I was just at their website configuring a laptop for a business purchace. While I have to say their range of laptops are pretty slick their UI designer should be shot.
Back on topic now, this laptop is nifty in itself. EArlier on another/. article, the hordes were in an uproar about the data security module in laptops. After seeing one on the website and with technical information, both the prior articles mentioning and this new biometric feature are for the purpose of protecting the users data from theft and not for "corporations" protection against "us". It wasn't engineered that way. Maybe in a few years that will happen, but to appease the paranoid crowd here - this is _FOR_ us. not against.
Two recently released reports have reinforced what open source advocates have known for years: Open source has positioned itself as a strong and fundamental commercial force. Both reports identified office suite applications space -- desktop software, such as word processing, spreadsheets and databases -- as ripe for growth for open source. In a report from El Segundo, Calif.-based consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share and more than 300 million users worldwide. However, the report notes that OpenOffice.org, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market, with over 16 million downloads and countless CD installations. A second report released by Research and Markets, an international research firm based in Ireland, gets to the bottom line of one of the most appealing aspects of open source applications: cost. "Savings of up to 25% are possible with alternatives to Microsoft Office," the report stated. "Significant savings potentials for the license and operating costs make open source programs, like OpenOffice or StarOffice, an alternative to Microsoft to be reckoned with." StarOffice is a free productivity application suite from Sun Microsystems that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation maker and e-mail component compatible with Microsoft Office. "In the world there is a blurring line between commercial and open source," said Paul Gustafson, the director of the Leading Edge Forum. The LEF is a program created by CSC charged with identifying various technological topics of interest and future trends in popular areas like open source. Gustafson said the "blurring line" has occurred as commercial providers, like IBM, have started to embrace open source with applications like WebSphere, which works with many open source titles. "This is not just for the sake of a new low-cost-based alternative; it is [vendors] recognizing and really embracing [open source] and the role it plays in software development," Gustafson said. While cost was one of the major factors for some of the organizations in CSC's research, Gustafson said quality and flexibility were just as important when considering open source alternatives. Gustafson said a CSC client, Thor Pederson, the Danish Minister of Finance, believed that open source was the only way to truly achieve broader interoperability between his agency and other organizations. "They did not have the confidence that proprietary [applications] would allow them to be interoperable with other organizations, and they did not believe in the 'thou shalt adopt' approach present in some commercial vendors," Gustafson said.
but i can undeerstand your frustration. however, try constructively saving this kind of arguement for when you can have a clear head and then review your post, remove the antagonising tone putting it to a postive light and then, only then, posting it.
it'll serve you well. and probably land you that job you wanted.
I remember this as well and loved it. You could even have a local area number for a lot of cities. I had a local boston number for my girlfriend at the time to call me in NY before I moved there, and she had a local NY number so I could call her there. Very cool stuff. Free long distance, anonymous information and the best part?? 5 years ago, this stuff was only 1/2 second of lag!
If the socialists in that country see fit to regulate the media to the extent that massive nation-wide filters need to be erected to keep "bad" things out, then Google (an American company) has no business telling them they are wrong.
What in the world?! Are you just dumb? In the best interests of mankind, it is far better to have a well educated populace with minds of their own to where they can benefit each other and the society they live in.
But you say a company, a group of people who are educated in many things, has no right to tell a government they are wrong, in principle and example (of not allowing their country to dictate business of internet searches, information and truth to be found) that they are wrong?
What are you smoking? The idea and mere notion that any government would restrict, limit and or otherwise hinder the peoples choice and agency to learn, educate themselves and live in freedom is wrong!!! A company has every right and responsibility, as individuals do as well, to fight against those that opress by example, words and action and to help their fellow man (mankind) and lift them up.
I'd like to know where you learned what you did in regards to your opinions. I respect them for what they are, but the answer you display in responce to keeping certian kinds of information away from the public that are obviously harmful, such as kiddie porn is like comparing apples and oranges.
There is a stark and obvious difference in censorship of the good things in life that may contradict the will of opressive and ruthless leaders and in the harmful nature of child porn.
For the linux n00b, and general community we should create the following piece of software:
linux.exe;)
It would scan your hardware. Completely. Then leave a text file on your desktop explaining what sound, video, chipset, usb, firewire, cd(rw)/dvd(rw), monitor, network, modem and any other hardware you have in your computer system (which is trivial b/c a lot of people just buy pre-packaged systems etc.) and tell you what you'll need in the way of modules you'll need. Possibly even tell you what distro your system is best suited for.
you know, a simple exe with an online database. It will give exact hardware information along with information as to what is it. for example:
Audio Intel 810 (AC '97 - or whatever), where to get drivers. NEtwork Linksys 10/100 PCI (firmware, or other model info), where to get drivers Video nVidia GeForce 5800 256MB, chipset info, where to get drivers.
What do you guys think? Worthwhile for the non geek in the world (meaning 99% of the world)?
Family, wife, kids, mom & dad (not the annoying kind) and a few select friends. Everyone else takes the back seat when it comes to online, email, IM, even slashdot pals. Those on the whitelist don't abuse it b/c they know it's for important things or emergencies. Kids.. well, they're another story but that's why you raise them correctly, right?
it's about controlling your enviroment, not your enviroment controlling you. you can learn to unplug, and for those of us that enjoy the convienence without the hassel of EVERYONE else being able to, at a whim, call us... well - learn to control IT, and not the other way around.
It's simply a state of mind many people don't understand.
If i had mod points I'd mod you up. This is a very insightful comment. National participation on medical, health and other scientific findings should be publicly available since they are funded (generally) by tax dollars. This is something I can stand behind.
and not subject to regulatory agencies. very nice, and useful as well! just think about being able to communicate with a useful tool (and toy) and you're gaming or in range of someone elses public network!
not that I'll be buying one yet, however - this idea is very cool.
You know what? That's a great idea! Instead of having KDE lag on my normal system without the network, now it can lag in user responsiveness from over the network.
so true, and I even own that book on top of several dozen that were banned by my high school for "inappropriate content"
what a laugh. And you know how I found out about books like these? My mom! Yup, the good ol' days where books weren't banned b/c as much as people may have shied away from things they didn't like, they were educated enough to understand that books like these promote learning, thinking, self-decision and idea forming.
Books that get banned are typically done by organizations that use a form of religious zealotry that even makes me shudder.
Anyways, kudos to you and those kids to whom you introduce "banned" works to. The more information these kids have in their heads (and not rammed down their throats (re: commercialization)) the better off they'll be.
I'm sorry if our licenses arn't corporate friendly.
I'm not sorry. There are many of us who aren't. NDA's and work contracts be damned. Use a pseudonym or online handle that can't be associated with your real life name. Presto! Instant anon actions that can't be easily referenced to yourself.
Window System Design: If I had it to do over again in 2002. James Gosling December 9, 2002 In the deep dark past I have been involved in building window systems. I did the original design and implementation of both the Andrew and NeWS window systems. Both of which predated X11. They shared with X11 the architectural feature of being networked: clients sent messages to the server over TCP connections. I occasionally get asked "if you had to do it over again, what would you do? Would you do the same thing". The answer is a strong no. It's now 20 years later, and the technological landscape is totally different. So here is what I would do. But first... The term "window system" is somewhat loose. It generally refers to the mechanism by which applications share access to the screen(s), keyboard and mouse. Beyond this it generally contains facilities for inter-application messages such as support for cutand- paste, and drag-and-drop. It also often contains support for the decorations surrounding windows that provide the user interface for resizing, opening and closing windows; although in some systems this has been left up to the application. Sometimes the window system provides higher level abstractions like menus. When a system is designed, there are always tradeoffs made that reflect the technology of the day. In the case of Andrew and NeWS, these tradeoffs were based on the state of the art 15 to 20 years ago (this probably applies to X11 too, but I wasn't involved in the design analysis behind it). There were a number of things that were very different between then and now. 1) The most significant is the relative performance of graphics rendering and network communication. Back then, rendering was relatively slow. The overhead of network communication was significantly overshadowed by the overhead of rendering. 2) Back then, there were no shared libraries. This seems odd, looked back at from today, but back then no version of Unix had the ability to have a library like libc or OpenGL that was shared between processes. All applications had to be "statically linked". There was a primitive segment Background History sharing facility that allowed one segment per process to be shared, that was at the beginning of the address space; but it wasn't powerful enough for this purpose. 3) Putting large things, like windowing libraries, into the kernel is generally a bad idea. It has a significant negative impact on the reliability and testability of the system. 4) When hardware acceleration was available, it generally had no interlocking mechanisms for arbitrating amongst independent threads that were trying to use it. This generally meant that either the accelerator was permanently allocated to a thread (very common, since acceleration was normally 3D hardware used exclusively for CAD), or there was an software interlock mechanism that added some cost to each operation. So, given these, where do you put all of the code that is involved in the window system - including the graphics rendering library? Remember that rendering libraries tended to be large, since hardware acceleration was almost non-existent. They couldn't be in each user process, since without being shared, they would take up an unacceptable amount of RAM. So the only way to get one copy of the code, and have it outside of the kernel, was to have it in one process, and to have applications communicate with this "window server". But today, while putting large amounts of code into the kernel is still a bad idea, rendering performance has improved dramatically, and most operating systems have shared libraries. The increase in rendering performance has outstripped Moore's law, which in turn has outstripped the increase in generally available bandwidth, making the overhead of shipping requests through the network an unacceptable burden. High per
Would be a system that is both lightweight and fast. Everything could move at the speed of a finely tuned video game. Advances in rendering pipelines and library design would be easy to accommodate. This window system design isn't particularly radical: it's more just pointing out that this is the way that X is going already, given the increasing predominance of applicationside rendering libraries. Once you accept that fact and admit that it's actually the right way to go, the design falls out, simply by stripping away legacy stuff that isn't needed any more.
So. Who's with me to create tihs sourceforge project? Dead serious folks, not a troll. BUt who has the gumption to get it started and make it run VERY fast, then after a while see how the X.org people would think of merging or using it? Eh eh?
let me know, use my gpg key to encrypt messages (it's the wave of the future!).
Slashdot Mirror
I have 6 invites also. The first 6 to reply to this message with a funny "pun" will get one. =)
3. Make slashdotters beg
2. ??
1. PROFIT!
GO!
I was just at their website configuring a laptop for a business purchace. While I have to say their range of laptops are pretty slick their UI designer should be shot.
/. article, the hordes were in an uproar about the data security module in laptops. After seeing one on the website and with technical information, both the prior articles mentioning and this new biometric feature are for the purpose of protecting the users data from theft and not for "corporations" protection against "us". It wasn't engineered that way. Maybe in a few years that will happen, but to appease the paranoid crowd here - this is _FOR_ us. not against.
/.ing
Back on topic now, this laptop is nifty in itself. EArlier on another
=) happy
damn, forgot to click that little button - sorry
posted anon to prevent karma whoring.
---ARTICLE---
Two recently released reports have reinforced what open source advocates have known for years: Open source has positioned itself as a strong and fundamental commercial force.
Both reports identified office suite applications space -- desktop software, such as word processing, spreadsheets and databases -- as ripe for growth for open source.
In a report from El Segundo, Calif.-based consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share and more than 300 million users worldwide.
However, the report notes that OpenOffice.org, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market, with over 16 million downloads and countless CD installations.
A second report released by Research and Markets, an international research firm based in Ireland, gets to the bottom line of one of the most appealing aspects of open source applications: cost.
"Savings of up to 25% are possible with alternatives to Microsoft Office," the report stated. "Significant savings potentials for the license and operating costs make open source programs, like OpenOffice or StarOffice, an alternative to Microsoft to be reckoned with."
StarOffice is a free productivity application suite from Sun Microsystems that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation maker and e-mail component compatible with Microsoft Office.
"In the world there is a blurring line between commercial and open source," said Paul Gustafson, the director of the Leading Edge Forum. The LEF is a program created by CSC charged with identifying various technological topics of interest and future trends in popular areas like open source.
Gustafson said the "blurring line" has occurred as commercial providers, like IBM, have started to embrace open source with applications like WebSphere, which works with many open source titles.
"This is not just for the sake of a new low-cost-based alternative; it is [vendors] recognizing and really embracing [open source] and the role it plays in software development," Gustafson said.
While cost was one of the major factors for some of the organizations in CSC's research, Gustafson said quality and flexibility were just as important when considering open source alternatives.
Gustafson said a CSC client, Thor Pederson, the Danish Minister of Finance, believed that open source was the only way to truly achieve broader interoperability between his agency and other organizations.
"They did not have the confidence that proprietary [applications] would allow them to be interoperable with other organizations, and they did not believe in the 'thou shalt adopt' approach present in some commercial vendors," Gustafson said.
but i can undeerstand your frustration. however, try constructively saving this kind of arguement for when you can have a clear head and then review your post, remove the antagonising tone putting it to a postive light and then, only then, posting it.
it'll serve you well. and probably land you that job you wanted.
I remember this as well and loved it. You could even have a local area number for a lot of cities. I had a local boston number for my girlfriend at the time to call me in NY before I moved there, and she had a local NY number so I could call her there. Very cool stuff. Free long distance, anonymous information and the best part?? 5 years ago, this stuff was only 1/2 second of lag!
I miss the good ol days sometimes.
Okay, I'll bite...
Did I hear that? Here on slashdot of all places?
If the socialists in that country see fit to regulate the media to the extent that massive nation-wide filters need to be erected to keep "bad" things out, then Google (an American company) has no business telling them they are wrong.
What in the world?! Are you just dumb? In the best interests of mankind, it is far better to have a well educated populace with minds of their own to where they can benefit each other and the society they live in.
But you say a company, a group of people who are educated in many things, has no right to tell a government they are wrong, in principle and example (of not allowing their country to dictate business of internet searches, information and truth to be found) that they are wrong?
What are you smoking? The idea and mere notion that any government would restrict, limit and or otherwise hinder the peoples choice and agency to learn, educate themselves and live in freedom is wrong!!! A company has every right and responsibility, as individuals do as well, to fight against those that opress by example, words and action and to help their fellow man (mankind) and lift them up.
I'd like to know where you learned what you did in regards to your opinions. I respect them for what they are, but the answer you display in responce to keeping certian kinds of information away from the public that are obviously harmful, such as kiddie porn is like comparing apples and oranges.
There is a stark and obvious difference in censorship of the good things in life that may contradict the will of opressive and ruthless leaders and in the harmful nature of child porn.
I'm sorry but that's just wrong.
Porn.
send them to my server? contact me and we'll work out a deal to where I can compensate you for your efforts.
--zo *use my GPG key below!
apparently the attempt at humor failed :P
Not to mention that when people run away from the area, it will generate more static electricity and therefor create a faster lightning strike.
HORN BLARES
Students: RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!
*static charges*
*BZZZZZT*
--students twitch, lying on the ground..
No thanks, I'll sit under a tree with a golf club while you run around.
For the linux n00b, and general community we should create the following piece of software:
;)
linux.exe
It would scan your hardware. Completely. Then leave a text file on your desktop explaining what sound, video, chipset, usb, firewire, cd(rw)/dvd(rw), monitor, network, modem and any other hardware you have in your computer system (which is trivial b/c a lot of people just buy pre-packaged systems etc.) and tell you what you'll need in the way of modules you'll need. Possibly even tell you what distro your system is best suited for.
you know, a simple exe with an online database. It will give exact hardware information along with information as to what is it. for example:
Audio Intel 810 (AC '97 - or whatever), where to get drivers.
NEtwork Linksys 10/100 PCI (firmware, or other model info), where to get drivers
Video nVidia GeForce 5800 256MB, chipset info, where to get drivers.
What do you guys think?
Worthwhile for the non geek in the world (meaning 99% of the world)?
-zoloto
I whitelist individuals.
Family, wife, kids, mom & dad (not the annoying kind) and a few select friends. Everyone else takes the back seat when it comes to online, email, IM, even slashdot pals. Those on the whitelist don't abuse it b/c they know it's for important things or emergencies. Kids.. well, they're another story but that's why you raise them correctly, right?
it's about controlling your enviroment, not your enviroment controlling you. you can learn to unplug, and for those of us that enjoy the convienence without the hassel of EVERYONE else being able to, at a whim, call us... well - learn to control IT, and not the other way around.
It's simply a state of mind many people don't understand.
worst... troll... ever!
you rock!
You klutz!
I hope it's not a deposit bottle!
If i had mod points I'd mod you up.
This is a very insightful comment. National participation on medical, health and other scientific findings should be publicly available since they are funded (generally) by tax dollars. This is something I can stand behind.
Funny. I saw this movie just last saturday and loved it. Though I laughed when watching it after 5+ years and the concepts seemed - hollywood. :P
Sneakers rocked.
and not subject to regulatory agencies. very nice, and useful as well! just think about being able to communicate with a useful tool (and toy) and you're gaming or in range of someone elses public network!
not that I'll be buying one yet, however - this idea is very cool.
You know what? That's a great idea! Instead of having KDE lag on my normal system without the network, now it can lag in user responsiveness from over the network.
either way, it's still slow
so true, and I even own that book on top of several dozen that were banned by my high school for "inappropriate content"
what a laugh. And you know how I found out about books like these? My mom! Yup, the good ol' days where books weren't banned b/c as much as people may have shied away from things they didn't like, they were educated enough to understand that books like these promote learning, thinking, self-decision and idea forming.
Books that get banned are typically done by organizations that use a form of religious zealotry that even makes me shudder.
Anyways, kudos to you and those kids to whom you introduce "banned" works to. The more information these kids have in their heads (and not rammed down their throats (re: commercialization)) the better off they'll be.
...forever!
I'm sorry if our licenses arn't corporate friendly.
I'm not sorry. There are many of us who aren't. NDA's and work contracts be damned. Use a pseudonym or online handle that can't be associated with your real life name. Presto! Instant anon actions that can't be easily referenced to yourself.
works for me, works for others.
Here it is..
Window System Design:
If I had it to do over again in 2002.
James Gosling
December 9, 2002
In the deep dark past I have been involved in building window
systems. I did the original design and implementation of both the
Andrew and NeWS window systems. Both of which predated
X11. They shared with X11 the architectural feature of being
networked: clients sent messages to the server over TCP
connections. I occasionally get asked "if you had to do it over
again, what would you do? Would you do the same thing". The
answer is a strong no. It's now 20 years later, and the
technological landscape is totally different. So here is what I
would do. But first...
The term "window system" is somewhat loose. It generally refers
to the mechanism by which applications share access to the
screen(s), keyboard and mouse. Beyond this it generally contains
facilities for inter-application messages such as support for cutand-
paste, and drag-and-drop. It also often contains support for the
decorations surrounding windows that provide the user interface
for resizing, opening and closing windows; although in some
systems this has been left up to the application. Sometimes the
window system provides higher level abstractions like menus.
When a system is designed, there are always tradeoffs made that
reflect the technology of the day. In the case of Andrew and
NeWS, these tradeoffs were based on the state of the art 15 to 20
years ago (this probably applies to X11 too, but I wasn't involved
in the design analysis behind it). There were a number of things
that were very different between then and now.
1) The most significant is the relative performance of graphics
rendering and network communication. Back then,
rendering was relatively slow. The overhead of network
communication was significantly overshadowed by the
overhead of rendering.
2) Back then, there were no shared libraries. This seems odd,
looked back at from today, but back then no version of
Unix had the ability to have a library like libc or OpenGL
that was shared between processes. All applications had to
be "statically linked". There was a primitive segment
Background
History
sharing facility that allowed one segment per process to be
shared, that was at the beginning of the address space; but it
wasn't powerful enough for this purpose.
3) Putting large things, like windowing libraries, into the
kernel is generally a bad idea. It has a significant negative
impact on the reliability and testability of the system.
4) When hardware acceleration was available, it generally had
no interlocking mechanisms for arbitrating amongst
independent threads that were trying to use it. This
generally meant that either the accelerator was permanently
allocated to a thread (very common, since acceleration was
normally 3D hardware used exclusively for CAD), or there
was an software interlock mechanism that added some cost
to each operation.
So, given these, where do you put all of the code that is involved in
the window system - including the graphics rendering library?
Remember that rendering libraries tended to be large, since
hardware acceleration was almost non-existent.
They couldn't be in each user process, since without being shared,
they would take up an unacceptable amount of RAM. So the only
way to get one copy of the code, and have it outside of the kernel,
was to have it in one process, and to have applications
communicate with this "window server".
But today, while putting large amounts of code into the kernel is
still a bad idea, rendering performance has improved dramatically,
and most operating systems have shared libraries. The increase in
rendering performance has outstripped Moore's law, which in turn
has outstripped the increase in generally available bandwidth,
making the overhead of shipping requests through the network an
unacceptable burden.
High per
So. Who's with me to create tihs sourceforge project? Dead serious folks, not a troll. BUt who has the gumption to get it started and make it run VERY fast, then after a while see how the X.org people would think of merging or using it? Eh eh?
let me know, use my gpg key to encrypt messages (it's the wave of the future!).
--zoloto
You sir...
best.. troll.. ever!