Uh, of course, I blinked and missed that residential VoiP is already here. Yeee ha!
The TWIF-IP adaptor bundled with this service supports two analog 'phones. Whee. Now picture one that'll talk to any DSL or cable uplink, has a 10/100 switched hub supporting 8 IP devices ('phones, PC's, NAS) with a DHCP server built in, that supports 6 analog devices ('phone, fax, trunks), any number of PC screenphones, that has a fully featured call control that provides any service you could imagine (and quite a few that you've never dreamed of), stores 10Gb of voicemail, and supports full RAS services (i.e. you can dial in to your home, then hop out from there, like a mini-ISP), all with a multi-lingual web based front end that you can access locally or remotely over IP or diallup. You want one? You know you do.;-) You can't get one yet at retail, but give us another 18 months for the telco's to saturate their SME's with these, and you might see a version hitting retail.
I work on voice over IP telephony products, and I think that the market is ready to switch (pun intended).
SME's are figuring out that they can use their DSL lines to make net calls and video conferencing, and they're starting to ask (big time) exactly why they're paying per minute to make voice calls. And telcos are listening, and worrying.
There is a huge demand at the low end for true all-in-one products that encorporate an ethernet switch, DSL uplinks, a firewall and web server, handle IP-to-IP calls as well as IP-TDM, TWIF, ISDN (yuk), voicemail, door answer, that come with web browsing hardware phones and PC softphones and value added applications like videoconferencing. You would not believe the amount of software and hardware that we have in our current product; think 128Mb RAM, 128Mb compact flash, a 10 GB hard drive and a PCB that would make your head spin, in what's traditionally been a market for small (embedded devices.
And we're not developing this stuff simply because it's fun; there's a real demand from SME's for it. Initially we intended selling these boxes at retail (unheard of for a full featured telecomms switch); we've backed off from that now, simply because telco's are so keen to sell them as part of packages, because they know that if they don't, we will sell them at retail, and they'll lose a stack of voice money.
Note that the features that we enjoy today on residential lines - caller ID, call waiting, three party, callback - all came out of SME private branch exchanges. Telcos just realised that they could make extra money selling them to residential customers as well. They'll dig their heels in (hard) to stop us moving from TDM calls to VoiP, but - bearing in mind that once your call hits the local exchange, it hops to an IP backbone anyway - they can't hold out forever. Sooner or later, a residential provider will crack and start offering realistic VoiP to the home, and then all the rulebooks get ripped up. Roll on the day!
That is, the biggest real, practical problems with computers in schools have to do with: Set up, installation, maintenance. &&
Training (not the kids, but the teachers)
Very insightful. You can put together a room of machines from Win95 to WinXP, and they all look and act pretty much the same. The GUI and interface varies, but the basics of network setup and application installation is "learn once, apply anywhere".
Now throw a linux box in there, and it pretty much doubles the required knowledge of the sysadmin. Throw in a second linux box and (oops) you raise the bar yet again, because chances are it will be set up in a completely different way from the first one.
Further to your suggestion about getting involved, I'd suggest this:
Ask their sysadmin if they have a standard Linux setup (the answer is no). Set up a Linux box to look and feel as much like a Microsoft box as possible, with KWord or OpenOffice, a decent samba setup and (e.g.) LinNetworkNeighborhood. Once you've convinced the school sysadmin that a linux box can play nice with the Windows boxen, write up a standard, with installation procedures, and donate CD's. The next time that admin gets a naked PC delivered, they'll have to decide whether to install a hooky copy of Windows, or a blessed copy of linux. Make it as easy as possible for them to pick the side of the angels.
Their statement is only true for pre-installed Windows (i.e. Dell installed it) where the license is tied to the particular PC
Well, it's not true even for that, because it says that the OS must stay with the hardware. It's a very simple, very clear, very untrue statement.
But congratulations on noting the important point. Most people seem to be missing that as far as Microsoft are concerned, all (non-Apple) PC's should be shipped with a pre-installed OS i.e. WinXP. They really don't want to be selling full retail OS's at all; ideally they'd only sell upgrades, but they grudgingly acknowledge that they can't - yet - force everyone to upgrade every time.
Further, they treat every sale of a "naked" PC as a case of theft (literally, not figuratively), and have repeatedly tried to force OEM's to rat out customers who buy naked PC's so that they can send round the local BSA/FACT stormtroopers on the basis that if you don't pay for an OEM Microsoft OS, you must be using a pirated Microsoft OS. Really.
Oddly, they neglect to mention that this also only applies to Microsoft software. What if the donated computer is a Mac?
I'll take a guess that they have an internal definition of a PC as an 80x86 machine, and that Mac's aren't PC's. Or maybe they just don't give a rat's ass.
Their statements here, while factually incorrect (what we old folks used to call "a lie") represent their ideal world view. Every PC ships with a pre-installed OEM licensed version of XP which cannot be transferred. Further, it represents their ultimate wet dream: that a Son of SSSCA/CDBPTA might very well make it illegal to remove the pre-installed Microsoft OS, let alone transfer it. All this is in addition to their major mid term goal: OS-as-a-service. Update or expire, your choice.
It's an interesting, if rather chilling, insight into the World According to Microsoft.
Patience... wait a few hours/days, and you can also catch people who buy cars from car thieves. Let's hear it for GPS.
Most states now (rightly) confiscate money received for stolen goods, but guess what your comeback is if you pay money for stolen goods? Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zip.
Think that one through. I can see a pretty good way to gut the whole stolen car industry right there, while lowering taxes through self funding police forces.
they are not requiring them to KEEP the OS, they are requiring that if you have windows 95 installed on it, and you donate the machine, you are donating your copy of windows 95 and can't use it anymore
That's not what they've said though. They've said that the OS (DOS in your example, with a GUI on top) must stay on the machine. You can't remove it. Or rather, they're saying that the school cannot accept a machine that has had the OS removed, and that they must demand all the media and license material as well.
It's an utter crock, but that's what they said. Please don't apologise for them without even doing the basic reading.
Simply requiring Internet Explorer seems odd, but since it's the default browser on both Windows and Mac OS I don't see the problem. It's not like the schools had to go out and *buy* the darn thing
Sure, because all PC's come with either Microsoft Windows or MacOS burned into the hardware. It's not as though you have to pay for them (or access to Internet Explorer), right?
Hmm, as I remember it, a couple of courts have decided otherwise.
[Toms will] show you that if you're buying a new computer, and want to play the latest games at a decent resolution and framerate, a 2 MX just isn't sufficient
Ah, fair point. However, a couple of things I should have been clearer on:
The primary use of this machine is for TV-out, which means 640x480. And at this resolution, there's little point running at maximum detail either.
Sure, if you want to run the latest games at full details, you need the latest hardware. But I'm of the mind that the best bang-per-buck comes from games that have been discounted to the 2/3 price level. A great game will be just as great (and more stable with more content) in six months time.
Basically, I'm saying that it's prohibitively expensive to try and stay at the bleeding edge of the performance curve, or to buy hardware to play any particular title. If we accept Tom's proposition that you need premium hardware to play new games at full detail, then that necessitates buying premium hardware every six months or so!
If you're prepared to lag six months behind in both hardware and games (or detail levels), then you get a lot more bang per buck. And let's never forget that most reviewers aren't paying for their hardware; I'd far rather see Tom's pick a price point and then put together the best system for that price.
Let's say he pays $150 for the 2mx now, and $150 for the 4ti later. He could also pay $300 for the 4ti now
We could say that, or we could say what I actually said, which was that the 3 (not 4) TI costs 2.5x the cost of the 2MX now, so if he buys it when it's dropped to the price of the 2MX, he saves money. We could also look at the fact that if he does it my way, he gets a spare and very usable 2MX to re-use. Further, we could understand the proposition that he can't see the jillion fps now. It's utterly irrelevant.
OK, let's assume that we do want access to government services online. Taxation, benefits, voting even. I want that. That's going to require fairly robust identity validation. Note: fairly. Right now, it's absolutely trivial to scam the benefits system, or to steal someone else's vote if you really care enough to do it. An online solution only needs to be as good as the ones we've already got, which (let's face it) aren't that great.
Further, while I'm as cynical as the next guy (if the next guy is a bitter, twisted conspiracy freak), I really doubt if any company is going to be able to buy this contract without providing a genuine solution, and most importantly, a credible promise of long term support. Not the best solution, or the cheapest solution, but a reliable solution.
So, who does that leave? Oracle, most likely. Microsoft are actually the wild card outsiders. IBM, maybe. Sun at a stretch.
Can you think of anyone else? Note that we're not talking about a development house, we're talking about a solution provider with a track record (even if it's a criminal track record) and thousands of techies available to patch and nurse the system for years ahead.
If we want the online services (and I do), we're going to have to accept that it will be a big Dark Side company that's running them.
So I suggest that in this case you don't go off at half cock writing to your elected representatives (I use both words loosely) demanding that Microsoft not be given this contract. At least not unless you can suggest a credible alternative. Perhaps the most productive thing you can do is to try and sell her on championing legislation to ensure transparency and openness in the running of the system, and most importantly, ensure that it's universally accessible, that the information is actually held in confidence, and that it's not mandatory.
I'm tempted to suggest that it follow the pattern of recent bill and be called the "Enduring Patriotic Freedom of Just Federal Freenessness Bill", that would be reverting to cynical type. So I won't.;-)
"Some"? Holy heck, welcome to the problem. I've just built a machine for my brother. An XP 1700+, 256Mb of DDR 2100 and a 64Mb GeForce 2 MX 400 with TV out. We debated hardest on the card. He wanted to go for a GeForce 3 TI to future proof himself. Here's how my reasoning went:
The 3 TI costs 2.5 x the price of the 2 MX.
Either card will push images to his (expensive) TV or (cheap) monitor as fast as it can take them for any current game.
When games come out that overstretch the 2 MX, what's the price on the 3 TI going to be? Probably about the same as the 2 MX today. By waiting a year, buying the 3 TI and binning (or donating to a needy brother, ahem) the 2 MX, he actually saves himself money. At no point will he be running a clunky game.
Logic prevailed. Oh, he still wanted the 3 TI, because game mags say it can run at a squillion fps @ 1600x1200x32, but we did manage to establish that the noticable benefit would be zero, because he doesn't have a monitor that can handle that.
I'd advise anyone else thinking of buying a high end graphics card to do this calculation. Unless you've got a 1600x1200 @ 80fps monitor, what the heck do you need a GeForce 3 or 4 TI for? Don't spend money "future proofing": all you're doing is paying a premium on hardware that will be a lot cheaper when you do find yourself needing it.
So is any Gnutella client compiled from source. Plus, the network is non proprietary, so you won't have to change clients/networks/licenses every couple of months.
Superpeering has helped give the Gnutella network a new lease of life, and there's a lot of content out there. The only problem is that asynchronous connections are taking their toll: last night I had 300+ files queued @ 0.0k/s. But that's endemic on any P2P network. Share your damn files!;-)
KaZaa wants to [use your CPU cycles]*without* telling you. That's just unacceptable
Wait... you're too lazy to even read the article that tells you that you were too lazy to read the EULA that tells you that they're going to use your CPU (and bandwidth)?
What do you need, a huge popup? Oh, wait, Brilliant are going to give you one of those as well.
There's no issue here. If you want to download a binary and not read the EULA to find out what you've just installed, you have no grounds for bitching about what you've just installed. None.
I replaced the original 6GB with a 12 and for about 2-3 months it was a quiet laptop, but now it's loud again and have to put in into sleep mode all the time
Ouch. I hadn't seen any of the 10GB+ drives go berserk. I'd hate to think it's an inherent property even on the newer ones. I guess I'll stick to Fujitsu and Toshiba. Incidentally, Linux has a wonderful application "hdparm" that gives you total control over your drive, including letting you set the spindown time to five seconds. I actually switched from Windows just for that alone. Well done, IBM.;-)
I've worked with about 10 travelstars, all of which were very quiet
Oh, I've bought plenty of quiet Travelstars, but some of them didn't stay that way for long. The screamers were all older sub 10Gb drives, the 4.8 and 6.5 being particular culprits, but they went Dark Side in a variety of laptops (and one in my own desktop). I haven't seen a newer 10GB+ one go buzzsaw, but then I only handled a few before giving up on the whole gig. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but it only takes a few irate people (mostly friends, family and coworkers) complaining about screaming Travelstars to really sour you on them, believe me.;-)
My Dell Lattitude IBM hard drive is so loud I hear it in my sleep... I don't have the money to replace it right now so I have to live with it
Ouch. I hear you. I have a laptop with a screaming Travelstar, and another two sitting on my desk, because I simply could not countenance inflicting them on anybody else. I only use my laptop for writing MS Word documents, but I installed Linux (and Wine) for one reason: hrparm. At least I can get the buzzsaw drove to spin down after 5 seconds.
In response to the poster below, yes indeed, some of them do go suddently from whisper to screaming after a few months (/years/weeks). IBM won't replace a screaming Travelstar with no other faults - believe me, I've tried. Now I'd only buy a Fujitsu or a Toshiba. Anyone who has nice things to say about a Travelstar: well, lucky you. Yours isn't screaming - yet.
notebook hard drives, since IBM's Travelstar series has a large share of the market
Which isn't necessarily a good thing. I do a bit of casual notebook trading and repair on the side, but I gave up on Travelstars recently. A lot of the older DADA < 10Gb drives were (or became) very noisy, and they failed uncomfortably frequently. The big problem though was that if you buy enough used Travelstars from eBay, then (quite apart from the stupid near new prices they can attract) you'll find an alarming number of them turn out to be failed drives that have clearly been slipped out the back door of a repair shop - including locked drives that are the devil's own work to unlock. That sort of thing goes on all the time (it's a perk of the job) but the scale I saw it happening on rather indicated that it had become endemic among IBM approved shops. Eventually I just gave up on the damn things altogther, and it's soured me on the brand. The nasty reports on the desktop drives - and worse, IBM's "not our problem" attitude - just put the nail in the coffin. Now you'd have to cut me a pretty good deal to persuade me to buy an IBM brand drive of any sort.
Well said. Ed Yourdon was the credible, sensible, plain spoken champion of the Y2K hypefest. I'm not sure if he set out deliberately and cynically to use Y2K hype to scam his way into government circles, or whether he just got caught up in it and found himself having to escalate his predictions until he couldn't back out.
Let's get this straight: Ed Yourdon predicted that Y2K would be the end of the world. He changed his mind more often than his underwear, and he was always oh so careful never to predict specifics, but he gave vastly inflated credibility to all the doom mongers, and he assumed that any Y2K ready declaration not done by an independent auditor was a smokescreen. Every tiny report of a computer failure was turned into a "probable" indicator of coming failure. He turned absense of evidence into evidence of absense when it suited him, and vice versa.
The sad part was that he suckered a lot of gullible folks in. There's still people today eating through their Y2K stocks and weeping over their lost life savings, and a smaller number grubbing around on dirt farms and hand pumping water from wells who'll grit their teeth and tell you that they thank Ed for prompting them to move to a self-sufficient subsistence lifestyle. Oh yes, this is better than relying on all those fragile modern foibles like washing machines and shops. Grind. Oh yes. Grind, grind.
Don't get me wrong, those people were responsible for their own decisions, and Ed is not a bad man. But he was wrong about Y2K. He was major league wrong, and he stubbornly clung to his position that the dominoes would start falling any day now (yeah, there's that 1950's thinking again), all through 1998 and 1999, right up to December 1999. Only in the last couple of weeks did he do a complete U-turn and backpedal and dissemble like there was going to be a tomorrow, which rather makes me think that he genuinely did believe the delusional scenarios that he was pushing to government and to anyone else that would listen. And he did admit that he was wrong shortly into 2000, but it was "OK, I was wrong, BUT..." and then he was off on a completely new tack about how he had singlehandedly save the free world by fearmongering up to the rollover, and ensuring that nobody slacked off. All praise Saint Ed.
I don't blame Ed for the misery he caused, but I do blame him for being a stubborn old fool, and for creating his own little solipsistic dreamland where the world had to end, because Ed had said it would. When it failed, it was exactly like watching a religious cult falling apart when the leader absconds with the takings from the collection plate. There are still people on his Y2K discussion board claiming that there was a Y2K catastrophe, but we didn't notice because we'd all been drugged with chemtrails.
So sure, buy and read this book if you like, but understand that Ed lost the plot about five years ago, and that anything he writes now must be treated as science fiction. Good old fashioned plain speaking science fiction, but utterly, completely untrustworthy.
In 1996 and 1997 the Radikal-case caused a lot of public upheaval, when German providers were summoned to make this specific homepage unavailable to their subscribers. The blocking was lifted twice, when it became clear how ineffective it was. Neither the Dutch nor German authorities have ever ordered XS4ALL to remove the material. On top of that, the paper publication was never forbidden in the Netherlands.
This is a nasty symptom of a modern disease. It doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, as long as you have enough money to just keep bringing lawsuits until you've exhausted the ability of your targets to defend themselves. I for one hope that Deutsche Bahn are severely bitchslapped over bringing this back to court yet again.
What's "a computer" (singular)? The "details" links are a little short. 1,400 processors, wow. How many kernels? 1? 1,400? What's the topography? Will it use resources completely dynamically, or can you split it into fixed side sub-units? If you can hot swap parts, can you turn off e.g. half of it and still feed the other half problems? Are various parts of it drawing from independend power sources? Is there a single point of control, or are there multiple master processes?
What I'm getting at is: at what point does a multiple processor "supercomputer" start to be indistinguishable from a "distributed computing network". Imagine a Beowulf cluster of SETI@home networks, for example.;-)
Thanks for noticing. It's just democracy in action: if you give a voice to everybody, you have to listen to the opinions of a lot of idiots. That's why politicians use a lot of short words. There's nothing that pisses a retard off more than a proposition that he can't quite hold in his head all at once.
You WANT laws to be written by lawyers, or at least people with a good legal sense [...] Tbe problem is when you have lawyers thinking they should act as gatekeepers to the legal system
All of which stems from having binary verdicts and "beyond all reasonable doubt" conditions. Lawyer (in which I include judges) argue technicalities. They don't argue about what did or didn't happen, or about right and wrong. They argue that their clients are law abiding, and that's a completely separate and largely irrelevant issue.
That's the problem. Not bad laws, but a bad system that places laws above facts.
There are no circumstances that I can think of where I wouldn't rather handle my own case in front of a jury of my peers and have then come to a consensus greyscale decision based on balance of probabilities. It's only when you have a lawyer instructing and feeding the jury, and arguing over what's admissable and what isn't, that the system becomes farcical and self serving.
Mmm, strangely enough, I'd be worried about being taught languages and logic by someone who couldn't be bothered even analysing exactly what he's writing.
Every year thousands of people graduate with CS degrees that can not: explain the sleeping barber problem; do OMT diagrams; define a Turing machine; give an example of a non-computable function; demonstrate even the remotest knowledge of what the "NP" means in 'NP-complete', use structured programming concepts, comment code, apply even the most basic software engineering techniques, etc
Yes, and I work with those people, day in and day out. The vast majority of professional software engineers forget 90% of everything they've been taught in a course the second they're out the door. They only remember (or relearn) what they need to do the job they're currently doing. And yet, somehow, the wheels of industry grind on.
If you don't take measures against cheating, the people who will lose (and lose big) are the good students. Think about it.
Because your entire career is determined by your grade and by the first job you take out of college right? Utter tosh. Within two years of graduating, everyone is in the job they deserve. The talented go into R&D. The mediocre go into maintenance. The incompetent put on suits and go into management. Those who'd rather talk about it than do it go into teaching.
the fact is, cheating is a HUGE problem these days in university
Provide references. Define cheating. Quantify the cost of it. Explain why it is an increasing problem "these days". This is a lazy, slack assertion.
if the honor code forbids students consulting others, why did the student do otherwise
The law prohibits professionals from running abusive monopolies, from lying on securities filings, or for taking bribes. Strangely, it still happens. All the time. We know that's the way business is done in the real world. Employees of a shareholder company have a fiduciary duty to ignore what's "right" and to do what's "profitable". If that means the likely cost of breaking the law is less than the likely benefits, then so be it. That's the cost of doing business.
Now, at what point exactly does a course designed to churn out grist for the corporate mill say "All that stuff we told you about playing fair? Forget it, it's time to enter the real world." ?
Honour systems (and spel it rite) are viewed as a joke outside of the USA. If you have to codify "right" behaviour (as in a Constitution), you're already doomed, because you're abrogating the responsibility of the culture to police itself. You're sending the very clear message that if you're not convicted, you haven't done anything wrong. This is the standard that's now applied in the business world (which is where most students end up) and it's horribly twisted and destructive.
Here's a better system for colleges. You say "We have no duty to educate you. We have a contract that can be terminated by either party, at any time, for any reason. If you don't like the course, stop attending. If we don't like you, we'll stop teaching you."
Frankly, we could do with a fewer people who worry about the letter of the law and more who accept the spirit of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, of course, I blinked and missed that residential VoiP is already here. Yeee ha!
The TWIF-IP adaptor bundled with this service supports two analog 'phones. Whee. Now picture one that'll talk to any DSL or cable uplink, has a 10/100 switched hub supporting 8 IP devices ('phones, PC's, NAS) with a DHCP server built in, that supports 6 analog devices ('phone, fax, trunks), any number of PC screenphones, that has a fully featured call control that provides any service you could imagine (and quite a few that you've never dreamed of), stores 10Gb of voicemail, and supports full RAS services (i.e. you can dial in to your home, then hop out from there, like a mini-ISP), all with a multi-lingual web based front end that you can access locally or remotely over IP or diallup. You want one? You know you do. ;-) You can't get one yet at retail, but give us another 18 months for the telco's to saturate their SME's with these, and you might see a version hitting retail.
I work on voice over IP telephony products, and I think that the market is ready to switch (pun intended).
SME's are figuring out that they can use their DSL lines to make net calls and video conferencing, and they're starting to ask (big time) exactly why they're paying per minute to make voice calls. And telcos are listening, and worrying.
There is a huge demand at the low end for true all-in-one products that encorporate an ethernet switch, DSL uplinks, a firewall and web server, handle IP-to-IP calls as well as IP-TDM, TWIF, ISDN (yuk), voicemail, door answer, that come with web browsing hardware phones and PC softphones and value added applications like videoconferencing. You would not believe the amount of software and hardware that we have in our current product; think 128Mb RAM, 128Mb compact flash, a 10 GB hard drive and a PCB that would make your head spin, in what's traditionally been a market for small (embedded devices.
And we're not developing this stuff simply because it's fun; there's a real demand from SME's for it. Initially we intended selling these boxes at retail (unheard of for a full featured telecomms switch); we've backed off from that now, simply because telco's are so keen to sell them as part of packages, because they know that if they don't, we will sell them at retail, and they'll lose a stack of voice money.
Note that the features that we enjoy today on residential lines - caller ID, call waiting, three party, callback - all came out of SME private branch exchanges. Telcos just realised that they could make extra money selling them to residential customers as well. They'll dig their heels in (hard) to stop us moving from TDM calls to VoiP, but - bearing in mind that once your call hits the local exchange, it hops to an IP backbone anyway - they can't hold out forever. Sooner or later, a residential provider will crack and start offering realistic VoiP to the home, and then all the rulebooks get ripped up. Roll on the day!
No keyboard. A Windows box...
How did they Ctrl-Alt-Delete?
Very insightful. You can put together a room of machines from Win95 to WinXP, and they all look and act pretty much the same. The GUI and interface varies, but the basics of network setup and application installation is "learn once, apply anywhere".
Now throw a linux box in there, and it pretty much doubles the required knowledge of the sysadmin. Throw in a second linux box and (oops) you raise the bar yet again, because chances are it will be set up in a completely different way from the first one.
Further to your suggestion about getting involved, I'd suggest this:
Ask their sysadmin if they have a standard Linux setup (the answer is no). Set up a Linux box to look and feel as much like a Microsoft box as possible, with KWord or OpenOffice, a decent samba setup and (e.g.) LinNetworkNeighborhood. Once you've convinced the school sysadmin that a linux box can play nice with the Windows boxen, write up a standard, with installation procedures, and donate CD's. The next time that admin gets a naked PC delivered, they'll have to decide whether to install a hooky copy of Windows, or a blessed copy of linux. Make it as easy as possible for them to pick the side of the angels.
Well, it's not true even for that, because it says that the OS must stay with the hardware. It's a very simple, very clear, very untrue statement.
But congratulations on noting the important point. Most people seem to be missing that as far as Microsoft are concerned, all (non-Apple) PC's should be shipped with a pre-installed OS i.e. WinXP. They really don't want to be selling full retail OS's at all; ideally they'd only sell upgrades, but they grudgingly acknowledge that they can't - yet - force everyone to upgrade every time.
Further, they treat every sale of a "naked" PC as a case of theft (literally, not figuratively), and have repeatedly tried to force OEM's to rat out customers who buy naked PC's so that they can send round the local BSA/FACT stormtroopers on the basis that if you don't pay for an OEM Microsoft OS, you must be using a pirated Microsoft OS. Really.
I'll take a guess that they have an internal definition of a PC as an 80x86 machine, and that Mac's aren't PC's. Or maybe they just don't give a rat's ass.
Their statements here, while factually incorrect (what we old folks used to call "a lie") represent their ideal world view. Every PC ships with a pre-installed OEM licensed version of XP which cannot be transferred. Further, it represents their ultimate wet dream: that a Son of SSSCA/CDBPTA might very well make it illegal to remove the pre-installed Microsoft OS, let alone transfer it. All this is in addition to their major mid term goal: OS-as-a-service. Update or expire, your choice.
It's an interesting, if rather chilling, insight into the World According to Microsoft.
Patience... wait a few hours/days, and you can also catch people who buy cars from car thieves. Let's hear it for GPS.
Most states now (rightly) confiscate money received for stolen goods, but guess what your comeback is if you pay money for stolen goods? Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zip.
Think that one through. I can see a pretty good way to gut the whole stolen car industry right there, while lowering taxes through self funding police forces.
That's not what they've said though. They've said that the OS (DOS in your example, with a GUI on top) must stay on the machine. You can't remove it. Or rather, they're saying that the school cannot accept a machine that has had the OS removed, and that they must demand all the media and license material as well.
It's an utter crock, but that's what they said. Please don't apologise for them without even doing the basic reading.
Sure, because all PC's come with either Microsoft Windows or MacOS burned into the hardware. It's not as though you have to pay for them (or access to Internet Explorer), right?
Hmm, as I remember it, a couple of courts have decided otherwise.
Ah, fair point. However, a couple of things I should have been clearer on:
Basically, I'm saying that it's prohibitively expensive to try and stay at the bleeding edge of the performance curve, or to buy hardware to play any particular title. If we accept Tom's proposition that you need premium hardware to play new games at full detail, then that necessitates buying premium hardware every six months or so!
If you're prepared to lag six months behind in both hardware and games (or detail levels), then you get a lot more bang per buck. And let's never forget that most reviewers aren't paying for their hardware; I'd far rather see Tom's pick a price point and then put together the best system for that price.
We could say that, or we could say what I actually said, which was that the 3 (not 4) TI costs 2.5x the cost of the 2MX now, so if he buys it when it's dropped to the price of the 2MX, he saves money. We could also look at the fact that if he does it my way, he gets a spare and very usable 2MX to re-use. Further, we could understand the proposition that he can't see the jillion fps now. It's utterly irrelevant.
Just a thought.
OK, let's assume that we do want access to government services online. Taxation, benefits, voting even. I want that. That's going to require fairly robust identity validation. Note: fairly. Right now, it's absolutely trivial to scam the benefits system, or to steal someone else's vote if you really care enough to do it. An online solution only needs to be as good as the ones we've already got, which (let's face it) aren't that great.
Further, while I'm as cynical as the next guy (if the next guy is a bitter, twisted conspiracy freak), I really doubt if any company is going to be able to buy this contract without providing a genuine solution, and most importantly, a credible promise of long term support. Not the best solution, or the cheapest solution, but a reliable solution.
So, who does that leave? Oracle, most likely. Microsoft are actually the wild card outsiders. IBM, maybe. Sun at a stretch.
Can you think of anyone else? Note that we're not talking about a development house, we're talking about a solution provider with a track record (even if it's a criminal track record) and thousands of techies available to patch and nurse the system for years ahead.
If we want the online services (and I do), we're going to have to accept that it will be a big Dark Side company that's running them.
So I suggest that in this case you don't go off at half cock writing to your elected representatives (I use both words loosely) demanding that Microsoft not be given this contract. At least not unless you can suggest a credible alternative. Perhaps the most productive thing you can do is to try and sell her on championing legislation to ensure transparency and openness in the running of the system, and most importantly, ensure that it's universally accessible, that the information is actually held in confidence, and that it's not mandatory.
I'm tempted to suggest that it follow the pattern of recent bill and be called the "Enduring Patriotic Freedom of Just Federal Freenessness Bill", that would be reverting to cynical type. So I won't. ;-)
"Some"? Holy heck, welcome to the problem. I've just built a machine for my brother. An XP 1700+, 256Mb of DDR 2100 and a 64Mb GeForce 2 MX 400 with TV out. We debated hardest on the card. He wanted to go for a GeForce 3 TI to future proof himself. Here's how my reasoning went:
Logic prevailed. Oh, he still wanted the 3 TI, because game mags say it can run at a squillion fps @ 1600x1200x32, but we did manage to establish that the noticable benefit would be zero, because he doesn't have a monitor that can handle that.
I'd advise anyone else thinking of buying a high end graphics card to do this calculation. Unless you've got a 1600x1200 @ 80fps monitor, what the heck do you need a GeForce 3 or 4 TI for? Don't spend money "future proofing": all you're doing is paying a premium on hardware that will be a lot cheaper when you do find yourself needing it.
So is any Gnutella client compiled from source. Plus, the network is non proprietary, so you won't have to change clients/networks/licenses every couple of months.
Superpeering has helped give the Gnutella network a new lease of life, and there's a lot of content out there. The only problem is that asynchronous connections are taking their toll: last night I had 300+ files queued @ 0.0k/s. But that's endemic on any P2P network. Share your damn files! ;-)
Wait... you're too lazy to even read the article that tells you that you were too lazy to read the EULA that tells you that they're going to use your CPU (and bandwidth)?
What do you need, a huge popup? Oh, wait, Brilliant are going to give you one of those as well.
There's no issue here. If you want to download a binary and not read the EULA to find out what you've just installed, you have no grounds for bitching about what you've just installed. None.
Ouch. I hadn't seen any of the 10GB+ drives go berserk. I'd hate to think it's an inherent property even on the newer ones. I guess I'll stick to Fujitsu and Toshiba. Incidentally, Linux has a wonderful application "hdparm" that gives you total control over your drive, including letting you set the spindown time to five seconds. I actually switched from Windows just for that alone. Well done, IBM. ;-)
Oh, I've bought plenty of quiet Travelstars, but some of them didn't stay that way for long. The screamers were all older sub 10Gb drives, the 4.8 and 6.5 being particular culprits, but they went Dark Side in a variety of laptops (and one in my own desktop). I haven't seen a newer 10GB+ one go buzzsaw, but then I only handled a few before giving up on the whole gig. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but it only takes a few irate people (mostly friends, family and coworkers) complaining about screaming Travelstars to really sour you on them, believe me. ;-)
Ouch. I hear you. I have a laptop with a screaming Travelstar, and another two sitting on my desk, because I simply could not countenance inflicting them on anybody else. I only use my laptop for writing MS Word documents, but I installed Linux (and Wine) for one reason: hrparm. At least I can get the buzzsaw drove to spin down after 5 seconds.
In response to the poster below, yes indeed, some of them do go suddently from whisper to screaming after a few months (/years/weeks). IBM won't replace a screaming Travelstar with no other faults - believe me, I've tried. Now I'd only buy a Fujitsu or a Toshiba. Anyone who has nice things to say about a Travelstar: well, lucky you. Yours isn't screaming - yet.
Which isn't necessarily a good thing. I do a bit of casual notebook trading and repair on the side, but I gave up on Travelstars recently. A lot of the older DADA < 10Gb drives were (or became) very noisy, and they failed uncomfortably frequently. The big problem though was that if you buy enough used Travelstars from eBay, then (quite apart from the stupid near new prices they can attract) you'll find an alarming number of them turn out to be failed drives that have clearly been slipped out the back door of a repair shop - including locked drives that are the devil's own work to unlock. That sort of thing goes on all the time (it's a perk of the job) but the scale I saw it happening on rather indicated that it had become endemic among IBM approved shops. Eventually I just gave up on the damn things altogther, and it's soured me on the brand. The nasty reports on the desktop drives - and worse, IBM's "not our problem" attitude - just put the nail in the coffin. Now you'd have to cut me a pretty good deal to persuade me to buy an IBM brand drive of any sort.
Well said. Ed Yourdon was the credible, sensible, plain spoken champion of the Y2K hypefest. I'm not sure if he set out deliberately and cynically to use Y2K hype to scam his way into government circles, or whether he just got caught up in it and found himself having to escalate his predictions until he couldn't back out.
Let's get this straight: Ed Yourdon predicted that Y2K would be the end of the world. He changed his mind more often than his underwear, and he was always oh so careful never to predict specifics, but he gave vastly inflated credibility to all the doom mongers, and he assumed that any Y2K ready declaration not done by an independent auditor was a smokescreen. Every tiny report of a computer failure was turned into a "probable" indicator of coming failure. He turned absense of evidence into evidence of absense when it suited him, and vice versa.
The sad part was that he suckered a lot of gullible folks in. There's still people today eating through their Y2K stocks and weeping over their lost life savings, and a smaller number grubbing around on dirt farms and hand pumping water from wells who'll grit their teeth and tell you that they thank Ed for prompting them to move to a self-sufficient subsistence lifestyle. Oh yes, this is better than relying on all those fragile modern foibles like washing machines and shops. Grind. Oh yes. Grind, grind.
Don't get me wrong, those people were responsible for their own decisions, and Ed is not a bad man. But he was wrong about Y2K. He was major league wrong, and he stubbornly clung to his position that the dominoes would start falling any day now (yeah, there's that 1950's thinking again), all through 1998 and 1999, right up to December 1999. Only in the last couple of weeks did he do a complete U-turn and backpedal and dissemble like there was going to be a tomorrow, which rather makes me think that he genuinely did believe the delusional scenarios that he was pushing to government and to anyone else that would listen. And he did admit that he was wrong shortly into 2000, but it was "OK, I was wrong, BUT..." and then he was off on a completely new tack about how he had singlehandedly save the free world by fearmongering up to the rollover, and ensuring that nobody slacked off. All praise Saint Ed.
I don't blame Ed for the misery he caused, but I do blame him for being a stubborn old fool, and for creating his own little solipsistic dreamland where the world had to end, because Ed had said it would. When it failed, it was exactly like watching a religious cult falling apart when the leader absconds with the takings from the collection plate. There are still people on his Y2K discussion board claiming that there was a Y2K catastrophe, but we didn't notice because we'd all been drugged with chemtrails.
So sure, buy and read this book if you like, but understand that Ed lost the plot about five years ago, and that anything he writes now must be treated as science fiction. Good old fashioned plain speaking science fiction, but utterly, completely untrustworthy.
Nice link, thanks. This is pretty cynical stuff:
This is a nasty symptom of a modern disease. It doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, as long as you have enough money to just keep bringing lawsuits until you've exhausted the ability of your targets to defend themselves. I for one hope that Deutsche Bahn are severely bitchslapped over bringing this back to court yet again.
What's "a computer" (singular)? The "details" links are a little short. 1,400 processors, wow. How many kernels? 1? 1,400? What's the topography? Will it use resources completely dynamically, or can you split it into fixed side sub-units? If you can hot swap parts, can you turn off e.g. half of it and still feed the other half problems? Are various parts of it drawing from independend power sources? Is there a single point of control, or are there multiple master processes?
What I'm getting at is: at what point does a multiple processor "supercomputer" start to be indistinguishable from a "distributed computing network". Imagine a Beowulf cluster of SETI@home networks, for example. ;-)
Thanks for noticing. It's just democracy in action: if you give a voice to everybody, you have to listen to the opinions of a lot of idiots. That's why politicians use a lot of short words. There's nothing that pisses a retard off more than a proposition that he can't quite hold in his head all at once.
All of which stems from having binary verdicts and "beyond all reasonable doubt" conditions. Lawyer (in which I include judges) argue technicalities. They don't argue about what did or didn't happen, or about right and wrong. They argue that their clients are law abiding, and that's a completely separate and largely irrelevant issue.
That's the problem. Not bad laws, but a bad system that places laws above facts.
There are no circumstances that I can think of where I wouldn't rather handle my own case in front of a jury of my peers and have then come to a consensus greyscale decision based on balance of probabilities. It's only when you have a lawyer instructing and feeding the jury, and arguing over what's admissable and what isn't, that the system becomes farcical and self serving.
Mmm, strangely enough, I'd be worried about being taught languages and logic by someone who couldn't be bothered even analysing exactly what he's writing.
Yes, and I work with those people, day in and day out. The vast majority of professional software engineers forget 90% of everything they've been taught in a course the second they're out the door. They only remember (or relearn) what they need to do the job they're currently doing. And yet, somehow, the wheels of industry grind on.
Because your entire career is determined by your grade and by the first job you take out of college right? Utter tosh. Within two years of graduating, everyone is in the job they deserve. The talented go into R&D. The mediocre go into maintenance. The incompetent put on suits and go into management. Those who'd rather talk about it than do it go into teaching.
Provide references. Define cheating. Quantify the cost of it. Explain why it is an increasing problem "these days". This is a lazy, slack assertion.
The law prohibits professionals from running abusive monopolies, from lying on securities filings, or for taking bribes. Strangely, it still happens. All the time. We know that's the way business is done in the real world. Employees of a shareholder company have a fiduciary duty to ignore what's "right" and to do what's "profitable". If that means the likely cost of breaking the law is less than the likely benefits, then so be it. That's the cost of doing business.
Now, at what point exactly does a course designed to churn out grist for the corporate mill say "All that stuff we told you about playing fair? Forget it, it's time to enter the real world." ?
Honour systems (and spel it rite) are viewed as a joke outside of the USA. If you have to codify "right" behaviour (as in a Constitution), you're already doomed, because you're abrogating the responsibility of the culture to police itself. You're sending the very clear message that if you're not convicted, you haven't done anything wrong. This is the standard that's now applied in the business world (which is where most students end up) and it's horribly twisted and destructive.
Here's a better system for colleges. You say "We have no duty to educate you. We have a contract that can be terminated by either party, at any time, for any reason. If you don't like the course, stop attending. If we don't like you, we'll stop teaching you."
Frankly, we could do with a fewer people who worry about the letter of the law and more who accept the spirit of it.