Windows really has to change to be able to compete.
Open Source software offers you the advantage of a propritary in house solution (customisability, flexibility) without having to go away and autally write all the code yourself - just change the bits you want changed.
Windows solutions (shared source being something of a joke) offer you very little more support or indemnification (read the EULA and see what's covered!) yet take away your flexibility.
In the long run, support costs with someone like CSC being similar for Windows or Linux (unfairly IMO, they must be raking it in even more than normal on Linux contracts, but there you go) a business needs to work out if the costs of customising an OSS app to make it perfect are more than the costs of licensing Windows. Factor in the cost of lock in to a Microsoft format and the loss of control in the figures, and you have a basis of comparison for your company.
-And of course if you contribute your changes back to the commnity (which you don't _have_ to do with the BSDL or under the GPL if you do not distribute outside the company) you will suddenly find yourself with Karma:Excellent in the geek community, which may or may not be good for your business.
"The 2nd point is support. It's impeccable, and having guaranteed 24-hour help for those times when things foo bar up so badly we can't repair things is essential to running a service for our clients."
Yes, but who supplies your support? If it was Microsoft there would be no market for the likes of CSC and EDS who make a fortune out of support contracts because Microsoft support is not adequate.
If you have to pay someone for 24x7 support you may as well pay them for support no a reliable platform that is far better suited for 24x7 operations.
The fact that OSS has worse support is a myth - OSS comes with a good developer base that you (or your support contractor) can tap into, and Windows comes with the somewhat inferior MSDN _and that's about it_. Everything else you have to pay for one way or another.
"There may be no price tag attached to the aquisition of some Open Source software but it costs to support and maintain it."
Right, like Windows installs itself, runs flawlessly, and every time it breaks a little man from Microsoft pops out of the air beside your computer and fixes it for you.
If you took the money you didn't spend on buying Windows and stashed it in a high yield investment account, it would probably cover paying a large percentage of your IT staff, especially since you could fire all the ones doing nothing but running around and rebooting crashed PCs and wiping spyware by having to reinstall the OS.
The current filesystem is not exactly difficule, and if any distro wants to change it, why the hell didn't they use symlinks to do it?
That way they could have run/programs and/usr/bin in paralell, rather than f^king things up for people who know exactly what the old names mean and where to find them, thank you very much.
The only change that I would like to see, that can't really be accomplised with symlinks (although I have it this way on my LFS box) is to put all user config stuff in ~/.etc, and other dirs to clean up my home dir and emulate the system wide file system. _That_ would make life easier for new users, as their own local stuff would look the same as the system wide stuff, just system things are in/etc, user stuff is in ~/.etc.
Now the wives (or the odd husband) of audio freaks everywhere have some chance of removing the big leather chair from the middle of the room, if the sweet spot is everywhere.
"b) Directly treat remote RAM as a local resource -- a whole new class of zero copy networking."
Been there, done that - I once worked on a flight simulator that used a shared memory area accross many machines to distribute data as things progressed.
It's not as cool as it sounds and was eventually ditched for ethernet (not TCP/IP, just raw network messages) for real time information exchange.
In the final analysis however, it's probably faster for high bandwidth applications to build a dedicated high speed bus than to read and write out of one memory area and avoid all of the locking and multiple access issues, and for low speed applications (where latency is small compared to data processing time) a conventional (but souped up) ethernet style system is probably adequate and a good deal cheaper.
"I would think car companies don't make these systems dependent on delicate electronics"
You would think that, wouldn't you?
In modern cars an electronics failure means that the car will stall, power assissted steering and brakeing will revert to manual, the ECU will fail (not exactly critical that one), traction control will drop out, ABS will stop working and several other problems. If you have an automatic the gears will stop shifting.
If you are used to driving a power assisted car, then the termination of power steering alone will probably be enough to send you off the road, especially when the lack of power assissted ABS/traction control brakes puts you into a skid.
In my car electronics failure means that the lights no longer work. Not exactly a disaster:o)
"In summary, "Grow up and thing about data just as you would physical things"."
Data however is not a physical thing - you loose nothing by someone taking a copy, at least if you believe that intellectual property rights are pointless like so many here on/.
I will graduate with £18k in loans at the rate of inflation which is hardly the best start to a career, but I can just about live with it considering that my tuition was free and I will have lived off that for 4 years. (Plus working for vaious people.)
This is fairly typical for MEng students, and is a big burden when they start their careers on about £20k~ ($30k~).
Recently however there has been lots of talk about making students pay tuition as well, adding around £20,000 to that figure (and people doing useful degrees like Engineering, Physics, Chemistry get hit hardest as they have the highest costs). The basic principle is that if it's worth doing a degree its worth paying for it.
This is utter bull, graduates already _do_ pay for it - through vastly higher taxation. I expect to pay ~40% tax on my earnings for about 50 years, is this not more than enough to pay for my education? Especially since more graduates add value to economy (in terms of human capital) and also boost company earnings, which are also taxed.
If increased tax revenues are not high enough to justify all of the people who want to do a course, then the number of places should be cut and only the most skilled allowed to take up a place.
The government should be funding students, especially in shortage areas, to encourage as many talented people as possible to do an appropriate degree. All of the crap about opening up access by making any halfwit who can afford it able to go to university is one of the most damaging things that can be done to education, IMO.
You might, in 5 years when games only run on the XBox 3, cost £75 (plus inflation) each and are of poor quality because MS stopped developing DirectX when they managed to wipe out the competition.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, and regulation is never good enough to compensate.
If it's trivial to access the system, then there should be no crime committed.
You cannot just leave an open webserver and expect people to 'just know' they they cannot request files from it. You cannot expect people not to poke around your unpassworded FTP server.
Trivial passwords should fall into the same category - you can't be bothered to take care of your data/services, you can't bitch when someone else reads it/uses them.
"Any "expertise" you may have was offset by your glaringly ignorant comment about Java."
I write in Java, and have been paid to do so in the past. I like it, but it has its place, and at the moment for 3D eye candy games, it's not really suitable. (Unless fully compiled, which kind of beats the point of it.)
"Also DirectX does hamper cross-platform development, but that is not Microsoft's main goal."
I admited to being biased, but I truley believe that Microsoft do set out to hamper cross platform support _before_ making life easier for Windows developers. They _could_ choose to open up DirectX and about 30 minutes later their games would play on Linux - and if it was MS (games) that were independant that may have happened. As it is they are using ties between their businesses to unfairly supress competition in all their business areas.
As long as the games are well written, they should be easily portable:
They should be written in a cross platform language, like C++ (no, I don't mean Java - not until we all have P7 9000 machines!) which can be easily compiled on Windows or UNIX.
They should be writen to use open standards as far as possible. Games that exploit OpenGL are easy to port, games that use the protritary, limited, locked down bodge of an API (biased? me?) known as DirectX are not.
This way (as happened for UT2k3) games can be available on _both_ Windows and Linux for very little extra cost.
It's a shame MS is trying to put a spoke in the wheel of this kind of thing, not only with Direct X and dropping where possible support of OpenGL (no OpenGL support in the XBox I see...) but also by offering developers great wodges of cash to develop nativly in DirectX and make the game available on the XBox first, ensuring that OpenGL games and Linux support are far less attractive than would otherwise be the case.
I would go up on the shuttle if there was only a 50:50 chance of making it back, what do other slashdotters feel that there cut off point would be? (Poll please!)
Re:The price of exploration
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"If nothing else, economics should ground the manned space programme once and for all."
Increasing understanding is more important than money.
Sure, if you want to stop the shuttle and put all of the money into disease research or oceanographic surveys because they offer a better return there _might_ be an argument. However, if the shuttle was cancelled the money would just be pissed away on politicians perks and pointless wars, so we should fight tooth and nail to keep it.
It's all part of NASA's work on alternative fuel sources - they believe that by running rocket engines on 'doubts' they can seriously cut down on the emissions caused by shuttle and satellite launches. The last major hurdle to overcome is how to make the navigation system certain that it has arrived in the correct place.
The organisation has a history of almost-but-not-quite developing revolutionary new fuel sources, last year NASA stopped developing their faster-than-light 'bad news' powered rockets as they were unwelcome everywhere they went.
So? Handwriting recognition on my Zaurus is nearly flawless, and predictive recognition is much more usable (and ignorable when required) than it is on a tablet.
It also has a usable battery life, and isn't more outsized than an American SUV. The software library for it is much better and it talks to my other PCs much more easily*.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a big paperweight, the tablet wins every time.
*Disclaimer: I don't use proprietary software, as I have no need of it. All my PCs run Linux or BSD. However, RDF for Zaurus is alive and well, and more slick than the pocket PC version.
"This isn't that different from people designing a car, a thing that is both functional and can be beautiful. It takes engineer and designer to make a car."
Uhhh, no. It takes an engineer to design a car. He only needs the help of a designer if he wants to sell it*.
*Or at least, if he wants to sell it to people who don't realise that a form that perfectly compliments the function is truley beautiful. The SR-71 is a good example of this (as are many planes) and so are many structures - the elegance of the solution to the problem is just stunning. The BMW X5 on the other hand is a perefct example of function being sacrificed for form, and such is even uglier than the Fiat Multipla IMO.
What pisses me off is that my TFTs are 4:3 ratio, so DVDs and my WinTV card (when in Widescreen) doesn't use most of the display. (I don't have a TV as having forked out so much for a bunch of TFTs it seems like a bit of a waste of money and space.)
Has anyone come up with a way of getting Xine/Mplayer to split accross 2 displays? That way I could remove the facing and build a new bracket for my super high res (2560x1024) widescreen display:o)
"I do look forward to fully interactive e-ink, so that, say, you could have a notebook with e-ink paper, you jot down notes with a stylus, the paper shows the proper marks so it feels just like regular writing, but with the options to save notes, recall them later, and memory that allows one notebook to keep the information that a whole stack of real notebooks couldn't hold."
We already have this - it's called an etch-a-sketch. To save documents, don't shake it. To erase documents, do shake it.
You can even save many pages (write smaller) and best of all the batteries last forever!
Slashdot Mirror
Windows really has to change to be able to compete.
Open Source software offers you the advantage of a propritary in house solution (customisability, flexibility) without having to go away and autally write all the code yourself - just change the bits you want changed.
Windows solutions (shared source being something of a joke) offer you very little more support or indemnification (read the EULA and see what's covered!) yet take away your flexibility.
In the long run, support costs with someone like CSC being similar for Windows or Linux (unfairly IMO, they must be raking it in even more than normal on Linux contracts, but there you go) a business needs to work out if the costs of customising an OSS app to make it perfect are more than the costs of licensing Windows. Factor in the cost of lock in to a Microsoft format and the loss of control in the figures, and you have a basis of comparison for your company.
-And of course if you contribute your changes back to the commnity (which you don't _have_ to do with the BSDL or under the GPL if you do not distribute outside the company) you will suddenly find yourself with Karma:Excellent in the geek community, which may or may not be good for your business.
"The 2nd point is support. It's impeccable, and having guaranteed 24-hour help for those times when things foo bar up so badly we can't repair things is essential to running a service for our clients."
Yes, but who supplies your support? If it was Microsoft there would be no market for the likes of CSC and EDS who make a fortune out of support contracts because Microsoft support is not adequate.
If you have to pay someone for 24x7 support you may as well pay them for support no a reliable platform that is far better suited for 24x7 operations.
The fact that OSS has worse support is a myth - OSS comes with a good developer base that you (or your support contractor) can tap into, and Windows comes with the somewhat inferior MSDN _and that's about it_. Everything else you have to pay for one way or another.
"There may be no price tag attached to the aquisition of some Open Source software but it costs to support and maintain it."
Right, like Windows installs itself, runs flawlessly, and every time it breaks a little man from Microsoft pops out of the air beside your computer and fixes it for you.
If you took the money you didn't spend on buying Windows and stashed it in a high yield investment account, it would probably cover paying a large percentage of your IT staff, especially since you could fire all the ones doing nothing but running around and rebooting crashed PCs and wiping spyware by having to reinstall the OS.
The current filesystem is not exactly difficule, and if any distro wants to change it, why the hell didn't they use symlinks to do it?
/programs and /usr/bin in paralell, rather than f^king things up for people who know exactly what the old names mean and where to find them, thank you very much.
/etc, user stuff is in ~/.etc.
That way they could have run
The only change that I would like to see, that can't really be accomplised with symlinks (although I have it this way on my LFS box) is to put all user config stuff in ~/.etc, and other dirs to clean up my home dir and emulate the system wide file system. _That_ would make life easier for new users, as their own local stuff would look the same as the system wide stuff, just system things are in
Now the wives (or the odd husband) of audio freaks everywhere have some chance of removing the big leather chair from the middle of the room, if the sweet spot is everywhere.
"However, this feature was removed after Windows 2000 RC2 due to technical issues."
Wow - now that must be something to see, a techincal issue that would stop _Microsoft_ releasing a product.
"b) Directly treat remote RAM as a local resource -- a whole new class of zero copy networking."
Been there, done that - I once worked on a flight simulator that used a shared memory area accross many machines to distribute data as things progressed.
It's not as cool as it sounds and was eventually ditched for ethernet (not TCP/IP, just raw network messages) for real time information exchange.
In the final analysis however, it's probably faster for high bandwidth applications to build a dedicated high speed bus than to read and write out of one memory area and avoid all of the locking and multiple access issues, and for low speed applications (where latency is small compared to data processing time) a conventional (but souped up) ethernet style system is probably adequate and a good deal cheaper.
"I would think car companies don't make these systems dependent on delicate electronics"
:o)
You would think that, wouldn't you?
In modern cars an electronics failure means that the car will stall, power assissted steering and brakeing will revert to manual, the ECU will fail (not exactly critical that one), traction control will drop out, ABS will stop working and several other problems. If you have an automatic the gears will stop shifting.
If you are used to driving a power assisted car, then the termination of power steering alone will probably be enough to send you off the road, especially when the lack of power assissted ABS/traction control brakes puts you into a skid.
In my car electronics failure means that the lights no longer work. Not exactly a disaster
"In summary, "Grow up and thing about data just as
/.
you would physical things"."
Data however is not a physical thing - you loose nothing by someone taking a copy, at least if you believe that intellectual property rights are pointless like so many here on
I will graduate with £18k in loans at the rate of inflation which is hardly the best start to a career, but I can just about live with it considering that my tuition was free and I will have lived off that for 4 years. (Plus working for vaious people.)
This is fairly typical for MEng students, and is a big burden when they start their careers on about £20k~ ($30k~).
Recently however there has been lots of talk about making students pay tuition as well, adding around £20,000 to that figure (and people doing useful degrees like Engineering, Physics, Chemistry get hit hardest as they have the highest costs). The basic principle is that if it's worth doing a degree its worth paying for it.
This is utter bull, graduates already _do_ pay for it - through vastly higher taxation. I expect to pay ~40% tax on my earnings for about 50 years, is this not more than enough to pay for my education? Especially since more graduates add value to economy (in terms of human capital) and also boost company earnings, which are also taxed.
If increased tax revenues are not high enough to justify all of the people who want to do a course, then the number of places should be cut and only the most skilled allowed to take up a place.
The government should be funding students, especially in shortage areas, to encourage as many talented people as possible to do an appropriate degree. All of the crap about opening up access by making any halfwit who can afford it able to go to university is one of the most damaging things that can be done to education, IMO.
You might, in 5 years when games only run on the XBox 3, cost £75 (plus inflation) each and are of poor quality because MS stopped developing DirectX when they managed to wipe out the competition.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, and regulation is never good enough to compensate.
Can't use on usenet. (Unless you subscribe to the heretical top-posting-html-rich view of the world that is.)
If it's trivial to access the system, then there should be no crime committed.
You cannot just leave an open webserver and expect people to 'just know' they they cannot request files from it. You cannot expect people not to poke around your unpassworded FTP server.
Trivial passwords should fall into the same category - you can't be bothered to take care of your data/services, you can't bitch when someone else reads it/uses them.
"Any "expertise" you may have was offset by your glaringly ignorant comment about Java."
I write in Java, and have been paid to do so in the past. I like it, but it has its place, and at the moment for 3D eye candy games, it's not really suitable. (Unless fully compiled, which kind of beats the point of it.)
"Also DirectX does hamper cross-platform development, but that is not Microsoft's main goal."
I admited to being biased, but I truley believe that Microsoft do set out to hamper cross platform support _before_ making life easier for Windows developers. They _could_ choose to open up DirectX and about 30 minutes later their games would play on Linux - and if it was MS (games) that were independant that may have happened. As it is they are using ties between their businesses to unfairly supress competition in all their business areas.
As long as the games are well written, they should be easily portable: They should be written in a cross platform language, like C++ (no, I don't mean Java - not until we all have P7 9000 machines!) which can be easily compiled on Windows or UNIX. They should be writen to use open standards as far as possible. Games that exploit OpenGL are easy to port, games that use the protritary, limited, locked down bodge of an API (biased? me?) known as DirectX are not. This way (as happened for UT2k3) games can be available on _both_ Windows and Linux for very little extra cost. It's a shame MS is trying to put a spoke in the wheel of this kind of thing, not only with Direct X and dropping where possible support of OpenGL (no OpenGL support in the XBox I see...) but also by offering developers great wodges of cash to develop nativly in DirectX and make the game available on the XBox first, ensuring that OpenGL games and Linux support are far less attractive than would otherwise be the case.
I would go up on the shuttle if there was only a 50:50 chance of making it back, what do other slashdotters feel that there cut off point would be? (Poll please!)
"If nothing else, economics should ground the manned space programme once and for all."
Increasing understanding is more important than money.
Sure, if you want to stop the shuttle and put all of the money into disease research or oceanographic surveys because they offer a better return there _might_ be an argument. However, if the shuttle was cancelled the money would just be pissed away on politicians perks and pointless wars, so we should fight tooth and nail to keep it.
I figured that the entire known world* would already get the reference :o)
*Or at least the part that I give even the slightest micron of a damn about.
It's all part of NASA's work on alternative fuel sources - they believe that by running rocket engines on 'doubts' they can seriously cut down on the emissions caused by shuttle and satellite launches. The last major hurdle to overcome is how to make the navigation system certain that it has arrived in the correct place.
The organisation has a history of almost-but-not-quite developing revolutionary new fuel sources, last year NASA stopped developing their faster-than-light 'bad news' powered rockets as they were unwelcome everywhere they went.
So? Handwriting recognition on my Zaurus is nearly flawless, and predictive recognition is much more usable (and ignorable when required) than it is on a tablet.
It also has a usable battery life, and isn't more outsized than an American SUV. The software library for it is much better and it talks to my other PCs much more easily*.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a big paperweight, the tablet wins every time.
*Disclaimer: I don't use proprietary software, as I have no need of it. All my PCs run Linux or BSD. However, RDF for Zaurus is alive and well, and more slick than the pocket PC version.
After using a tablet w/WinXP, I realised how right the person was who said:
"Tablet is the wrong word for this - the whole experience has more in common with a suppository."
"This isn't that different from people designing a car, a thing that is both functional and can be beautiful. It takes engineer and designer to make a car."
Uhhh, no. It takes an engineer to design a car. He only needs the help of a designer if he wants to sell it*.
*Or at least, if he wants to sell it to people who don't realise that a form that perfectly compliments the function is truley beautiful. The SR-71 is a good example of this (as are many planes) and so are many structures - the elegance of the solution to the problem is just stunning. The BMW X5 on the other hand is a perefct example of function being sacrificed for form, and such is even uglier than the Fiat Multipla IMO.
Hell no, the most important part is the extra one you left in the air intake.
The number of fatalities from FOD (foreign objects) left in an a/c by mechanics is far higher than the number of fatalities from missing parts!
What pisses me off is that my TFTs are 4:3 ratio, so DVDs and my WinTV card (when in Widescreen) doesn't use most of the display. (I don't have a TV as having forked out so much for a bunch of TFTs it seems like a bit of a waste of money and space.)
:o)
Has anyone come up with a way of getting Xine/Mplayer to split accross 2 displays? That way I could remove the facing and build a new bracket for my super high res (2560x1024) widescreen display
"I do look forward to fully interactive e-ink, so that, say, you could have a notebook with e-ink paper, you jot down notes with a stylus, the paper shows the proper marks so it feels just like regular writing, but with the options to save notes, recall them later, and memory that allows one notebook to keep the information that a whole stack of real notebooks couldn't hold."
We already have this - it's called an etch-a-sketch. To save documents, don't shake it. To erase documents, do shake it.
You can even save many pages (write smaller) and best of all the batteries last forever!