First of all, exactly how many computers have you bought?
Personally, about two dozen PCs over the years. Professionally, probably around 100.
Secondly, you never used the operating system that came with it? You always immediatly blanked it and installed some other operating system, every time?
Why would I "immediately blank it"? I paid a lot of money for it and the license prohibits me from reselling it anyway. And in order to get warranty service, you have to have it on most machines. That doesn't change the fact that it's garbage that I didn't want.
And finally, if you're so technologically-savvy that you never use Windows, why are you so incapable of building your own damn PC? Geez man, what's the problem? You buy a case, a motherboard, a CPU, a hard drive, some cables, connect it all together, and ta-da: you've got a cheap PC and didn't have to buy a Windows license.
I have built my own PCs. It's a lot of work and generally doesn't save money relative to PCs on sale. That doesn't change the fact that part of the money I pay for that PC goes to Microsoft for a product I didn't want in the first place.
I'm left to conclude that you are either an idiot, or a troll.
I'm left to conclude that you would have been just joyously happy in the USSR: you take and pay for whatever other people decide is good for you.
I have had to pay for that f*cking operating system for about every PC that I have ever bought, even though I don't use it. It's only right that other people who actually want to use it shouldn't have to pay for it.
Phones (as well as railways and other infrastructure) involve network effects: things need to talk to one another in order to be useful. Energy generation doesn't: a kilowatt hour you generate locally is just as useful to you as a kilowatt hour you ship in.
Graphics realism and speed could probably be
greatly enhanced with a technology burned into the
firmware that can make any shape with one equation.
It's called a "Pentium". It's a highly sophisticated, evolved equivalent of a recursive function. There is rumored to be a number of utilities for it that make it easier to input, output, and compose those functions.
After avoiding the subject for decades, a Belgian biologist discovers mathematics. One of the first areas he plays around with is "polar coordinates". "I never knew math could be this much fun", the biologist is quoted as saying. In his enthusiasm, the befuddled biologist decided to patent several formulas, following a recently fashionable trend of patenting the obvious.
Fusion is about the worst instance imaginable of expensive, centrally controlled energy production.
If you want "cheap abundant power", biological and catalytic processes for producing hydrogen from solar energy are much more relevant: they promise to be safe, simple, and not require central control or huge up-front investments. And, in fact, the simplest way of creating cheap, abundant power without increasing greenhouse gas emissions is to grow plants for fuel.
An even better way of "creating" lots of energy is not to use it in the first place: in particular, here in the US, we are unnecessarily wasteful in our use of energy.
I'd carry a copy of tomsrtbt, both on floppy and on CD; it boots when little else does. Maybe also a copy of Knoppix and a set of RedHat install CDs. ZipSlack runs off a boot floppy and a USB flash drive, if you must.
I wouldn't bother carrying any kind of Windows rescue disks. You should be able to fix whatever problems you can with their original Windows install CDs, and if they don't have the originals, they shouldn't be running Windows in the first place. In a pinch, the Linux CDs let you mount and fix most problems with Windows volumes. And with the RedHat install CDs, you can fix the most serious problem: the fact that these people are running Windows in the first place:-)
Debian is usually my preferred installation, but to run it, you probably want to have an Internet connection, and if you had that, you wouldn't be carrying all this stuff. For people without Internet connections, RedHat is probably a somewhat better choice.
"Wireless network engineers on the run" generally use something like a PocketPC or Zaurus, together with a CF WIFI card and a collection of wireless and network tools. That's smaller than the AirPort, battery operated, and far more flexible.
You can spend enormous amounts of money on trying to protect against every eventuality. But is that worth it? What makes the US economy so dynamic is that companies can take risks and that they do fail.
And while you are trying to take costly steps to protect your data, your competitors may well not be.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't plan and protect, I'm saying that, in real life, you have to look at what your risks are, what your legal obligations are, and what your competitors are doing. Accepting the risk of going out of business is part of doing business in the first place, and aliens abducting your mainframe should probably be lower on your list of worries than having an understaffed tech support line.
Yes, this makes a lot of sense. Contrary to the picture critics of open source try to paint, that it is some kind of communist conspiracy undermining good ol' American entrepreneurship, the success of open source and free software is actually simply free markets at work.
Companies like Microsoft are greatly overcharging for their products, perhaps not for the initial sale, but for the upgrades and on-going development. Or do you really think that the incremental improvements in your Office XP upgrade are really worth several hundred dollars to you compared to the version of Office you already paid for? And why would you want to pay for improvements that often are largely based on user feedback anyway, rather than representing actual R&D work by the software company?
Those are market inefficiencies with the commercial software model that open source software corrects. Sure, the open source model isn't perfect either, in that not everybody who benefits pays exactly for what they are getting, but it seems to all average out statistically well enough for open source software to be competitive.
It's unlikely that Apple would keep the crappy PC style architechture though.
Except for the processor, Apple has already adopted most of the "crappy PC style architecture": PCI bus, USB, standard video cards, etc.
Take a look at the base 1 MB and the terrible interrupt controller cascade.
Who cares? PCs have memory mapping hardware; it really doesn't matter what happens to the first megabyte. Heck, these days, you can just leave it unused if it bothers you. And interrupts--again, who cares? Interrupt conflicts just aren't an issue anymore these days.
Have you actually seen the heat sinks and heard the fans on some of Apple's recent desktops? They are bigger and louder than what you get on most PCs these days. And the Ti Powerbooks are pretty noisy as far as laptops go as well. I think it's a myth that Apple has any advantage in these areas. That may have been the case years ago, but today, the differences in instruction sets are negligible: a P4 is pretty much as much of a RISC as a PPC.
I doubt Apple will go to any x86 varient because that will turn them into a software company and kill their business
Why does picking an x86 turn them into a software company? Putting an x86 into their machines doesn't mean that their software will magically start running on standard PC hardware.
Before you can engage in reasonable debate, you'll have to accept that views contrary to your own can be reasonable as well.
Perhaps we can identify on which points we disagree? Because there really are only two simple points that I'm making:
US greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing in magnitude.
There exists some level of CO2 in the atmosphere at which the global climate and/or ecology will change significantly.
Name someone who advocates the unnecessary continuation of greenhouse gases.
What difference does it make what people advocate? What matters is what they do, and the Bush administration's policies do result in the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Growth that is not only risky but obviously also unnecessary because just about every other country in the world gets by with a fraction of the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of the US.
People and vested interests who find it inconvenient to their short-term business interests to reduce greenhouse gas emissions keep putting up this strawman.
Yes, there is an academic and scientific argument whether the weather has changed, what causes that, and how much more it's going to change in the future. That's nice. That's interesting. But it has little to do with public policy on greenhouse gas emissions, however.
The argument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is simply that if emissions keep growing, sooner or later they will change the climate. They may cause warming, they may cause cooling, or they may cause other changes in weather patterns. It may take another decade of growth, or it may take another half century. But the conservative and prudent thing to do is to limit our emissions until we know more.
And, in fact, reducing greenhouse gas emissions should have no deleterious effect on the global economy: it just replaces one set of industries with another. If anything, that creates new business activity as new infrastructure needs to be created (new power plants, railways, etc.).
It is quite ironic that self-proclaimed "conservatives" are the ones most in favor of continuing the dangerous experiment of emitting vast amounts of greenhouse gases on a global scale.
- It's not that they can't, they just dont want to
The kind of DRM software companies like Macrovision have created changes boot blocks, media player software, audio and video I/O, and CD/DVD drivers, and it is designed to limit the ability of PC users to distribute music. That is, it is designed to interfere with exactly what the business model of the station is and with what the station pays royalties for. After installing it, they may end up not being able to play, say, unsigned advertising clips they get as MP3's from customers, or rip other CDs to disk, or do any of a dozen things that they depend on.
Any radio station would be foolish to let that kind of software be installed on their PCs. These people depend on their PC hardware for their livelihood. If they refuse to install this software, it's because they really don't have much of a choice, not because they "just don't want to".
The right way for "normal" people to get a Linux system is the same way they get a Windows system: buy a system with Linux pre-installed. And the way to upgrade is to buy a new PC with a newer version of the OS.
Regular users should be discouraged from doing anything else: PC hardware is just too complex and messy to allow installation on arbitrary configurations. And that's as true of Windows as it is of Linux.
Move huge numbers of electrons from one capacitor to another with a single statement. Cause electrons to speed down long wires and recombine with holes.
Seriously: if you feel you must muck around with quantum states, a simple library like QDD will probably do. Or have a look here.
If quantum computers ever do anything useful--and that's a big "if"--then most likely you will just be using it through high-level operations and datatypes.
Until recently, the only people who really were heard were those who were part of large broadcasting organizations. Sure, the Web isn't perfect, and neither is Google, and sometimes this sort of thing happens, but it's still a lot better than it used to be.
Now, as for Google itself, I do think it's not good to have a single search engine that everybody relies on. Google seems to be trying to play nice, but they do make mistakes, and who knows what their management will be like in the future. If it bothers you, there is a simple thing you can do: use another search engine as your default.
Mozilla, for better or for worse, has copied Microsoft's component model for integrating its various bits and pieces. That means big, monolithic applications with lots of dynamically loaded parts. If mail, news, composer, browser, and other components now run as separate applications, how are they going to communicate? And why have something as messy as XPCOM at all then?
I think it would be great if this results in a leaner and meaner Mozilla, and if Mozilla finally gets working interprocess communication. Even better if Mozilla finally gets a clue about being able to run on different X displays and not complaining gratuitously that some profile is "in use". But it's a long road towards that, and I'm not sure that a lot of the cruft that is made redundant by this change will actually get removed.
Also, the open source/free software movement is very communal. People contribute their efforts for the collective benefit of the group. My comment relating free software to communism was related to this characteristic.
Your comment was equating communism and getting things for free, which is just wrong.
And your new argument is just as bogus. Cooperation ("collective benefit of the group") is an integral part of free market economies. Evidently, when it comes to software, cooperation is a successful free market strategy, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. Furthermore, free software involves its own internal free market economy, it is just that the costs and benefits are not exchanged in terms of money.
If you are concerned about Soviet-style failures and inefficiencies, be concerned about Microsoft: there you have a huge, centrally planned economy par excellence, an entity existing largely outside competitive pressures. Even the fact that Microsoft employees are getting rich isn't exactly out of character, if you look at the relative luxury Soviet party bosses enjoyed. The current state of the software industry is anything but a poster child for free market economies.
However, the profit incentive of the free market (commercial software) is so important in developing innovative products that I would put the free market (commercial) up against the free software community any day of the week. Without that incentive, innovation would suffer.
Let's look at where some big open source software actually came from. X was one of the first window systems, the first network transparent window system, and it was open source from the start, long before Microsoft came out with its clone of Apple's clone of Xerox's GUI. The web browser and web servers--academic developments without profit motive: Apache is based on the original CERN server, and Mozilla traces its roots back to XMosaic, which was in turn based on the NeXTStep browser. The networking code in BSD, Macintosh, commercial UNIX, and Windows--derived from open source, academic BSD code. Open source speech recognition and speech synthesis--derived from academic research projects at CMU, Edinburgh, and Cambridge. We could go on and on.
And, of course, Microsoft, the most profitable software company of all times, has never innovated in any significant way: all their major products are based on other people's inventions, sometimes purchased, and more often simply copied.
Basically, you are just mindlessly repeating political catch phrases. Study some history for a change--both of the world kind and of the free software kind.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, about two dozen PCs over the years. Professionally, probably around 100.
Secondly, you never used the operating system that came with it? You always immediatly blanked it and installed some other operating system, every time?
Why would I "immediately blank it"? I paid a lot of money for it and the license prohibits me from reselling it anyway. And in order to get warranty service, you have to have it on most machines. That doesn't change the fact that it's garbage that I didn't want.
And finally, if you're so technologically-savvy that you never use Windows, why are you so incapable of building your own damn PC? Geez man, what's the problem? You buy a case, a motherboard, a CPU, a hard drive, some cables, connect it all together, and ta-da: you've got a cheap PC and didn't have to buy a Windows license.
I have built my own PCs. It's a lot of work and generally doesn't save money relative to PCs on sale. That doesn't change the fact that part of the money I pay for that PC goes to Microsoft for a product I didn't want in the first place.
I'm left to conclude that you are either an idiot, or a troll.
I'm left to conclude that you would have been just joyously happy in the USSR: you take and pay for whatever other people decide is good for you.
I have had to pay for that f*cking operating system for about every PC that I have ever bought, even though I don't use it. It's only right that other people who actually want to use it shouldn't have to pay for it.
Phones (as well as railways and other infrastructure) involve network effects: things need to talk to one another in order to be useful. Energy generation doesn't: a kilowatt hour you generate locally is just as useful to you as a kilowatt hour you ship in.
It's called a "Pentium". It's a highly sophisticated, evolved equivalent of a recursive function. There is rumored to be a number of utilities for it that make it easier to input, output, and compose those functions.
After avoiding the subject for decades, a Belgian biologist discovers mathematics. One of the first areas he plays around with is "polar coordinates". "I never knew math could be this much fun", the biologist is quoted as saying. In his enthusiasm, the befuddled biologist decided to patent several formulas, following a recently fashionable trend of patenting the obvious.
If you want "cheap abundant power", biological and catalytic processes for producing hydrogen from solar energy are much more relevant: they promise to be safe, simple, and not require central control or huge up-front investments. And, in fact, the simplest way of creating cheap, abundant power without increasing greenhouse gas emissions is to grow plants for fuel.
An even better way of "creating" lots of energy is not to use it in the first place: in particular, here in the US, we are unnecessarily wasteful in our use of energy.
I wouldn't bother carrying any kind of Windows rescue disks. You should be able to fix whatever problems you can with their original Windows install CDs, and if they don't have the originals, they shouldn't be running Windows in the first place. In a pinch, the Linux CDs let you mount and fix most problems with Windows volumes. And with the RedHat install CDs, you can fix the most serious problem: the fact that these people are running Windows in the first place :-)
Debian is usually my preferred installation, but to run it, you probably want to have an Internet connection, and if you had that, you wouldn't be carrying all this stuff. For people without Internet connections, RedHat is probably a somewhat better choice.
"Wireless network engineers on the run" generally use something like a PocketPC or Zaurus, together with a CF WIFI card and a collection of wireless and network tools. That's smaller than the AirPort, battery operated, and far more flexible.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't plan and protect, I'm saying that, in real life, you have to look at what your risks are, what your legal obligations are, and what your competitors are doing. Accepting the risk of going out of business is part of doing business in the first place, and aliens abducting your mainframe should probably be lower on your list of worries than having an understaffed tech support line.
Companies like Microsoft are greatly overcharging for their products, perhaps not for the initial sale, but for the upgrades and on-going development. Or do you really think that the incremental improvements in your Office XP upgrade are really worth several hundred dollars to you compared to the version of Office you already paid for? And why would you want to pay for improvements that often are largely based on user feedback anyway, rather than representing actual R&D work by the software company?
Those are market inefficiencies with the commercial software model that open source software corrects. Sure, the open source model isn't perfect either, in that not everybody who benefits pays exactly for what they are getting, but it seems to all average out statistically well enough for open source software to be competitive.
Sure, you can say that...
Except for the processor, Apple has already adopted most of the "crappy PC style architecture": PCI bus, USB, standard video cards, etc.
Take a look at the base 1 MB and the terrible interrupt controller cascade.
Who cares? PCs have memory mapping hardware; it really doesn't matter what happens to the first megabyte. Heck, these days, you can just leave it unused if it bothers you. And interrupts--again, who cares? Interrupt conflicts just aren't an issue anymore these days.
Have you actually seen the heat sinks and heard the fans on some of Apple's recent desktops? They are bigger and louder than what you get on most PCs these days. And the Ti Powerbooks are pretty noisy as far as laptops go as well. I think it's a myth that Apple has any advantage in these areas. That may have been the case years ago, but today, the differences in instruction sets are negligible: a P4 is pretty much as much of a RISC as a PPC.
Why does picking an x86 turn them into a software company? Putting an x86 into their machines doesn't mean that their software will magically start running on standard PC hardware.
Perhaps we can identify on which points we disagree? Because there really are only two simple points that I'm making:
Name someone who advocates the unnecessary continuation of greenhouse gases.
What difference does it make what people advocate? What matters is what they do, and the Bush administration's policies do result in the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Growth that is not only risky but obviously also unnecessary because just about every other country in the world gets by with a fraction of the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions of the US.
Yes, there is an academic and scientific argument whether the weather has changed, what causes that, and how much more it's going to change in the future. That's nice. That's interesting. But it has little to do with public policy on greenhouse gas emissions, however.
The argument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is simply that if emissions keep growing, sooner or later they will change the climate. They may cause warming, they may cause cooling, or they may cause other changes in weather patterns. It may take another decade of growth, or it may take another half century. But the conservative and prudent thing to do is to limit our emissions until we know more.
And, in fact, reducing greenhouse gas emissions should have no deleterious effect on the global economy: it just replaces one set of industries with another. If anything, that creates new business activity as new infrastructure needs to be created (new power plants, railways, etc.).
It is quite ironic that self-proclaimed "conservatives" are the ones most in favor of continuing the dangerous experiment of emitting vast amounts of greenhouse gases on a global scale.
The kind of DRM software companies like Macrovision have created changes boot blocks, media player software, audio and video I/O, and CD/DVD drivers, and it is designed to limit the ability of PC users to distribute music. That is, it is designed to interfere with exactly what the business model of the station is and with what the station pays royalties for. After installing it, they may end up not being able to play, say, unsigned advertising clips they get as MP3's from customers, or rip other CDs to disk, or do any of a dozen things that they depend on.
Any radio station would be foolish to let that kind of software be installed on their PCs. These people depend on their PC hardware for their livelihood. If they refuse to install this software, it's because they really don't have much of a choice, not because they "just don't want to".
I'm sorry, but am I missing a pun here? "vi" was developed by Bill Joy on and for UNIX. See here.
Regular users should be discouraged from doing anything else: PC hardware is just too complex and messy to allow installation on arbitrary configurations. And that's as true of Windows as it is of Linux.
And in the US, we feed it to chicken and cows. I think compared with the US, the Philippines contribution to the problem is negligible.
Seriously: if you feel you must muck around with quantum states, a simple library like QDD will probably do. Or have a look here.
If quantum computers ever do anything useful--and that's a big "if"--then most likely you will just be using it through high-level operations and datatypes.
Now, as for Google itself, I do think it's not good to have a single search engine that everybody relies on. Google seems to be trying to play nice, but they do make mistakes, and who knows what their management will be like in the future. If it bothers you, there is a simple thing you can do: use another search engine as your default.
I think it would be great if this results in a leaner and meaner Mozilla, and if Mozilla finally gets working interprocess communication. Even better if Mozilla finally gets a clue about being able to run on different X displays and not complaining gratuitously that some profile is "in use". But it's a long road towards that, and I'm not sure that a lot of the cruft that is made redundant by this change will actually get removed.
Your comment was equating communism and getting things for free, which is just wrong.
And your new argument is just as bogus. Cooperation ("collective benefit of the group") is an integral part of free market economies. Evidently, when it comes to software, cooperation is a successful free market strategy, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. Furthermore, free software involves its own internal free market economy, it is just that the costs and benefits are not exchanged in terms of money.
If you are concerned about Soviet-style failures and inefficiencies, be concerned about Microsoft: there you have a huge, centrally planned economy par excellence, an entity existing largely outside competitive pressures. Even the fact that Microsoft employees are getting rich isn't exactly out of character, if you look at the relative luxury Soviet party bosses enjoyed. The current state of the software industry is anything but a poster child for free market economies.
However, the profit incentive of the free market (commercial software) is so important in developing innovative products that I would put the free market (commercial) up against the free software community any day of the week. Without that incentive, innovation would suffer.
Let's look at where some big open source software actually came from. X was one of the first window systems, the first network transparent window system, and it was open source from the start, long before Microsoft came out with its clone of Apple's clone of Xerox's GUI. The web browser and web servers--academic developments without profit motive: Apache is based on the original CERN server, and Mozilla traces its roots back to XMosaic, which was in turn based on the NeXTStep browser. The networking code in BSD, Macintosh, commercial UNIX, and Windows--derived from open source, academic BSD code. Open source speech recognition and speech synthesis--derived from academic research projects at CMU, Edinburgh, and Cambridge. We could go on and on.
And, of course, Microsoft, the most profitable software company of all times, has never innovated in any significant way: all their major products are based on other people's inventions, sometimes purchased, and more often simply copied.
Basically, you are just mindlessly repeating political catch phrases. Study some history for a change--both of the world kind and of the free software kind.