The current state of the USPTO could allow me to patent a method for buying "hot stocks" now with information from the future based on my special method for "non-temporal pipelining" to send stock results from www.nyse.com a few months in the future to >/dev/hotstocks. With enough references cited, and some "work", I'm sure I could patent this.
The entire IT staff. We have a pretty small budget for staffing. But our organization will jump quickly to get more PCs for the end users.
Isn't this Already the "Word on the Street"?
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Ignore Vista Until 2008
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Where I work we still have more Win2K than XP Pro because the move from NT4 to AD was a long and involved process for 3000+ machines and a team of 3 people to do it. When we got to Win2K AD (we STILL have NT4 domains because of crap legacy software we HAVE to have!) the move to XP was not relished. We've been doing it a building at a time now (60 buildings) and it's going. But this is 2005 going on 2006 and XP came out in 2002. So, you could say we are doing "managed diversity" in a big way. I don't see how this approach to Vista is any different than the way most wise insitutions proceed.
...rip to the format you need (I use Ogg Vorbis) and make sure your player will work with that format. IF you ever need to change formats because some braindead corporation decides that all music must now be in another format you can take one of two approaches:
1. Keep listening to old music on the player that already works in the format that already works and find something that works for the new format only for new purchases. 2. Find a new player based on an un-DRMed format and migrated from your CDs to the new format.
The only problem with my approach is that it "breaks" when the music industry decides to stop making CDs. So far, I've only been through two music players in six years. One for my car that I bought in 1999 that uses CD-Rs to play MP3s and my more recently purchased Rio Karma (with Ogg Vorbis support!). The nice thing is that I now carry my Karma and a transmitter with me everywhere. Nothing nicer than carrying more music than you'll ever listen to in one sitting with you at all times.:)
Re:until wine is merged into the linux kernel
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Cedega 5.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Your Slashdot ID suits you well young padwan... Watch and learn:
why would a bunch of windows shared libraries be in the linux kernel? they're not in the windows kernel.
They should go into the kernel for PRECISELY that reason. Microsoft wasn't innovative enough to think of what I've come up with and they will loose for it. By putting them in the kernel instead of luser space, they have total access to the system meaning absolute power!! They will outprform the sludge that comes out of Microsoft 10,000,000 fold!
do you even know the difference between the kernel and userspace?
Of COURSE IS DO!!! The kernel is where everything runs fast because it has absolute power!!! Luserspace is where everything runs slow because administrators don't want to give users absolute power! So if you move anything from luserspace to the kernel it will run 10,000,000 times faster than before! The system admins are just greedy and want to keep absolute power for themselves. I want Outlook running on my Unix box as root!!!
You realise that it's impossible to impress women with/. posts, right?
Uhh... I beg to differ. In fact I was at a bar last night and I got two luscious women to come home with me after I told them about how my hot tub runs on Linux. It's all in the attitude... (well that and the fact that I asked nearly every woman in the bar to come back and look at my Linux based hot tub)
The Microsoft dominated computer industry won't go away until Wine is merged into the Linux kernel so that it gets optimal performance and actually out-Windows Windows itself. Just imagine if the entire whole of Cedega was merged into the Linux kernel to be a completely self contained OS that runs all Windows applications including virii, wormii and and server applications. Just imagine what a combo like Linux + Cedega + IIS would wrought on the world!? It would be awesome. Microsoft would drop dead in it's tracks and no one would ever use Windows again. And not only that, you could run IIS at the same time that you have Unreal 2008 running at 20,000 frames per second with total perspective vortex shading. This would go a long way to improving the work conditions of many IT grunts because the production servers would now be useful for more important things than serving out the corporate web site.:)
You couldn't be MORE wrong than ever now could you? Linux Tovalds is not a business man. He's a communist. He believes in sharing his operating system so that he can infect machines with the biggest communist virus ever written by man. And why? I have it on good authority that he plans to utilize the Linux kernel in every computer to pull off a mass DDoS attack with millions of machines in unison against the American nations of the world. If you love American and your country you will join with Microsoft and SCO now in opposing the threat of this international terrorist by buying a copy of Windows XP for every electronic device in your house connected by a wire to the internet. Yes this even means to anything plugged into the mains because it's indirectly a channel to the internet since the grounding in all electonirc equipment is connected to everything else.
We have a plan to keep this from happening and it involves extensive litigation against Linux Torvalds and his corporation IBM. The big blue has been infected and is to be financially quarantined until further notice. Only buy stocks from true red blooded American nations like Seattle where Microsoft is and Utah where SCO is and invest in your country. All Americna nations of the world unite against this threat!!! We will not let the communists win! We will not let the spirit of sharing without earning prevail!! We must fight back against the oppressors linke teh Linux Tovalds and teh BSD!!!!!! Join me!!!
The television infrastructure in the US could be SO MUCH better than it is if it weren't for the rampant money grab these idiots are making on a daily basis. Instead of serving the customer they are serving the shareholders. It didn't used to be this way. It used to be a two way street where the networks actually made programs that people wanted to watch and in exchange people saw commercials for products they might actually be interested. Here we are 60-some years later and we are deluged with MORE advertising than ever and it's for shady loan companies, fly-by-night weight loss formulas (read "snakeoil") and 900 numbers for every kind of moronic obsession from fortune telling to phone sex. Any why? Because it makes a very small group of people very rich. They are no longer serving the customers. If they were they wouldn't be misinforming and making people dumber with crap programming and the advertising of products that are just barely legal.
I remember once reading the excited statements of the early engineers behind television in the 20th century. They believed (much like the internet in the 80s and 90s) that this new and wonderful technology would be used to bring culture, education and entertainment to the masses. They envisioned visual travelogues, remote classrooms, orchstral, operatic and stage productions being brought into people's living rooms. A populace with access to high quality content to enrich their minds and their lives. So we have the poorest funded public television network (PBS) that has to rely on donations because good quality television isn't profitable. Just like good quality internet resources aren't profitable.
It's not just the content that's crap. It's also the service. When I was growing up TV was percieved as "free" entertainment because you could just buy a TV and watch. Then cable came along with the promise of commercial free television. (PBS also offers this but no one is paying attention or paying donations) People rejoiced at the success of capitalism + television. You could PAY for better quality TV! But slowly the ads crept back in. Now you can't escape them. While the movies on certain cable and satellite channels might be free of commercials, the in between slots are marred with MORE commercials.
And your provider has the right to slap commercials over top of the network feed. Thereby allowing them far too much control over say... political ads. If the provider is biased towards a certain party or candidate, they can now completely slam competing candidates or issues out of your view without your consent. They can also make sure you're only aware of certain products. It's all too much control.
Why don't we have the promised "video dialtone" that AT&T was once working on? At one time there was talk of a new approach to video. TRUE on-demand content. And not just controlled content but ANY content. An actual realtime video library with on-demand access. It's a friday night and you want to watch a 50s Sci-Fi movie. You just do a search through the catalog, select the movie you want to watch. Go get some popcorn, come back and start the playback. You need to go to the bathroom? Pause it. Come back and pick up where you left off. You need to rewatch a section? Just rewind it. And since it's not tape, it's just the drag of a slider on your screen through a GUI. Once you're done watching it, the fair price charge ($.25 per hour) gets added to your phone bill. You only pay for what you watch.
Conversely, you want to watch the latest episode of a new series on SciFi, you again select from the same GUI based catalog and only get charged a fair price (which might be a bit higher for new content). Even better, for a slightly higher price you can watch it BEFORE it airs. True capitalism that works for the consumer and the service provider in a fair and balanced way instead of the rotten and corrupted version that has infected America. And if you REALLY wanted to own it, you could download it for a fair price a
According to the linked site, you are vulnerable if you are running PHP (version?) and have a/{website dir}/cgi-bin directory. I guess that means anyone runnign PHP is vulnerable?
...on how much responsibility you want to take for the open source/free software you use. Honestly... when was the last time any of us really needed paid support for a lot of the most popular FOSS software? I haven't used paid support AT ALL since moving from Windows to Linux. I'm also very willing to take on the responsibility of solving problems with the FOSS software I use at work. Many times the "worst" of it is in an extended Google search since many other people are likely to have experienced the same problem that I have.
Now, regarding paid support... I have yet to have a paid support response that I feel warrants the highly expensive support contract fees we pay where I work. If we're paying thousands a year for support I want 24x7 and I want qualified support staff. I just had an experience over the weekend (involving the migration of software from one system to another) for software that we pay a LOT for support services. It was dismal as usual. We called the company's after hours support line at about 9:30PM on Saturday night. It was automated and stressed that we'd better be in a down/critical situation. We left our message with the correct information regarding contact and the problem being experienced.
The message on their end stated as 60 minute response time. However, their support person managed to call the wrong number and we didn't hear anything. So we called back and actually got a human this time. After talking to the support person for a while, the person said they would call us back after doing some research. Since this product is HIGHLY PROPRIETARY, my Google searches only brought back two responses to the error message we were getting on our server. And those search results were only viewable in cached form. They were... cached web sites that use the same producvt who were experiencing the same error. That is to say the cached pages were just those sites displaying the same error at one point. No forum discussions. No knowledgebase articles. Nothing helpful.
Eventually we got a call back from support and this person had tripped through their internal knowledgebase which gave the most common cause of the error with no other suggestions. We verified that it wasn't the most common factor causing our error after which the support person said, "Well, I'm sorry folks. Maybe you should move back to the old system". WTF?! Fortunately, we pressed them to find someone else to give us a better answer and we eventually got a call from someone else who asked more pointed questions that eventually led to a solution but it took three hours to get to that point.
Ideally, we should have gotten a call from the second person right off the bat since our details were very specific. And that person should have been knowledgable enough to know for certain what was causing the problem. For god sakes, we're paying a LOT of money for support. Enough to staff one person yearly very comfortably. We should have had an answer within no more than 90 minutes. If this had been a FOSS project instead of proprietary crap, I would have had an answer in minutes since the error is definitely caused by a very finite list of factors. Sadly, that is not the case with proprietary software. And this is one of the BETTER experiences I've had with paid support!
The usual is more along the lines of me calling an issue in and having to hound them every few hours or days until I get an answer. Many times the answer is just, "uhhhhh... hmmmm... it SHOULD work...". I'm sorry but I'm more than willing to replace proprietary stuff with well known, well supported FOSS offerings: Apache, BIND, ISC DHCP, the Linux kernel, Bash, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, etc... And if I really need a fast answer that I didn't find with a Google search, there are always FOSS coders that will fix stuff for a reasonable fee that ISN'T the equivalent of a year's salary. This Microsoft guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
There are many areas where GNU/Linux distros (and the other *nix-like OSes) go far beyond anything that is possible in Windows or on the MacOS in terms of features. Many of these "beyond" areas would be VERY attractive to the average user. Unfortunately many of them are obscured behind the CLI or very complicated concepts. A few examples:
1. The xmdx extension for X window system (X.org) which would allow multiple machines to act as one shared screen over the network. Combined with the proper simple user interface and an xmdx aware pager, A user could execute their web browser on Machine A and go surfing. They could then drag-and-drop the browser to Machine B's desktop and keep on going down there. If this was further combined with an xmdx aware sound server, A music player could be made to follow it's user from machine to machine without ever stopping.
2. Virtualization might seem like a concept that would be useless to grandma, but you're not thinking straight if you believe that. If a GNU/Linux distro were set up to to run on top of a Xen paravirtualization environment in a transparent way and across multiple machines, imagine the user friendliness... To grandma, it looks like a desktop that is always where she left it and it never stops. She can shut her machine down and the Xen domain would migrate to the central home computer/data store.
3. Clustering. Again, a lot of people would think it's a dumb idea for "Joe Average" to have a cluster. But is it REALLY a dumb idea? I say no. Why should people be forced to throw away old computer systems once the latest version of Windows won't install? Why can't they just have an automatic cluster solution with a very transparent UI that provides them with MORE power than they would ever get from a single Windows box?
Just in general, the key should be to take very advanced concepts that don't even exist in the Windows world and make them available to the end-user in a very simple, transparent way. This is all possible with Linux. But most Linux folks don't think this way and therein lies the problem.
Back when the telephone system was actually reliable and "just worked" and was reasonably priced and didn't play stupid price gougin games. Unlike the nightmare hell of today's cell phone, VoIP, long distance and rural phone and feed outfits... Once again, "Yea de-regulation". They finished fucking up the phone industry and then they moved into energy and now we have the hell of utilities all playing games with you as well. Well done assholes. Well done...
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Some of this is also arrogant assumptions on all sides. The pro-MS camp is going to test Office under Windows against OO.o under Windows. However, OO.o is a port. It wasn't written for Windows, so there are bound to be some performance issues. Likewise, the pro-OO.o camp will post their various figures proving otherwise while running OO.o under Linux or some other *nix. All the while not taking into account that "Joe Average" at home isn't going to be running the optimal OS for OO.o. I've even seen some weird responses on the ZDNet site. Like the guy who compared OO.o running under Linux with MS Office running under Wine and providing memory usages stats from that. That's just plain silly. Wine has a LOT of overhead, so it's unnfair comparison in much the same way that comparing MS Office on Windows to OO.o on Windows is. The real truth would be found in comparing MS Office on Windows with OO.o on a *nix and then providing the caveat that each Office suite is made to run well on a particular platform. That's the most realistic view. Of course when the AJAX based Office suites pop up all over the place, this will all be moot.
If I meant porn, I would have said porn. And I also would have said, "Lord knows that porn pushes the envelope of acceptable sexual behavior (if you're a conservative)".;P I'm a kidder...
How does this affect someone like me who hasn't watched an over the air transmission for the past five years? I have DirecTV (standard NTSC analogue video) and I haven't yet heard an announcement from them that they would be phasing out their analogue transmissions. So... will I be able to keep using my standard NTSC set up past Dec. 31, 2008? If not, then maybe I better consider switching to DirecTV HD? What say you?
Why would people want my IP address in their/etc/hosts file? And how did you find out about my IP? You must be one of those leet haxorz. I am not worthy... I am not worthy... I am not worthy...;P
Seeing that many signs of the end times are popping up all over the place... How many of you are aware of the fact that G. W. Bush has requested the power to use military against American citizens in the United States in places where Avian Flu hits? I suppose that makes an even stronger point that G.W. Bush is the long professed anti-Christ that we were all taught about in Sunday school at the First Assemlies of God. (If you don't belong to the First Assemblies, then you need to check your faith and get saved brother) Believe you me, G.W. Bush is the genuine article. Just look at how much disaster has occurred during his administration and how little he's done to actually solve the problems. And yet, just as it was predicted in Revelations, G.W. Bush is still seen as the man with the answers. Even the latest Supreme Court nominee has stated that G.W. Bush is the smartest man she's ever met in her life. It's all so clear and only the true believers can see the truth. The anti-Christ is here and alive and well in the White House my bretheren. Vote Christian. Vote Democrat.
Well... outside of my occasional participation in Troll Tuesday madness, I tend to think I'm pretty reasonable. Perhaps it was one of my political comments? I'm a leftie, but love to play the whacked out neocon occasionally. I'm a free/open software supporter, but I like to play at being a clueless Windows jock at times. And sometimes I just like to pretend that I think I get it but I really don't just to mess with people. However, I'm open enough to have a few conservative friends and Windows gurus in my life with no real strife outside of friendly sparring. If you found any of the above positive reasons to foe me, then I understand. Otherwise, I'm not sure.
Hardware support through the ALSA project continues to get better. Especially in the pro/semi-pro gear arena. I made the switch from Windows to Linux last year when I saw that my Echo Layla was supported by a third-party ALSA driver that is now integrated into the main ALSA tree. What's even better is that USB and Firewire device support is becoming "the standard" for audio gear. As long as the hardware is made to USB/Firewire spec, ALSA will be able to support a wide variety of audio hardware for consumer, semi-pro and pro gear. Trust me. I went to school for audio production and have had various stints producing audio on everything from Digidesign Protools, Studer Dyaxis, Adobe Audition, Cakewalk Pro Audio, and Cubase VST 24. From what I'm seeing out of the Planet CCRMA project, the FOSS based DAWs for anyone are not too far in the future. Meaning that software that is more powerful than what you can get from proprietary businesses and if free of charge WILL drive some people towards Linux.
1. Why in the hell did you foe me? 2. In response to the GPPs gripe about Audacity, I agree to a certain extent. But I have to say that the Rezound audio editor is a much better choice for stereo editing and mastering. 3. Why did you foe me?
Slashdot Mirror
The current state of the USPTO could allow me to patent a method for buying "hot stocks" now with information from the future based on my special method for "non-temporal pipelining" to send stock results from www.nyse.com a few months in the future to > /dev/hotstocks. With enough references cited, and some "work", I'm sure I could patent this.
The entire IT staff. We have a pretty small budget for staffing. But our organization will jump quickly to get more PCs for the end users.
Where I work we still have more Win2K than XP Pro because the move from NT4 to AD was a long and involved process for 3000+ machines and a team of 3 people to do it. When we got to Win2K AD (we STILL have NT4 domains because of crap legacy software we HAVE to have!) the move to XP was not relished. We've been doing it a building at a time now (60 buildings) and it's going. But this is 2005 going on 2006 and XP came out in 2002. So, you could say we are doing "managed diversity" in a big way. I don't see how this approach to Vista is any different than the way most wise insitutions proceed.
...rip to the format you need (I use Ogg Vorbis) and make sure your player will work with that format. IF you ever need to change formats because some braindead corporation decides that all music must now be in another format you can take one of two approaches:
:)
1. Keep listening to old music on the player that already works in the format that already works and find something that works for the new format only for new purchases.
2. Find a new player based on an un-DRMed format and migrated from your CDs to the new format.
The only problem with my approach is that it "breaks" when the music industry decides to stop making CDs. So far, I've only been through two music players in six years. One for my car that I bought in 1999 that uses CD-Rs to play MP3s and my more recently purchased Rio Karma (with Ogg Vorbis support!). The nice thing is that I now carry my Karma and a transmitter with me everywhere. Nothing nicer than carrying more music than you'll ever listen to in one sitting with you at all times.
why would a bunch of windows shared libraries be in the linux kernel? they're not in the windows kernel.
They should go into the kernel for PRECISELY that reason. Microsoft wasn't innovative enough to think of what I've come up with and they will loose for it. By putting them in the kernel instead of luser space, they have total access to the system meaning absolute power!! They will outprform the sludge that comes out of Microsoft 10,000,000 fold!
do you even know the difference between the kernel and userspace?
Of COURSE IS DO!!! The kernel is where everything runs fast because it has absolute power!!! Luserspace is where everything runs slow because administrators don't want to give users absolute power! So if you move anything from luserspace to the kernel it will run 10,000,000 times faster than before! The system admins are just greedy and want to keep absolute power for themselves. I want Outlook running on my Unix box as root!!!
You realise that it's impossible to impress women with /. posts, right?
Uhh... I beg to differ. In fact I was at a bar last night and I got two luscious women to come home with me after I told them about how my hot tub runs on Linux. It's all in the attitude... (well that and the fact that I asked nearly every woman in the bar to come back and look at my Linux based hot tub)
The Microsoft dominated computer industry won't go away until Wine is merged into the Linux kernel so that it gets optimal performance and actually out-Windows Windows itself. Just imagine if the entire whole of Cedega was merged into the Linux kernel to be a completely self contained OS that runs all Windows applications including virii, wormii and and server applications. Just imagine what a combo like Linux + Cedega + IIS would wrought on the world!? It would be awesome. Microsoft would drop dead in it's tracks and no one would ever use Windows again. And not only that, you could run IIS at the same time that you have Unreal 2008 running at 20,000 frames per second with total perspective vortex shading. This would go a long way to improving the work conditions of many IT grunts because the production servers would now be useful for more important things than serving out the corporate web site. :)
No. I think you are thinking of the rather out of fashion "Slim Shadier".
You couldn't be MORE wrong than ever now could you? Linux Tovalds is not a business man. He's a communist. He believes in sharing his operating system so that he can infect machines with the biggest communist virus ever written by man. And why? I have it on good authority that he plans to utilize the Linux kernel in every computer to pull off a mass DDoS attack with millions of machines in unison against the American nations of the world. If you love American and your country you will join with Microsoft and SCO now in opposing the threat of this international terrorist by buying a copy of Windows XP for every electronic device in your house connected by a wire to the internet. Yes this even means to anything plugged into the mains because it's indirectly a channel to the internet since the grounding in all electonirc equipment is connected to everything else.
We have a plan to keep this from happening and it involves extensive litigation against Linux Torvalds and his corporation IBM. The big blue has been infected and is to be financially quarantined until further notice. Only buy stocks from true red blooded American nations like Seattle where Microsoft is and Utah where SCO is and invest in your country. All Americna nations of the world unite against this threat!!! We will not let the communists win! We will not let the spirit of sharing without earning prevail!! We must fight back against the oppressors linke teh Linux Tovalds and teh BSD!!!!!! Join me!!!
The television infrastructure in the US could be SO MUCH better than it is if it weren't for the rampant money grab these idiots are making on a daily basis. Instead of serving the customer they are serving the shareholders. It didn't used to be this way. It used to be a two way street where the networks actually made programs that people wanted to watch and in exchange people saw commercials for products they might actually be interested. Here we are 60-some years later and we are deluged with MORE advertising than ever and it's for shady loan companies, fly-by-night weight loss formulas (read "snakeoil") and 900 numbers for every kind of moronic obsession from fortune telling to phone sex. Any why? Because it makes a very small group of people very rich. They are no longer serving the customers. If they were they wouldn't be misinforming and making people dumber with crap programming and the advertising of products that are just barely legal.
I remember once reading the excited statements of the early engineers behind television in the 20th century. They believed (much like the internet in the 80s and 90s) that this new and wonderful technology would be used to bring culture, education and entertainment to the masses. They envisioned visual travelogues, remote classrooms, orchstral, operatic and stage productions being brought into people's living rooms. A populace with access to high quality content to enrich their minds and their lives. So we have the poorest funded public television network (PBS) that has to rely on donations because good quality television isn't profitable. Just like good quality internet resources aren't profitable.
It's not just the content that's crap. It's also the service. When I was growing up TV was percieved as "free" entertainment because you could just buy a TV and watch. Then cable came along with the promise of commercial free television. (PBS also offers this but no one is paying attention or paying donations) People rejoiced at the success of capitalism + television. You could PAY for better quality TV! But slowly the ads crept back in. Now you can't escape them. While the movies on certain cable and satellite channels might be free of commercials, the in between slots are marred with MORE commercials.
And your provider has the right to slap commercials over top of the network feed. Thereby allowing them far too much control over say... political ads. If the provider is biased towards a certain party or candidate, they can now completely slam competing candidates or issues out of your view without your consent. They can also make sure you're only aware of certain products. It's all too much control.
Why don't we have the promised "video dialtone" that AT&T was once working on? At one time there was talk of a new approach to video. TRUE on-demand content. And not just controlled content but ANY content. An actual realtime video library with on-demand access. It's a friday night and you want to watch a 50s Sci-Fi movie. You just do a search through the catalog, select the movie you want to watch. Go get some popcorn, come back and start the playback. You need to go to the bathroom? Pause it. Come back and pick up where you left off. You need to rewatch a section? Just rewind it. And since it's not tape, it's just the drag of a slider on your screen through a GUI. Once you're done watching it, the fair price charge ($.25 per hour) gets added to your phone bill. You only pay for what you watch.
Conversely, you want to watch the latest episode of a new series on SciFi, you again select from the same GUI based catalog and only get charged a fair price (which might be a bit higher for new content). Even better, for a slightly higher price you can watch it BEFORE it airs. True capitalism that works for the consumer and the service provider in a fair and balanced way instead of the rotten and corrupted version that has infected America. And if you REALLY wanted to own it, you could download it for a fair price a
According to the linked site, you are vulnerable if you are running PHP (version?) and have a /{website dir}/cgi-bin directory. I guess that means anyone runnign PHP is vulnerable?
...on how much responsibility you want to take for the open source/free software you use. Honestly... when was the last time any of us really needed paid support for a lot of the most popular FOSS software? I haven't used paid support AT ALL since moving from Windows to Linux. I'm also very willing to take on the responsibility of solving problems with the FOSS software I use at work. Many times the "worst" of it is in an extended Google search since many other people are likely to have experienced the same problem that I have.
Now, regarding paid support... I have yet to have a paid support response that I feel warrants the highly expensive support contract fees we pay where I work. If we're paying thousands a year for support I want 24x7 and I want qualified support staff. I just had an experience over the weekend (involving the migration of software from one system to another) for software that we pay a LOT for support services. It was dismal as usual. We called the company's after hours support line at about 9:30PM on Saturday night. It was automated and stressed that we'd better be in a down/critical situation. We left our message with the correct information regarding contact and the problem being experienced.
The message on their end stated as 60 minute response time. However, their support person managed to call the wrong number and we didn't hear anything. So we called back and actually got a human this time. After talking to the support person for a while, the person said they would call us back after doing some research. Since this product is HIGHLY PROPRIETARY, my Google searches only brought back two responses to the error message we were getting on our server. And those search results were only viewable in cached form. They were... cached web sites that use the same producvt who were experiencing the same error. That is to say the cached pages were just those sites displaying the same error at one point. No forum discussions. No knowledgebase articles. Nothing helpful.
Eventually we got a call back from support and this person had tripped through their internal knowledgebase which gave the most common cause of the error with no other suggestions. We verified that it wasn't the most common factor causing our error after which the support person said, "Well, I'm sorry folks. Maybe you should move back to the old system". WTF?! Fortunately, we pressed them to find someone else to give us a better answer and we eventually got a call from someone else who asked more pointed questions that eventually led to a solution but it took three hours to get to that point.
Ideally, we should have gotten a call from the second person right off the bat since our details were very specific. And that person should have been knowledgable enough to know for certain what was causing the problem. For god sakes, we're paying a LOT of money for support. Enough to staff one person yearly very comfortably. We should have had an answer within no more than 90 minutes. If this had been a FOSS project instead of proprietary crap, I would have had an answer in minutes since the error is definitely caused by a very finite list of factors. Sadly, that is not the case with proprietary software. And this is one of the BETTER experiences I've had with paid support!
The usual is more along the lines of me calling an issue in and having to hound them every few hours or days until I get an answer. Many times the answer is just, "uhhhhh... hmmmm... it SHOULD work...". I'm sorry but I'm more than willing to replace proprietary stuff with well known, well supported FOSS offerings: Apache, BIND, ISC DHCP, the Linux kernel, Bash, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, etc... And if I really need a fast answer that I didn't find with a Google search, there are always FOSS coders that will fix stuff for a reasonable fee that ISN'T the equivalent of a year's salary. This Microsoft guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Come on dude! This is Slashdot! Where's the fun in reading an article before posting uninformed flambait/trolls? Where's your sense of community? ;P
There are many areas where GNU/Linux distros (and the other *nix-like OSes) go far beyond anything that is possible in Windows or on the MacOS in terms of features. Many of these "beyond" areas would be VERY attractive to the average user. Unfortunately many of them are obscured behind the CLI or very complicated concepts. A few examples:
1. The xmdx extension for X window system (X.org) which would allow multiple machines to act as one shared screen over the network. Combined with the proper simple user interface and an xmdx aware pager, A user could execute their web browser on Machine A and go surfing. They could then drag-and-drop the browser to Machine B's desktop and keep on going down there. If this was further combined with an xmdx aware sound server, A music player could be made to follow it's user from machine to machine without ever stopping.
2. Virtualization might seem like a concept that would be useless to grandma, but you're not thinking straight if you believe that. If a GNU/Linux distro were set up to to run on top of a Xen paravirtualization environment in a transparent way and across multiple machines, imagine the user friendliness... To grandma, it looks like a desktop that is always where she left it and it never stops. She can shut her machine down and the Xen domain would migrate to the central home computer/data store.
3. Clustering. Again, a lot of people would think it's a dumb idea for "Joe Average" to have a cluster. But is it REALLY a dumb idea? I say no. Why should people be forced to throw away old computer systems once the latest version of Windows won't install? Why can't they just have an automatic cluster solution with a very transparent UI that provides them with MORE power than they would ever get from a single Windows box?
Just in general, the key should be to take very advanced concepts that don't even exist in the Windows world and make them available to the end-user in a very simple, transparent way. This is all possible with Linux. But most Linux folks don't think this way and therein lies the problem.
I'm sorry but there is only one solution to all statistical problems that require tracking data. The Count from Sesame Street:
;P
"One!! One car travelling down i90!!! Ahahahahah!!! Two!! Two cars travelling down i90!!! Ahahahahaha!!!..."
This is just as ridiculous as the Count from Sesame Street claiming that he has a list of IP violations in Linux in the SCO case. I can hear it now:
"One! One IP violation!!! Hahahahahah! Two!! Two IP violations!!!! Ahahahahaha!!!!"...
Back when the telephone system was actually reliable and "just worked" and was reasonably priced and didn't play stupid price gougin games. Unlike the nightmare hell of today's cell phone, VoIP, long distance and rural phone and feed outfits... Once again, "Yea de-regulation". They finished fucking up the phone industry and then they moved into energy and now we have the hell of utilities all playing games with you as well. Well done assholes. Well done...
Some of this is also arrogant assumptions on all sides. The pro-MS camp is going to test Office under Windows against OO.o under Windows. However, OO.o is a port. It wasn't written for Windows, so there are bound to be some performance issues. Likewise, the pro-OO.o camp will post their various figures proving otherwise while running OO.o under Linux or some other *nix. All the while not taking into account that "Joe Average" at home isn't going to be running the optimal OS for OO.o. I've even seen some weird responses on the ZDNet site. Like the guy who compared OO.o running under Linux with MS Office running under Wine and providing memory usages stats from that. That's just plain silly. Wine has a LOT of overhead, so it's unnfair comparison in much the same way that comparing MS Office on Windows to OO.o on Windows is. The real truth would be found in comparing MS Office on Windows with OO.o on a *nix and then providing the caveat that each Office suite is made to run well on a particular platform. That's the most realistic view. Of course when the AJAX based Office suites pop up all over the place, this will all be moot.
If I meant porn, I would have said porn. And I also would have said, "Lord knows that porn pushes the envelope of acceptable sexual behavior (if you're a conservative)". ;P I'm a kidder...
...Quake 4 will play at decent speeds on my next computer? Lord knows gaming really pushes the envelope of power.
How does this affect someone like me who hasn't watched an over the air transmission for the past five years? I have DirecTV (standard NTSC analogue video) and I haven't yet heard an announcement from them that they would be phasing out their analogue transmissions. So... will I be able to keep using my standard NTSC set up past Dec. 31, 2008? If not, then maybe I better consider switching to DirecTV HD? What say you?
Why would people want my IP address in their /etc/hosts file? And how did you find out about my IP? You must be one of those leet haxorz. I am not worthy... I am not worthy... I am not worthy... ;P
Here's how it's done:
Seeing that many signs of the end times are popping up all over the place... How many of you are aware of the fact that G. W. Bush has requested the power to use military against American citizens in the United States in places where Avian Flu hits? I suppose that makes an even stronger point that G.W. Bush is the long professed anti-Christ that we were all taught about in Sunday school at the First Assemlies of God. (If you don't belong to the First Assemblies, then you need to check your faith and get saved brother) Believe you me, G.W. Bush is the genuine article. Just look at how much disaster has occurred during his administration and how little he's done to actually solve the problems. And yet, just as it was predicted in Revelations, G.W. Bush is still seen as the man with the answers. Even the latest Supreme Court nominee has stated that G.W. Bush is the smartest man she's ever met in her life. It's all so clear and only the true believers can see the truth. The anti-Christ is here and alive and well in the White House my bretheren. Vote Christian. Vote Democrat.
Well... outside of my occasional participation in Troll Tuesday madness, I tend to think I'm pretty reasonable. Perhaps it was one of my political comments? I'm a leftie, but love to play the whacked out neocon occasionally. I'm a free/open software supporter, but I like to play at being a clueless Windows jock at times. And sometimes I just like to pretend that I think I get it but I really don't just to mess with people. However, I'm open enough to have a few conservative friends and Windows gurus in my life with no real strife outside of friendly sparring. If you found any of the above positive reasons to foe me, then I understand. Otherwise, I'm not sure.
Hardware support through the ALSA project continues to get better. Especially in the pro/semi-pro gear arena. I made the switch from Windows to Linux last year when I saw that my Echo Layla was supported by a third-party ALSA driver that is now integrated into the main ALSA tree. What's even better is that USB and Firewire device support is becoming "the standard" for audio gear. As long as the hardware is made to USB/Firewire spec, ALSA will be able to support a wide variety of audio hardware for consumer, semi-pro and pro gear. Trust me. I went to school for audio production and have had various stints producing audio on everything from Digidesign Protools, Studer Dyaxis, Adobe Audition, Cakewalk Pro Audio, and Cubase VST 24. From what I'm seeing out of the Planet CCRMA project, the FOSS based DAWs for anyone are not too far in the future. Meaning that software that is more powerful than what you can get from proprietary businesses and if free of charge WILL drive some people towards Linux.
1. Why in the hell did you foe me?
2. In response to the GPPs gripe about Audacity, I agree to a certain extent. But I have to say that the Rezound audio editor is a much better choice for stereo editing and mastering.
3. Why did you foe me?