Five years ago, Balan says, he would send 30 million messages in a day. Most would get through. He earned up to $10,000 in commissions for a good day's work.
Now, even though Balan keeps a database with 240 million e-mail addresses, only a fifth or fewer get through the filters. An average mailing earns him a paltry $250.
A "paltry $250"!? That's more than most programmers (the ones who can still find jobs) make. The really sick part of this is that these guys are complaining that they're making only 90k a year sitting on their ass when hard working programmers can't find jobs.
OK, perhaps this is a little OT, but I thought I'd share what I posted a while back on/. Basically, Americans have had their rights legislated away from them for some time now...
A common question Open Source advocates like to pose to the general populace is "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"
Of course, we all know that the answer is supposed to be no, but what most people don't realize is that this very thing has, in essence, been going on since the Clean Air Act of 1967. It is actually illegal to modify the engine in a passenger car to produce more horsepower, though such modification is seldom prosecuted. I came in on the tail end of the hot rod era; today, the integration of computers and engines has become so pervasive that the average hot rodder cannot modify his machine without a great deal of knowledge and expense. And those days of doubling or tripling the horsepower output of an engine are long gone.
But the point is this: the same thing that happened with automobiles will happen with the computer. You will have to be a specially licensed and bonded technician in order to own certain development tools (compilers, debuggers, and the like). While you will still be able to take apart your computer, making unauthorized modifications (to thwart the onboard DRM and Palladium chips) will be illegal. Unlike the hot rodder of today who is seldom prosecuted by the police, the machine will "call home" to Big Brother if it detects that it has been modified, and federal agents will show up to "fix" your computer.
And just wait until GPS units are mandatory in cars, and the FBI can find out everywhere you've been with a simple database query.
The erosion of our liberties is very real. Those of us who care about our liberties need to stand up and be heard; we need to do something about this before it gets out of hand. Learn a lesson from the automotive enthusiasts - if you don't vigilantly protect your liberties, the government will take them away.
For charging customers who owned their modems more than those who leased their modems? It seems as if they've reversed themselves on the assumption that people who own their modems cost them more in tech support.
Re:Wanna hurt the MPAA/RIAA'? End Media Addiction
on
Borrowing ROMs
·
· Score: 1
Cast off your media addiction and go do stuff that shows the various entertainment industries that they and their product are not needed/wanted. Find other hobbies/activities that don't support the monopolistic organizations.
Agreed. Some suggestions:
Help your local schools with computer/technical issues. Help them set up a network of Linux boxen.
Write free software.
Take time to help others with their computer problems...
There are much better things to do with your time than merely watching movies and downloading MP3's. If we are serious about protecting our rights online, we need to get out and get the word out - we need to be seen and heard in our communities. Let people know about the issues affecting free software. But don't sit back and do nothing and then complain about how you lost your rights...
I agree completely. Currently, my employer uses several million dollars worth of IBM hardware to do data processing that could just as easily be done on a Win2K box costing a few thousand. Why don't they switch? One word: reliability. IBM knows what Microsoft never figured out: build a rock solid, reliable platform, and you'll never have a problem making a profit. Regardless of how reliable MS claims their products are, their track record says otherwise, and no one where I work is eager to bet their career on the empty promises of Bill Gates and Company...
That you are in no way liable for any damages the software may cause;
That in the event of litigation, you, the end user, agrees to pay all of the defendant's legal fees, transportation costs (if any), costs due to lost time, etc... (Microsoft used a variation of this in their license agreements)
That you, the end user, agrees that since the software is provided for free, you have no expectations regarding merchantibily or fitness for a particular purpose.
What the UCITA does is make the click-through and shrinkwrap licensing have the force of law. Though I don't like this prospect, it can be used to keep free software authors out of legal trouble.
A common question Open Source advocates like to pose to the general populace is "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"
Of course, we all know that the answer is supposed to be no, but what most people don't realize is that this very thing has, in essence, been going on since the Clean Air Act of 1967. It is actually illegal to modify the engine in a passenger car to produce more horsepower, though such modification is seldom prosecuted. I came in on the tail end of the hot rod era; today, the integration of computers and engines has become so pervasive that the average hot rodder cannot modify his machine without a great deal of knowledge and expense. And those days of doubling or tripling the horsepower output of an engine are long gone.
But the point is this: the same thing that happened with automobiles will happen with the computer. You will have to be a specially licensed and bonded technician in order to own certain development tools (compilers, debuggers, and the like). While you will still be able to take apart your computer, making unauthorized modifications (to thwart the onboard DRM and Palladium chips) will be illegal. Unlike the hot rodder of today who is seldom prosecuted by the police, the machine will "call home" to Big Brother if it detects that it has been modified, and federal agents will show up to "fix" your computer.
And just wait until GPS units are mandatory in cars, and the FBI can find out everywhere you've been with a simple database query.
The erosion of our liberties is very real. Those of us who care about our liberties need to stand up and be heard; we need to do something about this before it gets out of hand. Learn a lesson from the automotive enthusiasts - if you don't vigilantly protect your liberties, the government will take them away.
His novel 1984, written in 1948, contained the foremost prophecy of the cold war: that technological advancement would render Stalinism unstoppable, with individual liberty the inevitable casualty. However, when the technologies that would enable this totalitarian global village reached fruition, the victim was not democracy, but totalitarianism itself. What went right?
Democracy is the new totalitarianism. I don't think that Orwell could have imagined a more evil state than that of the United States. No other administration to date has come as close to Orwell's Ministry of Love as the current one. In fact, John Ashcroft unwittingly quoted 1984 when he said in a press release "we have made measurable progress toward end of the war." The irony could not get any better!
Several engineering companies are distraught over learning that discoveries of the super-strong, super-light element known as Unobtanium were falsified as well.Unobtanium was reportedly discovered by the marketing departments of several prominent firms, but the discoveries were never confirmed by actual engineers.
I was a junior in college when I first read The Art of Computer Programming, and it really opened up my mind to what computer science is all about. It challenged me to think outside the HLL box. Knuth's work has become a timeless classic because he concentrates on the higher level concepts of computer science that transcend the currently popular architectures.
What really blew me away about Knuth's work is that he implements all of the features found in modern HLL's in his own variant of assembler. Someone who can work through and solve the exercises in his books will find themselves able to write programs in any language, and write them well at that. He does not concern himself with the Language Wars, or the Platform Wars, but instead presents the problems and solutions which are common to all computer systems. Too many programmers have been babied intellectually by their colleges and universities, which taught them how to program in a high level language rather than teaching them the fundamentals underlying computer science. Knuth does a good job in getting down to the underlying problems of computer science without bothering the user with the details of arcane architectures that will soon be obsolete.
For this reason, I look forward to his forthcoming work. I look forward to the new challenges which will expand my mind even farther.
One thing I wonder about is whether or not this is associated strictly with games, or merely using computers. I've noticed that I'm not as creative as I used to be since I've started programming for a living....
Why not learn to write efficient code in the first place? Then you'll need neither a debugger nor a profiler.
Not to be a troll, but I see a lot of programmers with this kind of attitude - "let the compiler catch mistakes", or "code it fast and use a debugger," etc... What invariably happens is that these programmers who learn to code this way spend their careers writing code which is neither efficient nor easy to maintain. Worse, they waste a lot of time using a debugger that they could have avoided had they thoroughly planned their code.
I used to just blitz through the code, without really planning what I was going to do. While this worked well for small projects, when I got into the professional world, my debugging time went up by an order of magnitude. I've found that I actually get code done faster if I think it through and plan it out before I start writing. I've learned that if I want to fly through coding and debugging, I have to take some time first and plan what I'm going to do. Otherwise, if I scramble off to code writing without planning, I end up using the debugger quite a bit. But then again, YMMV.
So what's the problem with your company using commercial databases on Linux? Nobody said (well, not nobody) that a free OS must run a free DB.
True, but that would put us back in the situation we're in now, where we are at the mercies of the vendor every time we need to upgrade. Basically, the problem is that unless we own the software, we are at the mercy of the vendor who may either:
Discontinue the software in the future.
Force us to upgrade (Yes, this happened to us).
Increase/Restructure the licensing fees so that we pay a per-processor-cycle or per-month charge to lease the software. Incidentally, they tend to do things like this after a company has been using their product for a while and built up a large codebase. They'll charge just marginally less than it would cost to convert to another vendor's database.
Charge a fee for every line of code the programmers hired by the company write. Yes, there are licensing agreements which effectively do this; not only do we pay for the database, we have to pay the vendor royalties for every line of code we pay programmers to write.
As you can see, we've had some big problems with proprietary software - problems that can only be addressed by using free software.
An easy way to kill Linux would be to create a hardware BIOS that detected the OS installed and refused to boot if it wasn't Palladium Windows.
Think this is impossible/implausible? Compaq did this very thing a few years ago with their midrange server and Windows NT - if you didn't use Compaq's version of Windows NT, the BIOS would hang the machine. This was intentional, as you could buy Windows NT from Microsoft at the time for less than Compaq was selling it.
But another insidious way to get Linux users is for Microsoft to make a deal with computer manufacturers that requires the computer makers to install a small part of the Palladium Windows into the BIOS. This way, if you don't agree to the Microsoft EULA, your hardware won't boot any OS.
Ok, granted. Problem is, business systems need a good database on the scale of DB/2 or Oracle. A toy database built by volunteers just won't cut it. Granted, it might be good enough for a web backend, but it's not enterprise class software.
I believe my company would be open to replacing their aging mainframe with a few Linux boxes. But the problem is that there are no free software databases that work as well as Adabas or DB2 do on the mainframe. If the free software folks would get serious about database development, then perhaps Linux could make real inroads into corporate America, and move from the server room to the enterprise datacenter.
Microsoft cannot implement this without going out of business, or losing a substantial amount of the desktop PC market to Linux.
Here's why:
Microsoft's dominance in the PC market has been fueled by the fact that their software has been backward compatible; existing desktop users have always found it easier to upgrade Windows than switch to Linux.
The appeal of Windows for the average user is that it is compatible with almost all of the hardware and software available today. Take away this compatibility, and there will be little reason for the average desktop user to adopt it.
Many businesses, including mine, depend on the backward compatibility of Windows to run many of our mission critical applications. We don't even have the source code for some of these, so switching to a Paladium Windows(TM) isn't even an option. Even in the cases for which we do have source code, we would still be forced to use Linux because Paladium Windows (TM) wouldn't run our unsigned code.
Paladium is pure speculation by Microsoft. They cannot afford to release this to the public, because they would lose their monopoly on desktop operating systems if they did.
That retinal scanning devices may cause blindness after prolonged use? Doesn't it occur to anyone that shooting lasers into a person's eyes is dangerous?
I, for one, will refuse to use these devices. If I can't fly without using them, then I won't fly. It's that simple - my eyesight is worth too much to risk - something as simple as a software glitch could cause the laser to blind people at random, like what happened with the Therac 25 in the 1980's. Sorry folks, but lasers and eyes just don't go together, and anyone with common sense should see that.
I wouldn't object so much if it was based on a passive scan - such as with a camera. But the laser thing scares me.
For the next year and a half, we are going to include (the JVM) in Windows XP. Then we'll make the changes to make sure that moving forward, we don't put Windows or our customers at risk
What strikes me as interesting is that Cullinan implicitly refers to Java as a "risk," when the software projects he manages have placed far more computers at risk of data loss, hacking, virus threats, etc... than Java ever has. Does Jim Cullinan actually use Windows? How can he be so clueless as to imply that Java places customers at risk when his own software has cost companies billions of dollars in downtime?
Oh, wait, I get it. Microsoft's Virtual Machine places customers at risk. No wonder he's going to stop shipping it in the future!
Write code away from a computer. Use a pencil and paper. I didn't have a computer when I was in college (very few people did). So I coded by hand on paper, then went to the lab to type it in.
This can't be emphasized enough. When I first started coding, I could complete the whole thing in front of the monitor screen. But now that I'm working in the professional world, I'm coming across problems so complex that they cannot be solved sitting in front of the monitor. More and more often, I find myself actually flowcharting the problem, and then writing my code out on paper. Yes, I could pound it out with the edit/test/debug cycle, but in the professional world, when you are under a deadline, the ability to code it write the first time is essential. I have found that it is always faster from a total development time standpoint to write and debug code on paper and then type it in than to just begin coding. The only mistakes a good programmer makes are syntax errors - because he's already verified the solution before he begins coding.
Intel chips have very small L1 caches as compared with AMD.
Which is a tremendous problem, from a performance standpoint. Having hand-coded assembly for both processors (Intel and AMD), I know that seldom do these processors live up to their claims of being able to execute 2 instructions per clock cycle. Actual benchmarks that I've done indicate an instruction throughput of about 1 instruction every 2 clock cycles; coincidentally, the L2 cache runs at 1/2 processor clock speed. Which means, of course, that the processor is operating mostly out of the L2 cache because the majority of instructions are resulting in L1 cache misses. Thus, any increase in L1 cache size will have a large impact on actual system performance.Intel correctly recognizes that most PC buyers make decisions based on processor speed rather than actual system throughput, and this is why they can use smaller L1 caches - because the typical user will never notice the difference in actual performance. Fortunately, the result is that AMD has had to make up for the MHz gap with processors that perform better in actual computing situations, and a large L1 cache can work wonders for system throughput.
250 Horsepower, 0-60 in under 7 seconds, 80 mpg - when can I buy one?!
With the price of gas expected to rise by 40 cents a gallon in the Chicago area to more than $2/gallon, I wouldn't mind owning one of these. It's about time a "high performance" vehicle was truly high performance when it comes to fuel economy.
Having been a gear-head for a while, I can tell you that high-performance and fuel efficiency were often on opposite ends of the spectrum; high performance has been synonymous with poor fuel economy ever since I can remember. It's good to see engineering talent change this. I for one wouldn't mind owning a very agile car with good fuel economy.
But the far more urgent concern is that media conglomerates will use their control over broadband pipes to restrict access to content, information, or technologies that compete with their own content or otherwise threaten their interests.
In a democracy, those who control the flow of information control the country. Grassroots movements can't get started without free communication, and as the Internet is becoming an increasingly used political sounding board, this deregulation will give the media companies more power than we realize. Unlike the government, which is required by the Constitution to allow free speech, the media companies have no such requirement - they can deny access to anyone without any justification whatsoever. Those with views unpopular (say Jews, Christians, or Muslims...) or critical of the ISP, may find themselves silenced without any legal recourse.
In the past, the reliability and robustness of Linux systems has been hampered more by the hardware than anything else. A key selling point of mainframes has been the fact that the hardware is significantly more reliable and fault tolerant than PC's.
This blows away Microsoft's arguments against the open source model. Contrary to what the CEO of Microsoft may assert, the GPL is not a cancer, but is now showing its value as companies such as RedHat are making deals with the large computer manufacturers.
This will absolutely defeat Microsoft's claim that Windows NT/2000/XP is ready for the enterprise. Now that the major database systems vendors such as Oracle are supporting Linux, there is simply no reason not to use it. Where's the commercial clustering software for Windows? Oh, right, it's not there - nor is it planned.
Microsoft has been touting Windows NT, 2000, and XP as enterprise-level operating systems for several years, but the reason why they have not successfully broken into the enterprise market is because the hardware on which NT runs is generally not reliable nor fault tolerant when compared to mainframes. The solution to this is to run a cluster of machines, but once again, Microsoft offers no clustering support for their "enterprise level operating systems". The lack of availability of a commercially backed clustering package for Linux was one of Microsoft's key objections to Linux in their "Linux Myths" whitepaper. It appears as if all of the criticisms Microsoft has had of Linux are now becoming irrelevant - Linux has adapted to the times, but Microsoft, as usual, has not.
This could easily keep Microsoft from ever breaking into the enterprise market. The simple truth is that PC boxes could not support enterprise and mission critical applications in the past because of the hardware reliability factor. Unbreakable Linux has the power to change this, and keep Microsoft out of the enterprise-level market indefinitely. Get used to the desktop, Microsoft, because you aren't going anywhere else!
The harm comes when the children who viewed porn start having sex and expect their partners to look as good as the women in the magazines. Unsatisfied, the men then go from one woman to the next, searching for the woman with the "perfect" body. The net result: women now have self-esteem issues like never before; men can't seem to be satisfied with just one partner; children go fatherless because the man won't stay and be a parent (he's off looking for the "perfect" woman, like the kind he's seen in the magazines...). Though pornography doesn't directly cause all of these things, it reinforces the selfish, lascivious desires in human nature, and tends to keep one from ever learning to genuinely love someone. How many women suffer from bulimia or anorexia because they are trying to look like the women in magazines (because presumably, men want a woman who looks like a porn star)? How many men have issues/insecurities about there own sexual performance, once they've seen the artificially endowed male porn stars? How many men learn to look only at a woman's outward appearance when looking for a girlfriend; worse, how many see women as nothing more than a means to a sexual end, and have no intentions of ever being a husband to one?
Porn is the root of all of these problems. Yes, it does hurt children, but because the effects are not immediate and devastating, it's easy to believe that it has no effect. The ill effects are subtle, real, and long-lasting.
Slashdot Mirror
A "paltry $250"!? That's more than most programmers (the ones who can still find jobs) make. The really sick part of this is that these guys are complaining that they're making only 90k a year sitting on their ass when hard working programmers can't find jobs.
OK, perhaps this is a little OT, but I thought I'd share what I posted a while back on /. Basically, Americans have had their rights legislated away from them for some time now...
A common question Open Source advocates like to pose to the general populace is "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"
Of course, we all know that the answer is supposed to be no, but what most people don't realize is that this very thing has, in essence, been going on since the Clean Air Act of 1967. It is actually illegal to modify the engine in a passenger car to produce more horsepower, though such modification is seldom prosecuted. I came in on the tail end of the hot rod era; today, the integration of computers and engines has become so pervasive that the average hot rodder cannot modify his machine without a great deal of knowledge and expense. And those days of doubling or tripling the horsepower output of an engine are long gone.
But the point is this: the same thing that happened with automobiles will happen with the computer. You will have to be a specially licensed and bonded technician in order to own certain development tools (compilers, debuggers, and the like). While you will still be able to take apart your computer, making unauthorized modifications (to thwart the onboard DRM and Palladium chips) will be illegal. Unlike the hot rodder of today who is seldom prosecuted by the police, the machine will "call home" to Big Brother if it detects that it has been modified, and federal agents will show up to "fix" your computer.
And just wait until GPS units are mandatory in cars, and the FBI can find out everywhere you've been with a simple database query.
The erosion of our liberties is very real. Those of us who care about our liberties need to stand up and be heard; we need to do something about this before it gets out of hand. Learn a lesson from the automotive enthusiasts - if you don't vigilantly protect your liberties, the government will take them away.
For charging customers who owned their modems more than those who leased their modems? It seems as if they've reversed themselves on the assumption that people who own their modems cost them more in tech support.
Agreed. Some suggestions:
- Help your local schools with computer/technical issues. Help them set up a network of Linux boxen.
- Write free software.
- Take time to help others with their computer problems...
There are much better things to do with your time than merely watching movies and downloading MP3's. If we are serious about protecting our rights online, we need to get out and get the word out - we need to be seen and heard in our communities. Let people know about the issues affecting free software. But don't sit back and do nothing and then complain about how you lost your rights...I agree completely. Currently, my employer uses several million dollars worth of IBM hardware to do data processing that could just as easily be done on a Win2K box costing a few thousand. Why don't they switch? One word: reliability. IBM knows what Microsoft never figured out: build a rock solid, reliable platform, and you'll never have a problem making a profit. Regardless of how reliable MS claims their products are, their track record says otherwise, and no one where I work is eager to bet their career on the empty promises of Bill Gates and Company...
What the UCITA does is make the click-through and shrinkwrap licensing have the force of law. Though I don't like this prospect, it can be used to keep free software authors out of legal trouble.
Of course, we all know that the answer is supposed to be no, but what most people don't realize is that this very thing has, in essence, been going on since the Clean Air Act of 1967. It is actually illegal to modify the engine in a passenger car to produce more horsepower, though such modification is seldom prosecuted. I came in on the tail end of the hot rod era; today, the integration of computers and engines has become so pervasive that the average hot rodder cannot modify his machine without a great deal of knowledge and expense. And those days of doubling or tripling the horsepower output of an engine are long gone.
But the point is this: the same thing that happened with automobiles will happen with the computer. You will have to be a specially licensed and bonded technician in order to own certain development tools (compilers, debuggers, and the like). While you will still be able to take apart your computer, making unauthorized modifications (to thwart the onboard DRM and Palladium chips) will be illegal. Unlike the hot rodder of today who is seldom prosecuted by the police, the machine will "call home" to Big Brother if it detects that it has been modified, and federal agents will show up to "fix" your computer.
And just wait until GPS units are mandatory in cars, and the FBI can find out everywhere you've been with a simple database query.
The erosion of our liberties is very real. Those of us who care about our liberties need to stand up and be heard; we need to do something about this before it gets out of hand. Learn a lesson from the automotive enthusiasts - if you don't vigilantly protect your liberties, the government will take them away.
His novel 1984, written in 1948, contained the foremost prophecy of the cold war: that technological advancement would render Stalinism unstoppable, with individual liberty the inevitable casualty. However, when the technologies that would enable this totalitarian global village reached fruition, the victim was not democracy, but totalitarianism itself. What went right?
Democracy is the new totalitarianism. I don't think that Orwell could have imagined a more evil state than that of the United States. No other administration to date has come as close to Orwell's Ministry of Love as the current one. In fact, John Ashcroft unwittingly quoted 1984 when he said in a press release "we have made measurable progress toward end of the war." The irony could not get any better!
Several engineering companies are distraught over learning that discoveries of the super-strong, super-light element known as Unobtanium were falsified as well.Unobtanium was reportedly discovered by the marketing departments of several prominent firms, but the discoveries were never confirmed by actual engineers.
Preregistration for H2K2 is closed -- you can still pay $50 at the door to get in, but you must bring cash; we cannot take credit cards for admission.
A hacker's conference that doesn't take credit card numbers? Whatever happened to social engineering?
I was a junior in college when I first read The Art of Computer Programming, and it really opened up my mind to what computer science is all about. It challenged me to think outside the HLL box. Knuth's work has become a timeless classic because he concentrates on the higher level concepts of computer science that transcend the currently popular architectures.
What really blew me away about Knuth's work is that he implements all of the features found in modern HLL's in his own variant of assembler. Someone who can work through and solve the exercises in his books will find themselves able to write programs in any language, and write them well at that. He does not concern himself with the Language Wars, or the Platform Wars, but instead presents the problems and solutions which are common to all computer systems. Too many programmers have been babied intellectually by their colleges and universities, which taught them how to program in a high level language rather than teaching them the fundamentals underlying computer science. Knuth does a good job in getting down to the underlying problems of computer science without bothering the user with the details of arcane architectures that will soon be obsolete.
For this reason, I look forward to his forthcoming work. I look forward to the new challenges which will expand my mind even farther.
One thing I wonder about is whether or not this is associated strictly with games, or merely using computers. I've noticed that I'm not as creative as I used to be since I've started programming for a living....
Not to be a troll, but I see a lot of programmers with this kind of attitude - "let the compiler catch mistakes", or "code it fast and use a debugger," etc... What invariably happens is that these programmers who learn to code this way spend their careers writing code which is neither efficient nor easy to maintain. Worse, they waste a lot of time using a debugger that they could have avoided had they thoroughly planned their code.
I used to just blitz through the code, without really planning what I was going to do. While this worked well for small projects, when I got into the professional world, my debugging time went up by an order of magnitude. I've found that I actually get code done faster if I think it through and plan it out before I start writing. I've learned that if I want to fly through coding and debugging, I have to take some time first and plan what I'm going to do. Otherwise, if I scramble off to code writing without planning, I end up using the debugger quite a bit. But then again, YMMV.
True, but that would put us back in the situation we're in now, where we are at the mercies of the vendor every time we need to upgrade. Basically, the problem is that unless we own the software, we are at the mercy of the vendor who may either:
-
Discontinue the software in the future.
- Force us to upgrade (Yes, this happened to us).
- Increase/Restructure the licensing fees so that we pay a per-processor-cycle or per-month charge to lease the software. Incidentally, they tend to do things like this after a company has been using their product for a while and built up a large codebase. They'll charge just marginally less than it would cost to convert to another vendor's database.
- Charge a fee for every line of code the programmers hired by the company write. Yes, there are licensing agreements which effectively do this; not only do we pay for the database, we have to pay the vendor royalties for every line of code we pay programmers to write.
As you can see, we've had some big problems with proprietary software - problems that can only be addressed by using free software.Think this is impossible/implausible? Compaq did this very thing a few years ago with their midrange server and Windows NT - if you didn't use Compaq's version of Windows NT, the BIOS would hang the machine. This was intentional, as you could buy Windows NT from Microsoft at the time for less than Compaq was selling it.
But another insidious way to get Linux users is for Microsoft to make a deal with computer manufacturers that requires the computer makers to install a small part of the Palladium Windows into the BIOS. This way, if you don't agree to the Microsoft EULA, your hardware won't boot any OS.
I believe my company would be open to replacing their aging mainframe with a few Linux boxes. But the problem is that there are no free software databases that work as well as Adabas or DB2 do on the mainframe. If the free software folks would get serious about database development, then perhaps Linux could make real inroads into corporate America, and move from the server room to the enterprise datacenter.
Here's why:
Paladium is pure speculation by Microsoft. They cannot afford to release this to the public, because they would lose their monopoly on desktop operating systems if they did.
I, for one, will refuse to use these devices. If I can't fly without using them, then I won't fly. It's that simple - my eyesight is worth too much to risk - something as simple as a software glitch could cause the laser to blind people at random, like what happened with the Therac 25 in the 1980's. Sorry folks, but lasers and eyes just don't go together, and anyone with common sense should see that.
I wouldn't object so much if it was based on a passive scan - such as with a camera. But the laser thing scares me.
What strikes me as interesting is that Cullinan implicitly refers to Java as a "risk," when the software projects he manages have placed far more computers at risk of data loss, hacking, virus threats, etc... than Java ever has. Does Jim Cullinan actually use Windows? How can he be so clueless as to imply that Java places customers at risk when his own software has cost companies billions of dollars in downtime?
Oh, wait, I get it. Microsoft's Virtual Machine places customers at risk. No wonder he's going to stop shipping it in the future!
This can't be emphasized enough. When I first started coding, I could complete the whole thing in front of the monitor screen. But now that I'm working in the professional world, I'm coming across problems so complex that they cannot be solved sitting in front of the monitor. More and more often, I find myself actually flowcharting the problem, and then writing my code out on paper. Yes, I could pound it out with the edit/test/debug cycle, but in the professional world, when you are under a deadline, the ability to code it write the first time is essential. I have found that it is always faster from a total development time standpoint to write and debug code on paper and then type it in than to just begin coding. The only mistakes a good programmer makes are syntax errors - because he's already verified the solution before he begins coding.
Which is a tremendous problem, from a performance standpoint. Having hand-coded assembly for both processors (Intel and AMD), I know that seldom do these processors live up to their claims of being able to execute 2 instructions per clock cycle. Actual benchmarks that I've done indicate an instruction throughput of about 1 instruction every 2 clock cycles; coincidentally, the L2 cache runs at 1/2 processor clock speed. Which means, of course, that the processor is operating mostly out of the L2 cache because the majority of instructions are resulting in L1 cache misses. Thus, any increase in L1 cache size will have a large impact on actual system performance.Intel correctly recognizes that most PC buyers make decisions based on processor speed rather than actual system throughput, and this is why they can use smaller L1 caches - because the typical user will never notice the difference in actual performance. Fortunately, the result is that AMD has had to make up for the MHz gap with processors that perform better in actual computing situations, and a large L1 cache can work wonders for system throughput.
250 Horsepower, 0-60 in under 7 seconds, 80 mpg - when can I buy one?!
With the price of gas expected to rise by 40 cents a gallon in the Chicago area to more than $2/gallon, I wouldn't mind owning one of these. It's about time a "high performance" vehicle was truly high performance when it comes to fuel economy.
Having been a gear-head for a while, I can tell you that high-performance and fuel efficiency were often on opposite ends of the spectrum; high performance has been synonymous with poor fuel economy ever since I can remember. It's good to see engineering talent change this. I for one wouldn't mind owning a very agile car with good fuel economy.
But the far more urgent concern is that media conglomerates will use their control over broadband pipes to restrict access to content, information, or technologies that compete with their own content or otherwise threaten their interests.
In a democracy, those who control the flow of information control the country. Grassroots movements can't get started without free communication, and as the Internet is becoming an increasingly used political sounding board, this deregulation will give the media companies more power than we realize. Unlike the government, which is required by the Constitution to allow free speech, the media companies have no such requirement - they can deny access to anyone without any justification whatsoever. Those with views unpopular (say Jews, Christians, or Muslims...) or critical of the ISP, may find themselves silenced without any legal recourse.-
In the past, the reliability and robustness of Linux systems has been hampered more by the hardware than anything else. A key selling point of mainframes has been the fact that the hardware is significantly more reliable and fault tolerant than PC's.
- This blows away Microsoft's arguments against the open source model. Contrary to what the CEO of Microsoft may assert, the GPL is not a cancer, but is now showing its value as companies such as RedHat are making deals with the large computer manufacturers.
- This will absolutely defeat Microsoft's claim that Windows NT/2000/XP is ready for the enterprise. Now that the major database systems vendors such as Oracle are supporting Linux, there is simply no reason not to use it. Where's the commercial clustering software for Windows? Oh, right, it's not there - nor is it planned.
Microsoft has been touting Windows NT, 2000, and XP as enterprise-level operating systems for several years, but the reason why they have not successfully broken into the enterprise market is because the hardware on which NT runs is generally not reliable nor fault tolerant when compared to mainframes. The solution to this is to run a cluster of machines, but once again, Microsoft offers no clustering support for their "enterprise level operating systems". The lack of availability of a commercially backed clustering package for Linux was one of Microsoft's key objections to Linux in their "Linux Myths" whitepaper. It appears as if all of the criticisms Microsoft has had of Linux are now becoming irrelevant - Linux has adapted to the times, but Microsoft, as usual, has not.This could easily keep Microsoft from ever breaking into the enterprise market. The simple truth is that PC boxes could not support enterprise and mission critical applications in the past because of the hardware reliability factor. Unbreakable Linux has the power to change this, and keep Microsoft out of the enterprise-level market indefinitely. Get used to the desktop, Microsoft, because you aren't going anywhere else!
Porn is the root of all of these problems. Yes, it does hurt children, but because the effects are not immediate and devastating, it's easy to believe that it has no effect. The ill effects are subtle, real, and long-lasting.