I think NASA would LOVE at this point to find life, or some evidence of earlier life on Mars (or anywhere for that matter) to spur people's imaginations and help fund future activities. I've argued for months with a friend of mine who is a former worker on the Apollo program. His thinking is that we need to get on with interstellar travel in some form to eventually allow mankind to escape from Earth. Going to the moon, or Mars, establishing permanent bases on those are just baby steps as compared with what we would need to visit even the closest star.
I get so tired of hearing people whine that we should be feeding the starving people on Earth before traveling to other planets. Some things are not simple economic trade-offs. A family might have to choose between buying a new TV or a new heater for the house, but they don't choose between buying a new heater and voting, reading a book or countless other activities that might benefit them. We HAVE the ability to feed everyone, educate everyone right now, with or without an active space program. Space research as well as other "optional" scientific activities spins off many benefits to all of us.
However, I don't expect us to find life elsewhere in our solar system, and I'm not too optimistic that mankind will ever develop interstellar travel. I'd rather just look at space travel (such as it is) as just another way to understand the universe we are in. Learning about the geology of Mars may help us understand the early geology of Earth. That knowledge may help us understand the nature of things such as "global warming" or how, in general, our presence on Earth can affect, for better or worse out climate. We can mine aluminum from the moon, iron from Mars and all sorts of other things that might be usefull for thousands of years, even if we never discover life anywhere else. But one thing is for sure, if we abandon space exploration and any other scientific activity not related to agriculture and medicine there will be a whole lot of discoveries that we miss, and we will never know WHAT we missed by not making them.
Our high tech science fiction movie craze may have raised our expectations so high that the reality of what we can actually do will disappoint everyone. Hopefully this will not be the case though.
Wow, while I was typing this Slashdot went down. Totally. Not sure I've ever seen that happen. Has someone Slashdotted Slashdot?
"Having principles make you feel dirty sometimes, as when you are forced into a pragmatic decision such as getting a mac because you don't have enough ability to get Linux/BSD/WhateverFreeOS running well, for example."
I wouldn't feel guilty at all. They fault lies partially in the still imperfect installation process for most Linux distros. I've tried many combinations of hardware and software and, while I usually get a successful install, it is often with compromises, no sound, no modem support,etc. Only gradually have I learned to overcome these limitations for a particular piece of hardware. I'm running Debian Stable on this laptop now and the only thing that doesn't work is the DVD player. I know what I need to do to fix that, but have not wanted to take the trouble. Just to see what would happen I installed Lindows on it for a while and it detected everything, including the DVD player. I was impressed, although I switched back to Debian due to problems with the Lindows apt-get facility.
Are the people at Microsoft THAT much smarter than the Linux developers in terms of hardware detection? No. Quite the contrary. After NT 4, Microsoft stopped doing nearly so much pre-testing with various hardware and have since relied on the "Built for Windows" certification process to get hardware makers to do all the work. PC systems are litterally designed to run the current version of Windows, period. Linux on the other hand HAS to do hardware detection and it has slowly gotten better and better at it.
This comes in handy when you have that odd, semi-broken PC that won't take a Windows install, or has Windows and suddenly stops working. In our labs we often took "broken" PCs and installed Linux on them to do diagnostics. The "brokenness" often involved no more than re-flashing a ROM or something, but the slight deviation put the system beyond Windows ability to cope.
I think the resilience of Linux will eventually cause it to be considered the most robust operating system ever, while Microsoft and Apple grow less and less able to deal with diversity. Think of all the bugs that got shaken out when Windows ran on half a dozen different hardware architectures (including the PowerPC) for a while. In the long run, systems suffer by being tailored to a specific hardware base.
One finall example of this: My iBook would not run OS X 10.1.x after x=2 (as I recall) and for that period of time I ran YellowDog Linux on it with no problems. Since then I tried 10.2 and it's running fine, but I've decided only to install security updates from now on and pass on Panther. During the period that I couldn't run OS X I read on the Apple forums of MANY people having the same problems as me. They were all being told by Apple that it was a hardware problem, getting motherboards, disk drives, memory sticks, and displays replaced left and right to no avail. It sure looks like to me that Apple has no ability to diagnose it's own software glitches, maybe they don't REALLY understand the BSD underpinnings completely. My guess is that many of these "hardware" fixes also involved fresh installs of the OS, fresh flashes or ROM and a bit of luck. Two months later after the user has restored all their applications and data the problem crops up again. I don't buy it.
I love my iBook, but it will probably be my last Apple until I see some evidence that they have their QA, for both hardware and software under control. This should be their strongest point by comparison to PCs and it is a shame to see them stumble so badly in this area.
Well, I won't run XP, and I wasn't making any comparisons with Linux. But Microsoft people are sensitive types, so it didn't surprise me to get jumped on. Talking with MS employees about Windows is like trying to tell a Fiat owner that they just maybe don't have the best car in the world.
Choice is a good thing. Long as MS doesn't try to legislate Windows I have no problems with them.
Well, I DO know something about optimizing large systems, even though I don't work at Microsoft. Judging by your photo, most of my work in that area was done when you were very very young.
In a character mode system you can put a prompt up for the user almost immediately. You don't actually have to be ready to process his input yet, just grab keystrokes. You finish initialization while the user is still thinking and typing. You don't need to initialize memory at all. Unless your code is buggy to begin with and you need zeros there for debugging, allocate space as needed and allow it to start out random. I know most modern systems don't do this, but it's been done.
GUI systems are of course a lot more involved. Can the part of the system that draws the screen and all the icons be isolated so as to get that up before loading all the common elements from Internet Explorer, Word, etc (and NO, they don't show up as separate entries on the task list!)? Yes, they probably could, but as those components get more and more bloated they each have their own initialization requirements.
I'm quite sure people at Microsoft don't sit around twiddling their thumbs and TRYING to make the system less efficient. They DO have a vested interest in making ordinary PCs less and less desirable each year so that the hardware upgrade cycle needs to continue. Every new version of Windows has a larger memory footprint and that has to do with putting more and more stuff on the critical path between turning the system on hand handling that first mouse movement.
I was doing my OWN benchmarking of these systems during the NT 3.5-4.0 timeframe and I DO know what I am talking about.
My recollection is that Windows boot times first started getting bad (WFW booted pretty fast comparatively) when publications like CNet were bending over backwards (or was it the other way) to show how much faster Office was than competing products. The benchmarking consisted of: (1) boot both systems, (2) start timers, (3) start application, (4) start benchmark series, (5) end application, (6) stop timers.
Lo, and behold, more and more initialization work for Office, and then IE, started showing up in the Windows boot sequence.
Merging applications into the OS is BAD DESIGN, but it won the poorly thought out benchmarks that many organizations used to select their "productivity" tools. Now Windows, and Windows users will pay the price. Serves them right.
Sure, leave your Windows machines running 24/7 to avoid the boot delay. Linux and OS X users have that option too, but for them it is truly an option, not something they NEED to do.
"I realize you're trying to be funny, but the sad reality is that whatever the solution is(if there is one), it will only work if there's enough mail clients and servers that apply it, and the matter of fact is that Microsoft holds the keys to a very large client base."
That sounds like a false premiss.
Current Baysian (sp?) filtering works just fine without a lot of users. In fact, now that so many mail programs are using this technique the spammers have adapted to it by including words in their messages to get through the filtering.
Furthermore, they are including large lists of words which will eventually cause your filtering mechanism to filter out legitimate mail. By the time MS has its filtering system ready the entire concept will have been used up IMHO.
I've had good luck with Mailblocks.com. No training needed. The only way spam gets through is if the spammer takes the time to visit a web page, squint at a graphic and type in a word. The few small time spammers that have done this in my case have then been explicitly blocked.
I predict MS will scrap all their anti spam work and start over before 2006. Maybe they will come up with something good. But everything being said by Bill Gates at this point is just marketing hype, not valid design concepts (for which he is not qualified).
I think I spotted several SCO IP addresses in there. Maybe the best thing to do is let RIAA know that SCO is using their servers as major music sharing hubs and at the same time convince SCO that RIAA has been running unlicensed copies of SCO Unix (what's it called this week?) for years. Let the clueless losers battle one another to death while the rest of us get on with our lives.
My guess is that they will end up looking a lot like Yahoo. I think Yahoo thinks that too, since they have already announced that they want to go head to head with Google's search technology. Yahoo surely hopes that by the time Google starts registering users they will be able to convince their existing user base that there is no need to register at Google too.
I doubt it will be required to register at Google to continue to use their search. You can do a lot of things with Yahoo without setting up an ID there, it's just that you can't do anything that requires it to remember your settings, preferences, etc.
"... then were will we escape too? A video game inside one of these virtual communities? And if these virtual worlds become too restrictive, they won't be fun anymore and who will be paying to play them then?"
Yes. I think the future of these online systems is to become so general purpose that you do indeed have activities embedded in them. While there is as yet no standard for immersive 3D-VR I think in the long run being in such an environment should be akin to "browsing the web", that is, not a specific activity at all but just a "mode" of travel.
Second Life, for example started out with a rather complex mechanism for scoring points and turning those points into virtual cash. That economy quickly got so complex and lopsided that I don't think anyone knew how to correct the balance. Fortunately a major simplification of the system has made the accumulation of virtual dollars less important, which means you can still "play monopoly" if you choose, but opting out doesn't have any dire consequences.
If you read "Snow Crash" you will remember that "going online" (I think they called it "goggling-in") was simply the only way to use the network. If you needed to send or receive written text you simply did that on virtual I/O devices. I see 3D-VR eventually evolving away from these special purpose shoot-em-ups and into something much more generic, with shooot-em-ups, chess, cards, socializing all as coexisting activities in that space.
Based on what I've seen of this program it's going to result in a bunch of soldiers who obsess about clothing, fabrics, and their hair style.
Of course if you could get the worlds terrorists to start using online games instead of actually exploding their body parts all over the place it might be a handy thing.
I'm afraid this is tax money down the drain, helped along by someone with the right contacts. We'll see.
if there are any fans in my iBook I have yet to hear them. I think I paid about $1400 for it too (that might be before the memory upgrade though).
My other laptop, a Compaq, that has an external fan gets noisy running Windows. In Linux the fan is always off, unless I run something that loops for a long while like Setiathome.
Seems like they should easily be able to make noisless laptops these days by simply backing off the clock speeds a bit. They would still perform perfectly adequately. Batteries would probably last longer too.
The idea that everyone needs to have the absolutely fastest clock speed in the universe is over except for special case use and gamers. hardware companies seem to be lothe to figure it out though.
"It's nobody's business where I am or what I am doing at any particular time, especially in public."
Yeah, I agree!
Just because I go to work for someone doesn't mean they have the right to know where I am or what I'm doing. It's bad enough that I have to give them my address for them to mail my check to. Now they want to track me for 8 hours a day too?! Give them an inch and they'll take a mile every time! I bet this is more the work of that Ashcroft guy. I bet Howard Dean has heard some rumors about this. You just wait and see!
KDE works fine for me under Debian Stable. I did have some problems with KDE tasks going into infinite loops, but swithing out KDM and using GDM instead seems to have cleared that up. Been running several machines that way for months.
Yeah I agree with parent. I'm glad they took lots of nice high resolution photos now, and even gathered some other data on temperatures, spectroscopy etc. rather than doing the risky business sooner. They in fact explained this at one of the press conferences. Having gotten past the riskiest part of the mission (the landing) they want to take advantage of that achievement while they can rather than proceeding with other risky maneuvers first. From here on out, every move, every pyro firing, and so on will potentially lead to dead air on their communications link.
If I were them I wouldn't want to take any more risks than necessary until after the second lander is safely down, and of course there is a significant chance that it will vanish and never be heard from just like the Beagle2. With all the work that went into this thing they have every right to be cautious.
With Windows shareware I remember trying dozens of packages before finding one that was worth keeping, and I considered myself lucky if I didn't screw up my system in the process.
In fact with reference to the post I originally responded to I installed the Hercules (an IBM Mainframe emulator) on my Linux system using one command "apt-get" and editing a couple of configurations files. One of the people I showed it too was really hot to get it working for himself, but he insisted on working with the Windows version. Two weeks later he had it limping along, but still with "issues". Plus it made his Windows system fairly useless for any other activity.
I'd love to get my hands on a good APL for Linux (with font support). I've dabbled with the Hercules running a VM/370 system. Just like the good old days.
My favorite trick is to set up Hercules, open up a port on my router and get a friend to TN370 into my IP address. When they see the mainframe logo pop up you tell them you picked up an old 370 and have it running in your basement off the dryer outlet. (OK, I have gullible friends).
One thing I've found is that (excluding games) there is a lot MORE software available for Linux than for Windows. It always puzzles me to see someone saying the opposite.
IBM will have little trouble switching to Linux. I have some friends there and they are on a short leash when it comes to tinkering with their IBM supplied laptops. They are consultants, so don't have an IBM desk or phone. Do all their reporting, timekeeping, intellectual capital tracking, etc. on these PCs using a wide variety of cobbled together applications MOST of which are server oriented, in many cases still mainframe oriented. The Windows systems often cause lock-ups, data loss, etc. My guess is it will be more web oriented now and the last thing they need is to have to deal with 17 different patch levels of IE running around out there.
No doubt this is the start of a big trend (in the US anyway).
Yeah, I sorta went thought that too, but then XM and CNET split up almost a year ago and they still to this day claim channel 130 as a tech station (I don't think 24 hours a day of David Lawrence qualifies). As for music, I noticed if I kept the same (electronica for example) station on for more than a few hours I had soon heard everything and I suspect it was just all being played in a loop.
Seems like the best thing is that when I'm in a fixed location to just stream audio from the Internet (as a way to hear music I don't already own), or make my own "mixes" using iTunes (or a Linux equivalent). On the road, I put up with local news, which is a good thing to do from time to time anyway, so it's not time wasted.
No doubt XM is great for long car trips. If I were doing more of that I would not be canceling my account about now.
This technology might be a good way for local stations to get a leg up on the competition for listeners like me who don't want to pay more for their commute time radio. I'd listen to it if I already had the right tuner.
(And of course if you didn't have to move to Iowa to pick up that station).
"Yeah, in fact I *do* listen to NPR. And the other local university stations, and sometimes the Pacifica station (good politics, dreadful on-air people (if, uh, uh, you know, uh, what I, uh, mean.))"
I've listened to Pacifica a few times in the past too and that sounds familiar.
Did, uh, you ever, uh, think that, uh, there, like, maybe is some, uh, correlation, like, between those, uh, politics, and uh, the way they, like uh, speak?
I sorta, like, do.
Just like the difference in quality of posts from people who think that Microsoft invented computers from those old enough to know better.
"However, I was a little dissapointed by the price of the new iPod mini. At $250 (just $50 less than the (now) 15Gb iPod) I can't really see how it's worth it. I'll just pay another $50 and get an iPod that can hold my entire music library. Not sure what they were thinking with that price."
I think you might have answered your own question. I've seen this over and over with high margin items, including PCs when the prices first started to drop on them. There is probably a marketing buzzword for it, but I don't know the word, just the technique.
When price pressures are slowing down your sales volume you just introduce something, anything at the lower price point to get people back in the stores or web pages. Then you offer your primary product at the old price point and rely on psychology to do its thing: "Well I drove all the way over here to see that new iPod, I might as well spend and extra $50 and get the better one."
They'll do that as long as it works, then the prices for both the new models and the old ones will drop (before next Christmas I bet).
"Microsoft can never "go head to head with IBM" because Microsoft would be fighting for a declining market with the only company to have survived all the other changes in the computer market over the past half century."
Good post, I enjoyed reading it. I think we only differ in that you seem to give Microsoft no way out of the corner it has painted itself into.
Don't forget that even at its currently depressed stock price Microsoft could buy IBM. Of course it wouldn't be allowed, but think of all the acquisitions that would be allowed. If Gates would step aside and let a real businessperson run the company I think they could turn the situation around. (I don't expect that to happen though).
"Anyhow, this article is a lot of FUD. I write software for local governments, and at least in this state (which is one of the richest in the US), OSS wouldn't save any money nor eliminate any problems."
That's a strong statement. I'd say that there is more FUD in your post than in the original article. Maybe you forget that a lot of Slashdotters are, or have been government workers too...
'"Code Security" is not a big problem in local government -- as local governments generally only use their digital systems to warehouse and process publically available information. These guys keep paper records going back to the 18th century, and if anything seems out of the ordinary they check the paper.'
I worked at a federal agency that had everything stored on paper too. One day they decided to double check some things and found out the off-site storage facility they had been paying for years had no idea where most of their documents were. Those that could be found were water damaged beyond being readable.
So much for using paper as a back-up mechanism. I think part of the point of the article is that local governments do things on-the-cheap and that if they all shared more of their systems the systems would likely improve for everyone, even the smallest local agencies.
"And if asked, we readily turn over our code to local auditors. Very rarely do we do this. Nobody cares about anything except getting the software to cut down on their workload."
Sam here. But they never ask. Thats the problem. They don't know if contractors are sticking to standard coding practices, they don't know if third party "shareware" components have snuck into their systems (and they have) and they don't get involved with these issues until something breaks, and by then it's probably too late. More eyes on the code solves this too. Worst case, after the same breakage occurs for one local shop, other local shops will at least be aware that there is a problem that needs to be addressed (and most of them will only have to apply the fix, not invent it).
"And that's the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear."
Right, small companies like yours, supplying one of a kind mixtures of COTS software and local code. You most likely have a long term contract where you are because you have wired a dependence on your institutional knowledge into your systems. Good for you, not good for taxpayers.
"Can you imagine the accountability headaches associated with asking a "community" to write custom tax logic? "
Again, you seem to have missed the point, which was that there is not all that much variation from one location to another. The types of variation caused by different tax rates etc. should not be buried in code logic anyway, but should be in parameter control files and be alterable at a fairly high level.
"Don't get me wrong...I like the idea of getting more eyes on my code...but I can't imagine injecting community code into a hectic development schedule like we maintain."
Well, from what you have said, it most likely wouldn't be your code getting examined. Most likely in fact you would adapt code written at a larger, richer locality to your needs.
"My boss would surely never go for it. Of course, I don't expect many of the OSS acolytes to agree with me...some people don't seem to understand that the minimum wage people working without possibility of overtime at the county clerk's office don't want to visit the newsgroups for help when they have bugs preventing their license software from printing."
Both you, and your boss probably won't go for it until you see other similar localities going for it successfully. At the federal level almost everyone looks to other agencies for guidance. With no agency in a clear leadership position you end up with the same thing you get in any leaderless organizations, n
"It is, I hate to admit it. I've found that I don't get very excited over low power, lower everything CPUs for mobile use. Give me that socket sucking power of my P4 any day. Does anyone else feel that we are pass due for another speed revolution?"
No. In fact we have been long overdue for a plateau (relatively) such as we are in now. It has allowed alternatives to Intel to be taken seriously
More importantly, the current stall in processors speeds will mostly likely lead to more efficient software, particularly from Microsoft, who tends to rely on Intel's huge speed jumps to justify more bloated version of Windows (not that I use it).
Finally, it's hard to find a PC these days with no moving parts (fans) and I've decided, if at all possible all my future PCs will be either fanless or at least passively cooled under normal use conditions. I don't like the noise, the added RF interference, or the ultimate need for repair when the fan bearings wear out. (Yeah, I know disk drives have moving parts, but they are generally easier to replace, and I think solid state disks are a ways off yet).
"Bred in tanks, the four centimetre (1.6 inch) gambusia are soon to be released into ponds surrounded by barbed wire, to reduce the risk of the male-only gene spreading to other species."
OK, I give up. How does a gene spread to other species?
Also, if I am not mistaken the gambusia is the same small fish that eats mosquito larvae and keeps that population down without us having to spray so much insecticide. While experimenting with this in an aquarium in a lab may be OK, it would seem to me careless to do the experiment in the wild at all.
Those two items make me wonder if the author of the article had a clue what they were writing about. But then I have a tendency to not trust journalists of all types.
Slashdot Mirror
I think NASA would LOVE at this point to find life, or some evidence of earlier life on Mars (or anywhere for that matter) to spur people's imaginations and help fund future activities. I've argued for months with a friend of mine who is a former worker on the Apollo program. His thinking is that we need to get on with interstellar travel in some form to eventually allow mankind to escape from Earth. Going to the moon, or Mars, establishing permanent bases on those are just baby steps as compared with what we would need to visit even the closest star.
I get so tired of hearing people whine that we should be feeding the starving people on Earth before traveling to other planets. Some things are not simple economic trade-offs. A family might have to choose between buying a new TV or a new heater for the house, but they don't choose between buying a new heater and voting, reading a book or countless other activities that might benefit them. We HAVE the ability to feed everyone, educate everyone right now, with or without an active space program. Space research as well as other "optional" scientific activities spins off many benefits to all of us.
However, I don't expect us to find life elsewhere in our solar system, and I'm not too optimistic that mankind will ever develop interstellar travel. I'd rather just look at space travel (such as it is) as just another way to understand the universe we are in. Learning about the geology of Mars may help us understand the early geology of Earth. That knowledge may help us understand the nature of things such as "global warming" or how, in general, our presence on Earth can affect, for better or worse out climate. We can mine aluminum from the moon, iron from Mars and all sorts of other things that might be usefull for thousands of years, even if we never discover life anywhere else. But one thing is for sure, if we abandon space exploration and any other scientific activity not related to agriculture and medicine there will be a whole lot of discoveries that we miss, and we will never know WHAT we missed by not making them.
Our high tech science fiction movie craze may have raised our expectations so high that the reality of what we can actually do will disappoint everyone. Hopefully this will not be the case though.
Wow, while I was typing this Slashdot went down. Totally. Not sure I've ever seen that happen. Has someone Slashdotted Slashdot?
"Having principles make you feel dirty sometimes, as when you are forced into a pragmatic decision such as getting a mac because you don't have enough ability to get Linux/BSD/WhateverFreeOS running well, for example."
I wouldn't feel guilty at all. They fault lies partially in the still imperfect installation process for most Linux distros. I've tried many combinations of hardware and software and, while I usually get a successful install, it is often with compromises, no sound, no modem support,etc. Only gradually have I learned to overcome these limitations for a particular piece of hardware. I'm running Debian Stable on this laptop now and the only thing that doesn't work is the DVD player. I know what I need to do to fix that, but have not wanted to take the trouble. Just to see what would happen I installed Lindows on it for a while and it detected everything, including the DVD player. I was impressed, although I switched back to Debian due to problems with the Lindows apt-get facility.
Are the people at Microsoft THAT much smarter than the Linux developers in terms of hardware detection? No. Quite the contrary. After NT 4, Microsoft stopped doing nearly so much pre-testing with various hardware and have since relied on the "Built for Windows" certification process to get hardware makers to do all the work. PC systems are litterally designed to run the current version of Windows, period. Linux on the other hand HAS to do hardware detection and it has slowly gotten better and better at it.
This comes in handy when you have that odd, semi-broken PC that won't take a Windows install, or has Windows and suddenly stops working. In our labs we often took "broken" PCs and installed Linux on them to do diagnostics. The "brokenness" often involved no more than re-flashing a ROM or something, but the slight deviation put the system beyond Windows ability to cope.
I think the resilience of Linux will eventually cause it to be considered the most robust operating system ever, while Microsoft and Apple grow less and less able to deal with diversity. Think of all the bugs that got shaken out when Windows ran on half a dozen different hardware architectures (including the PowerPC) for a while. In the long run, systems suffer by being tailored to a specific hardware base.
One finall example of this: My iBook would not run OS X 10.1.x after x=2 (as I recall) and for that period of time I ran YellowDog Linux on it with no problems. Since then I tried 10.2 and it's running fine, but I've decided only to install security updates from now on and pass on Panther. During the period that I couldn't run OS X I read on the Apple forums of MANY people having the same problems as me. They were all being told by Apple that it was a hardware problem, getting motherboards, disk drives, memory sticks, and displays replaced left and right to no avail. It sure looks like to me that Apple has no ability to diagnose it's own software glitches, maybe they don't REALLY understand the BSD underpinnings completely. My guess is that many of these "hardware" fixes also involved fresh installs of the OS, fresh flashes or ROM and a bit of luck. Two months later after the user has restored all their applications and data the problem crops up again. I don't buy it.
I love my iBook, but it will probably be my last Apple until I see some evidence that they have their QA, for both hardware and software under control. This should be their strongest point by comparison to PCs and it is a shame to see them stumble so badly in this area.
Well, I won't run XP, and I wasn't making any comparisons with Linux. But Microsoft people are sensitive types, so it didn't surprise me to get jumped on. Talking with MS employees about Windows is like trying to tell a Fiat owner that they just maybe don't have the best car in the world.
Choice is a good thing. Long as MS doesn't try to legislate Windows I have no problems with them.
Well, I DO know something about optimizing large systems, even though I don't work at Microsoft. Judging by your photo, most of my work in that area was done when you were very very young.
In a character mode system you can put a prompt up for the user almost immediately. You don't actually have to be ready to process his input yet, just grab keystrokes. You finish initialization while the user is still thinking and typing. You don't need to initialize memory at all. Unless your code is buggy to begin with and you need zeros there for debugging, allocate space as needed and allow it to start out random. I know most modern systems don't do this, but it's been done.
GUI systems are of course a lot more involved. Can the part of the system that draws the screen and all the icons be isolated so as to get that up before loading all the common elements from Internet Explorer, Word, etc (and NO, they don't show up as separate entries on the task list!)? Yes, they probably could, but as those components get more and more bloated they each have their own initialization requirements.
I'm quite sure people at Microsoft don't sit around twiddling their thumbs and TRYING to make the system less efficient. They DO have a vested interest in making ordinary PCs less and less desirable each year so that the hardware upgrade cycle needs to continue. Every new version of Windows has a larger memory footprint and that has to do with putting more and more stuff on the critical path between turning the system on hand handling that first mouse movement.
I was doing my OWN benchmarking of these systems during the NT 3.5-4.0 timeframe and I DO know what I am talking about.
My recollection is that Windows boot times first started getting bad (WFW booted pretty fast comparatively) when publications like CNet were bending over backwards (or was it the other way) to show how much faster Office was than competing products. The benchmarking consisted of: (1) boot both systems, (2) start timers, (3) start application, (4) start benchmark series, (5) end application, (6) stop timers.
Lo, and behold, more and more initialization work for Office, and then IE, started showing up in the Windows boot sequence.
Merging applications into the OS is BAD DESIGN, but it won the poorly thought out benchmarks that many organizations used to select their "productivity" tools. Now Windows, and Windows users will pay the price. Serves them right.
Sure, leave your Windows machines running 24/7 to avoid the boot delay. Linux and OS X users have that option too, but for them it is truly an option, not something they NEED to do.
"I realize you're trying to be funny, but the sad reality is that whatever the solution is(if there is one), it will only work if there's enough mail clients and servers that apply it, and the matter of fact is that Microsoft holds the keys to a very large client base."
That sounds like a false premiss.
Current Baysian (sp?) filtering works just fine without a lot of users. In fact, now that so many mail programs are using this technique the spammers have adapted to it by including words in their messages to get through the filtering.
Furthermore, they are including large lists of words which will eventually cause your filtering mechanism to filter out legitimate mail. By the time MS has its filtering system ready the entire concept will have been used up IMHO.
I've had good luck with Mailblocks.com. No training needed. The only way spam gets through is if the spammer takes the time to visit a web page, squint at a graphic and type in a word. The few small time spammers that have done this in my case have then been explicitly blocked.
I predict MS will scrap all their anti spam work and start over before 2006. Maybe they will come up with something good. But everything being said by Bill Gates at this point is just marketing hype, not valid design concepts (for which he is not qualified).
I think I spotted several SCO IP addresses in there. Maybe the best thing to do is let RIAA know that SCO is using their servers as major music sharing hubs and at the same time convince SCO that RIAA has been running unlicensed copies of SCO Unix (what's it called this week?) for years. Let the clueless losers battle one another to death while the rest of us get on with our lives.
My guess is that they will end up looking a lot like Yahoo. I think Yahoo thinks that too, since they have already announced that they want to go head to head with Google's search technology. Yahoo surely hopes that by the time Google starts registering users they will be able to convince their existing user base that there is no need to register at Google too.
I doubt it will be required to register at Google to continue to use their search. You can do a lot of things with Yahoo without setting up an ID there, it's just that you can't do anything that requires it to remember your settings, preferences, etc.
"... then were will we escape too? A video game inside one of these virtual communities? And if these virtual worlds become too restrictive, they won't be fun anymore and who will be paying to play them then?"
Yes. I think the future of these online systems is to become so general purpose that you do indeed have activities embedded in them. While there is as yet no standard for immersive 3D-VR I think in the long run being in such an environment should be akin to "browsing the web", that is, not a specific activity at all but just a "mode" of travel.
Second Life, for example started out with a rather complex mechanism for scoring points and turning those points into virtual cash. That economy quickly got so complex and lopsided that I don't think anyone knew how to correct the balance. Fortunately a major simplification of the system has made the accumulation of virtual dollars less important, which means you can still "play monopoly" if you choose, but opting out doesn't have any dire consequences.
If you read "Snow Crash" you will remember that "going online" (I think they called it "goggling-in") was simply the only way to use the network. If you needed to send or receive written text you simply did that on virtual I/O devices. I see 3D-VR eventually evolving away from these special purpose shoot-em-ups and into something much more generic, with shooot-em-ups, chess, cards, socializing all as coexisting activities in that space.
Based on what I've seen of this program it's going to result in a bunch of soldiers who obsess about clothing, fabrics, and their hair style.
Of course if you could get the worlds terrorists to start using online games instead of actually exploding their body parts all over the place it might be a handy thing.
I'm afraid this is tax money down the drain, helped along by someone with the right contacts. We'll see.
if there are any fans in my iBook I have yet to hear them. I think I paid about $1400 for it too (that might be before the memory upgrade though).
My other laptop, a Compaq, that has an external fan gets noisy running Windows. In Linux the fan is always off, unless I run something that loops for a long while like Setiathome.
Seems like they should easily be able to make noisless laptops these days by simply backing off the clock speeds a bit. They would still perform perfectly adequately. Batteries would probably last longer too.
The idea that everyone needs to have the absolutely fastest clock speed in the universe is over except for special case use and gamers. hardware companies seem to be lothe to figure it out though.
"It's nobody's business where I am or what I am doing at any particular time, especially in public."
Yeah, I agree!
Just because I go to work for someone doesn't mean they have the right to know where I am or what I'm doing. It's bad enough that I have to give them my address for them to mail my check to. Now they want to track me for 8 hours a day too?! Give them an inch and they'll take a mile every time! I bet this is more the work of that Ashcroft guy. I bet Howard Dean has heard some rumors about this. You just wait and see!
KDE works fine for me under Debian Stable. I did have some problems with KDE tasks going into infinite loops, but swithing out KDM and using GDM instead seems to have cleared that up. Been running several machines that way for months.
I think what you have there is a list of next year's Grammy award winners.
Yeah I agree with parent. I'm glad they took lots of nice high resolution photos now, and even gathered some other data on temperatures, spectroscopy etc. rather than doing the risky business sooner. They in fact explained this at one of the press conferences. Having gotten past the riskiest part of the mission (the landing) they want to take advantage of that achievement while they can rather than proceeding with other risky maneuvers first. From here on out, every move, every pyro firing, and so on will potentially lead to dead air on their communications link.
If I were them I wouldn't want to take any more risks than necessary until after the second lander is safely down, and of course there is a significant chance that it will vanish and never be heard from just like the Beagle2. With all the work that went into this thing they have every right to be cautious.
Ah, thanks. I'll give it a try!
Yep, that's what I meant. Thanks.
With Windows shareware I remember trying dozens of packages before finding one that was worth keeping, and I considered myself lucky if I didn't screw up my system in the process.
In fact with reference to the post I originally responded to I installed the Hercules (an IBM Mainframe emulator) on my Linux system using one command "apt-get" and editing a couple of configurations files. One of the people I showed it too was really hot to get it working for himself, but he insisted on working with the Windows version. Two weeks later he had it limping along, but still with "issues". Plus it made his Windows system fairly useless for any other activity.
"And APL which originated at IBM."
I'd love to get my hands on a good APL for Linux (with font support). I've dabbled with the Hercules running a VM/370 system. Just like the good old days.
My favorite trick is to set up Hercules, open up a port on my router and get a friend to TN370 into my IP address. When they see the mainframe logo pop up you tell them you picked up an old 370 and have it running in your basement off the dryer outlet. (OK, I have gullible friends).
One thing I've found is that (excluding games) there is a lot MORE software available for Linux than for Windows. It always puzzles me to see someone saying the opposite.
IBM will have little trouble switching to Linux. I have some friends there and they are on a short leash when it comes to tinkering with their IBM supplied laptops. They are consultants, so don't have an IBM desk or phone. Do all their reporting, timekeeping, intellectual capital tracking, etc. on these PCs using a wide variety of cobbled together applications MOST of which are server oriented, in many cases still mainframe oriented. The Windows systems often cause lock-ups, data loss, etc. My guess is it will be more web oriented now and the last thing they need is to have to deal with 17 different patch levels of IE running around out there.
No doubt this is the start of a big trend (in the US anyway).
Yeah, I sorta went thought that too, but then XM and CNET split up almost a year ago and they still to this day claim channel 130 as a tech station (I don't think 24 hours a day of David Lawrence qualifies). As for music, I noticed if I kept the same (electronica for example) station on for more than a few hours I had soon heard everything and I suspect it was just all being played in a loop.
Seems like the best thing is that when I'm in a fixed location to just stream audio from the Internet (as a way to hear music I don't already own), or make my own "mixes" using iTunes (or a Linux equivalent). On the road, I put up with local news, which is a good thing to do from time to time anyway, so it's not time wasted.
No doubt XM is great for long car trips. If I were doing more of that I would not be canceling my account about now.
This technology might be a good way for local stations to get a leg up on the competition for listeners like me who don't want to pay more for their commute time radio. I'd listen to it if I already had the right tuner.
(And of course if you didn't have to move to Iowa to pick up that station).
"Yeah, in fact I *do* listen to NPR. And the other local university stations, and sometimes the Pacifica station (good politics, dreadful on-air people (if, uh, uh, you know, uh, what I, uh, mean.))"
I've listened to Pacifica a few times in the past too and that sounds familiar.
Did, uh, you ever, uh, think that, uh, there, like, maybe is some, uh, correlation, like, between those, uh, politics, and uh, the way they, like uh, speak?
I sorta, like, do.
Just like the difference in quality of posts from people who think that Microsoft invented computers from those old enough to know better.
"However, I was a little dissapointed by the price of the new iPod mini. At $250 (just $50 less than the (now) 15Gb iPod) I can't really see how it's worth it. I'll just pay another $50 and get an iPod that can hold my entire music library. Not sure what they were thinking with that price."
I think you might have answered your own question. I've seen this over and over with high margin items, including PCs when the prices first started to drop on them. There is probably a marketing buzzword for it, but I don't know the word, just the technique.
When price pressures are slowing down your sales volume you just introduce something, anything at the lower price point to get people back in the stores or web pages. Then you offer your primary product at the old price point and rely on psychology to do its thing: "Well I drove all the way over here to see that new iPod, I might as well spend and extra $50 and get the better one."
They'll do that as long as it works, then the prices for both the new models and the old ones will drop (before next Christmas I bet).
"Microsoft can never "go head to head with IBM" because Microsoft would be fighting for a declining market with the only company to have survived all the other changes in the computer market over the past half century."
Good post, I enjoyed reading it. I think we only differ in that you seem to give Microsoft no way out of the corner it has painted itself into.
Don't forget that even at its currently depressed stock price Microsoft could buy IBM. Of course it wouldn't be allowed, but think of all the acquisitions that would be allowed. If Gates would step aside and let a real businessperson run the company I think they could turn the situation around. (I don't expect that to happen though).
"Anyhow, this article is a lot of FUD. I write software for local governments, and at least in this state (which is one of the richest in the US), OSS wouldn't save any money nor eliminate any problems."
That's a strong statement. I'd say that there is more FUD in your post than in the original article. Maybe you forget that a lot of Slashdotters are, or have been government workers too...
'"Code Security" is not a big problem in local government -- as local governments generally only use their digital systems to warehouse and process publically available information. These guys keep paper records going back to the 18th century, and if anything seems out of the ordinary they check the paper.'
I worked at a federal agency that had everything stored on paper too. One day they decided to double check some things and found out the off-site storage facility they had been paying for years had no idea where most of their documents were. Those that could be found were water damaged beyond being readable.
So much for using paper as a back-up mechanism. I think part of the point of the article is that local governments do things on-the-cheap and that if they all shared more of their systems the systems would likely improve for everyone, even the smallest local agencies.
"And if asked, we readily turn over our code to local auditors. Very rarely do we do this. Nobody cares about anything except getting the software to cut down on their workload."
Sam here. But they never ask. Thats the problem. They don't know if contractors are sticking to standard coding practices, they don't know if third party "shareware" components have snuck into their systems (and they have) and they don't get involved with these issues until something breaks, and by then it's probably too late. More eyes on the code solves this too. Worst case, after the same breakage occurs for one local shop, other local shops will at least be aware that there is a problem that needs to be addressed (and most of them will only have to apply the fix, not invent it).
"And that's the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear."
Right, small companies like yours, supplying one of a kind mixtures of COTS software and local code. You most likely have a long term contract where you are because you have wired a dependence on your institutional knowledge into your systems. Good for you, not good for taxpayers.
"Can you imagine the accountability headaches associated with asking a "community" to write custom tax logic? "
Again, you seem to have missed the point, which was that there is not all that much variation from one location to another. The types of variation caused by different tax rates etc. should not be buried in code logic anyway, but should be in parameter control files and be alterable at a fairly high level.
"Don't get me wrong...I like the idea of getting more eyes on my code...but I can't imagine injecting community code into a hectic development schedule like we maintain."
Well, from what you have said, it most likely wouldn't be your code getting examined. Most likely in fact you would adapt code written at a larger, richer locality to your needs.
"My boss would surely never go for it. Of course, I don't expect many of the OSS acolytes to agree with me...some people don't seem to understand that the minimum wage people working without possibility of overtime at the county clerk's office don't want to visit the newsgroups for help when they have bugs preventing their license software from printing."
Both you, and your boss probably won't go for it until you see other similar localities going for it successfully. At the federal level almost everyone looks to other agencies for guidance. With no agency in a clear leadership position you end up with the same thing you get in any leaderless organizations, n
"It is, I hate to admit it. I've found that I don't get very excited over low power, lower everything CPUs for mobile use.
Give me that socket sucking power of my P4 any day.
Does anyone else feel that we are pass due for another speed revolution?"
No. In fact we have been long overdue for a plateau (relatively) such as we are in now. It has allowed alternatives to Intel to be taken seriously
More importantly, the current stall in processors speeds will mostly likely lead to more efficient software, particularly from Microsoft, who tends to rely on Intel's huge speed jumps to justify more bloated version of Windows (not that I use it).
Finally, it's hard to find a PC these days with no moving parts (fans) and I've decided, if at all possible all my future PCs will be either fanless or at least passively cooled under normal use conditions. I don't like the noise, the added RF interference, or the ultimate need for repair when the fan bearings wear out. (Yeah, I know disk drives have moving parts, but they are generally easier to replace, and I think solid state disks are a ways off yet).
"Bred in tanks, the four centimetre (1.6 inch) gambusia are soon to be released into ponds surrounded by barbed wire, to reduce the risk of the male-only gene spreading to other species."
OK, I give up. How does a gene spread to other species?
Also, if I am not mistaken the gambusia is the same small fish that eats mosquito larvae and keeps that population down without us having to spray so much insecticide. While experimenting with this in an aquarium in a lab may be OK, it would seem to me careless to do the experiment in the wild at all.
Those two items make me wonder if the author of the article had a clue what they were writing about. But then I have a tendency to not trust journalists of all types.