Go ahead, spend 20 or 30 thousand on a black market SAM.
Why, are you still trying to unload the one you bought to defend your house during the Y2K meltdown?
Is the existing disaster not enough for you, adrenaline junkie? Fight Club was a MOVIE, not a documentary. Go donate some blood while you're out shopping for ammo, and quit bothering us.
Hey, I'm one of those test engineers at a big (OK, huge) hardware manufacturer, and I can tell you we DO look for root cause here when we encounter failures. And when we find them we fix them, and we at least try to make systemic changes so the same failure can't happen again. And we pay for it in time-to-market, big time. We aren't the first out the door for ANYTHING except products nobody's ever thought of besides us. But our reputation for quality is considered a company asset, (one that gets us a price premium) so we act to protect it.
Companies that haven't developed a reputation yet need to compete on some other basis, and they usually start with price which means using lower-quality parts AND reducing testing. Note that the really cheap products usually come along after the first-movers have created a market. Once this hypothetical cheap manufacturer has a market toehold they can start competing by getting products out sooner. Quality still isn't on the radar. You hope that once this company has a semi-secure position that it will START going for quality, but of course not all do. But that's the only way to grow beyond a certain size, at least in hardware manufacturing.
One of our big problems comes in validation testing after we know our product works on its own. There's such an infinity of other products out there that we have to pick a subset to do interoperability testing with and hope those are representative. Inevitably we miss something--there is no way to test a motherboard against every available video card, every sound card and hard drive (hard drive manufacturers discontinue and replace models 4-6 times PER YEAR), etc. You'd be validating forever and never ship anything.
Jennywl
"Once it ships I don't want it EVER coming back!"
Intel uses standard calendar quarters
on
Intel Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
Nice theory about a skewed fiscal year (that's how the government does it), but Intel uses the calendar year and Q3 2000 runs from July through September. Trust me on this one.
Viruses require powerful scripting languages and/or macros to spread
Most viruses require inadequate or disabled security features to spread
Viruses can only spread by finding suitable hosts
Virus damage = (damage to individual systems) x (number of infected systems)
Linux has #1, but this fact is mitigated by #2. The root/user design of Unix is fundamentally more secure than the Windows 9x "the user is always root" design. And because pre-configured Linux versions are available from lots of vendors, we can't have the situation where a single vendor ships their OS configured for maximum vulnerability and renders a majority of desktop systems on earth insecure. A fragmented Linux market protects the world from mistakes by a single vendor.
But our greatest protection comes from item 3. Viruses have to make assumptions about the environment they will find themselves spread to. The often-cited Internet worm was so successful because it contained exploits for several packages, not just sendmail, but sendmail was the first one it would try and was so widespread that the worm rarely had to resort to another exploit to propagate itself (Source: Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg). Linux is still an uncommon desktop OS, and that means a virus that finds a home on some stupid user's system will have trouble finding:
another Linux machine
that is badly enough secured for it to infect
which has the exact resources it needs to do its damage
and also has the tools it needs to spread.
And so by equation 4 above, Linux virii will be not-very-dangerous for a long time because Linux itself will have to become much more widespread AND much more uniform before Linux virii can spread very far.
TekPolitik said: The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value
A lot of the money in NASDAQ is coming from businesses and wealthy people right now: the individual 'small investor' has been on the short end of the economy for the last ten years, and so growth in investable capital has been concentrated in the hands of those who already had quite a bit of it. Also, most small investors are buying mutual funds instead of buying shares directly, which will help shield them from the effects of a crash (more on this later). The crash in the dot-com economy will resemble the savings & loan crash more than the Great Depression: big investors will be exposed to more risk than small ones, and so there will be some sort of bailout or safety net arranged so that companies don't suffer too much. Remember you read it here first!
The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism.
Actually, the last global revolution was the end of most organized colonialism at the end of World War I. The industrial revolution only affected Northern Europe, a comparatively small part of the world (but one we Americans learned a disproportionately great amount about in school). The end of colonialism created more upheaval because it affected much more land and many more people, who went from being subjects to nominally self-governing and had to abruptly create their own institutions to replace the recently departed colonial powers. The industrial revolution ushered in the idea of capitalism, but it was a long time before most of the world saw the large-scale kind of capitalism you're referring to.
The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.
Why should a stock market crash, particularly one localized to a very small sector of the economy, lead to a capitalism-replacing revolution? It's not going to lead to hundreds of thousands of people suddenly losing their life savings--this isn't the same economy we had in the 1920's. Let me explain. The dot-com economy has a high value on paper, as you've pointed out, but you're also aware they have very small revenues and profits: that means that they play a very small part in the economic life of the world as a whole. If they all disappeared tomorrow a lot of paper value would go with them, but not very many actual employees or revenues would be affected.
You said if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation. This is exactly what the Federal Reserve Board has been carefully preventing for the past 10 years. We have a lot of paper millionaires, but their millions are still worth something BECAUSE inflation has been artificially held down. By the same token, you don't have to be a millionaire just to put food on the table. As long as people still have jobs, loss of their stock market portfolios won't necessarily sink them.
And just how much do small investors stand to lose? Most of them (me included) are not buying stocks directly any more--we're buying mutual funds, which means paying other folks to watch the markets full time and to get our investments out of falling stocks before they drop too far. And most of the funds out there are not the "Massive Brokerage Co. Ludicrous Growth Fund" type, they're more conservative and so will jump to the safer blue chip stocks at the first sign of trouble. We saw this just last week, in fact: the first few dot-coms began plummeting, and the Dow went up. So the Ludicrous Growth fund might crash, but thanks to SEC rules anyone who invested in it pretty much knew what they were risking. This is a big contrast to the 1920's, when blue chips themselves were massively overvalued (providing no safe haven when the speculative stocks began to fall), small investors had much less information and market power than the market makers, and a sudden loss of stock market value was combined with high inflation. If the Great Depression didn't lead to a populist/socialist government in the US, any lesser stock market crash isn't going to either.
Perhaps he means "Any use by which you buy the use for a price." That would cover the fact that he obviously expects you to use an MPAA-sanctioned player.
The underlying concept Valenti voices in the interview, which some readers here have bought into, is the idea that programs themselves have an intrinsic value, and that people who produce them "deserve" to be compensated when someone else gets ahold of the product. I doubt Valenti really believes this, because the MPAA's actions show clearly that they understand that an item's value is only what people are willing to pay for it. The content they are trying to control has more value because it's scarce: you can only get it from one source. And like diamonds, the value is kept artificially inflated by controlling how much of the product is available in the market. That is, members of the cartel Valenti refers to as a "copyright assembly" allow limited licenses for shows or music so that no license holders are competing for viewers/listeners in the same territory.
Certainly that's been a profitable route for studios in the past, and the Internet holds the potential to end it (insert here predictions of doom by music studios who feel threatened by MP3) but like the music studios, he misses the new opportunities created when the material reaches a much larger audience than the relatively limited group who want to pay directly to watch or listen. Increasing access doesn't necessarily reduce sales overall: reduced direct sales of music or movies could be made up by increased sales of other stuff associated with the group/movie, or by that perennial favorite, advertising on the sites where people go to get the content. And at least for movies and sports events, people will still pay to go see those in person because almost none of us have the facilities to recreate that experience at home (at least until virtual reality becomes more like genuine reality). But when the artificial scarcity ends, all the studios can see is their loss of control over the artificially small market, and that blinds them to the possibilities of a new paradigm that takes advantage of the hugeness of the new market once distribution limits are removed.
Valenti is right to refer to his cartel members as businesses "to which copyright protection is vital"--without that ability to create artificial scarcity, the whole house of cards as they know it comes down. He claims that the nation's economy will suffer if that happens (apparently foreseeing the demise of the entire movie and broadcasting industry), and if the interviewer had asked he'd probably say that nobody would make movies any more because they wouldn't be able to get their money back. But we know that's not true: independent filmmakers are all over the place, borrowing from family and maxing out their credit cards to make a movie because they have something to say. And bands are continually putting their OWN material up as MP3s to let people hear it. Loss of access control would suck a lot of the money out of the current system, but it wouldn't be the death of creativity. And if it brought the salaries of movie stars and sports "heroes" down to less than 9-digit levels, I for one wouldn't shed a tear over it.
How much does that say to how easy it is to use Linux if a company can base a large part of its business on supporting Linux?
Any operating system complex enough to accomplish a multitude of tasks (networking, memory management, multitasking, multiprocessing, etc) is too complex for its use to be obvious in all respects. Ditto for an OS with enough flexibility to support the multitude of hardware out there. Simple machines, like toasters, require little support because there are so few options for how to use them. But even copy machines these days have become flexible enough to require LCD help screens instead of just an LED readout showing how many copies you decided to make. Linux may not be easy to use in the way that an appliance is, but neither is any other complex machine.
Think about all the various OS's you've been exposed to. Windows is NOT intuitive, it only becomes easier to use over time because the same shortcuts you learn for one package generally work for others. You need a lot of support for it because of its instability, and even more support if you decide to get mucking around in the device properties. The Mac OS provides a lot of help built into its UI where you don't necessarily see it (large hit zones for example) and also uses the same shortcuts between many apps. Plus it supports less hardware, reducing the required complexity behind the scenes and generally increasing stability, and I believe you don't have the same access to tweak it yourself. That sure cuts down the options the user has to digest and work with. I don't know enough about BeOS to speak for it but I'm sure Be users don't go from newbie to wizard in two weeks' time. Command-line OS's have all the complexity of Windows plus no visual cues of how to begin finding out what to do next: you might know enough to try 'help' and '?', but if you have nothing to click on and you don't know what magic words to use, it becomes like an old text adventure (Hitchhiker's Guide comes to mind) where you type anything you can think of hoping that you'll hit the right command. Your complete newbie who doesn't know 'man' probably won't know how to reach the Linux user community for support either: that pile of how-tos may be the only thing they know how to access.
To return to the point, the fact that an OS requires support is, in a twisted way, a sign of its capabilities. How that support is handled could be a flaw or a benefit, but the need for support itself isn't a sign of a bad product. Unless it needs support because it doesn't do what it's supposed to. Having a pile of documentation isn't in itself a bad thing either: nobody is forcing people to read it, it's there if they want it (and know how to find it).
People have been doing a great job of checking out every claim LinuxOne makes so far and documenting their every lie, exaggeration, omission, and plagiarism. It would be great if someone were to collect pointers to this stuff onto one page: sort of "Steaming Heap of Truth about LinuxOne." It would be a good resource to point news-types to (or anyone who might be inclined to take this troop of cheats at face value), especially since the source material is from many sources (Business Week, Motley Fool, and LinuxToday as well as/.).
I liken Firewire to AGP only in that they both are suitable to high-volume transmissions where some errors are tolerable. Of course you wouldn't make a video board with a Firewire interface to use inside your system. That would be as silly as using Ethernet in place of PCI, which was the idea I jumped all over at first. But there are Firewire video editors, it's showing up in digital cameras, and there's at least a few VCRs out there with it. Probably DVD as well, I just haven't looked recently. The most compelling scenario I've seen for actually using Firewire was in a Popular Mechanics article a few years back that described a home network with the PC as one node but not the controller, and which linked in the VCR, the TV, the cameras at the doors (OK, not a standard home), and the rest of the security system. But that required stringing more cable, and that one fact will probably ensure that wireless grows faster as soon as it hits the magic $200 price point for a complete home setup.
Your cell phone only talks to your network. With bluetooth, it will negotiate with any other device. Anyone that wants to can track these devices.
You mean 'any other device within range', which is only about 10 meters. Bluetooth transmits at 1 milliwatt, as compared to about 1.5 watts for a cell phone. You don't get a lot of range at that power, meaning that networks of Bluetooth devices will exist wherever a bunch of them are collected (in a building, basically) but one building-wide network won't be connected to another building. The only way one building worth of Bluetooth devices would be trackable outside that building would be if it was connected to the Internet or if someone is listening with an EXTREMELY sensitive receiver. Internet tracking is something we already know how to fight. As for the sensitive receiver, well, if that kind of capability is deployed nationwide they've been getting an awful lot of cordless phone traffic for a long time now. We can hope that, at 100 mW, the HomeRF transmissions will drown out the Bluetooth ones (they'll both be hopping in the same band).
Forgot how not-blazingly-fast DSL is compared with wired networking: I was thinking of DSL vs dialup. My bad. On to your other point.
if these devices show up everywhere and each is unique then you can be tracked.
Consider another wireless technology in which each access device has a unique identifier and autonegotiates its connection with the base station: cell phones. They can now be tracked (and if I had to call 911 from mine I'd be very grateful for the fact). But remember the furor that arose before that decision was agreed to. Are you referring to the idea that your transactions from your wireless address might be stored and associated with that address? If so, that risk exists now for MAC addresses (as Nick Petreley pointed out months ago in one of his InfoWorld columns--see here). So has the threat materialized? I haven't seen it myself--I've seen the privacy community doing a great job of shining a bright spotlight on anyone trying to do anything like this. I think the threat may not be bigger than cookies.
Why does it matter? Wireless networking xmitters should understand ethernet packets. They should not care what OS is producing them.
And in fact they don't. At least not as far as transmission goes. But once you've caught a packet and stripped off the header, what do you do with the contents? Send 'em out serially? Parallel? How are you marking start and stop? That's where OS (and hardware) dependence comes into the picture. And like it or not, one particular OS has most of the market among the businesses who can afford to buy new technology, so that's the OS that people build for.
Because of the OS independence of ethernet, I believe it would have been a better choice than USB as a peripheral bus.
How do you figure? You want as little management overhead on the data part of your peripheral bus as possible: that's why PCI has so many special signals (REQ#, GNT#, FRAME#, etc.) that are just for control of who's got the bus. This leaves the address/data lines free for shoving data as fast as your clock can mark it off. This is an example of the basic rule that hardware can accomplish a given task faster than software but at greater cost: the PCI bus is some 47 signals wide. But pulling 47-strand wire would be a real pain, so Ethernet makes do with 8 and accomplishes all the overhead by encoding it in the packet header, which could be considered software for the purpose of the rule above.
If packaged ethernet PCI cards can sell new for $8, then the ethernet chipset can't be all that expensive to stat building into printers, scanners, etc.
Perhaps you've never heard of a print server? Or network attached storage? These are examples of peripherals that are on the network. The time delay communicating with them is acceptable because people can deal with printing or file accesses taking a while to complete. But would you want your mouse or keyboard to have the same kind of latency? I think not: you'd be shot down each time you respawned while you waited for your mouse movement to process.
But ethernet is not Intel's baby like USB is, so it'll be build onto mboards to the detriment of all that is better. Firewire never had a chance except maybe in the Mac world.
Since when is USB Intel's baby? Last I heard it was its own standard, as in standards organization... USB is not a competitor against Ethernet, it's a competitor against the serial port (and a vastly superior competitor at that). And Firewire is a competitor against, well, something like AGP and something like the home entertainment network that doesn't presently exist. It achieves its greater throughput by eliminating some of the error checking of USB, so you wouldn't want it for file access, where every bit is critical. But it's great for streaming music or video because a bit here or there on those is no great loss. Ethernet doesn't compete against either one--it's for communication among independent systems, where a peripheral bus is for communication among subparts of one system.
Excuse me? Bluetooth's raw data rate is one, that's (1), Mbps. 1/100th the rate of fast Ethernet, and when you strip off the packet headers it's even less. This is comparable to DSL the way that a rowboat is comparable to the Queen Elizabeth II.
There are some things to worry about like will each device have an id; autonegotiation is scary
Of course each will have an ID: its MAC address, just like every network adapter on the planet. What's so scary about the autonegotiation? USB and 1394 handle it fine.
you are basically taking the research of others...their discoveries, hard work, and insights... and stealing them
And who paid for that research and hard work? US taxpayers, that's who. Now in my book, if I paid for it, I own it (or at least I ought to have fair use of it.) Did you miss that point in the initial story? This isn't guys in a garage dreaming up something cool and borrowing money from friends and family to create a company around it. They're using public funds to create knowledge which they are sequestering for private gain.
it hasn't been established that these new companies won't benefit us, the consumer
It hasn't been established that they will either. They certainly won't benefit anyone as much as the folks with stock options in the startups, but those startups will be built on research paid for by the public. If I wanted to contribute my dollars to someone else's enrichment I would do it directly. I do not appreciate my government making that choice for me. And you are out of line to suggest that anyone but the public has an inherent right to benefit from publicly funded research.
The Postal Service has value because it can deliver an envelope full of paper to any residence in the country for very little money per envelope. But that's a service of decreasing value to individuals: some 90% of mail carried by the Postal Service originates at businesses, and the vast majority of it is not sent first class. Bills are, because they have to be personalized, but advertising, coupons, and credit-card applications are bulk-mailed to everyone in the zip code for far less than $0.33 per piece: I believe it gets as cheap as $0.04 per piece for really huge mailings. Here in the electronic world we call that spam, and it's the majority of my snail mail every day (grump). First-class mail rates subsidize the costs of delivering all the rest of this: why should I pay extra mailing my Christmas cards just to ensure that my local crappy pizza place can send me coupons I'll never use all the rest of the year? Since the vast majority of bulk-rate mail gets thrown away unread and unused, delivering it at a subsidized rate can't be justified as an economic development activity. The USPS should increase the rates on bulk mail (hopefully that will cut down on the amount I get!) and quit raising the first-class rate.
OK, they have an office in Taipei (established 11 days ago). They do not claim another office in China. And they are selling LinuxLite in Chinese, but if it's only a front-end (as another poster pointed out) then output from Linux itself will still be in English. This does not count as a serious localization effort--it's more like slapping a Chinese label over the English on the RedHat box without ever opening it up. Too bad, because localizing Linux would be one way to generate a unique product, and bring Linux to a much larger slice of the world. And isn't it odd that the IPO paperwork doesn't mention ANY of their planned localizations (Spanish and Japanese) of LinuxLite? You would expect a company planning to expand in a major way would highlight all their plans for spending that new investment. Unless they didn't plan to spend it on the company, of course.
Ah, but LinuxOne claims to be paying theirs $60-80K per year, US dollars. At those rates, $4677 doesn't go far. And they don't claim to have any employees in China.
LinuxOne claims to be reselling, but nobody has found any evidence that they are really doing so. They also claim to have a Chinese-language version of Linux. Again, nobody has seen it. $4677 in software development costs in 1999 would not have been enough to even translate output messages, let alone test the changes. So what we have is a company lying about having products and hoping the financial markets won't see through their story before the IPO hits the boards. I'd call that cause for contempt, and BusinessWeek seems to agree.
A previous exchange ran thusly: With the industrial revolution, more jobs required long hours away from home, and women (esp. those with children) were largely excluded.
But why, apart from the ridiculous notion that "the woman's place is in the home?" I think the outcome had more to do with the unwilligness of men to take on childrearing responsibilities.
Certainly that's part of it, but even when men are willing to raise the children they require mom's help until the kids are weaned. Looking back at my anthropology classes, I recall that in hunting-gathering societies children nurse for as long as 2 years, adding in solid foods slowly beginning at 6-8 months. Modern societies transition children off nursing much earlier but they still are exclusively "milkivores" for several months, and until refrigeration became widespread in the last century that meant some woman had to provide the milk. That woman was not necessarily the birth mother (especially among the upper classes who could afford wet nurses) but among the working classes women with children had to bring them along to work so the kid(s) could be fed.
When Kurtz says "...a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read...", he's actually right. Both are cruel blows to someone trying to learn (I leave out the many tech support callers who do not want to learn--others have documented them well enough). But then Kurtz makes the leap that a COMIC STRIP making fun of callers learning how to operate a computer is equivalent to REAL LIFE tech support doing the same. COMICS ARE NOT REAL LIFE. They are an escape from real life, where characters say what we wish we could say without losing our jobs. The users calling tech support in the strip aren't real people, so their feelings can't really be hurt.
The people who find the UF tech support strips funny are often those who have lots of things piled up they wish they could say. And as another poster mentioned, teachers tell jokes about their students too, just not where the kids can hear them. I certainly did when I used to teach. It doesn't detract from your ability to be supportive and helpful in the classroom--it makes it easier by removing some of the tension and frustration. Let people have their escape: comic strips are healthier than a lot of other forms I could name. And don't mistake comic strips for real life.
Never met anyone with any real level of experience who talks about their major? I guess you don't ever go anywhere where technical people who don't know each other meet then (like conferences, training, or job fairs). Folks in these places talk about not just their present jobs, but also their academic background--helps you find like-minded folks faster. But perhaps you aren't concerned with like-minded folks.
Should WE even have a goal in educating newbies? Seems to me the newbie has a goal when she comes to you with a question, and the guru's job then is to help the newbie meet her goal.
Who cares if they screw it up?
Well, the newbie certainly does. Not everyone wants to learn by breaking and then fixing. Should the benefits of Linux be restricted to those who do?
We want to make them thoroughly knowledgeable and capable of exploring new environments on their computers without anyone else's help. This is best for newbies, and while it can be painful and time consuming, is infinitely rewarding, both in and of itself, as well as teaching the person something new.
This is more than a little arrogant. First, not all newbies are the same, and no one thing is best for all of them. Second, newbies != children, and you have no right to declare that the painful and time-consuming approach is really the best despite what the newbies themselves might wish.
This is suspiciously close to the same patronizing 'we know best' attitude that Microsoft exhibits and Linux users decry. Linux is supposed to be a tool for gaining better control over your computer and computing environment. If the Linux community requires everyone to undergo unofficial trials by fire before they get to use this wonderful tool, we are no better than a company that requires trial by checkbook.
...following the model of "A Stroll Through Perl" at the end of Chapter 1 in the O'Reilly "Learning Perl" book. Go find your copy, it's the one with the llama on the cover, and look back at Chapter 1. This begins with the simplest possible task you might want to accomplish (in Perl it's the classic 'Hello world' printing program) and gradually adds to it.
First you print a line (uses print).
Then you prompt the user for their name and address the hello to them (uses input and chomp).
Then you add a special greeting for one name and a default for everyone else (uses if-then and eq).
Then you add a password the user has to guess before they receive their greeting (uses = and ne).
Then you have several passwords, all correct (uses arrays and while loops).
Then you associate passwords with names (uses hash).
It goes on like this until at the end "Hello, world" has mushroomed into a security system that allows access only with passwords that are less than 7 days old, reports all passwords and their age on request, and records when each user last used their password. AND it checks for errors on file open/close operations and exits gracefully. You literally can't begin any simpler than this, but at the end you've got a lot of syntax you can work with.
A stroll through Linux could begin in the same simple way. What's the easiest thing you might want to do? How about get a directory listing? OK, show them how to use ls. Then go on to some of the options for it (not all of them, newbies don't care about listing in reverse order). Navigate to a different directory (cd, pwd). Create a directory (mkdir). Create symbolic links (I don't know how that's done yet). Explain the difference between a subdirectory and a link--this is something DOS/Win people will have no concept of at first. Mount a drive--and explain why it's needed. Now go on to opening a file with an editor--pico is easiest to start with because all the commands are right there visible. Then, maybe, go into editing configuration files.
The whole idea is to add information in small, measured doses so that your well-meaning newbie doesn't get snowed under too fast. Teach a little bit about a lot of commands, then later go back and fill in all the options you can use with those commands. Unix can have a learning curve like a cliff face if you've never seen a command line before, and the easiest way to learn it is to climb in short bursts with pauses to catch your breath.
I'm a registered/. user, but also work for one of the companies that has its own category graphic here. If I see a discussion about a product I've worked on, I can post anonymously and add some info to the discussion that very few other folks would have available (and I've noticed other members of my team doing likewise). If anonymous posting weren't allowed, none of us would jeopardize our jobs, we'd just shut up and the discussion would continue with guesses and misinformation and none of the facts we could have provided. So when you talk about eliminating nuisance AC posts, remember you will also eliminate some posts that ARE of value.
Slashdot Mirror
Go ahead, spend 20 or 30 thousand on a black market SAM.
Why, are you still trying to unload the one you bought to defend your house during the Y2K meltdown?
Is the existing disaster not enough for you, adrenaline junkie? Fight Club was a MOVIE, not a documentary. Go donate some blood while you're out shopping for ammo, and quit bothering us.
Numenaster
Hey, I'm one of those test engineers at a big (OK, huge) hardware manufacturer, and I can tell you we DO look for root cause here when we encounter failures. And when we find them we fix them, and we at least try to make systemic changes so the same failure can't happen again. And we pay for it in time-to-market, big time. We aren't the first out the door for ANYTHING except products nobody's ever thought of besides us. But our reputation for quality is considered a company asset, (one that gets us a price premium) so we act to protect it.
Companies that haven't developed a reputation yet need to compete on some other basis, and they usually start with price which means using lower-quality parts AND reducing testing. Note that the really cheap products usually come along after the first-movers have created a market. Once this hypothetical cheap manufacturer has a market toehold they can start competing by getting products out sooner. Quality still isn't on the radar. You hope that once this company has a semi-secure position that it will START going for quality, but of course not all do. But that's the only way to grow beyond a certain size, at least in hardware manufacturing.
One of our big problems comes in validation testing after we know our product works on its own. There's such an infinity of other products out there that we have to pick a subset to do interoperability testing with and hope those are representative. Inevitably we miss something--there is no way to test a motherboard against every available video card, every sound card and hard drive (hard drive manufacturers discontinue and replace models 4-6 times PER YEAR), etc. You'd be validating forever and never ship anything.
Jennywl
"Once it ships I don't want it EVER coming back!"
Nice theory about a skewed fiscal year (that's how the government does it), but Intel uses the calendar year and Q3 2000 runs from July through September. Trust me on this one.
Jenny
- Viruses require powerful scripting languages and/or macros to spread
- Most viruses require inadequate or disabled security features to spread
- Viruses can only spread by finding suitable hosts
- Virus damage = (damage to individual systems) x (number of infected systems)
Linux has #1, but this fact is mitigated by #2. The root/user design of Unix is fundamentally more secure than the Windows 9x "the user is always root" design. And because pre-configured Linux versions are available from lots of vendors, we can't have the situation where a single vendor ships their OS configured for maximum vulnerability and renders a majority of desktop systems on earth insecure. A fragmented Linux market protects the world from mistakes by a single vendor.But our greatest protection comes from item 3. Viruses have to make assumptions about the environment they will find themselves spread to. The often-cited Internet worm was so successful because it contained exploits for several packages, not just sendmail, but sendmail was the first one it would try and was so widespread that the worm rarely had to resort to another exploit to propagate itself (Source: Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg). Linux is still an uncommon desktop OS, and that means a virus that finds a home on some stupid user's system will have trouble finding:
- another Linux machine
- that is badly enough secured for it to infect
- which has the exact resources it needs to do its damage
- and also has the tools it needs to spread.
And so by equation 4 above, Linux virii will be not-very-dangerous for a long time because Linux itself will have to become much more widespread AND much more uniform before Linux virii can spread very far.TekPolitik said: The money that is being made on NASDAQ is coming from somewhere, and it's coming from moms and pops all over the world. It's going into dot-coms, many of which have never, and will never, have any genuine commercial value
A lot of the money in NASDAQ is coming from businesses and wealthy people right now: the individual 'small investor' has been on the short end of the economy for the last ten years, and so growth in investable capital has been concentrated in the hands of those who already had quite a bit of it. Also, most small investors are buying mutual funds instead of buying shares directly, which will help shield them from the effects of a crash (more on this later). The crash in the dot-com economy will resemble the savings & loan crash more than the Great Depression: big investors will be exposed to more risk than small ones, and so there will be some sort of bailout or safety net arranged so that companies don't suffer too much. Remember you read it here first!
The last global revolution was the industrial revolution. It created massive upheaval worldwide, and ushered in the age of capitalism.
Actually, the last global revolution was the end of most organized colonialism at the end of World War I. The industrial revolution only affected Northern Europe, a comparatively small part of the world (but one we Americans learned a disproportionately great amount about in school). The end of colonialism created more upheaval because it affected much more land and many more people, who went from being subjects to nominally self-governing and had to abruptly create their own institutions to replace the recently departed colonial powers. The industrial revolution ushered in the idea of capitalism, but it was a long time before most of the world saw the large-scale kind of capitalism you're referring to.
The coming revolution will happen for not dissimilar reasons, and will usher in a new economic paradigm to replace capitalism. And if that revolution becomes difficult, don't be surprised to see the other type of revolution, with guns.
Why should a stock market crash, particularly one localized to a very small sector of the economy, lead to a capitalism-replacing revolution? It's not going to lead to hundreds of thousands of people suddenly losing their life savings--this isn't the same economy we had in the 1920's. Let me explain. The dot-com economy has a high value on paper, as you've pointed out, but you're also aware they have very small revenues and profits: that means that they play a very small part in the economic life of the world as a whole. If they all disappeared tomorrow a lot of paper value would go with them, but not very many actual employees or revenues would be affected.
You said if everybody suddenly tomorrow had ten million dollars, then ten million dollars suddenly wouldn't make you wealthy. All it would do is create sudden and serious inflation. This is exactly what the Federal Reserve Board has been carefully preventing for the past 10 years. We have a lot of paper millionaires, but their millions are still worth something BECAUSE inflation has been artificially held down. By the same token, you don't have to be a millionaire just to put food on the table. As long as people still have jobs, loss of their stock market portfolios won't necessarily sink them.
And just how much do small investors stand to lose? Most of them (me included) are not buying stocks directly any more--we're buying mutual funds, which means paying other folks to watch the markets full time and to get our investments out of falling stocks before they drop too far. And most of the funds out there are not the "Massive Brokerage Co. Ludicrous Growth Fund" type, they're more conservative and so will jump to the safer blue chip stocks at the first sign of trouble. We saw this just last week, in fact: the first few dot-coms began plummeting, and the Dow went up. So the Ludicrous Growth fund might crash, but thanks to SEC rules anyone who invested in it pretty much knew what they were risking. This is a big contrast to the 1920's, when blue chips themselves were massively overvalued (providing no safe haven when the speculative stocks began to fall), small investors had much less information and market power than the market makers, and a sudden loss of stock market value was combined with high inflation. If the Great Depression didn't lead to a populist/socialist government in the US, any lesser stock market crash isn't going to either.
Jenny
Perhaps he means "Any use by which you buy the use for a price." That would cover the fact that he obviously expects you to use an MPAA-sanctioned player.
Jenny
The underlying concept Valenti voices in the interview, which some readers here have bought into, is the idea that programs themselves have an intrinsic value, and that people who produce them "deserve" to be compensated when someone else gets ahold of the product. I doubt Valenti really believes this, because the MPAA's actions show clearly that they understand that an item's value is only what people are willing to pay for it. The content they are trying to control has more value because it's scarce: you can only get it from one source. And like diamonds, the value is kept artificially inflated by controlling how much of the product is available in the market. That is, members of the cartel Valenti refers to as a "copyright assembly" allow limited licenses for shows or music so that no license holders are competing for viewers/listeners in the same territory.
Certainly that's been a profitable route for studios in the past, and the Internet holds the potential to end it (insert here predictions of doom by music studios who feel threatened by MP3) but like the music studios, he misses the new opportunities created when the material reaches a much larger audience than the relatively limited group who want to pay directly to watch or listen. Increasing access doesn't necessarily reduce sales overall: reduced direct sales of music or movies could be made up by increased sales of other stuff associated with the group/movie, or by that perennial favorite, advertising on the sites where people go to get the content. And at least for movies and sports events, people will still pay to go see those in person because almost none of us have the facilities to recreate that experience at home (at least until virtual reality becomes more like genuine reality). But when the artificial scarcity ends, all the studios can see is their loss of control over the artificially small market, and that blinds them to the possibilities of a new paradigm that takes advantage of the hugeness of the new market once distribution limits are removed.
Valenti is right to refer to his cartel members as businesses "to which copyright protection is vital"--without that ability to create artificial scarcity, the whole house of cards as they know it comes down. He claims that the nation's economy will suffer if that happens (apparently foreseeing the demise of the entire movie and broadcasting industry), and if the interviewer had asked he'd probably say that nobody would make movies any more because they wouldn't be able to get their money back. But we know that's not true: independent filmmakers are all over the place, borrowing from family and maxing out their credit cards to make a movie because they have something to say. And bands are continually putting their OWN material up as MP3s to let people hear it. Loss of access control would suck a lot of the money out of the current system, but it wouldn't be the death of creativity. And if it brought the salaries of movie stars and sports "heroes" down to less than 9-digit levels, I for one wouldn't shed a tear over it.
Jenny
How much does that say to how easy it is to use Linux if a company can base a large part of its business on supporting Linux?
Any operating system complex enough to accomplish a multitude of tasks (networking, memory management, multitasking, multiprocessing, etc) is too complex for its use to be obvious in all respects. Ditto for an OS with enough flexibility to support the multitude of hardware out there. Simple machines, like toasters, require little support because there are so few options for how to use them. But even copy machines these days have become flexible enough to require LCD help screens instead of just an LED readout showing how many copies you decided to make. Linux may not be easy to use in the way that an appliance is, but neither is any other complex machine.
Think about all the various OS's you've been exposed to. Windows is NOT intuitive, it only becomes easier to use over time because the same shortcuts you learn for one package generally work for others. You need a lot of support for it because of its instability, and even more support if you decide to get mucking around in the device properties. The Mac OS provides a lot of help built into its UI where you don't necessarily see it (large hit zones for example) and also uses the same shortcuts between many apps. Plus it supports less hardware, reducing the required complexity behind the scenes and generally increasing stability, and I believe you don't have the same access to tweak it yourself. That sure cuts down the options the user has to digest and work with. I don't know enough about BeOS to speak for it but I'm sure Be users don't go from newbie to wizard in two weeks' time. Command-line OS's have all the complexity of Windows plus no visual cues of how to begin finding out what to do next: you might know enough to try 'help' and '?', but if you have nothing to click on and you don't know what magic words to use, it becomes like an old text adventure (Hitchhiker's Guide comes to mind) where you type anything you can think of hoping that you'll hit the right command. Your complete newbie who doesn't know 'man' probably won't know how to reach the Linux user community for support either: that pile of how-tos may be the only thing they know how to access.
To return to the point, the fact that an OS requires support is, in a twisted way, a sign of its capabilities. How that support is handled could be a flaw or a benefit, but the need for support itself isn't a sign of a bad product. Unless it needs support because it doesn't do what it's supposed to. Having a pile of documentation isn't in itself a bad thing either: nobody is forcing people to read it, it's there if they want it (and know how to find it).
Jenny
People have been doing a great job of checking out every claim LinuxOne makes so far and documenting their every lie, exaggeration, omission, and plagiarism. It would be great if someone were to collect pointers to this stuff onto one page: sort of "Steaming Heap of Truth about LinuxOne." It would be a good resource to point news-types to (or anyone who might be inclined to take this troop of cheats at face value), especially since the source material is from many sources (Business Week, Motley Fool, and LinuxToday as well as /.).
Jenny
I liken Firewire to AGP only in that they both are suitable to high-volume transmissions where some errors are tolerable. Of course you wouldn't make a video board with a Firewire interface to use inside your system. That would be as silly as using Ethernet in place of PCI, which was the idea I jumped all over at first. But there are Firewire video editors, it's showing up in digital cameras, and there's at least a few VCRs out there with it. Probably DVD as well, I just haven't looked recently. The most compelling scenario I've seen for actually using Firewire was in a Popular Mechanics article a few years back that described a home network with the PC as one node but not the controller, and which linked in the VCR, the TV, the cameras at the doors (OK, not a standard home), and the rest of the security system. But that required stringing more cable, and that one fact will probably ensure that wireless grows faster as soon as it hits the magic $200 price point for a complete home setup.
Jenny
Your cell phone only talks to your network. With bluetooth, it will negotiate with any other device. Anyone that wants to can track these devices.
You mean 'any other device within range', which is only about 10 meters. Bluetooth transmits at 1 milliwatt, as compared to about 1.5 watts for a cell phone. You don't get a lot of range at that power, meaning that networks of Bluetooth devices will exist wherever a bunch of them are collected (in a building, basically) but one building-wide network won't be connected to another building. The only way one building worth of Bluetooth devices would be trackable outside that building would be if it was connected to the Internet or if someone is listening with an EXTREMELY sensitive receiver. Internet tracking is something we already know how to fight. As for the sensitive receiver, well, if that kind of capability is deployed nationwide they've been getting an awful lot of cordless phone traffic for a long time now. We can hope that, at 100 mW, the HomeRF transmissions will drown out the Bluetooth ones (they'll both be hopping in the same band).
Forgot how not-blazingly-fast DSL is compared with wired networking: I was thinking of DSL vs dialup. My bad. On to your other point.
if these devices show up everywhere and each is unique then you can be tracked.
Consider another wireless technology in which each access device has a unique identifier and autonegotiates its connection with the base station: cell phones. They can now be tracked (and if I had to call 911 from mine I'd be very grateful for the fact). But remember the furor that arose before that decision was agreed to. Are you referring to the idea that your transactions from your wireless address might be stored and associated with that address? If so, that risk exists now for MAC addresses (as Nick Petreley pointed out months ago in one of his InfoWorld columns--see here). So has the threat materialized? I haven't seen it myself--I've seen the privacy community doing a great job of shining a bright spotlight on anyone trying to do anything like this. I think the threat may not be bigger than cookies.
Jenny
Why does it matter? Wireless networking xmitters should understand ethernet packets. They should not care what OS is producing them.
And in fact they don't. At least not as far as transmission goes. But once you've caught a packet and stripped off the header, what do you do with the contents? Send 'em out serially? Parallel? How are you marking start and stop? That's where OS (and hardware) dependence comes into the picture. And like it or not, one particular OS has most of the market among the businesses who can afford to buy new technology, so that's the OS that people build for.
Because of the OS independence of ethernet, I believe it would have been a better choice than USB as a peripheral bus.
How do you figure? You want as little management overhead on the data part of your peripheral bus as possible: that's why PCI has so many special signals (REQ#, GNT#, FRAME#, etc.) that are just for control of who's got the bus. This leaves the address/data lines free for shoving data as fast as your clock can mark it off. This is an example of the basic rule that hardware can accomplish a given task faster than software but at greater cost: the PCI bus is some 47 signals wide. But pulling 47-strand wire would be a real pain, so Ethernet makes do with 8 and accomplishes all the overhead by encoding it in the packet header, which could be considered software for the purpose of the rule above.
If packaged ethernet PCI cards can sell new for $8, then the ethernet chipset can't be all that expensive to stat building into printers, scanners, etc.
Perhaps you've never heard of a print server? Or network attached storage? These are examples of peripherals that are on the network. The time delay communicating with them is acceptable because people can deal with printing or file accesses taking a while to complete. But would you want your mouse or keyboard to have the same kind of latency? I think not: you'd be shot down each time you respawned while you waited for your mouse movement to process.
But ethernet is not Intel's baby like USB is, so it'll be build onto mboards to the detriment of all that is better. Firewire never had a chance except maybe in the Mac world.
Since when is USB Intel's baby? Last I heard it was its own standard, as in standards organization... USB is not a competitor against Ethernet, it's a competitor against the serial port (and a vastly superior competitor at that). And Firewire is a competitor against, well, something like AGP and something like the home entertainment network that doesn't presently exist. It achieves its greater throughput by eliminating some of the error checking of USB, so you wouldn't want it for file access, where every bit is critical. But it's great for streaming music or video because a bit here or there on those is no great loss. Ethernet doesn't compete against either one--it's for communication among independent systems, where a peripheral bus is for communication among subparts of one system.
Jenny
the bandwidth is comaprable to dsl
Excuse me? Bluetooth's raw data rate is one, that's (1), Mbps. 1/100th the rate of fast Ethernet, and when you strip off the packet headers it's even less. This is comparable to DSL the way that a rowboat is comparable to the Queen Elizabeth II.
There are some things to worry about like will each device have an id; autonegotiation is scary
Of course each will have an ID: its MAC address, just like every network adapter on the planet. What's so scary about the autonegotiation? USB and 1394 handle it fine.
Jenny, incipient wireless engineer
you are basically taking the research of others...their discoveries, hard work, and insights... and stealing them
And who paid for that research and hard work? US taxpayers, that's who. Now in my book, if I paid for it, I own it (or at least I ought to have fair use of it.) Did you miss that point in the initial story? This isn't guys in a garage dreaming up something cool and borrowing money from friends and family to create a company around it. They're using public funds to create knowledge which they are sequestering for private gain.
it hasn't been established that these new companies won't benefit us, the consumer
It hasn't been established that they will either. They certainly won't benefit anyone as much as the folks with stock options in the startups, but those startups will be built on research paid for by the public. If I wanted to contribute my dollars to someone else's enrichment I would do it directly. I do not appreciate my government making that choice for me. And you are out of line to suggest that anyone but the public has an inherent right to benefit from publicly funded research.
Jenny, former coworker of federal scientists
The Postal Service has value because it can deliver an envelope full of paper to any residence in the country for very little money per envelope. But that's a service of decreasing value to individuals: some 90% of mail carried by the Postal Service originates at businesses, and the vast majority of it is not sent first class. Bills are, because they have to be personalized, but advertising, coupons, and credit-card applications are bulk-mailed to everyone in the zip code for far less than $0.33 per piece: I believe it gets as cheap as $0.04 per piece for really huge mailings. Here in the electronic world we call that spam, and it's the majority of my snail mail every day (grump). First-class mail rates subsidize the costs of delivering all the rest of this: why should I pay extra mailing my Christmas cards just to ensure that my local crappy pizza place can send me coupons I'll never use all the rest of the year? Since the vast majority of bulk-rate mail gets thrown away unread and unused, delivering it at a subsidized rate can't be justified as an economic development activity. The USPS should increase the rates on bulk mail (hopefully that will cut down on the amount I get!) and quit raising the first-class rate.
JennyWL
OK, they have an office in Taipei (established 11 days ago). They do not claim another office in China. And they are selling LinuxLite in Chinese, but if it's only a front-end (as another poster pointed out) then output from Linux itself will still be in English. This does not count as a serious localization effort--it's more like slapping a Chinese label over the English on the RedHat box without ever opening it up. Too bad, because localizing Linux would be one way to generate a unique product, and bring Linux to a much larger slice of the world. And isn't it odd that the IPO paperwork doesn't mention ANY of their planned localizations (Spanish and Japanese) of LinuxLite? You would expect a company planning to expand in a major way would highlight all their plans for spending that new investment. Unless they didn't plan to spend it on the company, of course.
Jenny
Ah, but LinuxOne claims to be paying theirs $60-80K per year, US dollars. At those rates, $4677 doesn't go far. And they don't claim to have any employees in China.
Jenny
LinuxOne claims to be reselling, but nobody has found any evidence that they are really doing so. They also claim to have a Chinese-language version of Linux. Again, nobody has seen it. $4677 in software development costs in 1999 would not have been enough to even translate output messages, let alone test the changes. So what we have is a company lying about having products and hoping the financial markets won't see through their story before the IPO hits the boards. I'd call that cause for contempt, and BusinessWeek seems to agree.
Jenny
A previous exchange ran thusly: With the industrial revolution, more jobs required long hours away from home, and women (esp. those with children) were largely excluded.
But why, apart from the ridiculous notion that "the woman's place is in the home?" I think the outcome had more to do with the unwilligness of men to take on childrearing responsibilities.
Certainly that's part of it, but even when men are willing to raise the children they require mom's help until the kids are weaned. Looking back at my anthropology classes, I recall that in hunting-gathering societies children nurse for as long as 2 years, adding in solid foods slowly beginning at 6-8 months. Modern societies transition children off nursing much earlier but they still are exclusively "milkivores" for several months, and until refrigeration became widespread in the last century that meant some woman had to provide the milk. That woman was not necessarily the birth mother (especially among the upper classes who could afford wet nurses) but among the working classes women with children had to bring them along to work so the kid(s) could be fed.
Jenny
When Kurtz says "...a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read...", he's actually right. Both are cruel blows to someone trying to learn (I leave out the many tech support callers who do not want to learn--others have documented them well enough). But then Kurtz makes the leap that a COMIC STRIP making fun of callers learning how to operate a computer is equivalent to REAL LIFE tech support doing the same. COMICS ARE NOT REAL LIFE. They are an escape from real life, where characters say what we wish we could say without losing our jobs. The users calling tech support in the strip aren't real people, so their feelings can't really be hurt.
The people who find the UF tech support strips funny are often those who have lots of things piled up they wish they could say. And as another poster mentioned, teachers tell jokes about their students too, just not where the kids can hear them. I certainly did when I used to teach. It doesn't detract from your ability to be supportive and helpful in the classroom--it makes it easier by removing some of the tension and frustration. Let people have their escape: comic strips are healthier than a lot of other forms I could name. And don't mistake comic strips for real life.
Jenny
Never met anyone with any real level of experience who talks about their major? I guess you don't ever go anywhere where technical people who don't know each other meet then (like conferences, training, or job fairs). Folks in these places talk about not just their present jobs, but also their academic background--helps you find like-minded folks faster. But perhaps you aren't concerned with like-minded folks.
Jenny
Should WE even have a goal in educating newbies? Seems to me the newbie has a goal when she comes to you with a question, and the guru's job then is to help the newbie meet her goal.
Who cares if they screw it up?
Well, the newbie certainly does. Not everyone wants to learn by breaking and then fixing. Should the benefits of Linux be restricted to those who do?
We want to make them thoroughly knowledgeable and capable of exploring new environments on their computers without anyone else's help. This is best for newbies, and while it can be painful and time consuming, is infinitely rewarding, both in and of itself, as well as teaching the person something new.
This is more than a little arrogant. First, not all newbies are the same, and no one thing is best for all of them. Second, newbies != children, and you have no right to declare that the painful and time-consuming approach is really the best despite what the newbies themselves might wish.
This is suspiciously close to the same patronizing 'we know best' attitude that Microsoft exhibits and Linux users decry. Linux is supposed to be a tool for gaining better control over your computer and computing environment. If the Linux community requires everyone to undergo unofficial trials by fire before they get to use this wonderful tool, we are no better than a company that requires trial by checkbook.
Jenny, who still considers herself a newbie
It goes on like this until at the end "Hello, world" has mushroomed into a security system that allows access only with passwords that are less than 7 days old, reports all passwords and their age on request, and records when each user last used their password. AND it checks for errors on file open/close operations and exits gracefully. You literally can't begin any simpler than this, but at the end you've got a lot of syntax you can work with.
A stroll through Linux could begin in the same simple way. What's the easiest thing you might want to do? How about get a directory listing? OK, show them how to use ls. Then go on to some of the options for it (not all of them, newbies don't care about listing in reverse order). Navigate to a different directory (cd, pwd). Create a directory (mkdir). Create symbolic links (I don't know how that's done yet). Explain the difference between a subdirectory and a link--this is something DOS/Win people will have no concept of at first. Mount a drive--and explain why it's needed. Now go on to opening a file with an editor--pico is easiest to start with because all the commands are right there visible. Then, maybe, go into editing configuration files.
The whole idea is to add information in small, measured doses so that your well-meaning newbie doesn't get snowed under too fast. Teach a little bit about a lot of commands, then later go back and fill in all the options you can use with those commands. Unix can have a learning curve like a cliff face if you've never seen a command line before, and the easiest way to learn it is to climb in short bursts with pauses to catch your breath.
Jenny
I'm a registered /. user, but also work for one of the companies that has its own category graphic here. If I see a discussion about a product I've worked on, I can post anonymously and add some info to the discussion that very few other folks would have available (and I've noticed other members of my team doing likewise). If anonymous posting weren't allowed, none of us would jeopardize our jobs, we'd just shut up and the discussion would continue with guesses and misinformation and none of the facts we could have provided. So when you talk about eliminating nuisance AC posts, remember you will also eliminate some posts that ARE of value.
JennyWL