Maybe I'm way out of the loop, but is Java part of *any* standard distributions? It ain't in Debian, RedHat, or Gentoo, I'm pretty sure of that... and its not in any of the BSDs. In fact, my impression was that you can't include it in a Linux distro because of the Sun license you have to agree to.
Security in an attack? Yeah, possibly. Fix blackouts by easing the strain? Pretty doubtful. I think more likely a bunch of power plants will close up shop and then all of a sudden you have roughly the same amount of available generation you did before, only its less reliable now because the wind could die or it could be overcast all week.
I don't see who's going to buy all this surplus power from local generators. If there's already enough, why buy more? Ok sure, it makes sense from a reliability standpoint, but economically it just means a rate hike on the electric bills, and people will scream about that no matter how good the reason.
All the problems you list point exclusively to the fact that we aren't capable of generating enough surplus power. We run on very thin margins, trying to estimate (too) closely what the demand on a given day will be, and we rely too much on far-away generators, which can have their own demand problems. The power system is designed that there should be enough suppliers in a region to handle any load the customers can drum up. Obviously that breaks down every so often. The more penny-pinching we do (with deregulation and other things), the closer we estimate, the more often these things can happen. NY went out because they weren't generating enough power to support themselves, so when neighboring networks went down they had no recourse.
Power companies can and DO run their own fiber. National Grid USA (who I recently interviewed with, hence why I know) recently rolled out their own fiber loop in Massachusetts. Probably paid way too much for it too, but there you have it. After the NY blackout there's a *lot* of pressure to make everything more distributed, responsive, and secure, regardless of cost, and thats the way they're going.
Thats crazy talk. Electricity just doesn't work like that. Its not data, its potential. You'd have to have a unique electrical circuit running from your house all the way to some massive switching station where all the suppliers lines run into, or some abstraction of that. Its not like ethernet, where you can bundle it up into a bunch of packets and send it along one wire and sort it out when it comes out the other end. I should further mention that even if the network could do that, which it *can't*, then your electric bill would almost certainly go up (unless you live somewhere with a very funky pricing scheme that I've never heard of). At least around here all the suppliers already bid each day to supply whatever amount they can at whatever price they choose, and the ISO pulls the lowest bids until it has enough to meet the expected demand. You won't do better pulling from random hydro plants. Ok, so maybe you'd like to not support coal plants or whatever, and I bet a lot of people would agree with that position, and then all of a sudden there aren't enough rivers to keep up with the demand, while all the (pretty clean these days) coal plants are running at 5% capacity.
100% true. Also there were certain switches that didn't flip when they were supposed to, which didn't help matters out. But in most areas, what happened is basically exactly what you described: one node went down, and the connecting networks severed their connection, but then didn't have enough connected nodes to support their current demand. New England didn't go out because we were producing a surplus of power locally at the time.
Its been said before, but even leaving out the stuff where they do their damnedest to break compatibility with everybody elses apps (how long did it take to get useful free software that reads and writes.doc? How about NTFS?), they've still been quite "unfair". The biggest one for me was the whole fiasco with Windows licensing for OEMs. Basically, they required vendors like Dell to *not* install competing web browsers (and I think media players too at one point), or they would charge them more for each Windows license. Leaving all the other crap aside, that alone is directly using their monopoly to force out competitors in other markets... shoulda been a real no-brainer for the judges.
Yeah yeah, people like to say that. Theres what, a handful of apps that run faster in WINE, and virtually none of them are games. In fact, most games won't run at all in my experience. And heaven help you if your app needs the IE libs or something... WINE is neat, but its only marginally useful in practice.
I wish they'd push Linux support a little harder. I mean, you can't find concrete verification anywhere that if you buy the Windows copy it will work on Linux. Now, I know it does, but thats because I found a screenshot of the back of the box somewhere. No online store mentions it.
I'm not sure Word supporting emoticons means that Outlook supports them. Symantics problem really, but still... Its an email program supporting an editing program that supports emoticons, whereas Evolution is an email program that supports emoticons.
But why, if Linux vendors switch to something else, will graphics chip makers continue to write for XFree86? It doesn't make sense. They didn't write the drivers in the first place because they *like* XFree86, they wrote them to appeal to the Linux market. If the Linux market moves, they will move. (unless, I suppose, they have a change of heart and decide Linux users aren't worth the effort... but that would have more to do with whether they think they're getting sales or not, not with whether or not they have to rewrite drivers)
Huh? Why? Last I checked XFree86 4.4 was in precisely 0 Linux distributions. Big companies (except maybe software companies) are completely unaware of this "licensing problem", and will continue to be ignorant.
Well for one, GIMP is MDI, not SDI. Its just not old-windows-style parent-child-whatchamacallit MDI. In fact, in Visual Studio, dialog-based MDI (GIMP-style) is an option for your base program. At any rate there seems to be no consensus on which is better (just read all these comments!), except that dialog-based MDI is probably better on Linux, and afterall GIMP is really a Linux app first. Sorry Windows guys, if you don't like it either write your own or pay for your software.
There do seem to be some improvements listed. Foremost appears to be the ability to view a scaled version of the desktops in full screen instead of just the little icons in the pager....They also describe animating the transition between this view and the full desktops via shrinking/expanding the active desktop.
Speaking for myself, my mailserver is on OpenBSD, and Sendmail is the only MTA in their main tree. Oh sure, I *could* use postfix from ports, but then I don't get the happy little email when theres a vulnerability, and I don't get the comfort of knowing that at least the OpenBSD team has parsed the source for bugs.
So yeah, I use Sendmail. From where I sit it seems like the most secure choice.
Probably because with the XFree86 debacle, licensing is now suddenly a hot topic. But a GPL-incompatible Apache isn't nearly as big a deal as a GPL-incompatible XFree86. Unless of course there's some very-important GPL'ed Apache module that I can't think of right now...
So what's the alternative? Try to make a girl-oriented game and hope somebody buys it? Major game development is not a grand social experiment, its a business. The industry will go where the money is, regardless of who's spending it. The simple truth is that they can only make what'll sell. If you can prove that a game concept will sell to females by the millions, then great, roll with it. But don't think EA or Sierra have any better of an idea what that game is than you or I do.
Actually the article, or maybe the comments attached to the article, suggested that the girl teams opted to have a seperate competition, rather than compete with the males. To me, that makes the whole mess kinda dumb. If they don't want to play, so what?
What gets me about this "correlation" is that they're not even talking about the same time period. Sure, 2000 to 2001 is *one* of the last 3 years, but it sure as hell isn't all of them. This statistic doesn't make any sense. For all we know from the article, Chicago's crime rate could have precisely followed the national crime rate over the past 3 years.
Indeed, but what pray tell do they define as a "server"? Joe Linuxn00b on his cablemodem running Apache could be a "server" by a certain definition. It doesn't give any useful specifics in the article, so how do we know they're not counting those?
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Maybe I'm way out of the loop, but is Java part of *any* standard distributions? It ain't in Debian, RedHat, or Gentoo, I'm pretty sure of that... and its not in any of the BSDs. In fact, my impression was that you can't include it in a Linux distro because of the Sun license you have to agree to.
Security in an attack? Yeah, possibly. Fix blackouts by easing the strain? Pretty doubtful. I think more likely a bunch of power plants will close up shop and then all of a sudden you have roughly the same amount of available generation you did before, only its less reliable now because the wind could die or it could be overcast all week.
I don't see who's going to buy all this surplus power from local generators. If there's already enough, why buy more? Ok sure, it makes sense from a reliability standpoint, but economically it just means a rate hike on the electric bills, and people will scream about that no matter how good the reason.
All the problems you list point exclusively to the fact that we aren't capable of generating enough surplus power. We run on very thin margins, trying to estimate (too) closely what the demand on a given day will be, and we rely too much on far-away generators, which can have their own demand problems. The power system is designed that there should be enough suppliers in a region to handle any load the customers can drum up. Obviously that breaks down every so often. The more penny-pinching we do (with deregulation and other things), the closer we estimate, the more often these things can happen. NY went out because they weren't generating enough power to support themselves, so when neighboring networks went down they had no recourse.
Power companies can and DO run their own fiber. National Grid USA (who I recently interviewed with, hence why I know) recently rolled out their own fiber loop in Massachusetts. Probably paid way too much for it too, but there you have it. After the NY blackout there's a *lot* of pressure to make everything more distributed, responsive, and secure, regardless of cost, and thats the way they're going.
Thats crazy talk. Electricity just doesn't work like that. Its not data, its potential. You'd have to have a unique electrical circuit running from your house all the way to some massive switching station where all the suppliers lines run into, or some abstraction of that. Its not like ethernet, where you can bundle it up into a bunch of packets and send it along one wire and sort it out when it comes out the other end. I should further mention that even if the network could do that, which it *can't*, then your electric bill would almost certainly go up (unless you live somewhere with a very funky pricing scheme that I've never heard of). At least around here all the suppliers already bid each day to supply whatever amount they can at whatever price they choose, and the ISO pulls the lowest bids until it has enough to meet the expected demand. You won't do better pulling from random hydro plants. Ok, so maybe you'd like to not support coal plants or whatever, and I bet a lot of people would agree with that position, and then all of a sudden there aren't enough rivers to keep up with the demand, while all the (pretty clean these days) coal plants are running at 5% capacity.
100% true. Also there were certain switches that didn't flip when they were supposed to, which didn't help matters out. But in most areas, what happened is basically exactly what you described: one node went down, and the connecting networks severed their connection, but then didn't have enough connected nodes to support their current demand. New England didn't go out because we were producing a surplus of power locally at the time.
I'm not much of a hacker admittedly, but how can you be sure you've found a security problem if you don't exploit it?
Its been said before, but even leaving out the stuff where they do their damnedest to break compatibility with everybody elses apps (how long did it take to get useful free software that reads and writes .doc? How about NTFS?), they've still been quite "unfair". The biggest one for me was the whole fiasco with Windows licensing for OEMs. Basically, they required vendors like Dell to *not* install competing web browsers (and I think media players too at one point), or they would charge them more for each Windows license. Leaving all the other crap aside, that alone is directly using their monopoly to force out competitors in other markets... shoulda been a real no-brainer for the judges.
I really want to know what they mean by that...
Yeah yeah, people like to say that. Theres what, a handful of apps that run faster in WINE, and virtually none of them are games. In fact, most games won't run at all in my experience. And heaven help you if your app needs the IE libs or something... WINE is neat, but its only marginally useful in practice.
Cadence runs just fine on Linux. I used it in school all the time. OrCad not as much though...
I wish they'd push Linux support a little harder. I mean, you can't find concrete verification anywhere that if you buy the Windows copy it will work on Linux. Now, I know it does, but thats because I found a screenshot of the back of the box somewhere. No online store mentions it.
I'm not sure Word supporting emoticons means that Outlook supports them. Symantics problem really, but still... Its an email program supporting an editing program that supports emoticons, whereas Evolution is an email program that supports emoticons.
P.S. emoticons are *not* a killer feature anyway
But why, if Linux vendors switch to something else, will graphics chip makers continue to write for XFree86? It doesn't make sense. They didn't write the drivers in the first place because they *like* XFree86, they wrote them to appeal to the Linux market. If the Linux market moves, they will move. (unless, I suppose, they have a change of heart and decide Linux users aren't worth the effort... but that would have more to do with whether they think they're getting sales or not, not with whether or not they have to rewrite drivers)
Huh? Why? Last I checked XFree86 4.4 was in precisely 0 Linux distributions. Big companies (except maybe software companies) are completely unaware of this "licensing problem", and will continue to be ignorant.
Well for one, GIMP is MDI, not SDI. Its just not old-windows-style parent-child-whatchamacallit MDI. In fact, in Visual Studio, dialog-based MDI (GIMP-style) is an option for your base program. At any rate there seems to be no consensus on which is better (just read all these comments!), except that dialog-based MDI is probably better on Linux, and afterall GIMP is really a Linux app first. Sorry Windows guys, if you don't like it either write your own or pay for your software.
I still think this 'idea' is covered by 3d-desktop
Sounds a lot like 3d-desktop to me.
Speaking for myself, my mailserver is on OpenBSD, and Sendmail is the only MTA in their main tree. Oh sure, I *could* use postfix from ports, but then I don't get the happy little email when theres a vulnerability, and I don't get the comfort of knowing that at least the OpenBSD team has parsed the source for bugs.
So yeah, I use Sendmail. From where I sit it seems like the most secure choice.
Probably because with the XFree86 debacle, licensing is now suddenly a hot topic. But a GPL-incompatible Apache isn't nearly as big a deal as a GPL-incompatible XFree86. Unless of course there's some very-important GPL'ed Apache module that I can't think of right now...
So what's the alternative? Try to make a girl-oriented game and hope somebody buys it? Major game development is not a grand social experiment, its a business. The industry will go where the money is, regardless of who's spending it. The simple truth is that they can only make what'll sell. If you can prove that a game concept will sell to females by the millions, then great, roll with it. But don't think EA or Sierra have any better of an idea what that game is than you or I do.
Actually the article, or maybe the comments attached to the article, suggested that the girl teams opted to have a seperate competition, rather than compete with the males. To me, that makes the whole mess kinda dumb. If they don't want to play, so what?
What gets me about this "correlation" is that they're not even talking about the same time period. Sure, 2000 to 2001 is *one* of the last 3 years, but it sure as hell isn't all of them. This statistic doesn't make any sense. For all we know from the article, Chicago's crime rate could have precisely followed the national crime rate over the past 3 years.
Indeed, but what pray tell do they define as a "server"? Joe Linuxn00b on his cablemodem running Apache could be a "server" by a certain definition. It doesn't give any useful specifics in the article, so how do we know they're not counting those?