Seriously, is memory even an issue? We like to say "wow my computer is zippy with 1Gb of RAM" but Win2k runs pretty well with it's recommended 64Mb - and still runable on whatever ammount is the minimum. Which doesn't matter either because you can't buy sticks of RAM that small anyway (mainstream).
Where I work not all of the 8 year old computers make it, but the RAM is almost always good. So I just canibalize RAM and other components. Stuffing a computer with RAM isn't that hard if you had the forsight to build the computers with only one stick of ram in the first place.
When you use older computers the thing that sucks more than anything else is the boot time, but seriously the less frequent reboots pretty much negate that as well. Anything from 300-450Mhz is perfectly good. Less than that I cant say, since 300Mhz is now my cutoff point (up from 233 Last year and 133 the year before).
Well I thought about that, but the cost of the CD and Jewel case is almost neglagible - the factories that press the music are completely hands-free. With the insert, I'm still thinking that all together it would come out to around a $1. I'm sure the distribution channels for shipping is also extremely efficient. Cut out record store profit , and I'd say they're getting around $8 for a $12 CD. That's still a pretty good profit margin if you only want one or two songs ($2 to download them on iTunes where they would only make $1.20)
I'm of course guessing at the costs, but the robitics used for CD production is pretty amazing stuff and really efficient, and printing in mass for a known size and quantity of inserts I doubt would add up to much either.
I think it probably is. A 99 cent song is still a lot less than the "$12+ for the entire CD just to get the song" situation we have now. Some will still download the entire album, but not all. I'm also guessing that impulse buying will increase.
So what happens now? They dump all their money into Britney, and you download the 1 song they hype on TV. They then go and browse randomly - possibly downloading from other artists which the company doesn't really market. This all depends on them having music that's worth listening to, so I imagine that in the short term they aren't going to make as much, until they give the customer a wider array of _good_ music to listen to.
A 96 Tarus has a 16 gal tank. A 2003 Tarus has a 19 Gal tank. Ford tarus gets 19/25 mpg
A Ferrari is a whole set of cars. A Ferrari 612 Scagletti gets 11/17 mpg with a 28.5 gal tank.
So the answer is still that it depends on the Tarus and depends on the Ferrari. More importantly it depends on the conditions and who is at the wheel. Seems to apply to MS vs Google just as well.
It's basically the freeware catch. Allow programmers to make free programs using QT. As they gain mindshare, QT gets its foot in the door and makes gains through the hobbiest programmer's real job.
The catch of course is that QT needs to be good enough to pay for. As many have said, QT is clean and nice to work with. If this is true enough, then people may become advocates of QT simply because of its superiority.
But you also have to look at the reality of the situation. Borland is completely marginalized, and MS now controls the development market for their own platform. Trolltech really doesn't have anything to lose by opening up their windows versions.
Does anyone have a picture of Linus with the BSD horns on? I think this should be the new apple logo for the zealotfrenzy.slashdot.org section where everyone's head will simultaniously explode.
Funny that you meantion emberrassing... I watched TV for quite some time, and a LOT of it while I was in high school. But somewhere along the line I became aware of the "laugh tracks". Suddenly I couldn't stand sitcoms. I always found myself wondering why they were trying to give the impressions that something was funny, when clearly it was not. I feel self concious about watching any sitcom now (not that I've watched any for years), but I refuse to watch TV even at someone else's house. Even when walking by a house with the TV on loud I cringe when hearing the laugh tracks.
While I look forward to any improvement over cmd.exe (heh, like that's hard), I have no doubt that MS still "doesn't get it". Unix systems have developed on a foundation since the 70's and the command line is still a preferred interface to many (including myself). Shells typically do not do much in themselves, they act as a _simple_ glue. A shell takes the collective enviornment of small utilities and gives you the power to harness them all together and accomplish just about anything. Is MS going to implement 1000 small utilities? No, because MS has a "do it all" philosophy.
As such what they will do is invent ANOTHER scripting language with a CLI interface for users. There is a difference between a scripting language and a shell, but I don't think MS can (or will) tell the difference. Scripts do some things well, shells do other things well. Scripting in a shell is good because it takes your native interface and allows you to automate it. Is MS seriously going to tell us that the CLI is the way of the future?
So basically we are where we are now, but with a more capable shell. I'm sure many of us people using Jscript can't wait to move down the chain from the second-teir citizenship we endure from MS's half hearted support of Jscript as a scripting language. And what happens when we cannot do a task in MSH? Same thing we do now, bunch of work arounds and cludges because something is not installed by default.
While I aplaud MS for trying to make windows not suck as much, the CLI is Unix turf and windows attempt at stabbing into such an enviornment will be half hearted at best. Windows needs a shell badly, but not another scripting language. Just look at how hard it is to change permissons on a directory. A nightmare to do in VBscript or Jscript, and really painful to do with cacls (such an intuitive name). MS can't bear the simplicity of chown / chmod.
In modern society it is quite possible to do a billion dollars worth of damage. If you can drive a truck full of TNT into a skyscraper you can probably get pretty close. The more we invest in building such big entities the more capable an individual is of doing significant damage.
I think you're right that they are probably lumping costs together and making up dallar ammounts but I imagine he could have easily done damage into the millions. Consider a criticle database where the backup isn't done properly (yeah, that NEVER happens but bear with me). Now some guy comes in and accidently wacks the machine. Maybe setting up the database again runs a few thousand, but the criticle information which cannot be replaced on the machine is worth far more - and that's a hard ammount to estimate. Hell, just consider how much the Pentigon spends doing security audits and integrity checks every time someone manages to break in.
You figure that such a person could run around for years doing damage (perhaps even unintentional) and getting such a high score doesn't seem that far fetched... well a billion is, but in the millions seems possible.
A car nut who owned his own tractor factory took his car back to the Ferrari factory when his clutch failed. Enzo Ferrari snubs the man because of his affiliation with tractors and "not understanding such a refined vehicle". The (rather pissed off man) fixes the clutch himself. Ferruccio Lamborghini later decides to enter the exotic car business himself, in competition with Ferrari.
Open Source is different things to different people. For me personally I want something that does a task correctly and doesn't make my life hell in order to do it. While I would find it easy to blast many Open Source projects for crappy software or huge gaps where no one seems to want to come up with a solution, I'm finding that more often than not, proprietary vendors are doing the same thing. As such I'd rather have Open Source software because:
1) Updates are much more frequent 2) Often integrated into solutions I use (FreeBSD, Linux) 3) Play nice with open standards - mainly because they have nothing to gain 4) Are usually affordable.
Now to RMS can choose "Open Source" as a way of life, and I respect him for that, but it isn't the only way it works. Life isn't so black and white.
I believe this isn't the first time someone associated with MS has done this. I've heard of a similar incident happening in Europe. Really I don't think this is newsworthy information. All of us know that you can end up with a bad office install, or office will end up with corrupted documents. Many of us also know that you can open such documents with Open Office just fine. I recommend this to uses on our own network every so often, so this is old hat. Another nice trick is to open MS office documents with Open Office, then save them with OO (to the MS format) and watch the file size decrease up to 30% at times and be able to open them JUST FINE in MS office.
I've noticed an intersting trend where I work. We're a small business that is getting more and more of our functions done by technology. With this we (actually management) tend to sign on with these Microsoft based solution where EVERYONE wants their own server. Back in the day when we had, say 3 servers this was quaint, but as we've gotten more and more this is getting a bit rediculous. I'm also loath to go against the recommendations because often these systems are extremely flaky and can manage to bring down the entire server - which is really bad news if you put all your eggs in one basket (or server). On FreeBSD / Linux I've never really felt compelled to add on another server unless it was related to security, hardware limitations or some other factor.
Note: This isn't really a bash against MS, just crap software vendors who create MS based solutions.
I'm not sure what is really involved by this, but a FreeBSD security bulletin was released today addressing this topic (including a kernel patch and work-around) so I highly doubt this is simply a stunt.
How "fast" a security fix gets out is a bit more complicated then "here is the fix". With FreeBSD the base system gets fixes out very fast, within a day or two. With Linux the fix comes out in just as fast, but how fast YOU get the fix varies a lot depending upon your distro. With FreeBSD ports (aka the third party software collection on Linux) it varies depending upon who is the port maintainer and how much testing they feel should be done - that goes for Linux too however.
Did you have the basic CD or the universal CD? The universal does include vim as a text editor. The first step after chrooting should always be "emerge vim" =P
understanding that treats the children with respect, to help them make up thier own minds
But that's the fundamental problem here isn't it? Both sides say they are right. Creationists say that's what their religion says. Evolutionists say it's a fact of science. I looked up the definition of a baptist one day (which I guess I sort of am), and the basics of it was that anyone can access to the word of God (the Bible) and things which are not of the word of God are simply man made traditions. What I take away from that is read the bible YOURSELF and figure it out YOURSELF. That's the problem with fundamentalists, they regurgitate things others have told them instead of researching it themselves. Most people probably consider themselves evolutionists, but very few actually understand it. How many of them just regurgitate things others have told them? Have they ever REALLY thought about it themselves? Even opened a science book?
Yeah, lack of criticle thinking - that's the problem. What will we ever do if we empower our kids to think for themselves and actually make decisions... Well that and the fact that Americans seem to believe that they personally are always right and therefore have the right to impose their rights on everyone else - but that's another issue.
Sorry to say, but most people seem to be missing the point. Most people have been brainwashed to think they need anti-virus programs, they need spyware removal apps... they really don't. They just need a secure enviornment - web browser, OS, etc. Even windows can be secured to the point where you don't need antivirus, it's just not set up that way by default and is of course "inconvinient"
Despite what the "Intel fanboys" are saying, Intel HAS lost this war at the first battle
Actually I'd say this is the third battle that Intel has lost.
1st - Intel Pentium vs AMD Athlon. Initally just two processors against each other, but emerges to a battle of Mhz over benchmarks. AMD starts designating processors with "performance numbers" and actually backs up their claims with the benchmarks that prove that Mhz isn't everything. Now days most processor review sites are hardly even concerned with the clock speed of the CPU.
2nd - AMD pushes 64 bit CPU and instruction set. Intel ends up playing follow-the-leader. Not much to say there, other than (along with the Itanium debacle) Intel doesn't neccesarily decide where the industry will go.
I'd also say that power consumption, performance, cost, and dual core "issues" are all different battles, and I wouldn't say Intel has lost them all yet (price of Operitons being sort of high, power consumption being a work in progress in both camps).
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Seriously, is memory even an issue? We like to say "wow my computer is zippy with 1Gb of RAM" but Win2k runs pretty well with it's recommended 64Mb - and still runable on whatever ammount is the minimum. Which doesn't matter either because you can't buy sticks of RAM that small anyway (mainstream).
Where I work not all of the 8 year old computers make it, but the RAM is almost always good. So I just canibalize RAM and other components. Stuffing a computer with RAM isn't that hard if you had the forsight to build the computers with only one stick of ram in the first place.
When you use older computers the thing that sucks more than anything else is the boot time, but seriously the less frequent reboots pretty much negate that as well. Anything from 300-450Mhz is perfectly good. Less than that I cant say, since 300Mhz is now my cutoff point (up from 233 Last year and 133 the year before).
Well I thought about that, but the cost of the CD and Jewel case is almost neglagible - the factories that press the music are completely hands-free. With the insert, I'm still thinking that all together it would come out to around a $1. I'm sure the distribution channels for shipping is also extremely efficient. Cut out record store profit , and I'd say they're getting around $8 for a $12 CD. That's still a pretty good profit margin if you only want one or two songs ($2 to download them on iTunes where they would only make $1.20)
I'm of course guessing at the costs, but the robitics used for CD production is pretty amazing stuff and really efficient, and printing in mass for a known size and quantity of inserts I doubt would add up to much either.
I think it probably is. A 99 cent song is still a lot less than the "$12+ for the entire CD just to get the song" situation we have now. Some will still download the entire album, but not all. I'm also guessing that impulse buying will increase.
So what happens now? They dump all their money into Britney, and you download the 1 song they hype on TV. They then go and browse randomly - possibly downloading from other artists which the company doesn't really market. This all depends on them having music that's worth listening to, so I imagine that in the short term they aren't going to make as much, until they give the customer a wider array of _good_ music to listen to.
Bacause your girlfriend wants to go to Victoria's Secret?
Not neccesarily true.
A 96 Tarus has a 16 gal tank. A 2003 Tarus has a 19 Gal tank.
Ford tarus gets 19/25 mpg
A Ferrari is a whole set of cars.
A Ferrari 612 Scagletti gets 11/17 mpg with a 28.5 gal tank.
So the answer is still that it depends on the Tarus and depends on the Ferrari. More importantly it depends on the conditions and who is at the wheel. Seems to apply to MS vs Google just as well.
It's basically the freeware catch. Allow programmers to make free programs using QT. As they gain mindshare, QT gets its foot in the door and makes gains through the hobbiest programmer's real job.
The catch of course is that QT needs to be good enough to pay for. As many have said, QT is clean and nice to work with. If this is true enough, then people may become advocates of QT simply because of its superiority.
But you also have to look at the reality of the situation. Borland is completely marginalized, and MS now controls the development market for their own platform. Trolltech really doesn't have anything to lose by opening up their windows versions.
Hell, 10% of websites don't work in IE either (or any browser) just because whoever made the page didn't know what in the hell they were doing.
Does anyone have a picture of Linus with the BSD horns on? I think this should be the new apple logo for the zealotfrenzy.slashdot.org section where everyone's head will simultaniously explode.
Funny that you meantion emberrassing... I watched TV for quite some time, and a LOT of it while I was in high school. But somewhere along the line I became aware of the "laugh tracks". Suddenly I couldn't stand sitcoms. I always found myself wondering why they were trying to give the impressions that something was funny, when clearly it was not. I feel self concious about watching any sitcom now (not that I've watched any for years), but I refuse to watch TV even at someone else's house. Even when walking by a house with the TV on loud I cringe when hearing the laugh tracks.
While I look forward to any improvement over cmd.exe (heh, like that's hard), I have no doubt that MS still "doesn't get it". Unix systems have developed on a foundation since the 70's and the command line is still a preferred interface to many (including myself). Shells typically do not do much in themselves, they act as a _simple_ glue. A shell takes the collective enviornment of small utilities and gives you the power to harness them all together and accomplish just about anything. Is MS going to implement 1000 small utilities? No, because MS has a "do it all" philosophy.
As such what they will do is invent ANOTHER scripting language with a CLI interface for users. There is a difference between a scripting language and a shell, but I don't think MS can (or will) tell the difference. Scripts do some things well, shells do other things well. Scripting in a shell is good because it takes your native interface and allows you to automate it. Is MS seriously going to tell us that the CLI is the way of the future?
So basically we are where we are now, but with a more capable shell. I'm sure many of us people using Jscript can't wait to move down the chain from the second-teir citizenship we endure from MS's half hearted support of Jscript as a scripting language. And what happens when we cannot do a task in MSH? Same thing we do now, bunch of work arounds and cludges because something is not installed by default.
While I aplaud MS for trying to make windows not suck as much, the CLI is Unix turf and windows attempt at stabbing into such an enviornment will be half hearted at best. Windows needs a shell badly, but not another scripting language. Just look at how hard it is to change permissons on a directory. A nightmare to do in VBscript or Jscript, and really painful to do with cacls (such an intuitive name). MS can't bear the simplicity of chown / chmod.
In modern society it is quite possible to do a billion dollars worth of damage. If you can drive a truck full of TNT into a skyscraper you can probably get pretty close. The more we invest in building such big entities the more capable an individual is of doing significant damage.
... well a billion is, but in the millions seems possible.
I think you're right that they are probably lumping costs together and making up dallar ammounts but I imagine he could have easily done damage into the millions. Consider a criticle database where the backup isn't done properly (yeah, that NEVER happens but bear with me). Now some guy comes in and accidently wacks the machine. Maybe setting up the database again runs a few thousand, but the criticle information which cannot be replaced on the machine is worth far more - and that's a hard ammount to estimate. Hell, just consider how much the Pentigon spends doing security audits and integrity checks every time someone manages to break in.
You figure that such a person could run around for years doing damage (perhaps even unintentional) and getting such a high score doesn't seem that far fetched
A car nut who owned his own tractor factory took his car back to the Ferrari factory when his clutch failed. Enzo Ferrari snubs the man because of his affiliation with tractors and "not understanding such a refined vehicle". The (rather pissed off man) fixes the clutch himself. Ferruccio Lamborghini later decides to enter the exotic car business himself, in competition with Ferrari.
Win2k has it, you just have to turn it on. There's some registry key with the settings, or you can use TweakUI
Open Source is different things to different people. For me personally I want something that does a task correctly and doesn't make my life hell in order to do it. While I would find it easy to blast many Open Source projects for crappy software or huge gaps where no one seems to want to come up with a solution, I'm finding that more often than not, proprietary vendors are doing the same thing. As such I'd rather have Open Source software because:
1) Updates are much more frequent
2) Often integrated into solutions I use (FreeBSD, Linux)
3) Play nice with open standards - mainly because they have nothing to gain
4) Are usually affordable.
Now to RMS can choose "Open Source" as a way of life, and I respect him for that, but it isn't the only way it works. Life isn't so black and white.
I believe this isn't the first time someone associated with MS has done this. I've heard of a similar incident happening in Europe. Really I don't think this is newsworthy information. All of us know that you can end up with a bad office install, or office will end up with corrupted documents. Many of us also know that you can open such documents with Open Office just fine. I recommend this to uses on our own network every so often, so this is old hat. Another nice trick is to open MS office documents with Open Office, then save them with OO (to the MS format) and watch the file size decrease up to 30% at times and be able to open them JUST FINE in MS office.
But a clock that is off by 3 hours is always wrong.
Wait til you get married. Then you'll realize your fiancee is obsolete =P
I've noticed an intersting trend where I work. We're a small business that is getting more and more of our functions done by technology. With this we (actually management) tend to sign on with these Microsoft based solution where EVERYONE wants their own server. Back in the day when we had, say 3 servers this was quaint, but as we've gotten more and more this is getting a bit rediculous. I'm also loath to go against the recommendations because often these systems are extremely flaky and can manage to bring down the entire server - which is really bad news if you put all your eggs in one basket (or server). On FreeBSD / Linux I've never really felt compelled to add on another server unless it was related to security, hardware limitations or some other factor.
Note: This isn't really a bash against MS, just crap software vendors who create MS based solutions.
I'm not sure what is really involved by this, but a FreeBSD security bulletin was released today addressing this topic (including a kernel patch and work-around) so I highly doubt this is simply a stunt.
How "fast" a security fix gets out is a bit more complicated then "here is the fix". With FreeBSD the base system gets fixes out very fast, within a day or two. With Linux the fix comes out in just as fast, but how fast YOU get the fix varies a lot depending upon your distro. With FreeBSD ports (aka the third party software collection on Linux) it varies depending upon who is the port maintainer and how much testing they feel should be done - that goes for Linux too however.
Did you have the basic CD or the universal CD? The universal does include vim as a text editor. The first step after chrooting should always be "emerge vim" =P
Why stop there? If we're going to do benchmarks on IIS on Windows and Apache on Linux on the same hardware, I say also benchmark:
Apache on Windows
Apache on FreeBSD
lighttpd on Linux/Whatever
Yes there are other very powerful webservers OTHER than Apache
understanding that treats the children with respect, to help them make up thier own minds
But that's the fundamental problem here isn't it? Both sides say they are right. Creationists say that's what their religion says. Evolutionists say it's a fact of science. I looked up the definition of a baptist one day (which I guess I sort of am), and the basics of it was that anyone can access to the word of God (the Bible) and things which are not of the word of God are simply man made traditions. What I take away from that is read the bible YOURSELF and figure it out YOURSELF. That's the problem with fundamentalists, they regurgitate things others have told them instead of researching it themselves. Most people probably consider themselves evolutionists, but very few actually understand it. How many of them just regurgitate things others have told them? Have they ever REALLY thought about it themselves? Even opened a science book?
Yeah, lack of criticle thinking - that's the problem. What will we ever do if we empower our kids to think for themselves and actually make decisions... Well that and the fact that Americans seem to believe that they personally are always right and therefore have the right to impose their rights on everyone else - but that's another issue.
Just fix it. ... with baindaids.
Sorry to say, but most people seem to be missing the point. Most people have been brainwashed to think they need anti-virus programs, they need spyware removal apps... they really don't. They just need a secure enviornment - web browser, OS, etc. Even windows can be secured to the point where you don't need antivirus, it's just not set up that way by default and is of course "inconvinient"
Despite what the "Intel fanboys" are saying, Intel HAS lost this war at the first battle
Actually I'd say this is the third battle that Intel has lost.
1st - Intel Pentium vs AMD Athlon. Initally just two processors against each other, but emerges to a battle of Mhz over benchmarks. AMD starts designating processors with "performance numbers" and actually backs up their claims with the benchmarks that prove that Mhz isn't everything. Now days most processor review sites are hardly even concerned with the clock speed of the CPU.
2nd - AMD pushes 64 bit CPU and instruction set. Intel ends up playing follow-the-leader. Not much to say there, other than (along with the Itanium debacle) Intel doesn't neccesarily decide where the industry will go.
I'd also say that power consumption, performance, cost, and dual core "issues" are all different battles, and I wouldn't say Intel has lost them all yet (price of Operitons being sort of high, power consumption being a work in progress in both camps).