Your recollections are different from mine. Prior to Google, I tended to use AltaVista and Hotbot. Searches took at least ten times as long. Results rarely included any recently created pages. The number of indexed pages was several orders of magnitude less than Google handles today (which in turn is one order of magnitude, or so, greater than current competitors). In spite of the fact that gaming of search engines is overwhelmingly targeted at Google, Google still does a relatively better job of finding the genuinely useful pages. Is Google perfect? No, of course not. Search is still only a partially solved problem. However, since its inception, Google has come up with most of the practical advances in the state of the art, as well as the best infrastructure for its implementation.
I very much hope the Office of the US Trustee, IBM, Novell and others do not appeal the delay. Of course, they have excellent grounds for doing so, but the result would likely just be a longer delay. SCO has successfully gamed the system, and will probably gain a six week delay in the process. If this is appealed, it will probably take longer than six weeks just to argue and get a decision. Meanwhile, SCO will argue that the purchase agreement cannot go forward with the Chapter 7 conversion hanging over their head (BS, of course, but prove it).
Re:IBM did this already, right?
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
If you have the cash, IBM has always been (and still is) the virtualization king. This started with CP-67 (originally for development) and gradually evolved via VM/370, VM/SP and VM/ESA into a platform for running multiple production OS in parallel. IBM, along the way, added a hardware level partitioning capability called LPAR.
IBM mainframes today have LPAR to allow partitioning of the real machine into (for all practical purposes) multiple completely independent computers. One or more of those can be running z/VM (a very powerful and mature hypervisor in its own right). On a big zSeries, it is entirely reasonable to run a few thousand separate Linux instances with good stability and efficiency.
What you are describing is one part of a general problem. When users are moving around using different networks, various tweaks to the network settings on the computer are often needed. A user-oriented tool to switch networks is needed. Some notebooks (e.g. Thinkpads) already come with such a tool. Otherwise, NetSwitcher is about US$20 a copy. Someone technical sets appropriate settings for each location the user visits. Subsequently, the user just calls up the configuration for 'Home', 'Office', 'Cust-X', 'Airport' or wherever.
Lately, I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time.
The time is fast approaching when CAPTCHAs will be too difficult for entry by humans. The only logical solution is to start an open source project to create a program that will enter the required data for you. Without this, we are looking at a time when humans will be unable to access their email or post on a message board, and only spam bots will be left. (Come to think of it, given what I see in most of my email and most posts on message boards, are most humans already locked out?)
Your criticism is somewhat merited. I think the fact that most people use Google, in spite of the fact that the leading browser (in terms of market share) defaults to Live Search is indicative. However, I might better have linked to this from August 2008
Google's customer satisfaction swells by an unparalleled improvement of 10%. For a company that already has a high level of customer satisfaction, Google breaks new ground. Not only does Google now lead Yahoo! by a 12% margin, but the search engine giant can claim the best score ever posted for any e-business company measured by ACSI.
Google's customer satisfaction prowess goes hand-in-hand with its leadership in developing technologies that make searches both faster and more accurate.
I find this quite confusing. Is this story implying that Mozilla will trash the Firefox search capabilities if someone comes up with enough money to merit the demolition? If I were Google, and wanted Chrome to replace Firefox, I might be willing to pay Mozilla myself to remove Google search from the product.
The speed at which Firefox starts and the time to load pages is heavily dependent on the extensions in use. For me, Firefox startup is pretty slow (about 5 seconds) because of my pretty extensive Adblock lists. Most pages load quite fast, helped by the Adblock lists. The speed at which Internet Explorer starts and loads pages is heavily dependent on how long ago a fresh install was done. Until the malware starts accumulating it can be pretty reasonable.
IMHO, the best Thai distributions to use (if you want maximum Thai documentation and active forums) are Linux TLE and SIS Linux. They do have some rough edges (and are not on the bleeding edge) but they do the job. If you basically want an English language distribution with Thai support on the side, look at Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise. There are some tweaks needed, but I have had it working well.
As far as circumventing Windows Product Activation and Windows Genuine Advantage goes, that is a continuing battle between MS and the pirates, which MS has been losing.
Netbooks will come with Linux or Windows 7 Starter edition, depending on model. In most cases, Linux will be replaced with Windows 7 (whichever is the most expensive version that the hardware supports) before leaving the shop. If it already has Windows, it will probably leave the shop unchanged.
White box computers, without exception, will be sold with Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise preloaded.
Low end desktops and full size notebooks all come with Free DOS or Linux, which means (as long as the hardware will support it) they will all have Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise preloaded before the computer leaves the shop.
More expensive name brand computers may come preloaded with a legit Windows 7 Home Premium or Windows 7 Professional preloaded. Often, they will leave the shop in original condition. A free upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise will be on offer.
EXISTING COMPUTERS
If the computer goes in for repair, or to have malware removed, part of the service is an upgrade to the latest and best version of Windows the system will support. [Note that saving your data is not part of the service.]
All this is depressing, given that perfectly good Thai Linux distributions exist. The trouble is that Windows is all anyone knows. I have converted a few souls to Linux and they mostly end up liking it (especially on Netbooks) but it is an up-hill struggle.
Although 4.2 is a year away from 4.0, delaying 4.0 until it was 4.2 would have taken much longer than a year, since people only test releases
I understand. Your solution was to tell people that something was a release when it wasn't. In extreme circumstances, I suppose a case can be made for misleading people to achieve an intended result. However, you should not then be surprised if you take a big hit to your credibility.
I believe the justification for patents is that it encourages innovation, allowing products to come to market that would otherwise never see the light of day. To be honest, I have always been pretty skeptical, but it seems particularly difficult to square such a claim when inventors are prevented from using their own inventions. If MIT wants to patent its students' work, it should at least exempt those who had the idea in the first place from paying royalties.
I noted that bit. If I understand correctly, he became irate when the airline still would not let him and his family fly even after they had been cleared by the terrorism experts. In certain situations, remaining cool becomes very difficult. Also, it is unclear that any other approach would have worked better (though I would have tried "do you know that I am a lawyer?").
As far as the other side goes, the FBI terrorism experts cleared them and the airline still banned them from flying.
By the way, on your point that the other passengers could reasonably be concerned based on their appearance, how many American Muslim families comprising a mix of male and female adults plus children traveling together have blown up or hijacked aircraft recently?
Khun Abhisit has become premier after extraordinary political manoeuvrings and a bidding war for MPs. For a fascinating look at how politics and "democracy" works in Thailand, take a look at this timeline by a Thai newspaper editor. While some details are based on rumours, the cash incentives to MPs and refusal by any body to investigate are public knowledge.
Thai politics has always been corrupt to a greater or lesser extent. However, the corruption reached a new level under the premiership of Khun Thaksin, a level which was maintained under the Thaksin proxy governments of Khun Samak and, briefly, Thaksin's son-in-law.
It has been reported that Thaksin has been hit hard by the global financial crisis, and the UK government's decision to freeze his UK assets based on doubts over their ownership. A cynic might suspect that Thaksin's latest proxies in the Phua Thai party lost out to the Democrat party because Thaksin balked over what winning would cost.
Thaksin's populist policies, helping the rural poor, were a welcome departure from government by an elitist urban elite with contempt for those up country. However, these policies were only pursued by Thaksin in order to gain power and line his own pockets.
The political kingmaker Khun Newin has advised Khun Abhisit to spoil the rural poor in the model of Thaksin. This might defuse the political situation here, but Thailand today is a politically divided country.
If this article was submitted to/. as a marketing ploy for AD RMS, it showed a singular lack of foresight. As comments already show, you do not have technically sophisticated people discuss ineffective technologies unless you want its drawbacks revealed for all to see. My suspicion, if the article was designed for discussion of AD RMS, is that someone is trying to avoid the hassle of implementing it in his organisation.
CIOs are notoriously conservative. Any solution you suggest that involves building a solution from scratch will scare them. The solution is to use existing proven technology. In the MS Windows world, at least, root kits have been distributing updates successfully for years. You should be looking at simply modifying an existing root kit to your requirements.
When were you looking? I do not dispute that SSDs cost more than regular HDDs, but your quoted prices are way too high. For instance, the OCZ 250GB SSD costs US$699 (less than a tenth of your lowest price)
Here is a teacher, accusing a student and an Open Source software organization of breaking the law (and no doubt intimating as such to her class) and confiscating the student's property for no valid reason. I believe the teacher is guilty of criminal acts. I also believe she leaves herself and the school board open to civil action. I am not an admirer of the US legal system, but this might be a good time to use it to send a message to the world's ignoramuses that, yes, some software is both good and free.
There should be a law against producing, purchasing, selling, requesting and trading pictures of children being molested (mere nudity should not be criminalised), but laws against accessing and possession do nothing to protect children; they simply provide an easy excuse for the government to exert control over citizens.
I have some sympathy for your views but, in the final analysis, preventing child abuse must be the priority and "access" is sufficient to encourage the production of child porn. There are many ways that a site can make money other than by demanding payment for access to porn images. Unfortunately, the law will catch people who intend no harm, indeed many who would be horrified at the idea that their actions could lead to a child being molested. That cannot be helped if we are going to minimise the number of children being forced into the pornography business.
Slashdot Mirror
Your recollections are different from mine. Prior to Google, I tended to use AltaVista and Hotbot. Searches took at least ten times as long. Results rarely included any recently created pages. The number of indexed pages was several orders of magnitude less than Google handles today (which in turn is one order of magnitude, or so, greater than current competitors). In spite of the fact that gaming of search engines is overwhelmingly targeted at Google, Google still does a relatively better job of finding the genuinely useful pages. Is Google perfect? No, of course not. Search is still only a partially solved problem. However, since its inception, Google has come up with most of the practical advances in the state of the art, as well as the best infrastructure for its implementation.
I very much hope the Office of the US Trustee, IBM, Novell and others do not appeal the delay. Of course, they have excellent grounds for doing so, but the result would likely just be a longer delay. SCO has successfully gamed the system, and will probably gain a six week delay in the process. If this is appealed, it will probably take longer than six weeks just to argue and get a decision. Meanwhile, SCO will argue that the purchase agreement cannot go forward with the Chapter 7 conversion hanging over their head (BS, of course, but prove it).
If you have the cash, IBM has always been (and still is) the virtualization king. This started with CP-67 (originally for development) and gradually evolved via VM/370, VM/SP and VM/ESA into a platform for running multiple production OS in parallel. IBM, along the way, added a hardware level partitioning capability called LPAR. IBM mainframes today have LPAR to allow partitioning of the real machine into (for all practical purposes) multiple completely independent computers. One or more of those can be running z/VM (a very powerful and mature hypervisor in its own right). On a big zSeries, it is entirely reasonable to run a few thousand separate Linux instances with good stability and efficiency.
What you are describing is one part of a general problem. When users are moving around using different networks, various tweaks to the network settings on the computer are often needed. A user-oriented tool to switch networks is needed. Some notebooks (e.g. Thinkpads) already come with such a tool. Otherwise, NetSwitcher is about US$20 a copy. Someone technical sets appropriate settings for each location the user visits. Subsequently, the user just calls up the configuration for 'Home', 'Office', 'Cust-X', 'Airport' or wherever.
The time is fast approaching when CAPTCHAs will be too difficult for entry by humans. The only logical solution is to start an open source project to create a program that will enter the required data for you. Without this, we are looking at a time when humans will be unable to access their email or post on a message board, and only spam bots will be left. (Come to think of it, given what I see in most of my email and most posts on message boards, are most humans already locked out?)
Your page was from 2007 (and highly suspicious anyway). Let's try a 2008 page and a couple of 2009 sites.
I find this quite confusing. Is this story implying that Mozilla will trash the Firefox search capabilities if someone comes up with enough money to merit the demolition? If I were Google, and wanted Chrome to replace Firefox, I might be willing to pay Mozilla myself to remove Google search from the product.
The speed at which Firefox starts and the time to load pages is heavily dependent on the extensions in use. For me, Firefox startup is pretty slow (about 5 seconds) because of my pretty extensive Adblock lists. Most pages load quite fast, helped by the Adblock lists. The speed at which Internet Explorer starts and loads pages is heavily dependent on how long ago a fresh install was done. Until the malware starts accumulating it can be pretty reasonable.
If your girlfriend finds you reading it ... unless you are reading it together of course!
IMHO, the best Thai distributions to use (if you want maximum Thai documentation and active forums) are Linux TLE and SIS Linux. They do have some rough edges (and are not on the bleeding edge) but they do the job. If you basically want an English language distribution with Thai support on the side, look at Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise. There are some tweaks needed, but I have had it working well.
As far as circumventing Windows Product Activation and Windows Genuine Advantage goes, that is a continuing battle between MS and the pirates, which MS has been losing.
EXISTING COMPUTERS
If the computer goes in for repair, or to have malware removed, part of the service is an upgrade to the latest and best version of Windows the system will support. [Note that saving your data is not part of the service.]
All this is depressing, given that perfectly good Thai Linux distributions exist. The trouble is that Windows is all anyone knows. I have converted a few souls to Linux and they mostly end up liking it (especially on Netbooks) but it is an up-hill struggle.
I understand. Your solution was to tell people that something was a release when it wasn't. In extreme circumstances, I suppose a case can be made for misleading people to achieve an intended result. However, you should not then be surprised if you take a big hit to your credibility.
I believe the justification for patents is that it encourages innovation, allowing products to come to market that would otherwise never see the light of day. To be honest, I have always been pretty skeptical, but it seems particularly difficult to square such a claim when inventors are prevented from using their own inventions. If MIT wants to patent its students' work, it should at least exempt those who had the idea in the first place from paying royalties.
I noted that bit. If I understand correctly, he became irate when the airline still would not let him and his family fly even after they had been cleared by the terrorism experts. In certain situations, remaining cool becomes very difficult. Also, it is unclear that any other approach would have worked better (though I would have tried "do you know that I am a lawyer?").
As far as the other side goes, the FBI terrorism experts cleared them and the airline still banned them from flying.
By the way, on your point that the other passengers could reasonably be concerned based on their appearance, how many American Muslim families comprising a mix of male and female adults plus children traveling together have blown up or hijacked aircraft recently?
Referring to Microsoft's customers?
Khun Abhisit has become premier after extraordinary political manoeuvrings and a bidding war for MPs. For a fascinating look at how politics and "democracy" works in Thailand, take a look at this timeline by a Thai newspaper editor. While some details are based on rumours, the cash incentives to MPs and refusal by any body to investigate are public knowledge.
Thai politics has always been corrupt to a greater or lesser extent. However, the corruption reached a new level under the premiership of Khun Thaksin, a level which was maintained under the Thaksin proxy governments of Khun Samak and, briefly, Thaksin's son-in-law.
It has been reported that Thaksin has been hit hard by the global financial crisis, and the UK government's decision to freeze his UK assets based on doubts over their ownership. A cynic might suspect that Thaksin's latest proxies in the Phua Thai party lost out to the Democrat party because Thaksin balked over what winning would cost.
Thaksin's populist policies, helping the rural poor, were a welcome departure from government by an elitist urban elite with contempt for those up country. However, these policies were only pursued by Thaksin in order to gain power and line his own pockets.
The political kingmaker Khun Newin has advised Khun Abhisit to spoil the rural poor in the model of Thaksin. This might defuse the political situation here, but Thailand today is a politically divided country.
If this article was submitted to /. as a marketing ploy for AD RMS, it showed a singular lack of foresight. As comments already show, you do not have technically sophisticated people discuss ineffective technologies unless you want its drawbacks revealed for all to see. My suspicion, if the article was designed for discussion of AD RMS, is that someone is trying to avoid the hassle of implementing it in his organisation.
Best troll for a long time, but I cannot resist biting ... how about Monty Python?
CIOs are notoriously conservative. Any solution you suggest that involves building a solution from scratch will scare them. The solution is to use existing proven technology. In the MS Windows world, at least, root kits have been distributing updates successfully for years. You should be looking at simply modifying an existing root kit to your requirements.
When were you looking? I do not dispute that SSDs cost more than regular HDDs, but your quoted prices are way too high. For instance, the OCZ 250GB SSD costs US$699 (less than a tenth of your lowest price)
Here is a teacher, accusing a student and an Open Source software organization of breaking the law (and no doubt intimating as such to her class) and confiscating the student's property for no valid reason. I believe the teacher is guilty of criminal acts. I also believe she leaves herself and the school board open to civil action. I am not an admirer of the US legal system, but this might be a good time to use it to send a message to the world's ignoramuses that, yes, some software is both good and free.
I have some sympathy for your views but, in the final analysis, preventing child abuse must be the priority and "access" is sufficient to encourage the production of child porn. There are many ways that a site can make money other than by demanding payment for access to porn images. Unfortunately, the law will catch people who intend no harm, indeed many who would be horrified at the idea that their actions could lead to a child being molested. That cannot be helped if we are going to minimise the number of children being forced into the pornography business.