"Vista or whatever, its an OK operating system, its a lot easier to use than any Linux variant"
I liked XP, but I have found nothing to like about Vista other than the claim it is more secure than XP, so take this as you want. Have you used Ubuntu 8.04? It is the first version that for me installed and ran easier and more quickly than XP or Vista. I had trouble installing 7.x versions, but after they were installed they also ran more reliably and quickly than Vista.
I acknowledge if there are any Windows specific programs you must use, setting up Wine or VM can be a pain. In that case dual boot is worth considering if switching wouldn't drive you nuts.
But so many consumer programs have a free equivalent that works at least good enough, if not better, than comparable Windows programs.
Providing improvements to business processes where technically possible, affordable, and not illegal is the number one job, just above securing company data. Because if you can't do number one, there isn't much worth securing for number 2.
Is a requested enhancement required for a company? Probably not. Is it important to provide continuous improvement and efficiency to keep the company competitive? Frequently it is.
I'm all for standing up and saying what kind of resources and safeguards are necessary to provide an enhancement so the company can decide how to expense the upgrade. But just saying ninny, ninny, boo, boo, you can't have it is ridiculous.
If your parents don't want to look at it, that is one thing. But if your neighbors don't want to look at it (planning ordinances) that is just too darn bad. FCC says devices used to receive TV signal can not be restricted.
I don't agree at all. The real problem is mundane procedures like power loss and restore were not documented. You train people and ensure your institutional knowledge isn't allowed to go stale. Just switching to the tech-du-jour is needlessly expensive.
The real wtf is they are apparently replacing a system requiring high availability with wintel, which is decidedly neither. Commodity hardware is good, but you should at least consider a higher reliability OS like UNIX or BSD or something else !!!
Now I agree there should be an End of Life risk assessment plan for this Tandem system with an indefinite date, such that they know where to get parts or coding expertise, in the absence they can get it running on currently available hardware, and if not consider alternative hardware/OS options and how long it would take to port.
that you were wrong VxWorks is the only OS to have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, I accept VxWorks is only as good or bad a tool as you wield it.
Linksys hasn't done a great job meeting the needs of its consumers with VxWorks. My impression is busybox (stripped Linux from the original GL) was marginally more robust in their implementation. The real advantage is the community was able to greatly improve on Linksys's busybox implementation, but are not reasonably able to do anything with VxWorks.
Are there any alternative firmware projects for the Zune? I haven't found any. It seems like decent hardware with the wireless and FM, and reasonably priced. But I wouldn't give the standard MS firmware 5 minutes of my time, for many reasons.
I was OK with Linksys reducing the memory footprint, especially since they introduced the 54GL.
I was not enthused they forsake open source firmware (busybox) for closed source VxWorks, and then that Linksys or VxWorks put some checksums in their upload routines that tried to disallow altered firmware.
The fact the openWRT people finally overcame the checksums and shoehorned busybox into the gimped 45Gs (while retaining more features than VxWorks) shows it was technically possible. They were just taking the comfortable path rather than upholding the hacker roots of the 54G which made it such a success.
In the residental US market, it is definitely true.
The reason I hesitate to agree with the light analogy is regardless of how many people use a light, it doesn't cost the utility supplier or customer any more money.
With internet, it does cost the supplier marginally more to provide the extra service to a "leacher". And while the customer generally isn't affected by leachers, there have been some cases of unscrupulous internet companies cutting off or demanding tier upgrades to "unlimited" customers that go over an unspecified service amount without warning.
And your "DHCP On" example doesn't fully encapsulate the idea that DHCP is by it's very definition an invitation to use the specified service. Still it is a reasonable analogy also.
If security and DHCP are off -
I am hesitant to equate this with physical property theft unless you prove you pay by the byte. Most people pay a flat rate. It is more like asking the police to investigate theft of electricity because someone peeked in your unlocked house and air conditioning escaped.
Now if security is off and DHCP is on (like most people)-
It's like calling the police on someone who comes in your house after you shouted out the door, "come in and bask in my air conditioned glory".
Maybe... just maybe... you have a point. But if so, the boomer generation should emphatically NOT be saying Gen X and Millenials are lazy self-entitled pansies.
Instead Boomers should be saying - We're sorry, we collected more intergenerational economic rents than we should have, and kept doing it for too long. We are the arrogant and greedy generation. Now that we are "rich" on our children, grand children, and great-grand-children's backs, how can we transfer some of that wealth back to later generations and ease your transition into economic sustainability?
I don't know about Britain, but in the US, computers with Linux pre-installed are usually $50 more than the equivalent hardware with Windows. Personally I wouldn't mind buying a computer with XP or Linux. But for the time being I refuse to buy a Vista computer so I don't become another "sale" in support of Microsoft's current tripe.
Why is PitaBred getting modded informative when he is wrong, and AC modded down when he is right?
Kerosene (jet A) does become more viscous when cold than octane (traditional gas). I'm sure they use Kerosene because the viscosity increase is manageable, it contains more power per liter than gas, diesel engines are more efficient, it is safer to transport, and jet A is probably easier to get in the Antarctic.
I wish I had some of my ethereal mod points right now.
As you rightly point out, cable companies have little information about specific customer's usage patterns before they start service. This is about expensing sunk costs after service decisions are made, to get an accurate idea of your costs and profit on each customer.
Imagine a senario where it costs $500 to provision access to a customer, and once you have committed that infrastructure the cost difference to service a high vs low usage customer is $1. Obviously this is an extreme example. It wouldn't make sense to allocate proportionally more of your cost to the heavy user (unless you are considering future cost expensing for network upgrades). Given flat rate pricing, it artificially makes it look like you are making money on the light user and losing money on the heavy user. You are really making almost the same amount of money on each customer. You'd want to allocate your expenses on a per customer basis.
Now imagine the alternate where it costs you $50 to provision access to a customer, and the cost difference of servicing a high vs low usage customer is $40. In this case, infrastructure costs are almost irrelevant compared to the ongoing extra cost of providing more service to high usage customers. You'd want to allocate costs based on usage, instead of on a per customer basis.
Once you have decided where your costs lie, you can talk about the best way to price your service. I was just pointing out that allocating costs solely on usage and not considering where those costs come from is a poor business decision.
drop your ipod or whatever into the toilet, is to take out the batteries
Oh, you mean those incredibly hard to replace batteries that Steveo charges you $66 to replace, and even then he doesn't give you back your iPod, but a refurbished one instead?
Yeah, those will be really easy to rip out in a flash while fumbling with the slick toilet water on the case!
KiahZero is claiming the largest expense of providing internet service is not in operating cost (pushing bits down the tubes), but in the capital costs and plant depreciation of rolling the tubes down each street and to your door.
If the biggest expense is operating costs, Mr. Ionly Checkemail is subsidizing the cost of providing Mr. Lawyer Heavyuser so much data when they pay the same amount. But if the biggest expense is in infrastructure, Mr. Heavyuser is subsidizing the cost of rolling wire to Mr. Checkemail's door when Mr. Heavyuser has to pay more for his high usage.
You could argue that the largest cost is depreciation due to obsolescence of the low bandwidth tubes as Mr. Heavyuser increases his usage and the cable company tries to keep up. That allocates more expense back to Mr. Heavyuser. Or you could challenge KiahZero's assumption that capital costs are higher than the operating costs.
and I'd argue that it's far better than XP was when it was released.
XP was a pile of excrement until SP1.
I've read this reaction before and I think it is a little revisionist.
Before XP release I read the technology press, and while XP didn't get stellar reviews, the overwhelming opinion seemed to be XP was a worthwhile upgrade that would take a little bit to grow into it's own. On this sentiment, I chose to buy and install XP on release day, and I never regretted it one bit. Yes I had minor issues, but it ran a little faster and much more stably on my 3 year old computer than Win 98SE.
Before Vista I read the technology press, and was surprised at the specific and vitriolic reaction. On this sentiment I didn't even consider upgrading my old computer. And I resolved to avoid purchasing Vista on a new computer until I started hearing more specific and positive reactions. When I finally got to use it on my girlfriend's new computer, I was absolutely abhorred at its utter lack of speed and usability.
Release Vista may be safer than release XP, but cyber-criminals as well as security researchers were also much less savvy 6 years ago. I would expect Vista to be safer.
In every other way release Vista is less than release XP.
Good point, and you are right on businesses (even large ones) skipping entire versions of Windows. The transportation company I work for ($10 billion in revenue) went straight from NT 3.51 to XP about 2 years ago.
"Sorry, but SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX already beat you to it, and they're doing *relevant, orbital rocketry*."
This is true for commercial payload operations. But Scaled Composites's goal is humans to suborbital and eventually LEO. This is a much more expensive and time consuming goal. I haven't heard anything about Scaled Composites interest in payloads. Of the 3 companies you mention, only SpaceX has expressed interest in human space flight, they only have the Dragon planned for this, and they have no forecast date of its first manned operation.
Scaled Composites is also planning on operating on an order of magnitude less revenue. The 3 companies you mention will see millions of dollars in revenue launching commercial payloads and will still be cheaper than using government launch services. Scaled Composites/Virgin is talking about providing individuals in the lower upper class flight experiences costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right now only the stratospheric upper class can afford a suborbital or LEO trip.
That is a little pretentious of you. It sounds like you feel your job is stressful, since you don't feel like someone else could hack it. Parent apparently found a job with some downtime. That doesn't say anything about whether he would thrive or wilt in a high stress job. But if he has such an accommodating job, why on Earth would he want to deal with your situation? We don't all have to tolerate bad working conditions.
"Security vulnerabilities aside, open access points are a legal nightmare waiting to happen "
Don't assume this is true, it may be the opposite of true, depending on your jurisdiction. Some places, like Germany I believe, can hold you responsible for actions that occur on your network if not "properly secured."
However, there have been several US lawyers and networking experts who have argued that if you secure your network to the best of your ability and it is infiltrated, you may be responsible in that you knew security was needed and failed in your implementation. It may also implicate yourself in any illegal activities if there is no way to identify the infiltration, as is the case in the poor and ethereal logging of almost all consumer grade wireless routers. An open router may provide more protection in most of the US than a secured router, as it gives you cover of plausible deniability (an useful tool for the innocent, as well as the guilty).
Unless something happened in the last couple months I don't know about, Myth didn't take away the free HTTP tv schedules. For the past couple years Myth had been legally piggybacking on a free XML tv schedule service provided by Tribune Media Services. TMS terminated their service so you have 2 choices for scheduling data now.
In North America, you can pay a minor fee ($20 a year) to the non profit schedulesdirect.org which licenses the data for redistribution from TMS. Or you can use one of the http scrapers that you refer to which are still available for Myth (outside of North America I think it is the only option). The scrapers are against the TOS of the websites they scrape from. They are generally tolerated, but the websites regularly make updates to their http schema which breaks the Myth scheduling package until someone gets around to fixing it. If $20 a year is too much for such a valuable service, I suggest you try becoming a freegan.
The center wing tanks were low in quantity and sit over the air conditioning packs which ran at the gate before departure, creating the jet A / oxygen vapor necessary for an explosion.
NTSB did not produce findings that the fuel quantity circuit was unsafe. Cracking in aging aircraft electrical lines is well known. Probable cause was high power circuit in same raceway arced over to fuel quantity circuit and arc terminated in fuel tank.
If this is accurate, then optical power delivery would effectively prevent a repeat. But new planes are getting nitrogen inerting systems for their fuel tanks. So while the chosen solution is backward, it solves one argument for optical power delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
"Vista or whatever, its an OK operating system, its a lot easier to use than any Linux variant"
I liked XP, but I have found nothing to like about Vista other than the claim it is more secure than XP, so take this as you want. Have you used Ubuntu 8.04? It is the first version that for me installed and ran easier and more quickly than XP or Vista. I had trouble installing 7.x versions, but after they were installed they also ran more reliably and quickly than Vista.
I acknowledge if there are any Windows specific programs you must use, setting up Wine or VM can be a pain. In that case dual boot is worth considering if switching wouldn't drive you nuts.
But so many consumer programs have a free equivalent that works at least good enough, if not better, than comparable Windows programs.
...that makes the IT department a liability.
Providing improvements to business processes where technically possible, affordable, and not illegal is the number one job, just above securing company data. Because if you can't do number one, there isn't much worth securing for number 2.
Is a requested enhancement required for a company? Probably not. Is it important to provide continuous improvement and efficiency to keep the company competitive? Frequently it is.
I'm all for standing up and saying what kind of resources and safeguards are necessary to provide an enhancement so the company can decide how to expense the upgrade. But just saying ninny, ninny, boo, boo, you can't have it is ridiculous.
If your parents don't want to look at it, that is one thing. But if your neighbors don't want to look at it (planning ordinances) that is just too darn bad. FCC says devices used to receive TV signal can not be restricted.
I don't agree at all. The real problem is mundane procedures like power loss and restore were not documented. You train people and ensure your institutional knowledge isn't allowed to go stale. Just switching to the tech-du-jour is needlessly expensive.
The real wtf is they are apparently replacing a system requiring high availability with wintel, which is decidedly neither. Commodity hardware is good, but you should at least consider a higher reliability OS like UNIX or BSD or something else !!!
Now I agree there should be an End of Life risk assessment plan for this Tandem system with an indefinite date, such that they know where to get parts or coding expertise, in the absence they can get it running on currently available hardware, and if not consider alternative hardware/OS options and how long it would take to port.
But going Wintel? WTH?
If that undergrad was a hard worker and successfully recovered the data, I bet he got a phat assignment the next summer.
that you were wrong VxWorks is the only OS to have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, I accept VxWorks is only as good or bad a tool as you wield it.
Linksys hasn't done a great job meeting the needs of its consumers with VxWorks. My impression is busybox (stripped Linux from the original GL) was marginally more robust in their implementation. The real advantage is the community was able to greatly improve on Linksys's busybox implementation, but are not reasonably able to do anything with VxWorks.
Are there any alternative firmware projects for the Zune? I haven't found any. It seems like decent hardware with the wireless and FM, and reasonably priced. But I wouldn't give the standard MS firmware 5 minutes of my time, for many reasons.
I was OK with Linksys reducing the memory footprint, especially since they introduced the 54GL.
I was not enthused they forsake open source firmware (busybox) for closed source VxWorks, and then that Linksys or VxWorks put some checksums in their upload routines that tried to disallow altered firmware.
The fact the openWRT people finally overcame the checksums and shoehorned busybox into the gimped 45Gs (while retaining more features than VxWorks) shows it was technically possible. They were just taking the comfortable path rather than upholding the hacker roots of the 54G which made it such a success.
In the residental US market, it is definitely true.
The reason I hesitate to agree with the light analogy is regardless of how many people use a light, it doesn't cost the utility supplier or customer any more money.
With internet, it does cost the supplier marginally more to provide the extra service to a "leacher". And while the customer generally isn't affected by leachers, there have been some cases of unscrupulous internet companies cutting off or demanding tier upgrades to "unlimited" customers that go over an unspecified service amount without warning.
And your "DHCP On" example doesn't fully encapsulate the idea that DHCP is by it's very definition an invitation to use the specified service. Still it is a reasonable analogy also.
If security and DHCP are off -
I am hesitant to equate this with physical property theft unless you prove you pay by the byte. Most people pay a flat rate. It is more like asking the police to investigate theft of electricity because someone peeked in your unlocked house and air conditioning escaped.
Now if security is off and DHCP is on (like most people)-
It's like calling the police on someone who comes in your house after you shouted out the door, "come in and bask in my air conditioned glory".
There is only one kernel generation between the 2. And I sometimes forget WFWG and NT aren't the same.
Maybe... just maybe... you have a point. But if so, the boomer generation should emphatically NOT be saying Gen X and Millenials are lazy self-entitled pansies. Instead Boomers should be saying - We're sorry, we collected more intergenerational economic rents than we should have, and kept doing it for too long. We are the arrogant and greedy generation. Now that we are "rich" on our children, grand children, and great-grand-children's backs, how can we transfer some of that wealth back to later generations and ease your transition into economic sustainability?
I don't know about Britain, but in the US, computers with Linux pre-installed are usually $50 more than the equivalent hardware with Windows. Personally I wouldn't mind buying a computer with XP or Linux. But for the time being I refuse to buy a Vista computer so I don't become another "sale" in support of Microsoft's current tripe.
Question -
Response -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624
Why is PitaBred getting modded informative when he is wrong, and AC modded down when he is right?
Kerosene (jet A) does become more viscous when cold than octane (traditional gas). I'm sure they use Kerosene because the viscosity increase is manageable, it contains more power per liter than gas, diesel engines are more efficient, it is safer to transport, and jet A is probably easier to get in the Antarctic.
I wish I had some of my ethereal mod points right now.
As you rightly point out, cable companies have little information about specific customer's usage patterns before they start service. This is about expensing sunk costs after service decisions are made, to get an accurate idea of your costs and profit on each customer.
Imagine a senario where it costs $500 to provision access to a customer, and once you have committed that infrastructure the cost difference to service a high vs low usage customer is $1. Obviously this is an extreme example. It wouldn't make sense to allocate proportionally more of your cost to the heavy user (unless you are considering future cost expensing for network upgrades). Given flat rate pricing, it artificially makes it look like you are making money on the light user and losing money on the heavy user. You are really making almost the same amount of money on each customer. You'd want to allocate your expenses on a per customer basis.
Now imagine the alternate where it costs you $50 to provision access to a customer, and the cost difference of servicing a high vs low usage customer is $40. In this case, infrastructure costs are almost irrelevant compared to the ongoing extra cost of providing more service to high usage customers. You'd want to allocate costs based on usage, instead of on a per customer basis.
Once you have decided where your costs lie, you can talk about the best way to price your service. I was just pointing out that allocating costs solely on usage and not considering where those costs come from is a poor business decision.
drop your ipod or whatever into the toilet, is to take out the batteries
Oh, you mean those incredibly hard to replace batteries that Steveo charges you $66 to replace, and even then he doesn't give you back your iPod, but a refurbished one instead?
Yeah, those will be really easy to rip out in a flash while fumbling with the slick toilet water on the case!
KiahZero is claiming the largest expense of providing internet service is not in operating cost (pushing bits down the tubes), but in the capital costs and plant depreciation of rolling the tubes down each street and to your door.
If the biggest expense is operating costs, Mr. Ionly Checkemail is subsidizing the cost of providing Mr. Lawyer Heavyuser so much data when they pay the same amount. But if the biggest expense is in infrastructure, Mr. Heavyuser is subsidizing the cost of rolling wire to Mr. Checkemail's door when Mr. Heavyuser has to pay more for his high usage.
You could argue that the largest cost is depreciation due to obsolescence of the low bandwidth tubes as Mr. Heavyuser increases his usage and the cable company tries to keep up. That allocates more expense back to Mr. Heavyuser. Or you could challenge KiahZero's assumption that capital costs are higher than the operating costs.
Before XP release I read the technology press, and while XP didn't get stellar reviews, the overwhelming opinion seemed to be XP was a worthwhile upgrade that would take a little bit to grow into it's own. On this sentiment, I chose to buy and install XP on release day, and I never regretted it one bit. Yes I had minor issues, but it ran a little faster and much more stably on my 3 year old computer than Win 98SE.
Before Vista I read the technology press, and was surprised at the specific and vitriolic reaction. On this sentiment I didn't even consider upgrading my old computer. And I resolved to avoid purchasing Vista on a new computer until I started hearing more specific and positive reactions. When I finally got to use it on my girlfriend's new computer, I was absolutely abhorred at its utter lack of speed and usability.
Release Vista may be safer than release XP, but cyber-criminals as well as security researchers were also much less savvy 6 years ago. I would expect Vista to be safer.
In every other way release Vista is less than release XP.
Good point, and you are right on businesses (even large ones) skipping entire versions of Windows. The transportation company I work for ($10 billion in revenue) went straight from NT 3.51 to XP about 2 years ago.
"Sorry, but SeaLaunch, Orbital Sciences, and SpaceX already beat you to it, and they're doing *relevant, orbital rocketry*."
This is true for commercial payload operations. But Scaled Composites's goal is humans to suborbital and eventually LEO. This is a much more expensive and time consuming goal. I haven't heard anything about Scaled Composites interest in payloads. Of the 3 companies you mention, only SpaceX has expressed interest in human space flight, they only have the Dragon planned for this, and they have no forecast date of its first manned operation.
Scaled Composites is also planning on operating on an order of magnitude less revenue. The 3 companies you mention will see millions of dollars in revenue launching commercial payloads and will still be cheaper than using government launch services. Scaled Composites/Virgin is talking about providing individuals in the lower upper class flight experiences costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right now only the stratospheric upper class can afford a suborbital or LEO trip.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
That is a little pretentious of you. It sounds like you feel your job is stressful, since you don't feel like someone else could hack it. Parent apparently found a job with some downtime. That doesn't say anything about whether he would thrive or wilt in a high stress job. But if he has such an accommodating job, why on Earth would he want to deal with your situation? We don't all have to tolerate bad working conditions.
"Security vulnerabilities aside, open access points are a legal nightmare waiting to happen " Don't assume this is true, it may be the opposite of true, depending on your jurisdiction. Some places, like Germany I believe, can hold you responsible for actions that occur on your network if not "properly secured." However, there have been several US lawyers and networking experts who have argued that if you secure your network to the best of your ability and it is infiltrated, you may be responsible in that you knew security was needed and failed in your implementation. It may also implicate yourself in any illegal activities if there is no way to identify the infiltration, as is the case in the poor and ethereal logging of almost all consumer grade wireless routers. An open router may provide more protection in most of the US than a secured router, as it gives you cover of plausible deniability (an useful tool for the innocent, as well as the guilty).
Unless something happened in the last couple months I don't know about, Myth didn't take away the free HTTP tv schedules. For the past couple years Myth had been legally piggybacking on a free XML tv schedule service provided by Tribune Media Services. TMS terminated their service so you have 2 choices for scheduling data now.
In North America, you can pay a minor fee ($20 a year) to the non profit schedulesdirect.org which licenses the data for redistribution from TMS. Or you can use one of the http scrapers that you refer to which are still available for Myth (outside of North America I think it is the only option). The scrapers are against the TOS of the websites they scrape from. They are generally tolerated, but the websites regularly make updates to their http schema which breaks the Myth scheduling package until someone gets around to fixing it. If $20 a year is too much for such a valuable service, I suggest you try becoming a freegan.
You can peruse the NTSB files http://www.ntsb.gov/events/TWA800/default.htm Or read the short version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_800
The center wing tanks were low in quantity and sit over the air conditioning packs which ran at the gate before departure, creating the jet A / oxygen vapor necessary for an explosion.
NTSB did not produce findings that the fuel quantity circuit was unsafe. Cracking in aging aircraft electrical lines is well known. Probable cause was high power circuit in same raceway arced over to fuel quantity circuit and arc terminated in fuel tank.
If this is accurate, then optical power delivery would effectively prevent a repeat. But new planes are getting nitrogen inerting systems for their fuel tanks. So while the chosen solution is backward, it solves one argument for optical power delivery.