A recent study found that Monkeys exhibit some of the *same* (economically) irrational behaviors as humans. For example, monkeys which were happy to complete a task for cucumbers (a medium coolness reward) got pissed off and went on strike when they saw other monkeys getting a better reward (grapes) for the same work. This is a clear example of "irrational economic behavior": either you think a cucumber is adequate compensation for a unit of work, or you don't. The price that two other parties negotiate for a unit of work should make no difference to you. Of course, the reaction is very *understandable* - humans (and, apparently, other primates,) don't like getting ripped off. But it ain't 'rational'.
Oh, there's also discussion about this research in The Economist
My wedding photographer (a professional, award-winning photojournalist) was paid for his labor, and charged around $3000. This paid for 8 hours of his time (so he captured a lot of the pre-wedding dressing and decorating as well as the reception,) and up to 30 rolls of film, which he handed over at the end of the night. (It wasn't a *complete* assignment of copyright; the contract says he still retains rights to, say use the images in his portfolio or in advertising his business, and I agreed that I cannot use the images commercially, but I can do all the things I *want* to do, such as print all the copies I want, burn them on CDs, put them on a private (non-commercial) website, etc. IMHO, that's a pretty fair exchange.)
This was something my wife and I were very concerned with when selecting our photographer, and it is the reason we eventually settled on hiring from The Wedding Bureau: their photographers are mostly (maybe all) professional photojournalists who do weddings/special events for extra money. All they do is take the pictures. If you want, they will give you the negatives at the end of the evening. If you prefer, for a lower price, they will hand over the negatives to the bureau, which build your albums & sell you individual prints, but you still get the negatives after 18 months.
I cannot reccomend these guys highly enough; they were completely professional from beginning to end, and the quality of the photographers they employ is phenomenal.
Here's two important wedding photo tips: (from recent personal experience:^)
Even if you hire a photographer for his labor and buy the rights to the negatives, by all means let the professional get the proofs developed for you, even if you think their price for this service is unreasonable. Contrary to popular belief, photo developing is an art, not a science, and a good photographer will know where to send his negatives to get the very best prints, because his business depends on it. When my wife and I got our proofs (and negatives) from our photographer, we were very happy with the results; the pictures were sharp, colors were great, exposures were just right, everything. Then we took some of our favorite pictures to the "upscale" neighborhood photo place to make big prints for the family. The prints *sucked*; they were too green, the contrast was uneven, and they were nowhere near as sharp as the proofs we got. To make along story short, we tried 9 different developers before we found a boutique developing lab (mostly used by low-volume professional photographers) who was able to print our prints almost as well as whoever did our original proofs. (The original lab was in south florida, 600 miles away, or we would have used them.) So: before you sink a lot of money on prints of those valuable photos, ask local photographers where they take their work, and do experiments - print the same negative at multiple stores - you will be utterly amazed how much difference there is between one place and another.
At first, places like the wedding bureau (who will charge you for the labor and give you the negatives) seem way more expensive than "traditional" photographers, but this is an illusion: before you decide you can't afford it, insist on a *full* price list from the traditional photographer, figure out a lower bound on how many prints you think you will want, and use this to figure out their true price. At the boutique lab we settled on, we can get new 8x10 prints of our favorite pictures for about $5 each (yes, this is *cheaper* than Wal-mart, etc. - go figure) -- the traditional wedding photographer will often want $50-$100 for each 8x10 - that adds up *fast*.
So, if Sigma Designs is violating XVID.org's copyrighted code, then XVID should serve Sigma Design's (or their hosting company) with a DMCA ceas and desist, no?
In a post-conference interview, researchers noted that GRACE has already exceeded the social skills of Richard Stallman, who has been observed picking his teeth and clipping his toenails (then flicking the debris onto the floor) while giving a talk at Georgia Tech.
"It's not really a fair contest:" groused Stallman,"GRACE doesn't have any toenails!"
(True story about the toenails, BTW. Interesting talk otherwise; or so I heard.)
I read somewhere that the consultant who came up with the name 'EXXON' [sorry, I forget the name,] was considered the most highly paid author, because he got paid $50,000 for a single word. (Authors, particularly those who write for magazines, typically get paid cents per word, where foo is not a bug number.)
So, assuming the then-standard ASCII notation, $50k/(5*8 bits) = $1,250.00/bit.
emusic DOES have whatsherface. (At least this free track) - it's Featured on the main login page at emusic this week.
BTW, the song is 9 minutes long, has a beat reminiscent of Madonna's "Respect Yourself", although the song overall sounds nothing like Madonna. I wouldn't buy it, personally, but then, I don't have to - I sampled it as part of my subscription.:^)
If you want to "teach" the music industry a lesson, don't waste $1 on one stupid track, get a $10/month subscription to E-music and download all-you-can-listen-to!
(Besides, you get this track free from emusic, too.)
This track is already available free to emusic subscribers.
If you're not hung up on top-40, check out emusic.com - sign up for a year subscription at $10/month, or 3 months at $15/month; there's a 14-day free trial, and you can download:
as many songs as you want (max 50 tracks during the free trial period)
unencrypted
with no special DRM
and keep the tracks after you cancel your subscription. (They even tell you to keep the 50 tracks if you choose not to subscribe!)
They claim they split the revenues 50/50 with the artists. (even if you allow for some exageration here, it'd almost have to be a better deal than the few pennies an artist gets per CD track sold through traditional outlets...
The only restrictions are:
they ask that you not hog the system by mass-downloading everything; just grab what you plan to listen to now or in the near future
and you are on your honor not to "steal" from them by sharing those files elsewhere
In other words, they are selling MP3's exactly the way we want to buy them, and trusting us not to rip them off, instead of imposing some clumsy technological constraints - just like any other honest business. (ok, I would prefer higher bitrate encodings, but so what? 128k sounds ok on my pc. I signed up, I sent them a long letter telling them what I liked about the service, and what I would like to see improved, including the option to pay a bit more to download better quality encodings. Who do you think they are going to listen to more - their existing, paying customer base, or people heckling them from the sidelines? [I got a personal response to my letter from their customer service. They didn't promise anything, but at least i know they heard me.])
They don't have many huge names (probably the most famous contemporary group in their catalog is They Might Be Giants,) but they have an awesome collection of old jazz and blues collection, a good classical section, some really bizarro-but-intersting international stuff, and a bunch of small indie labels. (They claim over 200,000 MP3 tracks available, from over 900 different [mostly small] record labels) Oh, and some comedy too, like most of George Carlin's albums.
Sorry if I sound like a commercial - I'm just a subscriber who loves this service, and I don't understand why more people haven't signed up yet...
Because, like it or not, high school is, for most, valuable job training before they leave high school and enter the work force, be that as secretaries using MS Office or accountants using Excel, etc. When you teach them to use software that is completely irrelevant outside of school, you are crippling them for life as they have to retrain themselves on all the applications that school had taught them in order to use something as commonplace as Office.
Learning to use some spreadsheet and wordprocessor while you're in school is probably a good thing, but don't get hung up on learning to use the market leader.
When I was in Junior High School, my computer lab taught us how to use word processing software on the most common PC available: the Apple IIe - I don't even remember what software we used. In high school, we had a lab full of really popular TRS-80 Model IIIs with WordStar or somesuch. In college, we had a huge computer lab chock full of IBM PS/2 workstations with the spiffy new 3.5" disks, and I took a [required, but lame] course on popular business software. We learned how to use the industry-leading WordPerfect and Quattro packages, and some dBase clone for a database. It was imoprtant to learn those packages, because that's what industry was using, and we wanted to be ready for the 'real world'.:^/
Guess what? The world doesn't stand still. A kid in Junior high today who learns to use MS Word because that's what his mommy uses at work will probably find that knowledge irrelevant in 2010, when he graduates from college. At least the typing skills will probably transfer.
So I don't wory too much about these kids learning to use StarOffice while the 'real' world uses MS Office. A wordprocessor is a wordprocessor is a wordprocessor, and everytime the world forces them to "upgrade" to a new one, they'll adapt, learn the new keystroke combination for bolding text and creating bullet lists, and then move on with their lives.
In the meantime, our schools are desperately short on cash; we would be far better off spending the money that would have gone to Micro$oft for their overpriced office suite on things that will still matter 10 years from now, like rasing salaries to attract smarter teachers, or hiring more teachers to reduce classrom sizes, or... [insert your favorite expensive school reform idea here]
I have a ReplayTV unit - I bought it the first month they came out - they ROCK!
They did, in fact, do what the author of this article described, around Christmas time last year (I remember the coke-drinking Santa Claus ad in particlar) but (on my unit, at least) they removed the extra commercials and restored the way it used to work in less than two months, so I'm not sure what this guy is complaining about:
A lot of the questions people are asking, (and some questions I'm sure your bosses asked,) are really a variation on the same theme: "you could have chosen a commercial supercomputer, or brand X proprietary clustering product, but you didn't - why?"
Whatever your answer, I think it's fair to say that there is something about this system, which uses an open-source clustering technology, built on top of an open-source operating system, which made it best for your needs; maybe it was the reliabilty, or the ability to modify it as needed, or maybe just the lower dollar cost to your department.
My question then, is this: have you given any thought to how you can help advance open source software, to give back to the community that created this tool? Getting the word out that the U.S. Goverment uses Linux for its cutting-edge weather forecasting tool would be an enormous PR win for the folks that still have trouble convincing their management that OSS software can be trusted for "real work." I'm not suggesting putting a picture of 'Tux' on every weather forecast, (although that would be kinda cute,) but it would be great if NOAA press releases about the project gave at least passing mention to the fact that the project will be benefitting from open source software.
I realize this is not something you would normally do for, say a Cray or IBM, but those are commercial enterprises, with their own PR budgets; they don't need your help to get their word out. OSS needs all the help it can get, so that future projects like yours can continue to reap the benefits.
Slow down a minute, folks - sending 40 Gbps over a fiber is trivial - it's been done by shipping, commercial telecom-grade DWDM (Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing) equipment for at least 5 years.
What's cool about this, is they put 40Gbps on a single carrier on a fiber. This means that, eventually, they can stack a bunch of 40Gbps carriers, on slightly different laser frequencies, in the same fiber to carry [1,2,4,8?]Tbps.
Commercial systems with the capacity to carry over a Terabit-per-second of data over a single fiber are already commercially available (and actually shipping) from companies like Ciena and probably Nortel. Lucent says they have equipment in the lab that is faster, but they're a bit like Microsoft in terms of making press releases long before they have working products, to inspire FUD in their competitor's potential customers...:^)
Please do not assume that everyone reading uses x86 hardware
He didn't *assume* it, he flat out told you that it uses x86 assembler and figured you'd be smart enough to figure out if it's useful to you.
Are you saying he shouldn't have posted something that might be of interest to the >= 90% of Linux users out there who have an x86 machine because it might have hurt the Alpha and Sparc users' feelings?
This is a trend that has been growing and growing on slashdot, and it's really starting to get on my nerves. Anytime somebody does something cool that runs under Linux86 (tm) someone has to rain on their parade, and complain about lack of [Suse|Slackware|Alpha|Sparc|Arm|ucLinux|PalmPilot| TRS-80] support, rather than say - "hey cool! they started supporting the most common flavor of linux - it should be much easier for them to add support for my platform now!"
My favorite (and I do NOT mean to imply that the poster I am currently replying to is this clueless) was a post I saw in a discussion about IBM's new JVM, bitching that IBM was just supporting x86. After all, the poster argued, how hard is it to just recompile the JVM on a sparc? [In case you don't get the irony of this naive poster's question: IBM's JVM does just-in-time compilation of Java Bytecode to native x86 instructions, so getting it to run under SPARC is NOT just a simple recompile, it would have required a serious extra development effort to integrate their JVM with a different compiler backend that emitted optimized SPARC instructions. - and IBM doesn't even sell SPARC-based products; in fact, they compete against them!]
I'm on a cable modem, so I can spare a few k per web pageI download. I don't mind downloading the ads, if it helps support the sites I visit, but I really don't want to *see* them. (I don't click on banner ads, because I don't want to encourage them, just like I *never* buy from or donate to someone who calls me at home because I don't want to get on their 'sucker' list.)
I wouldn't mind a broswer feature that says "go ahead and download these images, so the pages I read get their hit counts inflated, but just display a transparent gif in its place.
I realize that from the advertisers point of view, this is worse, in a way, because they can't tell how many people are actually viewing their ads, but I don't see how it's any more or less morally reprehensible than tossing my junk mail in the trash without reading it...
Speaking of junk mail - I suspect in the long run, this banner-blocking issue will become moot. Advertising has *always* been like the old spy-vs-spy cartoons: as consumers get more sophisticated at evading ads, the ad agencies just shift their tactics and send you more sophisticated ads - just this week I was fooled into opening a piece of junk mail that looked deceptively like an official bank overdraft notice. [it was an offer for a home equity line of credit 'to pay off those nagging creditors!']
So I say, give people a 'banner hiding' feature instead of a banner'blocking' feature. That way advertisers stay happy [perhaps 'blissfully ignorant' is more accurate] for the short run, web sites continue to get ad revenue which is fairly allocated [i.e. sites which get viewed more still get more ad revenue.], and sit back and wait for the ad agencies to come up with the next generation of sneakier advertising...:^)
It's true that some people saw this as a way to get a $300 PC. ($99 plus hard drive, etc.,) but I think there's another camp which i-opener can reach and make a bit more money. That would be those of us who, like myself, are perfectly willing to spend the money required to get a low-end PC to use as a network terminal,etc in our house, but don't want to stick a big ugly vanilla mini-tower, a 50lb 15" CRT and a rat's nest of cables in every room.
I'm willing to bet that over 75% of Slashdot readers don't buy Dell, or Compaq, or Gateway - they prefer to go to Fry's, or order online from their favorite distributor, and build the exact configuration they want. It's almost a matter of pride. But some of those same people -- not the starving students, of course:^) -- will turn around and plunk down $2500 for IBM ThinkPad so they can install and run Red Hat on it.
Why? Because they have no other alternative that meets their requirements (i.e. small, lightweight, portable.) You *can't* build your own laptop from off-the-shelf components.
This i-opener gives people the opportunity to build *their own* network terminal, with the features they want, with a form-factor that no one else will sell them. *THAT* is the untapped market which i-opener can make money from, if they are smart and nimble enought to take advantage of it.
"The experimental GigaChannel Ethernet multiplexer combines up to eight independent gigabit Ethernet signals into a single 10 Gb/s signal stream."
It sounds dopey, but it actually makes sense - what they are saying is that they can fit 8 Gigabit ethernet channels into a single OC-192 carrier (OC-192 is an industry standard, ~10Gbps SONET optical data rate) They can't fit 10, because there is overhead in any SONET stream, and they'd need extra overhead to split out the 1Gbps channels from one another. It seems like they ought to be able to fit 9 channels in there, if they really wanted to.
A thought just occurred to me - they may not be TDM muxing the 8 signals at all, but rather they are saying that they can cram 8 1Gbps carrier signals into the same frequency range that would normally carry a single OC-192 carrier. This would make it easier (read: cheaper) to split out one channel to drop it out at it's destination without having to have expensive 10Gbps/1Gbps mux hardware at each terminus, and it is consistent with them needing to have guard bands [dead frequencies between the carriers so one signal doesn't stomp on the one next door] between the 8 carriers. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this must be what they are doing - the other way would be *way* too expensive.
So, loopy as it sounds, fitting 8 Gigabit Ethernet channels into the 'space' of a 10Gbps optical channel makes perfect sense when taken in context.
...is that they've been talking about putting terabits through fibers for a while, and showing it off in lab trials and demo systems, while Ciena is actually doing it in a commercial product and shipping it to customers who use it and depend on it to carry their data. Today.
Don't get me wrong - Lucent has some very smart scientists and engineers, and some great technology comes out of the ol' Bell Labs, but Lucent also has a FUD machine at least as effective as Microsoft's - check out this article at LightReading for some of the dirt.
Grow up, kid, and learn something about how the real world works! Until they sell it to you, it belongs to them. Nothing requires them to sell it to you at all. It is their *property* until they agree to sell it to you.
The seller clearly sets out the terms under which they are willing to sell to you, and the buyer either accepts the terms and buys, or refuses the terms and does not buy. (Third option, the buyer comes back with a counter-offer and you negotiate doesn't really apply here)
Each and every time anybody sells something to you, you are entering into a legally binding contract with them, whether you sign a piece of paper of not. Usually, when you buy something at a store, the terms of the contract are simple 'cash for goods': pay X dollars, get Y product, and all the terms of the contract are satisfied as long as Y works as advertised [maybe not even that, if you bought it 'as-is'].
If you are young, maybe this is the only way you have ever bought anything in the past, but that does not mean it is the only type of sale there is. (Just wait until you buy a car, or worse - a house that comes with entailments, mandatory escrow, neighborhood covenants, etc. and you'll find out how many perfectly legal, if annoying, restrictions can be placed on the things you 'own' !)
The company that manufactures, and therefore OWNS the i-Openeners, is not offering a simple 'cash for goods' kind of sale contract. The terms (you pay $99 == you get iOpenener hardware) are NOT acceptable to them; since they do not agree to that contract, if you walk away with a box in your hand without agreeing to those terms, you are a thief, and have stolen property which the iOpener company did not agree to tranfer to you. The terms they ARE offering are (you pay $99 now, + $x/month for at least N months == you get iOpener hardware + you get N months of service that you can choose to use or ignore.) Take it or leave it, but don't think you get to re-write the entire human history of contract law because you don't want to think of yourself as a criminal.
Dork! Spare us the sarcasm and use your head when you read peoples' posts.
He's not asking if his linux box cabn magically pickup radio waves, he's asking whether he can install a $179 card in his router and a $179 card in his (say) laptop, and have the two talk together, or whether he *needs* the seperate, external $350 (>> $179) residential gateway which has (DHCP, NAT, Ethernet) nothing his router can't do already!
A partial answer: the hardware can do it (I know a guy who works on them) but I dunno whether the GPL drivers can. (But if i had to bet I would guess they do...)
I saw this first on the linuxgames.com website: pre-order s for a Loki port of Heavy Gear 2. Finally, some killer action games! (I like strategy games, and I know they were the easiest to port, but I was waiting for some action. [sorry, I just don't dig the quake-style FPS games, although I know those are 'action' too...])
People call strangers up and give them their credit card numbers all the time. What's new is, now they can [metaphorically speaking] call that phone number up, say "Hey! Do you have a listing for Billy Bob? What's his credit card number, billing address, and expiration date? And while you're at it, why not just read me your whole customer list..."
I have to admit, I've known about the EFF for a while, and while I agreed with what they were trying to do, for one reason or other I was never, I dunno, impressed enough by what they were doing to get involved.
This victory changed my mind. I guess this was an issue that I cared enough about, and one that I thought for sure the 'bad guys' were gonna squash us here, too, but they didn't. I just took the plunge and joined EFF, and made a $500 donation besides. [don't worry, I won't starve:^)
They are doing good work, they are doing important work, and they need and deserve our support. You don't have to give big $$ - heck, student memberships are only $20 (== 1.5 large pizzas.) And they have lots of ways you can help by donating time, or getting involved in letter-writing campaigns, etc.
I'm all for the *idea* of the Visor - USB-speed syncing, handpring-module expandability, cool [case] colors:^)
But I have been waiting exactly *10 weeks* for Handspring to ship me the Visor I ordered in mid-October, and my patience is wearing thin.
For all you smart guys out there who think all you have to do is come up with a great product design to get rich, take note -- if you want to succeed, you need the whole package: online ordering (with adequate horsepower/bandwidth,) integrated online order tracking/shipping system, sufficient manufacturing capacity for best-case (worst-case!) customer response, etc.
No matter how much I like the Visor when (if?) I finally get it, it will be a long time before I recommend it to anyone I like, just because of the sheer frustration of dealing with these clowns...
p.s. As I type this, I have been on hold for over 90 minutes (gotta love speakerphones!:^) to try and spur someone into looking into my problem - last time I called, they just told me to keep checking my credit card balance to find out if it shipped yet. ([By law] they don't charge your CC until they ship)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, there's also discussion about this research in The Economist
It's not *that* much more expensive.
My wedding photographer (a professional, award-winning photojournalist) was paid for his labor, and charged around $3000. This paid for 8 hours of his time (so he captured a lot of the pre-wedding dressing and decorating as well as the reception,) and up to 30 rolls of film, which he handed over at the end of the night. (It wasn't a *complete* assignment of copyright; the contract says he still retains rights to, say use the images in his portfolio or in advertising his business, and I agreed that I cannot use the images commercially, but I can do all the things I *want* to do, such as print all the copies I want, burn them on CDs, put them on a private (non-commercial) website, etc. IMHO, that's a pretty fair exchange.)
I cannot reccomend these guys highly enough; they were completely professional from beginning to end, and the quality of the photographers they employ is phenomenal.
Here's two important wedding photo tips: (from recent personal experience :^)
So, if Sigma Designs is violating XVID.org's copyrighted code, then XVID should serve Sigma Design's (or their hosting company) with a DMCA ceas and desist, no?
In a post-conference interview, researchers noted that GRACE has already exceeded the social skills of Richard Stallman, who has been observed picking his teeth and clipping his toenails (then flicking the debris onto the floor) while giving a talk at Georgia Tech.
"It's not really a fair contest:" groused Stallman,"GRACE doesn't have any toenails!"
(True story about the toenails, BTW. Interesting talk otherwise; or so I heard.)
I read somewhere that the consultant who came up with the name 'EXXON' [sorry, I forget the name,] was considered the most highly paid author, because he got paid $50,000 for a single word. (Authors, particularly those who write for magazines, typically get paid cents per word, where foo is not a bug number.)
So, assuming the then-standard ASCII notation, $50k/(5*8 bits) = $1,250.00/bit.
emusic DOES have whatsherface. (At least this free track) - it's Featured on the main login page at emusic this week.
:^)
BTW, the song is 9 minutes long, has a beat reminiscent of Madonna's "Respect Yourself", although the song overall sounds nothing like Madonna. I wouldn't buy it, personally, but then, I don't have to - I sampled it as part of my subscription.
If you want to "teach" the music industry a lesson, don't waste $1 on one stupid track, get a $10/month subscription to E-music and download all-you-can-listen-to!
(Besides, you get this track free from emusic, too.)
If you're not hung up on top-40, check out emusic.com - sign up for a year subscription at $10/month, or 3 months at $15/month; there's a 14-day free trial, and you can download:
- as many songs as you want (max 50 tracks during the free trial period)
- unencrypted
- with no special DRM
- and keep the tracks after you cancel your subscription. (They even tell you to keep the 50 tracks if you choose not to subscribe!)
They claim they split the revenues 50/50 with the artists. (even if you allow for some exageration here, it'd almost have to be a better deal than the few pennies an artist gets per CD track sold through traditional outlets...The only restrictions are:
- they ask that you not hog the system by mass-downloading everything; just grab what you plan to listen to now or in the near future
- and you are on your honor not to "steal" from them by sharing those files elsewhere
In other words, they are selling MP3's exactly the way we want to buy them, and trusting us not to rip them off, instead of imposing some clumsy technological constraints - just like any other honest business. (ok, I would prefer higher bitrate encodings, but so what? 128k sounds ok on my pc. I signed up, I sent them a long letter telling them what I liked about the service, and what I would like to see improved, including the option to pay a bit more to download better quality encodings. Who do you think they are going to listen to more - their existing, paying customer base, or people heckling them from the sidelines? [I got a personal response to my letter from their customer service. They didn't promise anything, but at least i know they heard me.])They don't have many huge names (probably the most famous contemporary group in their catalog is They Might Be Giants,) but they have an awesome collection of old jazz and blues collection, a good classical section, some really bizarro-but-intersting international stuff, and a bunch of small indie labels. (They claim over 200,000 MP3 tracks available, from over 900 different [mostly small] record labels) Oh, and some comedy too, like most of George Carlin's albums.
Sorry if I sound like a commercial - I'm just a subscriber who loves this service, and I don't understand why more people haven't signed up yet...
When I was in Junior High School, my computer lab taught us how to use word processing software on the most common PC available: the Apple IIe - I don't even remember what software we used. In high school, we had a lab full of really popular TRS-80 Model IIIs with WordStar or somesuch. In college, we had a huge computer lab chock full of IBM PS/2 workstations with the spiffy new 3.5" disks, and I took a [required, but lame] course on popular business software. We learned how to use the industry-leading WordPerfect and Quattro packages, and some dBase clone for a database. It was imoprtant to learn those packages, because that's what industry was using, and we wanted to be ready for the 'real world'. :^/
Guess what? The world doesn't stand still. A kid in Junior high today who learns to use MS Word because that's what his mommy uses at work will probably find that knowledge irrelevant in 2010, when he graduates from college. At least the typing skills will probably transfer.
So I don't wory too much about these kids learning to use StarOffice while the 'real' world uses MS Office. A wordprocessor is a wordprocessor is a wordprocessor, and everytime the world forces them to "upgrade" to a new one, they'll adapt, learn the new keystroke combination for bolding text and creating bullet lists, and then move on with their lives.
In the meantime, our schools are desperately short on cash; we would be far better off spending the money that would have gone to Micro$oft for their overpriced office suite on things that will still matter 10 years from now, like rasing salaries to attract smarter teachers, or hiring more teachers to reduce classrom sizes, or ... [insert your favorite expensive school reform idea here]
They did, in fact, do what the author of this article described, around Christmas time last year (I remember the coke-drinking Santa Claus ad in particlar) but (on my unit, at least) they removed the extra commercials and restored the way it used to work in less than two months, so I'm not sure what this guy is complaining about:
- They did something people didn't like
- customers complained
- they fixed it.
Where's the story?Whatever your answer, I think it's fair to say that there is something about this system, which uses an open-source clustering technology, built on top of an open-source operating system, which made it best for your needs; maybe it was the reliabilty, or the ability to modify it as needed, or maybe just the lower dollar cost to your department.
My question then, is this: have you given any thought to how you can help advance open source software, to give back to the community that created this tool? Getting the word out that the U.S. Goverment uses Linux for its cutting-edge weather forecasting tool would be an enormous PR win for the folks that still have trouble convincing their management that OSS software can be trusted for "real work." I'm not suggesting putting a picture of 'Tux' on every weather forecast, (although that would be kinda cute,) but it would be great if NOAA press releases about the project gave at least passing mention to the fact that the project will be benefitting from open source software.
I realize this is not something you would normally do for, say a Cray or IBM, but those are commercial enterprises, with their own PR budgets; they don't need your help to get their word out. OSS needs all the help it can get, so that future projects like yours can continue to reap the benefits.
What's cool about this, is they put 40Gbps on a single carrier on a fiber. This means that, eventually, they can stack a bunch of 40Gbps carriers, on slightly different laser frequencies, in the same fiber to carry [1,2,4,8?]Tbps.
Commercial systems with the capacity to carry over a Terabit-per-second of data over a single fiber are already commercially available (and actually shipping) from companies like Ciena and probably Nortel. Lucent says they have equipment in the lab that is faster, but they're a bit like Microsoft in terms of making press releases long before they have working products, to inspire FUD in their competitor's potential customers... :^)
He didn't *assume* it, he flat out told you that it uses x86 assembler and figured you'd be smart enough to figure out if it's useful to you.
Are you saying he shouldn't have posted something that might be of interest to the >= 90% of Linux users out there who have an x86 machine because it might have hurt the Alpha and Sparc users' feelings?
This is a trend that has been growing and growing on slashdot, and it's really starting to get on my nerves. Anytime somebody does something cool that runs under Linux86 (tm) someone has to rain on their parade, and complain about lack of [Suse|Slackware|Alpha|Sparc|Arm|ucLinux|PalmPilot| TRS-80] support, rather than say - "hey cool! they started supporting the most common flavor of linux - it should be much easier for them to add support for my platform now!"
My favorite (and I do NOT mean to imply that the poster I am currently replying to is this clueless) was a post I saw in a discussion about IBM's new JVM, bitching that IBM was just supporting x86. After all, the poster argued, how hard is it to just recompile the JVM on a sparc? [In case you don't get the irony of this naive poster's question: IBM's JVM does just-in-time compilation of Java Bytecode to native x86 instructions, so getting it to run under SPARC is NOT just a simple recompile, it would have required a serious extra development effort to integrate their JVM with a different compiler backend that emitted optimized SPARC instructions. - and IBM doesn't even sell SPARC-based products; in fact, they compete against them!]
I'm on a cable modem, so I can spare a few k per web pageI download. I don't mind downloading the ads, if it helps support the sites I visit, but I really don't want to *see* them. (I don't click on banner ads, because I don't want to encourage them, just like I *never* buy from or donate to someone who calls me at home because I don't want to get on their 'sucker' list.)
:^)
I wouldn't mind a broswer feature that says "go ahead and download these images, so the pages I read get their hit counts inflated, but just display a transparent gif in its place.
I realize that from the advertisers point of view, this is worse, in a way, because they can't tell how many people are actually viewing their ads, but I don't see how it's any more or less morally reprehensible than tossing my junk mail in the trash without reading it...
Speaking of junk mail - I suspect in the long run, this banner-blocking issue will become moot. Advertising has *always* been like the old spy-vs-spy cartoons: as consumers get more sophisticated at evading ads, the ad agencies just shift their tactics and send you more sophisticated ads - just this week I was fooled into opening a piece of junk mail that looked deceptively like an official bank overdraft notice. [it was an offer for a home equity line of credit 'to pay off those nagging creditors!']
So I say, give people a 'banner hiding' feature instead of a banner'blocking' feature. That way advertisers stay happy [perhaps 'blissfully ignorant' is more accurate] for the short run, web sites continue to get ad revenue which is fairly allocated [i.e. sites which get viewed more still get more ad revenue.], and sit back and wait for the ad agencies to come up with the next generation of sneakier advertising...
It's true that some people saw this as a way to get a $300 PC. ($99 plus hard drive, etc.,) but I think there's another camp which i-opener can reach and make a bit more money. That would be those of us who, like myself, are perfectly willing to spend the money required to get a low-end PC to use as a network terminal,etc in our house, but don't want to stick a big ugly vanilla mini-tower, a 50lb 15" CRT and a rat's nest of cables in every room.
:^) -- will turn around and plunk down $2500 for IBM ThinkPad so they can install and run Red Hat on it.
I'm willing to bet that over 75% of Slashdot readers don't buy Dell, or Compaq, or Gateway - they prefer to go to Fry's, or order online from their favorite distributor, and build the exact configuration they want. It's almost a matter of pride. But some of those same people -- not the starving students, of course
Why? Because they have no other alternative that meets their requirements (i.e. small, lightweight, portable.) You *can't* build your own laptop from off-the-shelf components.
This i-opener gives people the opportunity to build *their own* network terminal, with the features they want, with a form-factor that no one else will sell them. *THAT* is the untapped market which i-opener can make money from, if they are smart and nimble enought to take advantage of it.
"The experimental GigaChannel Ethernet multiplexer combines up to eight independent gigabit Ethernet signals into a single 10 Gb/s signal
stream."
It sounds dopey, but it actually makes sense - what they are saying is that they can fit 8 Gigabit ethernet channels into a single OC-192 carrier (OC-192 is an industry standard, ~10Gbps SONET optical data rate) They can't fit 10, because there is overhead in any SONET stream, and they'd need extra overhead to split out the 1Gbps channels from one another. It seems like they ought to be able to fit 9 channels in there, if they really wanted to.
A thought just occurred to me - they may not be TDM muxing the 8 signals at all, but rather they are saying that they can cram 8 1Gbps carrier signals into the same frequency range that would normally carry a single OC-192 carrier. This would make it easier (read: cheaper) to split out one channel to drop it out at it's destination without having to have expensive 10Gbps/1Gbps mux hardware at each terminus, and it is consistent with them needing to have guard bands [dead frequencies between the carriers so one signal doesn't stomp on the one next door] between the 8 carriers. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced this must be what they are doing - the other way would be *way* too expensive.
So, loopy as it sounds, fitting 8 Gigabit Ethernet channels into the 'space' of a 10Gbps optical channel makes perfect sense when taken in context.
Don't get me wrong - Lucent has some very smart scientists and engineers, and some great technology comes out of the ol' Bell Labs, but Lucent also has a FUD machine at least as effective as Microsoft's - check out this article at LightReading for some of the dirt.
Grow up, kid, and learn something about how the real world works! Until they sell it to you, it belongs to them. Nothing requires them to sell it to you at all. It is their *property* until they agree to sell it to you.
The seller clearly sets out the terms under which they are willing to sell to you, and the buyer either accepts the terms and buys, or refuses the terms and does not buy. (Third option, the buyer comes back with a counter-offer and you negotiate doesn't really apply here)
Each and every time anybody sells something to you, you are entering into a legally binding contract with them, whether you sign a piece of paper of not. Usually, when you buy something at a store, the terms of the contract are simple 'cash for goods': pay X dollars, get Y product, and all the terms of the contract are satisfied as long as Y works as advertised [maybe not even that, if you bought it 'as-is'].
If you are young, maybe this is the only way you have ever bought anything in the past, but that does not mean it is the only type of sale there is. (Just wait until you buy a car, or worse - a house that comes with entailments, mandatory escrow, neighborhood covenants, etc. and you'll find out how many perfectly legal, if annoying, restrictions can be placed on the things you 'own' !)
The company that manufactures, and therefore OWNS the i-Openeners, is not offering a simple 'cash for goods' kind of sale contract. The terms (you pay $99 == you get iOpenener hardware) are NOT acceptable to them; since they do not agree to that contract, if you walk away with a box in your hand without agreeing to those terms, you are a thief, and have stolen property which the iOpener company did not agree to tranfer to you. The terms they ARE offering are (you pay $99 now, + $x/month for at least N months == you get iOpener hardware + you get N months of service that you can choose to use or ignore.) Take it or leave it, but don't think you get to re-write the entire human history of contract law because you don't want to think of yourself as a criminal.
Dork! Spare us the sarcasm and use your head when you read peoples' posts.
He's not asking if his linux box cabn magically pickup radio waves, he's asking whether he can install a $179 card in his router and a $179 card in his (say) laptop, and have the two talk together, or whether he *needs* the seperate, external $350 (>> $179) residential gateway which has (DHCP, NAT, Ethernet) nothing his router can't do already!
A partial answer: the hardware can do it (I know a guy who works on them) but I dunno whether the GPL drivers can. (But if i had to bet I would guess they do...)
Hmmmm.... tough call.... $49.99+ vs $37... :^)
;^)
Thanks for the info!
Oh, BTW, what's this "chipping" thing? Is that like ROMming a game?
I saw this first on the linuxgames.com website: pre-order s for a Loki port of Heavy Gear 2. Finally, some killer action games! (I like strategy games, and I know they were the easiest to port, but I was waiting for some action. [sorry, I just don't dig the quake-style FPS games, although I know those are 'action' too...])
Yeah, the 'list of 1000s' part is somewhat new.
:^)
People call strangers up and give them their credit card numbers all the time. What's new is, now they can [metaphorically speaking] call that phone number up, say "Hey! Do you have a listing for Billy Bob? What's his credit card number, billing address, and expiration date? And while you're at it, why not just read me your whole customer list..."
...that's kind of new...
I have to admit, I've known about the EFF for a while, and while I agreed with what they were trying to do, for one reason or other I was never, I dunno, impressed enough by what they were doing to get involved.
:^)
This victory changed my mind. I guess this was an issue that I cared enough about, and one that I thought for sure the 'bad guys' were gonna squash us here, too, but they didn't. I just took the plunge and joined EFF, and made a $500 donation besides. [don't worry, I won't starve
They are doing good work, they are doing important work, and they need and deserve our support. You don't have to give big $$ - heck, student memberships are only $20 (== 1.5 large pizzas.) And they have lots of ways you can help by donating time, or getting involved in letter-writing campaigns, etc.
Get involved. It affects us.
-(--
I'm all for the *idea* of the Visor - USB-speed syncing, handpring-module expandability, cool [case] colors :^)
:^) to try and spur someone into looking into my problem - last time I called, they just told me to keep checking my credit card balance to find out if it shipped yet. ([By law] they don't charge your CC until they ship)
But I have been waiting exactly *10 weeks* for Handspring to ship me the Visor I ordered in mid-October, and my patience is wearing thin.
For all you smart guys out there who think all you have to do is come up with a great product design to get rich, take note -- if you want to succeed, you need the whole package: online ordering (with adequate horsepower/bandwidth,) integrated online order tracking/shipping system, sufficient manufacturing capacity for best-case (worst-case!) customer response, etc.
No matter how much I like the Visor when (if?) I finally get it, it will be a long time before I recommend it to anyone I like, just because of the sheer frustration of dealing with these clowns...
p.s. As I type this, I have been on hold for over 90 minutes (gotta love speakerphones!