Hey at least he knew what Photoshop was. If this poor gentleman is being forced to teach networking then frankly it is unfair to him. I have to wonder just how big of a smart ass the student was. If the student had taken to time to show this gentleman Linux and what it could do then maybe things would have gone differently. Some how in my mind I see this... Teacher: What are you running on that notebook? Student: It's Linux you dumb old fart. or something of that nature.
Gee you think. But it does make the zealots feel better. A much better way would be to point out that Linux is now being used to run many of the worlds fastest computers. Or inform her that companies like Google, and Amazon user Linux. So many ways to have been positive and tried to turn it around. No need to bring in Microsoft or the Unions. But it is so much easier to preach to the choir. You get the admiration of those that already agree with you and look cool for taking a stand.
I swear has the whole world gone stupid? Doesn't anybody care about "sharing their viewpoint" anymore. Or is more important to scream how right you are the how stupid the other person is?
Disruptive manner says it all. Any activity in the classroom that isn't part of the teachers plan is disruptive. Do you think it is possible to give a demonstration of Linux and had out CDs in class and not disruptive? I mean really think about it. So yeas she had every right to ask him to stop and take the CDs.
"Unless you are applying for a job as a unix/linux admin..." Well I would hope that you have a better than middle school education by then. While I am a Linux user I can see her point. She is being paid to teach people how to use Windows and probably Office. Most computers still use Windows and most places of work still use Office. Somebody that leaves High School and goes to work will most likely need to know how to use Office and Windows. Microsoft practically gives schools Windows and Office. The Teacher is teaching course that doesn't include Windows. I do think that this teacher made many wrong choices but I can also see her reason. I think that schools should encourage kids to push past the class limits as long as they don't disrupt the class.
One I don't believe a word of it unless you are at the wost school school on the planet. Anybody teaching networking would know what the heck Unix is unless he has been thrust into that job with no background. And if he really is between 60-70 good for him. When he was your age networking was totally unknown. Heck if really is 70 then when he was 20 transistors where the hot thing. The truth is if your story was in the least part true then what we have is a failure to educate. If someone teaching a networking class doesn't know what Linux is then the community really needs to work harder educating people about. For older computer people just point them to the Linux section of IBMs website should be a good start to show that it isn't for "hackers". Man I miss the days when hacker was a positive term.
He is right that there isn't a free lunch. Someone did pay for Linux and other FOSS to be developed. Sometimes it is a company like IBM, sometimes it is the tax payers of some nation for things like the NSA security additions to Linux. And yes Linux and a lot of FOSS is worth money. So yes using Free software is a ripe off. If you don't donate code, money, or documentation to any project that you use then you are ripping off the developers. The thing is that most developers are okay with it. Now the people that crab but don't contribute... Well they suck.
I can't say but expect to see them stop popping in a year or two. Wind and solar still have one huge problem. They can not be throttled. If you to through a period of low wind which can happen your have no incoming power. Also if the winds get to high your out of power as well. Solar is at least more predictable. Your out put will drop all winter and drop to zero at night. You will also have problems with summer storms in your area which are less predictable. Sure wind is growing fast going from zero gives you a huge growth curve but I doubt that you will ever see wind get above 20%. But back to your issues with nuclear. You have only one reactor in Iowa and it is providing +10% of your power. It is a small reactor at that. Add in that it is over 30 years old tech. You could replace 100% of all your power plants with just five new reactors. You would have zero carbon emissions and a proven solution. I am all for Solar but I am very skeptical on wind still but sure develop that as well. Every little bit helps I feel. The thing is simply without a major breakthrough in power storage they will only be supplemental.
Nuclear is only supplemental because of political silliness. When was the last Nuclear power plant in Iowa built? As I said where has wind and or solar EVER reached even 40%? Only asking for half of what nuclear has managed already. Guess what I know someone that works for a company that has been building wind farms. They are stopping because of issues with infrastructure. Nuclear is only supplemental in Iowa but it still is a lot bigger percentage than wind.
Wow 8? hummm I would call that supplemental. Let's take a look at France. They get well over 80 percent from nuclear. Not only that but the export power to the UK, Germany, and Italy. So does ANY industrialized country get close to even 40 percent of their power from wind and or solar? So I would say that your power company has only managed "supplemental" at best.
Not at all. nuclear works, is safe, and clean. Solar and wind have never worked as more of a supplement and we have been trying since the 70s.
I am all for more research into solar and wind and using it as a supplement. But I wouldn't use groundless fears and miss information from letting me use a power source that works well and is proven. Yes I live near a nuclear power plant.
BTW Three Mile Island didn't kill a single person and Chernobyl can not happen to any US commercial reactor because they are of a totally different design.
The problem is that electric cars have the economic pressure. Watch how oil has dropped. Say hello to SUVs and good buy the fuel efficient cars. Gas is back being cheap and people have short memories. I knew a person that had an electric car... In 1974! Electric cars will be dead soon until the next price spike. The difference is that it will take an even longer spike before companies are willing to invest in alternative energy after the beating they take this time around.
People do things they don't enjoy for two reason. 1. Reward. 2. fear of punishment. What I am saying is that FOSS will never completely replace closed source. Just as closed source can not destroy FOSS.
There will always be both. I for one think that is a good thing. Because if for no other reason than the Closes source applications I deal with pay my bills and about 50 other peoples along with health insurance and 401Ks. Closed source isn't strictly the domain of the mega corp but of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small companies. But if you think that you can do a better job then I suggest that you find a vertical market and start writing code. See just how well it works and just how much work it is to produce some of these programs.
I looked at that page and I saw mainly malware not viruses per say. Also if you look a good number of them are not even for OS/X some are for System 6. It does look like there are some threats but they are pretty few and far it would seem.
Wow that is well into the tinfoil hat area. What viruses are their for OS/X? What current exploits are out for it. I really don't buy into there are but they are secret.
That is interesting. I have not seen that kind of error in forever. I did put that kind of error into one of our in house programs intentionally. We had a clerical person that kept putting their machine into 640x480 so she could have big letters on the screen. Well my program just couldn't work well in that small of a screen. No matter how many times we told her to just pick a bigger font she wouldn't do it. So I got tired of her complaining about my program so I just put in a check and the program put up an error message if the screen wasn't at least 800x600 and refused to run. She never seemed to get it that I made the program do it but she obeyed and set her screen to a better resolution.
Well sort of kinda of. Most FOSS projects really get very little in the way contributions from outside sources. Most depend on a small core for 99% of the work. The bigger the project the harder it is for people to contribute. Smaller projects don't get a whole lot outside help at all to be honest. The you have the problem of attracting talent to your project. Not many good programmers will donate their time to dull project like say a U-Storage management program or one to run a gift shop. Then you have to deal with who will manage and judge the code. For a lot of small businesses they just want a solution. And what a lot of people don't understand is a lot of the closed source vertical market software companies are anything but mega corps. Most are small companies like the one I work for. We are a "big" vertical market developer. We have less the 35 people working here. Most of them are support techs. They get health insurance and 401ks. If we released our main product a FOSS all that would happen is that people wouldn't pay anything and we would go out of business. There was one FOSS project that was in our market. We even gave them documentation of all the file formats we had and interface protocols. It failed to produce anything usable. FOSS is great but I don't think it will ever replace traditional closed source software in every market.
"Honestly, the more it costs, the worse it appears to be in quality...)" Not really. Your looking at the per seat price. Let's take two examples. One is a program for managing say a U-Storage location vs Office. The U-Storage vendor might charge $2000 for their program while Office costs say $295. The U-Storage software vendor might sell 200 a year. Microsoft will sell what? Make it a million so the Math is easy. So the total cost of Office to the Planet is $295,000,000 while "expensive" vertical cost only $400,000. That might seem like a lot but then you have to think about marketing, paying the Programming staff, and support costs which will be much higher per customer for the vertical. That expensive is software is actually very cheap when you look at the that way. That is the advantage of boxware. Buy charging for every copy you can spread out the cost of development.
Well I would guess most server users will not be doing a CPU upgrade. But for the OEMs it is great. You have a new SKU with just a change of CPU. Does Intel even have a server version of the Nehalem yet?
You also only kind of hinted at the ease of migration. All that the OEMs need to do to introduce the Shanghai is to put it in the socket. with the I7 family it they will need to move to a new motherboard as well. For manufactures this will be a big win since for may buyers it will be seen as a nice safe evolutionary change. The one thing that worries the server market is big changes. It is all about stability.
I tend to agree but there are some trends that will use more CPU. HD-Video editing. You can buy a digital camera that will shoot 720p video for all of $150. Editing and transcodeing video takes CPU time. Gaming is the huge question. The consoles often make more sense for gaming but I think people will always want to play games on their PCs. Then you have speech input. That can always use more CPU power. So we may not be at good enough yet but I think we are getting very close.
"In addition, the open source IT staff seem to just want to constantly be changing everything when something newer and flashier comes out (read that as closer to functionality to a purchased project). In one year we have had 3 different email servers, with the associated problems of swapping over." That is just a bad IT department or changing requirements.
Most of the problems you are speaking about has more to do with a failure of leadership. We use a FOSS mailserver. Over the last few years we have changed once. Sendmail to Qmail and that is it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey at least he knew what Photoshop was.
If this poor gentleman is being forced to teach networking then frankly it is unfair to him. I have to wonder just how big of a smart ass the student was. If the student had taken to time to show this gentleman Linux and what it could do then maybe things would have gone differently. Some how in my mind I see this...
Teacher: What are you running on that notebook?
Student: It's Linux you dumb old fart.
or something of that nature.
Gee you think.
But it does make the zealots feel better.
A much better way would be to point out that Linux is now being used to run many of the worlds fastest computers. Or inform her that companies like Google, and Amazon user Linux. So many ways to have been positive and tried to turn it around.
No need to bring in Microsoft or the Unions.
But it is so much easier to preach to the choir. You get the admiration of those that already agree with you and look cool for taking a stand.
I swear has the whole world gone stupid? Doesn't anybody care about "sharing their viewpoint" anymore. Or is more important to scream how right you are the how stupid the other person is?
Disruptive manner says it all.
Any activity in the classroom that isn't part of the teachers plan is disruptive.
Do you think it is possible to give a demonstration of Linux and had out CDs in class and not disruptive?
I mean really think about it.
So yeas she had every right to ask him to stop and take the CDs.
"Unless you are applying for a job as a unix/linux admin..."
Well I would hope that you have a better than middle school education by then.
While I am a Linux user I can see her point.
She is being paid to teach people how to use Windows and probably Office. Most computers still use Windows and most places of work still use Office. Somebody that leaves High School and goes to work will most likely need to know how to use Office and Windows.
Microsoft practically gives schools Windows and Office. The Teacher is teaching course that doesn't include Windows. I do think that this teacher made many wrong choices but I can also see her reason. I think that schools should encourage kids to push past the class limits as long as they don't disrupt the class.
One I don't believe a word of it unless you are at the wost school school on the planet. Anybody teaching networking would know what the heck Unix is unless he has been thrust into that job with no background.
And if he really is between 60-70 good for him. When he was your age networking was totally unknown. Heck if really is 70 then when he was 20 transistors where the hot thing.
The truth is if your story was in the least part true then what we have is a failure to educate. If someone teaching a networking class doesn't know what Linux is then the community really needs to work harder educating people about.
For older computer people just point them to the Linux section of IBMs website should be a good start to show that it isn't for "hackers".
Man I miss the days when hacker was a positive term.
He is right that there isn't a free lunch.
Someone did pay for Linux and other FOSS to be developed. Sometimes it is a company like IBM, sometimes it is the tax payers of some nation for things like the NSA security additions to Linux.
And yes Linux and a lot of FOSS is worth money. So yes using Free software is a ripe off.
If you don't donate code, money, or documentation to any project that you use then you are ripping off the developers.
The thing is that most developers are okay with it. Now the people that crab but don't contribute... Well they suck.
I can't say but expect to see them stop popping in a year or two. Wind and solar still have one huge problem. They can not be throttled. If you to through a period of low wind which can happen your have no incoming power. Also if the winds get to high your out of power as well. Solar is at least more predictable. Your out put will drop all winter and drop to zero at night. You will also have problems with summer storms in your area which are less predictable. Sure wind is growing fast going from zero gives you a huge growth curve but I doubt that you will ever see wind get above 20%. But back to your issues with nuclear. You have only one reactor in Iowa and it is providing +10% of your power. It is a small reactor at that. Add in that it is over 30 years old tech. You could replace 100% of all your power plants with just five new reactors. You would have zero carbon emissions and a proven solution. I am all for Solar but I am very skeptical on wind still but sure develop that as well. Every little bit helps I feel. The thing is simply without a major breakthrough in power storage they will only be supplemental.
Nuclear is only supplemental because of political silliness. When was the last Nuclear power plant in Iowa built?
As I said where has wind and or solar EVER reached even 40%? Only asking for half of what nuclear has managed already. Guess what I know someone that works for a company that has been building wind farms. They are stopping because of issues with infrastructure.
Nuclear is only supplemental in Iowa but it still is a lot bigger percentage than wind.
Wow 8? hummm I would call that supplemental. Let's take a look at France. They get well over 80 percent from nuclear. Not only that but the export power to the UK, Germany, and Italy.
So does ANY industrialized country get close to even 40 percent of their power from wind and or solar?
So I would say that your power company has only managed "supplemental" at best.
Not at all.
nuclear works, is safe, and clean.
Solar and wind have never worked as more of a supplement and we have been trying since the 70s.
I am all for more research into solar and wind and using it as a supplement. But I wouldn't use groundless fears and miss information from letting me use a power source that works well and is proven. Yes I live near a nuclear power plant.
BTW Three Mile Island didn't kill a single person and Chernobyl can not happen to any US commercial reactor because they are of a totally different design.
The problem is that electric cars have the economic pressure.
Watch how oil has dropped. Say hello to SUVs and good buy the fuel efficient cars.
Gas is back being cheap and people have short memories.
I knew a person that had an electric car... In 1974!
Electric cars will be dead soon until the next price spike. The difference is that it will take an even longer spike before companies are willing to invest in alternative energy after the beating they take this time around.
This isn't my hope but just past experience.
People do things they don't enjoy for two reason.
1. Reward.
2. fear of punishment.
What I am saying is that FOSS will never completely replace closed source. Just as closed source can not destroy FOSS.
There will always be both. I for one think that is a good thing. Because if for no other reason than the Closes source applications I deal with pay my bills and about 50 other peoples along with health insurance and 401Ks.
Closed source isn't strictly the domain of the mega corp but of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small companies.
But if you think that you can do a better job then I suggest that you find a vertical market and start writing code. See just how well it works and just how much work it is to produce some of these programs.
1. She had 17" monitor at the time.
2. Since when do programmers decide what hardware people get?
I looked at that page and I saw mainly malware not viruses per say. Also if you look a good number of them are not even for OS/X some are for System 6.
It does look like there are some threats but they are pretty few and far it would seem.
Well I found this http://www.linux.com/feature/119025
If the information is accurate then I would say pretty good.
Wow that is well into the tinfoil hat area. What viruses are their for OS/X? What current exploits are out for it.
I really don't buy into there are but they are secret.
I mean is there? Anti-virus programs work by looking for specific code. If that code doesn't exists yet what does it look for? Windows viruses?
What I don't understand is why more people are not using JFS?
It has good performance, it is stable, and it supports very large file systems.
Seems like a good choice for many people.
That is interesting. I have not seen that kind of error in forever. I did put that kind of error into one of our in house programs intentionally.
We had a clerical person that kept putting their machine into 640x480 so she could have big letters on the screen. Well my program just couldn't work well in that small of a screen. No matter how many times we told her to just pick a bigger font she wouldn't do it.
So I got tired of her complaining about my program so I just put in a check and the program put up an error message if the screen wasn't at least 800x600 and refused to run.
She never seemed to get it that I made the program do it but she obeyed and set her screen to a better resolution.
Well sort of kinda of.
Most FOSS projects really get very little in the way contributions from outside sources. Most depend on a small core for 99% of the work. The bigger the project the harder it is for people to contribute. Smaller projects don't get a whole lot outside help at all to be honest. The you have the problem of attracting talent to your project. Not many good programmers will donate their time to dull project like say a U-Storage management program or one to run a gift shop.
Then you have to deal with who will manage and judge the code. For a lot of small businesses they just want a solution. And what a lot of people don't understand is a lot of the closed source vertical market software companies are anything but mega corps.
Most are small companies like the one I work for. We are a "big" vertical market developer. We have less the 35 people working here. Most of them are support techs. They get health insurance and 401ks. If we released our main product a FOSS all that would happen is that people wouldn't pay anything and we would go out of business. There was one FOSS project that was in our market. We even gave them documentation of all the file formats we had and interface protocols.
It failed to produce anything usable.
FOSS is great but I don't think it will ever replace traditional closed source software in every market.
"Honestly, the more it costs, the worse it appears to be in quality ...)"
Not really. Your looking at the per seat price.
Let's take two examples. One is a program for managing say a U-Storage location vs Office.
The U-Storage vendor might charge $2000 for their program while Office costs say $295.
The U-Storage software vendor might sell 200 a year. Microsoft will sell what? Make it a million so the Math is easy.
So the total cost of Office to the Planet is $295,000,000 while "expensive" vertical cost only $400,000. That might seem like a lot but then you have to think about marketing, paying the Programming staff, and support costs which will be much higher per customer for the vertical.
That expensive is software is actually very cheap when you look at the that way.
That is the advantage of boxware. Buy charging for every copy you can spread out the cost of development.
Well I would guess most server users will not be doing a CPU upgrade. But for the OEMs it is great. You have a new SKU with just a change of CPU. Does Intel even have a server version of the Nehalem yet?
You also only kind of hinted at the ease of migration. All that the OEMs need to do to introduce the Shanghai is to put it in the socket. with the I7 family it they will need to move to a new motherboard as well. For manufactures this will be a big win since for may buyers it will be seen as a nice safe evolutionary change. The one thing that worries the server market is big changes. It is all about stability.
I tend to agree but there are some trends that will use more CPU.
HD-Video editing. You can buy a digital camera that will shoot 720p video for all of $150. Editing and transcodeing video takes CPU time.
Gaming is the huge question. The consoles often make more sense for gaming but I think people will always want to play games on their PCs.
Then you have speech input. That can always use more CPU power.
So we may not be at good enough yet but I think we are getting very close.
"In addition, the open source IT staff seem to just want to constantly be changing everything when something newer and flashier comes out (read that as closer to functionality to a purchased project). In one year we have had 3 different email servers, with the associated problems of swapping over."
That is just a bad IT department or changing requirements.
Most of the problems you are speaking about has more to do with a failure of leadership. We use a FOSS mailserver. Over the last few years we have changed once. Sendmail to Qmail and that is it.