Apparently, Fred doesn't know that this has been an issue for years. It's only now that he's gotten tired of it and decided to vent his frustrations this way. This is a typical overreaction from someone who does not understand the nature of the problem.
No doubt he's one of those people who feels that he can't afford to filter his mail properly. God forbid that an important message from his mother may one day end up among the false positives! On the other hand, he's just as likely to be among the legions who daily send email messages from badly configured mail clients and servers -- the very thing that makes it possible for spam to look like ham.
The truth is that it doesn't matter what kind of messaging system we use: as long as it's decentralized, we will all have to configure our servers properly, or else we'll all end up with exactly the same problems again. The alternative would be to use a centralized authentication mechanism instead, but then the question would be: who would we trust with that? Microsoft? VeriSign? Yuk! I think everyone will agree (even Fred) that it's always better to have a decentralized system. In which case email (SMTP) is fine, but just needs to be configured properly.
Actually, even if Fred's mail server is properly configured (for sending mail), it's people like him who are actually to blame for keeping things such as mess. Yes, Fred is his own worst enemy. How so? Because his system keeps accepting all the crap along with the good stuff. Look at it this way: if everybody decided today to configure their mail servers properly, always filtering out and rejecting anything that looks fishy, that would force everybody else to configure their mail servers properly as well. In that case, the spammers would no longer have any place to hide, in which case we'd all be able to choose whether we accept their mail or not. End of problem.
It would be more constructive to talk about how Linux users can improve the experience for Windows users.
Being in one of my more pessimistic moods at the moment, I wonder if this is possible. Many Windows users don't have much control over their computers, but at the same time are terrified of starting all over again with a new OS, since that would mean relinquishing what little control they have over it -- something they struggled a long time to obtain. It's hard to get them to use any other word processor either for the same reason, even it's free. "I just want Windows and Word to work! (*sob*)." Sure. Like they keep telling you back at the store, you probably did something wrong and it's just a question of knowing how to treat it right...
Good point. I've been with Wikipedia for a while too, although I started to work on Citizendium last year and have moved many of my articles there (I wish they'd get their Wikimedia link working). Luckily, my work isn't very controversial, so I've not suffered as much from the problem you describe. Instead, my main gripes are Wikipedia's default permit policy towards editing, and it's refusal to acknowledge expert opinion. For example, most of the vandalism that occurs could easily be avoided if accounts were required for editors and people were made to wait a while (a day?) before they could start using their new account. The second problem isn't as easy to solve, but it's sometimes sad to see how ignorance and stupidity can win the day with nothing more than a majority vote.
DRM is your friend! If Microsoft didn't include it in Windows, the big media corporations would quickly sue the pants off of them, making it impossible to sell Windows. Why, that would be a disaster for the consumer! This way, we can at least still enjoy some forms of copyrighted content.
Microsoft managed to sell 40M licenses in 100 days. There's a subtle difference between that statement and "40M licenses were sold in 100 days."
Anyway, this is hardly surprising, as the world still views Windows as the only show in town, and vendors therefore install it on virtually all of their new systems without thinking and without giving consumers a choice. We could just as easily have asked how many new computers were going to be sold around the world (mostly to consumers) during the same period.
The question now is, how many long-time Windows users will continue to put up with Microsoft's solutions? I've no first hand experience with Vista, but from what I've heard it's less stable than XP, often way too slow, just as susceptible to infection, and often incompatible with older software. IMHO, Vista's reputation is well-deserved and can only serve to erode M$'s overall market share.
... all of the energy produced by a hybrid car's engine comes from the gasoline it burns; it's battery and electric motors simply help it to use its fuel more efficiently. However, the internal combustion engine of the average automobile is notoriously inefficient, converting only about 20% of the fuel that it burns into usable kinetic energy. That goes for hybrids just the same as any other car. Therefore, it should be possible to produce a non-hybrid car that is more fuel-efficient than a hybrid, just as long it's superior engine efficiently can make up the difference. On the other hand, if you were to combine such an efficient engine with hybrid technology, you should always end up with a more fuel-efficient automobile.
One possibility is that you'd get a white hole on the other side -- something that would be spew out the same matter that fell into the black hole on the other side. However, astronomers have never seen anything like this in our universe. It seems unlikely.
Another theory is that the Big Bang itself is an example of a white hole, which would lead to the possibility that the formation of every black hole gives birth to a new universe, separate from its parent universe. In that case, it may be that the increased rate of expansion of our universe is due to more matter falling into the associated black hole in our parent universe. If we imagine that this theory is correct, then I can think some more questions:
What happen to the associated child universes if two black holes merge?
Do child universes inherit the physical characteristics (laws, constants) of their parents?
What are the consequences for the child universe if the black hole that created it begins to lose mass due to hawking radiation? Does it contract?
If the third one is true, then perhaps a Big Crunch is inevitable. But, if our universe collapses before any of its own black holes have a chance to "dry up", what happens to our child universes? Are they destroyed? Do they get orphaned and then never contract/collapse?
Interestingly the design isn't a "steam kettle" system, like all existing thermal power plants - coal, natural gas or nuclear, which all use a heat source to boil water to spin a steam turbine. Bussard's Pollywell design generates high-energy alpha particles, which can be used to directly produce an electrical current.
Very interesting indeed. Where did you get that?
I was always wondering how he was planning to produce energy with this device: if he was going to boil water with it, then I couldn't figure out how he was going to keep the Pollywell device itself from overheating.
Oh, well. It seems we're still looking for 200 million dollars. Google could easily have done it -- hell, they're always looking for cheap electricity! -- but it seems #@^%! Doubleclick was more important to them. On the other hand, judging from the number of Google employees that walked out during Bussard's famous speech, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.
How's this for an alternative: if a million Slashdotters were to pitch in $200 each, we'd be able to finance it ourselves! Come to think of it, if a million Slashdotters were to pitch in only $10 each -- or even $1 -- we might actually attract enough attention to the project to get it rolling anyway...
Hear, hear! Sure, criminals will always find ways to obtain firearms (true for Europe), but if strict gun laws would be able to prevent even a small percentage of all the homicidal psychopaths out there from getting their hands on a gun, then just think of the number of lives that would be saved every year in a country like the US.
Also, yes -- people kill people -- but seeing as psychopaths will always be among us, it makes sense for society to make it harder for them to kill when they do. Europe has it's share of murders too, but it's just so much harder to kill more than a few people at a time when armed with only a knife or a baseball bat.
Up to 70% efficient means at least a 30% energy loss; when recharging millions of little devices, that all adds up to a lot of waste. In virtually all cases, recharging the old fashioned way is likely to be better for the environment. However, it looks set to become so popular, that I wonder if we'll be given the choice. I hate wires too, and the convenience of this invention is obvious, but it also has a down side.
Have you seen Primer (2004)? This is Sci-Fi the way it ought to be. Everything in a story like this seems normal except that little bit of scientific speculation. Or might that actually be possible as well? And weeks/months/years later, you're still talking/thinking about it.
Movies like Star Wars may be entertaining in their own right, but they have little to do with science. That stuff has more in common with Lord of the Rings: Fastasy-Fiction, except with spaceships and lasers. Star Wars is basic Swords and Sorcery... err, light sabers and The Force.
I've been predicting that M$ was going to shoot itself in the foot with Vista for a while now, but last year not many were willing to agree with me. Now, it looks like it's happening, but the question is, are we ready?
We're an army of Linux nerds, but I fear there will not be enough of us at first to satisfy any sudden growth in demand for support as Linux crosses the threshold of critical mass. At first, I think this lack of support will limit the rate of growth, but not for long. It's going to take several years at least for all those Windows admins to become useful, but modern distros like Ubuntu and pre-installed systems from major vendors will make things easier for users without any direct support, thus allowing for more growth sooner that would otherwise be possible. Still, this kind of growth will have its limits as well. Windows will only really start to disappear when there's enough professional support for Linux.
Apple's OSX systems are nice, but I don't think they'll be taking over from M$. Yes, it is *nix, but they're just too expensive; you're limited to using Apple's hardware and you still have licenses to worry about. It's not going to happen. I guess this is the price they pay for always having avoided going head-to-head with M$ for the desktop.
In the mean time, I'm going to have to get certified for Linux in a hurry. At least, that's if I want to get a piece of all that juicy Linux corporate consulting work on the horizon. I've been doing Linux almost exclusively for about six years now, but LPIC-1 isn't as easy as I thought it would be -- you have to remember loads of details for the exams. I'm almost there, though. Then there's LPIC-2, LPIC-3, maybe RHCE too. Anybody know of any other interesting Linux (or related) certifications?
It sounds like your dad may have had a point. If believing in some mythology helped my ancestors to survive tough times, or (even better) convinced them to reproduce more often ("go forth and multiply"), then it's possible that I may be more likely than not to believe in that sort of stuff as well. After all, how much different is that from the theory that gambling or thrill seeking can be seen as an addiction that some people are more predisposed to than others?
Don't worry, the sales of the necessary special patented reusable paper will make up for the fact that Xerox won't be selling you any ink for these printers. And it's not like your entire office will be able to get away with a single purchase of, say, 1000 pages of this stuff per employee. Some of it will be mailed away to clients and other 3rd parties, much of it will be deliberately mutilated (such as by having holes punched in it), and even more will disappear into company archives. It's also possible that after only a few uses, the average sheet of this stuff will end up looking pretty shabby due to normal (ab)use, Whatever, one wonders about Xerox's basic motivation behind the introduction of this product. I guess they figure there's now more money to be made from the sale of (special) paper than from toner cartridges.
Stallman shouldn't even be dealing with these thugs....
Cuba isn't the worst non-democratic regime out there: I'd rather live in Cuba than in North Korea or Zimbabwe. However, the important thing is that there are governments out there that are serious about making the switch to Open Source; no matter their political orientation, it will demonstrate to the rest of the world that life without M$ is possible.
Yes, it's kind of depressing that a non-democratic, repressive government like Cuba's will likely be using Open Source before ours will. I suppose I'm guessing, but I expect that this may be partly because the Cuban government is not as heavily influenced by Microsoft and other lobby groups as are western democracies.
Not everyone is an expert, yet at Wikipedia everybody gets an equal vote anyway. For any given field, there are alway far fewer experts than laymen. Yet Wikipedia does not give experts or otherwise reasonably knowledgeable individuals any credit whatsoever when it comes to making decisions regarding policy and content. As a result, excellent suggestions supported by solid and coherent arguments can always be voted away with simple replies, such as "No!"
Mostly I'm just kind of disappointed that we weren't able to release KDE 4.0 or a stable version of Debian etch before this day.
Otherwise, I can't see how the consumers who have bought into Vista so far will have much to cheer about. It'll be a lot slower than XP, since the recommended hardware requirements are so much higher than for XP. Aside from the new interface, its supposedly improved stability and security, Vista is really all about DRM: preventing people from playing protected content, including in cases of fair use. What they get back in return for these heinous constraints is the possibility of playing high definition content on their PCs.
However, that last part isn't going to happen any time soon, at least not legally. To play high definition content on Vista, your graphics card and your monitor both have to be HDCP compliant, but according to this article, which is less than a month old, only two monitors tested last year were HDCP compliant and not a single graphics card. When will HDCP compatibile hardware start to appear? According to the article, many monitor manufacturers haven't even heard of it and can't say anything about it, while the graphics card manufacturers (nVidia, ATI) could do it, but haven't seemed to have found the incentive yet to do so. For the latter it seems to a be a chicken and egg story: no content? no support. And even if the manufacturers do decide to start making their products HDCP compliant, remember what Peter Gutmann had to say about the ridiculous guidelines M$ gives them: they're "fundamentally impossible" to comply with.
The future is also looking increasingly bleak for DRM. Even if Vista does well, it's content protection will not make much difference to the content industry if people can buy super-cheap Chinese media players that play every known file format without any restrictions whatsoever. Hell, only last week we heard that the music companies seem to be thinking about ditching DRM. If so, then Vista will become rather uncool in this respect and M$ will start to play down the protected content issue as DRM begins to disappear from music and movies.
Of course, for M$, the MPAA and the RIAA were never what the DRM was about: they really only added it to Vista for their own benefit. M$ is always looking for ways to milk more money out of its stagnant share of the market. For years now they've had only two options: raising prices and fighting piracy. Of course, with Vista they're doing both. Now all they need is for it to catch on. However, I'm not so sure it'll be that easy. Their plan may backfire on them. Why? I know a lot of people who have remained satisfied with Windows over the years only because they've been able to run so much software on their PCs -- pirated software. If they're no longer able to do that, I'm not so sure they're just going to roll over and start paying for everything they'd like to continue to use. I figure we're about to see the arrival of a new wave of Linux newbies as a result. Perhaps not a flood, but I figure it'll be enough to offset any financial gains M$ planned on making. Most important of all for consumers, M$ will lose market share.
You're right, of course. M$ may earn billions, but the world loses trillions every year because Windows is a fundamentally flawed product. Nevertheless, a class action suit sounds to me like too much to hope for. I'll tell you why.
I was just thinking how its unfortunate that there are relatively few people who can appreciate what I and other sysadmins do. For instance, when an architect builds something, it's possible for other people to admire the results as well; they may not be able to appreciate all of the thought and planning that went into building a house, for example, but the end result is always visible and tangible and often plainly beautiful to lots of people who aren't architects.
Not so with computers. I've built some pretty cool systems, but only my peers are really able to appreciate what I do. My clients are usually happy with the results, but really they only want their applications to work -- the rest (most of my work) is just too abstract for them to comprehend.
That's why I think it's unlikely that people will start a class action lawsuit against M$. I mean, if most people don't even know what an operations system is, let alone what it's responsible for, how can you expect them to get worked up enough about it to want to challenge one of the world's richest companies in court?
They mean humans with SCUBA equipment subjecting themselves to extreme ambient pressures -- not diving in submarines. Deepsea submarines have taken man to the very deepest parts of the oceans (about 11,000m), but the record for technical diving with special SCUBA equipment is 318.25m: a record set by South African Nuno Gomes in Dahab (Sinai, Egypt) in 2005. Such dives are very dangerous and require careful management of multiple gas mixtures composed of oxygen, nitrogen and helium (trimix) to prevent problems like nitrogen narcosis, oxygen poisoning and decompression sickness (the bends). Deep dives like this also last so long (Nuno's dive was over 12 hours) that lots of other problems, such as hypothermia and dehydration, have plenty of time to develop.
The deepest simulated dive is 685.5msw (meters of sea water) set at Duke Medical Center (Durham, North Carolina) by three divers in 1981. In cases like this, HPNS (high pressure nervous syndrome) is the limiting factor. HPNS is a syndrome of neurologic dysfunction with symptoms that include tremors, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual distortions and altered sleep. Tremors associated with HPNS have been reported as shallow as 128.72msw, but the deeper you go, the more likely HPNS is to occur. Eventually, it can prevent a diver from performing essential tasks during a dive.
Knowing this, you have to admire those sperm whales: mammals that are believed to be able to dive as deep as 3,000 metres and then go hunting for food at that depth!
In 1000 years, people may try to read that data, but then they'll quickly loose interest when they realize it's in an ancient proprietary format that can only be interpreted with an application that hasn't existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. And who says technology will be more advanced in the far future than it is now, allowing people to read it regardless?
The Conservative Party in Canada is always on about cutting government intervention in the economy... Conservative parties everywhere are all the same: hypocrites. They're in favor of cutting regulations where they stand in the way of big business, but are just as happy to introduce new regulations when industry lobbyists say it will help big business. When the conservatives are in power, the corporations gain more influence over our lives... and they're anything but subject to the democratic process.
Your teacher was way, way off. Ten years ago I created a spreadsheet for myself to get a better idea of how big our universe is.
One of the calculations scaled 1 AU (Sun-Earth distance) down to 1 mm:
Sun to Earth: 1.0 mm
Sun to Mars: 1.5 mm
Sun to Jupiter: 5.2 mm
Sun to Saturn: 9.6 mm
Sun to Uranus: 1.9 cm
Sun to Neptune: 3.0 cm
Sun to Pluto: 4.0 cm
Sun to Kuiper belt: 4.0 cm
Sun to Oort Cloud: 10 m
Sun to Proxima Centauri: 267 m
Sun to Tau Ceti: 772 m
Milky Way galaxy diameter: 6,327 km
Milky Way to Andromeda galaxy: 139,200 km
Milky Way to galaxy 0140+326RD1*: 759,000,000 km'
*) At 12 billion light-years, the farthest known galaxy at the time.
') Almost as far as Jupiter is from the Sun.
Conclusion: the universe is really, really, really, really big. It makes the idea of even reaching the next star seem like a pretty wacky proposition.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, Fred doesn't know that this has been an issue for years. It's only now that he's gotten tired of it and decided to vent his frustrations this way. This is a typical overreaction from someone who does not understand the nature of the problem.
No doubt he's one of those people who feels that he can't afford to filter his mail properly. God forbid that an important message from his mother may one day end up among the false positives! On the other hand, he's just as likely to be among the legions who daily send email messages from badly configured mail clients and servers -- the very thing that makes it possible for spam to look like ham.
The truth is that it doesn't matter what kind of messaging system we use: as long as it's decentralized, we will all have to configure our servers properly, or else we'll all end up with exactly the same problems again. The alternative would be to use a centralized authentication mechanism instead, but then the question would be: who would we trust with that? Microsoft? VeriSign? Yuk! I think everyone will agree (even Fred) that it's always better to have a decentralized system. In which case email (SMTP) is fine, but just needs to be configured properly.
Actually, even if Fred's mail server is properly configured (for sending mail), it's people like him who are actually to blame for keeping things such as mess. Yes, Fred is his own worst enemy. How so? Because his system keeps accepting all the crap along with the good stuff. Look at it this way: if everybody decided today to configure their mail servers properly, always filtering out and rejecting anything that looks fishy, that would force everybody else to configure their mail servers properly as well. In that case, the spammers would no longer have any place to hide, in which case we'd all be able to choose whether we accept their mail or not. End of problem.
Good point. I've been with Wikipedia for a while too, although I started to work on Citizendium last year and have moved many of my articles there (I wish they'd get their Wikimedia link working). Luckily, my work isn't very controversial, so I've not suffered as much from the problem you describe. Instead, my main gripes are Wikipedia's default permit policy towards editing, and it's refusal to acknowledge expert opinion. For example, most of the vandalism that occurs could easily be avoided if accounts were required for editors and people were made to wait a while (a day?) before they could start using their new account. The second problem isn't as easy to solve, but it's sometimes sad to see how ignorance and stupidity can win the day with nothing more than a majority vote.
No, no! You've got it all wrong!
;-)
DRM is your friend! If Microsoft didn't include it in Windows, the big media corporations would quickly sue the pants off of them, making it impossible to sell Windows. Why, that would be a disaster for the consumer! This way, we can at least still enjoy some forms of copyrighted content.
Microsoft managed to sell 40M licenses in 100 days. There's a subtle difference between that statement and "40M licenses were sold in 100 days."
Anyway, this is hardly surprising, as the world still views Windows as the only show in town, and vendors therefore install it on virtually all of their new systems without thinking and without giving consumers a choice. We could just as easily have asked how many new computers were going to be sold around the world (mostly to consumers) during the same period.
The question now is, how many long-time Windows users will continue to put up with Microsoft's solutions? I've no first hand experience with Vista, but from what I've heard it's less stable than XP, often way too slow, just as susceptible to infection, and often incompatible with older software. IMHO, Vista's reputation is well-deserved and can only serve to erode M$'s overall market share.
No, no! They have have a happy cult too, but it's
very small and includes only rich M$ executives.
... all of the energy produced by a hybrid car's engine comes from the gasoline it burns; it's battery and electric motors simply help it to use its fuel more efficiently. However, the internal combustion engine of the average automobile is notoriously inefficient, converting only about 20% of the fuel that it burns into usable kinetic energy. That goes for hybrids just the same as any other car. Therefore, it should be possible to produce a non-hybrid car that is more fuel-efficient than a hybrid, just as long it's superior engine efficiently can make up the difference. On the other hand, if you were to combine such an efficient engine with hybrid technology, you should always end up with a more fuel-efficient automobile.
... just what we need to win the War on Terror. A truly worthwhile project. Really makes you feel good about paying taxes.
Another theory is that the Big Bang itself is an example of a white hole, which would lead to the possibility that the formation of every black hole gives birth to a new universe, separate from its parent universe. In that case, it may be that the increased rate of expansion of our universe is due to more matter falling into the associated black hole in our parent universe. If we imagine that this theory is correct, then I can think some more questions:
- What happen to the associated child universes if two black holes merge?
- Do child universes inherit the physical characteristics (laws, constants) of their parents?
- What are the consequences for the child universe if the black hole that created it begins to lose mass due to hawking radiation? Does it contract?
If the third one is true, then perhaps a Big Crunch is inevitable. But, if our universe collapses before any of its own black holes have a chance to "dry up", what happens to our child universes? Are they destroyed? Do they get orphaned and then never contract/collapse?Very interesting indeed. Where did you get that?
I was always wondering how he was planning to produce energy with this device: if he was going to boil water with it, then I couldn't figure out how he was going to keep the Pollywell device itself from overheating.
Oh, well. It seems we're still looking for 200 million dollars. Google could easily have done it -- hell, they're always looking for cheap electricity! -- but it seems #@^%! Doubleclick was more important to them. On the other hand, judging from the number of Google employees that walked out during Bussard's famous speech, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.
How's this for an alternative: if a million Slashdotters were to pitch in $200 each, we'd be able to finance it ourselves! Come to think of it, if a million Slashdotters were to pitch in only $10 each -- or even $1 -- we might actually attract enough attention to the project to get it rolling anyway...
Hear, hear! Sure, criminals will always find ways to obtain firearms (true for Europe), but if strict gun laws would be able to prevent even a small percentage of all the homicidal psychopaths out there from getting their hands on a gun, then just think of the number of lives that would be saved every year in a country like the US.
Also, yes -- people kill people -- but seeing as psychopaths will always be among us, it makes sense for society to make it harder for them to kill when they do. Europe has it's share of murders too, but it's just so much harder to kill more than a few people at a time when armed with only a knife or a baseball bat.
Up to 70% efficient means at least a 30% energy loss; when recharging millions of little devices, that all adds up to a lot of waste. In virtually all cases, recharging the old fashioned way is likely to be better for the environment. However, it looks set to become so popular, that I wonder if we'll be given the choice. I hate wires too, and the convenience of this invention is obvious, but it also has a down side.
Have you seen Primer (2004)? This is Sci-Fi the way it ought to be. Everything in a story like this seems normal except that little bit of scientific speculation. Or might that actually be possible as well? And weeks/months/years later, you're still talking/thinking about it.
Movies like Star Wars may be entertaining in their own right, but they have little to do with science. That stuff has more in common with Lord of the Rings: Fastasy-Fiction, except with spaceships and lasers. Star Wars is basic Swords and Sorcery... err, light sabers and The Force.
I've been predicting that M$ was going to shoot itself in the foot with Vista for a while now, but last year not many were willing to agree with me. Now, it looks like it's happening, but the question is, are we ready?
We're an army of Linux nerds, but I fear there will not be enough of us at first to satisfy any sudden growth in demand for support as Linux crosses the threshold of critical mass. At first, I think this lack of support will limit the rate of growth, but not for long. It's going to take several years at least for all those Windows admins to become useful, but modern distros like Ubuntu and pre-installed systems from major vendors will make things easier for users without any direct support, thus allowing for more growth sooner that would otherwise be possible. Still, this kind of growth will have its limits as well. Windows will only really start to disappear when there's enough professional support for Linux.
Apple's OSX systems are nice, but I don't think they'll be taking over from M$. Yes, it is *nix, but they're just too expensive; you're limited to using Apple's hardware and you still have licenses to worry about. It's not going to happen. I guess this is the price they pay for always having avoided going head-to-head with M$ for the desktop.
In the mean time, I'm going to have to get certified for Linux in a hurry. At least, that's if I want to get a piece of all that juicy Linux corporate consulting work on the horizon. I've been doing Linux almost exclusively for about six years now, but LPIC-1 isn't as easy as I thought it would be -- you have to remember loads of details for the exams. I'm almost there, though. Then there's LPIC-2, LPIC-3, maybe RHCE too. Anybody know of any other interesting Linux (or related) certifications?
It sounds like your dad may have had a point. If believing in some mythology helped my ancestors to survive tough times, or (even better) convinced them to reproduce more often ("go forth and multiply"), then it's possible that I may be more likely than not to believe in that sort of stuff as well. After all, how much different is that from the theory that gambling or thrill seeking can be seen as an addiction that some people are more predisposed to than others?
Don't worry, the sales of the necessary special patented reusable paper will make up for the fact that Xerox won't be selling you any ink for these printers. And it's not like your entire office will be able to get away with a single purchase of, say, 1000 pages of this stuff per employee. Some of it will be mailed away to clients and other 3rd parties, much of it will be deliberately mutilated (such as by having holes punched in it), and even more will disappear into company archives. It's also possible that after only a few uses, the average sheet of this stuff will end up looking pretty shabby due to normal (ab)use, Whatever, one wonders about Xerox's basic motivation behind the introduction of this product. I guess they figure there's now more money to be made from the sale of (special) paper than from toner cartridges.
Yes, it's kind of depressing that a non-democratic, repressive government like Cuba's will likely be using Open Source before ours will. I suppose I'm guessing, but I expect that this may be partly because the Cuban government is not as heavily influenced by Microsoft and other lobby groups as are western democracies.
Not everyone is an expert, yet at Wikipedia everybody gets an equal vote anyway. For any given field, there are alway far fewer experts than laymen. Yet Wikipedia does not give experts or otherwise reasonably knowledgeable individuals any credit whatsoever when it comes to making decisions regarding policy and content. As a result, excellent suggestions supported by solid and coherent arguments can always be voted away with simple replies, such as "No!"
Mostly I'm just kind of disappointed that we weren't able to release KDE 4.0 or a stable version of Debian etch before this day.
Otherwise, I can't see how the consumers who have bought into Vista so far will have much to cheer about. It'll be a lot slower than XP, since the recommended hardware requirements are so much higher than for XP. Aside from the new interface, its supposedly improved stability and security, Vista is really all about DRM: preventing people from playing protected content, including in cases of fair use. What they get back in return for these heinous constraints is the possibility of playing high definition content on their PCs.
However, that last part isn't going to happen any time soon, at least not legally. To play high definition content on Vista, your graphics card and your monitor both have to be HDCP compliant, but according to this article, which is less than a month old, only two monitors tested last year were HDCP compliant and not a single graphics card. When will HDCP compatibile hardware start to appear? According to the article, many monitor manufacturers haven't even heard of it and can't say anything about it, while the graphics card manufacturers (nVidia, ATI) could do it, but haven't seemed to have found the incentive yet to do so. For the latter it seems to a be a chicken and egg story: no content? no support. And even if the manufacturers do decide to start making their products HDCP compliant, remember what Peter Gutmann had to say about the ridiculous guidelines M$ gives them: they're "fundamentally impossible" to comply with.
The future is also looking increasingly bleak for DRM. Even if Vista does well, it's content protection will not make much difference to the content industry if people can buy super-cheap Chinese media players that play every known file format without any restrictions whatsoever. Hell, only last week we heard that the music companies seem to be thinking about ditching DRM. If so, then Vista will become rather uncool in this respect and M$ will start to play down the protected content issue as DRM begins to disappear from music and movies.
Of course, for M$, the MPAA and the RIAA were never what the DRM was about: they really only added it to Vista for their own benefit. M$ is always looking for ways to milk more money out of its stagnant share of the market. For years now they've had only two options: raising prices and fighting piracy. Of course, with Vista they're doing both. Now all they need is for it to catch on. However, I'm not so sure it'll be that easy. Their plan may backfire on them. Why? I know a lot of people who have remained satisfied with Windows over the years only because they've been able to run so much software on their PCs -- pirated software. If they're no longer able to do that, I'm not so sure they're just going to roll over and start paying for everything they'd like to continue to use. I figure we're about to see the arrival of a new wave of Linux newbies as a result. Perhaps not a flood, but I figure it'll be enough to offset any financial gains M$ planned on making. Most important of all for consumers, M$ will lose market share.
You're right, of course. M$ may earn billions, but the world loses trillions every year because Windows is a fundamentally flawed product. Nevertheless, a class action suit sounds to me like too much to hope for. I'll tell you why.
I was just thinking how its unfortunate that there are relatively few people who can appreciate what I and other sysadmins do. For instance, when an architect builds something, it's possible for other people to admire the results as well; they may not be able to appreciate all of the thought and planning that went into building a house, for example, but the end result is always visible and tangible and often plainly beautiful to lots of people who aren't architects.
Not so with computers. I've built some pretty cool systems, but only my peers are really able to appreciate what I do. My clients are usually happy with the results, but really they only want their applications to work -- the rest (most of my work) is just too abstract for them to comprehend.
That's why I think it's unlikely that people will start a class action lawsuit against M$. I mean, if most people don't even know what an operations system is, let alone what it's responsible for, how can you expect them to get worked up enough about it to want to challenge one of the world's richest companies in court?
They mean humans with SCUBA equipment subjecting themselves to extreme ambient pressures -- not diving in submarines. Deepsea submarines have taken man to the very deepest parts of the oceans (about 11,000m), but the record for technical diving with special SCUBA equipment is 318.25m: a record set by South African Nuno Gomes in Dahab (Sinai, Egypt) in 2005. Such dives are very dangerous and require careful management of multiple gas mixtures composed of oxygen, nitrogen and helium (trimix) to prevent problems like nitrogen narcosis, oxygen poisoning and decompression sickness (the bends). Deep dives like this also last so long (Nuno's dive was over 12 hours) that lots of other problems, such as hypothermia and dehydration, have plenty of time to develop.
The deepest simulated dive is 685.5msw (meters of sea water) set at Duke Medical Center (Durham, North Carolina) by three divers in 1981. In cases like this, HPNS (high pressure nervous syndrome) is the limiting factor. HPNS is a syndrome of neurologic dysfunction with symptoms that include tremors, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual distortions and altered sleep. Tremors associated with HPNS have been reported as shallow as 128.72msw, but the deeper you go, the more likely HPNS is to occur. Eventually, it can prevent a diver from performing essential tasks during a dive.
Knowing this, you have to admire those sperm whales: mammals that are believed to be able to dive as deep as 3,000 metres and then go hunting for food at that depth!
In 1000 years, people may try to read that data, but then they'll quickly loose interest when they realize it's in an ancient proprietary format that can only be interpreted with an application that hasn't existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. And who says technology will be more advanced in the far future than it is now, allowing people to read it regardless?
- It's an upgrade.
- It's the latest version.
- Everybody knows you have to keep your software up to date.
- It's the logical thing to do.
- Your computer will be happier if you upgrade.
- Upgrading is a no-brainer.
- You don't want to be left behind.
- You don't want to look stupid.
- It's the newest thing.
- The old version is stale.
- The new version is trendy and cool. Maybe even tubular.
- You'll be more productive.
- Soon, everyone will upgrade.
- Hell, they're already upgrading!
- The boss is already using it at home.
- Some of our other offices have already upgraded.
- Soon, the users will be demanding it.
- The developers are already using it.
- The old version doesn't have support for the new file format.
- We budgeted the cost over three years ago.
- It's a better investment anyway.
- It'll save you a lot of extra time and money if you don't think and just do it!
- You should never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
- They're selling the new version everywhere.
- You can't even buy the old version anymore.
- The manufacturer recommends the new version.
- Our supplier recommends the new version.
- They're offering us a discount if we upgrade now!
- The new OS has better support for the new version.
- It integrates better with the new interface.
- The manufacturer will discontinue support for the old version anyway.
- The new version is a superior product.
- It's the result of years of research.
- It gets rid of all the old bugs.
- It's the new standard.
- It's easy to install.
- It's more efficient.
- It's more intuitive.
- It's more secure.
- It's more stable.
- It's more faster.
- It's more better.
Just because!Your teacher was way, way off. Ten years ago I created a spreadsheet for myself to get a better idea of how big our universe is.
One of the calculations scaled 1 AU (Sun-Earth distance) down to 1 mm:
Sun to Earth: 1.0 mm
Sun to Mars: 1.5 mm
Sun to Jupiter: 5.2 mm
Sun to Saturn: 9.6 mm
Sun to Uranus: 1.9 cm
Sun to Neptune: 3.0 cm
Sun to Pluto: 4.0 cm
Sun to Kuiper belt: 4.0 cm
Sun to Oort Cloud: 10 m
Sun to Proxima Centauri: 267 m
Sun to Tau Ceti: 772 m
Milky Way galaxy diameter: 6,327 km
Milky Way to Andromeda galaxy: 139,200 km
Milky Way to galaxy 0140+326RD1*: 759,000,000 km'
*) At 12 billion light-years, the farthest known galaxy at the time.
') Almost as far as Jupiter is from the Sun.
Conclusion: the universe is really, really, really, really big. It makes the idea of even reaching the next star seem like a pretty wacky proposition.