true about setup being the misconception, however I contend that it isn't the OS that is the problem, but the applications that run on it.
Setting up Windows, if you know what you're doing, take no time (or you've never booted off a PXE floppy/CD with setup info on it and watched the OS copy itself over the network). That said, the same applies to Linux (or you've never booted off a floppy/CD and had the OS copy itself over the network) Obviously you have to know what you're doing in both cases, if you don't than you're going to make a dog's dinner out of whichever one you choose.
Also, when it comes to support Microsoft kicks ass. Really. If you have paid for support from MS, you really do get it. Seriously. Big time. My old company had a problem (of the CTOs making, the plonker) and we had guys at MS working round the clock to find what the issue was.
Cost similarly matters to you or me, but to most businesses with a budget to spend, and staff to pay, the cost of $300 is just negligible when its added to staff wages. Even then, big IT places will be buying PCs with Windows on them for free anyway, and the cost of the PC far outweighs the cost of the bundled apps, so cost is simply not an issue.
So anyway, I think the OS and all the rest simply is a non-issue as far as putting computers to work - you get knowledgeable staff and you're good to go. The problem comes with the apps you want to run - if you have something that is only supported on Windows, and you must run it, then you're not going to have a happy time choose Linux (regardless of how good Wine is). Similarly, for a lot of Linux-only apps. This is what I think causes the problems with these migrations more than anything.
Incidentally, saying Linux comes with everything out of the box and Windows has to have a load of apps setup is FUD. Sure, you run windows update to get the latest IE, but on Linux you run apt-get or yum to get the latest Firefox. Its the same. With apps like Office, you're installing a separate app, but if you compared that with a similar Linux app, you'd have to install that too (and we're talking non-free business apps that are not bundled with the OS).
automatic transmissions were introduced for the female population because some of the vehicle manufacturers thought manual transmissions were too difficult for a woman to operate.
Fantastic! You'll want to track down the ridiculously funny 'Women! Know your limits" sketch from Harry Enfield:
40s style voice-over: Look at this motor car. A BEAUTY, isn't it? It's got twenty years happy motoring ahead of it - or has it? Here comes a woman!
[Woman walks up to the car]
voice: Which side's she getting in? The driver's side! Oh, dear - the WRONG side.
Well worth checking if you can grab it off the web, or buy the DVD.
Intimidating! Understatement of the year, my Swindonian friend.
It does prove a point about the article - when I first arrived at the Magic roundabout I first blanked somewhat, then started thinking how to get across safely. I think this is the point of having no road signs - when you come across such an unusual state, you stop relying on learned responses and start to go a lot slower to account for the thinking that you suddenly begin doing. However, once you've gotten used to the new road, you bomb across it just like always.
I recommend the Magic roundabout to anyone visiting the UK, though my American colleagues find manual gearboxes and normal roundabouts confusing enough!
Read very carefully. NTFS junctions are the equivalent of unix hardlinks. NOT symlinks.
I use the junction tool too (so I can support 2 versions of my app), VS2005 works perfectly well with it, but I keep everything local, and as simple as possible. I've never had a problem with junctions.
true, and I hope so, but I doubt the $100 laptop will achieve that - you need the electricity and the networking infrestructure to get on the internet - something quite difficult in places these laptops are intended to go.
It reminds me of my old "3rd world" school lessons. Once, we sent tractors to african thinking that's what they needed to improve their agriculture. Fast forward 2 years and you have starving africans with broken down tractors (no spare parts or trained mechanics to fix them), and no diesel to put in them anyway. What we should have sent them was trowels, shovels and ploughs.
Although they can learn how to make solar stills for drinking water (hmm, how much water do you extract from an arid atmosphere?) missionary work where a teacher goes and shows them how to make this (and takes the raw materials with them) would be far more effective. If you want viral information dissemination - well, they already have this. Its called going and talking to the next village along. This kind of thing is already done with the AIDs work, amongst others.
Dempser farm windmills may be great, but do they have the steel and wiring to create them?
lol. Yeah, IBM had it right years back - "there will not be a need for more than 6 computers in the world". And *you* won't be allowed to play with them.
Who gives a damn about aliens if it needs to distinguish between humans and trees. I'd be worried about any tree that walks into its line of fire....after all, trees are just too clever to walk about while anyones looking:-)
Type 'computer recycle charity' into google, and see just how many hits you get. Or click this link ComputerAid International if you're too lazy:)
The $100 computer thing is more about a PC that can be used in places where there isn't the kind of electricity supply that would be needed to power most PCs.
Volunteer to get rid of them... a few to your friends, a few on ebay, a few to recycling charity (that will come and collect), the knackered ones to the dump. Go on, do your bit, don't just sit there and type how terrible it is.
Most of the problem isn't about corporate data - any charity that recycles computers guarantees that the data is wiped and uses specialist equipment to clean the drives, but that they only accept relatively good computers.
Look at ComputerAid International that uses MoD-specified data wiping tools, but won't accept anything less than a 450Mhz P3.
How old is your hardware? For the article-imparied, they tried it on a 1.2Ghz Athlon Gateway box that had 512Mb RAM and said "We were extremely impressed with Vista on the five-year-old Gateway".
They did say more RAM is a good idea and recommended 1Gb.
So I guess you will be able tyo run it on your old hardware after all.
The IPv6 addresses are handed out as a subnet to each end-user, so you just block that subnet, not the full address. Also, because the spammers/phishers are assigned a fixed address, they won't be using a dynamic one that changes all the time. Put these together and you'll have a list that is roughly the same size as the current one, not exponentially larger as the naysayers FUD suggests.
no, the title is misleading and poor journalism, plus poor editorial control (ie NO editorial control - did the editors RTFA?)
Perhaps its time to give editor points away, like mod points, to people who actually care about the quality of the stories they read and not just click 'accept' or 'reject' randomly.
and, for those interested, using MS Visual C++ v8 with all the default options it comes out as 6656 bytes. Obviously, statically linked it'll grow somewhat (to 114k strangely enough. I was expecting more)
not necessarily. Take your example of games. Once upon a time graphics instructions were practically poked into memory and a bitmap was directly manipulated. Now, in order to get the fancy graphics we're used to, a coder writes instructions to an engine that uses a scenegraph and physics and other libraries all of which use a 3d graphics library (eg opengl) that uses a low-level graphics driver. This is the code reuse that makes things different, and requires a lot of people, there's simply more code that is being brought to bear on the problem, and fortunately most of it is pre-written and stable.
So, code will never get too complex for a single person, its just that he'll be using a lot more libraries to perform work that he would never have been able to accomplish by writing from scratch.
Fortunately, these 'brainwashed' children grow up and start working in the real world with tools and software mandated by the job at hand, not what they've been brought up to believe is the only thing available.
I know it won't satisfy you, but you could slipstream those drivers in (think of it as recompiling your custom kernel with a driver.. like I had to do with my wireless usb adapter that wasn't recognised by the latest installer.
technically, the latest version of Microsoft's OS is XP SP2. If you use an install disc from 2001 (for *any* OS) it isn't going to recognise hard drive interfaces that were invented *after* 2001.
This also applies to other drivers, damn especially network drivers!. Try a FC4 CD with a brand new raid card and see if it recognises it. What do you do when it doesn't? Not only will the manufacturer have a driver available (included in the box) for windows, but MS gives you the opportunity of getting them installed in a easy-to-use way. Sure you have to use a floppy (hmm, are you sure - can't you select them from a CD now?), but everybody had a floppy drive in 2001 so its understandable they'd use that method.
sod all that. 'yum install xyz'. If that doesn't work then you'll know that that package has not hit the mainstream. Nobody should be installing from source - compiling is an a developer/power user task, ordinary users want it to just work with the minimum (and I mean minimum) of fuss, bother and (preferably) configuration.
The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developes start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.
So what - isn't this what open source is supposed to be about. If MS wants to embrace/extend/extinguish (otherwise known as forking) then that's fine, the GPL allows them to do so. why would you have a problem with PHP.net under a F/OSS licence.
If it makes PHP better under windows, and adds support for PHP to tools like Visual Studio then all is good. The old PHP will continue to work as before.
absolutely correct. It worked incredibly well for IBM - buy a DB2 database, get a free AS/400 with OS/400 to run it. You'd not find a better, well setup, seriously secure, seriously tuned, seriously dull database. All of which is a good thing when you're storing important data on something. Oracle should lose the egotism and do the same thing, but there's no chance of that happening.
Yes you can, and they do. I can't find the link to the full story I read, but there is this which is being used now, partly to heat water and party to ensure that you don't need to de-ice the road in winter (as in this link, all originally designed by this Dutch company.
Alternatively, there is a bit about what you can buy and use today in your back garden (not for tarmac road heatpumps, but ground heatpumps) here
Slashdot Mirror
true about setup being the misconception, however I contend that it isn't the OS that is the problem, but the applications that run on it.
Setting up Windows, if you know what you're doing, take no time (or you've never booted off a PXE floppy/CD with setup info on it and watched the OS copy itself over the network). That said, the same applies to Linux (or you've never booted off a floppy/CD and had the OS copy itself over the network) Obviously you have to know what you're doing in both cases, if you don't than you're going to make a dog's dinner out of whichever one you choose.
Also, when it comes to support Microsoft kicks ass. Really. If you have paid for support from MS, you really do get it. Seriously. Big time. My old company had a problem (of the CTOs making, the plonker) and we had guys at MS working round the clock to find what the issue was.
Cost similarly matters to you or me, but to most businesses with a budget to spend, and staff to pay, the cost of $300 is just negligible when its added to staff wages. Even then, big IT places will be buying PCs with Windows on them for free anyway, and the cost of the PC far outweighs the cost of the bundled apps, so cost is simply not an issue.
So anyway, I think the OS and all the rest simply is a non-issue as far as putting computers to work - you get knowledgeable staff and you're good to go. The problem comes with the apps you want to run - if you have something that is only supported on Windows, and you must run it, then you're not going to have a happy time choose Linux (regardless of how good Wine is). Similarly, for a lot of Linux-only apps. This is what I think causes the problems with these migrations more than anything.
Incidentally, saying Linux comes with everything out of the box and Windows has to have a load of apps setup is FUD. Sure, you run windows update to get the latest IE, but on Linux you run apt-get or yum to get the latest Firefox. Its the same. With apps like Office, you're installing a separate app, but if you compared that with a similar Linux app, you'd have to install that too (and we're talking non-free business apps that are not bundled with the OS).
To help the grandparent poster: Birmingham, West Midlands. 3264 miles east of America.
Pah. Birmingham's bluddy briliant. That's why they have this site: http://www.birminghamitsnotshit.co.uk/
automatic transmissions were introduced for the female population because some of the vehicle manufacturers thought manual transmissions were too difficult for a woman to operate.
Fantastic! You'll want to track down the ridiculously funny 'Women! Know your limits" sketch from Harry Enfield:
40s style voice-over: Look at this motor car. A BEAUTY, isn't it? It's got twenty years happy motoring ahead of it - or has it? Here comes a woman!
[Woman walks up to the car]
voice: Which side's she getting in? The driver's side! Oh, dear - the WRONG side.
Well worth checking if you can grab it off the web, or buy the DVD.
Intimidating! Understatement of the year, my Swindonian friend.
It does prove a point about the article - when I first arrived at the Magic roundabout I first blanked somewhat, then started thinking how to get across safely. I think this is the point of having no road signs - when you come across such an unusual state, you stop relying on learned responses and start to go a lot slower to account for the thinking that you suddenly begin doing. However, once you've gotten used to the new road, you bomb across it just like always.
I recommend the Magic roundabout to anyone visiting the UK, though my American colleagues find manual gearboxes and normal roundabouts confusing enough!
Read very carefully. NTFS junctions are the equivalent of unix hardlinks. NOT symlinks.
I use the junction tool too (so I can support 2 versions of my app), VS2005 works perfectly well with it, but I keep everything local, and as simple as possible. I've never had a problem with junctions.
true, and I hope so, but I doubt the $100 laptop will achieve that - you need the electricity and the networking infrestructure to get on the internet - something quite difficult in places these laptops are intended to go.
It reminds me of my old "3rd world" school lessons. Once, we sent tractors to african thinking that's what they needed to improve their agriculture. Fast forward 2 years and you have starving africans with broken down tractors (no spare parts or trained mechanics to fix them), and no diesel to put in them anyway. What we should have sent them was trowels, shovels and ploughs.
Although they can learn how to make solar stills for drinking water (hmm, how much water do you extract from an arid atmosphere?) missionary work where a teacher goes and shows them how to make this (and takes the raw materials with them) would be far more effective. If you want viral information dissemination - well, they already have this. Its called going and talking to the next village along. This kind of thing is already done with the AIDs work, amongst others.
Dempser farm windmills may be great, but do they have the steel and wiring to create them?
lol. Yeah, IBM had it right years back - "there will not be a need for more than 6 computers in the world". And *you* won't be allowed to play with them.
Who gives a damn about aliens if it needs to distinguish between humans and trees. I'd be worried about any tree that walks into its line of fire. ...after all, trees are just too clever to walk about while anyones looking :-)
Type 'computer recycle charity' into google, and see just how many hits you get. Or click this link ComputerAid International if you're too lazy :)
The $100 computer thing is more about a PC that can be used in places where there isn't the kind of electricity supply that would be needed to power most PCs.
Volunteer to get rid of them... a few to your friends, a few on ebay, a few to recycling charity (that will come and collect), the knackered ones to the dump. Go on, do your bit, don't just sit there and type how terrible it is.
Most of the problem isn't about corporate data - any charity that recycles computers guarantees that the data is wiped and uses specialist equipment to clean the drives, but that they only accept relatively good computers.
Look at ComputerAid International that uses MoD-specified data wiping tools, but won't accept anything less than a 450Mhz P3.
How old is your hardware? For the article-imparied, they tried it on a 1.2Ghz Athlon Gateway box that had 512Mb RAM and said "We were extremely impressed with Vista on the five-year-old Gateway".
They did say more RAM is a good idea and recommended 1Gb.
So I guess you will be able tyo run it on your old hardware after all.
The IPv6 addresses are handed out as a subnet to each end-user, so you just block that subnet, not the full address. Also, because the spammers/phishers are assigned a fixed address, they won't be using a dynamic one that changes all the time. Put these together and you'll have a list that is roughly the same size as the current one, not exponentially larger as the naysayers FUD suggests.
no, the title is misleading and poor journalism, plus poor editorial control (ie NO editorial control - did the editors RTFA?)
Perhaps its time to give editor points away, like mod points, to people who actually care about the quality of the stories they read and not just click 'accept' or 'reject' randomly.
and, for those interested, using MS Visual C++ v8 with all the default options it comes out as 6656 bytes. Obviously, statically linked it'll grow somewhat (to 114k strangely enough. I was expecting more)
not necessarily. Take your example of games. Once upon a time graphics instructions were practically poked into memory and a bitmap was directly manipulated. Now, in order to get the fancy graphics we're used to, a coder writes instructions to an engine that uses a scenegraph and physics and other libraries all of which use a 3d graphics library (eg opengl) that uses a low-level graphics driver. This is the code reuse that makes things different, and requires a lot of people, there's simply more code that is being brought to bear on the problem, and fortunately most of it is pre-written and stable.
So, code will never get too complex for a single person, its just that he'll be using a lot more libraries to perform work that he would never have been able to accomplish by writing from scratch.
...and Sun filled our universities with Java.
Fortunately, these 'brainwashed' children grow up and start working in the real world with tools and software mandated by the job at hand, not what they've been brought up to believe is the only thing available.
I know it won't satisfy you, but you could slipstream those drivers in (think of it as recompiling your custom kernel with a driver.. like I had to do with my wireless usb adapter that wasn't recognised by the latest installer.
technically, the latest version of Microsoft's OS is XP SP2. If you use an install disc from 2001 (for *any* OS) it isn't going to recognise hard drive interfaces that were invented *after* 2001.
This also applies to other drivers, damn especially network drivers!. Try a FC4 CD with a brand new raid card and see if it recognises it. What do you do when it doesn't? Not only will the manufacturer have a driver available (included in the box) for windows, but MS gives you the opportunity of getting them installed in a easy-to-use way. Sure you have to use a floppy (hmm, are you sure - can't you select them from a CD now?), but everybody had a floppy drive in 2001 so its understandable they'd use that method.
sod all that. 'yum install xyz'. If that doesn't work then you'll know that that package has not hit the mainstream. Nobody should be installing from source - compiling is an a developer /power user task, ordinary users want it to just work with the minimum (and I mean minimum) of fuss, bother and (preferably) configuration.
I do apologise, I thought it was GPL.
The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developes start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.
So what - isn't this what open source is supposed to be about. If MS wants to embrace/extend/extinguish (otherwise known as forking) then that's fine, the GPL allows them to do so. why would you have a problem with PHP.net under a F/OSS licence.
If it makes PHP better under windows, and adds support for PHP to tools like Visual Studio then all is good. The old PHP will continue to work as before.
absolutely correct. It worked incredibly well for IBM - buy a DB2 database, get a free AS/400 with OS/400 to run it. You'd not find a better, well setup, seriously secure, seriously tuned, seriously dull database. All of which is a good thing when you're storing important data on something. Oracle should lose the egotism and do the same thing, but there's no chance of that happening.
Yes you can, and they do. I can't find the link to the full story I read, but there is this which is being used now, partly to heat water and party to ensure that you don't need to de-ice the road in winter (as in this link, all originally designed by this Dutch company.
Alternatively, there is a bit about what you can buy and use today in your back garden (not for tarmac road heatpumps, but ground heatpumps) here