..you need to work "post-Columbine", "interactive", and "the New Media" in there somewhere. Variations are allowed and encouraged so long as they convey the establishing of a new "paradigm" or the destruction of an old one. For a recent addition, "Old Fartism" wouldn't hurt either. Oh yeah, never forget, you can never use "geek" too often!;-)
OK, sorry to reply to myself, but I think I have my iMac revisions crossed up -- I can't keep track anymore.
rev A - original 233Mhz rev B - still 233Mhz, VRAM upgraded to 6MB rev C - 266Mhz, no more mezzanine slot rev D - 333Mhz rev E - current 350/400Mhz, fanless models
I probably forgot something, but I *think* this is correct. The upgrade cards work in revs A-D.
Newer Technology has had iMac upgrades for several months. Theirs are 466Mhz w/1MB cache.
The main difference is how the manufacturers got around the issue of the Apple boot ROMs being on the processor daughtercard. Newer has you mail back the original daughtercard, which they then solder a new G3 on. (So yes, your card is technically a refurb) They are a little cheaper, though -- $450.
The guys from Powerlogix pulled a somewhat slicker trick. They apparently have a utility which reads the contents of the boot ROM and stores it on the hard drive. Their card uses flash ROM and the contents of the file are flashed to the card when you install it. Therefore you don't need to send your card back for them to make more upgrade cards -- and your card is brand new.
I don't think you can use either card with a rev D iMac, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to spend big bucks to upgrade a 400Mhz machine to 466 or 500Mhz. It's a more attractive deal if you have a rev A or B model (233 or 266Mhz) especially since those two can take Voodoo2 upgrades (yeah, yeah, pretty old but still an improvement over the built-in ATI chipsets).
What's of more interest is that Powerlogix may use the same technique to offer upgrades for the Wallstreet Powerbooks.
Yeah, the moderator system is kinda weird that way. The first two marked it as "funny", which of course was my intent, but the last marked it as "insightful", and the most recent moderator description is the one that shows up.
I guess he/she thought I was being deep or something...
Dang you whippersnappers! Data havens go back at least as far as Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net -- and probably before that too. I like Stephenson's work as much as the next guy (I dig The Diamond Age more than most) but most of the stuff in his books was written about somewhere else first. IMHO, what he's brilliant at is synthesis.
Now if you'll pardon me, my Ensure's gettin warm and my oatmeal's gettin cold. mumble, mumble...Cryptonomicon..mumble, mumble data haven. Feh!;-)
You've left some things out, as well as oversimplified quite a bit. What the studies found was that crew-served weapons (e.g., heavy machine guns) were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the killings. Based on their number, firing rate, and lethality, they inflicted even more casaualties than one would have thought.
The average rifleman on the other hand, has plenty of incentive to just keep his head down during a firefight, and no one is really watching him to make sure he fires his weapon. The crew on the machine gun will quickly notice if one of the crewmembers is not doing their job, and there was little evidence they ever failed to pull the trigger.
After WWII and Korea, the Army altered rifle training to emphasize firing the weapon in combat situations (instead of just shooting at round targets at the firing range). Their problem was pretty much "solved" by the time Vietnam rolled around, so video games had pretty much zilch to do with it.
FYI, the Palm V case is blasted aluminum, *not* titanium.
Titanium is stronger than steel and (I think) lighter than aluminum. It doesn't corrode. It obviously can stand a lot more heat than plastic, provides *much* more protection, and probably doesn't weigh much more. Now if it was common and cheap why would we even bother with the other materials?
Because it *isn't* common or cheap, and it is very hard to work with. It's a metal reserved for high-stress and temperature environments -- the SR-71 is skinned in titanium. Before composites every aircraft designer would have loved to build a whole plane out of titanium, but only a few could afford it.
Titanium is just one of those raw materials (unlike steel, silicon, or aluminum) that is relatively rare and expensive. Like I said, if it was common we'd make everything from it and we wouldn't think of using steel and aluminum in cars, airplanes, and cases any more than we'd think of using tin.
Personally, I have doubts about making a titanium case by itself for $100, much less a whole computer. Maybe Magnesium, but the thing is named "Tight", not "Might".
Redmond (AP) -- The software industry was rocked today by the revelation that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had been secretly sheltering persecuted Free Software programmers within the company's various business divisions. Ballmer, with the help of a sympathetic aide, had kept a list of programmers he knew to be writing code for open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD, and had sought to place them in obscure positions in the company where they could work unmolested.
One midlevel executive, who asked not to be identified, said "We're all shocked. Apparently Steve was placing workers in divisions he knew we'd pay little attention to -- places like Quality Control, the Macintosh Products Division -- those sorts of places." It is now believed that between 1994 and 1997, Ballmer had attempted to place most free software workers within the Internet Explorer division. With most of Microsoft concentrated on the Microsoft Network (MSN), the release of IE as a freely downloadable program was to be merely a prelude to the release of the IE source code itself.
However, others executives including Gates became suspicious of Ballmer's motives, and in 1998 a new policy was implemented for Internet Explorer. From then on, IE was to become part of the Windows 98 operating system itself, and many of Ballmer's workers were scattered to other divisions.
Ballmer's motivations and his scheme were exposed last week, when during a board meeting he proposed opening the source code to Windows 2000 as a means of placating the Justice Department in its lawsuit against Microsoft. It is now believed that the promotion of Ballmer to CEO was engineered by Gates to lure him out into the open. Microsoft's other board members yesterday voted unanimously for Ballmer's removal as CEO of the corporation.
As he left the Redmond campus this morning, a weeping Ballmer expressed regret that he did not do more. Pointing to his Rolex watch, a teary-eyed Ballmer said "You see this! This could have paid for a few more device drivers!" Referring to his Porsche sports car, he said "And this! This could have paid for a whole new window manager!"
Reaction within the free software community has been one of shock. Reached at his Cambridge, Massachussetts home, open source advocate Richard M. Stallman expressed gratitude that Ballmer had sheltered Free Software programmers within Microsoft, but still held reservations about his prominent role within the corporation. Nevertheless, on Monday, Stallman will propose changing the GNU Public License to declare Ballmer a "Righteous Closed Source Worker", the highest honor that can be bestowed upon someone who is not Free Software programmer.
...neither is big business or government. A lot of our international posters keep saying "DMCA, UCITA, etc. doesn't apply to me" and they're right. However, these laws didn't just pop up out of nowhere. I think it was inevitable that once the internet grew beyond novelty and into something useful (and therefore *worth* something) that corporations and government would want to control it.
Your country doesn't have to "follow the US lead" -- once the Net becomes something of real value in your country there will be a company or government agency there ready to claim control of it. The natural impulse of any organization is to grow and accrete more power. The problem has only surfaced in the US first because the Net has moved beyond novelty here and into the daily lives of many more people.
The US has its own spate of stupid laws, but we've already seen stupid laws passed in otherwise democratic places like Australia. Yes, RIAA and MPAA both end in "Association of America", but don't you think that companies like BMG will move to protect their interests when the time comes? (And right now they can sit back as the RIAA fights most of their battles for them.) In places where there is already strong control of existing media, it will be a natural to extend this to the Internet. Even though we all know how difficult this is technically, if something is illegal it still gives the government a pretext to arrest people they don't like.
Like I said, the impulse is everywhere, lying just under the surface. You won't end up with America's stupid laws -- you'll have a whole set of your own unless you watch out. Even if your country happens to be highly enlightened and all your personal liberties are preserved, if other countries around you are not, then it won't be much of a "World Wide" web, will it?
Re:How to get the defense industry on board
on
Auditing for Linux?
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· Score: 2
AFAIK, there is nothing about Linux that would prevent it from being certified as a DII COE platform. So long as you have a POSIX-compliant system you should be able get it certified through the Kernel Platform Certification (KPC - why do I think of fried chicken?) program. That's not to say no new code would be required, but I gather it's mostly a documentation process ("Does the system do X?" sort of thing). The 'kernel' services -- security, system management, networking, printing, etc. -- aren't anything cosmic.
The catch is that someone must pay the costs for it to go through the certification process, and no single program would want to foot the bill because they are probably underfunded to begin with. That being the case, they will likely choose one of the three platforms already certified (NT, Solaris, or HP-UX).
So it is left to the vendor to put forth the money and effort to get a platform through the process -- but in the case of Linux, which vendor? That's the catch that I see. Someone will have to carry the flag -- IBM? RedHat? It just depends on who wants to sell to the DoD bad enough.
Now, once you've been certified, there's still the matter of getting all the infrastructure and common applications running on your platform -- but if they'll run under Solaris and HP-UX it shouldn't be too hairy to port them.
In this context, I'm assuming auditing means *security* auditing. When you turn on auditing in Solaris, for example, you can log login attempts (successful and unsuccessful), file creations, modifications, and deletions, and probably any number of other things I'm unaware of.
Basically, it's a tool to help you detect breakins or suspicious behavior by users.
Holding everyone around you in disdain says a lot more about you than about them. Where I live I see a lot of honest, hard working people getting through day by day. I see immigrants working their asses off to make a better life for themselves or their children. It ain't perfect, but it's what *you* make of it.
I was born in the Philippines, and I've been to over a dozen countries. I've really enjoyed just about all of them, and there is usually something valuable to be learned from everyone. But I wouldn't trade places with *anyone*. If you think you're so unfortunate to live here, you can leave anytime you wish. Go right ahead, I sure as hell won't stop you...
Things aren't just English-centric because other folks "let" them be that way, they contribute to it, and it benefits them. After travelling through some 8 or 9 European countries, I've ditched any guilt about not speaking other languages fluently -- people simply learn whatever is *necessary* to get through their daily lives. If the average European speaks more than one language, it's not because of some great cultural enlightenment, but because they needed to for some reason -- often economic, as others have pointed out. And since it probably began as a child, it really took little extra effort -- kids can easily learn several languages, while it's a much more daunting task for an adult.
When I was in Italy hardly anyone spoke English, so you can bet I started to learn Italian pretty quick. When I was in Holland almost everyone spoke very good English, so attempts to learn Dutch were rather pointless. That area in Italy only sees a few tourists during parts of the year, mostly Germans. So if folks know any foreign languages it's usually -- you guessed it -- German. The Dutch, on the other hand, do business far and wide, so they've chosen to teach everyone English in school.
Since a lot of European countries aren't any bigger than a mid-sized U.S. state, their economies have to be highly integrated with their neighbors. Now if you border several other countries, which languages are you going to learn? Instead of learning five or six, you might choose the language of your dominant trading partner, OR you'll choose a significant trading partner common to everyone.
For example, if you live in Slovakia, you border on Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Ukraine. Which language should you learn? The answer is German, because all of you do significant trade with Germany. If you're going to learn another language beyond that, you'll pick English, because that gets you the Americans, the British, and let's not forget the Dutch. A Slovak interpreter I met did exactly this. He told me that the interpreters in his school always used to learn German and Russian. Once the Soviets left, everyone dropped Russian like a hot potato and started learning English. It's not some form of Cultural Imperialism, it's just being practical. When I was in Lithuania, I heard a Swedish businessman speaking to his Lithuanian counterpart in English, simply because it was a language common to them.
Americans just happen to live in a pretty big country where it's not necessary to speak any other languages, though I bet if you live in the southern parts of California, Texas, or Florida you'll pick up some Spanish just by osmosis. In fact, the insertion of Spanish into 'American' English will probably accelerate in the coming years, and 80 years from now we might all speak some form of 'Spanglish'.
As I recall from a speech Vint Cerf gave at my company, he said that during the California Gold Rush, the folks who got rich were not so much the miners (though a few struck it rich) but those who sold mining supplies -- pick axes, mules, etc.
Even after the prospectors were gone, the folks who sold supplies did just fine when the other settlers came.
Intel and Cisco sell mules -- I think they'll be just fine.
When people say that Brook's Law and Open Source are somehow in opposition, they haven't really read MMM:
1) "The best cure for any project is time", or something to that effect. Open Source projects are not subject to an arbitrary ship date, so they can take whatever time needed to get it right.
2) Testing *is* an easily parallelized task, and since Brooks advocates devoting a full third of the project schedule to it, an Open Source project can make up a lot of time here.
3) As you point out above, it's usually a small core of people who do the most work on a given project -- but they are almost invariably the *right* people. Due to the open nature of the process, talent and skill (and interest) can flow to where the need is. In contrast, a commercial company probably wouldn't reassign a programmer until there was a recognized problem. Of course, (1) they would have to recognize the problem, (2) know who the right programmers are, and (3) the programmers would have to get up to speed, since they wouldn't likely have prior access to the source.
I don't think Open Source projects are immune, but *nix systems have the advantage of being composed of a lot of small applications with well documented interfaces rather than a few large ones. The Linux kernel, Apache, and Perl are all of a manageable size, while a single large app like Mozilla arguably has some problems.
Actually, I thought it was built of plywood mainly because steel was a very precious commodity during the war. Either way, you're right, it was a very creative design.
In the same vein, I nominate the Sherman "Hedgehog" Tanks of the Normandy invasion. Normandy is (or at least was) full of large hedgerows, or "Bocage". Whenever a tank rolled over one, it would expose the thin armor on its underbelly, and the Germans quickly learned to place anti-tank guns on the other side to dispatch them.
After losing quite a few tanks, the legend goes that some Sergeant got the bright idea to cut up the steel beach obstacles (if you've seen "Saving Private Ryan", they're the ones shaped like children's jacks) and weld them to the front of the Shermans. These forks would lodge into the front of the hedgerow and the tank would bust on through going fast, straight, and level, with the much thicker front armor facing the enemy.
So aside from the sheer ingenuity level, it has the added irony of using the German's own obstacles against them, enough to qualify as an all-time "hack" in my book.
They've even got the Navajo dictionary. Turns out that the system was more than just the Navajo language and a few code words, since even a captured Navajo couldn't decipher it.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned this. The ability to reverse the procedure is HUGE. Even if the success rate of PRK or LASIK is 95%, it still means 1 out of 20 people is hating it, and its not a bad haircut we're talking about. If I was going to have a procedure, this would be the one.
Well of course the Dems know more about the Internet 'cuz like, you know, Al Gore invented it;)
What with Janet "No Strong Crypto" Reno, and Louis "Wiretappin' Must Be" Freeh, I think there are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle to complain about.
While I'm quick to respond when people here make clueless statements about Apple -- which doesn't happen nearly so much as it used to -- Cupertino has really screwed up on this one. It may not be their fault that Moto can't deliver G4s fast enough, or that RAM prices have gone up dramatically, but there are much better ways to do it than take it out of the hide of the customer.
The minimal thing to do would have been to offer the 500Mhz customers the opportunity to buy either a 450Mhz config or their original config with a 450 at a reduced price. If a price increase was absolutely necessary they should have grandfathered existing orders.
The sad thing is, they could have built up a lot of consumer goodwill by "doing the right thing" -- with the iBook and the new iMac they are going to have an extremely good Christmas season anyway. They could have coped with making a little less money and reinforcing their customer loyalty. Unfortunately, this seems to happen less and less with publicly traded companies.
While every computer may be a universal computer (Turing Machine) in the sense that it can run any algorithm, few (actually, none) are used in this manner. Every computer may have infinite *potential* uses, but the actual uses are bounded by the applications it runs. It may be replication of a physical product like a CD or DVD player, it may be something which has no physical analog like a Web browser, or perhaps something in-between like a word processor.
AFAIK, my Palm Pilot is a Turing Machine, but it is simple to use because it is limited to a certain set of apps. Could someone port The Gimp to it? Well, yes, but obviously the form factor of the Palm does not lend itself to that use. This particular *physical* instantiation of a Turing Machine is limited in functionality.
To a lesser degree, the same is still true of the home PC. To the extent that one can identify the uses for a particular computer -- web, e-mail, word processing, games -- one can make it "super easy" to use. Obviously, if you then load Mathematica or AutoCAD onto the machine, it may no longer be easy to use, but that is driven by the complexity of the application.
Interesting rhetorical gymnastics. Too bad they're either misleading or flat out wrong.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
The very quote you use says "don't need", as opposed to "make sure..does not". Quite a different logical meaning there. Perhaps you would be happier with a car or television that *forced* the user to be intimate with it's underlying technology? Maybe you should have to manually set the fuel-air ratio in your Honda? Screw channels, you should have to manually tune your TV. The entire computing world is built upon the concept of functional abstraction, otherwise we'd be trying to send web pages using assembly language. Apple is trying to 'abstract' up to the user level by integrating software and hardware. Many users may not know how a computer works. So what? Perhaps, God forbid, they actually want to do other things with their lives.
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
Gee, that's funny, my cable modem dowloaded a file the other night at 180KB/s. That pipe seems pretty full to me. Perhaps my Macs are running NT without my knowledge...
Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace
Hardly. I don't see Sony products anywhere in my workplace, and they seem to do okay. People bought two million iMacs because they were easy to use and looked cool (at least to their eyes), while the computers at work were neither. Frankly, I'd be less likely to buy the same product I see at work (phone, VCR, company car) because I know PHBs only care about buying what the herd mentality tells them they should buy, and what fits with the corporate culture. They're gonna buy the white Ford Taurus GL, not the SHO, and surely not a Beetle/Audi TT/Ferrari/anything mildy interesting. As people see how clueless some IT departments are, they'll come to the same conclusion about computers.
Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)
So the world needs another kernel? Avie Tevanian did a lot of work on what became the Mach kernel. Avie worked for Steve at NeXT. Apple bought NeXT. A lot of the other technology (e.g., QuickTime) was "homegrown" at Apple. People used to complain that Apple had NIH-syndrome. Now you criticize them because they didn't reinvent the wheel? So what are we to make of companies that now support Linux? How about IBM? Is this an indictment against OS/2 and AIX, or is it just good business? How about SGI and IRIX?
So what if Jobs has his own ideology about technology? Since Apple is a vertical integrator, they will never dominate the overall market. You can take Steve's vision or leave it. If I don't like Saab's vision for the automobile, I don't buy one, but I'm not frightened by them. I'm more frightened by a company that's wants to have a piece of everything. Now who could that be?
Katz, did you even bother reading the First Amendment?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Read that first word again -- CONGRESS. And by extension, Govt in general. Only in the case of the Brooklyn Art Museum does it even remotely apply (i.e., Whether the Govt can fund the arts in general and then decide it doesn't like particular art).
All the others concern PRIVATE organizations and people. The Reform Party can do whatever the hell it wants. So can Princeton. So can Ventura and Singer.
When did we get to a state where "Freedom of Speech" means someone can denigrate anything and everything I believe in, and I'm "censoring" them if I don't politely golf clap and say "Oh, isn't that precious! Oh, my aren't you intelligent and wonderful and I would be so honored to have you impart your unique and special wisdom to me!"
Bullshit. Democracy is messy and argumentative. Always has been, always will. If you decide to demean everything someone believes in, don't be surprised if they peaceably assemble and give you a lot of grief about it. A quick perusal of Boston, New York, or Chicago political history will show you that Freedom of Speech ain't for sissies. Of course violence or the threat of it is wrong, but someone else vehemently opposing what you say, calling for your ouster, or refusing to listen to what you say is NOT censorship. Even if they're being close-minded, they have a God-given right to be, and that doesn't impinge on any of your rights.
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..you need to work "post-Columbine", "interactive", and "the New Media" in there somewhere. Variations are allowed and encouraged so long as they convey the establishing of a new "paradigm" or the destruction of an old one. For a recent addition, "Old Fartism" wouldn't hurt either. Oh yeah, never forget, you can never use "geek" too often! ;-)
...You both get dirty, but the pig likes it."
OK, sorry to reply to myself, but I think I have my iMac revisions crossed up -- I can't keep track anymore.
rev A - original 233Mhz
rev B - still 233Mhz, VRAM upgraded to 6MB
rev C - 266Mhz, no more mezzanine slot
rev D - 333Mhz
rev E - current 350/400Mhz, fanless models
I probably forgot something, but I *think* this is correct. The upgrade cards work in revs A-D.
The main difference is how the manufacturers got around the issue of the Apple boot ROMs being on the processor daughtercard. Newer has you mail back the original daughtercard, which they then solder a new G3 on. (So yes, your card is technically a refurb) They are a little cheaper, though -- $450.
The guys from Powerlogix pulled a somewhat slicker trick. They apparently have a utility which reads the contents of the boot ROM and stores it on the hard drive. Their card uses flash ROM and the contents of the file are flashed to the card when you install it. Therefore you don't need to send your card back for them to make more upgrade cards -- and your card is brand new.
I don't think you can use either card with a rev D iMac, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to spend big bucks to upgrade a 400Mhz machine to 466 or 500Mhz. It's a more attractive deal if you have a rev A or B model (233 or 266Mhz) especially since those two can take Voodoo2 upgrades (yeah, yeah, pretty old but still an improvement over the built-in ATI chipsets).
What's of more interest is that Powerlogix may use the same technique to offer upgrades for the Wallstreet Powerbooks.
Yeah, the moderator system is kinda weird that way. The first two marked it as "funny", which of course was my intent, but the last marked it as "insightful", and the most recent moderator description is the one that shows up.
I guess he/she thought I was being deep or something...
Damn you Europeans and the Vespas you rode in on! Don't you know we're the only ones allowed to not pay dues to international organizations!
I need to switch to decaf...
Now if you'll pardon me, my Ensure's gettin warm and my oatmeal's gettin cold. mumble, mumble...Cryptonomicon..mumble, mumble data haven. Feh! ;-)
You've left some things out, as well as oversimplified quite a bit. What the studies found was that crew-served weapons (e.g., heavy machine guns) were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the killings. Based on their number, firing rate, and lethality, they inflicted even more casaualties than one would have thought.
The average rifleman on the other hand, has plenty of incentive to just keep his head down during a firefight, and no one is really watching him to make sure he fires his weapon. The crew on the machine gun will quickly notice if one of the crewmembers is not doing their job, and there was little evidence they ever failed to pull the trigger.
After WWII and Korea, the Army altered rifle training to emphasize firing the weapon in combat situations (instead of just shooting at round targets at the firing range). Their problem was pretty much "solved" by the time Vietnam rolled around, so video games had pretty much zilch to do with it.
FYI, the Palm V case is blasted aluminum, *not* titanium.
Titanium is stronger than steel and (I think) lighter than aluminum. It doesn't corrode. It obviously can stand a lot more heat than plastic, provides *much* more protection, and probably doesn't weigh much more. Now if it was common and cheap why would we even bother with the other materials?
Because it *isn't* common or cheap, and it is very hard to work with. It's a metal reserved for high-stress and temperature environments -- the SR-71 is skinned in titanium. Before composites every aircraft designer would have loved to build a whole plane out of titanium, but only a few could afford it.
Titanium is just one of those raw materials (unlike steel, silicon, or aluminum) that is relatively rare and expensive. Like I said, if it was common we'd make everything from it and we wouldn't think of using steel and aluminum in cars, airplanes, and cases any more than we'd think of using tin.
Personally, I have doubts about making a titanium case by itself for $100, much less a whole computer. Maybe Magnesium, but the thing is named "Tight", not "Might".
Redmond (AP) -- The software industry was rocked today by the revelation that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had been secretly sheltering persecuted Free Software programmers within the company's various business divisions. Ballmer, with the help of a sympathetic aide, had kept a list of programmers he knew to be writing code for open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD, and had sought to place them in obscure positions in the company where they could work unmolested.
One midlevel executive, who asked not to be identified, said "We're all shocked. Apparently Steve was placing workers in divisions he knew we'd pay little attention to -- places like Quality Control, the Macintosh Products Division -- those sorts of places." It is now believed that between 1994 and 1997, Ballmer had attempted to place most free software workers within the Internet Explorer division. With most of Microsoft concentrated on the Microsoft Network (MSN), the release of IE as a freely downloadable program was to be merely a prelude to the release of the IE source code itself.
However, others executives including Gates became suspicious of Ballmer's motives, and in 1998 a new policy was implemented for Internet Explorer. From then on, IE was to become part of the Windows 98 operating system itself, and many of Ballmer's workers were scattered to other divisions.
Ballmer's motivations and his scheme were exposed last week, when during a board meeting he proposed opening the source code to Windows 2000 as a means of placating the Justice Department in its lawsuit against Microsoft. It is now believed that the promotion of Ballmer to CEO was engineered by Gates to lure him out into the open. Microsoft's other board members yesterday voted unanimously for Ballmer's removal as CEO of the corporation.
As he left the Redmond campus this morning, a weeping Ballmer expressed regret that he did not do more. Pointing to his Rolex watch, a teary-eyed Ballmer said "You see this! This could have paid for a few more device drivers!" Referring to his Porsche sports car, he said "And this! This could have paid for a whole new window manager!"
Reaction within the free software community has been one of shock. Reached at his Cambridge, Massachussetts home, open source advocate Richard M. Stallman expressed gratitude that Ballmer had sheltered Free Software programmers within Microsoft, but still held reservations about his prominent role within the corporation. Nevertheless, on Monday, Stallman will propose changing the GNU Public License to declare Ballmer a "Righteous Closed Source Worker", the highest honor that can be bestowed upon someone who is not Free Software programmer.
...neither is big business or government. A lot of our international posters keep saying "DMCA, UCITA, etc. doesn't apply to me" and they're right. However, these laws didn't just pop up out of nowhere. I think it was inevitable that once the internet grew beyond novelty and into something useful (and therefore *worth* something) that corporations and government would want to control it.
Your country doesn't have to "follow the US lead" -- once the Net becomes something of real value in your country there will be a company or government agency there ready to claim control of it. The natural impulse of any organization is to grow and accrete more power. The problem has only surfaced in the US first because the Net has moved beyond novelty here and into the daily lives of many more people.
The US has its own spate of stupid laws, but we've already seen stupid laws passed in otherwise democratic places like Australia. Yes, RIAA and MPAA both end in "Association of America", but don't you think that companies like BMG will move to protect their interests when the time comes? (And right now they can sit back as the RIAA fights most of their battles for them.) In places where there is already strong control of existing media, it will be a natural to extend this to the Internet. Even though we all know how difficult this is technically, if something is illegal it still gives the government a pretext to arrest people they don't like.
Like I said, the impulse is everywhere, lying just under the surface. You won't end up with America's stupid laws -- you'll have a whole set of your own unless you watch out. Even if your country happens to be highly enlightened and all your personal liberties are preserved, if other countries around you are not, then it won't be much of a "World Wide" web, will it?
AFAIK, there is nothing about Linux that would prevent it from being certified as a DII COE platform. So long as you have a POSIX-compliant system you should be able get it certified through the Kernel Platform Certification (KPC - why do I think of fried chicken?) program. That's not to say no new code would be required, but I gather it's mostly a documentation process ("Does the system do X?" sort of thing). The 'kernel' services -- security, system management, networking, printing, etc. -- aren't anything cosmic.
The catch is that someone must pay the costs for it to go through the certification process, and no single program would want to foot the bill because they are probably underfunded to begin with. That being the case, they will likely choose one of the three platforms already certified (NT, Solaris, or HP-UX).
So it is left to the vendor to put forth the money and effort to get a platform through the process -- but in the case of Linux, which vendor? That's the catch that I see. Someone will have to carry the flag -- IBM? RedHat? It just depends on who wants to sell to the DoD bad enough.
Now, once you've been certified, there's still the matter of getting all the infrastructure and common applications running on your platform -- but if they'll run under Solaris and HP-UX it shouldn't be too hairy to port them.
In this context, I'm assuming auditing means *security* auditing. When you turn on auditing in Solaris, for example, you can log login attempts (successful and unsuccessful), file creations, modifications, and deletions, and probably any number of other things I'm unaware of.
Basically, it's a tool to help you detect breakins or suspicious behavior by users.
Holding everyone around you in disdain says a lot more about you than about them. Where I live I see a lot of honest, hard working people getting through day by day. I see immigrants working their asses off to make a better life for themselves or their children. It ain't perfect, but it's what *you* make of it.
I was born in the Philippines, and I've been to over a dozen countries. I've really enjoyed just about all of them, and there is usually something valuable to be learned from everyone. But I wouldn't trade places with *anyone*. If you think you're so unfortunate to live here, you can leave anytime you wish. Go right ahead, I sure as hell won't stop you...
Things aren't just English-centric because other folks "let" them be that way, they contribute to it, and it benefits them. After travelling through some 8 or 9 European countries, I've ditched any guilt about not speaking other languages fluently -- people simply learn whatever is *necessary* to get through their daily lives. If the average European speaks more than one language, it's not because of some great cultural enlightenment, but because they needed to for some reason -- often economic, as others have pointed out. And since it probably began as a child, it really took little extra effort -- kids can easily learn several languages, while it's a much more daunting task for an adult.
When I was in Italy hardly anyone spoke English, so you can bet I started to learn Italian pretty quick. When I was in Holland almost everyone spoke very good English, so attempts to learn Dutch were rather pointless. That area in Italy only sees a few tourists during parts of the year, mostly Germans. So if folks know any foreign languages it's usually -- you guessed it -- German. The Dutch, on the other hand, do business far and wide, so they've chosen to teach everyone English in school.
Since a lot of European countries aren't any bigger than a mid-sized U.S. state, their economies have to be highly integrated with their neighbors. Now if you border several other countries, which languages are you going to learn? Instead of learning five or six, you might choose the language of your dominant trading partner, OR you'll choose a significant trading partner common to everyone.
For example, if you live in Slovakia, you border on Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Ukraine. Which language should you learn? The answer is German, because all of you do significant trade with Germany. If you're going to learn another language beyond that, you'll pick English, because that gets you the Americans, the British, and let's not forget the Dutch. A Slovak interpreter I met did exactly this. He told me that the interpreters in his school always used to learn German and Russian. Once the Soviets left, everyone dropped Russian like a hot potato and started learning English. It's not some form of Cultural Imperialism, it's just being practical. When I was in Lithuania, I heard a Swedish businessman speaking to his Lithuanian counterpart in English, simply because it was a language common to them.
Americans just happen to live in a pretty big country where it's not necessary to speak any other languages, though I bet if you live in the southern parts of California, Texas, or Florida you'll pick up some Spanish just by osmosis. In fact, the insertion of Spanish into 'American' English will probably accelerate in the coming years, and 80 years from now we might all speak some form of 'Spanglish'.
Hasta la vista, Dude.
As I recall from a speech Vint Cerf gave at my company, he said that during the California Gold Rush, the folks who got rich were not so much the miners (though a few struck it rich) but those who sold mining supplies -- pick axes, mules, etc.
Even after the prospectors were gone, the folks who sold supplies did just fine when the other settlers came.
Intel and Cisco sell mules -- I think they'll be just fine.
When people say that Brook's Law and Open Source are somehow in opposition, they haven't really read MMM:
1) "The best cure for any project is time", or something to that effect. Open Source projects are not subject to an arbitrary ship date, so they can take whatever time needed to get it right.
2) Testing *is* an easily parallelized task, and since Brooks advocates devoting a full third of the project schedule to it, an Open Source project can make up a lot of time here.
3) As you point out above, it's usually a small core of people who do the most work on a given project -- but they are almost invariably the *right* people. Due to the open nature of the process, talent and skill (and interest) can flow to where the need is. In contrast, a commercial company probably wouldn't reassign a programmer until there was a recognized problem. Of course, (1) they would have to recognize the problem, (2) know who the right programmers are, and (3) the programmers would have to get up to speed, since they wouldn't likely have prior access to the source.
I don't think Open Source projects are immune, but *nix systems have the advantage of being composed of a lot of small applications with well documented interfaces rather than a few large ones. The Linux kernel, Apache, and Perl are all of a manageable size, while a single large app like Mozilla arguably has some problems.
Actually, I thought it was built of plywood mainly because steel was a very precious commodity during the war. Either way, you're right, it was a very creative design.
In the same vein, I nominate the Sherman "Hedgehog" Tanks of the Normandy invasion. Normandy is (or at least was) full of large hedgerows, or "Bocage". Whenever a tank rolled over one, it would expose the thin armor on its underbelly, and the Germans quickly learned to place anti-tank guns on the other side to dispatch them.
After losing quite a few tanks, the legend goes that some Sergeant got the bright idea to cut up the steel beach obstacles (if you've seen "Saving Private Ryan", they're the ones shaped like children's jacks) and weld them to the front of the Shermans. These forks would lodge into the front of the hedgerow and the tank would bust on through going fast, straight, and level, with the much thicker front armor facing the enemy.
So aside from the sheer ingenuity level, it has the added irony of using the German's own obstacles against them, enough to qualify as an all-time "hack" in my book.
I think with a population of over 250,000 in the Navajo nation, more than 50 or 60 would still speak it. Could be wrong, tho'.
There's more info at the Navy's History site:
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61 -2.htm
They've even got the Navajo dictionary. Turns out that the system was more than just the Navajo language and a few code words, since even a captured Navajo couldn't decipher it.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned this. The ability to reverse the procedure is HUGE. Even if the success rate of PRK or LASIK is 95%, it still means 1 out of 20 people is hating it, and its not a bad haircut we're talking about. If I was going to have a procedure, this would be the one.
Well of course the Dems know more about the Internet 'cuz like, you know, Al Gore invented it ;)
What with Janet "No Strong Crypto" Reno, and Louis "Wiretappin' Must Be" Freeh, I think there are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle to complain about.
While I'm quick to respond when people here make clueless statements about Apple -- which doesn't happen nearly so much as it used to -- Cupertino has really screwed up on this one. It may not be their fault that Moto can't deliver G4s fast enough, or that RAM prices have gone up dramatically, but there are much better ways to do it than take it out of the hide of the customer.
The minimal thing to do would have been to offer the 500Mhz customers the opportunity to buy either a 450Mhz config or their original config with a 450 at a reduced price. If a price increase was absolutely necessary they should have grandfathered existing orders.
The sad thing is, they could have built up a lot of consumer goodwill by "doing the right thing" -- with the iBook and the new iMac they are going to have an extremely good Christmas season anyway. They could have coped with making a little less money and reinforcing their customer loyalty. Unfortunately, this seems to happen less and less with publicly traded companies.
While every computer may be a universal computer (Turing Machine) in the sense that it can run any algorithm, few (actually, none) are used in this manner. Every computer may have infinite *potential* uses, but the actual uses are bounded by the applications it runs. It may be replication of a physical product like a CD or DVD player, it may be something which has no physical analog like a Web browser, or perhaps something in-between like a word processor.
AFAIK, my Palm Pilot is a Turing Machine, but it is simple to use because it is limited to a certain set of apps. Could someone port The Gimp to it? Well, yes, but obviously the form factor of the Palm does not lend itself to that use. This particular *physical* instantiation of a Turing Machine is limited in functionality.
To a lesser degree, the same is still true of the home PC. To the extent that one can identify the uses for a particular computer -- web, e-mail, word processing, games -- one can make it "super easy" to use. Obviously, if you then load Mathematica or AutoCAD onto the machine, it may no longer be easy to use, but that is driven by the complexity of the application.
Interesting rhetorical gymnastics. Too bad they're either misleading or flat out wrong.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
The very quote you use says "don't need", as opposed to "make sure..does not". Quite a different logical meaning there. Perhaps you would be happier with a car or television that *forced* the user to be intimate with it's underlying technology? Maybe you should have to manually set the fuel-air ratio in your Honda? Screw channels, you should have to manually tune your TV. The entire computing world is built upon the concept of functional abstraction, otherwise we'd be trying to send web pages using assembly language. Apple is trying to 'abstract' up to the user level by integrating software and hardware. Many users may not know how a computer works. So what? Perhaps, God forbid, they actually want to do other things with their lives.
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
Gee, that's funny, my cable modem dowloaded a file the other night at 180KB/s. That pipe seems pretty full to me. Perhaps my Macs are running NT without my knowledge...
Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace
Hardly. I don't see Sony products anywhere in my workplace, and they seem to do okay. People bought two million iMacs because they were easy to use and looked cool (at least to their eyes), while the computers at work were neither. Frankly, I'd be less likely to buy the same product I see at work (phone, VCR, company car) because I know PHBs only care about buying what the herd mentality tells them they should buy, and what fits with the corporate culture. They're gonna buy the white Ford Taurus GL, not the SHO, and surely not a Beetle/Audi TT/Ferrari/anything mildy interesting. As people see how clueless some IT departments are, they'll come to the same conclusion about computers.
Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)
So the world needs another kernel? Avie Tevanian did a lot of work on what became the Mach kernel. Avie worked for Steve at NeXT. Apple bought NeXT. A lot of the other technology (e.g., QuickTime) was "homegrown" at Apple. People used to complain that Apple had NIH-syndrome. Now you criticize them because they didn't reinvent the wheel? So what are we to make of companies that now support Linux? How about IBM? Is this an indictment against OS/2 and AIX, or is it just good business? How about SGI and IRIX?
So what if Jobs has his own ideology about technology? Since Apple is a vertical integrator, they will never dominate the overall market. You can take Steve's vision or leave it. If I don't like Saab's vision for the automobile, I don't buy one, but I'm not frightened by them. I'm more frightened by a company that's wants to have a piece of everything. Now who could that be?
Katz, did you even bother reading the First Amendment?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Read that first word again -- CONGRESS. And by extension, Govt in general. Only in the case of the Brooklyn Art Museum does it even remotely apply (i.e., Whether the Govt can fund the arts in general and then decide it doesn't like particular art).
All the others concern PRIVATE organizations and people. The Reform Party can do whatever the hell it wants. So can Princeton. So can Ventura and Singer.
When did we get to a state where "Freedom of Speech" means someone can denigrate anything and everything I believe in, and I'm "censoring" them if I don't politely golf clap and say "Oh, isn't that precious! Oh, my aren't you intelligent and wonderful and I would be so honored to have you impart your unique and special wisdom to me!"
Bullshit. Democracy is messy and argumentative. Always has been, always will. If you decide to demean everything someone believes in, don't be surprised if they peaceably assemble and give you a lot of grief about it. A quick perusal of Boston, New York, or Chicago political history will show you that Freedom of Speech ain't for sissies. Of course violence or the threat of it is wrong, but someone else vehemently opposing what you say, calling for your ouster, or refusing to listen to what you say is NOT censorship. Even if they're being close-minded, they have a God-given right to be, and that doesn't impinge on any of your rights.