I'm relatively sure you'd need to use two or more factor hardware and software encryption on multiple levels, an approved OS which would likely not be Windows given statements by Homeland Security, and some other things that I'm sure the people from the DoD will no doubt be only too happy to tell you if they want you to actually do something for them.
They'll definitely tell you what to do. In excrutiating detail. They're funny that day.
I don't think I've ever met a single person that hasn't been shafted by AOL. They're well known for autocharging a credit card of checking account despite three to five notarized statements of desire to cancel and when you kill the account they've been charging, they have the nerve to have their collections people call you to demand a new account to charge as well as back bill you for the time they weren't able to charge.
I'm not the only person who has had to instruct their bank to deny all charges to AOL based on such a cancellation letter and threat of filing fraud charges against the bank and AOL if they didn't comply.
AOL should be brought up on federal charges of some sort and brought to account for their long time behavior.
because they are essentially being tarred for the same thing that MS has for years, that they are leveraging their current financial strength to put their fingers into every cookie jar they can and because they are so large, the presumption of instant stolen thunder is made. But we said that about IBM when MS was a start-up and where are they now? Licking the rear of the Linux community in a pathetic attempt to co-opt some sort of audience to get their numbers going again. (Note to Linux weenies: IBM gave the world OS/2. It sucked like the intake of a TF30-414A. Run from their power of mediocrity while you can. Think of them as SCO in disguise. Run.)
Google can get into anything it likes just as anyone else can. So can MS. Or Novell or so on. Income inflation for techies is a GOOD thing after the dual nuclear economic bombings of the dot com and telecom sectors. So I think this is just sour grapes.
I will agree that they get way too much free and overly uncritical positive press from the crowd around here as does Apple. Let them earn it for good things and not because it fits into the lazy chintzy mindset of "well, it doesn't cost anything, it's free".
Those mentioning OS/2 in a positive light...
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...are either truly inexperienced with OS/2 or they are demented or both. I supported OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on a Token Ring LAN and there was nothing more excrutiating in my desktop/software support years than that. The ONLY things it excelled at were inflicting mental distress and running multiple DOS sessions without crashing. Whoopie-frigging-do. If I wasn't being paid to jump in the line of fire, you'd not have been able to force me at gunpoint to do it.
Windows 95 for all its issues was not as bad as people have made it out to be. First, MS did warn people that a fresh install rather than upgrade over Win3.x was advised. Second, the vendors like IBM did their level best to act like it was still the days of DOS/Win3.x or has it been forgotten that their Craptivas tended to use every freaking IRQ there was knowing that IRQ sharing was not remotely ready in that first release? Compaq, et al, had their own dufus-level driver and build issues.
Major corporations actually using it daily and not being able to take major efficiency disruptions did yeoman work bughunting and suggesting workarounds and fixes to Microsoft and some actually paid serious cash to Redmond for code access to work their own builds of it. Meanwhile people threw stones at those big corporations heedless of how much of their Windows headache was steadily being addressed by those corporations. To this day people still don't get it and still have a "tail wags the dog" mindset that the home and school are the real influence.
Nope. Business, where we all work, is where the PC market is guided along more than at home and the NT/2K touches in XP Home bear that out. I don't use a glitzy ego booster for Jobs at work, I use an OS that all things taken into account, is the best choice for my work. It offers things that our proprietary app writers find get their job done better than any other platform.
So in addition to hoisting a cold one to MS for a job well done in the end and congratulating them on ten years out from Windows 95, I also salute the corporations that adopted it in droves so long ago and all the work they and my fellow techs and coders did to fix things up. I was not and am still not happy about their basically selling beta code as finished product rushing it to market, but it did set the stage for a much easier desktop experience that only encouraged rapid personal computer adoption after years of doldrums and facilitated widespread Internet usage adoption to boot. If Apple or IBM had their way, never mind the Unix geeks, we'd have had personal computers that remained as inaccessible to the average user as what went before and not seen the renaisance that we did.
We need a new class of moderation here. Is it insightful? Is it interesting? Is it funny? No, it's all three. It's fun...sight...resting.... funsightresting, yeah... that's it... sure...
Must be a Freudian or other subconscious mispelling. Windows 95 was so bass ackwards it must have been mistaken for Polish. (This comment writer is of Polish extraction among others and is not offended and neither should you be on his behalf. Thank you.)
If there's a truer thing said on Slashdot, it would not be so important as this though it has been said before in different ways.
If Linus wanted to sell paper cups with the Linux name on them, there'd be a stampede to get the news posted. If a new geek cult game releases, there's a post. Slashdot readers submit posts knowing the editors cannot resist publishing them because everyone knows the other readers will comment on them by the hundreds. Much of the news is stuff that DOESN'T matter. WE ARE the viral marketing and we do it DESPITE our own cynicsm. Oy.
Maybe we should get it over with and charge people to talk about their product and get it exposed to the tech brigades instead of giving them free advertising here. I won't even say the name of this movie franchise I'm so sick of hearing about it never mind sick of the incessant ways it gets squirreled into being mentioned.
Next big Slashdot running gag: inserting catch words and product names that are already known to be over-hyped.
Am I the only one hearing Men at Work's refrain, "Can you hear the thunder? You better run, you better take cover..."
I'm not sure what the point of transorbital supersonic transport between Japan and anywhere else is. Is there truly enough intercontinental traffic to support this? I suspect something on the order of personal shuttlepods ala Trek would be more likely to debut before this becomes a going and economically viable and sound concern, thus obviating it.
Great for Japanese national pride, but does it really mean much more than that? What are the real chances this is going to cause any real shift in the ratios regarding their aircraft industry versus ours? I hope it works and all, but I think pushing towars a bigger contribution to the international space travel effort would be better in the long run. OTOH, maybe it will be in the area of transorbital travel.
That's the part I've never understanded about the US. On one hand the US is ultra-religious. But on the other hand helping the poor is totaly unamerican (socialism is baaaaaaaad).
This is a total misrepresentation most likely unintentionally but you never know.
First, this country is not remotely ultra-religious. The US just went through seven decades of tumult on the heels of the prior thirteen plus decades of prior tumult. World war, depression, world war and pre-eminence, cold war and beatnik cynicsm, cold war and hippie cynicsm, cold war and disco cynicsm, new age and return to great things in the eighties, no maybe we were wrong cynicsm in the nineties, and now who gives a rat's butt early twenty-first century.
Through all that we've had all sorts of mostly self-created shocks to our systems and religion is one of the few comforts in hard times other than eating (see our present obesity stats in the US) but we are not "ultra-religious". If you believe that, you've not seen the cities where eighteen sects of Christianity, three or more of Judaism, and two or more of Islam and so on coexist in a sea of secular "who or what is this G-d you speak of?" mindset.
Charity is the hallmark more of religion than secular state function and socialism is now and always has been a tool of power for those wielding it and nothing more. Grow up on welfare in a housing project and you'd know exactly how much the socialistic welfare system gives a fark about poverty and opportunity.
Unfortunately, the glib left has a lot of fellow believers in the press and they get nothing but a positive spin from the media despite the fact that our state-run welfare system is in reality a prison without walls designed to warehouse people who are otherwise considered undesireable by the people who most go on about "the poor" in the first place. They are the show cattle of the left, trotted to the corral at election time with a nice new harness and put back in their pen afterward with some crumbs. If "the poor" ever manage to not be poor anymore, they are no longer useful as they were before and instead become part of the scapegoated "selfish middle class" or "the (hated) rich" if they manage to succeed wonderfully.
Our welfare system will always be ready to give you the ratty tattered shirt off of someone else's back and a couple day-old fish, but will do all it can not to let you look at a fishing pole or even know what one is. And the fact is the fishing pole is hard work, self-sacrifice, discrimination between what is needed and what is wanted, and the ability to put off short term fancy for long term stability. These are not things taught in our society these days and anyone attempting to do so is called a racist, sexist, classist, etc., and hounded off the stage.
This is all because we are NOT religious and have largely adopted a mass public stance that G-d does not exist and therefore since there is no higher power than you, you can make up ethics and morality however you please as you go along and no one can tell you differently. Douglas Adams said something about this and getting hit crossing the street. I think that would be our present morass.
Absolutely correct. What most users don't know because the techs are tremendously underpaid and undermotivated and the customers are largely arrogant snots treating them as the enemy, is that the boxes have to be set to the appropriate output to see it properly. DVI won't work in certain modes on the box while NTSC output won't work in other modes because for some farking reason they didn't bother enabling it to downsample and output through two outputs at once... in some modes.
Firewire should also work for video output on those boxes that have it but not in the ripping pure digital stream way. Comcast also supports CableCARD in many markets.
Oh yeah, the cable companies, despite some rumors, peeps, and misfired comments, really isn't hot for any new digital technology that forces them to be some sort of DRM bad guy and to offer only services that wipe out whole classes of customer equipment. The need for a box with an analog tv in a digital only market is one thing, requiring whole new tvs to even use the box at all is another.
Write to your cable company, or satellite company, and tell them plainly and politely your (hopefully well researched) opinions. The content carriers are a powerful group if aligned together and DRM goes nowhere if they will not carry it that way. I know that some people think the tail wags the dog, but HBO loses massive cash the instant a company like HBO turns off the feed and Comcast is offering two hundred other channels. HBO is only concerned about theirs. Comcast can outlast HBO in such a fight. Same goes for the other content originators and the MSOs know it but just haven't had the cojones to stick it to them yet. The DRM/HD issue is one more reason for them to do it.
...so why not make the defacto of those opposed to the abuse of it OSS? If we all adopt it and (mostly) do not evade it unethically, and treat IP with respect, then MS and company are well farked. It wasn't Microsoft's WMA or Real Networks' RA, it was MP3 that the users chose. We can steal the proprietary vendors' thunder again in the IT world if we choose.
I have no problem as long as those using the DRM make the choices, not some big faceless brutal associations, government mandate, or the people who are there to make my PC and nothing else. I want it to be my choice and not something that locks me out of my own system against my choice.
...not using Windows is not an option. The reasons are numerous and well-documented and only the idiot zealots try to deny them.
The more stable and sane try to at least address the shortcomings and work on it and to them goes out my thanks and my encouragement to "get it" no matter what it takes as to why Windows continues to and probably will indefinitely kick Linux' ass on the desktop.
Okay, so maybe the various app writers are at the mercy of those who write the frameworks, those who press ahead with kernel designs, etc. But they really need to band together and say to those maintaining the core guts of Linux that enough is enough, we need a stable solid framework on par with what Microsoft has with Windows.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if Gnucash was a bit more friendly with exported MS Money files, if there were more friendly install scripts for webcam drivers (again, SPCA5xx farking rocks for those who don't blanche at typing "make"), if nVidia made their drivers a little friendlier, if Real bothered tightening up their player, and for that matter if Yahoo would finish porting all the nice doo-dads of their Windows messenger client to their Linux one.
Of course I could use some more and better graphics apps and format compatibility, and a lot of other things...
But I'm a techie sort so I can deal with whatever. The average user can't and since techies estranged from the average end-user's needs tend to be the ones building distros with the attitude that "we know what is best for you" rather than listening, I don't expect that to change.
What I'd really like to see out of the Linux world is a collection of several of the top apps per area together on a live DVD using Debian, one using FC, another with SuSE, etc. so that the users can get a better feel and then pick and choose their mix to get the best fit for them. Call it Distros On Demand if you will, but we need something like that if we're going to put more choice in the hands of the end-users to make them more comfortable with Linux.
Never mind hiding Vi and Emacs from them so their heads don't explode when they try to adapt from Notepad.
...I was hoping someone had finally done a quantum vacuum experiment speeding up the local speed of light within the experiment area. But nooooo...
It'll happen though. Eventually. Probably not untill Maxwell's original equations are restored and made sense of versus Heavyside's edits, but it'll happen.
Over at Tech Support Comedy we call people "starfish" who don't know what they are doing and for a long time they've been called "lusers" by others. These are the people making IT policy in schools these days and have been since time out of mind.
These are "tail wags the dog" imbeciles who were the other half of Apple scam to get into civilian homes through the children by putting used and wholly inadequate Apples in the schools. These are the idiots who thought that typing teachers should teach BASIC on Commodore PETs, the same dimbulbs who gave gifted classes LOGO instead of serious languages like C.
These are the sort of people still to this day deciding IT policy in the local schools and often enough, in the towns of those schools. People without proper education, background, aptitude, wisdom, or intelligence. Hiring a Must Call Someone Else (MCSE) with three years experience fixing neighbors' computers is no improvement either, and that often enough is as far towards proper people as they go. Loony.
The schools have 60s sci-fi television and AOL newbie levels of knowledge about basic data processing, elementary PC workings, and an understanding of pop media topics like viruses and spyware as shallow as a plate of spaghetti two seconds after it gets in front of Kirstie Ally. the average twelve year old knows a thousand times more than his forty-eight year-old teacher.
Why? Well, other than the fact that we only really pay lip service to the idea of proper education of children in the US as well shown by the schools spending more resources on fighting the No Child Left Behind Act than they actually do on teaching the children, it has long been known that the majority of public school teachers come from the bottom quartile of the colleges and universities. IOW, those who couldn't excel teach. Those who could get private sector jobs.
It's clearly not a matter of salary either when teachers do the bulk of their job for only nine months of the year and have starting salaries in excess of telecommunications technicians with fifteen years of experience who actually have bonafide standards and goals to stick to.
Politics rules the teaching world, always has, and will until we demand higher college scores from would-be teachers, force total financial divestiture and separation of the teachers' unions from leftist political groups who have dominated them for decades, and start taking serious stock of what kids already know versus what they don't and need to and start teaching based on that and not politics of the day.
Seriously, touchy-feely political claptrap and pop media nonsense have farked up the US schools to the point they are next to useless as educational vehicles, parents more and more know it, and the country's social landscape makes it glaringly obvious. The kids don't need twenty bazillion courses on AIDS, the environment, and tolerance, they need to frigging understand 2+2, what the capital of their own state is, and how to spell their own last name correctly. Since the schools would rather not bother with those things and instead focus on indoctrination, I'm not surprised they'd leave the passes on the PCs and then punish the kids for using them. Why not just leave some matches and magnesium strips out in front of them in science class while the teacher goes for a half-hour smoke break in the middle of class? (Actually, this happened when I was in school in my class and that was 1983 or so.)
I see this every day on the way to work. It's well known that the cops don't bother ticketing for speeding on the interstates around here unless you're doing between 10% and 25% again as fast as the majority. So the majority keep ratcheting up the pack speed. Try to put cruise control on at 69mph and you'll be damn near rear-ended by 75% of the people trying to do between 75mph and 80mph. This despite the steady increase in gas costs nationwide. We have Metro North right through my town to the city I work in but the costs are like that of going all the way to NYC every day. So it's be safe and poor or unsafe and almost poor.
Driving is one area which illustrates the ability of the common people of our world to descend to absolute stupidity faster than a Lamborghini can go 0 to 60.
1. Hard drive hardware encryption
2. Hard drive boot loader software encryption
3. OS software encryption
4. Container software encryption
5. File software encryption
6. Nym and Mixmaster remailing
7. Chained proxies
People have for years scoffed that these were only for terrorists, kiddie pr0n posters, and trolls. Then they said that you could just move to Canada. Well, what are you going to do when the draft dodger paradise forgets what civil rights like speech, privacy, and so on are all about?
Of course course, we should be less worried about a known dallier with socialism like Canada than the home of people who told the British crown where to stick it. I think one of our founders said something about not deserving either security or freedom if being willing to trade one for the other and something else about hanging together or hanging separately.
You know, criminals misuse guns, knives, and baseball bats. We don't stop owning or using them when and where necessary because of it. We shouldn't look askance at any and all methods of maintaining our privacy. What's next? We leave our doors unlocked and wide open because drug dealers close and lock theirs? Let's not be a bunch of yutzes.
If anything, the government is single-handedly ENCOURAGING criminals and terrorists to use advanced technologies for privacy by going on about them at length constantly and pushing therefore towards wider adoption by the civilian populace. Eventually these things will become normal and everyday and what frigging law can they pass then that will undo it without undoing the entirety of the pinnacle of Western civilization, freedom and primacy of the people over government?
1. Four cores standard
2. Chips pluggable to the mobo like Atari cartridges to eight CPUs
3. Mobos as blades to passive backplanes
4. Home blade servers and thin clients.
I think in the end we'll see low-end, mid-range, and high-end blade everything in the future with modularity being the way of everything.
But that's just my speculation.
Of course, a minor change points to warp physics
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One Hundred Years of E=MC2
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you have it that the values are irrellevant and only the geometery matters, then for E to be conserved and still change c...
E=(m/(n^2))*((n^2)*(c^2))
where n is the factor by which the speed of light changes.
...which only means that as the speed of light changes, mass must change where it does so that E does not change and violate conservation. And if t is related to c then quite possibly as c approaches infinity m drops towards 0 and the distance between any two points drops towards zero and the speed of time climbs towards infinity and at c=infinity everything happens at once and all distances are zero.
Conversely if c drops toward zero then mass heads for infinity and when c=0 then mass is infinite, nothing happens, and all distances are infinite.
It looks like reverse time dilation and one wonders if you can warp space to create a faster local c, can you accellarate normally at such a rate as to counter it and have dilation=0? It doesn't look so much like Star Trek's integral warp speeds as there being a curve on which normal dilation can match warp dilation. Would be interesting to have a high-speed zero dilation trip to the next system and back to check it out with chronometers.
whatever happened to "request a feature" button... Now were gonna need a "plant a rumor" button...
That's what the BBSpot Slashdot Story Generator is for. Sooner or later, one of these will get through per year, then several, or not. I note Dupe-A-Mania has been somewhat less of late than the early summer high.
Google needs a "stop and shore up what you already have" button before they spread out thinner than a supermodel with a fresh supply of laxatives.
I don't see megafauna as reproducing all willy-nilly and doing so without people noticing. Not too hard to track a big cat the size of a pony or an elephant almost twice normal size and covered in fur. We're not talking insects or kudzu, we're talking big arse creatures.
What gets to me is that this is the shotgun method of protecting wildlife. Reproduce it en masse and numbers will take care of it. Not going to happen. Impact on wildlife will be made less when we stop chowing up the countryside to put in homes because we want not only new houses but new land too. We've got plenty of cities and suburbs chock full of disused and underused land where new buildings could easily replace old, where we can easily with modern technology put in efficient dense housing that won't become slums if we truly don't want them to...
Instead we demolish farmland and forest, put in subdivisions, subdivide the properties over the decades and make it denser, then leave it behind as too old and we chow up some other forest or farm and put in another subdivision. In CT in the USA, the woods in the western hills are being sliced through at an alarming rate for the middle exec level wealthy who work in the white collar city jobs and commute home to $1M+ homes that are built up into the woods and across former farms. Meanwhile the cities they work in are falling apart and full of six-family apartments that are boarded up and with a little investment and hard work could be made into fairly spacious single-family townhouses right there.
Most of these people will as they and their kids get older simply move on the ever "newer" developments, fleeing from the cities while continuing to work in them or in office parks on the immediate periphery, fueling the developers who keep grinding the countryside up and leaving us with decreasing space for the wildlife.
Here, that is the major issue. That is what is destroying the environment. Clearing of wild places to put in expensive houses, all the societal support things that go with them, roads to get there, etc. Meanwhile we're wrongly concerned with old things like mining and so on. Those are fanciful targets of the usual socialist suspects. I'm not, I live in a city, and there's plenty of good space still here just waiting to be improved on for the good of anyone living here. But people refuse to even consider it, leave it to the poor, and move on to their formaly wild now suburban confines comfortably far from the "old places" but still near enough to make money off of them.
...it isn't much beyond an incremental sort of gee-whiz improvement. You can send T1s over long distances and then break them out fractionally or hook them to a DSLAM and use as a backhaul for the customers. The submersion thing might have come about from submersible communications at sea or from the fact that many remote mechanisms in telecom tend to be underground and the waterproofing for those vaults tends not to be the greatest.
I give it a big shrug and a I'll check into it later. I work in telecom so it does get my notice. Now if they make a 1.5Mbps line work to twenty miles on pure copper all the way, that will knock my socks off.
Talk about control, I see control freaks on the other side of this as well. If you want total control how about using Linux, which you can mod/change/hack to your heart's content. Or is it just more fun to try to do the "forbidden" thing?
The control drives more people away than it attracts not because it is not "open" as in "open source" but because the anal-retentive arrogance level is off the scale and that drives away third-party hardware and software vendors thus lessening the end-user's range of things they can do.
I have zero doubt that Windows, as great as it is relative to its competitors, would ever have done one percent as well as it did had Microsoft been so freakishly controlling as Apple was from the beginning of the Macintosh. Similarly, the PC platform would have been as widely adopted as it was had Compaq and company not done their number on IBM the way they did. The PC genie out of the bottle, Windows open to writing apps with a solid well-documented architecture to go by, it's not hard to see why it is where it is now.
That same nature of things allows Linux, BSD, and a dozen other things to run on the PC, and as time goes by Windows-like architectural standards will eventually and inevitably coalesce despite the present "do it because it is hard and not correct or beautiful" mindset contaminating Linux.
PC hardware was open long before "open source" in the most meaningful way of "open" and that is documented, easily understood, and sensible. A variety of vendors come and go in the direction of it and the end-user purchasing habits control what stays and what doesn't on it, not the vendors from above, and Apple needs to grow up and see that the only thing they can meaningfully controll is their software and that the best way to grow their market share is to co-opt the hardware that is majority dominated by Windows and Linux.
I have no faith in them to do so however. They are still too much like IBM was with microchannel and OS/2. Still daydreaming about total end to end domination of one single overall platform. IBM has that with their AS/400 more or less but how many of these are getting sold every day at the local stores?
Oh, that's right, none. Present popularity aside, the insane and insipid insistance on proprietary control isn't winning any love from the majority of Apple's user base. Continued religious worship of the Mac/Apple, solid positioning to compete as a Wintel alternative (as much as it is), and plain anti-MS sentiment are the bulk of Apple purchases. Apple should let it go and get on with being the only real competitor to Windows on the desktop.
Linux zealots may not like it, and like it even less that the one to challenge Redmond was born of BSD roots, but do you childishly want the competition with Micrsoft to be your pet platform or do you just want to see the competition happen at all? If the latter, then support the guerilla porting of OSX to the PC. In sufficient numbers it might even sink in to the ever-dense and deluded Steve Jobs.
Machiavellian tinfoil hat conspiracies that Jobs is intending for this aside, it has to happen. Linux isn't going to win that kind of sheer power any time soon. Apple could practically do it tomorrow. And that competition will only help Microsoft Windows users in the long run. We all benefit from that more than waiting for one distro or another to do more than cause a shurg from Redmond.
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I'm relatively sure you'd need to use two or more factor hardware and software encryption on multiple levels, an approved OS which would likely not be Windows given statements by Homeland Security, and some other things that I'm sure the people from the DoD will no doubt be only too happy to tell you if they want you to actually do something for them. They'll definitely tell you what to do. In excrutiating detail. They're funny that day.
I don't think I've ever met a single person that hasn't been shafted by AOL. They're well known for autocharging a credit card of checking account despite three to five notarized statements of desire to cancel and when you kill the account they've been charging, they have the nerve to have their collections people call you to demand a new account to charge as well as back bill you for the time they weren't able to charge. I'm not the only person who has had to instruct their bank to deny all charges to AOL based on such a cancellation letter and threat of filing fraud charges against the bank and AOL if they didn't comply. AOL should be brought up on federal charges of some sort and brought to account for their long time behavior.
because they are essentially being tarred for the same thing that MS has for years, that they are leveraging their current financial strength to put their fingers into every cookie jar they can and because they are so large, the presumption of instant stolen thunder is made. But we said that about IBM when MS was a start-up and where are they now? Licking the rear of the Linux community in a pathetic attempt to co-opt some sort of audience to get their numbers going again. (Note to Linux weenies: IBM gave the world OS/2. It sucked like the intake of a TF30-414A. Run from their power of mediocrity while you can. Think of them as SCO in disguise. Run.)
Google can get into anything it likes just as anyone else can. So can MS. Or Novell or so on. Income inflation for techies is a GOOD thing after the dual nuclear economic bombings of the dot com and telecom sectors. So I think this is just sour grapes.
I will agree that they get way too much free and overly uncritical positive press from the crowd around here as does Apple. Let them earn it for good things and not because it fits into the lazy chintzy mindset of "well, it doesn't cost anything, it's free".
...are either truly inexperienced with OS/2 or they are demented or both. I supported OS/2 2.1 and Warp 3 on a Token Ring LAN and there was nothing more excrutiating in my desktop/software support years than that. The ONLY things it excelled at were inflicting mental distress and running multiple DOS sessions without crashing. Whoopie-frigging-do. If I wasn't being paid to jump in the line of fire, you'd not have been able to force me at gunpoint to do it.
Windows 95 for all its issues was not as bad as people have made it out to be. First, MS did warn people that a fresh install rather than upgrade over Win3.x was advised. Second, the vendors like IBM did their level best to act like it was still the days of DOS/Win3.x or has it been forgotten that their Craptivas tended to use every freaking IRQ there was knowing that IRQ sharing was not remotely ready in that first release? Compaq, et al, had their own dufus-level driver and build issues.
Major corporations actually using it daily and not being able to take major efficiency disruptions did yeoman work bughunting and suggesting workarounds and fixes to Microsoft and some actually paid serious cash to Redmond for code access to work their own builds of it. Meanwhile people threw stones at those big corporations heedless of how much of their Windows headache was steadily being addressed by those corporations. To this day people still don't get it and still have a "tail wags the dog" mindset that the home and school are the real influence.
Nope. Business, where we all work, is where the PC market is guided along more than at home and the NT/2K touches in XP Home bear that out. I don't use a glitzy ego booster for Jobs at work, I use an OS that all things taken into account, is the best choice for my work. It offers things that our proprietary app writers find get their job done better than any other platform.
So in addition to hoisting a cold one to MS for a job well done in the end and congratulating them on ten years out from Windows 95, I also salute the corporations that adopted it in droves so long ago and all the work they and my fellow techs and coders did to fix things up. I was not and am still not happy about their basically selling beta code as finished product rushing it to market, but it did set the stage for a much easier desktop experience that only encouraged rapid personal computer adoption after years of doldrums and facilitated widespread Internet usage adoption to boot. If Apple or IBM had their way, never mind the Unix geeks, we'd have had personal computers that remained as inaccessible to the average user as what went before and not seen the renaisance that we did.
We need a new class of moderation here. Is it insightful? Is it interesting? Is it funny? No, it's all three. It's fun...sight...resting.... funsightresting, yeah... that's it... sure...
Must be a Freudian or other subconscious mispelling. Windows 95 was so bass ackwards it must have been mistaken for Polish. (This comment writer is of Polish extraction among others and is not offended and neither should you be on his behalf. Thank you.)
If there's a truer thing said on Slashdot, it would not be so important as this though it has been said before in different ways.
If Linus wanted to sell paper cups with the Linux name on them, there'd be a stampede to get the news posted. If a new geek cult game releases, there's a post. Slashdot readers submit posts knowing the editors cannot resist publishing them because everyone knows the other readers will comment on them by the hundreds. Much of the news is stuff that DOESN'T matter. WE ARE the viral marketing and we do it DESPITE our own cynicsm. Oy.
Maybe we should get it over with and charge people to talk about their product and get it exposed to the tech brigades instead of giving them free advertising here. I won't even say the name of this movie franchise I'm so sick of hearing about it never mind sick of the incessant ways it gets squirreled into being mentioned.
Next big Slashdot running gag: inserting catch words and product names that are already known to be over-hyped.
...can sing "Pac Man Fever" from wrote memory!
Am I the only one hearing Men at Work's refrain, "Can you hear the thunder? You better run, you better take cover..."
I'm not sure what the point of transorbital supersonic transport between Japan and anywhere else is. Is there truly enough intercontinental traffic to support this? I suspect something on the order of personal shuttlepods ala Trek would be more likely to debut before this becomes a going and economically viable and sound concern, thus obviating it.
Great for Japanese national pride, but does it really mean much more than that? What are the real chances this is going to cause any real shift in the ratios regarding their aircraft industry versus ours? I hope it works and all, but I think pushing towars a bigger contribution to the international space travel effort would be better in the long run. OTOH, maybe it will be in the area of transorbital travel.
That's the part I've never understanded about the US. On one hand the US is ultra-religious. But on the other hand helping the poor is totaly unamerican (socialism is baaaaaaaad).
This is a total misrepresentation most likely unintentionally but you never know.
First, this country is not remotely ultra-religious. The US just went through seven decades of tumult on the heels of the prior thirteen plus decades of prior tumult. World war, depression, world war and pre-eminence, cold war and beatnik cynicsm, cold war and hippie cynicsm, cold war and disco cynicsm, new age and return to great things in the eighties, no maybe we were wrong cynicsm in the nineties, and now who gives a rat's butt early twenty-first century.
Through all that we've had all sorts of mostly self-created shocks to our systems and religion is one of the few comforts in hard times other than eating (see our present obesity stats in the US) but we are not "ultra-religious". If you believe that, you've not seen the cities where eighteen sects of Christianity, three or more of Judaism, and two or more of Islam and so on coexist in a sea of secular "who or what is this G-d you speak of?" mindset.
Charity is the hallmark more of religion than secular state function and socialism is now and always has been a tool of power for those wielding it and nothing more. Grow up on welfare in a housing project and you'd know exactly how much the socialistic welfare system gives a fark about poverty and opportunity.
Unfortunately, the glib left has a lot of fellow believers in the press and they get nothing but a positive spin from the media despite the fact that our state-run welfare system is in reality a prison without walls designed to warehouse people who are otherwise considered undesireable by the people who most go on about "the poor" in the first place. They are the show cattle of the left, trotted to the corral at election time with a nice new harness and put back in their pen afterward with some crumbs. If "the poor" ever manage to not be poor anymore, they are no longer useful as they were before and instead become part of the scapegoated "selfish middle class" or "the (hated) rich" if they manage to succeed wonderfully.
Our welfare system will always be ready to give you the ratty tattered shirt off of someone else's back and a couple day-old fish, but will do all it can not to let you look at a fishing pole or even know what one is. And the fact is the fishing pole is hard work, self-sacrifice, discrimination between what is needed and what is wanted, and the ability to put off short term fancy for long term stability. These are not things taught in our society these days and anyone attempting to do so is called a racist, sexist, classist, etc., and hounded off the stage.
This is all because we are NOT religious and have largely adopted a mass public stance that G-d does not exist and therefore since there is no higher power than you, you can make up ethics and morality however you please as you go along and no one can tell you differently. Douglas Adams said something about this and getting hit crossing the street. I think that would be our present morass.
Absolutely correct. What most users don't know because the techs are tremendously underpaid and undermotivated and the customers are largely arrogant snots treating them as the enemy, is that the boxes have to be set to the appropriate output to see it properly. DVI won't work in certain modes on the box while NTSC output won't work in other modes because for some farking reason they didn't bother enabling it to downsample and output through two outputs at once... in some modes.
Firewire should also work for video output on those boxes that have it but not in the ripping pure digital stream way. Comcast also supports CableCARD in many markets.
Oh yeah, the cable companies, despite some rumors, peeps, and misfired comments, really isn't hot for any new digital technology that forces them to be some sort of DRM bad guy and to offer only services that wipe out whole classes of customer equipment. The need for a box with an analog tv in a digital only market is one thing, requiring whole new tvs to even use the box at all is another.
Write to your cable company, or satellite company, and tell them plainly and politely your (hopefully well researched) opinions. The content carriers are a powerful group if aligned together and DRM goes nowhere if they will not carry it that way. I know that some people think the tail wags the dog, but HBO loses massive cash the instant a company like HBO turns off the feed and Comcast is offering two hundred other channels. HBO is only concerned about theirs. Comcast can outlast HBO in such a fight. Same goes for the other content originators and the MSOs know it but just haven't had the cojones to stick it to them yet. The DRM/HD issue is one more reason for them to do it.
...so why not make the defacto of those opposed to the abuse of it OSS? If we all adopt it and (mostly) do not evade it unethically, and treat IP with respect, then MS and company are well farked. It wasn't Microsoft's WMA or Real Networks' RA, it was MP3 that the users chose. We can steal the proprietary vendors' thunder again in the IT world if we choose.
I have no problem as long as those using the DRM make the choices, not some big faceless brutal associations, government mandate, or the people who are there to make my PC and nothing else. I want it to be my choice and not something that locks me out of my own system against my choice.
It only took thirteen years to come up with something that has the same crappy resolution of Atari's Gameboy Pit Fighter port.
Okay, so it is cool and the content itself way better than Pit Fighter. Whole new way of graphing a matrix.
...not using Windows is not an option. The reasons are numerous and well-documented and only the idiot zealots try to deny them.
The more stable and sane try to at least address the shortcomings and work on it and to them goes out my thanks and my encouragement to "get it" no matter what it takes as to why Windows continues to and probably will indefinitely kick Linux' ass on the desktop.
Okay, so maybe the various app writers are at the mercy of those who write the frameworks, those who press ahead with kernel designs, etc. But they really need to band together and say to those maintaining the core guts of Linux that enough is enough, we need a stable solid framework on par with what Microsoft has with Windows.
Personally, I wouldn't mind if Gnucash was a bit more friendly with exported MS Money files, if there were more friendly install scripts for webcam drivers (again, SPCA5xx farking rocks for those who don't blanche at typing "make"), if nVidia made their drivers a little friendlier, if Real bothered tightening up their player, and for that matter if Yahoo would finish porting all the nice doo-dads of their Windows messenger client to their Linux one.
Of course I could use some more and better graphics apps and format compatibility, and a lot of other things...
But I'm a techie sort so I can deal with whatever. The average user can't and since techies estranged from the average end-user's needs tend to be the ones building distros with the attitude that "we know what is best for you" rather than listening, I don't expect that to change.
What I'd really like to see out of the Linux world is a collection of several of the top apps per area together on a live DVD using Debian, one using FC, another with SuSE, etc. so that the users can get a better feel and then pick and choose their mix to get the best fit for them. Call it Distros On Demand if you will, but we need something like that if we're going to put more choice in the hands of the end-users to make them more comfortable with Linux.
Never mind hiding Vi and Emacs from them so their heads don't explode when they try to adapt from Notepad.
...I was hoping someone had finally done a quantum vacuum experiment speeding up the local speed of light within the experiment area. But nooooo...
It'll happen though. Eventually. Probably not untill Maxwell's original equations are restored and made sense of versus Heavyside's edits, but it'll happen.
Over at Tech Support Comedy we call people "starfish" who don't know what they are doing and for a long time they've been called "lusers" by others. These are the people making IT policy in schools these days and have been since time out of mind.
These are "tail wags the dog" imbeciles who were the other half of Apple scam to get into civilian homes through the children by putting used and wholly inadequate Apples in the schools. These are the idiots who thought that typing teachers should teach BASIC on Commodore PETs, the same dimbulbs who gave gifted classes LOGO instead of serious languages like C.
These are the sort of people still to this day deciding IT policy in the local schools and often enough, in the towns of those schools. People without proper education, background, aptitude, wisdom, or intelligence. Hiring a Must Call Someone Else (MCSE) with three years experience fixing neighbors' computers is no improvement either, and that often enough is as far towards proper people as they go. Loony.
The schools have 60s sci-fi television and AOL newbie levels of knowledge about basic data processing, elementary PC workings, and an understanding of pop media topics like viruses and spyware as shallow as a plate of spaghetti two seconds after it gets in front of Kirstie Ally. the average twelve year old knows a thousand times more than his forty-eight year-old teacher.
Why? Well, other than the fact that we only really pay lip service to the idea of proper education of children in the US as well shown by the schools spending more resources on fighting the No Child Left Behind Act than they actually do on teaching the children, it has long been known that the majority of public school teachers come from the bottom quartile of the colleges and universities. IOW, those who couldn't excel teach. Those who could get private sector jobs.
It's clearly not a matter of salary either when teachers do the bulk of their job for only nine months of the year and have starting salaries in excess of telecommunications technicians with fifteen years of experience who actually have bonafide standards and goals to stick to.
Politics rules the teaching world, always has, and will until we demand higher college scores from would-be teachers, force total financial divestiture and separation of the teachers' unions from leftist political groups who have dominated them for decades, and start taking serious stock of what kids already know versus what they don't and need to and start teaching based on that and not politics of the day.
Seriously, touchy-feely political claptrap and pop media nonsense have farked up the US schools to the point they are next to useless as educational vehicles, parents more and more know it, and the country's social landscape makes it glaringly obvious. The kids don't need twenty bazillion courses on AIDS, the environment, and tolerance, they need to frigging understand 2+2, what the capital of their own state is, and how to spell their own last name correctly. Since the schools would rather not bother with those things and instead focus on indoctrination, I'm not surprised they'd leave the passes on the PCs and then punish the kids for using them. Why not just leave some matches and magnesium strips out in front of them in science class while the teacher goes for a half-hour smoke break in the middle of class? (Actually, this happened when I was in school in my class and that was 1983 or so.)
I see this every day on the way to work. It's well known that the cops don't bother ticketing for speeding on the interstates around here unless you're doing between 10% and 25% again as fast as the majority. So the majority keep ratcheting up the pack speed. Try to put cruise control on at 69mph and you'll be damn near rear-ended by 75% of the people trying to do between 75mph and 80mph. This despite the steady increase in gas costs nationwide. We have Metro North right through my town to the city I work in but the costs are like that of going all the way to NYC every day. So it's be safe and poor or unsafe and almost poor.
Driving is one area which illustrates the ability of the common people of our world to descend to absolute stupidity faster than a Lamborghini can go 0 to 60.
1. Hard drive hardware encryption
2. Hard drive boot loader software encryption
3. OS software encryption
4. Container software encryption
5. File software encryption
6. Nym and Mixmaster remailing
7. Chained proxies
People have for years scoffed that these were only for terrorists, kiddie pr0n posters, and trolls. Then they said that you could just move to Canada. Well, what are you going to do when the draft dodger paradise forgets what civil rights like speech, privacy, and so on are all about?
Of course course, we should be less worried about a known dallier with socialism like Canada than the home of people who told the British crown where to stick it. I think one of our founders said something about not deserving either security or freedom if being willing to trade one for the other and something else about hanging together or hanging separately.
You know, criminals misuse guns, knives, and baseball bats. We don't stop owning or using them when and where necessary because of it. We shouldn't look askance at any and all methods of maintaining our privacy. What's next? We leave our doors unlocked and wide open because drug dealers close and lock theirs? Let's not be a bunch of yutzes.
If anything, the government is single-handedly ENCOURAGING criminals and terrorists to use advanced technologies for privacy by going on about them at length constantly and pushing therefore towards wider adoption by the civilian populace. Eventually these things will become normal and everyday and what frigging law can they pass then that will undo it without undoing the entirety of the pinnacle of Western civilization, freedom and primacy of the people over government?
...that we will see, eventually...
1. Four cores standard
2. Chips pluggable to the mobo like Atari cartridges to eight CPUs
3. Mobos as blades to passive backplanes
4. Home blade servers and thin clients.
I think in the end we'll see low-end, mid-range, and high-end blade everything in the future with modularity being the way of everything.
But that's just my speculation.
If you have it that the values are irrellevant and only the geometery matters, then for E to be conserved and still change c...
...which only means that as the speed of light changes, mass must change where it does so that E does not change and violate conservation. And if t is related to c then quite possibly as c approaches infinity m drops towards 0 and the distance between any two points drops towards zero and the speed of time climbs towards infinity and at c=infinity everything happens at once and all distances are zero.
E=(m/(n^2))*((n^2)*(c^2))
where n is the factor by which the speed of light changes.
Conversely if c drops toward zero then mass heads for infinity and when c=0 then mass is infinite, nothing happens, and all distances are infinite.
It looks like reverse time dilation and one wonders if you can warp space to create a faster local c, can you accellarate normally at such a rate as to counter it and have dilation=0? It doesn't look so much like Star Trek's integral warp speeds as there being a curve on which normal dilation can match warp dilation. Would be interesting to have a high-speed zero dilation trip to the next system and back to check it out with chronometers.
Just thinking out loud is all...
whatever happened to "request a feature" button... Now were gonna need a "plant a rumor" button...
That's what the BBSpot Slashdot Story Generator is for. Sooner or later, one of these will get through per year, then several, or not. I note Dupe-A-Mania has been somewhat less of late than the early summer high.
Google needs a "stop and shore up what you already have" button before they spread out thinner than a supermodel with a fresh supply of laxatives.
I don't see megafauna as reproducing all willy-nilly and doing so without people noticing. Not too hard to track a big cat the size of a pony or an elephant almost twice normal size and covered in fur. We're not talking insects or kudzu, we're talking big arse creatures.
What gets to me is that this is the shotgun method of protecting wildlife. Reproduce it en masse and numbers will take care of it. Not going to happen. Impact on wildlife will be made less when we stop chowing up the countryside to put in homes because we want not only new houses but new land too. We've got plenty of cities and suburbs chock full of disused and underused land where new buildings could easily replace old, where we can easily with modern technology put in efficient dense housing that won't become slums if we truly don't want them to...
Instead we demolish farmland and forest, put in subdivisions, subdivide the properties over the decades and make it denser, then leave it behind as too old and we chow up some other forest or farm and put in another subdivision. In CT in the USA, the woods in the western hills are being sliced through at an alarming rate for the middle exec level wealthy who work in the white collar city jobs and commute home to $1M+ homes that are built up into the woods and across former farms. Meanwhile the cities they work in are falling apart and full of six-family apartments that are boarded up and with a little investment and hard work could be made into fairly spacious single-family townhouses right there.
Most of these people will as they and their kids get older simply move on the ever "newer" developments, fleeing from the cities while continuing to work in them or in office parks on the immediate periphery, fueling the developers who keep grinding the countryside up and leaving us with decreasing space for the wildlife.
Here, that is the major issue. That is what is destroying the environment. Clearing of wild places to put in expensive houses, all the societal support things that go with them, roads to get there, etc. Meanwhile we're wrongly concerned with old things like mining and so on. Those are fanciful targets of the usual socialist suspects. I'm not, I live in a city, and there's plenty of good space still here just waiting to be improved on for the good of anyone living here. But people refuse to even consider it, leave it to the poor, and move on to their formaly wild now suburban confines comfortably far from the "old places" but still near enough to make money off of them.
...it isn't much beyond an incremental sort of gee-whiz improvement. You can send T1s over long distances and then break them out fractionally or hook them to a DSLAM and use as a backhaul for the customers. The submersion thing might have come about from submersible communications at sea or from the fact that many remote mechanisms in telecom tend to be underground and the waterproofing for those vaults tends not to be the greatest.
I give it a big shrug and a I'll check into it later. I work in telecom so it does get my notice. Now if they make a 1.5Mbps line work to twenty miles on pure copper all the way, that will knock my socks off.
Talk about control, I see control freaks on the other side of this as well. If you want total control how about using Linux, which you can mod/change/hack to your heart's content. Or is it just more fun to try to do the "forbidden" thing?
The control drives more people away than it attracts not because it is not "open" as in "open source" but because the anal-retentive arrogance level is off the scale and that drives away third-party hardware and software vendors thus lessening the end-user's range of things they can do.
I have zero doubt that Windows, as great as it is relative to its competitors, would ever have done one percent as well as it did had Microsoft been so freakishly controlling as Apple was from the beginning of the Macintosh. Similarly, the PC platform would have been as widely adopted as it was had Compaq and company not done their number on IBM the way they did. The PC genie out of the bottle, Windows open to writing apps with a solid well-documented architecture to go by, it's not hard to see why it is where it is now.
That same nature of things allows Linux, BSD, and a dozen other things to run on the PC, and as time goes by Windows-like architectural standards will eventually and inevitably coalesce despite the present "do it because it is hard and not correct or beautiful" mindset contaminating Linux.
PC hardware was open long before "open source" in the most meaningful way of "open" and that is documented, easily understood, and sensible. A variety of vendors come and go in the direction of it and the end-user purchasing habits control what stays and what doesn't on it, not the vendors from above, and Apple needs to grow up and see that the only thing they can meaningfully controll is their software and that the best way to grow their market share is to co-opt the hardware that is majority dominated by Windows and Linux.
I have no faith in them to do so however. They are still too much like IBM was with microchannel and OS/2. Still daydreaming about total end to end domination of one single overall platform. IBM has that with their AS/400 more or less but how many of these are getting sold every day at the local stores?
Oh, that's right, none. Present popularity aside, the insane and insipid insistance on proprietary control isn't winning any love from the majority of Apple's user base. Continued religious worship of the Mac/Apple, solid positioning to compete as a Wintel alternative (as much as it is), and plain anti-MS sentiment are the bulk of Apple purchases. Apple should let it go and get on with being the only real competitor to Windows on the desktop.
Linux zealots may not like it, and like it even less that the one to challenge Redmond was born of BSD roots, but do you childishly want the competition with Micrsoft to be your pet platform or do you just want to see the competition happen at all? If the latter, then support the guerilla porting of OSX to the PC. In sufficient numbers it might even sink in to the ever-dense and deluded Steve Jobs.
Machiavellian tinfoil hat conspiracies that Jobs is intending for this aside, it has to happen. Linux isn't going to win that kind of sheer power any time soon. Apple could practically do it tomorrow. And that competition will only help Microsoft Windows users in the long run. We all benefit from that more than waiting for one distro or another to do more than cause a shurg from Redmond.
The only difference is R2 didn't have a 22" Free-space multimedia display/projector protruding from his chest.
...but if it shot out from his groin, that'd damn sure impress C3PO.
You're thinking of Gus from Tripping the Rift. C3PO is a dork. Gus is the flaming one.