Seeing as both computers had their hard drive crash, BSD can't do much better than the Linux one, unless it's drive was luckier and didn't break.;) But four hours to change it? That seems to me they didn't have a backup ready to go with the identical OS preloaded. It wouldn't need more than about a half hour to open a case and swap them out. So it sounds like they also had to do some sort of restore from backup, tape drive perhaps...
I did a couple VHS->VCD conversions of South Park episodes, and well, I didn't like it. The MPEGs looked fine on my monitor, but after burning them and dropping them into a DVD tv unit, it looked horribly pixelated. Most of the scenes are static in the cartoon, so I figured it'd be easier with that than live action. Do you get any better results?
It's interesting how these articles always come to boil things down to the amount of money spent/made.
"Microsoft makes more money before the morning coffee break every day of the year" than all the purveyors of Linux made in the entire year, Kusnetzky said. [Kusnetzky is an IDC analyst]
Look at that statement. One company charges anywhere from several hundred dollars for what, a 10 user license?, to many, many thousands for much larger user licenses. You want to add an email server, ok, chuck up another $50,000 (;)). Then the Linux market consists of $50-100 packages with varying amounts of support down to less than one hour's download of an ISO and $1.50-2.00 cheap CDs. All of which have no limit on the number of users or even the number of servers you put the software on (not to mention unlimited uptime)! So, yes, Microsoft can make more money during a coffee break than Linux, but only because they charge so damned much and you get so little.
Sales aren't the best way of judging dominance in this new market, and it will always be a stumbling block for us.
I was tasked with setting up a simple Linux web/mail/etc server for a local store. They were moving from one ISP who was hosting their web page to another where they wanted to host it with their new DSL. Simple enough. I send the required emails to NSI to move their name servers to the new DSL ISP.
Then, the DSL ISP decides they'll take their own sweet time updating their name servers with my client's domains. After like a week they start getting pissy with me, so I take things into my own hands. I set up Bind on the DSL box, and register whatever.com as a name server at NSI. Send in another form to change the primary name server for whatever.com to whatever.com. And it all worked. The only catch was that if the line goes down, things would revert to the secondary name server with the DSL ISP and fail because they are lazy asses.
Eventually that ISP got on the ball and made the additions to their name servers. By this time they did a whois check and found their DSL IP address as the primary name server. They called and got pissy with me, saying it couldn't be done. They say only "true" name servers can register with NSI as a name server. Not wanting to get them yanked from the ISP, I switched it back to the ISP's name server and all is good now.
So, you domain experts out there, tell me this. Why was this guy assuming only "true" name servers could register as a name server at NSI? Is NSI supposed to have some other authentication for adding a new name server? Just simply filling out the form to register a new one was all it took for me.
Plus I was thinking, if I and a friend set up a name server, couldn't we each be one of the name servers for each other's domains? (This DSL ISP uses static IP addresses.) Assuming it can be pulled off without the ISP noticing, we would have our own domains and not be subjected to the ISP's ridiculous business fees, web page hosting fees, etc. Mind you I'm not wanting to have a bandwidth hog like another Slashdot or anything big, but a simple personal web page but mostly my own vanity email@myname.com (or something).
Yes, but that doesn't make it right. My point was I won't let Verio off the hook just because they were denied.the patent. They are still in my "evil" category.
The problem with monetary penalties is they do not make a bit of difference to the truely evil companies. It already is a few thousand to get a patent, deterring your average homeless guy from patenting the designs to a cardboard box. But to Verio, Microsoft, etc, that's nothing. Raise it to $100,000 and they'll still go for it.
No, instead we must have another penalty. Like having the CEO lick an electric fence (not strong enough to kill, mind you), or be forced to live in a big vat of peanuts for two days (no other food/water). Then they'll start to learn their lessons.
To me, this more indicates how the Verio organization works. First, get a domain. Then file patent papers for anything that could possibly associated with it (most likely by the lawyer types). Is this good? Their priority is in getting exclusivity, no matter what.
Sure we all know Whois has been around for ages, thanks to Algore. And (probably) the techie types that set up the page know it already exists. And there is ZERO communication between any of them. Ah, what a wonderous day we live in. If someone invents a time machine, I'll go back to the late 1800's and make sure they disolve the patent office. They were on to something.;)
When said bug exposes your entire hard drive to the Internet for eleven days, it's a bit more than a "flaw." Of course this will not be the end of bugs, they will only get more and worse as time chugs along. And most unfortunate, there is not a single thing you can do when your servers are exposed like this but wait and wait for Microsoft to acknowledge and then issue a fix. Even then, you must be wary that this fix will corrupt some other aspect of the system.
This is a very important first step for Windows 2000. Microsoft couldn't handle this "flaw" very well, and the questions will now be there for every flaw and fix.
The sheer size of the code base means it's impossible for any one person to really understand what's going on,
You see, this is what you get when you choose to keep your source closed. You have only a very small group who COULD even know how to fix a bug. We thrive because Joe Tester out there who discovers a bug can just browse through the code and fix it simultaneously when he announces the bug on some mail list or whatever. So, there couldn't be anything better than Open Source when it comes to quality assurance.
And well, when marketting takes precidence over quality, you deserve what you get... The fact that MS wants to start making money off this product now rather than later is more important to them than having a fine product. You decide if you want to put your company's data into the hands of these folks.
For single player, SWAT 3 beats Rouge Spear if not for that reason alone. I played Rainbow 6 a little bit, but it just got tedious doing those maps. Plus they tell you exactly where the targets are, so you don't even have to explore the whole map. With SWAT, you never know where the enemies will be, so you must sweep each little room of the map.
As for anything HalfLife related, I don't see it ever happening. Valve has said in a number of interviews with magazines/web sites that they will not do a Linux port or let anyone else do one. It's sad, but ah well.
With anything in life, if you are going to just sit and bitch (X sucks), you are doing absolutely no good in getting it fixed. Come back with concrete examples, suggestions, etc. This going into a grocery store and saying, "I need groceries, get them," to the teenage stockboy and complaining because you ended up with too much chips and soda.
Do NOT just say "Open source sucks and it will never be as good as Microsoft's products," as this paper does. What is bad? Is it the tool icons in Gimp? Do you want a better explanation of certain menu bar items? Take apart a program and critique it, what's good, what's bad, etc. You like all the pretty icons in the latest Quicken, say so and point out where better flash like that would be appreciated in Open Source programs. Just do something more than bitch.
As another post on here said, people are used to their suggestions being ignored when they call some 1-800 number or mail a letter to a company. But that just isn't necessarily the way it is with open source software. About an hour ago I just replied to an email I received on a program I put up on Freshmeat and haven't touched for about 14 months. Do that with commercial companies, and they will just say "I'm sorry, we no longer support that, please pay for the newer version or go away." Access to developers in this community is infinitely better, yet this author says it's impossible.
Now, as developers can be more accessible, if you approach us with proper suggestions, you may just see your ideas in the next release. My beef is less with the user interface design of programs, but with the method this author took to complain about it, not a single example, not a single real suggestion. If the author's vision of a useful interface doesn't fly with you, what are the chances he will be able to dream up the perfect interface without specific help? If he could, it would be there the first time. We all want better programs, so please, help us!
1) Most importantly, no facts, just vague generalities.
I don't see a single tangible suggestion in this thing. What good does saying Open Source user interfaces suck, if you cannot say "Doing X in program Y is too complicated for the average user, it should be done like A and B." And don't forget to just say, "Fix it."
2) Don't do research. Open source is for geeks, that's all you need to know. Everyone knows what a geek is, so draw upon that.
Ignore any email addresses, news groups, mail lists, web sites, icq numbers, etc in the documentation of a program. There is no way to get in contact with the software authors, just give up right now. It is a closed society. If you are not a geek and willing to watch X-Files all night long, you will have no impact on anything. They are all sitting in their darkened basements admiring Natalie Portman while writing these programs.
3) Honor Microsoft, they are the only ones who can do anything right.
What do they do right? Who knows, but it is correct, and open source programs will never be able to touch them. Why don't these programmers just go to work for Microsoft? Then we'll have usable programs with every feature in the world, but actually work, philosophies be damned.
4) Users are the be-all when it comes to designing programs.
Any feature not included is a snub to users everywhere. After all, what other reason to users upgrade to the latest Windows/Office/etc program than the myriad of features listed on the boxes that they will never use. Eat up more and more hard drive space, but include them, all of them, and more, there isn't enough in that program. What you ask needs adding? I don't know, but add it, and don't stop there. Add something else too! Dammit I want a program that's usable, can't you get that through your head?!
5) Why is this grass in my yard still green?
There is no flexibility in that, and I have written paper upon paper imploring God/Mother Nature/whoever to change it. If grass is to be accepted by the vast majority of users, it must be willing to bend a little.
See, that's the problem with you Libertarians, you expect Big Brotha to take care of your petrification needs. Anyone who has actually read through Steve Forbes' tax plan will see his clear vision of Ms. Portman, Ms. Barrymore, and even Ms. Neve Campbell. A flat tax for everybody, deductions only for home mortgages and petrification research. Give the public sector the incentive and let it flourish in petrification. By having no other loop holes, we can encourage companies to beef up the petrification research to such a point that we will have our goal accomplished before Ms. Portman reaches the dreaded age of 22.
Letting the government handle petrification of young girls would be like throwing pennies at a petrified Leonardo DiCaprio. Sure we wouldn't have him in every other movie there is, but to do away with the problem completely, you must use dynamite! So, to really get the job done, please put your support behind Steve Forbes and the Republican party, which is the only party to put petrification into their party's platform.
After spending years grueling over the choices, and clicking the submit button, the thing alleges I'm not a user! Any subsequent attempts to go back to that vote.pl either say the same thing, or an internal server error (blasted perl!). Ah well, I'm not in the running so it's not that important.;)
Actually, I implemented something sorta like this in Tcl and some C with IRC eggdrop bots, though I don't think I have the sources anymore. Basically you could join a certain channel, upload a list file which you were offering to a central bot that managed the database. Then anyone could easily get an index, search, etc from the central server bot(s), and it would filter the requests to fetch files to the appropriate children bots (or people) that offered the items. Alas, it didn't catch on back then (94 or 95), and my interests moved elsewhere...
Ah well, one minor invention sticks around for years, three or four other better inventions fall by the wayside.;)
Though I'm not big with MP3s, I have been intrigued by the Napster. People have mentioned potention security issues and wishes of an IRC-like distributed network of servers. So, I ask, who's up for it? Things could be expanded to a more general purpose server, not just MP3s. And if/when they shut down or something, we will be able to carry on the torch forever and ever...
Oh yes, nothing can beat the speed and ease of managing multiple stations than a GUI. Click on the cute little picture of one server, update some bit of info, repeat for each server.
That sure is faster than maintaining a CVS server that all your servers feed from via cron, and just commit your latest change. But that requires typing, ewww, zero points for flexibility. 10 points for MS, yay!
The simple text files lying all around (most under/etc) a Linux system are confusing to the beginner, but they shine when you advance beyond that stage. Whether it's cvs, perl, python, etc you can do a multitude of actions that Windows just never will be able to. And likewise, these fly-by-night, quickie, here is all you need to know in one page because we know you can't sit down and read lengthy, boring reviews before making a decision and please click on our banner ads, sort of analyses will never know any better.
Infinite flexibility, source code, custom tailoring to the tiniest detail, reprogramming apps to do exactly what you want, these do not make a bit of difference. Have a pretty paper clip show you how to hit the G key, and they'll scream with glee.:)
MS Tech: Thank you for calling Microsoft, where do you want to go today?
IDG: We are doing a benchmark report and Windows 2000 didn't score high enough, and so we'd like tips to increase your scores before we go public with such negative results.
MS: Ah, it must be the ultra-reliable write-through flag. We here at MS do not condone other scrupulous OSes that do not properly handle this flag, causing nothing but corrupted data and crashing your entire organization, not to mention knocking our second moon out of alignment as well.
IDG: Ah, very good. Thank you for all your help.
MS: You do also realize we have GUI admin tools, don't you? We would hate to see a report that doesn't cover this terribly important aspect. Shortages of further MS products have been known to occur, ya know.
And give LinuxConf a try, it the only config tool for Linux.
IDG: Okee dokey. We don't want anything that drastic to occur. Consider it done.
MS: And give LinuxConf a try, it the only config tool for Linux.
IDG: Thanks for the tip. We should get back to "testing" (wink-wink) again. Goodbye.
I got a new catalytic converter for my truck today. Neighbors of mine, Mr. and Mrs. Loudbody, were quoted as saying, "That thing made the most god awful sound you could imagine. And he drove around at the oddest hours, too, sometimes waking us as early as 8pm, after we had the early bird special at Denny's. That puts ya to sleep real quick, ya know."
The late 199th decade vehicle is now known to be purring like a cuddly kitten. Once again able to reach speeds of 60mph in as little as three minutes. "There ain't nothin sweeter than cruising down the street at 30 when the speed limit is posted as 25," I was heard braggin at the local BigK.
The problem is the direction these people want all media to go in the present/future. Long gone are the days where you could go to the store, purchase a movie/album/whatever, and watch/listen to it all day, every day, forever and ever on any device imagineable. No, too much money is escaping that way. The future is controlling it with all your might (and they have plenty). Whether it's with DivX-style pay-per-views, or only "blessed" hardware/software can play that DVD, it's all about keeping the control in-house.
And quite honestly, it will be easily pulled off with these sort of huge pounces on anyone that threatens their dream of utter control (not the cow kind, yet). Play that Back Street Boys MP3 on any device, or watch that Life of Brian DVD by non-blessed means and boy, you are one naughty pirate. Companies wanting to become blessed, and not labeled hackers/pirates, will be more than happy to make their media players only play these sort of things, eventually (hoping) to do away with the likes of MP3.
Slashdot Mirror
Seeing as both computers had their hard drive crash, BSD can't do much better than the Linux one, unless it's drive was luckier and didn't break. ;) But four hours to change it? That seems to me they didn't have a backup ready to go with the identical OS preloaded. It wouldn't need more than about a half hour to open a case and swap them out. So it sounds like they also had to do some sort of restore from backup, tape drive perhaps...
I did a couple VHS->VCD conversions of South Park episodes, and well, I didn't like it. The MPEGs looked fine on my monitor, but after burning them and dropping them into a DVD tv unit, it looked horribly pixelated. Most of the scenes are static in the cartoon, so I figured it'd be easier with that than live action. Do you get any better results?
It's interesting how these articles always come to boil things down to the amount of money spent/made.
"Microsoft makes more money before the morning coffee break every day of the year" than all the purveyors of Linux made in the entire year, Kusnetzky said. [Kusnetzky is an IDC analyst]
Look at that statement. One company charges anywhere from several hundred dollars for what, a 10 user license?, to many, many thousands for much larger user licenses. You want to add an email server, ok, chuck up another $50,000 (;)). Then the Linux market consists of $50-100 packages with varying amounts of support down to less than one hour's download of an ISO and $1.50-2.00 cheap CDs. All of which have no limit on the number of users or even the number of servers you put the software on (not to mention unlimited uptime)! So, yes, Microsoft can make more money during a coffee break than Linux, but only because they charge so damned much and you get so little.
Sales aren't the best way of judging dominance in this new market, and it will always be a stumbling block for us.
I was tasked with setting up a simple Linux web/mail/etc server for a local store. They were moving from one ISP who was hosting their web page to another where they wanted to host it with their new DSL. Simple enough. I send the required emails to NSI to move their name servers to the new DSL ISP.
Then, the DSL ISP decides they'll take their own sweet time updating their name servers with my client's domains. After like a week they start getting pissy with me, so I take things into my own hands. I set up Bind on the DSL box, and register whatever.com as a name server at NSI. Send in another form to change the primary name server for whatever.com to whatever.com. And it all worked. The only catch was that if the line goes down, things would revert to the secondary name server with the DSL ISP and fail because they are lazy asses.
Eventually that ISP got on the ball and made the additions to their name servers. By this time they did a whois check and found their DSL IP address as the primary name server. They called and got pissy with me, saying it couldn't be done. They say only "true" name servers can register with NSI as a name server. Not wanting to get them yanked from the ISP, I switched it back to the ISP's name server and all is good now.
So, you domain experts out there, tell me this. Why was this guy assuming only "true" name servers could register as a name server at NSI? Is NSI supposed to have some other authentication for adding a new name server? Just simply filling out the form to register a new one was all it took for me.
Plus I was thinking, if I and a friend set up a name server, couldn't we each be one of the name servers for each other's domains? (This DSL ISP uses static IP addresses.) Assuming it can be pulled off without the ISP noticing, we would have our own domains and not be subjected to the ISP's ridiculous business fees, web page hosting fees, etc. Mind you I'm not wanting to have a bandwidth hog like another Slashdot or anything big, but a simple personal web page but mostly my own vanity email@myname.com (or something).
Something was up about 15 minutes ago with DNS. I wasn't getting anything from a myriad of nameservers. It appears to be fine now...
I'm there without problem, 22:29CST.
Yes, but that doesn't make it right. My point was I won't let Verio off the hook just because they were denied.the patent. They are still in my "evil" category.
The problem with monetary penalties is they do not make a bit of difference to the truely evil companies. It already is a few thousand to get a patent, deterring your average homeless guy from patenting the designs to a cardboard box. But to Verio, Microsoft, etc, that's nothing. Raise it to $100,000 and they'll still go for it.
No, instead we must have another penalty. Like having the CEO lick an electric fence (not strong enough to kill, mind you), or be forced to live in a big vat of peanuts for two days (no other food/water). Then they'll start to learn their lessons.
To me, this more indicates how the Verio organization works. First, get a domain. Then file patent papers for anything that could possibly associated with it (most likely by the lawyer types). Is this good? Their priority is in getting exclusivity, no matter what.
;)
Sure we all know Whois has been around for ages, thanks to Algore. And (probably) the techie types that set up the page know it already exists. And there is ZERO communication between any of them. Ah, what a wonderous day we live in. If someone invents a time machine, I'll go back to the late 1800's and make sure they disolve the patent office. They were on to something.
When said bug exposes your entire hard drive to the Internet for eleven days, it's a bit more than a "flaw." Of course this will not be the end of bugs, they will only get more and worse as time chugs along. And most unfortunate, there is not a single thing you can do when your servers are exposed like this but wait and wait for Microsoft to acknowledge and then issue a fix. Even then, you must be wary that this fix will corrupt some other aspect of the system.
This is a very important first step for Windows 2000. Microsoft couldn't handle this "flaw" very well, and the questions will now be there for every flaw and fix.
The sheer size of the code base means it's impossible for any one person to really understand what's going on,
You see, this is what you get when you choose to keep your source closed. You have only a very small group who COULD even know how to fix a bug. We thrive because Joe Tester out there who discovers a bug can just browse through the code and fix it simultaneously when he announces the bug on some mail list or whatever. So, there couldn't be anything better than Open Source when it comes to quality assurance.
And well, when marketting takes precidence over quality, you deserve what you get... The fact that MS wants to start making money off this product now rather than later is more important to them than having a fine product. You decide if you want to put your company's data into the hands of these folks.
Mandrake has had its MandrakeUpdate util for a couple versions now. So at least one distribution has such a util.
For single player, SWAT 3 beats Rouge Spear if not for that reason alone. I played Rainbow 6 a little bit, but it just got tedious doing those maps. Plus they tell you exactly where the targets are, so you don't even have to explore the whole map. With SWAT, you never know where the enemies will be, so you must sweep each little room of the map.
As for anything HalfLife related, I don't see it ever happening. Valve has said in a number of interviews with magazines/web sites that they will not do a Linux port or let anyone else do one. It's sad, but ah well.
For the last couple years the Computer Games (formerly Computer Games Strategy Plus) included CDs have had a few of the Zorks included for free.
You missed my point entirely.
With anything in life, if you are going to just sit and bitch (X sucks), you are doing absolutely no good in getting it fixed. Come back with concrete examples, suggestions, etc. This going into a grocery store and saying, "I need groceries, get them," to the teenage stockboy and complaining because you ended up with too much chips and soda.
Do NOT just say "Open source sucks and it will never be as good as Microsoft's products," as this paper does. What is bad? Is it the tool icons in Gimp? Do you want a better explanation of certain menu bar items? Take apart a program and critique it, what's good, what's bad, etc. You like all the pretty icons in the latest Quicken, say so and point out where better flash like that would be appreciated in Open Source programs. Just do something more than bitch.
As another post on here said, people are used to their suggestions being ignored when they call some 1-800 number or mail a letter to a company. But that just isn't necessarily the way it is with open source software. About an hour ago I just replied to an email I received on a program I put up on Freshmeat and haven't touched for about 14 months. Do that with commercial companies, and they will just say "I'm sorry, we no longer support that, please pay for the newer version or go away." Access to developers in this community is infinitely better, yet this author says it's impossible.
Now, as developers can be more accessible, if you approach us with proper suggestions, you may just see your ideas in the next release. My beef is less with the user interface design of programs, but with the method this author took to complain about it, not a single example, not a single real suggestion. If the author's vision of a useful interface doesn't fly with you, what are the chances he will be able to dream up the perfect interface without specific help? If he could, it would be there the first time. We all want better programs, so please, help us!
1) Most importantly, no facts, just vague generalities.
I don't see a single tangible suggestion in this thing. What good does saying Open Source user interfaces suck, if you cannot say "Doing X in program Y is too complicated for the average user, it should be done like A and B." And don't forget to just say, "Fix it."
2) Don't do research. Open source is for geeks, that's all you need to know. Everyone knows what a geek is, so draw upon that.
Ignore any email addresses, news groups, mail lists, web sites, icq numbers, etc in the documentation of a program. There is no way to get in contact with the software authors, just give up right now. It is a closed society. If you are not a geek and willing to watch X-Files all night long, you will have no impact on anything. They are all sitting in their darkened basements admiring Natalie Portman while writing these programs.
3) Honor Microsoft, they are the only ones who can do anything right.
What do they do right? Who knows, but it is correct, and open source programs will never be able to touch them. Why don't these programmers just go to work for Microsoft? Then we'll have usable programs with every feature in the world, but actually work, philosophies be damned.
4) Users are the be-all when it comes to designing programs.
Any feature not included is a snub to users everywhere. After all, what other reason to users upgrade to the latest Windows/Office/etc program than the myriad of features listed on the boxes that they will never use. Eat up more and more hard drive space, but include them, all of them, and more, there isn't enough in that program. What you ask needs adding? I don't know, but add it, and don't stop there. Add something else too! Dammit I want a program that's usable, can't you get that through your head?!
5) Why is this grass in my yard still green?
There is no flexibility in that, and I have written paper upon paper imploring God/Mother Nature/whoever to change it. If grass is to be accepted by the vast majority of users, it must be willing to bend a little.
See, that's the problem with you Libertarians, you expect Big Brotha to take care of your petrification needs. Anyone who has actually read through Steve Forbes' tax plan will see his clear vision of Ms. Portman, Ms. Barrymore, and even Ms. Neve Campbell. A flat tax for everybody, deductions only for home mortgages and petrification research. Give the public sector the incentive and let it flourish in petrification. By having no other loop holes, we can encourage companies to beef up the petrification research to such a point that we will have our goal accomplished before Ms. Portman reaches the dreaded age of 22.
Letting the government handle petrification of young girls would be like throwing pennies at a petrified Leonardo DiCaprio. Sure we wouldn't have him in every other movie there is, but to do away with the problem completely, you must use dynamite! So, to really get the job done, please put your support behind Steve Forbes and the Republican party, which is the only party to put petrification into their party's platform.
After spending years grueling over the choices, and clicking the submit button, the thing alleges I'm not a user! Any subsequent attempts to go back to that vote.pl either say the same thing, or an internal server error (blasted perl!). Ah well, I'm not in the running so it's not that important. ;)
Actually, I implemented something sorta like this in Tcl and some C with IRC eggdrop bots, though I don't think I have the sources anymore. Basically you could join a certain channel, upload a list file which you were offering to a central bot that managed the database. Then anyone could easily get an index, search, etc from the central server bot(s), and it would filter the requests to fetch files to the appropriate children bots (or people) that offered the items. Alas, it didn't catch on back then (94 or 95), and my interests moved elsewhere...
;)
Ah well, one minor invention sticks around for years, three or four other better inventions fall by the wayside.
Though I'm not big with MP3s, I have been intrigued by the Napster. People have mentioned potention security issues and wishes of an IRC-like distributed network of servers. So, I ask, who's up for it? Things could be expanded to a more general purpose server, not just MP3s. And if/when they shut down or something, we will be able to carry on the torch forever and ever...
Oh yes, nothing can beat the speed and ease of managing multiple stations than a GUI. Click on the cute little picture of one server, update some bit of info, repeat for each server.
/etc) a Linux system are confusing to the beginner, but they shine when you advance beyond that stage. Whether it's cvs, perl, python, etc you can do a multitude of actions that Windows just never will be able to. And likewise, these fly-by-night, quickie, here is all you need to know in one page because we know you can't sit down and read lengthy, boring reviews before making a decision and please click on our banner ads, sort of analyses will never know any better.
:)
That sure is faster than maintaining a CVS server that all your servers feed from via cron, and just commit your latest change. But that requires typing, ewww, zero points for flexibility. 10 points for MS, yay!
The simple text files lying all around (most under
Infinite flexibility, source code, custom tailoring to the tiniest detail, reprogramming apps to do exactly what you want, these do not make a bit of difference. Have a pretty paper clip show you how to hit the G key, and they'll scream with glee.
MS Tech: Thank you for calling Microsoft, where do you want to go today?
IDG: We are doing a benchmark report and Windows 2000 didn't score high enough, and so we'd like tips to increase your scores before we go public with such negative results.
MS: Ah, it must be the ultra-reliable write-through flag. We here at MS do not condone other scrupulous OSes that do not properly handle this flag, causing nothing but corrupted data and crashing your entire organization, not to mention knocking our second moon out of alignment as well.
IDG: Ah, very good. Thank you for all your help.
MS: You do also realize we have GUI admin tools, don't you? We would hate to see a report that doesn't cover this terribly important aspect. Shortages of further MS products have been known to occur, ya know.
And give LinuxConf a try, it the only config tool for Linux.
IDG: Okee dokey. We don't want anything that drastic to occur. Consider it done.
MS: And give LinuxConf a try, it the only config tool for Linux.
IDG: Thanks for the tip. We should get back to "testing" (wink-wink) again. Goodbye.
MS: And have a cheery day.
I got a new catalytic converter for my truck today. Neighbors of mine, Mr. and Mrs. Loudbody, were quoted as saying, "That thing made the most god awful sound you could imagine. And he drove around at the oddest hours, too, sometimes waking us as early as 8pm, after we had the early bird special at Denny's. That puts ya to sleep real quick, ya know."
The late 199th decade vehicle is now known to be purring like a cuddly kitten. Once again able to reach speeds of 60mph in as little as three minutes. "There ain't nothin sweeter than cruising down the street at 30 when the speed limit is posted as 25," I was heard braggin at the local BigK.
The problem is the direction these people want all media to go in the present/future. Long gone are the days where you could go to the store, purchase a movie/album/whatever, and watch/listen to it all day, every day, forever and ever on any device imagineable. No, too much money is escaping that way. The future is controlling it with all your might (and they have plenty). Whether it's with DivX-style pay-per-views, or only "blessed" hardware/software can play that DVD, it's all about keeping the control in-house.
And quite honestly, it will be easily pulled off with these sort of huge pounces on anyone that threatens their dream of utter control (not the cow kind, yet). Play that Back Street Boys MP3 on any device, or watch that Life of Brian DVD by non-blessed means and boy, you are one naughty pirate. Companies wanting to become blessed, and not labeled hackers/pirates, will be more than happy to make their media players only play these sort of things, eventually (hoping) to do away with the likes of MP3.