I'm with both of you, and I'm in the media business. My income depends on people paying me to write stuff for their Web sites/magazines/whatever. But personally, I use AdBlock Plus. Life is just too short to deal with all of that shouting in your face. It's not what I come to Web sites for, and if I can use technology to avoid it, I will.
That said, I haven't invented the alternative to the "failed business model" the GP describes. Have you?
I'm assuming most of you don't realize this -- obviously my Slashdot ID is pretty low, and I post a lot, which means I have a lot of Karma and "achievements" and all that -- but if you meet certain criteria (I don't know what the actual criteria are) Slashdot puts a little checkbox on every page that says "Ads Disabled." If you check it, you don't see ads on Slashdot. It's like they give you a free, permanent subscription. I must say it's a very classy move.
The delay (in seconds) is the number of attempts in the last 30 minutes, squared. This makes all but the most determined attacker give up and go away very quickly.
I like the idea but your settings seem very aggressive. The attackers may go away "very quickly"... but do they go away quickly enough? Under your system, if an attacker has tried to login just eight times in the last half hour, any legitimate user who tries to login will have to wait a full minute after establishing the connection until they're allowed to enter their password. If that was me, I might hangup the connection and try again (compounding the problem).
I'd represent a small vertical market, but as a teacher, the idea of having something like this that is portable and with the capacity to wirelessly connect to a projector makes me salivate...
Verticals have always been the market for these types of devices. The first-gen devices that ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition sold far more to folks working in (for example) health care and oil and gas than they did to consumers.
The problem is, marketing a device to these customers means the device is going to have a limited audience -- and therefore it will be expensive, perhaps pricing it out of the range of that audience. (See budget cuts in education, health care, etc...)
Furthermore, vertical markets also have special hardware needs. Most commonly, they require devices that have been ruggedized to some extent, to be able to survive hostile computing environments such as busy hospitals, oil rigs, and any other real-life work environment where you're being asked to depend on a computing device that you will be holding in one hand. This in turn makes the devices more expensive -- so at the end of the day, given the choice between a rugged device that isn't going to break but acts just like a Windows XP machine, and one that is a consumer-grade device with a miraculous new UI (but which costs the same because of all the R&D spent on software), most customers are going to choose the rugged XP machine.
That's why we see lots of mocked-up Flash demos of these miraculous new devices but few actual devices.
Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
Most retail stores have their own shrinkwrap supplies in the back somewhere. If a product comes back in good condition, they'll just wrap it up and put it back on the shelf. That's not to say I suspect any malfeasance on the part of the retailer. An employee could have stolen it without the company's knowledge, or the employee who accepted a return could have just re-wrapped it without opening the box to see if there really was a product in there. Or someone could have just as easily bought the product, swapped it out with the bolt to approximate the weight, then brought the box into their own retail job, where they used their boss's shrinkwrap machine to re-wrap it before returning it.
Watching the demo, I just can't understand why Microsoft seems so obsessed with the idea that everybody's going to want to interact with a computer using a pen.
Think about it. Let's say you're collaborating on a project with somebody, and he's done a lot of brainstorming about it. He comes to a meeting with a stack of notebooks where he's written down all his ideas. What's the first thing he says? "Sorry about my handwriting."
Even I apologize for my handwriting, and I have the handwriting of a comic-book letterer -- when I want to. The thing is, writing neatly takes a lot of time. It's much faster to use upper and lower case than block capitals, for starters, and it's faster to use cursive than printing. And even faster than that to just scrawl it out any way you can.
But you know what's even faster than that? Typing on a computer keyboard.
Microsoft first got on this kick with OneNote, its note-taking application, which it seemed to want to market as the killer app for tablet PCs. And by that I mean the first generation of tablet PCs. You know the ones. You didn't buy one. For some reason, Microsoft was pushing really hard for this idea that everybody would be walking around with tablet PCs, scribbling notes into OneNote with pens.
Now, I use OneNote every day. But while I have a nice-sized Wacom tablet sitting right here on my desk, which comes with a very nice, contoured stylus that fits very nicely in my hand, never once have I been inspired to plug the thing in to scrawl off some notes in OneNote. Not when there's a keyboard sitting right in front of me. Not when I know that if I simply type in my thoughts, OneNote won't have to try to OCR my scrawls in order to make the text searchable. Not when I know that storing a bitmap to save a six-word thought is a waste of space.
So in this Courier demo we not only have someone scribbling notes on a notepad -- which conveniently resembles an onscreen Moleskine notebook, because everybody knows people like their computers to model real-life things that are less efficient than computers, even when the computer doesn't much resemble that real-life thing -- but at one point the person draws a box around those notes, taps on it and the box turns into... a highlighted yellow version of that wobbly, hand-drawn box.
That might be all well and good if I was a bright-eyed fresh college grad like the eager woman in the demo, and my life was accompanied by a wistful accoustic indie-rock soundtrack. But in real life, if I was being jostled back and forth on the noisy subway on my way home and I drew that box and it popped up on my screen looking all fucked-up like I just drew it, the first thing that would cross my mind would be, "God dammit, why is this computer so stupid that it can't tell I was trying to draw a box just now? Why won't it just make a rectangle? Drawing boxes was so much fucking easier when all I had to do is click my mouse button, hold it and drag."
This UI goes beyond a solution looking for a problem. It's a way of actively making it harder for me to get work done with a computer.
It reminds me of all the VRML hype from years back. People were predicting that in the future, we wouldn't type URLs into a Web browser. We'd fire up our Avatars and fly to places on the Web in 3-D graphics. We would walk through virtual libraries, pulling electronic books off 3-D shelves. We'd ride dragons to meeting rooms where we'd chat with other avatars in real time. And all I could think was, "WTF? So we've just invented the Internet, this miraculous thing that puts the world of information right at your fingertips, no matter where you are, so that all you have to do is type a couple things and the information instantly appears on your screen... and you want to impose a 3-D spatial paradigm on it? Instead of calling up information out of thin air, you want to have to hike down the virtual block to get it? You call that progress?"
Same thing with this tablet idea. People are too stu
In that case I think the movie is far more profound.
You could argue that. I don't think your interpretation of the movie is quite right, though. What happens is that Alex is tortured by Mr. Alexander, and to escape he jumps out the window. This comes to the attention of the public, who have been told that Alex was "cured" by the Ludovico treatment, and becomes a big embarrassment for the parties involved. To avoid being blamed for a treatment that apparently drove Alex to attempt suicide, the government "undoes" the Ludovico treatment. So at the end of the movie, Alex is merely back where he was at the beginning.
That's where the movie ends, and I suppose it's "profound," in the sense that its message seems to be that the horrible (but independent-minded) Alex is actually better than the hypocritical government and other people who tried to use his plight for political ends.
Unfortunately, the movie was based on an abridged version of the book that appeared in the American market, which omitted the final chapter. In that final chapter, as I have said, Alex grows beyond his life of ultra-violence, leaves the gang, and contemplates having a child of his own (who, he considers, may turn out to be just as violent and horrible as he was as a young man).
To me, this final chapter drives home Burgess's point, which was to criticize the British welfare state and the moralizing do-gooders that it tends to empower. The Ludovico treatment "fixed" Alex, but it removed his power of choice. Mr. Alexander, who was critical of the government's treatment, wanted to use Alex to demonstrate the government's wrongheadedness, but as it turned out he actually hated Alex and wanted to torture him. The government reversed the Ludovico treatment, but not out of a desire to help Alex, but merely to protect itself from further embarrassment. Throughout the story, Alex's parents are impotent and fail to exert any influence over him. And in the end, for all the back-and-forth between counselors and doctors, government agents and revolutionaries, none of it matters at all; eventually Alex just turns 21, grows up, and gets on with his life. All that moralizing, all the meddling of the nanny-state, was completely pointless and hypocritical. "A Clockwork Orange" is a criticism of that society, as Anthony Burgess saw it. In the book, Alex is not a hero, and by the end he's not a villain either. He's just an everyman, responding to the circumstances of his surroundings. In that sense I think the book is much more "profound" than the movie's comparatively adolescent viewpoint, which appears merely to want to titillate the viewer with "Alex as anti-hero."
Unfortunately, in creative businesses like graphic design firms, certain "star" employees are often held to be "geniuses" and the idea that you would tell them to do anything is seen as "cramping their style."
I worked at one company where the creative director would regularly come over to coworkers' workstations, ask them a few questions, say "show me," then proceed to hover over their shoulders and say, "Move that to the left. Now to the right. Wait, go back. Make it red." Some people would eventually get fed up (because they had their own work to do) and say, "Knock yourself out, man," get up, and leave. The guy would actually sit down and proceed to use their computer for the next half-hour or so, until he got bored and wandered off.
Everyone was expected to appreciate and value the creative director's "input," because he was, after all, a genius.
Basically I think they'll end up getting sold in whole or in parts to Oracle, IBM or HP after the hedge fund is done stripping out all the cash from the company.
Of the three, my bet would be HP.
Oracle just bought Solaris, and so far it has been happy letting Red Hat do its Linux distribution packaging for it. A while back, Oracle was busy buying up some of the smaller competitors for Novell's identity management business, so it doesn't need Novell's stuff too. Novell's legacy NetWare business would just be an albatross.
Similarly, IBM probably doesn't see much in Novell's proprietary software portfolio that could fill any major gaps in its own. And IBM has said repeatedly that it does not want to manage a Linux distribution of its own, but prefers to partner with both of the leading enterprise distros (Red Hat and Novell), because the competitive atmosphere provides the best value for customers who want IBM solutions (which earn real money). I'm sure IBM would have no problem letting HP know it would have some guaranteed business from IBM if it wanted to grab Novell.
Would HP really be interested? I'm not sure. Maybe just as a spoiler vs. Dell.
Maybe Cisco would be interested in Novell, with its current expansion into servers? Novell's identity management portfolio seems a decent fit for Cisco, too.
Novell likely has undervalued assets that are worth more separately than together.
Unlikely, I think. If you discount the deal with Microsoft, I'm not sure the Linux business has ever been a moneymaker for Novell. Novell eDirectory is a very well respected product with a strong customer base, but Novell's problem has always been its arrogance/complacency. Active Directory has been bleeding market share from eDirectory for years. That's why Novell has been so eager to rewrite its core proprietary software to run on Linux and sell the whole shebang as a package. It's a kind of Hollywood accounting to disguise the fact that its strongest customers remain its legacy NetWare customers -- and that's a customer base that will dry up and blow away sooner or later.
Year after year, analysts and the press ask whether Novell is in a death spiral, and the answer is always, "How can we be dying? Look how much cash we have!" But while I'm no business major, to me, money in the bank does not a business make.
There are "bright spots" visible by satellite within North Korea. They are believed to correspond to enclaves of the wealthy elites. What's that you ask? How can they have "wealthy elites" within a Marxist utopian state? You may be nearing an answer to your own question.
Seconded. I have a Casio FX-115ES. It's $15 right now from Amazon and it's way more calculator than most high school students should need. Very rugged, solar powered, nice all around.
In no way does it replace my HP 50G, however, which I paid >$100 for and still cling to, even though I haven't had occasion to do much complex math in a long time.
Classes that require students to buy a TI-84 are bad classes, IMHO. At my local community college, none of the calculus classes require calculators. Many instructors forbid the use of calculators on tests. That's right -- all calculators are forbidden.
That said, a good calculator is a tool. It can help you understand how various classes of problems work, and it can help you do those problems faster. If you actually take the time to learn your calculator's functions (something that is admittedly nonintuitive, since many of them don't come with manuals anymore) and even learn how to program it (something few TI-84 owners actually do), you will see what powerful, useful devices they can be. You might find that you do not at all regret paying the cost of one textbook for a calculator that will come in handy throughout your school -- and potentially, professional -- career.
But if that's not the kind of thing that appeals to you? By all means, spend the $15. Casio makes a good calculator.
It's the fact that it is such a limited piece of hardware that makes it interesting.
Well... either that, or the fact that it is such a limited piece of hardware is what makes it so frustrating.
People who have never used a programmable calculator -- or who have never had to do much college math -- don't understand how much better they are for doing math. They are purpose-built devices designed to aid complex calculation. Yes, you could probably install a computer algebra system on an iPhone and get pretty much the same capabilities, but a calculator has actual buttons to do all those operations. They also have big libraries of code available to run common formulae for statistics, engineering, chemistry, etc. Modern calculators are very good at letting you get problems done faster.
Imagine a calculator with chemistry software installed, so that when you're doing complex problems in chemistry class you don't have to stop and compute out the molar mass of each compound; instead you just punch in the chemical formula and the calculator returns the mass for you. That's not really cheating. You won't get very far in chemistry class just knowing how to compute molar mass. But every time you add up the mass of a complex formula there's a chance you could make a small error, get the mass wrong, and get the wrong result for the problem. The calculator helps you avoid that.
Now imagine a calculator with a CPU as powerful as the iPhone's, but which is specifically designed so that it doesn't allow users to write that chemistry software.
"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
I've moved around Web hosts a few times for similar reasons, most of which amount to general incompetence on the part of the hosts. Often the host would start out fine, seem great, and then after a while the outages, increased latency, and other problems would mount. By the time I found myself getting in touch with the host's tech support regularly, I would realize how bad it really was. Eventually I felt I had no choice but to go elsewhere, and I was back in the same boat as before. I've come to believe that's just life when you're not willing to pay a lot for Web hosting.
I see a lot of posts suggesting that he start writing real programs. That's good advice, but it might not answer the question. The submitter says he works as a security guard. As such, sitting focused at a laptop writing code might not be an option. He seems to just want suggestions for books to read. As such, I reckon a book on algorithms wouldn't be a bad direction to head (provided he's got enough math to follow along).
The only problem I see is that if he's taking these classes for college credit or working toward completing a certificate, he's going to be really bored with the later classes when he actually has to take them if he reads all the books beforehand. Either that, or he'll know enough to be dangerous and he won't pay sufficient attention to the guidance from his instructor.
They'll be eating everyone of their nonsensical words when Judge Gertner renders her decision.
Then why can't you just wait for the judge to render her decision instead of predicting the future over and over again, as if your opinion was proven fact?
Gloating when history proves you right makes you look smug. Gloating about something that hasn't even happened, though... that's just strange.
Infoseek was my flavor, too. Then Disney bought it, changed the name to Go.com, brought in a terrible new design, and all of a sudden the search results went to shit. Hope it was worth the money, Disney.
A simple Amazon search for "Eee PC" reveals a raft of models comparable to your Acer. Why does everybody seem determined to forget that Asus basically created this category?
600ml in particular is very close to your "20 oz" (591ml) bottle - so much so that it would be trivial to label and sell the 600ml version as a 20 oz bottle (woo hoo, 9ml for FREE). Perhaps they already do!
Nope, it really is labeled 591mL. Nobody pays any attention.
if you're on a 24-hour plane ride, you're soon going to get tired of reading what's available for free. It's good for distracting yourself for brief periods (and the main reason I pay those extortionate 3G data charges), but for serious anti-boredom, I want something that you have to pay for — which is never going to be available without DRM of some kind.
If you can't be entertained by Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Miguel de Cervantes, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Daniel Defoe, Edith Wharton, Walter Scott, or ANY of the many, many other authors whose works are not protected by copyright... if you absolutely must buy something because nothing else will appease you... then frankly I pity you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with both of you, and I'm in the media business. My income depends on people paying me to write stuff for their Web sites/magazines/whatever. But personally, I use AdBlock Plus. Life is just too short to deal with all of that shouting in your face. It's not what I come to Web sites for, and if I can use technology to avoid it, I will.
That said, I haven't invented the alternative to the "failed business model" the GP describes. Have you?
I'm assuming most of you don't realize this -- obviously my Slashdot ID is pretty low, and I post a lot, which means I have a lot of Karma and "achievements" and all that -- but if you meet certain criteria (I don't know what the actual criteria are) Slashdot puts a little checkbox on every page that says "Ads Disabled." If you check it, you don't see ads on Slashdot. It's like they give you a free, permanent subscription. I must say it's a very classy move.
And Wired.
Well fucking played, sir.
Ah.
The delay (in seconds) is the number of attempts in the last 30 minutes, squared. This makes all but the most determined attacker give up and go away very quickly.
I like the idea but your settings seem very aggressive. The attackers may go away "very quickly"... but do they go away quickly enough? Under your system, if an attacker has tried to login just eight times in the last half hour, any legitimate user who tries to login will have to wait a full minute after establishing the connection until they're allowed to enter their password. If that was me, I might hangup the connection and try again (compounding the problem).
I'd represent a small vertical market, but as a teacher, the idea of having something like this that is portable and with the capacity to wirelessly connect to a projector makes me salivate...
Verticals have always been the market for these types of devices. The first-gen devices that ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition sold far more to folks working in (for example) health care and oil and gas than they did to consumers.
The problem is, marketing a device to these customers means the device is going to have a limited audience -- and therefore it will be expensive, perhaps pricing it out of the range of that audience. (See budget cuts in education, health care, etc...)
Furthermore, vertical markets also have special hardware needs. Most commonly, they require devices that have been ruggedized to some extent, to be able to survive hostile computing environments such as busy hospitals, oil rigs, and any other real-life work environment where you're being asked to depend on a computing device that you will be holding in one hand. This in turn makes the devices more expensive -- so at the end of the day, given the choice between a rugged device that isn't going to break but acts just like a Windows XP machine, and one that is a consumer-grade device with a miraculous new UI (but which costs the same because of all the R&D spent on software), most customers are going to choose the rugged XP machine.
That's why we see lots of mocked-up Flash demos of these miraculous new devices but few actual devices.
Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
Most retail stores have their own shrinkwrap supplies in the back somewhere. If a product comes back in good condition, they'll just wrap it up and put it back on the shelf. That's not to say I suspect any malfeasance on the part of the retailer. An employee could have stolen it without the company's knowledge, or the employee who accepted a return could have just re-wrapped it without opening the box to see if there really was a product in there. Or someone could have just as easily bought the product, swapped it out with the bolt to approximate the weight, then brought the box into their own retail job, where they used their boss's shrinkwrap machine to re-wrap it before returning it.
Watching the demo, I just can't understand why Microsoft seems so obsessed with the idea that everybody's going to want to interact with a computer using a pen.
Think about it. Let's say you're collaborating on a project with somebody, and he's done a lot of brainstorming about it. He comes to a meeting with a stack of notebooks where he's written down all his ideas. What's the first thing he says? "Sorry about my handwriting."
Even I apologize for my handwriting, and I have the handwriting of a comic-book letterer -- when I want to. The thing is, writing neatly takes a lot of time. It's much faster to use upper and lower case than block capitals, for starters, and it's faster to use cursive than printing. And even faster than that to just scrawl it out any way you can.
But you know what's even faster than that? Typing on a computer keyboard.
Microsoft first got on this kick with OneNote, its note-taking application, which it seemed to want to market as the killer app for tablet PCs. And by that I mean the first generation of tablet PCs. You know the ones. You didn't buy one. For some reason, Microsoft was pushing really hard for this idea that everybody would be walking around with tablet PCs, scribbling notes into OneNote with pens.
Now, I use OneNote every day. But while I have a nice-sized Wacom tablet sitting right here on my desk, which comes with a very nice, contoured stylus that fits very nicely in my hand, never once have I been inspired to plug the thing in to scrawl off some notes in OneNote. Not when there's a keyboard sitting right in front of me. Not when I know that if I simply type in my thoughts, OneNote won't have to try to OCR my scrawls in order to make the text searchable. Not when I know that storing a bitmap to save a six-word thought is a waste of space.
So in this Courier demo we not only have someone scribbling notes on a notepad -- which conveniently resembles an onscreen Moleskine notebook, because everybody knows people like their computers to model real-life things that are less efficient than computers, even when the computer doesn't much resemble that real-life thing -- but at one point the person draws a box around those notes, taps on it and the box turns into ... a highlighted yellow version of that wobbly, hand-drawn box.
That might be all well and good if I was a bright-eyed fresh college grad like the eager woman in the demo, and my life was accompanied by a wistful accoustic indie-rock soundtrack. But in real life, if I was being jostled back and forth on the noisy subway on my way home and I drew that box and it popped up on my screen looking all fucked-up like I just drew it, the first thing that would cross my mind would be, "God dammit, why is this computer so stupid that it can't tell I was trying to draw a box just now? Why won't it just make a rectangle? Drawing boxes was so much fucking easier when all I had to do is click my mouse button, hold it and drag."
This UI goes beyond a solution looking for a problem. It's a way of actively making it harder for me to get work done with a computer.
It reminds me of all the VRML hype from years back. People were predicting that in the future, we wouldn't type URLs into a Web browser. We'd fire up our Avatars and fly to places on the Web in 3-D graphics. We would walk through virtual libraries, pulling electronic books off 3-D shelves. We'd ride dragons to meeting rooms where we'd chat with other avatars in real time. And all I could think was, "WTF? So we've just invented the Internet, this miraculous thing that puts the world of information right at your fingertips, no matter where you are, so that all you have to do is type a couple things and the information instantly appears on your screen... and you want to impose a 3-D spatial paradigm on it? Instead of calling up information out of thin air, you want to have to hike down the virtual block to get it? You call that progress?"
Same thing with this tablet idea. People are too stu
In that case I think the movie is far more profound.
You could argue that. I don't think your interpretation of the movie is quite right, though. What happens is that Alex is tortured by Mr. Alexander, and to escape he jumps out the window. This comes to the attention of the public, who have been told that Alex was "cured" by the Ludovico treatment, and becomes a big embarrassment for the parties involved. To avoid being blamed for a treatment that apparently drove Alex to attempt suicide, the government "undoes" the Ludovico treatment. So at the end of the movie, Alex is merely back where he was at the beginning.
That's where the movie ends, and I suppose it's "profound," in the sense that its message seems to be that the horrible (but independent-minded) Alex is actually better than the hypocritical government and other people who tried to use his plight for political ends.
Unfortunately, the movie was based on an abridged version of the book that appeared in the American market, which omitted the final chapter. In that final chapter, as I have said, Alex grows beyond his life of ultra-violence, leaves the gang, and contemplates having a child of his own (who, he considers, may turn out to be just as violent and horrible as he was as a young man).
To me, this final chapter drives home Burgess's point, which was to criticize the British welfare state and the moralizing do-gooders that it tends to empower. The Ludovico treatment "fixed" Alex, but it removed his power of choice. Mr. Alexander, who was critical of the government's treatment, wanted to use Alex to demonstrate the government's wrongheadedness, but as it turned out he actually hated Alex and wanted to torture him. The government reversed the Ludovico treatment, but not out of a desire to help Alex, but merely to protect itself from further embarrassment. Throughout the story, Alex's parents are impotent and fail to exert any influence over him. And in the end, for all the back-and-forth between counselors and doctors, government agents and revolutionaries, none of it matters at all; eventually Alex just turns 21, grows up, and gets on with his life. All that moralizing, all the meddling of the nanny-state, was completely pointless and hypocritical. "A Clockwork Orange" is a criticism of that society, as Anthony Burgess saw it. In the book, Alex is not a hero, and by the end he's not a villain either. He's just an everyman, responding to the circumstances of his surroundings. In that sense I think the book is much more "profound" than the movie's comparatively adolescent viewpoint, which appears merely to want to titillate the viewer with "Alex as anti-hero."
Unfortunately, in creative businesses like graphic design firms, certain "star" employees are often held to be "geniuses" and the idea that you would tell them to do anything is seen as "cramping their style."
I worked at one company where the creative director would regularly come over to coworkers' workstations, ask them a few questions, say "show me," then proceed to hover over their shoulders and say, "Move that to the left. Now to the right. Wait, go back. Make it red." Some people would eventually get fed up (because they had their own work to do) and say, "Knock yourself out, man," get up, and leave. The guy would actually sit down and proceed to use their computer for the next half-hour or so, until he got bored and wandered off.
Everyone was expected to appreciate and value the creative director's "input," because he was, after all, a genius.
Mind you, in the book Alex basically just grows up and gets over it. He gets bored with ultra-violence and goes on to lead a more-or-less normal life.
And as for the helpful translation, below: Wow, you are one insightful dude. And here I thought he might have a cut throat banana peel.
Basically I think they'll end up getting sold in whole or in parts to Oracle, IBM or HP after the hedge fund is done stripping out all the cash from the company.
Of the three, my bet would be HP.
Oracle just bought Solaris, and so far it has been happy letting Red Hat do its Linux distribution packaging for it. A while back, Oracle was busy buying up some of the smaller competitors for Novell's identity management business, so it doesn't need Novell's stuff too. Novell's legacy NetWare business would just be an albatross.
Similarly, IBM probably doesn't see much in Novell's proprietary software portfolio that could fill any major gaps in its own. And IBM has said repeatedly that it does not want to manage a Linux distribution of its own, but prefers to partner with both of the leading enterprise distros (Red Hat and Novell), because the competitive atmosphere provides the best value for customers who want IBM solutions (which earn real money). I'm sure IBM would have no problem letting HP know it would have some guaranteed business from IBM if it wanted to grab Novell.
Would HP really be interested? I'm not sure. Maybe just as a spoiler vs. Dell.
Maybe Cisco would be interested in Novell, with its current expansion into servers? Novell's identity management portfolio seems a decent fit for Cisco, too.
Novell likely has undervalued assets that are worth more separately than together.
Unlikely, I think. If you discount the deal with Microsoft, I'm not sure the Linux business has ever been a moneymaker for Novell. Novell eDirectory is a very well respected product with a strong customer base, but Novell's problem has always been its arrogance/complacency. Active Directory has been bleeding market share from eDirectory for years. That's why Novell has been so eager to rewrite its core proprietary software to run on Linux and sell the whole shebang as a package. It's a kind of Hollywood accounting to disguise the fact that its strongest customers remain its legacy NetWare customers -- and that's a customer base that will dry up and blow away sooner or later.
Year after year, analysts and the press ask whether Novell is in a death spiral, and the answer is always, "How can we be dying? Look how much cash we have!" But while I'm no business major, to me, money in the bank does not a business make.
Are they really that fucked?
There are "bright spots" visible by satellite within North Korea. They are believed to correspond to enclaves of the wealthy elites. What's that you ask? How can they have "wealthy elites" within a Marxist utopian state? You may be nearing an answer to your own question.
Seconded. I have a Casio FX-115ES. It's $15 right now from Amazon and it's way more calculator than most high school students should need. Very rugged, solar powered, nice all around.
In no way does it replace my HP 50G, however, which I paid >$100 for and still cling to, even though I haven't had occasion to do much complex math in a long time.
Classes that require students to buy a TI-84 are bad classes, IMHO. At my local community college, none of the calculus classes require calculators. Many instructors forbid the use of calculators on tests. That's right -- all calculators are forbidden.
That said, a good calculator is a tool. It can help you understand how various classes of problems work, and it can help you do those problems faster. If you actually take the time to learn your calculator's functions (something that is admittedly nonintuitive, since many of them don't come with manuals anymore) and even learn how to program it (something few TI-84 owners actually do), you will see what powerful, useful devices they can be. You might find that you do not at all regret paying the cost of one textbook for a calculator that will come in handy throughout your school -- and potentially, professional -- career.
But if that's not the kind of thing that appeals to you? By all means, spend the $15. Casio makes a good calculator.
It's the fact that it is such a limited piece of hardware that makes it interesting.
Well... either that, or the fact that it is such a limited piece of hardware is what makes it so frustrating.
People who have never used a programmable calculator -- or who have never had to do much college math -- don't understand how much better they are for doing math. They are purpose-built devices designed to aid complex calculation. Yes, you could probably install a computer algebra system on an iPhone and get pretty much the same capabilities, but a calculator has actual buttons to do all those operations. They also have big libraries of code available to run common formulae for statistics, engineering, chemistry, etc. Modern calculators are very good at letting you get problems done faster.
Imagine a calculator with chemistry software installed, so that when you're doing complex problems in chemistry class you don't have to stop and compute out the molar mass of each compound; instead you just punch in the chemical formula and the calculator returns the mass for you. That's not really cheating. You won't get very far in chemistry class just knowing how to compute molar mass. But every time you add up the mass of a complex formula there's a chance you could make a small error, get the mass wrong, and get the wrong result for the problem. The calculator helps you avoid that.
Now imagine a calculator with a CPU as powerful as the iPhone's, but which is specifically designed so that it doesn't allow users to write that chemistry software.
From TFA:
"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."
I've moved around Web hosts a few times for similar reasons, most of which amount to general incompetence on the part of the hosts. Often the host would start out fine, seem great, and then after a while the outages, increased latency, and other problems would mount. By the time I found myself getting in touch with the host's tech support regularly, I would realize how bad it really was. Eventually I felt I had no choice but to go elsewhere, and I was back in the same boat as before. I've come to believe that's just life when you're not willing to pay a lot for Web hosting.
I see a lot of posts suggesting that he start writing real programs. That's good advice, but it might not answer the question. The submitter says he works as a security guard. As such, sitting focused at a laptop writing code might not be an option. He seems to just want suggestions for books to read. As such, I reckon a book on algorithms wouldn't be a bad direction to head (provided he's got enough math to follow along).
The only problem I see is that if he's taking these classes for college credit or working toward completing a certificate, he's going to be really bored with the later classes when he actually has to take them if he reads all the books beforehand. Either that, or he'll know enough to be dangerous and he won't pay sufficient attention to the guidance from his instructor.
They'll be eating everyone of their nonsensical words when Judge Gertner renders her decision.
Then why can't you just wait for the judge to render her decision instead of predicting the future over and over again, as if your opinion was proven fact?
Gloating when history proves you right makes you look smug. Gloating about something that hasn't even happened, though... that's just strange.
I particularly liked Infoseek.
Infoseek was my flavor, too. Then Disney bought it, changed the name to Go.com, brought in a terrible new design, and all of a sudden the search results went to shit. Hope it was worth the money, Disney.
I think you mean originated on eBaum's World...
Someone else will have to tell you that Anonymous didn't originate on eBaum's World, because I see what you did there, you little sneak, you.
A simple Amazon search for "Eee PC" reveals a raft of models comparable to your Acer. Why does everybody seem determined to forget that Asus basically created this category?
600ml in particular is very close to your "20 oz" (591ml) bottle - so much so that it would be trivial to label and sell the 600ml version as a 20 oz bottle (woo hoo, 9ml for FREE). Perhaps they already do!
Nope, it really is labeled 591mL. Nobody pays any attention.
if you're on a 24-hour plane ride, you're soon going to get tired of reading what's available for free. It's good for distracting yourself for brief periods (and the main reason I pay those extortionate 3G data charges), but for serious anti-boredom, I want something that you have to pay for — which is never going to be available without DRM of some kind.
If you can't be entertained by Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Miguel de Cervantes, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Daniel Defoe, Edith Wharton, Walter Scott, or ANY of the many, many other authors whose works are not protected by copyright ... if you absolutely must buy something because nothing else will appease you ... then frankly I pity you.