I suppose it could just be all in the heads of those doing the hiring, but at least in my experience companies treat their programmers (or other IT folks) like they are worth their weight in gold. Mind you, these are the very same companies that treat their _other_ employees (managers, admin/secretaries, marketing) like they are entirely disposable.
Perhaps it's more that there's a shortage of _good_ IT personel?
I don't think that we (meaning all computer users, but especially those of us in the open source community) should hate Microsoft. But I do think we should treat them for exactly what they are: a fiercely competative corporate machine that wants to eliminate anything that they can't control.
Making deals with them or working with their technology is a bad idea, without question, for all the reasons stated in the article and more.
We shouldn't ignore Microsoft; we may make software that interoperates with their technologies, or take ideas from their software to integrate into our own. But working _with_ them, and especially depending upon a service they provide, can only be a recipe for disaster.
When will they learn? They can't hope to do much of anything but tarnish our feelings for the original.
Actually, as long as they just don't try to "take advantage" of modern CGI by changing the look I'll forgive everything else. Angular, untextured surfaces with bright wireframe outlines are what it's all about - and why Tron still looks better than most CGI movies made today.
I wonder, is there ever going to be any sort of real competitor for the PC? I've watched the Amiga, various modern Atari clones (Medusa etc), SparcStations, BeBoxes, and Alphas, always wanting to buy a non-IBM PC-based system. But they are always slow, expensive, poorly supported, and have all sorts of quirks and problems that make the screwey world of PCs seem tame by comparisson.
The only real contender, that I have seen, is Apple's G4 line. And even those still put you in a tough spot: use MacOS, which locks up all the time, Linux PPC which has no apps, and OS X which has no apps.
Will there ever truly be a PC alternative? Or should I just stop worrying about it and accept my fate?
I've been using one of these for a few years. They are also very nice for taking your disks on the road; you can carry a drive between home and work, or whatever.
One guy I knew used it to enforce discipline on himself. Two drives, the same OS, but one was "work" and one was "play." Play contained chat clients, games, bookmarks to recreation sites, etc. Work contained purely down-to-business stuff. One interesting side effect to this approach (I thought) was the fact that he could have a very insecure install with lots of games and buggy flash plugins and things on the "play" drive, and if it gets compromised or the drive gets munged or whatever he looses nothing important.
"The fastest time ever for a system to be compromised was 15 minutes. This means the system was scanned, probed, and exploited within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet."
Wow. If that's true, this is just crazy.
My question is, when are distros going to start shipping with all services turned off by default? I can't imagine that any newbie is going to want to have finger, ftp, sendmail, etc running on their box. And for power users (like me), the very first thing I always do is go and turn off every single service.
What's disgusting is that it ever came to this point. Most businesses play a game of trying to play "nice guy" while being as fiercely competative (including nasty underhanded tricks) as possible. In most cases, I think this results in a pretty good balance as far as bringing the consumer a good product while making successful companies gobs of cash.
I don't blame it on the government, or even on Microsoft. I blame it on us, the consumers. That we shrug our shoulders and say, "Eh, what are you gonna do" and keep straight down this path. Do we think that, someday, magically, they are going to stop doing this stuff? Of course not. As long as we keep voting with our dollars, they'll keep this sort of nonsense up.
I'm not good at low-level stuff at all, but using the first edition of this book I was able to write my first driver in just a couple of hours. This is mostly thanks to Linux itself, of course, but this book laid it out much more cleanly than any of the HOWTOs that are available online.
You know, I think this pins down what bugs me about the game industry. The prevailing attitude seems to be that video games are all about making them as much like real life as possible. "Realistic" 3D graphics, immersive sound, realistic physics, and now these controllers.
Video games were _never_ about simulating reality (with the exception of simulators, and they are almost a whole seperate category). They are about using an understandable metaphor (like two guys fighting, or flying a spaceship, or Pac Man) to make a fun, abstract experience. Tetris, arguable the most popular and broadly appealing game of all time, has _nothing_ to do with reality.
Vibrate is the way to go folks. It's only really problem for people that keep their phones in a bag (such as a backpack or purse).
The main complaint I've heard is that if you turn most phones to vibrate, then if you're in the other room you'll never hear it. My phone (a Motorola Timeport, which is begining to show its age) offers a "Vibrate, Then Ring" option which I adore.
In fact, it seems as if this feature could be extended. How about vibrate+a very faint ring on the first ring, followed by a slightly louder ring, finally capping out at normal ring volume for the last one?
This looks like a very reasonable idea for generating true revenue from information. In particular, since they provide a "teaser" (the first few paragraphs of each entry) you can find out if it's something useful or not. And unlike a website which only covers a narrow range of topics, an encyclopedia is useful for just about any kind of general research.
The issue that will hold people back is just the bother of registering and paying, when it's easier just to go back to Google and see if you can find it in an unrestricted site. (Microsoft Passport to the rescue? *shudder*)
Do you think that creating products for the KDE audience is making it easier for the community to accept that some of them are closed-source? It's always seemed to me that KDE was more about "Let's make something cool that works well" than it is about typically GNU values and pure "free" software.
In fact, that's part of the reason I like it, and by the same token I'm glad to see your company making software even though it's closed source. (Certainly VMWare has shown us that closed source software can be equally high-quality to open source, though that's not generally the case.)
I choose my passwords based on ease of typing. No, I don't use "fred" - I choose phrases that are easy for a touch-typist, because the keys alternate back and forth between the hands.
Example: pqv0m3N
This is "hard" to remember, but it's not hard to remember how to type it, because it's very natural to type if you're a touch-typist. Once my fingers remember the pattern, I don't have to remember what the actual letters are.
I suppose I'd be in trouble if I ever had to enter it on a Dvork keyboard, or if I broke my left hand and had to type it all with my right:)
Well, if we take a parallel to web, we see that people have to have SSL-enabled browsers and SSL-enabled servers to browse securely. By that same token, why not crypto-enabled mail servers? Your mailer connects to the SMTP server, indicates the target mail address, and the mail server looks up whether that user is capable of accepting encrypted mail. At that point your mailer could default to sending it unencrypted, or perhaps stop and query the sender.
Alternately, we could have mail servers that do the decryption. This isn't a final solution (because it's not encrypted end-to-end) but perhaps it would get people used to being able to send encrypted emails, and those that care could start using crypto-enabled mailers.
Slashdot Mirror
I love it:
"Target Name: Earth
Is a satellite of: Sol (our Sun)"
Wow, are there any CG movies anymore that _aren't_ rendered on Linux?
Uh oh, you know what's coming. They're going to give geeks what they've _really_ been waiting for: lesbian innuendo between Scully and Xena.
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0300issue/0300zubrin.htm l
I suppose it could just be all in the heads of those doing the hiring, but at least in my experience companies treat their programmers (or other IT folks) like they are worth their weight in gold. Mind you, these are the very same companies that treat their _other_ employees (managers, admin/secretaries, marketing) like they are entirely disposable.
Perhaps it's more that there's a shortage of _good_ IT personel?
I don't think that we (meaning all computer users, but especially those of us in the open source community) should hate Microsoft. But I do think we should treat them for exactly what they are: a fiercely competative corporate machine that wants to eliminate anything that they can't control.
Making deals with them or working with their technology is a bad idea, without question, for all the reasons stated in the article and more.
We shouldn't ignore Microsoft; we may make software that interoperates with their technologies, or take ideas from their software to integrate into our own. But working _with_ them, and especially depending upon a service they provide, can only be a recipe for disaster.
When will they learn? They can't hope to do much of anything but tarnish our feelings for the original.
Actually, as long as they just don't try to "take advantage" of modern CGI by changing the look I'll forgive everything else. Angular, untextured surfaces with bright wireframe outlines are what it's all about - and why Tron still looks better than most CGI movies made today.
I wonder, is there ever going to be any sort of real competitor for the PC? I've watched the Amiga, various modern Atari clones (Medusa etc), SparcStations, BeBoxes, and Alphas, always wanting to buy a non-IBM PC-based system. But they are always slow, expensive, poorly supported, and have all sorts of quirks and problems that make the screwey world of PCs seem tame by comparisson.
The only real contender, that I have seen, is Apple's G4 line. And even those still put you in a tough spot: use MacOS, which locks up all the time, Linux PPC which has no apps, and OS X which has no apps.
Will there ever truly be a PC alternative? Or should I just stop worrying about it and accept my fate?
I've been using one of these for a few years. They are also very nice for taking your disks on the road; you can carry a drive between home and work, or whatever.
One guy I knew used it to enforce discipline on himself. Two drives, the same OS, but one was "work" and one was "play." Play contained chat clients, games, bookmarks to recreation sites, etc. Work contained purely down-to-business stuff. One interesting side effect to this approach (I thought) was the fact that he could have a very insecure install with lots of games and buggy flash plugins and things on the "play" drive, and if it gets compromised or the drive gets munged or whatever he looses nothing important.
"The fastest time ever for a system to be compromised was 15 minutes. This means the system was scanned, probed, and exploited within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet."
Wow. If that's true, this is just crazy.
My question is, when are distros going to start shipping with all services turned off by default? I can't imagine that any newbie is going to want to have finger, ftp, sendmail, etc running on their box. And for power users (like me), the very first thing I always do is go and turn off every single service.
What's disgusting is that it ever came to this point. Most businesses play a game of trying to play "nice guy" while being as fiercely competative (including nasty underhanded tricks) as possible. In most cases, I think this results in a pretty good balance as far as bringing the consumer a good product while making successful companies gobs of cash.
I don't blame it on the government, or even on Microsoft. I blame it on us, the consumers. That we shrug our shoulders and say, "Eh, what are you gonna do" and keep straight down this path. Do we think that, someday, magically, they are going to stop doing this stuff? Of course not. As long as we keep voting with our dollars, they'll keep this sort of nonsense up.
I'm not good at low-level stuff at all, but using the first edition of this book I was able to write my first driver in just a couple of hours. This is mostly thanks to Linux itself, of course, but this book laid it out much more cleanly than any of the HOWTOs that are available online.
You know, I think this pins down what bugs me about the game industry. The prevailing attitude seems to be that video games are all about making them as much like real life as possible. "Realistic" 3D graphics, immersive sound, realistic physics, and now these controllers.
Video games were _never_ about simulating reality (with the exception of simulators, and they are almost a whole seperate category). They are about using an understandable metaphor (like two guys fighting, or flying a spaceship, or Pac Man) to make a fun, abstract experience. Tetris, arguable the most popular and broadly appealing game of all time, has _nothing_ to do with reality.
Vibrate is the way to go folks. It's only really problem for people that keep their phones in a bag (such as a backpack or purse).
The main complaint I've heard is that if you turn most phones to vibrate, then if you're in the other room you'll never hear it. My phone (a Motorola Timeport, which is begining to show its age) offers a "Vibrate, Then Ring" option which I adore.
In fact, it seems as if this feature could be extended. How about vibrate+a very faint ring on the first ring, followed by a slightly louder ring, finally capping out at normal ring volume for the last one?
This looks like a very reasonable idea for generating true revenue from information. In particular, since they provide a "teaser" (the first few paragraphs of each entry) you can find out if it's something useful or not. And unlike a website which only covers a narrow range of topics, an encyclopedia is useful for just about any kind of general research.
The issue that will hold people back is just the bother of registering and paying, when it's easier just to go back to Google and see if you can find it in an unrestricted site. (Microsoft Passport to the rescue? *shudder*)
Do you think that creating products for the KDE audience is making it easier for the community to accept that some of them are closed-source? It's always seemed to me that KDE was more about "Let's make something cool that works well" than it is about typically GNU values and pure "free" software.
In fact, that's part of the reason I like it, and by the same token I'm glad to see your company making software even though it's closed source. (Certainly VMWare has shown us that closed source software can be equally high-quality to open source, though that's not generally the case.)
I choose my passwords based on ease of typing. No, I don't use "fred" - I choose phrases that are easy for a touch-typist, because the keys alternate back and forth between the hands.
:)
Example: pqv0m3N
This is "hard" to remember, but it's not hard to remember how to type it, because it's very natural to type if you're a touch-typist. Once my fingers remember the pattern, I don't have to remember what the actual letters are.
I suppose I'd be in trouble if I ever had to enter it on a Dvork keyboard, or if I broke my left hand and had to type it all with my right
Well, if we take a parallel to web, we see that people have to have SSL-enabled browsers and SSL-enabled servers to browse securely. By that same token, why not crypto-enabled mail servers? Your mailer connects to the SMTP server, indicates the target mail address, and the mail server looks up whether that user is capable of accepting encrypted mail. At that point your mailer could default to sending it unencrypted, or perhaps stop and query the sender. Alternately, we could have mail servers that do the decryption. This isn't a final solution (because it's not encrypted end-to-end) but perhaps it would get people used to being able to send encrypted emails, and those that care could start using crypto-enabled mailers.
Well if you were arguing for FreeBSD, how about this: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html