While it may be unclear if civil rights are being abused at this time, let's imagine what happens if speaking against the government becomes a crime someday. It will sure be handy to have all your movements in the previous years available for analysis. Government officials may discover all sorts of useful information about you, your family or your friends (or shall they call "your known associates"?).
After all, if you manage to evade them, it makes perfect sense to detain your family and friends for interrogation and to keep them as probable accomplices.
It's all for the good of the country. Trust your government.
"this could be useful if police need to see where you where last to try to find you"
While this can save a life every once and then, the potential to ruin whole coutries is there. Unless this info is safeguarded (like being accessible only when the police can convince a judge they need to get that data _on_that_very_specific_subset_of_the_data_) I would not sleep well...
For that life-saving abilities, a GPS and satellite-relayed location is just fine.
Because you have to make an effort to turn a civilian into a soldier who can shot a bullet at another civilian. Non-lethal weapons require much less effort on moral justification. While you know it's wrong to fire at a crowd because you know the full effects of a bullet, it is less clear how wrong it is to fire your stun weapons on them.
It's one of those situations when you really want to make as hard as possible (and as grave a crime as possible) to use weapons to control civilians.
This build, scheduled for May 2007, is the first to use an updated design for the laptop. Noticeable improvements over BTest-2 include:
* A faster, lower power processor: the Geode LX-700
o 64 KB I/64 KB D of L1 Cache, 128 KB of L2 Cache (vs. 32 KB of L1 cache)
o Faster processor and memory clock (433/333 vs. 366/266)
o 1.5 W typ. vs. 3 W typ.
o Much better graphics processor, including support for rotated blits and depth conversion
I stand corrected. By the time the Amiga 1000 was introduced, the norm were the CGA/EGA/MDA/Hercules adapters. VGA was introduced only in 1987.
Anyway, EGA and Hercules appealed more to professional non-video users (I had a Hercules display back then connected to a white phosphor monitor) and this created the impression the Amiga was only for "fun".
It's bad. I really miss the innovation of the 80s. Hardware only got boring since then.
Desktop computers were probably the only segment DEC did not have a huge influence. The PDP and VAX series pretty much set the pace for many medium-iron generations. The VT terminals were _the_ reference for terminal design and compatibility (even my IBM 3153 terminal has a VT-100 emulation mode). By the time DEC warmed up to desktop computing, the PC was the standard and everything seemed to be judged by how similar to the PC it was. VMS has influenced the Windows NT kernel (MS got the whole team out of DEC) and, even well after the Alpha started bringing high performance RISC boxes to the PC form-factor (even running Windows), their Unix was one of the first enterprise-ready 64 bit OSs available.
"it was a 16 bit Motorola 68000 system with graphics a lot of PCs still don't have today"
Forgive me, but just about every PC with VGA or better had better graphics than the Amiga 1000. The inability to upgrade the graphics (due to the video memory and bus timings that had to fit with NTSC timings) was one of the reasons for people perceiving the Amiga as a niche machine (games and video) back then and had no little influence in its ultimate demise.
You may want buttons when it makes sense, gestures when it makes sense and motion-detection when it makes sense. The iPhone "soft-buttons" and multi-touch screen and orientation sensing can cover pretty much all three.
Not to say I don't like My Nokia E62 - it's great to be able to ssh myself out of a problem - and I am even considering a E61i when my phone operator is ready to give me one for free.
While very interesting, I will wait for an Apple-supported iPhone development toolchain before seriously considering jumping in.
Only if you are still above escape velocity. If you got rid of enough kinetic energy, you will return to space for a while (may be quite a while), but you will return either to hit the ground or to do another pass through the atmosphere.
When we saw the Unix fragmentation, we saw a bunch of different flavors that ran each on some kind of proprietary hardware (or a bit less proprietary, when it used an industry standard bus like VME) that were actively marketed by the makers of such hardware and were deliberately incompatible with each other in order to provide some measure of lock-in and differentiation on a largely common software platform.
If we ignore the vanity Linuxes (the ones someone did to claim they made one) and the specific-purpose ones (router-on-a-floppy, rescue, media-box) and the opportunistic ones ("let's nail some OEM deal to make some cash" kind) we are left with only a handful of very serious vendors pitching what amounts to be the same product plus some limited bells and whistles, that run on mostly any computer you happen to have, and making money out of supporting it rather than selling you disks (or tapes, if we account for those ancient times) and servers/workstations.
The difference is that I could not run the same binaries on my DG Aviion systems and on my IBM AIX boxes. I can install a Red Hat package on my Ubuntu notebook any time I feel like it (I usually don't)
OK. It only happens that most Windows programs come with installers that run under admin privileges and scatter files all around the hard disk (under Program Files, under "Program Files" even when running under localized versions of Windows that would like to call it by other name, under \windows, \windows\system and so on), that write settings in an obscure database that gets corrupted, fragmented and dirty from time to time and that have to be called again when you are uninstalling the program so they can undo the mess they created (or create an even bigger one).
I have written my share of Windows programs that do not require installation. It's just not the norm.
"Here, the only installer I run at elevated privileges is APT system (software management tools and the repositories) and it is reputed as quite safe."
Synaptic (and APT) are system-wide software-management tools and thus require root privileges.
OTOH, it would be cool to be able to allow any user to install a program for himself and still keep it under package management.
"4. This is the type of thing that usually happens on Windows. The above shows just how similar the two really are."
No. Not really.
I had those drivers in a laptop some time ago because a client was dumb enough to buy equipment that had no decent Linux support. The fact highlights how bad it is to use the Windows approach of having to run installers at elevated privileges. Here, the only installer I run at elevated privileges is APT and it is reputed as quite safe.
As for Windows, you have to run such installers at elevated privileges just about evey time you need to make a change in your environment.
I ran the mentioned program once in about 6 years of active Linux usage. A Windows user runs one of those programs every month or so, to install even the most trivial things like cute emoticons for hotmail that come, most of the time, with some form of malware inside.
This is the lame Windows method escaping into Linux. Should be dealt with harshly.
No. It's still far more secure than Windows (or Macintosh, largely), since, in this case, you have to run a proprietary installer for a particular brand of printer/scanner I happen not to use (and that I won't recommend to anyone) and not use the mechanisms for software management built into any modern operating system (such as Red Hat, Debian or Gentoo).
Windows requires to run installers at elevated privilege levels to install things as trivial as a music players and, those, not rarely, intermingle themselves into the operating system in ways it makes impossible to get rid of them after you no longer need them.
I would like to add that, had the driver writer done his/her job and made it to work the proper way (SANE for the scanner, CUPS/GhostScript for the printer) and maybe something more specific for the fax part, he would never, ever, face any problem.
"Gah, not to get into a huge flame war here, but I seriously don't understand why there's this association of liking/using windows and being some kind of computer moron."
Well... Let's examine what your computer non-moron-ness index is.
"Let me put it right out in the open here - I like and use Windows."
Started bad.
"In fact, I'd wager that a large number of/. people do, and either downplay it or deny it. Now I'm not saying that unix type OS's don't have their place - I use solaris and linux at work for coding and my servers generally run openBSD."
Using Solaris for coding... Unless you have some very exotic toolset, it makes little sense. Most tools also run or run better under some flavor of Linux or BSD. I did some development under Solaris/SPARC and liked the performance compared to my x86 box of the time. Currently I do most of my development under Eclipse, NetBeans or Eric (and I am trying to get around Emacs/Slime), all of them run on just about every modern OS and are more than happy on my Core Duo notebook. Linux also makes it far easier to keep the whole environment up to date than Solaris or BSD (or even IRIX, which had an outstanding software manager). There are also some very sweet tools for OSX, but they tend to be more useful if you develop for OSX, so, they are as useful for me as Visual Studio (which is also very good, if you happen to do Windows).
I won't dispute your use of BSD for servers. It's a matter of taste. It works very well, but won't give you any non-moron points.
"BUT I want my personal box to be as easy and hassle free as possible so I run windows and only windows."
That's exactly why I don't run Windows. I have hosed countless Windows boxes during my Visual Studio years. And it's not trivial to back up all your user configuration between disasters. It used to take me one full day to recover a Windows box to a workable state (unless I have a system image to restore) and it takes me less than two hours to do the same from a Ubuntu CD. Yes. Even if I don't have an install-list file ready.
"I don't consider myself to be a windows victim and it's not a choice I made just because that's what came with the box."
There is no shame in being a victim. I keep a Windows box for "going to the bank" and a couple Windows images under VMWare for when I have to check something under IE 7. And no, I would never install IE under Wine - it's just wrong.
"Say what you want about bloatware, but it's nice to buy a piece of hardware and have it just work."
My printer requires a driver disk. So does my camera. And my modem (never reinstalled it after the first Windows setup was ruined). And my video card. They all need driver CDs under XPSP2. Vista is nicer in that regard, but it is at least an order of magnitude more bloated, so, it may not need driver CDs, but needs another hard drive, a couple more megahertz and a couple more gigabytes of RAM.
On the other hand, everything but wireless in my notebook worked from the start with Ubuntu. It took a kernel package update to make the wireless (broadcom) work. It takes minutes to have a Linux box with a very capable install and very pleasing eye-candy.
"It's nice to install a program without having to recompile the kernel."
You just lost all your non-moron points. Nobody has to recompile a kernel just to run a userland program. And nobody ever should. The most I ever had is to tweak some limits to make Oracle happy or install a different stock kernel package to make some weird - really weird and non-cooperative manufacturer - hardware work. If you have to recompile the kernel, then the program is broken.
"It's nice to have a box I can actually buy decent games for."
I have one of those too. It's called a Playstation and it's hooked to the biggest screen in the house, next to a very comfortable sofa. My son loves it and I can even do some writing while watching him play.
"And no...I haven't reinstalled every two weeks since I
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While it may be unclear if civil rights are being abused at this time, let's imagine what happens if speaking against the government becomes a crime someday. It will sure be handy to have all your movements in the previous years available for analysis. Government officials may discover all sorts of useful information about you, your family or your friends (or shall they call "your known associates"?).
After all, if you manage to evade them, it makes perfect sense to detain your family and friends for interrogation and to keep them as probable accomplices.
It's all for the good of the country. Trust your government.
"this could be useful if police need to see where you where last to try to find you"
While this can save a life every once and then, the potential to ruin whole coutries is there. Unless this info is safeguarded (like being accessible only when the police can convince a judge they need to get that data _on_that_very_specific_subset_of_the_data_) I would not sleep well...
For that life-saving abilities, a GPS and satellite-relayed location is just fine.
In the end, after all stars have also failed, the Universe will be a dark and cold vacuum. ;-)
It is.
Because you have to make an effort to turn a civilian into a soldier who can shot a bullet at another civilian. Non-lethal weapons require much less effort on moral justification. While you know it's wrong to fire at a crowd because you know the full effects of a bullet, it is less clear how wrong it is to fire your stun weapons on them.
It's one of those situations when you really want to make as hard as possible (and as grave a crime as possible) to use weapons to control civilians.
From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification:
Beta Test 3 Systems (BTest-3, or B3)
This build, scheduled for May 2007, is the first to use an updated design for the laptop. Noticeable improvements over BTest-2 include:
* A faster, lower power processor: the Geode LX-700
o 64 KB I/64 KB D of L1 Cache, 128 KB of L2 Cache (vs. 32 KB of L1 cache)
o Faster processor and memory clock (433/333 vs. 366/266)
o 1.5 W typ. vs. 3 W typ.
o Much better graphics processor, including support for rotated blits and depth conversion
I stand corrected. By the time the Amiga 1000 was introduced, the norm were the CGA/EGA/MDA/Hercules adapters. VGA was introduced only in 1987.
Anyway, EGA and Hercules appealed more to professional non-video users (I had a Hercules display back then connected to a white phosphor monitor) and this created the impression the Amiga was only for "fun".
It's bad. I really miss the innovation of the 80s. Hardware only got boring since then.
I am not sure if you rememeber anything not PC.
Desktop computers were probably the only segment DEC did not have a huge influence. The PDP and VAX series pretty much set the pace for many medium-iron generations. The VT terminals were _the_ reference for terminal design and compatibility (even my IBM 3153 terminal has a VT-100 emulation mode). By the time DEC warmed up to desktop computing, the PC was the standard and everything seemed to be judged by how similar to the PC it was. VMS has influenced the Windows NT kernel (MS got the whole team out of DEC) and, even well after the Alpha started bringing high performance RISC boxes to the PC form-factor (even running Windows), their Unix was one of the first enterprise-ready 64 bit OSs available.
"it was a 16 bit Motorola 68000 system with graphics a lot of PCs still don't have today"
Forgive me, but just about every PC with VGA or better had better graphics than the Amiga 1000. The inability to upgrade the graphics (due to the video memory and bus timings that had to fit with NTSC timings) was one of the reasons for people perceiving the Amiga as a niche machine (games and video) back then and had no little influence in its ultimate demise.
There was a Photoshop version for Unix. I remember using it on a SGI workstation.
This is lame. Having to run perl just to restart Apache and to print a message?! Come on...
A shell script could have done that.
And, BTW, real people use Emacs.
You may want buttons when it makes sense, gestures when it makes sense and motion-detection when it makes sense. The iPhone "soft-buttons" and multi-touch screen and orientation sensing can cover pretty much all three.
Not to say I don't like My Nokia E62 - it's great to be able to ssh myself out of a problem - and I am even considering a E61i when my phone operator is ready to give me one for free.
While very interesting, I will wait for an Apple-supported iPhone development toolchain before seriously considering jumping in.
It's not AT&T's fault. Everybody knows a hacker can start a nuclear war with nothing more than a touch-tone telephone.
The words of Richard Feynman keep echoing in my head. "Nature cannot be fooled"
Only if you are still above escape velocity. If you got rid of enough kinetic energy, you will return to space for a while (may be quite a while), but you will return either to hit the ground or to do another pass through the atmosphere.
When we saw the Unix fragmentation, we saw a bunch of different flavors that ran each on some kind of proprietary hardware (or a bit less proprietary, when it used an industry standard bus like VME) that were actively marketed by the makers of such hardware and were deliberately incompatible with each other in order to provide some measure of lock-in and differentiation on a largely common software platform.
If we ignore the vanity Linuxes (the ones someone did to claim they made one) and the specific-purpose ones (router-on-a-floppy, rescue, media-box) and the opportunistic ones ("let's nail some OEM deal to make some cash" kind) we are left with only a handful of very serious vendors pitching what amounts to be the same product plus some limited bells and whistles, that run on mostly any computer you happen to have, and making money out of supporting it rather than selling you disks (or tapes, if we account for those ancient times) and servers/workstations.
The difference is that I could not run the same binaries on my DG Aviion systems and on my IBM AIX boxes. I can install a Red Hat package on my Ubuntu notebook any time I feel like it (I usually don't)
OK. It only happens that most Windows programs come with installers that run under admin privileges and scatter files all around the hard disk (under Program Files, under "Program Files" even when running under localized versions of Windows that would like to call it by other name, under \windows, \windows\system and so on), that write settings in an obscure database that gets corrupted, fragmented and dirty from time to time and that have to be called again when you are uninstalling the program so they can undo the mess they created (or create an even bigger one).
I have written my share of Windows programs that do not require installation. It's just not the norm.
"Here, the only installer I run at elevated privileges is APT system (software management tools and the repositories) and it is reputed as quite safe."
OK. Fixed that.
Synaptic (and APT) are system-wide software-management tools and thus require root privileges. OTOH, it would be cool to be able to allow any user to install a program for himself and still keep it under package management.
"4. This is the type of thing that usually happens on Windows. The above shows just how similar the two really are."
No. Not really.
I had those drivers in a laptop some time ago because a client was dumb enough to buy equipment that had no decent Linux support. The fact highlights how bad it is to use the Windows approach of having to run installers at elevated privileges. Here, the only installer I run at elevated privileges is APT and it is reputed as quite safe.
As for Windows, you have to run such installers at elevated privileges just about evey time you need to make a change in your environment.
I ran the mentioned program once in about 6 years of active Linux usage. A Windows user runs one of those programs every month or so, to install even the most trivial things like cute emoticons for hotmail that come, most of the time, with some form of malware inside.
This is the lame Windows method escaping into Linux. Should be dealt with harshly.
No. It's still far more secure than Windows (or Macintosh, largely), since, in this case, you have to run a proprietary installer for a particular brand of printer/scanner I happen not to use (and that I won't recommend to anyone) and not use the mechanisms for software management built into any modern operating system (such as Red Hat, Debian or Gentoo).
Windows requires to run installers at elevated privilege levels to install things as trivial as a music players and, those, not rarely, intermingle themselves into the operating system in ways it makes impossible to get rid of them after you no longer need them.
I would like to add that, had the driver writer done his/her job and made it to work the proper way (SANE for the scanner, CUPS/GhostScript for the printer) and maybe something more specific for the fax part, he would never, ever, face any problem.
It's lame and inexcusable.
These are no packages. It's an installation program you run as root.
Really Windows-style.
"Gah, not to get into a huge flame war here, but I seriously don't understand why there's this association of liking/using windows and being some kind of computer moron."
/. people do, and either downplay it or deny it. Now I'm not saying that unix type OS's don't have their place - I use solaris and linux at work for coding and my servers generally run openBSD."
Well... Let's examine what your computer non-moron-ness index is.
"Let me put it right out in the open here - I like and use Windows."
Started bad.
"In fact, I'd wager that a large number of
Using Solaris for coding... Unless you have some very exotic toolset, it makes little sense. Most tools also run or run better under some flavor of Linux or BSD. I did some development under Solaris/SPARC and liked the performance compared to my x86 box of the time. Currently I do most of my development under Eclipse, NetBeans or Eric (and I am trying to get around Emacs/Slime), all of them run on just about every modern OS and are more than happy on my Core Duo notebook. Linux also makes it far easier to keep the whole environment up to date than Solaris or BSD (or even IRIX, which had an outstanding software manager). There are also some very sweet tools for OSX, but they tend to be more useful if you develop for OSX, so, they are as useful for me as Visual Studio (which is also very good, if you happen to do Windows).
I won't dispute your use of BSD for servers. It's a matter of taste. It works very well, but won't give you any non-moron points.
"BUT I want my personal box to be as easy and hassle free as possible so I run windows and only windows."
That's exactly why I don't run Windows. I have hosed countless Windows boxes during my Visual Studio years. And it's not trivial to back up all your user configuration between disasters. It used to take me one full day to recover a Windows box to a workable state (unless I have a system image to restore) and it takes me less than two hours to do the same from a Ubuntu CD. Yes. Even if I don't have an install-list file ready.
"I don't consider myself to be a windows victim and it's not a choice I made just because that's what came with the box."
There is no shame in being a victim. I keep a Windows box for "going to the bank" and a couple Windows images under VMWare for when I have to check something under IE 7. And no, I would never install IE under Wine - it's just wrong.
"Say what you want about bloatware, but it's nice to buy a piece of hardware and have it just work."
My printer requires a driver disk. So does my camera. And my modem (never reinstalled it after the first Windows setup was ruined). And my video card. They all need driver CDs under XPSP2. Vista is nicer in that regard, but it is at least an order of magnitude more bloated, so, it may not need driver CDs, but needs another hard drive, a couple more megahertz and a couple more gigabytes of RAM.
On the other hand, everything but wireless in my notebook worked from the start with Ubuntu. It took a kernel package update to make the wireless (broadcom) work. It takes minutes to have a Linux box with a very capable install and very pleasing eye-candy.
"It's nice to install a program without having to recompile the kernel."
You just lost all your non-moron points. Nobody has to recompile a kernel just to run a userland program. And nobody ever should. The most I ever had is to tweak some limits to make Oracle happy or install a different stock kernel package to make some weird - really weird and non-cooperative manufacturer - hardware work. If you have to recompile the kernel, then the program is broken.
"It's nice to have a box I can actually buy decent games for."
I have one of those too. It's called a Playstation and it's hooked to the biggest screen in the house, next to a very comfortable sofa. My son loves it and I can even do some writing while watching him play.
"And no...I haven't reinstalled every two weeks since I
Don't forget /. is getting increasingly digg-ish.
Expect a huge amount of Windows vict^H^H^H^Husers here.
Yeas, but the PPU is rather lame in performance when compared to the SPUs.
If Apple took it, it could be called G6