Sadly, even at $169, this system is overpriced for the hardware that you get.
Just for the hell of it, I went to mwave.com, and priced out their absolute cheapest pre-assembled barebones system. I was able to get a system with a faster processsor and a better motherboard for $153, or $165 with a cheap keyboard and mouse included.
Add a 50 cent burned Knoppix CD to the system, and you just got yourself a better system for $3.50 cheaper, and with no rebate hassles.
I'll bet that he switched back to Windows the second he was done writing the article. This guy sounds like another Windows zealot who tried Linux on their home system just to see what the fuss was about, only to go running back to Windows when they ran into a problem that was difficult to fix.
I've met a lot of people (myself included) who have installed Linux on their home computers and liked it at first. After awhile, though, the lack of commercial desktop software and games starts to become a turnoff. Finding drivers for some of my oddball hardware became was pain in the ass, too. After awhile, I found myself using Windows most of the time, mostly because I was too damn lazy to keep both OS installations up to date.
Only a Slashdot economist could consider a company that owns 90% of the OS market and has over $40 billion in the bank a "loser".
Even the article itself doesn't think that Microsoft is in any serious trouble. And I quote:
"The most likely outcome is that customers will face a choice between Linux, which is cheap and cheerful, and Windows, which offers more bells and whistles, is tightly integrated with other Microsoft products and is easier for unskilled staff to use, but costs more. In short, Microsoft will be not so much a loser from Linux as less of a winner. In the server market at least, Linux is providing Microsoft with some much-needed competition."
Sadly, I could never bring one of those to where I work. Security would take one look and think that I was a terrorist or something, and would have the police drag me off the premises in handcuffs:(
I doubt he'll get the whole $50,000. The object of the second prize was to load Linux on an X-Box without any unmodified hardware on retail software. Since you still need a copy of the 007 game and an external USB memory module, he'll probably only get a portion of the money.
Anyway, you can read the rules here:
http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/articles.php?a id =20030023081956
Re:Not to be a troll here but...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
·
· Score: 1
Did JonKatz change his user name? You're a dead ringer for him!
"The Community" would be stupid to purchase Mandrake stock right now.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, the stockholders often end up losing most of what they invested. Creditors and bond holders get first dibs at any remaining assets of the company, and companies under a high debt load (like Mandrake, read their balance sheet) often have nothing left for their shareholders if they are unable to emerge from bankruptcy and face liquidation.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, whining about the RIAA on Slashdot isn't going to help the cause of free music (as in free beer or free speech) on the internet. You're preaching the quoir around here, as anyone that even casually reads this site already knows that the greedy bastards that run the recording industry are evil.
No, if you want to REALLY make a difference, start complaining about RIAA in public forums that the "Average Joe" listens to! Write an editorial in your local newspaper. Contact your local congressman. Phone in on a local talk radio show. Organize a protest in front of your local mega-record chain, and hand out leaflets explaining the evils of the RIAA.
Whatever you do, don't think that bitching about Hilary Rosen to a forum that ALREADY hates her is going to solve anything. The time to take action is now.
This plea for help from Mandrake reminds me of a long-running Slashdot troll post....
1) Beg our customers for money, because we weren't able to get enough cash from our investors or from CD sales. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
As always, it's the "???" part that should bother you.
Begging customers to sign up for their club isn't exactly what I'd call a sound business model, but it seems to be their best idea at the moment. It will never work as long as people can download their product for free, because most people are cheap by nature.
If Mandrake wants to stay in business, they should do what most other publically traded technology companies do. SELL their products for more than it costs to make them!
Like last year, I'll be getting nothing but extra work assignments for Christmas. All of the "lifers" and pointy-haired bosses usually use the rest of their five weeks or so of vacation at the end of the year, which means that I end up covering their projects while they're gone. Oh well, at least it's quiet in the office around the holidays.
I'd imagine that most people in the IT industry got simularly screwed, so it probably isn't work complaining about it. At least you can sell your Larry Ellison bobble head doll on eBay, or just use it for target practice.
I know that I bought less games in 2002, because most of the major releases that I want to buy haven't been shipped yet. I'd love go out to the store and buy Rainbow Six 3, Simcity 4, and Doom 3 right now, but they're not going to be shipped until 2003.
That, plus the lack of any absolute "must buy" games being released this year, has cut down on my number of game purchases. Sure, Unreal Tournament 2003 and No One Lives Forever 2 were good, but they certainly weren't as ground-breaking as the original releases of those games.
Honestly, I wasn't a fan of this show, either. The whole "Gunsmoke in space" theme wasn't working for me, as I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
Would YOU want to trust this thing to save your important data? After looking at the specifications, I saw two BIG problems with it right away:
1) It needs a separate "wall wart" power supply to be plugged into the card to keep the data stored on the drive when the computer is off. So, what happens when the power goes out? Or, the power supply fails? Or, (most likely), some moron accidently unplugs it? That's right, total data loss. For the price they are charging for this thing, it should come with some sort of an Uninteruptible Power Supply built INTO the unit.
2) The card uses standard PC133 memory, which is less reliable memory type than the ECC memory that is supposed to be used in servers. An application like this practically DEMANDS ECC memory, to make sure that single-bit errors aren't slowly corrupting your data.
Sadly, this thing isn't any better than a glorified RAM disk. I wouldn't store anything more important than a swap file on it.
Microsoft isn't the only major corporation that has been funneling money to political organizations. Looking at the top 100 list, you'll see a lot of companies with "questionable" ethics that "donate" even larger sums of money than Microsoft:
5 Philip Morris $18,951,671 12 AT&T $17,464,374 18 Citigroup Inc $14,762,646 19 United Parcel Service $14,621,284 21 Goldman Sachs $13,665,527 26 AOL Time Warner $12,195,822 28 FedEx Corp $11,555,286 29 BellSouth Corp $10,838,209 30 SBC Communications $10,695,349 31 Verizon Communications $10,255,052 33 RJR Nabisco/RJ Reynolds Tobacco $10,079,162 34 Ernst & Young $9,967,638 35 Lockheed Martin $9,862,899 36 JP Morgan Chase & Co $9,861,326 40 Microsoft Corp $9,468,287
Ok, this statement confuses me. IBM's BladeCenter line is based on Intel's new standard for blade servers, which means that the blade rack should be able to accept blades from ANY manufacturer that follows the new Intel server blade standard.
HP/Compaq is also (supposedly) planning to use this standard for their new blade servers, so you'll be able to use HP blades in an IBM rack, and vice versa.
The only server blade company that seems to be sticking with a "proprietary" design is RLX technologies, which uses a more compact blade system that was originally designed to use Transmeta Crusoe processors. They also have Intel blades as well, which use a simular RLX proprietary form factor.
You can rest assured that Apple will promote the benefits of 64-bit processors if they really use this technology in their next-generation PowerMac.
Unfortunately, this IS Apple that we're talking about, so you can't expect a fair comparsion. Instead, you'll probably see Steve shouting "The G5, THE FIRST 64-bit home SUPER-computer"! He'll make sure to include some misleading benchmarks showing their new system completing some obscure Photoshop benchmark twice as fast as the latest Intel PC. How else is he going to justify charging $4,000 for it?:)
If he doesn't, go ahead and let him bitch to the FBI. When THEY are done yelling at him for wasting their time, he should leave you alone.
I would only get a lawyer if the guy was really stupid enough to open a civil suit against you. When that happens, make sure to counter-sue for your legal expenses.
Considering that RC5-72 is 256 times bigger than RC5-64, I don't think that it's going to be cracked any time soon. Even with Moore's Law in place, you're STILL talking about a 10+ year project to crack this code. This brings up two interesting questions:
* How many people are patient enough to wait that long for the job to finish? D.net has already lost a lot of geeks to the flashier projects like SETI, and most people just don't have the attention span to complete a long project without some periodic rewards along the way.
* What will it prove when they finally complete their task? If it takes thousands of computers over a decade to crack the code, are you REALLY going to be able to convince anyone that code isn't secure enough for basic data encryption? Sure, some paranoid government folks might panic, but the general public really isn't going to care.
After watching the series premier myself, I can also attest to the show's lack of creativity. Taking a spaghetti western and putting it into orbit isn't really original, it's just corny.
It's almost like they took the props from "Wild Wild West", added a few spaceships, and ended up creating something like "Gunsmoke in Space". Putting the two together doesn't make any sense, and makes the whole show look silly. Seeing shotguns, bowie knives, trains, and paper money in the 1870's makes sense, but seeing them in 2502 just looks stupid.
I'm wondering what Corel is charging OEM's for WordPerfect Office nowadays? Considering that they are hard up for customers at the moment, I'll bet that they gave HP a sweet deal in order to get some volume sales.
Hell, for all we know, Corel might be offering WordPerfect Office for LESS that Microsoft is charging for Works! Considering the the basic version of Works doesn't come with any of the full-featured addons like Word or Microsoft Money, this might be a good deal for both HP and consumers alike.
"Or has Microsoft succeded in delaying the abuse of their console long enough to make hacking it financially uninteresting?"
Unfortunately, yes.
An XBox costs about $210 (tax included). The mod chip costs needed to boot Linux costs about another $35, or you can buy a pre-modded X-Box for $295 (shipped).
Meanwhile, you can build a PC from parts with simular hardware specifications for about $350. The same system would have costed about $500 six months ago.
By the time the X-Box Linux guys have this thing playing games and running stable enough to be a web server, the price of the parts to build a comparible PC probably will have dropped another $50. This makes the cost of the system a wash, unless Microsoft lowers the cost of the X-Box again this year.
Also, the hardware specifications of the X-Box are already becoming outdated, and most PC's shipping now come with 1Ghz+ processors and 256MB of RAM.
Getting Linux running on an XBox is still a victory, however, but not as large of one that it would have been six months ago.
Re:All OSS no better than all CSS
on
Mega-Geek March?
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, The whole idea of this proposal seems inheritly stupid to me. Sure, I know that the whole idea of this bill is to cut costs and promote competition, but it seems to be doing quite the opposite.
For example, if a government office is already successfully using a commercial product, why should they have to throw it away and use an OSS product? Besides losing the money originally spent on the software, you're also going to have to spend money on implimentation and training. AND, if the product isn't as good as the commercial product, that government office is going to lose productivity until the software is improved. Forcing people to use inferior products is also a lousy way to encourage people that OSS is higher quality. All it could take is one vocal group of disgruntled Oracle or Office users proving that MySQL or KOffice is inferior to get parts of this bill overturned.
Not to mention that the whole idea of forcing Open Source software down people's throats seems wrong to me. If there is a better commercial option out there, everyone should be allowed to it! This is still America we're talking about, a country where you should still have freedom of choice. The Open Source community shouldn't start acting like a bunch of communists in order to promote their agenda.
The only problem with this plan is that there is almost ALWAYS one or two people in every organization who would be smart enough to figure out what you're doing. It might be a CS teacher who used to work as a network admin, or perhaps some 11th grade "hacker in training" who's Dad used to work at Cisco. If it irritates them enough, they're going to figure it out eventually.
If you're smart, you'll get to know these people and get on their good side, so they keep their mouths shut. Perhaps you could give them first dibs to new equipment, or offer them advice with problems on their home computers. Otherwise, they might start bitching to the "right" people to get you in trouble.
The CS teacher could go to the school superintendant stating that these blocked ports "are imparing his teaching ability". The superintendant probably isn't going to know what he's talking about, but it won't stop him from giving YOU a hard time about it! The student could write a article in the school paper with the headline of "Yadda Yadda High secretly CENSORS music from school network!" I've seen this approach used at my local University, and it did a great job of getting the President's attention. Either way, you're going to get in trouble for not stating your plan in the first place.
Seriously, I liked the bandwidth throttling plan better than this one. As long as the P2P applications are working to some extent, you have a good chance of no one figuring it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, even at $169, this system is overpriced for the hardware that you get.
Just for the hell of it, I went to mwave.com, and priced out their absolute cheapest pre-assembled barebones system. I was able to get a system with a faster processsor and a better motherboard for $153, or $165 with a cheap keyboard and mouse included.
Add a 50 cent burned Knoppix CD to the system, and you just got yourself a better system for $3.50 cheaper, and with no rebate hassles.
I'll bet that he switched back to Windows the second he was done writing the article. This guy sounds like another Windows zealot who tried Linux on their home system just to see what the fuss was about, only to go running back to Windows when they ran into a problem that was difficult to fix.
I've met a lot of people (myself included) who have installed Linux on their home computers and liked it at first. After awhile, though, the lack of commercial desktop software and games starts to become a turnoff. Finding drivers for some of my oddball hardware became was pain in the ass, too. After awhile, I found myself using Windows most of the time, mostly because I was too damn lazy to keep both OS installations up to date.
Only a Slashdot economist could consider a company that owns 90% of the OS market and has over $40 billion in the bank a "loser".
Even the article itself doesn't think that Microsoft is in any serious trouble. And I quote:
"The most likely outcome is that customers will face a choice between Linux, which is cheap and cheerful, and Windows, which offers more bells and whistles, is tightly integrated with other Microsoft products and is easier for unskilled staff to use, but costs more. In short, Microsoft will be not so much a loser from Linux as less of a winner. In the server market at least, Linux is providing Microsoft with some much-needed competition."
Sadly, I could never bring one of those to where I work. Security would take one look and think that I was a terrorist or something, and would have the police drag me off the premises in handcuffs :(
If I had mod points, I'd try to bump up this statement to a 5+ insightful.
Most people don't seem to realize that bitching about Microsoft/AOL/DMCA/Government on Slashdot doesn't solve anything.
I doubt he'll get the whole $50,000. The object of the second prize was to load Linux on an X-Box without any unmodified hardware on retail software. Since you still need a copy of the 007 game and an external USB memory module, he'll probably only get a portion of the money.
a id =20030023081956
Anyway, you can read the rules here:
http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/articles.php?
Did JonKatz change his user name? You're a dead ringer for him!
"The Community" would be stupid to purchase Mandrake stock right now.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, the stockholders often end up losing most of what they invested. Creditors and bond holders get first dibs at any remaining assets of the company, and companies under a high debt load (like Mandrake, read their balance sheet) often have nothing left for their shareholders if they are unable to emerge from bankruptcy and face liquidation.
In case you haven't figured it out yet, whining about the RIAA on Slashdot isn't going to help the cause of free music (as in free beer or free speech) on the internet. You're preaching the quoir around here, as anyone that even casually reads this site already knows that the greedy bastards that run the recording industry are evil.
No, if you want to REALLY make a difference, start complaining about RIAA in public forums that the "Average Joe" listens to! Write an editorial in your local newspaper. Contact your local congressman. Phone in on a local talk radio show. Organize a protest in front of your local mega-record chain, and hand out leaflets explaining the evils of the RIAA.
Whatever you do, don't think that bitching about Hilary Rosen to a forum that ALREADY hates her is going to solve anything. The time to take action is now.
This plea for help from Mandrake reminds me of a long-running Slashdot troll post....
1) Beg our customers for money, because we weren't able to get enough cash from our investors or from CD sales.
2) ???
3) Profit!
As always, it's the "???" part that should bother you.
Begging customers to sign up for their club isn't exactly what I'd call a sound business model, but it seems to be their best idea at the moment. It will never work as long as people can download their product for free, because most people are cheap by nature.
If Mandrake wants to stay in business, they should do what most other publically traded technology companies do. SELL their products for more than it costs to make them!
Like last year, I'll be getting nothing but extra work assignments for Christmas. All of the "lifers" and pointy-haired bosses usually use the rest of their five weeks or so of vacation at the end of the year, which means that I end up covering their projects while they're gone. Oh well, at least it's quiet in the office around the holidays.
I'd imagine that most people in the IT industry got simularly screwed, so it probably isn't work complaining about it. At least you can sell your Larry Ellison bobble head doll on eBay, or just use it for target practice.
I know that I bought less games in 2002, because most of the major releases that I want to buy haven't been shipped yet. I'd love go out to the store and buy Rainbow Six 3, Simcity 4, and Doom 3 right now, but they're not going to be shipped until 2003.
That, plus the lack of any absolute "must buy" games being released this year, has cut down on my number of game purchases. Sure, Unreal Tournament 2003 and No One Lives Forever 2 were good, but they certainly weren't as ground-breaking as the original releases of those games.
Honestly, I wasn't a fan of this show, either. The whole "Gunsmoke in space" theme wasn't working for me, as I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
Would YOU want to trust this thing to save your important data? After looking at the specifications, I saw two BIG problems with it right away:
1) It needs a separate "wall wart" power supply to be plugged into the card to keep the data stored on the drive when the computer is off. So, what happens when the power goes out? Or, the power supply fails? Or, (most likely), some moron accidently unplugs it? That's right, total data loss. For the price they are charging for this thing, it should come with some sort of an Uninteruptible Power Supply built INTO the unit.
2) The card uses standard PC133 memory, which is less reliable memory type than the ECC memory that is supposed to be used in servers. An application like this practically DEMANDS ECC memory, to make sure that single-bit errors aren't slowly corrupting your data.
Sadly, this thing isn't any better than a glorified RAM disk. I wouldn't store anything more important than a swap file on it.
Microsoft isn't the only major corporation that has been funneling money to political organizations. Looking at the top 100 list, you'll see a lot of companies with "questionable" ethics that "donate" even larger sums of money than Microsoft:
5 Philip Morris $18,951,671
12 AT&T $17,464,374
18 Citigroup Inc $14,762,646
19 United Parcel Service $14,621,284
21 Goldman Sachs $13,665,527
26 AOL Time Warner $12,195,822
28 FedEx Corp $11,555,286
29 BellSouth Corp $10,838,209
30 SBC Communications $10,695,349
31 Verizon Communications $10,255,052
33 RJR Nabisco/RJ Reynolds Tobacco $10,079,162
34 Ernst & Young $9,967,638
35 Lockheed Martin $9,862,899
36 JP Morgan Chase & Co $9,861,326
40 Microsoft Corp $9,468,287
Ok, this statement confuses me. IBM's BladeCenter line is based on Intel's new standard for blade servers, which means that the blade rack should be able to accept blades from ANY manufacturer that follows the new Intel server blade standard.
HP/Compaq is also (supposedly) planning to use this standard for their new blade servers, so you'll be able to use HP blades in an IBM rack, and vice versa.
The only server blade company that seems to be sticking with a "proprietary" design is RLX technologies, which uses a more compact blade system that was originally designed to use Transmeta Crusoe processors. They also have Intel blades as well, which use a simular RLX proprietary form factor.
Yes, it's pretty sad when the computer seems to have a more vibrant personality than the human player :)
You can rest assured that Apple will promote the benefits of 64-bit processors if they really use this technology in their next-generation PowerMac.
:)
Unfortunately, this IS Apple that we're talking about, so you can't expect a fair comparsion. Instead, you'll probably see Steve shouting "The G5, THE FIRST 64-bit home SUPER-computer"! He'll make sure to include some misleading benchmarks showing their new system completing some obscure Photoshop benchmark twice as fast as the latest Intel PC. How else is he going to justify charging $4,000 for it?
Just send this moron a few links like these, and he'll probably just apolgize and go away:
7 4, 00.html
5 5, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,521
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,520
If he doesn't, go ahead and let him bitch to the FBI. When THEY are done yelling at him for wasting their time, he should leave you alone.
I would only get a lawyer if the guy was really stupid enough to open a civil suit against you. When that happens, make sure to counter-sue for your legal expenses.
Considering that RC5-72 is 256 times bigger than RC5-64, I don't think that it's going to be cracked any time soon. Even with Moore's Law in place, you're STILL talking about a 10+ year project to crack this code. This brings up two interesting questions:
* How many people are patient enough to wait that long for the job to finish? D.net has already lost a lot of geeks to the flashier projects like SETI, and most people just don't have the attention span to complete a long project without some periodic rewards along the way.
* What will it prove when they finally complete their task? If it takes thousands of computers over a decade to crack the code, are you REALLY going to be able to convince anyone that code isn't secure enough for basic data encryption? Sure, some paranoid government folks might panic, but the general public really isn't going to care.
After watching the series premier myself, I can also attest to the show's lack of creativity. Taking a spaghetti western and putting it into orbit isn't really original, it's just corny.
It's almost like they took the props from "Wild Wild West", added a few spaceships, and ended up creating something like "Gunsmoke in Space". Putting the two together doesn't make any sense, and makes the whole show look silly. Seeing shotguns, bowie knives, trains, and paper money in the 1870's makes sense, but seeing them in 2502 just looks stupid.
I'm wondering what Corel is charging OEM's for WordPerfect Office nowadays? Considering that they are hard up for customers at the moment, I'll bet that they gave HP a sweet deal in order to get some volume sales.
Hell, for all we know, Corel might be offering WordPerfect Office for LESS that Microsoft is charging for Works! Considering the the basic version of Works doesn't come with any of the full-featured addons like Word or Microsoft Money, this might be a good deal for both HP and consumers alike.
"Or has Microsoft succeded in delaying the abuse of their console long enough to make hacking it financially uninteresting?"
Unfortunately, yes.
An XBox costs about $210 (tax included). The mod chip costs needed to boot Linux costs about another $35, or you can buy a pre-modded X-Box for $295 (shipped).
Meanwhile, you can build a PC from parts with simular hardware specifications for about $350. The same system would have costed about $500 six months ago.
By the time the X-Box Linux guys have this thing playing games and running stable enough to be a web server, the price of the parts to build a comparible PC probably will have dropped another $50. This makes the cost of the system a wash, unless Microsoft lowers the cost of the X-Box again this year.
Also, the hardware specifications of the X-Box are already becoming outdated, and most PC's shipping now come with 1Ghz+ processors and 256MB of RAM.
Getting Linux running on an XBox is still a victory, however, but not as large of one that it would have been six months ago.
Yeah, The whole idea of this proposal seems inheritly stupid to me. Sure, I know that the whole idea of this bill is to cut costs and promote competition, but it seems to be doing quite the opposite.
For example, if a government office is already successfully using a commercial product, why should they have to throw it away and use an OSS product? Besides losing the money originally spent on the software, you're also going to have to spend money on implimentation and training. AND, if the product isn't as good as the commercial product, that government office is going to lose productivity until the software is improved. Forcing people to use inferior products is also a lousy way to encourage people that OSS is higher quality. All it could take is one vocal group of disgruntled Oracle or Office users proving that MySQL or KOffice is inferior to get parts of this bill overturned.
Not to mention that the whole idea of forcing Open Source software down people's throats seems wrong to me. If there is a better commercial option out there, everyone should be allowed to it! This is still America we're talking about, a country where you should still have freedom of choice. The Open Source community shouldn't start acting like a bunch of communists in order to promote their agenda.
The only problem with this plan is that there is almost ALWAYS one or two people in every organization who would be smart enough to figure out what you're doing. It might be a CS teacher who used to work as a network admin, or perhaps some 11th grade "hacker in training" who's Dad used to work at Cisco. If it irritates them enough, they're going to figure it out eventually.
If you're smart, you'll get to know these people and get on their good side, so they keep their mouths shut. Perhaps you could give them first dibs to new equipment, or offer them advice with problems on their home computers. Otherwise, they might start bitching to the "right" people to get you in trouble.
The CS teacher could go to the school superintendant stating that these blocked ports "are imparing his teaching ability". The superintendant probably isn't going to know what he's talking about, but it won't stop him from giving YOU a hard time about it! The student could write a article in the school paper with the headline of "Yadda Yadda High secretly CENSORS music from school network!" I've seen this approach used at my local University, and it did a great job of getting the President's attention. Either way, you're going to get in trouble for not stating your plan in the first place.
Seriously, I liked the bandwidth throttling plan better than this one. As long as the P2P applications are working to some extent, you have a good chance of no one figuring it out.