What to configure? Microsoft provides you with Windows XP Mode which is a virtualized preconfigured environment for those few applications that need XP. I believe IE6 was also one of them as it's one of the few things that XP mode was needed for.
So if I do a default Windows 7 or 8 install does Windows XP Mode get installed by default then so hence require no configuration? Thought not, as thats what to configure.
This actually makes perfect sense. On a modern PC it will involve the user learning about virtualisation (to run XP) and then also learning how to configure windows (to not run updates). This is great way of preparing dole claimants for an IT job so by the time you have gained enough skills to claim any dole money you have enough skills to go straight into a job as and IT support worker for the dole office and their crappy old IT systems.
But it's a real problem for employers. Unless you're hiring for a factory where employees are easily trained and replaced, there's really no way you can replace an employee while they're off on parental leave. Let's say a lead developer took 6 months off. You probably need to hire the new person a good 2 months before the other person leaves just so they can catch up. And then it probably takes another month or so after the original employee gets back to get them caught back up. The other option is to just take the work of the person who leaves, and split it between the remaining employees, and don't hire anybody to fill the seat. This means everyone else has to either work more so the same amount of work can be done, or they just have to get less work done. Either way, if the person taking the time off is a high level employee, you're still going to be stuck having them work a little bit during their parental leave, if not just answering the phone a couple times a week to fill in missing information.
This is a problem that employers deal with in other countries though. My missus is just about to take maternity leave, she is planning to take the full 12 months she is entitled to by law (We live in the UK).
The second 6 months will be on vastly reduced pay though she does have the option to transfer some of this leave to me (in addition to the 2 weeks on full pay I also get by law) but since I earn more it does not make sense to do this unfortunately. The fact that she can transfer some to me if she returns to work though does mean we are both fairly equal in this regard. Note that this applies even though we work for completely different companies, if I earned less than her I would simply go into work and explain the situation to my boss and he has to give me the leave (on the same vastly reduced pay as she would get though, basically my pay would come from the government instead of my employer while I was off and they put a maximum weekly wage in place that is roughly equivalent to working in McDonalds).
Why does this guy get to explain himself? In my country, the IRS just sends me a letter about me misbehaving, and says I've got 30 days to pony up the cash.
Why the flying duck does a company then gets to make apologies, when it's obvious by now that they're cheating?
Because that is if you break the law. Google are not breaking any laws here, they are just making sure they pay as little tax as legally possible.
Big international companies always have the ability to declare their profits in whatever country they see fit by rigging the rates that the parent companies charge for use of the brand name, this is perfectly legal, if the government want to stop this they can try changing the law. Even if you changed this law though it would be tremendously hard to prove if the fees being charged for use of the brand name were over the top or not.
This is just that the government has to be seen to be doing something as we have local elections today and the ruling coalition is going to take a bath at the hands of smaller parties and desperately want to be seen to be doing something on tax avoidance.
The truth is that the government has already done something, they have lowered the rate of corporate tax to the same level as Ireland to make us competitive as a nation in the race to the bottom. Simply lowering the rate of corporate tax in response to corporations avoiding tax smacks of surrender and weakness though so they do not exactly want to draw attention to this.
A techie should be the one in charge of purchasing and fixing things. What government agency honestly has a public servant middle manager as the computer systems expert?
If you are a decent techie you can earn far more working in the private sector than you can working in government. Also, it is tremendously frustrating working in the public sector if you are competent because of the utter retards you have surrounding you in the public sector. You also have to deal with people who go sick every other day and never get fired because their manager does not want to take the risk of screwing up firing someone and all the crazy european labour laws you have to follow in the process.
This is all quite annoying to most decent techies I know are pretty driven so the only people who stay in the public sector for longer than it takes to earn their first decent reference (that gets them the better paid private sector job) are the people who seem some benefit from it. The benefit is never financial so usually it is that they get to doss about all day and do fuck all.
Or sell the machines, there are bound to be organizations willing to buy them, reimage them, then resell or use.
Trashing them is just idiotic.
They probably asked how much it would cost to securely remove all data from the hard disks with the same 100% cast iron guarantee and got a similar quote back from their outsourced IT as they did for cleaning the viruses off them.
As to reimaging the machines that is the sort of magic that only a techie would know about, not the clueless public servant middle manager who was tasked with the project.
Also, he would get the blame when one of the machines had a perfectly normal hardware failure in a year or so. If he buys he new machine he does not get blamed when it breaks in a similar time frame.
Of course none of this makes any sense whatsoever, it is a government job, it is not supposed to. That was my point. Anyone who doesn't understand should try watching the film Brasil.
Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.
Forget about virus infections for the near future.
Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.
Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.
This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.
All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.
In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.
If I was Monsanto (and hence only cared about profits) I would make damn sure that I didn't have to rely on the Indian courts to uphold any copyright or patent related stuff after their stances on generic drugs so it stands to reason they would build the legal restriction into the actual product.
Maybe I should have included a link to that page in my original reply. I thought it would mention that many GM crops produce sterile seeds on the main GM crops page I linked but I guess it relies on you to click on the "GM controversies" link. I didn't read all the page as most of what I typed was based on memory as I have been following the GM arguments for years.
You have opened your mouth and removed all doubt, you are a fool.
Start your post with an insult, nice way to show your own arrogance.
Virtually all crop plants, GMO or not, are highly resistant to pesticides. Pesticides kill bugs, usually insects, not plants.
Wrong. The main GM plant that people moan about is GM Soya made by Monsanto. They created GM soya as normal soya was killed if you used roundup weed killer on it. So Monsanto create a GM crop to increase their weedkiller sales.
Ok, you could argue that there is a difference between a pesticide and a weed killer but that is just being pedantic. The truth is the parent poster kind of had a point, they just screwed up by saying "Pesticide" when they should have said "WeedKiller". Interestingly wikipedia has the following to say about pesticides:
"A pesticide is generally a chemical or biological agent (such as a virus, bacterium, antimicrobial or disinfectant) that through its effect deters, incapacitates, kills or otherwise discourages pests. Target pests can include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, mollusks, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, cause nuisance, spread disease or are vectors for disease. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, some also have drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals. According to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 9 of the 12 most dangerous and persistent organic chemicals are pesticides."
So many people seem to consider it fair enough to call something a "pesticide" when the actual pest being killed is a weed. I know the correct term would be herbicide but hey, who am I to argue with wikipedia:)
Your concern about 'buying seeds every year' is extremely misguided and mostly wrong. Most farmers buy seed each year anyway, GMO or not.
That is also arguable. That might be the norm in the intensive farming in the developed world but it is not the case everywhere.
I think he was referring to the spate of farmers suicides in India where using seeds from a previous harvest is more common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_India. This was actually blamed on them not knowing they were buying seeds where the crops would produce sterile seeds so that a year after the bought the crop they planted a load of duds that did not grow.
I am not entirely sure why a bunch of farmers started killing themselves in far away country, but keeping some of your seeds from a previous harvest is still common in the case of third world subsistence farming it seems.
Personally I am not sure I agree with all of the anti GM lobby or not, but you were an insulting twat when it was not warranted as some of what he was saying actually had a basis in fact. You could have more politely corrected him without calling him a fool, especially since your post was very light on factual content and evidence itself. I am being deliberately insulting to let you know how it feels, but have tried to include more references to some of my assertions.
And here is where you have proven that you do not understand X11. Not only do requests not go through the network at all unless applications are displaying remotely (they use shared memory or domain sockets, not internetworking sockets) but X also has extensions permitting direct memory access or direct GPU access. However, if you happen to have a network in between the client and the server, it will get used, and provide you functionality that just won't be there with Wayland.
Lol. Of course I understood that x11 display server only sent stuff over the network if it was actually talking to a remote client.
What I was saying was the separation of the X11 into two parts is completely unneeded if you are only ever intending your OS to run on single user devices like phones and desktop computers. It might be a nice to have as far as us geeks are concerned, but he is obviously trying to target Ubuntu at having the same OS running on both Phones and Desktops / Laptops. For that market you can throw the client-server stuff away and very few users will care (even if those people who do care shout loudly about how great it was to make up form them being a small minority).
As to running Ubuntu on servers do they actually care about that market either? Personally where I work we use Red Hat (actual paid for RedHat, not Centos) and Debian for all the Linux servers so have no idea how friendly they are as a company to people running Ubuntu as a server OS. My gut feeling says they are probably not friendly at all but I am happy to be corrected in this.
I have been using Linux for a few years and remember playing with getting the X11 client to talk to a different X11 server in the past. I have only ever done this as a bit of fun though on two machines that were right next to each other. I have never actually used this or needed it in the 10 years I have been working as a software developer and system admin.
The first thing I do on a linux server is dive into inittab and change the default run level to something where there is no GUI running unless I start it. On most of the linux servers I build X is not even installed since they are just forming part of a LAMP stack and I do everything via the command line and reckon any system admin worth his salt who replaces / works with me should be able to do the same.
I'm a physicist, not CS -- I know only as much about Linux as I find interesting and/or necessary for me to work.
But I know I can run an animation remotely and it'll run as fast as it's able over the network, automagically and transparently, but I can run it locally, and it'll run even faster, and with local GPU acceleration if it's available. I know there's no magic involved here because I wrote the animation code in GLUT, and it is pretty ghetto.
X11 is fucking magic to my students the first time they see it -- "Wait, my program is running over there, but I see the window here, but the computer's over there? And I can do this from home, too?" It's fantastic. Please don't break this; it's one of the truly fantastic things about the Linux work environment. I may have windows on my desktop from four different computers, and I don't have to worry about anything -- it just works.
My point is that very few people installing Linux on stand alone devices give two shits about this though. So why not get rid of it in the quest for better performance.
Or just stuck with X11 and fixed what's wrong with that. Even better.
By X11 you must actually mean X.org. The original version of X11 that Linux used to ship with was Xfree86 but that ended when they got hissy and tried to change the licence to one that may (I am not a layer so have no idea if this is actually true or not, the important thing was that the community thought it might have been) have been incompatible with the GPL. This caused no end of crap and resulted in everyone moving to x.org.
The problem is that X.org is pretty much a dead project now. Ok, Ubuntu could have single handedly kept the project going but why should they if X11 is not ideal anyway (believe me, it wasn't). The X11 Window system was created almost 30 years ago and things have moved on along way since then. Sometimes you just need to look at old software in an objective way and decide to take a clean break from it.
At a rough guess I would say that the main reason for throwing X11 in the bin is the idea of the client - server separation. This might have made sense when you had to support dumb terminals and multiple users with different desktops on the same server but it makes no sense now. Nowadays every device (even phones!!!) have a dedicated CPU and Graphics Chip that the display manager can talk to directly without going over a possibly insecure network. Now you want to be able to give applications a direct pipeline to the graphics hardware to make it feel as responsive as possible if they need it.
The first thing you did wrong is that you estimated 2 months, without taking any time to break down how you were going to spend each and every day of that two months. If you had done that, you would have realized you were falling behind schedule within the first week.
This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be taught at university as an integral module to most degrees preparing you for a career as a software developer. Even people doing system type stuff should know this too.
I know a myriad of students will bitch and complain that they are not learning real development and are just learning business stuff, but screw them. In my experience students bitch and moan about everything anyway, they need to learn faster that in the real world (ie: paid work) people do not care, they just want you to shut up and get on with what you are told to do or I will fire you and pay someone who does. Once you have worked somewhere a few years you generally get some input into things but initially (ie, for most of the period you work there equivalent to your time at uni if on a 3 year degree as is the norm here in the UK) you just need to knuckle down and prove you can do the job.
I had to learn how to give realistic timescale estimates on the job and it is one of the hardest things I found initially. The fact is that most geeks (I know I did) find learning to actually create code or tinker with servers fun so will do it in their own time anyway. They crap they won't do for fun is the really dull stuff like learning how to scope projects, produce decent project plans but this is exactly what you need to be able to do in order to work as a techie.
Do any of you think it would be feasible to start a company that makes FOSS medical software for doctors' offices? I imagine that what an office needs isn't very different from office to office. The company would earn its money long-term providing support for the software. It would also need to be compliant with HIPAA and all other regulations.
What is the business case for the FOSS bit? Surely it makes loads more sense to keep the software closed source so someone cannot take you software then undercut you on the support as they do not have to support a development team keeping the software up to date.
Open Source works in the some markets where you can rely on lots of unpaid developers helping out with code contributions. This will not be the case with niche software as the only way to get a community of developers working on an open source product is if you have an even larger community of developers who want to USE that software.
There are a great many markets for software when open source simply does not work as only a paid developer would spend time working on that software. In this case you receive no benefit from making it open source unless you know few other companies who will contribute paid man hours to the project and even then, why not make contributing minimum number of developer hours a condition of getting access to the source code. (This is difficult, I know).
People who think the open source, paid support based model is suitable for every market for software applications are living in cloud cuckoo land.
I bet a lot of that $10k fee is due to the software requiring FDA certification.
I doubt it, that would make it far more expensive. The reality is that software development costs money.
Once you compar that $10K to the cost of something like Photoshop while also taking into account size of the respective markets it doesn't seem that expensive after all. I bet the market for Photoshop is at least 10 times the size of the market for specialist opticians software so of course the price will be at least 10 times as much (thats called an economy of scale).
Then there is the fact that if the people develop the opticians sofware know there are very few other players in the market then they whack in another hefty hike since they can.
The trick to making a fortune in the software development wass to find a niche market then develop a successful product for it using insider knowledge from the industry. Chances are some optician got someone to develop them some software that made their job easier because they knew a software developer who would work on the cheap. Since then the two of them have partnered up, formed a company and are laughing all the way to the bank as they sell the software to other opticians.
This is much harder to do nowadays though as most of these niche markets have been sown up by small companies who did this. Many of these small companies are still going though as they reward for developing a competing product from scratch does not justify the cost, especially when you need to hire an expert consultant from within the field in question.
Yeah, the party that LOVES more and more government.
The very same party that by some crazy-ass "logic" thinks that the same government that runs the TSA should run health care for everyone.
Imagine that.
(How the hell can the Slashtards who rail against rampant government incompetence when the TSA is involved or when the Patriot Act or warrantless wiretaps are mentioned suddenly love handing over 1/6 of the economy and control of their health care decisions to the same bureaucrats? IT'S THE SAME OVERWEENING INCOMPETENT GOVERNMENT YOU FUCKING MORONS! IT ISN'T GOING TO MAKE ANYTHING BETTER BECAUSE IT NEVER HAS!)
It was passed unanimously which means some republicans voted for it too. This is especially true since they controlled the senate and the house of representatives in 1996 when it passed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution
If the GOP gave two shits about the DMCA they have had ample opportunities to change it since. They haven't because they don't give a shit. Maybe the only reason for the vast payments to the Democratic party that year is simply because they needed more buying off, the republicans were on side already.
Fuck that, Copyright laws are important. If I make a software, I WANT all the users to pay me for my creation. If you don't use it don't pay, make it yourself , it will only take you 20 weeks of coding. But if I made it , I should be paid by all the users.PERIOD. I don't care that it's bits and they could be copied easily. I have the moral right to decide who can use what I made.
You are clearly an evil capitalist or a sock puppet for MPAA / RIAA / some other content conglomerate. There are no real people who believe in copyright law being applied to bits and bytes, especially not people who develop software since we are all communist hippies who think everything should be free.
Of course I actually agree with you though even though you may well be a troll:)
That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable. If it pushes Google to have a bit more of a responsive front end to their customers, then... I'm ok with that.
Though I'd also see Google's side of it if they insisted on a GMail/G+ account to prove they are a valid customer and not MS spam bots!
The full article doesn't talk about "customers", it talks about "users". Why the hell should Google have to answer an email from some retard too stupid to use their search engine and needs "support".
I have no problem with Google being forced into actually providing contact details to people or companies who actually pay them money directly (ie: customers), but I am not so sure that is what is being suggested here. If the only business relationship I have with Google is that I use a free service they provide should they really have to provide me with a method of contacting them?
Still, if they have the letters "fluor" in them they must be the same thing, right. Them thar chemmerculs.
I could tell from the url that it's a nutter site.
It's not really a nutter site. They are just against the idea of adding small amounts of fluoride to drinking water just because people can't be arsed to brush their teeth. I kind of have a bit of sympathy for this to be honest even though I personally use fluoride toothpaste (some people don't even do that). I have this strange belief that if I want to let my teeth all go to shit that is my prerogative and the local company who supply me tap water have no business trying to prevent me from doing so.
Seriously, running and hosting a website is expensive. If you completely
removed all adverts from the web then many websites would simply have to
close as it is impossible to reliably host something popular without
incurring costs.
Really? Bullshit. For about $100 per year you can easily have a hosting account for a small website. Add to that the cost of a domain name, and you're set. Just publish any content you like and see what happens.
Now, if you're saying that you can't afford to sink $150 per year on a website, and you would only be able to do it by getting paid for adviews, I'm going to have to seriously wonder about your ability to deliver even a small amount of content.
It's true that some of the mega websites have huge bills in the millions for all sorts of things, but on that end of the spectrum, the actual money's coming from investors and real products, not adviews.
If you have an idea for a website, start small and see if you can get 10 (decimal) people to pay money as a result. Then maybe try for 20. Most ideas fail that test, and the sooner your idea fails, the sooner you can try another. If it passes these hurdles, you'll be self-funding and I wish you the best of luck.
So you reckon you could host slashdot for $150 per year? Good luck.
Hell, have you noticed how Google's advertisements on other sites like Slashdot change based on what you've been recently searching on Google.
The least you could do (besides an adblocker, assuming you haven't already got one and are whitelisting slashdot) is disable all cookies, enabling exceptions for sites you want.
Of course the other alternative is to contribute a small amount to the costs of running a website like slashdot by becoming a subscriber. Then you can see no ads what so ever if you so chose.
Seriously, running and hosting a website is expensive. If you completely removed all adverts from the web then many websites would simply have to close as it is impossible to reliably host something popular without incurring costs.
I have nothing to do with slashdot, but I do work as technical lead for a site that probably has nowhere near as much traffic and I know we have to pay a fair whack for our hosting even before you pay my colleagues and myself to actually develop the site. There are free or very cheap hosting companies but they either don't guarantee enough uptime or don't let you go above bandwidth caps.
everyone got along and licensed their patents to each other through FRAND...right up until Apple came along and started making so much money that companies that had licensed out patents at reasonable terms to everyone else demanded Apple pay far more. Thus making a mockery of FRAND.
How exactly did they start making so much money?
Oh yes, by selling millions of the same product, thats how. In which case it is entirely right that the FRAND licence they pay is much higher than the licence that someone who will only sell a few thousand products pays.
Then there is also the problem that Apple made for themselves. They could have gone to Nokia up front and licenced the stuff they needed for mobile phone radio communications up front like everyone else. While the iPhone was still a speculative product they could have put in low sales estimates (ie: niche product) but still offered a high flat fee (not per unit based). This would have seemed like a good deal as it was low risk to Nokia (all the risk was on Apple) and they may well have got away with it. Instead they decided to hedge their bets in case their product failed and tried to sort out the FRAND licence with Nokia later after they had sold god knows how many iPhones and eliminated all Nokia's high end phones from the market. Of course Nokia at this point just laughed their ass off and held out for as much as they possible could as by that point they were scared shitless of Apple.
This is now the same for Motorola. If Apple had sorted out all the FRAND licence stuff with Motorola years ago when they first launched the first iphone then this would have been long before the whole Google spat started (and before Google bought them) so it would have been cheaper.
If Apple had quietly gone to all these companies they needed FRAND licensed patents for up front they could have negotiated a much better deal on what would have been at the time only a speculative product. By waiting until they already had an incredibly successful product they removed a lot of the power they would have in FRAND negotiations. That is why they have to pay more as the other companies they are negotiating with already know that Apple will have to obtain a licence at any cost to cover the products Apple already sold, even if they remove the offending tech from a future product. The other company also knows exactly how many products have been sold instead of having rely on Apple's estimates.
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What to configure? Microsoft provides you with Windows XP Mode which is a virtualized preconfigured environment for those few applications that need XP. I believe IE6 was also one of them as it's one of the few things that XP mode was needed for.
So if I do a default Windows 7 or 8 install does Windows XP Mode get installed by default then so hence require no configuration? Thought not, as thats what to configure.
This actually makes perfect sense. On a modern PC it will involve the user learning about virtualisation (to run XP) and then also learning how to configure windows (to not run updates). This is great way of preparing dole claimants for an IT job so by the time you have gained enough skills to claim any dole money you have enough skills to go straight into a job as and IT support worker for the dole office and their crappy old IT systems.
But it's a real problem for employers. Unless you're hiring for a factory where employees are easily trained and replaced, there's really no way you can replace an employee while they're off on parental leave. Let's say a lead developer took 6 months off. You probably need to hire the new person a good 2 months before the other person leaves just so they can catch up. And then it probably takes another month or so after the original employee gets back to get them caught back up. The other option is to just take the work of the person who leaves, and split it between the remaining employees, and don't hire anybody to fill the seat. This means everyone else has to either work more so the same amount of work can be done, or they just have to get less work done. Either way, if the person taking the time off is a high level employee, you're still going to be stuck having them work a little bit during their parental leave, if not just answering the phone a couple times a week to fill in missing information.
This is a problem that employers deal with in other countries though. My missus is just about to take maternity leave, she is planning to take the full 12 months she is entitled to by law (We live in the UK).
The second 6 months will be on vastly reduced pay though she does have the option to transfer some of this leave to me (in addition to the 2 weeks on full pay I also get by law) but since I earn more it does not make sense to do this unfortunately. The fact that she can transfer some to me if she returns to work though does mean we are both fairly equal in this regard. Note that this applies even though we work for completely different companies, if I earned less than her I would simply go into work and explain the situation to my boss and he has to give me the leave (on the same vastly reduced pay as she would get though, basically my pay would come from the government instead of my employer while I was off and they put a maximum weekly wage in place that is roughly equivalent to working in McDonalds).
Why does this guy get to explain himself? In my country, the IRS just sends me a letter about me misbehaving, and says I've got 30 days to pony up the cash.
Why the flying duck does a company then gets to make apologies, when it's obvious by now that they're cheating?
Because that is if you break the law. Google are not breaking any laws here, they are just making sure they pay as little tax as legally possible.
Big international companies always have the ability to declare their profits in whatever country they see fit by rigging the rates that the parent companies charge for use of the brand name, this is perfectly legal, if the government want to stop this they can try changing the law. Even if you changed this law though it would be tremendously hard to prove if the fees being charged for use of the brand name were over the top or not.
This is just that the government has to be seen to be doing something as we have local elections today and the ruling coalition is going to take a bath at the hands of smaller parties and desperately want to be seen to be doing something on tax avoidance.
The truth is that the government has already done something, they have lowered the rate of corporate tax to the same level as Ireland to make us competitive as a nation in the race to the bottom. Simply lowering the rate of corporate tax in response to corporations avoiding tax smacks of surrender and weakness though so they do not exactly want to draw attention to this.
A techie should be the one in charge of purchasing and fixing things. What government agency honestly has a public servant middle manager as the computer systems expert?
If you are a decent techie you can earn far more working in the private sector than you can working in government. Also, it is tremendously frustrating working in the public sector if you are competent because of the utter retards you have surrounding you in the public sector. You also have to deal with people who go sick every other day and never get fired because their manager does not want to take the risk of screwing up firing someone and all the crazy european labour laws you have to follow in the process.
This is all quite annoying to most decent techies I know are pretty driven so the only people who stay in the public sector for longer than it takes to earn their first decent reference (that gets them the better paid private sector job) are the people who seem some benefit from it. The benefit is never financial so usually it is that they get to doss about all day and do fuck all.
Or just reimage the machines from scratch.
Or sell the machines, there are bound to be organizations willing to buy them, reimage them, then resell or use.
Trashing them is just idiotic.
They probably asked how much it would cost to securely remove all data from the hard disks with the same 100% cast iron guarantee and got a similar quote back from their outsourced IT as they did for cleaning the viruses off them.
As to reimaging the machines that is the sort of magic that only a techie would know about, not the clueless public servant middle manager who was tasked with the project.
Also, he would get the blame when one of the machines had a perfectly normal hardware failure in a year or so. If he buys he new machine he does not get blamed when it breaks in a similar time frame.
Of course none of this makes any sense whatsoever, it is a government job, it is not supposed to. That was my point. Anyone who doesn't understand should try watching the film Brasil.
I think a better question would be, how often does something genuinely new come along?
Well, there was that new object orientated thingy-ma-whatsit that came out recently?
Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.
Forget about virus infections for the near future.
Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.
Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.
This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.
All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.
In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.
Monsanto was not the primary cause of those, and to the extent they were responsible, it was due to legal, not genetic restrictions on their seeds.
Nope. Some GM crops have the restriction built in at the genetic level. Kind of like a crop based DRM. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology
If I was Monsanto (and hence only cared about profits) I would make damn sure that I didn't have to rely on the Indian courts to uphold any copyright or patent related stuff after their stances on generic drugs so it stands to reason they would build the legal restriction into the actual product.
Maybe I should have included a link to that page in my original reply. I thought it would mention that many GM crops produce sterile seeds on the main GM crops page I linked but I guess it relies on you to click on the "GM controversies" link. I didn't read all the page as most of what I typed was based on memory as I have been following the GM arguments for years.
You have opened your mouth and removed all doubt, you are a fool.
Start your post with an insult, nice way to show your own arrogance.
Virtually all crop plants, GMO or not, are highly resistant to pesticides. Pesticides kill bugs, usually insects, not plants.
Wrong. The main GM plant that people moan about is GM Soya made by Monsanto. They created GM soya as normal soya was killed if you used roundup weed killer on it. So Monsanto create a GM crop to increase their weedkiller sales.
Ok, you could argue that there is a difference between a pesticide and a weed killer but that is just being pedantic. The truth is the parent poster kind of had a point, they just screwed up by saying "Pesticide" when they should have said "WeedKiller". Interestingly wikipedia has the following to say about pesticides:
"A pesticide is generally a chemical or biological agent (such as a virus, bacterium, antimicrobial or disinfectant) that through its effect deters, incapacitates, kills or otherwise discourages pests. Target pests can include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, mollusks, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, cause nuisance, spread disease or are vectors for disease. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, some also have drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals. According to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 9 of the 12 most dangerous and persistent organic chemicals are pesticides."
So many people seem to consider it fair enough to call something a "pesticide" when the actual pest being killed is a weed. I know the correct term would be herbicide but hey, who am I to argue with wikipedia :)
You might want to read the following, paying particular attention to the section on Glyphosphate resistant crops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops
Your concern about 'buying seeds every year' is extremely misguided and mostly wrong. Most farmers buy seed each year anyway, GMO or not.
That is also arguable. That might be the norm in the intensive farming in the developed world but it is not the case everywhere.
I think he was referring to the spate of farmers suicides in India where using seeds from a previous harvest is more common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_India. This was actually blamed on them not knowing they were buying seeds where the crops would produce sterile seeds so that a year after the bought the crop they planted a load of duds that did not grow.
I am not entirely sure why a bunch of farmers started killing themselves in far away country, but keeping some of your seeds from a previous harvest is still common in the case of third world subsistence farming it seems.
Personally I am not sure I agree with all of the anti GM lobby or not, but you were an insulting twat when it was not warranted as some of what he was saying actually had a basis in fact. You could have more politely corrected him without calling him a fool, especially since your post was very light on factual content and evidence itself. I am being deliberately insulting to let you know how it feels, but have tried to include more references to some of my assertions.
And here is where you have proven that you do not understand X11. Not only do requests not go through the network at all unless applications are displaying remotely (they use shared memory or domain sockets, not internetworking sockets) but X also has extensions permitting direct memory access or direct GPU access. However, if you happen to have a network in between the client and the server, it will get used, and provide you functionality that just won't be there with Wayland.
Lol. Of course I understood that x11 display server only sent stuff over the network if it was actually talking to a remote client.
What I was saying was the separation of the X11 into two parts is completely unneeded if you are only ever intending your OS to run on single user devices like phones and desktop computers. It might be a nice to have as far as us geeks are concerned, but he is obviously trying to target Ubuntu at having the same OS running on both Phones and Desktops / Laptops. For that market you can throw the client-server stuff away and very few users will care (even if those people who do care shout loudly about how great it was to make up form them being a small minority).
As to running Ubuntu on servers do they actually care about that market either? Personally where I work we use Red Hat (actual paid for RedHat, not Centos) and Debian for all the Linux servers so have no idea how friendly they are as a company to people running Ubuntu as a server OS. My gut feeling says they are probably not friendly at all but I am happy to be corrected in this.
I have been using Linux for a few years and remember playing with getting the X11 client to talk to a different X11 server in the past. I have only ever done this as a bit of fun though on two machines that were right next to each other. I have never actually used this or needed it in the 10 years I have been working as a software developer and system admin.
The first thing I do on a linux server is dive into inittab and change the default run level to something where there is no GUI running unless I start it. On most of the linux servers I build X is not even installed since they are just forming part of a LAMP stack and I do everything via the command line and reckon any system admin worth his salt who replaces / works with me should be able to do the same.
I'm a physicist, not CS -- I know only as much about Linux as I find interesting and/or necessary for me to work.
But I know I can run an animation remotely and it'll run as fast as it's able over the network, automagically and transparently, but I can run it locally, and it'll run even faster, and with local GPU acceleration if it's available. I know there's no magic involved here because I wrote the animation code in GLUT, and it is pretty ghetto.
X11 is fucking magic to my students the first time they see it -- "Wait, my program is running over there, but I see the window here, but the computer's over there? And I can do this from home, too?" It's fantastic. Please don't break this; it's one of the truly fantastic things about the Linux work environment. I may have windows on my desktop from four different computers, and I don't have to worry about anything -- it just works.
My point is that very few people installing Linux on stand alone devices give two shits about this though. So why not get rid of it in the quest for better performance.
Or just stuck with X11 and fixed what's wrong with that. Even better.
By X11 you must actually mean X.org. The original version of X11 that Linux used to ship with was Xfree86 but that ended when they got hissy and tried to change the licence to one that may (I am not a layer so have no idea if this is actually true or not, the important thing was that the community thought it might have been) have been incompatible with the GPL. This caused no end of crap and resulted in everyone moving to x.org.
The problem is that X.org is pretty much a dead project now. Ok, Ubuntu could have single handedly kept the project going but why should they if X11 is not ideal anyway (believe me, it wasn't). The X11 Window system was created almost 30 years ago and things have moved on along way since then. Sometimes you just need to look at old software in an objective way and decide to take a clean break from it.
At a rough guess I would say that the main reason for throwing X11 in the bin is the idea of the client - server separation. This might have made sense when you had to support dumb terminals and multiple users with different desktops on the same server but it makes no sense now. Nowadays every device (even phones!!!) have a dedicated CPU and Graphics Chip that the display manager can talk to directly without going over a possibly insecure network. Now you want to be able to give applications a direct pipeline to the graphics hardware to make it feel as responsive as possible if they need it.
The first thing you did wrong is that you estimated 2 months, without taking any time to break down how you were going to spend each and every day of that two months. If you had done that, you would have realized you were falling behind schedule within the first week.
This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be taught at university as an integral module to most degrees preparing you for a career as a software developer. Even people doing system type stuff should know this too.
I know a myriad of students will bitch and complain that they are not learning real development and are just learning business stuff, but screw them. In my experience students bitch and moan about everything anyway, they need to learn faster that in the real world (ie: paid work) people do not care, they just want you to shut up and get on with what you are told to do or I will fire you and pay someone who does. Once you have worked somewhere a few years you generally get some input into things but initially (ie, for most of the period you work there equivalent to your time at uni if on a 3 year degree as is the norm here in the UK) you just need to knuckle down and prove you can do the job.
I had to learn how to give realistic timescale estimates on the job and it is one of the hardest things I found initially. The fact is that most geeks (I know I did) find learning to actually create code or tinker with servers fun so will do it in their own time anyway. They crap they won't do for fun is the really dull stuff like learning how to scope projects, produce decent project plans but this is exactly what you need to be able to do in order to work as a techie.
Do any of you think it would be feasible to start a company that makes FOSS medical software for doctors' offices? I imagine that what an office needs isn't very different from office to office. The company would earn its money long-term providing support for the software. It would also need to be compliant with HIPAA and all other regulations.
What is the business case for the FOSS bit? Surely it makes loads more sense to keep the software closed source so someone cannot take you software then undercut you on the support as they do not have to support a development team keeping the software up to date.
Open Source works in the some markets where you can rely on lots of unpaid developers helping out with code contributions. This will not be the case with niche software as the only way to get a community of developers working on an open source product is if you have an even larger community of developers who want to USE that software.
There are a great many markets for software when open source simply does not work as only a paid developer would spend time working on that software. In this case you receive no benefit from making it open source unless you know few other companies who will contribute paid man hours to the project and even then, why not make contributing minimum number of developer hours a condition of getting access to the source code. (This is difficult, I know).
People who think the open source, paid support based model is suitable for every market for software applications are living in cloud cuckoo land.
I bet a lot of that $10k fee is due to the software requiring FDA certification.
I doubt it, that would make it far more expensive. The reality is that software development costs money.
Once you compar that $10K to the cost of something like Photoshop while also taking into account size of the respective markets it doesn't seem that expensive after all. I bet the market for Photoshop is at least 10 times the size of the market for specialist opticians software so of course the price will be at least 10 times as much (thats called an economy of scale).
Then there is the fact that if the people develop the opticians sofware know there are very few other players in the market then they whack in another hefty hike since they can.
The trick to making a fortune in the software development wass to find a niche market then develop a successful product for it using insider knowledge from the industry. Chances are some optician got someone to develop them some software that made their job easier because they knew a software developer who would work on the cheap. Since then the two of them have partnered up, formed a company and are laughing all the way to the bank as they sell the software to other opticians.
This is much harder to do nowadays though as most of these niche markets have been sown up by small companies who did this. Many of these small companies are still going though as they reward for developing a competing product from scratch does not justify the cost, especially when you need to hire an expert consultant from within the field in question.
No troll,
just an independent iOs developer trying to make a living on the appstore...
Good luck with that
Guess which political party the MAFIAA bought in order to get the DMCA passed?
Yeah, the party that LOVES more and more government.
The very same party that by some crazy-ass "logic" thinks that the same government that runs the TSA should run health care for everyone.
Imagine that.
(How the hell can the Slashtards who rail against rampant government incompetence when the TSA is involved or when the Patriot Act or warrantless wiretaps are mentioned suddenly love handing over 1/6 of the economy and control of their health care decisions to the same bureaucrats? IT'S THE SAME OVERWEENING INCOMPETENT GOVERNMENT YOU FUCKING MORONS! IT ISN'T GOING TO MAKE ANYTHING BETTER BECAUSE IT NEVER HAS!)
It was passed unanimously which means some republicans voted for it too. This is especially true since they controlled the senate and the house of representatives in 1996 when it passed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution
If the GOP gave two shits about the DMCA they have had ample opportunities to change it since. They haven't because they don't give a shit. Maybe the only reason for the vast payments to the Democratic party that year is simply because they needed more buying off, the republicans were on side already.
Fuck that,
Copyright laws are important. If I make a software, I WANT all the users to pay me for my creation. If you don't use it don't pay, make it yourself , it will only take you 20 weeks of coding. But if I made it , I should be paid by all the users.PERIOD. I don't care that it's bits and they could be copied easily. I have the moral right to decide who can use what I made.
You are clearly an evil capitalist or a sock puppet for MPAA / RIAA / some other content conglomerate. There are no real people who believe in copyright law being applied to bits and bytes, especially not people who develop software since we are all communist hippies who think everything should be free.
Of course I actually agree with you though even though you may well be a troll :)
Nice!!! Was wondering if anyone would mention Dr Strangelove.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove
That doesn't sound entirely unreasonable.
If it pushes Google to have a bit more of a responsive front end to their customers, then... I'm ok with that.
Though I'd also see Google's side of it if they insisted on a GMail/G+ account to prove they are a valid customer and not MS spam bots!
The full article doesn't talk about "customers", it talks about "users". Why the hell should Google have to answer an email from some retard too stupid to use their search engine and needs "support".
I have no problem with Google being forced into actually providing contact details to people or companies who actually pay them money directly (ie: customers), but I am not so sure that is what is being suggested here. If the only business relationship I have with Google is that I use a free service they provide should they really have to provide me with a method of contacting them?
Still, if they have the letters "fluor" in them they must be the same thing, right. Them thar chemmerculs.
I could tell from the url that it's a nutter site.
It's not really a nutter site. They are just against the idea of adding small amounts of fluoride to drinking water just because people can't be arsed to brush their teeth. I kind of have a bit of sympathy for this to be honest even though I personally use fluoride toothpaste (some people don't even do that). I have this strange belief that if I want to let my teeth all go to shit that is my prerogative and the local company who supply me tap water have no business trying to prevent me from doing so.
Really? Bullshit. For about $100 per year you can easily have a hosting account for a small website. Add to that the cost of a domain name, and you're set.
Just publish any content you like and see what happens.
Now, if you're saying that you can't afford to sink $150 per year on a website, and you would only be able to do it by getting paid for adviews, I'm going to have to seriously wonder about your ability to deliver even a small amount of content.
It's true that some of the mega websites have huge bills in the millions for all sorts of things, but on that end of the spectrum, the actual money's coming from investors and real products, not adviews.
If you have an idea for a website, start small and see if you can get 10 (decimal) people to pay money as a result. Then maybe try for 20. Most ideas fail that test, and the sooner your idea fails, the sooner you can try another. If it passes these hurdles, you'll be self-funding and I wish you the best of luck.
So you reckon you could host slashdot for $150 per year? Good luck.
Hell, have you noticed how Google's advertisements on other sites like Slashdot change based on what you've been recently searching on Google.
The least you could do (besides an adblocker, assuming you haven't already got one and are whitelisting slashdot) is disable all cookies, enabling exceptions for sites you want.
Of course the other alternative is to contribute a small amount to the costs of running a website like slashdot by becoming a subscriber. Then you can see no ads what so ever if you so chose.
Seriously, running and hosting a website is expensive. If you completely removed all adverts from the web then many websites would simply have to close as it is impossible to reliably host something popular without incurring costs.
I have nothing to do with slashdot, but I do work as technical lead for a site that probably has nowhere near as much traffic and I know we have to pay a fair whack for our hosting even before you pay my colleagues and myself to actually develop the site. There are free or very cheap hosting companies but they either don't guarantee enough uptime or don't let you go above bandwidth caps.
everyone got along and licensed their patents to each other through FRAND ...right up until Apple came along and started making so much money that companies that had licensed out patents at reasonable terms to everyone else demanded Apple pay far more. Thus making a mockery of FRAND.
How exactly did they start making so much money?
Oh yes, by selling millions of the same product, thats how. In which case it is entirely right that the FRAND licence they pay is much higher than the licence that someone who will only sell a few thousand products pays.
Then there is also the problem that Apple made for themselves. They could have gone to Nokia up front and licenced the stuff they needed for mobile phone radio communications up front like everyone else. While the iPhone was still a speculative product they could have put in low sales estimates (ie: niche product) but still offered a high flat fee (not per unit based). This would have seemed like a good deal as it was low risk to Nokia (all the risk was on Apple) and they may well have got away with it. Instead they decided to hedge their bets in case their product failed and tried to sort out the FRAND licence with Nokia later after they had sold god knows how many iPhones and eliminated all Nokia's high end phones from the market. Of course Nokia at this point just laughed their ass off and held out for as much as they possible could as by that point they were scared shitless of Apple.
This is now the same for Motorola. If Apple had sorted out all the FRAND licence stuff with Motorola years ago when they first launched the first iphone then this would have been long before the whole Google spat started (and before Google bought them) so it would have been cheaper.
If Apple had quietly gone to all these companies they needed FRAND licensed patents for up front they could have negotiated a much better deal on what would have been at the time only a speculative product. By waiting until they already had an incredibly successful product they removed a lot of the power they would have in FRAND negotiations. That is why they have to pay more as the other companies they are negotiating with already know that Apple will have to obtain a licence at any cost to cover the products Apple already sold, even if they remove the offending tech from a future product. The other company also knows exactly how many products have been sold instead of having rely on Apple's estimates.