Recently I upgraded enterprise PCs for a living. I quite accidentally found myself in control of 200 each 3-year old PCs that I had to get rid of, and the only condition was that I couldn't sell or dump them. They were P4's, 3.2GHz, with CDRW/DVD combo drives, 512MB of RAM and 30GB HDD, Gigabit networking, of the Ultraslim Desktop variety (I'm glossing over some details here - there were outliers.) They all had Windows OEM COA stickers. I had to wipe the drives, so they were full disk wiped with DBAN and then restored to the original OEM image. They were all thoroughly cleaned and tested by my team because that's how we work. A few didn't pass testing or wouldn't wipe and were discarded or used for parts. (A drive that won't wipe, we shred.)
When I approached my local school district with the opportunity to give them these for free, they were reluctant. They said they couldn't use them in schools but we could maybe work a deal with the local Co-op to provide them to underprivileged students. Mind, the ratio of students to computers in my district is about 1:20, and the budget had no money going forward for a long time. I didn't have monitors, so maybe that was a factor.
Instead we found a local school district which would take them on a slow rollout, with services on a volunteer basis. They still haven't taken half of them and they're in my warehouse gathering dust a year later.
Sometimes this stuff just not make sense. These PCs are going to gather dust until they're worthless and there's nothing I can do about it. Some days I think about plugging them in and running folding on them, but my boss would have fits about the electric expense. The whole point of giving them away was avoiding the expense of scrapping them, but our CFO doesn't see things that way. I have to deploy this crud before he declares it an asset, or I'll never be rid of the duty to inventory it.
I swap out thousands of these things every quarter and it amazes me how poorly the secondhand market works. Third world, first world, it doesn't matter to me. This stuff was manufactured at great cost, it still works, why don't people want it? Even if you had to populate it with RAM at $15 a machine, it runs LTSP just fine. They make a great thin client. You would think schools that don't have enough computers would jump at this but it's not so. I think they're afraid that if they got free PCs they would lose some of their funding to buy PCs, and that's just stupid. I wish I could eBay it, but our partnership deals won't allow it.
This stuff is only going to get worse. The stuff coming into the refurb channel now is more often notebooks or dual-core desktops. It's all 64 bit. Two years from now it's going to be quad core desktops and dual core notebooks. How are people going to justify rejecting that?
I usually agree with you but I think you're wrong here. US Paper currency fuels an underground economy in about half of the world. It's our biggest export, and North Korea's too (though they print their own). During the recent difficulties in the middle east we were legendary for losing track of pallets of Benjamins simply because that's the currency that you use to get the locals to do stuff they ordinarily wouldn't. I think in Iraq alone we can't account for three billion dollars worth of genuine US currency. The power of the dollar extends far past where you think it does.
So no, while you can't pay your French taxes in greenbacks you can buy with them anything that matters, and the seller almost always prefers it to the local coin in most places. The "informal" exchange rate is almost always better than the official one.
/Spent a lot of greenbacks overseas. Prefers money that glitters and rings true. Don't get caught smuggling currency - it's not worth a year in a Turkish prison.
Or to quote Benjamin Franklin:
"It is a happy country where justice and what was your own before, can be had for ready money. It is another addition to the value of money, and of course another spur to industry."
That's not stealing. THIS is stealing. In that example hundreds of millions of people are actually deprived their intellectual property - not just a few songs either, but millions of audible and visual records of history and culture spanning the 75 years. And by stealing all history and culture for what is the lifespan of an average person they deprive us of the very continuity of culture we as humans require to remain oriented and purposeful. This is a very real harm.
Let's not lose our perspective on which is the greater wrong. It's actually comparing one person sharing a few songs to the literal Farenheit 451 theft of an entire culture.
If you buy a safe at a yard sale, and it comes with the condition that you don't get the combination, but rather must gain the seller's assistance each time to insert or remove things, is the safe "open"? I think not.
IBM tried this language takeover thing in the 1980's, and it didn't work out for them. Otherwise we'd all be calling hard drives "fixed disks" and motherboards "planar boards".
They can't have "open". It means what it means and I have do doubt that Sony's implementation won't fit the definition. We just need to point this out to the idiots who are abusing our language and the problem will go away.
In the FOSS community, this 'malware' may by itself have interesting features worthy of a fork. Although the purposes to which it has been put are unsavory, it may have useful features.
With improved density current installation needs should be met forever even without folding.coms.
More importantly, the datacenter should locate somewhere with cheap power, labor and real estate that has good fiber. Where in the world it is is irrelevant - people who run servers don't fondle the hardware any more.
By definition, half of all people are dumber than the median. From your post I'm guessing you don't realize how much that, and an understanding of where the median is, and what the curve looks like, horrifies some of us.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. -- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
A Turing machine is a form of thought experiment with utility in many aspects of information science and mathematics. It was never intended as a platform to prove algorithms. That it has uses for algorithms is part of the proof of its general utility - which in the modern day goes far beyond afield of computer science. Typically algorithms are expressed not as Turing Machine code but in a format similar to a mathematical proof, in an actual programming language or as something called "abstract code" which has similarities to actual programming languages but without the distractions of implementation details.
The assumption that a pure algorithm must use a Turing machine as a standard platform is revealed as an error in this way: Turing machines have not only infinite storage, but infinite performance - the time to perform operations is not important to the operation of a Turing machine. For algorithms though efficiency of performance in number of operations, and hence time, is second only (and sometimes not even then) to correctness. Efficient use of resources like memory is an important metric for evaluating fitness of an algorithm. The Turing Machine doesn't consider these metrics because its purpose is not to find fit algorithms, but rather to serve as a generic type of operator for mathematic functions dealing with information.
In his momentous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"[14] (submitted on 28 May 1936), Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called Turing machines, formal and simple devices. He proved that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical problem if it were representable as an algorithm, even if no actual Turing machine would be likely to have practical applications, being much slower than practically realisable alternatives. - op. cit.
Although I agree with both you and the grandparent I feel you've missed some essence of the truth here.
On a completely different note: Determinism has some utility - it doesn't have all utility. Every lawyer and salesman knows that ambiguity can also be a useful tool.
I should imagine the kinetic enery would travel fastest in a direct line through the object, followed shortly later by the secondary shockwave effects. This would give more of a fountain eruption at the antipode, and more escaping ejecta. I can't wait until they get footage of this happening, rather than an animated model of what it might look like.
Shhhhh. There are many millions to be made selling these idiots the promise of what they want. They're throwing it away. Don't bump the elbow of the entrepeneur who's fleecing them this time.
And wait till they get a look at my painless bulletproof transparent DRM strategy. They'll go bananas for it! It's a vertical solution that brings minute-to-minte control of access to media in a form that people will be thrilled to pay a premium for because the reproduction quality is INCREDIBLE.
The $300 laptop is already here - an HP at Walmart.com. Trying to limit what people put in a netbook to protect the price of laptops is just chasing the unicorn.
People want our netbooks with the new low power processors and a screen as big as the lid. And maybe the new cellular wireless tech embedded. There's no good reason to deny us what we want, except that Microsoft is having trouble running from that tiny SSD. That's an antitrust issue begging for attention.
You're not pro-change. You're pro-Microsoft, probably because they pay you to be, and you think the jerkwad style is how you score points here. Don't pretend. You do know that any slashdotter can click your user id and see your posting history, right?
Do you even know how this slashdot thing works?
They ought to give you guys a four hour orientation session before they turn you loose to embarrass them.
Everybody who's interested can download it from MSDN. Actually, that's what the professionals are doing right now in order to properly evaluate the thing.
Windows 7 wasn't available on MSDN until the next day. Obviously you, a newbie to slashdot, have an advance copy and are projecting an expectation of what "professionals" will do. Naturally this is because in your part of the world you received your "launch day" talking points in the blog center before "launch day" actually occurred. You haven't actually ever seen the product, and likely never will see a fairly licensed copy in Bangalore. Not your fault, really, but it blunts your effectiveness.
You from farther up the thread:
They did not 'review' a prerelease, but the RTM. Are you by any chance a moron?
OK, I think I've outed you as an astroturfer, and a poor one. Obviously you think getting abusive with me is going to get me quivering in fear, but you couldn't be more wrong. You've blown it. Whether you're a professional in real life or not, the LinuxAndLube persona clearly isn't. I'd say that account is well and fairly burned out for effective astroturfing.
Oh, and is the 'symbolset' slashdot account not already forbidden for trolling in your blog center? I've outed more than a dozen of you dweebs so far, and all of the rest of you have failed to deliver their message convincingly when sparring with me. You guys should know better by now. You're down a few million dollars in marketing. I hope your supervisor wasn't dumb enough to award you points for that feeble crap.
It's not your fault, really. You don't understand what's happening here and you can't without many more years of experience. Until you have more understanding, it's best if you don't reply to posts with user IDs lower than, say, 1000000.
Let me reiterate what I said, in case you're having trouble grasping it: I have no opinion about whether Windows 7 is good or bad, and will not until I've tested it myself. Even you should have no trouble understanding that that is a responsible position to take. The betas look promising, thankfully. But the product itself? When I've tested it to my satisfaction I'll have an opinion and not before. Until then your impatience does not express professionalism.
You can use a single sign on solution like that offered by Imprivata and decent two factor authentication. Then, the user need only remember one password, or better yet not lose his biometric imprint, and retain control of his keycard. This does access for the whole system, and the end user doesn't even know his access credentials for subsystems. When mandatory changes happen, the sso system just handles it. It works with proximity cards too, and can be set up to log you out when you get out of range of the sensor, or to do fast user switching.
The Imprivata solution includes a high availability pair (or more) of Linux boxes that handle these things for the end user.
No I don't work for them. I did sit through some training. I understand their gear is popular in healthcare and with the military.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it is, if you're computing in base pi.
Let's not forget the Ernie Ball story.
<rant>
Recently I upgraded enterprise PCs for a living. I quite accidentally found myself in control of 200 each 3-year old PCs that I had to get rid of, and the only condition was that I couldn't sell or dump them. They were P4's, 3.2GHz, with CDRW/DVD combo drives, 512MB of RAM and 30GB HDD, Gigabit networking, of the Ultraslim Desktop variety (I'm glossing over some details here - there were outliers.) They all had Windows OEM COA stickers. I had to wipe the drives, so they were full disk wiped with DBAN and then restored to the original OEM image. They were all thoroughly cleaned and tested by my team because that's how we work. A few didn't pass testing or wouldn't wipe and were discarded or used for parts. (A drive that won't wipe, we shred.)
When I approached my local school district with the opportunity to give them these for free, they were reluctant. They said they couldn't use them in schools but we could maybe work a deal with the local Co-op to provide them to underprivileged students. Mind, the ratio of students to computers in my district is about 1:20, and the budget had no money going forward for a long time. I didn't have monitors, so maybe that was a factor.
Instead we found a local school district which would take them on a slow rollout, with services on a volunteer basis. They still haven't taken half of them and they're in my warehouse gathering dust a year later.
Sometimes this stuff just not make sense. These PCs are going to gather dust until they're worthless and there's nothing I can do about it. Some days I think about plugging them in and running folding on them, but my boss would have fits about the electric expense. The whole point of giving them away was avoiding the expense of scrapping them, but our CFO doesn't see things that way. I have to deploy this crud before he declares it an asset, or I'll never be rid of the duty to inventory it.
I swap out thousands of these things every quarter and it amazes me how poorly the secondhand market works. Third world, first world, it doesn't matter to me. This stuff was manufactured at great cost, it still works, why don't people want it? Even if you had to populate it with RAM at $15 a machine, it runs LTSP just fine. They make a great thin client. You would think schools that don't have enough computers would jump at this but it's not so. I think they're afraid that if they got free PCs they would lose some of their funding to buy PCs, and that's just stupid. I wish I could eBay it, but our partnership deals won't allow it.
This stuff is only going to get worse. The stuff coming into the refurb channel now is more often notebooks or dual-core desktops. It's all 64 bit. Two years from now it's going to be quad core desktops and dual core notebooks. How are people going to justify rejecting that?
Grrr... <end rant>
I usually agree with you but I think you're wrong here. US Paper currency fuels an underground economy in about half of the world. It's our biggest export, and North Korea's too (though they print their own). During the recent difficulties in the middle east we were legendary for losing track of pallets of Benjamins simply because that's the currency that you use to get the locals to do stuff they ordinarily wouldn't. I think in Iraq alone we can't account for three billion dollars worth of genuine US currency. The power of the dollar extends far past where you think it does.
So no, while you can't pay your French taxes in greenbacks you can buy with them anything that matters, and the seller almost always prefers it to the local coin in most places. The "informal" exchange rate is almost always better than the official one.
/Spent a lot of greenbacks overseas. Prefers money that glitters and rings true. Don't get caught smuggling currency - it's not worth a year in a Turkish prison.
Or to quote Benjamin Franklin:
"It is a happy country where justice and what was your own before, can be had for ready money. It is another addition to the value of money, and of course another spur to industry."
I think he was a bit more cynical than he let on.
God knows why someone would dump them.
The G6's are out now.
That's not stealing. THIS is stealing. In that example hundreds of millions of people are actually deprived their intellectual property - not just a few songs either, but millions of audible and visual records of history and culture spanning the 75 years. And by stealing all history and culture for what is the lifespan of an average person they deprive us of the very continuity of culture we as humans require to remain oriented and purposeful. This is a very real harm.
Let's not lose our perspective on which is the greater wrong. It's actually comparing one person sharing a few songs to the literal Farenheit 451 theft of an entire culture.
Let's go with a Dave Barry quote here: That's like calling a plant the most eloquent asparagus ever.
If you buy a safe at a yard sale, and it comes with the condition that you don't get the combination, but rather must gain the seller's assistance each time to insert or remove things, is the safe "open"? I think not.
IBM tried this language takeover thing in the 1980's, and it didn't work out for them. Otherwise we'd all be calling hard drives "fixed disks" and motherboards "planar boards".
They can't have "open". It means what it means and I have do doubt that Sony's implementation won't fit the definition. We just need to point this out to the idiots who are abusing our language and the problem will go away.
But I think Sony using this in practice in the way you describe is considerably less likely than Microsoft porting Exchange to FreeBSD.
In the FOSS community, this 'malware' may by itself have interesting features worthy of a fork. Although the purposes to which it has been put are unsavory, it may have useful features.
As a 'softie told me here once, vendors are coin operated. Take three guesses at who's dropping the coin in their slot and punching their buttons.
And so is Larrabee. The next year should be interesting in the hobby number crunching game.
With improved density current installation needs should be met forever even without folding .coms.
More importantly, the datacenter should locate somewhere with cheap power, labor and real estate that has good fiber. Where in the world it is is irrelevant - people who run servers don't fondle the hardware any more.
By definition, half of all people are dumber than the median. From your post I'm guessing you don't realize how much that, and an understanding of where the median is, and what the curve looks like, horrifies some of us.
Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. -- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
A Turing machine is a form of thought experiment with utility in many aspects of information science and mathematics. It was never intended as a platform to prove algorithms. That it has uses for algorithms is part of the proof of its general utility - which in the modern day goes far beyond afield of computer science. Typically algorithms are expressed not as Turing Machine code but in a format similar to a mathematical proof, in an actual programming language or as something called "abstract code" which has similarities to actual programming languages but without the distractions of implementation details.
The assumption that a pure algorithm must use a Turing machine as a standard platform is revealed as an error in this way: Turing machines have not only infinite storage, but infinite performance - the time to perform operations is not important to the operation of a Turing machine. For algorithms though efficiency of performance in number of operations, and hence time, is second only (and sometimes not even then) to correctness. Efficient use of resources like memory is an important metric for evaluating fitness of an algorithm. The Turing Machine doesn't consider these metrics because its purpose is not to find fit algorithms, but rather to serve as a generic type of operator for mathematic functions dealing with information.
In his momentous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"[14] (submitted on 28 May 1936), Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called Turing machines, formal and simple devices. He proved that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical problem if it were representable as an algorithm, even if no actual Turing machine would be likely to have practical applications, being much slower than practically realisable alternatives. - op. cit.
Although I agree with both you and the grandparent I feel you've missed some essence of the truth here.
On a completely different note: Determinism has some utility - it doesn't have all utility. Every lawyer and salesman knows that ambiguity can also be a useful tool.
The EULA.explicitly grants permission to use the output of the "sensor" for third party partners such as reality TV and amateur porn.
I should imagine the kinetic enery would travel fastest in a direct line through the object, followed shortly later by the secondary shockwave effects. This would give more of a fountain eruption at the antipode, and more escaping ejecta. I can't wait until they get footage of this happening, rather than an animated model of what it might look like.
Shhhhh. There are many millions to be made selling these idiots the promise of what they want. They're throwing it away. Don't bump the elbow of the entrepeneur who's fleecing them this time.
And wait till they get a look at my painless bulletproof transparent DRM strategy. They'll go bananas for it! It's a vertical solution that brings minute-to-minte control of access to media in a form that people will be thrilled to pay a premium for because the reproduction quality is INCREDIBLE.
I was going with zipped file, but yeah, that.
We're the phone company.
The $300 laptop is already here - an HP at Walmart.com. Trying to limit what people put in a netbook to protect the price of laptops is just chasing the unicorn.
People want our netbooks with the new low power processors and a screen as big as the lid. And maybe the new cellular wireless tech embedded. There's no good reason to deny us what we want, except that Microsoft is having trouble running from that tiny SSD. That's an antitrust issue begging for attention.
You're not pro-change. You're pro-Microsoft, probably because they pay you to be, and you think the jerkwad style is how you score points here. Don't pretend. You do know that any slashdotter can click your user id and see your posting history, right?
Do you even know how this slashdot thing works?
They ought to give you guys a four hour orientation session before they turn you loose to embarrass them.
Everybody who's interested can download it from MSDN. Actually, that's what the professionals are doing right now in order to properly evaluate the thing.
Windows 7 wasn't available on MSDN until the next day. Obviously you, a newbie to slashdot, have an advance copy and are projecting an expectation of what "professionals" will do. Naturally this is because in your part of the world you received your "launch day" talking points in the blog center before "launch day" actually occurred. You haven't actually ever seen the product, and likely never will see a fairly licensed copy in Bangalore. Not your fault, really, but it blunts your effectiveness.
You from farther up the thread:
They did not 'review' a prerelease, but the RTM. Are you by any chance a moron?
OK, I think I've outed you as an astroturfer, and a poor one. Obviously you think getting abusive with me is going to get me quivering in fear, but you couldn't be more wrong. You've blown it. Whether you're a professional in real life or not, the LinuxAndLube persona clearly isn't. I'd say that account is well and fairly burned out for effective astroturfing.
Oh, and is the 'symbolset' slashdot account not already forbidden for trolling in your blog center? I've outed more than a dozen of you dweebs so far, and all of the rest of you have failed to deliver their message convincingly when sparring with me. You guys should know better by now. You're down a few million dollars in marketing. I hope your supervisor wasn't dumb enough to award you points for that feeble crap.
It's not your fault, really. You don't understand what's happening here and you can't without many more years of experience. Until you have more understanding, it's best if you don't reply to posts with user IDs lower than, say, 1000000.
Let me reiterate what I said, in case you're having trouble grasping it: I have no opinion about whether Windows 7 is good or bad, and will not until I've tested it myself. Even you should have no trouble understanding that that is a responsible position to take. The betas look promising, thankfully. But the product itself? When I've tested it to my satisfaction I'll have an opinion and not before. Until then your impatience does not express professionalism.
You can use a single sign on solution like that offered by Imprivata and decent two factor authentication. Then, the user need only remember one password, or better yet not lose his biometric imprint, and retain control of his keycard. This does access for the whole system, and the end user doesn't even know his access credentials for subsystems. When mandatory changes happen, the sso system just handles it. It works with proximity cards too, and can be set up to log you out when you get out of range of the sensor, or to do fast user switching.
The Imprivata solution includes a high availability pair (or more) of Linux boxes that handle these things for the end user.
No I don't work for them. I did sit through some training. I understand their gear is popular in healthcare and with the military.