i'd imagine that star office on a 486 is one of the most unpleasant computing experiences one could ever suffer... Aside from opening a 96 megabyte TIFF on a Macintosh II with 8 megs of RAM... Seriously. Have you tried running Star Office? I have, on my Athlon 700 with 128MB, and just loading it takes a good 10 or 15 seconds.
I dunno. I got a Corsair PC133 128MB SDRAM DIMM a few months back with my system, and i guess i over paid. My main criteria was to buy everything from one place, because i was confident that though i could probably find cheaper prices mixing and matching suppliers, i didn't want to face a situation of having a problem with something and having the people who sold me the motherboard tell me it's the video cards fault, and have the video card vendor tell me it's not their fault, but rather it's a rare glitch between the video card and ethernet card, or something...
That plus, i only had to pay one shipping charge rather than get nickle and dimed to death...
Oh well... With everything that cheap, i may as well upgrade to 256 or 384 megs... Drop a couple more bucks to get from my Athlon 700 to a 1 Gig Athlon, and i'll be happier than anything except for the fact that i wish i'd had a few more dollars at the outset so i could have had a G4 to run Mac OS and LInuxPPC on rather than Windows and Linux... I'm stuck learning one OS and having another OS on my machine which i hate, just so if i need to troubleshoot anything... oh, and run dreamweaver.
I know i'm way off topic, but moderators should be kind, since it's near christmas an all...
Wow... the prices dropped quite a bit since i bought my new computer two months ago...:)
Re:Why would anyone bother with PhotoShop now ???
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
How about editable type?
Yes!
By editable, i don't mean "can you type into it" but rather "can you type something into it, and later go back and change the type, or does the type immediately get rasterized as soon as you click "okay""?:)
With kerning and leading controls?
Don't know enough about these
Kerning is adusting the space between pairs of letters within a word. Leading is adjusting the spacing between lines of text (in a paragraph, for instance).
Support any color management systems, or is it just for low-end web only graphics?
Don't know enough about it
Well, it's a "no" for now, until it supports CMYK. Essentially, colormanagement allows you to input information about your monitor and viewing conditions, as well as your output device (laser printer, inket jet printer, offset printer) so that the GIMP can adjust the colors to of your image which you see on screen to more faithfully appear on your screen as it will when it's printed. But, native 4 color support is needed, as well as a device independant space, like LAB.
How many levels of undo?
Not sure exactly, but I've never hit it before
Fair enough:)
Recordable history?
Like macros? No, but it does have _very_ good scripting support. Check out http://www.cooltext.com/ to see what can be done with a little scripting.
Like recordable macro's. Tell it to record, do your work, save the recording of it, and apply those steps to other images... In such a way that an end user wouldn't need to learn C, C++, Perl, Python, or anything else besides how to operate the program itself...
If you're doing e-commerce on a high traffic site you can't use selfsigned certs, most users will get curious, reject it, or write a mail to you. Do you want to answer dozens of email a day? No, you pay that VerySign tax and you have no problems....
Right. As far as commerce is concerned, the money spent to get a certificate from a real CA is (or should be, if everythings done right) a drop in the bucket for any company. I was more talking about a couple of webmail sites and specialized search engines i use that the owners have decided would like to offer the option of using secure forms to access their services. The certificates are signed only by the owners of the sites, not by Verisign or any other CA. I like that option, because i never enter any valuable information into them anyhow. The certifiates could very well be compromised, but at least everyone in my neighbor hood who might happen to be running a sniffer won't know what i've been looking at.
Understand what i'm saying here? I just don't think that browsers should be bolted down in such a way that it's impossible to have secure communications with other sites without Verisigns okay. Maybe in the default installs of IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera, they could reject certs that weren't signed by "trusted" authorities, but as long as they present a dialog and explain to you that if you'd like to accept that certificate, "go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Certificates and change a setting" or something like that.
Default install could be "only accept certificates from sites with Verisign signed certs" with the option to let you use unsigned certificates or certificates that were signed by people who aren't built into your browser.
Same with SSL. By default Browsers should reject SSL keys if its not signed by a CA. Exceptions could be made if it can be verified atleast by using a reverse lookup on DNS.. or something like that. However that doesn't mean that the proxy server cannot sniff DNS requests and forge it too... NEway... its just an idea. May be we should reject everything not signed by a CA.
Hope there's an option to turn that back on in the advanced preferences of this browser of yours... There are several sites that i visit where they use self signed keys. There's nothing intristically valuable at those sites, so there's no point the owners having to pay VeriSign for a certificate. It's just a way of maintaining a small bit of privacy while browsing a given site...
What other CA's are there that have their certificates preinstalled in IE and Netscape, anyhow? Verisign? Thawte, except now VeriSign owns them. So essentially, by mandating that a certificate come from Verisign in order to initiate SSL and SSH connections, you've put them in the drivers seats of being able to dictate who can communciate to whom and under what conditions... Isnt' that special?
I understood a lot about what was mentioned so far in this series of articles, and while there may be flaws in the implemntations of some things, for the most part the problems seem to stem from lax policies and such.
Re:Why would anyone bother with PhotoShop now ???
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Having CMYK support be an "optional" feature isn't likely to make the GIMP a photoshop killer anytime soon. For many, many people, working in any other color space or delivering files not in CMYK isn't even an option.
Kind of like if say koffice decided to make saving files an "optional feature"....
Re:Why would anyone bother with PhotoShop now ???
on
Gimp 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3
Hmmm... does it do CMYK, duotones, or Pantone colors yet?
How about editable type? With kerning and leading controls?
Support any color management systems, or is it just for low-end web only graphics?
How many levels of undo?
Recordable history?
REally, i'd like to know that. I just went to their site, and i can't find any specific document outline the features of the current release.
Probably he means the image you are manipulating is only a preview of the image (smaller resolution), while editing operations on the "real" image are queued, so they can be performed later on the real image.
Live Picture and Xres did that... I *think* Live Picture was acquired by Adobe, while Xres was bought out by Macromedia. Then there was Specular Collage. All in all, they were impressive in that they let you perform manipulations on images which were too big to manipulate normally, due to RAM constraints. But in the end, their main purpose really ended up being for compositing (at least in my experience and those of others i've talked to).
They arrived during the time of the first power macintoshes. 60-80 MHz PPC 601'. Their needs have disappeared across the years, since most people that actually have need for them also have photoshop, which, with it's layers performs the compositing just as well as the other programs. Plus, RAM got cheaper. And of course, Moore's law kept in effect, making todays computers (according to my calculator) somewhere between 64 and 128 times faster than they were back in 93-94.
Really though, unless you're producing posters or using absurd amounts of layers, most machines available these days can handle quite a bit of image processing... Just remember to get enough RAM to hold your OS, image editting application, and 3 to 5 times the size of your uncompressed image.
the ram issue was abit more of a challenge way back when. A 4 color 8.5 x 11 is about 28 megs. that'd mean 74 megabytes of RAM, outside the OS and app. Quite a bit of money. These days, 128 megs goes for what? $150? Seems like it's a better use of resources to buy more ram than it is to spend the time completely overhauling the GIMP for something speed, when that will come along just fine on it's own. Maybe some tweaking here or there, but just look at photoshop as a speed reference. If it's as fast as that, it's usable. If it's slower, figure out why and speed it up...
...and all the hard work we have done as individualists to get employers to respect us through our rare skills will come back to haunt us.
Well, that's the problem. Those skills were rare back in 1993, 1994, and even 1995. But as the stock market skyrocketed and computers became more accessible to the masses (a la, the introduction of Win95), the first thing that happened was a huge spike in demand for IT professionals of all sorts. Now, more and more, companies are outsourcing programming assignments to other courtries where the labor is cheaper. And as that's happening, hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids across the country are lining up for their CS degreees, clamouring towards the salaries for positions they see advertised. As more and more of them enter the market, the demand will lower and salary's will inevitably sink. I just don't think that the majority of IT skills are that "rare" per se... They're learned. And a great number of people are cabaple of being taught.
Welcome to the world of being a commodity rather than a rarity.
The tyrannical bosses will decide that all that turnover was just a fad and they really didn't have to treat IT pros with respect and fairness.
No, more like IT pro's are going to start having to have respect for their bosses once again. In the gold rush, so many of them let some idea of power seep into their heads, and they'ed make off the wall, bizarre demands for such things as salarys, work place atmospheres, time off, stock options or ownership, etc...
What's "fair" treatment to expect from your boss, versus "unfair"? Work too many hours on too low a salary? Quit, and make it known that's why you did. What other qualms could you have?
We should have formed a guild, (not a union) to pay off polititians to counter the industry and to make our opinions heard.
If you're thinking that, then why arent' you thinking of unionizing? seems the benefits would far outstrip any of those that woudl be provided by a guild. No one respects guilds nearly as much as they do unions. A guild could have made your opinions heard. A union would have made them respected.
The difference between service based an manufacturing based economies and businesses is basically that manufacturing/physical goods companies an directly account for their assets and cost of sales. There's only so cheaply that something can be made, so that cost serves as a baseline upon which educated valuations can be built.
A services based company's only costs are intangibles. Time and employee salaries. And since there's a large universe of skilled employees, each who are willing to work for less than the others, so will there be companies that will undertake projects (consulting, acting as middlemen, etc) for slightly less than the others. That's self destructive, as we've witnessed, because eventually the only way that companies can compete with one another is by absorbing huge losses, in order to have a price thats customers deem reasonable.
They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
After watching the internet bubble expand and pop, taking down so many businesses with it, investors will forever scrutinize the fundamentals in order to make sure such a bloodshed of money never happens to them again.
The drubbing will continue. So many of the dotcoms just happened across the opportunity of selling other companies products to customers, without needing to maintain stores, and hence could sell for cheaper than brick and mortar type shops.
Now that most businesses have their own websites and fulfillment systems, there's no point in a customer to go anywhere but to the source. The "service" of selling for cheaper than brick & mortar shops is being replaced by the value of the actual product itself.
<I>As a worker in a pretty stable dot com (actually, the online arm of a media group)</I>
Actually... you're not working for a dotcom, then... No other businesses. You work at the online arm of a media company.
There's the difference right there.
No one's predicting that the internet and business across the internet is fading away. Just that the internet "pure plays" of the last years' times are up. You don't work for one, so you're fairly isolated from what's occuring...
If you're intending to game a lot, shelling out a few hundred dollars for a card from NVidia wouldn't seem like a losing proposition.
If the machine is destined to sit in a closet, or maybe even a desk, where it's main role would be anything less graphics intensive (development, server tasks) then why shell out extra money for a graphics processor you'll never need... You can pick up an 8 meg ATI Xpert@Work AGP card (so it doesn't take away from your PCI slots...) for less than $40 or $50 dollars. And for me, it's been rock solid. You could even get away with spending less, if you knew you'd never be plugging the machine into a display that was running at higher than 1024x768.
It's oh so hard to make recommendations to people without having all the information that you need.
I wouldn't think that, in this case... Or in any. IF you're making your own product that's never bound to be distributed anyhow, it really doesn't matter what the license is, so long as it allows you access to the source code and the ability to change it and keep those changes. GPL and BSDL both allow for that.
They probably chose Linux over OpenBSD for other reasons... one small one being that Linux scales past a single processor. Another being that there's more application support behind linux. It seems these days that every document available from Gov't websites is available as Text, PDF, and WordPerfect. WordPerfect is available for Linux. I don't know about that for OpenBSD.
And then there's mindshare. There's a much larger community of people out there working on and committed to working on the advancement of Linux than there are in any of the BSD camps. So, they won't have to commit as many resources to the project than they would otherwise, because there's a lot more independant work going on inside the linux community than the BSD's communities (IMHO... don't flame me if you feel i'm wron on that one, please:)
given the GPL, it makes it kinda scary that they had to get permission to make it available over the web..
Not really... They'ed only have to make the source available to those who they'ed distributed binaries. It could be argued that agents in their employ wouldn't be entitled to the source anyhow, since they're just using the computers with the whatever software the NSA had decided to install.
Even in the most lenient of senses, still, the only people at the NSA who would be entitled to see the source code at this point are the developers who've created test builds of the OS, and the people that test it. No one else.
You or I can build a piece of GPLed software and never, ever release the source code to anyone, just as long as we don't release the binaries to anyone either... That's not breaking the law at all, according to the GPL, and there isn't a way that the GPL should be extended so that it would be a violation.
It's doubtful that these would ever become "full size" displays. 1000 dpi is overkill. On a 300 dpi laser printer, if you take a second to look, you'll "jaggies" around the curves of type, but do you notice the jaggies on type that's been printed from a 600 dpi laser printer? No... Our eyes can only handle so much resolution before it's just overkill.
The future for this technology rests most likely in head mounted displays for things like surgery and engineering tasks where there aren't any free hands... Maybe some ultra high end cell phone or PDA may one day opt for a "scaled back" version of it.
Anyhow, so far as gaming goes, you'll probably be able to make due with a far less powerful card than you're envisioning... For starters, the textures won't *need* to be 100 times larger, and really, your eyes wouldn't know the difference between a 150 or 200 dpi texture versus a 1000 dpi texture... The only issue will be that the cards will have to keep track of a lot more pixels. But it doesn't matter, because none of us will ever see this display resting on a desk anywhere...
I'm not saying that mainstream distro's shouldn't have the tools. I don't even think that i'm endorsing the idea that there should be more distro's or more versions of the existing distro's. I"m just saying, in that regard, there really should be a "joe desktop" install option, that only installs what's absolutely needed by linux, X, GNOME or KDE, and leaves all of the applications to be installed to the user.
If you're deploying linux in a business environment, the only compiling that should be going on should be by developers and administrators. Not by the desktop users. They'll be running Netscape & Star Office, in all likelyhood...
RPM's and DEB's are genearlly available for a lot of applications. So are tarred binaries, usually... There's nothing wrong with those. Next grip/hope... Linux should adopt some of the features of Apple's filesystem, in that applications should be placed in self contatined directories, and directories themselves should be directly exectuable (maybe that could be done at the shell level or the X server level. Execute directory -- > looks for standardly named binary file inside the directory that takes charge of launching the application. Then there'd be no need for package managment on the application side of things, except for versioning issues....
You should pick up this cd. I'd have posted a link to amazon, but they dont' seem to have it in stock... or in their database at all.
Anyways, it's packed with all the educational songs you could want, as rendered by a bunch of different artists... Biz Markie's Energy Blues is quite a laugh...
Just to quote the parent here, I don't think that linux is dying. The linux companies which IPO'ed may not be looking so hot, but that's not linux.
Onwards...
The tools provided with each "distro" of NT differentiated the server and workstation versions. Yes, they're the same under the hood, aside from a few registry settings. The author of the article wasn't saying there should be a "consumer" kernel and a "server" kernel. (s)He was saying that the tools installed in addition to the kernel should be more specific to the task at hand.
I think the author of the article wants more specialized distro's, more fine tuned to handle a given set of tasks... And none of the "mainstream" distro's have thought about that approach.
But then, i don't think that linux itself is ready to attack the general market, until some fundamental changes can occur. I might be wrong, because i've only been using it now for a few months, so PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG:)
But for instance, a simplified distro shouldn't need to have any development tools installed. Nor should it need any dev. libraries installed. The kernel should be more modular, or intellegent about it's modules, so that you can add modules simply by moving them to/lib/modules/kernel_version, rather than needing to recompile the kernel itself. That'd make adding new hardware a much easier task - plug it in, copy driver to the module directory, and you're off, maybe reboot or issue a command that makes the kernel rescan that directory... and you're off.
Other things (now i'm just trying for free tech support:) - let users each have their own completely customizable GNOME menu... So far as i can tell, the only part that each user can customize is the Favorites section. That makes little sense, since there are a bunch of administrative tools installed in a default RH install that non-root users can't launch, yet they're made "available" to them anyhow...
Oh... the original poster wasn't complaining about the lack of linux binaries. Just the appearance of Apple's player in Windows and MacOS.
Peter's Player was a great player in it's time. I'm not on a Mac at this moment, so i can't verify that it still works with the newer quicktime versions, but if you respond to this and ask, i'll run upstairs and download it to the mac there and let you know...
The app isn't the app. It's apple's player. There are plenty of other player to choose from, especially on the Mac platform. At least with older versions, when they first "upgraded" the look of the new player, you could still continue to use the old one if you so desired...
Yes, the apple suppled front end is garbage, but don't trash QuickTime iself for it, because there are plenty of other options...
As long as the project will run and won't destroy a users home directory (or even if it will, as long as it's clearly noted that may be the case in the README), then there really is no harm in releasing alpha binaries to users... They may not work. They may not be feature complete. But they may find a use for it, and let the author know. They might find a glaring hole, and do the same. They may be able to offer some advice/requests as to how the interface could or should work.
The point being, if it does compile, there really isn't much harm in making available a.tarred archive of the binary and libs needed to run it. It gets the project potentially into sights of a much larger crowd than if it were just made available to people that might actually build with the code....
Sorry, but i have happened across sites that require those popups to navigate through them... And my guess will be that the number will grow and grow as more and more people upgrade their browsers. Besides which, Netscape, let alone Mozilla, has the definite minority of the market right now, so those steps really won't help too much.
Past that, i'm fairly certain that advertisers will think of more certain ways to get your eyeballs than something as easy to ignore as a javascript popup... They're annoying, but easy to ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah.... A brave one you are! :)
i'd imagine that star office on a 486 is one of the most unpleasant computing experiences one could ever suffer... Aside from opening a 96 megabyte TIFF on a Macintosh II with 8 megs of RAM... Seriously. Have you tried running Star Office? I have, on my Athlon 700 with 128MB, and just loading it takes a good 10 or 15 seconds.
I dunno. I got a Corsair PC133 128MB SDRAM DIMM a few months back with my system, and i guess i over paid. My main criteria was to buy everything from one place, because i was confident that though i could probably find cheaper prices mixing and matching suppliers, i didn't want to face a situation of having a problem with something and having the people who sold me the motherboard tell me it's the video cards fault, and have the video card vendor tell me it's not their fault, but rather it's a rare glitch between the video card and ethernet card, or something...
That plus, i only had to pay one shipping charge rather than get nickle and dimed to death...
Oh well... With everything that cheap, i may as well upgrade to 256 or 384 megs... Drop a couple more bucks to get from my Athlon 700 to a 1 Gig Athlon, and i'll be happier than anything except for the fact that i wish i'd had a few more dollars at the outset so i could have had a G4 to run Mac OS and LInuxPPC on rather than Windows and Linux... I'm stuck learning one OS and having another OS on my machine which i hate, just so if i need to troubleshoot anything... oh, and run dreamweaver.
I know i'm way off topic, but moderators should be kind, since it's near christmas an all...
Wow... the prices dropped quite a bit since i bought my new computer two months ago... :)
How about editable type?
:)
:)
Yes!
By editable, i don't mean "can you type into it" but rather "can you type something into it, and later go back and change the type, or does the type immediately get rasterized as soon as you click "okay""?
With kerning and leading controls?
Don't know enough about these
Kerning is adusting the space between pairs of letters within a word. Leading is adjusting the spacing between lines of text (in a paragraph, for instance).
Support any color management systems, or is it just for low-end web only graphics?
Don't know enough about it
Well, it's a "no" for now, until it supports CMYK. Essentially, colormanagement allows you to input information about your monitor and viewing conditions, as well as your output device (laser printer, inket jet printer, offset printer) so that the GIMP can adjust the colors to of your image which you see on screen to more faithfully appear on your screen as it will when it's printed. But, native 4 color support is needed, as well as a device independant space, like LAB.
How many levels of undo?
Not sure exactly, but I've never hit it before
Fair enough
Recordable history?
Like macros? No, but it does have _very_ good scripting support. Check out http://www.cooltext.com/ to see what can be done with a little scripting.
Like recordable macro's. Tell it to record, do your work, save the recording of it, and apply those steps to other images... In such a way that an end user wouldn't need to learn C, C++, Perl, Python, or anything else besides how to operate the program itself...
If you're doing e-commerce on a high traffic site you can't use selfsigned certs, most users will get curious, reject it, or write a mail to you. Do you want to answer dozens of email a day? No, you pay that VerySign tax and you have no problems....
Right. As far as commerce is concerned, the money spent to get a certificate from a real CA is (or should be, if everythings done right) a drop in the bucket for any company. I was more talking about a couple of webmail sites and specialized search engines i use that the owners have decided would like to offer the option of using secure forms to access their services. The certificates are signed only by the owners of the sites, not by Verisign or any other CA. I like that option, because i never enter any valuable information into them anyhow. The certifiates could very well be compromised, but at least everyone in my neighbor hood who might happen to be running a sniffer won't know what i've been looking at.
Understand what i'm saying here? I just don't think that browsers should be bolted down in such a way that it's impossible to have secure communications with other sites without Verisigns okay. Maybe in the default installs of IE, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera, they could reject certs that weren't signed by "trusted" authorities, but as long as they present a dialog and explain to you that if you'd like to accept that certificate, "go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Certificates and change a setting" or something like that.
Default install could be "only accept certificates from sites with Verisign signed certs" with the option to let you use unsigned certificates or certificates that were signed by people who aren't built into your browser.
Same with SSL. By default Browsers should reject SSL keys if its not signed by a CA. Exceptions could be made if it can be verified atleast by using a reverse lookup on DNS.. or something like that. However that doesn't mean that the proxy server cannot sniff DNS requests and forge it too... NEway... its just an idea. May be we should reject everything not signed by a CA.
Hope there's an option to turn that back on in the advanced preferences of this browser of yours... There are several sites that i visit where they use self signed keys. There's nothing intristically valuable at those sites, so there's no point the owners having to pay VeriSign for a certificate. It's just a way of maintaining a small bit of privacy while browsing a given site...
What other CA's are there that have their certificates preinstalled in IE and Netscape, anyhow? Verisign? Thawte, except now VeriSign owns them. So essentially, by mandating that a certificate come from Verisign in order to initiate SSL and SSH connections, you've put them in the drivers seats of being able to dictate who can communciate to whom and under what conditions... Isnt' that special?
I understood a lot about what was mentioned so far in this series of articles, and while there may be flaws in the implemntations of some things, for the most part the problems seem to stem from lax policies and such.
Having CMYK support be an "optional" feature isn't likely to make the GIMP a photoshop killer anytime soon. For many, many people, working in any other color space or delivering files not in CMYK isn't even an option.
Kind of like if say koffice decided to make saving files an "optional feature"....
Hmmm... does it do CMYK, duotones, or Pantone colors yet?
How about editable type? With kerning and leading controls?
Support any color management systems, or is it just for low-end web only graphics?
How many levels of undo?
Recordable history?
REally, i'd like to know that. I just went to their site, and i can't find any specific document outline the features of the current release.
Probably he means the image you are manipulating is only a preview of the image (smaller resolution), while editing operations on the "real" image are queued, so they can be performed later on the real image.
Live Picture and Xres did that... I *think* Live Picture was acquired by Adobe, while Xres was bought out by Macromedia. Then there was Specular Collage. All in all, they were impressive in that they let you perform manipulations on images which were too big to manipulate normally, due to RAM constraints. But in the end, their main purpose really ended up being for compositing (at least in my experience and those of others i've talked to).
They arrived during the time of the first power macintoshes. 60-80 MHz PPC 601'. Their needs have disappeared across the years, since most people that actually have need for them also have photoshop, which, with it's layers performs the compositing just as well as the other programs. Plus, RAM got cheaper. And of course, Moore's law kept in effect, making todays computers (according to my calculator) somewhere between 64 and 128 times faster than they were back in 93-94.
Really though, unless you're producing posters or using absurd amounts of layers, most machines available these days can handle quite a bit of image processing... Just remember to get enough RAM to hold your OS, image editting application, and 3 to 5 times the size of your uncompressed image.
the ram issue was abit more of a challenge way back when. A 4 color 8.5 x 11 is about 28 megs. that'd mean 74 megabytes of RAM, outside the OS and app. Quite a bit of money. These days, 128 megs goes for what? $150? Seems like it's a better use of resources to buy more ram than it is to spend the time completely overhauling the GIMP for something speed, when that will come along just fine on it's own. Maybe some tweaking here or there, but just look at photoshop as a speed reference. If it's as fast as that, it's usable. If it's slower, figure out why and speed it up...
...and all the hard work we have done as individualists to get employers to respect us through our rare skills will come back to haunt us.
Well, that's the problem. Those skills were rare back in 1993, 1994, and even 1995. But as the stock market skyrocketed and computers became more accessible to the masses (a la, the introduction of Win95), the first thing that happened was a huge spike in demand for IT professionals of all sorts. Now, more and more, companies are outsourcing programming assignments to other courtries where the labor is cheaper. And as that's happening, hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids across the country are lining up for their CS degreees, clamouring towards the salaries for positions they see advertised. As more and more of them enter the market, the demand will lower and salary's will inevitably sink. I just don't think that the majority of IT skills are that "rare" per se... They're learned. And a great number of people are cabaple of being taught.
Welcome to the world of being a commodity rather than a rarity.
The tyrannical bosses will decide that all that turnover was just a fad and they really didn't have to treat IT pros with respect and fairness.
No, more like IT pro's are going to start having to have respect for their bosses once again. In the gold rush, so many of them let some idea of power seep into their heads, and they'ed make off the wall, bizarre demands for such things as salarys, work place atmospheres, time off, stock options or ownership, etc...
What's "fair" treatment to expect from your boss, versus "unfair"? Work too many hours on too low a salary? Quit, and make it known that's why you did. What other qualms could you have?
We should have formed a guild, (not a union) to pay off polititians to counter the industry and to make our opinions heard.
If you're thinking that, then why arent' you thinking of unionizing? seems the benefits would far outstrip any of those that woudl be provided by a guild. No one respects guilds nearly as much as they do unions. A guild could have made your opinions heard. A union would have made them respected.
Oh wel....
The difference between service based an manufacturing based economies and businesses is basically that manufacturing/physical goods companies an directly account for their assets and cost of sales. There's only so cheaply that something can be made, so that cost serves as a baseline upon which educated valuations can be built.
A services based company's only costs are intangibles. Time and employee salaries. And since there's a large universe of skilled employees, each who are willing to work for less than the others, so will there be companies that will undertake projects (consulting, acting as middlemen, etc) for slightly less than the others. That's self destructive, as we've witnessed, because eventually the only way that companies can compete with one another is by absorbing huge losses, in order to have a price thats customers deem reasonable.
They then drive the price up beyond what the fundamentals of the companies can support, and soon enough, you'll be reading about how manufacturing stocks are slumping.
After watching the internet bubble expand and pop, taking down so many businesses with it, investors will forever scrutinize the fundamentals in order to make sure such a bloodshed of money never happens to them again.
The drubbing will continue. So many of the dotcoms just happened across the opportunity of selling other companies products to customers, without needing to maintain stores, and hence could sell for cheaper than brick and mortar type shops.
Now that most businesses have their own websites and fulfillment systems, there's no point in a customer to go anywhere but to the source. The "service" of selling for cheaper than brick & mortar shops is being replaced by the value of the actual product itself.
<I>As a worker in a pretty stable dot com (actually, the online arm of a media group)</I>
Actually... you're not working for a dotcom, then... No other businesses. You work at the online arm of a media company.
There's the difference right there.
No one's predicting that the internet and business across the internet is fading away. Just that the internet "pure plays" of the last years' times are up. You don't work for one, so you're fairly isolated from what's occuring...
If you're intending to game a lot, shelling out a few hundred dollars for a card from NVidia wouldn't seem like a losing proposition.
If the machine is destined to sit in a closet, or maybe even a desk, where it's main role would be anything less graphics intensive (development, server tasks) then why shell out extra money for a graphics processor you'll never need... You can pick up an 8 meg ATI Xpert@Work AGP card (so it doesn't take away from your PCI slots...) for less than $40 or $50 dollars. And for me, it's been rock solid. You could even get away with spending less, if you knew you'd never be plugging the machine into a display that was running at higher than 1024x768.
It's oh so hard to make recommendations to people without having all the information that you need.
I wouldn't think that, in this case... Or in any. IF you're making your own product that's never bound to be distributed anyhow, it really doesn't matter what the license is, so long as it allows you access to the source code and the ability to change it and keep those changes. GPL and BSDL both allow for that.
:)
They probably chose Linux over OpenBSD for other reasons... one small one being that Linux scales past a single processor. Another being that there's more application support behind linux. It seems these days that every document available from Gov't websites is available as Text, PDF, and WordPerfect. WordPerfect is available for Linux. I don't know about that for OpenBSD.
And then there's mindshare. There's a much larger community of people out there working on and committed to working on the advancement of Linux than there are in any of the BSD camps. So, they won't have to commit as many resources to the project than they would otherwise, because there's a lot more independant work going on inside the linux community than the BSD's communities (IMHO... don't flame me if you feel i'm wron on that one, please
given the GPL, it makes it kinda scary that they had to get permission to make it available over the web..
Not really... They'ed only have to make the source available to those who they'ed distributed binaries. It could be argued that agents in their employ wouldn't be entitled to the source anyhow, since they're just using the computers with the whatever software the NSA had decided to install.
Even in the most lenient of senses, still, the only people at the NSA who would be entitled to see the source code at this point are the developers who've created test builds of the OS, and the people that test it. No one else.
You or I can build a piece of GPLed software and never, ever release the source code to anyone, just as long as we don't release the binaries to anyone either... That's not breaking the law at all, according to the GPL, and there isn't a way that the GPL should be extended so that it would be a violation.
It's doubtful that these would ever become "full size" displays. 1000 dpi is overkill. On a 300 dpi laser printer, if you take a second to look, you'll "jaggies" around the curves of type, but do you notice the jaggies on type that's been printed from a 600 dpi laser printer? No... Our eyes can only handle so much resolution before it's just overkill.
The future for this technology rests most likely in head mounted displays for things like surgery and engineering tasks where there aren't any free hands... Maybe some ultra high end cell phone or PDA may one day opt for a "scaled back" version of it.
Anyhow, so far as gaming goes, you'll probably be able to make due with a far less powerful card than you're envisioning... For starters, the textures won't *need* to be 100 times larger, and really, your eyes wouldn't know the difference between a 150 or 200 dpi texture versus a 1000 dpi texture... The only issue will be that the cards will have to keep track of a lot more pixels. But it doesn't matter, because none of us will ever see this display resting on a desk anywhere...
I'm not saying that mainstream distro's shouldn't have the tools. I don't even think that i'm endorsing the idea that there should be more distro's or more versions of the existing distro's. I"m just saying, in that regard, there really should be a "joe desktop" install option, that only installs what's absolutely needed by linux, X, GNOME or KDE, and leaves all of the applications to be installed to the user.
If you're deploying linux in a business environment, the only compiling that should be going on should be by developers and administrators. Not by the desktop users. They'll be running Netscape & Star Office, in all likelyhood...
RPM's and DEB's are genearlly available for a lot of applications. So are tarred binaries, usually... There's nothing wrong with those. Next grip/hope... Linux should adopt some of the features of Apple's filesystem, in that applications should be placed in self contatined directories, and directories themselves should be directly exectuable (maybe that could be done at the shell level or the X server level. Execute directory -- > looks for standardly named binary file inside the directory that takes charge of launching the application. Then there'd be no need for package managment on the application side of things, except for versioning issues....
You should pick up this cd. I'd have posted a link to amazon, but they dont' seem to have it in stock... or in their database at all.
Anyways, it's packed with all the educational songs you could want, as rendered by a bunch of different artists... Biz Markie's Energy Blues is quite a laugh...
Just to quote the parent here, I don't think that linux is dying. The linux companies which IPO'ed may not be looking so hot, but that's not linux.
Onwards...
The tools provided with each "distro" of NT differentiated the server and workstation versions. Yes, they're the same under the hood, aside from a few registry settings. The author of the article wasn't saying there should be a "consumer" kernel and a "server" kernel. (s)He was saying that the tools installed in addition to the kernel should be more specific to the task at hand.
I think the author of the article wants more specialized distro's, more fine tuned to handle a given set of tasks... And none of the "mainstream" distro's have thought about that approach.
:)
/lib/modules/kernel_version, rather than needing to recompile the kernel itself. That'd make adding new hardware a much easier task - plug it in, copy driver to the module directory, and you're off, maybe reboot or issue a command that makes the kernel rescan that directory... and you're off.
:) - let users each have their own completely customizable GNOME menu... So far as i can tell, the only part that each user can customize is the Favorites section. That makes little sense, since there are a bunch of administrative tools installed in a default RH install that non-root users can't launch, yet they're made "available" to them anyhow...
But then, i don't think that linux itself is ready to attack the general market, until some fundamental changes can occur. I might be wrong, because i've only been using it now for a few months, so PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG
But for instance, a simplified distro shouldn't need to have any development tools installed. Nor should it need any dev. libraries installed. The kernel should be more modular, or intellegent about it's modules, so that you can add modules simply by moving them to
Other things (now i'm just trying for free tech support
Oh... the original poster wasn't complaining about the lack of linux binaries. Just the appearance of Apple's player in Windows and MacOS.
Peter's Player was a great player in it's time. I'm not on a Mac at this moment, so i can't verify that it still works with the newer quicktime versions, but if you respond to this and ask, i'll run upstairs and download it to the mac there and let you know...
BetterPlayer.
You have to remember, quicktime is just an API. The player application just uses the hooks that the extensions (MacOS) and DLLS (Win) provide.
The app isn't the app. It's apple's player. There are plenty of other player to choose from, especially on the Mac platform. At least with older versions, when they first "upgraded" the look of the new player, you could still continue to use the old one if you so desired...
Yes, the apple suppled front end is garbage, but don't trash QuickTime iself for it, because there are plenty of other options...
As long as the project will run and won't destroy a users home directory (or even if it will, as long as it's clearly noted that may be the case in the README), then there really is no harm in releasing alpha binaries to users... They may not work. They may not be feature complete. But they may find a use for it, and let the author know. They might find a glaring hole, and do the same. They may be able to offer some advice/requests as to how the interface could or should work.
.tarred archive of the binary and libs needed to run it. It gets the project potentially into sights of a much larger crowd than if it were just made available to people that might actually build with the code....
The point being, if it does compile, there really isn't much harm in making available a
Sorry, but i have happened across sites that require those popups to navigate through them... And my guess will be that the number will grow and grow as more and more people upgrade their browsers. Besides which, Netscape, let alone Mozilla, has the definite minority of the market right now, so those steps really won't help too much.
Past that, i'm fairly certain that advertisers will think of more certain ways to get your eyeballs than something as easy to ignore as a javascript popup... They're annoying, but easy to ignore.