True- having one large group/monopoly/regulatory body in control of the whole affair where you get information filtered by them, prices set by them and conditions set is more like a communist dictatorship dystopia then a democratic capitalist society. Capitalist implies free market, implies competition and choice. And that is exactly what we dont have. In the movie industry, desktop software (not just the OS but all of the desktop) industry and music industry. Well we are creating it ourselves - OSS software(Sun, Lindows and Apple additionally),mp3.com etc.
The interesting thing is that this is the market created by the corps. If I could purchase individual songs from artists I choose and that are not filtered then very soon they would filter to the top of the league tables. Then all you would have to do is watch for the top surfers in a given music category - viola. Anyway- I still dont like buying a whole album when I only like 2 songs and as a musician myself it seems like a waste of my time and their time trying to market me a product most of which I will not like.
Re:OT: Please do not cast return of malloc()
on
Bad MEN Of Wireless
·
· Score: 1
Unless you are using malloc in C++ which is more strongly typed and the compiler will bitch if you do not cast it in this way.
How did this get modded as interesting when surely insightful was more interesting.
But really - yes there is a lot of corporate bashing on Slashdot. And thats not to say that smaller companies are innocent as little girls, but when you are big, and bad and high profile, then someone will point it out when you misbehave. Too many corporations are misbehaving, and the worlds justice systems are showing that they just cannot respond. In fact the American DOJ has shown to be impotent after actually finding Microsoft guilty.
Yes there are ideals of free software, and not free as in beer but free as in speech(please make sure you understand the distinction). Which means you can still make a profit. The question is at what price - I mean how many heads is it moral to stomp on to get there? In the ideal world none. In the current "real" world - a lot of big corporations just dont care because they have no-one else to answer to. Microsofts shareholders have far more power than any number of countries judicial systems.
If you dont care - then go away and continue to be part of the problem - your time will be up when the day comes to adapt or die(in the bankrupcy kind of sense)...
I once worked at a digital TV company that worked in exactly this way. Until one day, they added a new development kit- Digital TV Developer Box, Sun Ultra 5, Monitor, powered speakers etc and a new hub as well.....
Then someone turned on the kettle and the whole power circuit for the building went out - all the PC's, all the lights, the kettles, the water coolers - everything. You couldnt use the loos- no backup lighting. It was gonna take a couple of hours for an electrician to fix it, so we had a pub break.
For a couple of days there was no lights in two of the loos and we couldnt use the kettles or water coolers. At this point - MIS decided to rethink their cabling strategy - A) Fewer hubs with more ports, B) Get rid of powered speakers(in an open plan office only caused for music war chaos anyway) and C) Stop people plugging in mobiles to charge them at work(like that ever worked).
They also thought it was a good idea to electrically isolate the kitchen from the PC's, as well as the lights and water coolers. In all it took about a couple of months to get everything back to what we called normal.
I still remember having problems trying to work out wether that CAT5 was for a phone or the LAN - it took the tech guys 5 minutes a time of tugging cables - tracing it to the wall(easy if it went to a hub) then checking the numbered socket against the big loom cabinets in the corner.
Oh yeah - and we did find a C64 buried under some cables one time. Still not sure whos it was now...
Anyone here ever heard of PC104(or better still PC104 Plus)? Its a small low power, minimal factor fully modular, fully upgradeable PC solution. Used in industry. But so far the devices onforming are a little too expensive and a little too low spec.
Have a look at http://www.pc104.org/ or even try http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=PC104 .
Were there to be sufficient demand, maybe more domestic manufacturers could put boards together with this capability with better specs and more reasonable prices.
I was originally looking at this as a solution for an extremely high-power robot board.
Ummm What about the fact that you are so used to your mobile phone storing all the numbers and being able to look them up by name - so you cannot remember the number.. Next...
I am English, have never lived in the states - I am just one of the brits who gets pissed off for paying for bad service... Not just health either the trains, education - the whole deal is a real rub the wrong way....
What the NHS need to do is have a system that just works - securely and stably - be it OSS or MS. They need it to be installed professionaly(out of house) and ready to run. They also need to fire 80% of the beurocrats and make the computer system handle mosty of that workload and present it in a way that nurses - the most technophobic community I know of(they make Silver surfers look like technophiles in comparison) having worked with them - can understand.
BTW - I really cant stand the idea of my private medical data on any MS OS - given that it makes it widely available for anyone with basic hacking skills(like anyone from age 10 upwards).
I really hope "The perfect well functioning NHS"(Spelling correction fixed) was levelling sarcasm. They couldnt organise a pissup in a brewery. They are the most useless incompetant madical agency in the world. And we all pay for them - I dont resent using taxpayers money for health care- I resent the Zero ROI we get for it. I cannot even register with a damn doctor withing reasonable range of my flat because they are all overbooked - I cannot arrange appointments for weeks, and even then I get very little time, a quick and non-exhaustive diagnosis and shoved out of the door. Sorry for my rant - but dont even get me started on Uk public services. They are the biggest load of rubbish ever. I am in the process of going private through my company's benefit plan(it still comes off my salary) just simply because the NHS is useless. Try bricklaying with dead fish and you will get better results than attempting to use British medical facilities. If I ever have anything serious - I will get myself flown somewhere else for treatment.
Hmmm... Well that says it all. Linux has changed a lot from its humble beginnings. I still remember the first time I installed linux - ever. I remember taking a week to get a reasonable X-Configuration. Now I can use a single CD and have it all sorted out. I can have 24hr phone support(at a small cost) and 24hr community email support at no cost. I totally fail to see the point in the above comment.
In which case a power user would be welll trained enough to quickly find similar features in another package. there more than one way to skin a cat. If the features are not there- go nag the OSS community to add them.
i think he is pointing out that "Common sense" and "Layman thinking" can be exactly the opposite of some counter-intuitive reality that only a trained scientist or accurate study would show.
Much like which direction electrical current flows. Common sense once told us it was positive to negative - but it infact flows the other way.
As far as I am aware the MS compiler and libs are free once you click here to sell your soul to Bill Gates. It is the IDE, MSDN and supporting systems which are costly. However - If anyone knows how to get such things -compiler, libs and includes without stealing them from a visual studio(visual c++) disk please post how.
When I am doing hard core processing, and when teaching students to do the basics- it is better to steer clear of a gui at all and start them on console programming - for which Linux and Gcc alone are perfectly suited - methinks better so than windows. Partly because more interesting things can be acheived with the DevFS and by messing with shell script addons from within the program. Also the Man pages are a good start for documentation, but a good lecturer will have some good library reference docs and have taught the techniques well enough.
When learning gui programming - its a sad fact that althogh the design principles of making a usable GUI are the same, the programmin methods behind them are not. Java has at least three methods, visual studio around the same, delphi the same, and linux has many more. It is better to find a relatively simple one that is *freely available* to deonstrate the principles and hooking code to buttons etc(depending on which task system the app is based upon).
Good point made there- this article is not only funny as hell and interesting, but it is also informative. But lets be honest - it will only spawn the usual pro and anti MS wars.. I would just say if you are reading this thread - go have a look at it...
Maybe its time world ISP's(and UK ones) set up a firewall preventing access from Italian based ISPs and agencies- number one so Italian Citizens cannot violate Italys laws, and number two so their law agencies cannot touch the rest of the internet... A situation not unlike other countries.
I will certainly be firewalling my box in this way. Tough luck Italians - you screwed up- you dont get access to my site. Its worth noting that most of the Middle East should be treated like this as well - I dont want some fundamentalist nut closing down my robot site - okay its only robots no pron- but you never know. And yes - I count the Italians as much as the Saudi's when I say Fundamentalist nut.
Maybe my genetic algoryhtm discussions will violate some narrow-minded vatican anti-darwin beleifs.
Sigh... Sometimes I can really hate religeon(as a concept).
Please mod parent up as funny or informative. Sometimes programmers(I speak for myself as much as any other) and techs are so arrogant, that they fail to see outside of their own little world.
Yes I cannot think of any applications for such a large bandwidth - but I am dman sure if I had it I could use it. I am sure 10 or so years ago current broadband bandwidth would have been seen as excessive, or DVD and HD storage capacity. What would you do with 80Gb outside of the server space?
Come on folks - lets discuss the possibilities here... For one I am looking forward to usable video conferencing with a shared virtual desktop - like VNC and video conf on the same machine. or neat parallel processing clusters for A-life tasks.
You mean like they were before the internet was introduced into schools - at least over here(Uk). Where CD-Rom encyclopepias and Digests are used. Why bother with internet access at all?
I'm sorry but I really dont think such an oppresive level of control will help at all. ou have to remember certain pertinent areas of psychology to know that the harder and stricter you are, the harder someone will push back. In such an environment - a few kids WILL HACK - and some will probably be succesful - even if there method is getting the librarian to retype their password and nicking it(a common one even in the school I went to - we had a small LAN). A blanket ban on anything the school might not agree with is more likely to teach the children that all authority is oppresive (and should be rebelled against) than that pron viewing is not acceptable.
I remember we used to have beebs- which were all replaced by PC's. All the coder types(okay H4x0rs) were dissappointed because we had no access to programming tools - not even a command prompt at first. Although VBasic was clearly on the network -access was denied. We quickly got access to that, and found (having never hacked LANS before) that the security was incredibly poor. The funniest thing was when they disabled my personal user account I wasnt using because I hacked a teachers account which I continued to use - DUH.. And the teacher didnt even attempt to change the password we all new(not really hacking - just stealing a bimbo's password). We originally had just used her account to change our own accounts so they had access to all the software - but following the accounts being locked we just used hers for everything. Although to this day I still VBasic will never live up to BBC basic - ah back in the day...
So what we are saying is that worm activity on the internet, once it has stabilised may reveal the answer to life the universe and everything - what with the earth being a supercomputer and the internet being a supercomputer built by that. I wonder what deep thought would have to say about all of this...
Maybe someone needs to make a H2G2 entry to record this penomenon..
Re:Well, at least it was good pizza that night...
on
Happy Birthday Code Red
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Except there are patches I would be a little careful with as well. If you choose to run XP, there is a patch that makes the Guided Mode available through Nat and firewalls - tunneling effectively. Surely if someone has these in place- they sure as hell dont want such an obvious hole wide open...
I sometimes use VNC - but restrict it through a firewall so only a specific IP(my work PC) can communicate with it, in specific timeframes. It also does not run as default - I use SSH to start it, also Ip filtered and time restricted. Which I think is all possible in windows as well(have not tried that). Oh - And it does not run as ROOT. I restrict root to console only.
You see the other problem is that XP and 2k may well be running security vulnerable services without the user knowing -as default setup. Which is why XP is so bad as a joe user OS- it has more security holes than my socks...Unless you are competant to configure and patch it - and lets face it even many trained MIS staff miss them - let alone Joe Shmoe Wordprocessor who bought an XP box from PC world.
Slashdot Mirror
True- having one large group/monopoly/regulatory body in control of the whole affair where you get information filtered by them, prices set by them and conditions set is more like a communist dictatorship dystopia then a democratic capitalist society. Capitalist implies free market, implies competition and choice. And that is exactly what we dont have. In the movie industry, desktop software (not just the OS but all of the desktop) industry and music industry. Well we are creating it ourselves - OSS software(Sun, Lindows and Apple additionally),mp3.com etc.
The interesting thing is that this is the market created by the corps. If I could purchase individual songs from artists I choose and that are not filtered then very soon they would filter to the top of the league tables. Then all you would have to do is watch for the top surfers in a given music category - viola. Anyway- I still dont like buying a whole album when I only like 2 songs and as a musician myself it seems like a waste of my time and their time trying to market me a product most of which I will not like.
Unless you are using malloc in C++ which is more strongly typed and the compiler will bitch if you do not cast it in this way.
How did this get modded as interesting when surely insightful was more interesting.
But really - yes there is a lot of corporate bashing on Slashdot. And thats not to say that smaller companies are innocent as little girls, but when you are big, and bad and high profile, then someone will point it out when you misbehave. Too many corporations are misbehaving, and the worlds justice systems are showing that they just cannot respond. In fact the American DOJ has shown to be impotent after actually finding Microsoft guilty.
Yes there are ideals of free software, and not free as in beer but free as in speech(please make sure you understand the distinction). Which means you can still make a profit. The question is at what price - I mean how many heads is it moral to stomp on to get there? In the ideal world none. In the current "real" world - a lot of big corporations just dont care because they have no-one else to answer to. Microsofts shareholders have far more power than any number of countries judicial systems.
If you dont care - then go away and continue to be part of the problem - your time will be up when the day comes to adapt or die(in the bankrupcy kind of sense)...
Lets try that again shall we....
pc104.org and Google PC104 results.
I once worked at a digital TV company that worked in exactly this way. Until one day, they added a new development kit- Digital TV Developer Box, Sun Ultra 5, Monitor, powered speakers etc and a new hub as well.....
Then someone turned on the kettle and the whole power circuit for the building went out - all the PC's, all the lights, the kettles, the water coolers - everything. You couldnt use the loos- no backup lighting. It was gonna take a couple of hours for an electrician to fix it, so we had a pub break.
For a couple of days there was no lights in two of the loos and we couldnt use the kettles or water coolers. At this point - MIS decided to rethink their cabling strategy - A) Fewer hubs with more ports, B) Get rid of powered speakers(in an open plan office only caused for music war chaos anyway) and C) Stop people plugging in mobiles to charge them at work(like that ever worked).
They also thought it was a good idea to electrically isolate the kitchen from the PC's, as well as the lights and water coolers. In all it took about a couple of months to get everything back to what we called normal.
I still remember having problems trying to work out wether that CAT5 was for a phone or the LAN - it took the tech guys 5 minutes a time of tugging cables - tracing it to the wall(easy if it went to a hub) then checking the numbered socket against the big loom cabinets in the corner.
Oh yeah - and we did find a C64 buried under some cables one time. Still not sure whos it was now...
Anyone here ever heard of PC104(or better still PC104 Plus)? Its a small low power, minimal factor fully modular, fully upgradeable PC solution. Used in industry. But so far the devices onforming are a little too expensive and a little too low spec.
Have a look at http://www.pc104.org/ or even try http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=PC104 .
Were there to be sufficient demand, maybe more domestic manufacturers could put boards together with this capability with better specs and more reasonable prices.
I was originally looking at this as a solution for an extremely high-power robot board.
I spose they tested Max with a net dongle? I thought that used a parallel dongle.
BTW - I wonder how the licensing is set up for the ProE tests - I used to be a developer for it at PTC - a long time ago now.
Ummm What about the fact that you are so used to your mobile phone storing all the numbers and being able to look them up by name - so you cannot remember the number.. Next...
Hmmm... Imagine the bill savings... Have my computer screen over a cycle...
I am English, have never lived in the states - I am just one of the brits who gets pissed off for paying for bad service... Not just health either the trains, education - the whole deal is a real rub the wrong way....
What the NHS need to do is have a system that just works - securely and stably - be it OSS or MS. They need it to be installed professionaly(out of house) and ready to run. They also need to fire 80% of the beurocrats and make the computer system handle mosty of that workload and present it in a way that nurses - the most technophobic community I know of(they make Silver surfers look like technophiles in comparison) having worked with them - can understand. BTW - I really cant stand the idea of my private medical data on any MS OS - given that it makes it widely available for anyone with basic hacking skills(like anyone from age 10 upwards).
Dont IBM still have patents on teletype like devices(along with thousands more just waiting)...
I really hope "The perfect well functioning NHS"(Spelling correction fixed) was levelling sarcasm. They couldnt organise a pissup in a brewery. They are the most useless incompetant madical agency in the world. And we all pay for them - I dont resent using taxpayers money for health care- I resent the Zero ROI we get for it. I cannot even register with a damn doctor withing reasonable range of my flat because they are all overbooked - I cannot arrange appointments for weeks, and even then I get very little time, a quick and non-exhaustive diagnosis and shoved out of the door. Sorry for my rant - but dont even get me started on Uk public services. They are the biggest load of rubbish ever. I am in the process of going private through my company's benefit plan(it still comes off my salary) just simply because the NHS is useless. Try bricklaying with dead fish and you will get better results than attempting to use British medical facilities. If I ever have anything serious - I will get myself flown somewhere else for treatment.
Oh man - Mod this up for funny please....
Anyone here remember the star-trek spoof where they upload windows to a borg cube?
Hmmm... Well that says it all. Linux has changed a lot from its humble beginnings. I still remember the first time I installed linux - ever. I remember taking a week to get a reasonable X-Configuration. Now I can use a single CD and have it all sorted out. I can have 24hr phone support(at a small cost) and 24hr community email support at no cost. I totally fail to see the point in the above comment.
Ummm. What planet are you on bud? I can print and spell check from OSS office software - in an almost identical way to MS-Office.
Maybe the problem, here, is that the poster has never even seen or tried an open source office package.
In which case a power user would be welll trained enough to quickly find similar features in another package. there more than one way to skin a cat. If the features are not there- go nag the OSS community to add them.
i think he is pointing out that "Common sense" and "Layman thinking" can be exactly the opposite of some counter-intuitive reality that only a trained scientist or accurate study would show.
Much like which direction electrical current flows. Common sense once told us it was positive to negative - but it infact flows the other way.
As far as I am aware the MS compiler and libs are free once you click here to sell your soul to Bill Gates. It is the IDE, MSDN and supporting systems which are costly. However - If anyone knows how to get such things -compiler, libs and includes without stealing them from a visual studio(visual c++) disk please post how.
When I am doing hard core processing, and when teaching students to do the basics- it is better to steer clear of a gui at all and start them on console programming - for which Linux and Gcc alone are perfectly suited - methinks better so than windows. Partly because more interesting things can be acheived with the DevFS and by messing with shell script addons from within the program. Also the Man pages are a good start for documentation, but a good lecturer will have some good library reference docs and have taught the techniques well enough.
When learning gui programming - its a sad fact that althogh the design principles of making a usable GUI are the same, the programmin methods behind them are not. Java has at least three methods, visual studio around the same, delphi the same, and linux has many more. It is better to find a relatively simple one that is *freely available* to deonstrate the principles and hooking code to buttons etc(depending on which task system the app is based upon).
Good point made there- this article is not only funny as hell and interesting, but it is also informative. But lets be honest - it will only spawn the usual pro and anti MS wars.. I would just say if you are reading this thread - go have a look at it...
Maybe its time world ISP's(and UK ones) set up a firewall preventing access from Italian based ISPs and agencies- number one so Italian Citizens cannot violate Italys laws, and number two so their law agencies cannot touch the rest of the internet... A situation not unlike other countries.
I will certainly be firewalling my box in this way. Tough luck Italians - you screwed up- you dont get access to my site. Its worth noting that most of the Middle East should be treated like this as well - I dont want some fundamentalist nut closing down my robot site - okay its only robots no pron- but you never know. And yes - I count the Italians as much as the Saudi's when I say Fundamentalist nut. Maybe my genetic algoryhtm discussions will violate some narrow-minded vatican anti-darwin beleifs.
Sigh... Sometimes I can really hate religeon(as a concept).
Please mod parent up as funny or informative. Sometimes programmers(I speak for myself as much as any other) and techs are so arrogant, that they fail to see outside of their own little world.
Yes I cannot think of any applications for such a large bandwidth - but I am dman sure if I had it I could use it. I am sure 10 or so years ago current broadband bandwidth would have been seen as excessive, or DVD and HD storage capacity. What would you do with 80Gb outside of the server space?
Come on folks - lets discuss the possibilities here... For one I am looking forward to usable video conferencing with a shared virtual desktop - like VNC and video conf on the same machine. or neat parallel processing clusters for A-life tasks.
You mean like they were before the internet was introduced into schools - at least over here(Uk). Where CD-Rom encyclopepias and Digests are used. Why bother with internet access at all?
I'm sorry but I really dont think such an oppresive level of control will help at all. ou have to remember certain pertinent areas of psychology to know that the harder and stricter you are, the harder someone will push back. In such an environment - a few kids WILL HACK - and some will probably be succesful - even if there method is getting the librarian to retype their password and nicking it(a common one even in the school I went to - we had a small LAN). A blanket ban on anything the school might not agree with is more likely to teach the children that all authority is oppresive (and should be rebelled against) than that pron viewing is not acceptable.
I remember we used to have beebs- which were all replaced by PC's. All the coder types(okay H4x0rs) were dissappointed because we had no access to programming tools - not even a command prompt at first. Although VBasic was clearly on the network -access was denied. We quickly got access to that, and found (having never hacked LANS before) that the security was incredibly poor. The funniest thing was when they disabled my personal user account I wasnt using because I hacked a teachers account which I continued to use - DUH.. And the teacher didnt even attempt to change the password we all new(not really hacking - just stealing a bimbo's password). We originally had just used her account to change our own accounts so they had access to all the software - but following the accounts being locked we just used hers for everything. Although to this day I still VBasic will never live up to BBC basic - ah back in the day...
I think they tried to market mountain dew in the Uk for a very short time... I cant remember even trying it though...
Just a very silly tv spot campaign with a warbling country singer.
So what we are saying is that worm activity on the internet, once it has stabilised may reveal the answer to life the universe and everything - what with the earth being a supercomputer and the internet being a supercomputer built by that. I wonder what deep thought would have to say about all of this...
Maybe someone needs to make a H2G2 entry to record this penomenon..
Except there are patches I would be a little careful with as well. If you choose to run XP, there is a patch that makes the Guided Mode available through Nat and firewalls - tunneling effectively. Surely if someone has these in place- they sure as hell dont want such an obvious hole wide open...
I sometimes use VNC - but restrict it through a firewall so only a specific IP(my work PC) can communicate with it, in specific timeframes. It also does not run as default - I use SSH to start it, also Ip filtered and time restricted. Which I think is all possible in windows as well(have not tried that). Oh - And it does not run as ROOT. I restrict root to console only.
You see the other problem is that XP and 2k may well be running security vulnerable services without the user knowing -as default setup. Which is why XP is so bad as a joe user OS- it has more security holes than my socks...Unless you are competant to configure and patch it - and lets face it even many trained MIS staff miss them - let alone Joe Shmoe Wordprocessor who bought an XP box from PC world.