The public will NOT adopt it. Linux is a GEEK operating system and ALWAYS WILL BE if the present majority user base has its way. They DO NOT want it to be as easy to use as an AOL CD and given the choice will keep it that way.
They needn't stress or strain. The disparate elements driving Linux are about as sane and competent as the sires of Freddie Krueger and their offspring is about as safe for the unknowing.
Why should people write in to retailers and demand that they cater to an extreme demographic minority? PAYING (that's important) Apple users are a bigger demographic than Linux users and most places outside of Apple stores don't cater to them either.
If I was a retailer and someone demanded that I sell them a machine for less because it had a FREE operating system that nevertheless cost me time to install and was more time consuming at that due to its technological (oh heck, let's say it: insanely illogical) complexity, then I'd ask them what they were smoking. I'm not spending twice as long to set up desktops with an OS I'm not getting to sell for a markup. Do it your own self.
And that is the point of Linux. DOING IT YOURSELF. This runs counter to the profitable (because it is logically in line with human nature) way of doing it for others for money. In fact, if everyone was capable of doing it themselves (which they aren't) and had the free time (which they don't) they probably would to save money. Of course, the same could be said on the subject of paying for oral sex or performing it on yourself.
If everyone could do this, there'd not be a need for support techs. And actually, the same goes for Windows which although it is ten million times easier for the average starfish to deal with than ANY flavor of Unix still manages to flummox the majority enough to need... support techs.
Does the idea of trying to push an even harder OS and finding its lack of adoption sound so strange now? Free is not the driving force. Difficulty and time are.
I could build my own house for less and with twice the floor space because I know how. I have better ways to spend my time and am willing to pay a mortgage and get a smaller house to do so. So are the mainstream pc users with Windows. Linux may be uber-expandable and hacker friendly. It is not user friendly (ancient beardy engineers who used it from the beginning have said so for crying out loud) and never will be.
Windows desktops are less expensive than Linux? How can that be when the Windows desktop costs not one cent extra to put a FREE copy of Linux on and you get a Windows license left over.
Micrsoft is hindering Linux on the desktop? Excuse me while I laugh myself into an asthma fit.
The regular slew of updates to KDE ALONE will screw up the average KDE installation bad enough and quick enough to make you want to strangle everyone who works on it. Gnome which is supposed to be so much less cool than KDE is five times more stable in my experience and two times less useful. Of course so is a hammer by comparison to a vertical knee mill but at least the hammer does what it is designed to.
I use Fedora Core 3 as my regular desktop and only log into XP when I have an absolute need. I've made Quake run with sound in less than an hour USING the idiotically bad and largely conflicting and contradictory documentation on the net (woot! I can translate geekoid!). I got SSH working with public keys in ten minutes. I regularly customize my FC3 boxes and rework them rather than the lazier nuke and pave method. So... I am not a Windows newbie-to-Linux here.
The ONLY thing killing Linux on the desktop is Linux. XOrg and XFree86 and their ongoing back and forth pecadillos, KDE's zealot army of moronic children screaming the leetness of their preference, Gnome's less than stellar array of boosters, and both desktops' having little to no clue towards stability and regularity are merely the tip of the iceberg. The neverending foreverwar over what goes in the kernel, the endless bs of how drivers and hardware abstraction should work, the "ooh isn't this cool" phenomenon of distros spreading like mold based on their purveyors' egotistical desire to have some note in the history of Linux... All of this and more is what is killing Linux on the desktop.
It's like the movie Braveheart. The penguin sallies forth to do battle with the incredible menace and its own supporters backstabbing, squabbling, infighting, and inability to arrive at a common vision and stick with it do it in. Penguin meat anyone?
Ten times faster than what? Up until the telecom collapse there were a number of CLECs deploying DSLAMs with ADSL with a max speed of 7MbpsX1Mbps. Most have cut back on speed offerings due to lack of takers. The phone company offers maybe 3Mbps with a premium price paid and you have to be on top of the CO to get it.
Cable? I get 15MbpsX2Mbps which is about the speed of the big fiber push from Verizon. I pay $65 a month and it is totally worth it to me given the speed, reliability, and price. I looked at every option and this was the best one.
Ultimately, that is what it comes downt to. The paying AVERAGE consumer and NOT the whiny "I want everything for free" brigades and they're the loudest complainers, not the ones who've already adopted and been paying for years. I have had a cable modem for years, worked in DSL installation and tech support, and cable modem installation and tech support, so I know the relative strengths. I don't own a laptop and won't until milspec ruggedized books come down in cost (my big performance vs. reliability vs. cost concern is hardware not connections).
If you want T-1 speeds with the guaranteed SLAs, fine. Pay for them. Or don't. Hundreds of thousands already do just as I pay for the modem I've got at the service level I get. It is up to the end users.
As of now, there is no financial incentive for broadband to jump in speed and fall in cost for the purveyors that they themselves don't create such as several cable providers jumping their speed ahead of schedule in areas that Verizon and company hadn't bothered pushing fiber to yet, thus cutting them off at the knees by providing it early to an already existing audience at the same speeds and nearly the same price point. The lack of need to change e-mail addresses and networking specifics is an added bonus. Why save $5/month when it would cost me weeks of downtime making the transition and changing all my network set-ups and accounting?
Again, my decision. Not whiny pontificators in magazine articles. Seems like another bs article designed to arouse and anger the same usual suspects and not a serious delving into why the broadband scene is the way it is.
The kids going on about greed and corporations should grow up already. Their hypocrisy is showing when they spend 9/10 of their Internet posts on tinfoil hat rhetoric about government censorship and interference with "their internets" but then suddenly are all hot to toss total Internet access control over to the government as long as they get taxpayer funded "free" net access. Yeah, let the same government you despise, distrust, and live in fear of control your access to the net.
When pushed, what is the theory? That what they browse won't get banned or be interferred with. Of course a similar theory was had by many during WWII regarding the Nazis and who would be come after and saying nothing until they came after that last group. Everyone is fine as long as its free, and they ain't the ones being oppressed. Well the world works thus: the nail that sticks up gets pounded down; when the only tool in your box is a hammer everything looks like a nail; the only tool of government is a hammer. Sooner or later government run Internet will screw you and you'll wish you'd paid for it in a proper economic relationship.
Now, take a look at that list of shows again. Those do not deal with homosexuality in any real fashion. They portray a fairly typical stereotypical view of homosexuals and homosexuality. Men with a lisp, butch women, and all that. They're using homosexual characters as foils to enhance the heterosexual image of the non-gay characters, or otherwise treat the homosexual characters as living jokes.
You have obviously never been to Provincetown, MA where the locals spend the summer suffering the double-edged sword of the stereotypes flooding in and parading their stereotypes yet providing tourist dollars. Most of the stereotypes are played out there from June through August.
...and it was not "Chinglish"; it is the inevitable byproduct of using a machine without experience or intelligence to translate between two dramatically different languages. Grammatical errors are going to happen.
This sort of thing has been in the works forever and there's entire university physics and astrophysics texts written on it as well as related disciplines including plasma and ion propulsion. That the superheated reaction products of a rocket are ionized and thus subject to magnetic fields is well known. What is not well known is when we might make some use of this.
We do know that various superconductors are in that state when subjected to the cryogenic temperatures of liquified oxygen and hydrogen and using the fuel and oxidizer to cool such magnets would be an interesting thing. It would have to be in the line before the liquified reactants reached the nozzle cooling section but if it worked it might well dramatically reduce the size and thus mass of the nozzle and thus the cooling requirements as well. It depends on the tradeoff of field generating power equipment, coils, and so forth.
Ultimately the basic research being done here will be contributory to the future of space propulsion in its own small way.
Strangely, you can get Xine (and Mplayer I hear but its code is for sh*t) to play WMV just fine. I wonder where this closing off other platforms idea comes from. Didn't I hear this years ago? Oh yeah, I did. Back prior to HTML 3.2, all the way back to the beginnings of the Netscape and IE war. Both sides said the other's HTML tag additions were going to "kill the web's interoperability". I still hear it from the Firefox zealots regarding IE. The various Java-related vendors still scream it at each other. Whatever.
As long as human interpretation is called into play, then there's a definite method to any given data format and sooner or later someone will port it to another platform. Sometimes, as with Real Media, we wish they wouldn't.
"Once all the Germans were warlike and mean, But that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918 And they've hardly bothered us since then." -MLF Lullaby, Tom Lehrer
I think this sums it up pretty nicely. Europe cyclically decides to be an imperialistic pain in the arse in the name of one thing or another in one guise or another over and over, evidently taking the place of Rome, Greece, Persia, and other older power-mad pains in the arse, and someone else pays the price. If the US decided to do this sort of thing as often as Europe and its disparate gang of idiot states (they look this way thanks to the governments thereof elected, bought, or contracted like a disease) then the rest of the world would have bought into Soviet communism at the first chance and the US would have ceased existance faster than a joint accidentally left in front of Keith Richards.
The US pioneered the Internet, and gave the world something that they could bitch, moan, whine, and otherwise act like children on instead of doing it with weapons, bad television, and the chicanery of trade legislation. Now they want to tear it all down since while the people themselves were perfectly happy to abuse each other virtually, the alleged governments there seem to be only happy when they're abusing the people.
Given that the biggest moneymaker on the net is pr0n, and that they'll be shortly trying to cut off the supply thereof to the people of Europe by way of this forced net split, it seems to be rather elegant proof of the long term suspicion that those who govern Europe are in bad need of getting laid.
There's not much in it. That right there may drive them right to closed source everything.
OSS is held up today as the model of what software should always and forever be. It isn't and shouldn't be. It's one tool in the box.
And it is a variable tool between the BSD, GPL, etc. license forms. Or write your own. Or go with classic freeware. Or make it shareware. Or closed altogether. Or partial. Where it ends and the rest of the box begins is and should be murky and totally dependent on what you are doing.
After all, it is the coders' time. If they don't want to write code that isn't open, they're limiting their job spread. If they're willing to do it either way depending on the requirements, that would be better.
What do they need to know technically? That using OSS' all too common attiude that "it's free, so what do you want?" with regard to quality is the sort of thing that is coming around slowly to bite it in the butt and ethical programmers will not use OSS, or anything else, to cover their backside instead of doing it right the first time.
OSS or CSS or somewhere in between, it is what is learned in the guts of the CS course that matters and how it is done and what is done is a distant third.
Then you can see where that goes. Micro DNA scanners xmit results at all times. Nowhere you can go without being known. Lead albatross around your neck forever. No more starting over. Permanent lock in.
And will those advocating use of tuned-EMP device designed to defeat these tags be tarred and feathered as terrorists?
Don't blame the Republicans here kids. The Democrats are not averse to abusing your rights basic, human, and civil to get what they want and the press will always go along with it all. The public has no attention span, doesn't think too much, and will always vote in the same array of idiots no matter who it is that is running.
And Perotistas wouldn't be any different.
Commitment to the sanctity of human privacy and dignity is just not on the radar of the political establishment.
This seems tinfoil hat now, but so did a lot of things we take for granted today and a lot of it would sound like a Stalinist police state to the McCarthyites of the fifties and like a satanic tyranny to the founders of this nation.
Not surprisingly, governments everywhere, not just here, will embrace this. As usual, the state vs. the people will be the showdown. At it has been throughout history.
This is simply about the broken IP process where the ideas of "novel" and "non-obvious" are concerned. Allowing this to stand means essentially that ALL wireless e-mail systems are in jeopardy. I've been using e-mail wirelessly for a number of years now. Didn't Heathkit have a kit for sending low bandwidth data over radio years and years ago? The very concept that you can patent wireless e-mail or wireless anything else that was already being transmitted over wires long before is ludicrous. It's like patenting sending something over water on a boat instead of a truck.
It needs to be a LOT more novel, a LOT more non-obvious, and has to have NO prior art.
Seems to me the USPTO is granting patents left and right without doing their jobs properly and the courts are being way too reluctant to wade in and thump the USPTO soundly for it and make the difficult rulings that need to be made due to their idiocy.
We need a SCOTUS watershed case at this point to move the process of reformation to where something is actually being done about it.
This is absolutely true. The bulk of inventors today do not work for major corporations in the capacity of inventor, do not work for any major corporations in the capacity of researcher, and quite often do not actually work in the fields in which they invent. They have ideas, think them out, produce plans and information sufficient to prove it out on paper to the satisfaction of the USPTO and get a patent. Many are never assigned to any business.
Those that are snapped up are quite often snapped up by IP houses and not by corporations who do the work. Most of the rest are snapped up by corporations in that area or in a parallel area.
If we limit patents only to when the actual product or service is built out in finished working form, then we limit patents only to those corporations with the deep pockets for research and development. Most companies we work for do not have those deep pockets. Only the top of the heap will be able to actually achieve patents and have IP.
If you want a system run only by the wealthy, then go for it. Make that kind of change in the laws.
Their NAV is the source of more problems on more machines than any other AV software I've ever had to deal with. If Microsoft can do it right, I'm only too happy to give them that chance. Symantec has had many years to get their stuff right and can't forever blame Microsoft for their mistakes.
I personally hope for some sort of rootkit defense. Since MS wrote the kernel, maybe they'll get it done right.
I can do nothing but agree. This organization is dominated by countries who set new standards for the definition of the concept of "abuse of basic human rights" every single day, clap each other on the back, and throw stones at the USA, arguably the most free and advanced nation on the entire ball of mud.
Their immediate predecessors FAILED to stop WWII from happening which was their entire reason for existance in the aftermath of WWI. They have since their inception, failed to stop ANY world conflicts, bring ANY peace to ANYWHERE, and have done nothing but put forth and into force of world law the morally bankrupt concept that all points of view are equally valid. Genocide, summary and mass executions, usage of heavy military force against a nations own citizenry at any time, arbitrary invasion and rape of neighboring nations to plunder their resources, and denial of basic human dignity are NOT VALID and the nations who practice them would, if we had any real commitment to "human rights and dignity" be removed from power as was done with Saddam Hussein.
Instead the sick sad joke that is the UN will continue on its merry way, covering up attrocities of the governments of member nations that are otherwise leeches on the rest of the planet and peaceful humanity the world over. The USA will have to spend an inordinate amount of its economy on remaining militarily strong to be the world's policeman because the rest of the world would like to have it otherwise, but hasn't gotten around to removing the despots, tyrants, and troublemakers that sit on top of them keeping them down, keeping them from freedom, and keeping them fighting each other over petty religious and ethnic issues while those who orchestrate the conflicts within do so for their own gain and leave the carcass they feed off of to rot.
Well those carcasses are the remains of pieces of human civilization that should have had a better chance to go someplace and do something than to serve as the cash cow for monsters at the top.
The UN is a failure and will remain such as long as it is dominated by the very scoundrels it was supposed to protect humanity against and is focused on tearing down the number one nation of choice to run to for refugees from abuse the world over.
Thin clients essentially have no future over the Internet unless and until bandwidth versus "thickness of thin client" issues are dealt with. Totally thin with nothing running on the remote client, somewhat thin with graphics running on the client, fat with only databases sitting on the server... What is thin?
Now in the home, what would really drive things along is if you had ONE home PC that was modular like a blade server but on the same price scale as one and a half current personal computers, with multiple boards and multiple processors per board with an OS that does multiple sorts of clustering simultaneously and ridiculously cheap high-speed wireless tablet interfaces that do almost nothing on them and as such don't require any horsepower.
If you merely had to buy new boards for $300 a piece to upgrade processors every couple of years and could get slave boards for $200 a piece, but the clients were $100 and could be used indefinitely as long as they were intact, that I could see people buying.
Especially with add-ons for more central home use like digital cable and satellite tuners and dvr functions like Myth TV and in-house PBX with a mini Asterisk system.
This is the sort of well thought out package deal that Linux should be heading into before Microsoft goes there and eats their lunch. Given the nature of the Linux community, I don't doubt that this will happen as Microsoft is cohesive and top down and when they move, they do it in force. The Linux world is endlessly divisive and schismatic internally, loaded with disparate factions and egos, and overall totally oblivious to common sense and human nature. Those who use it and OSS in general have to do the big picture cobbling together of things and all the struggling themselves and then run into the roadblock of all the parts they use being run by people with cross purposes and no allegiance to the great things they may be doing with those things.
That would be like arguing that not everyone who has potentially defective silicone-gel breast implants should have them removed - you've got to wait until they burst and you get all sorts of auto-immune diseases, and THEN you can sue for the cost of getting them removed, and your damages. Otherwise, you're not a victim - just a "potential" victim.
This is nothing like that and you know it. There is a very big difference between failure of the core product risking your health and life and a wonky optional feature on a software product that does nothing more than control you PC. Personal computers are optional luxuries, not necessities, and if you aren't using and have no intention of using an optional feature then you are not harmed directly, only potentially harmed.
I have spent years being angry with Microsoft on general principle as a programmer that they've sold beta software as finished product but this doesn't anger me. This struck me as a serious bug that slipped through despite testing and would likely only show up in the unpredictable wilds of end user configurations and not the bland and uniform test beds of a developer. I was also a tester and went out of my way to make all my test machines as diverse and weird as possible to try and ellicit bugs from their hiding. Microsoft may not. Many corporations don't.
Meanwhile, the Micrsoft opposition embraces Microsoft's old policy of shoving unfinished code out the door and thinks that giving it away for free under the name Open Source makes them more righteous and noble. The expectation that OSS works better than closed source is still being trotted around constantly, so, false advertising. If we go by your standard that this group should have remained as a class, then the next time there's a lawsuit involving OSS, EVERYONE who has EVER downloaded but not even used or had any intention of using ANY OSS should be included in the class.
And soooo many people think that Mozilla is inherently safer, the people who develop it and revolve around it and so on the most saintly perfect people...
Wake up kids. They're as fallible as anyone at Microsoft and things like this will happen. Whether it is the browser or the websites hosting or the wikis, or whatever, mistakes are going to be made and patches and corrections will need to be done.
Microsoft isn't the only imperfect group of people out there. Everything is as vulnerable as the weakest link: the humans involved. Self-righteousness egged on by zealots can only weaken the link.
CACLS is useless if you aren't booted into safe mode. The changes won't take properly. Try and make OpenSSH for Windows work with strictmodes=yes and key authentication only set in sshd_config. The trick? You run it with user/pass authentication to create the directories and copy the key file to make the permissions correct. CACLS fails every time. They well and truly crippled any sort of controls on XP Home.
...since when have teachers not stolen their students code and claimed it as their own?
I wrote a program to compute points on a sphere in high school and when another teacher walked in, mine claimed it as his. Granted, being a single aging geek and the other teacher being a well stacked single lady might have had something to do with it...
...and all the other usual comments. The RIAA has a justifiable right to attempt to protect the intellectual property of those who assign them duty to do so. They are of course their own worst enemy. Like someone whose white Plymouth Reliant was stolen then going out, breaking down the doors of, and shooting, anyone who happens to own a white Plymouth Reliant. Way to go about things the right way people.
At the rate the RIAA and MPAA are going they will manage to set enough precedent to totally invalidate all copyright laws everywhere and cause world governments to start all over again.
I thought so. Google has not exactly gone out of their way to put their applications on Linux as opposed to Windows. Microsoft therefore ultimately leads Google by the nose. As they would be led by the nose by Linus if they focused all app development on Linux. As they would be led by the nose by Jobs if they focused all development on OSX.
Google is not an operating system and never will be. They will forever be at the mercy of the operating systems they publish on and the web browsers through which their services are accessed. If they concentrated on text interfaces, they'd be at the mercy of Lynx and its maintainers.
Google claiming they will beat Microsoft or anyone else is just plain ludicrous. It's like an aftermarket auto parts maker stating they will put the auto manufacturer out of business.
Exactly. In the same way that BASIC programmers had bad tendencies to not combine their loops and do the math to make it so and thus created nine thousand repeats of essentially the same routing, today's programmers on C++, etc. tend to look at the coolness of what they are doing and not at the things that code represent to the machine. Instead of their code generating the smallest most correct executables, they generate massively wonky ones which unnecessarily replicate basic operations over and over, which may generate stack, register, buffer, etc. issues in concert with other processes, etc.
I'm NOT arguing that they need write in assembly or binary. I AM arguing, I guess, that the traditional CS foundations of logic and math are important to understanding the bigger picture in the most meaningful way. Even if you never take a CS course, being able to go through an old compiler theory textbook and grasp what they mean is a good way to find new understanding in C at which point you understand that there was deeper meaning to Kernighan's and Ritchie's guide than just how C worked. Any language needs to base itself around those core principles and insist on the programmers understanding them.
Which is why I get that shaking head and rolling eyes thing whenever I see an explosion of interest for a new language whose very structure looks to me like spaghetti before anything is written with it and all the praise revolves around it being new, cool, object oriented, or some other buzzphrase. Maybe the languages before were'nt in need or replacement, just the people using them or at least a refresher in the basics.
You're missing my point (and maybe I wasn't clear). The core of all higher languages is in the end the basic logic of binary circuits. Understand AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, etc., and binary math, and that everything devolves to those foundations and you have a better grasp on what you can do with the higher concepts.
I rather think the explosion of applications on every platform with crappy memory management and bloat is directly related to this. Coders of today do not understand anything about stacks and registers and limitations. Frugality, Occam's Razor, and other important principles are ignored and heck, never even learned. Just throw everything you want in there and since you don't know why any of the snippets does what it does in machine code, you won't know when a compiler is going to do its designed thing and result in problems. If you did know, you would have written things differently.
The law of unintended consequences can be hemmed in by understanding the finer grained lower levels of any complex system. It isn't for nothing that the people who design and build engines have to know something of metallurgy, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, machining, etc. What the little tiny bits of metal will do in response to the doings of the big complex engine is important. So too is it with programming.
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The public will NOT adopt it. Linux is a GEEK operating system and ALWAYS WILL BE if the present majority user base has its way. They DO NOT want it to be as easy to use as an AOL CD and given the choice will keep it that way.
They needn't stress or strain. The disparate elements driving Linux are about as sane and competent as the sires of Freddie Krueger and their offspring is about as safe for the unknowing.
Why should people write in to retailers and demand that they cater to an extreme demographic minority? PAYING (that's important) Apple users are a bigger demographic than Linux users and most places outside of Apple stores don't cater to them either.
If I was a retailer and someone demanded that I sell them a machine for less because it had a FREE operating system that nevertheless cost me time to install and was more time consuming at that due to its technological (oh heck, let's say it: insanely illogical) complexity, then I'd ask them what they were smoking. I'm not spending twice as long to set up desktops with an OS I'm not getting to sell for a markup. Do it your own self.
And that is the point of Linux. DOING IT YOURSELF. This runs counter to the profitable (because it is logically in line with human nature) way of doing it for others for money. In fact, if everyone was capable of doing it themselves (which they aren't) and had the free time (which they don't) they probably would to save money. Of course, the same could be said on the subject of paying for oral sex or performing it on yourself.
If everyone could do this, there'd not be a need for support techs. And actually, the same goes for Windows which although it is ten million times easier for the average starfish to deal with than ANY flavor of Unix still manages to flummox the majority enough to need... support techs.
Does the idea of trying to push an even harder OS and finding its lack of adoption sound so strange now? Free is not the driving force. Difficulty and time are.
I could build my own house for less and with twice the floor space because I know how. I have better ways to spend my time and am willing to pay a mortgage and get a smaller house to do so. So are the mainstream pc users with Windows. Linux may be uber-expandable and hacker friendly. It is not user friendly (ancient beardy engineers who used it from the beginning have said so for crying out loud) and never will be.
Windows desktops are less expensive than Linux? How can that be when the Windows desktop costs not one cent extra to put a FREE copy of Linux on and you get a Windows license left over.
Micrsoft is hindering Linux on the desktop? Excuse me while I laugh myself into an asthma fit.
The regular slew of updates to KDE ALONE will screw up the average KDE installation bad enough and quick enough to make you want to strangle everyone who works on it. Gnome which is supposed to be so much less cool than KDE is five times more stable in my experience and two times less useful. Of course so is a hammer by comparison to a vertical knee mill but at least the hammer does what it is designed to.
I use Fedora Core 3 as my regular desktop and only log into XP when I have an absolute need. I've made Quake run with sound in less than an hour USING the idiotically bad and largely conflicting and contradictory documentation on the net (woot! I can translate geekoid!). I got SSH working with public keys in ten minutes. I regularly customize my FC3 boxes and rework them rather than the lazier nuke and pave method. So... I am not a Windows newbie-to-Linux here.
The ONLY thing killing Linux on the desktop is Linux. XOrg and XFree86 and their ongoing back and forth pecadillos, KDE's zealot army of moronic children screaming the leetness of their preference, Gnome's less than stellar array of boosters, and both desktops' having little to no clue towards stability and regularity are merely the tip of the iceberg. The neverending foreverwar over what goes in the kernel, the endless bs of how drivers and hardware abstraction should work, the "ooh isn't this cool" phenomenon of distros spreading like mold based on their purveyors' egotistical desire to have some note in the history of Linux... All of this and more is what is killing Linux on the desktop.
It's like the movie Braveheart. The penguin sallies forth to do battle with the incredible menace and its own supporters backstabbing, squabbling, infighting, and inability to arrive at a common vision and stick with it do it in. Penguin meat anyone?
Ten times faster than what? Up until the telecom collapse there were a number of CLECs deploying DSLAMs with ADSL with a max speed of 7MbpsX1Mbps. Most have cut back on speed offerings due to lack of takers. The phone company offers maybe 3Mbps with a premium price paid and you have to be on top of the CO to get it.
Cable? I get 15MbpsX2Mbps which is about the speed of the big fiber push from Verizon. I pay $65 a month and it is totally worth it to me given the speed, reliability, and price. I looked at every option and this was the best one.
Ultimately, that is what it comes downt to. The paying AVERAGE consumer and NOT the whiny "I want everything for free" brigades and they're the loudest complainers, not the ones who've already adopted and been paying for years. I have had a cable modem for years, worked in DSL installation and tech support, and cable modem installation and tech support, so I know the relative strengths. I don't own a laptop and won't until milspec ruggedized books come down in cost (my big performance vs. reliability vs. cost concern is hardware not connections).
If you want T-1 speeds with the guaranteed SLAs, fine. Pay for them. Or don't. Hundreds of thousands already do just as I pay for the modem I've got at the service level I get. It is up to the end users.
As of now, there is no financial incentive for broadband to jump in speed and fall in cost for the purveyors that they themselves don't create such as several cable providers jumping their speed ahead of schedule in areas that Verizon and company hadn't bothered pushing fiber to yet, thus cutting them off at the knees by providing it early to an already existing audience at the same speeds and nearly the same price point. The lack of need to change e-mail addresses and networking specifics is an added bonus. Why save $5/month when it would cost me weeks of downtime making the transition and changing all my network set-ups and accounting?
Again, my decision. Not whiny pontificators in magazine articles. Seems like another bs article designed to arouse and anger the same usual suspects and not a serious delving into why the broadband scene is the way it is.
The kids going on about greed and corporations should grow up already. Their hypocrisy is showing when they spend 9/10 of their Internet posts on tinfoil hat rhetoric about government censorship and interference with "their internets" but then suddenly are all hot to toss total Internet access control over to the government as long as they get taxpayer funded "free" net access. Yeah, let the same government you despise, distrust, and live in fear of control your access to the net.
When pushed, what is the theory? That what they browse won't get banned or be interferred with. Of course a similar theory was had by many during WWII regarding the Nazis and who would be come after and saying nothing until they came after that last group. Everyone is fine as long as its free, and they ain't the ones being oppressed. Well the world works thus: the nail that sticks up gets pounded down; when the only tool in your box is a hammer everything looks like a nail; the only tool of government is a hammer. Sooner or later government run Internet will screw you and you'll wish you'd paid for it in a proper economic relationship.
Now, take a look at that list of shows again. Those do not deal with homosexuality in any real fashion. They portray a fairly typical stereotypical view of homosexuals and homosexuality. Men with a lisp, butch women, and all that. They're using homosexual characters as foils to enhance the heterosexual image of the non-gay characters, or otherwise treat the homosexual characters as living jokes.
You have obviously never been to Provincetown, MA where the locals spend the summer suffering the double-edged sword of the stereotypes flooding in and parading their stereotypes yet providing tourist dollars. Most of the stereotypes are played out there from June through August.
...and it was not "Chinglish"; it is the inevitable byproduct of using a machine without experience or intelligence to translate between two dramatically different languages. Grammatical errors are going to happen.
This sort of thing has been in the works forever and there's entire university physics and astrophysics texts written on it as well as related disciplines including plasma and ion propulsion. That the superheated reaction products of a rocket are ionized and thus subject to magnetic fields is well known. What is not well known is when we might make some use of this.
We do know that various superconductors are in that state when subjected to the cryogenic temperatures of liquified oxygen and hydrogen and using the fuel and oxidizer to cool such magnets would be an interesting thing. It would have to be in the line before the liquified reactants reached the nozzle cooling section but if it worked it might well dramatically reduce the size and thus mass of the nozzle and thus the cooling requirements as well. It depends on the tradeoff of field generating power equipment, coils, and so forth.
Ultimately the basic research being done here will be contributory to the future of space propulsion in its own small way.
Strangely, you can get Xine (and Mplayer I hear but its code is for sh*t) to play WMV just fine. I wonder where this closing off other platforms idea comes from. Didn't I hear this years ago? Oh yeah, I did. Back prior to HTML 3.2, all the way back to the beginnings of the Netscape and IE war. Both sides said the other's HTML tag additions were going to "kill the web's interoperability". I still hear it from the Firefox zealots regarding IE. The various Java-related vendors still scream it at each other. Whatever.
As long as human interpretation is called into play, then there's a definite method to any given data format and sooner or later someone will port it to another platform. Sometimes, as with Real Media, we wish they wouldn't.
"Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then."
-MLF Lullaby, Tom Lehrer
I think this sums it up pretty nicely. Europe cyclically decides to be an imperialistic pain in the arse in the name of one thing or another in one guise or another over and over, evidently taking the place of Rome, Greece, Persia, and other older power-mad pains in the arse, and someone else pays the price. If the US decided to do this sort of thing as often as Europe and its disparate gang of idiot states (they look this way thanks to the governments thereof elected, bought, or contracted like a disease) then the rest of the world would have bought into Soviet communism at the first chance and the US would have ceased existance faster than a joint accidentally left in front of Keith Richards.
The US pioneered the Internet, and gave the world something that they could bitch, moan, whine, and otherwise act like children on instead of doing it with weapons, bad television, and the chicanery of trade legislation. Now they want to tear it all down since while the people themselves were perfectly happy to abuse each other virtually, the alleged governments there seem to be only happy when they're abusing the people.
Given that the biggest moneymaker on the net is pr0n, and that they'll be shortly trying to cut off the supply thereof to the people of Europe by way of this forced net split, it seems to be rather elegant proof of the long term suspicion that those who govern Europe are in bad need of getting laid.
There's not much in it. That right there may drive them right to closed source everything.
OSS is held up today as the model of what software should always and forever be. It isn't and shouldn't be. It's one tool in the box.
And it is a variable tool between the BSD, GPL, etc. license forms. Or write your own. Or go with classic freeware. Or make it shareware. Or closed altogether. Or partial. Where it ends and the rest of the box begins is and should be murky and totally dependent on what you are doing.
After all, it is the coders' time. If they don't want to write code that isn't open, they're limiting their job spread. If they're willing to do it either way depending on the requirements, that would be better.
What do they need to know technically? That using OSS' all too common attiude that "it's free, so what do you want?" with regard to quality is the sort of thing that is coming around slowly to bite it in the butt and ethical programmers will not use OSS, or anything else, to cover their backside instead of doing it right the first time.
OSS or CSS or somewhere in between, it is what is learned in the guts of the CS course that matters and how it is done and what is done is a distant third.
What does a company do when a gene is found that causes a 100% chance of the individual being sociopathic?
They make them host of their own MTV show.
Then you can see where that goes. Micro DNA scanners xmit results at all times. Nowhere you can go without being known. Lead albatross around your neck forever. No more starting over. Permanent lock in.
And will those advocating use of tuned-EMP device designed to defeat these tags be tarred and feathered as terrorists?
Don't blame the Republicans here kids. The Democrats are not averse to abusing your rights basic, human, and civil to get what they want and the press will always go along with it all. The public has no attention span, doesn't think too much, and will always vote in the same array of idiots no matter who it is that is running.
And Perotistas wouldn't be any different.
Commitment to the sanctity of human privacy and dignity is just not on the radar of the political establishment.
This seems tinfoil hat now, but so did a lot of things we take for granted today and a lot of it would sound like a Stalinist police state to the McCarthyites of the fifties and like a satanic tyranny to the founders of this nation.
Not surprisingly, governments everywhere, not just here, will embrace this. As usual, the state vs. the people will be the showdown. At it has been throughout history.
This is simply about the broken IP process where the ideas of "novel" and "non-obvious" are concerned. Allowing this to stand means essentially that ALL wireless e-mail systems are in jeopardy. I've been using e-mail wirelessly for a number of years now. Didn't Heathkit have a kit for sending low bandwidth data over radio years and years ago? The very concept that you can patent wireless e-mail or wireless anything else that was already being transmitted over wires long before is ludicrous. It's like patenting sending something over water on a boat instead of a truck.
It needs to be a LOT more novel, a LOT more non-obvious, and has to have NO prior art.
Seems to me the USPTO is granting patents left and right without doing their jobs properly and the courts are being way too reluctant to wade in and thump the USPTO soundly for it and make the difficult rulings that need to be made due to their idiocy.
We need a SCOTUS watershed case at this point to move the process of reformation to where something is actually being done about it.
If I had the points, I'd mod this +5 insightful.
This is absolutely true. The bulk of inventors today do not work for major corporations in the capacity of inventor, do not work for any major corporations in the capacity of researcher, and quite often do not actually work in the fields in which they invent. They have ideas, think them out, produce plans and information sufficient to prove it out on paper to the satisfaction of the USPTO and get a patent. Many are never assigned to any business.
Those that are snapped up are quite often snapped up by IP houses and not by corporations who do the work. Most of the rest are snapped up by corporations in that area or in a parallel area.
If we limit patents only to when the actual product or service is built out in finished working form, then we limit patents only to those corporations with the deep pockets for research and development. Most companies we work for do not have those deep pockets. Only the top of the heap will be able to actually achieve patents and have IP.
If you want a system run only by the wealthy, then go for it. Make that kind of change in the laws.
Their NAV is the source of more problems on more machines than any other AV software I've ever had to deal with. If Microsoft can do it right, I'm only too happy to give them that chance. Symantec has had many years to get their stuff right and can't forever blame Microsoft for their mistakes.
I personally hope for some sort of rootkit defense. Since MS wrote the kernel, maybe they'll get it done right.
I can do nothing but agree. This organization is dominated by countries who set new standards for the definition of the concept of "abuse of basic human rights" every single day, clap each other on the back, and throw stones at the USA, arguably the most free and advanced nation on the entire ball of mud.
Their immediate predecessors FAILED to stop WWII from happening which was their entire reason for existance in the aftermath of WWI. They have since their inception, failed to stop ANY world conflicts, bring ANY peace to ANYWHERE, and have done nothing but put forth and into force of world law the morally bankrupt concept that all points of view are equally valid. Genocide, summary and mass executions, usage of heavy military force against a nations own citizenry at any time, arbitrary invasion and rape of neighboring nations to plunder their resources, and denial of basic human dignity are NOT VALID and the nations who practice them would, if we had any real commitment to "human rights and dignity" be removed from power as was done with Saddam Hussein.
Instead the sick sad joke that is the UN will continue on its merry way, covering up attrocities of the governments of member nations that are otherwise leeches on the rest of the planet and peaceful humanity the world over. The USA will have to spend an inordinate amount of its economy on remaining militarily strong to be the world's policeman because the rest of the world would like to have it otherwise, but hasn't gotten around to removing the despots, tyrants, and troublemakers that sit on top of them keeping them down, keeping them from freedom, and keeping them fighting each other over petty religious and ethnic issues while those who orchestrate the conflicts within do so for their own gain and leave the carcass they feed off of to rot.
Well those carcasses are the remains of pieces of human civilization that should have had a better chance to go someplace and do something than to serve as the cash cow for monsters at the top.
The UN is a failure and will remain such as long as it is dominated by the very scoundrels it was supposed to protect humanity against and is focused on tearing down the number one nation of choice to run to for refugees from abuse the world over.
Thin clients essentially have no future over the Internet unless and until bandwidth versus "thickness of thin client" issues are dealt with. Totally thin with nothing running on the remote client, somewhat thin with graphics running on the client, fat with only databases sitting on the server... What is thin?
Now in the home, what would really drive things along is if you had ONE home PC that was modular like a blade server but on the same price scale as one and a half current personal computers, with multiple boards and multiple processors per board with an OS that does multiple sorts of clustering simultaneously and ridiculously cheap high-speed wireless tablet interfaces that do almost nothing on them and as such don't require any horsepower.
If you merely had to buy new boards for $300 a piece to upgrade processors every couple of years and could get slave boards for $200 a piece, but the clients were $100 and could be used indefinitely as long as they were intact, that I could see people buying.
Especially with add-ons for more central home use like digital cable and satellite tuners and dvr functions like Myth TV and in-house PBX with a mini Asterisk system.
This is the sort of well thought out package deal that Linux should be heading into before Microsoft goes there and eats their lunch. Given the nature of the Linux community, I don't doubt that this will happen as Microsoft is cohesive and top down and when they move, they do it in force. The Linux world is endlessly divisive and schismatic internally, loaded with disparate factions and egos, and overall totally oblivious to common sense and human nature. Those who use it and OSS in general have to do the big picture cobbling together of things and all the struggling themselves and then run into the roadblock of all the parts they use being run by people with cross purposes and no allegiance to the great things they may be doing with those things.
And so it goes...
That would be like arguing that not everyone who has potentially defective silicone-gel breast implants should have them removed - you've got to wait until they burst and you get all sorts of auto-immune diseases, and THEN you can sue for the cost of getting them removed, and your damages. Otherwise, you're not a victim - just a "potential" victim.
This is nothing like that and you know it. There is a very big difference between failure of the core product risking your health and life and a wonky optional feature on a software product that does nothing more than control you PC. Personal computers are optional luxuries, not necessities, and if you aren't using and have no intention of using an optional feature then you are not harmed directly, only potentially harmed.
I have spent years being angry with Microsoft on general principle as a programmer that they've sold beta software as finished product but this doesn't anger me. This struck me as a serious bug that slipped through despite testing and would likely only show up in the unpredictable wilds of end user configurations and not the bland and uniform test beds of a developer. I was also a tester and went out of my way to make all my test machines as diverse and weird as possible to try and ellicit bugs from their hiding. Microsoft may not. Many corporations don't.
Meanwhile, the Micrsoft opposition embraces Microsoft's old policy of shoving unfinished code out the door and thinks that giving it away for free under the name Open Source makes them more righteous and noble. The expectation that OSS works better than closed source is still being trotted around constantly, so, false advertising. If we go by your standard that this group should have remained as a class, then the next time there's a lawsuit involving OSS, EVERYONE who has EVER downloaded but not even used or had any intention of using ANY OSS should be included in the class.
No? Okay then.
And soooo many people think that Mozilla is inherently safer, the people who develop it and revolve around it and so on the most saintly perfect people...
Wake up kids. They're as fallible as anyone at Microsoft and things like this will happen. Whether it is the browser or the websites hosting or the wikis, or whatever, mistakes are going to be made and patches and corrections will need to be done.
Microsoft isn't the only imperfect group of people out there. Everything is as vulnerable as the weakest link: the humans involved. Self-righteousness egged on by zealots can only weaken the link.
CACLS is useless if you aren't booted into safe mode. The changes won't take properly. Try and make OpenSSH for Windows work with strictmodes=yes and key authentication only set in sshd_config. The trick? You run it with user/pass authentication to create the directories and copy the key file to make the permissions correct. CACLS fails every time. They well and truly crippled any sort of controls on XP Home.
For an extra $39.95 you get the Gold Version which lets you actually compose web pages.
I see the brainless buffoonery that gave us the Pavillion pre-loaded with Windows ME is still alive and well at HP.
Slashdotting brings him to his knees... Er... Tentacles...
...since when have teachers not stolen their students code and claimed it as their own? I wrote a program to compute points on a sphere in high school and when another teacher walked in, mine claimed it as his. Granted, being a single aging geek and the other teacher being a well stacked single lady might have had something to do with it...
...and all the other usual comments. The RIAA has a justifiable right to attempt to protect the intellectual property of those who assign them duty to do so. They are of course their own worst enemy. Like someone whose white Plymouth Reliant was stolen then going out, breaking down the doors of, and shooting, anyone who happens to own a white Plymouth Reliant. Way to go about things the right way people.
At the rate the RIAA and MPAA are going they will manage to set enough precedent to totally invalidate all copyright laws everywhere and cause world governments to start all over again.
I thought so. Google has not exactly gone out of their way to put their applications on Linux as opposed to Windows. Microsoft therefore ultimately leads Google by the nose. As they would be led by the nose by Linus if they focused all app development on Linux. As they would be led by the nose by Jobs if they focused all development on OSX.
Google is not an operating system and never will be. They will forever be at the mercy of the operating systems they publish on and the web browsers through which their services are accessed. If they concentrated on text interfaces, they'd be at the mercy of Lynx and its maintainers.
Google claiming they will beat Microsoft or anyone else is just plain ludicrous. It's like an aftermarket auto parts maker stating they will put the auto manufacturer out of business.
Exactly. In the same way that BASIC programmers had bad tendencies to not combine their loops and do the math to make it so and thus created nine thousand repeats of essentially the same routing, today's programmers on C++, etc. tend to look at the coolness of what they are doing and not at the things that code represent to the machine. Instead of their code generating the smallest most correct executables, they generate massively wonky ones which unnecessarily replicate basic operations over and over, which may generate stack, register, buffer, etc. issues in concert with other processes, etc.
I'm NOT arguing that they need write in assembly or binary. I AM arguing, I guess, that the traditional CS foundations of logic and math are important to understanding the bigger picture in the most meaningful way. Even if you never take a CS course, being able to go through an old compiler theory textbook and grasp what they mean is a good way to find new understanding in C at which point you understand that there was deeper meaning to Kernighan's and Ritchie's guide than just how C worked. Any language needs to base itself around those core principles and insist on the programmers understanding them.
Which is why I get that shaking head and rolling eyes thing whenever I see an explosion of interest for a new language whose very structure looks to me like spaghetti before anything is written with it and all the praise revolves around it being new, cool, object oriented, or some other buzzphrase. Maybe the languages before were'nt in need or replacement, just the people using them or at least a refresher in the basics.
You're missing my point (and maybe I wasn't clear). The core of all higher languages is in the end the basic logic of binary circuits. Understand AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, etc., and binary math, and that everything devolves to those foundations and you have a better grasp on what you can do with the higher concepts. I rather think the explosion of applications on every platform with crappy memory management and bloat is directly related to this. Coders of today do not understand anything about stacks and registers and limitations. Frugality, Occam's Razor, and other important principles are ignored and heck, never even learned. Just throw everything you want in there and since you don't know why any of the snippets does what it does in machine code, you won't know when a compiler is going to do its designed thing and result in problems. If you did know, you would have written things differently. The law of unintended consequences can be hemmed in by understanding the finer grained lower levels of any complex system. It isn't for nothing that the people who design and build engines have to know something of metallurgy, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, machining, etc. What the little tiny bits of metal will do in response to the doings of the big complex engine is important. So too is it with programming.