Holy shitsky, somebody mod the parent up! Maybe I'm just a luser who hasn't been paying attention, but this Pad2Pad thing is extremely cool. Custom PC board fab on the cheap. Zow.
A name-brand computer costs more than a homebrew computer with the same functionality. Not a lot more, but more. So your economic theory isn't quite as airtight as you imply.
Having said that, I think it's true that as time goes by, companies that shoot for the commodity price are going to defeat Sony's strategy. That is to say, Wal-Mart will save us all.:')
You should try this sometime. It really isn't just a LAF issue. In some cases, code that works on, e.g., Windows, simply doesn't work on the Mac, because the API was underspecified. The order in which you set things up affects whether or not the code actually produces a GUI - if you do things in the wrong order, which is not documented, you may literally not even see a window pop up on the screen. The problems I ran into were generally more subtle - failure to update, or incorrect updates, etc. So you really do have to test your app everywhere you expect it to run. Sad, but true.
They're not wasting their money. They're wasting our money. When you buy a new PC now, you're paying for the DRM that they put in it that you didn't ask for. This will just be another thing rolled into the price. Then if they can strongarm the big PC manufacturers to include it, the only way to avoid it will be to build your own system. I really recommend the Shuttle xPC form factor - small, quiet, cheap.;')
Spoken like someone who's probably never tried running their JVM-based GUI application on a new platform. Java cross-platform compatibility is a nice idea in theory, but in practice you wind up having to test everywhere and tweak your code when you run into differences in GUI implementations, so it's definitely not write-once, run everywhere. A more complete API specification would help here, but if wishes were horses, there'd be a lot of poo on the road.
Heh. You raise a good point. However, in my defense, the point is that it's a hell of a lot easier to fix things in software than in hardware. Switching to vi is one way of fixing it in software, but you still have to do key remapping to get the escape key into place, or to get control where it needs to be if you do C-[ instead of ESC.
If you're going to go to the trouble of remapping your keyboard, and you're already an emacs geek, why not just remap caps lock and control rather than learning a whole new editor?
Personally, I use vi when I'm in a terminal window, and Emacs when I'm doing a serious hack, and I can't really tell the difference between them most of the time, but there come times when circumstances force me to switch to Emacs, because it's more programmable and extensible, and when I am so forced, I'm glad I'm fluent with it.
Porting reveals bugs. It also forces you to rethink short-sighted decisions. Furthermore, most of the problems I run into with porting have to do with cross-version incompatibility on Linux - the BSDs actually have comparitively stable APIs.
This line of thinking is a lot like how I presume Microsoft thinks of things: if we just port to this one API, it doesn't matter how bletcherous it is. But as Microsoft has discovered, this kind of thinking actually turns into a straitjacket, which prevents them from being responsive when they need to be.
...as to why the author doesn't just swap caps and control like every Emacs power user does. It's no pinky strain at all to hit the caps lock key. This is just part of being a geek - you have to learn how to optimize your keyboard layout, or your hands are doomed.
For the various vi acolytes who suggested he switch to vi, I would like to point out that switching to vi would be a better option if only the escape key on most modern keyboards weren't so far off the home row that you have to pick up and move to hit it.
I think Microsoft can survive, but they aren't doing it right now. Right now they're flailing. They have a lot of cash, so they can flail for a long time, but they are in fact flailing. Look at what happened to Digital Equipment Corporation - when I joined them, their stock was in its final decline, but it was still above $100/share, and people were hoping it would go back up to $200. By the time I left people were totally wishing that they could sell their stock at $100/share, and now there's no company there at all.
Microsoft is in a crappy situation - they have a legacy O.S. that they need to support, and that is expensive to support, and that has no future. Anything they do to actually fix this problem is going to cannibalize their sales of the legacy product, and is going to have to compete head-to-head against much more mature products - e.g., Mac OS X and Linux.
So they really need to think completely out of the box to keep going, but unfortunately they don't appear to be doing so. That's okay, though - they need to ablate a ton of crap before they can really transform themselves; in particular they need to get rid of their current IP philosophy, and they desperately need to get rid of their O.S. product, even though it's their main source of revenue right now.
Will they succeed or fail? Who knows? Too soon to tell. But it'll be an interesting ride to follow. Groupthink is what killed DEC. Microsoft needs to stamp out groupthink like it's a wildfire if they want to avoid following DEC's flaming downward trajectory.
If a yahoo customer posts your social security number and bank account information, and you ask them to take it down, and they refuse, do you have a right to sue them? What about your medical records? What about your grades in school?
I'm guessing you said yes, you have a right to sue them if they refuse to take down this private information. So why *don't* you have the right to sue them when they refuse to take down pictures of your private *parts*?
An interesting win for companies regarding the network effect is that now a lot of employees are buying their own laptops for work with their own money, because the company won't pay for a Mac. Ironically, most of the executive staff and sales staff and half the engineers at the company I work for do their work on Macs, but the company won't buy them Macs, so they buy their own. Win win for the corporate bottom line.
The fact that someone allows their partner in a committed relationship to take nude pictures of them and trusts said partner not to share them is not evidence of low moral standing. It's evidence of kindness - he wanted pictures of her because they gave him pleasure, and she agreed to let him have said pictures. And, at least according to her story, he repaid her kindness by publicly humiliating her.
It's sad that she trusted someone who was not trustworthy, but this is evidence of his lack of ethical standards, not her lack of morals.
Of course, all we have here is her story - it could be that this whole thing is a setup to get some money out of Yahoo - but there's no reason to assume this based on what we know. If it did happen as described, I think she has a legitimate complaint both against Yahoo and against her boyfriend.
Fundamentally, the idea of numbered worlds has got to offend someone. After all, the "first world" would be Europe. The "second world" might be the U.S. and Australia. Third world? The colonies that didn't achieve independence prior to 1900? Honestly, I think people ought to just stop using the term "third world," because it's imprecise and offensive, but this is hardly a problem we're going to solve here on slashdot.:'(
Actually, I think the main thing blocking IPv6 right now is that the tech is immature. And as for "extending" IPv4 to work with IPv6, not really possible. The IP header doesn't have room for the extra bits. That's why it was done the way it was done. There are a lot of problems with IPv6 - e.g., trying to write topology into addresses - but there just wasn't a way to extend IPv4 in the way you suggest.
There are people in Europe right now working hard to get to the point where IPv6 is something you can use. Fear not. Even some folks here in the 'states, like me.:')
Dan does mention some real problems on the page to which you've linked, and I agree with some of his criticisms of the IPv6 process, where a lot has been invented prior to identifying a need for it, and in many cases all of this theoretical invention has wasted valuable time and opportunity.
However, a lot of what he says is quite out of date at this point. Furthermore, he complains that he's willing to hack but wants to be able to autoconfigure his hosts, and the implication is that he would hack if only he were told what to hack on, which frankly doesn't sound like the Dan we've all grown to know and love in the DNS world. If he really wants to fix these problems, the best way to show what the big bad people at IETF are doing wrong is to demonstrate it with working code.
The fact is that right now having an IPv6 address doesn't get you a whole lot of goodness in the U.S., and so we probably will be the last to adopt it if everybody here maintains your attitude.
IPv6 deployment in Asia is a reality, and to a lesser extent this is true in Europe as well. Anywhere where the IP infrastructure is being expanded is an easy place to deploy IPv6. 6to4 gateways are doable, just as are NATs. So you will see widespread deployment of IPv6 in Asia in the relatively near term.
As far as the U.S. and Europe go, slashdotters are precisely the people who should be thinking about trying to use IPv6 as soon as possible - as geeks, we are the early adopters, and as we try out the technology and try to use it, the world will catch up with us. The more we poo-poo it and don't try to actually deploy it, the longer it's going to take to address the concerns that Dan raises, and, I think, the more it's going to cost us in the long run.
One last thing: IPv4 link local addressing is fairly badly broken. If you want to be able to do link local addressing, it works a lot better in V6-land. This is largely an accident - nobody thought to cripple it until it was too late. But it's still true that you do get some value from deploying IPv6, even if only within your own home. If you use Rendesvous/Bonjour, you're probably already using IPv6 and just don't know it yet.
Um. Where is innovation happening these days? More and more, it's moving to places where there is less respect for intellectual property laws, not to places where there is more. The U.S. is the bastion of IP protection. In ten years, it's quite possible that there will be no innovation going on here - we will have to move to other countries in order to work.
When you talk about where innovation happens, remember that most of the really amazing breakthroughs in computer science happened _before_ software patents were legalized. Have you ever read Knuth, or read old JACM issues from the sixties and seventies? Stuff like that would get patented now, and would never make it into a journal at all - the first we'd hear about it was when the owner of the patent sued someone who'd invented it independently.
You could argue, in fact, that since software patents were legalized, the software field has been fighting a losing battle to continue to innovate, and that slowly but surely, the we are being dragged under.
The idea is that there is some kind of great risk that if I come up with a cool idea, and implement a really nice application on top of it, I won't be able to make a profit because my competitors will just look at what I did and copy it. The reality, though, is that if you give me a patent, I won't bother to make my app cool - I'll just do the minimal thing I need to to exploit the patent, and then charge whatever the captive market will bear.
Result: hardly anyone will be able to afford my app, and those who can afford it will be getting a really crappy app, because I have no incentive to spend money making the app easy to use, reliable, et cetera - my customers are trapped, for longer than the forseeable life of my company, so why should I bother? The incentive system right now is ass-backwards.
It's nice to be able to have an always-on phone that you can use to receive phone calls when you are at work or traveling. Why is it better than a cell phone? Lower power, and lower cost. Why is it worse? Hardly works anywhere at all.:'}
Fortunately, usually I'm in a place where it does work, not in a place where it doesn't.
On the one hand, if you stay on top of research, even though most of what you read is useless, you'll be in a good position to integrate what you read and it will probably kick off thinking processes that will be of value. Having a good overview of what's going on helps you to see connections between work that the authors may not even realize is related.
On the other hand, there's a tremendous amount of stuff out there. I don't mean crap - some of it's quite good. But staying on top of it could easily be a full-time job, and then some.
So I think your professor is right, in a sense, but what he's saying may not be practical in the real world, even if it makes sense in academia.
I would suggest that you decide how much time you're willing to spend reading papers, and make a habit of doing it, and when you run out of time, stop. If you have nothing that's obviously interesting in your stack, skim what's on top. If there's something interesting, skim that, and if you still think it's interesting, read it more carefully (if you need to - often skimming is all you need). But always cut yourself off when you get to the end of the allocated time - don't bog down reading papers all day.
Heck, this is advice I should probably take. Thanks for asking!;')
A lot of the CPU burn with AV software involves doing I/O or scanning memory, neither of which are speeded by a dual-core processor. So you might get some speedup from this, but it won't be the difference between sluggish and speedy - it'll be sluggish versus less sluggish.
But Episode II *didn't* suck! You could definitely get rid of all the scenes with Anikin Skywalker in them, and the movie would be much improved, but that battle scene at the end made it all worthwhile.
The biggest reason that these releases of confidential data cause harm is that practically every piece of information that exists in a corporate database about an american citizen or resident alien is keyed to the SSN, and the SSN is used as an authenticator. If it weren't for this, the mere fact that someone got a copy of your bank records would be annoying, but not particularly worrisome.
I don't particularly *want* a copy of my college transcripts roaming the Internet, but the main problem with them roaming the Internet comes if they have my SSN on them (they probably do). An identity thief can use this information in combination with other public information to apply for credit in my name, change addresses on accounts, et cetera.
So yes, by all means, write your senator. Ask him or (if you live in NY) her to do something about the SSN mess. Of course, probably what they'll do is propose legislation to start a national identity card or something stupid like that. And then there will be a big protest to stop that. So nothing will happen. Repeat until dispossessed.
Once all your stuff has been stolen, you won't have to worry about it anymore. Go pitch your tent someplace that stays warm in the winter, make sure there's water nearby, and learn how to live on mesquite meal and cactus fruit. Life under the stars will seem like heaven.
Just the opposite: they should make their product on Windows work so well that it's easier to use it than Metro. If they do this, Metro will die on the vine. If they try to do what you propose, Metro will succeed brilliantly, because it will be your only choice on Windows, and like it or not, the majority of people run Windows. Why do you think you keep getting those silly.doc files in your email?:'}
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Holy shitsky, somebody mod the parent up! Maybe I'm just a luser who hasn't been paying attention, but this Pad2Pad thing is extremely cool. Custom PC board fab on the cheap. Zow.
A name-brand computer costs more than a homebrew computer with the same functionality. Not a lot more, but more. So your economic theory isn't quite as airtight as you imply.
:')
Having said that, I think it's true that as time goes by, companies that shoot for the commodity price are going to defeat Sony's strategy. That is to say, Wal-Mart will save us all.
I'd be curious to know on what platforms you have tried to run your app. This hasn't been my experience at all.
You should try this sometime. It really isn't just a LAF issue. In some cases, code that works on, e.g., Windows, simply doesn't work on the Mac, because the API was underspecified. The order in which you set things up affects whether or not the code actually produces a GUI - if you do things in the wrong order, which is not documented, you may literally not even see a window pop up on the screen. The problems I ran into were generally more subtle - failure to update, or incorrect updates, etc. So you really do have to test your app everywhere you expect it to run. Sad, but true.
They're not wasting their money. They're wasting our money. When you buy a new PC now, you're paying for the DRM that they put in it that you didn't ask for. This will just be another thing rolled into the price. Then if they can strongarm the big PC manufacturers to include it, the only way to avoid it will be to build your own system. I really recommend the Shuttle xPC form factor - small, quiet, cheap. ;')
Spoken like someone who's probably never tried running their JVM-based GUI application on a new platform. Java cross-platform compatibility is a nice idea in theory, but in practice you wind up having to test everywhere and tweak your code when you run into differences in GUI implementations, so it's definitely not write-once, run everywhere. A more complete API specification would help here, but if wishes were horses, there'd be a lot of poo on the road.
Heh. You raise a good point. However, in my defense, the point is that it's a hell of a lot easier to fix things in software than in hardware. Switching to vi is one way of fixing it in software, but you still have to do key remapping to get the escape key into place, or to get control where it needs to be if you do C-[ instead of ESC.
If you're going to go to the trouble of remapping your keyboard, and you're already an emacs geek, why not just remap caps lock and control rather than learning a whole new editor?
Personally, I use vi when I'm in a terminal window, and Emacs when I'm doing a serious hack, and I can't really tell the difference between them most of the time, but there come times when circumstances force me to switch to Emacs, because it's more programmable and extensible, and when I am so forced, I'm glad I'm fluent with it.
Porting reveals bugs. It also forces you to rethink short-sighted decisions. Furthermore, most of the problems I run into with porting have to do with cross-version incompatibility on Linux - the BSDs actually have comparitively stable APIs.
This line of thinking is a lot like how I presume Microsoft thinks of things: if we just port to this one API, it doesn't matter how bletcherous it is. But as Microsoft has discovered, this kind of thinking actually turns into a straitjacket, which prevents them from being responsive when they need to be.
...as to why the author doesn't just swap caps and control like every Emacs power user does. It's no pinky strain at all to hit the caps lock key. This is just part of being a geek - you have to learn how to optimize your keyboard layout, or your hands are doomed.
For the various vi acolytes who suggested he switch to vi, I would like to point out that switching to vi would be a better option if only the escape key on most modern keyboards weren't so far off the home row that you have to pick up and move to hit it.
I think Microsoft can survive, but they aren't doing it right now. Right now they're flailing. They have a lot of cash, so they can flail for a long time, but they are in fact flailing. Look at what happened to Digital Equipment Corporation - when I joined them, their stock was in its final decline, but it was still above $100/share, and people were hoping it would go back up to $200. By the time I left people were totally wishing that they could sell their stock at $100/share, and now there's no company there at all.
Microsoft is in a crappy situation - they have a legacy O.S. that they need to support, and that is expensive to support, and that has no future. Anything they do to actually fix this problem is going to cannibalize their sales of the legacy product, and is going to have to compete head-to-head against much more mature products - e.g., Mac OS X and Linux.
So they really need to think completely out of the box to keep going, but unfortunately they don't appear to be doing so. That's okay, though - they need to ablate a ton of crap before they can really transform themselves; in particular they need to get rid of their current IP philosophy, and they desperately need to get rid of their O.S. product, even though it's their main source of revenue right now.
Will they succeed or fail? Who knows? Too soon to tell. But it'll be an interesting ride to follow. Groupthink is what killed DEC. Microsoft needs to stamp out groupthink like it's a wildfire if they want to avoid following DEC's flaming downward trajectory.
If a yahoo customer posts your social security number and bank account information, and you ask them to take it down, and they refuse, do you have a right to sue them? What about your medical records? What about your grades in school?
I'm guessing you said yes, you have a right to sue them if they refuse to take down this private information. So why *don't* you have the right to sue them when they refuse to take down pictures of your private *parts*?
An interesting win for companies regarding the network effect is that now a lot of employees are buying their own laptops for work with their own money, because the company won't pay for a Mac. Ironically, most of the executive staff and sales staff and half the engineers at the company I work for do their work on Macs, but the company won't buy them Macs, so they buy their own. Win win for the corporate bottom line.
The fact that someone allows their partner in a committed relationship to take nude pictures of them and trusts said partner not to share them is not evidence of low moral standing. It's evidence of kindness - he wanted pictures of her because they gave him pleasure, and she agreed to let him have said pictures. And, at least according to her story, he repaid her kindness by publicly humiliating her.
It's sad that she trusted someone who was not trustworthy, but this is evidence of his lack of ethical standards, not her lack of morals.
Of course, all we have here is her story - it could be that this whole thing is a setup to get some money out of Yahoo - but there's no reason to assume this based on what we know. If it did happen as described, I think she has a legitimate complaint both against Yahoo and against her boyfriend.
Fundamentally, the idea of numbered worlds has got to offend someone. After all, the "first world" would be Europe. The "second world" might be the U.S. and Australia. Third world? The colonies that didn't achieve independence prior to 1900? Honestly, I think people ought to just stop using the term "third world," because it's imprecise and offensive, but this is hardly a problem we're going to solve here on slashdot. :'(
Actually, I think the main thing blocking IPv6 right now is that the tech is immature. And as for "extending" IPv4 to work with IPv6, not really possible. The IP header doesn't have room for the extra bits. That's why it was done the way it was done. There are a lot of problems with IPv6 - e.g., trying to write topology into addresses - but there just wasn't a way to extend IPv4 in the way you suggest.
:')
There are people in Europe right now working hard to get to the point where IPv6 is something you can use. Fear not. Even some folks here in the 'states, like me.
Dan does mention some real problems on the page to which you've linked, and I agree with some of his criticisms of the IPv6 process, where a lot has been invented prior to identifying a need for it, and in many cases all of this theoretical invention has wasted valuable time and opportunity.
However, a lot of what he says is quite out of date at this point. Furthermore, he complains that he's willing to hack but wants to be able to autoconfigure his hosts, and the implication is that he would hack if only he were told what to hack on, which frankly doesn't sound like the Dan we've all grown to know and love in the DNS world. If he really wants to fix these problems, the best way to show what the big bad people at IETF are doing wrong is to demonstrate it with working code.
The fact is that right now having an IPv6 address doesn't get you a whole lot of goodness in the U.S., and so we probably will be the last to adopt it if everybody here maintains your attitude.
IPv6 deployment in Asia is a reality, and to a lesser extent this is true in Europe as well. Anywhere where the IP infrastructure is being expanded is an easy place to deploy IPv6. 6to4 gateways are doable, just as are NATs. So you will see widespread deployment of IPv6 in Asia in the relatively near term.
As far as the U.S. and Europe go, slashdotters are precisely the people who should be thinking about trying to use IPv6 as soon as possible - as geeks, we are the early adopters, and as we try out the technology and try to use it, the world will catch up with us. The more we poo-poo it and don't try to actually deploy it, the longer it's going to take to address the concerns that Dan raises, and, I think, the more it's going to cost us in the long run.
One last thing: IPv4 link local addressing is fairly badly broken. If you want to be able to do link local addressing, it works a lot better in V6-land. This is largely an accident - nobody thought to cripple it until it was too late. But it's still true that you do get some value from deploying IPv6, even if only within your own home. If you use Rendesvous/Bonjour, you're probably already using IPv6 and just don't know it yet.
Um. Where is innovation happening these days? More and more, it's moving to places where there is less respect for intellectual property laws, not to places where there is more. The U.S. is the bastion of IP protection. In ten years, it's quite possible that there will be no innovation going on here - we will have to move to other countries in order to work.
When you talk about where innovation happens, remember that most of the really amazing breakthroughs in computer science happened _before_ software patents were legalized. Have you ever read Knuth, or read old JACM issues from the sixties and seventies? Stuff like that would get patented now, and would never make it into a journal at all - the first we'd hear about it was when the owner of the patent sued someone who'd invented it independently.
You could argue, in fact, that since software patents were legalized, the software field has been fighting a losing battle to continue to innovate, and that slowly but surely, the we are being dragged under.
The idea is that there is some kind of great risk that if I come up with a cool idea, and implement a really nice application on top of it, I won't be able to make a profit because my competitors will just look at what I did and copy it. The reality, though, is that if you give me a patent, I won't bother to make my app cool - I'll just do the minimal thing I need to to exploit the patent, and then charge whatever the captive market will bear.
Result: hardly anyone will be able to afford my app, and those who can afford it will be getting a really crappy app, because I have no incentive to spend money making the app easy to use, reliable, et cetera - my customers are trapped, for longer than the forseeable life of my company, so why should I bother? The incentive system right now is ass-backwards.
It's nice to be able to have an always-on phone that you can use to receive phone calls when you are at work or traveling. Why is it better than a cell phone? Lower power, and lower cost. Why is it worse? Hardly works anywhere at all. :'}
Fortunately, usually I'm in a place where it does work, not in a place where it doesn't.
On the one hand, if you stay on top of research, even though most of what you read is useless, you'll be in a good position to integrate what you read and it will probably kick off thinking processes that will be of value. Having a good overview of what's going on helps you to see connections between work that the authors may not even realize is related.
;')
On the other hand, there's a tremendous amount of stuff out there. I don't mean crap - some of it's quite good. But staying on top of it could easily be a full-time job, and then some.
So I think your professor is right, in a sense, but what he's saying may not be practical in the real world, even if it makes sense in academia.
I would suggest that you decide how much time you're willing to spend reading papers, and make a habit of doing it, and when you run out of time, stop. If you have nothing that's obviously interesting in your stack, skim what's on top. If there's something interesting, skim that, and if you still think it's interesting, read it more carefully (if you need to - often skimming is all you need). But always cut yourself off when you get to the end of the allocated time - don't bog down reading papers all day.
Heck, this is advice I should probably take. Thanks for asking!
Once again I thank my lucky stars that I was born a Unix geek and not a Windows geek... :'}
Thanks for the explanation!
What's "roaming-profile abuse?"
A lot of the CPU burn with AV software involves doing I/O or scanning memory, neither of which are speeded by a dual-core processor. So you might get some speedup from this, but it won't be the difference between sluggish and speedy - it'll be sluggish versus less sluggish.
But Episode II *didn't* suck! You could definitely get rid of all the scenes with Anikin Skywalker in them, and the movie would be much improved, but that battle scene at the end made it all worthwhile.
The biggest reason that these releases of confidential data cause harm is that practically every piece of information that exists in a corporate database about an american citizen or resident alien is keyed to the SSN, and the SSN is used as an authenticator. If it weren't for this, the mere fact that someone got a copy of your bank records would be annoying, but not particularly worrisome.
I don't particularly *want* a copy of my college transcripts roaming the Internet, but the main problem with them roaming the Internet comes if they have my SSN on them (they probably do). An identity thief can use this information in combination with other public information to apply for credit in my name, change addresses on accounts, et cetera.
So yes, by all means, write your senator. Ask him or (if you live in NY) her to do something about the SSN mess. Of course, probably what they'll do is propose legislation to start a national identity card or something stupid like that. And then there will be a big protest to stop that. So nothing will happen. Repeat until dispossessed.
Once all your stuff has been stolen, you won't have to worry about it anymore. Go pitch your tent someplace that stays warm in the winter, make sure there's water nearby, and learn how to live on mesquite meal and cactus fruit. Life under the stars will seem like heaven.
Just the opposite: they should make their product on Windows work so well that it's easier to use it than Metro. If they do this, Metro will die on the vine. If they try to do what you propose, Metro will succeed brilliantly, because it will be your only choice on Windows, and like it or not, the majority of people run Windows. Why do you think you keep getting those silly .doc files in your email? :'}