How long will a Viao stay up on one fully charged car battery if that's all you have?
[I guess many boats include engines, generators, etc.(aircraft carriers are basically mobile cities), but I was kind of curious about the case where you had to bring all your coulombs with you.]
My major gripe is that most of us lazy bastards (he, me too!) will compare:
the MD5 checksum of the source tarball with
the number that appears on the webpage from the same friggin site where the tarball originated.
Like, if I were a Trojan cracker I wouldn't make sure to regenerate the md5sum on the web page to match up perfectly with the new tar ball!
If someone can replace blah.tar.gz they have a fair chance at being able to replace a blah.html file.
It really points up how good security for distributed packages depends on getting signatures and hashes distributed out to lots of different places in lots of different ways to make it much more difficult for a Trojan author to compromise that many different independent points of verification.
Don't rely completely on the included one-site-tells-all instructions for verification. They could be artfully contrived.
If we don't bother to use distributed verification to check the authenticity of our software, then we have only ourselves to blame for the consequences.
Is it just me, or does the whole concept of "broadcast" in the traditional RF 50kW sense seem like an outdated sledgehammer?
I mean, with the advent of cheap microprocessors, it seems like a low-power, cellular approach to putting video signals where you want them shows a lot more finesse.
The only reason I can figure for overwhelming market areas with such strong signals is so that 0.1% of the population in outlying areas can see I Love Lucy. That, and being able to tell advertisers that you easily can reach a million households once you purchased the right to a loud bullhorn.
It seems better to relay the signal to little cellular wireless access points and not to fry the airspace with such strong signals. That would make it possible for me to watch TV from Hong Kong if I choose to do so.
The revolution of business and technology is scarry because it could infringe on our lives, or it could be beneficial - helping each person become more free and "closely-independant" than ever.
Don't look for the evolution of business and technology to promote any kind of "free" and "closely-independent" person in society. Rather, look for the exact opposite.
Fundamentally, commercial success relies upon your dependent relationship based upon commercial transactions with suppliers of goods and services.
Look for suppliers to:
find new things for you to depend upon, and
for them to increase your dependency on existing products and services.
Dependency is moving largely into the emotional arena, too, as advertisements tend to target people so as to get them to think they need that new CD, that wireless phone, etc. If there were a way for advertisements to mentally condition you to be addicted to their product (I don't mean obvious physiologically addictive products like nicotine, alcohol), then believe it would be done. Can you imagine any product more succesful than one in which customers thought they'd die without it and feel completely satisfied only temporarily at each moment of purchase?
In the modern world, we're at an unprecedented level of interdependency already. If the trucks that bring food to my local grocery store stopped running today, then I'd starve within a few weeks.
It's kind of like the Oprah beef thing, where she was sued for making statements slandering someone's line of business.
In the United States over 200 years ago the founding fathers made it possible for the average citizen to criticize the powers that be: George W. Bush runs a government that enforces my right to say that he is a potty head.
But, heaven forbid I should say something that disparages one of the sacred corporate entities!
It reminds me of the Peoples Republic of China, where "slandering the state" is a crime. The only difference is that in the United States, substitute "corporations" for "state".
Even though I have two fairly functional hands, I've often thought how nice it would be to use one of these devices, particularly at meetings, where it would gauche to layout a laptop and using a PDA pen is less than satisfactory. I'll have to admit that furiuosly chording one of these devices in your lap under the table could look kind of suspicious.
Using chorded input on the one handed device seems to allow something like 4K possible input "characters", so even if you needed to map every emacs major mode's lisp function to a key you'd have an easier time than with a typical QWERTY board.
The advertisement suggests you can learn to use one of these in about a weekend. If you do, let me know if you like it or not.
I think a good successor to the floppy would be one of the USB storage devices.
It's got greater capacity, can be used as a boot device and uses that one USB interface that can also be used for mouse, keyboard, etc.
I think the only thing holding this back is that there are so many older PCs and older OS versions out there that don't have good USB support built-in. But that will change in the next year or two.
clue me in please... why is the resistance such a problem, if the third rail is how they are powering the trains in the first place?
It's all tied together with social security.
Politicians are often heard saying something along the lines of
"Social Security is the third rail. Don't touch it."
You've probably noticed that Social Security benefits are mostly received by old people.
You've probably also noticed that those old people move slowly. The reason they move more slowly than you or me and the reason they can't drive more than 20 mph under the speed limit is simply because they are encountering resistance.
Also seriously flawed in that you need IE on Windoze to use its web access features.
[Leave it to MS to never miss an opportunity to turn a great concept on its head to leverage the rest of their product line:) The folks at MS who actually implemented the web access feature in Project must have had the breath knocked out of them at the "IE specialization".]
Nevertheless, the concept of web based project management is still a really good one. Not only for read-access to view what's going on, but also to help formulate project plans.
I prefer to spend my time programming, but have had brushes with project planning exercises and noted the dearth of good open source alternatives to MS Project (which, practically, seems to require some training in order to learn the quirks of how to use it.)
The most intriguing development I've seen is out of the Horde Project (a PHP framework for web applications).
They mention something called Nag that came out 1.0 on June 11 of this year, but I don't know what it's really like.
Since I'm throwing buzzwords and wishlists about, I may as well suggest that WebDAV would be a great part of such a tool because it would offer a good means for collaborative authoring of project plans, which is really how the best ones get done. (The worst ones are guesses and dictats that make everyone mad.)
I've got about 0.3 TB of disk space at home between my 2 TiVo's. They have more disk space than my two computers do. They never get backed up, either, because there's nothing to back them up to. They're their own archive.
Video is driving desire for
low noise
high capacity
random access (linear tape sux!)
high reliability (no backup, remember!)
and what I see coming (while last mile service is still unacceptably slow) are home NAS systems connected via 802.11b to TiVo-looking consumer electronic devices and to wireless tablets just for watching shows.
If I were a disk manufacturer, I'd goad the consumer video recording technology to shift into higher gear (come out with TiVo's with built-in 802.11b and a NAS repackaged as a "VideoArchive") and be ready with all the pieces to satisfy this market.
[I've got a Mini-DV recorder, too, but haven't worked up the courage yet to figure out which IEEE-1394 card to buy for my Linux box and how to get it to work.]
Microsoft's real biggest threats come from the inertia of their own installed base (that they're beating into submission with Software Assurance 6) and from potentially adverse legal rulings against them.
IBM/Linux is a certainly a plausible-sounding competitor.
While I love Linux, open source, etc., I don't kid myself for one minute that MS is quaking in its boots about IBM and Linux.
It's more along the lines of a PR statement (one that some Linux zealots will go along with) to make it sound like:
"Competition?"
"Oh my yes! We have competition"
"Look at big bad IBM and those droves of lurking hackers wearing pirate garb fomenting cyber terrorism and flooding us with viral spam!"
"Yes, indeed, we have real competitors."
"We're probably not even really a monopoly and don't really deserve any government intervention into the marketplace because our competitors are just about to eat our lunch!"
Then, of course, there's the usual problem with the 50 point karma cap if you happen to get modded up before you get modded down (I think this happens more often)...
50 + 1 - 1 = 49
but
50 - 1 + 1 = 50
I always felt like a helium balloon bouncing against the ceiling.
Everyone has the right to give up their privacy in exchange for preferential treatment.
Yes, we're all free to give up our privacy. It's our choice.
My point is that if the choice involves paying an extra 15% for your groceries if you don't use such a card, then it becomes coercive.
Keep increasing the percentage and it becomes just as effective (or more so) as many laws.
I know people that break parking laws routinely and consider the trade offs between ticket cost and the added convenience of parking places, judging it merely as the "cost of convenient parking", a purely economic choice.
Likewise, this selling of your right to privacy is a gradual market-based phenomena.
But, since most consumers who sell their right to privacy have little knowledge of what they're selling, the market price for Not Losing Privacy is growing faster than I'd like. Fortunately I'm still able to find reasonably priced stores without the two-tier pricing system: regular prices for the "kiss-and-tell" crowd, maybe 5% more for the "butt-out" crowd.
Most people are dozing on this issue and will only find out about it in an abrupt, rude kind of way, as their health insurance premiums suddenly get tied into their grocery purchases: what? cigarettes, liquor, potato chips and Twinkies every week? No wonder you're in the "above average risk" category.
It would be entirely different if the Federal government mandated that we all use such cards and then required all stores to share their information with the FBI.
The government doesn't need to mandate use if the economics make discount card use endemic. I'm sure than any store is more than willing to share such data with the FBI without requiring a court order just in the interest of being helpful.
I think the framers of the U.S. constitution rightly worried about the concentration of power in government and restricted it very effectively with a system of checks and balances, but didn't foresee just how much extra-governmental power over the citizens has concentrated in the hands of corporations.
The practical implications of power concentration in corporations, be it discount cards or peeing in a cup for employment, are a lot greater in this day and age than anything the Federal government is allowed to do.
I've often thought a good way to illustrate this point would be for some legislator to propose that federal law enforcement agencies be given the ability to conduct themselves within exactly the same legal confines that restrict corporations.
That would wake up a few of my soporific fellow citizens.
When did "mandated by law" become the requirement for demonstrating a slippery slope?
Exactly.
Some of the most intrusive erosions of privacy occur without the need for obvious repressive laws.
For example, nothing really requires you to use one of those supermarket discount cards that identify who buys what, where and when. With some reasoning, you can figure out quite a lot from that sort of data. But it's been posed to the public in such a way that the majority is more than willing to part with their privacy and anonymity for a bowl of pottage.
Most people start sliding down that "slippery slope" without even realizing it.
The only problem is that if you wind it to get standby back, if someone calls you are likely to only have a minute or so of talking.
Could be a potential problem when I call up those automated voice mail hell^Hp trees that force me to navigate <wind>through the <wind>duration of every inappropriate <wind>branch and <wind>twig until I get to a nice operator <wind>leaf that puts me into a queue to talk to a real person.
"Thank you for calling $CORP. <wind>Your call is important to us. All of our operators are busy assisting other customers. Please <wind> continue to stay on the line...<music>... <wind> <product_advertisement>....<wind>..."
(I can see carpal tunnel setting in from winding...)
What really gets me is how selling my private data can fall under the heading "free speech", but reporting on and linking to DeCSS cannot.
Silly fool.
That's because the information about DeCSS is their private data, where they contribute a lot more money to elected officials, while your private data belongs to you, who does not contribute a lot of money to elected officials.
Future society probably won't have much need of diagnostic profiling for people. Instead, new prescriptive genetics will be all the rage.
If current trends (selective abortion after amniotic fluid tests for abnormalities like improper gender; people taking hormones and steriods) are any indication, the future will be populated uniformly by individuals looking a lot like recent celebrities and athletes.
And, like another poster has already mentioned, the people will choose to exercise their rights to modify their children's genetic make-up, even if those parents have displayed ample evidence at botching other choices...
There'll probably even be a few wacko parents that will want centaurs for children as well as daughters that grow up with four breasts. If you think people inherit defective genes and poor personality nurturing from their parents these days, wait until the parents have even more say in the choice - it'll be worse.
For all Linux's technical superiority to Windows, we as a community must not be seen as childishly attacking Microsoft.
Well, if I were a Microsoft advocate (i.e., one of those with a significant number of shares of MSFT - everyone else just tolerates their existence like they do death and taxes), then I'd look at every possible way of hindering the Linux rate of adoption.
One way would be good to discourage the uptake of Linux: pose as Linux zealot, scream at newbies to RTFM on the relay channels and use plenty of name-calling and profanity in my postings to newsgroups and web forums, attempt to alienate potential users of Linux by loudly trumpeting my inherent superiority to those lusers out there.
For every twenty people that advocate Linux intelligently "It's cheap, rock solid and works like a champ." on a word of mouth basis, one person yelling like a fool can sour just as many.
The only saving part in all this is that Microsoft advocates (Steve Ballmer) have less and less credibility as they issue statements to their potential customer base who actually use Microsoft products everyday and know exactly what they're getting for their money. Few Linux advocates actually get any signicant amount of money by taking their positions; the same can't be said of the most visible and vocal of the Microsoft advocates.
I'm not a kernel developer, either, but I have just enough ignorance to be dangerous....
AFAICT, if you have some process that's really gotta run, then you don't even want the kernel taking up valuable slices of time because of the potential impact on performance. Hence, allow your process to be effectively negatively niced beyond what is possible without the preemption patch.
I think some purists would argue that you might as well just start using a Real Time version of the kernel in that case. But I think that real time requirements can cause you to lose other good things that you might want to have around.
I've heard anecdotes that using the preemption patch and running X with an effective high priority makes things seem snappier for desktop use. Of course, there are probably plenty of potential applications in the server arena as well.
[I apologize to people that know what's really going on since I only know Jack Shit by reputation.]
I've got a couple of TiVo's, one with 200 GB of IDE disk in it and I'm running out of space. It's a nicer quality archive format than VHS, but limited in quantity.
I can foresee cheap wireless video cameras being used around the house for security monitoring being recorded to disk. That kind of application will eat up disk space in a hurry.
In addition to the advice to get out of your chair more often, let me add a reference to an invaluable book to help with back pain.
It's also at Amazon.
I've slouched in computer chairs for years and still do. But a reckless and stupid decision to do some back bending repetitive work a few years ago left my back quite sore - as in takes 5x as long to tie your shoe laces, can not walk faster than 1 mph sore.
The stretching exercises recommended in that book helped immensely and I still do them to this day. And I haven't had any back trouble since.
For me, all the hype and PR have tended to obscure what's really in.NET. Also, many of the language interfaces to it (VB, ASP, C#) do not have open source implementations. (Maybe Miguel de Icaza will be done soon:)
That said, there are probably some really good sound technical ideas hidden in.NET after the surrounding marketing has been washed away.
Subversion lets you use different low level layers for actually storing files, pluggin things through an API.
That great idea is compounded by their objective of using WebDAV as a lower level layer.
I like the idea of having an XML description of actions that need to be taken for a version control system. Perhaps.NET has some good ways for doing this, but I'm fearful of a simple open source tool acquiring too much bloated overhead (much in way that SOAP bloats XML-RPC) that could slow it down and make it dependent on more network activity than is always necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't even keep track of all the complaints and gripes I've heard about ICANN over the years.
A couple days ago a court ruling in California looked like it might turn over one of the rocks where all the critters hide...
So I have to ask:
[I guess many boats include engines, generators, etc.(aircraft carriers are basically mobile cities), but I was kind of curious about the case where you had to bring all your coulombs with you.]
My major gripe is that most of us lazy bastards (he, me too!) will compare:
Like, if I were a Trojan cracker I wouldn't make sure to regenerate the md5sum on the web page to match up perfectly with the new tar ball!
If someone can replace blah.tar.gz they have a fair chance at being able to replace a blah.html file.
It really points up how good security for distributed packages depends on getting signatures and hashes distributed out to lots of different places in lots of different ways to make it much more difficult for a Trojan author to compromise that many different independent points of verification.
If we don't bother to use distributed verification to check the authenticity of our software, then we have only ourselves to blame for the consequences.
Is it just me, or does the whole concept of "broadcast" in the traditional RF 50kW sense seem like an outdated sledgehammer?
I mean, with the advent of cheap microprocessors, it seems like a low-power, cellular approach to putting video signals where you want them shows a lot more finesse.
The only reason I can figure for overwhelming market areas with such strong signals is so that 0.1% of the population in outlying areas can see I Love Lucy. That, and being able to tell advertisers that you easily can reach a million households once you purchased the right to a loud bullhorn.
It seems better to relay the signal to little cellular wireless access points and not to fry the airspace with such strong signals. That would make it possible for me to watch TV from Hong Kong if I choose to do so.
The revolution of business and technology is scarry because it could infringe on our lives, or it could be beneficial - helping each person become more free and "closely-independant" than ever.
Don't look for the evolution of business and technology to promote any kind of "free" and "closely-independent" person in society. Rather, look for the exact opposite.
Fundamentally, commercial success relies upon your dependent relationship based upon commercial transactions with suppliers of goods and services.
Look for suppliers to:
Dependency is moving largely into the emotional arena, too, as advertisements tend to target people so as to get them to think they need that new CD, that wireless phone, etc. If there were a way for advertisements to mentally condition you to be addicted to their product (I don't mean obvious physiologically addictive products like nicotine, alcohol), then believe it would be done. Can you imagine any product more succesful than one in which customers thought they'd die without it and feel completely satisfied only temporarily at each moment of purchase?
In the modern world, we're at an unprecedented level of interdependency already. If the trucks that bring food to my local grocery store stopped running today, then I'd starve within a few weeks.
How can they limit public criticism?
It's kind of like the Oprah beef thing, where she was sued for making statements slandering someone's line of business.
In the United States over 200 years ago the founding fathers made it possible for the average citizen to criticize the powers that be: George W. Bush runs a government that enforces my right to say that he is a potty head.
But, heaven forbid I should say something that disparages one of the sacred corporate entities!
It reminds me of the Peoples Republic of China, where "slandering the state" is a crime. The only difference is that in the United States, substitute "corporations" for "state".
Sorry about your wreck and being laid up.
Even though I have two fairly functional hands, I've often thought how nice it would be to use one of these devices, particularly at meetings, where it would gauche to layout a laptop and using a PDA pen is less than satisfactory. I'll have to admit that furiuosly chording one of these devices in your lap under the table could look kind of suspicious.
Using chorded input on the one handed device seems to allow something like 4K possible input "characters", so even if you needed to map every emacs major mode's lisp function to a key you'd have an easier time than with a typical QWERTY board.
The advertisement suggests you can learn to use one of these in about a weekend. If you do, let me know if you like it or not.
I think a good successor to the floppy would be one of the USB storage devices.
It's got greater capacity, can be used as a boot device and uses that one USB interface that can also be used for mouse, keyboard, etc.
I think the only thing holding this back is that there are so many older PCs and older OS versions out there that don't have good USB support built-in. But that will change in the next year or two.
I know folks that use wwwreq and it seems to work as well as the people you have actually handling the tickets.
Also, see this page for a bigger list.
clue me in please... why is the resistance such a problem, if the third rail is how they are powering the trains in the first place?
It's all tied together with social security.
Politicians are often heard saying something along the lines of
You've probably noticed that Social Security benefits are mostly received by old people.
You've probably also noticed that those old people move slowly. The reason they move more slowly than you or me and the reason they can't drive more than 20 mph under the speed limit is simply because they are encountering resistance.
Hope that clears it up.
Also seriously flawed in that you need IE on Windoze to use its web access features.
[Leave it to MS to never miss an opportunity to turn a great concept on its head to leverage the rest of their product line:) The folks at MS who actually implemented the web access feature in Project must have had the breath knocked out of them at the "IE specialization".]
Nevertheless, the concept of web based project management is still a really good one. Not only for read-access to view what's going on, but also to help formulate project plans.
I prefer to spend my time programming, but have had brushes with project planning exercises and noted the dearth of good open source alternatives to MS Project (which, practically, seems to require some training in order to learn the quirks of how to use it.)
The most intriguing development I've seen is out of the Horde Project (a PHP framework for web applications).
They mention something called Nag that came out 1.0 on June 11 of this year, but I don't know what it's really like.
But I can see where having an XML database for projects that is accessed via PHP would be a good thing. That, and having some SVG enabled browsers (and server code) to create and view Gantt charts on the fly.
Since I'm throwing buzzwords and wishlists about, I may as well suggest that WebDAV would be a great part of such a tool because it would offer a good means for collaborative authoring of project plans, which is really how the best ones get done. (The worst ones are guesses and dictats that make everyone mad.)
Right on.
MiniDV format clocks in at nearly 13 GB per hour.
backup media consistently lags
I've got about 0.3 TB of disk space at home between my 2 TiVo's. They have more disk space than my two computers do. They never get backed up, either, because there's nothing to back them up to. They're their own archive.
Video is driving desire for
- low noise
- high capacity
- random access (linear tape sux!)
- high reliability (no backup, remember!)
and what I see coming (while last mile service is still unacceptably slow) are home NAS systems connected via 802.11b to TiVo-looking consumer electronic devices and to wireless tablets just for watching shows.If I were a disk manufacturer, I'd goad the consumer video recording technology to shift into higher gear (come out with TiVo's with built-in 802.11b and a NAS repackaged as a "VideoArchive") and be ready with all the pieces to satisfy this market.
[I've got a Mini-DV recorder, too, but haven't worked up the courage yet to figure out which IEEE-1394 card to buy for my Linux box and how to get it to work.]
Microsoft's real biggest threats come from the inertia of their own installed base (that they're beating into submission with Software Assurance 6) and from potentially adverse legal rulings against them.
IBM/Linux is a certainly a plausible-sounding competitor.
While I love Linux, open source, etc., I don't kid myself for one minute that MS is quaking in its boots about IBM and Linux.
It's more along the lines of a PR statement (one that some Linux zealots will go along with) to make it sound like:
Then, of course, there's the usual problem with the 50 point karma cap if you happen to get modded up before you get modded down (I think this happens more often)...
I always felt like a helium balloon bouncing against the ceiling.Everyone has the right to give up their privacy in exchange for preferential treatment.
Yes, we're all free to give up our privacy. It's our choice.
My point is that if the choice involves paying an extra 15% for your groceries if you don't use such a card, then it becomes coercive.
Keep increasing the percentage and it becomes just as effective (or more so) as many laws.
I know people that break parking laws routinely and consider the trade offs between ticket cost and the added convenience of parking places, judging it merely as the "cost of convenient parking", a purely economic choice.
Likewise, this selling of your right to privacy is a gradual market-based phenomena.
But, since most consumers who sell their right to privacy have little knowledge of what they're selling, the market price for Not Losing Privacy is growing faster than I'd like. Fortunately I'm still able to find reasonably priced stores without the two-tier pricing system: regular prices for the "kiss-and-tell" crowd, maybe 5% more for the "butt-out" crowd.
Most people are dozing on this issue and will only find out about it in an abrupt, rude kind of way, as their health insurance premiums suddenly get tied into their grocery purchases: what? cigarettes, liquor, potato chips and Twinkies every week? No wonder you're in the "above average risk" category.
It would be entirely different if the Federal government mandated that we all use such cards and then required all stores to share their information with the FBI.
The government doesn't need to mandate use if the economics make discount card use endemic. I'm sure than any store is more than willing to share such data with the FBI without requiring a court order just in the interest of being helpful.
I think the framers of the U.S. constitution rightly worried about the concentration of power in government and restricted it very effectively with a system of checks and balances, but didn't foresee just how much extra-governmental power over the citizens has concentrated in the hands of corporations.
The practical implications of power concentration in corporations, be it discount cards or peeing in a cup for employment, are a lot greater in this day and age than anything the Federal government is allowed to do.
I've often thought a good way to illustrate this point would be for some legislator to propose that federal law enforcement agencies be given the ability to conduct themselves within exactly the same legal confines that restrict corporations.
That would wake up a few of my soporific fellow citizens.
When did "mandated by law" become the requirement for demonstrating a slippery slope?
Exactly.
Some of the most intrusive erosions of privacy occur without the need for obvious repressive laws.
For example, nothing really requires you to use one of those supermarket discount cards that identify who buys what, where and when. With some reasoning, you can figure out quite a lot from that sort of data. But it's been posed to the public in such a way that the majority is more than willing to part with their privacy and anonymity for a bowl of pottage.
Most people start sliding down that "slippery slope" without even realizing it.
The only problem is that if you wind it to get standby back, if someone calls you are likely to only have a minute or so of talking.
Could be a potential problem when I call up those automated voice mail hell^Hp trees that force me to navigate <wind>through the <wind>duration of every inappropriate <wind>branch and <wind>twig until I get to a nice operator <wind>leaf that puts me into a queue to talk to a real person.
"Thank you for calling $CORP. <wind>Your call is important to us. All of our operators are busy assisting other customers. Please <wind> continue to stay on the line...<music> ... <wind> <product_advertisement> ....<wind> ..."
(I can see carpal tunnel setting in from winding...)
What really gets me is how selling my private data can fall under the heading "free speech", but reporting on and linking to DeCSS cannot.
Silly fool.
That's because the information about DeCSS is their private data, where they contribute a lot more money to elected officials, while your private data belongs to you, who does not contribute a lot of money to elected officials.
Hope that clears up the confusion.
(how long untill genetic profiling?)
Future society probably won't have much need of diagnostic profiling for people. Instead, new prescriptive genetics will be all the rage.
If current trends (selective abortion after amniotic fluid tests for abnormalities like improper gender; people taking hormones and steriods) are any indication, the future will be populated uniformly by individuals looking a lot like recent celebrities and athletes.
And, like another poster has already mentioned, the people will choose to exercise their rights to modify their children's genetic make-up, even if those parents have displayed ample evidence at botching other choices...
There'll probably even be a few wacko parents that will want centaurs for children as well as daughters that grow up with four breasts. If you think people inherit defective genes and poor personality nurturing from their parents these days, wait until the parents have even more say in the choice - it'll be worse.
How much progress are you and others making on realistic depictions of water (waves, splashing) at different scales?
(I still remember the clumsy ship in a bathtub effects from the 1970s!)
Even in recent productions like The Perfect Storm, I haven't been "convinced" sufficiently that it's a real wave.
For all Linux's technical superiority to Windows, we as a community must not be seen as childishly attacking Microsoft.
Well, if I were a Microsoft advocate (i.e., one of those with a significant number of shares of MSFT - everyone else just tolerates their existence like they do death and taxes), then I'd look at every possible way of hindering the Linux rate of adoption.
One way would be good to discourage the uptake of Linux: pose as Linux zealot, scream at newbies to RTFM on the relay channels and use plenty of name-calling and profanity in my postings to newsgroups and web forums, attempt to alienate potential users of Linux by loudly trumpeting my inherent superiority to those lusers out there.
For every twenty people that advocate Linux intelligently "It's cheap, rock solid and works like a champ." on a word of mouth basis, one person yelling like a fool can sour just as many.
The only saving part in all this is that Microsoft advocates (Steve Ballmer) have less and less credibility as they issue statements to their potential customer base who actually use Microsoft products everyday and know exactly what they're getting for their money. Few Linux advocates actually get any signicant amount of money by taking their positions; the same can't be said of the most visible and vocal of the Microsoft advocates.
I'm not a kernel developer, either, but I have just enough ignorance to be dangerous....
AFAICT, if you have some process that's really gotta run, then you don't even want the kernel taking up valuable slices of time because of the potential impact on performance. Hence, allow your process to be effectively negatively niced beyond what is possible without the preemption patch.
I think some purists would argue that you might as well just start using a Real Time version of the kernel in that case. But I think that real time requirements can cause you to lose other good things that you might want to have around.
I've heard anecdotes that using the preemption patch and running X with an effective high priority makes things seem snappier for desktop use. Of course, there are probably plenty of potential applications in the server arena as well.
[I apologize to people that know what's really going on since I only know Jack Shit by reputation.]
I've got a couple of TiVo's, one with 200 GB of IDE disk in it and I'm running out of space. It's a nicer quality archive format than VHS, but limited in quantity.
I can foresee cheap wireless video cameras being used around the house for security monitoring being recorded to disk. That kind of application will eat up disk space in a hurry.
In addition to the advice to get out of your chair more often, let me add a reference to an invaluable book to help with back pain.
It's also at Amazon.
I've slouched in computer chairs for years and still do. But a reckless and stupid decision to do some back bending repetitive work a few years ago left my back quite sore - as in takes 5x as long to tie your shoe laces, can not walk faster than 1 mph sore.
The stretching exercises recommended in that book helped immensely and I still do them to this day. And I haven't had any back trouble since.
For me, all the hype and PR have tended to obscure what's really in .NET. Also, many of the language interfaces to it (VB, ASP, C#) do not have open source implementations. (Maybe Miguel de Icaza will be done soon:)
That said, there are probably some really good sound technical ideas hidden in .NET after the surrounding marketing has been washed away.
Subversion lets you use different low level layers for actually storing files, pluggin things through an API.
That great idea is compounded by their objective of using WebDAV as a lower level layer.
I like the idea of having an XML description of actions that need to be taken for a version control system. Perhaps .NET has some good ways for doing this, but I'm fearful of a simple open source tool acquiring too much bloated overhead (much in way that SOAP bloats XML-RPC) that could slow it down and make it dependent on more network activity than is always necessary.