Having worked at a financial institution I can say that you might be surprised to see how loosely some connections to vendors can be, much less partners or acquisitions. As much as I like to hope that ADP raises the bar, I've seen some rather terrifying things in the past in the way systems can be interconnected.
RSA, BofA, Citi, Lockheed, now ADP... it's getting really scary out there. I'm rapidly losing any faith in the security of my information, whether they actively or passively have my consent to store it.
Sadly, it is the customers that ultimately lose if CBS et al are removed from DishTV's programming. Dish will suffer next as there is an exodus to DTV or Comcast.
The comments here, at least those at the upper karma limit, seem awfully biased towards DishTV. Is Viacom raising their rate more than they're raising others? I couldn't find any information to that effect so I can't say that they are or they aren't, but it seems an important piece of the puzzle. At least in the heated MS/Linux threads you find people on both sides of the argument. Is this issue truly that lopsided?
Personally, I don't think that Viacom and other commercial-supported networks should be charging anything to be rebroadcast... but I think we all know that's not going to change anytime soon.
I believe it was version 4.1, round about '95, that had a beautiful "feature" in its mail application.
If you'd already deleted the contents of a users' mailbox at the file system, and then went to remove the user in the application the software would delete every file (but not subdir) in the C:\ root dir, after which it pruned ever file AND subdir one directory deep... lead to some fun tech support calls!
Could you imagine how wonderful something like this could be for all the rookies out there? Especially if it was configured to constantly look for updates from a known-safe location managed by a group of white hats, constantly updating the system and patching necessary software?
What a great deal of sand in the face for Microsoft to learn of the open-source community banding together to secure the systems of the untrained, locking them down against participation in DDoS attacks and such. As if they don't already need a bulldozer to get the sand out of their faces with all the high-publicity IIS compromises of late. =)
Sure, some of us don't want something like this getting onto our systems as it demonstrates that we've not locked it down well enough to begin with. But for those who truly *can* stop it from exploiting known vulnerabilities, we obviously don't need it. However, I'd wager that well over 90% of the people using Linux don't know what to do to lock their systems down.
Bravo!
(that is, until someone finds out that this worm is actually doing something malicious while pretending to patch the system)
I am surprised that I haven't seen anyone suggest the idea that, although this would be a fantastic breakthrough for limited use, we're stepping back not moving forward.
What prompted the idea for me was the concept that with only two gestures it's possible to represent over 48 different actions.
Don't get me wrong, let me preface by saying that I believe strongly that evolution is a good thing, but are we trying to do away with the keyboard or what?
I have watched users very closely over the past 10 years. What I have been very disappointed to notice is people's increased dependance on the mouse.
When I was a regular Windows user I would push my mouse off to the side once a month and navigate entirely with the keyboard. You'd be amazed at how quickly you learn keyboard shortcuts you didn't even know existed. I'm not saying that I was more productive that day... far from it... but I *was* more productive the other days as I didn't need to keep reaching for my mouse to perform common tasks.
Today I watch people use their mouse to position the cursor at the end of a highlighted string of text so they can backspace over the entire string. Slightly better, I'll watch someone use their mouse to re-highlight an already highlighted string of text and delete it. Both are indicators to me that most users (present company excluded) just don't get it!
Yes, it would be pretty cool, and perhaps even quite useful, to use a minimal set of gestures in a browser. Until the introduction of the tab key in IE (and Netscape shortly after) there was no way to navigate in a browser without the mouse and I've hated it. Lynx is the only tool you can use to browse w/o a mouse that I have tried, and it's painful. Otherwise, unless I want to put both hands on the keyboard to go back I'm forced to move my mouse to the top-left corner and click back, or right-click and select back. Either way it's annoying. This is where I think gestures make sense.
Where I don't think gestures make sense is ordinary tasks like File// Save, Edit// Paste (all hail middle-click), etc. Speaking of middle-clicks, hooray for Netscape's "Open Link in New Window" functionality. Can you imagine the typical user (again, present company excluded) trying to learn these motions, or the simple concept behind it?
How intuitive do most of you find console gaming? To start with, take *any* of the fighting games for N64, PS(2), or DC... do those key-combinations make the slightest sense to you at all? Sure, the basics do, but what about all the "special moves" you have to learn if you want to win a level? How often do special moves require flawless execution of 6 or directions/buttons? Even THPS2 has too many *assignable* combinations to ever use knowingly for all the different characters.
Now take that concept and apply it to all the separate applications in the Windows space. Every one of them is going to think their gestures should be different. Look how long it took to reach an acceptable standard for copy-n-paste... vs.... and it's STILL not a given that either will work unless the software you're using is from the same vendor as the OS.
Take the concept and apply it to the KDE/Gnome war as well - no one is going to standardize on anything other than what they believe to be the best way to do it.
In closing, I'm all for limited gestures, it sounds like a really incredible concept, I just hope things don't get carried away to the point that people forget how to use their keyboards even more than they have now. A mouse is a wretched interface, although it provides some very useful assitance. Perhaps certain applications (web browsers for those who truly surf and do nothing productive) will benefit tremendously from this new paradigm, but for people who make a living on a computer there currently is no substitute for the keyboard. Unfortunately those same people are putting a roof over their heads by writing the software that the other 95% of the population uses and can probably continue to use by gestures alone. =(
I am surprised that I haven't seen anyone suggest the idea that, although this would be a fantastic breakthrough for limited use, we're stepping back not moving forward.
What prompted the idea for me was the concept that with only two gestures it's possible to represent over 48 different actions.
Don't get me wrong, let me preface by saying that I believe strongly that evolution is a good thing, but are we trying to do away with the keyboard or what?
I have watched users very closely over the past 10 years. What I have been very disappointed to notice is people's increased dependance on the mouse.
When I was a regular Windows user I would push my mouse off to the side once a month and navigate entirely with the keyboard. You'd be amazed at how quickly you learn keyboard shortcuts you didn't even know existed. I'm not saying that I was more productive that day... far from it... but I *was* more productive the other days as I didn't need to keep reaching for my mouse to perform common tasks.
Today I watch people use their mouse to position the cursor at the end of a highlighted string of text so they can backspace over the entire string. Slightly better, I'll watch someone use their mouse to re-highlight an already highlighted string of text and delete it. Both are indicators to me that most users (present company excluded) just don't get it!
Yes, it would be pretty cool, and perhaps even quite useful, to use a minimal set of gestures in a browser. Until the introduction of the tab key in IE (and Netscape shortly after) there was no way to navigate in a browser without the mouse and I've hated it. Lynx is the only tool you can use to browse w/o a mouse that I have tried, and it's painful. Otherwise, unless I want to put both hands on the keyboard to go back I'm forced to move my mouse to the top-left corner and click back, or right-click and select back. Either way it's annoying. This is where I think gestures make sense.
Where I don't think gestures make sense is ordinary tasks like File// Save, Edit// Paste (all hail middle-click), etc. Speaking of middle-clicks, hooray for Netscape's "Open Link in New Window" functionality. Can you imagine the typical user (again, present company excluded) trying to learn these motions, or the simple concept behind it?
How intuitive do most of you find console gaming? To start with, take *any* of the fighting games for N64, PS(2), or DC... do those key-combinations make the slightest sense to you at all? Sure, the basics do, but what about all the "special moves" you have to learn if you want to win a level? How often do special moves require flawless execution of 6 or directions/buttons? Even THPS2 has too many *assignable* combinations to ever use knowingly for all the different characters.
Now take that concept and apply it to all the separate applications in the Windows space. Every one of them is going to think their gestures should be different. Look how long it took to reach an acceptable standard for copy-n-paste... vs.... and it's STILL not a given that either will work unless the software you're using is from the same vendor as the OS.
Take the concept and apply it to the KDE/Gnome war as well - no one is going to standardize on anything other than what they believe to be the best way to do it.
In closing, I'm all for limited gestures, it sounds like a really incredible concept, I just hope things don't get carried away to the point that people forget how to use their keyboards even more than they have now. A mouse is a wretched interface, although it provides some very useful assitance. Perhaps certain applications (web browsers for those who truly surf and do nothing productive) will benefit tremendously from this new paradigm, but for people who make a living on a computer there currently is no substitute for the keyboard. Unfortunately those same people are putting a roof over their heads by writing the software that the other 95% of the population uses and can probably continue to use by gestures alone. =(
What ever happened to VDO net? They were pretty damn good in the early days of streaming. This was before anyone else was really doing it, or at least doing a good job of it. They're only real competition was from White Pine's CUSeeMe. FYI, we're talking about 1996 when the B/W Quickcam was newsworthy.
Although they may never have released them (I worked there - I used them), they had Linux and Solaris (SGI as well, IIRC) clients and servers that did pretty well.
Last I know the only place you ever saw their software in use was on the pr0n sites. Their VDOPhone was a real popular one for "live interaction" with remote floosies. Sure enough, a search at Yahoo turns up mostly adult sites, and their website (VDOnet.com) is now being held by Register.com.
Perhaps it was poor business decisions that put them under, or maybe it was the client list, but that company had some real promise and was pretty dedicated to supporting multi-platform clients and servers.
I'm under the impression that our friends in Seattle have already made progress toward this end. Although they've yet to directly attach the event to the trigger, Windows sure does seem to break often enough to convince me they're trying!
I haven't figured out the word that most offends white males to a degree that they 'gasp' in a state of shock like those other words cause.
There is no single word to make a white male's jaw drop. However, there are certain phrases that are virutally guaranteed to generate dramatic responses...
While I'm not ready to rush out and install the software as I rarely use VMware these days, I have to say that the ability to toggle between a Linux and Win4Lin desktop in full-screen mode does sound tempting... the claim of lower resource consumption sounds nice too.
...and kudos to LMN for a clean implementation of SlashCode!
Can you imagine what this is going to do to the laptop market? How do they expect to offer a P4 laptop when it requires a 1 pound heat sink? I'm having flashbacks to the "lunchbox" portables!
Decide.com is pretty damn impressive, IMHO. I used them to validate that my choice, GTE, was the best in the area. The audio playback of particular services compared against each other at specific locations (find one near home, near work, and along the way) was a big win. I haven't taken the time to check the others, but I'll have try them out sometime soon.
Their reviews of phones is pretty useful as well. Although I was convinced that the "Thin Phone" should be pretty awesome based on their reviews, I can't bring myself to ditch the StarTac I've had for the last year and a half after having actually tried it.
$0.02
Re:Random RISC OS trivia by an ex-user
on
The ROX Desktop
·
· Score: 1
Oh man, talk about memories... NewWave was incredible.
It's sad, no doubt. But isn't it odd that they just introduced John Cleese as his successor? That, and the sly "getaway" as he descended from Bond's presence. Coincidence?
We've just spent 2 weeks at my office researching the different solutions available to us for implementing the most reliable and scalable solution available today. Our needs differ a bit from yours as we're looking to put many machines on a network for load-distribution yet they all need to speak to the same data on a single repository. This holy grail is know as a SAN, or Storage Area Network.
Our solution is going to be a single cabinet RAID (level 5 for accessing smaller files) with a "hot spare" that will rebuild a crashed disk on the fly. This being a standard cabinet we'll have 8 disks, of which the capacity of 6 will be data (one parity (term used loosely as parity is striped on RAID-5), and one spare).
The disks are Seagate's 10,000 RPM Cheetahs, the most commonly recommended units among all the vendors we've talked to, and the controller is a multi-channel u2w with fibre interface to a Q-Logic PCI adapter.
The total system is going to run just over $15,000. This sounds like a lot, but pricing lower end systems isn't too much cheaper and you'll never get 24-hour turnaround on failed parts (if they're even available). This seems like overkill for a single system, but by adding a fibre hub later we can use the single system for many many machines once a file controller (dedicated machine) is put into place.
The beauty of SAN is that it operates much like FTP, with a control and a data connection. The control connection occurs over your existing LAN, and the data is transmitted directly over the fibre channel (max rate of 100 MB/s).
Other NAS (Network Accessible Storage) models are somewhat cheaper to implement, but performance can never match the fibre as the "control" and "data" connections (NFS or SMB) both transmit across your network.
I apologize for digressing from the straight RAID topic, but I felt obligated to give the/. community something to chew on in return for all that I've learned here.
Slashdot Mirror
Having worked at a financial institution I can say that you might be surprised to see how loosely some connections to vendors can be, much less partners or acquisitions. As much as I like to hope that ADP raises the bar, I've seen some rather terrifying things in the past in the way systems can be interconnected.
RSA, BofA, Citi, Lockheed, now ADP... it's getting really scary out there. I'm rapidly losing any faith in the security of my information, whether they actively or passively have my consent to store it.
Perhaps Microsoft used these equations in the latest version of Excel.
Think of the money that can be made opening schools to teach seeing-eye dogs to retrieve ducks, friends, friends of Vice Presidents...
Sadly, it is the customers that ultimately lose if CBS et al are removed from DishTV's programming. Dish will suffer next as there is an exodus to DTV or Comcast.
The comments here, at least those at the upper karma limit, seem awfully biased towards DishTV. Is Viacom raising their rate more than they're raising others? I couldn't find any information to that effect so I can't say that they are or they aren't, but it seems an important piece of the puzzle. At least in the heated MS/Linux threads you find people on both sides of the argument. Is this issue truly that lopsided?
Personally, I don't think that Viacom and other commercial-supported networks should be charging anything to be rebroadcast... but I think we all know that's not going to change anytime soon.
I believe it was version 4.1, round about '95, that had a beautiful "feature" in its mail application.
If you'd already deleted the contents of a users' mailbox at the file system, and then went to remove the user in the application the software would delete every file (but not subdir) in the C:\ root dir, after which it pruned ever file AND subdir one directory deep... lead to some fun tech support calls!
What a disaster... talk about poor QA!
Maybe someone will come out with "wireless usb" to confuse things further...
Sort of like DSL over satellites?
NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Episode II: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Force
What a great deal of sand in the face for Microsoft to learn of the open-source community banding together to secure the systems of the untrained, locking them down against participation in DDoS attacks and such. As if they don't already need a bulldozer to get the sand out of their faces with all the high-publicity IIS compromises of late. =)
Sure, some of us don't want something like this getting onto our systems as it demonstrates that we've not locked it down well enough to begin with. But for those who truly *can* stop it from exploiting known vulnerabilities, we obviously don't need it. However, I'd wager that well over 90% of the people using Linux don't know what to do to lock their systems down.
Bravo!
(that is, until someone finds out that this worm is actually doing something malicious while pretending to patch the system)
Xerox DocuShare
Can you imagine what it's like to try to aim like this? Try setting the FOV to 180 (I run 120) and see how much more difficult targeting is!
I am surprised that I haven't seen anyone suggest the idea that, although this would be a fantastic breakthrough for limited use, we're stepping back not moving forward.
// Save, Edit // Paste (all hail middle-click), etc. Speaking of middle-clicks, hooray for Netscape's "Open Link in New Window" functionality. Can you imagine the typical user (again, present company excluded) trying to learn these motions, or the simple concept behind it?
... and it's STILL not a given that either will work unless the software you're using is from the same vendor as the OS.
What prompted the idea for me was the concept that with only two gestures it's possible to represent over 48 different actions.
Don't get me wrong, let me preface by saying that I believe strongly that evolution is a good thing, but are we trying to do away with the keyboard or what?
I have watched users very closely over the past 10 years. What I have been very disappointed to notice is people's increased dependance on the mouse.
When I was a regular Windows user I would push my mouse off to the side once a month and navigate entirely with the keyboard. You'd be amazed at how quickly you learn keyboard shortcuts you didn't even know existed. I'm not saying that I was more productive that day... far from it... but I *was* more productive the other days as I didn't need to keep reaching for my mouse to perform common tasks.
Today I watch people use their mouse to position the cursor at the end of a highlighted string of text so they can backspace over the entire string. Slightly better, I'll watch someone use their mouse to re-highlight an already highlighted string of text and delete it. Both are indicators to me that most users (present company excluded) just don't get it!
Yes, it would be pretty cool, and perhaps even quite useful, to use a minimal set of gestures in a browser. Until the introduction of the tab key in IE (and Netscape shortly after) there was no way to navigate in a browser without the mouse and I've hated it. Lynx is the only tool you can use to browse w/o a mouse that I have tried, and it's painful. Otherwise, unless I want to put both hands on the keyboard to go back I'm forced to move my mouse to the top-left corner and click back, or right-click and select back. Either way it's annoying. This is where I think gestures make sense.
Where I don't think gestures make sense is ordinary tasks like File
How intuitive do most of you find console gaming? To start with, take *any* of the fighting games for N64, PS(2), or DC... do those key-combinations make the slightest sense to you at all? Sure, the basics do, but what about all the "special moves" you have to learn if you want to win a level? How often do special moves require flawless execution of 6 or directions/buttons? Even THPS2 has too many *assignable* combinations to ever use knowingly for all the different characters.
Now take that concept and apply it to all the separate applications in the Windows space. Every one of them is going to think their gestures should be different. Look how long it took to reach an acceptable standard for copy-n-paste... vs.
Take the concept and apply it to the KDE/Gnome war as well - no one is going to standardize on anything other than what they believe to be the best way to do it.
In closing, I'm all for limited gestures, it sounds like a really incredible concept, I just hope things don't get carried away to the point that people forget how to use their keyboards even more than they have now. A mouse is a wretched interface, although it provides some very useful assitance. Perhaps certain applications (web browsers for those who truly surf and do nothing productive) will benefit tremendously from this new paradigm, but for people who make a living on a computer there currently is no substitute for the keyboard. Unfortunately those same people are putting a roof over their heads by writing the software that the other 95% of the population uses and can probably continue to use by gestures alone. =(
I am surprised that I haven't seen anyone suggest the idea that, although this would be a fantastic breakthrough for limited use, we're stepping back not moving forward. What prompted the idea for me was the concept that with only two gestures it's possible to represent over 48 different actions. Don't get me wrong, let me preface by saying that I believe strongly that evolution is a good thing, but are we trying to do away with the keyboard or what? I have watched users very closely over the past 10 years. What I have been very disappointed to notice is people's increased dependance on the mouse. When I was a regular Windows user I would push my mouse off to the side once a month and navigate entirely with the keyboard. You'd be amazed at how quickly you learn keyboard shortcuts you didn't even know existed. I'm not saying that I was more productive that day... far from it... but I *was* more productive the other days as I didn't need to keep reaching for my mouse to perform common tasks. Today I watch people use their mouse to position the cursor at the end of a highlighted string of text so they can backspace over the entire string. Slightly better, I'll watch someone use their mouse to re-highlight an already highlighted string of text and delete it. Both are indicators to me that most users (present company excluded) just don't get it! Yes, it would be pretty cool, and perhaps even quite useful, to use a minimal set of gestures in a browser. Until the introduction of the tab key in IE (and Netscape shortly after) there was no way to navigate in a browser without the mouse and I've hated it. Lynx is the only tool you can use to browse w/o a mouse that I have tried, and it's painful. Otherwise, unless I want to put both hands on the keyboard to go back I'm forced to move my mouse to the top-left corner and click back, or right-click and select back. Either way it's annoying. This is where I think gestures make sense. Where I don't think gestures make sense is ordinary tasks like File // Save, Edit // Paste (all hail middle-click), etc. Speaking of middle-clicks, hooray for Netscape's "Open Link in New Window" functionality. Can you imagine the typical user (again, present company excluded) trying to learn these motions, or the simple concept behind it?
How intuitive do most of you find console gaming? To start with, take *any* of the fighting games for N64, PS(2), or DC... do those key-combinations make the slightest sense to you at all? Sure, the basics do, but what about all the "special moves" you have to learn if you want to win a level? How often do special moves require flawless execution of 6 or directions/buttons? Even THPS2 has too many *assignable* combinations to ever use knowingly for all the different characters.
Now take that concept and apply it to all the separate applications in the Windows space. Every one of them is going to think their gestures should be different. Look how long it took to reach an acceptable standard for copy-n-paste... vs. ... and it's STILL not a given that either will work unless the software you're using is from the same vendor as the OS.
Take the concept and apply it to the KDE/Gnome war as well - no one is going to standardize on anything other than what they believe to be the best way to do it.
In closing, I'm all for limited gestures, it sounds like a really incredible concept, I just hope things don't get carried away to the point that people forget how to use their keyboards even more than they have now. A mouse is a wretched interface, although it provides some very useful assitance. Perhaps certain applications (web browsers for those who truly surf and do nothing productive) will benefit tremendously from this new paradigm, but for people who make a living on a computer there currently is no substitute for the keyboard. Unfortunately those same people are putting a roof over their heads by writing the software that the other 95% of the population uses and can probably continue to use by gestures alone. =(
Let's not forget how that battle ended... DirecTV came out on top with the hackers reading 'GAMEOVER' on their ROMs.
Although they may never have released them (I worked there - I used them), they had Linux and Solaris (SGI as well, IIRC) clients and servers that did pretty well.
Last I know the only place you ever saw their software in use was on the pr0n sites. Their VDOPhone was a real popular one for "live interaction" with remote floosies. Sure enough, a search at Yahoo turns up mostly adult sites, and their website (VDOnet.com) is now being held by Register.com.
Perhaps it was poor business decisions that put them under, or maybe it was the client list, but that company had some real promise and was pretty dedicated to supporting multi-platform clients and servers.
I'm under the impression that our friends in Seattle have already made progress toward this end. Although they've yet to directly attach the event to the trigger, Windows sure does seem to break often enough to convince me they're trying!
There is no single word to make a white male's jaw drop. However, there are certain phrases that are virutally guaranteed to generate dramatic responses...
While I'm not ready to rush out and install the software as I rarely use VMware these days, I have to say that the ability to toggle between a Linux and Win4Lin desktop in full-screen mode does sound tempting... the claim of lower resource consumption sounds nice too.
...and kudos to LMN for a clean implementation of SlashCode!
Can you imagine what this is going to do to the laptop market? How do they expect to offer a P4 laptop when it requires a 1 pound heat sink? I'm having flashbacks to the "lunchbox" portables!
Decide.com is pretty damn impressive, IMHO. I used them to validate that my choice, GTE, was the best in the area. The audio playback of particular services compared against each other at specific locations (find one near home, near work, and along the way) was a big win. I haven't taken the time to check the others, but I'll have try them out sometime soon.
Their reviews of phones is pretty useful as well. Although I was convinced that the "Thin Phone" should be pretty awesome based on their reviews, I can't bring myself to ditch the StarTac I've had for the last year and a half after having actually tried it.
$0.02
Oh man, talk about memories... NewWave was incredible.
...the other is an expression used by somebody who wants to get his poitn across, and doesn't care to much what people think about his vocabulary
AK-47. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.. accept no substitutes.
It's sad, no doubt. But isn't it odd that they just introduced John Cleese as his successor? That, and the sly "getaway" as he descended from Bond's presence. Coincidence?
(Planting the conspiracy theory seed early)
We've just spent 2 weeks at my office researching the different solutions available to us for implementing the most reliable and scalable solution available today. Our needs differ a bit from yours as we're looking to put many machines on a network for load-distribution yet they all need to speak to the same data on a single repository. This holy grail is know as a SAN, or Storage Area Network.
/. community something to chew on in return for all that I've learned here.
Our solution is going to be a single cabinet RAID (level 5 for accessing smaller files) with a "hot spare" that will rebuild a crashed disk on the fly. This being a standard cabinet we'll have 8 disks, of which the capacity of 6 will be data (one parity (term used loosely as parity is striped on RAID-5), and one spare).
The disks are Seagate's 10,000 RPM Cheetahs, the most commonly recommended units among all the vendors we've talked to, and the controller is a multi-channel u2w with fibre interface to a Q-Logic PCI adapter.
The total system is going to run just over $15,000. This sounds like a lot, but pricing lower end systems isn't too much cheaper and you'll never get 24-hour turnaround on failed parts (if they're even available). This seems like overkill for a single system, but by adding a fibre hub later we can use the single system for many many machines once a file controller (dedicated machine) is put into place.
The beauty of SAN is that it operates much like FTP, with a control and a data connection. The control connection occurs over your existing LAN, and the data is transmitted directly over the fibre channel (max rate of 100 MB/s).
Other NAS (Network Accessible Storage) models are somewhat cheaper to implement, but performance can never match the fibre as the "control" and "data" connections (NFS or SMB) both transmit across your network.
I apologize for digressing from the straight RAID topic, but I felt obligated to give the
-Steve