It's better than nothing at least. It means that the companies promise not to do "bad stuff" with your data, and you can hold them to that promise in court later (since they are required by Trust-E to put their privacy policy in writing online).
After checking over my math, I'm even more skeptical. The 2.3 TB drive for $50 would represent a 600,000 times increase in capacity per dollar over two years, compared to the 40 or so we've seen in the last 5 years.
Well, I remember when buying a computer in 1994 that most hard drives were around 50 cents per megabyte. I bought my 8.4 gig last year (march 1998) for US$180, which is around 2 cents per megabyte.
This is why that 2.3 TB drive for $50 looks unreleastic. That'd be around 0.00002 cents per megabyte. In five years we've gone from 50 to 2 cents (25 times less), so I doubt we'll go from 2 to 0.00002 cents (100,000 times less) in a mere two years.
I, too, would like to see a chart with something more accurate than my anecdotal evidence =)
I'm still skeptical. The historical numbers you posted are exactly why. Apparently you forgot to do the math on those numbers =)
5 years ago 1 GB drives were just starting to come down in price, and I got an 810 MB hard drive for around $300. Now the best you can get for $300 is around 30 gigs. That's an increase of around 40 times the storage capacity/dollar over 5 years.
On the other hand, if a 2.3 TB drive were to ship for $50 in two years, that'd be an increase of around 500 times the storage capacity/dollar over two years.
I don't think that's going to happen. Perhaps in two years we'll see 300 gig hard drives, or possibly 500 gig hard drives at decent prices, but i doubt we'll see 2300+ gig hard drives for under $5000, let alone $50.
BeOS can handle this, NT can handle this, and I assume the commercial UNIXes can.
Windows9x may or may not be able to handle it. The FAT32 maximum is somewhere above 2 TB, but I'm not sure how far above.
Linux will indeed "suck hard at this," due to ext2fs's maximum of 1 TB.
Re:Abstractions, the "dumbing down" of the end use
on
Computer Stupidities
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· Score: 2
I think you have more of a problem with badly set up abstractions, not with the concept of abstractions in general.
Take your example of shortcuts. Ideally, a user shouldn't have to know how a shortcut is done low-level, the user should just know it's a shortcut that points to the actual file. OS/2 implements this properly. When you move a file, the shortcut points to the new location automatically. The only reason win95 shortcuts are bad is because they're implemented as simple textfiles that contain the directory/filename of another file. Same problem with UNIX symlinks.
I was under the impression that, while this was previously true with its T1, slashdot has upgraded to a T3 which is not saturated.
Anecdotal evidence seems to support this, as the main page usually loads quickly, while discussions with hundreds of deeply nested comments load much more slowly.
I'd be happy if Slashdot were like eBay. eBay gets hundreds (if not thousands) of times more traffic than Slashdot does, yet the two sites have comparable reliability.
You ignored the original point, that this is exactly what Red Hat is. Mandrake is Red Hat + KDE + some fine tuning. Red Hat is GNU/Linux + an install program + some fine tuning.
The 5 hours/day figure for adult females seems to reflect the stereotypical stay-at-home mom who watches soap operas all day. I suppose there are still quite a few of them around.
Well, the main reason I was going to use Linux in the first place was because of it's advocates. The GNU project and free software seem like worthwhile causes. If I ignore the advocacy from both sides, then I really don't have a need to switch. I don't need extensive uptime, and this box isn't a server.
As for X being only a protocol, yes, but it's also the foundation of the whole windowing system. Many of the problems are caused by X itself, and the various window managers try kludges that sometimes work around them, but usually only partially. Even something as basic as cut and paste proves problematic in X, while a 1984 Macintosh can cut and paste between apps without any problems.
Lots of other things seem strange, nonintuitive, or just downright dumb to us Windows users. Why can't you configure X within X itself? What's with the separate XF86Setup? Why do you have to run XF86Setup to run X? Why doesn't X have good auto-detection routines and some decent defaults so you only need to run XF86Setup if you wish to further customize X? Why is installing a new kernel an 8-step process? Why isn't there a decent archiver (one that lets you extract a single needed file, like zip, rar, arj, zoo, ace, etc., rather than tar.gzip which requires you to extract the whole thing)? Why isn't there a decent simple text editor? (no, pico doesn't count, and if you consider vim "simple" you're insane) Why is ppp so damn hard to configure?
I can think of a few more, but that's enough for now.
I'd have to disagree with that. The main allure GNU/Linux has for me is that it's free software. On its technical merits alone, I don't like it. I've used it before (Slackware 3.0), and I was not impressed. X especially is pretty shitty for a windowing system, unless you need to do networked stuff (which I don't). The whole "configure everything by editing textfiles" thing doesn't impress me either.
Well, AOL would get that server shut down promptly. MS could keep putting up more servers "without their knowledge," but they'd have to keep releasing new versions of their client to connect to the new proxies (or their users would have to keep reconfiguring the clients to use different proxies). For the long term, it'd be unworkable.
Yes, they only seem to be worried about addictions when it suits them. For example, love is one of the most addictive phenomenons in existance, yet psychologists, to my knowledge, have never warned against it or recommended mental help for those in love.
Scientific studies have shown that being in love chemically much resembles substance addiction, and symptoms are similar as well, including irrational behavior, withdrawal, etc.
To the metal ward with all internet users and lovestruck couples!
The newspaper today had a summary of a recent study about TV usage in the United States. Weird coincidence.
Anyway, they said the average is around 7.5 hours/day per household. The most TV-addicted demographic are adult females, who average around 5 hours/day of TV-watching, then adult males, who average around 4 hours/day, then kids under 12, who average around 3 hours/day and finally teenagers, who average around 2.75 hours/day.
Overall, it seems that the adults who complain that kids these days watch too much TV need to look at their own habits first.
I'm surprised AOL hasn't implemented a fairly easy method of stopping non-authorized clients. They could merely take a small (15x15 pixels or something) BMP of a trademarked logo (such as the AOL logo), and use it as a "key" to access the servers. Official AIM clients would transmit this logo to the servers for authentication, but Microsoft could not implement that in its client without being sued for trademark infringement. AOL could then authorize gaim and the other non-Windows AIM clients to use the logo free of charge, so they wouldn't be inconvenienced, and AOL would retain its control of the Windows clients, keeping Microsoft out.
This method works, and has legally been tested, as this is the method Gameboy uses to keep non-licensed developers from writing Gameboy games. If a game doesn't have the gameboy trademarked logo at the beginning of its ROM, the Gameboy refuses to play it.
Well, I'd rather not be part of a group of people that have an exclusionary and/or elitist attitude. I have tried Linux (I installed Slackware 3.0 lats year), but I wasn't impressed enough by its technical merits to continue using it. The RMS philosophy and the GPL intrigue me, but they're counterbalanced by the rest of the crap I see in the "Linux community." On just technical reasons, ignoring any ideologies, I see no reason to switch. Sure, Windows sucks in many ways, but so does X. Windows crashes, but it has a usable, consistent interface. X doesn't crash nearly as often (though XF86Setup required me to reboot a few times), but its interface pretty much sucks, and is not consistent in the least.
I wasn't implying that the Red Hat kernel was different because it was a different version. It's not even part of the Linux kernel development tree. It's not *any* kernel that you can find on ftp.kernel.org, but a custom kernel of their own, that differs not just in how it was configured, but in the code itself.
I'd say ESR is one of the main reasons I'm still using Windows rather than Linux. Articles like this, filled with half-truths, omissions, and outright lies are what's kept me away. Of course, ESR isn't the only guilty party, much of the Linux "community" behaves likewise.
IRIX is not being dropped, nor is it being replaced with Linux. IRIX is still being supported and developed for SGI's high-end servers, which Linux cannot, and most likely will not, run on. Linux is for low to mid end computers, not enterprise-class servers. That's what IRIX is, and will continue to be, for.
Linux is not "re-unifying" UNIX. There are still many different fragments of UNIX, ranging from Linux to FreeBSD to Solaris. The various BSDs seem to mess up ESR's arguments, so he just omits them. Typical.
Anyway, RMS's writings had almost convinced me to switch to Linux. Bruce Perens has done a good job as well. Unfortunately, the rest of the Linux community, along with ESR, has done the opposite. That, and the fact that I REALLY dislike X, is going to keep me in Windows, at least until I get some spare time to install FreeBSD.
No they don't. Red Hat Linux distros use a custom Red Hat kernel. Usually, it's an older kernel than the current latest "stable" kernel, but with some of the newer features and bugfixes added in, to make for a truly stable kernel (the "stable" kernel tree itself is somewhat of a misnomer).
I don't care if W. Bush used drugs, as long as he doesn't care if we do.
The problem is that W. Bush used drugs, but doesn't want us to. He said he's "learned from [his] mistakes" and realizes that drugs are bad and need to be eradicated.
I've tried CDex, but I haven't been able to get it to rip without skipping at least once per song. It is better than most of the other rippers though, since it at least tells you when it had skip problems. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually fix those skip problems, which is what cdrwin does (and what I'm looking for).
Slashdot Mirror
It's better than nothing at least. It means that the companies promise not to do "bad stuff" with your data, and you can hold them to that promise in court later (since they are required by Trust-E to put their privacy policy in writing online).
After checking over my math, I'm even more skeptical. The 2.3 TB drive for $50 would represent a 600,000 times increase in capacity per dollar over two years, compared to the 40 or so we've seen in the last 5 years.
Well, I remember when buying a computer in 1994 that most hard drives were around 50 cents per megabyte. I bought my 8.4 gig last year (march 1998) for US$180, which is around 2 cents per megabyte.
This is why that 2.3 TB drive for $50 looks unreleastic. That'd be around 0.00002 cents per megabyte. In five years we've gone from 50 to 2 cents (25 times less), so I doubt we'll go from 2 to 0.00002 cents (100,000 times less) in a mere two years.
I, too, would like to see a chart with something more accurate than my anecdotal evidence =)
I'm still skeptical. The historical numbers you posted are exactly why. Apparently you forgot to do the math on those numbers =)
5 years ago 1 GB drives were just starting to come down in price, and I got an 810 MB hard drive for around $300. Now the best you can get for $300 is around 30 gigs. That's an increase of around 40 times the storage capacity/dollar over 5 years.
On the other hand, if a 2.3 TB drive were to ship for $50 in two years, that'd be an increase of around 500 times the storage capacity/dollar over two years.
I don't think that's going to happen. Perhaps in two years we'll see 300 gig hard drives, or possibly 500 gig hard drives at decent prices, but i doubt we'll see 2300+ gig hard drives for under $5000, let alone $50.
BeOS can handle this, NT can handle this, and I assume the commercial UNIXes can.
Windows9x may or may not be able to handle it. The FAT32 maximum is somewhere above 2 TB, but I'm not sure how far above.
Linux will indeed "suck hard at this," due to ext2fs's maximum of 1 TB.
I think you have more of a problem with badly set up abstractions, not with the concept of abstractions in general.
Take your example of shortcuts. Ideally, a user shouldn't have to know how a shortcut is done low-level, the user should just know it's a shortcut that points to the actual file. OS/2 implements this properly. When you move a file, the shortcut points to the new location automatically. The only reason win95 shortcuts are bad is because they're implemented as simple textfiles that contain the directory/filename of another file. Same problem with UNIX symlinks.
I was under the impression that, while this was previously true with its T1, slashdot has upgraded to a T3 which is not saturated.
Anecdotal evidence seems to support this, as the main page usually loads quickly, while discussions with hundreds of deeply nested comments load much more slowly.
I'd be happy if Slashdot were like eBay. eBay gets hundreds (if not thousands) of times more traffic than Slashdot does, yet the two sites have comparable reliability.
The problem is that most people don't know it's available for free. Most of those that do wouldn't know how to get it anyway.
You ignored the original point, that this is exactly what Red Hat is. Mandrake is Red Hat + KDE + some fine tuning. Red Hat is GNU/Linux + an install program + some fine tuning.
The 5 hours/day figure for adult females seems to reflect the stereotypical stay-at-home mom who watches soap operas all day. I suppose there are still quite a few of them around.
Well, the main reason I was going to use Linux in the first place was because of it's advocates. The GNU project and free software seem like worthwhile causes. If I ignore the advocacy from both sides, then I really don't have a need to switch. I don't need extensive uptime, and this box isn't a server.
As for X being only a protocol, yes, but it's also the foundation of the whole windowing system. Many of the problems are caused by X itself, and the various window managers try kludges that sometimes work around them, but usually only partially. Even something as basic as cut and paste proves problematic in X, while a 1984 Macintosh can cut and paste between apps without any problems.
Lots of other things seem strange, nonintuitive, or just downright dumb to us Windows users. Why can't you configure X within X itself? What's with the separate XF86Setup? Why do you have to run XF86Setup to run X? Why doesn't X have good auto-detection routines and some decent defaults so you only need to run XF86Setup if you wish to further customize X? Why is installing a new kernel an 8-step process? Why isn't there a decent archiver (one that lets you extract a single needed file, like zip, rar, arj, zoo, ace, etc., rather than tar.gzip which requires you to extract the whole thing)? Why isn't there a decent simple text editor? (no, pico doesn't count, and if you consider vim "simple" you're insane) Why is ppp so damn hard to configure?
I can think of a few more, but that's enough for now.
I'd have to disagree with that. The main allure GNU/Linux has for me is that it's free software. On its technical merits alone, I don't like it. I've used it before (Slackware 3.0), and I was not impressed. X especially is pretty shitty for a windowing system, unless you need to do networked stuff (which I don't). The whole "configure everything by editing textfiles" thing doesn't impress me either.
Wow, didn't realize it had progressed that far. I'm using CDex v0.15 beta 4, which could be why it's not performing as well as you described =)
Well, AOL would get that server shut down promptly. MS could keep putting up more servers "without their knowledge," but they'd have to keep releasing new versions of their client to connect to the new proxies (or their users would have to keep reconfiguring the clients to use different proxies). For the long term, it'd be unworkable.
Yes, they only seem to be worried about addictions when it suits them. For example, love is one of the most addictive phenomenons in existance, yet psychologists, to my knowledge, have never warned against it or recommended mental help for those in love.
Scientific studies have shown that being in love chemically much resembles substance addiction, and symptoms are similar as well, including irrational behavior, withdrawal, etc.
To the metal ward with all internet users and lovestruck couples!
The newspaper today had a summary of a recent study about TV usage in the United States. Weird coincidence.
Anyway, they said the average is around 7.5 hours/day per household. The most TV-addicted demographic are adult females, who average around 5 hours/day of TV-watching, then adult males, who average around 4 hours/day, then kids under 12, who average around 3 hours/day and finally teenagers, who average around 2.75 hours/day.
Overall, it seems that the adults who complain that kids these days watch too much TV need to look at their own habits first.
I'm surprised AOL hasn't implemented a fairly easy method of stopping non-authorized clients. They could merely take a small (15x15 pixels or something) BMP of a trademarked logo (such as the AOL logo), and use it as a "key" to access the servers. Official AIM clients would transmit this logo to the servers for authentication, but Microsoft could not implement that in its client without being sued for trademark infringement. AOL could then authorize gaim and the other non-Windows AIM clients to use the logo free of charge, so they wouldn't be inconvenienced, and AOL would retain its control of the Windows clients, keeping Microsoft out.
This method works, and has legally been tested, as this is the method Gameboy uses to keep non-licensed developers from writing Gameboy games. If a game doesn't have the gameboy trademarked logo at the beginning of its ROM, the Gameboy refuses to play it.
Well, I'd rather not be part of a group of people that have an exclusionary and/or elitist attitude. I have tried Linux (I installed Slackware 3.0 lats year), but I wasn't impressed enough by its technical merits to continue using it. The RMS philosophy and the GPL intrigue me, but they're counterbalanced by the rest of the crap I see in the "Linux community." On just technical reasons, ignoring any ideologies, I see no reason to switch. Sure, Windows sucks in many ways, but so does X. Windows crashes, but it has a usable, consistent interface. X doesn't crash nearly as often (though XF86Setup required me to reboot a few times), but its interface pretty much sucks, and is not consistent in the least.
I wasn't implying that the Red Hat kernel was different because it was a different version. It's not even part of the Linux kernel development tree. It's not *any* kernel that you can find on ftp.kernel.org, but a custom kernel of their own, that differs not just in how it was configured, but in the code itself.
ESR really needs to check his facts before he goes spouting off.
That's what I've thought after nearly every single article of his I've read. Apparently he'd rather generate good PR than be accurate and truthful.
I'd say ESR is one of the main reasons I'm still using Windows rather than Linux. Articles like this, filled with half-truths, omissions, and outright lies are what's kept me away. Of course, ESR isn't the only guilty party, much of the Linux "community" behaves likewise.
IRIX is not being dropped, nor is it being replaced with Linux. IRIX is still being supported and developed for SGI's high-end servers, which Linux cannot, and most likely will not, run on. Linux is for low to mid end computers, not enterprise-class servers. That's what IRIX is, and will continue to be, for.
Linux is not "re-unifying" UNIX. There are still many different fragments of UNIX, ranging from Linux to FreeBSD to Solaris. The various BSDs seem to mess up ESR's arguments, so he just omits them. Typical.
Anyway, RMS's writings had almost convinced me to switch to Linux. Bruce Perens has done a good job as well. Unfortunately, the rest of the Linux community, along with ESR, has done the opposite. That, and the fact that I REALLY dislike X, is going to keep me in Windows, at least until I get some spare time to install FreeBSD.
All Linux distros use the same kernel.
No they don't. Red Hat Linux distros use a custom Red Hat kernel. Usually, it's an older kernel than the current latest "stable" kernel, but with some of the newer features and bugfixes added in, to make for a truly stable kernel (the "stable" kernel tree itself is somewhat of a misnomer).
I don't care if W. Bush used drugs, as long as he doesn't care if we do.
The problem is that W. Bush used drugs, but doesn't want us to. He said he's "learned from [his] mistakes" and realizes that drugs are bad and need to be eradicated.
I've tried CDex, but I haven't been able to get it to rip without skipping at least once per song. It is better than most of the other rippers though, since it at least tells you when it had skip problems. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually fix those skip problems, which is what cdrwin does (and what I'm looking for).