Anyone want to start a project that allows Windows machines to run Linux binaries? With the way it's going, that's what Windows will need to be a desktop OS.
Great idea! That would give you all the stability of Microsoft Windows, with the ability to run the broad base of Linux applications! Brilliant.
(That would be sarcasm, if you didn't catch it in all its brilliance.)
With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one.
This is going to start a flame war, but you're partly right. As a former resident of Virginia Beach, I can tell you that M$ net admins were a dime a dozen in that market. We were paying over $200 an hour for Linux admins on contract, because they refused to come on board full time. (Rightly so - there was just too much demand and not enough supply.) At that rate, $129k only buys you 645 hours, less admin costs and taxes. Two guys working for eight weeks aren't going to manage the switchover for six thousand workstations and servers. (No two guys I know.)
Plus, remember that this is the government we're talking about. If they switched operating systems, they would have to retrain all existing network admins. You can't just go and lay off your admins because they don't know Linux: these small-government employees are lifers, and it's about as close to job security as you could ever get.
Their combo camera & MP3 player is actually incredibly useful, and being done by several different companies. I must have seen ten of these things at Comdex this year.
It makes perfect sense for those of us who travel with laptops. I like being able to slap a CD on there to play on the plane or while I jog, and if I see something pretty, I can delete a song and take a bunch of pictures. No extra memory, devices, or cables to bring with you. It's great for travelers.
Funny how this has a greater probability of affecting harm to us tonight than y2k did on Dec 31 after all of our preparations, but this probably won't get much press coverage. If it doesn't have a sexy acronym, the major press doesn't seem to latch on to it. (Nothing against the Kansas City paper, of course.)
If GNOME or KDE or whoever manage to get that happening, then the non-Windows tribe can then claim that *nix can do on-the-fly resolution changes without having to restart the OS. Note that I've no idea if Windows 2000 or ME can do this.
Yep, for the record, even Win95 and NT4 could do it.
The other option is keeping everything hush-hush, and trying to be the only one that does something by the others not finding out how. The latter hasn't been tried for decades.
Uh, what? I can think of a dozen examples from any industry off the top of my head: Microsoft undocumented API's, SDMI encryption, race car engines, search engine rankings, Intel's chip designs, Apple's hardware designs, you name it, everybody in business wants to keep their information secret to make money off it.
License fees are how you make money when you're unable to produce your product in sufficient quantities to satisfy consumers while maximizing revenues. If you can make enough products using your existing factories, then you keep the production information secret and just produce it all yourself.
The memory industry is the perfect example. Rambus couldn't afford to build the chip factories necessary to satisfy public demand for its chips. Therefore, they sold licenses to other companies who could afford to build the factories (or already had them). Wham, Rambus is in the memory business without building expensive fabs.
If you read their latest earnings statement here, you'll notice something even more telling:
...no additional licenses for SDRAM-compatible ICs will be signed, that prices of RDRAMs will remain high compared to SDRAMs and that litigation and building costs will exceed the Company's plans.
They're perfectly aware that nobody else is going to license their chipsets, and they plan on suing anybody and everybody to make money.
The internet gambling industry has been looking for something like this for quite a while. If people can prove they're inside physical areas that are allowed to gamble, suddenly internet gambling is wide open for companies like Harrah's and Caesar's to take on. Currently they can't do it for fear of being sued in areas where gambling is illegal.
The drawback: pr0n users in the bible belt would be suddenly unable to hit their favorite sites. Site operators would restrict content to areas where they could be certain of legalities.
And even worse, Amazon could now target prices based on the economy of your neighborhood.
Well, you do have a point - he said he wanted the media to be the heavier part of the cost than the drives, and equipping every student with a Samsung cellular phone would certainly be the heaviest part of the cost equation.
Ah, now that explains why so many of these things looked overbuilt when I looked at them. I thought they looked pretty darned sturdy for a whimsical clock. Now I know... Hilarious post.
Not to be slimy here, but who isn't thinking that the next step is your local Indian tribe offering internet terminals at every gas stop on their land, with convenient betting for tourists just driving by?
You summed it up right there when you said "tech support is as close as any browser." I can't deploy an operating system on my remote users' laptops and branch offices when there's only one or two computers in the office. If the system goes down, they can't get to a browser - and where do you turn for Linux help? You can pay a company like Linuxcare, but when push comes to shove, you still can't get local help for Linux in most small cities.
I live in one of the biggest cities in the US, and I'm blessed with living less than three miles from our local user's group headquarters. I can get great support for Linux when it divebombs, but I wouldn't dream of doing it on my only home computer if I was living in Bucktooth, Arkansas or something.
What the Slashdot story and the underlying CNet article don't mention is that nobody is actually getting paid yet. I got all excited when I read these stories, and I proceeded to visit every company site named in the CNet story. None of them are paying out yet, and none of them even have pay rates figured out. Save your time.
Going further, I did a search on Yahoo, and hit just about every company listed under Distributed Computing. None of them are paying out - they're just taking in money from investors.
The Slashdot story is only partly right - there is indeed money to be made from this idle-cycle scheme, but it isn't going to be made by folks like you and me. It's being made by the companies who are suckering investors into this. Of all the sites I went through, I counted a rough total of over sixty million bucks in funding that the companies had gotten from investors. And not one dime has been paid out yet....
Remember, folks, the FAA has a long way to go before you can lift off in your own personal chopper.
Besides, hell will freeze over before I'd feel safe flying around my city in one of those things. I'd have to fly past a somewhat seedy neighborhood on the way to work, and I can just see guys "busting a cap in my ass", as they say. "Hey, look, there goes a guy in one of them homemade cheap choppers! See if you can get him with your nine."
I don't know what Evolution is either, and all it would have taken was five or six words to keep me from wasting my time (or hitting a gold mine) by clicking on an external web link.
Every time Slashdot posts a software release without even the slightest hint of what the software is, what it does, or where it's from, I laugh. It's like a birth announcement in the paper that looks like this:
"6 pounds, 3 ounces. 11:42 AM. Healthy. Red hair. Missing right index fingernail."
There's something missing there - the name of the kid! That's about useless to me, because I have absolutely zero idea whose kid it is. The software equivalent is NOT the manufacturer, it's the purpose of the software. Don't overwhelm me with useless information.
You really get the most from the bottom line of his message: he's not coming home with anything.
Every conference I've ever attended has revolved around building hype and excitement. The key isn't how much hype is left after an hour, but how much is left after you've gone home with (or in this case, without) a copy of the tools to actually play with and find fault with. Trust me, when you go home emptyhanded, there's a reason. Everything seems great when you take it from a jolly Matrix-themed conference with cool jellybeans, but when you're sent home without a CD, that really says something.
If Microsoft pulled a shenanigan like this and compared itself to the Matrix, we'd all be cracking jokes about it and saying that the software was an illusion. In this case, though, the guy is actually singing the company's praises! Hello? No software to take home? Doesn't that scream vaporware? We wouldn't tolerate it from Microsoft, and we shouldn't tolerate it from anyone else, either.
Granted, you saw it running on a few machines that weren't on the net. It was blazingly fast. Wow. Did you see what was inside the machines? What kinds of processors? Don't we always point fingers at Microsoft for pulling the same trick, demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPU's and shovelfuls of memory?
Am I the only one who thinks this "story" is nothing more than a rehash of a press release?
it can't be social pressures steering girls away from technology, because frankly, social pressures steer GUYS away from technology too! I mean, really, football is a lot more popular than chess club, and the social pressure is always on in school to perform athletically. It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
I manage software development for a very small "gated community", as the article calls it, and I have to say that the copyright policies never come into discussion when I interview candidates for positions. I just don't find a level of awareness amongst conventional Windows programmers. For example, in our local user's group for our development platform, we were doing a show-and-tell on web sites, and nobody in the entire group had even heard of Slashdot.
But you'd better believe they all frequented Amazon.
It just comes right down to daily life concerns for these people. They want to make the most money they can, spend it in the manner they choose, and they're not really about supporting causes unless it's an easy cause to support. You know the kind of people I mean: they recycle their trash, but they don't carpool.
Software licensing is the same way. Sure, it's easy to say you support open source when you're downloading somebody else's work, but when it comes to your paycheck, that's a much harder concession to make. If I wanted to hunt around for an open source employer in this market, I'd be hunting for quite a while. Instead, we all contribute to each other's programs out of a community experience. We all learn from each other, we all profit from the other's knowledge, and better products come out of it.
I've said this time and again, but if Slashdot is going to become a software announcement area like Freshmeat, can we at least get a little more info in the posts? This "news" is absolutely useless to me. The only two links with actual information are already Slashdotted, so even if this *was* something cool, it's going into my circular file.
"Some skeptics of Netpliance have speculated that these refurbished machines are a cheap way to conduct R&D through easily bought community members..."
Replace the word "Netpliance" with "Linux", and you'll see how ridiculously stupid the skeptics sound.
Best quote from the interview: "I'll try to work on it more, but I'm a student so classwork sucks a lot of my time up."
That's funny, that's exactly how I viewed classes, too. (Although I didn't produce anything nearly this brilliant.) The kids who studied and did well never really produced anything dumbfounding. The kids to watch were the ones who tolerated the classes just to get the information they needed, and then raced to the labs to do the real (albeit frivolous) work.
Necessity isn't the mother of invention: it's boredom.
Would that be anything like the process called Quality Assurance? The process that did such a great job of catching the metric conversion on the Mars misson? Oh, same kind of thing, eh? Thanks for pointing that out to me. All clear now.
Maybe, but you have to agree that any incompetence involved with fabricating the gyros will be a sign in their favor, unlike the other missions. If the gyros are junk, they still win. When the other missions suffered from incompetence, they failed. Ironically, this one can only fail if we are competent - but incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone want to start a project that allows Windows machines to run Linux binaries? With the way it's going, that's what Windows will need to be a desktop OS.
Great idea! That would give you all the stability of Microsoft Windows, with the ability to run the broad base of Linux applications! Brilliant.
(That would be sarcasm, if you didn't catch it in all its brilliance.)
With all due respect, but I still think a M$ network is easier to maintain than a *Nix one.
This is going to start a flame war, but you're partly right. As a former resident of Virginia Beach, I can tell you that M$ net admins were a dime a dozen in that market. We were paying over $200 an hour for Linux admins on contract, because they refused to come on board full time. (Rightly so - there was just too much demand and not enough supply.) At that rate, $129k only buys you 645 hours, less admin costs and taxes. Two guys working for eight weeks aren't going to manage the switchover for six thousand workstations and servers. (No two guys I know.)
Plus, remember that this is the government we're talking about. If they switched operating systems, they would have to retrain all existing network admins. You can't just go and lay off your admins because they don't know Linux: these small-government employees are lifers, and it's about as close to job security as you could ever get.
Their combo camera & MP3 player is actually incredibly useful, and being done by several different companies. I must have seen ten of these things at Comdex this year.
It makes perfect sense for those of us who travel with laptops. I like being able to slap a CD on there to play on the plane or while I jog, and if I see something pretty, I can delete a song and take a bunch of pictures. No extra memory, devices, or cables to bring with you. It's great for travelers.
Funny how this has a greater probability of affecting harm to us tonight than y2k did on Dec 31 after all of our preparations, but this probably won't get much press coverage. If it doesn't have a sexy acronym, the major press doesn't seem to latch on to it. (Nothing against the Kansas City paper, of course.)
If GNOME or KDE or whoever manage to get that happening, then the non-Windows tribe can then claim that *nix can do on-the-fly resolution changes without having to restart the OS. Note that I've no idea if Windows 2000 or ME can do this.
Yep, for the record, even Win95 and NT4 could do it.
The other option is keeping everything hush-hush, and trying to be the only one that does something by the others not finding out how. The latter hasn't been tried for decades.
Uh, what? I can think of a dozen examples from any industry off the top of my head: Microsoft undocumented API's, SDMI encryption, race car engines, search engine rankings, Intel's chip designs, Apple's hardware designs, you name it, everybody in business wants to keep their information secret to make money off it.
License fees are how you make money when you're unable to produce your product in sufficient quantities to satisfy consumers while maximizing revenues. If you can make enough products using your existing factories, then you keep the production information secret and just produce it all yourself.
The memory industry is the perfect example. Rambus couldn't afford to build the chip factories necessary to satisfy public demand for its chips. Therefore, they sold licenses to other companies who could afford to build the factories (or already had them). Wham, Rambus is in the memory business without building expensive fabs.
If you read their latest earnings statement here, you'll notice something even more telling:
...no additional licenses for SDRAM-compatible ICs will be signed, that prices of RDRAMs will remain high compared to SDRAMs and that litigation and building costs will exceed the Company's plans.
They're perfectly aware that nobody else is going to license their chipsets, and they plan on suing anybody and everybody to make money.
The internet gambling industry has been looking for something like this for quite a while. If people can prove they're inside physical areas that are allowed to gamble, suddenly internet gambling is wide open for companies like Harrah's and Caesar's to take on. Currently they can't do it for fear of being sued in areas where gambling is illegal.
The drawback: pr0n users in the bible belt would be suddenly unable to hit their favorite sites. Site operators would restrict content to areas where they could be certain of legalities.
And even worse, Amazon could now target prices based on the economy of your neighborhood.
Well, you do have a point - he said he wanted the media to be the heavier part of the cost than the drives, and equipping every student with a Samsung cellular phone would certainly be the heaviest part of the cost equation.
Ah, now that explains why so many of these things looked overbuilt when I looked at them. I thought they looked pretty darned sturdy for a whimsical clock. Now I know... Hilarious post.
Not to be slimy here, but who isn't thinking that the next step is your local Indian tribe offering internet terminals at every gas stop on their land, with convenient betting for tourists just driving by?
You summed it up right there when you said "tech support is as close as any browser." I can't deploy an operating system on my remote users' laptops and branch offices when there's only one or two computers in the office. If the system goes down, they can't get to a browser - and where do you turn for Linux help? You can pay a company like Linuxcare, but when push comes to shove, you still can't get local help for Linux in most small cities.
I live in one of the biggest cities in the US, and I'm blessed with living less than three miles from our local user's group headquarters. I can get great support for Linux when it divebombs, but I wouldn't dream of doing it on my only home computer if I was living in Bucktooth, Arkansas or something.
What the Slashdot story and the underlying CNet article don't mention is that nobody is actually getting paid yet. I got all excited when I read these stories, and I proceeded to visit every company site named in the CNet story. None of them are paying out yet, and none of them even have pay rates figured out. Save your time.
Going further, I did a search on Yahoo, and hit just about every company listed under Distributed Computing. None of them are paying out - they're just taking in money from investors.
The Slashdot story is only partly right - there is indeed money to be made from this idle-cycle scheme, but it isn't going to be made by folks like you and me. It's being made by the companies who are suckering investors into this. Of all the sites I went through, I counted a rough total of over sixty million bucks in funding that the companies had gotten from investors. And not one dime has been paid out yet....
Remember, folks, the FAA has a long way to go before you can lift off in your own personal chopper.
Besides, hell will freeze over before I'd feel safe flying around my city in one of those things. I'd have to fly past a somewhat seedy neighborhood on the way to work, and I can just see guys "busting a cap in my ass", as they say. "Hey, look, there goes a guy in one of them homemade cheap choppers! See if you can get him with your nine."
I don't know what Evolution is either, and all it would have taken was five or six words to keep me from wasting my time (or hitting a gold mine) by clicking on an external web link.
Every time Slashdot posts a software release without even the slightest hint of what the software is, what it does, or where it's from, I laugh. It's like a birth announcement in the paper that looks like this:
"6 pounds, 3 ounces. 11:42 AM. Healthy. Red hair. Missing right index fingernail."
There's something missing there - the name of the kid! That's about useless to me, because I have absolutely zero idea whose kid it is. The software equivalent is NOT the manufacturer, it's the purpose of the software. Don't overwhelm me with useless information.
Or, as my grandmother always said, even a blind squirrel can find a nut sometimes.
You really get the most from the bottom line of his message: he's not coming home with anything.
Every conference I've ever attended has revolved around building hype and excitement. The key isn't how much hype is left after an hour, but how much is left after you've gone home with (or in this case, without) a copy of the tools to actually play with and find fault with. Trust me, when you go home emptyhanded, there's a reason. Everything seems great when you take it from a jolly Matrix-themed conference with cool jellybeans, but when you're sent home without a CD, that really says something.
If Microsoft pulled a shenanigan like this and compared itself to the Matrix, we'd all be cracking jokes about it and saying that the software was an illusion. In this case, though, the guy is actually singing the company's praises! Hello? No software to take home? Doesn't that scream vaporware? We wouldn't tolerate it from Microsoft, and we shouldn't tolerate it from anyone else, either.
Granted, you saw it running on a few machines that weren't on the net. It was blazingly fast. Wow. Did you see what was inside the machines? What kinds of processors? Don't we always point fingers at Microsoft for pulling the same trick, demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPU's and shovelfuls of memory?
Am I the only one who thinks this "story" is nothing more than a rehash of a press release?
Isn't that great? I thought I was the only one to catch all those song titles. Glad to see someone else picked it up too.
it can't be social pressures steering girls away from technology, because frankly, social pressures steer GUYS away from technology too! I mean, really, football is a lot more popular than chess club, and the social pressure is always on in school to perform athletically. It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
I manage software development for a very small "gated community", as the article calls it, and I have to say that the copyright policies never come into discussion when I interview candidates for positions. I just don't find a level of awareness amongst conventional Windows programmers. For example, in our local user's group for our development platform, we were doing a show-and-tell on web sites, and nobody in the entire group had even heard of Slashdot.
But you'd better believe they all frequented Amazon.
It just comes right down to daily life concerns for these people. They want to make the most money they can, spend it in the manner they choose, and they're not really about supporting causes unless it's an easy cause to support. You know the kind of people I mean: they recycle their trash, but they don't carpool.
Software licensing is the same way. Sure, it's easy to say you support open source when you're downloading somebody else's work, but when it comes to your paycheck, that's a much harder concession to make. If I wanted to hunt around for an open source employer in this market, I'd be hunting for quite a while. Instead, we all contribute to each other's programs out of a community experience. We all learn from each other, we all profit from the other's knowledge, and better products come out of it.
I've said this time and again, but if Slashdot is going to become a software announcement area like Freshmeat, can we at least get a little more info in the posts? This "news" is absolutely useless to me. The only two links with actual information are already Slashdotted, so even if this *was* something cool, it's going into my circular file.
"Some skeptics of Netpliance have speculated that these refurbished machines are a cheap way to conduct R&D through easily bought community members..."
Replace the word "Netpliance" with "Linux", and you'll see how ridiculously stupid the skeptics sound.
Best quote from the interview: "I'll try to work on it more, but I'm a student so classwork sucks a lot of my time up."
That's funny, that's exactly how I viewed classes, too. (Although I didn't produce anything nearly this brilliant.) The kids who studied and did well never really produced anything dumbfounding. The kids to watch were the ones who tolerated the classes just to get the information they needed, and then raced to the labs to do the real (albeit frivolous) work.
Necessity isn't the mother of invention: it's boredom.
"There's a process called calibration..."
Would that be anything like the process called Quality Assurance? The process that did such a great job of catching the metric conversion on the Mars misson? Oh, same kind of thing, eh? Thanks for pointing that out to me. All clear now.
Maybe, but you have to agree that any incompetence involved with fabricating the gyros will be a sign in their favor, unlike the other missions. If the gyros are junk, they still win. When the other missions suffered from incompetence, they failed. Ironically, this one can only fail if we are competent - but incorrect.