> Where everything is disorganized and you simply wander through everything tossing it > out of the way like looking through your dirty clothes hamper for a clean set of underwear. > Call me old fashioned but I like hierarchical data and tree structures.
Do you have your underwear neatly folded and sorted in appropriate drawers? Welcome to the dinosaur club! Most people I know leave their clothes on the floor exactly as you are describing. You walk into their house and the entire floor is carpeted with it. There are clothes on the furniture, under the bed, on the bookshelves (if they have any bookshelves, that is), and even on the desk by the computer. Every time I see it, I remember the "Friends" episode "The One with the Dirty Girl", where Ross dates a messy woman and has various... encounters, with old food, and God knows what else. It always makes me feel like Monica, who at the end of the episode shows up at this woman's apartment and offers to clean up so she could sleep at night:) Naturally, messy people like that treat their computers in exactly the same manner.
>> "two quantum channels with zero capacity can carry information" > Feynman once said that nobody understands quantum mechanics, and this is why.
No. Nobody "understands" quantum mechanics because it is illogical. It is chock full of applications of the mind projection fallacy, starting with its premises and going all the way to the conclusions (some of which just happen to be correct for other reasons).
> The demise of Usenet was a long time ago, and coincided with the introduction of the web-based forum.
Uh, no. It coincided with the flood of spammers who discovered that it costs nothing to post on the newsgroups and that most people use their *gasp* actual email addresses in the posts. Now if you post anything, you are guaranteed to be spammed on the newsgroup and off. At least the forums are too numerous to attack effectively and are at least somewhat moderated. They are also more anonymous as you get to use different identities, with no public email address for each one. Sure, if spam were outlawed, usenet might come back, but as for me, I haven't posted on a newsgroup in almost a decade.
> Online video is a waste of time and bandwidth unless it's porn.
Not necessarily. Personally, I found the video quite educational. I've never seen someone assemble a circuit board before, having learned to do it from a book, and I have learned a few things by watching her do it.
> I tend to see e-mail as something you use for temporary exchange of messages
Well, you and I do, but many people religiously save every email they get forever. I have no idea why they do that. Unless you are an evil lawyer, it can't possibly make any difference what someone said or didn't say two years ago, so I automatically delete all my mail more than a few months old. Other people manage to fill gmail's storage quota with email, which God knows what.
> I'm guessing that robocars will also be owned by private citizens
That won't help. Whether the robocar is yours or rented, it still has to tell the traffic control where it is going, and, I am sure, who is in it. If you read the articles, you'll see a whole slew of schemes requiring "reservations" and access to information for planning purposes. Maybe that information will be free, and reservations could be avoided, but I bet that eventually there will not be any option for people who want privacy.
> you get all the freedom to stop and travel where you want to. > The question isn't why Americans love cars, the question is why Europe doesn't.
Because in Europe the public transport infrastructure is much better, and the cities are denser. You can walk almost anywhere, and it is easy to take a bus or train to go further. It's much more convenient than worrying about parking.
Personal public transit is not quite like a bus. Instead of just getting on and showing your bus pass, you'll have to tell the robocar who you are and where you are going. This is a totalitarian government's wet dream. It would be able to track your every move and completely deny you movement if it so chose. Robocars will usher in the new era where transportation, not just long distance travel, is a privilege, to be granted or withheld on a whim.
I propose that to circumvent the new "particular machine" requirement, all software patents should henceforth contain the phrase "this algorithm executes on a general purpose computer and a pony named Jack, housed in the San Francisco Zoo". A pony should be particular enough, right?
> especially when cutting edge means nothing and stability is paramount.
Now that's just a load of FUD. A 64 bit Linux is just as stable as a 32 bit one. It is not even "cutting edge", since the same source is compiled on both platforms. If you write good code, you shouldn't even have to change anything; just recompile and run. I run Slamd64 myself, and everything on it is 64bit and very nice and stable.
> Most of the useful(java plugin) or popular apps(games, some business) are not as > stable in 64-bit if they exist at all(skype) so why put out a 64 bit distro
So it's a chicken and egg problem. Somebody has to start wanting 64 bit programs before companies will start providing them. It's the nature of business. Sure, you might not see any benefit from migrating to 64 bit, just as many people like you did not see any benefit from migrating to 32 bit from good old DOS. But a distribution packager is supposed to know these things, supposed to care about the advantages of the x64 platform. He ought to start migrating everything and everyone onto 64 bit, because it will eventually happen, just as 32 bit application completely replaced 16 bit ones. Be the egg, not the chicken.
They don't! Over the last fifteen years of running a computer every day, I have only had one hard drive failure. One. That particular drive was bought used, on eBay, because it was cheap. I think that I can safely say that my chances of experiencing another drive failure any time soon are very very low.
Oh, please. As far as I know, if you are on IPv6, you can't see a damn thing on the internet except through IPv4 translation.
> Or all modern storage is solid state?
SSDs are still too expensive, too slow, and don't provide enough benefits to switch over.
> Or all modern ISPs are either wireless or fibre?
I wish. In most places, you can't get either.
> Or all modern car designs are super efficient?
Yes, they are. The SUV market is still around, sure, but energy efficient designs is where everyone is going.
> "all modern" is pretty meaningless until it becomes prevalent >> All modern CPUs are 64-bit
Every decent desktop CPU on the market now is 64 bit. A 32 bit Pentium line still exists, but not for much longer. All the other CPUs you can buy now are 64bit, which basically is Core 2 or Athlon 64. 32 bit CPUs are either really old ones on eBay, embedded things, or some super-energy-efficient-and-slow CPUs for notebooks. And no, it is not going to be obsolete either. We will never need more than 64 bits, since there aren't any human scale physical quantities in that range.
I really can't understand people who don't have a UPS. Don't you care about your data? At all? The UPS is not very expensive (My BackUPS 900 is very nice and only $100), and will last a long time (you just replace the batteries now and then). Once you are on UPS, you can stop worrying about any power issues, journalling file systems, crash recovery, and all that. The computer will never fail due to power. If you run Linux, it will also never fail due to the OS. If you are a normal user, that means your computer will never fail, period. Seriously, there is no excuse for not having a UPS. Go and get one right now!
> Back in the day, BeOS booted in 6 seconds to a fully usable desktop
Then why is my Linux kernel taking 10 seconds to boot? That's just the kernel, after leaving LILO and until seeing first init message. I believe it's mostly the USB driver, although I can't imagine why that should be so damn slow.
> it's a shame no one gives assembly the respect it deserves.
That's because aside from you, me, and a dozen other people, nobody knows assembly any more. Today's generation lives in the world of the 500M web application.
I disagree. There is quite a bit of difference between just booting and typing and opening the case to remove the battery or the drive. The difference is that the former can be done in plain view, while the latter can not. The vault in the bank is not uncrackable either, you know, it is only guaranteed to slow down the attacker until real security arrives. Putting a password on your bios and boot loader is like having a vault. It is not uncrackable, but it slows down any cracker and prevents him from just walking up to your machine and owning it. Opening up the case is not always practical. The computer may be in a place where people will see him open it. He might not have a screwdriver. Or the sysadmin might have soldered an AA battery to the back of the motherboard. There are different kinds of physical access, and the more you can secure, the better.
> on any Linux system you can log in in init 1 (runlevel 1)
Anyone with even the slightest bit of security concern would put a restricted flag in the boot loader to prevent this sort of thing. The boot loader will then ask for the password to alter the boot command line. See RedHat docs for a howto.
> Thats because frame buffers were one of those seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time. But that time is passed.
Well, gee, that's exactly what I think about X. I'd much rather get rid of the huge bloaty X.Org and work on the framebuffer console, as I am doing right now. If there was kernel mode switching support, I'd actually upgrade my video card again. Currently my nVidia 7600 is the best one supported (correct me if I'm wrong). I would certainly like to get something newer to play Windows games faster, but if I can't still have my framebuffer console, the deal is off.
> What is next after silicon transistors on a die?
Next, you optimize your bloaty software. Word Perfect 5.1 ran just fine on an 8MHz 286, and had a capaibility set not too different from the current word processors. Any piece of software can be optimized to the point when most operations are instantaneous
It is none of your business how I decide to spend my day or what I decide to do with my computer. If I feel like compiling my Linux distro from scratch, I'll do it. Take your environmentalist rants elsewhere.
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> Where everything is disorganized and you simply wander through everything tossing it
> out of the way like looking through your dirty clothes hamper for a clean set of underwear.
> Call me old fashioned but I like hierarchical data and tree structures.
Do you have your underwear neatly folded and sorted in appropriate drawers? Welcome to the dinosaur club! Most people I know leave their clothes on the floor exactly as you are describing. You walk into their house and the entire floor is carpeted with it. There are clothes on the furniture, under the bed, on the bookshelves (if they have any bookshelves, that is), and even on the desk by the computer. Every time I see it, I remember the "Friends" episode "The One with the Dirty Girl", where Ross dates a messy woman and has various... encounters, with old food, and God knows what else. It always makes me feel like Monica, who at the end of the episode shows up at this woman's apartment and offers to clean up so she could sleep at night :) Naturally, messy people like that treat their computers in exactly the same manner.
>> "two quantum channels with zero capacity can carry information"
> Feynman once said that nobody understands quantum mechanics, and this is why.
No. Nobody "understands" quantum mechanics because it is illogical. It is chock full of applications of the mind projection fallacy, starting with its premises and going all the way to the conclusions (some of which just happen to be correct for other reasons).
> The demise of Usenet was a long time ago, and coincided with the introduction of the web-based forum.
Uh, no. It coincided with the flood of spammers who discovered that it costs nothing to post on the newsgroups and that most people use their *gasp* actual email addresses in the posts. Now if you post anything, you are guaranteed to be spammed on the newsgroup and off. At least the forums are too numerous to attack effectively and are at least somewhat moderated. They are also more anonymous as you get to use different identities, with no public email address for each one. Sure, if spam were outlawed, usenet might come back, but as for me, I haven't posted on a newsgroup in almost a decade.
I'm still pumped from using the mouse.
> Online video is a waste of time and bandwidth unless it's porn.
Not necessarily. Personally, I found the video quite educational. I've never seen someone assemble a circuit board before, having learned to do it from a book, and I have learned a few things by watching her do it.
> I tend to see e-mail as something you use for temporary exchange of messages
Well, you and I do, but many people religiously save every email they get forever. I have no idea why they do that. Unless you are an evil lawyer, it can't possibly make any difference what someone said or didn't say two years ago, so I automatically delete all my mail more than a few months old. Other people manage to fill gmail's storage quota with email, which God knows what.
> I'm guessing that robocars will also be owned by private citizens
That won't help. Whether the robocar is yours or rented, it still has to tell the traffic control where it is going, and, I am sure, who is in it. If you read the articles, you'll see a whole slew of schemes requiring "reservations" and access to information for planning purposes. Maybe that information will be free, and reservations could be avoided, but I bet that eventually there will not be any option for people who want privacy.
> you get all the freedom to stop and travel where you want to.
> The question isn't why Americans love cars, the question is why Europe doesn't.
Because in Europe the public transport infrastructure is much better, and the cities are denser. You can walk almost anywhere, and it is easy to take a bus or train to go further. It's much more convenient than worrying about parking.
Personal public transit is not quite like a bus. Instead of just getting on and showing your bus pass, you'll have to tell the robocar who you are and where you are going. This is a totalitarian government's wet dream. It would be able to track your every move and completely deny you movement if it so chose. Robocars will usher in the new era where transportation, not just long distance travel, is a privilege, to be granted or withheld on a whim.
I propose that to circumvent the new "particular machine" requirement, all software patents should henceforth contain the phrase "this algorithm executes on a general purpose computer and a pony named Jack, housed in the San Francisco Zoo". A pony should be particular enough, right?
> especially when cutting edge means nothing and stability is paramount.
Now that's just a load of FUD. A 64 bit Linux is just as stable as a 32 bit one. It is not even "cutting edge", since the same source is compiled on both platforms. If you write good code, you shouldn't even have to change anything; just recompile and run. I run Slamd64 myself, and everything on it is 64bit and very nice and stable.
> Most of the useful(java plugin) or popular apps(games, some business) are not as
> stable in 64-bit if they exist at all(skype) so why put out a 64 bit distro
So it's a chicken and egg problem. Somebody has to start wanting 64 bit programs before companies will start providing them. It's the nature of business. Sure, you might not see any benefit from migrating to 64 bit, just as many people like you did not see any benefit from migrating to 32 bit from good old DOS. But a distribution packager is supposed to know these things, supposed to care about the advantages of the x64 platform. He ought to start migrating everything and everyone onto 64 bit, because it will eventually happen, just as 32 bit application completely replaced 16 bit ones. Be the egg, not the chicken.
> It's good thing that hard drives never fail!
They don't! Over the last fifteen years of running a computer every day, I have only had one hard drive failure. One. That particular drive was bought used, on eBay, because it was cheap. I think that I can safely say that my chances of experiencing another drive failure any time soon are very very low.
> Just like all modern addresses are IPV6?
Oh, please. As far as I know, if you are on IPv6, you can't see a damn thing on the internet except through IPv4 translation.
> Or all modern storage is solid state?
SSDs are still too expensive, too slow, and don't provide enough benefits to switch over.
> Or all modern ISPs are either wireless or fibre?
I wish. In most places, you can't get either.
> Or all modern car designs are super efficient?
Yes, they are. The SUV market is still around, sure, but energy efficient designs is where everyone is going.
> "all modern" is pretty meaningless until it becomes prevalent
>> All modern CPUs are 64-bit
Every decent desktop CPU on the market now is 64 bit. A 32 bit Pentium line still exists, but not for much longer. All the other CPUs you can buy now are 64bit, which basically is Core 2 or Athlon 64. 32 bit CPUs are either really old ones on eBay, embedded things, or some super-energy-efficient-and-slow CPUs for notebooks. And no, it is not going to be obsolete either. We will never need more than 64 bits, since there aren't any human scale physical quantities in that range.
No 64-bit build - no deal. All modern CPUs are 64-bit, and pretending that they don't exist is not going to help you.
I really can't understand people who don't have a UPS. Don't you care about your data? At all? The UPS is not very expensive (My BackUPS 900 is very nice and only $100), and will last a long time (you just replace the batteries now and then). Once you are on UPS, you can stop worrying about any power issues, journalling file systems, crash recovery, and all that. The computer will never fail due to power. If you run Linux, it will also never fail due to the OS. If you are a normal user, that means your computer will never fail, period. Seriously, there is no excuse for not having a UPS. Go and get one right now!
> Back in the day, BeOS booted in 6 seconds to a fully usable desktop
Then why is my Linux kernel taking 10 seconds to boot? That's just the kernel, after leaving LILO and until seeing first init message. I believe it's mostly the USB driver, although I can't imagine why that should be so damn slow.
> it's a shame no one gives assembly the respect it deserves.
That's because aside from you, me, and a dozen other people, nobody knows assembly any more. Today's generation lives in the world of the 500M web application.
I disagree. There is quite a bit of difference between just booting and typing and opening the case to remove the battery or the drive. The difference is that the former can be done in plain view, while the latter can not. The vault in the bank is not uncrackable either, you know, it is only guaranteed to slow down the attacker until real security arrives. Putting a password on your bios and boot loader is like having a vault. It is not uncrackable, but it slows down any cracker and prevents him from just walking up to your machine and owning it. Opening up the case is not always practical. The computer may be in a place where people will see him open it. He might not have a screwdriver. Or the sysadmin might have soldered an AA battery to the back of the motherboard. There are different kinds of physical access, and the more you can secure, the better.
> on any Linux system you can log in in init 1 (runlevel 1)
Anyone with even the slightest bit of security concern would put a restricted flag in the boot loader to prevent this sort of thing. The boot loader will then ask for the password to alter the boot command line. See RedHat docs for a howto.
> Thats because frame buffers were one of those seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time. But that time is passed.
Well, gee, that's exactly what I think about X. I'd much rather get rid of the huge bloaty X.Org and work on the framebuffer console, as I am doing right now. If there was kernel mode switching support, I'd actually upgrade my video card again. Currently my nVidia 7600 is the best one supported (correct me if I'm wrong). I would certainly like to get something newer to play Windows games faster, but if I can't still have my framebuffer console, the deal is off.
> What is next after silicon transistors on a die?
Next, you optimize your bloaty software. Word Perfect 5.1 ran just fine on an 8MHz 286, and had a capaibility set not too different from the current word processors. Any piece of software can be optimized to the point when most operations are instantaneous
Because, you know, free games are working out so well on Linux. We have thousands of games to play here! Oh, wait...
It is none of your business how I decide to spend my day or what I decide to do with my computer. If I feel like compiling my Linux distro from scratch, I'll do it. Take your environmentalist rants elsewhere.
> bringing it down from space is not cost-effective!)
Why isn't it? Vacuum compresses very well. You can pack a full year's supply of it into a single thermos bottle.
> Imagine fitting your kids with filters and "plug-ins" to make sure they turn out a certain way.
We already do. It's called "parenting". You do it by talking to them, and yes, it does work if you do it properly.