Your question about multiple drives per channel is for IDE controllers. This could be a potential concern, and many IDE RAID cards have one channel per drive, that they support. For example, look at this SX6000 from Promise. If you do have a RAID card fail, you'll have to replace it with an identical card. It's pretty rare, but it certainly can happen.
Your also asking about adding a drive to a RAID array. Some drive arrays will allow this, but generally speaking it won't. If you want to add a drive to an array you'll generally have to pull your data off of your drive array first. Once this is done, than the drive array can be rebuilt. This is very much dependent upon the card, and not the manufacture.
As for two disks going out, this is enough to make your whole RAID array fail. This is why if one disk in a RAID array fails it's critical to replace it immeadiately. This leads to many RAID drive arrays having a hot spare capability in addition to hot swap (yes this is available on IDE).
I have seen Adobe do something suspicous this ways. I have seen computers where I installed Windows and Office under one name and Adobe stuff under another. Digging through the registry later I found the Windows / Office name attached to an adobe registration key within the registry.
This was NOT the name used when installing the Adobe products. Obviously Adobe is surreptisously spying and gaining certain information about you regardless of what you tell it. Whether it sends this information back to adobe or not is something another person will have to tell. This in essence is spying on you, the question is what does it do about it?
Interesting things here. They had pictures of many items, including a picture of a Dell which leads me to wonder if were looking at paid product placement, programmer placeholder, or a picture that would come include with a driver? Perhaps such pictures would be part of an OEM customization kit? I also noticed that the option for copying music from a device was to use windows media player. Last I checked, copy and paste works just fine, so is this some kind of DRM thing? That would certainly not be compatible with Ogg Vorbis. I didn't see a simply copy from option without using Windows Media Player, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done as just another disk.
The one thing I saw that I really liked was a data syncronization utility. The ability to keep your contacts in your PDA, phone, email and whatever else all synchronized without using multiple computers strikes me as a good thing. Presently you usually need dedicated syncronization tools, and they tend not to play well with each other. Now since Outlook Express isn't going to given out anymore, and there not about to include Outlook itself, it makes me wonder what they are planning to do address book wise, and how this ties into syncing, presently a pain with phones and PDA's typically needing different software.
The problem with the Tampa system, or an airport system or any other public environment is that they are all transient in nature. An airport has millions of people going through every year, with a pretty good chunk in a hurry to catch a flight. Many of these people will never pass through that given airport again. You also have a much larger database of positives to pick from. The Tampa system had 30,000 mugshots to base from. There were simply too many out of control variables for the system to be effective. In essence you are looking at a system that doesn't deal well with transient environments. Now let's compare this to casinos where the technology was developed and you'll soon see the flaws with the Tampa system.
The casinos in Vegas have an official "black book" list of only 38 people they are required to keep out, Atlantic City has 173. In addition to this most casinos partake in a mutual database of people that they know or suspect are cheats. From these sources you have a listing of some 3000 - 5000 cheats (source being techs from Vegas I worked with for a while, can't find link to verify) that they want to look out for. They also have something more important. They have an environment where people enter and tend to stay for a few hours. They also have a lot of high quality video cameras from many angles, and have a fixed viewing area. Translation, they don't have nearly as many people to look for, can view a relatively stationary target from multiple angles, and have a lot more time to compare a picked out face to a database, and no security needs that an airport would have that dictate immeadiate detention.
The reasons this works in casinos almost all stack against this working in a public environment like a city center or an airport. The question is, how long until technology improves before such systems would be considered to have an acceptable false positive rate? Standards are also needed for compensation for people who are falsely picked up and miss flights, hotels and the like. A missed airplane flight can be thousands of dollars, what is the appropriate compensation to the poor detained soul that is not in fact a terrorist or criminal?
Probably not as bad you think. This is a fairly large site with excellent penetration into the tech community. It's also read predominently by people who use Windows - despite the open source slant. I don't have access to the site logs, but I know I have heard CmdrTaco tell that a good majority of the page views here are on Windows boxes. Strange as it sounds, this is probably one of the best places Microsoft to advertise and reach a critical target market - the people that are the backbone of IT. Although I do have to admit the first time I saw a MS ad here I took a screen shot for posterity. Before you flame me, I'm not defending MS, I'm just saying that their ads here make sense.
They've done this, sorta. They've been nailed for hiring people to set up half-ass web sites talking about a movie and made to look like amateur jobs. If I remember correctly, slashdot had an article about some guy who got $10,000 a pop for each such page a while back. To give the page credibility they would "leak" screenshots or other information to the website. I can't remember the term for it, but it's a well practiced form of marketing in marketingville.
CPU Speed? When did I say anything about CPU speed? Of course you have to test the whole bloody system, I/O has always been the stumbling block for speed. A good SCSI 160 drive with a 3.9 ms access speed and a decent amount of RAM will be far more effective for speed than an upgraded processor.
The point I was trying to make is that Apples test results were so biased as to be fundamentally flawed. Slashdot had an article about it a little while ago, with hundreds of comments exposing different flaws with their tests. Heck the test companies results didn't even agree with their results for the Dell server when Dell had them do the test if memory serves. Frankly, any test done in which there is colusion, much less cooperation between the test company and the company whose product is being tested is inherintly corrupt.
A test must be done by an independent research team with off the shelf hardware and repeatable results. Software should not be optimized in any manner, since the overwhelming majority of people who use software won't optimize it. Your right in one regard though, certain platforms while always do certain tasks better than others. This is why benchmark tests must test a number of software packages across multiple platforms. If, after all, you run photoshop for a living and could care less about Quake, than the fact that a certain platform does best at Photoshop, the fact that it performs worse in most other tests becomes incidental.
About time, now we can finally get an independent comparison review of the G5 vs Athlon and Intel offerings. Question is, how long will it take someone who isn't going to prejudice the tests to tell us how fast it really is?
Why on earth would they replace Mac labs with Linux?
Good question. In my personal ancedotal experience, the short answer was "license audit". For schools that often have old computers, rampant theft problems, changing admins, donated equipment, and no records organizational system - a license audit can be a financial disaster. Unable to "prove" that they have licenses for software, they can be forced to fork over untold thousands to buy what they already own. Usually this results in the years IT budget getting wiped out, and always results in massive headaches.
The other answer is one of hardware cost management, as Linux can run on older hardware that would otherwise need to be disposed of. With financial shortfalls in many schools, there often is no other alternative. They can also save money on licensing software upfront. Options do exist. The flipside of this is that Linux has an overall marketshare roughly equivalent to Mac (depending on Gatner vs whoever else did study). Since the overwhelming majority of the world uses Windows, this is the most appropriate platform to ready students for. Now if Linux manages to change this in several years with MS continuating customer alienation campaign proving successful, than my answer would be that Linux is the appropriate thing to teach kids.
Yes Linux is considerably harder to setup vs Windows or Mac, so the schools that are doing this are utterly dependent on having an in-house *nix expert available. Since so few people in education do know *nix, it's a major stumbling block. Frankly, the overwhelming majority of the educational institutes I dealt with would be dead in the water if someone gave them a lab of computers on the condition they run Linux. Meanwhile, the servers, which the students should rightly never touch, are starting switching to Linux - especially for file servers.
In short it's a transitional period right now for Linux on the desktop. I don't think it's ready yet - and desktop marketshare surveys excunuate my point. Now, all of this would change if Apple would ever get off their but and release their internal Athlon build of Jaguar! With their OS now running on BSD based Unix, many of there software interoperability issues are starting to be taken down. If they released their OS for the Intel platform, I believe that they could rapidly bring their marketshare from about 2% to about 10%.
Look, I'm sorry if I broke your heart. Don't take it personal, ok? What you read may not have been what you wanted to hear, but it's factually accurate. If you can actually think of something wrong with my comment other "doesn't worship mac", than put it in writing with a response. All the hurt feelings in the world aren't going to change the reality of the situation one iota though. There are a number of issues here for Apple to address, and I would welcome them to do so. But to simply make a comment like
-1 Troll is more like it
just shows you haven't the foggiest how to try to refute what I'm saying. I happen to have extensive exposure to this situation, and my statement stands. If you think something is factually innacurate, than spell it out. I'm not just some windows fanatic, I have and use Linux, Windows, and have even owned one of Apples' less than lusterful computers.
Hey I agree with you on the elitists part. To be perfectly honest, the worst ones are the Mac users - not the Linux people. I'm trying to work on the part about getting the non-elitists to move into Linux. I think the best thing some of the elitists Linux crowd could do is to keep their mouth shut when a newbie needs help. After all, isn't part of being elite to hold seperate yourself from the masses? Thus, they should seperate and stay out of the way.
Your right, windows has a lot of arcane voodoo, and it has people who can't be bothered to RTFM. I've also supported it extensively over the years. I'm just pointing out what I've seen that's holding Linux back. I'm not trying to bash it, heck I use it at home.
I didn't even like it when MS made as many interface changes as they did in XP. This garaunteed that I would have users who would have problems figuring out how to do what they wanted to do. The interface needs to be predictable and intuitive for users, something that has always been in favor of the Mac over the years.
Funny, when I was working in a rather large government agency, they also had pretty similiar views to what I wrote. I flat out asked about why Linux wasn't getting adopted in any kind of manner considering that the IT people almost all personally used it at home. It didn't get deployed, and wasn't even being considered because it's not ready for the desktop, and won't be for years. Compare this to servers where serious testing was active and it's widespread use was going to unquestionably grow.
Guess what. Your company is going to switch to Linux in a few years, and you'll be eating your fucking hat.
You write your comments like I'm a user being told what's best for me will be decided by my betters. This is exactly the kind of elitist asshole attitude that's holding Linux back. Are you really this arrogant, or do you not realize how you come across? Coming from someone who shouts out parts of their post, it comes across as laughable. I've done IT for a fair number of years in some pretty large business environements, in addition to the Federal government, so I'm fairly sure I know how IT departments operate.
I'll give you a clue, since you seem to lack one. In the real world, most networks are owned by small to medium sized busienesses. In the real world, these businesses can't afford or cost justify a *nix admin much less a Windows admin. In the real world most networks are run by someone who got put in charge because the boss heard they have a computer at home. These people are not interested in becoming full time admins, they are interested in doing their day to day job. These are people who do have the time or desire to deal with learning what a tarball or whatever else is.
Now, I've got a two for one clue offer going today, so here's your second clue. People aren't going to switch to free software that they don't know how to use, especially if it means retraining on all of their computer programs. People also have programs that they are required to operate, often from vendors or suppliers, and these programs require Windows. Perhaps you've wondered why Linux isn't on all of these computers already when it's free? By the logic you spouse, everyone would have already done so. Think about it, ok, that's all I ask, just think.
I'd like to see Linux gain marketshare, and I happen to have been in a position over the years to have had a pretty good idea on what's holding it back. Instead of getting your panties in a bunch, look and see what you can do to make it beter so that in a few years, companies are switching to Linux on the desktop.
You yourself admit that Linux isn't coming for a few years, now stop, breath, and think to yourself that there must be reasons why. You might even consider that it's possible to do something about it. Once you consider that possibility it is then time to come up with ideas on what to do about it. Guess what, I was giving ideas on what to do about. IHBT, and have wasted too much time on this already, but such a glaring example had to be pointed out.
How to gain real marketshare for Linux on the desktop.
Standardize all hardware installation and removal in one place across all distros.
Name changes that non-it people get. Grep makes sense to IT types, but few outside IT are going to know what it means. Similiarly, I shouldn't have to explain that eth0 refers to their Network card and so on.
Improve Wine. You can give me a hundred stories about how with your uber-133t skills you get a certain archaic package to work under a certain distro and that lusers don't need graphics anyways. This is exactly the type of attitude that will keep Linux from the masses. They want to be able to use their programs, and most could care less what OS their using (how many times have you talked to someone who didn't even know which OS they had?). If they can happily use the same programs they used before, they could well not even notice the OS.
Most importantly of all, all versions of MS office must work seamlessly. This is the standard in the business world, and StarOffice, OpenOffice are poor substitutes. They don't want to learn the quirks of these packages, they just want to use MS Office. Nothing is more important for gaining marketshare than this.
Drop the attitude. The attitude that many newbies encounter is more than enough to send them back into bill's not-so loving arms. When someone is trying Linux they far too often run into someone who an elitist that thinks they should not only know *nix inside out, and be a programmer to boot. When joe-sixpack gets told to go RTFM after asking what a tarball is, he's going to get indignant and goes back to what he knows - windows.
Have a resource available to those who come from the Windows world that tells people in plain English what the Linux terminology is for equivalent ms / windows functions. Also have this resource list programs like gimp that can replace their old windows programs. A frequent complaint of those that try switching to Linux is that they can't do what they used to freely do under Windows. Slashdot types will respond, of course they can, they don't know what to use. Well, how would they know what to use?
I used to support this field for a couple of years. I've worked with schools through the US and Canada in every state and province. I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands of schools, so I've run into this. The product I supported runs on Macintosh as well as various Windows, DOS and Novell flavors. We were even experimenting with Linux, with mixed results (server side would work fairly decently, client side was very difficult to get to work right under wine). Thus, understand from our standpoint, we were pretty OS agnostic.
The short of it is that Mac labs were dissapearing accross Canada and the US at an incredible rate. The schools on the whole hate the Mac's. They had support issues that easily were as great as Windows labs, debunking the myth that Mac's don't need support. They were proprietary and not what the students were going to use in the real world (outside advertising / graphics). For schools and teachers that actually do want to prepare students for the outside world, this is an issue (yes some teachers really care). Hardware that could run on the mac was always more expensive, at least 10% more, typically could run up to half again as much. This is for companies selling the exact identical piece of kit.
This also doesn't take into account that appletalk is so chatty that they had to buy a dedicated router to keep them from crapflooding the rest of the network. This gets expensive very quickly. Now that apples have finally joined the realm of TCP/IP, it's not the problem it once was - but the damage was done. This problem got so bad that about the first thing I had to do was check and see if they had a mac lab, regardless of whether or not out software was running on it!
Software for the mac tends to be much more limited in selection, and often more expensive. Since most vendors don't make mac versions, the few that do feel free to charge more due to a lack of competition. The mac's themselves are also expensive. They can buy a lab of wintel systems cheaper than a lab of mac's, and they don't run into all the proprietary issues that mac forces on it's users.
It's not a case of apples school days are numbered, it's a case of a few leftover mac labs waiting for the next budget to become available to replace them with wintels. Frankly, mac labs were very rarely ever replaced with macs, and then only if their was a rabid mac lover in decision chain. For perspective, roughly 3% of replacement labs that used to be Novell were replaced by Novell, and this was far more common than a mac lab getting replaced by a mac lab.
You might be thinking I'm some kind of rabid windows evangelican at this point - I'm not. I've got and use Linux & Windows at home, and am about to start school for SUN. To be honest, I see more Linux labs surpassing mac labs in schools in the very near future if it hasn't already happened. Certainly linux is starting to penetrate into school for file servers. Remember that many of these mac labs only originally got installed in the first place because Apple sold the computers at a loss or simply gave them away to schools.
Any software that doesn't allow one copy also has an invalid license. Ergo by preventing me by license or DRM (digital restrictions managment) from making my one copy, the license is also invalid. Not that I'm rooting for the one copy thing to knock down the GPL, I'm just saying this is a two-edged sword that could also be used against draconian liceneses and DRM measures. Regardless, this bears watching. You can't argue that it works for more than one and than counter that you mean it can work for less than one.
This problem will be fixed the day that Al Gore wins a presidential election he didn't run in. Unfortunately I can't see anything short of a non-candidate winning that will get Joe Sixpacks' attention. Nothing short of that will get the kind of public scrutiny needed to make this go away. I don't like it because I view the vote as something sacred, but somebody somewhere is going to do this to make the point. It's fundamentally no different than MS ignoring yet another security flaw and finally an exploit gets released to force them to do so.
The article talks about one problem that was their 5 years ago and was still there when reviewed. This was claimed to be fixed years and in fact was never fixed. Without open source voting machines, there is no way to gain the absolute confidence of the public, and a hacker somewhere is going to prove my point. You may think the newest version of an operating system is a big target, but it's nothing compared to the vote that decides who runs the worlds lone superpower. The only question is who will get the most votes in 2004, mickey mouse or daffy duck?
Some good answers, and some information on effective lobbying of our congress critters. I've actually written a few letters to my congress critters on various tech issues, and have even received replies that actually appeared to answer what I wrote about. I just wish more people voice concers to their congressman than/. He's right on the money on one thing though, more donations to the EFF are going to be required if we want our voice to compete with the likes of MS, RIAA etc.
No! Compressed air for a plane, ship or vehicle, sure. Compressed water? Not gonna happen. You can't compress water, it simply not possible. Think about it, with all the weight of the worlds oceans, water still hasn't compressed. As for water moving faster at different points, sure, but getting compressed, not going to happen.
I'm trying to figure out at what point do you differentiate between "fair use" and "piracy". At what point does "fair use" stop and "piracy" begin? Would letting an immeadiate relative or direct friend make use of a software package be considerered "fair use"? Can you provide an example of what would be considered "fair use" that would contradict the licensing terms of an EULA?
This is FUD pure and simple. They simply don't have the resources in lawyers and the like to take this to a widespread level. A tactic used by civil rights workers back in the 60's was to have so many people present, and so many people arrested that they overwhelmed the system, forcing the let-go of the rest. If enough people get involved in enough jurisdictions, than at least one of them will get an intelligent judge. With that intelligent judge a precedent about fair use with regards to music can be set, letting the rest go.
Enough cases and favorable precedent will be set somewhere. Some of these precedents will make their way up to district courts, and could eventually make their way all the way to the Supreme Court, a risk the **AA's just can't take. We've seen this before from the **AA's where they were afraid of a precedent going against them and dropped the case. They know about this, and don't dare make this as widespread as many people seem to believe they would.
Thus you see why I am so flabergasted. That's why I titled my comment "finally opposed". This is the first time the EFF has done something I consider to be wrong. Besides the technology there defending is having someone else decide on your behalf when to push that "skip/ff" button. If this was software that you used yourself in your home, than it would be a different story, but it isn't (not as far as I could tell from the story).
Slashdot Mirror
Your also asking about adding a drive to a RAID array. Some drive arrays will allow this, but generally speaking it won't. If you want to add a drive to an array you'll generally have to pull your data off of your drive array first. Once this is done, than the drive array can be rebuilt. This is very much dependent upon the card, and not the manufacture.
As for two disks going out, this is enough to make your whole RAID array fail. This is why if one disk in a RAID array fails it's critical to replace it immeadiately. This leads to many RAID drive arrays having a hot spare capability in addition to hot swap (yes this is available on IDE).
I have seen Adobe do something suspicous this ways. I have seen computers where I installed Windows and Office under one name and Adobe stuff under another. Digging through the registry later I found the Windows / Office name attached to an adobe registration key within the registry.
This was NOT the name used when installing the Adobe products. Obviously Adobe is surreptisously spying and gaining certain information about you regardless of what you tell it. Whether it sends this information back to adobe or not is something another person will have to tell. This in essence is spying on you, the question is what does it do about it?
Interesting things here. They had pictures of many items, including a picture of a Dell which leads me to wonder if were looking at paid product placement, programmer placeholder, or a picture that would come include with a driver? Perhaps such pictures would be part of an OEM customization kit? I also noticed that the option for copying music from a device was to use windows media player. Last I checked, copy and paste works just fine, so is this some kind of DRM thing? That would certainly not be compatible with Ogg Vorbis. I didn't see a simply copy from option without using Windows Media Player, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be done as just another disk.
The one thing I saw that I really liked was a data syncronization utility. The ability to keep your contacts in your PDA, phone, email and whatever else all synchronized without using multiple computers strikes me as a good thing. Presently you usually need dedicated syncronization tools, and they tend not to play well with each other. Now since Outlook Express isn't going to given out anymore, and there not about to include Outlook itself, it makes me wonder what they are planning to do address book wise, and how this ties into syncing, presently a pain with phones and PDA's typically needing different software.
The problem with the Tampa system, or an airport system or any other public environment is that they are all transient in nature. An airport has millions of people going through every year, with a pretty good chunk in a hurry to catch a flight. Many of these people will never pass through that given airport again. You also have a much larger database of positives to pick from. The Tampa system had 30,000 mugshots to base from. There were simply too many out of control variables for the system to be effective. In essence you are looking at a system that doesn't deal well with transient environments. Now let's compare this to casinos where the technology was developed and you'll soon see the flaws with the Tampa system.
The casinos in Vegas have an official "black book" list of only 38 people they are required to keep out, Atlantic City has 173. In addition to this most casinos partake in a mutual database of people that they know or suspect are cheats. From these sources you have a listing of some 3000 - 5000 cheats (source being techs from Vegas I worked with for a while, can't find link to verify) that they want to look out for. They also have something more important. They have an environment where people enter and tend to stay for a few hours. They also have a lot of high quality video cameras from many angles, and have a fixed viewing area. Translation, they don't have nearly as many people to look for, can view a relatively stationary target from multiple angles, and have a lot more time to compare a picked out face to a database, and no security needs that an airport would have that dictate immeadiate detention.
The reasons this works in casinos almost all stack against this working in a public environment like a city center or an airport. The question is, how long until technology improves before such systems would be considered to have an acceptable false positive rate? Standards are also needed for compensation for people who are falsely picked up and miss flights, hotels and the like. A missed airplane flight can be thousands of dollars, what is the appropriate compensation to the poor detained soul that is not in fact a terrorist or criminal?
Probably not as bad you think. This is a fairly large site with excellent penetration into the tech community. It's also read predominently by people who use Windows - despite the open source slant. I don't have access to the site logs, but I know I have heard CmdrTaco tell that a good majority of the page views here are on Windows boxes. Strange as it sounds, this is probably one of the best places Microsoft to advertise and reach a critical target market - the people that are the backbone of IT. Although I do have to admit the first time I saw a MS ad here I took a screen shot for posterity. Before you flame me, I'm not defending MS, I'm just saying that their ads here make sense.
They've done this, sorta. They've been nailed for hiring people to set up half-ass web sites talking about a movie and made to look like amateur jobs. If I remember correctly, slashdot had an article about some guy who got $10,000 a pop for each such page a while back. To give the page credibility they would "leak" screenshots or other information to the website. I can't remember the term for it, but it's a well practiced form of marketing in marketingville.
CPU Speed? When did I say anything about CPU speed? Of course you have to test the whole bloody system, I/O has always been the stumbling block for speed. A good SCSI 160 drive with a 3.9 ms access speed and a decent amount of RAM will be far more effective for speed than an upgraded processor.
The point I was trying to make is that Apples test results were so biased as to be fundamentally flawed. Slashdot had an article about it a little while ago, with hundreds of comments exposing different flaws with their tests. Heck the test companies results didn't even agree with their results for the Dell server when Dell had them do the test if memory serves. Frankly, any test done in which there is colusion, much less cooperation between the test company and the company whose product is being tested is inherintly corrupt.
A test must be done by an independent research team with off the shelf hardware and repeatable results. Software should not be optimized in any manner, since the overwhelming majority of people who use software won't optimize it. Your right in one regard though, certain platforms while always do certain tasks better than others. This is why benchmark tests must test a number of software packages across multiple platforms. If, after all, you run photoshop for a living and could care less about Quake, than the fact that a certain platform does best at Photoshop, the fact that it performs worse in most other tests becomes incidental.
About time, now we can finally get an independent comparison review of the G5 vs Athlon and Intel offerings. Question is, how long will it take someone who isn't going to prejudice the tests to tell us how fast it really is?
Good question. In my personal ancedotal experience, the short answer was "license audit". For schools that often have old computers, rampant theft problems, changing admins, donated equipment, and no records organizational system - a license audit can be a financial disaster. Unable to "prove" that they have licenses for software, they can be forced to fork over untold thousands to buy what they already own. Usually this results in the years IT budget getting wiped out, and always results in massive headaches.
The other answer is one of hardware cost management, as Linux can run on older hardware that would otherwise need to be disposed of. With financial shortfalls in many schools, there often is no other alternative. They can also save money on licensing software upfront. Options do exist. The flipside of this is that Linux has an overall marketshare roughly equivalent to Mac (depending on Gatner vs whoever else did study). Since the overwhelming majority of the world uses Windows, this is the most appropriate platform to ready students for. Now if Linux manages to change this in several years with MS continuating customer alienation campaign proving successful, than my answer would be that Linux is the appropriate thing to teach kids.
Yes Linux is considerably harder to setup vs Windows or Mac, so the schools that are doing this are utterly dependent on having an in-house *nix expert available. Since so few people in education do know *nix, it's a major stumbling block. Frankly, the overwhelming majority of the educational institutes I dealt with would be dead in the water if someone gave them a lab of computers on the condition they run Linux. Meanwhile, the servers, which the students should rightly never touch, are starting switching to Linux - especially for file servers.
In short it's a transitional period right now for Linux on the desktop. I don't think it's ready yet - and desktop marketshare surveys excunuate my point. Now, all of this would change if Apple would ever get off their but and release their internal Athlon build of Jaguar! With their OS now running on BSD based Unix, many of there software interoperability issues are starting to be taken down. If they released their OS for the Intel platform, I believe that they could rapidly bring their marketshare from about 2% to about 10%.
just shows you haven't the foggiest how to try to refute what I'm saying. I happen to have extensive exposure to this situation, and my statement stands. If you think something is factually innacurate, than spell it out. I'm not just some windows fanatic, I have and use Linux, Windows, and have even owned one of Apples' less than lusterful computers.
Hey I agree with you on the elitists part. To be perfectly honest, the worst ones are the Mac users - not the Linux people. I'm trying to work on the part about getting the non-elitists to move into Linux. I think the best thing some of the elitists Linux crowd could do is to keep their mouth shut when a newbie needs help. After all, isn't part of being elite to hold seperate yourself from the masses? Thus, they should seperate and stay out of the way.
Your right, windows has a lot of arcane voodoo, and it has people who can't be bothered to RTFM. I've also supported it extensively over the years. I'm just pointing out what I've seen that's holding Linux back. I'm not trying to bash it, heck I use it at home.
I didn't even like it when MS made as many interface changes as they did in XP. This garaunteed that I would have users who would have problems figuring out how to do what they wanted to do. The interface needs to be predictable and intuitive for users, something that has always been in favor of the Mac over the years.
You write your comments like I'm a user being told what's best for me will be decided by my betters. This is exactly the kind of elitist asshole attitude that's holding Linux back. Are you really this arrogant, or do you not realize how you come across? Coming from someone who shouts out parts of their post, it comes across as laughable. I've done IT for a fair number of years in some pretty large business environements, in addition to the Federal government, so I'm fairly sure I know how IT departments operate.
I'll give you a clue, since you seem to lack one. In the real world, most networks are owned by small to medium sized busienesses. In the real world, these businesses can't afford or cost justify a *nix admin much less a Windows admin. In the real world most networks are run by someone who got put in charge because the boss heard they have a computer at home. These people are not interested in becoming full time admins, they are interested in doing their day to day job. These are people who do have the time or desire to deal with learning what a tarball or whatever else is.
Now, I've got a two for one clue offer going today, so here's your second clue. People aren't going to switch to free software that they don't know how to use, especially if it means retraining on all of their computer programs. People also have programs that they are required to operate, often from vendors or suppliers, and these programs require Windows. Perhaps you've wondered why Linux isn't on all of these computers already when it's free? By the logic you spouse, everyone would have already done so. Think about it, ok, that's all I ask, just think.
I'd like to see Linux gain marketshare, and I happen to have been in a position over the years to have had a pretty good idea on what's holding it back. Instead of getting your panties in a bunch, look and see what you can do to make it beter so that in a few years, companies are switching to Linux on the desktop.
You yourself admit that Linux isn't coming for a few years, now stop, breath, and think to yourself that there must be reasons why. You might even consider that it's possible to do something about it. Once you consider that possibility it is then time to come up with ideas on what to do about it. Guess what, I was giving ideas on what to do about. IHBT, and have wasted too much time on this already, but such a glaring example had to be pointed out.
How to gain real marketshare for Linux on the desktop.
Standardize all hardware installation and removal in one place across all distros.
Name changes that non-it people get. Grep makes sense to IT types, but few outside IT are going to know what it means. Similiarly, I shouldn't have to explain that eth0 refers to their Network card and so on.
Improve Wine. You can give me a hundred stories about how with your uber-133t skills you get a certain archaic package to work under a certain distro and that lusers don't need graphics anyways. This is exactly the type of attitude that will keep Linux from the masses. They want to be able to use their programs, and most could care less what OS their using (how many times have you talked to someone who didn't even know which OS they had?). If they can happily use the same programs they used before, they could well not even notice the OS.
Most importantly of all, all versions of MS office must work seamlessly. This is the standard in the business world, and StarOffice, OpenOffice are poor substitutes. They don't want to learn the quirks of these packages, they just want to use MS Office. Nothing is more important for gaining marketshare than this.
Drop the attitude. The attitude that many newbies encounter is more than enough to send them back into bill's not-so loving arms. When someone is trying Linux they far too often run into someone who an elitist that thinks they should not only know *nix inside out, and be a programmer to boot. When joe-sixpack gets told to go RTFM after asking what a tarball is, he's going to get indignant and goes back to what he knows - windows.
Have a resource available to those who come from the Windows world that tells people in plain English what the Linux terminology is for equivalent ms / windows functions. Also have this resource list programs like gimp that can replace their old windows programs. A frequent complaint of those that try switching to Linux is that they can't do what they used to freely do under Windows. Slashdot types will respond, of course they can, they don't know what to use. Well, how would they know what to use?
The short of it is that Mac labs were dissapearing accross Canada and the US at an incredible rate. The schools on the whole hate the Mac's. They had support issues that easily were as great as Windows labs, debunking the myth that Mac's don't need support. They were proprietary and not what the students were going to use in the real world (outside advertising / graphics). For schools and teachers that actually do want to prepare students for the outside world, this is an issue (yes some teachers really care). Hardware that could run on the mac was always more expensive, at least 10% more, typically could run up to half again as much. This is for companies selling the exact identical piece of kit.
This also doesn't take into account that appletalk is so chatty that they had to buy a dedicated router to keep them from crapflooding the rest of the network. This gets expensive very quickly. Now that apples have finally joined the realm of TCP/IP, it's not the problem it once was - but the damage was done. This problem got so bad that about the first thing I had to do was check and see if they had a mac lab, regardless of whether or not out software was running on it!
Software for the mac tends to be much more limited in selection, and often more expensive. Since most vendors don't make mac versions, the few that do feel free to charge more due to a lack of competition. The mac's themselves are also expensive. They can buy a lab of wintel systems cheaper than a lab of mac's, and they don't run into all the proprietary issues that mac forces on it's users.
It's not a case of apples school days are numbered, it's a case of a few leftover mac labs waiting for the next budget to become available to replace them with wintels. Frankly, mac labs were very rarely ever replaced with macs, and then only if their was a rabid mac lover in decision chain. For perspective, roughly 3% of replacement labs that used to be Novell were replaced by Novell, and this was far more common than a mac lab getting replaced by a mac lab.
You might be thinking I'm some kind of rabid windows evangelican at this point - I'm not. I've got and use Linux & Windows at home, and am about to start school for SUN. To be honest, I see more Linux labs surpassing mac labs in schools in the very near future if it hasn't already happened. Certainly linux is starting to penetrate into school for file servers. Remember that many of these mac labs only originally got installed in the first place because Apple sold the computers at a loss or simply gave them away to schools.
Pricewatch shows venders with the 7200 RPM drive for $339 @ 60GB capacity. Although at the least the MSRP price *should* be included in the article.
Any software that doesn't allow one copy also has an invalid license. Ergo by preventing me by license or DRM (digital restrictions managment) from making my one copy, the license is also invalid. Not that I'm rooting for the one copy thing to knock down the GPL, I'm just saying this is a two-edged sword that could also be used against draconian liceneses and DRM measures. Regardless, this bears watching. You can't argue that it works for more than one and than counter that you mean it can work for less than one.
The article talks about one problem that was their 5 years ago and was still there when reviewed. This was claimed to be fixed years and in fact was never fixed. Without open source voting machines, there is no way to gain the absolute confidence of the public, and a hacker somewhere is going to prove my point. You may think the newest version of an operating system is a big target, but it's nothing compared to the vote that decides who runs the worlds lone superpower. The only question is who will get the most votes in 2004, mickey mouse or daffy duck?
Just saw, it does appear that I am wrong and that water can be compressed - just with great difficulty. I stand corrected.
Some good answers, and some information on effective lobbying of our congress critters. I've actually written a few letters to my congress critters on various tech issues, and have even received replies that actually appeared to answer what I wrote about. I just wish more people voice concers to their congressman than /. He's right on the money on one thing though, more donations to the EFF are going to be required if we want our voice to compete with the likes of MS, RIAA etc.
No! Compressed air for a plane, ship or vehicle, sure. Compressed water? Not gonna happen. You can't compress water, it simply not possible. Think about it, with all the weight of the worlds oceans, water still hasn't compressed. As for water moving faster at different points, sure, but getting compressed, not going to happen.
"The upcoming boom in automobiles is likely to fail unless we install governors on all cars to enforce speed limits."
Reading this, does anyone else go, hunh?
I'm trying to figure out at what point do you differentiate between "fair use" and "piracy". At what point does "fair use" stop and "piracy" begin? Would letting an immeadiate relative or direct friend make use of a software package be considerered "fair use"? Can you provide an example of what would be considered "fair use" that would contradict the licensing terms of an EULA?
Enough cases and favorable precedent will be set somewhere. Some of these precedents will make their way up to district courts, and could eventually make their way all the way to the Supreme Court, a risk the **AA's just can't take. We've seen this before from the **AA's where they were afraid of a precedent going against them and dropped the case. They know about this, and don't dare make this as widespread as many people seem to believe they would.
Thus you see why I am so flabergasted. That's why I titled my comment "finally opposed". This is the first time the EFF has done something I consider to be wrong. Besides the technology there defending is having someone else decide on your behalf when to push that "skip/ff" button. If this was software that you used yourself in your home, than it would be a different story, but it isn't (not as far as I could tell from the story).