"What the text generation is up to" is an interesting question in itself. Your tone implies whatever they're up to is abhorrent (at least I think that's your tone), but my guess is they will never recognize this problem at all. Either they'll annotate their messages with emoticons or somesuch, or give each other more benefit of the doubt, or defer certain discussions to interactive conversations, or maybe they'll just be thicker skinned? What I guarantee they won't do is scrutinize and revise each little IM they send to each other, that's just not time-efficient.
And how about the next generation after that? I'd say it's likely the Internet won't be particularly text-based by then, since hopfully bandwidth won't be a problem. Little video-emails recorded on cellphones would convey all the prosidy and facial expression that email lacks.
the network stack occasionally crashes under VMWare.... Simply killing and restarting dhcpd actually does get the system back up and running. It's kind of neat, even though it does take some getting used to.
I think I'd prefer the Linux network stack, which AFAIK simply doesn't crash in the first place.
Which gets back to the heart of the matter - is runtime modularity in a kernel worth it? It's very hard for me to see the justification for general computer usage, when both Linux and Windows seem to be very reliable. (I'll leave the embedded guys to hold their own side discussion:)
BY FAR my biggest qualm with Linux is that it doesn't have support for some of the zillions of hardware devices out there (or for certain features of those devices)... in other words, microkernels don't address the problem I care about.
In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books.
I don't think that proves what you think it does. You don't think people like quality texts? Project Gutenberg uploads over 2 million e-texts each month! The reason is simple, people know to go there when they want certain kinds of texts. The odds of finding the books you want on Kazaa are so tiny, why would anybody try? But if it gained popularity, people would learn to search there. The numbers might never be huge, yet they still might be a sizeable percentage of the market for such books, which is what the publishing industry fears.
Simple, because multicast doesn't solve the problem of givving each viewer specifically what they want, when they want it. And because it doesn't do much to alleviate bandwidth where it really counts - the last mile. And because the airwaves and broadcast cable networks already do a fine job of delivering content (like sports events) that everybody wants to watch at the same time.
However, if I were a provider, I would have to consider that all of a sudden even a small percentage of my customers could consume all of my bandwidth and would have to come up with some approach to keep the pipes working.
Nobody is against fairly allocating bandwidth to customers, including giving more bandwidth to those who pay more. What does that have to do with content-specific filtering? Nothing.
Problem though is that internet costs (to the user) are too low, and there's not a lot of money to be made from providing bandwidth so there's very little motivation to improve the situation.
No, the problem is that bandwidth to the home is a natural monopoly, so it has been taken over by the greedy, lazy telco and cable companies who expect to charge more and more for the same old service every year. Had it been up to them, modems would still not be allowed on phone lines at all, "how dare you invade our network with your unapproved devices and applications"!
I wish I could buy into a municipal dark fiber network, then companies could compete to deliver bandwidth over that network. I'm sick of paying the cable company a recurring bill every month, only to have them begrudge any ongoing upgrades to the network. Fiber has eliminated any real technical bandwidth limitations, it's just a matter of setting up incentives to drive services up and prices down.
But I think it's not such a tremendous leap to suppose that they have been spying on electronic communications on an unprecedented scale. What else could they possibly have been up to for the last 25 years?
Of course, that's they're job... to spy on potential threats, not in America, and especially not on Americans without a warrant. The 4th ammendment prohibits this.
Google actually shopped around for years trying to license or sell their search algorithms before giving up and foolishly (most said at the time) trying to establish their own brand in the saturated search market.
That said, I don't think generalizations should be drawn from google. It's a one-in-a-million case where the underlying technology actually trumped everything else, and a good algorithm made its inventors super rich. How often does that happen? Almost never. All your examples are about exactly the opposite; normally the value generated by great ideas goes not to the inventor but rather to whomever can best market them (IP law notwithstanding).
Specially considering that what really matters for desktop is gnome, kde,x.org...not the kernel.
IMHO, as a longtime linux desktop user, you have it exactly backwards! The big weakness of Linux on the desktop is hardware support (even moreso for FreeBSD). The lack of MS Office is the other contender for biggest weakness, at least for people (including myself) who must use these programs.
Gnome and KDE could be ported to any old kernel relatively easily, so how much comparative advantage can they provide? Besides which, you really can't do anything with Gnome and KDE that you can't do without them, in fact I still prefer fvwm2.
One the other hand, DNA is quite different. You can learn from DNA things the govenrment is not entitled to know. Your lineage, your health prospects, your allegries, and any number of personal attributes. From blood you can learn even more. e.g. are you HiV positive.
For that matter, given your DNA it is possible in theory (and soon in practice?) to manufacture your twin!
P.S. Whatever happened to the dream of everyone having perfect access to all information; "information wants to be free" they exclaimed, and yet, when that information is of value to themselves, they want to preserve it. They desire a monopoly upon it (a copyright which never expires), and in the process, have they not murdered the very dream of an open source society?
A completely open society is not what we're moving towards. Rather it's a society where Big Brother has all the information, and the populace has very little (due to govt secrecy). For instance, your private phone calls are now open to the government. But the mere identities of those behind our national energy policy is a secret. If anything, it should be just the opposite; private matters should be private, and public affairs should be public, yet somehow we've got it reversed.
Personally, I think even a completely open society (which I don't desire) would be better than one where the most important information is concentrated into the hands of just a few people.
Case in point: we sold our house at or near the peak and we are now renting. There is a pretty good chance that when we buy at the bottom we will have made 30% or more. Only people who are buying right now when all indicators suggest that prices haven't reached the bottom will be hurt. I.e. paying attention pays off! Look at basic forces.
That's what my dad thought when he moved our family out of San Jose in 1979, after several years of solid appreciation.
Do you really think there will be a big housing bust? I thought if that would ever happen, it would be in silicon valley after the.com bust. But what actually happened? Very little. A few prices retreated for a short while, then recovered and grew.
I was under the impression that Core 2 was dual core, hence the "2"... but now I see the Core 2 Duo is something else. Anyways, I'll take the fastest CPU I can get, thankyouverymuch.
CPUs that fast are never, ever the system's bottleneck.
Even a routine task like compiling a program is cpu-bound. I recently upgraded my laptop from a 4200 RPM to a 7200 RPM drive. It can copy big files almost twice as fast, yet compiling is barely faster at all, because over 95% of the elapsed time is simply user CPU time. Same with video editing and compressing large files; they are very often NOT I/O bound.
I'm not a Sony fanboy, not by a long shot, but comparing a 5 grand PC to a 1/2 grand PS/3 does seem a tad unfair, now doesn't it?
First, $5K is your estimate, not Intel's. (Come on, $2K for graphics cards!? $1K for a Blu-Ray drive when you can't even buy PC software OR movies for Blu-Ray!?)
Second, not everybody is terribly concerned about "performance per dollar"... they just want the best performance they can reasonably afford. I know my bike-racing brother's $4K ride is not 1/2 the weight of a $2K bike, and so does he, but it doesn't seem to bother him (and yes, he does win a lot of races!) Intel is just putting Sony in their place, which is their right if they have the goods to back it up.
Voila you are no longer an unlawful combatant and rather a POW
Too clever. Look, the Geneva conventions are dead, and we killed them. I guarantee our next enemy will simply declare our soldiers "unlawful combatants" through some (possibly creative) interpretation of international law.
Raise your hand if you've "burned out" a chip that ran stable but was destroyed by overclocking. My Celeron 566 still runs 24/7 at 850 mhz after all these years.
Nokia, Motorola, and the other big handset manufacturers also make a bundle selling infrastructure equipment to wireless carriers. Do you think they are going to shoot themselves in the foot by producing a device that is free to use?
Maybe not, but the faceless far-east companies who actually make everything might not care.
Slashdot Mirror
And how about the next generation after that? I'd say it's likely the Internet won't be particularly text-based by then, since hopfully bandwidth won't be a problem. Little video-emails recorded on cellphones would convey all the prosidy and facial expression that email lacks.
Which gets back to the heart of the matter - is runtime modularity in a kernel worth it? It's very hard for me to see the justification for general computer usage, when both Linux and Windows seem to be very reliable. (I'll leave the embedded guys to hold their own side discussion :)
BY FAR my biggest qualm with Linux is that it doesn't have support for some of the zillions of hardware devices out there (or for certain features of those devices)... in other words, microkernels don't address the problem I care about.
Simple, because multicast doesn't solve the problem of givving each viewer specifically what they want, when they want it. And because it doesn't do much to alleviate bandwidth where it really counts - the last mile. And because the airwaves and broadcast cable networks already do a fine job of delivering content (like sports events) that everybody wants to watch at the same time.
I wish I could buy into a municipal dark fiber network, then companies could compete to deliver bandwidth over that network. I'm sick of paying the cable company a recurring bill every month, only to have them begrudge any ongoing upgrades to the network. Fiber has eliminated any real technical bandwidth limitations, it's just a matter of setting up incentives to drive services up and prices down.
And if true, any reference to 911 in justifying these measures must be a lie.
That said, I don't think generalizations should be drawn from google. It's a one-in-a-million case where the underlying technology actually trumped everything else, and a good algorithm made its inventors super rich. How often does that happen? Almost never. All your examples are about exactly the opposite; normally the value generated by great ideas goes not to the inventor but rather to whomever can best market them (IP law notwithstanding).
Gnome and KDE could be ported to any old kernel relatively easily, so how much comparative advantage can they provide? Besides which, you really can't do anything with Gnome and KDE that you can't do without them, in fact I still prefer fvwm2.
OK, then, most Senators are lawyers, and an awful lot of Reps are too!
Personally, I think even a completely open society (which I don't desire) would be better than one where the most important information is concentrated into the hands of just a few people.
What if I don't even know who Alexander Tyler is supposed to be and I like it anyways?
Do you really think there will be a big housing bust? I thought if that would ever happen, it would be in silicon valley after the .com bust. But what actually happened? Very little. A few prices retreated for a short while, then recovered and grew.
Good luck! Most Congressmen are lawyers!
Surely inspection of the vulnerability test will betray the flaw to attackers?
I was under the impression that Core 2 was dual core, hence the "2"... but now I see the Core 2 Duo is something else. Anyways, I'll take the fastest CPU I can get, thankyouverymuch.
The Core 2 isn't a netburst chip, is it?
Second, not everybody is terribly concerned about "performance per dollar"... they just want the best performance they can reasonably afford. I know my bike-racing brother's $4K ride is not 1/2 the weight of a $2K bike, and so does he, but it doesn't seem to bother him (and yes, he does win a lot of races!) Intel is just putting Sony in their place, which is their right if they have the goods to back it up.
Raise your hand if you've "burned out" a chip that ran stable but was destroyed by overclocking. My Celeron 566 still runs 24/7 at 850 mhz after all these years.