I also tried this and the hard part was the expectation from some people that anything could be fixed. Hardware calls were no problem, I could give a reasonably accurate time estimate and things generally went accroding to plan.
But the calls that went something like "AOL's not working" were a nightmare. After a brief attempt to diagonse over the phone I would explain the fee structure and the minimum charge and they would agree and I would go out. When I get there I find one of those undiagnosable windows problems where something (registry, DLL, whatever) has got confused and the thing just craps out. This could be on a machibne with a 5 year old OS and no origianl disks. The machine may be too low spec to upgrade, and the customer might not want to ("will I get all my stuff back?"; "have you got the original disks?"; "what disks?"). So I could spend a happy hour trying to get the software going and fail completely. I would then explain the options and that fact I wanted paying - "But you haven't fixed it"; "Well I think the only way to fix it is to reinstall...". Getting paid on those calls was tough.
I suppose you could screen the calls but it is difficult because the customers don't have the ability to describe the problem. A call like "my Email's not working" may be because they have lost the Icon or managed to change the dial-up number, or it could be a windows problem.
But what I really found was there was not really enough work to make it pay, for every business there are half a dozen friends-of-friends who will do it for free, or a beer, or whatever.
Or put another way, a guy from Microsoft, who has probably never configured or operated any of the systems he mentions, is telling a group of people, who also have probably never used those systems, that it's really scarey if you move away from Microsoft...
And this is NEWS?
For my sins I have used a lost of operating systems over the years and they all have their pros and cons, the one thing that seems common across them is that the more scarey they look the less likely they are to break because people don't mess with the difficult ones. Most failures are caused by human error (it's just that no one admits to it) and making server OS's look familiar tempts people to fiddle.
The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become
Yeah! really dig those medieval infant mortality levels... who wants antibiotics, the chlorination of water and vaccination anyway.
the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago
A thousand years ago you would have lived in a small village, every one would have known everything about you, who you were, where you were, what you ate, when you took a dump, the whole thing. More or less 900 years ago the monarch commisioned a complete survey of the country (the doomsday book) detailing who you were, what you owned...
I agree that the chances of detecting a signal are very, very small indeed. However I see a different problem, that being the length of time that high-power broadcast signals are being used by a civilisation.
It seems likely that in the next couple of decades a lot of our brodacast signals on the lower frequencies that can escape the ionosphere will have been turned off in favour of internet based tv/radio, microwave signals from satellites directed at earth and spread-spectrum technologies that are indistinguishable from background noise.
So that means we will have had about 120 years of broadcast that has escaped into space. So, assuming we are in anyway typical (BIG ASSUMPTION), we are trying to find a transmission from a planet that went through this 120 year phase at exactly the right time thousands of years ago so that the signal arrives at earth now while we are listening.
I think the universe is big enough for there to be life out there, it's just that we won't find it, and we definitely won't hear it's radio transmissions.
It seems to me that the recent study, which was a review of other studies, largely concluded that most studies were not robust enough to be useful, and also that they did not take into account the fact that people that eat oily fish, probably have a better diet anyway.
All that said there seems to be a growing view (and one that seems reasonable to me) that suggests that taking the apparently beneficial component of a food in isolation may simply not work. In this context eating Omega-3 when it occurs in Oily fish may work. But extracting the Omega-3 and taking it as a dietary suppliment may not work.
If this sounds unlikely, consider the situation where a benficial molecule is too large to pass through the gut wall under normal conditions, however suppose there is something in the associated food that enables the beneficial molecule to pass. Take the molecule in isolation and it will not be absorbed by the body.
The whole situation is vastly more complex than main stream dietary advice tends to let on. The food industry loves simple messages - especially where they can readily put a low cost suppliment in a low cost product to yeild a high price "health food" - e.g. Omega-3 in margarine. Best bet is to eat a balanced diet.
One of the big issues with infrastructure kit is obsolescence. Twenty or thirty years down the line there are no spares available for the hardware, and the company that made it may have folded (and it is expected to go for this long and no it isn't PCs).
So one solution is to write an emulator for the equipment that needs replacing and possibly run this on a rack mount "industial" PC. What's inside the PC? pretty much standard stuff, and in a few years I guess this may be forced to include DRM chips. Which either means ruling out this as an option, or doing extra validation to prove that the DRM hardware does not lead to unexpected results.
I've seen this done with PC's to replace teletypes, PCs to replace tape drives, PCs to replace hardware montiors...
If you every created anything, you too are a copyright holder. I believe that's the whole point of "copy-left" type licenses - i.e. they make it ok for you to copy my work, otherwise it would not be ok. And if you are a creative person there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living from your cretions.
I do agree with your sentiment though, the big publishers never create anything themselves and yet seek to protect copyrights so that they get their large slice of someone else's talent
There is a lot of expense in mining/refining on earth, that's why precious metals are precious. One thing there is in space is a very big, very hot thing called the sun. What you need to do is strap some thrusters to the asteroid and get it into a close orbit round the Sun. Then maybe gravity and some Eutectic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic) theory will take over allowing some of the elements to separate - I guess that one reason we don't do this on Earth is the cost of heating a load of waste material, but if the heat was pretty much free?
Ok, I admit you might have some issues controlling the orbit of a molten blob of metals (presumably the thrusters fell off when they got too hot:-). But extending this theory, once you got some separation, you could cast the economic material into the shape of a glider, coated with some of the less economic stuff as a heat shield/ablative coating and fly it back to earth...
Ok, ok, making a platinum glider fly presents a few challenges, but boy, I bet Richard Branson would be up for it!
What the article does say is that all Knock Keys are the same. This means that if I record the knocks, I can (given time etc... ) figure out your pin code, I can then use my kock key and your code to open the door. Or easier, I just watch you enter your code on the keypad via a security camera and come along and open your door.
Another view of this is that millions of locks in the world are not really there for security, they are there for safety reasons and managing the keys for these is a nightmare. Utility companies have thousands of bits of plant at remote locations (pumping stations, substations...). Given that many of these are located away from populaiton centres no amount of locking will prevent a determined theif from breaking in with heavy cutting gear. This safety situation also applies to power distrubution cubicles in buildings, lif shaft access, etc.
The plant is locked to prevent unauthorised access, and unsafe operation. So in these cases I can see a use for this type of lock. Its a lot easier to keep a list of access codes against lock numbers than it is to manage thousands of physical keys - which people put in their pocket and then go away on leave for a fortnight.
The above post really spells out what this is all about. It is exceptionally unlikely that there is signifiant risk to a "normal" business from being sued over software patent infringmet. What Microsoft are trying to do is stem the tide of OSS adoption by creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Unthinking company directors will read the headline, become concerned and stick with MS, however small the real risk.
Most organisations I have worked for have, at some point, permitted the priacy of software, or encouraged it, or even used it as a normal way of running the business. They may express concern about such practices publically but do little about preventing it in reality. This must open the business up to substantially greater risk than that of being sued over patents issues, but often see turning a blind eye to piracy as cost effective.
This is the way to go. I keep most of my stuff on a webserver and then I can access it from anywhere I work (or just about) - also duplicate a lot of this on a USB pen drive. There is nothing worse than spending 4 hours solving a problem only to have to solve the same thing again a year later because you don't have access to the code you generated last time.
There are lots of suggestions here about version control systems - these are good (SVN/Tortoise is excellent - I use it all the time) but offer you nothing if what you want to retrieve a little snippet of code created 18 months ago. What you need is searchable code - either by grep'ing files in a shell or by having a full text search through a web server. (I know one can grep an SVN repo but it adds nothing over stuffing it all in a few directories as far as finding 3 lines of code go).
If you are doing PHP/JS then it really is a good idea to create re-usable classes, tempting though it is to not bother with the extra code. Once you get into it, it is easy and makes re-use really easy. The more you do, the easier life gets.
All that said, I find that the things I need are the ones I don't use very often - little shell scripts, one line commands, regexs, etc. I kind of half-heartedly put these in a wiki - it is easy to edit and if I was abit more dilligent about it, it would be a really useful reference resource - may be that's another New Year's resolution to abandon by March.
Once again various aspect of a huge and diverse issue are conflated...
Many studies (including anylising ice cores which contain atmospheric records going back millenia) have shown that CO2 has risien since the industrial revolution and temperatures have risen too. The evidence it there go and read the papers.
It's not just about survival of the species, if we as a species just wanted to survive we would still be living in caves. We are intelligent, which means that we are aware of others, society and some kind of collective good.
The fact the we and the planet have survived worse is no excuse for engendering flooding on a massive scale, extreme weather and a range of other effects that will kill millions, cause wars and famine (sorry, sounding a bit biblical here...). Surviving is not enough, we as individuals and as a species seek to better our lot, and now it is turning out that that is much more closely coupled to the rest of nature than we ever imagined.
Many civilisations have risen and collapsed, some partly due to environmental changes. Have we come this far, taken our first steps into space, decoded the human genome, to say "Bring it On" to the next major global environmental change? Whilst we may survive, much of what we have achieved will be lost and if you think it can't happen the ancient Greeks - 2000 years ago - knew the Earth was spherical and it's diameter. But 500 years ago people believed the earth was flat...
I just re-read this and felt I better put in a disclamer for those of you who think I am comparing Win 95 to Linux - I AM NOT, also for those of you who use Linux everyday and think I am knocking it - I AM NOT (I use it most days too) - see if you can figure out what I am driving at by reading the whole comment.
Back in the early 90's I worked for a company that was a late adopter of PC technology. At the time they had a mixture of DOS and OS/2 with Wordperfect and Lotus 123 . Email and most apps were on Minis and Mainframes. The assets were old and the users were SCREAMING for Windows/Office. Eventually (1996!) the company began a programme of upgrading the desktops with Windows 95 machines - which was what the users wanted.
Only the users found that Office on Win95 worked Ok at home where they used it for an hour or so but use it for eight hours editing multiple documents and it failed due to memory leaks. Necessarily, the desktop was reasonably well locked down so they could do all the stuff they wanted (i.e. play games and install any application they wanted).So after week or two the users were as unhappy with the "new" Windows 95 as they had been with the old DOS and OS/2 arrangement.
And I can't help but suspect that the same will happen with Linux, it may be cool at home and it may be cool to talk about it when you don't use it anger, but when you find that it hasn't magically transformed your crap job into a world of fun and entertainment, that will be Linux's fault, not becasue you have a crap job.
I guess when you are worth $40 billion you can tell Bill how to run his business.
Fact is that most people don't care about the locking mechanism of their car, or it's cylinder diameter or stroke; they didn't by their DVD player because of its tech spec; they don't know the soil type in their garden or the geology unerlying their house. And... (hope all the Slashdotter's are sitting down)... they don't care about OS security or a few bugs.
If people can plug in their latset gizmo and have it work 7 times out of 10 then they are happy enough. For most people the computer at work is reasonably well locked down and works 95% of the time. The home machine is a toy, if it fails they can't play for a while and I know many who are happy to assume that, like a lot of consumer electronics, when it stops working you go a get a new one (even if it stopped because it was shot through with viruses and bugs). Most people have too much other stuff to consume their time to care about quality of the underlying technology/infrastructure/design/geology...
Bill knows this and knows what sells, "wasting" time on fixing security holes and the like does not deliver more profit to the shareholders. And as for making Slashdotters happy - why should he, he'll never persuade some people to use his software because they are ideologaiclly opposed to Microsoft, whatever it does.
I use mutt and fetchmail in a company of Exchange users
isn't exactly "bending like a reed in the wind" -using a graphical mail client would be.
Why do you use mutt and fetchmail? Why? Why? Why? Just about everywhere I have worked it has been easier (and often there is no choice) to just use what they use rather than trying to be clever or different. It is good to gain wide experience and it is good to have the flexibility to use the tools at hand.
When enough people start doing this, google can tell sites wanting to much money for their adspace to go stic it up
Google does not negotiate a price for ad space. The way it works (on Google at least) is basically the more an advertiser pays the higher up the list/more likely to get seen the ad is. When a link is clicked Google charges the advertiser and pays a proportion to the site that has syndicated the ads.
This means that Google gets paid whatever. The only thing Google has to worry about is sites generating clicks falsely - as in, I set up a site and sit there all day clicking the Google ads to generate revenue from Google. But Google checks the spread of time, IP addresses etc. and refuses to pay if it thinks the clicks are not genuine.
The thing that I can't figure out is who goes to a contentless site and starts click the ads? I very rarely click ads anyway, but to do it from a crap site just seems really dumb.
Why is this a button rather than a mandatory step in the log in process? They ae going to make you type in 3 items of "secret" info (and a user name) to access the site, but to prevent phishing you, the user, have to click a button.
When a fool gets phished, the bank will disclaim liability if the fool did not click the button and verify the sitekey. Of course the fools out there will never click the button and hence the bank gets to disclaim its liability in phishing attacks. Sensible people will of course click the button, but they would be extremely unlikely to get phished anyway.
Surely fuel cells are more likely than batteries - people tend to say "battery" when they mean "portable source of electricity". To get pedantic about it a watch battery, for example, is not a battery but a cell. A battery is a collection (battery) of cells. Point being "battery" has become a general term.
I haven't figured it out properly - but my guess is that 1HP at a given voltage takes the same amount of "juice" whatever the rpm (P=iV). The problem with conventional motors is that speed control is done by altering i, V or frequency.
Also if you had 4 motors or 1 to accelerate a given mass you would still only need the same amount of "juice" because it's the input energy that counts.
The term professional comes from the fact the professionals (used to) profess an oath. There are only three professions in this sense, Doctors, Lawyers and Clergy.
I don't believe that getting paid is enough to make one a professional, for two reasons,
getting paid is no indication of competance
a professional may do some work for no fee, this does not alter the professional's status
Most countries have recongnised "Professional Bodies" who confer professional status on members who demonstrate that they have sufficient knowledge and experience - e.g. The BCS, IEEE etc.
These bodies also require members to adhere to professional standards and codes of practice which is similar to professing an oath.
So a professional is someone who has had that status conferred to them, whether or not they get paid for a particular piece of work.
No one would suggest that Linus is an amateur, the Article is wrong in suggesting that work done for free is amatuer.
Has it not always been the case that there are technologies of convenience and technologies on which we depend? The convenience technologies - your TV remote for example - are engineered for price/features and you can live without them (go on... you can, you know you can, if you really try).The others, the ones on which we really depend (drugs, aircraft flight systems etc.) are engineered for reliability/price.
The upshot is that conveniece and reliability are generally opposing design goals. Things which are highly reliable by definition must be mature (read old) technologies - you can't know if it will run for n years if you haven't run 1000's of examples for more than n years. WiFi is both relativly new and falls into the convenience camp. And until we can be convinced otherwise it must stay there.
It seems to me there are still two huge holes open to terrorists (I'm sure Mr Blunket's boys will be round to get me for stating this publicly) - these are:
1) Persuade existing UK citizens to carry out terrorist acts (they will have ligit IDs - in fact I would arrest the first 1000 people to register for an ID as these are probably terrorists keen to get an ID before they do something nasty)
2) Follow the existing illegal immigrant routes into the UK and commit the terrorist act within a few weeks of arriving.
Or some combination of the above - i.e. use UK citizens to acquire materials etc. using their IDs (don't tell me every mobile phone shop and garden centre is going to validate your ID before selling you some goods) and use the illegal immigrant route to bring in the bomber and the difficult to obtain stuff.
Faster and better for who? Faster to execute or faster to maintain? Better usability or a better match to business requirements?
Given a finite amount of resource, any project has to make compromises and in most cases performance optimisation is a long way down the list. Everyone is rightly concerned about security and quite often the most performant code is not the most secure. Checking variable lengths and types uses clock cycles but blocks security holes.
Let's be honest - OSS is good because it is low cost, we can modify the code if we need to and over time teh feature/performance/security balance will be improved in line with what the userbase require.
You are quite right, the problem is that we like capitalism until it turns round and bites us in the ass.
I have several friends in middle management who were given the task of making substantial portions of their teams redundant - then guess what - they were next, big surprise!
Adapt and survive - and that adaptation may mean taking a big cut, I took a 20/hour cut in 2002 but I kept working where many others just failed to find work. What the middle classes can't believe is that it is happening to them, and alot of them wish they had never started picking at that particular loose thread
Slashdot Mirror
I also tried this and the hard part was the expectation from some people that anything could be fixed. Hardware calls were no problem, I could give a reasonably accurate time estimate and things generally went accroding to plan.
But the calls that went something like "AOL's not working" were a nightmare. After a brief attempt to diagonse over the phone I would explain the fee structure and the minimum charge and they would agree and I would go out. When I get there I find one of those undiagnosable windows problems where something (registry, DLL, whatever) has got confused and the thing just craps out. This could be on a machibne with a 5 year old OS and no origianl disks. The machine may be too low spec to upgrade, and the customer might not want to ("will I get all my stuff back?"; "have you got the original disks?"; "what disks?"). So I could spend a happy hour trying to get the software going and fail completely. I would then explain the options and that fact I wanted paying - "But you haven't fixed it"; "Well I think the only way to fix it is to reinstall...". Getting paid on those calls was tough.
I suppose you could screen the calls but it is difficult because the customers don't have the ability to describe the problem. A call like "my Email's not working" may be because they have lost the Icon or managed to change the dial-up number, or it could be a windows problem.
But what I really found was there was not really enough work to make it pay, for every business there are half a dozen friends-of-friends who will do it for free, or a beer, or whatever.
Or put another way, a guy from Microsoft, who has probably never configured or operated any of the systems he mentions, is telling a group of people, who also have probably never used those systems, that it's really scarey if you move away from Microsoft...
And this is NEWS?
For my sins I have used a lost of operating systems over the years and they all have their pros and cons, the one thing that seems common across them is that the more scarey they look the less likely they are to break because people don't mess with the difficult ones. Most failures are caused by human error (it's just that no one admits to it) and making server OS's look familiar tempts people to fiddle.
I agree that the chances of detecting a signal are very, very small indeed. However I see a different problem, that being the length of time that high-power broadcast signals are being used by a civilisation.
It seems likely that in the next couple of decades a lot of our brodacast signals on the lower frequencies that can escape the ionosphere will have been turned off in favour of internet based tv/radio, microwave signals from satellites directed at earth and spread-spectrum technologies that are indistinguishable from background noise.
So that means we will have had about 120 years of broadcast that has escaped into space. So, assuming we are in anyway typical (BIG ASSUMPTION), we are trying to find a transmission from a planet that went through this 120 year phase at exactly the right time thousands of years ago so that the signal arrives at earth now while we are listening.
I think the universe is big enough for there to be life out there, it's just that we won't find it, and we definitely won't hear it's radio transmissions.
It seems to me that the recent study, which was a review of other studies, largely concluded that most studies were not robust enough to be useful, and also that they did not take into account the fact that people that eat oily fish, probably have a better diet anyway.
All that said there seems to be a growing view (and one that seems reasonable to me) that suggests that taking the apparently beneficial component of a food in isolation may simply not work. In this context eating Omega-3 when it occurs in Oily fish may work. But extracting the Omega-3 and taking it as a dietary suppliment may not work.
If this sounds unlikely, consider the situation where a benficial molecule is too large to pass through the gut wall under normal conditions, however suppose there is something in the associated food that enables the beneficial molecule to pass. Take the molecule in isolation and it will not be absorbed by the body.
The whole situation is vastly more complex than main stream dietary advice tends to let on. The food industry loves simple messages - especially where they can readily put a low cost suppliment in a low cost product to yeild a high price "health food" - e.g. Omega-3 in margarine. Best bet is to eat a balanced diet.
One of the big issues with infrastructure kit is obsolescence. Twenty or thirty years down the line there are no spares available for the hardware, and the company that made it may have folded (and it is expected to go for this long and no it isn't PCs).
...
So one solution is to write an emulator for the equipment that needs replacing and possibly run this on a rack mount "industial" PC. What's inside the PC? pretty much standard stuff, and in a few years I guess this may be forced to include DRM chips. Which either means ruling out this as an option, or doing extra validation to prove that the DRM hardware does not lead to unexpected results.
I've seen this done with PC's to replace teletypes, PCs to replace tape drives, PCs to replace hardware montiors
If you every created anything, you too are a copyright holder. I believe that's the whole point of "copy-left" type licenses - i.e. they make it ok for you to copy my work, otherwise it would not be ok. And if you are a creative person there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living from your cretions. I do agree with your sentiment though, the big publishers never create anything themselves and yet seek to protect copyrights so that they get their large slice of someone else's talent
There is a lot of expense in mining/refining on earth, that's why precious metals are precious. One thing there is in space is a very big, very hot thing called the sun. What you need to do is strap some thrusters to the asteroid and get it into a close orbit round the Sun. Then maybe gravity and some Eutectic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic) theory will take over allowing some of the elements to separate - I guess that one reason we don't do this on Earth is the cost of heating a load of waste material, but if the heat was pretty much free?
:-). But extending this theory, once you got some separation, you could cast the economic material into the shape of a glider, coated with some of the less economic stuff as a heat shield/ablative coating and fly it back to earth...
Ok, I admit you might have some issues controlling the orbit of a molten blob of metals (presumably the thrusters fell off when they got too hot
Ok, ok, making a platinum glider fly presents a few challenges, but boy, I bet Richard Branson would be up for it!
What the article does say is that all Knock Keys are the same. This means that if I record the knocks, I can (given time etc... ) figure out your pin code, I can then use my kock key and your code to open the door. Or easier, I just watch you enter your code on the keypad via a security camera and come along and open your door.
...). Given that many of these are located away from populaiton centres no amount of locking will prevent a determined theif from breaking in with heavy cutting gear. This safety situation also applies to power distrubution cubicles in buildings, lif shaft access, etc.
Another view of this is that millions of locks in the world are not really there for security, they are there for safety reasons and managing the keys for these is a nightmare. Utility companies have thousands of bits of plant at remote locations (pumping stations, substations
The plant is locked to prevent unauthorised access, and unsafe operation. So in these cases I can see a use for this type of lock. Its a lot easier to keep a list of access codes against lock numbers than it is to manage thousands of physical keys - which people put in their pocket and then go away on leave for a fortnight.
The above post really spells out what this is all about. It is exceptionally unlikely that there is signifiant risk to a "normal" business from being sued over software patent infringmet. What Microsoft are trying to do is stem the tide of OSS adoption by creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Unthinking company directors will read the headline, become concerned and stick with MS, however small the real risk.
Most organisations I have worked for have, at some point, permitted the priacy of software, or encouraged it, or even used it as a normal way of running the business. They may express concern about such practices publically but do little about preventing it in reality. This must open the business up to substantially greater risk than that of being sued over patents issues, but often see turning a blind eye to piracy as cost effective.
This is the way to go. I keep most of my stuff on a webserver and then I can access it from anywhere I work (or just about) - also duplicate a lot of this on a USB pen drive. There is nothing worse than spending 4 hours solving a problem only to have to solve the same thing again a year later because you don't have access to the code you generated last time.
There are lots of suggestions here about version control systems - these are good (SVN/Tortoise is excellent - I use it all the time) but offer you nothing if what you want to retrieve a little snippet of code created 18 months ago. What you need is searchable code - either by grep'ing files in a shell or by having a full text search through a web server. (I know one can grep an SVN repo but it adds nothing over stuffing it all in a few directories as far as finding 3 lines of code go).
If you are doing PHP/JS then it really is a good idea to create re-usable classes, tempting though it is to not bother with the extra code. Once you get into it, it is easy and makes re-use really easy. The more you do, the easier life gets.
All that said, I find that the things I need are the ones I don't use very often - little shell scripts, one line commands, regexs, etc. I kind of half-heartedly put these in a wiki - it is easy to edit and if I was abit more dilligent about it, it would be a really useful reference resource - may be that's another New Year's resolution to abandon by March.
Once again various aspect of a huge and diverse issue are conflated...
Many studies (including anylising ice cores which contain atmospheric records going back millenia) have shown that CO2 has risien since the industrial revolution and temperatures have risen too. The evidence it there go and read the papers.
It's not just about survival of the species, if we as a species just wanted to survive we would still be living in caves. We are intelligent, which means that we are aware of others, society and some kind of collective good.
The fact the we and the planet have survived worse is no excuse for engendering flooding on a massive scale, extreme weather and a range of other effects that will kill millions, cause wars and famine (sorry, sounding a bit biblical here...). Surviving is not enough, we as individuals and as a species seek to better our lot, and now it is turning out that that is much more closely coupled to the rest of nature than we ever imagined.
Many civilisations have risen and collapsed, some partly due to environmental changes. Have we come this far, taken our first steps into space, decoded the human genome, to say "Bring it On" to the next major global environmental change? Whilst we may survive, much of what we have achieved will be lost and if you think it can't happen the ancient Greeks - 2000 years ago - knew the Earth was spherical and it's diameter. But 500 years ago people believed the earth was flat...
I just re-read this and felt I better put in a disclamer for those of you who think I am comparing Win 95 to Linux - I AM NOT, also for those of you who use Linux everyday and think I am knocking it - I AM NOT (I use it most days too) - see if you can figure out what I am driving at by reading the whole comment.
Back in the early 90's I worked for a company that was a late adopter of PC technology. At the time they had a mixture of DOS and OS/2 with Wordperfect and Lotus 123 . Email and most apps were on Minis and Mainframes. The assets were old and the users were SCREAMING for Windows/Office. Eventually (1996!) the company began a programme of upgrading the desktops with Windows 95 machines - which was what the users wanted.
Only the users found that Office on Win95 worked Ok at home where they used it for an hour or so but use it for eight hours editing multiple documents and it failed due to memory leaks. Necessarily, the desktop was reasonably well locked down so they could do all the stuff they wanted (i.e. play games and install any application they wanted).So after week or two the users were as unhappy with the "new" Windows 95 as they had been with the old DOS and OS/2 arrangement.
And I can't help but suspect that the same will happen with Linux, it may be cool at home and it may be cool to talk about it when you don't use it anger, but when you find that it hasn't magically transformed your crap job into a world of fun and entertainment, that will be Linux's fault, not becasue you have a crap job.
I guess when you are worth $40 billion you can tell Bill how to run his business.
... (hope all the Slashdotter's are sitting down) ... they don't care about OS security or a few bugs.
Fact is that most people don't care about the locking mechanism of their car, or it's cylinder diameter or stroke; they didn't by their DVD player because of its tech spec; they don't know the soil type in their garden or the geology unerlying their house. And
If people can plug in their latset gizmo and have it work 7 times out of 10 then they are happy enough. For most people the computer at work is reasonably well locked down and works 95% of the time. The home machine is a toy, if it fails they can't play for a while and I know many who are happy to assume that, like a lot of consumer electronics, when it stops working you go a get a new one (even if it stopped because it was shot through with viruses and bugs). Most people have too much other stuff to consume their time to care about quality of the underlying technology/infrastructure/design/geology...
Bill knows this and knows what sells, "wasting" time on fixing security holes and the like does not deliver more profit to the shareholders. And as for making Slashdotters happy - why should he, he'll never persuade some people to use his software because they are ideologaiclly opposed to Microsoft, whatever it does.
Why do you use mutt and fetchmail? Why? Why? Why? Just about everywhere I have worked it has been easier (and often there is no choice) to just use what they use rather than trying to be clever or different. It is good to gain wide experience and it is good to have the flexibility to use the tools at hand.
Google does not negotiate a price for ad space. The way it works (on Google at least) is basically the more an advertiser pays the higher up the list/more likely to get seen the ad is. When a link is clicked Google charges the advertiser and pays a proportion to the site that has syndicated the ads.
This means that Google gets paid whatever. The only thing Google has to worry about is sites generating clicks falsely - as in, I set up a site and sit there all day clicking the Google ads to generate revenue from Google. But Google checks the spread of time, IP addresses etc. and refuses to pay if it thinks the clicks are not genuine.
The thing that I can't figure out is who goes to a contentless site and starts click the ads? I very rarely click ads anyway, but to do it from a crap site just seems really dumb.
When a fool gets phished, the bank will disclaim liability if the fool did not click the button and verify the sitekey. Of course the fools out there will never click the button and hence the bank gets to disclaim its liability in phishing attacks. Sensible people will of course click the button, but they would be extremely unlikely to get phished anyway.
So what's wrong with a clutch on an electic motor?
I haven't figured it out properly - but my guess is that 1HP at a given voltage takes the same amount of "juice" whatever the rpm (P=iV). The problem with conventional motors is that speed control is done by altering i, V or frequency.
Also if you had 4 motors or 1 to accelerate a given mass you would still only need the same amount of "juice" because it's the input energy that counts.
Slashdot, news for historians, stuff that doen't matter anymore
I don't believe that getting paid is enough to make one a professional, for two reasons,
Most countries have recongnised "Professional Bodies" who confer professional status on members who demonstrate that they have sufficient knowledge and experience - e.g. The BCS, IEEE etc. These bodies also require members to adhere to professional standards and codes of practice which is similar to professing an oath.
So a professional is someone who has had that status conferred to them, whether or not they get paid for a particular piece of work.
No one would suggest that Linus is an amateur, the Article is wrong in suggesting that work done for free is amatuer.
The upshot is that conveniece and reliability are generally opposing design goals. Things which are highly reliable by definition must be mature (read old) technologies - you can't know if it will run for n years if you haven't run 1000's of examples for more than n years. WiFi is both relativly new and falls into the convenience camp. And until we can be convinced otherwise it must stay there.
1) Persuade existing UK citizens to carry out terrorist acts (they will have ligit IDs - in fact I would arrest the first 1000 people to register for an ID as these are probably terrorists keen to get an ID before they do something nasty)
2) Follow the existing illegal immigrant routes into the UK and commit the terrorist act within a few weeks of arriving.
Or some combination of the above - i.e. use UK citizens to acquire materials etc. using their IDs (don't tell me every mobile phone shop and garden centre is going to validate your ID before selling you some goods) and use the illegal immigrant route to bring in the bomber and the difficult to obtain stuff.
Given a finite amount of resource, any project has to make compromises and in most cases performance optimisation is a long way down the list. Everyone is rightly concerned about security and quite often the most performant code is not the most secure. Checking variable lengths and types uses clock cycles but blocks security holes.
Let's be honest - OSS is good because it is low cost, we can modify the code if we need to and over time teh feature/performance/security balance will be improved in line with what the userbase require.
I have several friends in middle management who were given the task of making substantial portions of their teams redundant - then guess what - they were next, big surprise!
Adapt and survive - and that adaptation may mean taking a big cut, I took a 20/hour cut in 2002 but I kept working where many others just failed to find work. What the middle classes can't believe is that it is happening to them, and alot of them wish they had never started picking at that particular loose thread