Neither apt-get, nor the application you mention, is equivalent to Microsoft's "Add/remove programs" feature. There's no sense in defending that by including alternative packages since the functionality of apt-get simply does not exist at all in a Windows world.
"Add/Remove" gives a limited, inaccurate list of software installed on the system, and runs the uninstallers for that software. That's it.
Apt is a whole system for managing installed apps, detecting dependencies, finding and downloading software, and getting automatic updates.
The program you mention sounds great, but it is a big hack around a fundamental difference between the operating systems. It compensates for the fact that Windows has no such database of applications and files. It's like the old uninstaller applications from the days of Windows 3.x and Windows 9x. It still isn't comparable to apt-get.
...show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste.
The summary is technically right: Thanks to reprocessing fuel, the waste problem has been solved. But since the US doesn't reprocess spent fuel, we don't yet have a solution for that. This won't change until we stop calling it "waste" and start calling it "spent fuel" - the term "waste" is inaccurate.
From the article:
The big problem with controlling waste: Today's reactors capture only about 5% of the useful energy contained in uranium
"Today's reactors" -- meaning, "reactors based on modern technology" do not capture only 5% of the energy. But "Today's reactors" as in "the ones we are building in the US today" do only capture 5% of the energy. It is the most absurd aspect of US nuclear power. Until this is addressed, nuclear isn't going very far.
"And it doesn't involve the Flash being placed in the drive."
What I mean by that is, that this discussion is about something fundamentally different from what the original poster described. Go back way up in the chain, someone was talking about some sort of SSD built-in to the HDD. But such a device cannot know about what files are in what directory, and cache them accordingly. It only sees sectors. Like for example, it could not know that files in the "temporary internet folders" directory doenot need to go to the permanent storage.
So my statement was to clarify that an on-disk SSD could not do what you have done.
Yes, some data could be gleaned indirectly. I'm not so convinced that such a tool is really possible, but maybe one day we will have enough behavioral knowledge that we can code it into a program and make it guess your fetishes.
No software cannot determine your sexual orientation, nor your hidden adultery. It does not read minds, or hearts. It does not magically know events from the past or the future.
Now, if you went online and posted about your homosexual adulterous relationship on a board that publicly reveals your IP address, then yes, a tool could indeed find it. In that case, who defeated the last barrier of your privacy? Did the tool? Or is it your own darned fault?
Incorrect. The California deregulation was something entirely different. Just because they slapped the word "deregulation" onto that monstrosity does not mean that all cases of monopoly-breaking are suddenly bad.
Allow me to explain. But first of all:
If AT+T's network sucks, go for somebody else.
The entire point of this discussion is that people cannot do that. They are stuck with the provider who is tied to their phone, forced into a multi-year contract, and even if they get out of it, they are limited to the carriers who provide decent service in their area.
Now, a history lesson:
This is exactly the sort of nonsense California implemented when they introduced a "deregulation" of electricity.
Before I go into this, let me explain that many states have done this pseudo-deregulation successfully. The California problem had nothing to do with deregulation, and the term deregulation is thrown around to mean 100 different things.
The problem in California was two-fold.
1) During their pseudo-deregulation, the California legislature decided that electricity prices would be fixed. This is true irony here: a government created a regulation overriding the market price, and called it "deregulation". That is definitely --NOT-- deregulation. During this transitional time period, the rules of supply and demand could not function.
California is hot, and during this transitional period, summer came - and air conditioners use lots of power. Under normal market forces, prices would go up when demand went up, and people who respond by conserving electricity. Instead, demand went up and price remained the same, so people kept using electricity at an increasing rate -- until the state ran out of capacity.
2) Electricity is not deregulated. It is heavily hugely highly regulated. Even with price fixing, the market has another solution: Building new power plants. Imagine if there was a shortage of green beans. Farmers would start growing more of them, since there is now money to be made. But that doesn't work with power, because there is so much regulation that you can't just buy a plot of land and build a power plant. The most efficient form of power we have is so heavily regulated it is basically illegal to build them at all. (Nuclear).
It's a good article, and it says essentially the same thing I am saying:
Most important was their assumption that there would always be a surplus of cheap wholesale electricity. So they sold off too much of their generating capacity and had too little of their own supply at a time when rates were still frozen.
aving dismantled key efficiency programs, the utilities now realized that their customers, buying power at fixed costs, had little incentive to conserve.
Wow, it is even worse than I thought:
A bill, AB 1890...Some consumer and environmental groups were furious about a wide range of issues, most notably the reactor bailouts, which they worried (correctly) would prolong the operating life of deteriorating nukes
OMG! Bailouts! I didn't know that. Ha! See: this is what they call "de-regulation" -- how is bailing out a failing company with a product that can't survive part of de-regulation? De-regulation would be letting them go out of business.
This is what allowed Enron to screw a good part of the country
Enron is irrelevant to this discussion. Equating financial oversight to electricity regulations is apples to oranges. This is another case of associating deregulation==bad in all cases.
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
Several manufacturers did this, but it didn't offer much benefit over the existing DRAM caches that are on the drives. Further evidence of this is that Microsoft's ReadyBoost does this, and provides no major benefit. Bottom line: Just get more RAM in your machine, or buy a drive with a bigger cache.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
Already covered. Windows XP and above create a Prefetch folder that the files needed during bootup, in a nice contiguous block. Once you do that, putting it into NAND doesn't matter since seek time becomes mostly irrelevant, and NAND doesn't offer higher continuous read speeds than a good platter hard drive.
Plus: Boot time isn't entirely I/O bound. I am sitting next to two identical Windows XP embedded systems: One with an SLC NAND flash hard drive, the other with a 7200RPM disk: The disk boots about 3 seconds faster.
I clicked the link to FreedomSite.Org, but they block it here at the office. (Yes, I know, that isn't censorship since it isn't the government - I'm lucky they let me browse Slashdot at all)
How about this: Cell phone companies are no longer permitted to own cell phone towers. Instead, we have
(1) Stores selling cell phones. (2) Service companies offering cell phone contracts. (3) Cellular Service Providers (CSPs) that provide cellular service to phones, by billing the service companies (2)
So I go to Wal-Mart (1) and buy a phone. I activate it with AT&T (2). My phone finds a nearby tower that speaks a compatible protocol, that is owned and operated by a CSP (3). The CSP then tracks my usage and bills my service company (2), who then bills me.
This basically takes the internet approach, and applies it to the cellular network.
Advantages: - No more tying of cell phones (1) to service companies (2) - No more long complex service contracts, because it removes barriers of entry into that business, and because it is easy for cellular users to switch. - Increased incentive to move toward a single standard. No more CDMA because: who would want to finance a tower that isn't going to work for new phones and customers? - No concept of "roaming" charges since cell towers are no longer tied to a specific provider. - More efficient coverage since there are no longer redundant towers. Ex: Today, T-Mobile and AT&T may both build a tower in the same place, to service their own respective customers. In this system, one tower would suffice. - More incentive to build towers where it is profitable, regardless of whose customers they are. Ex: Verizon builds towers in places where they have customers. But they won't build where they do not have customers.
He did not commit any logical fallacy, nor did not make a dichotomy of any kind. First of all, he had 3 options not two. Second, he was talking about cutting percentages of one budget to increase another. As for your last point, corn production or cosmetics make no more valid of a comparison than infrastructure.
There is also the risk that they will get struck by space debris.
Not when you have a 1 gigawatt microwave laser cannon!
Re:Elektronorgtechnica Bias -- Any Video Game Real
on
Tetris Improves Your Brain
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
You have that backwards. The article is correct. Since they only tested Tetris, the only claim they can make is about Tetris.
Neither. My post was based on my recollections + reading the Wikipedia article. It was just an attempt to hold back the "OMG, the sky is falling!" FUD.
TKIP was fundamentally broken, by design. We knew that. TKIP was invented as an intermediate encryption that could run on the same hardware that WEP ran on. It allowed router manufacturers to use something better than WEP without having to beef-up their hardware. It worked well, and bought several years before it was completely broken. Anyone who has a router using TKIP bought at a bad time, and is stuck with something that's only a little better than WEP. The solution is to buy a router that supports WPA2, which has real AES encryption.
1) Even your worst-case scenario is not as bad as the situation I described where ISPs can literally distort reality. So this is worth it.
2) Network Neutrality is not the slippery slope of government regulation that it is made out to be. We have network neutrality on telephones, and it has not caused problem. Can you imagine a world where telephone companies could charge based on what people say over the telephone, or who they say it to? If that was going on, don't you think it would be well worth-it to pass laws to stop it? Even though it meant that the government could now regulation the phone system?
From a US perspective: without network neutrality, this is all legal.
Page 8 of the PDF shows CNN.COM with an advertisement replaced. What stops them from replacing the content of the articles? Page 10 shows how they hacked Google results. What keeps them from changing those results to filter articles on politics, religion, gender issues, laws...
How long is the average CEO employed at a given corporation? I have the image of the grand-old-company where the CEO built the company from their bare hands 30 years ago, or where it was handed down from their father to the eldest son, or something like that. But today, CEOs tend to be interim problem-fixers, relying on PR spin and legal tactics to keep a company going. Or to reinvent the company then rush out.
This may be contributing to the short-term mindset.
You are right, but what is missing is an alternative solution. We could avoid this all together if we had competition for broadband providers. Then, the market would (in theory) favor network neutrality.
But, the problem with that is - Politicians aren't smart enough to figure that out - Network neutrality is too important to trust to the market
Let me clarify that last item. Network neutrality is as vital as the first amendment. Without it, Comcast customers might click on the FCC link and see a page that says "The FCC has decided that network neutrality is currently being enforced just fine, and the FCC will not get involved." We are in a new and strange world - where one person could read a newspaper and see one thing, and another user could go to read that same newspaper, but there is someone secretly standing between them and the page right in front of them, who can change the article. That slippery slope is more dangerous than the slippery slope that the FCC brings.
For every person like me, there's probably 5000 people who would say "who cares if Comcast/Cox/Whoever changes those boring news articles? I can download my music/porn/games twice as fast!" So I would prefer to see the FCC get involved, rather than not.
This cannot be understated. The computer industry experienced exponential growth once it became open. It all started the day Compaq produced the first IBM PC clone. That day will only come for phones/PDAs when people can use any phone, with software from any company or individual, with any telephone service provider.
We need to treat phone technology openly, just like...well... almost every other piece of hardware on earth (TVs, CD players, vacuum cleaners, hammers, baseballs,...)
Sarahbau seemed to be describing a scenario where there was no regulation in place. The Transformer company polluted the area, and it is the responsibility of the new owner to clean it up, but the new owner was not notified of the pollution until an anonymous "friend" tipped them off.
This sounds like a situation where there is no regulation, or where the regulation doesn't make sense. I thought you were proposing that the seller would be legally required to inform potential buyers of environmental damage, and holding them financially responsible if they do not.
This scenario struck me because there is a similar situation in Burlington, VT where a property is for sale, but the owners were operating a laundromat that dumped waste water into the ground. I got the impression that the buyers are responsible for the cleanup, rather than the owners who polluted it. They are just looking for a bigger dummy to take it off their hands, rather than fixing the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither apt-get, nor the application you mention, is equivalent to Microsoft's "Add/remove programs" feature. There's no sense in defending that by including alternative packages since the functionality of apt-get simply does not exist at all in a Windows world.
"Add/Remove" gives a limited, inaccurate list of software installed on the system, and runs the uninstallers for that software. That's it.
Apt is a whole system for managing installed apps, detecting dependencies, finding and downloading software, and getting automatic updates.
The program you mention sounds great, but it is a big hack around a fundamental difference between the operating systems. It compensates for the fact that Windows has no such database of applications and files. It's like the old uninstaller applications from the days of Windows 3.x and Windows 9x. It still isn't comparable to apt-get.
...show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste.
The summary is technically right: Thanks to reprocessing fuel, the waste problem has been solved. But since the US doesn't reprocess spent fuel, we don't yet have a solution for that. This won't change until we stop calling it "waste" and start calling it "spent fuel" - the term "waste" is inaccurate.
From the article:
The big problem with controlling waste: Today's reactors capture only about 5% of the useful energy contained in uranium
"Today's reactors" -- meaning, "reactors based on modern technology" do not capture only 5% of the energy. But "Today's reactors" as in "the ones we are building in the US today" do only capture 5% of the energy. It is the most absurd aspect of US nuclear power. Until this is addressed, nuclear isn't going very far.
"And it doesn't involve the Flash being placed in the drive."
What I mean by that is, that this discussion is about something fundamentally different from what the original poster described. Go back way up in the chain, someone was talking about some sort of SSD built-in to the HDD. But such a device cannot know about what files are in what directory, and cache them accordingly. It only sees sectors. Like for example, it could not know that files in the "temporary internet folders" directory doenot need to go to the permanent storage.
So my statement was to clarify that an on-disk SSD could not do what you have done.
Interesting perspective.
Yes, some data could be gleaned indirectly. I'm not so convinced that such a tool is really possible, but maybe one day we will have enough behavioral knowledge that we can code it into a program and make it guess your fetishes.
No software cannot determine your sexual orientation, nor your hidden adultery. It does not read minds, or hearts. It does not magically know events from the past or the future.
Now, if you went online and posted about your homosexual adulterous relationship on a board that publicly reveals your IP address, then yes, a tool could indeed find it. In that case, who defeated the last barrier of your privacy? Did the tool? Or is it your own darned fault?
Incorrect. The California deregulation was something entirely different. Just because they slapped the word "deregulation" onto that monstrosity does not mean that all cases of monopoly-breaking are suddenly bad.
Allow me to explain. But first of all:
If AT+T's network sucks, go for somebody else.
The entire point of this discussion is that people cannot do that. They are stuck with the provider who is tied to their phone, forced into a multi-year contract, and even if they get out of it, they are limited to the carriers who provide decent service in their area.
Now, a history lesson:
This is exactly the sort of nonsense California implemented when they introduced a "deregulation" of electricity.
Before I go into this, let me explain that many states have done this pseudo-deregulation successfully. The California problem had nothing to do with deregulation, and the term deregulation is thrown around to mean 100 different things.
The problem in California was two-fold.
1) During their pseudo-deregulation, the California legislature decided that electricity prices would be fixed. This is true irony here: a government created a regulation overriding the market price, and called it "deregulation". That is definitely --NOT-- deregulation. During this transitional time period, the rules of supply and demand could not function.
California is hot, and during this transitional period, summer came - and air conditioners use lots of power. Under normal market forces, prices would go up when demand went up, and people who respond by conserving electricity. Instead, demand went up and price remained the same, so people kept using electricity at an increasing rate -- until the state ran out of capacity.
2) Electricity is not deregulated. It is heavily hugely highly regulated. Even with price fixing, the market has another solution: Building new power plants. Imagine if there was a shortage of green beans. Farmers would start growing more of them, since there is now money to be made. But that doesn't work with power, because there is so much regulation that you can't just buy a plot of land and build a power plant. The most efficient form of power we have is so heavily regulated it is basically illegal to build them at all. (Nuclear).
Read more at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010212/wasserman [thenation.com]
It's a good article, and it says essentially the same thing I am saying:
Most important was their assumption that there would always be a surplus of cheap wholesale electricity. So they sold off too much of their generating capacity and had too little of their own supply at a time when rates were still frozen.
aving dismantled key efficiency programs, the utilities now realized that their customers, buying power at fixed costs, had little incentive to conserve.
Wow, it is even worse than I thought:
A bill, AB 1890...Some consumer and environmental groups were furious about a wide range of issues, most notably the reactor bailouts, which they worried (correctly) would prolong the operating life of deteriorating nukes
OMG! Bailouts! I didn't know that. Ha! See: this is what they call "de-regulation" -- how is bailing out a failing company with a product that can't survive part of de-regulation? De-regulation would be letting them go out of business.
This is what allowed Enron to screw a good part of the country
Enron is irrelevant to this discussion. Equating financial oversight to electricity regulations is apples to oranges. This is another case of associating deregulation==bad in all cases.
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
Several manufacturers did this, but it didn't offer much benefit over the existing DRAM caches that are on the drives. Further evidence of this is that Microsoft's ReadyBoost does this, and provides no major benefit. Bottom line: Just get more RAM in your machine, or buy a drive with a bigger cache.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
Already covered. Windows XP and above create a Prefetch folder that the files needed during bootup, in a nice contiguous block. Once you do that, putting it into NAND doesn't matter since seek time becomes mostly irrelevant, and NAND doesn't offer higher continuous read speeds than a good platter hard drive.
Plus: Boot time isn't entirely I/O bound. I am sitting next to two identical Windows XP embedded systems: One with an SLC NAND flash hard drive, the other with a 7200RPM disk: The disk boots about 3 seconds faster.
No surprise: Isn't this basically what ReadyBoost does?
I clicked the link to FreedomSite.Org, but they block it here at the office. (Yes, I know, that isn't censorship since it isn't the government - I'm lucky they let me browse Slashdot at all)
How about this: Cell phone companies are no longer permitted to own cell phone towers. Instead, we have
(1) Stores selling cell phones.
(2) Service companies offering cell phone contracts.
(3) Cellular Service Providers (CSPs) that provide cellular service to phones, by billing the service companies (2)
So I go to Wal-Mart (1) and buy a phone. I activate it with AT&T (2). My phone finds a nearby tower that speaks a compatible protocol, that is owned and operated by a CSP (3). The CSP then tracks my usage and bills my service company (2), who then bills me.
This basically takes the internet approach, and applies it to the cellular network.
Advantages:
- No more tying of cell phones (1) to service companies (2)
- No more long complex service contracts, because it removes barriers of entry into that business, and because it is easy for cellular users to switch.
- Increased incentive to move toward a single standard. No more CDMA because: who would want to finance a tower that isn't going to work for new phones and customers?
- No concept of "roaming" charges since cell towers are no longer tied to a specific provider.
- More efficient coverage since there are no longer redundant towers. Ex: Today, T-Mobile and AT&T may both build a tower in the same place, to service their own respective customers. In this system, one tower would suffice.
- More incentive to build towers where it is profitable, regardless of whose customers they are. Ex: Verizon builds towers in places where they have customers. But they won't build where they do not have customers.
He did not commit any logical fallacy, nor did not make a dichotomy of any kind. First of all, he had 3 options not two. Second, he was talking about cutting percentages of one budget to increase another. As for your last point, corn production or cosmetics make no more valid of a comparison than infrastructure.
Better yet: Trademark the gesture of hailing a taxi.
The duck quack is a generic sound, used by hunters for hundreds of years.
Also, I think ducks used it even before that.
There is also the risk that they will get struck by space debris.
Not when you have a 1 gigawatt microwave laser cannon!
Playing Tetris actually gives you more brain to work with, says a new study to be published later this week.
So you're saying you had control groups of people that played other video games and Tetris showed a difference? Or a control group studying chess? I suspect the title of this article should be "Puzzles Improve Your Brain."
You have that backwards. The article is correct. Since they only tested Tetris, the only claim they can make is about Tetris.
Military helmets indeed cause brain damage: If the solider was not wearing a helmet they would be dead -- and thus, they would have no brain damage.
Neither. My post was based on my recollections + reading the Wikipedia article. It was just an attempt to hold back the "OMG, the sky is falling!" FUD.
For the record, I have a Linksys at home. :-)
TKIP was fundamentally broken, by design. We knew that. TKIP was invented as an intermediate encryption that could run on the same hardware that WEP ran on. It allowed router manufacturers to use something better than WEP without having to beef-up their hardware. It worked well, and bought several years before it was completely broken. Anyone who has a router using TKIP bought at a bad time, and is stuck with something that's only a little better than WEP. The solution is to buy a router that supports WPA2, which has real AES encryption.
Two things to keep in mind here:
1) Even your worst-case scenario is not as bad as the situation I described where ISPs can literally distort reality. So this is worth it.
2) Network Neutrality is not the slippery slope of government regulation that it is made out to be. We have network neutrality on telephones, and it has not caused problem. Can you imagine a world where telephone companies could charge based on what people say over the telephone, or who they say it to? If that was going on, don't you think it would be well worth-it to pass laws to stop it? Even though it meant that the government could now regulation the phone system?
From a US perspective: without network neutrality, this is all legal.
Page 8 of the PDF shows CNN.COM with an advertisement replaced. What stops them from replacing the content of the articles? Page 10 shows how they hacked Google results. What keeps them from changing those results to filter articles on politics, religion, gender issues, laws...
How long is the average CEO employed at a given corporation? I have the image of the grand-old-company where the CEO built the company from their bare hands 30 years ago, or where it was handed down from their father to the eldest son, or something like that. But today, CEOs tend to be interim problem-fixers, relying on PR spin and legal tactics to keep a company going. Or to reinvent the company then rush out.
This may be contributing to the short-term mindset.
You are right, but what is missing is an alternative solution. We could avoid this all together if we had competition for broadband providers. Then, the market would (in theory) favor network neutrality.
But, the problem with that is
- Politicians aren't smart enough to figure that out
- Network neutrality is too important to trust to the market
Let me clarify that last item. Network neutrality is as vital as the first amendment. Without it, Comcast customers might click on the FCC link and see a page that says "The FCC has decided that network neutrality is currently being enforced just fine, and the FCC will not get involved." We are in a new and strange world - where one person could read a newspaper and see one thing, and another user could go to read that same newspaper, but there is someone secretly standing between them and the page right in front of them, who can change the article. That slippery slope is more dangerous than the slippery slope that the FCC brings.
For every person like me, there's probably 5000 people who would say "who cares if Comcast/Cox/Whoever changes those boring news articles? I can download my music/porn/games twice as fast!" So I would prefer to see the FCC get involved, rather than not.
This cannot be understated. The computer industry experienced exponential growth once it became open. It all started the day Compaq produced the first IBM PC clone. That day will only come for phones/PDAs when people can use any phone, with software from any company or individual, with any telephone service provider.
We need to treat phone technology openly, just like...well... almost every other piece of hardware on earth (TVs, CD players, vacuum cleaners, hammers, baseballs, ...)
Then I am confused by your comment.
Sarahbau seemed to be describing a scenario where there was no regulation in place. The Transformer company polluted the area, and it is the responsibility of the new owner to clean it up, but the new owner was not notified of the pollution until an anonymous "friend" tipped them off.
This sounds like a situation where there is no regulation, or where the regulation doesn't make sense. I thought you were proposing that the seller would be legally required to inform potential buyers of environmental damage, and holding them financially responsible if they do not.
This scenario struck me because there is a similar situation in Burlington, VT where a property is for sale, but the owners were operating a laundromat that dumped waste water into the ground. I got the impression that the buyers are responsible for the cleanup, rather than the owners who polluted it. They are just looking for a bigger dummy to take it off their hands, rather than fixing the situation.
How does the fact that the White House has a flickr page affect this case at all?