Archtechturally, it was good. The problem with it wasn't that the idea was bad, it's implementation was shoddy- and, in that, I don't mean the chip itself, I mean things like a 33 MHz Front-Side bus really, really hamstrung it. In reality, AMD's still flogging the next generation version of this design with many, but not all the implementational flaws removed from it- you're probably familiar with the Geode GX and LX CPU options from AMD. If you've seen a design with one of those, you've seen the MediaGX in it's latest incarnation. No, it's not a gaming powerhouse, but it really never was intended to fill that role.
All depends on what they provide in the way of PCI/PCI-X cards- or whatever the future buses might be...
I'd say that odds are good you'd get about the same number of media interfaces and what you didn't have would very probably have a media adapter or bridge that's standalone to take care of the gaps.
You're 100% correct. And better yet, there's things looming on the horizon that few know about.
But hey, this IS/., so those proclaimations are dime a dozen. But I strongly suspect that I'll have some decent pull now on the driver front (LGP- I'm sure ATI can be convinced to fix things so I'm not sitting here twiddling my thumbs on mostly 2D only game ports because the stupid driver on my laptop doesn't perform worth spit...) and in 4-7 weeks, things are very likely to get MUCH more interesting for all parties involved- and I'll have a bigger impact on these sorts of things. (Again, this IS/., so I'm not even going to expect you to believe a single thing I'm typing here because talking out one's behind IS the norm here...but I'll re-iterate, things look like they're about to change very rapidly.)
No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).
"Academic purposes" means non-commercial teaching, research, and personal experimentation while attending or employed by an accredited educational institution. Academic purposes expressly excludes commercial uses.
Ths modifies all the above. It means unless you're under this category specifically, you don't have a license for the items you mentioned.
Unfortunately, "locker talk" is not what you allow to be published like this. It's not at all appropriate for a CX0 crowd individual of a company to comport himself like this in front of the press or elsewhere. It ranks right on up there with Ballmer throwing chairs (Just like the tags on this news item would indicate...)
It's very indicative of the company's attitude as a whole- really, it is.
Stability and security are necessities to a successful business. I think we learned that in Jr. High.
Yeah, and I think some of the people out there un-learned it during the studies for their MBA degree. No, I don't think that an MBA is imnical to things or that it's the root cause of all of this- hell, I'm getting an MBA first and then going back to finish my MSCS because of what I'm ending up doing in my life these days. But I do think that there's a lot of goings on that just run counter to sustainability that are going on that are very similar to the 1920's- disturbingly so. We've got a bunch of people doing whatever it takes to ensure stock valuations stay high, solely for the benefit of the "shareholders", never once thinking about what the value is going to be to them in one year's timeframe. Never once thinking about the valuation being more of an ephemeral thing, meaning the sale price of the stock and that it's not the quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even the daily valuation that you need to concern yourself with. If you're doing that, you're not worrying about the valuation of the company for the shareholders, because you're catering to the people that are selling your stock or short-selling it to make a profit- basically manipulating things or gambling on things so that they'll be richer. It doesn't actually HELP the shareholders when you do that- especially if you're selling off the future to get the current valuation. Many of the companies out there are doing this, helping improve the value of company for the share-sellers, not worrying about keeping the company afloat and doing well.
I just hope we have enough regulations, etc. in place to prevent another Black Monday. We're heading for it otherwise if we don't adjust some of our business practices with respect to the stock market- and I just don't see this mess changing until several more millions of people are impacted by another Enron, Tyco, or WorldCom. And with no care or concern of the consequences of their actions save the bottom line in the short term it's just going to keep happening and happening time and and time again.
It's still a damn concern. If you're placing work there, shouldn't it be relatively stable?
The only reason it's risen to this position in the IT industry is that they're adequate in many situations and they're cheap. No concerns whatsoever were being applied to whether or not the whole project would go up in flames because of a terrorist bombing over there or not.
Sure, it can happen here. It can happen anywhere, in all honesty, so long as there's people willing to commit terroristic acts. It's just that it's slightly less likely to happen here in the States and a few other relatively stable places right now. Outsourcing isn't about business, per se, it's about greed and trying to eke out the very last dollar to show profitability to the Street, LSE and other places like it.
It's no more sustainable than strip mining is. And considerations about how easy it would be for someone to do this should be factored in, right along with the risks of IP theft, confidential data leakage, etc. But very few doing the outsourcing stuff think of anything but that bottom line cost- I know, I've seen it repeatedly. And it's very disturbing. I've a client with some important financial services software that went and had his Java codebase for the program "cleaned up" by a Russian firm. For all I know, they did a good job, but since the nature of the program requires a trusted state, much like any system handling classified data, the codebase in it's entirity is going to require an audit for backdoors, etc. He is going to spend roughly 2/3rds of his "savings" in paying me to go back through and audit the codebase for security reasons- IF he's lucky, it will be all he'll spend on this escipade. I'm betting that there will be things that will positively need to be re-worked as they almost always do in these outsource projects. This will mean a net loss over what he'd have spent just contracting with a company with a security bond, accreditation, etc.
For many things, offshoring doesn't make any sense whatsoever. This is not to say that it is precluded or that they can't produce usable results. It's that people keep seeing those dollars "saved" and never once looking at what the consequences that are also associated with that price. It's damned well about time that we all do.
If you weren't commercial, they were WRONG telling you that you couldn't do it...
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Please note that subsection C explicitly allows it if you're non-commercial. As best as I can tell, you weren't commercial (were you?)- if not, the Free-DOS people steered you wrong and they should have boned up on the license they chose before complaining about "violations" of the terms.
(I'm sure you're trolling, but it needs to be said...yet again...)
The answer would be: Use whatever license you want. You are NOT obligated to provide online distribution of the sources you used to make the binary image. You are obligated to provide some sort of access upon request for three years from the first distibution of the binary image in question. Big fundamental difference between that and what was presented by everyone so far.
I honestly can't see worrying about this- it's NOT hard to comply with the license terms. Keep a CD set or DVD set of the source code you used to arrive at the distribution- keep it somewhere safe. When someone asks for it in writing either via email or snail mail, you tell them it will be $X for the trouble of burning a copy of the disc sets and that you'd be more than happy to oblige upon reciept of the request combined with the needed handling fee. Typically, it can be as much as $30-40 for a large source repository.
Some will take you up on it. Some won't.
But it's completely in compliance with the terms of the GPL license grant. You don't have to make it available online- it's just that it's easier and more convienent for the major distributions to make it available that way because the infrastructure and bandwidth is already in place for it and it's actually cheaper in the long run because they're not fielding the manual process described above. But for it to be cheaper you've got to have it all in place like Fedora Core, Debian, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, and others already have...
Yes and no... They're releasing something remotely innovative- and quite a few non-kiddie style titles; unfortunately they're almost all sports titles (But then, this IS EA we're talking about here...).
EA could go out on a limb and not spew more silly Madden, etc. titles- but I guess I shouldn't be too upset, they're taking the Wii seriously; seriously enough to put major titles, some of the big ones of the year supposedly, on the platform out of the gate. If the other publishers and studios are on the same page, this is going to get interesting for the very reasons that people are saying Nintendo's back in the Saddle again- low price, decent performance, and as good or better titles for less cost overall. If I were Sony I'd be sweating bullets right now and I'd be a little nervous if I were Bill and Co. They've overpriced themselves and the HD capabilities aren't as compelling as they'd hoped- more of an albatross because you now have to spend about $1000 above and beyond the $400-600 you had to spend on the silly console on an HD monitor, just to take real advantage of the console.
I HAVE seen stuff that works in 98 that doesn't in XP- typically involves VxD's, etc. Your mileage may vary but your experience counts only for just that- experience.
As to the software training aspect you mention- if you're having to "relearn" things, you never really mastered the use of it in the first place; you're operating by rote and you're going to have problems each and every time MS "updates" the os and apps. That's a plain and simple fact of life- and what most proponents of Windows that bring up this as a reason (like yourself) keep omiting because it's below the radar for you- it's just how things are to you and it doesn't register that you're still doing the same effort you'd have done to switch to another OS over time.
Yes, he's still making games...
on
Romero's New Gig
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The mobile games company only really flopped because the platform wasn't suitable for gaming like he thought it would be. When the money didn't come in quite like he'd hoped for, Monkeystone was put largely bed (The site's still there and you can download the PocketPC and PC demos of the titles he did ship under the Monkeystone name, but there's no product info under the products tab, nor any way to buy the titles at this time from the site...)- you can still get the Linux iteration of Hyperspace Delivery Boy from Linux Game Publishing through Tux Games' online store. He did deliver on the initial title and it's a fun, playable, if slightly simple game like you might find on a GBA. Which, is what he'd officially sought to accomplish with it and the Monkeystone studio.
One hopes he learned from each of the experiences of Daikatana and Monkeystone and that this pass at doing things will do as well as DooM did for him.
It's also unfortunate that the Second Law of Thermodynamics keeps getting quoted for this.
The Second Law is stated as follows:
The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.
If you draw the box big enough, it's an isolated system. A windmill's not perpetual motion. Nor does it violate the second law. Why? Because it's not an isolated system. By itself, it's an overunity device, meaning it generates more energy/work than was input into it to produce the energy/work- it is pulling in the energy from outside the system of the windmil in the form of air motion caused by the thermodynamics of the Earth itself.. Read that carefuly. Read the second law quote carefuly. By itself, it's box is not an isolated system. A Casimir Force experiment produces net force from ZPE- physics knows this much. It's much like the windmill. What the original article was indicating was that this force producing source of energy (Much like the Windmill in nature) was much larger than originally thought. Can we tap it like we tap the thermodynamic processes of the Earth with a Windmill? Who knows?
Is what you stated precisely and unequivocably correct? I'm not sure, but the odds are that it isn't based on the above statement which has experimental and theoretical backing in traditional Physics.
Business owner buys 10 Dells at $500 apiece Business owner spends days of downtime trying to learn XP, which is different enough from 98 to cause issues. Business owner spends days of downtime trying to defend against the latest spyware, etc. Business owner spends days of downtime trying to ensure all apps work with XP (Not all 98 apps will work there).
In reality, they will do #2, but it's no more rosy that #1- and there will be many businesses that have been wanting to get off that Windows ride because they've been following how much money, etc. it actually has been costing them. Things have reached a threshold where it's really more of a push costs-wise to switch to one or the other (And, it would be a switch even in the case of XP or Vista (Especially Vista...))
Many physicists claim that, yes, there's such a thing as ZPE. What they don't agree upon is that it's tappable- that the net available energy is usable and that it's very probably sumable to zero. I've not RTFA yet, but I suspect that all of this hullabaloo is about the fact that either we need to rework our Physics models of the universe (yet again...), or account for what appears to be a "small" but potentially measureable amount of net positive energy available out of the vacuum as Physics defines it- at least that would explain the writeup we got out of this and why it's "news". Now, whether or not we can tap this energy or safely use it (Hey, that'd be tapping into the wheelworks- we've NO idea what that'd do to reality as we know it...)- I suspect that he doesn't go into that but that would be what the ZPE researchers (legitimate AND crackpot...) are trying to find out.
You can bet your bottom dollar that they'll be trying it here next. Whether they get a similar ruling over here or not remains to be seen, but just because it's not happened yet over here doesn't mean it won't.
1) The thing slowing down the PC isn't the local hardware. 2) The network pipe has to be well in excess of a gigabit per second to be faster than the hardware. 3) The author has NO clue about what he's really on about.
Nifty trick, that- problem is, like the Great Firewall of China, it has the potential of collateral damage. That guy in the linked article was just lucky that nobody needed anything more than DNS mediated web surfing. It's a hack, and naught else.
Reliability and consistency is first on my mind, followed up by speed.
Unless MS Office is a standard in the same sense as ODF now is, it's not as useful to me as ODF can be. MS Office is only a standard in the sense that "everybody uses it"- here's a clue for you: not everybody does.
I don't. I don't send editable documents to people with formatting unless I'm needing their editing input in the first place. I send PDF or PS files to people when I need a formally formatted and printer ready document to go to people. Yes, MS Office is smaller. Yes, even ODF is smaller. What most people don't get is that it's less likely for someone to catch a Macro Trojan/Worm off of PDF files and they're honestly what you see is what you get- with an MS Office document, it's not guaranteed if you use a font they don't have on their machine- same goes with OpenOffice.
If it doesn't need formatting- it probably ought to be sent as a text email/file. If it does, and doesn't need editing, it probably needed to be sent as a PDF or similar. If it needs editing, you might want to consider something secure, something portable. MS Office formats are neither and can probably be said to not be so because they're little more than COM structured document stores.
Okay, you apply the required fix, which means stateful monitoring of packet traffic. Now, instead of a light duty machine monitoring the traffic and issuing connection resets to both sides when it sees a problem item in the content, you now need a massive cluster of machines with load balancing, etc. that will slow down connectivity because it now has to at least keep track of state within itself, more probably act as an intermediary.
They'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get there and still miss the target. What they did was clever and cheap comparatively speaking, but it's highly vulnerable to attack once someone figured out how they did it- and it really wasn't a firewall in any normal sense of the word. Doing it the "right" way for a company's one thing- doing it for a country with many OC256's worth of bandwidth is another altogether.
It might be "chump change", but it seriously eats the daily profits of the company all the same (As in the damn fine eats approximately 1/20th of the profits per day...)- and ultimately they're answerable to the shareholders. They could have avoided this drag on profits- which is what is going to be the only thing they're going to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Archtechturally, it was good. The problem with it wasn't that the idea was bad, it's implementation
was shoddy- and, in that, I don't mean the chip itself, I mean things like a 33 MHz Front-Side bus
really, really hamstrung it. In reality, AMD's still flogging the next generation version of this
design with many, but not all the implementational flaws removed from it- you're probably familiar
with the Geode GX and LX CPU options from AMD. If you've seen a design with one of those, you've
seen the MediaGX in it's latest incarnation. No, it's not a gaming powerhouse, but it really never
was intended to fill that role.
All depends on what they provide in the way of PCI/PCI-X cards- or whatever the future buses might be...
I'd say that odds are good you'd get about the same number of media interfaces and what you didn't
have would very probably have a media adapter or bridge that's standalone to take care of the gaps.
You're 100% correct. And better yet, there's things looming on the horizon that few know about.
/., so those proclaimations are dime a dozen. But I strongly suspect that I'll /., so I'm not even going to expect you to believe a single thing I'm typing here
But hey, this IS
have some decent pull now on the driver front (LGP- I'm sure ATI can be convinced to fix things
so I'm not sitting here twiddling my thumbs on mostly 2D only game ports because the stupid driver
on my laptop doesn't perform worth spit...) and in 4-7 weeks, things are very likely to get MUCH
more interesting for all parties involved- and I'll have a bigger impact on these sorts of things.
(Again, this IS
because talking out one's behind IS the norm here...but I'll re-iterate, things look like they're
about to change very rapidly.)
No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd
have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).
Ths modifies all the above. It means unless you're under this category specifically, you don't have a license for the items you mentioned.
Unfortunately, "locker talk" is not what you allow to be published like this. It's
not at all appropriate for a CX0 crowd individual of a company to comport himself
like this in front of the press or elsewhere. It ranks right on up there with
Ballmer throwing chairs (Just like the tags on this news item would indicate...)
It's very indicative of the company's attitude as a whole- really, it is.
Yeah, and I think some of the people out there un-learned it during the studies for their MBA degree.
No, I don't think that an MBA is imnical to things or that it's the root cause of all of this- hell,
I'm getting an MBA first and then going back to finish my MSCS because of what I'm ending up doing
in my life these days. But I do think that there's a lot of goings on that just run counter to
sustainability that are going on that are very similar to the 1920's- disturbingly so. We've got a
bunch of people doing whatever it takes to ensure stock valuations stay high, solely for the benefit
of the "shareholders", never once thinking about what the value is going to be to them in one year's
timeframe. Never once thinking about the valuation being more of an ephemeral thing, meaning the
sale price of the stock and that it's not the quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even the daily valuation
that you need to concern yourself with. If you're doing that, you're not worrying about the valuation
of the company for the shareholders, because you're catering to the people that are selling
your stock or short-selling it to make a profit- basically manipulating things or gambling on things
so that they'll be richer. It doesn't actually HELP the shareholders when you do that- especially
if you're selling off the future to get the current valuation. Many of the companies out there
are doing this, helping improve the value of company for the share-sellers, not worrying about keeping
the company afloat and doing well.
I just hope we have enough regulations, etc. in place to prevent another Black Monday. We're heading
for it otherwise if we don't adjust some of our business practices with respect to the stock market- and
I just don't see this mess changing until several more millions of people are impacted by another Enron,
Tyco, or WorldCom. And with no care or concern of the consequences of their actions save the bottom line
in the short term it's just going to keep happening and happening time and and time again.
It's still a damn concern. If you're placing work there, shouldn't it be relatively stable?
The only reason it's risen to this position in the IT industry is that they're adequate in
many situations and they're cheap. No concerns whatsoever were being applied to whether or
not the whole project would go up in flames because of a terrorist bombing over there or not.
Sure, it can happen here. It can happen anywhere, in all honesty, so long as there's people
willing to commit terroristic acts. It's just that it's slightly less likely to happen here
in the States and a few other relatively stable places right now. Outsourcing isn't about
business, per se, it's about greed and trying to eke out the very last dollar to show profitability
to the Street, LSE and other places like it.
It's no more sustainable than strip mining is. And considerations about how easy it would
be for someone to do this should be factored in, right along with the risks of IP theft,
confidential data leakage, etc. But very few doing the outsourcing stuff think of anything
but that bottom line cost- I know, I've seen it repeatedly. And it's very disturbing. I've
a client with some important financial services software that went and had his Java codebase
for the program "cleaned up" by a Russian firm. For all I know, they did a good job, but
since the nature of the program requires a trusted state, much like any system handling
classified data, the codebase in it's entirity is going to require an audit for backdoors, etc.
He is going to spend roughly 2/3rds of his "savings" in paying me to go back through and
audit the codebase for security reasons- IF he's lucky, it will be all he'll spend on this
escipade. I'm betting that there will be things that will positively need to be re-worked
as they almost always do in these outsource projects. This will mean a net loss
over what he'd have spent just contracting with a company with a security bond, accreditation,
etc.
For many things, offshoring doesn't make any sense whatsoever. This is not to say that it
is precluded or that they can't produce usable results. It's that people keep seeing those
dollars "saved" and never once looking at what the consequences that are also associated
with that price. It's damned well about time that we all do.
(I'm sure you're trolling, but it needs to be said...yet again...)
The answer would be: Use whatever license you want. You are NOT obligated to provide online distribution
of the sources you used to make the binary image. You are obligated to provide some sort of access upon
request for three years from the first distibution of the binary image in question. Big fundamental
difference between that and what was presented by everyone so far.
I honestly can't see worrying about this- it's NOT hard to comply with the license terms. Keep a CD set
or DVD set of the source code you used to arrive at the distribution- keep it somewhere safe. When someone
asks for it in writing either via email or snail mail, you tell them it will be $X for the trouble of
burning a copy of the disc sets and that you'd be more than happy to oblige upon reciept of the request
combined with the needed handling fee. Typically, it can be as much as $30-40 for a large source repository.
Some will take you up on it. Some won't.
But it's completely in compliance with the terms of the GPL license grant. You don't have to make it
available online- it's just that it's easier and more convienent for the major distributions to make
it available that way because the infrastructure and bandwidth is already in place for it and it's
actually cheaper in the long run because they're not fielding the manual process described above. But
for it to be cheaper you've got to have it all in place like Fedora Core, Debian, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu,
Slackware, Gentoo, and others already have...
Yes and no... They're releasing something remotely innovative- and quite a few non-kiddie style titles; unfortunately they're almost all sports titles (But then, this IS EA we're talking about here...).
EA could go out on a limb and not spew more silly Madden, etc. titles- but I guess I shouldn't be too upset, they're taking the Wii seriously; seriously enough to put major titles, some of the big ones of the year supposedly, on the platform out of the gate. If the other publishers and studios are on the same page, this is going to get interesting for the very reasons that people are saying Nintendo's back in the Saddle again- low price, decent performance, and as good or better titles for less cost overall. If I were Sony I'd be sweating bullets right now and I'd be a little nervous if I were Bill and Co. They've overpriced themselves and the HD capabilities aren't as compelling as they'd hoped- more of an albatross because you now have to spend about $1000 above and beyond the $400-600 you had to spend on the silly console on an HD monitor, just to take real advantage of the console.
It just doesn't make much sense.
Is that anything like a Crack Ho?
I HAVE seen stuff that works in 98 that doesn't in XP- typically involves VxD's, etc. Your mileage may vary
but your experience counts only for just that- experience.
As to the software training aspect you mention- if you're having to "relearn" things, you never really
mastered the use of it in the first place; you're operating by rote and you're going to have problems
each and every time MS "updates" the os and apps. That's a plain and simple fact of life- and what
most proponents of Windows that bring up this as a reason (like yourself) keep omiting because it's
below the radar for you- it's just how things are to you and it doesn't register that you're still doing
the same effort you'd have done to switch to another OS over time.
The mobile games company only really flopped because the platform wasn't
suitable for gaming like he thought it would be. When the money didn't
come in quite like he'd hoped for, Monkeystone was put largely bed
(The site's still there and you can download the PocketPC and PC demos
of the titles he did ship under the Monkeystone name, but there's no
product info under the products tab, nor any way to buy the titles
at this time from the site...)- you can still get the Linux iteration
of Hyperspace Delivery Boy from Linux Game Publishing through Tux Games'
online store. He did deliver on the initial title and it's a fun,
playable, if slightly simple game like you might find on a GBA. Which,
is what he'd officially sought to accomplish with it and the Monkeystone
studio.
One hopes he learned from each of the experiences of Daikatana and Monkeystone
and that this pass at doing things will do as well as DooM did for him.
The Second Law is stated as follows:
If you draw the box big enough, it's an isolated system. A windmill's not perpetual motion. Nor does it violate the second law.
Why? Because it's not an isolated system. By itself, it's an overunity device, meaning it generates more energy/work than was
input into it to produce the energy/work- it is pulling in the energy from outside the system of the windmil in the form of air
motion caused by the thermodynamics of the Earth itself.. Read that carefuly. Read the second law quote carefuly. By itself,
it's box is not an isolated system. A Casimir Force experiment produces net force from ZPE- physics knows this much. It's much
like the windmill. What the original article was indicating was that this force producing source of energy (Much like the Windmill
in nature) was much larger than originally thought. Can we tap it like we tap the thermodynamic processes of the Earth with a
Windmill? Who knows?
Is what you stated precisely and unequivocably correct? I'm not sure, but the odds are that it isn't based on the above statement
which has experimental and theoretical backing in traditional Physics.
Secenerio 2:
Business owner buys 10 Dells at $500 apiece
Business owner spends days of downtime trying to learn XP, which is different enough from 98 to cause issues.
Business owner spends days of downtime trying to defend against the latest spyware, etc.
Business owner spends days of downtime trying to ensure all apps work with XP (Not all 98 apps will work there).
In reality, they will do #2, but it's no more rosy that #1- and there will be many businesses
that have been wanting to get off that Windows ride because they've been following how much
money, etc. it actually has been costing them. Things have reached a threshold where it's
really more of a push costs-wise to switch to one or the other (And, it would be a switch even
in the case of XP or Vista (Especially Vista...))
If you're spending hundreds of hours relearning, you never really mastered the Windows side
of the equation- you're operating by rote.
And then the networking will have to still catch up...
Many physicists claim that, yes, there's such a thing as ZPE. What they don't
agree upon is that it's tappable- that the net available energy
is usable and that it's very probably sumable to zero. I've not RTFA yet, but
I suspect that all of this hullabaloo is about the fact that either we need to
rework our Physics models of the universe (yet again...), or account for what appears
to be a "small" but potentially measureable amount of net positive energy available
out of the vacuum as Physics defines it- at least that would explain the writeup
we got out of this and why it's "news". Now, whether or not we can tap this energy
or safely use it (Hey, that'd be tapping into the wheelworks- we've NO idea what
that'd do to reality as we know it...)- I suspect that he doesn't go into that
but that would be what the ZPE researchers (legitimate AND crackpot...) are trying
to find out.
You can bet your bottom dollar that they'll be trying it here next. Whether they get a similar
ruling over here or not remains to be seen, but just because it's not happened yet over here
doesn't mean it won't.
1) The thing slowing down the PC isn't the local hardware.
2) The network pipe has to be well in excess of a gigabit per second to be faster than the hardware.
3) The author has NO clue about what he's really on about.
Nifty trick, that- problem is, like the Great Firewall of China, it has the potential of collateral damage. That guy in the linked article was just lucky that nobody needed anything more than DNS mediated web surfing. It's a hack, and naught else.
Reliability and consistency is first on my mind, followed up by speed.
Unless MS Office is a standard in the same sense as ODF now is, it's not as useful to me as ODF can be.
MS Office is only a standard in the sense that "everybody uses it"- here's a clue for you: not everybody does.
I don't. I don't send editable documents to people with formatting unless I'm needing
their editing input in the first place. I send PDF or PS files to people when I need a formally formatted
and printer ready document to go to people. Yes, MS Office is smaller. Yes, even ODF is smaller. What most people don't get is that it's less likely for someone to catch a Macro Trojan/Worm off of PDF files and they're honestly what you see is what you get- with an MS Office document, it's not guaranteed if you use a font they don't have on their machine- same goes with OpenOffice.
If it doesn't need formatting- it probably ought to be sent as a text email/file. If it does, and doesn't need editing, it probably needed to be sent as a PDF or similar. If it needs editing, you might want to consider something secure, something portable. MS Office formats are neither and can probably be said to not be so because they're little more than COM structured document stores.
Okay, you apply the required fix, which means stateful monitoring of packet traffic. Now, instead of a light duty machine monitoring the traffic and issuing connection resets to both sides when it sees a problem item in the content, you now need a massive cluster of machines with load balancing, etc. that will slow down connectivity because it now has to at least keep track of state within itself, more probably act as an intermediary.
They'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get there and still miss the target. What they did was clever and cheap comparatively speaking, but it's highly vulnerable to attack once someone figured out how they did it- and it really wasn't a firewall in any normal sense of the word. Doing it the "right" way for a company's one thing- doing it for a country with many OC256's worth of bandwidth is another altogether.
It might be "chump change", but it seriously eats the daily profits of the company all the same (As in the damn fine eats approximately 1/20th of the profits per day...)- and ultimately they're answerable to the shareholders. They could have avoided this drag on profits- which is what is going to be the only thing they're going to see.