Water vapor is not bad for the environment. 70% of the planet's surface is after all covered with water....and 50-75% [worldbank.org] of the human body itself is also water. So I'm going to go out on a limb here to state that "water A-OK."
I am sure they will find a way to protest it. It destroys the natural desert. Eventually, we will all drown since all this water is being 'created'. It will cause more rain, which makes people gloomy, and lead to more suicides. Rich people are driving hydrogen SUVs and that is unfair, somehow.
Remember, you don't have to have any facts to protest, just a big sign, and lots of time on your hand.
The price differential between CRT and LCD monitors is still enough that most larger businesses are still only buying CRTs for most of their users. Sure the executives and receptionists are getting LCDs but everyone else gets cheap 17" CRT monitors.
We just did some calculating and figured we could use 15" LCDs instead of 17" CRTs and lose a little in size, and cost a little more up front, but save enough in less than 2 years to pay for the cost difference, in ELECTRICITY. Our graphics stations will likely stay with 19 to 21" CRTs but we will be phasing in LCDs in large part because the TCO is good, the space consumed is better, the employee moral benefits is great, thus the overall value is exceptional.
They're much more compatible, they're created from the same code base. It's the same application interface, except that the server is extended. The same drivers work in both. Looking from underneath or above, they're the same.
Then why the *fuck* do I have to pay thousands to connect 30 people to a $199 piece of software?
What if you give a gun to a drunk 4 year old and he shoots a chimp? Whats your point?
You can't compare criminal negligence with activities that occur over an insecure web gateway, or none of the cafe's or airports would put up wireless gateways. That would be like holding the USPS responsible for the Unibomber's crimes.
I just realized I've been playing on your servers for a year! You do a good job with them.
We started them in 1999. Moved them a time or two, hijacking bandwidth and cpus where we can:) I am migrating the nameing from Mayberry to Pharmboy as we speak. (I live in North Carolina, near the real "Mayberry" (Mount Airy) thus my game name, Barney Fife)
But yea, I still love to go through and beat the dumb ass scientists with the crowbar for being whiney. Also, Barney gets mad and starts shooting YOU if you smack him with the crowbar. Sick man, I know.
For Windows/Mac OS X, most software is binary-only, and companies are going to decide that it's not worth the effort of supporting processor X, when it only has a fraction of the users. So, which ever gains popularity will be the defacto only system to use, and users of the other will be out of luck.
Which is exactly why I said Apple on AMD, if it ever occured, would be on the server side, where the source is available because most is open source. Apple ships Apache with OS X, for example. Porting over the other server applications would likely come from the open source community. Apple would have to port over OS X, which is not trivial but since it is BSD it would be more portable than windows by a long shot. Porting the applications afterward would be much easier.
Keep in mind, Apple has gotten pretty serious about the server market lately. Their offerings NOW are decent for many applications. This would give apple a 64 bit server, with backward compatability for existing 32bit applications. This is one way to get into serving huge databases. Of course the 970 will offer similar capability, but is actually designed to be a desktop cpu, not server. The Power4 cpu, the big brother of the 970, is designed for server use. This would make the AMD cpus capable of mulitboot Linux/OS X/Windows more easily. It may also give better performance for Windows apps running on top of OS X.
I am not necessarily EXPECTING this to happen, but Apple has a better chance of developing a specialized OS for servers on a different CPU than Microsoft. If memory serves me correct, MS gave up support for other CPUs a version to two back. Its all wild speculation, but interesting possibilities exist. Remember, the OS X kernel has been opened up in the OpenDarwin project, so OSS programmers may be helping with the dirty work.
As to the users being more advanced: If you port the kernel on top of any cpu, and put aqua on top of it, or X11, which Apple is also involved in, then how geeky you are is not longer a factor.
Look, does slashdot also post articles about how redhat 5.1 is "dead". Fuckers.
actually redhat announced that it is EOLing all versions one year after the intro of the next version, even for those of us that pay for support for our current 7.2- systems. We have talked about this in several areas, although I don't see a particular article posted on it.
We do opt in mail. Under 10k, once a month, and I design them.
We send them text only, one page only, very quick bullets with links in plain text. The real newsletter is on the site, and we just use the email to say hi and direct them to the site. We explain why we do it this way in the email. We get a great response, good feedback, and less than 1% unsubscribe per cycle. We go out of our way to be and look responsible. Each email has an opt out link and our toll free phone number, that is answered by a real human being.
We have never gotten a complaint by going these extra steps. The way we use it, it is legitimate. We don't send to all customers, ever. Only to those who opt in. Yes, we want email marketing to become more legitimate because most of us are. The only way achieve this legitimatacy is to get rid of the real spam.
Most companies are responsible with commercial email, its just the few who use it as the sole business that make it look bad for those of us who it only plays a small but important role in our marketing.
It's a very nasty situation when an OS has two different processors (and two different sets of binaries).
Linux, the cousin of BSD (the parent of OS X) runs on many processors, as do many of the other *nix varients. It would be much easier to run a *nix based OS on multiple platforms than Windows, because it already runs on other platforms, and was designed to from the very beginning. Berkeley designed 4BSD to do exactly this. Windows' support of other CPUs, is a less sucessful story.
Even though the one article focuses on 4 to 8 way desktops, the server market would be the likely first target: You can get more per unit out of the gate, and less application support is need to get them in the field. Put a 4 to 8 way box, with 16 to 64 gigs of ram, and you have a great web server. It might take longer to get all the multimedia and other desktop niceties up to snuff, but I would bet that support for apache, bind, sql, and other OSS services would come fast, since OSS can potentially develop faster when properly motivated.
Since the 970s are designed specifically for SMP and to be reasonably priced, and the server market is not sold purely by the gigahertz rating, but rather by real world performance, AND it being produced by IBM who is very likely to support Linux and *nix in general on this CPU, these could get popular fast.
I wouldn't want to own any SUN stock when it comes out.
I thought Half Life would have made an excellent movie.
I would agree with that. I still have a couple TFC servers, but hope back to HL every now and then. HL was the first game I ever played that make me jump and gave me chill bumps. Its a bit dated now, but won game of the year in 1997 for good reason. The idea that the hero, Gordon Freeman, was a pretty normal guy (well, a normal guy with a PhD in physics) was part of the draw, IMHO.
And you gotta love those little head eating monsters that looked like skinned chickens.
I agree. We should send ALL the inspectors to the moon. As a matter of fact, lets send the entire UN to the moon, just to be safe. I will even pitch in for gas, because I am that kind of guy.
I know that if we did, _I_ would sleep better at night.
Now does Microsoft buying VPC make sense? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe MS Mac Business Unit caught wind of this and wants to one-up Apple somehow. Any thoughts?
Very interesting. I had not thought of that angle. Now I have to wonder if Apple is going to throw some resources over to the WINE project, making Virtual PC less relevent. I could even see IBM throwing some muscle that direction as well, since IBM has no love for MS. Purely speculation, but remember, IBM and AMD still have a working relationship as well, and obviously IBM and Apple have for years.
If you had all these OS's, with Apple taking the lead on the desktop, and BSD/Linux/Unix on the server end, and the ability to run legacy applications from MS..... The more you think about it, the more curiouser it gets:)
Maybe they are just going to use AMD64 chips to build 8 and 4 way XServes?
This is EXACTLY what I was thinking. Of course, with opendarwin, someone will have some fun trying to port osX over to the AMD anyway, if for no other reason, than just to do it. (like Xbox, etc.)
I would love to be able to have more choice, and IF Apple did port osX over to the new AMD64, I would buy one in a SNAP, just to see if we can finally replace our windows boxes.
Since XP has a 10-connection limit it's gonna make a pretty crappy file server in a moderate-use environment...
95 had a 10 user limit that could easily be changed in the properties tag of the protocol. As far as I can tell, you can't do that with XP. I have run 20 clients on a 95a file server and it ran acceptable for that purpose.
Also, I thought XP home had a limit of 3, XP pro of 5, 2k of 10. I could be wrong though.
Hmm, the 'real' phrase is pretty ambiguous, especially for a license. Is the implication that MS is warning the user that the software isn't fit for those purposes? Or is it still meant as a restriction on what MS wants their software used for?
I will leave the idea of MS software being "fit" for any purpose to the MS bashers. But it appears more like a way to say nothing while implying much, to keep people from doing what they have the legal right to do, and MS can't stop them from doing.
Hmmm... the only thing that might work is very public lawsuits and threats about patent voilations and what begins to happen?
Not to be political, but does anyone else see the parallels between this and kama kazi tactics? You're going to lose, take everyone with you. Its self destruction for small gains, at the expense of MUCH to others.
The first thing you need to do is check with your local zoning laws. In some states/counties/cities you can run a small business if it is not 'retail' out of your home, ie: as long as customers don't come by.
Here in NC, we had to go to the county zoning board, request a variance for a similar problem. It takes from 60 to 120 days in most places I know of, unless you live in a major city. Houston, on the other hand, only recently introduced zoning laws and it may not be an issue at all there.
If you do not have customers that come by, I would not worry so much. Unless your neighbors complain, there is no issue, and if you have no commercial traffic, there is nothing to complain about. A good relationship with your neighbors is more important than minute details of zoning laws, and if you have one or two customers come by a day, it is no more traffic than many people normally have anyway.
If you do have to go to a zoning board meeting, bring notes, be polite, be forceful but not rude, do your homework first and find comparible cases to present. Most of these guys want just don't want hassles, and if its easier to give you what you want than to deal with you if they think you will be back and back and back, then your odds are better. If they have done this variance before for someone else, you can present the case where they would rather quietly grant it for you than not.
If you get turned down, learn who is on the board, find a connection. Lion's club, Elks, Rotary, etc. and do a favor. Or find a way to do a favor directly, such as fixing a problem, or writing some small software program, whatever, not in exchange of course. In otherwords, schmooze him a bit. Then request the variance again.
Say what you want, but local govt. IS more corrupt that way, very small petty things. You can spend thousands fighting it, or get what you want first, then fight it.
No, you miss the point. Its a terrible idea in that it PENALIZES people who buy very efficient cars, since 1/3 of the fuel cost is taxes. It makes buying and owning a fuel efficient car MORE expensive, by a large margin. Those of us that drive Chevy trucks would not really be affected, since our gas mileage is bad enough we break even (17.5mpg everywhere)
Oh yea, and most American's would call this an absolute violation of privacy. In America, we believe it is not any business of the government where we go, and GPS monitoring would allow them to check your every move. Seeing that we are a free country, we would consider this dangerous.
best damn idea ive heard in ages... i hear portland is wonderfull.. if oregon wasnt in the USA, i might consider living there.
Thats ok, we already have plenty of people who think its ok for the government to track every citizen, we don't need more.
So we all can reduce the effects of crackers by using safer programming languages, chroot, and other methods of good admin? What a concept! They offer suggestions like "Of course, if you don't need that particular daemon, it's better to simply turn it off."
That is so profound. I think I will go change all my root passwords from "password" to something else, maybe even mixing cases of letters. It never dawned on me before. I might even start using iptables.</sarcasm>
This is hardly newsworthy. It is saying: The more you implement good security measures, the less security problems you will have. While I love the Register, this article should be modded redundant itself. Its not that its wrong, its just not offering anything new or interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
I did. It would have about the same power as a single new 3.0ghz box...and take up more room. Oh, and cost more.
(although I'd like to know who modded this
up to 4)
Remember, if all the intellegent people reply, you are only left with fools to moderate. Answer your question?
Water vapor is not bad for the environment. 70% of the planet's surface is after all covered with water. ...and 50-75% [worldbank.org] of the human body itself is also water. So I'm going to go out on a limb here to state that "water A-OK."
I am sure they will find a way to protest it. It destroys the natural desert. Eventually, we will all drown since all this water is being 'created'. It will cause more rain, which makes people gloomy, and lead to more suicides. Rich people are driving hydrogen SUVs and that is unfair, somehow.
Remember, you don't have to have any facts to protest, just a big sign, and lots of time on your hand.
The price differential between CRT and LCD monitors is still enough that most larger businesses are still only buying CRTs for most of their users. Sure the executives and receptionists are getting LCDs but everyone else gets cheap 17" CRT monitors.
We just did some calculating and figured we could use 15" LCDs instead of 17" CRTs and lose a little in size, and cost a little more up front, but save enough in less than 2 years to pay for the cost difference, in ELECTRICITY. Our graphics stations will likely stay with 19 to 21" CRTs but we will be phasing in LCDs in large part because the TCO is good, the space consumed is better, the employee moral benefits is great, thus the overall value is exceptional.
Holy shit dude, clean your bathroom BEFORE you photograph it. My god, reminds me of a Motel 6 I stayed at in Jacksonville, Florida....
They're much more compatible, they're created from the same code base. It's the same application interface, except that the server is extended. The same drivers work in both. Looking from underneath or above, they're the same.
Then why the *fuck* do I have to pay thousands to connect 30 people to a $199 piece of software?
Im not a MS basher, Im a pissed of MS customer.
What if you give a gun to a drunk 4 year old and he shoots a chimp? Whats your point?
You can't compare criminal negligence with activities that occur over an insecure web gateway, or none of the cafe's or airports would put up wireless gateways. That would be like holding the USPS responsible for the Unibomber's crimes.
I just realized I've been playing on your servers for a year! You do a good job with them.
:) I am migrating the nameing from Mayberry to Pharmboy as we speak. (I live in North Carolina, near the real "Mayberry" (Mount Airy) thus my game name, Barney Fife)
We started them in 1999. Moved them a time or two, hijacking bandwidth and cpus where we can
But yea, I still love to go through and beat the dumb ass scientists with the crowbar for being whiney. Also, Barney gets mad and starts shooting YOU if you smack him with the crowbar. Sick man, I know.
Best. Game. Ever.
For Windows/Mac OS X, most software is binary-only, and companies are going to decide that it's not worth the effort of supporting processor X, when it only has a fraction of the users. So, which ever gains popularity will be the defacto only system to use, and users of the other will be out of luck.
Which is exactly why I said Apple on AMD, if it ever occured, would be on the server side, where the source is available because most is open source. Apple ships Apache with OS X, for example. Porting over the other server applications would likely come from the open source community. Apple would have to port over OS X, which is not trivial but since it is BSD it would be more portable than windows by a long shot. Porting the applications afterward would be much easier.
Keep in mind, Apple has gotten pretty serious about the server market lately. Their offerings NOW are decent for many applications. This would give apple a 64 bit server, with backward compatability for existing 32bit applications. This is one way to get into serving huge databases. Of course the 970 will offer similar capability, but is actually designed to be a desktop cpu, not server. The Power4 cpu, the big brother of the 970, is designed for server use. This would make the AMD cpus capable of mulitboot Linux/OS X/Windows more easily. It may also give better performance for Windows apps running on top of OS X.
I am not necessarily EXPECTING this to happen, but Apple has a better chance of developing a specialized OS for servers on a different CPU than Microsoft. If memory serves me correct, MS gave up support for other CPUs a version to two back. Its all wild speculation, but interesting possibilities exist. Remember, the OS X kernel has been opened up in the OpenDarwin project, so OSS programmers may be helping with the dirty work.
As to the users being more advanced: If you port the kernel on top of any cpu, and put aqua on top of it, or X11, which Apple is also involved in, then how geeky you are is not longer a factor.
Look, does slashdot also post articles about how redhat 5.1 is "dead". Fuckers.
actually redhat announced that it is EOLing all versions one year after the intro of the next version, even for those of us that pay for support for our current 7.2- systems. We have talked about this in several areas, although I don't see a particular article posted on it.
But it has been talked about a fair amount.
We do opt in mail. Under 10k, once a month, and I design them.
We send them text only, one page only, very quick bullets with links in plain text. The real newsletter is on the site, and we just use the email to say hi and direct them to the site. We explain why we do it this way in the email. We get a great response, good feedback, and less than 1% unsubscribe per cycle. We go out of our way to be and look responsible. Each email has an opt out link and our toll free phone number, that is answered by a real human being.
We have never gotten a complaint by going these extra steps. The way we use it, it is legitimate. We don't send to all customers, ever. Only to those who opt in. Yes, we want email marketing to become more legitimate because most of us are. The only way achieve this legitimatacy is to get rid of the real spam.
Most companies are responsible with commercial email, its just the few who use it as the sole business that make it look bad for those of us who it only plays a small but important role in our marketing.
It's a very nasty situation when an OS has two different processors (and two different sets of binaries).
Linux, the cousin of BSD (the parent of OS X) runs on many processors, as do many of the other *nix varients. It would be much easier to run a *nix based OS on multiple platforms than Windows, because it already runs on other platforms, and was designed to from the very beginning. Berkeley designed 4BSD to do exactly this. Windows' support of other CPUs, is a less sucessful story.
Even though the one article focuses on 4 to 8 way desktops, the server market would be the likely first target: You can get more per unit out of the gate, and less application support is need to get them in the field. Put a 4 to 8 way box, with 16 to 64 gigs of ram, and you have a great web server. It might take longer to get all the multimedia and other desktop niceties up to snuff, but I would bet that support for apache, bind, sql, and other OSS services would come fast, since OSS can potentially develop faster when properly motivated.
Since the 970s are designed specifically for SMP and to be reasonably priced, and the server market is not sold purely by the gigahertz rating, but rather by real world performance, AND it being produced by IBM who is very likely to support Linux and *nix in general on this CPU, these could get popular fast.
I wouldn't want to own any SUN stock when it comes out.
I thought Half Life would have made an excellent movie.
I would agree with that. I still have a couple TFC servers, but hope back to HL every now and then. HL was the first game I ever played that make me jump and gave me chill bumps. Its a bit dated now, but won game of the year in 1997 for good reason. The idea that the hero, Gordon Freeman, was a pretty normal guy (well, a normal guy with a PhD in physics) was part of the draw, IMHO.
And you gotta love those little head eating monsters that looked like skinned chickens.
They should give UN weapons inspectors more time!
I agree. We should send ALL the inspectors to the moon. As a matter of fact, lets send the entire UN to the moon, just to be safe. I will even pitch in for gas, because I am that kind of guy.
I know that if we did, _I_ would sleep better at night.
go U.S.A! we're totally going to KICK THE MOON'S ASS!!!
Yea, just use a GPS guided MOAB and...oh wait....
Now does Microsoft buying VPC make sense? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe MS Mac Business Unit caught wind of this and wants to one-up Apple somehow. Any thoughts?
:)
Very interesting. I had not thought of that angle. Now I have to wonder if Apple is going to throw some resources over to the WINE project, making Virtual PC less relevent. I could even see IBM throwing some muscle that direction as well, since IBM has no love for MS. Purely speculation, but remember, IBM and AMD still have a working relationship as well, and obviously IBM and Apple have for years.
If you had all these OS's, with Apple taking the lead on the desktop, and BSD/Linux/Unix on the server end, and the ability to run legacy applications from MS..... The more you think about it, the more curiouser it gets
Maybe they are just going to use AMD64 chips to build 8 and 4 way XServes?
This is EXACTLY what I was thinking. Of course, with opendarwin, someone will have some fun trying to port osX over to the AMD anyway, if for no other reason, than just to do it. (like Xbox, etc.)
I would love to be able to have more choice, and IF Apple did port osX over to the new AMD64, I would buy one in a SNAP, just to see if we can finally replace our windows boxes.
Since XP has a 10-connection limit it's gonna make a pretty crappy file server in a moderate-use environment...
95 had a 10 user limit that could easily be changed in the properties tag of the protocol. As far as I can tell, you can't do that with XP. I have run 20 clients on a 95a file server and it ran acceptable for that purpose.
Also, I thought XP home had a limit of 3, XP pro of 5, 2k of 10. I could be wrong though.
Hmm, the 'real' phrase is pretty ambiguous, especially for a license. Is the implication that MS is warning the user that the software isn't fit for those purposes? Or is it still meant as a restriction on what MS wants their software used for?
I will leave the idea of MS software being "fit" for any purpose to the MS bashers. But it appears more like a way to say nothing while implying much, to keep people from doing what they have the legal right to do, and MS can't stop them from doing.
Hmmm... the only thing that might work is very public lawsuits and threats about patent voilations and what begins to happen?
Not to be political, but does anyone else see the parallels between this and kama kazi tactics? You're going to lose, take everyone with you. Its self destruction for small gains, at the expense of MUCH to others.
The first thing you need to do is check with your local zoning laws. In some states/counties/cities you can run a small business if it is not 'retail' out of your home, ie: as long as customers don't come by.
Here in NC, we had to go to the county zoning board, request a variance for a similar problem. It takes from 60 to 120 days in most places I know of, unless you live in a major city. Houston, on the other hand, only recently introduced zoning laws and it may not be an issue at all there.
If you do not have customers that come by, I would not worry so much. Unless your neighbors complain, there is no issue, and if you have no commercial traffic, there is nothing to complain about. A good relationship with your neighbors is more important than minute details of zoning laws, and if you have one or two customers come by a day, it is no more traffic than many people normally have anyway.
If you do have to go to a zoning board meeting, bring notes, be polite, be forceful but not rude, do your homework first and find comparible cases to present. Most of these guys want just don't want hassles, and if its easier to give you what you want than to deal with you if they think you will be back and back and back, then your odds are better. If they have done this variance before for someone else, you can present the case where they would rather quietly grant it for you than not.
If you get turned down, learn who is on the board, find a connection. Lion's club, Elks, Rotary, etc. and do a favor. Or find a way to do a favor directly, such as fixing a problem, or writing some small software program, whatever, not in exchange of course. In otherwords, schmooze him a bit. Then request the variance again.
Say what you want, but local govt. IS more corrupt that way, very small petty things. You can spend thousands fighting it, or get what you want first, then fight it.
THAT is a TERRIFIC(!) idea!
No, you miss the point. Its a terrible idea in that it PENALIZES people who buy very efficient cars, since 1/3 of the fuel cost is taxes. It makes buying and owning a fuel efficient car MORE expensive, by a large margin. Those of us that drive Chevy trucks would not really be affected, since our gas mileage is bad enough we break even (17.5mpg everywhere)
Oh yea, and most American's would call this an absolute violation of privacy. In America, we believe it is not any business of the government where we go, and GPS monitoring would allow them to check your every move. Seeing that we are a free country, we would consider this dangerous.
best damn idea ive heard in ages... i hear portland is wonderfull.. if oregon wasnt in the USA, i might consider living there.
Thats ok, we already have plenty of people who think its ok for the government to track every citizen, we don't need more.
Does anyone else see the irony here?
So we all can reduce the effects of crackers by using safer programming languages, chroot, and other methods of good admin? What a concept! They offer suggestions like "Of course, if you don't need that particular daemon, it's better to simply turn it off."
That is so profound. I think I will go change all my root passwords from "password" to something else, maybe even mixing cases of letters. It never dawned on me before. I might even start using iptables.</sarcasm>
This is hardly newsworthy. It is saying: The more you implement good security measures, the less security problems you will have. While I love the Register, this article should be modded redundant itself. Its not that its wrong, its just not offering anything new or interesting.
Penny Arcade should get in touch with the MAD Magazine guys in New York
:>
Yea, then every 12 year old boy would know how crappy this was, since that is the demographics for MAD. Too bad they can't vote.
Oh, YOU read MAD? You don't still live in your parents basement do you? Or run a comics store on the Simpsons?