Xerox gets full credit for creating the Internet because they created ethernet and other computing ideas? If this is true what prevents me from using the same device to assign all credit to inventors of integrated circuits?
Who did what is no mystery all you need to do is pick an RFC and look at the authors list. RFC 760 and 761 are a good place to start.
As far as nuclear survivability my understanding is this was a mixed bag. Some people were pushing this very meme for political reasons and others had different intentions. It comes down to who you ask and value judgements you choose to assign to each actor.
It's always about cancer isn't it. Hey and you guessed it... always impossible to prove any causal link to much of anything related to cancer but lets play that game and beat our heads against the wall even though we already know what the outcome will be.
High barrier for rising above noise floor in which >20% of everyone dies of cancer anyway. You can focus on certain types of cancers to improve your chances except in most cases nobody really has much clue which those would be apriori.
Lag time of onset... waiting 10 or 20 years for a statistically significant signal is too long and too late.
Lack of ability to isolate cause and effect.
Lack of will/funds/humans to conduct a large and long enough survey which could provide any statistically significant and therefore useful information.
This makes the whole cancer angle moot... It is not falsifiable. Even if there was a real health risk in the form of increased cancer you won't find it unless things are really bad.
What I do know is some pretty nonsensical language made its way into safe drinking water act and it is still there as far as I can tell. I'm not against fracking... I'm against government corruption. I'm against people doing sloppy work. I'm against corrupt regulatory frameworks which intentionally fail to properly internalize externalities.
Just read the summary, but it actually says it's not real time unless it really takes a single cell 10 hours to divide
NYT article says so...
"Currently it takes about 9 to 10 hours of computer time to simulate a single division of the smallest cell â" about the same time the cell takes to divide in its natural environment."
Instead of properly standartizing NAT they removed it, with the argument that there are enought adresses now.
Well, if you used Nat for anything else than adress space expansion, like multihoming, topology hiding,... you are f**d with ipv6.
To understand why this is not true requires us to parse what is meant by "NAT". Not all "NATs" are created equally.
1. NAT where 1 IP is being used by a boatload of hosts. (1:many)
2. NAT where each host has a corrosponding mapped address. (1:1)
With IPv6 only the first case is dead. The second case is still very much possible.. for example via snat target in ip6tables.
From systems perspective there is a big difference between deterministically rewriting IP headers (#2) which is quite trivial vs fancy ALG codes needed to multiplex shit and maintain state charts so that everything appears to work behind a single IP Address. (#1)
Besides there are other ways to accomplish things you cite in IPv6 without using any NAT however those knobs are still there should you need them.
The main difference being NSLs are pretty much not legally enforceable and have, in fact, been ruled against by courts in the US in the past as unconstitutional.
The kicker from my understanding is concept of "third party doctrine" where assertion of 4th amendment protections don't apply when your information is held by someone else.
The net effect as far as I've been able to parse NSLs are just blatently unconstititutional red herrings. They are allowed to persist simply because the third party doctrine wields all the real power.
I think Microsoft should triple the fees. I'm sick of vendors who think they don't have to take QA seriously since they can push out a patch at moments notice. Fuck 'em.
And that's what it comes down to. People en-masse are reactive, not preventative. You can have all the charts and stats and proof showing that it's _going_ to cause huge headaches for everyone.. but until it actually does, nothing will be done.
This is irrelevent. People en-masse don't know what the heck IPv4 or IPv6 mean nor do they care. They just want their shit to work.
What do you mean the IP Stack on my PC or tablet or phone was updated to support IPv6 years ago? What is a stack? What is an IPv6?
What do you mean my ISP flipped a switch, pushed firmware or configuration and now I'm on IPv6? What is IPv6? I don't see anything different.
The transition does not require action on the users part. It will just happen at some point even if that point coincides with the user throwing out an old router and replacing it with a new one after its PSU dies or it is deemed obsolete.
IPv6 is driven by the industry not by the end user ("most of the population").
Big content and large ISPs have already made their stance and desire for IPv6 clear by driving its adoption for selfish reasons.
Until some new technology that everyone wants comes along and requires IPv6, no one will care about it.
The killer app for IPv6 is maintaining a global network of PEERS. It's what you or others don't have to worry about loosing which makes a transition more appealing than accepting status quo for eternity.
Content extracts value by reaching everyone directly without having to worry about degregation through additional hops/congested CGNs.
Service providers extract value by not having to operate expensive CGN.
Governments and LEA extract value by not having to deal with multiple devices cloaked behind a CGN.
Even partial deployment provides some value to all stakeholders.
It makes no sense for businesses to pay thousands on larbor to reconfigure their entire network for IPv6, and see no beneficial gain.
Nobody is suggesting they do. All they need to do is make their *external* presence accessible via IPv6. They can keep IPv4 internally forever for all anyone cares.
Not to mention a lot of legacy hardware still don't support IPv6, like network printers/copiers, camera systems, security systems, etc.
IPv4 is not going away anytime soon. IPv6 is being added. Noone is taking away your toys. You don't have to go out and buy new stuff.
Even if the global IPv4 network went away IPv4 private networks would still be avaliable. You could still tunnel your IPv4 network over IPv6 with anyone you chose to have access to it.
It also complicates maters worse when you try to network across long distances
Having more globally unique addresses complicates matters? I won't pretend I understand how this complicates matters more than attempting to communicate with two peers both stuck behind CGNs.
Vista and Windows 7 "prefer" IPv6 too... Heck even Windows XP with its crappy IPv6 stack turned on prefers IPv6.
If you read the whole cnet article what has changed is network awareness sending an IPv6 only HTTP request periodically to a Microsoft server using this to judge if IPv6 connectivity is actually available.
In other words the behavior of all windows 8 systems on the planet with regards to IPv6 usage is dictated by the availability by a single Microsoft URL. What could possibly go wrong with that? Is it not also wonderful MS having their system ping out to MS servers by default periodically without anyone knowing or providing a user choice to turn it off not involving registry hacks?
With regards to IPv6 usage I just checked the interface stats on my gateway with an HE tunnel configured. Very interesting...IPv6 Internet traffic is a full 25% of overall Internet usage over the last 145 day period. This predates the June 6th IPv6 go live day by several months.
IPv6 = 32GB IPv4 = 129GB
ISPs are still dragging their feet lighting up IPv6.. I fear we will have to wait another two years before most large ISPs get their act together on full production deployment.
The most interesting thing seems to be the "long tail" effect reflected in my actual usage.
Given current environment where just a handful of megasites are responsible for the majority of all Internet traffic by volume huge changes in traffic patterns can tip the scales on IPv6 usage rapidly while the countless millions of other sites run by the rest take just as long to switch over as the IPv6 naysayers say it will.
If I had to choose between SQL, NoSQL or not having that choice and instead selecting a schema design that did not suck guess which option I would pick every time?
You can always tell the clueless "data experts" they are constantly neaping about database size, queries per second, join performance...etc.
While the less clueless in realitive terms only care about minimizing contention.
Everyone seems to be installing spyware and shit that calls home constantly including software which can't be uninstalled. Games requiring you to "login" to play even when not playing online. In game advertising. Ominous license agreements enabling collection of your first born from your computer.
I can't buy new games anymore. In the last three years every single time I have seen a game I liked.. each time I have look up what "klingons" are included...sighed and moved on.
All I want to do is play.. not have to deal with vendor bullshit. For $70 people are not going to fork out that much cash and also put up with any bullshit. Who knows maybe they will have learned their lesson from what went down with previous battlefield titles but I doubt it.
I never understood the benefit of Agile or why anyone would want to go there. If your working on boring small projects which only take time and a lot of typing to complete I guess Agile works. I could see this working with shops dedicated to small scale custom projects.
For anything non-trivial you really need to invest in infustructure and design or you will end up with a patchwork of shit.
Agile seeks to exert pressure away from thinking and design rewarding instead the brainless zombie which makes shit up as they go along. It also encourages use of more modern and exotic language features to cover for the underlying system being a piece of shit.
A good development process will exert no artifical pressure detremental to the overall project lifecycle. Agile fails this test in a great number of domains.
Laziness is actually a virtue the entire point should be to reward those doing the least with least amount of effort to get the job done.
The catch is laziness must be evaluated in the context of the entire lifecycle of the system. Being lazy up front and having to work 10 times harder later as a result means you suck. Being lazy up front and having to hire more people just to support your POS when the complaints come filing in means you suck. Agile encourages people to suck in my not so particularly humble opinion.
I'm having trouble understanding the "speed" argument. Couldn't you provide different code paths for different browser versions and still maintain full performance?
I'm sure this means the size of the library is increased some but so what? aint that what cache is for?
Seems a little odd considering one of the major highlights/selling points was browser compatibility. Write once without worries of platform specific hacks. If you adopt the position of getting rid of old browsers much of those same historical compatibility issues solve themselves.
Personally, I use Linux because it's lower maintenance and less overhead, and gets out of my way when I'm working, but if I was a business lead, I'd certainly be avoiding Windows for anything requiring data security. The wonder is that we're not seeing users suing over compromised data/systems.
I know right... What are the chances out of the bazillion open source projects that go into your average linux distribution any of them could be be infiltrated by a three letter agency from this or any other nation... Impossible.... totally...utterly..... impossible.....right...?
I know some people will say well its open source others would have the code and just know. Just like they knew about that Debian "SSL patch"... Or any of hundreds of "innocent" security bugs having later been discovered by attackers.
How long was kernel.org compromised? Without anyone knowing?
The great thing about software overlays for input is they are reconfigurable allowing experimentation and user choice with little cost. All manners of corded schemes are now possible thanks to multi-touch.
For desktop computers, sure. Between Windows 7 and Office 2010, Microsoft has the desktop market locked down as tight as ever. The problem is that entire market may just evaporate. Are we going to care about desktop PCs in ten years?
What do you think? Are we? Will all of our desktops be replaced with robby the robots flying around on hoverboards in the next 10 years?
I don't know what it will take for Microsoft to survive the next decade, but if they just do bug fixes and refinement, they are fucked.
Jets are not getting any faster, cars are not getting any more fuel effecient, cpu performance has stagnated on a per-core basis. My Internet connection has not changed in the past 6 years, all of my hardware is at least 5 years old and the new shit is not substantially better, not worth spending the money to upgrade.
There is only marginal additional value in a new computer just off the assembly line vs one made 5 years ago.
The cold hard truth is all of the easy avenues for innovation have already been tapped. There may will be revolutionary breakthroughs but their existance is speculative and unpredictable. Progress that matters. Progress that is useful. Progress that makes any difference is difficult, complex and slow. It will continue to get slower into the future. I have a laundary list of bugs in windows having never been fixed and which severly well...bug me wasting a non-trivial number of minutes over a course of a week. If MS just made their products better instead of feeling compelled to reinvent the wheel I would gladly upgrade.
Disruptive change is generally only acceptable to a market if it is accompanied by significant benefit. Change for changes sake or change that makes things worse (Metro) are a loosing proposition.
It is not clear to me in what areas Apple has innovated. They created a market for iPhone and iPad selling lots of these devices, making lots of money but what is it about a flat screen computer people slide their fingers across that constitutes innovation? The army of EEs and process guys kicking ass and taking names behind the scenes?
It seems to me app developers are the ones providing virtually all of the value users dervive from the use of these products.
Apples contributions in the areas of reduced choice, hardware lockin, software lockin, full platform control and hard wiring of consumables hopefully shall not be considered "innovation" worthy of emulation by Micro$oft.
I think chances for MS to gain market share in the smartphone market with WP8 for mobile are pretty good by their choice to use windows kernel, allowing native code and continued innovation in development tools.
I think chances for MS to loose market share in the traditional PC market are pretty good if they insist on shoving their metro garbage in places it don't belong.
All and all Ballmer strikes me more and more as an incompetent idiot in dire need of replacement.
If you look at their data, they determined that at 25KV/m applied pulse, 3 out of 5 autos would have serious enough issues to stop running
I recommend reading the whole report. Quite interesting.
37 cars tested up to 50KV/m from 1986 to 2002. No problems for any of those cars off at the time of EMP.
"The most serious effect observed on running automobiles was that the motors in three cars stopped at field strengths of approximately 30 kV/m or above. In an actual EMP exposure, these vehicles would glide to a stop and require the driver to restart them."...
"Electronics in the dashboard of one automobile were damaged and required repair. Other effects were relatively minor. Twenty-five automobiles exhibited malfunctions that could be considered only a nuisance (e.g., blinking dashboard lights) and did not require driver intervention to correct. Eight of the 37 cars tested did not exhibit any anomalous response."
Nuisance != "serious enough issues to stop running"...
Stop running != stop working until repaired
I think there will be about 8 out of 10 serious issues with an EMP event which max out at about 50KVm. And about half of those will be in
No, the TEST maxed out at 50KVm. EMP events don't "max out". What is the basis of 8 out of 10? Can you cite a source?
But what good is a running car if there is no way to put fuel into it?
The point is our cars still work after an EMP which is a heck of a lot better scenario than not working at all.
Few cars would be running, mostly old ones with old ignition systems and mechanical fuel pumps
"Thus, while it might be expected that increased EMP vulnerability would accompany the proliferated electronics applications, this trend, at least in part, is mitigated by the increased application of EMI/EMC practices."
The Linux desktop isn't unfriendly, per se. The problem is it is difficult to use just the desktop with Linux, because the OS was designed from the ground up to be used from the command line, and tacking on a GUI doesn't really change that. That's really the reason Linux never had its year on the desktop, and probably never will: Linux never was intended to be a desktop OS.
In my view the modern window managers for Linux are awesome. Latest KDEs looks very nice...a hint of OS/2 shell.. It is a capable platform including all of the interfacing and APIs to develop great looking apps.
The deal breaker for me are fonts and font scaling/processing. Linux fonts look like shit and they are not processed properly compared to Windows and Apple platforms. Anti-Aliasing needed to keep you from seeing how truely ugly Linux fonts really are make text look blurry and oversized.
Don't think that being disconnected from the grid would not mean you are safe. Anything with even a few feet of wire hanging onto it would be subject to serious damage. Most consumer electronics, including cars, cell phones, radios and TVs would likely be damaged beyond repair. Your solar powered home will be as dark as everybody else and those of you with local generators are unlikely to be in much better shape. You will literally find yourself back in horse and buggy days, only with very few horses to be had. Few cars would be running, mostly old ones with old ignition systems and mechanical fuel pumps
As Mr Nimzicki once said "Uh Mr. President. Thats not entirely accurate"
Slashdot Mirror
Xerox gets full credit for creating the Internet because they created ethernet and other computing ideas? If this is true what prevents me from using the same device to assign all credit to inventors of integrated circuits?
Who did what is no mystery all you need to do is pick an RFC and look at the authors list. RFC 760 and 761 are a good place to start.
As far as nuclear survivability my understanding is this was a mixed bag. Some people were pushing this very meme for political reasons and others had different intentions. It comes down to who you ask and value judgements you choose to assign to each actor.
It's always about cancer isn't it. Hey and you guessed it ... always impossible to prove any causal link to much of anything related to cancer but lets play that game and beat our heads against the wall even though we already know what the outcome will be.
High barrier for rising above noise floor in which >20% of everyone dies of cancer anyway. You can focus on certain types of cancers to improve your chances except in most cases nobody really has much clue which those would be apriori.
Lag time of onset... waiting 10 or 20 years for a statistically significant signal is too long and too late.
Lack of ability to isolate cause and effect.
Lack of will/funds/humans to conduct a large and long enough survey which could provide any statistically significant and therefore useful information.
This makes the whole cancer angle moot... It is not falsifiable. Even if there was a real health risk in the form of increased cancer you won't find it unless things are really bad.
What I do know is some pretty nonsensical language made its way into safe drinking water act and it is still there as far as I can tell. I'm not against fracking... I'm against government corruption. I'm against people doing sloppy work. I'm against corrupt regulatory frameworks which intentionally fail to properly internalize externalities.
Just read the summary, but it actually says it's not real time unless it really takes a single cell 10 hours to divide
NYT article says so...
"Currently it takes about 9 to 10 hours of computer time to simulate a single division of the smallest cell â" about the same time the cell takes to divide in its natural environment."
Instead of properly standartizing NAT they removed it, with the argument that there are enought adresses now.
Well, if you used Nat for anything else than adress space expansion, like multihoming, topology hiding, ... you are f**d with ipv6.
To understand why this is not true requires us to parse what is meant by "NAT". Not all "NATs" are created equally.
1. NAT where 1 IP is being used by a boatload of hosts. (1:many)
2. NAT where each host has a corrosponding mapped address. (1:1)
With IPv6 only the first case is dead. The second case is still very much possible.. for example via snat target in ip6tables.
From systems perspective there is a big difference between deterministically rewriting IP headers (#2) which is quite trivial vs fancy ALG codes needed to multiplex shit and maintain state charts so that everything appears to work behind a single IP Address. (#1)
Besides there are other ways to accomplish things you cite in IPv6 without using any NAT however those knobs are still there should you need them.
The main difference being NSLs are pretty much not legally enforceable and have, in fact, been ruled against by courts in the US in the past as unconstitutional.
The kicker from my understanding is concept of "third party doctrine" where assertion of 4th amendment protections don't apply when your information is held by someone else.
The net effect as far as I've been able to parse NSLs are just blatently unconstititutional red herrings. They are allowed to persist simply because the third party doctrine wields all the real power.
I think Microsoft should triple the fees. I'm sick of vendors who think they don't have to take QA seriously since they can push out a patch at moments notice. Fuck 'em.
Alright well I'm sure Peta takes "dead beef" just as seriously too so send in those patches.
That goes double for java and its sexist cafe babes.
Less people are willing to tolerate the actions and speech of others the closer society gets to the drain.
Please make it work... I want one of these!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_Transform_Telescope
Vista is over 5 years old. That is ancient in computer terms.
Who cares? Why should people spend their money upgrading when they have no reason to? To make Microsoft happy?
You don't see any other software vendors saying windows 7 only. They actually value their paying customers.
Vista does not offer DirectX11 GPU
Whats this got to do with office?
nor the DRM and document protection of Windows 7 for the sharing features of Sky Drive Pro.
This is really great. Windows 7 has more DRM. Let me run out and upgrade right away.
Why would they go there with vista/win2k8? Seems excessive considering new version is only incrementally better than Office 2010.
What realistically is the value prop to the end-user to upgrade? Being annoyed with ugly ass metro styling and "cloud" shit?
Sounds like a good way to loose out on office revenue.
And that's what it comes down to. People en-masse are reactive, not preventative. You can have all the charts and stats and proof showing that it's _going_ to cause huge headaches for everyone.. but until it actually does, nothing will be done.
This is irrelevent. People en-masse don't know what the heck IPv4 or IPv6 mean nor do they care. They just want their shit to work.
What do you mean the IP Stack on my PC or tablet or phone was updated to support IPv6 years ago? What is a stack? What is an IPv6?
What do you mean my ISP flipped a switch, pushed firmware or configuration and now I'm on IPv6? What is IPv6? I don't see anything different.
The transition does not require action on the users part. It will just happen at some point even if that point coincides with the user throwing out an old router and replacing it with a new one after its PSU dies or it is deemed obsolete.
IPv6 is driven by the industry not by the end user ("most of the population").
Big content and large ISPs have already made their stance and desire for IPv6 clear by driving its adoption for selfish reasons.
Until some new technology that everyone wants comes along and requires IPv6, no one will care about it.
The killer app for IPv6 is maintaining a global network of PEERS. It's what you or others don't have to worry about loosing which makes a transition more appealing than accepting status quo for eternity.
Content extracts value by reaching everyone directly without having to worry about degregation through additional hops/congested CGNs.
Service providers extract value by not having to operate expensive CGN.
Governments and LEA extract value by not having to deal with multiple devices cloaked behind a CGN.
Even partial deployment provides some value to all stakeholders.
It makes no sense for businesses to pay thousands on larbor to reconfigure their entire network for IPv6, and see no beneficial gain.
Nobody is suggesting they do. All they need to do is make their *external* presence accessible via IPv6. They can keep IPv4 internally forever for all anyone cares.
Not to mention a lot of legacy hardware still don't support IPv6, like network printers/copiers, camera systems, security systems, etc.
IPv4 is not going away anytime soon. IPv6 is being added. Noone is taking away your toys. You don't have to go out and buy new stuff.
Even if the global IPv4 network went away IPv4 private networks would still be avaliable. You could still tunnel your IPv4 network over IPv6 with anyone you chose to have access to it.
It also complicates maters worse when you try to network across long distances
Having more globally unique addresses complicates matters? I won't pretend I understand how this complicates matters more than attempting to communicate with two peers both stuck behind CGNs.
Vista and Windows 7 "prefer" IPv6 too... Heck even Windows XP with its crappy IPv6 stack turned on prefers IPv6.
If you read the whole cnet article what has changed is network awareness sending an IPv6 only HTTP request periodically to a Microsoft server using this to judge if IPv6 connectivity is actually available.
In other words the behavior of all windows 8 systems on the planet with regards to IPv6 usage is dictated by the availability by a single Microsoft URL. What could possibly go wrong with that? Is it not also wonderful MS having their system ping out to MS servers by default periodically without anyone knowing or providing a user choice to turn it off not involving registry hacks?
With regards to IPv6 usage I just checked the interface stats on my gateway with an HE tunnel configured. Very interesting...IPv6 Internet traffic is a full 25% of overall Internet usage over the last 145 day period. This predates the June 6th IPv6 go live day by several months.
IPv6 = 32GB
IPv4 = 129GB
ISPs are still dragging their feet lighting up IPv6.. I fear we will have to wait another two years before most large ISPs get their act together on full production deployment.
The most interesting thing seems to be the "long tail" effect reflected in my actual usage.
Given current environment where just a handful of megasites are responsible for the majority of all Internet traffic by volume huge changes in traffic patterns can tip the scales on IPv6 usage rapidly while the countless millions of other sites run by the rest take just as long to switch over as the IPv6 naysayers say it will.
If I had to choose between SQL, NoSQL or not having that choice and instead selecting a schema design that did not suck guess which option I would pick every time?
You can always tell the clueless "data experts" they are constantly neaping about database size, queries per second, join performance...etc.
While the less clueless in realitive terms only care about minimizing contention.
Everyone seems to be installing spyware and shit that calls home constantly including software which can't be uninstalled. Games requiring you to "login" to play even when not playing online. In game advertising. Ominous license agreements enabling collection of your first born from your computer.
I can't buy new games anymore. In the last three years every single time I have seen a game I liked.. each time I have look up what "klingons" are included...sighed and moved on.
All I want to do is play.. not have to deal with vendor bullshit. For $70 people are not going to fork out that much cash and also put up with any bullshit. Who knows maybe they will have learned their lesson from what went down with previous battlefield titles but I doubt it.
I never understood the benefit of Agile or why anyone would want to go there. If your working on boring small projects which only take time and a lot of typing to complete I guess Agile works. I could see this working with shops dedicated to small scale custom projects.
For anything non-trivial you really need to invest in infustructure and design or you will end up with a patchwork of shit.
Agile seeks to exert pressure away from thinking and design rewarding instead the brainless zombie which makes shit up as they go along. It also encourages use of more modern and exotic language features to cover for the underlying system being a piece of shit.
A good development process will exert no artifical pressure detremental to the overall project lifecycle. Agile fails this test in a great number of domains.
Laziness is actually a virtue the entire point should be to reward those doing the least with least amount of effort to get the job done.
The catch is laziness must be evaluated in the context of the entire lifecycle of the system. Being lazy up front and having to work 10 times harder later as a result means you suck. Being lazy up front and having to hire more people just to support your POS when the complaints come filing in means you suck. Agile encourages people to suck in my not so particularly humble opinion.
I'm having trouble understanding the "speed" argument. Couldn't you provide different code paths for different browser versions and still maintain full performance?
I'm sure this means the size of the library is increased some but so what? aint that what cache is for?
Seems a little odd considering one of the major highlights/selling points was browser compatibility. Write once without worries of platform specific hacks. If you adopt the position of getting rid of old browsers much of those same historical compatibility issues solve themselves.
Personally, I use Linux because it's lower maintenance and less overhead, and gets out of my way when I'm working, but if I was a business lead, I'd certainly be avoiding Windows for anything requiring data security. The wonder is that we're not seeing users suing over compromised data/systems.
I know right... What are the chances out of the bazillion open source projects that go into your average linux distribution any of them could be be infiltrated by a three letter agency from this or any other nation... Impossible.... totally ...utterly..... impossible... ..right...?
I know some people will say well its open source others would have the code and just know. Just like they knew about that Debian "SSL patch"... Or any of hundreds of "innocent" security bugs having later been discovered by attackers.
How long was kernel.org compromised? Without anyone knowing?
On screen keyboards are small and cramped. We don't need to rearrange the keys we need to rethink the whole thing.
WPM people have been able to get with this thing is amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
The great thing about software overlays for input is they are reconfigurable allowing experimentation and user choice with little cost. All manners of corded schemes are now possible thanks to multi-touch.
For desktop computers, sure. Between Windows 7 and Office 2010, Microsoft has the desktop market locked down as tight as ever. The problem is that entire market may just evaporate. Are we going to care about desktop PCs in ten years?
What do you think? Are we? Will all of our desktops be replaced with robby the robots flying around on hoverboards in the next 10 years?
I don't know what it will take for Microsoft to survive the next decade, but if they just do bug fixes and refinement, they are fucked.
Jets are not getting any faster, cars are not getting any more fuel effecient, cpu performance has stagnated on a per-core basis. My Internet connection has not changed in the past 6 years, all of my hardware is at least 5 years old and the new shit is not substantially better, not worth spending the money to upgrade.
There is only marginal additional value in a new computer just off the assembly line vs one made 5 years ago.
The cold hard truth is all of the easy avenues for innovation have already been tapped. There may will be revolutionary breakthroughs but their existance is speculative and unpredictable. Progress that matters. Progress that is useful. Progress that makes any difference is difficult, complex and slow. It will continue to get slower into the future. I have a laundary list of bugs in windows having never been fixed and which severly well...bug me wasting a non-trivial number of minutes over a course of a week. If MS just made their products better instead of feeling compelled to reinvent the wheel I would gladly upgrade.
Disruptive change is generally only acceptable to a market if it is accompanied by significant benefit. Change for changes sake or change that makes things worse (Metro) are a loosing proposition.
It is not clear to me in what areas Apple has innovated. They created a market for iPhone and iPad selling lots of these devices, making lots of money but what is it about a flat screen computer people slide their fingers across that constitutes innovation? The army of EEs and process guys kicking ass and taking names behind the scenes?
It seems to me app developers are the ones providing virtually all of the value users dervive from the use of these products.
Apples contributions in the areas of reduced choice, hardware lockin, software lockin, full platform control and hard wiring of consumables hopefully shall not be considered "innovation" worthy of emulation by Micro$oft.
I think chances for MS to gain market share in the smartphone market with WP8 for mobile are pretty good by their choice to use windows kernel, allowing native code and continued innovation in development tools.
I think chances for MS to loose market share in the traditional PC market are pretty good if they insist on shoving their metro garbage in places it don't belong.
All and all Ballmer strikes me more and more as an incompetent idiot in dire need of replacement.
If you look at their data, they determined that at 25KV/m applied pulse, 3 out of 5 autos would have serious enough issues to stop running
I recommend reading the whole report. Quite interesting.
37 cars tested up to 50KV/m from 1986 to 2002. No problems for any of those cars off at the time of EMP.
"The most serious effect observed on running ...
automobiles was that the motors in three cars stopped at field strengths of approximately
30 kV/m or above. In an actual EMP exposure, these vehicles would glide to a
stop and require the driver to restart them."
"Electronics in the dashboard of one automobile
were damaged and required repair. Other effects were relatively minor. Twenty-five
automobiles exhibited malfunctions that could be considered only a nuisance (e.g.,
blinking dashboard lights) and did not require driver intervention to correct. Eight of the
37 cars tested did not exhibit any anomalous response."
Nuisance != "serious enough issues to stop running" ...
Stop running != stop working until repaired
I think there will be about 8 out of 10 serious issues with an EMP event which max out at about 50KVm. And about half of those will be in
No, the TEST maxed out at 50KVm. EMP events don't "max out". What is the basis of 8 out of 10? Can you cite a source?
But what good is a running car if there is no way to put fuel into it?
The point is our cars still work after an EMP which is a heck of a lot better scenario than not working at all.
Few cars would be running, mostly old ones with old ignition systems and mechanical fuel pumps
"Thus, while it might be expected that increased EMP vulnerability would accompany the
proliferated electronics applications, this trend, at least in part, is mitigated by the
increased application of EMI/EMC practices."
What? You mean I didn't read the following correctly?
If you would have read the report you would not be coming back to me wondering what part(s) you got wrong.
What does the report say about vechicles? Old Vechicles? New Vechicles? What were the results of their testbed?
The Linux desktop isn't unfriendly, per se. The problem is it is difficult to use just the desktop with Linux, because the OS was designed from the ground up to be used from the command line, and tacking on a GUI doesn't really change that. That's really the reason Linux never had its year on the desktop, and probably never will: Linux never was intended to be a desktop OS.
In my view the modern window managers for Linux are awesome. Latest KDEs looks very nice...a hint of OS/2 shell.. It is a capable platform including all of the interfacing and APIs to develop great looking apps.
The deal breaker for me are fonts and font scaling/processing. Linux fonts look like shit and they are not processed properly compared to Windows and Apple platforms. Anti-Aliasing needed to keep you from seeing how truely ugly Linux fonts really are make text look blurry and oversized.
Don't think that being disconnected from the grid would not mean you are safe. Anything with even a few feet of wire hanging onto it would be subject to serious damage. Most consumer electronics, including cars, cell phones, radios and TVs would likely be damaged beyond repair. Your solar powered home will be as dark as everybody else and those of you with local generators are unlikely to be in much better shape. You will literally find yourself back in horse and buggy days, only with very few horses to be had. Few cars would be running, mostly old ones with old ignition systems and mechanical fuel pumps
As Mr Nimzicki once said "Uh Mr. President. Thats not entirely accurate"
Please read the EMP commission report. http://www.empcommission.org/