But this is being sold through the web site, not at the stores. Most of the people who buy them probably read about them here at slashdot. I doubt that they sell very many.
I tend to see this as one giant corporate bully giving another giant corporate bully notice. Walmart pushes everyone they buy from to lower their prices. This is just their way of trying to muscle MS.
Before Christmas, I saw a complete HP system at Wal-Mart for $468. It was a WinXP box with 256MB of RAM and a monitor. It even came with a CD burner.
Wal-Mart's just trying to break through that price level. It probably ain't going to happen unless MS takes a smaller cut.
First of all, I agree with the guy who said that there are bigger issues this time around than geek issues.
But having said that, I don't understand why the parties stand where they do on this stuff. Hollywood people are huge Kerry supporters, so you'd expect him to be falling all over himself to do whtaever he could to help them out.
Bush, on the other hand, gets creamed by Hollywood types all the time. They donate tons of money to his opponents, do benefits, make statements on talk shows, etc. But Ashcroft is behaving pretty much like the industry's dream AG.
The only explanation for this that I can think of is that the candidates really believe what they say. The Republicans probably really do believe in the private property argument -- I imagine they find piracy deeply offensive.
I don't know -- it's always been a small thing that's puzzled me.
we need a competitive open source webmail app
on
Gmail Adds Features
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The thing I love about gmail is the javascript client -- it's really usable.
I'd love to see an open source competitor. Maybe even something that does good full text indexing of your mail, and provides those nifty searches.
Then whether google was going to charge, or whether they'd provide IMAP, or whatever, wouldn't matter. Anyone could do whatever they need.
I don't have any idea how you'd write something like google's mail client -- I didn't know client side javascript was good enough to do something so usable. If anyone knows of any tutorials (books, web sites, etc.), I'd love to hear about them.
"What made it not a pyramid scheme was that it was unintentional. At least, I think it was."
I just don't believe that. I remember people talking about how this was bogus at the time -- AOL got slammed for similar practices. If I knew it was a pyramid scheme, I find it hard to believe that the incredibly sophisticated finance types working for Yahoo! didn't.
I used to live in Chicago. When I first moved there, I wondered why none of the aldermen seemed to be honest. The answer, I think, is that the system prevents honest people from moving up.
I have the same impression of wall street. I don't think that honest managers can run public companies in a way that's competitive. A guy like warren buffet is an obvious counter example, but he's unusual and he dates back to a different era.
By the time these crazy bubble scams came around, we were living in a different world with different expectations. Share prices had to rise quickly and constantly, and the only people who could pull that off were scamsters.
I don't think the geek community has ever really come to terms with what happened on the financial side during the bubble, how crooked the people who ran it really were, or how much damage it did to the economy. The google IPO was surrounded by nostalgia for the bubble -- if only the old days would come back!
Almost all of what this guy says strikes me as questionable at best.
First of all, if you buy a new machine with the OS pre-installed, it will probably be patched almost up to date out of the box.
Second of all, if you're installing your own OS, you're taking on the responsibility to do things in a minimally competent way. That might mean a NAT router, a slipstream installed CD, or just a CD with the service pack burned on it, so you can install it before you plug into the net.
Third of all, you should be using a hardware firewall anyway.
Why not seem like a cease and desist gnome?
on
Dealing with Intruders?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't understand why you'd care how you come off to the people trying to crack into your system.
They're out to do you harm. If one of them gets through and does some damage, you could lose your job.
The whole campaign is so ugly that aggressive spamming wouldn't seem like a really serious annoyance to me. I'm more worried about the lies and character assasination.
What happens when people start doing bad stuff with the tor system? You know it's going to happen...
The model is bad, because the people running the servers (like the old cypherpunk remailers) are supposed to provide services for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, and take the heat when people do malicious stuff with the network.
It seems to me that it's not a bad technical system, but that it fails when you start to think about the social and economic realities of the net.
I've always loved google, but this sort of bugs me.
I think I can predict the flames -- the market decides what the value is, I don't know that the stock will go down any better than the investors know the stock will go up, the google people deserve to get rich, and all of that.
But I remember the dot com days (as do most people here, I'm sure). I think that we're going to see a massive transfer of wealth between unsophisticated small investors who are doing more speculating than investing, and the sharpies running this IPO.
It seems to me that the geek community has never come to terms with exactly what happened in the dot com days, and how dishonest and damaging a lot of the financial shenanigans were. A lot of guys who were ring leaders -- guys like Jeff "profits don't matter" Bezos -- are still respected and admired.
You can say a lot of bad things about MS, and I'd probably agree with most of them. But they never screwed their investors the way that almost every open source IPO did. That's always something that's left out when people talk about the software morality play here.
I don't see why people see this as a good thing for the tech industry. The only way IPOs will be good, over the long run, is if the investors make good returns. With this valuation that's impossible. People are going to get screwed, just like the old days, and it will just revive the bitter taste in everyone's mouth, and make the next IPO that much harder.
I think that the books can be hard for some people to connect with because they're essentially Medieval. Tolkein was a Medievalist, and he wanted to write Medieval books. That's what he did.
I had a lot of trouble with the books at first because the characters seemed so flat. If you compare them to characters if good modern novels -- people in Tolstoy or Proust, or whatever -- Tolkein's characters are pretty cartoony.
Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare "invented the Human" -- that his plays were the first time characters with rich inner lives, complicated motivations, conflicts, and everything else that we think of as "Human" showed up in literature.
But Shakespeare comes after the Medieval period -- if you're writing Medieval books, those are innovations you don't use.
In between the time I first read LOTR and its recent revival, I ended up grappling with Milton, and as part of that effort I read a book by CS Lewis called "The Discarded Image". The discarded image is the old Medieval world view that's been put aside in favor of our more modern views. Lewis felt that if you wanted to understand literature that was written in the Medieval period, you had to have some sense of their outlook, the sorts of things people believed back then. His book is an attempt to help people get up to speed.
I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but it seems to me that LOTR has a lot to offer if you take it on those terms. It doesn't have rich complex characters from a psychological point of view, but it does flesh out that old world view pretty convincingly.
There are a lot of ideas in those books that appeal to me. Sam the gardner is better than a king who makes foolish choices. In the old days, the slot you occupied in society was more or less an accident of birth, and your value was determined when you stood before your maker after your death. A gardner who was honest and true would be better than a king. We don't really feel that way now. Today, a lawyer is almost always better than a garbageman, no matter how the lawyer conducts his business.
There was an old picture of the way society was organized -- people were tied to their lords through bonds of "love and fealty". And in these books, you see a lot of oaths, and loyalty is the highest virtue. That system of values is often contrasted to capitalism, in which everyone is out for themselves, and we all believe that society works itself out pretty well as a result. That seemed coarse to a lot of people at first, though.
I've read some letters that Tolkein wrote to his son Christopher during the war -- he was pretty horrified by the technology and the killing. He seemed to see the direction the world had taken as pretty evil. The winged Nazgul were modeled on military aircraft, I believe.
I once had a teacher who had spent a lot of time studying Medieval thought, and he felt the same way, that we had a fair amount to learn from the old values, that they were superior to our own in many ways. I don't know if I buy that, but there are people who do.
And even though the books aren't explicitly Christian, I think they're very much so implicitly. But it's an older view of Christianity. The corrosive and corrupting nature of sin is a big theme in the books. Just carrying the ring eats away at you. Frodo's problem is an essential human problem -- he's obliged to engage the world pretty directly by carrying that ring, but doing so corrupts him. You have to be willing to engage the world, but those same social connections -- based on bonds of love and fealty -- form your safety net.
I don't know what to make of the massive popularity of the films and the books today. I think their greatness lies primarily in the way they flesh out that old discarded image in a narrative story. As far as I know, there isn't a real Medieval story, dating back from those times, that does it nearly as well. Instead, you have lots of smaller stories that you can sort of cobble together to create a p
I don't know that's not a direct answer to your question, but I think it's one of the main differences between doing this sort of thing on BSD and Linux.
The New York Review of Books is very good, although it takes a lot of time to read an issue thoroughly.
I like Harper's as well, but it's a distant second for me.
I enjoy Linux magazines. I don't always buy them, though -- many of them are from Europe, and they cost $10 or $15 a copy. Sometimes I'll flip through them at my local Barnes and Noble, and make notes of interesting software projects they talk about, so I can look them up on the web.
Do non-standard installers have an effect on security updates?
I've wondered about that with livecd distros that can set up debian systems on a hard disk. If they draw their packages from standard sources, you'd have to figure that the updates would come through ok.
But what about the things the installer itself sets up? Does it all come from packages that will be updated, or does some of the system come from files on the install media that aren't covered by package update?
I have a tragically unhip Archos jukebox that I like a lot, mostly because it uses standard rechargeable batteries and looks like a USB disk to my computer, which means you don't need odd software to use it.
There's an open source firmware replacement for it called Rockbox, which I don't use, and this is one of their FAQ entries:
http://rockbox.haxx.se/docs/faq.html
Obviously, these are different machines, and I don't claim that just because something's true of the Archos it's true of another player.
--
17. You mention supporting Ogg Vorbis and other file types on your list of ideas. What is the status on that?
Pessimist's Answer: At the current time we believe this is not very likely. The Micronas chip (MAS3507) decoder in the Archos does not natively support decoding and there is very little program space in the player to implement it ourselves. The alternative would be to write a software decoder as part of the Rockbox firmware. However, as much as we love our players, the computing power of the Archos (SH1 microcontroller) is not fully sufficient for this need.
Optimist's Answer: We can play any format if only we can write code for the DSP to decode it. The MAS 3507 (and 3587) are generic DSPs that simply have MP3 codecs in ROM. We can download new codecs in them and we will be the first to celebrate if we can get OGG or FLAC or anything into these DSPs. Unfortunately, we have no docs or tools for writing new MAS DSP code and Micronas is very secretive about it. If anyone can help, please get in touch!
The recent release of Tremor (integer Ogg decoder) indicates it uses around 100 KB for lookup tables. That's not unreasonable for a decoder, but we only have 4 KB for both code *and* data. So the grim reality is that Ogg will never be supported by the Archos Players and Recorders.
I used to run a small ISP in Chicago. One day some guys came into our office and said that if we didn't move downtown and plug into a fiber ring they were building, we'd be out of business, that no one would peer to us.
The reality is that our upstream provider was selling bandwidth, and if they didn't do a good job, they'd lose customers, and it's in their interests to keep that bandwidth running as well as possible.
If there was a monopoly on the net, something like this could happen. But in a competive market, as soon as one provider starts to screw people, they'll just move.
Isn't a lot of Cisco's appeal on the hardware side?
I haven't had a router in a few years, but when I did have a couple, they were rock solid. I always assumed that a big part of it was the fact that they didn't have any moving parts.
Wouldn't the computer architecture make an OpenBSD router less stable?
All of these posts are leaving out mSQL
on
Why MySQL Grew So Fast
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think that MySQL had a lot of help from mSQL.
I don't remember the details of the licenses, or exactly what happened, so some of what I say here might be wrong. But wasn't mSQL sort of dominant in this space (people writing simple web/db apps on linux) until they did something ugly with their license?
And wasn't MySQL's API sort of similar to mSQL's, making it easier for projects like PHP to pick up MySQL?
I saw my first spreadsheet on an old Osborne computer. My dad knew a guy who bought small banks, and he had the Osborne and VisiCalc.
Before this guy could buy a bank, he had to value them, and his valuations were always based on a few guesses (predictions) -- what interest rates would be, or whatever (I don't know exactly how he did it).
He told me that when he started doing this stuff with a normal calculator, a pencil, and paper, changing a guess took him a couple of days. Then he got a programmable calculator, and managed to cut it down to about 5 hours. With VisiCalc, it took a few seconds.
The point being that both the programmable calculator and the spreadsheet software gave him an edge in his work -- they made him better at buying banks. They paid for themselves.
*If* no one is using the sorts of software described in this article, and *if* the software really does make you better at making decisions, people should be able to use it to buy banks (or whatever) and do a better job than their competitors. It should give you a leg up in the market place.
That's exactly what happened with spreadsheets. That's why they're popular. A lot of dumb people have started to misuse them, apparently (that sounds plausible to me), but there's no denying that they have provided and continue to provide enormous value to users.
If this new stuff is better, then why isn't Warren Buffet using it? If the answer is "because he's too dumb", why doesn't someone else start using it, and outperform Buffet?
I don't know. This is scary, in a sense. But there's a lot of risk in the world, and you just have to live with it. If my computer gets wiped off, it's not the end of the world.
I know that everyone isn't in a position to say that -- some people are running banks, or whatever. But most people can say it.
We drive cars, even though cars crash and people die in them. Another person can crash into you even if you're doing everything right, and you'll die. We live and work in buildings, even though we know that there are fires every day in large cities. Sometimes people die in fires. You lock your doors, and you make a good faith effort to keep the bad guys out, but if someone really wanted to get in, they could.
You just have to deal with uncertainty in life.
Your computers are never going to be completely safe. The sun will come up tomorrow anyway.
As a practical matter, people who take reasonable precautions *usually* come off pretty well with computers. They can hold on to their data and keep it out of other people's hands. There's no guarantee that will always be the case, but it's been true until now.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is being sold through the web site, not at the stores. Most of the people who buy them probably read about them here at slashdot. I doubt that they sell very many.
I tend to see this as one giant corporate bully giving another giant corporate bully notice. Walmart pushes everyone they buy from to lower their prices. This is just their way of trying to muscle MS.
Before Christmas, I saw a complete HP system at Wal-Mart for $468. It was a WinXP box with 256MB of RAM and a monitor. It even came with a CD burner.
Wal-Mart's just trying to break through that price level. It probably ain't going to happen unless MS takes a smaller cut.
Are the drivers for these things freely available?
Sometimes when you buy a linux machine, it comes with binary drivers that make it hard to run with a mainstream distro.
DV is going to survive as a community, although I doubt there will be any torrents or sharing involved.
The forums are back up now...
First of all, I agree with the guy who said that there are bigger issues this time around than geek issues.
But having said that, I don't understand why the parties stand where they do on this stuff. Hollywood people are huge Kerry supporters, so you'd expect him to be falling all over himself to do whtaever he could to help them out.
Bush, on the other hand, gets creamed by Hollywood types all the time. They donate tons of money to his opponents, do benefits, make statements on talk shows, etc. But Ashcroft is behaving pretty much like the industry's dream AG.
The only explanation for this that I can think of is that the candidates really believe what they say. The Republicans probably really do believe in the private property argument -- I imagine they find piracy deeply offensive.
I don't know -- it's always been a small thing that's puzzled me.
The thing I love about gmail is the javascript client -- it's really usable.
I'd love to see an open source competitor. Maybe even something that does good full text indexing of your mail, and provides those nifty searches.
Then whether google was going to charge, or whether they'd provide IMAP, or whatever, wouldn't matter. Anyone could do whatever they need.
I don't have any idea how you'd write something like google's mail client -- I didn't know client side javascript was good enough to do something so usable. If anyone knows of any tutorials (books, web sites, etc.), I'd love to hear about them.
"What made it not a pyramid scheme was that it was unintentional. At least, I think it was."
I just don't believe that. I remember people talking about how this was bogus at the time -- AOL got slammed for similar practices. If I knew it was a pyramid scheme, I find it hard to believe that the incredibly sophisticated finance types working for Yahoo! didn't.
I used to live in Chicago. When I first moved there, I wondered why none of the aldermen seemed to be honest. The answer, I think, is that the system prevents honest people from moving up.
I have the same impression of wall street. I don't think that honest managers can run public companies in a way that's competitive. A guy like warren buffet is an obvious counter example, but he's unusual and he dates back to a different era.
By the time these crazy bubble scams came around, we were living in a different world with different expectations. Share prices had to rise quickly and constantly, and the only people who could pull that off were scamsters.
I don't think the geek community has ever really come to terms with what happened on the financial side during the bubble, how crooked the people who ran it really were, or how much damage it did to the economy. The google IPO was surrounded by nostalgia for the bubble -- if only the old days would come back!
Almost all of what this guy says strikes me as questionable at best.
First of all, if you buy a new machine with the OS pre-installed, it will probably be patched almost up to date out of the box.
Second of all, if you're installing your own OS, you're taking on the responsibility to do things in a minimally competent way. That might mean a NAT router, a slipstream installed CD, or just a CD with the service pack burned on it, so you can install it before you plug into the net.
Third of all, you should be using a hardware firewall anyway.
I don't understand why you'd care how you come off to the people trying to crack into your system.
They're out to do you harm. If one of them gets through and does some damage, you could lose your job.
The whole campaign is so ugly that aggressive spamming wouldn't seem like a really serious annoyance to me. I'm more worried about the lies and character assasination.
What happens when people start doing bad stuff with the tor system? You know it's going to happen...
The model is bad, because the people running the servers (like the old cypherpunk remailers) are supposed to provide services for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, and take the heat when people do malicious stuff with the network.
It seems to me that it's not a bad technical system, but that it fails when you start to think about the social and economic realities of the net.
I've always loved google, but this sort of bugs me.
I think I can predict the flames -- the market decides what the value is, I don't know that the stock will go down any better than the investors know the stock will go up, the google people deserve to get rich, and all of that.
But I remember the dot com days (as do most people here, I'm sure). I think that we're going to see a massive transfer of wealth between unsophisticated small investors who are doing more speculating than investing, and the sharpies running this IPO.
It seems to me that the geek community has never come to terms with exactly what happened in the dot com days, and how dishonest and damaging a lot of the financial shenanigans were. A lot of guys who were ring leaders -- guys like Jeff "profits don't matter" Bezos -- are still respected and admired.
You can say a lot of bad things about MS, and I'd probably agree with most of them. But they never screwed their investors the way that almost every open source IPO did. That's always something that's left out when people talk about the software morality play here.
I don't see why people see this as a good thing for the tech industry. The only way IPOs will be good, over the long run, is if the investors make good returns. With this valuation that's impossible. People are going to get screwed, just like the old days, and it will just revive the bitter taste in everyone's mouth, and make the next IPO that much harder.
I think that the books can be hard for some people to connect with because they're essentially Medieval. Tolkein was a Medievalist, and he wanted to write Medieval books. That's what he did.
I had a lot of trouble with the books at first because the characters seemed so flat. If you compare them to characters if good modern novels -- people in Tolstoy or Proust, or whatever -- Tolkein's characters are pretty cartoony.
Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare "invented the Human" -- that his plays were the first time characters with rich inner lives, complicated motivations, conflicts, and everything else that we think of as "Human" showed up in literature.
But Shakespeare comes after the Medieval period -- if you're writing Medieval books, those are innovations you don't use.
In between the time I first read LOTR and its recent revival, I ended up grappling with Milton, and as part of that effort I read a book by CS Lewis called "The Discarded Image". The discarded image is the old Medieval world view that's been put aside in favor of our more modern views. Lewis felt that if you wanted to understand literature that was written in the Medieval period, you had to have some sense of their outlook, the sorts of things people believed back then. His book is an attempt to help people get up to speed.
I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but it seems to me that LOTR has a lot to offer if you take it on those terms. It doesn't have rich complex characters from a psychological point of view, but it does flesh out that old world view pretty convincingly.
There are a lot of ideas in those books that appeal to me. Sam the gardner is better than a king who makes foolish choices. In the old days, the slot you occupied in society was more or less an accident of birth, and your value was determined when you stood before your maker after your death. A gardner who was honest and true would be better than a king. We don't really feel that way now. Today, a lawyer is almost always better than a garbageman, no matter how the lawyer conducts his business.
There was an old picture of the way society was organized -- people were tied to their lords through bonds of "love and fealty". And in these books, you see a lot of oaths, and loyalty is the highest virtue. That system of values is often contrasted to capitalism, in which everyone is out for themselves, and we all believe that society works itself out pretty well as a result. That seemed coarse to a lot of people at first, though.
I've read some letters that Tolkein wrote to his son Christopher during the war -- he was pretty horrified by the technology and the killing. He seemed to see the direction the world had taken as pretty evil. The winged Nazgul were modeled on military aircraft, I believe.
I once had a teacher who had spent a lot of time studying Medieval thought, and he felt the same way, that we had a fair amount to learn from the old values, that they were superior to our own in many ways. I don't know if I buy that, but there are people who do.
And even though the books aren't explicitly Christian, I think they're very much so implicitly. But it's an older view of Christianity. The corrosive and corrupting nature of sin is a big theme in the books. Just carrying the ring eats away at you. Frodo's problem is an essential human problem -- he's obliged to engage the world pretty directly by carrying that ring, but doing so corrupts him. You have to be willing to engage the world, but those same social connections -- based on bonds of love and fealty -- form your safety net.
I don't know what to make of the massive popularity of the films and the books today. I think their greatness lies primarily in the way they flesh out that old discarded image in a narrative story. As far as I know, there isn't a real Medieval story, dating back from those times, that does it nearly as well. Instead, you have lots of smaller stories that you can sort of cobble together to create a p
I just saw a blog post today, about user mode linux, and the grief it inflicts:
r e/ misc/manoj.2004.07.27.html
http://www.golden-gryphon.com/blog/manoj/softwa
I don't know that's not a direct answer to your question, but I think it's one of the main differences between doing this sort of thing on BSD and Linux.
They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome.
But this new movie is going to be good. Really, it will. I have a very good feeling about it -- you can tell from the logo.
Is this true? I'm not saying it isn't -- just wondering if anyone who isn't an anonymous coward will back it up.
Are there any instances of the ftp-masters insisting on things that the most of the rest of the project doesn't want?
The New York Review of Books is very good, although it takes a lot of time to read an issue thoroughly.
I like Harper's as well, but it's a distant second for me.
I enjoy Linux magazines. I don't always buy them, though -- many of them are from Europe, and they cost $10 or $15 a copy. Sometimes I'll flip through them at my local Barnes and Noble, and make notes of interesting software projects they talk about, so I can look them up on the web.
I hope this isn't a dumb question, but...
Do non-standard installers have an effect on security updates?
I've wondered about that with livecd distros that can set up debian systems on a hard disk. If they draw their packages from standard sources, you'd have to figure that the updates would come through ok.
But what about the things the installer itself sets up? Does it all come from packages that will be updated, or does some of the system come from files on the install media that aren't covered by package update?
Is there any chance that someone will sell a small and inexpensive gizmo that will let you know if something is tagged?
I can sort of imagine taking one to the store, so I can avoid buying clothing that's trackable.
I was wondering about that.
I have a tragically unhip Archos jukebox that I like a lot, mostly because it uses standard rechargeable batteries and looks like a USB disk to my computer, which means you don't need odd software to use it.
There's an open source firmware replacement for it called Rockbox, which I don't use, and this is one of their FAQ entries:
http://rockbox.haxx.se/docs/faq.html
Obviously, these are different machines, and I don't claim that just because something's true of the Archos it's true of another player.
--
17. You mention supporting Ogg Vorbis and other file types on your list of ideas. What is the status on that?
Pessimist's Answer: At the current time we believe this is not very likely. The Micronas chip (MAS3507) decoder in the Archos does not natively support decoding and there is very little program space in the player to implement it ourselves. The alternative would be to write a software decoder as part of the Rockbox firmware. However, as much as we love our players, the computing power of the Archos (SH1 microcontroller) is not fully sufficient for this need.
Optimist's Answer: We can play any format if only we can write code for the DSP to decode it. The MAS 3507 (and 3587) are generic DSPs that simply have MP3 codecs in ROM. We can download new codecs in them and we will be the first to celebrate if we can get OGG or FLAC or anything into these DSPs. Unfortunately, we have no docs or tools for writing new MAS DSP code and Micronas is very secretive about it. If anyone can help, please get in touch!
The recent release of Tremor (integer Ogg decoder) indicates it uses around 100 KB for lookup tables. That's not unreasonable for a decoder, but we only have 4 KB for both code *and* data. So the grim reality is that Ogg will never be supported by the Archos Players and Recorders.
I used to run a small ISP in Chicago. One day some guys came into our office and said that if we didn't move downtown and plug into a fiber ring they were building, we'd be out of business, that no one would peer to us.
The reality is that our upstream provider was selling bandwidth, and if they didn't do a good job, they'd lose customers, and it's in their interests to keep that bandwidth running as well as possible.
If there was a monopoly on the net, something like this could happen. But in a competive market, as soon as one provider starts to screw people, they'll just move.
If you can get away with it (which seems unlikely), you should just make JPGs of the pages and put them in .cbr files.
It would be much easier than scanning or typing the stuff up, and there's a good free viewer for windows.
I'm amazed that you can OCR handwritten pages at all -- that's incredible. I had no idea the technology was that good.
Isn't a lot of Cisco's appeal on the hardware side?
I haven't had a router in a few years, but when I did have a couple, they were rock solid. I always assumed that a big part of it was the fact that they didn't have any moving parts.
Wouldn't the computer architecture make an OpenBSD router less stable?
I think that MySQL had a lot of help from mSQL.
I don't remember the details of the licenses, or exactly what happened, so some of what I say here might be wrong. But wasn't mSQL sort of dominant in this space (people writing simple web/db apps on linux) until they did something ugly with their license?
And wasn't MySQL's API sort of similar to mSQL's, making it easier for projects like PHP to pick up MySQL?
I saw my first spreadsheet on an old Osborne computer. My dad knew a guy who bought small banks, and he had the Osborne and VisiCalc.
Before this guy could buy a bank, he had to value them, and his valuations were always based on a few guesses (predictions) -- what interest rates would be, or whatever (I don't know exactly how he did it).
He told me that when he started doing this stuff with a normal calculator, a pencil, and paper, changing a guess took him a couple of days. Then he got a programmable calculator, and managed to cut it down to about 5 hours. With VisiCalc, it took a few seconds.
The point being that both the programmable calculator and the spreadsheet software gave him an edge in his work -- they made him better at buying banks. They paid for themselves.
*If* no one is using the sorts of software described in this article, and *if* the software really does make you better at making decisions, people should be able to use it to buy banks (or whatever) and do a better job than their competitors. It should give you a leg up in the market place.
That's exactly what happened with spreadsheets. That's why they're popular. A lot of dumb people have started to misuse them, apparently (that sounds plausible to me), but there's no denying that they have provided and continue to provide enormous value to users.
If this new stuff is better, then why isn't Warren Buffet using it? If the answer is "because he's too dumb", why doesn't someone else start using it, and outperform Buffet?
I don't know. This is scary, in a sense. But there's a lot of risk in the world, and you just have to live with it. If my computer gets wiped off, it's not the end of the world.
I know that everyone isn't in a position to say that -- some people are running banks, or whatever. But most people can say it.
We drive cars, even though cars crash and people die in them. Another person can crash into you even if you're doing everything right, and you'll die. We live and work in buildings, even though we know that there are fires every day in large cities. Sometimes people die in fires. You lock your doors, and you make a good faith effort to keep the bad guys out, but if someone really wanted to get in, they could.
You just have to deal with uncertainty in life.
Your computers are never going to be completely safe. The sun will come up tomorrow anyway.
As a practical matter, people who take reasonable precautions *usually* come off pretty well with computers. They can hold on to their data and keep it out of other people's hands. There's no guarantee that will always be the case, but it's been true until now.