So $45.6M/295M in the USA (according to Google) is about 16 cents per person per year. I'd say 16 cents is a bargain for a life-saving technology.
And why the hell do I have to buy the life of a $45.6M toddler when I could save a starving African kid who just needs some rice or something for a hell of a lot less? Just have another toddler -- it isn't going to cost you $45.6M to do so. You don't like something that sounds callous? How come you're so willing to apply it to the aforementioned African kiddies, throwing away a large number of lives to save a few?
Human life is expensive. A surviving, healthy, educated person is quite valuable. But I seriously doubt that the typical person produces $45M in value over the course of their lifetime.
Except for the fact that every now and then you actually need to get information from a manufacturer's webpage, and a fair number of those exist in Taiwan, China, Korea, and so forth.
It means that he's scared of little yellow people who are less fat and don't demand SUVs to do work taking his job away, so he's enthusiastic about screwing them over.
This is a classic public good problem. It's very bad for everyone if everyone chooses to shaft the other guy, and doesn't solve any problems -- you have a broken, useless Internet. On the other hand, for each *individual*, it is worthwhile to make the choice to shaft other people.
It's like eight million other, similar, poorly-engineered measures that people have taken on the Internet. People always do them because they're advantageous for them as an individual in the short run. SPF, for instance.
Mail needs a trust system, but the sort of trust system that would work is utterly uninteresting to all the players involved because it can't be made to be a huge money-maker.
(a) It can't be centralized. Won't work. VeriSign lusts after another market for which it can charge businesses increasingly larger sums of money to "buy" reputability from them. Whoever develops a working solution will not have any ties to VeriSign.
(b) It must be fine-grained enough to at least the user level. Trying to apply a policy to a whole domain just doesn't work. IT types/vendors selling net admin products to IT types love this sort of approach. Unbelivably irritating to the end user. DomainKeys/SPF are currently getting stuck somewhere around here.
(c) It must be easy enough that at least the basic features are usable (and take little enough work and be useful enough *to* be used) by Joe Sixpack's idiot cousin. This is where PGP/GPG falls over.
(d) It can't be controlled by one company. Microsoft is in a great position to push a useful solution, but they're never going to accept something that they don't get to control one way or another. DomainKeys had this problem.
(e) It can't be "one size fits all". Yes, there are some things that we all consider undesireable, but a system must recognize that there is a large gray area, and a system that can't operate differently at the behest of each end user isn't going to make it.
There are other constraints on such a system, but these are the ones that are currently not being fulfilled.
What distro are you using that doesn't auto-download and install all required packages?
(I will grant that there is still one possibility -- if you're using third-party RPM repositories on a RPM-based system that aren't fully compatible with each other. Red Hat still doesn't have as large a *all tested with each other* set of packages as Debian does.)
Websites that are incompatible with a webbrowser (and that includes IE, not just FF) are without fail crap. I don't think I've *ever* seen such a website existing in the competitive world (such as, say, search engines, or game review sites, and so forth). The only places this happens are when some idiot "developer" manages to get funding to do some intranet work and then policy gets pushed through to force people to use the guy's site.
So now we have FireFox, Foxie, and FireFoxIE. That's lovely. I think that people complaining about confusion being a problem are on pretty firm ground.
Someone give this guy a wedgie. He remembers how to program in Pascal.
It's too bad; Pascal was a good choice for an instructional language. Straightforward syntax and usable for real-world problems.
I think that the move to Java for introductory programming classes is very depressing. What people wanted was a "safe C", so that beginners didn't have to worry about bizarre misbehavior in their programs. Java, however, is a horrible choice for a teaching language, as it brings an entire raft of crap along with it, including all the OO crap, masses of library code, fat abstraction layers, and so forth. I've seen people take intro programming classes in Java and come out with some vague memories of some Java terminology, but not having learned anything about algorithms or structured thinking because they're busy struggling with all of the nonsense in Java.
The older I get, the more I think that Knuth is right about wanting CS classes to be taught in assembly.
I ate at a Long John Silver's a couple years ago where both the cashier and a guy working the grill in the back commented that they were getting computer forensics degrees.
Rebooting doesn't zero RAM (assuming that it's an instantaneous reboot, not killing the power and letting it sit off). If you're dedicated and are looking at a locked computer, you can reboot the computer, boot into a CD with software that can scan through memory, and go to town.
I once hung my Power Mac 6100/60 after spending almost four hours writing a paper in BBEdit without saving (yes, that was pretty stupid under Classic Mac OS), rebooted, and started dumping out data to the disk from memory from MacsBug. I think Andy Ihatkno (or whatever the guy's name is -- Mac people will know who I'm talking about) once wrote an article about something along these lines in MacUser, years ago.
I and another buddy that have interest in computer security once sat down, and as a mind game, tried to figure out how to reasonably secure a home computer, without any special hardware, extreme effort, or conditions placed on the user, against local attack. It just wasn't very feasible.
If you think that your Mac will protect you...well, good luck.
A couple thoughts: hardware keyloggers, trojaned bootloaders, etc.
Penny Arcade is one of the most polished webcomics out there. It may not be stunningly deep or anything, but (a) it's generally at least decently funny, which is harder than it sounds, and (b) the art is really pretty.
There are also a couple of other decent geek webcomics, like GPF and UserFriendly.
Of PA, GPL, UF, and Sluggy, PA consistently has better art -- they always produce a large, colored strip. PA has a written component, and even the comics act as a humorous news source -- it actually informs you about the game industry. It has a good deal of reasonably balanced commentary -- they don't hash on anyone's game system.
PA is very approachable for new readers. It's very easy to drop in and figure out what's going on and start enjoying it. Even if you aren't familiar with the game industry, it's pretty easy to see from a comic or two that EA Is Evil, Blizzard Is The Center Of the Universe, and so forth. The longest story arcs (and these are exceedingly rare) are maybe ten comics long. Most comics are stand-alone. There is an exceedingly small number of characters that must be learned to appreciate the comic, and each strip pretty much makes clear the role of any characters in it, so that you don't have to read back -- there are The Two Hardcore Videogamers that make up almost all the comics, Their Women, The Mac Guy, and so forth. You need never refer back to understand a comic.
UF has long story arcs that require understanding the nature of some pretty bizarre characters introduced over a long stretch of comics (like the giant hallucinatory Coca-Cola bottle that Mike sees), or why a given comic is taking place in a nuclear missile silo. Story arcs are longer and harder for a new reader to get into, and some jokes are more esoteric. The panels are not drawn as well and are mostly not in color. Most of the humor derives from the text -- the *expressions* alone in PA provide much of the humor, whereas UF is mostly some necessary drawings provided to support the text. There are some references (to pop culture or what-have-you) that are not immediately accessable to the audience that PA tightly focusses on -- the hardcore gamer crowd.
GPF is small, mostly black-and-white, and has some esoteric characters. Story arcs are long and require reading back to appreciate what's going on.
Sluggy has *extremely* long story arcs with references back to ancient comics, and essentially requires an investiture of reading about five years * three hundred some comics a year == fifteen hundred comics to understand the current comic. It has extremely unusual characters that can be difficult to figure out (a new reader is going to be bemused by Sluggy standbys like the Dimension of Pain and so forth). The art has improved since the beginning, but is not as flashy as the PA art and is not in color. The real killer is that Sluggy has an absolutely massive cast of characters with a very complex web of relationships -- it's quite difficult to follow all of them, even for a hard-core reader. Pete keeps bringing back characters that "died", and occasionally introduces more. There are probably at least twenty major characters in the cast, which is staggering for a new reader. Those that love following vast, wide-stretching plots may love this, but it makes it hard to pull in new readers. Sluggy not infrequently does pun-based jokes, which is a truly bad form of humor, and often has punch lines fall flat. It is not as consistently funny as PA. It often relies on specialized knowledge to appreciate (for example, the current arc requires having read Harry Potter), whereas PA is generally accessable to anyone with some gaming experience.
Now, I enjoy all the above comics, but PA definitely has the most widespread appeal.
Tycho/Gabe rubbing off
on
PAX05 Writeup
·
· Score: 1
Has anyone noticed how much many of the comments here reflect the Tycho/Gabe writing style? Apparently they're having quite an influence.
It doesn't need to. This is Linux. You can make it do anything you want.
run "xev" from an xterm. That'll bring up a little window. Any time you tap a key, it'll print information about that key. Hit the key you want to be Compose. It'll print out a couple of lines, one of which says "keycode XXX", where XXX is a number. Then run the command 'xmodmap -e "keycode XXX = Mode_switch Multi_key"' -- you now get your very own Compose key.
The problem is that for a long time, somewhere, it was hammered into people's heads that "TCO is important". That's a pretty simple, important concept. The idea is that the vendor can hide costs, and that the customer's up-front cost may be less than what they will actually wind up paying.
However, the entire concept of having a bloody vendor doing a TCO study and presenting you with the results is absurd -- it's the vendor presenting you with *another* set of up-front costs. Who is to say that they don't have *more* hidden costs? Unless they are providing you with a guarantee that you will not have to pay a single cent above the TCO that they are claiming, that they will pay every cent in your related costs above claimed TCO, a vendor-supplied TCO is simply meaningless.
The concept of TCO is important. The idea of slapping an absolute value for TCO on product packaging is quite silly.
I think that there's one pretty simple argument in favor of Linux. Any time a vendor provides any possibility of lock-in, be it user familiarity with their software, format incompatibility with thier software, whatever, there is a cost to migrate. At some point, if they are doing a good job of running their business, they will wind up extracting from you $COST_OF_MIGRATION - 1. That's an ideal case, but that's the way it is. Look at software packages from people like IBM, Novell, and so forth. They *will* get more expensive, have expensive things to interface their software and so forth, and the further on in the lifecycle the software is (the more entrenched their remaining customers are and the harder it is to move away from the product) the more expensive the prices. IBM makes a tremendous amount of money from simply providing compatibility with their old systems -- IBM's systems are *not* cheap. Look at SCO if you want to see an even more towards-the-end-of-the-life example.
Now, Microsoft has a great deal of lock-in potential. They provide the primary application suite, have a number of closed formats and protocols, the operating system, and the server-side apps to interface with the application suite. Now, if you go with Microsoft, you are gambling that either (a) someone will come along and reduce cost of migration to a nominal amount (not that likely, especially when it is in Microsoft's interests not to allow this), or (b) that Microsoft will screw up extracting money from their locked-in customers at some point in the future (which seems unlikely, because Microsoft has done a pretty decent and aggressive job of being a business thus far).
Now, I expect Red Hat to do the same damn thing at Microsoft at some point in the future, someday. The point is that it's not very hard to transition from Red Hat to something else if necessary, be it as simple as to White Box Linux or even more extreme (SuSE, Debian, etc). At least in the current state of things, it is extremely difficult for a Linux vendor to achieve any significant degree of lock-in. Start worrying if a vendor starts shipping non-open-source GUI apps (build user familiarity with them, making it harder to switch away), servers (closed protocols, leveraging incompatibility), or so forth. Aside from TrollTech, though, I've seen few attempts to "get a lock" on the Linux distro world, and it looks like there will be a multi-vendor environment for a long time to come. Seems like a pretty attractive option.
Slashdot Mirror
So $45.6M /295M in the USA (according to Google) is about 16 cents per person per year. I'd say 16 cents is a bargain for a life-saving technology.
And why the hell do I have to buy the life of a $45.6M toddler when I could save a starving African kid who just needs some rice or something for a hell of a lot less? Just have another toddler -- it isn't going to cost you $45.6M to do so. You don't like something that sounds callous? How come you're so willing to apply it to the aforementioned African kiddies, throwing away a large number of lives to save a few?
Human life is expensive. A surviving, healthy, educated person is quite valuable. But I seriously doubt that the typical person produces $45M in value over the course of their lifetime.
It's a good thing that people like him run things, though, or else we wouldn't get very far.
You have the luxury of being able to make irrational decisions and expressing distaste at actually evaluating things because he is willing to do it.
Except for the fact that every now and then you actually need to get information from a manufacturer's webpage, and a fair number of those exist in Taiwan, China, Korea, and so forth.
...to act like IE in terms of speed and compatibility.
Okay, I can understand IE being more compatible with IE, but faster rendering? Not on my Windows box at work, that's for sure.
It means that he's scared of little yellow people who are less fat and don't demand SUVs to do work taking his job away, so he's enthusiastic about screwing them over.
This is a classic public good problem. It's very bad for everyone if everyone chooses to shaft the other guy, and doesn't solve any problems -- you have a broken, useless Internet. On the other hand, for each *individual*, it is worthwhile to make the choice to shaft other people.
It's like eight million other, similar, poorly-engineered measures that people have taken on the Internet. People always do them because they're advantageous for them as an individual in the short run. SPF, for instance.
Mail needs a trust system, but the sort of trust system that would work is utterly uninteresting to all the players involved because it can't be made to be a huge money-maker.
(a) It can't be centralized. Won't work. VeriSign lusts after another market for which it can charge businesses increasingly larger sums of money to "buy" reputability from them. Whoever develops a working solution will not have any ties to VeriSign.
(b) It must be fine-grained enough to at least the user level. Trying to apply a policy to a whole domain just doesn't work. IT types/vendors selling net admin products to IT types love this sort of approach. Unbelivably irritating to the end user. DomainKeys/SPF are currently getting stuck somewhere around here.
(c) It must be easy enough that at least the basic features are usable (and take little enough work and be useful enough *to* be used) by Joe Sixpack's idiot cousin. This is where PGP/GPG falls over.
(d) It can't be controlled by one company. Microsoft is in a great position to push a useful solution, but they're never going to accept something that they don't get to control one way or another. DomainKeys had this problem.
(e) It can't be "one size fits all". Yes, there are some things that we all consider undesireable, but a system must recognize that there is a large gray area, and a system that can't operate differently at the behest of each end user isn't going to make it.
There are other constraints on such a system, but these are the ones that are currently not being fulfilled.
What distro are you using that doesn't auto-download and install all required packages?
(I will grant that there is still one possibility -- if you're using third-party RPM repositories on a RPM-based system that aren't fully compatible with each other. Red Hat still doesn't have as large a *all tested with each other* set of packages as Debian does.)
Websites that are incompatible with a webbrowser (and that includes IE, not just FF) are without fail crap. I don't think I've *ever* seen such a website existing in the competitive world (such as, say, search engines, or game review sites, and so forth). The only places this happens are when some idiot "developer" manages to get funding to do some intranet work and then policy gets pushed through to force people to use the guy's site.
So now we have FireFox, Foxie, and FireFoxIE. That's lovely. I think that people complaining about confusion being a problem are on pretty firm ground.
...inherit problems of Firefox (such as bad memory handling...
What on earth are they talking about?
Imagine the United States without the vacation areas of Florida or the history of New Orleans.
On the other hand, imagine the United States without southerners.
I was wondering why a city covered with 25' of wet sponges is better off than a city covered with 25' of water.
From what I've heard, the state of lousiana is overwhelmingly pleased by bush's response to the crisis.
Bush marketed himself as a dumb religious type. I doubt he can do any wrong in Lousiana's eyes.
I mean, doesn't it bother you that half a trillion dollars of "taxpayer's money" goes for military budget?
Yes, it does, actually.
Someone give this guy a wedgie. He remembers how to program in Pascal.
It's too bad; Pascal was a good choice for an instructional language. Straightforward syntax and usable for real-world problems.
I think that the move to Java for introductory programming classes is very depressing. What people wanted was a "safe C", so that beginners didn't have to worry about bizarre misbehavior in their programs. Java, however, is a horrible choice for a teaching language, as it brings an entire raft of crap along with it, including all the OO crap, masses of library code, fat abstraction layers, and so forth. I've seen people take intro programming classes in Java and come out with some vague memories of some Java terminology, but not having learned anything about algorithms or structured thinking because they're busy struggling with all of the nonsense in Java.
The older I get, the more I think that Knuth is right about wanting CS classes to be taught in assembly.
Seriously, whoever taught people that low-intensity static magnetic fields were dangerous for magentic media should be shot.
They weren't familiar with Earth's magnetic field.
I ate at a Long John Silver's a couple years ago where both the cashier and a guy working the grill in the back commented that they were getting computer forensics degrees.
Rebooting doesn't zero RAM (assuming that it's an instantaneous reboot, not killing the power and letting it sit off). If you're dedicated and are looking at a locked computer, you can reboot the computer, boot into a CD with software that can scan through memory, and go to town.
I once hung my Power Mac 6100/60 after spending almost four hours writing a paper in BBEdit without saving (yes, that was pretty stupid under Classic Mac OS), rebooted, and started dumping out data to the disk from memory from MacsBug. I think Andy Ihatkno (or whatever the guy's name is -- Mac people will know who I'm talking about) once wrote an article about something along these lines in MacUser, years ago.
I and another buddy that have interest in computer security once sat down, and as a mind game, tried to figure out how to reasonably secure a home computer, without any special hardware, extreme effort, or conditions placed on the user, against local attack. It just wasn't very feasible.
If you think that your Mac will protect you...well, good luck.
A couple thoughts: hardware keyloggers, trojaned bootloaders, etc.
People mount things with atime?
I never found atime to be useful, and did find it to cause irritating hard drive noise and reduce performance.
Well, you're right, but why do you care what he thinks of you? He's a random /. troll.
A couple reasons:
Penny Arcade is one of the most polished webcomics out there. It may not be stunningly deep or anything, but (a) it's generally at least decently funny, which is harder than it sounds, and (b) the art is really pretty.
There are also a couple of other decent geek webcomics, like GPF and UserFriendly.
Of PA, GPL, UF, and Sluggy, PA consistently has better art -- they always produce a large, colored strip. PA has a written component, and even the comics act as a humorous news source -- it actually informs you about the game industry. It has a good deal of reasonably balanced commentary -- they don't hash on anyone's game system.
PA is very approachable for new readers. It's very easy to drop in and figure out what's going on and start enjoying it. Even if you aren't familiar with the game industry, it's pretty easy to see from a comic or two that EA Is Evil, Blizzard Is The Center Of the Universe, and so forth. The longest story arcs (and these are exceedingly rare) are maybe ten comics long. Most comics are stand-alone. There is an exceedingly small number of characters that must be learned to appreciate the comic, and each strip pretty much makes clear the role of any characters in it, so that you don't have to read back -- there are The Two Hardcore Videogamers that make up almost all the comics, Their Women, The Mac Guy, and so forth. You need never refer back to understand a comic.
UF has long story arcs that require understanding the nature of some pretty bizarre characters introduced over a long stretch of comics (like the giant hallucinatory Coca-Cola bottle that Mike sees), or why a given comic is taking place in a nuclear missile silo. Story arcs are longer and harder for a new reader to get into, and some jokes are more esoteric. The panels are not drawn as well and are mostly not in color. Most of the humor derives from the text -- the *expressions* alone in PA provide much of the humor, whereas UF is mostly some necessary drawings provided to support the text. There are some references (to pop culture or what-have-you) that are not immediately accessable to the audience that PA tightly focusses on -- the hardcore gamer crowd.
GPF is small, mostly black-and-white, and has some esoteric characters. Story arcs are long and require reading back to appreciate what's going on.
Sluggy has *extremely* long story arcs with references back to ancient comics, and essentially requires an investiture of reading about five years * three hundred some comics a year == fifteen hundred comics to understand the current comic. It has extremely unusual characters that can be difficult to figure out (a new reader is going to be bemused by Sluggy standbys like the Dimension of Pain and so forth). The art has improved since the beginning, but is not as flashy as the PA art and is not in color. The real killer is that Sluggy has an absolutely massive cast of characters with a very complex web of relationships -- it's quite difficult to follow all of them, even for a hard-core reader. Pete keeps bringing back characters that "died", and occasionally introduces more. There are probably at least twenty major characters in the cast, which is staggering for a new reader. Those that love following vast, wide-stretching plots may love this, but it makes it hard to pull in new readers. Sluggy not infrequently does pun-based jokes, which is a truly bad form of humor, and often has punch lines fall flat. It is not as consistently funny as PA. It often relies on specialized knowledge to appreciate (for example, the current arc requires having read Harry Potter), whereas PA is generally accessable to anyone with some gaming experience.
Now, I enjoy all the above comics, but PA definitely has the most widespread appeal.
Has anyone noticed how much many of the comments here reflect the Tycho/Gabe writing style? Apparently they're having quite an influence.
It doesn't need to. This is Linux. You can make it do anything you want.
run "xev" from an xterm. That'll bring up a little window. Any time you tap a key, it'll print information about that key. Hit the key you want to be Compose. It'll print out a couple of lines, one of which says "keycode XXX", where XXX is a number. Then run the command 'xmodmap -e "keycode XXX = Mode_switch Multi_key"' -- you now get your very own Compose key.
The problem is that for a long time, somewhere, it was hammered into people's heads that "TCO is important". That's a pretty simple, important concept. The idea is that the vendor can hide costs, and that the customer's up-front cost may be less than what they will actually wind up paying.
However, the entire concept of having a bloody vendor doing a TCO study and presenting you with the results is absurd -- it's the vendor presenting you with *another* set of up-front costs. Who is to say that they don't have *more* hidden costs? Unless they are providing you with a guarantee that you will not have to pay a single cent above the TCO that they are claiming, that they will pay every cent in your related costs above claimed TCO, a vendor-supplied TCO is simply meaningless.
The concept of TCO is important. The idea of slapping an absolute value for TCO on product packaging is quite silly.
I think that there's one pretty simple argument in favor of Linux. Any time a vendor provides any possibility of lock-in, be it user familiarity with their software, format incompatibility with thier software, whatever, there is a cost to migrate. At some point, if they are doing a good job of running their business, they will wind up extracting from you $COST_OF_MIGRATION - 1. That's an ideal case, but that's the way it is. Look at software packages from people like IBM, Novell, and so forth. They *will* get more expensive, have expensive things to interface their software and so forth, and the further on in the lifecycle the software is (the more entrenched their remaining customers are and the harder it is to move away from the product) the more expensive the prices. IBM makes a tremendous amount of money from simply providing compatibility with their old systems -- IBM's systems are *not* cheap. Look at SCO if you want to see an even more towards-the-end-of-the-life example.
Now, Microsoft has a great deal of lock-in potential. They provide the primary application suite, have a number of closed formats and protocols, the operating system, and the server-side apps to interface with the application suite. Now, if you go with Microsoft, you are gambling that either (a) someone will come along and reduce cost of migration to a nominal amount (not that likely, especially when it is in Microsoft's interests not to allow this), or (b) that Microsoft will screw up extracting money from their locked-in customers at some point in the future (which seems unlikely, because Microsoft has done a pretty decent and aggressive job of being a business thus far).
Now, I expect Red Hat to do the same damn thing at Microsoft at some point in the future, someday. The point is that it's not very hard to transition from Red Hat to something else if necessary, be it as simple as to White Box Linux or even more extreme (SuSE, Debian, etc). At least in the current state of things, it is extremely difficult for a Linux vendor to achieve any significant degree of lock-in. Start worrying if a vendor starts shipping non-open-source GUI apps (build user familiarity with them, making it harder to switch away), servers (closed protocols, leveraging incompatibility), or so forth. Aside from TrollTech, though, I've seen few attempts to "get a lock" on the Linux distro world, and it looks like there will be a multi-vendor environment for a long time to come. Seems like a pretty attractive option.