"We done come over there with our 'quipment and y'alls fucked it up royally and y'all are goin' through allour files. Jesus H. Christ y'all are so batshit I can't see straight. I ain't made dollar to donuts in this place. I'm gonna call Aunt Ethel to see if we can't move back in with the in-laws over in Taiwan."
Call me when there's a FOR LEASE sign hanging off of Google China's office building... printed in Chinese characters with a characiture of a pixelated puppy next to it, of course.
I've been sort-a temped to get a Wii Fit, but I already pay for a $60 gym membership that I use about 3x a week. Kinda defeats the purpose of buying one. Plus the WiiFit is no fun if nobody if you're single and nobody can see you sweat. [Best place to pickup a date short of inter-office dating]
3 years into the Wii the only game I really liked playing was the Wii bowling in WiiSports, which came with the unit.
I also use a really nice DLP HDTV projector for games and movies, and I cannot tell you what a PITA it is to set up that IR bar underneath the projector image in the front side of my living room but yet have the Wii sit in the back of the room where the projector and my amp sits. I have to disconnect everything when I'm done or my dog will trip over all the wires.
Then there's the trouble of standing in the right spot so I can use the Wii without blocking the picture, because the way I swing the controller around I really can't use the thing sitting down.
That could still spell catastrophe if they used commercial paper (bonds) to help ramp up production of the units that were manufactured thus far.
Let's say you're a self-employed box builder. You sell a box configuration that attracts a new company who wants to outfit all their desktops with your new whizbang baby ITX thin client PCs. Company calls you up and wants 500 of these bad boys.
To get all the parts for an order this large, you live on the float. On your credit card. You run up your MasterCard (like a big company does with short term paper). Now you purchase all the parts required to build the units and you'll pay the credit card bill as soon as the invoice from the customer gets paid.
But, as you're assembling the final 20 PCs to get the order ready for shipment, the company calls you to slash their invoice and now they only want 350 computers.
No... quirk of/. I submitted the comment then returned to look at my spelling (which of course I can't fix, but it's a habit)... and since it wasn't there I figured the software "ate it". So like any respectable person who sees something go into a black hole, I re-ran my transaction.;o)
The day that a blackhat finds a hole on a virgin iPhoneOS image that gets exploited to spread a nasty worm will be the day that millions of AAPL fans will feel sunk and betrayed that Apple didn't coddle and protect them.
For the private domain, that might be the only thing that throws much of Apple's secrecy policy out the window. They would have to in order to save their unblemished reputation.
Either that, or AAPL installs iNortonAV for free on all mobile devices much like what Windows users deal with (an AV client that takes up 2GB of flash and steals 50% of your CPU cycles while it scans for trojans in your 3G packets while taking a call from your grandma)
Agreed. Apple is no different than game developers justifying its secrecy. This isn't about AAPL's technology. We already know what they use for technology ever since Steve left NeXT and turned AAPL into a BSD Unix shop.
It's all about their marketing arm. Their entire branding is all about total ease of use from every angle from hardware to software and the sleek, elegant design. This is not like MSFT where the entire industry cuts them slack for turning out a totally unfinished, buggy or otherwise complete failure (WindowsME, Vista).
Apple's clique in life has always been young, urban, chic, sexy. Anything that peels away all that makeup and reveals the sausage underneath is seen in Cuptertino as a potential catastrophe to Apple's public image.
Microsoft's culture never painted itself into a corner this way. Bless their hearts, they're still plugging away at the Zune.
I still cannot fathom why people scramble to get the latest copy of a Windows OS way before it's really even declared "ready."
It's not like your development software is really going to work on the thing; and for that matter--we all know once it finally gets pressed to a DVD the first Service Pack is already on its way out the door, so QA-testing is moot.
Most package managers aren't going to be happy with handling distribution packages for COTS software that is mostly pre-compiled binaries.
That's a burden for COTS distribution unless you're Java-based.
Plus, there's that whole Gtk/Qt mess (which one should I use), testing in multiple languages, and the COTS package having to support multiple platforms.
In the COTS space, for industry-specific apps... Mac is finally getting some attention. However, plain jane dumb users (the kind in OfficeSpace) aren't going to be dropping to the shell and running sh configure, make, make install as root.
COTS developers need to be convinced that it is worth their while to go through the pain of multiple distributions.
Maybe in the OSS world, someone could write a better autoconfigure wrapper (maybe at the dist level?) that can let users know whether their systems meet the minimum requirements to run a COTS app, and COTS developers can "trust" implicitly that requirements checker is always going to be there; and to take care of shortfalls [user is missing some commercial or OSS libs, or needs to upgrade].
A secretary can't understand the output from sh configure and then run to rpmfind or her disto to get libfsckinguselessblahblah.1.4.so
She needs the kintergarden interface that holds her hand and gently walks her through installing missing libs that a COTS developer linked into his/her project.
I encounter this problem daily. I'm in a corporation that makes software.
EVERYBODY in the company knows that Linux is great, has been proven to be stable, the kernel can be adapted to run on anything, and now has a superior GUI (factoring in compiz/beryl + emerald), and you can use every programming language known to man on it.
Our particular problem is that the Microsoft monopoly has held on for so long, we're populated with a lot of Microsoft druids from the highest levels of the organization to the bottom.
We can't fire those people, obviously, and replace them with OSS-devotees; that would cut off our nose to spite our face. And besides, our clients (power industry, oil and gas) are almost always 100% windows desktop shops, with the random chance that their SAP system might be on an AIX server or HP-UX or if it's a brand new IBM mainframe... would be on a Linux mainframe.
But, I don't see anybody that wants a native SAPGUI for Linux, much less see the product I work on, which is graphics intensive, to run natively on Linux.
Shoot... imagine your average SAPGUI corporate druid that would want to run SAPGUI on Linux natively... this is what they would have to do: http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/HOW_TO_Run_SAP_GUI_On_LINUX_To_Connect_SAP_R3_Systems
You think they're going to do that? Unless they're a geek... no.
And that little example is just a product I work on that is 80% Java based. Think of that huge mountain of little VB6 apps still out there.
Most corporations have tons of home-grown apps that sit internally which take care of important processes that keep the company humming. Sure, most of them could be reduced to python scripts with a CLI front-end, a Berkeley DB instead of Access and the users could just use PuTTY to get to them; but is that realistic? Who wants to do that work all over again?
What would convince companies it is worth their time to move to a FOSS platform on the desktop?
I mean, we already have a nice office suite that does most of everything you want and has that neat free-PDF generation stuff Office doesn't have (OOo), email clients galore, seamless wireless connectivity has gotten better, plenty of browsers, lots of security, every networking app and util you can think of, and every day--more native OSS clients you can shake a stick at.
These are just some of the problems that have to be worked around. I do my part where I work. My desktop at work is Linux, and so is home. Been that way for years now.
Always run the bleeding-edge version of Compiz and when other admins, execs, system architects and other geek-minded people pay a visit to my desk, I make sure they are wowed and dazzled by my desktop display [face it... candy does lure them in].
The problem out there in corporations is the population of people who are more than willing to dump and reload to a new version of Windows whenever it comes out, but mainly too afraid to run Linux on anything other than trash boxes--at best.
If you want people to embrace the desktop, you need to convince people that they love it, not argue with them when they try to compare KDE+GNOME to their old Windows installation.
Apple seems to have accepted this reality--and the market share of OSX in the desktop space has been increasing the last 5 years.
Just keep doing cool stuff on your own workstation or your laptop, and share it with.
Jealousy is the best and fastest way to spark adoption.
As long as Portable.NET is around, Microsoft can't kill OSS by sucking people into Mono and then killing it with licensing changes. Portable.NET is a stack that's just as good as Mono.
I'm getting pretty tired of the proprietary ATI and nVidia drivers, which seem to be a resurging problem with getting working with full 3D capability with the proprietary drivers by both vendors.
The quality of the closed drivers has always been rather poor, especially with ATI, and it has complicated efforts to get products such as Compiz-fusion working properly. Combine that with distributions who try their hardest to get video detection and seamless configuration working in their installers and you have a frustrating environment where first time users to open systems such as *BSD and Linux suffer because of the installation headaches.
I'm a seasoned user of Linux, who has been on Slackware since 1995 and now on OpenSuSE. I write.NET and Java code for a living and I rely on VMWare for Linux to do my job.
But when I get a kernel update, I cringe and avoid installing it--for fear of having to go through the nightmare of getting my proprietary video drivers working again with compiz-fusion. I'm several kernel releases behind and with my ATI drivers, I'm about 7 releases behind--only because the last time I had to do video configuration, it took me about 24-hours worth of trial and effort to get my video drivers stable again.
Now that OpenSuSE 11.0 is out, I'm gonna have to spend a long weekend with an experimental partition to see how much work it will take me to get compiz working nicely with my ATI Radeon card at work and my integrated mobile Radeon card at home.
A good representation of every type of hipster art student in Philadelphia has shown up.
I live in the 13 story apartment tower next door in the pictures (where it says Deena's Shoes), so I get to hear shouting while I'm trying to eat my lunch and play XBOX.
They are looking for weaknesses in our defenses against melamine-free wheat gluten, procedures for testing toys for lead paint, and new marketing strategies to get more teenage girls mesmerized by Hello Kitty.
Slashdot Mirror
That sentence still has 40% marketease in it.
Here's the Texas-Bubba version:
"We done come over there with our 'quipment and y'alls fucked it up royally and y'all are goin' through allour files. Jesus H. Christ y'all are so batshit I can't see straight. I ain't made dollar to donuts in this place. I'm gonna call Aunt Ethel to see if we can't move back in with the in-laws over in Taiwan."
Except make a blog post to swell Internet rumors.
That's it.
Call me when there's a FOR LEASE sign hanging off of Google China's office building... printed in Chinese characters with a characiture of a pixelated puppy next to it, of course.
Watching all the Linux and MSFT fanboys taking out their snuff boxes then proceeding straight to 19th century backhanded bitchslaps with gloves.
Spank Apple's silly fanny!
My Wii is a doorstop.
I've been sort-a temped to get a Wii Fit, but I already pay for a $60 gym membership that I use about 3x a week. Kinda defeats the purpose of buying one. Plus the WiiFit is no fun if nobody if you're single and nobody can see you sweat. [Best place to pickup a date short of inter-office dating]
3 years into the Wii the only game I really liked playing was the Wii bowling in WiiSports, which came with the unit.
I also use a really nice DLP HDTV projector for games and movies, and I cannot tell you what a PITA it is to set up that IR bar underneath the projector image in the front side of my living room but yet have the Wii sit in the back of the room where the projector and my amp sits. I have to disconnect everything when I'm done or my dog will trip over all the wires.
Then there's the trouble of standing in the right spot so I can use the Wii without blocking the picture, because the way I swing the controller around I really can't use the thing sitting down.
That could still spell catastrophe if they used commercial paper (bonds) to help ramp up production of the units that were manufactured thus far.
Let's say you're a self-employed box builder. You sell a box configuration that attracts a new company who wants to outfit all their desktops with your new whizbang baby ITX thin client PCs. Company calls you up and wants 500 of these bad boys.
To get all the parts for an order this large, you live on the float. On your credit card. You run up your MasterCard (like a big company does with short term paper). Now you purchase all the parts required to build the units and you'll pay the credit card bill as soon as the invoice from the customer gets paid.
But, as you're assembling the final 20 PCs to get the order ready for shipment, the company calls you to slash their invoice and now they only want 350 computers.
No... quirk of /. I submitted the comment then returned to look at my spelling (which of course I can't fix, but it's a habit)... and since it wasn't there I figured the software "ate it". So like any respectable person who sees something go into a black hole, I re-ran my transaction. ;o)
this first person shooter game is missing?
Romanian babies.
Will Nintendo fire workers as part of a Wiistructuring?
Will Nintendo lay people off in a "Wiistructuring?"
The day that a blackhat finds a hole on a virgin iPhoneOS image that gets exploited to spread a nasty worm will be the day that millions of AAPL fans will feel sunk and betrayed that Apple didn't coddle and protect them.
For the private domain, that might be the only thing that throws much of Apple's secrecy policy out the window. They would have to in order to save their unblemished reputation.
Either that, or AAPL installs iNortonAV for free on all mobile devices much like what Windows users deal with (an AV client that takes up 2GB of flash and steals 50% of your CPU cycles while it scans for trojans in your 3G packets while taking a call from your grandma)
Agreed. Apple is no different than game developers justifying its secrecy. This isn't about AAPL's technology. We already know what they use for technology ever since Steve left NeXT and turned AAPL into a BSD Unix shop.
It's all about their marketing arm. Their entire branding is all about total ease of use from every angle from hardware to software and the sleek, elegant design. This is not like MSFT where the entire industry cuts them slack for turning out a totally unfinished, buggy or otherwise complete failure (WindowsME, Vista).
Apple's clique in life has always been young, urban, chic, sexy. Anything that peels away all that makeup and reveals the sausage underneath is seen in Cuptertino as a potential catastrophe to Apple's public image.
Microsoft's culture never painted itself into a corner this way. Bless their hearts, they're still plugging away at the Zune.
I still cannot fathom why people scramble to get the latest copy of a Windows OS way before it's really even declared "ready."
It's not like your development software is really going to work on the thing; and for that matter--we all know once it finally gets pressed to a DVD the first Service Pack is already on its way out the door, so QA-testing is moot.
but does this run on Linux?
If you follow that logic... boarding a jet liner would freak you out.
Does it?
This isn't a bug.
It's because all those 35,000 Zune subscribers forgot to enroll in Microsoft Zune Advantage.
All those Microsofties apparently purchased their Zunes from #warez and are currently in violation of their Terms of Agreement.
---based off N number of JREs (FOSS, IBM, Sun)...
---on N number of distributions
---who use N number of package management systems, that package software in
---N number of archive formats
Yeah, this is a cakewalk.
What... having trouble bringing home the bacon on C++? Why not learn both so that way you won't be made irrelevant by the supreme Java PHB overlords.
That's not what she said.
they should stop using MSAccess.
Most package managers aren't going to be happy with handling distribution packages for COTS software that is mostly pre-compiled binaries.
That's a burden for COTS distribution unless you're Java-based.
Plus, there's that whole Gtk/Qt mess (which one should I use), testing in multiple languages, and the COTS package having to support multiple platforms.
In the COTS space, for industry-specific apps... Mac is finally getting some attention. However, plain jane dumb users (the kind in OfficeSpace) aren't going to be dropping to the shell and running sh configure, make, make install as root.
COTS developers need to be convinced that it is worth their while to go through the pain of multiple distributions.
Maybe in the OSS world, someone could write a better autoconfigure wrapper (maybe at the dist level?) that can let users know whether their systems meet the minimum requirements to run a COTS app, and COTS developers can "trust" implicitly that requirements checker is always going to be there; and to take care of shortfalls [user is missing some commercial or OSS libs, or needs to upgrade].
A secretary can't understand the output from sh configure and then run to rpmfind or her disto to get libfsckinguselessblahblah.1.4.so
She needs the kintergarden interface that holds her hand and gently walks her through installing missing libs that a COTS developer linked into his/her project.
I encounter this problem daily. I'm in a corporation that makes software.
EVERYBODY in the company knows that Linux is great, has been proven to be stable, the kernel can be adapted to run on anything, and now has a superior GUI (factoring in compiz/beryl + emerald), and you can use every programming language known to man on it.
Our particular problem is that the Microsoft monopoly has held on for so long, we're populated with a lot of Microsoft druids from the highest levels of the organization to the bottom.
We can't fire those people, obviously, and replace them with OSS-devotees; that would cut off our nose to spite our face. And besides, our clients (power industry, oil and gas) are almost always 100% windows desktop shops, with the random chance that their SAP system might be on an AIX server or HP-UX or if it's a brand new IBM mainframe... would be on a Linux mainframe.
But, I don't see anybody that wants a native SAPGUI for Linux, much less see the product I work on, which is graphics intensive, to run natively on Linux.
Shoot... imagine your average SAPGUI corporate druid that would want to run SAPGUI on Linux natively... this is what they would have to do:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/HOW_TO_Run_SAP_GUI_On_LINUX_To_Connect_SAP_R3_Systems
You think they're going to do that? Unless they're a geek... no.
And that little example is just a product I work on that is 80% Java based. Think of that huge mountain of little VB6 apps still out there.
Most corporations have tons of home-grown apps that sit internally which take care of important processes that keep the company humming. Sure, most of them could be reduced to python scripts with a CLI front-end, a Berkeley DB instead of Access and the users could just use PuTTY to get to them; but is that realistic? Who wants to do that work all over again?
What would convince companies it is worth their time to move to a FOSS platform on the desktop?
I mean, we already have a nice office suite that does most of everything you want and has that neat free-PDF generation stuff Office doesn't have (OOo), email clients galore, seamless wireless connectivity has gotten better, plenty of browsers, lots of security, every networking app and util you can think of, and every day--more native OSS clients you can shake a stick at.
These are just some of the problems that have to be worked around. I do my part where I work. My desktop at work is Linux, and so is home. Been that way for years now.
Always run the bleeding-edge version of Compiz and when other admins, execs, system architects and other geek-minded people pay a visit to my desk, I make sure they are wowed and dazzled by my desktop display [face it... candy does lure them in].
The problem out there in corporations is the population of people who are more than willing to dump and reload to a new version of Windows whenever it comes out, but mainly too afraid to run Linux on anything other than trash boxes--at best.
If you want people to embrace the desktop, you need to convince people that they love it, not argue with them when they try to compare KDE+GNOME to their old Windows installation.
Apple seems to have accepted this reality--and the market share of OSX in the desktop space has been increasing the last 5 years.
Just keep doing cool stuff on your own workstation or your laptop, and share it with.
Jealousy is the best and fastest way to spark adoption.
As long as Portable.NET is around, Microsoft can't kill OSS by sucking people into Mono and then killing it with licensing changes. Portable.NET is a stack that's just as good as Mono.
I'm getting pretty tired of the proprietary ATI and nVidia drivers, which seem to be a resurging problem with getting working with full 3D capability with the proprietary drivers by both vendors.
The quality of the closed drivers has always been rather poor, especially with ATI, and it has complicated efforts to get products such as Compiz-fusion working properly. Combine that with distributions who try their hardest to get video detection and seamless configuration working in their installers and you have a frustrating environment where first time users to open systems such as *BSD and Linux suffer because of the installation headaches.
I'm a seasoned user of Linux, who has been on Slackware since 1995 and now on OpenSuSE. I write .NET and Java code for a living and I rely on VMWare for Linux to do my job.
But when I get a kernel update, I cringe and avoid installing it--for fear of having to go through the nightmare of getting my proprietary video drivers working again with compiz-fusion. I'm several kernel releases behind and with my ATI drivers, I'm about 7 releases behind--only because the last time I had to do video configuration, it took me about 24-hours worth of trial and effort to get my video drivers stable again.
Now that OpenSuSE 11.0 is out, I'm gonna have to spend a long weekend with an experimental partition to see how much work it will take me to get compiz working nicely with my ATI Radeon card at work and my integrated mobile Radeon card at home.
The Church of Scientology's tallest building... an old skyscraper in Philadelphia, is the site being protested right now.
A good representation of every type of hipster art student in Philadelphia has shown up.
I live in the 13 story apartment tower next door in the pictures (where it says Deena's Shoes), so I get to hear shouting while I'm trying to eat my lunch and play XBOX.
They are looking for weaknesses in our defenses against melamine-free wheat gluten, procedures for testing toys for lead paint, and new marketing strategies to get more teenage girls mesmerized by Hello Kitty.