The alternative school in HISD when I was in high school (~6-8 years ago, Clements is in Fort Bend ISD so it's not the same district) was basically a bullshit school where they sent "dropout risks" and "problem kids." You got to go home at noon (after state attendance was taken, of course!) you were allowed to smoke on the patio (ironically, other schools would send you to an ALC for smoking on campus) and they even looked the other way at drug use. The entire purpose of "Alternative learning centers" was to boost the attendance and graduation rates for kids who would probably drop out or be truant otherwise.
I didn't go to one, but knew plenty of kids who did. The smart kids who were sent there dropped out and got their GED at 17 rather than put up with the kind of BS that went on.
Marathon was a great series. You were essentially the pawn in a war between 3 competing AIs. The worst part of the games was the inability to jump. They released level editors that let you fuck with the levels in any way you wanted though so it was all good.
And the dual auto-reloading sawed off shotguns in Marathon 2 have got to be the most kick-ass weapons I've ever played with. They had a great rhythm to them while also having the ability to shred armies of enemies if you got them in a hallway.
Fine then; in a highly competitive space where people are advertising the hell out of their products, everyone is doing it. Google and Yahoo both provide tools that make this kind of activity possible, so you can't claim that it's not intended.;)
In other words, if you're paying $50-100 per click on Google sponsored links (and there are a lot of keywords where that's what you have to pay to even show up on the first page,) it doesn't make sense not to buy some links on other sites to get yourself in the first 5 Google search spots as well.
It's not cheating, everyone on the first page of every google search you do that could possibly lead to a sale of any kind has paid a consultant to be there. There is an entire industry built around gaming search engine results. There are the "white hats" who buy links, etc but do it in a google approved manner (i.e. on industry linkblogs or sites that sell links with relevant content.) There are black hats who spam blog comments/message boards/whatever they can find with their links, and their sites will often end up in Google hell eventually.
Google realizes that any system they can create will be gamed by SEO consultants before they can change their algorithms, so they set them up in such a way that to game the system, you have to do things in a way that actually makes meta tags, subjects and relevant content meaningful. It makes the internet as a whole more usable, and sites that provide no meaningful content or don't play by the rules will be buried.
Yes, this often means that you can raise your Google rank by buying or renting links on popular industry-related sites. There are entire advertising networks set up to organize this kind of activity. This has been going on for years, and if you didn't realize that by doing a Google search you were being marketed to, well, open your eyes.:)
[quote]His sympathy for Red Hat being "exploited" is wildly absurd and shows his failure to understand who made the software in Open Source products. Red Hat did not, for the most part, make the system they are selling. People like me did, and Red Hat did not pay us for it. And if you want to use that software in Debian or CentOS, that's fine with us.[/quote]
And even people on the CentOS boards will tell you that if you're doing mission critical stuff that absolutely must be stable, buy RedHat for the support. It's not that expensive.
The "reinstallation" CD Dell gives you is just an OEM (as in it will only work with OEM and not retail serial numbers) copy of XP. It doesn't even have drivers that weren't included in XP SP2 (you have to download those from Dell or use the driver CD that came with your PC.)
It also doesn't come with any of the preinstalled crap. If it did, it wouldn't be nearly as useful.
What happens when an XP system needs re-installation and I can't get an activation for any reason?
You call the 1-800 number on the popup window, and if your serial number isn't on the "blacklist" (unless you pulled your serial number off the internet, this shouldn't be a problem) then a nice Indian woman named "Susan" gives you an activation code. Yeah, it's kind of a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world.
At the point Vista is at right now, I would move to Ubuntu or RHEL on the desktop before I moved to Vista. Seriously; no shit. I still use XP on everything, not because it's incredibly awesome but because I know it works most of the time. The general consensus among Windows admins out there seems to be that Vista is not ready for wide deployment due to ongoing compatability and driver issues. In my admittedly brief testing, I'd have to agree.
I'll be hoarding up a bunch of VLKs for XP and Office (or possibly even installing OpenOffice on some users who don't really need Office) and ordering machines with no OS. This move will backfire on Microsoft; the IT world in general is far more trusting of Open Source desktop apps than they were during the Windows 98->XP switch (and far more distrustful of Vista than XP.) If a user has to re-learn the OS anyway and the admin does not trust Windows to work reliably, why not move them to Linux? Hell you could load Ubuntu on a machine and tell the end-user it's Vista and they probably wouldn't know the difference.
All of this is moot. Maybe not in Second Life but in WoW it is.
All of the real world game world transactions are expressly forbidden by the WoW terms of use. Most of these companies are pretty under the radar as it is, why the hell are they going to pay taxes? I doubt many of them have any presence in the US at all. Why should they pay US taxes?
I have a pair of 4:3 monitors and I love them. I personally dislike dual 16:9s but I've found it's largely a personal preference. Regardless, I don't think any major OEM is going to stop making 4:3 monitors anytime soon.
I know Dell for one will sell you a PC without an OS. Just tell them you're planning on installing XP on it and they'll probably sell you an OEM copy of XP as well (it just won't come pre-loaded on the PC.) You may have to harass the consumer-side sales reps, but I've not had any problems doing this.
You can yell at me and tell me I'm wrong, but can't you use apache2 instead of IIS, even with ASP.NET? (bear in mind I use neither IIS nor ASP.NET.) I would assume the application is just using the web server to pass packets and manage connections.
What happens if your house burns down/floods/etc? Even a kitchen fire could be enough depending on how much smoke and water damage there is. Do you lose both your house and your livelihood? Or do you keep off-site backups?
Yep. Hard drives and DVDs are backup media, tape is disaster recovery media. DVDs are not durable enough nor do they really hold enough (tape has much better density; 400GB per LTO3 tape compared to 9GB per DL-DVD.) Tape is still the undisputed king for long-term, high capacity backups.
For home use, online backups are fine, but for even small businesses, volumes of data approaching 1TB are not uncommon.
I'd venture that a good 75% of people who would buy Linux loaded PCs from Dell already load RedHat or CentOS on them. It's basically the de-facto standard distribution in the "real world" for anyone who values third party software support (this is not an endorsement of RedHat over any other distro, just a recognition that for the market Dell sells rack servers to, it's probably the best mix of "free software" cred and "business suit" job security.)
So why not RedHat? It seems to make the most sense given where Dell is coming from and who their typical server customer is. Hell, Dell can even add the OS support contract as a line item when you buy the thing, or they could set up their own repositories and support them themselves.
Teachers in many southern states (no idea about others, but I know its true in Texas) are not allowed to strike, so the unions really have no meaningful threats other than sick-outs which just get taken from the pool of bad-weather or vacation days. And when a union is powerless like that, people just don't join because they see it as a waste of money, so the union is effectively gutted.
Not saying it's right, but it is absolutely a practicable solution in many states.
If you need php5, compile it. It's not that hard. Hell, you can compile and install an entire LAMP stack from source in under an hour in a non-root home directory as long as you know which modules you need. The LAMP stack changes a lot more than the base OS does, so IMO it's better to compile it yourself no matter which distro you use.
This makes a lot of sense.. No, it's not going to replace a real copy of Photoshop on a graphic designer's workstation, but it may be enough for Adobe to squeeze some ad revenue out of people who would normally just download it off BitTorrent. These are the casual users of Photoshop who use it maybe once every few weeks and for whom buying a $600 program doesn't make sense.
Basically, Adobe is getting no money from those people right now, so any additional revenue they can pull from them is free money. Of course, your graphics professionals will still have the legit, expensive copy of Photoshop because $600 really isn't that much if you're using it to make money.
If it hadn't become obvious years ago, slashdot is a site where managers go to stay 'current' on tech news. Sys admins and programmers only check/. so that when their manager asks them a question, they have an ample supply of snarky responses to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans get squeamish about massive layoffs, but investors certainly do not.
The alternative school in HISD when I was in high school (~6-8 years ago, Clements is in Fort Bend ISD so it's not the same district) was basically a bullshit school where they sent "dropout risks" and "problem kids." You got to go home at noon (after state attendance was taken, of course!) you were allowed to smoke on the patio (ironically, other schools would send you to an ALC for smoking on campus) and they even looked the other way at drug use. The entire purpose of "Alternative learning centers" was to boost the attendance and graduation rates for kids who would probably drop out or be truant otherwise.
I didn't go to one, but knew plenty of kids who did. The smart kids who were sent there dropped out and got their GED at 17 rather than put up with the kind of BS that went on.
Marathon was a great series. You were essentially the pawn in a war between 3 competing AIs. The worst part of the games was the inability to jump. They released level editors that let you fuck with the levels in any way you wanted though so it was all good.
And the dual auto-reloading sawed off shotguns in Marathon 2 have got to be the most kick-ass weapons I've ever played with. They had a great rhythm to them while also having the ability to shred armies of enemies if you got them in a hallway.
Is that the military version of the "My mood: Suicidal" tag on emospace?
Mod parent up, oldskewl.
Slashdot has always sucked, even in the beginning. It only succeeded because it predates RSS feeds.
Fine then; in a highly competitive space where people are advertising the hell out of their products, everyone is doing it. Google and Yahoo both provide tools that make this kind of activity possible, so you can't claim that it's not intended. ;)
In other words, if you're paying $50-100 per click on Google sponsored links (and there are a lot of keywords where that's what you have to pay to even show up on the first page,) it doesn't make sense not to buy some links on other sites to get yourself in the first 5 Google search spots as well.
It's not cheating, everyone on the first page of every google search you do that could possibly lead to a sale of any kind has paid a consultant to be there. There is an entire industry built around gaming search engine results. There are the "white hats" who buy links, etc but do it in a google approved manner (i.e. on industry linkblogs or sites that sell links with relevant content.) There are black hats who spam blog comments/message boards/whatever they can find with their links, and their sites will often end up in Google hell eventually.
:)
Google realizes that any system they can create will be gamed by SEO consultants before they can change their algorithms, so they set them up in such a way that to game the system, you have to do things in a way that actually makes meta tags, subjects and relevant content meaningful. It makes the internet as a whole more usable, and sites that provide no meaningful content or don't play by the rules will be buried.
Yes, this often means that you can raise your Google rank by buying or renting links on popular industry-related sites. There are entire advertising networks set up to organize this kind of activity. This has been going on for years, and if you didn't realize that by doing a Google search you were being marketed to, well, open your eyes.
[quote]His sympathy for Red Hat being "exploited" is wildly absurd and shows his failure to understand who made the software in Open Source products. Red Hat did not, for the most part, make the system they are selling. People like me did, and Red Hat did not pay us for it. And if you want to use that software in Debian or CentOS, that's fine with us.[/quote]
And even people on the CentOS boards will tell you that if you're doing mission critical stuff that absolutely must be stable, buy RedHat for the support. It's not that expensive.
Welcome to politics. It's been this way... well, always.
The "reinstallation" CD Dell gives you is just an OEM (as in it will only work with OEM and not retail serial numbers) copy of XP. It doesn't even have drivers that weren't included in XP SP2 (you have to download those from Dell or use the driver CD that came with your PC.)
It also doesn't come with any of the preinstalled crap. If it did, it wouldn't be nearly as useful.
What happens when an XP system needs re-installation and I can't get an activation for any reason?
You call the 1-800 number on the popup window, and if your serial number isn't on the "blacklist" (unless you pulled your serial number off the internet, this shouldn't be a problem) then a nice Indian woman named "Susan" gives you an activation code. Yeah, it's kind of a pain in the ass, but it's not the end of the world.
At the point Vista is at right now, I would move to Ubuntu or RHEL on the desktop before I moved to Vista. Seriously; no shit. I still use XP on everything, not because it's incredibly awesome but because I know it works most of the time. The general consensus among Windows admins out there seems to be that Vista is not ready for wide deployment due to ongoing compatability and driver issues. In my admittedly brief testing, I'd have to agree.
I'll be hoarding up a bunch of VLKs for XP and Office (or possibly even installing OpenOffice on some users who don't really need Office) and ordering machines with no OS. This move will backfire on Microsoft; the IT world in general is far more trusting of Open Source desktop apps than they were during the Windows 98->XP switch (and far more distrustful of Vista than XP.) If a user has to re-learn the OS anyway and the admin does not trust Windows to work reliably, why not move them to Linux? Hell you could load Ubuntu on a machine and tell the end-user it's Vista and they probably wouldn't know the difference.
All of this is moot. Maybe not in Second Life but in WoW it is.
All of the real world game world transactions are expressly forbidden by the WoW terms of use. Most of these companies are pretty under the radar as it is, why the hell are they going to pay taxes? I doubt many of them have any presence in the US at all. Why should they pay US taxes?
I have a pair of 4:3 monitors and I love them. I personally dislike dual 16:9s but I've found it's largely a personal preference. Regardless, I don't think any major OEM is going to stop making 4:3 monitors anytime soon.
I know Dell for one will sell you a PC without an OS. Just tell them you're planning on installing XP on it and they'll probably sell you an OEM copy of XP as well (it just won't come pre-loaded on the PC.) You may have to harass the consumer-side sales reps, but I've not had any problems doing this.
I assume many other large OEMs are the same way.
This seems to be true of all things.
The more you boast of how good you are at something, the better you must be!
The WiFi is a fine, if not great, idea to add to a music player. The way they marketed and implemented it is crap.
You can yell at me and tell me I'm wrong, but can't you use apache2 instead of IIS, even with ASP.NET? (bear in mind I use neither IIS nor ASP.NET.) I would assume the application is just using the web server to pass packets and manage connections.
I think he meant data backups...
What happens if your house burns down/floods/etc? Even a kitchen fire could be enough depending on how much smoke and water damage there is. Do you lose both your house and your livelihood? Or do you keep off-site backups?
Yep. Hard drives and DVDs are backup media, tape is disaster recovery media. DVDs are not durable enough nor do they really hold enough (tape has much better density; 400GB per LTO3 tape compared to 9GB per DL-DVD.) Tape is still the undisputed king for long-term, high capacity backups.
For home use, online backups are fine, but for even small businesses, volumes of data approaching 1TB are not uncommon.
I'd venture that a good 75% of people who would buy Linux loaded PCs from Dell already load RedHat or CentOS on them. It's basically the de-facto standard distribution in the "real world" for anyone who values third party software support (this is not an endorsement of RedHat over any other distro, just a recognition that for the market Dell sells rack servers to, it's probably the best mix of "free software" cred and "business suit" job security.)
So why not RedHat? It seems to make the most sense given where Dell is coming from and who their typical server customer is. Hell, Dell can even add the OS support contract as a line item when you buy the thing, or they could set up their own repositories and support them themselves.
Really?
Teachers in many southern states (no idea about others, but I know its true in Texas) are not allowed to strike, so the unions really have no meaningful threats other than sick-outs which just get taken from the pool of bad-weather or vacation days. And when a union is powerless like that, people just don't join because they see it as a waste of money, so the union is effectively gutted.
Not saying it's right, but it is absolutely a practicable solution in many states.
If you need php5, compile it. It's not that hard. Hell, you can compile and install an entire LAMP stack from source in under an hour in a non-root home directory as long as you know which modules you need. The LAMP stack changes a lot more than the base OS does, so IMO it's better to compile it yourself no matter which distro you use.
This makes a lot of sense.. No, it's not going to replace a real copy of Photoshop on a graphic designer's workstation, but it may be enough for Adobe to squeeze some ad revenue out of people who would normally just download it off BitTorrent. These are the casual users of Photoshop who use it maybe once every few weeks and for whom buying a $600 program doesn't make sense.
Basically, Adobe is getting no money from those people right now, so any additional revenue they can pull from them is free money. Of course, your graphics professionals will still have the legit, expensive copy of Photoshop because $600 really isn't that much if you're using it to make money.
If it hadn't become obvious years ago, slashdot is a site where managers go to stay 'current' on tech news. Sys admins and programmers only check /. so that when their manager asks them a question, they have an ample supply of snarky responses to them.