A few years ago, I heard about the slaughter of nearly a million people in Rwanda over a few week period. I walked into a room where people were talking about the OJ Simpson trial, and brought it up. After a quick explaination of the details, and a few reactions of shock and disbelief, the people in the room slowly drifted back to discussing the OJ trial.
It is highly insightful to state that Slashdot continues to post information about a selective subset of information, and that a small group of themes appear repeatedly in its headlines. Unfortunately, pointing this out isn't going to change what people enjoy chattering about.
I would have to see the terms of the contract to be certain, but it looks like this is a case of a customer not knowing what he wants, and getting a confused mess as a result.
If you have to put work on a contract on hold for five days while the customer decides if they like the product, that five days can seem awfully long. I just saw at least three posts that say "That certainly is a shitty site". If it's that obviously garbage, why did it take AIM more than five days to figure it out? The answer is that they probably had no clue what they wanted or needed, and this was reflected in the requirements that they submitted to Razorfish.
Unlike medical or construction services, there is no clear cut "good" or "bad" for web design. There are a few serious faux pas', and some major no-no's, but nowhere in a web design is there a statement like "Rule 12: Don't make it ugly!". On the other hand, there could be a few minimum standards for usability. Things like "can you get to a full description of any product in four clicks or less?"
The user interface on the maintenance software is another issue entirely. Having been required to do specs that describe a user interface right down to the usability of the selected colors I have to suggest that, again, if they didn't get what they wanted at the end then they didn't know what they wanted at the beginning. The only way to do business with people that want to squander your time with indecision is to make them pay for you time or stop doing business with them. Guess which one Razorfish picked...
In the case listed in this article, you have to ask the question "does it do what the customer asked for in the contract." and "Could the contractor (Razorfish, in this case) logically have deduced the demands on the table from the requests on the contract". Another question that I would LOVE to toss into this is "how much interference did the customer present to providing the demanded capabilities."
Since MP3.com's problem is highly similar to that of the Usenet, why not create a Slashdot-like solution? Before any piece of music gets on to MP3.com (or a similar site), it has to be reviewed by a certain number of people, and SOMEONE has to actually like it. I suspect that this would cut the number of pieces out there by about 90%, and the rest is a matter of taste.
The original design of these things allowed for 30 foot strides(once you got going), and speeds that were considered too much of a liability for the company to sell. No gasoline, pistons, or even moving parts, just good old fasioned efficient engineering.
According to the web site it takes 30 days just to get out of orbit with this thruster. I don't think that, for short trips like the moon, that this is going to be useful.
This actually raises an interesting issue of moral obligation of the media. This Beta information doesn't really benefit the public in any way, but does seriously damage Adobe's competitiveness. Certainly he has the constitutional right to publish this, but is it reasonable to be that inconsiderate to the company without any notable benefit to anyone besides the publication itself?
This appears to be a variation on the Ion engine that was so effective in DeepSpace 1. No, you're not going to get much of a thrust off of it in any hour or so, but you're going to get more overall through the course of the trip because it's continual. Sorry, no Mach 2 rocket cars for this engine.
It would be much more realistic to compare performance between this and an Ion engine instead of a chemical rocket. Ion engines are a proven technology which is jets ionized Xenon instead of Hydrogen plasma. Xenon is safer to carry, but nearly impossible to collect en-route.
What I want to know is where they're getting the continual stream of power to generate the radio waves to create this plasma. This isn't trivial, and power generating and storage systems take up weight.
This article reminds me of a game that my friends and I used to play in highschool: match the actor to the X-man character for the movie that's been brewing since (at least) '84. All meaningless speculation with no real substance.
It is nice to say that two companies have complementary talents. This says nothing about their holdings, culture, and philosophy. What's this big reliance on geographical location? For instance:
Caldera & SuSE: Severely different philosophies about how money should be earned, otherwise SuSE would be a bigger money-maker. Caldera would absorb SuSE, rip the pieces the wanted out of it and ditch the rest, and all of SuSE's core talent would probably walk.
LinuxCare & O'Reilly: If O'Reilly wanted to go into the Technical Service industry, why LinuxCare? That would be a waste of a grand majority of their knowledge base. Better to hit someone like Teletech with a partnership. This sounds like "pick a big-name TechServ company, hey, this one looks good..."
Hooking both SCO and Compaq up with a Linux company makes very little sense since both of them have gone out of their way to come up with something pointedly different from the standard Unix. I can't imagine them creating a Linux that is that similar to (or compatible with) other's offerings.
I can't claim to be an expert on this mostly because I'm just guessing. Then again, so is Mr. Leibovitch.
Battlefield earth is an excellent movie in the "weird stuff to put on TV with the sound turned off" category. I've used that as a tactic at many fine parties to give people something to talk about without interrupting their ability to actually talk. The more disjointed the plotline, the better a movie is for that, and it takes advantage of the things that this movie does best: mediocre makeup jobs and cool explosions.
Just because the acting, scripting, plotline, and causality are worthless doesn't mean the movie has no value whatsoever. Just pull the thing entirely out of context by removing the sound, and you have great video wallpaper.
They tuck this little bit in at the end, even though it seems to me that it's the core of the ruling:
It is a standard legal practice to put "definitions of terms" at the end of any legal statement, just to prevent cluttering up the language of the statement itself.
Does that mean I have to run my Java apps within IE, or application providers have to include a VM with their package?
There is nowhere in the language of this that I've seen that prevents the two Microsoft entities from having a third party bundle their products together. They just can't develop them together with any more cohesion than any other company can bundle the products together.
Developer tools? I'm also ambivalent about this, for the opposite reason: I think compilers should be considered part of the OS, but I can see the danger in that arrangement.
IMHO as a professional developer, I'm really looking forward to Code Warrior and Borland getting the same insight to the OS's interface that VisualWhatever has gotten over the years.
Ok, so they have extremely fast connections to pass content through. How does this slow everyone else's access down? In fact, it theoretically cuts down on conjestion by taking some of the streaming bandwidth off of the Internet.
Here's another point: How much of the internet can they speed up? Is this just the connections to their subscribers? Also, I'm certain that this will decrease conjestion slowdowns, but they still have to pass the data through the last mile.
No, I don't see how this will allow them to SLOW DOWN other's connections, nor do I see a significant increase in the time it takes a customer to download the information. Just an increase in the availability of the information. Many thinks to Excite@Home, though, for getting them out of our way.
One of the many datasheets that I've always wanted to see is a rating of each of the voting issues identifying which corporations they benefit. I would really enjoy a cross-reference between that and each politicians' voting record and campaign funding to generate a "corporate lackey index".
The question I have is: What do you think needs to happen before this kind of thing can come into existance, and what other data-tools do you feel will be valuable and possible for the future citizens on the net.
Why? Because obscenity is an art form. Just like any other art form, it is often abused or done poorly, and often has to be adjusted for a target audience.
Those who went to the Southpark movie were expecting a great deal of obscenity, and would have been disappointed if they hadn't gotten it from every angle. The point of "Blame Canada" isn't to pummel the audience with obscenity - that was "Uncle Fucker"s job - it is to make fun of the general public's response to many problems. I trust Trey's ability to do that in a way that the Oscar audience can actually apreciate.
Sometimes I hate to admit it, but occasionally I prefer the censored version of some things. My favorite example of this is Insane Clown Posse's "Another Love Song". When God handed out tact, these guys went back for a second helping of obnoxious.
- Just because you can doesn't mean you should - Just because you can't doesn't mean you shouldn't
Although many scenarios have been presented for horrible results, none of them have been particularly realistic. Let me present a more realistic one:
These bacteria have been specifically genetically tailored to have a short lifespan. Lets say that genetic tailoring gets reversed in the wild by a couple of stray gamma rays. (they don't generally remove the genes, they just "switch them off")
Now we have a bacteria with a normal lifespan that feeds on petroleum and petroleum byproducts, feeding on an immense supply of food and multiplying at a normal logrithmic manner. It doesn't take much imagination to have a few of these little critters surviving to migrate to an area where they could start feeding on plastic bags and other things that get tossed onto our beaches.
It would be quite annoying to suddenly discover that a bacteria has been created that eats the plastic that we rely on to keep our food fresh, huh?
(This scenario provided to you by Larry Niven, actually, from the second Ringworld novel)
It is almost impossible for a chemical reaction to render a radioactive material inert. I say _almost_ because it IS impossible for a chemical reaction to actually cause an atom's nucleus to be converted to a more stable form (that would be a nuclear reaction), but it is possible for a chemical reaction to bind the unstable atoms with atoms of another material (say, lead) that will render it harmless.
Unfortunately, most of the materials that would do this are harmful to the poor little selves involved in this process, and it would take one heck of a tough bacteria to survive hanging out in a radioactive environment in the first place. (either that, or a continual supply of new bacteria)
I can just see them in the lab, mixing up the latest batch of plutonium, lead, and barley agar.
It would appear that this article prescribes a meta form of intelligent agent to the ills of information overload. The concept of preventing the distribution of technologies that allow people to check sports scores while sitting at stoplights sounds a little Orwellian to me.
I do have to admit that I would love to have the ability to mark events like the Star/Clinton trials and beanie babies for deletion from my conciousness map, just like spam filtering.
This article does, however, summon forth a vision of a world where news reporters purposely slant their stories so that they can fit them into the range of categories that are filtered by the fewest readers. Since all authors will be, in effect, globally syndicated, the competition for attention will be fierce.
I remember that the courts had a similar problem with infrared scanners. They illegalized infrared survailence because it was possible to watch people having sex. I wonder if that applies to pre-raid examinations of a premisis.
This reminds me of when the Police (the band, not the blueshirts) put out a song called "Ah Doo Doo Doo, Ah Da Da Da" specifically because they thought it would be funny to hear a bunch of the boss jocks try to say it and still sound cool. It will take a lot longer to get popular simply because a lot of alpha geeks out there wouldn't be caught dead talking about their code in terms of kibis & bits.
Another problem I have with this system is that it is still tied to the base10 numbering system, setting the markers around every three tens place. Admittedly, this is the way we think about them currently, but let's apply a little Sapir Whorf, eh?
Does anybody out there actually think that this would be a simpler programming consideration than multithreading? Theoretically it should be possible to pass a packet to a machine that states "do this processing with this data" and have it return results when it's done. A small server would dole out the packet to the next avaliable "Processing Request Protocol" machine available, possibly with a little flag requesting a minimum speed for the machine (don't want to send big tasks to small machines) Programming for this would have to take into account similar considerations as for multi-threading because the farmed out processes would lock down resources until they returned. The biggest consideration would be dynamically determined memory items, which would require a protocol call -- a WHOLE lot slower to process than merely dereferencing a pointer. I wouldn't suggest this for any language that doesn't already have extensions for thread-safe operation, but beyond that it should be just another library.
If SMS is like other Microsoft products, then there is no need to run a virus check for it. It would have the patented Microsoft trait of gobbling down your resources and bringing the system to its knees. of course, if you run too many other MS products there will be no telling which one is doing it at any one time...
So what if Jar Jar sounds Jamaican and happens to have dreadlock-like ears? So what if the flying junk dealer could be a southeast Asian carpet dealer if you closed your eyes? Hollywood has been casting cultural stereotypes for years. This doesn't make them racist, it just means they are exagerating reality a little. And with animated critters it just seems natural to exagerate reality a lot.
Besides, I get really tired of aliens with perfect English. Have you ever tried to invent an accent that doesn't sound like something from earth? I've worked on in a few time, and it almost always comes out sounding like some existing accent done poorly. No, I don't think that this is one of Lucas's failings. There's plenty else to criticize him about.
Like the fact that Jar Jar is a pathetic and non-sypathetic poor excuse for a marionette. I hate it when characters succeed BECAUSE of their faults.
The history of the linux and open source movement has been plagued by the gap between what we, the coders, want to produce and what the general public (PHB's in particular) actually wants to use. I suspect that the terms "hacker" and "cracker" is another example of this. Maybe we should give up the attempt to convince the overwhelming majority that their opinion is wrong and come up with a term to replace "hacker" for ourselves.
Personally I favor the term "digirati", derived from literati.
I agree with the premise that Windows is using its market share like bootstrap levitation to elevate its marketability, but I'm not certain that it can't exist in the middle ground.
Software evolution is like Darwinism at high speed. Any operating system must fill an empty or poorly filled nitch in order to get any kind of attention.
Linux came into existence filling the niche of the hotrod motorheads of the computer world. These guys wanted speed, reliability, and raw power, and would do all the tinkering that they had to in order to get it. Even to the point of building their hotrod from the ground up. Since that's its core attraction it will always be its greatest strength, and the members of the business world who find this valueable will be attracted by it.
Windows came into existence to cater to the basic commuters of the computer world. These guys want a identityless mechanism that will continue to function without continually having to learn the ideosyncracies of the latest repair of upgrade. Sure they have to change the oil, fill the gas tank, replace the wiper blades, and etc., but that's all become a matter of acceptable maintenance. Kinda like rebooting your desktop system once every three days of so, or reinstalling it once a year to clean out the registry.
On the other hand, Windows and Linux have mutually decided that they need to take over each other's market nitch, and are steadily rushing to provide what the other does better. They are currently involved in "convergent evolution," much like IE and Netscape three years ago. In perhaps three to five years there isn't likely to be a significant difference between the two, and most arguments will devolve into religious dogma.
And should the day occur, NT will run for a year without a crash, and Linux will sport intuitive device management and configuration. And Linux will still be free.
The primary reason I feel that I need encryption has nothing to do with drugs, terrorism, pornography or copyright violations. It is because I am involved in politics.
The various government agencies of the United States have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no real interest in the will of the people as long as their own interests are being served, and I spend a lot of my time trying to compensate for this. No one in their right mind would believe that a competing party member would pass up the opportunity to read the campaign plans passed in my e-mails.
Key escrow? Why for God's sake would I want to hand the keys to my encryption to the very people who I am attempting to keep in the dark? The government wants you to believe that working against the people in power is working against the best interests of the general population, but this isn't always the case.
The real danger to encryption isn't the apparently inexhorable advance of computer speed, it is in a very sudden shift to a different form of technology. I heard about optical computers that will increase computing speed by a factor of 1000. Big deal - that's ten bits of encryption. I have plenty to spare.
It is always possible that some wise guy mathematician is going to suddenly figure out the trap door that makes encryption meaningless. Because of this, I only use encryption to hide thing that I don't want people to know right now. Who cares what my policial plans were for last year's campaign?
Another real danger is that someone will just completely forgo the current concept that it takes transisters to crack code. Does anybody here remember that we have the ability to sequence DNA? I wouldn't put it past the NSA to whip up 85 gallon barrels of DNA coded with a key, add a few buckets of solutions and have 6.022x10^23 computations done in an afternoon. I'm certain that there are plenty of eggheads who can tell me why this would be impossible - there always are - but this is just one possibility.
Of course, even THAT is only 77 more bits of encryption, right?
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago, I heard about the slaughter of nearly a million people in Rwanda over a few week period. I walked into a room where people were talking about the OJ Simpson trial, and brought it up. After a quick explaination of the details, and a few reactions of shock and disbelief, the people in the room slowly drifted back to discussing the OJ trial.
It is highly insightful to state that Slashdot continues to post information about a selective subset of information, and that a small group of themes appear repeatedly in its headlines. Unfortunately, pointing this out isn't going to change what people enjoy chattering about.
Mythological Beast
I would have to see the terms of the contract to be certain, but it looks like this is a case of a customer not knowing what he wants, and getting a confused mess as a result.
If you have to put work on a contract on hold for five days while the customer decides if they like the product, that five days can seem awfully long. I just saw at least three posts that say "That certainly is a shitty site". If it's that obviously garbage, why did it take AIM more than five days to figure it out? The answer is that they probably had no clue what they wanted or needed, and this was reflected in the requirements that they submitted to Razorfish.
Unlike medical or construction services, there is no clear cut "good" or "bad" for web design. There are a few serious faux pas', and some major no-no's, but nowhere in a web design is there a statement like "Rule 12: Don't make it ugly!". On the other hand, there could be a few minimum standards for usability. Things like "can you get to a full description of any product in four clicks or less?"
The user interface on the maintenance software is another issue entirely. Having been required to do specs that describe a user interface right down to the usability of the selected colors I have to suggest that, again, if they didn't get what they wanted at the end then they didn't know what they wanted at the beginning. The only way to do business with people that want to squander your time with indecision is to make them pay for you time or stop doing business with them. Guess which one Razorfish picked...
In the case listed in this article, you have to ask the question "does it do what the customer asked for in the contract." and "Could the contractor (Razorfish, in this case) logically have deduced the demands on the table from the requests on the contract". Another question that I would LOVE to toss into this is "how much interference did the customer present to providing the demanded capabilities."
Mythological Beast
Since MP3.com's problem is highly similar to that of the Usenet, why not create a Slashdot-like solution? Before any piece of music gets on to MP3.com (or a similar site), it has to be reviewed by a certain number of people, and SOMEONE has to actually like it. I suspect that this would cut the number of pieces out there by about 90%, and the rest is a matter of taste.
Mythological Beast
Have you seen Exerlopers?
The original design of these things allowed for 30 foot strides(once you got going), and speeds that were considered too much of a liability for the company to sell. No gasoline, pistons, or even moving parts, just good old fasioned efficient engineering.
Mythological Beast
According to the web site it takes 30 days just to get out of orbit with this thruster. I don't think that, for short trips like the moon, that this is going to be useful.
This actually raises an interesting issue of moral obligation of the media. This Beta information doesn't really benefit the public in any way, but does seriously damage Adobe's competitiveness.
Certainly he has the constitutional right to publish this, but is it reasonable to be that inconsiderate to the company without any notable benefit to anyone besides the publication itself?
This appears to be a variation on the Ion engine that was so effective in DeepSpace 1. No, you're not going to get much of a thrust off of it in any hour or so, but you're going to get more overall through the course of the trip because it's continual. Sorry, no Mach 2 rocket cars for this engine.
It would be much more realistic to compare performance between this and an Ion engine instead of a chemical rocket. Ion engines are a proven technology which is jets ionized Xenon instead of Hydrogen plasma. Xenon is safer to carry, but nearly impossible to collect en-route.
What I want to know is where they're getting the continual stream of power to generate the radio waves to create this plasma. This isn't trivial, and power generating and storage systems take up weight.
Mythological Beast
This article reminds me of a game that my friends and I used to play in highschool: match the actor to the X-man character for the movie that's been brewing since (at least) '84. All meaningless speculation with no real substance.
It is nice to say that two companies have complementary talents. This says nothing about their holdings, culture, and philosophy. What's this big reliance on geographical location? For instance:
Caldera & SuSE: Severely different philosophies about how money should be earned, otherwise SuSE would be a bigger money-maker. Caldera would absorb SuSE, rip the pieces the wanted out of it and ditch the rest, and all of SuSE's core talent would probably walk.
LinuxCare & O'Reilly: If O'Reilly wanted to go into the Technical Service industry, why LinuxCare? That would be a waste of a grand majority of their knowledge base. Better to hit someone like Teletech with a partnership. This sounds like "pick a big-name TechServ company, hey, this one looks good..."
Hooking both SCO and Compaq up with a Linux company makes very little sense since both of them have gone out of their way to come up with something pointedly different from the standard Unix. I can't imagine them creating a Linux that is that similar to (or compatible with) other's offerings.
I can't claim to be an expert on this mostly because I'm just guessing. Then again, so is Mr. Leibovitch.
Mythological Beast
Battlefield earth is an excellent movie in the "weird stuff to put on TV with the sound turned off" category. I've used that as a tactic at many fine parties to give people something to talk about without interrupting their ability to actually talk. The more disjointed the plotline, the better a movie is for that, and it takes advantage of the things that this movie does best: mediocre makeup jobs and cool explosions.
Just because the acting, scripting, plotline, and causality are worthless doesn't mean the movie has no value whatsoever. Just pull the thing entirely out of context by removing the sound, and you have great video wallpaper.
Mythological Beast
They tuck this little bit in at the end, even though it seems to me that it's the core of the ruling:
It is a standard legal practice to put "definitions of terms" at the end of any legal statement, just to prevent cluttering up the language of the statement itself.
Does that mean I have to run my Java apps within IE, or application providers have to include a VM with their package?
There is nowhere in the language of this that I've seen that prevents the two Microsoft entities from having a third party bundle their products together. They just can't develop them together with any more cohesion than any other company can bundle the products together.
Developer tools? I'm also ambivalent about this, for the opposite reason: I think compilers should be considered part of the OS, but I can see the danger in that arrangement.
IMHO as a professional developer, I'm really looking forward to Code Warrior and Borland getting the same insight to the OS's interface that VisualWhatever has gotten over the years.
Mythological Beast
Ok, so they have extremely fast connections to pass content through. How does this slow everyone else's access down? In fact, it theoretically cuts down on conjestion by taking some of the streaming bandwidth off of the Internet.
Here's another point: How much of the internet can they speed up? Is this just the connections to their subscribers? Also, I'm certain that this will decrease conjestion slowdowns, but they still have to pass the data through the last mile.
No, I don't see how this will allow them to SLOW DOWN other's connections, nor do I see a significant increase in the time it takes a customer to download the information. Just an increase in the availability of the information. Many thinks to Excite@Home, though, for getting them out of our way.
Mythological Beast
One of the many datasheets that I've always wanted to see is a rating of each of the voting issues identifying which corporations they benefit. I would really enjoy a cross-reference between that and each politicians' voting record and campaign funding to generate a "corporate lackey index".
The question I have is: What do you think needs to happen before this kind of thing can come into existance, and what other data-tools do you feel will be valuable and possible for the future citizens on the net.
Mythological Beast
As a rule, I usually agree with self-censorship.
Why? Because obscenity is an art form. Just like any other art form, it is often abused or done poorly, and often has to be adjusted for a target audience.
Those who went to the Southpark movie were expecting a great deal of obscenity, and would have been disappointed if they hadn't gotten it from every angle. The point of "Blame Canada" isn't to pummel the audience with obscenity - that was "Uncle Fucker"s job - it is to make fun of the general public's response to many problems. I trust Trey's ability to do that in a way that the Oscar audience can actually apreciate.
Sometimes I hate to admit it, but occasionally I prefer the censored version of some things. My favorite example of this is Insane Clown Posse's "Another Love Song". When God handed out tact, these guys went back for a second helping of obnoxious.
- Just because you can doesn't mean you should
- Just because you can't doesn't mean you shouldn't
Although many scenarios have been presented for horrible results, none of them have been particularly realistic. Let me present a more realistic one:
These bacteria have been specifically genetically tailored to have a short lifespan. Lets say that genetic tailoring gets reversed in the wild by a couple of stray gamma rays. (they don't generally remove the genes, they just "switch them off")
Now we have a bacteria with a normal lifespan that feeds on petroleum and petroleum byproducts, feeding on an immense supply of food and multiplying at a normal logrithmic manner. It doesn't take much imagination to have a few of these little critters surviving to migrate to an area where they could start feeding on plastic bags and other things that get tossed onto our beaches.
It would be quite annoying to suddenly discover that a bacteria has been created that eats the plastic that we rely on to keep our food fresh, huh?
(This scenario provided to you by Larry Niven, actually, from the second Ringworld novel)
RR
It is almost impossible for a chemical reaction to render a radioactive material inert. I say _almost_ because it IS impossible for a chemical reaction to actually cause an atom's nucleus to be converted to a more stable form (that would be a nuclear reaction), but it is possible for a chemical reaction to bind the unstable atoms with atoms of another material (say, lead) that will render it harmless.
Unfortunately, most of the materials that would do this are harmful to the poor little selves involved in this process, and it would take one heck of a tough bacteria to survive hanging out in a radioactive environment in the first place. (either that, or a continual supply of new bacteria)
I can just see them in the lab, mixing up the latest batch of plutonium, lead, and barley agar.
It would appear that this article prescribes a meta form of intelligent agent to the ills of information overload. The concept of preventing the distribution of technologies that allow people to check sports scores while sitting at stoplights sounds a little Orwellian to me.
I do have to admit that I would love to have the ability to mark events like the Star/Clinton trials and beanie babies for deletion from my conciousness map, just like spam filtering.
This article does, however, summon forth a vision of a world where news reporters purposely slant their stories so that they can fit them into the range of categories that are filtered by the fewest readers. Since all authors will be, in effect, globally syndicated, the competition for attention will be fierce.
I remember that the courts had a similar problem with infrared scanners. They illegalized infrared survailence because it was possible to watch people having sex. I wonder if that applies to pre-raid examinations of a premisis.
This reminds me of when the Police (the band, not the blueshirts) put out a song called "Ah Doo Doo Doo, Ah Da Da Da" specifically because they thought it would be funny to hear a bunch of the boss jocks try to say it and still sound cool. It will take a lot longer to get popular simply because a lot of alpha geeks out there wouldn't be caught dead talking about their code in terms of kibis & bits.
Another problem I have with this system is that it is still tied to the base10 numbering system, setting the markers around every three tens place. Admittedly, this is the way we think about them currently, but let's apply a little Sapir Whorf, eh?
Does anybody out there actually think that this would be a simpler programming consideration than multithreading? Theoretically it should be possible to pass a packet to a machine that states "do this processing with this data" and have it return results when it's done. A small server would dole out the packet to the next avaliable "Processing Request Protocol" machine available, possibly with a little flag requesting a minimum speed for the machine (don't want to send big tasks to small machines) Programming for this would have to take into account similar considerations as for multi-threading because the farmed out processes would lock down resources until they returned. The biggest consideration would be dynamically determined memory items, which would require a protocol call -- a WHOLE lot slower to process than merely dereferencing a pointer. I wouldn't suggest this for any language that doesn't already have extensions for thread-safe operation, but beyond that it should be just another library.
If SMS is like other Microsoft products, then there is no need to run a virus check for it. It would have the patented Microsoft trait of gobbling down your resources and bringing the system to its knees. of course, if you run too many other MS products there will be no telling which one is doing it at any one time...
So what if Jar Jar sounds Jamaican and happens to have dreadlock-like ears? So what if the flying junk dealer could be a southeast Asian carpet dealer if you closed your eyes? Hollywood has been casting cultural stereotypes for years. This doesn't make them racist, it just means they are exagerating reality a little. And with animated critters it just seems natural to exagerate reality a lot.
Besides, I get really tired of aliens with perfect English. Have you ever tried to invent an accent that doesn't sound like something from earth? I've worked on in a few time, and it almost always comes out sounding like some existing accent done poorly. No, I don't think that this is one of Lucas's failings. There's plenty else to criticize him about.
Like the fact that Jar Jar is a pathetic and non-sypathetic poor excuse for a marionette. I hate it when characters succeed BECAUSE of their faults.
The history of the linux and open source movement has been plagued by the gap between what we, the coders, want to produce and what the general public (PHB's in particular) actually wants to use. I suspect that the terms "hacker" and "cracker" is another example of this. Maybe we should give up the attempt to convince the overwhelming majority that their opinion is wrong and come up with a term to replace "hacker" for ourselves.
Personally I favor the term "digirati", derived from literati.
I agree with the premise that Windows is using its market share like bootstrap levitation to elevate its marketability, but I'm not certain that it can't exist in the middle ground.
Software evolution is like Darwinism at high speed. Any operating system must fill an empty or poorly filled nitch in order to get any kind of attention.
Linux came into existence filling the niche of the hotrod motorheads of the computer world. These guys wanted speed, reliability, and raw power, and would do all the tinkering that they had to in order to get it. Even to the point of building their hotrod from the ground up. Since that's its core attraction it will always be its greatest strength, and the members of the business world who find this valueable will be attracted by it.
Windows came into existence to cater to the basic commuters of the computer world. These guys want a identityless mechanism that will continue to function without continually having to learn the ideosyncracies of the latest repair of upgrade. Sure they have to change the oil, fill the gas tank, replace the wiper blades, and etc., but that's all become a matter of acceptable maintenance. Kinda like rebooting your desktop system once every three days of so, or reinstalling it once a year to clean out the registry.
On the other hand, Windows and Linux have mutually decided that they need to take over each other's market nitch, and are steadily rushing to provide what the other does better. They are currently involved in "convergent evolution," much like IE and Netscape three years ago. In perhaps three to five years there isn't likely to be a significant difference between the two, and most arguments will devolve into religious dogma.
And should the day occur, NT will run for a year without a crash, and Linux will sport intuitive device management and configuration. And Linux will still be free.
The primary reason I feel that I need encryption has nothing to do with drugs, terrorism, pornography or copyright violations. It is because I am involved in politics.
The various government agencies of the United States have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no real interest in the will of the people as long as their own interests are being served, and I spend a lot of my time trying to compensate for this. No one in their right mind would believe that a competing party member would pass up the opportunity to read the campaign plans passed in my e-mails.
Key escrow? Why for God's sake would I want to hand the keys to my encryption to the very people who I am attempting to keep in the dark? The government wants you to believe that working against the people in power is working against the best interests of the general population, but this isn't always the case.
The real danger to encryption isn't the apparently inexhorable advance of computer speed, it is in a very sudden shift to a different form of technology. I heard about optical computers that will increase computing speed by a factor of 1000. Big deal - that's ten bits of encryption. I have plenty to spare.
It is always possible that some wise guy mathematician is going to suddenly figure out the trap door that makes encryption meaningless. Because of this, I only use encryption to hide thing that I don't want people to know right now. Who cares what my policial plans were for last year's campaign?
Another real danger is that someone will just completely forgo the current concept that it takes transisters to crack code. Does anybody here remember that we have the ability to sequence DNA? I wouldn't put it past the NSA to whip up 85 gallon barrels of DNA coded with a key, add a few buckets of solutions and have 6.022x10^23 computations done in an afternoon. I'm certain that there are plenty of eggheads who can tell me why this would be impossible - there always are - but this is just one possibility.
Of course, even THAT is only 77 more bits of encryption, right?