If there are any nearby planets with heavier elements and some range of chemistry, perhaps they could support life forms that derive their principal source of energy from such the magnetar's field.
Those life forms would have a leg up on us in terms of interfacing with electronic equipment more naturally than we do.
OTOH, maybe they'd miss out on all the visible spectrum features we make use of for our eyeballs.
Sure Mozilla may offer some neat "underground" type features but the one thing it doesn't do is offer the ability to talk to a support technician on the phone when it won't work properly.
You make a very good point. It certainly does reflect my experience to date.
Practically speaking, IT managers are a cautions conservative bunch, and when they rollout a product to the desktop they
want,
are willing,
expect,
and are suspicious if they don't have to
pay money for a deep bench of support.
In fact, that conservative view on making sure things are stable is why most companies are no where near the level of XP deployment that MS is trying to push onto them.
However, I think most Fortune 500 companies are like mine: mere mortal users don't talk with tech support at Microsoft or, heaven forbid, the actual programmer at Microsoft.
No, our support calls get culled and binned. When and if a local tech decides that it's a problem with say, IE, then he logs it with Microsoft. And we pay for that privilege.
Whether Microsoft does anything about the problem is a whole other matter. While we have gotten genuine concerned support on some occasions (not for IE, for Exchange), other times you get:
"that's not really a problem"
"that's an extension"
"we know about it already; it's fixed in the next Service Pack coming out RSN"
and where there's not a competing vendor for support that has the same kind of access to the source code. If we're unhappy with our support contract for Internet Explorer, then it's not like there's another choice.
With Mozilla, support outfits are going to have to compete based on how well they perform in a competitive environment - anyone and everyone has direct access to source code.
Mozilla support companies won't be able to rely on contracts that are artificially fattened, based on some exclusive access to the source code.
IT organizations are getting pretty tired of paying big bucks to MS and feeling as if they have absolutely no choice in the matter.
Mozilla gives them a new choice that they haven't had until very recently.
Being cost conscious, I think they'll look into it.
I'm guessing you'll get plenty of suggestions to change your language, which is certainly something to consider if you have that option.
But if you're like me, you don't have that option. You've got a load of C++ that's not simply going to magically transform into Python or Java overnight.
I would suggest the hard road. Boil down supported standard features in the compilers that you can use and tell people to stick to that list unless they can make a case that all of the compilers now support the new feature that they want to use.
Although I feel it is dated now, Netscape used to publish such a guide for their developers.
For example, in our early days, we would not permit namespaces or RTTI.
Now, as compilers have gotten more supportive of the ISO C++ standard, we permit those features in our codebase.
But we haven't yet decided to open the floodgates on exception handling, although it's supported pretty broadly.
Finally, you really need an automated build system that runs the latest repository snapshots through the compilers on all the platforms and throws the results up on a web page, like Tinderbox.
That will tend to enforce good standards as developers will see that their check-in attempts fly through with green and no warnings, or get dirty yellow about warnings, or red with downright errors during the build.
Remeber, free speech et al was written in a time when there wasn't true anonmity.
Sort of.
In that day and age, if I went to the town marketplace, people would know me and could tell someone that Joe over there had been talking like a Tory, or whatever.
But the central government probably didn't know me on that basis. And neither did they know instantly if someone uttered a word against the King's will. It had to be really outrageous and it would take weeks or months for politically indiscreet speech to cause a reaction with the central governmental authority.
But a desire for anonymity was still there, because some individuals were in jeopardy, even with the molasses-like speed of the British military and government's intelligence operation.
Indeed, that action at a distance delay is one of the reasons why rebellion in the colonies succeeded where rebellion in Scotland or Ireland did not.
Despite the practical protection of distance and not computerized databases on citizens, Thomas Paine, in particular, often wrote under a pseudonym.
At any rate, technology has changed.
Despite its bureaucratic nature, we can't rely upon the FBI to be as sluggish in keyword analysis as King George's government.
But anonymity of one kind or another was an important protection back then. These days, anonymity is an even more important ingredient as a check on unrestrained power that seeks to stifle opposing points of view.
You'll want the more sophisticated AOL Boss Spoofer continuous stegonographic translation so that phrases like:
"Kewl! Didja see Britney's midriff last night? I swear she's gaining weight or pregnant!"
are only visible in the realm of approved keywords with gratifying cleartext like
"Yes, I find that our corporation's responsible and visionary management practices are beginning to pay off and be appreciated for how much they offer employees over our competitors."
1. which is now 99% geared towards IE
That is false. 99% of the web does not require IE. Very few sites actually require IE. Mostly clueless idiots.
Some recent surveys on browsers indicate that IE is used by about 96% of users. That's not 99, but I think it's sufficiently large that any web site developer will insure first that their pages look good in IE, then maybe Netscape, if they have time. The W3 standards are all fine and good, but the de facto standard is defined by how IE behaves. MS owns that behavior and can change it at will.
2. Um... please explain how something that's free can get any cheaper. Adobe charges money for its PDF creation products. They are not free. MS is competing with them. Therefore, Adobe's products will get cheaper or Adobe will lose the market. Imagine that.
I think distribution of a PDF competitor as part of a default distribution of Windows or Office would kill off Adobe's version of PDF in much the same manner that bundling of IE with Windows killed off Netscape, despite the latter being reduced to zero price. It was more hassle for people to download some large binary from Netscape over their modems and to try to disentangle IE's tentacles, that most people just caved in and accepted IE as their browser. It's been demonstrated that zero price is not enough to compete with Microsoft.
MS will embrace Adobe's PDF idea, extend it using XDocs, and then let Adobe's PDF wither as Office defaults to output XDoc instead of PDF. And wither it will, because Office, too, is used by about 90% of the office productivity suite marketplace.
When a desperate Adobe offers an Office plug-in for free download that enables one to write PDF, they'll get the same rousing response as Netscape did for free downloads of its application.
I don't want to belabor these points because how MS operates is well-known by now.
That said, however, the basic technical ideas of both PDF and of XDoc are good.
Publishing their respective specifications and letting an international standards body ratify those standards is a great idea. I would move to XDoc from PDF if it were technically-sound, completely and openly published, and ratified by an international standards organization.
Companies, either Adobe or Microsoft, trying to own a standard and use it to wring the most dollars out of it, simply by tripping up the competition with a deft change of the standard is not a good idea.
Who is worse, the people who abuse privileges/freedoms, or the people who limit the privileges/freedoms to curb the abuse?
Answer: They're both bad.
Yes, people who use their computer power to subvert copyright are bad. They ought to be punished accordingly, but certainly not punished for exercising fair use doctrines.
But that obnoxious behavior by various individuals is no justification for bad blanket legislation that stomps on liberties in an attempt to curtail bad behavior.
It is just as irresponsible for legislators to pass computer laws like these as it is for them to solve problems such as theft and burglary by mandating a police state and requiring everyone to present an internal passport on demand and to show signed receipts for all goods in their possession.
Of course in the U.S., with the way things are going with the "Patriot" Act, perhaps there is some consistency there...
"Here, look, we can show you how the security works on our product yet it's still solid".
This is a really important point.
As needs for security, authentication and privacy grow in the future, there will be different means of accomplishing that goal.
If the cornerstone of MS technology is to require centralized authentication with them, or to make it practically-speaking difficult for anyone to offer competing Certifying Authorities in the.NET world, then many Enterprises are going to ask tough questions of it, like:
"Why should
you be involved in my security?"
and
"Remind me again, exactly what value added am I getting for my money?"
A genuinely distributed security model that does not gratuitously tie any commercial entitity into a position of indispensibility is what's needed. If MS doesn't provide that, then someone else will.
This is an extra feature of secure computing that is not obvious.
I think Microsoft has come to recoginize that the crypto experts are right: code review of algorithms is essential for gaining the greatest credence that your system is secure, despite the risk that you might temporarily look bad.
But even more is required than a secure system.
A system is need where anyone who so desires can freely build their own web of trust independent of all other authorities.
....looks like they'll have to drastically open up their middleware
"Excuse me?"
"That's not middleware."
"You're pointing to an integral part of the Windows operating system."
"It's part of our big bung^Hdle of innovative and patented technology and it would be unfair of the burdensome government bureaucracy to make us give it away to competitors in this very competitive business we're in."
"Opening up that part of Windows would allow pedophiles, terrorists and hackers to hurt you."
"Nope. That's not the middleware we were thinking about and we're sure an unbiased judge three years from now will agree with our reasonable and expert assessment."
You know, I was just thinking how much useless email gets generated when you mix together average Joe corporate users and applications such as Outlook.
"Please see the attached Powerpoint presentation reiterating our department's and corporation's commitment to teamwork, quality and apple pie."
and other egregious examples.
If only Outlook could be retro-fitted with a stupidity governor that would nudge users towards making efficient use of their IT infrastructure, rather than just blundering along doing ugly things just because
they can
it's easy
it's the path of least resistance.
I'd like to see Outbound Outlook filters that would solve these problems close to the source.
"Well, Joe, I'm going to copy your massive attachment to the webserver since you don't need 400 identical copies of floating around."
"Hmmm...I won't bother sending your email to most of the staff because the last time you sent an email with these keywords 75% of the staff deleted it before reading it and the other 25% deleted it within 2 seconds of opening it. We'll just forward it to upper management so you can get credit for communicating company values to the only people who really care."
[Sorry for the Dilbertesque rant. Too much sugar, I guess.]
Well, I'm hoping that a democratic republic helps to even out some of the chances of getting someone elected that lives out several sigma on the bell curve.
With a lottery, any fool can win. Listen to a few radio talk shows or some of my in-laws someday and you'll even begin to believe that Dick Cheney is better.
No, I think elections are a good way of smoothing out the radical singularities. It's by no means foolproof, since the German populace was sufficiently gullible to elect Hitler. But I think my odds are still better than the lottery.
I kind of like the idea of ancient China, where bureaucratic positions were based somewhat on a meritocracy; higher test scores gave you a better position.
Yes, at this point the advantages of a Solaris laptop are a pittance compared with what else is out there.
Most user applications that demand laptop portability are met with x86 hardware or a Mac running Powerpoint.
Even if Sun had had the benefit of Intel's economies of scale so that we'd be using UltraSPARC V's by now, they still would have difficulty selling the laptop to any market except perhaps Solaris field engineers.
64 bit addressing and Solaris 9 is a great boon for folks running databases on big iron, but I just can't see what it buys you on a laptop.
There are some good reasons for selling CPU time as an on-demand service. I'm sure IBM knows what those reasons are and will use them to try and sell this concept.
But there are two, possibly three, very powerful forces working against them here.
First, computing power is very cheap these days. It's not precious. People have 2 GHz Pentium 4 processors sitting around waiting for their next keystroke in Word and they don't feel guilty about wasting CPU cycles.
Second, the price keeps dropping at about a 40% annual rate. That same cheap PC waiting for the next keystroke would have been worth tens of millions of dollars to a scientific establishment in 1974. Not now. With a market where the supply of computing power is constantly increasing, it will be very difficult to peg any kind of price that people can use to make buying decisions, because those decisions will look foolish a year from now when someone asks why they didn't just buy a couple more PCs, or even a rack of PCs to do the task.
Third, the rented computing power needs to be connected very well with the data it will be processing or producing. If the rented machine is on the customer's site next to his SAN warehouse, then everything's fine and this may not be a real problem. But if the big machine is in Fishkill and the customer's 10 TB of data are sitting in a weird database inside a firewall connected via T1 to the Internet, then there may be a problem.
If I were IBM, I'd look into ways of increasing demand for computing power. Protein folding simulations for new pharmaceuticals is one way, financial scenario analyses is another, and database mining is yet another. They have to make customers want to buy extra computing power because they can easily see a business need for doing so.
The other thing is they need to increase demand for the ultra high reliability mainframes. For some of those computing needs, a rack o cheap PCs is going to be a much more economical choice for their customers. However, there are some applications, like VoIP telephony, video streaming, or credit card approvals, where people would get upset by downtime.
This kind of certification is a great thing for people running Win2K.
But I have to wonder if Microsoft's upgrade cycle will cause those people to lose official support for Win2K unless they upgrade to XP or whatever's next very soon now?
A lot of enterprises do a lot of time-consuming testing before they rollout something like Win2K, which is probably the first reasonable OS from MS.
It'd be a real shame if all that testing and certification gets thrown out the window because MS doesn't feel its customers aren buying upgraded products fast enough.
You Found a Crack in the Armor
on
Nosy Vendors?
·
· Score: 2
Glaring gaps in the marketplace.
If Dell wants your basic Linux hardware to cost significantly more than one of its desktop machines, all fine and good. Maybe they have good reasons for charging more, such as increased reliability testing for that hardware that brings up its MTBF.
But maybe your non-profit can get sufficient numbers of nines of reliability from a Dell desktop machine built as a server. And it costs a lot less, even including the Microsoft tax for an OS you'll never use but can't avoid buying.
Go for it. You're free to make your own choice in an almost free market.
Shoot, Dell might learn something about a market niche that it's not quite satisfying. If they don't address the market's needs, then someone else surely will.
It reminds me a lot of the controversy a number of years ago where someone figured out that by flipping a registry key of Windows NT they could turn a "workstation" into a "server". But Microsoft wanted people to buy the "server" OS explicitly and pay a bunch more money for it than for the "workstation" box.
I know they're trying to reduce the effect of buoyant (natural) convection by going into the microgravity environment. And, pure density-driven convection due to the differences in density of air and molten ceramic will also be minimized in space.
But if there are temperature gradients in the molten ceramic, they might still have to contend with molten bubbles migrating due to thermocapillary (Marangoni) convection. The surface tension of the air/liquid interface is generally a function of temperature.
You're right, in that many of the most egregious reasons for unions have been ameliorated by various laws.
However, there are many people who would argue that such laws do not yet go far enough.
The minimum wage, in particular, has seen considerable erosion in real terms over the past quarter of a century. Maybe it was too high then to compete in a global economy. Maybe it's too low now. But it's a matter of debate rather than a foregone conclusion.
Likewise with workplace safety.
Conditions in modern meatpacking plants are not as safe as some people would like. I haven't personally worked in such a factory, so I can't say anything more than I've read some pretty atrocious accounts in books such as Fast Food Nation. There again, I'm sure there's a debate over what laws represent a reasonable and cost-effective safeguard against bad things.
You and I do agree that laws can address some of the problems that occurred in the 19th century.
I think, though, that the free market will constantly push towards reducing costs and increasing profits in innovative ways, including attempts to make the legal environment less burdensome to business.
Where the right balance lies is a very tricky thing to find. There's a great deal of both emotion and of money involved that tends to cloud where the right answer lies.
how quickly Microsoft and its antagonists can get worked up by someone lazily and recklessly waving about the possibility that some old dirty laundry is about to disappear...
IIRC, there have been some funny stories about shredders running long into the night at various places and times (Arthur Anderson's Enron task force, the McDougal's savings and loan, Iran Contra, etc.) Probably a lot more that I'm missing.
Practically, those kinds of problems do exist with unionized workplaces.
It's too bad unions are that way, because they are a natural response to the kind of exploitation that can occur sometimes (cf 19th century industrial revolution) when very few labor purchasers swim in a very large market of individuals. Natural market forces will push wages down to levels where your serf society starts to look downright feudal and would make current poverty problems look mild by comparison.
The problem is that most unions are run for a blanket protection of the whole herd of sheep.
Scragly, mangy sheep get the same equitable protection as those bristly, wool-producing rams. The universal broad-based support needed to form a union seems to rely upon that kind of universal protection extended to everyon without regard to ability. In the same way, the United States Declaration of Independence got broad support by positing that "all men are created equal" and deserving of equal protection, when, really, many at the time probably figured that white, over 25, property-owning, non-enslaved males deserved more protection than other kinds of people. The framers just needed something general to garner broad support to fly against the much-hated system of ancestral rights based on family name of the nobility.
IMHO, it's symptomatic of the chicken-egg problems with teachers and teacher pay.
Teachers have to unionize to get paid anything decent, but once they have the union they resist merit initiatives that would differentiate and pay good teachers a lot more than bad teachers.
The justification for rejecting merit pay usually seems to be that deciding upon good and bad teachers is put into the hands of those no-good management lackeys working for a highly political school administration, whose sole aim in life is to destroy the union by firing the top organizers (I'm sure it does happen sometimes.)
But in reality, I suspect that the highest ranks of the union are populated by members who boast of seniority and good people-organizing skills, not necessarily good teaching skills, so there's a built-in conflict of interest.
If teacher's unions organized their own internal quality standards and ratings, perhaps they could get some sympathy from the administrations and voting tax base for higher pay. Otherwise, they could simply present data showing their good teachers were leaving for better-paying positions elsewhere and your Johnny and Sally are getting a 2nd-rate education.
I doubt geeks will organize in the same way for a while. There are barriers to entry to prevent the supply of knowledgeable and highly-trained geeks from increasing to where their salaries go down severely. Geeks can still get paid a lot better than your average high school graduate - certainly better than your average teacher.
Slashdot Mirror
If there are any nearby planets with heavier elements and some range of chemistry, perhaps they could support life forms that derive their principal source of energy from such the magnetar's field.
Those life forms would have a leg up on us in terms of interfacing with electronic equipment more naturally than we do.
OTOH, maybe they'd miss out on all the visible spectrum features we make use of for our eyeballs.
So what is the deal with Bluetooth, anyway?
Rumour and innuendo suggests it's problems might be:
- hardware's too expensive
- standard is too complicated (but more secure)
- standard came too late
is any of this true?Sure Mozilla may offer some neat "underground" type features but the one thing it doesn't do is offer the ability to talk to a support technician on the phone when it won't work properly.
You make a very good point. It certainly does reflect my experience to date.
Practically speaking, IT managers are a cautions conservative bunch, and when they rollout a product to the desktop they
- want,
- are willing,
- expect,
- and are suspicious if they don't have to
pay money for a deep bench of support.In fact, that conservative view on making sure things are stable is why most companies are no where near the level of XP deployment that MS is trying to push onto them.
However, I think most Fortune 500 companies are like mine: mere mortal users don't talk with tech support at Microsoft or, heaven forbid, the actual programmer at Microsoft.
No, our support calls get culled and binned. When and if a local tech decides that it's a problem with say, IE, then he logs it with Microsoft. And we pay for that privilege.
Whether Microsoft does anything about the problem is a whole other matter. While we have gotten genuine concerned support on some occasions (not for IE, for Exchange), other times you get:
- "that's not really a problem"
- "that's an extension"
- "we know about it already; it's fixed in the next Service Pack coming out RSN"
and where there's not a competing vendor for support that has the same kind of access to the source code. If we're unhappy with our support contract for Internet Explorer, then it's not like there's another choice.With Mozilla, support outfits are going to have to compete based on how well they perform in a competitive environment - anyone and everyone has direct access to source code.
Mozilla support companies won't be able to rely on contracts that are artificially fattened, based on some exclusive access to the source code.
IT organizations are getting pretty tired of paying big bucks to MS and feeling as if they have absolutely no choice in the matter.
Mozilla gives them a new choice that they haven't had until very recently.
Being cost conscious, I think they'll look into it.
Python is an excellent starting language.
Some folks I think have even written up some presentations to help teach Python to beginners.
Other than that, I think a web browser, an email client and LyX is probably about what you'll need.
Looks intriguing to me.
I'm a Linux user generally and figured to the cheap route of some x86 laptop.
But considering
- the hassles of WinModems and XFree86 for laptop screens under Linux,
- that OS 10.2 will run MS Office natively,
- that it's still really a UNIX under the covers
- and that it's cool looking and not too heavy
I'm thinking this might be a better way to go.If you consider
- the source of the story and
- that many TiVo users enjoy skipping through advertisements and
- that advertising forms the bread and butter livelihood of the readers of that particular periodical,
then the bent of that story is fairly predictable.I'm guessing you'll get plenty of suggestions to change your language, which is certainly something to consider if you have that option.
But if you're like me, you don't have that option. You've got a load of C++ that's not simply going to magically transform into Python or Java overnight.
I would suggest the hard road. Boil down supported standard features in the compilers that you can use and tell people to stick to that list unless they can make a case that all of the compilers now support the new feature that they want to use.
Although I feel it is dated now, Netscape used to publish such a guide for their developers.
For example, in our early days, we would not permit namespaces or RTTI.
Now, as compilers have gotten more supportive of the ISO C++ standard, we permit those features in our codebase.
But we haven't yet decided to open the floodgates on exception handling, although it's supported pretty broadly.
Finally, you really need an automated build system that runs the latest repository snapshots through the compilers on all the platforms and throws the results up on a web page, like Tinderbox.
That will tend to enforce good standards as developers will see that their check-in attempts fly through with green and no warnings, or get dirty yellow about warnings, or red with downright errors during the build.
Remeber, free speech et al was written in a time when there wasn't true anonmity.
Sort of.
In that day and age, if I went to the town marketplace, people would know me and could tell someone that Joe over there had been talking like a Tory, or whatever.
But the central government probably didn't know me on that basis. And neither did they know instantly if someone uttered a word against the King's will. It had to be really outrageous and it would take weeks or months for politically indiscreet speech to cause a reaction with the central governmental authority.
But a desire for anonymity was still there, because some individuals were in jeopardy, even with the molasses-like speed of the British military and government's intelligence operation. Indeed, that action at a distance delay is one of the reasons why rebellion in the colonies succeeded where rebellion in Scotland or Ireland did not.
Despite the practical protection of distance and not computerized databases on citizens, Thomas Paine, in particular, often wrote under a pseudonym.
At any rate, technology has changed.
Despite its bureaucratic nature, we can't rely upon the FBI to be as sluggish in keyword analysis as King George's government.
But anonymity of one kind or another was an important protection back then. These days, anonymity is an even more important ingredient as a check on unrestrained power that seeks to stifle opposing points of view.
here.
But you're right, there ought to be a little bit more granularity in the trust specfications.
[Reminds me of when my brother in law sent me a Power of Attorney so I could act in his behalf for his minor son.
I didn't tell him that I was thereby enabled to do a lot financial transactions on his behalf, sell his house, etc.]
They need a few more questions, like:
[With memories of boss.el for Emacs...]
You'll want the more sophisticated AOL Boss Spoofer continuous stegonographic translation so that phrases like:
are only visible in the realm of approved keywords with gratifying cleartext like1. which is now 99% geared towards IE
That is false. 99% of the web does not require IE. Very few sites actually require IE. Mostly clueless idiots.
Some recent surveys on browsers indicate that IE is used by about 96% of users. That's not 99, but I think it's sufficiently large that any web site developer will insure first that their pages look good in IE, then maybe Netscape, if they have time. The W3 standards are all fine and good, but the de facto standard is defined by how IE behaves. MS owns that behavior and can change it at will.
2. Um... please explain how something that's free can get any cheaper.
Adobe charges money for its PDF creation products. They are not free. MS is competing with them. Therefore, Adobe's products will get cheaper or Adobe will lose the market. Imagine that.
I think distribution of a PDF competitor as part of a default distribution of Windows or Office would kill off Adobe's version of PDF in much the same manner that bundling of IE with Windows killed off Netscape, despite the latter being reduced to zero price. It was more hassle for people to download some large binary from Netscape over their modems and to try to disentangle IE's tentacles, that most people just caved in and accepted IE as their browser. It's been demonstrated that zero price is not enough to compete with Microsoft.
MS will embrace Adobe's PDF idea, extend it using XDocs, and then let Adobe's PDF wither as Office defaults to output XDoc instead of PDF. And wither it will, because Office, too, is used by about 90% of the office productivity suite marketplace.
When a desperate Adobe offers an Office plug-in for free download that enables one to write PDF, they'll get the same rousing response as Netscape did for free downloads of its application.
I don't want to belabor these points because how MS operates is well-known by now.
That said, however, the basic technical ideas of both PDF and of XDoc are good.
Publishing their respective specifications and letting an international standards body ratify those standards is a great idea. I would move to XDoc from PDF if it were technically-sound, completely and openly published, and ratified by an international standards organization.
Companies, either Adobe or Microsoft, trying to own a standard and use it to wring the most dollars out of it, simply by tripping up the competition with a deft change of the standard is not a good idea.
Who is worse, the people who abuse privileges/freedoms, or the people who limit the privileges/freedoms to curb the abuse?
Answer: They're both bad.
Yes, people who use their computer power to subvert copyright are bad. They ought to be punished accordingly, but certainly not punished for exercising fair use doctrines.
But that obnoxious behavior by various individuals is no justification for bad blanket legislation that stomps on liberties in an attempt to curtail bad behavior.
It is just as irresponsible for legislators to pass computer laws like these as it is for them to solve problems such as theft and burglary by mandating a police state and requiring everyone to present an internal passport on demand and to show signed receipts for all goods in their possession.
Of course in the U.S., with the way things are going with the "Patriot" Act, perhaps there is some consistency there...
So am I the only one that laments my home desktop PC being this large noisy machine that consumes a lot of electric power?
I'd like a desktop machine with a real keyboard, mouse and monitor, but
The best way I see for this to happen is for a chip designed for laptops to be incorporated into the next generation desktops.
Why not?
"Here, look, we can show you how the security works on our product yet it's still solid".
This is a really important point.
As needs for security, authentication and privacy grow in the future, there will be different means of accomplishing that goal.
If the cornerstone of MS technology is to require centralized authentication with them, or to make it practically-speaking difficult for anyone to offer competing Certifying Authorities in the .NET world, then many Enterprises are going to ask tough questions of it, like:
andA genuinely distributed security model that does not gratuitously tie any commercial entitity into a position of indispensibility is what's needed. If MS doesn't provide that, then someone else will.
This is an extra feature of secure computing that is not obvious.
I think Microsoft has come to recoginize that the crypto experts are right: code review of algorithms is essential for gaining the greatest credence that your system is secure, despite the risk that you might temporarily look bad.
But even more is required than a secure system.
A system is need where anyone who so desires can freely build their own web of trust independent of all other authorities.
"Excuse me?"
"That's not middleware."
"You're pointing to an integral part of the Windows operating system."
"It's part of our big bung^Hdle of innovative and patented technology and it would be unfair of the burdensome government bureaucracy to make us give it away to competitors in this very competitive business we're in."
"Opening up that part of Windows would allow pedophiles, terrorists and hackers to hurt you."
"Nope. That's not the middleware we were thinking about and we're sure an unbiased judge three years from now will agree with our reasonable and expert assessment."
You know, I was just thinking how much useless email gets generated when you mix together average Joe corporate users and applications such as Outlook.
and other egregious examples.If only Outlook could be retro-fitted with a stupidity governor that would nudge users towards making efficient use of their IT infrastructure, rather than just blundering along doing ugly things just because
I'd like to see Outbound Outlook filters that would solve these problems close to the source.
[Sorry for the Dilbertesque rant. Too much sugar, I guess.]Well, I'm hoping that a democratic republic helps to even out some of the chances of getting someone elected that lives out several sigma on the bell curve.
With a lottery, any fool can win. Listen to a few radio talk shows or some of my in-laws someday and you'll even begin to believe that Dick Cheney is better.
No, I think elections are a good way of smoothing out the radical singularities. It's by no means foolproof, since the German populace was sufficiently gullible to elect Hitler. But I think my odds are still better than the lottery.
I kind of like the idea of ancient China, where bureaucratic positions were based somewhat on a meritocracy; higher test scores gave you a better position.
Yes, at this point the advantages of a Solaris laptop are a pittance compared with what else is out there.
Most user applications that demand laptop portability are met with x86 hardware or a Mac running Powerpoint.
Even if Sun had had the benefit of Intel's economies of scale so that we'd be using UltraSPARC V's by now, they still would have difficulty selling the laptop to any market except perhaps Solaris field engineers.
64 bit addressing and Solaris 9 is a great boon for folks running databases on big iron, but I just can't see what it buys you on a laptop.
There are some good reasons for selling CPU time as an on-demand service. I'm sure IBM knows what those reasons are and will use them to try and sell this concept.
But there are two, possibly three, very powerful forces working against them here.
First, computing power is very cheap these days. It's not precious. People have 2 GHz Pentium 4 processors sitting around waiting for their next keystroke in Word and they don't feel guilty about wasting CPU cycles.
Second, the price keeps dropping at about a 40% annual rate. That same cheap PC waiting for the next keystroke would have been worth tens of millions of dollars to a scientific establishment in 1974. Not now. With a market where the supply of computing power is constantly increasing, it will be very difficult to peg any kind of price that people can use to make buying decisions, because those decisions will look foolish a year from now when someone asks why they didn't just buy a couple more PCs, or even a rack of PCs to do the task.
Third, the rented computing power needs to be connected very well with the data it will be processing or producing. If the rented machine is on the customer's site next to his SAN warehouse, then everything's fine and this may not be a real problem. But if the big machine is in Fishkill and the customer's 10 TB of data are sitting in a weird database inside a firewall connected via T1 to the Internet, then there may be a problem.
If I were IBM, I'd look into ways of increasing demand for computing power. Protein folding simulations for new pharmaceuticals is one way, financial scenario analyses is another, and database mining is yet another. They have to make customers want to buy extra computing power because they can easily see a business need for doing so.
The other thing is they need to increase demand for the ultra high reliability mainframes. For some of those computing needs, a rack o cheap PCs is going to be a much more economical choice for their customers. However, there are some applications, like VoIP telephony, video streaming, or credit card approvals, where people would get upset by downtime.
This kind of certification is a great thing for people running Win2K.
But I have to wonder if Microsoft's upgrade cycle will cause those people to lose official support for Win2K unless they upgrade to XP or whatever's next very soon now?
A lot of enterprises do a lot of time-consuming testing before they rollout something like Win2K, which is probably the first reasonable OS from MS.
It'd be a real shame if all that testing and certification gets thrown out the window because MS doesn't feel its customers aren buying upgraded products fast enough.
Glaring gaps in the marketplace.
If Dell wants your basic Linux hardware to cost significantly more than one of its desktop machines, all fine and good. Maybe they have good reasons for charging more, such as increased reliability testing for that hardware that brings up its MTBF.
But maybe your non-profit can get sufficient numbers of nines of reliability from a Dell desktop machine built as a server. And it costs a lot less, even including the Microsoft tax for an OS you'll never use but can't avoid buying.
Go for it. You're free to make your own choice in an almost free market.
Shoot, Dell might learn something about a market niche that it's not quite satisfying. If they don't address the market's needs, then someone else surely will.
It reminds me a lot of the controversy a number of years ago where someone figured out that by flipping a registry key of Windows NT they could turn a "workstation" into a "server". But Microsoft wanted people to buy the "server" OS explicitly and pay a bunch more money for it than for the "workstation" box.
I know they're trying to reduce the effect of buoyant (natural) convection by going into the microgravity environment. And, pure density-driven convection due to the differences in density of air and molten ceramic will also be minimized in space.
But if there are temperature gradients in the molten ceramic, they might still have to contend with molten bubbles migrating due to thermocapillary (Marangoni) convection. The surface tension of the air/liquid interface is generally a function of temperature.
Good luck to them, anyway.
You're right, in that many of the most egregious reasons for unions have been ameliorated by various laws.
However, there are many people who would argue that such laws do not yet go far enough.
The minimum wage, in particular, has seen considerable erosion in real terms over the past quarter of a century. Maybe it was too high then to compete in a global economy. Maybe it's too low now. But it's a matter of debate rather than a foregone conclusion.
Likewise with workplace safety.
Conditions in modern meatpacking plants are not as safe as some people would like. I haven't personally worked in such a factory, so I can't say anything more than I've read some pretty atrocious accounts in books such as Fast Food Nation. There again, I'm sure there's a debate over what laws represent a reasonable and cost-effective safeguard against bad things.
You and I do agree that laws can address some of the problems that occurred in the 19th century.
I think, though, that the free market will constantly push towards reducing costs and increasing profits in innovative ways, including attempts to make the legal environment less burdensome to business.
Where the right balance lies is a very tricky thing to find. There's a great deal of both emotion and of money involved that tends to cloud where the right answer lies.
how quickly Microsoft and its antagonists can get worked up by someone lazily and recklessly waving about the possibility that some old dirty laundry is about to disappear...
IIRC, there have been some funny stories about shredders running long into the night at various places and times (Arthur Anderson's Enron task force, the McDougal's savings and loan, Iran Contra, etc.) Probably a lot more that I'm missing.
Practically, those kinds of problems do exist with unionized workplaces.
It's too bad unions are that way, because they are a natural response to the kind of exploitation that can occur sometimes (cf 19th century industrial revolution) when very few labor purchasers swim in a very large market of individuals. Natural market forces will push wages down to levels where your serf society starts to look downright feudal and would make current poverty problems look mild by comparison.
The problem is that most unions are run for a blanket protection of the whole herd of sheep.
Scragly, mangy sheep get the same equitable protection as those bristly, wool-producing rams. The universal broad-based support needed to form a union seems to rely upon that kind of universal protection extended to everyon without regard to ability. In the same way, the United States Declaration of Independence got broad support by positing that "all men are created equal" and deserving of equal protection, when, really, many at the time probably figured that white, over 25, property-owning, non-enslaved males deserved more protection than other kinds of people. The framers just needed something general to garner broad support to fly against the much-hated system of ancestral rights based on family name of the nobility.
IMHO, it's symptomatic of the chicken-egg problems with teachers and teacher pay.
Teachers have to unionize to get paid anything decent, but once they have the union they resist merit initiatives that would differentiate and pay good teachers a lot more than bad teachers.
The justification for rejecting merit pay usually seems to be that deciding upon good and bad teachers is put into the hands of those no-good management lackeys working for a highly political school administration, whose sole aim in life is to destroy the union by firing the top organizers (I'm sure it does happen sometimes.)
But in reality, I suspect that the highest ranks of the union are populated by members who boast of seniority and good people-organizing skills, not necessarily good teaching skills, so there's a built-in conflict of interest.
If teacher's unions organized their own internal quality standards and ratings, perhaps they could get some sympathy from the administrations and voting tax base for higher pay. Otherwise, they could simply present data showing their good teachers were leaving for better-paying positions elsewhere and your Johnny and Sally are getting a 2nd-rate education.
I doubt geeks will organize in the same way for a while. There are barriers to entry to prevent the supply of knowledgeable and highly-trained geeks from increasing to where their salaries go down severely. Geeks can still get paid a lot better than your average high school graduate - certainly better than your average teacher.