I'll do what I always do. Wait for my current card not to be able to keep up at the optimal resolution for my screens with the games I like, then pick a £100 card that does.
*pats his shiney new GF4 Ti 4200*
Sure, I have to upgrade more often, but it seems to be a lot less painful for me than for early adopters - and there are plenty of homes for older cards in my secondary and tertiary boxes, and then a final home put out to pasture in the render farm.
...is easily big enough to polish and support OSS in house (they have nearly 5,000 support staff world wide and 2,000 developers supporting 100,000 workstations). They get no support direct from Microsoft. They have no interest in making money from software - things (and there are a lot of things) that get written in house stay in house, no matter what the commercial potential.
And yet they still don't use OSS, despite the fact that it would offer them huge cost savings, less problems with obsolescence, a decent code base for internal development and many other advantages. It's really, massivly bizarre why why don't see what they could gain.
Perhaps they have been locked in a cuboard for the last 10 years and don't realise it exists?
Mind you, this _is_ British industry - a culture exists where if there had been a practice of lopping off the foot of every new hire for the last 20 years it would carry on forever, because 'that's the way we have always done things'.
Here, software is not made by armies of "Microserfs" employed by a giant corporation,
Yes.
but by armies of volunteer programmers who "donate" their code to the public domain.
No.
Most Open Source code is not in the public domain, but rather distributed under an exceptionally liberal license.
Re:I blame the British 'techie' environment.
on
Linux Usage in the UK
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I personally blame the demise of the BBC Master - after that with their fancy Acorn/RiscOS GUIs teachers no longer needed to program anthing at all.
My school followed the same restrictive policies as most while I was there, lock everything down, don't let the kids play - even though drives can be reghosted fast (you could leave at least one machine for messing around) and screwing up the software doesn't break the hardware. That would have encourage creativity. The computer club was about _using_ software not _developing_ it or even pushing it's limits.
My university isn't much better - officially it's Microsoft for everything. Even the SU spam server (really, they partner with an odious outfit called Uniservity) runs on exchange. Thankfully the techies know what they are doing and the routers and mail system run on Unix, and there are a couple of semi-public Solaris boxes if you know who who to ask for passwords. They even unnofficially support the local LUG with disk space and a mailing list - but it's a far cry from educating people about why Unix is a good thing.
The engineering department is the latest casualty to this - the CAD lab just got rid of SPARCs which ran for 5 years with no admin in favour of new x86/2k boxes that crash once a week. The BIOSes are locked so that you cannot dual boot with a Knoppix CD. They have even stated that you cannot install VNC and talk back to your box in halls, and have disabled Java applets to stop that too:o(
The sooner educational insitutions wake up to what is going on and realise that they are there to allow students to _learn_ not to restrict them the better. Probably not much chance though when everything they get is funded and dictated by industry.
The RIAA already managed to get a tax put on blank CDs because some were being used to copy music. This is just an extension of the same thing - because you could at some point in the future comit a crime, we will make you pay for it now.
It's shockingly hard to read VBA code - even stuff I wrote myself 3 months ago and documented well. It's the splitting up of the code along arbritary (ie this code relates to this table, and this code relates to this interface) versus functional (this code relates to user interaction and this code relates to logic) lines. It's almost impossible, no matter how talented, to functionally split VBA code into clean modules - some dirty hacks have to be used, and these make the code even less readable than splitting it up along arbitrary lines in the first place.
As for my comment about scripting - you are indeed right, it is great for interfacing one thing to another. It's the fact that it's being used for logic and processing that I am bitching about:o)
What are the obscure technical reasons the article alludes to?
Microsoft doing their hardest to make sure that you cannot easily reverse engineer VBA perhaps?
However, this comment is out of date (or nearly so) as theyhave managed to get it going in OO.org 1.1 beta, despite the same roadblocks that MS used to try and cripple Samba, WineX etc. A little while to get it stable and it should be in Star Office as well.
Personally I am not sad that it's not in OO at the moment, as too many people waste time writing VBA apps for things that really should be done in a proper language. Some of the hacks required to get a crippled version of a crippled language running in a crippled environment beggar belief.
Worst of all is when managers spend aeons hammering on about 'portable code' and 'good structure' and 'maintanable design' right before asking for a DB app knocked up in Access. Aaaargh! Hypocritical goits! No one can write anything but a dirty hack in VBA, it _just isn't possible_!
All you should need is a clean, open API into your business logic which should be destinct from the application suite and centralised for version control and efficiency, which can then hook into a _real_ database for data security and integrity. None of this half assed scripting rubbish that so many people get away with, even for enterprise applications:o(
I e-mailed my MEP and was most supprised to get a reply at all, unfortunatly it wasn't anything good.
He said that after cairful consideration and consultation with industry they were a necessary step to allow the EU to remain competative:o( I wonder how much he got paid to say that?
Engineers are supposed to be ethical as well as commercially minded, and consider the social consequences of their actions - something he seems to have forgotten when he became a politician.
Re:And in Europe ...
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Funnily enough my parents in the US pay about 50% total deductions after medical insurance etc. I pay (in the UK) 50% total deductions as well.
You pay for it one way or another, just with the system of taxation rather than private insurance the poor get treated too.
Heck people downloaded the new Honda Accord adds to see them - they actually _paid_ (for the bandwidth and in their time) to get hold of them! There were even a lot of downloads of the making of movie!
(Low quality version at http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/multimedia/video/cl ips/cars/thecog.zip or there is a high quality 48mb TVAD.MOV floating around, or you can even order the DVD direct from Honda for free in the UK at http://www.honda.co.uk/brochure/orderCars.jsp?sour ce=accord)
If you have adds like that, people will watch them. If not then people will do what they have always done - fast forward them, or if that's turned off, go and make a cup of tea instead.
Reality TV, news, and "event" programming such as the Oscars do significantly better at getting viewers to see the commercials.
Hell, we alreay know that reality TV viewers will watch _anything_ - why are you surpriised that they are watching the adds too? It's probably of better quality than the programme itself!
I think you will find that everything in the metric system is expressed (or is trying to be expressed, there aree still some problems with the kg) based on the distance which light travels in one second.
This is a good deal more logical (and consistant) than basing it on the length of a body part:o)
...to the companies with big support contracts. People like CSC will happily carry on supporting NT4 for years to come, as long as you give them enough cash.
Hell, I know of one deployment of NT3.51 still being supported by a 3rd party!
...the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisments said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirley to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutley, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be able to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchasers own property would result in the attention of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremley impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys.' - T Pratchatt and N Gaiman
And to think that in 1990 that was written as a joke... now it seems like a rather accurate description of reality.
Im fairly sure that in the UK any and all personal data is covered by the data protection act, which amongst other things covers good practice _and_ fines/punishments for offenders.
Because it's a criminal offense you can't insure against it either, in the same way that you cannot insure against earnings lost due to being jailed for manslaughter or parking fines.
This is BS. Most organization don't have public ethernet jacks sitting curbside like a phone booth.
But if you turn up in a suit carrrying a laptop you will have little trouble finding yourself a quiet conference room. Less chance of getting caught then WiFi attacks as well, because they won't be expecting it.
Got to admit that even on my LAN+WiFi-LAN the weak point is the wired section - the WiFi net is encrypted, authenticated and heavily monitored and the wired LAN even has a DHCP server handing out public IP addresses to all and sundry! Probably ought to fix that one sharpish.
My mother used to run VMS 'for fun'. I don't think I would dare show her Lindows and ask her what she thinks, she might cut my head off and feed it to the dog before catapulting my decapitated body into Michael Robertson's back garden.
Re:Like it or not, managers default to commercial
on
What is Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
Big business does not get support direct from the vendor except in rare cases.
I know of one company that contracts IT to CSC, at £1200+/box/yr plus £40/call plus £80/relocation. (IE moving the box accross the room or accross the world.)
They think it's worth it because it gives them known costs, support who know the business (although that bit backfires a bit...), someone to blame when things go wrong (penalty clauses and SLAs) and all the other things that make them comfortable.
They couldn't give a rats ass as if Linux or Windows was deployed, as long as it brought their cost base down. It's CSC who choose not to do it, not the company in question.
(FWIW the numbers there probably sounded like a good deal 5+ years ago when the 10 yr contract was signed. Bet someone feels a bit foolish now.)
The feeling is mutual dude! I wouldn't touch OS X with a 50 foot pole (although Linux on a G5 might be nice) unless the only alternative was running a box with Windows on it.
Linux has mostly replaced conventional UNIX boxes because it can do (roughly) the same stuff for less money. It's never (I hope) going to be quite as idiot proof as OS X (because that way the idiots will start using it) - so it's not really going to attack there in the same way.
If anything Windows is going to get more and more squeezed between the two decent desktop UNIXish systems - at one end by the simple OS X, at the other end by the cheap Linux.
It's not a battle between OS X and Linux - they compliment each other and Apple even seem to be playing reasonably nice with the OSS community. The battle is for the middle ground, currently occupied by Windows.
They are getting access to computers for a non-technical class? Your budget must be way too high.
Computers make no sense at all for this kind of thing - except possible for rock bottom (~$100) old machines that can function as a cheap yet flexible typewriter. You want them to lean how to write, not how to participate in the endless circle jerk that is blogs (and/.... oh, um, never mind then).
At least make them write their essay in vi - that way they might learn something useful at the same time.
64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...
Well, duh. 64 bit Linux running on an Athlon 64 of course. Cheaper, faster, better games with earlier releases _and_ a pretter user interface. Fluxbox baby! Ohhh yeah!
I'm fairly sure that there is an X11 server for OZ. At the very least there is an arm-ipkg of X11, because I had it installed on my iPaq (w/familiar) before I got my Zaurus.
BTW You can forward the OZ screen to your desktop as well as X11 apps...
Slashdot Mirror
I'll do what I always do. Wait for my current card not to be able to keep up at the optimal resolution for my screens with the games I like, then pick a £100 card that does.
*pats his shiney new GF4 Ti 4200*
Sure, I have to upgrade more often, but it seems to be a lot less painful for me than for early adopters - and there are plenty of homes for older cards in my secondary and tertiary boxes, and then a final home put out to pasture in the render farm.
...is easily big enough to polish and support OSS in house (they have nearly 5,000 support staff world wide and 2,000 developers supporting 100,000 workstations). They get no support direct from Microsoft. They have no interest in making money from software - things (and there are a lot of things) that get written in house stay in house, no matter what the commercial potential.
And yet they still don't use OSS, despite the fact that it would offer them huge cost savings, less problems with obsolescence, a decent code base for internal development and many other advantages. It's really, massivly bizarre why why don't see what they could gain.
Perhaps they have been locked in a cuboard for the last 10 years and don't realise it exists?
Mind you, this _is_ British industry - a culture exists where if there had been a practice of lopping off the foot of every new hire for the last 20 years it would carry on forever, because 'that's the way we have always done things'.
Here, software is not made by armies of "Microserfs" employed by a giant corporation,
Yes.
but by armies of volunteer programmers who "donate" their code to the public domain.
No.
Most Open Source code is not in the public domain, but rather distributed under an exceptionally liberal license.
I personally blame the demise of the BBC Master - after that with their fancy Acorn/RiscOS GUIs teachers no longer needed to program anthing at all.
:o(
My school followed the same restrictive policies as most while I was there, lock everything down, don't let the kids play - even though drives can be reghosted fast (you could leave at least one machine for messing around) and screwing up the software doesn't break the hardware. That would have encourage creativity. The computer club was about _using_ software not _developing_ it or even pushing it's limits.
My university isn't much better - officially it's Microsoft for everything. Even the SU spam server (really, they partner with an odious outfit called Uniservity) runs on exchange. Thankfully the techies know what they are doing and the routers and mail system run on Unix, and there are a couple of semi-public Solaris boxes if you know who who to ask for passwords. They even unnofficially support the local LUG with disk space and a mailing list - but it's a far cry from educating people about why Unix is a good thing.
The engineering department is the latest casualty to this - the CAD lab just got rid of SPARCs which ran for 5 years with no admin in favour of new x86/2k boxes that crash once a week. The BIOSes are locked so that you cannot dual boot with a Knoppix CD. They have even stated that you cannot install VNC and talk back to your box in halls, and have disabled Java applets to stop that too
The sooner educational insitutions wake up to what is going on and realise that they are there to allow students to _learn_ not to restrict them the better. Probably not much chance though when everything they get is funded and dictated by industry.
The RIAA already managed to get a tax put on blank CDs because some were being used to copy music. This is just an extension of the same thing - because you could at some point in the future comit a crime, we will make you pay for it now.
It's shockingly hard to read VBA code - even stuff I wrote myself 3 months ago and documented well. It's the splitting up of the code along arbritary (ie this code relates to this table, and this code relates to this interface) versus functional (this code relates to user interaction and this code relates to logic) lines. It's almost impossible, no matter how talented, to functionally split VBA code into clean modules - some dirty hacks have to be used, and these make the code even less readable than splitting it up along arbitrary lines in the first place.
:o)
As for my comment about scripting - you are indeed right, it is great for interfacing one thing to another. It's the fact that it's being used for logic and processing that I am bitching about
What are the obscure technical reasons the article alludes to?
:o(
Microsoft doing their hardest to make sure that you cannot easily reverse engineer VBA perhaps?
However, this comment is out of date (or nearly so) as theyhave managed to get it going in OO.org 1.1 beta, despite the same roadblocks that MS used to try and cripple Samba, WineX etc. A little while to get it stable and it should be in Star Office as well.
Personally I am not sad that it's not in OO at the moment, as too many people waste time writing VBA apps for things that really should be done in a proper language. Some of the hacks required to get a crippled version of a crippled language running in a crippled environment beggar belief.
Worst of all is when managers spend aeons hammering on about 'portable code' and 'good structure' and 'maintanable design' right before asking for a DB app knocked up in Access. Aaaargh! Hypocritical goits! No one can write anything but a dirty hack in VBA, it _just isn't possible_!
All you should need is a clean, open API into your business logic which should be destinct from the application suite and centralised for version control and efficiency, which can then hook into a _real_ database for data security and integrity. None of this half assed scripting rubbish that so many people get away with, even for enterprise applications
I e-mailed my MEP and was most supprised to get a reply at all, unfortunatly it wasn't anything good.
:o( I wonder how much he got paid to say that?
He said that after cairful consideration and consultation with industry they were a necessary step to allow the EU to remain competative
Engineers are supposed to be ethical as well as commercially minded, and consider the social consequences of their actions - something he seems to have forgotten when he became a politician.
Funnily enough my parents in the US pay about 50% total deductions after medical insurance etc. I pay (in the UK) 50% total deductions as well.
You pay for it one way or another, just with the system of taxation rather than private insurance the poor get treated too.
Heck people downloaded the new Honda Accord adds to see them - they actually _paid_ (for the bandwidth and in their time) to get hold of them! There were even a lot of downloads of the making of movie!
l ips/cars/thecog.zip or there is a high quality 48mb TVAD.MOV floating around, or you can even order the DVD direct from Honda for free in the UK at http://www.honda.co.uk/brochure/orderCars.jsp?sour ce=accord)
(Low quality version at http://multimedia.honda-eu.com/multimedia/video/c
If you have adds like that, people will watch them. If not then people will do what they have always done - fast forward them, or if that's turned off, go and make a cup of tea instead.
Reality TV, news, and "event" programming such as the Oscars do significantly better at getting viewers to see the commercials.
Hell, we alreay know that reality TV viewers will watch _anything_ - why are you surpriised that they are watching the adds too? It's probably of better quality than the programme itself!
We have nothing to fear from survalence devices running on Windows - the staff will be too busy rebooting them to actually get any monitoring done.
:o(
When they start running them on *nix, then you have to worry
What do you mean metric isn't based in reality?
:o)
I think you will find that everything in the metric system is expressed (or is trying to be expressed, there aree still some problems with the kg) based on the distance which light travels in one second.
This is a good deal more logical (and consistant) than basing it on the length of a body part
...to the companies with big support contracts. People like CSC will happily carry on supporting NT4 for years to come, as long as you give them enough cash.
Hell, I know of one deployment of NT3.51 still being supported by a 3rd party!
So where is the list of things that they accidentally broke, broke whilst trying to fix other things, or didn't quite fix right?
Or do we have to wait another couple of weeks for that one...
And to think that in 1990 that was written as a joke... now it seems like a rather accurate description of reality.
Im fairly sure that in the UK any and all personal data is covered by the data protection act, which amongst other things covers good practice _and_ fines/punishments for offenders.
Because it's a criminal offense you can't insure against it either, in the same way that you cannot insure against earnings lost due to being jailed for manslaughter or parking fines.
This is BS. Most organization don't have public ethernet jacks sitting curbside like a phone booth.
But if you turn up in a suit carrrying a laptop you will have little trouble finding yourself a quiet conference room. Less chance of getting caught then WiFi attacks as well, because they won't be expecting it.
Got to admit that even on my LAN+WiFi-LAN the weak point is the wired section - the WiFi net is encrypted, authenticated and heavily monitored and the wired LAN even has a DHCP server handing out public IP addresses to all and sundry! Probably ought to fix that one sharpish.
My mother used to run VMS 'for fun'. I don't think I would dare show her Lindows and ask her what she thinks, she might cut my head off and feed it to the dog before catapulting my decapitated body into Michael Robertson's back garden.
Big business does not get support direct from the vendor except in rare cases.
I know of one company that contracts IT to CSC, at £1200+/box/yr plus £40/call plus £80/relocation. (IE moving the box accross the room or accross the world.)
They think it's worth it because it gives them known costs, support who know the business (although that bit backfires a bit...), someone to blame when things go wrong (penalty clauses and SLAs) and all the other things that make them comfortable.
They couldn't give a rats ass as if Linux or Windows was deployed, as long as it brought their cost base down. It's CSC who choose not to do it, not the company in question.
(FWIW the numbers there probably sounded like a good deal 5+ years ago when the 10 yr contract was signed. Bet someone feels a bit foolish now.)
The feeling is mutual dude! I wouldn't touch OS X with a 50 foot pole (although Linux on a G5 might be nice) unless the only alternative was running a box with Windows on it.
Linux has mostly replaced conventional UNIX boxes because it can do (roughly) the same stuff for less money. It's never (I hope) going to be quite as idiot proof as OS X (because that way the idiots will start using it) - so it's not really going to attack there in the same way.
If anything Windows is going to get more and more squeezed between the two decent desktop UNIXish systems - at one end by the simple OS X, at the other end by the cheap Linux.
It's not a battle between OS X and Linux - they compliment each other and Apple even seem to be playing reasonably nice with the OSS community. The battle is for the middle ground, currently occupied by Windows.
They are getting access to computers for a non-technical class? Your budget must be way too high.
/.... oh, um, never mind then).
Computers make no sense at all for this kind of thing - except possible for rock bottom (~$100) old machines that can function as a cheap yet flexible typewriter. You want them to lean how to write, not how to participate in the endless circle jerk that is blogs (and
At least make them write their essay in vi - that way they might learn something useful at the same time.
64bit for the consumer and the world's most beautiful OS or a meagre increase for a 32bit chip with Microsoft Windows. I know what I'll pick...
Well, duh. 64 bit Linux running on an Athlon 64 of course. Cheaper, faster, better games with earlier releases _and_ a pretter user interface. Fluxbox baby! Ohhh yeah!
I'm fairly sure that there is an X11 server for OZ. At the very least there is an arm-ipkg of X11, because I had it installed on my iPaq (w/familiar) before I got my Zaurus.
BTW You can forward the OZ screen to your desktop as well as X11 apps...