IP phones are just for geeks and serve no useful purpose over normal phones
Ahh - there is nothing like the smell of a troll in the morning! That statement is just so ridiculous it's not worth responding to.
My polycom 601 (a high-end business phone) only takes 6.21W. If your IP phone REALLY takes 20W, I would consider replacing it. That, or your meter is whacked.
Re:Down with phosphors!
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There isn't no chance
Syntax Error
LCD's don't have burn-in, they have retention. Retention can be fixed with a number of utilities (search Google.) There is nothing to "burn-in" on an LCD.
OK, here are the numbers for a mac mini (no monitor - just the cpu.)
Powered off: 0.035A Booting: 0.250A - 0.320A On, but idle: 0.180A - 0.250A Sleep mode: 0.050A Unplugged: 0.0A
So booting isn't that much more power than idle, and it's for a short period of time.
I find it interesting that powered off isn't really powered off, so you are better off using the switch on your power strip than relying on the mac "off" mode, which isn't a whole lot better than sleep.
Someone who wants to play with math more than me can figure out the break-even points, but it's clear that you are far better off unplugging your mac and rebooting overnight than leaving it in sleep mode. It's a no-brainer for a week. This basically says, unplug all your crap when you go on vacation, because with modern electronics, off isn't off.
When you look at the long term costs (over 5 years for example,) building your own data center isn't as outrageously expensive as you think... But it depends on a number of factors such as size, competency of employees, how much you need to physically touch your stuff, etc.
You know that co-locators do charge you the costs and a percentage of profit and their prices can change anytime and once your locked into a datacenter, you usually can't get out for cheap.
Your costs can only change at any time if you have a really shitty contract. Contract negotiations can take longer than implementation in some cases. There are so many colo companies out there that you really can dictate your terms if your are persistent. Yes, moving from one data center to another is VERY expensive and a total pain in the ass, so you craft a contract and working relationship with your colo that doesn't require that move.
If you are building an ISP that does colocation, it's a WHOLE different ballgame. What you need for your enterprise is very different than what AT&T needs in a colo. Most likely, if you need guards at your building, you already have guards. If you don't need guards, just adding a data center isn't going to create the need.
It also depends on the SIZE of your data center. If it's small, being a room or 3 in a building, in-house management can be cost-effective. When you build it, you use suppliers that fully maintain what they sell - YOU don't need to know how to maintain a chiller - you just need to know who to call when it goes south (or have it automatically report back to the maintainer....) If you are large enough, chances are that you have a mechanical guy that can deal with all the minor stuff anyway. With modern servers, chances are you are not going to need a HUGE data center, although you will have to spend more time planning cooling and power.
I have built and managed smaller data centers (50 or so racks) in the past, and while challenging, they are not beyond the abilities of competent staff. Just make sure you do a LOT of planning, bring in the experts, and check references of everyone bidding on your jobs (don't just ASK for references, really check them...)
The/etc files are designed to be human readable and the registry isn't. They are only cryptic when you don't have experience working with them. hkey\local\user\KFJLDSFHSDIFHSDJKFHSDKJFHSDK will ALWAYS be cryptic because the programmers are writing out objects and the binary representation of ENUM's.
It's a mindset difference. On Windows, configuration info is designed to be managed by the application via the API. Manual management is highly discouraged and nearly impossible. It's the other way around on Unix. The best is probably somewhere in between - many apps are going to XML.
99.9...% of the human population do not and are never going to give a shit about being "Free."
Got a source for that statistic or did you just pull it out of your ass? Ass? Thought so. FYI, When you do that, everything you say becomes suspect whether or not it has any merit.
I could ask the same questions. Why use Windows? Is it that you LIKE DRM, Activation, Genuine (dis)Advantage? Or maybe it is the fabulous license terms, security, etc... Some people don't care about all that, others do.
Frankly, I don't care which OS you use, and you shouldn't care which one I use. Just don't push your choice on me.
How a "registry" can be more or less cryptical than a bunch of ini files?
Simply because most programmers (such as Microsoft programmers) use ENUM values in it, so you end up with entries such as "Policy DWORD 3", this gem from.Net: "50727 REG_SZ 50727-50727", cryptic keys such as: "{874aa5f2-3745-9e23-8a39-8972bcb1455e}" - care to tell me what that means??? Unless you have the source to the application and know where these things are used in that source or VERY extensive documentation, you are screwed.
Contrast that with damn near any native Unix app (such as Apache) where all the configuration files are in a human readable form where you can easily cut and paste examples from the internet, easily copy to another machine, manage it from any text editor, etc. (I'm not saying that the apache config file is the best format, but it does work.) Instead of having to hand-compute bitmasks, you use words.
While you CAN use regedt32 (regedit) to partially "manage" settings, the majority of the contents are useless as the registry is first and foremost designed to ONLY be managed via the various applications via the API it and Not by humans.
The registry is a double-edged sword. It can be an efficient way for applications to save and restore state / settings, but at the expense of making it Very difficult to manage outside of the application.
Many Unix applications are beginning to use XML files to replace the old way. I'm on the fence about that, but still prefer it over the Windows Registry.
The early termination fee is supposed to cover the cost of the subsidy on the cost of the phone, the sales droids (commission,) etc. IMHO, it should be prorated from the date you had service, but it's not.
But the better they get at copying the Windows look and feel, the less reason there is to switch.
Why?
Maybe there are OTHER reasons to switch besides the GUI such as:
No Activation / Genuine (dis)Advantage No DRM Better security Cost Freedom of choice (more alternatives in packages / distros) Easier administration of large numbers of systems (it's a well known fact that it takes less administrators per machine than windows) etc., etc.
Mono is far FAR from complete which is why it's not at ready for production use. For example, it doesn't handle.Net 2.0., and the SDK libraries are only partially implemented.
The bottom line is that.Net is not cross-platform yet. Don't hold your breath (especially since MS is now in bed with Novell.)
It's kind of amusing, when you think about it, that what Sun really got out of their lawsuit against Microsoft for their (really, really minor, especially relative to stuff like what Netscape did) modifications to Java was a pure competitor in.NET.
Except for one MAJOR point:.NET is not cross-platform (yes, that matters.) Java is also scalable from mobile to mainframe (kind of like Linux:-)
Personally, I don't use a windows-like theme at all, but the answer is that the Windows look and feel is familiar to people who are moving from Windows to Linux (easier transition) or who work in both environments on a regular basis (consistency.) I would have thought this is obvious...
You are missing the point. With the lawsuit threat, it won't get into Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Suse, Gentoo, Fedora, or any other major distro. While DVD Jon did beat his wrap, he spent a LOT of time dealing with the courts.
Seriously, I keep hearing people say "Microsoft is going to be the only company with technology X and everyone else will go out of business!", and yet we have this massive open source community that is more than capable of developing technology X faster, better, and cheaper.
So why don't they? I mean, face it, if it's so awful that Microsoft will be the only company that has it... shouldn't we not let that happen? Why can't we mobilise our army of programmers to stop it?
Three things. The DMCA, encryption, and patents. The DMCA forbids us from cracking the encryption on DVD's and the HDCP protocol, and the technology behind it is patented. While the work to crack this stuff can be done out of the US, no distribution in the US and many other countries can distribute without the threat of lawsuits.
I didn't buy ANY DVD's until there was a way to crack it. I knew all along that I wanted to have a media server PC that could store and manage my videos like I could with music. Along those lines, I won't buy any HD-DVD technology until there is a viable way for me to crack it (and HDCP.) The higher resolution, while nice, is not worth the restrictions. I will not buy a "license to watch on authorized devices only under our restrictive terms / technology with no viable backup options or media conversion capability." The Vista DRM / limitations on HD content are unacceptable to me, and I won't utilize any OS that restricts my ability to enjoy my collection of purchased entertainment in any way I see fit.
Some people don't care about all this, and that's fine too. They are free to waste their money in any way they want.
I do enough funky things requiring lots of open source tools that just are very difficult to get working correctly on the mac. I too really wanted to be able to use the mac as a replacement for Linux, but it just wasn't meant to be. Apple has tried really hard to "GUIfy" unix and hide all the underlying parts, but for those that need to work with those underlying parts, the work done during "guification" makes non-gui work very difficult for us non-gui people (I'm sure I'll get flamed for this... Some fanatics can't grasp that not everything apple does is perfect, or "the one true way." Heretic!!!)
I also find it difficult to navigate from the keyboard on the mac - Squigglydoo-Tab versus Squigglydoo-backtick. On Linux and Windows, I can easily alt-tab between my top two windows no matter if they are the same application or different applications. I also can't just click on an application icon to get a new window (instance), I have to activate the application and Squigglydoo-N or use the menus. I'm sure if I ONLY used the mac all day, everyday, I would get used to it - but I don't. I use Mac, Windows, and Linux, and have to switch back and forth between them. ("Heritic! The mac way is better, you are a l00zer if you don't agree...")
First off, I'll say that Linux is and has been my primary desktop OS for the past 9+ years. I have no trouble working with it, and I have no intention of ever moving to OS X or Windows as my primary (I already use all three on a daily basis.)
BUT, IMHO I think there is more behind the scenes that has yet to be done, and it has nothing to do with "themes." What is lacking is a cohesive and comprehensive framework that allow all applications / applets to work together and communicate with each other seamlessly. We have a whole bunch of parts right now that are mostly independent with few exceptions. For example: I have a mail notification applet that pops up a summary new mail, and I can click on the notification to launch my mail client of choice (which happens to be Mutt.) What the applet can't do is launch mutt (or attach to an existing instance) opening the current message that I clicked on. Obviously that is a very minor nit, and there are much bigger problems to tackle... Bonobo on Gnome is a start of that framework. KDE has it's own competing technology.
Take sound for instance... There are many competing frameworks (ecasound, jack, esd, etc.) Many applications only support one or two, and frequently the interface is buggy and doesn't work correctly. Good luck getting sound from Gaim, Mail notification, MPlayer, desktop sound effects, and Amarok all working at the same time. Can it be done? Well, yes, I was able to get it to work but it was Very painful. I seriously doubt the majority of linux users would be successful (newbies would be doomed.)
I guess my point is that we can either pretend that all is fine in the Linux desktop world, or we can look at what the other leaders in the market have done and realize that we have a lot more to do. With all the fractured alternative technologies to solve the same problem, I don't know if it the goal of everything working together seamlessly can ever be reached. That won't stop me, personally, from using Linux however. It will probably stop the enterprise.
The point is that most email traverses the internet in the clear and can be easily snooped. Just because Bob sends Sally an email doesn't mean that Fred and Barney won't read it too.
I do agree with you that government / corp users shouldn't be using gmail and such, but *where* email is stored is only 1/2 of the problem. I'm just saying don't ignore the other half.
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IP phones are just for geeks and serve no useful purpose over normal phones
Ahh - there is nothing like the smell of a troll in the morning! That statement is just so ridiculous it's not worth responding to.
My polycom 601 (a high-end business phone) only takes 6.21W. If your IP phone REALLY takes 20W, I would consider replacing it. That, or your meter is whacked.
There isn't no chance
Syntax Error
LCD's don't have burn-in, they have retention. Retention can be fixed with a number of utilities (search Google.) There is nothing to "burn-in" on an LCD.
OK, here are the numbers for a mac mini (no monitor - just the cpu.)
Powered off: 0.035A
Booting: 0.250A - 0.320A
On, but idle: 0.180A - 0.250A
Sleep mode: 0.050A
Unplugged: 0.0A
So booting isn't that much more power than idle, and it's for a short period of time.
I find it interesting that powered off isn't really powered off, so you are better off using the switch on your power strip than relying on the mac "off" mode, which isn't a whole lot better than sleep.
Someone who wants to play with math more than me can figure out the break-even points, but it's clear that you are far better off unplugging your mac and rebooting overnight than leaving it in sleep mode. It's a no-brainer for a week. This basically says, unplug all your crap when you go on vacation, because with modern electronics, off isn't off.
When I buy a DVD, I buy a disk that has a movie on it - not a license.
When you look at the long term costs (over 5 years for example,) building your own data center isn't as outrageously expensive as you think... But it depends on a number of factors such as size, competency of employees, how much you need to physically touch your stuff, etc.
You know that co-locators do charge you the costs and a percentage of profit and their prices can change anytime and once your locked into a datacenter, you usually can't get out for cheap.
Your costs can only change at any time if you have a really shitty contract. Contract negotiations can take longer than implementation in some cases. There are so many colo companies out there that you really can dictate your terms if your are persistent. Yes, moving from one data center to another is VERY expensive and a total pain in the ass, so you craft a contract and working relationship with your colo that doesn't require that move.
If you are building an ISP that does colocation, it's a WHOLE different ballgame. What you need for your enterprise is very different than what AT&T needs in a colo. Most likely, if you need guards at your building, you already have guards. If you don't need guards, just adding a data center isn't going to create the need.
It also depends on the SIZE of your data center. If it's small, being a room or 3 in a building, in-house management can be cost-effective. When you build it, you use suppliers that fully maintain what they sell - YOU don't need to know how to maintain a chiller - you just need to know who to call when it goes south (or have it automatically report back to the maintainer....) If you are large enough, chances are that you have a mechanical guy that can deal with all the minor stuff anyway. With modern servers, chances are you are not going to need a HUGE data center, although you will have to spend more time planning cooling and power.
I have built and managed smaller data centers (50 or so racks) in the past, and while challenging, they are not beyond the abilities of competent staff. Just make sure you do a LOT of planning, bring in the experts, and check references of everyone bidding on your jobs (don't just ASK for references, really check them...)
The /etc files are designed to be human readable and the registry isn't. They are only cryptic when you don't have experience working with them. hkey\local\user\KFJLDSFHSDIFHSDJKFHSDKJFHSDK will ALWAYS be cryptic because the programmers are writing out objects and the binary representation of ENUM's.
It's a mindset difference. On Windows, configuration info is designed to be managed by the application via the API. Manual management is highly discouraged and nearly impossible. It's the other way around on Unix. The best is probably somewhere in between - many apps are going to XML.
99.9...% of the human population do not and are never going to give a shit about being "Free."
Got a source for that statistic or did you just pull it out of your ass? Ass? Thought so. FYI, When you do that, everything you say becomes suspect whether or not it has any merit.
I could ask the same questions. Why use Windows? Is it that you LIKE DRM, Activation, Genuine (dis)Advantage? Or maybe it is the fabulous license terms, security, etc... Some people don't care about all that, others do.
Frankly, I don't care which OS you use, and you shouldn't care which one I use. Just don't push your choice on me.
How a "registry" can be more or less cryptical than a bunch of ini files?
.Net: "50727 REG_SZ 50727-50727", cryptic keys such as: "{874aa5f2-3745-9e23-8a39-8972bcb1455e}" - care to tell me what that means??? Unless you have the source to the application and know where these things are used in that source or VERY extensive documentation, you are screwed.
Simply because most programmers (such as Microsoft programmers) use ENUM values in it, so you end up with entries such as "Policy DWORD 3", this gem from
Contrast that with damn near any native Unix app (such as Apache) where all the configuration files are in a human readable form where you can easily cut and paste examples from the internet, easily copy to another machine, manage it from any text editor, etc. (I'm not saying that the apache config file is the best format, but it does work.) Instead of having to hand-compute bitmasks, you use words.
While you CAN use regedt32 (regedit) to partially "manage" settings, the majority of the contents are useless as the registry is first and foremost designed to ONLY be managed via the various applications via the API it and Not by humans.
The registry is a double-edged sword. It can be an efficient way for applications to save and restore state / settings, but at the expense of making it Very difficult to manage outside of the application.
Many Unix applications are beginning to use XML files to replace the old way. I'm on the fence about that, but still prefer it over the Windows Registry.
The early termination fee is supposed to cover the cost of the subsidy on the cost of the phone, the sales droids (commission,) etc. IMHO, it should be prorated from the date you had service, but it's not.
Oh, I don't know... I find it a continual up-hill battle with Verizon...
But the better they get at copying the Windows look and feel, the less reason there is to switch.
Why?
Maybe there are OTHER reasons to switch besides the GUI such as:
No Activation / Genuine (dis)Advantage
No DRM
Better security
Cost
Freedom of choice (more alternatives in packages / distros)
Easier administration of large numbers of systems (it's a well known fact that it takes less administrators per machine than windows)
etc., etc.
Mono is far FAR from complete which is why it's not at ready for production use. For example, it doesn't handle .Net 2.0., and the SDK libraries are only partially implemented.
.Net is not cross-platform yet. Don't hold your breath (especially since MS is now in bed with Novell.)
The bottom line is that
It's kind of amusing, when you think about it, that what Sun really got out of their lawsuit against Microsoft for their (really, really minor, especially relative to stuff like what Netscape did) modifications to Java was a pure competitor in .NET.
.NET is not cross-platform (yes, that matters.) Java is also scalable from mobile to mainframe (kind of like Linux :-)
Except for one MAJOR point:
Whenever you have difficulty installing Linux, the general solution is to use google.
Oh my, look at that... The first result provides some clues...
Personally, I don't use a windows-like theme at all, but the answer is that the Windows look and feel is familiar to people who are moving from Windows to Linux (easier transition) or who work in both environments on a regular basis (consistency.) I would have thought this is obvious...
You are missing the point. With the lawsuit threat, it won't get into Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Suse, Gentoo, Fedora, or any other major distro. While DVD Jon did beat his wrap, he spent a LOT of time dealing with the courts.
Seriously, I keep hearing people say "Microsoft is going to be the only company with technology X and everyone else will go out of business!", and yet we have this massive open source community that is more than capable of developing technology X faster, better, and cheaper.
So why don't they? I mean, face it, if it's so awful that Microsoft will be the only company that has it... shouldn't we not let that happen? Why can't we mobilise our army of programmers to stop it?
Three things. The DMCA, encryption, and patents. The DMCA forbids us from cracking the encryption on DVD's and the HDCP protocol, and the technology behind it is patented. While the work to crack this stuff can be done out of the US, no distribution in the US and many other countries can distribute without the threat of lawsuits.
You would think so, but that's not the case. Sound is still a mess, even with dmix.
I didn't buy ANY DVD's until there was a way to crack it. I knew all along that I wanted to have a media server PC that could store and manage my videos like I could with music. Along those lines, I won't buy any HD-DVD technology until there is a viable way for me to crack it (and HDCP.) The higher resolution, while nice, is not worth the restrictions. I will not buy a "license to watch on authorized devices only under our restrictive terms / technology with no viable backup options or media conversion capability." The Vista DRM / limitations on HD content are unacceptable to me, and I won't utilize any OS that restricts my ability to enjoy my collection of purchased entertainment in any way I see fit.
Some people don't care about all this, and that's fine too. They are free to waste their money in any way they want.
I do enough funky things requiring lots of open source tools that just are very difficult to get working correctly on the mac. I too really wanted to be able to use the mac as a replacement for Linux, but it just wasn't meant to be. Apple has tried really hard to "GUIfy" unix and hide all the underlying parts, but for those that need to work with those underlying parts, the work done during "guification" makes non-gui work very difficult for us non-gui people (I'm sure I'll get flamed for this... Some fanatics can't grasp that not everything apple does is perfect, or "the one true way." Heretic!!!)
I also find it difficult to navigate from the keyboard on the mac - Squigglydoo-Tab versus Squigglydoo-backtick. On Linux and Windows, I can easily alt-tab between my top two windows no matter if they are the same application or different applications. I also can't just click on an application icon to get a new window (instance), I have to activate the application and Squigglydoo-N or use the menus. I'm sure if I ONLY used the mac all day, everyday, I would get used to it - but I don't. I use Mac, Windows, and Linux, and have to switch back and forth between them. ("Heritic! The mac way is better, you are a l00zer if you don't agree...")
First off, I'll say that Linux is and has been my primary desktop OS for the past 9+ years. I have no trouble working with it, and I have no intention of ever moving to OS X or Windows as my primary (I already use all three on a daily basis.)
BUT, IMHO I think there is more behind the scenes that has yet to be done, and it has nothing to do with "themes." What is lacking is a cohesive and comprehensive framework that allow all applications / applets to work together and communicate with each other seamlessly. We have a whole bunch of parts right now that are mostly independent with few exceptions. For example: I have a mail notification applet that pops up a summary new mail, and I can click on the notification to launch my mail client of choice (which happens to be Mutt.) What the applet can't do is launch mutt (or attach to an existing instance) opening the current message that I clicked on. Obviously that is a very minor nit, and there are much bigger problems to tackle... Bonobo on Gnome is a start of that framework. KDE has it's own competing technology.
Take sound for instance... There are many competing frameworks (ecasound, jack, esd, etc.) Many applications only support one or two, and frequently the interface is buggy and doesn't work correctly. Good luck getting sound from Gaim, Mail notification, MPlayer, desktop sound effects, and Amarok all working at the same time. Can it be done? Well, yes, I was able to get it to work but it was Very painful. I seriously doubt the majority of linux users would be successful (newbies would be doomed.)
I guess my point is that we can either pretend that all is fine in the Linux desktop world, or we can look at what the other leaders in the market have done and realize that we have a lot more to do. With all the fractured alternative technologies to solve the same problem, I don't know if it the goal of everything working together seamlessly can ever be reached. That won't stop me, personally, from using Linux however. It will probably stop the enterprise.
Yes, you did miss the point.
The point is that most email traverses the internet in the clear and can be easily snooped. Just because Bob sends Sally an email doesn't mean that Fred and Barney won't read it too.
I do agree with you that government / corp users shouldn't be using gmail and such, but *where* email is stored is only 1/2 of the problem. I'm just saying don't ignore the other half.