Healthcare is a want, plenty of people work an 8 hour daily trip to affod some ineffective "herbal" remedy or self-diagnosis. Only a few die. Clean water is a want, plenty of people survive with an 8 hour daily trip to collect some polluted water to cook in. Only a few die.
For anyone who complains that the main-stream (or alternative media) aren't doing their job
Mainstream media are often the ones that get shot at by American yahoos. Alternative media are often fat lardasses that blog about "how terrible mainstream media" is while drinking a latte at their local starbucks. Sure, you get some bloggers that simply report on events where they live, but they are typically intelligent enough to stay out of any real on-the-ground danger, its "just" the government.
I work for mainstream media - I'm not a journalist, so I only need to travel airport->office->hotel, but I had to go on a hostile environment course a couple of months ago. One of the things you think about when you talk to people that have been kidnapped and watch videos of people that have had their foot blown off, is "why the fuck am I here".
Yes, similar numbers on my 4 year old laptop running linux, although "ffmpeg -version" is 25 times faster.
I'm not sure about windows in general, but the corporate windows we have at work, on similar hardware, takes 10 seconds to run java -version the first time.
What does any of this have to do with open standards, which represent the topic of this discussion?
Open standards allow us to ignore these kinds of argument completely, because they essentially guarantee that, no matter what kind of software you choose, I can continue using the software of my choice, provided that the two of us can agree on the standard to be implemented.
I choose my favourite software for my own reasons; you choose yours. Everyone's happy.
The term "open standard" often includes standards which must be licensed on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis. Mpeg for example, is an "open standard", the specs are published, you can buy them and implement them as much as the next guy. That's fine for companies like Microsoft or Sony, who make proprietary software and hardware, but not for Free (libre, open source) software.
In the past, I'd blame senior management for this kind of post, but Erik Huggers actions since he joined the BBC have surprised everyone, although after Ashley Highfield he didn't have to do much;) I think the problem is lower down. It's not at the top, it's not at the bottom (the engineers behind iplayer know exactly what open source, open standards, and drm are), it's somewhere in the middle, the level that managers get wined and dined at, but don't get the scrutiny that senior public figures do.
(disclaimer, I work for the bbc, although nowhere near iplayer, views are mine and nothing to do with my employer)
The short answer? Jaunty was the first Linux distribution which, out-of-the-box, wasn't pure shit on a modern laptop. Now, admittedly Ubuntu may not be unique in that sense... I guess I could try Fedora again. No, wait, I couldn't.
My laptop has been running hardy since it came out, gutsy before then, I got it in Nov 07. Never had an issue.
Never used gnome either, I run fluxbox, with 5 virtual desktops, and a right-mouse menu of firefox, amarok and rxvt. While I've got a database browser and eclipse on there too, I tend to launch from the command line (rxvt, via Alt-Capslock - which itself is mapped to escape). If I'm doing some development which requires drag and drop, I'll load up konqueror, but it's rare.
Sounds like every geeks wet dream. And yet I can't help but think to myself... this is a telephone. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate verbal communication.
today I had a 50 minute journey home. The first 20 involve standing on a train.
The mobile device I carry allowed me to listen to music, read two emails, send one, then play a little game.
I then got a seat, continued listening to music, checked a new email, updated my calendar, then started to read/.
After 40 minutes, the music paused, and the screen I was looking at told me my wife was ringing. I answered the phone, no need to remove headphones, then went back to slashdot to write this reply.
Smart phones, with a decent sized screen, and a real webbrowser, are first and formost ultra portable computers. The phone is an addon. Most mornings I break out the laptop and vim or eclipse to do some serious work, but to combine an mp3 player, phone, and javascript capable web browser, takes the device way beyond phone. I hardly use a phone, email and web though...
Re:Have you tried this thing called 'Google'? (Score:5, Funny) by Assmasher (456699) writes:... I guess I ASSumed nobody would look at NeHe and then ask where to get Linux/OGL tutorials:). Hehe. A poor start to the day.
A train, yes, but WW2 comprehensively disproved the idea that it's easy to bring down a rail network.
A rail network on home turf, where the native population is large, and the invaders are located hundreds of miles away. The Luftwaffe would take out England's lines, but they were easily* rebuilt. The RAF would take out European ones, the same applies.
Now if Germany invaded, the local rail network in the southern counties could be easily sabotaged by the same natives that fixed them in the first place, remove a few sleepers and you'll take out a train at the same time. You'd need the invaders to outnumber the natives, at least enough to guard a hell of a lot of track. Moving to roads would be easier until the invader gained a strong foothold.
# Also, what would be the advantage? I mean, take that you get in from the South of Spain and from there you go, non-stop, at 300 km/h. For a track length of 15.000 km(and that assumes you can do almost a straight line from start to end) that would mean 50 hours. More than by plane, and that after making very optimistic calculus. Also think that I didn't include time from switching trains if you need to.
Firstly, London-Istanbul-Tehran-Delhi-Beijing is well under 7,000 miles. A route via Berlin and Moscow is 5,200 miles. The later, at 250mph, is under 24 hours.
There is currently a direct daytime train from Essen to Vienna, which takes over 10 hours. It leaves at 05:00, and arrives at 15:20. I doubt anyone uses the train for the full length -- especially as you can get the 05:53, change once, and arrive at the same time.
The train stops at many places en-route though, and the overlapping, intermediate journeys, make it viable.
A London->Beijing train may be diehard (although 24 hours isn't that long a trip, the U.S. has multi-day trains, the Trans-Siberian takes a week), but London->Istanbul in 6 hours? That's competitive with the flight. Vienna-Tehran in 8 hours?
London -> Delhi in 18 hours isn't that bad, leave London at 9AM Monday morning, arrive for 9AM Tuesday meeting. Leave Delhi 9PM Wednesday night, arrive 9AM Thursday morning, you'll be lucky to beat that on a plane, unless you're happy with 5 hours of sleep on an overnight. Given the BA LHR-TLV flight times, I'd much rather take a 10 hour overnight train, leave at 8PM, sleep at 10, wake at 8AM after 8 hours sleep in Tel Aviv for transfer to the Jerusalem office. The flight alternative is leave at 8PM and get about 4 hours sleep, arriving in Jerusalem about 6AM.
Of course that's assuming an average of 250mph, which is unlikely (the 186mph Eurostar averages 110mph to Brussels, Thalys does 140mph from Paris), and magical scheduling, but if they can, there's plenty of viable long-distance passenger trips.
updates the CMDB Oh, the easy bit. You then need to do the following:
Fills in the chagne control paperwork Fills it in again after Remedy times out Waits 2 weeks for the change board to meet Reads in astonishment that a couple of idiots without a technical clue between them have blocked it because you claimed 48 internal drives, and they say that you're lying (this is for an x4540) Resubmit the change control with photos Waits 2 weeks for the change board to meet again Enter change lockdown period because there's a problem with the voip phones Exit change lockdown period Have change control cancelled because the original date has now passed Resubmit the change control Waits 2 weeks for the change board to meet Get permission to connect Install the server Wait for a week while the outsourced network partners enable the correct vlan on the switch Discover they managed to disable jumbo frames while doing that Wait another week while they fix that
Microsoft thought the internet was a fad and that everybody would use a Microsoft-branded network (can't remember the name, it was similar to Compuserve or something
and using non-Microosft products and services is not frowned upon
Shame it's not like that in certain large corporations that went down the microsoft route. Ironic that it's easier to plug an osx laptop in to a microsoft network than a ### network.
I think jokes about the UK rain are often based on a comparison of a London winter with a mediterranean summer.
London is bone dry compared with places on the west of the island.
Jerusalem: 23.20 London: 22.91
I'm back in Jerusalem in a few weeks, can't wait, it's felt freezing this weekend despite the sun being out, and it being 6 degrees. Having said that, last time I was in Israel it snowed.
I would never go to a dodgy country without an iphone. Get kidnapped, and whoever's taken you will probably keep the shiny phone. Of course, base has the IMEI number, and it will help them pin-point you (or your taker).
Of course, had the iphone cracked while you're being dragged out the car and thrown in a ditch with a hood over your head, not much use.
Final Cut probably supports a larger range of formats.
But seems to really struggle with mov-wrapped anamorphic pal dv files. It'll import avi-wrapped ones fine, but ignores the aspect ratio on the mov wrapped ones. I believe it's fixed in FCP7, and at some point over the next few years we'll have rolled it out worldwide, at least to staff laptops -- freelancers in Uzbekistan probably won't be upgrading.
Avid (PC) copes with the mov-wrapped and avi wrapped files fine.
Ironically QEdit (Windows) will only import the mov wrapped files, not the avi ones (at all), so the required file format is flipped, mov for windows, avi for mac.
Well, the main difference is that Linux offers more choices. More choices, more "uhhhh.... dunnnoooooo..." moments.
It already starts with the partition. Do you want to resize your existing system, do you want to use the unused portion of your disk, do you want to wipe your old system, do you want to use the MBR or install it in a partition and have some other boot manager make the "main" decision... Windows simply offers "I take it all and your old system can suck it". And behold, people accept it because it's easy. It doesn't ask a lot of "stupid" questions they have no answer for.
And that continues throughout the install process. What browser do you want to use, what mail system, what this, what that... Windows simply slaps IE, Mediaplayer and... whatever their crappy mailproggy is called, forgot it... at you. Don't like it? Sucks to be you.
People appearantly want their OS like their politicians: Making decisions for them.
At work, our standard network based server install does that. It will blat your disk drive (if you hve more than one raid array it will ask you), in general it simply asks for IP/subnet/gateway/hostname/dns. Installs a bare-bones ubuntu server install, with a few extra packages (vim-full, ssh-server, linux-server, some internal packages that do compliance things like changing/etc/issue, disable ipv6, etc), Doesn't even ask for a username or password.
I think I managed to do an install, including 2 POSTs, in 15 minutes once, but that was installing on a machine with an SSD.
The windows guys have a series of 4 cds, or a dvd and a cd. It takes 15 minutes just to finish answering the network questions. They then have to deal with various things like partitioning. We're some gold-platinum-enterprise partner or something, we have whole teams integrating the windows build. It's terrible, you can't even PXE boot it!
Slashdot Mirror
Healthcare and the internet are WANTS.
Healthcare is a want, plenty of people work an 8 hour daily trip to affod some ineffective "herbal" remedy or self-diagnosis. Only a few die.
Clean water is a want, plenty of people survive with an 8 hour daily trip to collect some polluted water to cook in. Only a few die.
For anyone who complains that the main-stream (or alternative media) aren't doing their job
Mainstream media are often the ones that get shot at by American yahoos. Alternative media are often fat lardasses that blog about "how terrible mainstream media" is while drinking a latte at their local starbucks. Sure, you get some bloggers that simply report on events where they live, but they are typically intelligent enough to stay out of any real on-the-ground danger, its "just" the government.
I work for mainstream media - I'm not a journalist, so I only need to travel airport->office->hotel, but I had to go on a hostile environment course a couple of months ago. One of the things you think about when you talk to people that have been kidnapped and watch videos of people that have had their foot blown off, is "why the fuck am I here".
is hot.
Just a note to our cousins across the pond, British police officers *do not* look like that :(
Initial startup time:
real 0m0.928s
user 0m0.080s
sys 0m0.030s
Yes, similar numbers on my 4 year old laptop running linux, although "ffmpeg -version" is 25 times faster.
I'm not sure about windows in general, but the corporate windows we have at work, on similar hardware, takes 10 seconds to run java -version the first time.
What does any of this have to do with open standards, which represent the topic of this discussion?
Open standards allow us to ignore these kinds of argument completely, because they essentially guarantee that, no matter what kind of software you choose, I can continue using the software of my choice, provided that the two of us can agree on the standard to be implemented.
I choose my favourite software for my own reasons; you choose yours. Everyone's happy.
The term "open standard" often includes standards which must be licensed on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis. Mpeg for example, is an "open standard", the specs are published, you can buy them and implement them as much as the next guy. That's fine for companies like Microsoft or Sony, who make proprietary software and hardware, but not for Free (libre, open source) software.
Unfortunately, this often confuses the issue at a senior level, or adds to the spin that's possible. Look at this recent statement on "open source" "products" like h264 from the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/03/bbc_iplayer_content_protection.html
In the past, I'd blame senior management for this kind of post, but Erik Huggers actions since he joined the BBC have surprised everyone, although after Ashley Highfield he didn't have to do much ;) I think the problem is lower down. It's not at the top, it's not at the bottom (the engineers behind iplayer know exactly what open source, open standards, and drm are), it's somewhere in the middle, the level that managers get wined and dined at, but don't get the scrutiny that senior public figures do.
(disclaimer, I work for the bbc, although nowhere near iplayer, views are mine and nothing to do with my employer)
The short answer? Jaunty was the first Linux distribution which, out-of-the-box, wasn't pure shit on a modern laptop. Now, admittedly Ubuntu may not be unique in that sense... I guess I could try Fedora again. No, wait, I couldn't.
My laptop has been running hardy since it came out, gutsy before then, I got it in Nov 07. Never had an issue.
Never used gnome either, I run fluxbox, with 5 virtual desktops, and a right-mouse menu of firefox, amarok and rxvt. While I've got a database browser and eclipse on there too, I tend to launch from the command line (rxvt, via Alt-Capslock - which itself is mapped to escape). If I'm doing some development which requires drag and drop, I'll load up konqueror, but it's rare.
Sounds like every geeks wet dream. And yet I can't help but think to myself ... this is a telephone. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate verbal communication.
today I had a 50 minute journey home. The first 20 involve standing on a train.
The mobile device I carry allowed me to listen to music, read two emails, send one, then play a little game.
I then got a seat, continued listening to music, checked a new email, updated my calendar, then started to read /.
After 40 minutes, the music paused, and the screen I was looking at told me my wife was ringing. I answered the phone, no need to remove headphones, then went back to slashdot to write this reply.
Smart phones, with a decent sized screen, and a real webbrowser, are first and formost ultra portable computers. The phone is an addon. Most mornings I break out the laptop and vim or eclipse to do some serious work, but to combine an mp3 player, phone, and javascript capable web browser, takes the device way beyond phone. I hardly use a phone, email and web though...
Re:Have you tried this thing called 'Google'? (Score:5, Funny) ... I guess I ASSumed nobody would look at NeHe and then ask where to get Linux/OGL tutorials :). Hehe. A poor start to the day.
by Assmasher (456699) writes:
Perhaps you've got something else on your mind
4. send in wave after way of robot drones just for the fun of it
We'd simply send in wave after wave of our own men against the drones until they hit their inbuilt kill limit.
If you're in the UK, a normal (non-business) bank customer and transferring anything more than a couple of thousand pounds to a foreign bank account,
I sent £2,500 last week online with hsbc, has to be sent between 09:00 and 15:30.
A train, yes, but WW2 comprehensively disproved the idea that it's easy to bring down a rail network.
A rail network on home turf, where the native population is large, and the invaders are located hundreds of miles away. The Luftwaffe would take out England's lines, but they were easily* rebuilt. The RAF would take out European ones, the same applies.
Now if Germany invaded, the local rail network in the southern counties could be easily sabotaged by the same natives that fixed them in the first place, remove a few sleepers and you'll take out a train at the same time. You'd need the invaders to outnumber the natives, at least enough to guard a hell of a lot of track. Moving to roads would be easier until the invader gained a strong foothold.
# Also, what would be the advantage? I mean, take that you get in from the South of Spain and from there you go, non-stop, at 300 km/h. For a track length of 15.000 km(and that assumes you can do almost a straight line from start to end) that would mean 50 hours. More than by plane, and that after making very optimistic calculus. Also think that I didn't include time from switching trains if you need to.
Firstly, London-Istanbul-Tehran-Delhi-Beijing is well under 7,000 miles. A route via Berlin and Moscow is 5,200 miles. The later, at 250mph, is under 24 hours.
There is currently a direct daytime train from Essen to Vienna, which takes over 10 hours. It leaves at 05:00, and arrives at 15:20. I doubt anyone uses the train for the full length -- especially as you can get the 05:53, change once, and arrive at the same time.
The train stops at many places en-route though, and the overlapping, intermediate journeys, make it viable.
A London->Beijing train may be diehard (although 24 hours isn't that long a trip, the U.S. has multi-day trains, the Trans-Siberian takes a week), but London->Istanbul in 6 hours? That's competitive with the flight. Vienna-Tehran in 8 hours?
London -> Delhi in 18 hours isn't that bad, leave London at 9AM Monday morning, arrive for 9AM Tuesday meeting. Leave Delhi 9PM Wednesday night, arrive 9AM Thursday morning, you'll be lucky to beat that on a plane, unless you're happy with 5 hours of sleep on an overnight. Given the BA LHR-TLV flight times, I'd much rather take a 10 hour overnight train, leave at 8PM, sleep at 10, wake at 8AM after 8 hours sleep in Tel Aviv for transfer to the Jerusalem office. The flight alternative is leave at 8PM and get about 4 hours sleep, arriving in Jerusalem about 6AM.
Of course that's assuming an average of 250mph, which is unlikely (the 186mph Eurostar averages 110mph to Brussels, Thalys does 140mph from Paris), and magical scheduling, but if they can, there's plenty of viable long-distance passenger trips.
updates the CMDB
Oh, the easy bit. You then need to do the following:
Fills in the chagne control paperwork
Fills it in again after Remedy times out
Waits 2 weeks for the change board to meet
Reads in astonishment that a couple of idiots without a technical clue between them have blocked it because you claimed 48 internal drives, and they say that you're lying (this is for an x4540)
Resubmit the change control with photos
Waits 2 weeks for the change board to meet again
Enter change lockdown period because there's a problem with the voip phones
Exit change lockdown period
Have change control cancelled because the original date has now passed
Resubmit the change control
Waits 2 weeks for the change board to meet
Get permission to connect
Install the server
Wait for a week while the outsourced network partners enable the correct vlan on the switch
Discover they managed to disable jumbo frames while doing that
Wait another week while they fix that
And you're good to go!
Microsoft thought the internet was a fad and that everybody would use a Microsoft-branded network (can't remember the name, it was similar to Compuserve or something
The Microsoft Network - MSN - came with win95.
Gimme your /etc/shadow too. What's the problem? It's encrypted.
That's the reason I still have passwords in /etc/passwd -- noone will think of looking there!
It's also nearly my birthday, so another reason to celebrate. :-)
Surely you mean approximately your birthday?
and using non-Microosft products and services is not frowned upon
Shame it's not like that in certain large corporations that went down the microsoft route. Ironic that it's easier to plug an osx laptop in to a microsoft network than a ### network.
Huh? Pi isn't 14.3 or 14/3.
No, but it's close to 22nd July.
I think jokes about the UK rain are often based on a comparison of a London winter with a mediterranean summer.
London is bone dry compared with places on the west of the island.
Jerusalem: 23.20
London: 22.91
I'm back in Jerusalem in a few weeks, can't wait, it's felt freezing this weekend despite the sun being out, and it being 6 degrees. Having said that, last time I was in Israel it snowed.
I'm *so* glad your iphone survived.
I would never go to a dodgy country without an iphone. Get kidnapped, and whoever's taken you will probably keep the shiny phone. Of course, base has the IMEI number, and it will help them pin-point you (or your taker).
Of course, had the iphone cracked while you're being dragged out the car and thrown in a ditch with a hood over your head, not much use.
Myself and another admin at my company remarked that hostage situations were unlikely in our data rooms, but not an impossibility.
I'm currently on a hostile environment training course, as I'm shortly off to various mid-asia countries to install various servers in data rooms.
Surviving being taken as a hostage is Thursday
you don't have the option to use different ones for different organizations
I have 8 fingers, 2 thumbs, so I guess that I could use different ones to a point
Final Cut probably supports a larger range of formats.
But seems to really struggle with mov-wrapped anamorphic pal dv files. It'll import avi-wrapped ones fine, but ignores the aspect ratio on the mov wrapped ones. I believe it's fixed in FCP7, and at some point over the next few years we'll have rolled it out worldwide, at least to staff laptops -- freelancers in Uzbekistan probably won't be upgrading.
Avid (PC) copes with the mov-wrapped and avi wrapped files fine.
Ironically QEdit (Windows) will only import the mov wrapped files, not the avi ones (at all), so the required file format is flipped, mov for windows, avi for mac.
Well, the main difference is that Linux offers more choices. More choices, more "uhhhh.... dunnnoooooo..." moments.
It already starts with the partition. Do you want to resize your existing system, do you want to use the unused portion of your disk, do you want to wipe your old system, do you want to use the MBR or install it in a partition and have some other boot manager make the "main" decision... Windows simply offers "I take it all and your old system can suck it". And behold, people accept it because it's easy. It doesn't ask a lot of "stupid" questions they have no answer for.
And that continues throughout the install process. What browser do you want to use, what mail system, what this, what that... Windows simply slaps IE, Mediaplayer and ... whatever their crappy mailproggy is called, forgot it ... at you. Don't like it? Sucks to be you.
People appearantly want their OS like their politicians: Making decisions for them.
At work, our standard network based server install does that. It will blat your disk drive (if you hve more than one raid array it will ask you), in general it simply asks for IP/subnet/gateway/hostname/dns. Installs a bare-bones ubuntu server install, with a few extra packages (vim-full, ssh-server, linux-server, some internal packages that do compliance things like changing /etc/issue, disable ipv6, etc), Doesn't even ask for a username or password.
I think I managed to do an install, including 2 POSTs, in 15 minutes once, but that was installing on a machine with an SSD.
The windows guys have a series of 4 cds, or a dvd and a cd. It takes 15 minutes just to finish answering the network questions. They then have to deal with various things like partitioning. We're some gold-platinum-enterprise partner or something, we have whole teams integrating the windows build. It's terrible, you can't even PXE boot it!
Hotmail, perhaps? No?
I assumed that, but gmail may be more appropiate, given the nature of the first exploit to hit the news