Posts by Christian Berger 4850 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
What on earth could a student do with it? I mean Windows 7 doesn't come with Latex, so there is no way of generating paper documents. It also doesn't come with an SSH-client or X11 so you cannot even log into the computer at the university.
So essentially it's as useful as a brick, but way more expensive.
The Windows Infrastructure mostly consists of legacy applications. A big chunk of it is even based on tools from the 1990s. Some applications even took every little "technological advance" available to the developers through the decades. Those use VBX and OCX components along with .net and MS-SQL server. Even if they wanted to switch, some companies can't because their product is so old, they don't have the source code for all the obsolete components they use.
Now cut to Linux. There you have, as mentioned before, the same kernel running on anything. Since most applications are available in source code, you can just recompile them for different architectures. In fact since the operating system actually provides services, like for example good command line tools, you can write shell scripts which will simply work, regardless of the CPU architecture.
So if Microsoft wanted to switch to anything else than i386, they would either have to throw their entire ecosystem over board, or they would have to introduce emulation (as they already did on Alpha). There is no way a reasonable amount of the ecosystem is going to change.
That whenever some M$-Fanboy asks you yet again for Windows support, you can now direct them to the nearest Microsoft store.
Well about the books they sell. They are actually not to bad, but they clearly show how little effort Microsoft is putting into their software products. For example Menu entries in Windows need to be translated by the application. So if you want to have a multilingual application, you need to have a list of words and phrases translated into major languages. On most modern platforms you have some sort of locale system to get those phrases from a platform maintained database. Microsoft actually has such a database and they print it in one of their $400 books. It would have been trivial for them to ship it with their OS, but they refuse to do so.
For example you can narrow your criteria after conducting the study.
If you follow the hysteria about the topic, you'll find that they are constantly debating on what exactly is supposed to be dangerous. I think the latest on that topic is that only pulsed radiation within a certain range of intensities is dangerous.
Of course once you stop relying on science and reason, you can explain it like this guy here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT7YZpJ4oks
Note that starting from 0:50 you will see god (Gott) creating the creation (Schöpfung) by means of scalar waves. Now wait till 2:03 where you'll see the "transmission tower" (Sendemast) which disturbs the scalar waves of the creation and is of course outside of the creation.
So essentially what you have is a lot of studies which go one way, a lot of studies which go the other way, some publication bias, and meta analysis of varying quality. The typical symptoms of a non-existing effect.
Also note that there are some people who claim to sensitive to that kind of radiation, yet none of them got themselves successfully tested in the lab.
Besides isn't it odd that such devices should cause brain tumours? I mean back when people used to telephone with such things, they were either in the trunk of a car, or worn around the hip. Nowadays they are hand-held and even the worst ones can easily be read at a distance of several decimeters. Wouldn't that more likely cause some sort of hand tumour?
The music industry already learned that DRM-free files sell considerably better than DRMed ones. Now it's time for the film and book industry to learn the same.
They already had a chance. If you look at the sales of DVDs you will find that they went up right after their DRM was broken.
Even if Sony wouldn't have introduced DRM-ridden software with the net-MD recorders it would still be dead by now. Today it just makes sense to build a little device with good A/D converters and a SD-Slot and just record the raw values of the converter. That can be made for a fraction of the cost.
Gold has just as little intrinsic value to the average person as money has. As a normal person you cannot actually do anything with gold.
If you want to do long term investments, invest in things that actually have long term value. Like education, railway lines or fiber optic cables. (But not passive optical distribution networks.) Those things will still be useful in the future. Just look around and find out what investments in the past you still find useful today. Those are the things that are worth investing in in the long run.
The problem is that such a hardware needs lots of minds to develop software. Great minds usually don't work for companies.
Now if a tablet would have cost the same price a laptop cost, there would have been lots of people trying to find out how to actually do stuff on it.
Todays tables are mostly popular since they are about the same price as a cheap laptop, not twice as expensive as an average one.
The graphics card obviously had 32 Megabytes not Gigabytes.
Maybe the cube was the end of the time when people actually had computers on their desks. I mean back then people slowly started abandoning optical media in favour of harddisk and digital transfer of data.
Well apart from the obvious problem that most phones neither have their sourcecode publically accessible nor can you make sure it runs a firmware you could check, there are other ways to subvert your phone.
The simplest is simply swapping the battery. There are batteries out there with slightly smaller cells and a tiny bug insides. That's cheap to do and far simpler than swapping the phone.
The other way which is harder is to do is to exploit the baseband controller. Many have some sort of "auto answer" feature, activated by a command sent to the baseband controller from the application controller and stored in a byte somewhere in memory. A clever exploit might be able to write a suitable byte into that memory location. This could be done either from the application controller or if you have more resources, from the wireless network side by faking a cell.
Another way to intercept phonecalls is to load an application onto the SIM-card via the SIM application toolkit. This also requires the phone to be booked into a cell you control. That way you can, for example, make every call a 3-way call to the attacker.
You could just have a distribution and do the payment via license files, if the programmer chooses to require payment.
App-Stores are just the lazy solution to that problem, and the big problem is that they require DRM which leads to many people breaking the copy protection in order to be able to use their devices.
High end users automatically write their own programmes. On the Windows platform this leads to horrible VBA scripts. On Unix(oid) platforms this leads to horrible shell scripts. But those scripts get their job done way more efficiently than doing it per hand. The languages allow to write a program which is efficient even for only a single use.
That's why we need proper computers in such mobile devices. That's why we need shells more than finger gestures or facebook screens.
Unfortunately there is a lot of hostility against computers in our societies. People have stopped to learn how to program. I've seen graduated engineers _complaining_ they cannot find a job and furiously trying to refute it's because they don't understand programming.
One is the problem of protocols. What we need are open and simple/obvious protocols for those devices to talk to each other.
The other one is computer literacy. What's the use of your coffee maker being able to tell you when the coffee is ready when you cannot process that information automatically?
Well why not store it as text with the message in an individual file, just keep an index, either in another file (you can rebuild) or in RAM.
Contacts can easily be stored in plain text files. So are appointments and tasks. Store them as text, and if you need the speed, also have them in a binary form, either in RAM or on disk. Besides we are not talking about "large amounts of data". We are talking about a few hundred thousand datasets at most.
The point is, how do you recover from times when something bad happens. Things will go wrong, eventually, and it doesn't need to be the software. Just imagine a bit flips somewhere on your storage system or you loose a file. How much data did you actually loose? Can you repair the damage easily?
"We made mistakes in the 1990s, refused to fix them in the 2000s, and now everything people warned us about suddenly happened and we're f*cked".
What we should learn from this is how we should store our data. Storing everything in large binary blobs of data is not a good solution, especially for something comparatively slow like e-mail.
Why do we store simple lists in SQL-Databases?
Why do we store e-mails in binary blobs?
I have to confess, I have previously written software which did all of the above, but the point now is to learn from this, to throw out that 1990s software, and don't listen to those dim-wits which store _everything_ in Databases, even though it makes no sense.
(And in case you have a situation where you need to store data that can easily be represented as text in binary files, always keep a copy of that data as text)
Yes, but think of the scratches a child might leave on the car. That's why some car drivers still try to avoid people.
However there is virtually no punishment for people who do kill other people while driving. Otto Wiesheu, famous German politician once killed a Jew while drunk driving. He got 12 months probation, plus a 20k DM fine.
If that's really true, that would be a big no-go in Germany. Here by law computer screens at workplaces must be ergonomic, which includes that there must be no glare.
Other than that, the Mac vs Windows argument is ridiculous. Both have X11 servers available and both have debian-like package managers from external parties. So there essentially is not much of a difference anyhow.
Get rid of the copy constructor. Please! I know it sounds like a good idea on paper, but people just aren't going to use pointers when they have to put funny characters around them.
The point is, it's the idiots who need help, not the experts. Nobody who knows what they are doing will ever complain for having to put some extra code into some exotic or dangerous program part. However requiring the idiot to learn C and Assembler, as well as all the implementation details of that platform, just to avoid the biggest pitfalls, isn't going to work.
My point is: Unlike what many C++ programmers seem to believe, it is possible to have systems which are both easy to use/program and powerful and fast.
This is clearly not a high point of German engineering. Just like Uwe Boll, the car industry simply is our 'black sheep' and there's nothing we can do about it.
Some of the obvious flaws are for example the DRMed computer inside or the air conditioning.
Again, I'm sorry, please wait for the Indians or Chinese to bring out an electric car. The second generation will surely surpass everything we make.
Even mysql is a hassle. It's not like SQL is a difficult language, but it's missing the simplicity of text files. Now just explain the steps you need to add a single dataset. What do you need to do to delete a dataset you see. How did you add the users and manage them. If the answer is "some more tools", keep in mind you'll have to install and configure them, too.
Obviously there are great uses for SQL servers, however unless you actually need those features it's just a lot of hassle to set up.
Those can be processed easily, either by opening it with a text editor or via the usualy unix tools. Plus you don't have the problem that only one person can open it at a time. In fact you can even use Wikis.
I agree that setting up an SQL server is a big hassle, but it can be avoided easily.
Besides unless you have many thousands of database entries, SQL doesn't give you much speed advantage.
I mean there are maybe about10 real C++ experts around. The rest are people who believe they know C++, but instead only know a subset of an older version of C++ thus being likely to fall into one of the many pitfalls.
The main problem is that people tend to believe that C++ is a high-level object oriented language when it's instead just a macro assembler with a really strange syntax. Mind you, it would only be half the problem if the standardisation people would get it. Instead they add more and more non-orthogonal features every few years.
I wonder why nobody talks about OOPascal anymore. There are now several free compilers around. It's fast and has just the features you need for C++-style OO. Most importantly some misfeatures like implicit object copies have been removed. The := operator only copies a handle to the object, not the object itself.
There's even a platform independent GUI toolkit coming with it. It even looks native on every platform.
I mean for the foreseeable future a WP7 phone will be exactly as useful as a good feature phone... for several times the price.
It's completing in the "I just want a browser and don't know what DRM is"-market. And that market is already full with Apple with it's IOS as well as Google with it's Android, as well as hundreds of cheap Chinese companies trying to sell good feature phones.
What might have been a success would be the Maemo approach. Take a full featured OS (in this case Debian) and trim it down until it fits on a mobile device. That actually creates a new, untapped market.
They are going to bring out a new version of Windows which is incompatible to Windows on mobile devices and the only feature is the browser? Hmm.... didn't Google bring out something like that months ago?
Well seriously, once you have a good browser the importance of local apps is going to diminish, especially if you don't have a way to easily backup your device.
It was from a legit source. I was able to pay via PayPal among other things, what I got was a torrent file which I used to download the movie.
The movie obviously was DRM free.
The big point is that the music industry has shown that convenience only helps so far. Sales soared on iTunes once they removed the DRM, even though iTunes was already fairly usable.
I will pay a reasonable price for content, provided it's DRM free and there is open source software to play and convert it into other formats.
All the other OSes are crippled by stupid ideas like code-signing or special incompatible APIs. They are all based on a Top Down approach where some store owner gets to decide which applications you get and which you won't get.
The people who currently buy those devices do it, because they want to use "cloud services", as there is no way to do something locally on those devices. However in a few years the "web experience" will have progressed beyond what Apps currently do.
On Meego/Maemo however you can simply port existing applications at virtually no effort. Many applications can simply be re-compiled. So if I want maxima or a Pascal compiler I can simply install them.
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