Well you better cough up some cash or hope that what works with Fedora will work with their Enterprise Server.
Huh? It's all linux. You don't have to use redhat branded packages to run software - heck, you could (gasp!) compile stuff from source if you wanted to. What you get with Enterprise and Advanced server, aside from some non-free software, is support, and lots of it. Companies that don't need that support, or the guaranteed reliability, will probably continue to use 7.3, and upgrade to 9 in a couple of years when it's "mature" enough.
Fedora is still RedHat. It's just that RedHat has stopped supplying the boxed "free" version and has opened up its development to the community (as I understand it, in the past, RedHat has been very bad about not accepting user-contributed patches, etc).
I don't get it. Why is everyone complaining that redhat has dropped support for their non-enterprise distro? All they did was, well, drop support for it as in tech support, which you had to pay for anyway. All of the same quality we've come to expect from them as far as packages go will still be there like it was before, if not better, through Fedora (which is now part of RedHat instead of being a separate group).
Other than the lack of official pay-for tech support (which my guess is most home users didn't use), this is a good thing. Not only do we get RedHat's people working on packages, but we get the experience and time of the Fedora people, too. This will mean more packages, better packages, and more releases more often.
In exchange, RedHat will get some better packages for their enterprise distros, which will give them a stronger foothold in the enterprice market, which is a good thing for Linux fanatics everywhere.
The quality of the non-enterprise redhat release will not get worse, and we will presumably still see updates for the "old" redhat branches get pushed through Fedora, so those of us using 7.3, 8 or 9 in production environments will still get our openssh, bind, sendmail, whatever patches when we need them.
When my company got in a small pile of Seagate SATA 120 gig hard drives a few months back (before any manufacturers were offering them for sale), a couple were DOA, and at least 2 more died shortly thereafter. I think that left us with 1 or 2 test units, since they wouldn't even RMA the drives that didn't work.
Needless to say, we've had NO trouble with any Seagate SATA drives since then (outside of the normal hard drive failure rate, and Seagate seems to be more reliable than most).
Children are inheriently irresponsible, precisely because they are children
I beg to differ... Kids are irresponsible because they haven't been taught to be more so, and because people like you just assume that they are. There are countless studies that show when you EXPECT kids to act a certain way, the way you treat them molds their responses into that. Thus, when you give a teacher a classroom of underachievers, but tell him/her that they're honor students, their grades go up; but when it's a class of honor students and the teacher has been told that they're "problem kids" the grades go down and the behavior changes accordingly.
Give some credit to the kids whose parents care enough to instill resposibility at a young age (or at all). Children are irresponsible because most people treat them like children. My parents tried to treat me as much as an equal (intellectually, anyway) as they could, and I think that I'm better for it (I did better in school, finding jobs, etc).
"higher-quality than from people who do it professionally" ????
What, like open source software is all coded by a bunch of high school kids with no skill? I'm willing to bet that almost all of the people working on the big projects, and most of the people working on the smaller projects are people who "do it professionally".
Even the projects that are coded primarily by high school students (well, he's in college now) are among the best quality programs I've ever used. I've personally contributed to several small/medium OSS projects, and I'm a professional programmer. Heck, I've even worked on OSS projects as part of my day job.
Mr. Ballmer, you really need to do your research better. We're not just hacks out here (and those of us who are, won't be for long because of the experience and help that the OSS community provides).
I'd rather have a system with 100 security holes a year that all get fixed in hours . . . than a system with 10 security holes a year that get patched months later if at all
Agreed. Though all things considered, a lot has to be said for the diligence of most the Linux admins I know, compared to the M$ admins. When a patch comes out, we're usually chomping on the bit for it to show up in the various repositories (the overzealous ones have of course already compiled it an hour earlier). Whereas with the M$ stuff (as is seen by the continuing presence of cmd.exe and other IIS-virus-related requests in my apache logs), the admins don't even apply the few M$ patches that do come out in a timely manner.
I was having trouble getting some of my music to import properly from my ipod collection (since most of my music is in ogg format, I've reencoded a bunch of it to mp3 for putting onto my ipod), when I realized that iTunes doesn't like certain characters in the filenames. When you drag & drop, it pretends to import, but then doesn't, and when you use the control-o function, iTunes will actually crash/quit without warning.
The offending character that I've found is the ":" - presumably because this is an illegal character in MacOS (it's the directory separator character - equivalent to / in *nix or \ in Windows). Quite annoying.
Has anyone considered that there's an EXTREMELY good chance that the Music Store portions of iTunes are backed by Safari/KHTML? Which means that it wouldn't take that much for Apple to make a Windows version of Safari available, too? Would make a nice alterative to IE, since with its built-in (ie. easy) user agent switching, it can become more compatible with restrictive sites than gecko-based browsers.
The way iTunes and the iTMS locks you in to Apple software and Apple hardware
Locks you into the apple hardware? iTunes deals with AIFF, MP3 and AAC audio.. Granted, AIFF has long been mostly the mac variant of WAV for mostly-uncompressed audio, MP3 is a "standard", and AAC is the new accepted standard for mpeg4 audio. How are these last two something that locks you into the iPod hardware? If the other players aren't supporting AAC it's because they're not supporting all of the standards (granted, imho Apple is doing the same thing by not supporting ogg vorbis, and given the choice I would have purchased the new iRiver player - but I won an iPod from my local Apple store, so I'm not about to complain about anything other than the new kernel's inability to mount it).
Granted, I don't know a lot of mainstream windows-using people, but everyone I do know uses mp3 for music, and doesn't really even know what WMA is.
You missed the part of the article where they mentioned that it's perfectly legal for telemarketers to have a human dial the number manually... They'll just revert back to the days before autodialers and have the callers actually dial your number.
A 2006 release date will give Microsoft a chance to rip off the visual style of Apple's successor to Panther, whatever that might be
If nothing else, they're stealing the eye candy. I have it on VERY good authority (my company builds a number of their test machines) that Longhorn will require a DirectX 9 capable video card. I used to think that this sucked for those of us without the cash to get a new card, but if I'm sure I'll have one by 2006 (or hopefully by then Gimp will suck less and I won't need Photoshop).
Then again, the eye candy in XP sucks so much that I had to revert to the older look & feel, I don't know if I want to see what they do with 3d accelated eye candy.
You've obviously never had to copy down a long bios version string, or pause the linux kernel boot messages to actually read them (looking for errors, etc). It's still very useful in console-land.
And then there's the whole KVM-port-switch thing, too.
I believe the purpose of this new system is try to foil people from distributing compressed copies of the film on the internet
That may be true, but it seems weird to me. A recent trick in the dvd screener world is to make certain portions of the film black and white. That doesn't seem to do more than annoy pirates, so certainly a few spots here and there throughout a pirated film, especially one that was already low-quality to begin with, aren't going to do more than annoy the people crazy enough to watch such a low-quality film, anyway.
It will, however, annoy theatre-goers, who already think that they're spending too much to see a movie ($9-10 is a lot, especially if you're paying for a date, too). Unless it's something spectacular, I'm more than willing to wait until it's out on dvd and rent it for $3 (or spend the $20 I would have at the theatre for a dvd copy that I can watch over and over)
let's give them even less of a reason to buy, view or care about movies
Read the article. This is about putting markers on movies released on reels to theatres. Different reels get different formats of spots, just like a serial number (but since a good pirate could alter serial numbers, spots probably make for a pseudo encryption).
Unless the movie industry is going overboard in the self-foot-shooting department, I doubt that these spots will be put into each and every DVD released to the public (what, do they want to see who's pirating movies purchased from Amazon vs. those purchased from Blockbuster?). These are for catching those theatres whose employees release "telesync" rips - a camera hooked up with a direct line in for audio (since you'd have to be an employee to get that direct line in), usually recorded after-hours with no customers in the theatre. And frankly, not worth watching, anyway, since anything shot with a camera pointed at a movie screen looks like crap.
I mean, how hard would it be to just check to see if an ip is listed as a valid MX record for a particular domain? For the hobbyists, it's easy enough to add an mx record for your home mail server, and for the big companies, they wouldn't exactly be changing their mail servers very often.
The only thing we're not doing now is forcing that mx is the "only" server, just that it's the incoming server.
The latest Spamassassin catches them all just fine for me - some of them score high enough even without my bayes training. Actually, after upgrading to 2.6, the only spam I see in my inbox is the type with a single image and a buch of random dictionary words, and even those are starting to get caught by my bayes filters (random dictionary words means that there are a lot of words that don't show up in my normal messages).
Actually, most of our customers are enterprise-level types (Microsoft, MIT, Real), and for the most part they buy ATA/SATA RAID systems. They're much cheaper than SCSI, and we've actually had a lot of trouble with the U320 hardware (both drives and controllers) failing. Longer warranties don't do any good if you have to keep sending the hardware in for repair/replacement. Better to buy 2-3 SATA drives for the cost of a SCSI drive and have them around for instant swapping if/when something breaks.
assuming the browser developers are equally concerned with standards
After struggling for weeks/months designing a new site, I can assure you that they are all adhering strictly to html and javascript standards. Unfortunately, no one seems to agree about what those standards are.
Maybe because she hasn't touched that page in a couple of years? And most of the really-bad things were done so long ago that she can't even get into them to remove the content (most of it was done 7+ years ago when she was in high school).
But I'll try not to take it personally. She *was* bad (we all start out that way). Not so much anymore. Unfortunately, she's decided to keep that old stuff around. All of the good stuff, well, sits in photoshop and on her hard drive because it has nowhere else to go.
Gradual reduction of hard drive warranties? Didn't Maxtor just bump up the warranty on their drives to 5 years? And WD and Seagate both have 3 year warranties on their drives. Granted, I'm talking about the "good" (SATA, 8 meg cache, etc.) drives, not the cheap ones that most of us users are using rebates to get for really-cheap.
You get to hop between jobs? My wife's BA has gotten her absolutely SQUAT becuase she has relatively few real-world skills (she's an awesome web designer, but with everyone-and-their-dog out there claiming to be one, too, it's not exactly a favorable market to get started in), there are NO jobs out there for her.
I, on the other hand, have an MA from one of the best schools in the country (U. Chicago), and it gets me, well, squat. Luckily, I've been doing html, perl and database development since high school, which gives me almost 9 years of industry experience and the opportunity to, well, hop between jobs every year or two.
And please don't forget about all of those PhD's out there in the tech industry - many of whom are unemployed. Education is great, but nothing is as good as real-world experience.
It is the responsiblity of the purchaser to pay the sales tax in their home state.
Actually, that changes on a state-to-state basis. And also depends on whether or not the purchasee is in the same state as the purchaser. If your business has a physical presence in WA, and you sell something to a customer who receives it (shipped to, or picked up in-store) in WA, then you as the company are responsible for collecting and paying the sales tax on that item. Thus, when I order from Amazon (located about 15 minutes from my house), I pay sales tax. When I buy from buy.com (located in CA), I don't. Not only that, but when I buy from Amazon, I also have to pay the extra.8% or so of sales tax that the county tacks on.
What these states want to do is set it up so that if my company ships something to FL or TX or CA or wherever, we'd have to collect the sales tax for that shipping address, and then find some way to get that tax to the appropriate state. It's a HUGE hassle, since we'd have to know all of the various tax percentages for that state (and its counties), and know when they change. The article says that the states are trying to make this easier/simpler, but it'll still be a huge hassle. This is why the federal goverment has been trying to get an "internet tax" passed, that would provide one sales tax value for all internet purchases, which the federal government would then divvy up to each state how it sees fit).
This study wasn't looking to see which was better, LAME 128 or others, it was looking to see if any of the lower-quality streams could match the quality of LAME 128 (ie. the study started with the assumption that LAME 128 was better than lower bitrate streams from other codec's).
And please, at low bitrates like this, we're not talking about encoding music for personal use anymore... This is streaming music here, where bandwidth is expensive (or not available, in the case of a cell phone) and a few k here and there means money.
How long have you waited? Though some people here talk about getting their honeypot addresses spidered in a matter of hours, you do have to rememeber that even if the spam spiders are running 24/7/365, it may take them awhile to get back to the pages and articles that you posted (my guess is that usenet groups are also prioritized pretty low, as I know people who post there often, and have for a long time, and never received spam to those addresses).
The best way to get spam? Put your email address into a popular HOWTO, or run a 3-letter domain (a friend of mine gets about 2/second to his three-letter domain). And be patient.
But if you want some of mine, I'm happy to get rid of it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? It's all linux. You don't have to use redhat branded packages to run software - heck, you could (gasp!) compile stuff from source if you wanted to. What you get with Enterprise and Advanced server, aside from some non-free software, is support, and lots of it. Companies that don't need that support, or the guaranteed reliability, will probably continue to use 7.3, and upgrade to 9 in a couple of years when it's "mature" enough.
Fedora is still RedHat. It's just that RedHat has stopped supplying the boxed "free" version and has opened up its development to the community (as I understand it, in the past, RedHat has been very bad about not accepting user-contributed patches, etc).
Other than the lack of official pay-for tech support (which my guess is most home users didn't use), this is a good thing. Not only do we get RedHat's people working on packages, but we get the experience and time of the Fedora people, too. This will mean more packages, better packages, and more releases more often.
In exchange, RedHat will get some better packages for their enterprise distros, which will give them a stronger foothold in the enterprice market, which is a good thing for Linux fanatics everywhere.
The quality of the non-enterprise redhat release will not get worse, and we will presumably still see updates for the "old" redhat branches get pushed through Fedora, so those of us using 7.3, 8 or 9 in production environments will still get our openssh, bind, sendmail, whatever patches when we need them.
Needless to say, we've had NO trouble with any Seagate SATA drives since then (outside of the normal hard drive failure rate, and Seagate seems to be more reliable than most).
I beg to differ... Kids are irresponsible because they haven't been taught to be more so, and because people like you just assume that they are. There are countless studies that show when you EXPECT kids to act a certain way, the way you treat them molds their responses into that. Thus, when you give a teacher a classroom of underachievers, but tell him/her that they're honor students, their grades go up; but when it's a class of honor students and the teacher has been told that they're "problem kids" the grades go down and the behavior changes accordingly.
Give some credit to the kids whose parents care enough to instill resposibility at a young age (or at all). Children are irresponsible because most people treat them like children. My parents tried to treat me as much as an equal (intellectually, anyway) as they could, and I think that I'm better for it (I did better in school, finding jobs, etc).
What, like open source software is all coded by a bunch of high school kids with no skill? I'm willing to bet that almost all of the people working on the big projects, and most of the people working on the smaller projects are people who "do it professionally".
Even the projects that are coded primarily by high school students (well, he's in college now) are among the best quality programs I've ever used. I've personally contributed to several small/medium OSS projects, and I'm a professional programmer. Heck, I've even worked on OSS projects as part of my day job.
Mr. Ballmer, you really need to do your research better. We're not just hacks out here (and those of us who are, won't be for long because of the experience and help that the OSS community provides).
Agreed. Though all things considered, a lot has to be said for the diligence of most the Linux admins I know, compared to the M$ admins. When a patch comes out, we're usually chomping on the bit for it to show up in the various repositories (the overzealous ones have of course already compiled it an hour earlier). Whereas with the M$ stuff (as is seen by the continuing presence of cmd.exe and other IIS-virus-related requests in my apache logs), the admins don't even apply the few M$ patches that do come out in a timely manner.
The offending character that I've found is the ":" - presumably because this is an illegal character in MacOS (it's the directory separator character - equivalent to / in *nix or \ in Windows). Quite annoying.
Has anyone considered that there's an EXTREMELY good chance that the Music Store portions of iTunes are backed by Safari/KHTML? Which means that it wouldn't take that much for Apple to make a Windows version of Safari available, too? Would make a nice alterative to IE, since with its built-in (ie. easy) user agent switching, it can become more compatible with restrictive sites than gecko-based browsers.
Locks you into the apple hardware? iTunes deals with AIFF, MP3 and AAC audio.. Granted, AIFF has long been mostly the mac variant of WAV for mostly-uncompressed audio, MP3 is a "standard", and AAC is the new accepted standard for mpeg4 audio. How are these last two something that locks you into the iPod hardware? If the other players aren't supporting AAC it's because they're not supporting all of the standards (granted, imho Apple is doing the same thing by not supporting ogg vorbis, and given the choice I would have purchased the new iRiver player - but I won an iPod from my local Apple store, so I'm not about to complain about anything other than the new kernel's inability to mount it).
Granted, I don't know a lot of mainstream windows-using people, but everyone I do know uses mp3 for music, and doesn't really even know what WMA is.
You missed the part of the article where they mentioned that it's perfectly legal for telemarketers to have a human dial the number manually... They'll just revert back to the days before autodialers and have the callers actually dial your number.
don't know how if these would work, but it's easy enough to find mini DVD-R disks for sale.
If nothing else, they're stealing the eye candy. I have it on VERY good authority (my company builds a number of their test machines) that Longhorn will require a DirectX 9 capable video card. I used to think that this sucked for those of us without the cash to get a new card, but if I'm sure I'll have one by 2006 (or hopefully by then Gimp will suck less and I won't need Photoshop).
Then again, the eye candy in XP sucks so much that I had to revert to the older look & feel, I don't know if I want to see what they do with 3d accelated eye candy.
You've obviously never had to copy down a long bios version string, or pause the linux kernel boot messages to actually read them (looking for errors, etc). It's still very useful in console-land.
And then there's the whole KVM-port-switch thing, too.
That may be true, but it seems weird to me. A recent trick in the dvd screener world is to make certain portions of the film black and white. That doesn't seem to do more than annoy pirates, so certainly a few spots here and there throughout a pirated film, especially one that was already low-quality to begin with, aren't going to do more than annoy the people crazy enough to watch such a low-quality film, anyway.
It will, however, annoy theatre-goers, who already think that they're spending too much to see a movie ($9-10 is a lot, especially if you're paying for a date, too). Unless it's something spectacular, I'm more than willing to wait until it's out on dvd and rent it for $3 (or spend the $20 I would have at the theatre for a dvd copy that I can watch over and over)
Read the article. This is about putting markers on movies released on reels to theatres. Different reels get different formats of spots, just like a serial number (but since a good pirate could alter serial numbers, spots probably make for a pseudo encryption).
Unless the movie industry is going overboard in the self-foot-shooting department, I doubt that these spots will be put into each and every DVD released to the public (what, do they want to see who's pirating movies purchased from Amazon vs. those purchased from Blockbuster?). These are for catching those theatres whose employees release "telesync" rips - a camera hooked up with a direct line in for audio (since you'd have to be an employee to get that direct line in), usually recorded after-hours with no customers in the theatre. And frankly, not worth watching, anyway, since anything shot with a camera pointed at a movie screen looks like crap.
The only thing we're not doing now is forcing that mx is the "only" server, just that it's the incoming server.
The latest Spamassassin catches them all just fine for me - some of them score high enough even without my bayes training. Actually, after upgrading to 2.6, the only spam I see in my inbox is the type with a single image and a buch of random dictionary words, and even those are starting to get caught by my bayes filters (random dictionary words means that there are a lot of words that don't show up in my normal messages).
Actually, most of our customers are enterprise-level types (Microsoft, MIT, Real), and for the most part they buy ATA/SATA RAID systems. They're much cheaper than SCSI, and we've actually had a lot of trouble with the U320 hardware (both drives and controllers) failing. Longer warranties don't do any good if you have to keep sending the hardware in for repair/replacement. Better to buy 2-3 SATA drives for the cost of a SCSI drive and have them around for instant swapping if/when something breaks.
After struggling for weeks/months designing a new site, I can assure you that they are all adhering strictly to html and javascript standards. Unfortunately, no one seems to agree about what those standards are.
But I'll try not to take it personally. She *was* bad (we all start out that way). Not so much anymore. Unfortunately, she's decided to keep that old stuff around. All of the good stuff, well, sits in photoshop and on her hard drive because it has nowhere else to go.
Gradual reduction of hard drive warranties? Didn't Maxtor just bump up the warranty on their drives to 5 years? And WD and Seagate both have 3 year warranties on their drives. Granted, I'm talking about the "good" (SATA, 8 meg cache, etc.) drives, not the cheap ones that most of us users are using rebates to get for really-cheap.
I, on the other hand, have an MA from one of the best schools in the country (U. Chicago), and it gets me, well, squat. Luckily, I've been doing html, perl and database development since high school, which gives me almost 9 years of industry experience and the opportunity to, well, hop between jobs every year or two.
And please don't forget about all of those PhD's out there in the tech industry - many of whom are unemployed. Education is great, but nothing is as good as real-world experience.
Actually, that changes on a state-to-state basis. And also depends on whether or not the purchasee is in the same state as the purchaser. If your business has a physical presence in WA, and you sell something to a customer who receives it (shipped to, or picked up in-store) in WA, then you as the company are responsible for collecting and paying the sales tax on that item. Thus, when I order from Amazon (located about 15 minutes from my house), I pay sales tax. When I buy from buy.com (located in CA), I don't. Not only that, but when I buy from Amazon, I also have to pay the extra .8% or so of sales tax that the county tacks on.
What these states want to do is set it up so that if my company ships something to FL or TX or CA or wherever, we'd have to collect the sales tax for that shipping address, and then find some way to get that tax to the appropriate state. It's a HUGE hassle, since we'd have to know all of the various tax percentages for that state (and its counties), and know when they change. The article says that the states are trying to make this easier/simpler, but it'll still be a huge hassle. This is why the federal goverment has been trying to get an "internet tax" passed, that would provide one sales tax value for all internet purchases, which the federal government would then divvy up to each state how it sees fit).
This study wasn't looking to see which was better, LAME 128 or others, it was looking to see if any of the lower-quality streams could match the quality of LAME 128 (ie. the study started with the assumption that LAME 128 was better than lower bitrate streams from other codec's).
And please, at low bitrates like this, we're not talking about encoding music for personal use anymore... This is streaming music here, where bandwidth is expensive (or not available, in the case of a cell phone) and a few k here and there means money.
The best way to get spam? Put your email address into a popular HOWTO, or run a 3-letter domain (a friend of mine gets about 2/second to his three-letter domain). And be patient.
But if you want some of mine, I'm happy to get rid of it. ;)