i think the guy was noticing that wherever you go, the prices are the same. it isn't buing advice. and he was asking why. i think that is a legit/. article. besides, there's no SCO news today, and no current unknown windows exploits, so what else we got to talk? beowolf clusters? BSD? desktop linux? then that only leaves apple.
i am in the market for a digital camera. no matter where you go, they are all the same price. exactly the same price. it's been afew years since i worked retail, but this is a defense mechanism of sorts. one, since nobody is the low price leader, and everybody price matches, then nobody gets screwed, everybody sells some. besides, that way, store A doesn't run out, while store B gets screwed, which also pisses off customers. and it encourages people to buy now, because they ain't gonna find it cheaper next door. it also allows the stores to add on their own deals and warranties. this is where they make the big bucks. you even see this trend with cars. the price is the price. the real difference is in service. i for one will not shop in best buy, etc., because their sales drones don't know shit. i would rather go to ritz camera, and i know that the price is the same. manufacturers have been trying to do this for some time. there was a famous case a number of years ago with browning shotguns. they wanted all dealers to price them the same. went to court and lost. but, if you look at the hardware market, the markup is almost nil. as for ipods, you bet your ass that if you sell it for $1 less than apple without their approval, you'll never get another shipment. macmall sells their hardware for $5 less, but i guess they got a deal from apple. and besides,l they always throw more memory, etc., in with the deal. just don't expect things to change. and truthfully, i think customers like it better. if you want a good deal, go to ebay.
sadly, those who want equality focus on outcomes. thus, affirmative action, preferences, etc. arguig logic here at/. willonly have you banging your head against a wall. the best part is when it ends.
i amhardly defending the poor, beleagured pharmacueticals. but, name any other county besides the US that actually has a pharmacuetical industry. how many millions have their lives extended because of drugs made in the US? for every drug that gets accepted, hundreds are rejected, and the R&D has to be recouped. the only other country that actually makes drugs are the french, primarily as a way to kill unborn children, and mainly to be sold in the US, or to Euro gov'ts' health care systems.
no, an unreglulated economy will not devolve into serfdom. it never has. it is only when gov't play favorites that the great inequalities emerge. the market is the great equalizer. (hint, think OSS) most monopolies are unnatural (except utilities, the economies of scale) and are anti-capitalist and anti-competitive.
That is the chance you take when you value freedom over Iron-fisted government rule.
not quite. if we valued "freedom", then we wouldn't ahve all sorts of things like min. wage laws, mandatory health benefits, anti-discrimination laws, welfare, soc. security, etc. in fact, we wouldn't have the legal lottery system that we have now. our system (legal) is the exact opposite of a "free" one. de Tocquville said (paraphrasing here) that the republic will be over when the people discover they can vote themselves money. the problem is that we as a society don't value freedom enough. we are more than willing to have government at all levels do those things that they have no business doing. this is a pattern on both thte right, but even more the left. since/. is majority leftward leaning, you'd think they'd be more in tune with a less powerful government. but they're not. the big issue that has everyone here hating bush is the war, but guys like dean are running around talking about how they're gonna re-regulate this and that, etc. You want nationalized health care, you can really say goodbye to privacy there. we don't value freedom anymore. c'mon, a "conservative" president passes the largest entitlement program since the 60's, which will pass 500 billion to 1 trillion dollars of mandated expenditures on the next generation, and we're supposed to be abotu freedom. no, people aren't taking chances any mroe with freedom. our legal system is living proof. for instance, even if a drug is FDA approved, you can still sue them if does bad things. not if they lied, not if they fabricated data, nothing. it didn't work, it might have had bad side effects, etc. yet, they can still be liable. (and we wonder why drugs are so expensive!!)
when you work on something of interest to you, and you put your name on it, it simply means more to you and therefore you will be more concerned. i don't care how much you get paid, are you going to put your full effort into someone else's project? i don't think so.
kudos to microsoft for coming up with another business model. it wasn't enough to force vendors and users to pay for windows, and break all kinds of anti-trust laws. those damn pesky linux cd's still work. and even though they get their $50 or whatever OEM fees, it still isn't the same. now, they've got the perfect strategy, force manufacturers to make hard that can only run windows and nothing else. if you can't beat, beat them over the head. awesome. think i'm going to buy some microsoft stock.
The publicity alone would put Linux OS not only into the mainstream as the best choice, but you'd probably see a lot of your non-geek friends asking for it.
given everything that microsoft has already done, people would have longed left them. no, they are the 800 pound gorilla. besides, all the major hardwre manufacturers are scared shitless of them. in fact, they need to do this, or something like it. they realize the real battle is in the server room, the data center. and they aren't winning that battle. so the next move is to make the integration so tight, that windows clients can't work with anything but windows servers. as for themowning the computer, they own the OS. you get a license to use it, at their discretion.
and has this caused anyone besides/.'ers to abandon them?
they can do whatever they want. it's your haradware, but not your OS. and it's also not your word processor (MS Word). so in reality it's not your data. thus, and the word processor does, and the OS does, it doesn't really belong to you. the last XP service pack said that microsoft can pretty much do as they please with your computer. WMP keeps a database of every media you listen/watch. and with the new DRM, they are limiting what you can with your comptuer even further. so since it's their database, then it's their data. sorry to rain on anyone's parade...
dude, you're joking right? deep freeze is a total piece of shit, and i say this trying hard not to offend feces. we use it at my school, and it crashes the computers so often and so bad we had to put rubber padding on the floor. as for linux, it is realtively easy to lock a linux box down from a user. and oas for os x, simply create a user called student (or if you authenticaate using ldap, etc.) and yo can lock them out of EVERYTHING. take away every single app. period. so, deep freeze for os x is a total waste of money.
as a teacher you are the one who must be the force for change
and that has been the problem. one, where schools were a "force for change" it was politicizaton. which is wrong. two, more importantly, why are schools supposed to be the force for change? that isn't the point of schools. the material we teach, i.e. history, literature, mathematics, even chem, bio, etc., doesn't change. sadly we did change, and when we did so, the schools stopped serving the public interest. the reason schools are held in such low regard by the public is our own fault.
I teach history, AND technology. i am finishing a masters in ed. tech this spring, and next year I will be teaching the AP java class. except for technology classes, which i feel should be a separate part of the curriculum, computers really have no place in schools. sure, they're nice to type papers on, but other than that, they do nothing for learning. before the flames start, i am a technophile and a teacher. let me give you a few examples:
-powerpoint has become the new project medium. students spend hours with the eye candy and little on content. and then teachers show these off as some sort of great accomplishment.
-students need to read more, write more, and think more. none of these are skills that require computers. infact, spelling and grammar have deteriorated because of the fscking F7 key (that's spell check for you emacs is my word processor crowd!!)
-truth be told, many teachers are lazy. and computers are a great way to appear to be something good, when in fact teachers are taking a week in the lab as a week off. or they dump the kids on the computers and let the computer teach them.
i am i think a pretty good history teacher. i have thorough knowledge and a deeper understanding of the discipline. i challenge the kids to read and write and think critically, and apply what they've learned to present, as well understand the ideas and people, not just memorize facts. (for instance, in my 10th grade mod civ class, we've read everyone from aristotle to plato, thomas more to john locke, hume, ricardo, marx, and many in between. we've done a project simpy titled, "defend the stuarts". you history buffs will appreciate that. not that there is a right answer to that, but, damn, ya gotta think about that one.) now, i've not needed the computer for any of that. computers are simply a way for the schools to show how much they're doing, when again, they're not doing the one thing they need to do, which is educate. school technology is all about playing PR game. it is sad. worst of al is that now we teachers have to compete with the computer. if we are not exciting enough, interesting enough, entertaining enough, etc., the we de facto excuse the kids for tuning out in school. i can't compete with that. i am a teacher, not an entertainer.
of course. like i'd hang out at a coffee house anyways. but actually, have you seen the sony ad for the vaio that has a bunch of people oggling over a laptop. there is a coolness factor to owning some things, and we pay for it. sure, my ipod is a great mp3 player, but it has a cool factor. it's like all those damn cell phones that do everything. and of course, being a 34 year old teacher, dad of two little kids, i really need to be cool.
since i have an ibook, to enter a new network, even if you use dhcp, you have to add it in the network preferences, and you have to tell it to use ldap, etc. most publc wifi's go like this: one, you have to get your mac address add to the database, two, you set it up to use dhcp (but do not configure any ldap, etc., since you're not authenticating against anything, and have no technical shared resources) then you get your IP address, and you go from there. besides, if this is the only os x exploit, then public wifi networks are a great advert for macs. (as if being the coolest dude in the coffee house with the mac laptop wasn't going to sell them!!)
really, from apples docs, you have to have a malicious dhcp server on your subnet. of course, someone could bring a rogue box into work, but this isn't on par with ms exploits. wouldn't a simple mac address filter at the switch level take care of all this. yeah, you could instal dhcpd on your authorized client, but this should also be a fairly easy thing to detect. i think apple is right, it's a configuration level solution.
So having a legitimate company support you over an obscure horde of sweaty hackers who just tells you to RTFM does not count as a reason?
no, you hire the programmers and since you have the code you have complete control over the OS. that is what open source is all about. i for one would rather have the company that installs the OS in my car actually know WTF is going on with it. i'd prefer something like that not be out the hands of the manufacturer. but hey, that's just me.
when i read interviews with microsoft tech people, they always seem to come across as real technophiles, people concerned with the bits and bytes, if you will. somewhere along the way, it seems, marketing and finance must enter the coding cubicles and say something. it almost sorta reminds of the russian military. for every division (or whatever), there was a political officer. it seems there must be the equivalent in microsoft development departments. can't one of them just say no, we're going to do things the right way. it seems the fish is rotten from the top. really sad if you think about it.
a few years ago, i purchased a p120/16mb ram acer for abotu $1500. it wasn't top of the line at the time either. now, i can get a far more comparatively powerful box for half that. so yes, the actual dollar amount has dropped.
actually it's not a tough choice. neither is good. however, one, to "provide" things, they must take from you and me. and thy ultimately have to work with the very same corporations. look at france. try opening a small business. you can't. sure, you have okay health care, etc., but you have no chance at success. and you get what the government gives you. and you really think they're better? a few months ago, 12,000 die from heat. you think that would happen in the US? never. in fact, if something ever came remotely as close, people would be in a world of shit. what happened to the beaurocrats in france? nothing.
damn, 300,000 desktops, 4200 servers. holy crap, they hvae to pay a ton in license fees. i wonder if they have looked to open source alternatives. well, maybe they bought software assurance.
Slashdot Mirror
i think the guy was noticing that wherever you go, the prices are the same. it isn't buing advice. and he was asking why. i think that is a legit /. article. besides, there's no SCO news today, and no current unknown windows exploits, so what else we got to talk? beowolf clusters? BSD? desktop linux? then that only leaves apple.
i am in the market for a digital camera. no matter where you go, they are all the same price. exactly the same price. it's been afew years since i worked retail, but this is a defense mechanism of sorts. one, since nobody is the low price leader, and everybody price matches, then nobody gets screwed, everybody sells some. besides, that way, store A doesn't run out, while store B gets screwed, which also pisses off customers. and it encourages people to buy now, because they ain't gonna find it cheaper next door. it also allows the stores to add on their own deals and warranties. this is where they make the big bucks. you even see this trend with cars. the price is the price. the real difference is in service. i for one will not shop in best buy, etc., because their sales drones don't know shit. i would rather go to ritz camera, and i know that the price is the same. manufacturers have been trying to do this for some time. there was a famous case a number of years ago with browning shotguns. they wanted all dealers to price them the same. went to court and lost. but, if you look at the hardware market, the markup is almost nil. as for ipods, you bet your ass that if you sell it for $1 less than apple without their approval, you'll never get another shipment. macmall sells their hardware for $5 less, but i guess they got a deal from apple. and besides,l they always throw more memory, etc., in with the deal. just don't expect things to change. and truthfully, i think customers like it better. if you want a good deal, go to ebay.
because, dead men tell no tales!!
sadly, those who want equality focus on outcomes. thus, affirmative action, preferences, etc. arguig logic here at /. willonly have you banging your head against a wall. the best part is when it ends.
i amhardly defending the poor, beleagured pharmacueticals. but, name any other county besides the US that actually has a pharmacuetical industry. how many millions have their lives extended because of drugs made in the US? for every drug that gets accepted, hundreds are rejected, and the R&D has to be recouped. the only other country that actually makes drugs are the french, primarily as a way to kill unborn children, and mainly to be sold in the US, or to Euro gov'ts' health care systems.
no, an unreglulated economy will not devolve into serfdom. it never has. it is only when gov't play favorites that the great inequalities emerge. the market is the great equalizer. (hint, think OSS) most monopolies are unnatural (except utilities, the economies of scale) and are anti-capitalist and anti-competitive.
That is the chance you take when you value freedom over Iron-fisted government rule.
/. is majority leftward leaning, you'd think they'd be more in tune with a less powerful government. but they're not. the big issue that has everyone here hating bush is the war, but guys like dean are running around talking about how they're gonna re-regulate this and that, etc. You want nationalized health care, you can really say goodbye to privacy there. we don't value freedom anymore. c'mon, a "conservative" president passes the largest entitlement program since the 60's, which will pass 500 billion to 1 trillion dollars of mandated expenditures on the next generation, and we're supposed to be abotu freedom. no, people aren't taking chances any mroe with freedom. our legal system is living proof. for instance, even if a drug is FDA approved, you can still sue them if does bad things. not if they lied, not if they fabricated data, nothing. it didn't work, it might have had bad side effects, etc. yet, they can still be liable. (and we wonder why drugs are so expensive!!)
not quite. if we valued "freedom", then we wouldn't ahve all sorts of things like min. wage laws, mandatory health benefits, anti-discrimination laws, welfare, soc. security, etc. in fact, we wouldn't have the legal lottery system that we have now. our system (legal) is the exact opposite of a "free" one. de Tocquville said (paraphrasing here) that the republic will be over when the people discover they can vote themselves money. the problem is that we as a society don't value freedom enough. we are more than willing to have government at all levels do those things that they have no business doing. this is a pattern on both thte right, but even more the left. since
when you work on something of interest to you, and you put your name on it, it simply means more to you and therefore you will be more concerned. i don't care how much you get paid, are you going to put your full effort into someone else's project? i don't think so.
kudos to microsoft for coming up with another business model. it wasn't enough to force vendors and users to pay for windows, and break all kinds of anti-trust laws. those damn pesky linux cd's still work. and even though they get their $50 or whatever OEM fees, it still isn't the same. now, they've got the perfect strategy, force manufacturers to make hard that can only run windows and nothing else. if you can't beat, beat them over the head. awesome. think i'm going to buy some microsoft stock.
The publicity alone would put Linux OS not only into the mainstream as the best choice, but you'd probably see a lot of your non-geek friends asking for it.
/.'ers to abandon them?
given everything that microsoft has already done, people would have longed left them. no, they are the 800 pound gorilla. besides, all the major hardwre manufacturers are scared shitless of them. in fact, they need to do this, or something like it. they realize the real battle is in the server room, the data center. and they aren't winning that battle. so the next move is to make the integration so tight, that windows clients can't work with anything but windows servers. as for themowning the computer, they own the OS. you get a license to use it, at their discretion. and has this caused anyone besides
they can do whatever they want. it's your haradware, but not your OS. and it's also not your word processor (MS Word). so in reality it's not your data. thus, and the word processor does, and the OS does, it doesn't really belong to you. the last XP service pack said that microsoft can pretty much do as they please with your computer. WMP keeps a database of every media you listen/watch. and with the new DRM, they are limiting what you can with your comptuer even further. so since it's their database, then it's their data. sorry to rain on anyone's parade...
dude, you're joking right? deep freeze is a total piece of shit, and i say this trying hard not to offend feces. we use it at my school, and it crashes the computers so often and so bad we had to put rubber padding on the floor. as for linux, it is realtively easy to lock a linux box down from a user. and oas for os x, simply create a user called student (or if you authenticaate using ldap, etc.) and yo can lock them out of EVERYTHING. take away every single app. period. so, deep freeze for os x is a total waste of money.
because they are just a bunch of teenage hackers, not college trained programmers.
</tounge>
then how bad does something have t be to not make it?
i hear WindowsME just missed CC by a whisker.
as a teacher you are the one who must be the force for change
and that has been the problem. one, where schools were a "force for change" it was politicizaton. which is wrong. two, more importantly, why are schools supposed to be the force for change? that isn't the point of schools. the material we teach, i.e. history, literature, mathematics, even chem, bio, etc., doesn't change. sadly we did change, and when we did so, the schools stopped serving the public interest. the reason schools are held in such low regard by the public is our own fault.
I teach history, AND technology. i am finishing a masters in ed. tech this spring, and next year I will be teaching the AP java class. except for technology classes, which i feel should be a separate part of the curriculum, computers really have no place in schools. sure, they're nice to type papers on, but other than that, they do nothing for learning. before the flames start, i am a technophile and a teacher. let me give you a few examples:
-powerpoint has become the new project medium. students spend hours with the eye candy and little on content. and then teachers show these off as some sort of great accomplishment.
-students need to read more, write more, and think more. none of these are skills that require computers. infact, spelling and grammar have deteriorated because of the fscking F7 key (that's spell check for you emacs is my word processor crowd!!)
-truth be told, many teachers are lazy. and computers are a great way to appear to be something good, when in fact teachers are taking a week in the lab as a week off. or they dump the kids on the computers and let the computer teach them.
i am i think a pretty good history teacher. i have thorough knowledge and a deeper understanding of the discipline. i challenge the kids to read and write and think critically, and apply what they've learned to present, as well understand the ideas and people, not just memorize facts. (for instance, in my 10th grade mod civ class, we've read everyone from aristotle to plato, thomas more to john locke, hume, ricardo, marx, and many in between. we've done a project simpy titled, "defend the stuarts". you history buffs will appreciate that. not that there is a right answer to that, but, damn, ya gotta think about that one.) now, i've not needed the computer for any of that. computers are simply a way for the schools to show how much they're doing, when again, they're not doing the one thing they need to do, which is educate. school technology is all about playing PR game. it is sad. worst of al is that now we teachers have to compete with the computer. if we are not exciting enough, interesting enough, entertaining enough, etc., the we de facto excuse the kids for tuning out in school. i can't compete with that. i am a teacher, not an entertainer.
of course. like i'd hang out at a coffee house anyways. but actually, have you seen the sony ad for the vaio that has a bunch of people oggling over a laptop. there is a coolness factor to owning some things, and we pay for it. sure, my ipod is a great mp3 player, but it has a cool factor. it's like all those damn cell phones that do everything. and of course, being a 34 year old teacher, dad of two little kids, i really need to be cool.
since i have an ibook, to enter a new network, even if you use dhcp, you have to add it in the network preferences, and you have to tell it to use ldap, etc. most publc wifi's go like this: one, you have to get your mac address add to the database, two, you set it up to use dhcp (but do not configure any ldap, etc., since you're not authenticating against anything, and have no technical shared resources) then you get your IP address, and you go from there. besides, if this is the only os x exploit, then public wifi networks are a great advert for macs. (as if being the coolest dude in the coffee house with the mac laptop wasn't going to sell them!!)
really, from apples docs, you have to have a malicious dhcp server on your subnet. of course, someone could bring a rogue box into work, but this isn't on par with ms exploits. wouldn't a simple mac address filter at the switch level take care of all this. yeah, you could instal dhcpd on your authorized client, but this should also be a fairly easy thing to detect. i think apple is right, it's a configuration level solution.
So having a legitimate company support you over an obscure horde of sweaty hackers who just tells you to RTFM does not count as a reason?
no, you hire the programmers and since you have the code you have complete control over the OS. that is what open source is all about. i for one would rather have the company that installs the OS in my car actually know WTF is going on with it. i'd prefer something like that not be out the hands of the manufacturer. but hey, that's just me.
clearly this is the work of a DX fan. (wwf reference)
when i read interviews with microsoft tech people, they always seem to come across as real technophiles, people concerned with the bits and bytes, if you will. somewhere along the way, it seems, marketing and finance must enter the coding cubicles and say something. it almost sorta reminds of the russian military. for every division (or whatever), there was a political officer. it seems there must be the equivalent in microsoft development departments. can't one of them just say no, we're going to do things the right way. it seems the fish is rotten from the top. really sad if you think about it.
a few years ago, i purchased a p120/16mb ram acer for abotu $1500. it wasn't top of the line at the time either. now, i can get a far more comparatively powerful box for half that. so yes, the actual dollar amount has dropped.
technology is getting faster and better and cheaper. damn. who'da thunk it.
actually it's not a tough choice. neither is good. however, one, to "provide" things, they must take from you and me. and thy ultimately have to work with the very same corporations. look at france. try opening a small business. you can't. sure, you have okay health care, etc., but you have no chance at success. and you get what the government gives you. and you really think they're better? a few months ago, 12,000 die from heat. you think that would happen in the US? never. in fact, if something ever came remotely as close, people would be in a world of shit. what happened to the beaurocrats in france? nothing.
damn, 300,000 desktops, 4200 servers. holy crap, they hvae to pay a ton in license fees. i wonder if they have looked to open source alternatives. well, maybe they bought software assurance.