The computer industry has, in the past, dropped things like a hot potato when they started to suck.
Really I think Windows has become the sole exception to this rule so far.
Monopolies have a way of collapsing under their own weight. The biggest mistake is thinking that your situation is different somehow from all the rest throughout history. That's how it always happens, cocky until it's too late.
So in 2000 I predicted the major fall of MS in 5 years. I may have underestimated the time frame a little, but I still think it's coming. In the last 2 years MSFT has underperformed the market. Revenue/employee at MS is falling. IE has lost the browser monopoly. The signs are there. MS is getting into trouble.
A small nudge over the cliff could send MS in a downward spiral. I don't know if I should make another time-frame prediction, but the next 5 years could be pretty interesting for MS.
That's really not true. The supreme court has held political speech as the most protected form of free speech.
You are confusing two issues here, the stupid campaign finance reform laws, and the constitutional protections we all enjoy. Guess which will always win in the end.
It's a private institution, and they can set and enforce the rules as you see fit.
And we are free to say it's a shitty move.
I'm with you though. I don't think businesses should have the government telling them who they should and shouldn't hire. If they don't want to hire people with red hair or black skin, that's their business.
But that doesn't mean we have to like it, and we can and should speak against them if we disagree. Once you get to the point of passing a law to force them to stop, that's going to far.
Unfortunately if you live in a state that passed the UCITA then all your contract law arguments get a lot weaker. (Maryland and Virginia only last I checked, thankfully)
But in the end you are right, under normal contract law there's no way an EULA could stand up. Just as the court wouldn't uphold a contract that signed away your entire future earnings for a popsicle, they wouldn't uphold such craziness that is in EULAs.
I think it would be a very good gesture for someone with lots of resources to produce a program with an insane EULA that does say something like "You will pay me $10,000 per year for the next 100 years", just to challenge the concept. Try to collect on some of the debts, but don't try too awfully hard, just until you get some people to sue you over it.
Re:And they don't even mention LARPing...
on
Masks in the Woods
·
· Score: 1
You know, wearing a mask in public is illegal in most states. (With specific exceptions for holidays where masks are usually worn)
No exceptions for cold weather in most states though. Anyway, a rarely enforced law, generally used to hold someone suspected of burglary until they can come up with better charges.
Still something to keep in mind, if some redneck cop wants to harass "freaks playing with fake swords" they could use it against you.
It is important. You did buy a copy. Under copyright law you bought a fixed representation of the copyrighted work, that that gives you certain rights, such as under the first sale doctrine.
Of course it is illegal to make computer generated images of sex with children
It's not. Sorry to burst your fascist bubble.
The supreme court ruled against your "thoughtcrime leads to real crime" line of logic. They said the only good reason to ban child porn is to protect children from the actual acts, not some potential increase in acts, and therefore any porn that doesn't involve real children is legal, even if it depicts adults that are pretending to be children, or drawn or rendered images that are presented as children.
'looking at it on a screen might intice you into doing it for real' thing.
The supreme court struck down that line of reasoning when it struck down the ban on "simulated child porn".
Besides, if you follow that reasoning to its logical conclusion, you better start pulling about half the movies at the rental store off the shelves, since most depict illegal acts of some sort.
For example, it is illegal to create computer-generated child pornography
No, it's not.
See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition
The court ruled that simulated child porn that involves no images of children and no children in its production is constitutionally protected free speech.
if someone fessed up and said, "Hey, we fucked up last time, but we got it right this time", and could be trusted
The problem isn't that no one says this, it's that they've been saying it about every version since Windows 95. They constantly spread FUD about using their old versions so that people will upgrade.
MS aren't the only people guilty of this though. Every try to ask for help on a slightly older version of an open source application? You'll most likely get 10 people bashing you for running a version that came out more than 2 months ago.
And the same was true of Mac users. OS 9 was the best thing since sliced bread if you were to listen to the Mac users at the time. A few months after OS X came out and they got over the intial cognitive dissonance, all you could hear about was how much OS 9 sucked from mac users.
Re:NOT A Selling Point-But a "must have" for secur
on
Buy Vista or Else
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It has little to do with the users these days. It's more about the inept application developers.
I've found a relationship (too bad slashdot doesn't do math symbols):
x = the cost of the software product that runs on Windows y = the chance the software requires everyone using it to log in as administrator
As x -> infinity, y -> infinity
Seriously though, too much windows software, especially vertical apps or expensive commercial apps, still require every user to log in as administrator.
MS should force this issue, you are right. It should be something like Mac OS X does by default, you shouldn't be able to log in as administrator by default. That would at least send the application developers a message that developing your software to assume admin access is stupid.
He wants to transport energy. From off-peak to peak times. His problem is one of energy storage and it's not wrong for him to ask about fuel cells.
The answer is still "no", however. He could crack water into H2 and O2 during off peak and run it through fuel cells during peak times, but there's a pretty large efficiency loss in electrolysis, and another one with the fuel cells.
Not to mention an extremely large up front cost. $5000 per kilowatt or so. For comparision, a house typically has 24 kilowatt service.
Other than that downside, the cost of wearing out all those lead acid batteries faster is high.
A good AGM SLA might cycle 500 times if you are lucky and you don't cycle them very deeply (keep it less than 80% discharged). You'll be replacing a lot of them after a year or two vs 4 or 5 years if you weren't cycling them every day.
And a good AGM SLA isn't cheap. An 85 amp hour runs well over $100, and that's small by datacenter standards, a 5000VA UPS might take 4 of those.
Your utility might charge you based on KVAR hours or apparent power. If you have a bunch of computers and UPS then your power factor may be bad.
Make sure there's no charge there for KVAR hours instead of Kilowatt hours, or no surcharge for power factor. If there's on there it would benefit you to get a consultant in to install PFC correction.
but nobody without a political axe to grind considers the GNU clones to be serious replacements.
What are you talking about man?
Pretty much every sysadmin I talk to that gets stuck managing an IRIX, Sun, SCO, AIX or BSD system, the first thing they do is load all the GNU utilities on there. The ones that come with the OS really suck compared the the GNU ones.
You may freak out the various OS subsystems that have never been tested to handle high speed data from what appears to be a disk subsystem.
In theory everything would work fine, but I've found that pushing the edge does uncover lots of bugs, such as when we started building multiterabyte servers with 3+ controller cards. Most drivers aren't very well tested handling that number of cards, and the filesystems pretty much all had 2TB limitations.
I suspect you might run into the same issues if the OS suddenly got 10gbps throughput from what it thought was a disk controller.
The very first SATA module set showed up as sdX, then they put in the libATA to hdX, it does look like as of 2.6.7 or 2.6.8 and later everything's back to sdX.
Not all. It depends on what kernel module you use. The newer set of modules make drives show up as hdX.
3ware in Linux uses no SATA kernel code. The 3ware module has been around since before SATA was even supported at all in Linux and it hasn't changed significantly since then.
If it weren't for TrueImage, TrueType would have died as yet another Apple technology that didn't go anywhere.
TrueImage development was why MS crosslicensed TrueType from Apple, and that's why TrueType fonts are so common these days, found on every Windows system.
I'd wait on SAS. It remains to be seen whether it will even go anywhere. It would suck to dump that much money into something that never takes off.
Not to mention you can't ensure that you'll even be able to get replacement drives if some fail, considering the extremely limited choices and supply of SAS drives and components.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not insurmountable.
The computer industry has, in the past, dropped things like a hot potato when they started to suck.
Really I think Windows has become the sole exception to this rule so far.
Monopolies have a way of collapsing under their own weight. The biggest mistake is thinking that your situation is different somehow from all the rest throughout history. That's how it always happens, cocky until it's too late.
So in 2000 I predicted the major fall of MS in 5 years. I may have underestimated the time frame a little, but I still think it's coming. In the last 2 years MSFT has underperformed the market. Revenue/employee at MS is falling. IE has lost the browser monopoly. The signs are there. MS is getting into trouble.
A small nudge over the cliff could send MS in a downward spiral. I don't know if I should make another time-frame prediction, but the next 5 years could be pretty interesting for MS.
That's really not true. The supreme court has held political speech as the most protected form of free speech.
You are confusing two issues here, the stupid campaign finance reform laws, and the constitutional protections we all enjoy. Guess which will always win in the end.
It's a private institution, and they can set and enforce the rules as you see fit.
And we are free to say it's a shitty move.
I'm with you though. I don't think businesses should have the government telling them who they should and shouldn't hire. If they don't want to hire people with red hair or black skin, that's their business.
But that doesn't mean we have to like it, and we can and should speak against them if we disagree. Once you get to the point of passing a law to force them to stop, that's going to far.
I think it will be slowly decided.
Unfortunately if you live in a state that passed the UCITA then all your contract law arguments get a lot weaker. (Maryland and Virginia only last I checked, thankfully)
But in the end you are right, under normal contract law there's no way an EULA could stand up. Just as the court wouldn't uphold a contract that signed away your entire future earnings for a popsicle, they wouldn't uphold such craziness that is in EULAs.
I think it would be a very good gesture for someone with lots of resources to produce a program with an insane EULA that does say something like "You will pay me $10,000 per year for the next 100 years", just to challenge the concept. Try to collect on some of the debts, but don't try too awfully hard, just until you get some people to sue you over it.
You know, wearing a mask in public is illegal in most states. (With specific exceptions for holidays where masks are usually worn)
No exceptions for cold weather in most states though. Anyway, a rarely enforced law, generally used to hold someone suspected of burglary until they can come up with better charges.
Still something to keep in mind, if some redneck cop wants to harass "freaks playing with fake swords" they could use it against you.
It is important. You did buy a copy. Under copyright law you bought a fixed representation of the copyrighted work, that that gives you certain rights, such as under the first sale doctrine.
This is whether you accept the EULA or not.
Microsoft office as sold and supported by Microsoft does not violate that patent.
Are they going to recall all the copies sitting at retailers and distributers?
I didn't think so.
Of course it is illegal to make computer generated images of sex with children
It's not. Sorry to burst your fascist bubble.
The supreme court ruled against your "thoughtcrime leads to real crime" line of logic. They said the only good reason to ban child porn is to protect children from the actual acts, not some potential increase in acts, and therefore any porn that doesn't involve real children is legal, even if it depicts adults that are pretending to be children, or drawn or rendered images that are presented as children.
'looking at it on a screen might intice you into doing it for real' thing.
The supreme court struck down that line of reasoning when it struck down the ban on "simulated child porn".
Besides, if you follow that reasoning to its logical conclusion, you better start pulling about half the movies at the rental store off the shelves, since most depict illegal acts of some sort.
For example, it is illegal to create computer-generated child pornography
No, it's not.
See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition
The court ruled that simulated child porn that involves no images of children and no children in its production is constitutionally protected free speech.
if someone fessed up and said, "Hey, we fucked up last time, but we got it right this time", and could be trusted
The problem isn't that no one says this, it's that they've been saying it about every version since Windows 95. They constantly spread FUD about using their old versions so that people will upgrade.
MS aren't the only people guilty of this though. Every try to ask for help on a slightly older version of an open source application? You'll most likely get 10 people bashing you for running a version that came out more than 2 months ago.
And the same was true of Mac users. OS 9 was the best thing since sliced bread if you were to listen to the Mac users at the time. A few months after OS X came out and they got over the intial cognitive dissonance, all you could hear about was how much OS 9 sucked from mac users.
It has little to do with the users these days. It's more about the inept application developers.
I've found a relationship (too bad slashdot doesn't do math symbols):
x = the cost of the software product that runs on Windows
y = the chance the software requires everyone using it to log in as administrator
As x -> infinity, y -> infinity
Seriously though, too much windows software, especially vertical apps or expensive commercial apps, still require every user to log in as administrator.
MS should force this issue, you are right. It should be something like Mac OS X does by default, you shouldn't be able to log in as administrator by default. That would at least send the application developers a message that developing your software to assume admin access is stupid.
He wants to transport energy. From off-peak to peak times. His problem is one of energy storage and it's not wrong for him to ask about fuel cells.
The answer is still "no", however. He could crack water into H2 and O2 during off peak and run it through fuel cells during peak times, but there's a pretty large efficiency loss in electrolysis, and another one with the fuel cells.
Not to mention an extremely large up front cost. $5000 per kilowatt or so. For comparision, a house typically has 24 kilowatt service.
Other than that downside, the cost of wearing out all those lead acid batteries faster is high.
A good AGM SLA might cycle 500 times if you are lucky and you don't cycle them very deeply (keep it less than 80% discharged). You'll be replacing a lot of them after a year or two vs 4 or 5 years if you weren't cycling them every day.
And a good AGM SLA isn't cheap. An 85 amp hour runs well over $100, and that's small by datacenter standards, a 5000VA UPS might take 4 of those.
Your utility might charge you based on KVAR hours or apparent power. If you have a bunch of computers and UPS then your power factor may be bad.
Make sure there's no charge there for KVAR hours instead of Kilowatt hours, or no surcharge for power factor. If there's on there it would benefit you to get a consultant in to install PFC correction.
but nobody without a political axe to grind considers the GNU clones to be serious replacements.
What are you talking about man?
Pretty much every sysadmin I talk to that gets stuck managing an IRIX, Sun, SCO, AIX or BSD system, the first thing they do is load all the GNU utilities on there. The ones that come with the OS really suck compared the the GNU ones.
As you'll recall, there were originally thoughts that v3 would require modifications to such applications to be available.
I must have missed some story, is it confirmed it won't have anything about server-side applications now?
Why don't we ever see a book review on here that says, "This book is a total joke, a scam to make money on a buzzword?"
I'm sure such a book review might not pay as well in kickbacks, but it sorta devalues the point of doing book reviews if you never see negative ones.
Did DOS really change anything major from 3.3 to 6.22?
As far as I can tell they basically work the same, just came with different (shitty) utilities.
100 people commenting "They must have run the web server on the 8088 too".
Coral doesn't have it but google does.
You may freak out the various OS subsystems that have never been tested to handle high speed data from what appears to be a disk subsystem.
In theory everything would work fine, but I've found that pushing the edge does uncover lots of bugs, such as when we started building multiterabyte servers with 3+ controller cards. Most drivers aren't very well tested handling that number of cards, and the filesystems pretty much all had 2TB limitations.
I suspect you might run into the same issues if the OS suddenly got 10gbps throughput from what it thought was a disk controller.
The very first SATA module set showed up as sdX, then they put in the libATA to hdX, it does look like as of 2.6.7 or 2.6.8 and later everything's back to sdX.
3ware still doesn't use any kernel SATA code.
Not all. It depends on what kernel module you use. The newer set of modules make drives show up as hdX.
3ware in Linux uses no SATA kernel code. The 3ware module has been around since before SATA was even supported at all in Linux and it hasn't changed significantly since then.
If it weren't for TrueImage, TrueType would have died as yet another Apple technology that didn't go anywhere.
TrueImage development was why MS crosslicensed TrueType from Apple, and that's why TrueType fonts are so common these days, found on every Windows system.
So I'd say they are pretty closely tied together.
I'd wait on SAS. It remains to be seen whether it will even go anywhere. It would suck to dump that much money into something that never takes off.
Not to mention you can't ensure that you'll even be able to get replacement drives if some fail, considering the extremely limited choices and supply of SAS drives and components.