that's not true in all cases though. check the Windows EULA - you may think you bought your copy of Windows but all you did was buy the license to use it. the software still belongs to Bill.
i'm reminded of the kid who asked Bill to sign his copy of MS Office or something and Bill refused saying it belonged to him (Bill) and this guy didn't have the right to deface it.
i imagine this is the case with lots of other stuff too..
Agreed. Censorship (if you want to call it that) should be the responsibility of individuals. I.E. if we are concerned with what our children are being exposed to via movies, it's better that we "take matters into our own hands" in this way rather than abdicating responsibility and letting the state decide what is acceptable and what is not.
When I first heard about bluetooth a good few years ago, it was billed as not just the end of wires but the end of the bulky cellphone handset.
The sales pitch described how you'd be able to leave your phone in your hotel room and take calls via the wireless headset while sat in the bar downstairs. Sounded great. Trouble was, it took much longer to get any product to market and when they did, it was expensive and the functionality was pretty flawed.
Just like WAP, the marketeers told a great story and just like WAP, the reality was pretty disappointing...
It's very likely given that they owned the code in the 80's. The (very) abridged history goes something like this.. Micro$oft licensed Unix from AT&T and produced Xenix - a Unix-based OS for a variety of platforms including x86.
Over time, this ended up in the hands of SCO. When you log onto a SCO Openserver box, the following is displayed:
SCO OpenServer(TM) Release 5 (C) 1976-1998 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (C) 1980-1994 Microsoft Corporation All Rights reserved
So one school of thought could definitely suggest that M$ are covering their own backs by licensing "borrowed code" they've been using for the last 20 years.
However, what they have to fear from SCO I can't imagine.
Here's another interesting link re: Stephenson. Real vintage stuff from '94. It's an interview/transcript prior to the release of Diamond Age. Back when Wired Magazine's web outlet was called "hotwired".... http://hotwired.lycos.com/talk/clu b/special/transc ripts/95-01-19.stephenson.html
The idea of a Snow Crash movie has already been mooted. IMO, it's not necessarily the best Stephenson book but its probably the most filmable (and, as the most -obvious- the most likely to do well commercially.
For a previous/. article, read: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/22/157249.shtml
So what if you want to change your default gateway, your WINS server address or completely change your addressing scheme because you're linking with another network or something?
I guess you're right - only a lazy sysadm wouldn't want to visit 3000 desktops and reconfigure them manually!
And with regard to broadcast - fire up Ethereal (www.ethereal.com) and see how little DHCP clags your network compared to Netbios! Oh, you can't cos you're running static IPs! Good for you and your protestant work ethic!;)
Unfortunately, the only way that Linux will have a chance to take greater market share in the desktop or server arenas is through consolidation.
There are simply too many different flavours out there and this causes the problem of limited takeup beyond die-hard Linux users and the wider problem of quality.
As someone else on/. said recently, too much free software (whether different distros of Linux or office suites or whatever) can be a bad thing for quality. Paraphrasing, you can probably download 10 different programs that do A-B-C functionality. But none of them do it 100%.
In any other movement/"industry", there are periods of rapid growth followed by consolidation. Some might say this is when monopolies form - look at the motor industry or telecoms or computing. There used to be dozens of players in each field but this has shrunk down to a handful.
So - what's more important, diversity or quality? Only one of these will lead to greater adoption in the mainstream...
Call this flamebait but... I think you guys don't appreciate the value of language diversity. When languages die, stuff dies with them. Beyond just cultural reference points. You couldn't possibly take a language spoken by some isolated tribe and convert it word-for-word into English. Things would be lost. Just like there's stuff you can do in COBOL but not in C and vice versa.
It's only through knowing these rare, dying languages that scientists have been able to talk to indigenous people and discover so-called wonder drugs in remote jungles etc.
IANAL (that's L for Linguist) but I know that diversity is a good thing. If we all spoke English, well, damn that would be like if we all used Windows.
You're right in that today's infrastructure isn't made for chuffing massive, hard-drive-sized hunks of data back and forth.
But what about incremental backups?
OK so you've got to get your base image uploaded -somehow- but after that, data changes very little on a daily basis and this level of data transfer to some secure backup repository won't be a problem at all with current bandwidth.
Privacy issues aside, the concept of gathering as much information as possible in an attempt to gain intelligence to prevent acts of terrorism is fundamentally flawed.
Post 9/11, it transpired that we, the supposed forces of good, had intercepted messages between "them", the forces of bad, that would have tipped us of. The trouble was that by the time the messages had been processed, decoded, translated, it was 9/12.
Put simply, we can gather the data, and we do. But we don't have the necessary "human bandwidth" to turn it into usable information within a reasonable timeframe.
Does anyone else find it kind of telling that an article on X-Box posted at 02:47 has 106 replies whereas one about weddings posted three hours earlier only has 22?????
We geeks need to do more procreating or we'll just die out!!!
That's right. Don't just choose a product based on how many other people use it - if everyone did that, it'd be a very boring world.
fyi, I have a >20GB Interbase DB...
So, according to the press release, they're saying you can lower cost of ownership by putting all the gubbins for your PCs in the computer room and just have I/O on the desk.
Have they heard of CITRIX??
I don't know about the others but InterBase is definitely ready for production use!
I've been using IB for the last five years in a car rental company in UK. We have 120 rental locations with a SCO server at each running InterBase. Each site has between 2 and 30 users.
We couldn't run our business without InterBase!
Reasons we chose it:
1. ANSI 92 Compliant and supports transactions and triggers (and event alerters which are good)
2. Native drivers and ODBC
3. JDBC, direct API and E/SQL (precomilers supplied)
4. It's pretty fast (if used properly)
5. Optimistic locking/versioning means its very forgiving for developers and also good for performance
6. Virtually ZERO maintenance - just do a backup and restore once in a while - our DBAs don't know it's there (good job as they spend most time firefighting/nursing the central Sybase and Oracle!)
7. It's multi platform - we use it on SCO, Solaris (sparc) and Linux (dev only right now)
8. It scales well - we also have a >20GB data mart in Interbase
9. It's small (freakin small). We install it onto our SCO servers off TWO FLOPPYS!
10. arent nine reasons enough?
Basically, it's rock solid, very flexible and hassle-free.
Like I said, our business couldn't do without it (and we're the no1 car rental company in UK).
Check it out at interbase2000.org.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you man.
....?
This argument is as old as geekdom itself. Ooh, should I buy a now or wait another few months and buy
It's the nature of the beast. You have to suck it up and just buy or else you procrastinate forever.
Blame Moore's law or something.....
.."Workout the task without noisy PC" and whats more, it comes with "New life style".
Where do I sign up??
that's not true in all cases though. check the Windows EULA - you may think you bought your copy of Windows but all you did was buy the license to use it. the software still belongs to Bill.
i'm reminded of the kid who asked Bill to sign his copy of MS Office or something and Bill refused saying it belonged to him (Bill) and this guy didn't have the right to deface it.
i imagine this is the case with lots of other stuff too..
Agreed. Censorship (if you want to call it that) should be the responsibility of individuals. I.E. if we are concerned with what our children are being exposed to via movies, it's better that we "take matters into our own hands" in this way rather than abdicating responsibility and letting the state decide what is acceptable and what is not.
I'm not interested till it can do Ogg Vorbis!!
..when it comes to separating the men from the boys is of course VI. :wq
When I first heard about bluetooth a good few years ago, it was billed as not just the end of wires but the end of the bulky cellphone handset.
The sales pitch described how you'd be able to leave your phone in your hotel room and take calls via the wireless headset while sat in the bar downstairs. Sounded great. Trouble was, it took much longer to get any product to market and when they did, it was expensive and the functionality was pretty flawed.
Just like WAP, the marketeers told a great story and just like WAP, the reality was pretty disappointing...
It's very likely given that they owned the code in the 80's. The (very) abridged history goes something like this.. Micro$oft licensed Unix from AT&T and produced Xenix - a Unix-based OS for a variety of platforms including x86.
Over time, this ended up in the hands of SCO. When you log onto a SCO Openserver box, the following is displayed:
SCO OpenServer(TM) Release 5
(C) 1976-1998 The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
(C) 1980-1994 Microsoft Corporation
All Rights reserved
So one school of thought could definitely suggest that M$ are covering their own backs by licensing "borrowed code" they've been using for the last 20 years.
However, what they have to fear from SCO I can't imagine.
Here's another interesting link re: Stephenson. Real vintage stuff from '94. It's an interview/transcript prior to the release of Diamond Age. Back when Wired Magazine's web outlet was called "hotwired"....u b/special/transc ripts/95-01-19.stephenson.html
http://hotwired.lycos.com/talk/cl
The idea of a Snow Crash movie has already been mooted. IMO, it's not necessarily the best Stephenson book but its probably the most filmable (and, as the most -obvious- the most likely to do well commercially.
/. article, read: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/22/157249.shtml
For a previous
Heh heh - you're a funny guy.
;)
So what if you want to change your default gateway, your WINS server address or completely change your addressing scheme because you're linking with another network or something?
I guess you're right - only a lazy sysadm wouldn't want to visit 3000 desktops and reconfigure them manually!
And with regard to broadcast - fire up Ethereal (www.ethereal.com) and see how little DHCP clags your network compared to Netbios! Oh, you can't cos you're running static IPs! Good for you and your protestant work ethic!
Unfortunately, the only way that Linux will have a chance to take greater market share in the desktop or server arenas is through consolidation.
/. said recently, too much free software (whether different distros of Linux or office suites or whatever) can be a bad thing for quality. Paraphrasing, you can probably download 10 different programs that do A-B-C functionality. But none of them do it 100%.
There are simply too many different flavours out there and this causes the problem of limited takeup beyond die-hard Linux users and the wider problem of quality.
As someone else on
In any other movement/"industry", there are periods of rapid growth followed by consolidation. Some might say this is when monopolies form - look at the motor industry or telecoms or computing. There used to be dozens of players in each field but this has shrunk down to a handful.
So - what's more important, diversity or quality? Only one of these will lead to greater adoption in the mainstream...
Call this flamebait but... I think you guys don't appreciate the value of language diversity. When languages die, stuff dies with them. Beyond just cultural reference points. You couldn't possibly take a language spoken by some isolated tribe and convert it word-for-word into English. Things would be lost. Just like there's stuff you can do in COBOL but not in C and vice versa.
It's only through knowing these rare, dying languages that scientists have been able to talk to indigenous people and discover so-called wonder drugs in remote jungles etc.
IANAL (that's L for Linguist) but I know that diversity is a good thing. If we all spoke English, well, damn that would be like if we all used Windows.
And the multi-colored George Foreman Grills!!
You're right in that today's infrastructure isn't made for chuffing massive, hard-drive-sized hunks of data back and forth.
But what about incremental backups?
OK so you've got to get your base image uploaded -somehow- but after that, data changes very little on a daily basis and this level of data transfer to some secure backup repository won't be a problem at all with current bandwidth.
Privacy issues aside, the concept of gathering as much information as possible in an attempt to gain intelligence to prevent acts of terrorism is fundamentally flawed.
Post 9/11, it transpired that we, the supposed forces of good, had intercepted messages between "them", the forces of bad, that would have tipped us of. The trouble was that by the time the messages had been processed, decoded, translated, it was 9/12.
Put simply, we can gather the data, and we do. But we don't have the necessary "human bandwidth" to turn it into usable information within a reasonable timeframe.
So how long till I can print out a nice fillet steak?..........
Does anyone else find it kind of telling that an article on X-Box posted at 02:47 has 106 replies whereas one about weddings posted three hours earlier only has 22?????
We geeks need to do more procreating or we'll just die out!!!
That's right. Don't just choose a product based on how many other people use it - if everyone did that, it'd be a very boring world.
fyi, I have a >20GB Interbase DB...
So, according to the press release, they're saying you can lower cost of ownership by putting all the gubbins for your PCs in the computer room and just have I/O on the desk. Have they heard of CITRIX??
I don't know about the others but InterBase is definitely ready for production use! I've been using IB for the last five years in a car rental company in UK. We have 120 rental locations with a SCO server at each running InterBase. Each site has between 2 and 30 users. We couldn't run our business without InterBase! Reasons we chose it: 1. ANSI 92 Compliant and supports transactions and triggers (and event alerters which are good) 2. Native drivers and ODBC 3. JDBC, direct API and E/SQL (precomilers supplied) 4. It's pretty fast (if used properly) 5. Optimistic locking/versioning means its very forgiving for developers and also good for performance 6. Virtually ZERO maintenance - just do a backup and restore once in a while - our DBAs don't know it's there (good job as they spend most time firefighting/nursing the central Sybase and Oracle!) 7. It's multi platform - we use it on SCO, Solaris (sparc) and Linux (dev only right now) 8. It scales well - we also have a >20GB data mart in Interbase 9. It's small (freakin small). We install it onto our SCO servers off TWO FLOPPYS! 10. arent nine reasons enough? Basically, it's rock solid, very flexible and hassle-free. Like I said, our business couldn't do without it (and we're the no1 car rental company in UK). Check it out at interbase2000.org.