I started my first job yesterday, and I am forced to use Windos at work. My employer is wasting thousands of dollars in M$ licensing fees. His server crashes 3-4 times a day, and my workstation crashes even more often.
You need better admins, plain and simple. I can't remember the last time my Win2k workstation crashed.
Nor should tax dollars be spent on Bic pens, or Bostitch staplers, or Lockheed jets, or any other product built by an evil moneygrubbing company!
Please...
Like it or not, years ago M$ was the logical choice for software. And, like it or not, M$ has advanced, through a common user interface, the state of desktop computing.
Now...that situation may be changing, with the advent of new open source tools and applications that actually work and can be used by the average office worker. BUT, an entity the size of (name your fave countries government) cannot change overnight. Give it time.
So you're saying that court records should be closed?
Some parts, yes. Divorce cases. People are having their bank acct info, social security num, name and address posted on official online sites as part of the 'court record'.
That info needs to be redacted.
Court sponsored identity theft, anyone?
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 1
so I don't buy much of anything other than groceries (well, and beer) these days
Linux has been a viable, reliable alternative to Windows for "how" long? For just typing up documents? Oh, maybe about ten years!
I don't know about you, but I don't use an operating system for "just typing up documents". Rather, I use an application that runs on top of the operating system. One that includes a spell checker, the ability to inset charts, graphs, headers, footers, a table of contents, maybe. You know..stuff that makes a document complete, readable, and usable, rather than a mere collection of words and letters.
HTMLDOC is what i use. it's available on both UNIX and Windows platforms, is released under the GPL and...
..it still costs $150. hmm...Adobe Acrobat (proven tool with great support) for $250, or HTMLDOC (new, no training classes available, no large scale support available) for $150.
For large scale government use, that's pretty much a no-brainer. Go with the proven tool. That's the same with OpenOffice and other 'free', GPL tools. Can I send 50,000 people to training classes in the next year? Can the OpenOffice helpdesk handle the support workload imposed by adding 1,000,000 new users from one organization? Do they have a easy to use upgrade/bugfix tool?
All these questions and many, many more, need to be asked before a large organization jumps from what they have been using to something brand new.
When some Government clerk is just typing up documents on a PC, why do they need a copy of Windows (and presumably Office) when Linux and KOffice or OpenOffice, etc, will do the exact same thing at a fraction of the cost?
Because:
a) It is not necessarily a "fraction of the cost". You have to include the entire ball of wax in the TCO calcs. TCO includes the word 'Total'
b) OpenOffice has been out as a reliable product for "how" long?
c) Linux has been a viable, reliable alternative to Windows for "how" long?
d) Free != free
Another problem with this model when applied to home use is online ads.
Ads/popups/whatever eat up bandwidth. Maybe not a lot, but not stuff I asked for. And maybe enough to put me over the cap. I have to look at the ads, and now potentially pay for the priveledge of doing so.
What's that you say? Software to kill all the popups? Sure...but if everyone killed their ads, the advertisers wouldn't pay anymore, and so those websites would either go under, or be forced to charge for access.
Is TW/RR going to give me a rebate on bandwidth associated with advertisements? Not a chance.
THe actual "common area" is tucked away in a corner, not out in the regular TV/family room. Acessible, but not a constant bombardment of other people. Privacy, but anyone can walk by at any time.
Yes, hard core coding would be tough with constant interruptions. As it is, it's not really that way.
The bedroom is just too tough to monitor easily. If something surreptitious were to be happening, all the kid would have to do is keep an ear out for anyone climbing the stairs and close down for the moment. And then there is the 3 AM stuff.
A PC is the bedroom is sooo much harrder to monitor, and sooo much easier to slip into unwanted activities.
Kind of the same as having the boyfriend upstairs in the bedroom, anytime they want. Probably nothing is going on, but...you want to be sure.
I know what you mean. Kids need to be able to screw around with it. But also within limits. An unconnected/isolated PC is merely (today) a very versatile PS2/Xbox/GameCube. Useful and fun, but limited. And if you have multiple kids, a PC in EACH room is a bit much. My kids have dabbled, and the only thing they have to worry about is direct access to porn and the like. IM with their friends? Sure. Building a game? I encourage it! Designing a website for the kid across the street? You bet.
But having it in a common room removes the tendancy to be surfing on a not so nice website, knowing that someone might walk by. Or having a conversation with "your new best friend" ("Shh...don't tell daddy about us"). They know where they can and cannot go. And if something pops up inadvertantly, they also know to back out of it quick, and not return.
A net connected PC in the bedroom is like a TV with ALL the cable channels in the bedroom, and a 900# capable phone. I'd never see the kid again. And not know WTF they are doing in there.
Quite the contrary. His access is filtered. Jusr as he is not allowed to wander the streets downtown alone.
But it's more of "exclude those", rather than "include only these". There is a house AOL acct, and whatever you say about them I think they suck), AOL does have rather effective, user selectable kid filters.
And the kids PC is not in the bedroom. Bad mistake. The PC is in a common room, with frequent walkthru's.
.kids.us provides a false security. "If it's in the kids.us domain, it must be safe." Not likely.
The "WTF" comment was on the gall of appending the.us to this proposed domain. Why not just.kids?
I think if it must be done, it should be on an exclusion basis, rather than inclusion..porn or something similar. But I still don't think that would work well either. Define porn.
However... how would you restrict such access without software the kids could screw around with?
Introducing the new KidPC. No 'install' rights in the OS, and an embedded browser that returns ONLY.kids.us websites. Your child is now safe. You may return to the couch, and the latest rerun on Cops.
The vast majority of websites are kid-friendly, or at least kid-neutral. To confine kids to a kids only domain of approved sites limits their creativity and access immesurably.
Case in point: Last year, my son was 9. Calls me up at work one day, and says "Dad, I have a science project coming up." The little dude had gone online, and researched plans for building a very simple, leafblower powered, one man hovercraft. Some guy in WhoKnowsWhere, Iowa had built one, and put the design online. So my son made some mods, wrote a "how and why", we built it, he won first place. If restricted to 'kids.us', he probably would never have come across this.
Is every website operator supposed to submit their site for inclusion into the kids domain? Not a chance. There is a wealth of kid usable info from various sources such as hobbyists, colleges, clubs, that would not normally think of themselves as 'kid-friendly'. All these would be shut out from kids access.
Instead, they will be tooling around in disney.kids.us, nickjr.kids.us, and toysrus.kids.us. Utterly devoid of anything but another sales opportunity, and some games.
And while we're at it, WTF is with this "kids.us"? Are American children the only ones deserving of 'protection'?
Who will be doing the approving? Are their thoughts about 'kid friendly' the same as mine? Not a chance.
ahh...but "College student Bob" does not need all the tools and tricks contained in MS Office. Star or OpenOffice will serve him just as well.
The developers of the lower end suites (graphics, office, whatever) could use the minimal fee, rather than "College student Bob" using a pirated copy of MS Office.
If there was a large notice: "This ride has had 3 significant safety incidents in the last 4 years", would you ride it? Would you let your kids? You'd have to stop and think, removing the suspension of belief. What would that type of information do for you Is that good or bad? Define 'significant'. Is 3 G's good or bad? IS it good for *you*? No way to know until you've done it.
Ride = fun, not ride = possible death.
If there was a warning on your new cars sun visor: "This model car was involved in 1,000 fatal accidents in the past 12 months", would you buy it? Would you let your kids ride in it?
Chances are, the model car you drive was involved in many, many fatal crashes in the last few months. But people drive each and every day.
Given that it is evidently trivial to dupe a fingerprint in gelatin...
How many people already have their prints on file? No...not just criminals. People who have been arrested, but not convicted. Members of the military, police, child care workers. Children of paranoid parents, etc, etc, ad infinitum. All 'respectable' persons. Clear prints, already in electronic format, ready to be stolen/hacked/duplicated and used.
Think about THAT when the vote comes up for biometric entry into the country.
All the 'kid registration' over the last few years has been a desensitization to this point.
Screw the drive up, have the store deliver. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly overall.
This is assuming of I want my fridge talking to the grocery store. (Not bloody likely!)
And then, of course your health insurance company will want this data. "Oh no, Mr. Johnson...you can't order those HoHo's. Your last physical showed you 15 lbs overweight. Here's some tofu and rice cakes instead"
With the inevitable time overruns due to rebuilding caused by grammar and conceptual mistakes, is it really going to be cheaper hiring offshore vs. hiring a team locally?
My last team had a Chinese woman, and Indian woman, a Hungarian male, and 3 Americans, all sitting in the same office. The disconnect between Chinese/Hindu/Hungary caused several large delays. Doing this from 10,000 miles away has got to be worse. Much worse.
www.amazon.co.uk has this warning:
This CD includes anti-copying technology that is intended to prevent unlawful copying of the CD with a PC. This may affect playability of the CD on certain computer devices such as PCs and gaming platforms.
This warning is absent at www.amazon.com
"...may affect..." Nothing about anything more hazardous wrt to iMacs. They do, however, specifically call it a CD.
If it looks like a duck....it damn well better BE a duck.
You must be kidding---there can't be anywhere in the US or most of Canada where Art Bell can't be heard on normal radio on one of the 1000 stations he's on every night. (those outside N America please disregard these comments)
His characters try to create such outlandish rumors on the Internet that the world's population will realize that you can't believe everything you read.
Too late. See National Enquirer, or The Sun. The rumors are out there, and people do believe them.
Slashdot Mirror
I started my first job yesterday, and I am forced to use Windos at work. My employer is wasting thousands of dollars in M$ licensing fees. His server crashes 3-4 times a day, and my workstation crashes even more often.
You need better admins, plain and simple. I can't remember the last time my Win2k workstation crashed.
Nor should tax dollars be spent on Bic pens, or Bostitch staplers, or Lockheed jets, or any other product built by an evil moneygrubbing company!
Please...
Like it or not, years ago M$ was the logical choice for software. And, like it or not, M$ has advanced, through a common user interface, the state of desktop computing.
Now...that situation may be changing, with the advent of new open source tools and applications that actually work and can be used by the average office worker. BUT, an entity the size of (name your fave countries government) cannot change overnight.
Give it time.
So you're saying that court records should be closed?
Some parts, yes. Divorce cases. People are having their bank acct info, social security num, name and address posted on official online sites as part of the 'court record'.
That info needs to be redacted.
Court sponsored identity theft, anyone?
so I don't buy much of anything other than groceries (well, and beer) these days
Beer IS groceries!
Linux has been a viable, reliable alternative to Windows for "how" long?
For just typing up documents? Oh, maybe about ten years!
I don't know about you, but I don't use an operating system for "just typing up documents". Rather, I use an application that runs on top of the operating system. One that includes a spell checker, the ability to inset charts, graphs, headers, footers, a table of contents, maybe. You know..stuff that makes a document complete, readable, and usable, rather than a mere collection of words and letters.
HTMLDOC is what i use. it's available on both UNIX and Windows platforms, is released under the GPL and...
..it still costs $150. hmm...Adobe Acrobat (proven tool with great support) for $250, or HTMLDOC (new, no training classes available, no large scale support available) for $150.
For large scale government use, that's pretty much a no-brainer. Go with the proven tool. That's the same with OpenOffice and other 'free', GPL tools. Can I send 50,000 people to training classes in the next year? Can the OpenOffice helpdesk handle the support workload imposed by adding 1,000,000 new users from one organization? Do they have a easy to use upgrade/bugfix tool?
All these questions and many, many more, need to be asked before a large organization jumps from what they have been using to something brand new.
When some Government clerk is just typing up documents on a PC, why do they need a copy of Windows (and presumably Office) when Linux and KOffice or OpenOffice, etc, will do the exact same thing at a fraction of the cost?
Because:
a) It is not necessarily a "fraction of the cost". You have to include the entire ball of wax in the TCO calcs. TCO includes the word 'Total'
b) OpenOffice has been out as a reliable product for "how" long?
c) Linux has been a viable, reliable alternative to Windows for "how" long?
d) Free != free
Another problem with this model when applied to home use is online ads.
Ads/popups/whatever eat up bandwidth. Maybe not a lot, but not stuff I asked for. And maybe enough to put me over the cap. I have to look at the ads, and now potentially pay for the priveledge of doing so.
What's that you say? Software to kill all the popups? Sure...but if everyone killed their ads, the advertisers wouldn't pay anymore, and so those websites would either go under, or be forced to charge for access.
Is TW/RR going to give me a rebate on bandwidth associated with advertisements? Not a chance.
Please...just some vaseline first.
THe actual "common area" is tucked away in a corner, not out in the regular TV/family room. Acessible, but not a constant bombardment of other people. Privacy, but anyone can walk by at any time.
Yes, hard core coding would be tough with constant interruptions. As it is, it's not really that way.
The bedroom is just too tough to monitor easily. If something surreptitious were to be happening, all the kid would have to do is keep an ear out for anyone climbing the stairs and close down for the moment. And then there is the 3 AM stuff.
A PC is the bedroom is sooo much harrder to monitor, and sooo much easier to slip into unwanted activities.
Kind of the same as having the boyfriend upstairs in the bedroom, anytime they want. Probably nothing is going on, but...you want to be sure.
I know what you mean. Kids need to be able to screw around with it. But also within limits. An unconnected/isolated PC is merely (today) a very versatile PS2/Xbox/GameCube. Useful and fun, but limited. And if you have multiple kids, a PC in EACH room is a bit much. My kids have dabbled, and the only thing they have to worry about is direct access to porn and the like. IM with their friends? Sure. Building a game? I encourage it! Designing a website for the kid across the street? You bet.
But having it in a common room removes the tendancy to be surfing on a not so nice website, knowing that someone might walk by. Or having a conversation with "your new best friend" ("Shh...don't tell daddy about us"). They know where they can and cannot go. And if something pops up inadvertantly, they also know to back out of it quick, and not return.
A net connected PC in the bedroom is like a TV with ALL the cable channels in the bedroom, and a 900# capable phone. I'd never see the kid again. And not know WTF they are doing in there.
Like Uncle Ronnie said "Trust, but verify."
Quite the contrary. His access is filtered. Jusr as he is not allowed to wander the streets downtown alone.
.kids.us provides a false security. "If it's in the kids.us domain, it must be safe." Not likely.
.us to this proposed domain. Why not just .kids?
.porn or something similar. But I still don't think that would work well either. Define porn.
But it's more of "exclude those", rather than "include only these". There is a house AOL acct, and whatever you say about them I think they suck), AOL does have rather effective, user selectable kid filters.
And the kids PC is not in the bedroom. Bad mistake. The PC is in a common room, with frequent walkthru's.
The "WTF" comment was on the gall of appending the
I think if it must be done, it should be on an exclusion basis, rather than inclusion.
However... how would you restrict such access without software the kids could screw around with?
.kids.us websites. Your child is now safe. You may return to the couch, and the latest rerun on Cops.
Introducing the new KidPC. No 'install' rights in the OS, and an embedded browser that returns ONLY
The vast majority of websites are kid-friendly, or at least kid-neutral. To confine kids to a kids only domain of approved sites limits their creativity and access immesurably.
Case in point: Last year, my son was 9. Calls me up at work one day, and says "Dad, I have a science project coming up." The little dude had gone online, and researched plans for building a very simple, leafblower powered, one man hovercraft. Some guy in WhoKnowsWhere, Iowa had built one, and put the design online. So my son made some mods, wrote a "how and why", we built it, he won first place. If restricted to 'kids.us', he probably would never have come across this.
Is every website operator supposed to submit their site for inclusion into the kids domain? Not a chance. There is a wealth of kid usable info from various sources such as hobbyists, colleges, clubs, that would not normally think of themselves as 'kid-friendly'. All these would be shut out from kids access.
Instead, they will be tooling around in disney.kids.us, nickjr.kids.us, and toysrus.kids.us. Utterly devoid of anything but another sales opportunity, and some games.
And while we're at it, WTF is with this "kids.us"? Are American children the only ones deserving of 'protection'?
Who will be doing the approving? Are their thoughts about 'kid friendly' the same as mine? Not a chance.
What is a 'reasonable price' for a development tool? One that you can make a living from.
It sounds like $25 would be too much for anything for you.
Spoken by someone who does not actually build anything for a living.
If your boss (future boss?) said "We will never pay you for anything, ever", would that be ok with you?
ahh...but "College student Bob" does not need all the tools and tricks contained in MS Office. Star or OpenOffice will serve him just as well.
The developers of the lower end suites (graphics, office, whatever) could use the minimal fee, rather than "College student Bob" using a pirated copy of MS Office.
And overall, that reduces the *fun factor*.
If there was a large notice: "This ride has had 3 significant safety incidents in the last 4 years", would you ride it? Would you let your kids? You'd have to stop and think, removing the suspension of belief. What would that type of information do for you Is that good or bad? Define 'significant'. Is 3 G's good or bad? IS it good for *you*? No way to know until you've done it.
Ride = fun, not ride = possible death.
If there was a warning on your new cars sun visor: "This model car was involved in 1,000 fatal accidents in the past 12 months", would you buy it? Would you let your kids ride in it?
Chances are, the model car you drive was involved in many, many fatal crashes in the last few months. But people drive each and every day.
You'll let the secret out
Given that it is evidently trivial to dupe a fingerprint in gelatin...
How many people already have their prints on file? No...not just criminals. People who have been arrested, but not convicted. Members of the military, police, child care workers. Children of paranoid parents, etc, etc, ad infinitum. All 'respectable' persons. Clear prints, already in electronic format, ready to be stolen/hacked/duplicated and used.
Think about THAT when the vote comes up for biometric entry into the country.
All the 'kid registration' over the last few years has been a desensitization to this point.
Screw the drive up, have the store deliver. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly overall.
This is assuming of I want my fridge talking to the grocery store. (Not bloody likely!)
And then, of course your health insurance company will want this data. "Oh no, Mr. Johnson...you can't order those HoHo's. Your last physical showed you 15 lbs overweight. Here's some tofu and rice cakes instead"
With the inevitable time overruns due to rebuilding caused by grammar and conceptual mistakes, is it really going to be cheaper hiring offshore vs. hiring a team locally?
My last team had a Chinese woman, and Indian woman, a Hungarian male, and 3 Americans, all sitting in the same office. The disconnect between Chinese/Hindu/Hungary caused several large delays. Doing this from 10,000 miles away has got to be worse. Much worse.
www.amazon.co.uk has this warning:
This CD includes anti-copying technology that is intended to prevent unlawful copying of the CD with a PC. This may affect playability of the CD on certain computer devices such as PCs and gaming platforms.
This warning is absent at www.amazon.com
"...may affect..." Nothing about anything more hazardous wrt to iMacs. They do, however, specifically call it a CD.
If it looks like a duck....it damn well better BE a duck.
I don't believe protecting porn is anything even remotely close to what the founding fathers intended.
Ok...easy. Just define porn. As an exercise, describe to me why Hustler is, and why Venus de Milo is not, "porn".
You must be kidding---there can't be anywhere in the US or most of Canada where Art Bell can't be heard on normal radio on one of the 1000 stations he's on every night. (those outside N America please disregard these comments)
The question is, who wants to?
His characters try to create such outlandish rumors on the Internet that the world's population will realize that you can't believe everything you read.
Too late. See National Enquirer, or The Sun. The rumors are out there, and people do believe them.
We are doomed.