they have no more right to see the contents of MY black box than they have to see the contents of MY car. Searching my vechicle and my truck requires my permission and certainly hunting under the hood should as well.
If the anti-gun folks are finally willing to own up to the 2nd amendment then they also will have to say that it says ARMS which implies that the revolutionaries who wrote it felt the people should not be robbed of weapons intended for military use. The reason of course is so that if our government should become corrupt enough 200+ million americans can walk up to the door with weapons and overthrow them.
hmmm odd, I could kill you right now with nothing but my bare hands if I wanted to. But I bet that gun on the floor isn't going to magically get it's ass off the floor and do something about it on it's own.
Absolutely, guns are created to be weapons... not neccesarily to be used, but to be there if need arises for them to be used.
And the revolutionaries who put the second amendment in the constitution did NOT give us the right to bear arms so we could go huntin' with pa. They put that in there in case we should one day have to do what they did.
Are guns enough should the need arise to overthrow our corrupt government? Nope sure aren't, then again the second amendment says nothing about guns, it says arms and the word arms implies weapons intended for military use.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating doing that, but that is why it's there although you'll never get a politician to admit it. Arguments about whether we need to hunt to survive these days are irrelevant in the gun debate because that's not what it's for. It's to keep open the ultimate authority the people have.
absolutely, they get less than 10% of the price of each song and all their expenses have to come out of that 10%, after bandwidth cost, work in packaging the files, and gateway fees for the credit card transactions the sales the hack would increase might actually be costing them a couple pennies a pop, not making them money. Of course if the hack works with the iPOD they probably wouldn't care.
"True. Which means that I will be spending $500 extra during budget year 2004 to keep up with the new staff. In an organization with 70 employees that's not much... and when the boss doesn't consider $500 a barrier then there's little to push us to go all OSS."
That's one way to look at it, another is that's $7500 that should be finding better use in the budget.
"Did I mention I used linux in front of the network to filter mail, etc? Besides, it is just as easy to admin a Linux network poorly as it is to admin a Windows network poorly."
If you were running linux across the board you wouldn't need to filter, and although you cleverly place your linux as the head of the security you leave your vulnerable systems on the inside were the greatest threat lies... the employees themselves. Filtering mail is great and all, but not needing to filter it is even better.
"I'm no MS zealot. I merely use the tools that make sense for the job."
That's as it should be, Linux is not always the right option, nor proprietary Unix, nor MacOS. It's just that I fail to think of many situations in which the tool that makes sense for the job is windows;) It seems your implying that you keep windows out of your server room knowing it's not stable or secure and that's well and good. But you seem to feel for some reason you appear to believe obvious that it's the right choice for the job on the desktop.
Let's look at the obvious benefits of the platforms.
Mac, obviously the easiest to use, requires much less training but completely abstracts the user from the computer, as a result after working with mac for years the typical mac user still knows nothing about computers and what to do if something goes wrong.
Windows, has a large number of applications due to it's popularity, and has support from all hardware vendors due to it's popularity. The interface is counterintuitive jumping from abstract like a mac to exposing you to the way the computer works in a seemingly random fashion with no rhyme or reason to it. It breaks constantly in numerous ways, sometimes even calling broken behavior "features". As a result after a few years working with it pretty much everyone takes problems in stride and knows how to work around a number of flukes. After working with windows nobody calls the tech simply because a program crashes anymore, they just try whatever they were doing again and/or reboot and carry on.
Linux, the most stable and secure of the choices and by far the most flexible for the power user. Has a large number of applications available, far more than the mac, far less than windows. It has a gui which is far more intuitive and consistant than windows and less than the mac. It does not attempt to abstract concepts from the user, instead it seeks to simplify working with the true nature of the beast. The result is that after a few years the user knows a great deal about the system and as such understands what to do if there is a problem. If something goes wrong the user knows to contact the admin immediately since on this platform something going wrong typically means hardware failure.
All three have ups and downs, none is clear winner, but whichever clear winner you come up with it's surely not windows. It's only up is the large number of programs and vendor support for hardware and that is a superficial benefit that will automagically transfer to whichever desktop system becomes most popular.
From your responses it's apparent we are debating, but not the same issue. I'm debate the fact of the superior solution, you are debating the non-profits perceptions which has nothing to do with reality.
The only point I'll debate is the one point in which we are both discussing fact.
"This is an absurd and unsupportable accusation. Very few of the millions upon millions of people who used Windows for business last year lost a week of productivity due to their operating system. The director of the non-profit most likely has not had such an experience. By contrast, there are dozens of articles all over the web about people who spent a week just installing Linux. Telling a non-profit director, who has been using Windows successfully, that the average Windows system has a week of down time every year will do nothing but ruin your credibility."
I work for an independant tech shop, for every business with a dedicated admin there are dozens and dozens who hire techs from shops like ours. Every day I handle calls for the hundreds of businesses that constitute our regular customer base, each with anywhere from 1 to 500 pc's. With 4 onsite technicians and 1 tech in the shop we administer all of them.
Furthermore we basically have a monopoly in central illinois, if you have anything other than the most basic windows setups we are the only option out there. As such I'm in a unique position to experience a vast array of solutions and work with all of them, not subject to any one bosses idea of what should be setup and not.
This includes linux solutions, MacOS, proprietary unix, and certainly windows. The first three options almost never require attention after setup and as such we use them anywhere we can. As a result about 50% of our customer base now uses these solutions, the other 50% has existing setups that require windows, insists on having what the jones do or some such nonsense. 50% of our customer base uses other solutions but 95% of my time is spent fixing windows problems...
Because of the large number of windows problems we are interviewing to hire more techs as if 4 shouldn't be enough to administer a few thousand pc's in a varying array of configurations. Our linux systems are the easiest to administer, they don't break, so we just have to keep them patched and that is accomplished simply by dropping the rpm in an apt repository located at our office. For the past 5yrs we have grown rapidly but have kept the tide managable by avoiding windows like the plague, so don't even think to try to tell me what none of the inhouse admin's on slashdot are in any position to know... windows DOES have more downtime on average than I'd dare to say MOST other solutions.
except for a few things. Windows requires significantly more work to keep running. It's a security risk. You have to deal with viruses. And you only have to train an employee once. Whereas you have to replace computers and spend the $100 per machine again over and over and over again.
Except on point one he is right there. Point one is not technicaly correct (except in terms of point 2 and 3), you could easily run a PIV with 256mb ram as a terminal server and serve to 20 clients.
"do some simple web browsing and word processing, you can show them how easy that is to do on a Pentium-100"
Unless they have broadband or faster, in which case you might as well give them a high end PII or a PIII that will have a newer harddrive and gettable ram. Since that P-100 would need a new ide controller and hard drive and EDO ram (aka solid gold) just to render the pages as fast as a new computer. You could simply buy a better used machine for that $270 worth of additional hardware.
"Where would you go to buy a copy of Windows 98 and Office 97?"
win98 at least can still be bought from places like ingram micro. Office 97 is getting tough to find.
"And if you're talking Linux, who'll be doing tech support?"
It's not much harder to find support for linux than for windows and it generally needs drastically less support.
"Suppose the computer users are paid employees who are familiar with Windows. Maybe person X gets $30K/year. If, over the lifetime of the computer, that person wastes a week of time learning about Linux, it was a bad decision."
That's false, I fail to see where you come up with that math. A week would be a small price to pay. Windows system are expensive to keep up, they break constantly, and that isn't even considering the licensing cost. On average from experience working with both solutions I'd guestimate in the course of a year the average windows system has over a week of downtime compared with about an hour for the average linux system. And then there is the productivity gain that comes with using well chosen solutions.
It's not like linux is an almost as good or good enough solution, we shouldnt forget it's a superior solution, in the hands of a user who has learned to use it word is rapidly accelerated, in the hands of someone who learns just enough to get by, it will still outpace the same user on windows since there also they learn just enough to get by.
"But, you protest, Linux isn't hard to use. Can they call you if they have a problem? They can't. They are frightned that there will be a problem that they can't solve."
And this is different from windows how? The only difference I see is there is less genuine concern running linux since it typically has so many fewer problems.
"What do you tell a non-profit whose $1M grant application was rejected because Word was unable to open the document saved in Microsoft fomat by Open Office. If I was running a non-profit, I'd be panic striken by the possibility."
You don't tell them anything, you default OO to rtf, anyone who knows enough to make use of features which can't be saved in rtf format can manage to save in word format, and I fail to see where your going to come up with a grant proposal that justifies an advanced format. Not to mention despite what people like you would have us below, there are virtually nil features of word not supported by OO. I've never even heard of a case where an OO saved word doc wasn't readable by word, the other way around yes (actually no for word, but I've seen one or two advanced spreadsheets that wouldn't open in OO) but each and every detail of OO is used tested to work the other way around, in fact it's by examining the freaking word documents produced by word that they've come up with all of them!
"People who are familiar with Linux and Open Office cost more on average than people who are familiar with Windows and Microsoft Office. What makes you think that the cost of hardware and software is even a material factor in the decision?"
You need less such people to begin with, and likely won't need anyone in house at all in most cases. Those who you do hire when you need a tech to come in and fix something will simply be chosen for their knowledge of what you have and they won't have to be called often. Of course such infrequent visits could add an extra 30mins because nobody remembers your setup;)
No they don't need the horsepower (or aren't likely to at any rate), but they DO need the newer hardware.
I'm forced everyday to explain to companies that bought used computers because they "don't need anything that fast" why they have to upgrade sooner than someone who bought new. You don't have to buy high end, but you do have to buy new. Why? Because I don't have a ready supply of EDO ram these days, no I don't stock your AT power supplies sorry, nope no ISA slots here buddy and no ISA cards either. PCI video cards, wtf are you talking about, I had to LOOK to find somewhere I can still order them. PII fans... getting tough to find.
You also have a massive drop in value of older hardware in comparison with new. An athlon over 1ghz is still a fairly valuable machine and worth putting money into, a PIII or PII is not worth putting over a hundred dollars in today, and even then only the hardware could be used in a new machine if a more significant investment were required tommorow.
We made this mistake with mail servers for small businesses. We had PII's out the wazzoo, and many customer's had extra's from upgrades. So we'd sell them a nice linux mail/web/ftp/webmail/spamfilter/dns/dnscaching solution. They perform excellently, none have ever needed so much as a reboot (with one exception, it had bad ram).
After about 18months or so word was starting to get around, more and more customers were asking for these solutions.... the problem we are very much out of PII's!!!
Right now we have maybe 20-25 of these servers out there, they just sit and work and remote administration and updates from our office is a breeze, I perform monthly maintaince on all of them in less than an hour. I could easily triple the number and it would still take less than an hour. It also occurs to us, that 5yrs down the line, where will we be in terms of parts? Where will we find processor to replace the dead ones? Will we still be able to get PC100/133 ram?
Re:Microshaft offers substantial discounts to NP's
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Linux for Non-Profits?
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If all the microsoft software for the entire office costs $1, they would still have paid more for a very substantially inferior product for pretty much all uses.
I just told you how you idiot, some raw atomic material has to make it there, man doesn't. We already know how to teleport a living person, we simply don't have the computing power to track the quantum entanglement on that scale yet. Just because we won't do it soon doesn't mean we can't manage to squeeze a little more juice out of computing technology (especially since quantum computing itself is likely to come about in 20yrs or so) before the freakin sun burns out.
Do you? A is you, what your hoping to transport, B is raw material that will form into you where your hoping to go (the original raw material will no longer exist), C is the material you will entagle with B (not yourself) and bring back. Because of C it is possible to read the atomic information of the human body (or anything else) on a low enough level to disrupt it. If you want to know how go read up on quantum teleportation.
As for computing power, ever is a very very long time. When we are talking in terms of what we can come up and accomplish before the sun dies, it is a very long time indeed. We will be well beyond mere quantum computing then.
not accurate at all. Microsoft has told us they are selling us a vault. Most vault manufacturers DO insure the contents of the vaults they sell should they be broken into.
Microsoft assures us, they not only take no responsibility if it's broken into, they don't even promise the product that says "This is the most secure vault on earth, perfect for your security needs!" is fit to be used for any purpose, including *gasp* as a fucking vault!!!
And to be honest, I don't really blame em, after all, I wouldn't want to ensure the contents if I conned somebody into paying a 10000% markup on a paper vault that sits in the middle of the street.
hmmm aside from notepad, I'm not quite sure microsoft ever HAS released anything that works well enough to use. Oh wait, I know, it's the flight simulator built into excel right?
Ok, let me get this straight, and by all means step in and correct me if I'm wrong here.
But most programmers work for companies, and companies as a policy only hire the top 1-2% of all programmers. Somehow it just doesn't computer, do the rest somehow work for divine entities and thus don't count?
"Point 1 - where to go? Mars? You would need massive external support to live there. Can't happen if by your arg Earth is gone. Anywhere worth going (Earth like planet) is so far away it is not worth considering given our understanding of physics.....leading to"
I agree we are going the wrong route. But remember, no small portions of our current physics are simply theories dreamed up by someone who was bored one day and only justification for being bought into is they sound reasonable and nobody has come up with a better pipedream. Most that are mathmatically substantiated stand on the shoulders of other pipe-dreams.
Quantum physics is also poised to break many of the old rules. For instance quantum teleportation is VERY promising, although it will be awhile before we are actually teleporting anything as complex as lifeforms, we've already teleported photons individually and a laser beam. When we do, this will allow us to travel from point a to b faster than light is able to (relatively instant actually, over infinite distance), although this may not count since we didn't actually traverse the "space" inbetween. Since entaglement must occur at the place your going to, and be brought back to the place your coming from, this would require a simple rig, sent off with atoms from close by, which must then be sent by normal means (good thing it's easy to send an inanimate object a VERY long way in space provided we sent it flying as fast as we can, with a clear path and are willing to wait for it to get there.) And set to automatically teleport, using the atoms we sent, atoms from that location back there. From there we can teleport more, and get back more, until such a point where we have enough raw material to keep teleportation going indefinately. Then we can teleport telescopes and teleport another object to acomplish the same task creating a vast relay system which would allow us to teleport pretty much anything, pretty much anywhere we want.
That is assuming my primative understanding of the physics involved is correct.
Well considering the parent was responding to a post that says we should give up on space travel altogether I don't think it was out of the question to mention it.
If we do not make any attempts whatsoever to figure out how to viably travel in space, the time period it would take to develop inter-stellar travel could be indefinate.
Nobody said transoceanic travel is comparable to intergalactic travel. I think space habitats are a relatively small challenge considering how much more evolved the human mind is then when transoceanic travel was tackled, not to mention the refinement of methods of study, the vast base of existing knowledge we have to build on.
Give me a break, if we didn't already know how, something like transoceanic travel would take us about month to figure out with the current physical evolution of the human mind. It takes a bigger more complex problem now to be anywhere near the challenge that was then.
In what way is a telescope more useful than a space station? In what way is a means of gaining knowledge for an individual or a group of individuals more important than gaining knowledge for mankind?
Slashdot Mirror
they have no more right to see the contents of MY black box than they have to see the contents of MY car. Searching my vechicle and my truck requires my permission and certainly hunting under the hood should as well.
If the anti-gun folks are finally willing to own up to the 2nd amendment then they also will have to say that it says ARMS which implies that the revolutionaries who wrote it felt the people should not be robbed of weapons intended for military use. The reason of course is so that if our government should become corrupt enough 200+ million americans can walk up to the door with weapons and overthrow them.
hmmm odd, I could kill you right now with nothing but my bare hands if I wanted to. But I bet that gun on the floor isn't going to magically get it's ass off the floor and do something about it on it's own.
Absolutely, guns are created to be weapons... not neccesarily to be used, but to be there if need arises for them to be used.
And the revolutionaries who put the second amendment in the constitution did NOT give us the right to bear arms so we could go huntin' with pa. They put that in there in case we should one day have to do what they did.
Are guns enough should the need arise to overthrow our corrupt government? Nope sure aren't, then again the second amendment says nothing about guns, it says arms and the word arms implies weapons intended for military use.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating doing that, but that is why it's there although you'll never get a politician to admit it. Arguments about whether we need to hunt to survive these days are irrelevant in the gun debate because that's not what it's for. It's to keep open the ultimate authority the people have.
absolutely, they get less than 10% of the price of each song and all their expenses have to come out of that 10%, after bandwidth cost, work in packaging the files, and gateway fees for the credit card transactions the sales the hack would increase might actually be costing them a couple pennies a pop, not making them money. Of course if the hack works with the iPOD they probably wouldn't care.
pc != windows for godsake. The new security bios will prevent you from running anything but windows on A PC.
"True. Which means that I will be spending $500 extra during budget year 2004 to keep up with the new staff. In an organization with 70 employees that's not much... and when the boss doesn't consider $500 a barrier then there's little to push us to go all OSS."
;) It seems your implying that you keep windows out of your server room knowing it's not stable or secure and that's well and good. But you seem to feel for some reason you appear to believe obvious that it's the right choice for the job on the desktop.
That's one way to look at it, another is that's $7500 that should be finding better use in the budget.
"Did I mention I used linux in front of the network to filter mail, etc? Besides, it is just as easy to admin a Linux network poorly as it is to admin a Windows network poorly."
If you were running linux across the board you wouldn't need to filter, and although you cleverly place your linux as the head of the security you leave your vulnerable systems on the inside were the greatest threat lies... the employees themselves. Filtering mail is great and all, but not needing to filter it is even better.
"I'm no MS zealot. I merely use the tools that make sense for the job."
That's as it should be, Linux is not always the right option, nor proprietary Unix, nor MacOS. It's just that I fail to think of many situations in which the tool that makes sense for the job is windows
Let's look at the obvious benefits of the platforms.
Mac, obviously the easiest to use, requires much less training but completely abstracts the user from the computer, as a result after working with mac for years the typical mac user still knows nothing about computers and what to do if something goes wrong.
Windows, has a large number of applications due to it's popularity, and has support from all hardware vendors due to it's popularity. The interface is counterintuitive jumping from abstract like a mac to exposing you to the way the computer works in a seemingly random fashion with no rhyme or reason to it. It breaks constantly in numerous ways, sometimes even calling broken behavior "features". As a result after a few years working with it pretty much everyone takes problems in stride and knows how to work around a number of flukes. After working with windows nobody calls the tech simply because a program crashes anymore, they just try whatever they were doing again and/or reboot and carry on.
Linux, the most stable and secure of the choices and by far the most flexible for the power user. Has a large number of applications available, far more than the mac, far less than windows. It has a gui which is far more intuitive and consistant than windows and less than the mac. It does not attempt to abstract concepts from the user, instead it seeks to simplify working with the true nature of the beast. The result is that after a few years the user knows a great deal about the system and as such understands what to do if there is a problem. If something goes wrong the user knows to contact the admin immediately since on this platform something going wrong typically means hardware failure.
All three have ups and downs, none is clear winner, but whichever clear winner you come up with it's surely not windows. It's only up is the large number of programs and vendor support for hardware and that is a superficial benefit that will automagically transfer to whichever desktop system becomes most popular.
From your responses it's apparent we are debating, but not the same issue. I'm debate the fact of the superior solution, you are debating the non-profits perceptions which has nothing to do with reality.
The only point I'll debate is the one point in which we are both discussing fact.
"This is an absurd and unsupportable accusation. Very few of the millions upon millions of people who used Windows for business last year lost a week of productivity due to their operating system. The director of the non-profit most likely has not had such an experience. By contrast, there are dozens of articles all over the web about people who spent a week just installing Linux. Telling a non-profit director, who has been using Windows successfully, that the average Windows system has a week of down time every year will do nothing but ruin your credibility."
I work for an independant tech shop, for every business with a dedicated admin there are dozens and dozens who hire techs from shops like ours. Every day I handle calls for the hundreds of businesses that constitute our regular customer base, each with anywhere from 1 to 500 pc's. With 4 onsite technicians and 1 tech in the shop we administer all of them.
Furthermore we basically have a monopoly in central illinois, if you have anything other than the most basic windows setups we are the only option out there. As such I'm in a unique position to experience a vast array of solutions and work with all of them, not subject to any one bosses idea of what should be setup and not.
This includes linux solutions, MacOS, proprietary unix, and certainly windows. The first three options almost never require attention after setup and as such we use them anywhere we can. As a result about 50% of our customer base now uses these solutions, the other 50% has existing setups that require windows, insists on having what the jones do or some such nonsense. 50% of our customer base uses other solutions but 95% of my time is spent fixing windows problems...
Because of the large number of windows problems we are interviewing to hire more techs as if 4 shouldn't be enough to administer a few thousand pc's in a varying array of configurations. Our linux systems are the easiest to administer, they don't break, so we just have to keep them patched and that is accomplished simply by dropping the rpm in an apt repository located at our office. For the past 5yrs we have grown rapidly but have kept the tide managable by avoiding windows like the plague, so don't even think to try to tell me what none of the inhouse admin's on slashdot are in any position to know... windows DOES have more downtime on average than I'd dare to say MOST other solutions.
except for a few things. Windows requires significantly more work to keep running. It's a security risk. You have to deal with viruses. And you only have to train an employee once. Whereas you have to replace computers and spend the $100 per machine again over and over and over again.
Except on point one he is right there. Point one is not technicaly correct (except in terms of point 2 and 3), you could easily run a PIV with 256mb ram as a terminal server and serve to 20 clients.
"do some simple web browsing and word processing, you can show them how easy that is to do on a Pentium-100"
Unless they have broadband or faster, in which case you might as well give them a high end PII or a PIII that will have a newer harddrive and gettable ram. Since that P-100 would need a new ide controller and hard drive and EDO ram (aka solid gold) just to render the pages as fast as a new computer. You could simply buy a better used machine for that $270 worth of additional hardware.
"Where would you go to buy a copy of Windows 98 and Office 97?"
win98 at least can still be bought from places like ingram micro. Office 97 is getting tough to find.
"And if you're talking Linux, who'll be doing tech support?"
It's not much harder to find support for linux than for windows and it generally needs drastically less support.
"Suppose the computer users are paid employees who are familiar with Windows. Maybe person X gets $30K/year. If, over the lifetime of the computer, that person wastes a week of time learning about Linux, it was a bad decision."
;)
That's false, I fail to see where you come up with that math. A week would be a small price to pay. Windows system are expensive to keep up, they break constantly, and that isn't even considering the licensing cost. On average from experience working with both solutions I'd guestimate in the course of a year the average windows system has over a week of downtime compared with about an hour for the average linux system. And then there is the productivity gain that comes with using well chosen solutions.
It's not like linux is an almost as good or good enough solution, we shouldnt forget it's a superior solution, in the hands of a user who has learned to use it word is rapidly accelerated, in the hands of someone who learns just enough to get by, it will still outpace the same user on windows since there also they learn just enough to get by.
"But, you protest, Linux isn't hard to use. Can they call you if they have a problem? They can't. They are frightned that there will be a problem that they can't solve."
And this is different from windows how? The only difference I see is there is less genuine concern running linux since it typically has so many fewer problems.
"What do you tell a non-profit whose $1M grant application was rejected because Word was unable to open the document saved in Microsoft fomat by Open Office. If I was running a non-profit, I'd be panic striken by the possibility."
You don't tell them anything, you default OO to rtf, anyone who knows enough to make use of features which can't be saved in rtf format can manage to save in word format, and I fail to see where your going to come up with a grant proposal that justifies an advanced format. Not to mention despite what people like you would have us below, there are virtually nil features of word not supported by OO. I've never even heard of a case where an OO saved word doc wasn't readable by word, the other way around yes (actually no for word, but I've seen one or two advanced spreadsheets that wouldn't open in OO) but each and every detail of OO is used tested to work the other way around, in fact it's by examining the freaking word documents produced by word that they've come up with all of them!
"People who are familiar with Linux and Open Office cost more on average than people who are familiar with Windows and Microsoft Office. What makes you think that the cost of hardware and software is even a material factor in the decision?"
You need less such people to begin with, and likely won't need anyone in house at all in most cases. Those who you do hire when you need a tech to come in and fix something will simply be chosen for their knowledge of what you have and they won't have to be called often. Of course such infrequent visits could add an extra 30mins because nobody remembers your setup
No they don't need the horsepower (or aren't likely to at any rate), but they DO need the newer hardware.
I'm forced everyday to explain to companies that bought used computers because they "don't need anything that fast" why they have to upgrade sooner than someone who bought new. You don't have to buy high end, but you do have to buy new. Why? Because I don't have a ready supply of EDO ram these days, no I don't stock your AT power supplies sorry, nope no ISA slots here buddy and no ISA cards either. PCI video cards, wtf are you talking about, I had to LOOK to find somewhere I can still order them. PII fans... getting tough to find.
You also have a massive drop in value of older hardware in comparison with new. An athlon over 1ghz is still a fairly valuable machine and worth putting money into, a PIII or PII is not worth putting over a hundred dollars in today, and even then only the hardware could be used in a new machine if a more significant investment were required tommorow.
We made this mistake with mail servers for small businesses. We had PII's out the wazzoo, and many customer's had extra's from upgrades. So we'd sell them a nice linux mail/web/ftp/webmail/spamfilter/dns/dnscaching solution. They perform excellently, none have ever needed so much as a reboot (with one exception, it had bad ram).
After about 18months or so word was starting to get around, more and more customers were asking for these solutions.... the problem we are very much out of PII's!!!
Right now we have maybe 20-25 of these servers out there, they just sit and work and remote administration and updates from our office is a breeze, I perform monthly maintaince on all of them in less than an hour. I could easily triple the number and it would still take less than an hour. It also occurs to us, that 5yrs down the line, where will we be in terms of parts? Where will we find processor to replace the dead ones? Will we still be able to get PC100/133 ram?
If all the microsoft software for the entire office costs $1, they would still have paid more for a very substantially inferior product for pretty much all uses.
I just told you how you idiot, some raw atomic material has to make it there, man doesn't. We already know how to teleport a living person, we simply don't have the computing power to track the quantum entanglement on that scale yet. Just because we won't do it soon doesn't mean we can't manage to squeeze a little more juice out of computing technology (especially since quantum computing itself is likely to come about in 20yrs or so) before the freakin sun burns out.
Do you? A is you, what your hoping to transport, B is raw material that will form into you where your hoping to go (the original raw material will no longer exist), C is the material you will entagle with B (not yourself) and bring back. Because of C it is possible to read the atomic information of the human body (or anything else) on a low enough level to disrupt it. If you want to know how go read up on quantum teleportation.
As for computing power, ever is a very very long time. When we are talking in terms of what we can come up and accomplish before the sun dies, it is a very long time indeed. We will be well beyond mere quantum computing then.
A photon was used because it's simple and make's for a good choice for proof of concepts. The same theory applies to any type of atom.
"Does anyone think that they would have delivered stable versions of windows without the pressure of competition."
Your argument isn't valid unless you can name a stable version of windows. I sure can't, and I've worked extensively with EVERY version of windows.
not accurate at all. Microsoft has told us they are selling us a vault. Most vault manufacturers DO insure the contents of the vaults they sell should they be broken into.
Microsoft assures us, they not only take no responsibility if it's broken into, they don't even promise the product that says "This is the most secure vault on earth, perfect for your security needs!" is fit to be used for any purpose, including *gasp* as a fucking vault!!!
And to be honest, I don't really blame em, after all, I wouldn't want to ensure the contents if I conned somebody into paying a 10000% markup on a paper vault that sits in the middle of the street.
hmmm aside from notepad, I'm not quite sure microsoft ever HAS released anything that works well enough to use. Oh wait, I know, it's the flight simulator built into excel right?
Ok, let me get this straight, and by all means step in and correct me if I'm wrong here.
But most programmers work for companies, and companies as a policy only hire the top 1-2% of all programmers. Somehow it just doesn't computer, do the rest somehow work for divine entities and thus don't count?
"Point 1 - where to go? Mars? You would need massive external support to live there. Can't happen if by your arg Earth is gone. Anywhere worth going (Earth like planet) is so far away it is not worth considering given our understanding of physics.....leading to"
I agree we are going the wrong route. But remember, no small portions of our current physics are simply theories dreamed up by someone who was bored one day and only justification for being bought into is they sound reasonable and nobody has come up with a better pipedream. Most that are mathmatically substantiated stand on the shoulders of other pipe-dreams.
Quantum physics is also poised to break many of the old rules. For instance quantum teleportation is VERY promising, although it will be awhile before we are actually teleporting anything as complex as lifeforms, we've already teleported photons individually and a laser beam. When we do, this will allow us to travel from point a to b faster than light is able to (relatively instant actually, over infinite distance), although this may not count since we didn't actually traverse the "space" inbetween. Since entaglement must occur at the place your going to, and be brought back to the place your coming from, this would require a simple rig, sent off with atoms from close by, which must then be sent by normal means (good thing it's easy to send an inanimate object a VERY long way in space provided we sent it flying as fast as we can, with a clear path and are willing to wait for it to get there.) And set to automatically teleport, using the atoms we sent, atoms from that location back there. From there we can teleport more, and get back more, until such a point where we have enough raw material to keep teleportation going indefinately. Then we can teleport telescopes and teleport another object to acomplish the same task creating a vast relay system which would allow us to teleport pretty much anything, pretty much anywhere we want.
That is assuming my primative understanding of the physics involved is correct.
Well considering the parent was responding to a post that says we should give up on space travel altogether I don't think it was out of the question to mention it.
If we do not make any attempts whatsoever to figure out how to viably travel in space, the time period it would take to develop inter-stellar travel could be indefinate.
Nobody said transoceanic travel is comparable to intergalactic travel. I think space habitats are a relatively small challenge considering how much more evolved the human mind is then when transoceanic travel was tackled, not to mention the refinement of methods of study, the vast base of existing knowledge we have to build on.
Give me a break, if we didn't already know how, something like transoceanic travel would take us about month to figure out with the current physical evolution of the human mind. It takes a bigger more complex problem now to be anywhere near the challenge that was then.
In what way is a telescope more useful than a space station? In what way is a means of gaining knowledge for an individual or a group of individuals more important than gaining knowledge for mankind?