I'm glad that someone 2nd's my opinion that board tapes aren't all that. I think that the lure of boards for at least Grateful Dead concerts, was that the variability between shows was less from show to show vs. audience (microphone) recordings. A board tape will always sound like a board tape, but an audience recording to a $50 boom box vs something like B&K 4006 omni mikes > Lunatec 316> Panasonic SV-250 makes all the difference in the world.
Actually, some mikes that are used in audience concert recordings have different cartridges to change the reception pattern of the mike (cardiod, hypercardiod, shotgun, etc ). Why? For better stereo seperation at different distances from the stage.
A good stereo audience recording sounds excellent. They really have that "there" feeling. I've actually jumped listening to a recording when a balloon popped near the mikes!
Some people have meantioned using minidisc for shows. I have never had a recording come from a minidisc. I've seen "tapers" use minidiscs, but there not considered tradable, they are for personal use only.
Regarding the recording of music on PDAs in general, I don't see this happening. There isn't a need. A minidisc is about as small as your gonna get, if size is what your after. Also, many of the current tapers have a dat deck, a good A/D converter, and some even have separate preamps to give gain from the mics to the a/d converter.
Trust me there are plennty of excellent recordings out there for many taper friendly bands. Many of the recordings have detailed lineage of the source. For example:
FOB B&K 4006 omni's (in hat, 36th row left of center) > Lunatec 316> Panasonic SV-250 by Marc Nutter; Transfer: Sony DTC-A6 > Dio 2448 > SF 4.5 @ 48K, Resample, add fades> CDWAV> SHN
This is from a recording 8 years ago, taping is almost godlike now!
When you consider that 1-2% of 50,000 machines is 500 to 1000 machines, this does not seem unreasonable. Would anyone notice a 1-2% decrease in performance of thier car, light bulb, toaster, or computer?
The problem with Internet advertising is that ads are not relevant, not selling products that anyone wants...
I believe the problem with internet advertising is due to a couple of things. First, this is the 1st medium of advertising where there is some actual data regarding the "effectiveness" of the ads. Also, many internet ads are generated from a 3rd party. This is not true with other mediums of advertising like tv, radio, newspaper, etc. The latter media formats have an advertising department and the comanies wanting to advertise with them give them the material to use as an ad. With the internet, many of the ads are through 3rd party companies like doubleclick, etc. and is up to them to generate "data" for their clients regarding some kind of measured "effectiveness" of said ads, and will try those nasty tricks that we have all come to love like popups/unders, flash ads, obnoxious animated ads, etc.
Civil litigation is not based on real monitary value. What is the value of a "wrongful death" suit?
Basically, the rule of thumb is to sue for about 1/2 of what you can get. And that value is then doubled to be what you can get so the lawyers get their 1/2.
Ever hot swap a CPU on a SMP PC? How about adding a CPU or RAM module without powering down? Hot sawp PCI?
Hot swap, hot schwap. If you need to replace a cpu, because it failed, I would assume that your system is already in a flaked state. Also, if the system is that important that you cannot turn the machine off because of a hardware problem, then you are going to have at least one hot spare ready. Whatcha gonna do if the MB fries? (Yeah, I know that E10k's and E15k's can do this, but those machines are closer to a cluster than one big computer.)
How about 4-way machines scalable to 64-way?
These are few and far between. Basically a niche market that Sun can already provide.
64+ Gb of RAM?
Its entirely possible with a 64bit platform.
Terabytes of storage?
Done already. In fact ext2/3 filesystems can have 4 terabyte partitions.
PCs are only starting to be able to compete in that market, which is why Sun, IBM, and HP still sell those types of machines.
Sun, IBM, and HP sell PCs too (well, sunblades and cobalt servers from Sun). And the current trend is not large monolithic machines, but more small machines coupled together. Like blade servers (which is what the article is addressing) and clusters of machines.
Sun has to do something different, because the UltraSparc chips are not holding up very well compared to others.
All I want is a billing system that charges me Xc per minute anytime to anyone, with X/2c per minute nights / weekends. Is straight billing so hard or so wrong?
Huh? You want to pay by the minute? Nothing else charges by the minute except for phones.
Why is it that people's phone charges can be significantly more than electricity bills? The phone industry is a complete scam, with 1000 different ways to get ripped off.
I had a cell phone once. I got it only because I was unemployed and didn't have a permanent residence, and needed a stable phone # for job searches. Then I got a gf. Then I got a $400 bill. Then I got a permanant residence with a land line, and threw the cell in the trash.
Now I have a land line with no long distance carrier and I use a phone card from costco that costs $20 for 570 minutes (~ 3.5c/min) with no monthly charge. My employer gets to pay for my cell phone. I will never own a personal cell phone again unless its $20-30 a month flat rate like my home phone.
I'm not that familiar with any MS products, but when I was talking to HP about buying an Itanium, they were saying how HPUX and Linux ran fine on the Itaniums and that they were "waiting for MS to get their act together". To which I assumend that XP did not run well on the Itaniums.
Why is it that they won't support existing 64bit technologies (Itanium, Alpha's back in the day), but their gung ho for yet another x86 hack?
If yah sue everyone that uses your tech then your tech will disappear.
They are not doing that, they sat on it for over ten years, and now their dipping into the pockets deep enough to pay. Anyway, I'm baffled where this patent came from. Remember this page? It goes on and on about how gifs are evil because of patents and uses a jpeg for an image.
Photography is already biased enough depending on what you LEAVE OUT
Or inversly, what you LEAVE IN. I personally find TV other mass media "news", not to be very newsworthy.
Does everyone remember last summer when the media made a big deal of a couple of kids missing? Granted, if I were involved in such a thing, it would probably be the worst thing to ever happen in my life, but every day I see photos in my mailbox and on milk cartons about missing kids. This wasn't news, nor is much of the other FUD that the media spreads.
What's the big deal? I would get fired if I were to come into work drunk, or violate any other "specifically barred policies".
On a side note, digital (and regular) modifications are the rule rather than the exception for photographers. They take inches off of those models legs, add this, remove that. One interesting trick is that they dilate the pupils of models to make them look sexier. Am I missing the importance of this?
Read this sentence a couple of times. Apple-made motherboards preloaded with Macintosh ROMs -- the vital piece of hardware-cum-software that makes a Mac a Mac.
At least I though it was funny. But seriously, someone already mentioned that OSX is not licensed to run on something other than a Mac, but I would believe that the ROMs are even more protected.
Yeah, most of us have seen the X supply and demand plot, but that is under _ideal_ conditions and a truly "free" market. These conditions are exactly what is being questioned. If prices are fixed, then this model does not work. I too have questioned the prices of LCD displays, especially the smaller televisions. I would love to have one, but I cannot justify the cost for a 3X" CRT TV for a 15" LCD (~ 600$ the last time I looked).
Sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night, so I may not be totally coherent.
It sounds as though the author wants companies to give jobs and money to Americans simply because they are Americans, and while that is a perfectly valid belief, he goes on to say that he wants to compete based on skills.
If an American company expects to sell goods/services in America, then the ppl have to be able to afford it. For example, in Japan they still have full service gas stations, but very little welfare systems.
On top of that, his car example admits that the Japanese built cheaper, more fuel effecient cars. So which is it?
I meant the Japanese cars of the '70s. More noncoherentness, bad example I guess. The attitude then was that you were selling out and not supporting American companies and workers if you bought a Japanese car. Today, there is little difference between US and American cars because they are both made in US (sometimes Mexico or Canida).
Economies are globalizing. It sounds to me that the author only wants to compete if he is going to win!
Let me try to be a little more clear. I work at a research facility where top scientists all over the world collaborate to do their research. That is compitition based on skills. I have no problem with that.
I do not want to compete with someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country who, granted may have equal skills as I, but who's biggest asset to the American company is that they will work for less money. I do not feel as though the economy nor America in general will benefit from this. Sure, maybe some shareholders may get some shortterm gain, but I don't think that its best in the long run.
There may be integrated monitor versions, but we use them with standard CRTs. FYI, the card reader is not really a smart card per say, the card only acts as an identifying token to maintain sessions, it does nothing in terms of authentication/authorization or any kind of encryption. The performance of these guys in terms of X over a network is pretty good. I belive that there is some kind of hardware compressor or special codec chip in the box to lower network bandwidth needs.
I'm starting to get pretty pissed off at US companies farming out work to H1Bs and overseas. I remember when I was a kid, there was pride in the US and American products. Foreign cars (mostly Japanese) were cheaper, more fuel efficient alternatives to US models, and there was some kind of "buy American" belief that most people held.
But today, many of the largest companies in the US are giving money to foreigners, not immigrants, but giving the money away. And the motivation is purely greed (competition I guess in the companies eyes).
Sun does it, I've heard that Intel does it, Nike, and I'm sure that whoever is not on the list now, is looking to do so soon.
This is utter bullshit. I went to college, spent 2 years in grad school, learned Linux/UNIX on my own time and am an administer of a million dollar computer, and coadminister another XX million dollar computer, and purchase 50 to 100k worth of equipment a year. Yet, I drive a 1991 car that my father gave me, live in an apartment because I can't afford a house, and my home computer is a 100MHz AMD. Yes, I am grateful to have a job, especially since I was laid off for 6 months not too long ago, but maybe I would be able to afford to have the "average American" things if I weren't competing with every computer employee in the world.
I don't mind competing based on skills, bring em on! But to lower my standard of living because of this competition, no, I don't think so.
fact remains that our addiction to oil is completely fucking up our climate
I don't see it as much as the per person or capita's addiction to oil, but that the population keeps increasing which means more clear cut rain forests, more fossil fuels used, etc.
I read recently that the human population will stabalize to about 10 to 12 billion in the next 50 or so years. Only after our population has stabalized for a while can we even begin to make plans on how we are supposed to live on this planet.
No matter how much we humans think we can figure out about our world and the universe, there's always some phenomenon that we don't account for yet we plod forward anyway. This is not to say that humans are not contributing to global warming, but we should be looking more into the natural physical phenomena that could be contributing to a problem that affects us.
How about looking at the geological and fossil record for some evidence? In the recent past (geologically speaking) there have been 4 ice ages and 4 "thaws", and before that the temperature of the Earth was erratic at best. Also, homo sapiens are only 40,000 or so years old, and industrialism that we think is causing global warming and whatnot has only been around about 100 years.
The Earth and life was here before humans, and most likely will go on after we are gone.
I didn't read the article, but I'm assuming that it never specified that this data transfer rate would go to the desktop. Think of it in terms of scaling. Many 10/100 switches have a gigabit uplink so that 10 desktops can sustain 100mb at a time, but none of them run at a gigabit.
Itanium expensive yes. Itanium not that fast, no. I've benchmarked them and am in the process of buying 3 of em. And when the 1.5GHz CPUs come out later this year they will be the fastest procs in their class, period.
I doubt Apple will go to any x86 varient because that will turn them into a software company and kill their business, unless they think that they will be able to make up the loss of profits off of hardware by increased OS sales. Apple's software is basically thier OS, and even M$ with their stronghold on the PC (and desktop in general) market makes mucho dinero off of apps like Office. I don't think that ppl want another PC OS, remember BeOS?
On a side note, its pretty much common knowledge that Dvorak is a moron, and articles here based on something that he says is usually flamebait from the getgo.
Doesn't this sound like the MPAA, Microsoft a la RIAA trying to make piracy sound like terrorism, and get the public all jumpy and hate piracy?
Good point. It used to be communism, but I guess that we won that long drawn out "Cold War". Communism used to be US's ideology for justifying our commercialization and defense spending, now its called Terrorism. Different word, different enemy, same people profit from it.
Now regarding the MPAA and M$ claims. I'll regurgitate what I heard a preacher say regarding the "War on drugs". It would be "unamerican" for people to not sell drugs. Why would/should some underpriveledged kid who has ambition and drive work his ass off at McDonalds for $5/hr when he can make 10x that selling drugs? Why would/should someone from a contry with a suffering economy and weak copyright laws not sell pirated software/movies?
Nah, thats not what is stopping Linux. What is stopping Linux is: "It will just fucking work". Only now are companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, and RedHat are putting their rep where their mouth is. One would have to live in the middle of the desert not to recognise Linux now.
An example of "It will just fucking work" in action. I just paid NetApp something like $1,300 dollars for a GigE card in a NAS box, and then paid some guy $375 to put the card in the box. Now the NetApp is going fine at GigE. (Btw, the $1,300 card is an Intel e1000 card that you can get for under $200). Where did all that $$ go to? In making sure that "It will just fucking work". That is where, although it could have been much cheaper IMHO.
An example of "It will eventually work after I dink around with it Linux style". I bought a Linux server for $5,000. I specified that I wanted a GigE card, RedHat 7.1, and the hardisk partitioned according to a dump of fdisk -l on another machine. The machine did not come with a power cord. The machine came with RH 7.2, and partitioned incorrectly. The machine also came with the wrong GigE card. I contacted the company, and for $145 they sent me the "right" GigE card. The only problem, is that the driver for the card is only ported to kernel 2.4.20 and I have to run 2.4.9, so I must now contact either the people that sold me the card and/or the card people for some kind of backport of the driver to kernel 2.4.9. The machine is still not in production because of the GigE card.
Announcements like RH's Enterprise Linux and the previous Advanced Server are welcome to me. I hope that soon I can pay someone for a real Linux solution, not parts of one. One that will "just fucking work!"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that someone 2nd's my opinion that board tapes aren't all that. I think that the lure of boards for at least Grateful Dead concerts, was that the variability between shows was less from show to show vs. audience (microphone) recordings. A board tape will always sound like a board tape, but an audience recording to a $50 boom box vs something like B&K 4006 omni mikes > Lunatec 316> Panasonic SV-250 makes all the difference in the world.
Actually, some mikes that are used in audience concert recordings have different cartridges to change the reception pattern of the mike (cardiod, hypercardiod, shotgun, etc ). Why? For better stereo seperation at different distances from the stage.
A good stereo audience recording sounds excellent. They really have that "there" feeling. I've actually jumped listening to a recording when a balloon popped near the mikes!
Some people have meantioned using minidisc for shows. I have never had a recording come from a minidisc. I've seen "tapers" use minidiscs, but there not considered tradable, they are for personal use only.
Regarding the recording of music on PDAs in general, I don't see this happening. There isn't a need. A minidisc is about as small as your gonna get, if size is what your after. Also, many of the current tapers have a dat deck, a good A/D converter, and some even have separate preamps to give gain from the mics to the a/d converter.
Trust me there are plennty of excellent recordings out there for many taper friendly bands. Many of the recordings have detailed lineage of the source. For example:
FOB B&K 4006 omni's (in hat, 36th row left of center) > Lunatec 316> Panasonic SV-250 by Marc Nutter; Transfer: Sony DTC-A6 > Dio 2448 > SF 4.5 @ 48K, Resample, add fades> CDWAV> SHN
This is from a recording 8 years ago, taping is almost godlike now!
When you consider that 1-2% of 50,000 machines is 500 to 1000 machines, this does not seem unreasonable. Would anyone notice a 1-2% decrease in performance of thier car, light bulb, toaster, or computer?
The problem with Internet advertising is that ads are not relevant, not selling products that anyone wants...
I believe the problem with internet advertising is due to a couple of things. First, this is the 1st medium of advertising where there is some actual data regarding the "effectiveness" of the ads. Also, many internet ads are generated from a 3rd party. This is not true with other mediums of advertising like tv, radio, newspaper, etc. The latter media formats have an advertising department and the comanies wanting to advertise with them give them the material to use as an ad. With the internet, many of the ads are through 3rd party companies like doubleclick, etc. and is up to them to generate "data" for their clients regarding some kind of measured "effectiveness" of said ads, and will try those nasty tricks that we have all come to love like popups/unders, flash ads, obnoxious animated ads, etc.
Civil litigation is not based on real monitary value. What is the value of a "wrongful death" suit?
Basically, the rule of thumb is to sue for about 1/2 of what you can get. And that value is then doubled to be what you can get so the lawyers get their 1/2.
Ever hot swap a CPU on a SMP PC? How about adding a CPU or RAM module without powering down? Hot sawp PCI?
Hot swap, hot schwap. If you need to replace a cpu, because it failed, I would assume that your system is already in a flaked state. Also, if the system is that important that you cannot turn the machine off because of a hardware problem, then you are going to have at least one hot spare ready. Whatcha gonna do if the MB fries? (Yeah, I know that E10k's and E15k's can do this, but those machines are closer to a cluster than one big computer.)
How about 4-way machines scalable to 64-way?
These are few and far between. Basically a niche market that Sun can already provide.
64+ Gb of RAM?
Its entirely possible with a 64bit platform.
Terabytes of storage?
Done already. In fact ext2/3 filesystems can have 4 terabyte partitions.
PCs are only starting to be able to compete in that market, which is why Sun, IBM, and HP still sell those types of machines.
Sun, IBM, and HP sell PCs too (well, sunblades and cobalt servers from Sun). And the current trend is not large monolithic machines, but more small machines coupled together. Like blade servers (which is what the article is addressing) and clusters of machines.
Sun has to do something different, because the UltraSparc chips are not holding up very well compared to others.
All I want is a billing system that charges me Xc per minute anytime to anyone, with X/2c per minute nights / weekends. Is straight billing so hard or so wrong?
Huh? You want to pay by the minute? Nothing else charges by the minute except for phones.
Why is it that people's phone charges can be significantly more than electricity bills? The phone industry is a complete scam, with 1000 different ways to get ripped off.
I had a cell phone once. I got it only because I was unemployed and didn't have a permanent residence, and needed a stable phone # for job searches. Then I got a gf. Then I got a $400 bill. Then I got a permanant residence with a land line, and threw the cell in the trash.
Now I have a land line with no long distance carrier and I use a phone card from costco that costs $20 for 570 minutes (~ 3.5c/min) with no monthly charge. My employer gets to pay for my cell phone. I will never own a personal cell phone again unless its $20-30 a month flat rate like my home phone.
I'm not that familiar with any MS products, but when I was talking to HP about buying an Itanium, they were saying how HPUX and Linux ran fine on the Itaniums and that they were "waiting for MS to get their act together". To which I assumend that XP did not run well on the Itaniums.
Why is it that they won't support existing 64bit technologies (Itanium, Alpha's back in the day), but their gung ho for yet another x86 hack?
If yah sue everyone that uses your tech then your tech will disappear.
They are not doing that, they sat on it for over ten years, and now their dipping into the pockets deep enough to pay. Anyway, I'm baffled where this patent came from. Remember this page? It goes on and on about how gifs are evil because of patents and uses a jpeg for an image.
Photography is already biased enough depending on what you LEAVE OUT
Or inversly, what you LEAVE IN. I personally find TV other mass media "news", not to be very newsworthy.
Does everyone remember last summer when the media made a big deal of a couple of kids missing? Granted, if I were involved in such a thing, it would probably be the worst thing to ever happen in my life, but every day I see photos in my mailbox and on milk cartons about missing kids. This wasn't news, nor is much of the other FUD that the media spreads.
... in the newspaper's policy.
What's the big deal? I would get fired if I were to come into work drunk, or violate any other "specifically barred policies".
On a side note, digital (and regular) modifications are the rule rather than the exception for photographers. They take inches off of those models legs, add this, remove that. One interesting trick is that they dilate the pupils of models to make them look sexier. Am I missing the importance of this?
Read this sentence a couple of times. Apple-made motherboards preloaded with Macintosh ROMs -- the vital piece of hardware-cum-software that makes a Mac a Mac.
At least I though it was funny. But seriously, someone already mentioned that OSX is not licensed to run on something other than a Mac, but I would believe that the ROMs are even more protected.
Yeah, most of us have seen the X supply and demand plot, but that is under _ideal_ conditions and a truly "free" market. These conditions are exactly what is being questioned. If prices are fixed, then this model does not work. I too have questioned the prices of LCD displays, especially the smaller televisions. I would love to have one, but I cannot justify the cost for a 3X" CRT TV for a 15" LCD (~ 600$ the last time I looked).
as much engineers as carpenters are.
I'm very confused by this post.
:)
Sorry, I didn't get much sleep last night, so I may not be totally coherent.
It sounds as though the author wants companies to give jobs and money to Americans simply because they are Americans, and while that is a perfectly valid belief, he goes on to say that he wants to compete based on skills.
If an American company expects to sell goods/services in America, then the ppl have to be able to afford it. For example, in Japan they still have full service gas stations, but very little welfare systems.
On top of that, his car example admits that the Japanese built cheaper, more fuel effecient cars. So which is it?
I meant the Japanese cars of the '70s. More noncoherentness, bad example I guess. The attitude then was that you were selling out and not supporting American companies and workers if you bought a Japanese car. Today, there is little difference between US and American cars because they are both made in US (sometimes Mexico or Canida).
Economies are globalizing. It sounds to me that the author only wants to compete if he is going to win!
Let me try to be a little more clear. I work at a research facility where top scientists all over the world collaborate to do their research. That is compitition based on skills. I have no problem with that.
I do not want to compete with someone who lives in a dirt floor shack in a 3rd world country who, granted may have equal skills as I, but who's biggest asset to the American company is that they will work for less money. I do not feel as though the economy nor America in general will benefit from this. Sure, maybe some shareholders may get some shortterm gain, but I don't think that its best in the long run.
And I'm a he
There may be integrated monitor versions, but we use them with standard CRTs. FYI, the card reader is not really a smart card per say, the card only acts as an identifying token to maintain sessions, it does nothing in terms of authentication/authorization or any kind of encryption. The performance of these guys in terms of X over a network is pretty good. I belive that there is some kind of hardware compressor or special codec chip in the box to lower network bandwidth needs.
This is US centric, so consider yourself warned.
I'm starting to get pretty pissed off at US companies farming out work to H1Bs and overseas. I remember when I was a kid, there was pride in the US and American products. Foreign cars (mostly Japanese) were cheaper, more fuel efficient alternatives to US models, and there was some kind of "buy American" belief that most people held.
But today, many of the largest companies in the US are giving money to foreigners, not immigrants, but giving the money away. And the motivation is purely greed (competition I guess in the companies eyes).
Sun does it, I've heard that Intel does it, Nike, and I'm sure that whoever is not on the list now, is looking to do so soon.
This is utter bullshit. I went to college, spent 2 years in grad school, learned Linux/UNIX on my own time and am an administer of a million dollar computer, and coadminister another XX million dollar computer, and purchase 50 to 100k worth of equipment a year. Yet, I drive a 1991 car that my father gave me, live in an apartment because I can't afford a house, and my home computer is a 100MHz AMD. Yes, I am grateful to have a job, especially since I was laid off for 6 months not too long ago, but maybe I would be able to afford to have the "average American" things if I weren't competing with every computer employee in the world.
I don't mind competing based on skills, bring em on! But to lower my standard of living because of this competition, no, I don't think so.
fact remains that our addiction to oil is completely fucking up our climate
I don't see it as much as the per person or capita's addiction to oil, but that the population keeps increasing which means more clear cut rain forests, more fossil fuels used, etc.
I read recently that the human population will stabalize to about 10 to 12 billion in the next 50 or so years. Only after our population has stabalized for a while can we even begin to make plans on how we are supposed to live on this planet.
No matter how much we humans think we can figure out about our world and the universe, there's always some phenomenon that we don't account for yet we plod forward anyway. This is not to say that humans are not contributing to global warming, but we should be looking more into the natural physical phenomena that could be contributing to a problem that affects us.
How about looking at the geological and fossil record for some evidence? In the recent past (geologically speaking) there have been 4 ice ages and 4 "thaws", and before that the temperature of the Earth was erratic at best. Also, homo sapiens are only 40,000 or so years old, and industrialism that we think is causing global warming and whatnot has only been around about 100 years.
The Earth and life was here before humans, and most likely will go on after we are gone.
I didn't read the article, but I'm assuming that it never specified that this data transfer rate would go to the desktop. Think of it in terms of scaling. Many 10/100 switches have a gigabit uplink so that 10 desktops can sustain 100mb at a time, but none of them run at a gigabit.
Itanium expensive yes. Itanium not that fast, no. I've benchmarked them and am in the process of buying 3 of em. And when the 1.5GHz CPUs come out later this year they will be the fastest procs in their class, period.
I doubt Apple will go to any x86 varient because that will turn them into a software company and kill their business, unless they think that they will be able to make up the loss of profits off of hardware by increased OS sales. Apple's software is basically thier OS, and even M$ with their stronghold on the PC (and desktop in general) market makes mucho dinero off of apps like Office. I don't think that ppl want another PC OS, remember BeOS?
On a side note, its pretty much common knowledge that Dvorak is a moron, and articles here based on something that he says is usually flamebait from the getgo.
I'd be thinking 'surrender', wouldn't you?
Not if I believe that I will be going to the highest of all heavens if I die fighting as hard as I can fight.
Doesn't this sound like the MPAA, Microsoft a la RIAA trying to make piracy sound like terrorism, and get the public all jumpy and hate piracy?
Good point. It used to be communism, but I guess that we won that long drawn out "Cold War". Communism used to be US's ideology for justifying our commercialization and defense spending, now its called Terrorism. Different word, different enemy, same people profit from it.
Now regarding the MPAA and M$ claims. I'll regurgitate what I heard a preacher say regarding the "War on drugs". It would be "unamerican" for people to not sell drugs. Why would/should some underpriveledged kid who has ambition and drive work his ass off at McDonalds for $5/hr when he can make 10x that selling drugs? Why would/should someone from a contry with a suffering economy and weak copyright laws not sell pirated software/movies?
Nah, thats not what is stopping Linux. What is stopping Linux is: "It will just fucking work". Only now are companies like IBM, HP, Oracle, and RedHat are putting their rep where their mouth is. One would have to live in the middle of the desert not to recognise Linux now.
An example of "It will just fucking work" in action. I just paid NetApp something like $1,300 dollars for a GigE card in a NAS box, and then paid some guy $375 to put the card in the box. Now the NetApp is going fine at GigE. (Btw, the $1,300 card is an Intel e1000 card that you can get for under $200). Where did all that $$ go to? In making sure that "It will just fucking work". That is where, although it could have been much cheaper IMHO.
An example of "It will eventually work after I dink around with it Linux style". I bought a Linux server for $5,000. I specified that I wanted a GigE card, RedHat 7.1, and the hardisk partitioned according to a dump of fdisk -l on another machine. The machine did not come with a power cord. The machine came with RH 7.2, and partitioned incorrectly. The machine also came with the wrong GigE card. I contacted the company, and for $145 they sent me the "right" GigE card. The only problem, is that the driver for the card is only ported to kernel 2.4.20 and I have to run 2.4.9, so I must now contact either the people that sold me the card and/or the card people for some kind of backport of the driver to kernel 2.4.9. The machine is still not in production because of the GigE card.
Announcements like RH's Enterprise Linux and the previous Advanced Server are welcome to me. I hope that soon I can pay someone for a real Linux solution, not parts of one. One that will "just fucking work!"
So we are supposed to take slashdot less seriously than CNN, but pay MORE for it than CNN?
:)
BTW, its too seriously
Rob, I've been reading slashdot since it was "Chips and Dips", I love it! Do you have any insight into this thread?.