I'm not really even sure why I'm reading this article, as I never have and don't plan on running Windows at home. I suppose it's just out of morbid curiosity: watching Microsoft abuse it's userbase, legitimate or otherwise, is just too much fun to pass up. On the other hand, I fully support anything that defrauds MS out of a buck...but really, I can't feel very sorry for anyone these days given the available alternatives.
I'm just waiting for the day that they'll disable security updates to all un-"activated" copies of Windows. I'll try to control my glee.
Just wondering... what would your free (beer and speech) replacement for AutoCAD be?
If you think MS dominates the desktop market, it's nothing like how thoroughly Autodesk dominates the computer-drafting market. I've not really researched it in a while, but it used to be hard to find a real alternative at any price.
Given that a full version of AutoCAD Electrical goes for a cool $5,295, the FS community would have a hell of a 'killer app' if they coughed up a respectable alternative.
Luckily for me, a career car-pool-lane violator (no not really, but for the purposes of argument), not too many people think so either. However if for some reason an overwhelming majority of the populace thought that car-pool-lane violators should hang, I'd be pretty stupid to expect anything different, wouldn't I?
Punishments reflect our society's feelings as to appropriate recompense for crimes, or at least that's the theory. You can argue whether the system works all you want. But the point is that very few people think that driving too slowly ought to be punishable by death, while at least a significant number of people in this discussion think that writing malicious viruses should be.
Your opinion, by itself, is irrelevant. However find yourself a few million like-minded friends, and maybe things will start to turn your way.
No, this is Slashdot, where chances are the people who actually have to write and fine-tune and otherwise spend their day dealing with those filters hang out.
Sure, the majority of people here probably could just turn their filters on, but don't act like the technology to block annoying behavior like the spammers' just falls from the sky. Someone has to make it, and that's their time that the spammer is taking up.
There are a lot of people with legitimate grievances about unwanted bulk email, some greater than others. But when you get a lot of people together who each have a small grievance...it's probably not enough to cause any of them to actually go out and kill the person responsible, but don't expect them to act all sad about it when somebody else (assumedly for their own, probably nefarious reasons) does.
All the humanitarian-liberal whiners will disagree, but there comes a time when you have to put a value on human life. When someone has effectively made it their purpose to lie, steal, cheat, rob, and destroy (as virus and trojan writers effectively have), and do it on a scale that's unprecedented, I think we're well within our rights to contemplate taking their lives.
With the increased reliance on computers for essential services, releasing a virus onto the internet becomes a crime more and more like arson. When you set fire to some curtains in a crowded tenement, you might not be meaning to kill anyone, but you also have no idea what the force that you're unleashing--the fire--is going to do. It might just fizzle out, while it might rage and consume people and property. Similarly, when someone releases a virus, it might just get caught and blocked early, but it might also shut down huge sections of the network, and possibly interrupt essential services to many people.
Where I live, arson is one of the few crimes where, as a civilian, you can legally shoot someone if you see them attempting it. The thought being, I think, that once someone has shown themselves willing to set a fire and let it go, without caring about the consequences, their life is pretty much forfeit if killing them will stop the release. Similarly, people who release computer viruses have also demonstrated a lack of concern for the ultimate--and unknown--consequences of their actions.
As our world becomes more heavily dependent on technology and infrastructure, it becomes more appropriate to reevaluate how we treat people who attack that infrastructure, without consideration of the many people it will affect.
But I'll relate a personal story, because I have nothing better to do at the moment. I used to play a lot of games, back probably five or six years ago. Maybe more. I used a Mac, and while there were quite a few games around, there was definitely a delay between the PC releases and the Mac ports, and this used to drive me crazy. And of course in order to be able to run each year's cool games, I dropped hundreds (probably thousands, total) of dollars in upgrades into computers which otherwise didn't need them.
Then, one day, I bought this thing called a Sony Playstation. For about the cost of a good video card, I got a system that played more games than had ever been available for the Mac, and because it was a closed box, didn't require a constant stream of upgrades in order to remain current. Eventually it became obsolete and replaced by the PS2, but it took several years: when you stretch that cost over the upgrades I would have put in a gaming computer over the same time, it's ridiculously cheap.
Furthermore, by moving my gaming to the console, the computer suddenly became much more stable. My computer went back to being a work and communications device, and the television a leisure and gaming one. I've never looked back. Because I don't run games, the toughest thing my computer has to do is edit DV video, which even at only 400MHz it does fine. No doubt if I was still playing games, I'd have upgraded by now; since the only force driving me to upgrade is the OS, and my computer is still current as far as Apple is concerned, I haven't needed to. More money saved for me.
The "game gap" between the Mac and PC--which apparently has become even wider than it was when I still cared, before I bought a console--doesn't matter to me, and certainly doesn't figure into my purchasing patterns. Why should I spend my money and effort wringing the most performance out of my system in order to play resource-hogging games, when I can buy a console instead, where the developers have to spend their time and money trying to figure out how to wring the best framerate out of MY hardware?
I agree with you, and wanted to make a point regarding developing nations:
Linux is a great alternative for situations when you have an excess of manpower available to set up and maintain hardware. Schools, universities, and probably developing countries where 'person time' is less expensive compared to 'machine time' relative to developed countries, are all great markets. For instance, you can easily build a custom distro specific to your situation, and distribute to everyone free-of-charge. If a user has trouble, you can remotely log in and fix the problem. Plus, the knowledge that junior technicians gain from working on users' systems is directly applicable to working on bigger server systems in the future (assuming Linux or UNIX servers).
But when manpower is really expensive, and you've got money to burn on hardware, Mac OS starts to look more attractive. They're easy to set up (you can even foist the setup on the end user if you want and probably be OK) and administrate using Apple's proprietary software, interoperate well with server systems (although not Exchange, admittedly), and are widely perceived as being very user friendly.
It just depends which direction you're trying to go. Do you want to build up a user-base of technically literate people, without becoming dependent on any hardware or software supplier? Or do you already have a user base of people addicted to a particular OS, and are trying to wean them off of it, while spreading a few highly-trained and platform-flexible administrators around as thinly as possible?
I think the limitation to Darwin would be the amount of available software versus Linux.
Plus...maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it runs on Intel/AMD commodity hardware, does it? If it doesn't, then it's out right there -- why buy Apple HW at a premium just to put any other OS on it? And even if there is a x86 version, there are lots of other free and stable OSes available.
It's not that there's anything wrong with Darwin per se, I just haven't ever seen a convincing argument why it's any better than the other options available (FreeBSD, Linux, etc.). If there is a reason, by all means please share it. But I think that Darwin will always be a footnote to Mac OS X barring some convincing strength versus Linux/UNIX/BSD.
I really hope you're joking. Have you looked inside a Power Mac lately? I can't imagine a more easily upgradable computer.
You can swap out everything: hard drives, memory, optical drives, processors, AGP video card... three open PCI slots... everything you'd expect to be able to upgrade is there. It doesn't even take any tools to open the case; it's like the hood of a car.
Maybe you're thinking of the Mac Mini? But the upgradability of the Power Mac line is not a legitimate criticism.
It's nothing new either, I'm still using a Power Mac G4/400 from almost six years ago, and it's running the latest version of OS X. While I don't have any statistics to back it up, I don't know any PC users who are still using a system they bought six years ago, and does half the things I can do with mine.
I'll start this off by saying I'm a Mac user. However, I've also used Linux pretty extensively during certain periods, most recently about six months ago, but I've just never had the motivation (financial or otherwise) to change the OS on my main desktop to anything but Mac OS.
The problem with Linux is mostly with the hardware compatibility, and it's that it's very tough to get hardware that you KNOW will be compatible. If I need to get a wireless card for my Mac, I know I'm going to pay a premium. Fine, I accept that. But I also know that when I go out and buy Apple's proprietary Airport Card for $99, that the damn thing is going to work, flawlessly, the first time, without any dicking around with config files.
That's what makes it worth the extra money. Now with Linux, I know that there are probably wireless cards out there that would work just as (or nearly) as well with the distro of Linux I was using as an Airport card does with Mac OS. However it's nearly impossible to tell, standing there in the store, which one is going to work and which one is going to make me want to pound my head against the keyboard in frustration.
The lesson that Apple should be to Linux developers, especially those in charge of distros, is that you DO NOT need to support every after-market piece of hardware under the sun. Except for someone who's trying to cobble together a system out of parts they have already (and thus ought to be ready for a certain amount of tweaking), users just want to know what to buy in order to make sure it'll work.
That predictability has been the problem with Linux, in my experience. And it's not a problem that's directly attributable to the Linux developers: the hardware makers (who seem to find it amusing to change little insignificant things...like entire chipsets without changing the model number) ought to take much of the heat. But really I think that developers would do well to stop spreading themselves thin trying to support every brand and type of hardware in existence, and instead try to work towards a future where users can walk into a store and--even if they only have ONE wireless card, one network card, one modem, etc. to choose from--pick up a peripheral and KNOW that it will work, and work well and easily. I think developers would be surprised at the premium users will pay for this sort of experience. (Although they shouldn't -- what's the difference in price between a Mac and PC these days?)
Even if this "storefront" was electronic, it would be an improvement. Maybe this already exists, I haven't checked recently. But an online store where you could click on your distro, and then only be presented with hardware that was well-supported, would make Linux seem that more mature to the average user.
I'm not arguing with you. We all wish (along with probably every other CEO, cubicle slave, or business school grad) that we could start the next WalMart or Dell. It's tough, and frankly I think it boils down to a lot of luck, and maybe one bright idea. This is why I mentioned "bootstrapping" an economy of scale as being the hard part.
However once you have the empire built, maintaining it is a lot easier than getting it started: because you can dictate terms to both your suppliers and distributors / retailers, you can undercut the competition in your final price, and keep yourself on top. Unless someone has a radically different business model that you're unable (or unwilling, or too slow) to adapt to, and barring Enron-like criminal mismanagement, you'll probably stay on top.
The only hard part about it is "bootstrapping" an operation that big, once you have it running it's cake: you can dictate pricing terms to your parts suppliers (because you're so big, you can bankrupt them by canceling your orders), have everything manufactured overseas where labor is cheap, play your distributers against each other to keep their percentage minimal, and maintain your market share by undercutting any possible competition (which, not being as big as you, can't compete with your price).
Let's face it: Dell is the Wal-Mart of PCs. They're really good at what they do, but at the end of the day you need to step back and ask yourself 'is what they're doing really any good?'
I'm going to make that assumption, because the only other option is too depressing.
Unless you'd like a future where everything is basically owned and run--to a far greater extent than it already is--by a very small number of tremendously rich individuals, corporations are a good thing. This is because very few people actually have the resources by themselves to bankroll significant and long-lasting ventures: scientific, industrial, or otherwise.
To do big things, like build factories, operate supertankers, run airlines, you need a lot of money. Much more than any one sane person would be willing to put up. This is why corporations exist: they allow people to pool their resources, while mitigating risk. Without the shelter from liability that corporations offer, no one would invest in them. Without the great pools of capital that corporations provide, a whole lot of things that we enjoy and make life more enjoyable would disappear.
Maybe you want to live in a world without corporations, but count me out of it.
Actually I was just thinking about the explosives thing:
I don't really know how terrorists detonate the explosives that they make their suicide bombs out of, but if they're just regular blasting caps set off electrically, I wonder whether the microwaves would create sparks or charges in the wires sufficient to detonate the caps and thus the explosives.
Maybe there could be a use for this at border crossing points: if someone suspect (wearing unseasonably bulky clothing, etc.) is walking towards you, light them up with some sort of ray that will cause any explosives they're wearing to detonate. Do it from far enough away, and there's no risk to friendly personnel. And you don't necessarily have to use enough power to cause pain/burning, since that's not the point.
I don't see why you couldn't just pulse the microwave beam. It's not like you have to run it continuously. In fact, without a very large power supply you'd probably be hard pressed to run it continuously for any amount of time anyway: that's gotta be a lot of power it puts out.
My guess is that they'll do some tests to figure out how long you need to be exposed to the beam for it to start to hurt, and then how long you need for the heat to dissipate so that your skin temperature doesn't keep increasing. Then design the production device with that duty cycle in mind.
Frankly, a device which produced flashes of searing pain intermittently would be a lot more effective in deterring me than one which just produced a continuous but less severe pain. Especially if you rigged it so that it flashed on after semi-random intervals, so you couldn't prepare yourself for it.
I don't think so. They already have lots of more efficient way to kill people, especially if they pack together nice and closely.
Have you watched The History Channel any time in the last decade? The U.S. armed forces can easily kill people without driving a truck up and pointing a great big parabolic dish at them, in order to fry them with some Wellsian heat ray. There are things called cluster bombs which would be more than adequate for the task, and can be dropped from thousands of feet up.
As to your third speculative question, ('Wonder if making people feel like they're being burned alive counts as torture?') I'll suggest the answer is 'no.' If this was true, they wouldn't use irritant gasses with anywhere near the frequency as they do. If you've never been exposed to tear gas, it feels a little like your sinuses are on fire (and if you're sweating, your skin too). However since it doesn't cause any permanent damage, it's not torture. (At least when done to control a crowd. If you put someone in a room and filled it with CS, then it probably would.)
So I take it you'd prefer getting machine-gunned, then?
I'll take my chances with the Evil Sunburn Ray of Doom; maybe it'll give me cancer, maybe not, but getting shot in the torso with a piece of lead going several hundred feet per second is definitely going to ruin my day.
The only problem I see with this weapon as a crowd-control / anti-riot device is that you can't see when it's being used. In a riot, you normally have lots of people in back pushing a thin line of people in the front forwards. With a water cannon or rubber bullets, you at least have some feedback to the people in the rear that something bad is going on up front. With this, other than a whole lot of people suddenly getting overwarm, there's no indication that it's on. I just wonder whether people in the rear would keep pushing those unfortunate fools in front forwards, not knowing that they were getting the Orville Redenbacher treatment. Maybe they could couple the actual microwave emitter to a very powerful visible-spectrum light. The visible light wouldn't do anything, but nobody would know that, and they'd be able to tell when the thing was on.
Given that the only depleted uranium rounds are only fired from 25, 105, and 120mm guns, if you got hit by one cancer ought to be the last thing on your mind. Personally, I'd be much more concerned with keeping myself in one piece, or barring that at least in as few as possible.
I also find it hard to believe that there is ANY country in existence today that is actually inhabited by the direct and undiluted descendants of it's aboriginal peoples, dating back to the evolution of man. And while we're at it, why not bitch about the land we probably stole from the Neanderthals?
Practically all land is "stolen," according to somebody's point of view. It has no bearing on the grandparent's comment.
Yes, apparently the OP was just expressing his hope that we extend to Iraqis a particular part of esoteric British common law. Who knew there were such passionate people around?
PS: Yes, I know he meant "courtesy," but I've no problem in poking fun at such an obvious mistake, especially since it got through whatever passes for copy editing.
Maybe we're missing something: like this is going to be a special air conditioner, specifically designed for the high Arctic...?
Seriously, the only way I can imagine they even got this thing to work, without throwing an extra gasoline generator in the trunk of the car, is to build it with a much smaller cooling capacity than a standard phase-change air conditioner. Which is stupid; the car companies don't make A/C units bigger than they have to be just for fun, and given how much Americans like air conditioning, I doubt anything smaller would be marketable anyway.
You are correct, but the comparison between the Peltier chips and the entire A/C system in today's car is not apt.
You might as well point out that the evaporator coils of a standard air conditioner have no moving parts. They don't -- however other parts of the system which are necessary for them to do anything worthwhile do.
Likewise, in a peltier-cooler based A/C system, the cooling junctions themselves have no moving parts, but you need (at the very least) a fan to move the air over them, plus you need a source of electricity: probably the car's alternator. As others have pointed out, this will put just as much load on the engine's fan belt as a regular mechanical compressor would, and quite possibly much more because peltier junctions are so inefficient when compared with traditional refrigeration systems.
The entire system as a whole (unless you have an electric vehicle) would not be completely devoid of mechanical parts, and never can be, since the power source is an internal combustion engine and it's output is not naturally electric.
I gotta call you on the 'fewer satellites' business. It's my understanding that the GPS sats are a low-orbit constellation, 24 of them or so, and that each is constantly moving around the earth. Unless they were constantly maneuvering them, this makes it impossible for there to ever be more satellites over one location than over any other.
I guess they could put more at higher latitudes, if they thought that was where the demand was going to be, but that just doesn't seem consistent with the system design.
Maybe there's some other reason why you're not seeing as many satellites down there?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, isn't it?
I'm not really even sure why I'm reading this article, as I never have and don't plan on running Windows at home. I suppose it's just out of morbid curiosity: watching Microsoft abuse it's userbase, legitimate or otherwise, is just too much fun to pass up. On the other hand, I fully support anything that defrauds MS out of a buck...but really, I can't feel very sorry for anyone these days given the available alternatives.
I'm just waiting for the day that they'll disable security updates to all un-"activated" copies of Windows. I'll try to control my glee.
Just wondering ... what would your free (beer and speech) replacement for AutoCAD be?
If you think MS dominates the desktop market, it's nothing like how thoroughly Autodesk dominates the computer-drafting market. I've not really researched it in a while, but it used to be hard to find a real alternative at any price.
Given that a full version of AutoCAD Electrical goes for a cool $5,295, the FS community would have a hell of a 'killer app' if they coughed up a respectable alternative.
That's fine, and I respect your opinion.
Luckily for me, a career car-pool-lane violator (no not really, but for the purposes of argument), not too many people think so either. However if for some reason an overwhelming majority of the populace thought that car-pool-lane violators should hang, I'd be pretty stupid to expect anything different, wouldn't I?
Punishments reflect our society's feelings as to appropriate recompense for crimes, or at least that's the theory. You can argue whether the system works all you want. But the point is that very few people think that driving too slowly ought to be punishable by death, while at least a significant number of people in this discussion think that writing malicious viruses should be.
Your opinion, by itself, is irrelevant. However find yourself a few million like-minded friends, and maybe things will start to turn your way.
No, this is Slashdot, where chances are the people who actually have to write and fine-tune and otherwise spend their day dealing with those filters hang out.
Sure, the majority of people here probably could just turn their filters on, but don't act like the technology to block annoying behavior like the spammers' just falls from the sky. Someone has to make it, and that's their time that the spammer is taking up.
There are a lot of people with legitimate grievances about unwanted bulk email, some greater than others. But when you get a lot of people together who each have a small grievance...it's probably not enough to cause any of them to actually go out and kill the person responsible, but don't expect them to act all sad about it when somebody else (assumedly for their own, probably nefarious reasons) does.
I agree.
All the humanitarian-liberal whiners will disagree, but there comes a time when you have to put a value on human life. When someone has effectively made it their purpose to lie, steal, cheat, rob, and destroy (as virus and trojan writers effectively have), and do it on a scale that's unprecedented, I think we're well within our rights to contemplate taking their lives.
With the increased reliance on computers for essential services, releasing a virus onto the internet becomes a crime more and more like arson. When you set fire to some curtains in a crowded tenement, you might not be meaning to kill anyone, but you also have no idea what the force that you're unleashing--the fire--is going to do. It might just fizzle out, while it might rage and consume people and property. Similarly, when someone releases a virus, it might just get caught and blocked early, but it might also shut down huge sections of the network, and possibly interrupt essential services to many people.
Where I live, arson is one of the few crimes where, as a civilian, you can legally shoot someone if you see them attempting it. The thought being, I think, that once someone has shown themselves willing to set a fire and let it go, without caring about the consequences, their life is pretty much forfeit if killing them will stop the release. Similarly, people who release computer viruses have also demonstrated a lack of concern for the ultimate--and unknown--consequences of their actions.
As our world becomes more heavily dependent on technology and infrastructure, it becomes more appropriate to reevaluate how we treat people who attack that infrastructure, without consideration of the many people it will affect.
That's not really saying much, is it? Considering that there were probably zero international food chains under the Soviet regime.
Wow, this isn't even a very good troll.
But I'll relate a personal story, because I have nothing better to do at the moment. I used to play a lot of games, back probably five or six years ago. Maybe more. I used a Mac, and while there were quite a few games around, there was definitely a delay between the PC releases and the Mac ports, and this used to drive me crazy. And of course in order to be able to run each year's cool games, I dropped hundreds (probably thousands, total) of dollars in upgrades into computers which otherwise didn't need them.
Then, one day, I bought this thing called a Sony Playstation. For about the cost of a good video card, I got a system that played more games than had ever been available for the Mac, and because it was a closed box, didn't require a constant stream of upgrades in order to remain current. Eventually it became obsolete and replaced by the PS2, but it took several years: when you stretch that cost over the upgrades I would have put in a gaming computer over the same time, it's ridiculously cheap.
Furthermore, by moving my gaming to the console, the computer suddenly became much more stable. My computer went back to being a work and communications device, and the television a leisure and gaming one. I've never looked back. Because I don't run games, the toughest thing my computer has to do is edit DV video, which even at only 400MHz it does fine. No doubt if I was still playing games, I'd have upgraded by now; since the only force driving me to upgrade is the OS, and my computer is still current as far as Apple is concerned, I haven't needed to. More money saved for me.
The "game gap" between the Mac and PC--which apparently has become even wider than it was when I still cared, before I bought a console--doesn't matter to me, and certainly doesn't figure into my purchasing patterns. Why should I spend my money and effort wringing the most performance out of my system in order to play resource-hogging games, when I can buy a console instead, where the developers have to spend their time and money trying to figure out how to wring the best framerate out of MY hardware?
I agree with you, and wanted to make a point regarding developing nations:
Linux is a great alternative for situations when you have an excess of manpower available to set up and maintain hardware. Schools, universities, and probably developing countries where 'person time' is less expensive compared to 'machine time' relative to developed countries, are all great markets. For instance, you can easily build a custom distro specific to your situation, and distribute to everyone free-of-charge. If a user has trouble, you can remotely log in and fix the problem. Plus, the knowledge that junior technicians gain from working on users' systems is directly applicable to working on bigger server systems in the future (assuming Linux or UNIX servers).
But when manpower is really expensive, and you've got money to burn on hardware, Mac OS starts to look more attractive. They're easy to set up (you can even foist the setup on the end user if you want and probably be OK) and administrate using Apple's proprietary software, interoperate well with server systems (although not Exchange, admittedly), and are widely perceived as being very user friendly.
It just depends which direction you're trying to go. Do you want to build up a user-base of technically literate people, without becoming dependent on any hardware or software supplier? Or do you already have a user base of people addicted to a particular OS, and are trying to wean them off of it, while spreading a few highly-trained and platform-flexible administrators around as thinly as possible?
I think the limitation to Darwin would be the amount of available software versus Linux.
Plus...maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it runs on Intel/AMD commodity hardware, does it? If it doesn't, then it's out right there -- why buy Apple HW at a premium just to put any other OS on it? And even if there is a x86 version, there are lots of other free and stable OSes available.
It's not that there's anything wrong with Darwin per se, I just haven't ever seen a convincing argument why it's any better than the other options available (FreeBSD, Linux, etc.). If there is a reason, by all means please share it. But I think that Darwin will always be a footnote to Mac OS X barring some convincing strength versus Linux/UNIX/BSD.
I really hope you're joking. Have you looked inside a Power Mac lately? I can't imagine a more easily upgradable computer.
... three open PCI slots ... everything you'd expect to be able to upgrade is there. It doesn't even take any tools to open the case; it's like the hood of a car.
You can swap out everything: hard drives, memory, optical drives, processors, AGP video card
Maybe you're thinking of the Mac Mini? But the upgradability of the Power Mac line is not a legitimate criticism.
It's nothing new either, I'm still using a Power Mac G4/400 from almost six years ago, and it's running the latest version of OS X. While I don't have any statistics to back it up, I don't know any PC users who are still using a system they bought six years ago, and does half the things I can do with mine.
Yeah but installing / running e17 is out of the range of many average users, because it has to be built from CVS. It's just not an option.
So maybe the OP should have been read as: "[Out of the stable, easily-installed and widely available distros/OSes,] the eye candy's better."
Unless I'm mistaken and e17 has moved forwards a lot...Last time I checked a release date hadn't even been announced and it was still pre-alpha.
I'll start this off by saying I'm a Mac user. However, I've also used Linux pretty extensively during certain periods, most recently about six months ago, but I've just never had the motivation (financial or otherwise) to change the OS on my main desktop to anything but Mac OS.
The problem with Linux is mostly with the hardware compatibility, and it's that it's very tough to get hardware that you KNOW will be compatible. If I need to get a wireless card for my Mac, I know I'm going to pay a premium. Fine, I accept that. But I also know that when I go out and buy Apple's proprietary Airport Card for $99, that the damn thing is going to work, flawlessly, the first time, without any dicking around with config files.
That's what makes it worth the extra money. Now with Linux, I know that there are probably wireless cards out there that would work just as (or nearly) as well with the distro of Linux I was using as an Airport card does with Mac OS. However it's nearly impossible to tell, standing there in the store, which one is going to work and which one is going to make me want to pound my head against the keyboard in frustration.
The lesson that Apple should be to Linux developers, especially those in charge of distros, is that you DO NOT need to support every after-market piece of hardware under the sun. Except for someone who's trying to cobble together a system out of parts they have already (and thus ought to be ready for a certain amount of tweaking), users just want to know what to buy in order to make sure it'll work.
That predictability has been the problem with Linux, in my experience. And it's not a problem that's directly attributable to the Linux developers: the hardware makers (who seem to find it amusing to change little insignificant things...like entire chipsets without changing the model number) ought to take much of the heat. But really I think that developers would do well to stop spreading themselves thin trying to support every brand and type of hardware in existence, and instead try to work towards a future where users can walk into a store and--even if they only have ONE wireless card, one network card, one modem, etc. to choose from--pick up a peripheral and KNOW that it will work, and work well and easily. I think developers would be surprised at the premium users will pay for this sort of experience. (Although they shouldn't -- what's the difference in price between a Mac and PC these days?)
Even if this "storefront" was electronic, it would be an improvement. Maybe this already exists, I haven't checked recently. But an online store where you could click on your distro, and then only be presented with hardware that was well-supported, would make Linux seem that more mature to the average user.
I'm not arguing with you. We all wish (along with probably every other CEO, cubicle slave, or business school grad) that we could start the next WalMart or Dell. It's tough, and frankly I think it boils down to a lot of luck, and maybe one bright idea. This is why I mentioned "bootstrapping" an economy of scale as being the hard part.
However once you have the empire built, maintaining it is a lot easier than getting it started: because you can dictate terms to both your suppliers and distributors / retailers, you can undercut the competition in your final price, and keep yourself on top. Unless someone has a radically different business model that you're unable (or unwilling, or too slow) to adapt to, and barring Enron-like criminal mismanagement, you'll probably stay on top.
Not really, it's just an economy of scale.
The only hard part about it is "bootstrapping" an operation that big, once you have it running it's cake: you can dictate pricing terms to your parts suppliers (because you're so big, you can bankrupt them by canceling your orders), have everything manufactured overseas where labor is cheap, play your distributers against each other to keep their percentage minimal, and maintain your market share by undercutting any possible competition (which, not being as big as you, can't compete with your price).
Let's face it: Dell is the Wal-Mart of PCs. They're really good at what they do, but at the end of the day you need to step back and ask yourself 'is what they're doing really any good?'
I'm assuming this is a troll.
I'm going to make that assumption, because the only other option is too depressing.
Unless you'd like a future where everything is basically owned and run--to a far greater extent than it already is--by a very small number of tremendously rich individuals, corporations are a good thing. This is because very few people actually have the resources by themselves to bankroll significant and long-lasting ventures: scientific, industrial, or otherwise.
To do big things, like build factories, operate supertankers, run airlines, you need a lot of money. Much more than any one sane person would be willing to put up. This is why corporations exist: they allow people to pool their resources, while mitigating risk. Without the shelter from liability that corporations offer, no one would invest in them. Without the great pools of capital that corporations provide, a whole lot of things that we enjoy and make life more enjoyable would disappear.
Maybe you want to live in a world without corporations, but count me out of it.
Actually I was just thinking about the explosives thing:
I don't really know how terrorists detonate the explosives that they make their suicide bombs out of, but if they're just regular blasting caps set off electrically, I wonder whether the microwaves would create sparks or charges in the wires sufficient to detonate the caps and thus the explosives.
Maybe there could be a use for this at border crossing points: if someone suspect (wearing unseasonably bulky clothing, etc.) is walking towards you, light them up with some sort of ray that will cause any explosives they're wearing to detonate. Do it from far enough away, and there's no risk to friendly personnel. And you don't necessarily have to use enough power to cause pain/burning, since that's not the point.
I don't see why you couldn't just pulse the microwave beam. It's not like you have to run it continuously. In fact, without a very large power supply you'd probably be hard pressed to run it continuously for any amount of time anyway: that's gotta be a lot of power it puts out.
My guess is that they'll do some tests to figure out how long you need to be exposed to the beam for it to start to hurt, and then how long you need for the heat to dissipate so that your skin temperature doesn't keep increasing. Then design the production device with that duty cycle in mind.
Frankly, a device which produced flashes of searing pain intermittently would be a lot more effective in deterring me than one which just produced a continuous but less severe pain. Especially if you rigged it so that it flashed on after semi-random intervals, so you couldn't prepare yourself for it.
I don't think so. They already have lots of more efficient way to kill people, especially if they pack together nice and closely.
Have you watched The History Channel any time in the last decade? The U.S. armed forces can easily kill people without driving a truck up and pointing a great big parabolic dish at them, in order to fry them with some Wellsian heat ray. There are things called cluster bombs which would be more than adequate for the task, and can be dropped from thousands of feet up.
As to your third speculative question, ('Wonder if making people feel like they're being burned alive counts as torture?') I'll suggest the answer is 'no.' If this was true, they wouldn't use irritant gasses with anywhere near the frequency as they do. If you've never been exposed to tear gas, it feels a little like your sinuses are on fire (and if you're sweating, your skin too). However since it doesn't cause any permanent damage, it's not torture. (At least when done to control a crowd. If you put someone in a room and filled it with CS, then it probably would.)
So I take it you'd prefer getting machine-gunned, then?
I'll take my chances with the Evil Sunburn Ray of Doom; maybe it'll give me cancer, maybe not, but getting shot in the torso with a piece of lead going several hundred feet per second is definitely going to ruin my day.
The only problem I see with this weapon as a crowd-control / anti-riot device is that you can't see when it's being used. In a riot, you normally have lots of people in back pushing a thin line of people in the front forwards. With a water cannon or rubber bullets, you at least have some feedback to the people in the rear that something bad is going on up front. With this, other than a whole lot of people suddenly getting overwarm, there's no indication that it's on. I just wonder whether people in the rear would keep pushing those unfortunate fools in front forwards, not knowing that they were getting the Orville Redenbacher treatment. Maybe they could couple the actual microwave emitter to a very powerful visible-spectrum light. The visible light wouldn't do anything, but nobody would know that, and they'd be able to tell when the thing was on.
Given that the only depleted uranium rounds are only fired from 25, 105, and 120mm guns, if you got hit by one cancer ought to be the last thing on your mind. Personally, I'd be much more concerned with keeping myself in one piece, or barring that at least in as few as possible.
And your country would be ... ?
I also find it hard to believe that there is ANY country in existence today that is actually inhabited by the direct and undiluted descendants of it's aboriginal peoples, dating back to the evolution of man. And while we're at it, why not bitch about the land we probably stole from the Neanderthals?
Practically all land is "stolen," according to somebody's point of view. It has no bearing on the grandparent's comment.
Yes, apparently the OP was just expressing his hope that we extend to Iraqis a particular part of esoteric British common law. Who knew there were such passionate people around?
Curtsey (and Courtesy):
http://www.lectlaw.com/def/c157.htm
PS: Yes, I know he meant "courtesy," but I've no problem in poking fun at such an obvious mistake, especially since it got through whatever passes for copy editing.
Maybe we're missing something: like this is going to be a special air conditioner, specifically designed for the high Arctic...?
Seriously, the only way I can imagine they even got this thing to work, without throwing an extra gasoline generator in the trunk of the car, is to build it with a much smaller cooling capacity than a standard phase-change air conditioner. Which is stupid; the car companies don't make A/C units bigger than they have to be just for fun, and given how much Americans like air conditioning, I doubt anything smaller would be marketable anyway.
You are correct, but the comparison between the Peltier chips and the entire A/C system in today's car is not apt.
You might as well point out that the evaporator coils of a standard air conditioner have no moving parts. They don't -- however other parts of the system which are necessary for them to do anything worthwhile do.
Likewise, in a peltier-cooler based A/C system, the cooling junctions themselves have no moving parts, but you need (at the very least) a fan to move the air over them, plus you need a source of electricity: probably the car's alternator. As others have pointed out, this will put just as much load on the engine's fan belt as a regular mechanical compressor would, and quite possibly much more because peltier junctions are so inefficient when compared with traditional refrigeration systems.
The entire system as a whole (unless you have an electric vehicle) would not be completely devoid of mechanical parts, and never can be, since the power source is an internal combustion engine and it's output is not naturally electric.
I gotta call you on the 'fewer satellites' business. It's my understanding that the GPS sats are a low-orbit constellation, 24 of them or so, and that each is constantly moving around the earth. Unless they were constantly maneuvering them, this makes it impossible for there to ever be more satellites over one location than over any other.
I guess they could put more at higher latitudes, if they thought that was where the demand was going to be, but that just doesn't seem consistent with the system design.
Maybe there's some other reason why you're not seeing as many satellites down there?