Without his work, it's doubtful that many people outside the scientific, academic & military community would be using the Internet today.
In 1989-90, I was a student at the University of Illinois, working in a little computer lab. The Internet was growing at 8% per month. A coworker predicted that in 10 years, everyone's toaster and fridge would be on the Internet.
"No", I told him, "only computer geeks will ever use the Internet." That was before the web took over.
We were both wrong, or perhaps while I wasn't looking the definition of "geek" changed.
At any rate, the Internet was exploding, and it wasn't due to the efforts of Al Gore. There are certain forces in history that gain momentum and will just happen, regardless of the efforts of individuals to aid or deter them. Al was on the right side of the curve, but to claim that only geeks would ever use the Internet is just as wrong now as it was when I said it 15 years ago.
In fact, that's probably why people lampoon him so much for saying he "created the Internet". When he got to Congress in 1976 it was already experiencing exponential growth, and the importance of it in the sweep of history dwarfs the ability of any one person to create it.
Not for individual users, certainly, but for the right business that's a nice deal. Consider your typical "roach coach" sandwich&coffee van. Now these guys can offer wifi and compete with the dirtbound coffee houses. Hmmm, possible but not likely.
They're really selling to people who want more upstream bandwidth than a consumer/small-biz broadband connection provides.
It's a nice deal for an ISP who wants an alternate route, or for businesses that run their own in-house network over leased lines.
The US Air Force has awarded a $100 million contract to SpaceX, an orbital rocket launch company which aims to 'increase the reliability and reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of ten.'
Sometimes software comes out which is "too slow", or "bloated", and doesn't become popular.
For instance, the Lotus Smartsuite products were way ahead of Microsoft's Office suite when they were released, but the entire package was took about 25 1.4MB floppies, I think, and then would hardly run on the typical system at the time. A couple of years ago I was looking for some clip-art and loaded it from CD. On modern hardware, the package was quite pleasant to use.
There were some bugs in SmartSuite, and Microsoft did a number on compatibility at the API level, but I think overall it was the bloatware aspect that hurt it the most. A few years later the package seems rather spritely and compact.
Hardware suffers from the opposite problem. The attitude "Why would I need that much?", which hardware vendors play into by offering products with overkill specs in the wrong areas. Since they can't double processor speed, doubling the amount of RAM is the next best thing, right?
No, the next best thing would be to offer rock-solid reliability in the hardware and drivers. Make it cheaper. Ship the source for your drivers. I want it to work, and if it doesn't work I want there to be a way to fix it.
I know that's not how the video card business works. If you're not at the cutting edge, you're an also-ran. I just wish it weren't that way.
Sorry for rambling. To tie it all together, I think vendors get caught up in having features their marketing department can brag about, rather than delivering products their customers can use most effectively.
Retailers must understand, however, that almost half of all online purchases are from shoppers who leave a site after the first visit, and return -- even days later -- to buy
First, note that this says of those who do make a purchase, almost half have gone away and come back to finish the transaction. It doesn't say that half of all people who go away will come back.
Second, they're leaving out the fact that for many sites, putting something in your shopping cart is required in order to shop. You can't check a price at many sites without using their shopping cart.
Contrary to what ScanAlert says ("Digital window-shopping is very popular among online shoppers..."), I think most people don't "window shop" in the traditional sense of taking inventory of what's out there.
A lot of the time online shoppers (Ok, I) do initial investigation, get ready to buy something, and then go check elsewhere. Since many online prices are in a similar range, it's often easier to simply complete the first transaction rather than wade through another online store.
Plus, we all have our favorite, habitual, or default online retailers.
It may be a distinction without a difference, but I think there is a sharp contrast in purchase behavior between someone hunting down a better deal (comparison shopping) and someone seeing what is out there (window shopping).
They say their magnetic pump (which is a cool idea, if you'll pardon the pun) is "inherently reliable". OK, but it's still there, generating its own heat, and everything breaks eventually.
What if you could avoid having a pump altogether? I imagine the liquid metal coolant has convective properties the same as any other fluid. Probably the metal expands quite a bit with heat, just as mercury does. With proper case design (such as a vertical motherboard), you could probably get good coolant flow without a pump.
O'course, the case might end up needing to be six feet high and require a solid gold heat sink or something.
HOLY SHIT! This post BLOWS A FUCKING WHEEL off RAW's rickety charnel wagon.
to your post
Uh, OK. I think detect a hint of sarcasm, but Im just not sure. Can you be a little clearer? Sometimes sarcasm doesn't come across well in online posts.
came up in meta-moderation. I thought the parent was funny, but then I saw your reply.
That was really funny. I'm still smiling stupidly. Good job.
...it has a real name. When a Linux product is launched to the masses it retains whatever stupid code name that it originally had. Or rather it was given a stupid code name as it's REAL name.
What's in a name? A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
All the descriptive names are taken.
I'm distrustful and disdainful of marketing practices that dumb down a product's appeal. Changing a product's name to be "real" (or in other words, focus-group vanilla) makes my teeth itch.
P.S.: I find it ironic that you posted as Anonymous Coward. But what's in a name?
Pure, utter bull. SCO was never, ever a nice company. They pulled EVERY dirty trick in the book that they could. This case is, in fact, the SECOND time they have partnered with Microsoft to bring down a UNIX competitor via the Courts. The first time was a legal threat to a small company called Microport, when Microport publically announced Xenix binary compatibility in stock AT&T UNIX.
In 1979, Larry and Doug Michels founded The Santa Cruz Operation ("oldSCO"). Santa Cruz was then partly held by Microsoft. They ported UNIX to the 8086, releasing Xenix-86 in 1983, followed by releases for the '286 and '386 chips. (Both Santa Cruz and Microsoft sold Xenix at various times.)
In 1994, Caldera was founded as a Linux distributor by Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks, financed and guided by Novell founder Ray Noorda.
In 1995, Santa Cruz bought Xenix from Microsoft and UNIX/UnixWare from Novell.
In 1996, Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell, and promptly sued Microsoft over antitrust.
In 1998, Project Monterey was announced between IBM, Sequent, and Santa Cruz.
In 1999, Microsoft sold off all it's Santa Cruz shares.
In 2000 (January), Microsoft settled the DR DOS case with Caldera for between $60 and $150 million. In March of that year, Caldera Systems reincorporated in Delaware, receiving a $30 million investment from Sun, Santa Cruz, Citrix, Novell and venture capitalists and made an IPO. Ray Noorda then owned 73% of Caldera Systems. In a deal announced in August of 2000 and completed in the Spring of 2001, Caldera bought the server and OS part of oldSCO. OldSCO then changed its name to Tarentella, which (in 2005) sells a nice directory for Unix. At some point after the UNIX purchase, apparently, Ray Noorda stopped giving much guidance to Caldera.
It was widely believed, that Caldera's purchase of Santa Cruz' UNIX group would mean the end of Monterey. Certainly it gave IBM an out, since their Monterey contract specified that a change in control could end the agreement.
In January 2003 IBM made some public statements implying that they were using their AIX knowledge to advance Linux.
In March of 2003, Caldera sued IBM for copyright infringement, I mean trade secret violations, I mean "this has always been a contract case". In July, Caldera changed its name to "The SCO Group".
As far as I know, none of the people calling the shots at The SCO Group (Caldera) have anything to do with The Santa Cruz Operation.
While this is cool, as I thought when I saw it on KernelTrap, disk mirroring is useful in situations where the hardware is less reliable than the transaction. If you have e.g., an application-level way to back out of a write (an "undo" feature), then disk mirroring is your huckleberry.
Most (all) of my quick restore needs result from users deleting or overwriting files - the hardware is more reliable than the transaction. I do have on-disk backups of the most important stuff, but sometimes they surprise me.
I'd like a system library that would modify the rename(2), truncate(2), unlink(2), and write(2) calls to move the deleted stuff to some private directory (/.Trash,/.Recycler, whatever). Obviously the underlying routine would have to do its own garhage collection, deleting trash files by some FIFO or largest-older-first algorithm.
this university ran > 1000 CRTs 24/7. Anybody care to guestimate how much electricity they could have saved over this time period?
(Using conservative figures)
At 100 watts, a monitor consumes 1200 watts in 12 hours or (at 7 cents per kWh) about $.084 in electricity every night. Call it $25/year.
1000 monitors waste $25,000/year.
Depending on your climate, heat dissipation is really hard to figure, since in the winter all those monitors made the buildings easier to heat in the winter, harder to cool in the summer. Not very efficient, but it's there.
I don't know what effect power cycling a monitor has on its longevity, but I bet doing it once a day for twelve hours would increase useful life, not decrease it on average.
I work for a public university. The people who are accountable for the equipment budget and the people who pay the light bill never talk.
I recommend flat panel monitors to people based on aesthetics and reliability. Power consumption (30-40 watts for an LCD, 150 for a CRT) is a non-issue with users, since the power bill is paid by a central campus entity and doesn't show up on our departmental budgets at all.
Actually, I don't know who pays the power bill. Maybe nobody!
I regularly go to the houses of friends and relatives to help them with their computer problems.
Typically, during the course of unfouling the mess I find, there are several gigabytes of movies, music, software, and other files in directories made by various malware programs. I uninstall the software and delete the files.
Just because a movie was uploaded from a particular computer, it doesn't mean the user knew about it. It takes a person of greater expertise than is common among end users to discover the problem (even though the average user notices lower performance, that's not the same as knowing that the machine is hosting a "Spiderman 2" torrent).
If you don't know that you are doing something, you shouldn't be held accountable for it. There are various levels of "knowing" something in a legal sense: knowing of the problem, knowing the problem *could* occur, knowing with certitude, etc.
The standard (in the U.S., anyway) is that the user must know that a program is on his computer that will transfer files illegally. He doesn't have to put the software there knowingly, put the unlicensed material there, nor actively initiate the illegal transfer itself. If and only if he knows the facility for the illegal transfer exists and he fails to stop it is he liable when the transfer happens.
It's like this: suppose you have a dog that never bites anyone and has never left his yard. If someone else comes along to give your dog PCP, you aren't liable when your dog goes nuts. If you know that the dog has gotten the PCP, you are liable whether you are present when the dog goes nuts or not.
O'course, that's just the theory; you still may be stuck proving your innocence, either with a drugged-up dog or a mal-P2P-infected PC.
... just because an experiment or observation is not novel does not mean we have nothing to learn from it!
Atmospheric conditions on Mars are interesting, and certainly worth studying in their own right. While we can predict in software the way it ought to work given lower gravity, different air composition, cold, etc., studying it for real is something else.
My complaint is with the hype over all things Martian, and I decided to have some fun with it.
Slashdot Mirror
>snobby geek
Yeah, I guess that was a little heavy-handed.
Maybe I should have said it turns into a large, pulsating donut.
... it becomes a giant orchid, with powers to make you sign a mortgage and chain yourself to a friggin' desk for 30 years.
(If you don't get the above, you don't understand the light sabre symbolism at all).
In 1989-90, I was a student at the University of Illinois, working in a little computer lab. The Internet was growing at 8% per month. A coworker predicted that in 10 years, everyone's toaster and fridge would be on the Internet.
"No", I told him, "only computer geeks will ever use the Internet." That was before the web took over.
We were both wrong, or perhaps while I wasn't looking the definition of "geek" changed.
At any rate, the Internet was exploding, and it wasn't due to the efforts of Al Gore. There are certain forces in history that gain momentum and will just happen, regardless of the efforts of individuals to aid or deter them. Al was on the right side of the curve, but to claim that only geeks would ever use the Internet is just as wrong now as it was when I said it 15 years ago.
In fact, that's probably why people lampoon him so much for saying he "created the Internet". When he got to Congress in 1976 it was already experiencing exponential growth, and the importance of it in the sweep of history dwarfs the ability of any one person to create it.
That's the point. They are protecting their customers.
Whoever said Microsoft was a heartless monopoly with a cash register for a soul sure has to eat their words now.
I have seen the Light. Now I just have to contact 4,356 people and convince them not to turn me in.
Not for individual users, certainly, but for the right business that's a nice deal. Consider your typical "roach coach" sandwich&coffee van. Now these guys can offer wifi and compete with the dirtbound coffee houses. Hmmm, possible but not likely.
They're really selling to people who want more upstream bandwidth than a consumer/small-biz broadband connection provides.
It's a nice deal for an ISP who wants an alternate route, or for businesses that run their own in-house network over leased lines.
What if someone is digging a hole through the air and cuts their wireless connection? What then, huh?
This is unfair competition with BellAtlantic. I predict lawsuits when users demand to be given a choice.
Won't this give them all brain cancer?
The problems seem endless.
Sometimes software comes out which is "too slow", or "bloated", and doesn't become popular.
For instance, the Lotus Smartsuite products were way ahead of Microsoft's Office suite when they were released, but the entire package was took about 25 1.4MB floppies, I think, and then would hardly run on the typical system at the time. A couple of years ago I was looking for some clip-art and loaded it from CD. On modern hardware, the package was quite pleasant to use.
There were some bugs in SmartSuite, and Microsoft did a number on compatibility at the API level, but I think overall it was the bloatware aspect that hurt it the most. A few years later the package seems rather spritely and compact.
Hardware suffers from the opposite problem. The attitude "Why would I need that much?", which hardware vendors play into by offering products with overkill specs in the wrong areas. Since they can't double processor speed, doubling the amount of RAM is the next best thing, right?
No, the next best thing would be to offer rock-solid reliability in the hardware and drivers. Make it cheaper. Ship the source for your drivers. I want it to work, and if it doesn't work I want there to be a way to fix it.
I know that's not how the video card business works. If you're not at the cutting edge, you're an also-ran. I just wish it weren't that way.
Sorry for rambling. To tie it all together, I think vendors get caught up in having features their marketing department can brag about, rather than delivering products their customers can use most effectively.
First, note that this says of those who do make a purchase, almost half have gone away and come back to finish the transaction. It doesn't say that half of all people who go away will come back.
Second, they're leaving out the fact that for many sites, putting something in your shopping cart is required in order to shop. You can't check a price at many sites without using their shopping cart.
Contrary to what ScanAlert says ("Digital window-shopping is very popular among online shoppers..."), I think most people don't "window shop" in the traditional sense of taking inventory of what's out there.
A lot of the time online shoppers (Ok, I) do initial investigation, get ready to buy something, and then go check elsewhere. Since many online prices are in a similar range, it's often easier to simply complete the first transaction rather than wade through another online store.
Plus, we all have our favorite, habitual, or default online retailers.
It may be a distinction without a difference, but I think there is a sharp contrast in purchase behavior between someone hunting down a better deal (comparison shopping) and someone seeing what is out there (window shopping).
They say their magnetic pump (which is a cool idea, if you'll pardon the pun) is "inherently reliable". OK, but it's still there, generating its own heat, and everything breaks eventually.
What if you could avoid having a pump altogether? I imagine the liquid metal coolant has convective properties the same as any other fluid. Probably the metal expands quite a bit with heat, just as mercury does. With proper case design (such as a vertical motherboard), you could probably get good coolant flow without a pump.
O'course, the case might end up needing to be six feet high and require a solid gold heat sink or something.
The parent
to your post
came up in meta-moderation. I thought the parent was funny, but then I saw your reply.That was really funny. I'm still smiling stupidly. Good job.
What's in a name? A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
All the descriptive names are taken.
I'm distrustful and disdainful of marketing practices that dumb down a product's appeal. Changing a product's name to be "real" (or in other words, focus-group vanilla) makes my teeth itch.
P.S.: I find it ironic that you posted as Anonymous Coward. But what's in a name?
In 1979, Larry and Doug Michels founded The Santa Cruz Operation ("oldSCO"). Santa Cruz was then partly held by Microsoft. They ported UNIX to the 8086, releasing Xenix-86 in 1983, followed by releases for the '286 and '386 chips. (Both Santa Cruz and Microsoft sold Xenix at various times.)
In 1994, Caldera was founded as a Linux distributor by Ransom Love and Bryan Sparks, financed and guided by Novell founder Ray Noorda.
In 1995, Santa Cruz bought Xenix from Microsoft and UNIX/UnixWare from Novell.
In 1996, Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell, and promptly sued Microsoft over antitrust.
In 1998, Project Monterey was announced between IBM, Sequent, and Santa Cruz.
In 1999, Microsoft sold off all it's Santa Cruz shares.
In 2000 (January), Microsoft settled the DR DOS case with Caldera for between $60 and $150 million. In March of that year, Caldera Systems reincorporated in Delaware, receiving a $30 million investment from Sun, Santa Cruz, Citrix, Novell and venture capitalists and made an IPO. Ray Noorda then owned 73% of Caldera Systems. In a deal announced in August of 2000 and completed in the Spring of 2001, Caldera bought the server and OS part of oldSCO. OldSCO then changed its name to Tarentella, which (in 2005) sells a nice directory for Unix. At some point after the UNIX purchase, apparently, Ray Noorda stopped giving much guidance to Caldera.
It was widely believed, that Caldera's purchase of Santa Cruz' UNIX group would mean the end of Monterey. Certainly it gave IBM an out, since their Monterey contract specified that a change in control could end the agreement.
In January 2003 IBM made some public statements implying that they were using their AIX knowledge to advance Linux.
In March of 2003, Caldera sued IBM for copyright infringement, I mean trade secret violations, I mean "this has always been a contract case". In July, Caldera changed its name to "The SCO Group".
As far as I know, none of the people calling the shots at The SCO Group (Caldera) have anything to do with The Santa Cruz Operation.
I guess that's why I'm not in charge of NASA.
>WTF?
Right tool for the right job. See this.
While this is cool, as I thought when I saw it on KernelTrap, disk mirroring is useful in situations where the hardware is less reliable than the transaction. If you have e.g., an application-level way to back out of a write (an "undo" feature), then disk mirroring is your huckleberry.
/.Recycler, whatever). Obviously the underlying routine would have to do its own garhage collection, deleting trash files by some FIFO or largest-older-first algorithm.
Most (all) of my quick restore needs result from users deleting or overwriting files - the hardware is more reliable than the transaction. I do have on-disk backups of the most important stuff, but sometimes they surprise me.
I'd like a system library that would modify the rename(2), truncate(2), unlink(2), and write(2) calls to move the deleted stuff to some private directory (/.Trash,
Just a thought.
(Using conservative figures)
At 100 watts, a monitor consumes 1200 watts in 12 hours or (at 7 cents per kWh) about $.084 in electricity every night. Call it $25/year.
1000 monitors waste $25,000/year.
Depending on your climate, heat dissipation is really hard to figure, since in the winter all those monitors made the buildings easier to heat in the winter, harder to cool in the summer. Not very efficient, but it's there.
I don't know what effect power cycling a monitor has on its longevity, but I bet doing it once a day for twelve hours would increase useful life, not decrease it on average.
I work for a public university. The people who are accountable for the equipment budget and the people who pay the light bill never talk.
I recommend flat panel monitors to people based on aesthetics and reliability. Power consumption (30-40 watts for an LCD, 150 for a CRT) is a non-issue with users, since the power bill is paid by a central campus entity and doesn't show up on our departmental budgets at all.
Actually, I don't know who pays the power bill. Maybe nobody!
single Point of Failure? There, I thought you could.
(I know that's PoF, not PoE, but hey.)
I regularly go to the houses of friends and relatives to help them with their computer problems.
Typically, during the course of unfouling the mess I find, there are several gigabytes of movies, music, software, and other files in directories made by various malware programs. I uninstall the software and delete the files.
Just because a movie was uploaded from a particular computer, it doesn't mean the user knew about it. It takes a person of greater expertise than is common among end users to discover the problem (even though the average user notices lower performance, that's not the same as knowing that the machine is hosting a "Spiderman 2" torrent).
If you don't know that you are doing something, you shouldn't be held accountable for it. There are various levels of "knowing" something in a legal sense: knowing of the problem, knowing the problem *could* occur, knowing with certitude, etc.
The standard (in the U.S., anyway) is that the user must know that a program is on his computer that will transfer files illegally. He doesn't have to put the software there knowingly, put the unlicensed material there, nor actively initiate the illegal transfer itself. If and only if he knows the facility for the illegal transfer exists and he fails to stop it is he liable when the transfer happens.
It's like this: suppose you have a dog that never bites anyone and has never left his yard. If someone else comes along to give your dog PCP, you aren't liable when your dog goes nuts. If you know that the dog has gotten the PCP, you are liable whether you are present when the dog goes nuts or not.
O'course, that's just the theory; you still may be stuck proving your innocence, either with a drugged-up dog or a mal-P2P-infected PC.
I think you misunderstood the GP post. It's XP in general that's brain-damaged, not the XP TCP/IP stack.
Microsoft is trying to blame the design of TCP/IP instead of the design of Windows. Everybody else makes it work; why can't they?
Atmospheric conditions on Mars are interesting, and certainly worth studying in their own right. While we can predict in software the way it ought to work given lower gravity, different air composition, cold, etc., studying it for real is something else.
My complaint is with the hype over all things Martian, and I decided to have some fun with it.
Sorry, but since we can't legally compete with private firms, weather data is available by subscription only.
The properties of fluids are the same on Earth and Mars.
Man, what if all of physics works the same there? Just think of the number of stories.
"Scientist discovers light on Mars!"
"Stuff falls down when you drop it on Mars!"
"On Mars, stuff stays where you put it!"
"On Mars, a rock keeps moving if you kick it!"
"Mars displays friction!"
"On Mars, energy tends to move from stuff with more to stuff with less!"
This didn't start out as a Troll, sorry. I'm just tired of Martian News of the obvious.
'nuff said.