It would surprise me if they hadn't at least measured Linux up for mobile phone use but in view of the fact that Symbian is owned by Nokia along with Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens IIRC Nokia is probably not in a hurry to adopt it as standard for all their phones. Linux is the top choicle for smaller companies who either cannot afford to license Windows Mobile or Symbian or more likely because Linux gives them more control and thus enables them to get a foothold on the market with good hardware integration of the embedded OS and innovatively designed user interface and software. That along with an innovatively designed device/casing/keyboard is what matters most to customers. There is a growing perception in the business world that only Windows Mobile can be truly integrated with Windows/Exchange etc.. and that using phones running Symbian, Linux &Co will be only cause problems. I just hope Microsoft doesn't manage to netscape these competitors and get a 90% share of the mobile OS market as well, it will kill off every last spark of innovation if they do.
You must be new here. Here are a few reasons, some of them obvious:
A lot of people dislike it simply because it is made by Microsoft. Not very rational but a fact none the less.
I haven't kept up to date on MSIE security issues but ActiveX used to be a source of security risks. That may have been fixed but even if it has, the stigma has stuck.
ActiveX is only available with MSIE which only runs on Windows so it is widely seen as an attempt to achieve vendor lock. MSIE can be made to run on Linux and soon on OS.X via WINE but that happens without Microsofts blessing and I am not at all sure how well ActiveX works with a WINE'd MSIE install on Linux.
Because of the Windows only nature of ActiveX any website that is based on it but offers content that has appeal to more people than just Windows users ActiveX kind of sucks since they can't use those websites. Where I used to work half the development department used Linux laptops for work related resons and they had to jump through flaming hoops to access the corporate web app used to track trouble reports etc. which was based on ActiveX and certified for MSIE only. Many companies tend to prefer Java based webapps or Microsoft solutions to keep their options open on switching to browsers other than MSIE or even OS'es other than Windows.
Put condoms and twinkies right next to the self check counter... Sit back and reap the benefits!
You are a poor capitalist. What you do is you put a kiosk selling sledgehammers and crowbars right next to the shop with the self check counter... Sit back and reap the profits as people frustrated with the self check counters suddenly get in touch with their inner luddite!
... scientists now hope they'll find soft tissue in other environments and maybe from ancient mammals."
Like archaic humans? Especially Neanderthals. I for one am looking forward to observing the ensuing shitstorm^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dispassionate, civilized debate between members of the scientific community.
If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?
<sarcasm> Perhaps they will be automatically detected/deduced for you by the same infallable logic engine we have come to know and love from the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' pirate software detector thus rendering manual configuration unnecessary in which case the manual configuration utility may well have been removed from Windows Vista. </sarcasm>
Here's some background that isn't apparent from the article. The CNN piece talks about Neanderthals in the context of understanding brain evolution, but the million dollar question- in most scientists' minds- is whether Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred, after 500,000 years of separation. It seems at least possible: lions and tigers produce fertile offspring and they diverged 2 million years ago.
I have always had trouble understanding why some scientists flatly deny that interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans would have even been possible. Interbreeding between species seperated by longer periods of evolution than 2 million years is possible. Some boffins in Dubai actually managed to produce a living camel/lama hybrid. They had to use artificial insemenation but the result was a living hybrid (which they called a 'cama') and camels and lamas are seperated by 40 million years of evolution. It would seem to me that Neanderthals and modern humans probably could interbreed, in light of what history tells us about human nature it would be strange if they didn't and the only question is: Would the resulting individuals have been fertile? If they weren't it might explain why no Neanderthal DNA has survived in the modern human genome. I will certainly be interested in whether or not this DNA mapping/reconstruction effort succeeds.
Web sites can be blocked if they contain pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism.
Wow, what an ambitious task. Perhaps those Indian censors try to make the river Ganges flow up hill while they are at it.
"I must say that I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability."
The principles? They cannot even grasp the concept!
I have heard enough of their sales pitches to know that Microsoft's concept of interoperability is simpe and they grasp it quite well: "Throw out every piece of software that you currently operate that isn't made by Microsoft and exchange it for equivalent Microsoft products. After that everyting will inter-operate just fine so long as you don't stray form the yellow brick Microsoft road."
It makes sense: why upgrade now when you plan on upgrading your hardware for Vista?
The only people that are waiting to upgrade their hardware until Vista arrives are nerds and techno freaks that get a kick out of building their own pooters and a healthy proportion of those wouldn't touch VIsta with a 18 foot pike because they either run Linux/OS.X or because they are die hard gamers who will stick with XP to wring every ounce of performance out of their system to be able to run Quake 4, Doom 3 (or whatever the latest gaming craze is) at an insane resolution on a 30" cinema display and still get decent frame rates. The vast unshaven mass of PC buyers is completely unaware of the existence of Vista and will remain so until they happen to see a news report on it's launch and even then they probably won't care much until they buy a new PC one day and... geeee... Windows sure looks different.
As the article says, you can't learn social skills sitting in front of a computer. And some of the people here on slashdot prove that. However, this is Chicago, and the public schools there ain't so safe. The article didn't mention it, but for families whose choices are 1) Send their kids to public schools where they'll either become criminals or get beat up by them, or 2) Use this virtual school, well, I'd keep them home. A lot of people in Chicago home school because the private schools are very expensive and the public schools are terrible.
At best this is no more than another tool to use for those who have opted for home schooling. One thing is for sure, andyboy who expects to be able to plant his/her children in front of a computer and have them start doing math lessons on the internet unsupervised is delusional. Kids will not sit and do math or physics lessons when they could be playing Quake or running around the neighborhood getting into trouble with their friends (putting potatoes in peoples exhaust pipes, dropping firecrackers into mailboxes etc...) and they will abscond the second you look away. Children need teachers if they are to learn anything. I can see how a virtual learning service would be useful if you opt for home schooling because your public schools are training camps for aspiring criminals and you can't afford a private school but I would always prefer a public or private school to home schooling and home schooling to unsupervised virtual learning.
Dear Mr finiteSet, To punish you for using such a weak password to your Debian developer account we have changed your password to the following: !_@m_@n_!ns3ns!t!v3_cl0d_wh0_us3s_w3@k_p@ssw0rds_b ut_!_pr0m!s3_n0t_t0_d0_!t_@g@!n_s0_l0ng_@s_!_l!v3
3.1 isnt a OS. Anything those machines need to do can be done in DOS. Why would you have a fancy 3.1 gui on a vending machine?
So sue me for using the wrong word. What I meant was ATMs and ticket selling machines, flight booking portals, gambling machines etc. that are often fitted with a CRT or LCD display. You tend to need some sort of window manager to implement a system like that. I have seen such machines running all kinds of operating systmens including OS/2, Linux and Windows XP and I fail to see at first glance why Windows 3.1 shuld not qualify even if it is only a glorified GUI shell and not a true OS. In the Netherlands IIRC there used to be (I'm assuming it has been replaced with something more modern) a nation wide system of automatic ticket selling machines, all network connected to a central server. Each node was basically an ancient PC computer fitted with an x86 CPU running a variant of Unix System V and what you saw on the CRT display was a GUI app running on some sort of X Windows system.
Windows 3.1 won't work in dosemu (which uses the old V86 virtualization that's been in the Intel 80386 onwards), nor will it run in OS/2's V86 environment. But you can patch it with some DLL you used to be able to download from IBM that makes it use DPMI for protected mode, and then it runs in both.
Just out of honest curiosity, who still uses Windows 3.1 these days? The only thing I can think of is that some vending machines, ticket selling automats and ATMs run on antiquated pretty antiquated operating systems. I've also visited a Software and Computer museum in Berlin where they had a box running Windows 3.1 along with alot of other strange software I had almost forgotten ever existed. The most backward computer user I know still uses Windows 95.
Mac and *nix users have some pretty decent non-Firefox browsers that arent available to Windows users. Just curious, anyone got relevant stats?
Most enterprise grade webapps and web based control interfaces such as OEMDBC (Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Console) and the Lotus Notes webmail client to cite a couple of examples tend to either barf an error message and not work properly or refuse to work all with an uncertified browser like Safari or Opera which is not surprising. If I was developing a webapp as complex as OEMDBC I would enforce similar restrictions. So if you are running OS.X or Linux in a corporate environment and (that's assuming you don't get terminated by the MCSE certified stormtroopers from the IT department for violating their use-Windows dictum) using Firefox is de facto mandatory at least for the business webapps since Firefox is the only native browser available for Linux and OS.X that has a market share big enough for Oracle, IBM and the likes take it seriously. I hope that Firefox keeps growing I would hate to see these companies go back to a IE only certification policy for their web interfaces. Then there are of course those unfortunate cases of webapps that only work in Internet Explorer. I have never quite understood why people do that, creating a webapp that runs only on one browser on one single OS seems pretty pointless.
I would have to agree. Seems like in a Microsoft-driven world, people will go out and buy Windows XP or Windows Vista. Even with the WGA in place, people would still buy Windows. I'm all pro-Linux myself, but I still use a Microsoft OS at home. I would like to see Linux take their fair share in the desktop market, but I don't think it will happen with Microsoft dominating the market. Plus, users are too familiar with Windows and are a little hesitant to switch to Linux.
How hesitant users are to switch depends on the demographics. Mostly it is the older users who are stuck in the Windows cycle, alot of younger people who are comfortable around computers are much more mobile in this respect and willing to try new things. I have seen enough people switch to OS.X from Windows to know that. Of course the OS.X switchers are not exacty a mass exodus but alot of them are not exactly powerusers either and Mac sales have been picking up recently. There is no real reason why Linux as a desktop OS for regular users shouldn't also be able to achieve similar growth and thus help to gnaw away at Microsoft's market share. What keeps regular users(not nerds) away from Linux as a desktop OS is among other things:
The still user unfriendly and sometimes buggy nature of many Linux distributions, especially when it comes to laptop support.
The fact that major PC manufacturers don't offer Linux as an OS option complete with a support package and sell it aggressively.
The sheer flora of desktop environments that are available for Linux since alot of normal users associate the desktop strongly with the operating system however illogical that may appear to a nerd.
I'd like to see some major PC maker offer a Linux line of Destop and Laptop PC's, a hardware/software package similar in concept to Apple's offerings and with the same effort being put into support, development, making the OS easy and consistent to use and that users can easily get ahold of applications to replace the ones they miss from Windows. The components for this already exists, somebody just needs to get off his/her ass and use them to shake up the computer world like Ryanair and the likes managed to shake up the airline business. One thing is for sure, as long as people keep using Windows as they do nothing and wait for Microsoft to shoot it self in the foot and screw up it's monopoly nothing will change.
If the ISP gets paid by other networks to recieve data from the ISP then the ISP might think twice about closing accounts that create large amount of revenue for it.
I think the point he was trying to make is that the revenue generated by those users who own the accounts which are being used to illegaly download music generate less revenue than it would cost to deal with the flood of lawsuits from the BPI. Also keep in mind that in many European countries the party that loses a civil lawsuit pays the costs of the proceedings. I don't know if that's the case in the UK but even if it isn't any business person with a modicum of sense will draw the obvious conclusion which is: Close the filesharing users down and get the lawyers of your back cheaply.
Tada! Two sentances. I imagine, were I a perl coder, I could have done it in half of one, but there you go.
True enough but the drawback of using Perl style syntactic obfuscation to compact this/. story is that people would have to stare at the resulting half a sentence for a lengthy period of time before they managed to figure out what the hell you are trying to say.
Not to worry, the New York Times will be publishing a how-to guide next week complete with tunnel schematics and rates of expansion for various explosives.
Probably, but there is another side to this coin that isn't quite so funny. I once watched an interview with a retired KGB commander. The reporter asked him what he thought were the three best spies ever. The Russian grinned and replied: "Three people you have never heard of". The reporter didn't ask him to explain so I'm guessing that it wasn't until afterwards that the reporter understood what the KGB guy meant by that, namely that the three best spies of all time are unknown because they all got away with it. The same pretty much goes wor signals intelligence the best sources are the ones nobody ever finds out about. I wonder who decided to let this out of the bag and publicize it so well. If I was one of those the FBI investigators I'd be itching to rip the lungs out of whoever decided to plaster this all over the frontpages thus ruining a good source of signals intelligence. I know it isn't exactly rocketscience to monitor chatrooms but if the terrorists are actually dumb enough to discuss attacks on the US using unencrypted communications why advertise your bugging operation? It's a pity terrorists everywhere have now been thoroughly educated on the subject of secure communications just so a few political weasels can raise their approval rating by a few points.
Slashdot Mirror
It would surprise me if they hadn't at least measured Linux up for mobile phone use but in view of the fact that Symbian is owned by Nokia along with Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens IIRC Nokia is probably not in a hurry to adopt it as standard for all their phones. Linux is the top choicle for smaller companies who either cannot afford to license Windows Mobile or Symbian or more likely because Linux gives them more control and thus enables them to get a foothold on the market with good hardware integration of the embedded OS and innovatively designed user interface and software. That along with an innovatively designed device/casing/keyboard is what matters most to customers. There is a growing perception in the business world that only Windows Mobile can be truly integrated with Windows/Exchange etc.. and that using phones running Symbian, Linux &Co will be only cause problems. I just hope Microsoft doesn't manage to netscape these competitors and get a 90% share of the mobile OS market as well, it will kill off every last spark of innovation if they do.
You must be new here. Here are a few reasons, some of them obvious:
Put condoms and twinkies right next to the self check counter... Sit back and reap the benefits!
You are a poor capitalist. What you do is you put a kiosk selling sledgehammers and crowbars right next to the shop with the self check counter... Sit back and reap the profits as people frustrated with the self check counters suddenly get in touch with their inner luddite!
... scientists now hope they'll find soft tissue in other environments and maybe from ancient mammals."
Like archaic humans? Especially Neanderthals. I for one am looking forward to observing the ensuing shitstorm^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dispassionate, civilized debate between members of the scientific community.
If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?
<sarcasm>
Perhaps they will be automatically detected/deduced for you by the same infallable logic engine we have come to know and love from the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' pirate software detector thus rendering manual configuration unnecessary in which case the manual configuration utility may well have been removed from Windows Vista.
</sarcasm>
...while professional futurists often get it wrong, the amateurs sometimes get it eerily right.
Here's some background that isn't apparent from the article. The CNN piece talks about Neanderthals in the context of understanding brain evolution, but the million dollar question- in most scientists' minds- is whether Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred, after 500,000 years of separation. It seems at least possible: lions and tigers produce fertile offspring and they diverged 2 million years ago.
I have always had trouble understanding why some scientists flatly deny that interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans would have even been possible. Interbreeding between species seperated by longer periods of evolution than 2 million years is possible. Some boffins in Dubai actually managed to produce a living camel/lama hybrid. They had to use artificial insemenation but the result was a living hybrid (which they called a 'cama') and camels and lamas are seperated by 40 million years of evolution. It would seem to me that Neanderthals and modern humans probably could interbreed, in light of what history tells us about human nature it would be strange if they didn't and the only question is: Would the resulting individuals have been fertile? If they weren't it might explain why no Neanderthal DNA has survived in the modern human genome. I will certainly be interested in whether or not this DNA mapping/reconstruction effort succeeds.
Wow, what an ambitious task. Perhaps those Indian censors try to make the river Ganges flow up hill while they are at it.
I have heard enough of their sales pitches to know that Microsoft's concept of interoperability is simpe and they grasp it quite well: "Throw out every piece of software that you currently operate that isn't made by Microsoft and exchange it for equivalent Microsoft products. After that everyting will inter-operate just fine so long as you don't stray form the yellow brick Microsoft road."
I think you mean lithium ion cannon. ... it's: Dell (TM) Lithium Ion thermal emasculator.
It makes sense: why upgrade now when you plan on upgrading your hardware for Vista?
The only people that are waiting to upgrade their hardware until Vista arrives are nerds and techno freaks that get a kick out of building their own pooters and a healthy proportion of those wouldn't touch VIsta with a 18 foot pike because they either run Linux/OS.X or because they are die hard gamers who will stick with XP to wring every ounce of performance out of their system to be able to run Quake 4, Doom 3 (or whatever the latest gaming craze is) at an insane resolution on a 30" cinema display and still get decent frame rates. The vast unshaven mass of PC buyers is completely unaware of the existence of Vista and will remain so until they happen to see a news report on it's launch and even then they probably won't care much until they buy a new PC one day and... geeee... Windows sure looks different.
As the article says, you can't learn social skills sitting in front of a computer. And some of the people here on slashdot prove that. However, this is Chicago, and the public schools there ain't so safe. The article didn't mention it, but for families whose choices are 1) Send their kids to public schools where they'll either become criminals or get beat up by them, or 2) Use this virtual school, well, I'd keep them home. A lot of people in Chicago home school because the private schools are very expensive and the public schools are terrible.
At best this is no more than another tool to use for those who have opted for home schooling. One thing is for sure, andyboy who expects to be able to plant his/her children in front of a computer and have them start doing math lessons on the internet unsupervised is delusional. Kids will not sit and do math or physics lessons when they could be playing Quake or running around the neighborhood getting into trouble with their friends (putting potatoes in peoples exhaust pipes, dropping firecrackers into mailboxes etc...) and they will abscond the second you look away. Children need teachers if they are to learn anything. I can see how a virtual learning service would be useful if you opt for home schooling because your public schools are training camps for aspiring criminals and you can't afford a private school but I would always prefer a public or private school to home schooling and home schooling to unsupervised virtual learning.
Dear Mr finiteSet,b ut_!_pr0m!s3_n0t_t0_d0_!t_@g@!n_s0_l0ng_@s_!_l!v3
To punish you for using such a weak password to your Debian developer account we have changed your password to the following:
!_@m_@n_!ns3ns!t!v3_cl0d_wh0_us3s_w3@k_p@ssw0rds_
Enjoy
The Debian team
3.1 isnt a OS. Anything those machines need to do can be done in DOS. Why would you have a fancy 3.1 gui on a vending machine?
So sue me for using the wrong word. What I meant was ATMs and ticket selling machines, flight booking portals, gambling machines etc. that are often fitted with a CRT or LCD display. You tend to need some sort of window manager to implement a system like that. I have seen such machines running all kinds of operating systmens including OS/2, Linux and Windows XP and I fail to see at first glance why Windows 3.1 shuld not qualify even if it is only a glorified GUI shell and not a true OS. In the Netherlands IIRC there used to be (I'm assuming it has been replaced with something more modern) a nation wide system of automatic ticket selling machines, all network connected to a central server. Each node was basically an ancient PC computer fitted with an x86 CPU running a variant of Unix System V and what you saw on the CRT display was a GUI app running on some sort of X Windows system.
Windows 3.1 won't work in dosemu (which uses the old V86 virtualization that's been in the Intel 80386 onwards), nor will it run in OS/2's V86 environment. But you can patch it with some DLL you used to be able to download from IBM that makes it use DPMI for protected mode, and then it runs in both.
Just out of honest curiosity, who still uses Windows 3.1 these days? The only thing I can think of is that some vending machines, ticket selling automats and ATMs run on antiquated pretty antiquated operating systems. I've also visited a Software and Computer museum in Berlin where they had a box running Windows 3.1 along with alot of other strange software I had almost forgotten ever existed. The most backward computer user I know still uses Windows 95.
Mac and *nix users have some pretty decent non-Firefox browsers that arent available to Windows users. Just curious, anyone got relevant stats?
Most enterprise grade webapps and web based control interfaces such as OEMDBC (Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Console) and the Lotus Notes webmail client to cite a couple of examples tend to either barf an error message and not work properly or refuse to work all with an uncertified browser like Safari or Opera which is not surprising. If I was developing a webapp as complex as OEMDBC I would enforce similar restrictions. So if you are running OS.X or Linux in a corporate environment and (that's assuming you don't get terminated by the MCSE certified stormtroopers from the IT department for violating their use-Windows dictum) using Firefox is de facto mandatory at least for the business webapps since Firefox is the only native browser available for Linux and OS.X that has a market share big enough for Oracle, IBM and the likes take it seriously. I hope that Firefox keeps growing I would hate to see these companies go back to a IE only certification policy for their web interfaces. Then there are of course those unfortunate cases of webapps that only work in Internet Explorer. I have never quite understood why people do that, creating a webapp that runs only on one browser on one single OS seems pretty pointless.
How hesitant users are to switch depends on the demographics. Mostly it is the older users who are stuck in the Windows cycle, alot of younger people who are comfortable around computers are much more mobile in this respect and willing to try new things. I have seen enough people switch to OS.X from Windows to know that. Of course the OS.X switchers are not exacty a mass exodus but alot of them are not exactly powerusers either and Mac sales have been picking up recently. There is no real reason why Linux as a desktop OS for regular users shouldn't also be able to achieve similar growth and thus help to gnaw away at Microsoft's market share. What keeps regular users (not nerds) away from Linux as a desktop OS is among other things:
- The still user unfriendly and sometimes buggy nature of many Linux distributions, especially when it comes to laptop support.
- The fact that major PC manufacturers don't offer Linux as an OS option complete with a support package and sell it aggressively.
- The sheer flora of desktop environments that are available for Linux since alot of normal users associate the desktop strongly with the operating system however illogical that may appear to a nerd.
I'd like to see some major PC maker offer a Linux line of Destop and Laptop PC's, a hardware/software package similar in concept to Apple's offerings and with the same effort being put into support, development, making the OS easy and consistent to use and that users can easily get ahold of applications to replace the ones they miss from Windows. The components for this already exists, somebody just needs to get off his/her ass and use them to shake up the computer world like Ryanair and the likes managed to shake up the airline business. One thing is for sure, as long as people keep using Windows as they do nothing and wait for Microsoft to shoot it self in the foot and screw up it's monopoly nothing will change.If the ISP gets paid by other networks to recieve data from the ISP then the ISP might think twice about closing accounts that create large amount of revenue for it.
I think the point he was trying to make is that the revenue generated by those users who own the accounts which are being used to illegaly download music generate less revenue than it would cost to deal with the flood of lawsuits from the BPI. Also keep in mind that in many European countries the party that loses a civil lawsuit pays the costs of the proceedings. I don't know if that's the case in the UK but even if it isn't any business person with a modicum of sense will draw the obvious conclusion which is: Close the filesharing users down and get the lawyers of your back cheaply.
Anybody care to summarize the pros and cons of Parallels vs VMWare?
The latter is vaporware on OS.X.
How is this different from a regular slashdot summary?
It would have that critical extra layer of obfuscation added on top of the already existing chaos.....
Tada! Two sentances. I imagine, were I a perl coder, I could have done it in half of one, but there you go.
/. story is that people would have to stare at the resulting half a sentence for a lengthy period of time before they managed to figure out what the hell you are trying to say.
True enough but the drawback of using Perl style syntactic obfuscation to compact this
Dear Oracle,
All your patents are belong to us. Please pay us money.
Greetings,
EpicRealms
...on a forum for nerds that is periodically overrun by total asshats.
Not to worry, the New York Times will be publishing a how-to guide next week complete with tunnel schematics and rates of expansion for various explosives.
Probably, but there is another side to this coin that isn't quite so funny. I once watched an interview with a retired KGB commander. The reporter asked him what he thought were the three best spies ever. The Russian grinned and replied: "Three people you have never heard of". The reporter didn't ask him to explain so I'm guessing that it wasn't until afterwards that the reporter understood what the KGB guy meant by that, namely that the three best spies of all time are unknown because they all got away with it. The same pretty much goes wor signals intelligence the best sources are the ones nobody ever finds out about. I wonder who decided to let this out of the bag and publicize it so well. If I was one of those the FBI investigators I'd be itching to rip the lungs out of whoever decided to plaster this all over the frontpages thus ruining a good source of signals intelligence. I know it isn't exactly rocketscience to monitor chatrooms but if the terrorists are actually dumb enough to discuss attacks on the US using unencrypted communications why advertise your bugging operation? It's a pity terrorists everywhere have now been thoroughly educated on the subject of secure communications just so a few political weasels can raise their approval rating by a few points.