I use an SBC DSL line with a third-party ISP, and I know the people who run this ISP, so I actually know what I'm talking about. The reason SBC wants to force everyone to use PPPoE is simple: they want to take away all the advantages that third party ISPs can give to customers.
My ISP doesn't use PPPoE, and they give everyone a static IP address. These two features, along with the fact that this ISP has several upstream providers (unlike SBC, which has exactly one) and is run by competent and knowledgeable staff, is what makes it an attractive alternative to the local SBC ISP. If you go with SBC's ISP, you have to settle for PPPoE regardless, and they charge an additional 40 bucks a month for a static IP.
With the new ISP contracts SBC is forcing everyone to use, third party ISPs won't be allowed to give out static IP's. Yes, it's technically feasible to do so, but SBC won't let them. So there will be fewer reasons for anyone to go with a third party ISP.
It's a great model: rather than adding features to your own product, just take away features from your competitor's.
Other than at the very beginning of my involvement with Linux, when I downloaded everything onto floppies, I've always purchased a copy of the Linux distros that I use, mainly to support the vendor and also to get cute stickers to put on my computer.
As I recall, I've purchased Slackware 2.3, Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Red Hat 5.1, Red Hat 6.1, Slackware 7.1, and now Slackware 8.0. In most cases, I actually downloaded the distribution first, tried it on a machine, liked it, and bought it.
I suppose the total cost of these must have added up to around $280. When I compare that to buying boxed versions of Windows 95 and Windows 98 for all three machines, it really doesn't look too bad.
At the risk of flogging this horse... I could see this being a reasonable thing to try, since historically a number of air-to-air missiles have been converted into surface-to-air ones (the MIM-72 Chaparral, an adaptation of the AIM-9 Sidewinder; and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow, an adaptation of the AIM-7 Sparrow). Also, there is a version of the humvee called the Avenger that ships with a radar and a small turret with four Stinger surface-to-air missiles on it. This is a good page on the Avenger system.
The only thing is, an AIM-120 AMRAAM is 12 feet long and weighs about 350 lbs, while the humvee is about 15.4 feet long, and with all the required acquisition gear, motorized rotating/elevating mounts, etc, etc, the humvee would get a little top-heavy. By comparison a Stinger missile is 5 feet long and weighs 22 lbs.
So, I guess it could have happened, but I don't see why anyone would want to try that.
I was demo-ing an electronic toll collection system we were developing for an agency, and pretty much everything was ready except for the touch-screen interface used by collectors in the tollbooth. We had to make some last minute adjustments the night before, and thought we'd covered everything. Unfortunately, we did miss a couple of things, and we had a slight bug in the interface. This wasn't a really serious bug in and of itself, and we instructed the guy operating the screen for the demo to hit the [RESET] pad on the screen if something went nuts.
Unfortunately, for our own testing purposes, we had the [RESET] pad reset the state of all the outputs from the system, not just the touch screen handler. And of course we forgot to change that back. And this particular bug happened as the third of three vehicles was entering the booth area, which meant the previous vehicle, an 18-wheeler, was departing, and therefore was next to the upraised toll gate. So the guy in the toll booth sees the problem on the touch screen, and obligingly taps the [RESET] panel, which resets the screen, and the red lights, and... the gate.
So, I'm standing on the left side, and all the suits are standing to the right of the lane, when all of a sudden, BAMM, the gate tries to close and hits the truck trailer. Fortunately, it bounces back, the truck keeps going, and nobody on the other side of the lane was any the wiser. I almost collapsed, but the show went on without any problems after that.
But I always think of how different that would have been if we'd sequenced that particular test so that a car was in that spot instead of a big truck.
Reese Witherspoon wasn't in Clueless. Alicia Silverstone played the blonde stereotype lead character in that one. Witherspoon's characters in various films have been compared to Alicia Silverstone's Clueless character, which may explain the confusion.
It's a shame to see a company like Compaq willing to take such drastic measures for the sake of short term results. They're divesting themselves of the Alpha and basically making themselves slaves to Intel in order to make their quarterly report look good. This is probably great for bonuses at the top, but it's pretty short sighted. And it's really sad to see the company that so revolutionized personal computing in its early years (first portable PC(tm), first 100% compatible IBM PC BIOS clone, first 386 PC, etc) so completely at the mercy of stock market volatility.
Oh, I meant to say: I do this routine four times per week. I typically try to do it five times per week, skipping only Wednesday and Friday evenings, but typically something interferes and I miss another day.
I used to have chronic lower back pain, which came in cycles. I'd be fine for a month, then suddenly it would strike and get progressively worse until by the third day I couldn't stand up straight.
About the same time this was becoming unacceptable, I also decided I was getting too flabby, couldn't dance long enough without getting winded, etc. So I started going to the gym. After several months, I've gotten a pretty good routine: 40 minutes of Precor elliptical cross-trainer, followed by a "total-body" weight workout of 3 sets of 15 reps at low weight on 8 machines, followed by about 100 crunches.
Since the first month of this workout, I haven't had any back problems at all. And I feel better, look better, and can dance longer. Must be working...
Just like any other kind of entertainment or hobby, whether computer use hurts or helps children learn and develop depends on what they do with them. If you sit around and play console games all day, you're not going to learn a whole heck of a lot. If you're obsessive about it, you might even become a bit of a social recluse. On the other hand, if you learn programming and start actually creating something with a computer, you're challenging yourself intellectually, reading, and learning new and useful skills. You might even join a user group or (gasp) get on IRC or Usenet where you'll at least be using the computer to interact with real people in some capacity.
Computers, like any other tool, don't have an automatic inherent effect on their users' development or behavior. Like all other pieces of technology, they amplify the effort the user puts into them. If you want to waste time, a Playstation can help you waste a great deal of it really effectively. If on the other hand you want to learn and create, a computer is a wonderful tool to help you reach those goals.
The author seems a little over-focused on the business aspects of "the Linux desktop". He believes that because Eazel died and Mandrake is having financial difficulties, the sky is falling in. Well, color me unconvinced.
Eazel died because it had no way to make money. Mandrake is having problems because it has never really managed to claw it's way out of Red Hat's shadow. Tough, but have you looked at the number of Linux distributions out there? Can you say market glut?
But these things aren't really relevant. All that these events prove, is that businesses which receive a lot of venture capital funding and don't have any revenue projections will go away. We've seen a lot of non-linux businesses with the same problem suffer the same fate recently.
The fact is that Linux isn't going anywhere. A lot of people use it, as servers, as workstations, and yes, as desktops. And there will always be a community of developers who will add to the body of work that's out there. Whether it's AbiWord or KOffice or GNUMeric or whatever, those applications aren't going to suddenly wink out of existence because some startups' funding dried up. That is exactly the beauty of Open Source -- when the product is free and the source is free, abandonware is an obsolete concept.
And with these desktop projects, as with all other open source projects, people will take up the reins, ant the evolution will continue.
Mundie's real argument, and why it doesn't matter
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Mundie Responds
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Boil it down, Mundie is making three points:
-If Microsoft software were GPL'd, Microsoft couldn't make money. Therefore, the GPL is bad.
-If free software writers use the GPL, then Microsoft can't steal their software to make money. Therefore, the GPL is bad.
-If users select GPL'd software, they can acquire it at no cost and therefore deny Microsoft the revenue from selling them competing software. Therefore, the GPL is bad.
The problem is, Microsoft really doesn't have a leg to stand on. Microsoft can certainly make a case that GPL'd software is bad for Microsoft. But they have provided no evidence whatsoever that GPL'd software is bad for users. And at a time when MS is changing their licencing terms and ramping up a revenue model based on software rentals, their efforts to discredit open source may serve more to show Microsoft's real intentions than to boost their market share.
Re:Everybody's not above average!
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IT Unions?
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Uh, I think you're confusing "average" with "median".
Well, sort of. "Average" is an imprecise term that can mean any of mean, mode, or median. You're talking about the mean, he's really talking about the median.
Granted, when most people think of average they're really thinking of the mean. But strictly speaking any of the three is correct.
Re:Everybody's not above average!
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IT Unions?
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Speak for yourself. By most measures (IQ, SAT score, GPA, income level, credit rating, average salary increase per year, NTN Trivia Player's Plus score) I'm well above average. Odds are not a factor in this.
If I don't like what my employer does, I'll find another job. I've done it before, I would do it again. I don't need to pay a union to bargain for benefits or salary for me, I can do it myself perfectly well with what I bring to the table and what I can do for my employer. If you can't say the same, find another field to work in.
Oh, and I have a perfect driving record. Guess I'm not average there either.
What would be the point?
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IT Unions?
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Unions today exist to give non-highly-skilled laborers artificial leverage to increase their salaries to a level which the job market would not ordinarily pay. Good IT workers are not easy to find, and because of the relatively high degree of specialization within IT professions, once a person has been in the IT field for a few years, he or she can usually command a fairly high salary by virtue of experience with a specific technology or within a specific industry. Because of this segmentation of the IT field, there just isn't the need for IT people to unionize.
This would be funny if it weren't basically true
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TCP/IP Over HTTP
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If you look at the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol, RFC 2567), you'll notice that it's a protocol designed to encapsulate printing in HTTP POST operations. The motivation for this? Ease of administration, since so many firewalls out there already allow HTTP out, it makes remote printing much easier for end users. Of course, the fact that HTTP is basically a client-driven, instantaneous response protocol totally inappropriate to things like delayed spooled printing and reporting of asynchronous printer error conditions hasn't ever stopped the IETF from forging ahead with this.
Because it's not human, assuming we could easily overpower it, we'd kill it and dissect it, and take apart all of its technology. Then the other aliens on the mother ship would figure out that we're some kind of horrible parasite devouring all of the planet's atmosphere and natural resources, kill us all with some sort of genetically engineered microphage, and make first contact with the dolphins.
This only makes sense. As the PC becomes less of a computer and more of an entertainment device, it only serves Microsoft's monopolistic desires to have a MS-only, proprietary media format. The recording industries will only want to release media in this secure format because of this, Microsoft and Intel will have cornered the market on multimedia. One hand washes the other.
And, of course, consumers will flock to the new system since it's the only way they'll be allowed to use the media they so desperately want. And you won't be able to claim restraint of trade or any of that -- look how much choice you have! Why, you can buy your PC from Dell or Gateway OR IBM, and you can play stuff from Time-Warner or Sony or Disney!
He makes a great point. It doesn't really matter how good your hardware is, if you don't have a good set of well known games to run on your console people won't buy it.
Atari figured this out in the early 80's, which is why despite the fact that their 2600 machine was terrible compared to its competition at the time, it was wildly successful. They had some of the best-known games on the market - Space Invaders, then Asteroids (easy since they owned that), then Pac Man, and even Donkey Kong (Mario again!). And even though Atari's Pac Man was horrible, they had an exclusive licence for it so if you wanted to play a Pac-Man-like game at home you pretty much had to buy a 2600. They enforced their licence really aggressively, I remember when they sued Magnavox and made them recall the KC Munchkin game for the Odyssey/VideoPac. KC was a far, far better game, and ran on a much better platform, but what Atari couldn't beat with better silicon it beat with better lawyers.
If you ask me, the video game crash of 1983-1986 pretty much served them right.
Most people who get CS degrees are the farthest thing from being actual computer "scientists". Real computer science is basically mathematics - whether it is finite automata or database normalization, it boils down to math.
On the other hand, computer programming, which is really what the vast majority of CS people do, is the farthest thing from science. If it were done with discipline and planning, you might be able to call it engineering, but really when you look at the way software is actually created, it can't even be called that.
So let's not flatter ourselves. The fact that you use computers as a tool in true scientific research, or you program computers to do specific tasks, in no way makes you a computer scientist.
Is it so unthinkable that "morons" could be enlightened by others or *gasp* themselves during exposure to the net?
Yes.
I think it boils down to what your definition of "moron" is. Is it any user who doesen't like the things you like or think the same way as you? Or is it merely a status thing, the fact that you've been online longer than them?
No. They're morons.
One thing I will enjoy when the "giant mass of people" begin filtering in is an end to this pointless net-elitism and a beginning to more thought diversity.
Net-elitism isn't pointless. The signal-to-noise ratio on most internet forums has dropped to the point of uselessness. Before the "thought diversity" started, it was possible to find real discussions about real subjects with real knowledgeable people. Now you can't, because everything is drowned out by first-posters and idiots.
Lastly, I find it laughable that you believe that "giant media corporations" are going to start dictating content and that the "masses" will swallow it without question.
Laugh away, but it's still going to happen. People can't handle real interactivity in large groups, they just destroy everything and turn it into a wash of white noise. The reason for this is that they just want other people to respond to them, they want to be entertained without having to be entertaining. So yes, they will happily swallow mass-media content without question, because it will give them the online experience they really want. Consumption without thought or effort.
Yes, I have an elitist attitude about this. I see the internet as a medium that was once useful for research and intelligent discussion rapidly degenerating into chaos. On the one hand, you have the text-only forums being drowned out by DDoS attacks (IRC) or abused (UseNet). They won't last. Free web providers are consolidating and will eventually disappear because they can't survive on ad revenues alone. And eventually all that will be left is the same drivel we have on television, brough to you by the same people and with the same level of intelligence.
Back before the internet sucked, every September brought a new influx of college students who experienced internet access for the first time. For about four weeks newsgroups and IRC were in chaos as people flamed, ranted, and trolled away merrily. Then 99% of these people discovered alcohol, dating, football, or classes, and went away.
Unfortunately, now we have a steady influx of new "netizens" all the time, and television, magazine, and radio ads encouraging more and more clueless people to join the internet revolution. This is the problem. You no longer need to be at a university, fairly large high-tech corporation, or government agency to get on the Net, any moron can do it. And most morons, unfortunately, do.
And that's the problem. There is no "vision", there is no evolution of anything with meaning on the Internet. It's just a giant mass of people, most of whom have nothing to say, trying as hard as they can to say it and be heard.
Oh well, it hardly matters any more. Everything worthwhile and free is being destroyed by idiots (IRC servers being taken down by packet kids, newsgroups being turned into porn and warez clearinghouses are useless for discussions, etc) and the other "free" forums are dying off as the advertising revenue that kept them going dries up. In a few more years the only "content" will be provided by giant media corporations. Interactivity will be limited to choosing from a set of pasteurized, homogenized "content" designed to maximize clickthroughs and eyeballs. The Net, like everything else that gains mass popularity, will fall to the lowest common denominator.
And we deserve it.
Map of DSL-Enabled Telephone Exchanges
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The Modem Lives On
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Here's a map I found on dslreports.com, which shows DSL-enabled Central Offices in green and non-DSL ones in red. It was put up on February 24 2001 so it's current.
I know, this only covers DSL and not cable, but it does give a pretty interesting picture nonetheless.
Valenti, the MPAA, and Distribution
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Hannibal's Return
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Isn't it funny that the same organization which can determine whether or not a movie is shown in theaters -- by means of the rating system -- is also the one that can determine whether and when it can be seen on your DVD player -- by means of Region Codes? Isn't it interesting how this organization has managed to get so much power that merely by assigning a letter or two ('R' or 'PG') or a number (region '1' or '3') they alone can make entertainment decisions for literally millions of people?
Doesn't anyone see anything just a little bit wrong with that?
quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur -- that which is said in Latin sounds profound
Sorry, but no. There is no documentation anywhere to tell you that you need to read the ata(4) man page to find out about the disk driver or the syscons(4) man page to find out about video modes. Yes, once you do find that out, the man pages are nice enough. But there is woefully little meta-information out there, and that is my point.
What I was trying to say in my original post, and I must have been unclear because you've missed it completely, is that more FreeBSD books is a good thing because the Web resources are sorely lacking. There are dozens upon dozens of excellent Linux texts, and there is the very nice and informative Linux Documentation Project, but there are about three FreeBSD-specific books and no real equivalent to the LDP.
Yes, I know that BSD is Unix and you don't "need" FreeBSD-specific books, but things like disk drivers and video drivers, which are _very_ specific to an operating system, should be documented somewhere. Having to search through every man page or rummage through the "excellent, logically laid out" source tree to find what boils down to basic configuration information is idiotic.
At any rate, it hardly matters any more. The little exposure I've had to the FreeBSD culture as a whole, on the web and on IRC, has pretty well turned me off on the entire idea. I used to think that too many Linux users had this 31337 attitude, but really the FreeBSD "advocates" have impressed me with just how much farther this sort of thing can be taken. Have fun with your (excellent) OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I use an SBC DSL line with a third-party ISP, and I know the people who run this ISP, so I actually know what I'm talking about. The reason SBC wants to force everyone to use PPPoE is simple: they want to take away all the advantages that third party ISPs can give to customers.
My ISP doesn't use PPPoE, and they give everyone a static IP address. These two features, along with the fact that this ISP has several upstream providers (unlike SBC, which has exactly one) and is run by competent and knowledgeable staff, is what makes it an attractive alternative to the local SBC ISP. If you go with SBC's ISP, you have to settle for PPPoE regardless, and they charge an additional 40 bucks a month for a static IP.
With the new ISP contracts SBC is forcing everyone to use, third party ISPs won't be allowed to give out static IP's. Yes, it's technically feasible to do so, but SBC won't let them. So there will be fewer reasons for anyone to go with a third party ISP.
It's a great model: rather than adding features to your own product, just take away features from your competitor's.
Other than at the very beginning of my involvement with Linux, when I downloaded everything onto floppies, I've always purchased a copy of the Linux distros that I use, mainly to support the vendor and also to get cute stickers to put on my computer.
As I recall, I've purchased Slackware 2.3, Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Red Hat 5.1, Red Hat 6.1, Slackware 7.1, and now Slackware 8.0. In most cases, I actually downloaded the distribution first, tried it on a machine, liked it, and bought it.
I suppose the total cost of these must have added up to around $280. When I compare that to buying boxed versions of Windows 95 and Windows 98 for all three machines, it really doesn't look too bad.
At the risk of flogging this horse... I could see this being a reasonable thing to try, since historically a number of air-to-air missiles have been converted into surface-to-air ones (the MIM-72 Chaparral, an adaptation of the AIM-9 Sidewinder; and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow, an adaptation of the AIM-7 Sparrow). Also, there is a version of the humvee called the Avenger that ships with a radar and a small turret with four Stinger surface-to-air missiles on it. This is a good page on the Avenger system.
The only thing is, an AIM-120 AMRAAM is 12 feet long and weighs about 350 lbs, while the humvee is about 15.4 feet long, and with all the required acquisition gear, motorized rotating/elevating mounts, etc, etc, the humvee would get a little top-heavy. By comparison a Stinger missile is 5 feet long and weighs 22 lbs.
So, I guess it could have happened, but I don't see why anyone would want to try that.
I was demo-ing an electronic toll collection system we were developing for an agency, and pretty much everything was ready except for the touch-screen interface used by collectors in the tollbooth. We had to make some last minute adjustments the night before, and thought we'd covered everything. Unfortunately, we did miss a couple of things, and we had a slight bug in the interface. This wasn't a really serious bug in and of itself, and we instructed the guy operating the screen for the demo to hit the [RESET] pad on the screen if something went nuts.
Unfortunately, for our own testing purposes, we had the [RESET] pad reset the state of all the outputs from the system, not just the touch screen handler. And of course we forgot to change that back. And this particular bug happened as the third of three vehicles was entering the booth area, which meant the previous vehicle, an 18-wheeler, was departing, and therefore was next to the upraised toll gate. So the guy in the toll booth sees the problem on the touch screen, and obligingly taps the [RESET] panel, which resets the screen, and the red lights, and... the gate.
So, I'm standing on the left side, and all the suits are standing to the right of the lane, when all of a sudden, BAMM, the gate tries to close and hits the truck trailer. Fortunately, it bounces back, the truck keeps going, and nobody on the other side of the lane was any the wiser. I almost collapsed, but the show went on without any problems after that.
But I always think of how different that would have been if we'd sequenced that particular test so that a car was in that spot instead of a big truck.
Reese Witherspoon wasn't in Clueless. Alicia Silverstone played the blonde stereotype lead character in that one. Witherspoon's characters in various films have been compared to Alicia Silverstone's Clueless character, which may explain the confusion.
It's a shame to see a company like Compaq willing to take such drastic measures for the sake of short term results. They're divesting themselves of the Alpha and basically making themselves slaves to Intel in order to make their quarterly report look good. This is probably great for bonuses at the top, but it's pretty short sighted. And it's really sad to see the company that so revolutionized personal computing in its early years (first portable PC(tm), first 100% compatible IBM PC BIOS clone, first 386 PC, etc) so completely at the mercy of stock market volatility.
Oh, I meant to say: I do this routine four times per week. I typically try to do it five times per week, skipping only Wednesday and Friday evenings, but typically something interferes and I miss another day.
I used to have chronic lower back pain, which came in cycles. I'd be fine for a month, then suddenly it would strike and get progressively worse until by the third day I couldn't stand up straight.
About the same time this was becoming unacceptable, I also decided I was getting too flabby, couldn't dance long enough without getting winded, etc. So I started going to the gym. After several months, I've gotten a pretty good routine: 40 minutes of Precor elliptical cross-trainer, followed by a "total-body" weight workout of 3 sets of 15 reps at low weight on 8 machines, followed by about 100 crunches.
Since the first month of this workout, I haven't had any back problems at all. And I feel better, look better, and can dance longer. Must be working...
Just like any other kind of entertainment or hobby, whether computer use hurts or helps children learn and develop depends on what they do with them. If you sit around and play console games all day, you're not going to learn a whole heck of a lot. If you're obsessive about it, you might even become a bit of a social recluse. On the other hand, if you learn programming and start actually creating something with a computer, you're challenging yourself intellectually, reading, and learning new and useful skills. You might even join a user group or (gasp) get on IRC or Usenet where you'll at least be using the computer to interact with real people in some capacity.
Computers, like any other tool, don't have an automatic inherent effect on their users' development or behavior. Like all other pieces of technology, they amplify the effort the user puts into them. If you want to waste time, a Playstation can help you waste a great deal of it really effectively. If on the other hand you want to learn and create, a computer is a wonderful tool to help you reach those goals.
The author seems a little over-focused on the business aspects of "the Linux desktop". He believes that because Eazel died and Mandrake is having financial difficulties, the sky is falling in. Well, color me unconvinced.
Eazel died because it had no way to make money. Mandrake is having problems because it has never really managed to claw it's way out of Red Hat's shadow. Tough, but have you looked at the number of Linux distributions out there? Can you say market glut?
But these things aren't really relevant. All that these events prove, is that businesses which receive a lot of venture capital funding and don't have any revenue projections will go away. We've seen a lot of non-linux businesses with the same problem suffer the same fate recently.
The fact is that Linux isn't going anywhere. A lot of people use it, as servers, as workstations, and yes, as desktops. And there will always be a community of developers who will add to the body of work that's out there. Whether it's AbiWord or KOffice or GNUMeric or whatever, those applications aren't going to suddenly wink out of existence because some startups' funding dried up. That is exactly the beauty of Open Source -- when the product is free and the source is free, abandonware is an obsolete concept.
And with these desktop projects, as with all other open source projects, people will take up the reins, ant the evolution will continue.
Boil it down, Mundie is making three points:
-If Microsoft software were GPL'd, Microsoft couldn't make money. Therefore, the GPL is bad.
-If free software writers use the GPL, then Microsoft can't steal their software to make money. Therefore, the GPL is bad.
-If users select GPL'd software, they can acquire it at no cost and therefore deny Microsoft the revenue from selling them competing software. Therefore, the GPL is bad.
The problem is, Microsoft really doesn't have a leg to stand on. Microsoft can certainly make a case that GPL'd software is bad for Microsoft. But they have provided no evidence whatsoever that GPL'd software is bad for users. And at a time when MS is changing their licencing terms and ramping up a revenue model based on software rentals, their efforts to discredit open source may serve more to show Microsoft's real intentions than to boost their market share.
Uh, I think you're confusing "average" with "median".
Well, sort of. "Average" is an imprecise term that can mean any of mean, mode, or median. You're talking about the mean, he's really talking about the median.
Granted, when most people think of average they're really thinking of the mean. But strictly speaking any of the three is correct.
Speak for yourself. By most measures (IQ, SAT score, GPA, income level, credit rating, average salary increase per year, NTN Trivia Player's Plus score) I'm well above average. Odds are not a factor in this.
If I don't like what my employer does, I'll find another job. I've done it before, I would do it again. I don't need to pay a union to bargain for benefits or salary for me, I can do it myself perfectly well with what I bring to the table and what I can do for my employer. If you can't say the same, find another field to work in.
Oh, and I have a perfect driving record. Guess I'm not average there either.
Unions today exist to give non-highly-skilled laborers artificial leverage to increase their salaries to a level which the job market would not ordinarily pay. Good IT workers are not easy to find, and because of the relatively high degree of specialization within IT professions, once a person has been in the IT field for a few years, he or she can usually command a fairly high salary by virtue of experience with a specific technology or within a specific industry. Because of this segmentation of the IT field, there just isn't the need for IT people to unionize.
If you look at the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol, RFC 2567), you'll notice that it's a protocol designed to encapsulate printing in HTTP POST operations. The motivation for this? Ease of administration, since so many firewalls out there already allow HTTP out, it makes remote printing much easier for end users. Of course, the fact that HTTP is basically a client-driven, instantaneous response protocol totally inappropriate to things like delayed spooled printing and reporting of asynchronous printer error conditions hasn't ever stopped the IETF from forging ahead with this.
All hail the Printer Working Group!
You've been watching too much self-praising ecospeak.
You've been watching too much Star Trek.
Because it's not human, assuming we could easily overpower it, we'd kill it and dissect it, and take apart all of its technology. Then the other aliens on the mother ship would figure out that we're some kind of horrible parasite devouring all of the planet's atmosphere and natural resources, kill us all with some sort of genetically engineered microphage, and make first contact with the dolphins.
This only makes sense. As the PC becomes less of a computer and more of an entertainment device, it only serves Microsoft's monopolistic desires to have a MS-only, proprietary media format. The recording industries will only want to release media in this secure format because of this, Microsoft and Intel will have cornered the market on multimedia. One hand washes the other.
And, of course, consumers will flock to the new system since it's the only way they'll be allowed to use the media they so desperately want. And you won't be able to claim restraint of trade or any of that -- look how much choice you have! Why, you can buy your PC from Dell or Gateway OR IBM, and you can play stuff from Time-Warner or Sony or Disney!
All is well. Procreate. Consume.
He makes a great point. It doesn't really matter how good your hardware is, if you don't have a good set of well known games to run on your console people won't buy it.
Atari figured this out in the early 80's, which is why despite the fact that their 2600 machine was terrible compared to its competition at the time, it was wildly successful. They had some of the best-known games on the market - Space Invaders, then Asteroids (easy since they owned that), then Pac Man, and even Donkey Kong (Mario again!). And even though Atari's Pac Man was horrible, they had an exclusive licence for it so if you wanted to play a Pac-Man-like game at home you pretty much had to buy a 2600. They enforced their licence really aggressively, I remember when they sued Magnavox and made them recall the KC Munchkin game for the Odyssey/VideoPac. KC was a far, far better game, and ran on a much better platform, but what Atari couldn't beat with better silicon it beat with better lawyers.
If you ask me, the video game crash of 1983-1986 pretty much served them right.
Most people who get CS degrees are the farthest thing from being actual computer "scientists". Real computer science is basically mathematics - whether it is finite automata or database normalization, it boils down to math.
On the other hand, computer programming, which is really what the vast majority of CS people do, is the farthest thing from science. If it were done with discipline and planning, you might be able to call it engineering, but really when you look at the way software is actually created, it can't even be called that.
So let's not flatter ourselves. The fact that you use computers as a tool in true scientific research, or you program computers to do specific tasks, in no way makes you a computer scientist.
Is it so unthinkable that "morons" could be enlightened by others or *gasp* themselves during exposure to the net?
Yes.
I think it boils down to what your definition of "moron" is. Is it any user who doesen't like the things you like or think the same way as you? Or is it merely a status thing, the fact that you've been online longer than them?
No. They're morons.
One thing I will enjoy when the "giant mass of people" begin filtering in is an end to this pointless net-elitism and a beginning to more thought diversity.
Net-elitism isn't pointless. The signal-to-noise ratio on most internet forums has dropped to the point of uselessness. Before the "thought diversity" started, it was possible to find real discussions about real subjects with real knowledgeable people. Now you can't, because everything is drowned out by first-posters and idiots.
Lastly, I find it laughable that you believe that "giant media corporations" are going to start dictating content and that the "masses" will swallow it without question.
Laugh away, but it's still going to happen. People can't handle real interactivity in large groups, they just destroy everything and turn it into a wash of white noise. The reason for this is that they just want other people to respond to them, they want to be entertained without having to be entertaining. So yes, they will happily swallow mass-media content without question, because it will give them the online experience they really want. Consumption without thought or effort.
Yes, I have an elitist attitude about this. I see the internet as a medium that was once useful for research and intelligent discussion rapidly degenerating into chaos. On the one hand, you have the text-only forums being drowned out by DDoS attacks (IRC) or abused (UseNet). They won't last. Free web providers are consolidating and will eventually disappear because they can't survive on ad revenues alone. And eventually all that will be left is the same drivel we have on television, brough to you by the same people and with the same level of intelligence.
All is well. Procreate. Consume.
Back before the internet sucked, every September brought a new influx of college students who experienced internet access for the first time. For about four weeks newsgroups and IRC were in chaos as people flamed, ranted, and trolled away merrily. Then 99% of these people discovered alcohol, dating, football, or classes, and went away.
Unfortunately, now we have a steady influx of new "netizens" all the time, and television, magazine, and radio ads encouraging more and more clueless people to join the internet revolution. This is the problem. You no longer need to be at a university, fairly large high-tech corporation, or government agency to get on the Net, any moron can do it. And most morons, unfortunately, do.
And that's the problem. There is no "vision", there is no evolution of anything with meaning on the Internet. It's just a giant mass of people, most of whom have nothing to say, trying as hard as they can to say it and be heard.
Oh well, it hardly matters any more. Everything worthwhile and free is being destroyed by idiots (IRC servers being taken down by packet kids, newsgroups being turned into porn and warez clearinghouses are useless for discussions, etc) and the other "free" forums are dying off as the advertising revenue that kept them going dries up. In a few more years the only "content" will be provided by giant media corporations. Interactivity will be limited to choosing from a set of pasteurized, homogenized "content" designed to maximize clickthroughs and eyeballs. The Net, like everything else that gains mass popularity, will fall to the lowest common denominator.
And we deserve it.
Here's a map I found on dslreports.com, which shows DSL-enabled Central Offices in green and non-DSL ones in red. It was put up on February 24 2001 so it's current.
The map is Here.
I know, this only covers DSL and not cable, but it does give a pretty interesting picture nonetheless.
Isn't it funny that the same organization which can determine whether or not a movie is shown in theaters -- by means of the rating system -- is also the one that can determine whether and when it can be seen on your DVD player -- by means of Region Codes? Isn't it interesting how this organization has managed to get so much power that merely by assigning a letter or two ('R' or 'PG') or a number (region '1' or '3') they alone can make entertainment decisions for literally millions of people?
Doesn't anyone see anything just a little bit wrong with that?
quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur -- that which is said in Latin sounds profound
Sorry, but no. There is no documentation anywhere to tell you that you need to read the ata(4) man page to find out about the disk driver or the syscons(4) man page to find out about video modes. Yes, once you do find that out, the man pages are nice enough. But there is woefully little meta-information out there, and that is my point.
What I was trying to say in my original post, and I must have been unclear because you've missed it completely, is that more FreeBSD books is a good thing because the Web resources are sorely lacking. There are dozens upon dozens of excellent Linux texts, and there is the very nice and informative Linux Documentation Project, but there are about three FreeBSD-specific books and no real equivalent to the LDP.
Yes, I know that BSD is Unix and you don't "need" FreeBSD-specific books, but things like disk drivers and video drivers, which are _very_ specific to an operating system, should be documented somewhere. Having to search through every man page or rummage through the "excellent, logically laid out" source tree to find what boils down to basic configuration information is idiotic.
At any rate, it hardly matters any more. The little exposure I've had to the FreeBSD culture as a whole, on the web and on IRC, has pretty well turned me off on the entire idea. I used to think that too many Linux users had this 31337 attitude, but really the FreeBSD "advocates" have impressed me with just how much farther this sort of thing can be taken. Have fun with your (excellent) OS.