So, add it up. How much of a premium would you be willing to pay over what you currently pay to credit card companies, if they were to indemnify you against such losses?
How much would it cost the credit card companies to then implement technological measures to prevent such fraud?
Conversely, how much would it cost you in lost business and productivity to just accept cash or wire transfers for everything?
You have to realize that half the people you're addressing were wearing diapers in the 80s, and the other half were too busy teasing their hair to notice.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You guys loved the Germans and Russians and their dweebish technologies enough to adopt their inflections. We kind of like the Romans, since it looks like Club of Rome turned out to be right, and our dweeb leaders make movies about how our politicians march around like Roman Emperors. "Cracker" is of course just a shout-out to our homies in the GNAA. Hell, if the Japanese didn't come from a completely different language family, car geeks would be speaking Engrish.
Okay, let's carry this a little further. What eventually happened to that highly proprietary format that nobody wanted to use?
Looks to me like it's the de-facto method of internet video distribution. It'll probably be part of the new DVD standard. It's pretty much crushed competing media players on the most popular desktop OS in the world. The EU forced MS to unbundle it, but no one wants the unbundled version because there is no alternative. When MS gets around to integrating it into cell phones, it'll probably replace the last few MP3 players that don't already support it as well.
I don't know. I wouldn't underestimate the MS marketing beast. They've done better before.
Let's say, they tell their users it will be "faster". Everybody knows MS users are idiots. With the new firewall in SP2, there's no way more than 20% of them know how to open a port for bittorrent anyways. Of that, I'd bet even less are motivated to do it all the time. So, bittorrent is either worthless or slow for 80% of Microsoft users.
Bam! In comes the Microsoft "solution": integrate bittorrent into their "OS". The client automatically gets a port opened up whenever it's used. Hordes of idiots go running around saying "it's faster". Add in a few more integration techniques, and it may very well be faster (ie. bittorrent is crippled).
Oh, and also, the whole thing is funded by the RIAA. MS bittorrent checks all the shared files for piracy and/or requires DRM. Step, umm, five? Profit.
I know that MS likes to claim there is some reason for having all those different divisions under the same company, other than to expand their monopoly into new areas, but is there?
They don't seem to take advantage of any of the innovative things they could do, like putting web browsing and e-mail on the X-Box, or making X-Box games run in Windows. Support was a total afterthought, until recently. I'd be suprised if the support people had any influence at all on the developers.
In fact, the entire company seems to be run around the mantra of "don't fuck up the Windows/Office revenue stream". Everything else is just little side projects that are subsidized by their monopoly. I'm not saying many of these "side projects" aren't quality. They are. I'm just wondering why the seem to be run as separate businesses when 1) they aren't and 2) they probably couldn't stand on their own if they were.
Why did your company commit to call center software that is so poorly supported?
It doesn't matter. The problem isn't the vendor. There is no softphone vendor without problems. Hell, even DOS applications (DOS!?@) have difficulty working on every version of Windows. 3rd party vendors are still living in the world where their software worked out-of-the-box on every new version of Windows, and Microsoft still had a motivation to keep it that way.
Billy is right about one thing. Soon, only subscription software will survive. Starting with 3rd party vendors, no software company that isn't big enough to eat upgrade costs or switch lots of customers to a subscription model will be left.
And continuing to eat upgrade costs will be hard to maintain, even for a company like Microsoft. Pretty soon, we get what we see here. Innovation slows, nobody wants to upgrade, yet they still demand support. Nobody signed up for Microsoft's subscription offer for Windows 2000, arguably the best OS MS ever made. Those customers will realize their folly when they see what Microsoft has in store for them now.
And this is why IBM is mopping up. Walk into any large Linux shop and you probably won't see KDE or Gnome on the desktop. You'll see XFCE, or FVWM, running on everything from ancient P1s to brand new Dells. And it will run the same on all of them: fast and responsive.
A setup like this can be supported for the next 20 years. End user training will be minimal as well, because it looks and works just like Windows 95/98. No confusing menus, no complicated wizards, no solitaire, just whatever industry-specific apps are needed along with a web browser. No product activation, no "end of life", no confusing new interfaces with every release, and no forced hardware upgrades.
An IT department with three people can manage a thousand of these, with no outlay for software or outside support. If you, as a single admin at a smaller company, can manage this setup by yourself, you've got it made. You can spend your time contributing to your favorite OSS project instead of re-installing Windows for the nth time.
We're all confident that you guys have benefitted from NetBSD as well. I, for one, am no longer interested in the public continuing to fund R&D for the most wealthy company in the world.
And, yes, despite the ridiculous metric (Btu/Wh), that is nearly 2x as efficient.
I've got a small window unit that costs $40/mo to run continuously. This keeps my room cool and the rest of a 1000 sq ft house bearable. It cost $120 a couple of years ago, but they've gone down in price since then. The South Korean company that made it seems to have done a nice job, too, because it's been dropped before and still runs like a champ.
In all other aspects - lying to their employees, misdirecting funding, fudging non-scientific reports- they are devious lying weasels.
That sounds about right. The physics professors I remember were mostly egomaniacal psychopaths. The ones most vocal in their profession of religious devotion were usually the worst offenders.
This report (from a poster above) fascinates me, though:
When APS junior members were asked if they had ever observed or had personal knowledge of ethical violations while they were graduate students or postdocs, fully 39% of those responding to the survey said yes.
One of the reported offenses:
slavery of graduate students. Professors threaten to not write letters of recommendation unless graduate students stay in their group to produce more data.
Also, not suprising:
only a quarter of physics department chairs responded to the survey they were sent.
What is suprising, though, is that the APS is treating this as a "lack of education" issue. As though well-educated professionals with high IQs need to be told that deception, manipulation, and abuse of those in their charge are unethical practices.
Other than the obvious ingenuity involved in the creation of this device, the reason things like this don't exist in the real world is that they're hardly efficient. And comparing the purchase price instead of the operating costs of such a device is a sure sign you're missing something.
Air conditioners are unbelievably cheap and unbelievably efficient nowadays.
As others have said, this setup has all sorts of problems, from a reliance upon a source of ice that may very well be dumping more heat into the local environment than it saves, to wasting water.
Though this system doesn't use a pump, a recirculating system with a small electric pump could end up creating more heat than it saves.
If you're really bent upon saving energy in a cost-effective fashion, adding insulation is almost always efficient. Good blinds on the windows are also a great investment.
With that said, I'm typing this on a 333 Mhz machine with 188 Mb of Ram - and Open Office STILL loads faster than what this guy says in TFA. Not sure what he could have possibly done to slow his machine down so much. In fact I just tried opening Write in the background while I typed this and it still only took like 10 seconds (at most) to open.
Perhaps you should RTFA again. The conclusion was that OpenOffice.org opened in 4 seconds on average.
With the downfall of the Jedi, they lost the ability to project Yoda in CGI form. The best they could do was recruit Jim Henson to animate a crude caricature of Yoda in a jerky, unrealistic fashion. Just be lucky he didn't go all Fraggle Rock every once in a while and get thrown across the set.
If you expect the average user of a computer system to have access to a sysadmin, know a sysadmin or be able to afford one for their system, you live in the world of IBM ala 1968.
I live in the world of IBM a la 2005. Sounds like you live in the world of Microsoft a la 1995. If you expect to be able to bypass the admin of a Linux system to install some crapware, you can keep your infested Windows box.
The Open Source development model is vastly superior because it cuts idiots out of doing things they shouldn't be doing
You just said that the vast majority of computer owners should chuck their computers. That is absurd.
No, I said users should stick with using applications, not installing spyware.
If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp, I neither want to bother the admin with it nor do I want to force it an all the others users, yet Debian requires me todo exactly that.
This is what I was responding to. This is what you want:
People want to use their tools, not effing debug them.
Can't have it both ways. If you want to use bleeding edge OSS software, you'd better be prepared to contribute, or at least support your own damn self. Oh and by the way, everything you've asked for is technically possible, you just have to know how to do it. No one's going to make it easy because it's a lot of work for absolutely no benefit.
unless Linux develops a model where ordinary users can install their own applications Linux will forever be relegated to specialty applications in large corporations.
First of all, that's complete horseshit. Anyone can su to root and install programs on their own machine. What it sounds like you're asking for is the ability to install programs on someone else's machine where you just happen to have a user account. That will never happen, because, like I've said, it just causes more work for everyone involved.
If Linux wants to make inroads into small business where computers are used as tools only or the home market, it will have to have something like Apple.
Well, as someone who actually supports Linux in small businesses, I'll just have to disagree. And there are people who will support home users in the same way as Windows, but without limiting the ability of users to screw up their own machines with random malware, I wouldn't expect any better results.
Slashdot Mirror
A screenshot is as much a work of art as a passport photo. Put your own copyright notice on it; register it even. It's yours.
Of course the real discussion here should be that copyright is completely broken.
thousands of dollars every day
So, add it up. How much of a premium would you be willing to pay over what you currently pay to credit card companies, if they were to indemnify you against such losses?
How much would it cost the credit card companies to then implement technological measures to prevent such fraud?
Conversely, how much would it cost you in lost business and productivity to just accept cash or wire transfers for everything?
You have to realize that half the people you're addressing were wearing diapers in the 80s, and the other half were too busy teasing their hair to notice.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You guys loved the Germans and Russians and their dweebish technologies enough to adopt their inflections. We kind of like the Romans, since it looks like Club of Rome turned out to be right, and our dweeb leaders make movies about how our politicians march around like Roman Emperors. "Cracker" is of course just a shout-out to our homies in the GNAA. Hell, if the Japanese didn't come from a completely different language family, car geeks would be speaking Engrish.
So to the public who doesn't know what Linux is, it becomes "that cheap Windows knock-off".
At this point, it's better that Linux be "the cheap Windows knock-off" than "that weird thing I can't use".
Okay, let's carry this a little further. What eventually happened to that highly proprietary format that nobody wanted to use?
Looks to me like it's the de-facto method of internet video distribution. It'll probably be part of the new DVD standard. It's pretty much crushed competing media players on the most popular desktop OS in the world. The EU forced MS to unbundle it, but no one wants the unbundled version because there is no alternative. When MS gets around to integrating it into cell phones, it'll probably replace the last few MP3 players that don't already support it as well.
Don't underestimate THEM.
Here's where I call BS: "20-30% faster."
I don't know. I wouldn't underestimate the MS marketing beast. They've done better before.
Let's say, they tell their users it will be "faster". Everybody knows MS users are idiots. With the new firewall in SP2, there's no way more than 20% of them know how to open a port for bittorrent anyways. Of that, I'd bet even less are motivated to do it all the time. So, bittorrent is either worthless or slow for 80% of Microsoft users.
Bam! In comes the Microsoft "solution": integrate bittorrent into their "OS". The client automatically gets a port opened up whenever it's used. Hordes of idiots go running around saying "it's faster". Add in a few more integration techniques, and it may very well be faster (ie. bittorrent is crippled).
Oh, and also, the whole thing is funded by the RIAA. MS bittorrent checks all the shared files for piracy and/or requires DRM. Step, umm, five? Profit.
I know that MS likes to claim there is some reason for having all those different divisions under the same company, other than to expand their monopoly into new areas, but is there?
They don't seem to take advantage of any of the innovative things they could do, like putting web browsing and e-mail on the X-Box, or making X-Box games run in Windows. Support was a total afterthought, until recently. I'd be suprised if the support people had any influence at all on the developers.
In fact, the entire company seems to be run around the mantra of "don't fuck up the Windows/Office revenue stream". Everything else is just little side projects that are subsidized by their monopoly. I'm not saying many of these "side projects" aren't quality. They are. I'm just wondering why the seem to be run as separate businesses when 1) they aren't and 2) they probably couldn't stand on their own if they were.
Why did your company commit to call center software that is so poorly supported?
It doesn't matter. The problem isn't the vendor. There is no softphone vendor without problems. Hell, even DOS applications (DOS!?@) have difficulty working on every version of Windows. 3rd party vendors are still living in the world where their software worked out-of-the-box on every new version of Windows, and Microsoft still had a motivation to keep it that way.
Billy is right about one thing. Soon, only subscription software will survive. Starting with 3rd party vendors, no software company that isn't big enough to eat upgrade costs or switch lots of customers to a subscription model will be left.
And continuing to eat upgrade costs will be hard to maintain, even for a company like Microsoft. Pretty soon, we get what we see here. Innovation slows, nobody wants to upgrade, yet they still demand support. Nobody signed up for Microsoft's subscription offer for Windows 2000, arguably the best OS MS ever made. Those customers will realize their folly when they see what Microsoft has in store for them now.
And this is why IBM is mopping up. Walk into any large Linux shop and you probably won't see KDE or Gnome on the desktop. You'll see XFCE, or FVWM, running on everything from ancient P1s to brand new Dells. And it will run the same on all of them: fast and responsive.
A setup like this can be supported for the next 20 years. End user training will be minimal as well, because it looks and works just like Windows 95/98. No confusing menus, no complicated wizards, no solitaire, just whatever industry-specific apps are needed along with a web browser. No product activation, no "end of life", no confusing new interfaces with every release, and no forced hardware upgrades.
An IT department with three people can manage a thousand of these, with no outlay for software or outside support. If you, as a single admin at a smaller company, can manage this setup by yourself, you've got it made. You can spend your time contributing to your favorite OSS project instead of re-installing Windows for the nth time.
www.microsoft.com
We're all confident that you guys have benefitted from NetBSD as well. I, for one, am no longer interested in the public continuing to fund R&D for the most wealthy company in the world.
Pre-1992 central air conditioners may have SEER ratings of only 6 or 7. The national efficiency standard for central air conditioners in 2005 requires a minimum SEER of 10, but it will rise to SEER 13 for products manufactured after January 22, 2006.
And, yes, despite the ridiculous metric (Btu/Wh), that is nearly 2x as efficient.
I've got a small window unit that costs $40/mo to run continuously. This keeps my room cool and the rest of a 1000 sq ft house bearable. It cost $120 a couple of years ago, but they've gone down in price since then. The South Korean company that made it seems to have done a nice job, too, because it's been dropped before and still runs like a champ.
In all other aspects - lying to their employees, misdirecting funding, fudging non-scientific reports- they are devious lying weasels.
That sounds about right. The physics professors I remember were mostly egomaniacal psychopaths. The ones most vocal in their profession of religious devotion were usually the worst offenders.
This report (from a poster above) fascinates me, though:
When APS junior members were asked if they had ever observed or had personal knowledge of ethical violations while they were graduate students or postdocs, fully 39% of those responding to the survey said yes.
One of the reported offenses:
slavery of graduate students. Professors threaten to not write letters of recommendation unless graduate students stay in their group to produce more data.
Also, not suprising:
only a quarter of physics department chairs responded to the survey they were sent.
What is suprising, though, is that the APS is treating this as a "lack of education" issue. As though well-educated professionals with high IQs need to be told that deception, manipulation, and abuse of those in their charge are unethical practices.
This situation is quite fucked up.
Other than the obvious ingenuity involved in the creation of this device, the reason things like this don't exist in the real world is that they're hardly efficient. And comparing the purchase price instead of the operating costs of such a device is a sure sign you're missing something.
Air conditioners are unbelievably cheap and unbelievably efficient nowadays.
As others have said, this setup has all sorts of problems, from a reliance upon a source of ice that may very well be dumping more heat into the local environment than it saves, to wasting water.
Though this system doesn't use a pump, a recirculating system with a small electric pump could end up creating more heat than it saves.
If you're really bent upon saving energy in a cost-effective fashion, adding insulation is almost always efficient. Good blinds on the windows are also a great investment.
These days, it's almost easier to list what Linux *doesn't* support.
RAID controllers are a big "if", especially the cheap ones, but software RAID is always doable.
I don't think there's a single ethernet card that is unsupported.
Sound cards are generally supported, but if you want to use them for anything serious, you'll have to do more homework than just checking a HCL.
Video cards, same thing. Most all will "work", but things like 3D acceleration (for games) will likely require extra effort and research.
Printers: Don't get a "win" printer, like a Lexmark or some of the new HPs.
Modems: Most are Winmodems, which are mostly unsupported. Anything that connects to a serial port will work. Anything else is suspect.
WiFi Cards: Also, mostly unsupported without resorting to hacks like using Windows drivers.
With that said, I'm typing this on a 333 Mhz machine with 188 Mb of Ram - and Open Office STILL loads faster than what this guy says in TFA. Not sure what he could have possibly done to slow his machine down so much. In fact I just tried opening Write in the background while I typed this and it still only took like 10 seconds (at most) to open.
Perhaps you should RTFA again. The conclusion was that OpenOffice.org opened in 4 seconds on average.
at leat (sic) if he used OpenOffice on windows
He's not testing a linux app against a windows app. Both apps are running on Windows.
on a P4-M 2GHz laptop running Windows 2003
What? You're running a server edition OS on your laptop? I'm calling bullshit...
Surely you don't actually mean OpenOffice 1.1.14, as I'm pretty sure no such version ever existed.
I'm using slightly older versions than in the article, but I've found Word is faster (via Wine) than OOo on Linux.
Fedora Core 1, 2.2Ghz Celeron:
OpenOffice 1.1.3*:
Opening Time:
First: 22 seconds
Average: 11.6 seconds
Closing Time:
1 second
Word XP:
Opening Time:
First: 9 seconds
Average: 5 seconds
Closing Time:
3 seconds
*Note: 1.1.4 is supposedly quite a bit faster.
True. But Writer even creates .doc files that are usually 50% smaller than the ones Word makes.
are considering some changes that would cut the real strengths of Debian.
Such as?
How did Yoda go so senile so quickly?
With the downfall of the Jedi, they lost the ability to project Yoda in CGI form. The best they could do was recruit Jim Henson to animate a crude caricature of Yoda in a jerky, unrealistic fashion. Just be lucky he didn't go all Fraggle Rock every once in a while and get thrown across the set.
It was his battlestation. Vader said as much a couple of times.
I haven't seen ep. VI, but I always thought the Grand Moff would have been a good character to develop further.
Are you talking about taking away a child's school education
Unfortunately, Star Wars may be the best political education many of them get.
If you expect the average user of a computer system to have access to a sysadmin, know a sysadmin or be able to afford one for their system, you live in the world of IBM ala 1968.
I live in the world of IBM a la 2005. Sounds like you live in the world of Microsoft a la 1995. If you expect to be able to bypass the admin of a Linux system to install some crapware, you can keep your infested Windows box.
The Open Source development model is vastly superior because it cuts idiots out of doing things they shouldn't be doing
You just said that the vast majority of computer owners should chuck their computers. That is absurd.
No, I said users should stick with using applications, not installing spyware.
If *I* want to install a bleeding edge version of Gimp, I neither want to bother the admin with it nor do I want to force it an all the others users, yet Debian requires me todo exactly that.
This is what I was responding to. This is what you want:
People want to use their tools, not effing debug them.
Can't have it both ways. If you want to use bleeding edge OSS software, you'd better be prepared to contribute, or at least support your own damn self. Oh and by the way, everything you've asked for is technically possible, you just have to know how to do it. No one's going to make it easy because it's a lot of work for absolutely no benefit.
unless Linux develops a model where ordinary users can install their own applications Linux will forever be relegated to specialty applications in large corporations.
First of all, that's complete horseshit. Anyone can su to root and install programs on their own machine. What it sounds like you're asking for is the ability to install programs on someone else's machine where you just happen to have a user account. That will never happen, because, like I've said, it just causes more work for everyone involved.
If Linux wants to make inroads into small business where computers are used as tools only or the home market, it will have to have something like Apple.
Well, as someone who actually supports Linux in small businesses, I'll just have to disagree. And there are people who will support home users in the same way as Windows, but without limiting the ability of users to screw up their own machines with random malware, I wouldn't expect any better results.