I'm betting, as one of the 'naysayers', that most of us would like to go to interviews and work in khakis or tan cargo pants and a nice short-sleeved work-shirt or an irish wool sweater or a stylish mock-turtleneck.
Most of us aren't looking to go to work in ripped jeans and a t-shirt...just clothes that don't require sweating in in/outside temperatures of more than 65 degrees F...and clothes that don't require a noose on our necks.
Encouraging the status quo by stating that "if you gotta wear a suit, then wear the friggin' suit" will never cause things to change. How often does change that is fair come from the top down? If you made it to the top...then you likely played the game...if you played the game why would you want to change it?
The suit/corporate-vanity is an issue not because of the clothes as much as the clothes are a metaphor about the lack of respect for knowledge and actual skill there is in the corporate world. It tends to be more about who you agree with, or who's vanity you appeal to, or who can demonstrate they will do business as usual.
Personally...I think that Mozilla 1.0 on Windows is quite a bit better than IE on Windows. Namely, it is faster rendering pages. Just about every site that I go to is faster to a degree that is noticable.
And the quicklaunch pre-loaded app is nice too. It puts IE and Moz on the same playing field, since most of IE is preloaded for the Windows Explorer. Now most of Netscape is preloaded...and it can open a new window faster than IE.
I have long time IE user friends that have given Moz 1.0 a shot and liked what they have seen. Even if they don't stick with Moz on Windows...at least they looked and made an informed choice.
And the article also seems to go out of its way to make some unfounded slams too. Such as:
"The median number of project administrators was 1. In fact, the largest number of developers in a project was 42 - a far cry from the high numbers reported previously."
Previously to what? Where is the link to the previous report or findings?
"Others have pointed out that Torvalds essentially did not have a life and spent considerable number of hours rewriting code submissions by others."
If he enjoyed what he was doing, who are they to say he didn't have a life?
I would personally say that my own meager involvement with Sourceforge has been to learn by experiencing at least some of the open-source collaboration. I'm glad it is there, regardless of this apparent negative press about open-source developers numbers.
It would seem to me that they are primarily competing with companies selling Windows servers, like Dell. If you check out the web store price for a Dell PowerEdge 1650 and load it up to be similar in features to the 'custom' Apple Xserve (don't forget to add Windows 2k Svr)...you get a price of ~$7600.
That is only ~$200 less than the Xserve. So, it would seem that Apple is being pretty competitively priced. Granted there are other *nix solutions that carry a more attractive price tag, and some of them have nearly as elegant a rackcase. Looks aren't everything to Mac enthusiasts.
Well, 'Anonymous Coward', I didn't say it was Enron. I only said that it was a "certain energy company".
On the question of whether or not Enron is a piece of the puzzle concerning the false energy crisis of California, there are a number of articles tracing influences in that market, of which this article, What Cheney's Hiding, is only one.
I didn't see your posting when I made mine along the same subject. I agree with what you have to say.
One only has to look the activities of W's cohorts, and where they get their $$$, to see the further damage that is being dealt in deregulation of these things, and handing control to lying, greedy companies like Enron.
Check out OpenSecrets.org to see who is getting money from where. Then check their voting record and see if they voting to represent the people or to represent their own greed.
Some people believe that George W. could have known about the corrupt dealings of Ken Lay and Enron? Perhaps they should read their correspondence with each other while Bush was governor of Texas on TheSmokingGun.com
Just remember that CA's rolling blackouts were caused by the greed of a certain energy company that created the facade of an energy shortage to make a mint from a neutered regulatory market.
If the CA Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) handles its responsibilities well, it stands to be a good thing for fairness to the consumer. Certainly CPUC is taking notice of more of the consumer's concerns than are a bunch of companies concerned only with the bottom-line fighting for marketshare.
The other question is what vulnerability are they talking about in a specific distro? Lets say their are 30 vulnerabilities with UnconfusedLinux (for example), but 12 are from the version of Squid I included, 10 from Tux, and 8 from mod_frontpage. And say that 95% of the users of my distro don't use those features because I do not put them on the default install?
So, for this situation it counts up to 0 vulnerabilities. Are they counting those kinds of situations? No way.
This is just like the chatter about Linux being so vulnerable because of the worms that attacked BIND. Wow...what a thought that most people wouldn't even be using BIND on their Linux workstations, or likely not even on many servers.
Bottom line is that groups like Bugtraq need to be MUCH MUCH MUCH more specific with their statistics.
The phone company was prevented from charging a 'per phone' additional charge, as was the cable company for trying to charge for 'multiple TVs'. Why is this any different?
If I were using their equipment and actually eating more of the company's IPs via dynamic assignment, then it makes sense to charge more. But if you are within your agreement for bandwidth and the connection (i.e. only one IP used and no piggy-backing), then it would seem illegal as a breach of service contract and privacy to look inside your home network and charge for every network device you route to internally.
This has got to be illegal, citing the phone company and cable-TV company for an example.
You all are perfectly fine posting whatever you want. That is one of the missions of./ to let everyone have whatever say they want to have.
I personally am a believer in Apple's OS and applications, but I want to hear when Apple is being evil, just as much as when Microsoft is evil.
As to the posting about people's lost files because of the installer messing up, I think that the lead poster, with the 100GB of missing data is exaggerating. Also why would someone have 100GB of non-trivial data that is not backed up? Seems fishy.
I won't discuss the issue, as I feel that the discussion that is already posted is VERY good. I hope that everyone will read some of the great responses to this article.
Here is a good website discussion the issues concerning world trade. They are against, mind you.
My experience with Dell hardware and support has been horrible. Granted we have our Dell server hardware working pretty well now, it was a rough road to get there. But for certain their support continues to be horrible.
Our mess started with PowerEdge 6300's and the PowerVault 201S. This is back when 36 GB SCSI from IBM had just been available for a short time. We ordered a couple of those and happily set it up using the PowerVault's backplane split to increase our overall bandwidth between the PowerVault and the PowerEdge system. And it worked great, but only for a short time. Then it would lock the whole server up.
We called Dell's server support and jumped through hoop after hoop, replacing drives, PERC2 controller cards, mainboards, backplanes, split-modules...pretty much everything, only to end up still having the same problem. Firmware and drivers were all at the latest revision approved by Dell.
After being on the phone with them for nearly 2 weeks and even having their contracted technicians out on two occasions, it was down the the wire where my project NEEDED this storage space online right away! They still had no solution, and would not yet consider just taking the servers back and refunding our cost.
After a lot of thought, there was one thing that the technicians had not tried, so finally taking matters back into my own hands...I reconnected the PowerVault unit as to not split the backplane. Viola...worked fine and still does to date. I had mentioned trying this on two occcasions for the technicians contracted from Dell to try. They believed that the split-backplace configuration should have worked, so they never would try running it not split.
Granted this is not a perfect solution because Dell never actually solved the problem and did not give us the ideal configuration that we wanted. But yet it worked well enough.
OK...this is the funny but really angering part. I kid you not, OVER ONE YEAR after all this happened Dell's server techs call me out of the blue. They ask me first if I had gotten my split-backplane problem taken care of? I couldn't help but be sarcastic while informing them that was over a YEAR ago! They apologized and told me what the problem was. Their engineers apparently had just recently found that during the first runs of the backplane split modules for the PowerVault 200 and 201 had a hairline crack in the board that prevented the module from working correctly. ONE YEAR to find that out!!!
Since then we have not purchased Dell server hardware again. We have had great support from Compaq instead, and with our supplier we also have a better price for the hardware we get.
As to the workstation and notebook issues that started this discussion, the organization that I work for buys a lot of Dell. We have had problems with their Workstation series and Optiplex series, usually with video drivers and such. We've always had to get drivers right from Intel and ATI to get anything to work because the Dell drivers don't seem to work with NT4's sp6a.
The little sub-desktop Optiplex Pentium III 733 machines (their cheap... and companies liek cheap no matter how well they work) overheat all the time. They suck.
Well, anyway...that is my experience. I have another friend that swears by them, has never had any major problems, and support has been good to him. Of course he is not working with their high-end stuff though. Anyway...for what it is worth...there you go.
My goodness this has generated a lot of needless discussion. The fix is not even as difficult as a script or a manual file change. I did not see this in a quick scan of the posts, but I hope that someone else mentioned this already!
Simply open up the "Preferences", goto "Download Options", and UN-check the following:
Automatically decode MacBinary files
Automatically decode BinHex files
Problem solved.
If you are REALLY paranoid about the files even being decompressed automatically by StuffIt at that point, just remove the entries for.bin,.hqx, and.sit under "Preferences" then "File Helpers".
This is as easy of a hole to plug as was the QuickTime autostart worms vulnerability.
This is a Release CANDIDATE, yes?
on
Mandrake 8.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
From what I can see on Mandrake's website, this is a release candidate, not a final.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Mandrake as a distribution. I like that they are quite a bit less conservative in their distributions than RedHat or Slackware tend to be.
Mandrake 8.1 looks like a great step forward though, especially with their single-user install options.
The old Firewire vs. USB argument...
on
USB 2.0 For Linux
·
· Score: 1
I applaud Linux developers for supporting USB2 before certain other companies.
There are two things to remember about USB2 as compared to Firewire though...
1. 480Mbits/sec is only a possible maximum. Ultimately your getting that speed depends largely on the topology that is employed.
2. Firewire packets have a time code. USB2 packets do not. That makes USB2 inappropriate for use as a dependable high-quality media conduit.
I was using Word 2000 the other day... I know, shame on me. But my F1 Office Assistant informed me of a little secret. Apparently it is he who controls the world... secretly, of course. And if I was a good little Micro$oft lemming, he wouldn't destroy all the files on my computer.
Suspicious, I consulted my friendly install of StarOffice on my Linux machine. He didn't answer back, which is what I woudl have expected from M$ Office, and StarOffice continued to happily to my word processing without bother or error.
Moving back over to my Windows machine with M$ Office... that little MechWarrior like droid was not at all happy! He threatened to allow the 'I love you' worm to work its way through my machine via its evil powers of VB scripting.
With F1 no longer being a concern, and no virus or VB script security problems on my Linux machine... I moved back over to the screen with the Gnome footprint eagerly waiting to do what I request without problem or crash.
I donned my red hat and rode off in into the lovely sunset with my StarOffice at my side.
Personally, I am quite at home with Netscape6's UI. Sure it is a bit different from the previous versions, and of course a MUCH different feel than M$'s IE. But here on my Linux box... I feel quite at home with NS6. And let me be one to say that NS6 is VERY fast on Linux compared to the Windows or Mac versions. VERY FAST on Linux!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm betting, as one of the 'naysayers', that most of us would like to go to interviews and work in khakis or tan cargo pants and a nice short-sleeved work-shirt or an irish wool sweater or a stylish mock-turtleneck.
Most of us aren't looking to go to work in ripped jeans and a t-shirt...just clothes that don't require sweating in in/outside temperatures of more than 65 degrees F...and clothes that don't require a noose on our necks.
Encouraging the status quo by stating that "if you gotta wear a suit, then wear the friggin' suit" will never cause things to change. How often does change that is fair come from the top down? If you made it to the top...then you likely played the game...if you played the game why would you want to change it?
The suit/corporate-vanity is an issue not because of the clothes as much as the clothes are a metaphor about the lack of respect for knowledge and actual skill there is in the corporate world. It tends to be more about who you agree with, or who's vanity you appeal to, or who can demonstrate they will do business as usual.
Personally...I think that Mozilla 1.0 on Windows is quite a bit better than IE on Windows. Namely, it is faster rendering pages. Just about every site that I go to is faster to a degree that is noticable.
And the quicklaunch pre-loaded app is nice too. It puts IE and Moz on the same playing field, since most of IE is preloaded for the Windows Explorer. Now most of Netscape is preloaded...and it can open a new window faster than IE.
I have long time IE user friends that have given Moz 1.0 a shot and liked what they have seen. Even if they don't stick with Moz on Windows...at least they looked and made an informed choice.
Exactly!
And the article also seems to go out of its way to make some unfounded slams too. Such as:
Previously to what? Where is the link to the previous report or findings?
If he enjoyed what he was doing, who are they to say he didn't have a life?
I would personally say that my own meager involvement with Sourceforge has been to learn by experiencing at least some of the open-source collaboration. I'm glad it is there, regardless of this apparent negative press about open-source developers numbers.
It would seem to me that they are primarily competing with companies selling Windows servers, like Dell. If you check out the web store price for a Dell PowerEdge 1650 and load it up to be similar in features to the 'custom' Apple Xserve (don't forget to add Windows 2k Svr)...you get a price of ~$7600.
That is only ~$200 less than the Xserve. So, it would seem that Apple is being pretty competitively priced. Granted there are other *nix solutions that carry a more attractive price tag, and some of them have nearly as elegant a rackcase. Looks aren't everything to Mac enthusiasts.
Well, 'Anonymous Coward', I didn't say it was Enron. I only said that it was a "certain energy company".
On the question of whether or not Enron is a piece of the puzzle concerning the false energy crisis of California, there are a number of articles tracing influences in that market, of which this article, What Cheney's Hiding, is only one.
Here are a couple others:
I didn't see your posting when I made mine along the same subject. I agree with what you have to say.
One only has to look the activities of W's cohorts, and where they get their $$$, to see the further damage that is being dealt in deregulation of these things, and handing control to lying, greedy companies like Enron.
Check out OpenSecrets.org to see who is getting money from where. Then check their voting record and see if they voting to represent the people or to represent their own greed.
Some people believe that George W. could have known about the corrupt dealings of Ken Lay and Enron? Perhaps they should read their correspondence with each other while Bush was governor of Texas on TheSmokingGun.com
I would highly recommend Michael Moore's new book, "Stupid White Men". He has done his research well on Bush and his cadre.
Just remember that CA's rolling blackouts were caused by the greed of a certain energy company that created the facade of an energy shortage to make a mint from a neutered regulatory market.
If the CA Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) handles its responsibilities well, it stands to be a good thing for fairness to the consumer. Certainly CPUC is taking notice of more of the consumer's concerns than are a bunch of companies concerned only with the bottom-line fighting for marketshare.
I'm sure that YOU wouldn't have. ;-)
I'm totally with you on this issue.
The other question is what vulnerability are they talking about in a specific distro? Lets say their are 30 vulnerabilities with UnconfusedLinux (for example), but 12 are from the version of Squid I included, 10 from Tux, and 8 from mod_frontpage. And say that 95% of the users of my distro don't use those features because I do not put them on the default install?
So, for this situation it counts up to 0 vulnerabilities. Are they counting those kinds of situations? No way.
This is just like the chatter about Linux being so vulnerable because of the worms that attacked BIND. Wow...what a thought that most people wouldn't even be using BIND on their Linux workstations, or likely not even on many servers.
Bottom line is that groups like Bugtraq need to be MUCH MUCH MUCH more specific with their statistics.
If he was not a big fan of OpenGL...why move to Microsoft to build on a bastardized wrap-up of OpenGL (DirectX)?
No one believes that Microsoft comes up with their shit themselves, do they?
The phone company was prevented from charging a 'per phone' additional charge, as was the cable company for trying to charge for 'multiple TVs'. Why is this any different?
If I were using their equipment and actually eating more of the company's IPs via dynamic assignment, then it makes sense to charge more. But if you are within your agreement for bandwidth and the connection (i.e. only one IP used and no piggy-backing), then it would seem illegal as a breach of service contract and privacy to look inside your home network and charge for every network device you route to internally.
This has got to be illegal, citing the phone company and cable-TV company for an example.
You all are perfectly fine posting whatever you want. That is one of the missions of ./ to let everyone have whatever say they want to have.
I personally am a believer in Apple's OS and applications, but I want to hear when Apple is being evil, just as much as when Microsoft is evil.
As to the posting about people's lost files because of the installer messing up, I think that the lead poster, with the 100GB of missing data is exaggerating. Also why would someone have 100GB of non-trivial data that is not backed up? Seems fishy.
I won't discuss the issue, as I feel that the discussion that is already posted is VERY good. I hope that everyone will read some of the great responses to this article.
Here is a good website discussion the issues concerning world trade. They are against, mind you.
http://www.citizen.org/trade/index.cfm
My experience with Dell hardware and support has been horrible. Granted we have our Dell server hardware working pretty well now, it was a rough road to get there. But for certain their support continues to be horrible.
Our mess started with PowerEdge 6300's and the PowerVault 201S. This is back when 36 GB SCSI from IBM had just been available for a short time. We ordered a couple of those and happily set it up using the PowerVault's backplane split to increase our overall bandwidth between the PowerVault and the PowerEdge system. And it worked great, but only for a short time. Then it would lock the whole server up.
We called Dell's server support and jumped through hoop after hoop, replacing drives, PERC2 controller cards, mainboards, backplanes, split-modules...pretty much everything, only to end up still having the same problem. Firmware and drivers were all at the latest revision approved by Dell.
After being on the phone with them for nearly 2 weeks and even having their contracted technicians out on two occasions, it was down the the wire where my project NEEDED this storage space online right away! They still had no solution, and would not yet consider just taking the servers back and refunding our cost.
After a lot of thought, there was one thing that the technicians had not tried, so finally taking matters back into my own hands...I reconnected the PowerVault unit as to not split the backplane. Viola...worked fine and still does to date. I had mentioned trying this on two occcasions for the technicians contracted from Dell to try. They believed that the split-backplace configuration should have worked, so they never would try running it not split.
Granted this is not a perfect solution because Dell never actually solved the problem and did not give us the ideal configuration that we wanted. But yet it worked well enough.
OK...this is the funny but really angering part. I kid you not, OVER ONE YEAR after all this happened Dell's server techs call me out of the blue. They ask me first if I had gotten my split-backplane problem taken care of? I couldn't help but be sarcastic while informing them that was over a YEAR ago! They apologized and told me what the problem was. Their engineers apparently had just recently found that during the first runs of the backplane split modules for the PowerVault 200 and 201 had a hairline crack in the board that prevented the module from working correctly. ONE YEAR to find that out!!!
Since then we have not purchased Dell server hardware again. We have had great support from Compaq instead, and with our supplier we also have a better price for the hardware we get.
As to the workstation and notebook issues that started this discussion, the organization that I work for buys a lot of Dell. We have had problems with their Workstation series and Optiplex series, usually with video drivers and such. We've always had to get drivers right from Intel and ATI to get anything to work because the Dell drivers don't seem to work with NT4's sp6a.
The little sub-desktop Optiplex Pentium III 733 machines (their cheap... and companies liek cheap no matter how well they work) overheat all the time. They suck.
Well, anyway...that is my experience. I have another friend that swears by them, has never had any major problems, and support has been good to him. Of course he is not working with their high-end stuff though. Anyway...for what it is worth...there you go.
I can't believe that Apple would do a pre-release of this device. They were not even telling their own employees not directly involved!
The picture looks pretty fake too. It looks a lot like the first Windows CE PDA's.
My goodness this has generated a lot of needless discussion. The fix is not even as difficult as a script or a manual file change. I did not see this in a quick scan of the posts, but I hope that someone else mentioned this already!
Simply open up the "Preferences", goto "Download Options", and UN-check the following:
Problem solved.
If you are REALLY paranoid about the files even being decompressed automatically by StuffIt at that point, just remove the entries for .bin, .hqx, and .sit under "Preferences" then "File Helpers".
This is as easy of a hole to plug as was the QuickTime autostart worms vulnerability.
From what I can see on Mandrake's website, this is a release candidate, not a final.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Mandrake as a distribution. I like that they are quite a bit less conservative in their distributions than RedHat or Slackware tend to be.
Mandrake 8.1 looks like a great step forward though, especially with their single-user install options.
I applaud Linux developers for supporting USB2 before certain other companies.
There are two things to remember about USB2 as compared to Firewire though...
1. 480Mbits/sec is only a possible maximum. Ultimately your getting that speed depends largely on the topology that is employed.
2. Firewire packets have a time code. USB2 packets do not. That makes USB2 inappropriate for use as a dependable high-quality media conduit.
I enjoy the Aqua desktop. There will be quite a few improvements with 10.1 though.
Suspicious, I consulted my friendly install of StarOffice on my Linux machine. He didn't answer back, which is what I woudl have expected from M$ Office, and StarOffice continued to happily to my word processing without bother or error.
Moving back over to my Windows machine with M$ Office... that little MechWarrior like droid was not at all happy! He threatened to allow the 'I love you' worm to work its way through my machine via its evil powers of VB scripting.
Flustered... I then remembered who should be in control of the computer in the first place... ME! I promtly played my own ace-in-the-hole against that evil little M$ droid, named "F1", and hit the power button on the computer.
With F1 no longer being a concern, and no virus or VB script security problems on my Linux machine... I moved back over to the screen with the Gnome footprint eagerly waiting to do what I request without problem or crash.
I donned my red hat and rode off in into the lovely sunset with my StarOffice at my side.
Personally, I am quite at home with Netscape6's UI. Sure it is a bit different from the previous versions, and of course a MUCH different feel than M$'s IE. But here on my Linux box... I feel quite at home with NS6. And let me be one to say that NS6 is VERY fast on Linux compared to the Windows or Mac versions. VERY FAST on Linux!