Uhh... Linux doesn't support enough "layers of information". Riiiiiiiight. Is there a kernel option for more "layers of information" that can perhaps be enabled? Which operating systems support the most "layers of information" right out of the box?::snicker::
Well, clearly you have zero experience in the corporate world, or you would know how this works. In order to enable a more robust and proven architecture, this company chose a layered information model. That seems plain enough to me, from the article. Picture the information layers, each adding onto the last. Like an onion. Each information layer represents a greater degree of, um, data abstraction. Yeah. And you keep peeling away the layers, and peeling away, until eventually you get...
Full disclosure: I work for one of eWeek's competitors. Still, though I have no reason to defend them, I feel like there wasn't much harm in running this story. They were obviously approached by somebody working for some PR agency who put together these "case studies" for them, and they decided they had enough material to package a little story. I don't see this as being any kind of official statement from eWeek: "Linux bad, Microsoft good." They just found an angle and went with it.
In truth, any kind of meaningful Windows/Linux case studies are hard to come by. I know, because I've tried to find them. You all probably already know the names of all the organizations that have done switch-overs to Linux. And I say "organizations," because a lot of those are in the public sector. Novell can rattle off numbers and shoot you out press releases on all kinds of companies that have "decided to" switch to Linux, but the proof's in the pudding, and I don't smell no pudding.
Likewise, even if this story about switching from Linux to Windows was completely unbiased, it would be an anomaly... two companies, totally specific circumstances, almost meaningless. It serves to illustrate a certain angle on the industry and stimulate discussion. Nobody's story of the year, but I don't think it's a particular low point, either.
Copyright holders look the other way unless money is being exchanged.
This may tend to be true anecdotally: I regularly allow my own, copyrighted work to be used or reproduced for occasions where it sounds like nobody's looking to profit. But I wish people wouldn't say things like this, because it reinforces a popular misconception about copyright, which is that it's OK to do whatever you want with something so long as you're not planning to profit. This is just not true. If you make a thousand copies of my music CD and give them to other people without asking me if it's OK, should I not be mad because you gave them away for free?
Say, rather, that copyright holders have the option of looking the other way if no money is exchanged -- because, unlike trademarks, you do not risk losing the copyright if you don't vigorously defend it. But that's not really saying anything. If you use someone else's work in a way they don't like and they find out about it, expect to receive a C&D.
What's the advantage of having an entire distro built around this game, rather than just having an application for the game and all its training stuff built into the app?
The fact that it's a live CD image that fits on a 3" CD-R means you can carry it around in your pocket with you and play it anywhere. You simply boot the machine off your CD -- no need to install anything and leave a mess. Does your friend have a computer? Play it there. Your hotel? Play it there. An Internet cafe? Etc. As long as the machine can boot from CD, it'll work.
I just heard some sad news on the Sci-Fi - the beloved Ancient Arte of Ye Magick was found dead in its Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its Great Work, there's no denying its contributions to genre fiction. Truly a universal ideal.
Red Hat's main product is Enterprise Linux, designed for the server market -- Sun's bread and butter. Java Desktop System is targeted (obviously) as a replacement for Windows desktops. This is still a relatively small market, mainly consisting of companies with a need for volume lightweight deskop installs (e.g. call centers and the like). So there's not really a contradiction here. Sun's position is that Red Hat can't support mission-critical enterprise infrastructure to the extent to which Sun's products and its service organization is able. It's not like they're trying to destroy Linux. They're just trying to discredit their competition. They're well aware that Linux will go on as always, supported by the OSS community, no matter what they say -- and the JDS will continue to benefit from that.
It'll be more interesting to see how they go after Novell.
Yeah, and we all voted to put those people in Guantanemo Bay. Just like the people of California voted for this law that takes away their rights. Don't be an idiot.
Hear hear! I can't stand how many people keep making this simple mistake. By calling destructive computer criminals "hackers," you're bringing down everybody who codes for the love of it. Lots of us have been calling ourselves hackers for years, only now to get painted with this negative brush.
I don't expect the mainstream press to know any better, but this is Slashdot. Can we please try to keep our definitions straight?
A hacker is a skilled, passionate computer programmer -- nothing more.
A person who commits malicious computer crimes is a biscuit. Like those evil software pirates who walk around with those parrots on their shoulders: "Polly want a biscuit!" Get it right, people.
Yes, I bought the iRiver after comparing it with some of the other players on the market. The one I was leaning toward most was the Rio Karma. I decided to go with the iRiver because it seemed to be a more "open" design (it's just a big hard drive, as opposed to the Karma, which requires a Java applet to move files on/off), and because iRiver promised to implement some features and bugfixes in a future firmware. They went so far as to post a schedule of updates on their Web site.
But then, after I bought the device, they merely posted an apology when they failed to release a firmware on their first deadline date. And then, silence. For months. You can go check out their online forums and you'll see that they are positively filled with irate customers screaming for iRiver to get its act together and release the updates it promised, but as far as anyone can tell nobody from iRiver even reads the forums.
This was a real disappointment, because in the past I owned an iRiver CD-based MP3 player and their firmware updates were regular, timely, and added all kinds of valuable features, from extended battery life to extra anti-skip protection, etc. It seems clear that iRiver's focus is now on pumping out new products (such as the H320, the market for which isn't entirely clear) rather than satisfying past customers. A real shame.
Right now, the H-series from iRiver is still missing:
Gapless playback
On-the-fly playlists
A proper shuffle feature (the current one is not particularly random)
Level indicators for the record function
I'm sure other people can point to other bugs and missing features that had been promised earlier.
Why do mp3 players never have an AM tuner? Always FM only, but most talk radio comes in AM, it seems only natural that they would include this. What's the holdup.
<nod>
However, I wouldn't scratch my head too hard... I can tell you that the FM tuner on my iRiver H120 is a joke. I can't walk down the street and expect to get a signal. Very loud blasts of static as the headphone cord swings back and forth. It's nearly useless.
Actually, PBS has been ahead of the curve on digital broadcasting here in the U.S. It was the first network to do a national broadcast of a program fully produced and aired in hi-def. It was also the first to offer a 24/7 network of HD programming. In addition, it has worked to develop applications for interactive TV, and has worked to build various advanced broadcasting technologies. PBS.org is the most-visited.org Web domain in the world. So in a nutshell you're, like, wrong. PBS has decades of leadership in broadcast technology. But I know everyone loves to knock it, so go right ahead.
Stephenson's 4-page tangent on the building of pipe-organs is seen as fluff that needs to be edited out to many in Cryptonomicon. Me? I find that to be the part of the story that's most engaging. He's telling the story of geeks from days-gone-past, and that's MY story.
My problem with that is that, you're exactly right, it sounds more like your story (or Stephenson's idealized story) than that of anybody living in the historical period being described. Stephenson's so-called historical fiction just strikes me as the same near-future SF transposed onto a historical setting, imagined by somebody whose cultural frame of reference is completely out of whack with the time period in question. The characters don't act like geeks of history, they act like geeks of today. Example: modern geeks living in the late-90s dot-com bubble in which Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon liked their sushi, so of course Bobby Shaftoe has to take time out of WWII to try some sushi and decide he likes it. Yeah, I guess it could happen. But in Stephenson's hands it just seems predictable and silly. If any of this meandering detail did anything to make his characters seem less like cardboard cutouts from some Wired editor's wet dream, it wouldn't come off as being so pointless. But Stephenson's books these days look like the phone book and tell you just about as much about the names in them, plus they have bad endings -- so, no plot, no characters... basically you have a huge tome of Stephenson's meticulous research, written as fiction. Enjoyable? Not really, not to me anyway.
He is much more wordy now than he was earlier in his life. Is this inherintly a bad thing? Of course not.
"Of course not"? Hold up there, pardner. It may not be "inherently" a bad thing, but I'm sure the parent and many other people would agree with me that it's definitely a very bad sign.
Speaking as an editor myself, "wordiness" all too often obscures the point, leads the reader astray with needless details, bogs down narrative pacing, and generally distracts from the point of the book. This isn't always the case, but it's the case so often that wordiness itself becomes a kind of alarm bell for people who read a lot.
There have been plenty of wordy writers who wrote that way out of love for the language. On rare occasions, their prose becomes a sort of poetry. Stephen does not strike me as one of these people. I agree with the parent that what Stephenson needs is an editor. Really, really, really badly.
Fair enough. But then again, maybe there's a distinction to be made between music that is produced as art and music that's produced as product.
A friend of mine was approached by Electronic Arts to record maybe a couple dozen songs for a Sims expansion and The Sims 2, at a rate of $1,000 per song (buyout, as cited -- all rights included). He accomplished this, with the help of a few local musicians that he paid very little, in roughly 48 hours of studio time. He did it as product; nothing more, nothing less. As far as he's concerned, he got a pretty good deal.
Now, this case is sort of an exception, because all of the lyrics to the songs have to be in Simlish. Pretty hard to find a market for that outside the franchise. But even if that weren't the case, is he really screwing himself, in your estimation?
As a magazine editor, I regularly publish lots of work by authors who give up all rights to the material they produce. Very few of them have ever come back looking to reclaim those articles. They did that writing for money, just like my friend recorded those songs for money. And I've done the same, and I don't really regret it.
Seems to me this notion of artists licensing their work to labels is just some kind of backlash to all this talk you hear about corporations wanting consumers to "license" their software and recordings. The way the corporation wants it, you never buy a CD, you license it. You never buy a disc of software, you license it. That sucks. So, great -- is the solution really for individuals to start acting like corporations?
Whatever happened to getting hired to do a job and doing it, or producing a product and selling it, getting paid, and moving on to the next thing with the satisfaction of being an ethical businessman?
well i have a problem with the catholic church. guess i shouldnt do business with anyone business that gives money to a catholic organization, or is headed by a catholic.
Sure. Where I come from, we call that "integrity in one's beliefs." Personally, I don't see a whole lot that says the modern Catholic Church is a Bad Thing(tm) as an institution, so I won't be joining your boycott. The practices of the Church of Scientology are well-documented elsewhere, however -- see other poster in this thread -- and they strike me as reason enough not to want to send money to that organization.
Unfortunately, I am a longtime Earthlink DSL subscriber. I guess it doesn't bother me that much.
I'm not sure what you mean by "basically the same story". You mean they all featured mankind trying to repel an alien invasion? Because that's where the similiarites stop. Indepedence Day follows the trials and tribulations of the heros who are going to stop the bad guys. Signs is a focused study on how one family reacts to the threat. "V" examined whether a group of rag-tag freedom fighters could actually win against a technologically-superior advesary.
Yeah? So how significant do you think the similarities will be between Steven Spielberg's movie and Welles' War of the Worlds? Let me guess... there will be no heroes, no touching family moments, and no rag-tag freedom fighters. Right?
Jeez! I'm a little amazed. I've been reading Slashdot regularly every day and somehow, without really realizing when it happened, I'd almost completely forgotten about Jon Katz. How can this be? I still remember how he used to make my blood boil with his pompous, sophomoric rants. And yet at some point I sort of started to chalk that up to the nature of the beast -- listening to children in grown-up bodies blabbering on like they wielded the authority of a BBC field correspondent was all part of the fun of Slashdot. Then he disappeared and... could it be... my Slashdot experience seems to be none the worse for wear! How can this have happened? How can I have so quickly forgotten all about Jon Katz's seminal contribution to Slashdot history, when it had given me so much bitter, perverse joy?
Oh yeah... now I remember. That was about the time I started browsing at -1.
When overtime pay was first instituted, it was an attempt to compensate employees in cases where their employers forced them to work long hours. In a sense, it was designed as a disincentive for employers to overwork their employees -- taking time away from their families, burning them out and increasing the potential risk for injury etc. Not only would employees have to be paid for overtime hours (not always a given, in the past), but they'd actually have to be paid more than their regular wage.
Now look at how this measure is being cast. We want to give employers back their right to overtime pay because they need to work longer hours to make more money. In other words, we're not voting down this reduction in overtime because we think our working people are overtaxed and already work longer hours than any other country in the civilized world (they are). We're voting it down in affirmation of Joe Sixpack's right to work longer hours so he can put food on his table. Meanwhile, what has the government been spending your taxes on lately? My, what a wonderful system we have.
Scams are criminal acts. Thus, the money was removed from the bank due to a criminal act. A bank that loses money to a criminal act that refuses to reimburse its customers might well lose its status as a bank.
And robbing me at gunpoint while I take money out of an ATM is a criminal act also. Should I expect Bank of America to reimburse my lost funds? I might have a case against them if I can prove that they didn't erect adequate security measures around their ATM. But nobody ever told me I was guaranteed not to get robbed at an ATM. I'm expected to take a reasonable amount of caution about my person and be aware of my surroundings. If this particular ATM was pretty much identical to every other ATM on the network where people didn't get robbed last week, then so far as I know, it's up to me to recover the lost funds from the criminal who robbed me, not the bank that otherwise facilitated a perfectly legitimate transaction.
Even closer to the mark, if I use my ATM card to pay for a product and that product later turns out to not work as advertised, that's a crime (at least in the state of California, where I live). We have "lemon laws" that say that products we buy should perform as advertised. I deserve my money back. But even though the company that sold me the product deducted the money directly from my account, it defrauded me -- not the bank. Why should the bank be held liable? Because I failed to investigate the seller and/or the product beforehand? Because I failed to file a civil suit against the party that defrauded me?
"Give people an inch and they'll take a mile" is the phrase that comes to mind here. Bank of America did the right thing by ol' grandma in this case. They didn't have to, so let's applaud them for it.
He's right. You click on the "Your Account" link, which takes you to a page that lists your current rental status and tells you your current package, i.e. "Three At a Time Plan." Next to that are two links, one that says "Change" and another that says "Cancel." If you click "Cancel," the first bulletpoint on the next page reads, "Cancellation will be effective immediately." All you need to do is check the "I understand and agree" box and submit the form. Who told you that you needed to call by phone?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I think you missed the joke.
Not the most impressive journalism.
Full disclosure: I work for one of eWeek's competitors. Still, though I have no reason to defend them, I feel like there wasn't much harm in running this story. They were obviously approached by somebody working for some PR agency who put together these "case studies" for them, and they decided they had enough material to package a little story. I don't see this as being any kind of official statement from eWeek: "Linux bad, Microsoft good." They just found an angle and went with it.
In truth, any kind of meaningful Windows/Linux case studies are hard to come by. I know, because I've tried to find them. You all probably already know the names of all the organizations that have done switch-overs to Linux. And I say "organizations," because a lot of those are in the public sector. Novell can rattle off numbers and shoot you out press releases on all kinds of companies that have "decided to" switch to Linux, but the proof's in the pudding, and I don't smell no pudding.
Likewise, even if this story about switching from Linux to Windows was completely unbiased, it would be an anomaly ... two companies, totally specific circumstances, almost meaningless. It serves to illustrate a certain angle on the industry and stimulate discussion. Nobody's story of the year, but I don't think it's a particular low point, either.
Say, rather, that copyright holders have the option of looking the other way if no money is exchanged -- because, unlike trademarks, you do not risk losing the copyright if you don't vigorously defend it. But that's not really saying anything. If you use someone else's work in a way they don't like and they find out about it, expect to receive a C&D.
I just heard some sad news on the Sci-Fi - the beloved Ancient Arte of Ye Magick was found dead in its Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its Great Work, there's no denying its contributions to genre fiction. Truly a universal ideal.
Once you get an agent, you may find that other publishing houses have an eight-month wait, also.
Red Hat's main product is Enterprise Linux, designed for the server market -- Sun's bread and butter. Java Desktop System is targeted (obviously) as a replacement for Windows desktops. This is still a relatively small market, mainly consisting of companies with a need for volume lightweight deskop installs (e.g. call centers and the like). So there's not really a contradiction here. Sun's position is that Red Hat can't support mission-critical enterprise infrastructure to the extent to which Sun's products and its service organization is able. It's not like they're trying to destroy Linux. They're just trying to discredit their competition. They're well aware that Linux will go on as always, supported by the OSS community, no matter what they say -- and the JDS will continue to benefit from that.
It'll be more interesting to see how they go after Novell.
Yeah, and we all voted to put those people in Guantanemo Bay. Just like the people of California voted for this law that takes away their rights. Don't be an idiot.
Hear hear! I can't stand how many people keep making this simple mistake. By calling destructive computer criminals "hackers," you're bringing down everybody who codes for the love of it. Lots of us have been calling ourselves hackers for years, only now to get painted with this negative brush.
I don't expect the mainstream press to know any better, but this is Slashdot. Can we please try to keep our definitions straight?
A hacker is a skilled, passionate computer programmer -- nothing more.
A person who commits malicious computer crimes is a biscuit. Like those evil software pirates who walk around with those parrots on their shoulders: "Polly want a biscuit!" Get it right, people.
But then, after I bought the device, they merely posted an apology when they failed to release a firmware on their first deadline date. And then, silence. For months. You can go check out their online forums and you'll see that they are positively filled with irate customers screaming for iRiver to get its act together and release the updates it promised, but as far as anyone can tell nobody from iRiver even reads the forums.
This was a real disappointment, because in the past I owned an iRiver CD-based MP3 player and their firmware updates were regular, timely, and added all kinds of valuable features, from extended battery life to extra anti-skip protection, etc. It seems clear that iRiver's focus is now on pumping out new products (such as the H320, the market for which isn't entirely clear) rather than satisfying past customers. A real shame.
Right now, the H-series from iRiver is still missing:
- Gapless playback
- On-the-fly playlists
- A proper shuffle feature (the current one is not particularly random)
- Level indicators for the record function
I'm sure other people can point to other bugs and missing features that had been promised earlier.However, I wouldn't scratch my head too hard ... I can tell you that the FM tuner on my iRiver H120 is a joke. I can't walk down the street and expect to get a signal. Very loud blasts of static as the headphone cord swings back and forth. It's nearly useless.
Actually, PBS has been ahead of the curve on digital broadcasting here in the U.S. It was the first network to do a national broadcast of a program fully produced and aired in hi-def. It was also the first to offer a 24/7 network of HD programming. In addition, it has worked to develop applications for interactive TV, and has worked to build various advanced broadcasting technologies. PBS.org is the most-visited .org Web domain in the world. So in a nutshell you're, like, wrong. PBS has decades of leadership in broadcast technology. But I know everyone loves to knock it, so go right ahead.
Speaking as an editor myself, "wordiness" all too often obscures the point, leads the reader astray with needless details, bogs down narrative pacing, and generally distracts from the point of the book. This isn't always the case, but it's the case so often that wordiness itself becomes a kind of alarm bell for people who read a lot.
There have been plenty of wordy writers who wrote that way out of love for the language. On rare occasions, their prose becomes a sort of poetry. Stephen does not strike me as one of these people. I agree with the parent that what Stephenson needs is an editor. Really, really, really badly.
Read the sig.
Fair enough. But then again, maybe there's a distinction to be made between music that is produced as art and music that's produced as product.
A friend of mine was approached by Electronic Arts to record maybe a couple dozen songs for a Sims expansion and The Sims 2, at a rate of $1,000 per song (buyout, as cited -- all rights included). He accomplished this, with the help of a few local musicians that he paid very little, in roughly 48 hours of studio time. He did it as product; nothing more, nothing less. As far as he's concerned, he got a pretty good deal.
Now, this case is sort of an exception, because all of the lyrics to the songs have to be in Simlish. Pretty hard to find a market for that outside the franchise. But even if that weren't the case, is he really screwing himself, in your estimation?
As a magazine editor, I regularly publish lots of work by authors who give up all rights to the material they produce. Very few of them have ever come back looking to reclaim those articles. They did that writing for money, just like my friend recorded those songs for money. And I've done the same, and I don't really regret it.
Seems to me this notion of artists licensing their work to labels is just some kind of backlash to all this talk you hear about corporations wanting consumers to "license" their software and recordings. The way the corporation wants it, you never buy a CD, you license it. You never buy a disc of software, you license it. That sucks. So, great -- is the solution really for individuals to start acting like corporations?
Whatever happened to getting hired to do a job and doing it, or producing a product and selling it, getting paid, and moving on to the next thing with the satisfaction of being an ethical businessman?
Unfortunately, I am a longtime Earthlink DSL subscriber. I guess it doesn't bother me that much.
Jeez! I'm a little amazed. I've been reading Slashdot regularly every day and somehow, without really realizing when it happened, I'd almost completely forgotten about Jon Katz. How can this be? I still remember how he used to make my blood boil with his pompous, sophomoric rants. And yet at some point I sort of started to chalk that up to the nature of the beast -- listening to children in grown-up bodies blabbering on like they wielded the authority of a BBC field correspondent was all part of the fun of Slashdot. Then he disappeared and ... could it be ... my Slashdot experience seems to be none the worse for wear! How can this have happened? How can I have so quickly forgotten all about Jon Katz's seminal contribution to Slashdot history, when it had given me so much bitter, perverse joy?
Oh yeah... now I remember. That was about the time I started browsing at -1.
When overtime pay was first instituted, it was an attempt to compensate employees in cases where their employers forced them to work long hours. In a sense, it was designed as a disincentive for employers to overwork their employees -- taking time away from their families, burning them out and increasing the potential risk for injury etc. Not only would employees have to be paid for overtime hours (not always a given, in the past), but they'd actually have to be paid more than their regular wage.
Now look at how this measure is being cast. We want to give employers back their right to overtime pay because they need to work longer hours to make more money. In other words, we're not voting down this reduction in overtime because we think our working people are overtaxed and already work longer hours than any other country in the civilized world (they are). We're voting it down in affirmation of Joe Sixpack's right to work longer hours so he can put food on his table. Meanwhile, what has the government been spending your taxes on lately? My, what a wonderful system we have.
Even closer to the mark, if I use my ATM card to pay for a product and that product later turns out to not work as advertised, that's a crime (at least in the state of California, where I live). We have "lemon laws" that say that products we buy should perform as advertised. I deserve my money back. But even though the company that sold me the product deducted the money directly from my account, it defrauded me -- not the bank. Why should the bank be held liable? Because I failed to investigate the seller and/or the product beforehand? Because I failed to file a civil suit against the party that defrauded me?
"Give people an inch and they'll take a mile" is the phrase that comes to mind here. Bank of America did the right thing by ol' grandma in this case. They didn't have to, so let's applaud them for it.
He's right. You click on the "Your Account" link, which takes you to a page that lists your current rental status and tells you your current package, i.e. "Three At a Time Plan." Next to that are two links, one that says "Change" and another that says "Cancel." If you click "Cancel," the first bulletpoint on the next page reads, "Cancellation will be effective immediately." All you need to do is check the "I understand and agree" box and submit the form. Who told you that you needed to call by phone?
His message history looks fine to me. What the hell are you on about?
P.S. You are aware that mods have no power to ban or remove anybody, right?