For home use, get a ancient PC, put a good hard drive in it, install Linux with Bacula (www.bacula.org) & only backup your data (not the entire OS) directly to disk. In the long run you'll be much farther ahead on cost & performance. If you ever have a crash, re-install the OS then restore the data.
I salvaged an 11 year old 486-66DX with 24mb ram. Put a 120GB HD in it, an ethernet card, and installed Debian with Bacula. All together it cost me less than $100 to provide a backup solution for three PCs. Everything is scheduled to backup automatically & I get emails if something doesn't work.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. Businesses obviously have different priorities.
Another variant of these have been around for 30+ years. IBM mainframes with dumb terminals. Not fancy or graphical, but I can go to any dumb terminal & it acts the same as any other dumb terminal.
I work for a company that provides pagers, phones, laptops, brodband, & second phone lines to people who need it. When I first started it was simple to get this. You simply told your boss that you needed it and started submitting expense reports. No justification was needed. Needless to say, it was very widely abused. There were numerous people who didn't do any off hour support who got everything paid for by the company.
It cought the attention of our CIO too. He decided to make a few adjustments. Unless your boss was willing to assure his boss that you consistantly were needed for off-hour support, you couldn't expense anything. Every person who was approved was reviewed by management two leves up.
The result is that a lot of support people continued to be able to get their support tools paid for, but a lot of middle management didn't. It also really cut costs with almost no impact on support.
I also once worked for a company that wouldn't pay for a a second phone line (this was before broadband). A co-worker of mine put together a case that if he worked one hour more a day from home, the productivity gain was a lot more than the cost. He was approved & he routinely put in 2-4 hours more. It worked out in the businesses favor.
...by the year 2000 we'll have flying cars and whole cities on the moon."
While this may be comming in our future, I think 20 years is a little optimistic. People have difficulty predicting technology 2 years in advance, much less 20.
A small library near me has about 8 Windows PCs. Every time I'm in there I only see people use them to connect to an AS/400 via TN5250 so people can search the library catalog. That is one expensive dumb terminal.
Politics & the war in Iraq aside, he raises an interesting question. As I understand the GPL, a company can do whatever they want to do with Linux. The only restriction is that IF they redistribute their changes outside the company, they must distribute the source code.
Am I correct in assuming that if the military takes Linux & changes it, they don't need to publish anything if they keep it internal?
Every old generation seems to refer to the young generation as being somehow inferior. The odd thing is that the younger generation tends to believe the reverse.
Ahhh for the good old days where you were lucky to live to 30. They had life so much simpler. No generation gap, no technology to worry about, & the only off-shore worries were when the vikings game a calling.
The loyalty cards are not really the same as RFID.
RFID can be used to track items purchased, but really don't have a direct way to tie that information back to an individual consumer (assuming you don't give them the information in another way). A lot of stores have ways of doing this anyway and have for a very long time. Keeping track of what sells help keep your prices down by reducing overhead and helps make sure things are reordered promptly. There isn't a large difference between keeping track of what is sold and keeping track of the IP addresses tha access a web page and where they came from.
Consumer loyalty cards are very different. They track by individual user. A store might know that I like to buy a certain brand of cereal and use that information to increase their revenue by either targeting me in a marketing campaign or by selling the data to another company. Every loyalty program I've ever seen are voluntary except for private bulk stores (like SAMS CLUB or COSTCO). You are getting the discount in agreement that the store can use your information. If you don't agree, you can't complain about not getting a discount because they are not makinge money from you. Lower income families are more likely to use this, but their information is also less likely to be useful because of the lower discretionary income. There are also numerous ways around these cards and several people have commented on them.
There is also the option of not shopping at RFID or loyalty cards stores. Don't be angry when you have to pay more. Businesses are designed to make money. They use any legal means to do this function. While the ethics of this may be questionable, it is not currently illegal. If a store says that they'll give you a discount in exchange for marketing information, competing businesses may be put at a disadvantage because the primary shopping habit of people is based on price, not privacy.
I thought NetBSD was doing a Lego contest. I was really excited until I realized it was a logo contest. With Lego returning to blocks I thought my hour of glory had finally arrived.
I guess I need to draw more than stick figures to win. That leaves me out.
Maybe I'll use PhotoShop to copy a $100.00 bill and submit that for the logo...
Get prepared to answer about one million questions when you put it through the xray machine. To be on the safe side, arrive about 2 days prior to your departure time.
While I'm glad they are going back to blocks, Mindstorms looked like a great educational tool. In a few more years my son would have been old enough to use it.
Oh well, maybe I'll pick one up before they disappear.
Benchmarks are just that. Benchmarks. A general guide to general performance. There never has, nor will there ever be, an all encompasing benchmark.
Thing of all of the parms which go into application performance. CPU (speed & quantity), memory (usage, speed, quantity), disk space (speed, defragmentation amount), and cache utilization are just a few of the big ones.
Think of the amount of impact the coder makes. Do they constantly free & release memory as opposed to maintaining internal buffer pools in their application? Do they write code to take advantage of multiple CPUs? Do they constantly read & re-read the same files which almost never change?
How about compiling & linking flags? Do they optimize for the x386 architecture or they optimize for the specific CPU?
I've seen really poorly written programs in C that are slow. I've seen well written programs in Java which perform nicely.
I'm not saying that the results of a benchmark are useless, but use them as a guide rather than a rule. The only real performance you need to worry about is your application's performance.
Re:Interesting Statistic
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 3, Informative
My apoligies for a blanket statement. Next time I'll do more research. I always thought that the same thing that made the hydrogen a good fuel made it more dangerous (I could have sworn I heard this in high school chemestry, but I'm old).
I did a quick google search & found this. Very informative.
http://www.e-sources.com/hydrogen/safety.html
Thanks for catching me on this. I can say I learned something new today.
Re:Interesting Statistic
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Where do you want to dump the highly toxic chemicals that would be the result of the 200 square mile solar installation? Where are you going to put it that wouldn't make environmentalists, homeowners, or farmers go crazy and is still safe from natural disasters?
Wind is nice and clean, but it takes a lot of windmills to generate enough power to replace a power plant. Windmill farms are regarded as many to be ugly so people don't want them around their houses.
Hydro sounds like a great idea, but many people have a bias against hydrogen because of past mistakes with it. We can handle it much safer now, but it is still more dangerous than gasoline.
Also remember that the bigger you make something, the more difficult is to maintain. Snow, ice, earthquakes, tornados, and hurricanes can cause havoc on large equipment.
Everyone knows the nasty side effects of using oil & coal energy.
Don't get me wrong, I (like you) am looking forward to the day when I can throw away all gasoline powered devices, but we are not quite there yet. Hopefully it will be very soon.
That is probably true if you count all of the users who accidentally delete a critical file or Windows being so screwed up a re-install is the only option. Not to mention the occasional HD crash or scratched CD.
Which would you prefer, a computer picking a random candidate or a person picking a random candidate. At least a computer wouldn't vote based solely upon Democratic & Republican lines and wouldn't have a name recognition bias.
For personal use, I have two old 486 PCs. One is over 12 years old and isn't used much. The "newer" one is 10 years old and is used every day. I put a 120GB drive in it and it uses Bacula (www.bacula.org) to backup three other machines. Works great. Cheaper than any tape drive & faster too.
For professional use, I work on a mainframe so that is easy. My customers have some programs that haven't been compiled in about 30 years and are still used. We have round tape drives that were manufactured in the 1970's and are still needed to send data to some of our customers.
Bundeling unrelated things together in congress is nothing new. It is a favorite way to get pet projects and a way to manuver things in your way. Both parties do it and all presidents hate it.
They tried to change this a few years back by giving the presedent a line item veto. It was declared unconstitutional because it gave the executive branch too much power over the legislative branch. The only way to change it legally is for a constitutional amendment.
The funny thing is that most state governments allow for a line item veto.
1.) In cold weather, the diesel fuel can turn into jelly. That is why you need to plug them in at night. That is also one reason semi trucks are kept running at rest stops.
2.) Diesel prices don't seem to change quite as much as gasoline. When (if) gasoline goes down again, diesel probably won't follow as quickly.
3.) Not every gas station has diesel fuel. Get away from major highways and you may have difficulties.
4.) Man oh man can they produce smoke as they get older. You'll look like James Bond with a smoke screen.
5.) They are noiser than gasoline cars.
6.) I've herd people say that they don't last as long as a gasoline engine. I can't prove or disprove this, but they saf when you get over 120,000 the risk of a major failure increases.
Other than that, they are fine. I've driven several diesel trucks. I can say if you take care of them, they are great. If you need a powerful vehicle they can't be beat.
This may not be a simple matter of retribution against SCO. Look at it this way:
I run a business. I hire some people who were formerly employeed by SCO. I release a major new product which brings in millions. What is to stop SCO from taking me to court, saying that the employees I hired from them used SCO IP to improve my product?
SCO has already shown a willingness to sue based upon shaky grounds. I'd bet if they don't win the IBM lawsuit they will go after someone else next.
Just the threat of a lawsuit affects stock prices and can have a dramatic impact on a business.
I'm not saying this is the case here, but it would make me think if I was in charge of hiring people.
Perhaps a more informative estimate would be to take the difference in the number of lines in the 2.2 kernel vs the 2.4 kernel, since SCO claims 2.2 is fine but 2.4 has copied code.
3,377,902 (2.4) - 1,800,847 (2.2) = 1,577,055
In other words, SCO claims that 2/3 of the improvements in the 2.4 series kernel belong to them. That is a rather unrealistic statement since a lot of those enhancements didn't come from IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
...TAPE is a four letter word.
For home use, get a ancient PC, put a good hard drive in it, install Linux with Bacula (www.bacula.org) & only backup your data (not the entire OS) directly to disk. In the long run you'll be much farther ahead on cost & performance. If you ever have a crash, re-install the OS then restore the data.
I salvaged an 11 year old 486-66DX with 24mb ram. Put a 120GB HD in it, an ethernet card, and installed Debian with Bacula. All together it cost me less than $100 to provide a backup solution for three PCs. Everything is scheduled to backup automatically & I get emails if something doesn't work.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. Businesses obviously have different priorities.
Another variant of these have been around for 30+ years. IBM mainframes with dumb terminals. Not fancy or graphical, but I can go to any dumb terminal & it acts the same as any other dumb terminal.
I work for a company that provides pagers, phones, laptops, brodband, & second phone lines to people who need it. When I first started it was simple to get this. You simply told your boss that you needed it and started submitting expense reports. No justification was needed. Needless to say, it was very widely abused. There were numerous people who didn't do any off hour support who got everything paid for by the company.
It cought the attention of our CIO too. He decided to make a few adjustments. Unless your boss was willing to assure his boss that you consistantly were needed for off-hour support, you couldn't expense anything. Every person who was approved was reviewed by management two leves up.
The result is that a lot of support people continued to be able to get their support tools paid for, but a lot of middle management didn't. It also really cut costs with almost no impact on support.
I also once worked for a company that wouldn't pay for a a second phone line (this was before broadband). A co-worker of mine put together a case that if he worked one hour more a day from home, the productivity gain was a lot more than the cost. He was approved & he routinely put in 2-4 hours more. It worked out in the businesses favor.
...by the year 2000 we'll have flying cars and whole cities on the moon."
While this may be comming in our future, I think 20 years is a little optimistic. People have difficulty predicting technology 2 years in advance, much less 20.
A small library near me has about 8 Windows PCs. Every time I'm in there I only see people use them to connect to an AS/400 via TN5250 so people can search the library catalog. That is one expensive dumb terminal.
Politics & the war in Iraq aside, he raises an interesting question. As I understand the GPL, a company can do whatever they want to do with Linux. The only restriction is that IF they redistribute their changes outside the company, they must distribute the source code.
Am I correct in assuming that if the military takes Linux & changes it, they don't need to publish anything if they keep it internal?
Every old generation seems to refer to the young generation as being somehow inferior. The odd thing is that the younger generation tends to believe the reverse.
Ahhh for the good old days where you were lucky to live to 30. They had life so much simpler. No generation gap, no technology to worry about, & the only off-shore worries were when the vikings game a calling.
The loyalty cards are not really the same as RFID.
RFID can be used to track items purchased, but really don't have a direct way to tie that information back to an individual consumer (assuming you don't give them the information in another way). A lot of stores have ways of doing this anyway and have for a very long time. Keeping track of what sells help keep your prices down by reducing overhead and helps make sure things are reordered promptly. There isn't a large difference between keeping track of what is sold and keeping track of the IP addresses tha access a web page and where they came from.
Consumer loyalty cards are very different. They track by individual user. A store might know that I like to buy a certain brand of cereal and use that information to increase their revenue by either targeting me in a marketing campaign or by selling the data to another company. Every loyalty program I've ever seen are voluntary except for private bulk stores (like SAMS CLUB or COSTCO). You are getting the discount in agreement that the store can use your information. If you don't agree, you can't complain about not getting a discount because they are not makinge money from you. Lower income families are more likely to use this, but their information is also less likely to be useful because of the lower discretionary income. There are also numerous ways around these cards and several people have commented on them.
There is also the option of not shopping at RFID or loyalty cards stores. Don't be angry when you have to pay more. Businesses are designed to make money. They use any legal means to do this function. While the ethics of this may be questionable, it is not currently illegal. If a store says that they'll give you a discount in exchange for marketing information, competing businesses may be put at a disadvantage because the primary shopping habit of people is based on price, not privacy.
Maybe OS/2 had it correct as well. Their BSOD was called the "Grey Tombstone" by some.
I thought NetBSD was doing a Lego contest. I was really excited until I realized it was a logo contest. With Lego returning to blocks I thought my hour of glory had finally arrived.
I guess I need to draw more than stick figures to win. That leaves me out.
Maybe I'll use PhotoShop to copy a $100.00 bill and submit that for the logo...
Get prepared to answer about one million questions when you put it through the xray machine. To be on the safe side, arrive about 2 days prior to your departure time.
... was actually find a way to get more hours (or minutes) into a day? Don't tell my boss or he'll have us working Venus days.
While I'm glad they are going back to blocks, Mindstorms looked like a great educational tool. In a few more years my son would have been old enough to use it.
Oh well, maybe I'll pick one up before they disappear.
If they have a "None of the above" button, it will probably be the most popular vote in every election.
Benchmarks are just that. Benchmarks. A general guide to general performance. There never has, nor will there ever be, an all encompasing benchmark.
Thing of all of the parms which go into application performance. CPU (speed & quantity), memory (usage, speed, quantity), disk space (speed, defragmentation amount), and cache utilization are just a few of the big ones.
Think of the amount of impact the coder makes. Do they constantly free & release memory as opposed to maintaining internal buffer pools in their application? Do they write code to take advantage of multiple CPUs? Do they constantly read & re-read the same files which almost never change?
How about compiling & linking flags? Do they optimize for the x386 architecture or they optimize for the specific CPU?
I've seen really poorly written programs in C that are slow. I've seen well written programs in Java which perform nicely.
I'm not saying that the results of a benchmark are useless, but use them as a guide rather than a rule. The only real performance you need to worry about is your application's performance.
My apoligies for a blanket statement. Next time I'll do more research. I always thought that the same thing that made the hydrogen a good fuel made it more dangerous (I could have sworn I heard this in high school chemestry, but I'm old).
I did a quick google search & found this. Very informative.
http://www.e-sources.com/hydrogen/safety.html
Thanks for catching me on this. I can say I learned something new today.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Where do you want to dump the highly toxic chemicals that would be the result of the 200 square mile solar installation? Where are you going to put it that wouldn't make environmentalists, homeowners, or farmers go crazy and is still safe from natural disasters?
Wind is nice and clean, but it takes a lot of windmills to generate enough power to replace a power plant. Windmill farms are regarded as many to be ugly so people don't want them around their houses.
Hydro sounds like a great idea, but many people have a bias against hydrogen because of past mistakes with it. We can handle it much safer now, but it is still more dangerous than gasoline.
Also remember that the bigger you make something, the more difficult is to maintain. Snow, ice, earthquakes, tornados, and hurricanes can cause havoc on large equipment.
Everyone knows the nasty side effects of using oil & coal energy.
Don't get me wrong, I (like you) am looking forward to the day when I can throw away all gasoline powered devices, but we are not quite there yet. Hopefully it will be very soon.
That is probably true if you count all of the users who accidentally delete a critical file or Windows being so screwed up a re-install is the only option. Not to mention the occasional HD crash or scratched CD.
Which would you prefer, a computer picking a random candidate or a person picking a random candidate. At least a computer wouldn't vote based solely upon Democratic & Republican lines and wouldn't have a name recognition bias.
Yes I'm kidding.
For personal use, I have two old 486 PCs. One is over 12 years old and isn't used much. The "newer" one is 10 years old and is used every day. I put a 120GB drive in it and it uses Bacula (www.bacula.org) to backup three other machines. Works great. Cheaper than any tape drive & faster too.
For professional use, I work on a mainframe so that is easy. My customers have some programs that haven't been compiled in about 30 years and are still used. We have round tape drives that were manufactured in the 1970's and are still needed to send data to some of our customers.
Bundeling unrelated things together in congress is nothing new. It is a favorite way to get pet projects and a way to manuver things in your way. Both parties do it and all presidents hate it.
They tried to change this a few years back by giving the presedent a line item veto. It was declared unconstitutional because it gave the executive branch too much power over the legislative branch. The only way to change it legally is for a constitutional amendment.
The funny thing is that most state governments allow for a line item veto.
Diesel is great, but there are a few issues.
1.) In cold weather, the diesel fuel can turn into jelly. That is why you need to plug them in at night. That is also one reason semi trucks are kept running at rest stops.
2.) Diesel prices don't seem to change quite as much as gasoline. When (if) gasoline goes down again, diesel probably won't follow as quickly.
3.) Not every gas station has diesel fuel. Get away from major highways and you may have difficulties.
4.) Man oh man can they produce smoke as they get older. You'll look like James Bond with a smoke screen.
5.) They are noiser than gasoline cars.
6.) I've herd people say that they don't last as long as a gasoline engine. I can't prove or disprove this, but they saf when you get over 120,000 the risk of a major failure increases.
Other than that, they are fine. I've driven several diesel trucks. I can say if you take care of them, they are great. If you need a powerful vehicle they can't be beat.
This may not be a simple matter of retribution against SCO. Look at it this way:
I run a business. I hire some people who were formerly employeed by SCO. I release a major new product which brings in millions. What is to stop SCO from taking me to court, saying that the employees I hired from them used SCO IP to improve my product?
SCO has already shown a willingness to sue based upon shaky grounds. I'd bet if they don't win the IBM lawsuit they will go after someone else next.
Just the threat of a lawsuit affects stock prices and can have a dramatic impact on a business.
I'm not saying this is the case here, but it would make me think if I was in charge of hiring people.
Perhaps a more informative estimate would be to take the difference in the number of lines in the 2.2 kernel vs the 2.4 kernel, since SCO claims 2.2 is fine but 2.4 has copied code.
3,377,902 (2.4) - 1,800,847 (2.2) = 1,577,055
In other words, SCO claims that 2/3 of the improvements in the 2.4 series kernel belong to them. That is a rather unrealistic statement since a lot of those enhancements didn't come from IBM.
But you can download a version of the 2.4 kernel source from SCO for free. There are no license agreements or anything to sign.
In other words, they are distributing the same thing they are saying has been stolen.