I'm all in favor of transparent proxying being wiped out, anyway. It's just a royal PITA for end users. I'll happily use an opaque proxy *as long as when I need to I can bypass the proxy*.
Personally I would rather see the money spent on smart bombs that minimalize civilian casualties. While I'm no lover of war, when it's necessary, I personally think killing less innocent people is good.
Um. So we could use them in places like Iraq, to "stop the terrorist threat and prevent Saddam from using his weapons of mass destruction"?
The United States hasn't been in a "necessary" war since World War II. Bombing people in Bosnia or Iraq is hardly "necessary".
Do you think said deal included the cost of training users and hiring administrators on the *Windows* side?
Would you care to guestimate the cost of training users?
Son, this is the *United States Army*. All they *do* is train people. And it's a pretty safe guess that all these folks are getting is Office, which could be replaced with OO.org. Not exactly a switch that requires much training.
Employing linux administrators?
As opposed to employing Windows administrators? As people have pointed out time and time again, the greater number of systems that a Linux admin can administer is much more than the 30% or so extra that that admin makes.
Do you really think planners in business and the government base their decisions solely on what it costs to aquire the software?
God, I hope not. I hope they also consider security (not a really big strength of MS products) and long term cost (getting locked into a vendor).
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
Re:I had a feeliing it would get posted to slashdo
on
Linux Router Project Dead
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Dave, I think some of the other folks have it right.
LRP is useful, and made a huge contribution to bringing Linux to the embedded world. Had it not been for LRP, it is possible that MS would have hooks in far more software than it does, via CE, and Linux wouldn't be making nearly as many waves as it does in business publications.
However, you cannot let something like this turn into something that consumes all your time and energy. It cannot be more than a hobby, unless you have some way ahead of time to convert it into money.
My guess is that you spent a lot of time working on this, and expected to be able to "cash in" the fame at some point to get a decent job (with Caldera or whomever). Not unreasonable, and a lot of GPL folks feel the same way. But it's a bad market for tech folks right now (or at least less good than it was), and it didn't turn out that way. Even Linus, who has a tremendous amount of fame stored up, worked for years for Transmeta and on other things before actually becoming bankrolled by a company.
You can *always* get a job. It may not be a great job. It may pay $30k. It may be working at a Babbages. If you have technical skills, you can at least put food on the table. You may be better off lowering your standards, getting a job that doesn't pay too much (and thus eating and having something to do all day), waiting out the recession, and then run out and look for a better job. There are a lot of folks that can't find a decent job now. That's just part of tech life right now.
Thank you for your code.
Finally, you should take the people poking on you here only semi-seriously. Slashdotters love actually being able to affect something by typing, regardless of the actual impact. If it's to piss some guy off who is already pretty upset, then they'll do it.
P.S. From a technical standpont, I agree with a few other people -- I think your final set of ideas may be too ambitious to do well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a good interpreter and good language, and the same goes for an OS and support utilities. I'd hold off on that, since it's such a huge project. It may be good if you're willing to wait until retirement or something like that, but in the meantime, it's a tremendous undertaking.
The reason for regional restrictions is to allow the companies to impose price discrimination. The idea is that you want to charge any one person as much as they are absolutely willing to pay before going someone else. Normally, you have to set a single price -- if you charged the wealthy citizens of the US more for Super Mario Brothers 5, someone would just import Indian copies sold cheaply. However, if you can break up the world into incompatible regions, you can charge a much closer value to what people are willing to pay in each region. Basically, this tends to be a good thing for very poor countries (as long as the game/movie actually comes out in their region), since they have to pay less, and bad for wealthy countries. It tends to irritate customers, who are directly impacted by compatibility issues, and don't directly see cost differences.
Also, AFAIK, region coding has not been successfully argued in court to be considered a form of copy protection, and hence is not covered under the DMCA. The reason region free hardware DVD players aren't commonly sold in the US any more is because the DVD Consortium can exert pressure on their licensees, not because it's against the law.
If Joe Sixpack asks for $47k pay for his job, medical benefits, and the ability to leave with two weeks notice, he can't then turn right around and whine that he isn't making $55k and identical bennies. He got what he asked for.
If I'm Jimmy Drummaster, an aspiring upcoming musician, and I don't feel that the promotion and management services provided are worth what current sellers are asking, I'm more than free to set up my own website and sell MP3s. Hell, I'd be selling to a larger market segment than iTunes is (far more people can play MP3s than use Macs).
I'm not trying to be deliberately callous -- I'm simply saying that if musicians don't like iTunes, they can choose a different route. (Of course, there are those that have sold contracts to put out n albums -- stupid sort of deal IMHO, but such is life -- and they'll have to put out n more CDs before they go freelance. And again, they got what they asked for.)
Nobody is shedding tears for *other* classes of workers that don't get better deals than they asked for -- computer consultants or plumbers or proctologists aren't getting any love.
My personal guess is that the people writing the article don't care about the musician *either* and just has some vague ideas that enough undirected protest will somehow result in him getting free music of the caliber he's currently enjoying.
Exactly. And not one of the phrases you just quoted appeared in anything I said, nor did I write supporting any of the points you attacked me for supporting.
In other words, as I said, you responded to the wrong post.
It looks like you're claiming that this isn't possible. Technically, you're right --- you can't necessarily get bits from the air. However, you're ignoring the fact that video contains a good deal of redundant information. Video codecs try to avoid including redundant information this, but only do so in the simplest ways.
Suppose I show three consecutive frames of an eggbeater. Now, if you knew nothing about this video, if the frames had no correlation between each other, and were just each random static, then I couldn't improve the quality at all.
When I'm showing an object that I know is the same object from frame to frame, however, I can use detail from each of the frames and add it to the other frames.
MBTF might have a little bit of value as a relative measure -- i.e. perhaps drives with an order of magnitude higher MBTF will last longer. It's a lot less useful as an absolute measure.
Lots of equipment (not just hard drives) has some sort of estimated lifetime. The best the manufacturer can ever do is estimate under semi-realistic conditions and extrapolate.
Read my post. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I was arguing that OpenNIC was an alternative, or that I was "butchering" English, but it certainly wasn't from actually reading what I wrote.
Given how irrelevant your post is to what I wrote, I can only assume that you responded to the wrong comment.
I agree about the useless domains (politics), but wildly disagree about your attempt to segregate content based on DNS.
As many folks have stated, this means that a worldwide judge of content, aribitor of morality, must exist. It breaks the hierarchical model of DNS (granted, the new TLDs (which I don't like) did so as well).
You know, if you consider this such a trivial-yet-valuable task, you might want to consider doing it yourself, and making your nameserver available to others intead of bitching about the volunteer work at OpenNIC.
ICANN does more than just DNS -- they also determine well-known ports and break up the IP space. Well-known ports used to be easy to move away from, but massive (stupid) deployment of corporate firewalls has resulted in it being difficult to move away from existing WKP, because they're the only holes in firewalls. Furthermore, there's a lot of routers out there with hard-coded stuff related to non-routeable addresses.
You do realize the kind of force required to deform a seat belt buckle to the point that it jams would mean that you aren't going to be worrying about anything ever again, much less getting out of a car?
If the person sitting behind, say, the driver isn't wearing a seatbelt, even though the driver is, the driver is going to be rather unhappy. Nice heavyweight 250 pound guy hitting the back of your seat at 60 MPH is not within card design guidelines.
Making people drive cars safely has little detriment, and a tremendous benefit -- a huge number of people are killed in auto accidents each year. I'm all for government keeping out of private lives unless there's a darn good reason, but auto safety qualifies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all in favor of transparent proxying being wiped out, anyway. It's just a royal PITA for end users. I'll happily use an opaque proxy *as long as when I need to I can bypass the proxy*.
The six-year deal, which also involved a software reseller called Softmart that will get a commission
They wouldn't have gotten much of a commission on a $0 product, now would they? Of *course* they're better off recommending MS!
Personally I would rather see the money spent on smart bombs that minimalize civilian casualties. While I'm no lover of war, when it's necessary, I personally think killing less innocent people is good.
Um. So we could use them in places like Iraq, to "stop the terrorist threat and prevent Saddam from using his weapons of mass destruction"?
The United States hasn't been in a "necessary" war since World War II. Bombing people in Bosnia or Iraq is hardly "necessary".
Do you think said deal included the cost of training users and hiring administrators on the *Windows* side?
Would you care to guestimate the cost of training users?
Son, this is the *United States Army*. All they *do* is train people. And it's a pretty safe guess that all these folks are getting is Office, which could be replaced with OO.org. Not exactly a switch that requires much training.
Employing linux administrators?
As opposed to employing Windows administrators? As people have pointed out time and time again, the greater number of systems that a Linux admin can administer is much more than the 30% or so extra that that admin makes.
Do you really think planners in business and the government base their decisions solely on what it costs to aquire the software?
God, I hope not. I hope they also consider security (not a really big strength of MS products) and long term cost (getting locked into a vendor).
Is there anyone on Slashdot that hangs onto Windows for anything other than games?
Dave, I think some of the other folks have it right.
LRP is useful, and made a huge contribution to bringing Linux to the embedded world. Had it not been for LRP, it is possible that MS would have hooks in far more software than it does, via CE, and Linux wouldn't be making nearly as many waves as it does in business publications.
However, you cannot let something like this turn into something that consumes all your time and energy. It cannot be more than a hobby, unless you have some way ahead of time to convert it into money.
My guess is that you spent a lot of time working on this, and expected to be able to "cash in" the fame at some point to get a decent job (with Caldera or whomever). Not unreasonable, and a lot of GPL folks feel the same way. But it's a bad market for tech folks right now (or at least less good than it was), and it didn't turn out that way. Even Linus, who has a tremendous amount of fame stored up, worked for years for Transmeta and on other things before actually becoming bankrolled by a company.
You can *always* get a job. It may not be a great job. It may pay $30k. It may be working at a Babbages. If you have technical skills, you can at least put food on the table. You may be better off lowering your standards, getting a job that doesn't pay too much (and thus eating and having something to do all day), waiting out the recession, and then run out and look for a better job. There are a lot of folks that can't find a decent job now. That's just part of tech life right now.
Thank you for your code.
Finally, you should take the people poking on you here only semi-seriously. Slashdotters love actually being able to affect something by typing, regardless of the actual impact. If it's to piss some guy off who is already pretty upset, then they'll do it.
P.S. From a technical standpont, I agree with a few other people -- I think your final set of ideas may be too ambitious to do well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to write a good interpreter and good language, and the same goes for an OS and support utilities. I'd hold off on that, since it's such a huge project. It may be good if you're willing to wait until retirement or something like that, but in the meantime, it's a tremendous undertaking.
I have heard a ham friend of mine, say that he will be forced to move out of state because there is no work for computer people in Pittsburgh.
You might mention the Pittsburgh Technology Council's website.
The reason for regional restrictions is to allow the companies to impose price discrimination. The idea is that you want to charge any one person as much as they are absolutely willing to pay before going someone else. Normally, you have to set a single price -- if you charged the wealthy citizens of the US more for Super Mario Brothers 5, someone would just import Indian copies sold cheaply. However, if you can break up the world into incompatible regions, you can charge a much closer value to what people are willing to pay in each region. Basically, this tends to be a good thing for very poor countries (as long as the game/movie actually comes out in their region), since they have to pay less, and bad for wealthy countries. It tends to irritate customers, who are directly impacted by compatibility issues, and don't directly see cost differences.
Also, AFAIK, region coding has not been successfully argued in court to be considered a form of copy protection, and hence is not covered under the DMCA. The reason region free hardware DVD players aren't commonly sold in the US any more is because the DVD Consortium can exert pressure on their licensees, not because it's against the law.
Dmitry Sklyarov was charged with breaking US laws *in* the US -- selling his company's software while physically the US.
If Joe Sixpack asks for $47k pay for his job, medical benefits, and the ability to leave with two weeks notice, he can't then turn right around and whine that he isn't making $55k and identical bennies. He got what he asked for.
If I'm Jimmy Drummaster, an aspiring upcoming musician, and I don't feel that the promotion and management services provided are worth what current sellers are asking, I'm more than free to set up my own website and sell MP3s. Hell, I'd be selling to a larger market segment than iTunes is (far more people can play MP3s than use Macs).
I'm not trying to be deliberately callous -- I'm simply saying that if musicians don't like iTunes, they can choose a different route. (Of course, there are those that have sold contracts to put out n albums -- stupid sort of deal IMHO, but such is life -- and they'll have to put out n more CDs before they go freelance. And again, they got what they asked for.)
Nobody is shedding tears for *other* classes of workers that don't get better deals than they asked for -- computer consultants or plumbers or proctologists aren't getting any love.
My personal guess is that the people writing the article don't care about the musician *either* and just has some vague ideas that enough undirected protest will somehow result in him getting free music of the caliber he's currently enjoying.
Exactly. And not one of the phrases you just quoted appeared in anything I said, nor did I write supporting any of the points you attacked me for supporting.
In other words, as I said, you responded to the wrong post.
It looks like you're claiming that this isn't possible. Technically, you're right --- you can't necessarily get bits from the air. However, you're ignoring the fact that video contains a good deal of redundant information. Video codecs try to avoid including redundant information this, but only do so in the simplest ways.
Suppose I show three consecutive frames of an eggbeater. Now, if you knew nothing about this video, if the frames had no correlation between each other, and were just each random static, then I couldn't improve the quality at all.
When I'm showing an object that I know is the same object from frame to frame, however, I can use detail from each of the frames and add it to the other frames.
Yup.
MBTF might have a little bit of value as a relative measure -- i.e. perhaps drives with an order of magnitude higher MBTF will last longer. It's a lot less useful as an absolute measure.
Lots of equipment (not just hard drives) has some sort of estimated lifetime. The best the manufacturer can ever do is estimate under semi-realistic conditions and extrapolate.
Yes and yes.
Read my post. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I was arguing that OpenNIC was an alternative, or that I was "butchering" English, but it certainly wasn't from actually reading what I wrote.
Given how irrelevant your post is to what I wrote, I can only assume that you responded to the wrong comment.
It is highly possible that the release will be delayed even after 2005.
Can you name a single time a Windows release date didn't slip?
It's too bad that Qt is so much more heavyweight and slower than gtk.
I agree about the useless domains (politics), but wildly disagree about your attempt to segregate content based on DNS.
As many folks have stated, this means that a worldwide judge of content, aribitor of morality, must exist. It breaks the hierarchical model of DNS (granted, the new TLDs (which I don't like) did so as well).
You know, if you consider this such a trivial-yet-valuable task, you might want to consider doing it yourself, and making your nameserver available to others intead of bitching about the volunteer work at OpenNIC.
ICANN does more than just DNS -- they also determine well-known ports and break up the IP space. Well-known ports used to be easy to move away from, but massive (stupid) deployment of corporate firewalls has resulted in it being difficult to move away from existing WKP, because they're the only holes in firewalls. Furthermore, there's a lot of routers out there with hard-coded stuff related to non-routeable addresses.
Will Apple make a faster, simplified version of Aqua for the workstation? The current Mac OSX GUI seems very resource hungry.
The best thing about the PPC is its vector unit
Wow, you're a big vector fan...
You're right that using Macs as servers is stupid from a cost perspective, though.
You do realize the kind of force required to deform a seat belt buckle to the point that it jams would mean that you aren't going to be worrying about anything ever again, much less getting out of a car?
If the person sitting behind, say, the driver isn't wearing a seatbelt, even though the driver is, the driver is going to be rather unhappy. Nice heavyweight 250 pound guy hitting the back of your seat at 60 MPH is not within card design guidelines.
Making people drive cars safely has little detriment, and a tremendous benefit -- a huge number of people are killed in auto accidents each year. I'm all for government keeping out of private lives unless there's a darn good reason, but auto safety qualifies.