Who wants to sit in a 4X8 closet with a bunch of cheap windows boxes? I want floated floors with forced air cooling, an inert gas fire suppression systems (and gas masks for everybody!), huge monolith UPSs (built in), a biodiesel/fuel cell backup generator, 3 fiber trunks on major internet backbones (gotta have multi-homing), an isolated command and control center, rackspace out the wazoo, a top 500 supercomputer or two, bullet proof glass walls with opacity dimmers, biometric security scanners, armed guards, NORAD like bomb shelter construction. Oh yeah, and a cafeteria. And armed female guards cloned from Lucy Liu's DNA. Now we're talking.
I ride a big downhill mountain bike around, people in cars are definately trying to kill me. You have to follow the rules to avoid a painful collision, but I usually don't. I also don't when riding motorcycles, the temptation to white-line it through traffic jams is irresistable. With overcrowding and everyone in the states owning 2-3 cars and SUVs, traffic sucks really bad unless you can white-line through it on a bike. I would like to start carrying an M72 recoilless rifle around so I can take out all the H2s and other oversized SUVs that are polluting the roads, but this would probably get me in trouble with the law. Maybe they can integrate this HUD into a control system for guided missiles or a Vulcan auto cannon. Then I could mount a Vulcan on my side car...
Now they can tell the crew, 'Yep, you're definitely f*cked. The damage can't be repaired cause you're not equipped for a spacewalk, and attempting re-entry would be catastrophic.'
Thank god for our new sensors. What they really need is a fully equipped orbital repair station.
I was tired of the "We use Macs because they don't get attacked by viruses and hackers" refrain from Mac nuts.
Still don't get attacked by viruses weekly. So maybe someone on the same network can exploit a well known (by now) security flaw, which is really just a couple of bad default settings. If someone actually does exploit this flaw, I can just walk over to his desk and tell him to cut it out.
... someone at mini-itx wedged a server into a cable modem case. I just love servers-in-disguise! For my next feat, I will cram a Crusoe based server into my 2" x 12" APC power strip!
"any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive."
I would fire this guy right away. This is bad business no matter how you look at it. They charged the state 73 million for the machines, making any additional modifications 'prohibitivly expensive' just means Diebold doesn't get the contract to modify them. It's very likely that Diebold designed the system poorly in the first place, making it prohibitivly expensive for them to add/make modifications. Using expressions like 'closing the barn door' and 'charging out the yin-yang' should be terminating offenses in the first place. This is the kind of person that winds up being CEO eventually. Which would explain why fiasco's like Diebold's happen in the first place.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I agree with you here, there is no suitable replacement for Autocad (that I can think of) for Linux. When I was doing 3D modelling a lot more, I NT.
I wish I could recommend something besides the M-audio interface. It is very pretty and probably works better than their other stuff used too. I've had a few cheap M-audio interfaces. Hated them all, mostly due to random driver errors and crashing. Like I said, I don't know of anything better in that price range, although the Digi002 (more expensive, apps must support Direct I/O or be pro-tools) and the Emagic A26 USB interface (less expensive, less features, not firewire)
are both very good for the job.
And I did leave out games, although I play a few on linux when I have time (I don't).
And anyway, since when did trolling require thinking? Generally the more thoughtless a comment is, the more responses it will get. As long as someone feels belittled, cheated, threatened, opposed, etc..
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I smelled fear. I struck.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I work for and own companies. While the IT department is dealing with hundreds of requests from Windows users to help them deal with removing spyware, crashing, installing restricively licensed and overpriced software, etc.. me and my co-workers are busy being productive on Linux machines. We can interoperate with Microsoft products without a problem using samba, open office and other nice software, control other users PC's or test windows applications using rdesktop, run lots of games and multimedia apps, all on fast, cheap linux boxes. At my companies, everybody runs OS X or Linux, depending on their jobs. In fact, the least productive part of my day is when I have to fire up rdesktop and log into a windows machine to test some code to make sure it behaves nicely on Windows. We have one sales guy running XP on his laptop, but the admins are installing Linux on there next week because he can't get XP to stop crashing. I'm sorry you think you have to be told what to 'do' to make 'money'. Thats a really unfortunate place to be.
it was stolen. Thats what you get for buying the demo copy, sans utilities CD.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Replying to my own post again..
I forgot to point out that the reviewer is even afraid to upgrade to the latest version of Windows and feels safe and secure with Windows 98! I had not considered that this kind of person reads/. How many feeble, trembling, gutless Windows 98 users are there still out there?
Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The only thing that keeps people stuck on Windows is their attitudes. I have not had the displeasure of using a Windows machine in over a year. Everyone that uses OS X or Linux regularly knows that Windows provides no significant benefits, is overpriced and wrought with drawbacks. Anyone that wishes to drop Windows is free to do so at any time. The resigned attitude that you are stuck with anything is rediculous. You are scared. Be honest, say "I am scared of other operating systems".
Most of the time you can't really charge more, you just have to hope that you sell more records. We have a fixed price agreement with our distributors. If we bump up the price, the distributor will bump up his price and the stores will either bump their prices or not pick up the record at all. I am talking about the current market for vinyl (which is mostly DJs), so maybe this is a little offtopic. Same rules apply for CDs though. If you spend more on cover art and bonus material, you better hope it means more record sales.
Is is 3D as in Doom or 3D as in Quake? Assuming they are using the Java3D API, looks like 3D as in Quake. (not psuedo 3d)
I wouldn't mind a 3D interface, except that most interfaces are created these days with a orthographic view. If the OS exposed a 3D application development environment (which it would, hopefully) I would REALLY like to get into it. We have semi-serious discussions about 3D interfaces for some parts of our software (sourceforge.net/projects/bie). There are many applications/domains where a Z-plane could have meaning and add lots of functionality. Anyone who says otherwise probably doesn't need more that 640k ram either.
They have spent a decade on the subject and Notes is their best offering? I generally don't have a problem with email QOS at all, unless I am using Notes at work. Now I just use Note's POP server with Evolution (don't tell anyone, corporate requires everyone to use the Notes client.), which works a lot better than trying to run the client. It doesn't have linux support, barely works in wine, and iNotes blows just as bad and has browser support issues.
Outside of work I use Communigate Pro server with it's built in webmail client. Never have problems with that.
...Well, who pays for the ones that are the losers?... ..The winners pay...
Hopefully not. I've never signed a contract that would allow the record label to withhold my earnings until they had made a profit on *all* of their artists. There is usually a clause in the contract that allows them to withhold a 15-20% reserve, which they always do. This reserve is meant to be held against *your* sales gross, not the sales of the entire record company. Most smaller labels track all their numbers on a per artist/per release basis. Bigger labels are dealing with much lower profit margins and lots more money up front, so they probably have a completely different way of doing the books. Artists and their managers need to take a better look at their label's contracts. I would not sign anything that would keep me from earning money because the label was doing badly with other artists. If they did withold it, I would expect to get it back once the label was able to pay it.
There are lots of good fiction/sci-fi writers these days: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Chrichton are the most obvious. It's probably not fair to make this kind of comparison, they belong to a different caste of author altogether. I agree, there are good stories that are entertaining, and then there are novels which are extensivly researched and meticulously crafted by well travelled and well read authors. I recently read a book that was based on the ID game DOOM called "Valley of the Dead" or something. It was written like absolute crap, but it managed to be entertaining. There will always be a lot more crap out there than quality, that goes for just about anything that can be bought or sold. Beats watching TV.
Well, 'Badly written' is a relative term. It was readable at least. Some of his wordiness bothered me (the words 'immediate' and 'vicinity' used together provide no more meaning than 'area' in the same context, things like that. Or why not just say 'near'? Words for the sake of wordiness bother me.)
Overall, I think you are right, I simply did not enjoy the book, maybe as the author intended. I thought it was weak, borrowed too heavily from too many well known stories, and was a waste of time. I don't have time to read *everything* ever written. When I do read something, I expect to walk away with the feeling that I had just read something great, something which will become an important peice of literary history, something original. If I don't get an inkling of that feeling, I am justifiably dissapointed.
this is a little offtopic
but no more so than the rant at the beginning of this book review, which reminded me of the worst book/author ever.
The worst book ever: Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson
This is the worst peice of crap ever published (and I have been known to enjoy books based on the game DOOM).
The main character is a middle aged leper of all things, who is the most despicable character in the whole story. Starting at about page 2, I was hoping someone would come along and put him out of his misery. The character is filled with self pity and has no heroic qualities at all. At the pinnicle of his despicability, he actually rapes a teenaged girl who saves his life early in the story. It seemed to me that the author thought it would be OK for the main character to be a self-pitying rapist with no moral fiber. On top of that, the entire story is a complete rip off of the LOTR trilogy, except that near the end, our main character finds himself back in suburbia wondering if the whole thing was a dream. It's just badly written, I couldn't read the whole thing once I found out the main character does not die the bloody, painful death
he deserves. Since then, I have stayed away from cheap paperback sci-fi and fantasy. I hope my brain is never again tainted by the scribblings of talentless human typewriters.
why not 'online for dummies'?
on
Online! The Book
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This book is as perfect for every computer user as the 'Internet Yellow Pages' are. HMM, lets make a BOOK out of PAPER that lists all the websites we can find. Brilliant. These books are for people who always say,
'One of these days, you are going to have to teach me how to use computers'.
No, I won't.
Teach yourself or find something else to do. Writing a book like this is obviously going to make the authors and publishers some money, which is the point. This book was written by 'internet experts', the kind of people who get fired as soon as their companies find out how useless they really are. Then they get hired to write about what they barely know.
You could do a trilogy on the first 30 pages of the Silmarillion. The amount of material in there rivals many ancient mythologies, you could probably make a pretty good movie based on any one of them. Some parts and stories are lacking the level of detail and dialog that the LOTR and the Hobbit contain, so you would have quite a bit of freedom in that area. To cover the Silmarillion I'm guessing you would need about 4+ trilogies.
Agreed. You don't need an office until you have employees, me and my business partner run things from our laptops and save $4 to 800 per month on rent. Business cards are for sales people and CEOs, unless you are doing a lot of handshaking and networking, business cards are useless. A good way to handle this is to print some generic cards with you company logo, web address and a company phone number/email. Employees can write their email or phone number on back if they really need to.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if your hours (and therefore your salary) is billed as R&D time, can't that be claimed as R&D credits?
tallgreen.com
Recent startup, still relativly small,
Provide Open Source CMS hosting using WebGUI (cms), Communigate (email) AWStats (stats), Resin and other open source software. No VC, No debt, No CTO, Low overhead and primarily service based. It doesn't take much to start a small company and grow. Know your market, find ways to reduce costs, provide good products/services.
Slashdot Mirror
Who wants to sit in a 4X8 closet with a bunch of cheap windows boxes? I want floated floors with forced air cooling, an inert gas fire suppression systems (and gas masks for everybody!), huge monolith UPSs (built in), a biodiesel/fuel cell backup generator, 3 fiber trunks on major internet backbones (gotta have multi-homing), an isolated command and control center, rackspace out the wazoo, a top 500 supercomputer or two, bullet proof glass walls with opacity dimmers, biometric security scanners, armed guards, NORAD like bomb shelter construction. Oh yeah, and a cafeteria. And armed female guards cloned from Lucy Liu's DNA. Now we're talking.
I ride a big downhill mountain bike around, people in cars are definately trying to kill me. You have to follow the rules to avoid a painful collision, but I usually don't. I also don't when riding motorcycles, the temptation to white-line it through traffic jams is irresistable. With overcrowding and everyone in the states owning 2-3 cars and SUVs, traffic sucks really bad unless you can white-line through it on a bike. I would like to start carrying an M72 recoilless rifle around so I can take out all the H2s and other oversized SUVs that are polluting the roads, but this would probably get me in trouble with the law. Maybe they can integrate this HUD into a control system for guided missiles or a Vulcan auto cannon. Then I could mount a Vulcan on my side car...
Now they can tell the crew, 'Yep, you're definitely f*cked. The damage can't be repaired cause you're not equipped for a spacewalk, and attempting re-entry would be catastrophic.'
Thank god for our new sensors. What they really need is a fully equipped orbital repair station.
... from now on, our distribution will be known as 'Windux'.
I was tired of the "We use Macs because they don't get attacked by viruses and hackers" refrain from Mac nuts.
Still don't get attacked by viruses weekly. So maybe someone on the same network can exploit a well known (by now) security flaw, which is really just a couple of bad default settings. If someone actually does exploit this flaw, I can just walk over to his desk and tell him to cut it out.
... someone at mini-itx wedged a server into a cable modem case. I just love servers-in-disguise! For my next feat, I will cram a Crusoe based server into my 2" x 12" APC power strip!
"any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive."
I would fire this guy right away. This is bad business no matter how you look at it. They charged the state 73 million for the machines, making any additional modifications 'prohibitivly expensive' just means Diebold doesn't get the contract to modify them. It's very likely that Diebold designed the system poorly in the first place, making it prohibitivly expensive for them to add/make modifications. Using expressions like 'closing the barn door' and 'charging out the yin-yang' should be terminating offenses in the first place. This is the kind of person that winds up being CEO eventually. Which would explain why fiasco's like Diebold's happen in the first place.
I agree with you here, there is no suitable replacement for Autocad (that I can think of) for Linux. When I was doing 3D modelling a lot more, I NT.
I wish I could recommend something besides the M-audio interface. It is very pretty and probably works better than their other stuff used too. I've had a few cheap M-audio interfaces. Hated them all, mostly due to random driver errors and crashing. Like I said, I don't know of anything better in that price range, although the Digi002 (more expensive, apps must support Direct I/O or be pro-tools) and the Emagic A26 USB interface (less expensive, less features, not firewire) are both very good for the job. And I did leave out games, although I play a few on linux when I have time (I don't).
And anyway, since when did trolling require thinking? Generally the more thoughtless a comment is, the more responses it will get. As long as someone feels belittled, cheated, threatened, opposed, etc..
I smelled fear. I struck.
I work for and own companies. While the IT department is dealing with hundreds of requests from Windows users to help them deal with removing spyware, crashing, installing restricively licensed and overpriced software, etc.. me and my co-workers are busy being productive on Linux machines. We can interoperate with Microsoft products without a problem using samba, open office and other nice software, control other users PC's or test windows applications using rdesktop, run lots of games and multimedia apps, all on fast, cheap linux boxes. At my companies, everybody runs OS X or Linux, depending on their jobs. In fact, the least productive part of my day is when I have to fire up rdesktop and log into a windows machine to test some code to make sure it behaves nicely on Windows. We have one sales guy running XP on his laptop, but the admins are installing Linux on there next week because he can't get XP to stop crashing. I'm sorry you think you have to be told what to 'do' to make 'money'. Thats a really unfortunate place to be.
it was stolen. Thats what you get for buying the demo copy, sans utilities CD.
Replying to my own post again.. I forgot to point out that the reviewer is even afraid to upgrade to the latest version of Windows and feels safe and secure with Windows 98! I had not considered that this kind of person reads /. How many feeble, trembling, gutless Windows 98 users are there still out there?
The only thing that keeps people stuck on Windows is their attitudes. I have not had the displeasure of using a Windows machine in over a year. Everyone that uses OS X or Linux regularly knows that Windows provides no significant benefits, is overpriced and wrought with drawbacks. Anyone that wishes to drop Windows is free to do so at any time. The resigned attitude that you are stuck with anything is rediculous. You are scared. Be honest, say "I am scared of other operating systems".
Most of the time you can't really charge more, you just have to hope that you sell more records. We have a fixed price agreement with our distributors. If we bump up the price, the distributor will bump up his price and the stores will either bump their prices or not pick up the record at all. I am talking about the current market for vinyl (which is mostly DJs), so maybe this is a little offtopic. Same rules apply for CDs though. If you spend more on cover art and bonus material, you better hope it means more record sales.
Is is 3D as in Doom or 3D as in Quake? Assuming they are using the Java3D API, looks like 3D as in Quake. (not psuedo 3d)
I wouldn't mind a 3D interface, except that most interfaces are created these days with a orthographic view. If the OS exposed a 3D application development environment (which it would, hopefully) I would REALLY like to get into it. We have semi-serious discussions about 3D interfaces for some parts of our software (sourceforge.net/projects/bie). There are many applications/domains where a Z-plane could have meaning and add lots of functionality. Anyone who says otherwise probably doesn't need more that 640k ram either.
They have spent a decade on the subject and Notes is their best offering? I generally don't have a problem with email QOS at all, unless I am using Notes at work. Now I just use Note's POP server with Evolution (don't tell anyone, corporate requires everyone to use the Notes client.), which works a lot better than trying to run the client. It doesn't have linux support, barely works in wine, and iNotes blows just as bad and has browser support issues. Outside of work I use Communigate Pro server with it's built in webmail client. Never have problems with that.
...Well, who pays for the ones that are the losers?...
..The winners pay...
Hopefully not. I've never signed a contract that would allow the record label to withhold my earnings until they had made a profit on *all* of their artists. There is usually a clause in the contract that allows them to withhold a 15-20% reserve, which they always do. This reserve is meant to be held against *your* sales gross, not the sales of the entire record company. Most smaller labels track all their numbers on a per artist/per release basis. Bigger labels are dealing with much lower profit margins and lots more money up front, so they probably have a completely different way of doing the books. Artists and their managers need to take a better look at their label's contracts. I would not sign anything that would keep me from earning money because the label was doing badly with other artists. If they did withold it, I would expect to get it back once the label was able to pay it.
There are lots of good fiction/sci-fi writers these days: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Chrichton are the most obvious. It's probably not fair to make this kind of comparison, they belong to a different caste of author altogether. I agree, there are good stories that are entertaining, and then there are novels which are extensivly researched and meticulously crafted by well travelled and well read authors. I recently read a book that was based on the ID game DOOM called "Valley of the Dead" or something. It was written like absolute crap, but it managed to be entertaining. There will always be a lot more crap out there than quality, that goes for just about anything that can be bought or sold. Beats watching TV.
Well, 'Badly written' is a relative term. It was readable at least. Some of his wordiness bothered me (the words 'immediate' and 'vicinity' used together provide no more meaning than 'area' in the same context, things like that. Or why not just say 'near'? Words for the sake of wordiness bother me.)
Overall, I think you are right, I simply did not enjoy the book, maybe as the author intended. I thought it was weak, borrowed too heavily from too many well known stories, and was a waste of time. I don't have time to read *everything* ever written. When I do read something, I expect to walk away with the feeling that I had just read something great, something which will become an important peice of literary history, something original. If I don't get an inkling of that feeling, I am justifiably dissapointed.
this is a little offtopic but no more so than the rant at the beginning of this book review, which reminded me of the worst book/author ever.
The worst book ever: Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson
This is the worst peice of crap ever published (and I have been known to enjoy books based on the game DOOM). The main character is a middle aged leper of all things, who is the most despicable character in the whole story. Starting at about page 2, I was hoping someone would come along and put him out of his misery. The character is filled with self pity and has no heroic qualities at all. At the pinnicle of his despicability, he actually rapes a teenaged girl who saves his life early in the story. It seemed to me that the author thought it would be OK for the main character to be a self-pitying rapist with no moral fiber. On top of that, the entire story is a complete rip off of the LOTR trilogy, except that near the end, our main character finds himself back in suburbia wondering if the whole thing was a dream. It's just badly written, I couldn't read the whole thing once I found out the main character does not die the bloody, painful death he deserves. Since then, I have stayed away from cheap paperback sci-fi and fantasy. I hope my brain is never again tainted by the scribblings of talentless human typewriters.
This book is as perfect for every computer user as the 'Internet Yellow Pages' are. HMM, lets make a BOOK out of PAPER that lists all the websites we can find. Brilliant. These books are for people who always say,
'One of these days, you are going to have to teach me how to use computers'.
No, I won't.
Teach yourself or find something else to do. Writing a book like this is obviously going to make the authors and publishers some money, which is the point. This book was written by 'internet experts', the kind of people who get fired as soon as their companies find out how useless they really are. Then they get hired to write about what they barely know.
You could do a trilogy on the first 30 pages of the Silmarillion. The amount of material in there rivals many ancient mythologies, you could probably make a pretty good movie based on any one of them. Some parts and stories are lacking the level of detail and dialog that the LOTR and the Hobbit contain, so you would have quite a bit of freedom in that area. To cover the Silmarillion I'm guessing you would need about 4+ trilogies.
Sorry, that's tallgreen.com.
Agreed. You don't need an office until you have employees, me and my business partner run things from our laptops and save $4 to 800 per month on rent. Business cards are for sales people and CEOs, unless you are doing a lot of handshaking and networking, business cards are useless. A good way to handle this is to print some generic cards with you company logo, web address and a company phone number/email. Employees can write their email or phone number on back if they really need to.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if your hours (and therefore your salary) is billed as R&D time, can't that be claimed as R&D credits?
tallgreen.com Recent startup, still relativly small, Provide Open Source CMS hosting using WebGUI (cms), Communigate (email) AWStats (stats), Resin and other open source software. No VC, No debt, No CTO, Low overhead and primarily service based. It doesn't take much to start a small company and grow. Know your market, find ways to reduce costs, provide good products/services.