Depends on if the clock is attached to a buzzer for the alarm, or if the clock's alarm is actually attached to a [Word censored by the PATRIOT Act. Please go about your normal duties, citizens!].
That's strange, I was about to say the same thing about Win2k!
With Win2k (and XP) you have to throw out much of your older, less supported hardware because if there isn't drivers in the O/S, and the company is out of business, your hardware is best used as a cheese grater.
Of course, running Linux, I've found all my older hardware supported -- right down to my 1993 MAD 16 Opti soundcard. Can you say the same about windows 2000?
When I want to set up a scanner in RedHat Linux, I simply run the sane daemon. Does windows 2000 come with all supported scanner software out of the box? What about digital cameras? RedHat works with them out of the box too.
I had to install special drivers to get my Lava Dual Serial port card working in Win2k that messed up the onboard serial ports. In Linux the card worked right away, and the "drivers" didn't mess up my other serial ports at all.
And, on another note, does windows 2000 support the latest graphics cards out of the box? I know when I plugged my Radeon card into my Linux box I had both 2D and 3D support working without downloading anyhting at all.
To finish off, how about printers? I can quickly and easily install most all printers on my Linux box without downloading any special drivers. Can you say the same about the latest WinPrinter for your Windows 2000 system?
So's digital, and CDs aren't exactly "done right" -- they're the consumer byproduct, and sound perfectly fine when you factor in the differences caused by human hearing itself (remember: The CD was mastered to sound right to the sound engineer at the studio, and his ears are not yours).
I'd be willing to be dollars to donuts that you can't tell the difference between a record (played more than once) and either an SACD or another 43 Khz, 24-bit source.
The cost to make a record sound good (which will only ever last for the first few plays anyways) far outstrips that of professional digital audio gear which can beat the repeated performance of a record anyday.
Now, if you only listen to your records once (while the vynil molecules are still fresh) and only on one side (the other side may be "ruined" due to friction with the surface underneath) you might have a point. But it seems to me only Bill Gates could afford to buy a new record every time he plays a side.
Of course, this is all assuming your record player doesn't implement the RIAA curve fully (a very expensive one ($2500) could probably get away with this and still output good quality sound, a $200 record player couldn't) which applies a filter to the top end anyways (the only part of the sound digital reproductions strip). With the RIAA curve, by the time the sound reaches the pro audio level, is well past the 50 db down mark (I think -- I know at the top end of CD audio its already 20 db down). At 50 dB down, dynamic range and signal to noise ratios are simply going to kill any hope of reproducing the sound, unless its been recorded so loud on the record that it can shatter class with a cup-and-needle player.
You'd really require an insane Signal to Noise ratio on a record player to beat the 24-bit pro audio gear. I'd probably bet around the 100 db range... You'd better have silver, triple shielded cable!
>The same can be said about 100Hz tvs.
Wha? You do know film is projected at 24 "hz", right? A 100 Hz refresh on a TV would only strengthen the quality of the film's reproduction...
>But NOT one project I've seen (including the Linux VCR, the Linux-Tivo thing on/. before, etc) has found a way to change the channels on the CABLE box when you want to watch something else.
They have their own domain, lirc.org. Like you're about to say, this is exactly the other half of the equation you need -- just add the glue code now and you're done.
>I'm working on coding my own using the TiVo emitters, but I really don't want to duplicate work.
Visit the site above and let us know when its complete!
This problem can be simplified by sending the left-hand and right-hand polarizations down two separate cables to each apartment. Only a commercial grade satellite splitter/amplifier is required on each "half" of the dual LNB with enough oomph to amplify the signal for the entire apartment complex.
In the apartment room, the customer simply buys a de-multiplexer (signal combiner) and plugs the resulting signal cable into their receiver.
Of course, neither of these is the way this is usually done from what I've heard, since most apartment building cable is not the RG-11 required (even RG-6 will be useless for some of the long runs required in apartment buildings, and adding booster amps could be a serious PITA). Its often RG-59 in older buildings, and often cheap thin crap at that.
So, the deal I've heard DirecTV offers is that the landlord hooks up a bunch of receivers to a set of multiplexers, and multiplexes the output from those receivers to create his own mini-CATV system, which will work over the crappy cable in the apartment building.
Not too elegant, and limiting in channels, but hey, what are you going to do? Rip out the old cable?:-)
A proper drop with RG-6 cable going straight into a high-quality TV amp with integrated splitter with the pirate drop hanging off of that (again, with high quality cable and professinoal connections) could eliminate methods one and two, or not?
If that pirate drop enters a computer (with its case on, of course!) TV Tuner card, that will also fix method three, right? Or, one could buy a $200 TBC and hook the cable up to that as well, I suppose.
BTW: Leakage on the 121.5 Mhz aircraft frequency band and the fact that vans check for that remind me of my now past days pirating DishNetwork and the fact that their unusual data rate to the smart card appears to be designed to emit a strong harmonic on that frequency if somone should bring a cable out from the smartcard slot unsheilded...
Thanks for the very interesting info!
You're the ultra-extreme minority...
on
What Free Cable?
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· Score: 1
The last set of stats that I have (out of date, from 1990) said 98% of all American households have a TV.
That number is most likely about 99 - 99.9% right now.
Sorry to say it, but they are never going to make special breaks for the few thousand scattered Americans without a TV.
>Also plagiarism is commonly described as "stealing someone else's words".
Quite true, I should have thought about that.
In the case of plagarism, you are directly stealing the "profits" of the author by claiming the work is yours. The losses (required to call something stealing) to the author are often, in the case of plagarism, demonstrable, unlike plain piracy.
>Wrong. You're trying to use a reducto ad absurdum argument on be. It won't work.
You're using latin debating terms to piss me off. It will work!
You said "Of course, there's also the fact that, with remarkably few exceptions, commercial software is of higher quality than free software."
Emphasis mine.
Then you said:
"if you try to turn software into a business, you're probably going to spend more time and energy on your software than if you just do it as a hobby."
Which is absurd, unless you spend most of your life at work (most people don't, fortunately).
"So the implication is that commercial software is of higher quality than free software."
But you said that the remarkable majority (opposite of remarkably few) of commercial software is of higher quality than free software.
You said it. Not me.
Either take that or I'm going to call you on it.
>Are you trying to say that commercial software is not, as a rule, better than comparable free software?
Totally, that's exactly what I'm saying. I think that very little commercial software out there beats free software. By commercial and free software I'm not talking about individual packages, but entire solutions, since often a free solution consists of more separate packages than a free solution.
>On the other hand, I can't think of any databases that are as good as or better than Oracle, DB2, or Sybase. I also can't think of a free ERP or AR/AP package the compares to SAP, or a free CRM package that compares to Siebel or Salesforce.com, or a free HR package that compares to Peoplesoft.
I will say that there are very high quality free database systems. They may, or may not, do what you want. Of course, commercial software doesn't guarantee it'll do exactly what you want, either, unless you spend an amount equivalent to hiring programmers to add the features into an open source package.
Here's a few more free pieces of software you've overlooked that meet or beat commercial solutions:
Sendmail, GCC, Cygwin, KDE, GhostScript, Mozilla, I could go on, but I think I've already surpassed your few commercial examples.
>So I'm really having a hard time understanding your argument, here.
I'm having a hard time with yours, actually.
So, what you're saying is that commercial software beats free software because it does a better job at accounting systems and ERP systems (which are often interrelated)?
I think you'll need to do far better than that, especially as projects like GNUCash gain steam.
If people would stop twisting words about we'd find that copyright violation isn't as serious as people think.
Heck, we don't even apply the word "stealing" to murder, even though one could twist the word stealing to mean "stealing someone's life".
The only way piracy becomes stealing is when someone sells a full-price boxed fraudulent copy. Then you can prove the "pirate" was interested in buying the real thing.
Saying that someone on a fixed-income would have bought M$Office Professional for $300 (or bought an entire beatles compilation for $300) instead of getting a copy from a friend doesn't make it true.
If it were true that thinking someone might have the intent of stealing made it fact, there'd be no need for "Break and Enter" as a crime.
In most countries, when someone commits a petty misdemenor (and that's what copyright violation should be) police will wait to see "how far" the criminal will take the crime so they can pin the maximum number of charges on them (except, of course, taking it to the point of risking peoples lives).
If a policeman sees you breaking into a house and stops you right away, unless he can find proof that you had intentions of stealing things (for example, you had a big truck and connections with a gang) the best he'll probably get you is a month or two in jail. Maybe. All you'll have to say to the judge is that you were going to play a prank.
Same with piracy. Unless you can prove I was going to buy the software/music (receipts of a returned goods would work, or perhaps testimony from people you might have told you were interested in purchasing it from) there's no solid evidence, and noone is a thief.
>I love hearing the users fuss and complain about their settings, and browser favorites, and desktop links, that aren't there anymore because you recovered a ghost image.
Roaming profiles are your friend.
>Also restoring a ghosted image could be fast but you're still talking at least minutes and possibly hours to less than a second with the sun ray.
Maybe, but that assumes you have to ghost the new computer at the client's desk. You'd be best to do it in the shop days earlier (these are spare machines, ready to go right away, right?) with a base image. Tell the worker to pop in the auto boot disk for their area on lunch break and when they're back their computer is full of whatever software their department uses.
Problems solved, and money still saved.
The only benefit I see to Sun's solution that can't be easily replicated with current solutions is the ability to keep applications open between sessions. This isn't the big deal to most workers that many people on slashdot are making it out to be!
>I mean, if you're not going to let them "save to the hard drive", why do they need a hard drive on their machine?
Because a hard drive is fast and cheap, unlike flash based local storage or network storage which can be fast but is normally never cheap.
You save money and because it takes about 20 seconds to swap a failed hard drive when you use a caddy, you lose no reasonable time whatsoever (one can probably have the drive in the caddy pre-ghosted) fixing a broken hard drive.
>As a skilled sys admin, do you want to be wandering around the office, installing boot disks or lugging around replacement workstations?
Trust me, where I work we employ students to do this work, and it works beautifully for us. Its really a no-brainer once you get it "down pat".
>At Sun, replacing the desktop appliance is handled by the same people who do other buildings management.
Well, we save even more by getting students to swap PCs. Its really a simple job.
>You also don't have the heat and space take up of PCs on the desk
You can design that out of a PC with just a little work (see my other comment, which seems to have sparked some controversy!).
>You never need to upgrade the box on the desk, unlike with a PC - you simply add an extra server to the farm, or add some CPU or memory to your existing server.
This is true, but you can always run the PCs as dedicated X-Terms, which gives them 90% of the benefits of the SunRay (still not complete session saving, everything else works).
>but you're still nowhere near the ease of managing a Sun Ray network.
I think you'd be surprised how much simpler it can be to manage a PC network nowadays.
Novell _really_ makes things easier than ever. Where I work we manage 30k+ accounts and 1500 stations with only a handful of IT staff (under 30). I'd be surprised if this were possible with all Sun workstations.
>You wouldn't get that with a PC network!
We add 3k to 10k accounts each year with ease as new students come in. You certainly can get that with a PC network! Its all automated -- new student info is entered into a mainframe, new account is created via batch jobs during the summer.
We probably see 10-100 messed up accounts a year. Which is pretty good, considering the numbers.
>If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it.
If a workstation sets on fire, you replace it with a backup workstation, pop in a ghost boot disk, and wait for the image to download (could be anything from 5 minutes to 10 hours depending on how crappy your network is:).
>If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it
In a company with standard software in the ghost images (which is how any company with more than a handful of computers should be managing the software on their workstations) all the computers have the same basic software. No need for smartcards.
>And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
Seriously, take a look into Symantec Ghost and Zenworks. They'll save you so much time you'll hardly believe it!
One image can serve for hundreds of computers. When you patch a computer all you'll need to do is update the image once (so that new ghost installs already have the fix) and push the upgrade onto clients with Zenworks.
That's going to take you about the same amount of time as patching the server and testing it with a few clients.
If you're worried about people saving their work onto their harddrives, tell them the harddrives are cleaned automatically every login (a little popup box that says its doing this will work wonders for re-inforcement) and that anything you want to keep for more than that session must be saved to the network drive.
Software like DeepFreeze can not only stop 90% of workers screwing up their systems by installing crappy software, but it will also enforce your "don't save to the hard drive" policy. The other 10% who are smart enough to work around DeepFreeze are smart enough to listen to your "don't save to the hard drive" policy because they've seen you ghost machines, and they've seen hard drives crash.
BTW: Bob takes more care of his computer when he knows that if it breaks he doesn't have a computer until its repaired!
If your company requires Unix, a little work with NIS and NFS could do wonders (and ghost will still work, although there's always dd if you're desparate)...
>Imagine finding someone else's coffee stains or bagel seeds on or inside your keyboard?
Imagine being allergic to peanuts only to find out that someone at the only station left dropped his PBnJ Sammich on the keyboard the day before?
Or, imagine being left handed only to find that every time you get up you have to have a spare non-ergo mouse to replace the company standard at every terminal.
Or, imagine you use a special peripheral (like a scanner) only to find out the two stations with it are both being used to surf the internet on lunch break.
>You can't buy an entire computer, with monitor and OS for that price.
You sure can buy an entire computer with monitor and OS and many other peripherals for less. I'll stick to the same online company to show it can be done without effort.
Total: $512 and this does far more than the Sunray.
Savings: Up to $144. More if you don't want to use Windows. Another $124 if I'm right and the $500 sunray doesn't include a display.
And I know you can get that price much, much, much lower if you were to deal with distributors (and if you're talking 50 or more units, you most likely would have to).
>There are no costs involved in administrating a stand alone cpu, and you never have to upgrade.
More video performance is always needed with age, vendors obsolete proprietary old hardware by not providing necessary software upgrades, network standards change, people spill coffee into them, people stuff postit notes in silly places, people destroy the buttons, they stack telephone books on them, stack books to block the fan, stop the fan with pens when its too noisy, open them to "fix" them -- there's way more, but I'm not interested in reliving the pain.:-)
BTW: Speaking as someone who has worked as computer support staff for a college with over 1000 terminals, I can tell you that software is one of the least worries. Computers, even though most parts don't move, do "wear out" -- parts either fail or stupid people beat the crap out of the computers.
Basically, I got myself involved in a little flamewar on another message board.
Someone actually posted that (i dont care about grammer i am not takeing a english test) with exactly that spelling (but with more george like spacing) as an excuse as to why they don't need to know any english.
Seems to me they didn't look up the definition of irony before they wrote that.:-)
(I'd rather not say where exactly I saw it or who said it because that would be a tad unfair -- sometimes people just say something silly by accident)
>For example, Kant's categorical imperative: the software industry could not exist if everyone pirated, therefore those that do pirate are hypocrites, because in order for them to pirate, they require other people to pay and support the industry.
Ahh, but on the contrary, the software industry could not have been created if software was not originally free.
Read the history of computing and you'll notice that "piracy" was such a silly issue that Mr. Piracy-Is-Theft himself released an open letter condemning the many people not purchasing his software.
Funny thing was that at the time people were still employed as software engineers anyways.
So, we see the circular problem that eixists: Virtually all modern information based technologies are fuelled by piracy, yet virtually all modern information based technologies don't exist unless there's information to sell.
Let's put it simply:
- Satellite TV became "hot" in the early 80's because it was pirateable. This fuelled a demand for satellite dishes, and the satellite TV programming industry was born.
- VCRs became "hot" because they could be used (at the time -- I know about the Betamax decision, TYVM) to illegally timeshift and permanently record copyrighted programs. Later on pre-recorded videocasettes were availiable for rent, and piracy of these produced consumer priced pre-recorded videos.
I can think of other technologies fuelled by piracy (the RIAAs latest pathetic attempt at releasing a proper MP3 for purchase comes to mind), but I'm tired and want to go to bed.:-)
>I could also see why they might label it as the worst kind of theft because......the victim is totally defenseless.
Oh boy, you are so wrong in so many ways.
Before it was illegal in Canada I pirated the hell out of DishNetwork.
Did you know they purposely destroyed the software in hacked receivers?
They would rob me of $200 in hardware that I purcased (since I am _not_ a thief -- check the definition more closely) for me "stealing" $0 in programming (it was, and still is, impossible to pay for American TV legally in Canada, so therefore the limit of their "loss" is $0).
Of course, once they played their trump card, all was lost. Within a few weeks designs were released to the general public to rewrite the broken receivers using $5 in parts, and life was good.
And, just to let you know, people trying to "pirate" Celine Dion silver discs in their Macs get their drives ruined.
Normally, if I caught someone stealing my wallet, I'd expect it back, and I'd expect them to go do some community service (jail is usually reserved for serious crimes, like using my credit cards to buy a new car). But when you pirate, well, they can defend themselves by:
- Destroying infinitely more hardware (by cost) than their pirated information.
- Putting you in jail for longer than a murderer.
- Making you go bankrupt.
I wouldn't say they're defenceless. In fact, I'd say they have more of an offense than anything else.
Sorry to break it to you, but "piracy" meant illegal use of information a long time before computers.
Back in the days of "pirate radio" a boat would illegally broadcast hit music without paying royalties or obeying the idiotic 2:30 maximum song length rule. Because the boat would be inside international waters, the government could do nothing whatsoever. You can guess why the word pirate (one who plunders with the use of a boat) was linked to illicit boat radio.:-)
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>I don't think a clock can be.
Depends on if the clock is attached to a buzzer for the alarm, or if the clock's alarm is actually attached to a [Word censored by the PATRIOT Act. Please go about your normal duties, citizens!].
That's strange, I was about to say the same thing about Win2k!
With Win2k (and XP) you have to throw out much of your older, less supported hardware because if there isn't drivers in the O/S, and the company is out of business, your hardware is best used as a cheese grater.
Of course, running Linux, I've found all my older hardware supported -- right down to my 1993 MAD 16 Opti soundcard. Can you say the same about windows 2000?
When I want to set up a scanner in RedHat Linux, I simply run the sane daemon. Does windows 2000 come with all supported scanner software out of the box? What about digital cameras? RedHat works with them out of the box too.
I had to install special drivers to get my Lava Dual Serial port card working in Win2k that messed up the onboard serial ports. In Linux the card worked right away, and the "drivers" didn't mess up my other serial ports at all.
And, on another note, does windows 2000 support the latest graphics cards out of the box? I know when I plugged my Radeon card into my Linux box I had both 2D and 3D support working without downloading anyhting at all.
To finish off, how about printers? I can quickly and easily install most all printers on my Linux box without downloading any special drivers. Can you say the same about the latest WinPrinter for your Windows 2000 system?
I'd say not.
>Analog sound is usually better when done right
So's digital, and CDs aren't exactly "done right" -- they're the consumer byproduct, and sound perfectly fine when you factor in the differences caused by human hearing itself (remember: The CD was mastered to sound right to the sound engineer at the studio, and his ears are not yours).
I'd be willing to be dollars to donuts that you can't tell the difference between a record (played more than once) and either an SACD or another 43 Khz, 24-bit source.
The cost to make a record sound good (which will only ever last for the first few plays anyways) far outstrips that of professional digital audio gear which can beat the repeated performance of a record anyday.
Now, if you only listen to your records once (while the vynil molecules are still fresh) and only on one side (the other side may be "ruined" due to friction with the surface underneath) you might have a point. But it seems to me only Bill Gates could afford to buy a new record every time he plays a side.
Of course, this is all assuming your record player doesn't implement the RIAA curve fully (a very expensive one ($2500) could probably get away with this and still output good quality sound, a $200 record player couldn't) which applies a filter to the top end anyways (the only part of the sound digital reproductions strip). With the RIAA curve, by the time the sound reaches the pro audio level, is well past the 50 db down mark (I think -- I know at the top end of CD audio its already 20 db down). At 50 dB down, dynamic range and signal to noise ratios are simply going to kill any hope of reproducing the sound, unless its been recorded so loud on the record that it can shatter class with a cup-and-needle player.
You'd really require an insane Signal to Noise ratio on a record player to beat the 24-bit pro audio gear. I'd probably bet around the 100 db range... You'd better have silver, triple shielded cable!
>The same can be said about 100Hz tvs.
Wha? You do know film is projected at 24 "hz", right? A 100 Hz refresh on a TV would only strengthen the quality of the film's reproduction...
>I think you mean "Winchester drive".
Funny, I would have said drum drive. But whatever pleases you...
>But NOT one project I've seen (including the Linux VCR, the Linux-Tivo thing on /. before, etc) has found a way to change the channels on the CABLE box when you want to watch something else.
They have their own domain, lirc.org. Like you're about to say, this is exactly the other half of the equation you need -- just add the glue code now and you're done.
>I'm working on coding my own using the TiVo emitters, but I really don't want to duplicate work.
Visit the site above and let us know when its complete!
HTH.
This problem can be simplified by sending the left-hand and right-hand polarizations down two separate cables to each apartment. Only a commercial grade satellite splitter/amplifier is required on each "half" of the dual LNB with enough oomph to amplify the signal for the entire apartment complex.
:-)
In the apartment room, the customer simply buys a de-multiplexer (signal combiner) and plugs the resulting signal cable into their receiver.
Of course, neither of these is the way this is usually done from what I've heard, since most apartment building cable is not the RG-11 required (even RG-6 will be useless for some of the long runs required in apartment buildings, and adding booster amps could be a serious PITA). Its often RG-59 in older buildings, and often cheap thin crap at that.
So, the deal I've heard DirecTV offers is that the landlord hooks up a bunch of receivers to a set of multiplexers, and multiplexes the output from those receivers to create his own mini-CATV system, which will work over the crappy cable in the apartment building.
Not too elegant, and limiting in channels, but hey, what are you going to do? Rip out the old cable?
Just guessing, but I'm thinking:
A proper drop with RG-6 cable going straight into a high-quality TV amp with integrated splitter with the pirate drop hanging off of that (again, with high quality cable and professinoal connections) could eliminate methods one and two, or not?
If that pirate drop enters a computer (with its case on, of course!) TV Tuner card, that will also fix method three, right? Or, one could buy a $200 TBC and hook the cable up to that as well, I suppose.
BTW: Leakage on the 121.5 Mhz aircraft frequency band and the fact that vans check for that remind me of my now past days pirating DishNetwork and the fact that their unusual data rate to the smart card appears to be designed to emit a strong harmonic on that frequency if somone should bring a cable out from the smartcard slot unsheilded...
Thanks for the very interesting info!
The last set of stats that I have (out of date, from 1990) said 98% of all American households have a TV.
That number is most likely about 99 - 99.9% right now.
Sorry to say it, but they are never going to make special breaks for the few thousand scattered Americans without a TV.
>Furthermore, this project has nothing to do with bypassing a copy protection device.
Just wait until an offshoot of this software lets you bypass the DRM on WMA files.
>Also plagiarism is commonly described as "stealing someone else's words".
Quite true, I should have thought about that.
In the case of plagarism, you are directly stealing the "profits" of the author by claiming the work is yours. The losses (required to call something stealing) to the author are often, in the case of plagarism, demonstrable, unlike plain piracy.
>Wrong. You're trying to use a reducto ad absurdum argument on be. It won't work.
You're using latin debating terms to piss me off. It will work!
You said "Of course, there's also the fact that, with remarkably few exceptions, commercial software is of higher quality than free software."
Emphasis mine.
Then you said:
"if you try to turn software into a business, you're probably going to spend more time and energy on your software than if you just do it as a hobby."
Which is absurd, unless you spend most of your life at work (most people don't, fortunately).
"So the implication is that commercial software is of higher quality than free software."
But you said that the remarkable majority (opposite of remarkably few) of commercial software is of higher quality than free software.
You said it. Not me.
Either take that or I'm going to call you on it.
>Are you trying to say that commercial software is not, as a rule, better than comparable free software?
Totally, that's exactly what I'm saying. I think that very little commercial software out there beats free software. By commercial and free software I'm not talking about individual packages, but entire solutions, since often a free solution consists of more separate packages than a free solution.
>On the other hand, I can't think of any databases that are as good as or better than Oracle, DB2, or Sybase. I also can't think of a free ERP or AR/AP package the compares to SAP, or a free CRM package that compares to Siebel or Salesforce.com, or a free HR package that compares to Peoplesoft.
I will say that there are very high quality free database systems. They may, or may not, do what you want. Of course, commercial software doesn't guarantee it'll do exactly what you want, either, unless you spend an amount equivalent to hiring programmers to add the features into an open source package.
Here's a few more free pieces of software you've overlooked that meet or beat commercial solutions:
Sendmail, GCC, Cygwin, KDE, GhostScript, Mozilla, I could go on, but I think I've already surpassed your few commercial examples.
>So I'm really having a hard time understanding your argument, here.
I'm having a hard time with yours, actually.
So, what you're saying is that commercial software beats free software because it does a better job at accounting systems and ERP systems (which are often interrelated)?
I think you'll need to do far better than that, especially as projects like GNUCash gain steam.
Since when did copying become stealing?
If people would stop twisting words about we'd find that copyright violation isn't as serious as people think.
Heck, we don't even apply the word "stealing" to murder, even though one could twist the word stealing to mean "stealing someone's life".
The only way piracy becomes stealing is when someone sells a full-price boxed fraudulent copy. Then you can prove the "pirate" was interested in buying the real thing.
Saying that someone on a fixed-income would have bought M$Office Professional for $300 (or bought an entire beatles compilation for $300) instead of getting a copy from a friend doesn't make it true.
If it were true that thinking someone might have the intent of stealing made it fact, there'd be no need for "Break and Enter" as a crime.
In most countries, when someone commits a petty misdemenor (and that's what copyright violation should be) police will wait to see "how far" the criminal will take the crime so they can pin the maximum number of charges on them (except, of course, taking it to the point of risking peoples lives).
If a policeman sees you breaking into a house and stops you right away, unless he can find proof that you had intentions of stealing things (for example, you had a big truck and connections with a gang) the best he'll probably get you is a month or two in jail. Maybe. All you'll have to say to the judge is that you were going to play a prank.
Same with piracy. Unless you can prove I was going to buy the software/music (receipts of a returned goods would work, or perhaps testimony from people you might have told you were interested in purchasing it from) there's no solid evidence, and noone is a thief.
>I love hearing the users fuss and complain about their settings, and browser favorites, and desktop links, that aren't there anymore because you recovered a ghost image.
Roaming profiles are your friend.
>Also restoring a ghosted image could be fast but you're still talking at least minutes and possibly hours to less than a second with the sun ray.
Maybe, but that assumes you have to ghost the new computer at the client's desk. You'd be best to do it in the shop days earlier (these are spare machines, ready to go right away, right?) with a base image. Tell the worker to pop in the auto boot disk for their area on lunch break and when they're back their computer is full of whatever software their department uses.
Problems solved, and money still saved.
The only benefit I see to Sun's solution that can't be easily replicated with current solutions is the ability to keep applications open between sessions. This isn't the big deal to most workers that many people on slashdot are making it out to be!
>I mean, if you're not going to let them "save to the hard drive", why do they need a hard drive on their machine?
Because a hard drive is fast and cheap, unlike flash based local storage or network storage which can be fast but is normally never cheap.
You save money and because it takes about 20 seconds to swap a failed hard drive when you use a caddy, you lose no reasonable time whatsoever (one can probably have the drive in the caddy pre-ghosted) fixing a broken hard drive.
>As a skilled sys admin, do you want to be wandering around the office, installing boot disks or lugging around replacement workstations?
Trust me, where I work we employ students to do this work, and it works beautifully for us. Its really a no-brainer once you get it "down pat".
>At Sun, replacing the desktop appliance is handled by the same people who do other buildings management.
Well, we save even more by getting students to swap PCs. Its really a simple job.
>You also don't have the heat and space take up of PCs on the desk
You can design that out of a PC with just a little work (see my other comment, which seems to have sparked some controversy!).
>You never need to upgrade the box on the desk, unlike with a PC - you simply add an extra server to the farm, or add some CPU or memory to your existing server.
This is true, but you can always run the PCs as dedicated X-Terms, which gives them 90% of the benefits of the SunRay (still not complete session saving, everything else works).
>but you're still nowhere near the ease of managing a Sun Ray network.
I think you'd be surprised how much simpler it can be to manage a PC network nowadays.
Novell _really_ makes things easier than ever. Where I work we manage 30k+ accounts and 1500 stations with only a handful of IT staff (under 30). I'd be surprised if this were possible with all Sun workstations.
>You wouldn't get that with a PC network!
We add 3k to 10k accounts each year with ease as new students come in. You certainly can get that with a PC network! Its all automated -- new student info is entered into a mainframe, new account is created via batch jobs during the summer.
We probably see 10-100 messed up accounts a year. Which is pretty good, considering the numbers.
>If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it.
:).
If a workstation sets on fire, you replace it with a backup workstation, pop in a ghost boot disk, and wait for the image to download (could be anything from 5 minutes to 10 hours depending on how crappy your network is
>If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it
In a company with standard software in the ghost images (which is how any company with more than a handful of computers should be managing the software on their workstations) all the computers have the same basic software. No need for smartcards.
>And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
Seriously, take a look into Symantec Ghost and Zenworks. They'll save you so much time you'll hardly believe it!
One image can serve for hundreds of computers. When you patch a computer all you'll need to do is update the image once (so that new ghost installs already have the fix) and push the upgrade onto clients with Zenworks.
That's going to take you about the same amount of time as patching the server and testing it with a few clients.
If you're worried about people saving their work onto their harddrives, tell them the harddrives are cleaned automatically every login (a little popup box that says its doing this will work wonders for re-inforcement) and that anything you want to keep for more than that session must be saved to the network drive.
Software like DeepFreeze can not only stop 90% of workers screwing up their systems by installing crappy software, but it will also enforce your "don't save to the hard drive" policy. The other 10% who are smart enough to work around DeepFreeze are smart enough to listen to your "don't save to the hard drive" policy because they've seen you ghost machines, and they've seen hard drives crash.
BTW: Bob takes more care of his computer when he knows that if it breaks he doesn't have a computer until its repaired!
If your company requires Unix, a little work with NIS and NFS could do wonders (and ghost will still work, although there's always dd if you're desparate)...
>Imagine finding someone else's coffee stains or bagel seeds on or inside your keyboard?
Imagine being allergic to peanuts only to find out that someone at the only station left dropped his PBnJ Sammich on the keyboard the day before?
Or, imagine being left handed only to find that every time you get up you have to have a spare non-ergo mouse to replace the company standard at every terminal.
Or, imagine you use a special peripheral (like a scanner) only to find out the two stations with it are both being used to surf the internet on lunch break.
>But if you expect somebody to give you money for software, it implies that you've spent some time polishing and perfecting that software.
Well, you're right on. I mean, with a polished and perfected piece of software there'd be no security or usability problems, right?
So why, exactly, do so many people rag on Microsoft? I mean, they have fewer security problems now then ever before!
>Of course, there's also the fact that, with remarkably few exceptions, commercial software is of higher quality than free software.
And all shareware is worth its registration price.
Heh. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell ya.
>You can't buy an entire computer, with monitor and OS for that price.
/w PS: $24.
:-)
You sure can buy an entire computer with monitor and OS and many other peripherals for less. I'll stick to the same online company to show it can be done without effort.
Allow me to demonstrate:
- Motherboard with CPU, sound, video, network, USB: $79 (mentioned above by me cause I was too lazy to log in and I tire of seeming like a PCChips pusher)
- 17" Monitor: $125.
- Mouse and Keyboard: $15 (not worth linking -- they're usually cheaper).
- Windows: $86.
- Memory: $42
256 MB.
- Case
Total: $356
Let's make it better than the sun box though:
- Hard Drive: $65.
- Floppy Drive: $9.
- CD Burner: $67.
Total: $512 and this does far more than the Sunray.
Savings: Up to $144. More if you don't want to use Windows. Another $124 if I'm right and the $500 sunray doesn't include a display.
And I know you can get that price much, much, much lower if you were to deal with distributors (and if you're talking 50 or more units, you most likely would have to).
>There are no costs involved in administrating a stand alone cpu, and you never have to upgrade.
More video performance is always needed with age, vendors obsolete proprietary old hardware by not providing necessary software upgrades, network standards change, people spill coffee into them, people stuff postit notes in silly places, people destroy the buttons, they stack telephone books on them, stack books to block the fan, stop the fan with pens when its too noisy, open them to "fix" them -- there's way more, but I'm not interested in reliving the pain.
BTW: Speaking as someone who has worked as computer support staff for a college with over 1000 terminals, I can tell you that software is one of the least worries. Computers, even though most parts don't move, do "wear out" -- parts either fail or stupid people beat the crap out of the computers.
Basically, I got myself involved in a little flamewar on another message board.
:-)
Someone actually posted that (i dont care about grammer i am not takeing a english test) with exactly that spelling (but with more george like spacing) as an excuse as to why they don't need to know any english.
Seems to me they didn't look up the definition of irony before they wrote that.
(I'd rather not say where exactly I saw it or who said it because that would be a tad unfair -- sometimes people just say something silly by accident)
>But I'm pretty sure all the ATI owners are pretty pissed.
Why?
I own a Radeon, it works quite well with both Tux Racer and GLTron (never tried much more).
Exactly what is it that makes Nvidia's binary drivers better than the open source drivers for my Radeon? They seem to be working fine for me.
>For example, Kant's categorical imperative: the software industry could not exist if everyone pirated, therefore those that do pirate are hypocrites, because in order for them to pirate, they require other people to pay and support the industry.
:-)
Ahh, but on the contrary, the software industry could not have been created if software was not originally free.
Read the history of computing and you'll notice that "piracy" was such a silly issue that Mr. Piracy-Is-Theft himself released an open letter condemning the many people not purchasing his software.
Funny thing was that at the time people were still employed as software engineers anyways.
So, we see the circular problem that eixists: Virtually all modern information based technologies are fuelled by piracy, yet virtually all modern information based technologies don't exist unless there's information to sell.
Let's put it simply:
- Satellite TV became "hot" in the early 80's because it was pirateable. This fuelled a demand for satellite dishes, and the satellite TV programming industry was born.
- VCRs became "hot" because they could be used (at the time -- I know about the Betamax decision, TYVM) to illegally timeshift and permanently record copyrighted programs. Later on pre-recorded videocasettes were availiable for rent, and piracy of these produced consumer priced pre-recorded videos.
I can think of other technologies fuelled by piracy (the RIAAs latest pathetic attempt at releasing a proper MP3 for purchase comes to mind), but I'm tired and want to go to bed.
>I could also see why they might label it as the worst kind of theft because... ...the victim is totally defenseless.
Oh boy, you are so wrong in so many ways.
Before it was illegal in Canada I pirated the hell out of DishNetwork.
Did you know they purposely destroyed the software in hacked receivers?
They would rob me of $200 in hardware that I purcased (since I am _not_ a thief -- check the definition more closely) for me "stealing" $0 in programming (it was, and still is, impossible to pay for American TV legally in Canada, so therefore the limit of their "loss" is $0).
Of course, once they played their trump card, all was lost. Within a few weeks designs were released to the general public to rewrite the broken receivers using $5 in parts, and life was good.
And, just to let you know, people trying to "pirate" Celine Dion silver discs in their Macs get their drives ruined.
Normally, if I caught someone stealing my wallet, I'd expect it back, and I'd expect them to go do some community service (jail is usually reserved for serious crimes, like using my credit cards to buy a new car). But when you pirate, well, they can defend themselves by:
- Destroying infinitely more hardware (by cost) than their pirated information.
- Putting you in jail for longer than a murderer.
- Making you go bankrupt.
I wouldn't say they're defenceless. In fact, I'd say they have more of an offense than anything else.
Sorry to break it to you, but "piracy" meant illegal use of information a long time before computers.
:-)
Back in the days of "pirate radio" a boat would illegally broadcast hit music without paying royalties or obeying the idiotic 2:30 maximum song length rule. Because the boat would be inside international waters, the government could do nothing whatsoever. You can guess why the word pirate (one who plunders with the use of a boat) was linked to illicit boat radio.
All independant thought has to have a base on reality, or it ends up so abstract as to make no useful sense during your lifetime.
If you don't believe me, here's an independant thought:
asiduhfiuasdhfui asduifhiausdfh aisdufh.