Sure, but define "P2P file sharing application." Does not a remote web server - my peer - share its files with me? Does this make a web browser such an application (even though I am not "seeding" with it)? What if I use something like Shutterfly to upload pictures?
It is their network, but this rule is vague enough that they have grounds, if weak ones, to terminate anyone at any time.
I've been setting up a traffic statistics server (AWStats, if you're interested), and I'm seeing traffic from Netscape 4, Firefox 0.10.0 (zero ten zero, not a typo), IE 3.02.
Actually, I believe it is illegal to [i]buy[/i] votes, which is what canvassers used to do a long time ago. They'd run through skid row and say, "Free beer for anyone who votes for Mr. Candidate!" then drive people to the polls and buy them beer.
But I don't think it's illegal to [i]sell[/i] your vote. The person who should be prosecuted is the one who bought it, not the one who sold it.
And they'll just throttle everything. Game over. There's your dead end.
Which is frankly what they should be doing to begin with. They've oversaturated their equipment, but they're still selling 'blazing fast speed.' If their network can't support the speeds they're selling, they should be selling and enforcing lower speeds.
And in the days of writing and printing, the technology was not taken up completely and uniformly across all individuals. Those individuals who make more use of the internet will indeed be the ones leading the charge of discovery and progress. The occasional user won't lose out, for a couple of reasons. One, the occasional user is able to take advantage of the applied science generated by the discoverers. Two, information gleaned from occasional visits is still information gleaned which would not have otherwise been gleaned. (What prize do I get for using 'gleaned' three times in the same sentence?) Oh but that information has questionable validity, you may protest. No less questionable than information gathered from anywhere else, really.
For an occasional user, personalizing a set of information is very useful, especially if the information is not otherwise assembled somewhere else online. So you need to either assemble it yourself, or seek someone else's assembly in another medium. That book of UNIX commands you refer to could just as easily be a web site, as long as someone put in the effort to assemble it. You could assemble it yourself, either as a bound book on paper or as an electronic document, and keep it only for yourself, or publish it in quantity.
I hate to harp on the example of books, but it's just so apt. Information in books is very easily lost. Books are physical things which can be lost or destroyed (accidentally or not). The only way I can have access to the information in a book is to come into physical contact with it, or to get it secondhand from someone who has had physical contact. Books are costly to produce, and can only reasonably be reproduced using very expensive and specialized equipment. Electronic documents, on the other hand, being vastly easier to reproduce and distribute by almost anyone, are nearly impossible to destroy. This has even been demonstrated with the HD DVD key, for example. The attempt to remove the electronic information greatly amplified widespread knowledge of it.
Even in the summary, all these other, older technologies are mentioned. Why is it perfectly normal to use those technologies, but not this one? Didn't the printing press relieve us of having to write everything by hand, and didn't written language relieve us of having to simply remember everything? You can't be saying that written language contributed to some loss of coherence because it freed us from having to remember so much, can you?
The knowledge and coherence of humanity only continues to grow in size and complexity because of technology. It's not static. Modern technology allows us to use our innate comprehension to think about different things, or think about the same things differently, just the way that written language allowed ancient peoples to think about greater and more complex economies - since they were able to write down the exact details of trades instead of having to remember them.
This all boils down to "those damned kids and their rock and roll."
I have a hard time believing that that has anything to do with being technologically ignorant. For one, she was clearly capable of using email, viewing an attachment to email, and presumably receiving a fax. It's not too much to assume that in an insurance adjuster's office, where there would very likely be at least one computer printer (if not the same physical device as the fax machine itself), that she would know how to print things to said printer, including the aforementioned email attachment.
We're talking about someone who was insisting on receiving a printed copy of a document from one printing machine instead of another printing machine, where the printed quality of the document was not at issue. This is tantamount to saying, "That typed copy from the electric typewriter is great, but I really need it to be done on the manual typewriter," or "That Gutenberg Bible is wonderful, but you're going to need to hand copy it."
Well, that last one, I can see the church issuing edicts about the satanic nature of the printing press, so never mind.
I filed an auto insurance claim once, and I had a police report. The adjuster asked me, via email, if I could give the the police report. I replied, asking whether she needed the original, or if a copy would do. "Oh, you can fax it to me," she emailed.
"Well," I replied, "I don't have a fax machine, but I've attached a scan of the document to this email."
Adjuster: "That's great, but I really need you to fax me a hardcopy."
I had to explain to her that she could simply print the image I'd sent to accomplish the same thing, since it would be identical to my scanning the image with a fax machine and transmitting it to a printer at her office. In fact, my scanned image was even in color, if she wanted to print it to a color printer, and would probably be unreadable as a fax anyway. This woman couldn't have been older than thirty, so the argument about "the older generation" does not apply.
Is there an argument for "the stupider generation?"
You're right about that, all of it. But when the issue at hand is being able to acquire a computer without acquiring Windows, "most people" are already removed from the equation. I would guess that someone who is interested in running Linux on a yet-to-be-acquired computer is very likely to be capable of building from a barebones kit, even if for the first time.
You can very easily buy a barebones kit that includes a case, PSU, CPU, mainboard. You add to that a CPU fan that matches the CPU in the kit, some RAM that matches the mainboard. Everything else is a matter of hardware upgrades most people do themselves anyway: video, hard drive, CD drives, sound card.
And the major parts sites (I'm thinking Newegg in particular) make it very easy to figure out what is compatible with what. Your board supports DDR PC2700? So buy that. You have a PCI-X slot? Get a PCI-X video card. Your CPU is a... I don't even remember the CPU socket numbers anymore, and I was able to pick the right fan.
I built an AMD dual core x64 machine for under $300 recently. Yes, it's a lower end board, and lower end video - but what more would I have gotten from a manufacturer?
Comparing Linux (or Mac or FreeBSD or VAX) to Windows is pretty much necessary. It's a common point of reference that almost everyone has, so it can serve as a starting point for determining the relative merits of a given OS.
And frankly, if you can get ISDN, you can probably get IDSL. Remember IDSL? It's 144K (because it also uses the D channel for data), and is the only DSL service that can be extended through fiber. If you have wired telephone service, you can get IDSL, as long as there's a company that will sell it to you.
Also, with just plain old dialup, it might be useful to use a demand dial router instead of dialing from the client computer directly. I'm using Smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org/) at my house on cable (instead of the Linksys phone router from Vonage), and I know it does modem dialing, too.
How come a Coinstar machine can accurately sort and count at least four different coin variations, eliminating the coins that are outside of those tolerances, and a voting machine can't tabulate a simple column of votes?
Is it just me, or does it (apart from the security aspect) seem like it should be amazingly simple to write the code for a voting machine? If it should be so simple, why oh why are there always these oddball errors that officials and voting machine companies (sorry, Diebold, company) are unable to explain?
How hard is it, really, for an application to accurately add up several distinct columns of ones? And how in god's name can there be more than one "readout method?"
There's already a lot of ATMs. Why couldn't a voting machine function be added to existing ATMs? People could identify themselves by swiping a card (like you do for getting boarding passes on an airplane). You could vote anywhere, anytime, not just in your precinct on a specific day. Hell, they'd even have paper receipts!
Obviously, some people are not going to want to or be able to identify themselves with a swipe card. That doesn't exclude the election commission from operating centrally located polling places that run old skool. Not necessarily in every precinct, but near public transportation centers, and serving multiple precincts.
In order for Blu-Ray to sell like DVDs, there have to be a lot of Blu-Ray players out there. And there's no sense getting a Blu-Ray player if you don't have an HDTV.
There are a hell of a lot of people who still don't have HDTVs, and there are a hell of a lot of people who do have HDTVs who don't care to get a Blu-Ray player.
I just looked up a random Blu-Ray player at Amazon: $389.00. You can get a DVD player for around $30, and it still looks pretty good. This guy is banking on more people being videophiles than there actually are.
That's not a "problem" with RAID. That has nothing to do with the failure rates of hard drives under normal conditions. Fire, flood, lightning strike - these are all anomalous external forces. Hard drives tend to fail when you put them in a drill press, too, but I wouldn't expect those events to have a statistical significance.
Besides which, I wasn't talking about "what you should do to be safe in case your hard drives all die." All of that is obvious. I was pointing out that, because of the misrepresentation of failure rates in hard drives, the risk to the consumer of said drives is both higher and more hidden.
Things which have moving parts have shorter lifespans than things which are solid state.
Of the pieces of hardware in a computer, these have moving parts:
Cooling fans Hard drives Removeable media drives (CD, floppy, tape, etc) Switches (power button and the like) Ports (if you count things like the pins inside network and modem ports)
All of those things except hard drives could fail simultaneously, and you'd be pretty likely to be able to have the server running again in short order - by pulling the hard drive(s) and transplanting them into identical hardware. If any one of those non-hard drive things fails alone, the server is likely to continue running long enough to effect replacement before catastrophe (excepting maybe cooling fans, but you still wouldn't have a recovery scenario).
If the hard drives all simultaneously fail, you need to restore from backup, which is a lot of downtime.
Because failed drives result in so much downtime, fudging the reliability statistics on hard drives creates am exponentially higher risk to the consumer, one they are not generally aware of.
Note: I know about RAID, and everyone should use redundant disks. I'm talking a complete failure of all hard drives in a system. Unlikely, yes, but not out of the question. I had two of three drives in a RAID5 in predictive failure on a brand new HP server that I had just finished a customer project with, and had to wait until after the weekend to receive new drives. I was damned lucky.
How does that correlate at all? In my construct, the manufacturers would pay a licensing fee only for those machines that shipped with Windows - the ones with premium-priced licensed hardware. Manufacturers would be free to sell machines without Windows by using regular-priced non-Windows licensed hardware.
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Sure, but define "P2P file sharing application." Does not a remote web server - my peer - share its files with me? Does this make a web browser such an application (even though I am not "seeding" with it)? What if I use something like Shutterfly to upload pictures?
It is their network, but this rule is vague enough that they have grounds, if weak ones, to terminate anyone at any time.
I've been setting up a traffic statistics server (AWStats, if you're interested), and I'm seeing traffic from Netscape 4, Firefox 0.10.0 (zero ten zero, not a typo), IE 3.02.
Mice work, people are familiar with them, and they're cheap.
Well, I meant that in those days (I'm thinking pre-WW2), it was practiced openly, and never prosecuted (if it was even illegal).
I would also like to apologize for my failure to use the proper tagging in my parent comment.
Actually, I believe it is illegal to [i]buy[/i] votes, which is what canvassers used to do a long time ago. They'd run through skid row and say, "Free beer for anyone who votes for Mr. Candidate!" then drive people to the polls and buy them beer.
But I don't think it's illegal to [i]sell[/i] your vote. The person who should be prosecuted is the one who bought it, not the one who sold it.
Which is frankly what they should be doing to begin with. They've oversaturated their equipment, but they're still selling 'blazing fast speed.' If their network can't support the speeds they're selling, they should be selling and enforcing lower speeds.
And in the days of writing and printing, the technology was not taken up completely and uniformly across all individuals. Those individuals who make more use of the internet will indeed be the ones leading the charge of discovery and progress. The occasional user won't lose out, for a couple of reasons. One, the occasional user is able to take advantage of the applied science generated by the discoverers. Two, information gleaned from occasional visits is still information gleaned which would not have otherwise been gleaned. (What prize do I get for using 'gleaned' three times in the same sentence?) Oh but that information has questionable validity, you may protest. No less questionable than information gathered from anywhere else, really.
For an occasional user, personalizing a set of information is very useful, especially if the information is not otherwise assembled somewhere else online. So you need to either assemble it yourself, or seek someone else's assembly in another medium. That book of UNIX commands you refer to could just as easily be a web site, as long as someone put in the effort to assemble it. You could assemble it yourself, either as a bound book on paper or as an electronic document, and keep it only for yourself, or publish it in quantity.
I hate to harp on the example of books, but it's just so apt. Information in books is very easily lost. Books are physical things which can be lost or destroyed (accidentally or not). The only way I can have access to the information in a book is to come into physical contact with it, or to get it secondhand from someone who has had physical contact. Books are costly to produce, and can only reasonably be reproduced using very expensive and specialized equipment. Electronic documents, on the other hand, being vastly easier to reproduce and distribute by almost anyone, are nearly impossible to destroy. This has even been demonstrated with the HD DVD key, for example. The attempt to remove the electronic information greatly amplified widespread knowledge of it.
Even in the summary, all these other, older technologies are mentioned. Why is it perfectly normal to use those technologies, but not this one? Didn't the printing press relieve us of having to write everything by hand, and didn't written language relieve us of having to simply remember everything? You can't be saying that written language contributed to some loss of coherence because it freed us from having to remember so much, can you?
The knowledge and coherence of humanity only continues to grow in size and complexity because of technology. It's not static. Modern technology allows us to use our innate comprehension to think about different things, or think about the same things differently, just the way that written language allowed ancient peoples to think about greater and more complex economies - since they were able to write down the exact details of trades instead of having to remember them.
This all boils down to "those damned kids and their rock and roll."
I have a hard time believing that that has anything to do with being technologically ignorant. For one, she was clearly capable of using email, viewing an attachment to email, and presumably receiving a fax. It's not too much to assume that in an insurance adjuster's office, where there would very likely be at least one computer printer (if not the same physical device as the fax machine itself), that she would know how to print things to said printer, including the aforementioned email attachment.
We're talking about someone who was insisting on receiving a printed copy of a document from one printing machine instead of another printing machine, where the printed quality of the document was not at issue. This is tantamount to saying, "That typed copy from the electric typewriter is great, but I really need it to be done on the manual typewriter," or "That Gutenberg Bible is wonderful, but you're going to need to hand copy it."
Well, that last one, I can see the church issuing edicts about the satanic nature of the printing press, so never mind.
I filed an auto insurance claim once, and I had a police report. The adjuster asked me, via email, if I could give the the police report. I replied, asking whether she needed the original, or if a copy would do. "Oh, you can fax it to me," she emailed.
"Well," I replied, "I don't have a fax machine, but I've attached a scan of the document to this email."
Adjuster: "That's great, but I really need you to fax me a hardcopy."
I had to explain to her that she could simply print the image I'd sent to accomplish the same thing, since it would be identical to my scanning the image with a fax machine and transmitting it to a printer at her office. In fact, my scanned image was even in color, if she wanted to print it to a color printer, and would probably be unreadable as a fax anyway. This woman couldn't have been older than thirty, so the argument about "the older generation" does not apply.
Is there an argument for "the stupider generation?"
All by itself, this is stupid. But combine this with wifi media players and real municipal wifi, and it becomes more reasonable.
Since when is "allowing blank passwords" a compromise, and not stupid?
You're right about that, all of it. But when the issue at hand is being able to acquire a computer without acquiring Windows, "most people" are already removed from the equation. I would guess that someone who is interested in running Linux on a yet-to-be-acquired computer is very likely to be capable of building from a barebones kit, even if for the first time.
You can very easily buy a barebones kit that includes a case, PSU, CPU, mainboard. You add to that a CPU fan that matches the CPU in the kit, some RAM that matches the mainboard. Everything else is a matter of hardware upgrades most people do themselves anyway: video, hard drive, CD drives, sound card.
... I don't even remember the CPU socket numbers anymore, and I was able to pick the right fan.
And the major parts sites (I'm thinking Newegg in particular) make it very easy to figure out what is compatible with what. Your board supports DDR PC2700? So buy that. You have a PCI-X slot? Get a PCI-X video card. Your CPU is a
I built an AMD dual core x64 machine for under $300 recently. Yes, it's a lower end board, and lower end video - but what more would I have gotten from a manufacturer?
What if I make mine in the shape of my penis?
Comparing Linux (or Mac or FreeBSD or VAX) to Windows is pretty much necessary. It's a common point of reference that almost everyone has, so it can serve as a starting point for determining the relative merits of a given OS.
And frankly, if you can get ISDN, you can probably get IDSL. Remember IDSL? It's 144K (because it also uses the D channel for data), and is the only DSL service that can be extended through fiber. If you have wired telephone service, you can get IDSL, as long as there's a company that will sell it to you.
Also, with just plain old dialup, it might be useful to use a demand dial router instead of dialing from the client computer directly. I'm using Smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org/) at my house on cable (instead of the Linksys phone router from Vonage), and I know it does modem dialing, too.
How come a Coinstar machine can accurately sort and count at least four different coin variations, eliminating the coins that are outside of those tolerances, and a voting machine can't tabulate a simple column of votes?
Is it just me, or does it (apart from the security aspect) seem like it should be amazingly simple to write the code for a voting machine? If it should be so simple, why oh why are there always these oddball errors that officials and voting machine companies (sorry, Diebold, company) are unable to explain?
How hard is it, really, for an application to accurately add up several distinct columns of ones? And how in god's name can there be more than one "readout method?"
There's already a lot of ATMs. Why couldn't a voting machine function be added to existing ATMs? People could identify themselves by swiping a card (like you do for getting boarding passes on an airplane). You could vote anywhere, anytime, not just in your precinct on a specific day. Hell, they'd even have paper receipts!
Obviously, some people are not going to want to or be able to identify themselves with a swipe card. That doesn't exclude the election commission from operating centrally located polling places that run old skool. Not necessarily in every precinct, but near public transportation centers, and serving multiple precincts.
And this is different from a ToS with punishment for breaking it ... how?
No domino computer? Really?
http://www.pinkandaint.com/oldhome/comp/dominoes/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_computer
In order for Blu-Ray to sell like DVDs, there have to be a lot of Blu-Ray players out there. And there's no sense getting a Blu-Ray player if you don't have an HDTV.
There are a hell of a lot of people who still don't have HDTVs, and there are a hell of a lot of people who do have HDTVs who don't care to get a Blu-Ray player.
I just looked up a random Blu-Ray player at Amazon: $389.00. You can get a DVD player for around $30, and it still looks pretty good. This guy is banking on more people being videophiles than there actually are.
That's not a "problem" with RAID. That has nothing to do with the failure rates of hard drives under normal conditions. Fire, flood, lightning strike - these are all anomalous external forces. Hard drives tend to fail when you put them in a drill press, too, but I wouldn't expect those events to have a statistical significance.
Besides which, I wasn't talking about "what you should do to be safe in case your hard drives all die." All of that is obvious. I was pointing out that, because of the misrepresentation of failure rates in hard drives, the risk to the consumer of said drives is both higher and more hidden.
Things which have moving parts have shorter lifespans than things which are solid state.
Of the pieces of hardware in a computer, these have moving parts:
Cooling fans
Hard drives
Removeable media drives (CD, floppy, tape, etc)
Switches (power button and the like)
Ports (if you count things like the pins inside network and modem ports)
All of those things except hard drives could fail simultaneously, and you'd be pretty likely to be able to have the server running again in short order - by pulling the hard drive(s) and transplanting them into identical hardware. If any one of those non-hard drive things fails alone, the server is likely to continue running long enough to effect replacement before catastrophe (excepting maybe cooling fans, but you still wouldn't have a recovery scenario).
If the hard drives all simultaneously fail, you need to restore from backup, which is a lot of downtime.
Because failed drives result in so much downtime, fudging the reliability statistics on hard drives creates am exponentially higher risk to the consumer, one they are not generally aware of.
Note: I know about RAID, and everyone should use redundant disks. I'm talking a complete failure of all hard drives in a system. Unlikely, yes, but not out of the question. I had two of three drives in a RAID5 in predictive failure on a brand new HP server that I had just finished a customer project with, and had to wait until after the weekend to receive new drives. I was damned lucky.
How does that correlate at all? In my construct, the manufacturers would pay a licensing fee only for those machines that shipped with Windows - the ones with premium-priced licensed hardware. Manufacturers would be free to sell machines without Windows by using regular-priced non-Windows licensed hardware.
Windows = license. Not Windows = Not license.
Where's the rub?