Very interesting, but it seems they are only at some 2500 signatures, and I understand they need a cool 100,000 to pull it off. This seems quite unlikely to happen, since the previous slashdot article on the 100 dollar laptop already pointed to it. Which is a shame. On the other hand, pledging to buy one never hurts, especially if it can't be pulled off anyway, so sign up people:)
I see this as a step up to a full operating system, including runtime code for applications, fitting on a flash drive. HDD's would then be used for media storage and backups. Almost all of my data consists of media and/or backups. Say, a 16 GB flash drive would be enough to remove my hdd for every minute use. Then it would just need to spin up when it's needed, saving huge amounts of power.
Yes, Windows is better documented... That is, if you are looking for really shallow documentation. For both Linux and Windows, you are way better off by buying a few good books. The GUI documentation of Linux is pretty worryingly bad, but if you go deeper, it gets better. With Windows, it's just the other way around. Even MSDN is pretty bad and (maybe more importantly) one sided. And, if you are trying to watch it on the machine you are working on, prepare for a reboot; MSDN requires the latest Internet Explorer most of the time. I do not expect.NET to improve this situation, with Java application servers you can just unzip the stuff in a folder and run (as with the VM).
Exactly. So the thing is, if you are already sure you are asking the real user, then why would you repeatedly request a password? At least make it an *option* to just click ok/cancel, maybe forgetting the admin login when the system is locked etc. The repeated password logins of linux already drive me crazy, and just assuming that I have admin rights for half an hour (like in ubuntu) obviously is a security risk. So, ask admin password, grant access rights afterwards if a secured OK button is clicked. Add options to access rights after a while, requesting a password again. You would also need to think about when to grant access. Does an application get access for the time of the current session, and does that mean full admin rights or a subset? But you would have to think about such things anyway.
Ever tried to update your computer over modem, or downloaded a range of security updates? I'm not so sure that google would loose it to microsoft for that reason. With the percentage of broadband users in the Netherlands, this is fortunately mostly an academic question anyway. In the US, which is -ehm- slightly larger, this might be a bigger issue.
For office applications? I don't care. I really don't care. Give me an office application on a network anytime, and spend *some* of the remaining money on GBit networking. I'm saving to the network drive anyway. Current servers are, just like desktops, *WAY* faster than back then, and even 8 years ago, office applications were running fine over the network (Sun with X-stations for instance). Startup times would be much improved, actually (no need to spin up the hard drive). Even with a cable or ADSL, I don't see a problem, especially if most GUI things can be handled client side.
I can see problems with usability though, web forms are not that advanced. But that's for another thread.
That's a bit too strong, there are lots of websites not for profit. Source forge, universities, linux sites more or less in general, home pages etc, etc. You would be more or less back where you started from in the first place, but to say there is not a free web is not true. In many places in the Netherlands, internet is free, although having a computer is a good thing, of course.
There is a lot to say about the old days, but I digress, the current situation is definately better (12mbit download...geez, what am I complaining about:)
The rather obvious solution is the Linux/Ubuntu way of asking for admin priviledges only when needed. One could even envision using a protected image (read access only for Admin), displaying that together with the security question, and just providing an Ok/Cancel dialogue. Problem is that this image should never be able to be read (even when capturing a screen) and that the button should only be clickable by the user. Then again, this is a problem with the current system as well (man in the middle using a trojan horse, which is why ctrl-alt-del is still required in Windows).
More fun here: "Please read our PRIVACY POLICY, and these TERMS OF USE carefully BEFORE using this website. "
So schools and parent should be wise and let their kids read the Intellectual Property Notice and Disclaimer from the site before starting with the comics. Lets see how much interest they get from the kids after that. I'll start with my 3 year old nephew tomorrow, lets see what he thinks of it.
The fact that these disasters don't "kill the earth" is widely understood. Bacteria for instance can endure almost anything, and for the earth to be fysically destroyed, you would need a *very* big boulder. The problem is that more complex life does not take nearly as much abuse. So as long as you don't care about billions of people dying, if not extinction of the human race, then you can keep sleeping in total comfort. But for me that complex, self-aware life would have to start again would not be a comforting thought. This *did* bring a very complex eco-system to a grinding halt, and I don't think the human race would be able to survive such a disaster.
Ok, I'm back at a slightly normal installation. Strangely enough, there are now no problems anymore in the package manager. I started the synaptic package manager after xhost + from a user prompt and then starting it from a sudo su - session: not something you would like to let a novice user do either. Then I had to remove the mplayer32 package to be able to upgrade openoffce. Fortunately, this being linux, I have not found any data loss yet, and the new system feels *much* more responsive than the first. After also upgrading the nvidia package, resetting my xorg.conf to include the nvidia driver and a reboot, everything seems to be fine. I hope. I liked the way my ntp.conf was updated, nice way to show the diff between the files, and this is the first linux distro upgrade that, although not smoothly, actually worked.
I'll leave it in there for now. Almost 1 o'clock, Linux does that to you...
Yeah, tried that myself too. First, I though I would easily beat you because of my faster download speed.
Now my nvidia drivers are not working anymore, my drive needed manual repairing (by just hitting y all the time), my network conection was down for some time (needed to bring it up manually as well, for some reason), a manual xorg.conf edit was needed, and the synaptic package manager complains that my (correct) root password is incorrect.
This was typed on the last I will see from Linux from another year at least. Fucked up package managers get me all the time (first tried fedora).
If there are any errors in this post, I am currently looking at about 20 cursors due to the broken firefox/nv driver combination. Back to windows for me.
The cell architecture makes it easy to distribute workloads, that's true. But that's just the beginning of solving the parallel puzzle. The trick is to spread the workload in such a way that the communication overhead is minimal. Otherwise, it may be wiser to use a different architecture. My guess is that the cell processor is interesting to grid computing, but needs a serious platform, both hardware and software-wise to be viable for the more serious work. On the other hand, IBM should be big enough to handle this.
Yes, if there isn't any communication overhead between the processors. If you have 100 seperate threads or processes, without (or almost without) any computation, then the application is perfect for multiple CPU's. If there is a lot of communication needed, then much less so. You cannot write an application for 8 cores with very fast communications and expect it to run on multiple processors without any modifications. That's why many parallel processor designs cost more for the networking part than for the processors itself.
This is going a bit too far in my opinion. There are many companies that do excell in not doing evil (and even the opposite). In many cases it becomes a central part in what they stand for, and people would not forgive such a company for going the other route. Take for instance XS4ALL, a very successfull internet provider here in the Netherlands. Currently it is part of KPN. KPN is not a company that has "doing good" in its mission statements (using pretty unfair business practices to keep its head above the surface). On the other hand, XS4ALL maintaines it's status as defender of privacy, fight against spam and providing very robust and extensive internet services - they are owned but are mostly independent from the KPN headquarters. Currently they are fighting the law that requires them to keep internet access logs.
If the company goes IPO that doesn't mean that the entire staff is replaced suddenly. Maybe in the long stance when shareholders demand a staff that only looks at profit. People make the company. I am reasonably hopefull that the ones that are currently working at Google are not evil. Maybe if others start flowing in.
Whoo, even including funky music as well. But it was more for user identification (or, more acurately, chair identification). Not that there was much of an example of that in the movie of the original post.
I wanted to post the specs itself, but thanks Adobe for continuously messing up their product: the copied text is put in the clipboard buffer backwards.
Warning: the word showstopper has a double meaning, but the one from Meriam Webster says the following:
Main Entry: showstopper Pronunciation: -"stä-p&r Function: noun 1 : an act, song, or performer that wins applause so prolonged as to interrupt a performance 2 : something or someone exceptionally arresting or attractive
Now, in IT it is mostly used to mean exactly the opposite, but it seems to me that introducing that meaning as well might let things get a bit confusing...
That is: I suppose you weren't using it in the "gold crown" sense:)
Ha, now they know why Java does not let you conveniently forget to handle most exceptions. Unhandled exception, eh? Well, at least they now have reflection, so they know where to look.
Bugger that. I've used emacs my first years and I hated it even more than Vi. You simply don't do that to trusting students. Type one wrong command and I had to spend the rest of the hour trying to find out how to get rid of that window, how to undo something etc. Now I would not have so many problems with it, but I know for sure back then I thoroughly hated going *back* to trap like that.
Keep those over-engeneered ASCII-text editors out of my way.
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting, but it seems they are only at some 2500 signatures, and I understand they need a cool 100,000 to pull it off. This seems quite unlikely to happen, since the previous slashdot article on the 100 dollar laptop already pointed to it. Which is a shame. On the other hand, pledging to buy one never hurts, especially if it can't be pulled off anyway, so sign up people :)
Run it in VMWare where it can do no harm. Or on a seperate (old) machine. Problem fixed, any others?
I see this as a step up to a full operating system, including runtime code for applications, fitting on a flash drive. HDD's would then be used for media storage and backups. Almost all of my data consists of media and/or backups. Say, a 16 GB flash drive would be enough to remove my hdd for every minute use. Then it would just need to spin up when it's needed, saving huge amounts of power.
Yes, Windows is better documented... That is, if you are looking for really shallow documentation. For both Linux and Windows, you are way better off by buying a few good books. The GUI documentation of Linux is pretty worryingly bad, but if you go deeper, it gets better. With Windows, it's just the other way around. Even MSDN is pretty bad and (maybe more importantly) one sided. And, if you are trying to watch it on the machine you are working on, prepare for a reboot; MSDN requires the latest Internet Explorer most of the time. I do not expect .NET to improve this situation, with Java application servers you can just unzip the stuff in a folder and run (as with the VM).
Exactly. So the thing is, if you are already sure you are asking the real user, then why would you repeatedly request a password? At least make it an *option* to just click ok/cancel, maybe forgetting the admin login when the system is locked etc. The repeated password logins of linux already drive me crazy, and just assuming that I have admin rights for half an hour (like in ubuntu) obviously is a security risk. So, ask admin password, grant access rights afterwards if a secured OK button is clicked. Add options to access rights after a while, requesting a password again. You would also need to think about when to grant access. Does an application get access for the time of the current session, and does that mean full admin rights or a subset? But you would have to think about such things anyway.
Ever tried to update your computer over modem, or downloaded a range of security updates? I'm not so sure that google would loose it to microsoft for that reason. With the percentage of broadband users in the Netherlands, this is fortunately mostly an academic question anyway. In the US, which is -ehm- slightly larger, this might be a bigger issue.
For office applications? I don't care. I really don't care. Give me an office application on a network anytime, and spend *some* of the remaining money on GBit networking. I'm saving to the network drive anyway. Current servers are, just like desktops, *WAY* faster than back then, and even 8 years ago, office applications were running fine over the network (Sun with X-stations for instance). Startup times would be much improved, actually (no need to spin up the hard drive). Even with a cable or ADSL, I don't see a problem, especially if most GUI things can be handled client side.
I can see problems with usability though, web forms are not that advanced. But that's for another thread.
That's a bit too strong, there are lots of websites not for profit. Source forge, universities, linux sites more or less in general, home pages etc, etc. You would be more or less back where you started from in the first place, but to say there is not a free web is not true. In many places in the Netherlands, internet is free, although having a computer is a good thing, of course.
:)
There is a lot to say about the old days, but I digress, the current situation is definately better (12mbit download...geez, what am I complaining about
The rather obvious solution is the Linux/Ubuntu way of asking for admin priviledges only when needed. One could even envision using a protected image (read access only for Admin), displaying that together with the security question, and just providing an Ok/Cancel dialogue. Problem is that this image should never be able to be read (even when capturing a screen) and that the button should only be clickable by the user. Then again, this is a problem with the current system as well (man in the middle using a trojan horse, which is why ctrl-alt-del is still required in Windows).
More fun here: "Please read our PRIVACY POLICY, and these TERMS OF USE carefully BEFORE using this website. "
So schools and parent should be wise and let their kids read the Intellectual Property Notice and Disclaimer from the site before starting with the comics. Lets see how much interest they get from the kids after that. I'll start with my 3 year old nephew tomorrow, lets see what he thinks of it.
Maybe it was a question, I would hazard a guess and say...not 4 but 5 times wider!
(seriously though, 30 miles sounded more interesting than 24 miles, so they used the bigger number?)
The fact that these disasters don't "kill the earth" is widely understood. Bacteria for instance can endure almost anything, and for the earth to be fysically destroyed, you would need a *very* big boulder. The problem is that more complex life does not take nearly as much abuse. So as long as you don't care about billions of people dying, if not extinction of the human race, then you can keep sleeping in total comfort. But for me that complex, self-aware life would have to start again would not be a comforting thought. This *did* bring a very complex eco-system to a grinding halt, and I don't think the human race would be able to survive such a disaster.
Ok, I'm back at a slightly normal installation. Strangely enough, there are now no problems anymore in the package manager. I started the synaptic package manager after xhost + from a user prompt and then starting it from a sudo su - session: not something you would like to let a novice user do either. Then I had to remove the mplayer32 package to be able to upgrade openoffce. Fortunately, this being linux, I have not found any data loss yet, and the new system feels *much* more responsive than the first. After also upgrading the nvidia package, resetting my xorg.conf to include the nvidia driver and a reboot, everything seems to be fine. I hope. I liked the way my ntp.conf was updated, nice way to show the diff between the files, and this is the first linux distro upgrade that, although not smoothly, actually worked.
I'll leave it in there for now. Almost 1 o'clock, Linux does that to you...
Yeah, tried that myself too. First, I though I would easily beat you because of my faster download speed.
Now my nvidia drivers are not working anymore, my drive needed manual repairing (by just hitting y all the time), my network conection was down for some time (needed to bring it up manually as well, for some reason), a manual xorg.conf edit was needed, and the synaptic package manager complains that my (correct) root password is incorrect.
This was typed on the last I will see from Linux from another year at least. Fucked up package managers get me all the time (first tried fedora).
If there are any errors in this post, I am currently looking at about 20 cursors due to the broken firefox/nv driver combination. Back to windows for me.
With a bit of misfortune, they stick a bit of DRM in your head, and make you remember their side of the story, including advertising :(
The cell architecture makes it easy to distribute workloads, that's true. But that's just the beginning of solving the parallel puzzle. The trick is to spread the workload in such a way that the communication overhead is minimal. Otherwise, it may be wiser to use a different architecture. My guess is that the cell processor is interesting to grid computing, but needs a serious platform, both hardware and software-wise to be viable for the more serious work. On the other hand, IBM should be big enough to handle this.
Yes, if there isn't any communication overhead between the processors. If you have 100 seperate threads or processes, without (or almost without) any computation, then the application is perfect for multiple CPU's. If there is a lot of communication needed, then much less so. You cannot write an application for 8 cores with very fast communications and expect it to run on multiple processors without any modifications. That's why many parallel processor designs cost more for the networking part than for the processors itself.
This is going a bit too far in my opinion. There are many companies that do excell in not doing evil (and even the opposite). In many cases it becomes a central part in what they stand for, and people would not forgive such a company for going the other route. Take for instance XS4ALL, a very successfull internet provider here in the Netherlands. Currently it is part of KPN. KPN is not a company that has "doing good" in its mission statements (using pretty unfair business practices to keep its head above the surface). On the other hand, XS4ALL maintaines it's status as defender of privacy, fight against spam and providing very robust and extensive internet services - they are owned but are mostly independent from the KPN headquarters. Currently they are fighting the law that requires them to keep internet access logs.
If the company goes IPO that doesn't mean that the entire staff is replaced suddenly. Maybe in the long stance when shareholders demand a staff that only looks at profit. People make the company. I am reasonably hopefull that the ones that are currently working at Google are not evil. Maybe if others start flowing in.
Delete an internet article that was featured on slashdot? Ugh. I hope he has some access to nuclear misiles to start WWIII.
Whoo, even including funky music as well. But it was more for user identification (or, more acurately, chair identification). Not that there was much of an example of that in the movie of the original post.
Can be found here:
. pdf
http://www.merl.com/projects/DiamondTouch/DTflier
I wanted to post the specs itself, but thanks Adobe for continuously messing up their product: the copied text is put in the clipboard buffer backwards.
Warning: the word showstopper has a double meaning, but the one from Meriam Webster says the following:
:)
Main Entry: showstopper
Pronunciation: -"stä-p&r
Function: noun
1 : an act, song, or performer that wins applause so prolonged as to interrupt a performance
2 : something or someone exceptionally arresting or attractive
Now, in IT it is mostly used to mean exactly the opposite, but it seems to me that introducing that meaning as well might let things get a bit confusing...
That is: I suppose you weren't using it in the "gold crown" sense
The answer to 1 is simple: you would turn into ... ELECTRIC MAN!!!
Ha, now they know why Java does not let you conveniently forget to handle most exceptions. Unhandled exception, eh? Well, at least they now have reflection, so they know where to look.
Bugger that. I've used emacs my first years and I hated it even more than Vi. You simply don't do that to trusting students. Type one wrong command and I had to spend the rest of the hour trying to find out how to get rid of that window, how to undo something etc. Now I would not have so many problems with it, but I know for sure back then I thoroughly hated going *back* to trap like that.
Keep those over-engeneered ASCII-text editors out of my way.