Apples and oranges ; being wired to eat sugar and fat is the norm. Being wired to be sexually attracted to your own gender is not.
You made a point about the choice to what level you indulge your desires, but that doesn't address the fact that you can't choose those basic desires.
I enjoy healthy food but it doesn't stop my body taking satisfaction from the junk. That's a lifestyle choice. I have a high sex drive (for what it's worth, I'm in the majority), but I don't indulge it as much as I could, and that's a lifestyle choice.
I loathe Marmite. Some people love it. I couldn't even imagine enjoying a sexual encounter with the same gender - but homosexuals are wired the other way. I didn't choose which gender I fancy, and neither did they.
Sounds more like a Pavlovian response than a real instinctive attraction though ; you've learned to associate ugly women with sexual pleasure the same way those dogs learned to associate bells with steak.
I hate them too. They have staff in our local markets who try to encourage you to use them. I try to be polite when they ask "Would you like to use the self-checkout?" and not say stuff like "No, I don't want to use the self-checkout so your vast oligarchic corporation can fire a couple of checkout girls and profit from me doing their job for myself instead. Your participation in this system either makes you as sheep, or a traitor to your class, so which are you?"
It's shit like this that makes me glad I work in a sector of IT (healthcare) which can at least pretend that increased automation might bring some benefits by increasing the amount of work that gets done, instead of decreasing the amount of labour doing it.
I have no idea if they actually do this, but I reckon they can profile you on any kind of card payment as well. You could tie purchases on a single card together without storing the card number (and thus contravening PCI regulations) if you hashed them. If they're not already doing this, I guarantee that they are prohibited from doing it by law. Of course, they can't actively mess with your buying habits by mailing you coupons without a club card.
It's not as bad as what I hear in the States, where they can offer different prices to card holders ; so they mark up the basics to an absurd price and make the sensible prices "club perks".
Lately I've been cooking for myself from scratch ingredients a lot more. My lasagne makes anything they stock taste like insipid slop, I enjoy the act of cooking it, and 600g of beef and a half-pack of bacon plus the rest (the meat is by far the most expensive part, plenty of veggies makes it healthier, tastier, AND more economical) has made me 12 portions. Hooray for foil trays from supermarket ready meals....
The supermarkets are one of the most active propaganda experts on the planet - the next generation of infowar is being fought there.
Forget the CIA ; their intelligence collection is old school.
The supermarkets want to skew their customers towards raising that margin of about 4% ; even a tiny skew is worth it to them.
So they profile your buying habits, they work out what you buy. They work out what everyone buys. They want to know what kind of person buys the high-end ice-cream, and other high-margin items. Quite aside from the obvious ploys, like putting coupons out for high margin items so you'll get into the habit of buying them, they'll coupon other items that aren't high margin, but they know that people who buy them are high-margin customers.
Alas, this means less shelf space for the items that low-margin customers buy, like basic staples. Who cares, you can get those things from the Mom & Pop store, right? Oh...
A whole host of infowar tricks, like reorganising the store shelves periodically to disrupt your "route" and get you in front of lines you don't usually buy.
Just because the shell I use the most isn't as colourful, and the icons are what are called "characters" for the most part, doesn't make it any less powerful than a GUI shell.
No-one directly uses the OS, even if they write some kind of scary low-level shell that directly calls kernel functions by typing their names, they are still in an application.
Not universally. PulseAudio has a spaz and dies for me, often, if you break the audio stream up enough. Alas, this includes doing things like seeking around in videos. You have to kill it manually, and then you usually have to restart any applications that were connected to it so they can re-establish their sessions. It does seem tied to the audio hardware - it only occurs on one machine for me.
It's annoying, and probably doesn't occur on most hardware.
It doesn't wreck Linux as a desktop platform for me - I do nearly all of my productive work on it (apart from things that require Windows - like testing Windows GUI toolkit behaviour in the cross-platform GUIs that I sometimes write). And it is very much more productive for me than Windows is, not least because Linux is not encumbered by the shitload of corporate malware that IT seems to feel it requires to prevent it being a giant security risk.
The BBC elevates the standard of UK television so much, because the commercial channels have to raise their game or lose their viewers to something that doesn't advertise - the BBC can pack the whole hour with content, ITV and the others have to make do with between 42 and 48 minutes.
We have fewer average advertisement minutes per hour, and generally more consistent quality. I've seen US TV. It's awful compared to the UK.
The £12 a month we pay for it is much cheaper than basic cable, but we get multiple national TV channels, radio stations, local radio, the BBC website (including the news), iPlayer, etc, etc, etc.
Now : imagine the USA had a federal TV tax in the same way. Because content is worth more the more you spread it around... the sheer quantity of good quality stuff (even if you account for Sturgeon's Law) would be mind-boggling.
It's less to do with the full disk encryption, which these days is pretty much supported by hardware encryption features in the CPU. The I/O performance is slower than the decryption, so the encryption is not a rate limiting step - it usually only consumes a couple of % CPU time.
The problem is the OTHER software deployed on the computer... often in the name of security, but also things that are supposed to make the computer more manageable for the IT dept.
So, we have...
* Antivirus
We used to use Symantec, but we changed that because we got a bundle deal from McAfee for their full disk encryption, etc. Symantec used to run about 15% CPU time during high I/O. McAfee is more like 40% on the same hardware.
* Asset management
A program that makes a list of every file on your disk, including those inside archives. It then archives this list up and sends it back to IT for them to process. This is so they can detect things that they don't approve of, like music, video, and software they don't like. The end result is that every day your computer has a period where it first thrashes the disc for about 30 minutes, then eats a whole CPU core for another 10 while it compresses the list. These times go up a lot if you are, for example, a Java developer with a lot of JAR archives in their local Maven repository. So the more productive you are, the more your productivity is hurt.
The program that tries (and fails) to patch your software every single day. This program also caches a copy of the installer for every program that IT have on the "approved" list on your local hard drive just in case you want to install it, meaning you get a bit tight on disk space. This is going to get worse because they are now issuing laptops with faster, but smaller, SSDs (partly to counter some of the other stuff, one supposes).
The brand new program that inspects every file you write, in addition to the antivirus... an extra antivirus? It's part of one of these buzzword-fashionable "Endpoint management" suites. It's much hungrier even than McAfee, eating over 50% of CPU time - on a dual core machine.. so this thing is not just hogging CPU, it's hogging it with multiple threads. In conjunction with the other stuff, this takes a process which writes a lot of files from a runtime of 2:30 to over 13 minutes. The same thing on Linux (Java) runs in under a minute.
And on top of this, we are now being told that we are only allowed "approved" software on our new machines. Given that we are an R&D organization, this directive will seriously hobble our ability to operate if it's followed. There is, of course, a "small" fee to approve of software that isn't already on the list (it costs about 1/3rd what one of those PCs in TFA cost to run for a year....). The problem they are trying to solve is the other side of the gold coin of computers - they are a tremendously flexible tool. Some people use that to install malware. Some people use that to do epic stuff. This is like nuking the forest because it contains a few biting insects along with all the plants that cure cancer.
So to recap ; all that crap is making some workloads literally run over 10 times slower than the same hardware running Linux. And we're not talking an abstract "1s rather than 100ms", or even "10s rather than 1s" kind of performance gap ; we're talking 10 minutes rather than 1. That adds up to a lot of minutes. I'm going to add some instrumentation to these tools to see how often they get run (something I wish I'd done before now, on reflection).
Yeah, the new "endpoint management" thing (not sure what it manages) now fights the antivirus for the CPU.
A process that used to take 4:30 cold and 2:30 with a warm cache, is now reliably taking over 13 minutes.
It takes less than a minute on a Linux system with identical hardware (it's Java). This is an operation that people would previously not think twice about doing 10 times an hour, now they'll be lucky to have it done four times, and their system will be totally tied up the whole time, which negates the point which is that they can do some work, and run the process, and see the output of their work.
I worked hard making that app perform well, multithreading, optimization, the works. The team were enjoying an order of magnitude performance improvement ove rtheir previous tools. Now it runs slower than it ever has done. Frickin Mordac the Preventer.
The main problem was that the project came too early ; it was innovative.
It used very uncommon hardware - you needed a 12" analogue / digital laserdisc reader, and you needed an uncommon add-on CPU unit for the BBC Micro.
Only a few years later, CD-ROM became ubiquitous, with the 700MB basic disc size being more than double one of the single 300MB sides on those 12" discs, although I'm not entirely sure whether the purely digital CD-ROM would have enough storage to cope with encodes of the analogue video tracks. A single DVD-ROM could probably house the whole project, along with a bootable OS and emulator to run it.
To give him his fair due, he's talking about reverse engineering, presumably in the absence of the standard.
The markup does make it much easier - you do at least get to see the structs, and the names of their elements, instead of just inferring them by poking around in a hex editor.
But I'd lay odds that the guy re-implementing ODF from scratch and a few sample documents would be done long before the guy with the MOO-XML documents had recovered from his first nervous breakdown.
MOO-XML is transparently just a serialization of the internal binary formats of Office produced in response to the threat of large buyers (like governments) insisting on open document formats ; unlike ODF which was designed to be an XML format from scratch. It let their government buyers tick the box and push through the procurement order - "Hey, it's what we use already, so it's definitely compatible, and it supports all that open format jazz - so it's the best value for money, even if this other thing is free."
The fact that the XML formats are now the default is just the final piece of delicious irony.
After they were forced to, for interoperability purposes ; you can see this from the 6-monthly release dates on the documents, even if the formats haven't changed, it's obvious a court order is compelling them to go to the effort of releasing a new document.
The document bundle also has over 6000 pages (6,154) ; Excel accounting for the lions share at over 2600 pages. Coincidentally I think this is about the same size as the initial MOO-XML format submission.
It's quite a task to re-implement (presuming these documents are clear, concise, and accurate).
Just to note, CP-1252 is the standard Western code page for Windows. I know this because I have to make special efforts on all my build scripts to cope with the fact that Windows has so far failed to join the "Just use UTF-8 like every other modern OS" club.
Not even Microsoft can implement their Office XML "standard" ; from examination it's pretty much a direct name-for-name serialization of their internal binary structs, with some of the more obvious gaffes like explicitly saying "do this like this old version of Word" hastily renamed to placate ISO. It needs you to implement a whole bunch of specific behaviours if you want it to work in the MS software (things like "if you update this bit, you also have to update this other bit just so or it won't work"), but these aren't documented.
You've got more of a chance, sure, just because the structs are marked and you don't have to infer where their boundaries are, but it's a far cry from ODF which was designed from the outset to be an open XML format rather than just hastily being bunged together to permit large purchasing bodies (like governments) to tick the "Open format" box on their form.
Didn't you know? - Hollywood is all run by billionaire philanthropists for the love of the art of cinema. No Hollywood movie ever turns a profit. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix couldn't even turn a profit with box office takings close to $1B ; it booked a loss close to $170M - with beloved, multi week blockbuster smash hits like this one making a loss, the only conceivable reason that they make any movie is that those investor angels just love Tinseltown and it's output, because they sure aren't doing it for the money.
Trailer #3 is much better. Manages to combine hope, honour, duty, and awesome, all things we have in short supply these days. That one Costner moment where he chokes out "You are my son." is hopefully how good the rest of the film is.
If nothing else, that trailer is an excellent example of the film makers art. I hope the film lives up to it.
And who do you think they deploy the weapons and write the laws for? It's still government for the people - the legal persons that corporations claim to be.
It won't fix his problem ; it's usually an overloaded local router. I got to the point where mine was giving out 150ms pings just for one hop - it didn't have enough CPU and RAM to deal with the all the connections being thrown around by torrent-seeding media sharers.
Broadband is all set up for consumption - downloading your content like a good little consumer. It's not set up for everyone being a server of dozens of connections.
It looks like a traditional home entertainment system component ; they're trying to appeal to the segment of the market that doesn't play games, what with all the TV features they rolled into it, and a they even made a TV series to show on it. Alas, this may be one sharkjump too many.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd need Wine installed to see the visual payload (if it had one), and Wine is good enough to run many Windows viruses.
Apples and oranges ; being wired to eat sugar and fat is the norm. Being wired to be sexually attracted to your own gender is not.
You made a point about the choice to what level you indulge your desires, but that doesn't address the fact that you can't choose those basic desires.
I enjoy healthy food but it doesn't stop my body taking satisfaction from the junk. That's a lifestyle choice. I have a high sex drive (for what it's worth, I'm in the majority), but I don't indulge it as much as I could, and that's a lifestyle choice.
I loathe Marmite. Some people love it. I couldn't even imagine enjoying a sexual encounter with the same gender - but homosexuals are wired the other way. I didn't choose which gender I fancy, and neither did they.
Sounds more like a Pavlovian response than a real instinctive attraction though ; you've learned to associate ugly women with sexual pleasure the same way those dogs learned to associate bells with steak.
Right now it screams "I've heard of PRISM".
Now is the best time to start routinely encrypting your communications, because you have a plausible reason to do so.
I hate them too. They have staff in our local markets who try to encourage you to use them. I try to be polite when they ask "Would you like to use the self-checkout?" and not say stuff like "No, I don't want to use the self-checkout so your vast oligarchic corporation can fire a couple of checkout girls and profit from me doing their job for myself instead. Your participation in this system either makes you as sheep, or a traitor to your class, so which are you?"
It's shit like this that makes me glad I work in a sector of IT (healthcare) which can at least pretend that increased automation might bring some benefits by increasing the amount of work that gets done, instead of decreasing the amount of labour doing it.
I have no idea if they actually do this, but I reckon they can profile you on any kind of card payment as well. You could tie purchases on a single card together without storing the card number (and thus contravening PCI regulations) if you hashed them. If they're not already doing this, I guarantee that they are prohibited from doing it by law. Of course, they can't actively mess with your buying habits by mailing you coupons without a club card.
It's not as bad as what I hear in the States, where they can offer different prices to card holders ; so they mark up the basics to an absurd price and make the sensible prices "club perks".
Lately I've been cooking for myself from scratch ingredients a lot more. My lasagne makes anything they stock taste like insipid slop, I enjoy the act of cooking it, and 600g of beef and a half-pack of bacon plus the rest (the meat is by far the most expensive part, plenty of veggies makes it healthier, tastier, AND more economical) has made me 12 portions. Hooray for foil trays from supermarket ready meals....
The supermarkets are one of the most active propaganda experts on the planet - the next generation of infowar is being fought there.
Forget the CIA ; their intelligence collection is old school.
The supermarkets want to skew their customers towards raising that margin of about 4% ; even a tiny skew is worth it to them.
So they profile your buying habits, they work out what you buy. They work out what everyone buys. They want to know what kind of person buys the high-end ice-cream, and other high-margin items. Quite aside from the obvious ploys, like putting coupons out for high margin items so you'll get into the habit of buying them, they'll coupon other items that aren't high margin, but they know that people who buy them are high-margin customers.
Alas, this means less shelf space for the items that low-margin customers buy, like basic staples. Who cares, you can get those things from the Mom & Pop store, right? Oh...
A whole host of infowar tricks, like reorganising the store shelves periodically to disrupt your "route" and get you in front of lines you don't usually buy.
There are shells and shells.
Just because the shell I use the most isn't as colourful, and the icons are what are called "characters" for the most part, doesn't make it any less powerful than a GUI shell.
No-one directly uses the OS, even if they write some kind of scary low-level shell that directly calls kernel functions by typing their names, they are still in an application.
Not universally. PulseAudio has a spaz and dies for me, often, if you break the audio stream up enough. Alas, this includes doing things like seeking around in videos. You have to kill it manually, and then you usually have to restart any applications that were connected to it so they can re-establish their sessions. It does seem tied to the audio hardware - it only occurs on one machine for me.
It's annoying, and probably doesn't occur on most hardware.
It doesn't wreck Linux as a desktop platform for me - I do nearly all of my productive work on it (apart from things that require Windows - like testing Windows GUI toolkit behaviour in the cross-platform GUIs that I sometimes write). And it is very much more productive for me than Windows is, not least because Linux is not encumbered by the shitload of corporate malware that IT seems to feel it requires to prevent it being a giant security risk.
The BBC elevates the standard of UK television so much, because the commercial channels have to raise their game or lose their viewers to something that doesn't advertise - the BBC can pack the whole hour with content, ITV and the others have to make do with between 42 and 48 minutes.
We have fewer average advertisement minutes per hour, and generally more consistent quality. I've seen US TV. It's awful compared to the UK.
The £12 a month we pay for it is much cheaper than basic cable, but we get multiple national TV channels, radio stations, local radio, the BBC website (including the news), iPlayer, etc, etc, etc.
Now : imagine the USA had a federal TV tax in the same way. Because content is worth more the more you spread it around... the sheer quantity of good quality stuff (even if you account for Sturgeon's Law) would be mind-boggling.
It's less to do with the full disk encryption, which these days is pretty much supported by hardware encryption features in the CPU. The I/O performance is slower than the decryption, so the encryption is not a rate limiting step - it usually only consumes a couple of % CPU time.
The problem is the OTHER software deployed on the computer... often in the name of security, but also things that are supposed to make the computer more manageable for the IT dept.
So, we have...
* Antivirus
We used to use Symantec, but we changed that because we got a bundle deal from McAfee for their full disk encryption, etc. Symantec used to run about 15% CPU time during high I/O. McAfee is more like 40% on the same hardware.
* Asset management
A program that makes a list of every file on your disk, including those inside archives. It then archives this list up and sends it back to IT for them to process. This is so they can detect things that they don't approve of, like music, video, and software they don't like. The end result is that every day your computer has a period where it first thrashes the disc for about 30 minutes, then eats a whole CPU core for another 10 while it compresses the list. These times go up a lot if you are, for example, a Java developer with a lot of JAR archives in their local Maven repository. So the more productive you are, the more your productivity is hurt.
The program that tries (and fails) to patch your software every single day. This program also caches a copy of the installer for every program that IT have on the "approved" list on your local hard drive just in case you want to install it, meaning you get a bit tight on disk space. This is going to get worse because they are now issuing laptops with faster, but smaller, SSDs (partly to counter some of the other stuff, one supposes).
The brand new program that inspects every file you write, in addition to the antivirus ... an extra antivirus? It's part of one of these buzzword-fashionable "Endpoint management" suites. It's much hungrier even than McAfee, eating over 50% of CPU time - on a dual core machine.. so this thing is not just hogging CPU, it's hogging it with multiple threads. In conjunction with the other stuff, this takes a process which writes a lot of files from a runtime of 2:30 to over 13 minutes. The same thing on Linux (Java) runs in under a minute.
And on top of this, we are now being told that we are only allowed "approved" software on our new machines. Given that we are an R&D organization, this directive will seriously hobble our ability to operate if it's followed. There is, of course, a "small" fee to approve of software that isn't already on the list (it costs about 1/3rd what one of those PCs in TFA cost to run for a year....). The problem they are trying to solve is the other side of the gold coin of computers - they are a tremendously flexible tool. Some people use that to install malware. Some people use that to do epic stuff. This is like nuking the forest because it contains a few biting insects along with all the plants that cure cancer.
So to recap ; all that crap is making some workloads literally run over 10 times slower than the same hardware running Linux. And we're not talking an abstract "1s rather than 100ms", or even "10s rather than 1s" kind of performance gap ; we're talking 10 minutes rather than 1. That adds up to a lot of minutes. I'm going to add some instrumentation to these tools to see how often they get run (something I wish I'd done before now, on reflection).
Yeah, the new "endpoint management" thing (not sure what it manages) now fights the antivirus for the CPU.
A process that used to take 4:30 cold and 2:30 with a warm cache, is now reliably taking over 13 minutes.
It takes less than a minute on a Linux system with identical hardware (it's Java). This is an operation that people would previously not think twice about doing 10 times an hour, now they'll be lucky to have it done four times, and their system will be totally tied up the whole time, which negates the point which is that they can do some work, and run the process, and see the output of their work.
I worked hard making that app perform well, multithreading, optimization, the works. The team were enjoying an order of magnitude performance improvement ove rtheir previous tools. Now it runs slower than it ever has done. Frickin Mordac the Preventer.
The main problem was that the project came too early ; it was innovative.
It used very uncommon hardware - you needed a 12" analogue / digital laserdisc reader, and you needed an uncommon add-on CPU unit for the BBC Micro.
Only a few years later, CD-ROM became ubiquitous, with the 700MB basic disc size being more than double one of the single 300MB sides on those 12" discs, although I'm not entirely sure whether the purely digital CD-ROM would have enough storage to cope with encodes of the analogue video tracks. A single DVD-ROM could probably house the whole project, along with a bootable OS and emulator to run it.
To give him his fair due, he's talking about reverse engineering, presumably in the absence of the standard.
The markup does make it much easier - you do at least get to see the structs, and the names of their elements, instead of just inferring them by poking around in a hex editor.
But I'd lay odds that the guy re-implementing ODF from scratch and a few sample documents would be done long before the guy with the MOO-XML documents had recovered from his first nervous breakdown.
MOO-XML is transparently just a serialization of the internal binary formats of Office produced in response to the threat of large buyers (like governments) insisting on open document formats ; unlike ODF which was designed to be an XML format from scratch. It let their government buyers tick the box and push through the procurement order - "Hey, it's what we use already, so it's definitely compatible, and it supports all that open format jazz - so it's the best value for money, even if this other thing is free."
The fact that the XML formats are now the default is just the final piece of delicious irony.
After they were forced to, for interoperability purposes ; you can see this from the 6-monthly release dates on the documents, even if the formats haven't changed, it's obvious a court order is compelling them to go to the effort of releasing a new document.
The document bundle also has over 6000 pages (6,154) ; Excel accounting for the lions share at over 2600 pages. Coincidentally I think this is about the same size as the initial MOO-XML format submission.
It's quite a task to re-implement (presuming these documents are clear, concise, and accurate).
Just to note, CP-1252 is the standard Western code page for Windows. I know this because I have to make special efforts on all my build scripts to cope with the fact that Windows has so far failed to join the "Just use UTF-8 like every other modern OS" club.
Not even Microsoft can implement their Office XML "standard" ; from examination it's pretty much a direct name-for-name serialization of their internal binary structs, with some of the more obvious gaffes like explicitly saying "do this like this old version of Word" hastily renamed to placate ISO. It needs you to implement a whole bunch of specific behaviours if you want it to work in the MS software (things like "if you update this bit, you also have to update this other bit just so or it won't work"), but these aren't documented.
You've got more of a chance, sure, just because the structs are marked and you don't have to infer where their boundaries are, but it's a far cry from ODF which was designed from the outset to be an open XML format rather than just hastily being bunged together to permit large purchasing bodies (like governments) to tick the "Open format" box on their form.
Didn't you know? - Hollywood is all run by billionaire philanthropists for the love of the art of cinema. No Hollywood movie ever turns a profit. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix couldn't even turn a profit with box office takings close to $1B ; it booked a loss close to $170M - with beloved, multi week blockbuster smash hits like this one making a loss, the only conceivable reason that they make any movie is that those investor angels just love Tinseltown and it's output, because they sure aren't doing it for the money.
Trailer #3 is much better. Manages to combine hope, honour, duty, and awesome, all things we have in short supply these days. That one Costner moment where he chokes out "You are my son." is hopefully how good the rest of the film is.
If nothing else, that trailer is an excellent example of the film makers art. I hope the film lives up to it.
And who do you think they deploy the weapons and write the laws for? It's still government for the people - the legal persons that corporations claim to be.
It won't fix his problem ; it's usually an overloaded local router. I got to the point where mine was giving out 150ms pings just for one hop - it didn't have enough CPU and RAM to deal with the all the connections being thrown around by torrent-seeding media sharers.
Broadband is all set up for consumption - downloading your content like a good little consumer. It's not set up for everyone being a server of dozens of connections.
Hell, until Star Citizen (hopefully) resurrects the space sim genre, that sounds like a grand idea, along with both I-War games.
It looks like a traditional home entertainment system component ; they're trying to appeal to the segment of the market that doesn't play games, what with all the TV features they rolled into it, and a they even made a TV series to show on it. Alas, this may be one sharkjump too many.
Yeah, it's not even the vomit of one bee, they all have a massive mutual "20 bees, one cell" eating each others vomit and sicking it up again party.