I'm not sure how that qualifies as flamebait. It's a lot easier to fit Linux to low end hardware than Mac or Windows. Windows 7 runs on netbooks but it doesn't run that well. And if Linux gets wider acceptance in Europe, that would hardly be a surprise.
It's possible the mod moved the rating with the scroll wheel after selection. It's easy to do and not notice. If you're not paying attention you can start scrolling page but if the rating dropdown is still selected, you'll scroll the selection options. At least in FF, not sure if IE works the same way.
n a newly-disclosed patent application for Embedding a Unique Serial Number into the Content of an Email for Tracking Information Dispersion (phew!)
Get a Blackberry or a wireless broadband card for your netbook. And you can defeat the Great Blue email content tracker, which should keep you and your pathetic band safe from the Death Star, at least temporarily.
...why would someone qualified for a profession who can earn upwards of $100,000 per year, work in PC repairwhy would someone qualified for a profession who can earn upwards of $100,000 per year, work in PC repair...
Heck, I made mahogany row and I'd be perfectly happy running my own little PC repair business. Sure it's less money but it's also way less stress. Still looking longingly at the A+ class at our local community college but they don't offer anything for data recovery. I've built PC's for years, but there have to be better diagnostic techniques than the one I use. Replacing components until I find the bad one.
Do you guys know if there any good boot camp type training programs for data recovery? That would be interesting, too.
A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."
I am so happy to be working in an office free of the MS strangle hold. CALs always struck me as the most insidious of their macabre licensing circus. First you pay for the software, then you pay again so people can use it. What a racket. For the $41,000 you're paying in CALs I can cover an employee salary for 8 months (that would be one of the lower level people).
We don't have any problems getting our work done at the office without Microsoft. We have corporate Gmail and use GoogleDocs, so far with zero problems. If we have super sekret corporate information we can't trust to Google, we can store them in the truecrypt file container. We can send out pdf's to clients and customers, everyone can read them and they format just fine.
Plus I really like that we don't have to fit either our business processes or development processes to MSFT models. It's a lot more open and a lot more productive. You don't realize how much time you spend dancing on Microsoft's string until you get away from them. And, as an extra bonus, I can blow your ROI and TCO numbers out of the water. Just about any metric you want to use. And I never have to make the painful choice between layoffs and new servers. We can upgrade on our schedule, patch on our schedule, work the way we want to. If we need more capacity, we just stand it up. If we don't need it we can turn it off and it's not wasted money sitting there doing nothing.
And it's not just a small office. If you set it up right, you could do the same thing with almost any size organization. The only consistent pain in the rear problem we have regularly are those damn webinar programs. GoToMeeting and crap like that. Many of those are Windows only. That's kind of annoying.
But if your data center is in say, Minnesota, it seems like you could balance the temperature with outside air for many months out of the year. Obviously you'd need to light up the chillers in the summer, but running them 4 months out of the year seems like a huge energy savings than running them year round.
I remember visting Superior in the summer and the lake water was freezing f'ing cold even in June. Wonder if you could run a closed loop heat exchanger without screwing up the lake environment?
It's like asking the general public whether it's better to use an oropharyngeal airway or nasopharyngeal airway. There's no way a random group of people get what traffic shaping and net neutrality really mean. I look at our customers, even the ones who can grasp technical topics, you have to keep it really simple. They had to skew those questions to get answers on that topic, there's no way.
I find OpenOffice quirky and unreliable. It often crashes for me.
2001 called and wants that review back. I've used OO on Linux, Windows XP, and Vista. On old machines, brand new ones and everything in between. And the number of times it's crashed on me or here at the office where we also use it....
0
Quirky you can argue, especially if you're used to something else. But if it crashes your computer, then your computer has much bigger problems.
In my opinion Google is much better positioned to gain future market share than MS. If you haven't had a chance to play around with GoogleVoice, you owe it to yourself to try it. The integration of the web, telephony and email. Amazing as it is now, they're just scratching the surface of the true potential.
With Chrome, Google will be in a position to integrate email, telephony, productivity, social media interaction, photo and video management, all in a device that costs less than $200. With cloud services delivered in a browser window, the underlying OS is meaningless. Whether you use Chrome or Windows, you'll have access to the services, but Google will be able to offer them for less. Google doesn't depend on OS sales for a big chunk of revenue.
MSFT's big strategy seems to be trying to carve enough fat off Windows to get it crammed into a small device, all that effort to offer users a slightly poorer version of what they have on their desktop. It's the same, slightly smaller candy bar in a different wrapper. Where's the innovation in that? MS has to work like mad just to stay relevant in the market.
Take a look at Google Labs sometime and look at all the neat services they're working on. And what has MSFT come up with lately? A table that costs $10,000.
In the fight between Google and MSFT, I'm putting my money on Google.
...makes ya wonder what the NSA or any other BIGGER and better funded group would have up their sleeves.
There are probably some NSA designers out there reminding everyone that it was inevitable someone would figure it out and luckily they still had 500 more ways to get the same data.
Years ago at Hanford they were doing some experiments monitoring the power going into a house. Discovered they could tell exactly what was going on in every room at any given moment just by watching minor fluctuations in the power signal. I can't remember if it was utility sponsored research or DoE funded. It was discontinued over privacy concerns...or so they said at the time. I'm sure the NSA wouldn't share those concerns. With the right equipment I'm wondering if you couldn't key log every computer in the house for entire neighborhoods?
The day I have to run a Wild Weasel mission to mask keystrokes on my wall outlets is the day I'm going to get really serious about moving off grid.
I think a rather significant portion of his plan was that some government entity, be it Texas or the USA, would get behind it and pony up the money necessary to get the power to a distribution system.
I'm not sure that would have been such a bad idea. Here's someone putting his own money where his mouth is on national energy policy and dependence on foreign oil.
Seems like the collective "we" could have ponied up a little support as part of the Smart Grid upgrade. It fits many of the qualification for a stimulus project. Green jobs, alternative energy, Smart Grid, local jobs and it's shovel ready.
I'm not saying it was smart, only that it does seem to line up with our national priorities and why would helping out with the grid upgrade been such a bad idea? There have been public/private partnerships in other areas, why not this one?
This is the same dirtbag who helped SCO craft their litigation strategy against IBM and Linux. Claiming that he was somehow instrumental in many of the software channels we use today. I never did figure what channels he was talking about, but apparently he's not getting mega rich off them if he's out begging for VC money.
Look where SCO is today. Barely breathing in bankruptcy court.
Netscape got spanked, SCO was a loser...you really want this guy investing your money? Seems more like a giant ego linked to an opportunist who gets more publicity than he rates if you ask me.
Oddly ironic that Compuserve was around before AOL. Gah, I still remember the days when AOL users first flooded the net. They were rude, they were shrill and they were legion.
The days you would actually still use a gopher server.
We got our first internet connection from the local library.
Some admins would actually block AOL users from their web servers.
I have one token XP box at home and installed Vista Business on our fire station computer and, after working with it for a while, my honest opinion is that Vista sucks major donkey balls. I understand anyone not wanting to install or support it. It's not just that XP is more familiar, it's that it works better. I've never done anything but the simplest tasks without a "you sure you want to do this?" pop up in Vista. Massively annoying.
If Linux worked like Vista it would be the laughing stock of the computer world. Yet Microsoft trumpets Vista like it's some kind of victory for them.
Ubuntu on the desktops, CentOS on the server side. The field people are still using Windows laptops. The only Windows desktops are kiosks for a couple Windows only apps which we could virutalize, but what's the point? We had the old Windows boxes laying around, why not use them?
But we're not going to replace them with another Windows box, either. When they're dead, they're gone.
Malware and virus cleanup do cost money, but there are other costs routinely left out of cost estimates. I've seen enough of them to know.
- Cost of anti-virus software. The reps will claim that's a wash because you still need A/V software for Linux. BZZZT. You still need a firewall and scanner for email attachments but not software to guard every workstation on your network. If you use corporate Gmail, Google does a pretty good job screening out the email nasties. All for $50/user per year. Cheap compared to Exchange.
- The cost of patch testing. The time it takes to research and test patches before they're rolled out. And the cost of spending hours in the MS knowledge base researching why X stopped working on Wednesday only to find something was hosed by automatic updates. You have one expense or the other, sometimes both.
- The cost of CALS. That's one that used to really chap my undies. It wasn't enough to pay for the software, then you had to buy a license so other people can use it.
-The cost of training. Which, ironically, is one of the things MS throws up as a hidden cost of switching to Linux. Every couple years you'll be going back to class for...something.
Some of those might have changed since I left the last MS shop...I hope so anyway. Life is so much calmer, less complicated and less expensive in a non-MS environment, you have no idea until you try it.
It may be bus arrival times in San Francisco today, but this whole notion of data being exclusive property isn't new and isn't going away. And if Bilski stands and ends up partially undermining software patents, then I would hazard a guess that more companies are going to try monetizing the data aggregates and outputs. Even without Bilski as software becomes more of a commodity market, then data and data aggregates will become the value market.
This isn't a new concept. The public pays for scientific research at an institution of higher learning also funded by tax dollars, yet sometimes the only way you could get a copy of the results is pay for an expensive subscription to a scientific journal, which claims copyright on the published data.
This case probably isn't a good example and the developer trying to be the data gatekeeper is going to lose, but it's only the beginning. There will be more.
Memphis, TN - The capitol of North Mississippi. Grimy, dirty, backward city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. Not even tourists want to go there anymore. Redbirds Stadium is a great place for a ball game but entertainment outside that sucks ass.
North Platte, NE - If there's a place that can make Memphis look attractive, it would be that hell hole of a city.
I agree with Bentonville. Wal-Mart has to outsource development because it's such a crappy place to work and then you have to live in podunkville, AR, for the privilege of working in a crap shop. Their turn over is high and even the really good people I know who have worked there hated it.
Even with the economy in the toilet there are too many good opportunities out there to be stuck in a dreary job.
Both offer lower quality service, with rationing, and less access to innovative procedures.
Does your insurance company pay for innovative procedures? Mine doesn't. They won't pay for anything experimental or unproven. I don't know of many that do. Perhaps you mean Canada and the UK practice standardized medicine, adopting new procedures as they become standardized. Nothing stops anyone in either of those companies from going out to get experimental treatments. You're not going to get them here unless you can afford to pay for them, or get your insurance through being a member of Congress. They get great care.
The way to reduce health care costs is to find waste in the system and eliminate them through process improvement.
It's been 40 years, why hasn't it happened? I build medical software, we improve process continuously but the prices never go down. The doctors eliminate jobs, keep more of their clinic billing but the costs still keep going up.
There is continuous process improvement in our health care system now. Our little ER in the local hospital has to call in a doctor. It doesn't get much more efficient than that. Not even a doctor on staff. But the prices never go down. The hospital charges more, does the same job with fewer people, the insurance company pays less, ships their call center overseas, efficiency happens but the prices keep going up. Service keeps going down. Your way doesn't work.
We tried it your way the last generation and it's a dismal failure. Keeping the system we have now is not an option. People who oppose health care reform remind of when my brother tried to take my toddler nephews dirty old blanket away from him. It was filthy, tattered and torn but he still threw a tantrum when they tried to replace it with a new one. I've never seen such a bunch of whiny, fearful, change resistant people in my entire life. Take a deep breath, it'll be okay. You'll get a brand new binky.
The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese, drove up besides him and threw rocks at him while shouting,
Try that around here. The headline would read something like Mystery Attackers Killed In Hail of Gunfire - Bystanders join police shooting at attackers in van.
I'm always surprised reading about incidents like that. I guess when you live farther from town you don't depend on the cops for protection. The only thing they could do getting here 15 minutes later is fill out the reports.
If that means someone needs to get searched then so be it.
I despise gutless people. People who would unthinkingly hand over all their civil rights because they're pussies. Cash in a box is not going to threaten the safety of an aircraft and was out of bounds for TSA. They could have called the airport cops and said hey that guy's got a box of money. Unless it can be used as a weapon, it's none of their concern.
Unless you think he was going to go from seat to seat bribing people to help storm the flight deck.
This country was not founded by spineless people but we certainly allowed them to multiply and dilute the gene pool.
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I'm not sure how that qualifies as flamebait. It's a lot easier to fit Linux to low end hardware than Mac or Windows. Windows 7 runs on netbooks but it doesn't run that well. And if Linux gets wider acceptance in Europe, that would hardly be a surprise.
It's possible the mod moved the rating with the scroll wheel after selection. It's easy to do and not notice. If you're not paying attention you can start scrolling page but if the rating dropdown is still selected, you'll scroll the selection options. At least in FF, not sure if IE works the same way.
n a newly-disclosed patent application for Embedding a Unique Serial Number into the Content of an Email for Tracking Information Dispersion (phew!)
Get a Blackberry or a wireless broadband card for your netbook. And you can defeat the Great Blue email content tracker, which should keep you and your pathetic band safe from the Death Star, at least temporarily.
This guy doesn't need a defense, he just needs to reside in East Texas and he's part of this case no matter how ill placed the blame is.
You stay classy, Texas.
Heck, I made mahogany row and I'd be perfectly happy running my own little PC repair business. Sure it's less money but it's also way less stress. Still looking longingly at the A+ class at our local community college but they don't offer anything for data recovery. I've built PC's for years, but there have to be better diagnostic techniques than the one I use. Replacing components until I find the bad one.
Do you guys know if there any good boot camp type training programs for data recovery? That would be interesting, too.
A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010."
I am so happy to be working in an office free of the MS strangle hold. CALs always struck me as the most insidious of their macabre licensing circus. First you pay for the software, then you pay again so people can use it. What a racket. For the $41,000 you're paying in CALs I can cover an employee salary for 8 months (that would be one of the lower level people).
We don't have any problems getting our work done at the office without Microsoft. We have corporate Gmail and use GoogleDocs, so far with zero problems. If we have super sekret corporate information we can't trust to Google, we can store them in the truecrypt file container. We can send out pdf's to clients and customers, everyone can read them and they format just fine.
Plus I really like that we don't have to fit either our business processes or development processes to MSFT models. It's a lot more open and a lot more productive. You don't realize how much time you spend dancing on Microsoft's string until you get away from them. And, as an extra bonus, I can blow your ROI and TCO numbers out of the water. Just about any metric you want to use. And I never have to make the painful choice between layoffs and new servers. We can upgrade on our schedule, patch on our schedule, work the way we want to. If we need more capacity, we just stand it up. If we don't need it we can turn it off and it's not wasted money sitting there doing nothing.
And it's not just a small office. If you set it up right, you could do the same thing with almost any size organization. The only consistent pain in the rear problem we have regularly are those damn webinar programs. GoToMeeting and crap like that. Many of those are Windows only. That's kind of annoying.
But if your data center is in say, Minnesota, it seems like you could balance the temperature with outside air for many months out of the year. Obviously you'd need to light up the chillers in the summer, but running them 4 months out of the year seems like a huge energy savings than running them year round.
I remember visting Superior in the summer and the lake water was freezing f'ing cold even in June. Wonder if you could run a closed loop heat exchanger without screwing up the lake environment?
It's like asking the general public whether it's better to use an oropharyngeal airway or nasopharyngeal airway. There's no way a random group of people get what traffic shaping and net neutrality really mean. I look at our customers, even the ones who can grasp technical topics, you have to keep it really simple. They had to skew those questions to get answers on that topic, there's no way.
I find OpenOffice quirky and unreliable. It often crashes for me.
2001 called and wants that review back. I've used OO on Linux, Windows XP, and Vista. On old machines, brand new ones and everything in between. And the number of times it's crashed on me or here at the office where we also use it....
0
Quirky you can argue, especially if you're used to something else. But if it crashes your computer, then your computer has much bigger problems.
Nothing else really matters to either company.
In my opinion Google is much better positioned to gain future market share than MS. If you haven't had a chance to play around with GoogleVoice, you owe it to yourself to try it. The integration of the web, telephony and email. Amazing as it is now, they're just scratching the surface of the true potential.
With Chrome, Google will be in a position to integrate email, telephony, productivity, social media interaction, photo and video management, all in a device that costs less than $200. With cloud services delivered in a browser window, the underlying OS is meaningless. Whether you use Chrome or Windows, you'll have access to the services, but Google will be able to offer them for less. Google doesn't depend on OS sales for a big chunk of revenue.
MSFT's big strategy seems to be trying to carve enough fat off Windows to get it crammed into a small device, all that effort to offer users a slightly poorer version of what they have on their desktop. It's the same, slightly smaller candy bar in a different wrapper. Where's the innovation in that? MS has to work like mad just to stay relevant in the market.
Take a look at Google Labs sometime and look at all the neat services they're working on. And what has MSFT come up with lately? A table that costs $10,000.
In the fight between Google and MSFT, I'm putting my money on Google.
There are probably some NSA designers out there reminding everyone that it was inevitable someone would figure it out and luckily they still had 500 more ways to get the same data.
Years ago at Hanford they were doing some experiments monitoring the power going into a house. Discovered they could tell exactly what was going on in every room at any given moment just by watching minor fluctuations in the power signal. I can't remember if it was utility sponsored research or DoE funded. It was discontinued over privacy concerns...or so they said at the time. I'm sure the NSA wouldn't share those concerns. With the right equipment I'm wondering if you couldn't key log every computer in the house for entire neighborhoods?
The day I have to run a Wild Weasel mission to mask keystrokes on my wall outlets is the day I'm going to get really serious about moving off grid.
I first read the article title as How To Program Kids Via XBOX.
That would have gotten me right into console gaming.
I think a rather significant portion of his plan was that some government entity, be it Texas or the USA, would get behind it and pony up the money necessary to get the power to a distribution system.
I'm not sure that would have been such a bad idea. Here's someone putting his own money where his mouth is on national energy policy and dependence on foreign oil.
Seems like the collective "we" could have ponied up a little support as part of the Smart Grid upgrade. It fits many of the qualification for a stimulus project. Green jobs, alternative energy, Smart Grid, local jobs and it's shovel ready.
I'm not saying it was smart, only that it does seem to line up with our national priorities and why would helping out with the grid upgrade been such a bad idea? There have been public/private partnerships in other areas, why not this one?
This is the same dirtbag who helped SCO craft their litigation strategy against IBM and Linux. Claiming that he was somehow instrumental in many of the software channels we use today. I never did figure what channels he was talking about, but apparently he's not getting mega rich off them if he's out begging for VC money.
Look where SCO is today. Barely breathing in bankruptcy court.
Netscape got spanked, SCO was a loser...you really want this guy investing your money? Seems more like a giant ego linked to an opportunist who gets more publicity than he rates if you ask me.
Oddly ironic that Compuserve was around before AOL. Gah, I still remember the days when AOL users first flooded the net. They were rude, they were shrill and they were legion.
The days you would actually still use a gopher server.
We got our first internet connection from the local library.
Some admins would actually block AOL users from their web servers.
Exciting times.
So the 1st amendment is dead.
Gunned down in the street by the 2nd amendment.
I have one token XP box at home and installed Vista Business on our fire station computer and, after working with it for a while, my honest opinion is that Vista sucks major donkey balls. I understand anyone not wanting to install or support it. It's not just that XP is more familiar, it's that it works better. I've never done anything but the simplest tasks without a "you sure you want to do this?" pop up in Vista. Massively annoying.
If Linux worked like Vista it would be the laughing stock of the computer world. Yet Microsoft trumpets Vista like it's some kind of victory for them.
Enjoying the peace and quiet a great deal.
Ubuntu on the desktops, CentOS on the server side. The field people are still using Windows laptops. The only Windows desktops are kiosks for a couple Windows only apps which we could virutalize, but what's the point? We had the old Windows boxes laying around, why not use them?
But we're not going to replace them with another Windows box, either. When they're dead, they're gone.
Malware and virus cleanup do cost money, but there are other costs routinely left out of cost estimates. I've seen enough of them to know.
- Cost of anti-virus software. The reps will claim that's a wash because you still need A/V software for Linux. BZZZT. You still need a firewall and scanner for email attachments but not software to guard every workstation on your network. If you use corporate Gmail, Google does a pretty good job screening out the email nasties. All for $50/user per year. Cheap compared to Exchange.
- The cost of patch testing. The time it takes to research and test patches before they're rolled out. And the cost of spending hours in the MS knowledge base researching why X stopped working on Wednesday only to find something was hosed by automatic updates. You have one expense or the other, sometimes both.
- The cost of CALS. That's one that used to really chap my undies. It wasn't enough to pay for the software, then you had to buy a license so other people can use it.
-The cost of training. Which, ironically, is one of the things MS throws up as a hidden cost of switching to Linux. Every couple years you'll be going back to class for...something.
Some of those might have changed since I left the last MS shop...I hope so anyway. Life is so much calmer, less complicated and less expensive in a non-MS environment, you have no idea until you try it.
It may be bus arrival times in San Francisco today, but this whole notion of data being exclusive property isn't new and isn't going away. And if Bilski stands and ends up partially undermining software patents, then I would hazard a guess that more companies are going to try monetizing the data aggregates and outputs. Even without Bilski as software becomes more of a commodity market, then data and data aggregates will become the value market.
This isn't a new concept. The public pays for scientific research at an institution of higher learning also funded by tax dollars, yet sometimes the only way you could get a copy of the results is pay for an expensive subscription to a scientific journal, which claims copyright on the published data.
This case probably isn't a good example and the developer trying to be the data gatekeeper is going to lose, but it's only the beginning. There will be more.
Lock phasers on the pleasure centers.
Stand by to fire.
My personal worst list:
I agree with Bentonville. Wal-Mart has to outsource development because it's such a crappy place to work and then you have to live in podunkville, AR, for the privilege of working in a crap shop. Their turn over is high and even the really good people I know who have worked there hated it.
Even with the economy in the toilet there are too many good opportunities out there to be stuck in a dreary job.
If we have to make a choice between health care and building a moon base, I say go with the less expensive lift vehicles and health care.
The moon base will just have to wait.
Both offer lower quality service, with rationing, and less access to innovative procedures.
Does your insurance company pay for innovative procedures? Mine doesn't. They won't pay for anything experimental or unproven. I don't know of many that do. Perhaps you mean Canada and the UK practice standardized medicine, adopting new procedures as they become standardized. Nothing stops anyone in either of those companies from going out to get experimental treatments. You're not going to get them here unless you can afford to pay for them, or get your insurance through being a member of Congress. They get great care.
The way to reduce health care costs is to find waste in the system and eliminate them through process improvement.
It's been 40 years, why hasn't it happened? I build medical software, we improve process continuously but the prices never go down. The doctors eliminate jobs, keep more of their clinic billing but the costs still keep going up.
There is continuous process improvement in our health care system now. Our little ER in the local hospital has to call in a doctor. It doesn't get much more efficient than that. Not even a doctor on staff. But the prices never go down. The hospital charges more, does the same job with fewer people, the insurance company pays less, ships their call center overseas, efficiency happens but the prices keep going up. Service keeps going down. Your way doesn't work.
We tried it your way the last generation and it's a dismal failure. Keeping the system we have now is not an option. People who oppose health care reform remind of when my brother tried to take my toddler nephews dirty old blanket away from him. It was filthy, tattered and torn but he still threw a tantrum when they tried to replace it with a new one. I've never seen such a bunch of whiny, fearful, change resistant people in my entire life. Take a deep breath, it'll be okay. You'll get a brand new binky.
The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese, drove up besides him and threw rocks at him while shouting,
Try that around here. The headline would read something like Mystery Attackers Killed In Hail of Gunfire - Bystanders join police shooting at attackers in van.
I'm always surprised reading about incidents like that. I guess when you live farther from town you don't depend on the cops for protection. The only thing they could do getting here 15 minutes later is fill out the reports.
If that means someone needs to get searched then so be it.
I despise gutless people. People who would unthinkingly hand over all their civil rights because they're pussies. Cash in a box is not going to threaten the safety of an aircraft and was out of bounds for TSA. They could have called the airport cops and said hey that guy's got a box of money. Unless it can be used as a weapon, it's none of their concern.
Unless you think he was going to go from seat to seat bribing people to help storm the flight deck.
This country was not founded by spineless people but we certainly allowed them to multiply and dilute the gene pool.