The moon landing was an OMG moment only because you weren't paying attention to the incremental developments. They had to shoot a satellite up, then one with a dog, then one with a guy, then two guys, then three, then try to get out of the capsule, then try to get to the moon orbit and back, and so on. Imagine if you last paid attention to computers when we were all using the Intel 80486.
The OS world is largely dead in terms of innovation.
Talk about punishing success. Yes, it would be exciting to be living in 1967 when the cache was just invented, when we realized that by having a relatively small but fast memory buffer, we can dramatically speed up the computer. However, revolutions are not the only form of innovation. Time Machine, for example, finally brings fire-and-forget backups to us. Literally all you do is buy an external drive, format it, and tell Time Machine to use it. For anybody willing to spend $150 on a drive, this beats decades of wisdom that most people (including me) can't and won't bother to follow. The introduction of Core Data completes the MVC puzzle, and takes us one stop closer to the mythical "software IC." I strongly suggest this series of very short movies to see how you put together an application. Sure, there's still a ton of fluff and hype, but don't toss everything out.
Are these as dramatic as the cache? No. But it's important not to be spoiled by what seemed like daily revolutions of the past that you fail to see the actual innovations in front of us.
Wouldn't this mean that the system currently in place is working then?
No, it means that the current system is not so utterly broken that it knowingly incarcerates innocent people. How many more people are innocent, we don't know. How many others fit the objective criteria under which some were deemed innocent, we don't know. What we do know is that the current system has made hundreds of mistakes, and normally something that makes hundreds of mistakes can benefit from oversight.
I have to ask, are you people upset with Gitmo because people are being held there or because the Bush administration is behind it. It seems to me that all the opposition stems from any connection with Bush. It has little to do with the system itself.
I can only speak for myself. I'm upset because the US government is trying to subvert US law by inventing convenient new legal concepts like "enemy combatant," by deliberately housing them in Cuba so that they're not on "US soil," etc. I'm upset that the US president can apparently designate anybody as an "enemy combatant" and strip his or her rights. I mean, if you're a Bush supporter, would you like that kind of power in Clinton's hands?
We basically have a set of people who are willing to jeopardize the lives of other Americans just to gain political points.
Life is filled with jeopardy, yet we accept some of those risks. You risk death when you drive a car, yet you do it because you need to get somewhere. America (as a whole, not just Blue or Red America) needs to discuss how much transparency it needs to trust its government, and how much secrecy the government needs to do its job. From my view point, the Bush administration isn't even interested in this discussion.
Gitmo is the place where the worst of the worst are kept. [...] Our soldiers are not going to send some poor farmer to Gitmo just because his neighbor said he was a bad guy.
Your blind faith is amusing. That might well be the intention, but according to the Boston Globe, 146 detainees have been released from Guantanamo by late 2004 (because I'm too lazy to track down more recent numbers). Clearly, either Bush is soft on your "worst of the worst," or the system make lots of mistakes. Deal with that fact before you consider denying people their right to be fairly tried.
The article I cited actually points out that seven of the released detainees went back to fighting the US, which you should probably also consider as mistakes.
No, the chances of earth being hit by a significant asteroid is essentially 100%, as certain as death itself. The question is when, and how we might survive that. A properly-equipped observatory can help answer the first question.
A physical keyboard on the iPhone would either increase its size or decrease the screen's size.
gorgeous all-in-one PCs that make your monitor a disposable item
"All-in-one" is not for everybody, but it's value is not purely aesthetic. Less stuff to plug in, easier to move around, takes less space, etc.
elegant slim notebooks that offer inadequate cooling for the GPU and necessitate factory underclocking
You do realize that the size of a notebook computer is an important feature, right? You do realize that basically every notebook computer has a worse keyboard, dimmer screen (at least when on battery), slower and smaller hard drive, less expansion capability, and is more expensive when compared to a desktop, right? Sacrificing power for size has been a prime objective of portable computers since day one!
iTunes' ignorance of audio organized by folder rather than tags
Uh, what are you complaining about here?
no handy screws for battery replacement on the clean, mirror-finished backs of iPods
An end-user accessible battery limits where you can put the battery, and increases the thickness of the device (because the battery itself would need a plastic case, and because the compartment itself needs extra space). It's also a part that could come off, or come loose.
Just because you don't understand all the technical reasons doesn't mean it has "no benefit beyond aesthetics."
Cheap and good audio equipment won't make you a better musician, cheap and good digital cameras don't make you a better photographer
Products like ACID and GarageBand make me a better "musician," if you first understand that I cannot play any instrument. Modern cameras make me a better "photographer," because I'm nearsighted and really need the auto-focus, and because not having to deal with various exposure settings gives me that much more time to frame the shot. Similarly, Photoshop doesn't make me an artist, but I'm able to retouch and improve many photographs.
It indeed doesn't make me a good musician or a good photographer, but it does make me a better one.
No, you don't. All you need is a transaction id that the credit card company would issue you when you charged the card. (I have no idea if this id is in place, the point is that you don't actually have to store the sensitive card number.)
Whether kernel developers take requirements directly from users, or via application software programmers, the end result is the same: kernel developers need to and do take end user requirements into consideration. APIs are indeed important, documentation is indeed important, but "usability is a problem for the desktop maintainers ( the KDE or GNOME guys ), not the kernel hackers" is plain false.
You have probably defined things a bit too narrowly. As an extreme example, you can have a well-documented single-tasking kernel, and it would be a royal pain to turn into a usable modern operating system using just user-level "desktop code." Less extreme examples include the ability to service real time tasks like playing music without skipping and burning CDs (coasters were a real problem when CPU capacity was just a bit more than the CD burners needed), and various other tasks that make a desktop environment usable. Some of these usability traits require direct support from the OS kernel.
First of all, the AC who responded to you is quite correct. Power constraints on the mobile phone will limit its maximum distance from a tower. Worse, a mobile phone would have an approximately omnidirectional antenna, which makes it even harder on battery life. But also just as importantly, you don't want a mobile phone that transmits a lot of power right next to your brain even if the battery technology was available.
Secondly, city dwellers are some of the most important market segments, and you definitely should not expect to cover 2 miles per tower with many tall concrete structures in the way. These structures interfere significantly with your transmissions.
They'll need more than the rights to the spectrum. They'll need to set up antennas everywhere, which includes both the broadcast equipment, tower, as well as renting/buying the space occupied by the towers. If memory serves, an unobstructed GSM tower covers about a 2-mi radius (say, 12.5 sq mi), so covering the most populous tenth of the (nearly 3 million sq mi total) lower 48 states would involve 24,000 towers. CDMA can be configured to cover a wider area, but this should give you an idea of the scope of the project.
I hate carriers at least as much as anybody else, but after Google makes that kind of investment they may find it hard not to be Evil with their pricing.
What Linux advocates frequently miss is the fact that "switching" is a major decision that is fraught with risks both real and imagined (and don't discount the imaginary risks, either). Therefore, what you're switching to must be visibly and significantly better than where you are in order to trigger that decision. Getting people to leave Windows 98 (for whatever other OS) wasn't so hard: people understood that not crashing a lot was a very good thing. Getting people off Windows XP is much harder, because XP is already much better than 98. In fact, Microsoft is having difficulty getting people to leave XP!
So, it's not enough that there are "free equivalents" to the applications that people need. People say they want something as good as Photoshop, but even that wouldn't actually do it. It needs to be demonstrably quite a bit better than Photoshop to overcome the risks to the "switch". And by "good," please use the definition that the people do, not some technical superiority that they have no hope of understanding.
Are people really happy with Apple's contributions to BSD and Konqueror code?
Nokia was happy enough to take WebKit and use it on their S60. Besides, if you want to be made happy by people using your code, license it in a way that makes you happy.
However, in a different way than binary code bloat you describe, source code is also susceptible to bloat. Too many #ifdefs render the code far less readable, and also harder to test exhaustively. Maintainers who don't completely understand every #ifdef are reluctant to keep them coherent, or remove ones that are actually obsolete. Over years (and maintainers) code really does have a tendency to rot, and there is wisdom in keeping things as clear of #ifdefs as possible.
If I accidentally send a letter to you containing confidential information it's my mistake. You probably shouldn't read it, but I should never have sent it in the first place.
Please read what I wrote more carefully. The recipient makes no mistake whatsoever by opening the email. However, because the recipient doesn't actually have the right to read it, he or she should stop reading as soon as it is clear that he or she is not the intended recipient. The post I was responding to is claiming that simply being addressed confers rights to the message.
Forgetting to lock it, no... but giving you the key, yes.
Having access to something you don't plausibly need to perform your job is not the same as being given a key.
You're completely within your rights to read anything that comes to your inbox
So if your CEO sends you an email entitled "Next Year's Projections", the "To:" fields contain board members and vice presidents (and you, inexplicably, except that a VP has an email address close to yours), you think you have a right to the information in the attachment?
What you're mistaking is that technical restrictions (passwords, email addresses) are simply means to enforce rights, much like locks on doors are means. They do not imply or transfer rights by themselves, just as a door that was not locked is not an invitation to snoop around inside. The right to these information resides in who you are (CEO, VP, etc), not in what access you happen to get. Conversely, just because the CEO forgets his password doesn't mean that he lost his right to the information. (The minute he is fired, however, he may not access sensitive information even if his password still works.)
Controlling access is the admins responsibility. Yes, I'll state that again... If you give me access to the HR drive, I have every right to view the spreadsheets inside.
You are wrong. Somebody who forgets to lock a door did not invite you in, even if you keep the findings to yourself. Somebody who makes a typo and sends sensitive email to you did not invite you to read all of it, only enough to realize that it's not for you. If you don't learn this, I'm afraid you'll continue to lose jobs.
But IMHO, it leads him to make some pretty stupid decisions and be blind to the implications of vendor lock-in and restrictive licenses.
I won't comment on "stupid," but being "blind" is usually the folly of those who stick to philosophies. I don't think Torvalds was blind to the implications of vendor lock-in, rather he assessed it and accepted it. Just as you probably do when you fly on a Boeing or AirBus jet run by proprietary closed-source software, or any of innumerable other things you do in "civilized" life. You may believe that opening those sources would result in a better airplane, but you accept the risk differential and wait for your peanuts.
It's not just XP being good enough, but also most people's existing hardware being good enough. Used to be that hardware manufacturers would make extra money when people wanted to upgrade to hungry software, and Microsoft makes extra money when people upgraded computers for some other reason, but now when both are good enough, nobody feels the need to upgrade until it's actually broken.
Both responses to my post addressed essentially the same point, so I'll just reply once here.
The spectrum belongs to the public, which is why the government can be responsible for allocating it to private entities. As such, any proceeds from such allocation (much like the sale of government land) belongs to the people. It can be issued back in the form of $40 vouchers, or it can be sent in to the treasury to reduce taxes. It's the same money.
The difference is that Bill Gates and you both get $40 back, even though he's probably paying more of the government's expenses than you are. If the billion dollars were used to reduce taxes, then he'd get more than $40 (and you might get less than $40). Therefore, the net effect of this is a redistribution of money. In fact, if I'm not mistaken Bill Gates will get "screwed" twice, because he might not have any analog TVs left in the house to avail of the voucher.
You've entirely missed my point. The government has no money of its own. It spends our tax money. So to say the government "should foot the bill" you really mean all other taxpayers (perhaps including you) should foot the bill. If you're an average taxpayer, you're really just paying $40 in taxes and getting a $40 voucher back. If you're an above-average taxpayer, you're helping pay for somebody else's TV upgrade. So the question is why there is a societal need to redistribute income in this way, which I think is what any self-respecting small-government type would ask.
Slashdot Mirror
The moon landing was an OMG moment only because you weren't paying attention to the incremental developments. They had to shoot a satellite up, then one with a dog, then one with a guy, then two guys, then three, then try to get out of the capsule, then try to get to the moon orbit and back, and so on. Imagine if you last paid attention to computers when we were all using the Intel 80486.
Talk about punishing success. Yes, it would be exciting to be living in 1967 when the cache was just invented, when we realized that by having a relatively small but fast memory buffer, we can dramatically speed up the computer. However, revolutions are not the only form of innovation. Time Machine, for example, finally brings fire-and-forget backups to us. Literally all you do is buy an external drive, format it, and tell Time Machine to use it. For anybody willing to spend $150 on a drive, this beats decades of wisdom that most people (including me) can't and won't bother to follow. The introduction of Core Data completes the MVC puzzle, and takes us one stop closer to the mythical "software IC." I strongly suggest this series of very short movies to see how you put together an application. Sure, there's still a ton of fluff and hype, but don't toss everything out.
Are these as dramatic as the cache? No. But it's important not to be spoiled by what seemed like daily revolutions of the past that you fail to see the actual innovations in front of us.
No, it means that the current system is not so utterly broken that it knowingly incarcerates innocent people. How many more people are innocent, we don't know. How many others fit the objective criteria under which some were deemed innocent, we don't know. What we do know is that the current system has made hundreds of mistakes, and normally something that makes hundreds of mistakes can benefit from oversight.
I can only speak for myself. I'm upset because the US government is trying to subvert US law by inventing convenient new legal concepts like "enemy combatant," by deliberately housing them in Cuba so that they're not on "US soil," etc. I'm upset that the US president can apparently designate anybody as an "enemy combatant" and strip his or her rights. I mean, if you're a Bush supporter, would you like that kind of power in Clinton's hands?
Life is filled with jeopardy, yet we accept some of those risks. You risk death when you drive a car, yet you do it because you need to get somewhere. America (as a whole, not just Blue or Red America) needs to discuss how much transparency it needs to trust its government, and how much secrecy the government needs to do its job. From my view point, the Bush administration isn't even interested in this discussion.
Your blind faith is amusing. That might well be the intention, but according to the Boston Globe, 146 detainees have been released from Guantanamo by late 2004 (because I'm too lazy to track down more recent numbers). Clearly, either Bush is soft on your "worst of the worst," or the system make lots of mistakes. Deal with that fact before you consider denying people their right to be fairly tried.
The article I cited actually points out that seven of the released detainees went back to fighting the US, which you should probably also consider as mistakes.
No, the chances of earth being hit by a significant asteroid is essentially 100%, as certain as death itself. The question is when, and how we might survive that. A properly-equipped observatory can help answer the first question.
A physical keyboard on the iPhone would either increase its size or decrease the screen's size.
"All-in-one" is not for everybody, but it's value is not purely aesthetic. Less stuff to plug in, easier to move around, takes less space, etc.
You do realize that the size of a notebook computer is an important feature, right? You do realize that basically every notebook computer has a worse keyboard, dimmer screen (at least when on battery), slower and smaller hard drive, less expansion capability, and is more expensive when compared to a desktop, right? Sacrificing power for size has been a prime objective of portable computers since day one!
Uh, what are you complaining about here?
An end-user accessible battery limits where you can put the battery, and increases the thickness of the device (because the battery itself would need a plastic case, and because the compartment itself needs extra space). It's also a part that could come off, or come loose.
Just because you don't understand all the technical reasons doesn't mean it has "no benefit beyond aesthetics."
Products like ACID and GarageBand make me a better "musician," if you first understand that I cannot play any instrument. Modern cameras make me a better "photographer," because I'm nearsighted and really need the auto-focus, and because not having to deal with various exposure settings gives me that much more time to frame the shot. Similarly, Photoshop doesn't make me an artist, but I'm able to retouch and improve many photographs.
It indeed doesn't make me a good musician or a good photographer, but it does make me a better one.
No, you don't. All you need is a transaction id that the credit card company would issue you when you charged the card. (I have no idea if this id is in place, the point is that you don't actually have to store the sensitive card number.)
Whether kernel developers take requirements directly from users, or via application software programmers, the end result is the same: kernel developers need to and do take end user requirements into consideration. APIs are indeed important, documentation is indeed important, but "usability is a problem for the desktop maintainers ( the KDE or GNOME guys ), not the kernel hackers" is plain false.
You have probably defined things a bit too narrowly. As an extreme example, you can have a well-documented single-tasking kernel, and it would be a royal pain to turn into a usable modern operating system using just user-level "desktop code." Less extreme examples include the ability to service real time tasks like playing music without skipping and burning CDs (coasters were a real problem when CPU capacity was just a bit more than the CD burners needed), and various other tasks that make a desktop environment usable. Some of these usability traits require direct support from the OS kernel.
First of all, the AC who responded to you is quite correct. Power constraints on the mobile phone will limit its maximum distance from a tower. Worse, a mobile phone would have an approximately omnidirectional antenna, which makes it even harder on battery life. But also just as importantly, you don't want a mobile phone that transmits a lot of power right next to your brain even if the battery technology was available.
Secondly, city dwellers are some of the most important market segments, and you definitely should not expect to cover 2 miles per tower with many tall concrete structures in the way. These structures interfere significantly with your transmissions.
They'll need more than the rights to the spectrum. They'll need to set up antennas everywhere, which includes both the broadcast equipment, tower, as well as renting/buying the space occupied by the towers. If memory serves, an unobstructed GSM tower covers about a 2-mi radius (say, 12.5 sq mi), so covering the most populous tenth of the (nearly 3 million sq mi total) lower 48 states would involve 24,000 towers. CDMA can be configured to cover a wider area, but this should give you an idea of the scope of the project.
I hate carriers at least as much as anybody else, but after Google makes that kind of investment they may find it hard not to be Evil with their pricing.
What Linux advocates frequently miss is the fact that "switching" is a major decision that is fraught with risks both real and imagined (and don't discount the imaginary risks, either). Therefore, what you're switching to must be visibly and significantly better than where you are in order to trigger that decision. Getting people to leave Windows 98 (for whatever other OS) wasn't so hard: people understood that not crashing a lot was a very good thing. Getting people off Windows XP is much harder, because XP is already much better than 98. In fact, Microsoft is having difficulty getting people to leave XP!
So, it's not enough that there are "free equivalents" to the applications that people need. People say they want something as good as Photoshop, but even that wouldn't actually do it. It needs to be demonstrably quite a bit better than Photoshop to overcome the risks to the "switch". And by "good," please use the definition that the people do, not some technical superiority that they have no hope of understanding.
Nokia was happy enough to take WebKit and use it on their S60. Besides, if you want to be made happy by people using your code, license it in a way that makes you happy.
However, in a different way than binary code bloat you describe, source code is also susceptible to bloat. Too many #ifdefs render the code far less readable, and also harder to test exhaustively. Maintainers who don't completely understand every #ifdef are reluctant to keep them coherent, or remove ones that are actually obsolete. Over years (and maintainers) code really does have a tendency to rot, and there is wisdom in keeping things as clear of #ifdefs as possible.
Please read what I wrote more carefully. The recipient makes no mistake whatsoever by opening the email. However, because the recipient doesn't actually have the right to read it, he or she should stop reading as soon as it is clear that he or she is not the intended recipient. The post I was responding to is claiming that simply being addressed confers rights to the message.
Having access to something you don't plausibly need to perform your job is not the same as being given a key.
So if your CEO sends you an email entitled "Next Year's Projections", the "To:" fields contain board members and vice presidents (and you, inexplicably, except that a VP has an email address close to yours), you think you have a right to the information in the attachment?
What you're mistaking is that technical restrictions (passwords, email addresses) are simply means to enforce rights, much like locks on doors are means. They do not imply or transfer rights by themselves, just as a door that was not locked is not an invitation to snoop around inside. The right to these information resides in who you are (CEO, VP, etc), not in what access you happen to get. Conversely, just because the CEO forgets his password doesn't mean that he lost his right to the information. (The minute he is fired, however, he may not access sensitive information even if his password still works.)
You are wrong. Somebody who forgets to lock a door did not invite you in, even if you keep the findings to yourself. Somebody who makes a typo and sends sensitive email to you did not invite you to read all of it, only enough to realize that it's not for you. If you don't learn this, I'm afraid you'll continue to lose jobs.
I won't comment on "stupid," but being "blind" is usually the folly of those who stick to philosophies. I don't think Torvalds was blind to the implications of vendor lock-in, rather he assessed it and accepted it. Just as you probably do when you fly on a Boeing or AirBus jet run by proprietary closed-source software, or any of innumerable other things you do in "civilized" life. You may believe that opening those sources would result in a better airplane, but you accept the risk differential and wait for your peanuts.
It's not just XP being good enough, but also most people's existing hardware being good enough. Used to be that hardware manufacturers would make extra money when people wanted to upgrade to hungry software, and Microsoft makes extra money when people upgraded computers for some other reason, but now when both are good enough, nobody feels the need to upgrade until it's actually broken.
If only there was a simple experiment a person with a 5-digit Slashdot ID could run to find out for himself or herself... ;)
...and that's why many, many employers are reluctant to hire fresh CS graduates.
Unless you would buy one (except for the widescreen factor), you're not a customer. Were you planning to buy one?
Both responses to my post addressed essentially the same point, so I'll just reply once here.
The spectrum belongs to the public, which is why the government can be responsible for allocating it to private entities. As such, any proceeds from such allocation (much like the sale of government land) belongs to the people. It can be issued back in the form of $40 vouchers, or it can be sent in to the treasury to reduce taxes. It's the same money.
The difference is that Bill Gates and you both get $40 back, even though he's probably paying more of the government's expenses than you are. If the billion dollars were used to reduce taxes, then he'd get more than $40 (and you might get less than $40). Therefore, the net effect of this is a redistribution of money. In fact, if I'm not mistaken Bill Gates will get "screwed" twice, because he might not have any analog TVs left in the house to avail of the voucher.
You've entirely missed my point. The government has no money of its own. It spends our tax money. So to say the government "should foot the bill" you really mean all other taxpayers (perhaps including you) should foot the bill. If you're an average taxpayer, you're really just paying $40 in taxes and getting a $40 voucher back. If you're an above-average taxpayer, you're helping pay for somebody else's TV upgrade. So the question is why there is a societal need to redistribute income in this way, which I think is what any self-respecting small-government type would ask.