Re:apple need to bump up the entry level spec
on
New Apples Next Week
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· Score: 1
I agree that Apple should bump up the specs and charge a bit more, but it may hurt them if the base price is higher. When I was putting together a purchase req for new PCs (at about $700 each), I was asked "why can't we get those $299 PCs I see Dell advertise?" Some people don't see the difference.
The Larry Bird vs. Dr. J game One on One would switch to a spreadsheet with information on National Meatloaf consumption. Hope the boss didn't look too closely.
Senator: And what are these fears of Open Source you speak of?
MS Whore: Well Sir, last year my company only made $5 billion in profits as a result of our innovations. If open source software is allowed to continue, it won't be worth our while to continue innovating. I've heard rumblings in the office that Bill Gates would fold up the company if it's only making a paltry $1 billion per year. And take his ball^H^H^H^H innovations and go home.
As others have said, this review doesn't give any feel for the book or its value to readers.
The first thing that impressed me with this book is the included CD with FreeBSD 4.2. The FreeBSD site lists a release date of 22-Nov-2000, so I was very impressed to receive this version in a book purchased in January 2001.
The author advises how to use FreeBSD as a replacement to Windows servers in a number of areas, including:
Internet connection sharing
Web serving
Fileserving
Printserving
E-mail server
Working as a consultant for small companies without a full-time MIS person, I've found these needs to be the most common as well.
The author does an excellent job not only of explaining how to get the FreeBSD server running, but also tells how to configure the clients. Instructions for setting up networking on DOS, Win 3.1, Win95/98/Me and NT are given. I got the sense that the author was out there working in the same types of places his readers are.
The author also gives good advice on installing FreeBSD. He suggests just doing a standard install initially, because you're not going to know exactly which components you'll need. A more fine-tuned install can be done later. He also recommends compiling the kernel on the server. Even if you don't need a custom kernel (and, he says, most don't), it's a good test of your hardware. A PC that can't correctly compile the standard kernel isn't reliable enough to be used as a server.
As for the author's section on FreeBSD Advocacy, it will hardly shock or offend anyone who's skimmed through comments of a Slashdot article about Microsoft. He simply says that he believes FreeBSD is technically superior to other OSes. And although other OSes have their place, he'd recommend using FreeBSD in many cases. I don't have any problem with an author taking some space to make the case for using certain software on technical or philosophical grounds, especially when the chapter is titled "FreeBSD Advocacy".
This book comes up very strong in an area where other books fail: practical advice. Sure, each chapter's subject has entire books devoted to it, but the average person isn't going to need them early on. With this book, the reader can, for example, get to the point where the documentation included with Samba makes more sense.
I'd definitely recommend the book for those who are serving companies where the $800 NT server license, plus the cost of Client Access Licenses, is not small change. And if FreeBSD turns out to be more manageable and reliable as well, that's gravy.
While not in the same caliber as the E10K, I recall reading an article where Linus was talking about the 8-processor server sitting in his garage and used for testing. So apparently there are some generous souls providing equipment. While many of us would drool, he had the nerve to complain about the noise of the thing!;-)
The mother of an autistic boy wrote the author of the challenge and said that her son's speech was improving while playing with the Furby. Of course the language the Furby uses is less helpful than teaching a more mainstream language. Basically, the author was looking forward to sending her a modified Furby to help her son improve his communication.
In most cases, he doesn't even bother supplying any media, license agreement, a manual or documentation.
Customer to dealer: "Not so quick, what are you trying to pull pal? I don't see the fine print legalese License Agreement here. What do you think, I was born yesterday?"
This is why aluminum bicycles have thick thin-walled tubes, so they can't flex. When properly designed, aluminum will provide a better strength-to-weight ratio than titanium.
Aluminum may produce the stiffest bike, but many cyclists are looking for something with a less bone-jarring ride. The weight savings of aluminum may be negated by the fatigue caused by absorbing all of the bumps.
Unfortunate and disgusting, but not illegal
on
AOL Nation
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· Score: 1
The government usually disallows mergers if the combined company will dominate a particular industry. The only overlap that AOL and Time Warner have (other than the general field of "entertainment") is Internet access, since Time Warner has some cable modem subscribers. But since AOL fought to have cable systems open to online services, they may have to share even their own with other ISPs. There is still as much competition in the movie, television, and music businesses as there was before this proposed merger. The combined company may very well go on to wield too much power, but until that time, there's not much the government should do.
I was wondering if the Media was going to have egg on their face after pumping this Y2K stuff, but it seems they're already passing the buck. I heard one broadcast say "The date change has come with few of the problems that computer technologists feared."
Those darn computer technologists, taking over our airwaves and making TV movies and filling news broadcasts with Y2K stories.
I'm surprised to see all of the dismissive comments in this forum. A well-designed Web site can allow blind people to perform tasks they couldn't do on their own in the non-online world. Those paper mailings don't come in Braille, but online text can easily be read to the user by a program. Keeping in mind a few design tips can help to make your site more usable by everyone.
I'm not sure if AOL could correct their problems this easily, but web creators using HTML should:
1) use ALT tags for your images. It doesn't take long to type in a brief description of the image. And this also helps the low-bandwidth among us who like to cruise with graphics off.
2) avoid plug-ins unless they're essential or you can't express the information any other way.
3) avoid Java applets of scrolling text (or at least offer an alternative non-Java page)
I'm sure there are many more ways, but these are easy to do and when you start receiving mail from blind users who thank you for making your site accessible to them, you'll feel great.
Isn't this what it's all about? Access for everyone!
From my reading of the article it appears the author of the GPL'd program allowed the special exception.
Corel had developed a GUI packaging utility called get_it which linked against both libqt and libapt-pkg. libqt is the Qt development library and libapt-pkg is licensed under the GPL . . . We did not mention the issue at the time, to give Branden an opportunity to notify the libapt-pkg author and maintainer Jason Gunthorpe and give him a chance to respond . . . Jason will place a specific exception into the license for libapt-pkg to allow Corel to link against both it and the Qt library.
I would have felt more comfortable if the QT license had allowed the exception rather than the GPL being co-opted.
Stock markets try to ensure that everyone has access to information about a publicly traded company at the same time. And company insiders who, of course, have financial information before others, can't take advantage of that early information to profit. For instance, if I'm president of a company and I know that our financial numbers are going to be worse than the market expects, I can't dump the stock a few days before the public finds out. If I know we're going to post higher profits than expected, I can't buy up a lot of stock before announcing the numbers.
The stock market wouldn't work very well if the insiders of the company kept robbing the outside investors.
The important advantages the author states apply to Solaris on Sparc but not to X86. Even if the OS was given away, the additional cost of the hardware would wipe out the savings. Plus, the flexibility users get and the wide range of other OSes on X86 is something many wouldn't want to give up.
I'd be curious to hear from people who are dual-booting Solaris X86 and Linux on how they compare.
Re:Watch this get moderated down by RedHat lovers.
on
Open Letter to Red Hat
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· Score: 1
Robert says: Cygnus and Borland/Inprise would make great acquisitions. Robert, once again, money does NOT GROW ON TREES. Whether or not Borland/Inprise has been in decline, it COSTS MONEY. Lots and LOTS of money. Furthermore, Inprise is a faltering company, and is NOT a good buy.
I'm not going to argue whether Borland is a good buy or not, but it doesn't require lots and lots of money to acquire them, just a decent amount of stock. Right now, RedHat's market capitalization is 29 times higher than Borland/Inprise!! Even if they paid a large premium, the cost would be less than the daily fluctuation of RedHat's stock.
Is this something they do for IPOs only or for all trading?
It seems like a Catch-22. If you haven't traded stock before, they won't let you in. How do you get the experience if they won't let you buy your first stock?
The actual market value of the company after a $10 IPO would be $660 million. The $60 million is only the part of the company being offered to the public. The rest will be owned by VCs, Intel, and all of the other current investors.
It seems like a better product than WebTV. Alot of WebTV users are complaining that they can't run Java apps or RealAudio content. This machine may have a better chance at doing that. If this machine can capture as much market share as WebTV (1 to 2 million, I believe) then it could help BeOS to get a lot more Internet apps developed.
Just in case it was driving anyone else crazy trying to figure out who that actor was (it was hard to tell with the glasses, beard, and makeup), I finally figured out it was the character Sam from "The Single Guy," the sitcom of a couple years ago.
P source code will still be available under either license, but under BSD, the changes made to create P+ may not be open source. So, P can continue on, but P+ may offer features that P cannot "borrow". Eventually P+ has the potential to become proprietary and you lose the benefits of source code that would have been kept if P was GPL'd.
I am willing to bet it won't even cut into the MS profit margin. It will be plauged with bugs, bad tech support and send consumers screaming. What it does do is give Linux a bad name if all of that happens, articles like this that the public can see, and then go buy one of these things will hurt Linux in the long run, say the box works OK (it won't be bug free it's version 1.0 of a hybrid OS)then everything might be fien, but if it's as buggy as most 1.0 products then MS can say "llok it runs Linux".
And for the conspiracy-minded, the company is based in the Seattle area. See their careers page.
Some pundits still refer to BeOS as "that operating system Apple almost bought but passed over in favor of NeXT." These journalists don't seem to realize that the vast majority of BeOS users and developers were overjoyed that that deal didn't go down.
But another deep-pocketed buyer can come by at any time and buy up the company and possibly ruin BeOS. At least with Open Source, likeminded individuals would be able to continue the development.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that Apple should bump up the specs and charge a bit more, but it may hurt them if the base price is higher. When I was putting together a purchase req for new PCs (at about $700 each), I was asked "why can't we get those $299 PCs I see Dell advertise?" Some people don't see the difference.
How ridiculous for a direct online seller to require buyers to mail in for a rebate!
Any one in the marketing business have statistics on the percentage of buyers who take the time and remember to redeem rebates?
The Larry Bird vs. Dr. J game One on One would switch to a spreadsheet with information on National Meatloaf consumption. Hope the boss didn't look too closely.
Senator: And what are these fears of Open Source you speak of?
MS Whore: Well Sir, last year my company only made $5 billion in profits as a result of our innovations. If open source software is allowed to continue, it won't be worth our while to continue innovating. I've heard rumblings in the office that Bill Gates would fold up the company if it's only making a paltry $1 billion per year. And take his ball^H^H^H^H innovations and go home.
As others have said, this review doesn't give any feel for the book or its value to readers.
The first thing that impressed me with this book is the included CD with FreeBSD 4.2. The FreeBSD site lists a release date of 22-Nov-2000, so I was very impressed to receive this version in a book purchased in January 2001.
The author advises how to use FreeBSD as a replacement to Windows servers in a number of areas, including:
Internet connection sharing
Web serving
Fileserving
Printserving
E-mail server
Working as a consultant for small companies without a full-time MIS person, I've found these needs to be the most common as well.
The author does an excellent job not only of explaining how to get the FreeBSD server running, but also tells how to configure the clients. Instructions for setting up networking on DOS, Win 3.1, Win95/98/Me and NT are given. I got the sense that the author was out there working in the same types of places his readers are.
The author also gives good advice on installing FreeBSD. He suggests just doing a standard install initially, because you're not going to know exactly which components you'll need. A more fine-tuned install can be done later. He also recommends compiling the kernel on the server. Even if you don't need a custom kernel (and, he says, most don't), it's a good test of your hardware. A PC that can't correctly compile the standard kernel isn't reliable enough to be used as a server.
As for the author's section on FreeBSD Advocacy, it will hardly shock or offend anyone who's skimmed through comments of a Slashdot article about Microsoft. He simply says that he believes FreeBSD is technically superior to other OSes. And although other OSes have their place, he'd recommend using FreeBSD in many cases. I don't have any problem with an author taking some space to make the case for using certain software on technical or philosophical grounds, especially when the chapter is titled "FreeBSD Advocacy".
This book comes up very strong in an area where other books fail: practical advice. Sure, each chapter's subject has entire books devoted to it, but the average person isn't going to need them early on. With this book, the reader can, for example, get to the point where the documentation included with Samba makes more sense.
I'd definitely recommend the book for those who are serving companies where the $800 NT server license, plus the cost of Client Access Licenses, is not small change. And if FreeBSD turns out to be more manageable and reliable as well, that's gravy.
While not in the same caliber as the E10K, I recall reading an article where Linus was talking about the 8-processor server sitting in his garage and used for testing. So apparently there are some generous souls providing equipment. While many of us would drool, he had the nerve to complain about the noise of the thing! ;-)
The mother of an autistic boy wrote the author of the challenge and said that her son's speech was improving while playing with the Furby. Of course the language the Furby uses is less helpful than teaching a more mainstream language. Basically, the author was looking forward to sending her a modified Furby to help her son improve his communication.
Customer to dealer: "Not so quick, what are you trying to pull pal? I don't see the fine print legalese License Agreement here. What do you think, I was born yesterday?"
Aluminum may produce the stiffest bike, but many cyclists are looking for something with a less bone-jarring ride. The weight savings of aluminum may be negated by the fatigue caused by absorbing all of the bumps.
The government usually disallows mergers if the combined company will dominate a particular industry. The only overlap that AOL and Time Warner have (other than the general field of "entertainment") is Internet access, since Time Warner has some cable modem subscribers. But since AOL fought to have cable systems open to online services, they may have to share even their own with other ISPs. There is still as much competition in the movie, television, and music businesses as there was before this proposed merger. The combined company may very well go on to wield too much power, but until that time, there's not much the government should do.
Those darn computer technologists, taking over our airwaves and making TV movies and filling news broadcasts with Y2K stories.
I'm surprised to see all of the dismissive comments in this forum. A well-designed Web site can allow blind people to perform tasks they couldn't do on their own in the non-online world. Those paper mailings don't come in Braille, but online text can easily be read to the user by a program. Keeping in mind a few design tips can help to make your site more usable by everyone.
I'm not sure if AOL could correct their problems this easily, but web creators using HTML should:
1) use ALT tags for your images. It doesn't take long to type in a brief description of the image. And this also helps the low-bandwidth among us who like to cruise with graphics off.
2) avoid plug-ins unless they're essential or you can't express the information any other way.
3) avoid Java applets of scrolling text (or at least offer an alternative non-Java page)
I'm sure there are many more ways, but these are easy to do and when you start receiving mail from blind users who thank you for making your site accessible to them, you'll feel great.
Isn't this what it's all about? Access for everyone!
From my reading of the article it appears the author of the GPL'd program allowed the special exception.
Corel had developed a GUI packaging utility called get_it which linked against both libqt and libapt-pkg. libqt is the Qt development library and libapt-pkg is licensed under the GPL . . . We did not mention the issue at the time, to give Branden an opportunity to notify the libapt-pkg author and maintainer Jason Gunthorpe and give him a chance to respond . . . Jason will place a specific exception into the license for libapt-pkg to allow Corel to link against both it and the Qt library.
I would have felt more comfortable if the QT license had allowed the exception rather than the GPL being co-opted.
The stock market wouldn't work very well if the insiders of the company kept robbing the outside investors.
Re: The Brooklyn Museum art exhibit
Since when does freedom = taxpayer financing to allow wider distribution of your free speech?
The artist is free to create the work, David Bowie is free to display it on his Web site. That's all freedom is. Freedom != funding.
For a good argument against the exhibit, read this Salon article.
The important advantages the author states apply to Solaris on Sparc but not to X86. Even if the OS was given away, the additional cost of the hardware would wipe out the savings. Plus, the flexibility users get and the wide range of other OSes on X86 is something many wouldn't want to give up.
I'd be curious to hear from people who are dual-booting Solaris X86 and Linux on how they compare.
Robert says: Cygnus and Borland/Inprise would make great acquisitions.
Robert, once again, money does NOT GROW ON TREES. Whether or not Borland/Inprise has been in decline, it COSTS MONEY. Lots and LOTS of money. Furthermore, Inprise is a faltering company, and is NOT a good buy.
I'm not going to argue whether Borland is a good buy or not, but it doesn't require lots and lots of money to acquire them, just a decent amount of stock. Right now, RedHat's market capitalization is 29 times higher than Borland/Inprise!! Even if they paid a large premium, the cost would be less than the daily fluctuation of RedHat's stock.
Following in the grand tradition of MTV asking the important questions:
Abe. . . the world wants to know. . . boxers or briefs?
Is this something they do for IPOs only or for all trading?
It seems like a Catch-22. If you haven't traded stock before, they won't let you in. How do you get the experience if they won't let you buy your first stock?
The actual market value of the company after a $10 IPO would be $660 million. The $60 million is only the part of the company being offered to the public. The rest will be owned by VCs, Intel, and all of the other current investors.
It seems like a better product than WebTV. Alot of WebTV users are complaining that they can't run Java apps or RealAudio content. This machine may have a better chance at doing that. If this machine can capture as much market share as WebTV (1 to 2 million, I believe) then it could help BeOS to get a lot more Internet apps developed.
Just in case it was driving anyone else crazy trying to figure out who that actor was (it was hard to tell with the glasses, beard, and makeup), I finally figured out it was the character Sam from "The Single Guy," the sitcom of a couple years ago.
P source code will still be available under either license, but under BSD, the changes made to create P+ may not be open source. So, P can continue on, but P+ may offer features that P cannot "borrow". Eventually P+ has the potential to become proprietary and you lose the benefits of source code that would have been kept if P was GPL'd.
And for the conspiracy-minded, the company is based in the Seattle area. See their careers page.
But another deep-pocketed buyer can come by at any time and buy up the company and possibly ruin BeOS. At least with Open Source, likeminded individuals would be able to continue the development.