I agree, I'm personally a fan of the BSD Ports infrastructure myself. Downloading, patching, and installing software is very easy when you're using a less than popular architecture. Case in point, Darwin. I can download and install about 2000 programs from the Ports collection as of right now and the rest will be patched and working as time passes. Debian's apt-get has the same strength. RPM based distributions really eat my ass though because you're pretty much stuck with one source for your programs. This leaves you at the whim of whichever group you got your Linux distro from for your security updates and pretty much everything else. Which is the why you don't use Windows right?
Re:I dont mean to jump the gun...
on
X-server for PS2
·
· Score: 1
Sorry to burst your bubble dude but Microsoft learned the lesson that Sony didn't. They're retailing the XBox for 299$ which is about the same price (currently) as a PS2. However contrary to the PS2's initial release Microsoft is filling their box with well known and relatively commodity hardware. The main part of the lesson Sony did not learn was to have the ability to supply demand for your product. Microsoft's got two manufacturing facilities so far, one in Mexico and one in Hungary with one in Asia pending. American and European XBoxes will be coming from their respective continents which reduces much of the overhead that Sony has to pay for in shipping boxes in from overseas. All things considered I don't see Microsoft actually losing money on the XBox so every one you buy is putting some money back in their pocket. Buy one and stick Linux on it if you want but you're still bending over for the shaft that is Microsoft corporation.
Saying it boils down to money and stupidity is pretty obtuse. Using RC-4 is much more practical for intensifying security on a transmission than 3DES merely because 3DES is a computational monster and more data intensive then RC-4. RSA would be a poor choice as well being that RSA is an asymmetric cipher and requires more infrastructure than a symmetric cipher. Symmetric ciphers are sort of natrual for 802.11 because your network may be only as complex as two hosts connecting as network peers. Even using the Diffie-Hellman algorithm to build shared secret keys for an asymmetric can be costly in terms of bandwidth and processing. This is something you don't want on wireless components that need to run off laptop batteries and are limited to 11Mbps of bandwidth. Because 802.11b has a IV vector size doesn't mean the original designers don't know their encryption theories, it simply means the original drafters had to work within the constrains of the technology.
Consider yourself modded up in my heart. Finally someone who hasn't been stricken with the Slashdot hive mind virus that spreads so seemingly easy among Linux using teenagers.
Hello? What do you think the 802.11b code stands for? The long name would be IEEE 802.11b. That means it was reviewed and accepted by the IEEE. The fact that you're complaining about an IEEE standard not being up for review makes me wonder if you know what the fuck you're talking about.
Well since the Lucent branded cards have an antenna built into them whereas the Apple branded cards don't because the antenna is in the computer's chassis, I can see where some of the extra cost comes from.
Since the advent of broadband in homes people have been wasting as much bandwidth as possible by downloading warez and MP3s and bootleg copies of feature films at all times of the day. You notice CD-Rs and large hard drives are often purchased by the same people with fat internet pipes. Hmmm.
Now virus and worm writers are taken advantage of these people that have been screwing their networks up the ass for years now. I feel so so bad. Webservers that shouldn't have been running in the first place are being blocked. Man I'm heartbroken.
I don't think broadband is a bad thing at all and nor am I against downloading large chunks of data. Freeware, patches, legal ISOs, music, ect is all cool and why you've got the fast pipe in the first place. The problem lies in the folks running their webservers and anon FTPs that are filling up the outgoing frames which normally don't get filled up on consumer oriented pipes. I wouldn't want to be the dude trying to manage the consumer network that was never intended for such traffic. If it were me I'd cap your monthly bandwidth and start charging like web hosts do. Whoever thought it was a good idea to leave broadband unthrottled and uncapped was a jackass. It works fine when you can feed a shitload of dialup users with a single T3 or OC line. Things break down when you apply that same model to people who have bandwidth rated at a signifigant portion of a T3 or OC line.
Thanks for the heads up on your new position regarding internet.com I know I am relieved to know you won't be reading their crap anymore. I'm sure there's hundred of not thousands more that are just as relieved as me. Phew.
Why the fuck do people feel the need to tell other of their new and more retarded zealous position regarding this sort of stuff? What ever happened to apathy? So someone pretended in order to build up hype or at least make something appear cool. You can't tell my thousands of slashdot losers havent tried to start a "web design" company or some such using pronouns like "we" and "us" to make it sound like a company when it was really just one guy with warezed copies of Photoshop and Frontpage thinking he was l33t. That's pretty much what the linuxToday dude did. Those damn dropping journalistic standards, it must be due to the decline in the test scores of American high school students. Fuck me!
I don't feel too sorry for people who shelled out 3500$ for a 733 PowerMac because they should have been a little more informed before they confirmed their order. Hey I have a great idea lets lay down 3 grand for a new Mac right before a big show like Mac World where you're practically assured speed and configuration changes. It isn't by any means cruel to customers, it's always been buyer beware and always should be. Geez dude, the whole goal of marketing is to sell shit to people they may or may not want or need.
Multitasking seems to go back to the mantra beat into CIS/business students nowadays trying to convince them they are a new breed of "knowledge workers". This is a cute bizshit term for indentured servant or corporate bitch. If you're hired to be one of these poor folks you're expected to do the jobs of five people because the company wants to "streamline" their operations. Maybe this is because office suites package several programs in a single box managers get the impression you ought to be using every program in the box in order to be getting the company's money worth. Who can get work done when you've got to stop in the middle of everything to write up a response to a memo to attend a "team update session" or some shit. Too bad the only real opposition to this method was the dotcom-everyone-is-a-vice-president style of management which failed miserably. My tip is to look unfriendly when you start to work somewhere and tone down the personal hygiene a little and no one will want to bother you when you're in the middle of something.
These are still expensive for something that is just going to be used for DNS or NAT or some such. Thus i wouldn't exactly exclaim these things as perfect for mundane tasks like DHCP or DNS serving. A second hand Cisco box is *perfect* as a NAT or Firewall and if you're so concerned with a price a single 1U box can perform alot duties like DHCP and DNS. Besides these aren't exactly embeded systems per se. They've got alot of cool factor and could be really useful for some applications. I think their desktop render farm is a pretty cool one actually, something I think they're more suited to than webserving on the cheap.
I've got a PowerBook G3/333 which I'm actually using right now. I got in in September of 99 and it's been chugging along quite fine since then. I've put OS10 on it and it runs great and with almost half of the BSD ports collection working on Darwin I have lots of tools to work with. I really love the PowerBook line because you get a good deal of horsepower and plenty of time working off the battery. You can find the G3 PBs for 1300$ and under at powermax.com used.
In my experience OS10 works great on my PB including REALLY fast wakeup times from sleep mode. However if MacOS isn't exactly your thing theres lots of fairly well supported options to choose from. You can use just the Darwin core to which 2000 BSD Ports work (for the most part) on or another variant of BSD. For the hardcore Linuxytes there's always YDL or LinuxPPC. YDL I know is supposed to work really well on these and before OS10 came out I was really close to sticking it on here. Some people bitch and moan about a lack of legacy connection ports on the G3 PBs but I don't miss anything really and if you NEED certain connections there's always USB connected port replicators for serial and ADB ports. I get good battery life and good performance so I'll put in my suggestion for a Mac laptop which includes new or older iBooks which have the same features as PBs but with a smaller screen.
Now I'm sort of wondering if I can finally have a thin client Java box that isn't tied to a Solaris server (for no other reason than I can't afford an Ultra 5S just to have a couple internet terminals laying around). Well maybe.
Has anyone actually hacked one of these toys and maybe used GTK+ FB on it? It seems like writing directly to the frame buffer would be more efficient than mucking around with X, especially on a small system with limited resources. I just want to run a lightweight Gecko based browser on something small and kinda cool looking.
Oh yeah, for the MP3 player people flooding the thread, look into a NIC. It is fairly easy to stick whatever stuff you want onto the data disc which means ypclient and your favourite MP3 player. A couple of edits of the Boa config file and a CGI script and you can have a web based MP3 player sucking files off whatever box stores them. It seems like the easiest hack out of all of the boxes on the list.
So...Windows XP figures out when vendors write shitty drivers and call them on it by informing you and the vendor and that's bad? Is it just as bad when a kernel module causes a core dump and it writes a mail message to the admin defining the error? This is ridiculous. So the fuck what if Microsoft fucked over Caldera by making Windows 3.11 crash on it, it's their fucking product. Windows 2000 supports driver certification just like Win XP does, it is a professional class workstation OS and damn well should have some way to verify the integrity of the hardware drivers you're installing. Maybe when a vendor's drivers keep causing a system to core dump they will get on the ball and release what we call "updates" to their drivers. I'm sorry releasing a single driver update over a product's lifetime is a pretty shitty way to treat your customers. Compare for example Creative and nVidia. Creative drivers for their sound cards and modems are over a year old and dispite being shit have not been improved upon at all. On the other end of the spectrum nVidia unified their driver base and continuously updates and refines their drivers. It drives you to buy shitty bargain basement hardware for your systems because at least then you get what you paid for.
I'd like to see alot more talkback features in fucking software so vendors can actually improve their fucking products. The Omni group pretty graciously lets you use their browser for free with no restrictions yet maintains a bug tracking system. Bug report e-mails aren't exactly support for software. Slashdot always finds a reason to bitch just because Microsoft's logo is found somewhere near an article.
Funny I was thinking the same thing. The problem with these sorts of little boxes is they can be pretty fucking useless. If you've got an ethernet port or two you can turn it into a little server or number cruncher or some such (like the Centricity made out of briQs) or use it as a router. Other than something headless you're sort of SOL with these because they've got really limited interfaces which aren't included in the purchase price. Turning anything from this list into a little X term costs more than buying a full fledged PC. I could always use the pre-formed SBCs for robot brains though. I've been working on one that I can talk to with my Powerbook with an 802.11b card. A robot with a.plan, that's sort of scary.
You're trying to waste money young Padawan. The 2,500$ model is a 400MHz G4 with 128 megs of RAM and a 10 GB drive. For less than half that you could pick up a Netra with the same specs. Granted a Netra is a traditional 19" rackmount chassis but unless space is REALLY confined you'd be wasting your money with a tower full of 5.25" systems. An 8 node Centricity will set you back almost 30 grand while an 8 node Netra set-up will set you back about a third of that. I'd rather have a high capacity SMP box for 28k$
It's easy for me to shrug it off and I like it that way. If you're writing something which you ought to know is illegal to distribute then you're asking to be dragged off in chains, justifiable or not. You used to get dragged off in chains for drinking coffee and growing a goatee because you were a Pinko bastard. The problem I have is this dude was selling Elcomsoft's product for 99$ at DefCon which is designed to circumvent a copyright enforcement technology. It doesn't matter if ROT-13 is the best protection measure someone uses, it is a protection measure and the breaking of such a measure constitutes an illegal act. Envelopes use only a little bit of cheap glue and paper to seal important or valuable documents. Is it ludicrous to arrest someone for tampering with envelopes just because they have inadequate protections? Yeah when your paycheck comes in such an envelope you're not going to bitch about someone getting arrested for mail tampering. Poor Dmitri is has done some less than scrutable stuff yet people rush to defend him just because the DMCA is mentioned in conjunction with his arrest. He was selling a product that has little use other than to circumvent copyright controls which serve the purpose of letting people sell a product. His liberties to distribute his product end where someone's right begins to make a living selling eBooks or the right to make a living writing books distributed in an electronic format. Sorry I can't help being able to interpret the legal system. I guess being an able minded citizen is a bad thing.
How come everyone is acting like there's some unified front against Adobe? Dmitri's arrest stems from the fact he was selling the PDF cracking tool he made. It isn't purely research if you fucking sell it. That's called trafficing. Which is why he was arrested. I suggest instead of protesting Adobe we take the time to thank Elcomsoft for their e-mail extraction software which keeps most of you from using a real e-mail address on slashdot posts. I had a pretty amusing time reading about the mailing list and protest plans that popped up. Protest and bitch for the right reasons, don't think just because a guy was arrested in relation to the DMCA that he must be innocent. At least the EFF in general is smarter than slashdot.
To the credit of the developers at Microsoft (who can be some cool guys if you don't judge them for the business practices of their corporate bosses) I've yet to see an business suite as functional and cool as Office/BackOffice. I've got a MOUS for Office 2k thus I've been forced to learn all the things you can do with Office that most people won't ever see. Office and the programs in BackOffice have been worked on for the past couple years to integrate well together.
Companies can replace entire operating divisions of their businesses because because everyone can easily collaborate and access the same data from inside their productivity applications. At a board meeting an Excel worksheet can be brought up calculating how well your company's new more ruthless tactics have increased profit margins. This calculation can be done in realtime because Excel can talk directly to SQL server which is getting database entries directly from POS terminals or your e-commerce front-end. MS Project can form get data for project groups from the employee database and then organize it all into Visio or PowerPoint for the meeting you're late for.
Office suites offering MS file type compatibility are a dime a dozen. Because/. is pretty much blindly pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft bitching about MS dominance on yet another desktop OS is expected but still pretty foolish. If you're a company with a non-Microsoft OS on your desktop systems you're very fortunate to have them port Office to your system. Microsoft gets to sell more copies of Office and Apple gets to sell boxes to companies who's only problem with MacOS is a lack of compatibility with their Microsoft supplied back end. Hetrogeneous hardware is a moot point when your software all speaks the same language. If you're sore in the seat because Microsoft uses their own language and doesn't play nice with competition, write an Open analog to Microsoft's service products. Oh, does it cost a bundle with little to no return? Thats because everyone else can use your work for their product and undercut you because they don't have your development cost tacked onto the price. Office/BackOffice has cost MS billions over the years. If I had a suite of products that was worth over a billion dollars I wouldn't be so apt to let other people play with it either.
While I like AppleWorks plenty (6.2 is one of the best upgrades ever downloaded, ever) it lacks a good deal of the functionality that exists in Office that most people on/. will probably never use. Microsoft has a whole slew of products that all integrate into one another. It's how they get companies to use exclusively Microsoft products. Word can do a mail merge directly from any product in the BackOffice family. You can keep a customer database on your intranet server and then send e-mails too all clients that fit a certain criteria such as those with outstanding credit or something. One person can do the work from their 600$ Dell workstation that 5 years ago took an entire department to do. There are other ways to do this with various other business suites but few are so tightly integrated as Microsoft's. Word processing and spreadsheets are the bleeding edge of the early 80's.
Actually the Quartz docs on the ADC site contain some info about Quartz's remote display capabilities. If you look around it's in one of the PDF files describing Quartz. Quartz is split much like X is on traditional Unix machines with a server doing all the display shit and a client on the backend that actually talks to applications. AFAIK the backend will accept RPCs from the network as it would from the local display server. I think Apple's sort of shuffled this capability to the side because xterms aren't their business. You don't exactly but Mac servers to run a bunch of dumb terminals dispite OS X's capability to do so. Besides that I think they'd rather have people use Cocoa for RPCs rather than Quartz. I wonder if you could turn a normal Carbon app into a distributed app by using Quartz...
Whenever you read something about potential uses of the OC based Internet2 they use buzz words like telepresence and virtual reality. These Gibsonian geek concepts don't mean shit to 99.999% of people. This is sort of ridiculous because it ignores some really obvious uses of fibre being ubitquitous.
You open up a single screen theater in a real estate sparse section of downtown where a dot com used to have its headquarters. You get a digital projector and a fibre line hooked up. You can download Disney or Dreamworks latest and greatest animated musical tearjerker directly from the studio to play during the day. That night you switch to that summer's blockbuster you downloaded the other night and stored on a disk array. For the late showings you put on a cult classic that draws a modest but frequest crowd of college kids and twenty somethings. You make good returns and respectable margins because you've cut the cost of the film print out of the equation. Costs now for such a setup might be high but in a world where both these technologies are commonplace the costs are affordable.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, I'm personally a fan of the BSD Ports infrastructure myself. Downloading, patching, and installing software is very easy when you're using a less than popular architecture. Case in point, Darwin. I can download and install about 2000 programs from the Ports collection as of right now and the rest will be patched and working as time passes. Debian's apt-get has the same strength. RPM based distributions really eat my ass though because you're pretty much stuck with one source for your programs. This leaves you at the whim of whichever group you got your Linux distro from for your security updates and pretty much everything else. Which is the why you don't use Windows right?
Sorry to burst your bubble dude but Microsoft learned the lesson that Sony didn't. They're retailing the XBox for 299$ which is about the same price (currently) as a PS2. However contrary to the PS2's initial release Microsoft is filling their box with well known and relatively commodity hardware. The main part of the lesson Sony did not learn was to have the ability to supply demand for your product. Microsoft's got two manufacturing facilities so far, one in Mexico and one in Hungary with one in Asia pending. American and European XBoxes will be coming from their respective continents which reduces much of the overhead that Sony has to pay for in shipping boxes in from overseas. All things considered I don't see Microsoft actually losing money on the XBox so every one you buy is putting some money back in their pocket. Buy one and stick Linux on it if you want but you're still bending over for the shaft that is Microsoft corporation.
Saying it boils down to money and stupidity is pretty obtuse. Using RC-4 is much more practical for intensifying security on a transmission than 3DES merely because 3DES is a computational monster and more data intensive then RC-4. RSA would be a poor choice as well being that RSA is an asymmetric cipher and requires more infrastructure than a symmetric cipher. Symmetric ciphers are sort of natrual for 802.11 because your network may be only as complex as two hosts connecting as network peers. Even using the Diffie-Hellman algorithm to build shared secret keys for an asymmetric can be costly in terms of bandwidth and processing. This is something you don't want on wireless components that need to run off laptop batteries and are limited to 11Mbps of bandwidth. Because 802.11b has a IV vector size doesn't mean the original designers don't know their encryption theories, it simply means the original drafters had to work within the constrains of the technology.
Consider yourself modded up in my heart. Finally someone who hasn't been stricken with the Slashdot hive mind virus that spreads so seemingly easy among Linux using teenagers.
Hey you mean with Windows I can't use IPSec or VPN? Fuck man why didn't you tell me earlier! I knew there must be a catch.
Hello? What do you think the 802.11b code stands for? The long name would be IEEE 802.11b. That means it was reviewed and accepted by the IEEE. The fact that you're complaining about an IEEE standard not being up for review makes me wonder if you know what the fuck you're talking about.
Well since the Lucent branded cards have an antenna built into them whereas the Apple branded cards don't because the antenna is in the computer's chassis, I can see where some of the extra cost comes from.
Since the advent of broadband in homes people have been wasting as much bandwidth as possible by downloading warez and MP3s and bootleg copies of feature films at all times of the day. You notice CD-Rs and large hard drives are often purchased by the same people with fat internet pipes. Hmmm.
Now virus and worm writers are taken advantage of these people that have been screwing their networks up the ass for years now. I feel so so bad. Webservers that shouldn't have been running in the first place are being blocked. Man I'm heartbroken.
I don't think broadband is a bad thing at all and nor am I against downloading large chunks of data. Freeware, patches, legal ISOs, music, ect is all cool and why you've got the fast pipe in the first place. The problem lies in the folks running their webservers and anon FTPs that are filling up the outgoing frames which normally don't get filled up on consumer oriented pipes. I wouldn't want to be the dude trying to manage the consumer network that was never intended for such traffic. If it were me I'd cap your monthly bandwidth and start charging like web hosts do. Whoever thought it was a good idea to leave broadband unthrottled and uncapped was a jackass. It works fine when you can feed a shitload of dialup users with a single T3 or OC line. Things break down when you apply that same model to people who have bandwidth rated at a signifigant portion of a T3 or OC line.
Thanks for the heads up on your new position regarding internet.com I know I am relieved to know you won't be reading their crap anymore. I'm sure there's hundred of not thousands more that are just as relieved as me. Phew.
Why the fuck do people feel the need to tell other of their new and more retarded zealous position regarding this sort of stuff? What ever happened to apathy? So someone pretended in order to build up hype or at least make something appear cool. You can't tell my thousands of slashdot losers havent tried to start a "web design" company or some such using pronouns like "we" and "us" to make it sound like a company when it was really just one guy with warezed copies of Photoshop and Frontpage thinking he was l33t. That's pretty much what the linuxToday dude did. Those damn dropping journalistic standards, it must be due to the decline in the test scores of American high school students. Fuck me!
I don't feel too sorry for people who shelled out 3500$ for a 733 PowerMac because they should have been a little more informed before they confirmed their order. Hey I have a great idea lets lay down 3 grand for a new Mac right before a big show like Mac World where you're practically assured speed and configuration changes. It isn't by any means cruel to customers, it's always been buyer beware and always should be. Geez dude, the whole goal of marketing is to sell shit to people they may or may not want or need.
Multitasking seems to go back to the mantra beat into CIS/business students nowadays trying to convince them they are a new breed of "knowledge workers". This is a cute bizshit term for indentured servant or corporate bitch. If you're hired to be one of these poor folks you're expected to do the jobs of five people because the company wants to "streamline" their operations. Maybe this is because office suites package several programs in a single box managers get the impression you ought to be using every program in the box in order to be getting the company's money worth. Who can get work done when you've got to stop in the middle of everything to write up a response to a memo to attend a "team update session" or some shit. Too bad the only real opposition to this method was the dotcom-everyone-is-a-vice-president style of management which failed miserably. My tip is to look unfriendly when you start to work somewhere and tone down the personal hygiene a little and no one will want to bother you when you're in the middle of something.
These are still expensive for something that is just going to be used for DNS or NAT or some such. Thus i wouldn't exactly exclaim these things as perfect for mundane tasks like DHCP or DNS serving. A second hand Cisco box is *perfect* as a NAT or Firewall and if you're so concerned with a price a single 1U box can perform alot duties like DHCP and DNS. Besides these aren't exactly embeded systems per se. They've got alot of cool factor and could be really useful for some applications. I think their desktop render farm is a pretty cool one actually, something I think they're more suited to than webserving on the cheap.
I've got a PowerBook G3/333 which I'm actually using right now. I got in in September of 99 and it's been chugging along quite fine since then. I've put OS10 on it and it runs great and with almost half of the BSD ports collection working on Darwin I have lots of tools to work with. I really love the PowerBook line because you get a good deal of horsepower and plenty of time working off the battery. You can find the G3 PBs for 1300$ and under at powermax.com used.
In my experience OS10 works great on my PB including REALLY fast wakeup times from sleep mode. However if MacOS isn't exactly your thing theres lots of fairly well supported options to choose from. You can use just the Darwin core to which 2000 BSD Ports work (for the most part) on or another variant of BSD. For the hardcore Linuxytes there's always YDL or LinuxPPC. YDL I know is supposed to work really well on these and before OS10 came out I was really close to sticking it on here. Some people bitch and moan about a lack of legacy connection ports on the G3 PBs but I don't miss anything really and if you NEED certain connections there's always USB connected port replicators for serial and ADB ports. I get good battery life and good performance so I'll put in my suggestion for a Mac laptop which includes new or older iBooks which have the same features as PBs but with a smaller screen.
Now I'm sort of wondering if I can finally have a thin client Java box that isn't tied to a Solaris server (for no other reason than I can't afford an Ultra 5S just to have a couple internet terminals laying around). Well maybe.
Has anyone actually hacked one of these toys and maybe used GTK+ FB on it? It seems like writing directly to the frame buffer would be more efficient than mucking around with X, especially on a small system with limited resources. I just want to run a lightweight Gecko based browser on something small and kinda cool looking.
Oh yeah, for the MP3 player people flooding the thread, look into a NIC. It is fairly easy to stick whatever stuff you want onto the data disc which means ypclient and your favourite MP3 player. A couple of edits of the Boa config file and a CGI script and you can have a web based MP3 player sucking files off whatever box stores them. It seems like the easiest hack out of all of the boxes on the list.
So...Windows XP figures out when vendors write shitty drivers and call them on it by informing you and the vendor and that's bad? Is it just as bad when a kernel module causes a core dump and it writes a mail message to the admin defining the error? This is ridiculous. So the fuck what if Microsoft fucked over Caldera by making Windows 3.11 crash on it, it's their fucking product. Windows 2000 supports driver certification just like Win XP does, it is a professional class workstation OS and damn well should have some way to verify the integrity of the hardware drivers you're installing. Maybe when a vendor's drivers keep causing a system to core dump they will get on the ball and release what we call "updates" to their drivers. I'm sorry releasing a single driver update over a product's lifetime is a pretty shitty way to treat your customers. Compare for example Creative and nVidia. Creative drivers for their sound cards and modems are over a year old and dispite being shit have not been improved upon at all. On the other end of the spectrum nVidia unified their driver base and continuously updates and refines their drivers. It drives you to buy shitty bargain basement hardware for your systems because at least then you get what you paid for.
I'd like to see alot more talkback features in fucking software so vendors can actually improve their fucking products. The Omni group pretty graciously lets you use their browser for free with no restrictions yet maintains a bug tracking system. Bug report e-mails aren't exactly support for software. Slashdot always finds a reason to bitch just because Microsoft's logo is found somewhere near an article.
Funny I was thinking the same thing. The problem with these sorts of little boxes is they can be pretty fucking useless. If you've got an ethernet port or two you can turn it into a little server or number cruncher or some such (like the Centricity made out of briQs) or use it as a router. Other than something headless you're sort of SOL with these because they've got really limited interfaces which aren't included in the purchase price. Turning anything from this list into a little X term costs more than buying a full fledged PC. I could always use the pre-formed SBCs for robot brains though. I've been working on one that I can talk to with my Powerbook with an 802.11b card. A robot with a .plan, that's sort of scary.
You're trying to waste money young Padawan. The 2,500$ model is a 400MHz G4 with 128 megs of RAM and a 10 GB drive. For less than half that you could pick up a Netra with the same specs. Granted a Netra is a traditional 19" rackmount chassis but unless space is REALLY confined you'd be wasting your money with a tower full of 5.25" systems. An 8 node Centricity will set you back almost 30 grand while an 8 node Netra set-up will set you back about a third of that. I'd rather have a high capacity SMP box for 28k$
Holy fuck now I can play Angband on a PS2 with a 200$ devkit only available in Japan! Sweet ass sweet.
It's easy for me to shrug it off and I like it that way. If you're writing something which you ought to know is illegal to distribute then you're asking to be dragged off in chains, justifiable or not. You used to get dragged off in chains for drinking coffee and growing a goatee because you were a Pinko bastard. The problem I have is this dude was selling Elcomsoft's product for 99$ at DefCon which is designed to circumvent a copyright enforcement technology. It doesn't matter if ROT-13 is the best protection measure someone uses, it is a protection measure and the breaking of such a measure constitutes an illegal act. Envelopes use only a little bit of cheap glue and paper to seal important or valuable documents. Is it ludicrous to arrest someone for tampering with envelopes just because they have inadequate protections? Yeah when your paycheck comes in such an envelope you're not going to bitch about someone getting arrested for mail tampering. Poor Dmitri is has done some less than scrutable stuff yet people rush to defend him just because the DMCA is mentioned in conjunction with his arrest. He was selling a product that has little use other than to circumvent copyright controls which serve the purpose of letting people sell a product. His liberties to distribute his product end where someone's right begins to make a living selling eBooks or the right to make a living writing books distributed in an electronic format. Sorry I can't help being able to interpret the legal system. I guess being an able minded citizen is a bad thing.
"Laptops without an OS are much cheaper than with an OS"
Uh...not to mention they are refurbished as you state. OEM versions of Windows cost about 20$ each if not less.
How come everyone is acting like there's some unified front against Adobe? Dmitri's arrest stems from the fact he was selling the PDF cracking tool he made. It isn't purely research if you fucking sell it. That's called trafficing. Which is why he was arrested. I suggest instead of protesting Adobe we take the time to thank Elcomsoft for their e-mail extraction software which keeps most of you from using a real e-mail address on slashdot posts. I had a pretty amusing time reading about the mailing list and protest plans that popped up. Protest and bitch for the right reasons, don't think just because a guy was arrested in relation to the DMCA that he must be innocent. At least the EFF in general is smarter than slashdot.
To the credit of the developers at Microsoft (who can be some cool guys if you don't judge them for the business practices of their corporate bosses) I've yet to see an business suite as functional and cool as Office/BackOffice. I've got a MOUS for Office 2k thus I've been forced to learn all the things you can do with Office that most people won't ever see. Office and the programs in BackOffice have been worked on for the past couple years to integrate well together. /. is pretty much blindly pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft bitching about MS dominance on yet another desktop OS is expected but still pretty foolish. If you're a company with a non-Microsoft OS on your desktop systems you're very fortunate to have them port Office to your system. Microsoft gets to sell more copies of Office and Apple gets to sell boxes to companies who's only problem with MacOS is a lack of compatibility with their Microsoft supplied back end. Hetrogeneous hardware is a moot point when your software all speaks the same language. If you're sore in the seat because Microsoft uses their own language and doesn't play nice with competition, write an Open analog to Microsoft's service products. Oh, does it cost a bundle with little to no return? Thats because everyone else can use your work for their product and undercut you because they don't have your development cost tacked onto the price. Office/BackOffice has cost MS billions over the years. If I had a suite of products that was worth over a billion dollars I wouldn't be so apt to let other people play with it either.
Companies can replace entire operating divisions of their businesses because because everyone can easily collaborate and access the same data from inside their productivity applications. At a board meeting an Excel worksheet can be brought up calculating how well your company's new more ruthless tactics have increased profit margins. This calculation can be done in realtime because Excel can talk directly to SQL server which is getting database entries directly from POS terminals or your e-commerce front-end. MS Project can form get data for project groups from the employee database and then organize it all into Visio or PowerPoint for the meeting you're late for.
Office suites offering MS file type compatibility are a dime a dozen. Because
While I like AppleWorks plenty (6.2 is one of the best upgrades ever downloaded, ever) it lacks a good deal of the functionality that exists in Office that most people on /. will probably never use. Microsoft has a whole slew of products that all integrate into one another. It's how they get companies to use exclusively Microsoft products. Word can do a mail merge directly from any product in the BackOffice family. You can keep a customer database on your intranet server and then send e-mails too all clients that fit a certain criteria such as those with outstanding credit or something. One person can do the work from their 600$ Dell workstation that 5 years ago took an entire department to do. There are other ways to do this with various other business suites but few are so tightly integrated as Microsoft's. Word processing and spreadsheets are the bleeding edge of the early 80's.
Actually the Quartz docs on the ADC site contain some info about Quartz's remote display capabilities. If you look around it's in one of the PDF files describing Quartz. Quartz is split much like X is on traditional Unix machines with a server doing all the display shit and a client on the backend that actually talks to applications. AFAIK the backend will accept RPCs from the network as it would from the local display server. I think Apple's sort of shuffled this capability to the side because xterms aren't their business. You don't exactly but Mac servers to run a bunch of dumb terminals dispite OS X's capability to do so. Besides that I think they'd rather have people use Cocoa for RPCs rather than Quartz. I wonder if you could turn a normal Carbon app into a distributed app by using Quartz...
Whenever you read something about potential uses of the OC based Internet2 they use buzz words like telepresence and virtual reality. These Gibsonian geek concepts don't mean shit to 99.999% of people. This is sort of ridiculous because it ignores some really obvious uses of fibre being ubitquitous.
You open up a single screen theater in a real estate sparse section of downtown where a dot com used to have its headquarters. You get a digital projector and a fibre line hooked up. You can download Disney or Dreamworks latest and greatest animated musical tearjerker directly from the studio to play during the day. That night you switch to that summer's blockbuster you downloaded the other night and stored on a disk array. For the late showings you put on a cult classic that draws a modest but frequest crowd of college kids and twenty somethings. You make good returns and respectable margins because you've cut the cost of the film print out of the equation. Costs now for such a setup might be high but in a world where both these technologies are commonplace the costs are affordable.