Coffee spewed on monitor...
on
Apple Backs Blu-ray
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· Score: 1, Interesting
That was funny. One of the more interesting things I've seen in my life was a German version of Penthouse with the same layout as an American one someone had lying around. I thought something looked odd about the model. When I compared the two, I saw that the German layout hadn't airbrushed the panty marks and other minor skin blemishes from the model.
Heck, she was still good looking, but somehow wasn't quite as "perfect" as the airbrushed version and I found myself definately prefering that "perfection".
Call me a pig if you want, and I do love looking at "real" women with all of their imperfections, but the parent is absolutely right. Do we really want to see High Def tit-job scars? How about stretch marks?
High def can have the tendency to look real. Unfortuneatly, the reason we buy porn isn't reality, it's fantasy.
TW
Re:You're modded as +3 funny but...
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 5, Interesting
However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men.
Although geeks are very important to IT, they often lack qualities that are very important to IT. In my IT department I can think of a very good example of a male geek who has enough certs to choke a horse and a female non-geek with just a low interest in persuing off-hours IT-for-fun kind of stuff. The woman is better.
The male is an egotistical blowhard who doesn't finish projects completely or on time. His projects are poorly documented. But, heck, he can answer almost any question off the top of his head about the interals of the servers and services he runs.
The female is demure and often has to say " I'll need to check on that." However, her projects work, come in on time, have excellent documentation and can be used much more easily by the whole company.
So, she's not as smart, IT-wise, as the guy. But who's the better IT worker?
More accurately I might have said, "consumer VOIP over their wired home internet connection is a niche market." VOIP most definately is the wave of the future as far as, "all voice traffic will go over IP" is concerned. But as a low-cost alternative to a proffesional carrier's service, it will all but disapear.
Why? Because the proffesional carrier is going to promise you the service no matter where you are, poor service notwithstanding. The proffesional carrier called Nextel obviously understands VOIP, but they don't sell VOIP. They sell cell service. The consumer that buys Nextel service doesn't bring his own internet service and doesn't care that he's talking on VOIP. All he cares about is that he can recieve or place a call wherever he happens to be standing. And he happens to be paying about as much as any other carriers cell service.
Now, it's very possible that a plain-old networking company, not affiliated with a traditional "phone" company can put up a nice mesh data network that works in major cities and that consumers will then use special VOIP handsets to place and recieve calls to/from any phone number all at a flat data fee. That would be VOIP in the truest sense and people will eat it up. But what will you really have at that point? It'll be Nextel with flat pricing. Think about it.
In that sense, you and I will both be right. You'll be right that we're using VOIP and I'll be right that we're using cell service. But big VOIP companies like Vonage will be nowhere near the picture. Their niche marke will have dried up in favor of the service the carrier offers.
I hear one more question coming on. Why wouldn't companies like Vonage just make use of the prevailing wireless data network? Won't they still be important so you can use ANY data network. In a word: No. Why? Because it's F-ing expensive to build a reliable, ubiquitous wireless data network. These networks WILL charge for their services. You, as a consumer, will not want to get multiple service contracts from multiple data vendors, just like you strive to avoid that kind of thing now with your broadband and cell services. Since you'll be using a single vendor, they'll maximise their profits by selling you not just the data service, but the VOIP service that goes with it, just like curren't cell carriers sell you data to go with your voice. That will end up cutting Vonage completely out of the loop, much like AOL finds it extremely hard to get their service bundled with most broadband providers today.
In the end, you'll end up with a wireless service that will resemble our current cell services in almost every way except they'll be faster and they'll likely have a different pricing model.
Cell phones are great, and they fill an important gap, but they do not (in most demographics) compete with landline.
For now. But this article speaks of the future. A whole generation of college students is now seeing the landline as mostly irrelevant. They'll continue to see it that way as they enter the workforce, have kids, and buy those kids their own cell phones.
Landlines, as you point out, are not irrelevant _now_. But their the trend is definately moving in that direction.
Put another way, would you have invested much money in a buggy whip company if you could go back in time to 1900? Or typwriters if you stepped in the time machine to 1980? Or consumer landlines if you stepped in the time machine to.. well, no need to step. You'd take your short term profit, not invest for the long haul.
I use my cell phone for everything. I get "free" use of long distance all the time and "free" minutes on nights and weekends which means I can stay on the phone for hours without needing to tie up my network connection.
People who operate like me are growing and land-line use is shrinking. We don't care about long distance charges. VOIP is a niche and will always be a niche and Google suddenly "getting into it" will mean nothing more than a modest new revenue stream until VOIP moves from mostly irrelevant to totally irrelevant.
I normally don't comment on sigs, but I have to make an exception on this one. the line: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. -Hillary Clinton" Isn't that just eminent domain? Don't just about all politicians do that at some point to lay a road or build a bridge?
Maybe she wants to take away too much for too little gain or maybe the thing she wants to take away is too important to us. Maybe it's not. But just highlighting that someone is willing to take something away for the common good isn't really saying much more than that they appear to understand their options. That's not much more cleaver than pointing out that Hillary said "I know how to use the voting machine in the U.S. Senate chambers. - Hillary Clinton"
In Windows, by default, the application in the foreground is afforded a higher priority than any other process, except those with a priority explicitly set at higher than normal.
Sure, you can tell it to have service priority or forground process priority. But my experience is that even though it has _some_ tunability, it doesn't go far enough and the parts that do go far engough (task manager, registry) are far from easy to tune. A couple of sliders, some check boxes and an advanced tab would do wonders for these automatic settings.
It's my opinion that consumers are forced to buy far more processor than they really need because they can't download in the background while gaming without impacting their game, etc. Their download (and andivirus and background email check and antispam) _should_ just slow to a crawl when they're suddenly faced with 50 fully rendered enemies. Simply changing the priority level on the process or the background/forground priority doesn't go far enough, unfortuneately, toward making this a reality.
... and more everwhere else. Games continue to get most of their good stuff from the GPU, not the CPU. It aint that the CPU isn't important, but it's not going to make a huge difference all by itself.
What I hope to see, but don't expect, is better prioritization of CPU requests. If you have something high-priority going on, like a full screen video game, recording a movie or ripping a CD, I'd like to see the antivirus and other maintenance tasks handled by the other core, or even put on hold. My personal experience is that this stuff can sometimes be set up to some extent, but it's overall kind of crappy and labor intensive.
But this really isn't intel's fault. MS and the app vendors need to take the blame. So, the question is: do other OSs handle this better for consumer products?
It's more than just insulting. They're not actually giving you something, but making an attempt to limit their legal liability. It's like the airlines paying you by the pound for lost or damaged luggage.
What these have in common is that your actual losss is almost always going to far exceed the amount they say they'll pay, but they're going to argue in court that you agreed, via a legal contract (the EULA) to accept the lower ammount.
I personally hope that EULAs are largely invalidated one day. I don't know if anyone has considered it, but since Microsoft's Windows software has been determined by several courts of law to be a monopoly, I think it's worth argueing that at least the Windows EULA is a contract "signed" under durress and is thus invalid in the contract sense.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if someone holds a gun to your head and makes you sign something then that durress is a legal way out of the terms of the contract. Because of the definition of the term Monopoly, I would think that me "agreeing" to the EULA is not truly optional and thus, not really as binding as, say, my apartment lease. I'd love to hear an actual contract attorney's appinion on this.
The real lesson here is, the moment you get your box, repartition it and ghost the system partition!
Not a bad idea... except for the Ghosting and repartitioning part.
Let me be more specific:
Ghosting and repartitioning is great for you and me.
Ghosting and repartitioning is not a realistic option for the Average Computer User.
Now, some would say reinstallation is also not a realistic option for the ACU, but I've known many ACUs that have simply had no choice. Yes, they've needed help (often from me) and yes, they just do whatever the expert in their life tells them to do. But is Microsoft slowly ratcheting downt he screws to the point that that their personal expert will have to tell them to buy a new copy of WinXP, Longhorn, Etc? I think they are.
The only good that could possibly come from this is that some of these people are gonna refuse to pay the MS tax yet again and they'll load up a copy of Fedora. Unfortuneatly, the more likely outcome is that it will turn them into Technical Pirates who'll use bootleg copies of the OS because it's too much of a hassle to get MS to give them permission to reload their legal copy.
Right when I am peeved that I had to re-install, I have to get back on the phone with M$.
Don't worry, it shouldn't affect you. According to the Juniper research guy in the article you don't really need to reinstall your computer after all.
"Seeing as how the typical OEM would normally preactivate Windows XP, most legitimate users shouldn't have much need to go through the activation process,"
See, it's all better. When you buy your computer, that's the OS you get to use for the entire life of the computer and certainly no one at Microsoft tech support or anywhere else would ever ask you to reinstall. Have a nice day.
Ok, you've answerd the real reason. Now can anyone answer the reason they're actually giving? Are they saying it's anti-competitive or what? I had a hard time telling from TFA.
Yeah, Novell's market-speak is horrible. Their naming "conventions" are even worse (don't know how many names I've used for their directory in the last 5 years).
Here's the translation: Open Enterprise Server is really just Netware 6.5. But it has the following very important addition: You can choose to not have the Netware kernel and instead run all of your familiar "Netware Stuff" on top of a SUSE Eneterprise Linux Kernel.
If you are an administrator of user accounts or services you should, theorectically, see no difference at all with it running on a SUSE kernel vs the Netware kernel. But if you work with the box itself, or third party software loaded on the box, you're totally dealing with a Linux box if you choose that option.
It takes 3 shellcommands and inserting your favorite validation-server to hook up an osx-client on an AD-server, SMB-shares included
... Except that he's not looking for AD, he's looking for the AD equivilent on Linux. Though he didn't say it, he's probably also looking for open source, which AD is most definately not.
Open Enterprise Server has a public beta right now. It runs on SUSE or Netware. The whole reason Novell bought SUSE was to answer questions just like this post.
Of course the poster probably meant "open source directory services". Sorry, eDir is a pay-at-the-door shop.
Why this got marked troll is beyond me. Us non-mathmaticians are curious about what significance there is for categories of numbers that mathmaticians get excited about.
If an expert gets excited, there's usually a reason. It's reasonable for non experts to ask what that reason is.
Interesting article, and you're right, wealth has nothing to do with it.
But if I were you I would have hopped on the "buggy" quip instead of "virus-riddled." Though you don't, technically, buy Windows with viruses preloaded for your convenience, one of the biggest advantages to using an open source alternative is not dealing with the hassle of viruses to the same extent as Windows users. It's truley a hassle and a guy on a week long vacation could easily find himself with infected machines when he gets back (sql slammer, et al)
On the other hand, one of the biggest disadvantages of open source is that the stuff is every bit as buggy as closed source. I just threw in the quip to emphasis the absurdity of the statement.
TW
Re:Xbox-Linux Project B Complete?
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 1
Is there a self-boot disc on non-modded xbox's in our near furture?
See, this is exactly what security experts have been saying all along.
1. Use any security algorithym. 2. It's guaranteed to be unsafe given enough time or processing power 3.... But if you make it strong enough, by the time it gets cracked no one will care.
In the case of the xbox, recent articles have placed xbox2 to be out by fall. If you crack xbox1s SHA-1 hash near the launch of xbox2, will anyone still care? If not, then it was, indeed, a very successful security mechanism.
Even better, why do we give a damn if he is or he isn't? Is Free Software or Open Source suddenly a bad idea if one of its proponents supports a different political system?
"Hark! I should buy all of my buggy, virus riddled software from the richest man on the planet because a communist created the GPL!"
are they going to tell you "you can't fly with a broken laptop
Well, the obvious answer is to put in your checked luggage. Only problem is, they wont even let you put locks on your luggage and their "insurance" only covers whatever you check, "by the pound."
It's the most massive screwing you can imagine. They screw you once by doing everything possible to humiliate you for having carry-ons or even outright forbid them... and then they screw you again by making the alternative likely theft, destruction or just plain losing your posestions.
Oh well, at least there's FedEx, right? Now if only I can get that box that will let me FedEx myself...
Which is exactly what you'll have to do if scientists keep getting asked to change their data to fit political need.
I don't know about you, but I've always been under the impression that the trains run at all only because of well understood scientific principals. If/when those clash with something politicians want to hear about the environment or the economics of running trains, then, well, the trains themselves will lose.
I'd love to think this is all theorectical, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it already has something to do whith why I sit in traffic every morning instead of riding in a quick, comfortable, inexpensive train.
What task using say, Microsoft Office 98 can not be done that can be done using Microsoft Office XP? Don't go to marketing literature to answer it, answer it off of the top of your head. Cop-out answers like "file versions are too new for it" don't count either. I want to know what actual features that real people use didn't yet exist in MS Office 98 that people depend on now in Office XP.
Although I generally agree with you when it comes to Word and Excell, if your company uses Exchange like ours does, there's a whole slew of highly useful features in Outlook 2003 which we happen to get as part of our Office suite. To name just a few, search folders, RPC over HTTP and cached mode have all been extremely useful.
Yes, we could get Outlook seperately, but I just kind of wanted to point out that Office is more than just Word and Excel and yes, MS does really put out some new goodies somewhere with each new release.
Actually, the medium-sized company I work at paid overtime until a couple of years ago. We were actually all salaried employees in IT, but the company seemed to understand our plight so they voluntarily gave us straight pay, based on our salary, for every hour we worked over forty. It kept a lot of good people from bailing out to startups during the dot.com boom years.
When it was cut, we moved to only forty hour paid work weeks with all overtime comped. People would keep spreadsheets of the overtime they spent patching servers or whatever and they would actually take off a day at a time or a week at a time here or their as compensation. It wasn't' quite as good as getting the extra pay, but it made the department a workable experience for people with families and almost no one left for the next couple of years too.
Recently comp time has been going through a "tightening up" phase. I personally know of several people that are looking to move on. In truth, we have some positive movement in the economy, and we really could use some fresh faces in our department, but the correlation between going to a more traditional salaried environment and people's desire to leave is not lost on me.
I think bosses around the country should keep this in mind if they need to address tough retention issues at their companies. If you treat employee's time with respect, they're much more likely to want to keep working for you. It takes a lot of time to teach a new employee the way things are done at your particular company so keeping them around for a few extra years is definitely to your benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
That was funny. One of the more interesting things I've seen in my life was a German version of Penthouse with the same layout as an American one someone had lying around. I thought something looked odd about the model. When I compared the two, I saw that the German layout hadn't airbrushed the panty marks and other minor skin blemishes from the model.
Heck, she was still good looking, but somehow wasn't quite as "perfect" as the airbrushed version and I found myself definately prefering that "perfection".
Call me a pig if you want, and I do love looking at "real" women with all of their imperfections, but the parent is absolutely right. Do we really want to see High Def tit-job scars? How about stretch marks?
High def can have the tendency to look real. Unfortuneatly, the reason we buy porn isn't reality, it's fantasy.
TW
However, people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement working on computers are better at computers than those who do not, and people who spend their entire adolescence in their basement are far more likely to be men.
Although geeks are very important to IT, they often lack qualities that are very important to IT. In my IT department I can think of a very good example of a male geek who has enough certs to choke a horse and a female non-geek with just a low interest in persuing off-hours IT-for-fun kind of stuff. The woman is better.
The male is an egotistical blowhard who doesn't finish projects completely or on time. His projects are poorly documented. But, heck, he can answer almost any question off the top of his head about the interals of the servers and services he runs.
The female is demure and often has to say " I'll need to check on that." However, her projects work, come in on time, have excellent documentation and can be used much more easily by the whole company.
So, she's not as smart, IT-wise, as the guy. But who's the better IT worker?
TW
More accurately I might have said, "consumer VOIP over their wired home internet connection is a niche market." VOIP most definately is the wave of the future as far as, "all voice traffic will go over IP" is concerned. But as a low-cost alternative to a proffesional carrier's service, it will all but disapear.
Why? Because the proffesional carrier is going to promise you the service no matter where you are, poor service notwithstanding. The proffesional carrier called Nextel obviously understands VOIP, but they don't sell VOIP. They sell cell service. The consumer that buys Nextel service doesn't bring his own internet service and doesn't care that he's talking on VOIP. All he cares about is that he can recieve or place a call wherever he happens to be standing. And he happens to be paying about as much as any other carriers cell service.
Now, it's very possible that a plain-old networking company, not affiliated with a traditional "phone" company can put up a nice mesh data network that works in major cities and that consumers will then use special VOIP handsets to place and recieve calls to/from any phone number all at a flat data fee. That would be VOIP in the truest sense and people will eat it up. But what will you really have at that point? It'll be Nextel with flat pricing. Think about it.
In that sense, you and I will both be right. You'll be right that we're using VOIP and I'll be right that we're using cell service. But big VOIP companies like Vonage will be nowhere near the picture. Their niche marke will have dried up in favor of the service the carrier offers.
I hear one more question coming on. Why wouldn't companies like Vonage just make use of the prevailing wireless data network? Won't they still be important so you can use ANY data network. In a word: No. Why? Because it's F-ing expensive to build a reliable, ubiquitous wireless data network. These networks WILL charge for their services. You, as a consumer, will not want to get multiple service contracts from multiple data vendors, just like you strive to avoid that kind of thing now with your broadband and cell services. Since you'll be using a single vendor, they'll maximise their profits by selling you not just the data service, but the VOIP service that goes with it, just like curren't cell carriers sell you data to go with your voice. That will end up cutting Vonage completely out of the loop, much like AOL finds it extremely hard to get their service bundled with most broadband providers today.
In the end, you'll end up with a wireless service that will resemble our current cell services in almost every way except they'll be faster and they'll likely have a different pricing model.
TW
Sorry better story.
TW
Cell phones are great, and they fill an important gap, but they do not (in most demographics) compete with landline.
For now. But this article speaks of the future. A whole generation of college students is now seeing the landline as mostly irrelevant. They'll continue to see it that way as they enter the workforce, have kids, and buy those kids their own cell phones.
Landlines, as you point out, are not irrelevant _now_. But their the trend is definately moving in that direction.
Put another way, would you have invested much money in a buggy whip company if you could go back in time to 1900? Or typwriters if you stepped in the time machine to 1980? Or consumer landlines if you stepped in the time machine to.. well, no need to step. You'd take your short term profit, not invest for the long haul.
TW
I use my cell phone for everything. I get "free" use of long distance all the time and "free" minutes on nights and weekends which means I can stay on the phone for hours without needing to tie up my network connection.
People who operate like me are growing and land-line use is shrinking. We don't care about long distance charges. VOIP is a niche and will always be a niche and Google suddenly "getting into it" will mean nothing more than a modest new revenue stream until VOIP moves from mostly irrelevant to totally irrelevant.
Sorry, I just calls 'em as I sees 'em.
TW
I normally don't comment on sigs, but I have to make an exception on this one. the line: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. -Hillary Clinton" Isn't that just eminent domain? Don't just about all politicians do that at some point to lay a road or build a bridge?
Maybe she wants to take away too much for too little gain or maybe the thing she wants to take away is too important to us. Maybe it's not. But just highlighting that someone is willing to take something away for the common good isn't really saying much more than that they appear to understand their options. That's not much more cleaver than pointing out that Hillary said "I know how to use the voting machine in the U.S. Senate chambers. - Hillary Clinton"
TW
In Windows, by default, the application in the foreground is afforded a higher priority than any other process, except those with a priority explicitly set at higher than normal.
Sure, you can tell it to have service priority or forground process priority. But my experience is that even though it has _some_ tunability, it doesn't go far enough and the parts that do go far engough (task manager, registry) are far from easy to tune. A couple of sliders, some check boxes and an advanced tab would do wonders for these automatic settings.
It's my opinion that consumers are forced to buy far more processor than they really need because they can't download in the background while gaming without impacting their game, etc. Their download (and andivirus and background email check and antispam) _should_ just slow to a crawl when they're suddenly faced with 50 fully rendered enemies. Simply changing the priority level on the process or the background/forground priority doesn't go far enough, unfortuneately, toward making this a reality.
TW
... and more everwhere else. Games continue to get most of their good stuff from the GPU, not the CPU. It aint that the CPU isn't important, but it's not going to make a huge difference all by itself.
What I hope to see, but don't expect, is better prioritization of CPU requests. If you have something high-priority going on, like a full screen video game, recording a movie or ripping a CD, I'd like to see the antivirus and other maintenance tasks handled by the other core, or even put on hold. My personal experience is that this stuff can sometimes be set up to some extent, but it's overall kind of crappy and labor intensive.
But this really isn't intel's fault. MS and the app vendors need to take the blame. So, the question is: do other OSs handle this better for consumer products?
TW
It's more than just insulting. They're not actually giving you something, but making an attempt to limit their legal liability. It's like the airlines paying you by the pound for lost or damaged luggage.
What these have in common is that your actual losss is almost always going to far exceed the amount they say they'll pay, but they're going to argue in court that you agreed, via a legal contract (the EULA) to accept the lower ammount.
I personally hope that EULAs are largely invalidated one day. I don't know if anyone has considered it, but since Microsoft's Windows software has been determined by several courts of law to be a monopoly, I think it's worth argueing that at least the Windows EULA is a contract "signed" under durress and is thus invalid in the contract sense.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if someone holds a gun to your head and makes you sign something then that durress is a legal way out of the terms of the contract. Because of the definition of the term Monopoly, I would think that me "agreeing" to the EULA is not truly optional and thus, not really as binding as, say, my apartment lease. I'd love to hear an actual contract attorney's appinion on this.
TW
The real lesson here is, the moment you get your box, repartition it and ghost the system partition!
Not a bad idea... except for the Ghosting and repartitioning part.
Let me be more specific:
Ghosting and repartitioning is great for you and me.
Ghosting and repartitioning is not a realistic option for the Average Computer User.
Now, some would say reinstallation is also not a realistic option for the ACU, but I've known many ACUs that have simply had no choice. Yes, they've needed help (often from me) and yes, they just do whatever the expert in their life tells them to do. But is Microsoft slowly ratcheting downt he screws to the point that that their personal expert will have to tell them to buy a new copy of WinXP, Longhorn, Etc? I think they are.
The only good that could possibly come from this is that some of these people are gonna refuse to pay the MS tax yet again and they'll load up a copy of Fedora. Unfortuneatly, the more likely outcome is that it will turn them into Technical Pirates who'll use bootleg copies of the OS because it's too much of a hassle to get MS to give them permission to reload their legal copy.
TW
Right when I am peeved that I had to re-install, I have to get back on the phone with M$.
Don't worry, it shouldn't affect you. According to the Juniper research guy in the article you don't really need to reinstall your computer after all.
"Seeing as how the typical OEM would normally preactivate Windows XP, most legitimate users shouldn't have much need to go through the activation process,"
See, it's all better. When you buy your computer, that's the OS you get to use for the entire life of the computer and certainly no one at Microsoft tech support or anywhere else would ever ask you to reinstall. Have a nice day.
TW
I am glad for this, as firewire is less common than USB 2. The sooner we all agree on a single standard the better.
Dilbert quote: "Our computers are so simple they only come with one button, and we press it for you before the computer leaves the factory."
Yeah, complexity can be bad, but the simplicity can be even worse.
TW
Ok, you've answerd the real reason. Now can anyone answer the reason they're actually giving? Are they saying it's anti-competitive or what? I had a hard time telling from TFA.
TW
Yeah, Novell's market-speak is horrible. Their naming "conventions" are even worse (don't know how many names I've used for their directory in the last 5 years).
:-)
Here's the translation: Open Enterprise Server is really just Netware 6.5. But it has the following very important addition: You can choose to not have the Netware kernel and instead run all of your familiar "Netware Stuff" on top of a SUSE Eneterprise Linux Kernel.
If you are an administrator of user accounts or services you should, theorectically, see no difference at all with it running on a SUSE kernel vs the Netware kernel. But if you work with the box itself, or third party software loaded on the box, you're totally dealing with a Linux box if you choose that option.
Hope that helped
TW
... Except that he's not looking for AD, he's looking for the AD equivilent on Linux. Though he didn't say it, he's probably also looking for open source, which AD is most definately not.
TW
Open Enterprise Server has a public beta right now. It runs on SUSE or Netware. The whole reason Novell bought SUSE was to answer questions just like this post.
Of course the poster probably meant "open source directory services". Sorry, eDir is a pay-at-the-door shop.
TW
Why this got marked troll is beyond me. Us non-mathmaticians are curious about what significance there is for categories of numbers that mathmaticians get excited about.
If an expert gets excited, there's usually a reason. It's reasonable for non experts to ask what that reason is.
TW
Interesting article, and you're right, wealth has nothing to do with it.
But if I were you I would have hopped on the "buggy" quip instead of "virus-riddled." Though you don't, technically, buy Windows with viruses preloaded for your convenience, one of the biggest advantages to using an open source alternative is not dealing with the hassle of viruses to the same extent as Windows users. It's truley a hassle and a guy on a week long vacation could easily find himself with infected machines when he gets back (sql slammer, et al)
On the other hand, one of the biggest disadvantages of open source is that the stuff is every bit as buggy as closed source. I just threw in the quip to emphasis the absurdity of the statement.
TW
Is there a self-boot disc on non-modded xbox's in our near furture?
See, this is exactly what security experts have been saying all along.
1. Use any security algorithym.
2. It's guaranteed to be unsafe given enough time or processing power
3.... But if you make it strong enough, by the time it gets cracked no one will care.
In the case of the xbox, recent articles have placed xbox2 to be out by fall. If you crack xbox1s SHA-1 hash near the launch of xbox2, will anyone still care? If not, then it was, indeed, a very successful security mechanism.
TW
Even better, why do we give a damn if he is or he isn't? Is Free Software or Open Source suddenly a bad idea if one of its proponents supports a different political system?
"Hark! I should buy all of my buggy, virus riddled software from the richest man on the planet because a communist created the GPL!"
It's silly.
TW
are they going to tell you "you can't fly with a broken laptop
Well, the obvious answer is to put in your checked luggage. Only problem is, they wont even let you put locks on your luggage and their "insurance" only covers whatever you check, "by the pound."
It's the most massive screwing you can imagine. They screw you once by doing everything possible to humiliate you for having carry-ons or even outright forbid them... and then they screw you again by making the alternative likely theft, destruction or just plain losing your posestions.
Oh well, at least there's FedEx, right? Now if only I can get that box that will let me FedEx myself...
TW
Which is exactly what you'll have to do if scientists keep getting asked to change their data to fit political need.
I don't know about you, but I've always been under the impression that the trains run at all only because of well understood scientific principals. If/when those clash with something politicians want to hear about the environment or the economics of running trains, then, well, the trains themselves will lose.
I'd love to think this is all theorectical, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it already has something to do whith why I sit in traffic every morning instead of riding in a quick, comfortable, inexpensive train.
TW
What task using say, Microsoft Office 98 can not be done that can be done using Microsoft Office XP? Don't go to marketing literature to answer it, answer it off of the top of your head. Cop-out answers like "file versions are too new for it" don't count either. I want to know what actual features that real people use didn't yet exist in MS Office 98 that people depend on now in Office XP.
Although I generally agree with you when it comes to Word and Excell, if your company uses Exchange like ours does, there's a whole slew of highly useful features in Outlook 2003 which we happen to get as part of our Office suite. To name just a few, search folders, RPC over HTTP and cached mode have all been extremely useful.
Yes, we could get Outlook seperately, but I just kind of wanted to point out that Office is more than just Word and Excel and yes, MS does really put out some new goodies somewhere with each new release.
TW
Actually, the medium-sized company I work at paid overtime until a couple of years ago. We were actually all salaried employees in IT, but the company seemed to understand our plight so they voluntarily gave us straight pay, based on our salary, for every hour we worked over forty. It kept a lot of good people from bailing out to startups during the dot.com boom years.
When it was cut, we moved to only forty hour paid work weeks with all overtime comped. People would keep spreadsheets of the overtime they spent patching servers or whatever and they would actually take off a day at a time or a week at a time here or their as compensation. It wasn't' quite as good as getting the extra pay, but it made the department a workable experience for people with families and almost no one left for the next couple of years too.
Recently comp time has been going through a "tightening up" phase. I personally know of several people that are looking to move on. In truth, we have some positive movement in the economy, and we really could use some fresh faces in our department, but the correlation between going to a more traditional salaried environment and people's desire to leave is not lost on me.
I think bosses around the country should keep this in mind if they need to address tough retention issues at their companies. If you treat employee's time with respect, they're much more likely to want to keep working for you. It takes a lot of time to teach a new employee the way things are done at your particular company so keeping them around for a few extra years is definitely to your benefit.
TW