To add: I suspect that if Dell's version of Ubuntu is popular enough, then people will start branching the versions of the software so core components won't have to be upgraded in order to have the latest and greatest versions of popular software (oOo and gimp and amarok) This will be very bad for the core developers but I'm sure some kind of balance will work itself out.
Or Dell offical adopts Gentoo as a linux distro and then everyone can live on the bleeding-edge all of the time:).
It puzzles me to see major corps use way, way, way overpowered/overpriced solutions to the simplest stuff.
It's alot more scalable to use a modestly powerful chip and linux then to code everything by hand on a pic controller. In the future, you'll want to add more features. You want process separation so if one process crashes, it won't take down the whole machine, you'll want to add a GUI, you'll want networking, etc etc etc.
From a cost POV, small arm CPUs make more sense then PICs because they are not much more expensive nowadays.
Employing a bunch of hardware engineers to create a new core does NOT minimize per-unit cost, it adds to it.
It does if each unit will be more profitable then before. This is a game for accountants but generally you plan on selling enough units to offset the upfront development costs, then it makes sense to make each unit as profitable as possible.
In my situation, the company already had pre-existing cores ready to use. Instead of just reusing their own IP, they created whole new cores to satisfy some manager's ego, because they supposedly might get 5% better performance (and on a peripheral part like a USB controller, who cares?).
Oh, well that's a totally different issue. Maybe he thought it would be more profitable...
They didn't give us the protools files or the midi or midi sample files they used to produce the tracks! That is simply unacceptable and they should burn, burn, burn!! They have to release every revision of every patch file used in each track before the album can be considered "maximally re-mixable".
In fact, if they are really interested in connecting with their fans, they should be giving away instruments of the same type used to make each track.
Cheerio Ben
PS. Trent Razor is a pretty cool but shy guy. Tried to talk to him once but he kinda escaped.
Worse, sometimes new drivers need to be written for certain on-chip peripherals, because some bonehead empire-building managers at the chipmaker wanted to justify a higher budget for their department by,
This is what my company does as well because when you expect to ship so many units that the per-unit cost is much more important then the development costs so it makes sense to do everything possible to minimize the per-unit cost. The upshot of this is that it causes my company to employ one kernel hacker and several kernel consultants, all working on the mainline kernel.
I just don't like it when people recommend solutions like using SSH to administer 1000 machines.
You could you ssh+scripts to maintain a 1000 machines. That means that you have to develop and maintain your own policies and management tools instead of having a 3rd party supply/dicate them to you.
IANASA (i am not a system administrator) but I find that home-grown tools are just as powerful and useful as commerical tools when it comes to administration at the small level. (3-5 machines)
If the kid who did this is insane but without access to two handguns, maybe he could try to stab 30 people to death or done some crazy martial arts on them. He won't have succeed.
Yeah, I agree 100%. I thought MS should offer to help update major software for free just to get out versions to customers so they do update to vista. Maybe they could afford it, maybe not. Time will tell.
Maybe they want you to upgrade instead? Force you, the customer, to spend a ton of money on the newest versions of all of the programs you use on a daily basis...
Vista strikes me as being "an intermediate OS" as well, considering the number of features that MS has to drop in order to get it to ship. There were some other comments with similar ideas.
Actually, the sensible way forward is to greatly reduce our energy usage. We could easily reduce energy usage to a small fraction of what we're using today while improving our standard of living.
I agree however the only way to do that is to make the price of consuming a lot of energy much higher then it is now. Otherwise, the consumer isn't going to care whether he is using "green" energy or "non-green" energy.
We could tax energy use but that's never very popular. Unfortunately, I strongly believe that consumers as a group will always buy whatever from of energy is the cheapest which is why this "probably green" wind energy is so cool. It has the potential to beat the energy price of coal for a yet undiscovered negetive impact on the environment.
part from that, what possible reason is there for a home user to upgrade?
Um, the UI is now bright and shiny, just the thing to attract all of eye-candy popping designer types. And it's got 3d flipping thingies. And desktop search. And media player now plays DVDs.
Obviously, there's something there for everyone. including hackers.:) Update now so that you too can get infected by the most cutting edge virii. Ang get annoyed by UAC. And aero. and stuttering video in Mediaplayer.
use http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/08/30/ipod-v ideo-howto I have another excellent script but/. lamely blocks me from posting it and I can't find it on the net:( Search for video_to_ipod_converter. Amarok will sync video fine to the ipod. Just make sure the title is encoded into the video.
Then we should be all for these kind of alternative energy generation. We know that coal-fired plants have a large negetive impact on the environment so trying new forms of energy is the only sensible way forward. To be cautious about exploring new sources of energy because of unknown environmental impact seems overly superstitious to me.
Ben
Re:My predictions for Wndows over the next year...
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
Not true. My friend installed Vista recently and a 2year old machine and the performance was terrible when we were watching a dixv movie. He tried rebooting, he tried kill all of the running services and turning off aero. Nothing helped. Eventually i had him kill explorer.exe while we were watching the movie. Finally the movie played properly. I think he's planning on getting a mac for his next computer.
Ben
Re:the real issue isn't when the stop selling OEM
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
I bet that if you look around hard enough, you could find companies to offer support for FC3. It's probably not worth it for Redhat anymore though... I guess MS is such a huge company that support for XP is rapidly not becoming worth it either...
Ben
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 1
I'm not running firewall or AV software on my linux box, it simply doesn't need it.
Oh please say you're joking... I'm a huge fan of linux too, (running gentoo at home 24/7) but I'm not dumb enough to leave my whole system exposed to the outside world. I mean, yeah it's easy enough to say that your box is invulerable but really it's not. you've definitely got cups on port 631 and maybe apache on 80 or 8080 and maybe vnc server on 5900 and maybe openssh on 21. Any of those could have buffer overflows. Seriously, firewall everything but the ports you absolutely must expose (openssh on a non-standard port comes to mind and apache of course).
Congressmen/women are responsible to their voters and if they don't bring home the bacon (aka pork in spending bills), they'll not get reelected for another term. The number of people in DC involved in politics is HUGE with a wide range of opinions and agendas. Sure, it's a given that everyone is out for more power but the idea is that they will reach an equilbrimum and balance out. Currently, by hook and by crook, Bush is trying to expand executive power to unreached levels and only recently has congress woken up to the fact that's it'll be their power on the chopping block soon if they don't do something. So I expect to see a major "push-back" probably after Bush vetos the defence budget with the timetable for withdrawal. Then maybe, hopefully congress will get the balls to override his veto.
To say they're all in it together is really quite funny though... Ben
Unfortunately, this would never happen. Bush cannot leave his room without the premission of Rove, Chaney and maybe Rumfeld and Gonzalez. So IMHO if you really want to see shit fly, Bush should be impeached and let Chaney try to do all of the double-talking without anyone to hide behind. More likely, he'll abdicate and run away to Duabai (home of the new headquarters of Halliburton) to enjoy his ill-gotten millions.
Bush is going to get hung out to dry no matter what happens. The sad thing is, I doubt he even realizes that his presidency is the worst in history (or at least since Hoover). God knows what'll be in his presdential library haha.
It seems like if the new DVDs are telling the DVD-playing software to ignore certain keys, it should be easy just to delete the censored key file or hack the software to ignore the key file. Of course Im sure AACS is a much more powerful and complicated protection scheme then this.
Slashdot Mirror
To add: I suspect that if Dell's version of Ubuntu is popular enough, then people will start branching the versions of the software so core components won't have to be upgraded in order to have the latest and greatest versions of popular software (oOo and gimp and amarok) This will be very bad for the core developers but I'm sure some kind of balance will work itself out.
:).
Or Dell offical adopts Gentoo as a linux distro and then everyone can live on the bleeding-edge all of the time
Cheers
Ben
It puzzles me to see major corps use way, way, way overpowered/overpriced solutions to the simplest stuff.
It's alot more scalable to use a modestly powerful chip and linux then to code everything by hand on a pic controller. In the future, you'll want to add more features. You want process separation so if one process crashes, it won't take down the whole machine, you'll want to add a GUI, you'll want networking, etc etc etc.
From a cost POV, small arm CPUs make more sense then PICs because they are not much more expensive nowadays.
Cheers
Ben
Employing a bunch of hardware engineers to create a new core does NOT minimize per-unit cost, it adds to it.
It does if each unit will be more profitable then before. This is a game for accountants but generally you plan on selling enough units to offset the upfront development costs, then it makes sense to make each unit as profitable as possible.
In my situation, the company already had pre-existing cores ready to use. Instead of just reusing their own IP, they created whole new cores to satisfy some manager's ego, because they supposedly might get 5% better performance (and on a peripheral part like a USB controller, who cares?).
Oh, well that's a totally different issue. Maybe he thought it would be more profitable...
Cheerio
Ben
It doesn't get any more re-mixable.
They didn't give us the protools files or the midi or midi sample files they used to produce the tracks!
That is simply unacceptable and they should burn, burn, burn!! They have to release every revision of every patch file used in each track before the album can be considered "maximally re-mixable".
In fact, if they are really interested in connecting with their fans, they should be giving away instruments of the same type used to make each track.
Cheerio
Ben
PS. Trent Razor is a pretty cool but shy guy. Tried to talk to him once but he kinda escaped.
Worse, sometimes new drivers need to be written for certain on-chip peripherals, because some bonehead empire-building managers at the chipmaker wanted to justify a higher budget for their department by,
This is what my company does as well because when you expect to ship so many units that the per-unit cost is much more important then the development costs so it makes sense to do everything possible to minimize the per-unit cost. The upshot of this is that it causes my company to employ one kernel hacker and several kernel consultants, all working on the mainline kernel.
Cheerio
Ben
I just don't like it when people recommend solutions like using SSH to administer 1000 machines.
You could you ssh+scripts to maintain a 1000 machines. That means that you have to develop and maintain your own policies and management tools instead of having a 3rd party supply/dicate them to you.
IANASA (i am not a system administrator) but I find that home-grown tools are just as powerful and useful as commerical tools when it comes to administration at the small level. (3-5 machines)
Cheers
Ben
I hope so. I'd love to see him try to do Seppuku with one of nitendo's wireless controllers.
It would be so poetic...
Cheers
Ben
What's wrong is that this guy had easy access to handguns when he was going through a very difficult+emotional time in his life.
e d_States_(by_state)#Virginia and http://www.vpc.org/press/9904col.htm It'll keep on happening every couple of years until people wise up and realize that YES, guns do kill people. There's an interesting webapp that gives a state-by-state break down of gun-related fatalities http://www.campaignadvantage.com/services/websites /archive/agsfoundation/asp/gundeaths.asp It's good to note that the states with tighter gun laws have lower gun-related deaths/10000 people.
Gun control laws should be tighten up. It's not really suprising that this happens in States with ZERO gun control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_Unit
If the kid who did this is insane but without access to two handguns, maybe he could try to stab 30 people to death or done some crazy martial arts on them. He won't have succeed.
Ben
I guess you are not a nerd then ;P
Ben
Yeah, I agree 100%. I thought MS should offer to help update major software for free just to get out versions to customers so they do update to vista. Maybe they could afford it, maybe not. Time will tell.
Ben
Maybe they want you to upgrade instead? Force you, the customer, to spend a ton of money on the newest versions of all of the programs you use on a daily basis...
Just a thought
Ben
Vista strikes me as being "an intermediate OS" as well, considering the number of features that MS has to drop in order to get it to ship. There were some other comments with similar ideas.
Ben
Actually, the sensible way forward is to greatly reduce our energy usage. We could easily reduce energy usage to a small fraction of what we're using today while improving our standard of living.
I agree however the only way to do that is to make the price of consuming a lot of energy much higher then it is now. Otherwise, the consumer isn't going to care whether he is using "green" energy or "non-green" energy.
We could tax energy use but that's never very popular. Unfortunately, I strongly believe that consumers as a group will always buy whatever from of energy is the cheapest which is why this "probably green" wind energy is so cool. It has the potential to beat the energy price of coal for a yet undiscovered negetive impact on the environment.
Hopefully, it's not too good to be true...
Ben
part from that, what possible reason is there for a home user to upgrade?
:) Update now so that you too can get infected by the most cutting edge virii. Ang get annoyed by UAC. And aero. and stuttering video in Mediaplayer.
Um, the UI is now bright and shiny, just the thing to attract all of eye-candy popping designer types.
And it's got 3d flipping thingies. And desktop search. And media player now plays DVDs.
Obviously, there's something there for everyone. including hackers.
Cheerio
Ben
use http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/08/30/ipod-v ideo-howto /. lamely blocks me from posting it and I can't find it on the net :(
I have another excellent script but
Search for video_to_ipod_converter. Amarok will sync video fine to the ipod. Just make sure the title is encoded into the video.
Cheers
Ben
Then we should be all for these kind of alternative energy generation.
We know that coal-fired plants have a large negetive impact on the environment so trying new forms of energy is the only sensible way forward.
To be cautious about exploring new sources of energy because of unknown environmental impact seems overly superstitious to me.
Ben
Not true. My friend installed Vista recently and a 2year old machine and the performance was terrible when we were watching a dixv movie.
He tried rebooting, he tried kill all of the running services and turning off aero. Nothing helped. Eventually i had him kill explorer.exe while we were watching the movie. Finally the movie played properly. I think he's planning on getting a mac for his next computer.
Ben
I bet that if you look around hard enough, you could find companies to offer support for FC3.
It's probably not worth it for Redhat anymore though...
I guess MS is such a huge company that support for XP is rapidly not becoming worth it either...
Ben
I'm not running firewall or AV software on my linux box, it simply doesn't need it.
Oh please say you're joking...
I'm a huge fan of linux too, (running gentoo at home 24/7) but I'm not dumb enough to leave my whole system exposed to the outside world.
I mean, yeah it's easy enough to say that your box is invulerable but really it's not. you've definitely got cups on port 631 and maybe apache on 80 or 8080 and maybe vnc server on 5900 and maybe openssh on 21. Any of those could have buffer overflows. Seriously, firewall everything but the ports you absolutely must expose (openssh on a non-standard port comes to mind and apache of course).
Cheers
Ben
Do you think you're overreacting a bit too much?
Congressmen/women are responsible to their voters and if they don't bring home the bacon (aka pork in spending bills), they'll not get reelected for another term. The number of people in DC involved in politics is HUGE with a wide range of opinions and agendas. Sure, it's a given that everyone is out for more power but the idea is that they will reach an equilbrimum and balance out. Currently, by hook and by crook, Bush is trying to expand executive power to unreached levels and only recently has congress woken up to the fact that's it'll be their power on the chopping block soon if they don't do something. So I expect to see a major "push-back" probably after Bush vetos the defence budget with the timetable for withdrawal. Then maybe, hopefully congress will get the balls to override his veto.
To say they're all in it together is really quite funny though...
Ben
Bush needs to hang Rove out to dry
Unfortunately, this would never happen. Bush cannot leave his room without the premission of Rove, Chaney and maybe Rumfeld and Gonzalez.
So IMHO if you really want to see shit fly, Bush should be impeached and let Chaney try to do all of the double-talking without anyone to
hide behind. More likely, he'll abdicate and run away to Duabai (home of the new headquarters of Halliburton) to enjoy his ill-gotten millions.
Bush is going to get hung out to dry no matter what happens. The sad thing is, I doubt he even realizes that his presidency is the worst in history (or at least since Hoover). God knows what'll be in his presdential library haha.
Ben
It seems like if the new DVDs are telling the DVD-playing software to ignore certain keys, it should be easy just to delete the censored key file or hack the software to ignore the key file. Of course Im sure AACS is a much more powerful and complicated protection scheme then this.
But that's what I'm reading...
Ben
Nor is the port to iPod linux, but it works...
http://www.ipodlinux.org/ScummVM
Damn, now if the sound only works properly...
cheerio
Ben
Thats f**king disgusting. hahah
Time to email it to all of my friends!!!
Ben
Ummm, why not try for RubyQt instead?
heh
Ben