Microsoft is serious about figuring out what Linux does better than their product and how. Then they will follow their age-old pattern of emulating it. Or perhaps I should Assimilate it (Just look at that Bill Gates Borg top of this page).
Of course we'll never hear the full results of their tests unless they accidentally put it on a public FTP server for a short time. Instead they'll edit it so that only the parts about how Windows is better will be released with all the blacked out parts replaced with FUD.
Everyone knows this. Not a surprise. Business as usual. The world continues to go round...
At a local Junior College where I work we had some summer classes for older women. IT was highly successful. It was just basic usage, but women in general were found to be uncomfortable outside their peer group.
Another class would be technical skills for younger girls- Networking and the like. You could probably get money from Cisco for this, they are forever trying to attract women into the field with their Cisco Academy program- just look at the frontpage of cisco.netacad.net.
Even better if you can get a women to teach this. Go find a local college girl to do it.
In all seriousness SCO must be thinking that as long as they can stay in the news people will equate UNIX=SCO. So when the guys who make the money decisions and don't have a clue about technical things are told they need to buy UNIX they'll order the purchase of SCO Unix!
So there IS a method to this madness! Just stay in the News as LOUD and as LONG as possible and that way when the legal nonesense portion of the case is over they've gotten so much free and loud advertising that they might actually (gasp!) make a sale! Finally! It all makes sense! And if along the way they win some money somewhere, all the better (for SCO I mean).
The BIGGEST battles are coming in Return of the Kind. Remember the intro to Fellowship? Imagine that going on for 2 of the 3 hours we see in the theater!
What he had for the last two movies simply is NOT enough to get it all done in time! He HAD to get more!
This is an embedded system that is for things like manufacturing. Which means the code for the applications still has to be error free for it to do what is needed. same with regards to efforts to put the system into cars.
I kind of feel the article is misleading, making some beleive just because a system is running QNX that nothing can go wrong.
I teach at a Junior College and have encountered a wide range of misconceptions about online classes. The biggest is that it requires less time/attentino by the instructor. Nothing is further from the truth.
Typing out an answer to a question requires a lot more time and effort than if you can say it orrally while visually checking to see if everyone understands it
Additionally, an instructor is much harder pressed to find ways to check students for understanding. In a classroom I can just call someone to the board to work out a subnet problem, or have everyone do it on their own peice of paper independently. Then we go over it and if anyone has questions or didn't get the same answer I can quickly find out why. I have faces I can look at and people I can easily build relationships with to know what they're level of undersatnding is.
This all goes out the window on an Online format. New techniques have to be developed. Instructors who have PHDs and have been teaching for years and years may be able to handle things in a live room based soley on their teaching experience, but are totally lost when they have to rethink the entire process after moving online.
Just Designing an online curriculam is different than simply assigning a book to buy. If you are going to teach a class effectively online, you need to find materials and delivery methods that take advantage of the online format. Most instructors don't realize that.
I havn't personally reviewed any online classes I thought were well done. I've seen some of what we're doing at my school, and am pretty dissapointed. My wife signed up for them. She did fine, and learned, but only because she was motivated to put in a lot of extra personal effort that normally isn't required by students in a classroom (the drop rate was somehting like 60-70+% for that online class)
On the plus side, if you don't read the book, you ain't passing!
I guess I'm the only one here that feels like Oliver whenever he sees news of Russia (or China in this case) beating the pants off the US in space.
For those who don't know, Oliver was a character in a comic that featured a Penguin as its star character back in the 80's. Oliver was super intelligent kid who would bang his head and scream stupidly whenever the newspaper or TV reported the Russians doing something in space while Sky Lab, or something similar of US origin, fell from the sky.
I've been watching benchmarks for VGA cards for years. It seems that ever since I started to read them various companies were accused of (and often found guilty of) cheating. Heck, back when my dad worked for a database company in the 70's they did the same thing.
The only suprise is ATI admitting to tweaking some things and removing the offending (if trivial) code. I suppose they see they can beat nVidia even without cheating, so they win the PR war by saying: Look at how fast our card is WITHOUT any cheating vs. how slow nVidia is even while they DO cheat!
1. Tax credit 2. Press (preferably good press) 3. Good will of the charities. 4. Make themselves feel like good giving citizens 5. AND keep Open Source from gaining mindshare
They win all the way around, and without costing them a dime. I mean really. Charities can't afford 200 dollar Operating Systems and 3 or 400 dollar Office Suites, let alone the people who know how to maintain it.
Which brings a potential 6th benefit for MS: What if it crashes and these charites don't know how to reactivate it? Uh-oh, they might end up having to go out and BUY a new copy! Meaning more profit for Microsoft.
They have a lot of stuff there. I always found IBM docs more clear and complete than Windows docs. But that may have simply been due to the fact that Windows never came with printed docs to my memory (oo, wait, I do seem to remember something with my win3.1 machine. Yeah, lost it as soon as I found OS/2...)
THeir conclusion was the 5200 was good for the price, but questionable if it would really be able to keep up with DX9 games when they became available.
Back when I was a CompSCi student the guy teaching Software Engineering was the most interesting classes to be in. He worked at NASA on verifying the code for the manuaver jets (orwhatever they call them) was bug free. It was supposed to take only one semester. He was gone 3. That was for just 3 pages of code.
NASA figures they have the most bug free code on the planet. And they figure they have about 1 error for every 10,000 lines of code or "1 error per 10 KLOC" (at least this was back in '92 or 93). They also figured the average programmer could pump out 10 lines of error free code a day.
TEN LINES A DAY! My God! How many lines of code are there in Windows?! How many people do they have working on it? They aren't pumping out a measily 10 lines of code a day! That's for sure!
Heck, if Linux was written at that speed I doubt we'd have any kind of graphical interface at all!
Now think about something like the a fly by wire Jetliner. Oooo... two or three million lines of code, divided by 10,000 (assuming NASA level error rates) and you'd never get my old professor to fly on one of those! Oh, what about Star Wars Missile defense? I think I'll stop flying altogether and just take a boat thank you!
Anyone who just looks at the SW to be secure and doesn't put up firewalls and IDS all throughout their enterprise is going to get screwed. Likewise, if all you do is put up firewalls and IDS and don't bother to keep your servers (Windows or otherwise) patched and monitored, you're still going to lose your data.
Purchase your components based on need. (duh!) If you need to run a certain app, then you may be left with Windows. It is then up to you to secure it with your own effort.
All these articles about how poor "MS" security is do is make people aware that security is up to them, since MS hasn't bothered. But install the most secure system possible without configuring it properly and you might as well have left the door to the building unlocked with big cartoon arrow signs to that effect telling everyone you don't have any security.
I gave up on Counter Strike many years ago, after the cheats were posted all over the sites and everyone (even myself, I'm sorry to say- I just didn't beleive cheats worked until I tried it) downloaded and tried them.
About 6 months later I found Day of Defeat. I've seen some people cheat there, but it is much more rare than CS ever was.
Other games to try would be games that don't move so fast. I Hear there are WW2 mods for Ghost Recon that move so slowly cheaters/Immature idiots never bother.
They (mgt) probably figure they're just training these guys up, and in a few years they'll be good enough to replace $60 Americans with maybe 10 or 12 dollar Indians.
I can just imagine the look on the poor Network administrator's face when he finds out his server has been swamped by requests. Wonder if he'll figure out who's to blame before he reads it on/.
Actually I did read the article. And I'd say it was ambigious as to that point, thus my use of the word "MAY" in the original post.
The fact is, having played the old warcraft games' missions where you only get a small group of heroes was a whole lot les fun than getting to build armies. Thus it MAY turn out to be more fun to play as "EVIL" and build up the massive armies, thus glorifying the very ideas Tolkien railed against.
In my opinion it would have been much better to make the game more like MYTH than Warcraft.
What resources am I supposed to mine? Tolkien was about how awful industrialization and cutting down trees and mining stuff was. And here's a game that may end up glorifying it?
Actually, their all the same. We are a Junior College and a large company just donated a ton of equipment to us over the last 2 years (the good stuff was all the 2500 and 2600 Cisco Routers along with an Adtrans and some access servers). There were nearly 2-300 Compaq Deskpros. Mostly 200-266Mhz systems. A couple Sparcs, some SGIs, an HP700 series Plotter, and more HP LaserJet IVs than I can shake a stick at.
Well, we had no place to put them. Or rather, no safe place to put them. We grabbed some space from the Welding department and put them in their cage outside. Covered roof, open front. Lucky for us, this is California, and the weather is pretty mild. But still, they've survived two winters and summers out there. Most of them work just fine. I'm using one of the Toshiba Tecra 520CDTs right now. Got win2k on it (darned video chip doesn't work with LINUX darnit). Got a few of the desktops at home I have various OSes on for playin around.
I forgot about the monitors. We had tons of NEC 15 inch monitors too.
A lot of the stuff didn't fit in the cage. So it got left outside rapped in plastic wrap. Rained on, sun dried at 100+F. Pulled into the classroom and given to A+ students to fix. And fix them they did!
I really dislike compaq stuff when I have to work on it, but this old stuff was pretty durable, if the cases were poorly layed out (giant case, can't put anything in it but what it came with, really stupid)
This also included a ton of giant rack mount servers that are heavy enough to make you beleive they were made of armor plating with the intention of surviving a war.
Oh well, thats it. Tons of mistreated equipment here. Most of it still working.
I lived in Taiwan for 5 years. I was highly paid as an English teacher- about 15 bucks an hour for maybe 20 hours a week.
When I heard computers calling me back I went up to AsusTek looking for a job writing manuals. Y'know how much they offered the first time? 12,000 USD a year plus "stock options." When I let my friends know I thought that was pathetic and turned it down they were amazed. People over there live on less, and dream about working at AsusTek. They have computers and cars. No S***! They just all live with their parents (my brother in law makes a bit more as an MCSE sysadmin at Viewsonic, has a PocketPC, a color couple cell phones, a car and counts himself really darned well off)
Their final offer was 25,000, no stock options (the "options" could not be exercised until after you quit, you got a lot of 1000 after two years, and a lot every year thereafter. The "option" was not given to you, but kept in the President's safe and given to you when you quit if he liked you)
Prices used to be a lot less for hardware over there. But that was when it was 25nt to the dollar. Last time I checked prices are about the same (if it costs a 100 US here, it costs within 3% of that there).
The fact is, Linux is encroaching on their Market Share. But since things can't change overnight, let them in and get them to talk about interoperating with existing Windows installations. Get them to write software that makes it easier to interoperate.
Then it will be easier to get rid of them. Really, they did this with Novel, why don't we do it with them?
The driving factor was the APPLICATIONS. They ran way faster on Wintel than Sparc, and they were available. The MS IT team was somewhat unprepared and stingy with giving out information on how to integrate the new WinXP machines into the existing Windows Server infrastructure. The (former) Unix Engineers wanted to do RIS and the like. But they were having to put in their own seperate Win2k Servers and figure out how to do the Domain structure for AD.
So it seemed that the MS-IT team didn't push the Unix people to do Windows. In fact, whenever I go to MS-sponsered seminars there is usually one speaker who blasts the way Boeing does their IT work (they write their own management scripts and treat it like Unix instead of Windows or some such MS-sponsered FUD)
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is serious about figuring out what Linux does better than their product and how. Then they will follow their age-old pattern of emulating it. Or perhaps I should Assimilate it (Just look at that Bill Gates Borg top of this page).
Of course we'll never hear the full results of their tests unless they accidentally put it on a public FTP server for a short time. Instead they'll edit it so that only the parts about how Windows is better will be released with all the blacked out parts replaced with FUD.
Everyone knows this. Not a surprise. Business as usual. The world continues to go round...
At a local Junior College where I work we had some summer classes for older women. IT was highly successful. It was just basic usage, but women in general were found to be uncomfortable outside their peer group.
Another class would be technical skills for younger girls- Networking and the like. You could probably get money from Cisco for this, they are forever trying to attract women into the field with their Cisco Academy program- just look at the frontpage of cisco.netacad.net.
Even better if you can get a women to teach this. Go find a local college girl to do it.
In all seriousness SCO must be thinking that as long as they can stay in the news people will equate UNIX=SCO. So when the guys who make the money decisions and don't have a clue about technical things are told they need to buy UNIX they'll order the purchase of SCO Unix!
So there IS a method to this madness! Just stay in the News as LOUD and as LONG as possible and that way when the legal nonesense portion of the case is over they've gotten so much free and loud advertising that they might actually (gasp!) make a sale! Finally! It all makes sense! And if along the way they win some money somewhere, all the better (for SCO I mean).
The BIGGEST battles are coming in Return of the Kind. Remember the intro to Fellowship? Imagine that going on for 2 of the 3 hours we see in the theater!
What he had for the last two movies simply is NOT enough to get it all done in time! He HAD to get more!
This is an embedded system that is for things like manufacturing. Which means the code for the applications still has to be error free for it to do what is needed. same with regards to efforts to put the system into cars.
I kind of feel the article is misleading, making some beleive just because a system is running QNX that nothing can go wrong.
I'm all for sqaushing SCO and all, but buying them out, or sueing them out of existence just sounds like something MS would do. Oh, does, I mean.
I teach at a Junior College and have encountered a wide range of misconceptions about online classes. The biggest is that it requires less time/attentino by the instructor. Nothing is further from the truth.
Typing out an answer to a question requires a lot more time and effort than if you can say it orrally while visually checking to see if everyone understands it
Additionally, an instructor is much harder pressed to find ways to check students for understanding. In a classroom I can just call someone to the board to work out a subnet problem, or have everyone do it on their own peice of paper independently. Then we go over it and if anyone has questions or didn't get the same answer I can quickly find out why. I have faces I can look at and people I can easily build relationships with to know what they're level of undersatnding is.
This all goes out the window on an Online format. New techniques have to be developed. Instructors who have PHDs and have been teaching for years and years may be able to handle things in a live room based soley on their teaching experience, but are totally lost when they have to rethink the entire process after moving online.
Just Designing an online curriculam is different than simply assigning a book to buy. If you are going to teach a class effectively online, you need to find materials and delivery methods that take advantage of the online format. Most instructors don't realize that.
I havn't personally reviewed any online classes I thought were well done. I've seen some of what we're doing at my school, and am pretty dissapointed. My wife signed up for them. She did fine, and learned, but only because she was motivated to put in a lot of extra personal effort that normally isn't required by students in a classroom (the drop rate was somehting like 60-70+% for that online class)
On the plus side, if you don't read the book, you ain't passing!
I guess I'm the only one here that feels like Oliver whenever he sees news of Russia (or China in this case) beating the pants off the US in space.
For those who don't know, Oliver was a character in a comic that featured a Penguin as its star character back in the 80's. Oliver was super intelligent kid who would bang his head and scream stupidly whenever the newspaper or TV reported the Russians doing something in space while Sky Lab, or something similar of US origin, fell from the sky.
So, that's either 121,000 people spending 301 dollars or 61,000 people spending 600.
And thats only if there are that many shares outstanding.
But you still have to admit NAT is useful in creating a poor man's firewall and helping to keep your private network private.
I've been watching benchmarks for VGA cards for years. It seems that ever since I started to read them various companies were accused of (and often found guilty of) cheating. Heck, back when my dad worked for a database company in the 70's they did the same thing.
The only suprise is ATI admitting to tweaking some things and removing the offending (if trivial) code. I suppose they see they can beat nVidia even without cheating, so they win the PR war by saying: Look at how fast our card is WITHOUT any cheating vs. how slow nVidia is even while they DO cheat!
More than Both. If they can get:
1. Tax credit
2. Press (preferably good press)
3. Good will of the charities.
4. Make themselves feel like good giving citizens
5. AND keep Open Source from gaining mindshare
They win all the way around, and without costing them a dime. I mean really. Charities can't afford 200 dollar Operating Systems and 3 or 400 dollar Office Suites, let alone the people who know how to maintain it.
Which brings a potential 6th benefit for MS:
What if it crashes and these charites don't know how to reactivate it? Uh-oh, they might end up having to go out and BUY a new copy! Meaning more profit for Microsoft.
Clicking around found me here:
u x/ tutorials.jsp
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/
They have a lot of stuff there. I always found IBM docs more clear and complete than Windows docs. But that may have simply been due to the fact that Windows never came with printed docs to my memory (oo, wait, I do seem to remember something with my win3.1 machine. Yeah, lost it as soon as I found OS/2...)
Anyways, if all you want are tutorials by IBM:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/views/lin
Tom's Hardware questions this as well:
e fo rcefx-5600-5200-26.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030311/g
THeir conclusion was the 5200 was good for the price, but questionable if it would really be able to keep up with DX9 games when they became available.
Back when I was a CompSCi student the guy teaching Software Engineering was the most interesting classes to be in. He worked at NASA on verifying the code for the manuaver jets (orwhatever they call them) was bug free. It was supposed to take only one semester. He was gone 3. That was for just 3 pages of code.
NASA figures they have the most bug free code on the planet. And they figure they have about 1 error for every 10,000 lines of code or "1 error per 10 KLOC" (at least this was back in '92 or 93). They also figured the average programmer could pump out 10 lines of error free code a day.
TEN LINES A DAY! My God! How many lines of code are there in Windows?! How many people do they have working on it? They aren't pumping out a measily 10 lines of code a day! That's for sure!
Heck, if Linux was written at that speed I doubt we'd have any kind of graphical interface at all!
Now think about something like the a fly by wire Jetliner. Oooo... two or three million lines of code, divided by 10,000 (assuming NASA level error rates) and you'd never get my old professor to fly on one of those! Oh, what about Star Wars Missile defense? I think I'll stop flying altogether and just take a boat thank you!
Anyone who just looks at the SW to be secure and doesn't put up firewalls and IDS all throughout their enterprise is going to get screwed. Likewise, if all you do is put up firewalls and IDS and don't bother to keep your servers (Windows or otherwise) patched and monitored, you're still going to lose your data.
Purchase your components based on need. (duh!) If you need to run a certain app, then you may be left with Windows. It is then up to you to secure it with your own effort.
All these articles about how poor "MS" security is do is make people aware that security is up to them, since MS hasn't bothered. But install the most secure system possible without configuring it properly and you might as well have left the door to the building unlocked with big cartoon arrow signs to that effect telling everyone you don't have any security.
I gave up on Counter Strike many years ago, after the cheats were posted all over the sites and everyone (even myself, I'm sorry to say- I just didn't beleive cheats worked until I tried it) downloaded and tried them.
About 6 months later I found Day of Defeat. I've seen some people cheat there, but it is much more rare than CS ever was.
Other games to try would be games that don't move so fast. I Hear there are WW2 mods for Ghost Recon that move so slowly cheaters/Immature idiots never bother.
They (mgt) probably figure they're just training these guys up, and in a few years they'll be good enough to replace $60 Americans with maybe 10 or 12 dollar Indians.
I can just imagine the look on the poor Network administrator's face when he finds out his server has been swamped by requests. Wonder if he'll figure out who's to blame before he reads it on /.
Actually I did read the article. And I'd say it was ambigious as to that point, thus my use of the word "MAY" in the original post.
The fact is, having played the old warcraft games' missions where you only get a small group of heroes was a whole lot les fun than getting to build armies. Thus it MAY turn out to be more fun to play as "EVIL" and build up the massive armies, thus glorifying the very ideas Tolkien railed against.
In my opinion it would have been much better to make the game more like MYTH than Warcraft.
Therefore I stand by my original post.
What resources am I supposed to mine? Tolkien was about how awful industrialization and cutting down trees and mining stuff was. And here's a game that may end up glorifying it?
Actually, their all the same. We are a Junior College and a large company just donated a ton of equipment to us over the last 2 years (the good stuff was all the 2500 and 2600 Cisco Routers along with an Adtrans and some access servers). There were nearly 2-300 Compaq Deskpros. Mostly 200-266Mhz systems. A couple Sparcs, some SGIs, an HP700 series Plotter, and more HP LaserJet IVs than I can shake a stick at.
Well, we had no place to put them. Or rather, no safe place to put them. We grabbed some space from the Welding department and put them in their cage outside. Covered roof, open front. Lucky for us, this is California, and the weather is pretty mild. But still, they've survived two winters and summers out there. Most of them work just fine. I'm using one of the Toshiba Tecra 520CDTs right now. Got win2k on it (darned video chip doesn't work with LINUX darnit). Got a few of the desktops at home I have various OSes on for playin around.
I forgot about the monitors. We had tons of NEC 15 inch monitors too.
A lot of the stuff didn't fit in the cage. So it got left outside rapped in plastic wrap. Rained on, sun dried at 100+F. Pulled into the classroom and given to A+ students to fix. And fix them they did!
I really dislike compaq stuff when I have to work on it, but this old stuff was pretty durable, if the cases were poorly layed out (giant case, can't put anything in it but what it came with, really stupid)
This also included a ton of giant rack mount servers that are heavy enough to make you beleive they were made of armor plating with the intention of surviving a war.
Oh well, thats it. Tons of mistreated equipment here. Most of it still working.
I lived in Taiwan for 5 years. I was highly paid as an English teacher- about 15 bucks an hour for maybe 20 hours a week.
When I heard computers calling me back I went up to AsusTek looking for a job writing manuals. Y'know how much they offered the first time? 12,000 USD a year plus "stock options." When I let my friends know I thought that was pathetic and turned it down they were amazed. People over there live on less, and dream about working at AsusTek. They have computers and cars. No S***! They just all live with their parents (my brother in law makes a bit more as an MCSE sysadmin at Viewsonic, has a PocketPC, a color couple cell phones, a car and counts himself really darned well off)
Their final offer was 25,000, no stock options (the "options" could not be exercised until after you quit, you got a lot of 1000 after two years, and a lot every year thereafter. The "option" was not given to you, but kept in the President's safe and given to you when you quit if he liked you)
Prices used to be a lot less for hardware over there. But that was when it was 25nt to the dollar. Last time I checked prices are about the same (if it costs a 100 US here, it costs within 3% of that there).
The fact is, Linux is encroaching on their Market Share. But since things can't change overnight, let them in and get them to talk about interoperating with existing Windows installations. Get them to write software that makes it easier to interoperate.
Then it will be easier to get rid of them. Really, they did this with Novel, why don't we do it with them?
The driving factor was the APPLICATIONS. They ran way faster on Wintel than Sparc, and they were available. The MS IT team was somewhat unprepared and stingy with giving out information on how to integrate the new WinXP machines into the existing Windows Server infrastructure. The (former) Unix Engineers wanted to do RIS and the like. But they were having to put in their own seperate Win2k Servers and figure out how to do the Domain structure for AD.
So it seemed that the MS-IT team didn't push the Unix people to do Windows. In fact, whenever I go to MS-sponsered seminars there is usually one speaker who blasts the way Boeing does their IT work (they write their own management scripts and treat it like Unix instead of Windows or some such MS-sponsered FUD)