Personally, I don't consider a 5MB shockwave file a page at all, rather it is an obstacle placed between myself and what I seek, much like the wristband weilding bouncer at the front door of a nightclub. I'm sick of all the shockwave/flash crap that I have to wade through. It generally serves no useful purpose other than to stroke the ego of some web designer who convinced some misguided marketeer that a fifteen second animation intro will give more "sticky eyeballs". Here is an example of that taken to a ludicrous extreme, where usability and accesability are sacrificed on the alter of coolness to "enhance" content of dubious value. Read the manifesto to see what I'm talking about.
Embedded audio falls in the same category. It's all vanity, and anyone who expects me to pay for that can kiss my ass.
In the rare circumstances where I might go to a page specifically for such content, that page would have it's own economic model and subsequent payment structure. Sputnik7 is one of those rare sites. Their animations add to the site without getting in the way. I would have no problem paying for their content, provided it was reasonable; say $.10 for a song or short film, maybe $1.00 for a full length anime, but I'm sure as hell not going to pay for their animated menus. I like not having to drive to the video store, but not enough that I'm willing to pay more for it. The same goes for FTP.
Downloading trial software is something else again. I wouldn't buy a car from a dealer who charged me to test drive, and the same goes for software vendors. Same for the guy buying the t-shirt. Any merchant who charges you for the privilege of browsing their wares is too full of themselves and needs to go out of business.
As for the per-diem idea, I think it's a lot more sound than per-page, But it's essentially a subscription model. Why pay $.10 per day when $3.00 per month is so much easier, and at that point why do it per month when you could just pay $36 per year and not have to worry about all these stupid micropayments? The "problems" you point out I don't see as problems, it's simply an analog to real world subscriptions. If I subscribe to a magazine and all I read are the little half page blurbs at the front while I'm sitting on the can, I pay the same as the professor who makes 200 photocopies of the 10 page main article for class discussion or the dentist who puts it out in his waiting room for who knows how many people to read. If I don't like it, too bad for me.
Web sites need to have their own payment models based on what they do, just as magazines and movie theaters have different payment models based on what they do.
That said, I don't like the per-page idea at all. Too much opportunity for abuse. There's probably a site out there that it makes sense for, but only if there really isn't any other way, and I can't think of a situation where that would be true.
It would still require electricity to power the book, and there would have to be traces embedded in the pages to get the electricity to the print. Interesting idea, though.
I don't think the computer monitor idea is silly at all, especially when you consider the DPI that a good printer can acheive. You'd just print an array of RGB dots on a sheet thats, say, 34"x44" (standard E size, which most plotters can handle, including the inkjet plotter I'm eyeing thoughtfully at this very moment). Frankly, a 56" diagonal viewable screen that I can pin to my wall like a poster doesn't sound silly to me at all...
Of course, it'll still require support circuitry and such (which can also be printed, I used to work at a company that did that) and interface connectors and such, so in the short term it would just make flat-panel monitors cheaper.
As for the comments that "those who can, do, those who can't, get MBAs," consider: you can argue that a good website is important to most businesses now. You'd probably even be right. But having decent management goes to the very core of any business endeavor; managers (with MBAs!) will always be in demand.
First, I was speaking from personal experience and presented several observations to support my inflamatory statement, which I'm guessing you didn't bother to read.
Second, not everyone who reads/. is a web monkey. I mostly do mechanical design, and take care of IT stuff and maintain the website as needed.
Third, I've worked under some excellent managers, and it hasn't escaped my notice that not one of them had an MBA! I even went so far as to describe one of them. It also hasn't escaped my notice that the MBAs that I've worked under have universally been morons with no managerial skills, and the only apparent benefit they brought to their respective companies was the ability to manipulate the quarterly statements in order to raise the stock price.
Fourth, the whole problem with MBAs is that they generally go into it because it's a bright career path. Conversely, most engineers go into engineering because they like it. Anyone who chooses a career path based solely on how much money they can make is going to be bad at it.
Fifth, yes most companies websites are mostly formalities, and that's probably because most companies websites suck. For an example of an extremely useful and well-designed website I encourage you to visit McMaster-Carr. The first thing you will probably notice is the lack of gratuitous graphics. What's less obvious is that they took a 3000+ page catalog with over 370,000 products and made it so usable online that the person at my company who still uses the print version is a part-time machinist who's a total technophobe. If more companies made their sites that useful and usable, they'd be a much bigger part of the business world.
"Those who can, do. Those who can't major in Business."
I've dealt with my share of MBAs at various stages of developement, from the larval student stage when I was a math tutor, up to the aged veteran who made his fortune bringing failing companies back from the brink of death. Every one of them was just barely smart enough to get into college.
All the schooling in the world won't help if you're incapable of learning from your mistakes, listening to the experts you hire, or thinking beyond the next quarterly statement. I read an article about 10 years ago (I think it was in the Wall Street Journal) that said most companies would rather hire someone with an English degree than a Business degree. The reasoning being that someone with an English degree knows how to communicate, and they can learn the business stuff easily enough. The converse didn't seem to be true.
I'm not saying an engineer would do a better job of running a business, but at least an engineer has the training to make logical decisions based on the facts they are presented with.
The CEO of the company I work for now is the best businessman I've ever met. He's been, at various times in his life, a carpenter, a machinist, a welder, and an engineer. He took some time to read a few books on sales and hired a consultant to teach him business management and strategy, and I have no problem puting my future in his hands. His background and experience with the things my company does are extremely helpful, but what really makes a difference is his ability to listen to others and plan for the long term.
Go here and check out their 5811 under PC/104 & PC/104+ SBC. Here's the short list of features:
Intel Pentium MMX or AMD K6, K6-2, K6-2/3D Up to 450 MHz CPU with 100 MHz system bus 512 KB L2 Pipeline burst Cache memory Two DIMM sockets supports ECC / SDRAM up to 512 MB Dual Ultra DMA/33 EIDE and folppy interface CRT / Flat Panel Display interface with 2 or 4 MB display memory LVDS supports Flat Panel Display cable up to 20' 10/100 Base-T network interface using Intel 82558 Ultra Fast and Wide SCSI-3 supports 40 MB/s Disk-On-Chip (DOC) socket supports up to 144 MB Flash disk Four serials ports, one parallel port and two USB ports Dynapro Touchscreen interface Thermally controlled CPU & system fans
It runs Linux just fine (SuSE 6.3), although I never had a chance to try it from the DOC, since I got the DOCs with Phar Lap already flashed on them. We even got our touchscreen to work! (Sorry, I don't remember the manufacturer.)
It uses standard 168-pin SDRAM, and supports 100MHz FSB, and it actually has the jumper settings for a 500MHz CPU (not sure why they list 450MHz as the top speed, ours were running at 350MHz). Basically it's a highly integrated, very compact Super7. The footprint is slightly larger than a paperback novel, and the hieght is determined by the RAM. The IDE sockets are laptop style, and the PS/2, serial, parallel, and USB are headers that you have to plug a small interface card into that has the real connectors on it.
The only interface I can think of that you'd be missing is firewire, but in my experience firewire is pretty sketchy under Linux anyway, so you may not be missing much.
When I was working with these I was constantly fantasizing about stealing one and building my own portable system. The only problem I could think of was finding a small enough AT power supply, although it uses an adapter which could easily be modified for any PSU that provided the right voltages. Just make sure your 5V rail is stable, they're kind of sensative to that.
If either of these are considered art, then video games have to be also. So what if it's primarily an entertainment medium, so are TV and Movies. All art has an entertainment aspect.
And yes, I am an artist (mostly music, but I dabble in just about everything).
You wouldn't be able to hook a TFT directly to a standard VGA port because it's not just a matter of a different pinout. Any LCD screen that hooks up to VGA has some sort of converter built in. There are other styles of port that should work, though. I'm think XGA and DVA, but it's been about a year since I've dealt with one of those, and even then it was only indirectly, so I could have my TLAs messed up.
You're an English teacher, right? I think it's safe to assume that you work at a school, and probably that school has some computers, so...
Do they have any *nix boxen?
Do they have any computer classes? If so, do any of them involve *nix?
If the answer to any of these is no, talk to your administration. Knowing *nix can be a definite advantage to you're students when they get thrust into the real world, and teaching them will be much more rewarding than actually being an admin, and if you work it right you'll end up being an admin too. Create the program if it isn't there, and try to get into it if it is. Let them know that you really want to do this. Volunteer for stuff. Is there a computer club? Go to their meetings.
Here's what I did: I got a job doing mechanical assembly at a small company that does custom industrial automation. I had some CAD experience, so I got into the design team, and I ended up doing all the IT stuff too, since I knew more about it than anyone else. As the company grew from 5 employees to 15, it became obvious that the bosses desktop machine should not be doing double-duty as the fileserver. We looked at our options, and they were basically Novell Small Business (about $1500 + $70 per new employee (at least 10 in the next 2 years) + Hardware to run it on) or Linux (free, since I had just got my copy of SuSE 7.1 Pro and it would run fine on the recently retired P-75 we lovingly refered to as The Tower of Power + a 20GB HDD, which brought the cost up to a whopping $120). Win2k was mentioned, but the General Manager was against it, and the cost wasn't that much less than Novell. Given that we're a pretty small company without much extra cash, the choice was simple. I made it even simpler by offering to do the setup as a consultant on my own time for $100, which worked out to about $5 an hour, but it served my ulterior motive to become a *nix admin quite nicely. Sometimes you have to give to get...;)
Don't let your degree or current job get in your way. The best CS instructor I ever had, and my personal *nix guru, got his degree in history.
And as for the age thing, the only advantages younger folks have is enthusiasm and the time to play with stuff. It seems like you've got plenty of the former, and have put in plenty of the later.
Ms. Gibbons, regarding a shareholder resolution which would require MS to be careful about human rights abuse in China:
We have three concerns about Microsoft's China operations, labor rights problems, human rights problems, the sale of technology that may help Chinese government suppress dissent. First, as many of you know, China has terrible labor rights and human rights problems, common forms of labor rights abuse include physical abuse, forced labor, child labor, improper deductions from wages, and dangerous working conditions. The Chinese government does not enforce labor laws, therefore, Microsoft must undertake special measures to ensure its employees and subcontracted employees are not suffering labor rights abuses, and we have no evidence that Microsoft is adequately addressing these problems.
...
If Microsoft wants to do business in China where human rights and labor rights are freely abused, it must take action to avoid complicity in these serious abuses.
As shareholders you should be concerned if Microsoft or suppliers are violating labor rights in China, if Microsoft does not seek to protect employees who are arrested and tortured for religious practices or union activities, or if Microsoft software is used to suppress dissent.
...
Mr. Belluzo's response:
Thank you, Ms. Gibbons. Well, the board recommends a vote against this proposal, believing that it is not necessary. In 1991 the company adopted the Microsoft Corporation business practice standards and compliance policy, to ensure compliance with the laws of the countries in which we operate. In addition, Microsoft already maintains strong policies designed to promote a healthy environment, prohibit harassment, and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, or national origin.
Huh?
What exactly does that mean? Microsoft follows the labour laws of a country infamous for abuse of labour and human rights? Are we meant to be reassured by this? It's nice to know that Microsoft promotes a healthy work environment, but that doesn't address Ms. Gibbons' concerns in the slightest.
Anyway, I also have a new most hated buzzword, and that is "massively mobilizing". I think it's even worse than "going forward". It's a good thing they aren't massively mobilizing going forward, or I might have to take my sniper skills into meatspace.
And my final thought on the whole thing; these are some of the RICHEST MEN IN THE WORLD! Why can't they GET DECENT FSCKING HAIRCUTS?!?
Same story here in Grass Valley, CA with Pacific Bell/SBC.
My wife and I are considering buying a house. My requirements? A garage (or at least space for one, I worked in construction for almost 10 years) and it must be within 3 miles of the CO!
IANAL, but I would say not necessarily. That would certainly be the best way to do it, but you would also have to be able to show that their abuse has harmed you personally, and more importantly sufficiently to justify the loss of copyright. I think that would be very difficult for any given individual to do, although it could perhaps be done as a class action. I'm asuming, of course, a civil action rather than a criminal one, and I'm not sure what this would fall under. For an individual I suspect it would be easier to use that arguement as a defense or coutersuit.
Despite what everybody here wants to say, or how people want to spin it, the common way that software such as morpheus is used is ethically, and legally wrong.
I would argue that the members of the RIAA have abused their copyrights, and therefore lost those rights.
I offer as evidence the exhorbitant prices charged for music CDs. A CD cost twice as much as a Cassette (asuming one is available), but it actually costs much less to produce a CD. They have used bully tactics, leveraged their distribution monopoly, and pushed through unconstitutional legislation to artifically maintain those inflated prices.
I'm not saying I would necessarily win in court, that would depend on the real evidence I could bring to support my claims. My point was to demonstrate the inherent flaws in your statement of ethical and legal absolutes. Both are dependent almost entirely on spin.
I agree, and that's another thing that makes that sort of copying fair use. There are a lot of warez sites that present stuff "for preview only" and that statement protects them from a lot of liability. At least that was the case when I actually went to warez sites, which was a couple of years ago.
You're definately taking the more difficult side of that arguement.
I could very easily argue that the tape I make for my friend is for nonprofit educational purposes (namely, to introduce my friend to a musical group or style of music that they were formerly unfamiliar with). This arguement becomes even easier if it's a mix tape.
I could also argue that it is a personal backup which I have loaned to my friend.
Anyway, here is an excellent resource if you're interested in the specifics.
I don't think I'm in favor of privatising the shuttle. It's a publicly owned scientific tool, and the public should continue to reap the benefits without having to deal with some corporate agenda. It could certainly be managed more efficiently, but I don't think privatisation is really the answer, especially if it just means contracting out the operation.
What about Corporate sponsorship, though? How much would Pepsi pay to have their logo on the space shuttle wing? How much would Nike pay to be the Official Footware of the US Space Program?
By consumers in this case I mean customers of Microsoft. Samba extends the capabilities of MS Operating Systems beyond what the producer intended, and as such it is totally useless to someone who isn't a consumer of MS products.
Similarly, an auto mechanic who spends all his spare time tricking out his truck is still a consumer of Chevy (or whoever).
Interestingly enough, the fact that the Samba team has a separate implementation of SMB and CIFS than the Microsoft implementation, and that it is intended to be used in the same places where Microsoft file sharing would be done, makes Samba a competitor.
Huh? Without Samba my windows boxes can't see a damned thing on my *nix boxes. How does Samba compete with MS if it allows windows to do something it couldn't do before? Competition implies that they are both trying to do the same thing, which isn't true. Samba isn't for installation on windows, and I don't see MS putting out SMB/CIFS implementations for *nix. I admit it's possible that they have, but I've never heard of it.
And of course Samba has a different implementation than MS. It's not like they had access to MS's code...
Doesn't matter if it was created "by consumers, for consumers", by entering that "market" (I'm using that loosely to mean the set of situations and scenarios in which Samba and NT Server provide the same functionality) Samba became a competitor.
Samba is not a competitor because it offers something MS's SMB/CIFS doesn't; interoperability. You could argue that Samba enables competition, and I would agree, but Samba itself is not a competitor. And since any anti-trust remedy should increase competition, shouldn't something that enables that competition be a beneficiary of that remedy, particularly something that is created and maitained by the very consumers whos protection is at issue?
NT unreliability in the area of interest (CIFS/SMB file sharing) is largely hearsay. If you believe otherwise, please cite (independant, unbiased) studies that prove one way or the other.
Well, there was that thing from the Gartner Group a little while back, although it was about using MS for webservers mostly. I don't doubt that MS's implementation of SMB/CIFS is rock solid, but that amounts to dick when it's sadled with the instability of the OS it's running on. In my personal experience, I have never seen an MS server match the reliability of a *nix server, whether they were maitained by myself or anyone else. If you tell me that your NT server goes a month or two between reboots, I'm still going to point to *nix servers with uptimes of several months or even years, and the 2 minutes it takes for you to reboot that NT box could easily cost a couple thousand dollars in lost productivity, and that's for a company that's not even that big.
I spend 50+ hours a week using windows, and I know it a hell of a lot better than I know Linux. My post wasn't about Linux evangelism, it was about why the Samba team has as much right as anyone else to benefit from any judgement against MS. What does it mean to the consumer if MS has to open up it's API's? Nothing, except what groups like Samba are able to do with them.
So what if they're a third party, they're complaints were equally valid for Sun and Oracle. Their assessment of the proposed settlement was accurate.
You're the one who said said anti-trust is supposed to protect the consumer, how would it do that if the only beneficiaries of this action were the companies that origionally complained? If this were simply a civil action, I would agree that the Samba team have no right to complain, but it isn't civil action, it's anti-trust, and anti-trust is supposed to benefit everyone (well, except for the abusive monopoly, of course).
hint: anti-trust legislation is supposed to be designed to protect the consumer, not a monopoly's competitors. Samba's the latter, not the former.
WRONG!
For Samba to be a competitor it would have to be a company, which it isn't. Even if Samba was a company, or the product of a company, it wouldn't be a competitor.
Samba is a tool created by consumers, for consumers, for the purposes of sharing files and printers in a heterogeneous network using Microsoft's communication protocols and standards (namely SMB and CIFS), which currently have to be reverse-engineered by contributors to the Samba project.
Samba is entirely free, free as in speech, free as in beer. Samba protects the consumer by promoting interoperability in heterogeneous networks.
The Samba team has grounds to object because they are consumers who would like to be able to keep their important files on a single powerful and RELIABLE *nix server rather than clusters of redundant and UNRELIABLE NT servers.
Had you bothered to find out what Samba was before declaring judgement upon them, you would already have known all that.
It's MS's lawyers that should really be "looked up to", they're the ones that wrote the license that prevents OEMs from giving Joe User a choice to use another OS at boot time. Granted, it takes a "good" salesman to sell such a license, and an even "better" businessman to come up with such a feindish clause, but that's not where the true genius lies. Only a lawyer of the "highest" calibur could word such an agreement so that anyone would agree to it.
And no, the quotation marks are not for emphasis...
Out of curiosity, what do you recomend when FreeBSD isn't the best tool for the job?
My company did some mechanical design and prototype assembly for a company that was designing Transmeta-based webservers. They were pretty cool, but the company ran out of funding and is currently treading water looking for another cash infusion.
Basically, it consisted of 3 hot-swapable bricks (each slightly larger than your standard red brick), each containing 2 IDE HDDs and a control card with CPU and communications. They used some crazy thermal interface pads to use the brick chasis as the heatsink, too. I really hope they can get back on their feet, but Transmeta going under would probably mean an end to their product.
I'm just implementing what's written in the book, and eradicating the countless off-by-one bugs
Of course you're bored, you're doing boring stuff. Pick a project you find interesting, or start one of your own, and start hacking. Whenever I get tired of the same old stuff, I write an NPC generator for whatever table-top RPG I'm into at the moment. Soon enough I'll have to find something else to fill that need, but hopefully by then I'll be a good enough programmer to actually contribute something to the community.
Of course, when I first read the title I thought you were talking about Counter-Strike, and my answer was going to be Diablo2...
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I don't consider a 5MB shockwave file a page at all, rather it is an obstacle placed between myself and what I seek, much like the wristband weilding bouncer at the front door of a nightclub. I'm sick of all the shockwave/flash crap that I have to wade through. It generally serves no useful purpose other than to stroke the ego of some web designer who convinced some misguided marketeer that a fifteen second animation intro will give more "sticky eyeballs". Here is an example of that taken to a ludicrous extreme, where usability and accesability are sacrificed on the alter of coolness to "enhance" content of dubious value. Read the manifesto to see what I'm talking about.
Embedded audio falls in the same category. It's all vanity, and anyone who expects me to pay for that can kiss my ass.
In the rare circumstances where I might go to a page specifically for such content, that page would have it's own economic model and subsequent payment structure. Sputnik7 is one of those rare sites. Their animations add to the site without getting in the way. I would have no problem paying for their content, provided it was reasonable; say $.10 for a song or short film, maybe $1.00 for a full length anime, but I'm sure as hell not going to pay for their animated menus. I like not having to drive to the video store, but not enough that I'm willing to pay more for it. The same goes for FTP.
Downloading trial software is something else again. I wouldn't buy a car from a dealer who charged me to test drive, and the same goes for software vendors. Same for the guy buying the t-shirt. Any merchant who charges you for the privilege of browsing their wares is too full of themselves and needs to go out of business.
As for the per-diem idea, I think it's a lot more sound than per-page, But it's essentially a subscription model. Why pay $.10 per day when $3.00 per month is so much easier, and at that point why do it per month when you could just pay $36 per year and not have to worry about all these stupid micropayments? The "problems" you point out I don't see as problems, it's simply an analog to real world subscriptions. If I subscribe to a magazine and all I read are the little half page blurbs at the front while I'm sitting on the can, I pay the same as the professor who makes 200 photocopies of the 10 page main article for class discussion or the dentist who puts it out in his waiting room for who knows how many people to read. If I don't like it, too bad for me.
Web sites need to have their own payment models based on what they do, just as magazines and movie theaters have different payment models based on what they do.
That said, I don't like the per-page idea at all. Too much opportunity for abuse. There's probably a site out there that it makes sense for, but only if there really isn't any other way, and I can't think of a situation where that would be true.
I know people who would buy them. A friend of mine used to buy glow-in-the-dark highlighters so he could study in the dark, or so he claimed anyway...
I don't think the computer monitor idea is silly at all, especially when you consider the DPI that a good printer can acheive. You'd just print an array of RGB dots on a sheet thats, say, 34"x44" (standard E size, which most plotters can handle, including the inkjet plotter I'm eyeing thoughtfully at this very moment). Frankly, a 56" diagonal viewable screen that I can pin to my wall like a poster doesn't sound silly to me at all...
Of course, it'll still require support circuitry and such (which can also be printed, I used to work at a company that did that) and interface connectors and such, so in the short term it would just make flat-panel monitors cheaper.
First, I was speaking from personal experience and presented several observations to support my inflamatory statement, which I'm guessing you didn't bother to read.
Second, not everyone who reads /. is a web monkey. I mostly do mechanical design, and take care of IT stuff and maintain the website as needed.
Third, I've worked under some excellent managers, and it hasn't escaped my notice that not one of them had an MBA! I even went so far as to describe one of them. It also hasn't escaped my notice that the MBAs that I've worked under have universally been morons with no managerial skills, and the only apparent benefit they brought to their respective companies was the ability to manipulate the quarterly statements in order to raise the stock price.
Fourth, the whole problem with MBAs is that they generally go into it because it's a bright career path. Conversely, most engineers go into engineering because they like it. Anyone who chooses a career path based solely on how much money they can make is going to be bad at it.
Fifth, yes most companies websites are mostly formalities, and that's probably because most companies websites suck. For an example of an extremely useful and well-designed website I encourage you to visit McMaster-Carr. The first thing you will probably notice is the lack of gratuitous graphics. What's less obvious is that they took a 3000+ page catalog with over 370,000 products and made it so usable online that the person at my company who still uses the print version is a part-time machinist who's a total technophobe. If more companies made their sites that useful and usable, they'd be a much bigger part of the business world.
I've dealt with my share of MBAs at various stages of developement, from the larval student stage when I was a math tutor, up to the aged veteran who made his fortune bringing failing companies back from the brink of death. Every one of them was just barely smart enough to get into college.
All the schooling in the world won't help if you're incapable of learning from your mistakes, listening to the experts you hire, or thinking beyond the next quarterly statement. I read an article about 10 years ago (I think it was in the Wall Street Journal) that said most companies would rather hire someone with an English degree than a Business degree. The reasoning being that someone with an English degree knows how to communicate, and they can learn the business stuff easily enough. The converse didn't seem to be true.
I'm not saying an engineer would do a better job of running a business, but at least an engineer has the training to make logical decisions based on the facts they are presented with.
The CEO of the company I work for now is the best businessman I've ever met. He's been, at various times in his life, a carpenter, a machinist, a welder, and an engineer. He took some time to read a few books on sales and hired a consultant to teach him business management and strategy, and I have no problem puting my future in his hands. His background and experience with the things my company does are extremely helpful, but what really makes a difference is his ability to listen to others and plan for the long term.
MBAs don't seem able to learn either of those.
Intel Pentium MMX or AMD K6, K6-2, K6-2/3D
Up to 450 MHz CPU with 100 MHz system bus
512 KB L2 Pipeline burst Cache memory
Two DIMM sockets supports ECC / SDRAM up to 512 MB
Dual Ultra DMA/33 EIDE and folppy interface
CRT / Flat Panel Display interface with 2 or 4 MB display memory
LVDS supports Flat Panel Display cable up to 20'
10/100 Base-T network interface using Intel 82558
Ultra Fast and Wide SCSI-3 supports 40 MB/s
Disk-On-Chip (DOC) socket supports up to 144 MB Flash disk
Four serials ports, one parallel port and two USB ports
Dynapro Touchscreen interface
Thermally controlled CPU & system fans
It runs Linux just fine (SuSE 6.3), although I never had a chance to try it from the DOC, since I got the DOCs with Phar Lap already flashed on them. We even got our touchscreen to work! (Sorry, I don't remember the manufacturer.)
It uses standard 168-pin SDRAM, and supports 100MHz FSB, and it actually has the jumper settings for a 500MHz CPU (not sure why they list 450MHz as the top speed, ours were running at 350MHz). Basically it's a highly integrated, very compact Super7. The footprint is slightly larger than a paperback novel, and the hieght is determined by the RAM. The IDE sockets are laptop style, and the PS/2, serial, parallel, and USB are headers that you have to plug a small interface card into that has the real connectors on it.
The only interface I can think of that you'd be missing is firewire, but in my experience firewire is pretty sketchy under Linux anyway, so you may not be missing much.
When I was working with these I was constantly fantasizing about stealing one and building my own portable system. The only problem I could think of was finding a small enough AT power supply, although it uses an adapter which could easily be modified for any PSU that provided the right voltages. Just make sure your 5V rail is stable, they're kind of sensative to that.
And yes, I am an artist (mostly music, but I dabble in just about everything).
*sigh*
Do they have any *nix boxen?
Do they have any computer classes? If so, do any of them involve *nix?
If the answer to any of these is no, talk to your administration. Knowing *nix can be a definite advantage to you're students when they get thrust into the real world, and teaching them will be much more rewarding than actually being an admin, and if you work it right you'll end up being an admin too. Create the program if it isn't there, and try to get into it if it is. Let them know that you really want to do this. Volunteer for stuff. Is there a computer club? Go to their meetings.
Here's what I did: I got a job doing mechanical assembly at a small company that does custom industrial automation. I had some CAD experience, so I got into the design team, and I ended up doing all the IT stuff too, since I knew more about it than anyone else. As the company grew from 5 employees to 15, it became obvious that the bosses desktop machine should not be doing double-duty as the fileserver. We looked at our options, and they were basically Novell Small Business (about $1500 + $70 per new employee (at least 10 in the next 2 years) + Hardware to run it on) or Linux (free, since I had just got my copy of SuSE 7.1 Pro and it would run fine on the recently retired P-75 we lovingly refered to as The Tower of Power + a 20GB HDD, which brought the cost up to a whopping $120). Win2k was mentioned, but the General Manager was against it, and the cost wasn't that much less than Novell. Given that we're a pretty small company without much extra cash, the choice was simple. I made it even simpler by offering to do the setup as a consultant on my own time for $100, which worked out to about $5 an hour, but it served my ulterior motive to become a *nix admin quite nicely. Sometimes you have to give to get... ;)
Don't let your degree or current job get in your way. The best CS instructor I ever had, and my personal *nix guru, got his degree in history.
And as for the age thing, the only advantages younger folks have is enthusiasm and the time to play with stuff. It seems like you've got plenty of the former, and have put in plenty of the later.
We have three concerns about Microsoft's China operations, labor rights problems, human rights problems, the sale of technology that may help Chinese government suppress dissent. First, as many of you know, China has terrible labor rights and human rights problems, common forms of labor rights abuse include physical abuse, forced labor, child labor, improper deductions from wages, and dangerous working conditions. The Chinese government does not enforce labor laws, therefore, Microsoft must undertake special measures to ensure its employees and subcontracted employees are not suffering labor rights abuses, and we have no evidence that Microsoft is adequately addressing these problems.
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If Microsoft wants to do business in China where human rights and labor rights are freely abused, it must take action to avoid complicity in these serious abuses.
As shareholders you should be concerned if Microsoft or suppliers are violating labor rights in China, if Microsoft does not seek to protect employees who are arrested and tortured for religious practices or union activities, or if Microsoft software is used to suppress dissent.
...
Mr. Belluzo's response:
Thank you, Ms. Gibbons. Well, the board recommends a vote against this proposal, believing that it is not necessary. In 1991 the company adopted the Microsoft Corporation business practice standards and compliance policy, to ensure compliance with the laws of the countries in which we operate. In addition, Microsoft already maintains strong policies designed to promote a healthy environment, prohibit harassment, and prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, or national origin.
Huh?
What exactly does that mean? Microsoft follows the labour laws of a country infamous for abuse of labour and human rights? Are we meant to be reassured by this? It's nice to know that Microsoft promotes a healthy work environment, but that doesn't address Ms. Gibbons' concerns in the slightest.
Anyway, I also have a new most hated buzzword, and that is "massively mobilizing". I think it's even worse than "going forward". It's a good thing they aren't massively mobilizing going forward, or I might have to take my sniper skills into meatspace.
And my final thought on the whole thing; these are some of the RICHEST MEN IN THE WORLD! Why can't they GET DECENT FSCKING HAIRCUTS?!?
My wife and I are considering buying a house. My requirements? A garage (or at least space for one, I worked in construction for almost 10 years) and it must be within 3 miles of the CO!
But again, IANAL...
I would argue that the members of the RIAA have abused their copyrights, and therefore lost those rights.
I offer as evidence the exhorbitant prices charged for music CDs. A CD cost twice as much as a Cassette (asuming one is available), but it actually costs much less to produce a CD. They have used bully tactics, leveraged their distribution monopoly, and pushed through unconstitutional legislation to artifically maintain those inflated prices.
I'm not saying I would necessarily win in court, that would depend on the real evidence I could bring to support my claims. My point was to demonstrate the inherent flaws in your statement of ethical and legal absolutes. Both are dependent almost entirely on spin.
I could very easily argue that the tape I make for my friend is for nonprofit educational purposes (namely, to introduce my friend to a musical group or style of music that they were formerly unfamiliar with). This arguement becomes even easier if it's a mix tape.
I could also argue that it is a personal backup which I have loaned to my friend.
Anyway, here is an excellent resource if you're interested in the specifics.
What about Corporate sponsorship, though? How much would Pepsi pay to have their logo on the space shuttle wing? How much would Nike pay to be the Official Footware of the US Space Program?
Similarly, an auto mechanic who spends all his spare time tricking out his truck is still a consumer of Chevy (or whoever).
Nice nickname, btw.
Huh? Without Samba my windows boxes can't see a damned thing on my *nix boxes. How does Samba compete with MS if it allows windows to do something it couldn't do before? Competition implies that they are both trying to do the same thing, which isn't true. Samba isn't for installation on windows, and I don't see MS putting out SMB/CIFS implementations for *nix. I admit it's possible that they have, but I've never heard of it.
And of course Samba has a different implementation than MS. It's not like they had access to MS's code...
Doesn't matter if it was created "by consumers, for consumers", by entering that "market" (I'm using that loosely to mean the set of situations and scenarios in which Samba and NT Server provide the same functionality) Samba became a competitor.
Samba is not a competitor because it offers something MS's SMB/CIFS doesn't; interoperability. You could argue that Samba enables competition, and I would agree, but Samba itself is not a competitor. And since any anti-trust remedy should increase competition, shouldn't something that enables that competition be a beneficiary of that remedy, particularly something that is created and maitained by the very consumers whos protection is at issue?
NT unreliability in the area of interest (CIFS/SMB file sharing) is largely hearsay. If you believe otherwise, please cite (independant, unbiased) studies that prove one way or the other.
Well, there was that thing from the Gartner Group a little while back, although it was about using MS for webservers mostly. I don't doubt that MS's implementation of SMB/CIFS is rock solid, but that amounts to dick when it's sadled with the instability of the OS it's running on. In my personal experience, I have never seen an MS server match the reliability of a *nix server, whether they were maitained by myself or anyone else. If you tell me that your NT server goes a month or two between reboots, I'm still going to point to *nix servers with uptimes of several months or even years, and the 2 minutes it takes for you to reboot that NT box could easily cost a couple thousand dollars in lost productivity, and that's for a company that's not even that big.
I spend 50+ hours a week using windows, and I know it a hell of a lot better than I know Linux. My post wasn't about Linux evangelism, it was about why the Samba team has as much right as anyone else to benefit from any judgement against MS. What does it mean to the consumer if MS has to open up it's API's? Nothing, except what groups like Samba are able to do with them.
So what if they're a third party, they're complaints were equally valid for Sun and Oracle. Their assessment of the proposed settlement was accurate.
You're the one who said said anti-trust is supposed to protect the consumer, how would it do that if the only beneficiaries of this action were the companies that origionally complained? If this were simply a civil action, I would agree that the Samba team have no right to complain, but it isn't civil action, it's anti-trust, and anti-trust is supposed to benefit everyone (well, except for the abusive monopoly, of course).
WRONG!
For Samba to be a competitor it would have to be a company, which it isn't. Even if Samba was a company, or the product of a company, it wouldn't be a competitor.
Samba is a tool created by consumers, for consumers, for the purposes of sharing files and printers in a heterogeneous network using Microsoft's communication protocols and standards (namely SMB and CIFS), which currently have to be reverse-engineered by contributors to the Samba project.
Samba is entirely free, free as in speech, free as in beer. Samba protects the consumer by promoting interoperability in heterogeneous networks.
The Samba team has grounds to object because they are consumers who would like to be able to keep their important files on a single powerful and RELIABLE *nix server rather than clusters of redundant and UNRELIABLE NT servers.
Had you bothered to find out what Samba was before declaring judgement upon them, you would already have known all that.
And no, the quotation marks are not for emphasis...
Out of curiosity, what do you recomend when FreeBSD isn't the best tool for the job?
Basically, it consisted of 3 hot-swapable bricks (each slightly larger than your standard red brick), each containing 2 IDE HDDs and a control card with CPU and communications. They used some crazy thermal interface pads to use the brick chasis as the heatsink, too. I really hope they can get back on their feet, but Transmeta going under would probably mean an end to their product.
Of course you're bored, you're doing boring stuff. Pick a project you find interesting, or start one of your own, and start hacking. Whenever I get tired of the same old stuff, I write an NPC generator for whatever table-top RPG I'm into at the moment. Soon enough I'll have to find something else to fill that need, but hopefully by then I'll be a good enough programmer to actually contribute something to the community.
Of course, when I first read the title I thought you were talking about Counter-Strike, and my answer was going to be Diablo2...
It's spelled "tolerance"
fscking mensa retards...