But I don't get excited when I hear that yet another company is using Linux. Why don't I get excited? Well, I guess it's because I'm assuming that it's all related to the companies bottom line and not a love for Linux or a hate for all things coming from Redmond, WA.
Dreamworks wants to make a profit. The larger the profit they can make, the happier everyone is. One way to increase your profits is to reduce your costs. Simple math right? So how do you reduce the cost of your software? You switch to open source of course.
Just because it's a large company and they chose to use open source software isn't anything special in my book. It's the logical choice for those in the know. But then again I guess it's nice to hear about Linux's ever-increasing acceptance.
I'm a creationist. I also believe in evolution. Yes you can have both. I believe that God created the Heavens, Earth, and everything else. Life then evolved into what it is now. There is evidence of evolution all around us but there is no concrete evidence that proves or disproves creation.
Yes I know that AIDS is a virus and not a bacteria but there have been cases of other things becoming airborne such as certain strains of Ebola. My fear is that somehow AIDS will become airborne.
I think the main problem with infections and diseases becoming more resistant to treatment lies partly in a lot of people failing to use the medicine for the required amount of time. I had a skin fungus that kept coming back because everytime I cound't see it anymore, I would quit spraying the medicine on it. After a few times of this, the medicine was no longer effective and I had to get some much stronger (and much more costly) medicine to combat the problem. Using antibiotics for a short while until the problem is apparently gone and then stopping, may allow whatever it is that is being treated to adapt to the treatments. Then it gets spread to someone else and the process repeats itself until eventually, we have no way to stop even common ailments.
I have one on each cpu (dual cpu's), one on the memory, two on the power supply, one on the gfx card, two on the back of the case and two on the front of the case (one at the bottom and one in front of the hard drives). For some reason I was thinking there was only 6.
And yea it's kinda loud but the fans are all pretty high quality so it's not that bad. It's louder now because I have the cases open but even with the cases closed it's never anywhere near where it should be. The saddest part is that I was just looking at some hard drive coolers and I'm going to order a pair of those for each machine so that will add 4 more fans in each. I also plan to add one or two fans to the top of the case since heat rises.
I know that water cooling exists for computers but what about refrigeration? The freezer in my kitchen stays at -10f (unless you leave the door open for too long)... what is the reason that this technology has not been used to cool computers? I know it's not much quieter than what I'm using now but it would keep the computer cooler than it is... and it would be cool to see the window all frosty... until the moisture shorted something out... so maybe that's not such a good idea.
I have large cases and 6 fans in each just to make sure that nothing overheats. One fan blows air over the hard drives to ensure that they don't overheat and I have them spaced out a bit. I had another machine that had two hard drives almost touching each other and they would get very hot and the computer would start acting very funny. I seperated the two drives and the problems went away.
With 6 fans in each of two computers, my office sounds like an airport but my boxes stay cool. I also have one side from each tower propped up against the wall... not for extra cooling but just because I'm always changing stuff around.. I got tired of having to open the case everytime so I just left them off.
I have a pair of maxtor drives in each. They are 40 gig drives and I've had no problems with them. They are only about 9 months old though...
It doesn't look too bad... but the two main computers make it sound like a freakin airport in here. I wish I had a digital camera to take a pic. I'll try to summarize though.
Two desks. The main one has my tower sitting next to it with a 19" monitor on top. On top of the monitor is my Ximian monkey.. next to the monitor on either side are speakers. A sub sits under the desk. Phone, printer and a pair of lamps also take up space on the desk.. oh, keyboard, optical mouse and calculator as well as too many papers and other shit are on the desk. Next to this desk is another desk with pretty much the same setup. That tower is black, mine is blue. Next to that desk (that's my lady's desk) is a third desk that has been converted into a bookshelf. Bunch of programming/tech books sit on that. Then the rest of the room is occupied by various parts that I haven't found a use for yet. Several zip drives, cd-rom drives, a couple of dvd drives, sound cards, modems, God knows what else... yea maybe I should clean up this dump.
This is depressing... I think I show go get some food and quit thinking about what a freakin pig pen my office is.
Wasn't Einstien home schooled/self taught? It's my understanding that he was kicked out of school and was home schooled by his mother after that. Maybe he wasn't very social in his later years but you have to hand it to the guy, he's most intelligent/gifted person I've ever heard of.
Secondly, I think in todays society social skills aren't nearly as important as they used to be. I'm not a very social person yet I'm doing just fine because I found a life that worked well for me. I'm a self-employed programmer and I work from home. During the day I'm completely by myself and I hang out with friends after work. I deal with clients over the phone and online and have never met any of my clients in person. This works great for me. If I was in a different line of work, say maybe a used car salesman, then obviously I would need to be much more outgoing.
I would also like to point out that you don't need to limit yourself to just high school courses. A lot of college level courses will also count for high school credit, so taking online college courses may open up a lot of options.
But what about those of us who just drop in once in a while? Slashdot serves a great purpose. It routinely has stories about stuff that interests me. It's not the only site I frequent, but it's the only one that has the ability to crush a site (albeit for a short amount of time) and therefore I think there are several options that could and should be looked at.
I think some sort of Slashdot cache would greatly improve Slashdot in terms of usefulness. As someone pointed out in a post above, the main thing stoping this is the money for the extra bandwidth a cache would require. I think having the cache only for those who subscribe to the service solves that problem. If you use the bandwidth, you need to pay for it. Those who don't mind waiting for a slow site, or waiting a few hours to read the article don't have to pay.
Maybe that would be an idea for a future poll. List a few options to solve this problem and allow the Slashdot community to vote on what option they would prefer. If there is sufficient interest in a pay-for-cache approach, maybe that could be implemented.
And I do apologize for this being off-topic but seeing as how I can get to the article to read it before posting anything on-topic, I figured I would comment on this.
In the beginning we could take down servers with a mere few clicks.
But that wasn't good enough. We didn't want to just crash the servers, we wanted to truly stop anyone from viewing the data so next we attacked the cache.
I'm going to laugh my ass off the day they come knocking at my door. Yes I have a shitload of mp3's on my computer and yes I only listen to mp3's and yes I burn them to cd so that I can play them in my car... but yes, I have 7 cd binders sitting on my shelf... err wait, 6 on my shelf, one of the floor (damn cat).. that contain all of the cd's that I own and have ripped to mp3.
Give me the option to legally download the music that I want at a fair price and I'll do so. I always thought that to be good at what you do, you need to do what the customer wants, not force what you want to do on the customer. I don't care to buy a piece of plastic that is just going to take up more space on my shelf and hurt the environment a bit more. Why can't they let me download what I want and charge me a fair price for each song? Yea I know that there are a couple services out there that do this but they are not very convenient, cost as much (in most cases) as buying a regular cd, and I still have to come home and rip the damn things.
Ah, my mistake. The green that is seen by the user has nothing to do with the underlying technology. It's still infrared but the what the user sees is displayed in green because I'm guessing that human eyes can adjust better between darkness and green than darkness and red? Does that make any sense?
This past summer at one of the local fairs the National Guard had an outdoor area where you could look at some of their equipment and one of the things they were letting people try was night vision in a tent and the display was in green. I've also heard the term infragreen a few times (don't remember where) so I wrongly assumed that the newer night vision units used an apparently non-existent technology.
My bad. The "your a stupid idiot" beatings may commence now.
What aroused my curiosity is that I know the military switched from using infrared technology to infragreen for night vision because it worked much better. I don't know the specifics on why it worked better. Maybe a green led would work better than a red one if they both have the same brightness. I don't care much for green, and would deffinitely go with blue given a choice, but only if the performance is equal.
I have several itellimice that I can play around with. Maybe I'll have to drop by Radio Shack later and pick up some various colors and see which ones perform better. How best should I determine the results of each color? Just my own opinion of which responds better or is there some (easy) scientific way to test the performance of a mouse?
Back when optical mice were still on the drawing board, was any testing done to determine which color offered the best performance or was red simply chosen because the creator(s) thought it looked cool?
Personally I would rather have blue to match the blue case on my computer but the mouse that I have isn't all that responsive as it is and if it gets any worse, it wouldn't be usable.
Maybe one of the mod sites could do a test to see which colors offer the best performance and which colors should be avoided.
is the fact that Oracle won't allow benchmarks to be published without their written consent, and of course your not going to get their consent unless your benchmark shows them in a favorable light.
MySQL on the other hand is much more open. Maybe that's because they are faster in most situations, or maybe it's because they really do have a better philosophy.
If you look at what happened between MySQL and NuSphere, MySQL was never out to crucify anyone. They don't verbally bash anyone or toot their own horn. Look at what they say on their website about their own benchmarks and how they repeatedly point out that the competing products they have tested were not completely optimized due to their lack of knowledge regarding optimizations for those products.
I think MySQL will eventually be the dominant database for two reasons:
It's easier/faster
It cots a lot less than Oracle
And to top it all off, they are a company that we can feel good about supporting. I have a feeling that if they were to become as large as MS, they would never try anything dirty to gain greater market share or to hold on to what they already have. I think a few other companies could do well to learn by the example MySQL has given us. You don't have to play dirty to get ahead.
MySQL AB is pleased to announce that it has settled its lawsuit with
Progress Software Corporation and NuSphere Corporation. For more
information, see the joint press release at
I belive that you are mistaken. Is it not Second Audio Program rather than Spanish Audio Program? It's available is other areas of the world so I doubt very much that it would stand for Spanish.
I'm wondering if the economy has anything to do with this. It seems that when the economy is booming, we have fewer idiots running loose, or maybe we simply don't here about them as much. I guess I don't understand when these insane lawsuits became so common. We now seem to live in a society where we can sue for damn near anything and get pretty rich, pretty quick.
For example, remember the woman who spilled some hot coffee on herself at a Mickey D's? If I had done that, I wouldn't have told anyone about it at all. I wouldn't want to publicize the fact that I had done something stupid. It would have never crossed my mind that all I needed to do was pick up a phone, call up a lawyer and get rich.
1. Do something stupid.
2. Call a lawyer.
3. ???
4. Profit
IIRC, it seems that there was a bit of a lull for a while while the stock market was shooting up and everyone (or most everyone) was profiting... now that the bubble burst and more and more people are out of work, and more people are upon hard times, that the idiot lawsuits are going to start happening a lot more.
But maybe I was just too busy there for a while to pay any attention to the headlines... maybe the idiot lawsuits were happening all along.
I was thinking more along the lines of refocusing our effort. I agree with you that simply saying fuck it would be bad in the end but cutting our losses by ending the court battles and spending that same energy through other channels could prove much more effective.
How much has been spent to date on this by the various government entities that have been involved and more importantly, how much more will be spent over the next 5 years? If the money that will be spent over the next 5 years were to be instead redirected to something like the Linux Kernel project or some other worthy project, would we not in the end be better off?
I strongly beleive that Linux can and will be the death of the desktop supremacy held by the Windows OS.
You missed my point. If something would have been done early on, we wouldn't be sitting here several years later talking about this. The fact of the matter is the government waited too long before intervening and I feel that at this point, what they are trying to do is a lost cause.
I'm simply saying that it's time to cut our losses and move on. Lets spend those tax dollars on improving Linux and other Free Software and cut our ties to MS that way.
There is a big difference between wanting to rip and burn your cd collection and what MS is doing to it's competition.
Groups are actively lobbying to get laws passed that reduce or eliminate our rights as to what we can do with music once we have purchased it. That is much different than allowing MS to continue it's practices while other superior products mature enough to dominate the market.
Sure it would be nice if something could be done now, but what do you suggest? It seems to me that the leading opinion is to take a hatchet to the bastards and cut MS into either two or three companies. And then what? Will splitting Windows from the herd make a difference? Of course not. The new Windows company can still decide to only realease intimate details of how their OS works to New Company #1 and New Company #1 will still have a distinct advantage and will only write New Company #1 Word 2010 for Windows 2010.
The only solution as far as I can see is to contribute to the products that I like and use as well as writing members of Congress as well as the DOJ and telling them that I would prefer if my tax dollars were spent on items that can be benneficial to the nation as a whole.
If I believed that anything positive could ever come out of all of this, I would feel differently about the matter but since this has been going on for years, and not a damn thing has come of it yet, I'm assuming that nothing ever will. If one half of the energy that has went into trying to defeat MS from a legal standpoint had went into trying to make Linux mature faster, we would be a lot farther along than we are.
Let us all be realistic for a moment. Will anything the Government does, change anything in the bigger picture for MS? I think not. If something was going to happen, it would have already happened. MS has too much power where it counts.
And what would really happen if MS was broken into multiple companies? Would we be any better off? I think eventually superior products and services will be widely adopted and MS will lose it's stranglehold on the industry. But until that happens, I think the government is simply wasting a lot of our tax dollars that could be better spent on other things.
Just wanted to comment on your sig... I had never heard fo G4TV before but after taking a look on the site, I found out that I get that channel... just watched it for a few minutes and got to see a lot of lovely booth babes from E3. Brightened my day a bit! Thanks!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Dreamworks wants to make a profit. The larger the profit they can make, the happier everyone is. One way to increase your profits is to reduce your costs. Simple math right? So how do you reduce the cost of your software? You switch to open source of course.
Just because it's a large company and they chose to use open source software isn't anything special in my book. It's the logical choice for those in the know. But then again I guess it's nice to hear about Linux's ever-increasing acceptance.
This isn't going to start a flame war isn't it?
I think the main problem with infections and diseases becoming more resistant to treatment lies partly in a lot of people failing to use the medicine for the required amount of time. I had a skin fungus that kept coming back because everytime I cound't see it anymore, I would quit spraying the medicine on it. After a few times of this, the medicine was no longer effective and I had to get some much stronger (and much more costly) medicine to combat the problem. Using antibiotics for a short while until the problem is apparently gone and then stopping, may allow whatever it is that is being treated to adapt to the treatments. Then it gets spread to someone else and the process repeats itself until eventually, we have no way to stop even common ailments.
And yea it's kinda loud but the fans are all pretty high quality so it's not that bad. It's louder now because I have the cases open but even with the cases closed it's never anywhere near where it should be. The saddest part is that I was just looking at some hard drive coolers and I'm going to order a pair of those for each machine so that will add 4 more fans in each. I also plan to add one or two fans to the top of the case since heat rises.
I know that water cooling exists for computers but what about refrigeration? The freezer in my kitchen stays at -10f (unless you leave the door open for too long)... what is the reason that this technology has not been used to cool computers? I know it's not much quieter than what I'm using now but it would keep the computer cooler than it is... and it would be cool to see the window all frosty... until the moisture shorted something out... so maybe that's not such a good idea.
With 6 fans in each of two computers, my office sounds like an airport but my boxes stay cool. I also have one side from each tower propped up against the wall... not for extra cooling but just because I'm always changing stuff around.. I got tired of having to open the case everytime so I just left them off.
I have a pair of maxtor drives in each. They are 40 gig drives and I've had no problems with them. They are only about 9 months old though...
Two desks. The main one has my tower sitting next to it with a 19" monitor on top. On top of the monitor is my Ximian monkey.. next to the monitor on either side are speakers. A sub sits under the desk. Phone, printer and a pair of lamps also take up space on the desk.. oh, keyboard, optical mouse and calculator as well as too many papers and other shit are on the desk. Next to this desk is another desk with pretty much the same setup. That tower is black, mine is blue. Next to that desk (that's my lady's desk) is a third desk that has been converted into a bookshelf. Bunch of programming/tech books sit on that. Then the rest of the room is occupied by various parts that I haven't found a use for yet. Several zip drives, cd-rom drives, a couple of dvd drives, sound cards, modems, God knows what else... yea maybe I should clean up this dump.
This is depressing... I think I show go get some food and quit thinking about what a freakin pig pen my office is.
I really showed my intelligence. I spelled Einstein incorrectly. Sheesh.
Secondly, I think in todays society social skills aren't nearly as important as they used to be. I'm not a very social person yet I'm doing just fine because I found a life that worked well for me. I'm a self-employed programmer and I work from home. During the day I'm completely by myself and I hang out with friends after work. I deal with clients over the phone and online and have never met any of my clients in person. This works great for me. If I was in a different line of work, say maybe a used car salesman, then obviously I would need to be much more outgoing.
I would also like to point out that you don't need to limit yourself to just high school courses. A lot of college level courses will also count for high school credit, so taking online college courses may open up a lot of options.
I think some sort of Slashdot cache would greatly improve Slashdot in terms of usefulness. As someone pointed out in a post above, the main thing stoping this is the money for the extra bandwidth a cache would require. I think having the cache only for those who subscribe to the service solves that problem. If you use the bandwidth, you need to pay for it. Those who don't mind waiting for a slow site, or waiting a few hours to read the article don't have to pay.
Maybe that would be an idea for a future poll. List a few options to solve this problem and allow the Slashdot community to vote on what option they would prefer. If there is sufficient interest in a pay-for-cache approach, maybe that could be implemented.
And I do apologize for this being off-topic but seeing as how I can get to the article to read it before posting anything on-topic, I figured I would comment on this.
In the beginning we could take down servers with a mere few clicks.
But that wasn't good enough. We didn't want to just crash the servers, we wanted to truly stop anyone from viewing the data so next we attacked the cache.
Now we:
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:i4tXkfSa-3sC: www.socallinuxexpo.com/presentations.php+&hl=en&lr =lang_en&ie=UTF-8
It's coming up real slow for me though... still hasn't loaded so I don't know if it will help anyone or not.
But it's worth a try.
Give me the option to legally download the music that I want at a fair price and I'll do so. I always thought that to be good at what you do, you need to do what the customer wants, not force what you want to do on the customer. I don't care to buy a piece of plastic that is just going to take up more space on my shelf and hurt the environment a bit more. Why can't they let me download what I want and charge me a fair price for each song? Yea I know that there are a couple services out there that do this but they are not very convenient, cost as much (in most cases) as buying a regular cd, and I still have to come home and rip the damn things.
Bastards. All of them... well most anyway.
This past summer at one of the local fairs the National Guard had an outdoor area where you could look at some of their equipment and one of the things they were letting people try was night vision in a tent and the display was in green. I've also heard the term infragreen a few times (don't remember where) so I wrongly assumed that the newer night vision units used an apparently non-existent technology.
My bad. The "your a stupid idiot" beatings may commence now.
I have several itellimice that I can play around with. Maybe I'll have to drop by Radio Shack later and pick up some various colors and see which ones perform better. How best should I determine the results of each color? Just my own opinion of which responds better or is there some (easy) scientific way to test the performance of a mouse?
Personally I would rather have blue to match the blue case on my computer but the mouse that I have isn't all that responsive as it is and if it gets any worse, it wouldn't be usable.
Maybe one of the mod sites could do a test to see which colors offer the best performance and which colors should be avoided.
MySQL on the other hand is much more open. Maybe that's because they are faster in most situations, or maybe it's because they really do have a better philosophy.
If you look at what happened between MySQL and NuSphere, MySQL was never out to crucify anyone. They don't verbally bash anyone or toot their own horn. Look at what they say on their website about their own benchmarks and how they repeatedly point out that the competing products they have tested were not completely optimized due to their lack of knowledge regarding optimizations for those products.
I think MySQL will eventually be the dominant database for two reasons:
- It's easier/faster
- It cots a lot less than Oracle
And to top it all off, they are a company that we can feel good about supporting. I have a feeling that if they were to become as large as MS, they would never try anything dirty to gain greater market share or to hold on to what they already have. I think a few other companies could do well to learn by the example MySQL has given us. You don't have to play dirty to get ahead.MySQL AB is pleased to announce that it has settled its lawsuit with Progress Software Corporation and NuSphere Corporation. For more information, see the joint press release at
http://www.mysql.com/press/release_2002_14.html
Regards, Monty
Yes, three times as many annoying popups while trying to find some decent pr0n! Just what I've been wanting. Thanks for the suggestion!!!
I belive that you are mistaken. Is it not Second Audio Program rather than Spanish Audio Program? It's available is other areas of the world so I doubt very much that it would stand for Spanish.
For example, remember the woman who spilled some hot coffee on herself at a Mickey D's? If I had done that, I wouldn't have told anyone about it at all. I wouldn't want to publicize the fact that I had done something stupid. It would have never crossed my mind that all I needed to do was pick up a phone, call up a lawyer and get rich.
1. Do something stupid.
2. Call a lawyer.
3. ???
4. Profit
IIRC, it seems that there was a bit of a lull for a while while the stock market was shooting up and everyone (or most everyone) was profiting... now that the bubble burst and more and more people are out of work, and more people are upon hard times, that the idiot lawsuits are going to start happening a lot more.
But maybe I was just too busy there for a while to pay any attention to the headlines... maybe the idiot lawsuits were happening all along.
How much has been spent to date on this by the various government entities that have been involved and more importantly, how much more will be spent over the next 5 years? If the money that will be spent over the next 5 years were to be instead redirected to something like the Linux Kernel project or some other worthy project, would we not in the end be better off?
I strongly beleive that Linux can and will be the death of the desktop supremacy held by the Windows OS.
I'm simply saying that it's time to cut our losses and move on. Lets spend those tax dollars on improving Linux and other Free Software and cut our ties to MS that way.
Groups are actively lobbying to get laws passed that reduce or eliminate our rights as to what we can do with music once we have purchased it. That is much different than allowing MS to continue it's practices while other superior products mature enough to dominate the market.
Sure it would be nice if something could be done now, but what do you suggest? It seems to me that the leading opinion is to take a hatchet to the bastards and cut MS into either two or three companies. And then what? Will splitting Windows from the herd make a difference? Of course not. The new Windows company can still decide to only realease intimate details of how their OS works to New Company #1 and New Company #1 will still have a distinct advantage and will only write New Company #1 Word 2010 for Windows 2010.
The only solution as far as I can see is to contribute to the products that I like and use as well as writing members of Congress as well as the DOJ and telling them that I would prefer if my tax dollars were spent on items that can be benneficial to the nation as a whole.
If I believed that anything positive could ever come out of all of this, I would feel differently about the matter but since this has been going on for years, and not a damn thing has come of it yet, I'm assuming that nothing ever will. If one half of the energy that has went into trying to defeat MS from a legal standpoint had went into trying to make Linux mature faster, we would be a lot farther along than we are.
But that's just my $.02
Let us all be realistic for a moment. Will anything the Government does, change anything in the bigger picture for MS? I think not. If something was going to happen, it would have already happened. MS has too much power where it counts. And what would really happen if MS was broken into multiple companies? Would we be any better off? I think eventually superior products and services will be widely adopted and MS will lose it's stranglehold on the industry. But until that happens, I think the government is simply wasting a lot of our tax dollars that could be better spent on other things.
Just wanted to comment on your sig... I had never heard fo G4TV before but after taking a look on the site, I found out that I get that channel... just watched it for a few minutes and got to see a lot of lovely booth babes from E3.
Brightened my day a bit! Thanks!!!