I don't want to breakup the SpeakEasy love-fest, but they are not the only Linux-friendly game in town. I live in a relatively small market on the central coast of CA and have had several broadband providers over the last eight (yes, since 1997) years. Here are a few observations in no particular order:
Verizon has offered 768/768 ADSL (not SDSL) service in this market since '97.
Verizon's focus on businesses with that service has made it unreasonably expensive if you wanted a couple of static IP's.
Third parties selling service over the 768/768 Verizon circuit have been available since '97 and had more attractive service packages (IP's and TOS 's). These offerings would not likely go away since Verizon is already being paid the retail circuit price.
I recently tried SpeakEasy over a Covad circuit and canceled it after they were unable to set up a stable 768k upload speed to a residence that had been using a Verizon circuit for four years. Claims of excessive distance don't fly when I have a DSL box on the shelf next to it working.
I agree that SpeakEasy was Linux friendly and had reasonably competent techs. However, their follow-through was lacking in my case.
It is possible to get reasonable TOS from a cable company. After ditching SpeakEasy, I moved to Cox Business Services for 8 IP's and 4M/768k at about the same price (~$120/month). The TOS is comparable to SpeakEasy's.
A lot of the posts seem to be written by embittered individuals that haven't spent much time on campus. I've worked in both academic (large, public US universites) and commercial environments as a sysadm type. Here are some observations from my 12+ years on campus:
If it is a public institution, accept that you are paid by tax revenues. If there is a budget crisis at the state, expect that your salary will be flat and operating budget will drop.
On the subject of salary, a mid-range sysadmin typically makes what a junior faculty member does. While that isn't an impressive amount, it fits the environment reasonably well. Senior sysadmins come behind senior faculty.
Stay a generalist. While the business world may have the money to separate sysadmins, software engineers, and DBA's, an academic department probably cannot. (Campus administrative units are another story.) To survive at the department level, you need to be a generalist and able to learn fast.
If you are applying for a position at the department level, ask to read their most recent PRP (peer review process) document. This is generated when faculty from other campuses evaluate the department's current operation and future plans. Most places go through a PRP every 5 or 10 years. The contents will tell you a lot about that department's priorities and support for IT.
While instruction is the core university mission, research grants bring in the money. Expect to have support for instruction take a back seat to developing research infrastructure in lean times.
Faculty run the institution, literally. They are as a group responsible (through an academic senate) for the campus's operation. Don't rail against it; that's part of their job. Instead, identify the ones with sense and influence and make allies.
If you provide a stable environment (one that facilitates them getting work done) for faculty, they will back you in bad times. There's nothing quite like someone dropping by the machine room with a six-pack at 01:00 when the system restore isn't going as smoothly as you hoped.
The goal of the flag was not to impede a consumer's ability to copy or use content lawfully in the home, nor was the policy intended to 'foreclose use of the Internet to send digital broadcast content where it can be adequately protected from indiscriminate redistribution,'
Considering that the FCC heard testimony indicating the flag would do exactly this, it's amazing they would claim it wasn't their intent. It certainly was the intent of the content distributors. The flag's protection wasn't going to stop commercial piracy rings; they were going to 'aquire' digital masters and stamp disks anyway. All it would do is make handling digital content a pain for end-users.
The poster should be a little more careful. This fight isn't about "cheap broadband". That's already available in some forms in some locations. This fight is about taxpayer-supported, free-to-the-public broadband, a different issue entirely. This pits the corporations against local goverment as a service provider. Historically, in the US, that is atypical.
Having said that, there is precident. It used to be common that the best roads were turnpikes with tolls collected. While that is still the case in some locations (primarily in the Northeastern US), most highways are now taxpayer-supported, free-to-the-public utilities. I'm sure there is a boardroom somewhere that would love to collect a tariff for vehicles on Interstate 10, but it hasn't happened yet. Publicly funded libraries are another example. The real issue is whether or not this service, broadband connectivity, is best provided publicly or privately.
I don't have an opinion yet. This is asking "Which is likely to be the least responsive, most pigheaded organization: a municiple government or a public utility?"
For decades plebes (first-year Midshipmen) at the US Naval Academy have needed to know the daily happiness and gas factors. Hopefully, he cited this prior work.
Happiness factor = (days of leave) / (days until leave)
Lots of states in the US are approving similar curricula. My father was part of the roll out of Active Physics® for a school in Virginia a few years ago. He's now leading a rollout for a district in Southern California. Essentially, for each lesson you take an observable phenomenon then beat the physics of it to death for a couple weeks as the students explore the concepts via lab exercises. The University of California even accepts this conceptual course as a college prep lab science for admissions purposes.
The more interesting change is the order in which the sciences are being taught in high school. Recognizing that biology and chemistry are really applied physics, this is slowly becoming conceptual physics (9th grade), chemistry (10th grade), biology (11th grade), then AP physics or narrower disciple as a science elective (12th grade).
They claim 90% accuracy in use. What does that mean? Does the weapon fail to fire 10% of the time or do 10% of the users fail to sucessfully train the weapon? Something else?
What happens if you need to use your off hand to fire the weapon? Most right-handed types find it very awkward to use their sinister hand. In this case is the grip signature really that repeatable?
This seems a long way from something that a sane law enforcement unit would issue and even farther from what an individual would pay extra for. Thanks, but I'll just keep my guns and ammo locked away from the kids.
You are describing the situation for a high-end box.
Exactly. The article was discussing this project as a way to cut into Cisco's and Juniper's profits not to replacement $80 NAT boxes. Firstly, those are barely routers; they normally support two networks and only a minimal set of protocals. More importantly, they are a already largely Linux-based and the prices are in free-fall.
In pure CPU power a PC is 25 times faster than those, and the bus is fast enough to accomodate the same types of interfaces these routers support.
CPU power is largely irrelevant in this market. The best current designs off-load specific CPU intensive stuff (like access control) to ASIC's freeing the CPU up for other work. For network gear the backplane and switching fabric are the key issues.
When we hire, I don't pay much attention to the degree granting institution. However, I consider fellowships and internships as very strong indicators of ability. If your school does not have relationships with industry (due to size or location) to provide these opportunities, then your job search may suffer.
The first router I managed was a white-box 386 running PC-Route across three ISA, thin-net cards. How did it compare to a Cisco AGS+? Badly, but it was cheap and got the job done for routing three underused 10 Mb/s subnets. Am I about to trade my 6506 in for an Opteron with multiple NIC's? Not a chance.
IMHO, XORP's challenge will be that the available buses in commodity PC's are not fast enough for multiple Gb/s ethernet if any of them are at more than 50% usage. Do the math; PCI-E can't move the bits around fast enough. Sure, higher speed PCI-E will be able to once it's beyond vaporware. However 10 Gb Ethernet is already available which ramps the problem up again. Where XORP may play a real role is in allowing new companies to focus on building specialized hardware without having to write the OS from scratch.
Note to those comparing this to the impact of x86/Linux on Unix vendors: Linux would never have taken off if Intel had not been in a position to pour R&D money into their chip development. SGI fell when a desktop PC with an nVidia card was faster at rendering (using Windows NT 4!) than anything SGI sold for less than $100k; the VR lab I worked with cut over in 1998 based entirely on cost. Almost all of the advantages of the various 64-bit RISC processors (the notable exception is memory addressing beyond 4 GB) collapsed in front of the sheer clock-speed advantage provided by P6 and Athlon processors. For Cisco to fall to commodity hardware and FOSS a similar process would have to occur. Someone would have to fund the hardware R&D to create a commodity, high-speed bus and get the chipset manufacturers to adopt it.
I'm more interested in the possible causes they discuss.
"Mechanisms that would produce this outcome include having votes electronically registered in the machine prior to any voters using the machine or after the last voter users it--through software errors or hacking--and other flaws that interfere with counting after some limit is reached,"
It's interesting how this boils down to a statistical anomoly that didn't show in pre-election polling, software bug (a data type overflow or something related), human error in prepping the machines (make sure the test data is wiped everywhere please), or fraud.
With closed source software and no paper trail, there isn't any way sort out the oddity.
In July, spam made up 94.5% of e-mail traffic, nearly double from a year before, says e-mail management firm MessageLabs.
Does anyone else wonder where MessageLabs gets their statistics? I can't help but wonder at their methodology (though I suspect rectal extraction). I get daily reports on SpamAssassin and my configured DNS block lists for the servers I manage. Their spam traffic doesn't start to approach 95% of inbound messages. After eliminating all internal email from the statistics, SpamAssassin flags about 20% of incoming email as suspicious and SpamHaus blocks another 10% or so. These are not confidential, hard-to-find addresses. These are university servers where staff and faculty are required to have valid email addresses posted on the department web pages. Any spider worth a damn should have harvested them long ago. I find it very hard to believe that this environment is getting 60% less spam than systems that don't provide a directory of valid addresses.
Spam is a problem, but it's time journalists (online and otherwise) start taking stats with a grain of salt. Too many organizations are willing to publish questionable numbers in an attempt to sound like they have thoroughly researched the issue.
Or in the MessageLabs case, to sell a product that will 'solve' the problem.
Let's put this in perspective. In '92 MS was looking at the Sybase source code and thinking about building a new filesystem around a database engine. Chicago AKA Win95 was almost out the door and it seemed reasonable to shoehorn this into Cairo (NT4). They were absolutely the dominant and fastest growing player.
I commented to a collegue in '93 (paraphrasing Robert Heinlein) that I did business with MS for the same reason I obeyed Newton's laws.
What happened around 1995? The internet became a commercial entity. Suddenly, MS needed to provide new applications (like IIS, IE, Outlook Express, an SMTP aware Exchange server, etc.) not just dork with cool OS technologies. A few years later, they are comfortable again after playing catch-up and start thinking about filesystems again, this time in "Longhorn". Again, they started talking about the capability two OS releases into the future.
However, this isn't a feature that is going to drive sales. MS needs to keep developers of home and office apps happy so they develop yet another new graphics system to replace DirectX. The perception of Windows security has never been lower and is starting to affect sales. IIS is losing ground again to Apache/Linux.
It's time to focus on revenue streams again and the revolutionary, expensive, difficult-to-build features get axed. It's probably not a bad idea. Think about the problems they've had with MS-SQL and ask yourself if you want a similar technology built into every teenager's game and grandmother's email box.
The ELF bit is a weak arguement, but what can they do? They have a medium-sized pile of money and a dead-end product line. They can litigate, piss the money away trying to outdevelop both the open-source community and Microsoft in the OS space, or give up and find a new business to try and develop. Given the source of their pot of money, it makes sense to take their shot a the IBM lottery...
Of course, understanding their position doesn't make the decision a smart one.
I wish the article revealed the source of the funds. Many campuses collect a "technology fee" in addition the more general tuition and whatnot. A subset of those univerities actually put a student committee in charge of spending that money.
I suspect that many of those committees would be inclined to spend some of the money to make unlimited music a supported technology. After all, the campus has already collected it. Imagine a handful of 20-year-olds sitting on a pot of a few hundred thousand dollars and deciding between a bulk purchase of Microsoft licenses and unlimited music. Who thinks they are going to go for unlimited copies of Office?
Studios which focus on cross-platform titles, as many of the largest publishers in the world do, face a gigantic problem - while developing a title on PS2, Xbox and GameCube is an easy prospect as code, art and audio can be effectively reused on all three platforms, adding a next-generation platform to the mix will require complete re-development.
I'm sorry, but this is a big assumption that doesn't seem supportable. Once the dev tools are released, art and sound should be able to be shared even with a next-generation console in the mix. Right now game boxes have differing operating systems and hardware. Once the art and audio is hammered out, it can be adapted to fit each console. More difficult would be getting the game physics and rendering engines to work on each console, but it's done, too. "Next generation" doesn't mean anything here.
The real costs are developing the in-house expertise to deal with API changes and working through the inevitable bugs in the development tools. Releasing consoles too close together does impact the bottom line here. Employees spend less time writing profitable code and more time training. However, this does not necessarily mean that a next generation port of a cross-platform game will cost more than the sum of all the other ports.
...most users still can't program a digital clock without help and most techs can't develop an interface that my grandmother can use. Until these two factors converge, high tech toys are going to remain the Playthings of Geekdom.
Universities have been doing this since the 1980's (user@department.campus.edu). It's the trivial-case application for DNS. It's a stupid patent to grant, but at least there is a ton of prior art predating 1999.
This will likely just go away. Unfortunately, Network Solutions or Register.com will bleed attorney's fees for a while to challenge the patent. It is the best proof (so far) that USPTO are just too buried to make consistently good decisions.
Do you feel that corporate IT budgets should be focusing on cutting edge technology to best serve its customer's needs, or should they focus on shoring up what they have now in order to maximize its usefulness to the customer?
Fundamentally, there isn't much of a difference here. If your business needs require a cutting-edge solution, implement one. However, money spent on "gee this is cool" equipment/software in excess of the business need is wasted.
To put it in perspective, at the peak of the.com era (1998) we were still providing email to ~1000 people with an eight-year-old Sun 670MP. I was constantly amazed at conferences and classes when other IT departments insisted on E10000 servers to provide email for 100 people. They had spent in excess of $100k for the ultimate server for a low-bandwidth, low-CPU service.
Another interesting data point is the number of CRM, HR, and financial systems that are developed but never reach deployment. Businesses try to get the all-singing, all-dancing solution and it turns out the technology does not yet exist or final system is simply too complex. However, the consultants get to keep their money and things continue to work using the legacy system.
I am the IT manager of a large academic department at a California university. I have installed Red Hat linux as the distribution of choice since 1995. I trusted that Red Hat would rapidly make patches available and found Red Hat's default GUI layout to be intuitive when training others. However, I am now in a quandry. I don't want to switch distributions; I'm happy with what I have. However, as the campus negotiated pricing for RHEL, several critical questions went unanswered. Since I am limited to one question per post, I will ask the big one.
Why does the only level of support available for 4-CPU systems cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per year? Operationally, there is no difference between my 1, 2, and 4 CPU boxes. I get OS patches from Red Hat and support from the Open Source Community. However, the lowest level of support for my 4-CPU box would cost about as much as the whole campus's software support contact with Sun. Why is this a good deal and how can I possibly justify it at the political layer?
Now, I personally disagree with the view being stated in the amendment - I don't think we need individuals bearing arms to keep freedom in the modern world. I am in favor of gun control...
I'm in favor of gun control, too. Without it, I can't hit anything past a couple meters.::stinger::
OK, it's an old joke. However, in this case the real issue is that one side of a contentous issue is being blocked. The earlier posters are correct that Symantec (as a private company) can block whatever they choose with their product. However, the first time that a public library uses this particular filter it has taken a step toward stifling political debate.
To get past the ideology of the question, think back a couple of years. Some of the early filtering packages blocked pro-choice web sites. Others blocked anti-choice sites. Both sides of the debate went ballistic at the thought that a public library would use software limiting access to their information.
You might want to check you claim about Microsoft a bit better. Microsoft has been shipping a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo for Windows for at while. Take a
look.
The author seems to believe that Bluetooth was supposed to be a competetor to 802.11a/b/g. He's just wrong. Bluetooth is/was/ever-shall-be about cable management for very small networks.
The typical computer still is a rat's nest of wires when you look at the back. Game consoles and cell phones have a similar problem. The whole point to Bluetooth is to replace the low-bandwidth cables with a limited-range, wireless solution. While it may not be all that useful for a monitor, it certainly can replace speakers/headsets, keyboards, mice, joysticks, PDA's, etc. Think about how nice it will be to only have three cables (power, monitor power, and VGA/DVI) involved.
If only Logitech would get off the pot and start shipping Bluetooth product, we would see some real deployment. MS has had an expensive Bluetooth keyboard/mouse setup for months.
This has to be a troll. The arguement that patents should not exist is the arguement that all research should be federally funded with the results going into the public domain. Think how few fundamental technologies (light bulbs, telephone, telegraph, radio, television, etc.) would have been developed if the R&D costs could not be recovered during the patent period.
That doesn't mean perpetual patents are a good idea. Nor does it mean that 14 years makes sense for a software patent.
Similarly, anyone that thinks the GPL is other than firmly based in intellectual property law hasn't actually read it. In this round, IBM is just attempting to protect its own property as licensed under the GPL. SCO has continued to distribute Linux, which contains a lot more than the allegedly infringing code, after refusing to abide by the license chosen by thousands of other coders.
Contributing code to Linux does not automatically put it in the public domain; the author reserves some rights to it. IBM is putting those rights to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The poster should be a little more careful. This fight isn't about "cheap broadband". That's already available in some forms in some locations. This fight is about taxpayer-supported, free-to-the-public broadband, a different issue entirely. This pits the corporations against local goverment as a service provider. Historically, in the US, that is atypical.
Having said that, there is precident. It used to be common that the best roads were turnpikes with tolls collected. While that is still the case in some locations (primarily in the Northeastern US), most highways are now taxpayer-supported, free-to-the-public utilities. I'm sure there is a boardroom somewhere that would love to collect a tariff for vehicles on Interstate 10, but it hasn't happened yet. Publicly funded libraries are another example. The real issue is whether or not this service, broadband connectivity, is best provided publicly or privately.
I don't have an opinion yet. This is asking "Which is likely to be the least responsive, most pigheaded organization: a municiple government or a public utility?"
For decades plebes (first-year Midshipmen) at the US Naval Academy have needed to know the daily happiness and gas factors. Hopefully, he cited this prior work.
Lots of states in the US are approving similar curricula. My father was part of the roll out of Active Physics® for a school in Virginia a few years ago. He's now leading a rollout for a district in Southern California. Essentially, for each lesson you take an observable phenomenon then beat the physics of it to death for a couple weeks as the students explore the concepts via lab exercises. The University of California even accepts this conceptual course as a college prep lab science for admissions purposes.
The more interesting change is the order in which the sciences are being taught in high school. Recognizing that biology and chemistry are really applied physics, this is slowly becoming conceptual physics (9th grade), chemistry (10th grade), biology (11th grade), then AP physics or narrower disciple as a science elective (12th grade).
They claim 90% accuracy in use. What does that mean? Does the weapon fail to fire 10% of the time or do 10% of the users fail to sucessfully train the weapon? Something else?
What happens if you need to use your off hand to fire the weapon? Most right-handed types find it very awkward to use their sinister hand. In this case is the grip signature really that repeatable?
This seems a long way from something that a sane law enforcement unit would issue and even farther from what an individual would pay extra for. Thanks, but I'll just keep my guns and ammo locked away from the kids.
http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:bHfNvjS0VKcJ: www.joemarini.com/articles/notOpeningEverything200 41121.php+&hl=en&client=firefox-a
Exactly. The article was discussing this project as a way to cut into Cisco's and Juniper's profits not to replacement $80 NAT boxes. Firstly, those are barely routers; they normally support two networks and only a minimal set of protocals. More importantly, they are a already largely Linux-based and the prices are in free-fall.
CPU power is largely irrelevant in this market. The best current designs off-load specific CPU intensive stuff (like access control) to ASIC's freeing the CPU up for other work. For network gear the backplane and switching fabric are the key issues.
When we hire, I don't pay much attention to the degree granting institution. However, I consider fellowships and internships as very strong indicators of ability. If your school does not have relationships with industry (due to size or location) to provide these opportunities, then your job search may suffer.
The first router I managed was a white-box 386 running PC-Route across three ISA, thin-net cards. How did it compare to a Cisco AGS+? Badly, but it was cheap and got the job done for routing three underused 10 Mb/s subnets. Am I about to trade my 6506 in for an Opteron with multiple NIC's? Not a chance.
IMHO, XORP's challenge will be that the available buses in commodity PC's are not fast enough for multiple Gb/s ethernet if any of them are at more than 50% usage. Do the math; PCI-E can't move the bits around fast enough. Sure, higher speed PCI-E will be able to once it's beyond vaporware. However 10 Gb Ethernet is already available which ramps the problem up again. Where XORP may play a real role is in allowing new companies to focus on building specialized hardware without having to write the OS from scratch.
Note to those comparing this to the impact of x86/Linux on Unix vendors: Linux would never have taken off if Intel had not been in a position to pour R&D money into their chip development. SGI fell when a desktop PC with an nVidia card was faster at rendering (using Windows NT 4!) than anything SGI sold for less than $100k; the VR lab I worked with cut over in 1998 based entirely on cost. Almost all of the advantages of the various 64-bit RISC processors (the notable exception is memory addressing beyond 4 GB) collapsed in front of the sheer clock-speed advantage provided by P6 and Athlon processors. For Cisco to fall to commodity hardware and FOSS a similar process would have to occur. Someone would have to fund the hardware R&D to create a commodity, high-speed bus and get the chipset manufacturers to adopt it.
I'm more interested in the possible causes they discuss.
It's interesting how this boils down to a statistical anomoly that didn't show in pre-election polling, software bug (a data type overflow or something related), human error in prepping the machines (make sure the test data is wiped everywhere please), or fraud.With closed source software and no paper trail, there isn't any way sort out the oddity.
Does anyone else wonder where MessageLabs gets their statistics? I can't help but wonder at their methodology (though I suspect rectal extraction). I get daily reports on SpamAssassin and my configured DNS block lists for the servers I manage. Their spam traffic doesn't start to approach 95% of inbound messages. After eliminating all internal email from the statistics, SpamAssassin flags about 20% of incoming email as suspicious and SpamHaus blocks another 10% or so. These are not confidential, hard-to-find addresses. These are university servers where staff and faculty are required to have valid email addresses posted on the department web pages. Any spider worth a damn should have harvested them long ago. I find it very hard to believe that this environment is getting 60% less spam than systems that don't provide a directory of valid addresses.
Spam is a problem, but it's time journalists (online and otherwise) start taking stats with a grain of salt. Too many organizations are willing to publish questionable numbers in an attempt to sound like they have thoroughly researched the issue.
Or in the MessageLabs case, to sell a product that will 'solve' the problem.
Let's put this in perspective. In '92 MS was looking at the Sybase source code and thinking about building a new filesystem around a database engine. Chicago AKA Win95 was almost out the door and it seemed reasonable to shoehorn this into Cairo (NT4). They were absolutely the dominant and fastest growing player.
I commented to a collegue in '93 (paraphrasing Robert Heinlein) that I did business with MS for the same reason I obeyed Newton's laws.
What happened around 1995? The internet became a commercial entity. Suddenly, MS needed to provide new applications (like IIS, IE, Outlook Express, an SMTP aware Exchange server, etc.) not just dork with cool OS technologies. A few years later, they are comfortable again after playing catch-up and start thinking about filesystems again, this time in "Longhorn". Again, they started talking about the capability two OS releases into the future.
However, this isn't a feature that is going to drive sales. MS needs to keep developers of home and office apps happy so they develop yet another new graphics system to replace DirectX. The perception of Windows security has never been lower and is starting to affect sales. IIS is losing ground again to Apache/Linux.
It's time to focus on revenue streams again and the revolutionary, expensive, difficult-to-build features get axed. It's probably not a bad idea. Think about the problems they've had with MS-SQL and ask yourself if you want a similar technology built into every teenager's game and grandmother's email box.
The ELF bit is a weak arguement, but what can they do? They have a medium-sized pile of money and a dead-end product line. They can litigate, piss the money away trying to outdevelop both the open-source community and Microsoft in the OS space, or give up and find a new business to try and develop. Given the source of their pot of money, it makes sense to take their shot a the IBM lottery...
Of course, understanding their position doesn't make the decision a smart one.
I wish the article revealed the source of the funds. Many campuses collect a "technology fee" in addition the more general tuition and whatnot. A subset of those univerities actually put a student committee in charge of spending that money.
I suspect that many of those committees would be inclined to spend some of the money to make unlimited music a supported technology. After all, the campus has already collected it. Imagine a handful of 20-year-olds sitting on a pot of a few hundred thousand dollars and deciding between a bulk purchase of Microsoft licenses and unlimited music. Who thinks they are going to go for unlimited copies of Office?
Studios which focus on cross-platform titles, as many of the largest publishers in the world do, face a gigantic problem - while developing a title on PS2, Xbox and GameCube is an easy prospect as code, art and audio can be effectively reused on all three platforms, adding a next-generation platform to the mix will require complete re-development.
I'm sorry, but this is a big assumption that doesn't seem supportable. Once the dev tools are released, art and sound should be able to be shared even with a next-generation console in the mix. Right now game boxes have differing operating systems and hardware. Once the art and audio is hammered out, it can be adapted to fit each console. More difficult would be getting the game physics and rendering engines to work on each console, but it's done, too. "Next generation" doesn't mean anything here.
The real costs are developing the in-house expertise to deal with API changes and working through the inevitable bugs in the development tools. Releasing consoles too close together does impact the bottom line here. Employees spend less time writing profitable code and more time training. However, this does not necessarily mean that a next generation port of a cross-platform game will cost more than the sum of all the other ports.
...most users still can't program a digital clock without help and most techs can't develop an interface that my grandmother can use. Until these two factors converge, high tech toys are going to remain the Playthings of Geekdom.
Universities have been doing this since the 1980's (user@department.campus.edu). It's the trivial-case application for DNS. It's a stupid patent to grant, but at least there is a ton of prior art predating 1999.
This will likely just go away. Unfortunately, Network Solutions or Register.com will bleed attorney's fees for a while to challenge the patent. It is the best proof (so far) that USPTO are just too buried to make consistently good decisions.
Fundamentally, there isn't much of a difference here. If your business needs require a cutting-edge solution, implement one. However, money spent on "gee this is cool" equipment/software in excess of the business need is wasted.
To put it in perspective, at the peak of the .com era (1998) we were still providing email to ~1000 people with an eight-year-old Sun 670MP. I was constantly amazed at conferences and classes when other IT departments insisted on E10000 servers to provide email for 100 people. They had spent in excess of $100k for the ultimate server for a low-bandwidth, low-CPU service.
Another interesting data point is the number of CRM, HR, and financial systems that are developed but never reach deployment. Businesses try to get the all-singing, all-dancing solution and it turns out the technology does not yet exist or final system is simply too complex. However, the consultants get to keep their money and things continue to work using the legacy system.
Dear Mr. Szulik,
I am the IT manager of a large academic department at a California university. I have installed Red Hat linux as the distribution of choice since 1995. I trusted that Red Hat would rapidly make patches available and found Red Hat's default GUI layout to be intuitive when training others. However, I am now in a quandry. I don't want to switch distributions; I'm happy with what I have. However, as the campus negotiated pricing for RHEL, several critical questions went unanswered. Since I am limited to one question per post, I will ask the big one.Why does the only level of support available for 4-CPU systems cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per year? Operationally, there is no difference between my 1, 2, and 4 CPU boxes. I get OS patches from Red Hat and support from the Open Source Community. However, the lowest level of support for my 4-CPU box would cost about as much as the whole campus's software support contact with Sun. Why is this a good deal and how can I possibly justify it at the political layer?
Thank you.
I'm in favor of gun control, too. Without it, I can't hit anything past a couple meters. ::stinger::
OK, it's an old joke. However, in this case the real issue is that one side of a contentous issue is being blocked. The earlier posters are correct that Symantec (as a private company) can block whatever they choose with their product. However, the first time that a public library uses this particular filter it has taken a step toward stifling political debate.
To get past the ideology of the question, think back a couple of years. Some of the early filtering packages blocked pro-choice web sites. Others blocked anti-choice sites. Both sides of the debate went ballistic at the thought that a public library would use software limiting access to their information.
You might want to check you claim about Microsoft a bit better. Microsoft has been shipping a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo for Windows for at while. Take a look.
The author seems to believe that Bluetooth was supposed to be a competetor to 802.11a/b/g. He's just wrong. Bluetooth is/was/ever-shall-be about cable management for very small networks.
The typical computer still is a rat's nest of wires when you look at the back. Game consoles and cell phones have a similar problem. The whole point to Bluetooth is to replace the low-bandwidth cables with a limited-range, wireless solution. While it may not be all that useful for a monitor, it certainly can replace speakers/headsets, keyboards, mice, joysticks, PDA's, etc. Think about how nice it will be to only have three cables (power, monitor power, and VGA/DVI) involved.
If only Logitech would get off the pot and start shipping Bluetooth product, we would see some real deployment. MS has had an expensive Bluetooth keyboard/mouse setup for months.
This has to be a troll. The arguement that patents should not exist is the arguement that all research should be federally funded with the results going into the public domain. Think how few fundamental technologies (light bulbs, telephone, telegraph, radio, television, etc.) would have been developed if the R&D costs could not be recovered during the patent period.
That doesn't mean perpetual patents are a good idea. Nor does it mean that 14 years makes sense for a software patent.
Similarly, anyone that thinks the GPL is other than firmly based in intellectual property law hasn't actually read it. In this round, IBM is just attempting to protect its own property as licensed under the GPL. SCO has continued to distribute Linux, which contains a lot more than the allegedly infringing code, after refusing to abide by the license chosen by thousands of other coders.
Contributing code to Linux does not automatically put it in the public domain; the author reserves some rights to it. IBM is putting those rights to use.