about owning an iPod which requires you to purchase music from the iTMS. You can own an iPod and just ignore the iTMS completely, and use it just like you would an iRiver or a Creative or whatever.
The whole "I hate the iPod because I don't want to pay $0.99 a song" is silly. Nothing about the iPod requires that you buy your music that way. In fact, I'd argue that if you want to get your music from a CD, the iPod is probably still the best player, because iTunes is the easiest ripping/syncing/library-management software around -- naturally that's debatable, of course.
Your points about the lack of a microphone and a line input are well taken, because they're actual capabilities of other devices which the iPod does not have. But the DRM thing is a rather silly point and it gets brought up a lot. If you're buying another player as a sort of "protest vote" against DRM, that's your choice, but it's not really a limitation of the device. Apple isn't Sony, and you can use an iPod just fine without ever paying a cent into the iTMS or buying a single DRMed song.
This is true. When I made my original comment, I was thinking only of end-user desktop systems, not really of servers. I suppose you could make the same "OS exception" with any machine that's more or less dedicated to a particular purpose or application. E.g., if you had a machine that was nothing but a webserver, you would want Apache to use all the resources on the machine in order to produce maximum performance. Any system that has one function that is much more important than anything else, would want to be much more aggressive in apportioning resources to that application, than a normal multipurpose desktop would be.
For everyone else: They suggest that you could use the robot as a sentry to patrol buildings and detect movement/changes in the environment. Which makes me wonder what its runtime is.
I don't really get this. Would using a robot really have any advantages over building a sensor network? Seems like you could build and deploy a lot of sensors for the cost of a robot, and have much better coverage besides.
Plus, a robot following any sort of predictable rounds is vulnerable to being diverted or otherwise disabled, or simply avoided; a network of independent sensors is more robust and harder to avoid.
I could see a use for robots to deploy sensors, however; mapping as they move around, and building a sensor mesh behind them as they go.
Well with the OS it's different than when an application RAM-hogs.
It's not like (at least on most desktop, non-mainframe systems) like the OS is really competing for memory with any other OS. It's not shared. The OS knows who's trying to use the memory and how much is "extra" at any given time, thus it can just use whatever's left over at the moment for cache.
With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.
If every application did what you're describing Firefox doing, we'd be in a lot of trouble; the OS would never get to do any of those cute "spare" memory tricks that it does, because the apps would be trying to use way more memory than they actually needed to perform their core functions.
Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.
Easier than this would just be to make a bucket still. (Second item down on the page.)
No idea how many times you'd need to run seawater through it in order to produce something potable, but it's dead simple to set up. It requires two buckets, one which will fit inside the other, a piece of clear plastic sheeting, a bungee cord or duct tape, and two clean rocks or other heavy objects. Basically you put the small bucket inside the large bucket, and put the clean rock in the bottom of the small bucket to keep it from floating. Then put seawater into the large bucket (around the outside of the small bucket). Then put the clear plastic sheeting over the top, and secure it tightly with the bungee cord. Place the small rock in the center, to create a dimple. Place the whole apparatus in the sun. In theory, the sun causes the water in the seawater to boil/evaporate, which then condenses against the top, runs towards the center, and drips down into the small bucket.
You can do similar things if you are in an area that gets warm during the day and cool at night. It's really just developing any sort of temperature differential that's key.
I've never tried making a bucket still, but I've seen the diagram in various survival manuals; I think the idea is that you can adapt it to use basically any moist plant product instead of seawater (e.g., in the desert you could use cactus chunks or something).
I think you miss the point. Most technological development is incremental. For every "breakthrough" (and wasn't it just recently that we were reading about how frequently things are mis-termed 'breakthroughs'?) there is far more effort put into, and effect taken from, small incremental improvements to existing technologies.
You might not think much of low-sulfur diesel, but if it results in 10% of U.S. automobiles becoming diesel, it will probably have saved more gasoline than any alternative-energy scheme that's been proposed to date. The spring-loaded crescent wrench may seem like a trivial improvement, but it might make an existing tool -- one that's basically pretty good already -- even easier to use for a lot of people.
Frankly I'd much prefer that people spent their time making improvements to existing technologies, which have already proven their worth, than try to constantly reinvent the wheel in new and unproductive ways.
Incremental improvements may not seem that impressive on paper, but they're how progress and development actually happens. Look closely enough at most apparent "breakthroughs," and you'll really find a series of incremental gains, made one after the other. As a society we want to believe that inventors create new technologies out of whole cloth, as if divinely inspired, but this is rarely the case. More frequently, history picks the developer of what it deems to be the "key" incremental improvement and awards them the credit for the whole thing, more or less arbitrarily.
The "next big thing" will almost always really be a series of "next little things;" only in hindsight and in summation do they amount to much. Dismissing things because they are "incremental" is shortsighted.
I think the major problem with the command line isn't the interface itself -- as other people pointed out, many users who've been alive for more than a decade or two, previously used CLI systems and some still do. It's not that foreign an interface, unless you're under 20 and have spent your whole life using Windows or a Macintosh.
The problem with using a CLI versus a GUI, in my opinion, is that most CLI applications require a lot more memorization. You have to learn the command itself, but then also its flags and options, and what stuff you can pass it and generally just how to use it. There's very little context that you can use to "figure stuff out" in the manner of a GUI application.
Now some -- perhaps even many -- CLI applications are so powerful that it's worth learning how to use them, because of what they do. Just as a trivial example, sed isn't the easiest or most intuitive thing to teach someone who's idea of editing text is Notepad or Microsoft Word, but one "s/his/hers/g" run through a multi-page document will make that learning process worth your while.
However, it's getting people up and over that learning curve that's the difficulty. In general, the problem with CLI applications is that they're harder to be self-explanatory than GUI apps; at best you can make them spit out a command reference or helpfile when you run them with --help, but that's still a lot less intuitive than a GUI app with menus and tool palettes with roll-over tooltips. The latter requires you to remember vaguely what tool does what and where it's located on the screen, but IMO it's a much less memorization-intensive learning process than actually having to memorize, letter for letter, which commands you need to enter and what they all do.
For certain styles of people, the CLI application might even be easier. However, I think that many people find GUI's easier to learn, as evidenced by their rapid adoption and the decline of the CLI in all but specialist roles.
I think what it boils down to is this: the Constitution isn't an exclusive document. It wasn't intended to mean, "everything is illegal, except for a few certain things." They enumerated the really big important stuff that they thought the Government needed to avoid, but they weren't giving Congress a carte blanche to trample on the other rights that people had always assumed that they had.
Unfortunately, the Ninth Amendment doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect from the USSC or anybody else. It pretty much gets ignored; rather than drawing on the "pneumbra" and other IMO shaky legal arguments, I think it would have safe to just say 'hey, people have always had a certain right to privacy, therefore it's protected under the Ninth Amendment.' That makes it harder to chisel away at established freedoms, even if they weren't one of the top eight that made it into enumerated Amendments, or into the body of the Constitution itself.
There's a certain amount of irony in that the issue which gets the folks in Congress interested in technology, is watching one of their own get busted because he didn't understand that what he was sending over the "tubes" could be saved at either end.
I guess if you can't convince them that "knowledge is power," maybe we should work on "knowledge is not getting indicted."
I have been told that there are certain softmodems -- ones that use a particular Intel chipset -- that you can find for under $10 that will work under Asterix in place of the proprietary cards. I think it's the Intel 537 series chipsets that are the key. Since all they do is bridge the phone line to the computer, they can be used for voice or data given appropriate software. Given how few modems I've seen in stores lately, eBay may be your friend.
Now that would mean basically one line, either to the telco PSTN system or to an extension, per PCI slot, which unless you had some abnormally large mobo is probably not too great. However, you could load up the PCI slots with them, use them all for the outgoing lines (to the telco) and then do your internal extensions over VOIP. That would also have the advantage of not having to run analog phone lines throughout the office; everything is just on your data network provided it can handle the load. Might be a bit of cash though, if you don't have VoIP phones already.
Also, there is hardware besides Digium's which is compatible with Asterisk, see this list for an overview of vendors.
Just in case anyone else was interested in what you get by searching that, results 1-2 are part of the COBOL language reference from IBM, but after that you get into sample code pretty quickly. (And if you wanted to add one more language to the list that you can write "Hello, world!" in, here you go.)
37,500 results total. Not too bad for a "dead" language.
But what happens when something goes wrong, and a paid user gets locked out of their operating system? What happens when I sneak a peak at your Microsoft licence number while you are working on your PC at the airport, and I post it on a website, and then Microsoft restricts your licence?
Yep.
Do you hear that? It's the sound of a few million Linux* users, sniggering to themselves.
* - Mac users can snigger too, but not too hard, because it could happen there, too.
I'm not sure how you read it, and it's certainly open to interpretation, but I understood "the system will curtail functionality much further by restricting users to just the Web browser for an hour at a time" to mean, we will only allow you to use Internet Explorer, and we will only allow you to use that for one hour at a time.
As in, no Firefox, no Opera, no any-other-application-except-IE.
The computer effectively becomes nothing but a crappy time-limited, IE-only web kiosk.
Slashdot Mirror
So I take it you'll be calling your broker and shorting their stock tomorrow, right?
Because I'm sure that they never thought of that possibility.
Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
... in other words .... sudo?
So
I think this depends on what sort of programming you do.
I'm not saying that it's not male-dominated by any means, but there are certain types of development work that seem to have more women in them than others.
At least where I've worked, there seem to be a lot more women in database systems programming than in other areas. I have no idea why this is, and it could have had more to do with the projects and companies involved than the work itself, but that was my experience.
In general, the projects where I have seen more women in development roles were the ones that were of longer duration and where hours/work-environment was more flexible. In particular, maintainance-phase projects (aka "Never-Ending Projects") with predictable workloads had a lot of older programmers with kids in school, both men and women. Most of the "death marches" that I've worked on were either all- or nearly-all male, and mostly unmarried or married but without kids.
we give out very little monetary humanitarian aid to other countries
This might have something to do with how "giving money away" is less politically popular in the U.S. than defense spending is.
Any politican that gave away billions or trillions of dollars to another country would find themselves in all likelihood less popular than one who spent the same amount fighting a war against the same country. It's easy to forget now, that when the U.S. went into Iraq, it was quite popular. It's only since things have slowed down and the coverage on TV isn't as impressive, and the American death toll has increased, that public support has flagged. But when it was non-stop "watch Arabs get the shit bombed out of them" on Fox News, there was close to 80% support for it.
During peacetime (or rather, "not-currently-at-or-just-following-a-war-time"), defense spending is quite popular, and cash assistance to foreign governments is not. The political reality is that Americans would rather have their tax dollars given to the local Electric Boat, General Dynamics, or Northrop Grumman facility, than be given to foreign governments in support of something resembling a cohesive foreign policy. Then, when a foreign-policy problem does pop up, it's quite easy to look for the obvious solution ('well, heck -- what are we paying for this gigantic military for?').
Call me cynical, but look across the recent history of the United States and you'll see that we have ourselves "A Splendid Little War" about every decade or so, and then go home and lick our wounds and engage in some introspection for a while until we decide to have another go. This is not the result of any military-industrial complex conspiracy (not that they don't profit handsomely from it), but rather of the desires of the voters themselves.
and their payload is limited, though quite imposing.
I disagree with this point.
You can put far more ordnance on a ballistic missile submarine than you can practically put on a satellite, and they are more survivable. Each Ohio-class submarine, if loaded completely (and currently they are not; treaties require that each missile carry a reduced number of warheads than they are designed for), can carry enough megatonnage to pretty much wipe out the continent of your choice, or at least glass its major cities over. Each submarine has 24 missile tubes, each missile capable of 8 independently-targetable 475-kt warheads, so that's 192 warheads per submarine (totaling about 91.2 MT gross yield). It would take either a large constellation of armed satellites (difficult to hide) or a smaller number of very large ones, to give you the capability of each submarine. By virtue of being underwater they are both difficult to detect and track, and almost impossible to wipe out in a first strike -- the ocean is a pretty good absorber of radiation and energy. Satellites in space, even "stealth" ones, would be easier to track and destroy.
As a nuclear launch platform submarines are as close to a perfect first-strike or retaliatory weapon as you could want; and as they're crewed by human beings they have a level of intelligence that would be difficult to replicate using remotely-controlled satellites.
While I think there might be a few advantages to a satellite launch platform, as simply another way of dropping weapons onto a target, there's not enough to justify the expense.
If you want to see why the U.S. is interested in putting nukes in space for military reasons, you have to look elsewhere than just at launch capabilities. The real reasons for wanting weapons up there is as an ICBM defense; if you want National Missile Defense, you need satellites as another layer in addition to ground and air-based interceptors. The U.S. doesn't need nukes in space simply to be able to wipe out a theoretical enemy's cities, but it does need it in order to build up "defense in depth" against missiles, and to engage in anti-satellite and EMP warfare. There's no real point in spending billions on yet another method of ground-attack, a capability that we already have in spades.
Some of them send you software firewalls on the "signup kit" CD, but I don't know of any that will send you a hardware firewall/router, except as part of an occasional special promotion.
I think that Comcast Broadband's "CD 'o Crap" includes a software firewall on it, ZoneAlarm or similar, but that won't do you much good if your computer is already compromised; I assume most rootkits will just disable a firewall from inside if you install one after you've been attacked. So they're pretty much useless to anyone who's not installing the software on top of a virgin Windows installation and which has never been connected to the 'net.
Plus, I'm not convinced that a software firewall is really that great anyway; most people will just click that "Allow" button for just about any reason, and that pretty much defeats the entire purpose of having it.
So okay- a naked machine may have an issue but this is really a non-issue if you spend an extra 20 bucks for an inexpensive router with a built in firewall.
And that's $20 that the average computer user doesn't understand why they should "waste" on a funny box. I mean, they already use one of those surge-strip thingies, doesn't that mean that they're protected?
ah yes... nothing underlines the superiority of Linux better than an XP user having to hide behind a Linux based "Hardware" firewall/router...
Actually, these days they're not Linux, they're VxWorks -- unless you special-order the "WRT54GL" version, which most people wouldn't do because you can't buy them at BestBuy and they cost more.
I guess this goes into the realm of "to each his own," but before I bought an iPod, I had a mass-storage type MP3 player. (Pontis, if anyone cares.)
I hated it. I thought having to actually manipulate the files directly was a giant pain in the ass, and I jumped ship from that whole organizational scheme to iTunes with the first version that was released. I actually stopped using that MP3 player because I started to use iTunes, and went back to using a CD player.
As far as I'm concerned, anything that requires you to touch the files directly is obnoxious. There's just no reason for it. Unless you have a file manager that can display and sort by arbitrary metadata (like the BeOS's could), the file manager just isn't going to be as good at working with MP3 files as a dedicated library management package is.
Cramming all the metadata into the file name is a kludge at best; it reeks of inelegance and if there's one thing I can't stand, that's it. I would much rather have an automatic system tag everything on import, manage and organize it on the back-end, and sync it all to the portable player without me ever having to look at the files. How exactly it organizes things in the back end doesn't really matter to me, except perhaps in how easily it allows me to go in and pick out a particular file to email it (which is simple in iTunes -- "Show song in Finder"), or find the files so I can back them up.
I guess this is a matter of personal preference, but I just find it very surprising that anyone would actually want to go back to the days of folders full of [Track#]-[ArtistName]-[AlbumName]-[SongName].mp3 that you have to work with directly. In my opinion, the iTunes way -- that is, using the metadata embedded in the files to organize, manage, and present a single interface to the user for importation, playback, and portable device syncronization -- is the way to go. I don't ever want to go back to having to deal with files directly (unless it's through some type of a file manager which can parse the metadata). I didn't much like it in 1997, and I like it even less now that I've seen the alternative.
There are certainly things I don't like about the iPod -- a microphone, line input, and FM tuner would be great, for starters, and bi-directional sync would be nice, too -- but anything that doesn't allow me to just drop the player into its cradle and have the software sync it with my library, without any interaction whatsoever, is a huge step backwards.
Actually, I think Microsoft is scared of everyone.
Well, yeah. I mean, they're standing atop the marketshare hill -- they have to be scared of everyone. There's no place to go but down; it's not a question of winning anymore, it's a question of hanging on to the top spot for as long as they can. History has shown that such situations don't last forever, but they're going to try and play it for all it's worth. (As anyone in their situation would.) To survive, Microsoft has to constantly be looking for the new competitor that's going to unseat them.
IBM, Kodak, Standard Oil, U.S. Steel -- all of these companies were once the untouchable masters of their respective domains, but all fell from grace eventually. Microsoft knows that it too shall fail eventually, but it's going to prolong it as best it can, and that means they have to be paranoid of everyone and everything that could possibly, at any point in the future, harm their position.
This is true. However, when the "fad of the white earbuds" ends, I'm not sure that audio players in general will fade away.
Certainly the obnoxiously rich teenagers of the world will move on and find a new status symbol to demonstrate how much money mommy and daddy have, but that doesn't mean that the technology will be any less useful or desired. I can think of a bunch of things which started off as expensive fads, and have since trickled down and become commonplace parts of daily life. Lots of household appliances were this way to begin with: having a "Radar Range" was at one point something reserved for the very rich, or at least those willing to blow a lot of money on something; today it seems a bit odd to invite your neighbors over to show off your microwaved food.
I suspect this is what will happen to portable audio players. The fad will end right about the time that everybody can own one (which we're probably getting very close to right now). Having those white earbuds isn't cool when it doesn't signify your wealth/status/hipness/whatever. So the popularity of the fad, in essence, is the engine of its own demise. But the demise of the fad isn't the demise of the technology -- the opposite, in fact, because the ending of the fad means that the device has reached a widespread audience and acceptance into society at multiple levels.
That is where I see audio players going. Until perhaps the entire category of devices is subsumed into some "convergence" technology (which I am not too convinced of, in the immediate future at least), they'll just become a staple consumer product. Like the dishwasher and the microwave and the cell phone, what was once a status symbol becomes commonplace.
The risk for Apple is that, like the Radar Range or the Frigidaire, their association as a "premium" brand could hurt them and drive them into obscurity later, as the market becomes one dominated by the hoi polloi and not the elite.
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of the iPod, but the DRM one I don't particularly understand. Okay, so the iPod supports DRM. It doesn't require it. There is nothing about owning an iPod which requires you to purchase music from the iTMS. You can own an iPod and just ignore the iTMS completely, and use it just like you would an iRiver or a Creative or whatever.
The whole "I hate the iPod because I don't want to pay $0.99 a song" is silly. Nothing about the iPod requires that you buy your music that way. In fact, I'd argue that if you want to get your music from a CD, the iPod is probably still the best player, because iTunes is the easiest ripping/syncing/library-management software around -- naturally that's debatable, of course.
Your points about the lack of a microphone and a line input are well taken, because they're actual capabilities of other devices which the iPod does not have. But the DRM thing is a rather silly point and it gets brought up a lot. If you're buying another player as a sort of "protest vote" against DRM, that's your choice, but it's not really a limitation of the device. Apple isn't Sony, and you can use an iPod just fine without ever paying a cent into the iTMS or buying a single DRMed song.
This is true. When I made my original comment, I was thinking only of end-user desktop systems, not really of servers. I suppose you could make the same "OS exception" with any machine that's more or less dedicated to a particular purpose or application. E.g., if you had a machine that was nothing but a webserver, you would want Apache to use all the resources on the machine in order to produce maximum performance. Any system that has one function that is much more important than anything else, would want to be much more aggressive in apportioning resources to that application, than a normal multipurpose desktop would be.
For everyone else: They suggest that you could use the robot as a sentry to patrol buildings and detect movement/changes in the environment. Which makes me wonder what its runtime is.
I don't really get this. Would using a robot really have any advantages over building a sensor network? Seems like you could build and deploy a lot of sensors for the cost of a robot, and have much better coverage besides.
Plus, a robot following any sort of predictable rounds is vulnerable to being diverted or otherwise disabled, or simply avoided; a network of independent sensors is more robust and harder to avoid.
I could see a use for robots to deploy sensors, however; mapping as they move around, and building a sensor mesh behind them as they go.
Well with the OS it's different than when an application RAM-hogs.
It's not like (at least on most desktop, non-mainframe systems) like the OS is really competing for memory with any other OS. It's not shared. The OS knows who's trying to use the memory and how much is "extra" at any given time, thus it can just use whatever's left over at the moment for cache.
With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.
If every application did what you're describing Firefox doing, we'd be in a lot of trouble; the OS would never get to do any of those cute "spare" memory tricks that it does, because the apps would be trying to use way more memory than they actually needed to perform their core functions.
Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.
Easier than this would just be to make a bucket still. (Second item down on the page.)
No idea how many times you'd need to run seawater through it in order to produce something potable, but it's dead simple to set up. It requires two buckets, one which will fit inside the other, a piece of clear plastic sheeting, a bungee cord or duct tape, and two clean rocks or other heavy objects. Basically you put the small bucket inside the large bucket, and put the clean rock in the bottom of the small bucket to keep it from floating. Then put seawater into the large bucket (around the outside of the small bucket). Then put the clear plastic sheeting over the top, and secure it tightly with the bungee cord. Place the small rock in the center, to create a dimple. Place the whole apparatus in the sun. In theory, the sun causes the water in the seawater to boil/evaporate, which then condenses against the top, runs towards the center, and drips down into the small bucket.
You can do similar things if you are in an area that gets warm during the day and cool at night. It's really just developing any sort of temperature differential that's key.
I've never tried making a bucket still, but I've seen the diagram in various survival manuals; I think the idea is that you can adapt it to use basically any moist plant product instead of seawater (e.g., in the desert you could use cactus chunks or something).
I think you miss the point. Most technological development is incremental. For every "breakthrough" (and wasn't it just recently that we were reading about how frequently things are mis-termed 'breakthroughs'?) there is far more effort put into, and effect taken from, small incremental improvements to existing technologies.
You might not think much of low-sulfur diesel, but if it results in 10% of U.S. automobiles becoming diesel, it will probably have saved more gasoline than any alternative-energy scheme that's been proposed to date. The spring-loaded crescent wrench may seem like a trivial improvement, but it might make an existing tool -- one that's basically pretty good already -- even easier to use for a lot of people.
Frankly I'd much prefer that people spent their time making improvements to existing technologies, which have already proven their worth, than try to constantly reinvent the wheel in new and unproductive ways.
Incremental improvements may not seem that impressive on paper, but they're how progress and development actually happens. Look closely enough at most apparent "breakthroughs," and you'll really find a series of incremental gains, made one after the other. As a society we want to believe that inventors create new technologies out of whole cloth, as if divinely inspired, but this is rarely the case. More frequently, history picks the developer of what it deems to be the "key" incremental improvement and awards them the credit for the whole thing, more or less arbitrarily.
The "next big thing" will almost always really be a series of "next little things;" only in hindsight and in summation do they amount to much. Dismissing things because they are "incremental" is shortsighted.
I think the major problem with the command line isn't the interface itself -- as other people pointed out, many users who've been alive for more than a decade or two, previously used CLI systems and some still do. It's not that foreign an interface, unless you're under 20 and have spent your whole life using Windows or a Macintosh.
The problem with using a CLI versus a GUI, in my opinion, is that most CLI applications require a lot more memorization. You have to learn the command itself, but then also its flags and options, and what stuff you can pass it and generally just how to use it. There's very little context that you can use to "figure stuff out" in the manner of a GUI application.
Now some -- perhaps even many -- CLI applications are so powerful that it's worth learning how to use them, because of what they do. Just as a trivial example, sed isn't the easiest or most intuitive thing to teach someone who's idea of editing text is Notepad or Microsoft Word, but one "s/his/hers/g" run through a multi-page document will make that learning process worth your while.
However, it's getting people up and over that learning curve that's the difficulty. In general, the problem with CLI applications is that they're harder to be self-explanatory than GUI apps; at best you can make them spit out a command reference or helpfile when you run them with --help, but that's still a lot less intuitive than a GUI app with menus and tool palettes with roll-over tooltips. The latter requires you to remember vaguely what tool does what and where it's located on the screen, but IMO it's a much less memorization-intensive learning process than actually having to memorize, letter for letter, which commands you need to enter and what they all do.
For certain styles of people, the CLI application might even be easier. However, I think that many people find GUI's easier to learn, as evidenced by their rapid adoption and the decline of the CLI in all but specialist roles.
This is a good point.
I think what it boils down to is this: the Constitution isn't an exclusive document. It wasn't intended to mean, "everything is illegal, except for a few certain things." They enumerated the really big important stuff that they thought the Government needed to avoid, but they weren't giving Congress a carte blanche to trample on the other rights that people had always assumed that they had.
Unfortunately, the Ninth Amendment doesn't seem to get a whole lot of respect from the USSC or anybody else. It pretty much gets ignored; rather than drawing on the "pneumbra" and other IMO shaky legal arguments, I think it would have safe to just say 'hey, people have always had a certain right to privacy, therefore it's protected under the Ninth Amendment.' That makes it harder to chisel away at established freedoms, even if they weren't one of the top eight that made it into enumerated Amendments, or into the body of the Constitution itself.
There's a certain amount of irony in that the issue which gets the folks in Congress interested in technology, is watching one of their own get busted because he didn't understand that what he was sending over the "tubes" could be saved at either end.
I guess if you can't convince them that "knowledge is power," maybe we should work on "knowledge is not getting indicted."
I have been told that there are certain softmodems -- ones that use a particular Intel chipset -- that you can find for under $10 that will work under Asterix in place of the proprietary cards. I think it's the Intel 537 series chipsets that are the key. Since all they do is bridge the phone line to the computer, they can be used for voice or data given appropriate software. Given how few modems I've seen in stores lately, eBay may be your friend.
Might want to see this article:
A $10 Linux Answering Machine
Now that would mean basically one line, either to the telco PSTN system or to an extension, per PCI slot, which unless you had some abnormally large mobo is probably not too great. However, you could load up the PCI slots with them, use them all for the outgoing lines (to the telco) and then do your internal extensions over VOIP. That would also have the advantage of not having to run analog phone lines throughout the office; everything is just on your data network provided it can handle the load. Might be a bit of cash though, if you don't have VoIP phones already.
Also, there is hardware besides Digium's which is compatible with Asterisk, see this list for an overview of vendors.
Well, see, with a vertical distribution, you get enough CDs to stack them up against each other and not have them fall down.
Just in case anyone else was interested in what you get by searching that, results 1-2 are part of the COBOL language reference from IBM, but after that you get into sample code pretty quickly. (And if you wanted to add one more language to the list that you can write "Hello, world!" in, here you go.)
37,500 results total. Not too bad for a "dead" language.
But what happens when something goes wrong, and a paid user gets locked out of their operating system? What happens when I sneak a peak at your Microsoft licence number while you are working on your PC at the airport, and I post it on a website, and then Microsoft restricts your licence?
Yep.
Do you hear that? It's the sound of a few million Linux* users, sniggering to themselves.
* - Mac users can snigger too, but not too hard, because it could happen there, too.
I'm not sure how you read it, and it's certainly open to interpretation, but I understood "the system will curtail functionality much further by restricting users to just the Web browser for an hour at a time" to mean, we will only allow you to use Internet Explorer, and we will only allow you to use that for one hour at a time.
As in, no Firefox, no Opera, no any-other-application-except-IE.
The computer effectively becomes nothing but a crappy time-limited, IE-only web kiosk.