I've been using one flavour of Linux or another for years now and every few months someone says "this is the year of Linux" or some such and everytime we see a decent improvement but nothing like the improvement that would be needed to really cement Linux's position.
I'm starting to wonder, however, if we have actually finally turned the corner. Dell with Linux PCs, AMD / ATI promising open source drivers now this announcement as well as a myriad of others. This is starting to sound like the last few big companies holding out are finally thinking there is something worth looking at with Linux. Ok, it's still small time compared to Windows support but it's a fine start.
Perhaps it won't happen this year but I could see Linux making some good growth in late 2008 through 2009
The only thing we need now is one desktop environment rather than two. Sigh. I've given up even caring which on wins anymore I just wish we had one decent one.
There is a really simple and quick fix for this problem - don't connect the control equipment to a (public) computer network.
What is more interesting than the fact this was possible is the fact that some numb skull thought it might be a good idea to link critical control systems to a public network. I can see that there is scope for remote control, especially with a nuclear plant, but I hardly think sending the data over the Intertubes is the correct way to do it.
While I don't completely disagree with your view I can't completely agree with it either. While at school I was messing around one time, nothing serious just being a bit loud, and a teacher just came along and pulled my ear. Trouble is he pulled it hard enough that I heard a loud pop - my ear has never been the same since and gives me some trouble, I put it down to that event.
Problem is this: if nothng had gone wrong with my ear do I think his action was justified? Yes. Considering something appears to have gone wrong do I still think it was justified? Absolutely not.
I'm not saying that kids don't need a whack now and then but it can have unforseen negative consequences. Saying that I'll probably give my kids a clip when they need it. I don't look forward to doing it but I can see it is necessary sometimes to focus the mind.
While I too have waited and waited for 64bit Java plugin you mention I struggle to penalize Sun for not producing it. Up until recently the adoption of 64 bit was very low in the home market - the only market that uses the plug-in really. What little adoption there was was mostly Linux as well thus reducing the market further. There was just no scope for making any money or even winning wide spread praise for producing the plug-in and hence no business case for it.
If you want to have a crack at Sun for Java why not try the way they did virtually nothing with the language until.net started providing interesting new features. If you don't like that one how about the fact that they provide really nice looking specifications or some interesting stuff and then pretty much abandon them with (generally) at best a poor reference implimentation (e.g. JSF)
Interesting. I have also thought about what is really different now and I also come to the conclusion that for a lot of people not much has changed. There are things you can do now that you couldn't before. In the area that I work the calculations we do would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Couldn't agree more. I've been developing in Java from the early days and it's certainly starting to become time to make a clean break. As long as sun announce that they will continue to support the 1.x language for say 10 years but stop adding new features 2 years from now I think the majority of people will switch.
At the end of the day look at the move from the old days of dos to the newer windows stuff. DOS applications were often impossible to run in 2000 which was only about 10 years after dos applications started to disappear. Microsofts support for legacy applications was almost fanatical IMHO.
I thought at least some of the life around under sea thermal vents was powered by the hear from the earths core which, if I'm not mistaken, comes primarily from radioactive decay deep within the Earth and has nothing to do with the sun.
The radioactive material did come from a star though so you could argue that all (known) life derives it's energy from stars in one way or another.
Quite, the law was recently changed in the UK to allow the police to use the motoway ANPR system to track any suspect. Before the change they could only use it to track "terrorists".
where have I heard this idea before?
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah, in that last bastion of freedom: the UK. If it was restricted to just London I could live with that as who in their right mind would want to go there anyway but this broken thinking is spreading to other cities. If that wasn't enough we now have ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) on all the motorways, some a-roads and I've seen it at pertol stations as well.
Welcome to the police state. Have a nice stay.
That's pretty much what the Java signing process does for you already although it's not very easy to use. The code requests a number of restricted features and you get to choose whether to allow or deny the code. It's not a perfect as it swings madly between allowing everything and being picky over tiny things but it does work fairly well.
While I agree that there are a limited number of reasons why applets should go full screen I think none is a little harsh. I could imagine a situation where you wanted an applet based game to go full screen as, IIRC, you can get better 3D processing full screen. I fully admit though that this is unlikely to happen in reality.
I'm surprised no one has thought of doing this before. What I am curious about though is why the applet doesn't have a border - I suspect it is because it has gone full screen. If that is the case a really easy fix would be to simply ban applets from going full screen unless they are signed.
This has about a much chance of flying as your common or garden stone. Aside from the fact that the article appears to be fundamentally flawed who would really want this functionality? Networks are just too slow for this to really work well. Even dumb terminals have lag and they are generally connected via a high speed network with minimal hops. Factor in the Interweb and this is just another web 2.0 pipe dream. Why is there this obsession with putting everything on the network even when it's not suitable for it?
It might fail for the reasons given (no I've not read the full article yet - naturally) but personally I think it will fail simply because it's too much work for the amount of payback. It would be great if one day magically over night all our data was semantically marked up but that's not going to happen. The reality of it is that we will have to mark up the majority of content by hand. Even then inter-ontology mappings are so difficult that I'm not sure the system would be much use.
Perhaps worse than that though is the prospect of semantic spamming. It would be impossible to trust the semantic mark up in a document unless you could actually process the document and understand it. What would be the point in the mark up in that case?
Agreed, I ran cat5e round our whole house soon after moving in. Best improvement I made. It's not quite as easy as you make out though and if I did it again I'd think more about where I put the cable drops (the patch panel is in the loft). Wireless has also come down in price a lot since I wired up my place so maybe a couple of base stations would be a better solution.
Thanks for the ideas. I'm on a diet at the moment but I've found that I've adjusted to a lower calorie intake pretty well. Salads could become boring - especially considering that I really enjoy bread but they are liveable. There are some really nice shake on salad seasoning's (by Schwartz) that relieve the monotony. The really big win for me though is mashed potato. I can eat piles of the stuff and still loose weight.
I hope gentoo doesn't pass away as it's a clever idea and a good system but really who was it appealing to? Even as a geek is wasn't really interested in compiling my own packages because there is so little to be gained by it. Probably the best solution is to have a system where you can compile your own easily when you want to but generally take the precompiled offering - basically what Debian does. The performance that Gentoo claimed never really appeared AFAIK and I think that would be the only reason for the system.
While I agree with what you are saying I wish people wouldn't prefix "chemicals" with "nasty". It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of chemistry and is anthropomorphizing a non-living thing.
The plastic that the battery is surround in is a chemical, the clothes you where are made of chemicals, the food you eat is chemicals. There are no "nasty" chemicals. There are certainly chemicals that are dangerous to us and there are chemicals that are difficult to dispose of and plenty of other classifications. If this is a lead acid battery (which I'm guessing it is) then the acid, the thing most people would point at and say that's a chemical, is probably one of the least harmful components. The feed stocks for the plastic that made the battery casing are often horribly toxic as are some of the plasticizers that are used. Metal production produces huge quantities of waste material and consumes vast amounts of power.
I suppose the other components don't count as chemicals though as they aren't liquids and under standard conditions they don't really do much.
What is interesting though is that 1.5 million people have actually gone and done something. I would say that constitutes a very large and loud no. Most people are just plain lazy and can't be bothered to form an opinion one way or the other. The unfortunate consequence of that is that generally politician count apathetic voters as being for the motion. Personally I think any motion that is supported by less than x% of the total population should fail automatically (where x is maybe 30%) regardless of whether it wins a majority in the vote or not. This would stop the situation where a motion can get passed that only three people vote.
Parliament should be like a good firewall - default reject (the motion).
I agree that we could spend the money better but to say that $400 Billion in investment would give us the technology to get to the stars in the years time frame is madness. I think you are massively underestimating the distances we are talking about. It is a very very long way to even the nearest star. In fact I think the distance is probably beyond human comprehension in the same way people can't imagine a billion years.
I've been using KDE on Debian for years and I've never found it to be slow - I think KDE is worth another go. I admit that it's perhaps not quite as snappy as Gnome and Windows on the same machine but it's not slow. Redraws are instant, moving windows around doesn't cause a slow down - in fact I struggle to quantify what makes me feel that KDE isn't quite as fast. It feels like KDE applications take a tiny bit longer to start than the equivalent Gnome app but then the KDE applications tend to have more features and the difference is maybe a couple of seconds at most.
May I be about the only person here to say that this sounds like a good idea. Fair enough it's not secure enough to protect your uber secret data but realistically how many of use are carrying information that is that vital in our mobile phone? What most of use want the password for is to make our phone virtually worthless if stolen. If you are carrying around data that is very important then I would suggest so other form of encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using one flavour of Linux or another for years now and every few months someone says "this is the year of Linux" or some such and everytime we see a decent improvement but nothing like the improvement that would be needed to really cement Linux's position.
I'm starting to wonder, however, if we have actually finally turned the corner. Dell with Linux PCs, AMD / ATI promising open source drivers now this announcement as well as a myriad of others. This is starting to sound like the last few big companies holding out are finally thinking there is something worth looking at with Linux. Ok, it's still small time compared to Windows support but it's a fine start.
Perhaps it won't happen this year but I could see Linux making some good growth in late 2008 through 2009
The only thing we need now is one desktop environment rather than two. Sigh. I've given up even caring which on wins anymore I just wish we had one decent one.
There is a really simple and quick fix for this problem - don't connect the control equipment to a (public) computer network.
What is more interesting than the fact this was possible is the fact that some numb skull thought it might be a good idea to link critical control systems to a public network. I can see that there is scope for remote control, especially with a nuclear plant, but I hardly think sending the data over the Intertubes is the correct way to do it.
While I don't completely disagree with your view I can't completely agree with it either. While at school I was messing around one time, nothing serious just being a bit loud, and a teacher just came along and pulled my ear. Trouble is he pulled it hard enough that I heard a loud pop - my ear has never been the same since and gives me some trouble, I put it down to that event. Problem is this: if nothng had gone wrong with my ear do I think his action was justified? Yes. Considering something appears to have gone wrong do I still think it was justified? Absolutely not. I'm not saying that kids don't need a whack now and then but it can have unforseen negative consequences. Saying that I'll probably give my kids a clip when they need it. I don't look forward to doing it but I can see it is necessary sometimes to focus the mind.
Wet mud, wet mud! Do you know how dangerous that can be. Someone could drown in that you know.
While I too have waited and waited for 64bit Java plugin you mention I struggle to penalize Sun for not producing it. Up until recently the adoption of 64 bit was very low in the home market - the only market that uses the plug-in really. What little adoption there was was mostly Linux as well thus reducing the market further. There was just no scope for making any money or even winning wide spread praise for producing the plug-in and hence no business case for it. If you want to have a crack at Sun for Java why not try the way they did virtually nothing with the language until .net started providing interesting new features. If you don't like that one how about the fact that they provide really nice looking specifications or some interesting stuff and then pretty much abandon them with (generally) at best a poor reference implimentation (e.g. JSF)
Interesting. I have also thought about what is really different now and I also come to the conclusion that for a lot of people not much has changed. There are things you can do now that you couldn't before. In the area that I work the calculations we do would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Couldn't agree more. I've been developing in Java from the early days and it's certainly starting to become time to make a clean break. As long as sun announce that they will continue to support the 1.x language for say 10 years but stop adding new features 2 years from now I think the majority of people will switch. At the end of the day look at the move from the old days of dos to the newer windows stuff. DOS applications were often impossible to run in 2000 which was only about 10 years after dos applications started to disappear. Microsofts support for legacy applications was almost fanatical IMHO.
I thought at least some of the life around under sea thermal vents was powered by the hear from the earths core which, if I'm not mistaken, comes primarily from radioactive decay deep within the Earth and has nothing to do with the sun. The radioactive material did come from a star though so you could argue that all (known) life derives it's energy from stars in one way or another.
Quite, the law was recently changed in the UK to allow the police to use the motoway ANPR system to track any suspect. Before the change they could only use it to track "terrorists".
Oh yeah, in that last bastion of freedom: the UK. If it was restricted to just London I could live with that as who in their right mind would want to go there anyway but this broken thinking is spreading to other cities. If that wasn't enough we now have ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) on all the motorways, some a-roads and I've seen it at pertol stations as well. Welcome to the police state. Have a nice stay.
That's pretty much what the Java signing process does for you already although it's not very easy to use. The code requests a number of restricted features and you get to choose whether to allow or deny the code. It's not a perfect as it swings madly between allowing everything and being picky over tiny things but it does work fairly well.
While I agree that there are a limited number of reasons why applets should go full screen I think none is a little harsh. I could imagine a situation where you wanted an applet based game to go full screen as, IIRC, you can get better 3D processing full screen. I fully admit though that this is unlikely to happen in reality.
I'm surprised no one has thought of doing this before. What I am curious about though is why the applet doesn't have a border - I suspect it is because it has gone full screen. If that is the case a really easy fix would be to simply ban applets from going full screen unless they are signed.
This has about a much chance of flying as your common or garden stone. Aside from the fact that the article appears to be fundamentally flawed who would really want this functionality? Networks are just too slow for this to really work well. Even dumb terminals have lag and they are generally connected via a high speed network with minimal hops. Factor in the Interweb and this is just another web 2.0 pipe dream. Why is there this obsession with putting everything on the network even when it's not suitable for it?
It might fail for the reasons given (no I've not read the full article yet - naturally) but personally I think it will fail simply because it's too much work for the amount of payback. It would be great if one day magically over night all our data was semantically marked up but that's not going to happen. The reality of it is that we will have to mark up the majority of content by hand. Even then inter-ontology mappings are so difficult that I'm not sure the system would be much use.
Perhaps worse than that though is the prospect of semantic spamming. It would be impossible to trust the semantic mark up in a document unless you could actually process the document and understand it. What would be the point in the mark up in that case?
anonymizing it straight away! That would be an even quicker solution to the problem.
Agreed, I ran cat5e round our whole house soon after moving in. Best improvement I made. It's not quite as easy as you make out though and if I did it again I'd think more about where I put the cable drops (the patch panel is in the loft). Wireless has also come down in price a lot since I wired up my place so maybe a couple of base stations would be a better solution.
Don't you mean just as oxygen for a delicious instant beverage?
Thanks for the ideas. I'm on a diet at the moment but I've found that I've adjusted to a lower calorie intake pretty well. Salads could become boring - especially considering that I really enjoy bread but they are liveable. There are some really nice shake on salad seasoning's (by Schwartz) that relieve the monotony. The really big win for me though is mashed potato. I can eat piles of the stuff and still loose weight.
I hope gentoo doesn't pass away as it's a clever idea and a good system but really who was it appealing to? Even as a geek is wasn't really interested in compiling my own packages because there is so little to be gained by it. Probably the best solution is to have a system where you can compile your own easily when you want to but generally take the precompiled offering - basically what Debian does. The performance that Gentoo claimed never really appeared AFAIK and I think that would be the only reason for the system.
While I agree with what you are saying I wish people wouldn't prefix "chemicals" with "nasty". It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of chemistry and is anthropomorphizing a non-living thing.
The plastic that the battery is surround in is a chemical, the clothes you where are made of chemicals, the food you eat is chemicals. There are no "nasty" chemicals. There are certainly chemicals that are dangerous to us and there are chemicals that are difficult to dispose of and plenty of other classifications. If this is a lead acid battery (which I'm guessing it is) then the acid, the thing most people would point at and say that's a chemical, is probably one of the least harmful components. The feed stocks for the plastic that made the battery casing are often horribly toxic as are some of the plasticizers that are used. Metal production produces huge quantities of waste material and consumes vast amounts of power.
I suppose the other components don't count as chemicals though as they aren't liquids and under standard conditions they don't really do much.
What is interesting though is that 1.5 million people have actually gone and done something. I would say that constitutes a very large and loud no. Most people are just plain lazy and can't be bothered to form an opinion one way or the other. The unfortunate consequence of that is that generally politician count apathetic voters as being for the motion. Personally I think any motion that is supported by less than x% of the total population should fail automatically (where x is maybe 30%) regardless of whether it wins a majority in the vote or not. This would stop the situation where a motion can get passed that only three people vote.
Parliament should be like a good firewall - default reject (the motion).
I agree that we could spend the money better but to say that $400 Billion in investment would give us the technology to get to the stars in the years time frame is madness. I think you are massively underestimating the distances we are talking about. It is a very very long way to even the nearest star. In fact I think the distance is probably beyond human comprehension in the same way people can't imagine a billion years.
I've been using KDE on Debian for years and I've never found it to be slow - I think KDE is worth another go. I admit that it's perhaps not quite as snappy as Gnome and Windows on the same machine but it's not slow. Redraws are instant, moving windows around doesn't cause a slow down - in fact I struggle to quantify what makes me feel that KDE isn't quite as fast. It feels like KDE applications take a tiny bit longer to start than the equivalent Gnome app but then the KDE applications tend to have more features and the difference is maybe a couple of seconds at most.
May I be about the only person here to say that this sounds like a good idea. Fair enough it's not secure enough to protect your uber secret data but realistically how many of use are carrying information that is that vital in our mobile phone? What most of use want the password for is to make our phone virtually worthless if stolen. If you are carrying around data that is very important then I would suggest so other form of encryption.