I've been using wikis for a couple of years now and they are a great way to have multiple people contribute information and organize it.
Its the least amount of code required to maintain a database, present it, interact with it, search and organize it in a network of inter-linked web content.
Blogs (like/. scroll of the end of the page and despite their searchability, the information disappears into "desuetude".)
Wikis are fundamentally meant to be more persistent by their nature.
They are more organized and any item can (and should,) be reviewed, expanded, ammended and tweaked into shape by anyone in the community who wants to have input.
and Linux is knocking at the door of the MIS. That would mean rooms full of servers and thousands of NT desktops.
Tellers and staff run custom apps, don't have multi-media or ever web browsers on their machines and definitely aren't playing with their machines so M$ latest geegaws are of absolutely no interest.
A usage study has shown that only a small percentage of the features of the Office Suite are actually used and a great deal of the features that M$ wants to reverse engineer into their products (in direct violation of the DMCA they pushed for, which will come back and bite them some day) are already available in other products from vendors with better market focus.
In the second-rate, also-ran, pursuit of Apple's flash and style, M$ has lost focus of their customers, the same boring old desktops that didn't want a computer with a funny name back in 1980.
Man, you must be a criminal lawyer, or, more likely. a criminal.
Your advice is about as morally reprehensible as the lawyers calculations that the settlement by people killed by having their hearts ripped out because they were impaled on solid steering columns would probably be less than the cost of replacing these with collapsible columns which would save their lives.
It never entered the lawyer's minds that people might rather pay a little extra for riding in a car that wouldn't FUCKIN' KILL EM LIKE BUGS ON PINS!!!
You are one sorry-ass son-of-a-bitch. It must suck to be you and HAVE to use an electric razor'cause you might slit your throat in knee-jerk remorse if you tried scraping the stubble with a straight-edge.
I listen to bands that are recording their own stuff and SELLING it over the web and using it to attract and communicate to/with their fans.
The RIAA is screwed because the artists have come up with a better business model. One that puts money in THEIR pockets not the RIAAs and the managers and producers and other parasites sucking the life out of the artists.
Many million record seling artists are still perfoming not because they want to but because they HAVE to.
Personally, I have to put up with NT 4.0 SVCPK 5 at work and have had to for years at various sites and for various clients.
And forget about that multi-media crap. The CD-ROMs in those puppies don't even have jacks for earphones.
We're pretty fuckin' sick of this crap and there is no fuckin' way me and about 15,000 other micro-serfs are going to put up with MicroSnot at home.
As a 3 Mac and 1 Linux box owner, I can hopmestly say, I'd sooner rip my testicles out of my scrotum with a cork-screw before letting one of those boxes into my home.
If I have to I use a Citrix client on one of my OS X boxes to work from home.
Switch? To a MicroSnot box? Bwahahahahahaha... Can you say "NO FUCKING WAY!" ?
I don't know who uses M$ OS who actually _wants_ to(and I work for a bank with tens of thousands of desk tops.)
They use it because that's they were told to by the office. (The ones who have been told to use Citrix Clients to communicate with the office and own Macs at home can and likely do use the Mac OS X app.)
Windows is something the office sticks you with when they're too dumb to use Linux.
And IBM didn't see a world-wide demand for more than a dozen mainframes.
By the time you factor in biometric security, voice recognition and Christ's own gaming engines, VR generation, desk-top video editing and so on, 64 bits gets chewed up pretty fast even if you offload some processing to custom chips (and anyway who wants to build boxen with more ASICs that cost more money?)
64-=bitrs on the desktop? In five years it may be the majority of new box builds are 64-bits and 32-bit will be for poor for folks stuck on Windows without a migration path.
The phrase "After eight years as a Macintosh owner, I switched to a PC with Windows XP and Office XP. Why? It's about more and better..." is a bit suspicious in itself.
It doesn't say she bought the box herself, that she owns it.Maybe its just some box supplied by her employer.
I don't even bother debating anymore. I just ask people to put their own money where their mouthes are. NOBODY wants the same box that they're stuck with at work.
They're declaring intent to break, enter & pillage
If somebody tried this in person, they'd get shot. Its called self-defense. This is a terrorist act using Gestapo tactics by a group which produces nothing and contributes nothing to society. If YOU tried this, you'd get shot at too.
Now we're going to have to back-up all our data (we'll need to buy lots of CD & dvd burners. Bet they'll love that. And that won't disrupt P2P sites that they are alleging to go after.) Wrecking P2P hosts is not exactly neat and clean. There'll be collateral damage. Somebody's systems are going to get wrecked.
The first time that someone loses corporate data on their servers due to an xxAA attack, the lawyers will have a field day. The activity may have been caused by an employee who was using extra bandwidth in a dubious manner but a company which get its data munged by the RIAA will send the RIAA the bill and about a dozen lawyers to collect their damages.
This will DESTROY the xxAAs. Ripping MP3s might have cost some sales (and I really doubt that,) but this virtual Gestapo tactic will back fire in the worst possible way.
Attacking your clientelle is totally stupid. Beyond stupid. Its suicidal. The xxAAs clients are in for a real shock. The backlast will hit them too.
Imagine a two month stretch where NOBODY buys a CD or goes to a movie of any xxAA member. We all buy for non-members and fuck the membership.
Anf their political friends will hang them absolutely out to dry the first time a government P2P server get reamed.
The xxAAs will be legislated OUT of existence using cyber-terorist laws.
There is no closed source on servers and certain no closed source on mainframes.
At, on average, $299/line of COBOL or SQL you damn well want to get the source because you have to recompile in into your production environment. You have to be able to do a complete software metrics exrcise to do capacity planning and can insure that you meet you SLAs (Service Level Agreeements.)
Closed source is only for unimportant crap.
It didn't exist before Li'l Billy whined in Byte Magazine that he was getting ripped off and after ripping US off for billions and billions, its coming to an end.
given the low price for a system these days and the crap sound you'll get if you do it wrong, buy an iSub and a couple of sound stix at the Apple store and save yourself a couple of years of apologising for the crappy looking cabinets.
Why should Apple compete with M$ on the desktop that's ruled by the x86 architecture?
It can just be where M$ doesn't seem to be able to go. Window's doesn't run on anything else but the x86 and I predict it never will. Not for technical reasons but for administrative and political ones.
The server market has always been mainly 64 bits. (Sparc w. Solaris & other Big Iron,) The portion that wasn't (Linux boxen) is migrating to 64 bit.
The desktop is goin to follow. Its gone from 8 bits (where CP/M and Apple OS were king) to 16 bits (where Mac OS and M$ got their start) to 32 bits and the next step is 64.
Linux is already there, its part of the kernel tree.
Mac OS X is already there its also part of the BSD tree.
Linux has the necessary developper base ready, willing and able to create distros and port everything to the new architecture. Since they have the source, they CAN.
Apple has complete control of the hardware and OS. When Jobs decides the user base going to 64 bits, then they'll accomplish it like they did the switch to the PPC (680x0 -> ppc60x) and the switch to OS X (OS1..9->10.2).They have control and a track record of doing it successfully.
Windows is going to be trapped by its own installed base and stymied by the internal difficulties of managing and maintaining development teams across architectures.
I'm not even going to mention the quality and security, or lack there of, of M$s offerings.
M$ will bog down in the platform shift and will disappear with the x86 architecture as surely as CP/M did and for the same reasons (which WEREN'T technical.)
Say bye bye, Bill. Though with billions in cash, M$ will be around in some form or other. And he'll probably abuse a Mac on his desktop because it works there.
In case anybody has any doubt, the desktop is NOT where Jobs wants Apple to play. There are more bedrooms and kitchend and living rooms and dens and hovels in the world than there are corporate desktops.
M$s credo "A computer on every desktop"is very limiting.
Apple's credo might be "computing everywhere else."
As a card carrying geek, even though I'm heading into middle age and middle management, I find myself reading way "2 much L33T SP33X, D00D."
Its a reflection of the anti-establishment spirit in too many of us. (Like "Tiny Tim" McVeigh's final statement, a reading of "Bloodied but unbowed." What an ignorant ass-hole. Couldn't even come up with his own last words.)
That's bad enough, but the IM/Chat room abbreviated drivel is something else.
At issue is the unavoidable tendency of human beings to be fuckin' lazy.
This would not be a problem if typing was as fast and as unskilled as speech (ever listen to most conversations? Eaves drop on people for a couple of hours one day and you'll be going: "Yuck!")
But its not and it demands physical coordination from people who find hard enough to marshal a thought or to wrestle a meme to the ground.
Hence the rapid adoption of contractions and the birthing of illiterate drivel. Pray for rapid advances in speech recognition so that correct writing and spelling becomes as effortless as speech.
As for having some content... "Well, like, he said she said they said that Brit'ny did what'ch call it and then..." I don't hold out much hope. "Hear what I say blood?" and "Wazzup?"
Still its better than some moron spewing some religious tract and extoring death.
How could anyone find fault with "Bill the Biller."?
Don't tell me people are starting to wonder who paid to make him the richest man in the world. And if maybe they have paid too much, for too long and over and over and over.
(Don't look at me... I run Linux on x86 and OS X on Macs. Since the days of the x80 architecture M$ has ALWAYS been the worst alternative. Windows has ALWAYS been second a visually mediocre GUI. Functionally its no great shakes either. And don't get me started on security:-)
call me callous but the only difference betwen Spam in my email box and the TV set re-re-running "Petticoat Junction"as filler between the ads is that I can delete Spam without having to read more than the subject line.
I threw the set out years ago. My watching is limited to "The Sopranos" last Sunday at my local bar and the rest of the time, my back is to the set and I'm talking with people.
Hillary Rosen and Jack Valenty can hang onto their crap until its all squeezed out between their fingers. They can't make me watch it or the damn commercials.
The Web was supposed to let us FIND what we wanted, when we wanted, where we wanted. Well that got fucked up by the very engines that were supposed to help us. Instead Google et al. drown us in irrevancies because they search on an entire document instead of a phrase or a meme.
In the meantime, Madison Avenue has taken this opportunity to kill the goose that laid their golden egg by eliminating the messy content/ad-matrix.
Between reruns of shows with less and less content, trimmed to make more room for the ads, and the pap we're getting in new shows, there's nothing worth wasting the electricity for.
"it is a example of how copy-blocking can be used to set limits on how individuals use the most ubiquitous of technologies -- the television set" but its NOT entirely accurate is it?
"the problem only affects subscribers who attempt to record programming through the IEEE 1394 interface, a high-speed digital connection known as Firewire " which is an Apple created technology.
This could be used by Inter and M$ to attack the only competitor they have in the home market.
This should be brought before the FTC as anti-competitive restriction.
And this "organic"self-repair Zen gestalt type of system is a bunch if crap. If it really worked, there would be no cyrrhosis, no adult-onset diabetes, no emphesima, etcera...
Living systems reproduce asexually or breed because everything more complex than an algal mat is incapable of surviving for very long.
We'd do better do better than what passes for intelligence and self-repair onm homo sapiens sapiens.
I use OS X and Macs on my desktops and Linux on my server.
Frankly, Linux as a desktop sucks and blows. The guys at Gnome, KDE and the app writers REALLY need to rip-off Apple's GUI Guidelines and get something consistent and usable into user's hands.
The desktop is no place for the ignorant and its no place to try to re-invent the wheel because users don't fuckin' want it, okay?
Apple spent sixty million bucks developping the GUI. If you think you are going to come up with some thing so overwhelmigly better that it will blow the old order away, then you are an arrogant ass-hole.
Be that as it may, I an NOT buying a windows box.
But lately, I'm thinking that I could run my server on an OS X box.But then again why throw away a perfectly good Athlon.
(When did the USPO go "For Profit?" Who was in power, albeit not in possession of any higher cognitive abilities?)
This type of mandated idiocy won't stop until the USPO get sued for some really big bucks and whoever issued the patent, reviewed it, supervised and made money from letting it escape it, gets their ass fired.
I think this might be the case that breaks the camel's back. ebay should sue the patent office for interfering with their normal existing legal business operations.
In fact, it might be fun to try taking out a patent on the information recording portions of the patenting process and sue the USPO for patent violation.
Bill Gates was right in his 1991 memo. The application of software and process patents will bring the very concept of innovation to a stand-still.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using wikis for a couple of years now and they are a great way to have multiple people contribute information and organize it.
/. scroll of the end of the page and despite their searchability, the information disappears into "desuetude".)
Its the least amount of code required to maintain a database, present it, interact with it, search and organize it in a network of inter-linked web content.
Blogs (like
Wikis are fundamentally meant to be more persistent by their nature.
They are more organized and any item can (and should,) be reviewed, expanded, ammended and tweaked into shape by anyone in the community who wants to have input.
And then firebomb the patent office and all their fuckin' archives.
This is absolutely stupid.
Visible computing, all open-source right down to the electron traces.
and Linux is knocking at the door of the MIS. That would mean rooms full of servers and thousands of NT desktops.
Tellers and staff run custom apps, don't have multi-media or ever web browsers on their machines and definitely aren't playing with their machines so M$ latest geegaws are of absolutely no interest.
A usage study has shown that only a small percentage of the features of the Office Suite are actually used and a great deal of the features that M$ wants to reverse engineer into their products (in direct violation of the DMCA they pushed for, which will come back and bite them some day) are already available in other products from vendors with better market focus.
In the second-rate, also-ran, pursuit of Apple's flash and style, M$ has lost focus of their customers, the same boring old desktops that didn't want a computer with a funny name back in 1980.
Man, you must be a criminal lawyer, or, more likely. a criminal.
Your advice is about as morally reprehensible as the lawyers calculations that the settlement by people killed by having their hearts ripped out because they were impaled on solid steering columns would probably be less than the cost of replacing these with collapsible columns which would save their lives.
It never entered the lawyer's minds that people might rather pay a little extra for riding in a car that wouldn't FUCKIN' KILL EM LIKE BUGS ON PINS!!!
You are one sorry-ass son-of-a-bitch. It must suck to be you and HAVE to use an electric razor'cause you might slit your throat in knee-jerk remorse if you tried scraping the stubble with a straight-edge.
I listen to bands that are recording their own stuff and SELLING it over the web and using it to attract and communicate to/with their fans.
The RIAA is screwed because the artists have come up with a better business model. One that puts money in THEIR pockets not the RIAAs and the managers and producers and other parasites sucking the life out of the artists.
Many million record seling artists are still perfoming not because they want to but because they HAVE to.
Personally, I have to put up with NT 4.0 SVCPK 5 at work and have had to for years at various sites and for various clients.
And forget about that multi-media crap. The CD-ROMs in those puppies don't even have jacks for earphones.
We're pretty fuckin' sick of this crap and there is no fuckin' way me and about 15,000 other micro-serfs are going to put up with MicroSnot at home.
As a 3 Mac and 1 Linux box owner, I can hopmestly say, I'd sooner rip my testicles out of my scrotum with a cork-screw before letting one of those boxes into my home.
If I have to I use a Citrix client on one of my OS X boxes to work from home.
Switch?
To a MicroSnot box?
Bwahahahahahaha...
Can you say "NO FUCKING WAY!" ?
Computer Language Magazine, January 1990
I don't know who uses M$ OS who actually _wants_ to(and I work for a bank with tens of thousands of desk tops.)
They use it because that's they were told to by the office. (The ones who have been told to use Citrix Clients to communicate with the office and own Macs at home can and likely do use the Mac OS X app.)
Windows is something the office sticks you with when they're too dumb to use Linux.
And IBM didn't see a world-wide demand for more than a dozen mainframes.
By the time you factor in biometric security, voice recognition and Christ's own gaming engines, VR generation, desk-top video editing and so on, 64 bits gets chewed up pretty fast even if you offload some processing to custom chips (and anyway who wants to build boxen with more ASICs that cost more money?)
64-=bitrs on the desktop? In five years it may be the majority of new box builds are 64-bits and 32-bit will be for poor for folks stuck on Windows without a migration path.
The phrase "After eight years as a Macintosh owner, I switched to a PC with Windows XP and Office XP. Why? It's about more and better..." is a bit suspicious in itself.
It doesn't say she bought the box herself, that she owns it.Maybe its just some box supplied by her employer.
I don't even bother debating anymore. I just ask people to put their own money where their mouthes are. NOBODY wants the same box that they're stuck with at work.
They're declaring intent to break, enter & pillage
If somebody tried this in person, they'd get shot. Its called self-defense. This is a terrorist act using Gestapo tactics by a group which produces nothing and contributes nothing to society. If YOU tried this, you'd get shot at too.
Now we're going to have to back-up all our data (we'll need to buy lots of CD & dvd burners. Bet they'll love that. And that won't disrupt P2P sites that they are alleging to go after.) Wrecking P2P hosts is not exactly neat and clean. There'll be collateral damage. Somebody's systems are going to get wrecked.
The first time that someone loses corporate data on their servers due to an xxAA attack, the lawyers will have a field day. The activity may have been caused by an employee who was using extra bandwidth in a dubious manner but a company which get its data munged by the RIAA will send the RIAA the bill and about a dozen lawyers to collect their damages.
This will DESTROY the xxAAs. Ripping MP3s might have cost some sales (and I really doubt that,) but this virtual Gestapo tactic will back fire in the worst possible way.
Attacking your clientelle is totally stupid. Beyond stupid. Its suicidal. The xxAAs clients are in for a real shock. The backlast will hit them too.
Imagine a two month stretch where NOBODY buys a CD or goes to a movie of any xxAA member. We all buy for non-members and fuck the membership.
Anf their political friends will hang them absolutely out to dry the first time a government P2P server get reamed.
The xxAAs will be legislated OUT of existence using cyber-terorist laws.
There is no closed source on servers and certain no closed source on mainframes.
At, on average, $299/line of COBOL or SQL you damn well want to get the source because you have to recompile in into your production environment. You have to be able to do a complete software metrics exrcise to do capacity planning and can insure that you meet you SLAs (Service Level Agreeements.)
Closed source is only for unimportant crap.
It didn't exist before Li'l Billy whined in Byte Magazine that he was getting ripped off and after ripping US off for billions and billions, its coming to an end.
given the low price for a system these days and the crap sound you'll get if you do it wrong, buy an iSub and a couple of sound stix at the Apple store and save yourself a couple of years of apologising for the crappy looking cabinets.
Why should Apple compete with M$ on the desktop that's ruled by the x86 architecture?
It can just be where M$ doesn't seem to be able to go. Window's doesn't run on anything else but the x86 and I predict it never will. Not for technical reasons but for administrative and political ones.
The server market has always been mainly 64 bits. (Sparc w. Solaris & other Big Iron,) The portion that wasn't (Linux boxen) is migrating to 64 bit.
The desktop is goin to follow. Its gone from 8 bits (where CP/M and Apple OS were king) to 16 bits (where Mac OS and M$ got their start) to 32 bits and the next step is 64.
Linux is already there, its part of the kernel tree.
Mac OS X is already there its also part of the BSD tree.
Linux has the necessary developper base ready, willing and able to create distros and port everything to the new architecture. Since they have the source, they CAN.
Apple has complete control of the hardware and OS. When Jobs decides the user base going to 64 bits, then they'll accomplish it like they did the switch to the PPC (680x0 -> ppc60x) and the switch to OS X (OS1..9->10.2).They have control and a track record of doing it successfully.
Windows is going to be trapped by its own installed base and stymied by the internal difficulties of managing and maintaining development teams across architectures.
I'm not even going to mention the quality and security, or lack there of, of M$s offerings.
M$ will bog down in the platform shift and will disappear with the x86 architecture as surely as CP/M did and for the same reasons (which WEREN'T technical.)
Say bye bye, Bill. Though with billions in cash, M$ will be around in some form or other. And he'll probably abuse a Mac on his desktop because it works there.
In case anybody has any doubt, the desktop is NOT where Jobs wants Apple to play. There are more bedrooms and kitchend and living rooms and dens and hovels in the world than there are corporate desktops.
M$s credo "A computer on every desktop"is very limiting.
Apple's credo might be "computing everywhere else."
As a card carrying geek, even though I'm heading into middle age and middle management, I find myself reading way "2 much L33T SP33X, D00D."
... "Well, like, he said she said they said that Brit'ny did what'ch call it and then..." I don't hold out much hope. "Hear what I say blood?" and "Wazzup?"
Its a reflection of the anti-establishment spirit in too many of us. (Like "Tiny Tim" McVeigh's final statement, a reading of "Bloodied but unbowed." What an ignorant ass-hole. Couldn't even come up with his own last words.)
That's bad enough, but the IM/Chat room abbreviated drivel is something else.
At issue is the unavoidable tendency of human beings to be fuckin' lazy.
This would not be a problem if typing was as fast and as unskilled as speech (ever listen to most conversations? Eaves drop on people for a couple of hours one day and you'll be going: "Yuck!")
But its not and it demands physical coordination from people who find hard enough to marshal a thought or to wrestle a meme to the ground.
Hence the rapid adoption of contractions and the birthing of illiterate drivel. Pray for rapid advances in speech recognition so that correct writing and spelling becomes as effortless as speech.
As for having some content
Still its better than some moron spewing some religious tract and extoring death.
How could anyone find fault with "Bill the Biller."?
:-)
Don't tell me people are starting to wonder who paid to make him the richest man in the world. And if maybe they have paid too much, for too long and over and over and over.
(Don't look at me... I run Linux on x86 and OS X on Macs. Since the days of the x80 architecture M$ has ALWAYS been the worst alternative. Windows has ALWAYS been second a visually mediocre GUI. Functionally its no great shakes either. And don't get me started on security
call me callous but the only difference betwen Spam in my email box and the TV set re-re-running "Petticoat Junction"as filler between the ads is that I can delete Spam without having to read more than the subject line.
I threw the set out years ago. My watching is limited to "The Sopranos" last Sunday at my local bar and the rest of the time, my back is to the set and I'm talking with people.
Hillary Rosen and Jack Valenty can hang onto their crap until its all squeezed out between their fingers. They can't make me watch it or the damn commercials.
The Web was supposed to let us FIND what we wanted, when we wanted, where we wanted. Well that got fucked up by the very engines that were supposed to help us. Instead Google et al. drown us in irrevancies because they search on an entire document instead of a phrase or a meme.
In the meantime, Madison Avenue has taken this opportunity to kill the goose that laid their golden egg by eliminating the messy content/ad-matrix.
Between reruns of shows with less and less content, trimmed to make more room for the ads, and the pap we're getting in new shows, there's nothing worth wasting the electricity for.
"it is a example of how copy-blocking can be used to set limits on how individuals use the most ubiquitous of technologies -- the television set" but its NOT entirely accurate is it?
"the problem only affects subscribers who attempt to record programming through the IEEE 1394 interface, a high-speed digital connection known as Firewire " which is an Apple created technology.
This could be used by Inter and M$ to attack the only competitor they have in the home market.
This should be brought before the FTC as anti-competitive restriction.
That would be a start anyway.
And this "organic"self-repair Zen gestalt type of system is a bunch if crap. If it really worked, there would be no cyrrhosis, no adult-onset diabetes, no emphesima, etcera...
Living systems reproduce asexually or breed because everything more complex than an algal mat is incapable of surviving for very long.
We'd do better do better than what passes for intelligence and self-repair onm homo sapiens sapiens.
DECSS was not an attempt to get free content, it was an attempt to play content on something other than a M$ box that had bought and paid for.
Will this play on my OS X box or has M$ closed this off?
Most businesses already own Intel boxes which are underweight for Windows but plenny okay for Linux.
Which is cheaper?
$50 for a Red Hat box or $1,200 for a new iMac?
Case closed.
As long as they're tossing M$ for anything better...
Frankly, Linux as a desktop sucks and blows. The guys at Gnome, KDE and the app writers REALLY need to rip-off Apple's GUI Guidelines and get something consistent and usable into user's hands.
The desktop is no place for the ignorant and its no place to try to re-invent the wheel because users don't fuckin' want it, okay?
Apple spent sixty million bucks developping the GUI. If you think you are going to come up with some thing so overwhelmigly better that it will blow the old order away, then you are an arrogant ass-hole.
Be that as it may, I an NOT buying a windows box.
But lately, I'm thinking that I could run my server on an OS X box.But then again why throw away a perfectly good Athlon.
Why are you bothering giving advice that might fix a problem that shouldn'texist in the first place?
(When did the USPO go "For Profit?" Who was in power, albeit not in possession of any higher cognitive abilities?)
This type of mandated idiocy won't stop until the USPO get sued for some really big bucks and whoever issued the patent, reviewed it, supervised and made money from letting it escape it, gets their ass fired.
I think this might be the case that breaks the camel's back. ebay should sue the patent office for interfering with their normal existing legal business operations.
In fact, it might be fun to try taking out a patent on the information recording portions of the patenting process and sue the USPO for patent violation.
Bill Gates was right in his 1991 memo. The application of software and process patents will bring the very concept of innovation to a stand-still.