The people I know and work with in the open source community are probably the most piracy conscious people I know, mostly because of jack holes like this guy. It bugs the hell out of me that people always tie open source and piracy when in fact, there could be nothing further from the truth. I'm the first one to pay for things like GAMES for Linux, or quality e-books because I want people to produce more of them! And honestly, there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for your work.
I think ultimately this has nothing to do with Open Source and everything to do with people wanting something for nothing, and if they can get it, they'll take full advantage. Likely the tie to Open Source comes from the fact that people who are extremely cost conscious are going to prefer Open Source products because they align with their pricing criteria (The same way illegal copies of products align with their pricing criteria)
I fully admit I'm a dumb idiot who sits on the couch watching football. It happens after you get married. When I was single there was a ton of stuff I used to do that I no longer do, such as cook. My wife likes to do it, I like eating, so win-win. That said, when she goes out of town, I'm so unaccustomed to cooking that I often don't, or will order out for the entirety of her trip. Why? I have no idea, but I do. Back in the day I actually *liked* cooking.
It works the other way too, every night I find my wife's keys, where ever it is that she puts them, and put them on the hook by the door they're supposed to go on. When I'm out of town, she gets to spend 30ish minutes every morning looking for her keys
I actually think a Dell commercial highlighting that they have a copious amount of nerds and that I'm too dumb to spec out a machine would, if presented correctly, be really, really funny. Hey, it works for Apple!
Lets see, extra chips on a piece of equipment that handles all the network traffic, which would include NFS and a variety of other plain text protocols (why would someone use encryption on a "secure" network). Add to that a sprinkling of Teredo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling
And looks to me like it's very likely that someone could steal whatever they wanted.
Good thing all our corporate suppliers are bound by contracts that would totally be enforced by this foreign government who's providing the bogus equipment. Didn't think about that, did you, stupid corporate outsourcing asshat.
So if you're willing to forgo support options, I'd build a server yourself from components. You'll be able to get the mix of horse power you want and power consumption that it seems you need. fuzzyfuzzyfungus suggested using a desktop given your modest specs, I'd concur with this, but the cases used by large PC vendors don't really lend themselves for operating in a really harsh environment. I'd start with a case like this:
While the window is flashy, it's got a ton of fans, and good airflow, so while there will be dust and whatnot, you shouldn't see a lot of cake up, plus with the window, you can see when it needs any cleaning.
Or you could go with the google approach, instead of buying a case, just slap down a piece of corkboard on a shelf in the rack and place your components. You'll have to do a bit of jerry rigging with fans if you go that route, but it would save you $100. With a can of compressed air, you can keep it as clean as you need.
This is a little OT, but Cringley has a blog post/podcast entitled "Bob the Impaler" where he discusses Microsoft's profitability, and how they've developed a structure of hiding profit to fly low on the radar of the Federal Trade Commission. I have a feeling that these unprofitable up/down grades are somewhere in that fat...
There are a ton of projects out there on Sourceforge, pick one and dig in. As a hiring manager, this is something I looked for in candidates because:
1) They could get the pre-requisite experience without having a job as a developer
2) It showed they enjoyed software development
3) It displayed showing initiative, which is something a lot of candidates lack
Best case: A company sees the project and wants to sponser it, making your project your full time development job
Worst case: You spend some time working on a project that goes no where, but you now have some real experience that you can tout on your resume and in the interview
Added Bonus: You get to talk in the interview about the open source community, your participation in it, and maybe on how that experience can also benefit your perspective employer.
Plus you'll be able to brag about your software to friends and co-workers.
Oracle used to sell specialized Oracle hardware back in the day. They bought a company in Landover, MD, I think they were called Gould Systems, but they made machines to run Oracle.
Oracle later re-named them the Oracle Complex Systems Group, then later still, axed the whole thing.
Seems someone in PR doesn't know their own company's history...
I have to disagree with your philosophy on naming boxen. I worked at a place where one admin based names on trees, another animals, and yet another transformers. As we grew, things quickly derailed.
For example: No one in Europe can get mail.
Old system: Ok, who set up the mail system in EMEA?
Frank?
Alright, when did Frank install it, during his scooby doo character phase? Or was it Bond Girls?
I've worked in shops with 100 boxes to 10,000 boxes. Having systems with cute names from a movie or theme works for a while, but the system starts to break down once replacement machines start entering the network.
Probably the best naming scheme was first sub-domained by airport code and/or country code:
jfk.us.domain.com
lgw.uk.domain.com
If that doesn't work, you can also do city.country.domain.com
Once you've got your subdomains worked out, the machine host name ends up being the function, or a code you've designed to indicate function (since you don't want to tell everyone what your boxes do). You probably also want to include a numeric component as well. ie NS3, NI2 (Network Infrastructure ie DNS, DHCP, routing, firewall, etc). Make sure you document what each designation machine does, that way people don't start running around naming things incorrectly.
I like this system because it allows for growth, replacement, and tells you something useful about the machines if their name shows up in a log somewhere.
I would argue that many of your users don't need to touch the machines, especially those in production. If there are some that users need to access, you can always create a CNAME to give them that gets them to a box that already has a name in your organized naming scheme.
I don't know whether or not CentOS hurts Red Hat or not,/. readers make good points on both sides of this arguement. However, the "It's GPL Red Hat has to tolerate CentOS!" argument is somewhat flawed.
CentOS is built from the src RPMs that Red Hat provides which puts them in compliance with the GPL (v2). From what I hear, the CentOS folks have scripts that search through the source code tars contained in the src RPMs and strip out all the Red Hat logos, Trademarks, etc. and then compile the packages for CentOS. Which, consequently, is how CentOS is able to make the updates available for their distro so quickly. But realize that the GPL does not dictate the format of the source code that has to be provided. In fact, the GPL (v2) simply states that the source code must be supplied in an "easily accessible format" to requestors. So Red Hat _could_ cat all the source code that makes the RHEL distro into one giant text file. In doing so, they would still comply with the requirements of the GPL, but would totally bork folks like CentOS who are making derivitive distributions from it and would make Red Hat unbelievably large jerk wads...
If it doesn't, then it has no chance in the PDA marketplace. I know, I had a Nokia 770, it worked great; only problem, calendar sucked. It did have the ability to set an alarm, once per day. WTF? How useful is that?
Seriously, who puts out a PDA that doesn't have a working calendar and expects it to be a success?
Some of you may remember this story:
Hacker Sentenced To Longest US Sentence Yet
about a young man who accessed a wide open access point to check his Yahoo! e-mail. The feds nailed him for "Unauthorized Access to a Protected Computer" because he accessed the Lowes Store Wi-Fi Access Point. I fail to see how Skyhook's methods are any different. They may not have used the access point to do something, but they still connected to it, uninvited.
If it's good enough for our real life citizens, it should also apply to our corporate citizens; at least in a fair and just world.
Now let's meet the crew, we have
Bob Smith, A statistician
Joe Franklin, Another statistician
and
Tom Reynolds, A completely different type of statistician.
You can't tell me that a crew of statisticians isn't going to be nerdy!
The goal is to not pay Red Hat a dime. Think about it, how does CentOS work? Easy, Red Hat, being an open source company, releases the sourcecode for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. Then CentOS takes the source code, removes all the copyrighted artwork and such, and BAM! CentOS. Oracle basically says they're going to do the same thing with their "Unbreakable Linux". So, you can get RHEL with out paying for it. Grab the source RPMs, remove the artwork, and rebuild binary RPMs.
Really, this is Crazy Larry being pissed off that Red Hat bought JBoss. He's going to stick it to Red Hat the only way he can, run his own Linux support business, at a loss, in order to grab marketshare from Red Hat. Once Red Hat is anemic enough, or belly up, and his own customer base is large enough, he'll jack up the rate to something that's profitable. In Economic terms, this is known as "dumping". Flooding the market with low cost goods in order to gain market share. Then when all the competitors go out of business, you have a monopoly. And we all know what happens when someone has a monopoly...
I think many readers missed the point of the article, which is not that gamers have to report any IRL income from the game on their tax forms, but rather, how do you make a suitable tax scheme within virtual environments. Many virtual economies suffer from either significant inflation or deflation, which has a tendency to benefit the uber rich players, and penalize the more normalized income players. Which is not unlike IRL economies in different countries around the globe.
I for one think that using virtual economies to experiment with tax reform ideas is an idea far overdue. For example, wouldn't you like to see the The Fair Tax put into practice to see what ramifications it would have on a functioning economy? I mean, that is legislation that is posed annually to the US Congress. Or even implementing a tax system like what a country currently employs, then mucking with it to see if there is a better option.
Unfortunately, while this is a worth while goal, many virtual economies do not have the same market forces as a real one. For example, barrier to entry into a industry is very low. You're an enchanter in WoW and want to be a Tinkerer? No problem, drop your skill and work up points in another. IRL it's not so simple. You want to be a automobile producer? You can't simply aquire skill points and make it happen. You need to purchase capital, expensive capital. Plus virtual economies suffer from other problems as well, such as the ability for people to gain significant market monopoly power. Those of you who play WoW on Arthas and are Horde. Um, sorry about running the Auction House prices on gems up 500%, but the game let me... Game manufacturers and GMs really don't regulate the economy as much as say the Federal Reserve would, and they allow players to establish Cartels and other organizations that will allow them to set prices and control the flow of goods.
While virtual economies are not perfect, with some effort, we could really use them as models to test economic theories without affecting our IRL economies. This would be great for Economists who work on tax reform and other areas. Kudos to someone else finally figuring it out.
Seriously, companies don't really learn from another company's trials and tribulations. At some point they all suffer from the same thing, which will cause them to experience "a downfall". This malady is:
"But we're [insert company name here]!"
I know it looks innocuous, but let's see that in action!
1988, IBM was having big problems with management bloat, a stagnant product line, and a poor customer experience. But if you asked someone there 'Why would I buy from you when I could buy from Compaq or some other less expensive, more innovative competitor?' the response was invariably, "But we're IBM!"
In 1998, SGI started shipping their coolest, most important product ever. The $15,000 Windows NT workstation. If you asked an executive at SGI 'Why would I pay $15000 for a Windows NT machine with a nice graphics card when I can build a whitebox with an Nvidia Riva TNT card for far less money?', the response was "But we're SGI!"
Today, ask a SUN exec 'Why should I pay $X for a solaris workstation when I can buy assemble a box for $500 running Linux that will do the same thing?' What do they say? "But we're SUN!"
It's been my experience that this becomes a problem at most sucessful companies, and if you pay attention, you'll see it's cyclical. The company adopts this mentality, loses customers, re-vamp's their product line, customer service, etc. Gains customers, becomes successful again, and ultimately repeats their mistakes and do the whole thing over again.
Unfortunately, we've already seen that governments place a higher importance on the appearence of security rather than actual security. For direct evidence, just look at airport screening.
I'll conceed that x-ray'ing baggage would highlight obvious weapons like knives or guns. However, as we've seen from the likes of Yousef Josef and other terrorists, people can smuggle bomb components on plains using items, such as watches, which would not be picked up by the usual airport screening proceedures. Add to that the ever so effective comparison of the name and date on my boarding pass with the name on whatever casually inspected ID I provide. Please don't even get me started on how rediculous making me take off my shoes is.
If governments were really serious about airport security, they would adapt a model similar to the one used in Israel. Roving groups of heavily armed, well trained commandos that stop "interesting" individuals and select them for additional screening. However, this method would be too inconvienent and intrusive for travelers (Americans).
This is the state of governmental security. To the not very determined to violate it, lay individual, it appears that there is SOME kind of security in place. With a slight bit more investigation, someone with a bit of desire can easily violate it, thereby rendering the "security" utterly useless. But hey, they have to have some way to spend our tax dollars, right?
The reason Red Hat does not offer RHEL4 DVDs as a download from Red Hat Network is that there is a two Gigabyte download limit for files in Apache. FYI
-Runz
P.S. Tried http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ lately? You can request features and submit bug reports for developers to work on. It is still open source, so if they don't move at a speed that is acceptable, you could always just suck it up and do it yourself....
LMFAO
Of course RHEL 2.1 AS has no LVM support, it was created four friggin years ago! And lets face it LVM on Linux back then was not what you would call, um, stable or reliable. But lets also look at what Red Hat has done with RHEL 2.1 AS. They've published updated and bug fixes over the last four years, and another 3 years into the future. It's still a reliable platform, even if it is no longer a modern one.
And seriously, holding Red Hat accountable for what Oracle or some SAN provider is doing is ludacris. Like they have any control over the Oracle sourcecode or QA at another corporation, or licensing agreements offered by other companies on unrelated add-on products. There's a reason Oracle installs itself in/opt. I mean, That's like saying that Fedora sucks because your Nvidia graphics card doesn't work right, *mutters* with the binary drivers I downloaded from Nvidia and have nothing to do with Red Hat nor included in any part with the Red Hat distribution...
You want to talk about hinky agreements, how about the fact that SUN sales reps got kickbacks from Oracle based on the number of per CPU Oracle licenses they sold! Like that didn't encourage the sales people to tell the customer they need an extra 2 CPUs to really do the Oracle operations they wanted. I'm sure Red Hat has problems, like every other company, but dinging them because of crap that other companies do is silly.
-Runz
This would be excellent for us Linux users. The MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) industry sees Korea as a huge market. If they couldn't run their games on Windows, then the game companies would have to port their stuff to Linux to stay in the Korean market. I see this as a win-win all the way around.
I got flamed for proposing this theory when the article was first posted on/.
One major problem with the study, not really addressed by this problems article is one of comparison. Yes, Yahoo! and Google are two search engines, but they perform their searches differently, and more importantly, use different criteria when returning matches! It is quite possible that when doing the exact same search in both yeilds a difference in results. Why? Because the two different search engines have different criteria for providing output, or matches if you will, from said search. Perhaps Yahoo! does indeed have more pages indexed, but because of their search algorithm, or their program which displays results to the user, less matches are provided; even though more pages were looked at.
I'm not saying that Yahoo! does have more or less pages than Google. But the study that was executed and published did not account for many of the differences between the products they were comparing. The above is merely another interpretation of said results. I'm glad that some folks at NCSA agree and provided some clarification; lest we get another urban myth like storks bring babies.
I did RTFA. Fine the conclusionary statement is Google consistently provides more results, so Yahoo!'s claim of more indexed pages is suspicious. But my point was one of search engine design. Would not a better search engine, even though it may have more indexed pages to search, actually provide less, more appropriate matches? I am just providing an alternative explination for the data that was collected and analyzed by NCSA. Perhaps Yahoo! does have more indexed pages, but through a different search algorithm generated fewer, but better results.
If we were to apply the same logic used in this analysis to another field, say automobiles, one would conclude that a hand-crafted Shelby Cobra is an inferior auto when compared to a Ford Focus simply because there were fewer of them manufactured.
The beauty of statistics is that they have a variety of possible interpretations. I don't remember who it was that I heard say this, but I belive it was a political lobbyist, "Tell me what you want to prove, and I'll find statistics to back it up!" This statement further illudes that statistical data, while interesting, is given positive or negative connatation based on the interpretation of said statistics.
BTW, I understand that 9 out of 10/. readers think anonymous posters are pussies. Or mabye they thought anonymous posters were pussy cats, damn you statistics!
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1: build pier into the ocean
Step 2: push snow off pier into ocean
Step 3: ????
Step 4: PROFIT!!!!!!
-Runz
The people I know and work with in the open source community are probably the most piracy conscious people I know, mostly because of jack holes like this guy. It bugs the hell out of me that people always tie open source and piracy when in fact, there could be nothing further from the truth. I'm the first one to pay for things like GAMES for Linux, or quality e-books because I want people to produce more of them! And honestly, there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for your work.
I think ultimately this has nothing to do with Open Source and everything to do with people wanting something for nothing, and if they can get it, they'll take full advantage. Likely the tie to Open Source comes from the fact that people who are extremely cost conscious are going to prefer Open Source products because they align with their pricing criteria (The same way illegal copies of products align with their pricing criteria)
-Runz
Oddly, Windows 7 works just fine on my MacBook Pro 15".
There was a Firmware update about 2 weeks ago, which may have been what we were waiting for; but I had no problems with it when I installed it today.
-Runz
I fully admit I'm a dumb idiot who sits on the couch watching football. It happens after you get married. When I was single there was a ton of stuff I used to do that I no longer do, such as cook. My wife likes to do it, I like eating, so win-win. That said, when she goes out of town, I'm so unaccustomed to cooking that I often don't, or will order out for the entirety of her trip. Why? I have no idea, but I do. Back in the day I actually *liked* cooking.
It works the other way too, every night I find my wife's keys, where ever it is that she puts them, and put them on the hook by the door they're supposed to go on. When I'm out of town, she gets to spend 30ish minutes every morning looking for her keys
I actually think a Dell commercial highlighting that they have a copious amount of nerds and that I'm too dumb to spec out a machine would, if presented correctly, be really, really funny. Hey, it works for Apple!
-RunZ
It's like cars, top three items women shoppers want in cars:
Economy
Safety
Cup Holders
Applied to computers:
Battery Life
Don't catch on fire
Cup Holders
*Someone* hasn't read the market research.
-RunZ
You may remember that /. ran the following several stories:
Feds Seize $78M of Bogus Chinese Cisco Gear
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/29/1642221
and
FBI Says Military Had Counterfeit Cisco Routers
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/09/164201&from=rss
Lets see, extra chips on a piece of equipment that handles all the network traffic, which would include NFS and a variety of other plain text protocols (why would someone use encryption on a "secure" network). Add to that a sprinkling of Teredo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling
And looks to me like it's very likely that someone could steal whatever they wanted.
Good thing all our corporate suppliers are bound by contracts that would totally be enforced by this foreign government who's providing the bogus equipment. Didn't think about that, did you, stupid corporate outsourcing asshat.
-Runz
So if you're willing to forgo support options, I'd build a server yourself from components. You'll be able to get the mix of horse power you want and power consumption that it seems you need. fuzzyfuzzyfungus suggested using a desktop given your modest specs, I'd concur with this, but the cases used by large PC vendors don't really lend themselves for operating in a really harsh environment. I'd start with a case like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129021
While the window is flashy, it's got a ton of fans, and good airflow, so while there will be dust and whatnot, you shouldn't see a lot of cake up, plus with the window, you can see when it needs any cleaning.
Depending on the size of your UPS, you can put the whole kit and kaboodle into a rolling rack:
http://www.racksolutions.com/portable-racks-guide.shtml
Or you could go with the google approach, instead of buying a case, just slap down a piece of corkboard on a shelf in the rack and place your components. You'll have to do a bit of jerry rigging with fans if you go that route, but it would save you $100. With a can of compressed air, you can keep it as clean as you need.
-Runz
This is a little OT, but Cringley has a blog post/podcast entitled "Bob the Impaler" where he discusses Microsoft's profitability, and how they've developed a structure of hiding profit to fly low on the radar of the Federal Trade Commission. I have a feeling that these unprofitable up/down grades are somewhere in that fat...
Cringely's home page it's about 2/3 down the page.
-Runz
1) They could get the pre-requisite experience without having a job as a developer
2) It showed they enjoyed software development
3) It displayed showing initiative, which is something a lot of candidates lack
Best case: A company sees the project and wants to sponser it, making your project your full time development job
Worst case: You spend some time working on a project that goes no where, but you now have some real experience that you can tout on your resume and in the interview
Added Bonus: You get to talk in the interview about the open source community, your participation in it, and maybe on how that experience can also benefit your perspective employer.
Plus you'll be able to brag about your software to friends and co-workers.
-Runz
Oracle used to sell specialized Oracle hardware back in the day. They bought a company in Landover, MD, I think they were called Gould Systems, but they made machines to run Oracle.
Oracle later re-named them the Oracle Complex Systems Group, then later still, axed the whole thing.
Seems someone in PR doesn't know their own company's history...
-Runz
I absolutely agree with you about labeling!
I have to disagree with your philosophy on naming boxen. I worked at a place where one admin based names on trees, another animals, and yet another transformers. As we grew, things quickly derailed.
For example: No one in Europe can get mail.
Old system: Ok, who set up the mail system in EMEA?
Frank?
Alright, when did Frank install it, during his scooby doo character phase? Or was it Bond Girls?
New system: I'll check MX1.emea.domain.ext
-Runz
I've worked in shops with 100 boxes to 10,000 boxes. Having systems with cute names from a movie or theme works for a while, but the system starts to break down once replacement machines start entering the network.
Probably the best naming scheme was first sub-domained by airport code and/or country code:
jfk.us.domain.com
lgw.uk.domain.com
If that doesn't work, you can also do city.country.domain.com
Once you've got your subdomains worked out, the machine host name ends up being the function, or a code you've designed to indicate function (since you don't want to tell everyone what your boxes do). You probably also want to include a numeric component as well. ie NS3, NI2 (Network Infrastructure ie DNS, DHCP, routing, firewall, etc). Make sure you document what each designation machine does, that way people don't start running around naming things incorrectly.
I like this system because it allows for growth, replacement, and tells you something useful about the machines if their name shows up in a log somewhere.
I would argue that many of your users don't need to touch the machines, especially those in production. If there are some that users need to access, you can always create a CNAME to give them that gets them to a box that already has a name in your organized naming scheme.
Hope that's useful.
-Runz
I don't know whether or not CentOS hurts Red Hat or not, /. readers make good points on both sides of this arguement. However, the "It's GPL Red Hat has to tolerate CentOS!" argument is somewhat flawed.
CentOS is built from the src RPMs that Red Hat provides which puts them in compliance with the GPL (v2). From what I hear, the CentOS folks have scripts that search through the source code tars contained in the src RPMs and strip out all the Red Hat logos, Trademarks, etc. and then compile the packages for CentOS. Which, consequently, is how CentOS is able to make the updates available for their distro so quickly. But realize that the GPL does not dictate the format of the source code that has to be provided. In fact, the GPL (v2) simply states that the source code must be supplied in an "easily accessible format" to requestors. So Red Hat _could_ cat all the source code that makes the RHEL distro into one giant text file. In doing so, they would still comply with the requirements of the GPL, but would totally bork folks like CentOS who are making derivitive distributions from it and would make Red Hat unbelievably large jerk wads...
-Runz
If it doesn't, then it has no chance in the PDA marketplace. I know, I had a Nokia 770, it worked great; only problem, calendar sucked. It did have the ability to set an alarm, once per day. WTF? How useful is that?
Seriously, who puts out a PDA that doesn't have a working calendar and expects it to be a success?
-Runz
Some of you may remember this story: Hacker Sentenced To Longest US Sentence Yet about a young man who accessed a wide open access point to check his Yahoo! e-mail. The feds nailed him for "Unauthorized Access to a Protected Computer" because he accessed the Lowes Store Wi-Fi Access Point. I fail to see how Skyhook's methods are any different. They may not have used the access point to do something, but they still connected to it, uninvited.
If it's good enough for our real life citizens, it should also apply to our corporate citizens; at least in a fair and just world.
-Runz
Now let's meet the crew, we have
Bob Smith, A statistician
Joe Franklin, Another statistician
and
Tom Reynolds, A completely different type of statistician.
You can't tell me that a crew of statisticians isn't going to be nerdy!
-Runz
The goal is to not pay Red Hat a dime. Think about it, how does CentOS work? Easy, Red Hat, being an open source company, releases the sourcecode for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. Then CentOS takes the source code, removes all the copyrighted artwork and such, and BAM! CentOS. Oracle basically says they're going to do the same thing with their "Unbreakable Linux". So, you can get RHEL with out paying for it. Grab the source RPMs, remove the artwork, and rebuild binary RPMs.
Really, this is Crazy Larry being pissed off that Red Hat bought JBoss. He's going to stick it to Red Hat the only way he can, run his own Linux support business, at a loss, in order to grab marketshare from Red Hat. Once Red Hat is anemic enough, or belly up, and his own customer base is large enough, he'll jack up the rate to something that's profitable. In Economic terms, this is known as "dumping". Flooding the market with low cost goods in order to gain market share. Then when all the competitors go out of business, you have a monopoly. And we all know what happens when someone has a monopoly...
-Runz
I think many readers missed the point of the article, which is not that gamers have to report any IRL income from the game on their tax forms, but rather, how do you make a suitable tax scheme within virtual environments. Many virtual economies suffer from either significant inflation or deflation, which has a tendency to benefit the uber rich players, and penalize the more normalized income players. Which is not unlike IRL economies in different countries around the globe.
I for one think that using virtual economies to experiment with tax reform ideas is an idea far overdue. For example, wouldn't you like to see the The Fair Tax put into practice to see what ramifications it would have on a functioning economy? I mean, that is legislation that is posed annually to the US Congress. Or even implementing a tax system like what a country currently employs, then mucking with it to see if there is a better option.
Unfortunately, while this is a worth while goal, many virtual economies do not have the same market forces as a real one. For example, barrier to entry into a industry is very low. You're an enchanter in WoW and want to be a Tinkerer? No problem, drop your skill and work up points in another. IRL it's not so simple. You want to be a automobile producer? You can't simply aquire skill points and make it happen. You need to purchase capital, expensive capital. Plus virtual economies suffer from other problems as well, such as the ability for people to gain significant market monopoly power. Those of you who play WoW on Arthas and are Horde. Um, sorry about running the Auction House prices on gems up 500%, but the game let me... Game manufacturers and GMs really don't regulate the economy as much as say the Federal Reserve would, and they allow players to establish Cartels and other organizations that will allow them to set prices and control the flow of goods.
While virtual economies are not perfect, with some effort, we could really use them as models to test economic theories without affecting our IRL economies. This would be great for Economists who work on tax reform and other areas. Kudos to someone else finally figuring it out.
-Runz
Seriously, companies don't really learn from another company's trials and tribulations. At some point they all suffer from the same thing, which will cause them to experience "a downfall". This malady is:
"But we're [insert company name here]!"
I know it looks innocuous, but let's see that in action!
1988, IBM was having big problems with management bloat, a stagnant product line, and a poor customer experience. But if you asked someone there 'Why would I buy from you when I could buy from Compaq or some other less expensive, more innovative competitor?' the response was invariably, "But we're IBM!"
In 1998, SGI started shipping their coolest, most important product ever. The $15,000 Windows NT workstation. If you asked an executive at SGI 'Why would I pay $15000 for a Windows NT machine with a nice graphics card when I can build a whitebox with an Nvidia Riva TNT card for far less money?', the response was "But we're SGI!"
Today, ask a SUN exec 'Why should I pay $X for a solaris workstation when I can buy assemble a box for $500 running Linux that will do the same thing?' What do they say? "But we're SUN!"
It's been my experience that this becomes a problem at most sucessful companies, and if you pay attention, you'll see it's cyclical. The company adopts this mentality, loses customers, re-vamp's their product line, customer service, etc. Gains customers, becomes successful again, and ultimately repeats their mistakes and do the whole thing over again.
Sad.
-Runz
Unfortunately, we've already seen that governments place a higher importance on the appearence of security rather than actual security. For direct evidence, just look at airport screening.
I'll conceed that x-ray'ing baggage would highlight obvious weapons like knives or guns. However, as we've seen from the likes of Yousef Josef and other terrorists, people can smuggle bomb components on plains using items, such as watches, which would not be picked up by the usual airport screening proceedures. Add to that the ever so effective comparison of the name and date on my boarding pass with the name on whatever casually inspected ID I provide. Please don't even get me started on how rediculous making me take off my shoes is.
If governments were really serious about airport security, they would adapt a model similar to the one used in Israel. Roving groups of heavily armed, well trained commandos that stop "interesting" individuals and select them for additional screening. However, this method would be too inconvienent and intrusive for travelers (Americans).
This is the state of governmental security. To the not very determined to violate it, lay individual, it appears that there is SOME kind of security in place. With a slight bit more investigation, someone with a bit of desire can easily violate it, thereby rendering the "security" utterly useless. But hey, they have to have some way to spend our tax dollars, right?
-Runz
Just as a note...
The reason Red Hat does not offer RHEL4 DVDs as a download from Red Hat Network is that there is a two Gigabyte download limit for files in Apache. FYI
-Runz
P.S. Tried http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ lately? You can request features and submit bug reports for developers to work on. It is still open source, so if they don't move at a speed that is acceptable, you could always just suck it up and do it yourself....
LMFAO Of course RHEL 2.1 AS has no LVM support, it was created four friggin years ago! And lets face it LVM on Linux back then was not what you would call, um, stable or reliable. But lets also look at what Red Hat has done with RHEL 2.1 AS. They've published updated and bug fixes over the last four years, and another 3 years into the future. It's still a reliable platform, even if it is no longer a modern one. And seriously, holding Red Hat accountable for what Oracle or some SAN provider is doing is ludacris. Like they have any control over the Oracle sourcecode or QA at another corporation, or licensing agreements offered by other companies on unrelated add-on products. There's a reason Oracle installs itself in /opt. I mean, That's like saying that Fedora sucks because your Nvidia graphics card doesn't work right, *mutters* with the binary drivers I downloaded from Nvidia and have nothing to do with Red Hat nor included in any part with the Red Hat distribution...
You want to talk about hinky agreements, how about the fact that SUN sales reps got kickbacks from Oracle based on the number of per CPU Oracle licenses they sold! Like that didn't encourage the sales people to tell the customer they need an extra 2 CPUs to really do the Oracle operations they wanted. I'm sure Red Hat has problems, like every other company, but dinging them because of crap that other companies do is silly.
-Runz
This would be excellent for us Linux users. The MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) industry sees Korea as a huge market. If they couldn't run their games on Windows, then the game companies would have to port their stuff to Linux to stay in the Korean market. I see this as a win-win all the way around.
-Runz
I got flamed for proposing this theory when the article was first posted on /.
One major problem with the study, not really addressed by this problems article is one of comparison. Yes, Yahoo! and Google are two search engines, but they perform their searches differently, and more importantly, use different criteria when returning matches! It is quite possible that when doing the exact same search in both yeilds a difference in results. Why? Because the two different search engines have different criteria for providing output, or matches if you will, from said search. Perhaps Yahoo! does indeed have more pages indexed, but because of their search algorithm, or their program which displays results to the user, less matches are provided; even though more pages were looked at.
I'm not saying that Yahoo! does have more or less pages than Google. But the study that was executed and published did not account for many of the differences between the products they were comparing. The above is merely another interpretation of said results. I'm glad that some folks at NCSA agree and provided some clarification; lest we get another urban myth like storks bring babies.
-Runz
I did RTFA. Fine the conclusionary statement is Google consistently provides more results, so Yahoo!'s claim of more indexed pages is suspicious. But my point was one of search engine design. Would not a better search engine, even though it may have more indexed pages to search, actually provide less, more appropriate matches? I am just providing an alternative explination for the data that was collected and analyzed by NCSA. Perhaps Yahoo! does have more indexed pages, but through a different search algorithm generated fewer, but better results.
/. readers think anonymous posters are pussies. Or mabye they thought anonymous posters were pussy cats, damn you statistics!
If we were to apply the same logic used in this analysis to another field, say automobiles, one would conclude that a hand-crafted Shelby Cobra is an inferior auto when compared to a Ford Focus simply because there were fewer of them manufactured.
The beauty of statistics is that they have a variety of possible interpretations. I don't remember who it was that I heard say this, but I belive it was a political lobbyist, "Tell me what you want to prove, and I'll find statistics to back it up!" This statement further illudes that statistical data, while interesting, is given positive or negative connatation based on the interpretation of said statistics.
BTW, I understand that 9 out of 10
-Runz