More importantly, though, I see the exemption for phone companies and banks as the biggest problem.
They're not exempt, the FTC just doesn't have total jurisdiction over those industries. I think it's likely that the FCC (which *does* have jurisdiction) will cooperate with the FTC though they may add a couple of exceptions, just to look like they're doing something.
The ion cloud is completely irrelevant to the chances of finding life deep in the oceans of Europa. The Earth itself is surrounded by belts of ionized radiation.
Exactly, it just increases the chances that life on Europa will have super-powers. The Fantastic Four knows all about that. Sure, they have super-powers now but all-in-all they'd rather they didn't, especially Ben Grimm.
There's some rather important stuff missing from the article. First, the charge per megabyte is "a fraction of a cent." What fraction is it? If it's 1/10 of 1 cent, that's not too bad (1 ISO = 64 cents). If it's half a cent or more, that would get expensive fast.
Is internal traffic charged? The implication is they only meter traffic which crosses the campus "boundary" but it's the sort of thing you would want to be clear about. Is Internet2 traffic charged the same as Internet traffic? The whole point of I2 is to make interesting uses of tons of bandwidth. There's a reference to researchers moving large amounts of telescope data which sounds like an I2 project and they only offered to "round off the edges." Since many I2 projects deal with terabytes per month, I guess they're just have to seek new grants or close down. Webmonkey just had an article about I2 which featured a project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bye Bye birdies!
The biggest problem with this kind of per-user billing is there are no practical ways for the average person to monitor, or in some way control, their own bandwidth usage. They talk about people making "informed choices" but also say that most traffic is out-going Kazaa traffic and that some students aren't aware their computers are used to serve data by Kazaa. I bet most students don't know they're computers are serving all those files, they certainly don't know how much data they're serving. This is just a big example of something I've thought about for a few years; today's applications and operating systems are simply not transparent enough for anyone to make an "informed choice." Sure, Slashdot readers know about things like client/server and P2P architectures but how the hell is a regular person supposed to learn this stuff? Even if you do know what those things mean, are you sure you know what each particular program is doing? Once something has been around a while, most people can learn what to avoid but every time some new program comes along, a lot of people will be caught unawares.
[friend at other university]: "Hey [cornell student], try this cool thingy to add to AIM, it'll let all our friends play music for each other."
[cornell student]: "Thanks [friend at other university], I will."
[1 month later]
[cornell student]:"Network bill for $XXX.XX?! Looks like I'll have to spend my summer being a test subject for medical experiments instead of working on that very educational research project."
The same thing happened to me with my Matrox G450. Windows Update doesn't *tell* you it's a French version, it just has a name and a long version number. Actually I don't think there are different versions of the drivers for different languages, the different text is all in there and it's supposed to figure out which language you have. I didn't even notice until I finally had a reason to change something and it was all "merci blah blah!"
I think Matrox might be to blame for this. I downloaded an updated driver from the Matrox site on another occasion and it made all the text Italian.
Many slashdot editors are PA-lovers, (how do you think I found out about it?) I'm sure timothy was referring to that comic (and now a T-shirt!) But hey, I'm not here to knock a link to the comic, spread the love! On toast!
Re:i'm not even trying to be an ass here....
on
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think that book is pretty good for delivering a clue to those who haven't experienced life on the low end of the salary scale. I spent about 5 years at the upper-lower part of the scale after college (clerk in Borders book store and just-above-minium-wage clerical work for a public university) so I feel I have a pretty good sense of it from my own experience. I have some problems with her methodology and conclusions. The big conclusion was "it's really hard to live on what you make at basic service sector jobs" but she was always trying it with no friends or family, living alone and without using any credit. Poor people need each other more than do people who are better off. They need to help each other and they often need to share living quarters (she correctly points out that when calculating poverty rates, the government uses outdated measures which over-emphasize food costs and de-emphasize housing costs). I don't think that's necessarily something which needs correcting, if it's even possible. As for credit, as long as you don't have a history of messing up your credit, *anyone* can get credit and credit can be key when you're just getting started somewhere (for deposits on apartments and such). Following her own estimations, if she had stayed somewhere 6 months instead of just 2, she could have been in a pretty settled place.
I think I'm coming off too harshly on the book. She does a very good job of getting across how stressful it is to just live in such a precarious state, where even a small setback can throw everything off. I wish she had talked more about health care and how that can be the whammy that can ruin lives. When me and my partner were both working at the book store (about 10 yrs. ago), she had to go to the emergency due to flu induced dehydration. We didn't have health insurance so that one visit cost us $900. It took many months to pay off but at least for us it only meant not adding money to our safety net and a bit less enterainment. Much more recently she had a more serious condition which put her in the hospital for a week, including some time in ICU. That bill was $24,000 but she had health insurance so we didn't pay a thing. What if the $24,000 incident happened back when the $900 one did?
I haven't tried but others have (with Mail.app too). They had problems with it not working right, not knowing the correct "search base" or something. Since I use Entourage only secondarily (primary is Outlook 2000 in the office), it's not much of an issue for me. Anyone I want to email has already emailed me so the address history does the trick. We'll need to figure it out before deploying it though.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't really see how javascript or even flash "enchances" the viewing experience over straight HTML and your bmps/gifs/pngs/jpegs.
You might be ignorant but you're probably just not thinking. You don't think things like mouseovers and pull-down menus "enhance the viewing experience?" Maybe think the Windows GUI peaked at Win3.1, too. Javascript can reveal and hide chunks of text faster than if you made them each a separate web page. Javascript can also do calculations and basic text processing so you don't have to do even basic functions in a CGI. Speed improves the viewing experience.
The biggest problem I had working on web projects (in school) with browser compatibility was the different DOMs in Javascript. I think IE and Mozilla are compatible now but if you still have to accomodate Navigator 4.x, you've got problems.
The problem with many web designers is they used to be in desktop publishing and they won't give up complete control of the layout. Fonts and font sizes are still an issue between multiple platforms and browsers. Table rendering is pretty consistent now between browsers but if you want to do the "right thing" and use CSS for layout, there are lots of differences in which parts of CSS are supported and how they're implemented.
A lot of companies have the same problem my university does, they can't upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 because it requires Active Directory. Switching to Active Directory requires a lot of careful planning and in most cases, visits to every seat. It'll happen eventually but it's a lot harder than upgrading a cluster of groupware servers.
This summer our new Macs will run OS X, a first for us outside our department. Fortunately the Exchange server has IMAP enabled so we'll start them off with Entourage without the update then apply it when the server is ready. They won't have group calendaring but all the Macs are going to faculty who only really want email anyway. Entourage makes a pretty good Exchange+IMAP client, the main thing I miss is the Global Address List.
Gas and electric is charged based on use because those are consumable resources and the cost to you is proportional to the cost to them. 1 kW or 1 "therm" requires X amount of gas, coal, hydro capacity, etc. They don't charge for use just to keep you from using more than your "fair share."
ISP bandwidth costs are largely flat. They pay for an OC3 whether their customers happen to use most of the available bandwidth or not. They have to buy their bandwidth based on peak capacity. If they were to charge based on use it would *only* be to discourage use and therefore reduce the need to add capacity.
The most important part of a network connection is binary, either you have it or you don't. How many actual bits you can cram through it in a given day is far less important. The only use fees I would be cool with would be ones which specificlly charge for (and therefore discourage) the behavior which ends up costing the ISP money, disproportionate use at peak times. Monthly or daily GB limits are stupid because if I download a bunch of.isos at 3am, it isn't going to cost my ISP *anything* because there's not much other bandwidth use going on. Now if I download.isos at 8pm on a weekday, then that could lead them to needing more capacity.
Most ISPs aren't stupid enough to care about whether you're using a NAT within your home. You don't need multiple computers in your house to use a crazy amount of bandwidth. They *do* care about you using a NAT in your home to share your connection with your neighbors, that's robbing them of a potential customer. Your electric company would also care if you were doing the same thing with an extension cord instead of Cat5 because they also have flat fees. My utlity bill has a "Minimum Monthly Charge" of $17.50. If I just used my neighbor's electricity and split the bill, we would be robbing the utility of that monthly charge from me.
The domain is not "mechanical engineering" it's "television." Junkyard Wars has too many white guys for the televsion domain. As long as the contestants have sufficient skills, I'm happy they're looking to mix things up a bit more in other respects.
That sounds interesting but what happens if a vehicle doesn't *have* a card reader or the card reader is broken? What's the incentive for someone to have a functioning card reader in their car? I assume someone could be fined for not having a functional card reader but how are they caught? In the U.S. you have to wear your seat belt and you can't use a radar detector (in most states) but since people are only (sometimes) caught when they've been pulled over for some other infraction, the laws are a small deterrent.
Singapore is also a small nation, London probably has to deal with at least an order of magnatude more vehicles than they do. Don't you think the expense of millions of card readers and 10s of millions of cards would dwarf the cost of 700 cameras and the software programmers (card reader systems need programmers too, you know)? I imagine the camera system has the advantage of being able to be used for other purposes like catching people who run red lights and may provide photographic evidence of other, more serious crimes (not that I necessarily agree with the use of cameras).
As for the card-waving on the bus, what if you forget to wave your card getting on? Do you ride for free? What if you forget to wave when you get off, are you charged for riding the whole day?
When I have a file open on an NT server and an OS X client also has it open, everything is fine until I try to save the file. The app says it can't save the file under the original name and saves it with a random (alphanumeric) 8 character string for a name, not even the correct filename extension. That's pretty annoying but at least my changes aren't lost.
If a 2nd Windows client opened the file, they would be warned that the file was already open and they could only open it Read Only (I only have experience with MS Word and Excel in this context so I don't know for certain if the applications play a part).
I think there certainly is the potential for ending up with a crazy mixed-up file if more than one client saves changes to it at once. The more likely event is the last saved version is the one which is kept but it depends on the application and in some cases, the file.
It's a poor use of language. "Trail of Tears" has a very specific meaning which is way beyond the sentiment they're trying to convey (which any U.S.-ian should know but probably doesn't since we're so ignorant of history). Exaggeration is fine but this is taking it to an extreme. You might as well go all the way and call the article "MySQL, ODBC, & OpenOffice 1.0, a Configruation Holocaust." Actually that might not be as bad because "Holocaust" is qualified with an adjective which indicates its scope. No, it still sucks.
Powerful words should be used carefully, otherwise their glib use leaves our language impoverished and trivialized.
Ah, I see, they call it "Altivec compatible." As long as apps don't have to be re-written, that's cool. Of course I forgot about the whole 64-bit thing. They're making interesting claims of 32-bit apps running just as fast on these chips, we'll see.
How about "not at all?" From the beginning of PowerPC Macs, the PowerPC was the domain of "AIM": Apple, IBM, Motorola. They all had a formal agreement of some kind regarding the chip's development. I think it kind of fell apart, probably around when Motorola developed Altivec, but IBM has never stopped making PowerPC chips for themselves, Apple, and others. I think IBM makes all the G3 chips Apple buys today. IBM has long done a better job of keeping up with advancements in chip production and keeping yields at a higher level than Motorola. Higher yields means cheaper and faster chips. Unfortunately Apple needs Altivec and Motorola hasn't been sharing.
Use of the IBM 970 chip is still rumor, one I haven't really paid attention to though. Has Motorola finally licensed Altivec to IBM or did IBM make their own version of it? You can't have two different kinds of G4s so if the IBM chip doesn't have Altivec it would have to be called something else ("G5?") and the G4 would have to replace the G3 in the iBooks (or, as someone else mentions, the iBook dies in favor of the 12" PowerBook). Even so, if there's a new Altivec-like chip feature, it'll take a long time for apps to be updated to take advantage of it. Apple would use it immediately, followed quickly by Adobe Photoshop, but many apps would wait until their next upgrade cycle.
Actually we've been pretty successful doing just that. We have a lab running Win2k that has its file system very locked down. We started with Microsoft's own security templates which basically gives the "Users" group Read & Execute permission only for the entire drive except their own profile directory and to *specific* files in the C:\winnt\ directory which any user account needs Write access to. To this we added a Deny Execute rule to the profile directory so they can Read/Write files but if they download a program, it won't run (our students don't have individual domain accounts so the lab machines auto-login with a generic account. It's harder to do Deny Execute if they have their own logins).
The user account uses a mandatory roaming profile so when it logs out, all changes to the profile directory are wiped and thanks to WinExit screensaver, the account logs out (force quitting applications) after 30 min. of inactivity (then the auto-login logs it back in). To protect their documents from accidents, the default save location is a "docs" folder outside the profile directory to which they have read/write access but also Deny Execute. That folder is kept clean by a nightly script.
I find figuring out the registry permisions harder than file permissions. Some programs use the Registry in weird ways. RegMon helps figure it out and FileMon helps with the files. What would really help would be if more software companies would write less shitty software and software installers. User settings can go in their profile directory and registry, user documents can go where ever the user decides. Application settings that aren't per user can go in HKLM\Software\Foo\ and then you can choose which users have write permission there.
It would be a lot easier if we were running Active Directory so we could have global Group Policies. As it is, I had to do it all locally on one machine then Ghost the rest.
Computing is the single most important method of communication in the business world.
That's daft. The most important communication is what occurs between people face-to-face. And we don't really have a lot of that either, more like a lot of mental masterbation and flinging feces at one another (at least at the last IT executive committee meeting I attended)
I think he's using a different definition of "important" than you. Can today's business world (which really means "corporations" rather than the entire set of all businesses) survive without face-to-face communications? Yes. Can they survive without electronic communications (including email, EDI, etc.)? No. That makes electronic communications more important.
I think what you're saying is true. I don't pay much attention to the FSF but it seems like this leads to an argument for software being free. If users didn't have the barrier of having to pay for an upgrade and if software developers didn't have to focus on working to get people to buy the upgrades (i.e. adding features vs. improving stability, ease of use, etc.), software would become better in these less commodifiable (that's not a word) ways.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the FCC oversees all that banks and airlines do, just what they do over phone lines.
More importantly, though, I see the exemption for phone companies and banks as the biggest problem.
They're not exempt, the FTC just doesn't have total jurisdiction over those industries. I think it's likely that the FCC (which *does* have jurisdiction) will cooperate with the FTC though they may add a couple of exceptions, just to look like they're doing something.
The ion cloud is completely irrelevant to the chances of finding life deep in the oceans of Europa. The Earth itself is surrounded by belts of ionized radiation.
Exactly, it just increases the chances that life on Europa will have super-powers. The Fantastic Four knows all about that. Sure, they have super-powers now but all-in-all they'd rather they didn't, especially Ben Grimm.
Is internal traffic charged? The implication is they only meter traffic which crosses the campus "boundary" but it's the sort of thing you would want to be clear about. Is Internet2 traffic charged the same as Internet traffic? The whole point of I2 is to make interesting uses of tons of bandwidth. There's a reference to researchers moving large amounts of telescope data which sounds like an I2 project and they only offered to "round off the edges." Since many I2 projects deal with terabytes per month, I guess they're just have to seek new grants or close down. Webmonkey just had an article about I2 which featured a project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bye Bye birdies!
The biggest problem with this kind of per-user billing is there are no practical ways for the average person to monitor, or in some way control, their own bandwidth usage. They talk about people making "informed choices" but also say that most traffic is out-going Kazaa traffic and that some students aren't aware their computers are used to serve data by Kazaa. I bet most students don't know they're computers are serving all those files, they certainly don't know how much data they're serving. This is just a big example of something I've thought about for a few years; today's applications and operating systems are simply not transparent enough for anyone to make an "informed choice." Sure, Slashdot readers know about things like client/server and P2P architectures but how the hell is a regular person supposed to learn this stuff? Even if you do know what those things mean, are you sure you know what each particular program is doing? Once something has been around a while, most people can learn what to avoid but every time some new program comes along, a lot of people will be caught unawares.
[friend at other university]: "Hey [cornell student], try this cool thingy to add to AIM, it'll let all our friends play music for each other."
[cornell student]: "Thanks [friend at other university], I will."
[1 month later]
[cornell student]:"Network bill for $XXX.XX?! Looks like I'll have to spend my summer being a test subject for medical experiments instead of working on that very educational research project."
The same thing happened to me with my Matrox G450. Windows Update doesn't *tell* you it's a French version, it just has a name and a long version number. Actually I don't think there are different versions of the drivers for different languages, the different text is all in there and it's supposed to figure out which language you have. I didn't even notice until I finally had a reason to change something and it was all "merci blah blah!"
I think Matrox might be to blame for this. I downloaded an updated driver from the Matrox site on another occasion and it made all the text Italian.
Many slashdot editors are PA-lovers, (how do you think I found out about it?) I'm sure timothy was referring to that comic (and now a T-shirt!) But hey, I'm not here to knock a link to the comic, spread the love! On toast!
I think that book is pretty good for delivering a clue to those who haven't experienced life on the low end of the salary scale. I spent about 5 years at the upper-lower part of the scale after college (clerk in Borders book store and just-above-minium-wage clerical work for a public university) so I feel I have a pretty good sense of it from my own experience. I have some problems with her methodology and conclusions. The big conclusion was "it's really hard to live on what you make at basic service sector jobs" but she was always trying it with no friends or family, living alone and without using any credit. Poor people need each other more than do people who are better off. They need to help each other and they often need to share living quarters (she correctly points out that when calculating poverty rates, the government uses outdated measures which over-emphasize food costs and de-emphasize housing costs). I don't think that's necessarily something which needs correcting, if it's even possible. As for credit, as long as you don't have a history of messing up your credit, *anyone* can get credit and credit can be key when you're just getting started somewhere (for deposits on apartments and such). Following her own estimations, if she had stayed somewhere 6 months instead of just 2, she could have been in a pretty settled place.
I think I'm coming off too harshly on the book. She does a very good job of getting across how stressful it is to just live in such a precarious state, where even a small setback can throw everything off. I wish she had talked more about health care and how that can be the whammy that can ruin lives. When me and my partner were both working at the book store (about 10 yrs. ago), she had to go to the emergency due to flu induced dehydration. We didn't have health insurance so that one visit cost us $900. It took many months to pay off but at least for us it only meant not adding money to our safety net and a bit less enterainment. Much more recently she had a more serious condition which put her in the hospital for a week, including some time in ICU. That bill was $24,000 but she had health insurance so we didn't pay a thing. What if the $24,000 incident happened back when the $900 one did?
Canyonero!
</ob simpsons>
I haven't tried but others have (with Mail.app too). They had problems with it not working right, not knowing the correct "search base" or something. Since I use Entourage only secondarily (primary is Outlook 2000 in the office), it's not much of an issue for me. Anyone I want to email has already emailed me so the address history does the trick. We'll need to figure it out before deploying it though.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but I don't really see how javascript or even flash "enchances" the viewing experience over straight HTML and your bmps/gifs/pngs/jpegs.
You might be ignorant but you're probably just not thinking. You don't think things like mouseovers and pull-down menus "enhance the viewing experience?" Maybe think the Windows GUI peaked at Win3.1, too. Javascript can reveal and hide chunks of text faster than if you made them each a separate web page. Javascript can also do calculations and basic text processing so you don't have to do even basic functions in a CGI. Speed improves the viewing experience.
The biggest problem I had working on web projects (in school) with browser compatibility was the different DOMs in Javascript. I think IE and Mozilla are compatible now but if you still have to accomodate Navigator 4.x, you've got problems.
The problem with many web designers is they used to be in desktop publishing and they won't give up complete control of the layout. Fonts and font sizes are still an issue between multiple platforms and browsers. Table rendering is pretty consistent now between browsers but if you want to do the "right thing" and use CSS for layout, there are lots of differences in which parts of CSS are supported and how they're implemented.
A lot of companies have the same problem my university does, they can't upgrade from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 because it requires Active Directory. Switching to Active Directory requires a lot of careful planning and in most cases, visits to every seat. It'll happen eventually but it's a lot harder than upgrading a cluster of groupware servers.
This summer our new Macs will run OS X, a first for us outside our department. Fortunately the Exchange server has IMAP enabled so we'll start them off with Entourage without the update then apply it when the server is ready. They won't have group calendaring but all the Macs are going to faculty who only really want email anyway. Entourage makes a pretty good Exchange+IMAP client, the main thing I miss is the Global Address List.
Gas and electric is charged based on use because those are consumable resources and the cost to you is proportional to the cost to them. 1 kW or 1 "therm" requires X amount of gas, coal, hydro capacity, etc. They don't charge for use just to keep you from using more than your "fair share."
.isos at 3am, it isn't going to cost my ISP *anything* because there's not much other bandwidth use going on. Now if I download .isos at 8pm on a weekday, then that could lead them to needing more capacity.
ISP bandwidth costs are largely flat. They pay for an OC3 whether their customers happen to use most of the available bandwidth or not. They have to buy their bandwidth based on peak capacity. If they were to charge based on use it would *only* be to discourage use and therefore reduce the need to add capacity.
The most important part of a network connection is binary, either you have it or you don't. How many actual bits you can cram through it in a given day is far less important. The only use fees I would be cool with would be ones which specificlly charge for (and therefore discourage) the behavior which ends up costing the ISP money, disproportionate use at peak times. Monthly or daily GB limits are stupid because if I download a bunch of
Most ISPs aren't stupid enough to care about whether you're using a NAT within your home. You don't need multiple computers in your house to use a crazy amount of bandwidth. They *do* care about you using a NAT in your home to share your connection with your neighbors, that's robbing them of a potential customer. Your electric company would also care if you were doing the same thing with an extension cord instead of Cat5 because they also have flat fees. My utlity bill has a "Minimum Monthly Charge" of $17.50. If I just used my neighbor's electricity and split the bill, we would be robbing the utility of that monthly charge from me.
The domain is not "mechanical engineering" it's "television." Junkyard Wars has too many white guys for the televsion domain. As long as the contestants have sufficient skills, I'm happy they're looking to mix things up a bit more in other respects.
That sounds interesting but what happens if a vehicle doesn't *have* a card reader or the card reader is broken? What's the incentive for someone to have a functioning card reader in their car? I assume someone could be fined for not having a functional card reader but how are they caught? In the U.S. you have to wear your seat belt and you can't use a radar detector (in most states) but since people are only (sometimes) caught when they've been pulled over for some other infraction, the laws are a small deterrent.
Singapore is also a small nation, London probably has to deal with at least an order of magnatude more vehicles than they do. Don't you think the expense of millions of card readers and 10s of millions of cards would dwarf the cost of 700 cameras and the software programmers (card reader systems need programmers too, you know)? I imagine the camera system has the advantage of being able to be used for other purposes like catching people who run red lights and may provide photographic evidence of other, more serious crimes (not that I necessarily agree with the use of cameras).
As for the card-waving on the bus, what if you forget to wave your card getting on? Do you ride for free? What if you forget to wave when you get off, are you charged for riding the whole day?
When I have a file open on an NT server and an OS X client also has it open, everything is fine until I try to save the file. The app says it can't save the file under the original name and saves it with a random (alphanumeric) 8 character string for a name, not even the correct filename extension. That's pretty annoying but at least my changes aren't lost.
If a 2nd Windows client opened the file, they would be warned that the file was already open and they could only open it Read Only (I only have experience with MS Word and Excel in this context so I don't know for certain if the applications play a part).
I think there certainly is the potential for ending up with a crazy mixed-up file if more than one client saves changes to it at once. The more likely event is the last saved version is the one which is kept but it depends on the application and in some cases, the file.
It's a poor use of language. "Trail of Tears" has a very specific meaning which is way beyond the sentiment they're trying to convey (which any U.S.-ian should know but probably doesn't since we're so ignorant of history). Exaggeration is fine but this is taking it to an extreme. You might as well go all the way and call the article "MySQL, ODBC, & OpenOffice 1.0, a Configruation Holocaust." Actually that might not be as bad because "Holocaust" is qualified with an adjective which indicates its scope. No, it still sucks.
Powerful words should be used carefully, otherwise their glib use leaves our language impoverished and trivialized.
"Pink" was a joint operating system project between Apple and IBM. Here's an article about it from 1993: Surrender the Pink!
Ah, I see, they call it "Altivec compatible." As long as apps don't have to be re-written, that's cool. Of course I forgot about the whole 64-bit thing. They're making interesting claims of 32-bit apps running just as fast on these chips, we'll see.
PowerPC 970 -- First in a new family of high-performance 64-bit PowerPC microprocessors
(How weird is that? IBM and Apple...)
How about "not at all?" From the beginning of PowerPC Macs, the PowerPC was the domain of "AIM": Apple, IBM, Motorola. They all had a formal agreement of some kind regarding the chip's development. I think it kind of fell apart, probably around when Motorola developed Altivec, but IBM has never stopped making PowerPC chips for themselves, Apple, and others. I think IBM makes all the G3 chips Apple buys today. IBM has long done a better job of keeping up with advancements in chip production and keeping yields at a higher level than Motorola. Higher yields means cheaper and faster chips. Unfortunately Apple needs Altivec and Motorola hasn't been sharing.
Use of the IBM 970 chip is still rumor, one I haven't really paid attention to though. Has Motorola finally licensed Altivec to IBM or did IBM make their own version of it? You can't have two different kinds of G4s so if the IBM chip doesn't have Altivec it would have to be called something else ("G5?") and the G4 would have to replace the G3 in the iBooks (or, as someone else mentions, the iBook dies in favor of the 12" PowerBook). Even so, if there's a new Altivec-like chip feature, it'll take a long time for apps to be updated to take advantage of it. Apple would use it immediately, followed quickly by Adobe Photoshop, but many apps would wait until their next upgrade cycle.
Those two guys work together so often, it's easy to get the names mixed up. David Cross did his Lipton impression in a stand-up thing shown on HBO.
David Cross: The Pride is Back
Actually we've been pretty successful doing just that. We have a lab running Win2k that has its file system very locked down. We started with Microsoft's own security templates which basically gives the "Users" group Read & Execute permission only for the entire drive except their own profile directory and to *specific* files in the C:\winnt\ directory which any user account needs Write access to. To this we added a Deny Execute rule to the profile directory so they can Read/Write files but if they download a program, it won't run (our students don't have individual domain accounts so the lab machines auto-login with a generic account. It's harder to do Deny Execute if they have their own logins).
The user account uses a mandatory roaming profile so when it logs out, all changes to the profile directory are wiped and thanks to WinExit screensaver, the account logs out (force quitting applications) after 30 min. of inactivity (then the auto-login logs it back in). To protect their documents from accidents, the default save location is a "docs" folder outside the profile directory to which they have read/write access but also Deny Execute. That folder is kept clean by a nightly script.
I find figuring out the registry permisions harder than file permissions. Some programs use the Registry in weird ways. RegMon helps figure it out and FileMon helps with the files. What would really help would be if more software companies would write less shitty software and software installers. User settings can go in their profile directory and registry, user documents can go where ever the user decides. Application settings that aren't per user can go in HKLM\Software\Foo\ and then you can choose which users have write permission there.
It would be a lot easier if we were running Active Directory so we could have global Group Policies. As it is, I had to do it all locally on one machine then Ghost the rest.
Computing is the single most important method of communication in the business world.
That's daft. The most important communication is what occurs between people face-to-face. And we don't really have a lot of that either, more like a lot of mental masterbation and flinging feces at one another (at least at the last IT executive committee meeting I attended)
I think he's using a different definition of "important" than you. Can today's business world (which really means "corporations" rather than the entire set of all businesses) survive without face-to-face communications? Yes. Can they survive without electronic communications (including email, EDI, etc.)? No. That makes electronic communications more important.
I think what you're saying is true. I don't pay much attention to the FSF but it seems like this leads to an argument for software being free. If users didn't have the barrier of having to pay for an upgrade and if software developers didn't have to focus on working to get people to buy the upgrades (i.e. adding features vs. improving stability, ease of use, etc.), software would become better in these less commodifiable (that's not a word) ways.
Nigel Fox, who heads the optics group at NPL, said: "When you look at the black, it is an incredibly beautiful surface. It's like black velvet."
This could breathe new life into paintings of Elvis, Jesus, and weeping clowns. It could take the art world by storm!
2 minutes? You didn't even get to the "nudity" part. Watching it at work? That's a paddlin'.