Except we don't need it. It's mostly for show. We have enough nuclear firepower to wipe the floor with any real nation that decided to oppose us. Are you seriously suggesting that if we engaged in a war where aircraft carriers were truly necessary and -under threat- that we would hold off on the nukes? We'd have to face an actual military foe for that.
As nice as it is that we can just roll over whatever dinky (or even not-so-dinky) country in the world because our military spending is through the roof, it isn't even necessary. We don't need more soldiers, we need smarter, better ones. We need soldiers that understand the role they are in, and commanders that are going to lead them by example in doing so. I mean no slight to our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in other conflicts past and current. Rather, the enemy has changed, and our military has not. We still have overwhelming firepower, for what? We don't need to take out a city, we need to find the -one guy- who wants revenge, who has some political or religious vendetta against us.
Instead we send boys off to their death, to risk life and limb against an uncertain adversary. And for what? They're so terrified out there because they well and truly never know when their life will end abruptly that they are close to snapping. We have soldiers coming out and bravely admitting some of the criminal activities that are occurring with the complicit support of their commanders. Drop weapons are placed on the bodies of innocent civilians to hide the fact that they were killed merely because they appeared threatening. Mosques are shot at out of revenge, not because of apparent threat. These boys and girls we are sending are ill-prepared to deal with the fact that people around them are dying for no reason whatsoever in a pointless ground conflict that has no apparent end.
I'd be terrified too. I'd probably want revenge too if some faceless Arab took my friend's life suddenly and with the utmost cowardice through the use of something like an IED. Every single day I'd have to decide whether or not I think that guy walking towards me might be wearing an explosive belt. Every day I'd have to live with the fact that I don't know the people around me, I can't understand them, and that my target is going to look exactly like a civilian.
Offense is not what we need, we need strategic and tactical advantage. We don't have it. We're fighting Joe Arab.
I guarantee you that after only 8 years with his nearly ridiculously thorough backup policy he hasn't encountered any errors. It sounds like he's got everything in triplicate: a DVD, an ISO, and an offsite mirror with the same ISO.
There's no way after only 8 years he's got data that's unreadable from three different sources.
Hell, if it's a portable hard drive, just leave it attached to a non-network connected POS machine with a USB port and use cron to ask for an md5 sum or something every few days.
Agreed, it's a price Microsoft has paid for compatibility. That's why there are a lot of people at Microsoft who are pushing -hard- for this fancy ".NET" thing. See, if you can abstract the API and the code and everything below it, or even convince a large number of developers to use managed code by default, you can get rid of a lot of the backward compatibility cruft.
On the other hand, most applications written for Windows in the past decade run without problem despite enormous changes in the kernel, the API, the drivers, etc. This is in large part the reason why their software is valuable. Thankfully there are thousands or millions of Linux volunteers fixing old code so that I can run it on the latest kernels in Ubuntu or Gentoo or what-have-you, but if you find a deprecated or obsolete program, or some abandoned code from a few years ago, you may run into some major problems running it on Linux. Anything from problems with GCC not building it to missing libraries.
I'm not saying one approach is better than the other, they both have their downsides, but Linux versus Windows is more than just the ideology of source code availability.
Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He's been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons.
The most impressive things to read on Raymond's weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: "Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn't work at all. You're going to tell your friends, 'Don't upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it's not compatible with program Z.' Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn't work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You're going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)"
I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.
This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1...
A lot of developers and engineers don't agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It's why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work...
To contrast, I've got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.
Your initial comment was "Some of these apps, such as the package manager, rely on HTML..."
No, they don't. The HTML is just a news window. A single pane of a much larger application that performs much more complex functions. Webapps != apps that use HTML. I want you to thoroughly comprehend that. Using HTML because it's a mature, 'featureful' syntax for displaying a wide variety of static and some dynamic content is a smart move, not one indicative of the state of web applications.
I said that already though. While both apps use WebKit to pull a front page and news about the application, neither is a webapp.
Just because *gasp*, they both use WebKit to render webpages doesn't make them webapps. In fact, isn't WebKit the only rendering engine available on the iPhone right now? Yes, yes it is.
Which package manager? Installer.app doesn't rely on HTML, it loads a main page that is HTML but the user interface, search function, etc, are all CocoaTouch/UIKit. It downloads.xml files as well for its information.
The other main package manager, Cydia, is based on apt, and it too will draw an HTML page for its intro, but the UI, search, actual management functions, everything else is CocoaTouch.
HTML makes a lot of sense when you have applications with fluid data that should be refreshed. WebKit is compact, you can make a static UI pretty quickly and efficiently and support is pretty good. But a Web App cannot install stuff to your phone if it's properly secured. (I only add that because one of the methods of jailbreaking an iphone was a website with a remote code execution exploit.)
How? There isn't enough content to run BitTorrent maxing out my connection 24/7. I'd have to buy a new hard drive every day to do that. Can you propose to me any way of actually utilizing my connection 24/7 with BitTorrent, maintaining a seed ratio and not clogging my hard disks (because I'd need to buy a NAS in short order.)
I think the result would be significantly lower than 100%. For one thing, 100% of people will never use any one technology. For another, even those who do can't possible saturate their connection 100% of the time unless they're on dialup. I have fifteen megabit cable with a realized throughput of around 13000 kbps to the continental US, and can easily get 1.6-1.7 mega-bytes- per second on downloads. Even at just 1 MB/sec, I have to buy another 80GB hard disk a day to fill this line. Heck, I'd run out of content I'd even want to download.
I doubt that, there are certainly many civil governments and businesses that are nigh criminally negligent over ensuring the safety of their structures. Is the PE still responsible if the building fails because it hasn't been maintained or repaired?
I'm not arguing the validity of gun rights, I just argue the validity of his argument for them. And your analogy, frankly, sucks. There's no cause and effect, you forget that there's a third party, a group whose duty it is to enforce the rules. Yes, even sometimes they are given exception to them. So when you make guns illegal, it's not just the criminals that have them, but in every society I've ever seen that has banned gun ownership, the police are given an exception. Your analogy has no group of bulls who are charged with preventing domestication of the cattle, your analogy does not posit the existence of a group of people whose job it is to find the stray firearms and with the force of law, remove them.
To continue on the subject of 2nd Amendment debate, where is the line drawn? Am I allowed to own a nuclear weapon to defend myself from a hostile government? A tank? An RPG? Am I allowed to possess anti-tank mines to protect myself from martial law? Why or why not?
Tackling questions like that are vital to the strength of the constitution, if we ignore them, dismiss them out of hand and ignore the people who ask tough questions, or otherwise fail to answer them, we have failed the people who ask them.
The difference between the Republicans and Democrats isn't more or less government involvement, they both want to spend more money. The difference is that the Republicans favor a top-down approach, that is, if you grease the gears at the top, it'll "trickle down" to the people at the bottom. There are historical examples of this working, and examples of it not working. The Democrats favor a bottom-up approach, thinking that if you provide for people's basic needs -now- they can start working on valuable contributions to society without having to worry about their personal wellbeing or a reliable paycheck while they make those changes to their lifestyle that they want (go back to school, etc.) There are historical examples of that working too.
So which one is right? NEITHER. It doesn't matter who you vote for, they're both interested in spending our money. The difference is whether right now you think one method or the other will help the economy more. Well, we've had 8 years of top-down and it's done nothing but hurt the majority of US citizens. That's why I'll vote Obama.
An isolated instance. Correlation != causation. So one thing happened and another thing happened, but that doesn't necessarily mean one caused the other. In some parts of the world, restricted gun ownership has 'reduced' crime by your logic. (Note there's no proof, it's all correlation.)
On the other hand, I am a firm believer that Doom caused violent crime rates to drop in the United States. See, if you graph the release of several major First Person Shooters and the violent crime rate, you find that there's definitely a drop in crime. By your logic, that's proof right? Doom causes fewer crimes. So if we want to reduce crime, just re-release Doom! (It's GPL licensed now so you can go ahead and do that.)
Thank you for your clarification, but please, don't begin with an ad hominem, or at least calling me dangerous. No, I'm not, I don't presume to be a lawyer, but I sought to clarify an issue as best as I could with that disclaimer. I failed, and someone followed up on my request for more reasoned advice.
And honestly, if Vista means more effective, more complete controls over security policies, then I think it's totally worth whatever cost it takes to get it to run. There are alternatives, of course, if they wanted to run some really hardcore SELinux configurations, but it's frankly easier to have a homogeneous user configuration and with Vista at least, more secure.
Yes there are flaws, but we're discussing what pros exist. There are definite cons here, and I would be very inclined to agree with you that desktop computing power is oversold, and I'm sure big iron is more than adequate for any mid-size business that uses it. Large businesses that are able to adequately judge needed capacity and jump-start programs with full capacity can very much go to these mainframe manufacturers and say, we need this much throughput, this much whatever. Big iron is -not- for even medium sized businesses and I think IBM recognizes that.
Clusters on the other hand, make perfect sense for startups. Cheap, easily replaced, don't need to be homogeneous, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Except we don't need it. It's mostly for show. We have enough nuclear firepower to wipe the floor with any real nation that decided to oppose us. Are you seriously suggesting that if we engaged in a war where aircraft carriers were truly necessary and -under threat- that we would hold off on the nukes? We'd have to face an actual military foe for that.
As nice as it is that we can just roll over whatever dinky (or even not-so-dinky) country in the world because our military spending is through the roof, it isn't even necessary. We don't need more soldiers, we need smarter, better ones. We need soldiers that understand the role they are in, and commanders that are going to lead them by example in doing so. I mean no slight to our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in other conflicts past and current. Rather, the enemy has changed, and our military has not. We still have overwhelming firepower, for what? We don't need to take out a city, we need to find the -one guy- who wants revenge, who has some political or religious vendetta against us.
Instead we send boys off to their death, to risk life and limb against an uncertain adversary. And for what? They're so terrified out there because they well and truly never know when their life will end abruptly that they are close to snapping. We have soldiers coming out and bravely admitting some of the criminal activities that are occurring with the complicit support of their commanders. Drop weapons are placed on the bodies of innocent civilians to hide the fact that they were killed merely because they appeared threatening. Mosques are shot at out of revenge, not because of apparent threat. These boys and girls we are sending are ill-prepared to deal with the fact that people around them are dying for no reason whatsoever in a pointless ground conflict that has no apparent end.
I'd be terrified too. I'd probably want revenge too if some faceless Arab took my friend's life suddenly and with the utmost cowardice through the use of something like an IED. Every single day I'd have to decide whether or not I think that guy walking towards me might be wearing an explosive belt. Every day I'd have to live with the fact that I don't know the people around me, I can't understand them, and that my target is going to look exactly like a civilian.
Offense is not what we need, we need strategic and tactical advantage. We don't have it. We're fighting Joe Arab.
And hopefully everyone won't just be stuck at +4 Funny and some negative karma mods that make the whole thing feel worthless.
God dammit, now what's the answer? Why are the building edges sharp?
Feynman would never have left me hanging like that.
I guarantee you that after only 8 years with his nearly ridiculously thorough backup policy he hasn't encountered any errors. It sounds like he's got everything in triplicate: a DVD, an ISO, and an offsite mirror with the same ISO.
There's no way after only 8 years he's got data that's unreadable from three different sources.
Hell, if it's a portable hard drive, just leave it attached to a non-network connected POS machine with a USB port and use cron to ask for an md5 sum or something every few days.
It's still property, it's still their home.
And they still lost it.
Agreed, it's a price Microsoft has paid for compatibility. That's why there are a lot of people at Microsoft who are pushing -hard- for this fancy ".NET" thing. See, if you can abstract the API and the code and everything below it, or even convince a large number of developers to use managed code by default, you can get rid of a lot of the backward compatibility cruft.
On the other hand, most applications written for Windows in the past decade run without problem despite enormous changes in the kernel, the API, the drivers, etc. This is in large part the reason why their software is valuable. Thankfully there are thousands or millions of Linux volunteers fixing old code so that I can run it on the latest kernels in Ubuntu or Gentoo or what-have-you, but if you find a deprecated or obsolete program, or some abandoned code from a few years ago, you may run into some major problems running it on Linux. Anything from problems with GCC not building it to missing libraries.
I'm not saying one approach is better than the other, they both have their downsides, but Linux versus Windows is more than just the ideology of source code availability.
Your initial comment was "Some of these apps, such as the package manager, rely on HTML..."
No, they don't. The HTML is just a news window. A single pane of a much larger application that performs much more complex functions. Webapps != apps that use HTML. I want you to thoroughly comprehend that. Using HTML because it's a mature, 'featureful' syntax for displaying a wide variety of static and some dynamic content is a smart move, not one indicative of the state of web applications.
Oh god! Watch out there's a huge arrow approaching your head!
Or using the compatbility modes designed for that purpose.
To be honest, I've only ever had to run one or two programs with those compatibility modes.
I said that already though. While both apps use WebKit to pull a front page and news about the application, neither is a webapp.
Just because *gasp*, they both use WebKit to render webpages doesn't make them webapps. In fact, isn't WebKit the only rendering engine available on the iPhone right now? Yes, yes it is.
Which package manager? Installer.app doesn't rely on HTML, it loads a main page that is HTML but the user interface, search function, etc, are all CocoaTouch/UIKit. It downloads .xml files as well for its information.
The other main package manager, Cydia, is based on apt, and it too will draw an HTML page for its intro, but the UI, search, actual management functions, everything else is CocoaTouch.
HTML makes a lot of sense when you have applications with fluid data that should be refreshed. WebKit is compact, you can make a static UI pretty quickly and efficiently and support is pretty good. But a Web App cannot install stuff to your phone if it's properly secured. (I only add that because one of the methods of jailbreaking an iphone was a website with a remote code execution exploit.)
How? There isn't enough content to run BitTorrent maxing out my connection 24/7. I'd have to buy a new hard drive every day to do that. Can you propose to me any way of actually utilizing my connection 24/7 with BitTorrent, maintaining a seed ratio and not clogging my hard disks (because I'd need to buy a NAS in short order.)
I think the result would be significantly lower than 100%. For one thing, 100% of people will never use any one technology. For another, even those who do can't possible saturate their connection 100% of the time unless they're on dialup. I have fifteen megabit cable with a realized throughput of around 13000 kbps to the continental US, and can easily get 1.6-1.7 mega-bytes- per second on downloads. Even at just 1 MB/sec, I have to buy another 80GB hard disk a day to fill this line. Heck, I'd run out of content I'd even want to download.
Uhm, this API does the processing for you, so you'd have to do all that work anyway.
Very little in the way of wasted effort. What this needs is a promise that Office 2007 and this API will be synced to the ISO specification.
I doubt that, there are certainly many civil governments and businesses that are nigh criminally negligent over ensuring the safety of their structures. Is the PE still responsible if the building fails because it hasn't been maintained or repaired?
You are covering up for something with your post, but I think your email spam filter's contents can help you with that.
What I'm trying to say is: GP doesn't have anything to do with you, and everything to do with people who get SUVs and don't do "SUV stuff."
Nationwide 3G coverage provided by AT&T by the end of this month to early next month, I believe.
They've been upgrading their network.
So you mean it might require innovation on the part of the developers?
Dear heaven no, we better cancel WWDC.
I'm not arguing the validity of gun rights, I just argue the validity of his argument for them. And your analogy, frankly, sucks. There's no cause and effect, you forget that there's a third party, a group whose duty it is to enforce the rules. Yes, even sometimes they are given exception to them. So when you make guns illegal, it's not just the criminals that have them, but in every society I've ever seen that has banned gun ownership, the police are given an exception. Your analogy has no group of bulls who are charged with preventing domestication of the cattle, your analogy does not posit the existence of a group of people whose job it is to find the stray firearms and with the force of law, remove them.
To continue on the subject of 2nd Amendment debate, where is the line drawn? Am I allowed to own a nuclear weapon to defend myself from a hostile government? A tank? An RPG? Am I allowed to possess anti-tank mines to protect myself from martial law? Why or why not?
Tackling questions like that are vital to the strength of the constitution, if we ignore them, dismiss them out of hand and ignore the people who ask tough questions, or otherwise fail to answer them, we have failed the people who ask them.
The difference between the Republicans and Democrats isn't more or less government involvement, they both want to spend more money. The difference is that the Republicans favor a top-down approach, that is, if you grease the gears at the top, it'll "trickle down" to the people at the bottom. There are historical examples of this working, and examples of it not working. The Democrats favor a bottom-up approach, thinking that if you provide for people's basic needs -now- they can start working on valuable contributions to society without having to worry about their personal wellbeing or a reliable paycheck while they make those changes to their lifestyle that they want (go back to school, etc.) There are historical examples of that working too.
So which one is right? NEITHER. It doesn't matter who you vote for, they're both interested in spending our money. The difference is whether right now you think one method or the other will help the economy more. Well, we've had 8 years of top-down and it's done nothing but hurt the majority of US citizens. That's why I'll vote Obama.
An isolated instance. Correlation != causation. So one thing happened and another thing happened, but that doesn't necessarily mean one caused the other. In some parts of the world, restricted gun ownership has 'reduced' crime by your logic. (Note there's no proof, it's all correlation.)
On the other hand, I am a firm believer that Doom caused violent crime rates to drop in the United States. See, if you graph the release of several major First Person Shooters and the violent crime rate, you find that there's definitely a drop in crime. By your logic, that's proof right? Doom causes fewer crimes. So if we want to reduce crime, just re-release Doom! (It's GPL licensed now so you can go ahead and do that.)
Remember: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.
Repeat after me: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.
P.S.: CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION.
No, you only get to play the game once then you have to take it to the courts and prove you're willing to take legal action to defend your copyright.
Thank you for your clarification, but please, don't begin with an ad hominem, or at least calling me dangerous. No, I'm not, I don't presume to be a lawyer, but I sought to clarify an issue as best as I could with that disclaimer. I failed, and someone followed up on my request for more reasoned advice.
And honestly, if Vista means more effective, more complete controls over security policies, then I think it's totally worth whatever cost it takes to get it to run. There are alternatives, of course, if they wanted to run some really hardcore SELinux configurations, but it's frankly easier to have a homogeneous user configuration and with Vista at least, more secure.
Yes there are flaws, but we're discussing what pros exist. There are definite cons here, and I would be very inclined to agree with you that desktop computing power is oversold, and I'm sure big iron is more than adequate for any mid-size business that uses it. Large businesses that are able to adequately judge needed capacity and jump-start programs with full capacity can very much go to these mainframe manufacturers and say, we need this much throughput, this much whatever. Big iron is -not- for even medium sized businesses and I think IBM recognizes that.
Clusters on the other hand, make perfect sense for startups. Cheap, easily replaced, don't need to be homogeneous, etc.