3 Years of desktop support and 5 years of server? The fact that Ubuntu is looking at long-term development for their OS instead of the usual 6-month fire-and-forget releases of many other Linux Distros subscribe to is an encouraging sign that Linux is coming of age.
Longer lifespans for Linux provides a level of security that will allow many users wary of switching over from Windows to start looking at a Linux distro as a serious replacement for their current OS. Just think: there IS an alternative to warning users that they have to buy a new OS for new features and security updates.
I'm only worried that theyll spend all $10m on pretzels and beer.
It seems to me that IBM may be doing this not for the sole reason to outsource, but to gain market share outside the US in terms of government contracts. The Indian Government is fiercely isolationist when it comes to contracting out IT and other services, and IBM acquiring Daksh may just get their foot in the door.
AMD did something interesting, like actually developing and marketing the 64-bit archetecture before Intel. They were the trailblazers, but they can't fragment a target market unless there is an established market.
And it'll sure be interesting to have 3, heck, 4 different implementations of the x86 archetecture, maybe even X different implementation of multimedia extensions (alright, this isn't the best example, but it's sufficient), but in the end, you'll have one company left over because they are deemed "superior" above the rest, and that one company will clobber and gobble up their competitors. Now imagine Intel as that company.
*shudder*. It'll be the Microsoft equivilant for microchip manufacturer.
This is how technology goes mainstream and becomes inexpensive enough for the everyday consumer: following.
Being a trailblazer may get you bragging rights, but you risk fragmenting the industry and the market you feed. For the longest time in the 90's AMD and Cyrix went on a follow-quest, and breached the low-cost PC market. Not only did they enhance choice and lower prices, they kept the number of standards down to a minimum. Just imagine what would occur if AMD, in the 1990's, came up with something completely different, but can run exactly the same thing Intel chips can at the same price: the market gets fragmented, prices remain high and stagnant, and no one is the winner until one of the two gets clobbered, eliminating competition in the market and raising prices even further.
It's not characteristic for Intel to follow AMD, but IMO, it's the smart thing to do to be competitive.
Oh yes, just because they are following, doesn't mean they can't do it better. AMD did in the 90's and today.
RFIDs, like bar codes, are not emitting devices, meaning that they don't send out signals. They interact with an external data source, like a scanner, to retreive data and to respond to data requests.
As such, they can easily be evaded. In fact, it's easier to tamper with RFIDs than barcodes simply because of the fact that tampered RFIDs are as not visually identifiable as barcodes (i.e. The naked eye can see if someone's ripped out the barcode or taped something over it). Any man with motivation can buy a RFIDs reprogrammer on EBay, walk into Walmart, and effectively make all boxes of whole wheat cheerios identify as gold-pressed latinum. Imagine the riots that could occur at the checkout lines when old ladies have to pay thousands of dollars to satisfy their daily intake of fibre.
All that tampering can be done without drawing attention to the culprit: you can hear a person cut or rip a box apart, but you can't hear binary code being reprogrammed through a contactless RFIDs programmer.
There are greater dangers than old ladies not getting their recommended daily intake of fibre.
I think the problem with teaching programming to youth these days is the perception of learning a "language". Instead of subjecting students to the CONCEPTS of programming, such as inheritence, oop, etc., schools are more inclined to teach children languages instead. It produces grades, I presume.
The trouble with that presumption is that kids get so accustomed to one language that when they get to college and learn the concepts, they have to throw all they learned out the window and start fresh. Why can't we start these kids off the right foot and wean them off of the language dependency?
The way I see it is children should be taught the fundamentals of programing at a relatively young age (12-16), like looping and recursion, and let them experiment with the fundamentals with their own choice of language.
There must be a clear distinction made between deregulation and delegation.
In many cases around the world, including Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan (Not sure about the US, someone can clarify), xDSL service may be delegated to a 3rd party to eliminate some of the burden on the call centres of the larger Telcos, although the backbone, routing equipment, and in some cases even consumer equipment, remain property of the Telcos. When delegation exist, there is little the consumer can do but put up with the hot air and incompetence of these big, monopolistic telcos. The reason why these "delegated" smaller agents have as poor a service as their larger counterparts because they have NO incentive to put a smile on their face. The consumer prices are just the same, the costs incurred by smaller companies to the large Telcos are at parity, and consumers choose whatever they hear is best from their best friend's neighbour's dog.
In very VERY small cases where true deregulation exist and competing organizations can lay their own fibre-optic lines to serve the community, prices are driven down and service improves drastically.
Think of it: id Software can be the first game company to be qualified advertise games with "Real Life Space Physics" if John Carmack comes back alive from one of his space flights.
Branding all customers as pirates, giving out terse PR statements, and not providing satisfactory responses are just consequences of the record companies having exclusive access to popular media.
Look at the airline industry: polite, apologetic, and responsive. Why? There's hundreds of competitive airlines out there.
Look at the Record Industry: rude, unresponsive, and completely devoid of PR sense -- Consequence of record companies colluding with each other record companies to maintain their monopoly.
There ARE avenues of competition, such as pay-per-use Internet media distribution, but they nixed it at governmental levels because it threatens their monopolistic attitude.
What record companies don't understand is that if they treat consumers with respect and ship products at reasonable prices to compensate for a good piece of recorded media, consumers would be more inclined to purchase such products instead of downloading it off of Kazaa. What's worse is that these "state of the art" copy protection measures are so breakable that they tend to show up on Kazaa in no time flat.
Stupid? Not in the least. When the industry was established, the government had no idea it would flurish, and left it to rot and die. In a turnabout of events, the industry grew exponentially, and now the government wants to succeed off of the pioneers who have worked with a set of rules since the industry began to take off.
Rules and regulations did not materialize because the government did not see full potential of the internet, and they sat on their laurels. There's a term for this: Bandwagon hopping. There's another term for this: Leeching.
Using Enron as a parallel is irresponsible at best. What Enron did was criminal, while what e-tailers are doing are adhering to rules that were simply set to such a lax state because governments were too lazy to focus on an industry that "just wouldn't fly" 8 years ago.
The e-tailing industry prides itself being different than traditional retailers due to the fact that it is free of taxes and govo-economic meddling that traditional retailers are stuck with. The entire industry was built based on that fact, when the industry was established, the government failed to change or make rules dealing with taxation.
It isn't a subsidy when the government slaps you with a penalty because your industry is partially successful after a long period of time. This isn't a subsidy, it's changing the rules after the fact, and it's a poor policy at best, if not downright unethical.
Products "Made in the USA" outnumbers products at least 100-1 in China.
Products "Made in China" outnumbers products at least 100-1 in the USA.
Putting further import taxes would actually INCREASE the prices of general products overall because import tariffs would give FURTHER dis-incentives to investors from importing products into the USA, and since there is less foriegn competition, domestic producers would be free to increase prices because they have a virtual domestic monopoly. Increasing import tariffs would actually be worse off for both the consumer and the long-term economic outlook. Sure, GDP will rise, but at the expense of worker livelihood and domestic morale.
One more thing: China has a extremely high GDP not because of economic tariffs, but because of the political circumstances surrounding its tradidional isolationalist thinking of "Motherland products are best".
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes. Sure, shopping online a huge convenience, but people today would still choose to drive to their local retailer and actually touch and try out a product before making a purchase, and forcing taxes on e-tailing would take away any incentive for consumers to use the services of the fledging new industry.
With huge competition with prices and selection from traditional real-life retailiers such as Walmart and Best Buy, e-tailers are already having enough trouble trying to grow their new industry. Slapping taxes and removing incentives for consumers to use online services would only impair progress. We're already seeing the effects of fees on online services and its related decrease in usage (MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail), taxes would further the disincentive campaign that seems to be propagating through the online world.
So radio signals aren't to blame for screwing with the navigational and computer systems of commercial aircraft. This development basically contradicts everything major Airlines have said to prevent the use of mobile phones on flights.
More frigtening would be the prospect of electronic companies develping "airplane-safe" electronics, such as radio-signal free CD players, PDAs, laptops, etc. What's to stop airlines from demanding passengers from purchasing "safe" products and completely banning mainstream electronics on planes, and in return making us pay more money for redundent electronics? The development of such items would be a cash cow, targeting those who travel often, but are routinely forced to turn off our MD Walkmans and laptops because the flight attendent thinks it's going to screw with the electronics in the cockpit.
Just think: "I'm sorry sir, but that's not a United Airlines Sony walkman. We can't permit you using that on the flight sir. Please go to the airport gift shop and buy a $400 new walkman."
It's not extremely surprising. Most asian computer users are still not very well versed in the English language, and that is proven in some of the email text found on virus infected emails.
Because of the poor grasp of English, emails with attached 'cute wallpaper', 'nude pics of Brittney', and 'Figures you please review' will be opened 8 our of 10 times. Without a big flashing strobe light on top of monitors that would alarm when an infected email appears, most asian users will continue to open infected email without a second thought.
Repeated beatings of the gaming industry can't be rescued by a single validation.
What really needs to be done is that society must realize that not all disasterous things int he world can be blamed on the gaming industry. When that happens, then it will be a true validation of pc/console gaming.
Financial compensation should not be used as a relative scale for the level of responsibility you have the public.
A 16-year old would be reprimanded for flipping a Whopper the wrong way, and he gets paid a fraction of what a developer is getting paid. Does that mean we should let that kid off scott free if he spits in a burger or two?
CEOs are held accountable for fudging their books, so why aren't developers held accountable for their backdoors and vulnerabilities?
These bugs cost money, and public confidence in their product and general products in the industry. The Word97 situation is no different than those of Enron or Worldcom, except the people prosecuted should be front line workers.
Idiotic behaviour, either with accounting or with C++, should be punished to deter future screw-ups.
Yea.... this has been a recurring problem. I've been getting weird clicking noises since a year ago, and it finally died on me a week ago.
Came home one night, the computer froze, but the HD Access light was on. It was plain on, so I reset, W2K startup screen started, then this weird screeching noise occured, then W2K bluescreened, giving me a HD error. I just sent my drive to IBM to be replaced, but since I live in Canada, I don't expect back for a few months.
Last time I checked the store I go to, they pulled the 60GXPs because of some 'unknown fault', and they refused to stock 75GXPs.
Not good. I just want a drive I can use without dying.
Slashdot Mirror
3 Years of desktop support and 5 years of server? The fact that Ubuntu is looking at long-term development for their OS instead of the usual 6-month fire-and-forget releases of many other Linux Distros subscribe to is an encouraging sign that Linux is coming of age.
Longer lifespans for Linux provides a level of security that will allow many users wary of switching over from Windows to start looking at a Linux distro as a serious replacement for their current OS. Just think: there IS an alternative to warning users that they have to buy a new OS for new features and security updates.
I'm only worried that theyll spend all $10m on pretzels and beer.
Heidelberg is the codename for Core-3.
It seems to me that IBM may be doing this not for the sole reason to outsource, but to gain market share outside the US in terms of government contracts. The Indian Government is fiercely isolationist when it comes to contracting out IT and other services, and IBM acquiring Daksh may just get their foot in the door.
"If you lived in the Northeast US or Canada what were your memories of the August Blackout?"
Well, a few days after the blackout I made a photo-documentary of the 'mayhem' that was downtown Toronto during the great blackout of '03.
The documentary is located here
AMD did something interesting, like actually developing and marketing the 64-bit archetecture before Intel. They were the trailblazers, but they can't fragment a target market unless there is an established market.
And it'll sure be interesting to have 3, heck, 4 different implementations of the x86 archetecture, maybe even X different implementation of multimedia extensions (alright, this isn't the best example, but it's sufficient), but in the end, you'll have one company left over because they are deemed "superior" above the rest, and that one company will clobber and gobble up their competitors. Now imagine Intel as that company.
*shudder*. It'll be the Microsoft equivilant for microchip manufacturer.
This is how technology goes mainstream and becomes inexpensive enough for the everyday consumer: following.
Being a trailblazer may get you bragging rights, but you risk fragmenting the industry and the market you feed. For the longest time in the 90's AMD and Cyrix went on a follow-quest, and breached the low-cost PC market. Not only did they enhance choice and lower prices, they kept the number of standards down to a minimum. Just imagine what would occur if AMD, in the 1990's, came up with something completely different, but can run exactly the same thing Intel chips can at the same price: the market gets fragmented, prices remain high and stagnant, and no one is the winner until one of the two gets clobbered, eliminating competition in the market and raising prices even further.
It's not characteristic for Intel to follow AMD, but IMO, it's the smart thing to do to be competitive.
Oh yes, just because they are following, doesn't mean they can't do it better. AMD did in the 90's and today.
The graphic link is now off the main page.
The article itself seems to have been heavily gutted as well. I don't remember seeing so many one-liner paragraphs than before.
RFIDs, like bar codes, are not emitting devices, meaning that they don't send out signals. They interact with an external data source, like a scanner, to retreive data and to respond to data requests.
As such, they can easily be evaded. In fact, it's easier to tamper with RFIDs than barcodes simply because of the fact that tampered RFIDs are as not visually identifiable as barcodes (i.e. The naked eye can see if someone's ripped out the barcode or taped something over it). Any man with motivation can buy a RFIDs reprogrammer on EBay, walk into Walmart, and effectively make all boxes of whole wheat cheerios identify as gold-pressed latinum. Imagine the riots that could occur at the checkout lines when old ladies have to pay thousands of dollars to satisfy their daily intake of fibre.
All that tampering can be done without drawing attention to the culprit: you can hear a person cut or rip a box apart, but you can't hear binary code being reprogrammed through a contactless RFIDs programmer.
There are greater dangers than old ladies not getting their recommended daily intake of fibre.
I think the problem with teaching programming to youth these days is the perception of learning a "language". Instead of subjecting students to the CONCEPTS of programming, such as inheritence, oop, etc., schools are more inclined to teach children languages instead. It produces grades, I presume.
The trouble with that presumption is that kids get so accustomed to one language that when they get to college and learn the concepts, they have to throw all they learned out the window and start fresh. Why can't we start these kids off the right foot and wean them off of the language dependency?The way I see it is children should be taught the fundamentals of programing at a relatively young age (12-16), like looping and recursion, and let them experiment with the fundamentals with their own choice of language.
There must be a clear distinction made between deregulation and delegation.
In many cases around the world, including Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Japan (Not sure about the US, someone can clarify), xDSL service may be delegated to a 3rd party to eliminate some of the burden on the call centres of the larger Telcos, although the backbone, routing equipment, and in some cases even consumer equipment, remain property of the Telcos. When delegation exist, there is little the consumer can do but put up with the hot air and incompetence of these big, monopolistic telcos. The reason why these "delegated" smaller agents have as poor a service as their larger counterparts because they have NO incentive to put a smile on their face. The consumer prices are just the same, the costs incurred by smaller companies to the large Telcos are at parity, and consumers choose whatever they hear is best from their best friend's neighbour's dog.
In very VERY small cases where true deregulation exist and competing organizations can lay their own fibre-optic lines to serve the community, prices are driven down and service improves drastically.
Such is the price of false deregulation.
I'm quite sure this... thing... will never be allowed in Canada because:
a. It's too fast for all the old ladies to watch their grandchildren fall to their deaths
b. Will make people on the ground have motion sickness.
Damn. I have motion sickness just LOOKING at those stills.
Think of it: id Software can be the first game company to be qualified advertise games with "Real Life Space Physics" if John Carmack comes back alive from one of his space flights.
Coming Soon: Doom VIII: Space Warfare
Branding all customers as pirates, giving out terse PR statements, and not providing satisfactory responses are just consequences of the record companies having exclusive access to popular media.
Look at the airline industry: polite, apologetic, and responsive. Why? There's hundreds of competitive airlines out there.
Look at the Record Industry: rude, unresponsive, and completely devoid of PR sense -- Consequence of record companies colluding with each other record companies to maintain their monopoly.
There ARE avenues of competition, such as pay-per-use Internet media distribution, but they nixed it at governmental levels because it threatens their monopolistic attitude.
What record companies don't understand is that if they treat consumers with respect and ship products at reasonable prices to compensate for a good piece of recorded media, consumers would be more inclined to purchase such products instead of downloading it off of Kazaa. What's worse is that these "state of the art" copy protection measures are so breakable that they tend to show up on Kazaa in no time flat.
Stupid? Not in the least. When the industry was established, the government had no idea it would flurish, and left it to rot and die. In a turnabout of events, the industry grew exponentially, and now the government wants to succeed off of the pioneers who have worked with a set of rules since the industry began to take off.
Rules and regulations did not materialize because the government did not see full potential of the internet, and they sat on their laurels. There's a term for this: Bandwagon hopping. There's another term for this: Leeching.
Using Enron as a parallel is irresponsible at best. What Enron did was criminal, while what e-tailers are doing are adhering to rules that were simply set to such a lax state because governments were too lazy to focus on an industry that "just wouldn't fly" 8 years ago.
The e-tailing industry prides itself being different than traditional retailers due to the fact that it is free of taxes and govo-economic meddling that traditional retailers are stuck with. The entire industry was built based on that fact, when the industry was established, the government failed to change or make rules dealing with taxation.
It isn't a subsidy when the government slaps you with a penalty because your industry is partially successful after a long period of time. This isn't a subsidy, it's changing the rules after the fact, and it's a poor policy at best, if not downright unethical.
Products "Made in the USA" outnumbers products at least 100-1 in China. Products "Made in China" outnumbers products at least 100-1 in the USA. Putting further import taxes would actually INCREASE the prices of general products overall because import tariffs would give FURTHER dis-incentives to investors from importing products into the USA, and since there is less foriegn competition, domestic producers would be free to increase prices because they have a virtual domestic monopoly. Increasing import tariffs would actually be worse off for both the consumer and the long-term economic outlook. Sure, GDP will rise, but at the expense of worker livelihood and domestic morale. One more thing: China has a extremely high GDP not because of economic tariffs, but because of the political circumstances surrounding its tradidional isolationalist thinking of "Motherland products are best".
What politicians fail to understand is that the major draw to e-tailing is the lack of taxes. Sure, shopping online a huge convenience, but people today would still choose to drive to their local retailer and actually touch and try out a product before making a purchase, and forcing taxes on e-tailing would take away any incentive for consumers to use the services of the fledging new industry.
With huge competition with prices and selection from traditional real-life retailiers such as Walmart and Best Buy, e-tailers are already having enough trouble trying to grow their new industry. Slapping taxes and removing incentives for consumers to use online services would only impair progress. We're already seeing the effects of fees on online services and its related decrease in usage (MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail), taxes would further the disincentive campaign that seems to be propagating through the online world.It's a frabricated market based on a set of unfounded restrictions. In the real world, it's called fraud.
So radio signals aren't to blame for screwing with the navigational and computer systems of commercial aircraft. This development basically contradicts everything major Airlines have said to prevent the use of mobile phones on flights.
More frigtening would be the prospect of electronic companies develping "airplane-safe" electronics, such as radio-signal free CD players, PDAs, laptops, etc. What's to stop airlines from demanding passengers from purchasing "safe" products and completely banning mainstream electronics on planes, and in return making us pay more money for redundent electronics? The development of such items would be a cash cow, targeting those who travel often, but are routinely forced to turn off our MD Walkmans and laptops because the flight attendent thinks it's going to screw with the electronics in the cockpit.
Just think: "I'm sorry sir, but that's not a United Airlines Sony walkman. We can't permit you using that on the flight sir. Please go to the airport gift shop and buy a $400 new walkman."
It's not extremely surprising. Most asian computer users are still not very well versed in the English language, and that is proven in some of the email text found on virus infected emails.
Because of the poor grasp of English, emails with attached 'cute wallpaper', 'nude pics of Brittney', and 'Figures you please review' will be opened 8 our of 10 times.
Without a big flashing strobe light on top of monitors that would alarm when an infected email appears, most asian users will continue to open infected email without a second thought.
Repeated beatings of the gaming industry can't be rescued by a single validation. What really needs to be done is that society must realize that not all disasterous things int he world can be blamed on the gaming industry. When that happens, then it will be a true validation of pc/console gaming.
Financial compensation should not be used as a relative scale for the level of responsibility you have the public.
A 16-year old would be reprimanded for flipping a Whopper the wrong way, and he gets paid a fraction of what a developer is getting paid. Does that mean we should let that kid off scott free if he spits in a burger or two?
CEOs are held accountable for fudging their books, so why aren't developers held accountable for their backdoors and vulnerabilities?
These bugs cost money, and public confidence in their product and general products in the industry. The Word97 situation is no different than those of Enron or Worldcom, except the people prosecuted should be front line workers.
Idiotic behaviour, either with accounting or with C++, should be punished to deter future screw-ups.
Yea.... this has been a recurring problem. I've been getting weird clicking noises since a year ago, and it finally died on me a week ago. Came home one night, the computer froze, but the HD Access light was on. It was plain on, so I reset, W2K startup screen started, then this weird screeching noise occured, then W2K bluescreened, giving me a HD error. I just sent my drive to IBM to be replaced, but since I live in Canada, I don't expect back for a few months. Last time I checked the store I go to, they pulled the 60GXPs because of some 'unknown fault', and they refused to stock 75GXPs. Not good. I just want a drive I can use without dying.