Thank you, Mr. Data... now would someone please explain that to me in English?:-P * reads man lart while he waits for someone to hit him with a cluestick*
Good call on bringing up the point about the window managers running on top of a GUI. I never actually knew that...
You've managed to echo my feelings precisely AND teach me some new info about Linux. Thanks for the insight!
From the article: The question then is: many strong proprietary companies such as Microsoft are moving full speed ahead on high-level managed language platforms. Can open source compete, or is it too unable to make hard decisions? Rephrased: is there some way we can find to move away from C/C++, without causing massive alienation and forking?
It's time to start the discussion. Rather than fooling around in the background, companies should get involved in a broad community process where we work out a common direction for the open source desktop codebase.[emphasis mine]
I'm not a coder, or technical in any form, but I can see how this makes sense. I'd love to adopt Linux but am still trying to mount/dev/clue;-)
It's my guess that more people would want to adopt Linux distros, regardless of their flavour, if the open source OS community worked out those kind of specs as a group, so that different desktop versions of Linux were broadly the same.
(Yes, I know about the kernel, but matters that the article addresses seem to be important. IMHO, it could harm Linux in the future if different distros become too divergent, leading to a loss of interoperability or the requirement of, say, 14 different varieties of OpenOffice.org depending on your distro.)
Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire is the only reason I'm not going to put Linux on my laptop. I've been playing that game since 2000, on and off, and although I want to convert my desktop box to Linux, I'm not even going to try with the laptop. All my good games (AC, Homeworld...) run on it;-)
(well, that and I need a Windows machine to do my coursework...)
I have a funny feeling some film studies geek is going to follow the action with a DV camera, and edit the raw footage into a movie using the soundtrack from "Cannonball Run"...
I, for one, welcome our autonomous vehicle overlords - even if they do sound like Burt Reynolds.
Grandparent has a fair point, but parent reflects the situation where I am.
I use my university's network for internet access, paying UK60 a year for access in my room. At the start of the year there were a lot of virus-related problems, mostly people bringing machines in from home and plugging them in without a firewall or AV software.
Network Services don't insist on this. They don't insist on a virus scan first. What they DO do is cut you off if your PC is causing a nuisance to the network, because they're only three men taking care of the main servers and staff terminals (public terminals are someone else's responsibility).
A lot of people whine about it, but IMHO it's fair policy. They're busy enough without having to help the blissfully clueless. That said, it wouldn't kill them if your 60 included a CD with, say, ZoneAlarm and AVG on... (I distributed similar CDs to friends, with Mozilla Firebird, just so they didn't pick up anything nasty.)
The moral of the story: well, there are two. The first is "You're paying us for the service, not for us to hold your hand and show you how to use your computer." The second is that some people really need to be beaten around the head with a clue-by-four.
See, if I was a techie, I'd've picked that up (the gaffe, I mean - "areal", I could've figured out). Instead, I didn't know it til two people put it down correctly.
I was pretty off-base anyway, guessing that "aureal" was to do with magnetic fields, kinda like the "aurora borealis". Which was probably pretty close to wrong. (Latin was never my strong suit, and I don't know many Greek derivations either)
I'm not techical. Not even remotely knowledgeable about HD sizes and technology. Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.
But that article seems pretty suspect to me. I know some OEM PCs have HDs with hidden partitions, but I doubt they'd be half the HD size. Plus unless there's a way to mask partitions from DOS, you could see what was on the HD using, say, fdisk (on a Windows machine - I dunno the Linux equivalent).
I, for one, will not be trying it. I agree with parent in detecting a whiff of bullshit.
Disclaimer: I am not a techie. Please do feel free to correct me on any of the above.
Thanks, AC. I assume you're in the service, so your post has set my mind at rest to a degree.
Although I'll still laugh when the first Microsoft military-grade OS for full control of battleships or nuclear attack subs comes up with the error "404: Nuclear weapons not found.";-)
That's an interesting post. I'm deeply surprised that someone would take the time to write something so insightful and detailed in response to a short post intended purely as a joke (I just couldn't resist riffing on The Fellowship of the Ring when Elvish languages were mentioned - specifically the part where the Fellowship is trying to open the door into Moria).
I remember a movie from a few years back called Sneakers, where Robert Redford and his buddies actually do fake a voiceprint-based password using fragments of a recorded conversation. I certainly wouldn't trust something like that on critical access.
Anyway, thanks for the effort and the insight. I found it interesting, even though I don't work in the IT industry.
Yep, via departmental intranet.
AFAIK, said DB is not connected at all to the internet, so it's highly unlikely such a thing could be accessed, even if you were the world's best Black Hat. I'm not even close to being a "leet" hacker...
Then again, what do I know about hacking? Last computer I tried to hack called me Dr. Falken and asked if I'd like to play a game;-)
The point I was trying to make was that sometimes, you pay for something before it's available and expect to get it, but don't.
It was perhaps an oversimplified allegory, but I was just trying to make the point that slipped releases are not necessarily MS's fault. The "terms of sale" of the two examples are different, sure, but at least from my point of view it's a comparable situation, and MS is not the sole offender in promising releases and then not delivering.
i.e. in all fairness, it's not just MS who suffers from release slippage...
Off the top of my head, I don't know any major retailers (or e-tailers) who took pre-orders. My local (small) games store takes pre-orders and special orders for just about anything, and I know they've had a lot of folks wanting money back after Half-Life 2 got delayed... beyond that I couldn't say, I'm not a big gamer. Frankly I was just using it to get a point across - pre-orders in general are bad, and it's all too easy for item X to end up as vapourware.
Agreed. I merely mentioned DNF because it was the most recognizable piece of vapourware I could think of.
Perhaps magazine subscriptions would be a better allegory. I can think of magazines which go monthly, sell a bunch of 12-month subscriptions, then start missing issues or go quarterly at the same cover price. I know if that happens to me, I'd get pretty incensed.
Then again, I'm not much of a techie. Just a guy pointing out that it's inevitable - shit happens, whether in games or business.
That said, I think if I'd ordered on a contract (no refund), I'd expect the entity I had the contract with to work with me in honouring it at some point - say, a partial refund or a rescheduled expiry.
... remember it's not only MS who produce vapourware. Pre-orders for, say, Duke Nukem Forever have gone the same way - although I dare say most retailers offering a pre-order will have issued refunds.
Sadly, in business, slippage does occur and contracts do expire. It's not preferred, but it occurs more than most people would like.
The long and short is, IMHO this is only noteworthy at this time because of the sheer scale in terms of both cash value and number of "victims".
Unless the US.mil only use Windows for admin and noncritical purposes, parent scares the holy crap out of me.
You can just imagine it now. Accidental missile launch. Captain stabs the abort key to self-destruct the missile. Suddenly, weapons, radar, comms, guidance & navigation, the whole bridge gets locked in Blue Screen O'Death.
Hell, you'd lose half your technical staff to applying patches, fixing issues raised by applying patches, and sorting out user privileges. And if the ship decides that the bilge stopcocks are closed when in fact they're open and flooding the lower decks... well, it's an undocumented feature and it'll be fixed in about a fortnight.
Frankly, although I actively support the development of alterative (Linux) OSs, I don't believe any off-the-shelf OS should be used for a situation like this - whether it's administering medication, controlling a nuclear reactor, or keeping the USS Enterprise away from the Puget Sound lighthouse (yes, I know it's an urban legend...), a custom, purpose-written OS built on a solid kernel is the way to go, IMHO. If that OS is based on the Linux kernel and it uses plugins for different equipment and systems, fine - just not Microsoft Windows NT for Warfare;-)
Obligatory Star Wars quote and a sobering thought
on
US Government Upgrades RAM
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Look at the size of that thing!
When I worked for the Inland Revenue in the UK, we hooked into a national database of personal details available to a wide variety of government departments. We used Telnet clients via an intranet, and although I forget the precise specs of the central server, it sure as hell didn't need a RAM disk that big.
We never had any problem waiting for results, either. On a really bad day, you'd get maybe a 1s lag between hitting enter and a results screen coming up.
So if the US.gov needs a RAM disk that big, it's one fricking huge database. I have to wonder what sort of info it carries (part of the size might be due to things like photos, fingerprints, criminal records - stuff our DB didn't use), and how many people are on there (100% of the population?).
The scary thing: what if 2.5TB is a fraction of the database size - say, 25 to 50%? You'd still get reasonable performance, but the idea of a government holding 5-10TB of personal data seems positively Orwellian. "Big Bush is watching you"?
Disclaimer: I am not a techie, a lawyer or a government analyst. And it's only 5 years since I junked my Amiga 500, which did perfectly well with a mere 1MB of RAM, so maybe I'm used to thinking on a different scale. If you feel I'm wrong in any way, please feel free to correct me - I actively appreciate it!
'reversing the polarity' usually only works in Star Trek:)
Rubbish.
During the late 1960s/early 1970s, when Jon Pertwee was in the title role, most technical problems on Doctor Who were solved by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Peter David and Bill Mumy deliberately wrote a similar gag into their show Space Cases in 1997. And anyone who's seen the stage musical Return to the Forbidden Planet knows that you absolutely, positively, never reverse the polarity of the klystron generator!
Parent has good science but loses (2D10+5) geek points for incompletely researched sci-fi reference;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, Mr. Data... now would someone please explain that to me in English? :-P
* reads man lart while he waits for someone to hit him with a cluestick*
Good call on bringing up the point about the window managers running on top of a GUI. I never actually knew that...
You've managed to echo my feelings precisely AND teach me some new info about Linux. Thanks for the insight!
From the article:
/dev/clue ;-)
The question then is: many strong proprietary companies such as Microsoft are moving full speed ahead on high-level managed language platforms. Can open source compete, or is it too unable to make hard decisions? Rephrased: is there some way we can find to move away from C/C++, without causing massive alienation and forking?
It's time to start the discussion. Rather than fooling around in the background, companies should get involved in a broad community process where we work out a common direction for the open source desktop codebase. [emphasis mine]
I'm not a coder, or technical in any form, but I can see how this makes sense. I'd love to adopt Linux but am still trying to mount
It's my guess that more people would want to adopt Linux distros, regardless of their flavour, if the open source OS community worked out those kind of specs as a group, so that different desktop versions of Linux were broadly the same.
(Yes, I know about the kernel, but matters that the article addresses seem to be important. IMHO, it could harm Linux in the future if different distros become too divergent, leading to a loss of interoperability or the requirement of, say, 14 different varieties of OpenOffice.org depending on your distro.)
lynch.mob?
anthill.mob?
marriedtothe.mob?
beingchasedbyanangry.mob?
I've never seen that movie. I did consider making a Wacky Races reference, though.
Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire is the only reason I'm not going to put Linux on my laptop. I've been playing that game since 2000, on and off, and although I want to convert my desktop box to Linux, I'm not even going to try with the laptop. All my good games (AC, Homeworld...) run on it ;-)
(well, that and I need a Windows machine to do my coursework...)
I have a funny feeling some film studies geek is going to follow the action with a DV camera, and edit the raw footage into a movie using the soundtrack from "Cannonball Run"...
I, for one, welcome our autonomous vehicle overlords - even if they do sound like Burt Reynolds.
Grandparent has a fair point, but parent reflects the situation where I am.
I use my university's network for internet access, paying UK60 a year for access in my room. At the start of the year there were a lot of virus-related problems, mostly people bringing machines in from home and plugging them in without a firewall or AV software.
Network Services don't insist on this. They don't insist on a virus scan first. What they DO do is cut you off if your PC is causing a nuisance to the network, because they're only three men taking care of the main servers and staff terminals (public terminals are someone else's responsibility).
A lot of people whine about it, but IMHO it's fair policy. They're busy enough without having to help the blissfully clueless. That said, it wouldn't kill them if your 60 included a CD with, say, ZoneAlarm and AVG on... (I distributed similar CDs to friends, with Mozilla Firebird, just so they didn't pick up anything nasty.)
The moral of the story: well, there are two. The first is "You're paying us for the service, not for us to hold your hand and show you how to use your computer." The second is that some people really need to be beaten around the head with a clue-by-four.
And that, I think, is what we Brits call "taking the piss"... ;-)
See, if I was a techie, I'd've picked that up (the gaffe, I mean - "areal", I could've figured out). Instead, I didn't know it til two people put it down correctly.
I was pretty off-base anyway, guessing that "aureal" was to do with magnetic fields, kinda like the "aurora borealis". Which was probably pretty close to wrong. (Latin was never my strong suit, and I don't know many Greek derivations either)
I'm not techical. Not even remotely knowledgeable about HD sizes and technology. Couldn't tell you what "aureal density" means.
But that article seems pretty suspect to me. I know some OEM PCs have HDs with hidden partitions, but I doubt they'd be half the HD size. Plus unless there's a way to mask partitions from DOS, you could see what was on the HD using, say, fdisk (on a Windows machine - I dunno the Linux equivalent).
I, for one, will not be trying it. I agree with parent in detecting a whiff of bullshit.
Disclaimer: I am not a techie. Please do feel free to correct me on any of the above.
Thanks, AC. I assume you're in the service, so your post has set my mind at rest to a degree. ;-)
Although I'll still laugh when the first Microsoft military-grade OS for full control of battleships or nuclear attack subs comes up with the error "404: Nuclear weapons not found."
That's an interesting post. I'm deeply surprised that someone would take the time to write something so insightful and detailed in response to a short post intended purely as a joke (I just couldn't resist riffing on The Fellowship of the Ring when Elvish languages were mentioned - specifically the part where the Fellowship is trying to open the door into Moria).
I remember a movie from a few years back called Sneakers, where Robert Redford and his buddies actually do fake a voiceprint-based password using fragments of a recorded conversation. I certainly wouldn't trust something like that on critical access.
Anyway, thanks for the effort and the insight. I found it interesting, even though I don't work in the IT industry.
Yep, via departmental intranet. ;-)
AFAIK, said DB is not connected at all to the internet, so it's highly unlikely such a thing could be accessed, even if you were the world's best Black Hat. I'm not even close to being a "leet" hacker...
Then again, what do I know about hacking? Last computer I tried to hack called me Dr. Falken and asked if I'd like to play a game
The point I was trying to make was that sometimes, you pay for something before it's available and expect to get it, but don't.
It was perhaps an oversimplified allegory, but I was just trying to make the point that slipped releases are not necessarily MS's fault. The "terms of sale" of the two examples are different, sure, but at least from my point of view it's a comparable situation, and MS is not the sole offender in promising releases and then not delivering.
i.e. in all fairness, it's not just MS who suffers from release slippage...
Off the top of my head, I don't know any major retailers (or e-tailers) who took pre-orders. My local (small) games store takes pre-orders and special orders for just about anything, and I know they've had a lot of folks wanting money back after Half-Life 2 got delayed... beyond that I couldn't say, I'm not a big gamer. Frankly I was just using it to get a point across - pre-orders in general are bad, and it's all too easy for item X to end up as vapourware.
Agreed. I merely mentioned DNF because it was the most recognizable piece of vapourware I could think of.
Perhaps magazine subscriptions would be a better allegory. I can think of magazines which go monthly, sell a bunch of 12-month subscriptions, then start missing issues or go quarterly at the same cover price. I know if that happens to me, I'd get pretty incensed.
Then again, I'm not much of a techie. Just a guy pointing out that it's inevitable - shit happens, whether in games or business.
That said, I think if I'd ordered on a contract (no refund), I'd expect the entity I had the contract with to work with me in honouring it at some point - say, a partial refund or a rescheduled expiry.
... remember it's not only MS who produce vapourware. Pre-orders for, say, Duke Nukem Forever have gone the same way - although I dare say most retailers offering a pre-order will have issued refunds.
Sadly, in business, slippage does occur and contracts do expire. It's not preferred, but it occurs more than most people would like.
The long and short is, IMHO this is only noteworthy at this time because of the sheer scale in terms of both cash value and number of "victims".
I think his karma just ran over my dogma ;-)
They're still waiting for biometric logon features, namely voiceprint-based passwords. ;-)
"Speak 'friend' and enter!"
Unless the US.mil only use Windows for admin and noncritical purposes, parent scares the holy crap out of me. ;-)
You can just imagine it now. Accidental missile launch. Captain stabs the abort key to self-destruct the missile. Suddenly, weapons, radar, comms, guidance & navigation, the whole bridge gets locked in Blue Screen O'Death.
Hell, you'd lose half your technical staff to applying patches, fixing issues raised by applying patches, and sorting out user privileges. And if the ship decides that the bilge stopcocks are closed when in fact they're open and flooding the lower decks... well, it's an undocumented feature and it'll be fixed in about a fortnight.
Frankly, although I actively support the development of alterative (Linux) OSs, I don't believe any off-the-shelf OS should be used for a situation like this - whether it's administering medication, controlling a nuclear reactor, or keeping the USS Enterprise away from the Puget Sound lighthouse (yes, I know it's an urban legend...), a custom, purpose-written OS built on a solid kernel is the way to go, IMHO. If that OS is based on the Linux kernel and it uses plugins for different equipment and systems, fine - just not Microsoft Windows NT for Warfare
Look at the size of that thing!
When I worked for the Inland Revenue in the UK, we hooked into a national database of personal details available to a wide variety of government departments. We used Telnet clients via an intranet, and although I forget the precise specs of the central server, it sure as hell didn't need a RAM disk that big.
We never had any problem waiting for results, either. On a really bad day, you'd get maybe a 1s lag between hitting enter and a results screen coming up.
So if the US.gov needs a RAM disk that big, it's one fricking huge database. I have to wonder what sort of info it carries (part of the size might be due to things like photos, fingerprints, criminal records - stuff our DB didn't use), and how many people are on there (100% of the population?).
The scary thing: what if 2.5TB is a fraction of the database size - say, 25 to 50%? You'd still get reasonable performance, but the idea of a government holding 5-10TB of personal data seems positively Orwellian. "Big Bush is watching you"?
Disclaimer: I am not a techie, a lawyer or a government analyst. And it's only 5 years since I junked my Amiga 500, which did perfectly well with a mere 1MB of RAM, so maybe I'm used to thinking on a different scale. If you feel I'm wrong in any way, please feel free to correct me - I actively appreciate it!
No, but they'll possibly start reviewing vapourware ;-)
+5 and a cup of tea with Professor Chronotis...
(I really should stop doing obscure sci-fi gags, but I love Cambridge and Douglas Adams!)
'reversing the polarity' usually only works in Star Trek :)
;-)
Rubbish.
During the late 1960s/early 1970s, when Jon Pertwee was in the title role, most technical problems on Doctor Who were solved by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Peter David and Bill Mumy deliberately wrote a similar gag into their show Space Cases in 1997. And anyone who's seen the stage musical Return to the Forbidden Planet knows that you absolutely, positively, never reverse the polarity of the klystron generator!
Parent has good science but loses (2D10+5) geek points for incompletely researched sci-fi reference