There's also a large number of problems created by this solution.
A split process or even split thread model creates a much larger resource footprint than not splitting it on that basis. This is essentially because each process and often times each thread requires it's own copy of shared state in order to be independent. On the other hand, stability between threads and even plugins is actually pretty rarely an issue. Crash to Desktops are pretty rare these days, and performance isn't actually all that terrible.
That's not to say that rearchitecting Firefox to have fewer blocking issues wouldn't be a very good idea, but there's certainly some arguments to be made that the Chrome and IE 8 models aren't the ideal solution. Personally I think that from a purely technical point of view IE 6 actually has the right model(when it's enabled), sad as that makes me since everything else about that application is atrocious and outdated. New windows/tabs(yes I know IE 6 doesn't have tabs, but that's not the point) created from one core process all share the same process. Windows created by reloading the application don't share state with the other windows at all. This would mean you could create independent processes for the times it matters(where a crash to that tab/window would have negative consequences, but share threads between tabs/windows that don't matter so they use fewer resources. Combine that with some additional threading on activities which are likely to block and you'd probably have a better overall solution than Chrome.
There is a tradeoff between reliability and performance and sometimes the reliability just isn't worth the cost. It's like getting nine nines for a data center. You can do it, but it's going to cost you an absolutely stupendous amount of money, and in most cases it just isn't worth it.
Personally I'm not sure exactly how to feel about this. Mobile phones don't trace your exact location, and the police are requesting the data through proper legal channels.
The problem here seems more to do with whether a subpoena is appropriate for this information and perhaps more importantly whether subpoenas ought to be granted simply as a matter of course. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the police requesting this sort of data as part of a criminal investigation with proper warrants and the like. The problem is whether it would be too easy to get this information when it isn't appropriate.
If you like being a tech and you want to be a tech and you haven't had any real problems being a tech, then keep being a tech. You're 39, not 90 and can in all likelihood continue to do whatever you set your mind to for another 20 years or so. If you like management and want to be in management take that job, if you really want to be a pastry chef go do that. Life's too damned short to do something other than what you want to do just because you're afraid it might be hard.
There's a lot of other factors involved of course, there's different kinds of tech jobs some of which are less volatile than the web side of things, there's management jobs which are more technical and management jobs which are less technical. There's the question of whether you're any good at being a manager, or whether you're any good at being a tech, but none of them really matter.
A lot of people will tell you to think of the future, think of where you can get if you do this or do that. They're probably also going to tell you to take the management path because that's the path to big bucks, and that could be the right choice for you, it could also not be. Do what you love if it's at all possible, and if it's not try to find something that's as close as you can get because going to work every day in a job you hate isn't worth it.
I didn't say all these ideas are full of shit, some are demonstrably not, and certainly there are plenty of stupid venture capitalists(see the.COM fiasco for evidence).
However, "only a 24 year old could understand this" isn't about selling good ideas to 50 year olds. Selling good ideas is easy because if they're really demonstrably good ideas you can show the 50 year olds how it will make money. If it doesn't make money then it's not a good idea, or at least it's not a good idea to invest in if you want return on your money. Facebook and YouTube are not good ideas, from the venture capitalist perspective at least, because not matter how popular they are, they don't actually make any real money(money from other people buying them doesn't count, revenue is what matters). Yes there's a certain amount of blind faith that the way the person says money will be made will actually work, but that's not the ideas this schmuck is going to sell.
He doesn't have a perspective, he has a line of bullshit.
The "only the young can be this innovative" line is an old one. The basic premise is that the reason why the 50 year olds with all the money don't understand the idea is because they're old, not because the idea is full of shit. It works because a lot of 50 year olds are afraid they're old and out of touch and will pretend the idea is good to seem young, sort of an emperors new clothes type of thing if you see what I mean.
This guy doesn't really believe his own bullshit, he just wants to make a lot of money out of pretending he does.
You're right, my brain was dead, replace OLED with e-Ink. Either way, putting linux on it is pretty much going to do nothing for the cost. To be honest I wouldn't be all that surprised if it's running some form of BSD or windows as is. It's sure as hell not windows.
I'm not sure where people get this acceptable wear levels for SSD's thing.
All the math I've seen indicates that, presuming reasonable wear algorithms, if you write the volume of your data to disk every day your drive will last for about 30 years and that it will scale linearly with shifts up or down in that amount. An ordinary hard disk lasts about 5 years, so for your 8 GB disk you'd have to be writing approximately 48 GB of data to it every single day in order for it to not last longer than a current HD, and the SSD is still readable at the end(though this isn't super important for caching). That's certainly not an implausible amount of data, even for a home desktop user, but it is fairly high, and since it's fairly linear, you'd reach a feasible number for pretty much any ordinary data set well before 64 GB, let alone 256 GB
I think that it's probably also inaccurate to say that SSD's will never replace HDD's. Hard drive sizes are certainly increasing, but the need for capacity isn't increasing anywhere near as fast. Under present usage patterns, most users will never fill a 1 TB drive within the lifetime of the drive, certainly not with anything that can't be archived. If you can get price point down to 25 cents per GB it would probably be worthwhile to use them in pretty much any circumstance excluding applications involving really heavy writes or a lot of long linear reads. Data Center Storage is already substantially more expensive than that, and the extra speed would make up for a lot of space issues. Even if you had to use 4 disks instead of 1.
That price point probably won't be met in the next year or so, but it's certainly achievable within the next couple. True by then HDD's may be 4 TB for the same price or more, but a couple of TB you don't need vs a faster system isn't much of a choice.
If you've still got an external(or internal) physical HDD, then SSD's have not taken over. They've become a part of a new solution, not replaced an old solution.
First of all, open source and open standards are two totally separate things.
Second, I'm fairly certain that the biggest cost in those things is the screen, followed by the hardware, followed by the name recognition mark up(Sony, Amazon), the percentage of the cost that the OS creates on a device whose entire purpose is to store, index, and display documents in a limited subset of formats is just not even worth mentioning. Half of slashdot could knock that kind of system up in a couple of months on their own.
E-book readers are expensive because the OLED screens which are so necessary for them to be even remotely comfortable to read are really new technology and still really expensive and because the hardware is specialized largely to the purpose. Eventually we'll get economies of scale and that will drop the price quite dramatically, but OS licensing fees aren't even in it, Linux doesn't have code to run an ebook reader, and everything that isn't about running an ebook reader isn't necessary, so there's not much gain.
Just because video is the general demo example, doesn't mean that video is all that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc can do. The video tag only affects a subset of what these technologies are about. FFS why does everyone on Slashdot think that every web technology is either flat HTML or about delivering video. Silverlight isn't going to disappear because of the Video tag anymore than you throw away your whole tool box when you buy a new hammer. You might replace your old hammer(and when HTML 5 becomes standard the video tag will probably be the way to display video), but you don't throw away your screwdrivers.
That's who these people are. Google and Amazon in particular have heavy investments in the cloud.
SQL and relational databases work fine for most real purposes, they even scale fairly well. What they don't do, is scale very well via a cloud infrastructure without very serious amounts of data analysis and design. This isn't so much a problem with relational databases or the way they scale, but with the way they distribute. You can't magically throw more small servers at an sql database and make it work faster because they're not designed that way.
Amazon managed to put their databases in a cloud, but only because they did a lot of analysis on their data and found some very convenient patterns. Those patterns don't directly translate to other data sources.
If you have to spend half a million dollars redesigning your database it's cheaper to buy servers than to pay Amazon to host them in the cloud. Amazon and Google both want you to pay them to host your data in the cloud. For obvious reasons that means they want a new database system which works well when applied in small amounts over their "computational unit" servers as opposed to when stuck on a gigantic powerful single server as is the case with current SQL databases. They don't really care if their new alternative is actually any better, just that it's good enough that people find it cheaper to use the cloud, if they can get a cut of the use of the technology as well as the hosting, all the better.
Oh, there are plenty of asses, however, in my experience, only cyclists combine being asses with pretending they have the moral high ground.
I know good cyclists, just as I know good drivers, but this is an asshat toy, it's creating a bike lane just for you, because you're a cyclist and you deserve one. It won't make you safer because it's not a lane, it doesn't create space for you and it doesn't magically move the cars around you.
If you're doing the right thing and the driver is doing the right thing you won't need it, and if you're not or they're not then it won't help. If people want bike lanes they should be proper bike lanes. I like real bike lanes, they keep cyclists in a lane designed for traffic of their own speed, so they can do their thing, and I can do mine(whether I'm walking or driving).
Comcast won't be brought to heel, US internet consumers will be forced to accept bandwidth caps which means Comcast won't need to be assholes to make a profit. All you can eat doesn't work anymore, but the US consumers won't let ISPs end it, so they have to be even more evil than usual.
Well considering that the tier 1 internet server would still have to be able to run the games, meaning Windows, and be able to render the graphics meaning probably nvidia workstation hardware, and the fact that neither company is moronic in their licensing, I'd say it'd be a profit bonanza for those two companies. Microsoft would probably gladly give up a portion of the desktop market to get the enterprise licensing this sort of monstrosity would take.
I have nothing against cyclists per see, it's a bit annoying that they're too slow for regular traffic and two fast for the foot path, but I can live with that if the cyclists respect others on the road and/or they have dedicated lanes(which I approve of).
The problem is that most cyclists(like a lot of people on motor bikes for that matter), really don't respect others on the road, they don't signal properly, they don't keep to safe sides of the lane, they ride down between cars to avoid having to wait their turn like everyone else, and do things like ride in packs slowly to anger drivers for some political bloody reason.
Giving those asshats the belief that everywhere they go is their own dedicated bike lane is just stupid, we all have to share the road, and acting like an ass whether you're in a car or on a bike, is bad form and not helping anything. When you drive like an idiot on a vehicle that provides you with no protection and expect everyone to get out of your way as you ride like a drunken maniac, then you're a darwin award waiting to happen.
Using it by default isn't a particularly dumb decision. It isn't default for non ascii files, and the cases where you wouldn't to convert your file are actually pretty rare for the vast majority of people, and most of the people who would encounter circumstances where it wasn't a good idea know enough to change the defaults.
Primarily because the file transfer is the only point at where you can know exactly what the source and destination formats are without manual intervention. One side knows what the file is and the other knows what it should be, and an automatic conversion can take place. At any other point you'd have to specify one or the other format manually, which would be silly and tedious.
If you don't want that conversion done(like for the Linux SAMBA share) then don't use it, that's why you have the option. ASCII mode converts a data file from being native on the source to being native on the destination, which is a very nice feature for the vast majority of circumstances.
And there's a lot more to the web than "new media" and garbage forums. Stuff you'll never see getting static web pages mailed to you opportunities that will just skip you by.
I know it's fashionable for people on Slashdot to yearn for the old days when all the web did was markup information, and to hate javascript, flash, and anything else which isn't plain old html, but there's a lot of potential for real value in that sort of thing. Value which allows you to provide, with a little work, platform agnostic applications. Java,.NET, AJAX, and any number of other technologies are a very real prt of that.
Now I know that RMS doesn't really want platform agnostic applications, he wants free software applications, but web based applications is a very real part of where things are going and it's a place where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly, at least not yet. If you're serious about free software, ignoring those technologies is a very big mistake. There's a lot more to computing than the web, but the web is one of the areas where free software(Java in particular) can make really huge strides.
Yes, but trying to be an expert on computing without using, or believe in, the web is a bit like trying to be an automotive expert who doesn't use or believe in roads. Yes you can have a car which never goes on roads, and the automotive insight of someone who doesn't use roads can be applicable, but if you don't use your car the way everyone else does, then you're very likely to be out of touch with how everyone else views cars. Same with RMS and computing.
Why are we even arguing all of this, RMS is a raving nutter, and he's just getting nuttier. He is, at the very least paranoid, seeing absolutely everything as the beginning of the end and the thin edge of the wedge. The fact that he's the most vocal advocate of open source is a tragedy for the whole movement. The GNU suite of software is very good, but put RMS in the back room and lock the door, let him code and keep him away from people like the rest of the dungeon nerds.
This isn't really all that big a deal. Electronic voting is a problem because you're trying to make something totally anonymous and be possible to audit at the same time. This is pretty much impossible. If you kept a record of who everyone voted for it would be very easy to audit and a lot of the problems with electronic voting would go away. The EMR is not in anyway anonymous and an audit trail could easily be maintained determining every change, who made it, and when. Verifying integrity under those circumstances is pretty easy. Add to that the fact that your paper record has pretty much zero data integrity as it is(it's missing large amounts of data, is based on translating handwriting, and is generally so full of transcription records it may as well be random), and isn't available when it's needed anyway.
Electronic security isn't really that much of a joke, and even where it is, that's usually caused by trying to deliver information to anyone while at the same time making it secure. Again, pretty much anyone can walk into most hospitals and grab and read a paper chart and read it, so there's not much existing security anyway. Data access really needs to be more contextual than user based anyway.
Easy of data sharing isn't really orthogonal to security either because we're not really looking at maintaining individual access lists anyway. You really are delivering role based access, and if you have good enough logging and audit trails you can almost let doctors assign their own roles, just make the penalty for claiming to be something you're not(ie treating physician) harsh enough that people won't take the risks. The only real difficulty is identifying who people are, and that's more a process issue than a technical one.
For a number of reasons Electronic Medical Records won't happen any time soon. It will probably also be very expensive(mostly because their going to keep funding projects which are doomed to fail for a few more decades). That said, considering the current state of things(I've worked in a hospital) an electronic system couldn't help but be better.
I can tell you what the problem is. It's a problem of process.
Any half decent programmer can implement the framework for an EMR, it's not really all that technically difficult. Providing access to a database isn't hard, putting security descriptors on a database isn't hard, converting physical records to electronic ones isn't all that hard either.
What's hard is getting the data from all the doctors and hospitals into one place, positively identifying the people involved(doctor, patient, etc), working out who ought to be able to see the record and under what circumstances.
Every one of these projects treats the problem as a purely technical problem. It's not, from a purely technical perspective it's not even particularly challenging, a 1st year Uni student could probably implement most of it.
The fundamental problem is that in order to be able to generate a centralized Electronic Medical Record you have to be capable of generating a centralized physical medical record, at least in theory even if it wouldn't be practical. At present, no country has the capability of doing this and so each and every one of these projects fails.
Open source developers primarily work for free, so they work on projects that interest them, either because the problem is interesting, they need or want the features being implemented or implementing the problem will gain them status within the community. That is to say they, like everyone else on this planet, work for personal gain even if it's not monetary in nature.
No amount of user testing is going to change this, because Linux isn't developed for the users, it's developed for the developers. If you want people to do boring stuff which they don't want and which isn't in any way impressive, then you have to motivate them in some other way. This generally means money, and most of the paid Linux programming jobs are on the server side of things.
Note there's nothing wrong with any of this, it's just reality and human nature, when people are doing stuff for fun, they tend to not want to do stuff that isn't fun. Why should they? I'd hazard a guess that a lot of open source developers make a living doing something else and whatever that is will have plenty of boring, tedious stuff which gets you no recognition or reward, why would people want to do more of that at home for free?
Is anyone surprised that an old man who generally wrote dystopian science fiction doesn't like new technology.
Not that I don't like libraries, good libraries are a fantastic place with all sorts of wonderful things. The problem is, for every library with an extensive book catalog, comfortable reading areas, and good enthusiastic qualified libraries, you'll find a few that have almost no books, unqualified or bitter staff, and poor facilities.
With the internet, and a few more iterations on the e-reader technology, and you might be able to deliver the library of congress to nearly everyone in the world, all for almost nothing. It wouldn't be as good as the best of current libraries, but it would be one hell of a lot better than most of the libraries that are actually out there.
Yes, but they're getting together and getting things done 3 years too late. We needed HTML 5 three years ago, not three years from now.
What Microsoft did with IE has caused me more drama than I care to think about, but none of that changes anything.
Standards committees always standardize what is already been done(and for political reasons sometimes it's standardized in a way which totally diverges from what the market is actually doing), they very very rarely standardize what we will be doing.
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There's also a large number of problems created by this solution.
A split process or even split thread model creates a much larger resource footprint than not splitting it on that basis. This is essentially because each process and often times each thread requires it's own copy of shared state in order to be independent. On the other hand, stability between threads and even plugins is actually pretty rarely an issue. Crash to Desktops are pretty rare these days, and performance isn't actually all that terrible.
That's not to say that rearchitecting Firefox to have fewer blocking issues wouldn't be a very good idea, but there's certainly some arguments to be made that the Chrome and IE 8 models aren't the ideal solution. Personally I think that from a purely technical point of view IE 6 actually has the right model(when it's enabled), sad as that makes me since everything else about that application is atrocious and outdated. New windows/tabs(yes I know IE 6 doesn't have tabs, but that's not the point) created from one core process all share the same process. Windows created by reloading the application don't share state with the other windows at all. This would mean you could create independent processes for the times it matters(where a crash to that tab/window would have negative consequences, but share threads between tabs/windows that don't matter so they use fewer resources. Combine that with some additional threading on activities which are likely to block and you'd probably have a better overall solution than Chrome.
There is a tradeoff between reliability and performance and sometimes the reliability just isn't worth the cost. It's like getting nine nines for a data center. You can do it, but it's going to cost you an absolutely stupendous amount of money, and in most cases it just isn't worth it.
That was a brain lapse, BSD or Windows should read BSD or Linux.
That presumes that criminals are smart.
Personally I'm not sure exactly how to feel about this. Mobile phones don't trace your exact location, and the police are requesting the data through proper legal channels.
The problem here seems more to do with whether a subpoena is appropriate for this information and perhaps more importantly whether subpoenas ought to be granted simply as a matter of course. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the police requesting this sort of data as part of a criminal investigation with proper warrants and the like. The problem is whether it would be too easy to get this information when it isn't appropriate.
If you like being a tech and you want to be a tech and you haven't had any real problems being a tech, then keep being a tech. You're 39, not 90 and can in all likelihood continue to do whatever you set your mind to for another 20 years or so. If you like management and want to be in management take that job, if you really want to be a pastry chef go do that. Life's too damned short to do something other than what you want to do just because you're afraid it might be hard.
There's a lot of other factors involved of course, there's different kinds of tech jobs some of which are less volatile than the web side of things, there's management jobs which are more technical and management jobs which are less technical. There's the question of whether you're any good at being a manager, or whether you're any good at being a tech, but none of them really matter.
A lot of people will tell you to think of the future, think of where you can get if you do this or do that. They're probably also going to tell you to take the management path because that's the path to big bucks, and that could be the right choice for you, it could also not be. Do what you love if it's at all possible, and if it's not try to find something that's as close as you can get because going to work every day in a job you hate isn't worth it.
I didn't say all these ideas are full of shit, some are demonstrably not, and certainly there are plenty of stupid venture capitalists(see the .COM fiasco for evidence).
However, "only a 24 year old could understand this" isn't about selling good ideas to 50 year olds. Selling good ideas is easy because if they're really demonstrably good ideas you can show the 50 year olds how it will make money. If it doesn't make money then it's not a good idea, or at least it's not a good idea to invest in if you want return on your money. Facebook and YouTube are not good ideas, from the venture capitalist perspective at least, because not matter how popular they are, they don't actually make any real money(money from other people buying them doesn't count, revenue is what matters). Yes there's a certain amount of blind faith that the way the person says money will be made will actually work, but that's not the ideas this schmuck is going to sell.
He doesn't have a perspective, he has a line of bullshit.
The "only the young can be this innovative" line is an old one. The basic premise is that the reason why the 50 year olds with all the money don't understand the idea is because they're old, not because the idea is full of shit. It works because a lot of 50 year olds are afraid they're old and out of touch and will pretend the idea is good to seem young, sort of an emperors new clothes type of thing if you see what I mean.
This guy doesn't really believe his own bullshit, he just wants to make a lot of money out of pretending he does.
You're right, my brain was dead, replace OLED with e-Ink. Either way, putting linux on it is pretty much going to do nothing for the cost. To be honest I wouldn't be all that surprised if it's running some form of BSD or windows as is. It's sure as hell not windows.
I'm not sure where people get this acceptable wear levels for SSD's thing.
All the math I've seen indicates that, presuming reasonable wear algorithms, if you write the volume of your data to disk every day your drive will last for about 30 years and that it will scale linearly with shifts up or down in that amount. An ordinary hard disk lasts about 5 years, so for your 8 GB disk you'd have to be writing approximately 48 GB of data to it every single day in order for it to not last longer than a current HD, and the SSD is still readable at the end(though this isn't super important for caching). That's certainly not an implausible amount of data, even for a home desktop user, but it is fairly high, and since it's fairly linear, you'd reach a feasible number for pretty much any ordinary data set well before 64 GB, let alone 256 GB
I think that it's probably also inaccurate to say that SSD's will never replace HDD's. Hard drive sizes are certainly increasing, but the need for capacity isn't increasing anywhere near as fast. Under present usage patterns, most users will never fill a 1 TB drive within the lifetime of the drive, certainly not with anything that can't be archived. If you can get price point down to 25 cents per GB it would probably be worthwhile to use them in pretty much any circumstance excluding applications involving really heavy writes or a lot of long linear reads. Data Center Storage is already substantially more expensive than that, and the extra speed would make up for a lot of space issues. Even if you had to use 4 disks instead of 1.
That price point probably won't be met in the next year or so, but it's certainly achievable within the next couple. True by then HDD's may be 4 TB for the same price or more, but a couple of TB you don't need vs a faster system isn't much of a choice.
If you've still got an external(or internal) physical HDD, then SSD's have not taken over. They've become a part of a new solution, not replaced an old solution.
First of all, open source and open standards are two totally separate things.
Second, I'm fairly certain that the biggest cost in those things is the screen, followed by the hardware, followed by the name recognition mark up(Sony, Amazon), the percentage of the cost that the OS creates on a device whose entire purpose is to store, index, and display documents in a limited subset of formats is just not even worth mentioning. Half of slashdot could knock that kind of system up in a couple of months on their own.
E-book readers are expensive because the OLED screens which are so necessary for them to be even remotely comfortable to read are really new technology and still really expensive and because the hardware is specialized largely to the purpose. Eventually we'll get economies of scale and that will drop the price quite dramatically, but OS licensing fees aren't even in it, Linux doesn't have code to run an ebook reader, and everything that isn't about running an ebook reader isn't necessary, so there's not much gain.
Just because video is the general demo example, doesn't mean that video is all that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc can do. The video tag only affects a subset of what these technologies are about. FFS why does everyone on Slashdot think that every web technology is either flat HTML or about delivering video. Silverlight isn't going to disappear because of the Video tag anymore than you throw away your whole tool box when you buy a new hammer. You might replace your old hammer(and when HTML 5 becomes standard the video tag will probably be the way to display video), but you don't throw away your screwdrivers.
That's who these people are. Google and Amazon in particular have heavy investments in the cloud.
SQL and relational databases work fine for most real purposes, they even scale fairly well. What they don't do, is scale very well via a cloud infrastructure without very serious amounts of data analysis and design. This isn't so much a problem with relational databases or the way they scale, but with the way they distribute. You can't magically throw more small servers at an sql database and make it work faster because they're not designed that way.
Amazon managed to put their databases in a cloud, but only because they did a lot of analysis on their data and found some very convenient patterns. Those patterns don't directly translate to other data sources.
If you have to spend half a million dollars redesigning your database it's cheaper to buy servers than to pay Amazon to host them in the cloud. Amazon and Google both want you to pay them to host your data in the cloud. For obvious reasons that means they want a new database system which works well when applied in small amounts over their "computational unit" servers as opposed to when stuck on a gigantic powerful single server as is the case with current SQL databases. They don't really care if their new alternative is actually any better, just that it's good enough that people find it cheaper to use the cloud, if they can get a cut of the use of the technology as well as the hosting, all the better.
Oh, there are plenty of asses, however, in my experience, only cyclists combine being asses with pretending they have the moral high ground.
I know good cyclists, just as I know good drivers, but this is an asshat toy, it's creating a bike lane just for you, because you're a cyclist and you deserve one. It won't make you safer because it's not a lane, it doesn't create space for you and it doesn't magically move the cars around you.
If you're doing the right thing and the driver is doing the right thing you won't need it, and if you're not or they're not then it won't help. If people want bike lanes they should be proper bike lanes. I like real bike lanes, they keep cyclists in a lane designed for traffic of their own speed, so they can do their thing, and I can do mine(whether I'm walking or driving).
Comcast won't be brought to heel, US internet consumers will be forced to accept bandwidth caps which means Comcast won't need to be assholes to make a profit. All you can eat doesn't work anymore, but the US consumers won't let ISPs end it, so they have to be even more evil than usual.
Well considering that the tier 1 internet server would still have to be able to run the games, meaning Windows, and be able to render the graphics meaning probably nvidia workstation hardware, and the fact that neither company is moronic in their licensing, I'd say it'd be a profit bonanza for those two companies. Microsoft would probably gladly give up a portion of the desktop market to get the enterprise licensing this sort of monstrosity would take.
I have nothing against cyclists per see, it's a bit annoying that they're too slow for regular traffic and two fast for the foot path, but I can live with that if the cyclists respect others on the road and/or they have dedicated lanes(which I approve of).
The problem is that most cyclists(like a lot of people on motor bikes for that matter), really don't respect others on the road, they don't signal properly, they don't keep to safe sides of the lane, they ride down between cars to avoid having to wait their turn like everyone else, and do things like ride in packs slowly to anger drivers for some political bloody reason.
Giving those asshats the belief that everywhere they go is their own dedicated bike lane is just stupid, we all have to share the road, and acting like an ass whether you're in a car or on a bike, is bad form and not helping anything. When you drive like an idiot on a vehicle that provides you with no protection and expect everyone to get out of your way as you ride like a drunken maniac, then you're a darwin award waiting to happen.
Using it by default isn't a particularly dumb decision. It isn't default for non ascii files, and the cases where you wouldn't to convert your file are actually pretty rare for the vast majority of people, and most of the people who would encounter circumstances where it wasn't a good idea know enough to change the defaults.
Primarily because the file transfer is the only point at where you can know exactly what the source and destination formats are without manual intervention. One side knows what the file is and the other knows what it should be, and an automatic conversion can take place. At any other point you'd have to specify one or the other format manually, which would be silly and tedious.
If you don't want that conversion done(like for the Linux SAMBA share) then don't use it, that's why you have the option. ASCII mode converts a data file from being native on the source to being native on the destination, which is a very nice feature for the vast majority of circumstances.
And there's a lot more to the web than "new media" and garbage forums. Stuff you'll never see getting static web pages mailed to you opportunities that will just skip you by.
I know it's fashionable for people on Slashdot to yearn for the old days when all the web did was markup information, and to hate javascript, flash, and anything else which isn't plain old html, but there's a lot of potential for real value in that sort of thing. Value which allows you to provide, with a little work, platform agnostic applications. Java, .NET, AJAX, and any number of other technologies are a very real prt of that.
Now I know that RMS doesn't really want platform agnostic applications, he wants free software applications, but web based applications is a very real part of where things are going and it's a place where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly, at least not yet. If you're serious about free software, ignoring those technologies is a very big mistake. There's a lot more to computing than the web, but the web is one of the areas where free software(Java in particular) can make really huge strides.
Yes, but trying to be an expert on computing without using, or believe in, the web is a bit like trying to be an automotive expert who doesn't use or believe in roads. Yes you can have a car which never goes on roads, and the automotive insight of someone who doesn't use roads can be applicable, but if you don't use your car the way everyone else does, then you're very likely to be out of touch with how everyone else views cars. Same with RMS and computing.
Why are we even arguing all of this, RMS is a raving nutter, and he's just getting nuttier. He is, at the very least paranoid, seeing absolutely everything as the beginning of the end and the thin edge of the wedge. The fact that he's the most vocal advocate of open source is a tragedy for the whole movement. The GNU suite of software is very good, but put RMS in the back room and lock the door, let him code and keep him away from people like the rest of the dungeon nerds.
For a number of reasons Electronic Medical Records won't happen any time soon. It will probably also be very expensive(mostly because their going to keep funding projects which are doomed to fail for a few more decades). That said, considering the current state of things(I've worked in a hospital) an electronic system couldn't help but be better.
I can tell you what the problem is. It's a problem of process.
Any half decent programmer can implement the framework for an EMR, it's not really all that technically difficult. Providing access to a database isn't hard, putting security descriptors on a database isn't hard, converting physical records to electronic ones isn't all that hard either.
What's hard is getting the data from all the doctors and hospitals into one place, positively identifying the people involved(doctor, patient, etc), working out who ought to be able to see the record and under what circumstances.
Every one of these projects treats the problem as a purely technical problem. It's not, from a purely technical perspective it's not even particularly challenging, a 1st year Uni student could probably implement most of it.
The fundamental problem is that in order to be able to generate a centralized Electronic Medical Record you have to be capable of generating a centralized physical medical record, at least in theory even if it wouldn't be practical. At present, no country has the capability of doing this and so each and every one of these projects fails.
Open source developers primarily work for free, so they work on projects that interest them, either because the problem is interesting, they need or want the features being implemented or implementing the problem will gain them status within the community. That is to say they, like everyone else on this planet, work for personal gain even if it's not monetary in nature.
No amount of user testing is going to change this, because Linux isn't developed for the users, it's developed for the developers. If you want people to do boring stuff which they don't want and which isn't in any way impressive, then you have to motivate them in some other way. This generally means money, and most of the paid Linux programming jobs are on the server side of things.
Note there's nothing wrong with any of this, it's just reality and human nature, when people are doing stuff for fun, they tend to not want to do stuff that isn't fun. Why should they? I'd hazard a guess that a lot of open source developers make a living doing something else and whatever that is will have plenty of boring, tedious stuff which gets you no recognition or reward, why would people want to do more of that at home for free?
Is anyone surprised that an old man who generally wrote dystopian science fiction doesn't like new technology.
Not that I don't like libraries, good libraries are a fantastic place with all sorts of wonderful things. The problem is, for every library with an extensive book catalog, comfortable reading areas, and good enthusiastic qualified libraries, you'll find a few that have almost no books, unqualified or bitter staff, and poor facilities.
With the internet, and a few more iterations on the e-reader technology, and you might be able to deliver the library of congress to nearly everyone in the world, all for almost nothing. It wouldn't be as good as the best of current libraries, but it would be one hell of a lot better than most of the libraries that are actually out there.
Yes, but they're getting together and getting things done 3 years too late. We needed HTML 5 three years ago, not three years from now.
What Microsoft did with IE has caused me more drama than I care to think about, but none of that changes anything.
Standards committees always standardize what is already been done(and for political reasons sometimes it's standardized in a way which totally diverges from what the market is actually doing), they very very rarely standardize what we will be doing.