From TFA: "Just turning the machine on is a joy, because starting up now takes 20 seconds instead of 60, like the previous model; you'll want to do it again and again."
Sounds like we have yet another reviewer who is eager to run Windows on his Mac...
Re:This browser is important
on
IE7 Leaked
·
· Score: 1
"In a year or so, this browser will have > 70% of the online browser market share."
70%? In a year? Are you kidding? You're being very optimistic about the rate at which people update their software. Unless Microsoft releases IE 7 as a security update to IE 6 (in other words, unless it is a manditory install on systems with autoupdate turned on) we will be lucky if it sees 30% saturation by Q1 2007. That's assuming a late Q1 or early Q2 2006 release too.
Are you serious? Have to read Thud? It is Terry's most well structures and his most thought provoking work to date! He's like a fine wine, he gets better with age, but if all you understand is beer, you'd best say away.
0. What an operating system is: Most people think OS == computer, and so they fail to appreciate the degree of flexability that their computer actually offers them. If they understood that OS != computer then they would be more open to a FOS OS.
0.5. The idea that there is a division between userspace (things I can do) kernelspace (things the computer does). This is useful because it leads naturally into a discussion of root/administrator and other system accounts, why they are there and why they should be protected. It would also debuse people of the notion that their computers are not safe just because they are on, but not "doing anything". It also is a good segway into "what a driver is".
1. WHOIS and DNS basics: If more people used it, we wouldn't have as much phishing as we do now, because they would not implicity trust URLs.
2. Include a big chapter on all of the easy ways that passwords can be cracked, stolen, guessed, etc. Most people don't appreciate how much information you can steal, say, rooting around in their trash for old desktop calendars. They also don't appreciate how fast you can crack short passwords.
3. Digital Signatures. If only more people knew how to use these! E-mail spoofing and privacy concerns go poof!
4. Bitorrent and filesharing, because you've got to give people what they want.
5. Explain what all of the major HTTP error codes mean and how they get around them. This kills the old "Son, I got a timeout error. Is the computer broke? No mom, just wait a little while and try again. The Web site is busy, or having routing problems."
6. Backups, backups, backups.
7. Explain the USB 2.0 Fullspeed vs. Highspeed crapulance.
8. VoIP HOWTO? Its day may have come...
9. The difference between POP3 and IMAP. Having that as common knowledge would have saved me some time over the years...
10. Explain that deleted != destroyed. Data recovery tools can get stuff back. You should cover this from both side 1) this is good because sometimes you can recover data 2) this is bad because you teenage son's porn stash never really died.
You're thinking about it wrong. Flash drives will probably never win out in situations where cost per GB or long term reliablilty is the chief factor, nor will it probably ever get a foothold in the server-side storage market. The considerations of this niche are already far removed from what the average user sees (consider, for instance, the universal prevalence of tape as a backup medium. Typical users haven't seriously used tape for years and years.)
Where flash will win, without a doubt, are areas where performance and power are the main considerations. Think of these possiblities:
1. Read and write speeds on par with conventional memory. That is tens of millions of times faster than the best disk. (I know flash isn't quite there yet, but I am convinced that the day will come soon.)
2. No moving parts = perfectly silent and vibration free operations.
3. No seek time (I think, not sure about this).
4. Fantastically lower power consumption than a HD, due to lack of moving parts. This also means fantastically less heat than a HD. Also it can be cooled with a heatsink instead of a fan.
Sounds like just what the laptop market needs, doesn't it?
Also, and this really peaks my interest, consider the technical possibilites of a long term memory system almost as fast as main memory. It would be the end of memory buffers in a filesystem context. Though, the entire file handling API may need to be rewritten to take advantage of this. And indeed, if the speeds are that fast, why have the concept of a file API at all? Why not have each program view the entire filesystem as an extension of its own primary memory. Imagine, for instance, an image browser that had all of the images on your computer "preloaded" by the kernel when it was run.
The possibilites of the convergence of primary and secondary memory are terrific, IMHO.
This whole thing is rather facecious. I happened to write my thesis (majors in CS, philosophy, and theology) on this very subject, though instead of using the term "true" AI I refer to the concept as "Asimovian AI."
The definition is simple: an Asimovian AI is an AI that is intelligent in the same essential manner that humans are intelligent. This resonates well with our intuitive understanding of what it means to be a fully realized intelligence.
The usefulness of this definition lies in the fact that Asimovian AI can be effectively defined via a process of comparison to human intelligence. An Asimovian AI must contain each of the properties that a human does, such that if that property were removed, it would lead one to conclude that the resulting being is not intelligent in the same essential manner as a human.
Here is a short list of essential attributes that this "true" AI lacks, in no particular order: free will (it's true there is currently no way to detect free will, but it is not even probable in this case), reflexive knowledge, reflexive awareness, the ability to express "theological love" (that is to say non-intellectual, wholistic love such as poets talk about), the ability to weight the morality of an arbitrary situation, and the ability to disobey its original programming. (The last of these is tied to free will, and it may (in theory) be the basis of creating a "free will test" of some kind.)
However, it must be noted that an Asimovian AI is not quite the same as an artificial human intelligence--though an artificial human intelligence would be an Asimovian AI--since there seems to be no reason for excluding an AI with extra capacities above and beyond humans from the definition, as it would be "more" than fully realized. This process of comparison means that an Asimovian AI will, of necessity, contain all of the essential properties of a general intelligence, in addition to all of the unique and essential properties of a human intelligence. At the same time it allows for Asimovian AI to have a nature all its own, and to include properties that are not found in humans, insofar as those new properties do not conflict with the necessary set.
It has always been my opinion that, in the limit, (once all of the nastiness of not supporting current and stable standards like CSS2, proper DOM, XSLT and whatnot has been ironed of IE) the only significant advantage that Firefox will have over IE will be that its shorter release cycle allows it room for more advanced experimentation. In other words, its things like XUL (which I have great faith in) and browser-as-platform orient innovations that will set Firefox appart and put IE into a perpetual catch-up cycle, not Standards.
I would like to take a moment to clarify the archbishop's NYT article that people have been quoting. Let me first make it clear, I think that he made a fool of himself, not because of what he said, but because of the way in which he said it. What he was trying to say, and what he made it sound like he was saying are two rather different things.
Whenever you hear someone use the term "Darwinism" a little flag should go off in your head, because Darwinism !== evolution. The archbishop was making a teleological argument against Darwinism the philosophy, not against evolution the scientific and mathematical reality. What he failed to understand, is that the average reader doesn't appreciate he difference.
Darwinism is the philosophical stance that the theory of evolution explains not just how human beings came to be, but why as well. It is an application of Ockham's razor: the belief that there cannot be a creator, because a creator is not necessary for the process to continue. The archbishop, in other words, was trying to distance the Church from appearing to endorse a philosophy that he fells leads naturally to atheism.
The Catholic view of evolution, by contrast, is governed by the Christian understanding of providence, that is that every movement of the material universe can be (or maybe is) guided by God to some eventual good. This is similar to intelligent design on the superficial level, but it is not laced with any literalist overtones (like the "young Earth" theory, or crap like that).
(Catholic have never been Biblical literalists, by the way. In the 3rd century the theologian Augustine recognized that there were two different, and incompatible accounts of creation, and decided that they were best explained as a metaphor rather than as a method.)
The Church, in reality, tends to be quite neutral on scientific views these days, unless the views in question contradict something that the Church cannot accept. The principle is called Fides et Ratio (faith and reason), and the underlying doctrine is that the two can never be in opposition. However it has never been, and will continue not be, neutral on any philosophical view with it feels is in opposition to its beliefs. Hence the archbishop recently denounced Darwinism, the philosophy riding on the coat tails of evolution.
Actually, fount is the British and the old poetic spelling of font. When this spelling is used, it generally means a fountain, spring, or source. Using the modern spelling, a font refers to a basin for baptizing people or holding holy water, (sometimes also called a laver), although it can refer to the old useage as well. However, I don't think the word can be used to mean "plethora".
Well its is true that converting to hydrogen power does not solve the our oil problems, I think that there is one very important way in which it improves the issue, which is largly overlooked: it centralizes the problem.
Think about it, what is easier and cheeper in the long run, finding a perfect energy source for the production of fuel at a couple of hundred hydrogen facilities (or, alternaly, a few of thousand power plants), or finding a perfect energy source for all of the cars and trucks in use.
That is why we take what we can get for the cars and truck now, and look toward solving the easier problem of hydrogen production later. Its very similar, in its way, to rolling out fiber to the household, only with energy.
A researcher at Fermi Lab once informed me that, pound for pound, antimater is the most expensive material in the universe. At that time (5 years ago) they could still basically count the number of antimater particles they had stored in their equiptment (they probably still can). If you do the math, I belive antimater costs around $100 trillion US dollars per ounce to produce.
I have recorded the event in my journal. Someday, when it becomes the foundation of a great and powerful human civilization the likes of which no man can now comprehend the convention will be both well known and universally celebrated.
I admit that I have never run a DNS server, and I don't know anything more about DNS than the basics. However, to me the idea of having the creator of a DNS record set the TTL field (I believe this is what people are saying is happening) was flawed from the beginning. If anything it should be:
globally set by the server, period or
globally set by the server to a sane random interval (to avoid overloading the root servers at predictable intervals)
In any event, is there any real necessary gain by having the record creator specify the TTL?
I am more than a little surprised that Apple decided to pack gcc 4.0 into the package. I'm not entirely convinced that gcc 4 is ready for prime time, and I am not sure if any other *nix distros are shipping with it this early.
Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.
Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.
Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.
The CSE department at Notre Dame phased out about 200 Solaris boxes last year in favor or Red Hat Linux Enterprise. They are still good boxes, though, and you find them scattered around the place.
That should be genothi seauton (gamma, epsilon, nu, omicron, theta, iota; sigma, epsilon, alpha, upsilon, tau, omicron, nu; since slashdot doesn't allow HTML entities).
What is the world coming to if people can't even transliterate 5th century Athenian Greek properly?
I wonder if this could really lead to a serious inbalence in funds in the future. Imagine, say, a large "technocratic" state (like New York) with just millions of servers, and a skeleton staff to physically maintain them. Now combine this with a collection of "bedroom" states where people live and perform their work (remotly) in the technocratic state. The technocratic state would receive funding out of proportion to need, to the serious deterement of the other states.
This is a strained example, or course, but it would not take a lot to through a pair of states out of balence (they mostly run close to or over the edge of debt anyway). It could have a measurable impact in the future.
IMHO the true benefit of Mono is not in its intrinsic value as a langauge (althought I think that, in general, C# was very well thought out--the Framework was less well thought out, but still pretty good), but in its value (eventually) as a tool for cross platform development.
You can write an application using GTK# and have it run on Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc. Its the Java promise all over again, but reworked to run better. For this reason alone I am considering doing a non-trivial desktop database application for a publisher in Mono, since they have many platforms, and I think the overall effort of using this system will be easier that trying to pull a Mozilla on my budget.
What Cringley has failed to realize is that unless the telecos mark up all of their traffic except their competetor's VOIP the net effect (assuming that his model even works, and I'm more than a little skeptical because of the volume of VOIP needed to make it work) would be that everything else experiences a slowdown: all smtp, http, p2p, bgp, etc begin to suck. If this happens the ISP will have killed their network more effectily than any hacker ever could. Then they would bleed customers, because they will go to where the bandwidth is.
The DVD format will probably die out (and by DVD format, I mean the current DVDs and all their logical sucessors, like BlueRay, etc). It will not be convienence of broadband that will kill them, however, it will be our changing consumption habits.
When my parents first starting buying CDs in the 80's (they were around $25.00/disk then) they accumulated them carefully, picking what they like, and checking carefully that what they were buying coresponded directly to the LP orignals they were used to. They listened to them one at a time in an old Pioneer CD player (25+ lbs, lasted over 20 years before it died). By contrast I, and others I know, like to have our music quickly. I find and download files, burn tracks, buy CDs on a whim, digitize them and deemand that they all be available to us at once on small portable MP3 players. I keep my music on my laptop and it follows me wherever I go. My parents and I use music in fundamentally different ways, and we expect different things from our music.
The same thing will happen with DVDs. The easier something is to use the more people will use it. The day will come when our culture comsumes such a quantity and variety of media that streaming, downloaded, or otherwise transmited movies will make much more sense for our livestyles. We will wants LOTS of movies, want them now, and want them everywhere we go. DVDs are nice, but they are also bulky. Our whole collection can't travel with us around the globe or fit in a hand-held player, or a car theater system. But these things are in development and in small circles in active use. These lifestyle changes will be the driving force toward a new file-less format.
That doesn't mean that disk are dead. That day will come when we have a 100% reliable, superfast, globally accessable storage and transmission network that you could feel cofortable uploading media to and knowing that it would still be there is a couple of centures. (I'm not holding my breath). Until then there must always be a hardcopy of some kind, if only because encodings change so quickly that we need a "master" to rip from.
When I graduate from college this Spring (3 months) I will hold a BS in computer science and a BA in philosophy and theology. I will admit that I am a little biased, but in my mind it is an excellence combination. Both of them complement each other very well. Philosophy has trained me to look at problems from the ground up, to be perceptive towards cause and effect, implication, and logical consistancy. Programming has trained me to tackle problems from the top down, through compartmentalization, abstraction, and modeling.
Real if you think about it, CS is the science of description. You create interfaces, models, abstraction, and concepts and present them to antoher person as a justified simplification for a higher problem. This is not to far from what philosophy attempts. Plus, philosophy will sharpen your skills as a writer, and that is probably the most important abilty that most programmers lack.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA: "Just turning the machine on is a joy, because starting up now takes 20 seconds instead of 60, like the previous model; you'll want to do it again and again." Sounds like we have yet another reviewer who is eager to run Windows on his Mac...
"In a year or so, this browser will have > 70% of the online browser market share."
70%? In a year? Are you kidding? You're being very optimistic about the rate at which people update their software. Unless Microsoft releases IE 7 as a security update to IE 6 (in other words, unless it is a manditory install on systems with autoupdate turned on) we will be lucky if it sees 30% saturation by Q1 2007. That's assuming a late Q1 or early Q2 2006 release too.
Are you serious? Have to read Thud? It is Terry's most well structures and his most thought provoking work to date! He's like a fine wine, he gets better with age, but if all you understand is beer, you'd best say away.
Some of these may surpise you:
0. What an operating system is: Most people think OS == computer, and so they fail to appreciate the degree of flexability that their computer actually offers them. If they understood that OS != computer then they would be more open to a FOS OS.
0.5. The idea that there is a division between userspace (things I can do) kernelspace (things the computer does). This is useful because it leads naturally into a discussion of root/administrator and other system accounts, why they are there and why they should be protected. It would also debuse people of the notion that their computers are not safe just because they are on, but not "doing anything". It also is a good segway into "what a driver is".
1. WHOIS and DNS basics: If more people used it, we wouldn't have as much phishing as we do now, because they would not implicity trust URLs.
2. Include a big chapter on all of the easy ways that passwords can be cracked, stolen, guessed, etc. Most people don't appreciate how much information you can steal, say, rooting around in their trash for old desktop calendars. They also don't appreciate how fast you can crack short passwords.
3. Digital Signatures. If only more people knew how to use these! E-mail spoofing and privacy concerns go poof!
4. Bitorrent and filesharing, because you've got to give people what they want.
5. Explain what all of the major HTTP error codes mean and how they get around them. This kills the old "Son, I got a timeout error. Is the computer broke? No mom, just wait a little while and try again. The Web site is busy, or having routing problems."
6. Backups, backups, backups.
7. Explain the USB 2.0 Fullspeed vs. Highspeed crapulance.
8. VoIP HOWTO? Its day may have come...
9. The difference between POP3 and IMAP. Having that as common knowledge would have saved me some time over the years...
10. Explain that deleted != destroyed. Data recovery tools can get stuff back. You should cover this from both side 1) this is good because sometimes you can recover data 2) this is bad because you teenage son's porn stash never really died.
11. Rudamentary HTML and CSS
That should be enough for now.
You're thinking about it wrong. Flash drives will probably never win out in situations where cost per GB or long term reliablilty is the chief factor, nor will it probably ever get a foothold in the server-side storage market. The considerations of this niche are already far removed from what the average user sees (consider, for instance, the universal prevalence of tape as a backup medium. Typical users haven't seriously used tape for years and years.)
Where flash will win, without a doubt, are areas where performance and power are the main considerations. Think of these possiblities:
1. Read and write speeds on par with conventional memory. That is tens of millions of times faster than the best disk. (I know flash isn't quite there yet, but I am convinced that the day will come soon.)
2. No moving parts = perfectly silent and vibration free operations.
3. No seek time (I think, not sure about this).
4. Fantastically lower power consumption than a HD, due to lack of moving parts. This also means fantastically less heat than a HD. Also it can be cooled with a heatsink instead of a fan.
Sounds like just what the laptop market needs, doesn't it?
Also, and this really peaks my interest, consider the technical possibilites of a long term memory system almost as fast as main memory. It would be the end of memory buffers in a filesystem context. Though, the entire file handling API may need to be rewritten to take advantage of this. And indeed, if the speeds are that fast, why have the concept of a file API at all? Why not have each program view the entire filesystem as an extension of its own primary memory. Imagine, for instance, an image browser that had all of the images on your computer "preloaded" by the kernel when it was run.
The possibilites of the convergence of primary and secondary memory are terrific, IMHO.
This whole thing is rather facecious. I happened to write my thesis (majors in CS, philosophy, and theology) on this very subject, though instead of using the term "true" AI I refer to the concept as "Asimovian AI."
The definition is simple: an Asimovian AI is an AI that is intelligent in the same essential manner that humans are intelligent. This resonates well with our intuitive understanding of what it means to be a fully realized intelligence.
The usefulness of this definition lies in the fact that Asimovian AI can be effectively defined via a process of comparison to human intelligence. An Asimovian AI must contain each of the properties that a human does, such that if that property were removed, it would lead one to conclude that the resulting being is not intelligent in the same essential manner as a human.
Here is a short list of essential attributes that this "true" AI lacks, in no particular order: free will (it's true there is currently no way to detect free will, but it is not even probable in this case), reflexive knowledge, reflexive awareness, the ability to express "theological love" (that is to say non-intellectual, wholistic love such as poets talk about), the ability to weight the morality of an arbitrary situation, and the ability to disobey its original programming. (The last of these is tied to free will, and it may (in theory) be the basis of creating a "free will test" of some kind.)
However, it must be noted that an Asimovian AI is not quite the same as an artificial human intelligence--though an artificial human intelligence would be an Asimovian AI--since there seems to be no reason for excluding an AI with extra capacities above and beyond humans from the definition, as it would be "more" than fully realized. This process of comparison means that an Asimovian AI will, of necessity, contain all of the essential properties of a general
intelligence, in addition to all of the unique and essential properties of a human intelligence. At the same time it allows for Asimovian AI to have a nature all its own, and to include properties that are not found in humans, insofar as those new properties do not conflict with the necessary set.
It has always been my opinion that, in the limit, (once all of the nastiness of not supporting current and stable standards like CSS2, proper DOM, XSLT and whatnot has been ironed of IE) the only significant advantage that Firefox will have over IE will be that its shorter release cycle allows it room for more advanced experimentation. In other words, its things like XUL (which I have great faith in) and browser-as-platform orient innovations that will set Firefox appart and put IE into a perpetual catch-up cycle, not Standards.
So does this mean that I will finally be able to get the Japanese music that I like, or will Apple only sell Japanese songs in Japan?
I would like to take a moment to clarify the archbishop's NYT article that people have been quoting. Let me first make it clear, I think that he made a fool of himself, not because of what he said, but because of the way in which he said it. What he was trying to say, and what he made it sound like he was saying are two rather different things.
Whenever you hear someone use the term "Darwinism" a little flag should go off in your head, because Darwinism !== evolution. The archbishop was making a teleological argument against Darwinism the philosophy, not against evolution the scientific and mathematical reality. What he failed to understand, is that the average reader doesn't appreciate he difference.
Darwinism is the philosophical stance that the theory of evolution explains not just how human beings came to be, but why as well. It is an application of Ockham's razor: the belief that there cannot be a creator, because a creator is not necessary for the process to continue. The archbishop, in other words, was trying to distance the Church from appearing to endorse a philosophy that he fells leads naturally to atheism.
The Catholic view of evolution, by contrast, is governed by the Christian understanding of providence, that is that every movement of the material universe can be (or maybe is) guided by God to some eventual good. This is similar to intelligent design on the superficial level, but it is not laced with any literalist overtones (like the "young Earth" theory, or crap like that).
(Catholic have never been Biblical literalists, by the way. In the 3rd century the theologian Augustine recognized that there were two different, and incompatible accounts of creation, and decided that they were best explained as a metaphor rather than as a method.)
The Church, in reality, tends to be quite neutral on scientific views these days, unless the views in question contradict something that the Church cannot accept. The principle is called Fides et Ratio (faith and reason), and the underlying doctrine is that the two can never be in opposition. However it has never been, and will continue not be, neutral on any philosophical view with it feels is in opposition to its beliefs. Hence the archbishop recently denounced Darwinism, the philosophy riding on the coat tails of evolution.
Actually, fount is the British and the old poetic spelling of font. When this spelling is used, it generally means a fountain, spring, or source. Using the modern spelling, a font refers to a basin for baptizing people or holding holy water, (sometimes also called a laver), although it can refer to the old useage as well. However, I don't think the word can be used to mean "plethora".
Well its is true that converting to hydrogen power does not solve the our oil problems, I think that there is one very important way in which it improves the issue, which is largly overlooked: it centralizes the problem.
Think about it, what is easier and cheeper in the long run, finding a perfect energy source for the production of fuel at a couple of hundred hydrogen facilities (or, alternaly, a few of thousand power plants), or finding a perfect energy source for all of the cars and trucks in use.
That is why we take what we can get for the cars and truck now, and look toward solving the easier problem of hydrogen production later. Its very similar, in its way, to rolling out fiber to the household, only with energy.
A researcher at Fermi Lab once informed me that, pound for pound, antimater is the most expensive material in the universe. At that time (5 years ago) they could still basically count the number of antimater particles they had stored in their equiptment (they probably still can). If you do the math, I belive antimater costs around $100 trillion US dollars per ounce to produce.
I have recorded the event in my journal. Someday, when it becomes the foundation of a great and powerful human civilization the likes of which no man can now comprehend the convention will be both well known and universally celebrated.
- globally set by the server, period or
- globally set by the server to a sane random interval (to avoid overloading the root servers at predictable intervals)
In any event, is there any real necessary gain by having the record creator specify the TTL?I am more than a little surprised that Apple decided to pack gcc 4.0 into the package. I'm not entirely convinced that gcc 4 is ready for prime time, and I am not sure if any other *nix distros are shipping with it this early.
Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.
Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.
Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.
The CSE department at Notre Dame phased out about 200 Solaris boxes last year in favor or Red Hat Linux Enterprise. They are still good boxes, though, and you find them scattered around the place.
That should be genothi seauton (gamma, epsilon, nu, omicron, theta, iota; sigma, epsilon, alpha, upsilon, tau, omicron, nu; since slashdot doesn't allow HTML entities).
What is the world coming to if people can't even transliterate 5th century Athenian Greek properly?
I wonder if this could really lead to a serious inbalence in funds in the future. Imagine, say, a large "technocratic" state (like New York) with just millions of servers, and a skeleton staff to physically maintain them. Now combine this with a collection of "bedroom" states where people live and perform their work (remotly) in the technocratic state. The technocratic state would receive funding out of proportion to need, to the serious deterement of the other states.
This is a strained example, or course, but it would not take a lot to through a pair of states out of balence (they mostly run close to or over the edge of debt anyway). It could have a measurable impact in the future.
IMHO the true benefit of Mono is not in its intrinsic value as a langauge (althought I think that, in general, C# was very well thought out--the Framework was less well thought out, but still pretty good), but in its value (eventually) as a tool for cross platform development.
You can write an application using GTK# and have it run on Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc. Its the Java promise all over again, but reworked to run better. For this reason alone I am considering doing a non-trivial desktop database application for a publisher in Mono, since they have many platforms, and I think the overall effort of using this system will be easier that trying to pull a Mozilla on my budget.
What Cringley has failed to realize is that unless the telecos mark up all of their traffic except their competetor's VOIP the net effect (assuming that his model even works, and I'm more than a little skeptical because of the volume of VOIP needed to make it work) would be that everything else experiences a slowdown: all smtp, http, p2p, bgp, etc begin to suck. If this happens the ISP will have killed their network more effectily than any hacker ever could. Then they would bleed customers, because they will go to where the bandwidth is.
Never have I seen computer animation so human mixed with human actors so mechanical.
When your gambling debts are high, you do what you have to do to pay them off...
The DVD format will probably die out (and by DVD format, I mean the current DVDs and all their logical sucessors, like BlueRay, etc). It will not be convienence of broadband that will kill them, however, it will be our changing consumption habits.
When my parents first starting buying CDs in the 80's (they were around $25.00/disk then) they accumulated them carefully, picking what they like, and checking carefully that what they were buying coresponded directly to the LP orignals they were used to. They listened to them one at a time in an old Pioneer CD player (25+ lbs, lasted over 20 years before it died). By contrast I, and others I know, like to have our music quickly. I find and download files, burn tracks, buy CDs on a whim, digitize them and deemand that they all be available to us at once on small portable MP3 players. I keep my music on my laptop and it follows me wherever I go. My parents and I use music in fundamentally different ways, and we expect different things from our music.
The same thing will happen with DVDs. The easier something is to use the more people will use it. The day will come when our culture comsumes such a quantity and variety of media that streaming, downloaded, or otherwise transmited movies will make much more sense for our livestyles. We will wants LOTS of movies, want them now, and want them everywhere we go. DVDs are nice, but they are also bulky. Our whole collection can't travel with us around the globe or fit in a hand-held player, or a car theater system. But these things are in development and in small circles in active use. These lifestyle changes will be the driving force toward a new file-less format.
That doesn't mean that disk are dead. That day will come when we have a 100% reliable, superfast, globally accessable storage and transmission network that you could feel cofortable uploading media to and knowing that it would still be there is a couple of centures. (I'm not holding my breath). Until then there must always be a hardcopy of some kind, if only because encodings change so quickly that we need a "master" to rip from.
When I graduate from college this Spring (3 months) I will hold a BS in computer science and a BA in philosophy and theology. I will admit that I am a little biased, but in my mind it is an excellence combination. Both of them complement each other very well. Philosophy has trained me to look at problems from the ground up, to be perceptive towards cause and effect, implication, and logical consistancy. Programming has trained me to tackle problems from the top down, through compartmentalization, abstraction, and modeling. Real if you think about it, CS is the science of description. You create interfaces, models, abstraction, and concepts and present them to antoher person as a justified simplification for a higher problem. This is not to far from what philosophy attempts. Plus, philosophy will sharpen your skills as a writer, and that is probably the most important abilty that most programmers lack.