I once had to reverse engeneer the authentication software of a firewall just because I needed some Linux machines to connect to the internet (so they could test if the web was available).
I was in IT by that time, and even I didn't think it was urgent to get a more Linux friendly firewall. It simply didn't make business sense.
So, instead of $1000, you must spend $3000 and get the same result in one hour that we needed 10 years and several millions to get at the 90's... I see, that is useless.
Had the GP bet on that, he'd be destroyed by short term market manipulation that several entities, including your federal government, make several times a week, like almost everybody that betted against WallStreet.
"I'd be more comfortable with making it necessary on request to be photographed or videotaped (along with your ID) by the police officer if he suspects you of anything (not just photography, but taking odd notes or sketches of a floorplan)."
And ruin a perfect oportunity to arrest a terrorist. If the police suspects somebody, they should investigate this person until they know what he is up to, anyway, interacting with hin in any way will only change his plans and make him more cautionous. If the police don't suspect somebody, they should leave him alone.
Anyway, asking somebody to delete his pictures is foolish, arrogant and, if I understand your laws well, criminal.
Recessions are when people get fired for buying IBM. Not directly, but because they reduce the company competitiveness, and the result goes back into lay-offs.
"Now I actually see a stagnation of Open Source... Those that did, did, those that didn't wont..."
Or, maybe, those that didn't will go bankrupt, altough I don't expect so many people to go without at least a fight. IT is a major cost of business today (and a major - maybe the biggest - source of savings), one can't ignore major costs during a recession and expect to stay in bussiness. Now, you seem to agree that life-cycle costs of FOSS are lower than the alternative, since your focus is at the migration costs.
Anyway, a more "recession-style" migration would be giving people some very simple training and expecting them to adapt to the new software otherwise they'll be fired. That isn't nice, but lots of people would be fired anyway, better choose the readblocks than the adaptable ones.
"By the way, don't listen to the pundits that tell you the recession will last years. Those same pundits four months ago were saying life is great. They don't have a clue, they just echo the popular opinion of the time."
I don't know what pundits are you listening to, but the ones I listen were predicting that crisis by 2006. It just seemed less intense by that time, but that isn't really their fault, since from the data available by then, one couldn't say the crisis would be so harsh (we took the worst possible path, or something very near it).
Jacking SSL wasn't sucessful exactly because it was strong, so there was no known vector to attack it. Since malware couldn't attack SSL, they refrained to less efficient tatics, like relying on the ignorance of the user.
Now, that SSL is broken, it is almost certain that they will start to use the more efficient attacks, that directly target SSL.
The Brazilian Government is nearly MS only. Also the news that come here (may be wrong) imply that governments over the world are huge customers of Microsoft. Your case seems to be an exception.
Your comments are perfectly valid, but you should take in mind that the post you quote was written on another time, a time when Linux didn't excell supporting any kind of hardware you can think of and when the community wasn't mature enough to understand what should go to a CLI and what should go to a GUI (ok, we aren't still that mature, but used to favor CLI, now we favor GUI).
"these are entirely sufficient for "ordinary" users who just want to surf the web, read email, look at some photos, chat, write a term paper for school,"
play simple games, keep track of finance, create a home made DVD, simulate the behaviour of electrons around a molecule, design a mechanical machine, electronic circuit or a microchip (altough civil engineering CAD is lacking), run complicated simulations on economy and trow the world into another recession, create a complete 3D movie... It is quite hard to find a ninche that most Linux repositories don't aready fill.
"Their virtualization software... going to eat VMWare's lunch."
Only if they stop running it on top of Windows. There is no faster way to kill a blade than loading it with a 2GB hungry OS. You could run several usefull virtual machines on that memory.
Well, my last employer use it. I really doubt small and medium offices can afford to use SQL databases, they are expensive and ineficient, everybody but big business and govenment would be bankrupt quite fast if relied on such thing. Now, did I say govenment? That is an ideal market for Microsoft...
Funny, I have a "Titan" mp3 player. Never heard about that brand before, and couldn't tell it without looking... But it never locked on me. Way more reliable that old tape and disk players.
Well, LEDs are dimmable, at least if you just plug them in series instead of creating some complicated stabilized power supply. LEDs are even easier to dim than incandescent light, since they operate at constant voltage you can put a variable resistance (you only need a potenciometer) on series with them and still dissipate a very small amount of power, but dimmers built for incandescent light won't work (those are active circuits that chop the AC tension, LEDs won't work on reduced tensions).
There is also no theoretical reason that prohibits one from dimming fluorescent lamps (they could work with a simple potenciometer, like LEDs - again, dimmers for incandescent lamps have no chance of working), the problem is a practical one. The power supply you have at home isn't adequate for fluorescent lamps, so they need complicated stabilized power supplies to work. Those circuits were designed with some expectations about where they are plugged, and one of those expectations is that there is negligible resistance in series with them.
There are CFLs of different quality, and I've never seen a chinese brand that is consistently good (altought some of the lamps may be good). If, as some previous comments and the article imply, you buy most of your lamps from China, you probably won't see any advantaje on using them, if my experience is correct, they do nearly break even on durabiity/cost.
Now, good quality CFL last a long time, one of the good ones I brought had a manufacturing defect, but I never saw any other fail. Some of the problems people say do, indeed, apply: they don't have te same colors as incandescent - that is up to an architect to decide if is good or bad; they are hard to use outside, most of the time, they are just not reliable; they hve problems with varying voltage; they don't dim well. In short, they are good for most applications, but bad for lots of specialized ones.
To the hell with backward compatibility. Browsers should already have stoped accepting MD5 signatures by 2004. It was broken by that time, the fact that there was no known exploit did not make it any less bad. By that time people aready used alternatives and tought it would be broken soon, so why did CAs wait?
I hope that, now, the main browsers stop accepting it, and with all that noise about the way Firefox handles certificates, I hope it moves soon. Too bad we have IE6 that probably won't receive any kind of update.
Reliability decreases with pow(number of atoms per transistor, 2/3), now when you apply some kind of error correcting, it increases with exp(number of transistors). If you maintain the chip size (that is, the number of atoms is constant), and the functionality, reliability will just increase with smaler transistors.
You get reduced reliability only if you want those smaler transistors to do more than the big ones, and even then, when you want them to do a LOT more.
Almost everybody here loves MS hardware, mostly because it is good, or at least, used to be before they started having driver issues on Windows. But that kind of problem doesn't affect Linux users...
Ok, let me protest here too. They may be useless for windows users that can't configure their shortcuts (altought, they are good to open explorer), but at Linux they are very usefull. No application rely on it, that means that you can appropriate every windows key combination without inteference.
Slashdot Mirror
Try to open regedit someday.
Anyway, "easy to use" is jargon to "works like Windows" nowadays. So, obviously, Windows is "easy to use", you can't contest that.
Sometimes they are semimetals.
Well, I don't.
I once had to reverse engeneer the authentication software of a firewall just because I needed some Linux machines to connect to the internet (so they could test if the web was available).
I was in IT by that time, and even I didn't think it was urgent to get a more Linux friendly firewall. It simply didn't make business sense.
So, instead of $1000, you must spend $3000 and get the same result in one hour that we needed 10 years and several millions to get at the 90's... I see, that is useless.
Probability of something going wrong: 1.0
Had the GP bet on that, he'd be destroyed by short term market manipulation that several entities, including your federal government, make several times a week, like almost everybody that betted against WallStreet.
And ruin a perfect oportunity to arrest a terrorist. If the police suspects somebody, they should investigate this person until they know what he is up to, anyway, interacting with hin in any way will only change his plans and make him more cautionous. If the police don't suspect somebody, they should leave him alone.
Anyway, asking somebody to delete his pictures is foolish, arrogant and, if I understand your laws well, criminal.
Recessions are when people get fired for buying IBM. Not directly, but because they reduce the company competitiveness, and the result goes back into lay-offs.
Slashdot.
Or, maybe, those that didn't will go bankrupt, altough I don't expect so many people to go without at least a fight. IT is a major cost of business today (and a major - maybe the biggest - source of savings), one can't ignore major costs during a recession and expect to stay in bussiness. Now, you seem to agree that life-cycle costs of FOSS are lower than the alternative, since your focus is at the migration costs.
Anyway, a more "recession-style" migration would be giving people some very simple training and expecting them to adapt to the new software otherwise they'll be fired. That isn't nice, but lots of people would be fired anyway, better choose the readblocks than the adaptable ones.
I don't know what pundits are you listening to, but the ones I listen were predicting that crisis by 2006. It just seemed less intense by that time, but that isn't really their fault, since from the data available by then, one couldn't say the crisis would be so harsh (we took the worst possible path, or something very near it).
Jacking SSL wasn't sucessful exactly because it was strong, so there was no known vector to attack it. Since malware couldn't attack SSL, they refrained to less efficient tatics, like relying on the ignorance of the user.
Now, that SSL is broken, it is almost certain that they will start to use the more efficient attacks, that directly target SSL.
The Brazilian Government is nearly MS only. Also the news that come here (may be wrong) imply that governments over the world are huge customers of Microsoft. Your case seems to be an exception.
Your comments are perfectly valid, but you should take in mind that the post you quote was written on another time, a time when Linux didn't excell supporting any kind of hardware you can think of and when the community wasn't mature enough to understand what should go to a CLI and what should go to a GUI (ok, we aren't still that mature, but used to favor CLI, now we favor GUI).
Ok, you are not very ambitious...
"these are entirely sufficient for "ordinary" users who just want to surf the web, read email, look at some photos, chat, write a term paper for school,"
play simple games, keep track of finance, create a home made DVD, simulate the behaviour of electrons around a molecule, design a mechanical machine, electronic circuit or a microchip (altough civil engineering CAD is lacking), run complicated simulations on economy and trow the world into another recession, create a complete 3D movie... It is quite hard to find a ninche that most Linux repositories don't aready fill.
Only if they stop running it on top of Windows. There is no faster way to kill a blade than loading it with a 2GB hungry OS. You could run several usefull virtual machines on that memory.
Well, my last employer use it. I really doubt small and medium offices can afford to use SQL databases, they are expensive and ineficient, everybody but big business and govenment would be bankrupt quite fast if relied on such thing. Now, did I say govenment? That is an ideal market for Microsoft...
Funny, I have a "Titan" mp3 player. Never heard about that brand before, and couldn't tell it without looking... But it never locked on me. Way more reliable that old tape and disk players.
Oh, no. They rent Windows by the year, not the hour.
Well, LEDs are dimmable, at least if you just plug them in series instead of creating some complicated stabilized power supply. LEDs are even easier to dim than incandescent light, since they operate at constant voltage you can put a variable resistance (you only need a potenciometer) on series with them and still dissipate a very small amount of power, but dimmers built for incandescent light won't work (those are active circuits that chop the AC tension, LEDs won't work on reduced tensions).
There is also no theoretical reason that prohibits one from dimming fluorescent lamps (they could work with a simple potenciometer, like LEDs - again, dimmers for incandescent lamps have no chance of working), the problem is a practical one. The power supply you have at home isn't adequate for fluorescent lamps, so they need complicated stabilized power supplies to work. Those circuits were designed with some expectations about where they are plugged, and one of those expectations is that there is negligible resistance in series with them.
There are CFLs of different quality, and I've never seen a chinese brand that is consistently good (altought some of the lamps may be good). If, as some previous comments and the article imply, you buy most of your lamps from China, you probably won't see any advantaje on using them, if my experience is correct, they do nearly break even on durabiity/cost.
Now, good quality CFL last a long time, one of the good ones I brought had a manufacturing defect, but I never saw any other fail. Some of the problems people say do, indeed, apply: they don't have te same colors as incandescent - that is up to an architect to decide if is good or bad; they are hard to use outside, most of the time, they are just not reliable; they hve problems with varying voltage; they don't dim well. In short, they are good for most applications, but bad for lots of specialized ones.
To the hell with backward compatibility. Browsers should already have stoped accepting MD5 signatures by 2004. It was broken by that time, the fact that there was no known exploit did not make it any less bad. By that time people aready used alternatives and tought it would be broken soon, so why did CAs wait?
I hope that, now, the main browsers stop accepting it, and with all that noise about the way Firefox handles certificates, I hope it moves soon. Too bad we have IE6 that probably won't receive any kind of update.
Reliability decreases with pow(number of atoms per transistor, 2/3), now when you apply some kind of error correcting, it increases with exp(number of transistors). If you maintain the chip size (that is, the number of atoms is constant), and the functionality, reliability will just increase with smaler transistors.
You get reduced reliability only if you want those smaler transistors to do more than the big ones, and even then, when you want them to do a LOT more.
Almost everybody here loves MS hardware, mostly because it is good, or at least, used to be before they started having driver issues on Windows. But that kind of problem doesn't affect Linux users...
Ok, let me protest here too. They may be useless for windows users that can't configure their shortcuts (altought, they are good to open explorer), but at Linux they are very usefull. No application rely on it, that means that you can appropriate every windows key combination without inteference.