Productivity is already high enough for everyone to live comfortably, and has been for some time. In America, since 1983, the bottom 80% of the population have had less than 20% of the wealth.
almost everything on a Windows box at some point requires super user powers
It should just be Installing software and tinkering with certain OS settings.
In fact, about the same class of things that prompts gksudo or similar to pop up on Linux.
The main difference is that UAC just allows you to push the button and assumes that you are the user who logged in originally. Linux takes the harder route and asks for your password.
So ; they both do the same thing, only on Linux it's a bit more secure/tedious.
The problem with UAC is largely because sloppy programmers got used to both themselves and home users running with administrative rights by default, so instead of keeping their stuff to the user profile and user documents folder, they do stupid things like writing config files to the same folder the program is installed in, editing the system hive of the registry (when they should just use the user hive), etc. It's very tedious to develop software as a non-admin user on XP, so most Windows programmers are in the Administrators group, and thus things like this slip through the net rather easily.
Because Linux programmers don't habitually run as root, they don't tend to do this as much. So you'll see fewer (but more annoying) prompts for elevation on Linux.
I upgraded to the Win7 RC after some faulty RAM trashed my registry and rendered my Vista install deceased.
I moved from 32-bit Vista to a downloaded copy of 64-Bit "7" and expected torture.
Instead, it's really rather nice. Many of my favourite apps have native 64-bit versions, the 64-bit drivers all seem to work without hitches, much of my hardware just has bundled drivers or drivers from Windows Update. My wife likes the pretty UK-themed wallpapers. It feels snappier and lighter than Vista.
Even so ; you can tell what you use an OS for by how much is installed on it. My "7" partition just has games. It doesn't even have my favourite text editor.
All the work (mostly Java these days) is now on my Ubuntu install. The "7" RC will expire some time next year, and when it does, I will be highly tempted to just cast away childish things (or move entirely to consoles), and just trash the Windows partition. I get enough Windows at work:-)
Knowledgeable users manage this problem. They still suffer from it ; even the "sensible" software we install likes to add resident tasks. And virtually nothing can clean your registry out without risking terminal damage to your OS (unless you really know what you are doing, and I used to be one of these people - but I let the knowledge atrophy because it's more trouble than it's worth).
It certainly prolongs the MTBRBICWC for Windows (Mean Time Between Reinstalls Because It's Clogged With Crap).
Linux definitely scores points here for storing application-settings in their own hidden folder in your home directory. Uninstall the app? Delete the folder. Or not, if you don't mind - it's not slowing anything else down, they all look in their own folders, not in one giant nasty binary blob database.
And the way that X handles multiple screens has some fairly nasty problems, especially with the new generation of composite rendered desktops - two screens of the same resolution have to have different refresh rates so the driver can tell the difference between them, but the simplest way of double-screening on X involves making one big double-width virtual screen (which of course, has it's own refresh rate).
The downside to this being that you have one physical screen that ends up as the "master" which syncs to the X refresh rate, and on the other screen, it's out of sync. So you get a line of horizontal tearing that proceeds vertically across the screen at the difference between the refresh rates. Because this is low, it creeps slowly and is very obvious, particularly when you are dragging windows or watching video. And you can't avoid it because of the way X is designed.
On my setup, I could exert no control over which screen was the "master" either ; for some stupid reason it's always the monitor on the secondary port of the GPU, so I had to swap the cables over and reconfigure everything (including my Windows desktop). And if I boot to the console it's now on my secondary screen.
As much as I love Linux and think it's faster, more powerful, and more satsifying than "that other OS", Windows utterly kicks the living daylights out of it in terms of multi-monitor setup, because Windows
* Can actually support two monitors at the same resolution without ugly vsync tearing
* The screen setup is all in one place and you don't have to work out which driver-specific app you have to use (or which text file to edit)
* Doesn't make you choose between Xinerama and TwinView (without explaining the benefits of either).
The major problem with X was that it was designed to be what Remote Desktop / VNC is today, for big fat servers to render GUI windows on dumb terminals.
The problem with this is that PPA means "Personal" Package archive and a lot of them are just that - an arbitrary repository. In many cases you are trusting some random stranger, and not Canonical, to have produced a package that doesn't contain horrendous malware. Every Launchpad user is entitled to a 1GB PPA just by signing up. Mine contains packages for MythTV with patches to fix a bug that hasn't made it out to the stable branch yet. You can install them if you really want to, but do you trust me? And how do you distinguish from all the other people with MythTV in their PPA?
Lots of projects have links to deb packages that install their GPG key and their PPA, after which you can see them in Synaptic, but this still isn't any guarantee. About the only thing you can do is be careful which groups you install keys and PPAs from. And I'd guess the reason that more of them aren't in the Universe repository is that the task of vetting them all is a mammoth one.
It's gotten to be very good ; I interact with SVN solely through Bazaar these days, not least because it makes the pain of our ludicrous network topology much less.
It also makes branching much easier - and you're much more likely to branch, because your boss isn't going to say "hey, who keeps cluttering the repo with new branches".
Although if he's the kind of boss who watches the commit RSS feed he might start to think you're slacking until you merge and push your first big patch.....
Google Wave looks like an awesome platform for this.
Alas, it's not ready yet. But a wave-enabled IDE would be tough to beat for pair programming.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Indeed. With a bridge, the requirements are simple and obvious - you want a structure that permits transit from one side of some geographical divide to the other. All the detail is just detail, the end requirement is invariable.
With a software project, the requirements are often poorly understood or even unknown - a nebulous sense that things could be better if only we had better software. Often the software itself will reveal the real requirements.
They were also keen on carbon-capture and also nuclear.
It's funny how big corporate interests are not so keen on projects where any little group of people could afford their own small-scale generation capacity. Although I could be talking through my tinfoil hat.
I keep wanting to build a flash drive with a thermite filler and some kind of rip-strip fuse that you could just yank on hard to set it off.
No offence to IronKey, but how do you know that it's really, really, destroyed your data beyond recovery? Maybe it just locks out the disk controller. A small heap of smouldering slag is much more definitive.
Now, if you could combine the thermite with their remote wipe protocols......
I think this was put in as colour in one of Neal Stephenson's novels (I think it was the Diamond Age) ; aha
Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.
You might even be able to administer this as a temporary treatment.
When viruses divide in cells they hijack your own cellular machinery to do it, by using the same programming mechanism - the production of RNA which causes the synthesis of proteins. If you engineered a virus to produce the glycoxylate shunt RNA complexes, it would produce the shunts in cells it infected. Eventually the virus would run it's course and be eliminated by the immune system. The shunts would persist for some time but eventually go out of commission as their proteins wore out. This could be long enough to lose a whole mess of fat, without permanent side effects.
If you could tailor it specifically to infect adipocytes, the viral destruction of the cells would have a double effect - fat tissue is one of the regulators of your appetite, which is why those of us who were a bit chubby in childhood have more problems with willpower than those who were stringbeans - we have a billion hungry little mouth/blobs screaming "feed me". Remove a significant population of those cells and you are looking at a long term decrease in appetite.
Indeed ; for me, the "practical" motivation is the greatest. If there's something wrong with the software, I can actually fix it instead of blindly downloading updates and patches in the hope that it fixes the problem. Hell, Ubuntu want your patches so much they even give you a build server for them ; I fixed my problem (with MythTV), uploaded the patch, and now my machine just downloads the patched package when I install it. Far less expensive than a support contract, and the problem probably gets fixed in less time (and it's much less frustrating - you aren't waiting on someone else's idea of what constitutes "important", you don't have to wait for a release or hotfix, and you learn new skills at the same time).
Try creating your own personal version of MS software (say, Windows Media Centre), patched just the way you like it, and see how far it gets you.
The performance, reliability, robustness, zero cost, freedom of speech, reciprocal helpfulness, and yes, security, these things are also good.
Corporations have just become a parasitic entity perched on the back of humanity anyway. Their original purpose was to provide a service to society - they each had a charter that laid out their responsibilities (e.g. - build this bridge, build a road, etc) and the corporation ended when they were fulfilled.
Since then they gained the rights of a person, which isn't strictly fair because they don't have any of the limitations of a person - people are not immortal, or gifted with a thousand hands.
I think this kind of technology is possible. It's also so tempting to implement that it's almost inevitable. The question is who gets it first ; is it going to be a totalitarian regime (be that a government or a powerful corporation), or is it going to be "the people"? If corporations realize how much power it can grant them (and they're not universally clueless), they'll fight tooth and nail to keep it. The tinfoil hatted part of me thinks that this is one reason why they are so keen on getting DRM right - they're investing in their future.
if you can afford it, you already pay enough taxes to support a small mid-American city
I call BS. If you can afford this car, you can afford enough accountants to ensure that you pay as little tax as possible, which in some cases, means the government actually pays you to be incredibly rich.
The BBC Micro came with an in-line assembler in the BASIC that shipped with the machine. The manual that came with it had a full reference for BASIC and 6502 assembler. It was a great machine for learning about computers ; lots of languages available, BASIC and assembler out of the box, and so many and varied I/O ports it was a hardware hackers dream as well. I remember the first time I patched in a routine that made the on board sound generate "key ticks" for each keystroke and being thrilled.
BBC BASIC was so good it's even been ported to Windows as a commercial product.... it still has the assembler, which now generates x86 opcodes instead.
The Spectrum used a Z80, and a lot more people were familiar with the assembly because of all the time devoted to poking games on it, but you needed a separate assembler to do any serious coding, like a Multiface with Genie. Rather more cumbersome, even if some people found the Z80 nicer to code for.
Your liver makes acetaminophen into some really nasty toxic shit, and that's what damages it. Fortunately, it has another metabolic pathway that detoxes the stuff before it reaches toxic concentrations.
This pathway is powered by a limited stock of glutathione in the liver. When you run out, the toxic products start to accumulate rapidly and cause acute liver failure. Up until that point you are suffering no significant ill effects. Therefore you could take a therapeutic dose for extended periods with little ill effect, it only causes a problem when you overwhelm your capacity to produce glutathione.
Acetaminophen is the number one cause of acute liver failure in the USA and UK, but is not noted for causing chronic damage (or it would certainly not be available over the counter).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but for the hours you'd use it, it would be 5 watts on average. And it wouldn't demand to watch Jane Austen movies and have the house redecorated.
Productivity is already high enough for everyone to live comfortably, and has been for some time. In America, since 1983, the bottom 80% of the population have had less than 20% of the wealth.
almost everything on a Windows box at some point requires super user powers
It should just be Installing software and tinkering with certain OS settings.
In fact, about the same class of things that prompts gksudo or similar to pop up on Linux.
The main difference is that UAC just allows you to push the button and assumes that you are the user who logged in originally. Linux takes the harder route and asks for your password.
So ; they both do the same thing, only on Linux it's a bit more secure/tedious.
The problem with UAC is largely because sloppy programmers got used to both themselves and home users running with administrative rights by default, so instead of keeping their stuff to the user profile and user documents folder, they do stupid things like writing config files to the same folder the program is installed in, editing the system hive of the registry (when they should just use the user hive), etc. It's very tedious to develop software as a non-admin user on XP, so most Windows programmers are in the Administrators group, and thus things like this slip through the net rather easily.
Because Linux programmers don't habitually run as root, they don't tend to do this as much. So you'll see fewer (but more annoying) prompts for elevation on Linux.
Yoda is drunk. All the time.
Why else you think talk like this I do? Hmmm? giggle
I upgraded to the Win7 RC after some faulty RAM trashed my registry and rendered my Vista install deceased.
I moved from 32-bit Vista to a downloaded copy of 64-Bit "7" and expected torture.
Instead, it's really rather nice. Many of my favourite apps have native 64-bit versions, the 64-bit drivers all seem to work without hitches, much of my hardware just has bundled drivers or drivers from Windows Update. My wife likes the pretty UK-themed wallpapers. It feels snappier and lighter than Vista.
Even so ; you can tell what you use an OS for by how much is installed on it. My "7" partition just has games. It doesn't even have my favourite text editor.
All the work (mostly Java these days) is now on my Ubuntu install. The "7" RC will expire some time next year, and when it does, I will be highly tempted to just cast away childish things (or move entirely to consoles), and just trash the Windows partition. I get enough Windows at work :-)
Knowledgeable users manage this problem. They still suffer from it ; even the "sensible" software we install likes to add resident tasks. And virtually nothing can clean your registry out without risking terminal damage to your OS (unless you really know what you are doing, and I used to be one of these people - but I let the knowledge atrophy because it's more trouble than it's worth).
One of the best utilities for this is Autoruns.
It certainly prolongs the MTBRBICWC for Windows (Mean Time Between Reinstalls Because It's Clogged With Crap).
Linux definitely scores points here for storing application-settings in their own hidden folder in your home directory. Uninstall the app? Delete the folder. Or not, if you don't mind - it's not slowing anything else down, they all look in their own folders, not in one giant nasty binary blob database.
It's still a PITA. And not as functional either.
And the way that X handles multiple screens has some fairly nasty problems, especially with the new generation of composite rendered desktops - two screens of the same resolution have to have different refresh rates so the driver can tell the difference between them, but the simplest way of double-screening on X involves making one big double-width virtual screen (which of course, has it's own refresh rate).
The downside to this being that you have one physical screen that ends up as the "master" which syncs to the X refresh rate, and on the other screen, it's out of sync. So you get a line of horizontal tearing that proceeds vertically across the screen at the difference between the refresh rates. Because this is low, it creeps slowly and is very obvious, particularly when you are dragging windows or watching video. And you can't avoid it because of the way X is designed.
On my setup, I could exert no control over which screen was the "master" either ; for some stupid reason it's always the monitor on the secondary port of the GPU, so I had to swap the cables over and reconfigure everything (including my Windows desktop). And if I boot to the console it's now on my secondary screen.
As much as I love Linux and think it's faster, more powerful, and more satsifying than "that other OS", Windows utterly kicks the living daylights out of it in terms of multi-monitor setup, because Windows
* Can actually support two monitors at the same resolution without ugly vsync tearing
* The screen setup is all in one place and you don't have to work out which driver-specific app you have to use (or which text file to edit)
* Doesn't make you choose between Xinerama and TwinView (without explaining the benefits of either).
The major problem with X was that it was designed to be what Remote Desktop / VNC is today, for big fat servers to render GUI windows on dumb terminals.
Java is a walk in the park compared to these two to maintain...
The problem with this is that PPA means "Personal" Package archive and a lot of them are just that - an arbitrary repository. In many cases you are trusting some random stranger, and not Canonical, to have produced a package that doesn't contain horrendous malware. Every Launchpad user is entitled to a 1GB PPA just by signing up. Mine contains packages for MythTV with patches to fix a bug that hasn't made it out to the stable branch yet. You can install them if you really want to, but do you trust me? And how do you distinguish from all the other people with MythTV in their PPA?
Lots of projects have links to deb packages that install their GPG key and their PPA, after which you can see them in Synaptic, but this still isn't any guarantee. About the only thing you can do is be careful which groups you install keys and PPAs from. And I'd guess the reason that more of them aren't in the Universe repository is that the task of vetting them all is a mammoth one.
It's gotten to be very good ; I interact with SVN solely through Bazaar these days, not least because it makes the pain of our ludicrous network topology much less.
It also makes branching much easier - and you're much more likely to branch, because your boss isn't going to say "hey, who keeps cluttering the repo with new branches".
Although if he's the kind of boss who watches the commit RSS feed he might start to think you're slacking until you merge and push your first big patch.....
Google Wave looks like an awesome platform for this.
Alas, it's not ready yet. But a wave-enabled IDE would be tough to beat for pair programming.
Indeed. With a bridge, the requirements are simple and obvious - you want a structure that permits transit from one side of some geographical divide to the other. All the detail is just detail, the end requirement is invariable.
With a software project, the requirements are often poorly understood or even unknown - a nebulous sense that things could be better if only we had better software. Often the software itself will reveal the real requirements.
The CBI in the UK has been railing against our governments focus on wind power as well.
They were also keen on carbon-capture and also nuclear.
It's funny how big corporate interests are not so keen on projects where any little group of people could afford their own small-scale generation capacity. Although I could be talking through my tinfoil hat.
I keep wanting to build a flash drive with a thermite filler and some kind of rip-strip fuse that you could just yank on hard to set it off.
No offence to IronKey, but how do you know that it's really, really, destroyed your data beyond recovery? Maybe it just locks out the disk controller. A small heap of smouldering slag is much more definitive.
Now, if you could combine the thermite with their remote wipe protocols......
I think this was put in as colour in one of Neal Stephenson's novels (I think it was the Diamond Age) ; aha
Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself.
You might even be able to administer this as a temporary treatment.
When viruses divide in cells they hijack your own cellular machinery to do it, by using the same programming mechanism - the production of RNA which causes the synthesis of proteins. If you engineered a virus to produce the glycoxylate shunt RNA complexes, it would produce the shunts in cells it infected. Eventually the virus would run it's course and be eliminated by the immune system. The shunts would persist for some time but eventually go out of commission as their proteins wore out. This could be long enough to lose a whole mess of fat, without permanent side effects.
If you could tailor it specifically to infect adipocytes, the viral destruction of the cells would have a double effect - fat tissue is one of the regulators of your appetite, which is why those of us who were a bit chubby in childhood have more problems with willpower than those who were stringbeans - we have a billion hungry little mouth/blobs screaming "feed me". Remove a significant population of those cells and you are looking at a long term decrease in appetite.
Indeed ; for me, the "practical" motivation is the greatest. If there's something wrong with the software, I can actually fix it instead of blindly downloading updates and patches in the hope that it fixes the problem. Hell, Ubuntu want your patches so much they even give you a build server for them ; I fixed my problem (with MythTV), uploaded the patch, and now my machine just downloads the patched package when I install it. Far less expensive than a support contract, and the problem probably gets fixed in less time (and it's much less frustrating - you aren't waiting on someone else's idea of what constitutes "important", you don't have to wait for a release or hotfix, and you learn new skills at the same time).
Try creating your own personal version of MS software (say, Windows Media Centre), patched just the way you like it, and see how far it gets you.
The performance, reliability, robustness, zero cost, freedom of speech, reciprocal helpfulness, and yes, security, these things are also good.
Yes they do. A handwritten recipe for cookies is executable, it just runs on a different class of machine.
It's more likely to go the other way - the satnav gets a wireless data link and routes traffic according to congestion, just like the internet.
I like your idea though, seems like a good idea for a sci-fi movie.
Corporations have just become a parasitic entity perched on the back of humanity anyway. Their original purpose was to provide a service to society - they each had a charter that laid out their responsibilities (e.g. - build this bridge, build a road, etc) and the corporation ended when they were fulfilled.
Since then they gained the rights of a person, which isn't strictly fair because they don't have any of the limitations of a person - people are not immortal, or gifted with a thousand hands.
I think this kind of technology is possible. It's also so tempting to implement that it's almost inevitable. The question is who gets it first ; is it going to be a totalitarian regime (be that a government or a powerful corporation), or is it going to be "the people"? If corporations realize how much power it can grant them (and they're not universally clueless), they'll fight tooth and nail to keep it. The tinfoil hatted part of me thinks that this is one reason why they are so keen on getting DRM right - they're investing in their future.
I bought the first UK issue of Wired, and swore never to buy Wired again, ever, after approximately 4 minutes reading.
Utterly utterly dire.
if you can afford it, you already pay enough taxes to support a small mid-American city
I call BS. If you can afford this car, you can afford enough accountants to ensure that you pay as little tax as possible, which in some cases, means the government actually pays you to be incredibly rich.
"Dysoning" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
BeebEm?
The BBC Micro came with an in-line assembler in the BASIC that shipped with the machine. The manual that came with it had a full reference for BASIC and 6502 assembler. It was a great machine for learning about computers ; lots of languages available, BASIC and assembler out of the box, and so many and varied I/O ports it was a hardware hackers dream as well. I remember the first time I patched in a routine that made the on board sound generate "key ticks" for each keystroke and being thrilled.
BBC BASIC was so good it's even been ported to Windows as a commercial product.... it still has the assembler, which now generates x86 opcodes instead.
The Spectrum used a Z80, and a lot more people were familiar with the assembly because of all the time devoted to poking games on it, but you needed a separate assembler to do any serious coding, like a Multiface with Genie. Rather more cumbersome, even if some people found the Z80 nicer to code for.
This is one case where it's counterintuitive.
Your liver makes acetaminophen into some really nasty toxic shit, and that's what damages it. Fortunately, it has another metabolic pathway that detoxes the stuff before it reaches toxic concentrations.
This pathway is powered by a limited stock of glutathione in the liver. When you run out, the toxic products start to accumulate rapidly and cause acute liver failure. Up until that point you are suffering no significant ill effects. Therefore you could take a therapeutic dose for extended periods with little ill effect, it only causes a problem when you overwhelm your capacity to produce glutathione.
Acetaminophen is the number one cause of acute liver failure in the USA and UK, but is not noted for causing chronic damage (or it would certainly not be available over the counter).