Some of the article discussion complains that leaving out the screen is a bad move, but is that necessarily the case?
Maybe not.
In the essay What have we got to lose? (as anthologized in _The Salmon of Doubt_), Douglas Adams gives a fascinating overview of all the cases where a clever new product was born not by adding some dazzling new feature, but by identifying properties that could easily be dispensed with.
Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman, for instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to music and a whole new industry. Sony's new Handycam rather brilliantly leaves out the zoom function on the grounds that all a zoom does is cost money, add a lot of bulk and render every amateur video ever made unwatchable. (They might, while they're following this line of thought, consider marketing a record-only video player, and video companies might consider releasing movies that are actually recorded in fast forward mode.) The RISC chip works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of getting on with the easy stuff and leaving out all the difficult bits for someone else to deal with. (I know it's a little more complicated than that, but you have to admit, it's a damned attractive idea). A well-made dry martini works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of leaving out the martini.
So... an iPod with no screen. Well why not? How often do you actually look at the screen? Probably not very -- most of the time the device sits in your pocket, and a lot of people just control the thing through Apple's remote control, which of course has already dispensed with the screen, and has in fact left you with something that looks a lot like the device in the article's photo.
But okay, some of the complaints are right -- browsing through even a modest music collection can get tedious when the only controls you have are to skip forward & back by a track. Being able to see what's going on is nice, but do you have to be able to see it when every iPod listener is already ipso facto listening to the device? Think about it: this would be an excellent place to use some kind of audio / speech interface, and Apple certainly knows how to design a system that way, having had a speech interface built into Macs for many years now.
That may or may not be what Apple is up to here, but it seems like an obvious future direction for the suite of products. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, for example, a future version of the bundled headphones doubled as a microphone somehow, so that you could control the device by just saying "iPod, shuffle playlist Beatles", and it would go forth and do your bidding, and you didn't have to dig it out of your pocked or your backpack or whereever you keep yours stashed.
My wife's company would like to transfer her to an office in their Swiss office in Lucerne / Luzern, but she's got baggage -- me.
So, they're willing to sponsor her, take care of her visa & other paperwork, help set her/us up with an apartment, and bring her over for a couple of year, while she learns how the European side of her company works and she gradually makes her way up the management ladder.
Meanwhile, I'll have to leave my job and basically start over; there's basically no chance that her company's Swiss office would have any IT work (it's all either in the US or outsourced to India). But that's alright, it's an opportunity strongly to be considered, right? But I haven't the slightest idea what the IT market is like in this little, seemingly rural part of the country, and there's so much that needs to be sorted out before going and once we get there.
What skills are in demand in central Switzerland? How does one go about learning such things? Same as here, I guess -- find & browse job listing sites...
Is there any IT work in a medium sized city, or is it better to commute to Zurich or Bern? How feasible is it to commute that far each day?
How much of a liability is my weak grasp of the languages? I'm sure I can pick it up once I get there, but at this point my German and French are both very weak, and I only know as much Italian as I can puzzle out from the Latin I took waaaaay back in high school. I've heard it said that most IT work is done in English, but as a practical matter, don't you have to have a grasp on the dominant local language[s] as well?
Is there any chance of finding full time, salaried employment, or will it all just be consulting gigs? I guess I don't care either way, but a nice predictable job sounds appealing right now...
Is it better to be paid in Swiss Francs, Euros, or US Dollars? Or will that question even come up? If the dollar keeps plummeting, as it seems like it will, the Euro looks more appealing -- but then when the IRS comes knocking it could become painful, fast.
What happens back home? We bought a car before this opportunity came up -- a Subaru Forester -- a nice, reasonable car for snows and mountains. Is it insanity to ship it over with us? Is it insanity to sell a three month old car with less than 4000 miles on it? And what happens with our mortgage back home -- does it make more sense to rent or sell?
Will it make sense to talk to someone at a Swiss consulate before going, or getting in touch with some kind of relocation agency? I suppose it would make more sense than babbling about it on Slashdot, but oh well, the timing of this article caught me right as I was starting to consider all these questions...
Maybe it would be easier to just bus tables at a ski resort and take a few years off from IT...
I need to start working on my resume, or CV I guess. European CVs don't bear much resemblance to American resumes, do they? It seems like they're a lot chattier & biographical than the dry list of titles & skills & credentials that is expected over here. Just one more thing to do in the next handful of months....
Seriously, his acting is so bad, it makes William Shatner and Keanu Reeves look like somone on a par with Lawrence Olivier.
I loved Caruso in Hudson Hawk -- it is, in spite of the bad reputation, a really witty, fun movie -- but now that I see CSI:Miami, it occurs to me that the best part of Caruso's "Hudson Hawk" role is that they didn't let him say any of his lines out loud. Every time he had something to say, he'd hand another character a business card that had his line printed on it. In the context of "Hudson Hawk", this was cute & funny; in the context of his CSI work, this looks like a desperate attempt by the producers of HH to get this bumbler to shut up and save their film.
In hindsight, it was a brilliant move on their part -- some actors just shouldn't be allowed to speak their lines out loud...
No one is taking/usr/bin/perl away from anyone else, so the statement is perfectly reasonable. If Perl6 doesn't follow through on the promise to execute Perl5 code at least as well as the old Perl5 interpreter did, you are absolutely not forced to upgrade.
This isn't like upgrading, say, the Linux kernel, where it's an all or nothing affair and once you've upgraded you can't go back and also use the older version on the same system. The current Perl5 and the future Perl6 toolkits should be perfectly capable of co-existing on the same system, so there's nothing to be afraid of in the compatibility department. But, if the promises to make Perl5 code run faster, and be both more debuggable and more extensible are true -- and they should be, but no one knows yet -- then you have a lot to gain by upgrading.
In other words, you know little about Boston natives. *shrug*
I am a Boston native, and I've even met you at Boston Perl Mongers meeting shortly before you moved to the west coast. So no, it's not that I know little about Boston natives. Sorry:-)
And you're right, I did mis-read the subject -- i thought it said "it's not really funny, but I want you to laugh anyway." My mistake.
So what? The left field pole is hundreds of feet from the right field pole? So, again, how is your "simple mistake" different from Kerry's? Right now you're drawing a distinction without a difference...
P.S. Bellhorn hit the home run to right field (not left) and it hit the right field foul pole, AKA the Pesky Pole. See how easy it is to mis-remember?
To be pedantic, that's not misremembering, it's me confusing my right and my left, which happens far too often.
But when you make a simple mistake -- one which, I note, remains uncorrected in the article text as I write this (I can't decide if that's integrity or not) -- it's okay, but when Kerry makes one, he's somehow hopelessly out of touch?
What's the difference? The fact that he's running for office and you're not?
For those of you who are not Boston-area natives, you might not understand that Red Sox loyalty is far greater than political loyalty
"...for Pudge."
This is a really bizarre blanket statement with little basis in reality.
Yay blanket assertions!
Come on -- on one hand you have baseball, on the other you have the absolutely worst president in recent memory. What's worse -- a simple gaffe about sports statistics (big surprise: not everyone gives a damn about such minutae), vs another four years of this nightmare? Somehow I think Pudge is resoundingly incorrect on this one.
But still, it's nice to see that he feels comfortable enough in his position as one of the "official" voices of Slashdot to use the site as a soapbox for his cranky politics...:-)
and while this might not cause anyone to vote for Bush, it might make Kerry voters stay home.
Or not. You never can tell!
Worse, many Red Sox fans have vowed to see the Sox win a World Series before they die, so tens of thousands of Kerry voters could die before November 2.
???
Of course, this won't affect Massachusetts, Vermont, or Rhode Island, and probably not Maine, but New Hampshire is a possibility.
This article seems to be some new application of the phrase "news for nerds, stuff that matters" that flouts just about every term in the phrase. Impressive.
The obvious thing to try then is to set up Apache (or Squid, or similar software) running as a reverse proxy on that machine.
The first thing I did when finding out about this tool was to install it on a Windows machine with a couple of Samba mounted network drives (I'm hoping that it will index the content of these drives, but I can't tell yet), then set up Apache as a reverse proxy to provide the indexed material as a URL that would be widely accessible on the local LAN.
So far I can't quite get it to work -- I can connect from another computer (a Mac running Safari), but first I get complaints about running the wrong browser, and then I get errors about invalid URLs that apparently aren't being passed through.
Still though, it seems certain that this should be doable, and if it can be done, this would beat the living snot out of my company's current ht://Dig based search engine.
Google is right to make this tool inaccessible from non-localhost access -- the average home user does not need to have the contents of their hard drive set up with an easy to browse, globally accessible search interface. And I can see where Google wouldn't want this to work on LANs either -- it would cut into their business of selling search appliances. But come on, this is right on the cusp of working as it is, and it's only in beta. If Google doesn't provide a way to turn on access for local (e.g. 192.168.x.x) addresses, I'm sure that Apache or something like it can be configured to do this.
For it to really be a Doom movie, it has to be done first person shooter style.
This means, of course, that the camera has to be permanently mounted behind a gun barrel and, aside from mirrors and other reflective objects, you never get to see the protagonist's face -- because he is, after all, the true everyman, representative of everyone and specifically looking like no one. For truly, who among us has not had to slay a million zillion zombies?
A true first person shooter version of Doom / Quake etc would be cool, in a "Blaim Doom Project" kind of way...
There was a 2002 paperpublished by the Mitre Corporation that used the term "FOSS", meaning "free and open-source software". As far as I know, this was the first use of the term, but it may go back a bit farther than this.
I don't, however, have any idea what "FLOSS" is supposed to mean. Assuming that it isn't related to dental hygiene, what is it supposed to stand for ? "Free {Linux, liberty, low-cost} open-source software" ? Just a nonsense corruption of "FOSS" ?
The closest explanation I can find is this blog entry by David Wheeler: "Free-Libre / Open Source Software". Is this really what people are trying to say ?
By "protection", the earlier poster seems to have been talking about the term in the sense of "protection racket", as in "you hand over the money and we see that nothing bad happens to you."
It's debatable whether or not this kind of protection is "worth the money" -- generally there's an implied threat that if you don't pay then you'll suffer the consequences -- but it's clearly illegal under US Federal Law, the RICO act, etc.
It would be interesting to see if a case could be made against them for monopolistic racketeering...
Yeah, I didn't literally mean to suggest that the quote should be part of the talk, but rather that it does a good job of illustrating how the kids & parents will probably respond to the ubiquity of technology. The talk given needs to be done on those terms: the kids are going to take this stuff for granted, so it has to be explained to them how it's a big deal, and what they may be able to expect in the future.
In February, Microsoft
released the Software Development Kit (SDK) for its forthcoming Xbox 2 video game console. Since the Xbox 2 will utilize IBM processors similar to the ones used in today's Macintosh systems, the SDK was seeded to developers on dual Apple Power Mac G5 systems running a custom Windows NT Kernel.
The article implies that the guy who got fired a year or so ago for posting pictures of a Microsoft loading dock full of Powermac G5s may have been fired not because of petty Mac - Windows jealously (or whatever the explanation was at the time), but because those G5s were a tool for the development for Xbox2.
Of course, pointing out that computers are ubiquitous now will probably be more fascinating to the parents than to the children. At the age level we're talking about, the pervasive presense of computers in modern society may very well be taken for granted.
It may be more illuminating to go on for a bit about how these are great automating machines, and that whereas today we can do all these cool things because of computers and the internet (of which they probably won't need many examples), it wasn't that long ago that these things weren't possible, or had to be done manually with great effort by lots of people.
From there, the obvious conclusion -- which the kids should be steered towards but which they might figure out before you have to say it -- is that this has been a continual process for decades now, and it is only accelerating. Anything that can be automated, will be automated. Barriers to communication will keep falling. New possibilities will keep emerging. Nearly all of this will come as a surprise to everyone, but will seem obvious in hindsight. As examples, maybe point out things like digital music -- which they'll all already know about -- being a big change from the little silver discs you've been using for 20 years now, or how VoIP is making calling cheap or free (and how expensive long distance used to be), etc.
In any case, the point is that kids today don't really need to be told that computers are everywhere, any more than people a generation or two older need to be told that electricity is everywhere. It's not novel to these kids, but you have to make it clear what a big, drastic, and world changing difference this is from only 10 or 20 years ago.
There's a great Douglas Adams quote that the kids might like here:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies;
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're after thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
I've never given Microsoft my address, so I'm not sure how it would have ended up in their database. And yes they can track my IP, but only with a registration system like Passport can they say that any activity I make from home, work, and elsewhere is all coming from the same person. As for XP, well, that's just yet another reason that I'm glad to be using a Mac instead of Windows...:-)
That doesn't get around the problem of not wanting to sign up for big brother's Passport account. Ever. And especially not for a crappy Hotmail account.
If they can't provide this demo software without demanding an onerous registration in exchange, then the software just isn't worth it to me.
And no, using fake information on the signup doesn't get around the problem either. It's not that Microsoft would then know exactly who I am -- or who I pretended to be -- but that they would now have one concrete way of tracking what I'm doing, no matter who I say I am. That's much worse than simply knowing my identity, as far as I'm concerned.
Go to http://beta.microsoft.com, login with your passport account.
...and if that particular dusty corner of our souls hasn't been sold to the beast yet, and we don't have passport accounts, then... that's it? Can't sign in?
Marketing-speak from marketers can be annoying, but it's also easy to dismiss. It is, after all, their job.
Much worse is when your company hires a new manager for you that talks that way.
"We need to take the bull by the horns and make this our major
action item. Let's round-table this so that we can get buy-in from all of the stakeholders."
In a perfect world, the response would be clear...
STAFF: What country you from!
MANGER: What?
STAFF: "What" ain't no country I know! Do they speak English in "What?"
MANAGER: What?
...
But no, we have to go along with this nonsense, where civil disobedience can be nothing more than pointedly avoiding cliches, trying to use proper spelling & diction, and especially not verbing perfectly innocent nouns like "round-table".
The English language is a beautiful thing. I'm going to miss it when it's gone...
To clarify, for those who haven't used it or read the link above, NFSRoot is not the same as a thin client, and it isn't a matter of just running X sessions remotely.
At boot time, the system uses PXE to pull down a read-only root filesystem, from which the kernel is launched, and sets up a ramdisk for read-write filesystems (/var).
All applications come down over the network from the NFS server and run locally; processes that emit log data end up writing back to a central server.
If client has catastrophic hardware failure, no big deal -- reconfigure DHCP to say that foo.domain.org is dead and now a machine with a different MAC address is going to be the new foo.domain.org, and the next time that user boots with the new computer, everything (minus anything they put in their/usr/local that wasn't backed up somehow) is back without missing a beat.
If the NFS server goes down, the client machines may freeze, but in theory they should resume cleanly when the server comes back up. (In practice this does't always work, but it works a lot better than I would have expected it to -- a lot of the times, things really are just Fine.)
Stateless Linux seems to offer most of the same things that most of the Linux users at my company are already doing today with NFSRoot. The main blind spot we have with NFSRoot is a good way to handle laptop users, but at my company there aren't many of those so we can deal with that. Aside from that case, the way we use NFSroot seems to be basically identical to what RedHat is proposing with this Stateless Linux proposal.
So -- can anyone that has read up on both explain the difference? It isn't obvious to me...
Stateless Linux might be a bit broader -- NFSRoot as I have seen it deployed seems to match only the case of, as the HOWTO puts it, "caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive", rather than the other three scenarios described under "stateless Linux clients" in the HOWTO -- but that's splitting hairs over what seems to be, in most ways, the same basic idea.
So -- how is Stateless Linux a radically new thing? There are documents for NFSRoot going back to 1997 and maybe earlier, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people were doing things like this on platforms like Sun & SGI well over a decade ago. So -- what exactly is it that's new here ?
I don't think the headline is correct. According to WordNet, the verb definitions for "effect" and "affect" are as follows:
$ <i>dict -d wn effect</i> 1 definition found
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
effect v 1: produce; "The scientists set up a shockwave" [syn: {effectuate}, {bring about}, {set up}] 2: act so as to bring into existence; "effect a change"
$ <i>dict -d wn affect</i> 1 definition found
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
affect v 1: have an effect upon; "Will the new rules affect me?" [syn: {impact}, {bear upon}, {bear on}, {touch on}, {touch}] 2: act physically on; have an effect upon 3: connect closely and often incriminatingly; "This new ruling affects your business" [syn: {involve}, {regard}] 4: make believe with the intent to deceive; "He feigned that he was ill"; "He shammed a headache" [syn: {feign}, {sham}, {pretend}, {dissemble}] 5: have an emotional or cognitive impact upon; "This child impressed me as unusually mature"; "This behavior struck me as odd" [syn: {impress}, {move}, {strike}] $
The headline should clearly be "Mysterious force affects Pioneer 10 & 11 probes", should it not ? The second definition for "affect" is exactly what this sentence is saying."
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the article discussion complains that leaving out the screen is a bad move, but is that necessarily the case?
Maybe not.
In the essay What have we got to lose? (as anthologized in _The Salmon of Doubt_), Douglas Adams gives a fascinating overview of all the cases where a clever new product was born not by adding some dazzling new feature, but by identifying properties that could easily be dispensed with.
So... an iPod with no screen. Well why not? How often do you actually look at the screen? Probably not very -- most of the time the device sits in your pocket, and a lot of people just control the thing through Apple's remote control, which of course has already dispensed with the screen, and has in fact left you with something that looks a lot like the device in the article's photo.
But okay, some of the complaints are right -- browsing through even a modest music collection can get tedious when the only controls you have are to skip forward & back by a track. Being able to see what's going on is nice, but do you have to be able to see it when every iPod listener is already ipso facto listening to the device? Think about it: this would be an excellent place to use some kind of audio / speech interface, and Apple certainly knows how to design a system that way, having had a speech interface built into Macs for many years now.
That may or may not be what Apple is up to here, but it seems like an obvious future direction for the suite of products. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, for example, a future version of the bundled headphones doubled as a microphone somehow, so that you could control the device by just saying "iPod, shuffle playlist Beatles", and it would go forth and do your bidding, and you didn't have to dig it out of your pocked or your backpack or whereever you keep yours stashed.
My wife's company would like to transfer her to an office in their Swiss office in Lucerne / Luzern, but she's got baggage -- me.
So, they're willing to sponsor her, take care of her visa & other paperwork, help set her/us up with an apartment, and bring her over for a couple of year, while she learns how the European side of her company works and she gradually makes her way up the management ladder.
Meanwhile, I'll have to leave my job and basically start over; there's basically no chance that her company's Swiss office would have any IT work (it's all either in the US or outsourced to India). But that's alright, it's an opportunity strongly to be considered, right? But I haven't the slightest idea what the IT market is like in this little, seemingly rural part of the country, and there's so much that needs to be sorted out before going and once we get there.
Maybe it would be easier to just bus tables at a ski resort and take a few years off from IT...
I need to start working on my resume, or CV I guess. European CVs don't bear much resemblance to American resumes, do they? It seems like they're a lot chattier & biographical than the dry list of titles & skills & credentials that is expected over here. Just one more thing to do in the next handful of months....
Oh good, it's not just me.
Seriously, his acting is so bad, it makes William Shatner and Keanu Reeves look like somone on a par with Lawrence Olivier.
I loved Caruso in Hudson Hawk -- it is, in spite of the bad reputation, a really witty, fun movie -- but now that I see CSI:Miami, it occurs to me that the best part of Caruso's "Hudson Hawk" role is that they didn't let him say any of his lines out loud. Every time he had something to say, he'd hand another character a business card that had his line printed on it. In the context of "Hudson Hawk", this was cute & funny; in the context of his CSI work, this looks like a desperate attempt by the producers of HH to get this bumbler to shut up and save their film.
In hindsight, it was a brilliant move on their part -- some actors just shouldn't be allowed to speak their lines out loud...
No one is taking /usr/bin/perl away from anyone else, so the statement is perfectly reasonable. If Perl6 doesn't follow through on the promise to execute Perl5 code at least as well as the old Perl5 interpreter did, you are absolutely not forced to upgrade.
This isn't like upgrading, say, the Linux kernel, where it's an all or nothing affair and once you've upgraded you can't go back and also use the older version on the same system. The current Perl5 and the future Perl6 toolkits should be perfectly capable of co-existing on the same system, so there's nothing to be afraid of in the compatibility department. But, if the promises to make Perl5 code run faster, and be both more debuggable and more extensible are true -- and they should be, but no one knows yet -- then you have a lot to gain by upgrading.
Well at least we agree about that :-)
I am a Boston native, and I've even met you at Boston Perl Mongers meeting shortly before you moved to the west coast. So no, it's not that I know little about Boston natives. Sorry :-)
And you're right, I did mis-read the subject -- i thought it said "it's not really funny, but I want you to laugh anyway." My mistake.
So what? The left field pole is hundreds of feet from the right field pole? So, again, how is your "simple mistake" different from Kerry's? Right now you're drawing a distinction without a difference...
But when you make a simple mistake -- one which, I note, remains uncorrected in the article text as I write this (I can't decide if that's integrity or not) -- it's okay, but when Kerry makes one, he's somehow hopelessly out of touch?
What's the difference? The fact that he's running for office and you're not?
"...for Pudge."
This is a really bizarre blanket statement with little basis in reality.
Yay blanket assertions!
Come on -- on one hand you have baseball, on the other you have the absolutely worst president in recent memory. What's worse -- a simple gaffe about sports statistics (big surprise: not everyone gives a damn about such minutae), vs another four years of this nightmare? Somehow I think Pudge is resoundingly incorrect on this one.
But still, it's nice to see that he feels comfortable enough in his position as one of the "official" voices of Slashdot to use the site as a soapbox for his cranky politics... :-)
Or not. You never can tell!
???
This article seems to be some new application of the phrase "news for nerds, stuff that matters" that flouts just about every term in the phrase. Impressive.
If you don't like Latin, then how about "after this, therefore because of this."
Or to use a more familiar Latin phrase, non sequitur: "it does not follow."
There's bravery for ya -- anonymously self-censoring the word "fuck".
Heh...
The obvious thing to try then is to set up Apache (or Squid, or similar software) running as a reverse proxy on that machine.
The first thing I did when finding out about this tool was to install it on a Windows machine with a couple of Samba mounted network drives (I'm hoping that it will index the content of these drives, but I can't tell yet), then set up Apache as a reverse proxy to provide the indexed material as a URL that would be widely accessible on the local LAN.
So far I can't quite get it to work -- I can connect from another computer (a Mac running Safari), but first I get complaints about running the wrong browser, and then I get errors about invalid URLs that apparently aren't being passed through.
Still though, it seems certain that this should be doable, and if it can be done, this would beat the living snot out of my company's current ht://Dig based search engine.
Google is right to make this tool inaccessible from non-localhost access -- the average home user does not need to have the contents of their hard drive set up with an easy to browse, globally accessible search interface. And I can see where Google wouldn't want this to work on LANs either -- it would cut into their business of selling search appliances. But come on, this is right on the cusp of working as it is, and it's only in beta. If Google doesn't provide a way to turn on access for local (e.g. 192.168.x.x) addresses, I'm sure that Apache or something like it can be configured to do this.
For it to really be a Doom movie, it has to be done first person shooter style.
This means, of course, that the camera has to be permanently mounted behind a gun barrel and, aside from mirrors and other reflective objects, you never get to see the protagonist's face -- because he is, after all, the true everyman, representative of everyone and specifically looking like no one. For truly, who among us has not had to slay a million zillion zombies?
A true first person shooter version of Doom / Quake etc would be cool, in a "Blaim Doom Project" kind of way ...
What the heck is FLOSS ?
There was a 2002 paper published by the Mitre Corporation that used the term "FOSS", meaning "free and open-source software". As far as I know, this was the first use of the term, but it may go back a bit farther than this.
I don't, however, have any idea what "FLOSS" is supposed to mean. Assuming that it isn't related to dental hygiene, what is it supposed to stand for ? "Free {Linux, liberty, low-cost} open-source software" ? Just a nonsense corruption of "FOSS" ?
The closest explanation I can find is this blog entry by David Wheeler: "Free-Libre / Open Source Software". Is this really what people are trying to say ?
By "protection", the earlier poster seems to have been talking about the term in the sense of "protection racket", as in "you hand over the money and we see that nothing bad happens to you."
It's debatable whether or not this kind of protection is "worth the money" -- generally there's an implied threat that if you don't pay then you'll suffer the consequences -- but it's clearly illegal under US Federal Law, the RICO act, etc.
It would be interesting to see if a case could be made against them for monopolistic racketeering...
Yeah, I didn't literally mean to suggest that the quote should be part of the talk, but rather that it does a good job of illustrating how the kids & parents will probably respond to the ubiquity of technology. The talk given needs to be done on those terms: the kids are going to take this stuff for granted, so it has to be explained to them how it's a big deal, and what they may be able to expect in the future.
This is interesting...
The article implies that the guy who got fired a year or so ago for posting pictures of a Microsoft loading dock full of Powermac G5s may have been fired not because of petty Mac - Windows jealously (or whatever the explanation was at the time), but because those G5s were a tool for the development for Xbox2.
Of course, pointing out that computers are ubiquitous now will probably be more fascinating to the parents than to the children. At the age level we're talking about, the pervasive presense of computers in modern society may very well be taken for granted.
It may be more illuminating to go on for a bit about how these are great automating machines, and that whereas today we can do all these cool things because of computers and the internet (of which they probably won't need many examples), it wasn't that long ago that these things weren't possible, or had to be done manually with great effort by lots of people.
From there, the obvious conclusion -- which the kids should be steered towards but which they might figure out before you have to say it -- is that this has been a continual process for decades now, and it is only accelerating. Anything that can be automated, will be automated. Barriers to communication will keep falling. New possibilities will keep emerging. Nearly all of this will come as a surprise to everyone, but will seem obvious in hindsight. As examples, maybe point out things like digital music -- which they'll all already know about -- being a big change from the little silver discs you've been using for 20 years now, or how VoIP is making calling cheap or free (and how expensive long distance used to be), etc.
In any case, the point is that kids today don't really need to be told that computers are everywhere, any more than people a generation or two older need to be told that electricity is everywhere. It's not novel to these kids, but you have to make it clear what a big, drastic, and world changing difference this is from only 10 or 20 years ago.
There's a great Douglas Adams quote that the kids might like here:
I've never given Microsoft my address, so I'm not sure how it would have ended up in their database. And yes they can track my IP, but only with a registration system like Passport can they say that any activity I make from home, work, and elsewhere is all coming from the same person. As for XP, well, that's just yet another reason that I'm glad to be using a Mac instead of Windows... :-)
That doesn't get around the problem of not wanting to sign up for big brother's Passport account. Ever. And especially not for a crappy Hotmail account. If they can't provide this demo software without demanding an onerous registration in exchange, then the software just isn't worth it to me. And no, using fake information on the signup doesn't get around the problem either. It's not that Microsoft would then know exactly who I am -- or who I pretended to be -- but that they would now have one concrete way of tracking what I'm doing, no matter who I say I am. That's much worse than simply knowing my identity, as far as I'm concerned.
...and if that particular dusty corner of our souls hasn't been sold to the beast yet, and we don't have passport accounts, then... that's it? Can't sign in?
Oh well, scratch that.
Marketing-speak from marketers can be annoying, but it's also easy to dismiss. It is, after all, their job.
Much worse is when your company hires a new manager for you that talks that way.
In a perfect world, the response would be clear...
But no, we have to go along with this nonsense, where civil disobedience can be nothing more than pointedly avoiding cliches, trying to use proper spelling & diction, and especially not verbing perfectly innocent nouns like "round-table".
The English language is a beautiful thing. I'm going to miss it when it's gone...
To clarify, for those who haven't used it or read the link above, NFSRoot is not the same as a thin client, and it isn't a matter of just running X sessions remotely.
At boot time, the system uses PXE to pull down a read-only root filesystem, from which the kernel is launched, and sets up a ramdisk for read-write filesystems (/var).
All applications come down over the network from the NFS server and run locally; processes that emit log data end up writing back to a central server.
If client has catastrophic hardware failure, no big deal -- reconfigure DHCP to say that foo.domain.org is dead and now a machine with a different MAC address is going to be the new foo.domain.org, and the next time that user boots with the new computer, everything (minus anything they put in their /usr/local that wasn't backed up somehow) is back without missing a beat.
If the NFS server goes down, the client machines may freeze, but in theory they should resume cleanly when the server comes back up. (In practice this does't always work, but it works a lot better than I would have expected it to -- a lot of the times, things really are just Fine.)
Stateless Linux seems to offer most of the same things that most of the Linux users at my company are already doing today with NFSRoot. The main blind spot we have with NFSRoot is a good way to handle laptop users, but at my company there aren't many of those so we can deal with that. Aside from that case, the way we use NFSroot seems to be basically identical to what RedHat is proposing with this Stateless Linux proposal.
So -- can anyone that has read up on both explain the difference? It isn't obvious to me...
I've skimmed over the Stateless Linux HOWTO, and it doesn't seem to be all that different from NFSRoot.
Stateless Linux might be a bit broader -- NFSRoot as I have seen it deployed seems to match only the case of, as the HOWTO puts it, "caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive", rather than the other three scenarios described under "stateless Linux clients" in the HOWTO -- but that's splitting hairs over what seems to be, in most ways, the same basic idea.
So -- how is Stateless Linux a radically new thing? There are documents for NFSRoot going back to 1997 and maybe earlier, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people were doing things like this on platforms like Sun & SGI well over a decade ago. So -- what exactly is it that's new here ?
I don't think the headline is correct. According to WordNet, the verb definitions for "effect" and "affect" are as follows:
The headline should clearly be "Mysterious force affects Pioneer 10 & 11 probes", should it not ? The second definition for "affect" is exactly what this sentence is saying."