I think that can be defensible depending on the type of class or curriculm. For a community college, for example, that teaches hands on office skills, using what the student is likely to find in the work place is probably a good idea. For other types of curricula, like programming concepts, using a certain IDE on a particular platform with a specific API doesn't seem too wise.
Then again, I work for a community college and I remember in the 80s we taught Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE III+ in the data processing degree program. I used to bitch that it was stupid to put a particular vendor's program into a degree program. "What if 10 years from now, no one has ever heard of Lotus or dBASE?" The reply was basically that I was an idiot. Those programs have their markets sewn all up, businesses love them, businesses don't tend to change, there is no way anyone could unseat them.
When I went for my CS degree, I was all excited when it came to assembler class because I had a Mac and the University used Macs and I wanted to learn how to code assembly on the Mac (68000 at the time). Well, I got in the class and they had loaded some program that turned the Mac into a text-only console and we only learned the basics of the assembler language itself, absolutely no toolbox calls.
I was pissed off, but it turned out to be a good thing in the long run.
So, I'm agreeing with your statement, just saying I can see some (but not many) exceptions.
OK, some contradiction here. She claims she spams through off shore services, but it also says she pays $1,000 a month for a lease line. That doesn't make sense.
If it's off shore, she originates messags from there, and the bandwidth require would be satisfied with a 14.4k modem. Upload one message, message list stored off shore, fire.
So who does she get her lease line from in the U.S.? Or is all of this just typical spammer lies?
I can't tell from their site what it takes to do this. Do you have to buy the base product for $2,500 and then add the server licenses for $50 each, or can you buy them separate? If the former, then if you only have 4 servers, it's $2,700.
And, with all that, you don't get ANY support and I'm back to counting and keeping track of number of installs. All stuff "free" (as in freedom and beer) software was supposed to get me away from.
True. Also, around that same time she moved from DC to CA and got a day job, so most of the day there was nothing to look at except the occasional cat.
Still all confusing as heck. I can't tell if an institution can opt to buy just the individual packages without the base package. All makes no sense. You'd think redhat would want people to run their own satellite rhn server to keep the load and bandwidth off of theirs...
From earlier leaked reports it sounded like WS would cost $25, AS $50 or you could get a site license for $2500 for WS and distribute to your staff/faculty/students.
Nope.
The $25 and $50 price is for individual (that is, student/faculty/staff) academic purchase only. If you're an institution, it's $2,500 for a base package (so you can run your own RHN and save redhat's bandwidth) and then add on WS at $25 each and AS for $50 each -- OR -- add on a site license for $7/FTE for WS and $7/FTE for servers. So a full site license is $2,500 + $14 FTE, which for my joint would cost $10,620 a year.
And, for all of this cash, all you get is permission to make copies of this 99.5% open source software and not a drop one of support.
Good point. I don't watch all that much TV so it'd not be that big of a deal for me. I bought the entire (well, 6 so far) box sets of Deep Space 9 because I only got to watch the first season or two when it first aired and it's been a lot of fun watching it in order when I get a chance (I can't imagine ever watching it twice though, so that turns out to be around $4.00 an episode. Still, for me, the convenience is worth it)
Sorry if you're broke. I'm not, but I'm also old. There has to be some benefit of growing old you know, although it does seem backwards. When I was young and could enjoy life more, I was broke. Now I'm old, I have financial independence and am too damn tired to go out and have a good time!:)
What about cable on demand service? Right now I can watch a lot of stuff "on demand" by flipping through a menu and selecting the show I want. If they offered network shows without commercials, I'd be willing to pay like 50 cents to watch each one.
Oh, I'm sorry, that would KILL TV advertising industry, but should I care? I get enough advertising crap all the time anyway. At least with on demand, the tv shows would still make money. The networks would just recoup their cost directly from the consumer instead of advertisers and I'd only have to waste 22 or 44 minutes of my life instead of a 30 minutes or an hour respectively.
Between that and DVD box sets (which I figured I paid almost $1000 last year alone for), I think there's still a profitable world out there for TV production companies.
Like banner ads, unfortunately. Expect more of those annoying graphics flying around the bottom of the screen during your shows. You know, like how it's limited currently to advertising other shows in the first minute after a commercial break.
I agree PDFs can be useful in some situations, like if I want to view a store's circular that appears in a newspaper, but the same info should be available in HTML as well when possible.
For example, many transit agencies take shortcuts on publishing their schedules by just making PDFs of their schedules available, which makes it impossible to view from a Pocket PC, WAP gateway, or a public kiosk that might not have a pdf viewer installed. The worse offenders just scan their printed schedules and publish in PDF as a bitmap.:(
There's a widespread belief that way too much taxpayer's money is being spent on keeping alive a form of transportation considered obsolete.
Hmm, let's see, either 1.5 hours traveling to NYC while relaxing in the cafe car with my laptop, or fighting traffic for 2-3 hours on the boring NJ Turnpike, dealing with midtown traffic, finding parking, and then trying not to fall asleep at the wheel on the return journey.
Amtrak works -- and is profitable --in certain parts of the U.S. The problem is they have to keep the unprofitable running of many long distance routes due to congressional pressure. The same Congress that won't let Amtrak cut unprofitable long distance routes is the same Congress that whines about giving them a few hundred million a year in subsidy (all while saying that spending 87 billion in Iraq is no big deal, it's just a drop in the bucket).
As for the leg of rail that Amtrak uses between DC and Florida, it's all owned by freight operators. Passenger trains get second priority on most parts of that line, the track can't handle high speeds, and even if it could, many of the communities that the lines run through insist on lower train speed limits because the locals are too stupid to wait for a rail crossing signal and figure they can run around the gates to beat the train.
There's no way the density of population in that part of the country could provide the number of passengers to warrant large-scale upgrades of the rail lines there -- that is unless you forced more people to switch out of their cars through much higher gas taxes, which ain't going to happen.
Click #2, find link after futzing with page search if needed.
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess that violates the 5-9 items on a page rule.
I have better rules. How about ban senseless use of flash, annoying animated graphics, lazy conversion of printed matter to PDF documents instead of crafting true HTML pages, and sites with little or no content? But then again, who am I to argue with marketing "experts" who know what I want better than I do?
Try typing on the trains I use and you'll get an elbow in the ribcage.
Good point. I took a ride on the Midland Mainline up to Kettering last month and couldn't believe how much that thing shook from side-to-side. Not near as nice running as the older diesel-electrics I rode in in past visits to the UK (ok, so you had to open the window to reach out to open the door at a station, but the trains themselves were much smoother running...)
And 25 quid for an hour journey is a bit on the steep side too. Then again, an hour and a half ride on Amtrak to NYC costs me $57.00 -- but at least it doesn't shake you out of your seat!
ask for vpn access, it's no extra charge. You get a real IP (not NATed) and ports like ssh are not blocked. The "APN" is internet3.voicestream.net when you configure your settings. (internet2 is NAT)
I'm a bit confused about the T-mobile claims. I have unlimited internet access (GPRS) through t-mobile for an extra $20/month -- unlimited access. At least that is what it is in the U.S. It's $30/month if you don't have a voice plan with them.
It's not the fastest in the world, but it works fairly well and I usually use it while moving (bus, train, passenger in a car).
Fortunately for me, the mail.app client on OS X works fairly well with net connections going up and down.
No, you just don't get support, updates and new releases.
I reread the agreement hoping to tell you that you were an idiot, but the egg may be on my face. Where it does say that the annual payment will be automatically invoiced each year unless explicitly terminated, I couldn't see anywhere where it says you have to remove software if you don't remove.
You could look at this the other way, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL. The way the RHEL license/contract reads, if you decide not to renew, you have to remove RHEL.
What's the renewal rate for Microsoft? 99.999%?
Yeah, I'm not too happy with ole Redhat these days. Our enterprise RHN subscription runs out December 11, but I still can't get any info about the alleged rumored educational version of RHEL out of them. Christmas holidays would be a perfect time for migrating our servers to RHEL Academic, but I fear they are going to shaft us on this one as well.
It's almost like they don't have a well thought out business plan and are making it up as they go along. All of this should have been mapped out several months in advance, giving customers the ability to plan their own migrations. The Academic piece was just forgotten about and filled in a week or so ago, and it's still vaporware.
Thanks to certifications that misuse the term engineer, like MCSE, the term engineer has been watered down to the point where it really doesn't carry much weight or meaning anymore -- much to the chagrin of real PEs, EEs, etc., I'm sure.:-(
btw, I'm an "engineer" too -- RHCE. Y'all be impressed now...
"You too can be an MCSE Microsoft certified system engineer, even if you have no computer experience." (From some ad on the radio I heard recently for some MCSE training course)
Sorry, you do have a good point. But seriously, do you know how difficult and how much effort and time it takes to earn a P.E.? Porting that to software developers -- properly -- would inflate the cost of software development greatly, which is the opposite direction the PHBs care to go. Unless the software is controlling something that could cause loss of life if it fails, I don't think it's going to work...
btw, I'm thankful for PEs everytime I drive across a bridge, board a plane, or even walk underneath a traffic light hanging from a 50 foot mast arm.
OK, so this law is passed and everyone gets one free shot at spamming people. Will this little fed stamp-of-approval stop ISPs and businesses from filtering out this spam? Will spammers be able to litigate using the ole restraint of trade argument, if this is signed into law and makes spam legal?
Another thing I've always wondered about is confidentiality. Say I farm out the programming of my next big internet thang to some foreign company. What's to say that company could resell (or at least reuse) some of that code when they do the same coding for my competitor when they want in on the next big thang too?
If not that, what about the programmers bleeding out code?
Imagine you're running a programmer sweat shop and you get two companies wanting the same sort of thing. Why write it twice. Reuse code, profit. And if it's closed source, each company will never know they helped subsidise the code for their competitor and visa-versa.
Yes, you got it right. But the rates aren't bad at all. Go to www.w-mobile.com and compare to www.t-mobile.co.uk for example. We get free calling, both ways, at nights and weekends, for example. Also, how can the person who calls a mobile from a landline bargain for a better rate in the UK? There's no incentive for the carriers to drop the inbound rate at all. Plus it's usually the same rate no matter where in the country you call or are located, and the U.S. is a big place. I doubt you can get an EU flat rate plan, can you?! T-mobile is starting three-day weekends now. That's a full three days of unlimited free calling (and receiving). Other carriers are starting nights at 19.00 now. Get a plan that fits you best.
btw, we also pay for incoming text messaging, but it's a lot cheaper than 10p. Usually can buy bundles like 400 messages (in/out) for $3.99. That's a penny a text message. And carriers provide an email address so anyone can text you for free from any computer.
There's advantages and disadvantages to both methods of charging.
The difference in the U.S. is number portability extends to landline phones too. So I can move my home phone number to my mobile phone and disconnect forever my landline. This is why the RBOCs (landline providers) are fighting this so hard.
The only reason the US can get away with this is because the owner of the phone pays for both incoming and outgoing calls. It doesn't cost the caller anything extra to call a mobile phone.
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Then again, I work for a community college and I remember in the 80s we taught Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE III+ in the data processing degree program. I used to bitch that it was stupid to put a particular vendor's program into a degree program. "What if 10 years from now, no one has ever heard of Lotus or dBASE?" The reply was basically that I was an idiot. Those programs have their markets sewn all up, businesses love them, businesses don't tend to change, there is no way anyone could unseat them.
When I went for my CS degree, I was all excited when it came to assembler class because I had a Mac and the University used Macs and I wanted to learn how to code assembly on the Mac (68000 at the time). Well, I got in the class and they had loaded some program that turned the Mac into a text-only console and we only learned the basics of the assembler language itself, absolutely no toolbox calls.
I was pissed off, but it turned out to be a good thing in the long run.
So, I'm agreeing with your statement, just saying I can see some (but not many) exceptions.
Wow, that's a real professional web site design. If the browser won't accept cookies, serve a blank page instead. I guess that is innovation for you.
If it's off shore, she originates messags from there, and the bandwidth require would be satisfied with a 14.4k modem. Upload one message, message list stored off shore, fire.
So who does she get her lease line from in the U.S.? Or is all of this just typical spammer lies?
And, with all that, you don't get ANY support and I'm back to counting and keeping track of number of installs. All stuff "free" (as in freedom and beer) software was supposed to get me away from.
I'm still going to miss her.
Still all confusing as heck. I can't tell if an institution can opt to buy just the individual packages without the base package. All makes no sense. You'd think redhat would want people to run their own satellite rhn server to keep the load and bandwidth off of theirs...
Nope.
The $25 and $50 price is for individual (that is, student/faculty/staff) academic purchase only. If you're an institution, it's $2,500 for a base package (so you can run your own RHN and save redhat's bandwidth) and then add on WS at $25 each and AS for $50 each -- OR -- add on a site license for $7/FTE for WS and $7/FTE for servers. So a full site license is $2,500 + $14 FTE, which for my joint would cost $10,620 a year.
And, for all of this cash, all you get is permission to make copies of this 99.5% open source software and not a drop one of support.
Sorry if you're broke. I'm not, but I'm also old. There has to be some benefit of growing old you know, although it does seem backwards. When I was young and could enjoy life more, I was broke. Now I'm old, I have financial independence and am too damn tired to go out and have a good time! :)
Oh, I'm sorry, that would KILL TV advertising industry, but should I care? I get enough advertising crap all the time anyway. At least with on demand, the tv shows would still make money. The networks would just recoup their cost directly from the consumer instead of advertisers and I'd only have to waste 22 or 44 minutes of my life instead of a 30 minutes or an hour respectively.
Between that and DVD box sets (which I figured I paid almost $1000 last year alone for), I think there's still a profitable world out there for TV production companies.
Like banner ads, unfortunately. Expect more of those annoying graphics flying around the bottom of the screen during your shows. You know, like how it's limited currently to advertising other shows in the first minute after a commercial break.
For example, many transit agencies take shortcuts on publishing their schedules by just making PDFs of their schedules available, which makes it impossible to view from a Pocket PC, WAP gateway, or a public kiosk that might not have a pdf viewer installed. The worse offenders just scan their printed schedules and publish in PDF as a bitmap. :(
Hmm, let's see, either 1.5 hours traveling to NYC while relaxing in the cafe car with my laptop, or fighting traffic for 2-3 hours on the boring NJ Turnpike, dealing with midtown traffic, finding parking, and then trying not to fall asleep at the wheel on the return journey.
Amtrak works -- and is profitable --in certain parts of the U.S. The problem is they have to keep the unprofitable running of many long distance routes due to congressional pressure. The same Congress that won't let Amtrak cut unprofitable long distance routes is the same Congress that whines about giving them a few hundred million a year in subsidy (all while saying that spending 87 billion in Iraq is no big deal, it's just a drop in the bucket).
As for the leg of rail that Amtrak uses between DC and Florida, it's all owned by freight operators. Passenger trains get second priority on most parts of that line, the track can't handle high speeds, and even if it could, many of the communities that the lines run through insist on lower train speed limits because the locals are too stupid to wait for a rail crossing signal and figure they can run around the gates to beat the train.
There's no way the density of population in that part of the country could provide the number of passengers to warrant large-scale upgrades of the rail lines there -- that is unless you forced more people to switch out of their cars through much higher gas taxes, which ain't going to happen.
Click #2, find link after futzing with page search if needed.
Oh, I'm sorry, I guess that violates the 5-9 items on a page rule.
I have better rules. How about ban senseless use of flash, annoying animated graphics, lazy conversion of printed matter to PDF documents instead of crafting true HTML pages, and sites with little or no content? But then again, who am I to argue with marketing "experts" who know what I want better than I do?
And 25 quid for an hour journey is a bit on the steep side too. Then again, an hour and a half ride on Amtrak to NYC costs me $57.00 -- but at least it doesn't shake you out of your seat!
I find it interesting that others won't learn from the mistakes the UK have found from privitizing the rails there.
There are many who are pushing to privitize Amtrak as the solution to the modest subsidies it requires.
Oh, I get it, if it's American companies doing it, then it'd be better.
ask for vpn access, it's no extra charge. You get a real IP (not NATed) and ports like ssh are not blocked. The "APN" is internet3.voicestream.net when you configure your settings. (internet2 is NAT)
It's not the fastest in the world, but it works fairly well and I usually use it while moving (bus, train, passenger in a car).
Fortunately for me, the mail.app client on OS X works fairly well with net connections going up and down.
I reread the agreement hoping to tell you that you were an idiot, but the egg may be on my face. Where it does say that the annual payment will be automatically invoiced each year unless explicitly terminated, I couldn't see anywhere where it says you have to remove software if you don't remove.
My bad. Touche.
What's the renewal rate for Microsoft? 99.999%?
Yeah, I'm not too happy with ole Redhat these days. Our enterprise RHN subscription runs out December 11, but I still can't get any info about the alleged rumored educational version of RHEL out of them. Christmas holidays would be a perfect time for migrating our servers to RHEL Academic, but I fear they are going to shaft us on this one as well.
It's almost like they don't have a well thought out business plan and are making it up as they go along. All of this should have been mapped out several months in advance, giving customers the ability to plan their own migrations. The Academic piece was just forgotten about and filled in a week or so ago, and it's still vaporware.
btw, I'm an "engineer" too -- RHCE. Y'all be impressed now...
"You too can be an MCSE Microsoft certified system engineer, even if you have no computer experience." (From some ad on the radio I heard recently for some MCSE training course)
Sorry, you do have a good point. But seriously, do you know how difficult and how much effort and time it takes to earn a P.E.? Porting that to software developers -- properly -- would inflate the cost of software development greatly, which is the opposite direction the PHBs care to go. Unless the software is controlling something that could cause loss of life if it fails, I don't think it's going to work...
btw, I'm thankful for PEs everytime I drive across a bridge, board a plane, or even walk underneath a traffic light hanging from a 50 foot mast arm.
OK, so this law is passed and everyone gets one free shot at spamming people. Will this little fed stamp-of-approval stop ISPs and businesses from filtering out this spam? Will spammers be able to litigate using the ole restraint of trade argument, if this is signed into law and makes spam legal?
If not that, what about the programmers bleeding out code?
Imagine you're running a programmer sweat shop and you get two companies wanting the same sort of thing. Why write it twice. Reuse code, profit. And if it's closed source, each company will never know they helped subsidise the code for their competitor and visa-versa.
Apple's manual states that the battery is good for about 300 charges. If you charge it up daily, well, do the math.
btw, we also pay for incoming text messaging, but it's a lot cheaper than 10p. Usually can buy bundles like 400 messages (in/out) for $3.99. That's a penny a text message. And carriers provide an email address so anyone can text you for free from any computer.
There's advantages and disadvantages to both methods of charging.
The only reason the US can get away with this is because the owner of the phone pays for both incoming and outgoing calls. It doesn't cost the caller anything extra to call a mobile phone.