It brings skills into the country and stops the export of programming jobs. It ensures that the organisatons you want to account are local. It means that all of your population can take advantage of gov't programming and development work. It reduces dependancies on countries which may or may not change their mind about you in the future. It means you aren't bound to proprietary standards (docs and APIs) which might be used to keep you on that platform. It means that the code can never be taken away from you.
Given that a countries primary mandate is social, it makes a great deal of sense to mandate free software, for the good of the country, unless you happen to be the country that is the home of Microsoft (and even then that's debatable - MS is perfectly happy to outsource programming jobs to wherever is cheapest).
This is the area which has made Airbus popular enough to unseat Boeing (in terms of aircraft shipped per year, I think it was either last year or this year that they went ahead for the first time).
Because they had the advantage of starting from scratch fairly recently nearly all of their aircraft have common cockpits, common handling characteristics, common spares and other things designed to save the operator money when running a mixed airbus fleet.
This is great for people like BA and American who operate short and long haul fleets, as it gives them the chance to be able to interchange pilots, mechanics and some parts between the A318 (tiny, ~100 seats) and the A380 (huge, ~800+ seats) without retraining.
Next on Slashdot...
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Why the RIAA will be asking for $30 tax/day/user for this new technology from congress.
Managers? What do they know?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
My managers in the past have prefered young programmers because, almost without exception, they want stuff written in pretend languages like VB not a _real_ language like C or Cobol that a more experienced programmer may choose for any given job. (I once saw one specifiy VB on Windows for a computational algorythm that would take about a week to run with their set of data.)
There seems to be a lot less tolerance of genuine hackers who can write clean optimised code at the cost of non-understanding by a few suits (who as a rule seem to be older, but the young ones get hit by this crap too) than there used to be.
Ah well, what they don't know won't hurt them, and you can call C from Labview...
"Hey boss! I found a new COTS tool that is easy to understand and will save us money..."
After the last time Microsoft was found guilty the chaiman of Enron was playing golf with the chairman of Worldcom, so goes the story...
"So Bob, should we stop doing business with these criminals?" "Hell no, Joe, I just got a $2bn kickback! Ye hah for corporate America! Anything goes." "Good thinking Bob, oh, and I love your new caddy by the way - a Senator is just so much better than my Congressman."
I think I may have expressed myself badly - my point was that you can run your Linux/BSD servers on _anything_ (hell, you could even have a cluster of Mac hardware running Linux if you like, or Arm palmtops, whatever) you were not restricted to one hardware vendor.
Don't you also have a single hardware supplier if you go with Suns? Or with a lot of IBM boxes?
But you can port an app written for Linux, using Linux/GNU libraries, from hardware platform to hardware platform very easily. And the whole point about x86 boxes is that you can change supplier whenever you feel like it - there are even multiple chip suppliers. If the AMD fab burns down, well there is still Intel, VIA, Transmeta...
Even the current XServes can already handle a lot more than that. And if you didn't mean to imply they can't, then I don't understand your reasoning behind this. Too expensive = will only be used for small setups so their higer cost can be recouped even less?
What I meant to imply is that smaller companies will ditch some raw performance for ease of use and administration any time - even if it's just something that they think is easier, or have been told is easier (otherwise why would anyone have Windows servers?);o)
Why not?? I paid $99 for Windows one time and all updates are free.
Really? I don't recall Win98 being free to Win95 users. Or Win98 SE being free to Win98 owners. Or WinME beinf free to Win98 SE owners. Or WinXP being free to WinME users...
Most Windows users seem to thing that Kazaa is an official distribution channel for Microsoft Upgrades.
Well, I suppose it works better than Windows Update, and you have less chance of your computer being rendered unusable with a file you downloaded from Kazaa:o)
6. Somewhere in this timeframe, new Xserves will start to appear with the 970 chip and the 64-bit server operating system (which should be interesting for folks running "big ass" database/graphical rendering farms.
Have to disagree with you here - what does an Apple back end have to offer someone doing huge distributed computations that Linux or BSD on x86 (or Sparc, or anything else you care to name) except increased price and a single hardware supplier?
If you have 100 or more nodes in your render farm then +$1,000 per box adds up very fast indeed. It's not like anyone is ever going to see the pretty cases or slick desktop on those machines.
Sure I could see a company worried about it's non-technical employees shifting to OS X desktops* if they deside to go all UNIX but I can't ever see OS X standing on it's merits as a UNIX clone in the serious server or cluster market. The Xserves will probably find a home in smallish companies who need a web server that is pretty reliable, or a DB server for a couple of hundred users at most.
*Of course, IME, if they are too stupid to handle KDE then you really have been scraping the barel. It's not like you are asking them to configure the damn thing, just use it. You could even run Fluxbox + idesk and given them two icons to click on - Mozilla and OpenOffice.
Executives at SCO, the RIAA, Amazon and other large companies sufered public embarrisment when it was annouced that IP was being stolen and they rushed home to see if they owned any of it to sue over.
On the other hand, this gives Quark a couple of point releases to iron out all those bugs _before_ the new 64 bit hardware* gives those OS 9 design shops yet another reason to upgrade.
*And odly DTP can seriously use that >>4gb of ram - this is one of the few places where 64 bit will be a great thing, not just a marketing trick.
All the nodes on my WiFi network talk in ad-hoc mode, using Mobile Mesh for routing (including the Zaurus). Traffic is then encrypted with IPSec and authenticated against my LDAP server.
As a result as long as I am in range of any one of my nodes (not a difficult thing in this house) I get a good signal - the cloud covers most of the garden too. And all without dropping a bundle on network engineers, antennas, amplifers or anything else.
But then again what do you expect of someone who works for MSN? Routing? Isn't that the thing you do with some kind of workmans tool?
The protypes of these kids are people like me. I got my first computer when I was ~6, could easily touch type before I left primary school, and can probably beat 50 WPM easily, even in C - let alone English. (Not including debugging time, regrettably.)
On the other hand I can write very fast and pretty accuratly as well. It takes me under 10 minutes to fill a side of A4 (~500 words or so) with words that make sense - a skill I _had_ to develop for exams. One of my economics A level papers required about 8 sides of answers in two hours. (That seriously kills your hands folks!) I was perfectly capable of writing in cursive before leaving primary school however, spending several hours a day playing with computers didn't make me forget what I had been taught.
If these kids can't write in cursive however, because they are too stupid to learn it or remember it, what can they possibly write that will be of any use?
At least with the proliferation of computers kids are _reading_ and practicing reading - a far more useful thing than writing. After all, if you can learn to read you can find a book that tells you how to write.
What shouldn't be allowed is the continuing trivialisation of computers - the idea that they are there for nothing but entertainment. There are people in this world who don't actually realise that the black box they use every day can be hacked to make it do far more interesting and fun things, to make it do what you want better or faster. Common perception of people who do hack around is that they are doing something wrong, not something right! This IMO is far more dangerous than any slip in percieved handwriting ability in children and corrected as soon as possible..
I'm a little bit more paranoid than that - I wrote a one time pad encoder/decoder and swap floppy disks full of randomly generated pads (say hellooooo WinTV card - ideal for picking up random noise).
This is considerably more secure than public key or even symetric encryption as there is no possible way to reconstruct the message without the key, which is scrubbed by the app off both disks as the message is converted. (The encoder chooses the next coherent free block of random numbers to encode with.) As long as you exchange the pad files via a trusted mechanism (handing over physical media) and you only send data to people you trust not to redistribute it, no one will ever get hold of a copy.
Not that I would ever give anyone my root passwords anyway - the very idea would make me go white and shake untill I had checked out my entire box for intrustions and rootkits;o)
A couple of favourites would be Ian Clarke (founder of the Freenet project) for a pro-freedom view (and the guy who runs CofE if you can track him down).
For an anti- or more preciley restriced- freedom viewpoint an interview with Parry Aftab of WiredPatrol (nee Cyberangels) would be interesting. Just beware that you won't get a word in edgeways - plesant but rather assertive:o)
1) You can insisit that people send you stuff in a plain text or open standard format. Word can make.rtf files just fine.
2) You don't want people sending you Macros anyway (virus risk!) so it's no bad thing to be incompatible with the rest of the world in that case. Everything else IME has been faultless with OpenOffice.
3) OO 1.1 includes Office Macro support.
So stop spreading FUD > Linux is perfectly adequate WRT documents - certainly for a saving of >> £400 / desk.
Another function added at the expense of security and usability.
I get the distinct feeling that if Microsoft organised a piss up in a brewery there would be sausages, crisps, plenty of seating, a cool entertainment system, probably even a stripper......and a distinct lack of beer.
My 6310i does _18_ days on one battery - and spare batteries are £18 ($25 or so?).
I assume this is for people who, unlike me, don't use their phones only for data calls, and can't carry a spare battery in their laptop case or with their PDA.
Ah well, new gadgets are always good, and I'd love to get more than 3 hours out of my laptop as well - I'm sure I can hook something up to feed one off the other.
I'm the worlds greatest programmer, what the hell does anyone else have to teach me? I can write code much faster than anyone else, and have it finished before google even returns a result. Just look at me go!
for(i=0;i<4;i++) {
switch(i) {
case 0:...
case 1:...
case 2:...
case 3:... } }
By taking the idiot box out of the porest homes society might start to normalise. People who cannot afford a television might find more productive things to do, getting (eventually) to a ste where the can afford one. Begin slow regression to dumb intellectual stupor.
It'll keep everyone on rougly the same level, and nicley halt the big downward spiral. Besides, if you get all your news off the internet at least you get more choice about where your lies come from than American broadcast TV.
Slashdot Mirror
It brings skills into the country and stops the export of programming jobs. It ensures that the organisatons you want to account are local. It means that all of your population can take advantage of gov't programming and development work. It reduces dependancies on countries which may or may not change their mind about you in the future. It means you aren't bound to proprietary standards (docs and APIs) which might be used to keep you on that platform. It means that the code can never be taken away from you.
Given that a countries primary mandate is social, it makes a great deal of sense to mandate free software, for the good of the country, unless you happen to be the country that is the home of Microsoft (and even then that's debatable - MS is perfectly happy to outsource programming jobs to wherever is cheapest).
This is the area which has made Airbus popular enough to unseat Boeing (in terms of aircraft shipped per year, I think it was either last year or this year that they went ahead for the first time).
Because they had the advantage of starting from scratch fairly recently nearly all of their aircraft have common cockpits, common handling characteristics, common spares and other things designed to save the operator money when running a mixed airbus fleet.
This is great for people like BA and American who operate short and long haul fleets, as it gives them the chance to be able to interchange pilots, mechanics and some parts between the A318 (tiny, ~100 seats) and the A380 (huge, ~800+ seats) without retraining.
Why the RIAA will be asking for $30 tax/day/user for this new technology from congress.
My managers in the past have prefered young programmers because, almost without exception, they want stuff written in pretend languages like VB not a _real_ language like C or Cobol that a more experienced programmer may choose for any given job. (I once saw one specifiy VB on Windows for a computational algorythm that would take about a week to run with their set of data.)
There seems to be a lot less tolerance of genuine hackers who can write clean optimised code at the cost of non-understanding by a few suits (who as a rule seem to be older, but the young ones get hit by this crap too) than there used to be.
Ah well, what they don't know won't hurt them, and you can call C from Labview...
"Hey boss! I found a new COTS tool that is easy to understand and will save us money..."
After the last time Microsoft was found guilty the chaiman of Enron was playing golf with the chairman of Worldcom, so goes the story...
"So Bob, should we stop doing business with these criminals?"
"Hell no, Joe, I just got a $2bn kickback! Ye hah for corporate America! Anything goes."
"Good thinking Bob, oh, and I love your new caddy by the way - a Senator is just so much better than my Congressman."
I think I may have expressed myself badly - my point was that you can run your Linux/BSD servers on _anything_ (hell, you could even have a cluster of Mac hardware running Linux if you like, or Arm palmtops, whatever) you were not restricted to one hardware vendor.
Don't you also have a single hardware supplier if you go with Suns? Or with a lot of IBM boxes?
;o)
But you can port an app written for Linux, using Linux/GNU libraries, from hardware platform to hardware platform very easily. And the whole point about x86 boxes is that you can change supplier whenever you feel like it - there are even multiple chip suppliers. If the AMD fab burns down, well there is still Intel, VIA, Transmeta...
Even the current XServes can already handle a lot more than that. And if you didn't mean to imply they can't, then I don't understand your reasoning behind this. Too expensive = will only be used for small setups so their higer cost can be recouped even less?
What I meant to imply is that smaller companies will ditch some raw performance for ease of use and administration any time - even if it's just something that they think is easier, or have been told is easier (otherwise why would anyone have Windows servers?)
Why not?? I paid $99 for Windows one time and all updates are free.
:o)
Really? I don't recall Win98 being free to Win95 users. Or Win98 SE being free to Win98 owners. Or WinME beinf free to Win98 SE owners. Or WinXP being free to WinME users...
Most Windows users seem to thing that Kazaa is an official distribution channel for Microsoft Upgrades.
Well, I suppose it works better than Windows Update, and you have less chance of your computer being rendered unusable with a file you downloaded from Kazaa
6. Somewhere in this timeframe, new Xserves will start to appear with the 970 chip and the 64-bit server operating system (which should be interesting for folks running "big ass" database/graphical rendering farms.
Have to disagree with you here - what does an Apple back end have to offer someone doing huge distributed computations that Linux or BSD on x86 (or Sparc, or anything else you care to name) except increased price and a single hardware supplier?
If you have 100 or more nodes in your render farm then +$1,000 per box adds up very fast indeed. It's not like anyone is ever going to see the pretty cases or slick desktop on those machines.
Sure I could see a company worried about it's non-technical employees shifting to OS X desktops* if they deside to go all UNIX but I can't ever see OS X standing on it's merits as a UNIX clone in the serious server or cluster market. The Xserves will probably find a home in smallish companies who need a web server that is pretty reliable, or a DB server for a couple of hundred users at most.
*Of course, IME, if they are too stupid to handle KDE then you really have been scraping the barel. It's not like you are asking them to configure the damn thing, just use it. You could even run Fluxbox + idesk and given them two icons to click on - Mozilla and OpenOffice.
This is Slashdot - most people will just answer 'Jedi'.
Chances are that if you are the kind of person that would charge to see your brand new porsche you wouldn't have any friends!
Executives at SCO, the RIAA, Amazon and other large companies sufered public embarrisment when it was annouced that IP was being stolen and they rushed home to see if they owned any of it to sue over.
On the other hand, this gives Quark a couple of point releases to iron out all those bugs _before_ the new 64 bit hardware* gives those OS 9 design shops yet another reason to upgrade.
*And odly DTP can seriously use that >>4gb of ram - this is one of the few places where 64 bit will be a great thing, not just a marketing trick.
All the nodes on my WiFi network talk in ad-hoc mode, using Mobile Mesh for routing (including the Zaurus). Traffic is then encrypted with IPSec and authenticated against my LDAP server.
As a result as long as I am in range of any one of my nodes (not a difficult thing in this house) I get a good signal - the cloud covers most of the garden too. And all without dropping a bundle on network engineers, antennas, amplifers or anything else.
But then again what do you expect of someone who works for MSN? Routing? Isn't that the thing you do with some kind of workmans tool?
The protypes of these kids are people like me. I got my first computer when I was ~6, could easily touch type before I left primary school, and can probably beat 50 WPM easily, even in C - let alone English. (Not including debugging time, regrettably.)
On the other hand I can write very fast and pretty accuratly as well. It takes me under 10 minutes to fill a side of A4 (~500 words or so) with words that make sense - a skill I _had_ to develop for exams. One of my economics A level papers required about 8 sides of answers in two hours. (That seriously kills your hands folks!) I was perfectly capable of writing in cursive before leaving primary school however, spending several hours a day playing with computers didn't make me forget what I had been taught.
If these kids can't write in cursive however, because they are too stupid to learn it or remember it, what can they possibly write that will be of any use?
At least with the proliferation of computers kids are _reading_ and practicing reading - a far more useful thing than writing. After all, if you can learn to read you can find a book that tells you how to write.
What shouldn't be allowed is the continuing trivialisation of computers - the idea that they are there for nothing but entertainment. There are people in this world who don't actually realise that the black box they use every day can be hacked to make it do far more interesting and fun things, to make it do what you want better or faster. Common perception of people who do hack around is that they are doing something wrong, not something right! This IMO is far more dangerous than any slip in percieved handwriting ability in children and corrected as soon as possible..
And there was me thinking that the average Slashdotter lived in a faraday cage and had tempest hardened computers and media cases :o)
I'm a little bit more paranoid than that - I wrote a one time pad encoder/decoder and swap floppy disks full of randomly generated pads (say hellooooo WinTV card - ideal for picking up random noise).
;o)
This is considerably more secure than public key or even symetric encryption as there is no possible way to reconstruct the message without the key, which is scrubbed by the app off both disks as the message is converted. (The encoder chooses the next coherent free block of random numbers to encode with.) As long as you exchange the pad files via a trusted mechanism (handing over physical media) and you only send data to people you trust not to redistribute it, no one will ever get hold of a copy.
Not that I would ever give anyone my root passwords anyway - the very idea would make me go white and shake untill I had checked out my entire box for intrustions and rootkits
When I started downloading the 8mb file it was running at 25K/sec - it's now down to 4K/sec and still dropping.
:o)
I hope they have a fire supression system in their sever room
A couple of favourites would be Ian Clarke (founder of the Freenet project) for a pro-freedom view (and the guy who runs CofE if you can track him down).
:o)
For an anti- or more preciley restriced- freedom viewpoint an interview with Parry Aftab of WiredPatrol (nee Cyberangels) would be interesting. Just beware that you won't get a word in edgeways - plesant but rather assertive
1) You can insisit that people send you stuff in a plain text or open standard format. Word can make .rtf files just fine.
2) You don't want people sending you Macros anyway (virus risk!) so it's no bad thing to be incompatible with the rest of the world in that case. Everything else IME has been faultless with OpenOffice.
3) OO 1.1 includes Office Macro support.
So stop spreading FUD > Linux is perfectly adequate WRT documents - certainly for a saving of >> £400 / desk.
Another function added at the expense of security and usability.
...and a distinct lack of beer.
I get the distinct feeling that if Microsoft organised a piss up in a brewery there would be sausages, crisps, plenty of seating, a cool entertainment system, probably even a stripper...
My 6310i does _18_ days on one battery - and spare batteries are £18 ($25 or so?).
I assume this is for people who, unlike me, don't use their phones only for data calls, and can't carry a spare battery in their laptop case or with their PDA.
Ah well, new gadgets are always good, and I'd love to get more than 3 hours out of my laptop as well - I'm sure I can hook something up to feed one off the other.
This is likley to happen with IP6/packet based phones - but rather than a name it'll be your now virtualised phone number mapping to an IP6 address.
:o)
At least that was how I set it up when working on htis kind of thing at my old dot bomb
I'm the worlds greatest programmer, what the hell does anyone else have to teach me? I can write code much faster than anyone else, and have it finished before google even returns a result. Just look at me go!
... ... ... ... } }
for(i=0;i<4;i++) {
switch(i) {
case 0:
case 1:
case 2:
case 3:
By taking the idiot box out of the porest homes society might start to normalise. People who cannot afford a television might find more productive things to do, getting (eventually) to a ste where the can afford one. Begin slow regression to dumb intellectual stupor.
It'll keep everyone on rougly the same level, and nicley halt the big downward spiral. Besides, if you get all your news off the internet at least you get more choice about where your lies come from than American broadcast TV.