If Pres. Bush can get the FCC and/or Congress to rework the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to reflect the current situation of the telecom market (namely that long distance is no longer an attractive market)
Huh? What's the long distance market have to do with an ISP like Covad? And call me crazy, but long distance is at least attractive enough that I still get constant spam wanting me to switch my long distance company to someone else. At the same time, I never see that constant spam for changing ISP's (from anybody other than AOL, of course).
The government should have nothing to do with bailing out companies that invested too much in tech with the wrong ideas in mind. It's one thing to bail out monsters like Chrysler or Continental, because they employ tens of thousands of American workers. It's entirely another thing to rework federal law simply because yet another dot-com servicer went belly-up.
If every airport, starbucks and business class hotel in the US deployed 802.11B I suspect there would be practically no need for 3G, Ricochet or the rest.
MobileStar has been doing that for a while. They have 802.11b access points at Starbucks, airports, and hotels. I travel back and forth between Dallas and Houston, two of the covered cities, and I'm mighty tempted by their plans, but the prices are too high. It's $30/mo for local unlimited, or $60/mo for national unlimited. If it worked at my college campus, then I'd be sold. Otherwise, I'm praying for Richochet to make it through.
As of July 23, SWBell Internet Services & Prodigy are dumping a bunch of newsgroups "after evaluating possible copyright infringement issues". They posted an FAQ about it, and the bottom line is they're no longer offering any of the newsgroups with sounds, mp3, cd.image, movies, multimedia, warez, or vcd in the title.
You have to put up with a three minute interview and a horrible site design, but it's here, in RealAudio and Windows Media, along with a demonstration in a smoky room. The sound is more like a compressed air can, and I would swear it's being produced by an air compressor.
When they say "impossible to ignore", they're not saying your head instantly turns to it - they're saying that in a smoky room, you can pretty well tell where it's coming from without having to think or concentrate on it. Believe me, my head didn't instantly gravitate toward my laptop speakers when the sound came on.
You would think that MS would have put in something to stop this by now. Maybe a "are you really sure?" "are you really really sure?" type nested dialog boxes...
Office XP goes even further than that. I was thrilled to find that the default installation completely blocks a lot of types of attachments, including exe's, vbscripts, etc. You can't even open them if you want to! The only way around it is to edit the registry. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want the junior users editing the registry either, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
We got a demo unit a month ago for a 30-day evaluation. I set the thing up, so I'll shoot my mouth off here and let you know how it went.
We do customer satisfaction surveys - when you see a comment card in a hotel, it probably gets sent to us when you're done. We scan it, compile the comments, and give nice reports to hotel managers (among other things.)
Well, everybody wants more detailed satisfaction data, so we explored the idea of having these at the hotel front desk. When you checked out, the clerk would hand you this webpad, and you would take a survey instantly just by tapping your choices onscreen. Did you use the restaurant? (Yes/no) Then, of course, it could do things that comment cards can't: change questions based on your inputs (only show restaurant questions to people who click Yes, only show dissatisfaction questions to people who weren't happy, etc.) Anyway, that's what we were using it for - web-based surveys in a restricted environment.
First off, this thing is locked down tighter than the Pope's poop chute. After struggling with it for an hour, we called the support line only to find out that they really didn't know much about it either. When we finally got hold of someone who had a clue, he informed us that no, we couldn't change the IP address - it was DHCP-only. That should have been our first clue that this thing wasn't ready for prime time.
I couldn't tell you what version of Linux it was, because frankly, I didn't care, but you don't have access to configuration utilities anyway.
The handwriting recognition is good for a first release of the unit. (We didn't need recognition, but we played with it anyway.) IMHO, it was better and more intuitive than the iPaqs I've used.
The screen is great, very readable from all angles. It has a built-in speaker, so just for yuks, we tuned into a RealAudio station and walked around the building, using it as the world's most expensive boom box. Somehow, people were not amused. Other than Netscape, RealAudio, and a couple of obscure plugins, that was about it.
At first glance in the ads, you might think the 802.11b wireless is built in - it's not, it uses a normal PCMCIA card. FrontPath shipped them with a couple of different cards (tech support has to ask you which one you have) and we had the Lucent one, if I remember right. The coverage was absolutely phenomenal for a battery-powered unit: we could traverse most of our 35,000 sq ft building, both floors, using just one central DLink access point on the second floor. Very impressive.
Usability is pretty rough - most of the icons don't make much sense. From a physical standpoint, it's just not the right size/weight either. The weight is pretty much spread across across the entire unit, so when you hold it and write on it, you have to support it from underneath. You can't just hold it by the side, it'll flop all over the place. It's heavier than it looks, and it's awkward, too - the "easel" they give you to rest the thing on doesn't support it well enough to actually use it while it's in the easel. (Whoo, bad sentence there.)
That pricing is flexible - I think we got a quote for around $1500 for even the smallest quantity order, but I'm not in accounting so I couldn't give you an exact number.
We recommended against it just because of the ludicrous price. At that price point, we could put in small touchscreen PC's instead, and get much, much more functionality. Remember, you're paying laptop-grade bucks for a machine that only surfs the web and NOTHING ELSE.
Italicize the whole article, both questions and answers, and then suddenly switch to bold formatting about halfway through. Looks like the article posters make the same mistakes as us comment posters, and makes you wonder if there's a Preview button for articles. Hahaha.
Jacobsen says he's thinking in the opposite direction--about putting more human nature into the machines. His idea is to build an exoskeleton intelligent enough to take care of the soldier wearing it. If the human trooper is badly wounded, the machine would say to itself, in effect, "Take this guy home."
Wow, I see another use for these. If the exoskeleton gives me the ability to lift very heavy objects, and it can take me home when I get into trouble, then suddenly I can become... that's right... the world's best power drinker! Woohoo! Homer Simpson would be jealous. I could lift full-size kegs to my mouth to extract the last drops of sweet beer. I could win every bar fight. And when things get really ugly, it takes over, walks straight home, and I'm in bed before I even know it.
I don't know about the servers, but their workstations were really overpriced. Same goes for Penguin Computing.
Wow, it was definitely the other way around for the servers - they were incredibly reasonable. We just decided to pick up about 40 1u servers from them, and then today's announcement hits. So much for that plan. Nobody could even come close to touching their 1u prices, and the hardware was phenomenal. Single-CPU 1u units could be had for about $1,000, and you sure can't find that at Dell (except with the crappy Celeron units).
Given that any company can market Linux tools and computers, where's IBM's edge in this market over other players like Compaq and RedHat who have been there longer?
For everyone here who's slagging Compaq, why don't you guys go get a REAL Compaq (like a Deskpro) and then tell me what you think.. if all you've had to deal with is a Presario, your opinion is flawed, because you've never seen what they can really do..
Well, you actually hit the nail on the head in another way, probably without intending to. Anybody on this board who uses a Presario shouldn't be using one, anyway. Talk to the real Presario target market - first time computer users, moms, dads, grandparents - and you'll get a different opinion. While I'd never buy a Presario for myself, and they're never something I'd recommend for a second computer, they're a great starter box. They give you everything you need with an awesome out-of-box experience, very friendly and easy to use.
The biggest problem with Presarios is that advanced users (like Slashdot readers) see them at Best Buy for very reasonable prices, and don't understand what's in the box before they pick one up. Read the displays, and Compaq is very specific about what OS runs on each machine. If you want to get Windows 2000 on a baseline Presario, for example, you just can't do it. It's not that the machine isn't fast enough, or that they're trying to build value, but they just don't have drivers for the hardware, and they don't intend to start. That's fine for what they're sold for - my grandma's never going to upgrade her Presario to Windows 2000, not when she can get an all-new Presario in two years that has more stuff and comes with Windows 2000 built in.
Tux is a static web server, whereas Apache and IIS are both full-blown dynamic web servers.
Where is everybody getting that Tux 2.0 is a static webserver? Here's the quote direct from Redhat's page:
TUX is a kernel-based, threaded, extremely high performance HTTP server. It is able to efficiently and safely serve both static and dynamic data.
ZD's test was a mix of 60% static and 40% dynamic. So...???
how did it handle dynamic content? Oh wait, they probably didn't think to test THAT out.
Well, from the article: "...found that Tux was able to perform nearly three times faster than current Web server mainstay Apache (12,792 transactions per second vs. 4,602 tps) when running a mix of dynamic and static Web content.
Oh wait, you probably didn't think to read THAT before you posted.
Well, there were comparisons to IIS, and IIS beat Apache by about 10%. That gives you some idea to the relevance. The Slashdot editor could have just as easily said that Tux nearly doubled IIS's performance, and that's just as impressive - especially given that ZDNet is usually very kind to IIS.
Amusingly, the story also mentions that IIS (which pulled off 5,137 transactions per second) beat Apache (4,602 tps) in the performance tests. I wouldn't be so trollish as to guess why the Slashdot editor didn't note that in the story.
Considering the guy's also selling a GE Vintage Wall Clock and National Geographic maps from the 1950's, I'm guessing he's either going through hard times or he's cleaning the closet.
The thing about this news is that I just don't see what niche linux should fill.
You mentioned the server niche (too big to call a niche!) but there's the hobbyist niche, for starters. All of us like to tinker, and it's more fun to tinker with Linux than it is to tinker with Win2k. You can't mod the source code to 2k. Even if you could, it's more fun to play with a 70's Chevy than it is a 2001, because it's easier to understand the workings of the 70's Chevy. Win2k is pretty darned big, and none of us would want to go rebuilding that thing.
Windows has good office software, games, and stability.
No, Windows has GREAT office software, games, and stability. My boss is even more daring than I am - at the end of the day, the guy simply pulls out his network card puts the laptop in his briefcase, and hits the road without powering down. He just goes into suspend. He doesn't reboot for weeks at a time, and he complains loudly when he has to reboot. Me, I power down my laptop when I leave the office, but other than that, I don't reboot anymore with Win2k.
Did Win3/95/98/NT suck? Absolutely. How about the early versions of the Linux kernal? Anybody want to talk about those? We didn't even have plug & play, let alone USB support. It's time we stop comparing Linux to Win95/NT, and compare it to 2k. It's not as easy to call this guy a troll, because the stuff really does work.
I just don't see why people should bother with linux at all. It seems like a strange anomoly.
Well, the price of the OS, for starters. I have $400 tied up in licensing for the two machines in front of me, and that would buy stronger hardware. Then there's the price of the office software, whammo, another $500. You're talking real money here.
So why am I using Win2k? Because the money it costs is offset by the things I can do. There's no equivalent to Dreamweaver Ultradev or to Databeacon for Linux. Using these RAD (not the coolness term, I mean Rapid App Dev) tools, in a week, I can build a site that sells for $50k or more, but I can't do that in Linux. Sure, I could hand-code for weeks, but there's no RAD tool that will do OLAP/SQL/web stuff quicker than Ultradev & Databeacon. I know I'm a special case, but I see how my coworkers experience the same problems.
So, as an end result, the licensing costs and the stability just pay off in terms of my productivity. Is MS expensive and unfriendly? Yep. Does it let me pull down a great salary? Yep. Do I complain? Nope. If Ultradev and Databeacon worked on a Mac and not a PC, well then, I'd buy a Mac. Ditto with Linux. I'm not a software zealot, a license zealot, or a hardware zealot - I'm a productivity zealot, and let's face it, Bgates and crew has the app market nailed down solid.
Actually, being online in an airplane would allow you to communicate with people during a plane crash, something passengers normally can't do.
Have you flown in the last ten years? GTE has Airfones in the back of the seats. For $2-$5 a minute, you can call anybody you want, get stock quotes, get the weather, and more.
With the 'net though, you could discuss the entire situation much sooner. Write entire emails.
Again, you can do that now too. The Airfones have modem jacks.
Passengers forget to turn phones off all the time. It should be the job of the plane manufacturers to make planes safe in the presence of passengers.
The planes you get on are much, much older than you think. They don't predate bag phones, but they definitely predate your spiffy handheld Nokia that plays games. (Think about the DC-10's - those bad boys are older than I am, and I'm not that young.) Furthermore, the planes were designed long before they were built. These planes just weren't designed to handle dozens of people holding battery-operated microcomputers, let alone 2-way radios (which is essentially what a cell phone is.)
These Boeings that are coming out are the first generation of planes that are specifically designed with today's wired user in mind, and as such, you're seeing wireless access on board.
2.4GHz is already polluted by wideband radiation in planes, since they use microwave ovens to heat the food. So there can be some level of confidence that you 802.11 tranciever isn't going to bring the plane down.
No, they don't use microwaves to heat ALL the food, only a few small things. I mean really, can you imagine them heating up meals for 120 people in microwaves? Even if they had half a dozen microwaves, and each meal only took 30 seconds, that's a long time. They get the meals pre-heated from the ground crew - those meal trucks that pull up to the plane, and then rise up to the back door.
However being charged money to get on the net is not really a necessity is it? One person sets his laptop up as a gateway/NAT router and everyone else sets up as an ad-hoc 802.11 network. That would save people a bit of cash.
I'm going to shell out my money for internet access on the plane, which isn't going to be fast by any means, and then I'm going to share it with other people for free? And furthermore, I'm going to waste time on my flight to run up and down the aisles asking if anybody wants to set up a quick network? Riiight. For that matter, we could do this today - the GTE Airfones have 9600 (woohoo) data access, and we could easily set up connection sharing using one of those bad boys. But we don't, because in an airplane, the last thing you want to do is get to know people up and down the plane, especially the ones who are trying to mooch internet access.
So lobby lobby your MP/Senator/FAA rep/garage mechanic/EU minister to change the rules. It will improve the quality of your traveling life.
No, not until the current fleet of planes is replaced. And not just replaced at one airline, but replaced at all of them - remember that "value" airlines usually buy their planes used from other airlines, so even today's planes will be in service for 20-30 years.
How the parent post got modded up to 5 Insightful is disgusting, either that or/. readers truly never get on planes. I know I might be the other extreme (gf works for an airline, I fly 4-6 times a month) but this is ridiculous.
Slashdot readers love to preach about the evils of monopolies - so why does it feel so good to root for IBM getting its foot in the gaming industry door? What is it about IBM that we all secretly like? I can't believe it's the Linux push, because that's a recent thing. Maybe it's their slick notebooks.
Anyone who cries when a free website is changed and they are not notified is an idiot
Well, on one hand, I think it's only fair to try to maintain a good relationship with the community, even when you're going out of business. If you know your customers will be screwed by your deletion of data, you have the responsibility to your customers (as well as your advertisers and investors) to at least notify the community 72 hours beforehand. If I was one of their advertisers, and the service just died, I'd be pissed because my name was associated with such poor service.
On the other hand, if I ran a free data storage, and I knew that notifying the public would result in massive bandwidth use (suddenly everyone logs on to get their stuff), then I might not tell them after all. That would be low and underhanded, but sometimes that's how you get through business.
but to tap into the large corporations, ASP's have to either guarantee backups or allow companies to do their own.
Or a combination of both. I prefer to have an ASP that does the backups, and ships me tapes on a weekly basis. I don't want to hassle with the huge bandwidth required, but I want to be able to maintain a locally updated server with pretty recent data in the event of a disaster. I know that kind of takes some of the benefits out of the whole ASP thing (after all, they're supposed to be better at disaster recovery than I am).
Slashdot Mirror
If Pres. Bush can get the FCC and/or Congress to rework the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to reflect the current situation of the telecom market (namely that long distance is no longer an attractive market)
Huh? What's the long distance market have to do with an ISP like Covad? And call me crazy, but long distance is at least attractive enough that I still get constant spam wanting me to switch my long distance company to someone else. At the same time, I never see that constant spam for changing ISP's (from anybody other than AOL, of course).
The government should have nothing to do with bailing out companies that invested too much in tech with the wrong ideas in mind. It's one thing to bail out monsters like Chrysler or Continental, because they employ tens of thousands of American workers. It's entirely another thing to rework federal law simply because yet another dot-com servicer went belly-up.
If every airport, starbucks and business class hotel in the US deployed 802.11B I suspect there would be practically no need for 3G, Ricochet or the rest.
MobileStar has been doing that for a while. They have 802.11b access points at Starbucks, airports, and hotels. I travel back and forth between Dallas and Houston, two of the covered cities, and I'm mighty tempted by their plans, but the prices are too high. It's $30/mo for local unlimited, or $60/mo for national unlimited. If it worked at my college campus, then I'd be sold. Otherwise, I'm praying for Richochet to make it through.
As of July 23, SWBell Internet Services & Prodigy are dumping a bunch of newsgroups "after evaluating possible copyright infringement issues". They posted an FAQ about it, and the bottom line is they're no longer offering any of the newsgroups with sounds, mp3, cd.image, movies, multimedia, warez, or vcd in the title.
You have to put up with a three minute interview and a horrible site design, but it's here, in RealAudio and Windows Media, along with a demonstration in a smoky room. The sound is more like a compressed air can, and I would swear it's being produced by an air compressor.
When they say "impossible to ignore", they're not saying your head instantly turns to it - they're saying that in a smoky room, you can pretty well tell where it's coming from without having to think or concentrate on it. Believe me, my head didn't instantly gravitate toward my laptop speakers when the sound came on.
You would think that MS would have put in something to stop this by now. Maybe a "are you really sure?" "are you really really sure?" type nested dialog boxes...
Office XP goes even further than that. I was thrilled to find that the default installation completely blocks a lot of types of attachments, including exe's, vbscripts, etc. You can't even open them if you want to! The only way around it is to edit the registry. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want the junior users editing the registry either, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
We got a demo unit a month ago for a 30-day evaluation. I set the thing up, so I'll shoot my mouth off here and let you know how it went.
We do customer satisfaction surveys - when you see a comment card in a hotel, it probably gets sent to us when you're done. We scan it, compile the comments, and give nice reports to hotel managers (among other things.)
Well, everybody wants more detailed satisfaction data, so we explored the idea of having these at the hotel front desk. When you checked out, the clerk would hand you this webpad, and you would take a survey instantly just by tapping your choices onscreen. Did you use the restaurant? (Yes/no) Then, of course, it could do things that comment cards can't: change questions based on your inputs (only show restaurant questions to people who click Yes, only show dissatisfaction questions to people who weren't happy, etc.) Anyway, that's what we were using it for - web-based surveys in a restricted environment.
First off, this thing is locked down tighter than the Pope's poop chute. After struggling with it for an hour, we called the support line only to find out that they really didn't know much about it either. When we finally got hold of someone who had a clue, he informed us that no, we couldn't change the IP address - it was DHCP-only. That should have been our first clue that this thing wasn't ready for prime time.
I couldn't tell you what version of Linux it was, because frankly, I didn't care, but you don't have access to configuration utilities anyway.
The handwriting recognition is good for a first release of the unit. (We didn't need recognition, but we played with it anyway.) IMHO, it was better and more intuitive than the iPaqs I've used.
The screen is great, very readable from all angles. It has a built-in speaker, so just for yuks, we tuned into a RealAudio station and walked around the building, using it as the world's most expensive boom box. Somehow, people were not amused. Other than Netscape, RealAudio, and a couple of obscure plugins, that was about it.
At first glance in the ads, you might think the 802.11b wireless is built in - it's not, it uses a normal PCMCIA card. FrontPath shipped them with a couple of different cards (tech support has to ask you which one you have) and we had the Lucent one, if I remember right. The coverage was absolutely phenomenal for a battery-powered unit: we could traverse most of our 35,000 sq ft building, both floors, using just one central DLink access point on the second floor. Very impressive.
Usability is pretty rough - most of the icons don't make much sense. From a physical standpoint, it's just not the right size/weight either. The weight is pretty much spread across across the entire unit, so when you hold it and write on it, you have to support it from underneath. You can't just hold it by the side, it'll flop all over the place. It's heavier than it looks, and it's awkward, too - the "easel" they give you to rest the thing on doesn't support it well enough to actually use it while it's in the easel. (Whoo, bad sentence there.)
That pricing is flexible - I think we got a quote for around $1500 for even the smallest quantity order, but I'm not in accounting so I couldn't give you an exact number.
We recommended against it just because of the ludicrous price. At that price point, we could put in small touchscreen PC's instead, and get much, much more functionality. Remember, you're paying laptop-grade bucks for a machine that only surfs the web and NOTHING ELSE.
Italicize the whole article, both questions and answers, and then suddenly switch to bold formatting about halfway through. Looks like the article posters make the same mistakes as us comment posters, and makes you wonder if there's a Preview button for articles. Hahaha.
Jacobsen says he's thinking in the opposite direction--about putting more human nature into the machines. His idea is to build an exoskeleton intelligent enough to take care of the soldier wearing it. If the human trooper is badly wounded, the machine would say to itself, in effect, "Take this guy home."
... that's right ... the world's best power drinker! Woohoo! Homer Simpson would be jealous. I could lift full-size kegs to my mouth to extract the last drops of sweet beer. I could win every bar fight. And when things get really ugly, it takes over, walks straight home, and I'm in bed before I even know it.
Wow, I see another use for these. If the exoskeleton gives me the ability to lift very heavy objects, and it can take me home when I get into trouble, then suddenly I can become
is the sound of thousands of out-of-work, non-qualified dot-bombers clicking madly on the "Fatbrain" link to order this book.
"Unnecessary messages are pure evil."
- Everett N. McKay, page 367
Developing User Interfaces for Microsoft Windows
(c) Copyright 1999
I don't know about the servers, but their workstations were really overpriced. Same goes for Penguin Computing.
Wow, it was definitely the other way around for the servers - they were incredibly reasonable. We just decided to pick up about 40 1u servers from them, and then today's announcement hits. So much for that plan. Nobody could even come close to touching their 1u prices, and the hardware was phenomenal. Single-CPU 1u units could be had for about $1,000, and you sure can't find that at Dell (except with the crappy Celeron units).
Given that any company can market Linux tools and computers, where's IBM's edge in this market over other players like Compaq and RedHat who have been there longer?
For everyone here who's slagging Compaq, why don't you guys go get a REAL Compaq (like a Deskpro) and then tell me what you think.. if all you've had to deal with is a Presario, your opinion is flawed, because you've never seen what they can really do..
Well, you actually hit the nail on the head in another way, probably without intending to. Anybody on this board who uses a Presario shouldn't be using one, anyway. Talk to the real Presario target market - first time computer users, moms, dads, grandparents - and you'll get a different opinion. While I'd never buy a Presario for myself, and they're never something I'd recommend for a second computer, they're a great starter box. They give you everything you need with an awesome out-of-box experience, very friendly and easy to use.
The biggest problem with Presarios is that advanced users (like Slashdot readers) see them at Best Buy for very reasonable prices, and don't understand what's in the box before they pick one up. Read the displays, and Compaq is very specific about what OS runs on each machine. If you want to get Windows 2000 on a baseline Presario, for example, you just can't do it. It's not that the machine isn't fast enough, or that they're trying to build value, but they just don't have drivers for the hardware, and they don't intend to start. That's fine for what they're sold for - my grandma's never going to upgrade her Presario to Windows 2000, not when she can get an all-new Presario in two years that has more stuff and comes with Windows 2000 built in.
Tux is a static web server, whereas Apache and IIS are both full-blown dynamic web servers.
Where is everybody getting that Tux 2.0 is a static webserver? Here's the quote direct from Redhat's page:
TUX is a kernel-based, threaded, extremely high performance HTTP server. It is able to efficiently and safely serve both static and dynamic data.
ZD's test was a mix of 60% static and 40% dynamic. So...???
how did it handle dynamic content? Oh wait, they probably didn't think to test THAT out.
Well, from the article:
"...found that Tux was able to perform nearly three times faster than current Web server mainstay Apache (12,792 transactions per second vs. 4,602 tps) when running a mix of dynamic and static Web content.
Oh wait, you probably didn't think to read THAT before you posted.
Well, there were comparisons to IIS, and IIS beat Apache by about 10%. That gives you some idea to the relevance. The Slashdot editor could have just as easily said that Tux nearly doubled IIS's performance, and that's just as impressive - especially given that ZDNet is usually very kind to IIS.
Amusingly, the story also mentions that IIS (which pulled off 5,137 transactions per second) beat Apache (4,602 tps) in the performance tests. I wouldn't be so trollish as to guess why the Slashdot editor didn't note that in the story.
Ultradev is available for the Mac, but it can't connect to most databases - no ODBC. So in practical terms, it's not really relevant.
Considering the guy's also selling a GE Vintage Wall Clock and National Geographic maps from the 1950's, I'm guessing he's either going through hard times or he's cleaning the closet.
The thing about this news is that I just don't see what niche linux should fill.
You mentioned the server niche (too big to call a niche!) but there's the hobbyist niche, for starters. All of us like to tinker, and it's more fun to tinker with Linux than it is to tinker with Win2k. You can't mod the source code to 2k. Even if you could, it's more fun to play with a 70's Chevy than it is a 2001, because it's easier to understand the workings of the 70's Chevy. Win2k is pretty darned big, and none of us would want to go rebuilding that thing.
Windows has good office software, games, and stability.
No, Windows has GREAT office software, games, and stability. My boss is even more daring than I am - at the end of the day, the guy simply pulls out his network card puts the laptop in his briefcase, and hits the road without powering down. He just goes into suspend. He doesn't reboot for weeks at a time, and he complains loudly when he has to reboot. Me, I power down my laptop when I leave the office, but other than that, I don't reboot anymore with Win2k.
Did Win3/95/98/NT suck? Absolutely. How about the early versions of the Linux kernal? Anybody want to talk about those? We didn't even have plug & play, let alone USB support. It's time we stop comparing Linux to Win95/NT, and compare it to 2k. It's not as easy to call this guy a troll, because the stuff really does work.
I just don't see why people should bother with linux at all. It seems like a strange anomoly.
Well, the price of the OS, for starters. I have $400 tied up in licensing for the two machines in front of me, and that would buy stronger hardware. Then there's the price of the office software, whammo, another $500. You're talking real money here.
So why am I using Win2k? Because the money it costs is offset by the things I can do. There's no equivalent to Dreamweaver Ultradev or to Databeacon for Linux. Using these RAD (not the coolness term, I mean Rapid App Dev) tools, in a week, I can build a site that sells for $50k or more, but I can't do that in Linux. Sure, I could hand-code for weeks, but there's no RAD tool that will do OLAP/SQL/web stuff quicker than Ultradev & Databeacon. I know I'm a special case, but I see how my coworkers experience the same problems.
So, as an end result, the licensing costs and the stability just pay off in terms of my productivity. Is MS expensive and unfriendly? Yep. Does it let me pull down a great salary? Yep. Do I complain? Nope. If Ultradev and Databeacon worked on a Mac and not a PC, well then, I'd buy a Mac. Ditto with Linux. I'm not a software zealot, a license zealot, or a hardware zealot - I'm a productivity zealot, and let's face it, Bgates and crew has the app market nailed down solid.
Actually, being online in an airplane would allow you to communicate with people during a plane crash, something passengers normally can't do.
Have you flown in the last ten years? GTE has Airfones in the back of the seats. For $2-$5 a minute, you can call anybody you want, get stock quotes, get the weather, and more.
With the 'net though, you could discuss the entire situation much sooner. Write entire emails.
Again, you can do that now too. The Airfones have modem jacks.
Passengers forget to turn phones off all the time. It should be the job of the plane manufacturers to make planes safe in the presence of passengers.
/. readers truly never get on planes. I know I might be the other extreme (gf works for an airline, I fly 4-6 times a month) but this is ridiculous.
The planes you get on are much, much older than you think. They don't predate bag phones, but they definitely predate your spiffy handheld Nokia that plays games. (Think about the DC-10's - those bad boys are older than I am, and I'm not that young.) Furthermore, the planes were designed long before they were built. These planes just weren't designed to handle dozens of people holding battery-operated microcomputers, let alone 2-way radios (which is essentially what a cell phone is.)
These Boeings that are coming out are the first generation of planes that are specifically designed with today's wired user in mind, and as such, you're seeing wireless access on board.
2.4GHz is already polluted by wideband radiation in planes, since they use microwave ovens to heat the food. So there can be some level of confidence that you 802.11 tranciever isn't going to bring the plane down.
No, they don't use microwaves to heat ALL the food, only a few small things. I mean really, can you imagine them heating up meals for 120 people in microwaves? Even if they had half a dozen microwaves, and each meal only took 30 seconds, that's a long time. They get the meals pre-heated from the ground crew - those meal trucks that pull up to the plane, and then rise up to the back door.
However being charged money to get on the net is not really a necessity is it? One person sets his laptop up as a gateway/NAT router and everyone else sets up as an ad-hoc 802.11 network. That would save people a bit of cash.
I'm going to shell out my money for internet access on the plane, which isn't going to be fast by any means, and then I'm going to share it with other people for free? And furthermore, I'm going to waste time on my flight to run up and down the aisles asking if anybody wants to set up a quick network? Riiight. For that matter, we could do this today - the GTE Airfones have 9600 (woohoo) data access, and we could easily set up connection sharing using one of those bad boys. But we don't, because in an airplane, the last thing you want to do is get to know people up and down the plane, especially the ones who are trying to mooch internet access.
So lobby lobby your MP/Senator/FAA rep/garage mechanic/EU minister to change the rules. It will improve the quality of your traveling life.
No, not until the current fleet of planes is replaced. And not just replaced at one airline, but replaced at all of them - remember that "value" airlines usually buy their planes used from other airlines, so even today's planes will be in service for 20-30 years.
How the parent post got modded up to 5 Insightful is disgusting, either that or
Slashdot readers love to preach about the evils of monopolies - so why does it feel so good to root for IBM getting its foot in the gaming industry door? What is it about IBM that we all secretly like? I can't believe it's the Linux push, because that's a recent thing. Maybe it's their slick notebooks.
Anyone who cries when a free website is changed and they are not notified is an idiot
Well, on one hand, I think it's only fair to try to maintain a good relationship with the community, even when you're going out of business. If you know your customers will be screwed by your deletion of data, you have the responsibility to your customers (as well as your advertisers and investors) to at least notify the community 72 hours beforehand. If I was one of their advertisers, and the service just died, I'd be pissed because my name was associated with such poor service.
On the other hand, if I ran a free data storage, and I knew that notifying the public would result in massive bandwidth use (suddenly everyone logs on to get their stuff), then I might not tell them after all. That would be low and underhanded, but sometimes that's how you get through business.
but to tap into the large corporations, ASP's have to either guarantee backups or allow companies to do their own.
Or a combination of both. I prefer to have an ASP that does the backups, and ships me tapes on a weekly basis. I don't want to hassle with the huge bandwidth required, but I want to be able to maintain a locally updated server with pretty recent data in the event of a disaster. I know that kind of takes some of the benefits out of the whole ASP thing (after all, they're supposed to be better at disaster recovery than I am).