I try not to get into conspiracy theories and all that, but when you wonder who 9/11 was profitable for, I can start to believe that whether they knew or not about the threat, trying to prevent the attack would have been less profitable for the Bush administration and all the companies that back it, than letting it happen.
Effectively, this had given new justifications for those privacy infringements, for attacking Iraq (something that Rumsfeld has wanted to do since 98 at least) etc etc
Hm, did I mention I was trying not to get into conspiracy theories...
Ok, I'd not really read the article, just had a glance at it quite fast and didn't really see it was more about the private sector scooping on you, not the government. However from a European point of view it seems that there isn't really any boundary between government and corporations in the USA, so I guess my previous post is still valid?
This sounds to me very much like what Poindexter is doing/wants to do with DARPA and their various projects. Check out the TIA (Total Information Awareness) programme in particular, if you haven't heard about it yet.
This is old news, but somehow those things manage to remain fairly hidden, and just resurface once in a while. Esp. when America is at war, and people are just focused on Iraq news.
Where did you find this? The main document linked to dates from March 26th, 2003, and the reports mostly have dates around November 2002. Maybe not exactly news, but not as outdated as you seem to suggest.
Yeah so when they get out after their 3 years they can commit a serious crime and get death penalty for it. Now Texas can effectively get rid of file traders.
Speeds seem to be terrible on all of the services I've used. Kazaa (Kazaalite) has the ability to download from multiple users, making up for that a little bit.
Applications such as Kazaa let you configure how many uploads you accept at the same time, and you can cap the upload speed as well.
The faster p2p application I know was probably Audiogalaxy, where you could not cap the speed, and if you wanted to be able to download 10 tracks simultaneously, you had to allow 10 simultaneous uploads as well. Also, it would try and connect you with the user who you could get the fastest download from.
This is not important in the server market. I would be surprised to see too many people buy servers pre-installed with Windows, only to re-install Linux. Major vendors already have Linux preinstall options.
Good point, I don't know how I actually missed that. I'm really not impressed by this article, very vague and now indeed this desktop/server confusion.
However it seems to me, if we're talking of the x86 based server market, that with very few low-end servers exceptions, most will be shipped with no OS preinstalled at all. The most common option will be an installation help CD with a RAID configuration tool, drivers etc that supports several OS's inc. WinNT and w2k and different flavours of Linux, but no OS as such.
I tend to agree that the article is actually pretty vague: - it's difficult to count how many people use Windows. - it's difficult to count how many people use Linux - however it seems that a very vague survey says that developers are more and more into Linux, so that means good news for Linux in terms of market share.
Hm, I don't really see why 2 pages were needed to say that.
I was just wondering: How do you install a Microsoft OS on a RAID volume knowing that x86-64 is getting rid of legacy devices like floppies (see the IBM x-series 450 eg.)?
Slackware wasn't actually my first distro, back in 2000 (long time Linux user indeed...) I first installed Mandrake 8.0, but due to my fantastic computer specs - Cyrix 300, 32megs RAM etc... - I needed something a bit less heavy, and installed Slackware 7.1 (or 7.0?).
I've learnt much more with Slackware than I would have had I used Mandrake or Red Hat etc. I think that's one of the keys about choosing your first distribution - do you want it up and running directly and are you going to be using the GUI all the time? Or do you actually want to spend some time on it and try to understand how the system works?
The only minor glitch imho, is that some of the major distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE have moved more from the original Unix than Slack has, you don't find the settings in the same places etc.. so that Slackware is kind of getting away from the new Linux standards, which can be annoying when you're supposed to support some RH systems occasionally. But then it isn't Slack's fault.
I've tried other Red Hat and Mandrake etc.. since then, and keep getting frustrated with them for various reasons, and keep coming back to Slack:)
In good/. fashion I haven't read the articles and don't know if they mention the bitrate, but even so I'd be amazed if AOL offered anything at a quality higher than 128 kbps MP3s. Paying for audio files of low quality? No, thanks.
For me a blog still means a weblog, ie. a collection of links, not some kind of journal (although I love some of the livejournal entries - teen diaries more than anything really.).
How can you really surf and spot places you want to link to with a mobile phone? Ok, so it is getting better than it used to with the new generation of big colour screen mobile phones, but I still can't imagine surfing around from my phone and updating my blog from there.
And the phone keyboards?! R we going 2 c journals updated in abbreviated style?
It just seems to me that it can only be a way to get even more irritating teen journals getting published on the web. Not so good.
Why was this story posted at 1am (local time), I would've liked to answer earlier on!
I don't think Intel are on the right track there either.
I've had the chance to have some training on an Itanium2 based server with the EFI shell. From what I saw, the whole thing was for me only intended at developers. I don't know whether this is all to do with the EFI shell or the x86 64 bit architecture, but the boot process is quite different to what I've been used to. As was already mentioned, floppy drives are not supported at all. The keyboard, video and mouse only get initialised when you get to your boot loader. Which was after 2 minutes at least. Extremely slow.
Getting to the boot loader we then had several options, including OS, diagnostics, boot loader configuration, and the EFI Shell itself.
What I can say about the shell is that it is anything but intuitive. It's a bastard mix of UNIX and DOS commands. The parameters are much more limited, ls only supports 3 or 4 attributes eg. No auto-completion, no screen scrolling (-b after each command to show only one page at a time) etc. Maybe we did something wrong, but if a CDrom was inserted after we'd accessed the EFI Shell, it wasn't seen and we couldn't mount it. The BIOS/firmware flash update thing via a CD or a USB key is alright, although I suppose I still find a floppy disk more practical.
Which I think is one of the main points. Why so much bloat in place of the BIOS? I don't think there's anything in there that you cannot do by booting on a floppy eg. But then floppies are passé. Oh well. Your mum won't understand the EFI shell. And why it takes so long to get video on the screen after you've powered the machine on. (The time Windows takes to boot afterwards is slow in comparison). Improvement? I still need to be convinced.
In a simple historical test of the technique, Kleinberg analysed all the annual State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790. He found that particular word "bursts" could indeed be linked to important events at the time the speeches were delivered.
Has an important increase of the use of the word "nukular" been reported in the last few weeks then?
Avril, Blink 182 etc are good marketing tools to make kids who think they don't want to adhere to society, effectively adhere to it.
This is probably not a bad idea from Microsoft to indeed try to ensure a new generation uses their products, however the IM market is absolutely bloated, you've got your friends on AIM, those on MSN, those on ICQ etc. (Tip, drop them all, just keep those on IRC;) Do people really need yet another protocol? The market seems to be going more for clients such as Trillian incorporating several protocols. Will it really be anything more than a MSN replacement?
Targeting another market, Lotus's new Sametime client (or has it changed name too?) is meant to be quite good and incorporating many features as well.
You can surely convert DVD's to Divx very fast with the upcoming IBM x-series 450, with what should be up to 4 Itanium 64-bit CPUs. Not sure it'll be worth the expense though!
Now, if you take a look at most sites, you will see that the most popular browsers are IE, followed by Netscape Navigator 4.7, followed by Netscape 6.x (including Mozilla), and finally trailed VERY FAR BEHIND by Opera.
Some interesting stats would be what percentage of people use Opera, identifying as Opera, and not Mozilla or IE.
I don't use Opera much anymore (restricted at work, thanks for phoenix.zip:) , but I remember identifying as Opera most of the times - for the webmasters stats - but often had to identify as IE to access some sites.
Tsk, and how would we get arguments about the best distro if one day everything came under a United Linux? Go on, admit you would miss the flame wars:)
Nothing that I find surprising in that article, except maybe the fact that DVDs are the same price as CDs in the US, as I don't think that's the case yet in Europe.
Given the choice between 45 min of music, or a film and extras for the same price, there's no surprise a majority of people will go for the DVD.
This might change when DVD burners become more popular, but time and space will still be an issue. Not only will a film encoded in DivX take more space, it will also take longer to download. You can download a film in the time you could download 10 albums. Once again, what do you choose? Another thing is while encoding music to mp3s doesn't take too long, it will take you much longer to encode a film into DivX.
The boom in illegal music downloads can probably be attributed to the democratisation of broadband internet access. To see such a boom in illegal film downloads, faster internet accesses would be needed, and there seems to be a stabilisation at 512kbps for many people. And I can't see many people using their work connections to download full films.
The film industry can probably still feel safe until a large number of people have a T1 connection and a DVD-burner at home.
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I try not to get into conspiracy theories and all that, but when you wonder who 9/11 was profitable for, I can start to believe that whether they knew or not about the threat, trying to prevent the attack would have been less profitable for the Bush administration and all the companies that back it, than letting it happen.
Effectively, this had given new justifications for those privacy infringements, for attacking Iraq (something that Rumsfeld has wanted to do since 98 at least) etc etc
Hm, did I mention I was trying not to get into conspiracy theories...
Ok, I'd not really read the article, just had a glance at it quite fast and didn't really see it was more about the private sector scooping on you, not the government. However from a European point of view it seems that there isn't really any boundary between government and corporations in the USA, so I guess my previous post is still valid?
You aren't in the UK are you?
This sounds to me very much like what Poindexter is doing/wants to do with DARPA and their various projects. Check out the TIA (Total Information Awareness) programme in particular, if you haven't heard about it yet.
This is old news, but somehow those things manage to remain fairly hidden, and just resurface once in a while. Esp. when America is at war, and people are just focused on Iraq news.
Where did you find this? The main document linked to dates from March 26th, 2003, and the reports mostly have dates around November 2002. Maybe not exactly news, but not as outdated as you seem to suggest.
Yeah so when they get out after their 3 years they can commit a serious crime and get death penalty for it. Now Texas can effectively get rid of file traders.
Speeds seem to be terrible on all of the services I've used. Kazaa (Kazaalite) has the ability to download from multiple users, making up for that a little bit.
Applications such as Kazaa let you configure how many uploads you accept at the same time, and you can cap the upload speed as well.
The faster p2p application I know was probably Audiogalaxy, where you could not cap the speed, and if you wanted to be able to download 10 tracks simultaneously, you had to allow 10 simultaneous uploads as well. Also, it would try and connect you with the user who you could get the fastest download from.
This is not important in the server market. I would be surprised to see too many people buy servers pre-installed with Windows, only to re-install Linux. Major vendors already have Linux preinstall options.
Good point, I don't know how I actually missed that. I'm really not impressed by this article, very vague and now indeed this desktop/server confusion.
However it seems to me, if we're talking of the x86 based server market, that with very few low-end servers exceptions, most will be shipped with no OS preinstalled at all. The most common option will be an installation help CD with a RAID configuration tool, drivers etc that supports several OS's inc. WinNT and w2k and different flavours of Linux, but no OS as such.
I tend to agree that the article is actually pretty vague:
- it's difficult to count how many people use Windows.
- it's difficult to count how many people use Linux
- however it seems that a very vague survey says that developers are more and more into Linux, so that means good news for Linux in terms of market share.
Hm, I don't really see why 2 pages were needed to say that.
I was just wondering:
How do you install a Microsoft OS on a RAID volume knowing that x86-64 is getting rid of legacy devices like floppies (see the IBM x-series 450 eg.)?
Slackware wasn't actually my first distro, back in 2000 (long time Linux user indeed...) I first installed Mandrake 8.0, but due to my fantastic computer specs - Cyrix 300, 32megs RAM etc... - I needed something a bit less heavy, and installed Slackware 7.1 (or 7.0?).
:)
I've learnt much more with Slackware than I would have had I used Mandrake or Red Hat etc. I think that's one of the keys about choosing your first distribution - do you want it up and running directly and are you going to be using the GUI all the time? Or do you actually want to spend some time on it and try to understand how the system works?
The only minor glitch imho, is that some of the major distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE have moved more from the original Unix than Slack has, you don't find the settings in the same places etc.. so that Slackware is kind of getting away from the new Linux standards, which can be annoying when you're supposed to support some RH systems occasionally. But then it isn't Slack's fault.
I've tried other Red Hat and Mandrake etc.. since then, and keep getting frustrated with them for various reasons, and keep coming back to Slack
Can we really expect any music from bands/singers that are not signed to a record company belonging to AOL/TW?
As opposed to Rhapsody (which I haven't tried), emusic has a great selection and uses the MP3 format, but 128kbps is not good enough for me.
In good /. fashion I haven't read the articles and don't know if they mention the bitrate, but even so I'd be amazed if AOL offered anything at a quality higher than 128 kbps MP3s.
Paying for audio files of low quality? No, thanks.
For me a blog still means a weblog, ie. a collection of links, not some kind of journal (although I love some of the livejournal entries - teen diaries more than anything really.).
How can you really surf and spot places you want to link to with a mobile phone? Ok, so it is getting better than it used to with the new generation of big colour screen mobile phones, but I still can't imagine surfing around from my phone and updating my blog from there.
And the phone keyboards?! R we going 2 c journals updated in abbreviated style?
It just seems to me that it can only be a way to get even more irritating teen journals getting published on the web. Not so good.
Why was this story posted at 1am (local time), I would've liked to answer earlier on!
I don't think Intel are on the right track there either.
I've had the chance to have some training on an Itanium2 based server with the EFI shell.
From what I saw, the whole thing was for me only intended at developers.
I don't know whether this is all to do with the EFI shell or the x86 64 bit architecture, but the boot process is quite different to what I've been used to.
As was already mentioned, floppy drives are not supported at all. The keyboard, video and mouse only get initialised when you get to your boot loader. Which was after 2 minutes at least. Extremely slow.
Getting to the boot loader we then had several options, including OS, diagnostics, boot loader configuration, and the EFI Shell itself.
What I can say about the shell is that it is anything but intuitive. It's a bastard mix of UNIX and DOS commands. The parameters are much more limited, ls only supports 3 or 4 attributes eg. No auto-completion, no screen scrolling (-b after each command to show only one page at a time) etc.
Maybe we did something wrong, but if a CDrom was inserted after we'd accessed the EFI Shell, it wasn't seen and we couldn't mount it.
The BIOS/firmware flash update thing via a CD or a USB key is alright, although I suppose I still find a floppy disk more practical.
Which I think is one of the main points. Why so much bloat in place of the BIOS? I don't think there's anything in there that you cannot do by booting on a floppy eg. But then floppies are passé. Oh well. Your mum won't understand the EFI shell. And why it takes so long to get video on the screen after you've powered the machine on. (The time Windows takes to boot afterwards is slow in comparison). Improvement? I still need to be convinced.
Am I the only one here who is reminded of Hagbard Celine's Leif Eriksson submarine from Robert Anton Wilson's novels? :)
Now if those guys could build that...
It reminds me a bit of how everyone on UK TV used to say "wicked" constantly at the time of BB3, while I never heard it in real life.
In a simple historical test of the technique, Kleinberg analysed all the annual State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790. He found that particular word "bursts" could indeed be linked to important events at the time the speeches were delivered.
Has an important increase of the use of the word "nukular" been reported in the last few weeks then?
Come on, you perfectly know that you will have to run Palladium to run three degrees, and you will not be able to save this new copyrighted music!
Avril, Blink 182 etc are good marketing tools to make kids who think they don't want to adhere to society, effectively adhere to it.
;) Do people really need yet another protocol? The market seems to be going more for clients such as Trillian incorporating several protocols. Will it really be anything more than a MSN replacement?
This is probably not a bad idea from Microsoft to indeed try to ensure a new generation uses their products, however the IM market is absolutely bloated, you've got your friends on AIM, those on MSN, those on ICQ etc. (Tip, drop them all, just keep those on IRC
Targeting another market, Lotus's new Sametime client (or has it changed name too?) is meant to be quite good and incorporating many features as well.
You can surely convert DVD's to Divx very fast with the upcoming IBM x-series 450, with what should be up to 4 Itanium 64-bit CPUs.
Not sure it'll be worth the expense though!
Yeah, I was thinking of suggesting some questions to the guy who did the interview, for the next time he interviews someone in IT. Like:
- What's your favourite lollipop flavour?
- In "Snow White + the Seven Dwarves", which is your favourite dwarf?
Now, if you take a look at most sites, you will see that the most popular browsers are IE, followed by Netscape Navigator 4.7, followed by Netscape 6.x (including Mozilla), and finally trailed VERY FAR BEHIND by Opera.
:) , but I remember identifying as Opera most of the times - for the webmasters stats - but often had to identify as IE to access some sites.
Some interesting stats would be what percentage of people use Opera, identifying as Opera, and not Mozilla or IE.
I don't use Opera much anymore (restricted at work, thanks for phoenix.zip
Tsk, and how would we get arguments about the best distro if one day everything came under a United Linux? :)
Go on, admit you would miss the flame wars
Nothing that I find surprising in that article, except maybe the fact that DVDs are the same price as CDs in the US, as I don't think that's the case yet in Europe.
Given the choice between 45 min of music, or a film and extras for the same price, there's no surprise a majority of people will go for the DVD.
This might change when DVD burners become more popular, but time and space will still be an issue. Not only will a film encoded in DivX take more space, it will also take longer to download. You can download a film in the time you could download 10 albums. Once again, what do you choose? Another thing is while encoding music to mp3s doesn't take too long, it will take you much longer to encode a film into DivX.
The boom in illegal music downloads can probably be attributed to the democratisation of broadband internet access. To see such a boom in illegal film downloads, faster internet accesses would be needed, and there seems to be a stabilisation at 512kbps for many people. And I can't see many people using their work connections to download full films.
The film industry can probably still feel safe until a large number of people have a T1 connection and a DVD-burner at home.