I'd be very interested to see where you can get a current (by which I mean less than about a year old) computer with RS-232 or SCSI interfaces. SCSI was never all that widespread, at least in the PC (vs. Mac) world - I used to own a lot of SCSI gear, and always had to buy interface card. And I haven't seen a new computer with a serial port in many, many years.
"Bloat" implies useless or unnecessary growth in file size, which is just not what we're talking about here. Sure, simple text files were nice and small, but they were... simple text files. What's your solution? That people stop exchanging pictures, video, and rich text? The tl;dr version of your post: you kids get off my lawn.
Copy a 500GB system image to a NAS over 10Mbit and get back to me (should take about 4.7 days).
How often do people actually do that? I'm not saying it never happens, but seriously. Copying your entire system image is not something most people do all that often.
I used to play a game called "Harpoon 2" (a naval warfare sim) on the original Pentium. Once more than a few contacts were present, it was dog slow. Slow to the point where you'd make some moves, enter, then go get a cup of coffee while the machine thought for a few minutes. Game time would advance by 30 seconds. Repeat. Later I loaded it up on a P4, and was pleasantly surprised to find the game was actually playable.
And that experience was not unique to that one application - just about any application that felt slow on older machines was pretty snappy by the time P4's rolled out. Intel, AMD, et al, simply threw speed at the problem faster than developers could soak it up. I'm hard pressed to think of ANYTHING I use on a routine basis that really bogs the machine down, and that certainly didn't used to be the case. Sure, those folks who do stuff like 3d rendering and similar very computationally intense tasks are still feeling the need for more speed, but really: you wouldn't have even been able to do that stuff on older machines. That's not a case of code bloat.
... deflation is probably not a big deal unless you have a loan denominated in Bitcoins, and none of those are likely to be made, well, ever. Which leads to the larger point: there's never going to be a Bitcoin dominated economy. To provide sufficient money supply to do anything with, you need demand deposits, which means you need banks that deal in Bitcoins. But Bitcoins were designed to cut banks out of the picture, so no checking accounts, so not very much money supply, so no possibility of a Bitcoin economy of any size.
The whole saga of Bitcoins is a classic example of developer hubris. Nakamoto didn't really know anything about economics, but hey, he was a hotshot programmer, how hard could it be? Bitcoin could have been a much bigger deal if it had been thought out more, but as it is, it won't amount to much beyond a pyramid scheme combined with a method of buying weed online.
... but I just noticed that the point of closing the Panama Canal was to deny access to US Navy ships, vs. merchants. That makes even less sense - the US Pacific fleet could whip the Chinese fleet all by itself, several times over, without any help from the Atlantic fleet.
People who make these kinds of statements about war with China need to think about it a little. 1) The Chinese own tons of our bonds, and if they were to some how beat us, the bonds would now be... worthless. 2) If they decided to do "financial warfare" by dumping the bonds, that takes time to accomplish, and the act of dumping the first increment of bonds would rapidly depress the price of the remaining bonds. They'd lose tons of money. 3) How many US flagged ships do you think go through the Panama Canal? The answer is practically freaking none, as we barely even have a merchant marine any more. What are they going to do, stop sending their own ships, full of their own export goods, through the canal?
The fact of the matter is that the US and China are very tightly tied together, economically speaking. Anything they do to hurt us is going to cause an enormous amount of pain for themselves. Unless something really inconceivably stupid happens (perhaps involving Taiwan), there's approximately zero chance of war with China.
... lists the issuance of letters of marque as a war crime. Not to mention that they applied to war at sea, not in cyberspace. Not to mention that I'm not real comfortable with the idea of subcontracting our national security affairs to LulzSec (or equivalent).
I'm sort of dubious that we even NEED a "cyber" "warfare" capability, but if we do, maybe getting the military to do it isn't such a bad thing.
Re: 1) This is my biggest beef with the iPhone. My last phone was a Treo 650, before that I had a couple of other Palm devices (which used the original Graffiti system). On any of those, either the keyboard based Treo or the Graffiti based devices, I could take notes just about as fast as I could write. With the iPhone... not so much. The soft keyboard sort of blows. But I wouldn't trade a bigger screen to get a real keyboard, I guess.
Re: 4) My experience with iPhone and ActiveSync has been that it Just Works. I didn't even require any assistance from our IT shop - I just pointed the iPhone to the OWA server, put in my details, and I had mail, calendar, etc. Easy. No idea about the security, etc, but it certainly couldn't be any easier to set up or use.
Also: I think your arguments are spot on for the person who's using their smartphone to do business stuff. But if you are doing other things with it, the iPhone has a lot to offer - just as an example, I like to fish, and I need to know what the tides are. There's an app for that. I also need to know sunrise/sunset times. There's an app for that. I'm watching my weight. There's an app for that. Etc, etc.
A few years ago, Hurricane Isabel blew through my part of the world, causing a lot of severe damage. My power was out for almost three days. I had no cell service (damage to either the tower or its power supply, I'm not sure which), no cable service for quite a while even after the power came back on, etc. But! I had kept an old Princess phone around (my wireless handset was useless, obvs), and as a result, had POTS the whole time. Luckily, we didn't have any emergencies, but if we had, I could have called someone.
I'm not so well prepared any more - we replaced our landline service with your standard TV/Internet/phone bundle (Verizon FiOS). While this system has a battery backup that will allow phone calls for an hour or so after lights out, after that... if the cell service is also down, I guess it's back to smoke signals.
Wow, so Forbes magazine wants to dismantle a government organization and replace it with private industry? What a surprise.
Yes, TSA rules are sort of insane and should be fixed. I'm absolutely mystified by why they think industry would do better. "Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out." Right, Forbes, like they weeded it out before, you know, 9/11 happened? Give me a break.
Being able to make the leads with a pen is all very nice, but what about actual components? Call me when you can draw a functioning capacitor, transistor, etc. Until then, I don't really know what you'd do with this.
Joe (picks up stick in parking lot): Hmm, I could use an extra one of these. (tosses in desk drawer)
(next week)Sally: Hey Joe, I've got to bring some files to a meeting at the customer site. Got a spare stick?
Joe: Sure, Sally, use this one.
Now between them Joe and Sally have not only infected their own network, but also their customer's. No amount of user training provided to Sally and the customer would have been sufficient to stop this - only the OS is in a position to save the day here.
People are inherently unreliable - machines shouldn't be.
Lots of these are jokes, and I'd like to see some evidence that they ever actually appeared in manuals. The "do not look at laser with remaining eye" thing is a standard laser safety joke that's been going around for years. This whole thing is pretty lame.
The technology isn't the issue. We can do video calling right now, and have been able to do so for some time. The thing is that people don't WANT video calling.
But plain old telephone technology is ancient.
Lots of technology is ancient. I walked up the stairs to my office today, even though the building has an elevator. People still write with pencil and paper. Electricity is still transmitted with 60 Hz A/C technology that Tesla would recognize. The point is that technology upgrades aren't an end in themselves - they need to meet some need people have. And people don't apparently need to do video calling.
He just wanted to spin the results in a certain way. Even on Slashdot, though, there's only so much spin you can get away with without people noticing.
Is still a pretty big deal. If everyone cut the transportation portion of their fossil fuel use by a third, we could put a big dent oil imports and cut pollution by quite a bit (probably even more than a third cut in this, as it's easier to capture pollution from one big smokestack than from millions of tiny ones). Additionally, you'd probably actually cut energy usage by more than a third, because electric vehicles are a lot more energy efficient than internal combustion ones (most of your energy is lost as heat). Further, as wind/solar/nuclear use replace coal/oil/natural gas, you automatically improve all this stuff without having to do anything else, just because your cars instantly become even less dependent on fossil fuels.
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Switching to electric cars would be a big step forward.
Mostly, people just aren't that keen on video calling. It's honestly kind of a pain: you have to keep looking at the screen, avoid scratching your face, or doing anything else while you're talking. With a plain old audio call, you can lay around on the bed in your underwear while simultaneously reading slashdot during the boring parts of the conversation. We've had the technology to do video calling for quite a while - people just aren't that into it.
So put up all your pictures from your visit to the local art museum for all to see, and put up your drunken binge photos restricted to just your friends. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be very interested to see where you can get a current (by which I mean less than about a year old) computer with RS-232 or SCSI interfaces. SCSI was never all that widespread, at least in the PC (vs. Mac) world - I used to own a lot of SCSI gear, and always had to buy interface card. And I haven't seen a new computer with a serial port in many, many years.
"Bloat" implies useless or unnecessary growth in file size, which is just not what we're talking about here. Sure, simple text files were nice and small, but they were... simple text files. What's your solution? That people stop exchanging pictures, video, and rich text? The tl;dr version of your post: you kids get off my lawn.
How often do people actually do that? I'm not saying it never happens, but seriously. Copying your entire system image is not something most people do all that often.
I used to play a game called "Harpoon 2" (a naval warfare sim) on the original Pentium. Once more than a few contacts were present, it was dog slow. Slow to the point where you'd make some moves, enter, then go get a cup of coffee while the machine thought for a few minutes. Game time would advance by 30 seconds. Repeat. Later I loaded it up on a P4, and was pleasantly surprised to find the game was actually playable.
And that experience was not unique to that one application - just about any application that felt slow on older machines was pretty snappy by the time P4's rolled out. Intel, AMD, et al, simply threw speed at the problem faster than developers could soak it up. I'm hard pressed to think of ANYTHING I use on a routine basis that really bogs the machine down, and that certainly didn't used to be the case. Sure, those folks who do stuff like 3d rendering and similar very computationally intense tasks are still feeling the need for more speed, but really: you wouldn't have even been able to do that stuff on older machines. That's not a case of code bloat.
Riiiight, I just won't use my AC. Got it.
... deflation is probably not a big deal unless you have a loan denominated in Bitcoins, and none of those are likely to be made, well, ever. Which leads to the larger point: there's never going to be a Bitcoin dominated economy. To provide sufficient money supply to do anything with, you need demand deposits, which means you need banks that deal in Bitcoins. But Bitcoins were designed to cut banks out of the picture, so no checking accounts, so not very much money supply, so no possibility of a Bitcoin economy of any size.
The whole saga of Bitcoins is a classic example of developer hubris. Nakamoto didn't really know anything about economics, but hey, he was a hotshot programmer, how hard could it be? Bitcoin could have been a much bigger deal if it had been thought out more, but as it is, it won't amount to much beyond a pyramid scheme combined with a method of buying weed online.
MMILF
... but I just noticed that the point of closing the Panama Canal was to deny access to US Navy ships, vs. merchants. That makes even less sense - the US Pacific fleet could whip the Chinese fleet all by itself, several times over, without any help from the Atlantic fleet.
People who make these kinds of statements about war with China need to think about it a little. 1) The Chinese own tons of our bonds, and if they were to some how beat us, the bonds would now be... worthless. 2) If they decided to do "financial warfare" by dumping the bonds, that takes time to accomplish, and the act of dumping the first increment of bonds would rapidly depress the price of the remaining bonds. They'd lose tons of money. 3) How many US flagged ships do you think go through the Panama Canal? The answer is practically freaking none, as we barely even have a merchant marine any more. What are they going to do, stop sending their own ships, full of their own export goods, through the canal?
The fact of the matter is that the US and China are very tightly tied together, economically speaking. Anything they do to hurt us is going to cause an enormous amount of pain for themselves. Unless something really inconceivably stupid happens (perhaps involving Taiwan), there's approximately zero chance of war with China.
... lists the issuance of letters of marque as a war crime. Not to mention that they applied to war at sea, not in cyberspace. Not to mention that I'm not real comfortable with the idea of subcontracting our national security affairs to LulzSec (or equivalent).
I'm sort of dubious that we even NEED a "cyber" "warfare" capability, but if we do, maybe getting the military to do it isn't such a bad thing.
Long time iPhone user here. A couple of comments:
Re: 1) This is my biggest beef with the iPhone. My last phone was a Treo 650, before that I had a couple of other Palm devices (which used the original Graffiti system). On any of those, either the keyboard based Treo or the Graffiti based devices, I could take notes just about as fast as I could write. With the iPhone... not so much. The soft keyboard sort of blows. But I wouldn't trade a bigger screen to get a real keyboard, I guess.
Re: 4) My experience with iPhone and ActiveSync has been that it Just Works. I didn't even require any assistance from our IT shop - I just pointed the iPhone to the OWA server, put in my details, and I had mail, calendar, etc. Easy. No idea about the security, etc, but it certainly couldn't be any easier to set up or use.
Also: I think your arguments are spot on for the person who's using their smartphone to do business stuff. But if you are doing other things with it, the iPhone has a lot to offer - just as an example, I like to fish, and I need to know what the tides are. There's an app for that. I also need to know sunrise/sunset times. There's an app for that. I'm watching my weight. There's an app for that. Etc, etc.
A few years ago, Hurricane Isabel blew through my part of the world, causing a lot of severe damage. My power was out for almost three days. I had no cell service (damage to either the tower or its power supply, I'm not sure which), no cable service for quite a while even after the power came back on, etc. But! I had kept an old Princess phone around (my wireless handset was useless, obvs), and as a result, had POTS the whole time. Luckily, we didn't have any emergencies, but if we had, I could have called someone.
I'm not so well prepared any more - we replaced our landline service with your standard TV/Internet/phone bundle (Verizon FiOS). While this system has a battery backup that will allow phone calls for an hour or so after lights out, after that... if the cell service is also down, I guess it's back to smoke signals.
Wow, so Forbes magazine wants to dismantle a government organization and replace it with private industry? What a surprise.
Yes, TSA rules are sort of insane and should be fixed. I'm absolutely mystified by why they think industry would do better. "Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out." Right, Forbes, like they weeded it out before, you know, 9/11 happened? Give me a break.
Being able to make the leads with a pen is all very nice, but what about actual components? Call me when you can draw a functioning capacitor, transistor, etc. Until then, I don't really know what you'd do with this.
Joe (picks up stick in parking lot): Hmm, I could use an extra one of these. (tosses in desk drawer)
(next week)Sally: Hey Joe, I've got to bring some files to a meeting at the customer site. Got a spare stick?
Joe: Sure, Sally, use this one.
Now between them Joe and Sally have not only infected their own network, but also their customer's. No amount of user training provided to Sally and the customer would have been sufficient to stop this - only the OS is in a position to save the day here.
People are inherently unreliable - machines shouldn't be.
Only old people are still talking about coverage, speed, and pricing in Korea.
... are using Pool++
I was in New York a few years ago and the river water didn't seem all that bad.
So what you're saying is... Hulu is cable TV?/p?
Lots of these are jokes, and I'd like to see some evidence that they ever actually appeared in manuals. The "do not look at laser with remaining eye" thing is a standard laser safety joke that's been going around for years. This whole thing is pretty lame.
The technology isn't the issue. We can do video calling right now, and have been able to do so for some time. The thing is that people don't WANT video calling.
Lots of technology is ancient. I walked up the stairs to my office today, even though the building has an elevator. People still write with pencil and paper. Electricity is still transmitted with 60 Hz A/C technology that Tesla would recognize. The point is that technology upgrades aren't an end in themselves - they need to meet some need people have. And people don't apparently need to do video calling.
He just wanted to spin the results in a certain way. Even on Slashdot, though, there's only so much spin you can get away with without people noticing.
Is still a pretty big deal. If everyone cut the transportation portion of their fossil fuel use by a third, we could put a big dent oil imports and cut pollution by quite a bit (probably even more than a third cut in this, as it's easier to capture pollution from one big smokestack than from millions of tiny ones). Additionally, you'd probably actually cut energy usage by more than a third, because electric vehicles are a lot more energy efficient than internal combustion ones (most of your energy is lost as heat). Further, as wind/solar/nuclear use replace coal/oil/natural gas, you automatically improve all this stuff without having to do anything else, just because your cars instantly become even less dependent on fossil fuels.
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Switching to electric cars would be a big step forward.
Mostly, people just aren't that keen on video calling. It's honestly kind of a pain: you have to keep looking at the screen, avoid scratching your face, or doing anything else while you're talking. With a plain old audio call, you can lay around on the bed in your underwear while simultaneously reading slashdot during the boring parts of the conversation. We've had the technology to do video calling for quite a while - people just aren't that into it.
So put up all your pictures from your visit to the local art museum for all to see, and put up your drunken binge photos restricted to just your friends. Problem solved.