Well, I did qualify it with unless you need offsite storage.
Small buisnesses arent necessarily able to afford the costs associated with tape, and the handling of tapes is a pain and very time consuming unless you can afford a real tape library that can handle a lot of tapes. Not to mention you need to educate the (probably part-time) sysadmin in tape handling.
You can combine diskbased backups with offsite uploading of the really really important savesets to have maximum security for lowest cost.
But the simple fact of life is that unless you have the size to afford it, tape will be prohibitively expensive and you're likely to end up with bad backups or a backup software ticking away the weeks waiting for writable media.
Of course, diskbased backups are what I run at home, and not what I'd recommend for 100% data safety. At work we've got a several tape silos and cross-site backups. But I've seen enough small buisnesses to prefer a realistic backup solution in their range rather than none at all.
And in the ordinary small buisness scenario, when you have that hard drive crash you'll discover the tape drive hasnt been cleaned in three years, half the tapes are corrupt, and nobody understood what the 'waiting for writable media' message on the backup server meant.
Tapes work when you can afford them, and you have a fulltime dedicated sysadmin who can deal with it. But if you dont, you're likely to end up with a non-functional backup system.
Actually, for any small buisness I wouldnt recommend a tape drive. As things are currently, it's _far_ cheaper to plop in a few disks, or even get a whole separate 'backup' server, and dump out the data onto a file type device on disk rather than real tapes.
Currently, you get pretty much the same megabyte price on IDE disk as you get for tape, and that's not even figuring in a DLT drive or loader, and/or the time spent dealing with it.
Not to mention that restores off a diskbased file device are quite a bit faster than off tape.
So, unless you need serious archive capability (in which case you shouldnt be using tape anyway), or offsite storage of tape, go with disk rather than tape. Tape makes sense when you have horridly expensive 'enterprise' storage solutions like fibre channel disks, but for any smallscale operation the tape vendors have priced themselves out of buisness (or the disk vendors have gone so cheap as to drive them out of buiness).
Longer battery life: 24-48 hours full operation 8 weeks in standby minimum.
Oh, I'd like to add one. A five year warranty with same-day repairs. At least. (The point is; make them unlikely to break down).
I've had a Psion Series 3, and an IPaq. I'd consider the psion the superior device by far, even being almost a decade older. AA batteries for a fairly long battery life, did what I needed it too, had programming tools for fun. But eventually it broke down.
The IPaq lasted about three months, then the constant glitchiness and constant need for recharge, eventual discharge coupled with final battery breakdown left me not bothering to get it repaired. I cant use something that's more unreliable than my own memory for a PDA.
Retraining is such an overrated cost that it's not even funny. These are people we are talking about. Not vegetables. People at least moderately competent at their jobs. Secretaries and government workers who have probably seen more userinterfaces and word processors in their careers than you can count to on your fingers and toes.
If they could transition through mainframe terminals to dos computers to Windows 3.x to Windows 2000, they sure as hell can transition to Linux Windows lookalike apps.
Like my accountant mother in law said about her Gnumeric spreadsheet, 'but you said it was different from excel. How is this different from excel?'.
The only retraining issue will be in retraining the purchasers to bring their own lunch rather than get free lunch with MS salesmen.
We already have come up with several good ways to dispose it; the first and foremost is: Dont. Use it again. Current fission fuel is used to about 1% when it's decomissioned for efficiency. It could easily be reprocessed, used in a breeder reactor and used again. Eventually you'll get 'spent' fuel but in far far lower amounts for the amount of energy gained. And we're not going to run out of nuclear fissile material any time soon, especially if we reuse the fuel. Even so, it's just a stopgap until fusion gets here.
The solar chimney project is interesting, and I've run across if before, but still, the thing is 5km wide, and 1km high. And again, you need 5 of them to replace a single fission reactor (if their 200MW output is 24/7/365, which I doubt, rather like an average of 50MW average, which would make it 20 of them to replace one plant assuming 100% efficient energy storage). We might as well build glass domes over most cities to capture waste energy. Again, it ends up being interesting, but not practical.
The company wont sniff at popping for a boxed copy. The techs will groan in pain for having to push a request for purchase through the company purchasing department tho, as well as motivate the expenditure. Or more likely they'll shrug and just test on RedHat because it will take a long time before marketshare for UL grows large enough for any management to care enough to ask the techs to do certification for UL.
It isnt the money. It's the convenience and getting evangelical support inside the development companies. This will have neither convenience nor many pushers, and with a nonexistent marketshare it will have little or no management support.
Indeed. I dont doubt a second we can cut energy usage on current applications. Probably down to 25-50% of what it is today. But then we need to replace a lot of oil powered things with electric versions instead. Like cars. And then we have the whole developing world. Energy usage will only increase, even if it's used more efficiently. Which still doesnt place energy consumption within reach of the ability of solar or wind to deliver.
We could raise energy prices until it's possible to deliver with alternative energy. But I'll place a solid bet that any politician trying that will be facing a revolution as soon as people get their brand new electricity bill with an extra zero or two tagged onto the end.
Fission fuel can be reprocessed and reused. We dont need to produce millions of tons of radioactive waste.
The alternative to fission isnt solar or wind. The alternative is freezing in a cave, because there arent going to be any solar and wind farms the size of Canada. No matter however much we may wish it. The scale of it is off by several thousand times from the realistic.
Um, what this does show is we still need _huge_ ugly solar farms to get results. An average fission reactor outputs 1GW. You need 2000 of these to replace one single fission reactor. Oh, and that's during daylight hours. Say 6000 of these to replace one reactor if you have to deal with energy storage and loss during non daylight hours. The only thing infinite about solar power is how much space you're going to need to build the plants.
Solar isnt the future, nor is wind. The future is fusion and the way until we get it is fission. There is no alternative.
The problem with todays worm hybrids is that the 'permanent' protection often turns out to be 'the protection you needed yesterday today'. Most large corporations suffering from the mail worms do have extensive virus protection. The daily updates are a day late. Which leaves you pretty much permanently vulnerable.
Virus protection software just isnt enough. Disallowing any form of executable attachments (including any and all forms of documents that can or do support macro languages), and securing systems with privilidge based access to executables will get you much more security. Of course you'll have to keep up good standard practices of minimum running services and frequent patching too.
Yah, but out of a batch of 10 we got, I think 7 have been serviced within a year. The most common problem appears to be the battery giving up and dying within 5 seconds to an hour after leaving the cradle.
I used a handheld (psion series 3) regularly for about a year in the early nineties (even coded a space invaders for it during a boring train trip:) but eventually decided the dependency on it didnt mix with the shoddy engineering in handhelds in general. They break more than the paper kind.
Maybe I'll pick up the habit again. When they become dependable.
You dont get it, do you. The info _will_ be junked _anyway_. Even if you dont want to do it, planned obscelecense will do it for you. You do not have a choice. If you wrote it in a wordprocessor it's _biodegradable_. All that info _will_ be thrown away if you dont keep it in a more persistent format.
I am in the middle of the buisness world. The notes and memos we send arent documentation, and they last about as long as it takes someone to hit delete in outlook. The.xls documents last until the guy maintaining them quits. These are extreme short-term storage formats. They're not documentation, and they dont last. And anyone trying to say the documentation is in that word document I sent around will get to do it again.
Real data is stored in big databases, real documentation is stored in SGML. Because we need to keep it for more than an upgrade cycle of Office.
If your buisness knowledge is stored in Word format you have a problem. And I bet those buisnesses wont be laughing when Microsoft tells them they have to 'convert their old documents to text' because the format's changed and the new format 'will render the document somewhat like the old one'.
It's not going to be the guys trying to convince you to run Linux that will ask you to junk your data. It will be the vendor of whatever wordprocessor you use, because their profit isnt helped by you wanting to keep your old software version.
This is exactly why real documentation is, has been, and will continue to be, written in SGML. Maintaining documents written by hundreds of people containing hundreds of thousands of information elements in dozens of languages isnt done in Word or Office. I've yet to see any 'real' documents in Word; nothing that is even remotely related to actual products that are to be sold can be kept in formats so prone to time-degradation.
The switch isnt that hard. Junk the info and learn the lesson; people didnt write documents they wanted to last in lipstick on toilet paper before computers, and Word (or other word processing formats) are the computerized equivalent of lipstick on toilet paper.
You might lose a lot of formatting info, but that's the price you've got to pay. In education the old phrase 'do it again, and do it right this time' should carry some weight.
The problem is that current IP laws are no longer geared towards being an incentive for maximising future development.
Music and books are prime examples. The industries make avid use of 'slavery' contracts that give little or no incentive for anyone to produce good new works, because the creators arent the ones reaping the profits. Most creators would do better getting an ordinary job. At the same time the corporations are using their influence to supress alternatives, which makes it very difficult to achieve significant distribution of your works, should you decide not to sign up on a 'slavery' contract. As far as books go, there are several times I've been 'robbed' of works of creation _because_ of copyright. They're out of print, and wont be reprinted, and due to copyright they cant be put up on the net for download.
In the software industry we have proof in free software that the necessary IP would be developed anyway; the contract between the public and the creator companies in this case is a total loss for the public; they're not gaining anything they wouldnt have gained without IP laws (the exception, of course, being games and similar one-off pieces). But most software gets written to scratch an itch, and would be written wether or not there is a copyright on it.
Movies are more difficult, as are medicines and other works that carry costs beyond the ability of one or a few individuals to produce. Here copyright still has a meaning, and perhaps even patents.
The theory of using IP as an incentive has some points, but the current implementations do not work anymore.
Forced freedom is the only freedom you'll ever have.
It's not forced freedom versus complete freedom. It's forced freedom versus working the saltmines for the first guy to exercise his 'complete freedom' to hire a few thugs who'll come over and enslave you.
The same, of course, pretty much goes for software.
My guess: because there are dozens of other distributions that do distribute ISO images for free.
I wont be using (or even trying) united linux either. I'll stick with Redhat and Debian for home use and Redhat for corporate use. The price of buing another Linux distribution is small, but with corporate purchasing involved, the difference between Redhat and, for example, SuSE isnt a few bucks, it's several hundred dollars worth of paperwork time and several weeks to go through processing. Unless I pay for it myself.
So, give me a complete ISO download to speed up implementation projects and I can dump the support contract through purchasing, without the red tape that comes automatically with an incoming pricetag to a large corporation.
It's not a question of price. It's completely a question of convenience, and if it isnt convenient it's not what's going to get installed.
I went the other way. I started out with slackware (or was it SLS?) and eventually went to redhat. Pretty much when I had to upgrade glibc and kernel on 5 machines. That's when you start getting over the 'fun' part of rolling your own.
These days I even run my home network with homes and compiled stuff mounted over nfs, so I can easily upgrade and/or wipe systems in 20 minutes.
And Redhat has taken a fairly consistent free software stance for their distribution throughout most of their history. While not everyone may actually care about that, the people most likely to push Linux adoption within an enterprise are often people who do care. For those the choice falls between Redhat and Debian, with debian more adherent to the free software interests, but with redhat not too bad, and more palatable for buisness (not to mention support for all that fun enterprise software needed).
Standardizing may solve the problem with software, but it wont solve how they're percieved. Being semi-proprietary may help them get their customers to pay, but it isnt going to help their marketshare, or help them gain advocates. Redhat remains a better compromise between freedom and buisness.
Not necessarily. R2 and 3po have similarities with Jar Jar (and I found 3po fairly annoying from the beginning), but they didnt get the same focus. Maybe it was that the other characters were stronger in 4-6, or that Lucas didnt quite feel the same need to demo his New Cool Graphics, because they became more (bad) comic relief than pretty much 'main feature'.
It is Lucas great fortune that technology wasnt up to making episodes 1-3 when he started out, because if he had made them in order, and if they had been as they are today, the story would have ended with episode I.
Actually, it was. It was bad enough to skip episode II completely. And Episode I wasnt bad because it was the first of a saga; the lack of advancing storyline could be forgiven; it was bad because it was a cross between CGI-grossout and slapstick comedy, the first which leaves you with a bored 'yeah yeah, been done before', the second which maybe is humourous to a fiveyearold but most have grown out of it.
I've given up on Lucas. He showed promise with Episodes IV and V, but then he lost his creativity and touch. The best he could do for the series would be to leave it to someone with a vision.
No, the bottleneck is the same as it's been the last 5-10 years. You cant get better performance reading and writing to disk as long as you dont have better performance between the platter and the head of the drive. You can get a ATA500 bus and it wont make any difference as long as you cant read faster off the disk. You have to get faster disks (try a 15k rpm disk for example).
For SCSI the bus speed can make more of a difference since you can have more devices per bus. But with IDE's pitiful 2 devices the bus doesnt really make a difference for any OS that has a memory FS cache already (which will usually sequence reads and writes enough that the disks own buffer doesnt matter much (which is the only thing you're getting more speed against with a faster bus)).
That one's simple; of course they can check who's got Code Red. The problem is that it will be the regularly-paying low-bandwidth-use Average Joe and his or her kids who basically couldnt fix it even if they knew they had it. It will also be a significant percentage of their customers.
Either they'll have to cut off 20-50% of their customers or they'd have provide technical assistance to that number of people... neither option of which will be palatable to anyone wanting to actually not go bankrupt immediately.
If it annoys you, set up a webserver to answer the code red infection attempts by shutting down or wiping the offending machine. Or pop up a warning for the poor suckers on their display with a pointer to where they can find a cleanup patch, if you're a nice person. It's not very complicated and I think you can find example cgi scripts by searching on google a bit.
Nah, last one I saw because I happened to pass by a movie theatre the day after it went up. I figured that well, the last half of return of the jedi stank, but maybe Lucas hadnt gone senile after all.
Of course, he had.
As far as I'm concerned, I've given Starwars a second chance, and unless I get several good reviews from friends I'm not going to bother.
It really is too bad. Starwars had a lot of potential, but overdosing on comic relief characters and fluffy teddybears makes it apparent that Lucas should concentrate on childrens cartoons. Not that that's a bad thing, only Lucas just hasnt got what it takes to make good movies of this calibre anymore. The later films are not epic in any other sense than 'epically embarrasing almost-slapstick comedy'.
I do wonder what exactly it was that destroyed Lucas tho. Was there some specific even in his life that made him lose his touch? Where did things go wrong for him (or 'right')?
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Well, I did qualify it with unless you need offsite storage.
Small buisnesses arent necessarily able to afford the costs associated with tape, and the handling of tapes is a pain and very time consuming unless you can afford a real tape library that can handle a lot of tapes. Not to mention you need to educate the (probably part-time) sysadmin in tape handling.
You can combine diskbased backups with offsite uploading of the really really important savesets to have maximum security for lowest cost.
But the simple fact of life is that unless you have the size to afford it, tape will be prohibitively expensive and you're likely to end up with bad backups or a backup software ticking away the weeks waiting for writable media.
Of course, diskbased backups are what I run at home, and not what I'd recommend for 100% data safety. At work we've got a several tape silos and cross-site backups. But I've seen enough small buisnesses to prefer a realistic backup solution in their range rather than none at all.
And in the ordinary small buisness scenario, when you have that hard drive crash you'll discover the tape drive hasnt been cleaned in three years, half the tapes are corrupt, and nobody understood what the 'waiting for writable media' message on the backup server meant.
Tapes work when you can afford them, and you have a fulltime dedicated sysadmin who can deal with it. But if you dont, you're likely to end up with a non-functional backup system.
Actually, for any small buisness I wouldnt recommend a tape drive. As things are currently, it's _far_ cheaper to plop in a few disks, or even get a whole separate 'backup' server, and dump out the data onto a file type device on disk rather than real tapes.
Currently, you get pretty much the same megabyte price on IDE disk as you get for tape, and that's not even figuring in a DLT drive or loader, and/or the time spent dealing with it.
Not to mention that restores off a diskbased file device are quite a bit faster than off tape.
So, unless you need serious archive capability (in which case you shouldnt be using tape anyway), or offsite storage of tape, go with disk rather than tape. Tape makes sense when you have horridly expensive 'enterprise' storage solutions like fibre channel disks, but for any smallscale operation the tape vendors have priced themselves out of buisness (or the disk vendors have gone so cheap as to drive them out of buiness).
Even worse, you'd be amazed at how quickly someone elses pingflood can send a user over his monthly limit.
Longer battery life: 24-48 hours full operation 8 weeks in standby minimum.
Oh, I'd like to add one. A five year warranty with same-day repairs. At least. (The point is; make them unlikely to break down).
I've had a Psion Series 3, and an IPaq. I'd consider the psion the superior device by far, even being almost a decade older. AA batteries for a fairly long battery life, did what I needed it too, had programming tools for fun. But eventually it broke down.
The IPaq lasted about three months, then the constant glitchiness and constant need for recharge, eventual discharge coupled with final battery breakdown left me not bothering to get it repaired. I cant use something that's more unreliable than my own memory for a PDA.
Retraining is such an overrated cost that it's not even funny. These are people we are talking about. Not vegetables. People at least moderately competent at their jobs. Secretaries and government workers who have probably seen more userinterfaces and word processors in their careers than you can count to on your fingers and toes.
If they could transition through mainframe terminals to dos computers to Windows 3.x to Windows 2000, they sure as hell can transition to Linux Windows lookalike apps.
Like my accountant mother in law said about her Gnumeric spreadsheet, 'but you said it was different from excel. How is this different from excel?'.
The only retraining issue will be in retraining the purchasers to bring their own lunch rather than get free lunch with MS salesmen.
We already have come up with several good ways to dispose it; the first and foremost is: Dont. Use it again. Current fission fuel is used to about 1% when it's decomissioned for efficiency. It could easily be reprocessed, used in a breeder reactor and used again. Eventually you'll get 'spent' fuel but in far far lower amounts for the amount of energy gained. And we're not going to run out of nuclear fissile material any time soon, especially if we reuse the fuel. Even so, it's just a stopgap until fusion gets here.
The solar chimney project is interesting, and I've run across if before, but still, the thing is 5km wide, and 1km high. And again, you need 5 of them to replace a single fission reactor (if their 200MW output is 24/7/365, which I doubt, rather like an average of 50MW average, which would make it 20 of them to replace one plant assuming 100% efficient energy storage). We might as well build glass domes over most cities to capture waste energy. Again, it ends up being interesting, but not practical.
The company wont sniff at popping for a boxed copy. The techs will groan in pain for having to push a request for purchase through the company purchasing department tho, as well as motivate the expenditure. Or more likely they'll shrug and just test on RedHat because it will take a long time before marketshare for UL grows large enough for any management to care enough to ask the techs to do certification for UL.
It isnt the money. It's the convenience and getting evangelical support inside the development companies. This will have neither convenience nor many pushers, and with a nonexistent marketshare it will have little or no management support.
Indeed. I dont doubt a second we can cut energy usage on current applications. Probably down to 25-50% of what it is today. But then we need to replace a lot of oil powered things with electric versions instead. Like cars. And then we have the whole developing world. Energy usage will only increase, even if it's used more efficiently. Which still doesnt place energy consumption within reach of the ability of solar or wind to deliver.
We could raise energy prices until it's possible to deliver with alternative energy. But I'll place a solid bet that any politician trying that will be facing a revolution as soon as people get their brand new electricity bill with an extra zero or two tagged onto the end.
Fission fuel can be reprocessed and reused. We dont need to produce millions of tons of radioactive waste.
The alternative to fission isnt solar or wind. The alternative is freezing in a cave, because there arent going to be any solar and wind farms the size of Canada. No matter however much we may wish it. The scale of it is off by several thousand times from the realistic.
Um, what this does show is we still need _huge_ ugly solar farms to get results. An average fission reactor outputs 1GW. You need 2000 of these to replace one single fission reactor. Oh, and that's during daylight hours. Say 6000 of these to replace one reactor if you have to deal with energy storage and loss during non daylight hours. The only thing infinite about solar power is how much space you're going to need to build the plants.
Solar isnt the future, nor is wind. The future is fusion and the way until we get it is fission. There is no alternative.
The problem with todays worm hybrids is that the 'permanent' protection often turns out to be 'the protection you needed yesterday today'. Most large corporations suffering from the mail worms do have extensive virus protection. The daily updates are a day late. Which leaves you pretty much permanently vulnerable.
Virus protection software just isnt enough. Disallowing any form of executable attachments (including any and all forms of documents that can or do support macro languages), and securing systems with privilidge based access to executables will get you much more security. Of course you'll have to keep up good standard practices of minimum running services and frequent patching too.
Yah, but out of a batch of 10 we got, I think 7 have been serviced within a year. The most common problem appears to be the battery giving up and dying within 5 seconds to an hour after leaving the cradle.
:) but eventually decided the dependency on it didnt mix with the shoddy engineering in handhelds in general. They break more than the paper kind.
I used a handheld (psion series 3) regularly for about a year in the early nineties (even coded a space invaders for it during a boring train trip
Maybe I'll pick up the habit again. When they become dependable.
You dont get it, do you. The info _will_ be junked _anyway_. Even if you dont want to do it, planned obscelecense will do it for you. You do not have a choice. If you wrote it in a wordprocessor it's _biodegradable_. All that info _will_ be thrown away if you dont keep it in a more persistent format.
.xls documents last until the guy maintaining them quits. These are extreme short-term storage formats. They're not documentation, and they dont last. And anyone trying to say the documentation is in that word document I sent around will get to do it again.
I am in the middle of the buisness world. The notes and memos we send arent documentation, and they last about as long as it takes someone to hit delete in outlook. The
Real data is stored in big databases, real documentation is stored in SGML. Because we need to keep it for more than an upgrade cycle of Office.
If your buisness knowledge is stored in Word format you have a problem. And I bet those buisnesses wont be laughing when Microsoft tells them they have to 'convert their old documents to text' because the format's changed and the new format 'will render the document somewhat like the old one'.
It's not going to be the guys trying to convince you to run Linux that will ask you to junk your data. It will be the vendor of whatever wordprocessor you use, because their profit isnt helped by you wanting to keep your old software version.
This is exactly why real documentation is, has been, and will continue to be, written in SGML. Maintaining documents written by hundreds of people containing hundreds of thousands of information elements in dozens of languages isnt done in Word or Office. I've yet to see any 'real' documents in Word; nothing that is even remotely related to actual products that are to be sold can be kept in formats so prone to time-degradation.
The switch isnt that hard. Junk the info and learn the lesson; people didnt write documents they wanted to last in lipstick on toilet paper before computers, and Word (or other word processing formats) are the computerized equivalent of lipstick on toilet paper.
You might lose a lot of formatting info, but that's the price you've got to pay. In education the old phrase 'do it again, and do it right this time' should carry some weight.
Yes, and that is the theory behind IP.
The problem is that current IP laws are no longer geared towards being an incentive for maximising future development.
Music and books are prime examples. The industries make avid use of 'slavery' contracts that give little or no incentive for anyone to produce good new works, because the creators arent the ones reaping the profits. Most creators would do better getting an ordinary job. At the same time the corporations are using their influence to supress alternatives, which makes it very difficult to achieve significant distribution of your works, should you decide not to sign up on a 'slavery' contract. As far as books go, there are several times I've been 'robbed' of works of creation _because_ of copyright. They're out of print, and wont be reprinted, and due to copyright they cant be put up on the net for download.
In the software industry we have proof in free software that the necessary IP would be developed anyway; the contract between the public and the creator companies in this case is a total loss for the public; they're not gaining anything they wouldnt have gained without IP laws (the exception, of course, being games and similar one-off pieces). But most software gets written to scratch an itch, and would be written wether or not there is a copyright on it.
Movies are more difficult, as are medicines and other works that carry costs beyond the ability of one or a few individuals to produce. Here copyright still has a meaning, and perhaps even patents.
The theory of using IP as an incentive has some points, but the current implementations do not work anymore.
Forced freedom is the only freedom you'll ever have.
It's not forced freedom versus complete freedom. It's forced freedom versus working the saltmines for the first guy to exercise his 'complete freedom' to hire a few thugs who'll come over and enslave you.
The same, of course, pretty much goes for software.
My guess: because there are dozens of other distributions that do distribute ISO images for free.
I wont be using (or even trying) united linux either. I'll stick with Redhat and Debian for home use and Redhat for corporate use. The price of buing another Linux distribution is small, but with corporate purchasing involved, the difference between Redhat and, for example, SuSE isnt a few bucks, it's several hundred dollars worth of paperwork time and several weeks to go through processing. Unless I pay for it myself.
So, give me a complete ISO download to speed up implementation projects and I can dump the support contract through purchasing, without the red tape that comes automatically with an incoming pricetag to a large corporation.
It's not a question of price. It's completely a question of convenience, and if it isnt convenient it's not what's going to get installed.
I went the other way. I started out with slackware (or was it SLS?) and eventually went to redhat. Pretty much when I had to upgrade glibc and kernel on 5 machines. That's when you start getting over the 'fun' part of rolling your own.
These days I even run my home network with homes and compiled stuff mounted over nfs, so I can easily upgrade and/or wipe systems in 20 minutes.
And Redhat has taken a fairly consistent free software stance for their distribution throughout most of their history. While not everyone may actually care about that, the people most likely to push Linux adoption within an enterprise are often people who do care. For those the choice falls between Redhat and Debian, with debian more adherent to the free software interests, but with redhat not too bad, and more palatable for buisness (not to mention support for all that fun enterprise software needed).
Standardizing may solve the problem with software, but it wont solve how they're percieved. Being semi-proprietary may help them get their customers to pay, but it isnt going to help their marketshare, or help them gain advocates. Redhat remains a better compromise between freedom and buisness.
Not necessarily. R2 and 3po have similarities with Jar Jar (and I found 3po fairly annoying from the beginning), but they didnt get the same focus. Maybe it was that the other characters were stronger in 4-6, or that Lucas didnt quite feel the same need to demo his New Cool Graphics, because they became more (bad) comic relief than pretty much 'main feature'.
It is Lucas great fortune that technology wasnt up to making episodes 1-3 when he started out, because if he had made them in order, and if they had been as they are today, the story would have ended with episode I.
Actually, it was. It was bad enough to skip episode II completely. And Episode I wasnt bad because it was the first of a saga; the lack of advancing storyline could be forgiven; it was bad because it was a cross between CGI-grossout and slapstick comedy, the first which leaves you with a bored 'yeah yeah, been done before', the second which maybe is humourous to a fiveyearold but most have grown out of it.
I've given up on Lucas. He showed promise with Episodes IV and V, but then he lost his creativity and touch. The best he could do for the series would be to leave it to someone with a vision.
No, the bottleneck is the same as it's been the last 5-10 years. You cant get better performance reading and writing to disk as long as you dont have better performance between the platter and the head of the drive. You can get a ATA500 bus and it wont make any difference as long as you cant read faster off the disk. You have to get faster disks (try a 15k rpm disk for example).
For SCSI the bus speed can make more of a difference since you can have more devices per bus. But with IDE's pitiful 2 devices the bus doesnt really make a difference for any OS that has a memory FS cache already (which will usually sequence reads and writes enough that the disks own buffer doesnt matter much (which is the only thing you're getting more speed against with a faster bus)).
That one's simple; of course they can check who's got Code Red. The problem is that it will be the regularly-paying low-bandwidth-use Average Joe and his or her kids who basically couldnt fix it even if they knew they had it. It will also be a significant percentage of their customers.
Either they'll have to cut off 20-50% of their customers or they'd have provide technical assistance to that number of people... neither option of which will be palatable to anyone wanting to actually not go bankrupt immediately.
If it annoys you, set up a webserver to answer the code red infection attempts by shutting down or wiping the offending machine. Or pop up a warning for the poor suckers on their display with a pointer to where they can find a cleanup patch, if you're a nice person. It's not very complicated and I think you can find example cgi scripts by searching on google a bit.
Nah, last one I saw because I happened to pass by a movie theatre the day after it went up. I figured that well, the last half of return of the jedi stank, but maybe Lucas hadnt gone senile after all.
Of course, he had.
As far as I'm concerned, I've given Starwars a second chance, and unless I get several good reviews from friends I'm not going to bother.
It really is too bad. Starwars had a lot of potential, but overdosing on comic relief characters and fluffy teddybears makes it apparent that Lucas should concentrate on childrens cartoons. Not that that's a bad thing, only Lucas just hasnt got what it takes to make good movies of this calibre anymore. The later films are not epic in any other sense than 'epically embarrasing almost-slapstick comedy'.
I do wonder what exactly it was that destroyed Lucas tho. Was there some specific even in his life that made him lose his touch? Where did things go wrong for him (or 'right')?