It works fine outside of the US to talk to other users... What doesn't work, is being able to route calls to/from regular phones with it, although you can integrate it into asterisk and handle call routing yourself.
MS themselves offered nothing drastically better over unix, novell and apple back in the days... What they offered, was a massively inferior package that was also a lot cheaper (also considering the cheaper hardware)... OpenOffice plays them at their own game here.
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount, especially when that cost recurs every 3 or so years and there is a huge push towards reducing cost because of the current financial climate. In fact, the cost of the software often outstrips the cost of the hardware by quite a considerable margin, which is an utterly ridiculous situation.
OpenOffice may indeed have serious bugs, but then MS also have serious and highly irritating bugs (they are even famous for it)... On the other hand, LibreOffice are looking to be far more responsive to fixing bugs than Sun/Oracle/MS ever were.
As for native formats, the native formats of OO are fully documented and open, and gradually people are starting to wake up to the importance of keeping any important data in open formats. Keeping your data in proprietary formats is a huge risk to your business, and the only problem is that the people running many of these businesses simply don't understand technology.
The "enterprise" market is a boring one... You get boring, corporate-grey products... And your company will get a reputation for providing boring products that are only used at work. Devices will always be old, and have be several years behind in features. The margins won't be great either, companies refresh their hardware slowly and will always look to save money.
And very poor support for anything other than exchange... I've used them at work, and not been terribly impressed... The requirement to run a separate proprietary server for blackberry, the need to use their own custom APNs, not being able to add more than one account, no support for imap/caldav/carddav/etc... And email is their best feature, web browsing is pretty lousy, media support pretty poor, they are fairly mediocre voice handsets (especially with the tiny number keys for typing phone numbers)... I personally find the iphone email client much better than the blackberry one too (i carry one of each, iphone for personal use and blackberry for work).
Bitcoins are no easier to avoid tax with than cash, arguably harder... And there is already widespread tax evasion taking place with cash, as well as holding currency in foreign banks etc...
The real problem government has with them, is that they cannot artificially control the value of bitcoins.
There is no guarantee with any currency... Any currency you hold could be devalued, look at the Zimbabwean dollar for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar) which suffered from hyperinflation. And the problem with such currencies, is that they are controlled by a single entity - usually the government of the country where the currency originates, so acts of incompetence or malice can very rapidly devalue the currency.
You don't need to keep your bitcoin wallet on your computer all the time, its still possible to receive bitcoins while the wallet is offline... So put your wallet on a USB stick, and treat it like you would with paper money - lock it away in a safe when you dont require it.
They have the easiest blocks to solve, but the way bitcoin is designed is that a block is solved every 10 minutes... So even if an early adopter threw a lot of gpus at it, bitcoins are still being generated at roughly the same rate... The only difference is that now there are a larger number of people competing for the same generation rate of coins.
Any currency works like that... If someone grabs your cash then they have all your money with traditional currency too. You need to take the same precautions with bitcoin too.
The current trend seems to be towards more power efficient hardware and virtualization (and dynamic scaling etc), rather than ever faster hardware... So while your interpreted spreadsheet may be able to compute payroll calculations in a second, your hardware will consume more power doing it that way than using an optimized implementation... Also with sub optimal code, you won't be able to run as many instances on a single piece of hardware, and thus require more hardware.
The beauty of Gentoo is that you can mix and match... There is a gnome3 overlay if you want it.
I like being able to have control over the system, so i can mix and match package versions at will... With most binary distros its an all or nothing upgrade - if you want new gnome3, you also need to take new x11, new glibc, new gcc etc.
It comes down to the skill and available time of the programmer...
To use a car analogy, even a bad driver with an automatic gearbox will be able to achieve the 0-60 time quoted in the manufacturer's specs, but with a manual gearbox you need to be a good driver to achieve that.. A bad driver will be faster with the automatic, while a good driver will be faster with the manual all else being equal.
A garbage collector doesnt have as clear an understanding of the program as a good developer, and thus might waste processor cycles trying to clean up some unimportant structures while it should be processing flat out on some performance-critical logic.
Are they really trying to claim that developing a proprietary disc format, and having the hardware used to read it custom made is going to be cheaper than just using a format which already exists, and for which drives are already being mass produced cheaply?
The gamecube was the also-ran of its generation, which decreased the number of people actively trying to hack it... The gamecube had very little to offer over the PS2 or Xbox. The Wii on the other hand was extremely popular, and had a unique control system not available on other consoles which also brought with it some unique games.
The problem with these one off purchase games with online play, is that most of them don't release the server code and force you to play on their servers... And if they are not making any ongoing revenue, they have very little incentive to keep the servers running - and the online play mode of the game becomes useless once the servers are shut down.
Warcraft is a bit better since your paying for a service so they have an incentive to keep it running, but i do resent being expected to purchase the game *and* pay for service.
Surely assembly would be the highest performing language, while also requiring the most extensive tuning efforts and a level of sophistication not available to the average programmer...
More importantly tho, would be to know which language provides the best balance between performance and work required?
And ofcourse another thing to consider, is how often the code will run.. Not much point saving an hour writing it, only to waste 500 hours of cpu time running it.
I don't bank with citigroup, and I certainly never will knowing how little effort they put into their security practices.
What makes you think that other banks are any better? People used to think that RSA and SecurID were secure a couple of months ago...
Personally i'd rather see hackers publish information like this where the company is forced to admit to the hack, rather than serious organised criminals systematically stealing money and keeping it under the radar so the bank can continue denying the hack.
Banks often buy ready made software and customise it rather than writing their own from scratch, and there aren't many suppliers of online banking applications... Also the people writing the software and doing the customisation will be under pressure, and are likely to cut corners etc.
However i would expect a bank to have hired external contractors to audit the application, and any semi competent security testers should have found an issue like this. Perhaps their testers relied on automated tools, and while automated tools are good at finding the most well known webapp bugs like sql injection, they are useless for finding logic errors such as this - since the tool has no way to know that the account data its seeing doesn't belong to the currently logged in user.
That's exactly the point, windows has such a bad reputation that a large number of people simply don't want to try them regardless of how good they might be. If it was called something else and not associated with windows people might be more inclined to try it.
Yes they really need to drop the windows name, being associated with windows is generally a bad thing...
Windows is known for crashing. Windows is known for malware. Windows mobile is known for having an awkward unsuitable interface.
Windows still sells on the desktop space because users often aren't aware alternatives exist at all, or view them as expensive (Mac) or for geeks (Linux)... Many of these users hate windows and have bad things to say about it, but believe it is an integral part of computing and accept it as a "necessary evil" which is required to (access the internet|play games|do work|etc)...
In other areas, especially phones, users are aware that better alternatives exist and so they will often avoid windows like the plague...
And look at the xbox for an example, it is not associated/branded with windows and has been relatively successful, would it have sold so well if it had been branded as "Windows Game" or similar?
If you are a current customer however, was it you or some other employee who evaluated a system where a third party holds copies of the keys, and deemed such a system fit for use? Surely a system like this, where you are utterly beholden to the supplier would raise a red flag?
The main issue was in providing seed keys themselves, rather than providing customers with blank tokens the means to generate their own. Some other providers do provide customers with the means to seed their own keys, and compromising suppliers of such tokens would not necessarily compromise their customers.
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Not good if your using an ipad/iphone in a work environment where they've decided to block you from installing arbitrary apps...
It works fine outside of the US to talk to other users...
What doesn't work, is being able to route calls to/from regular phones with it, although you can integrate it into asterisk and handle call routing yourself.
MS themselves offered nothing drastically better over unix, novell and apple back in the days... What they offered, was a massively inferior package that was also a lot cheaper (also considering the cheaper hardware)... OpenOffice plays them at their own game here.
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount, especially when that cost recurs every 3 or so years and there is a huge push towards reducing cost because of the current financial climate. In fact, the cost of the software often outstrips the cost of the hardware by quite a considerable margin, which is an utterly ridiculous situation.
OpenOffice may indeed have serious bugs, but then MS also have serious and highly irritating bugs (they are even famous for it)... On the other hand, LibreOffice are looking to be far more responsive to fixing bugs than Sun/Oracle/MS ever were.
As for native formats, the native formats of OO are fully documented and open, and gradually people are starting to wake up to the importance of keeping any important data in open formats. Keeping your data in proprietary formats is a huge risk to your business, and the only problem is that the people running many of these businesses simply don't understand technology.
The "enterprise" market is a boring one... You get boring, corporate-grey products... And your company will get a reputation for providing boring products that are only used at work. Devices will always be old, and have be several years behind in features.
The margins won't be great either, companies refresh their hardware slowly and will always look to save money.
And very poor support for anything other than exchange...
I've used them at work, and not been terribly impressed... The requirement to run a separate proprietary server for blackberry, the need to use their own custom APNs, not being able to add more than one account, no support for imap/caldav/carddav/etc...
And email is their best feature, web browsing is pretty lousy, media support pretty poor, they are fairly mediocre voice handsets (especially with the tiny number keys for typing phone numbers)...
I personally find the iphone email client much better than the blackberry one too (i carry one of each, iphone for personal use and blackberry for work).
Bitcoins are no easier to avoid tax with than cash, arguably harder... And there is already widespread tax evasion taking place with cash, as well as holding currency in foreign banks etc...
The real problem government has with them, is that they cannot artificially control the value of bitcoins.
There is no guarantee with any currency... Any currency you hold could be devalued, look at the Zimbabwean dollar for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_dollar) which suffered from hyperinflation. And the problem with such currencies, is that they are controlled by a single entity - usually the government of the country where the currency originates, so acts of incompetence or malice can very rapidly devalue the currency.
You don't need to keep your bitcoin wallet on your computer all the time, its still possible to receive bitcoins while the wallet is offline...
So put your wallet on a USB stick, and treat it like you would with paper money - lock it away in a safe when you dont require it.
They have the easiest blocks to solve, but the way bitcoin is designed is that a block is solved every 10 minutes... So even if an early adopter threw a lot of gpus at it, bitcoins are still being generated at roughly the same rate...
The only difference is that now there are a larger number of people competing for the same generation rate of coins.
Any currency works like that...
If someone grabs your cash then they have all your money with traditional currency too.
You need to take the same precautions with bitcoin too.
Intel GPUs only really target the lowend, they are pretty weak compared to the offerings from ATI/AMD and nVidia...
The current trend seems to be towards more power efficient hardware and virtualization (and dynamic scaling etc), rather than ever faster hardware...
So while your interpreted spreadsheet may be able to compute payroll calculations in a second, your hardware will consume more power doing it that way than using an optimized implementation... Also with sub optimal code, you won't be able to run as many instances on a single piece of hardware, and thus require more hardware.
The beauty of Gentoo is that you can mix and match...
There is a gnome3 overlay if you want it.
I like being able to have control over the system, so i can mix and match package versions at will... With most binary distros its an all or nothing upgrade - if you want new gnome3, you also need to take new x11, new glibc, new gcc etc.
It comes down to the skill and available time of the programmer...
To use a car analogy, even a bad driver with an automatic gearbox will be able to achieve the 0-60 time quoted in the manufacturer's specs, but with a manual gearbox you need to be a good driver to achieve that.. A bad driver will be faster with the automatic, while a good driver will be faster with the manual all else being equal.
A garbage collector doesnt have as clear an understanding of the program as a good developer, and thus might waste processor cycles trying to clean up some unimportant structures while it should be processing flat out on some performance-critical logic.
Are they really trying to claim that developing a proprietary disc format, and having the hardware used to read it custom made is going to be cheaper than just using a format which already exists, and for which drives are already being mass produced cheaply?
The gamecube was the also-ran of its generation, which decreased the number of people actively trying to hack it... The gamecube had very little to offer over the PS2 or Xbox. The Wii on the other hand was extremely popular, and had a unique control system not available on other consoles which also brought with it some unique games.
The problem with these one off purchase games with online play, is that most of them don't release the server code and force you to play on their servers... And if they are not making any ongoing revenue, they have very little incentive to keep the servers running - and the online play mode of the game becomes useless once the servers are shut down.
Warcraft is a bit better since your paying for a service so they have an incentive to keep it running, but i do resent being expected to purchase the game *and* pay for service.
Manual memory management doesn't necessarily result in fragmentation, it just leaves the job of avoiding fragmentation in your hands.
Surely assembly would be the highest performing language, while also requiring the most extensive tuning efforts and a level of sophistication not available to the average programmer...
More importantly tho, would be to know which language provides the best balance between performance and work required?
And ofcourse another thing to consider, is how often the code will run.. Not much point saving an hour writing it, only to waste 500 hours of cpu time running it.
I don't bank with citigroup, and I certainly never will knowing how little effort they put into their security practices.
What makes you think that other banks are any better?
People used to think that RSA and SecurID were secure a couple of months ago...
Personally i'd rather see hackers publish information like this where the company is forced to admit to the hack, rather than serious organised criminals systematically stealing money and keeping it under the radar so the bank can continue denying the hack.
Banks often buy ready made software and customise it rather than writing their own from scratch, and there aren't many suppliers of online banking applications... Also the people writing the software and doing the customisation will be under pressure, and are likely to cut corners etc.
However i would expect a bank to have hired external contractors to audit the application, and any semi competent security testers should have found an issue like this. Perhaps their testers relied on automated tools, and while automated tools are good at finding the most well known webapp bugs like sql injection, they are useless for finding logic errors such as this - since the tool has no way to know that the account data its seeing doesn't belong to the currently logged in user.
That's exactly the point, windows has such a bad reputation that a large number of people simply don't want to try them regardless of how good they might be.
If it was called something else and not associated with windows people might be more inclined to try it.
Yes they really need to drop the windows name, being associated with windows is generally a bad thing...
Windows is known for crashing.
Windows is known for malware.
Windows mobile is known for having an awkward unsuitable interface.
Windows still sells on the desktop space because users often aren't aware alternatives exist at all, or view them as expensive (Mac) or for geeks (Linux)... Many of these users hate windows and have bad things to say about it, but believe it is an integral part of computing and accept it as a "necessary evil" which is required to (access the internet|play games|do work|etc)...
In other areas, especially phones, users are aware that better alternatives exist and so they will often avoid windows like the plague...
And look at the xbox for an example, it is not associated/branded with windows and has been relatively successful, would it have sold so well if it had been branded as "Windows Game" or similar?
If you are a current customer however, was it you or some other employee who evaluated a system where a third party holds copies of the keys, and deemed such a system fit for use? Surely a system like this, where you are utterly beholden to the supplier would raise a red flag?
The main issue was in providing seed keys themselves, rather than providing customers with blank tokens the means to generate their own.
Some other providers do provide customers with the means to seed their own keys, and compromising suppliers of such tokens would not necessarily compromise their customers.