Probably no worse than getting lightning through
your power cables or your phone cables, which
also happend.
The fixed wireless
antennas are not very exposed and they should
be grounded separately. Ideally, there would
also be opto-coupling in there, but that may
not be the case.
First, Sprint didn't create the service, they bought it.
Second, it hasn't died; in fact, I'm using it right now.
It has worked flawlessly since I got it about a year ago.
Throughput and latency are both as good or better as any wired
connection I have ever had.
If you have one
predominant operating system, you have a very
fertile ground for viruses. Whether Schmidt
just refuses to acknowledge this or just
doesn't grasp it, it's a fact of life. Microsoft
itself is a major problem when it comes to
security because of their size and dominance,
and they would be the problem even
if they were much more careful about security
in their products than they actually are.
For this, as well as for many other reasons,
it is essential that one operating system and
one software company does not dominate the
industry. The cost of dealing with cross-platform
issues is the price we have to pay for a competitive
market and a resilient infrastructure.
Suggestions that our salvation lies in uniformity,
market dominance by one company,
and bigness are more reminiscent of the central
planning of the USSR than of what has made our
society so successful. It's kind of funny to
see that some of the most staunch conservatives
and defenders of Microsoft-style laissez-faire
economics seem
to be falling into the same trap that the communists
fell into.
Water is very special--there is no other solvent quite like it. For example, water is densest at 4C. As ice, it actually floats (which is why Europa and other satellites can have an ice cover over an ocean, rather than being frozen almost solid). Very cold water in interstellar space may actually be non-crystalline. Chemically, and as a solvent, it is also very versatile. And it happens to be liquid in a temperature range in which carbon-based chemistry works well. And, of course, water is abundant.
There really aren't a lot of other choices. It is unimaginable really to have life (at least any kind of life we could interact with) in solid or gaseous form, so you need a solvent. Methane, carbon dioxide, helium, and hydrogen are abundant but nowhere near as versatile as water. Liquid ammonia or some mix of solvents might work, but they don't look promising.
So, people have thought about this but not really come up with any plausible alternatives so far. Water and carbon seems to be the only reasonable cohice. But if someone can make a plausible argument, I think the scientific community is receptive.
First, the Palm input method is not particularly
efficient and requires a significant learning
curve. For a custom-designed symbology, Unistrokes
is a couple of times faster, and a tappable
keyboard is both simpler and somewhat faster.
I would expect that an on-screen keyboard on
this device is better than the Palm.
Now, as for Pocket PC, all the might of Microsoft
hasn't managed to displace Palm. For Microsoft
to throw money at porting bloated software to
handheld devices is not going to magically make
them usable. Microsoft never gets these things right;
at best, they have the good sense to buy or copy
what they need, a few years late.
You are right that this thing doesn't come with
the "right" set of applications, and it's also a bit
too expensive. But it's a great
platform for starting to develop those applications,
which is what I'm planning on using it for.
And as a portable web browser for reading the
news around the house, it's also pretty nifty.
that "autorun" is not enabled for this kind of removable device? It might be worth a try...
In any case, I think the point is that a malicious or careless user might use this to transport a virus onto the corporate network. But since Windows is so vulnerable to mail and web attacks anyway, that's probably the least concern to system managers.
I ask you again, markj02, what are you talking about, when you ask, "That's a typical mistake people make. While not talking specifically about OSX vs. UNIX, more is not necessarily better, and the total can be less than the sum of its parts."
Which part of "more is not necessarily better" is so hard to understand? Brevity and consistency can be virtues and values in themselves, which is why we have Cliff Notes and costly "executive summaries". Similarly, having all of BSD and all of an Apple UI and three different GUI APIs all in the same system doesn't necessarily make for a good operating system (although it admittedly seems to be a better pragmatic compromise than Windows).
Unless you run a completely locked-down environment with preinstalled, restricted applications, secure hardware, and almost no Internet access, you are kidding yourself if you think that you can prevent information from leaking out that way. In fact, why would users even bother with USB keychains? They'd much more easily and less suspiciously arrange for an outside web site to exploit a security hole in IE and have the site download information through a secure channel through the corporate firewall. Much less suspicious, easily deniable, and less hassle.
And if you lock down your environment so much, you may be able to have unskilled labor run the deep fryer, but you'll be keeping your knowledge workers from getting their job done. This kind of control freakish behavior is what drove people from mainframes onto PCs into the first place, and if you try to reinstitute mainframe-like controls on your PCs, your users will simply switch to other systems; you don't own them.
Microsoft is great at giving system managers the illusion of security and control. But that attests more to the gullibility of their customers than to any kind of sound security technology.
For only a couple of hundred dollars more, you can get a full laptop. And at "2.8-3.5h", the battery life isn't all that impressive. On the other hand, the Midori is simpler and lighter. Is that good enough? That remains to be seen, I suppose.
Windows is probably easier to get started with than Linux. But IT undergraduates will presumably go on to become IT professionals, and that means learning to use professional and often complex tools. If they can't deal with it, they should choose a different profession. By comparison, a point-and-shoot camera takes great pictures and is really easy to use, yet professional photographers use a wide variety of cameras, including much more complex and cumbersome professional systems.
The same is true for development environment. To a beginning C++ programmer, VC++ may be the best thing since sliced bread, and it may be popular with a bread-and-butter industry of Windows developers (as well as a few big companies), but a lot, if not most, real-world, heavy-duty development does not take place in that kind of environment.
In fact, I think it is unacceptable for any IT professional to know only one platform. UNIX IT professionals must be intimately familiar with Windows, and Windows IT professionals must be intimately familiar with UNIX. And both should have knowledge of other platforms and software development environments as well.
There's no point (IMHO) in being able to install or deinstall Photoshop from the CLI.
You bet that there is a point: if you have to set up half a dozen machines for different users, the last thing you want to do is to click through a Photoshop installation again and again and again.
Perhaps a set of basic building blocks to work from are good for your purposes, but it's hardly the only variety of software people need.
Good systems have simple paradigms that users can comprehend and conceptualize. That doesn't mean that the whole system is simple, it merely means that its complex functions are consistently built from simpler ones. That principle is as valid for GUI apps for end users as it is for command line apps for UNIX power users. Trouble seems to ensue when people mix the metaphors.
OSX is not "built upon the BSD bedrock". It's Mach with a BSD personality on top of it, which means that it is a somewhat different beast from BSD. As for functionality, since OSX comes with a lot of extra software and functionality, it may require a lot of extra software to administer.
Well, let's look at the original Macintosh, which really introduced this style. Apple took a simple operating system with DOS-like functionality (files, devices, etc.) and put a GUI on top of it that looked vaguely like what they had seen at Xerox. And the GUI even kind of represented correctly the objects that were important to the OS at the time; since the underlying OS was so simplistic, the GUI could afford to be simplistic as well.
Fast forward to 2001 and you have an underlying OS with sophisticated name spaces, networking, hypertext, and access to gigabytes of data. Icons representing devices and a handful of files don't cut it anymore, if they ever did.
This is, of course, also why trying to adopt the Apple GUI to UNIX machines has failed so miserably in the past. It wasn't that the Apple GUI was so super-sophisticated that nobody could copy it. Rather, UNIX has always been too complex for the Apple GUI to represent well.
So, where does that leave us? Windows, Gnome, and KDE are slavishly trying to copy the original Apple paradigm, putting file icons and link icons everywhere, leading to a complex mess. Yes, this needs to go. Trouble is, while there are a bunch of better ideas, the one thing that users hate more than a bad UI is a UI that's different from what they are used to. So, all the good ideas that are out there (and have been out there for a couple of decades) have a really hard time in the market. It's not better ideas that's needed, what's needed is better ideas that are also palatable to existing users. And that, nobody has come up with yet.
You don't need to run a "server". You plug the Linksys into the Ethernet jack from your broadband provider and it will probably configure itself via DHCP. You connect your PC to the Linksys firewall (directly or via the powerline interface) and tell it to configure via DHCP as well. It's no harder than if you get a new VCR.
If you don't like to "chase down video drivers", don't. Get a preconfigured machine with Windows and don't upgrade the hardware. Laptops are particularly easy in that regard (no temptation to upgrade, and the restore CD always works). If you want something even easier, get a Macintosh--they only come in one-size-fits-all (well, four sizes). And Linux has its own long-term stability--yes, you have to tinker, but what you need to know doesn't change very much over time.
I'm going to leave out Linux and Unix for simplicity and because with Mac OS X you get BSD 'for free' since it's built atop it.
That's a typical mistake people make. While not talking specifically about OSX vs. UNIX, more is not necessarily better, and the total can be less than the sum of its parts.
For example, widespread use of GUI software on an OS almost invariably means that important administrative functions become unavailable from the command line (are you sure you can do all software installations/system maintenance from the command line in OSX)? The extra stuff means additional potential for security holes, additional documentation, additional learning curve, additional hardware requirements.
Microsoft is making the same mistake with Windows and Office: whenever they don't have something that another system has, they just throw it into Windows or Office. That's great for people who buy software by checklists, but it doesn't make for a more functional or more usable system.
Good systems are designed coherently from the ground up, for specific needs, with a simple, powerful set of primitives. UNIX has strayed far from that ideal, but Windows and OSX seem to have strayed even further.
A group of people that is very intelligent, hard-working, have children, and are incapable of deception. What's so "chilling" about that?
Humans have evolved elaborate mechanisms for sdeception, pretense, and manipulating each other. Those probably served some evolutionary purpose. Now these seem to be impaired in people with Asperger's syndrome. But, so what? Fur and the prehensile tail served their purposes in our ancestors, but we eventually discarded them.
Maybe, rather than a disease, Asperger's syndrome is simply one reasonable possibility for the evolution of humanity. Maybe Earth will actually become Vulcan. Time will tell.
Slashdot Mirror
The fixed wireless antennas are not very exposed and they should be grounded separately. Ideally, there would also be opto-coupling in there, but that may not be the case.
First, Sprint didn't create the service, they bought it. Second, it hasn't died; in fact, I'm using it right now. It has worked flawlessly since I got it about a year ago. Throughput and latency are both as good or better as any wired connection I have ever had.
For this, as well as for many other reasons, it is essential that one operating system and one software company does not dominate the industry. The cost of dealing with cross-platform issues is the price we have to pay for a competitive market and a resilient infrastructure.
Suggestions that our salvation lies in uniformity, market dominance by one company, and bigness are more reminiscent of the central planning of the USSR than of what has made our society so successful. It's kind of funny to see that some of the most staunch conservatives and defenders of Microsoft-style laissez-faire economics seem to be falling into the same trap that the communists fell into.
There really aren't a lot of other choices. It is unimaginable really to have life (at least any kind of life we could interact with) in solid or gaseous form, so you need a solvent. Methane, carbon dioxide, helium, and hydrogen are abundant but nowhere near as versatile as water. Liquid ammonia or some mix of solvents might work, but they don't look promising.
So, people have thought about this but not really come up with any plausible alternatives so far. Water and carbon seems to be the only reasonable cohice. But if someone can make a plausible argument, I think the scientific community is receptive.
Now, as for Pocket PC, all the might of Microsoft hasn't managed to displace Palm. For Microsoft to throw money at porting bloated software to handheld devices is not going to magically make them usable. Microsoft never gets these things right; at best, they have the good sense to buy or copy what they need, a few years late.
You are right that this thing doesn't come with the "right" set of applications, and it's also a bit too expensive. But it's a great platform for starting to develop those applications, which is what I'm planning on using it for. And as a portable web browser for reading the news around the house, it's also pretty nifty.
In any case, I think the point is that a malicious or careless user might use this to transport a virus onto the corporate network. But since Windows is so vulnerable to mail and web attacks anyway, that's probably the least concern to system managers.
Which part of "more is not necessarily better" is so hard to understand? Brevity and consistency can be virtues and values in themselves, which is why we have Cliff Notes and costly "executive summaries". Similarly, having all of BSD and all of an Apple UI and three different GUI APIs all in the same system doesn't necessarily make for a good operating system (although it admittedly seems to be a better pragmatic compromise than Windows).
And if you lock down your environment so much, you may be able to have unskilled labor run the deep fryer, but you'll be keeping your knowledge workers from getting their job done. This kind of control freakish behavior is what drove people from mainframes onto PCs into the first place, and if you try to reinstitute mainframe-like controls on your PCs, your users will simply switch to other systems; you don't own them.
Microsoft is great at giving system managers the illusion of security and control. But that attests more to the gullibility of their customers than to any kind of sound security technology.
For only a couple of hundred dollars more, you can get a full laptop. And at "2.8-3.5h", the battery life isn't all that impressive. On the other hand, the Midori is simpler and lighter. Is that good enough? That remains to be seen, I suppose.
The same is true for development environment. To a beginning C++ programmer, VC++ may be the best thing since sliced bread, and it may be popular with a bread-and-butter industry of Windows developers (as well as a few big companies), but a lot, if not most, real-world, heavy-duty development does not take place in that kind of environment.
In fact, I think it is unacceptable for any IT professional to know only one platform. UNIX IT professionals must be intimately familiar with Windows, and Windows IT professionals must be intimately familiar with UNIX. And both should have knowledge of other platforms and software development environments as well.
You bet that there is a point: if you have to set up half a dozen machines for different users, the last thing you want to do is to click through a Photoshop installation again and again and again.
Perhaps a set of basic building blocks to work from are good for your purposes, but it's hardly the only variety of software people need.
Good systems have simple paradigms that users can comprehend and conceptualize. That doesn't mean that the whole system is simple, it merely means that its complex functions are consistently built from simpler ones. That principle is as valid for GUI apps for end users as it is for command line apps for UNIX power users. Trouble seems to ensue when people mix the metaphors.
OSX is not "built upon the BSD bedrock". It's Mach with a BSD personality on top of it, which means that it is a somewhat different beast from BSD. As for functionality, since OSX comes with a lot of extra software and functionality, it may require a lot of extra software to administer.
Fast forward to 2001 and you have an underlying OS with sophisticated name spaces, networking, hypertext, and access to gigabytes of data. Icons representing devices and a handful of files don't cut it anymore, if they ever did.
This is, of course, also why trying to adopt the Apple GUI to UNIX machines has failed so miserably in the past. It wasn't that the Apple GUI was so super-sophisticated that nobody could copy it. Rather, UNIX has always been too complex for the Apple GUI to represent well.
So, where does that leave us? Windows, Gnome, and KDE are slavishly trying to copy the original Apple paradigm, putting file icons and link icons everywhere, leading to a complex mess. Yes, this needs to go. Trouble is, while there are a bunch of better ideas, the one thing that users hate more than a bad UI is a UI that's different from what they are used to. So, all the good ideas that are out there (and have been out there for a couple of decades) have a really hard time in the market. It's not better ideas that's needed, what's needed is better ideas that are also palatable to existing users. And that, nobody has come up with yet.
If you don't like to "chase down video drivers", don't. Get a preconfigured machine with Windows and don't upgrade the hardware. Laptops are particularly easy in that regard (no temptation to upgrade, and the restore CD always works). If you want something even easier, get a Macintosh--they only come in one-size-fits-all (well, four sizes). And Linux has its own long-term stability--yes, you have to tinker, but what you need to know doesn't change very much over time.
That's a typical mistake people make. While not talking specifically about OSX vs. UNIX, more is not necessarily better, and the total can be less than the sum of its parts.
For example, widespread use of GUI software on an OS almost invariably means that important administrative functions become unavailable from the command line (are you sure you can do all software installations/system maintenance from the command line in OSX)? The extra stuff means additional potential for security holes, additional documentation, additional learning curve, additional hardware requirements.
Microsoft is making the same mistake with Windows and Office: whenever they don't have something that another system has, they just throw it into Windows or Office. That's great for people who buy software by checklists, but it doesn't make for a more functional or more usable system.
Good systems are designed coherently from the ground up, for specific needs, with a simple, powerful set of primitives. UNIX has strayed far from that ideal, but Windows and OSX seem to have strayed even further.
Humans have evolved elaborate mechanisms for sdeception, pretense, and manipulating each other. Those probably served some evolutionary purpose. Now these seem to be impaired in people with Asperger's syndrome. But, so what? Fur and the prehensile tail served their purposes in our ancestors, but we eventually discarded them.
Maybe, rather than a disease, Asperger's syndrome is simply one reasonable possibility for the evolution of humanity. Maybe Earth will actually become Vulcan. Time will tell.