While we're at it, we should also all pull the "fast forward" buttons off of our DVR remotes, too. Television shows cost a lot of money to produce, and we shouldn't deny the TV networks their hard-earned ad revenue either. And we should read every ad in newspapers and magazines, too. Don't forget when you're driving down the freeway on your way to work to stop and read the billboards, too. You guys out there actually watching the road are irresponsible freeloaders!
Fast-booting. Okay, let me tell you something. My SATA HDD-based desktop boots in under a minute. Big frickin' deal if I get an extra 10 seconds switching out my 300GB HDD for an 80GB SSD. My aging 5-year-old 1.6 Ghz Pentium M laptop boots in about 2-3 minutes. Even that I don't notice very much, with suspend-to-disk and whatnot.
What about my 5-year-old laptop makes unuseful for word processing, e-mail and Web browsing? Nothing. Nothing at all. That's exactly what I use it for.
I think a better analogy would be to say that today's programmers are more like a Cargo Cult [wikipedia.org].
Do you mean the cretans that pass for programmers by banging together some JavaScript and PHP code snippets found by googling things like "JavaScript menus" to produce a website, or do you mean actual programmers? If the former, I agree, if the latter, well, no.
No one ever said otherwise. The needs of enterprise customers will ensure that magnetic HDDs will continue to exist for years to come.
And it's not always worthwhile to upgrade a PC. Hard drives will continue to exist there as long as there is a significant price difference between HDDs and SSDs. Some people, like gamers, will pay for the extra performance. Someone using their PC for word processing, Web browsing and e-mail gains no advantage on a desktop, and little advantage on a laptop.
The reason you still see FDD controllers, serial ports, parallel ports, etc., on modern PC motherboards (even many laptops have the hardware although they don't have the external port itself) is that these things are all integrated into the chipsets these days. The extra bits of hardware to support this stuff on the motherboard costs pennies so there's literally no reason not to include it.
As far as QBASIC, there's a community project to revive it called qb64. Duelling snakes, here I come!
No, they screwed themselves. They built a machine that was far too expensive for the marketplace, and there was such poor leadership at Xerox, so the Star just didn't take.
And it wasn't just Microsoft (or, more correctly, Apple) that benefited from Xerox PARC. The following technologies all were originally developed at PARC and their inventors went on to start their own businesses or work for other companies:
- Ethernet: Bob Metcalfe went off to start 3COM - WYSIWYG word processing: Butler Lampson went off to work at DEC (He now works at Microsoft) - GUI: Most of the GUI programmers went to work at Apple. - Laser printers: The Laser printer guys went to work at Apple - PostScript: John Warnock took his invention with him he founded Adobe Systems (it's no surprise that Apple's LaserWriter was the first printer to use PostScript)
and the list goes on. Today's corporate office PC network basically owes its existence to Xerox PARC and the Xerox Star.
Forensics is an applied science -- it uses scientific apparatus to figure out what happened in the past, typically in order to convict criminals. But looking at the past doesn't make something not a science -- archaeology seeks to figure out what happened in the past because understanding where we came from is important to understanding where we are going.
Without archaeology, where would we have gotten Darwin's theory of evolution?
Pro-tip: Anything that's "resuable" that has a limit on the number of times it can be re-used like, say CD-RWs or this plastic paper, are actually consumable.
Still, if it really does last 1,000 times (which I doubt), and you're only printing stuff for temporary consumption (as in, you aren't keeping hard copies of anything locked in a filing cabinet), you actually could save enough money -- if you print enough, that is.
Innovation at Microsoft ended long, long ago. Microsoft has failed to produce a single innovation that it has not outright purchased for a at least a decade. And no, ClearType is not an innovation: others were doing subpixel font smoothing well before ClearType came along. The sad thing is that without the ability to innovate internally, they will lack the mobility to survive the coming storm of change in their industry. Vista failed to deliver innovation in operating systems, Windows 7 is just Microsoft playing catchup with Apple, Azure will fail to secure a Windows monopoly in the cloud. Microsoft makes hundred-billion-dollar profits because of their monopoly position. Once it starts slipping -- and it already has -- they must either learn to become an equal player in the industry or they will die.
can you run your own email server in Iran without getting shot at?
Do not worry, Infidel! We have tracked your IP address! The Imperial Guard is on their way, as I write this! Death to you, and may Allah have mercy on your soul!
You can take your unconstitutional further criminalization of what is ultimately a civil issue -- copyright infringement -- and shove it up your ass. Rights holders already have all the recourse they need -- the public court system. Taking away my constitutional rights to satisfy the profit needs of some rights holders is simply unacceptable. What do we have to do? Toss CDs and DVDs into Boston Harbor?
So first they cool it to -17 degree and it remains a liquid, then they warm it up to -7 degree and it freezes. That's like traveling from Greenwich to the Arctic via Antarctica and then call it a scientific discovery that one can actually reach the Arctic by going south, right?
Deep packet inspection can be a very, very resource intensive thing. I seriously doubt that any such laws will be likely to require deep packet inspection. For one, it would put quite a few smaller ISPs out of business for good.
I have a feeling I know why the FBI wants this. It used to be that all the traffic passed through telco routers owned by Verizon and AT&T. Nowadays, most traffic is being handled by companies like Level3 or UUNet. They had it easy with the telcos, who always had a close relationship with government regulators. Businesses like Level 3, Google, etc., are far less likely to be cooperative.
Yes. On a front-wheel drive, jamming on the e-brake will cause the car to spin. In fact, stunt drivers use this effect on purpose, to do 180s and whatnot. As far as the throttle sticking, you can throw the car into neutral -- or you can shut the engine off -- before applying the e-brake.
Or maybe we should recognize that multi-ton incendiary missiles capable of travelling at a hundred miles per hour on a level surface should be required to have at least 3 manual systems: Shifting, braking, and emergency shutoff.
All current production cars already have this. Every car produced for sale in North America or Europe (at least) is required to have a manually-operated emergency brake, and a crash safety switch that shuts the engine down in the event of a crash. And even cars with an automatic transmission have a way to manually shift the car into a low gear (1/2).
I think this is great news, but what happens if inadvertently some of this software infringes on a patent or two?
The same thing that happens when any other open source infringes on a patent. Absolutely nothing unless or until the patent owner decides to sue somebody. There is no hole ripped in the space-time continuum, nobody is going to get arrested, nothing will self-destruct.
BTW--The Library of Congress != USPTO. Copyrights are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and copies of the works are stored in the Library of Congress; Patents and Trademarks with the USPTO. There is no "office of intellectual property". Know why? Because, legally, there's no such thing.
Personally? Eh. Privatization of manned space flight could lead to new innovations and cheapening, but with the whole "launch sites near the equator" thing, there's a real limit to how many sites you can create. And once that land gets up for grabs, things might end up going crazy for a while. I know quite a lot of people would despise launch platforms near their homes.
Meh. It's probably not as bad you think.
Actually, I think a lot of commercial and privatized launches will end up being overseas. For example, SpaceX is launching from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the U.S. Marshall Islands. There's a lot more of these little atolls in the South Pacific, many of them either uninhabited or semi-uninhabited. Many of them are even U.S. territories.
Now on some of them you can't sustain any sort of long-term housing because the food (vegetation) will irradiate you since they did nuclear bomb teesting on these islands decades ago, but that actually makes them ideal for a rocket launch site. No one needs to live there long-term; you set the launch site up a couple of weeks prior to launch, ship in all the supplies you're going to need, and then ship them all out when the mission is done. The water and land surface itself aren't irradiated anymore, it's mostly just the vegetation and underground mineral deposits present on the island.
And since they're far nearer the equator than central Florida, they present lots of low-cost launch options.
So I wouldn't be surprised in the next 5-10 years if we heard of spaceflights launching from Bikini Atoll, for instance.
Don't trust any technology or hardware that you don't have complete and unhindered access to. I'm telling you now, I've seen records pulled up on people for things that the above mentioned agencies should never have had access to - things regular plebs wouldn't have believed possible to monitor. Those fellows will get records down to every time you've gone to the toilet - its that scary.
Corollary: any encryption technology that you need to rely on should be open source and well-understood. The hardware you use it on should be completely open and you should understand how things work on that hardware. Even better if you have compiled that code yourself.
And if you think it's only the cell manufacturers that have sold out, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.
Read the parent. Carefully. He knows what he's talking about.
All of this density wouldn't have been nearly as much of a problem if people had used WiFi in the intended way.
People saw WiFi and went "ooooh! Now I can get rid of all those unseemly wires!" and started loading wireless cards into desktops and servers. The purpose of wireless was to eliminate wires for portable equipment. Fixed equipment can used fixed wires with no problem. If the ugliness of a mess of wires and switches is your problem, there are better answers than going wireless.
In that respect, only people with laptops would need wireless routers, and the number of connected access points and connected clients would be less.
Even so, you're right in that the number of networks is excessive; but that's hardly the fault of the FCC, it's the fault of ISPs who can't think of any better business model than to sell individual all-you-can-eat hardwired Internet connections.
Slashdot Mirror
While we're at it, we should also all pull the "fast forward" buttons off of our DVR remotes, too. Television shows cost a lot of money to produce, and we shouldn't deny the TV networks their hard-earned ad revenue either. And we should read every ad in newspapers and magazines, too. Don't forget when you're driving down the freeway on your way to work to stop and read the billboards, too. You guys out there actually watching the road are irresponsible freeloaders!
Fast-booting. Okay, let me tell you something. My SATA HDD-based desktop boots in under a minute. Big frickin' deal if I get an extra 10 seconds switching out my 300GB HDD for an 80GB SSD. My aging 5-year-old 1.6 Ghz Pentium M laptop boots in about 2-3 minutes. Even that I don't notice very much, with suspend-to-disk and whatnot.
What about my 5-year-old laptop makes unuseful for word processing, e-mail and Web browsing? Nothing. Nothing at all. That's exactly what I use it for.
Put things in perspective, man.
Yeah. I'm definitely getting off of Knuth's lawn.
Do you mean the cretans that pass for programmers by banging together some JavaScript and PHP code snippets found by googling things like "JavaScript menus" to produce a website, or do you mean actual programmers? If the former, I agree, if the latter, well, no.
Duh. Ethanol.
No one ever said otherwise. The needs of enterprise customers will ensure that magnetic HDDs will continue to exist for years to come.
And it's not always worthwhile to upgrade a PC. Hard drives will continue to exist there as long as there is a significant price difference between HDDs and SSDs. Some people, like gamers, will pay for the extra performance. Someone using their PC for word processing, Web browsing and e-mail gains no advantage on a desktop, and little advantage on a laptop.
The reason you still see FDD controllers, serial ports, parallel ports, etc., on modern PC motherboards (even many laptops have the hardware although they don't have the external port itself) is that these things are all integrated into the chipsets these days. The extra bits of hardware to support this stuff on the motherboard costs pennies so there's literally no reason not to include it.
As far as QBASIC, there's a community project to revive it called qb64. Duelling snakes, here I come!
No, they screwed themselves. They built a machine that was far too expensive for the marketplace, and there was such poor leadership at Xerox, so the Star just didn't take.
And it wasn't just Microsoft (or, more correctly, Apple) that benefited from Xerox PARC. The following technologies all were originally developed at PARC and their inventors went on to start their own businesses or work for other companies:
- Ethernet: Bob Metcalfe went off to start 3COM
- WYSIWYG word processing: Butler Lampson went off to work at DEC (He now works at Microsoft)
- GUI: Most of the GUI programmers went to work at Apple.
- Laser printers: The Laser printer guys went to work at Apple
- PostScript: John Warnock took his invention with him he founded Adobe Systems (it's no surprise that Apple's LaserWriter was the first printer to use PostScript)
and the list goes on. Today's corporate office PC network basically owes its existence to Xerox PARC and the Xerox Star.
Not so.
For example, some Linksys routers run Linux, but others run a proprietary VxWorks-based OS. They're all, to my knowledge, based on MIPS processors.
Forensics is an applied science -- it uses scientific apparatus to figure out what happened in the past, typically in order to convict criminals. But looking at the past doesn't make something not a science -- archaeology seeks to figure out what happened in the past because understanding where we came from is important to understanding where we are going.
Without archaeology, where would we have gotten Darwin's theory of evolution?
Pro-tip: Anything that's "resuable" that has a limit on the number of times it can be re-used like, say CD-RWs or this plastic paper, are actually consumable.
Still, if it really does last 1,000 times (which I doubt), and you're only printing stuff for temporary consumption (as in, you aren't keeping hard copies of anything locked in a filing cabinet), you actually could save enough money -- if you print enough, that is.
Yeah, because Steam is representative of overall desktop operating system use.
In other news, Canonical claims that Ubuntu use is nearly 100% based on their Web server logs.
Innovation at Microsoft ended long, long ago. Microsoft has failed to produce a single innovation that it has not outright purchased for a at least a decade. And no, ClearType is not an innovation: others were doing subpixel font smoothing well before ClearType came along. The sad thing is that without the ability to innovate internally, they will lack the mobility to survive the coming storm of change in their industry. Vista failed to deliver innovation in operating systems, Windows 7 is just Microsoft playing catchup with Apple, Azure will fail to secure a Windows monopoly in the cloud. Microsoft makes hundred-billion-dollar profits because of their monopoly position. Once it starts slipping -- and it already has -- they must either learn to become an equal player in the industry or they will die.
Replying to undo a bad mod. Sorry.
Do not worry, Infidel! We have tracked your IP address! The Imperial Guard is on their way, as I write this! Death to you, and may Allah have mercy on your soul!
Thanks,
The Iranian Minister of Information
You can take your unconstitutional further criminalization of what is ultimately a civil issue -- copyright infringement -- and shove it up your ass. Rights holders already have all the recourse they need -- the public court system. Taking away my constitutional rights to satisfy the profit needs of some rights holders is simply unacceptable. What do we have to do? Toss CDs and DVDs into Boston Harbor?
No, it's more like the realization that Canada is south of Detroit.
Deep packet inspection can be a very, very resource intensive thing. I seriously doubt that any such laws will be likely to require deep packet inspection. For one, it would put quite a few smaller ISPs out of business for good.
I have a feeling I know why the FBI wants this. It used to be that all the traffic passed through telco routers owned by Verizon and AT&T. Nowadays, most traffic is being handled by companies like Level3 or UUNet. They had it easy with the telcos, who always had a close relationship with government regulators. Businesses like Level 3, Google, etc., are far less likely to be cooperative.
Yes. On a front-wheel drive, jamming on the e-brake will cause the car to spin. In fact, stunt drivers use this effect on purpose, to do 180s and whatnot. As far as the throttle sticking, you can throw the car into neutral -- or you can shut the engine off -- before applying the e-brake.
Or maybe we should recognize that multi-ton incendiary missiles capable of travelling at a hundred miles per hour on a level surface should be required to have at least 3 manual systems: Shifting, braking, and emergency shutoff.
All current production cars already have this. Every car produced for sale in North America or Europe (at least) is required to have a manually-operated emergency brake, and a crash safety switch that shuts the engine down in the event of a crash. And even cars with an automatic transmission have a way to manually shift the car into a low gear (1/2).
Won't help. Chauffeurs are still people. What prevents them from wanting to use a phone while driving their socialites around?
Easy! We'll just mandate that all chauffeurs be both blind and deaf!
Oh, wait...
The same thing that happens when any other open source infringes on a patent. Absolutely nothing unless or until the patent owner decides to sue somebody. There is no hole ripped in the space-time continuum, nobody is going to get arrested, nothing will self-destruct.
BTW--The Library of Congress != USPTO. Copyrights are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and copies of the works are stored in the Library of Congress; Patents and Trademarks with the USPTO. There is no "office of intellectual property". Know why? Because, legally, there's no such thing.
Meh. It's probably not as bad you think.
Actually, I think a lot of commercial and privatized launches will end up being overseas. For example, SpaceX is launching from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the U.S. Marshall Islands. There's a lot more of these little atolls in the South Pacific, many of them either uninhabited or semi-uninhabited. Many of them are even U.S. territories.
Now on some of them you can't sustain any sort of long-term housing because the food (vegetation) will irradiate you since they did nuclear bomb teesting on these islands decades ago, but that actually makes them ideal for a rocket launch site. No one needs to live there long-term; you set the launch site up a couple of weeks prior to launch, ship in all the supplies you're going to need, and then ship them all out when the mission is done. The water and land surface itself aren't irradiated anymore, it's mostly just the vegetation and underground mineral deposits present on the island.
And since they're far nearer the equator than central Florida, they present lots of low-cost launch options.
So I wouldn't be surprised in the next 5-10 years if we heard of spaceflights launching from Bikini Atoll, for instance.
Don't trust any technology or hardware that you don't have complete and unhindered access to. I'm telling you now, I've seen records pulled up on people for things that the above mentioned agencies should never have had access to - things regular plebs wouldn't have believed possible to monitor. Those fellows will get records down to every time you've gone to the toilet - its that scary.
Corollary: any encryption technology that you need to rely on should be open source and well-understood. The hardware you use it on should be completely open and you should understand how things work on that hardware. Even better if you have compiled that code yourself.
And if you think it's only the cell manufacturers that have sold out, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.
Read the parent. Carefully. He knows what he's talking about.
All of this density wouldn't have been nearly as much of a problem if people had used WiFi in the intended way.
People saw WiFi and went "ooooh! Now I can get rid of all those unseemly wires!" and started loading wireless cards into desktops and servers. The purpose of wireless was to eliminate wires for portable equipment. Fixed equipment can used fixed wires with no problem. If the ugliness of a mess of wires and switches is your problem, there are better answers than going wireless.
In that respect, only people with laptops would need wireless routers, and the number of connected access points and connected clients would be less.
Even so, you're right in that the number of networks is excessive; but that's hardly the fault of the FCC, it's the fault of ISPs who can't think of any better business model than to sell individual all-you-can-eat hardwired Internet connections.