Nothing against Macs, but I'm not very Mac compatible. I have never found the Mac interface to be easy or natural or intuitive. What it is, is consistent. Which is really important. But I'm pretty sure that I personally would HATE using a Mac. I think that my future OS-Interface will be Linux-KDE. I have a Linux KDE system running and sometimes use it. It's usable, but still has a few rough edges. For the time being, Windows 9 does everything I need to do and more crisply and responsively than the much faster XP boxes elsewhere in the house. I really don't expect to have to move on for a few more years.
I certainly wouldn't discourage others from using a Mac, and, in fact, for the past few years, I've been encouraging people to look at them when buying a new PC.
I'm generally really skeptical about things like this, but this one looks sort of OK. The basic idea apparently is to overload the sensors on heat seeking missiles. So, what could possibly go wrong is likely that the missile will not be disabled, but will maybe lock onto the laser instead of the engine. That might be an improvement as having a heat seaking missile fly up one of the engine exhausts and detonate most likely is not a good thing.
This doesn't sound like something that will blow up the jet in the adjacent jetway when it accidentaly is activated. Or destroy six gates and maim 1000 waiting passengers. Or anything like that.
Considering that there are quite possibly an unknown number of US Stinger and Soviet SA-7 missiles floating around in the inventory of arms dealers in the shadier parts of the world, this anti-missile laser might be an OK idea.
At least, I'd like to hear why I'm wrong about this, as I will probably learn something I didn't know.
***People like you are the reason the rest of the Internet has to put up with assaults from 10,000+ zombie botnets.***
No, my totally confused friend. the problem is more people like YOU. Those botnets are not running on Windows 9 PCs. They are on NT based Windows PCs -- often on "fully patched" ones. Why? Because Microsoft foolishly enabled a gazillion vulnerable services when they switched to NT based windows architecture. They've improved things to some extent (took them a while though, didn't it?), but no where near enough IMHO. Windows 9 is not designed to be secure, but it has far fewer vulnerabilities. And detecting and removing malware on Windows 9 is (usually) not all that hard. Not that I've seen a lot lately. But then I'm behind an NAT router, don't do HTML eMail, don't click on strange links, got IE off my Windows 98 machine before I connected it to the Internet and only enable Javascript for sites that REALLY need it and that I trust.
If you wish to believe that downloading updates frantically from a variety of websites will keep your state of the art system secure, I doubt that I can change your mind. But if you have ever been involved in software quality assurance or configuration control even tangentially, you should know in your heart that is a fantasy. Updates are usually reactive, often inadequately tested, and sometimes defective.
Something else you might want to think about. Windows Update is an accident waiting to happen. Sooner or later, MS is going to release a patch that breaks millions of PCs or someone is going to hijack the IP and brick or zombieate hundreds of thousands of PCs. MS actually did release an Windows 98 update a number of years ago that broke IDE. Fortunately, the number of Windows Update users at that time was quite small. That should be all the warning that is needed, but IT folk tend often to be slow learners
Which would you rather have? An old car that starts, runs, and gets you to where you want to go, or a new car that can't go three weeks between breakdowns or recalls? Sure, you'd rather have a shiny new car that runs perfectly. So would I. But it 'taint available. When it is, I'll buy one -- probably. 'Til then, I believe that I'll stick with stuff that works.
***Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP.***
That's sort of like overall this year's flu virus is a lot like last year's. Or President Bush's new Iraq strategy isn't much different from the old strategy. Hardly a recommendation.
I just spent an hour finding and killing some mysterious Browser Helper Object on my wife's XP-SP2 PC that devoted its life to helping out the browser by popping up ads in IE. At least I think I killed it. Every year, the malware gets more clever. Every release, the software gets more bloated and complex. Every year, the Internet becomes more of a mess and it is harder to find information on exorcising malware, or on persuading Windows to do even the most simple and basic things. And every year I get older, dumber, and less interested in dinking with Windows just in order to do stuff I do find interesting.
Screw it. I never upgraded to XP, and I don't believe that I'll be upgrading to Vista. I have finally moved from Windows 95 to Windows 98 despite the fact that W95 boots faster and runs as well. But only because I think eventually I will need USB that works and I don't think that will ever be available in Windows 95.
I don't really hate Microsoft, but they are going to have to do a lot better than NT based Windows desktops to make me a customer again. Let me know when MS releases an OS worth buying. It hasn't happened for quite a few years, and doesn't look likely to happen again any time soon.
***I wouldn't necessarily keep looking to the telcos for broadband access. It seems to me that there's an increasing number of options to the consumers, including more rural areas. If you can't get DSL, then what about cable (there's more of it strung up in the countryside than most people realize)? If you can't get cable, what about satellite?***
Good questions:
With a few exceptions cable coverage is even worse in Vermont than DSL coverage. Adelphia was supposed to string cable wherever they had (as I recall) 13 potential customers per mile of road. Didn't happen. Now that Comcast has taken over the bankrupt Adelphi operation (cause of bankrupcy -- run by crooks, not economic realities), I'm not optimistic that things will improve any. Yes there are some other cable franchises in a few towns. Not many.
Satellite is great for TV -- and, if anything, a bit cheaper than cable. That's one reason why cable doesn't go beyond the suburbs such as they are. (The big city -- Burlington -- has less than 40,000 people). Trouble is that satellites have problems with the quarter second round trip delay out to synchronous orbit that are difficult -- maybe impossible -- to overcome. You CAN surf the net via satellite, but I'm told that it's not always that happy an experience. When I looked into it for a rural school a few years ago, the technical problems for a bunch of users multiplexed onto an NAT router were VERY intimidating.
In theory, wireless is an answer. Two problems. First, the dot-com bubble burst before many wireless providers actually got on the air. It's not clear that the technology works satisfactorily even where the topography is favorable. Second, the topography in Vermont is not friendly to radio waves. Most people live in the woods in valleys. Cell phones are iffy in much of the state including major highways not all that many miles from population centers. I've gotten better and more consistent cell phone signals in the remote areas of the Great Basin than in Vermont.
How about broadband via power line? As far as I know, it works OK in demonstrations, but not all that well in reality. Lots of hype. Little reality.
We Americans have somehow gotten the idea that DSL is expensive to implement. I think we got that information from the big telcos -- which is a lot like getting information on global warming from Chevron. I'd ask two questions. How can Waitsfield Telecom provide DSL to a bunch of tiny towns -- most of which aren't big enough to rate a traffic light? (They are subsidized by the Universal Service Fund, but so are other rural customers). The second question is how Canada is able to provide DSL at reasonable rates to wide spots in the road in scattered across regions that make Tibet look like a teeming metropolis population-wise.
Verizon, OTOH, somehow can't get DSL to towns of several thousand that are less than a half hour drive from the corner of Church and Main in downtown Burlington.
***Michael Crichton (the Harvard-educated scientist who wrote Coma, Jurassic Park and A State Of Fear, among other things) vs Al Gore (inventor of the Internet) battle? If we're scientists, where is our skepticism?***
Crichton's point exactly AFAICS. Crichton's position seems to be that only three facts re global warming are well established:
Worlwide temperatures have increased slightly in recent years
Industrial society is pumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere -- significant amounts.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas
The rest, he maintains, is bad science -- drawing unwarrented conclusions from insufficient evidence. I don't think he's entirely wrong about that.
OTOH, I don't think anyone has asked him if pumping large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere when we have not the slightest idea to get it out is a good idea. Personally, I think it is not. I wonder what Crichton thinks.
***With Verizon aggressively rolling out high-speed FiOS (FTTP) in its service area, what will happen to the consumers stuck with a smaller telco like those moving to FairPoint?" ***
Rural customers in Vermont couldn't get DSL from Bell Atlantic. And they still can't now that the bills have a Verison logo on them. Oddly, they can get DSL from some of the smaller local providers -- notably Waitsfield Telecom which is pretty much the poster child for usable rural broadband for customers in its service area in the Central part of the state.
Unless the Vermont Public Service Commission suddenly grows some balls -- something they've never shown much sign of having -- I imagine that things will get worse, not better with this sale. The governor says that broadband is one of his priorities. But IMO he's a political hack -- mostly mouth. OTOH, occasionally I'm pleasantly suprised. Maybe Jim Douglas or the next governor or the one after that will take some meaningful action.
***I read the WSJ, and it seems that every other day or so, a WSJ tech story comes onto/. Is it just some special, year-long coincidence, or does the WSJ have a godlike tech section in addition to the greatest business section ever?***
Just a guess, but my general feeling is that the rather small free portion of the WSJ web site is heavily weighted toward tech material. At least that was the case last year when I checked the WSJ site most days. Haven't got around to setting up a link yet on this PC.
***Well, there are people who like to think that they're smart enough that they don't have to pay any mind to "society's rules", that their extreme brilliance is all that they need. Geeks are notorious for that, although often unfairly stereotyped to the extremes. But in generally, things like "I'm going to wear t-shirts and sandals to business meetings, and they can go ahead and fire me if they don't like it" are basically symptoms of the same thing.***
In my experience, it isn't a matter of thinking that they are too smart to pay attention to "society's rules". It is a perception (more or less correct AFAICS) that anyone who thinks 'society's rules' are important is a either a fool, a knave, or both. The basic problem is a surely mistaken belief on the part of the eccentrics that people are really smart enough to see through phonies and demagouges. They believe that this time freedom, justice, and actual worth will triumph over superfical "values". Regretably Iprobably), it rarely works out that way, although it might well be a better, safer, and happier world if it did.
The first law of social dynamics: Never trust a man who owns and uses a blow drier.
***Agreed. GUIs are detestable for many reasons I will not elaborate here***
Speaking only for myself, I'd like to hear your reasons for detesting GUIs. I suppose that they might be considered off topic, but it'd still be nice to hear some arguments against GUI-abuse -- other than the fairly obvious fact the GUI software tends to be difficult or impossible to script reliably.
Who knows, if enough people start looking critically at the current Graphical User Interfaces, maybe we'll start getting GUIs that everyone agrees are better.
There are a number of problems with laptops in enterprise situations.
Repair is next to impossible. So, if the screen acts up, the whole PC is scrapped. That's not great since there never seems to be enough budget for all the things IT wants to do. About the only things you can economically repair in a typical laptop are the hard drive and the battery... And the battery is just an aggravating, unecessary component if the laptop is used in place of a desktop.
Laptops are kind of fragile.
Laptops simply cost too much compared to desktops.
It used to be the case, and probably still is that laptops compromise performance for better battery life.
Laptops are rather inflexible with regard to positioning. You can usually tuck a desktop out of the way, and just expose the monitor and keyboard to the user. Can't do that with a laptop.
Laptop keyboards suck. Even if the feel is decent, the keys are too close together and poorly laid out.
Laptops are entirely too portable. They need to be nailed down (more cost and labor) in a lot of environments if you expect them not to walk off. {The classic desktop case is a bit hard to tuck into a backpack. Theft may be more of a problem with smaller cases).
Are laptops and rack servers replacing some desktop systems? Sure. Are desktop systems going to go away? Not any time soon.
The Via CPU based boards and computers look really neat, but there seem to (have been? be?) some issues with Linux on those CPUs. See http://www.mini-itx.com/faq.asp for example. I don't think that link is a definitive discussion, It's just the first rational link I got with a Google search. I have read similar things elsewhere.
Anyway, unless I was sure that I only wanted to use Windows (or some other OS that is known to work), I'd do some research before buying these boards -- no matter that they look REALLY, REALLY neat.
***one reason it has taken so long for HDTV to catch on is that at one point there were 40 different standards floating around.***
Well, yes, it probably is. But's not the only reason or even the primary reason. Reasons why HDTV hasn't caught on:
Not that many stations on the air because no one thought to ask how long it would take to put up new transmitters and antennae for essentially every TV station in the US. [Answer... quite a while]
High cost of DTV recievers and the fact that many households have LOTS of analog TVs (we have six in regular use and a couple of more in the garage)
Lack of quality programming and way too many commercials. I sure don't need HDTV to watch fluorescent (or phosphorescent, I'm not sure which) moths flit around the screen for twelve minutes out of every hour. And that's one of the less annoying ads.
Lack of cable bandwidth for HDTV over and above current channels in many areas.
Poorer signal coverage for (H)DTV relative to Analog
Lack of competent standards leadership from the FCC.
It's worth noting that Britain seems to have managed it's DTV rollout a lot better than the US. I'm still looking for a real detailled discussion of the differences in approach.
No way that analog TV in the US is going away at the end of 2009. It isn't going to happen unless a lot of senators and congressmen relish the prospect of having to find a real job after the 2010 elections. I'm thinking 2012 at the soonest, more likely 2015 or later.
***The patent was applied for in 1998, I believe the first atari consoles had joysticks in the late 70s, and I'm sure there are earlier examples. The only thing that the patent application seems to have going for it is the specific use of CMOS fabrication for the circuit.***
I don't know about the Atari, et.al. joysticks, but the classical PC joystick used an Analog ID (the 555?) to generate a voltage dependant interval and counted clock ticks during the interval. The patent is on a somewhat different approach to measuring the voltage, so it might be valid. But, ISTR that joystick ports were integrated into various ICs in the early 1990s. So likely, there IS prior art.
At most, this is a patent on some joystick ports using a specific technology to process the inputs.
Moreover, unless Microsoft is manufacturing its own ICs, how can they be guilty of patent ifringement here? Whoever they buy the ICs from may be guilty of patent infringement, but surely that isn't Microsoft's problem any more than your resale of a used car obligates you to pay some patent holder because the car maker neglected to negotiate a patent agreement on the brake pedal hinge.
Is whatever good the patent system may do (damn little as far as I can see) enough to overcome this sort of whackiness?
***For almost ten years now, it's been, "Windows sucks because there's no security by default.", and, "Never hook an unpatched Windows box to the internet, because it's asking for trouble.".***
Absolutely true, and a perfectly valid point
***Lack of security was one of the main reasons given to switch to Linux (which, by the way, has required a user or root password to accomplish certain things for quite awhile, unlike Vista, which has just implemented it.)***
But, the point of the article is that the WAY that Microsoft has implemented security purportedly has a bunch of problems. At least in the eye's of the author who actually knows something about the subject.
There's security and there is security. For example, you could secure your business by issuing an ID card to every employee and having someone check the card before they can enter the building. That works (sort of) and doesn't do a lot of damage. Or you could hire two guys with AK-47s to work over every car that enters the parking lot with someone in it not known to the guards. No doubt about that being effective. But some people might consider it to be excessive.
I don't really much care as I have no intention of using Vista... not ever. But it does seem to me that this article and other's I've read indicate Vista's security is going to take some major tweaking to make it usable by normal mortals. Why is asserting that unreasonable?
***It seems that they got the design requirements wrong! Where I came from, people couldn't care less about books as long as they could play Tetris....***
Of course the kids are going to use the OLPC to play Tetris and other games. It's not an either Tetris or read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" thing. The OLPC looks to be able to do both, and it's a safe bet that it will be used for both.
When I worked in a K-8 school, I asked some teachers if I should take Solitaire of the Windows machines. Some didn't care. Some WANTED it on the machines so the kids could play it at appropriate times. Nobody wanted it to be disappeared.
***I've never seen confirmation that MS apps make any significant use of non-documented OS APIs.***
Or go prowl around the WINE web site www.winehq.org. You'll find lots of complaints about missing, lousy, and inaccurate documentation from Microsoft. e.g. from the WINE FAQ "That said, the documentation is often bad, nonexistent, and even misleading where it exists, so a fair amount of reverse engineering has been necessary, particularly in the shell (Explorer) interface."
And, if I recall correctly, complaints that many API features have no known use or usage -- which would make resolving ambiguities in the documentation no small job. But secret APIs? No I've never seen any indication that the folks who are trying to make an Open Source clone of the Windows API think that Microsoft is deliberately hiding parts of the API.
The evidence suggests that the problem with the MS APIs is marginal competence in documenting and implementing them, not malice. i.e. The crummy documentation is most likely as much of a problem for MS as it is for WINE.
***But people aren't willing to wait or pay for engineered software. Windows already costs $199, and a real OS that followed engineering principles wouldn't cost $199. It would cost probably around $10,000 per copy, if it were being sold on every desktop.***
I'd guess closer to $2000 than $10000 because coding and testing a system with clear specifications (I worked on exactly ONE of those in forty years) is just barely more than trivial. I'd guess that if you actually had specs for an engineered OS, your programmers would be knocking off 50-100 lines of code a day after averaging the system test people's hours and a bit of rework. And everyone that wanted to would be going home at 5:00.
But that's still more than most people want to pay up front. Much easier to pay later in security problems, near total rewrites, lost user time... etc, etc,etc.
Also GUI OSes are Complicated. We never really got text mode right. But Unix seems mostly right, and even MSDOS will run reliably for years despite a plethora of bugs. I think that maybe we could engineer a text mode OS that works. I'm not at all sure that we have the technology to engineer a GUI that is internally consistent and is usable.
But the really important thing -- and something that is not done all that often -- is to have the design right and the interfaces documented rigorously before coding starts. Even that doesn't gurantee success. And it certainly doesn't prevent problems. But I've never seen a large project without a solid design and clearly defined interfaces that wasn't a total horror show.
And that's a problem, because just winging it can work quite well on a small project.
Good point. But it's much worse than that. In software development, you're expected to conduct the orchestra and get the performance right -- while compsing the music on the fly -- without rehersals -- while responding to real time input from the audience -- and likely with one or two instruments in the orchestra whose characteristics are largely unknown. Plus which, the acoustics of the theatre are lousy, the roof leaks, and the guys on the light and sound boards are incompetent if not malicious.
***From outer space, we could tell that the Earth has a lot of metabolic activity in it, because the sky is mostly highly reactive oxygen that is a result of plant respiration. Mars, on the other hand, is mostly chemically inert. There is very little metabolism going on there, if there is any at all. Either life there has already eaten up the planet, or else there wasn't enough resource to really get started, or there was never life at all.***
Sounds pretty plausible until you remember that life on Earth has apparently been around for most of the planet's lifetime. There is pretty good evidence that there was very little free Oxygen for the first half of Earth's lifetime, and some evidence that there were periods of near total Oxygen depletion (combined with surface temperatures below 0C) as recently as 600 million years ago. Granted, the Earth for most of its lifetime was a vastly different place than the Mars of today, it also apparently was a vastly different place than the Earth of the past 550 million years.
*** I think life originated in an environment that is most like where we find the greatest biomass and biodiversity -- water in sunlight at about 60-120 F. ***
That's not a dumb opinion, but it wouldn't be my bet, or, I think, most other people's bet. We seem to be a long way from knowing how cellular life evolved, but we do know or a number of environments where fairly complex organic compounds can be created spontaneously (e.g. the Miller-Urey experiments where water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen and a bit of electricity were mixed and cooked periodically). None of these involve the sort of environment where life thrives today.
BTW, one thing most hypothetical scenarios of life on Earth share is the supposition that life -- and specifically photosynthetic organisms -- came long before free Oxygen did. That's because the oceans were apparently loaded with vast qantities of dissolved iron that had to be oxidized and precipitated out before Oxygen could exist in the atmosphere in large quantities.
***So all we need is a widget on the desktop that allows you to turn on and off the internet connection, and logs all information that goes in and out, along with denying any redirection of data to other than the specific target request (if you send a request to www.google.com, only www.google.com may respond).***
Well.... No, not exactly... unfortunately.
Even if all you are worried about is TCP/IP to web sites, you will need to allow traffic to your ISP and your DNS provider. I don't think these connections are entirely invulnerable, but they should be pretty safe... I think. I could be wrong about this.
It'd certainly be possible to ignore site redirections within a web browser. I'm not sure how useful it'd be as there are legitimate reasons to redirect. Unfortunately, I don't think any current browser will let you do that. The only user really configurable browser I'm aware of is GRAIL and it is only about 70% complete and likely never will be finished unless somebody decides to take the project over. (You might be able to do a wget script that fetched a website into a file then fed the file to a browser for display. I'm not sure how you would handle clicked links in the web page. Anyway, if you do PERL, Python, or Ruby, you might well be able to hack a prototype together in a few weeks.)
It'd probably take advertisers and websites who use redirections about 48-96 hours to switch to a system where the website delivers the ads from its own web page, so killing advertising is not a likely side affect.
Unfortunately, there are a bunch of IP services besides HTTP -- file and printer sharing, SSH, ICMP (ping), FTP,... The list is pretty long. Each of these runs on their own port(s). You can block these suckers with a firewall and only open the ports when you think you need them. I don't think most users could understand that, and many of those that can understand it probably would run out of patience within a day or two.
Turning off "unneeded" ports can have unexpected consequences. For example, turing off ICMP will break Path MTU Determination which tries to optimize packet sizes. It's possible to turn PMTUD off (I've done it), but doing so isn't all that much fun.
I have to ask...what's the difference between Win2K and Win2K Pro?
You're right. The lowest level of W2K seems to be professional. Sort of like Olives where the medium sized ones are "Extra Large". Never paid much attemtion since I detest W2K (XP is much better) and we wouldn't have deployed it at work anyway because it offered us no significant advantages and had a lot of problems for us relative to Windows 98.
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Nothing against Macs, but I'm not very Mac compatible. I have never found the Mac interface to be easy or natural or intuitive. What it is, is consistent. Which is really important. But I'm pretty sure that I personally would HATE using a Mac. I think that my future OS-Interface will be Linux-KDE. I have a Linux KDE system running and sometimes use it. It's usable, but still has a few rough edges. For the time being, Windows 9 does everything I need to do and more crisply and responsively than the much faster XP boxes elsewhere in the house. I really don't expect to have to move on for a few more years.
I certainly wouldn't discourage others from using a Mac, and, in fact, for the past few years, I've been encouraging people to look at them when buying a new PC.
This doesn't sound like something that will blow up the jet in the adjacent jetway when it accidentaly is activated. Or destroy six gates and maim 1000 waiting passengers. Or anything like that.
Considering that there are quite possibly an unknown number of US Stinger and Soviet SA-7 missiles floating around in the inventory of arms dealers in the shadier parts of the world, this anti-missile laser might be an OK idea.
At least, I'd like to hear why I'm wrong about this, as I will probably learn something I didn't know.
No, my totally confused friend. the problem is more people like YOU. Those botnets are not running on Windows 9 PCs. They are on NT based Windows PCs -- often on "fully patched" ones. Why? Because Microsoft foolishly enabled a gazillion vulnerable services when they switched to NT based windows architecture. They've improved things to some extent (took them a while though, didn't it?), but no where near enough IMHO. Windows 9 is not designed to be secure, but it has far fewer vulnerabilities. And detecting and removing malware on Windows 9 is (usually) not all that hard. Not that I've seen a lot lately. But then I'm behind an NAT router, don't do HTML eMail, don't click on strange links, got IE off my Windows 98 machine before I connected it to the Internet and only enable Javascript for sites that REALLY need it and that I trust.
If you wish to believe that downloading updates frantically from a variety of websites will keep your state of the art system secure, I doubt that I can change your mind. But if you have ever been involved in software quality assurance or configuration control even tangentially, you should know in your heart that is a fantasy. Updates are usually reactive, often inadequately tested, and sometimes defective.
Something else you might want to think about. Windows Update is an accident waiting to happen. Sooner or later, MS is going to release a patch that breaks millions of PCs or someone is going to hijack the IP and brick or zombieate hundreds of thousands of PCs. MS actually did release an Windows 98 update a number of years ago that broke IDE. Fortunately, the number of Windows Update users at that time was quite small. That should be all the warning that is needed, but IT folk tend often to be slow learners
Which would you rather have? An old car that starts, runs, and gets you to where you want to go, or a new car that can't go three weeks between breakdowns or recalls? Sure, you'd rather have a shiny new car that runs perfectly. So would I. But it 'taint available. When it is, I'll buy one -- probably. 'Til then, I believe that I'll stick with stuff that works.
That's sort of like overall this year's flu virus is a lot like last year's. Or President Bush's new Iraq strategy isn't much different from the old strategy. Hardly a recommendation.
I just spent an hour finding and killing some mysterious Browser Helper Object on my wife's XP-SP2 PC that devoted its life to helping out the browser by popping up ads in IE. At least I think I killed it. Every year, the malware gets more clever. Every release, the software gets more bloated and complex. Every year, the Internet becomes more of a mess and it is harder to find information on exorcising malware, or on persuading Windows to do even the most simple and basic things. And every year I get older, dumber, and less interested in dinking with Windows just in order to do stuff I do find interesting.
Screw it. I never upgraded to XP, and I don't believe that I'll be upgrading to Vista. I have finally moved from Windows 95 to Windows 98 despite the fact that W95 boots faster and runs as well. But only because I think eventually I will need USB that works and I don't think that will ever be available in Windows 95.
I don't really hate Microsoft, but they are going to have to do a lot better than NT based Windows desktops to make me a customer again. Let me know when MS releases an OS worth buying. It hasn't happened for quite a few years, and doesn't look likely to happen again any time soon.
Good questions:
With a few exceptions cable coverage is even worse in Vermont than DSL coverage. Adelphia was supposed to string cable wherever they had (as I recall) 13 potential customers per mile of road. Didn't happen. Now that Comcast has taken over the bankrupt Adelphi operation (cause of bankrupcy -- run by crooks, not economic realities), I'm not optimistic that things will improve any. Yes there are some other cable franchises in a few towns. Not many.
Satellite is great for TV -- and, if anything, a bit cheaper than cable. That's one reason why cable doesn't go beyond the suburbs such as they are. (The big city -- Burlington -- has less than 40,000 people). Trouble is that satellites have problems with the quarter second round trip delay out to synchronous orbit that are difficult -- maybe impossible -- to overcome. You CAN surf the net via satellite, but I'm told that it's not always that happy an experience. When I looked into it for a rural school a few years ago, the technical problems for a bunch of users multiplexed onto an NAT router were VERY intimidating.
In theory, wireless is an answer. Two problems. First, the dot-com bubble burst before many wireless providers actually got on the air. It's not clear that the technology works satisfactorily even where the topography is favorable. Second, the topography in Vermont is not friendly to radio waves. Most people live in the woods in valleys. Cell phones are iffy in much of the state including major highways not all that many miles from population centers. I've gotten better and more consistent cell phone signals in the remote areas of the Great Basin than in Vermont.
How about broadband via power line? As far as I know, it works OK in demonstrations, but not all that well in reality. Lots of hype. Little reality.
We Americans have somehow gotten the idea that DSL is expensive to implement. I think we got that information from the big telcos -- which is a lot like getting information on global warming from Chevron. I'd ask two questions. How can Waitsfield Telecom provide DSL to a bunch of tiny towns -- most of which aren't big enough to rate a traffic light? (They are subsidized by the Universal Service Fund, but so are other rural customers). The second question is how Canada is able to provide DSL at reasonable rates to wide spots in the road in scattered across regions that make Tibet look like a teeming metropolis population-wise.
Verizon, OTOH, somehow can't get DSL to towns of several thousand that are less than a half hour drive from the corner of Church and Main in downtown Burlington.
Crichton's point exactly AFAICS. Crichton's position seems to be that only three facts re global warming are well established:
The rest, he maintains, is bad science -- drawing unwarrented conclusions from insufficient evidence. I don't think he's entirely wrong about that.
OTOH, I don't think anyone has asked him if pumping large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere when we have not the slightest idea to get it out is a good idea. Personally, I think it is not. I wonder what Crichton thinks.
Rural customers in Vermont couldn't get DSL from Bell Atlantic. And they still can't now that the bills have a Verison logo on them. Oddly, they can get DSL from some of the smaller local providers -- notably Waitsfield Telecom which is pretty much the poster child for usable rural broadband for customers in its service area in the Central part of the state.
Unless the Vermont Public Service Commission suddenly grows some balls -- something they've never shown much sign of having -- I imagine that things will get worse, not better with this sale. The governor says that broadband is one of his priorities. But IMO he's a political hack -- mostly mouth. OTOH, occasionally I'm pleasantly suprised. Maybe Jim Douglas or the next governor or the one after that will take some meaningful action.
Just a guess, but my general feeling is that the rather small free portion of the WSJ web site is heavily weighted toward tech material. At least that was the case last year when I checked the WSJ site most days. Haven't got around to setting up a link yet on this PC.
In my experience, it isn't a matter of thinking that they are too smart to pay attention to "society's rules". It is a perception (more or less correct AFAICS) that anyone who thinks 'society's rules' are important is a either a fool, a knave, or both. The basic problem is a surely mistaken belief on the part of the eccentrics that people are really smart enough to see through phonies and demagouges. They believe that this time freedom, justice, and actual worth will triumph over superfical "values". Regretably Iprobably), it rarely works out that way, although it might well be a better, safer, and happier world if it did.
The first law of social dynamics: Never trust a man who owns and uses a blow drier.
Speaking only for myself, I'd like to hear your reasons for detesting GUIs. I suppose that they might be considered off topic, but it'd still be nice to hear some arguments against GUI-abuse -- other than the fairly obvious fact the GUI software tends to be difficult or impossible to script reliably.
Who knows, if enough people start looking critically at the current Graphical User Interfaces, maybe we'll start getting GUIs that everyone agrees are better.
Really, Really well done. Thanks
Are laptops and rack servers replacing some desktop systems? Sure. Are desktop systems going to go away? Not any time soon.
Anyway, unless I was sure that I only wanted to use Windows (or some other OS that is known to work), I'd do some research before buying these boards -- no matter that they look REALLY, REALLY neat.
Well, yes, it probably is. But's not the only reason or even the primary reason. Reasons why HDTV hasn't caught on:
It's worth noting that Britain seems to have managed it's DTV rollout a lot better than the US. I'm still looking for a real detailled discussion of the differences in approach.
No way that analog TV in the US is going away at the end of 2009. It isn't going to happen unless a lot of senators and congressmen relish the prospect of having to find a real job after the 2010 elections. I'm thinking 2012 at the soonest, more likely 2015 or later.
I don't know about the Atari, et.al. joysticks, but the classical PC joystick used an Analog ID (the 555?) to generate a voltage dependant interval and counted clock ticks during the interval. The patent is on a somewhat different approach to measuring the voltage, so it might be valid. But, ISTR that joystick ports were integrated into various ICs in the early 1990s. So likely, there IS prior art.
At most, this is a patent on some joystick ports using a specific technology to process the inputs.
Moreover, unless Microsoft is manufacturing its own ICs, how can they be guilty of patent ifringement here? Whoever they buy the ICs from may be guilty of patent infringement, but surely that isn't Microsoft's problem any more than your resale of a used car obligates you to pay some patent holder because the car maker neglected to negotiate a patent agreement on the brake pedal hinge.
Is whatever good the patent system may do (damn little as far as I can see) enough to overcome this sort of whackiness?
Absolutely true, and a perfectly valid point
***Lack of security was one of the main reasons given to switch to Linux (which, by the way, has required a user or root password to accomplish certain things for quite awhile, unlike Vista, which has just implemented it.)***
But, the point of the article is that the WAY that Microsoft has implemented security purportedly has a bunch of problems. At least in the eye's of the author who actually knows something about the subject.
There's security and there is security. For example, you could secure your business by issuing an ID card to every employee and having someone check the card before they can enter the building. That works (sort of) and doesn't do a lot of damage. Or you could hire two guys with AK-47s to work over every car that enters the parking lot with someone in it not known to the guards. No doubt about that being effective. But some people might consider it to be excessive.
I don't really much care as I have no intention of using Vista ... not ever. But it does seem to me that this article and other's I've read indicate Vista's security is going to take some major tweaking to make it usable by normal mortals. Why is asserting that unreasonable?
Of course the kids are going to use the OLPC to play Tetris and other games. It's not an either Tetris or read "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" thing. The OLPC looks to be able to do both, and it's a safe bet that it will be used for both.
When I worked in a K-8 school, I asked some teachers if I should take Solitaire of the Windows machines. Some didn't care. Some WANTED it on the machines so the kids could play it at appropriate times. Nobody wanted it to be disappeared.
Or go prowl around the WINE web site www.winehq.org. You'll find lots of complaints about missing, lousy, and inaccurate documentation from Microsoft. e.g. from the WINE FAQ "That said, the documentation is often bad, nonexistent, and even misleading where it exists, so a fair amount of reverse engineering has been necessary, particularly in the shell (Explorer) interface."
And, if I recall correctly, complaints that many API features have no known use or usage -- which would make resolving ambiguities in the documentation no small job. But secret APIs? No I've never seen any indication that the folks who are trying to make an Open Source clone of the Windows API think that Microsoft is deliberately hiding parts of the API.
The evidence suggests that the problem with the MS APIs is marginal competence in documenting and implementing them, not malice. i.e. The crummy documentation is most likely as much of a problem for MS as it is for WINE.
I'd guess closer to $2000 than $10000 because coding and testing a system with clear specifications (I worked on exactly ONE of those in forty years) is just barely more than trivial. I'd guess that if you actually had specs for an engineered OS, your programmers would be knocking off 50-100 lines of code a day after averaging the system test people's hours and a bit of rework. And everyone that wanted to would be going home at 5:00.
But that's still more than most people want to pay up front. Much easier to pay later in security problems, near total rewrites, lost user time ... etc, etc ,etc.
Also GUI OSes are Complicated. We never really got text mode right. But Unix seems mostly right, and even MSDOS will run reliably for years despite a plethora of bugs. I think that maybe we could engineer a text mode OS that works. I'm not at all sure that we have the technology to engineer a GUI that is internally consistent and is usable.
But the really important thing -- and something that is not done all that often -- is to have the design right and the interfaces documented rigorously before coding starts. Even that doesn't gurantee success. And it certainly doesn't prevent problems. But I've never seen a large project without a solid design and clearly defined interfaces that wasn't a total horror show.
And that's a problem, because just winging it can work quite well on a small project.
Good point. But it's much worse than that. In software development, you're expected to conduct the orchestra and get the performance right -- while compsing the music on the fly -- without rehersals -- while responding to real time input from the audience -- and likely with one or two instruments in the orchestra whose characteristics are largely unknown. Plus which, the acoustics of the theatre are lousy, the roof leaks, and the guys on the light and sound boards are incompetent if not malicious.
Sounds pretty plausible until you remember that life on Earth has apparently been around for most of the planet's lifetime. There is pretty good evidence that there was very little free Oxygen for the first half of Earth's lifetime, and some evidence that there were periods of near total Oxygen depletion (combined with surface temperatures below 0C) as recently as 600 million years ago. Granted, the Earth for most of its lifetime was a vastly different place than the Mars of today, it also apparently was a vastly different place than the Earth of the past 550 million years.
*** I think life originated in an environment that is most like where we find the greatest biomass and biodiversity -- water in sunlight at about 60-120 F. ***
That's not a dumb opinion, but it wouldn't be my bet, or, I think, most other people's bet. We seem to be a long way from knowing how cellular life evolved, but we do know or a number of environments where fairly complex organic compounds can be created spontaneously (e.g. the Miller-Urey experiments where water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen and a bit of electricity were mixed and cooked periodically). None of these involve the sort of environment where life thrives today.
BTW, one thing most hypothetical scenarios of life on Earth share is the supposition that life -- and specifically photosynthetic organisms -- came long before free Oxygen did. That's because the oceans were apparently loaded with vast qantities of dissolved iron that had to be oxidized and precipitated out before Oxygen could exist in the atmosphere in large quantities.
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The Wikipedia has pretty extensive summary of theories of how life originated on Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life
Would that necessarily be a bad thing? [And yeah, I agree that the statement is a bit hyperbolic].
Well .... No, not exactly ... unfortunately.
I have to ask...what's the difference between Win2K and Win2K Pro?
You're right. The lowest level of W2K seems to be professional. Sort of like Olives where the medium sized ones are "Extra Large". Never paid much attemtion since I detest W2K (XP is much better) and we wouldn't have deployed it at work anyway because it offered us no significant advantages and had a lot of problems for us relative to Windows 98.