Here is what I'd like to buy: a laptop, but without the keyboard, monitor, touchpad, speakers, and optical drive. Basically a little brick I could carry back and forth between work/home and drop into a docking station that's hooked up to a full-size keyboard, mouse and 21" LCD monitor. If you ditch all the human I/O devices (keyboard, touchpad, monitor, speakers) and commit to using an external optical drive, the thing shouldn't be much bigger/heavier than a portable hard drive.
Alternately, I'd be happy with a "very fast" portable hard drive that has an elegant plugin interface to a desktop box. Then I could install everything on that drive and just lug it back and forth. The issue there is that I'd need to have "very similar" hardware in the two locations.
I disagree. One is never "entitled" to act like a snotty primadona. Even when one is in the right, which I'm not convinced is the case here. Policies change. The fact that the information was freely available 8 years ago is pretty much irrelevant. It's the company's prerogative to require an NDA if they so choose, just as it is Theo's prerogative to drop driver support from OpenBSD. It's really a matter of who has more leverage. Who suffers more if support for Hifn's hardware is dropped, Hifn or OpenBSD? I'm not familiar with this space, so the answer isn't obvious to me. Is Hifn's hardware supported in Linux? Other *nixes? Windows? What percentage of their customers rely on OpenBSD support? Who are they more loyal to, Hifn for the hardware or OpenBSD for the OS?
You're missing the point. When AMD gains share it's interpreted as a sign that AMD is "doing well" and will eventually gain even more share, possibly capturing a majority.
When IIS gains share it's interpreted as a fluke, with detractors hastily pointing towards the 30% lead Apache still enjoys.
Actually, that's not correct - and is really a superficial symptom of what is being compained about. There is no problem with 'M' being on the cardboard box and retailers asking that people should be over 17+ (or at least make it appear plausible enough if there's no ID available.)
Maybe we're not talking to the same set of gamers. I consistently hear people gripe about the ratings system, how "kids are going to play them anyway" and how "it's the parents job to police what their children watch." The supposed corollary of the latter is that games should be sold to anyone regardless of rating. You yourself make this argument in your list of grievances when you include "banning excessivly violent game sales to minors" among the things gamers object to. As a soon-to-be parent, I want merchants to be banned from selling excessively violent video games to minors. Why? Because it makes it a little easier to restrict what games my child can access. If another parent feels differently and has no problem with such games, they're free to purchase it themselves.
Video game ratings and movie ratings are not the same as age limits for porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms. The former are done by the industry, and the latter is done by the government.
I brought up the government-limited activities in response to the argument gamers often trot out that "kids are going to do it anyway" and "it's the parents job". If those two things necessarily imply that movie/game ratings are useless, then so are laws that limit porn, cigarettes, etc.
The Hays code doesn't censor movies, it assigns them a rating. Within reason (i.e. no child porn), producers remain free to create whatever content they choose. They do so, however, with the understanding that certain content will not be viewable by children under a certain age.
It never ceases to amaze me how the "gamer crowd" completely discards the idea that maybe, just maybe, children shouldn't have access to all video game content and that maybe, just maybe, the industry should attempt to facilitate parents' roles as content filters. And do the opponents of video game ratings apply their logic consistently? Do they also oppose movie ratings, and age limits on the purchase of porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms?
After all, if "kids are going to do it anyway" and "it's entirely the parents' responsibility to limit access" then any artificial age limit is clearly redundant.
I have no problem with effective, targeted marketing. Actually, I prefer it to ineffective, non-targeted marketing. I'm really into foosball, I'd rather see adds for foosball related stuff than for products I have absolutely no interest in.
That said, what I do have a problem is invasive or disruptive marketing. Stuff that fills up my inbox. Stuff that obscures webpages I'm trying to view, and forces me to find a miniscule "X" in order to close the advertisement. You get the picture.
My cable account is advertised as 6 Mb/s. I compress a relatively large (20M) file and put it on a "close by" server, then use either FTP or wget to transfer it to my local box. Typically I see an average transfer rate of about 590 KB/s. If you figure 8 bits in a byte with 1 for overhead, that's pretty close to 6 Mb/s. They offer a 9 Mb/s premium service, but I'm uncertain how much additional benefit it would offer.
DSL in my area comes in 1.5, 3.0 and 6.0 Mb/s flavors, with the latter priced slgihtly less than the comparable 6 Mb/s cable modem service.
In my opinion, the reason workers in general, but especially tech workers, have such a craving for "slack time" is not, generally speaking, because they're overworked, but because their "work time" is wholly unfulfilling. IMO this is an unfortunate side-effect of modern society. In times past, people's "work time" was often directly related to their survival. Growing food or raising animals to eat, or to sell in order to buy essential things. Such work conveys a certain level of psychological fulfilment, since it's necessity for survival elevates it to a level of extreme importance. If, when I don't do my job, my kids starve, then that provides alot of motivation. When I've done my job I've done something "important"- I've provided for my family. This becomes less true as one rises in the financial strata. When the software developer does his job, he doesn't think to himself, "I've fed my family," he more readily thinks, "I've bought my kid an Xbox." Not quite as satisfying.
Another thing that affects motivation and fulfillment is productivity and one's views the product being created. If I'm a craftsman who makes furniture, and I consider the furniture I produce to be of the very highest quality, then it can become a source of pride for me. I know I'm creating something beautiful, or at the very least functional, and that gives me a sense of fulfillment. Productivity is also easily measured, since I produce X units in a given day. Not so in the tech world. As a software developer, not only is my work "not very important" in the life-or-death sense, it's also hard to measure how much I've "done" from day-to-day. And the quality of the final product is almost always "less than optimal". So the developer thinks of himself as spending alot of time not being particularly productive in order to produce a piece of low-quality unimportant crap.
When you have this large pool of workers who 1) don't care about what they're working on, 2) don't feel like they're particularly productive, and 3) find it difficult to take any pride in what they eventually produce, that's a recipe for dissatisfaction. It's no wonder such workers want more "slack time"!
Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions for this problem other than, "Find a job you like and do that," which isn't always feasible for all people.
While it's true that the ultimate responsibility lies with the parent, this argument is spurious. Just because a kid should know better, does that make it okay for me to sell him something that's potentially dangerous?
Obviously you can argue the games aren't harmful, but that's not the point this guy seems to be trying to make. His point is, "It's the parents' fault, ergo there shouldn't be laws that prohibit sales to minors." That doesn't follow. By that logic, nothing should be prohibited from being sold to children.
Sure, no product of any reasonable complexity will ever ship without a single bug. For that matter, no sufficiently complex product will ever ship with all the known bugs fixed. In my opinion, however, developers and product managers have been come way too cavalier about shipping product that contains known serious defects. Too much emphasis is placed on features to the detriment of quality. It would please me if every major commercial product tacked on 2-4 months to the end of every release cycle and dedicated it solely to bug fixing. This would be on top of whatever other time they already devote to this task. They're going to do this work eventually anyway, when those bugs are found by customers instead of in-housr testers and developers.
I'm a "big picture" guy. Most people will never program a computer or design hardware. They will most likely shop for a computer, however, and for software to run on it. They will have to act as their own sysadmin and perform various system tasks. They will use applications like browsers, word processors, firewalls, virus scanners, messaging clients, email clients, etc. Given these tasks, I'd lay out the following goals:
Have a basic understanding of PC hardware. What are all the "parts"? What sort of performance attributes do the various parts have? Why would I want one over the other?
Have a basic understanding of what software "is", how it works, and how it was created. Know that programmers write source code and that specialized programs called "compilers" turn it into object code, which is then assembled into machine code.
Understand what an operating system "is", what services it provides to applications. Know what OS choices exist and what differentiates them.
Know how to use a few common apps, and how to administer the user's OS of choice. That includes applying updates, adding new hardware, updating drivers, etc.
Know how to practice "safe computing" and not fall prey to malware, phishing scams, etc.
The reason ISPs claim they want to do this is that certain sites represent the majority of their bandwidth. That bandwidth is being consumed by the ISPs users. Rather than charge the third-party site a fee, push that cost to the ISP's users. Or, more accurately, those users who consume large amounts of bandwidth.
I'd argue that neither cellular networks nor the internet has "spare capacity". Dropped calls? More likely to be because of a congested network than communication difficulties. And now they're talking about streaming video and audio directly to cell phones, and offering high speed net access (over cellular) for laptops. On the internet side of things, we're about to see "movies on demand" streamed directly to set top boxes over the net, and more widespread use of VoIP. If there's a bandwidth crunch (and there always will be- it's almost axiomatic) then make the users consuming the most bandwidth pay accordingly.
At least, theoretically speaking. Charge the end-user on a per-bandwidth-consumed basis. Voila. People who want to stream movies or torrent huge files will pay a premium. The rest of us who just web browse, check email, play networked games, and occasionally view a video clip...we pay the same (or less) than we do now. This way nobody's bandwidth is artificially limited. The only limit is how much you want to buy.
ISPs could give people an initial "bucket" of bytes in exchange for a base monthly charge. No charge until that bucket is exhausted, after which they start paying. Basically, have it work like cell phone plans. Would this be annoying? Sure, a little. Would it be more fair? Probably.
Re:understatement of the year
on
Back to the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
And why do I care about sending people to other planets?
My poing being, if I want the most scientific bang for my buck, sending someone to the moon is not the way to go. Sure, we might learn some more things about space travel. So what. That's of limited utility. I'd rather solve the problems on this planet first, or at least make a dent.
Or cheap, or arguably even price competitive when compared to other scientific investments. Which begs the question, why are we going to the moon again?
Sure. As many posters have pointed out, the problem isn't with the format but the applications. And most or all OSS word processors have poor accessibility. This guy's aim (ODF) is off, but he still has a valid point, which is that Microsoft devotes more time/resources to making its products accessible than does the OSS community. Your post made it seem as if that wasn't a problem. "If OSS solutions don't work for you, just use Word/Windows."
I seriously do not mean this as a troll, but c'mon - Just buy Windows and use MS Office.
As long as you're okay with the existence of a sizeable demographic for whom Windows/Office is the absolute best OS+Editor combination...and for whom Linux+OpenOffice is completely unusable, then your suggestion makes perfect sense.
Most OSS advocates wouldn't be satisfied with that scenario.
As an application developer, it really irks me that I have to release software that I *know* has bugs, choosing instead to complete whatever features were supposed to be in the release. As a consumer of applications, sometimes I wish that instead of adding all the new wizbang stuff, someone would devote an entire release to fixing *all* known bugs and improving performance. Maybe this will finally happen w/ the kernel.
Most commercials make me want to jab something sharp into my eyesockets. Some, however, are actually funny. Or, if not outright funny, at least visually interesting. Make more of those and I might be persuaded not to switch channels.
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Here is what I'd like to buy: a laptop, but without the keyboard, monitor, touchpad, speakers, and optical drive. Basically a little brick I could carry back and forth between work/home and drop into a docking station that's hooked up to a full-size keyboard, mouse and 21" LCD monitor. If you ditch all the human I/O devices (keyboard, touchpad, monitor, speakers) and commit to using an external optical drive, the thing shouldn't be much bigger/heavier than a portable hard drive.
Alternately, I'd be happy with a "very fast" portable hard drive that has an elegant plugin interface to a desktop box. Then I could install everything on that drive and just lug it back and forth. The issue there is that I'd need to have "very similar" hardware in the two locations.
Do you honestly believe personal achievement gives a person license to be petty and immature, or are you just baiting me?
I disagree. One is never "entitled" to act like a snotty primadona. Even when one is in the right, which I'm not convinced is the case here. Policies change. The fact that the information was freely available 8 years ago is pretty much irrelevant. It's the company's prerogative to require an NDA if they so choose, just as it is Theo's prerogative to drop driver support from OpenBSD. It's really a matter of who has more leverage. Who suffers more if support for Hifn's hardware is dropped, Hifn or OpenBSD? I'm not familiar with this space, so the answer isn't obvious to me. Is Hifn's hardware supported in Linux? Other *nixes? Windows? What percentage of their customers rely on OpenBSD support? Who are they more loyal to, Hifn for the hardware or OpenBSD for the OS?
...or does Theo come off as a snotty primadona?
You're missing the point. When AMD gains share it's interpreted as a sign that AMD is "doing well" and will eventually gain even more share, possibly capturing a majority.
When IIS gains share it's interpreted as a fluke, with detractors hastily pointing towards the 30% lead Apache still enjoys.
Maybe we're not talking to the same set of gamers. I consistently hear people gripe about the ratings system, how "kids are going to play them anyway" and how "it's the parents job to police what their children watch." The supposed corollary of the latter is that games should be sold to anyone regardless of rating. You yourself make this argument in your list of grievances when you include "banning excessivly violent game sales to minors" among the things gamers object to. As a soon-to-be parent, I want merchants to be banned from selling excessively violent video games to minors. Why? Because it makes it a little easier to restrict what games my child can access. If another parent feels differently and has no problem with such games, they're free to purchase it themselves.
I brought up the government-limited activities in response to the argument gamers often trot out that "kids are going to do it anyway" and "it's the parents job". If those two things necessarily imply that movie/game ratings are useless, then so are laws that limit porn, cigarettes, etc.When Intel's market share vastly outstrips AMD's, the anti-Wintel crowd cheers loudly about AMD's solid gains at Intel's expense.
When IIS makes solid gains in market share at the expense of Apache, the same crowd cheers loudly about how Apache still has 30% more share.
Guess it's all about the spin.
Fair enough. Replace "Hays code" with "current MPAA ratings system". What I get for only skimming the article.
The Hays code doesn't censor movies, it assigns them a rating. Within reason (i.e. no child porn), producers remain free to create whatever content they choose. They do so, however, with the understanding that certain content will not be viewable by children under a certain age.
It never ceases to amaze me how the "gamer crowd" completely discards the idea that maybe, just maybe, children shouldn't have access to all video game content and that maybe, just maybe, the industry should attempt to facilitate parents' roles as content filters. And do the opponents of video game ratings apply their logic consistently? Do they also oppose movie ratings, and age limits on the purchase of porn, cigarettes, alcohol and firearms?
After all, if "kids are going to do it anyway" and "it's entirely the parents' responsibility to limit access" then any artificial age limit is clearly redundant.
I have no problem with effective, targeted marketing. Actually, I prefer it to ineffective, non-targeted marketing. I'm really into foosball, I'd rather see adds for foosball related stuff than for products I have absolutely no interest in.
That said, what I do have a problem is invasive or disruptive marketing. Stuff that fills up my inbox. Stuff that obscures webpages I'm trying to view, and forces me to find a miniscule "X" in order to close the advertisement. You get the picture.
Listen closely and tell your friends, "Embryonic stem cells do not come from aborted fetuses."
No, they come from aborted embryos.
My cable account is advertised as 6 Mb/s. I compress a relatively large (20M) file and put it on a "close by" server, then use either FTP or wget to transfer it to my local box. Typically I see an average transfer rate of about 590 KB/s. If you figure 8 bits in a byte with 1 for overhead, that's pretty close to 6 Mb/s. They offer a 9 Mb/s premium service, but I'm uncertain how much additional benefit it would offer.
DSL in my area comes in 1.5, 3.0 and 6.0 Mb/s flavors, with the latter priced slgihtly less than the comparable 6 Mb/s cable modem service.
In my opinion, the reason workers in general, but especially tech workers, have such a craving for "slack time" is not, generally speaking, because they're overworked, but because their "work time" is wholly unfulfilling. IMO this is an unfortunate side-effect of modern society. In times past, people's "work time" was often directly related to their survival. Growing food or raising animals to eat, or to sell in order to buy essential things. Such work conveys a certain level of psychological fulfilment, since it's necessity for survival elevates it to a level of extreme importance. If, when I don't do my job, my kids starve, then that provides alot of motivation. When I've done my job I've done something "important"- I've provided for my family. This becomes less true as one rises in the financial strata. When the software developer does his job, he doesn't think to himself, "I've fed my family," he more readily thinks, "I've bought my kid an Xbox." Not quite as satisfying.
Another thing that affects motivation and fulfillment is productivity and one's views the product being created. If I'm a craftsman who makes furniture, and I consider the furniture I produce to be of the very highest quality, then it can become a source of pride for me. I know I'm creating something beautiful, or at the very least functional, and that gives me a sense of fulfillment. Productivity is also easily measured, since I produce X units in a given day. Not so in the tech world. As a software developer, not only is my work "not very important" in the life-or-death sense, it's also hard to measure how much I've "done" from day-to-day. And the quality of the final product is almost always "less than optimal". So the developer thinks of himself as spending alot of time not being particularly productive in order to produce a piece of low-quality unimportant crap.
When you have this large pool of workers who 1) don't care about what they're working on, 2) don't feel like they're particularly productive, and 3) find it difficult to take any pride in what they eventually produce, that's a recipe for dissatisfaction. It's no wonder such workers want more "slack time"!
Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions for this problem other than, "Find a job you like and do that," which isn't always feasible for all people.
While it's true that the ultimate responsibility lies with the parent, this argument is spurious. Just because a kid should know better, does that make it okay for me to sell him something that's potentially dangerous?
Obviously you can argue the games aren't harmful, but that's not the point this guy seems to be trying to make. His point is, "It's the parents' fault, ergo there shouldn't be laws that prohibit sales to minors." That doesn't follow. By that logic, nothing should be prohibited from being sold to children.
Sure, no product of any reasonable complexity will ever ship without a single bug. For that matter, no sufficiently complex product will ever ship with all the known bugs fixed. In my opinion, however, developers and product managers have been come way too cavalier about shipping product that contains known serious defects. Too much emphasis is placed on features to the detriment of quality. It would please me if every major commercial product tacked on 2-4 months to the end of every release cycle and dedicated it solely to bug fixing. This would be on top of whatever other time they already devote to this task. They're going to do this work eventually anyway, when those bugs are found by customers instead of in-housr testers and developers.
I'm a "big picture" guy. Most people will never program a computer or design hardware. They will most likely shop for a computer, however, and for software to run on it. They will have to act as their own sysadmin and perform various system tasks. They will use applications like browsers, word processors, firewalls, virus scanners, messaging clients, email clients, etc. Given these tasks, I'd lay out the following goals:
That's all I can think of at the moment.
The reason ISPs claim they want to do this is that certain sites represent the majority of their bandwidth. That bandwidth is being consumed by the ISPs users. Rather than charge the third-party site a fee, push that cost to the ISP's users. Or, more accurately, those users who consume large amounts of bandwidth.
I'd argue that neither cellular networks nor the internet has "spare capacity". Dropped calls? More likely to be because of a congested network than communication difficulties. And now they're talking about streaming video and audio directly to cell phones, and offering high speed net access (over cellular) for laptops. On the internet side of things, we're about to see "movies on demand" streamed directly to set top boxes over the net, and more widespread use of VoIP. If there's a bandwidth crunch (and there always will be- it's almost axiomatic) then make the users consuming the most bandwidth pay accordingly.
At least, theoretically speaking. Charge the end-user on a per-bandwidth-consumed basis. Voila. People who want to stream movies or torrent huge files will pay a premium. The rest of us who just web browse, check email, play networked games, and occasionally view a video clip...we pay the same (or less) than we do now. This way nobody's bandwidth is artificially limited. The only limit is how much you want to buy.
ISPs could give people an initial "bucket" of bytes in exchange for a base monthly charge. No charge until that bucket is exhausted, after which they start paying. Basically, have it work like cell phone plans. Would this be annoying? Sure, a little. Would it be more fair? Probably.
And why do I care about sending people to other planets?
My poing being, if I want the most scientific bang for my buck, sending someone to the moon is not the way to go. Sure, we might learn some more things about space travel. So what. That's of limited utility. I'd rather solve the problems on this planet first, or at least make a dent.
"This won't be easy."
Or cheap, or arguably even price competitive when compared to other scientific investments. Which begs the question, why are we going to the moon again?
Sure. As many posters have pointed out, the problem isn't with the format but the applications. And most or all OSS word processors have poor accessibility. This guy's aim (ODF) is off, but he still has a valid point, which is that Microsoft devotes more time/resources to making its products accessible than does the OSS community. Your post made it seem as if that wasn't a problem. "If OSS solutions don't work for you, just use Word/Windows."
I seriously do not mean this as a troll, but c'mon - Just buy Windows and use MS Office.
As long as you're okay with the existence of a sizeable demographic for whom Windows/Office is the absolute best OS+Editor combination...and for whom Linux+OpenOffice is completely unusable, then your suggestion makes perfect sense.
Most OSS advocates wouldn't be satisfied with that scenario.
As an application developer, it really irks me that I have to release software that I *know* has bugs, choosing instead to complete whatever features were supposed to be in the release. As a consumer of applications, sometimes I wish that instead of adding all the new wizbang stuff, someone would devote an entire release to fixing *all* known bugs and improving performance. Maybe this will finally happen w/ the kernel.
Most commercials make me want to jab something sharp into my eyesockets. Some, however, are actually funny. Or, if not outright funny, at least visually interesting. Make more of those and I might be persuaded not to switch channels.