Say you're a company that offers some kind of computer related service - maybe you produce CGI and have a big render farm. You may consider the type and number of computers you use to be trade secrets, because you have figured out an optimal configuration that gives you a great return on investment.
Do you want stray software on your computers reporting back to the vendor without you being aware of it the number of computers in your farm, specific information about the hardware in the system, and so on? If you are running a big distributed application, do you want your network cycles being eaten by your software pinging home?
There are some types of information that companies want to keep private in order to remain competitive, and if a piece of software on their system copies that information and sends it outside of the company without their consent then that is extremely bad.
In the current economy, information is a commodity. It has value, and copies of it should only come free if the producer of the information consents to it being made free.
I won't even get into how a defense contractor should react to software that might try to send information like that from inside a classified environment...
We were out of compliance I figure by about 8 percent (out of 72 desktops).
with the amount of the settlement ($65k plus $35k in legal fees). He focused his wrath on Microsoft, which would imply that what was illegal was Office and/or Windows - to get up to $65k worth of that you'd have to be running illegal copies on most of the 72 desktops.
I also find it a little ironic that his company now has the discipline to only put things on worker's computers that they need (he makes a great point about not putting Web browsers on machines that don't need them) - if they had done that before, that would have kept them out of this mess (or they would have been violating licenses and clearly known it).
That said, I think this is a great example of how a company can be successful using alternative software.
This is probably redundant by now, but for a LONG time the majority of Fry's employees have been known to have:
Horrible customer support skills.
Minimal knowledge of any products in the store.
A poor grasp of English.
I'm not sure why it's news to anybody that they're not selling and supporting Linux well. They don't sell and support ANYTHING well. Fry's is great if you know exactly what you want, it sucks if you want advice or support.
I'm also not sure how this article asserts that they are not selling Linux - they are clearly selling Linux, they are just diong it the same half-assed way they sell everything else.
Because there's no public mandate to make it open source? Or was that a rhetorical question? Besides, there's always the argument that security is less likely to be compromised if the only bodies that verify the code are folks like SAIC.
I showed up at 4pm and was maybe 40th in line or so, and I made it into the store with the first group of people allowed in (at 5:45, a little earlier than expected), which included the people who stayed overnight. I have no clue why anybody would stay overnight for that, unless they just wanted to experience sitting around overnight on third street.
I actually got back into line at 6pm to meet up with a couple friends who got there then, and we got in to the store just in time to see Less Than Jake play.
Two trips into the store = two t-shirts, a trip to get my powerbook looked at at the genius bar before it got too crowded, a chance to win an iSight, and live music. Score!
If it's a neighbor that uses it all the time rather than some random person that's popping by and using it for a half hour, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask to split the costs of the access point. Not that he was quite that straightforward about it, but there doesn't seem to be an ethical dillema here.
Wow, this article is the great equalizer. Now I can't get annoyed with people for not reading the links because virtually nobody on/. would understand the links even if they tried to read them!
I don't think I've ever seen a numerical benchmark that has been really satisfying. Cook-offs are really the way to go IMO, and Apple blew the Dell away with Photoshop, PDF viewing, and Mathematica. What should matter is how well your applications perform, not what arbitrary benchmark number you've managed to come up with.
If you are using the 'Graphite' appearance instead of the 'Blue' appearance, closing the wrong window can be a big problem. In 'Blue' the buttons are multicolored like you said, and it's easy to see which one is active. In 'Graphite' the buttons are just less faint and it's easy to make a mistake.
I think the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation preemptively got the phone number because they knew that the Apple Store would be getting the same one in a different AC.
Just because someone (or a company) does some bad things, doesn't mean that every single action on its part has to do with its plot to spread evil throughout the world.
Stop watching too many black and white James Bond movies, and join the real world.
You've obviously never looked at licensing agreements between companies before. They are generally written by lawyers, salespeople, and businesspeople who have no clue what's logistically fesiable to actually implement. They are also often custom-tailored for specific partners, it's rare to find cookiecutter contracts used with all business partners of a company because the bigwigs at different companies like to nitpick different contract details.
Disclaimer: I am primarily a Mac OS X and FreeBSD user. I don't tend to like or advocate the use of Microsoft software.
A decade or so back, Bill Gates and Microsoft got a lot of flak about being in the newer generation of wealthy that wasn't nearly as philanthropic as the old weathly.
After that, he made statements about shifting his focus to philanthropy after he retired (I think he said at age 50, at the time). Then after he got married, his wife has been extremely active in charitable donation (most notably with grants to urban schools and to youth in third world countries with disease problems).
One of the easiest ways for Microsoft itself to be philanthropic is to donate their products, rather than to donate cash. So it seems to make perfect sense for them, if they are trying to contribute to society in a charitable fashion, to donate their products to nonprofits and other needy organizations.
Yes, they may be helping improve their market share with these donations. But you people can't have your cake and eat it too -- if bitch about them not giving to charity, and then you can't turn around and bitch about them doing it, regardless of how they do it (unless they're giving all their money to the KK or something). This would be like bitching about Ford trying to increase their market share if they donated trucks to organizations that brought meals to the elderly that couldn't get out of the house. This is a totally ridiculous topic, the text describing the article itself is basically flamebait.
I was a in the platinum beta test program for Solaris at the time, and the question of it being made open source came up when I was visiting. Sun was actually interested in making all of the Solaris source available to NDA-signing clients, but found themselves unable to do so for legal reasons.
Over the years, over 100 subcontractors, some of which no longer exist as companies, were involved in writing the code that makes up Solaris. It was impossible for Sun to get the okay from all those subcontractors to make those pieces of the source available to clients outside of Sun, and I suspect it quickly became a logistical nightmare of tracking which pieces of code were subject to which legal agreements with subcontractors, who had the IP rights of any subcontractors that were defunct, and so on.
The whole point of exercises like this is to see if they can get more bang for their buck, which in turn will hopefully save taxpayer money.
It may be posted to/. because it's nifty, but that's not why the money is being spent on the project.
You also seem to imply that all government research should be directed towards modelling what other governments can do, which is asinine. Maybe you just think that that's the only legitimate reason to do research like this, which isn't all too bright either.
this is just in comparison with the 'functionally important' part of the geneome which is the scientific way of saying 'the dinky bit of DNA that we actually understand'
of course chimps are going to be making similar protiens and amino acids as we are.
there's a lot of 'junk dna' out there that biochemists simply don't understand the function of yet. doesn't mean it's actually junk or not functionally important.
Quartz Extreme is supported on any video card that's come with a Mac for the last two years or so. From Apple's site: Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.
It significantly improves the performance of the GUI. I don't know the numbers, but the feel of it is much smoother, especially when you get into a situation with lots of windows at once, transparances, video in windows, video in windows behind transparencies, wiggling transparent windows back and forth really fast over other transparent windows over video, etc.
Where did Apple claim to correct that issue? I did not see a changelog or any information on what was in the update, and spent some time looking for one right when the new version came out. Please provide a link.
(I am using Safari, working with the suspicion that Apple did in fact fix the problem, and didn't provide a changelog because they didn't want to admit to having had that problem. There's not even very much of an indication that the version on the site is even a new one, most regular users who decided to check out Safari after it had been out for a couple days wouldn't have noticed it was a different version than the original public Beta release.)
both . and tmp are writeable by the admin group, which the primary user is automatically in. scary. i'd change permissions, but i've noticed that doing things like that will sometimes have weird outcomes.
====
[cheshire:/] scott% ls -al total 9929 drwxrwxr-t 33 root admin 1122 Jan 10 07:42./ drwxrwxr-t 33 root admin 1122 Jan 10 07:42../ . . . lrwxrwxr-t 1 root admin 12 Jan 10 07:42 tmp@ ->/private/tmp
the 12" powerbook is shiny and ibooks are plastic. apple consumers shouldn't be confused.
the market is for people who want a more powerful machine in a small package, which is a market that does exist.
rabid religious types
on
Broken .Mac?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
My girlfriend upgraded her iTools to.Mac and she has had myriad problems. In particular the disk part of it seems very flaky; it doesn't seem to handle uploads and downloads very well at all, sometimes. We tried it from her place and from my place and it was very flaky both places. We both have different DSL providers, too.
I also know she's complained about her site being down a couple times. She hasn't been using.Mac nearly as much in the last couple of months so I can't speak to how it's been behaving more recently.
All the people who keep claiming that it's perfect and has only gone down once should recognize that it's possible some people have had a worse experience than others, instead of claiming that people who are complaining are cowardly, or Microsoft's dupes, or whatever. The bad experiences may have something to do with the way.Mac interacts with some firewalls, or some ISPs, but some people have had problems and in fact have better things to do with their time than lie about having problems.
Also - posting to public forums like this is part of a solution if one has repeatedly complained to Apple and still has bad service. It makes the problems more visible, and gives them more of an incentive to correct them.
Slashdot Mirror
Say you're a company that offers some kind of computer related service - maybe you produce CGI and have a big render farm. You may consider the type and number of computers you use to be trade secrets, because you have figured out an optimal configuration that gives you a great return on investment.
Do you want stray software on your computers reporting back to the vendor without you being aware of it the number of computers in your farm, specific information about the hardware in the system, and so on? If you are running a big distributed application, do you want your network cycles being eaten by your software pinging home?
There are some types of information that companies want to keep private in order to remain competitive, and if a piece of software on their system copies that information and sends it outside of the company without their consent then that is extremely bad.
In the current economy, information is a commodity. It has value, and copies of it should only come free if the producer of the information consents to it being made free.
I won't even get into how a defense contractor should react to software that might try to send information like that from inside a classified environment...
I have trouble reconciling Ball's statement:
We were out of compliance I figure by about 8 percent (out of 72 desktops).
with the amount of the settlement ($65k plus $35k in legal fees). He focused his wrath on Microsoft, which would imply that what was illegal was Office and/or Windows - to get up to $65k worth of that you'd have to be running illegal copies on most of the 72 desktops.
I also find it a little ironic that his company now has the discipline to only put things on worker's computers that they need (he makes a great point about not putting Web browsers on machines that don't need them) - if they had done that before, that would have kept them out of this mess (or they would have been violating licenses and clearly known it).
That said, I think this is a great example of how a company can be successful using alternative software.
As for Windows problems, I have none. You see there is this littel OS called Linux. Prhaps you have heard of it?
Ah, so you avoid Windows problems with Linux problems? Sneaky!
I've played with the demo version - lots of fun!
I'm not sure why it's news to anybody that they're not selling and supporting Linux well. They don't sell and support ANYTHING well. Fry's is great if you know exactly what you want, it sucks if you want advice or support.
I'm also not sure how this article asserts that they are not selling Linux - they are clearly selling Linux, they are just diong it the same half-assed way they sell everything else.
Why isn't this code open source by law?
Because there's no public mandate to make it open source? Or was that a rhetorical question? Besides, there's always the argument that security is less likely to be compromised if the only bodies that verify the code are folks like SAIC.
I showed up at 4pm and was maybe 40th in line or so, and I made it into the store with the first group of people allowed in (at 5:45, a little earlier than expected), which included the people who stayed overnight. I have no clue why anybody would stay overnight for that, unless they just wanted to experience sitting around overnight on third street.
I actually got back into line at 6pm to meet up with a couple friends who got there then, and we got in to the store just in time to see Less Than Jake play.
Two trips into the store = two t-shirts, a trip to get my powerbook looked at at the genius bar before it got too crowded, a chance to win an iSight, and live music. Score!
If it's a neighbor that uses it all the time rather than some random person that's popping by and using it for a half hour, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask to split the costs of the access point. Not that he was quite that straightforward about it, but there doesn't seem to be an ethical dillema here.
Wow, this article is the great equalizer. Now I can't get annoyed with people for not reading the links because virtually nobody on /. would understand the links even if they tried to read them!
I don't think I've ever seen a numerical benchmark that has been really satisfying. Cook-offs are really the way to go IMO, and Apple blew the Dell away with Photoshop, PDF viewing, and Mathematica. What should matter is how well your applications perform, not what arbitrary benchmark number you've managed to come up with.
If you are using the 'Graphite' appearance instead of the 'Blue' appearance, closing the wrong window can be a big problem. In 'Blue' the buttons are multicolored like you said, and it's easy to see which one is active. In 'Graphite' the buttons are just less faint and it's easy to make a mistake.
I think the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation preemptively got the phone number because they knew that the Apple Store would be getting the same one in a different AC.
It's kind of funny when people speculate about and verify phone numbers by looking them up on websites instead of just dialing them. ;)
Just because someone (or a company) does some bad things, doesn't mean that every single action on its part has to do with its plot to spread evil throughout the world.
Stop watching too many black and white James Bond movies, and join the real world.
You've obviously never looked at licensing agreements between companies before. They are generally written by lawyers, salespeople, and businesspeople who have no clue what's logistically fesiable to actually implement. They are also often custom-tailored for specific partners, it's rare to find cookiecutter contracts used with all business partners of a company because the bigwigs at different companies like to nitpick different contract details.
A decade or so back, Bill Gates and Microsoft got a lot of flak about being in the newer generation of wealthy that wasn't nearly as philanthropic as the old weathly.
After that, he made statements about shifting his focus to philanthropy after he retired (I think he said at age 50, at the time). Then after he got married, his wife has been extremely active in charitable donation (most notably with grants to urban schools and to youth in third world countries with disease problems).
One of the easiest ways for Microsoft itself to be philanthropic is to donate their products, rather than to donate cash. So it seems to make perfect sense for them, if they are trying to contribute to society in a charitable fashion, to donate their products to nonprofits and other needy organizations.
Yes, they may be helping improve their market share with these donations. But you people can't have your cake and eat it too -- if bitch about them not giving to charity, and then you can't turn around and bitch about them doing it, regardless of how they do it (unless they're giving all their money to the KK or something). This would be like bitching about Ford trying to increase their market share if they donated trucks to organizations that brought meals to the elderly that couldn't get out of the house. This is a totally ridiculous topic, the text describing the article itself is basically flamebait.
I was a in the platinum beta test program for Solaris at the time, and the question of it being made open source came up when I was visiting. Sun was actually interested in making all of the Solaris source available to NDA-signing clients, but found themselves unable to do so for legal reasons.
Over the years, over 100 subcontractors, some of which no longer exist as companies, were involved in writing the code that makes up Solaris. It was impossible for Sun to get the okay from all those subcontractors to make those pieces of the source available to clients outside of Sun, and I suspect it quickly became a logistical nightmare of tracking which pieces of code were subject to which legal agreements with subcontractors, who had the IP rights of any subcontractors that were defunct, and so on.
The whole point of exercises like this is to see if they can get more bang for their buck, which in turn will hopefully save taxpayer money.
/. because it's nifty, but that's not why the money is being spent on the project.
It may be posted to
You also seem to imply that all government research should be directed towards modelling what other governments can do, which is asinine. Maybe you just think that that's the only legitimate reason to do research like this, which isn't all too bright either.
this is just in comparison with the 'functionally important' part of the geneome which is the scientific way of saying 'the dinky bit of DNA that we actually understand'
of course chimps are going to be making similar protiens and amino acids as we are.
there's a lot of 'junk dna' out there that biochemists simply don't understand the function of yet. doesn't mean it's actually junk or not functionally important.
I updated 10.2.3 -> 10.2.4 on a powerbook 800 and have seen no battery problems. i never use the modem, so.
Quartz Extreme is supported on any video card that's come with a Mac for the last two years or so. From Apple's site:
Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.
It significantly improves the performance of the GUI. I don't know the numbers, but the feel of it is much smoother, especially when you get into a situation with lots of windows at once, transparances, video in windows, video in windows behind transparencies, wiggling transparent windows back and forth really fast over other transparent windows over video, etc.
Where did Apple claim to correct that issue? I did not see a changelog or any information on what was in the update, and spent some time looking for one right when the new version came out. Please provide a link.
(I am using Safari, working with the suspicion that Apple did in fact fix the problem, and didn't provide a changelog because they didn't want to admit to having had that problem. There's not even very much of an indication that the version on the site is even a new one, most regular users who decided to check out Safari after it had been out for a couple days wouldn't have noticed it was a different version than the original public Beta release.)
the 12" powerbook is shiny and ibooks are plastic. apple consumers shouldn't be confused.
the market is for people who want a more powerful machine in a small package, which is a market that does exist.
My girlfriend upgraded her iTools to .Mac and she has had myriad problems. In particular the disk part of it seems very flaky; it doesn't seem to handle uploads and downloads very well at all, sometimes. We tried it from her place and from my place and it was very flaky both places. We both have different DSL providers, too.
.Mac nearly as much in the last couple of months so I can't speak to how it's been behaving more recently.
.Mac interacts with some firewalls, or some ISPs, but some people have had problems and in fact have better things to do with their time than lie about having problems.
I also know she's complained about her site being down a couple times. She hasn't been using
All the people who keep claiming that it's perfect and has only gone down once should recognize that it's possible some people have had a worse experience than others, instead of claiming that people who are complaining are cowardly, or Microsoft's dupes, or whatever. The bad experiences may have something to do with the way
Also - posting to public forums like this is part of a solution if one has repeatedly complained to Apple and still has bad service. It makes the problems more visible, and gives them more of an incentive to correct them.