Just once I wish some large manufacturer somewhere would adopt the stance that HP used to have, back when Hewlett and Packard were running the show. Back before Queen Bitch of the Universe took over:
Uncompromising quality.
Damn near everything they did was done right, and when it wasn't, they went to great lengths to fix it.
Quality costs money, but you know what? I buy for the long term. I'd rather pay 2-3x up front for something that'll last a lifetime. I'll do that even for equipment that might be obsolete in 5 years because at least I'll know that it simply won't fail in those 5 years because it's built right.
Computers are harder to do that way, of course, because of the rapid pace of technological advancement, but a good design could make replacement of those bits easy while allowing you to retain the rest. Things like keyboards, mice, cases, power supplies, etc. can be built solid and built to last a very long time because the technology behind them doesn't really change much. As an example, I'm sure many of us here still make use of old IBM buckling-spring keyboards, the kind that are 15+ years old and work as well now as they did when they were new. That's the kind of quality I'm talking about.
And yet, you basically can't find anyone who builds things that well anymore. It's not "profitable" or some such crap. But I say that's bullshit. HP managed to get away with it until its founders let go of the reins. They had their up times and down times during the reign of their founders, but their customers were loyal because HP could be relied upon to do it right.
Maybe I'm just looking at things through rose colored glasses, but I still have my HP 41CX and 11C calculators as proof that the equipment they built really was built to last. But who builds things that way these days? Nobody I know of. Not even HP.
That's something that I think needs to change. I just wish someone would step up to the plate...
Feedback is a good thing when it makes a difference. That is, when it's heeded.
Feedback is a bad thing when it's ignored, because it becomes a waste of time and resources and gives the population a false sense of accomplishment -- it makes them believe that their voice is important when it obviously isn't.
In this case, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that the latter option is what's actually happening.
Governments no longer listen to the people. They listen almost exclusively to corporations.
Interestingly, I've noticed this doomsday scenario doesn't really happen that often anymore. I was always the go-to guy amongst family and friends for fixing computer issues, and for the last year or so, no one has bothered me at all.
That's quite interesting, actually. I suspect the primary reason has less to do with SP2 for XP and more to do with the way spyware, spambots, etc. are written these days: to use relatively few resources in order to avoid detection.
That said, a friend of mine who does regular Windows support for the people he knows has to fairly regularly clean things up for them, despite SP2. The people who give him the fewest problems are the ones he's set up to run with restricted user privileges.
So things probably have improved a bit, but I honestly can't say how much.
The problem is, when you can't explain why in terms that matter to them, they'll tune you once again. They don't care. You can't make them care. You need a better lever than technical mumbo-jumbo.
Oh, that's easy.
"Because there's no way in hell I'm going to help you out when the piece of shit OS you're running takes a dump on you. At that point you will care about all this technical mumbo-jumbo, because only someone who understands it will be able to save your ass. I'm not going to help you out when that happens because the OS you've chosen to run is an unsupportable piece of crap."
It's funny how the "technical mumbo-jumbo" suddenly starts to matter when the shit hits the fan.
I could go on and on about what made Amiga great, but every time I even mention it, people immediately place me in the slot marked, "crazy." I'd like to see more Amiga philosophy in modern software design, but even I have to admit that light of Amiga may be irretrievably fading. Really, you people have no idea what you missed...
Man, ain't that the truth.
Imagine owning a computer that was not only at least 2 years ahead of everything else around it, but also at the same time was something that you, as a computer-oriented individual, could completely understand the internal workings of. It was a platform that made it easy to do magic.
The OS was not only efficient, internally it was dirt simple. You could read the assembly source code for the OS and understand the whole thing without breaking a sweat. The way they wrote it and the way they managed the internal data structures was a thing of beauty. I've not seen anything like it since.
The only failing of the Amiga was that it lacked hardware memory protection. If it had that, it would have been bulletproof.
If anything proved that you don't need complexity to achieve power, the Amiga did. I think we've forgotten that. There is very little in the computing world today that is elegantly simple (both internally and externally) and powerful at the same time anymore.
And yeah, you people who haven't experienced that elegantly simple power have no idea what you missed.
Re:Switching XP - Amiga
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I understand that now software do a lot more, we have higher resolutions and color depths... But does it justifies the lack of performance, the bloat? I mean, OpenOffice will crawl on a machine with less than 256MB, and a average Amiga had no more than 4MB of RAM!
Welcome to the world of object-oriented programming. What, you thought all that crazy inheritance was free???
Applications are bloated because developers try to (and fail to, as it turns out) "optimize" for lowest development time, and they think they'll be more "productive" if they use a bunch of classes from some class library that kinda sorta does what they need (hey, no big deal, just subclass from it and reimplement the methods that don't do what you want, right?). But if everything I've seen is even halfway true, there is usually no real reduction in development time, and the resulting programs are usually even more opaque (and thus harder to debug) than they would be if they had been badly written in a procedural language. At least with a procedural language, what you see is what you get, and tracking down the flow of control is relatively straightforward. With an object-oriented program, what appear to be straightforward method calls tend to be very difficult to track back to their actual source unless you use some magic tool to do the job for you. End result: the program is harder to understand (is it really using the class method you think it is, or is it using the method of one of its ancestors?), harder to debug, and harder to maintain.
Object oriented programming is a tool, just like procedural programming is. There are certain classes of problems where it's very obviously the right tool for the job, and sometimes it's the right thing to use even in the middle of a procedural program. But it's not a general-purpose programming method.
If you think I'm wrong about all this, try justifying the 30-40 levels or so of inheritance nesting that you get from a typical Java stacktrace. Each of those levels represents an additional level of inefficiency that simply wouldn't be there if the program had been written properly (which may or may not involve writing it in an object-oriented fashion).
The BSD license doesn't mean that you have to release the source code to any modification/redistributions. It just says that modifications/redistributions (weather that is source, binary or both) have to be released under the BSD license. In that regard I don't think it would have much impact on Apple (I presume you are referring to Mac OS X) or Microsoft (I presume you are talking about their FTP app.
I think your understanding of the license is basically correct, but you don't seem to be seeing the implications.
There is one point that has a huge effect on both Microsoft and Apple: redistribution in any form not explicitly allowed by the licence is prohibited. That's standard copyright law. Additionally, you can't add licensing terms that conflict with the original terms. It's unclear to me whether or not you can add any terms at all (e.g., by adding the GPL to it).
That means one of two possible things: either Apple and Microsoft are in violation of copyright because they are redistributing code that incorporates BSD code under a more restrictive non-BSD license, or the recipient of said code has the rights to the binaries under the BSD license (and can thus freely redistribute the binary!).
Those are surprising and far-reaching conclusions.
With respect to Microsoft, it could have a big impact, because they incorporate BSD code into their TCP/IP stack if I'm not mistaken. In the case of OSX, a very large amount of the code is BSD code or incorporates BSD code. In both cases, they relicense the binary code under a far more restrictive (as regards redistribution) license than the BSD license.
Performance-wise, yes. In terms of resource usage, yes. We have deployed a number of commercial groupware systems implemented in Java, as well as several implemented in Perl. We have found the Perl systems to perform far better. We'd take the time to try to figure out why the Java solutions perform so poorly, but it just wouldn't be feasible. The Perl solutions meet our needs more than adequately, so we use them.
There's a reason Java applications seem to be, on average, slower and more heavyweight than their equivalents in Perl: it seems to encourage complexity.
The typical Java stacktrace you get when something goes wrong is, in my experience, some 30+ levels deep. That's ridiculously high.
That means that Java applications are built with class upon class upon class upon class, to a ridiculous degree. The amount of subclassing that happens in a typical Java program is much worse than any other language I've seen, by a factor of 4 or more.
It's so bad that you have to use a language-aware tool like Eclipse to keep track of it all. Without the ability of such tools to track the class relationships, such programs would literally be impossible to maintain.
And what does all that extra complexity buy you? Why, nothing at all, actually. The software isn't any easier to develop, debug, or maintain than it would be in any other reasonable language. In fact, I would argue that it's harder to maintain because of the additional complexity.
The choice to make a program more complex is one that must be made very carefully. Java somehow seems to encourage developers to increase the complexity of their programs. Whether it's because of the language (which includes the class libraries in this case) or the development tools I cannot really say. I suspect it's a combination of both.
Because of these issues, I've been completely underwhelmed with Java as a development and execution platform. As a language it has some strengths, as all languages do, but I don't find any of those strengths particularly compelling, and find the weaknesses to be very significant.
Java actually turns out to be a reasonable language to write programs in, but it requires an extreme amount of discipline and you don't get a whole lot in exchange. If I want my programs to be maintainable, I'll write them in Ada or something.
I swear, both countries appear to be in a race to see which country can reach the bliss of fascism first.
To be honest, it's not clear to me exactly why this is. I mean, I understand why it's happening in the U.S.: the U.S. government is controlled by its largest corporations. There are various reasons for that, ranging from the chokehold on the media those corporations have to the campaign finance setup and lobbying setup that exists in the U.S. Fascism by definition is more friendly to big corporations than any other form of government, so it's easy to see why those who run the biggest corporations want fascism to rise in the U.S.
But the UK? Why is it going down that path? I was rather under the impression that the media wasn't a slave to the big corporations there, which means that the people there should have a somewhat less biased source of information on which to base their voting decisions. Money is power so I can see the big corporations having some influence there, but nothing like in the U.S.
And yet, the paths both countries are following are almost identical. What gives?
I lost a long-time friend in the WTC and I had family right next door to it at the time who could very well have been killed... The idea of an elaborate conspiracy is preposterous and is based on psuedo-science at best.
I'm truly sorry for that. Losing a long-time friend in a tragedy like the WTC must be one of the hardest things to endure. I'm very happy that your family survived.
And while I agree with you that the idea of an elaborate conspiracy is hard to swallow, that fact should not cause you to discard it out of hand. Such things should be left on the table to be used when no other explanation will suffice.
Which is another way of saying that if you want to know the truth, you must be willing to go wherever the evidence and the laws of physics lead.
No matter how you, I, or anyone else might feel, emotion simply cannot and does not negate physics. The real world always wins in the end. So regardless of how we might feel, the bottom line is that physics does not allow for the collapse of the WTC to have been caused solely by the crash of a couple of airliners (one into each tower) and the subsequent fires.
I've read the NIST FAQ. Their response to question 6 is basically a nonresponse, a bald assertion without any calculations or modeling to back it up. They basically assert that the structure of the building, which was overdesigned to hold the building up both dynamically and statically (the building had to withstand winds and other external factors that would place greater compressive load on some parts of the structure while placing reduced load on other parts, which means that all parts had to be designed to take the greater compressive loads) and which was also designed to withstand the loss of structural support as a result of the collision of a 707 airliner, presented no significant resistance to the collapse front.
This paper does some analysis of the energy and momentum involved, and this adds further clarification. The conclusion of both papers is basically that the collapse could not have been sustained with the support structure in place. That conclusion is arrived at under assumptions that greatly favor collapse.
So to assert without accompanying analysis that the structure could not and would not provide any significant resistance to collapse, as NIST does, goes well beyond reason. It asks the reader to believe in miracles.
To bring this discussion back on the topic that started it, that belief in miracles and lack of reasoning ability is exactly what TheGratefulNet was talking about here in his comment that kicked this whole thing off.
Damn, you had me up until the 9/11 comment. Granted I don't know your exact beliefs on it, but I've never seen a theory on 9/11 start like that and end with sound reason and evidence.
Really? There's only one fact, which is easily verifiable just by looking at the many video footage sources available, that you need to know to deduce the most likely explanation for the destruction of the WTC. That fact is that the towers came down at nearly free-fall speed.
Physics takes care of the rest. For a building to come down at nearly free-fall speed, there has to be almost no functioning structure left in the building. Why? Because any remaining functioning structure, even if that structure's strength has been compromised, will absorb some of the energy of the collapse and thus serve to increase the amount of time it takes for the collapse to occur.
Therefore, simply weakening the support structure beyond the point that collapse is possible isn't sufficient. If the structure were weakened just beyond the point that collapse is possible, the building would collapse but would do so slowly, as the energy of the collapse is absorbed by the remaining strength of the structure. The weaker the remaining structure, the less energy the structure can absorb. The weaker the structure, the closer to free-fall speed the building will collapse at. Conversely, the stronger the structure, the further away from free-fall speed the collapse will occur.
And so, for the building to collapse at nearly free-fall speed, the strength of the internal structure of the building must be almost completely removed. Not just compromised to the point of making collapse possible, but removed. And not just in certain sections of the building, but everywhere in the building, for if there are any reasonably large sections of the building that have any reasonable percentage of their strength left, they will absorb some of the energy of the collapse and thus increase the amount of time of the collapse.
Even if the heat from the aircraft collisions and subsequent office fires were sufficient to weaken the entire structure of the building to the point that it could no longer keep the building standing, there's not nearly enough power (energy expended in a given period of time) there to weaken the entire structure enough to cause it to lose all its strength, even temporarily.
There are other facts that are relevant, too: the collision and subsequent fires took place primarily towards the top of the buildings. The further towards the top of the building the sources of energy are, the harder it is to compromise the structure towards the bottom of the building. The structure at the bottom is the structure that needs to be compromised the most.
If the collisions from the aircraft and the subsequent fire aren't enough to remove almost all the strength from the entire structure of the building, that means something else did. And for that, the most reasonable, plausible explanation I've ever heard is some sort of manual intervention. In other words, controlled demolition.
The rest is a matter of details (that is, determining the specific methods used to remove the structural strength from the building). But physics alone is enough to get you to the point where it becomes clear that the collisions and subsequent fires are not sufficient to explain the collapse.
I am very busy at work and suffer under the delusion that the idea of electronic communication is to get ones point accross and not to have it reviewed for grammer, spelling or punctuation or to be saved for posterity.
Unfortunately, grammar, spelling, and punctuation all have an effect on how well you get your point across because they all contribute to the clarity of the communication. I'm not saying that if you have perfect grammar, spelling, and punctuation, that your point will magically come across clearly or anything, but rather that without those things your point will not come across as clearly as it would otherwise. Such is the nature of written communication, electronic or not.
All I can do is to encourage you and others to proofread your writings before firing them off. You might not catch all the errors but you will catch some, and you may even find that the effort improves your ability to write correctly the first time. That will be especially valuable to you when you find yourself having to write a document in a professional capacity.
Finally (and perhaps unfortunately), you might want to reexamine your thoughts about your electronic communications being saved for posterity. Chances are they will be, whether you want them to be or not. It's probably best to operate under the assumption that whatever you say will basically live forever. It's certainly best to write software that way.:-)
ACC is not quite that bad (yet). 9 char pwd. We ARE, however, going to the Standard Desktop Configuration (SDC) as of Jan 31. No admin accounts, no Outlook webmail, everything very much locked down. Which is fine for 99% of the poeple out there, but as a developer, I find it a real a real PITA.
"What?? I can't change the clock on the PC? How am I supposed to test this function that generates a string based on the time?"
"What? I can't defrag my own harddrive?"
"What? I can't create a folder in C:\?"
I hate to sound like a dick, but....good!
By being forced to develop your software as a restricted user, you're forced to ensure that your software will run with restricted user privileges. You're forced to use the proper means of determining the user's home directory, their temp directory, etc. You're forced to use the HKCU registry to store any registry items. You're forced to make the software multiuser-capable.
That's the way it should be. If most software had been written like that from the beginning, Windows would probably be a lot more secure for the general population because they would be able to comfortably run as a restricted user and know that all their software would Just Work.
So while it may be more painful as a developer to run as a restricted user, the pain does have a rather substantial payoff. Hopefully that'll make the pain a bit more bearable.
While centralization of data storage is a good idea, it would not solve the entire problem. There are still multiple vectors for data leaks including USB drives, CDR, web-based email or forums, or even network transfers.
None of which are addressed by encrypting the client system's drive, of course.
The purpose of encrypting the drive is to make it difficult for the data to be compromised in the event the system gets lost or stolen. It does nothing to address intentional leaks, and neither does the use of thin clients.
I believe the point the GP was making is that using thin clients and leaving the data on the server accomplishes the same goal as encrypting the drives do, but in a more manageable way.
If you wanted or expected more, you should have asked for it up front. It amazes me that people complain about not getting something they didn't ask for in the first place.
If your employer wanted or expected more than 40 hours a week out of you, then they should have asked for it up front. It amazes me that corporations complain about not getting something they didn't ask for in the first place.
See? It goes both ways. Or, rather, it should. But of course, it doesn't, because employers have far more power over employees than the other way around.
Even so, unless you believe that corporations are as much in the wrong about expecting more out of their employees than they explicitly ask for up front, you should probably STFU about employees asking for things up front.
How shocking! Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Film at 11!
I'm sorry, but due to the newly passed Freedom Laws, the film will not be shown because it has not been approved by the newly formed Ministry of Freedom. Thank you for your understanding.
"'The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.'"
Yeah, because "likely" and "certain" are obviously the same thing in the British government's eyes.
Even if you dispense entirely with the notion of free will, locking up someone before they've committed a crime just because they might is the antithesis of justice.
And it's exactly what I would expect out of a government that seems to be using 1984 as a "how-to" manual.
I swear, the British and the Americans must be in a race to see who reaches totalitarian bliss first...
A justice system that is so where money often plays such a key role in influencing the outcome is a very disfunctional justice system.
It's not a justice system, it's a legal system. Viewed from that perspective, it suddenly makes a lot more sense, because that perspective makes it clear who the system serves (hint: it's not the people of the U.S.).
Politicians who wanted to get elected used to have to go out, meet the people, and build grass roots support. They'd get elected locally, and supporters of their values further afield would notice, and help elect them to higher office later on by publicising for them. This requires relatively little money and is pretty much immune to Big Media bias, but it requires a personal touch that takes a lot of hard work, and most politicians today go for the easy option of buying Big Media coverage instead.
Well, back then the mass media wasn't owned by huge corporations -- it was owned by quite a number of smaller corporations. The end result was a lot more competition in the media space and a much wider variety of opinions, viewpoints, etc. In that kind of environment, grassroots campaigning was effective. The media was simply another part of it.
Today, grassroots campaigning can't work, because the media works against it. If I'm not mistaken, most of Howard Dean's support came from grassroots. The media quickly asserted its power and his campaign died a quick death.
All of which illustrates my point: the situation today is very different, and the campaigning techniques that worked 20+ years ago simply cannot work today. The internet is the closest thing we have to a grassroots-friendly medium, and the corporations are working very hard to eliminate it as a viable means of creating grassroots support (and thus subverting the mass media). DRM (in the form of TCPA and other technologies) is the biggest threat to the internet, in my opinion. The same corporations that want to maintain control over the voters are the ones that are pushing the hardest for the most draconian DRM.
The sheer amount of power those corporations have over the political process in the United States and Europe (think software patents would even be on the table in the EU if it weren't for them?) means there's a huge chance that they'll succeed in their goal of turning the internet into the equivalent of cable TV -- communications on their terms only.
Again, I personally believe that this is only a matter of time, that the spin doctors' days are numbered, and that the world will be a much nicer place when we have more considered, representative politics and less sound-bite-driven mass-media crap.
After all, it's the season of miracles. A man can dream, can't he?:-)
Considering that almost the entire world is descending at an accelerating rate towards authoritarian police statehood, I think your dream will remain just that. I think we're far too gone now to recover from it now. From where I'm sitting, global fascism looks like it's unavoidable. The forces that are in favor of it are too strong by far for things to turn out any other way...
Actually, there are several examples here in the UK where popular discontent has resulted in major changes in government policy in recent years.
Ah. The UK. Not the US. Though it appears to me that the UK is swiftly moving in the same direction as the US has been headed for a long time.
That aside, your whole argument has one fundamental problem: businesses don't vote, people do. Until you have a political system so corrupt that businesses do get a vote like citizens -- and this has never happened anywhere, to my knowledge -- the support of businesses and lobby groups is only as good as their money.
No, it doesn't depend on their money, it depends on their control. You can't vote for someone whose existence you know nothing about and very few people will vote for someone they've heard little about (especially little good). Like it or not, most people get this information from the mass media. The large corporations are in complete control of the mass media here in the U.S., which means they control the very information most people use to make their political decisions with. This is why politicians in the U.S. don't listen to their constituents but instead to the corporations that made their election possible. Politicians who don't (or appear they won't) do the bidding of their corporate masters quickly find themselves out of the running. One need only look as far as Howard Dean to see this (hint: the "Dean Scream" was a media fabrication, and it went very, very far in destroying his ability to seek political office).
In the UK you have the BBC, which helps. But I suspect it only delays the inevitable. I can't really comment on the UK situation since I don't know what it takes to become a viable political candidate there, but I'd bet it takes more than just popular support.
Then the people will cease to accept it, DRM will become a political timebomb, and the politicians and lawyers will turn on the tech and media companies who advocate DRM like piranha in a frenzy. It always ends this way, when something good is corrupted by corporate interests; it's only a matter of time.
You think so, huh? Got any examples within the last 20 years of this happening? I don't. I suspect you don't, either.
Things are different now than they used to be. The politicians don't listen to the people anymore because they don't have to. They listen to the corporations because they do have to. Failing to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors would guarantee their loss of the next election. Politicians are commodities -- there's always another politician willing to do anything to get elected. And since gaining the favor of the media (which means gaining the favor of the corporations) is a prerequisite for getting elected...well, you can see where that leads.
Back when there was real competition in the mass media, politicians actually had the luxury of listening to the voting population. Today, every mass media organization worth mentioning is owned by one of a very small handful of very large corporations, and all these big corporations have lots of common interests, like preventing the little guy from being able to speak too loudly.
So no, it's not only a matter of time before the people ultimately get what they want. The people no longer have any real power. The corporations do. The people will end up living with what they're given, because their only alternative will be to do without entirely.
I've always had a huge interest in space. The sooner we're able to permanently and independently live in space, the better.
But a permanent, independent manned presence in space isn't likely to happen within our lifetimes. Why? Because:
NASA is nothing more than a convenient means to funnel money from the taxpayers to the big defense contractors. And for the foreseeable future, the resources required to research, develop, and build a permanent independent manned presence in space aren't available to anything less than a large government, so you can count private interests out here. The amount of energy required to move back and forth between earth and space is far too great to make the finances work out in favor of getting materials from space, so the private sector can be counted out for the foreseeable future.
A permanent manned presence in space that isn't truly independent will be very expensive to maintain. More expensive than most governments have shown themselves willing to pay for except in the most dire of perceived circumstances, and even then only temporarily. Temporary != permanent.
Any group of people who are in space permanently and independently will be a group of people the governments on the earth are going to want to keep on a tight leash. Why? Because once you're in space and have enough technology to be truly independent, you suddenly have a very large amount of power over the earth-dwellers. Why? Because to live independently in space means you have to be able to manufacture everything you need to survive, including ships, fuel, food, air, etc. You have to be able to get to the raw materials required for all that and move them (in some form) into space. The moon is better than earth for this but true independence probably means being able to mine asteroids and comets for that. That probably means you can move around reasonably large masses. If you can move around reasonably large masses then you can drop those masses (and other things) onto earth, which means you now have the equivalent of WMDs. No earth government is going to be willing to risk having their power usurped by some group of space-dwellers.
The bottom line is that an independent permanent manned presence in space simply is not going to happen. Earth-based governments won't allow it because they want to maintain their power. And a dependent manned presence in space is too costly to maintain. The only way such a presence will ever happen is through a power struggle between governments. The presence will thus last only as long as the power struggle continues.
As a big fan of hard science fiction, I find this to be very depressing. But reality always wins in the end, and reality in this case is that it looks like we're going to be stuck here on earth for a very, very long time.:-(
I forgot to mention why this depends on the timing.
If Linux develops a large enough following soon enough, then it will become politically unpalatable to mandate DRM, and without that your vision that DRM will go by the wayside due to the popularity of Linux may happen. But unless Linux develops a large enough user base fast enough, the DRM mandate will happen and, at that point, Linux will literally disappear from everywhere but maybe the server room, because the entity (most likely Microsoft, but it might wind up being some group controlled by the **AA and friends) that controls the signing keys will want it to disappear from the desktop.
Regardless, if such a mandate comes to pass, free software development will almost certainly grind to a screeching halt, as development will require, at a minimum, the acquisition of a very expensive set of keys. And that assumes that such keys are available to free software developers at all. Those who control the keys will almost certainly preferentially favor their "friends", and that won't be anyone who likes free (as in speech) software.
DRM that is controlled by anyone but the end user is ultimately and fundamentally antithetical to "free speech" software.
Slashdot Mirror
Just once I wish some large manufacturer somewhere would adopt the stance that HP used to have, back when Hewlett and Packard were running the show. Back before Queen Bitch of the Universe took over:
Uncompromising quality.
Damn near everything they did was done right, and when it wasn't, they went to great lengths to fix it.
Quality costs money, but you know what? I buy for the long term. I'd rather pay 2-3x up front for something that'll last a lifetime. I'll do that even for equipment that might be obsolete in 5 years because at least I'll know that it simply won't fail in those 5 years because it's built right.
Computers are harder to do that way, of course, because of the rapid pace of technological advancement, but a good design could make replacement of those bits easy while allowing you to retain the rest. Things like keyboards, mice, cases, power supplies, etc. can be built solid and built to last a very long time because the technology behind them doesn't really change much. As an example, I'm sure many of us here still make use of old IBM buckling-spring keyboards, the kind that are 15+ years old and work as well now as they did when they were new. That's the kind of quality I'm talking about.
And yet, you basically can't find anyone who builds things that well anymore. It's not "profitable" or some such crap. But I say that's bullshit. HP managed to get away with it until its founders let go of the reins. They had their up times and down times during the reign of their founders, but their customers were loyal because HP could be relied upon to do it right.
Maybe I'm just looking at things through rose colored glasses, but I still have my HP 41CX and 11C calculators as proof that the equipment they built really was built to last. But who builds things that way these days? Nobody I know of. Not even HP.
That's something that I think needs to change. I just wish someone would step up to the plate...
Feedback is a good thing when it makes a difference. That is, when it's heeded.
Feedback is a bad thing when it's ignored, because it becomes a waste of time and resources and gives the population a false sense of accomplishment -- it makes them believe that their voice is important when it obviously isn't.
In this case, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that the latter option is what's actually happening.
Governments no longer listen to the people. They listen almost exclusively to corporations.
That's quite interesting, actually. I suspect the primary reason has less to do with SP2 for XP and more to do with the way spyware, spambots, etc. are written these days: to use relatively few resources in order to avoid detection.
That said, a friend of mine who does regular Windows support for the people he knows has to fairly regularly clean things up for them, despite SP2. The people who give him the fewest problems are the ones he's set up to run with restricted user privileges.
So things probably have improved a bit, but I honestly can't say how much.
Oh, that's easy.
"Because there's no way in hell I'm going to help you out when the piece of shit OS you're running takes a dump on you. At that point you will care about all this technical mumbo-jumbo, because only someone who understands it will be able to save your ass. I'm not going to help you out when that happens because the OS you've chosen to run is an unsupportable piece of crap."
It's funny how the "technical mumbo-jumbo" suddenly starts to matter when the shit hits the fan.
That's easy!
All you have to do is go through all the frequencies being used by the radio triggers and send a "detonate" signal on each such frequency.
I guarantee you'll detect the explosive when it goes off...
Hey, it's better than having it go off on the plane, right? :-)
Man, ain't that the truth.
Imagine owning a computer that was not only at least 2 years ahead of everything else around it, but also at the same time was something that you, as a computer-oriented individual, could completely understand the internal workings of. It was a platform that made it easy to do magic.
The OS was not only efficient, internally it was dirt simple. You could read the assembly source code for the OS and understand the whole thing without breaking a sweat. The way they wrote it and the way they managed the internal data structures was a thing of beauty. I've not seen anything like it since.
The only failing of the Amiga was that it lacked hardware memory protection. If it had that, it would have been bulletproof.
If anything proved that you don't need complexity to achieve power, the Amiga did. I think we've forgotten that. There is very little in the computing world today that is elegantly simple (both internally and externally) and powerful at the same time anymore.
And yeah, you people who haven't experienced that elegantly simple power have no idea what you missed.
Welcome to the world of object-oriented programming. What, you thought all that crazy inheritance was free???
Applications are bloated because developers try to (and fail to, as it turns out) "optimize" for lowest development time, and they think they'll be more "productive" if they use a bunch of classes from some class library that kinda sorta does what they need (hey, no big deal, just subclass from it and reimplement the methods that don't do what you want, right?). But if everything I've seen is even halfway true, there is usually no real reduction in development time, and the resulting programs are usually even more opaque (and thus harder to debug) than they would be if they had been badly written in a procedural language. At least with a procedural language, what you see is what you get, and tracking down the flow of control is relatively straightforward. With an object-oriented program, what appear to be straightforward method calls tend to be very difficult to track back to their actual source unless you use some magic tool to do the job for you. End result: the program is harder to understand (is it really using the class method you think it is, or is it using the method of one of its ancestors?), harder to debug, and harder to maintain.
Object oriented programming is a tool, just like procedural programming is. There are certain classes of problems where it's very obviously the right tool for the job, and sometimes it's the right thing to use even in the middle of a procedural program. But it's not a general-purpose programming method.
If you think I'm wrong about all this, try justifying the 30-40 levels or so of inheritance nesting that you get from a typical Java stacktrace. Each of those levels represents an additional level of inefficiency that simply wouldn't be there if the program had been written properly (which may or may not involve writing it in an object-oriented fashion).
In global-warmed Russia, islands warm up to you!
I think your understanding of the license is basically correct, but you don't seem to be seeing the implications.
There is one point that has a huge effect on both Microsoft and Apple: redistribution in any form not explicitly allowed by the licence is prohibited. That's standard copyright law. Additionally, you can't add licensing terms that conflict with the original terms. It's unclear to me whether or not you can add any terms at all (e.g., by adding the GPL to it).
That means one of two possible things: either Apple and Microsoft are in violation of copyright because they are redistributing code that incorporates BSD code under a more restrictive non-BSD license, or the recipient of said code has the rights to the binaries under the BSD license (and can thus freely redistribute the binary!).
Those are surprising and far-reaching conclusions.
With respect to Microsoft, it could have a big impact, because they incorporate BSD code into their TCP/IP stack if I'm not mistaken. In the case of OSX, a very large amount of the code is BSD code or incorporates BSD code. In both cases, they relicense the binary code under a far more restrictive (as regards redistribution) license than the BSD license.
There's a reason Java applications seem to be, on average, slower and more heavyweight than their equivalents in Perl: it seems to encourage complexity.
The typical Java stacktrace you get when something goes wrong is, in my experience, some 30+ levels deep. That's ridiculously high.
That means that Java applications are built with class upon class upon class upon class, to a ridiculous degree. The amount of subclassing that happens in a typical Java program is much worse than any other language I've seen, by a factor of 4 or more.
It's so bad that you have to use a language-aware tool like Eclipse to keep track of it all. Without the ability of such tools to track the class relationships, such programs would literally be impossible to maintain.
And what does all that extra complexity buy you? Why, nothing at all, actually. The software isn't any easier to develop, debug, or maintain than it would be in any other reasonable language. In fact, I would argue that it's harder to maintain because of the additional complexity.
The choice to make a program more complex is one that must be made very carefully. Java somehow seems to encourage developers to increase the complexity of their programs. Whether it's because of the language (which includes the class libraries in this case) or the development tools I cannot really say. I suspect it's a combination of both.
Because of these issues, I've been completely underwhelmed with Java as a development and execution platform. As a language it has some strengths, as all languages do, but I don't find any of those strengths particularly compelling, and find the weaknesses to be very significant.
Java actually turns out to be a reasonable language to write programs in, but it requires an extreme amount of discipline and you don't get a whole lot in exchange. If I want my programs to be maintainable, I'll write them in Ada or something.
I swear, both countries appear to be in a race to see which country can reach the bliss of fascism first.
To be honest, it's not clear to me exactly why this is. I mean, I understand why it's happening in the U.S.: the U.S. government is controlled by its largest corporations. There are various reasons for that, ranging from the chokehold on the media those corporations have to the campaign finance setup and lobbying setup that exists in the U.S. Fascism by definition is more friendly to big corporations than any other form of government, so it's easy to see why those who run the biggest corporations want fascism to rise in the U.S.
But the UK? Why is it going down that path? I was rather under the impression that the media wasn't a slave to the big corporations there, which means that the people there should have a somewhat less biased source of information on which to base their voting decisions. Money is power so I can see the big corporations having some influence there, but nothing like in the U.S.
And yet, the paths both countries are following are almost identical. What gives?
I'm truly sorry for that. Losing a long-time friend in a tragedy like the WTC must be one of the hardest things to endure. I'm very happy that your family survived.
And while I agree with you that the idea of an elaborate conspiracy is hard to swallow, that fact should not cause you to discard it out of hand. Such things should be left on the table to be used when no other explanation will suffice.
Which is another way of saying that if you want to know the truth, you must be willing to go wherever the evidence and the laws of physics lead.
No matter how you, I, or anyone else might feel, emotion simply cannot and does not negate physics. The real world always wins in the end. So regardless of how we might feel, the bottom line is that physics does not allow for the collapse of the WTC to have been caused solely by the crash of a couple of airliners (one into each tower) and the subsequent fires.
I've read the NIST FAQ. Their response to question 6 is basically a nonresponse, a bald assertion without any calculations or modeling to back it up. They basically assert that the structure of the building, which was overdesigned to hold the building up both dynamically and statically (the building had to withstand winds and other external factors that would place greater compressive load on some parts of the structure while placing reduced load on other parts, which means that all parts had to be designed to take the greater compressive loads) and which was also designed to withstand the loss of structural support as a result of the collision of a 707 airliner, presented no significant resistance to the collapse front.
This paper does some analysis of the energy and momentum involved, and this adds further clarification. The conclusion of both papers is basically that the collapse could not have been sustained with the support structure in place. That conclusion is arrived at under assumptions that greatly favor collapse.
So to assert without accompanying analysis that the structure could not and would not provide any significant resistance to collapse, as NIST does, goes well beyond reason. It asks the reader to believe in miracles.
To bring this discussion back on the topic that started it, that belief in miracles and lack of reasoning ability is exactly what TheGratefulNet was talking about here in his comment that kicked this whole thing off.
Really? There's only one fact, which is easily verifiable just by looking at the many video footage sources available, that you need to know to deduce the most likely explanation for the destruction of the WTC. That fact is that the towers came down at nearly free-fall speed.
Physics takes care of the rest. For a building to come down at nearly free-fall speed, there has to be almost no functioning structure left in the building. Why? Because any remaining functioning structure, even if that structure's strength has been compromised, will absorb some of the energy of the collapse and thus serve to increase the amount of time it takes for the collapse to occur.
Therefore, simply weakening the support structure beyond the point that collapse is possible isn't sufficient. If the structure were weakened just beyond the point that collapse is possible, the building would collapse but would do so slowly, as the energy of the collapse is absorbed by the remaining strength of the structure. The weaker the remaining structure, the less energy the structure can absorb. The weaker the structure, the closer to free-fall speed the building will collapse at. Conversely, the stronger the structure, the further away from free-fall speed the collapse will occur.
And so, for the building to collapse at nearly free-fall speed, the strength of the internal structure of the building must be almost completely removed. Not just compromised to the point of making collapse possible, but removed. And not just in certain sections of the building, but everywhere in the building, for if there are any reasonably large sections of the building that have any reasonable percentage of their strength left, they will absorb some of the energy of the collapse and thus increase the amount of time of the collapse.
Even if the heat from the aircraft collisions and subsequent office fires were sufficient to weaken the entire structure of the building to the point that it could no longer keep the building standing, there's not nearly enough power (energy expended in a given period of time) there to weaken the entire structure enough to cause it to lose all its strength, even temporarily.
There are other facts that are relevant, too: the collision and subsequent fires took place primarily towards the top of the buildings. The further towards the top of the building the sources of energy are, the harder it is to compromise the structure towards the bottom of the building. The structure at the bottom is the structure that needs to be compromised the most.
If the collisions from the aircraft and the subsequent fire aren't enough to remove almost all the strength from the entire structure of the building, that means something else did. And for that, the most reasonable, plausible explanation I've ever heard is some sort of manual intervention. In other words, controlled demolition.
The rest is a matter of details (that is, determining the specific methods used to remove the structural strength from the building). But physics alone is enough to get you to the point where it becomes clear that the collisions and subsequent fires are not sufficient to explain the collapse.
Unfortunately, grammar, spelling, and punctuation all have an effect on how well you get your point across because they all contribute to the clarity of the communication. I'm not saying that if you have perfect grammar, spelling, and punctuation, that your point will magically come across clearly or anything, but rather that without those things your point will not come across as clearly as it would otherwise. Such is the nature of written communication, electronic or not.
All I can do is to encourage you and others to proofread your writings before firing them off. You might not catch all the errors but you will catch some, and you may even find that the effort improves your ability to write correctly the first time. That will be especially valuable to you when you find yourself having to write a document in a professional capacity.
Finally (and perhaps unfortunately), you might want to reexamine your thoughts about your electronic communications being saved for posterity. Chances are they will be, whether you want them to be or not. It's probably best to operate under the assumption that whatever you say will basically live forever. It's certainly best to write software that way. :-)
I hate to sound like a dick, but....good!
By being forced to develop your software as a restricted user, you're forced to ensure that your software will run with restricted user privileges. You're forced to use the proper means of determining the user's home directory, their temp directory, etc. You're forced to use the HKCU registry to store any registry items. You're forced to make the software multiuser-capable.
That's the way it should be. If most software had been written like that from the beginning, Windows would probably be a lot more secure for the general population because they would be able to comfortably run as a restricted user and know that all their software would Just Work.
So while it may be more painful as a developer to run as a restricted user, the pain does have a rather substantial payoff. Hopefully that'll make the pain a bit more bearable.
None of which are addressed by encrypting the client system's drive, of course.
The purpose of encrypting the drive is to make it difficult for the data to be compromised in the event the system gets lost or stolen. It does nothing to address intentional leaks, and neither does the use of thin clients.
I believe the point the GP was making is that using thin clients and leaving the data on the server accomplishes the same goal as encrypting the drives do, but in a more manageable way.
If your employer wanted or expected more than 40 hours a week out of you, then they should have asked for it up front. It amazes me that corporations complain about not getting something they didn't ask for in the first place.
See? It goes both ways. Or, rather, it should. But of course, it doesn't, because employers have far more power over employees than the other way around.
Even so, unless you believe that corporations are as much in the wrong about expecting more out of their employees than they explicitly ask for up front, you should probably STFU about employees asking for things up front.
I'm sorry, but due to the newly passed Freedom Laws, the film will not be shown because it has not been approved by the newly formed Ministry of Freedom. Thank you for your understanding.
Yeah, because "likely" and "certain" are obviously the same thing in the British government's eyes.
Even if you dispense entirely with the notion of free will, locking up someone before they've committed a crime just because they might is the antithesis of justice.
And it's exactly what I would expect out of a government that seems to be using 1984 as a "how-to" manual.
I swear, the British and the Americans must be in a race to see who reaches totalitarian bliss first...
It's not a justice system, it's a legal system. Viewed from that perspective, it suddenly makes a lot more sense, because that perspective makes it clear who the system serves (hint: it's not the people of the U.S.).
Well, back then the mass media wasn't owned by huge corporations -- it was owned by quite a number of smaller corporations. The end result was a lot more competition in the media space and a much wider variety of opinions, viewpoints, etc. In that kind of environment, grassroots campaigning was effective. The media was simply another part of it.
Today, grassroots campaigning can't work, because the media works against it. If I'm not mistaken, most of Howard Dean's support came from grassroots. The media quickly asserted its power and his campaign died a quick death.
All of which illustrates my point: the situation today is very different, and the campaigning techniques that worked 20+ years ago simply cannot work today. The internet is the closest thing we have to a grassroots-friendly medium, and the corporations are working very hard to eliminate it as a viable means of creating grassroots support (and thus subverting the mass media). DRM (in the form of TCPA and other technologies) is the biggest threat to the internet, in my opinion. The same corporations that want to maintain control over the voters are the ones that are pushing the hardest for the most draconian DRM.
The sheer amount of power those corporations have over the political process in the United States and Europe (think software patents would even be on the table in the EU if it weren't for them?) means there's a huge chance that they'll succeed in their goal of turning the internet into the equivalent of cable TV -- communications on their terms only.
Considering that almost the entire world is descending at an accelerating rate towards authoritarian police statehood, I think your dream will remain just that. I think we're far too gone now to recover from it now. From where I'm sitting, global fascism looks like it's unavoidable. The forces that are in favor of it are too strong by far for things to turn out any other way...
But yes, at least you can dream. For now. :-)
Ah. The UK. Not the US. Though it appears to me that the UK is swiftly moving in the same direction as the US has been headed for a long time.
No, it doesn't depend on their money, it depends on their control. You can't vote for someone whose existence you know nothing about and very few people will vote for someone they've heard little about (especially little good). Like it or not, most people get this information from the mass media. The large corporations are in complete control of the mass media here in the U.S., which means they control the very information most people use to make their political decisions with. This is why politicians in the U.S. don't listen to their constituents but instead to the corporations that made their election possible. Politicians who don't (or appear they won't) do the bidding of their corporate masters quickly find themselves out of the running. One need only look as far as Howard Dean to see this (hint: the "Dean Scream" was a media fabrication, and it went very, very far in destroying his ability to seek political office).
In the UK you have the BBC, which helps. But I suspect it only delays the inevitable. I can't really comment on the UK situation since I don't know what it takes to become a viable political candidate there, but I'd bet it takes more than just popular support.
You think so, huh? Got any examples within the last 20 years of this happening? I don't. I suspect you don't, either.
Things are different now than they used to be. The politicians don't listen to the people anymore because they don't have to. They listen to the corporations because they do have to. Failing to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors would guarantee their loss of the next election. Politicians are commodities -- there's always another politician willing to do anything to get elected. And since gaining the favor of the media (which means gaining the favor of the corporations) is a prerequisite for getting elected...well, you can see where that leads.
Back when there was real competition in the mass media, politicians actually had the luxury of listening to the voting population. Today, every mass media organization worth mentioning is owned by one of a very small handful of very large corporations, and all these big corporations have lots of common interests, like preventing the little guy from being able to speak too loudly.
So no, it's not only a matter of time before the people ultimately get what they want. The people no longer have any real power. The corporations do. The people will end up living with what they're given, because their only alternative will be to do without entirely.
I've always had a huge interest in space. The sooner we're able to permanently and independently live in space, the better.
But a permanent, independent manned presence in space isn't likely to happen within our lifetimes. Why? Because:The bottom line is that an independent permanent manned presence in space simply is not going to happen. Earth-based governments won't allow it because they want to maintain their power. And a dependent manned presence in space is too costly to maintain. The only way such a presence will ever happen is through a power struggle between governments. The presence will thus last only as long as the power struggle continues.
As a big fan of hard science fiction, I find this to be very depressing. But reality always wins in the end, and reality in this case is that it looks like we're going to be stuck here on earth for a very, very long time. :-(
I forgot to mention why this depends on the timing.
If Linux develops a large enough following soon enough, then it will become politically unpalatable to mandate DRM, and without that your vision that DRM will go by the wayside due to the popularity of Linux may happen. But unless Linux develops a large enough user base fast enough, the DRM mandate will happen and, at that point, Linux will literally disappear from everywhere but maybe the server room, because the entity (most likely Microsoft, but it might wind up being some group controlled by the **AA and friends) that controls the signing keys will want it to disappear from the desktop.
Regardless, if such a mandate comes to pass, free software development will almost certainly grind to a screeching halt, as development will require, at a minimum, the acquisition of a very expensive set of keys. And that assumes that such keys are available to free software developers at all. Those who control the keys will almost certainly preferentially favor their "friends", and that won't be anyone who likes free (as in speech) software.
DRM that is controlled by anyone but the end user is ultimately and fundamentally antithetical to "free speech" software.