. For Windows, it is easy. In a corporate environment desktop, you want XP-Pro. Period. Update to the latest patches.
And lose out to your competition because out-of-the-box Windows phones the mothership incessantly and enables your users to defeat your firewalls in order to surf the latest Realmedia or WMV streams. Your bandwidth costs go up astronomically which kicks into your overhead, so that gets investigated, and your boss finds out your end-users are violating copyright and SEC regulations, and you lose your job for being a fool.
I don't know of any major corporations - none, as I sit here in the corporate capital of the world - that do anything other than ghost out a standard image. A PC comes in the door, the disk is formatted and the highly optimized and controlled corporate image is loaded. If the end-user screws it up, re-ghost immediately. Sarbannes-Oxley, HIPAA, GLB, FDA regs all prevent you from storing important data on the local hard drive anyway, so the data's on a server somewhere access controls can be monitored and backups documented.
It can take as long as 400 man-hours to produce a corporate desktop image. The determining factors are the experience and knowledge of the staff member who does it. If that person is a Windows guru, Windows is faster. If the person is a Linux guru, linux is faster.
So it still comes down to the same thing some other poster keeps chanting - it's what the kids are getting taught. My nine-year-old and six-year-old are being thoroughly indoctrinated with Microsoft by the public school system, so there you are. But it's still not malice - the teachers don't know any better.
When you build a Windows machine, you have to test it to see if all the parts will work together under your chosen version of the OS and your required end-user application(s). Even if you use only Microsoft-certified hardware and applications!
When you build a linux machine (and I've built a few;)) it's even more likely that you will have some hardware that simply won't run the software you require, because the hardware vendors typically only do a windows test suite during their product development cycle.
So your reason #2 could be real. The rest of your reasons all boil down to "we think we can extort more money from stupid linux users, caveat emptor" or make the assumption that a significant number of end-users buy their software and peripherals from their PC vendor.
PDPs with magnetic core memory could be made to pick up where you left off after a power interuption. Execute op, increment PC... not only was the memory non-volatile, it was practically immune to the transient power spiking that typically comes before and after a power failure.
I can remember sitting in the dark in a University computer center waiting for the power to come back on so I could finish my work...
I had a machinist swear to me that brass and bronze are functionally identical. I've even seen a guy come back from a supplier with brass stock that was sold to them as "bronze".
Be careful with your ventilation when working brasses or bronze. One of my friends hot-forged bronze for years without a fume hood. When he lost his mind, the examining doctors found arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in near-lethal concentrations all through his system.
I learned to work metals in a forge. Two of my close friends are professional blacksmiths.
You stated "work hardening, you're wrong about how often it happens. Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane.". I guess I'm either extremely stupid or insane, then, but I guess I'd be better off believing a slashdot post than my lyin' eyes, right?:^)
I use a lot of found and recycled metals. Nearly everything experiences changes in hardness in real-world use. Nearly all fabrication processes (except stock removal by low-temperature grinding) will noticeably change the hardness of a piece. There are plenty of polishing, burnishing and stropping techniques which will also work-harden various metals.
A really good smith can hit a couple of auto rocker-arms with a hammer and tell you the difference between one fresh out of the factory and one that's been used in a real engine. A great smith can tell you simply by the sound they make when struck.
Maybe you're working with extremely powerful equipment, so you can't distinguish any changes in hardness unless they are very extreme? That's what it sounds like. If you use a hand shear on thick metal, you will notice that the edges of a cut are harder than the uncut metal, for instance, but if you are using a power nibbler you'd never be able to tell.
No. You can't play Sid Meier's "Civilisation" with more than one player on each side of a NAT gateway.
This is probably true of all DirectPlay-based games, actually - since they want peer-to-peer communications, and they use IP address to distinguish nodes, you can't have more than one player transit the gateway in either direction cleanly.
Your married-with-two-kids co-worker invites you over to dinner. When you arrive a son of the coworker answers the door. What is the probability that the other child is a girl?
The probability of the other child being a girl is slightly lower than that of the other child being a boy.
Because, your cow-orker may have a psychological obsession that causes him to murder female offspring, (like Kronos, who used to eat his sons, for example) but clearly he does not have any such obsession that applies to males.
Interesting; I didn't realize that! I thought they used brute force to reduce the volume of air until it liquified, and then drew off specific fractions once the liquids stratified.
Now that I understand what you're talking about:) I think I agree with you, at least in general.
I still think that "intelligent design", and other flavors of creationism, deserve to be in philosophy classes and not in science classes. But I also think you are absolutely right that good science can always benefit from criticism.
Incidentally, Unitarian Universalist churches teach that evolution is a observable fact, and that science and religion are 100% compatible as long as both follow reasonable ethical guidelines (c.g. human sacrifice and human vivisection are equally repugnant).
Yeah, my kid listed "air" as part of his answer to "name four natural resources" and got points marked off (air, despite being a non-synthetic commodity resource, was not listed in the book).
I should mention that just outside of town the local gas company has a tower where they compress air to extract oxygen, nitrogen, and argon for commercial sale.
The same teacher marked "fuel" as a correct answer to the same question. When I pointed out that many fuels are synthetic, and thus not natural resources, it became apparent that the teacher did not know what natural resources actually are, and was simply parroting an incorrect textbook.
I know plenty of religious people who would never make such a stupid mistake; but the next generation is having all this wrong information drilled into them in lieu of actual education.
Hell, by your standards, Gattaca wouldn't be sci-fi either.
Did you recognize the buildings and cars in Gattaca? What a fantastic insider reference!
Once I noticed that it was Danny DeVito who made Gattaca, and that he is genetically handicapped in his chosen profession, I realised that it's reality masquerading as science fiction. Brilliant work.
WWF (aka All Georgia Pro Wrestling) = entertainment Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" = acerbic entertainment Mythbusters = geeky entertainment
Nothing on any of these shows is any more true than anything you'd see in Archie Comic Books. It's supposed to be fun, people, not a freakin' belief system!
Most bloggers do not charge for their works, therefore they are not billionaires, therefore they can expect no consideration from the current administration.
Bloggers who happen to be billionaires, but still do not charge for their works, will be considered enemy combatants.
Bloggers who do charge for their works, and who are billionaires, are to be called "legitimate journalists" and not bloggers. They will be expected to contribute heavily to the Republicrat or Demolican of their choice.
Recently my family and I spent a week in London, which is a popular foreign place to visit because they have learned to speak some English over there. Although frankly they have a long way to go. Often, when they get to the crucial part of a sentence, they'll realize that they don't know the correct words, so they'll just make some silly ones up. I had a lot of conversations that sounded like this:
ME: Excuse me. Could you tell us how to get to Buckingham Palace?
BRITISH PERSON: Right. You go down this street here, then you nip up the weckershams.
ME: We should nip up the weckershams?
BRITISH PERSON: Right. Then you take your first left, then you just pop 'round the gorn-and-scumbles, and, Jack's a doughnut, there you are!
ME: Jack's a DOUGHNUT?
BRITISH PERSON: Right.
Also they have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can't move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed.
Copyright Dave Barry 1990
I have been using the expression "Jack's a Doughnut" rather frequently with my British relations, and they've started picking it up!
How likely are you to switch your DNS over to a new, untested root server system?
Well, I've done it twice now; mostly so my users could see the.med domain (which is pretty much a ghost town) if they wanted to. I 've used both OpenNIC and AlterNIC successfully (and simultaneously, too) while still retaining 100% compatibility with the ICANN DNS root. If somebody lit them up again I'd use 'em. It's not very difficult if you really understand DNS.
I think it really comes down to the old question, "What if they held a war, and nobody came?", except that in this case, the question will be, "What if they propose a new set of root servers, and nobody used them?"
That's very insightful, since it's exactly what has happened to all the alternate DNS roots so far. The closest thing to a successful alternate DNS root was the.biz domain - and as soon as that started to take off, ICANN purposely introduced a naming collision (by opening up their own.biz, after swearing for years that DNS couldn't scale past the existing TLDs).
The problem is ICANN isn't quite evil enough to the general public to notice them. Those of us who are intimately familiar with the workings of DNS know, but Joe Six-Pack doesn't, so he just uses whatever's already provided by his ISP (and the ISP's DNS may well have been configured by a ham-fisted minimum-wage drone, or been left at distribution default settings). I blame Jon Postel, he left a legacy of "nice guy" attitude that ICANN hasn't entirely shaken off.:)
Somebody should persuade ICANN that there's profit to be had torturing puppies on public television, then there would be a real revolt.
Seriously, the USA exercises exactly as much control over the namespace each sysadmin chooses to give them. Change your name service switch configuration and Jack's a doughnut!
Now, IP address numbers, that's another matter entirely. Packet routing depends on the numbers, and allocation of the numbers = control of the Internet. If I hate you, I'll give you a number in a chinese or korean block that has been blacklisted globally for spamming - take that you filthy wogs!!
For readers mercifully free of the burden of a sense of humor: I'm not a racist. For those unfamiliar with proper english: Wogs start at Calais.
Slashdot Mirror
A long row to ho, obviously.
I don't know of any major corporations - none, as I sit here in the corporate capital of the world - that do anything other than ghost out a standard image. A PC comes in the door, the disk is formatted and the highly optimized and controlled corporate image is loaded. If the end-user screws it up, re-ghost immediately. Sarbannes-Oxley, HIPAA, GLB, FDA regs all prevent you from storing important data on the local hard drive anyway, so the data's on a server somewhere access controls can be monitored and backups documented.
It can take as long as 400 man-hours to produce a corporate desktop image. The determining factors are the experience and knowledge of the staff member who does it. If that person is a Windows guru, Windows is faster. If the person is a Linux guru, linux is faster.
So it still comes down to the same thing some other poster keeps chanting - it's what the kids are getting taught. My nine-year-old and six-year-old are being thoroughly indoctrinated with Microsoft by the public school system, so there you are. But it's still not malice - the teachers don't know any better.
When you build a Windows machine, you have to test it to see if all the parts will work together under your chosen version of the OS and your required end-user application(s). Even if you use only Microsoft-certified hardware and applications!
;)) it's even more likely that you will have some hardware that simply won't run the software you require, because the hardware vendors typically only do a windows test suite during their product development cycle.
When you build a linux machine (and I've built a few
So your reason #2 could be real. The rest of your reasons all boil down to "we think we can extort more money from stupid linux users, caveat emptor" or make the assumption that a significant number of end-users buy their software and peripherals from their PC vendor.
"He's TRISEXUAL, man!"
"What's that?"
"He'll try anything - chickens, mud, you know."
PDPs with magnetic core memory could be made to pick up where you left off after a power interuption. Execute op, increment PC... not only was the memory non-volatile, it was practically immune to the transient power spiking that typically comes before and after a power failure.
I can remember sitting in the dark in a University computer center waiting for the power to come back on so I could finish my work...
They're always driving Poles into the ground.
I had a machinist swear to me that brass and bronze are functionally identical. I've even seen a guy come back from a supplier with brass stock that was sold to them as "bronze".
Be careful with your ventilation when working brasses or bronze. One of my friends hot-forged bronze for years without a fume hood. When he lost his mind, the examining doctors found arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury in near-lethal concentrations all through his system.
I learned to work metals in a forge. Two of my close friends are professional blacksmiths.
:^)
You stated "work hardening, you're wrong about how often it happens. Quite frankly, it doesn't unless you're either extremely stupid or even more so insane.". I guess I'm either extremely stupid or insane, then, but I guess I'd be better off believing a slashdot post than my lyin' eyes, right?
I use a lot of found and recycled metals. Nearly everything experiences changes in hardness in real-world use. Nearly all fabrication processes (except stock removal by low-temperature grinding) will noticeably change the hardness of a piece. There are plenty of polishing, burnishing and stropping techniques which will also work-harden various metals.
A really good smith can hit a couple of auto rocker-arms with a hammer and tell you the difference between one fresh out of the factory and one that's been used in a real engine. A great smith can tell you simply by the sound they make when struck.
Maybe you're working with extremely powerful equipment, so you can't distinguish any changes in hardness unless they are very extreme? That's what it sounds like. If you use a hand shear on thick metal, you will notice that the edges of a cut are harder than the uncut metal, for instance, but if you are using a power nibbler you'd never be able to tell.
This is probably true of all DirectPlay-based games, actually - since they want peer-to-peer communications, and they use IP address to distinguish nodes, you can't have more than one player transit the gateway in either direction cleanly.
They built this thing called "the Internet" that you might have heard of?
Testing this amazing new widget called a "router" required a fair amount of address space at one time.
Well, OK, actually they called it a "gateway" but that means something else now.
Although I don't know Scott Evil I think I can safely say my Stats teacher would have hated you too, gknoy.
Because, your cow-orker may have a psychological obsession that causes him to murder female offspring, (like Kronos, who used to eat his sons, for example) but clearly he does not have any such obsession that applies to males.
Interesting; I didn't realize that! I thought they used brute force to reduce the volume of air until it liquified, and then drew off specific fractions once the liquids stratified.
Now that I understand what you're talking about :) I think I agree with you, at least in general.
I still think that "intelligent design", and other flavors of creationism, deserve to be in philosophy classes and not in science classes. But I also think you are absolutely right that good science can always benefit from criticism.
Incidentally, Unitarian Universalist churches teach that evolution is a observable fact, and that science and religion are 100% compatible as long as both follow reasonable ethical guidelines (c.g. human sacrifice and human vivisection are equally repugnant).
Sadly, the people who will be trying to legislate this issue will no doubt be just as clueless.
*hint: addresses are numbers and all namespaces are voluntary
Complexity is by definition reducible. If it can't be split up, it isn't complex, it's called "simple".
Simple things are often irreducible. Complex things are always reducible, at least theoretically.
Yeah, my kid listed "air" as part of his answer to "name four natural resources" and got points marked off (air, despite being a non-synthetic commodity resource, was not listed in the book).
I should mention that just outside of town the local gas company has a tower where they compress air to extract oxygen, nitrogen, and argon for commercial sale.
The same teacher marked "fuel" as a correct answer to the same question. When I pointed out that many fuels are synthetic, and thus not natural resources, it became apparent that the teacher did not know what natural resources actually are, and was simply parroting an incorrect textbook.
I know plenty of religious people who would never make such a stupid mistake; but the next generation is having all this wrong information drilled into them in lieu of actual education.
This is slashdot, what the hell do you think you are doing making a post that requires critical thought?
It'd be OK if you made it more technical, and mentioned software a few times.
Once I noticed that it was Danny DeVito who made Gattaca, and that he is genetically handicapped in his chosen profession, I realised that it's reality masquerading as science fiction. Brilliant work.
Thanks for the breath of fresh air, Tum.
WWF (aka All Georgia Pro Wrestling) = entertainment
Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" = acerbic entertainment
Mythbusters = geeky entertainment
Nothing on any of these shows is any more true than anything you'd see in Archie Comic Books. It's supposed to be fun, people, not a freakin' belief system!
Most bloggers do not charge for their works, therefore they are not billionaires, therefore they can expect no consideration from the current administration.
:)
Bloggers who happen to be billionaires, but still do not charge for their works, will be considered enemy combatants.
Bloggers who do charge for their works, and who are billionaires, are to be called "legitimate journalists" and not bloggers. They will be expected to contribute heavily to the Republicrat or Demolican of their choice.
You know it's true.
I have been using the expression "Jack's a Doughnut" rather frequently with my British relations, and they've started picking it up!
That's very insightful, since it's exactly what has happened to all the alternate DNS roots so far. The closest thing to a successful alternate DNS root was the
The problem is ICANN isn't quite evil enough to the general public to notice them. Those of us who are intimately familiar with the workings of DNS know, but Joe Six-Pack doesn't, so he just uses whatever's already provided by his ISP (and the ISP's DNS may well have been configured by a ham-fisted minimum-wage drone, or been left at distribution default settings). I blame Jon Postel, he left a legacy of "nice guy" attitude that ICANN hasn't entirely shaken off.
Somebody should persuade ICANN that there's profit to be had torturing puppies on public television, then there would be a real revolt.
Seriously, the USA exercises exactly as much control over the namespace each sysadmin chooses to give them.
Change your name service switch configuration and Jack's a doughnut!
Now, IP address numbers, that's another matter entirely. Packet routing depends on the numbers, and allocation of the numbers = control of the Internet. If I hate you, I'll give you a number in a chinese or korean block that has been blacklisted globally for spamming - take that you filthy wogs!!
For readers mercifully free of the burden of a sense of humor: I'm not a racist. For those unfamiliar with proper english: Wogs start at Calais.