I'm glad we've got someone who know what he/she is talking about here. To my earlier comment, I tried to mention the profit part of the P/E ratio. Now, I know that this is something that really applies to buying portions of businesses, i.e. "stock". I also know that many investors do not consider P/E to be a very important factor when choosing an investment. Even my own Morgan Stanley advisor has urged me to not consider P/E so much when choosing investments. I promptly told him to go climb a tree. Call me old fashioned.
So, you say multiples of 3 to 5? On what are you basing these numbers? I don't have any experience with this sort of thing, but why would this differ from "normal" multiples, such as Yahoo's? What difference does it make if the site in question is actually a functioning company, rather than some guy in a basement cold-calling potential advertisers to make some cash on the side? What other factors would be involved in the valuation?
You could talk to an accountant or a lawyer, but if you want to swag a number, take yearly revenues (profits, after operating expenses have been paid) and multiply by 20. That'll give you a conservative estimate. If you want to get gutsy, multiply by 100.
Unfortunately, if you live in the U.S., you'll most likely miss the entire show. They will bring the satellites down over the ocean, most likely the Pacific if they can. The last thing they want to do is risk causing damage to something. As unlikely as the possibility of damaging something may be, there are 66 of those things, and 66 chances to screw up.
Unfortunately, I don't remember where I saw the article, prolly Cnet News.com or Wired, but an article concerning the pending shutdown of Iridium stated that the satellites would be brought down over the ocean.
I bought a computer with an 80 MegaByte hard drive. Today I can buy an 80 Gigabyte drive. 3 (or is it 4) orders of magnatude larger. If we were to have 3 (or 4?) orders of magnatude of hard drive progress in the next decade, I'll have 80 TeraBytes on my desk in 2010!
I've been thinking about this recently, specifically about the long time that UNIX has been around. I grew up with half a dozen different OS's, from Commodore to DRDOS to Win32. I got to thinking that UNIX is 30 years old the other day and stopped in wonder for a second. It really is an amazing acheivement for the original UNIX architects to have created something so useful for so long.
The article's comment about distributed computing systems is right on though. Unix as we know it, and single processor machines for that matter will die. It won't be much longer (less than 10 years) when many households have more computing power in their refrigerators than you have on your desktop now. All these devices (fridge, washer, dryer, toaster...) will be networked together. The processing power from these devices may be used to drive an AI that runs your household.
UNIX in it's present state is not able to handle multiple processors of different architectures (I may be wrong here, but bear with me please). We'll get to a point where we can run a processor emulator in tandem with a processor's normal tasks, using that emulator to provide clock cycles to a distributed computing function.
Think of the unused clock cycles in downtown Chicago alone. There have to be hundreds of thousands of PC's that are only used 30% of their lifetimes, putting all that power to waste.
What's the capacity of Iridium?
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R.I.P. Iridium
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Does anyone know how many channels that these satellites will support? I used to do satcom for the USAF, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to communicate with the satellite. The big problem would be getting information about the actual satellite like: What uplink and downlink freqs they use, how many channels can they handle at once, what is the data rate at which they talk to each other (yeah, yeah, I know it's prolly analog), what type of multiplexing do they use, et al.
Big problem: Uncle Sam is going to get his hands on those things before anyone else, so good luck finding any info on how to control the satellites. You're going to need a lot more equipment than just a phone and it's 2400bps data stream.
Big problem 2: If nobody claims those puppies, they will probably have to bring them down. Maybe we can convince them to bring them all down over the U.S. during the evening on the 4th of July! We'd have our first man made meteor shower!
Lucent did this about, what, a year ago? Read here. Nortel has already done this as well. Here's the Nortel link.
Optical switching is really cool, don't get me wrong! The slowest link in any big telco network is the switching equipment. How are you going to resolve Nortel's new 2.4Terabit pipes with OC-3 or OC-12 switching technology? Guess what, not happening.
Have a read about what Lucent and Nortel are doing...very cool stuff.
Fair enough. In my own defense, I cannot tolerate an illogical argument. I can tolerate being uninformed, but putting together an argument without proper justification for your premises is tanamount to saying, "you are wrong because I say so".
Your most recent post however, is much more well thought out, and has the necessary information to back up your argument.
As to my guessing about the status of the Viking lander, I may not have made my own point clear. I didn't mean to say that the Viking lander had not been decontaminated, but that just by making a point of saying that Galileo had not been, is not equivalent to saying that other probes had.
Please pardon my stubbornness, I hate being wrong. I'm also a karma whore, and do not like my "up" moderations being questioned.;-)
Question for you, since you follow this much more closely than I: Does NASA know why the high gain antenna did not deploy? If so, why? I earlier read an article saying that even though the data stream would be slow, information could still be derived while Galileo was plummeting to it's death.
Did you even read the sentence you quoted from me? Certainly Viking had not, if this is only a modern phenomenon. Did you miss the qualifier, "if this is only a modern phenomenon"?
I think you also missed why my comment was moderated up. The comment was moderated as "insightful" not "informative". The American Heritage dictionary's defintion of insight is "The act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner." It says nothing about facts or truth. I made no claim as to knowing facts about the Galileo mission or the Viking mission (remember? if this is only a modern phenomenon?>`).
My argument is about NASA posturing about something that really isn't very likely to happen. Making big news about a course correction is posturing . They aren't going to crash Galileo into Jupiter because they want to miss Europa, they are going to do it because the probe is almost dead, and they want to get the most use out of it while they can still control it. If they just wanted to miss Europa, they should just point the thing out into space, crash it into Saturn and get some pictures and research data from there...or somewhere else. They would not destroy a $1.5billion USD spacecraft without good reason, and research of the kind that they will be able to do by sending Galileo hurtling down into Jupiter's atmosphere is a better reason then missing Europa.
You'll understand that I feel just because they said Galileo didn't undergo decontamination doesn't mean that other spacecraft have. Certainly Viking had not, if this is only a modern phenomenon.
Personally, I doubt that crashing Galileo into Europa is going to make a hill-of-beans difference to any ecosystem that may exist there. It is extrememly unlikely that any microbes on Galileo survived the trip, especially after the passes over Io.
I guess my point in my previous post is that the statment made by NASA about Europa is mostly usless rubbish/propaganda. It's like saying, "I ain't never been to jail," when all of one's siblings are in jail. What do they want, a cookie? (sorry, blatant Chris Rock rip-off there) So NASA gets to fire a thruster on the side of Galileo for a few seconds and send it hurtling into Jupiter. They talked about that last week describing how they would be able to get good research data from the drop into the atmosphere of Jupiter before Galileo was crushed or burned up. They made no mention of this, "We better miss Europa or we may cause major ecological damage," line.
This remark is little better than posturing on NASA's part. I feel if they were truly concerned about space pollution, they would be doing something about all the crap that is up in Earth orbit. Also, they have probes all over the place now, from Mars Surveyor, to Pioneer, Voyager, blah, blah, blah. NEAR might hit Eros, but they haven't mentioned that there might be life there, as far as NASA knows.
If they don't want to contaminate Europa, what about Mars? Recent discoveries of what may or may not be life on Mars might lead us to believe that the same policies would apply to both planets. Is NASA taking extra precautions with the space junk they are crashing into Mars, the Moon, Venus, yada, yada, yada? Okay, no yada, yada, yada, but several countries are sending probes out to the inner reaches of the Solar System. The U.S.S.R sent a probe to Venus and Mars, Japan is going to send a probe to the moon, the U.S.A. has sent all kinds of junk into space, and this is the first time I've ever heard of anyone worrying about contaminating another planet.
What's so special about Europa? Are these scientists too scared of big black monoliths that tell them to stay the fsck away from Europa? Please, NASA, don't publish this rubbish. If you were truly concerned about contaminating other planets, this would have been addressed years ago.
You all might want to have a look at The Register and Tom's Hardware to get better information about this story. Both sites have been publishing some interesting stories (specifically The Register) concerning this chip race that we all love watching. They seem to do a good job of getting the dirt on both AMD and Intel, and although they do seem to play favorites with AMD (as I'm sure most of you do as well), they have posted relatively unbiased articles about both companies. When I say unbiased, you have to look at all of their storys, as both sites have taken to Intel bashing as of late, and for good reason.
Intel is still having production problems with their 800Mhz PIII, whether they will confirm that is another matter. The Register contacted a German distributor and he said that he isn't getting the 800Mhz chips, let alone something running at 1Ghz. Also, a story on The Register a couple of days ago said that Intel had told manufacturers to expect 866Mhz's by the end of February. That obviously hasn't happened.
I find it hard to believe that Chipzilla is going to be able to jump 200Mhz in one month. Maybe they'll take a prototype, tape an ice-cube to it and ship it to Dell so they can say they did. You may see these chips in volume by June, but I sure wouldn't believe this information coming out of Chipzilla now...
I think $12,500 is a relatively small number. What if this were a large company? I seem to remember Caterpillar having some sort of trouble in this arena a year or so ago, and they had to replace all the username/password thingys for everyone in the company (because they weren't sure exactly who was compromised). If you've got a company with tens of thousands of users, that type of task could take days if not weeks. I know good sysadmins get paid bu-ku bucks, mebbe $500 a day after taxes/benefits/actual salary is figured in. If $12,500 was the amount spent to recreate everyone's logins, this company got off light.
Violence in video games, what about the Matrix?
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I'm sorry, I didn't get the whole violence in video games message there. What I saw was a not so disguised attempt to reap the rewards of the current The Matrix craze. The little beady sunglasses, the big machine guns, the black clothing? This episode was nothing more than a Matrix clone, and a poor one at that.
I'm sorry to see the X-files stoop to this level. I've enjoyed the X-files for years, mostly because of the originality of the story lines, but obviously originality is no longer necessary for Chris Carter. Perhaps he's just tapped out...
It's not that MS Office is a bad product. I don't think that it's all that bad (other than the price). It's that once the leap is made away from Windows, targeting MS Office becomes much easier.
The biggest reasons that Linux has not replaced Windows on the desktop is because of the unavailability of well known and trusted products for Linux. MS Office is a well known and trusted product. Make that available for Linux and you give the management types the bone they were looking for from IT's arguments for Linux.
If you switch to Linux because you can save money by not buying Windows licenses, then Linux possibly becomes a known and trusted solution. Once Linux is known and trusted, Star Office (or any other inexpensive, non MS office suite) becomes more feasible as a solution. It doesn't necessarily need to be Star Office. It could be Corel Office. My point is that users/management buy what they are comfortable with.
Make Linux a comfortable solution, and you open the door to other comfortable and inexepensive solutions. There's no reason other than FUD to pay $500 for an office suite.
How's about we slap a big 'ol "I'll believe it when I see it," on top of that one. Why would Microsoft make MS Office for Linux? That's exactly what IT managers around the globe are waiting for as an excuse to do desktop replacement. I think that having Office on Linux will open the floodgates for putting Linux on the desktop, and the next step after that is replacing Office with Star Office.
It seem very unlikely that MS will ever do anything that will make the corporate user more comfortable with using Linux. I know there are people that would jump all over the chance to stop buying Windows licenses at my company, how about at yours? The only thing that keeps them from doing so is the lack of MS applications, specifically MS Office.
Of course, if there were 30 Mini-Microsofts, we might just have a different story on our hands.
Microsoft CEO #23 to his development staff: What can we do to differentiate ourselves from Microsoft #'s 1-22, 24-30?
Little Geeky Programmer: Hey, let's port MS Office to Linux!
I saw your post and was compelled to reply to it rather than meta-moderate it. What a bunch of hooey! I cannot stand zealotous behaviour unless it is my own zealotous behavior, so here it is:
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users
This stone age idea was okay about 3 years ago, but I have yet to see a mainstream graphics app that hasn't been ported to NT. I worked in a hybrid Mac/NT environment for a year and a half and watched the Macs get displaced during that time. I have to say that my users were not thrilled to see their Macs go, but they wouldn't take them back now.
Show me a PC that can handle 3 different size monitors of different resolutions and refresh rates for an illustration who uses a mouse, tablet, and trackball.
I dare you to give me a real explanation for this nonsense. Are you so strapped for cash that you cannot buy real equipment? Obviously not, because you are buying Macs. Don't cry that the PC's are more expensive either. There's a reason for spending $16K on a PC. It's called DUAL PROCESSING. Your fancy G4 isn't going to stand a chance against a dual PIII 733Mhz workstation. I don't give a damn what app you're running.
You know, here's another one for you: Does Kinetix make 3D Studio Max for the Macintosh? Last I checked, no. What's been the hottest 3D animation suite going for the last year or so? 3DSMAX. Nuff said.
If you're going to defend your platform, come up with better defense. I can show you a PC that'll not only match your Mac, but it'll take it to school on how to run Photoshop. And then I show you an entire design department that switched to i386 because the Mac just wasn't up to the job...
Who paid for this study?
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I certainly hope my tax dollars did not get put towards a bunch of lunatics saying that I should rob Peter to pay Paul. God forbid that I should reduce the amount of time they (I) spend with family, friends and -- most of all -- the television. Hey everyone out there, you are too stupid to realize that spending 1 hour on the Internet per week reduces your capacity to watch television by 1 hour per week. You must read this Stanford study in order to really find out what a detriment that the Internet is having on your life. I definitely need to spend less time on the Internet now that I've read this article. Maybe I should get a dog...
I generally work about 40ish hours a week, give or take 3. I make a point of not spending every waking minute at work. I also make a point of having my productivity and reliablity at a higher quality than everyone I work with. If you want to get paid like a rock-star, you have to work like one. But getting paid isn't everything.
Realize that your hours off in a day are very valuable to you. You are paying for those hours by not being at work, so if you get paid $30/hour, you pay $30 for every hour you do not work. Spend your free time wisely, and also consider spending money to increase your free time.
If it takes you two hours to do your laundry every week, but only cost you $30 to have someone else do it, PAY TO HAVE YOUR LAUNDRY DONE. Same goes for many other things. If you are a knowledge worker, chances are you're making some good scratch, so live a little and pay to have done the things you don't like to do.
Now that you've taken some free time back from life, take some from work as well. Most bosses worth working for are willing to accept the fact that productivity is more important than showing the flag. Get your goals for the day from the boss, and finish them. Then maybe get something else, and finish it. Then tell your boss that you've finished everything that you need to finish and are taking off. Just leave. If they have a problem with it, then you're going to have a heart to heart.
Time off is as good as money, so when you get your next raise, ask for a couple more personal days. Be satisfied with only a 6% raise and maybe a few "I'll look the other way if you want to take off early's". Free time, in my mind, can be as good, if not better, than cash. It clears my mind and often makes me MORE PRODUCTIVE. I make a point of getting much time off, and off the books, and it has been very good to me. My suggestion is that you, the reader, do the same.
Of course, opinions are like assholes...everybody's got one.
Valenti complained about being called a "luddite", and I'll admit that luddite is an extreme qualifier for Valenti. Perhaps we'll call him "luddite-lite". Maybe even Amstel-Luddite, the technology drinker's luddite.
If I were a member of the MPAA, I'd seriously be afraid of Valenti's ability to look to the future. He seems to fear change, and not to embrace it and turn it to his advantage. He doesn't want to foster the change of the business model that media/software/information companies are going to have to make in order to compete effectively in the emerging market.
My judgement: Don't ever hire this guy to create a future vision of anything...
I have been in meetings with the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffets and Jay Walker, and Jeff Bezos, and Jerry Yang, and all these people, and they don't know where it's going either. They're making judgments. They're making educated judgments about how they're going to fashion the future, but I'm telling you: the future is like walking down some unlit corridor, and it gets darker and darker as you move into it. And after a while you're moving on instinct alone.
Extra, Extra! Computer Currents Slashdotted! If you go to the link to the article RIGHT NOW 1335 CST you'll see: Solaris and Linux Vulnerable To Hack By Sherman Fridman, Newsbytes. February 11, 2000 Due to flagrant inaccuracies this article has been pulled and is being re-written. Occasionally one of these slips through the editorial process. Computer Currents regrets the error. I'm glad to see that they've seen the error of their ways...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad we've got someone who know what he/she is talking about here. To my earlier comment, I tried to mention the profit part of the P/E ratio. Now, I know that this is something that really applies to buying portions of businesses, i.e. "stock". I also know that many investors do not consider P/E to be a very important factor when choosing an investment. Even my own Morgan Stanley advisor has urged me to not consider P/E so much when choosing investments. I promptly told him to go climb a tree. Call me old fashioned.
So, you say multiples of 3 to 5? On what are you basing these numbers? I don't have any experience with this sort of thing, but why would this differ from "normal" multiples, such as Yahoo's? What difference does it make if the site in question is actually a functioning company, rather than some guy in a basement cold-calling potential advertisers to make some cash on the side? What other factors would be involved in the valuation?
You could talk to an accountant or a lawyer, but if you want to swag a number, take yearly revenues (profits, after operating expenses have been paid) and multiply by 20. That'll give you a conservative estimate. If you want to get gutsy, multiply by 100.
Or, in the case of Yahoo...multiply by 1770!
Unfortunately, if you live in the U.S., you'll most likely miss the entire show. They will bring the satellites down over the ocean, most likely the Pacific if they can. The last thing they want to do is risk causing damage to something. As unlikely as the possibility of damaging something may be, there are 66 of those things, and 66 chances to screw up.
Unfortunately, I don't remember where I saw the article, prolly Cnet News.com or Wired, but an article concerning the pending shutdown of Iridium stated that the satellites would be brought down over the ocean.
I bought a computer with an 80 MegaByte hard drive. Today I can buy an 80 Gigabyte drive. 3 (or is it 4) orders of magnatude larger. If we were to have 3 (or 4?) orders of magnatude of hard drive progress in the next decade, I'll have 80 TeraBytes on my desk in 2010!
I've been thinking about this recently, specifically about the long time that UNIX has been around. I grew up with half a dozen different OS's, from Commodore to DRDOS to Win32. I got to thinking that UNIX is 30 years old the other day and stopped in wonder for a second. It really is an amazing acheivement for the original UNIX architects to have created something so useful for so long.
The article's comment about distributed computing systems is right on though. Unix as we know it, and single processor machines for that matter will die. It won't be much longer (less than 10 years) when many households have more computing power in their refrigerators than you have on your desktop now. All these devices (fridge, washer, dryer, toaster...) will be networked together. The processing power from these devices may be used to drive an AI that runs your household.
UNIX in it's present state is not able to handle multiple processors of different architectures (I may be wrong here, but bear with me please). We'll get to a point where we can run a processor emulator in tandem with a processor's normal tasks, using that emulator to provide clock cycles to a distributed computing function.
Think of the unused clock cycles in downtown Chicago alone. There have to be hundreds of thousands of PC's that are only used 30% of their lifetimes, putting all that power to waste.
Here is the fix for that broken link.
Does anyone know how many channels that these satellites will support? I used to do satcom for the USAF, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to communicate with the satellite. The big problem would be getting information about the actual satellite like: What uplink and downlink freqs they use, how many channels can they handle at once, what is the data rate at which they talk to each other (yeah, yeah, I know it's prolly analog), what type of multiplexing do they use, et al.
Big problem: Uncle Sam is going to get his hands on those things before anyone else, so good luck finding any info on how to control the satellites. You're going to need a lot more equipment than just a phone and it's 2400bps data stream.
Big problem 2: If nobody claims those puppies, they will probably have to bring them down. Maybe we can convince them to bring them all down over the U.S. during the evening on the 4th of July! We'd have our first man made meteor shower!
That's a fascinating idea. Hmmm...never thought about that one. I wonder if there's a way to split or copy the wavelengths?
Lucent did this about, what, a year ago? Read here. Nortel has already done this as well. Here's the Nortel link.
Optical switching is really cool, don't get me wrong! The slowest link in any big telco network is the switching equipment. How are you going to resolve Nortel's new 2.4Terabit pipes with OC-3 or OC-12 switching technology? Guess what, not happening.
Have a read about what Lucent and Nortel are doing...very cool stuff.
Fair enough. In my own defense, I cannot tolerate an illogical argument. I can tolerate being uninformed, but putting together an argument without proper justification for your premises is tanamount to saying, "you are wrong because I say so".
;-)
Your most recent post however, is much more well thought out, and has the necessary information to back up your argument.
As to my guessing about the status of the Viking lander, I may not have made my own point clear. I didn't mean to say that the Viking lander had not been decontaminated, but that just by making a point of saying that Galileo had not been, is not equivalent to saying that other probes had.
Please pardon my stubbornness, I hate being wrong. I'm also a karma whore, and do not like my "up" moderations being questioned.
Question for you, since you follow this much more closely than I: Does NASA know why the high gain antenna did not deploy? If so, why? I earlier read an article saying that even though the data stream would be slow, information could still be derived while Galileo was plummeting to it's death.
Did you even read the sentence you quoted from me? Certainly Viking had not, if this is only a modern phenomenon. Did you miss the qualifier, "if this is only a modern phenomenon"?
I think you also missed why my comment was moderated up. The comment was moderated as "insightful" not "informative". The American Heritage dictionary's defintion of insight is "The act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner." It says nothing about facts or truth. I made no claim as to knowing facts about the Galileo mission or the Viking mission (remember? if this is only a modern phenomenon?>`).
My argument is about NASA posturing about something that really isn't very likely to happen. Making big news about a course correction is posturing . They aren't going to crash Galileo into Jupiter because they want to miss Europa, they are going to do it because the probe is almost dead, and they want to get the most use out of it while they can still control it. If they just wanted to miss Europa, they should just point the thing out into space, crash it into Saturn and get some pictures and research data from there...or somewhere else. They would not destroy a $1.5billion USD spacecraft without good reason, and research of the kind that they will be able to do by sending Galileo hurtling down into Jupiter's atmosphere is a better reason then missing Europa.
You'll understand that I feel just because they said Galileo didn't undergo decontamination doesn't mean that other spacecraft have. Certainly Viking had not, if this is only a modern phenomenon.
Personally, I doubt that crashing Galileo into Europa is going to make a hill-of-beans difference to any ecosystem that may exist there. It is extrememly unlikely that any microbes on Galileo survived the trip, especially after the passes over Io.
I guess my point in my previous post is that the statment made by NASA about Europa is mostly usless rubbish/propaganda. It's like saying, "I ain't never been to jail," when all of one's siblings are in jail. What do they want, a cookie? (sorry, blatant Chris Rock rip-off there) So NASA gets to fire a thruster on the side of Galileo for a few seconds and send it hurtling into Jupiter. They talked about that last week describing how they would be able to get good research data from the drop into the atmosphere of Jupiter before Galileo was crushed or burned up. They made no mention of this, "We better miss Europa or we may cause major ecological damage," line.
This remark is little better than posturing on NASA's part. I feel if they were truly concerned about space pollution, they would be doing something about all the crap that is up in Earth orbit. Also, they have probes all over the place now, from Mars Surveyor, to Pioneer, Voyager, blah, blah, blah. NEAR might hit Eros, but they haven't mentioned that there might be life there, as far as NASA knows.
If they don't want to contaminate Europa, what about Mars? Recent discoveries of what may or may not be life on Mars might lead us to believe that the same policies would apply to both planets. Is NASA taking extra precautions with the space junk they are crashing into Mars, the Moon, Venus, yada, yada, yada? Okay, no yada, yada, yada, but several countries are sending probes out to the inner reaches of the Solar System. The U.S.S.R sent a probe to Venus and Mars, Japan is going to send a probe to the moon, the U.S.A. has sent all kinds of junk into space, and this is the first time I've ever heard of anyone worrying about contaminating another planet.
What's so special about Europa? Are these scientists too scared of big black monoliths that tell them to stay the fsck away from Europa? Please, NASA, don't publish this rubbish. If you were truly concerned about contaminating other planets, this would have been addressed years ago.
You all might want to have a look at The Register and Tom's Hardware to get better information about this story. Both sites have been publishing some interesting stories (specifically The Register) concerning this chip race that we all love watching. They seem to do a good job of getting the dirt on both AMD and Intel, and although they do seem to play favorites with AMD (as I'm sure most of you do as well), they have posted relatively unbiased articles about both companies. When I say unbiased, you have to look at all of their storys, as both sites have taken to Intel bashing as of late, and for good reason.
Intel is still having production problems with their 800Mhz PIII, whether they will confirm that is another matter. The Register contacted a German distributor and he said that he isn't getting the 800Mhz chips, let alone something running at 1Ghz. Also, a story on The Register a couple of days ago said that Intel had told manufacturers to expect 866Mhz's by the end of February. That obviously hasn't happened.
I find it hard to believe that Chipzilla is going to be able to jump 200Mhz in one month. Maybe they'll take a prototype, tape an ice-cube to it and ship it to Dell so they can say they did. You may see these chips in volume by June, but I sure wouldn't believe this information coming out of Chipzilla now...
I think $12,500 is a relatively small number. What if this were a large company? I seem to remember Caterpillar having some sort of trouble in this arena a year or so ago, and they had to replace all the username/password thingys for everyone in the company (because they weren't sure exactly who was compromised). If you've got a company with tens of thousands of users, that type of task could take days if not weeks. I know good sysadmins get paid bu-ku bucks, mebbe $500 a day after taxes/benefits/actual salary is figured in. If $12,500 was the amount spent to recreate everyone's logins, this company got off light.
I'm sorry, I didn't get the whole violence in video games message there. What I saw was a not so disguised attempt to reap the rewards of the current The Matrix craze. The little beady sunglasses, the big machine guns, the black clothing? This episode was nothing more than a Matrix clone, and a poor one at that.
I'm sorry to see the X-files stoop to this level. I've enjoyed the X-files for years, mostly because of the originality of the story lines, but obviously originality is no longer necessary for Chris Carter. Perhaps he's just tapped out...
It's not that MS Office is a bad product. I don't think that it's all that bad (other than the price). It's that once the leap is made away from Windows, targeting MS Office becomes much easier.
The biggest reasons that Linux has not replaced Windows on the desktop is because of the unavailability of well known and trusted products for Linux. MS Office is a well known and trusted product. Make that available for Linux and you give the management types the bone they were looking for from IT's arguments for Linux.
If you switch to Linux because you can save money by not buying Windows licenses, then Linux possibly becomes a known and trusted solution. Once Linux is known and trusted, Star Office (or any other inexpensive, non MS office suite) becomes more feasible as a solution. It doesn't necessarily need to be Star Office. It could be Corel Office. My point is that users/management buy what they are comfortable with.
Make Linux a comfortable solution, and you open the door to other comfortable and inexepensive solutions. There's no reason other than FUD to pay $500 for an office suite.
How's about we slap a big 'ol "I'll believe it when I see it," on top of that one. Why would Microsoft make MS Office for Linux? That's exactly what IT managers around the globe are waiting for as an excuse to do desktop replacement. I think that having Office on Linux will open the floodgates for putting Linux on the desktop, and the next step after that is replacing Office with Star Office.
It seem very unlikely that MS will ever do anything that will make the corporate user more comfortable with using Linux. I know there are people that would jump all over the chance to stop buying Windows licenses at my company, how about at yours? The only thing that keeps them from doing so is the lack of MS applications, specifically MS Office.
Of course, if there were 30 Mini-Microsofts, we might just have a different story on our hands.
Microsoft CEO #23 to his development staff:
What can we do to differentiate ourselves from Microsoft #'s 1-22, 24-30?
Little Geeky Programmer: Hey, let's port MS Office to Linux!
Microsoft CEO #23: Hmmm....
I saw your post and was compelled to reply to it rather than meta-moderate it. What a bunch of hooey! I cannot stand zealotous behaviour unless it is my own zealotous behavior, so here it is:
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users
This stone age idea was okay about 3 years ago, but I have yet to see a mainstream graphics app that hasn't been ported to NT. I worked in a hybrid Mac/NT environment for a year and a half and watched the Macs get displaced during that time. I have to say that my users were not thrilled to see their Macs go, but they wouldn't take them back now.
Show me a PC that can handle 3 different size monitors of different resolutions and refresh rates for an illustration who uses a mouse, tablet, and trackball.
I dare you to give me a real explanation for this nonsense. Are you so strapped for cash that you cannot buy real equipment? Obviously not, because you are buying Macs. Don't cry that the PC's are more expensive either. There's a reason for spending $16K on a PC. It's called DUAL PROCESSING. Your fancy G4 isn't going to stand a chance against a dual PIII 733Mhz workstation. I don't give a damn what app you're running.
You know, here's another one for you: Does Kinetix make 3D Studio Max for the Macintosh? Last I checked, no. What's been the hottest 3D animation suite going for the last year or so? 3DSMAX. Nuff said.
If you're going to defend your platform, come up with better defense. I can show you a PC that'll not only match your Mac, but it'll take it to school on how to run Photoshop. And then I show you an entire design department that switched to i386 because the Mac just wasn't up to the job...
I certainly hope my tax dollars did not get put towards a bunch of lunatics saying that I should rob Peter to pay Paul. God forbid that I should reduce the amount of time they (I) spend with family, friends and -- most of all -- the television. Hey everyone out there, you are too stupid to realize that spending 1 hour on the Internet per week reduces your capacity to watch television by 1 hour per week. You must read this Stanford study in order to really find out what a detriment that the Internet is having on your life. I definitely need to spend less time on the Internet now that I've read this article. Maybe I should get a dog...
I generally work about 40ish hours a week, give or take 3. I make a point of not spending every waking minute at work. I also make a point of having my productivity and reliablity at a higher quality than everyone I work with. If you want to get paid like a rock-star, you have to work like one. But getting paid isn't everything.
Realize that your hours off in a day are very valuable to you. You are paying for those hours by not being at work, so if you get paid $30/hour, you pay $30 for every hour you do not work. Spend your free time wisely, and also consider spending money to increase your free time.
If it takes you two hours to do your laundry every week, but only cost you $30 to have someone else do it, PAY TO HAVE YOUR LAUNDRY DONE. Same goes for many other things. If you are a knowledge worker, chances are you're making some good scratch, so live a little and pay to have done the things you don't like to do.
Now that you've taken some free time back from life, take some from work as well. Most bosses worth working for are willing to accept the fact that productivity is more important than showing the flag. Get your goals for the day from the boss, and finish them. Then maybe get something else, and finish it. Then tell your boss that you've finished everything that you need to finish and are taking off. Just leave. If they have a problem with it, then you're going to have a heart to heart.
Time off is as good as money, so when you get your next raise, ask for a couple more personal days. Be satisfied with only a 6% raise and maybe a few "I'll look the other way if you want to take off early's". Free time, in my mind, can be as good, if not better, than cash. It clears my mind and often makes me MORE PRODUCTIVE. I make a point of getting much time off, and off the books, and it has been very good to me. My suggestion is that you, the reader, do the same.
Of course, opinions are like assholes...everybody's got one.
Valenti complained about being called a "luddite", and I'll admit that luddite is an extreme qualifier for Valenti. Perhaps we'll call him "luddite-lite". Maybe even Amstel-Luddite, the technology drinker's luddite.
If I were a member of the MPAA, I'd seriously be afraid of Valenti's ability to look to the future. He seems to fear change, and not to embrace it and turn it to his advantage. He doesn't want to foster the change of the business model that media/software/information companies are going to have to make in order to compete effectively in the emerging market.
My judgement: Don't ever hire this guy to create a future vision of anything...
Need I say more?
Extra, Extra! Computer Currents Slashdotted! If you go to the link to the article RIGHT NOW 1335 CST you'll see: Solaris and Linux Vulnerable To Hack By Sherman Fridman, Newsbytes. February 11, 2000 Due to flagrant inaccuracies this article has been pulled and is being re-written. Occasionally one of these slips through the editorial process. Computer Currents regrets the error. I'm glad to see that they've seen the error of their ways...
No, not die Fledermaus, die. It's as in German, the German 'the'. The Bart, er, The Fledermaus. No one who speaks German can possibly be evil, right?
On another note, isn't is supposed to be Delflator Mouse (in The Tick)? I thought the whole idea of the name was to poke fun...