Oh, and and for an example in the digital realm: the Apollo Guidance Computer is now flying Apollo spacecraft around the Earth and Moon in simulators, which was possible primarily because packrats kept old software listings in their basement for decades which were scanned, OCR-ed and then hand-fixed where required in order to recreate the original binaries to run in an emulator. The Saturn guidance computer which put the Apollo spacecraft into orbit is not, because there were no packrats to keep the software and IBM appears to have thrown it away or lost it.
The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears.
True. I was recently reading through an aviation history thread which had been running for nearly ten years, and there were numerous sites which had been linked to with relevant information which simply no longer exist; in most cases the links just led to some domain squatter site.
This is the same logic that a packrat friend of mine uses when she doesn't want to throw away ANYTHING. "It is useful and valuable." Yeah? Really? If it's so useful and valuable, why the heck is it sitting in your closet/attic/basement/etc?
I'm sure some ancient Roman packrat had her friends bitching about the empty bottles and amphoras they kept in their basement, yet today archaeologists are thanking her for thereby allowing them to determine much about the diet and patterns of trade in that part of the world in that time.
Obviously the odds of some random piece of junk in your basement being useful to archaeologists in 2000 years are slim, but stashing away old digitial data is far closer to the ancient Roman packrat example.
That's the basic problem. Actually this is problem in a number of government run systems.
It's actually worse than that. If you're producing a thousand reports per week, then any real information is probably hidden under the huge steaming pile of 'intelligence'.
So it ends up just little more than a means of covering your backside because after someone carries out a terrorist attack you can point to the report which should have allowed you to stop if it anyone had read it and been able to decide that it was actually important information and it was important enough to do something about.
How do you do that, given that it is loaded in the browser process - or did you put those restrictions on your entire browser?
It runs inside nspluginwrapper, which can be restricted in arbitrary ways. I didn't realise until later that it's only doing that when running 32-bit Flash on a 64-bit Firefox, I thought it was being sandboxed in that way by default.
They need to come up with a reliable way to fix this, make absolutely sure it actually fixes the problem, and then make sure the patch doesn't cause crashes on any of the OS variants out there. Otherwise the chaos would be worse.
Indeed: just imagine the riots in the streets if they accidentally broke Farmville. Having millions more PCs in botnets will be much less harmful.
Start sandboxing the browser so that by default, plug-ins are sandboxed from each other and from instances of each other in other "sessions" and they are not allowed a persistent storage.
Or run Linux and use an Apparmor wrapper to prevent Flash from doing anything bad if it's compromised.
On my systems it can't read much of anything, can't write to anything other than/tmp and its own config files, and web sites can't download flash turds to track me... all enforced by the kernel.
Of course, if they were allowed to patent it, then it would become a 'broadest patent takes all' competition and everyone else would have to risk lawsuits for infringement or beg to license the algorithms...
But the major players in most industries will already have patent licensing deals with each other because they can't operate without access to each others' patents.
Patents exist to keep everyone else out of the market, not to gain more than a minor temporary advantage over your competitors.
Of course they would, or they would open themselves up to a possible lawsuit asking for damages in the amount of possible profits (+ penalty, interest, legal fees) lost because of it.
So you're going to sue the government because your 'secret algorithm' was important evidence in a criminal case?
How can anyone determine whether a court case was legitimate if they're not allowed to see the evidence? Closed courts in all but the most extreme cases go completely against the very basis of the anglo legal system.
OK, for all you whiners about the evils of software patents, this is what you get - secret algorithms.
And this is a problem because?
'Secret algorithms' are far less painful than patents, because anyone can produce their own algorithm, whereas no-one can use tech covered by even the stupidest and most absurdly obvious patent without risking a long and expensive court battle.
Of course no sane legal system would close a sourt just because someone's 'secret algorithm' might be mentioned.
When was the last time you saw something from Microsoft that made your jaw drop?
Never.
Microsoft have certainly made big steps in the Microsoft market -- Windows 3.x to 95 was huge jump in Microsoft software, but still pretty crappy compared to a Unix workstation of the time -- but with the possible exception of 'Bob' I can't think of anything they've done that I hadn't already seen on Sun, Next, Linux, SGI, etc.
IMHO one of the reasons why they're no longer a company many people care about is because everyone can now see that they're just trying to copy what others have done before, whereas in 1995 very few people had even seen a Unix workstation to realise how bad Windows was in comparison (of course it was also at least 10x cheaper, which is why few people had seen a Unix workstation).
Remember arcade-style games on PCs? Killed by the consoles. And Microsoft makes one. So Microsoft is positioned to be a player in at least this market.
Microsoft has lost billions in the console market, and the consolisation of gaming has been one of the reasons for the decline of desktop PCs, where Microsoft earn billions every year. The only reason I've booted Windows in the last month is to play some Windows games that don't run well in Linux, so if I was playing games on a console instead I wouldn't have run any Microsoft software on a PC in that time.
You had to find the perfect path to complete the mission or you would run out of time and have to start all over again. It was frustrating but at the same time when you did figure out how to do it, there was a sense of accomplishment. It was like the game designers would not let you get by with mediocrity. You had to do it just right.
No, it was just a pain in the ass. I so freaking hate games that force me to go through the same mission again and again to progress in order to hide a lack of content; and it's particularly troublesome with this kind of game on the PC which expect you to get through the mission using a keyboard which only has full accelerate/brake/left/right controls and poor frame-rates due to an unoptimised port of a console engine.
This 'you must do this mission again and again' idea is another example of consolitis infecting the PC market, because I don't remember it in any PC game I played before the majority of games became console ports. Certainly it was true in the 8-bit gaming days, but that was because there simply wasn't much content you could fit into 16k of RAM.
Umm, isn't this the same thing Bill Gates has been saying for the last decade or more?
If so, it would appear that no-one is listening. Microsoft's money still comes from Windows and Office and pretty much everything else they've done has been a financial failure (and often a technical failure too).
I can't freakin' STAND Gnome. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.
Gnome is basically Windows XP/MacOS/Solaris/every other GUI for the last twenty years. KDE is... actually I don't really know what it is, it just seems like a mess every time I try to use it.
My point is that for a large group of users, myself included, huge storage capacities are no longer the biggest selling point when it comes to hard drives on portable machines.
Sure. But:
a) there are good reasons to have a large hard drive other than movies or music. b) I've met plenty of non tech-savvy people who bought laptops with 100-250GB hard drives and soon had to buy an external drive too because they've accumulated so much stuff. For example, they buy the laptop then they buy an HD camcorder which records to flash or an internal hard drive and have to keep copying the video off the camera onto the computer.
Unless you plan to carry around a huge music or movie collection, I never understood the point of maxing out on hard disk capacity when buying a laptop anyway.
I thought 640GB would be plenty when I bought my new laptop. Then I realised that I have well over 500GB of games just on Steam and new games often seem to use 20+GB.
What are you doing that you really worry about doing 100,000 writes to a large percentage of your disk?
Cheap SSDs are typically only rated for 10,000 writes. And there are a lot of extra writes required to handle wear leveling and the need to erase the disk in large chunks (at least I think modern SSDs still do that?)
Now, that's probably still enough for the SSD to outlive a typical home PC, but it's worrying enough that I put all the non-persistent files (/tmp,/var/log, etc) on my SSD-based machine into RAM disks.
The important number for the mass market is the minimum price for a new drive of minimally usable size (call it 32-64 GB for now, it's drifting up, but not terribly quickly by the standards of exponential tech progression).
What can you fit on 32-64GB these days? I have single game installs that are over 30GB.
Sure, a 40GB SSD is big enough for my netbook as it's accessing pretty much everything other than the OS and applications over the network. But pretty much anyone who buys a home PC with only 32GB of disk space is going to be looking to replace it within a few months.
Because they're orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks? Because they use less power?
But that's irrelevant in most typical home uses, since performance only affects boot time and application startup (and the write power usage on some SSDs is worse than my 2TB HDD). If you're starting up the system and a few applications and using them for hours then you won't notice much difference from an SSD other than that it costs 50x as much as a hard drive.
Now, I am in the process of replacing the hard drive in my netbook with an SSD because we _do_ regularly boot it up, run Firefox for five minutes to check something and then shut it down, so there certainly is a market for that. But the idea that an SSD will magically make everything much faster is just silly; it will dramatically speed up things that are heavily dependent on disk seek performance, and that's it.
Similarly, if you're buying enterprise SSDs and using them for database storage, you'd probably never go back to HDD. But that's also a relatively small market.
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Not to buy locked down hardware or software, particularly if it requires the permission of a remote server in order to be allowed to function.
Oh, and and for an example in the digital realm: the Apollo Guidance Computer is now flying Apollo spacecraft around the Earth and Moon in simulators, which was possible primarily because packrats kept old software listings in their basement for decades which were scanned, OCR-ed and then hand-fixed where required in order to recreate the original binaries to run in an emulator. The Saturn guidance computer which put the Apollo spacecraft into orbit is not, because there were no packrats to keep the software and IBM appears to have thrown it away or lost it.
The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears.
True. I was recently reading through an aviation history thread which had been running for nearly ten years, and there were numerous sites which had been linked to with relevant information which simply no longer exist; in most cases the links just led to some domain squatter site.
This is the same logic that a packrat friend of mine uses when she doesn't want to throw away ANYTHING. "It is useful and valuable." Yeah? Really? If it's so useful and valuable, why the heck is it sitting in your closet/attic/basement/etc?
I'm sure some ancient Roman packrat had her friends bitching about the empty bottles and amphoras they kept in their basement, yet today archaeologists are thanking her for thereby allowing them to determine much about the diet and patterns of trade in that part of the world in that time.
Obviously the odds of some random piece of junk in your basement being useful to archaeologists in 2000 years are slim, but stashing away old digitial data is far closer to the ancient Roman packrat example.
That's the basic problem. Actually this is problem in a number of government run systems.
It's actually worse than that. If you're producing a thousand reports per week, then any real information is probably hidden under the huge steaming pile of 'intelligence'.
So it ends up just little more than a means of covering your backside because after someone carries out a terrorist attack you can point to the report which should have allowed you to stop if it anyone had read it and been able to decide that it was actually important information and it was important enough to do something about.
You kids who can't remember the dark days of there being only one web browser need to get off my lawn.
What days were they? 1993?
Even then I'm pretty sure that there were browsers available other than Mosaic.
How do you do that, given that it is loaded in the browser process - or did you put those restrictions on your entire browser?
It runs inside nspluginwrapper, which can be restricted in arbitrary ways. I didn't realise until later that it's only doing that when running 32-bit Flash on a 64-bit Firefox, I thought it was being sandboxed in that way by default.
They need to come up with a reliable way to fix this, make absolutely sure it actually fixes the problem, and then make sure the patch doesn't cause crashes on any of the OS variants out there. Otherwise the chaos would be worse.
Indeed: just imagine the riots in the streets if they accidentally broke Farmville. Having millions more PCs in botnets will be much less harmful.
Attention browser developers:
Start sandboxing the browser so that by default, plug-ins are sandboxed from each other and from instances of each other in other "sessions" and they are not allowed a persistent storage.
Or run Linux and use an Apparmor wrapper to prevent Flash from doing anything bad if it's compromised.
On my systems it can't read much of anything, can't write to anything other than /tmp and its own config files, and web sites can't download flash turds to track me... all enforced by the kernel.
Of course, if they were allowed to patent it, then it would become a 'broadest patent takes all' competition and everyone else would have to risk lawsuits for infringement or beg to license the algorithms...
But the major players in most industries will already have patent licensing deals with each other because they can't operate without access to each others' patents.
Patents exist to keep everyone else out of the market, not to gain more than a minor temporary advantage over your competitors.
Of course they would, or they would open themselves up to a possible lawsuit asking for damages in the amount of possible profits (+ penalty, interest, legal fees) lost because of it.
So you're going to sue the government because your 'secret algorithm' was important evidence in a criminal case?
How can anyone determine whether a court case was legitimate if they're not allowed to see the evidence? Closed courts in all but the most extreme cases go completely against the very basis of the anglo legal system.
OK, for all you whiners about the evils of software patents, this is what you get - secret algorithms.
And this is a problem because?
'Secret algorithms' are far less painful than patents, because anyone can produce their own algorithm, whereas no-one can use tech covered by even the stupidest and most absurdly obvious patent without risking a long and expensive court battle.
Of course no sane legal system would close a sourt just because someone's 'secret algorithm' might be mentioned.
When was the last time you saw something from Microsoft that made your jaw drop?
Never.
Microsoft have certainly made big steps in the Microsoft market -- Windows 3.x to 95 was huge jump in Microsoft software, but still pretty crappy compared to a Unix workstation of the time -- but with the possible exception of 'Bob' I can't think of anything they've done that I hadn't already seen on Sun, Next, Linux, SGI, etc.
IMHO one of the reasons why they're no longer a company many people care about is because everyone can now see that they're just trying to copy what others have done before, whereas in 1995 very few people had even seen a Unix workstation to realise how bad Windows was in comparison (of course it was also at least 10x cheaper, which is why few people had seen a Unix workstation).
Remember arcade-style games on PCs? Killed by the consoles. And Microsoft makes one. So Microsoft is positioned to be a player in at least this market.
Microsoft has lost billions in the console market, and the consolisation of gaming has been one of the reasons for the decline of desktop PCs, where Microsoft earn billions every year. The only reason I've booted Windows in the last month is to play some Windows games that don't run well in Linux, so if I was playing games on a console instead I wouldn't have run any Microsoft software on a PC in that time.
Not a good business plan, IMHO.
You had to find the perfect path to complete the mission or you would run out of time and have to start all over again. It was frustrating but at the same time when you did figure out how to do it, there was a sense of accomplishment. It was like the game designers would not let you get by with mediocrity. You had to do it just right.
No, it was just a pain in the ass. I so freaking hate games that force me to go through the same mission again and again to progress in order to hide a lack of content; and it's particularly troublesome with this kind of game on the PC which expect you to get through the mission using a keyboard which only has full accelerate/brake/left/right controls and poor frame-rates due to an unoptimised port of a console engine.
This 'you must do this mission again and again' idea is another example of consolitis infecting the PC market, because I don't remember it in any PC game I played before the majority of games became console ports. Certainly it was true in the 8-bit gaming days, but that was because there simply wasn't much content you could fit into 16k of RAM.
So yeah, Microsoft needs to do what Apple did. Dump the old, force the new and get it over with.
Who would buy Windows if it didn't run Windows apps?
Umm, isn't this the same thing Bill Gates has been saying for the last decade or more?
If so, it would appear that no-one is listening. Microsoft's money still comes from Windows and Office and pretty much everything else they've done has been a financial failure (and often a technical failure too).
I can't freakin' STAND Gnome. I never really understood the appeal of it...just seemed like a convuluted mess to me.
Gnome is basically Windows XP/MacOS/Solaris/every other GUI for the last twenty years. KDE is... actually I don't really know what it is, it just seems like a mess every time I try to use it.
I don't know... but perhaps for similar reasons that big oil companies are investing so much money into the 'green' alternative fuel space.
You mean that Western governments are going to give massive subsidies to Adobe for putting an HTML5 interface on top of Flash?
My point is that for a large group of users, myself included, huge storage capacities are no longer the biggest selling point when it comes to hard drives on portable machines.
Sure. But:
a) there are good reasons to have a large hard drive other than movies or music.
b) I've met plenty of non tech-savvy people who bought laptops with 100-250GB hard drives and soon had to buy an external drive too because they've accumulated so much stuff. For example, they buy the laptop then they buy an HD camcorder which records to flash or an internal hard drive and have to keep copying the video off the camera onto the computer.
Unless you plan to carry around a huge music or movie collection, I never understood the point of maxing out on hard disk capacity when buying a laptop anyway.
I thought 640GB would be plenty when I bought my new laptop. Then I realised that I have well over 500GB of games just on Steam and new games often seem to use 20+GB.
What are you doing that you really worry about doing 100,000 writes to a large percentage of your disk?
Cheap SSDs are typically only rated for 10,000 writes. And there are a lot of extra writes required to handle wear leveling and the need to erase the disk in large chunks (at least I think modern SSDs still do that?)
Now, that's probably still enough for the SSD to outlive a typical home PC, but it's worrying enough that I put all the non-persistent files (/tmp, /var/log, etc) on my SSD-based machine into RAM disks.
The important number for the mass market is the minimum price for a new drive of minimally usable size (call it 32-64 GB for now, it's drifting up, but not terribly quickly by the standards of exponential tech progression).
What can you fit on 32-64GB these days? I have single game installs that are over 30GB.
Sure, a 40GB SSD is big enough for my netbook as it's accessing pretty much everything other than the OS and applications over the network. But pretty much anyone who buys a home PC with only 32GB of disk space is going to be looking to replace it within a few months.
Because they're orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks? Because they use less power?
But that's irrelevant in most typical home uses, since performance only affects boot time and application startup (and the write power usage on some SSDs is worse than my 2TB HDD). If you're starting up the system and a few applications and using them for hours then you won't notice much difference from an SSD other than that it costs 50x as much as a hard drive.
Now, I am in the process of replacing the hard drive in my netbook with an SSD because we _do_ regularly boot it up, run Firefox for five minutes to check something and then shut it down, so there certainly is a market for that. But the idea that an SSD will magically make everything much faster is just silly; it will dramatically speed up things that are heavily dependent on disk seek performance, and that's it.
Similarly, if you're buying enterprise SSDs and using them for database storage, you'd probably never go back to HDD. But that's also a relatively small market.
Code fix. If external_temp -20F, don't shutdown. Wow, that was *extremely* difficult.
Which part of 'burning fuel while stopped can never be a good thing' are you having a hard time understanding?