Oldsmobile hasn't been a real car company since before WW II. It was just a brand that GM used to market generic GM cars. The same is true of Saturn, though their demotion to "just a brand" is pretty recent. Pontiac and Plymouth were never anything except brands. Their disappearance didn't really represent the shuttering of specific businesses, just GM and Chrysler getting some of the cruft out of their marketing and distribution models.
By contrast, Saab is a distinct entity for a very long time, one that created a lot of really interesting cars, and never disappeared into the GM bureaucracy. Their product was popular among geeky types for a long time, especially before they started specializing in "luxury" cars.
Saab has its own factories, designers, etc. Everybody who works there, from the janitor to the CEO, is out of work. The workers in the rest of GM do have reason to worry, but layoffs for them are something to worry about, not a dead certainty.
Not being a pro writer, I'll have to babble colloquially.
"Colloquial" is not the word I'd use.
You don't need to be a "pro writer" to write readable prose. You just need a little patience and practice. Your little brain dump might well contain information I'd like to know, but filtering out the noise is too much work.
Another guy who can't be bothered to read the whole post. I was not arguing that thin clients are useless. I was arguing that thin clients have a specific use case, and this guy isn't it.
You're quite right about the bureaucratic difficulty of hiring people versus paying some other cost, even if the other cost is actually higher. Though I think it has less to do with "a different pool of money" than with the fact that modern organizations tend to be dominated by numbers dweebs who like to keep head counts down.
But I really doubt that these issues have much to do with the use of thin clients. It's an objective fact that you can save a lot of money if you don't have to hire a lot of IT people to babysit your desktop systems. (Plus, the kind of IT you need for centralized system can be shipped overseas.) By contrast, it's a lot harder to convince people that hiring people to customize OS software is cheaper than paying license fees. It might save money on paper, but it's not unheard of for a project to require more work than anticipated.
I have two suggestions: grow up, and learn to read. The guy is pricing new hardware. The system you found is a remanufactured out-of-production unit; even if it were brand new, it doesn't appear to meet his specs. A brand new system from the same manufacturer runs $350 or so.
What are the benefits of desktop virtualization? As they apply to you, that is. Every user of this technology that I know of is a big company or school that needs to deploy hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of desktop systems, and often can't afford to have an IT guy at every site. That's why they're willing to pay a premium price for the thin clients — it's more than offset by lower "cost of ownership".
Even if do have a use for DV that isn't obvious to me, you might as well do it with PCs. The only catch with them is that you have to install the client software on each PC. Thin clients are for people who don't want to do that.
Somebody please explain to me why Android matters. What does it have that all the other phone OSs don't? Better APIs? Nicer SDK? I imagine a lot of geeks like the idea of owning a hackable phone, but that's not enough by itself.
Whenever I ask this question, I get answers that only address issues with the iPhone, like the fact that nobody tells you what software you can run on it. Please recall that there are a lot of phone OSs out there.
Why not? Because they'll switch to "real" languages when they become professional programmers? Most will never do that; they'll go into some other line of work and maybe do a little programming on the side or as a minor part of their job. And a lot of software gets written that way.
I bet VLC would be even more successful on Mac if they charged $39.99 for it.
Hm. If I were a freelance Mac developer, and thought you were right, I'd consider supporting a commercial version. Of course, anybody could take my source code and compile it without paying me, but I'll bet a lot of people would pay either because they think I deserve the money or they just don't know any better.
I think the point Bruce is trying to make (correct me if I'm wrong Bruce) is that this litigation affects every consultant who uses Busybox in their project. If companies fear that using Busybox will make them vulnerable to litigation, they'll refuse to use it, no matter how many guarantees the consultants give them.
If I did that kind of consulting, I'd be very concerned. The whole point of FOSS is that it creates a community that uses and improves it without a lot of hassle. Litigation tends to screw that up. (And no, it doesn't matter if the litigation is based on bad law; you can still run up big legal bills proving that it's bad.) Of course, some litigation is unavoidable, just to keep the rules in force. But this lawsuit appears (to me; Bruce is being more circumspect) to be motivated more by the chance of fat settlements than any real concern over GPL abuse.
Though I imagine that iPhone users account for most of the pissed-offitness. Imagine spending all that money for such a fancy toy and it just not working.
My first thought was that I too would participate with my LG Incite. But the fact is that AT&T has always been badly managed. (Yes, I know that most of the company is just SBC-rebranded, but the wireless operation dates back to the original post-breakup AT&T.) It's typical that they can't manage such a simple thing as network capacity. And stupid CEOs like this guy are never held accountable for their stupidity.
We need to do some de-monopolization of telecom in this country. Until that happens, AT&T laughs at your petty data disruption.
Double-smartass answer: only a typical doesn't-get-out-much geek, who thinks that he and his friends are the whole marketplace, would even ask whether console gaming is in trouble. When the care and feeding of a PC is as simple and pain-free as a console (which is to say, never) then we can talk. The DGOM geek doesn't see this, because dealing with his PCs weirdnesses is something he takes for granted, and even enjoys. He simply doesn't relate to non-geeks who have no interest in hacking their toys, and may even suffer from anxiety attacks when they have to solve technical problems.
Climate change is nothing new for Earth's plants and animals, including humans.
That's like saying that the sinking of the Titanic was no big deal, because everybody gets wet now and then.
Yes, climates have always changed. This change is happening real fast, with drastic consequences, at least for those of us dependent on normal human activities. You know, like growing food.
Above comments were based on my experience with the Beta version. Just installed the final version on another system, and it went and asked me before it enabled download-everything. So I have to take back the "dumb" — it makes perfect sense that a feature would have this kind of issue in the beta. That's what betas are for.
All in all, I'm pretty impressed with this version of TB. And I'm relieved — I was beginning to think the Mozilla had just abandoned it.
Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches.
And the shuttle was designed to make orbital flights cheap and safe. It accomplished neither — the political compromises necessary to keep the project alive resulted in a fundamentally flawed design that cost too much to operate and killed two whole crews.
I'm not a big believer in the "the marketplace is always smarter than government" arguments that have been in vogue lately. There are plenty of times when the marketplace is a perfect moron, as anybody with a 401K ought to know by now. But politics has always had a bad effect on the space program, starting back when JFK turned it from a serious attempt to create a space infrastructure to a pointless expensive show-up-the-Russians stunt.
I thoroughly agree with you, except that I think that "ideology" is the wrong word. Consider the birther movement: there's no system of belief behind it. Obama's whole persona (liberal politics, exotic name, heavy-duty African-American cultural vibe) just rubs them the wrong way, and they'll never admit that his election was legitimate.
Climate change deniers are just the latest version of the people who've been pretending that ecological and resource problems just don't exist, and doing so for as long as I can remember. Declining biodiversity? No big deal. Running out of oil? Hey, they've been saying that for years; it's just a scam to pump up the price. The don't want to make the changes needed to cope with these issues, so they'll believe any scatterbrained theory that says they don't have to. It's like the joke about the guy who jumps off the top of the Empire State building. When he's about halfway down, somebody calls him on his cell phone and asks him why he's killing himself. "Killing myself? I'm just proving that jumping off buildings isn't as dangerous as they'd like you to believe. Look, I've been falling for a long time, and nothing nasty has happened ye....."
Good lord, is that just some rhetorical flourish, or do you really believe that Obama's rhetoric is that of a "European socialist"? If so, try getting your information from somewhere besides Fox News. Like his own speeches and books. Even if you don't believe what he says, I think you'll find what he actually says is quite a bit different from what the right-wing pundits say he says.
I agree that that the measures Gates has taken are puny compared with what needs to be done. But the fact that he's done anything at all is unprecedented. And if ending F22, "future warfare", and stealth destroyer procurement isn't a salvo in the MIC wars, then the fight over Ares isn't either.
Where have you been? The first salvo was fired even before Obama was sworn in. That would be when he persuaded Defense Secretary Robert Gates (who used to literally count the days until he was replaced) to stay on. I've often wondered how and why Obama did that. My best guess is that they agreed on an agenda of cost cutting and procurement reform.
When Gates announced his program, the defense special interests fought back — hard. And yet they lost. Mind-boggling, but true. Now that's change I can believe in!
I'm all for space travel, but I want to see the same thing happen at NASA. Anybody who really believes we're going to start a moon base and travel to Mars using Apollo-style space capsules is fooling themselves. The program is pure pork, USDA approved.
"A beating" is how Watts describes it. If the BP version of events is true (and I'm not ruling out the possibility that they're lying) then, it wasn't a beating it was a legitimate use of force to control a nasty situation.
Slashdot Mirror
EXTERMINATE!! EXTERMINATE!! EXTERMINATE!! EXTERMINATE!!
Sorry. Love those Daleks. Too bad all the other Dr. Who characters are such dweebs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAk2HjHSGbo
And where did you get your SIM card? From a service provider, I assume. Who made you agree to the usual.
Oldsmobile hasn't been a real car company since before WW II. It was just a brand that GM used to market generic GM cars. The same is true of Saturn, though their demotion to "just a brand" is pretty recent. Pontiac and Plymouth were never anything except brands. Their disappearance didn't really represent the shuttering of specific businesses, just GM and Chrysler getting some of the cruft out of their marketing and distribution models.
By contrast, Saab is a distinct entity for a very long time, one that created a lot of really interesting cars, and never disappeared into the GM bureaucracy. Their product was popular among geeky types for a long time, especially before they started specializing in "luxury" cars.
Saab has its own factories, designers, etc. Everybody who works there, from the janitor to the CEO, is out of work. The workers in the rest of GM do have reason to worry, but layoffs for them are something to worry about, not a dead certainty.
Completely different story.
Not being a pro writer, I'll have to babble colloquially.
"Colloquial" is not the word I'd use.
You don't need to be a "pro writer" to write readable prose. You just need a little patience and practice. Your little brain dump might well contain information I'd like to know, but filtering out the noise is too much work.
Another guy who can't be bothered to read the whole post. I was not arguing that thin clients are useless. I was arguing that thin clients have a specific use case, and this guy isn't it.
Sigh. I can understand not having the time or patience to read a post in detail. But you didn't even look past the first couple of sentences.
You're quite right about the bureaucratic difficulty of hiring people versus paying some other cost, even if the other cost is actually higher. Though I think it has less to do with "a different pool of money" than with the fact that modern organizations tend to be dominated by numbers dweebs who like to keep head counts down.
But I really doubt that these issues have much to do with the use of thin clients. It's an objective fact that you can save a lot of money if you don't have to hire a lot of IT people to babysit your desktop systems. (Plus, the kind of IT you need for centralized system can be shipped overseas.) By contrast, it's a lot harder to convince people that hiring people to customize OS software is cheaper than paying license fees. It might save money on paper, but it's not unheard of for a project to require more work than anticipated.
I have two suggestions: grow up, and learn to read. The guy is pricing new hardware. The system you found is a remanufactured out-of-production unit; even if it were brand new, it doesn't appear to meet his specs. A brand new system from the same manufacturer runs $350 or so.
What are the benefits of desktop virtualization? As they apply to you, that is. Every user of this technology that I know of is a big company or school that needs to deploy hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of desktop systems, and often can't afford to have an IT guy at every site. That's why they're willing to pay a premium price for the thin clients — it's more than offset by lower "cost of ownership".
Even if do have a use for DV that isn't obvious to me, you might as well do it with PCs. The only catch with them is that you have to install the client software on each PC. Thin clients are for people who don't want to do that.
Somebody please explain to me why Android matters. What does it have that all the other phone OSs don't? Better APIs? Nicer SDK? I imagine a lot of geeks like the idea of owning a hackable phone, but that's not enough by itself.
Whenever I ask this question, I get answers that only address issues with the iPhone, like the fact that nobody tells you what software you can run on it. Please recall that there are a lot of phone OSs out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_operating_systems
Why not? Because they'll switch to "real" languages when they become professional programmers? Most will never do that; they'll go into some other line of work and maybe do a little programming on the side or as a minor part of their job. And a lot of software gets written that way.
Ubuntu is an offshoot of Debian. Not a fork, exactly, more like a companion:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/debian
I bet VLC would be even more successful on Mac if they charged $39.99 for it.
Hm. If I were a freelance Mac developer, and thought you were right, I'd consider supporting a commercial version. Of course, anybody could take my source code and compile it without paying me, but I'll bet a lot of people would pay either because they think I deserve the money or they just don't know any better.
I think the point Bruce is trying to make (correct me if I'm wrong Bruce) is that this litigation affects every consultant who uses Busybox in their project. If companies fear that using Busybox will make them vulnerable to litigation, they'll refuse to use it, no matter how many guarantees the consultants give them.
If I did that kind of consulting, I'd be very concerned. The whole point of FOSS is that it creates a community that uses and improves it without a lot of hassle. Litigation tends to screw that up. (And no, it doesn't matter if the litigation is based on bad law; you can still run up big legal bills proving that it's bad.) Of course, some litigation is unavoidable, just to keep the rules in force. But this lawsuit appears (to me; Bruce is being more circumspect) to be motivated more by the chance of fat settlements than any real concern over GPL abuse.
Though I imagine that iPhone users account for most of the pissed-offitness. Imagine spending all that money for such a fancy toy and it just not working.
My first thought was that I too would participate with my LG Incite. But the fact is that AT&T has always been badly managed. (Yes, I know that most of the company is just SBC-rebranded, but the wireless operation dates back to the original post-breakup AT&T.) It's typical that they can't manage such a simple thing as network capacity. And stupid CEOs like this guy are never held accountable for their stupidity.
We need to do some de-monopolization of telecom in this country. Until that happens, AT&T laughs at your petty data disruption.
I get links. Perhaps Google is filtering yours out?
Double-smartass answer: only a typical doesn't-get-out-much geek, who thinks that he and his friends are the whole marketplace, would even ask whether console gaming is in trouble. When the care and feeding of a PC is as simple and pain-free as a console (which is to say, never) then we can talk. The DGOM geek doesn't see this, because dealing with his PCs weirdnesses is something he takes for granted, and even enjoys. He simply doesn't relate to non-geeks who have no interest in hacking their toys, and may even suffer from anxiety attacks when they have to solve technical problems.
Climate change is nothing new for Earth's plants and animals, including humans.
That's like saying that the sinking of the Titanic was no big deal, because everybody gets wet now and then.
Yes, climates have always changed. This change is happening real fast, with drastic consequences, at least for those of us dependent on normal human activities. You know, like growing food.
You seem to have invented your own definition of "denier". I'm talking about those who deny that climate change is man-made.
Above comments were based on my experience with the Beta version. Just installed the final version on another system, and it went and asked me before it enabled download-everything. So I have to take back the "dumb" — it makes perfect sense that a feature would have this kind of issue in the beta. That's what betas are for.
All in all, I'm pretty impressed with this version of TB. And I'm relieved — I was beginning to think the Mozilla had just abandoned it.
Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches.
And the shuttle was designed to make orbital flights cheap and safe. It accomplished neither — the political compromises necessary to keep the project alive resulted in a fundamentally flawed design that cost too much to operate and killed two whole crews.
I'm not a big believer in the "the marketplace is always smarter than government" arguments that have been in vogue lately. There are plenty of times when the marketplace is a perfect moron, as anybody with a 401K ought to know by now. But politics has always had a bad effect on the space program, starting back when JFK turned it from a serious attempt to create a space infrastructure to a pointless expensive show-up-the-Russians stunt.
I thoroughly agree with you, except that I think that "ideology" is the wrong word. Consider the birther movement: there's no system of belief behind it. Obama's whole persona (liberal politics, exotic name, heavy-duty African-American cultural vibe) just rubs them the wrong way, and they'll never admit that his election was legitimate.
Climate change deniers are just the latest version of the people who've been pretending that ecological and resource problems just don't exist, and doing so for as long as I can remember. Declining biodiversity? No big deal. Running out of oil? Hey, they've been saying that for years; it's just a scam to pump up the price. The don't want to make the changes needed to cope with these issues, so they'll believe any scatterbrained theory that says they don't have to. It's like the joke about the guy who jumps off the top of the Empire State building. When he's about halfway down, somebody calls him on his cell phone and asks him why he's killing himself. "Killing myself? I'm just proving that jumping off buildings isn't as dangerous as they'd like you to believe. Look, I've been falling for a long time, and nothing nasty has happened ye....."
Good lord, is that just some rhetorical flourish, or do you really believe that Obama's rhetoric is that of a "European socialist"? If so, try getting your information from somewhere besides Fox News. Like his own speeches and books. Even if you don't believe what he says, I think you'll find what he actually says is quite a bit different from what the right-wing pundits say he says.
I agree that that the measures Gates has taken are puny compared with what needs to be done. But the fact that he's done anything at all is unprecedented. And if ending F22, "future warfare", and stealth destroyer procurement isn't a salvo in the MIC wars, then the fight over Ares isn't either.
Where have you been? The first salvo was fired even before Obama was sworn in. That would be when he persuaded Defense Secretary Robert Gates (who used to literally count the days until he was replaced) to stay on. I've often wondered how and why Obama did that. My best guess is that they agreed on an agenda of cost cutting and procurement reform.
When Gates announced his program, the defense special interests fought back — hard. And yet they lost. Mind-boggling, but true. Now that's change I can believe in!
I'm all for space travel, but I want to see the same thing happen at NASA. Anybody who really believes we're going to start a moon base and travel to Mars using Apollo-style space capsules is fooling themselves. The program is pure pork, USDA approved.
Sorry, absolutely nothing justifies a beating.
"A beating" is how Watts describes it. If the BP version of events is true (and I'm not ruling out the possibility that they're lying) then, it wasn't a beating it was a legitimate use of force to control a nasty situation.