Actually, I've been seeing several broadcast TV shows being shown in letterbox lately...couldn't tell you which ones because I don't watch TV that much, but I think one of them was like Law and Order or some program similar to that.
Re:You should go!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The best thing about this conference is it is run by small business "net geeks". The whole total amount of this is $99 and instead of being either on the West Coast or the east cost, they are smack dab in the middle of the country. What more can you ask for in a great conference?
Hawaii. Hot polynesian or west coast chicks wearing next to nothing. A place with a decent night life. A nice resort hotel, rather than the "Des Moines Motel 6". Other than that, not much.
On the plus side, I've heard that Des Moines has casinos.:)
Read my original comment. The sort of thin clients I'm referring to are a bit different... sort of a cross between a full desktop Linux box and an X terminal. Think Sun's strategy. Besides who says bighorkinmachine isn't a cluster with full redundancy and an entire mirror stored in a different building?
If you think about it, many applications are already setup this way. Try using Outlook if your Exchange Server goes down. It ain't happening. With Office, you might be able to still work, but if your file server is down, you probably can't get the files you need.
Who says these average consumers are even buying a new machine? By all reports, in the U.S., the desktop market is nearing saturation, and people aren't upgrading because there is no compelling reason to do so. My aunt is still running the 600 mhz Celeron machine she bought 2 years ago and doesn't plan on getting a new machine because it works just great for the things she does -- word processing, personal finance, web surfing, and playing Solitaire. I think you'll find most muggle PC consumers fall into this category.
This guy totally misses the point on TCO. The thing is if you go with a thin client model -- i.e., have a nice fat server with lots of processing power that can serve up the major appplications to Linux thin client PCs that are, in some part, acting basically as X terminals (although some applications can be seamlessly loaded and executed locally as well depending on demand and needs)
You don't need to spend $BIGNUM on client PCs. Only maybe about $200-$500 a seat in terms of the hardware. And large enterprises don't typically buy their support from Microsoft, they typically buy it from companies like IBM or EDS who then contact Microsoft only when there is a problem they themselves can't figure out. They buy this support whether they have a UNIX client, a Windows client, or a Linux client.... it doesn't matter, the cost of support is basically the same.
Whilst you could argue that MS would be abusing their power in this way, MS could argue that they are under no obligation to make their OS run on certain hardware. A very tricky situation.
And I am under no obligation to purchase hardware on which Microsoft operating systems will run. Consumers will have to vote with their dollars, once again. If M$ doesn't make these machines compelling enough, consumers will stick with what they have and M$ will be left with yet another white elephant.
EULA on the hardware disallowing any other operating systems
EULAs don't apply to hardware, only to software. EULAs require copyright protection. The only thing you could EULA would be the firmware and even then, the most you could do would be to disallow reverse engineering, and we all know how that turned out in court... IBM lost.
Voiding the warranty of the hardware.
Maybe, but unless the porting required hardware modifications, I doubt that such voiding of the warranty would stand up in court. (IANAL)
monthly fee for a hardware "lease" or "rental" or "maintenance", with a hardware-required dial-in. (think tivo)
While many corporations *do* lease equipment in this manner (General Motors is a big one -- it has such an arrangement with EDS), I don't think that the average consumer would buy/lease the equipment in this manner. Credit is plentiful and cheap (esp. now with the low interest rates) and most people would rather own a machine outright than lease it in this manner or pay some sort of 'maintenance' agreement.
Hardware lockouts ostensibly for DRM.
This is the main avenue I see as working. This is the so-called 'Trusted Computing' initiative, and even Phoenix Technologies and AMI are working on BIOSes that won't boot unsigned OSes. The question is, what constitutes and signed OS, who signs the OS, can the 'Trusted Computing' stuff be turned off, etc.?
Far lower distribution? We are totally footing the bill for the distribution with our net connections. Consider if you spend $50 a month on your network connection, you add $1.67 per day to the price. Of course you also get the rest of the day, but the point for me here is that the network connection is also part of the price that Apple isn't footing. Getting it down to $.50 will get many many more songs purchased.
So I take it you wouldn't have an Internet connection if it weren't for music? If you can't make that statement -- truthfully -- then no, that $50 a month doesn't count for anything.
And Apple *is* paying for bandwidth, and machines and people to admin those machines, and people to develop web content, maintain the databse, manually process transactions that fail, etc. None of that is free.
Small note: There is now a commercial version of PostgreSQL available for Windows, but for the moment it's Japanese only and its still beta. See the announcement on the PostgreSQL site for more information.
The other key is that it must be affordable. $1 song isn't bad, but I'd like to see something more on the order of $0.50-$0.75 a song. At $1/song, if you consider the average CD to contain around 15 songs, that still $15. Cheaper than the $20+ a CD the RIAA cartel charges, but still more expensive than it really should be, especially considering that the distribution costs are *far* lower than traditional CDs.
Have you tried the C64 port of Linux? It's AWESOME. Cool old hardware and FAST! I'm using it now. The only thing is that Mozilla in 40 column mode really sux0rz.
You *are* missing something. If setting up Postfix, Sendmail or is so easy, where is the accountability? Sure, my ISP can set up a perl script that goes through the logs and generates a summary, but what prevents *me* from setting up an e-mail server that *doesn't* count the number of mails I've sent?
(Hint: It's a rhetorical question. The answer is 'nothing.')
I disagree with the statement that the lack GUI interface building tools are a problem for these databases.
More and more we're seeing companies going with Web and intranet-based databases. Who needs a GUI front end that needs to be updated on each client when you the front-end can run in a Web browser? PHP, Java, and XML/XSLT are some of the key technologies here.
Report generation can be done easily in a Web browser as well. Tools like Microstrategy make enterprise reporting and data mining quite simple with Web technology. Heck, even generating reports with a simple PHP script can be done easily on a smaller scale.
I think you did not get the main point here. Of course in the Constitution of the US and in any constitution in any democratic country, there are explicit statements about equality of rights. That does not mean that people actually are able to exercise those rights, because their environment is such that they are concerned about a dozen other things (like trying to eat tonight) that prevent them to do so. That is, theory and practice diverge a lot here. For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.
I think *you* did not get the main point. *I* came from a poor, white trash family. In many ways, I had LESS opportunities available to me than most inner city African Americans or hispanics *because* I'm white. I went to school got a degree and got a good job, despite the fact that neither I nor my family *ever* received *any* goverment handouts. I'm a Unix sysadmin, and I'm paid well for it. So yes, you *can* pull out of poverty if you're willing to work hard for it. Most people on the government tit *aren't* willing to lift a finger. Why should they? They get free food and free money from the government.
1 - You pay taxes on everything you buy because you can buy it. Theses taxes are (should be?) used to construct/run/maintain services and infraestructure which can be used by everybody (even by those who can not buy things and thus pay those taxes)
*snip*
4 - You pay property tax because you are rich enough to buy a house: by paying it, you support everybody.
What you're essentially saying is that it is the job of government to redistribute wealth and make it 'fair' for everyone else.
What I'm saying is, no it isn't. I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in States we have a system that was setup on 'equal opportunity', not 'equal outcome'. Opportunity and outcome are not the same thing.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't help to support the poor. But what I am saying is that it's not the government's place to do that. That's up to private individuals and private organizations. This is why we have charities.
Government redistribution of wealth through taxes is socialism, pure and simple. It's the stuff of Marx and Lenin, not the stuff of Jefferson and Franklin.
First off, how the fsck do they intend to even enforce something like that? I can setup an e-mail server on a *nix box in 5 minutes. (Literally, I know I've done it). How do you account for how many e-mails a user sent?
Secondly, what about businesses? We probably send at least a few hundred (non-spam) e-mails a day out to the public Internet where I work, we'd get hit pretty hard.
And lastly, this is just an other tax, another form of revenue generation. We don't NEED more taxes. I'm sick to death of the government sticking out its greedy little hand. Go AWAY! I already pay tax on everything I buy, every drop of gas I put in my car, every cigarette I smoke, every drop of alcohol I consume, and every dollar I make. I pay property taxes, and I pay a form of tax when I go to the state parks to camp. I pay a tax to license the car I drive, and to just have the privelege of being able to drive.
No, I'm sick of it. Put your greedy little hand back in your pocket and go away!
First off, cable is asymetric. Bright House limits me to 400Kbps upstream (2Mbps down), and its gonna get worse because when I move next month, Comcast is giving me only 128Kbps upstream.
Secondly, X is decidely not a very secure protocol. You can run X over SSH, sure but you've still gotta have the X ports open on your firewall, which in my book, is a bit scary.
Yeah. A full desktop for remote access. Have you tried running VNC (even tight VNC) at work when you want to access your box at home that has a 2Mb/400Kb cable modem connction? If you haven't, you'll have to trust me when I say it's ssslllllllooooowwww and consumes much bandwidth.
This thing is text mode, so in theory you could run it over a terminal window, right? This would be MUCH faster. Midnight Commander runs *great* in PuTTY, for instance.
And I don't think its so ugly. It kinda reminds me of my Turbo Pascal days. Looks a lot like the Borland interface ca. ~TP 6.0 with the ObjectVision framework. Gosh, I miss those days!:)
Not those dome-covered cameras, like you see in department stores or grocery stores.
Even with a totally visible camera, you can't usually tell how wide the angle of view is on the lens. Also, some visible cameras are capable of moving, and do so on a programmed frequency. You'd definitely want to know what that camera can see.
If you have a place that has a lot of visible cameras the space available to hide in may be as little 2-3 sq. ft. Without being able see that space for sure, you might not take the chance, but if you can pick up the video image via X10 video sniffing, you will know exactly where that space is.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've been seeing several broadcast TV shows being shown in letterbox lately...couldn't tell you which ones because I don't watch TV that much, but I think one of them was like Law and Order or some program similar to that.
The best thing about this conference is it is run by small business "net geeks". The whole total amount of this is $99 and instead of being either on the West Coast or the east cost, they are smack dab in the middle of the country. What more can you ask for in a great conference?
:)
Hawaii. Hot polynesian or west coast chicks wearing next to nothing. A place with a decent night life. A nice resort hotel, rather than the "Des Moines Motel 6". Other than that, not much.
On the plus side, I've heard that Des Moines has casinos.
Read my original comment. The sort of thin clients I'm referring to are a bit different ... sort of a cross between a full desktop Linux box and an X terminal. Think Sun's strategy. Besides who says bighorkinmachine isn't a cluster with full redundancy and an entire mirror stored in a different building?
If you think about it, many applications are already setup this way. Try using Outlook if your Exchange Server goes down. It ain't happening. With Office, you might be able to still work, but if your file server is down, you probably can't get the files you need.
Who says these average consumers are even buying a new machine? By all reports, in the U.S., the desktop market is nearing saturation, and people aren't upgrading because there is no compelling reason to do so. My aunt is still running the 600 mhz Celeron machine she bought 2 years ago and doesn't plan on getting a new machine because it works just great for the things she does -- word processing, personal finance, web surfing, and playing Solitaire. I think you'll find most muggle PC consumers fall into this category.
This guy totally misses the point on TCO. The thing is if you go with a thin client model -- i.e., have a nice fat server with lots of processing power that can serve up the major appplications to Linux thin client PCs that are, in some part, acting basically as X terminals (although some applications can be seamlessly loaded and executed locally as well depending on demand and needs)
You don't need to spend $BIGNUM on client PCs. Only maybe about $200-$500 a seat in terms of the hardware. And large enterprises don't typically buy their support from Microsoft, they typically buy it from companies like IBM or EDS who then contact Microsoft only when there is a problem they themselves can't figure out. They buy this support whether they have a UNIX client, a Windows client, or a Linux client.... it doesn't matter, the cost of support is basically the same.
This guy really misses the boat, IMHO.
Whilst you could argue that MS would be abusing their power in this way, MS could argue that they are under no obligation to make their OS run on certain hardware. A very tricky situation.
And I am under no obligation to purchase hardware on which Microsoft operating systems will run. Consumers will have to vote with their dollars, once again. If M$ doesn't make these machines compelling enough, consumers will stick with what they have and M$ will be left with yet another white elephant.
EULA on the hardware disallowing any other operating systems
... IBM lost.
EULAs don't apply to hardware, only to software. EULAs require copyright protection. The only thing you could EULA would be the firmware and even then, the most you could do would be to disallow reverse engineering, and we all know how that turned out in court
Voiding the warranty of the hardware.
Maybe, but unless the porting required hardware modifications, I doubt that such voiding of the warranty would stand up in court. (IANAL)
monthly fee for a hardware "lease" or "rental" or "maintenance", with a hardware-required dial-in. (think tivo)
While many corporations *do* lease equipment in this manner (General Motors is a big one -- it has such an arrangement with EDS), I don't think that the average consumer would buy/lease the equipment in this manner. Credit is plentiful and cheap (esp. now with the low interest rates) and most people would rather own a machine outright than lease it in this manner or pay some sort of 'maintenance' agreement.
Hardware lockouts ostensibly for DRM.
This is the main avenue I see as working. This is the so-called 'Trusted Computing' initiative, and even Phoenix Technologies and AMI are working on BIOSes that won't boot unsigned OSes. The question is, what constitutes and signed OS, who signs the OS, can the 'Trusted Computing' stuff be turned off, etc.?
Far lower distribution? We are totally footing the bill for the distribution with our net connections. Consider if you spend $50 a month on your network connection, you add $1.67 per day to the price. Of course you also get the rest of the day, but the point for me here is that the network connection is also part of the price that Apple isn't footing. Getting it down to $.50 will get many many more songs purchased.
So I take it you wouldn't have an Internet connection if it weren't for music? If you can't make that statement -- truthfully -- then no, that $50 a month doesn't count for anything.
And Apple *is* paying for bandwidth, and machines and people to admin those machines, and people to develop web content, maintain the databse, manually process transactions that fail, etc. None of that is free.
Ummm...when even the LAST of the Indy movies came out, there wer no such thing as DVDs yet. They've been out on VHS for years.
Small note: There is now a commercial version of PostgreSQL available for Windows, but for the moment it's Japanese only and its still beta. See the announcement on the PostgreSQL site for more information.
The other key is that it must be affordable. $1 song isn't bad, but I'd like to see something more on the order of $0.50-$0.75 a song. At $1/song, if you consider the average CD to contain around 15 songs, that still $15. Cheaper than the $20+ a CD the RIAA cartel charges, but still more expensive than it really should be, especially considering that the distribution costs are *far* lower than traditional CDs.
Hey! Speak for yourself! I still am! :)
Microsoft announced that a patch to "Windows XP for Spacecraft" will be available on Wednesday.
Have you tried the C64 port of Linux? It's AWESOME. Cool old hardware and FAST! I'm using it now. The only thing is that Mozilla in 40 column mode really sux0rz.
You *are* missing something. If setting up Postfix, Sendmail or is so easy, where is the accountability? Sure, my ISP can set up a perl script that goes through the logs and generates a summary, but what prevents *me* from setting up an e-mail server that *doesn't* count the number of mails I've sent?
(Hint: It's a rhetorical question. The answer is 'nothing.')
The same people who would use a Laptop in a McDonald's?
:-P
Sorry, cheap shot.
No, like me he/she/it/whatever probably lives in a suburb of Detroit. There's a lot of us.
I just signed up using my location as Detroit...
:)
Hmmm...who was it that said that Detroit was the Paris of the midwest?
I disagree with the statement that the lack GUI interface building tools are a problem for these databases.
More and more we're seeing companies going with Web and intranet-based databases. Who needs a GUI front end that needs to be updated on each client when you the front-end can run in a Web browser? PHP, Java, and XML/XSLT are some of the key technologies here.
Report generation can be done easily in a Web browser as well. Tools like Microstrategy make enterprise reporting and data mining quite simple with Web technology. Heck, even generating reports with a simple PHP script can be done easily on a smaller scale.
I think you did not get the main point here. Of course in the Constitution of the US and in any constitution in any democratic country, there are explicit statements about equality of rights. That does not mean that people actually are able to exercise those rights, because their environment is such that they are concerned about a dozen other things (like trying to eat tonight) that prevent them to do so. That is, theory and practice diverge a lot here. For people to be able to exercise their rights, they need a minimum standard of living, standard that is guaranteed by social policies.
I think *you* did not get the main point. *I* came from a poor, white trash family. In many ways, I had LESS opportunities available to me than most inner city African Americans or hispanics *because* I'm white. I went to school got a degree and got a good job, despite the fact that neither I nor my family *ever* received *any* goverment handouts. I'm a Unix sysadmin, and I'm paid well for it. So yes, you *can* pull out of poverty if you're willing to work hard for it. Most people on the government tit *aren't* willing to lift a finger. Why should they? They get free food and free money from the government.
1 - You pay taxes on everything you buy because you can buy it. Theses taxes are (should be?) used to construct/run/maintain services and infraestructure which can be used by everybody (even by those who can not buy things and thus pay those taxes)
*snip*
4 - You pay property tax because you are rich enough to buy a house: by paying it, you support everybody.
What you're essentially saying is that it is the job of government to redistribute wealth and make it 'fair' for everyone else.
What I'm saying is, no it isn't. I don't know how it is in Europe, but here in States we have a system that was setup on 'equal opportunity', not 'equal outcome'. Opportunity and outcome are not the same thing.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't help to support the poor. But what I am saying is that it's not the government's place to do that. That's up to private individuals and private organizations. This is why we have charities.
Government redistribution of wealth through taxes is socialism, pure and simple. It's the stuff of Marx and Lenin, not the stuff of Jefferson and Franklin.
What you're saying here
First off, how the fsck do they intend to even enforce something like that? I can setup an e-mail server on a *nix box in 5 minutes. (Literally, I know I've done it). How do you account for how many e-mails a user sent?
Secondly, what about businesses? We probably send at least a few hundred (non-spam) e-mails a day out to the public Internet where I work, we'd get hit pretty hard.
And lastly, this is just an other tax, another form of revenue generation. We don't NEED more taxes. I'm sick to death of the government sticking out its greedy little hand. Go AWAY! I already pay tax on everything I buy, every drop of gas I put in my car, every cigarette I smoke, every drop of alcohol I consume, and every dollar I make. I pay property taxes, and I pay a form of tax when I go to the state parks to camp. I pay a tax to license the car I drive, and to just have the privelege of being able to drive.
No, I'm sick of it. Put your greedy little hand back in your pocket and go away!
First off, cable is asymetric. Bright House limits me to 400Kbps upstream (2Mbps down), and its gonna get worse because when I move next month, Comcast is giving me only 128Kbps upstream.
Secondly, X is decidely not a very secure protocol. You can run X over SSH, sure but you've still gotta have the X ports open on your firewall, which in my book, is a bit scary.
Yeah. A full desktop for remote access. Have you tried running VNC (even tight VNC) at work when you want to access your box at home that has a 2Mb/400Kb cable modem connction? If you haven't, you'll have to trust me when I say it's ssslllllllooooowwww and consumes much bandwidth.
:)
This thing is text mode, so in theory you could run it over a terminal window, right? This would be MUCH faster. Midnight Commander runs *great* in PuTTY, for instance.
And I don't think its so ugly. It kinda reminds me of my Turbo Pascal days. Looks a lot like the Borland interface ca. ~TP 6.0 with the ObjectVision framework. Gosh, I miss those days!
Not those dome-covered cameras, like you see in department stores or grocery stores.
Even with a totally visible camera, you can't usually tell how wide the angle of view is on the lens. Also, some visible cameras are capable of moving, and do so on a programmed frequency. You'd definitely want to know what that camera can see.
If you have a place that has a lot of visible cameras the space available to hide in may be as little 2-3 sq. ft. Without being able see that space for sure, you might not take the chance, but if you can pick up the video image via X10 video sniffing, you will know exactly where that space is.