I've read it as well, and largely agree with the review though I would say a little more strongly that if you are new to RDF this is an invaluable resource. There's lots of great information online, but not with this cohesive style and concise format.
No technology is trying to become Cold Fusion..Net is trying to become Java, and so is Java, but no one in their right mind wants to aspire to be an evolutionary dead end like CF. Macromedia (who now one CF) are slowly migrating all CF to J2EE and will kill of CF.
Quite so. I knew a handful of people at Oracle between 2000 and 2002, and they were all non-technical people working as account execs, hr, etc. They all used Windows exclusively at Oracle, so a move to Linux will demonstrate a large user base of non-technical people to Linux from Windows. Granted, Oracle has the in house technical expertise to help those people.
Not likely. Defense and Homeland Security may award all their contracts to US companies, but most of those consulting firms are shipping a lot of their work overseas.
Oddly enough, I've met plenty of people who are like that in the flesh, but they have universally been Windows users. I have been harassed and even threatened by Windows users because I prefer to use Linux.
> Do the/. editors actually do any fact checking before they post???
You're new here, aren't you?
What's the appeal
on
All The Rave
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I never understood the appeal of Napster. I tried to use it a few times, but the signal to noise ratio was so pathetic it wasn't worth the effort. Nice try, interesting concept, largely unusable in my experience.
I think it's great that they are moving it beyond being an Outlook-alike. Why limit yourself to copying Microsofts mediocre offerings? Go above and beyond.
10 max ftp users?
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Now that's an enterprise ready organization. Maybe I'll try back in a few hours. Or maybe I'll have forgotten by then. Fortunately,/. will remind me by posting a dupe of this in the next few days (it's just a joke, sheesh!).
Based on my experience in Government, I would have to disagree. Big Brother has the resources and the money. What it lacks is coherence, organization, follow through, and the ability to actually finish a project rather than allow it to gradually fall apart as people spend more time and effort engaging in intra-group political battles than in actually trying to accomplish anything of any import. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Unless, of course, they are gay. Always a possibility.
Re:If Sun didn't invent Java would .NET exist?
on
.Net:... 3 Years Later
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Word was preceded by WordPerfect, WordStar, and probably dozens of others. Microsofts innovations have always been and will always be in the arenas marketing and licensing.
Actually, Spears would be more accurately described as an entertainer (for sufficiently loose definitions of entertainment) rather than a musician. Music is simply the vehicle she latched on to to ensure her fame and popularity. She's already tried branching into movies and will try again.
Waste of space would be another good description of her. Or marketing tool.
Do you have cable? Satellite TV? Then you are paying for someone to have the ability to advertise to you. Do you buy magazines ever? Same thing. Ever go to movies? See above. Hell, billboards are almost refreshing in that I don't have to pay for the "privilege" of being advertised at.
Most linux users I know have at least checked it out, and the Gnomers tend to really like it. I loved it (even got the boxed copy) until Red Hat 8 came out and Ximian didn't support it. Now that they support my distro again, I'll be trying it out again.
I worked for one of the biggies in the field, eCollege, back in the day (I think I was employee #30 or something like that). I'm not current on their offerings, but the delivery system was really very well architected and the UI was pretty intuitive and attractive.
The main problem, as I saw it at the time and see it today, was the quality of the content and the effort put forth by the schools and instructors. Many teachers did see it as a way to claim they were teaching X number of course units/term. Some teachers complained that they worked harder on the online courses than on their other courses (to be fair, some of them did.
We dealt with instructors who poured their heart and soul into it and really put an astounding amount of effort into making sure their student had the best possible online course. We considered those instructors to be a pain in the ass, but at least we respected them).
One of the most astounding things I've ever heard was when my boss had to apologize to a very irate instructor, explaining "You're right, that's our fault. I'm very sorry we didn't make it clear that you need to have a computer to teach online courses." This is a large part of the problem...
That being said, just as in the "real world" there are good instructors and bad ones. Ask around, particularly ask for referals from other students, and do your research!
I'll assume you've never worked with a government agency. I'm working at a large, high profile agency that has a pretty good sized budget. About 80% of the desktops are still on NT4 SP4 running on PIII Gateways or P4 Dells. The remainder are split about 15% XP and 5% Linux (for the sysadmins and other clueful people). Why? XP is expensive in large quantities even with government discounts, and they have to certify that it will work with all the applications that people use. Several groups want to upgrade, but critical apps of theirs don't run on XP ("don't run" as in crash horribly) and until they do those groups are stuck with NT. Other groups don't want to upgrade and are choosing to spend their budgets on other things (like hiring contractors to build custom applications to automate their business, as people are getting old and retiring and there's no one to replace them).
SCO -vs- Linux explained
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Probably the best* explanation of the situation I've seen yet is this.
*best in the sense of being hilarious.
Re:CIA Humint - Sigint - Remote Sensing
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I understand that they can't broadcast their successes, but seriously, missing pretty fundamental things NOT perpetrated by a shady loose network of terrorists (like the fall of E Germany, Czech border reforms, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (esp. considering he ASKED PERMISSION), Coup attempt in USSR, hell they missed the fall of the Soviet Union even though Gorbachev had been broadcasting it for YEARS).
There have been quite a few posts asking why artists don't include the lyrics with their albums. Any republishing of the lyrics, including in the liner notes of the album they came on, requires paying royalties. Sure, the artist will get some of that (sometimes as much as 15%), but the vast majority of it goes to the Harry Fox Agency or someone comparable. A lot of artists quite rightly view this as paying HFA for the privilege of including their own lyrics on their own album. The whole music industry should go down in flames and I hope it does. The more scumfuck music "executives" who lose their jobs, the better the world is. I feel sorry for all 5 people at the labels who actually care about music and try to help the artists out, but there are other jobs out there that are less demeaning, like urinal cake replacement technician.
You'd be hard pressed to convince me that OS X (which I love dearly) has a higher installed base than Solaris/SunOS (yes, the huge gov't agency I'm at still runs SunOS). There are a LOT of older systems still out there running older versions of OSs. People still run Amiga for the love of Ernest Borgnine!
>>Recording off of the radio requires comparitively greater effort than does pirating mp3's. While pirating, you can do a quick search and find what you are looking for on demand, whereas you need to "hunt and trap" what you are trying to find on the radio.
By that logic it should be perfectly legal to hack into military computer systems, because it's difficult.
Your argument about scale does have merit, however.
Keep in mind, she did this on a machine that was already well configured. If she had needed to install/configure OO or NSCP herself it might have been slightly more problematic (of course, no more so than it would on Win. The obvious advantage being that OO can be installed (and is by default) on linux while MSO has to be done seperately). I'm fairly sure I had a point in there, but I can't figure out what it was either.
Most small businesses do their shopping at Office Depot or a comparable office store. The "who the hell cares, no one buys computer related items anywhere but Fry's/newegg/CompUSA/random local specialty shop anyway" posts are naive and uninformed. A lot of non-technical people buy their equipment at office stores, not least because many of them have corporate accounts there. The implication here, while not stated explicitly, is that there will be no non-windows software at all. Back in 99/00 I convinced several clients to put linux on their servers largely on the basis of it being sold at Office Depot. This is an important marketing presence for linux. Not critical, but important.
Moreover, having a fairly major outlet only carry XP certified hardware will possibly encourage manufacturers to cut back on support for non-XP operating systems across their product lines. This will not only affect Mac/BSD/Linux users, but users of Windows 2000, NT, 98, and ME (yes, both of them).
Slashdot Mirror
I've read it as well, and largely agree with the review though I would say a little more strongly that if you are new to RDF this is an invaluable resource. There's lots of great information online, but not with this cohesive style and concise format.
No technology is trying to become Cold Fusion. .Net is trying to become Java, and so is Java, but no one in their right mind wants to aspire to be an evolutionary dead end like CF. Macromedia (who now one CF) are slowly migrating all CF to J2EE and will kill of CF.
Quite so. I knew a handful of people at Oracle between 2000 and 2002, and they were all non-technical people working as account execs, hr, etc. They all used Windows exclusively at Oracle, so a move to Linux will demonstrate a large user base of non-technical people to Linux from Windows. Granted, Oracle has the in house technical expertise to help those people.
Not likely. Defense and Homeland Security may award all their contracts to US companies, but most of those consulting firms are shipping a lot of their work overseas.
Oddly enough, I've met plenty of people who are like that in the flesh, but they have universally been Windows users. I have been harassed and even threatened by Windows users because I prefer to use Linux.
> Do the /. editors actually do any fact checking before they post???
You're new here, aren't you?
I never understood the appeal of Napster. I tried to use it a few times, but the signal to noise ratio was so pathetic it wasn't worth the effort. Nice try, interesting concept, largely unusable in my experience.
I think it's great that they are moving it beyond being an Outlook-alike. Why limit yourself to copying Microsofts mediocre offerings? Go above and beyond.
Now that's an enterprise ready organization. Maybe I'll try back in a few hours. Or maybe I'll have forgotten by then. Fortunately, /. will remind me by posting a dupe of this in the next few days (it's just a joke, sheesh!).
Based on my experience in Government, I would have to disagree. Big Brother has the resources and the money. What it lacks is coherence, organization, follow through, and the ability to actually finish a project rather than allow it to gradually fall apart as people spend more time and effort engaging in intra-group political battles than in actually trying to accomplish anything of any import. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Unless, of course, they are gay. Always a possibility.
Word was preceded by WordPerfect, WordStar, and probably dozens of others. Microsofts innovations have always been and will always be in the arenas marketing and licensing.
Waste of space would be another good description of her. Or marketing tool.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say he was trying to be funny. He succeeded, in my opinion.
Do you have cable? Satellite TV? Then you are paying for someone to have the ability to advertise to you. Do you buy magazines ever? Same thing. Ever go to movies? See above. Hell, billboards are almost refreshing in that I don't have to pay for the "privilege" of being advertised at.
Most linux users I know have at least checked it out, and the Gnomers tend to really like it. I loved it (even got the boxed copy) until Red Hat 8 came out and Ximian didn't support it. Now that they support my distro again, I'll be trying it out again.
The main problem, as I saw it at the time and see it today, was the quality of the content and the effort put forth by the schools and instructors. Many teachers did see it as a way to claim they were teaching X number of course units/term. Some teachers complained that they worked harder on the online courses than on their other courses (to be fair, some of them did.
We dealt with instructors who poured their heart and soul into it and really put an astounding amount of effort into making sure their student had the best possible online course. We considered those instructors to be a pain in the ass, but at least we respected them).
One of the most astounding things I've ever heard was when my boss had to apologize to a very irate instructor, explaining "You're right, that's our fault. I'm very sorry we didn't make it clear that you need to have a computer to teach online courses." This is a large part of the problem...
That being said, just as in the "real world" there are good instructors and bad ones. Ask around, particularly ask for referals from other students, and do your research!
I'll assume you've never worked with a government agency. I'm working at a large, high profile agency that has a pretty good sized budget. About 80% of the desktops are still on NT4 SP4 running on PIII Gateways or P4 Dells. The remainder are split about 15% XP and 5% Linux (for the sysadmins and other clueful people). Why? XP is expensive in large quantities even with government discounts, and they have to certify that it will work with all the applications that people use. Several groups want to upgrade, but critical apps of theirs don't run on XP ("don't run" as in crash horribly) and until they do those groups are stuck with NT. Other groups don't want to upgrade and are choosing to spend their budgets on other things (like hiring contractors to build custom applications to automate their business, as people are getting old and retiring and there's no one to replace them).
*best in the sense of being hilarious.
I understand that they can't broadcast their successes, but seriously, missing pretty fundamental things NOT perpetrated by a shady loose network of terrorists (like the fall of E Germany, Czech border reforms, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (esp. considering he ASKED PERMISSION), Coup attempt in USSR, hell they missed the fall of the Soviet Union even though Gorbachev had been broadcasting it for YEARS).
There have been quite a few posts asking why artists don't include the lyrics with their albums. Any republishing of the lyrics, including in the liner notes of the album they came on, requires paying royalties. Sure, the artist will get some of that (sometimes as much as 15%), but the vast majority of it goes to the Harry Fox Agency or someone comparable. A lot of artists quite rightly view this as paying HFA for the privilege of including their own lyrics on their own album. The whole music industry should go down in flames and I hope it does. The more scumfuck music "executives" who lose their jobs, the better the world is. I feel sorry for all 5 people at the labels who actually care about music and try to help the artists out, but there are other jobs out there that are less demeaning, like urinal cake replacement technician.
You'd be hard pressed to convince me that OS X (which I love dearly) has a higher installed base than Solaris/SunOS (yes, the huge gov't agency I'm at still runs SunOS). There are a LOT of older systems still out there running older versions of OSs. People still run Amiga for the love of Ernest Borgnine!
>>Recording off of the radio requires comparitively greater effort than does pirating mp3's. While pirating, you can do a quick search and find what you are looking for on demand, whereas you need to "hunt and trap" what you are trying to find on the radio.
By that logic it should be perfectly legal to hack into military computer systems, because it's difficult.
Your argument about scale does have merit, however.
Keep in mind, she did this on a machine that was already well configured. If she had needed to install/configure OO or NSCP herself it might have been slightly more problematic (of course, no more so than it would on Win. The obvious advantage being that OO can be installed (and is by default) on linux while MSO has to be done seperately). I'm fairly sure I had a point in there, but I can't figure out what it was either.
Most small businesses do their shopping at Office Depot or a comparable office store. The "who the hell cares, no one buys computer related items anywhere but Fry's/newegg/CompUSA/random local specialty shop anyway" posts are naive and uninformed. A lot of non-technical people buy their equipment at office stores, not least because many of them have corporate accounts there. The implication here, while not stated explicitly, is that there will be no non-windows software at all. Back in 99/00 I convinced several clients to put linux on their servers largely on the basis of it being sold at Office Depot. This is an important marketing presence for linux. Not critical, but important.
Moreover, having a fairly major outlet only carry XP certified hardware will possibly encourage manufacturers to cut back on support for non-XP operating systems across their product lines. This will not only affect Mac/BSD/Linux users, but users of Windows 2000, NT, 98, and ME (yes, both of them).