It is a wild ride in the market these days, and the outlook of low profits coupled with fierce competition means a few companies who are willing (and able) to bend laterally will. Loki doesn't have much room to move. They provide one product (in a target market sense) on one platform - games on Linux. Sure, Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 rock under Linux, especially Quake 3. But if they have no angle to stimulate interest, they will, unfortunately, be tacked up with the statistics from this recession.
I remember the first time I installed Linux. It ate me over and over again. This was back in the days of Red Hat 4.1. But I had to install Linux on the server it was going on, so I had no choice. I had to learn it, and had to make it work correctly.
To me it sounds like you don't "need" Linux running on your mahcine. I may be wrong, so I apologize if I am. However, the learning curve is steep, yes, but it is steep because the OS is not designed for being "user-friendly," rather, something designed for reliability and performance.
I assure you, the day you NEED a Linux box, it will come to you...:-)
Just a side-note: one of the most reliable and robust processors available right now for large applications (talking about mission-critical, server farm grade) is the Power architecture. This is an architecture made by IBM. A very robust RISC architecture. It's the processor in an IBM RS/6000 and other RS series servers. It just so happens to be the same architecture that Apple uses, just a version of it (PowerPC). The fact is that these processors ARE superior in their respective arenas.
Also, the other fact that Apple has to deal with (which in turn jacks up price) is the ability to produce the processors to meet demand. When the G4 debuted, Apple and Motorolla could not meet the demand. My buddy waited a few months extra for his dual G4. The inability to mass produce, something that Intel and AMD have the luxury of, will certainly jack up costs due to the obvious extra work required to produce the same output. This is probably, IMHO, one of the biggest contributors to Apple's price difference. But, (even being an Intel employee), I am thouroghly impressed with the G4's performace. I can't wait to see how the Intel Itanium aligns itself with the G4.
Have you used OS X? Do you have any idea of its features (how Aqua renders itself, for one)? Before you make statements like yours, please back them up by being informed.
I'm glad to see that OSX is shaping up to what it promised. I saw it in beta and on its first official release on my buddy's dual-G4, and did nothing but drool. It's pretty. And it's pretty quick too. I'm glad to hear that someone who has better access to it and knows what to look for in the OS gave his thumbs up. Apple needs this boost, and it never hurts for BSD to chalk up another feather in its cap.
When you look at it, it's pretty cool to see that protocols that go back many years (Ethernet for example) just keep coming back with positive results, and scale way beyond what they were ever intended for in their respective RFC. What happened to most current protocols developed recently? Exchange is one that comes to mind...
A threat isn't so bad when you're used to it.
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 1
IMHO, they can get away with calling this a "medium" level problem is because of the "standard" out there today. Just look around. Code Red, Code Red 2, SirCam, ILoveYou, and how many other Outlook-born viruses came out recently? The bar has been "raised", if you will, to a level of tolerance of remote root exploits and remote comprimises that people have become numb to it. I know that sounds far-fetched to some, but how often do you hear about a new virus (take Code Red for example), and just brush it off as normal, or not life-threatening, etc.? People have been reading all about Code Red the last few weeks, about its potential to take the internet to its knees, and the general response has been comotose. Average people just accept these things as "normal," so the average user will accept this as normal.
Just to show I don't completely pick on Windows-based products, when SSH 3.0.0 came out, it had one of the worst root exploits (well, exploit that can gain root) in awhile. What happened? CERT fired out an advisory, SSH wrote a patch, and people moved on, without there being a horrible mess. It is just accepted that sh*t happens, and that's that.
So where did you learn how to talk like that? I can see that your vocabulary is very extensive and rather sophisticated. I'm glad you have great communication skills. Keep up the good work!!
I totally agree with you. This wasn't meant to be philisophical; I was just trying to inject some humor... Anyhow, if they're being this absurd with this whole thing, then I wouldn't put it past Dolby to find a hole in the agreements with JVC...:-)
So I guess Dolby will politely ask JVC to recall my DVD player and pull the AC3 decoder out of it since the ability to decode AC3 streams exists in there? Who knows, I might reverse engineer the whole thing!!!
I should have pointed out the legal issues in my post. This was something that was stressed to them. However, you can stress legal all you want to certain people. But (this is from my observance and experience, which is in no way the way things are) kids who have the idea planted in their heads that they ARE superior and are better in technology than everyone else will use that, and then develop the mentality that they are untouchable, and that just bumps the legal issues under the moral umbrella. I agree with your comment, but there is a certain point that these kids just don't give a damn about it.
You'd hope, but like I pointed out in my post, these kids ARE 18-20 years old. They are freshmen and sophomores in college. It is a bit of a growing problem. I know this is pessimism at its finest, but it's reality.
It's also funny that people are moding me to offtopic, troll, etc., when I'm doing EXACTLY what/. just posted: ranting. How fscked up has this site become?? It's sad.
This is probably a bit off-topic, but how does a story like this (someone ranting about Mac) get posted, and the article I submitted last week about PCI 3.0 (only the future of next-generation I/O for PC's) doesn't get posted? I believe the gods of priority for "News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters" have sold out. Sorry for the additional rant, but it is a bit frustrating to be reading something completely and totally useless where something more useful and informative should belong.
My experience with the upcoming generation of kids these days is sure, they are very competent and pick up knowledge much quicker. I was a sys/network admin at my alma mater, and I took on the task of training students (mostly freshman) in the fine art of sys admin of UNIX machines.
To my joy, these kids took very well to the tasks. They learned Linux very quickly, as well as the shots of Solaris and AIX I threw at them. I was very impressed. However, to my continuing amazement, I watched as they would use what they learned to stomp on people. I know the whole "I have power and I'm going to use it" human nature thing always comes into play when people get root, but not like this.
I really couldn't believe the total lack of respect and ethical disregard these kids had for sys administration. I know that people need time to adjust to the responsibilities, but these kids didn't seem to. They just thought it was "cool" to keep flood pinging other servers, nmap'ing people, etc. I don't know what these kids aren't learning, but I don't see the evolution of sys admins as being a bright future if this attitude continues.
It's interesting. People have seen the short-comings of Java, with the client-side operating environment practically bringing your machine to its knees, not to mention certain IE vulnerabilities with older versions of JDK. So we tried to move away from that environment by performing server-side processing. ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, and the ever-powerful PHP. Why is it that we want to go away from the server-side arena when we know what it is like?
Now the reason I'm directly mentioning PHP is because this plugin boasts the ability to merge C++ with your webpages. Well, you can write CGI with C++, but that is usually rather painful. PHP is (to me) Perl and C/C++ all wrapped into one. You want classes? Sure, you got them. You want great string manipulation? Sure, that's there too. Not to mention you can embed Javascript in their if you NEED to use it. And now that PHP supports some level of GTK for graphics, why would you even want to use Java, especially since you can ram all the Shockwave and Macromedia Flash into a PHP-generated page that you want? I just don't see the benefit, if there is any, of trying this, when server-side dynamic pages have proven to be incredible, and give all and even more functionality that this product boasts. Who knows though, maybe it will be better than we all expect.
Re:Interesting that I got rejected for this story
on
RedHat 7.2 Beta: Roswell
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Funny, I submitted a story on PCI 3.0 (Intel's Arapahoe interface) to replace the existing PCI bus. His reason for rejecting it was "he had others who already submitted it, and was sitting on those waiting to post it." This was on Thursday of last week... I would have thought people would like to know what's going on for the future of computers, not just when Taco feels he needs to bash RedHat (even though Slackware is superior:-) ).
I don't like the whole idea of "breach-of-privacy" or anything like that, but a company needs to protect itself, and needs to protect its investments. A company pays for internet access, alpha pagers, corporate email systems, and is liable for what passes through them. Much like an ISP is liable for a stupid person who subscribes to them launching a full-scale DoS to a remote site. The ISP is held responsible initially, before an investigation takes place to find the culprit.
I guess the point is that if what you did and what you sent WAS considered private, then the whole antitrust case against MS would never had materialized. There were very strong words used between Mr. Gates and his executives, naming illegal practices in marketing and sales. The strategies that were used by MS to attempt purging Netscape from the market would never have had full-blown evidence if their email was considered private. How else is a corporation supposed to hold itself responsible and liable for what it and its employees do? If they do not assume the responsiblity, then who takes the blame?
It just makes no sense that a person can use a service that they are not paying for (internet, cell phone, pager, etc.), and expect that the person serving them that service and PAYING for that service will not expect to cover their bases and make sure they are not held responsible for illegal conduct or activity. And if this is flamebait, I apologize, but like other people said, if you want to do "questionable" things, like surf for porn or download mp3's, etc., just do it at home. You suck it up and take the responsibility.
I'm glad you're buying a typewriter. Then you can't make stupid posts with offensive language, bringing Linux into the picture, and giving MS the edge YET AGAIN in gaining popularity votes among corporate users by pigeonholing Linux as a "hackers" "script-kiddies" OS. Now, I hope this reply wasn't too much for your primitive mind to digest and process. Good day.
Maybe I can walk into gadgets-r-us (or is that gadgets.r.us?) and buy this and my authentic Ghostbusters proton pack... mmm... Droids and portable particle accelerators... mmm.
Getting laid off in Germany is not that much of a desaster as getting laid off in the U.S.
How do you figure? Are you saying that Germany's "social safety net" is better than the US's? I'm really not sure either way, but I think that if a person gets laid off in one place, it will affect the market somehow. The fact that the USD competes with the Euro now WILL make an impact on the US, especially if German shops close up.
I am quite confident that productive programmers are not laid off, they just get better organized and that's simply a good thing.
I don't disagree. Ideally, competent programmers can pick up from a termination, learn from it, and move on to bigger and better things. But right now, in today's economic climate, ideal is far from the truth. The reason MANY places are laying people off is because they simply don't need the workforce. Businesses aren't hiring in the volume that businesses are laying people off. So the news of these people being laid off is far from good; I would like to think optimistically and hope for the best, but in which market can I do that? Certainly none of them around here...
I don't know, but this post seems a bit weak for a/. story. The news contained in the links is pretty much the same news when the story first posted. I would have expected more information or exciting news out of a post. Sorry guys; it isn't all that interesting.
I can't say that I'm not upset about this news. I personally have never run SuSE on any of my boxes but I know people who have, and I have SuSE to thank for making X Servers a few years back that supported my hardware before XFree really caught up.
However, this news can't be all that shocking. Countless numbers of companies - small one-officed.com's to large scale corporations are announcing the same deal on a regular basis. The fact that SuSE is laying MORE people off is terrible, especially for the people being laid off. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people being laid off elsewhere? Cisco, Xerox, GM, to name a few. So I wouldn't take this news as earth-shaking, hailing the destruction of Linux (sorry, random Matrix plug), rather, I would view it as pretty sad to see some really great people getting laid off who helped make a really great product. Hopefully this whole economic mess will be over soon and we'll be seeing headlines that read "Hundreds Hired Into SuSE" or something.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a wild ride in the market these days, and the outlook of low profits coupled with fierce competition means a few companies who are willing (and able) to bend laterally will. Loki doesn't have much room to move. They provide one product (in a target market sense) on one platform - games on Linux. Sure, Unreal Tournament and Tribes 2 rock under Linux, especially Quake 3. But if they have no angle to stimulate interest, they will, unfortunately, be tacked up with the statistics from this recession.
I remember the first time I installed Linux. It ate me over and over again. This was back in the days of Red Hat 4.1. But I had to install Linux on the server it was going on, so I had no choice. I had to learn it, and had to make it work correctly.
:-)
To me it sounds like you don't "need" Linux running on your mahcine. I may be wrong, so I apologize if I am. However, the learning curve is steep, yes, but it is steep because the OS is not designed for being "user-friendly," rather, something designed for reliability and performance.
I assure you, the day you NEED a Linux box, it will come to you...
Just a side-note: one of the most reliable and robust processors available right now for large applications (talking about mission-critical, server farm grade) is the Power architecture. This is an architecture made by IBM. A very robust RISC architecture. It's the processor in an IBM RS/6000 and other RS series servers. It just so happens to be the same architecture that Apple uses, just a version of it (PowerPC). The fact is that these processors ARE superior in their respective arenas.
Also, the other fact that Apple has to deal with (which in turn jacks up price) is the ability to produce the processors to meet demand. When the G4 debuted, Apple and Motorolla could not meet the demand. My buddy waited a few months extra for his dual G4. The inability to mass produce, something that Intel and AMD have the luxury of, will certainly jack up costs due to the obvious extra work required to produce the same output. This is probably, IMHO, one of the biggest contributors to Apple's price difference. But, (even being an Intel employee), I am thouroghly impressed with the G4's performace. I can't wait to see how the Intel Itanium aligns itself with the G4.
Have you used OS X? Do you have any idea of its features (how Aqua renders itself, for one)? Before you make statements like yours, please back them up by being informed.
I'm glad to see that OSX is shaping up to what it promised. I saw it in beta and on its first official release on my buddy's dual-G4, and did nothing but drool. It's pretty. And it's pretty quick too. I'm glad to hear that someone who has better access to it and knows what to look for in the OS gave his thumbs up. Apple needs this boost, and it never hurts for BSD to chalk up another feather in its cap.
When you look at it, it's pretty cool to see that protocols that go back many years (Ethernet for example) just keep coming back with positive results, and scale way beyond what they were ever intended for in their respective RFC. What happened to most current protocols developed recently? Exchange is one that comes to mind...
IMHO, they can get away with calling this a "medium" level problem is because of the "standard" out there today. Just look around. Code Red, Code Red 2, SirCam, ILoveYou, and how many other Outlook-born viruses came out recently? The bar has been "raised", if you will, to a level of tolerance of remote root exploits and remote comprimises that people have become numb to it. I know that sounds far-fetched to some, but how often do you hear about a new virus (take Code Red for example), and just brush it off as normal, or not life-threatening, etc.? People have been reading all about Code Red the last few weeks, about its potential to take the internet to its knees, and the general response has been comotose. Average people just accept these things as "normal," so the average user will accept this as normal.
Just to show I don't completely pick on Windows-based products, when SSH 3.0.0 came out, it had one of the worst root exploits (well, exploit that can gain root) in awhile. What happened? CERT fired out an advisory, SSH wrote a patch, and people moved on, without there being a horrible mess. It is just accepted that sh*t happens, and that's that.
So where did you learn how to talk like that? I can see that your vocabulary is very extensive and rather sophisticated. I'm glad you have great communication skills. Keep up the good work!!
I totally agree with you. This wasn't meant to be philisophical; I was just trying to inject some humor... Anyhow, if they're being this absurd with this whole thing, then I wouldn't put it past Dolby to find a hole in the agreements with JVC... :-)
Cheers.
So I guess Dolby will politely ask JVC to recall my DVD player and pull the AC3 decoder out of it since the ability to decode AC3 streams exists in there? Who knows, I might reverse engineer the whole thing!!!
So how long will it take for Microsoft to come and gobble them up into MSN? Looks to me like they're ripe for the assimilating.
I should have pointed out the legal issues in my post. This was something that was stressed to them. However, you can stress legal all you want to certain people. But (this is from my observance and experience, which is in no way the way things are) kids who have the idea planted in their heads that they ARE superior and are better in technology than everyone else will use that, and then develop the mentality that they are untouchable, and that just bumps the legal issues under the moral umbrella. I agree with your comment, but there is a certain point that these kids just don't give a damn about it.
You'd hope, but like I pointed out in my post, these kids ARE 18-20 years old. They are freshmen and sophomores in college. It is a bit of a growing problem. I know this is pessimism at its finest, but it's reality.
It's also funny that people are moding me to offtopic, troll, etc., when I'm doing EXACTLY what /. just posted: ranting. How fscked up has this site become?? It's sad.
This is probably a bit off-topic, but how does a story like this (someone ranting about Mac) get posted, and the article I submitted last week about PCI 3.0 (only the future of next-generation I/O for PC's) doesn't get posted? I believe the gods of priority for "News for Nerds" and "Stuff that matters" have sold out. Sorry for the additional rant, but it is a bit frustrating to be reading something completely and totally useless where something more useful and informative should belong.
My experience with the upcoming generation of kids these days is sure, they are very competent and pick up knowledge much quicker. I was a sys/network admin at my alma mater, and I took on the task of training students (mostly freshman) in the fine art of sys admin of UNIX machines.
To my joy, these kids took very well to the tasks. They learned Linux very quickly, as well as the shots of Solaris and AIX I threw at them. I was very impressed. However, to my continuing amazement, I watched as they would use what they learned to stomp on people. I know the whole "I have power and I'm going to use it" human nature thing always comes into play when people get root, but not like this.
I really couldn't believe the total lack of respect and ethical disregard these kids had for sys administration. I know that people need time to adjust to the responsibilities, but these kids didn't seem to. They just thought it was "cool" to keep flood pinging other servers, nmap'ing people, etc. I don't know what these kids aren't learning, but I don't see the evolution of sys admins as being a bright future if this attitude continues.
It's interesting. People have seen the short-comings of Java, with the client-side operating environment practically bringing your machine to its knees, not to mention certain IE vulnerabilities with older versions of JDK. So we tried to move away from that environment by performing server-side processing. ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, and the ever-powerful PHP. Why is it that we want to go away from the server-side arena when we know what it is like?
Now the reason I'm directly mentioning PHP is because this plugin boasts the ability to merge C++ with your webpages. Well, you can write CGI with C++, but that is usually rather painful. PHP is (to me) Perl and C/C++ all wrapped into one. You want classes? Sure, you got them. You want great string manipulation? Sure, that's there too. Not to mention you can embed Javascript in their if you NEED to use it. And now that PHP supports some level of GTK for graphics, why would you even want to use Java, especially since you can ram all the Shockwave and Macromedia Flash into a PHP-generated page that you want? I just don't see the benefit, if there is any, of trying this, when server-side dynamic pages have proven to be incredible, and give all and even more functionality that this product boasts. Who knows though, maybe it will be better than we all expect.
Funny, I submitted a story on PCI 3.0 (Intel's Arapahoe interface) to replace the existing PCI bus. His reason for rejecting it was "he had others who already submitted it, and was sitting on those waiting to post it." This was on Thursday of last week... I would have thought people would like to know what's going on for the future of computers, not just when Taco feels he needs to bash RedHat (even though Slackware is superior :-) ).
I don't like the whole idea of "breach-of-privacy" or anything like that, but a company needs to protect itself, and needs to protect its investments. A company pays for internet access, alpha pagers, corporate email systems, and is liable for what passes through them. Much like an ISP is liable for a stupid person who subscribes to them launching a full-scale DoS to a remote site. The ISP is held responsible initially, before an investigation takes place to find the culprit.
I guess the point is that if what you did and what you sent WAS considered private, then the whole antitrust case against MS would never had materialized. There were very strong words used between Mr. Gates and his executives, naming illegal practices in marketing and sales. The strategies that were used by MS to attempt purging Netscape from the market would never have had full-blown evidence if their email was considered private. How else is a corporation supposed to hold itself responsible and liable for what it and its employees do? If they do not assume the responsiblity, then who takes the blame?
It just makes no sense that a person can use a service that they are not paying for (internet, cell phone, pager, etc.), and expect that the person serving them that service and PAYING for that service will not expect to cover their bases and make sure they are not held responsible for illegal conduct or activity. And if this is flamebait, I apologize, but like other people said, if you want to do "questionable" things, like surf for porn or download mp3's, etc., just do it at home. You suck it up and take the responsibility.
I'm glad you're buying a typewriter. Then you can't make stupid posts with offensive language, bringing Linux into the picture, and giving MS the edge YET AGAIN in gaining popularity votes among corporate users by pigeonholing Linux as a "hackers" "script-kiddies" OS. Now, I hope this reply wasn't too much for your primitive mind to digest and process. Good day.
UNIX, DOS, and Windows NT... The good, the bad, and the ugly.
I didn't want to steal your thunder, but fortune was good to me one day... Cheers.
Maybe I can walk into gadgets-r-us (or is that gadgets.r.us?) and buy this and my authentic Ghostbusters proton pack... mmm... Droids and portable particle accelerators... mmm.
Getting laid off in Germany is not that much of a desaster as getting laid off in the U.S.
How do you figure? Are you saying that Germany's "social safety net" is better than the US's? I'm really not sure either way, but I think that if a person gets laid off in one place, it will affect the market somehow. The fact that the USD competes with the Euro now WILL make an impact on the US, especially if German shops close up.
I am quite confident that productive programmers are not laid off, they just get better organized and that's simply a good thing.
I don't disagree. Ideally, competent programmers can pick up from a termination, learn from it, and move on to bigger and better things. But right now, in today's economic climate, ideal is far from the truth. The reason MANY places are laying people off is because they simply don't need the workforce. Businesses aren't hiring in the volume that businesses are laying people off. So the news of these people being laid off is far from good; I would like to think optimistically and hope for the best, but in which market can I do that? Certainly none of them around here...
I don't know, but this post seems a bit weak for a /. story. The news contained in the links is pretty much the same news when the story first posted. I would have expected more information or exciting news out of a post. Sorry guys; it isn't all that interesting.
I can't say that I'm not upset about this news. I personally have never run SuSE on any of my boxes but I know people who have, and I have SuSE to thank for making X Servers a few years back that supported my hardware before XFree really caught up.
.com's to large scale corporations are announcing the same deal on a regular basis. The fact that SuSE is laying MORE people off is terrible, especially for the people being laid off. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people being laid off elsewhere? Cisco, Xerox, GM, to name a few. So I wouldn't take this news as earth-shaking, hailing the destruction of Linux (sorry, random Matrix plug), rather, I would view it as pretty sad to see some really great people getting laid off who helped make a really great product. Hopefully this whole economic mess will be over soon and we'll be seeing headlines that read "Hundreds Hired Into SuSE" or something.
However, this news can't be all that shocking. Countless numbers of companies - small one-officed
-Do or do not. There is no try.