Microsoft can be installed and made to work by a moron. Sure, at that point it is probably not locked down properly and will run into security issues, but it is up and running after clicking "next" a few times.
I'm not sure how this can be considered a good thing... Given the choice between not giving the morons to get *anything* working and letting them set up wholey insecure systems, I think I'd be happier making sure they couldn't set anything up.
Especially since many bosses don't understand the difference between a working system and a secure working system, which simply means that the morons get the jobs by undercutting the salaries of people who could do the job properly.
... how many MS shops with an evaluation Linux server (likely installed and administered by someone who, while wholly capable with Microsoft products is a novice to Linux) were included in this "survey?"
No, sorry, my experience of MCSEs is that whilest they can configure Windows applciations, most of them don't know the fundamentals required to run a bunch of servers - we're talking about really fundamental stuff like IP subnetting, which you need to understand as soon as you get even a moderately sized network.
Documentation for linux is bad. Theres no arguing the point
I just switched a box from fedora core 4 to core 5 and was real pleased nobody had bothered to document the changes to the default install of Apache.
Whilest I love Fedora Core, I have many years of Linux experience under my belt. I think it is worth pointing out that Fedora Core is really intended as a testing ground for RedHat and not as an enterprise grade system. If you want things to Just Work and be documented you need to switch to something like RHEL - what you're doing is equivalent to playing with a bleeding edge beta version of Windows and complaining that Microsoft didn't bother to document some brand new feature.
Blanketly saying "Windows is more/less reliable than Linux!" is flat out wrong (or at the very least, misguided) anyway. What were these machines doing? Were they sitting there just passing packets and not reconfigured once, or are they being constantly tweaked and redeployed? How many people were using them?
Also, who was administering them? Did they ahve dedicated Linux admins or were they expecting the office MCSE to handle the machines?
How does the average failure generate 2-4 hours of downtime? In our environment, the number is closer to 10 miutes
They also blame lack of Linux documentation for the downtime. I'm failing to see how that argument works though: 1. Only an idiot admin would take the server down for maintenance until they have the documentation needed to do the job. 2. In my experience, documentation for Linux systems is a lot more readilly accessible than the docs for Windows systems. Yeah, it may not come in a big printed book, but there's plenty of it on the web and searching the web is usually easier than finding the right page in a book. Documentation does of course include searching mailing lists, which will often turn up people having the same problem as yourself, along with the solutions they've found (this sort of thing is not generally published in the vendor's paperbacks).
Obviously the admin needs to be well versed in the OS being used. You can't hire a Windows admin and expect them to immediately know how to fix problems on a Linux system. But the converse applies as well - I'm very experienced with Linux but put me infront of a Windows machine and I wouldn't have a clue where to start.
Blaming increased downtime on the OS when it's simply the fact that you employed people who had unsuitable skills for the job is a big cop-out.
10 to 20 hours of downtime a year for a server? That's awful!.
Indeed. For the record, my (Fedora) server has had at most 30 minutes downtime over the past year (and that was caused by 2 incidents of me being a moron and accidentally killing the power). I think that amount of yearly downtime is probably about average for that particular machine.
Now there have been a few hours of *network* downtime, but that's down to the routers infront of that machine, not the machine itself.
That certainly sounds like a claim that Windows has 20 percent more annual uptime than RHEL, expecially since the article doesn't state anywhere that the 20 percent figure was an increase over last year.
The article is rather contradictory because after they say Windows has 20% more uptime than Linux they then say:
On average, individual enterprise Windows, Linux, and Unix servers experienced 3 to 5 failures per server per year in 2005, generating 10 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server.
So, lets assume (for the sake of argument), worst case figures for Linux - 19.5 hours of downtime a year - lets make it 20 hours for ease of calculation. And best case figures for Windows of no downtime.
1 year = 365 days = 8760 hours So for Linux that's 8760-20 = 8740 hours of uptime per year.
Windows is alledgedly 20% better than this, so we get 8740*1.2 = 10488 Hours of uptime. Which is 437 days.
So to summarise, they've said that Linux gets just over 364 days of uptime per 365 days whilest Windows gets 437 days of uptime per 365 days. I want one of those windows servers that can accumulate well over a year's worth of uptime in a year.
When you hibernate, much of the stuff in memory can be dumped to the swap partition rather than to the "hibernate file". This means that on resume it can be swapped back in at a later time when it's actually needed rather than swapping it all in at once. So it's very likley that all the stuff that actually needs to be loaded immediately at resume time can fit into the flash memory.
What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?
FOr crashproof apps that can be proven to not crash mathmatically the developers who work there are more like engineers and charge twice as much salary.
But can you develop a crash-proof app in the same number of man-hours? I have no figures to hand, but I suspect the answer is no. So you can multiply that double-salary by the number of man years and you'll get something much bigger than double development costs.
No one wants to pay $700 for an OS. Thats how much it would cost if you double the price of WindowsXP
I think doubling the price of any software is very conservative - you're really talking several orders of magnitude I think.
Look at it this way: do you think there is *anyone* who uses Windows regularly but hasn't been affected by a bug (this can apply to most moderately complex systems - I can point at many bugs in the Linux kernel, Firefox, OOo, etc). I suspect the answer is no, so MS is going to have to refund the money paid every copy of the OS. That's before we consider damages to cover the cost of any work that Windows destroyed. The only possible solution is to make the software much more robust - that means much much more extensive testing of the software on vastly more hardware setups. Lead times for the software go up too - if you have to spend 6 months testing a new graphics driver you can forget about using that shiny new hardware.
Whilest (almost) bug-free software would be wonderful to have, it's just never going to happen for the normal consumer - noone can afford to spend 10k or more on an operating system, let alone all the (similarly priced) applications.
specify that in the contract, and leave everyone else alone.
How do I amend the licence for Windows? I'm pretty sure that MS would laugh in your face if you told them to put liability in the contract or you wouldn't buy their software (unless you happen to be a *very* large organisation)
Basic economics teaches that if a proprietary product is a piece of crap then it will die and be replaced by someone else.
This only works if all the software is interoperable - if everyone else in the world is using the pile of crap software and it's not interoperable with anything else then tough - you're stuck with it. (As is everyone else in the world since they similarly can't drop the only software that will talk the format other people are using).
We've seen this happen with Windows - everyone in the world is using Word to write documents, Word isn't available for non-Windows systems, therefore you're stuck using Windows if you want to interoperate with anyone else. It's only recently that Word format support in OOo and similar has got to the level where it's actually feasable to use Word files without actually using Word.
You also have to prevent bundling for your argument to be even remotely true - we all know how crap IE is, yet because it's bundled on almost every computer it's still used by the vast majority of people.
In the business world, we stress TCO: Total cost of ownership. If you waste gigabytes of bandwidth, time to clear off spyware, time to patch, upgrade, test, and deploy- time to update workstation images and deploy regularly. How much time does an IT manager spend doing this versus just installing a program and not thinking about it (the good ones of course)?
I think you've just proved the opposite though - the business world *claims* to be interested in TCO, however I have little experience of this really being the case. Far too frequently do I see businesses spending over the odds for sub-quality software. Maybe there is a *perception* of value, but nothing seems to be done to actually work out if that perception holds with reality.
Some examples: 1. I'm required to use Windows at work. It doesn't matter that my work is Linux based, or that I find working with Linux *much* faster and easier than Windows, or that I waste an inordinate amount of time patching and rebooting Windows. My workstation is required to run Windows and I spend all day ssh'd into a Linux machine to do my actual job. The decision has been made that *everyone* must run Windows, even when it is clearly inappropriate for the job. 2. Someone, somewhere, made the decision that everyone must use ClearCase for version control. Frankly it's a pile of crap - slow, hard to use, everyone is always wasting a huge amount of time trying to get it to do what they need. Subversion would do the job just fine (and it's free). I rather suspect that TCO wasn't the consideration in choosing ClearCase - I think it's the "noone got fired for buying IBM" excuse.
I could go on - I have very rarely seen a business make a software buying decision based on lower *actual* TCO - if TCO is used to justify a decision it's almost always because someone with an agenda has managed to pull numbers that support their agenda from a suitably biassed report (see the Microsoft funded "Linux has a higher TCO than Windows" reports for details)
Then GPL and other open source licenses are all invalid. You don't pay anything for the software.
GPL isn't an end-user agreement - it's a distribution agreement. All software starts off with a copyright preventing anyone except the author from copying it. The author can then grant exceptions to the copyright - the gpl is basically just a big list of exceptions. So the GPL isn't really a contract - it is simply the copyright holder dictating to you under what circumstances he won't enforce his copyright.
The end-user can still use and modify the software without agreeing to the GPL - it's only if they want to redistribute it that they need to agree.
How about if you pirate software? You haven't paid for it, therefore you're not bound by the EULA restrictions.
I guess this might be the case. However, you are then guilty of copyright infringement, which is a different law altogether.
A more interesting question is: 1. Legitimately purchase the software (so you haven't infringed copyright) 2. Hack the installer so that it doesn't ask you to agree to the EULA (You've not agreed to any "no modification/reverse engineering" clauses in the EULA at this point). 3. Install the software using the hacked installer.
At this point, are you bound by the EULA? I would be inclined to say you can't be, since you have neither agreed to the EULA nor broken any agreed terms or any laws.
oh yes i'm a "bigot" because i think using text browsers in this day and age are stupid
No. I was talking about your general attitude
perhaps you should go look up the definition of that word
Bigot, n: A person who regards his own faith and views as unquestionably right, and any belief or opinion opposed to or differing from them as unreasonable or wicked. In an extended sense, a person who is intolerant of opinions which conflict with his own
Sound familiar?
you fucking moron
Case in point - intolerance of other people's views.
You should try reading your journal entries yourself:
Generally I hold slashdot users as a group more intelligent than the average person, so seeing bigotry - which is the direct manifestation of ignorance and immaturity - running around slashdot like wildfire was disturbing so say the least
I think you've just made a prime example of yourself.
1) Name one that I haven't already rejected the validity of (like needing ot use links because your firewall when you already have SSH - use the damn -L option)
Ok, how about: 1. A text browser is vastly faster and more lightweight than a graphical browser. 2. Why would I require a graphical browser to read text news stories? The graphics just detract from the content 3. I have frequently used eLinks in a console while stuck without a GUI for whatever reason (there are numberous reasons why this may be the case - I'm not going to list them all, use your imagination). 4. Using the -L option to forward ports through SSH would involve having an HTTP proxy to forward to (you can't forward directly to an HTTP 1.1 server without playing DNS tricks). There may not be a proxy available. 5. What possible reason is there to *exclude* text browsers?
2) Bullshit
Ah yes, the art of pretending you've won an arguement you've already lost. Would you care to qualify that comment?
if you want to use a text based only browser (stupid) use the farking version of/. meant for cellphones
I'm sorry, but: 1. There are genuine reasons for using text-only browsers, so it's not "stupid" 2. If your web pages don't (by default) look good in both graphical browsers and in text browsers then you shouldn't be designing web pages since that means your code is broken to begin with. This stuff isn't rocket science.
Why is it stupid? I frequently use eLinks because it's a whole lot faster than firing up a graphical browser (why exactly do I need graphics in order to read text news stories?).
I've also found myself using Elinks in an 80x25 console on a machine while waiting for it to install a Linux distro - it certainly helps pass the time. Not to mention those times when I've had to go searching for drivers/configuration/whatever which I needed in order to actually get a GUI (how many people do you think use eLinks to hit nVidia's website and download the drivers?).
Next you'll be telling me that reading mailing lists in PINE instead of using web forums is "absofuckinglutely stupid" because clearly the fact that it lets me read the interesting posts 100x faster than a forum is pointless, right?
I don't see why it would be difficult to have multiple versions of the site, one of which could be a text browser-friendly one (didn't there used to be a twin page like that?).
Having multiple versions of the site starts to become a administator's nightmare because of the overhead of keeping all the various versions working. Less of a problem when the content is all pulled from a DB like Slashdot is.
But this is what XSLT is for - serve up the content in XML and have the browser apply the XSLT stylesheet client-side. This has the added side effect of reducing bandwidth usage since you're not shifting the styling and layout data over the network every time the page is loaded.
The icky problem with XSLT at the moment, is that whilest all the mainstream browsers (even IE) support it, there's no way for the server to tell whether the browser is capable since there is no header the browser is required to set if it is.
In any case, if your web site doesn't work in both modern browsers and text browsers then you must be truely clueless when it comes to web design.
Use elements that are applicable to the *type* of content (i.e. tables are used to output tabular data, not to position random stuff on the screen. Menus can be presented as unordered lists, etc.). Then style those elements to give you the visual effect you need. Text-only browsers can discard the styling data and they still get to see the content - the correct use of elements gives the browser good hints as to how to display the data. Small-screen devices such as PDAs can select a different stylesheet.
And if you're expecting everyone to have Javascript then your site is very badly broken - Javascript-only features cause serious usability problems (for example, they may force someone to open something in a pop-up window when they don't want to). Javascript is an *enhancement* - build your site without it and then if you want to add *optional* enhancements then write some Javascript that modifies the DOM tree to add hooks to the right elements.
Interestingly, if your corporate website doesn't meet the W3 accessibility guidelines then (depending on your location) you may be breaking the law - many parts of the world have laws that prevent businesses from discriminating against the disabled. These often extend to corporate websites and large organisations have been sued for sizable chunks of cash for ignoring these laws.
Are you sure about this? Pure oxygen is used in hospitals all the time, and don't forget Michael Jackson's oxygen chamber. He's still living, last time I checked.
AFAIK oxygen *chambers* run at low pressures, Oxygen *masks* mix the oxygen with air (so you end up with air with more oxygen than normal rather than just pure oxygen).
There is NO bullet proof software, though I give a hat nod to the guys that wrote the code for the Mars rovers.
Ah, that would be the software on the rovers that almost cost the mission quite early on then.:)
FWIW, I believe the rover software runs under VxWorks. It would, of course, be very interesting to see the software - it's a shame NASA aren't likely to open-source it. If they did I could quite imagine a few build-you-own-mars-rover projects popping up on the web.:)
Take the phone switches for example. These things don't crash, ever. They just work.
Sorry, that's just not true. Phone switches _do_ crash - it's just that the telcos have learnt to build networks with a hell of a lot of redundency. If a phone switch goes down then the worst that'll happen is you'll lose the calls that are in-progress on that switch (actually, the switch may be able to recover the calls if it resets quickly enough - just because the signalling goes down for a few seconds doesn't necessarilly mean the voice circuits have also failed). New calls will be routed via a redundent switch.
Of course, building any kind of highly redundent network is very costly so people avoid doing it if they can help it.
Also, phone systems are only designed to deal with a fairly specific set of events, they don't need to worry about security holes, etc, because everyone on the network is fairly trusted. I'm sure this will change very quickly in the near future with the convergence of the internet and the PSTN.
Probably the closest you'll get to completely reliable are the fly-by-wire systems used in planes, but even then they still put a lot of effort into redundency, with multiple computers arranged in voting systems so faults can be spotted and corrected or completely taken out of service as early as possible. This is probably also the most similar scenario to the bridge analogy - if it goes badly wrong, people die.
You reduce corona discharge because you don't have voltage peaking well above the average level 120 times a second. You can't really eliminate it short of putting the conductors in really wide evacuated tunnels.
I imagine you can eliminate it by putting a low-voltage shield around your high voltage wire. The problem of course is that you need an insulator between the wire and shield that isn't going to break down when subjected to the enormous electric field... and the cost of doing so would also be pretty huge.
If that happens, the real question is whether or not the last mile would be DC
I think it's unlikley that the "last mile" will become DC since there are significant safety concerns with DC (namely that if you grab hold of a live conductor you won't be able to let go whereas if you grab an AC conductor you naturally let go).
However, it seems quite plausible that we may end up with several low voltage DC supplies *within* the home. You wouldn't want to make the cable runs very long because of transmission losses at low voltage, but having a number of separate low voltage DC circuits is a good solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft can be installed and made to work by a moron. Sure, at that point it is probably not locked down properly and will run into security issues, but it is up and running after clicking "next" a few times.
I'm not sure how this can be considered a good thing... Given the choice between not giving the morons to get *anything* working and letting them set up wholey insecure systems, I think I'd be happier making sure they couldn't set anything up.
Especially since many bosses don't understand the difference between a working system and a secure working system, which simply means that the morons get the jobs by undercutting the salaries of people who could do the job properly.
... how many MS shops with an evaluation Linux server (likely installed and administered by someone who, while wholly capable with Microsoft products is a novice to Linux) were included in this "survey?"
No, sorry, my experience of MCSEs is that whilest they can configure Windows applciations, most of them don't know the fundamentals required to run a bunch of servers - we're talking about really fundamental stuff like IP subnetting, which you need to understand as soon as you get even a moderately sized network.
Documentation for linux is bad. Theres no arguing the point
I just switched a box from fedora core 4 to core 5 and was real pleased nobody had bothered to document the changes to the default install of Apache.
Whilest I love Fedora Core, I have many years of Linux experience under my belt. I think it is worth pointing out that Fedora Core is really intended as a testing ground for RedHat and not as an enterprise grade system. If you want things to Just Work and be documented you need to switch to something like RHEL - what you're doing is equivalent to playing with a bleeding edge beta version of Windows and complaining that Microsoft didn't bother to document some brand new feature.
Blanketly saying "Windows is more/less reliable than Linux!" is flat out wrong (or at the very least, misguided) anyway. What were these machines doing? Were they sitting there just passing packets and not reconfigured once, or are they being constantly tweaked and redeployed? How many people were using them?
Also, who was administering them? Did they ahve dedicated Linux admins or were they expecting the office MCSE to handle the machines?
How does the average failure generate 2-4 hours of downtime? In our environment, the number is closer to 10 miutes
They also blame lack of Linux documentation for the downtime. I'm failing to see how that argument works though:
1. Only an idiot admin would take the server down for maintenance until they have the documentation needed to do the job.
2. In my experience, documentation for Linux systems is a lot more readilly accessible than the docs for Windows systems. Yeah, it may not come in a big printed book, but there's plenty of it on the web and searching the web is usually easier than finding the right page in a book. Documentation does of course include searching mailing lists, which will often turn up people having the same problem as yourself, along with the solutions they've found (this sort of thing is not generally published in the vendor's paperbacks).
Obviously the admin needs to be well versed in the OS being used. You can't hire a Windows admin and expect them to immediately know how to fix problems on a Linux system. But the converse applies as well - I'm very experienced with Linux but put me infront of a Windows machine and I wouldn't have a clue where to start.
Blaming increased downtime on the OS when it's simply the fact that you employed people who had unsuitable skills for the job is a big cop-out.
10 to 20 hours of downtime a year for a server? That's awful!.
Indeed. For the record, my (Fedora) server has had at most 30 minutes downtime over the past year (and that was caused by 2 incidents of me being a moron and accidentally killing the power). I think that amount of yearly downtime is probably about average for that particular machine.
Now there have been a few hours of *network* downtime, but that's down to the routers infront of that machine, not the machine itself.
That certainly sounds like a claim that Windows has 20 percent more annual uptime than RHEL, expecially since the article doesn't state anywhere that the 20 percent figure was an increase over last year.
The article is rather contradictory because after they say Windows has 20% more uptime than Linux they then say:
On average, individual enterprise Windows, Linux, and Unix servers experienced 3 to 5 failures per server per year in 2005, generating 10 to 19.5 hours of annual downtime for each server.
So, lets assume (for the sake of argument), worst case figures for Linux - 19.5 hours of downtime a year - lets make it 20 hours for ease of calculation. And best case figures for Windows of no downtime.
1 year = 365 days = 8760 hours
So for Linux that's 8760-20 = 8740 hours of uptime per year.
Windows is alledgedly 20% better than this, so we get 8740*1.2 = 10488 Hours of uptime. Which is 437 days.
So to summarise, they've said that Linux gets just over 364 days of uptime per 365 days whilest Windows gets 437 days of uptime per 365 days. I want one of those windows servers that can accumulate well over a year's worth of uptime in a year.
When you hibernate, much of the stuff in memory can be dumped to the swap partition rather than to the "hibernate file". This means that on resume it can be swapped back in at a later time when it's actually needed rather than swapping it all in at once. So it's very likley that all the stuff that actually needs to be loaded immediately at resume time can fit into the flash memory.
What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?
FOr crashproof apps that can be proven to not crash mathmatically the developers who work there are more like engineers and charge twice as much salary.
But can you develop a crash-proof app in the same number of man-hours? I have no figures to hand, but I suspect the answer is no. So you can multiply that double-salary by the number of man years and you'll get something much bigger than double development costs.
No one wants to pay $700 for an OS. Thats how much it would cost if you double the price of WindowsXP
I think doubling the price of any software is very conservative - you're really talking several orders of magnitude I think.
Look at it this way: do you think there is *anyone* who uses Windows regularly but hasn't been affected by a bug (this can apply to most moderately complex systems - I can point at many bugs in the Linux kernel, Firefox, OOo, etc). I suspect the answer is no, so MS is going to have to refund the money paid every copy of the OS. That's before we consider damages to cover the cost of any work that Windows destroyed. The only possible solution is to make the software much more robust - that means much much more extensive testing of the software on vastly more hardware setups. Lead times for the software go up too - if you have to spend 6 months testing a new graphics driver you can forget about using that shiny new hardware.
Whilest (almost) bug-free software would be wonderful to have, it's just never going to happen for the normal consumer - noone can afford to spend 10k or more on an operating system, let alone all the (similarly priced) applications.
specify that in the contract, and leave everyone else alone.
How do I amend the licence for Windows? I'm pretty sure that MS would laugh in your face if you told them to put liability in the contract or you wouldn't buy their software (unless you happen to be a *very* large organisation)
Basic economics teaches that if a proprietary product is a piece of crap then it will die and be replaced by someone else.
This only works if all the software is interoperable - if everyone else in the world is using the pile of crap software and it's not interoperable with anything else then tough - you're stuck with it. (As is everyone else in the world since they similarly can't drop the only software that will talk the format other people are using).
We've seen this happen with Windows - everyone in the world is using Word to write documents, Word isn't available for non-Windows systems, therefore you're stuck using Windows if you want to interoperate with anyone else. It's only recently that Word format support in OOo and similar has got to the level where it's actually feasable to use Word files without actually using Word.
You also have to prevent bundling for your argument to be even remotely true - we all know how crap IE is, yet because it's bundled on almost every computer it's still used by the vast majority of people.
In the business world, we stress TCO: Total cost of ownership. If you waste gigabytes of bandwidth, time to clear off spyware, time to patch, upgrade, test, and deploy- time to update workstation images and deploy regularly. How much time does an IT manager spend doing this versus just installing a program and not thinking about it (the good ones of course)?
I think you've just proved the opposite though - the business world *claims* to be interested in TCO, however I have little experience of this really being the case. Far too frequently do I see businesses spending over the odds for sub-quality software. Maybe there is a *perception* of value, but nothing seems to be done to actually work out if that perception holds with reality.
Some examples:
1. I'm required to use Windows at work. It doesn't matter that my work is Linux based, or that I find working with Linux *much* faster and easier than Windows, or that I waste an inordinate amount of time patching and rebooting Windows. My workstation is required to run Windows and I spend all day ssh'd into a Linux machine to do my actual job. The decision has been made that *everyone* must run Windows, even when it is clearly inappropriate for the job.
2. Someone, somewhere, made the decision that everyone must use ClearCase for version control. Frankly it's a pile of crap - slow, hard to use, everyone is always wasting a huge amount of time trying to get it to do what they need. Subversion would do the job just fine (and it's free). I rather suspect that TCO wasn't the consideration in choosing ClearCase - I think it's the "noone got fired for buying IBM" excuse.
I could go on - I have very rarely seen a business make a software buying decision based on lower *actual* TCO - if TCO is used to justify a decision it's almost always because someone with an agenda has managed to pull numbers that support their agenda from a suitably biassed report (see the Microsoft funded "Linux has a higher TCO than Windows" reports for details)
IANAL, etc...
Then GPL and other open source licenses are all invalid. You don't pay anything for the software.
GPL isn't an end-user agreement - it's a distribution agreement. All software starts off with a copyright preventing anyone except the author from copying it. The author can then grant exceptions to the copyright - the gpl is basically just a big list of exceptions. So the GPL isn't really a contract - it is simply the copyright holder dictating to you under what circumstances he won't enforce his copyright.
The end-user can still use and modify the software without agreeing to the GPL - it's only if they want to redistribute it that they need to agree.
How about if you pirate software? You haven't paid for it, therefore you're not bound by the EULA restrictions.
I guess this might be the case. However, you are then guilty of copyright infringement, which is a different law altogether.
A more interesting question is:
1. Legitimately purchase the software (so you haven't infringed copyright)
2. Hack the installer so that it doesn't ask you to agree to the EULA (You've not agreed to any "no modification/reverse engineering" clauses in the EULA at this point).
3. Install the software using the hacked installer.
At this point, are you bound by the EULA? I would be inclined to say you can't be, since you have neither agreed to the EULA nor broken any agreed terms or any laws.
oh yes i'm a "bigot" because i think using text browsers in this day and age are stupid
No. I was talking about your general attitude
perhaps you should go look up the definition of that word
Bigot, n: A person who regards his own faith and views as unquestionably right, and any belief or opinion opposed to or differing from them as unreasonable or wicked. In an extended sense, a person who is intolerant of opinions which conflict with his own
Sound familiar?
you fucking moron
Case in point - intolerance of other people's views.
You should try reading your journal entries yourself:
Generally I hold slashdot users as a group more intelligent than the average person, so seeing bigotry - which is the direct manifestation of ignorance and immaturity - running around slashdot like wildfire was disturbing so say the least
I think you've just made a prime example of yourself.
1) Name one that I haven't already rejected the validity of (like needing ot use links because your firewall when you already have SSH - use the damn -L option)
Ok, how about:
1. A text browser is vastly faster and more lightweight than a graphical browser.
2. Why would I require a graphical browser to read text news stories? The graphics just detract from the content
3. I have frequently used eLinks in a console while stuck without a GUI for whatever reason (there are numberous reasons why this may be the case - I'm not going to list them all, use your imagination).
4. Using the -L option to forward ports through SSH would involve having an HTTP proxy to forward to (you can't forward directly to an HTTP 1.1 server without playing DNS tricks). There may not be a proxy available.
5. What possible reason is there to *exclude* text browsers?
2) Bullshit
Ah yes, the art of pretending you've won an arguement you've already lost. Would you care to qualify that comment?
if you want to use a text based only browser (stupid) use the farking version of /. meant for cellphones
I'm sorry, but:
1. There are genuine reasons for using text-only browsers, so it's not "stupid"
2. If your web pages don't (by default) look good in both graphical browsers and in text browsers then you shouldn't be designing web pages since that means your code is broken to begin with. This stuff isn't rocket science.
oh FFS - text based browsers in 2006?
absofuckinglutely stupid
Why is it stupid? I frequently use eLinks because it's a whole lot faster than firing up a graphical browser (why exactly do I need graphics in order to read text news stories?).
I've also found myself using Elinks in an 80x25 console on a machine while waiting for it to install a Linux distro - it certainly helps pass the time. Not to mention those times when I've had to go searching for drivers/configuration/whatever which I needed in order to actually get a GUI (how many people do you think use eLinks to hit nVidia's website and download the drivers?).
Next you'll be telling me that reading mailing lists in PINE instead of using web forums is "absofuckinglutely stupid" because clearly the fact that it lets me read the interesting posts 100x faster than a forum is pointless, right?
I don't see why it would be difficult to have multiple versions of the site, one of which could be a text browser-friendly one (didn't there used to be a twin page like that?).
Having multiple versions of the site starts to become a administator's nightmare because of the overhead of keeping all the various versions working. Less of a problem when the content is all pulled from a DB like Slashdot is.
But this is what XSLT is for - serve up the content in XML and have the browser apply the XSLT stylesheet client-side. This has the added side effect of reducing bandwidth usage since you're not shifting the styling and layout data over the network every time the page is loaded.
The icky problem with XSLT at the moment, is that whilest all the mainstream browsers (even IE) support it, there's no way for the server to tell whether the browser is capable since there is no header the browser is required to set if it is.
In any case, if your web site doesn't work in both modern browsers and text browsers then you must be truely clueless when it comes to web design.
Use elements that are applicable to the *type* of content (i.e. tables are used to output tabular data, not to position random stuff on the screen. Menus can be presented as unordered lists, etc.). Then style those elements to give you the visual effect you need. Text-only browsers can discard the styling data and they still get to see the content - the correct use of elements gives the browser good hints as to how to display the data. Small-screen devices such as PDAs can select a different stylesheet.
And if you're expecting everyone to have Javascript then your site is very badly broken - Javascript-only features cause serious usability problems (for example, they may force someone to open something in a pop-up window when they don't want to). Javascript is an *enhancement* - build your site without it and then if you want to add *optional* enhancements then write some Javascript that modifies the DOM tree to add hooks to the right elements.
Interestingly, if your corporate website doesn't meet the W3 accessibility guidelines then (depending on your location) you may be breaking the law - many parts of the world have laws that prevent businesses from discriminating against the disabled. These often extend to corporate websites and large organisations have been sued for sizable chunks of cash for ignoring these laws.
Are you sure about this? Pure oxygen is used in hospitals all the time, and don't forget Michael Jackson's oxygen chamber. He's still living, last time I checked.
AFAIK oxygen *chambers* run at low pressures, Oxygen *masks* mix the oxygen with air (so you end up with air with more oxygen than normal rather than just pure oxygen).
There is NO bullet proof software, though I give a hat nod to the guys that wrote the code for the Mars rovers.
:)
:)
Ah, that would be the software on the rovers that almost cost the mission quite early on then.
FWIW, I believe the rover software runs under VxWorks. It would, of course, be very interesting to see the software - it's a shame NASA aren't likely to open-source it. If they did I could quite imagine a few build-you-own-mars-rover projects popping up on the web.
Take the phone switches for example. These things don't crash, ever. They just work.
Sorry, that's just not true. Phone switches _do_ crash - it's just that the telcos have learnt to build networks with a hell of a lot of redundency. If a phone switch goes down then the worst that'll happen is you'll lose the calls that are in-progress on that switch (actually, the switch may be able to recover the calls if it resets quickly enough - just because the signalling goes down for a few seconds doesn't necessarilly mean the voice circuits have also failed). New calls will be routed via a redundent switch.
Of course, building any kind of highly redundent network is very costly so people avoid doing it if they can help it.
Also, phone systems are only designed to deal with a fairly specific set of events, they don't need to worry about security holes, etc, because everyone on the network is fairly trusted. I'm sure this will change very quickly in the near future with the convergence of the internet and the PSTN.
Probably the closest you'll get to completely reliable are the fly-by-wire systems used in planes, but even then they still put a lot of effort into redundency, with multiple computers arranged in voting systems so faults can be spotted and corrected or completely taken out of service as early as possible. This is probably also the most similar scenario to the bridge analogy - if it goes badly wrong, people die.
You reduce corona discharge because you don't have voltage peaking well above the average level 120 times a second. You can't really eliminate it short of putting the conductors in really wide evacuated tunnels.
I imagine you can eliminate it by putting a low-voltage shield around your high voltage wire. The problem of course is that you need an insulator between the wire and shield that isn't going to break down when subjected to the enormous electric field... and the cost of doing so would also be pretty huge.
If that happens, the real question is whether or not the last mile would
be DC
I think it's unlikley that the "last mile" will become DC since there are significant safety concerns with DC (namely that if you grab hold of a live conductor you won't be able to let go whereas if you grab an AC conductor you naturally let go).
However, it seems quite plausible that we may end up with several low voltage DC supplies *within* the home. You wouldn't want to make the cable runs very long because of transmission losses at low voltage, but having a number of separate low voltage DC circuits is a good solution.