Because it's a pain in the ass to run headless Windows boxes compared to headless Linux boxes.
Because Microsoft's idea of clustering is a couple of failover webservers, not a large, highly-parallel computer? (Granted, this makes sense for Microsoft -- "clusters" was a sexy word a couple years ago, before "grid computing" got to be sexy in business rags, and their customers generally have no need for massive parallel computation, but do run web servers and do read magazines that tell them that they need clustering technology deployed yesterday).
Because a minimalistic Windows setup is fatter and eats more disk space and memory than a minimalistic Linux setup, and buying more resources for a couple hundred nodes so that you can run some background crap produced in Redmond is pretty plainly a bad idea.
Because clusters are done by the sorts of smart people that do automation and systems development, and a large chunk of those sort of people can personally benefit greatly from Linux, so they're more familiar with Linux than Windows.
Because there's no reason to bump up your cluster's cost by a significant amount for software licenses when it doesn't help you at all.
Because Linux generally outperforms Windows (especially when you're looking at kernel-level performance), and the sorts of people that get large, expensive systems like this have a lot of interest in getting their code running as fast as possible -- doubling the compute speed means that they require half or less nodes in their cluster. If your kernel can shove more data onto the network more cheaply or context switch a few more times, you're more valuable.
Because they can customize a Linux system much more easily to do whatever they want than the Windows system. I was pretty appalled when someone managed to mess around with an new ATM up at Carnegie Mellon University and left it on the Windows desktop...and the thing was a full-blown Windows box, with all the software installed and whatnot, NOTEPAD, you name it. Not only is that just not professional, it's a sign of the developers having to fight the system to achive the result they want. Linux won't fight you if you want to customize it.
Linux is open source. If you're working on the kinds of projects where a lot of serious large-scale parallel computing is involved, you may well have significant systems expertise available, and hacking your Ethernet drivers or the kernel to speed things up may be reasonable. A large chunk, perhaps a majority of Linux Ethernet drivers started life with Donald Becker, who was working on Linux clustering for NASA, if I remember correctly. The man needed some high-performance networking code, and had the ability to produce it.
And finally, last but not least...Windows isn't fun. Linux is fun. Okay, you can't really put that on a checklist somewhere, but if someone likes what they're doing, they're going to do a better job of it. I'm working on a cross-platform project for my employer at the moment. The Windows developers are kind of apathetic, spend a lot of time chatting and whatnot, but the Linux port guy is a machine. He's *into* what he's doing, he's excited about it. Of course, that's anecdotal evidence, but I've seen a lot more enthusiastic people hacking Linux software than hacking Win32 software. [shrug] Make of it what you will.
Well, I dunno about color laser printers, but I imagine that at least on some inkjets, as long as the ink consistency of each color is identical, you could swap around the color cartridges and print the bill in what appears to the printer to be unusual colors, hopefully not triggering the detection algorithm.
I really hate this crap. It's not like we couldn't have currency with stuff like holograms on it, if the USG is really worried about the sort of people who are just Xeroxing off bills. Instead we keep our kinda ugly, muted money and the "cheaper way" is to add covert code into every copier and printer out there. Yeah...
Seriously, I do hope you don't catch flak over this. You might not be breaking NDA, but when a company pays lots of money for some woman with perky breasts to read statements prepared over lots of expensive marketing conferences, they have a potential to be pissy when some honest engineer starts just providing information, even if it doesn't violate any contracts.
It's a fair bet that there are other KMPS people reading this article, and if your userid and past posts provide enough information to identify you, you *could* get hassled.
I wish Slashdot would *purge* them after a week or something (long enough that they don't have to worry about abusive IPs or the like) so that they wouldn't have to even worry about whether or not they have lawyers going after them -- they can just say "Sorry, we don't retain those records".
* Bush Administration takes a page from Hitler's rise to power, uses terrorist act against goverment building to proclaim immediate need for reduction in civil rights, increase of police powers.
* Bush Administration takes a page from Stalinist USSR, demanding that document production be government-trackable (actually, Stalin didn't do it *secretly*, so he's actually still on the moral high ground on this one).
Meanwhile, more people will die in the United States each week, *every week* from tobacco than died in all of 9/11, and more people in the US will die from car accidents *every two months* than from 9/11. Hell, something like four times the number of people killed in 9/11 are killed every year in the US by the *common flu*.
However, we can afford to invade entire nations (including one that wasn't actually relevant to, y'know, 9/11) to stop *those terrorists*, but we can't put that funding to, y'know, save lives in car crashes. And despite all that money we spent, the reason 9/11 can't happen again has nothing to do with our expensive purchases, but with the fact that nobody's going to be able to stand up in a plane any more and say "Okay, everyone just stay in your seats!" without being mobbed. Kinda sad, that. Almost makes one think that one's government doesn't have one's best interests at heart.
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting. What exactly do they do now? Get a warrant for every house within 50 miles of said Office Max, and check the serial number on all the printers?
Or maybe, *just maybe*, this isn't about counterfeiting at all. Maybe Bush was just really peeved about that guy that forged those (extremely poor quality) documents that said that he was a slacker in the military.
Nah, what am I saying? The FBI is out to help us. They wouldn't abuse their powers. That's tin foil hat talk.
Uh...I recall reading about Baysian analysis on a computer in the last few years being used to figure out who was responsible for various of the Federalist papers. I don't think that it's quite as clear-cut as you're making out.
Except for the fact that the EFF will release this information *publically*. Right now, you already don't have anonymity on said printer models. The problem is that you don't *know* that you lack anonymity.
This way, there will be pressure on the printer manufacturers to stop this kind of nonsense and you will at least be aware of the fact that your printer is rigged.
Honestly, as hardware industries go, the printer industry is getting up there on the "evil" list. Use of the DMCA to prevent people from refilling their cartridges, misleading price-per-page information, use of a razor-and-blades model, covert watermarks, failing to print out images of currency (okay, this one isn't so bad, as there are few legitimate uses for this), "group" color catridges to require replacement of all color ink once a single color is exhausted...
I'm at the point where my biggest desire for a printer would be an uber-simple printer with no thrills, no onboard Postscript, nothing -- just a microcontroller to allow exact timing on head and rotor movement -- and then have all the logic in the computer next to it. Have enough logic onboard the printer to allow a simple protocol that exchanges things like resolution and paper size, and then commoditize the thing. Oh, and make the thing a nice solid piece of metal, not these flimsy plastic things that snap and break when you brush against them.
It's a tool that can cause harm, and it's a tool that can produce benefit.
If you're in law enforcement, you tend to see more of the down sides, so you're going to try to eliminate anonymity. Even better, you're going to try to get people to have the *illusion* of anonymity when they really aren't anonymous.
If this was really to eliminate counterfeiting, each printer could just carry a logo on the side saying "all documents produced by this printer contain a unique and identifying signature". Stick that on all the printers on the market, mandate that printers have to have said signature, and you're golden.
There's a good reason that this is secret -- it's because the FBI has a good deal of benefit involved in giving you the illusion of anonymity when you don't actually have anonymity.
Frankly, I don't like that. I want to know where I stand. If everyone decides that we must live in an Orwellian society, and I am outvoted on all sides, then by God, I want to know that every device surrounding me is monitoring what I do. I *don't* want to have a random subset of devices *secretly* monitoring me. That makes me unhappy.
And the FBI has engaged in wonderful abuses of their powers before...gathering information to blackmail Martin Luther King, for instance. We *know* that given enough slack, they will abuse their powers -- this has been demonstrated. The question is just how many powers they can be allowed before they start abusing them.
Secretly embedding signatures in things is not the sort of thing that I see as necessary or useful to any society other than a police state, where the only "trusted" people are the police.
Yes, but not for the reason that you're thinking. Bash is incredibly powerful. I wish that the Gimp would let me construct directed acyclic graphs of drawing operations, but it doesn't.
See, the thing is that I have used Inkscape for more time than Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw put together, and at least for *me*, it would be easier to explain Illustrator in terms of Inkscape. Not everyone has spent years churning along with proprietary software packages.
when 85%+ of your audience uses a particular browser
I keep forgetting that there's a Windows port of this thing.
Just as an aside, I've been underwhelmed by reliability of Windows ports of a number of open source software packages -- dia, the other day, was regularly crashing on some guy trying to use it on Windows.
Well, it's because the open source world doesn't suffer from version inflation, as the closed source world currently is, because it doesn't need to push its products through marketers.
V1.0 is when the thing is feature-complete, usable, and ideally "done" in its current form.
V2.0 comes if people decide that the architecture of the program needs to be redone and redo it.
Why is it that every Mac user has to feel that everything Apple does is part of some brilliant, long-orchestrated campaign, inevitably ending in success?
I'll bet half the posts on here will be from Mac users feeling defensive, that somebody said that "their team" isn't perfect.
Are people *honestly* afraid of, oh, I don't know, co-workers teasing them for being dumb enough to purchase Apple hardware? I really can't imagine this happening.
The same thing happens with video game consoles. Doesn't make a bit of sense. And, for that matter on places like rightnation.us when someone criticizes Bush Administration policy.
Just for once, it'd be nice to see people admitting that everyone makes occasional mistakes.
The AMD chips are 100% Pentium compatible, using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the Pentium architecture, and we all benefit from that. As long as they don't violate specific patents or copy parts of the circuitry, it's also legal.
Yes, but AMD doesn't consist of a lot of people with funny flat faces and customs that differ from us, so this time IP matters.
[shrug] I see it as great. Someone made a competing CPU. Maybe it will drive down costs. No reason to think that any IP laws were broken, any more than Cyrus, AMD, Transmeta, or any other CPU-instruction-set-cloning companies have done. If you think Chinese don't play a major role in R&D today...well, you haven't seen the CS research lab where I work. And that isn't even one of our Chinese locations.
Why is it that a huge chunk of Slashdot stories have a severe bias (okay, this much I can understand) that is then followed and rah-rah-rahed by everyone reading the article? Doesn't anyone on here learn that the article submitters usually have bias?
At least at (the prestigious US university that I attended), quite a few CS folks are Indian or Chinese (oddly, few Japanese seemed to show up -- could be because Japanese universities have reputations such that their people don't feel enough pressure to go to school overseas).
Here's a seat-of-the-pants prediction to dispel nationalist fear -- the US is going to continue to be wealthy, but China and other nations are going to get wealthy faster. And that's a rather more stable situation than what we have today. North and South Dakota don't threaten each other with nuclear weapons, because there's no power or wealth or anything worth fighting over disparity. Foreign human labor will get more expensive for people in the US, but steadily increasing use of automation will take up much of the slack, at least in the long run. There will be some memes from China that hit the US, and some from the US that hit China, and the most appealing ones will tend to win out. That gave us anime with Japan, which seemed to be a good thing from my standpoint.
All I can say is that if I saw someone's fireworks technology and figured out how to make nation-crushing armies out of it, I think I get a little of the credit.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, Jobs does have a penchant for squeezing in front of everyone else at his companies to enjoy the limelight...
I'm pretty sure that the grandparent post was using sarcasm.
Care to elaborate?
Because it's a pain in the ass to run headless Windows boxes compared to headless Linux boxes.
Because Microsoft's idea of clustering is a couple of failover webservers, not a large, highly-parallel computer? (Granted, this makes sense for Microsoft -- "clusters" was a sexy word a couple years ago, before "grid computing" got to be sexy in business rags, and their customers generally have no need for massive parallel computation, but do run web servers and do read magazines that tell them that they need clustering technology deployed yesterday).
Because a minimalistic Windows setup is fatter and eats more disk space and memory than a minimalistic Linux setup, and buying more resources for a couple hundred nodes so that you can run some background crap produced in Redmond is pretty plainly a bad idea.
Because clusters are done by the sorts of smart people that do automation and systems development, and a large chunk of those sort of people can personally benefit greatly from Linux, so they're more familiar with Linux than Windows.
Because there's no reason to bump up your cluster's cost by a significant amount for software licenses when it doesn't help you at all.
Because Linux generally outperforms Windows (especially when you're looking at kernel-level performance), and the sorts of people that get large, expensive systems like this have a lot of interest in getting their code running as fast as possible -- doubling the compute speed means that they require half or less nodes in their cluster. If your kernel can shove more data onto the network more cheaply or context switch a few more times, you're more valuable.
Because they can customize a Linux system much more easily to do whatever they want than the Windows system. I was pretty appalled when someone managed to mess around with an new ATM up at Carnegie Mellon University and left it on the Windows desktop...and the thing was a full-blown Windows box, with all the software installed and whatnot, NOTEPAD, you name it. Not only is that just not professional, it's a sign of the developers having to fight the system to achive the result they want. Linux won't fight you if you want to customize it.
Linux is open source. If you're working on the kinds of projects where a lot of serious large-scale parallel computing is involved, you may well have significant systems expertise available, and hacking your Ethernet drivers or the kernel to speed things up may be reasonable. A large chunk, perhaps a majority of Linux Ethernet drivers started life with Donald Becker, who was working on Linux clustering for NASA, if I remember correctly. The man needed some high-performance networking code, and had the ability to produce it.
And finally, last but not least...Windows isn't fun. Linux is fun. Okay, you can't really put that on a checklist somewhere, but if someone likes what they're doing, they're going to do a better job of it. I'm working on a cross-platform project for my employer at the moment. The Windows developers are kind of apathetic, spend a lot of time chatting and whatnot, but the Linux port guy is a machine. He's *into* what he's doing, he's excited about it. Of course, that's anecdotal evidence, but I've seen a lot more enthusiastic people hacking Linux software than hacking Win32 software. [shrug] Make of it what you will.
Well, I dunno about color laser printers, but I imagine that at least on some inkjets, as long as the ink consistency of each color is identical, you could swap around the color cartridges and print the bill in what appears to the printer to be unusual colors, hopefully not triggering the detection algorithm.
I really hate this crap. It's not like we couldn't have currency with stuff like holograms on it, if the USG is really worried about the sort of people who are just Xeroxing off bills. Instead we keep our kinda ugly, muted money and the "cheaper way" is to add covert code into every copier and printer out there. Yeah...
Seriously, I do hope you don't catch flak over this. You might not be breaking NDA, but when a company pays lots of money for some woman with perky breasts to read statements prepared over lots of expensive marketing conferences, they have a potential to be pissy when some honest engineer starts just providing information, even if it doesn't violate any contracts.
It's a fair bet that there are other KMPS people reading this article, and if your userid and past posts provide enough information to identify you, you *could* get hassled.
I wish Slashdot would *purge* them after a week or something (long enough that they don't have to worry about abusive IPs or the like) so that they wouldn't have to even worry about whether or not they have lawyers going after them -- they can just say "Sorry, we don't retain those records".
Let's see:
* Bush Administration takes a page from Hitler's rise to power, uses terrorist act against goverment building to proclaim immediate need for reduction in civil rights, increase of police powers.
* Bush Administration takes a page from Stalinist USSR, demanding that document production be government-trackable (actually, Stalin didn't do it *secretly*, so he's actually still on the moral high ground on this one).
Meanwhile, more people will die in the United States each week, *every week* from tobacco than died in all of 9/11, and more people in the US will die from car accidents *every two months* than from 9/11. Hell, something like four times the number of people killed in 9/11 are killed every year in the US by the *common flu*.
However, we can afford to invade entire nations (including one that wasn't actually relevant to, y'know, 9/11) to stop *those terrorists*, but we can't put that funding to, y'know, save lives in car crashes. And despite all that money we spent, the reason 9/11 can't happen again has nothing to do with our expensive purchases, but with the fact that nobody's going to be able to stand up in a plane any more and say "Okay, everyone just stay in your seats!" without being mobbed. Kinda sad, that. Almost makes one think that one's government doesn't have one's best interests at heart.
Perhaps one day, the use of "cash" will be illegal.
If you aren't a terrorist, if you don't have something to hide, why would you be wanting to use cash, anyway?
Those tapes are on loop or stored for a limited period of time, dude. They might go back a couple of days, but that's it.
Assume I had the common sense to only use the printer for counterfeiting. What exactly do they do now? Get a warrant for every house within 50 miles of said Office Max, and check the serial number on all the printers?
Or maybe, *just maybe*, this isn't about counterfeiting at all. Maybe Bush was just really peeved about that guy that forged those (extremely poor quality) documents that said that he was a slacker in the military.
Nah, what am I saying? The FBI is out to help us. They wouldn't abuse their powers. That's tin foil hat talk.
Uh...I recall reading about Baysian analysis on a computer in the last few years being used to figure out who was responsible for various of the Federalist papers. I don't think that it's quite as clear-cut as you're making out.
Except for the fact that the EFF will release this information *publically*. Right now, you already don't have anonymity on said printer models. The problem is that you don't *know* that you lack anonymity.
This way, there will be pressure on the printer manufacturers to stop this kind of nonsense and you will at least be aware of the fact that your printer is rigged.
Honestly, as hardware industries go, the printer industry is getting up there on the "evil" list. Use of the DMCA to prevent people from refilling their cartridges, misleading price-per-page information, use of a razor-and-blades model, covert watermarks, failing to print out images of currency (okay, this one isn't so bad, as there are few legitimate uses for this), "group" color catridges to require replacement of all color ink once a single color is exhausted...
I'm at the point where my biggest desire for a printer would be an uber-simple printer with no thrills, no onboard Postscript, nothing -- just a microcontroller to allow exact timing on head and rotor movement -- and then have all the logic in the computer next to it. Have enough logic onboard the printer to allow a simple protocol that exchanges things like resolution and paper size, and then commoditize the thing. Oh, and make the thing a nice solid piece of metal, not these flimsy plastic things that snap and break when you brush against them.
It's like this.
Anonymity is a tool.
It's a tool that can cause harm, and it's a tool that can produce benefit.
If you're in law enforcement, you tend to see more of the down sides, so you're going to try to eliminate anonymity. Even better, you're going to try to get people to have the *illusion* of anonymity when they really aren't anonymous.
If this was really to eliminate counterfeiting, each printer could just carry a logo on the side saying "all documents produced by this printer contain a unique and identifying signature". Stick that on all the printers on the market, mandate that printers have to have said signature, and you're golden.
There's a good reason that this is secret -- it's because the FBI has a good deal of benefit involved in giving you the illusion of anonymity when you don't actually have anonymity.
Frankly, I don't like that. I want to know where I stand. If everyone decides that we must live in an Orwellian society, and I am outvoted on all sides, then by God, I want to know that every device surrounding me is monitoring what I do. I *don't* want to have a random subset of devices *secretly* monitoring me. That makes me unhappy.
And the FBI has engaged in wonderful abuses of their powers before...gathering information to blackmail Martin Luther King, for instance. We *know* that given enough slack, they will abuse their powers -- this has been demonstrated. The question is just how many powers they can be allowed before they start abusing them.
Secretly embedding signatures in things is not the sort of thing that I see as necessary or useful to any society other than a police state, where the only "trusted" people are the police.
Bash has a better interface than The Gimp.
Yes, but not for the reason that you're thinking. Bash is incredibly powerful. I wish that the Gimp would let me construct directed acyclic graphs of drawing operations, but it doesn't.
See, the thing is that I have used Inkscape for more time than Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw put together, and at least for *me*, it would be easier to explain Illustrator in terms of Inkscape. Not everyone has spent years churning along with proprietary software packages.
when 85%+ of your audience uses a particular browser
I keep forgetting that there's a Windows port of this thing.
Just as an aside, I've been underwhelmed by reliability of Windows ports of a number of open source software packages -- dia, the other day, was regularly crashing on some guy trying to use it on Windows.
Of course, on my Linux box, no problems.
Well, it's because the open source world doesn't suffer from version inflation, as the closed source world currently is, because it doesn't need to push its products through marketers.
V1.0 is when the thing is feature-complete, usable, and ideally "done" in its current form.
V2.0 comes if people decide that the architecture of the program needs to be redone and redo it.
There are currently no usable open source natural-media art programs that I am aware of.
Your best bet, if you need/strongly want to use Linux, is to use WINE.
But the space agency has said it's impossible to eliminate falling launch debris.
"T-5 and holding due to pigeon..."
Why is it that every Mac user has to feel that everything Apple does is part of some brilliant, long-orchestrated campaign, inevitably ending in success?
I'll bet half the posts on here will be from Mac users feeling defensive, that somebody said that "their team" isn't perfect.
Are people *honestly* afraid of, oh, I don't know, co-workers teasing them for being dumb enough to purchase Apple hardware? I really can't imagine this happening.
The same thing happens with video game consoles. Doesn't make a bit of sense. And, for that matter on places like rightnation.us when someone criticizes Bush Administration policy.
Just for once, it'd be nice to see people admitting that everyone makes occasional mistakes.
The AMD chips are 100% Pentium compatible, using an unauthorized and unlicensed variation of the Pentium architecture, and we all benefit from that. As long as they don't violate specific patents or copy parts of the circuitry, it's also legal.
Yes, but AMD doesn't consist of a lot of people with funny flat faces and customs that differ from us, so this time IP matters.
[shrug] I see it as great. Someone made a competing CPU. Maybe it will drive down costs. No reason to think that any IP laws were broken, any more than Cyrus, AMD, Transmeta, or any other CPU-instruction-set-cloning companies have done. If you think Chinese don't play a major role in R&D today...well, you haven't seen the CS research lab where I work. And that isn't even one of our Chinese locations.
Why is it that a huge chunk of Slashdot stories have a severe bias (okay, this much I can understand) that is then followed and rah-rah-rahed by everyone reading the article? Doesn't anyone on here learn that the article submitters usually have bias?
At least at (the prestigious US university that I attended), quite a few CS folks are Indian or Chinese (oddly, few Japanese seemed to show up -- could be because Japanese universities have reputations such that their people don't feel enough pressure to go to school overseas).
Here's a seat-of-the-pants prediction to dispel nationalist fear -- the US is going to continue to be wealthy, but China and other nations are going to get wealthy faster. And that's a rather more stable situation than what we have today. North and South Dakota don't threaten each other with nuclear weapons, because there's no power or wealth or anything worth fighting over disparity. Foreign human labor will get more expensive for people in the US, but steadily increasing use of automation will take up much of the slack, at least in the long run. There will be some memes from China that hit the US, and some from the US that hit China, and the most appealing ones will tend to win out. That gave us anime with Japan, which seemed to be a good thing from my standpoint.
FWIW the folks from India (and even Pakistan heaven forbid) are amiable and friendly.
You ever accidentally mixed them up (Indians/Pakistanis)? I have, and I mean....well, wow.
I mean, if someone accidentally called *me* a Canadian, I wouldn't care.
All I can say is that if I saw someone's fireworks technology and figured out how to make nation-crushing armies out of it, I think I get a little of the credit.
They will end up with an arsenal manned with illiterate neocon farmboys protecting a long-drained oilpatch.
And *that* won't be dangerous for the rest of the world, no sirree.
Not Tom Clancy?