Stupid and stubborn - stupid and stubborn people people don't need the latest gizmo when something simpler will do the job. They would still be using C64's but can't get them repaired so they might try LInux.
I fail to see the logic of this statement. Failure to upgrade to every latest, greatest technology makes one stupid and stubborn? I would actually classify these users as 'intelligent and practical'. Somebody who writes their thesis in edlin is stupid and stubborn, but what about somebody who writes their thesis (or a business plan, or SOPs.... etc) with TeX or troff is not neccesserily stupid nor stubborn, even though they're certainly not using the latest gizmo.
I beg to differ on this one. While yes, it's true that a "good" 5.1 system will sound better than an equal 2 channel system, almost nobody on the planet owns a 5.1 system which could be qualified as "good". I own a good two channel + sub system (Kef Model 4 speakers, and a Velodyne HGS 12 sub, powered by a B&K ST3030 amp) which I will gladly compare to almost anybody's 5.1 system.
The "lots of speakers everywhere" theory is overrated, most people would be better served investing their money in 2 good channels than spreading it out and ending up with 5 mediocre ones.
As for how to get decent sound out of your computer? simple, a soundcard with a digital output, in my case running in a very strange manner into the digital inputs of my wadia 850 which I use as an external DAC.
check under the APM options, if you're doing a make menuconfig it will have an option of 'power off computer on shutdown' or something similar to that. As long as your M/B supports it, the machine does magically turn off on shutdown then.
A little while back Rob kindly provided us with a slashbox entitled 'slashdot stats' or something similar to that which gives hits/hr for previous 24 hours, loadavg and uptime. Keep up the great work Taco and Hemos.
I'm not a patent lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but after reading the entire patent it seems to me that they're patenting having a link from a given web server to a sepearte "page server" which is in effect any database driven web server.
If this is correct, then if I included something like a reference to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/24/042123 3&mode=nested on my personal website, I would be infringing on this patent.
Fortunately this is unenforceable, I just hope that the companies who have received said nasty latters from said lawyers realize that said company is a fine example of abuse of the said patent system and nothing truly threatening.
I actually have a pocket abacus... it's incredibly novel to break out the abacus while everyone else is reaching for their high-end TI/HP (of course I owned a calculator too... but anybody who has ever had a college math class that had the 'scientific calculator or less' rule knows that you don't need them 90% of the time)
I fully agree that experience is a neccessity, our HR manager won't let an IT applicant through if all they have is a 4 year degree, or even a masters because they mean nothing in the real world. However, books are neccessary. I can try by doing while hacking a sendmail.cf, or I could read the sendmail book cover to cover and fully understand what I'm doing when I start trying. The second approach gives much more predictable results. Learning by experience is great, but it's a recipe for disaster in a production environment. Try giving the 'books are unneccessary' speech when the cost of downtime on your systems starts being measured in thosands of dollars per second.
While cable has spiraled up in some areas, I really suggest www.directv.com as an alternative. No, it's not going to offer cable modem, but when compared to my local cable service it offered more channels, better picture and sound for the same price. easy decision.
Kevin Mitnick made personal copies of a whole lot of closed source code without permission.
Was this right, legal or ethical? of course not, but this does not mean that the damages are equal to the cost of the development, unless of course he had destroyed all the working copies of the source code or had sold it to an unscrupulous competitor who somehow managed to clone the software and release it without anybody realizing that it's identical.
Personally I think the companies should have to pick one side or another. Either they took a major loss, which should be accountable to the SEC and be able to be listed in their financials, or they didn't.
>We need reassurance from Red Hat which they >not become another Microsoft. Assurance in their >actions will not contradict the OSS model. >Assurance that their influence in the commercial >markets will be beneficial for both the >commercial and linux communities.
Actions speak louder than words, and RedHat's actions have done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that they are going to become another Microsoft, that they will violate the spirit of OSS, or that they are jeapordizing the relationship between the commercial and linux communities.
RedHat sponsors massive numbers of coders who write nothing but GPL'd code, they take care of getting Linux noticed in good ways by the press.
They made RPM which (not starting a deb v rpm war) is a viable and effective method of software distribution. In fact during a recent presentation on Microsoft SMS 2.0, Windows 2000, and DLL Hell, a consultee of mine turned to me and asked 'so basically Microsoft is claiming that in a few years, their DLL management will be as good as RedHat has today?'
I'd LOVE to hear a well-reasoned writeup on why RedHat is bad and should be trashed though. SysV init scripts, RPM package management, and one of the more overlooked advantages, wide installed base means it's more likely somebody else ran into the bug you're experiencing.
Drinking and driving is an unfair comparison to popping an E. While it is true that an "inexperienced" individual could make rational decisions about the intelligence of either act, somebody who snorts coke, or drops E does not cause second-hand effects to others, and does not risk the obvious catastrophes associated with drinking and driving.
I'd elaborate, but I've had this window open that I'm sure somebody else already has:-)
Simple applications such as word processing and spreadsheets? Suddenly I'm wondering if these 'simple' applications might be free, why in heavens do the microsoft versions cost close to $300USD per app? And why do I need 64 megs of ram to even consider running office and NT?
I often wish we could go back to the good old days, when the press ignored us and it was exciting to see the word Linux in print.
As for the viability of open source software, history has proven it again and again, and it has also proven that you can say white is black but eventually the people that matter while realize that white is white.
I think this article affirms that the most important part of college, with respect to the IT industry especially, is the emphasis on the learning process. I believe that college is useful (thus the reason I plan to someday finish the degree I started before I dropped out and became a sysadmin ), but not for the common reason. The experience I gained while studying chinese lang & lit is more useful in my everyday work than my IS related classes were, because it was learning a new way to look at things and an indirect emphasis on how to learn.
College is useful for learning other perspectives, be they language, art, music or interior design related, as long as the student studied the process of how to create music or whatever, not just rote memorization of the traits thereof.
The trouble of non-technical technical articles
on
WSJ Says Linux Lags
·
· Score: 1
The article makes some interesting assertations and provides some good constructive criticism, but unfortunately the criticism was dumbed-down to the point of creating misinformation about what Linux CAN do properly.
They mentioned logging capabilities, and to that I assume that they are referring to a journaling file system, or audit trails, both of which truly are missing on Linux. The trouble with the assertation was that it was too broad, and I believe this stems from an attempt to write about a technical subject to a non-technical audiance. The average WSJ reader doesn't know or care what an audit trail is, or what a journaling filesystem is and why you'd want one. The author's solution was to simplify to the point of PHB understandability. Unfortunately this led to an article that gave the impression that Linux has NO logging abilities, something that would petrify any reasonably responsible executive.
The SMP allegation is a bit trickier for me to understand. I would presume the author was referring to big-iron 64 and 128 processor type scalability, however this article also implies that it lacks even 2 or 4 way scalability, and implies that NT has greater scalability.
I'm not sure how best to respond, I wrote a paper letter to the WSJ since I'm a subscriber to the print edition outlining my concerns with the article and the possibility that there was some misunderstandings due to the technical nature of the article. Hopefully things like this will eventually disappera.
The most important thing is to keep focus. Write code. If you can't write code, test code. If you can't test code, write documentation. Just fine something, even the smalles thing, and do it. Anything we do to work on improving Linux and the related applications will solve many more problems than explaining to reporters the errors of their ways.
You're quite correct... had I taken a moment to proofread my submission I would've realized that I had forgotten the word probably in the sentence which was supposed to read 'More important, in my estimation, than even Oracle, Sybase, etc... though it probably would've been impossible without them.
What I meant to imply was that without other "enterprise" products coming to market it would seem unlikely for SAP to port their suite.
Thank you for clarifying that quite nicely!
I doubt the implied SUSE conspiracy, SAP is huge.
on
SAP invests in Red Hat
·
· Score: 3
SAP, though many of you have not heard of it, is most likely the world's leading ERP software dealer. Many companies have hundred-million dollar contracts regarding SAP, this is an important milestone. More important, in my estimation, than even Oracle, Sybase, etc... though it would've been impossible without them.
Something interesting to note at the moment is the mirroring of the current debates about linux on the desktop with debates about linux as a server about 3 years ago. The arguments are the same, the logic is the same. While I believe it's only a matter of time until Linux lights a fire on the desktop, I believe that our previous focuses, the ones about improving the system, debugging it, and attempting to make the most configurable, robust and stable system will take us even further.
Thank you, SAP, for making an honest evaluation and coming to the obvious (to most slashdotters anyway) conclusions regarding Linux's viability as an enterprise class operating system.
Personally I have to think that these are perhaps the most short-sighted students on the planet, and I'm not worried about it becoming a trend even if they somehow manage to win. Students like these are looking for one thing, a piece of paper and a good GPA so they can get a job.
Employers however are much more interested in honesty, trustworthiness and the all important factor of the likeliness of a candidate to sue them frivolously. Actions like this show that a person is likely to abuse any given system, show a lack of work ethic and any number of other negative qualities. I'd much rather find an F on an employee's record than a lawsuit regarding an F.
Perhaps you could devise a system where in addition to moderated points, each author's post average would be tallied and a top X could be created with decreasing order by moderated points secondarily sorted by average moderated post for the author, that way the 2 point message from a person who averages 2.3points/post ranks higher than the 2 point message from the person who averages 0.6.
I rather like this new moderation system though, makes the comments quite readable again.
I'm currently failing to see why I'd want to do this though... I can't even imagine how fast I'd go through toner if fax spammers no longer had to pay for their phone calls. Interesting idea, but I'd have to pop myself into the naysayer category.
actually, to become an MCSE, you have to pass SIX pathetically easy exams. (okay, they aren't all easy... for instance I know of more than one CCIE who can't pass TCP/IP just because they keep forgetting that 'can't do that' means 'can't do that with microsoft prodcuts'.
As for certification, well, I got my CLA at digitalmetrics.com just for kicks (for $15, how wrong can you go?) and I'll wait and see what else appears that seems worthwhile.
from what i understand rpm was originally just a few perl scripts that existed long before Red Hat the company existed, and it just sort of evolved from there. I don't think it was ever a malicious or most likely even a conscious decision not to use deb's, probably just a natural evolution.
Conceived as a computing champion, Microsoft Inc got it's hand bit battling unstoppable moves by the likes of RedHat Software Inc., Linux Torvalds, and a bored doctoral student who is currently working on some of the Linux kernel for "fun". Now it may be borrowing a page straight from North Carolina.
Indeed, with NT garnering decreased credibility and various Linux distributions growing at a rate of 212% last year, the Redmond vendor suddenly finds itself the unintended target of an exploding industry. And Microsoft is using every bit of its current market lead to push its alternative operating system into a dominant position.
Smart business move? Possibly. But some critics, such as the United States Department of Justice, contend that Microsoft's business practices, under CEO William Gates, are becoming heavy-handed and bad for the entire computing industry.
Most controversial, perhaps, is the company's new plan to fix bugs and respond to consumer problems, while 3rd party efforts to make revenue off of the open-source inspired idea are in the hopper. Further flustering the hornet's nest is Microsoft's unenthusiastic reception of any standards, including POSIX above v1, X-windows, kerberos, CODA, IPv6, and it's unwillingness to accept RedHat's challenge of becoming profitable and dominent while selling what is basically a commodity product.
It's ironic that the company which claims to be the market leader is not supporting well-known standards properly.
While the DOJ and numerous other companies are involved with lawsuits against the Redmond based giant, it's clear that Microsoft is no longer the chummy place it used to.... oh wait... never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see the logic of this statement. Failure to upgrade to every latest, greatest technology makes one stupid and stubborn? I would actually classify these users as 'intelligent and practical'. Somebody who writes their thesis in edlin is stupid and stubborn, but what about somebody who writes their thesis (or a business plan, or SOPs.... etc) with TeX or troff is not neccesserily stupid nor stubborn, even though they're certainly not using the latest gizmo.
I beg to differ on this one. While yes, it's true that a "good" 5.1 system will sound better than an equal 2 channel system, almost nobody on the planet owns a 5.1 system which could be qualified as "good". I own a good two channel + sub system (Kef Model 4 speakers, and a Velodyne HGS 12 sub, powered by a B&K ST3030 amp) which I will gladly compare to almost anybody's 5.1 system.
The "lots of speakers everywhere" theory is overrated, most people would be better served investing their money in 2 good channels than spreading it out and ending up with 5 mediocre ones.
As for how to get decent sound out of your computer? simple, a soundcard with a digital output, in my case running in a very strange manner into the digital inputs of my wadia 850 which I use as an external DAC.
check under the APM options, if you're doing a make menuconfig it will have an option of 'power off computer on shutdown' or something similar to that. As long as your M/B supports it, the machine does magically turn off on shutdown then.
A little while back Rob kindly provided us with a slashbox entitled 'slashdot stats' or something similar to that which gives hits/hr for previous 24 hours, loadavg and uptime. Keep up the great work Taco and Hemos.
I'm not a patent lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but after reading the entire patent it seems to me that they're patenting having a link from a given web server to a sepearte "page server" which is in effect any database driven web server.
3 3&mode=nested on my personal website, I would be infringing on this patent.
If this is correct, then if I included something like a reference to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/05/24/04212
Fortunately this is unenforceable, I just hope that the companies who have received said nasty latters from said lawyers realize that said company is a fine example of abuse of the said patent system and nothing truly threatening.
I actually have a pocket abacus... it's incredibly novel to break out the abacus while everyone else is reaching for their high-end TI/HP (of course I owned a calculator too... but anybody who has ever had a college math class that had the 'scientific calculator or less' rule knows that you don't need them 90% of the time)
Isn't it more than a bit ironic for an Anonymous Coward to ask for credentials?
My $0.02.
I fully agree that experience is a neccessity, our HR manager won't let an IT applicant through if all they have is a 4 year degree, or even a masters because they mean nothing in the real world. However, books are neccessary. I can try by doing while hacking a sendmail.cf, or I could read the sendmail book cover to cover and fully understand what I'm doing when I start trying. The second approach gives much more predictable results. Learning by experience is great, but it's a recipe for disaster in a production environment. Try giving the 'books are unneccessary' speech when the cost of downtime on your systems starts being measured in thosands of dollars per second.
While cable has spiraled up in some areas, I really suggest www.directv.com as an alternative. No, it's not going to offer cable modem, but when compared to my local cable service it offered more channels, better picture and sound for the same price. easy decision.
no, that's cyber-warfare :-)
Kevin Mitnick made personal copies of a whole lot of closed source code without permission.
Was this right, legal or ethical? of course not, but this does not mean that the damages are equal to the cost of the development, unless of course he had destroyed all the working copies of the source code or had sold it to an unscrupulous competitor who somehow managed to clone the software and release it without anybody realizing that it's identical.
Personally I think the companies should have to pick one side or another. Either they took a major loss, which should be accountable to the SEC and be able to be listed in their financials, or they didn't.
You can't be half pregnant.
satire.
:-)
looks like somebody got their revenge for the 'every site in the world got simultaneously sued and taken off-line' april fools joke.
>We need reassurance from Red Hat which they
>not become another Microsoft. Assurance in their
>actions will not contradict the OSS model.
>Assurance that their influence in the commercial
>markets will be beneficial for both the
>commercial and linux communities.
Actions speak louder than words, and RedHat's actions have done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that they are going to become another Microsoft, that they will violate the spirit of OSS, or that they are jeapordizing the relationship between the commercial and linux communities.
RedHat sponsors massive numbers of coders who write nothing but GPL'd code, they take care of getting Linux noticed in good ways by the press.
They made RPM which (not starting a deb v rpm war) is a viable and effective method of software distribution. In fact during a recent presentation on Microsoft SMS 2.0, Windows 2000, and DLL Hell, a consultee of mine turned to me and asked 'so basically Microsoft is claiming that in a few years, their DLL management will be as good as RedHat has today?'
I'd LOVE to hear a well-reasoned writeup on why RedHat is bad and should be trashed though. SysV init scripts, RPM package management, and one of the more overlooked advantages, wide installed base means it's more likely somebody else ran into the bug you're experiencing.
Drinking and driving is an unfair comparison to popping an E. While it is true that an "inexperienced" individual could make rational decisions about the intelligence of either act, somebody who snorts coke, or drops E does not cause second-hand effects to others, and does not risk the obvious catastrophes associated with drinking and driving.
:-)
I'd elaborate, but I've had this window open that I'm sure somebody else already has
Simple applications such as word processing and spreadsheets? Suddenly I'm wondering if these 'simple' applications might be free, why in heavens do the microsoft versions cost close to $300USD per app? And why do I need 64 megs of ram to even consider running office and NT?
I often wish we could go back to the good old days, when the press ignored us and it was exciting to see the word Linux in print.
As for the viability of open source software, history has proven it again and again, and it has also proven that you can say white is black but eventually the people that matter while realize that white is white.
Ignore the borg.
I think this article affirms that the most important part of college, with respect to the IT industry especially, is the emphasis on the learning process. I believe that college is useful (thus the reason I plan to someday finish the degree I started before I dropped out and became a sysadmin ), but not for the common reason. The experience I gained while studying chinese lang & lit is more useful in my everyday work than my IS related classes were, because it was learning a new way to look at things and an indirect emphasis on how to learn.
College is useful for learning other perspectives, be they language, art, music or interior design related, as long as the student studied the process of how to create music or whatever, not just rote memorization of the traits thereof.
The article makes some interesting assertations and provides some good constructive criticism, but unfortunately the criticism was dumbed-down to the point of creating misinformation about what Linux CAN do properly.
They mentioned logging capabilities, and to that I assume that they are referring to a journaling file system, or audit trails, both of which truly are missing on Linux. The trouble with the assertation was that it was too broad, and I believe this stems from an attempt to write about a technical subject to a non-technical audiance. The average WSJ reader doesn't know or care what an audit trail is, or what a journaling filesystem is and why you'd want one. The author's solution was to simplify to the point of PHB understandability. Unfortunately this led to an article that gave the impression that Linux has NO logging abilities, something that would petrify any reasonably responsible executive.
The SMP allegation is a bit trickier for me to understand. I would presume the author was referring to big-iron 64 and 128 processor type scalability, however this article also implies that it lacks even 2 or 4 way scalability, and implies that NT has greater scalability.
I'm not sure how best to respond, I wrote a paper letter to the WSJ since I'm a subscriber to the print edition outlining my concerns with the article and the possibility that there was some misunderstandings due to the technical nature of the article. Hopefully things like this will eventually disappera.
The most important thing is to keep focus. Write code. If you can't write code, test code. If you can't test code, write documentation. Just fine something, even the smalles thing, and do it. Anything we do to work on improving Linux and the related applications will solve many more problems than explaining to reporters the errors of their ways.
What I meant to imply was that without other "enterprise" products coming to market it would seem unlikely for SAP to port their suite.
Thank you for clarifying that quite nicely!
SAP, though many of you have not heard of it, is most likely the world's leading ERP software dealer. Many companies have hundred-million dollar contracts regarding SAP, this is an important milestone. More important, in my estimation, than even Oracle, Sybase, etc... though it would've been impossible without them.
Something interesting to note at the moment is the mirroring of the current debates about linux on the desktop with debates about linux as a server about 3 years ago. The arguments are the same, the logic is the same. While I believe it's only a matter of time until Linux lights a fire on the desktop, I believe that our previous focuses, the ones about improving the system, debugging it, and attempting to make the most configurable, robust and stable system will take us even further.
Thank you, SAP, for making an honest evaluation and coming to the obvious (to most slashdotters anyway) conclusions regarding Linux's viability as an enterprise class operating system.
Personally I have to think that these are perhaps the most short-sighted students on the planet, and I'm not worried about it becoming a trend even if they somehow manage to win. Students like these are looking for one thing, a piece of paper and a good GPA so they can get a job.
Employers however are much more interested in honesty, trustworthiness and the all important factor of the likeliness of a candidate to sue them frivolously. Actions like this show that a person is likely to abuse any given system, show a lack of work ethic and any number of other negative qualities. I'd much rather find an F on an employee's record than a lawsuit regarding an F.
Perhaps you could devise a system where in addition to moderated points, each author's post average would be tallied and a top X could be created with decreasing order by moderated points secondarily sorted by average moderated post for the author, that way the 2 point message from a person who averages 2.3points/post ranks higher than the 2 point message from the person who averages 0.6.
I rather like this new moderation system though, makes the comments quite readable again.
You might not be aware, but one can already print to an HP Jet Direct as a BSD style lp queue.
/etc/printcap for an hp laserjet on a jetdirect:
:lp=/dev/null2:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp0:\
:lf=/var/log/HPspooler:\
:rm=10.0.0.87:\
:rp=raw:
Here's the
hplaser|lp0:\
I'm currently failing to see why I'd want to do this though... I can't even imagine how fast I'd go through toner if fax spammers no longer had to pay for their phone calls. Interesting idea, but I'd have to pop myself into the naysayer category.
actually, to become an MCSE, you have to pass SIX pathetically easy exams. (okay, they aren't all easy... for instance I know of more than one CCIE who can't pass TCP/IP just because they keep forgetting that 'can't do that' means 'can't do that with microsoft prodcuts'.
As for certification, well, I got my CLA at digitalmetrics.com just for kicks (for $15, how wrong can you go?) and I'll wait and see what else appears that seems worthwhile.
from what i understand rpm was originally just a few perl scripts that existed long before Red Hat the company existed, and it just sort of evolved from there. I don't think it was ever a malicious or most likely even a conscious decision not to use deb's, probably just a natural evolution.
Conceived as a computing champion, Microsoft Inc got it's hand bit battling unstoppable moves by the likes of RedHat Software Inc., Linux Torvalds, and a bored doctoral student who is currently working on some of the Linux kernel for "fun". Now it may be borrowing a page straight from North Carolina.
Indeed, with NT garnering decreased credibility and various Linux distributions growing at a rate of 212% last year, the Redmond vendor suddenly finds itself the unintended target of an exploding industry. And Microsoft is using every bit of its current market lead to push its alternative operating system into a dominant position.
Smart business move? Possibly. But some critics, such as the United States Department of Justice, contend that Microsoft's business practices, under CEO William Gates, are becoming heavy-handed and bad for the entire computing industry.
Most controversial, perhaps, is the company's new plan to fix bugs and respond to consumer problems, while 3rd party efforts to make revenue off of the open-source inspired idea are in the hopper. Further flustering the hornet's nest is Microsoft's unenthusiastic reception of any standards, including POSIX above v1, X-windows, kerberos, CODA, IPv6, and it's unwillingness to accept RedHat's challenge of becoming profitable and dominent while selling what is basically a commodity product.
It's ironic that the company which claims to be the market leader is not supporting well-known standards properly.
While the DOJ and numerous other companies are involved with lawsuits against the Redmond based giant, it's clear that Microsoft is no longer the chummy place it used to.... oh wait... never mind.