I now have some no-name-brand CDs burned in 1998 that are still good. I have never had a good, name-brand CD fail for any reason. The only failure I have ever had was the top layer peeling off some el-cheapo CDs which were stored in plastic sleeves, not jewel cases.
One BIG key the article does not mention is to store the disc where the burned surface is not touching anything, such as in a jewel case -- the article should have mentioned that. Do not put in plastic sleeves or cases with slide-in sleeves.
Odd that the article is a sales pitch for that T-Y brand -- what about RiData? That's what I use for DVD archival storage. I haven't been using DVD-R long enough to comment on how long they'll last.
I have always found the alarmist idea that CDs will spontaneously self-destruct to be sort of over-the-top. CDs seem much more reliable for archiving than any other medium like diskette, hard disk, USB flash, or tape. Flash is more reliable, but has to be refreshed or it will disappear.
Can we boot to the rootkit and eliminate the layers of bloatware like IE and Outlook? Something like the old DDT shell in ITS - the debugger was the shell, eliminating the overhead of a shell. If we could boot to the rootkit, and just run the applications we needed, a lot of the overhead of Windows could probably be eliminated. All those things in the task list you have no idea what they are, like NMSSvc.exe, and the registry...
Spam couldn't possibly work. No one buys spam products. But think about it -- spam costs almost nothing to send. I think spam is designed to desensitize people so they're more susceptible to things that DO make money. Year after year, people are bombarded by pump-and-dump, porn, unregulated drugs, credit scams, mortgage scams. Look at the garbage that spammers dish out. There's nothing legit about any of it. Surely that affects recipients' minds? Then when they're confronted with a moral choice or choice about what web site to patronize, aren't they just a little bit more likely to make a bad decision, and patronize a scammy web site? All the years they've been bombarded with spam has to numb people, just a little. The way to get rid of spam would be to have a Great Awakening revival and get rid of lotteries, gambling, porn, alcohol, etc - what used to be classified as immorality - spammers are just the absolute bottom feeders trying to promote the immoral lifestyle. No one cares if you buy blue pills or get a mortgage from a spammer - spammers are bottom feeders and dupes - what the real world of immorality (including organized crime) wants is a lot of people who have a susceptibility to their message, who are predisposed to make bad moral decisions. Spam could be classified as a meme - a thought virus or thought cancer that attacks wholesome, moral thoughts. I'd love to see research done in this area, too.
I'll bite - where are the parts lists, schematics, etc to build this now? I have a 1GB USB drive - what do I attach to it to make a computer? Particularly one that can play MP3/OGG? Where's O'Reilly's hacks magazine when you need it? I mean, with a Linux bootable distro and a RAM drive, this could be pretty slick.
Executive summary of article: The creator of C++ now works for Texas A&M, an educational institution, and he thinks the solution to the problems of software is more education.
Let me state this: I DO NOT LISTEN TO MUSIC ON MY MP3 PLAYER! THERE IS NOTHING PIRATED ON MY MUVO!
If this trend continues, what the world needs is a kit. Flash memory / small embedded OS / amplifier / earphone plug / etc. Just like we build PCs from parts to avoid the Microsoft Tax on the preinstalled OS, we can build our own OGG and MP3 players from a kit.
If someone wants to make money, this would be good...
(I don't personally want a hard-drive based player - I'd rather have an almost indestructible flash memory player. But, it's a kit, and you can have whichever you want.)
All this good stuff is possible because people give the RIAA members their money. If you quit buying their wares, they'll have no resources with which to sue people. The only thing that matters in this debate is the money that Americans (and others) empty into the buckets of RIAA members each year.
Doesn't Microsoft get it? Most users are click-trained on Office. If you move a single icon, they are unable to use the product any longer. If you put this new re-GUI-ed office on a person's computer, they'll be catatonic. I mean, I have seen many users who learn exact, step-by-step procedures. They don't explore. They don't adapt. Revamping the entire UI is a bad idea - people will flee to OpenOffice.
If IBM had any sense at all, they'd open source Lotus 1-2-3 immediately -- there are millions of people who still remember / commands and @ functions who would abandon MS Office in a heartbeat to go back to the old, familiar software. I mean, if Borland can re-launch Turbo, why can't IBM re-launch 1-2-3? I know for a fact it once ran on UNIX - can you imagine what would happen if a character-mode 1-2-3 was available with all the old keystrokes and functions? People would flock to Linux. Does anyone at IBM actually remember they own 1-2-3?
Not sure if this is just about computer science, or interesting books in general.
Feynman - six easy and not so easy pieces (how science works) - character of physical law (how to think like science). He explains the scientific process, and is a good teacher. He was also a hardware hacker of a sort (safes and stuff).
Programming Perl - even if you don't, it's a thinking paradigm shift and introduction to a new culture.
The design & evolution of C++ - if you know C++, this account is fascinating. If you don't, read The C++ Programming Language.
DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS - by Aho and Ullman of the Dragon Book and Hopcroft - overlooked computer science book by the A in AWK and two authors of the Dragon book!
Any other book in the Jargon file, like the Wizard Book. Usually books like that have a reason for sticking around so long.
Not only what about no theft... I don't listen to music on my portable player!!! Why should I pay a premium?
I do have a few MP3s on my portable player, even though I rarely listen to them. So the real question is:
But what if the music you listen to isn't on Universal? Why should they get money? I can't think of anything I own that's on Universal, although with the constant buy-outs and catalogs moving, something I bought in the mid 90s. I would never knowingly buy something from them. (If I did steal music, I would not steal music from them!) Why do they get a cut from the purchase of these portable players unless someone is actually going to play Universal music on them? Even if I did buy something on Atlantic, A-and-M, or one of the other labels that have been swallowed up in the 90s or 2000s, why should anyone have to pay a premium to use a device?
Either third-party MP3 players like the Muvo (yes!) or SanDisk will be doing brisk sales, or D.I.Y. music player kits will become common at newegg.com (how hard could it be to solder an earphone jack to a USB keychain?)
>>> Really, though, who still uses dos apps?
Probably no one but history buffs, but it was a joke - if DOS won't run on Linux, how can C++/MFC/COM/Win32 apps? I did get Paint Shop Pro running in Wine once, but it crashed when I tried to do certain things. PSP is fairly trivial compared to, say, Office. MS can barely get their own OS to work...
Ok, so complex Windows 32-bit software on Linux sounds farfetched. I haven't gotten a DOS emulator to work. I have to use 2 of them, one for FCB legacy programs and another to run programs the first won't run. Let's get the simple, single-tasking DOS emulation working, THEN worry about Win32...
My post was a look at the real-world problems someone wanting to migrate to desktop Linux had.
Dumping Red Hat is not an option. I can't be down for however long it would take to install, harden, and configure another firewall/router machine.
Dual-booting is not an option. My Linux box is my Internet gateway.
GAIM actually wasn't able to do what I wanted to do. It can't talk securely to a Jabber server, or at least it couldn't back when I tried.
"subjected to a learning curve" - which is unfortunately why Linux isn't ready for real-world use.
"but give it time" - exactly! Linux is just not ready for real-world use, other than as a server OS.
I want to move off of Windows 2000 to Linux. So far, I've gotten about a third of the way there. I am not inexperienced. I have build UNIX workstations from bare metal. I have installed Emacs and gcc from scratch numerous times. Yet I find the migration to be daunting.
I've run into stuff like this:
Not even knowing where to start climbing the mountain. Simple things like MP3->WAV and WAV->MP3, ripping a CD, burning a CD, etc -- just day-to-day stuff that's trivial in Windows -- are day-long research projects. How do I get my printer to work with Linux? How do I get my scanner to work? I'm sure I can do it, eventually, but it's such a huge time sink trying to figure out how. Using USB devices in Linux took me days to figure out. It's a piece of cake now that I've climbed the mountain, but I despair of doing that sort of research project over and over for everything I run into.
Insane software installs. I tried to build the Psi IM client. It required this incredible toolkit called Qt that took hours to build. I found out that the add-in Psi needed would not build with the current version, so I had to start over with an earlier one. After another several hours of building it, I found out the add-in would only work with the multi-threaded version, so another build. After installing both, Psi found Qt but not the add in. I said nuts to it and gave up. Some software works great, but some of these installs are inhuman. I finally found a RH9 RPM of an older version, and it works fine.
My Linux box is my Internet connection router and has a lot of stuff on it like special SATA drivers. I can't just take it down for days/weeks while I upgrade. How do I upgrade off of Red Hat 9 without rebuilding the box? I haven't answered that question yet and am still using RH9.
What do I do about all my documents that use TTF fonts? OpenOffice reads my.doc files, but how to I install fonts? Another mountain to climb...
How do I make a PPP connection with my emergency modem dial-in access? Trivial in Windows, but I don't know where to start in Linux. Another mountain to climb...
Any one issue would be easy to solve, given enough time. But what's daunting me is the incredible amount of these issues to tackle, one after the other. By the time I migrate off of Win2K, I'll be on some other ancient, unsupported Linux version like RH9, and then what?
The WSJ sometime recently found a person who built a portfolio out of the stocks he saw in SPAM and tracked it. The stocks did NOT peak and dive, they just took a dive. Worth finding the original article if it is still around.
What's the control in this experiment? Wouldn't there be a correlation between TV and... well, anything at all? How many children don't watch television? Sounds like alarmism and scare-ism to me. Did they do a longitudinal study of children who did watch television and of children who did not and examine the size of the autistic children in both populations? The title of the paper seems unscientific - finding a correlation doesn't mean one caused the other. I imagine the scientifically illiterate media will have a field day with this one.
The DRM implications of beaming stuff into space are enormous. Will the aliens have the right media player and license? What if the DRM expires before the beam is received? If teens can't pay for MP3s on Earth, how will we collect money from aliens? What happens if I accidentally contribute copyrighted music - will the RIAA sue the aliens? What if the LCD screen on the time capsule cracks?
If this question is being asked, Windows is the new mainframe - the irrelevancy of the mainframe has been predicted as long as I can remember, and it just gets bigger and bigger.
Maybe teens aren't the mindless droids that the RIAA members think they are and don't want the sort of junk that RIAA members are producing? Maybe they're buying used CDs and ripping them? Maybe they're discovering classical, jazz, and progressive rock? Who knows, but I have trouble believing that any segment of the population would be inhibited by friction in collecting money in this day and age! Hard to imagine a teen couldn't use a family paypal account. Or that some venture capitalist wouldn't throw a few million at TeenzMp3Rockz.com to create a way for parents to pre-pay for music at MyDRMLockin.com or iLoveDRM.com...
In the main, software is so fluid that the definition of "suck" changes constantly, and is always a moving target. Software will always "suck" because no matter how good it is, someone can always imagine something better -- and we know it can be written with just a little more work. I've been doing research into computing in 1987, on DOS machines, and today's computers don't suck -- ie they're easier to use and more powerful -- but today's programs "suck" because we can always picture the next generation DWIM interface that will replace them. If you gave a Linux box with Open Office etc to a DOS user in 1987, and somehow got them on the Internet, they wouldn't think the banal trivialities (who cares where a Starbucks is?) "sucked" at all. My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 probably "sucked" too but I never noticed it when I was learning how it worked!
What Perl 6 needs, and I haven't seen yet, is a compelling reason to switch. It may be better under the covers, but Perl 5 works great from a user's perspective. In fact, I've been using 4 and 5 over the past decade and a half, since '91, to craft almost everything. It's part of my nervous system. I've internalized it.
So why would I switch to Perl 6? I'm just not hearing compelling reasons other than they've randomly changed a bunch of stuff so what I know doesn't work anymore or isn't optimal. The installed base of Perl 5 users is Perl 6's biggest enemy.
This would be like changing vi keys to make them conform to the CUA standard or Emacs - it might be progress, but people are used to vi qua vi in its historical form and don't want progress because the standard keys are in their nervous systems now.
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I now have some no-name-brand CDs burned in 1998 that are still good. I have never had a good, name-brand CD fail for any reason. The only failure I have ever had was the top layer peeling off some el-cheapo CDs which were stored in plastic sleeves, not jewel cases. One BIG key the article does not mention is to store the disc where the burned surface is not touching anything, such as in a jewel case -- the article should have mentioned that. Do not put in plastic sleeves or cases with slide-in sleeves. Odd that the article is a sales pitch for that T-Y brand -- what about RiData? That's what I use for DVD archival storage. I haven't been using DVD-R long enough to comment on how long they'll last. I have always found the alarmist idea that CDs will spontaneously self-destruct to be sort of over-the-top. CDs seem much more reliable for archiving than any other medium like diskette, hard disk, USB flash, or tape. Flash is more reliable, but has to be refreshed or it will disappear.
Can we boot to the rootkit and eliminate the layers of bloatware like IE and Outlook? Something like the old DDT shell in ITS - the debugger was the shell, eliminating the overhead of a shell. If we could boot to the rootkit, and just run the applications we needed, a lot of the overhead of Windows could probably be eliminated. All those things in the task list you have no idea what they are, like NMSSvc.exe, and the registry...
I know that if I, the omnipotent rewt on machines most people don't even remember exist, went on a rampage and trashed everything ...
Sort of a built-in check in that respect!
Spam couldn't possibly work. No one buys spam products. But think about it -- spam costs almost nothing to send. I think spam is designed to desensitize people so they're more susceptible to things that DO make money. Year after year, people are bombarded by pump-and-dump, porn, unregulated drugs, credit scams, mortgage scams. Look at the garbage that spammers dish out. There's nothing legit about any of it. Surely that affects recipients' minds? Then when they're confronted with a moral choice or choice about what web site to patronize, aren't they just a little bit more likely to make a bad decision, and patronize a scammy web site? All the years they've been bombarded with spam has to numb people, just a little. The way to get rid of spam would be to have a Great Awakening revival and get rid of lotteries, gambling, porn, alcohol, etc - what used to be classified as immorality - spammers are just the absolute bottom feeders trying to promote the immoral lifestyle. No one cares if you buy blue pills or get a mortgage from a spammer - spammers are bottom feeders and dupes - what the real world of immorality (including organized crime) wants is a lot of people who have a susceptibility to their message, who are predisposed to make bad moral decisions. Spam could be classified as a meme - a thought virus or thought cancer that attacks wholesome, moral thoughts. I'd love to see research done in this area, too.
I'll bite - where are the parts lists, schematics, etc to build this now? I have a 1GB USB drive - what do I attach to it to make a computer? Particularly one that can play MP3/OGG? Where's O'Reilly's hacks magazine when you need it? I mean, with a Linux bootable distro and a RAM drive, this could be pretty slick.
Executive summary of article: The creator of C++ now works for Texas A&M, an educational institution, and he thinks the solution to the problems of software is more education.
Let me state this: I DO NOT LISTEN TO MUSIC ON MY MP3 PLAYER! THERE IS NOTHING PIRATED ON MY MUVO!
If this trend continues, what the world needs is a kit. Flash memory / small embedded OS / amplifier / earphone plug / etc. Just like we build PCs from parts to avoid the Microsoft Tax on the preinstalled OS, we can build our own OGG and MP3 players from a kit.
If someone wants to make money, this would be good...
(I don't personally want a hard-drive based player - I'd rather have an almost indestructible flash memory player. But, it's a kit, and you can have whichever you want.)
All this good stuff is possible because people give the RIAA members their money. If you quit buying their wares, they'll have no resources with which to sue people. The only thing that matters in this debate is the money that Americans (and others) empty into the buckets of RIAA members each year.
Doesn't Microsoft get it? Most users are click-trained on Office. If you move a single icon, they are unable to use the product any longer. If you put this new re-GUI-ed office on a person's computer, they'll be catatonic. I mean, I have seen many users who learn exact, step-by-step procedures. They don't explore. They don't adapt. Revamping the entire UI is a bad idea - people will flee to OpenOffice.
If IBM had any sense at all, they'd open source Lotus 1-2-3 immediately -- there are millions of people who still remember / commands and @ functions who would abandon MS Office in a heartbeat to go back to the old, familiar software. I mean, if Borland can re-launch Turbo, why can't IBM re-launch 1-2-3? I know for a fact it once ran on UNIX - can you imagine what would happen if a character-mode 1-2-3 was available with all the old keystrokes and functions? People would flock to Linux. Does anyone at IBM actually remember they own 1-2-3?
Not sure if this is just about computer science, or interesting books in general.
Feynman - six easy and not so easy pieces (how science works) - character of physical law (how to think like science). He explains the scientific process, and is a good teacher. He was also a hardware hacker of a sort (safes and stuff).
Programming Perl - even if you don't, it's a thinking paradigm shift and introduction to a new culture.
The design & evolution of C++ - if you know C++, this account is fascinating. If you don't, read The C++ Programming Language.
DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS - by Aho and Ullman of the Dragon Book and Hopcroft - overlooked computer science book by the A in AWK and two authors of the Dragon book!
Any other book in the Jargon file, like the Wizard Book. Usually books like that have a reason for sticking around so long.
Not only what about no theft... I don't listen to music on my portable player!!! Why should I pay a premium?
I do have a few MP3s on my portable player, even though I rarely listen to them. So the real question is:
But what if the music you listen to isn't on Universal? Why should they get money? I can't think of anything I own that's on Universal, although with the constant buy-outs and catalogs moving, something I bought in the mid 90s. I would never knowingly buy something from them. (If I did steal music, I would not steal music from them!) Why do they get a cut from the purchase of these portable players unless someone is actually going to play Universal music on them? Even if I did buy something on Atlantic, A-and-M, or one of the other labels that have been swallowed up in the 90s or 2000s, why should anyone have to pay a premium to use a device?
Either third-party MP3 players like the Muvo (yes!) or SanDisk will be doing brisk sales, or D.I.Y. music player kits will become common at newegg.com (how hard could it be to solder an earphone jack to a USB keychain?)
>>> Really, though, who still uses dos apps? Probably no one but history buffs, but it was a joke - if DOS won't run on Linux, how can C++/MFC/COM/Win32 apps? I did get Paint Shop Pro running in Wine once, but it crashed when I tried to do certain things. PSP is fairly trivial compared to, say, Office. MS can barely get their own OS to work...
Tongue in cheek - but DOSBox does not support FCB so older apps have trouble in it.
Ok, so complex Windows 32-bit software on Linux sounds farfetched. I haven't gotten a DOS emulator to work. I have to use 2 of them, one for FCB legacy programs and another to run programs the first won't run. Let's get the simple, single-tasking DOS emulation working, THEN worry about Win32...
My post was a look at the real-world problems someone wanting to migrate to desktop Linux had. Dumping Red Hat is not an option. I can't be down for however long it would take to install, harden, and configure another firewall/router machine. Dual-booting is not an option. My Linux box is my Internet gateway. GAIM actually wasn't able to do what I wanted to do. It can't talk securely to a Jabber server, or at least it couldn't back when I tried. "subjected to a learning curve" - which is unfortunately why Linux isn't ready for real-world use. "but give it time" - exactly! Linux is just not ready for real-world use, other than as a server OS.
I want to move off of Windows 2000 to Linux. So far, I've gotten about a third of the way there. I am not inexperienced. I have build UNIX workstations from bare metal. I have installed Emacs and gcc from scratch numerous times. Yet I find the migration to be daunting.
I've run into stuff like this:
Not even knowing where to start climbing the mountain. Simple things like MP3->WAV and WAV->MP3, ripping a CD, burning a CD, etc -- just day-to-day stuff that's trivial in Windows -- are day-long research projects. How do I get my printer to work with Linux? How do I get my scanner to work? I'm sure I can do it, eventually, but it's such a huge time sink trying to figure out how. Using USB devices in Linux took me days to figure out. It's a piece of cake now that I've climbed the mountain, but I despair of doing that sort of research project over and over for everything I run into.
Insane software installs. I tried to build the Psi IM client. It required this incredible toolkit called Qt that took hours to build. I found out that the add-in Psi needed would not build with the current version, so I had to start over with an earlier one. After another several hours of building it, I found out the add-in would only work with the multi-threaded version, so another build. After installing both, Psi found Qt but not the add in. I said nuts to it and gave up. Some software works great, but some of these installs are inhuman. I finally found a RH9 RPM of an older version, and it works fine.
My Linux box is my Internet connection router and has a lot of stuff on it like special SATA drivers. I can't just take it down for days/weeks while I upgrade. How do I upgrade off of Red Hat 9 without rebuilding the box? I haven't answered that question yet and am still using RH9.
What do I do about all my documents that use TTF fonts? OpenOffice reads my .doc files, but how to I install fonts? Another mountain to climb...
How do I make a PPP connection with my emergency modem dial-in access? Trivial in Windows, but I don't know where to start in Linux. Another mountain to climb...
Any one issue would be easy to solve, given enough time. But what's daunting me is the incredible amount of these issues to tackle, one after the other. By the time I migrate off of Win2K, I'll be on some other ancient, unsupported Linux version like RH9, and then what?
The WSJ sometime recently found a person who built a portfolio out of the stocks he saw in SPAM and tracked it. The stocks did NOT peak and dive, they just took a dive. Worth finding the original article if it is still around.
What's the control in this experiment? Wouldn't there be a correlation between TV and ... well, anything at all? How many children don't watch television? Sounds like alarmism and scare-ism to me. Did they do a longitudinal study of children who did watch television and of children who did not and examine the size of the autistic children in both populations? The title of the paper seems unscientific - finding a correlation doesn't mean one caused the other. I imagine the scientifically illiterate media will have a field day with this one.
This opens the door for India to tax prana.
The DRM implications of beaming stuff into space are enormous. Will the aliens have the right media player and license? What if the DRM expires before the beam is received? If teens can't pay for MP3s on Earth, how will we collect money from aliens? What happens if I accidentally contribute copyrighted music - will the RIAA sue the aliens? What if the LCD screen on the time capsule cracks?
If this question is being asked, Windows is the new mainframe - the irrelevancy of the mainframe has been predicted as long as I can remember, and it just gets bigger and bigger.
Maybe teens aren't the mindless droids that the RIAA members think they are and don't want the sort of junk that RIAA members are producing? Maybe they're buying used CDs and ripping them? Maybe they're discovering classical, jazz, and progressive rock? Who knows, but I have trouble believing that any segment of the population would be inhibited by friction in collecting money in this day and age! Hard to imagine a teen couldn't use a family paypal account. Or that some venture capitalist wouldn't throw a few million at TeenzMp3Rockz.com to create a way for parents to pre-pay for music at MyDRMLockin.com or iLoveDRM.com...
People have no difficulty learning sports, political, etc jargon which is every bit as cryptic as technical jargon.
In the main, software is so fluid that the definition of "suck" changes constantly, and is always a moving target. Software will always "suck" because no matter how good it is, someone can always imagine something better -- and we know it can be written with just a little more work. I've been doing research into computing in 1987, on DOS machines, and today's computers don't suck -- ie they're easier to use and more powerful -- but today's programs "suck" because we can always picture the next generation DWIM interface that will replace them. If you gave a Linux box with Open Office etc to a DOS user in 1987, and somehow got them on the Internet, they wouldn't think the banal trivialities (who cares where a Starbucks is?) "sucked" at all. My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 probably "sucked" too but I never noticed it when I was learning how it worked!
What Perl 6 needs, and I haven't seen yet, is a compelling reason to switch. It may be better under the covers, but Perl 5 works great from a user's perspective. In fact, I've been using 4 and 5 over the past decade and a half, since '91, to craft almost everything. It's part of my nervous system. I've internalized it.
So why would I switch to Perl 6? I'm just not hearing compelling reasons other than they've randomly changed a bunch of stuff so what I know doesn't work anymore or isn't optimal. The installed base of Perl 5 users is Perl 6's biggest enemy.
This would be like changing vi keys to make them conform to the CUA standard or Emacs - it might be progress, but people are used to vi qua vi in its historical form and don't want progress because the standard keys are in their nervous systems now.