***Only reason people are using it, is because it's the only thing that let you manipulate a web page and will work more or less for 99% of the people out on the internet.***
Nothing against Javascript, but I think that's a very large misestimate of the number of people who have Javascript turned off in their browser. A lot of folks -- me included -- think that allowing websites to download and run programs on their PC is roughtly equivalent to putting up a sign in the front yard that says "Out of town until the 27th. Valubles mostly in the master bedroom. Please use the side door, clean up the broken glass, and wipe your feet... thanks." Many of those folks are system administrators who control the settings on a lot of machines
Yes, I'll turn on Javascript to work with a useful site that I trust and believe actually like NEEDS Javascript, like Google Maps. But in general, if you ship me Javascript, it won't get run. If it's needed to make your site work, I'll go find a competitor whose web folks have more common sense... and I won't be back.
Yes I know that Javascrip-t runs in a sandbox and can't be used to attack my PC. Just like I know that all politicians and software mongers are dead honest and have only my best interest at heart. Google gave me 862,000 hits on a search for 'javascript vulnerabilities'. Eight of the first ten hits look to be real problems. Clearly, there aren't 800,000 known vulnerabilities in Javascript, but I sure wouldn't bet on there not being hundreds and on some of them being serious and unpatched.
***that are in a difficult-to-read font***
I'm not going to defend the content of the article. I didn't mind it all that much, and agree with some of the points but I wouldn't exactly call it 'tightly focused'.
However, on my Windows98 PC here, it renders in Arial and a perfectly readable serifed font -- Courier I think. (I'm a content guy not a layout person). I tried both Off-by-One and Firefox and it's quite readable in both.
So maybe part of the problem is loading stuff like Office that makes a zillion dubiously readable fonts available. And maybe the solution for many people (yes, I know that some people really need Elvish 12pt et al for work or avocation reasons) is to delete a lot of the fonts that they will never use and detest when others use them. I only have 31 fonts installed on this machine. I suspect that's too few, but I also suspect that hundreds of fonts is too many for a lot of folks.
They are biased, but their bias is largely orthagonal to quality/usability.
That is to say that the FSF is perfectly capable of saying that Microsoft Fiasco is a wonderful and useful product, but is unacceptable because it is crippled by DRM. When you are assessing quality and/or usability the FSF assessment of quality may well be free of intentional bias.
OTOH, some Microsoft funded 'Mongolian Software Progress Foundation' that consists of an Ulan Bator taxi driver and two illiterate yak herders is unlikely to tell you that Fiasco is crap, even if the product is unstable, unusable, and likely to erase your hard drive.
Did anyone like actually feed the new web page to the W3C HTML validator? The old web page is currently back up, and it's clear that the MBTA web site designers don't consider standards compliance to be a priority.
Result: Failed validation, 40 errors (This is just the home page, not the whole site.)
Address: www.mbta.com
Encoding: utf-8 (assumed, there is no encoding specification in the header)
Doctype: (no Doctype found) -- the 40 errors assumes HTML4.01 Transitional. My guess is if there is no Doctype line in the header, the Web site designers probably have no clue that there ARE standards for HTML documents.
It's true that not every site needs to be standards compliant. Google's home page doesn't validate either. But Google's HTML actually works in a diverse collection of browsers.
My opinion FWIW -- If the site doesn't validate, the first step is to fix the site. If the site still doesn't render then, and only then, does it become reasonable to question whether the browser might be a problem.
***I know I know. They want hype and venture capital or fame or some such, but I can't count the number of things that are just a few years away and then never materialized.***
In general, that's a fair viewpoint, but this may well be a BIG deal and very likely not in that class. Potentially, it may be more like Gerhard Domagk's discovery in 1932 that a dye called Prontosil (Sulfanilamide) could kill Streptococcus in vitro without (usually) killing the patient. Basically the sulfa drugs were the first drugs recognized by Western medicine other than Asprin and narcotic painkillers that actually did anything useful.
There are still plenty of things that can go wrong. The treatment may not work on humans. It may be a one time deal that wears off after a few years and can't be repeated. It may kill or maim some patients. There may be side effects that don't bother mice but are devestating in humans.
But in any case, the apparent mechanism here is a total suprise and may well lead to other effective treatments even if this specific treatment doesn't work. Diabetes is a very widespread disorder and it does not seem to be all that well understood.
Hopefully, this will be or will lead to an effective treatment.
As for what's in it for the authors... quite likely a Nobel Prize if everything works out.
***It's almost 2007 and we're still hanging bags on the side of the 8080. No matter how many cores, caches or pipelines, no matter the clock rate, it's still the same-old same-old single-accumulator, bizzaro CISC instruction set piece of shite.***
Please don't get the idea that I'm defending the Intel x86 instruction set. When I first saw it in the early 1980s, I thought it was the most gawdawful mess I'd seen in 25 years in the business (I wrote my first assembler code in 1960). It hasn't improved any with time. I still detest it. Thankfully, I rarely have to use it.
[My candidate for the best microcomputer instruction set from the programmer's POV -- hands down, the MC6809]
But my understanding is that (almost?) all modern CPUs in fact have some different -- often vastly different -- architecture under the hood of their x86 chips and just use the x86 set as a sort of pidgin language that they translate into real instructions that typically run in a multiple register, multiple stack, highly parallel, etc environment of some sort. Do I have that wrong?
Is it time and past time to devise a new pidgin language? Probably. But let's don't let Intel have too much influence on the process. Intel doesn't seem to know the meaning of terms like simple or straightforward. I've never encountered anything they did that wasn't overly complex and often their design decisions seem to me to be utterly baffling.
In any case, it is still necessary, to emulate the x86 because there is all that legacy code out there. That doesn't mean that the hardware itself is constrained to actually implement all the x86 wierdness -- it just has be able to act like it does.
Based on his record, Jimmy Wales is no fool and I imagine that he has some plan in mind to eventually make money for his investors. His concept, whatever it may be may, or may not, be nefarious. It might be something as simple as someday tying optional money making ventures to a major, largely free of charge website. Which means creating the web site first.
In point of fact, Wales has done us -- all of us -- a major favor with the Wikipedia. He didn't have to. I'm inclined to cut Wales some slack on this. Let's see what the man is up to before we condemn him.
*** This kind of thing doesn't even have a chance until broadband is as ubiquitous and as reliable as electricity.***
Too bloody right!!! Even with DSL that can down up or down load megabit files in a few seconds, trying to do stuff interactively on web sites is often excrutiatingly painful.
In addition, 'they' simply have to fix caching. As far as I can tell specifying NOCACHE in HTML doesn't work reliably. For all I can see, it may not work at all in some browsers. As a result, users often end up staring at an old screen because their "updated screens" are loaded from cache (maybe, I'm told, on an intermediate server that doesn't even parse the HTML) rather than the newest page from the HTML server.
I recently ran across a suggestion that turning caching off in the HTTP header may get around that. I sure hope so. But it still has to be implemented in the server software before a lot of web based 'applications' are anything close to usable by ordinary humans.
BTW, before I retired, I pushed to put a project that looked ideal for a web based server onto our intranet. An interesting and enlightening experience. My conclusion: The internet is OK for distributing information, and marginal for some sorts of commerce. It's a loooooooooooonnnnngg way away from being a replacement for an operating system.
***I think that Japan's perseverance isn't because of its isolationist policies***
I don't disagree. My point was that a quite long period of isolation and deliberate supression of innovation didn't -- contrary to modern 'wisdom' -- do them all that much harm in the long run.
I'm pretty sure that sometime around 1700, the Japanese promulgated a law that made the creation of new things illegal -- but I couldn't find a link for it, so perhaps I misremember. On the other hand the Tokugawas did some things like running schools that taught commoners to read and write that seem quite unusual in a largely feudal society.
Anyway, I'm dubious that the idea that the West must continue to innovate as fast as we can to keep from being overwhelmed by the third world is as much of a slam dunk as it seems. I'm not opposed to continuous innovation as a strategy, but I reckon that it might be a good idea to have plans B and C ready in case innovation fails to do the job.
***Not a car I would ever drive... I prefer my cars with *no* software.***
That's a bit extreme I think.
Engine control software/firmware is relatively mature, pretty reliable, and results in cars that get pretty decent fuel usage with quite low pollution. Overall, I think it works a bit better than the corresponding analog systems of the 1970s and dumps less Sulfuric acid, Nitrous oxide and other obnoxious stuff out the tailpipe.
Other than that and cruise control, I'm with you. I recently drove a rented Chevrolet Suburban from Seattle to Vermont. It's a preposterous vehicle, but it will hold a lot of stuff which is what we needed. It actually ran and handled pretty well for a vehicle the general size and shape of a 1930s garage and got 20mpg (driven at 60mph). But the vehicle electronics... sob... totally incomprehensible. Everything is electronic and the only damn thing that is remotely comprehsible is the gear shift. We eventually figured out how to turn the windshield wipers off and how to control the radio volume and even tune stations. We may or may not have mastered the headlights. Didn't get a ticket, so I guess we must have gotten them on.
The low point of the trip was when the odometer display was replaced with a message reading "SERVICE ALL WHEEL DRIVE". This happened while negotiating a twisty road over Bozeman Pass on a wet road in sub-freezing weather. A call to Avis got the opinion that it was probably a mileage related service warning and not an actual fault, and no, the support tech didn't have a clue how to clear it. Anyway, the message went away on its own after a while and we drove the remainder of the trip in with All Wheel Drive switched off just in case.
If you ask me, this is Windows on Wheels. I can't imagine that anyone, anywhere, even in Detroit, actually wants vehicle electronics that work like that.
As a guy who has actually seen how computers are used in schools, I'm an extreme skeptic about most current uses of computers in schools, but the base article is just plain silly. Training and support costs for schools in India are very unlikely to run to $700 plus. And you don't need the Internet to get good use out of computers. Back before the Internet, we had Compuserve and Fidonet, and frankly. they worked pretty well. Sneakernet to the occasional computer that has a phone connection could work fine.
I'll be suprised if the third world can make the $100 laptop work all that well as a core element in their schools. Lord knows, we in the US are a pretty near total bust at making the $1000 (plus overhead) desktop do much useful in actually teaching the kids. But that doesn't mean that the idea is a bad one. The first computer or two in a school (should) go to the administration and they are useful there. Computers are useful for teachers in producing classroom materials. And I expect that the $100 laptops will turn up and do good work in small businesses. Even the Amish use computers -- just not for entertainment.
***The result was a kid had to hack in and gain ROOT privileges. The likelihood of a young kid knowing a way to get ROOT (and not a more experienced programmer) is pretty hard to swallow.***
Ironically, that's not so. Anyone who has ever inherited a Unix system with an unknown root password very likely knows that the "secure" flag is set backwards on a high percentage of them. I.e. "secure = yes" means that the physical console is in a secure environment and that it is therefore OK to run programs in single user mode without logging in. Setpass is not restricted in single user mode. Result. On a great many Unix/Linux/whatever systems if you have physical access to the computer, have a console attached, and can force a reboot, hacking into the system is trivial. Of course, you'll have to set a new root password, but you'll be in.
I don't know if this hole has been plugged, I used this technique to hack into a Red Hat based router in the late 1990s. It took me about fifteen minutes to find it on the Internet. No reason that a kid mighten't know it, and certainly no reason they couldn't use it if they knew it from, for example, hacking into a scrapped system that dad brought home from work or that somebody fished out of a dumpster.
Re:We have a bigger problem...
on
Saving U.S. Science
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· Score: 2, Interesting
***Your suggestion is no different - smashing looms has never been the answer***
Actually, smashing the looms probably WAS the right answer for the luddites since the textile factories were destroying their middle class life style and destroying the factories was their only realistic alternative. Their problem was, I think, that they weren't good enough at it.
There actually is a historical example where 'smashing the looms' did work for quite a while. Japan's Tokugawa shoguns closed the country to outside influence and most innovation in 1635. That policy worked until the late 1850s -- 230 years give or take a couple. (That's about the same time span as the US from the first conflicts at Lexington and Concord to the present). By way of comparison it's about 218 years longer than the Thousand Jahr Reich and 224 longer than the New American Century.
One might argue that Japan's isolation was doomed anyway due to internal pressures of various sorts. And that could be correct. But one should also note that of all the world's non-European cultures, Japan surely came through the European colonial era in the best shape.
***creating the next better product is.***
Might be. Might not. What happens if no one WANTS the next better product? There are plenty of examples of companies that couldn't come up with the next better product -- Polaroid and DEC come to mind.
===
Seems to me that all this should be of more than academic interest to denizens of the G7 nations.
All you need to know is that Symantec came in at 14 out ot 40. If that doesn't indicate that either the study is worthless or that customer satisfaction is at disaster levels, it's hard to imagine what would.
The Mars Rovers turn out not to be bug free either.. Despite 'quality' programming and surely a lot of testing, their software has bugs. See this Risks Digest article. If their interrupt problems had taken out the communications link permananetly or they had not, largely by luck apparently, left tools on board that allowed them to debug and fix the problem on the fly, or they'd made the wrong itsy-bitsy mistake patching code over a 90 million mile data link. the software folks would have been bums, not heros.
***I wish to see a comparison for the benefit of millions of users who do not want to (or who cannot afford to) upgrade to new hardware. This comparison would involve installing Vista and XP on a hardware configuration that is the minimum configuration recommended for XP (yes, XP). To enhance the comparison, we should include RedHat Linux.***
A good point. XP wants a P300 with 128mb of RAM. But it supports P233 with 64mb. When XP came out, I had XP running on the best junker in the junkpile -- P200 with 48mb and it actually was usable for web browsing and the occasional job that required something that wouldn't run on Windows 98.
My guess is that you might be able to measure Vista (and Linux) performance on minimal XP hardware with a sundial. But P800 with 512mb seems like overkill just to read Slashdot or compute 2006 Income Tax.
***Of course, why the new system requirements are so ridiculously higher than XP is something I'm still waiting on a good answer for. I'm sticking with XP until I'm absolutely forced to upgrade in 5 years or so because nothing has XP support anymore.***
You might get more than 5 years if you really don't want to upgrade. Maybe lots more. I've had pretty good luck getting stuff to run on Windows 95 although I sometimes need to install a Windows 98 DLL. Many programs that don't include Windows 95 in their support list actually work (and some that do don't -- but then, some programs that claim to run on XP don't either). Anyway, if you are determined to stick with XP, you may well have time to raise a puppy and maybe even to bury your beloved pet after it dies of old age before you are actually forced to upgrade.
Why do I stick with an antique OS? Well, it does what I need. And it runs on $20 hardware. It is noticably faster than its successors even though it is running on far more modest hardware. And I'm simply not smart enough to fix XP when it doesn't work quite the way I want it to -- which is way too often.
I expect that it comes down to communications security. If Vista is significantly safer to run on the Internet than XP, then people and companies will upgrade. If it is merely more complex and aggravating, then why bother?
If the Egyptians knew how to form and pour concrete, why on Earth would they drag huge blocks of limestone and granite around to build the rest of the structure? (Maybe Union rules negotiated by the Lower Nile chapter of the Amalgamated Pyramid Craftsmen?) Why not make the whole structure out of concrete? And where are the form marks -- the marks from the boards or whatever that were used to make the form for each block? Granted they'd probably be weathered off from the exposed surfaces, but they should still be there on protected surfaces.
Seems to me like Americans have this cultural thing that causes us to believe that complex, untested, technologies must be superior to the old fashioned way. When I was a kid during World War II, I used to thumb through the back pages of Popular Mechanics where they had pictures to these neat weapons that would surely bring the axis to its knees. Sixty years later, we STILL can't build usable versions of some of those things.
If the problem is that people make mistakes in counting, mark and scan technology should produce better results. If the problem is votes from dead or imaginary voters, how can any technology help?
If there is, as I suspect, no real problem at all, why the hell are we stumbling around with all this half-baked technology?
***I recently bought a projector that took HDMI, that is when I startedlooking for HDMI cables. Turns out the cheapest HDMI cable 3ft is for 30$-40$.***
That's odd, because just yesterday my local HARDWARE store had a bubble wrapped HDMI cable for about $10 right next to the 14ft network cables. Same aisle as the mousetraps -- other end.
***I discovered that reason for this is the specs, strangly yes, the specs. An article I read says the HDMI spec (an off shoot of DVI) was designed by computer engnineers and not video engineers. HDMI uses 4 twisted pair with no error correction (unlike TCP/IP) to send real time data and has a huge bandwidth requirements (HDTV). if they were video engineers they would have choosen coaxial.***
If coax were as good at carrying digital signals as UTP, your house and workplace would probably be wired with some sort of super thin-net (RG58) coax, not CAT-5E UTP. I doubt anyone who has worked with both prefers pulling UTP and crimping #$%&!% RJ-45 connectors to pulling coax and crimping BNCs.
***Monotone, BitKeeper, git, bzr, and so on would all handle this situation efficiently and gracefully; all the repositories can sync to each other and none need be more than a few minutes out of date. Amazing that Microsoft's solution is so poor by comparison***
I doubt this is a technology issue. It's probably almost entirely a scope of control issue. If the project is small enough that one or two people can look at all the changes, and decide which go where when, then build management will go pretty well unless the support tools are pretty awful. Once the project gets larger than that, controlling build content is going to be a huge problem.
Bad tools can hurt you. But this is one of a broad class of problems where 'better' tools won't necessarily help.
Fair comments -- however -- you should make allowances for the fact that major earthquakes are frequent on the West Coast of North America. In general, wood frame buildings stand up pretty well to being violently shaken whereas masonry buildings don't. Building codes in places like California discourage the use of masonry. e.g. California largely quit building brick school buildings after a number of schools were severely damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.
Please don't think that I'm trying to justify the flimsy construction of much of North America's housing stock. I'm not. But there are places where well designed wood frame constuction is probably more appropriate than brick/stone and mortar.
***2. Don't say that it is "very American" to do anything. You just said you're Canadian, so how would you know?***
Without commenting on the rest of your post, this particular sentance would probably be characterized by much of the human race as "typically American". And I think they'd be right. The assumption that because you and your neighbors don't know much about Canada, Canadians are equally ignorant about the US, really IS peculiarly American.
In reality, a lot of Canadians know more about the US than many Americans (and, I suspect in many cases more than they want to). They watch the same television that you do and their National News looks at highlights from the US as well. You might not have a clue who Stephen Harper, Ralph Klein, or Jean Charest is, but many Canadians can tell you who Donald Rumsfeld, George W Bush, Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton are and what they represent.
You might want to Google "Rick Mercer" -- a Canadian Comedian who in the past has collected a lot of embarassing footage of otherwise intelligent Americans displaying a total ignorance of Canadian geography, culture and history.
If you'd like to get out a little, I'd suggest occasionally visting the web site of the Toronto Globe and Mail www.theglobeandmail.com. You could expand that to include the Guardian www.guardian.co.uk which almost always has a couple of worthwhile articles -- often things that no one else is covering. And don't miss an occasional visit to www.watchingamerica.com. That'll cure you of any illusions that you might have about the quality of news reporting in the US (it's pretty dismal), any belief that all foreigners are ignorant about the US, and -- on the other hand -- any belief you may have that there are not a lot of total fruitcakes in the world who do not reside in LA, NYC, Kansas, or Washington DC.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing against Javascript, but I think that's a very large misestimate of the number of people who have Javascript turned off in their browser. A lot of folks -- me included -- think that allowing websites to download and run programs on their PC is roughtly equivalent to putting up a sign in the front yard that says "Out of town until the 27th. Valubles mostly in the master bedroom. Please use the side door, clean up the broken glass, and wipe your feet ... thanks." Many of those folks are system administrators who control the settings on a lot of machines
Yes, I'll turn on Javascript to work with a useful site that I trust and believe actually like NEEDS Javascript, like Google Maps. But in general, if you ship me Javascript, it won't get run. If it's needed to make your site work, I'll go find a competitor whose web folks have more common sense ... and I won't be back.
Yes I know that Javascrip-t runs in a sandbox and can't be used to attack my PC. Just like I know that all politicians and software mongers are dead honest and have only my best interest at heart. Google gave me 862,000 hits on a search for 'javascript vulnerabilities'. Eight of the first ten hits look to be real problems. Clearly, there aren't 800,000 known vulnerabilities in Javascript, but I sure wouldn't bet on there not being hundreds and on some of them being serious and unpatched.
However, on my Windows98 PC here, it renders in Arial and a perfectly readable serifed font -- Courier I think. (I'm a content guy not a layout person). I tried both Off-by-One and Firefox and it's quite readable in both.
So maybe part of the problem is loading stuff like Office that makes a zillion dubiously readable fonts available. And maybe the solution for many people (yes, I know that some people really need Elvish 12pt et al for work or avocation reasons) is to delete a lot of the fonts that they will never use and detest when others use them. I only have 31 fonts installed on this machine. I suspect that's too few, but I also suspect that hundreds of fonts is too many for a lot of folks.
They are biased, but their bias is largely orthagonal to quality/usability.
That is to say that the FSF is perfectly capable of saying that Microsoft Fiasco is a wonderful and useful product, but is unacceptable because it is crippled by DRM. When you are assessing quality and/or usability the FSF assessment of quality may well be free of intentional bias.
OTOH, some Microsoft funded 'Mongolian Software Progress Foundation' that consists of an Ulan Bator taxi driver and two illiterate yak herders is unlikely to tell you that Fiasco is crap, even if the product is unstable, unusable, and likely to erase your hard drive.
It certainly should be. If it were, there would be a lot fewer literal creationists and most of those that remained would at least have read Genesis.
Result: Failed validation, 40 errors (This is just the home page, not the whole site.)
Address: www.mbta.com
Encoding: utf-8 (assumed, there is no encoding specification in the header)
Doctype: (no Doctype found) -- the 40 errors assumes HTML4.01 Transitional. My guess is if there is no Doctype line in the header, the Web site designers probably have no clue that there ARE standards for HTML documents.
It's true that not every site needs to be standards compliant. Google's home page doesn't validate either. But Google's HTML actually works in a diverse collection of browsers.
My opinion FWIW -- If the site doesn't validate, the first step is to fix the site. If the site still doesn't render then, and only then, does it become reasonable to question whether the browser might be a problem.
In general, that's a fair viewpoint, but this may well be a BIG deal and very likely not in that class. Potentially, it may be more like Gerhard Domagk's discovery in 1932 that a dye called Prontosil (Sulfanilamide) could kill Streptococcus in vitro without (usually) killing the patient. Basically the sulfa drugs were the first drugs recognized by Western medicine other than Asprin and narcotic painkillers that actually did anything useful.
There are still plenty of things that can go wrong. The treatment may not work on humans. It may be a one time deal that wears off after a few years and can't be repeated. It may kill or maim some patients. There may be side effects that don't bother mice but are devestating in humans.
But in any case, the apparent mechanism here is a total suprise and may well lead to other effective treatments even if this specific treatment doesn't work. Diabetes is a very widespread disorder and it does not seem to be all that well understood.
Hopefully, this will be or will lead to an effective treatment.
As for what's in it for the authors ... quite likely a Nobel Prize if everything works out.
Please don't get the idea that I'm defending the Intel x86 instruction set. When I first saw it in the early 1980s, I thought it was the most gawdawful mess I'd seen in 25 years in the business (I wrote my first assembler code in 1960). It hasn't improved any with time. I still detest it. Thankfully, I rarely have to use it.
[My candidate for the best microcomputer instruction set from the programmer's POV -- hands down, the MC6809]
But my understanding is that (almost?) all modern CPUs in fact have some different -- often vastly different -- architecture under the hood of their x86 chips and just use the x86 set as a sort of pidgin language that they translate into real instructions that typically run in a multiple register, multiple stack, highly parallel, etc environment of some sort. Do I have that wrong?
Is it time and past time to devise a new pidgin language? Probably. But let's don't let Intel have too much influence on the process. Intel doesn't seem to know the meaning of terms like simple or straightforward. I've never encountered anything they did that wasn't overly complex and often their design decisions seem to me to be utterly baffling.
In any case, it is still necessary, to emulate the x86 because there is all that legacy code out there. That doesn't mean that the hardware itself is constrained to actually implement all the x86 wierdness -- it just has be able to act like it does.
In point of fact, Wales has done us -- all of us -- a major favor with the Wikipedia. He didn't have to. I'm inclined to cut Wales some slack on this. Let's see what the man is up to before we condemn him.
Too bloody right!!! Even with DSL that can down up or down load megabit files in a few seconds, trying to do stuff interactively on web sites is often excrutiatingly painful.
In addition, 'they' simply have to fix caching. As far as I can tell specifying NOCACHE in HTML doesn't work reliably. For all I can see, it may not work at all in some browsers. As a result, users often end up staring at an old screen because their "updated screens" are loaded from cache (maybe, I'm told, on an intermediate server that doesn't even parse the HTML) rather than the newest page from the HTML server.
I recently ran across a suggestion that turning caching off in the HTTP header may get around that. I sure hope so. But it still has to be implemented in the server software before a lot of web based 'applications' are anything close to usable by ordinary humans.
BTW, before I retired, I pushed to put a project that looked ideal for a web based server onto our intranet. An interesting and enlightening experience. My conclusion: The internet is OK for distributing information, and marginal for some sorts of commerce. It's a loooooooooooonnnnngg way away from being a replacement for an operating system.
I don't disagree. My point was that a quite long period of isolation and deliberate supression of innovation didn't -- contrary to modern 'wisdom' -- do them all that much harm in the long run.
I'm pretty sure that sometime around 1700, the Japanese promulgated a law that made the creation of new things illegal -- but I couldn't find a link for it, so perhaps I misremember. On the other hand the Tokugawas did some things like running schools that taught commoners to read and write that seem quite unusual in a largely feudal society.
Anyway, I'm dubious that the idea that the West must continue to innovate as fast as we can to keep from being overwhelmed by the third world is as much of a slam dunk as it seems. I'm not opposed to continuous innovation as a strategy, but I reckon that it might be a good idea to have plans B and C ready in case innovation fails to do the job.
That's a bit extreme I think.
Engine control software/firmware is relatively mature, pretty reliable, and results in cars that get pretty decent fuel usage with quite low pollution. Overall, I think it works a bit better than the corresponding analog systems of the 1970s and dumps less Sulfuric acid, Nitrous oxide and other obnoxious stuff out the tailpipe.
Other than that and cruise control, I'm with you. I recently drove a rented Chevrolet Suburban from Seattle to Vermont. It's a preposterous vehicle, but it will hold a lot of stuff which is what we needed. It actually ran and handled pretty well for a vehicle the general size and shape of a 1930s garage and got 20mpg (driven at 60mph). But the vehicle electronics ... sob ... totally incomprehensible. Everything is electronic and the only damn thing that is remotely comprehsible is the gear shift. We eventually figured out how to turn the windshield wipers off and how to control the radio volume and even tune stations. We may or may not have mastered the headlights. Didn't get a ticket, so I guess we must have gotten them on.
The low point of the trip was when the odometer display was replaced with a message reading "SERVICE ALL WHEEL DRIVE". This happened while negotiating a twisty road over Bozeman Pass on a wet road in sub-freezing weather. A call to Avis got the opinion that it was probably a mileage related service warning and not an actual fault, and no, the support tech didn't have a clue how to clear it. Anyway, the message went away on its own after a while and we drove the remainder of the trip in with All Wheel Drive switched off just in case.
If you ask me, this is Windows on Wheels. I can't imagine that anyone, anywhere, even in Detroit, actually wants vehicle electronics that work like that.
As a guy who has actually seen how computers are used in schools, I'm an extreme skeptic about most current uses of computers in schools, but the base article is just plain silly. Training and support costs for schools in India are very unlikely to run to $700 plus. And you don't need the Internet to get good use out of computers. Back before the Internet, we had Compuserve and Fidonet, and frankly. they worked pretty well. Sneakernet to the occasional computer that has a phone connection could work fine.
I'll be suprised if the third world can make the $100 laptop work all that well as a core element in their schools. Lord knows, we in the US are a pretty near total bust at making the $1000 (plus overhead) desktop do much useful in actually teaching the kids. But that doesn't mean that the idea is a bad one. The first computer or two in a school (should) go to the administration and they are useful there. Computers are useful for teachers in producing classroom materials. And I expect that the $100 laptops will turn up and do good work in small businesses. Even the Amish use computers -- just not for entertainment.
Ironically, that's not so. Anyone who has ever inherited a Unix system with an unknown root password very likely knows that the "secure" flag is set backwards on a high percentage of them. I.e. "secure = yes" means that the physical console is in a secure environment and that it is therefore OK to run programs in single user mode without logging in. Setpass is not restricted in single user mode. Result. On a great many Unix/Linux/whatever systems if you have physical access to the computer, have a console attached, and can force a reboot, hacking into the system is trivial. Of course, you'll have to set a new root password, but you'll be in.
I don't know if this hole has been plugged, I used this technique to hack into a Red Hat based router in the late 1990s. It took me about fifteen minutes to find it on the Internet. No reason that a kid mighten't know it, and certainly no reason they couldn't use it if they knew it from, for example, hacking into a scrapped system that dad brought home from work or that somebody fished out of a dumpster.
Actually, smashing the looms probably WAS the right answer for the luddites since the textile factories were destroying their middle class life style and destroying the factories was their only realistic alternative. Their problem was, I think, that they weren't good enough at it.
There actually is a historical example where 'smashing the looms' did work for quite a while. Japan's Tokugawa shoguns closed the country to outside influence and most innovation in 1635. That policy worked until the late 1850s -- 230 years give or take a couple. (That's about the same time span as the US from the first conflicts at Lexington and Concord to the present). By way of comparison it's about 218 years longer than the Thousand Jahr Reich and 224 longer than the New American Century.
One might argue that Japan's isolation was doomed anyway due to internal pressures of various sorts. And that could be correct. But one should also note that of all the world's non-European cultures, Japan surely came through the European colonial era in the best shape.
***creating the next better product is.***
Might be. Might not. What happens if no one WANTS the next better product? There are plenty of examples of companies that couldn't come up with the next better product -- Polaroid and DEC come to mind.
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Seems to me that all this should be of more than academic interest to denizens of the G7 nations.
So, How long until wallets start coming with built in shielding to discourage unauthorized RFID readout?
All you need to know is that Symantec came in at 14 out ot 40. If that doesn't indicate that either the study is worthless or that customer satisfaction is at disaster levels, it's hard to imagine what would.
The Mars Rovers turn out not to be bug free either.. Despite 'quality' programming and surely a lot of testing, their software has bugs. See this Risks Digest article. If their interrupt problems had taken out the communications link permananetly or they had not, largely by luck apparently, left tools on board that allowed them to debug and fix the problem on the fly, or they'd made the wrong itsy-bitsy mistake patching code over a 90 million mile data link. the software folks would have been bums, not heros.
A good point. XP wants a P300 with 128mb of RAM. But it supports P233 with 64mb. When XP came out, I had XP running on the best junker in the junkpile -- P200 with 48mb and it actually was usable for web browsing and the occasional job that required something that wouldn't run on Windows 98.
My guess is that you might be able to measure Vista (and Linux) performance on minimal XP hardware with a sundial. But P800 with 512mb seems like overkill just to read Slashdot or compute 2006 Income Tax.
You might get more than 5 years if you really don't want to upgrade. Maybe lots more. I've had pretty good luck getting stuff to run on Windows 95 although I sometimes need to install a Windows 98 DLL. Many programs that don't include Windows 95 in their support list actually work (and some that do don't -- but then, some programs that claim to run on XP don't either). Anyway, if you are determined to stick with XP, you may well have time to raise a puppy and maybe even to bury your beloved pet after it dies of old age before you are actually forced to upgrade.
Why do I stick with an antique OS? Well, it does what I need. And it runs on $20 hardware. It is noticably faster than its successors even though it is running on far more modest hardware. And I'm simply not smart enough to fix XP when it doesn't work quite the way I want it to -- which is way too often.
I expect that it comes down to communications security. If Vista is significantly safer to run on the Internet than XP, then people and companies will upgrade. If it is merely more complex and aggravating, then why bother?
If the Egyptians knew how to form and pour concrete, why on Earth would they drag huge blocks of limestone and granite around to build the rest of the structure? (Maybe Union rules negotiated by the Lower Nile chapter of the Amalgamated Pyramid Craftsmen?) Why not make the whole structure out of concrete? And where are the form marks -- the marks from the boards or whatever that were used to make the form for each block? Granted they'd probably be weathered off from the exposed surfaces, but they should still be there on protected surfaces.
If the problem is that people make mistakes in counting, mark and scan technology should produce better results. If the problem is votes from dead or imaginary voters, how can any technology help?
If there is, as I suspect, no real problem at all, why the hell are we stumbling around with all this half-baked technology?
That's odd, because just yesterday my local HARDWARE store had a bubble wrapped HDMI cable for about $10 right next to the 14ft network cables. Same aisle as the mousetraps -- other end.
***I discovered that reason for this is the specs, strangly yes, the specs. An article I read says the HDMI spec (an off shoot of DVI) was designed by computer engnineers and not video engineers. HDMI uses 4 twisted pair with no error correction (unlike TCP/IP) to send real time data and has a huge bandwidth requirements (HDTV). if they were video engineers they would have choosen coaxial.***
If coax were as good at carrying digital signals as UTP, your house and workplace would probably be wired with some sort of super thin-net (RG58) coax, not CAT-5E UTP. I doubt anyone who has worked with both prefers pulling UTP and crimping #$%&!% RJ-45 connectors to pulling coax and crimping BNCs.
I doubt this is a technology issue. It's probably almost entirely a scope of control issue. If the project is small enough that one or two people can look at all the changes, and decide which go where when, then build management will go pretty well unless the support tools are pretty awful. Once the project gets larger than that, controlling build content is going to be a huge problem.
Bad tools can hurt you. But this is one of a broad class of problems where 'better' tools won't necessarily help.
Please don't think that I'm trying to justify the flimsy construction of much of North America's housing stock. I'm not. But there are places where well designed wood frame constuction is probably more appropriate than brick/stone and mortar.
Without commenting on the rest of your post, this particular sentance would probably be characterized by much of the human race as "typically American". And I think they'd be right. The assumption that because you and your neighbors don't know much about Canada, Canadians are equally ignorant about the US, really IS peculiarly American.
In reality, a lot of Canadians know more about the US than many Americans (and, I suspect in many cases more than they want to). They watch the same television that you do and their National News looks at highlights from the US as well. You might not have a clue who Stephen Harper, Ralph Klein, or Jean Charest is, but many Canadians can tell you who Donald Rumsfeld, George W Bush, Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton are and what they represent.
You might want to Google "Rick Mercer" -- a Canadian Comedian who in the past has collected a lot of embarassing footage of otherwise intelligent Americans displaying a total ignorance of Canadian geography, culture and history.
If you'd like to get out a little, I'd suggest occasionally visting the web site of the Toronto Globe and Mail www.theglobeandmail.com. You could expand that to include the Guardian www.guardian.co.uk which almost always has a couple of worthwhile articles -- often things that no one else is covering. And don't miss an occasional visit to www.watchingamerica.com. That'll cure you of any illusions that you might have about the quality of news reporting in the US (it's pretty dismal), any belief that all foreigners are ignorant about the US, and -- on the other hand -- any belief you may have that there are not a lot of total fruitcakes in the world who do not reside in LA, NYC, Kansas, or Washington DC.