SQL Server 2000 is $5K per processor for unlimited client access. If you've only got 5-25 people accessing, it's less than that ($1K-$2K).
Yes, for old-fashioned client-server use. If you want to use your SQL Server for storage of data that's accessible through Internet, which is most of the usage you will see today (I don't know about intranet, though), you are in the 20k$ range, AFAIK.
I have an interesting question. My employer does not seem to make a big fuss about working for open-source projects (I have even forced a change to my contract to include all non-profit projects), but the contract does limit me what I do for profit - wheather it is on my time or company time. My contract states that I am liable to damages if I do anything similar (we have argued a lot about what similar means) to what I do at the company.
I don't know if it's a legend or not or whatever, but I believe there is *a lot* in our brain that we haven't explored yet. Just take for example eastern civilizations - they are able to achieve state of mind which allows them to go weeks without water and food.
Ok, 90% is a far stretch, but I just wanted to say that why add when we haven't explored existing.
I work for a smaller web company. We have made a web site (and some acompanying software) for a big firm in our country with a large legal department.
While they are using M$ products (they own more than 200 licences for Word), they read through our EULA very thrurally and wanted us to give 1-year guarantee (we settled for 6 months) on our software.
I did not help us to point out that MS guarantees their software will function as specified for only 1 or 3 (I can't remember which) months after the purchase.
My opinion is that they simply don't care anymore: "Everybody's using it, so someone must have read through. And, anyways, is not as we can change anything."
The problem studios have is that not everyone lives in the US. The lifespan of the movie starts in the US teathers and goes around the world. By the time it hits Europe (second stop on it's list) it's already started to come out on DVDs an tapes in the US. Sometimes, you can even buy a DVD in the States before you can see it in the movies here (Slovenia, Europe, for example). People are anctious to see the film, so they are willing to pirate.
*IF* there were a legitimate way to buy the movie from the US, people *WOULD* do it. But that would mean that big movie studios would have to release the movie all around the world at about the same time (for a specific media). I don't know exacly why, but it does not appear that this is going to happen anytime soon.
So; they need to stop people from whatching the movies *BEFORE* they appear in the teathers. (For first time viewing a screener is OK, but for keeping a movie in your collection DVD is preferable, given the fact that you *CAN LEGALLY* own that DVD, IMHO).
And that is exacly why there shouldn't be a default browser; if Microsoft (or for that matter any company) enforces their browser as "The Internet" then we have a monopoly; but on the other hand, if the user has three icons on the desktop: "Browse the internet with IE/NN/Opera", then the user has a choice and can choose the browser he is most conftable with. (And, consiquentially drag the other icons to Recycle bin when learns how:))
I think it is not the point wheather to bundle IE with Wins or not. We all know that it would severely cripple the OS if it were to be done now.
The real remedy would be to allow competition. How? By default both browsers should be installed (heck, Opera too). The user should have a choice to select a default browser when installing the OS and the swich should be made as easy as possible later on.
Well, I don't know about you guys, but I am a bit paranoid when it comes to Internet.
That's why at work (it is the only machine with a constant connection to internet I have access to), regardless that it is behind a company firewall, I have installed a desktop-solution firewall. I am running Windows 2000 and each application has to ask for *MY* permission before accessing the Internet. You'd be surprised how may (Microsoft) applications try to connect in this or other way to computers listed in Microsoft domain. And not just to blame MS, a lot of other software has a tendency to "dial home".
May point is (and was in the first message): you don't need to keep patching your software every week, you just need to be a bit careful (I am not very familiar with your specific type of exploit, but couldn't it be stopped it you had an port/IP combination block on your firewall?)
Microsoft's fault for leaving security caves in its OSes?
Actually folks, I guess it is our fault. Think about it. Where do most DoS attacks come from? They come from DSL/cable users which are 24/7 online. How come? They have a Trojan on their computer and don't know about it. Any how did they get a trojan? They are not educated enough.
As I once heard: people should be issued licenses for using computers (we issue licences for driving cars and expect everyone who drives a car to know what how to operate it). Well, there's no need to be so strict about computers, but think about it for a while: if an avarage user would have enough knowledge to know what a firewall is good for and not to open just anything s(he) gets, DDoS attacks would not be possible.
It is our job (the techies) to educate the users. DDoS attack would not be possble if everyone would be as concearned about their PCs as they are about their cars...
Well, I'm not quite sure about this. I study economics and know somes stuff, so let me explain.
In the ideal world, where we have total liberalisation of intra-country trade, every country (but note, not everyone!) would benefit from it.
It is the process of specialization. For example: your country produces computers better than beer (i.e. it needs less manpower and less capital to produce one computer), in my country it is quite the reverse. So it pays for us to exchage our beer for your computers. And you also profit from that.
Now, if we have no restrictions in international trade that would mean that you would have more computers and more beer to consume than you would if you were not trading at all. Same in our country. That's good for the economy.
But what is bad, and the reason why it won't ever happen, that you (or at least majority of people doing your kind of job), is the following:
if my country is exporting beer to your country it must mean that we have lower production costs and lower price (for beer) than your country, otherwise it would not be economical for you to import it in the first place. While this is good for the consumer (cheaper beer) it is not good for the beer producers.
That's why and where the government comes in: they put import taxes on beer to make it more expensive in your country. That lowers our export and your import, but it does cut some slack for your beer produces.
The same thing is with jobs. The countries are even more careful about this than about beer. The country will not allow itself to reach 17% unemployement rate just because all work is outsourced to India/China. Yes, the companies will have lower costs and bigger profits, but at what cost? Therefore the country will take some export/import limiting actions to stop this for happening.
Of course, on the long-term (Keynes, a well known economist once said: "On long term we are all dead" and I kind of agree with him on that, so this is just for argument's sake) you will see that the price of production factors (i.e. labour (wages) and capital) and the price of products will be the same accross all of the trading countries.
100:1 loseless compression on any data is impossible. Why? Here's why:
What are the requirements every (loseless) compression software must follow? It must be able for every array of bits of length N to produce another array of legth M, which can be then translated back into N.
Look at it this way:
You have a array of 1000 bits. They can be combined in 2^1000 ways. Because we imply that it is possible N -> M -> N we also must have (at least) 2^1000 different M arrays and that is only possible if you use at least 1000 bits, so no compression is possible.
So how does software compress stuff? Well, it uses repetitive data and shortens it. In the extreme scenario, when none of the data is repetitive, the file is even longer (because of compression software overhead).
Therefore it is impossible to compress (any)data 100:1 losslessly. Yes, you can compress it 100:1 if you just have an 1000-bits long array of ones, but not in any other case...
Well, I don't get much spam, either. Once in a month I get a "Enlarge your p*nis/buy viagra spam", but that's about it. Have serverside rule about it:)
How come you guys get so much spam? I simply use three different email addreses (or four, I guess):
- one regular
- one web address for stuff I want to keep separate
- one web address for sites requiring me to leave my email address when subscribing (this is the mail I get most spam at, but I check it only when I know there's some mail (=registration info), so if I get any spam it doesn't matter, since I don't read it anyway)
- and usually billg@micosoft.com when I need to access something (which wants my email address for unknown (?) reasons) and I know that it won't send me back usable mails.
And another thing: I used my second email address only to send a greeting card from one 3rd party site and guess what (I am quite certain of this): they have released my mail to some 4th party company and now I regulary get "Naked girls / ZOO / Britney spears" mails. Darn.
First of all, I must say I am not very familiar with US Sprint service. I live in Europe and 3G is an important issue here as it is in US and in Japan. I must agree that costs for setting up 3G are (in most of the countries around the world) simply astronomic. Mostly because of huge government apetites. This will cetranly/slow down/ adoption of 3G, but it will not kill it.
Secondly, I've seen japanese thingies and I could not believe it: the phones are lighter and thinner than your Motorola StarTAC and have support for 160+ px and color. Some (ok, a bit bigger models) even have a build in video camera.
While it is true that people want to use phones for phone calls, I guess no one would mind being able to see the person on the other side or even stream pictures of babies firsts steps and mooshy stuff like that.
Conclusion: if there is enough interest from big companies to push this forward, eventually everybody will be using 3G.
All the arguments you have given are (kind of) true. But just check out Japan. Their phones have at least 160x160px (and less than 90 grams weight), most are in color. And that's more than enough to use "wireless web access". 4x25 was what killed WAP, it's not what will kill 3G.
Japanese people are tottaly into mobile phones. They use them for iMode, phone-calls, mail, surfing, sending eachother pictures and some-kind-of MIDI files etc. etc. etc.
The catch is that with 3G you will not have a phone anymore but a multimedia all-purpose communication device.
Ok, truth first: I haven't read the patent licence, but here's a though:
Why the heck would I want to look over the public draft, suggest corrections and then (if my corrections are incorporated) pay a fee to use this standard?
Isn't that a bit stupid? Like Microsoft asking you to write code for Windows, which it can sell back to you later?
I say boycott this. W3C Patent = closed stadards = noone using them = we need another free body?
No offence to the US people, but your congressmen are stupid. Enforcing now this and now that law that makes most of the users unhappy and increases costs for techonlogy will just drive all the production further away to Taiwan, Korea and other contries. Speaking long term, the development of new tecnologies will probably move to EU with much more relaxed constraints...
Unconfirmed yet, but it seems that here in Europe (Slovenia) people have been hearing US army planes flying above their heads all day long (before the attacks).
Slashdot Mirror
I almost feel obligated to anwser this:
SQL Server 2000 is $5K per processor for unlimited client access. If you've only got 5-25 people accessing, it's less than that ($1K-$2K).
Yes, for old-fashioned client-server use. If you want to use your SQL Server for storage of data that's accessible through Internet, which is most of the usage you will see today (I don't know about intranet, though), you are in the 20k$ range, AFAIK.
Most frequently I use billg@microsoft.com, but presitent@whitehouse.gov seems ok, too :)
Hi.
I have an interesting question. My employer does not seem to make a big fuss about working for open-source projects (I have even forced a change to my contract to include all non-profit projects), but the contract does limit me what I do for profit - wheather it is on my time or company time. My contract states that I am liable to damages if I do anything similar (we have argued a lot about what similar means) to what I do at the company.
What are your experiences with this?
I don't know if it's a legend or not or whatever, but I believe there is *a lot* in our brain that we haven't explored yet. Just take for example eastern civilizations - they are able to achieve state of mind which allows them to go weeks without water and food.
Ok, 90% is a far stretch, but I just wanted to say that why add when we haven't explored existing.
Let me just try to explain it like this:
I work for a smaller web company. We have made a web site (and some acompanying software) for a big firm in our country with a large legal department.
While they are using M$ products (they own more than 200 licences for Word), they read through our EULA very thrurally and wanted us to give 1-year guarantee (we settled for 6 months) on our software.
I did not help us to point out that MS guarantees their software will function as specified for only 1 or 3 (I can't remember which) months after the purchase.
My opinion is that they simply don't care anymore: "Everybody's using it, so someone must have read through. And, anyways, is not as we can change anything."
AFAIK we still don't use most of our brains, so what's the point in having a 100 GB disk if you are using only 1 GB of your existing 10 GB disk?
I've been going through the comments and still haven't come accross 42.
The problem studios have is that not everyone lives in the US. The lifespan of the movie starts in the US teathers and goes around the world. By the time it hits Europe (second stop on it's list) it's already started to come out on DVDs an tapes in the US. Sometimes, you can even buy a DVD in the States before you can see it in the movies here (Slovenia, Europe, for example). People are anctious to see the film, so they are willing to pirate.
*IF* there were a legitimate way to buy the movie from the US, people *WOULD* do it. But that would mean that big movie studios would have to release the movie all around the world at about the same time (for a specific media). I don't know exacly why, but it does not appear that this is going to happen anytime soon.
So; they need to stop people from whatching the movies *BEFORE* they appear in the teathers. (For first time viewing a screener is OK, but for keeping a movie in your collection DVD is preferable, given the fact that you *CAN LEGALLY* own that DVD, IMHO).
I guess, if you can live with the fact that your Segway will also carry a dishwasher :)
And that is exacly why there shouldn't be a default browser; if Microsoft (or for that matter any company) enforces their browser as "The Internet" then we have a monopoly; but on the other hand, if the user has three icons on the desktop: "Browse the internet with IE/NN/Opera", then the user has a choice and can choose the browser he is most conftable with. (And, consiquentially drag the other icons to Recycle bin when learns how :))
I think it is not the point wheather to bundle IE with Wins or not. We all know that it would severely cripple the OS if it were to be done now.
The real remedy would be to allow competition. How? By default both browsers should be installed (heck, Opera too). The user should have a choice to select a default browser when installing the OS and the swich should be made as easy as possible later on.
Now, that's what I call free competition.
Well, I don't know about you guys, but I am a bit paranoid when it comes to Internet.
That's why at work (it is the only machine with a constant connection to internet I have access to), regardless that it is behind a company firewall, I have installed a desktop-solution firewall. I am running Windows 2000 and each application has to ask for *MY* permission before accessing the Internet. You'd be surprised how may (Microsoft) applications try to connect in this or other way to computers listed in Microsoft domain. And not just to blame MS, a lot of other software has a tendency to "dial home".
May point is (and was in the first message): you don't need to keep patching your software every week, you just need to be a bit careful (I am not very familiar with your specific type of exploit, but couldn't it be stopped it you had an port/IP combination block on your firewall?)
Script kiddiez fault for toying with the web?
Microsoft's fault for leaving security caves in its OSes?
Actually folks, I guess it is our fault. Think about it. Where do most DoS attacks come from? They come from DSL/cable users which are 24/7 online. How come? They have a Trojan on their computer and don't know about it. Any how did they get a trojan? They are not educated enough.
As I once heard: people should be issued licenses for using computers (we issue licences for driving cars and expect everyone who drives a car to know what how to operate it). Well, there's no need to be so strict about computers, but think about it for a while: if an avarage user would have enough knowledge to know what a firewall is good for and not to open just anything s(he) gets, DDoS attacks would not be possible.
It is our job (the techies) to educate the users. DDoS attack would not be possble if everyone would be as concearned about their PCs as they are about their cars...
Just my 0.02 Euro
Maybe they can put up an excellent wearable device, but they sure don't know how to code HTML tables!
:-)
Well, I'm not quite sure about this. I study economics and know somes stuff, so let me explain.
In the ideal world, where we have total liberalisation of intra-country trade, every country (but note, not everyone!) would benefit from it.
It is the process of specialization. For example: your country produces computers better than beer (i.e. it needs less manpower and less capital to produce one computer), in my country it is quite the reverse. So it pays for us to exchage our beer for your computers. And you also profit from that.
Now, if we have no restrictions in international trade that would mean that you would have more computers and more beer to consume than you would if you were not trading at all. Same in our country. That's good for the economy.
But what is bad, and the reason why it won't ever happen, that you (or at least majority of people doing your kind of job), is the following: if my country is exporting beer to your country it must mean that we have lower production costs and lower price (for beer) than your country, otherwise it would not be economical for you to import it in the first place. While this is good for the consumer (cheaper beer) it is not good for the beer producers.
That's why and where the government comes in: they put import taxes on beer to make it more expensive in your country. That lowers our export and your import, but it does cut some slack for your beer produces.
The same thing is with jobs. The countries are even more careful about this than about beer. The country will not allow itself to reach 17% unemployement rate just because all work is outsourced to India/China. Yes, the companies will have lower costs and bigger profits, but at what cost? Therefore the country will take some export/import limiting actions to stop this for happening.
Of course, on the long-term (Keynes, a well known economist once said: "On long term we are all dead" and I kind of agree with him on that, so this is just for argument's sake) you will see that the price of production factors (i.e. labour (wages) and capital) and the price of products will be the same accross all of the trading countries.
100:1 loseless compression on any data is impossible. Why? Here's why:
What are the requirements every (loseless) compression software must follow? It must be able for every array of bits of length N to produce another array of legth M, which can be then translated back into N.
Look at it this way:
You have a array of 1000 bits. They can be combined in 2^1000 ways. Because we imply that it is possible N -> M -> N we also must have (at least) 2^1000 different M arrays and that is only possible if you use at least 1000 bits, so no compression is possible.
So how does software compress stuff? Well, it uses repetitive data and shortens it. In the extreme scenario, when none of the data is repetitive, the file is even longer (because of compression software overhead).
Therefore it is impossible to compress (any)data 100:1 losslessly. Yes, you can compress it 100:1 if you just have an 1000-bits long array of ones, but not in any other case...
Boky
Well, I don't get much spam, either. Once in a month I get a "Enlarge your p*nis/buy viagra spam", but that's about it. Have serverside rule about it :)
:)
How come you guys get so much spam? I simply use three different email addreses (or four, I guess):
- one regular
- one web address for stuff I want to keep separate
- one web address for sites requiring me to leave my email address when subscribing (this is the mail I get most spam at, but I check it only when I know there's some mail (=registration info), so if I get any spam it doesn't matter, since I don't read it anyway)
- and usually billg@micosoft.com when I need to access something (which wants my email address for unknown (?) reasons) and I know that it won't send me back usable mails.
And another thing: I used my second email address only to send a greeting card from one 3rd party site and guess what (I am quite certain of this): they have released my mail to some 4th party company and now I regulary get "Naked girls / ZOO / Britney spears" mails. Darn.
Oh, what the heck; there are always RULES.
First of all, I must say I am not very familiar with US Sprint service. I live in Europe and 3G is an important issue here as it is in US and in Japan. I must agree that costs for setting up 3G are (in most of the countries around the world) simply astronomic. Mostly because of huge government apetites. This will cetranly /slow down/ adoption of 3G, but it will not kill it.
Secondly, I've seen japanese thingies and I could not believe it: the phones are lighter and thinner than your Motorola StarTAC and have support for 160+ px and color. Some (ok, a bit bigger models) even have a build in video camera.
While it is true that people want to use phones for phone calls, I guess no one would mind being able to see the person on the other side or even stream pictures of babies firsts steps and mooshy stuff like that.
Conclusion: if there is enough interest from big companies to push this forward, eventually everybody will be using 3G.
All the arguments you have given are (kind of) true. But just check out Japan. Their phones have at least 160x160px (and less than 90 grams weight), most are in color. And that's more than enough to use "wireless web access". 4x25 was what killed WAP, it's not what will kill 3G.
Japanese people are tottaly into mobile phones. They use them for iMode, phone-calls, mail, surfing, sending eachother pictures and some-kind-of MIDI files etc. etc. etc.
The catch is that with 3G you will not have a phone anymore but a multimedia all-purpose communication device.
Ok, truth first: I haven't read the patent licence, but here's a though:
Why the heck would I want to look over the public draft, suggest corrections and then (if my corrections are incorporated) pay a fee to use this standard?
Isn't that a bit stupid? Like Microsoft asking you to write code for Windows, which it can sell back to you later?
I say boycott this. W3C Patent = closed stadards = noone using them = we need another free body?
Boky
No offence to the US people, but your congressmen are stupid. Enforcing now this and now that law that makes most of the users unhappy and increases costs for techonlogy will just drive all the production further away to Taiwan, Korea and other contries. Speaking long term, the development of new tecnologies will probably move to EU with much more relaxed constraints...
Unconfirmed yet, but it seems that here in Europe (Slovenia) people have been hearing US army planes flying above their heads all day long (before the attacks).
Call me paranoid, but I think the army knew.