Hereforth, I propose that all mass in our universe is comprised of elaborate boolean operations on chicken. After all, it is a well-known truth that chicken tastes like everything, and it also helps explain why so much of DNA is the same throughout species.
Unfortunately, I don't have a concise mathematical model to support this hypothesis yet, but I'm sure there's someone resourceful out there who can take care of all that hand-waving stuff.
Arrogant, detached observers are quite entertaining. It is especially funny when they pipe out occasionally just to point out that they really regard their fellow "humans" as mere puppets.
I myself like to sit around all day, deep down in my lair, in my steel armchair, watching them do their little chores. Sometimes I even let out a grin and a little dry laugh before I resume petting my white cat!
Also does this mean I will be able to buy a Dell PowerEdge 2850 running Mac OSX Server?
I doubt you'd want to, what with Darwin's threading performance. OSX is a nice desktop but a load-bearing server it is not.
Re:For most consumers, hardware is less of a facto
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 1
You think you are the only one older than 20 that's used the argument?
Just barely older than 20, actually - not that it's of any real significance.
The last time it was toted that "the consumer definitely doesn't need any more power than this" was somewhere around when x86's first passed 1 GHz in clock speed. Before that it was the 300-500 MHz boxes that should be quite damn enough already. And so on. It has been a somewhat regular occurrence throughout the entire history of computing. Software developers "innovate" and hardware has to keep up, and vice versa.
You can still do a lot of your mundane computing tasks with an 80's box, using 80's software. It's also relatively easy to surpass the hardware limitations of a 200MHz Pentium box running Windows 98. Requirements will rise steeply again next year when Longhorn arrives with all of its GUI and API layer hoodoo, likely courted closely by popularised XComposite support in Linux. It's not going to stop here at all.
Add to this that home users are starting to catch on to things like video editing (with HDTV looming in the horizon) and it's pretty obvious that growing storage has a future as well.
How many consumers are going to need anything beyond a dual AMD-64 with 4 GB and a RAID-5 array of SATA drives?
Sigh. How many consumers honestly need anything beyond a 200 MHz Pentium? Yet, look at the equipment within a typical new x86 box - you'll be hard-pressed to find anything below the 2 GHz mark (about 1.5 GHz for laptops).
Re:For most consumers, hardware is less of a facto
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 1
Chip speeds and memory sizes are starting to go past consumer requirements,
Costs. They figured that the TCO of Linux, including support, training developers, etc. would actually be more expensive than the licensing fees that a Windows solution would incur.
Did they also consider the long-term effects in addition to just what they have to spend during the transfer?
For the record, a friend of mine works for a local corporation which is building a high-availability cluster for a special database application. Mostly Linux, and small part proprietary Unix (with vendor support for both). He asked the subcontractor about Windows in passing, and the answer was more or less "let's get real here".
See NeXTSTEP and MacOS X. Users were not root. Users seem to be getting along just fine. Login optional.
Ubuntu does this too. The default installation has the root account disabled for login purposes. What few administration tasks require root access is done through sudo using the user's password for authentication. Login could just as well be automatic.
I fail to see entirely what Linspire needs continuous root-level access for.
There is no doubt that he should be punished, but 9 years in jail for a crime that just annoyed victims is a bit much.
End-users are not the only victims here. Spam has cost much more than a mere annoyance to ISPs, organisations and jurisdictional bodies everywhere. It's a needless bandwidth hog, and spam filtering adds up to a significant black hole for resources worldwide.
It's a thing that should be taken seriously, although I agree that such a long prison sentence isn't the best way to deal with it.
What sort of things are you looking for "network transparency" in, and what's your definition of "network transparency" ?
The usual business: I log in on a remote VT, launch xmms which pops up on my local screen, press "play", and sound comes out of my speakers. Network lag aside, it appears the same as if I was running xmms locally. Hence, network transparency. This is something every Linux box can pull off.
Just mounting and running locally isn't always practical, either due to restrictions by software licensing, user privileges and/or differing hardware architectures. Network transparency may be a luxury, but it's a very handy one.
Just like the vast bulk of unix machines, you mean ?
The world has moved on - lots of green screens plugged into a single server is no longer the dominant model.
This may not constitute the vast bulk of UNIX machines, but at my local university the boxes (and not just servers) still serve lots of remote terminal sessions. It's a good solution to some things that also allows people to access the network from the outside without involving any extra hassle (both user- and maintenance-wise) from IPSec or VPN.
I might claim that NT in its current state is significantly more difficult to bend to such versatility.
If it was single user you'd end up with something like Windows 95. You'd have no way of restricting anything a program or user could do.
Not really. That only a single user may utilise the computer at any one time doesn't imply that security must be single grained. There's no reason why Windows 95 couldn't have non-superuser accounts, for instance (except that it's built on the original Windows, which probably makes such schemes impractical to implement).
In the simple networks where computers just share data through SMB/NFS and AD/LDAP and all apps are local to each machine, there's probably no real difference besides cosmetics. The differences and shortcomings start to crop up when you want to be a full-blown UNIX replacement, which, consequently, is what NT has been marketed as. It's where design starts to pay off over patching resources.
Not that it shows. A lot of things still require Administrator level access for no good reason. File permissions are needlessly cumbersome to manage and there's little to no network transparency in anything. "NT" and "multiple users" in the same sentence usually means that autonomical boxes authenticate to a common authority and use SMB shares for storage.
For all intents and purposes it could just as well be a single-user system and no-one would notice the difference.
Perhaps, but even in that context the quote makes just about as much sense as "How do I grow a tree which produces fruit but without the fruit actually being attached to the branches?"
Any scheme involving binary could be just as viral as they claim GPL to be, only in increasing dependency on closed "black box" components. I doubt too many open source developers would agree to such an arrangement.
The current direction of Windows reminds me of that old quote, "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it - badly", although all things considered it may not be entirely accurate.
For many years now Microsoft has been patching NT, a single-user system only really suitable for small local networks, into a multi-user system that can cope with many large networks. All the while they're making an effort to retain backwards-compatibility all the way back to MS-DOS, and to avoid doing anything that makes them look like UNIX. This obviously adds up to a very troublesome equation, even when one does not consider the hybrid "Windows 9x" branch (thankfully abandoned, but not yet gone or forgotten).
Now, a few years ago the swiss-cheese nature of the system became so apparent that the general public grew aware of it. That quickly resulted in official denial, then a plethora of security-oriented PR campaigns and, a bit later, more intensive patching. It has recently resulted in some actual improvement, but it's still being made by attacking the effects and not the problems themselves. Longhorn naturally promises to fix everything.
Take a look at all the new toys in Solaris 10, as well as SELinux, and you'll notice that the UNIX world is not just standing still either. There's just not as much noise to be made about being relatively secure compared to the previous version.
It's a wonderful idea, but it simply won't happen without government intervention...and who wants that?
I certainly would want governments to interfere more with this increasing trend of blatant disregard for consumer rights. What with conservatist views being largely in fashion, people seem to have this strange idea that a good government should be heavily centralised, weak, run with no taxes at all yet provide high-quality services.
Thing is, they tried that some 2000 years ago, but it didn't really work out.
Suppose you built your house way back when houses still were a new and fancy thing and not very common. You and a couple of your neighbours had houses from which you rented space for other people to live in. However, you weren't very happy with the divided income so you made a deal with your local banker friend: everyone who has an account gets a few days free to live in your house. Rejoice, people pour in and your neighbours go nearly bankrupt, with only a few odd government officials and their best friends still slumming around.
Now, since your house has to hold a lot of people at once it's been expanded so much that it's become a labyrinthine mess of corridors placed at odd angles to each other. Some features can only be triggered by mysterious buttons on the wall and in fact a lot of people aren't quite sure if it's water coming out of their showers. Come to think of it, it's nearly impossible to find one's way out of your house without a map.
Of course, you as a shrewd businessman charge a premium price for the map, with an explicit note printed on it to prohibit copying of the map and of poking strategic holes through the walls to make navigation easier for the common inhabitant.
Now things are looking good for you. Then someone figures out that by sending scouts into your house and mapping it out they can build a very similar, but not quite identical, house of their own. And they let people live in it for free, with maps and blueprints being posted on the bulletin boards at regular intervals for free use. So you, to keep your inhabitants from becoming too discontent, start posting incomplete fragments of your maps, with the notice still intact. You also claim that only your house contains all the authentic features and that the free house, being free, cannot be trusted to provide the same level of service even though everyone has access to the water pipe plans.
What about the fact that DRM allows Napster to offer an excellent service like Napster-to-Go?
Actually, if you look more closely, DRM is the restricting element.
I'd like to be able to buy music off the net and then burn my own legit compilation CD. Or copy it to as many memory cards/sticks as I want and listen on the go. Or, heaven forbid, use an officially unsupported computer platform (which I normally do). "No way, you freak!", says Captain DRM and promptly punches me in the face for asking.
Of course, for the courtesy, I'd have to buy CDs. Only they come copy-protected. Which has in fact up to now meant for me that I have to copy the disc to be able to play it in a CD-ROM drive. Similarly, my new cellphone prohibits me from sending a ringtone I've composed by myself, because it's "DRM-protected". From what?
Of course, none of these safety measures serve to hinder mass piracy, which was officially the whole point of enacting them.
I think it's somewhat redundant trying to guess what any supposed aliens might want to hear from us. If they don't care or are unable to understand us, would it even be worthwhile to attempt sustained contact?
People often appear to have trouble understanding each other, and it has taken years for researchers to decipher the communication habits of other species on our planet (which are far simpler than ours). Now imagine what it would take to make meaningful contact with a species with habits that are completely foreign to us, in ways that from a human perspective may appear odd or even disgusting.
In case our playing around with radio transmissions turns up results (of which I remain comfortably skeptic), I'd be content with just the knowledge that there is something out there, but wouldn't hope for anything more in a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Or move, or inhale, lest the flow of molecules in the air changes and the future is altered!
Hereforth, I propose that all mass in our universe is comprised of elaborate boolean operations on chicken. After all, it is a well-known truth that chicken tastes like everything, and it also helps explain why so much of DNA is the same throughout species.
Unfortunately, I don't have a concise mathematical model to support this hypothesis yet, but I'm sure there's someone resourceful out there who can take care of all that hand-waving stuff.
Arrogant, detached observers are quite entertaining. It is especially funny when they pipe out occasionally just to point out that they really regard their fellow "humans" as mere puppets.
I myself like to sit around all day, deep down in my lair, in my steel armchair, watching them do their little chores. Sometimes I even let out a grin and a little dry laugh before I resume petting my white cat!
Hello, and welcome to the Apple rumour mill.
I doubt you'd want to, what with Darwin's threading performance. OSX is a nice desktop but a load-bearing server it is not.
Just barely older than 20, actually - not that it's of any real significance.
The last time it was toted that "the consumer definitely doesn't need any more power than this" was somewhere around when x86's first passed 1 GHz in clock speed. Before that it was the 300-500 MHz boxes that should be quite damn enough already. And so on. It has been a somewhat regular occurrence throughout the entire history of computing. Software developers "innovate" and hardware has to keep up, and vice versa.
You can still do a lot of your mundane computing tasks with an 80's box, using 80's software. It's also relatively easy to surpass the hardware limitations of a 200MHz Pentium box running Windows 98. Requirements will rise steeply again next year when Longhorn arrives with all of its GUI and API layer hoodoo, likely courted closely by popularised XComposite support in Linux. It's not going to stop here at all.
Add to this that home users are starting to catch on to things like video editing (with HDTV looming in the horizon) and it's pretty obvious that growing storage has a future as well.
Sigh. How many consumers honestly need anything beyond a 200 MHz Pentium? Yet, look at the equipment within a typical new x86 box - you'll be hard-pressed to find anything below the 2 GHz mark (about 1.5 GHz for laptops).
What, again?
Did they also consider the long-term effects in addition to just what they have to spend during the transfer?
For the record, a friend of mine works for a local corporation which is building a high-availability cluster for a special database application. Mostly Linux, and small part proprietary Unix (with vendor support for both). He asked the subcontractor about Windows in passing, and the answer was more or less "let's get real here".
(sorry)
Ubuntu does this too. The default installation has the root account disabled for login purposes. What few administration tasks require root access is done through sudo using the user's password for authentication. Login could just as well be automatic.
I fail to see entirely what Linspire needs continuous root-level access for.
Yes, all they need is the Win32 API. I'm sure it'll be available for Linux, MacOS and Solaris any day now.
End-users are not the only victims here. Spam has cost much more than a mere annoyance to ISPs, organisations and jurisdictional bodies everywhere. It's a needless bandwidth hog, and spam filtering adds up to a significant black hole for resources worldwide.
It's a thing that should be taken seriously, although I agree that such a long prison sentence isn't the best way to deal with it.
I wonder how long until it'll be "0/100: Syntax error on line 37"
The usual business: I log in on a remote VT, launch xmms which pops up on my local screen, press "play", and sound comes out of my speakers. Network lag aside, it appears the same as if I was running xmms locally. Hence, network transparency. This is something every Linux box can pull off.
Just mounting and running locally isn't always practical, either due to restrictions by software licensing, user privileges and/or differing hardware architectures. Network transparency may be a luxury, but it's a very handy one.
Just like the vast bulk of unix machines, you mean ? The world has moved on - lots of green screens plugged into a single server is no longer the dominant model.This may not constitute the vast bulk of UNIX machines, but at my local university the boxes (and not just servers) still serve lots of remote terminal sessions. It's a good solution to some things that also allows people to access the network from the outside without involving any extra hassle (both user- and maintenance-wise) from IPSec or VPN.
I might claim that NT in its current state is significantly more difficult to bend to such versatility.
If it was single user you'd end up with something like Windows 95. You'd have no way of restricting anything a program or user could do.Not really. That only a single user may utilise the computer at any one time doesn't imply that security must be single grained. There's no reason why Windows 95 couldn't have non-superuser accounts, for instance (except that it's built on the original Windows, which probably makes such schemes impractical to implement).
In the simple networks where computers just share data through SMB/NFS and AD/LDAP and all apps are local to each machine, there's probably no real difference besides cosmetics. The differences and shortcomings start to crop up when you want to be a full-blown UNIX replacement, which, consequently, is what NT has been marketed as. It's where design starts to pay off over patching resources.
Not that it shows. A lot of things still require Administrator level access for no good reason. File permissions are needlessly cumbersome to manage and there's little to no network transparency in anything. "NT" and "multiple users" in the same sentence usually means that autonomical boxes authenticate to a common authority and use SMB shares for storage.
For all intents and purposes it could just as well be a single-user system and no-one would notice the difference.
Perhaps, but even in that context the quote makes just about as much sense as "How do I grow a tree which produces fruit but without the fruit actually being attached to the branches?"
Any scheme involving binary could be just as viral as they claim GPL to be, only in increasing dependency on closed "black box" components. I doubt too many open source developers would agree to such an arrangement.
The current direction of Windows reminds me of that old quote, "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it - badly", although all things considered it may not be entirely accurate.
For many years now Microsoft has been patching NT, a single-user system only really suitable for small local networks, into a multi-user system that can cope with many large networks. All the while they're making an effort to retain backwards-compatibility all the way back to MS-DOS, and to avoid doing anything that makes them look like UNIX. This obviously adds up to a very troublesome equation, even when one does not consider the hybrid "Windows 9x" branch (thankfully abandoned, but not yet gone or forgotten).
Now, a few years ago the swiss-cheese nature of the system became so apparent that the general public grew aware of it. That quickly resulted in official denial, then a plethora of security-oriented PR campaigns and, a bit later, more intensive patching. It has recently resulted in some actual improvement, but it's still being made by attacking the effects and not the problems themselves. Longhorn naturally promises to fix everything.
Take a look at all the new toys in Solaris 10, as well as SELinux, and you'll notice that the UNIX world is not just standing still either. There's just not as much noise to be made about being relatively secure compared to the previous version.
I certainly would want governments to interfere more with this increasing trend of blatant disregard for consumer rights. What with conservatist views being largely in fashion, people seem to have this strange idea that a good government should be heavily centralised, weak, run with no taxes at all yet provide high-quality services.
Thing is, they tried that some 2000 years ago, but it didn't really work out.
Suppose you built your house way back when houses still were a new and fancy thing and not very common. You and a couple of your neighbours had houses from which you rented space for other people to live in. However, you weren't very happy with the divided income so you made a deal with your local banker friend: everyone who has an account gets a few days free to live in your house. Rejoice, people pour in and your neighbours go nearly bankrupt, with only a few odd government officials and their best friends still slumming around.
Now, since your house has to hold a lot of people at once it's been expanded so much that it's become a labyrinthine mess of corridors placed at odd angles to each other. Some features can only be triggered by mysterious buttons on the wall and in fact a lot of people aren't quite sure if it's water coming out of their showers. Come to think of it, it's nearly impossible to find one's way out of your house without a map.
Of course, you as a shrewd businessman charge a premium price for the map, with an explicit note printed on it to prohibit copying of the map and of poking strategic holes through the walls to make navigation easier for the common inhabitant.
Now things are looking good for you. Then someone figures out that by sending scouts into your house and mapping it out they can build a very similar, but not quite identical, house of their own. And they let people live in it for free, with maps and blueprints being posted on the bulletin boards at regular intervals for free use. So you, to keep your inhabitants from becoming too discontent, start posting incomplete fragments of your maps, with the notice still intact. You also claim that only your house contains all the authentic features and that the free house, being free, cannot be trusted to provide the same level of service even though everyone has access to the water pipe plans.
I hope that wasn't too far-fetched for you. :)
But that's not going to happen until computers are smart enough to start wondering why exactly they need us meatbots.
Correction: I think the proper term would be meatbags, master.
Could've been the book or some of the sequels then, but I definitely remember he mentioned it in a foreword.
Actually, if you look more closely, DRM is the restricting element.
I'd like to be able to buy music off the net and then burn my own legit compilation CD. Or copy it to as many memory cards/sticks as I want and listen on the go. Or, heaven forbid, use an officially unsupported computer platform (which I normally do). "No way, you freak!", says Captain DRM and promptly punches me in the face for asking.
Of course, for the courtesy, I'd have to buy CDs. Only they come copy-protected. Which has in fact up to now meant for me that I have to copy the disc to be able to play it in a CD-ROM drive. Similarly, my new cellphone prohibits me from sending a ringtone I've composed by myself, because it's "DRM-protected". From what?
Of course, none of these safety measures serve to hinder mass piracy, which was officially the whole point of enacting them.
Not to mention that Arthur C. Clarke apparently wrote a good part of 2001 with a Kaypro (and sent the scripts out using a modem!).
I think it's somewhat redundant trying to guess what any supposed aliens might want to hear from us. If they don't care or are unable to understand us, would it even be worthwhile to attempt sustained contact?
People often appear to have trouble understanding each other, and it has taken years for researchers to decipher the communication habits of other species on our planet (which are far simpler than ours). Now imagine what it would take to make meaningful contact with a species with habits that are completely foreign to us, in ways that from a human perspective may appear odd or even disgusting.
In case our playing around with radio transmissions turns up results (of which I remain comfortably skeptic), I'd be content with just the knowledge that there is something out there, but wouldn't hope for anything more in a very long time.
Buy a new P4 and you can fry your steaks as well.