The linkt ot the old/. article about a school is an interesting example because I think schools are one of the best candidates for switching. I think MS realises that too because their academic pricing continues to be severely discounted (for that reason plus indoctrination into MS culture is easiest with students).
Here are some potential advantages:
1. Look at the time and money involved in ensuring you are compliant/legal. Schools are notoriously bad at making sure all their software installs are legal. The MS "software assurance" contracts might reduce the effort needed but you pay through the nose. School board trustees and the like care about dollars, so push that argument strongly.
2. Less vulnerability to viruses and other malware. Given that the users are mostly students, unless you lock down access very tightly the school environment is more prone than most to getting crap like spyware-infested P2P clients, chatroom smiley icons and comet cursors on them. Students can be quite persistent in working around roadblocks to get their toys.
3. No vendor lock-in--you are at the whim of Microsoft for your critical systems. Remember the misery school districts in Oregon went through? MS mya not go bankrupt and leave you in the lurch, but they might some day decide you have to pay 100% more to renew your contract just because--and no-one holds them to their promise to regularly update their software--look at how long it has been for Longhorn--the release cycle slowed to 1/2 speed.
4. No corporate domination of the learning environment. Everyone puts up a big sting when Coca-Cola pays for a new scoreboard in the gym with a big Coke logo on it and having educational programming piped into the classroom with commercials, so why is it OK for Microsoft to be in your face all over the school?
5. You can custom tailor software without reprucussions--make a custom Linux distro for the servers and workstations, implement a specially modified content management system for the school's course catalogue, etc.
6. If you teach programming and you are ambitious, you can use the actual software that makes your systems run as programming examples. The really good programming students could contribute to those projects
7. There is much better community support for Free software--at least overall. A few years ago I emailed one of the coders for PostgreSQL about a problem I was having and he replied within hours with a patch...with MS SQL server that would NEVER happen--you'd have to wait for a service pack or hotfix. True, Free software isn't always fixed that fast, but in the case of Microsoft, NOTHING is EVER fixed that fast, even if the problem is fixed by a small patch.
8. Standards. Apache is the standard--not IIS. The folks that bring you BIND, sendmail, postfix, etc do not play hanky-panky with important standards like DNS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP and so on. Microsoft has screwed with all of the above in the past.
There are many more arguments for--hopefully these provide inspiration.
Bundling with Windows can certiainly be an advantage, but it doesn't ensure success. I don't recall the proprietary MSN, which was advertised with a shortcut on every fresh Win95 desktop, being very successful at killing AOL and Compuserve. Ultimately, the product has to not completely suck like MSN did. The internet ended up making all those propprietary networks die or force them to re-invent themselves as web portals and ISPs.
Also, you cannot bundle something like Metro into an existing installed user base very easily, so adoption will take a year or more. Not everyone will jump to download another giant service pack for XP or will beat down the door for Longhorn on release day. If you've been deploying.net based software for any length of time you'll know that the many-megabyte.NET framework didn't magically appear on those old machines by itself.
I think it'll be like Windows Media formats, even if it is "free". Despite every copy of Windows supporting WMF files, MP3, MPEG, Quicktime and so on did not go away. Knocking PDF off its pedestal won't happen--at least not for many many years. Metro NEVER will be successful unless it is supported on Macs, UNIX/Linux, professional printing equipment, etc...AND it works as well as PDF. PDF and postscript are just too established.
The moral of the story is of course, that Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it.
Yep, pretty much all variants of MS Windows will continue to function if you delete everything it lets you delete. Of course it won't function PROPERLY, and it will not come back up when you reboot.
The most astonishing thing I've witnessed is what happens to a Linux box when its hard drive is trashed. At a former workplace some years ago we had a Linux box acting as our gateway (doing NAT, packet filtering, fetching and filtering mail to put on our server on the local network, etc). This was an older Pentium (100 MHz I think, pre-MMX) and it sat there doing its job basically untouched since before I started that job--over a year continuous uptime IIRC.
One weekend the cooling fan on the power supply failed and since the hard drive bracket was attached in close proximity to the power supply it baked the drive. Amazingly the machine kept functioning--we had net access and the firewall was working fine!
We only noticed the problem some hours into the day on Monday when someone realised there was no email from outside the office and that we should check the server. The IMAP server inside our network was fine, but when I tried logging into the gateway server it was behaving oddly (obviously since the drive couldn't be read). When I went to the server room I actually burned my finger when I touched the case near the power supply!
The drive was severely baked by the overheated power supply and wasn't even spinning. Despite that, the PC was still doing NAT, still filtering packets and by all indications was mostly functional, even without an accessible filesystem!
At times computers can be surprisingly robust, however in some cases like the parent post mentions, sometimes that can give idiots a lot of rope to hang themselves with.
plenty of reputable historians would argue that the Allies defeated the Nazis precisely because they _did_ have a better economy.
It's easy to say that in hindsight, but if you were the in the US in the 1940's I'd be willing to bet the economic benefits were not exactly on the radar when they made the decision to go to war. Actually, the high cost of the war in both lives and money was basically why they didn't participate in WWII sooner.
The whole reason that the US became so superior economically and had so much output was the same reason that Britons persevered so well during Nazi attacks--a firm commitment to their country and their beliefs. The reason so many jeeps and planes came out of the US was because of the sacrifice on the home front--wives went to work at a time when they were expected to stay at home, everything was rationed, whole factories dedicated all their output to the war instead of domestic demand, etc. None of that made sense form an economic standpoint, it was all driven by determination and resolve to fight for what was right.
As for RMS, I don't think he would be the right choice to run my comapny, but I'd definietly like to have someone that committed to his ideals to provide vision and direction.
The fact that you and many others have a problem with "This whole 'ethical' line of argumentation" vs. a "mainstram economic argument" is probably the biggest single reason we have debacles ranging from the Enron debacle to the scandal plaguing the Canadian government at present. Please explain how an economic argument "holds more water" than an ethical/ideological one.
It doesn't matter what sort of political or economic philospohy you subscribe to, when pure economics takes precedence over "ethics" then the said economic or political system becomes corrupt and vulnerable to collapse. Slavery did not end in America because someone had a convincing "mainstram economic argument" against it. Nazi Germany did not fall because it had an inferior economy. We triumphed over both because they were morally reprehensible (sorry, but I didn't spot the pre-requisite reverence to Nazis in this/. discussion so I had to add it).
I recently came across an interesting example of a compelling argument for "ethics" in business. The "Chik-fil-A" fast-food chain was founded and is headed by a very conservative, evangelical Christian. This man and much of the staff wear their religion on their sleeves, and unlike most visible personalities of the "religious right" they seem to actually practise whay they preach--their beliefs, faith, religous observances and family are of the highest priority--more so tham profits. The head of this company insists on not doing business on Sunday and on directing a portion of profits towards philanthropic activities as a sort of "tithe". While I do not subscribe to his brand of religious conservatism, I respect him highly for following his beliefs because they are the "right thing to do" even when there was no "mainstram economic" argument to do so. It is in some way like Google's well-known policy (at least in this forum) to "do no evil".
The result? Chik-fil-A has undergone rapid growth and has virtually the best employee retention and customer satisfaction in the industry. And we all know how Google turned out.
As for the maturity exhibited by the "unbunched panties of the BSD community"--what has that achieved for them? The many variants of BSD are certainly excellent from a technical perspective and are popular for web hosting and security, but there is a reason for the "BSD is dead" jokes--it is invisible to the general public and has no presence at all on the desktop. RMS and others might come across as wingnuts at times, but it is their dedication to ther beliefs and their inthusiasm for the free software movement that has made GNU/Linux as successful as it is.
You may view RMS' idealism as giving ammo to the opposition, but I prefer to think of it as a kevlar vest. The key is to stick to your principles while being informed and aware so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
I tried. Not once. With everything (hand, apt, alien, whatever). Sometimes, you can work it out. Sometimes, not.
It sounds like you tried to install some oddball, distro-specific RPMS to me. Next time, use apt-get to install the *debian package* for LSB-compatibility to your debian-based distro. After that, try installing *LSB Compliant* RPM packages and "sometimes" will turn into virtually "all the time" in terms of success rate. That is the whole point of the LSB people--it provides a consistent environment (filesystem and set of tools and libraries) on which to base software packages. If you require extra dependencies not in the specification, those must be included in the RPM or it is NOT an *LSB* RPM package. Dependency hell is virtually eliminated....that is the idea anyways.
And to everyone out there who that the LSB is really just Redhat has no idea what they are talking about. Yes, the packages must be RPM format....but NO, the LSB does NOT specify that RPM must be the native package manager, nor does it have to be the only one supported by the LSB-compliant OS. Debian can be made LSB-compliant by installing a NATIVE DEBIAN package that provides the LSB environment. Hell, even the LSB REVERENCE PLATFORM (LSB-si) isn't even red-hat based! (The LSB-SI was built from the ground up using the documentation and tools provided by the people at "Linux from Scratch"--the LSB-si OS is compiled and installed without the useof a single RPM)
The problem the LSB faces is that they MUST make some choices that will bruise egos--stuff like what directories hold what files, how init scrips are maintaines and what format is used to package apps are pretty fundamental and are the subject of religious wars--it doesn't mater what they picked someone would not be happy with the choice.
IMHO that is why installing software on Windows works relatively well--everything installs from a "setup.exe" and must conform to quite rigid guidelines to get the blessing from MS. When adding and removing programs doesn't go right it is pretty much ALWAYS because the unstall or uninstall did not conform to those rigid guidelines.
I guess LSB3 is going to take on the desktop now...It'll be interesting to see how they navigate the no-man's land between the GNOME and KDE front-lines in that battle.
CherryOS is copyright infringement AND stealing
on
CherryOS On Hold
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Splitting hairs I guess, but this is my interpretation...
Distributing CherryOS against the terms set forth by the copyright holder is copyright infringement, not theft, because the copyright holder is still in posession of the original code. Therefore CherryOS code is NOT "stolen".
What IS stolen are the rights granted by the copyright holder. When you pirate closed software you "steal comparatively little because the copyright holder grante very few rights (it is still wrong nonetheless). When you pirate free software you steal away a lot more valuable rights.
Can you be "pirating free software"? Of course it can, although you do it is different. Both involve violating a license agreement though, and IMHO I think the law should treat piracy of any software equally, free or not.
CherryOS could be a knock-off of PearPC and could still be packaged and sold as is and it wouldn't be piracy because this wouldn't violate the licence of free software. However when you buy CherryOS as they planned to sell it you do not get everything you should. There is no source code on the disc, or on the website for download, or in printed form or anything--only binaries. Furthermore, even if you obtained the source your rights to modify and redistribute it are also being denied. Thus, the license is violated, your rights have been taken away--STOLEN--and all copies of CherryOS are pirated software just like all those copies of Photoshop people get using their favourite P2P app.
Oh I know how corrupt they are, but I also know that the alternative (the Conservatives) are worse
You sound like an American--"since X is worse than Y I always vote for X". Canada has strong third parties you know. What about A, B and C? If you find right wing parties so distasteful why not vote for NDP? Seriously, the Green party is looking like a good alternative for many people as well (they placed third or better in many ridings, particularly in western Canada, and their policies are surprisingly well developed even though I do not agree with much of their platform).
As for as being a "permanent Liberal voter" because they're the least of evils you must be hopelessly naive. The Liberal gov't under Cretien and Martin has been far more corrupt, incompetent and disrespectful of Canada and its citizens than any in the past century. When the old Tories were buried in '93 I thought it was great--out with the old and arrogant and in with change and accountability. That was the year I got most involved in politics and was able to vote for the first time. By the next federal election I decided it be a cold day in hell before I vote Liberal again.
The more involved in politics you are, the more you see it--from the leader's office right to the riding level, the whole federal Liberal party relies a lot on graft and favouritism, and it has infected the operation of the government. The Liberal party has absolutely no principles or ideology--they operate on self-interest. The Liberal government has let the lunatics (bureaucrats) run the asylum without any due diligence or accountability.
Regardless of what your opinion is on gun control, ask yourself why is the cost of registering a single gun over $3000 when it is less than $100 to register a vehicle? How did HRDC lose hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money? Why does the gov't spend five and six figures for reports thinner than the Monday edition of the SUN--some of which cannot be found at all? What do we have to show for these rich gov't contracts with advertising firms who make untraceable cash donations to the Liberal party, and why do Cretien's relatives seem to pop up when we find scandal?
Why REALLY has Canada stayed out of Iraq? I'm telling you now that if you were informed about what happens in gov't you'd KNOW it wasn't because Liberal principles--it has a lot to do with not wanting to look like an international embarassment. If we had the military personnel and Martin could win an election by going to Iraq he would do it. Martin has proven to be no better than Cretien, and is so proud of his country that he runs his ships under a flag of convenience to avoid taxes--and to keep his company at "arms length" when he becomes PM he transfers ownership of CSL to...his sons. His arms mush be shorter than those of a T-Rex.
Some people may believe the values and principles of the Conservative party are some how "disrespectful" of Canada, but at least the people in that party (or the NDP or Greens for that matter) don't have a track record that would make an Enron executive blush. I'm sorry, but the Liberals need to be punished and if anything is disrespectful or lacking in courage it is voting Liberal and letting the same people have free reign over Canada after all the crap they've done to hurt the country.
There is a better than even chance that Canada will have another election before the year is out. For the health of the nation, please reconsider being a "permanent Liberal voter" and choose an alternative, whether it be Conservative, NDP, Green or an independent candidate. The Liberals are in such a state they need to be brought down as severely as the old Tory gov't was in 1993 so they can seriously re-examine and rebuild the party.
And by the way, what is wrong with letting Americans and others know that not everyone agrees with what the government is doing? Millions of Americans made it loud and clear they didn't agree with THEIR government about invading Iraq. Not o
He's a neocon, or at least a neocon sympathizer, which makes anything he says highly suspect.
I suppose that means you can take everything Michael Moore says at face value? If a socialist says the sky is pink at high noon on a clear day it must be so? Unless the source clearly has something to gain from publishing certain information you might want to put your prejudice aside and look at things deeper.
FYI, without mentioning the details themselves, "real journalists" have confirmed that this report is completely accurate--journalists employed by a company owned by major Liberal party supporters no less. Slanted site sponsors notwithstanding the report looked to me to be surprisingly balanced. There is some editorialising but a remarkable absence of ideological bias. The article could've been written word-for-word by an NDP supporter (NDP is Canada's socialist party) just as much as could've been written by a Conservative.
IMHO "AdScam" is not an ideological debate with small-gov't "neocons" whining about big gov't make-work projects (that is only one small facet). It is a debate about openness and ethics first and foremost by far. Ask NDP supporters and they will be just as critical as a Conservative about the honesty and openness of the Liberal government--or lack thereof. Whatever your political leanings, if you are Canadian you would do well to follow this story, regardless of whether the source represents your political values. The average citizen would be astonished at how corrupt the Canadian gov't is and how long it has been that way. Perhaps that would motivate voters to get off their asses and vote next election.
I have been on both ends of the tech/user relationship--these days as the user, and I have to say that by and large the amount of respect one gets depends on the people themselves, not on what role they play in an organisation.
One thing to remember--IT departments are essential to support the operation of a business, but they almost never directly contribute to the core function of a business. Basically, they ARE a "necessary evil", to put it plainly, in some sense like the janitors who keep the office clean and the lawyers to draw up the contracts.
Sysadmins, janitors, lawyers, etc do not make wigits for the MegaWigit corporation, or deliver parcels for UPS or perform surgery in the hospital for example. Yes, an organisation would fall apart without people to do their work, but since they do not perform functions directly related to the business there is a little extra effort required to earn and maintain respect and recognition. It isn't just because you are "a geek".
There is a good reason why IT people (and other support services staff) in some cases lose respect--it's because they either aren't doing the job right or they lack people skills. When I try to get a defective memory module replaced in my notebook through proper corporate channels and it has to pass through three different cities over the course of almost two weeks before I get it then I lose a little respect for the IT department--especially when they send the wrong type of memory. If I respectfully voice my concerns and they respond in kind and learn from the experience they regain my respect.
However, when IT continually sends parts and machines that do not match our requests, and grumble that we are circumventing their policies and procedures by just buying parts from the local shop (out of frustration) then you lose even more respect. Here's another tip: if a user sends his machine in to get repairied and you are going to re-image it...TELL THE PERSON so they can at least make an effort to back up! Not all users understand how things work in IT and a little common courtesy is in order.
As I said I've been on both sides, and I know users seem to do some pretty silly things to their PCs, but you have to hold your frustration in check, just as the user should with IT support.
Try to see things in the user's eyes--their experiences with IT is typically pretty abysmal since PCs--especially windows ones--are far from reliable. Most IT projects are also late and go through growing pains during implementation.Also, the majority of the time people talk to IT is when something is wrong. If you work at honing people skills and can see the situation from the other person's eyes you'll command all the respect you want, regardless of what you do for a living.
You completely missed my point altogether. It isn't the fact that the property is virtual that boggles my mind...I happen to disagree with the Chinese court ruling that implies there are no rights to virtual property. Generally, the vast majority of cash value to my name exists as a number in a bank's mainframe, and all the software on our machines es essentially virtual property.
It boggles my mind because of the nature of this virtual property--it is a prop in a game for cryin' out loud! The real-world analogue to this situation would be somebody paying $1000 for a litle plastic sword or a card with a picture on it or something...and somebody actually killing over the scam. Courts recognising virtual property is one thing--it's entirely another thing when people kill over games or bog down the court system suing over the theft of a virtual toy sword or the abduction of the beloved virtual pet of someone's virtual family on The Sims.
So are you some kind of hotshot that can get any computer up and going in a vew minutes to an hour? Well, any monkey can format and re-install or restore-from-ghost in very short order, but in my experience it is those technicians that people call "useless" when they get their "fixed" computers back without properly configured drivers and all their email and data since their last weekly backup wiped out (if the said user is swift enough to even do a weekly backup).
In the corporate world competent techies have made it easy for themselves. They probably deal with a fleet of identical Dells, each issues with a standard ghost image, scripts up the wazoo, something like Altris or other big brother software do roll out updates/config changes, etc etc etc.
OTOH, 4.5 hours to clean up a machine is actually a realistic high-range estimate when you are talking about some of the personal computers or PCs at mom-and-pop operations out there like "nerds on site" and the like must see. I imagine they see everything from PIIs to the latest screaming PIV from any number of builders out there, and some of them are probably slapped together with leftover components too. These users don't have an image to restore to--unless you count the "rescue CD" if they haven't managed to lose it...they might not have any OS install CD at all! And backups? HAH! I've found you're lucky to even have weekly backups. And no matter how trivial their files look, all these users want to save as much as possible. These users are also rather undisciplined in their own maintenance. The worms and viruses are one thing--prepare to spend some time getting rid of adware attached to weather bugs, comet cursors, chat smileys and "free" P2P programs.
In any case, if you average it out you might spend 2 hours per machine. I'd say that for how much damage Blaster-variants caused this guy got off lightly--even including the hours he will spend in jail. I suppose, though, that suing someone who is broke for a half-million is pretty pointless. I DO like the idea of making the guy shovel elephant poo for a month as a substitute.
I do try to be optimistic though--one good thing is that this whole Blaster debacle brought to light the security crisis in Microsoft products. To this day, an unpatched win2k or pre-sp2 winxp machine will become infected within minutes when hooked up directly to a typical high-speed internet connection. It seems unfortunate that some jackass had to pull a stunt like Blaster before anything serious was done about security at MS.
It's the 21st century and it isn't Chairman Mao's China anymore--$1000 might be a fortune to most Chinese but there plenty in China for which $1000 is achievable. The fact that someone would pay that much to buy an imaginary sword he can use to saly virtual beings in a video game makes him either a filthy righ celebrity with more money than he knows what to do with, or someone with a serious video game addiction.
In any case, if someone sold something I lent to them for a large sum of money I think it would be taken to the courts. If someone paid a year's salary for the use of some game account of mine I might seek to have them committed, but that's beside the point, and really so is the money involved. The fact that several people became involved in a dispute involving that much money, conflict and violence over something with no real-world value at all in a GAME is quite disturbing.
What is happening to people? Is the radiation from their PCs frying their brains? First off, some complete loser with far more money than brains willingly pays a cool grand for....an IMAGINARY sword--some bits in some corporation's server representing some wigit in a VIDEO GAME.
To make matters worse, some complete idiot gets so upset about being wronged he KILLS over it. I don't care if it's about the money, or "honour" or whatever, or whether the property in question was imaginary or real--if you seriously get that upset and irrational over such things you need your head examined.
I think the killer, the victim and the chump who bought the virtual property in question were all out of their minds--and I'd say about the only think remotely positive that came out of this tragedy is that there is one less delusional freak on the streets and maybe others that have slipped into this addiction will look at themselves and realise it is a game...for fun...and that there is a life out there beyond the computer screen.
Virtually all lcd manufactures accept screens with a "few" bad pixels
Yeah, but you see there is a little problem with Sony's excuse. It might be somewhat common for a notebook or desktop LCD to have 1 to 10 defective pixels (I've never seen more than a couple though), but keep in mind we are talking about 12" to 19" screens with 800,000 to well over a million quite small pixels. A Sony PSP has less than 135,000 pixels--and even accounting for the screen being smaller, the dot pitch is still larger for the PSP than for a notebook or desktop display.
Since the pixels (and thus the transistors) are larger and there are fewer of them, I'd expect the Cadillac of portable game devices to be equipped with a flawless display, not to have a similar defect rate to displays that are much more complex.
Remeber that early PSP units in Japan had this and more problems (too many defects with controller buttons and motors). It seems to be indicative of overall quality problems Sony is having with most of its consumer electronics in the past few years--something consumers won't tolerate if their products remain high priced. Maybe the recent overhaul in executive/management at Sony will remedy the problem, but it'll take some time (hopefully for them they'll get the PS3 right--it seems with each successive game platform they release the initial quality gets worse).
No one person can say whether Jon Stewart is any more or less qualified to be US president than GW Bush. The US head of state is democratically elected, so the majority of those who bother to vote make that decision.
I think that's pretty fair--count yourselves fortunate that almost any American can be US president--it'd sure be sad if you HAD to be a long-serving politician. Here in Canada the head of state's only qualification is to be born to the right parents...King Charles and Queen Camilla? the thought makes me shudder. At least the Queen Liz (the head of state for all the commonwealth nations) is a good lady and is basically a figurehead. Our Prime Minister OTOH...he is so powerful he can wreck our country quite easily--in fact the POTUS has to work much harder to get his way in his gov't than our PM.
Wow...it must be hard to go through life without a sense of humour. Perhaps you would develop one if you managed to find someone who was willing to perform a certain expletive on you rather than using said expletive every third word.
in any case, I said feature parity, not performance parity. You're right, the table-locking vacuum was a pain in the ass--about as elegant as re-indexing dbase tables. But not ready for prime-time? I'd have to take exception. I first started using PGSQL in the 6.0.x days and unless you were doing a lot of updates daily vacuum was not needed. I don't think I'd have trusted it to bank records back then but it ran fine.
IIRC that system ran on a P133 with 64MB of RAM and about 2 million records total over about a dozen tables. Vacuuming issue was resolved with very simple CRON job with only a few minutes of nightly disruption (less than an hour anyways). Again, not great for something like banking but when none of your users are online at 1AM local time it isn't an issue at all for them. It replaced a bloated Access application very nicely.
This version has support for Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views and many other features
<asbestos suit> Those PostgreSQL must be quaking in their boots not that MySQL has reached feature parity with PostgreSQL 6.0. Now that they're only six or seven years behind PGSQL developers will have to keep an eye on them </asbestos suit>
Anyways I think competition is a good thing, and it's good to see the market leader in the open source database realm become somewhat more industrial strength. I've been puzzled by how more robust, featureful alternatives like PostgreSQL and Firebird are overlooked in favour of MySQL, so at least if it continues to happen MySQL is starting to fit the bill better.
I know it sounds like a slight against MySQL, which really is the best choice in many situations since it is fast, has a smal footprint and is easy to set up, use and maintain. However, MySQL's suitability in web applications has made it so popular that it seems to have pushed alternatives to the sidelines even when they are the better choice. For example, I think I'd much rather set up an accounting system with a PGSQL backend over MySQL.
In any case, I encourage people to look at ALL the alternatives. PGSQL 8.0 is out and is very impressive. Also, devlopment of Firebird 2.0 is underway so expect rapid improvements as this major release gets closer to completion.
Coming off a project with a MS SQL Server 2000 backend I'd have to say the more alternatives the merrier. MSSQL2K is pretty stale and after workig with PGSQL for so long it makes MS SQL look completely brain dead in almost every way--particularly in the areas of concurrency and locking. It'll be interesting to see how Yukon stacks up, but at least MySQL and the others will provide some serious competition.
...not just because it is a new way of doing things...also because it is far more robust. If that single computer were to fail the result could be catastrophic (which is why there is one or more redundant one in mission critical applications). If one of a hundred picotux units were to fail you'd likely barely even notice.
I use VMWare extensively--it is great for developers, sales people, etc. to keep images of virtual machines that can be moved around to various physical boxes when required. However, it can't replace all that aging hardware.
Say, I got that spiffy new Xeon server and VMWare. Cool---now I can turf all those old "classic" pentiums and 486s and get on with....oh hold on I better make sure to take those dongles off the LPT1 ports so I can run the software. DAMN.. I forgot about the 16-bit ISA cards that talk to the industrial controllers we put in during the feed pump upgrade in 1989.
OK...so now I have the 6 ISA cards and 12 dongles so I can still run the old programs on my new Xeon server. Hmmm....there doesn't seem to be enough parallel ports for all these dongles. In fact it seems there are no LPT ports at all anymore--damn--purchasing forgot to order the "legacy options". Well lets open this thing up and see if we can put the cards in. Hmmm...these slots seem a bit small...
Anyways, you get the idea. Now it is time to phone the vendor, who politely tells you that you need to spend 26,000 dollars to get an "ethernet gateway" device to do the job of the old ISA cards and 12 licenses of the latest software, since the old DOS stuff is not supported anymore and doesn't do ethernet.
Sounds far fetched? Not really. It is pretty commonplace that some users expect 15 years of service from their systems. I've heard of support calls coming in for stuff my employer sold them over 20 years ago! Stuff that can only be programmed with DOS software! I think it's lost on Microsoft what some customers really expect--just as it is lost on customers how much it costs to support legacy systems (both time and money). For example, I've heard that to acquire an airworthy DC10 jet costs more now that the original purchase cost when it was brand new (even adjusting for inflation)! Why? Because parts and service to make one safe to fly are getting scarce and very expensive.
Anyways, I think it is quite short sighted of MS to drop all support of VB6, long-in-the-tooth as it may be. Even if you have to charge an arm and a leg to offer support, at least make it available. At least in the case of open source there will be someone who can help you so long as there are users out there, even if you always have to move on at some point.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. This is an embedded systems solution, not a desktop replacement. If you play in that world than you knwo 100 euros is quite inexpensive.
The PC is just too big, too fragile, too power-hungry and too unreliable for a lot of tasks where these tiny machines could be used--even if the computational power-to-price ratio is so much larger for the PC. People in the automation world probably remember a few years ago how the PC-based "soft PLC" would reduce costs and replace all those proprietary, expensive traditional PLCs. Never happened and never will because PCs are too general purpose and inefficient. To this day all I've ever used software-based PLCs for is simulation.
For those who are unaware, PLCs, or Programmable Logic Controllers, are esentially purpose-built embedded computer systems used to monitor and control industrial equipment. The bulk of them today are about as powerful as a 286 PC or even less and they cost as much as or more than a high-end PC. Despite that, the hardware and firmware/software in a PLC is designed from the ground up for deterministic, hard-real-time operation and I/O intensive applications. They also do not have processor fans, hard drives and other unreliable mechanical parts.
That is why these tiny Linux machines are so interesting--even if they cannot do as much as a PC or are more expensive. They could be the beginning of a standard, truly open platform for embedded systems. If the processor unit can fit in an RJ45 jack, then in the future we could do away with racks of PLCs and make field equipment control itself. The stuff I can imagine is mind boggling to say the least.
Besides humidity distorting the fit of the wood parts I see other things that need attention as well:
1. What about RF interference? I haven't disassambled plastic-bodied computers for awhile (last ones were an elderly Win95 laptop and before that my old Atari ST), but from what I remember they always included metal RF shielding (Anyone out there remember what an Atari 800 looked like inside? It was built so heavy that you could probably run over it with a car and the RF shield wouldn't dent!). Did this guy retain/replace the RF shielding when he constructed the wood laptop case? I imagine that the reason wood cases are pricey has something to do with that.
2. How about heat and flammability? Better make sure you clean out any sawdust real well. I'd carefully choose the wood for your case too--I know when it gets warm outside a couple of the planks on my deck ooze sap. I'd hate for my wooden laptop to ooze sap all over my warm CPU--couldn't be healthy for the electronics.
I think that making a desk with an integrated PC would be easy enough--the PC itself can be a plain metal box bolted into the desk and there is room to manoeuvre...but a wooden laptop? Can't see that it would be practical.
This study is not meant to "help" anyone, because the MMORPGers don't have a problem.
Well, as is the case with any group of enthusiasts, the vast majority really DON'T have a problem. Even if you spend 30 or 40 hours a week on the computer it might not be a problem, so long as you manage to get enough sleep, do your schoolwork or job properly and take care of yourself. Spending every second of your leisure time on one task would make you rather boring to be around, but it wouldn't be a problem.
However, there ARE a handful of people who DO have a problem with online gaming. These are the people who prioritise their gaming over school, work, family or "real world" friends. If you are averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night and have trouble putting 40 hours in at the office every week, lost touch with people and so on--TURN OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER.
This isn't just the case with online games--it is just the same as people who compulsively gamble, or play D&D (Jack Chick's ridiculous tracts on the subject notwithstanding, I had a dorm roomate who failed out of school pretty much entirely because of his D&D habit) etc. Heck, even exercise can become a compulsion/addiction (I've noticed a couple of people who ALWAYS seemed to be at the gym, no matter what day or time I managed to make it there--apparently they would spend ALL their free time there and weren't even competitive athletes).
On another note, This statement from you has to make me wonder:
This is just some supposed "normie" pointing out what they perceive to be abnormal behavior.
A "normie"? Gotta wonder if you might have a bit of a social adjustment problem yourself. There is nothing wrong with being different but, if you are derisively referring to most people people as "normies" and start viewing large segments of society with contempt you might want to seek professional help. Without furhter observation there is no way of knowing, but you might be one step away from sitting in a tower picking off terrified "normies" in the street with a high-power rifle.
(Don't take the above too seriously--it's just that I imagine some of the people I see going into those gaming stores and sci-fi conventions saying something like "the normies just don't have a clue" and have to stifle a laugh)
You even got the shinier side on the outside like any true believer should.
Given that highly-visible, powerful people with ties to the government are likely to be frequent flyers it isn't all that unusual that a number of them would see their demise on an airplane. I'm sure you could compile a list of Republican/right-wing people of note who died in plane crashes as well. I guess it's just hard to imagine Bill Clinton orchestrating anything like that, given his repurtation as uhhh...a lover and not a fighter;-)
As for the "presidential cousins"--you listed President Taft, and his senatorial son and granson as "cousins". The Bush family is far from royalty, and even royalty isn't inbred enough that a man, his son and his grandson could all be FIRST cousins--it is quite obvious that you consider cousins to be any people who share a traceable ancestral link. Well, that makes Orville and Wilbur Wright my "cousins" (I am more closely related to them than GWBush is to Kerry actually).
I guess since my "cousin's" invention was used as an instrument of murder by Bush and his Republican cronies that makes me part of a conspiracy...In any case, thank you for the most entertaining piece of paranoid conspiracy theory I've come across since Farenheit 911. I am thoroughly amused.
This online-auctioneer law and the bulk of gun-control legislation are both knee-jerk reactions that do little to nothing to stop criminal activity and a lot to complicate the lives of law-abiding citizens. They are both well-intentioned but misdirected. Do auto registration and business liquor licenses stop impaired driving? Of course not--they are mostly "user fees". How then would we expect gun or online aution licenses/registration to curb criminal activity?
The auctioneering law in Ohio sounds like it adds a huge amount of bureaucracy for anu good citizen who wishes to start an enterprise that markets its wares through eBay. How is requiring an Ohio seller to post a $50K bond, obtain a license and aprentice going to stop organized crime in New York from fencing goods on eBay, or some scammer in Los Angeles from bilking a buyer in Cincinatti out of his money? It won't. The law is useless.
This is the same route that Canadian gun registration has taken. That legislation was brought about in large part as a knee-jerk reation to the Marc Lepine shootings of female university students in Quebec. Citizens said "do something!" and politicians responded with gun registration. Now gun owners (even collectors who do not even USE the guns or have any ammo for them) must pay a fee, and fill out a bunch of forms answering quite personal questions, etc to keep their guns.
If you owned a gun before this legislation was implemented and do not register it you face criminal charges--yes that's right--you could go from having no criminal record to being a criminal BY DOING NOTHING AT ALL (you may own an unregisterd vehicle so long as you don't use it on public roads, so that tired comparison will not work). In any case, what makes people think that setting up a bureaucracy and a bunch of paperwork is going to make, say an Hells Angel go "oh wait--I'd better go register this gun I STOLE in New York and SMUGGLED into Montreal before I use it to shoot that bastard for stiffing me on that cocaine deal"?
Whether or not you believe in gun control is in large part immaterial. What is tragic is that nobody can see past the issue to the proposed solution. The Ohio law was to protect buyers on eBay so it is good and if you are against it you must support online criminal activity. The Canadian gun registry is to protect citizens from gun fatalities so it must be good, and if you are against it you must support criminals and wacko militias. TOTAL BULL.
You don't have to be a gun-toting redneck to be against gun control measures. That registry was supposed to be self-funding, only costing a couple million to set up the computer system. The government has spent OVER A BILLION now. In the meantime, municipal police, the RCMP and the military are struggling to stay within operating costs. There was a recent tragedy here where four RCMP were killed by a psychopath well known to authorities--they were shot with an unregistered high power assault rifle that isn't even legal to own in Canada much less register. This comes on the heels of a rash of gang-related shootings and knifings in Calgary nightclubs. Boy, that billion sure was well spent.
The victims of this crime were rookies on the force and there are some questions as to how the situation was handled. Given the history of the killer, why wasn't there appropriate backup? Partly due to underfunding some are saying--special forces were not available in a timely fashion. I wonder if maybe some of those lives would've been saved by using that billion or two to train and hire more officers instead of paper-pushers.
Gov. Taft has to ask himself a similar question--would the money needed to set up some online-auctioneering-license system not be better spent on enforcement? Perhaps setting up a task force between state police and FBI to pursue fraudulent auctioneers?
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The linkt ot the old /. article about a school is an interesting example because I think schools are one of the best candidates for switching. I think MS realises that too because their academic pricing continues to be severely discounted (for that reason plus indoctrination into MS culture is easiest with students).
Here are some potential advantages:
1. Look at the time and money involved in ensuring you are compliant/legal. Schools are notoriously bad at making sure all their software installs are legal. The MS "software assurance" contracts might reduce the effort needed but you pay through the nose. School board trustees and the like care about dollars, so push that argument strongly.
2. Less vulnerability to viruses and other malware. Given that the users are mostly students, unless you lock down access very tightly the school environment is more prone than most to getting crap like spyware-infested P2P clients, chatroom smiley icons and comet cursors on them. Students can be quite persistent in working around roadblocks to get their toys.
3. No vendor lock-in--you are at the whim of Microsoft for your critical systems. Remember the misery school districts in Oregon went through? MS mya not go bankrupt and leave you in the lurch, but they might some day decide you have to pay 100% more to renew your contract just because--and no-one holds them to their promise to regularly update their software--look at how long it has been for Longhorn--the release cycle slowed to 1/2 speed.
4. No corporate domination of the learning environment. Everyone puts up a big sting when Coca-Cola pays for a new scoreboard in the gym with a big Coke logo on it and having educational programming piped into the classroom with commercials, so why is it OK for Microsoft to be in your face all over the school?
5. You can custom tailor software without reprucussions--make a custom Linux distro for the servers and workstations, implement a specially modified content management system for the school's course catalogue, etc.
6. If you teach programming and you are ambitious, you can use the actual software that makes your systems run as programming examples. The really good programming students could contribute to those projects
7. There is much better community support for Free software--at least overall. A few years ago I emailed one of the coders for PostgreSQL about a problem I was having and he replied within hours with a patch...with MS SQL server that would NEVER happen--you'd have to wait for a service pack or hotfix. True, Free software isn't always fixed that fast, but in the case of Microsoft, NOTHING is EVER fixed that fast, even if the problem is fixed by a small patch.
8. Standards. Apache is the standard--not IIS. The folks that bring you BIND, sendmail, postfix, etc do not play hanky-panky with important standards like DNS, SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP and so on. Microsoft has screwed with all of the above in the past.
There are many more arguments for--hopefully these provide inspiration.
Bundling with Windows can certiainly be an advantage, but it doesn't ensure success. I don't recall the proprietary MSN, which was advertised with a shortcut on every fresh Win95 desktop, being very successful at killing AOL and Compuserve. Ultimately, the product has to not completely suck like MSN did. The internet ended up making all those propprietary networks die or force them to re-invent themselves as web portals and ISPs.
.net based software for any length of time you'll know that the many-megabyte .NET framework didn't magically appear on those old machines by itself.
Also, you cannot bundle something like Metro into an existing installed user base very easily, so adoption will take a year or more. Not everyone will jump to download another giant service pack for XP or will beat down the door for Longhorn on release day. If you've been deploying
I think it'll be like Windows Media formats, even if it is "free". Despite every copy of Windows supporting WMF files, MP3, MPEG, Quicktime and so on did not go away. Knocking PDF off its pedestal won't happen--at least not for many many years. Metro NEVER will be successful unless it is supported on Macs, UNIX/Linux, professional printing equipment, etc...AND it works as well as PDF. PDF and postscript are just too established.
The moral of the story is of course, that Windows is surprisingly resilient in terms of running as vital system files are deleted from underneath it.
Yep, pretty much all variants of MS Windows will continue to function if you delete everything it lets you delete. Of course it won't function PROPERLY, and it will not come back up when you reboot.
The most astonishing thing I've witnessed is what happens to a Linux box when its hard drive is trashed. At a former workplace some years ago we had a Linux box acting as our gateway (doing NAT, packet filtering, fetching and filtering mail to put on our server on the local network, etc). This was an older Pentium (100 MHz I think, pre-MMX) and it sat there doing its job basically untouched since before I started that job--over a year continuous uptime IIRC.
One weekend the cooling fan on the power supply failed and since the hard drive bracket was attached in close proximity to the power supply it baked the drive. Amazingly the machine kept functioning--we had net access and the firewall was working fine!
We only noticed the problem some hours into the day on Monday when someone realised there was no email from outside the office and that we should check the server. The IMAP server inside our network was fine, but when I tried logging into the gateway server it was behaving oddly (obviously since the drive couldn't be read). When I went to the server room I actually burned my finger when I touched the case near the power supply!
The drive was severely baked by the overheated power supply and wasn't even spinning. Despite that, the PC was still doing NAT, still filtering packets and by all indications was mostly functional, even without an accessible filesystem!
At times computers can be surprisingly robust, however in some cases like the parent post mentions, sometimes that can give idiots a lot of rope to hang themselves with.
plenty of reputable
historians would argue that the Allies defeated
the Nazis precisely because they _did_ have a better
economy.
It's easy to say that in hindsight, but if you were the in the US in the 1940's I'd be willing to bet the economic benefits were not exactly on the radar when they made the decision to go to war. Actually, the high cost of the war in both lives and money was basically why they didn't participate in WWII sooner.
The whole reason that the US became so superior economically and had so much output was the same reason that Britons persevered so well during Nazi attacks--a firm commitment to their country and their beliefs. The reason so many jeeps and planes came out of the US was because of the sacrifice on the home front--wives went to work at a time when they were expected to stay at home, everything was rationed, whole factories dedicated all their output to the war instead of domestic demand, etc. None of that made sense form an economic standpoint, it was all driven by determination and resolve to fight for what was right.
As for RMS, I don't think he would be the right choice to run my comapny, but I'd definietly like to have someone that committed to his ideals to provide vision and direction.
The fact that you and many others have a problem with "This whole 'ethical' line of argumentation" vs. a "mainstram economic argument" is probably the biggest single reason we have debacles ranging from the Enron debacle to the scandal plaguing the Canadian government at present. Please explain how an economic argument "holds more water" than an ethical/ideological one.
/. discussion so I had to add it).
It doesn't matter what sort of political or economic philospohy you subscribe to, when pure economics takes precedence over "ethics" then the said economic or political system becomes corrupt and vulnerable to collapse. Slavery did not end in America because someone had a convincing "mainstram economic argument" against it. Nazi Germany did not fall because it had an inferior economy. We triumphed over both because they were morally reprehensible (sorry, but I didn't spot the pre-requisite reverence to Nazis in this
I recently came across an interesting example of a compelling argument for "ethics" in business. The "Chik-fil-A" fast-food chain was founded and is headed by a very conservative, evangelical Christian. This man and much of the staff wear their religion on their sleeves, and unlike most visible personalities of the "religious right" they seem to actually practise whay they preach--their beliefs, faith, religous observances and family are of the highest priority--more so tham profits. The head of this company insists on not doing business on Sunday and on directing a portion of profits towards philanthropic activities as a sort of "tithe". While I do not subscribe to his brand of religious conservatism, I respect him highly for following his beliefs because they are the "right thing to do" even when there was no "mainstram economic" argument to do so. It is in some way like Google's well-known policy (at least in this forum) to "do no evil".
The result? Chik-fil-A has undergone rapid growth and has virtually the best employee retention and customer satisfaction in the industry. And we all know how Google turned out.
As for the maturity exhibited by the "unbunched panties of the BSD community"--what has that achieved for them? The many variants of BSD are certainly excellent from a technical perspective and are popular for web hosting and security, but there is a reason for the "BSD is dead" jokes--it is invisible to the general public and has no presence at all on the desktop. RMS and others might come across as wingnuts at times, but it is their dedication to ther beliefs and their inthusiasm for the free software movement that has made GNU/Linux as successful as it is.
You may view RMS' idealism as giving ammo to the opposition, but I prefer to think of it as a kevlar vest. The key is to stick to your principles while being informed and aware so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
I tried. Not once. With everything (hand, apt, alien, whatever). Sometimes, you can work it out. Sometimes, not.
It sounds like you tried to install some oddball, distro-specific RPMS to me. Next time, use apt-get to install the *debian package* for LSB-compatibility to your debian-based distro. After that, try installing *LSB Compliant* RPM packages and "sometimes" will turn into virtually "all the time" in terms of success rate. That is the whole point of the LSB people--it provides a consistent environment (filesystem and set of tools and libraries) on which to base software packages. If you require extra dependencies not in the specification, those must be included in the RPM or it is NOT an *LSB* RPM package. Dependency hell is virtually eliminated....that is the idea anyways.
And to everyone out there who that the LSB is really just Redhat has no idea what they are talking about. Yes, the packages must be RPM format....but NO, the LSB does NOT specify that RPM must be the native package manager, nor does it have to be the only one supported by the LSB-compliant OS. Debian can be made LSB-compliant by installing a NATIVE DEBIAN package that provides the LSB environment. Hell, even the LSB REVERENCE PLATFORM (LSB-si) isn't even red-hat based! (The LSB-SI was built from the ground up using the documentation and tools provided by the people at "Linux from Scratch"--the LSB-si OS is compiled and installed without the useof a single RPM)
The problem the LSB faces is that they MUST make some choices that will bruise egos--stuff like what directories hold what files, how init scrips are maintaines and what format is used to package apps are pretty fundamental and are the subject of religious wars--it doesn't mater what they picked someone would not be happy with the choice.
IMHO that is why installing software on Windows works relatively well--everything installs from a "setup.exe" and must conform to quite rigid guidelines to get the blessing from MS. When adding and removing programs doesn't go right it is pretty much ALWAYS because the unstall or uninstall did not conform to those rigid guidelines.
I guess LSB3 is going to take on the desktop now...It'll be interesting to see how they navigate the no-man's land between the GNOME and KDE front-lines in that battle.
Splitting hairs I guess, but this is my interpretation...
Distributing CherryOS against the terms set forth by the copyright holder is copyright infringement, not theft, because the copyright holder is still in posession of the original code. Therefore CherryOS code is NOT "stolen".
What IS stolen are the rights granted by the copyright holder. When you pirate closed software you "steal comparatively little because the copyright holder grante very few rights (it is still wrong nonetheless). When you pirate free software you steal away a lot more valuable rights.
Can you be "pirating free software"? Of course it can, although you do it is different. Both involve violating a license agreement though, and IMHO I think the law should treat piracy of any software equally, free or not.
CherryOS could be a knock-off of PearPC and could still be packaged and sold as is and it wouldn't be piracy because this wouldn't violate the licence of free software. However when you buy CherryOS as they planned to sell it you do not get everything you should. There is no source code on the disc, or on the website for download, or in printed form or anything--only binaries. Furthermore, even if you obtained the source your rights to modify and redistribute it are also being denied. Thus, the license is violated, your rights have been taken away--STOLEN--and all copies of CherryOS are pirated software just like all those copies of Photoshop people get using their favourite P2P app.
Oh I know how corrupt they are, but I also know that the alternative (the Conservatives) are worse
You sound like an American--"since X is worse than Y I always vote for X". Canada has strong third parties you know. What about A, B and C? If you find right wing parties so distasteful why not vote for NDP? Seriously, the Green party is looking like a good alternative for many people as well (they placed third or better in many ridings, particularly in western Canada, and their policies are surprisingly well developed even though I do not agree with much of their platform).
As for as being a "permanent Liberal voter" because they're the least of evils you must be hopelessly naive. The Liberal gov't under Cretien and Martin has been far more corrupt, incompetent and disrespectful of Canada and its citizens than any in the past century. When the old Tories were buried in '93 I thought it was great--out with the old and arrogant and in with change and accountability. That was the year I got most involved in politics and was able to vote for the first time. By the next federal election I decided it be a cold day in hell before I vote Liberal again.
The more involved in politics you are, the more you see it--from the leader's office right to the riding level, the whole federal Liberal party relies a lot on graft and favouritism, and it has infected the operation of the government. The Liberal party has absolutely no principles or ideology--they operate on self-interest. The Liberal government has let the lunatics (bureaucrats) run the asylum without any due diligence or accountability.
Regardless of what your opinion is on gun control, ask yourself why is the cost of registering a single gun over $3000 when it is less than $100 to register a vehicle? How did HRDC lose hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money? Why does the gov't spend five and six figures for reports thinner than the Monday edition of the SUN--some of which cannot be found at all? What do we have to show for these rich gov't contracts with advertising firms who make untraceable cash donations to the Liberal party, and why do Cretien's relatives seem to pop up when we find scandal?
Why REALLY has Canada stayed out of Iraq? I'm telling you now that if you were informed about what happens in gov't you'd KNOW it wasn't because Liberal principles--it has a lot to do with not wanting to look like an international embarassment. If we had the military personnel and Martin could win an election by going to Iraq he would do it. Martin has proven to be no better than Cretien, and is so proud of his country that he runs his ships under a flag of convenience to avoid taxes--and to keep his company at "arms length" when he becomes PM he transfers ownership of CSL to...his sons. His arms mush be shorter than those of a T-Rex.
Some people may believe the values and principles of the Conservative party are some how "disrespectful" of Canada, but at least the people in that party (or the NDP or Greens for that matter) don't have a track record that would make an Enron executive blush. I'm sorry, but the Liberals need to be punished and if anything is disrespectful or lacking in courage it is voting Liberal and letting the same people have free reign over Canada after all the crap they've done to hurt the country.
There is a better than even chance that Canada will have another election before the year is out. For the health of the nation, please reconsider being a "permanent Liberal voter" and choose an alternative, whether it be Conservative, NDP, Green or an independent candidate. The Liberals are in such a state they need to be brought down as severely as the old Tory gov't was in 1993 so they can seriously re-examine and rebuild the party.
And by the way, what is wrong with letting Americans and others know that not everyone agrees with what the government is doing? Millions of Americans made it loud and clear they didn't agree with THEIR government about invading Iraq. Not o
He's a neocon, or at least a neocon sympathizer, which makes anything he says highly suspect.
I suppose that means you can take everything Michael Moore says at face value? If a socialist says the sky is pink at high noon on a clear day it must be so? Unless the source clearly has something to gain from publishing certain information you might want to put your prejudice aside and look at things deeper.
FYI, without mentioning the details themselves, "real journalists" have confirmed that this report is completely accurate--journalists employed by a company owned by major Liberal party supporters no less. Slanted site sponsors notwithstanding the report looked to me to be surprisingly balanced. There is some editorialising but a remarkable absence of ideological bias. The article could've been written word-for-word by an NDP supporter (NDP is Canada's socialist party) just as much as could've been written by a Conservative.
IMHO "AdScam" is not an ideological debate with small-gov't "neocons" whining about big gov't make-work projects (that is only one small facet). It is a debate about openness and ethics first and foremost by far. Ask NDP supporters and they will be just as critical as a Conservative about the honesty and openness of the Liberal government--or lack thereof. Whatever your political leanings, if you are Canadian you would do well to follow this story, regardless of whether the source represents your political values. The average citizen would be astonished at how corrupt the Canadian gov't is and how long it has been that way. Perhaps that would motivate voters to get off their asses and vote next election.
I have been on both ends of the tech/user relationship--these days as the user, and I have to say that by and large the amount of respect one gets depends on the people themselves, not on what role they play in an organisation.
One thing to remember--IT departments are essential to support the operation of a business, but they almost never directly contribute to the core function of a business. Basically, they ARE a "necessary evil", to put it plainly, in some sense like the janitors who keep the office clean and the lawyers to draw up the contracts.
Sysadmins, janitors, lawyers, etc do not make wigits for the MegaWigit corporation, or deliver parcels for UPS or perform surgery in the hospital for example. Yes, an organisation would fall apart without people to do their work, but since they do not perform functions directly related to the business there is a little extra effort required to earn and maintain respect and recognition. It isn't just because you are "a geek".
There is a good reason why IT people (and other support services staff) in some cases lose respect--it's because they either aren't doing the job right or they lack people skills. When I try to get a defective memory module replaced in my notebook through proper corporate channels and it has to pass through three different cities over the course of almost two weeks before I get it then I lose a little respect for the IT department--especially when they send the wrong type of memory. If I respectfully voice my concerns and they respond in kind and learn from the experience they regain my respect.
However, when IT continually sends parts and machines that do not match our requests, and grumble that we are circumventing their policies and procedures by just buying parts from the local shop (out of frustration) then you lose even more respect. Here's another tip: if a user sends his machine in to get repairied and you are going to re-image it...TELL THE PERSON so they can at least make an effort to back up! Not all users understand how things work in IT and a little common courtesy is in order.
As I said I've been on both sides, and I know users seem to do some pretty silly things to their PCs, but you have to hold your frustration in check, just as the user should with IT support.
Try to see things in the user's eyes--their experiences with IT is typically pretty abysmal since PCs--especially windows ones--are far from reliable. Most IT projects are also late and go through growing pains during implementation.Also, the majority of the time people talk to IT is when something is wrong. If you work at honing people skills and can see the situation from the other person's eyes you'll command all the respect you want, regardless of what you do for a living.
You completely missed my point altogether. It isn't the fact that the property is virtual that boggles my mind...I happen to disagree with the Chinese court ruling that implies there are no rights to virtual property. Generally, the vast majority of cash value to my name exists as a number in a bank's mainframe, and all the software on our machines es essentially virtual property.
It boggles my mind because of the nature of this virtual property--it is a prop in a game for cryin' out loud! The real-world analogue to this situation would be somebody paying $1000 for a litle plastic sword or a card with a picture on it or something...and somebody actually killing over the scam. Courts recognising virtual property is one thing--it's entirely another thing when people kill over games or bog down the court system suing over the theft of a virtual toy sword or the abduction of the beloved virtual pet of someone's virtual family on The Sims.
So are you some kind of hotshot that can get any computer up and going in a vew minutes to an hour? Well, any monkey can format and re-install or restore-from-ghost in very short order, but in my experience it is those technicians that people call "useless" when they get their "fixed" computers back without properly configured drivers and all their email and data since their last weekly backup wiped out (if the said user is swift enough to even do a weekly backup).
In the corporate world competent techies have made it easy for themselves. They probably deal with a fleet of identical Dells, each issues with a standard ghost image, scripts up the wazoo, something like Altris or other big brother software do roll out updates/config changes, etc etc etc.
OTOH, 4.5 hours to clean up a machine is actually a realistic high-range estimate when you are talking about some of the personal computers or PCs at mom-and-pop operations out there like "nerds on site" and the like must see. I imagine they see everything from PIIs to the latest screaming PIV from any number of builders out there, and some of them are probably slapped together with leftover components too. These users don't have an image to restore to--unless you count the "rescue CD" if they haven't managed to lose it...they might not have any OS install CD at all! And backups? HAH! I've found you're lucky to even have weekly backups. And no matter how trivial their files look, all these users want to save as much as possible. These users are also rather undisciplined in their own maintenance. The worms and viruses are one thing--prepare to spend some time getting rid of adware attached to weather bugs, comet cursors, chat smileys and "free" P2P programs.
In any case, if you average it out you might spend 2 hours per machine. I'd say that for how much damage Blaster-variants caused this guy got off lightly--even including the hours he will spend in jail. I suppose, though, that suing someone who is broke for a half-million is pretty pointless. I DO like the idea of making the guy shovel elephant poo for a month as a substitute.
I do try to be optimistic though--one good thing is that this whole Blaster debacle brought to light the security crisis in Microsoft products. To this day, an unpatched win2k or pre-sp2 winxp machine will become infected within minutes when hooked up directly to a typical high-speed internet connection. It seems unfortunate that some jackass had to pull a stunt like Blaster before anything serious was done about security at MS.
...all these people are wacked out.
It's the 21st century and it isn't Chairman Mao's China anymore--$1000 might be a fortune to most Chinese but there plenty in China for which $1000 is achievable. The fact that someone would pay that much to buy an imaginary sword he can use to saly virtual beings in a video game makes him either a filthy righ celebrity with more money than he knows what to do with, or someone with a serious video game addiction.
In any case, if someone sold something I lent to them for a large sum of money I think it would be taken to the courts. If someone paid a year's salary for the use of some game account of mine I might seek to have them committed, but that's beside the point, and really so is the money involved. The fact that several people became involved in a dispute involving that much money, conflict and violence over something with no real-world value at all in a GAME is quite disturbing.
What is happening to people? Is the radiation from their PCs frying their brains? First off, some complete loser with far more money than brains willingly pays a cool grand for....an IMAGINARY sword--some bits in some corporation's server representing some wigit in a VIDEO GAME.
To make matters worse, some complete idiot gets so upset about being wronged he KILLS over it. I don't care if it's about the money, or "honour" or whatever, or whether the property in question was imaginary or real--if you seriously get that upset and irrational over such things you need your head examined.
I think the killer, the victim and the chump who bought the virtual property in question were all out of their minds--and I'd say about the only think remotely positive that came out of this tragedy is that there is one less delusional freak on the streets and maybe others that have slipped into this addiction will look at themselves and realise it is a game...for fun...and that there is a life out there beyond the computer screen.
Virtually all lcd manufactures accept screens with a "few" bad pixels
Yeah, but you see there is a little problem with Sony's excuse. It might be somewhat common for a notebook or desktop LCD to have 1 to 10 defective pixels (I've never seen more than a couple though), but keep in mind we are talking about 12" to 19" screens with 800,000 to well over a million quite small pixels. A Sony PSP has less than 135,000 pixels--and even accounting for the screen being smaller, the dot pitch is still larger for the PSP than for a notebook or desktop display.
Since the pixels (and thus the transistors) are larger and there are fewer of them, I'd expect the Cadillac of portable game devices to be equipped with a flawless display, not to have a similar defect rate to displays that are much more complex.
Remeber that early PSP units in Japan had this and more problems (too many defects with controller buttons and motors). It seems to be indicative of overall quality problems Sony is having with most of its consumer electronics in the past few years--something consumers won't tolerate if their products remain high priced. Maybe the recent overhaul in executive/management at Sony will remedy the problem, but it'll take some time (hopefully for them they'll get the PS3 right--it seems with each successive game platform they release the initial quality gets worse).
No one person can say whether Jon Stewart is any more or less qualified to be US president than GW Bush. The US head of state is democratically elected, so the majority of those who bother to vote make that decision.
I think that's pretty fair--count yourselves fortunate that almost any American can be US president--it'd sure be sad if you HAD to be a long-serving politician. Here in Canada the head of state's only qualification is to be born to the right parents...King Charles and Queen Camilla? the thought makes me shudder. At least the Queen Liz (the head of state for all the commonwealth nations) is a good lady and is basically a figurehead. Our Prime Minister OTOH...he is so powerful he can wreck our country quite easily--in fact the POTUS has to work much harder to get his way in his gov't than our PM.
Wow...it must be hard to go through life without a sense of humour. Perhaps you would develop one if you managed to find someone who was willing to perform a certain expletive on you rather than using said expletive every third word.
in any case, I said feature parity, not performance parity. You're right, the table-locking vacuum was a pain in the ass--about as elegant as re-indexing dbase tables. But not ready for prime-time? I'd have to take exception. I first started using PGSQL in the 6.0.x days and unless you were doing a lot of updates daily vacuum was not needed. I don't think I'd have trusted it to bank records back then but it ran fine.
IIRC that system ran on a P133 with 64MB of RAM and about 2 million records total over about a dozen tables. Vacuuming issue was resolved with very simple CRON job with only a few minutes of nightly disruption (less than an hour anyways). Again, not great for something like banking but when none of your users are online at 1AM local time it isn't an issue at all for them. It replaced a bloated Access application very nicely.
This version has support for Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views and many other features
<asbestos suit>
Those PostgreSQL must be quaking in their boots not that MySQL has reached feature parity with PostgreSQL 6.0. Now that they're only six or seven years behind PGSQL developers will have to keep an eye on them
</asbestos suit>
Anyways I think competition is a good thing, and it's good to see the market leader in the open source database realm become somewhat more industrial strength. I've been puzzled by how more robust, featureful alternatives like PostgreSQL and Firebird are overlooked in favour of MySQL, so at least if it continues to happen MySQL is starting to fit the bill better.
I know it sounds like a slight against MySQL, which really is the best choice in many situations since it is fast, has a smal footprint and is easy to set up, use and maintain. However, MySQL's suitability in web applications has made it so popular that it seems to have pushed alternatives to the sidelines even when they are the better choice. For example, I think I'd much rather set up an accounting system with a PGSQL backend over MySQL.
In any case, I encourage people to look at ALL the alternatives. PGSQL 8.0 is out and is very impressive. Also, devlopment of Firebird 2.0 is underway so expect rapid improvements as this major release gets closer to completion.
Coming off a project with a MS SQL Server 2000 backend I'd have to say the more alternatives the merrier. MSSQL2K is pretty stale and after workig with PGSQL for so long it makes MS SQL look completely brain dead in almost every way--particularly in the areas of concurrency and locking. It'll be interesting to see how Yukon stacks up, but at least MySQL and the others will provide some serious competition.
...not just because it is a new way of doing things...also because it is far more robust. If that single computer were to fail the result could be catastrophic (which is why there is one or more redundant one in mission critical applications). If one of a hundred picotux units were to fail you'd likely barely even notice.
I use VMWare extensively--it is great for developers, sales people, etc. to keep images of virtual machines that can be moved around to various physical boxes when required. However, it can't replace all that aging hardware.
Say, I got that spiffy new Xeon server and VMWare. Cool---now I can turf all those old "classic" pentiums and 486s and get on with....oh hold on I better make sure to take those dongles off the LPT1 ports so I can run the software. DAMN.. I forgot about the 16-bit ISA cards that talk to the industrial controllers we put in during the feed pump upgrade in 1989.
OK...so now I have the 6 ISA cards and 12 dongles so I can still run the old programs on my new Xeon server. Hmmm....there doesn't seem to be enough parallel ports for all these dongles. In fact it seems there are no LPT ports at all anymore--damn--purchasing forgot to order the "legacy options". Well lets open this thing up and see if we can put the cards in. Hmmm...these slots seem a bit small...
Anyways, you get the idea. Now it is time to phone the vendor, who politely tells you that you need to spend 26,000 dollars to get an "ethernet gateway" device to do the job of the old ISA cards and 12 licenses of the latest software, since the old DOS stuff is not supported anymore and doesn't do ethernet.
Sounds far fetched? Not really. It is pretty commonplace that some users expect 15 years of service from their systems. I've heard of support calls coming in for stuff my employer sold them over 20 years ago! Stuff that can only be programmed with DOS software! I think it's lost on Microsoft what some customers really expect--just as it is lost on customers how much it costs to support legacy systems (both time and money). For example, I've heard that to acquire an airworthy DC10 jet costs more now that the original purchase cost when it was brand new (even adjusting for inflation)! Why? Because parts and service to make one safe to fly are getting scarce and very expensive.
Anyways, I think it is quite short sighted of MS to drop all support of VB6, long-in-the-tooth as it may be. Even if you have to charge an arm and a leg to offer support, at least make it available. At least in the case of open source there will be someone who can help you so long as there are users out there, even if you always have to move on at some point.
but I can go buy a cheap desktop for that
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. This is an embedded systems solution, not a desktop replacement. If you play in that world than you knwo 100 euros is quite inexpensive.
The PC is just too big, too fragile, too power-hungry and too unreliable for a lot of tasks where these tiny machines could be used--even if the computational power-to-price ratio is so much larger for the PC. People in the automation world probably remember a few years ago how the PC-based "soft PLC" would reduce costs and replace all those proprietary, expensive traditional PLCs. Never happened and never will because PCs are too general purpose and inefficient. To this day all I've ever used software-based PLCs for is simulation.
For those who are unaware, PLCs, or Programmable Logic Controllers, are esentially purpose-built embedded computer systems used to monitor and control industrial equipment. The bulk of them today are about as powerful as a 286 PC or even less and they cost as much as or more than a high-end PC. Despite that, the hardware and firmware/software in a PLC is designed from the ground up for deterministic, hard-real-time operation and I/O intensive applications. They also do not have processor fans, hard drives and other unreliable mechanical parts.
That is why these tiny Linux machines are so interesting--even if they cannot do as much as a PC or are more expensive. They could be the beginning of a standard, truly open platform for embedded systems. If the processor unit can fit in an RJ45 jack, then in the future we could do away with racks of PLCs and make field equipment control itself. The stuff I can imagine is mind boggling to say the least.
Besides humidity distorting the fit of the wood parts I see other things that need attention as well:
1. What about RF interference? I haven't disassambled plastic-bodied computers for awhile (last ones were an elderly Win95 laptop and before that my old Atari ST), but from what I remember they always included metal RF shielding (Anyone out there remember what an Atari 800 looked like inside? It was built so heavy that you could probably run over it with a car and the RF shield wouldn't dent!). Did this guy retain/replace the RF shielding when he constructed the wood laptop case? I imagine that the reason wood cases are pricey has something to do with that.
2. How about heat and flammability? Better make sure you clean out any sawdust real well. I'd carefully choose the wood for your case too--I know when it gets warm outside a couple of the planks on my deck ooze sap. I'd hate for my wooden laptop to ooze sap all over my warm CPU--couldn't be healthy for the electronics.
I think that making a desk with an integrated PC would be easy enough--the PC itself can be a plain metal box bolted into the desk and there is room to manoeuvre...but a wooden laptop? Can't see that it would be practical.
This study is not meant to "help" anyone, because the MMORPGers don't have a problem.
Well, as is the case with any group of enthusiasts, the vast majority really DON'T have a problem. Even if you spend 30 or 40 hours a week on the computer it might not be a problem, so long as you manage to get enough sleep, do your schoolwork or job properly and take care of yourself. Spending every second of your leisure time on one task would make you rather boring to be around, but it wouldn't be a problem.
However, there ARE a handful of people who DO have a problem with online gaming. These are the people who prioritise their gaming over school, work, family or "real world" friends. If you are averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night and have trouble putting 40 hours in at the office every week, lost touch with people and so on--TURN OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER.
This isn't just the case with online games--it is just the same as people who compulsively gamble, or play D&D (Jack Chick's ridiculous tracts on the subject notwithstanding, I had a dorm roomate who failed out of school pretty much entirely because of his D&D habit) etc. Heck, even exercise can become a compulsion/addiction (I've noticed a couple of people who ALWAYS seemed to be at the gym, no matter what day or time I managed to make it there--apparently they would spend ALL their free time there and weren't even competitive athletes).
On another note, This statement from you has to make me wonder:
This is just some supposed "normie" pointing out what they perceive to be abnormal behavior.
A "normie"? Gotta wonder if you might have a bit of a social adjustment problem yourself. There is nothing wrong with being different but, if you are derisively referring to most people people as "normies" and start viewing large segments of society with contempt you might want to seek professional help. Without furhter observation there is no way of knowing, but you might be one step away from sitting in a tower picking off terrified "normies" in the street with a high-power rifle.
(Don't take the above too seriously--it's just that I imagine some of the people I see going into those gaming stores and sci-fi conventions saying something like "the normies just don't have a clue" and have to stifle a laugh)
You even got the shinier side on the outside like any true believer should.
;-)
Given that highly-visible, powerful people with ties to the government are likely to be frequent flyers it isn't all that unusual that a number of them would see their demise on an airplane. I'm sure you could compile a list of Republican/right-wing people of note who died in plane crashes as well. I guess it's just hard to imagine Bill Clinton orchestrating anything like that, given his repurtation as uhhh...a lover and not a fighter
As for the "presidential cousins"--you listed President Taft, and his senatorial son and granson as "cousins". The Bush family is far from royalty, and even royalty isn't inbred enough that a man, his son and his grandson could all be FIRST cousins--it is quite obvious that you consider cousins to be any people who share a traceable ancestral link. Well, that makes Orville and Wilbur Wright my "cousins" (I am more closely related to them than GWBush is to Kerry actually).
I guess since my "cousin's" invention was used as an instrument of murder by Bush and his Republican cronies that makes me part of a conspiracy...In any case, thank you for the most entertaining piece of paranoid conspiracy theory I've come across since Farenheit 911. I am thoroughly amused.
This online-auctioneer law and the bulk of gun-control legislation are both knee-jerk reactions that do little to nothing to stop criminal activity and a lot to complicate the lives of law-abiding citizens. They are both well-intentioned but misdirected. Do auto registration and business liquor licenses stop impaired driving? Of course not--they are mostly "user fees". How then would we expect gun or online aution licenses/registration to curb criminal activity?
The auctioneering law in Ohio sounds like it adds a huge amount of bureaucracy for anu good citizen who wishes to start an enterprise that markets its wares through eBay. How is requiring an Ohio seller to post a $50K bond, obtain a license and aprentice going to stop organized crime in New York from fencing goods on eBay, or some scammer in Los Angeles from bilking a buyer in Cincinatti out of his money? It won't. The law is useless.
This is the same route that Canadian gun registration has taken. That legislation was brought about in large part as a knee-jerk reation to the Marc Lepine shootings of female university students in Quebec. Citizens said "do something!" and politicians responded with gun registration. Now gun owners (even collectors who do not even USE the guns or have any ammo for them) must pay a fee, and fill out a bunch of forms answering quite personal questions, etc to keep their guns.
If you owned a gun before this legislation was implemented and do not register it you face criminal charges--yes that's right--you could go from having no criminal record to being a criminal BY DOING NOTHING AT ALL (you may own an unregisterd vehicle so long as you don't use it on public roads, so that tired comparison will not work). In any case, what makes people think that setting up a bureaucracy and a bunch of paperwork is going to make, say an Hells Angel go "oh wait--I'd better go register this gun I STOLE in New York and SMUGGLED into Montreal before I use it to shoot that bastard for stiffing me on that cocaine deal"?
Whether or not you believe in gun control is in large part immaterial. What is tragic is that nobody can see past the issue to the proposed solution. The Ohio law was to protect buyers on eBay so it is good and if you are against it you must support online criminal activity. The Canadian gun registry is to protect citizens from gun fatalities so it must be good, and if you are against it you must support criminals and wacko militias. TOTAL BULL.
You don't have to be a gun-toting redneck to be against gun control measures. That registry was supposed to be self-funding, only costing a couple million to set up the computer system. The government has spent OVER A BILLION now. In the meantime, municipal police, the RCMP and the military are struggling to stay within operating costs. There was a recent tragedy here where four RCMP were killed by a psychopath well known to authorities--they were shot with an unregistered high power assault rifle that isn't even legal to own in Canada much less register. This comes on the heels of a rash of gang-related shootings and knifings in Calgary nightclubs. Boy, that billion sure was well spent.
The victims of this crime were rookies on the force and there are some questions as to how the situation was handled. Given the history of the killer, why wasn't there appropriate backup? Partly due to underfunding some are saying--special forces were not available in a timely fashion. I wonder if maybe some of those lives would've been saved by using that billion or two to train and hire more officers instead of paper-pushers.
Gov. Taft has to ask himself a similar question--would the money needed to set up some online-auctioneering-license system not be better spent on enforcement? Perhaps setting up a task force between state police and FBI to pursue fraudulent auctioneers?