You're wrong. For the last five years my wife is a happy CentOS user. And as non technical as you can get it.
Yes she needs help with her PC, but roughly the same as when she used Windows before that. And for me it's less support work because of the reduced amount of bloatware and exploits targeting Linux.
When she moved from IE to FireFox and Outlook Express to Thunderbird the only thing I had to explain was what multi-tab browsing is. For the rest it was to her "all the same thing".
The main reason that non-technical users don't use Linux is that you can't buy preconfigured Linux systems in the big-box stores.
But this starts to become a moot point, because non-technical users just use a phone instead of a desktop or laptop.
.... do use a primary key of Lastname + birthdate, and then verify secondly with address or first name....
Which makes me remember what happened to me ten years ago. "Just of the Boat":-) in Canada I signed up for my companies healthcare. Got a first dental claim cheque but it had on it the wrong company name. Called the insurance guys and, long story short, there was another guy in Canada with the same last name (which is a weird Dutch one "Van Schatter", not your "Smith" or "Johnson") but also the same birthdate. Which is pretty rare, but he also had the same first name (again, not "Joe" or "Brian"), now that becomes creepy. OK, the address was different.......
You're so right, but it is even worse. There is lots of unnecessarily added stuff (like glucose) in our food, but it happens even more in cheap food (read: processed food) than fresh food (read: expensive food). And therefore the part of the population that could really need a "health boost" simply can't afford it. Hey, a single cucumber in my supermarket is more expensive than a burger in the fast food chain around the corner. Which should be completely the opposite. How tough is it to grow a cucumber and put it on a truck, while even a simple burger involves tens of ingredients and processing steps.
The worst is that this is all a matter of politics. Because Ohio has been a swing state for years and years, every president in the last decades has been pushing money to subsidize the production of corn. Sometimes with the argument that Americans need methanol (which recently caused a severe "tortilla problem" in Mexico), but most of it ends up unnecessarily in our food. As an example, glucose gets added to meat products like burgers. Mind you, even "0% fat yoghurt", made for the health fanatics among us, still has sugar products added. Check it yourself, read those damn "ingredients" small print on the labels. And BTW, I prefer the full-fat stuff, but still I want to decide myself if I like to add sugar or not.
The food industry is really, really sick. Lack of diversity, full of political lobbyism. 100% about money.
When it comes to how to cure this problem, first of all I agree with a former poster who said simply "let capitalism do it, and stop subsidies". That would absolutely be a good first step. Still I think that with something as important as food (which is the underlying foundation for health care) I wouldn't like to keep "the market" without control. Better have some stricter rules. Like banning hormones in beef, which currently results in you eating testosterone in your BigMagic. They are also in your daughter's burger, who - because of that - is now having her first period two years younger than the generation before her.
From the post it is not completely clear, but I guess this sporked OpenSolaris will still include the possibility of zones. Now I know Linux has similar features, but Containers/Zones have been a hit in the Solaris world from day one. And are widely used, including production environments where it does the segmentation / isolation of Oracle databases.
In future, it won't be enough to let a consumer make the decision on when to consume and encourage him with discounts in low peak hours. The model should be that for those loads where "time doesn't matter" we (the consumer) can indicate our constraints and then the electricity company will work within those boundaries. Of course, the more lenient the consumer is, the better rate he gets.
For this example, if I park my car at the office I don't care if the battery gets reloaded at 11 am of after lunch. As long as it's done before I drive home at 5 PM. Same for the return trip, the car could be rechared at 11PM or at 3AM, I don't care.
The crucial thing here is that fore heavier, but also time independent loads like this, your utility company gets control over when you are using electricity. We're still quite a bit away from that, but with smart grids, that's the way we're going.
And it will all benefit green power that produces electricity at "unexpected moments".
Unlimited simply means that the 90% of users with low usage are subsidizing the 10% with high usage.
When I go to McDonalds for just a burger, I don't want to pay for your Big Mac with super-sized fries.
A fair plan with metered use makes most sense. Problem is of course that too many Telcos and ISP's have scrapped the word fair from their spelling checker.
This is a very good step!! Phonebooks are useless already because they don't contain cellphone numbers. Not that I would suggest that those should be included.
And grandma anyway can't find her reading glasses....:-)
I ditched my "generator powered" light on my bicycle
Those are not a temporary fad that doesn't really work. In Holland (where there are more bicycles than people) those dynamo's are the standard way (at least were before LED lights) of powering bicycle lights.
It was the next progression after the carbid lantern, so I guess that started around WWII, maybe even earlier. At least I'm from 1957 and I can't remember anything else.
| I suppose the easiest option for long-term support of such devices would | be to emulate the floppy drive itself, and make a memory card reader that | plugged into a floppy bus.
You mean 'Wall-Street' wrong !! That's IMHO a better analogy.
This Goldman Sachs guy (OK, he was only partnering with GS, but still) that made $ 3 billion while screwing various pension funds. Compare that to 'stealing' some bandwidth from a telco company. Yes, both wrong, but......
Or on a simple Windows XP desktop: open Task Manager and add the "Threads" column. IExplorer 17 threads, System 56, some svchost.exe ranging from 15 to 70 threads. OK, many will be dormant, but I prefer them to sleep on another core.:)
In the server space we've gone through the same thing. Sun introduced the T1 with 8 cores and 32 threads (now 64 on T2). Lots of software wasn't suitable for this type of horizontal scaling. But over a period of five years, that changed dramatically.
On the desktop, you can expect the same. For now, not many desktop apps will take advantage of the additional cores. But if Intel would have stuck with 1-2 cores, no software will be written to take advantage of multiple cores.
Let's hope that the various cable companies like Shaw here in the west and EastLink in the Atlantic are stepping into the cellphone market. Here in Calgary, ten years ago Shaw gave Telus a beating when it came to Fast Internet and currently they make pretty good inroads in the VoIP market.
On the other hand, also the pricing of cable companies seems to go up-and-up with no end in sight. So also they could use some more competition.
It is not just the mandatory password changes that increases the mess. It is also that each and every site has different validation rules. If I could use one-and-only strong password for many sites, then I could remember that. However, some sites _require_ special characters, while others _forbid_ it, etc, etc. So each time you end up inventing something on the spot, and then two months down the road you've forgotten it.
I guess that I've 50 passwords to remember, so if I can't do that with just a few (I don't use the same password for my online banking as for my slashdot login:-) then it quickly becomes Post-it time again. Or worse, that little file on the PC desktop with a list of userid/passwd combo's.
Agreed, I did OS/9 diskless real-time programming in the past, or sw development for robots as another example. For that you need root access. But anyway, you will not (you even don't want to) do that type of development on the same PC you're using for email.
As you also said, the majority of developers are doing stuff ranging from VB, Java to SQL, which can happen nicely in a VM
Agreed, look at it another way: 2**32 is four billion address, which is one address per two world citizens. OK, I could share that IP with my wife, but given the number of devices in between us, that won't really work. Now I know, that places like Africa currently don't follow the pattern of "personal" computers, but how long will that last.
More realistically, given that my phone, web-server, car, camera, email, GPS unit, home security system, etc. all should have their own IP address, we need at least 20x what a 32 bit address space can provide. And then you've to add the 'wasted space' so that we can allocate blocks of addresses in a logical fashion.
So yes, IPv6 is the only way to go, if you like it or not. Couple of/8 blocks or NAT won't help us.
In modern times, I would give them no admin rights on the box itself, but you could provide virtual machines for them on which they can do whatever they want. The argument that they need to do things that "really, really":-) require access to the bare metal, doesn't hold anymore, because the applications they are building will anyway need to be able to run in a virtualized environment.
I've done many audits and project plans on this topic in the past, and the issue is always that developers are split personalities: on the one hand they are standard corporate citizens that need email, calendar and word, which must be rock solid and therefore IT controlled, on the other hand they do their development work that requires freedom over their box. In the past the best solution was always to give them two PCs (or a thin client for the standard desktop work), but today I would solve this all through virtual machines.
Re:Speaking for myself as a Swedish brick driver,
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 1
In the end, I find the best way to figure out where something is made is to look for the "Made in XXXXXX" statement.
Which especially for a car tells you nothing. If it says "Made in Mexico" (for arguments sake) it only means that final assembly happened there. The engine could be put together in Korea and the brakes coming from Portugal.
That's why my Fujitsu P7010-D was/is such a fun laptop: only 10.5 inch wide-screen, but with a 1280 x 768 resolution. That's way more pixels/inch than normal. I have one dead pixel, constant blue on, and I just don't notice it. Simply because the pixel is so small.
This laptop is 4-5 years old, with a Pentium-M probably still faster than an Atom, has a 3-5 hour battery life and a built-in CDRW/DVD. Yes, it is a bit heavier than a netbook, but the size is the same as your typical 10" netbook.
The only BIG BIG difference is of course that at the time those machines went for prices over 2000 dollar. Compare that with what you pay now for your 10 inch netbook. Those extra pixels didn't come cheap....
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know any non-technical Linux users?
You're wrong. For the last five years my wife is a happy CentOS user. And as non technical as you can get it.
Yes she needs help with her PC, but roughly the same as when she used Windows before that. And for me it's less support work because of the reduced amount of bloatware and exploits targeting Linux.
When she moved from IE to FireFox and Outlook Express to Thunderbird the only thing I had to explain was what multi-tab browsing is. For the rest it was to her "all the same thing".
The main reason that non-technical users don't use Linux is that you can't buy preconfigured Linux systems in the big-box stores.
But this starts to become a moot point, because non-technical users just use a phone instead of a desktop or laptop.
I fully agree, but given the average age of judges, he probably doesn't know what the word "upload" means. :-)
.... do use a primary key of Lastname + birthdate, and then verify secondly with address or first name ....
Which makes me remember what happened to me ten years ago. "Just of the Boat" :-) in Canada I signed up for my companies healthcare. Got a first dental claim cheque but it had on it the wrong company name. Called the insurance guys and, long story short, there was another guy in Canada with the same last name (which is a weird Dutch one "Van Schatter", not your "Smith" or "Johnson") but also the same birthdate. Which is pretty rare, but he also had the same first name (again, not "Joe" or "Brian"), now that becomes creepy. OK, the address was different.......
You're so right, but it is even worse. There is lots of unnecessarily added stuff (like glucose) in our food, but it happens even more in cheap food (read: processed food) than fresh food (read: expensive food). And therefore the part of the population that could really need a "health boost" simply can't afford it. Hey, a single cucumber in my supermarket is more expensive than a burger in the fast food chain around the corner. Which should be completely the opposite. How tough is it to grow a cucumber and put it on a truck, while even a simple burger involves tens of ingredients and processing steps.
The worst is that this is all a matter of politics. Because Ohio has been a swing state for years and years, every president in the last decades has been pushing money to subsidize the production of corn. Sometimes with the argument that Americans need methanol (which recently caused a severe "tortilla problem" in Mexico), but most of it ends up unnecessarily in our food. As an example, glucose gets added to meat products like burgers. Mind you, even "0% fat yoghurt", made for the health fanatics among us, still has sugar products added. Check it yourself, read those damn "ingredients" small print on the labels. And BTW, I prefer the full-fat stuff, but still I want to decide myself if I like to add sugar or not.
The food industry is really, really sick. Lack of diversity, full of political lobbyism. 100% about money.
When it comes to how to cure this problem, first of all I agree with a former poster who said simply "let capitalism do it, and stop subsidies". That would absolutely be a good first step. Still I think that with something as important as food (which is the underlying foundation for health care) I wouldn't like to keep "the market" without control. Better have some stricter rules. Like banning hormones in beef, which currently results in you eating testosterone in your BigMagic. They are also in your daughter's burger, who - because of that - is now having her first period two years younger than the generation before her.
The missing piece in the article:
by 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed by a new Volvo
From the post it is not completely clear, but I guess this sporked OpenSolaris will still include the possibility of zones. Now I know Linux has similar features, but Containers/Zones have been a hit in the Solaris world from day one. And are widely used, including production environments where it does the segmentation / isolation of Oracle databases.
(I'm former Sun guy, been there, done that.)
In future, it won't be enough to let a consumer make the decision on when to consume and encourage him with discounts in low peak hours. The model should be that for those loads where "time doesn't matter" we (the consumer) can indicate our constraints and then the electricity company will work within those boundaries. Of course, the more lenient the consumer is, the better rate he gets.
For this example, if I park my car at the office I don't care if the battery gets reloaded at 11 am of after lunch. As long as it's done before I drive home at 5 PM. Same for the return trip, the car could be rechared at 11PM or at 3AM, I don't care.
The crucial thing here is that fore heavier, but also time independent loads like this, your utility company gets control over when you are using electricity. We're still quite a bit away from that, but with smart grids, that's the way we're going.
And it will all benefit green power that produces electricity at "unexpected moments".
True unlimited is the way to go.
Unlimited simply means that the 90% of users with low usage are subsidizing the 10% with high usage.
When I go to McDonalds for just a burger, I don't want to pay for your Big Mac with super-sized fries.
A fair plan with metered use makes most sense. Problem is of course that too many Telcos and ISP's have scrapped the word fair from their spelling checker.
This is a very good step!! Phonebooks are useless already because they don't contain cellphone numbers. Not that I would suggest that those should be included.
And grandma anyway can't find her reading glasses.... :-)
I ditched my "generator powered" light on my bicycle
Those are not a temporary fad that doesn't really work. In Holland (where there are more bicycles than people) those dynamo's are the standard way (at least were before LED lights) of powering bicycle lights.
It was the next progression after the carbid lantern, so I guess that started around WWII, maybe even earlier. At least I'm from 1957 and I can't remember anything else.
| I suppose the easiest option for long-term support of such devices would
| be to emulate the floppy drive itself, and make a memory card reader that
| plugged into a floppy bus.
This exists already:
http://news.directindustry.com/press/sigmatek/compact-flash-floppy-drive-cff-011-retrofitting-for-35-floppy-drives-13981-35685.html
Don't know anything about this product, just googled for "floppy flash", but it seems someone thought already about this.
>
> But it's not 'nazi-wrong'.
>
You mean 'Wall-Street' wrong !! That's IMHO a better analogy.
This Goldman Sachs guy (OK, he was only partnering with GS, but still) that made $ 3 billion while screwing various pension funds. Compare that to 'stealing' some bandwidth from a telco company. Yes, both wrong, but......
she must have bought it with 40% off, told you it was 20%, and kept the difference :-)
Yes, but with seven windows. And I didn't see curtains .....
Or on a simple Windows XP desktop: open Task Manager and add the "Threads" column. IExplorer 17 threads, System 56, some svchost.exe ranging from 15 to 70 threads. OK, many will be dormant, but I prefer them to sleep on another core. :)
In the server space we've gone through the same thing. Sun introduced the T1 with 8 cores and 32 threads (now 64 on T2). Lots of software wasn't suitable for this type of horizontal scaling. But over a period of five years, that changed dramatically.
On the desktop, you can expect the same. For now, not many desktop apps will take advantage of the additional cores. But if Intel would have stuck with 1-2 cores, no software will be written to take advantage of multiple cores.
Chicken or egg ....
Well said!!
Let's hope that the various cable companies like Shaw here in the west and EastLink in the Atlantic are stepping into the cellphone market. Here in Calgary, ten years ago Shaw gave Telus a beating when it came to Fast Internet and currently they make pretty good inroads in the VoIP market.
On the other hand, also the pricing of cable companies seems to go up-and-up with no end in sight. So also they could use some more competition.
unless these passwords are automatically assigned
In which case it is guaranteed to be written down somewhere on a piece of paper. Talking about "improved security".....
It is not just the mandatory password changes that increases the mess. It is also that each and every site has different validation rules. If I could use one-and-only strong password for many sites, then I could remember that. However, some sites _require_ special characters, while others _forbid_ it, etc, etc. So each time you end up inventing something on the spot, and then two months down the road you've forgotten it.
I guess that I've 50 passwords to remember, so if I can't do that with just a few (I don't use the same password for my online banking as for my slashdot login :-) then it quickly becomes Post-it time again. Or worse, that little file on the PC desktop with a list of userid/passwd combo's.
From the RFA: "He said he informed Microsoft security employees of the vulnerability in June".
So, Microsoft could at least have fixed this in Windows 7 (according to Wikipedia: "released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009").
Agreed, I did OS/9 diskless real-time programming in the past, or sw development for robots as another example. For that you need root access. But anyway, you will not (you even don't want to) do that type of development on the same PC you're using for email.
As you also said, the majority of developers are doing stuff ranging from VB, Java to SQL, which can happen nicely in a VM
Agreed, look at it another way: 2**32 is four billion address, which is one address per two world citizens. OK, I could share that IP with my wife, but given the number of devices in between us, that won't really work. Now I know, that places like Africa currently don't follow the pattern of "personal" computers, but how long will that last.
More realistically, given that my phone, web-server, car, camera, email, GPS unit, home security system, etc. all should have their own IP address, we need at least 20x what a 32 bit address space can provide. And then you've to add the 'wasted space' so that we can allocate blocks of addresses in a logical fashion.
So yes, IPv6 is the only way to go, if you like it or not. Couple of /8 blocks or NAT won't help us.
In modern times, I would give them no admin rights on the box itself, but you could provide virtual machines for them on which they can do whatever they want. The argument that they need to do things that "really, really" :-) require access to the bare metal, doesn't hold anymore, because the applications they are building will anyway need to be able to run in a virtualized environment.
I've done many audits and project plans on this topic in the past, and the issue is always that developers are split personalities: on the one hand they are standard corporate citizens that need email, calendar and word, which must be rock solid and therefore IT controlled, on the other hand they do their development work that requires freedom over their box. In the past the best solution was always to give them two PCs (or a thin client for the standard desktop work), but today I would solve this all through virtual machines.
In the end, I find the best way to figure out where something is made is to look for the "Made in XXXXXX" statement.
Which especially for a car tells you nothing. If it says "Made in Mexico" (for arguments sake) it only means that final assembly happened there. The engine could be put together in Korea and the brakes coming from Portugal.
That's why my Fujitsu P7010-D was/is such a fun laptop: only 10.5 inch wide-screen, but with a 1280 x 768 resolution. That's way more pixels/inch than normal. I have one dead pixel, constant blue on, and I just don't notice it. Simply because the pixel is so small.
This laptop is 4-5 years old, with a Pentium-M probably still faster than an Atom, has a 3-5 hour battery life and a built-in CDRW/DVD. Yes, it is a bit heavier than a netbook, but the size is the same as your typical 10" netbook.
The only BIG BIG difference is of course that at the time those machines went for prices over 2000 dollar. Compare that with what you pay now for your 10 inch netbook. Those extra pixels didn't come cheap....