Re:Somone get these ppl some free software!
on
Given Up to Spyware?
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· Score: 1
It takes more time to convince them that there is no catch - "a better product for no money" seems too good to be true, so therefore it must be false.
Oh yes. And once you convince them, they'll still resist changing for all kinds if "reasons." Take my dad for instance... he's been programming computers for nearly 35 years and he should know better. *sigh*
Every time I speak to him he whinges on about the latest problem he's found in Windows for at least half an hour.
Next time you see him in JRDs tell him about your dad's Damascine conversion.
A couple of synthetic benchmarks prove nothing. In real world applications, itanic sucks. If alpha could run at 1.6GHz, it would beat the trousers off of itanic hands down. Face it, itanic is a turkey.
Maybe it has something to do with the Power Chip Alliance they announced the other day?
One goal of the alliance is to make Power chips used in high volumes. IBM has shipped more than 1 million PowerPC 970 chips, it said. The more widely used the Power processors are, however, the more directly they compete against the dominant x86 family such as Intel's Pentium and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.
One of our PHBs has cut out the middle-man. He prints his own Dilberts out and sticks them to his own office door... especially the ones where the PHB is being particularly detatched from reality.
They're called "journaling" because they keep a journal of what happens to the disk. If you lose power, it pulls up the journal and replays it to repair any damage done to the file system.
Close, but still not quite there.
The prblem is, of course, what happens when the power fails while writing the journal?
In practice, writing to the journal is a short, quick operation, so the probability of it happening at the same time is smaller, bit it's still there.
The correct solution is to have some sort of uninterruptable power supply which keeps the machine up long enough that either an orderly shutdown can be completed, or power is restored before the battery or whatever runs out.
This is all well and good until the UPS breaks at the same time as a power outage, or a mouse or pet hamster chews through the cable between the UPS unit and the computer.
You can engineer this problem out too, but a water pipe might burst near your computer and short it out.
So you can isolate the computer by encasing in it a water-proof housing with multiple redundant and divers power-supplies and maybe even a few Diesel generators.
Of course, none of this is any good when a suicide bomber explodes on top of it all.
So you install a couple of machinegun nests to prevent suicide bombers getting close enough. Problem solved!
Not to be like the dirty old dad in American Beauty...
My wife has a 19-year0old daughter who has this incredibly pretty (tall, thin, blond, beautiful face, very pleasant manner) but rather dizzy 18-year-old friend. She has stayed with us a couple of times. She also inherited a lot of money that she's trying to spend quickly (go figure).
One morning I took her to the station. She was going to see her boyfriend at university. She'd bought a load of stuff to take to him because he's a poor student. Later on I found out that the man selling the tickets at the station gave her the tickets (worth about $200 in US money) for free because she was so beautiful.
I was brought up in an egalitarian household. I had no idea this sort of things happens in Real Life.
Yes, but when those customers find out how slowly the Linux virtual servers run, they go right back out and look for proper UNIX or Linux servers. It is talk.
At the time, Linux/UNIX was what I was interested in, and still am. Back in those days I could see that Linux was going to be big some day and I was right. It's far more useful both professionally and personally. IBM JCL and all it's other proprietary nonsense may be good for an employment niche, but that's about it. Even the evil IBM is talking about Linux on the mainframe. (OK it's only talk, they'll still try to upsell you but that's another story).
The bean-counters will find a way of "writing off" this debacle so it doesn't show up in TCO. Not that I'm bitter and cynical or anything....
I once knew a bean-counter (quite senior) on nearly 3 times my engineer's salary. He was sat there in front of a spreadsheet adding up a column of numbers on a pocket calculator.
Welcome to the UK Public Sector. That was your tax money.
I used to work for a UK-government-owned company. They're all the same. They are completely stupid and suicidal when it comes to dealing with contractors of any sort, but especially IT ones. It's a combination of laziness, stupidity, ignorance and herd mentality. It if ain't M$ they don't want to know about it, unless they can use it to negotiate lower prices from M$.
Hopefully just another nail in Microsoft's coffin...
No it won't:-(
They will be impressed my Microsoft's "comittment to customer service" by having flown out high-ranking people from all over Europe to attend to it.
They are already to stupid and lazy to see through it all. That's why they chose Microsoft and EDS in the first place.
BTW I once had an interview with EDS to work on one of these government jobs. They wanted me to cut off all of my hair and go to their corporate boot camp to learn COBOL and IBM S/360 assembler. This was in 1996.
The thing is, this sort of thing is expected and accepted by the UK public sector. They'll just find a scapegoat and keep on buying Microsoft. The sad thing is, that's my tax money.
Slackware badly needs an Opteron/Athlon 64 port. Most new PeeCees will be 64-bit pretty soon.
I notice that there has been an IBM S390 port, so all three people who want to run Linux on S390 can choose a different distro (Slackware, SuSE, Red Hat). If IBM wants to make friends in the community, they could have spent the time and money on something more useful.
I've been a loyal Slackware user since 1995, and I'd offer to do an Opteron port if I had a machine and the time... I've been slowly amassing the required clue-set over the years, but that has coincided with a very busy work schedule. Maybe in the neay year...
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Oh yes. And once you convince them, they'll still resist changing for all kinds if "reasons." Take my dad for instance... he's been programming computers for nearly 35 years and he should know better. *sigh*
Every time I speak to him he whinges on about the latest problem he's found in Windows for at least half an hour.
Next time you see him in JRDs tell him about your dad's Damascine conversion.
A couple of synthetic benchmarks prove nothing. In real world applications, itanic sucks. If alpha could run at 1.6GHz, it would beat the trousers off of itanic hands down. Face it, itanic is a turkey.
One goal of the alliance is to make Power chips used in high volumes. IBM has shipped more than 1 million PowerPC 970 chips, it said. The more widely used the Power processors are, however, the more directly they compete against the dominant x86 family such as Intel's Pentium and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.
Look out Wintel! Look out Sun?
One of our PHBs has cut out the middle-man. He prints his own Dilberts out and sticks them to his own office door... especially the ones where the PHB is being particularly detatched from reality.
Close, but still not quite there.
The prblem is, of course, what happens when the power fails while writing the journal?
In practice, writing to the journal is a short, quick operation, so the probability of it happening at the same time is smaller, bit it's still there.
The correct solution is to have some sort of uninterruptable power supply which keeps the machine up long enough that either an orderly shutdown can be completed, or power is restored before the battery or whatever runs out.
This is all well and good until the UPS breaks at the same time as a power outage, or a mouse or pet hamster chews through the cable between the UPS unit and the computer.
You can engineer this problem out too, but a water pipe might burst near your computer and short it out.
So you can isolate the computer by encasing in it a water-proof housing with multiple redundant and divers power-supplies and maybe even a few Diesel generators.
Of course, none of this is any good when a suicide bomber explodes on top of it all.
So you install a couple of machinegun nests to prevent suicide bombers getting close enough. Problem solved!
Not quite, Einstein :-(
What happens when a rock falls from space ...
Working hard, achieving, and being productive is one thing, working yourself into insanity or an early grave is quite another.
If you need to write more that about 10-20 lines of bash to make mp3s and oggs out of your flac files, you're doing something wrong.
It is most satisfying to convert 20 albums from flac to ogg and mp3 while you sleep. The old SETI@home score goes down a bit, though :-)
My wife has a 19-year0old daughter who has this incredibly pretty (tall, thin, blond, beautiful face, very pleasant manner) but rather dizzy 18-year-old friend. She has stayed with us a couple of times. She also inherited a lot of money that she's trying to spend quickly (go figure).
One morning I took her to the station. She was going to see her boyfriend at university. She'd bought a load of stuff to take to him because he's a poor student. Later on I found out that the man selling the tickets at the station gave her the tickets (worth about $200 in US money) for free because she was so beautiful.
I was brought up in an egalitarian household. I had no idea this sort of things happens in Real Life.
I wish I was young, slim, blond and beautiful. :-)
Yes, but when those customers find out how slowly the Linux virtual servers run, they go right back out and look for proper UNIX or Linux servers. It is talk.
At the time, Linux/UNIX was what I was interested in, and still am. Back in those days I could see that Linux was going to be big some day and I was right. It's far more useful both professionally and personally. IBM JCL and all it's other proprietary nonsense may be good for an employment niche, but that's about it. Even the evil IBM is talking about Linux on the mainframe. (OK it's only talk, they'll still try to upsell you but that's another story).
You'd probably be retired now! Pity you chose long hair, and have another 40 years of work to go.
I get to do cool stuff with UNIX nowadays. 40 years of cool stuff is better than becoming an EDS pointy-hair for 4 years and having to learn IBM JCL.
I once knew a bean-counter (quite senior) on nearly 3 times my engineer's salary. He was sat there in front of a spreadsheet adding up a column of numbers on a pocket calculator.
Welcome to the UK Public Sector. That was your tax money.
I used to work for a UK-government-owned company. They're all the same. They are completely stupid and suicidal when it comes to dealing with contractors of any sort, but especially IT ones. It's a combination of laziness, stupidity, ignorance and herd mentality. It if ain't M$ they don't want to know about it, unless they can use it to negotiate lower prices from M$.
No it won't :-(
They will be impressed my Microsoft's "comittment to customer service" by having flown out high-ranking people from all over Europe to attend to it.
They are already to stupid and lazy to see through it all. That's why they chose Microsoft and EDS in the first place.
BTW I once had an interview with EDS to work on one of these government jobs. They wanted me to cut off all of my hair and go to their corporate boot camp to learn COBOL and IBM S/360 assembler. This was in 1996.
The thing is, this sort of thing is expected and accepted by the UK public sector. They'll just find a scapegoat and keep on buying Microsoft. The sad thing is, that's my tax money.
What would you use for the volume of an order-6 hypersphere?
I have a friend who's interested in doing this too. After Christmas.... :-)
I notice that there has been an IBM S390 port, so all three people who want to run Linux on S390 can choose a different distro (Slackware, SuSE, Red Hat). If IBM wants to make friends in the community, they could have spent the time and money on something more useful.
I've been a loyal Slackware user since 1995, and I'd offer to do an Opteron port if I had a machine and the time... I've been slowly amassing the required clue-set over the years, but that has coincided with a very busy work schedule. Maybe in the neay year...
This will give him a well-developed sense of Right and Wrong, Truth, Justice and the American Way(TM).
He'll grow up a God-fearing, Republican, join the Army or Police and will avoid all deviancy for the rest of his life.
Don't worry, it's just my secret entourage of mod-bombers. :-)
emacs?
/me ducks.
What are you waiting for, then? :-)
I hope his pee cee gets lots of viruses too. :-)
/me ducks.
Well, it seems to me that Windows NT and derivatives have security through apathy. After all, who wants to type in "administrator"?