"For the most part companies require at least some custom written software to do their work and fairly often this software is written in-house, by IT employees. now, say that company x needs some custom accounting software because the current enterprise accounting software packages don't have a feature that they need. they can a) tell their IT division to drop everything they're doing for a year or two and write this accounting system or b) tell their IT division to go download a GPL'ed accounting package, spend a couple days adding the needed feature, and release their changes under the GPL. the company in question would have saved hundred of thousands of dollars in labor and the GPL'ed accounting package would have an extra feature that may benifit some other company in the future. under a closed source system, those hudreds of thousands of dollars would have been wasted trying to "re-invent the wheel"
Yes, exactly, and this what a lot of people don't seem to understand, that there are people out there less interested in getting rich than they are in advancing the knowledge and capabilities of the human species.
Unlike the two IBM drives I've bought in the last year and a half, all the Maxtors I've bought in the last two years are still functioning perfectly. After my problems with the Deskstars I did some research and found a lot of other people having similar problems.
I know who I'm going to purchase from in the future. (Not to mention Maxtor has a great RMA system!)
and I've had zero success. Out of the two IBM drives I've bought I've had to RMA both of them (started out with clunking noises and both died completely within 9 months). It took IBM amost 6 weeks to get me my drives back. I've had one of the drives back since Christmas and IBM's site still shows the RMA hasn't shipped. IBM told me that the drive (a Deskstar 40g) was used too many hours (!) despite the fact that I had documented odd noises coming from it with their techs from day one (although they would not RMA it till it failed catastrophically, carrying two days work with it).
If I buy a brand new drive and am forced to ship it back to them within the first year of ownership I EXPECT A NEW DRIVE AS REPLACEMENT, NOT SOMEONE ELSE'S USED ONE. If I spent over a hundred bucks on a power saw from a tool shop and it failed within warranty, would they send me a used one in replacement? No, they'd most likely give me a new one off the shelf (and if they didn't I'd never shop there again)
Needless to say I will never buy another IBM drive and neither will our store.
One of them.
What I remember is Connie Chung with tears on her face while the footage played over and over again and nobody knew (tho we all really knew) whether or not the crew had survived.
I was 19 and it hurt more than anything - especially after all the months of accusations and counter-acc and all the crap; I knew at that time that the people of my generation would have no real chance at space travel.
oh, the pain, the pain
"I know who are younger basically shared your experience,"
For the generation before ours, it was "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"
History repeats itself, from generation to generation
CNN cameraman who immediately panned away from the explosion]
Oy, I remember that. Someone rushed into my optics class and told us the Challenger had exploded. We were all horrified and disbelieving.
I rushed home and caught a lot of CNN's coverage on tape. Only time I ever saw Connie Chung cry. I caught that part that you were talking about, but the tapes are goo now.
I had several friends wondering why I was so withdrawn?? for several days....and these were physics students.
The worst hurt was the lag before another launch. Public interest in space flight lagged out bad.
Its funding has never really been as high as was necessary
Funding is not the issue. Focus is.
We also need an easing of the restrictions (or at least some intelligent enforcement) on private launching.
NASA used to be good at research and cutting edge RD, that's where they should stay. Private companies should take up the commercial/science satellite launch burden more then they are.
Europe seems to have a business model for that which works.
and we say it over and over and still there's this huge growing population of people who can't believe facts. Anything to do with the bullshit one finds in most of the mainstream press? Naaaaahhhhhh....
You obviously don't use it. Or you're a troll. I don't really give a snit.
>Linux has a very unreliable filesystem
As opposed to Scandisk, which can't even run at all if there is something else going on? Like...Norton AV?
>Everybody uses Windows or BSD, nowadays
Bah
> Installation is a pain in the ass and it usually takes a whole support team to install a geeks' workstation
And a stable, up to date windows installation doesn't? I do this for a living and it's usually a two to six hour job (mostly those fvcking security updates) plus installing the applications they want to use, and those updates, etc, etc, plus finding alternatives to the so-called "signed Microsoft drivers" which usually don't work right.......
I can install Mandrake 8.2, KDE3, and the nvidia updates quicker on most of our new machines than I can install and update windows 98 or winXtraPokey - because I CAN SCRIPT THE INSTALL without paying money;-) AND MOST USERS HAVE ALL THE APPS THEY NEED CONTAINED IN THE INSTALL
>Installation and maintenance requires 4-5 times the bandwidth a 'normal' OS would require
ever hear of CD burners?
>Linux was deliberately made completely incompatible with [ insert your problem here ]
talk to the makers of [insert your product here ]
>Therefore, it has been statistically proven that most companies have already moved away from Linux
You are living in the mid nineties. Read the news. Companies are *moving* to Linux, not away.
>Heck, I lived for years without a C compiler and still do
What do you do for fun, download p0rn?
Troll to End All Trolls: Shut the FVCK UP ALREADY: LINUX IS BETTER: DEAL WITH IT
" Top Three Guaranteed ways to earn unwarranted karma:"
LOL
The *music* out there doesn't suck, it's the variety offered by most stores that sucks. There are three within a couple miles of my place and they are Top Ten stores with a few other selections to get some of the other crowd in.
Who cares? I can go to an mp3 site where artists offer samples, bury my bandwidth downloading music to my tastes (that's important as you realized) and if I like the free!! samples, I can buy it directly (more or less) from the artist.
That is artist/consumer relationship working like it should.
In other words, the record companies are long term fvcked, and they know it, and they're struggling to maintain power...and keep their corporate perks.
Too friccing bad. I won't shed one tear. They have enough of my money already.
If the record companies hadn't had a headlock on the music industry back in vinyl days, (and if mass vinyl production hadn't been so expensive;-) we wouldn't have paid so much for those.
I sank thousands of dollars into vinyl. It all became more than useless when CDs came out. I don't feel like replacing that. (nor the tape collection that is now mostly goo).
The point here is that CDs are cheap to produce. Let's get rid of the expensive middlemen and have the artists talk directly to fans. Eh?
BTW, I live less than half a mile from a house Dylan lived in for a long time. Everyone here is sick of him. Playing Dylan tunes is dangerous;-) I'll let you guess where I live.
Retroviruses are self-inserting security defeating trojan viruses that insert themselves as kernel module patches set to run at boot.;-)
They have many varied modes of transmission that mostly rely on kernel security vulnerabilities. They are also cross-platform executable and compilable.
(.NET anyone?:-)
Fortunately, since their real mode of transmission is RL, we have kept them more or less quarantined. However, research indicates that Moore's Law may apply; this particular fork of technology may become accessible to Dark Wizards Of The Sand Dune...er...Garage, in the future. Therefore we need to be wary, for that occurence, and over-reaction by the Great UnGeeked Who Wish To Control All (GUWWTCA copyright Ablemonk Forever)
;-)
It is definitely bedtime....
This Post brought to you courtesy of ZZTop and Boone's Farm...and don't bother to Flame It, either.
I don't think that anyone can deny anymore that soon we will have a great amount of potential control over genetics. The real issue in that field has shifted over from obtaining data to data analysis; and as computers and software improve that will get easier.
I will not enter here the argument about whether it should be or not. It's irrelevant anyway, barring a global economic crash of vast proportions. The technical ability is going to come. Live with it.
I always thought that Varley's "Steel Beach" novel was an excellent treatment of that particular sort of social fork disease...
groups in the US and elsewhere (everywhere?_!) that want to outlaw this kind of technology. Ackthptht! Voter Inertia....
Think about it: No rejection transplants, grown on demand, no immune system issues, and the technology to keep one alive for the required period is already here (sustains some patients for literally years while they wait for new kidneys or hearts)
Sure, it can be abused. Name me one - ONE - technology of any kind that can't be abused or turned to evil means. Come, you know you can...
No, you don't. The Self-induced forks to constitutional copyright law in the US ( and the erosion of states internal rights) have been going on for a long time.
This has implications in EVERY FIELD AND EVERY SMALL CORNER OF LIFE.
fsck sarcasm
Scream louder. Louder still. I can't hear you! The contributions are drowning you out.... /sarcasm
Louder Yet, Children.
Shlllooopp! rgw swxkubw BS DAKK ID RGW EINAB WNOUEW
Your adserver links are killing page load times! They have no bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!!
Title it: Slashdot Slashdots itself! Film at 11.
End Message
Thoroughly Troffed
Shadowbearer
Re:Its nice, but its KDE
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You might try going into KDE Control Center and turning off the animations. I have it on a 800mhz Duron box (256mb, GF2) and it performs beautifully.
KDE defaults to a "middle of the road" setting for window effects, etc. Turning them off speeds it up considerably. I've noticed much the same difference in speed ratios in Windows XP, and I suspect they are more hardware or hardware related driver issues then anything else.
One thing I also noticed was a small improvement in 2D desktop speed with the latest Nvidia driver rpms released a short time ago.
No matter what OS one uses, we still have to tweak for performance...
1."Does KDE 3.0 finally make KDE even remotely comparable to (well-optimized installs of) Win2k/XP?"
Yes. I have a 800mhz 256mb Geforce2mx400 system here I have installed Mandrake 8.2, the latest nvidia drivers, and KDE3.0. There is a huge difference in the basic UI speed, especially noticeable using Konquerer as file manager (thanks KDE!!!!) I also have run it on a 1700+ system with similar config and even with full effects enabled it is still considerably faster then XP.
2. Don't know as I don't use a lot of custom fonts, but can check out (I had some font problems with the betas)
3."Does anyone besides me think that the whole OS-X UI on Linux is an asthetic nightmare?"
Yup. But then in Linux, you can configure it to whatever you want, so if you don't like it, go online and find a theme you like;-) or design yer own....
4." Is it hard to understand that you can have good looks without all the glitzy, performance robbing features? "
*splutters* It runs great on a 800mhz Duron (my email machine) and perf-wise blows away WinXP on the 1700+..........and the 1700+ is a $600 machine. What more do you want? (change WM if you want something faster, but if you want the pretties you will pay cpu cycles for them in any OS)
"Additionally, stuff like transparency and animation, while nifty, doesn't make up for the fact that there is not a single Linux UI that looks polished and elegant"
I agree the default themes leave a lot to be desired, but then they *are* designed with the idea of attracting windows users.
"GTK+ looks dated, and 3rd party themes are of depressing quality (and not really developed much anymore, apparently). Plus, GTK+'s container mechanism makes for some rather annoying display quality. Resizing a Gaim window, for example, causes the 4 icons along the bottom to spread farther apart, to the point a comical distance seperates them. "
Agree, agree, and that is very annoying. I hate to say it, but I think that the Gnome people better work some on KDE compatibility;-)) Actually the most annoying thing to me about gnome apps on KDE is the inconsistency of file dialog popups. The code for them is also quite buggy (feature rather than crash bugs) as some dialogs don't keep filenames thru directory changes. (legacy code!! argh)
Slashdot Mirror
"For the most part companies require at least some custom written software to do their work and fairly often this software is written in-house, by IT employees. now, say that company x needs some custom accounting software because the current enterprise accounting software packages don't have a feature that they need. they can a) tell their IT division to drop everything they're doing for a year or two and write this accounting system or b) tell their IT division to go download a GPL'ed accounting package, spend a couple days adding the needed feature, and release their changes under the GPL. the company in question would have saved hundred of thousands of dollars in labor and the GPL'ed accounting package would have an extra feature that may benifit some other company in the future. under a closed source system, those hudreds of thousands of dollars would have been wasted trying to "re-invent the wheel"
Yes, exactly, and this what a lot of people don't seem to understand, that there are people out there less interested in getting rich than they are in advancing the knowledge and capabilities of the human species.
Greed is the path....to the Dark Side.
SB
"Nobody wants something you can get for free"
Tell that to the 2 million or so Kazaa users, the (estimated) 20 million or so Gnutella users, etc......
If "nobody wants something for free" then why are the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc all pushing for legislation against piracy?
"The idea that it might one day topple the Windows OS now seem like a distant and unfunny joke"
You obviously do not read the news. Or you are a Troll w/o a clue about humor.
"So then why do people pay for beer?"
Some of us brew our own, fool.
"99% of what matters in the world is being done on the windows platform."
FYI, many of the network drivers for Linux were written by an
engineer at NASA. SETI runs on Linux (faster, too).
Fool and thrice damned Took!
SB
Unlike the two IBM drives I've bought in the last year and a half,
all the Maxtors I've bought in the last two years are still functioning
perfectly. After my problems with the Deskstars I did some research and
found a lot of other people having similar problems.
I know who I'm going to purchase from in the future. (Not to mention
Maxtor has a great RMA system!)
SB
and I've had zero success. Out of the two IBM drives I've bought
I've had to RMA both of them (started out with clunking noises and
both died completely within 9 months). It took IBM amost 6 weeks
to get me my drives back. I've had one of the drives back since
Christmas and IBM's site still shows the RMA hasn't shipped. IBM told
me that the drive (a Deskstar 40g) was used too many hours (!) despite
the fact that I had documented odd noises coming from it with their
techs from day one (although they would not RMA it till it failed catastrophically, carrying two days work with it).
If I buy a brand new drive and am forced to ship it back to them
within the first year of ownership I EXPECT A NEW DRIVE AS REPLACEMENT,
NOT SOMEONE ELSE'S USED ONE. If I spent over a hundred bucks on a power
saw from a tool shop and it failed within warranty, would they
send me a used one in replacement? No, they'd most likely give me
a new one off the shelf (and if they didn't I'd never shop there again)
Needless to say I will never buy another IBM drive and neither will
our store.
SB
"CNN (this was their first big scoop story)"
One of them.
What I remember is Connie Chung with tears on her
face while the footage played over and over again
and nobody knew (tho we all really knew) whether
or not the crew had survived.
I was 19 and it hurt more than anything - especially
after all the months of accusations and counter-acc
and all the crap; I knew at that time that the people
of my generation would have no real chance at space travel.
oh, the pain, the pain
"I know who are younger basically shared your experience,"
For the generation before ours, it was "Where were you
when Kennedy was shot?"
History repeats itself, from generation to generation
CNN cameraman who immediately panned away from the explosion]
Oy, I remember that. Someone rushed into my optics class and told
us the Challenger had exploded. We were all horrified and disbelieving.
I rushed home and caught a lot of CNN's coverage on tape. Only time
I ever saw Connie Chung cry. I caught that part that you were talking about, but the tapes are goo now.
I had several friends wondering why I was so withdrawn??
for several days....and these were physics students.
The worst hurt was the lag before another launch. Public interest
in space flight lagged out bad.
*sigh*
I'm hoping my daughter has a chance to go....11 years old ;-)
and she already wants to go...must have been the Heinlein
novels I sent her
It's again time to
Its funding has never really been as high as was necessary
Funding is not the issue. Focus is.
We also need an easing of the restrictions (or at least some
intelligent enforcement) on private launching.
NASA used to be good at research and cutting edge RD, that's where
they should stay. Private companies should take up the
commercial/science satellite launch burden more then they are.
Europe seems to have a business model for that which works.
AG
and only a fraction of the payback that could come from
an even more serious space effort...
Time to
and we say it over and over and still there's this
huge growing population of people who can't believe
facts. Anything to do with the bullshit one finds in
most of the mainstream press? Naaaaahhhhhh....
[ insert your horoscope here ]
Sagan/grave == 50k rpms
>Linux is very unstable
;-) AND MOST USERS HAVE ALL THE APPS THEY NEED CONTAINED
You obviously don't use it. Or you're a troll. I don't really give
a snit.
>Linux has a very unreliable filesystem
As opposed to Scandisk, which can't even run at all if
there is something else going on? Like...Norton AV?
>Everybody uses Windows or BSD, nowadays
Bah
> Installation is a pain in the ass and it usually takes a whole support team to install a geeks' workstation
And a stable, up to date windows installation doesn't? I do
this for a living and it's usually a two to six hour job
(mostly those fvcking security updates) plus installing the
applications they want to use, and those updates, etc, etc,
plus finding alternatives to the so-called "signed Microsoft
drivers" which usually don't work right.......
I can install Mandrake 8.2, KDE3, and the nvidia updates quicker
on most of our new machines than I can install and update windows
98 or winXtraPokey - because I CAN SCRIPT THE INSTALL without
paying money
IN THE INSTALL
>Installation and maintenance requires 4-5 times the bandwidth a 'normal' OS would require
ever hear of CD burners?
>Linux was deliberately made completely incompatible with [ insert your problem here ]
talk to the makers of [insert your product here ]
>Therefore, it has been statistically proven that most companies have already moved away from Linux
You are living in the mid nineties. Read the news. Companies are
*moving* to Linux, not away.
>Heck, I lived for years without a C compiler and still do
What do you do for fun, download p0rn?
Troll to End All Trolls: Shut the FVCK UP ALREADY: LINUX IS BETTER: DEAL WITH IT
and don't forget to
" Top Three Guaranteed ways to earn unwarranted karma:"
LOL
The *music* out there doesn't suck, it's the variety offered by most stores that sucks. There are three within a couple miles of my place and they are Top Ten stores with a few other selections to get some of the other crowd in.
Who cares? I can go to an mp3 site where artists offer samples, bury my bandwidth downloading music to my tastes (that's important as you realized) and if I like the free!! samples, I can buy it directly (more or less) from the artist.
That is artist/consumer relationship working like it should.
In other words, the record companies are long term fvcked, and they know it, and they're struggling to maintain power...and keep their corporate perks.
Too friccing bad. I won't shed one tear. They have enough of my money already.
To Do List:
911 was a the headman's axe on a already sickly
economy
not that one could guess that from watching the
TV news *snort*
Remember to
If the record companies hadn't had a headlock on the music industry back in vinyl days, (and if mass vinyl production hadn't been so expensive ;-) we wouldn't have paid so much for those.
;-)
I sank thousands of dollars into vinyl. It all became more than useless when CDs came out. I don't feel like replacing that. (nor the tape collection that is now mostly goo).
The point here is that CDs are cheap to produce. Let's get rid of the expensive middlemen and have the artists talk directly to fans. Eh?
BTW, I live less than half a mile from a house Dylan lived in for a long time. Everyone here is sick of him. Playing Dylan tunes is dangerous
I'll let you guess where I live.
SB
Well said.
It has found a ecological niche.....
Which will render all Glass Pane Trolls mute
Free people found their glitch
Vanished if stroked under *nix
No more License Dispute.
SB
Ah, Coors; fsck blech/belch --uta
Live with it! Linux: The Human Republic's preferred Operating System! Buy Now!
mod me troll: I deserve it, you know I do, and
anyway, you want to
Here's a better one: *grinning*
;-)
.NET anyone? :-)
Retroviruses are self-inserting security defeating trojan viruses that insert themselves as kernel module patches set to run at boot.
They have many varied modes of transmission that mostly rely on kernel security vulnerabilities. They are also cross-platform executable and compilable.
(
Fortunately, since their real mode of transmission is RL, we have kept them more or less quarantined. However, research indicates that Moore's Law may apply; this particular fork of technology may become accessible to Dark Wizards Of The Sand Dune...er...Garage, in the future. Therefore we need to be wary, for that occurence, and over-reaction by the Great UnGeeked Who Wish To Control All (GUWWTCA copyright Ablemonk Forever)
;-)
It is definitely bedtime....
This Post brought to you courtesy of ZZTop and Boone's Farm...and don't bother to Flame It, either.
SB
Soolution = Nanotech.
I humbly bow before your subtle wisdom about the beer tap. You do have a point.
Of course I will point out those erratic, unpredictable episodes whenst the keg runs dry...
ShadowBurdened
I don't think that anyone can deny anymore that soon we will have a great amount of potential control over genetics. The real issue in that field has shifted over from obtaining data to data analysis; and as computers and software improve that will get easier.
I will not enter here the argument about whether it should be or not. It's irrelevant anyway, barring a global economic crash of vast proportions. The technical ability is going to come. Live with it.
I always thought that Varley's "Steel Beach" novel was an excellent treatment of that particular sort of social fork disease...
Shadow'ed
groups in the US and elsewhere (everywhere?_!) that want to outlaw this kind of technology. Ackthptht! Voter Inertia....
Think about it: No rejection transplants, grown on demand, no immune system issues, and the technology to keep one alive for the required period is already here (sustains some patients for literally years while they wait for new kidneys or hearts)
Sure, it can be abused. Name me one - ONE - technology of any kind that can't be abused or turned to evil means. Come, you know you can...
Shadowbearer
"It's Just a World, It's Not Heavy" - Atlas
"But I digress at this point."
No, you don't. The Self-induced forks to constitutional copyright law in the US ( and the erosion of states internal rights) have been going on for a long time.
This has implications in EVERY FIELD AND EVERY SMALL CORNER OF LIFE.
fsck sarcasm
Scream louder. Louder still. I can't hear you! The contributions are drowning you out....
/sarcasm
Louder Yet, Children.
Shlllooopp! rgw swxkubw BS DAKK ID RGW EINAB WNOUEW
Message to Slashdot:
Your adserver links are killing page load times!
They have no bandwidth!!!!!!!!!!!
Title it: Slashdot Slashdots itself! Film at 11.
End Message
Thoroughly Troffed
Shadowbearer
You might try going into KDE Control Center and turning off the animations. I have it on a 800mhz Duron box (256mb, GF2) and it performs beautifully.
KDE defaults to a "middle of the road" setting for window effects, etc. Turning them off speeds it up considerably. I've noticed much the same difference in speed ratios in Windows XP, and I suspect they are more hardware or hardware related driver issues then anything else.
One thing I also noticed was a small improvement in 2D desktop speed with the latest Nvidia driver rpms released a short time ago.
No matter what OS one uses, we still have to tweak for performance...
Cheers
Shadowbearer
Sig Mod: Only if the Dock DIES!
1."Does KDE 3.0 finally make KDE even remotely comparable to (well-optimized installs of) Win2k/XP?"
;-) or design yer own....
;-)) Actually the most annoying thing to me about gnome apps on KDE is the inconsistency of file dialog popups. The code for them is also quite buggy (feature rather than crash bugs) as some dialogs don't keep filenames thru directory changes. (legacy code!! argh)
Yes. I have a 800mhz 256mb Geforce2mx400 system here I have installed Mandrake 8.2, the latest nvidia drivers, and KDE3.0. There is a huge difference in the basic UI speed, especially noticeable using Konquerer as file manager (thanks KDE!!!!) I also have run it on a 1700+ system with similar config and even with full effects enabled it is still considerably faster then XP.
2. Don't know as I don't use a lot of custom fonts, but can check out (I had some font problems with the betas)
3."Does anyone besides me think that the whole OS-X UI on Linux is an asthetic nightmare?"
Yup. But then in Linux, you can configure it to whatever you want, so if you don't like it, go online and find a theme you like
4." Is it hard to understand that you can have good looks without all the glitzy, performance robbing features? "
*splutters* It runs great on a 800mhz Duron (my email machine) and perf-wise blows away WinXP on the 1700+..........and the 1700+ is a $600 machine. What more do you want? (change WM if you want something faster, but if you want the pretties you will pay cpu cycles for them in any OS)
"Additionally, stuff like transparency and animation, while nifty, doesn't make up for the fact that there is not a single Linux UI that looks polished and elegant"
I agree the default themes leave a lot to be desired, but then they *are* designed with the idea of attracting windows users.
"GTK+ looks dated, and 3rd party themes are of depressing quality (and not really developed much anymore, apparently). Plus, GTK+'s container mechanism makes for some rather annoying display quality. Resizing a Gaim window, for example, causes the 4 icons along the bottom to spread farther apart, to the point a comical distance seperates them. "
Agree, agree, and that is very annoying. I hate to say it, but I think that the Gnome people better work some on KDE compatibility
Cheers
Shadowbearer
"He's not heavy, he's my brother"