The tech support needs were greater for Linux products because their Linux products were extremely buggy and were never patched.
There were a number of non-newbies who bought their software. But many advertised features were still broken. Many features of the Windows suite were not available in the Linux version because of WINE limitations, even something as simple as loading a document in a running instance of WP (ie, from a browser). It had varied problems with things like window management with different window managers, font difficulties caused by interactions between their font server and other font servers....
The only way to get a fairly stable WPO2k/Linux or Draw/Linux installation was beyond most users, as it required downloading an unsupported CVS version of corelwine and recompiling it (twice to work with both Draw and WPO2k). And when you did that, you broke the online help.
In other words, sales figures were poor because the software was not worth buying. I have both WPO2k and Draw for Linux, and don't have either installed, because they aren't worth using.
It would be even better if Clark had compared digital shots of the same scene, rather than taking a picture of a print with a low-end digital camera, and setting up such things as "4.7MPixel equivalent" images.
In general, it's an interesting link, but should be taken with some skepticism.
You speak as if changing DSL isps is an easy thing, as if it's likely that you'll be able to find another provider who will service you, who will not have oversold upstream bandwidth, and you'll be able to switch without massive billing problems and disruptions of your service that seem to happen whenever someone with DSL changes _anything_ about their service (why billing contact changes should kill your DSL I don't know....)
Now, you may not have had these problems. You may not be in an area as fraught with DSL problems as others. But for that matter, my cable modem is faster than any DSL sold around here, and doesn't clog like you say it should. (And DSL happens not to be available at my specific location.)
Clearly, your post is a massive oversimplification of the issue. If someone wants to know which is best for them, they need to check out the specifics for their area, rather than relying on some "networkguru" who believes in a holy grail.
If you want to opt-out of TiVo's data collection, just call TiVo customer service and tell them, and they'll tell your machine to stop uploading that info. Problem solved.
Well, my $10 Soundblaster has an undocumented S/PDIF out that I can run to my receiver... why pay for a DAC in there that nobody who cares about high-end audio is going to use? (Or do high-end audio people buy cheap receivers and just run RCA cables from their devices?)
I'm much faster at typing than at handwriting. I'm much more likely to take detailed notes if typing.
My typing is much neater than my handwriting. I'm much more likely to be able to read my notes later if typing.
Electronic notes can be searched much more easily than paper. I'm much more likely to be able to find something in old notes if typing.
Electronic notes take less space than paper notebooks and are easier to store for long periods of time across multiple moves (ie, when said student goes to college). I'm more likely to continue to get use from my notes if typing.
How likely is that? Well, my wife took notes on her laptop throughout college and found all the above advantages to be significant. If one believes in notes at all, they should probably agree that computerized notes are good. If you don't agree notes are good, then the laptop would have no additional benefit.
Hmmm... shipping from one country where the predominate language is English, to another where the predominate language is English. Writing "Fragile" in english sounds pretty safe to me.
Especially when you consider the next two likely languages are French and Spanish, and the word is nearly exactly the same in each.
Besides, that degree of damage shouldn't happen to any package, even one not designated as "fragile".
There are a few different ssh clients written in Java. (Such as this one.) Throw one of those on a web page, and you have a more secure connection from anywhere. Not as good as you can get, but at least everything isn't sent cleartext over the wire.
As someone who hated scheme in CS101, but later came to appreciate the lisp family, I urge you to give it more of a try before trying to replace it with something you already know.
Lisp is a different language from most languages currently in vogue. To be successful, you'll need to think somewhat differently. That's why it's so hard the first week, but it will get easier. The stretching your brain goes through will make you a more versatile and better programmer in the end.
To make the learning curve easier, make sure you're using a good environment to work with your lisp. Traditionally, lisps work best with an environment which understands lisp, can allow you to evaluate s-expressions at a keystroke, and work with the incremental compilation that makes lisp a joy to work with. With an environment which supports paren-matching and auto-indenting, the mass of parentheses is no longer a problem.
There are a number of good lisp environments... most commercial lisps come with one, I believe. Emacs is also good (unsurprisingly). Ask your TA what they prefer... if they don't have a preference, ask the prof. Unlike perl or C, and like Smalltalk (I've heard), the development environment is an integral part of making Lisp what it is.
So, please, give it a try. You'll be better for it.
You're overestimating the amount of work most companies can do if the network goes down.
If our corporate network went down, we would be able to type up a letter or do a spreadsheet, but we wouldn't be able to look at the documents referenced in the letter, find the client contacts, look up the details of the help desk call, find the statistics to put into the spreadsheet. We wouldn't be able to access the machines on which we do development, and unless you were one of the few employees with an analog line and a modem, you wouldn't be able to access a client site to fix one of their problems.
For my specific job, I'd be able to do exactly nothing without the network. This is the same situation I was in at my last job.
The fact is, for most or at least many companies, networked resources are already critical assets. So why not put a little bit more on there?
Perhaps the reason we have so much trouble with domain names is that we have the wrong economic metaphor (or none at all). Why not treat domain names as real estate? If you're the first to stake a claim to coke.biz, congratulations. Coke can get into a bidding war with Pepsi to buy it. Same as if you were the first to stake a claim to a piece of swamp loaded with oil, or whatever. OTOH, if you use coke.biz to put up a site that is confusingly similar to the Coke website, then and only then could you be sued for trademark infringement.
Actually, we had that model for a long (well, in internet time) time. The problem with that was the domain-name speculators, who would pay the (comparitively small) domain name registrations and sit on thousands of domains, selling them for absurd amounts.
Nobody really liked that model, except the people who profited by registering other people's trademarks.
Timothy phrased his comments such, that it sounds like the content creator is trying to limit playback on FreeBSD, which is completely wrong. This simply is a developer exercising their right to control how their code is used.
That's incorrect. The letter did not say anything about illegally used code. It seems that Dolby is trying to limit the use of an independently developed program (written using the ac3 spec), based on a vague claim of IP rights. AFAICT, the letter doesn't give any specifics as to what ac3dec is violating... no specific patents or trademarks seem mentioned. And iirc, ac3 is a standard, and Dolby Digital is the trademark....
What on earth are you talking about? Could you provide a citation, please?
The point of patents is that "clean-room reverse-engineering" is neither necessary nor is it a defense. If I hold a patent on something, you may not use that method even if you independantly thought it up. You certainly don't need to reverse-engineer it, because the patent spells the innovation out in detail. That's what patents are for.
Now, perhaps you're referring to non-patented things like trade secrets, where reverse-engineering is fine. (Well, except in UCITA jurisdictions where it's prevented by a shrinkwrap license.)
Actually, I have a laptop as powerful as a desktop at twice the price, but it was important to me.
I wanted a powerful system I could put on my lap, since I hate desks, and try to avoid them whenever possible. That tends to make desktops problematic. Being able to work on the couch, in bed, in my ikea chair, on the balcony (all with wireless networking) was important to me.
Even if you have a third reduction in dot pitch, it's ok. You probably aren't going to be at the same distance as from your monitor. Being at arms reach from this thing is not a design goal, I'd think.
With my experience with NCSA stuff, it's probably targetted as small-group collaboration, where "real work" will be going on. A wall like this is going to be high-enough res and large enough physically that you can show a lot of data to a group of (say) five people to see what the data may mean. While you could use this to show images to a full lecture hall, having the high resolution wouldn't be as useful (since people would be too far away to tell anyway.)
Fair enough -- but if procmail is working as advertised and you route the data to the bit bucket, I don't see how you'd know how much you get in spam/forwarded viruses.
Procmail logs, naturally. It logs message size even when bit-bucketing.
Of course, by the time it hits procmail, you've already paid for the bandwidth (unless you have mail delivered to a server with procmail outside the net you pay for bandwidth).
Mailing lists look at "from" or worse, envelope-sender when allowing you to post or subscribing you.
Most mailers will take the From address, not the Reply-to, when
adding to an addressbook.
Most people don't even look at the reply-to.
There exist broken mail gateways which lose the reply-to.
Many mailers these days ignore reply-to entirely, because of broken
mailing lists.
Many broken mailing lists completely ditch the reply-to and put on
their own.
Slightly less broken mailing lists won't overwrite a reply-to, but
that means that people on the list who expect that hitting R will
reply to the list (because they've gotten used to the list setting
reply-to) will accidently and possibly unknowingly not send things
to the list when they want to.
I have been using the ats@acm.org address through several ISP changes
over 5 years or so and it has enabled people to find me after long
amounts of time. It only works because people will pull up old
emails of mine and see the address, and try it. No amount of telling
people what email address to use will stop short-lived addresses from
finding their way into people's addressbooks. No matter how much I
like OOL, eventually I'm going to stop using it because eventually,
I'm going to move off the island. (The odds of my wife completing her
PhD, doing two postdocs, and finding a tenured faculty position all
while sticking in this area are low, you know?)
I'm not precisely sure how ensuring a verizon return address would help
the spam issue. If it's sent through your IPs, you can track the
spam down no matter what the address. If it's not, you can't do
anything. (After all, you already refuse to relay from outside your
IPs.) It might make it slightly easier for other admins to lay blame,
but they're going to have to trace headers anyway to show that it
isn't someone relaying through uu.net and setting an verizon return
address.
If you have a sucky carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very low.
If you have a good carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very high.
Now, as the article discusses, there are more things the cable company has to keep track of to keep your speed high than with DSL. OTOH, you can get much higher top speeds with cable modems than with DSL. On the lioptonline group (for people with Cablevision's Optimum Online cable modem service) we have people complaining when their local transfer rates dip to 300KB/s... which is higher than the top speed of any consumer DSL I've seen.
So what you need to do is talk to other people with the provider you're considering. See how their speeds have been, and whether the provider seems responsive. See if there are any mailing lists you can check out to see if people are unsatisfied. Check out both DSL and cable modems to see which are better in your area.
For me, when things have been working, I've never dipped to DSL speeds, let alone a 56Kb modem. And when things stop working, the cable company comes out and fixes it (although sometimes it takes a while to figure out what's wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you live in the boonies, most major networks are indeed broadcasting in HDTV OTA.
Or unless you live in the NYC area, because most of the HDTV antennas went down with the WTC....
The tech support needs were greater for Linux products because their Linux products were extremely buggy and were never patched.
There were a number of non-newbies who bought their software. But many advertised features were still broken. Many features of the Windows suite were not available in the Linux version because of WINE limitations, even something as simple as loading a document in a running instance of WP (ie, from a browser). It had varied problems with things like window management with different window managers, font difficulties caused by interactions between their font server and other font servers....
The only way to get a fairly stable WPO2k/Linux or Draw/Linux installation was beyond most users, as it required downloading an unsupported CVS version of corelwine and recompiling it (twice to work with both Draw and WPO2k). And when you did that, you broke the online help.
In other words, sales figures were poor because the software was not worth buying. I have both WPO2k and Draw for Linux, and don't have either installed, because they aren't worth using.
It would be even better if Clark had compared digital shots of the same scene, rather than taking a picture of a print with a low-end digital camera, and setting up such things as "4.7MPixel equivalent" images.
In general, it's an interesting link, but should be taken with some skepticism.
You speak as if changing DSL isps is an easy thing, as if it's likely that you'll be able to find another provider who will service you, who will not have oversold upstream bandwidth, and you'll be able to switch without massive billing problems and disruptions of your service that seem to happen whenever someone with DSL changes _anything_ about their service (why billing contact changes should kill your DSL I don't know....)
Now, you may not have had these problems. You may not be in an area as fraught with DSL problems as others. But for that matter, my cable modem is faster than any DSL sold around here, and doesn't clog like you say it should. (And DSL happens not to be available at my specific location.)
Clearly, your post is a massive oversimplification of the issue. If someone wants to know which is best for them, they need to check out the specifics for their area, rather than relying on some "networkguru" who believes in a holy grail.
If you want to opt-out of TiVo's data collection, just call TiVo customer service and tell them, and they'll tell your machine to stop uploading that info. Problem solved.
Well, my $10 Soundblaster has an undocumented S/PDIF out that I can run to my receiver... why pay for a DAC in there that nobody who cares about high-end audio is going to use? (Or do high-end audio people buy cheap receivers and just run RCA cables from their devices?)
He opposed GNU work on the original Macintosh, and he clearly isn't the most rational man...
That was because of the Apple look and feel lawsuit. Seems like a decent reason to me.
How likely is that? Well, my wife took notes on her laptop throughout college and found all the above advantages to be significant. If one believes in notes at all, they should probably agree that computerized notes are good. If you don't agree notes are good, then the laptop would have no additional benefit.
Hmmm... shipping from one country where the predominate language is English, to another where the predominate language is English. Writing "Fragile" in english sounds pretty safe to me.
Especially when you consider the next two likely languages are French and Spanish, and the word is nearly exactly the same in each.
Besides, that degree of damage shouldn't happen to any package, even one not designated as "fragile".
There are a few different ssh clients written in Java. (Such as this one.) Throw one of those on a web page, and you have a more secure connection from anywhere. Not as good as you can get, but at least everything isn't sent cleartext over the wire.
Included and works great.
Worked fine with the old C=64 power supplies... I knew one guy who used his as an aquarium heater while powering his BBS.
As someone who hated scheme in CS101, but later came to appreciate the lisp family, I urge you to give it more of a try before trying to replace it with something you already know.
Lisp is a different language from most languages currently in vogue. To be successful, you'll need to think somewhat differently. That's why it's so hard the first week, but it will get easier. The stretching your brain goes through will make you a more versatile and better programmer in the end.
To make the learning curve easier, make sure you're using a good environment to work with your lisp. Traditionally, lisps work best with an environment which understands lisp, can allow you to evaluate s-expressions at a keystroke, and work with the incremental compilation that makes lisp a joy to work with. With an environment which supports paren-matching and auto-indenting, the mass of parentheses is no longer a problem.
There are a number of good lisp environments... most commercial lisps come with one, I believe. Emacs is also good (unsurprisingly). Ask your TA what they prefer... if they don't have a preference, ask the prof. Unlike perl or C, and like Smalltalk (I've heard), the development environment is an integral part of making Lisp what it is.
So, please, give it a try. You'll be better for it.
You're overestimating the amount of work most companies can do if the network goes down.
If our corporate network went down, we would be able to type up a letter or do a spreadsheet, but we wouldn't be able to look at the documents referenced in the letter, find the client contacts, look up the details of the help desk call, find the statistics to put into the spreadsheet. We wouldn't be able to access the machines on which we do development, and unless you were one of the few employees with an analog line and a modem, you wouldn't be able to access a client site to fix one of their problems.
For my specific job, I'd be able to do exactly nothing without the network. This is the same situation I was in at my last job.
The fact is, for most or at least many companies, networked resources are already critical assets. So why not put a little bit more on there?
Not available here.
Perhaps the reason we have so much trouble with domain names is that we have the wrong economic metaphor (or none at all). Why not treat domain names as real estate? If you're the first to stake a claim to coke.biz, congratulations. Coke can get into a bidding war with Pepsi to buy it. Same as if you were the first to stake a claim to a piece of swamp loaded with oil, or whatever. OTOH, if you use coke.biz to put up a site that is confusingly similar to the Coke website, then and only then could you be sued for trademark infringement.
Actually, we had that model for a long (well, in internet time) time. The problem with that was the domain-name speculators, who would pay the (comparitively small) domain name registrations and sit on thousands of domains, selling them for absurd amounts.
Nobody really liked that model, except the people who profited by registering other people's trademarks.
No, there's no agreement you enter when you buy a CD or DVD, unless you're buying CDs with shrinkwrap licenses, unlike the rest of us.
The thing that says you can't copy it is a little thing called copyright law. You may have heard of it.
Timothy phrased his comments such, that it sounds like the content creator is trying to limit playback on FreeBSD, which is completely wrong. This simply is a developer exercising their right to control how their code is used.
That's incorrect. The letter did not say anything about illegally used code. It seems that Dolby is trying to limit the use of an independently developed program (written using the ac3 spec), based on a vague claim of IP rights. AFAICT, the letter doesn't give any specifics as to what ac3dec is violating... no specific patents or trademarks seem mentioned. And iirc, ac3 is a standard, and Dolby Digital is the trademark....
What on earth are you talking about? Could you provide a citation, please?
The point of patents is that "clean-room reverse-engineering" is neither necessary nor is it a defense. If I hold a patent on something, you may not use that method even if you independantly thought it up. You certainly don't need to reverse-engineer it, because the patent spells the innovation out in detail. That's what patents are for.
Now, perhaps you're referring to non-patented things like trade secrets, where reverse-engineering is fine. (Well, except in UCITA jurisdictions where it's prevented by a shrinkwrap license.)
Actually, I have a laptop as powerful as a desktop at twice the price, but it was important to me.
I wanted a powerful system I could put on my lap, since I hate desks, and try to avoid them whenever possible. That tends to make desktops problematic. Being able to work on the couch, in bed, in my ikea chair, on the balcony (all with wireless networking) was important to me.
So I got an IBM Thinkpad A20p
Even if you have a third reduction in dot pitch, it's ok. You probably aren't going to be at the same distance as from your monitor. Being at arms reach from this thing is not a design goal, I'd think.
With my experience with NCSA stuff, it's probably targetted as small-group collaboration, where "real work" will be going on. A wall like this is going to be high-enough res and large enough physically that you can show a lot of data to a group of (say) five people to see what the data may mean. While you could use this to show images to a full lecture hall, having the high resolution wouldn't be as useful (since people would be too far away to tell anyway.)
Fair enough -- but if procmail is working as advertised and you route the data to the bit bucket, I don't see how you'd know how much you get in spam/forwarded viruses.
Procmail logs, naturally. It logs message size even when bit-bucketing.
Of course, by the time it hits procmail, you've already paid for the bandwidth (unless you have mail delivered to a server with procmail outside the net you pay for bandwidth).
adding to an addressbook.
mailing lists.
their own.
that means that people on the list who expect that hitting R will
reply to the list (because they've gotten used to the list setting
reply-to) will accidently and possibly unknowingly not send things
to the list when they want to.
I have been using the ats@acm.org address through several ISP changes
over 5 years or so and it has enabled people to find me after long
amounts of time. It only works because people will pull up old
emails of mine and see the address, and try it. No amount of telling
people what email address to use will stop short-lived addresses from
finding their way into people's addressbooks. No matter how much I
like OOL, eventually I'm going to stop using it because eventually,
I'm going to move off the island. (The odds of my wife completing her
PhD, doing two postdocs, and finding a tenured faculty position all
while sticking in this area are low, you know?)
I'm not precisely sure how ensuring a verizon return address would help
the spam issue. If it's sent through your IPs, you can track the
spam down no matter what the address. If it's not, you can't do
anything. (After all, you already refuse to relay from outside your
IPs.) It might make it slightly easier for other admins to lay blame,
but they're going to have to trace headers anyway to show that it
isn't someone relaying through uu.net and setting an verizon return
address.
If you have a sucky carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very low.
If you have a good carrier for any type of broadband, your speeds can be very high.
Now, as the article discusses, there are more things the cable company has to keep track of to keep your speed high than with DSL. OTOH, you can get much higher top speeds with cable modems than with DSL. On the lioptonline group (for people with Cablevision's Optimum Online cable modem service) we have people complaining when their local transfer rates dip to 300KB/s... which is higher than the top speed of any consumer DSL I've seen.
So what you need to do is talk to other people with the provider you're considering. See how their speeds have been, and whether the provider seems responsive. See if there are any mailing lists you can check out to see if people are unsatisfied. Check out both DSL and cable modems to see which are better in your area.
For me, when things have been working, I've never dipped to DSL speeds, let alone a 56Kb modem. And when things stop working, the cable company comes out and fixes it (although sometimes it takes a while to figure out what's wrong).