I think I'm finally starting to realize where I think RMS is reaching a bit on his idealism - the idea that if we use any 'non-free' software then it'll lead eventually to the complete loss of 'freedom'. He seems to define this as the ability to modify and redistribute source code at will, and to prevent anyone from restricting access to their code.
So does he think that in ten years (or twenty, or fifty) people will be so stuck in 'non-free' software that NO ONE will be distributing their code and allowing people to modify it and redistribute it?
That seems a little ridiculous to me.
There's always going to be some developers who do that. There's always going to be some developers who don't subscribe to the free software idea that won't do that. People always have had that choice, and they always will.
Many previous posts and articles have all said the same thing - RMS is a fanatic, but it's good to have him around to be the extremist rabid zealot, cuz hey, every cause needs an extremist rabit zealot.:) But this idea of a dark, evil future where no software is free, all because there's some closed source device drivers in the Linux kernel... yeah... not too sure about that one.
I picked up a Kyocera QCP6035 phone for CHEAP ($100 at Best Buy) a month ago. They're discontinued now, I think, but CompUSA still has em for $150, and they're practically free with a new account with all the rebates they throw at you. It's an 8MB PalmOS 3.5 PDA and SprintPCS phone combo, and it's BEAUTIFUL. Great battery life (for now), great reception over my older Samsung and Sanyo Sprint phones, and the best part: the built in net connection.
The phone comes with Sprint's dialup service built in, and doesn't cost any more than normal airtime. For a poor college kid like me the cost is silly low and I can do AIM, SSH, VNC, web/email, IRC, and never have to go into the office ever again:)
The IRsync capability as well as being able to use it as a modem is nice. Biggest downside is the serial cradle it comes with, but I think they have a USB one you can buy now.
I work for a small software company (interestingly enough, we're a customer of Divine's now by their acquisition of our web hosting provider). During the beginning of the slump last year we all were pushed into a 15% salary deferral and since then most of us have gotten paid back... except for a few employees that left/were fired, and my company decided not to honor their contract. Until they were threatened with a lawsuit...:)
A side note - one of the most difficult aspects of this is being the head (sole person) of the IT dept. and having a budget of ZERO. Literally. I can't fix anything, buy any necessary hardware upgrades... I managed to squeeze a UPS out of my CFO a few months ago, that's been it. Ergh.
Well, it's especially hard because my company's a Microsoft Certified Partner. When I came on board we were relying on Microsoft products for everything, and I don't think anyone realized that there were a few better ways of doing stuff - proxy, for example, as Squid and IPFilter on a ghetto Pentium box smoked MS Proxy 2.0 (on a box twice as fast).
So I'm starting to get away with using Linux and *BSD for things that they're better for, and as a result I'm slowly chipping away at the MS-dominant infrastructure we have piece by piece. YMMV, but it seems that the 'notion on what is good' doesn't always click with management.
First off, I have to rant about how much I love their precompiled MSI builds. Convincing my boss that installing a webserver to replace IIS would be easy was about 3 million times earlier with that... run it, click thru the wizard, once-over the config file and you're up. Now you, too, can escape the IIS headaches in less than five minutes!
With that said, has anyone tried the MSI for this latest beta? It didn't create the service for me automatically, and I wasn't sure if it was just my crackpipe or if it was an actual problem. Bug report's been filed already, just wanted to see if anyone else had any input...
That's a bit disappointing. Handspring's Visor Pro has 16MB. It kinda bumped up the standard (at least in my mind). I'm surprised Palm didn't spring for the extra 8. The thing's already $449, you'd think that they wouldn't mind kicking the price up a bit more for such an important feature.
... because here in the 'Nati we have one of the highest profile competitions between DSL and Cable (at least that I've heard about) in the country. Cincinnati Bell, our telco, offers a fairly decent DSL service ($40 a month for 768k down/408k up). It's now entering it's fourth year and has finally stabilized into a service I recommend to people. Unfortunately, Cincinnati Bell is also the Man that represses us all. Because they leverage their monopoly power in evil ways they've managed to extend the ability for service to most of the area (at the expense of countless souls, no doubt) and the way their network is set up, no CLEC's stand a chance of offering a competing service across their phone lines. A couple ISP's that have tried (NKY.net, Iglou.com) have all seen their effors squashed, or been confronted with significant obstacles. When Cincinnati Bell wants to win, they win.
Enough ranting about our evil telco, tho. The other side: Time Warner Cable's service regularly releases ads that just make DSL look silly. Their service ($40 for ~2MB up/down if you're lucky, and dns servers that die when someone sneezes) is tolerable IMHO and they compete very vigorously with CBell, who incidentally never seems to try anything to outdo their cable competition.
There is a point in all this - bad idea for a place to try this service. Maybe somewhere where last-mile is really an issue, or where there isn't such a monumental battle between high-speed services going on. Honestly, good luck in getting anyone to subscribe to this service in Cincinnati. We're all content with our cable/DSL and we're fairly resistent to change. Not that that's a bad thing:) Maybe they take it up to that crazy Cleveland burg up north.:)
The European Central Bank is working with technology partners on a hush-hush project to embed radio frequency identification tags into the very fibers of euro bank notes by 2005, EE Times has learned.
I've definitely met some teachers in my time that I would NOT want deciding the 'community standards' for appropriateness. Just because you have a teaching certificate doesn't give you automatic license to tell an entire school district what is and isn't acceptible. Our local board of education (elected by the majority of our community) decides that stuff. If I had kids, I wouldn't want them watching Showgirls or something in class just because a wacked out teacher thinks it's 'Art'.
And that's not an exaggeration or an overstatement. It DOES happen like that.
I won't even start on the ridiculousness of moral relativism here...
We use RFPMaster from the Sant Corporation to crank out our RFP's in minutes. Saved us SO much money because our salespeople would sit around writing these ridiculous things for days. There's a client/server version that just got updated, it's killer sweet and has some great features. Highly recommended if you have to drag yourself through these things on a regular basis.
If you're looking for a quick, easy way to efficiently get music to every system in your house, go get Streamsicle. It's a java-based combo web/mp3 server. Point it to your MP3 directory/share and fire up the server, and it works. Here's our setup:
A linux box running samba and the streamsicle server. The audio stream runs on TCP port 4711 and the web interface on 8080, but both are changeable to suit your needs. The server's pointed to/mnt/mp3s/ and the mp3 shares on all the machines in the house are smbmounted below that directory by computername (/mnt/mp3s/megatron,/mnt/mp3s/starscream, etc).
The clients connect to the web interface (customizable easily by stylesheets) and play the stream. 7 clients play easily on our 100base network with no hiccups. For parties, we put every system in the house in IE kiosk mode for easy song requesting. The interface is sweet - mp3 index is searchable and you can skip/delete tracks from the playlist from anywhere (which makes for interesting arguments at parties:)
One laptop has the audio line out going to the RCA in on our stereo system. Beautiful sound.
Internet radio? Easy, just hit 8080/4711 on the server you're running from or port forward thru your firewall.
RC2 of this project is out and very stable. 1.0 is looking really sweet and from the ML it looks like it'll be out pretty soon. I really recommend it, as it's a cheap (free) solution to getting your whole house playing a music collection everywhere you have a PC.
Total independant standard for benchmarking?
on
AthlonXP Released
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· Score: 1
Maybe what we need is an independant system (developed by an objective standards body) that rates processors based on their overall performance. Theirs would be the task of developing a sort of 'general benchmark' of processor quality (speed, power usage, etc) and then assigning a rating to each processor - An Athlon XP 1800+ would get, say, 3 Foobars, and the P4 2.2Ghz would get 5 Foobars. Different rating scales (for different classes of processor - RISC, 64-bit, etc) would help to differenciate (sp?). Sort of like an IEEE standards body, but for CPU's.
It'd at least be better and fairer for the consumer...
First off, I feel your frustration and pain. This isn't a childish 'ha ha I'm a better admin than you' post.
That said... the latest Windows service pack and this patch (the cumulative IIS 5.0 security update), as well as a single 486 linux-based firewall with ipchains kept Nimda entirely out of my network. I applied the cumulative patch back when Code Red popped up, and Nimda didn't touch me. Don't mess with 30+ patches - run one.
And maybe you train one of your clueless admins as your assistant - have him/her sit side-by-side with you as you wage your battle against stupid users. Train him/her while sitting in the fire with you. That's what got me trained, and how I'm training my assistants now.
If you're like me and (unfortunately) stuck in an Exchange/Outlook mail environment, and you're ready to drop-kick your salespeople for opening README.EXE because they 'thought it would be important', you can significantly save yourself some headaches. Here's what I did:
1) Got everyone using Outlook as an Exchange client to at least Outlook 2000 SR1. This keeps Outlook from being able to even receive 'Level 1' attachments (EXE, COM, BAT, VBS, etc). Get the update here.
2) I work for a software company, so our developers email around these types of files all the time. So I got the Outlook Email Security Update Administration Tools here. It allows you to customize what attachments get through your server and which don't, to which users, etc.
Keep those attachments out of the hands of your more careless users, and make Exchange (gasp) useful instead of painful.
Now maybe we won't have to listen to Taco whine every time/. links to something Quicktime.. was the "well guess I can't watch that" starting to grate on anyone else?:)
Re:Well there's innovation.. and then there's lame
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
I had to throw that in there, because as substandard as the animation on cartoons like Transformers and GIJoe was (not as bad as HE-MAN... I watched that a month or two ago and couldn't believe how terrible the animation was, even for the 80's)... it was still a dang fine show nonetheless - entertaining and fun. And at least the characters looked better than the pitiful excuse of a drawing the new Link is. That was my point.
Maybe referring to the 'animation' was the wrong term. DRAW Link better. His head looks like a football.
And be wary of knocking Transformers on a forum populated such as this one. It'd seem that there are a lot of rabid Transformers-loving nerds around.:)
Well there's innovation.. and then there's lame.
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
Is it me or does Link look like a walking hieroglyph in this? I look at that face and I just get annoyed.
The animation looks spectacular, but the characters just look lame. They could have made him look SO much better.
It looks like gameplay may improve a bit. But it's disappointing that Nintendo tried to go with shock value, making the characters look radically (and horribly, IMHO) different, instead of maybe concentrating on innovative gameplay.
Now this is obviously all speculative, as all I've seen is a 20 second clip or whatever, and I can't tell if gameplay's gonna improve, and who knows if they'll keep these changes.
All I know is I liked the look of the graphics in the initial movie from E3 (with Link and Ganon fighting) - THAT'S the Zelda games I remember. Not a Saturday morning battle for the Triforce. Or if you're going to use cartoons, go hire the animators from "The Batman and Superman Adventures" (or the greatest cartoon of all time, Transformers). Don't make Link look like a Nickelodeon cartoon.
Been there, done that. It's a personal opinion thing, of course... but Aglmesis just doesn't do it for me. It's pretty tasty, but once you've had Black Raspberry Chip or Coconut Chip from Graeters, why ever eat anything else?
Atmosphere I may agree with you on, though. Graeters doesn't feel as homey. But I can deal with that for some chocolate chips the size of Sweden.:)
He was persistent, indeed... and what's funny is how totally futile his efforts were, as OneNet would have probably fallen apart without Brent there at the time. Brent could have stolen his credit card number and bought a yacht, and OneNet wouldn't have fired him.
Brent's still useless, though. That'll never change.:) (I certainly hope he reads this).
You're nuts. Skyline is by far the best cuisine edible on this planet.
For non-Cincinnatians... Skyline and Gold Star are two competing chili franchises. Skyline's the hometown classic and Gold Star is the upstart. Their main ingredient is Cincinnati-style (less thick, more flavorful and spicy) chili, and they put it on everything. Skyline pioneered the cheese coney, a hot dog with Cincinnati-style chili and cheese, and it's probably the best food ever dreamed up by a person. For more information, check out their website. Gold Star.. ugh.
I do live in Clifton, though, and I must agree that Adriatico's is the best pizza in the city. LaRosa's is of course a close second. And how can ANYTHING compete with Graeter's?
On a side note, I used to work for the ISP young Bradley here used when he lived in Cincinnati, and I remember some of the more interesting discussions he was involved in on our local newsgroups. He was just about as... uh.. passionate.. then about free software. One of our systems admins actually wrote a script to place the prefix "GNU/" before random words in his newsgroup posts... Bradley wasn't thrilled, but it was one of the funnier things I've ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
This sound a little familiar to anyone else?
:)
Guess the editors lack some long term memory.
I think I'm finally starting to realize where I think RMS is reaching a bit on his idealism - the idea that if we use any 'non-free' software then it'll lead eventually to the complete loss of 'freedom'. He seems to define this as the ability to modify and redistribute source code at will, and to prevent anyone from restricting access to their code.
:) But this idea of a dark, evil future where no software is free, all because there's some closed source device drivers in the Linux kernel... yeah... not too sure about that one.
So does he think that in ten years (or twenty, or fifty) people will be so stuck in 'non-free' software that NO ONE will be distributing their code and allowing people to modify it and redistribute it?
That seems a little ridiculous to me.
There's always going to be some developers who do that. There's always going to be some developers who don't subscribe to the free software idea that won't do that. People always have had that choice, and they always will.
Many previous posts and articles have all said the same thing - RMS is a fanatic, but it's good to have him around to be the extremist rabid zealot, cuz hey, every cause needs an extremist rabit zealot.
I picked up a Kyocera QCP6035 phone for CHEAP ($100 at Best Buy) a month ago. They're discontinued now, I think, but CompUSA still has em for $150, and they're practically free with a new account with all the rebates they throw at you. It's an 8MB PalmOS 3.5 PDA and SprintPCS phone combo, and it's BEAUTIFUL. Great battery life (for now), great reception over my older Samsung and Sanyo Sprint phones, and the best part: the built in net connection.
:)
The phone comes with Sprint's dialup service built in, and doesn't cost any more than normal airtime. For a poor college kid like me the cost is silly low and I can do AIM, SSH, VNC, web/email, IRC, and never have to go into the office ever again
The IRsync capability as well as being able to use it as a modem is nice. Biggest downside is the serial cradle it comes with, but I think they have a USB one you can buy now.
I work for a small software company (interestingly enough, we're a customer of Divine's now by their acquisition of our web hosting provider). During the beginning of the slump last year we all were pushed into a 15% salary deferral and since then most of us have gotten paid back... except for a few employees that left/were fired, and my company decided not to honor their contract. Until they were threatened with a lawsuit... :)
A side note - one of the most difficult aspects of this is being the head (sole person) of the IT dept. and having a budget of ZERO. Literally. I can't fix anything, buy any necessary hardware upgrades... I managed to squeeze a UPS out of my CFO a few months ago, that's been it. Ergh.
But I guess it's one way to keep costs down...
Venkman - "I'm a little fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, bad?"
Egon - "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
Ray - "Total protonic reversal..."
Venkman - "Alright, important safety tip. Thanks, Egon."
Ah, one of the great comedies of the 80's...
Well, it's especially hard because my company's a Microsoft Certified Partner. When I came on board we were relying on Microsoft products for everything, and I don't think anyone realized that there were a few better ways of doing stuff - proxy, for example, as Squid and IPFilter on a ghetto Pentium box smoked MS Proxy 2.0 (on a box twice as fast).
So I'm starting to get away with using Linux and *BSD for things that they're better for, and as a result I'm slowly chipping away at the MS-dominant infrastructure we have piece by piece. YMMV, but it seems that the 'notion on what is good' doesn't always click with management.
First off, I have to rant about how much I love their precompiled MSI builds. Convincing my boss that installing a webserver to replace IIS would be easy was about 3 million times earlier with that... run it, click thru the wizard, once-over the config file and you're up. Now you, too, can escape the IIS headaches in less than five minutes!
With that said, has anyone tried the MSI for this latest beta? It didn't create the service for me automatically, and I wasn't sure if it was just my crackpipe or if it was an actual problem. Bug report's been filed already, just wanted to see if anyone else had any input...
in her prefs. Otherwise that might have been a LONG fifteen minutes. :)
:)
*sigh* Slashdot humor. It just never gets old.
Congratulations, you two
That's a bit disappointing. Handspring's Visor Pro has 16MB. It kinda bumped up the standard (at least in my mind). I'm surprised Palm didn't spring for the extra 8. The thing's already $449, you'd think that they wouldn't mind kicking the price up a bit more for such an important feature.
... because here in the 'Nati we have one of the highest profile competitions between DSL and Cable (at least that I've heard about) in the country. Cincinnati Bell, our telco, offers a fairly decent DSL service ($40 a month for 768k down/408k up). It's now entering it's fourth year and has finally stabilized into a service I recommend to people. Unfortunately, Cincinnati Bell is also the Man that represses us all. Because they leverage their monopoly power in evil ways they've managed to extend the ability for service to most of the area (at the expense of countless souls, no doubt) and the way their network is set up, no CLEC's stand a chance of offering a competing service across their phone lines. A couple ISP's that have tried (NKY.net, Iglou.com) have all seen their effors squashed, or been confronted with significant obstacles. When Cincinnati Bell wants to win, they win.
:) Maybe they take it up to that crazy Cleveland burg up north. :)
Enough ranting about our evil telco, tho. The other side: Time Warner Cable's service regularly releases ads that just make DSL look silly. Their service ($40 for ~2MB up/down if you're lucky, and dns servers that die when someone sneezes) is tolerable IMHO and they compete very vigorously with CBell, who incidentally never seems to try anything to outdo their cable competition.
There is a point in all this - bad idea for a place to try this service. Maybe somewhere where last-mile is really an issue, or where there isn't such a monumental battle between high-speed services going on. Honestly, good luck in getting anyone to subscribe to this service in Cincinnati. We're all content with our cable/DSL and we're fairly resistent to change. Not that that's a bad thing
From the article:
:)
The European Central Bank is working with technology partners on a hush-hush project to embed radio frequency identification tags into the very fibers of euro bank notes by 2005, EE Times has learned.
Hmm. Not very hush-hush anymore, is it
I've definitely met some teachers in my time that I would NOT want deciding the 'community standards' for appropriateness. Just because you have a teaching certificate doesn't give you automatic license to tell an entire school district what is and isn't acceptible. Our local board of education (elected by the majority of our community) decides that stuff. If I had kids, I wouldn't want them watching Showgirls or something in class just because a wacked out teacher thinks it's 'Art'.
And that's not an exaggeration or an overstatement. It DOES happen like that.
I won't even start on the ridiculousness of moral relativism here...
We use RFPMaster from the Sant Corporation to crank out our RFP's in minutes. Saved us SO much money because our salespeople would sit around writing these ridiculous things for days. There's a client/server version that just got updated, it's killer sweet and has some great features. Highly recommended if you have to drag yourself through these things on a regular basis.
RC2 of this project is out and very stable. 1.0 is looking really sweet and from the ML it looks like it'll be out pretty soon. I really recommend it, as it's a cheap (free) solution to getting your whole house playing a music collection everywhere you have a PC.
Maybe what we need is an independant system (developed by an objective standards body) that rates processors based on their overall performance. Theirs would be the task of developing a sort of 'general benchmark' of processor quality (speed, power usage, etc) and then assigning a rating to each processor - An Athlon XP 1800+ would get, say, 3 Foobars, and the P4 2.2Ghz would get 5 Foobars. Different rating scales (for different classes of processor - RISC, 64-bit, etc) would help to differenciate (sp?). Sort of like an IEEE standards body, but for CPU's.
It'd at least be better and fairer for the consumer...
First off, I feel your frustration and pain. This isn't a childish 'ha ha I'm a better admin than you' post.
That said... the latest Windows service pack and this patch (the cumulative IIS 5.0 security update), as well as a single 486 linux-based firewall with ipchains kept Nimda entirely out of my network. I applied the cumulative patch back when Code Red popped up, and Nimda didn't touch me. Don't mess with 30+ patches - run one.
And maybe you train one of your clueless admins as your assistant - have him/her sit side-by-side with you as you wage your battle against stupid users. Train him/her while sitting in the fire with you. That's what got me trained, and how I'm training my assistants now.
Good luck, man.
If you're like me and (unfortunately) stuck in an Exchange/Outlook mail environment, and you're ready to drop-kick your salespeople for opening README.EXE because they 'thought it would be important', you can significantly save yourself some headaches. Here's what I did:
1) Got everyone using Outlook as an Exchange client to at least Outlook 2000 SR1. This keeps Outlook from being able to even receive 'Level 1' attachments (EXE, COM, BAT, VBS, etc). Get the update here.
2) I work for a software company, so our developers email around these types of files all the time. So I got the Outlook Email Security Update Administration Tools here. It allows you to customize what attachments get through your server and which don't, to which users, etc.
Keep those attachments out of the hands of your more careless users, and make Exchange (gasp) useful instead of painful.
Just something I found useful.
Now maybe we won't have to listen to Taco whine every time /. links to something Quicktime.. was the "well guess I can't watch that" starting to grate on anyone else? :)
I had to throw that in there, because as substandard as the animation on cartoons like Transformers and GIJoe was (not as bad as HE-MAN... I watched that a month or two ago and couldn't believe how terrible the animation was, even for the 80's)... it was still a dang fine show nonetheless - entertaining and fun. And at least the characters looked better than the pitiful excuse of a drawing the new Link is. That was my point.
:)
Maybe referring to the 'animation' was the wrong term. DRAW Link better. His head looks like a football.
And be wary of knocking Transformers on a forum populated such as this one. It'd seem that there are a lot of rabid Transformers-loving nerds around.
Is it me or does Link look like a walking hieroglyph in this? I look at that face and I just get annoyed.
The animation looks spectacular, but the characters just look lame. They could have made him look SO much better.
It looks like gameplay may improve a bit. But it's disappointing that Nintendo tried to go with shock value, making the characters look radically (and horribly, IMHO) different, instead of maybe concentrating on innovative gameplay.
Now this is obviously all speculative, as all I've seen is a 20 second clip or whatever, and I can't tell if gameplay's gonna improve, and who knows if they'll keep these changes.
All I know is I liked the look of the graphics in the initial movie from E3 (with Link and Ganon fighting) - THAT'S the Zelda games I remember. Not a Saturday morning battle for the Triforce. Or if you're going to use cartoons, go hire the animators from "The Batman and Superman Adventures" (or the greatest cartoon of all time, Transformers). Don't make Link look like a Nickelodeon cartoon.
Been there, done that. It's a personal opinion thing, of course... but Aglmesis just doesn't do it for me. It's pretty tasty, but once you've had Black Raspberry Chip or Coconut Chip from Graeters, why ever eat anything else?
:)
Atmosphere I may agree with you on, though. Graeters doesn't feel as homey. But I can deal with that for some chocolate chips the size of Sweden.
He was persistent, indeed... and what's funny is how totally futile his efforts were, as OneNet would have probably fallen apart without Brent there at the time. Brent could have stolen his credit card number and bought a yacht, and OneNet wouldn't have fired him.
:) (I certainly hope he reads this).
Brent's still useless, though. That'll never change.
No it's not! It just moved to Jefferson Ave, right by UC's East Campus.
:)
It's still there. I would have noticed if it closed.
513.281.4344. Don't forget, $12 Bearcat pizzas the size of my car on Monday and Tuesday.
You're nuts. Skyline is by far the best cuisine edible on this planet.
For non-Cincinnatians... Skyline and Gold Star are two competing chili franchises. Skyline's the hometown classic and Gold Star is the upstart. Their main ingredient is Cincinnati-style (less thick, more flavorful and spicy) chili, and they put it on everything. Skyline pioneered the cheese coney, a hot dog with Cincinnati-style chili and cheese, and it's probably the best food ever dreamed up by a person. For more information, check out their website. Gold Star.. ugh.
I do live in Clifton, though, and I must agree that Adriatico's is the best pizza in the city. LaRosa's is of course a close second. And how can ANYTHING compete with Graeter's?
On a side note, I used to work for the ISP young Bradley here used when he lived in Cincinnati, and I remember some of the more interesting discussions he was involved in on our local newsgroups. He was just about as... uh.. passionate.. then about free software. One of our systems admins actually wrote a script to place the prefix "GNU/" before random words in his newsgroup posts... Bradley wasn't thrilled, but it was one of the funnier things I've ever seen.
Feeling good and hungry? It's Skyline time.
Who knows? Maybe having the 800-pound gorilla fight some battles for you isn't all bad..