I think that you know this, but I think it's worth noting that the protocols and formats you mention are troublesome because they're Microsoft formats, deliberately designed to cause problems with software from anybody but Microsoft.
This doesn't fix your practical difficulties getting along with MS software at work today (believe me, I feel your pain), but over time I think the trend favors OSS and open formats (which are designed to solve problems) over MS software and lockin formats (which are largely designed to cause problems).
I like that concept, "Rights of Personality." It cuts to the essence of a disturbing trend in places like the US and the UK. More and more, every minute of one's life is scrutinized by the state, business, marketers, and random individuals. But the next step is the research is being done on various mind-reading technologies. Right now, these manifest themselves as "lie detectors" and DHS-type projects to look for terrorists, smugglers, and other nogoodniks. Also, marketing types want to be able to detect your internal reactions to ads, to fine tune their attacks on yor will. Soon they'll be able to track your eyes to see who you find attractive, then include similar models in ads targeted at you (this could be a fantastic optimization for porn, I admit).
The trend, and the goal, is to be able to read more people, at greater distance. We don't know how far this technology can go, but some of the things already being tested are capable enough to give one pause. If you are not allowed to think unauthorized thoughts (to question the state; to remember a song without paying royalties), do you have a personality? Do you have free will? It seems to me that at that point, consciousness would be a curse.
Gene Wolfe wrote, I believe in Soldier of the Mist, that "A man without a sword is a slave." I would contend that today it's more relevant to say that a man without privacy is a prisoner; a man without private thoughts is a slave.
It's nice to know that some places still maintain the concept of a right to privacy.
HDTV on Comcast often has problems with smooth gradations in color. This tends to make common objects like, oh, human faces look synthetic. Sharpness is pretty good. The color banding was much worse on their digital SDTV; it was very obvious in any dark scene, and often scene transitions were garbled and blocky; so much so that when I moved I got analog cable instead. Better quality image and it's much quicker to change channels.
When the installer came for this new house, I mentioned that I was only getting digital for the purposes of HDTV, and that otherwise I liked analog better. It was rather entertaining listening to him explain that digital only needs ONE bandwidth, while analog needs FOUR bandwidths.
None of this is nearly as annoying as their execrable channel guide, which dedicates a third of the screne to some random bullshit preview and a third to advertising. And often takes ~10 seconds to flip to the next screen. And if you want to search by name... my god. To get to the middle of the alphabet, it's ~20 key presses (they make you go through the numerals if you try to go backwards). It's one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen-- and I have seen some shit.
But never mind all that; I've seen MythTV in action and I will soon be cured.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Excession left me cold at first, because the vastly superior machine AIs dominated the story relative to the human types. Of course, humans really would be largely irrelevant in that society... I came to think of it as one of his better works.
Look to Windward did a nice job of anticipating 9/11, I thought.
One of my favorites, though, is Use of Weapons. Not because of the ideas, or the story, or even the structure (which beat Memento to the punch, BTW-- but everything that surprises people in any mainstream media has always been done decades before in SF). But Zakalwe and Skaffen-Amtiskaw are my favorite Culture characters.
I'm not finished with Matter yet, but so far I'm enjoying it more than Windward or Excession. And I think a character from Use of Weapons might have a cameo...
He was also sure that the Internet was just a fad, that it could never replace commercial online access and print tech journals. Hmm. Can anybody remember learning anything valid from Dvorak, except by inverting his statements?
The pricing scheme is pretty iffy right now, I'd like to see availability of free ebooks and a good selection of cheap ones. Surely authors and publishers of older books would do better selling older books at approximately used book store prices. But the hardware looks pretty much good enough.
The one app that would make me buy it right now: an SSH client. I could get a lot of work done on a portable wireless terminal like that. Coupled with free ubiqitous wireless, that's a killer application... for nerds, admittedly. But still, it'd probably be quite easy to implement, and the bandwidth would be trivial compared to web browsing.
The CentOS userbase is an incentive to make your software Redhat-compatible. If there were not a free and painless option that is compatible with RH, many more people would have switched to SuSE, Ubuntu, etc.
CentOS is actually significantly better than RHEL in one respect, though. The package management system, yum, has always been more reliable for me than RHEL's up2date. Even now that RH uses yum, their reposistories seem to be down or slow fairly often. And I can't stand using RHEL's web site. It's much faster to deploy a CentOS server than a Red Hat one, enough so that the price difference seems almost secondary. On the other hand, if you install a lot of machines, you shouldn't be doing it from scratch.
Eh, but Red Hat's done far more good things than bad things. I think CentOS (and to a lesser extent, White Box and others) have a nice symbiotic relationship with them. Some users will prefer or need officially supported software, and that's why they're still turning nice, but not monopolistic insane profits. It would be a mistake to think that they'd get many of the CentOS users if they could only work around that pesky GPL and force them to buy from Redhat. Quite the opposite; they'd ruin themselves.
Hmm, how to express our sympathy...
on
SCO Layoffs Begin
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I don't want to talk to anybody using this service. How can I block them? Do they announce to innocent (called) parties that they're invading your privacy at the beginning of a call?
Now, consider what scumbags like Comcast could do with this. They bundle phone, cable, and Internet. So they could tweak not just your banner ads, but also your TV ads (using an upgraded on-demand system). And they could use peeping on one service to affect the others. For example, they could change your web ads based on what shows you watch. The only question is whether they think the cost in lawsuits (from other advertisers and customers) would be worth it. Hmm, maybe they can tie it into the DHS "we need retroactive immunity for any crime on the grounds that it would be bad for business for us to be subject to the law" stuff. Obviously the program could service "national security" purposes as well.
Yeah, that annoyed me too. It's like when they add lens flare to medieval/fantasy games. Introducing errors that contradict the story just because... hey, the engine supports it! George Lucas syndrome.
Uh... yeah, with the tunables I hit mid 500MB/s on 3wares. I like arecas, and the tunables help them too. I wasn't advocating a particular card, just pointing to some documentaion that affects all linux block devices.
First, a comment on the Seagate 750G drives: If you run these, and you want to keep them running, make sure you have clean power. I've seen several of them die, usually after a power outage. Never seen one on a UPS die.
Also, if you're concerned about Linux block device performance, look at the various kernel tunables. On a single drive, such as those Seagates, I can get extra ~10MB/s. On RAIDs and LVM volumes, the differences can be much higher-- more than twice as fast, in some cases. There are a few parameters that make a difference, and many values you might want to try for each. I have a script iterate through the various permutations, running IOZone on each, so I can see what does best for read vs. write and large vs. small file performance. But I can't release it just yet (employer makes 100% of income from Open Source; employer hates Open Source). Anyway, somebody out there can do better than I, I'm sure:)
A year after I cancelled my long distance services with a company called CSC, they started sending me a bill for $.06. They kept that up for a year before I called them up. Got their voice mail and told them to call me back so we could work out a payment plan.
I was a fan of BeOS. It ran quite well on a PII/266. But even at the time it was clear that they were vastly overrating how easy it would be to bolt various things on later, like multiuser. The attitude was "Well, we can set attributes using the database filesystem, so how hard can it be to add that multiuser stuff later?"
Those things can be hard. The fastest UI experience I'd had prior to BeOS was the Amiga. It was equally impressive, relative to its contemporary competition. But part of that came from shortcuts: it didn't have a couple little features like memory protection and device independent graphics. The reasons the Amiga died were probably not mostly technical, but those technical problems were not overcome before the Amiga was dead.
BeOS was cool, but denial and closed source is not a valid approach to surmounting huge technical hurdles. Remember, before Apple picked up NeXT, the approach Apple and Apple fanboys took was just that. You'd constantly see Apple fanboys saying things like "preemptive multi-tasking is slower than cooperative, it's completely useless." Microsoft always took almost the same approach publicly: preemptive multitasking, color, video, windowing, graphics acceleration, etc. were all useless fluff. But behind the scenes MS was actually working on them. And then they'd put them on the market and claim to have invented them. During that time Apple was, as far as anybody can tell, jerking off to its own marketing. Nearly a fatal case of denial.
Heh, oh well. I seldom flame people for grammar or spelling errors, but words... have meaning. It seems increasingly common for people to use similar-sounding words interchangeably. The less effectively we communicate, the dumber our species becomes.
Could somebody using one of these crooked ISPs check to see if they're rewriting referral links to sites like Amazon? I stayed at a hotel years ago which was stealing credits like this. It looke like Kazaa was doing this too. The reason I bring it up is that, if they're scummy enough to inline ads, they're scummy enough to try this. And if they are trying it, it would seem like an easier lawsuit to win, because it's very clearly theft.
The cable companies claim that they don't have a published or even fixed usage cap, but they are just cancelling the accounts of those who use more than the other 99% of the users. The justification for cancelling them: they use more than the rest.
Okay, assume that's true. Cancel the top one percent. Now you have a new top one percent. Cancel them. Now...
Pretty soon they'll have a lot of bandwidth freed up, and it'll be fair for everyone.
If you have something quick to say, a text message is much faster and more convenient. You want to get rid of email too? Hey, let's get rid of forums like/. Why post something permanently when we could just have a giant chat room? All we have to do is get everybody together at once. In fact: let's all meet in person! It's ever so much more personal that way.
If you have something quick to say, a text message is much faster and more convenient. Texting is also particularly useful for bits of information you might need later.
OTOH, SMS is a really crappy technology. I think it's vastly overpriced even given how inefficient it is, but... wow. And the telcos have little incentive to fix it as long as people are willing to pay insane, outrageous prices per byte.
First, let me say that Firefox is my favorite browser and I greatly appreciate the fantastic work the Firefox team has done.
That said, lately I do find that recent versions of Firefox on Linux and OSX (haven't checked Windows) really are much more usable with multiple cores. The reason is that when Firefox grabs all of one core, you still get decent performance from the rest of your system. I wonder if they're planning on making Firefox multithreaded to remove this safety barrier:). Usually when something is grabbing all the CPU, the culprit is Flash. Flash support on Linux is still poor. Usually I don't mind, because almost all Flash is a waste of time. I'm sure that others have pointed out that Flashblock and Adblock are almost necessities. Without them, FFox is... much like IE, actually.
I've also noticed another problem that I haven't had time to pin down yet. FFox on Ubuntu, even without Flash, seems to eventually slow to a crawl. The workaround is to close it out and restart-- thank goodness it can restore your tabs.
I think much of the recent degradation has to do with habitual defectors (advertisers and worse) working around Firefox's protections to do stuff with Javascript and Flash-- either by sneaking it by or making the site worthless without them. I really hate that, but fortunately there are alternatives to any such site.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't fix your practical difficulties getting along with MS software at work today (believe me, I feel your pain), but over time I think the trend favors OSS and open formats (which are designed to solve problems) over MS software and lockin formats (which are largely designed to cause problems).
The trend, and the goal, is to be able to read more people, at greater distance. We don't know how far this technology can go, but some of the things already being tested are capable enough to give one pause. If you are not allowed to think unauthorized thoughts (to question the state; to remember a song without paying royalties), do you have a personality? Do you have free will? It seems to me that at that point, consciousness would be a curse.
Gene Wolfe wrote, I believe in Soldier of the Mist, that "A man without a sword is a slave." I would contend that today it's more relevant to say that a man without privacy is a prisoner; a man without private thoughts is a slave.
It's nice to know that some places still maintain the concept of a right to privacy.
Wait... how many percents is 100 percents minus 20 percents? 100 percents? Whoa, that's a lot of percents.
When the installer came for this new house, I mentioned that I was only getting digital for the purposes of HDTV, and that otherwise I liked analog better. It was rather entertaining listening to him explain that digital only needs ONE bandwidth, while analog needs FOUR bandwidths.
None of this is nearly as annoying as their execrable channel guide, which dedicates a third of the screne to some random bullshit preview and a third to advertising. And often takes ~10 seconds to flip to the next screen. And if you want to search by name... my god. To get to the middle of the alphabet, it's ~20 key presses (they make you go through the numerals if you try to go backwards). It's one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen-- and I have seen some shit.
But never mind all that; I've seen MythTV in action and I will soon be cured.
Excession left me cold at first, because the vastly superior machine AIs dominated the story relative to the human types. Of course, humans really would be largely irrelevant in that society... I came to think of it as one of his better works.
Look to Windward did a nice job of anticipating 9/11, I thought.
One of my favorites, though, is Use of Weapons. Not because of the ideas, or the story, or even the structure (which beat Memento to the punch, BTW-- but everything that surprises people in any mainstream media has always been done decades before in SF). But Zakalwe and Skaffen-Amtiskaw are my favorite Culture characters.
I'm not finished with Matter yet, but so far I'm enjoying it more than Windward or Excession. And I think a character from Use of Weapons might have a cameo...
JET got their American iPod commercial based on exposure in Madden 2004.
A product that was advertised by one megacompany got so much exposure that it was also advertised by another megacompany? Did I mention I'm impressed?
He was also sure that the Internet was just a fad, that it could never replace commercial online access and print tech journals. Hmm. Can anybody remember learning anything valid from Dvorak, except by inverting his statements?
The one app that would make me buy it right now: an SSH client. I could get a lot of work done on a portable wireless terminal like that. Coupled with free ubiqitous wireless, that's a killer application... for nerds, admittedly. But still, it'd probably be quite easy to implement, and the bandwidth would be trivial compared to web browsing.
CentOS is actually significantly better than RHEL in one respect, though. The package management system, yum, has always been more reliable for me than RHEL's up2date. Even now that RH uses yum, their reposistories seem to be down or slow fairly often. And I can't stand using RHEL's web site. It's much faster to deploy a CentOS server than a Red Hat one, enough so that the price difference seems almost secondary. On the other hand, if you install a lot of machines, you shouldn't be doing it from scratch.
Eh, but Red Hat's done far more good things than bad things. I think CentOS (and to a lesser extent, White Box and others) have a nice symbiotic relationship with them. Some users will prefer or need officially supported software, and that's why they're still turning nice, but not monopolistic insane profits. It would be a mistake to think that they'd get many of the CentOS users if they could only work around that pesky GPL and force them to buy from Redhat. Quite the opposite; they'd ruin themselves.
...pelvic thrusts, I think.
Now, consider what scumbags like Comcast could do with this. They bundle phone, cable, and Internet. So they could tweak not just your banner ads, but also your TV ads (using an upgraded on-demand system). And they could use peeping on one service to affect the others. For example, they could change your web ads based on what shows you watch. The only question is whether they think the cost in lawsuits (from other advertisers and customers) would be worth it. Hmm, maybe they can tie it into the DHS "we need retroactive immunity for any crime on the grounds that it would be bad for business for us to be subject to the law" stuff. Obviously the program could service "national security" purposes as well.
Yeah, that annoyed me too. It's like when they add lens flare to medieval/fantasy games. Introducing errors that contradict the story just because... hey, the engine supports it! George Lucas syndrome.
Uh... yeah, with the tunables I hit mid 500MB/s on 3wares. I like arecas, and the tunables help them too. I wasn't advocating a particular card, just pointing to some documentaion that affects all linux block devices.
Also, if you're concerned about Linux block device performance, look at the various kernel tunables. On a single drive, such as those Seagates, I can get extra ~10MB/s. On RAIDs and LVM volumes, the differences can be much higher-- more than twice as fast, in some cases. There are a few parameters that make a difference, and many values you might want to try for each. I have a script iterate through the various permutations, running IOZone on each, so I can see what does best for read vs. write and large vs. small file performance. But I can't release it just yet (employer makes 100% of income from Open Source; employer hates Open Source). Anyway, somebody out there can do better than I, I'm sure :)
This discusses the tunables you'd want to check: http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=11050
Note that these do NOT apply only to 3Ware controllers. And the differences in performance can be massive.
A year after I cancelled my long distance services with a company called CSC, they started sending me a bill for $.06. They kept that up for a year before I called them up. Got their voice mail and told them to call me back so we could work out a payment plan.
Those things can be hard. The fastest UI experience I'd had prior to BeOS was the Amiga. It was equally impressive, relative to its contemporary competition. But part of that came from shortcuts: it didn't have a couple little features like memory protection and device independent graphics. The reasons the Amiga died were probably not mostly technical, but those technical problems were not overcome before the Amiga was dead.
BeOS was cool, but denial and closed source is not a valid approach to surmounting huge technical hurdles. Remember, before Apple picked up NeXT, the approach Apple and Apple fanboys took was just that. You'd constantly see Apple fanboys saying things like "preemptive multi-tasking is slower than cooperative, it's completely useless." Microsoft always took almost the same approach publicly: preemptive multitasking, color, video, windowing, graphics acceleration, etc. were all useless fluff. But behind the scenes MS was actually working on them. And then they'd put them on the market and claim to have invented them. During that time Apple was, as far as anybody can tell, jerking off to its own marketing. Nearly a fatal case of denial.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls...
You know what's arcane, at least around here? Fucking dictionaries. Apparently.
Could somebody using one of these crooked ISPs check to see if they're rewriting referral links to sites like Amazon? I stayed at a hotel years ago which was stealing credits like this. It looke like Kazaa was doing this too. The reason I bring it up is that, if they're scummy enough to inline ads, they're scummy enough to try this. And if they are trying it, it would seem like an easier lawsuit to win, because it's very clearly theft.
Okay, assume that's true. Cancel the top one percent. Now you have a new top one percent. Cancel them. Now...
Pretty soon they'll have a lot of bandwidth freed up, and it'll be fair for everyone.
You have a good point, but as evidence that big corporations are invulnerable you cite... Radioshack?
t _figure_out_how
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11409391/
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/even_ceo_can
If you have something quick to say, a text message is much faster and more convenient. Texting is also particularly useful for bits of information you might need later.
OTOH, SMS is a really crappy technology. I think it's vastly overpriced even given how inefficient it is, but... wow. And the telcos have little incentive to fix it as long as people are willing to pay insane, outrageous prices per byte.
That said, lately I do find that recent versions of Firefox on Linux and OSX (haven't checked Windows) really are much more usable with multiple cores. The reason is that when Firefox grabs all of one core, you still get decent performance from the rest of your system. I wonder if they're planning on making Firefox multithreaded to remove this safety barrier :). Usually when something is grabbing all the CPU, the culprit is Flash. Flash support on Linux is still poor. Usually I don't mind, because almost all Flash is a waste of time. I'm sure that others have pointed out that Flashblock and Adblock are almost necessities. Without them, FFox is... much like IE, actually.
I've also noticed another problem that I haven't had time to pin down yet. FFox on Ubuntu, even without Flash, seems to eventually slow to a crawl. The workaround is to close it out and restart-- thank goodness it can restore your tabs.
I think much of the recent degradation has to do with habitual defectors (advertisers and worse) working around Firefox's protections to do stuff with Javascript and Flash-- either by sneaking it by or making the site worthless without them. I really hate that, but fortunately there are alternatives to any such site.
Aaahhhh... that's the stuff.
Mammon.