Wow. That's an insane APR. When I was in college, I used Apple Financing and got a 6% APR (it was a Wells Fargo program at the time, but I heard they changed banks). My payments were about $20/mo for the $3000 G4 I purchased. If the APR is really that high for Apple Financing now, I'd look into traditional financial aid. You can get low interest rates, you can usually use them to buy computers, and you don't need to start paying until you graduate.
I still have that G4-- the video card, hard drives, and processor have been upgraded and stuffed into a bigger case, but it's still serving me quite well seven years later.
I don't have the book at hand, so I can't give you an exact citation, but in Noakes' Lore of Running (I have the 1991 edition), he notes that high-altitude training has been shown mainly to benefit athletes who compete at altitude, but that the benefits of training at high altitude and competing at sea level are small enough to be disputable. He adds that after the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, where U.S. runners were thrashed due to heat and altitude, U.S. runners picked up altitude training, but that the data that they've accumlated since then has lead them to believe that you really should tailor your training to the venue. If you enjoy training or exercise science, pick up this excellent book.
Where are you getting this from? That's not the case in any of the places I've seen. If anything, we're seeing way more linux products finding their way into the server room now, especially on the embedded side.
As for wireless devices that can be made to work another way-- i.e., interferece-- the manufacturers should stop cutting corners and prevent unauthorized use in hardware. This half-assedness is a big part of the reason why we're in trouble with kernel-space exploits in the first place. Yeah, it costs more, but it's the law. The law is there to keep the spectrum friendly enough to be useful.
I don't think that's it at all. I love OOo, but MSWord is, hands down, a better product (I work at a book publisher-- OOo is missing some important features). The problem is that you're tied in. Tie-in is Microsoft's M.O.
Had Microsoft simply said that Office 2007 would fully support ODF, I'm willing to bet there would be a very good chance that Massachusetts would choose Office 2007 for the supported desktop configuration. Having working in IT for years (and two years in MA state IT), I can tell you that the familiar is the path of least resistance-- IT folks in MA are familiar with MS Office. But Microsoft doesn't really care about Massachusetts-- they want the world to get the idea that you can't convert an MSWord doc into an ODF one. The evidence from Sun about there being platform-specific features in the document format leads me to believe that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to tie the format to the platform.
I think the stupid name will be beneficial to the cause. First of all, it makes people pay attention ("What? A pirate party?") Secondly, it points out the stupidity of the MPAA/RIAA's own use of the word 'pirate'.
I've been using Parallels Workstation for the Mac (or whatever they call it now) for a couple of months now. I admin a respectably-sized Active Directory and radmind'ed Mac network. We also have a dozen or so OpenBSD servers in our closet, so having a machine that can work with Windows, Macs, and has all of my fun UNIX tools is great. For years I've had two or three boxes connected via a KVM, but this is superior. I have a dual-display set up with my Intel iMac, with Parallels (WinXP) in one display, and the MacOS in the other. I can share files between the two, and I don't need to fiddle with a KVM switch, which never really seems to handle USB device removal/insertion very well.
This is the ultimate test of Parallels in my mind: I am running the Exchange 5.5 Administrator tool on my Mac (we have a legacy 5.5 install that we're migration away from). Do any of you realize what a perversion this is? It runs great!
Oh, and the Parallels team is super-responsive to bug reports. I am quite happy with this product.
I don't know what kind of volume Hifn deals with, but just some anecdotal evidence here-- I purchased a Hifn card for my own use, and based on my experience with the card running on OpenBSD (which detects and uses the card automatically, via crypto-API-enabled apps, e.g. OpenSSH), we were considering purchasing more of these at work. This recent exchange with Hifn changes that, as did the whole Adaptec debacle-- we only use MegaRAID stuff. That turned out to be a very good decision, because OpenBSD's support for MegaRAID cards has turned out to be stellar over the past year. So we'll probably be avoiding Hifn stuff here at work.
We're not a volume purchaser, but I have to imagine that losing sales from network admins like me does add up over time.
I suspect that Adobe is worried that they'll lose control of the PDF spec if they allow Microsoft to integrate it into Vista. You mention Microsoft's Java implementation, which is perfectly illustrative of this point. Microsoft's MO is "embrace and extend". With Java, LAN Manager, Kerberos, etc, etc, etc Microsoft has supported core features of the open standard in the first iteration. This brings people into their product sphere. In subsequent revisions, they've removed support for some of those core features-- now you've got a choice: go with your fully-interoperable apps and lose compatibility with Microsoft stuff, or choose Microsoft and get all the benefits of a vibrant developer community. The problem is, if you pick the latter option, you're locked in. Microsoft made sure that you couldn't guarantee that an app written for Sun's JVM would run on Microsoft's. That killed Java as an easy alternative to COM, and I STILL see Microsoft's VM being used (Oynx CRM software, for instance).
Another poster mentioned that even if Microsoft introduces XPS, they still have to convert the offset printers to the format. Still, I think Adobe should be concerned. A mere 5 years ago, printers only took QuarkXPress files. PDF succeeded on its own merits, and that took years to become the accepted format. But if XPS comes on every new Windows PC that a printer buys, then I think you'll see XPS happening a lot faster for Microsoft than it did for Adobe.
When I was in high school, I worked as a grocery clerk at Shaw's supermarket. Not nearly as hard as factory work, but not easy. They had a minimum requirement of stocking 40 cases an hour. I can tell you that this is virtually impossible. The fastest I could go was 36. I was literally running from shelf to shelf, for 8 hours straight.
After my boss informed me that I was on the verge of being fired, one of my coworkers told me privately that everyone lies on their stock sheet as a matter of course. I had been, in fact, vastly more productive than anyone else there. Vacation time? Forget about it. And I typically worked 6 days a week.
When I started the job, they showed us a number of 'educational videos' about the evils of unionized labor. There were montages of 'evil' labor organizers lurking in the shadows, waiting for the unsuspecting grocery clerk to walk by. "Psst... hey kid..." The irony was that my experience at that job made me realize how important labor unions are.
Yeah, the OP is full of shit. I may have a comparitively cushy job now, but it took me years to save up enough vacation time to have any decent time off. Always remember that, no matter how nice your boss may be, he doesn't represent your interests in any way. Americans are WAY overworked.
I know that these are all good recommendations for businesses that are cash-strapped, but it smacks of cheapness to me. Our Cogent 50Mbps line is dirt cheap considering the available bandwidth. Sure, a bean-counter might say that streaming audio is not a business necessity, and I agree, but if you give your employees a little breathing room, I think you'll find yourself in a more productive environment. AND the next time there IS a legitimate network issue, they won't be breathing down your neck to get it fixed because they know you'll go out of your way to help them out. I basically draw the line at P2P. A visit from the Director for streaming audio? Holy shit would I quit that job in a heartbeat.
Your point is essentially correct, though. The poster needs to analyze his traffic and go from there.
I second that. I was really excited to try out my new Garmin, but after what I figured was about a 12 mile run, it said 4.7. WTF? I was expecting more accuracy. Following all the hints about getting better reception in the woods (where I do most of my runs) doesn't help much either. I have a cheapo pedometer that I'm planning on calibrating on a track now.
Look, it's very simple. "Conservative" is an ambiguous term. A conservative is a person who perfers the status quo to change. Which status quo? Moral? Political? Economic? That's how modern-day Republicans can call themselves "conservative"-- they prefer that their moral views, which are held by a majority of Americans, stay held by the majority of Americans. These morals are primarily religiously-based.
A "strict constitutionalist" and a "civil libertarian" share a lot of common ground when you consider the fact that they are both, for the most part, political conservatives. They want political culture to be shaped by the absolutes of the Constitution. But culturally, civil libertarians and constitutionalist tend to have diverging moral views.
You can get as fine-grained about this as you want. As you mentioned before, there is no real black and white here.
It's an easy decision for us. We're tied in. Exchange, Active Directory, and so on. Our IT managers buy into the whole MS party line. So we lease machines. Every three years there's a new batch of hardware and that comes with a whole new pile of CALs, software with corporate site licenses, etc.
Microsoft caters to IT managers who don't want to think. For people who don't want to think, Microsoft makes it easy. If Microsoft can't do it, "it's not possible", in the words of one of my coworkers. It's a real shame, because there's a lot of very flexible software out there that would make our users' jobs a lot easier, but that might involve some brainpower on the part of the dropouts that run our IT department. I suspect that's the attitude of a lot of Microsoft's customers.
Massachusetts may be moving in the right direction, but it's not there yet. Many of us in MA are skeptical about the mandatory insurance coverage here-- when MA instituted compulsory car insurance, all it did was drive many insurers out. As a result, car insurance rates here are high. I can't say I fully understand the new plan, but considering that MA residents are shouldering the cost of insurance-- not the state-- I have this sinking feeling that this is more the case of insurers colluding with legislators than legislators acting on behalf of their constituents. I can tell you that even with my coverage through work, health care ain't cheap.
Not necessarily. Some architectures allow you to mark data as either writeable or executable (aka, "W XOR X"). This feature exists on Alpha, Sparc, AMD64 (to name a few), but not on i386 until recently. With regard to the current debate (PPC vs. i386), I think it's a moot point, because, unless I'm mistaken, this feature doesn't exist on PPC either. Of course, the OS has to know that feature is there and use it, and I don't think either Windows or the MacOS do this either.
To add to your comments about drivers-- in the BSD world, you tend to have more uniform drivers, which makes implementation go more quickly. Take wireless devices in BSD, for instance. The OpenBSD team has made a real effort to make sure that code that gets reused all the time (e.g., basic 802.11 stuff) is written once and reused throughout all the drivers. Linux wireless drivers are fragmented in this regard, partially because no one seems to care enough to unite their efforts, but also because Linux has happily accepted binary drivers from vendors. So there's no consistency.
Here's where the real payoff comes: on OpenBSD, I can plug virtually any wireless card into my box and configure it with ifconfig. If I want to know about specific features for each device, I get a nifty man page (e.g., "man iwi") that tells me if I can, for instance, do hardware WEP or run in HostAP mode, etc. They may not have all the bells and whistles (like WPA-PSK), but I get basic functionality, and I don't have to track down vendor firmware, recompile a kernel or anything like that. It just works. And these guys crank out dozens of new wireless drivers with each release, with manpages! I think this pretty well refutes OP's claim about Linux being ahead of BSD wrt drivers. I can live without hardware accelerated xterms if that means I don't have to futz with drivers and kernel recompiles just to get basic functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That's an insane APR. When I was in college, I used Apple Financing and got a 6% APR (it was a Wells Fargo program at the time, but I heard they changed banks). My payments were about $20/mo for the $3000 G4 I purchased. If the APR is really that high for Apple Financing now, I'd look into traditional financial aid. You can get low interest rates, you can usually use them to buy computers, and you don't need to start paying until you graduate.
I still have that G4-- the video card, hard drives, and processor have been upgraded and stuffed into a bigger case, but it's still serving me quite well seven years later.
I don't have the book at hand, so I can't give you an exact citation, but in Noakes' Lore of Running (I have the 1991 edition), he notes that high-altitude training has been shown mainly to benefit athletes who compete at altitude, but that the benefits of training at high altitude and competing at sea level are small enough to be disputable. He adds that after the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, where U.S. runners were thrashed due to heat and altitude, U.S. runners picked up altitude training, but that the data that they've accumlated since then has lead them to believe that you really should tailor your training to the venue. If you enjoy training or exercise science, pick up this excellent book.
Where are you getting this from? That's not the case in any of the places I've seen. If anything, we're seeing way more linux products finding their way into the server room now, especially on the embedded side.
Are you being pedantic or just an asshole?
As for wireless devices that can be made to work another way-- i.e., interferece-- the manufacturers should stop cutting corners and prevent unauthorized use in hardware. This half-assedness is a big part of the reason why we're in trouble with kernel-space exploits in the first place. Yeah, it costs more, but it's the law. The law is there to keep the spectrum friendly enough to be useful.
I don't think that's it at all. I love OOo, but MSWord is, hands down, a better product (I work at a book publisher-- OOo is missing some important features). The problem is that you're tied in. Tie-in is Microsoft's M.O.
Had Microsoft simply said that Office 2007 would fully support ODF, I'm willing to bet there would be a very good chance that Massachusetts would choose Office 2007 for the supported desktop configuration. Having working in IT for years (and two years in MA state IT), I can tell you that the familiar is the path of least resistance-- IT folks in MA are familiar with MS Office. But Microsoft doesn't really care about Massachusetts-- they want the world to get the idea that you can't convert an MSWord doc into an ODF one. The evidence from Sun about there being platform-specific features in the document format leads me to believe that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to tie the format to the platform.
I think the stupid name will be beneficial to the cause. First of all, it makes people pay attention ("What? A pirate party?") Secondly, it points out the stupidity of the MPAA/RIAA's own use of the word 'pirate'.
You know... that has to be the most insightful, concise thing I've heard said about what's wrong with copyright for a long time.
The problem is that judges often do not inform a jury of the full scope of their powers.
I've been using Parallels Workstation for the Mac (or whatever they call it now) for a couple of months now. I admin a respectably-sized Active Directory and radmind'ed Mac network. We also have a dozen or so OpenBSD servers in our closet, so having a machine that can work with Windows, Macs, and has all of my fun UNIX tools is great. For years I've had two or three boxes connected via a KVM, but this is superior. I have a dual-display set up with my Intel iMac, with Parallels (WinXP) in one display, and the MacOS in the other. I can share files between the two, and I don't need to fiddle with a KVM switch, which never really seems to handle USB device removal/insertion very well.
This is the ultimate test of Parallels in my mind: I am running the Exchange 5.5 Administrator tool on my Mac (we have a legacy 5.5 install that we're migration away from). Do any of you realize what a perversion this is? It runs great!
Oh, and the Parallels team is super-responsive to bug reports. I am quite happy with this product.
We're not a volume purchaser, but I have to imagine that losing sales from network admins like me does add up over time.
Oh, that's the problem! They thought he was coming to talk about his open sores movement! I'd tell him to step away, too.
"You get this bath, see? Imagine you've got this bath. And it's ebony. And it's conical."
Another poster mentioned that even if Microsoft introduces XPS, they still have to convert the offset printers to the format. Still, I think Adobe should be concerned. A mere 5 years ago, printers only took QuarkXPress files. PDF succeeded on its own merits, and that took years to become the accepted format. But if XPS comes on every new Windows PC that a printer buys, then I think you'll see XPS happening a lot faster for Microsoft than it did for Adobe.
Tell them that you're a philosopher. It's closer to what you actually do than what a bean counter does.
So basically you don't want to work. Welcome to life.
After my boss informed me that I was on the verge of being fired, one of my coworkers told me privately that everyone lies on their stock sheet as a matter of course. I had been, in fact, vastly more productive than anyone else there. Vacation time? Forget about it. And I typically worked 6 days a week.
When I started the job, they showed us a number of 'educational videos' about the evils of unionized labor. There were montages of 'evil' labor organizers lurking in the shadows, waiting for the unsuspecting grocery clerk to walk by. "Psst... hey kid..." The irony was that my experience at that job made me realize how important labor unions are.
Yeah, the OP is full of shit. I may have a comparitively cushy job now, but it took me years to save up enough vacation time to have any decent time off. Always remember that, no matter how nice your boss may be, he doesn't represent your interests in any way. Americans are WAY overworked.
Of course, without a free press, coordinating those uprisings gets a lot harder.
Your point is essentially correct, though. The poster needs to analyze his traffic and go from there.
I second that. I was really excited to try out my new Garmin, but after what I figured was about a 12 mile run, it said 4.7. WTF? I was expecting more accuracy. Following all the hints about getting better reception in the woods (where I do most of my runs) doesn't help much either. I have a cheapo pedometer that I'm planning on calibrating on a track now.
A "strict constitutionalist" and a "civil libertarian" share a lot of common ground when you consider the fact that they are both, for the most part, political conservatives. They want political culture to be shaped by the absolutes of the Constitution. But culturally, civil libertarians and constitutionalist tend to have diverging moral views.
You can get as fine-grained about this as you want. As you mentioned before, there is no real black and white here.
Microsoft caters to IT managers who don't want to think. For people who don't want to think, Microsoft makes it easy. If Microsoft can't do it, "it's not possible", in the words of one of my coworkers. It's a real shame, because there's a lot of very flexible software out there that would make our users' jobs a lot easier, but that might involve some brainpower on the part of the dropouts that run our IT department. I suspect that's the attitude of a lot of Microsoft's customers.
Massachusetts may be moving in the right direction, but it's not there yet. Many of us in MA are skeptical about the mandatory insurance coverage here-- when MA instituted compulsory car insurance, all it did was drive many insurers out. As a result, car insurance rates here are high. I can't say I fully understand the new plan, but considering that MA residents are shouldering the cost of insurance-- not the state-- I have this sinking feeling that this is more the case of insurers colluding with legislators than legislators acting on behalf of their constituents. I can tell you that even with my coverage through work, health care ain't cheap.
Not necessarily. Some architectures allow you to mark data as either writeable or executable (aka, "W XOR X"). This feature exists on Alpha, Sparc, AMD64 (to name a few), but not on i386 until recently. With regard to the current debate (PPC vs. i386), I think it's a moot point, because, unless I'm mistaken, this feature doesn't exist on PPC either. Of course, the OS has to know that feature is there and use it, and I don't think either Windows or the MacOS do this either.
Here's where the real payoff comes: on OpenBSD, I can plug virtually any wireless card into my box and configure it with ifconfig. If I want to know about specific features for each device, I get a nifty man page (e.g., "man iwi") that tells me if I can, for instance, do hardware WEP or run in HostAP mode, etc. They may not have all the bells and whistles (like WPA-PSK), but I get basic functionality, and I don't have to track down vendor firmware, recompile a kernel or anything like that. It just works. And these guys crank out dozens of new wireless drivers with each release, with manpages! I think this pretty well refutes OP's claim about Linux being ahead of BSD wrt drivers. I can live without hardware accelerated xterms if that means I don't have to futz with drivers and kernel recompiles just to get basic functionality.