IRC seems to me a better fit with its channels and server model, cept what to use to retrieve the headers that youd miss when your offline. SMTP and NNTP are both still a pull technologys for the last mile, and much higher latency then irc.
But IRC isn't really suited to the kinds of volumes that RSS feeds would impose on it -- at least not on a per-channel basis. IRCopers are also rather protective of people raping their bandwidth by using IRC as a transport layer. Usenet on the other hand was made for newsgroups.
The last mile of NNTP doesn't need to be pull the last mile, you could run servers onlying carry RSS groups that accept IHAVE commands from RSS clients. But if you're running edge servers yourself rather than using the ISPs newsservers, then another platform (like jabber or some of that jxta stuff) might be a better idea.
There's something to the latency issue, though. On the other hand, the alternative is using a regular RSS reader that checks at hourly intervals; whereas most ISPs won't mind if you check a newsgroup for new articles every few seconds.
The line between push/pull is rather thin, after all. If a server takes it time sending stuff to you, you might not see the hottest news as it breaks (e.g. mailinglists that sometimes take hours between mailing subscriber 1 and mailing subscriber 12000); on the other hand, if you hit refresh often enough.. Some versions of push are really pull; like those blackberry devices. The mail is pushed to you, but only after it's been pulled off of pop3 at scheduled intervals. If I use pine/mutt, aren't I pulling the mail from my spoolfile, where it has been pushed using SMTP?
IRC is a neat protocol (though sometimes poorly implemented) but usenet is just made for syndication. You don't even need to format stuff in RSS, just post MIME HTML (in special purpose groups!), no problemo. Cool or what?
Of course, there's no reason whatsoever RSS couldn't be embedded in IRC, DNS, or whatever..
So, serious question... NNTP servers are still out there and not totally dead... what's to stop an implementatino of RSS-over-NNTP now, while we still have the infrastructure?
Nothing.
Although if you want the groups to be carried commonly, on that existing infrastructure, it might be a good idea to use a single alt.* group (in time, perhaps, a big-8 group).
In that case, you'd want to include a unique id (URL for example) of the RSS file in the subject for easy filtering (the From: header is another obvious place for the feed's ID, but you'd have to figure out a way to translate a URL to an e-mail address).
Using the "Supersedes:" header, you could just post existing RSS files, although it would be nicer if each article was posted as a single article (which would work a lot better with a complete hierarchy, so that the Subject header is freed up for the actual article's subject).
That's on the content provider's side. On the client side, the RSS reader needs to, well, support NNTP.
So what's to stop it? A well-thought-out specification (RFC stylee) and an implementation.
Actually, I did come up with the idea without seeing your post. But since I've been a Usenet news administrator for 18 years, I suppose it's no surprise that I would think of NNTP as a solution.
18 years? Yikes!! Come to think of it, I should perhaps rephrase my idea in terms of FIDOnet echos..;-)
Not really so surprising though, since newsgroups are pretty suited for.. well.. news.. (I'm still a bit sad that the clari.* newsfeed went away, that was cool).
I have what to my 10 minutes of thought on the subject appears to be a better solution - every web site that currently publishes an RDF page should instead push new entries to an NNTP newsgroup. I'd suggest that a heirarchy be created for it, then sort of a reverse of the URL for the group name, like rdf.org.slashdot or rdf.uk.co.thregister. Then the articles get propogated in a distributed manner and people read a copy on their nearest news server instead of hammering your web site over and over looking to see if there are updates.
I'm not saying my idea is terribly original, but would your 10 minutes of thought perhaps have included reading this comment, seeing as it was posted about 15 minutes prior to yours?;-)
Keep up the good work in spreading the word though. Just don't patent it (actually, if you did come up with it without reading my comment, althemore proof how obvious my ideas are);-)
Complaining about people connecting to your RSS feeds "impolitely" is missing the mark a bit, I think. Even RSS readers that *do* check when the file was last changed, still download the entire feed when so much as a single character has changed.
There used to be a system where you could pull a list of recently posted articles off of a server that your ISP had installed locally, and only get the newest headers, and then decide which article bodies to retrieve.. The articles could even contain rich content, like HTML and binary files. And to top it off, articles posted by some-one across the globe were transmitted from ISP to ISP, spreading over the world like an expanding mesh.
They called this.. USENET..
I realize that RSS is "teh hotness" and Usenet is "old and busted", and that "push is dead" etc. But for Pete's sake, don't send a unicast protocol to do a multicast (even if it is at the application layer) protocol's job!
It would of course be great if there was a "cache" hierarchy on usenet. Newsgroups could be styled after content providers URLs (e.g. cache.com.cnn, cache.com.livejournal.somegoth) and you could just subscribe to crap that way. There's nothing magical about what RSS readers do that the underlying stuff has to be all RRS-y and HTTP-y..
For real push you could even send the RSS via SMTP, and you could use your ISPs outgoing mail server to multiply your bandwidth (i.e. BCC).
No shame in the For Dummies series brother or sister. A few grace my shelves also. I find them useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.
I've browsed in a few, and they seem pretty much on the ball usually, no really big stinkers on first look. The "for dummies" title is basically a way of poking fun at themselves, well, and their readership. Anyway, it's meant as a joke.
Other series however, seem to take such titles perhaps a little bit too seriously.
For those wondering, "MVP" is a title bestowed by Microsoft basically to people who help out others in the microsoft.* newsgroups and such. You can find a webpage of a couple of these peope at http://www.mvps.org/.
These aren't Microsoft partner companies or licensee developers by definition, an MVP can well be just some pimply 13 year old that happens to now a whole lot about IIS and shares it with others. As you'd expect there's a lot of emphasis on getting Microsoft applications to work, arcane Internet Explorer settings, scripting, that sort of thing.
These people, for the most part, aren't kernel hackers. If they were, they'd be busy hacking away at *BSD or linux, not figuring out VBA stuff in Excel.
It's hard to see how this will benefit Microsoft directly, in the way of open-ish source. It's not like an elite squad of kernel hackers will be pouring over the source code to find race conditions in inter process communications or something like that. Though perhaps it will help MVPs to explain to others what suitably vague-enough error messages actually mean by looking at the source code that produced it.
(I'm no kernel hacker myself by a long shot, and given the source code to windows I'd.. well.. shrug, I suppose).
(3) Cost of setting up parallel system, including hardware, software licenses, system administration: $250,000.
Seeing as they were replacing the old system, simply keeping the old stuff on standby should anything unsuspected happen would have cost far less than 250K.
Re:I'm not convinced of VoIP yet...
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Almost nobody cares that anyone can eavesdrop on their cell and cordless conversations. Why should they care any different about their VOIP ones?
Cordless phones and analog cell phones sure -- care to tell me how to eavesdrop on a digital (CDMA/TDMA/iDEN/GSM/etc) conversation using John Q. Public equipment?
There have been reports (for ages) of $10K suitcases that can eavesdrop on GSM conversations. I imagine the price would have gone down considerably. After all, all you need is a hacked-up phone that can tune into the ether, spit out the bitstreams, and feed that into your laptop with some customized software. The underlying encryption mechanisms of GSM are really very weak. I'd imagine that iDen/CDMA/TDMA technologies suffer from the same lapses in encryption.
There's no John Q Public for eavesdropping on wireless LANs, but then, given a suitable permissable WiFi card and wepcrack, you can get quite far - which is why they came up with WPA.. The GSM algorithms have been cracked by fine upstanding scientists who aren't selling complete kits to do this, which is quite possible (alongside with installed base) the reason nothing's been done about GSM's horrid insecurity.
Now, I've never seen one of those GSM eavesdropping kits, but then, I've never bought a gun in a bar from Hell's Angels - but I know the latter is quite feasible.
And, for added security goodness, use a mandatory user profile. (Though you still have to use the script to copy the settings, since they're in Local Settings, which doesn't get replicated by default).
The service (with 5 minutes free etc.) used is SIPPhone, the company that was started by the Lindows guy.
The 5 minutes for free can only be gotten by using phonegaim ON lindows, buying a SIPPhone device, or by buying $20 of SIPPhone minutes. Not actually free, then, just included with the cost of your purchase.
Note that you can only call people if you're BOTH using phonegaim. You could just exchange (S)IP numbers and use any normal SIP client for the same effect. Nothing to see here. There are already dozens of free SIP clients.
Note that skype, while a cooky closed-source, non-standard product, does have good support for using it behind NAT, which is harder with SIP. (Personally, I say, give me the IPv6 already).
"I'm an American who's tired of hearing from foreigners that one reason why Americans are not liked is because we travel abroad to other countries and EXPECT them to speak english, as if they're expected to know our language."
I'm sick of hearing this stereotype because all one has to do is look at a globe and it becomes obvious why we're not so fluent in other languages. It's not most of the USA can drive in a day and land in a country with a different national language. With the exception of Mexico (which gets so much tourism from us that English is relatively well understood) we have to hop on a plane at >$700 a ticket to visit a non-english speaking country.
The only countries in Europe with English as the official language are the UK and Ireland. They're frigging Islands, so it's not like we drive over all the time. Mainland Europe is a non-English zone.
So when we go somewhere we don't speak the lingo.. We buy a frigging phrasebook. Is that so hard?
How would you replace something your corporation depended upon, such as Active Directory.
Apparently there's more to this Active Directory thing than just being a bit of a hockey LDAP implementation that stores some authentication data and policies.. I must be missing something..
What features of AD are so earthshattering that your corporation can depend on it? No really, that's a serious question..
Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 17, @22:12 (#9726379)
"Windows? "Thanks for installing ProgramX, please reboot your computer to use it" Very interesting because I haven't had to reboot my Windows 2K or XP computer in a very long time.
No wonder you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. If you haven't been rebooting, then you haven't been using Windows Update, and your system is riddled with security holes.
I also haven't seen any program ask you to restart the computer other than Operating System updates and video card drivers.
Almost all applications ask for a reboot after setup. This is usually totally unnecessary, but it seems to be a default setting in WISE and its kin, much like the absurd "close all other programs" boilerplate.
If you don't get asked to reboot, you must not be installing many applications.
You cannot judge and OS on how frequently you have to reboot especially when in either one it is not rebooted frequently.
Yes you can. An OS that needs to be rebooted more frequently is simply badly designed.
For instance; try stopping and restarting the Telephony service on XP. Oh dear. It won't even stop. How in the world is the OS dependent on the Telephony service? Why would you have to reboot to upgrade it (since the service can't be stopped)? COM+ is another one, services.msc won't even offer you the option of stopping it.
And on linux, you don't even need to restart most daemons, they'll just reread their conf files if you tell them to (for example, a kill -USR1 will cause apache to reread its configuration).
And don't get me started on Window's bullshit ways of exclusively locking files that don't need to be locked.
The only reason for an OS to have to reboot should be to replace the kernel (though it would be nice, and it's quite possible, if that were avoided too).
"These snafus have led the government to open up the labs to defense-contracting bids for the first time in their 60+ year history (until now the labs have been run by UC-Berkeley)."
Given that the disks have already been found, and never left the possesion of those authorized to have it, why make such a fuzz about it? Why do we see this on the news (I did)? Why shut down all work? Wouldn't you want to keep the fact anything is missing quiet, if only to cast doubt in the mind of any one being offered stolen secrets as to whether they really are genuine?
And why suddenly decide to break open the bidding for the contract, within days/hours of an incident?
Great. Microsoft will be king of a **DEAD MARKET**. Congratulations, Bill Gates! Now maybe you can realize your lifelong ambition and become the world's #1 buggy whip manufacturer, too!
PDA's are so 9/10, dude. The market for them is contracting. Cell phones are where the action is now, and Palm has the hottest - and most profitable - cell phone by far with their Treo line.
There's also the pocket-pc based MDA/MDA2 on offer from T-Mobile, and the eTen 300/700. Basically just your run-off-the-mill iPaq (the MDA is made by HTC, who also produce iPaqs) with a radio unit built-in that accessible to the OS as a cell/data modem. The only specialized software on it is the SMS functionality in pocket outlook and the dialer.
Microsoft is also making a wince-based smartphone OS. That's kind of creepy, seeing how much it sucks. Unfortunately, the main competitors in phone-sized smart devices (Nokia, SonyEricsson) have dropped the ball significantly. While they're both using the Symbian/EPOC OS, they're incompatible with each other, and the usability of the system is really below par compared to the psion "organizers" of days past.
Seriously, the Psion 5 organizer/PDA was a great device. To this day, I can switch it on and say "dammit, this OS is better than pocketpc, even though pocketpc came years later and stole a lot of their ideas". Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white device, with a tiny cpu for today's norms, and with no built-in cellular or bluetooth connection.
If you happen across a psion 5 or later device, try it. You'll like it. And it will bring home just how significantly Nokia and SonyEricsson fucked up their shot at the smartphone.
The worst thing now is that pocketpc has more developers/enthusiasts (even open sourcers) programming for it than palm or symbian have. I now own a pocketpc based device, that MDA2 (actually mine is branded Qtek 2020) I mentioned. I have to reset it twice a day, but at least I can find apps for it. *sigh*
It's techinically impressive for a couple ofreasons
1) The unified memory architecture - the graphics and the main memory are shared. This means you dont have to wait for your PC or AGP bus to transfer your textures before you render them
Oh come on. Low end systems and laptops have had shared memory for ages. There's nothing new about that at all. Sure, to speed things up (and risk more instability) you can give up memory protection alltogether and let the CPU and GPU access the same places in RAM, but that's not technically impressive at all.
2) The price point - How much can you pick up your Xbox set top media center for now?
They're making a loss on each unit sold. How is that technically impressive? They're just price dumping, they didn't go and invent mass production or anything of the sort.
Apple made $61 million dollars profit on $2.01 billion dollars in Q3/04 and had the highest CPU shipments in three and a half years
That's a miniscule amount when you look at the profits of just about any other tech company. $61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
R&D costs are, well, costs. Profit is what you're left with after you've paid your costs. Like R&D.
According to AAPL's SEC filings, it spends about $120 million every 3 months on R&D (or about 480 million dollars per year).
Dell spent LESS than that, at $464 million for R&D, even though their turnover is 6 times Apple's, and their profit is $3 billion. Relative to Dell, Apple spends wild amounts of money on R&D.
Of course, all that pales in comparison with IBM's $5 billion R&D budget, but then, IBM is also in the business of researching things that Apple uses in its products, like the G5 processor for example (hard to miss that one, really..)
My doctors tried a number of things but option number 1 was always Prozac. What nonsense, they hand that out without thinking about it (in Britain anyway) and it really bugs me. No I won't take Prozac.
Actually, Prozac is a selective serotonic re-uptake inhibitor. So taking it causes more serotonin to be present in the brain. Serotonin plays a very big role in your sleep patterns. In fact, one commonly marketed sleeping drug (which actually works) is L-tryptophan (a chemical also present in milk - momma told you, didn't she?), which is converted into serotonin in the body. Unfortunately it is now banned from over-the-counter sale, because of a tainted batch causing a nasty illness. You can still get it as a prescribed drug (Tryptan).
The other thing that helped was making a routine of going to bed - always doing the same things in the same order (now it's feed the fish, go to bathroom for a wash etc, then go to straight to bed). If after 20-30 mins I'm not asleep then get up, read/do something (not video games that get adrenalin pumping) for a further 20 mins and then go through the entire routine again.
Slashdot Mirror
IRC seems to me a better fit with its channels and server model, cept what to use to retrieve the headers that youd miss when your offline. SMTP and NNTP are both still a pull technologys for the last mile, and much higher latency then irc.
But IRC isn't really suited to the kinds of volumes that RSS feeds would impose on it -- at least not on a per-channel basis. IRCopers are also rather protective of people raping their bandwidth by using IRC as a transport layer. Usenet on the other hand was made for newsgroups.
The last mile of NNTP doesn't need to be pull the last mile, you could run servers onlying carry RSS groups that accept IHAVE commands from RSS clients. But if you're running edge servers yourself rather than using the ISPs newsservers, then another platform (like jabber or some of that jxta stuff) might be a better idea.
There's something to the latency issue, though. On the other hand, the alternative is using a regular RSS reader that checks at hourly intervals; whereas most ISPs won't mind if you check a newsgroup for new articles every few seconds.
The line between push/pull is rather thin, after all. If a server takes it time sending stuff to you, you might not see the hottest news as it breaks (e.g. mailinglists that sometimes take hours between mailing subscriber 1 and mailing subscriber 12000); on the other hand, if you hit refresh often enough.. Some versions of push are really pull; like those blackberry devices. The mail is pushed to you, but only after it's been pulled off of pop3 at scheduled intervals. If I use pine/mutt, aren't I pulling the mail from my spoolfile, where it has been pushed using SMTP?
IRC is a neat protocol (though sometimes poorly implemented) but usenet is just made for syndication. You don't even need to format stuff in RSS, just post MIME HTML (in special purpose groups!), no problemo. Cool or what?
Of course, there's no reason whatsoever RSS couldn't be embedded in IRC, DNS, or whatever..
So, serious question ... NNTP servers are still out there and not totally dead... what's to stop an implementatino of RSS-over-NNTP now, while we still have the infrastructure?
Nothing.
Although if you want the groups to be carried commonly, on that existing infrastructure, it might be a good idea to use a single alt.* group (in time, perhaps, a big-8 group).
In that case, you'd want to include a unique id (URL for example) of the RSS file in the subject for easy filtering (the From: header is another obvious place for the feed's ID, but you'd have to figure out a way to translate a URL to an e-mail address).
Using the "Supersedes:" header, you could just post existing RSS files, although it would be nicer if each article was posted as a single article (which would work a lot better with a complete hierarchy, so that the Subject header is freed up for the actual article's subject).
That's on the content provider's side. On the client side, the RSS reader needs to, well, support NNTP.
So what's to stop it? A well-thought-out specification (RFC stylee) and an implementation.
Actually, I did come up with the idea without seeing your post. But since I've been a Usenet news administrator for 18 years, I suppose it's no surprise that I would think of NNTP as a solution.
18 years? Yikes!! Come to think of it, I should perhaps rephrase my idea in terms of FIDOnet echos..
Not really so surprising though, since newsgroups are pretty suited for.. well.. news.. (I'm still a bit sad that the clari.* newsfeed went away, that was cool).
I have what to my 10 minutes of thought on the subject appears to be a better solution - every web site that currently publishes an RDF page should instead push new entries to an NNTP newsgroup. I'd suggest that a heirarchy be created for it, then sort of a reverse of the URL for the group name, like rdf.org.slashdot or rdf.uk.co.thregister. Then the articles get propogated in a distributed manner and people read a copy on their nearest news server instead of hammering your web site over and over looking to see if there are updates.
;-)
;-)
I'm not saying my idea is terribly original, but would your 10 minutes of thought perhaps have included reading this comment, seeing as it was posted about 15 minutes prior to yours?
Keep up the good work in spreading the word though. Just don't patent it (actually, if you did come up with it without reading my comment, althemore proof how obvious my ideas are)
Complaining about people connecting to your RSS feeds "impolitely" is missing the mark a bit, I think. Even RSS readers that *do* check when the file was last changed, still download the entire feed when so much as a single character has changed.
There used to be a system where you could pull a list of recently posted articles off of a server that your ISP had installed locally, and only get the newest headers, and then decide which article bodies to retrieve.. The articles could even contain rich content, like HTML and binary files. And to top it off, articles posted by some-one across the globe were transmitted from ISP to ISP, spreading over the world like an expanding mesh.
They called this.. USENET..
I realize that RSS is "teh hotness" and Usenet is "old and busted", and that "push is dead" etc. But for Pete's sake, don't send a unicast protocol to do a multicast (even if it is at the application layer) protocol's job!
It would of course be great if there was a "cache" hierarchy on usenet. Newsgroups could be styled after content providers URLs (e.g. cache.com.cnn, cache.com.livejournal.somegoth) and you could just subscribe to crap that way. There's nothing magical about what RSS readers do that the underlying stuff has to be all RRS-y and HTTP-y..
For real push you could even send the RSS via SMTP, and you could use your ISPs outgoing mail server to multiply your bandwidth (i.e. BCC).
No shame in the For Dummies series brother or sister. A few grace my shelves also. I find them useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.
I've browsed in a few, and they seem pretty much on the ball usually, no really big stinkers on first look. The "for dummies" title is basically a way of poking fun at themselves, well, and their readership. Anyway, it's meant as a joke.
Other series however, seem to take such titles perhaps a little bit too seriously.
What are we to make, for example, of "The Complete Idiot's Guide To Past Life Regression"?
At least they have a clear understanding of their focus group.
For those wondering, "MVP" is a title bestowed by Microsoft basically to people who help out others in the microsoft.* newsgroups and such. You can find a webpage of a couple of these peope at http://www.mvps.org/.
These aren't Microsoft partner companies or licensee developers by definition, an MVP can well be just some pimply 13 year old that happens to now a whole lot about IIS and shares it with others. As you'd expect there's a lot of emphasis on getting Microsoft applications to work, arcane Internet Explorer settings, scripting, that sort of thing.
These people, for the most part, aren't kernel hackers. If they were, they'd be busy hacking away at *BSD or linux, not figuring out VBA stuff in Excel.
It's hard to see how this will benefit Microsoft directly, in the way of open-ish source. It's not like an elite squad of kernel hackers will be pouring over the source code to find race conditions in inter process communications or something like that. Though perhaps it will help MVPs to explain to others what suitably vague-enough error messages actually mean by looking at the source code that produced it.
(I'm no kernel hacker myself by a long shot, and given the source code to windows I'd.. well.. shrug, I suppose).
Honest question, but why would you want to shoot at 24fps, rather than 30fps? You can always take out the frames later to go to 24fps, right?
(3) Cost of setting up parallel system, including hardware, software licenses, system administration: $250,000.
Seeing as they were replacing the old system, simply keeping the old stuff on standby should anything unsuspected happen would have cost far less than 250K.
Almost nobody cares that anyone can eavesdrop on their cell and cordless conversations. Why should they care any different about their VOIP ones?
Cordless phones and analog cell phones sure -- care to tell me how to eavesdrop on a digital (CDMA/TDMA/iDEN/GSM/etc) conversation using John Q. Public equipment?
There have been reports (for ages) of $10K suitcases that can eavesdrop on GSM conversations. I imagine the price would have gone down considerably. After all, all you need is a hacked-up phone that can tune into the ether, spit out the bitstreams, and feed that into your laptop with some customized software. The underlying encryption mechanisms of GSM are really very weak. I'd imagine that iDen/CDMA/TDMA technologies suffer from the same lapses in encryption.
There's no John Q Public for eavesdropping on wireless LANs, but then, given a suitable permissable WiFi card and wepcrack, you can get quite far - which is why they came up with WPA.. The GSM algorithms have been cracked by fine upstanding scientists who aren't selling complete kits to do this, which is quite possible (alongside with installed base) the reason nothing's been done about GSM's horrid insecurity.
Now, I've never seen one of those GSM eavesdropping kits, but then, I've never bought a gun in a bar from Hell's Angels - but I know the latter is quite feasible.
And, for added security goodness, use a mandatory user profile. (Though you still have to use the script to copy the settings, since they're in Local Settings, which doesn't get replicated by default).
I meant to spell, "kooky", of course. *sigh*. My c/k zen is quickly fading..
unless/until somebody develops a SIP IM client for linux...
Does a java client cut it?
The service (with 5 minutes free etc.) used is SIPPhone, the company that was started by the Lindows guy.
The 5 minutes for free can only be gotten by using phonegaim ON lindows, buying a SIPPhone device, or by buying $20 of SIPPhone minutes. Not actually free, then, just included with the cost of your purchase.
Note that you can only call people if you're BOTH using phonegaim. You could just exchange (S)IP numbers and use any normal SIP client for the same effect. Nothing to see here. There are already dozens of free SIP clients.
Note that skype, while a cooky closed-source, non-standard product, does have good support for using it behind NAT, which is harder with SIP. (Personally, I say, give me the IPv6 already).
"I'm an American who's tired of hearing from foreigners that one reason why Americans are not liked is because we travel abroad to other countries and EXPECT them to speak english, as if they're expected to know our language."
I'm sick of hearing this stereotype because all one has to do is look at a globe and it becomes obvious why we're not so fluent in other languages. It's not most of the USA can drive in a day and land in a country with a different national language. With the exception of Mexico (which gets so much tourism from us that English is relatively well understood) we have to hop on a plane at >$700 a ticket to visit a non-english speaking country.
The only countries in Europe with English as the official language are the UK and Ireland. They're frigging Islands, so it's not like we drive over all the time. Mainland Europe is a non-English zone.
So when we go somewhere we don't speak the lingo.. We buy a frigging phrasebook. Is that so hard?
How would you replace something your corporation depended upon, such as Active Directory.
Apparently there's more to this Active Directory thing than just being a bit of a hockey LDAP implementation that stores some authentication data and policies.. I must be missing something..
What features of AD are so earthshattering that your corporation can depend on it? No really, that's a serious question..
Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 17, @22:12 (#9726379)
"Windows? "Thanks for installing ProgramX, please reboot your computer to use it"
Very interesting because I haven't had to reboot my Windows 2K or XP computer in a very long time.
No wonder you're posting as an Anonymous Coward. If you haven't been rebooting, then you haven't been using Windows Update, and your system is riddled with security holes.
I also haven't seen any program ask you to restart the computer other than Operating System updates and video card drivers.
Almost all applications ask for a reboot after setup. This is usually totally unnecessary, but it seems to be a default setting in WISE and its kin, much like the absurd "close all other programs" boilerplate.
If you don't get asked to reboot, you must not be installing many applications.
You cannot judge and OS on how frequently you have to reboot especially when in either one it is not rebooted frequently.
Yes you can. An OS that needs to be rebooted more frequently is simply badly designed.
For instance; try stopping and restarting the Telephony service on XP. Oh dear. It won't even stop. How in the world is the OS dependent on the Telephony service? Why would you have to reboot to upgrade it (since the service can't be stopped)?
COM+ is another one, services.msc won't even offer you the option of stopping it.
And on linux, you don't even need to restart most daemons, they'll just reread their conf files if you tell them to (for example, a kill -USR1 will cause apache to reread its configuration).
And don't get me started on Window's bullshit ways of exclusively locking files that don't need to be locked.
The only reason for an OS to have to reboot should be to replace the kernel (though it would be nice, and it's quite possible, if that were avoided too).
"These snafus have led the government to open up the labs to defense-contracting bids for the first time in their 60+ year history (until now the labs have been run by UC-Berkeley)."
Given that the disks have already been found, and never left the possesion of those authorized to have it, why make such a fuzz about it? Why do we see this on the news (I did)? Why shut down all work? Wouldn't you want to keep the fact anything is missing quiet, if only to cast doubt in the mind of any one being offered stolen secrets as to whether they really are genuine?
And why suddenly decide to break open the bidding for the contract, within days/hours of an incident?
How convenient.. Perhaps.. a bit too convenient?
My money is on either Microsoft Trying to buy it (yeah like that would go though) or AOL. If AOL tried I would fall out of my seat laughing.
Did you even read the about screen?
Copyright © 1998-2002 by Contributors to the Mozilla codebase under the Mozilla Public License and Netscape Public License. All Rights Reserved
Netscape.. Gee.. I wondered what happened to that company.. Didn't they already get bought up?
*NB: There's no way I'm calling it XBox2, because MS are never going to have an *2 competing with a *3 (e.g. PS3).
How about the Y-BoX?
Or the X-BoY?
Both names have a nice village People ring to them. (It's fun to play with the Y-B-O-X.. In the navy.. Come and join your x-boys..)
Great. Microsoft will be king of a **DEAD MARKET**. Congratulations, Bill Gates! Now maybe you can realize your lifelong ambition and become the world's #1 buggy whip manufacturer, too!
PDA's are so 9/10, dude. The market for them is contracting. Cell phones are where the action is now, and Palm has the hottest - and most profitable - cell phone by far with their Treo line.
There's also the pocket-pc based MDA/MDA2 on offer from T-Mobile, and the eTen 300/700. Basically just your run-off-the-mill iPaq (the MDA is made by HTC, who also produce iPaqs) with a radio unit built-in that accessible to the OS as a cell/data modem. The only specialized software on it is the SMS functionality in pocket outlook and the dialer.
Microsoft is also making a wince-based smartphone OS. That's kind of creepy, seeing how much it sucks. Unfortunately, the main competitors in phone-sized smart devices (Nokia, SonyEricsson) have dropped the ball significantly. While they're both using the Symbian/EPOC OS, they're incompatible with each other, and the usability of the system is really below par compared to the psion "organizers" of days past.
Seriously, the Psion 5 organizer/PDA was a great device. To this day, I can switch it on and say "dammit, this OS is better than pocketpc, even though pocketpc came years later and stole a lot of their ideas". Unfortunately, it's a black-and-white device, with a tiny cpu for today's norms, and with no built-in cellular or bluetooth connection.
If you happen across a psion 5 or later device, try it. You'll like it. And it will bring home just how significantly Nokia and SonyEricsson fucked up their shot at the smartphone.
The worst thing now is that pocketpc has more developers/enthusiasts (even open sourcers) programming for it than palm or symbian have. I now own a pocketpc based device, that MDA2 (actually mine is branded Qtek 2020) I mentioned. I have to reset it twice a day, but at least I can find apps for it. *sigh*
It's techinically impressive for a couple ofreasons
1) The unified memory architecture - the graphics and the main memory are shared. This means you dont have to wait for your PC or AGP bus to transfer your textures before you render them
Oh come on. Low end systems and laptops have had shared memory for ages. There's nothing new about that at all. Sure, to speed things up (and risk more instability) you can give up memory protection alltogether and let the CPU and GPU access the same places in RAM, but that's not technically impressive at all.
2) The price point - How much can you pick up your Xbox set top media center for now?
They're making a loss on each unit sold. How is that technically impressive? They're just price dumping, they didn't go and invent mass production or anything of the sort.
Apple made $61 million dollars profit on $2.01 billion dollars in Q3/04 and had the highest CPU shipments in three and a half years
That's a miniscule amount when you look at the profits of just about any other tech company. $61million in profits can barely drive R&D for a company like Dell or Gateway.
R&D costs are, well, costs. Profit is what you're left with after you've paid your costs. Like R&D.
According to AAPL's SEC filings, it spends about $120 million every 3 months on R&D (or about 480 million dollars per year).
Dell spent LESS than that, at $464 million for R&D, even though their turnover is 6 times Apple's, and their profit is $3 billion. Relative to Dell, Apple spends wild amounts of money on R&D.
Of course, all that pales in comparison with IBM's $5 billion R&D budget, but then, IBM is also in the business of researching things that Apple uses in its products, like the G5 processor for example (hard to miss that one, really..)
Is this really true? Look at spatial nautilus. The whole gnome community are on fire.
Correction, the GNOME community is complaining and the Nautilus coders are ignoring. An argument tends to suggest two-way interaction.
Oh no. It's the Monty Python Argument sketch all over again..
My doctors tried a number of things but option number 1 was always Prozac. What nonsense, they hand that out without thinking about it (in Britain anyway) and it really bugs me. No I won't take Prozac.
;-)
Actually, Prozac is a selective serotonic re-uptake inhibitor. So taking it causes more serotonin to be present in the brain. Serotonin plays a very big role in your sleep patterns. In fact, one commonly marketed sleeping drug (which actually works) is L-tryptophan (a chemical also present in milk - momma told you, didn't she?), which is converted into serotonin in the body. Unfortunately it is now banned from over-the-counter sale, because of a tainted batch causing a nasty illness. You can still get it as a prescribed drug (Tryptan).
The other thing that helped was making a routine of going to bed - always doing the same things in the same order (now it's feed the fish, go to bathroom for a wash etc, then go to straight to bed). If after 20-30 mins I'm not asleep then get up, read/do something (not video games that get adrenalin pumping) for a further 20 mins and then go through the entire routine again.
DO NOT OVERFEED FISH. Thanks.