In the article there is a link to Theo's personal site. He lists his hardware there, and the amazing thing is that he doesn't have a single machine capable of more than 200MHz.
I find it amazing in these days of 3.6GHz machines needed to run bleeding edge games and gimmicky OS's and everyone and their mothers going gooey over the latest GHz jump in analy embedded mobile devices that OpenBSD's chief developer uses computers that actually fit his needs. It is comforting to know that the SECURE processing and dissemination of digital information can be done efficiently without the large, bright, rounded, colourful buttons and Windows found in most other OS's.
I Live in Switzerland, that fabled land in Europe of greedy Banks, snowy alpine chocolate box covers and strange, overpiced cheese with holes in it. Switzerland is one of the richest countries on earth. But in the last year and a half there has been one economic desaster after another. The national airline, Swissair, a national symbol for something like 75 years went tits up at the end of 2001, after a desasterous spending spree in which they bought out about five other regional airlines in Europe which all went bankrupt. In this year alone, the big Swiss banks and insuances have started letting workers go in their thousands, something that has never happened here before and something that is especially troubling when one considers that Switzerland's main empoyers are those very banks and insurances.
I work for a small building supplies company that is also going through rocky times as a system administrator and general computer do it all. Life is damn hard and I earn very little. I am constantly worried that I will lose my job to the other IT guy who doesn't even know what a path in Windows is (C:\bla\bla etc) but is doing a course in software engineering in C++. The guy is absolutely useless in sys admin stuff (and is less than interested) but is the bosses darling because he does the company's website, and the boss is one of those people who get impressed by Flash intros. He's an Arab and can not put a simple written sentence in German together.
However, if there's one thing I have learned in this long and painful life, it's that life is not fair. Shit happens and one invariably gets shafted sometime or another.
I suppose that is why we have religion and why Osama and company are so trendy in the muslim world.
I know you Americans tend to get overexited about your toys and in the heat of the moment tend to forget where you are, but perhaps you should know that the USSR ceased to exist around 13 years ago.
Education is the start of all things needed by a society to function and it is the thing that makes or breaks a country. The incredibly bad standard of American education will and is coming back to haunt those who considered it unimportant.
Take a look at the average level of spelling here on slashdot. Then take a look at what those posters are saying and then take a look at a country with a president who has trouble communicating in grammatically correct sentences.
I support, or at least I try to, a number of Windows users in a small company. My co-worker, an immigrant from Egypt made a request for help form in Excel so that the users skill levels could be determined. It contained radio buttons and drop down lists.
Most users, presented with the form, couldn't fill it out, being overwhelmed with the form. The most common question was, "What is Windows?". The second most common question was, "How do I fill this out?".
The moral of the story: most average joes don't know the difference between Windows and anything else. Those that do are a dwindling minority.
The author of the article would most likely be complaining about something else if he were to be using Windows..
A thin client would be an ideal solution to this kind of problem except that thin clients have become very much out of vogue, although they do allow admins to have much better control over the system. Another approach, although rather expensive and ungainly, is Novell's ZENworks. It allows an admin to control what is on the users machine and what not.
I see the solution as being a compromise in allowing users freedoms and controlling the workstations. Ideally the computer would be regularly monitored, but this can be difficult in an environment where there are thousands of computers.
I find it so strange that Bush and co. have come this far. I remember after the 9/11 thing some frenchman publishing a book disputing the terrorists origions. He was ridiculed across the globe.
Now I wonder how wrong he actually was.
Some things that continue to make me wonder:
1.The only recorded biowarfare attack on Americans were the Anthrax letter attacks shortly after 9/11 in the US in which 5 died and some 20 people became ill. Even though there was the whole might of the FBI behind this no perpetrator has ever been found. It seemed during the investigation that some US scientist , Dr. Stephan Hatfield, who had been working at Fort Detrick in Maryland, was the chief suspect. Nothing ever came of that. The investigation was, as claimed by the FBI, blocked by the CIA, who refused to divulge information on that laboratory. As per usual, most have forgotten this incident. What really happened there??
2.A day or two after the 9/11 attacks a passport belonging to one of the highjackers turned up in the rubble in NYC. I still find it preposterous that a passport, made of paper, is found so quickly in a mountain of rubble from the WTC and that the investigators determined as quickly as they did who the perpetrators were, as oppposed to the investigation on the Anthrax attacks where nothing has ever happened.
I think, what is happaning in the US now is very reminiscent of what happened in Nazi Germany prior to world war two. in 1938, I think it was, a Jew assasinated a German Diplomat in Paris. This gave the Nazis the fodder they were waiting for and it triggered the Reichs Kristalnacht in which hundreds of synagogues were burnt and mayn jews lynched. Around that time is also the time the Nazis introduced compulsory registration of all jews.
I think you have a particularly corrupt government that is laying the foundation for an authoritarian empire building government. I am very worried that the fallout from the coming war in Iraq will trigger world war three, in whatever form it happens. The North Koreans seem to think that their backs are against the wall and might very well take every one with them they can if they feel they have no way out. India and Pakistan may well go to war as a result of all of this and I don't expect China to sit idly as it all goes to hell.
Excuse the pun, but your country is becoming more and more like the Soviet Union was. I am sure that eventually you will have practically no rights whatsoever and it will take many years of future governments to unravel this mess. I think you should all compain and above all do something before it's too late.
It seems this companies sell slow, ARM desktops with a proprietry OS (apart from that in article) with about four software packages at a very hefty price. You're going to pay for the browser??? Pay over $1000 for a 300MHz machine?
I don't think they have much of a footing to stand on financially, which may explain why they used GPL code in the first place. I actually feel sorry for them, because it looks very much like a move of desperation to me.
The Free Kevin campaign was initiated by a group of people who realized that Federal prosecutors and the Federal judiciary had turned a blind eye to my constitutional rights and statutory law that protects any person accused of a crime.
Every censorship is bad except for in a war, or except against a teenage Norwegian? Movie industry is dying so they need to control everything to get more money? Lobbying is an honest profession?
Sorry to add to all the speculation here, but could plain simple metal fatigue have had something to do with the accident? I know the shuttles are checked and serviced with an extremely high degree of detail but, as has often happened in airplanes travelling at much lower speeds, airframes have often failed in the past in aircraft as old as the Columbia. The origional airframe of Columbia is around 20 years old, and while having been rebuilt a number of times, the stresses on the craft are far higher than those in normal aircraft.
The outsourcing is happening everywhere, either in terms of work being moved abroad or cheaper workers moving into your country. It won't be stopped until people realise that it neither serves the foreign workers well over time - anyone remember the so-called Asian Tiger of the 90's? - or the local workers. Globalisation means basically being put at the mercy of large corporations, who care for neither the foreign workers nor you.
I don't know what the answer is because heavy state control doesn't work either and massive military spending in order to shore up foreign conquest only increases budget deficits. Maybe in 50 years we'll all be looking for work in Bangladesh, who knows?
Firstly, I truly fail to see how a weapon like this will make that much difference against an enemy that regards Kalashnikows and rocket-propelled grenades as high tech and has had it's most significant success using box-cutters.
Secondly, it seems that this weapon could very well be used against humans if used at similar frequencies to microwave ovens.
Thirdly, all this glory halleluyah for high-tech weapons is more than a little bit sick. In the real world, real people die in wars. Killing and maiming more people will make the USA even more unpopular globally than it is today and will most surely attract more attacks by fanatics who have nothing except their lives to lose.
Fourthly, the most recent use of high-tech biological weapons was in the USA, against Americans, most probably by an American. And, ironically your FBI has yet to name a suspect.
Fifthly, most of the rest of the world thinks that the USA has no real problem with Saddam, and that what the USA really wants is the oil. The rest of the world will not forget this, nor will they forget the paradox of the USA's treatment of North Korea, a country that has openly admitted having worked on nuclear weapons.
But don't worry. I'm sure that the reality of what is happening will eventually become evident to you as well.
Gartner tech analyst Mark Margevicius sees Houston and Chicago as aberrations. He says big tech buyers won't switch to SimDesk because it is so unproven
It's strange. This is what they said when the first incantaion of Windows rolled around in the mid 80's.
I live in switzerland and while Switzerland is arguably the worlds most democratic country in that any person can start an initiative to change a law if he can gather enough signatures for it, there is a chronic problem of low voter turnout. Voting over the internet could get younger people and others who normally couldn't be bothered to vote.
I don't know if this device works but I'm pretty sure that your government won't be happy about a website publishing links to a device that could poptentially harm their military.
US Pilots bombing Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan because they're a bit warped out on speed in Go pills, soldiers on the ground surviving assault rifle hits with armoured vests, nutrient patches to be able to stay fit longer in battle, remotely controled drone bombers. All very in the realm of Lucius Shepard's Green Eyes I think it was, written in the Contra years in the 80's.
Why is it that I think that things like this will not make better soldiers, but merely soldiers that are more and more dependant on technology to fight?
I learnt Java with Exploring Java and C with Practical C. I have so many ORA Java books now I don't know what to do with them. I found the ADW Java books to be very good as well but incredibly difficult and dry. O'Reilly books are usually human, and that is what often makes the difference.
I quote from Exploring Java: An event can be a pressing a key on the keyboard, moveing the mouse or banging ones's head against the monitor.
Isn't this the sort of thing that we all feel sometimes in this profession of ours?
I would suppose that Apple i.e. Steve Jobs' reckoning is that because Mac sales are going down, they have to increase revenue somewhere. What they will say to the public will probably be some variation of the rather poor iTools pitch made at last years MWNY -"We need to make money somehow and keep the servers running etc etc etc".
It pissed off a lot of people and far fewer went for it than they thought would, and judging from the comments on Mac forums since then the service has been bad pretty often, with day long down times etc. Not good if you happen to use.mac as your email for business for example.
In any case it was enough to get me to go for a Dell laptop instead of a Powerbook. Lately I've been thinking about going for a Powerbook again because I really like the OS, especially the free dev tools. However I had a suspicion that Apple might suddenly decide that charging for everything that isn't bolted in, so to speak, would be a Good Thing, and might very well sometime start to charge for the dev tools.
If they start charging for the iApps (I use none of them, but most mac users do) they will lose some more customers. Pobably not many but they defintely will lose some.
The irony of the situation is that the falling Mac sales are due mainly to the bad economy and the continuing preconception amongst a lot of non Mac users that the CPUs, Bus speeds etc are woefully behind in terms of power. Apple's lack of any truly new computers for almost a year now is obviously also leading to a flattening of sales.
Apple, I urge you to think this one over veeery carefully.
If I remember correctly the following facts are true:
1.The morons who highjacked planes on the 11th of september last year and flew them into various buildings highjacked those planes with fucking boxcutters. I'm not sure which high-tech university in the states is researching boxcutter warefare, but I doubt it would be classified as rocket science. 2.All the embassy bombings and suicide bombings over the last few years have been done with explosives that were readily available on the black market. This too isn't rocket science. 3.The Anthrax attacks in the US last year were carried out, in all probabability as mentioned by your own FBI, by an American. Possibly it was a pissed off or overly patriotic lunatic like a certain Dr.Stephan Hatfield, but what is fascinating is that nothing has ever come of this. No one has been prosecuted and there have never been any verified suspects. Christ, don't you people worry about stuff like this. Covering up after an internal biowarfare attack, in all likelyhood by an American, and you piss yourselves about foreigners.
I think you Americans, as a nation, are being screwed over by your own government, an you are walking down that road that leads to Fascist Empire Buidling, with all the horrors that it contains.
This is not to say that other governments don't do the same thing, but the US is the one that always had the claim to being a free society (even if those with certain experiences in the McCarthy years would claim otherwise)
Slashdot Mirror
In the article there is a link to Theo's personal site. He lists his hardware there, and the amazing thing is that he doesn't have a single machine capable of more than 200MHz.
I find it amazing in these days of 3.6GHz machines needed to run bleeding edge games and gimmicky OS's and everyone and their mothers going gooey over the latest GHz jump in analy embedded mobile devices that OpenBSD's chief developer uses computers that actually fit his needs. It is comforting to know that the SECURE processing and dissemination of digital information can be done efficiently without the large, bright, rounded, colourful buttons and Windows found in most other OS's.
I Live in Switzerland, that fabled land in Europe of greedy Banks, snowy alpine chocolate box covers and strange, overpiced cheese with holes in it. Switzerland is one of the richest countries on earth. But in the last year and a half there has been one economic desaster after another. The national airline, Swissair, a national symbol for something like 75 years went tits up at the end of 2001, after a desasterous spending spree in which they bought out about five other regional airlines in Europe which all went bankrupt. In this year alone, the big Swiss banks and insuances have started letting workers go in their thousands, something that has never happened here before and something that is especially troubling when one considers that Switzerland's main empoyers are those very banks and insurances.
I work for a small building supplies company that is also going through rocky times as a system administrator and general computer do it all. Life is damn hard and I earn very little. I am constantly worried that I will lose my job to the other IT guy who doesn't even know what a path in Windows is (C:\bla\bla etc) but is doing a course in software engineering in C++. The guy is absolutely useless in sys admin stuff (and is less than interested) but is the bosses darling because he does the company's website, and the boss is one of those people who get impressed by Flash intros. He's an Arab and can not put a simple written sentence in German together.
However, if there's one thing I have learned in this long and painful life, it's that life is not fair. Shit happens and one invariably gets shafted sometime or another.
I suppose that is why we have religion and why Osama and company are so trendy in the muslim world.
I know you Americans tend to get overexited about your toys and in the heat of the moment tend to forget where you are, but perhaps you should know that the USSR ceased to exist around 13 years ago.
Education is the start of all things needed by a society to function and it is the thing that makes or breaks a country. The incredibly bad standard of American education will and is coming back to haunt those who considered it unimportant.
Take a look at the average level of spelling here on slashdot. Then take a look at what those posters are saying and then take a look at a country with a president who has trouble communicating in grammatically correct sentences.
I support, or at least I try to, a number of Windows users in a small company. My co-worker, an immigrant from Egypt made a request for help form in Excel so that the users skill levels could be determined. It contained radio buttons and drop down lists.
Most users, presented with the form, couldn't fill it out, being overwhelmed with the form. The most common question was, "What is Windows?". The second most common question was, "How do I fill this out?".
The moral of the story: most average joes don't know the difference between Windows and anything else. Those that do are a dwindling minority.
The author of the article would most likely be complaining about something else if he were to be using Windows..
A thin client would be an ideal solution to this kind of problem except that thin clients have become very much out of vogue, although they do allow admins to have much better control over the system. Another approach, although rather expensive and ungainly, is Novell's ZENworks. It allows an admin to control what is on the users machine and what not.
I see the solution as being a compromise in allowing users freedoms and controlling the workstations. Ideally the computer would be regularly monitored, but this can be difficult in an environment where there are thousands of computers.
I find it so strange that Bush and co. have come this far. I remember after the 9/11 thing some frenchman publishing a book disputing the terrorists origions. He was ridiculed across the globe.
Now I wonder how wrong he actually was.
Some things that continue to make me wonder:
1.The only recorded biowarfare attack on Americans were the Anthrax letter attacks shortly after 9/11 in the US in which 5 died and some 20 people became ill. Even though there was the whole might of the FBI behind this no perpetrator has ever been found. It seemed during the investigation that some US scientist , Dr. Stephan Hatfield, who had been working at Fort Detrick in Maryland, was the chief suspect. Nothing ever came of that. The investigation was, as claimed by the FBI, blocked by the CIA, who refused to divulge information on that laboratory. As per usual, most have forgotten this incident. What really happened there??
2.A day or two after the 9/11 attacks a passport belonging to one of the highjackers turned up in the rubble in NYC. I still find it preposterous that a passport, made of paper, is found so quickly in a mountain of rubble from the WTC and that the investigators determined as quickly as they did who the perpetrators were, as oppposed to the investigation on the Anthrax attacks where nothing has ever happened.
I think, what is happaning in the US now is very reminiscent of what happened in Nazi Germany prior to world war two. in 1938, I think it was, a Jew assasinated a German Diplomat in Paris. This gave the Nazis the fodder they were waiting for and it triggered the Reichs Kristalnacht in which hundreds of synagogues were burnt and mayn jews lynched. Around that time is also the time the Nazis introduced compulsory registration of all jews.
I think you have a particularly corrupt government that is laying the foundation for an authoritarian empire building government. I am very worried that the fallout from the coming war in Iraq will trigger world war three, in whatever form it happens. The North Koreans seem to think that their backs are against the wall and might very well take every one with them they can if they feel they have no way out. India and Pakistan may well go to war as a result of all of this and I don't expect China to sit idly as it all goes to hell.
May God help us all.
Isn't this what the present US gov is doing.
Excuse the pun, but your country is becoming more and more like the Soviet Union was. I am sure that eventually you will have practically no rights whatsoever and it will take many years of future governments to unravel this mess. I think you should all compain and above all do something before it's too late.
It seems this companies sell slow, ARM desktops with a proprietry OS (apart from that in article) with about four software packages at a very hefty price. You're going to pay for the browser??? Pay over $1000 for a 300MHz machine?
I don't think they have much of a footing to stand on financially, which may explain why they used GPL code in the first place. I actually feel sorry for them, because it looks very much like a move of desperation to me.
The Free Kevin campaign was initiated by a group of people who realized that Federal prosecutors and the Federal judiciary had turned a blind eye to my constitutional rights and statutory law that protects any person accused of a crime.
Thank your lucky stars you aren't a Muslim.
Every censorship is bad except for in a war, or except against a teenage Norwegian? Movie industry is dying so they need to control everything to get more money? Lobbying is an honest profession?
Go fuck yourself you overpaid scum.
This is what MS' competition had to do in order to compete with MS in the 90's. Look what happened to them.
Sorry to add to all the speculation here, but could plain simple metal fatigue have had something to do with the accident? I know the shuttles are checked and serviced with an extremely high degree of detail but, as has often happened in airplanes travelling at much lower speeds, airframes have often failed in the past in aircraft as old as the Columbia. The origional airframe of Columbia is around 20 years old, and while having been rebuilt a number of times, the stresses on the craft are far higher than those in normal aircraft.
The outsourcing is happening everywhere, either in terms of work being moved abroad or cheaper workers moving into your country. It won't be stopped until people realise that it neither serves the foreign workers well over time - anyone remember the so-called Asian Tiger of the 90's? - or the local workers. Globalisation means basically being put at the mercy of large corporations, who care for neither the foreign workers nor you.
I don't know what the answer is because heavy state control doesn't work either and massive military spending in order to shore up foreign conquest only increases budget deficits. Maybe in 50 years we'll all be looking for work in Bangladesh, who knows?
Firstly, I truly fail to see how a weapon like this will make that much difference against an enemy that regards Kalashnikows and rocket-propelled grenades as high tech and has had it's most significant success using box-cutters.
Secondly, it seems that this weapon could very well be used against humans if used at similar frequencies to microwave ovens.
Thirdly, all this glory halleluyah for high-tech weapons is more than a little bit sick. In the real world, real people die in wars. Killing and maiming more people will make the USA even more unpopular globally than it is today and will most surely attract more attacks by fanatics who have nothing except their lives to lose.
Fourthly, the most recent use of high-tech biological weapons was in the USA, against Americans, most probably by an American. And, ironically your FBI has yet to name a suspect.
Fifthly, most of the rest of the world thinks that the USA has no real problem with Saddam, and that what the USA really wants is the oil. The rest of the world will not forget this, nor will they forget the paradox of the USA's treatment of North Korea, a country that has openly admitted having worked on nuclear weapons.
But don't worry. I'm sure that the reality of what is happening will eventually become evident to you as well.
Gartner tech analyst Mark Margevicius sees Houston and Chicago as aberrations. He says big tech buyers won't switch to SimDesk because it is so unproven
It's strange. This is what they said when the first incantaion of Windows rolled around in the mid 80's.
As a South African, this makes me proud. Ridiculous I know, but it does. Amandla Awetu!
I live in switzerland and while Switzerland is arguably the worlds most democratic country in that any person can start an initiative to change a law if he can gather enough signatures for it, there is a chronic problem of low voter turnout. Voting over the internet could get younger people and others who normally couldn't be bothered to vote.
I don't know if this device works but I'm pretty sure that your government won't be happy about a website publishing links to a device that could poptentially harm their military.
Because I already have it. ;-)
US Pilots bombing Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan because they're a bit warped out on speed in Go pills, soldiers on the ground surviving assault rifle hits with armoured vests, nutrient patches to be able to stay fit longer in battle, remotely controled drone bombers. All very in the realm of Lucius Shepard's Green Eyes I think it was, written in the Contra years in the 80's.
Why is it that I think that things like this will not make better soldiers, but merely soldiers that are more and more dependant on technology to fight?
I learnt Java with Exploring Java and C with Practical C. I have so many ORA Java books now I don't know what to do with them. I found the ADW Java books to be very good as well but incredibly difficult and dry. O'Reilly books are usually human, and that is what often makes the difference.
I quote from Exploring Java: An event can be a pressing a key on the keyboard, moveing the mouse or banging ones's head against the monitor.
Isn't this the sort of thing that we all feel sometimes in this profession of ours?
I would suppose that Apple i.e. Steve Jobs' reckoning is that because Mac sales are going down, they have to increase revenue somewhere. What they will say to the public will probably be some variation of the rather poor iTools pitch made at last years MWNY -"We need to make money somehow and keep the servers running etc etc etc".
.mac as your email for business for example.
It pissed off a lot of people and far fewer went for it than they thought would, and judging from the comments on Mac forums since then the service has been bad pretty often, with day long down times etc. Not good if you happen to use
In any case it was enough to get me to go for a Dell laptop instead of a Powerbook. Lately I've been thinking about going for a Powerbook again because I really like the OS, especially the free dev tools. However I had a suspicion that Apple might suddenly decide that charging for everything that isn't bolted in, so to speak, would be a Good Thing, and might very well sometime start to charge for the dev tools.
If they start charging for the iApps (I use none of them, but most mac users do) they will lose some more customers. Pobably not many but they defintely will lose some.
The irony of the situation is that the falling Mac sales are due mainly to the bad economy and the continuing preconception amongst a lot of non Mac users that the CPUs, Bus speeds etc are woefully behind in terms of power. Apple's lack of any truly new computers for almost a year now is obviously also leading to a flattening of sales.
Apple, I urge you to think this one over veeery carefully.
If I remember correctly the following facts are true:
1.The morons who highjacked planes on the 11th of september last year and flew them into various buildings highjacked those planes with fucking boxcutters. I'm not sure which high-tech university in the states is researching boxcutter warefare, but I doubt it would be classified as rocket science.
2.All the embassy bombings and suicide bombings over the last few years have been done with explosives that were readily available on the black market. This too isn't rocket science.
3.The Anthrax attacks in the US last year were carried out, in all probabability as mentioned by your own FBI, by an American. Possibly it was a pissed off or overly patriotic lunatic like a certain Dr.Stephan Hatfield, but what is fascinating is that nothing has ever come of this. No one has been prosecuted and there have never been any verified suspects. Christ, don't you people worry about stuff like this. Covering up after an internal biowarfare attack, in all likelyhood by an American, and you piss yourselves about foreigners.
I think you Americans, as a nation, are being screwed over by your own government, an you are walking down that road that leads to Fascist Empire Buidling, with all the horrors that it contains.
This is not to say that other governments don't do the same thing, but the US is the one that always had the claim to being a free society (even if those with certain experiences in the McCarthy years would claim otherwise)