For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light, but recent information has proved otherwise.
Electric bulbs don't emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers.
The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove that dark has mass and is heavier than light.
First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in. There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck dark than the ones in this room.
So with all things, Dark Suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot on a full Dark Sucker.
A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. One of the disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range.
There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can't handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.
Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem as the mass must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat and therefore it's not wise to touch an operating candle.
Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats at the top. The is why it is called light.
Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet. But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.
Next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is a Dark Sucker.
There's an SMC Barricade that does that. It uses an external modem though, which brings the price up a bit. I actually use this in the office right now as my main router, and the software isn't all that great. It will crash randomly, and requires a hard reboot (can't even ping it). It will work fine for a few months, but then it seems to crash about 4 times over a 7 day period, and then it will work for months again.
Otherwise a nice router, but I wouldn't recommend it for unattended site operation.
Corporations have intranets, but they may also have inter-networks with various vendors and customers -- these may not always be part of the Internet. So, as long as it is possible to have an internet that is not the Internet, the proper version should be capitalized.
I believe the proper 90's buzzword for these inter-networks is "extranet". So really, you can have an extranet that is not part of the internet, but there is only one internet, and the internet is really an extranet.
Now if you can excuse me, I need to go think outside the box and shift some paradigms to enhance my time utilization.
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may be capable of holding terabytes, or even petabytes, on a single platter. And it will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solid state storage as we know it. I doubt that hard drives will go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
I thought the comparison was pretty good. Floppies are still used by many people as a quick way to transport files back and forth from home (particularly by people that don't have Internet access at home). I generally don't put the drives in anymore, but theres a couple people in the office that specifically ask for them. The drives are dirt cheap, so it's not a big deal.
CRT's are still popular. Even the cheap LCDs are well over twice the cost of a CRT. If you're trying to do gaming or something that requires high refresh rates, you need a very good LCD and the costs start getting pretty high. I personally don't really like paying as much for the monitor as I do for the rest of the machine.
So I totally agree with the grandparent. Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT.
Yep, it'll be an alternative, that some people will use when they can afford it and/or require it. And like CRT's and floppies, many people will still use spinning drives when they don't feel like dropping a bunch of extra money on a fancy technology that doesn't really give them any huge benefit*.
* I'm talking about your typical desktop here, where the lifetime of the machine is a 3-4 years, you're using fans in the machine (so the missing noise of a drive is not a big deal), and the most system intensive task you do is boot up.
They should contact the US government and tell them they have 30 days to fix the spam problem before a nationwide block goes into place.
and what are the chance that Bush would take this as a terroist threat and use it as an excuse to go and bomb the shit out of the country that said it?
I could see a password of substantial length made of a phrase. Say, 64+ characters, changed every two weeks might be fine. Especially if you have a well-read workforce, which might enjoy making note of significant passages.
Impose this on your machine, then get back to us in two weeks with your thoughts.
The only way hackers can check passwords quickly enough to matter is if they manage to obtain access to the file that contains the checksums for the users' passwords. In Linux, at least, this is/etc/shadow, which can only be accessed by root. If a hacker has access to the files owned by root then you have much bigger problems than a hacker trying to guess at users' passwords.
This raises another good point, where if you're properly controlling the methods to access whatever it is you're protecting, you can cut off someone that's trying to brute force (ie, wrong password 3 times in a row). Then your length isn't going to matter as much.
You could also go farther, and 'silently' lock them out - no matter what happens, it won't accept the password. Meanwhile, your IDS flags a security event and someone can respond, perhaps while they're still connected.
You can type so much faster when you learn properly.
I'm not entirely sure about that. I can type fairly quickly, but I don't do "home row" touch-typing. When I took classes, the teacher used to get mad at me for that, and tell me I was doing it wrong.
I pretty much have my hands coming in at an angle, almost like I'm using a 'natural' keyboard.. I usually end up using all of my left hand, and on my right hand just my index and middle fingers for keys. My right ring finger presses keys like backspace and enter, and my pinky is entirely dedicated to the shift key. I can type probably 60wpm (fast enough, anyways), and I don't have to look at the keyboard at all.
Of course, the side effect of my typing style is I can't use a real natural keyboard at all (since my left hand is supposed to press keys that are on the right side of the keyboard) - I end up typing about 5 wpm probably.:) But at the same time, theres less of a strain on my wrists, so I get the comfort benefits (i guess) that a natural keyboard is supposed to give, without having to have a goofy looking keyboard.
And yet I can buy thousands upon thousands of CD's and/or DVD's for less than $50/each. Those other companies must be amzingly efficient compared to Sveasoft. And they're charging enough to make a profit too!
If you mass-produce CD's, they are very cheap. If you duplicate, say, 1000, you might pay something like $1/cd to get them with a jewel case and cover. Of course, 1000 copies of CD for source code is probably more than sveasoft is going to need/want. If you only duplicate a few, say, 100, you're probably going to be paying more like $3/CD.
I'm going on the assumption here that they aren't mass-producing any CDs, they are just burning them in-house as they are requested.
Yep. If they pay somebody $50 an hour to burn 1 CD, I say they need all the money we can give them
I didn't say anything about them paying somebody $50/hr to burn a CD, I said they charge customers that price. If you go to a store and get your computer serviced, they'll likely have a bench fee of $30-60/hr. The teenage tech thats servicing your system is probably only getting paid maybe $10/hr.
Now, if you have an employee that's normally doing work where they earn the company $50/hr, and are forced to make them burn CDs, why should you dump that profit and only charge $10 for a CD (minus media cost, minus employee wage, minus shipping, minus overhead (electricity, cost of equipment, furniture, etcetc))? You're probably in the hole at that point.
And why would you want to charge maybe $25 to cover it and just break even, when you would normally be making a profit if that employee was performing their regular job? Most businesses aren't in it to break even, they're in it to make a proft.
Now of course, my arguments don't take into account what is actually happening here - they are complying with the GPL to provide their modifications. Morally, should they be making a profit from distributing these CDs? I don't think so. I think they should even do it at a loss (well, actually, they should just provide it freely on their website). If that GPL'd software didn't exist to begin with, they either wouldn't have their product in the first place, or they'd spend a hell of a lot more than 10 minutes of employees wages developing the same thing.
It does say "reasonable cost", so it could be challeneged (likely by the EFF).
Sveasoft could probably justify $49 as being "reasonable". There is the cost of shipping and the media, of course, which isn't very much. But someone also has to burn it. They could very well be charging a normal hourly fee (say $50/hr) to have that person burn the CD. You could also factor in the cost of the cd burner itself (depreciated over x number of copies), or maybe a rental fee for using the burner. They could also being doing the same thing with a system dedicated to burning the CDs.
Although most people will think those claims are rediculus (and I'll admit, towards the end, they are;) ). But I think at the least it's reasonable to bill out the time someone spends doing it. After all, the more time someone spends burning a CD, the less time they spend programming or otherwise making money for the company -- why NOT bill it out?
Now, that all said, $100,000 would be a bit extreme. While proving $49 is "reasonable cost" with the above arguments might stand up in court, I think you'd have a hard time saying your hourly fee is $500,000 or that you really REALLY needed that Sun Fire server to handle the burning.
It's not cheap to sit on your patent. It costs $10000+ to get the patent in the first place. After that, patents have increasing maintenance fees due every 4 years ($910, $2090, $3220). If you don't pay, you lose your patent. The idea is that patents that have been forgotten about or aren't making money will expire sooner. (Of course, they should probably be much, much higher, like $5000, $25000, $125000, $625000, so that the fee tracks the value of the patent.)
The problem with using money for this is figuring out the fee. For a small business or individual inventory, $25000 is a lot of money, $625000 is unthinkable. For a large company like Microsoft, $625000 is nothing.
Increasing the fee just means cutting out the smaller players, which is what patents are supposed to prevent.
And users with big, heavily trained forearms? Hold your mouse up in the air for 30 minutes, then see how nice your arm feels. Then think about doing that all day long:)
Open Source folks need to go out there also and start publishing their cost ownership numbers, with real life examples.
By "Open Source folks" I assume you mean "companies that sell services centered around open source software"? Keep in mind that most of the developers and people writing OSS don't really care who uses it (though they certainly like when people do). They're not out to destroy Microsoft (well, not most of them, anyways;) ), they're just writing a tool that is useful to them, and making it available in case it is useful to other people as well.
I'm an IT guy in a small company, and didn't really track this closely, but I definately saw a decrease in the amount of time I spent dealing with network problems after switching to Samba/linux (from NT4). Sure, it took me some time to get everything set up (but the same is true for installing any OS), and it probably took more than using, say, Windows Server, but now I basically don't have to think about it.
I've used other server products too (nt4, 2k, netware 5), so I do have a bit of a basis to compare (though I have to admit Netware 5 was very nice, and I'd love to run it except it costs too much for a generally non-tech company that doesn't want to spend money on IT).
I'm sure there will be many people replying telling me how this is all BS, that windows is much easier.. but thats the point, I don't really care. For me, this was easier, I spent less time overall, so yes, that translates to lower TCO.
For example, if you want to register at example.com for something, you give them the address me.example@yourdomain.com (or some structure which has a prefix or postfix, the 'me.', and the site name for which you are registering).
What I've been doing for the last couple of years is using a catchall at a subdomain of my actual domain. The typical dictionary spams (postmaster, sales, etc) don't come in, because they only work on top level domains (otherwise spammers would be wasting a large amount of time spamming "sales@www.domain.com" which pretty much never exists..
When I sign up for an account at example.com, I just register as example.com@catch.mydomain.com. If I get spam, I can block it, and it doesn't interfere with my actual domain. If I decided one day I get too much spam to it, I could just switch to another subdomain name.
It would be nicer where after the patent is issued, they do a follow-up check a year or two later to be sure that you've made progress on actually building/using your invention, otherwise it's invalidated.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent. There's too many companies that hold patents and wait until there are a signifigant number of companies to sue before starting anything. While it makes sense from a business standpoint (most bang-for-the-buck), it seems totally against the ideas behind having patents.
There -is- an OS being loaded, just that its only going to support Toshiba's Apps... and nobody elses.
It's possible this is just some firmware on a chip that displays tv signals.. but say it is an OS, it leads to the question.. why bother with windows at all? Linux would have the capability to boot instantly, if you used some kind of suspend/hibernate feature.. so 'instant-on' basically just revives it from memory and lets you have full DVR, etc. No switching modes, and having to wait for windows to boot to get the enhanced features.
Now, by "has the ability" I mean it would be possible for Toshiba to add it in. I'm not totally sure of the APCI stuff that's in Linux now, but due to the nature of being open, the vendor can add whatever they want, as long as they have the know-how. Contrast to Windows, where they're stuck with the way Microsoft made it work.
The promise of distcc is closely related to source distributions like Gentoo. The benefit is overstated. Don't waste your time.
Like many code optimizations, this sounds like one of those things that you spend a lot of time on when really, you can spend a few dollars and buy the next faster up processor to get the same gain. Not really worth it, espessially if the amount of money you're getting paid (assuming you're getting paid) is greater than or equal to the cost of the upgrade..
I just thought it was some new annoying technology that I hoped wouldn't catch on too soon.
It's a great way for kids to annoy other people with their music without the cops catching on and citing them for noise ordinances.
Or perhaps they're just trying to do the exact same thing the article mentions to people listening loudly to what they perceive as crappy music, using music that they like (rap), as opposed to birds or waves (which apparently geeks like)..
I agree about the computer thing. I personally hate over zealous admins that lock the hell out of everything. I mean, sure, there's a place for it. But often times it simply pisses people off because they feel as though they aren't trusted and it makes them dislike their work enviornment just a litle less.
This is a tough one. I've been a sysadmin in a couple small companies. I started at the company I'm at now (family business), and locked down the network a little bit, but users could install software, and change things a fair amount. What happened was eventually systems were becoming totally unusable as adware got installed, and all sorts of other garbage people were trying out got on there, and the system would need to be redone. Since my primary job wasn't being a sysadmin, this made me do a bunch of extra work.
I then went over to a software development company, and as we grew, I took on the role of sysadmin there as well. Initially I tried a mildly locked down environment with software delopment from Win2k server, and it was a nightmare. I took it off within a day because the programmers all hated it, and it was easier to install manually on the few support staff systems than it was to create packages.
When I came back to my current job (which is not a computer company), I decide it was time to redo the network. So now it runs on Samba, and the workstations are locked down so that users can't install software, and a few registry changes are forced at login. I also use wpkg for software deployment, which is a huge timesaver. Most of the security, however, comes from the permissions on network shares and folders.
While this is what the grandparent poster hated, I can totally understand why. The amount of time I deal with dumb problems of users screwing up their machines has dropped to almost nothing, and I only get a few people annoyed ocasionally that they have to get me to install software for them. (Well worth my reduced time). I think for the most part they understand too, because our workstations are basically never down.
Most people won't fill their machines with bullshit. And the ones that do are pretty easy to detect, and those are the ones you can lock down.
But then it's after-the-fact. You now still have to spend time reimaging and configuring the system. Then you lock it down, and the user is angry because they can't make changes like they could before and like everything else can.
You should map all.com,.net,.org and for that matter any "real" web request to a "Hello World!" webserver that explains that your WiFi link isn't offering a connection to the Internet, instead it's a one-of-a-kind location that's offering...
The interesting thing to do would be to setup a local.something domain (maybe the name of your city?) that isn't a normal TLD. This would help to distinguish your network from the Internet.
It would also scale if the network is ever connected to the Internet, and external intenet users could even access the sites by changing their DNS settings.. perhaps even extending to local ISPs picking up this network and offering it as a local service, only when you're connected through them.
Instead of writing crappy music and trying to be superstars by selling their souls to the record company, maybe they could try writing honest music and making an honest living off it.
Make sure you don't confuse producers with artists. A lot of acts, particularly pop music where there is just a single singer and no 'band' per-se, is written by a producer or a song writer employed by a major label (often being told "we need a nice fun summer hit song"). The producers then decide who they should get from their talent pool to sing it (ie: who will make it a hit, who hasn't released something in a while, who looks best in the video - which likely is already written - for this song).
These sorts of artists are basically scouted by the industry, and turned into stars. How is someone off the street, who would normally never make it anywhere, going to turn down an offer to become a big star and make a crapload more money than they're making now at mcdonalds?
Slashdot Mirror
For years, it has been believed that electric bulbs emit light, but recent information has proved otherwise.
Electric bulbs don't emit light; they suck dark. Thus, we call these bulbs Dark Suckers.
The Dark Sucker Theory and the existence of dark suckers prove that dark has mass and is heavier than light.
First, the basis of the Dark Sucker Theory is that electric bulbs suck dark. For example, take the Dark Sucker in the room you are in. There is much less dark right next to it than there is elsewhere. The larger the Dark Sucker, the greater its capacity to suck dark. Dark Suckers in the parking lot have a much greater capacity to suck dark than the ones in this room.
So with all things, Dark Suckers don't last forever. Once they are full of dark, they can no longer suck. This is proven by the dark spot on a full Dark Sucker.
A candle is a primitive Dark Sucker. A new candle has a white wick. You can see that after the first use, the wick turns black, representing all the dark that has been sucked into it. If you put a pencil next to the wick of an operating candle, it will turn black. This is because it got in the way of the dark flowing into the candle. One of the disadvantages of these primitive Dark Suckers is their limited range.
There are also portable Dark Suckers. In these, the bulbs can't handle all the dark by themselves and must be aided by a Dark Storage Unit. When the Dark Storage Unit is full, it must be either emptied or replaced before the portable Dark Sucker can operate again.
Dark has mass. When dark goes into a Dark Sucker, friction from the mass generates heat. Thus, it is not wise to touch an operating Dark Sucker. Candles present a special problem as the mass must travel into a solid wick instead of through clear glass. This generates a great amount of heat and therefore it's not wise to touch an operating candle.
Also, dark is heavier than light. If you were to swim just below the surface of the lake, you would see a lot of light. If you were to slowly swim deeper and deeper, you would notice it getting darker and darker. When you get really deep, you would be in total darkness. This is because the heavier dark sinks to the bottom of the lake and the lighter light floats at the top. The is why it is called light.
Finally, we must prove that dark is faster than light. If you were to stand in a lit room in front of a closed, dark closet, and slowly opened the closet door, you would see the light slowly enter the closet. But since dark is so fast, you would not be able to see the dark leave the closet.
Next time you see an electric bulb, remember that it is a Dark Sucker.
Then again. providing an 800 number is nice clue for spam filters that it IS SPAM.
Of course, like most of the people I deal with at work, my email signature includes our 1-800 number.
Looks like even Wall Street sees where this is headed: SCOX
There's an SMC Barricade that does that. It uses an external modem though, which brings the price up a bit. I actually use this in the office right now as my main router, and the software isn't all that great. It will crash randomly, and requires a hard reboot (can't even ping it). It will work fine for a few months, but then it seems to crash about 4 times over a 7 day period, and then it will work for months again.
Otherwise a nice router, but I wouldn't recommend it for unattended site operation.
Corporations have intranets, but they may also have inter-networks with various vendors and customers -- these may not always be part of the Internet. So, as long as it is possible to have an internet that is not the Internet, the proper version should be capitalized.
I believe the proper 90's buzzword for these inter-networks is "extranet". So really, you can have an extranet that is not part of the internet, but there is only one internet, and the internet is really an extranet.
Now if you can excuse me, I need to go think outside the box and shift some paradigms to enhance my time utilization.
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may be capable of holding terabytes, or even petabytes, on a single platter. And it will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solid state storage as we know it. I doubt that hard drives will go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
I thought the comparison was pretty good. Floppies are still used by many people as a quick way to transport files back and forth from home (particularly by people that don't have Internet access at home). I generally don't put the drives in anymore, but theres a couple people in the office that specifically ask for them. The drives are dirt cheap, so it's not a big deal.
CRT's are still popular. Even the cheap LCDs are well over twice the cost of a CRT. If you're trying to do gaming or something that requires high refresh rates, you need a very good LCD and the costs start getting pretty high. I personally don't really like paying as much for the monitor as I do for the rest of the machine.
So I totally agree with the grandparent. Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT.
Yep, it'll be an alternative, that some people will use when they can afford it and/or require it. And like CRT's and floppies, many people will still use spinning drives when they don't feel like dropping a bunch of extra money on a fancy technology that doesn't really give them any huge benefit*.
* I'm talking about your typical desktop here, where the lifetime of the machine is a 3-4 years, you're using fans in the machine (so the missing noise of a drive is not a big deal), and the most system intensive task you do is boot up.
They should contact the US government and tell them they have 30 days to fix the spam problem before a nationwide block goes into place.
and what are the chance that Bush would take this as a terroist threat and use it as an excuse to go and bomb the shit out of the country that said it?
I say we just bring back public stonings.
I could see a password of substantial length made of a phrase. Say, 64+ characters, changed every two weeks might be fine. Especially if you have a well-read workforce, which might enjoy making note of significant passages.
Impose this on your machine, then get back to us in two weeks with your thoughts.
The only way hackers can check passwords quickly enough to matter is if they manage to obtain access to the file that contains the checksums for the users' passwords. In Linux, at least, this is /etc/shadow, which can only be accessed by root. If a hacker has access to the files owned by root then you have much bigger problems than a hacker trying to guess at users' passwords.
This raises another good point, where if you're properly controlling the methods to access whatever it is you're protecting, you can cut off someone that's trying to brute force (ie, wrong password 3 times in a row). Then your length isn't going to matter as much.
You could also go farther, and 'silently' lock them out - no matter what happens, it won't accept the password. Meanwhile, your IDS flags a security event and someone can respond, perhaps while they're still connected.
You can type so much faster when you learn properly.
:) But at the same time, theres less of a strain on my wrists, so I get the comfort benefits (i guess) that a natural keyboard is supposed to give, without having to have a goofy looking keyboard.
I'm not entirely sure about that. I can type fairly quickly, but I don't do "home row" touch-typing. When I took classes, the teacher used to get mad at me for that, and tell me I was doing it wrong.
I pretty much have my hands coming in at an angle, almost like I'm using a 'natural' keyboard.. I usually end up using all of my left hand, and on my right hand just my index and middle fingers for keys. My right ring finger presses keys like backspace and enter, and my pinky is entirely dedicated to the shift key. I can type probably 60wpm (fast enough, anyways), and I don't have to look at the keyboard at all.
Of course, the side effect of my typing style is I can't use a real natural keyboard at all (since my left hand is supposed to press keys that are on the right side of the keyboard) - I end up typing about 5 wpm probably.
And yet I can buy thousands upon thousands of CD's and/or DVD's for less than $50/each. Those other companies must be amzingly efficient compared to Sveasoft. And they're charging enough to make a profit too!
If you mass-produce CD's, they are very cheap. If you duplicate, say, 1000, you might pay something like $1/cd to get them with a jewel case and cover. Of course, 1000 copies of CD for source code is probably more than sveasoft is going to need/want. If you only duplicate a few, say, 100, you're probably going to be paying more like $3/CD.
I'm going on the assumption here that they aren't mass-producing any CDs, they are just burning them in-house as they are requested.
Yep. If they pay somebody $50 an hour to burn 1 CD, I say they need all the money we can give them
I didn't say anything about them paying somebody $50/hr to burn a CD, I said they charge customers that price. If you go to a store and get your computer serviced, they'll likely have a bench fee of $30-60/hr. The teenage tech thats servicing your system is probably only getting paid maybe $10/hr.
Now, if you have an employee that's normally doing work where they earn the company $50/hr, and are forced to make them burn CDs, why should you dump that profit and only charge $10 for a CD (minus media cost, minus employee wage, minus shipping, minus overhead (electricity, cost of equipment, furniture, etcetc))? You're probably in the hole at that point.
And why would you want to charge maybe $25 to cover it and just break even, when you would normally be making a profit if that employee was performing their regular job? Most businesses aren't in it to break even, they're in it to make a proft.
Now of course, my arguments don't take into account what is actually happening here - they are complying with the GPL to provide their modifications. Morally, should they be making a profit from distributing these CDs? I don't think so. I think they should even do it at a loss (well, actually, they should just provide it freely on their website). If that GPL'd software didn't exist to begin with, they either wouldn't have their product in the first place, or they'd spend a hell of a lot more than 10 minutes of employees wages developing the same thing.
It does say "reasonable cost", so it could be challeneged (likely by the EFF).
;) ). But I think at the least it's reasonable to bill out the time someone spends doing it. After all, the more time someone spends burning a CD, the less time they spend programming or otherwise making money for the company -- why NOT bill it out?
Sveasoft could probably justify $49 as being "reasonable". There is the cost of shipping and the media, of course, which isn't very much. But someone also has to burn it. They could very well be charging a normal hourly fee (say $50/hr) to have that person burn the CD. You could also factor in the cost of the cd burner itself (depreciated over x number of copies), or maybe a rental fee for using the burner. They could also being doing the same thing with a system dedicated to burning the CDs.
Although most people will think those claims are rediculus (and I'll admit, towards the end, they are
Now, that all said, $100,000 would be a bit extreme. While proving $49 is "reasonable cost" with the above arguments might stand up in court, I think you'd have a hard time saying your hourly fee is $500,000 or that you really REALLY needed that Sun Fire server to handle the burning.
It's not cheap to sit on your patent. It costs $10000+ to get the patent in the first place. After that, patents have increasing maintenance fees due every 4 years ($910, $2090, $3220). If you don't pay, you lose your patent. The idea is that patents that have been forgotten about or aren't making money will expire sooner. (Of course, they should probably be much, much higher, like $5000, $25000, $125000, $625000, so that the fee tracks the value of the patent.)
The problem with using money for this is figuring out the fee. For a small business or individual inventory, $25000 is a lot of money, $625000 is unthinkable. For a large company like Microsoft, $625000 is nothing.
Increasing the fee just means cutting out the smaller players, which is what patents are supposed to prevent.
As with all technologies: A killer app.
:)
And users with big, heavily trained forearms? Hold your mouse up in the air for 30 minutes, then see how nice your arm feels. Then think about doing that all day long
Open Source folks need to go out there also and start publishing their cost ownership numbers, with real life examples.
;) ), they're just writing a tool that is useful to them, and making it available in case it is useful to other people as well.
By "Open Source folks" I assume you mean "companies that sell services centered around open source software"? Keep in mind that most of the developers and people writing OSS don't really care who uses it (though they certainly like when people do). They're not out to destroy Microsoft (well, not most of them, anyways
I'm an IT guy in a small company, and didn't really track this closely, but I definately saw a decrease in the amount of time I spent dealing with network problems after switching to Samba/linux (from NT4). Sure, it took me some time to get everything set up (but the same is true for installing any OS), and it probably took more than using, say, Windows Server, but now I basically don't have to think about it.
I've used other server products too (nt4, 2k, netware 5), so I do have a bit of a basis to compare (though I have to admit Netware 5 was very nice, and I'd love to run it except it costs too much for a generally non-tech company that doesn't want to spend money on IT).
I'm sure there will be many people replying telling me how this is all BS, that windows is much easier.. but thats the point, I don't really care. For me, this was easier, I spent less time overall, so yes, that translates to lower TCO.
For example, if you want to register at example.com for something, you give them the address me.example@yourdomain.com (or some structure which has a prefix or postfix, the 'me.', and the site name for which you are registering).
What I've been doing for the last couple of years is using a catchall at a subdomain of my actual domain. The typical dictionary spams (postmaster, sales, etc) don't come in, because they only work on top level domains (otherwise spammers would be wasting a large amount of time spamming "sales@www.domain.com" which pretty much never exists..
When I sign up for an account at example.com, I just register as example.com@catch.mydomain.com. If I get spam, I can block it, and it doesn't interfere with my actual domain. If I decided one day I get too much spam to it, I could just switch to another subdomain name.
One of the biggest problem is the so-called submarine patent.
It would be nicer where after the patent is issued, they do a follow-up check a year or two later to be sure that you've made progress on actually building/using your invention, otherwise it's invalidated.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent. There's too many companies that hold patents and wait until there are a signifigant number of companies to sue before starting anything. While it makes sense from a business standpoint (most bang-for-the-buck), it seems totally against the ideas behind having patents.
A $150 pocket DVD player does not need a 2Ghz CPU to operate.
Maybe this is a good application for underclocking?
There -is- an OS being loaded, just that its only going to support Toshiba's Apps... and nobody elses.
.. why bother with windows at all? Linux would have the capability to boot instantly, if you used some kind of suspend/hibernate feature.. so 'instant-on' basically just revives it from memory and lets you have full DVR, etc. No switching modes, and having to wait for windows to boot to get the enhanced features.
It's possible this is just some firmware on a chip that displays tv signals.. but say it is an OS, it leads to the question
Now, by "has the ability" I mean it would be possible for Toshiba to add it in. I'm not totally sure of the APCI stuff that's in Linux now, but due to the nature of being open, the vendor can add whatever they want, as long as they have the know-how. Contrast to Windows, where they're stuck with the way Microsoft made it work.
The promise of distcc is closely related to source distributions like Gentoo. The benefit is overstated. Don't waste your time.
Like many code optimizations, this sounds like one of those things that you spend a lot of time on when really, you can spend a few dollars and buy the next faster up processor to get the same gain. Not really worth it, espessially if the amount of money you're getting paid (assuming you're getting paid) is greater than or equal to the cost of the upgrade..
I just thought it was some new annoying technology that I hoped wouldn't catch on too soon.
It's a great way for kids to annoy other people with their music without the cops catching on and citing them for noise ordinances.
Or perhaps they're just trying to do the exact same thing the article mentions to people listening loudly to what they perceive as crappy music, using music that they like (rap), as opposed to birds or waves (which apparently geeks like)..
I agree about the computer thing. I personally hate over zealous admins that lock the hell out of everything. I mean, sure, there's a place for it. But often times it simply pisses people off because they feel as though they aren't trusted and it makes them dislike their work enviornment just a litle less.
This is a tough one. I've been a sysadmin in a couple small companies. I started at the company I'm at now (family business), and locked down the network a little bit, but users could install software, and change things a fair amount. What happened was eventually systems were becoming totally unusable as adware got installed, and all sorts of other garbage people were trying out got on there, and the system would need to be redone. Since my primary job wasn't being a sysadmin, this made me do a bunch of extra work.
I then went over to a software development company, and as we grew, I took on the role of sysadmin there as well. Initially I tried a mildly locked down environment with software delopment from Win2k server, and it was a nightmare. I took it off within a day because the programmers all hated it, and it was easier to install manually on the few support staff systems than it was to create packages.
When I came back to my current job (which is not a computer company), I decide it was time to redo the network. So now it runs on Samba, and the workstations are locked down so that users can't install software, and a few registry changes are forced at login. I also use wpkg for software deployment, which is a huge timesaver. Most of the security, however, comes from the permissions on network shares and folders.
While this is what the grandparent poster hated, I can totally understand why. The amount of time I deal with dumb problems of users screwing up their machines has dropped to almost nothing, and I only get a few people annoyed ocasionally that they have to get me to install software for them. (Well worth my reduced time). I think for the most part they understand too, because our workstations are basically never down.
Most people won't fill their machines with bullshit. And the ones that do are pretty easy to detect, and those are the ones you can lock down.
But then it's after-the-fact. You now still have to spend time reimaging and configuring the system. Then you lock it down, and the user is angry because they can't make changes like they could before and like everything else can.
You should map all .com, .net, .org and for that matter any "real" web request to a "Hello World!" webserver that explains that your WiFi link isn't offering a connection to the Internet, instead it's a one-of-a-kind location that's offering...
.something domain (maybe the name of your city?) that isn't a normal TLD. This would help to distinguish your network from the Internet.
The interesting thing to do would be to setup a local
It would also scale if the network is ever connected to the Internet, and external intenet users could even access the sites by changing their DNS settings.. perhaps even extending to local ISPs picking up this network and offering it as a local service, only when you're connected through them.
Instead of writing crappy music and trying to be superstars by selling their souls to the record company, maybe they could try writing honest music and making an honest living off it.
Make sure you don't confuse producers with artists. A lot of acts, particularly pop music where there is just a single singer and no 'band' per-se, is written by a producer or a song writer employed by a major label (often being told "we need a nice fun summer hit song"). The producers then decide who they should get from their talent pool to sing it (ie: who will make it a hit, who hasn't released something in a while, who looks best in the video - which likely is already written - for this song).
These sorts of artists are basically scouted by the industry, and turned into stars. How is someone off the street, who would normally never make it anywhere, going to turn down an offer to become a big star and make a crapload more money than they're making now at mcdonalds?