And then there's his brilliant assessment of a DB based filesystem:
"The most important feature of Longhorn is replacement of the familiar DOS/Windows filesystem with an object database (W0). You will no longer copy files to a floppy or CD-ROM or attach them to an email, because there will be no files. Database records will be copied from one database to another, probably through a.NET server. Large organizations will have their own.NET servers, but everyone else will use one of Microsoft's, a service for which you will pay a fee."
Yeah, no more files. Everyone will need to pay to use MS's servers to store data. Uh-huh.
For the record, a DB based filesystem is really just using a relational DB to find stuff faster, rather than a FAT or jumping inodes.
The guy who wrote this doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
Not prove that he was not telling the truth, but that he was knowingly lying. You'd have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not believe what he said, at the time he said it.
Neither. They let chinese officials come to redmond to audit the code, they dont give them a copy to keep.
And perjury is knowingly lying under oath. You can testify that spacemen from venus stole your underpants, and it's not perjury unless it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you dont believe that.
Expert defense witnesses make up hokey bullshit on the stand all the time, and they dont get charged with perjury.
I do clean them with some alcohol, and it does help, but even so it only lasts so long. They clog on the inside eventually.
The quality of the refill ink makes a difference too, and of course the quality you expect out of it.
I would have been more accurate to say that my color carts last through 4 or 5 refills, and the black could go up to 40; because I use the color to print high-definition stuff like photos and cd liners, and the black is usually just draft mode hardcopies.
If they had a patent, I'd agree with you, and this would be a non-issue.
But they dont have a patent, and they cant get one. So they circumvent patent law using the DMCA, all they have to do is stick a little chip in the cartridges that the printer detects, and if you circumvent that, you're in violation.
The tech industry is getting chock full of companies trying to protect with copyrights or trademarks that which they cant protect with patents.
For instance, the PSX (and PS2) forces the sony logo onscreen as part of its bootup sequence and protection scheme - it must be on the disc to boot. So when Action Replay/Gameshark came out, they had to put the logo on their unlicensed disks for it to work in a real machine. Sony, who couldnt patent the boot-up process of the console, then sued them for trademark infringment for using the PS2 logo. A judge struck it down, saying they couldnt protect with a TM something that was unpatentable.
Copyright, patent and trademark exist for distinct purposes and with restrictions. Enough with the cutesy legal tricks to bypass those restrictions.
I have a Lexmark Z42, and I generally refill the cartridges with ink 4 or 5 times before the printhead gunks up to the point it needs replacing (black lasts a bit longer).
The printheads are 'disposable', they eventually clog with ink. This makes recycled cartridges worthless to me, since the printhead is oftentimes half gunked, and you get smudges and missing color, etc..
I've tried 3rd party replacement carts, and frankly the quality isnt there. They smear and leave white lines, or dont saturate the page enough..
While I think it sucks that they wont allow 3rd parties to make cartridges, it's no big loss because I've yet to find anything that matches the quality of the originals anyways.
Thing is, with analog tech, there's always some randomness. A DSP produces the same output every time. The randomness adds a lot of ambiance and reality to the sound, especially when it comes to good old rock n' roll; a little feedback here, a little pop there, a little bit of speaker hum there, and so on.
The new stuff suits an age where music is created in a boardroom. I guess the days are gone when the guitarist would go into the studio and just 'wing it' (like Jimmy Page winged the Stairway to Heaven solo in 4 takes)
I dont want my music scientifically created and produced by computers.
>> It's unfortunate that they sound like shit compared to the real thing. I tried out several of their products recently and nothing touched a real tube amp. It still sounds synthetic and digital.
I agree. It's frozen fish vs the catch of the day. IMO, we can no better synthesize sounds than we can images - eg, the cave troll in FOTR looks cool, but when frodo is riding it, it looks fake.
Besides, nothing says rock like a big stack of 'Marshalls' behind you and a sunburst strat in your hand.
I dont think anything is going to replace the tube fired wall-of-sound onstage, no more than a drum machine will replace the drummer with his big double bass kit. At least not until the last of the true metalheads die off.
Re:Sad News ... Fred Rodgers dead at 74
on
Presenting The CDR-ROM
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
cnn makes no mention of all the children he molested. You'd think they would - of course peppering the article with the word 'allegedly'.
I'd love to see the next gen of consoles use this, or even better, caddy/cartridge based hybrids with embedded flash memory chips... The unscratchability of a cartridge, the capacity of DVD, with built in save features.
I doubt it though, they make a KILLING on replacement discs and memory cards.
I read about something like this, but with a write once capability. Pretty tight copy protection if you can write users configuration data to the disc and then lock it.
>> you CAN hire a linux expert for the same as a windows expert.
You dont need an expert at all for many windows installations.
It's great for you that you found the cheapest solution. The company my wife works for just threw out their mainframe and the six figures earning support tech, because they realized that they could just install excel on a bunch of PCs, and no extra staff is needed because everyone knows how to work it.
I really cant wait until this whole boring nerd holy-war over the OS is past and gone.
>> If you want a good, professional Windows admin, then you are going to pay as much as the same quality of Unix admin.
In such cases, you're getting a good IT professional, period.
From an administrative POV, they aren't that dissimilar.
A good auto mechanic should be able to work on foreign and domestic vehicles. A good admin should be able to administrate, regardless of the operating system.
Where I am, we have a mixed bag of windows and unix software. We also routinely interface with big old-timey mainframes of all shapes and sizes. We dont hire based on "I know visual basic or I know perl", we hire based on "I know how to program, languages are just syntax to me."
>> Example: say all you want to do is store and serve static web pages: I think it would be hard to argue that Windows would have a lower TCO than linux, and linux is trivial to set up these days to perform these tasks.
Unless you have to hire a new employee to maintain that one trivial webserver because noone in your organization knows linux. And the unix gurus who apply all want 50K a year. Maybe outsourcing would be cheaper, or maybe you'd decide that IIS is simple enough to let the office manager handle it.
I agree with determining the solution based on the problem wholeheartedly. Many geeks dont realize how the business world thinks. They dont care about technical superiority, open code, or whatever. They care about cost vs benefit, and 9 times out of 10 would prefer a turnkey solution like Win2k Server and IIS to a roll-your-own linux/apache project. They'll pay for the convenience.
Anyways, my point is that the whole TCO debate can be argued for even the most trivial systems. It's irrelevant. (good) Businessmen wont let a nickel hold up a dollar, so they want the quickest and easiest, not always the cheapest.
When real managers calculate real TCO's, they take into account the use of the technology, the learning curve for *their* employees, and everything else that is specific to them.
Anyone who says 'this is cheaper than that' is just showing their own agenda.
It's no big surprise MSFT's agenda is selling MS products. But when "independant computer professionals" start doing it, it just bores me. I don't buy into the "fight FUD with FUD" approach to preaching Linux.
It just reads like the PS2 vs Xbox fanboy type crap. Who cares.
>> There's the added bonus that the books are searchable, which dead tree technology lacks
I have some dead tree books with this fancy breakthrough technology added, they call it an "index" or something like that. It lists keywords and the page numbers where those keywords are found. It adds search capabilities to paper books! I wonder if it's patented.
>> realize that shoplifting generally is dramatically less of a economic hit for retailers than you've been led to believe. They lose far more to employees taking stock home or skimming the tills
Employees taking stock home is shoplifting too.
And retailers DO lose a lot to 'classic' shoplifters. A nephew of mine works at Best Buy. He tells me at least a half dozen times a day they catch people trying to sprint out the door, usually with video games, sometimes cds or dvds (I figure video games are easy to resell to the gamestop across the way). About once or twice a week its something bigger - like a DVD player or computer part.
This isnt even in a slummy or crime-ridden area. It's a fairly affluent neighbourhood.
Saving even one $50 video game buys 1000 of these tags. Dont forget there are already security tags on most items, as well as big unweildly CD 'boots'. These tags are much cheaper than whats out there now.
>> Your credit card or debit card company knows what you bought? Funny, but mine don't. They see that I spent $107 at Fortinos and $89 at Walmart
Credit card companies recieve copies of the reciepts you generate. They may list a total dollar amount as the line-item on your statement, but they could look through it if they wanted to.
Stoor floor to door?
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I take my purchases to a clerk who rings them up, and to whom I give payment.
The store already knows what I've bought. Big deal.
These sound like a much more effective shoplifting deterrent than the current tags that can be defeated with a tinfoil-lined purse (or fanny sack as geeks call them).
It would be nice to see a system of these tags taking the current 'self check-out' aisles even further: the products in the cart announce themselves to a kiosk which automatically tallies up the bill. For practical purposes, that's much more anonymous than the cashier.
I'm more worried about the cashier-whos-a-friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-dentist-of- someone spreading gossip than I am some pencil-pusher in a cubicle 1000 miles away.
Slashdot Mirror
And then there's his brilliant assessment of a DB based filesystem:
.NET server. Large organizations will have their own .NET servers, but everyone else will use one of Microsoft's, a service for which you will pay a fee."
"The most important feature of Longhorn is replacement of the familiar DOS/Windows filesystem with an object database (W0). You will no longer copy files to a floppy or CD-ROM or attach them to an email, because there will be no files. Database records will be copied from one database to another, probably through a
Yeah, no more files. Everyone will need to pay to use MS's servers to store data. Uh-huh.
For the record, a DB based filesystem is really just using a relational DB to find stuff faster, rather than a FAT or jumping inodes.
The guy who wrote this doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
This article is a joke, a troll, a hoax, or just misinformation from an idiot. Perhaps a little bit from each pile.
... everyone will have to pay MS to store their files on their servers and none of your software will work ... blah blah
/.
there will be no files
Complete, utter bullshit. What a waste of my time reading that article. Thanks a bunch,
Not prove that he was not telling the truth, but that he was knowingly lying. You'd have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not believe what he said, at the time he said it.
Being factually incorrect is not perjury.
Neither. They let chinese officials come to redmond to audit the code, they dont give them a copy to keep.
And perjury is knowingly lying under oath. You can testify that spacemen from venus stole your underpants, and it's not perjury unless it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you dont believe that.
Expert defense witnesses make up hokey bullshit on the stand all the time, and they dont get charged with perjury.
I do clean them with some alcohol, and it does help, but even so it only lasts so long. They clog on the inside eventually.
The quality of the refill ink makes a difference too, and of course the quality you expect out of it.
I would have been more accurate to say that my color carts last through 4 or 5 refills, and the black could go up to 40; because I use the color to print high-definition stuff like photos and cd liners, and the black is usually just draft mode hardcopies.
If they had a patent, I'd agree with you, and this would be a non-issue.
But they dont have a patent, and they cant get one. So they circumvent patent law using the DMCA, all they have to do is stick a little chip in the cartridges that the printer detects, and if you circumvent that, you're in violation.
The tech industry is getting chock full of companies trying to protect with copyrights or trademarks that which they cant protect with patents.
For instance, the PSX (and PS2) forces the sony logo onscreen as part of its bootup sequence and protection scheme - it must be on the disc to boot. So when Action Replay/Gameshark came out, they had to put the logo on their unlicensed disks for it to work in a real machine. Sony, who couldnt patent the boot-up process of the console, then sued them for trademark infringment for using the PS2 logo. A judge struck it down, saying they couldnt protect with a TM something that was unpatentable.
Copyright, patent and trademark exist for distinct purposes and with restrictions. Enough with the cutesy legal tricks to bypass those restrictions.
I dont get email on the shitter..... yet.
I have a Lexmark Z42, and I generally refill the cartridges with ink 4 or 5 times before the printhead gunks up to the point it needs replacing (black lasts a bit longer).
The printheads are 'disposable', they eventually clog with ink. This makes recycled cartridges worthless to me, since the printhead is oftentimes half gunked, and you get smudges and missing color, etc..
I've tried 3rd party replacement carts, and frankly the quality isnt there. They smear and leave white lines, or dont saturate the page enough..
While I think it sucks that they wont allow 3rd parties to make cartridges, it's no big loss because I've yet to find anything that matches the quality of the originals anyways.
Thing is, with analog tech, there's always some randomness. A DSP produces the same output every time. The randomness adds a lot of ambiance and reality to the sound, especially when it comes to good old rock n' roll; a little feedback here, a little pop there, a little bit of speaker hum there, and so on.
The new stuff suits an age where music is created in a boardroom. I guess the days are gone when the guitarist would go into the studio and just 'wing it' (like Jimmy Page winged the Stairway to Heaven solo in 4 takes)
I dont want my music scientifically created and produced by computers.
>> It's unfortunate that they sound like shit compared to the real thing. I tried out several of their products recently and nothing touched a real tube amp. It still sounds synthetic and digital.
I agree. It's frozen fish vs the catch of the day. IMO, we can no better synthesize sounds than we can images - eg, the cave troll in FOTR looks cool, but when frodo is riding it, it looks fake.
Besides, nothing says rock like a big stack of 'Marshalls' behind you and a sunburst strat in your hand.
I dont think anything is going to replace the tube fired wall-of-sound onstage, no more than a drum machine will replace the drummer with his big double bass kit. At least not until the last of the true metalheads die off.
cnn makes no mention of all the children he molested. You'd think they would - of course peppering the article with the word 'allegedly'.
I'd love to see the next gen of consoles use this, or even better, caddy/cartridge based hybrids with embedded flash memory chips... The unscratchability of a cartridge, the capacity of DVD, with built in save features.
I doubt it though, they make a KILLING on replacement discs and memory cards.
I read about something like this, but with a write once capability. Pretty tight copy protection if you can write users configuration data to the disc and then lock it.
There's an oriental massage parlor down the way where you can get a palm for 20 bucks.
>> you CAN hire a linux expert for the same as a windows expert.
You dont need an expert at all for many windows installations.
It's great for you that you found the cheapest solution. The company my wife works for just threw out their mainframe and the six figures earning support tech, because they realized that they could just install excel on a bunch of PCs, and no extra staff is needed because everyone knows how to work it.
I really cant wait until this whole boring nerd holy-war over the OS is past and gone.
No, I'd say the analogy would be more like one runs gasoline and the other diesel. Subtle differences, but really irrelevant.
Even gas vs electric wouldnt make a difference to a good mechanic. He'd understand both, just like he'd understand disc vs drum vs ABS.
>> If you want a good, professional Windows admin, then you are going to pay as much as the same quality of Unix admin.
In such cases, you're getting a good IT professional, period.
From an administrative POV, they aren't that dissimilar.
A good auto mechanic should be able to work on foreign and domestic vehicles. A good admin should be able to administrate, regardless of the operating system.
Where I am, we have a mixed bag of windows and unix software. We also routinely interface with big old-timey mainframes of all shapes and sizes. We dont hire based on "I know visual basic or I know perl", we hire based on "I know how to program, languages are just syntax to me."
And what about client/server solutions based on Unix?
I think you'll find every Unix vs Windows argument flawed on its very base.
>> Example: say all you want to do is store and serve static web pages: I think it would be hard to argue that Windows would have a lower TCO than linux, and linux is trivial to set up these days to perform these tasks.
Unless you have to hire a new employee to maintain that one trivial webserver because noone in your organization knows linux. And the unix gurus who apply all want 50K a year. Maybe outsourcing would be cheaper, or maybe you'd decide that IIS is simple enough to let the office manager handle it.
I agree with determining the solution based on the problem wholeheartedly. Many geeks dont realize how the business world thinks. They dont care about technical superiority, open code, or whatever. They care about cost vs benefit, and 9 times out of 10 would prefer a turnkey solution like Win2k Server and IIS to a roll-your-own linux/apache project. They'll pay for the convenience.
Anyways, my point is that the whole TCO debate can be argued for even the most trivial systems. It's irrelevant. (good) Businessmen wont let a nickel hold up a dollar, so they want the quickest and easiest, not always the cheapest.
When real managers calculate real TCO's, they take into account the use of the technology, the learning curve for *their* employees, and everything else that is specific to them.
Anyone who says 'this is cheaper than that' is just showing their own agenda.
It's no big surprise MSFT's agenda is selling MS products. But when "independant computer professionals" start doing it, it just bores me. I don't buy into the "fight FUD with FUD" approach to preaching Linux.
It just reads like the PS2 vs Xbox fanboy type crap. Who cares.
They dont mention that one Saddam's pet projects is removing any trace that any religious belief other than Islam ever existed in the region.
That means destroying any and all artifacts that point to any other belief system ever preceding them.
Noone wasted time worrying about the art and archaeological treasures in Holland, France or Germany when they liberated Europe from Hitler.
With todays much more precise technology, it's unlikely that archaeological sites would be affected at all.
It's not news to /. until the check clears.
>> There's the added bonus that the books are searchable, which dead tree technology lacks
I have some dead tree books with this fancy breakthrough technology added, they call it an "index" or something like that. It lists keywords and the page numbers where those keywords are found. It adds search capabilities to paper books! I wonder if it's patented.
>> realize that shoplifting generally is dramatically less of a economic hit for retailers than you've been led to believe. They lose far more to employees taking stock home or skimming the tills
Employees taking stock home is shoplifting too.
And retailers DO lose a lot to 'classic' shoplifters. A nephew of mine works at Best Buy. He tells me at least a half dozen times a day they catch people trying to sprint out the door, usually with video games, sometimes cds or dvds (I figure video games are easy to resell to the gamestop across the way). About once or twice a week its something bigger - like a DVD player or computer part.
This isnt even in a slummy or crime-ridden area. It's a fairly affluent neighbourhood.
Saving even one $50 video game buys 1000 of these tags. Dont forget there are already security tags on most items, as well as big unweildly CD 'boots'. These tags are much cheaper than whats out there now.
>> Your credit card or debit card company knows what you bought? Funny, but mine don't. They see that I spent $107 at Fortinos and $89 at Walmart
Credit card companies recieve copies of the reciepts you generate. They may list a total dollar amount as the line-item on your statement, but they could look through it if they wanted to.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I take my purchases to a clerk who rings them up, and to whom I give payment.
- someone spreading gossip than I am some pencil-pusher in a cubicle 1000 miles away.
The store already knows what I've bought. Big deal.
These sound like a much more effective shoplifting deterrent than the current tags that can be defeated with a tinfoil-lined purse (or fanny sack as geeks call them).
It would be nice to see a system of these tags taking the current 'self check-out' aisles even further: the products in the cart announce themselves to a kiosk which automatically tallies up the bill. For practical purposes, that's much more anonymous than the cashier.
I'm more worried about the cashier-whos-a-friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-dentist-of
Anyways, more fluff.