my friend & neighbour is a senior maintenance engineer/manager at a prestigious hospital in cambridgeshire
he was called to a dig where an outside company were digging a trench across the grounds of the hospital. although they had permission to dig, the men had poor maps and despite being told they should exercise extreme care, took out the three-phase mains feed! Of course, the hospital had UPSs for operating theatres etc, and diesel generators, but it still tripped breakers in various places causing a mad rush to get things back up.
meanwhile, the trench diggers, thinking they'd gotten past the danger spot, carried on, and took out the water main within the hour!
my friend was home very late that night
it's not the backhoe, it's the morons operating them that are the problem!
very strangely, I find myself perhaps for the first time ever sympathizing with Microsoft, in that when "Red Flag" linux has been discussed on/., people have seemed in favour of a Chinese linux distro, noone proclaimed (for ex.) that
a special pro-freedom GPL should be written which didn't allow s/w to be used in despotic countries
noone suggested that this would somehow make linux evil
Now, back to normal/. programming... lets pack up Microsoft and SCO and send them to China where maybe they can learn what freedom means and why people don't want central control/DRM of themselves and their data!
I tried to respond to your post, but when I tried copying and pasting the text of your post to quote it, a copyright notice popped up, and an RIAA man knocked on my door and confiscated my computer and threatened to sue me for sharing your post with 65000 downloaders at US$10 per shot!
In this case the IBM salesperson was an employee of theirs, and BEA's salesman was also a BEA employee.
To give you an idea of the scale of the contact, we had GBP25K of servers (or US$17k). The BEA license cost about GBP100K (about US$65K), so I would guess the commission made the IBM man somewhat keen to win it no matter what!
The key fact was that when initially challenged why IBM sent the WinNT version, they lied about the solaris version being in final beta, whereas porting had barely started. Had they come clean up-front, and even done what they later suggested which was to loan us some unix boxes which would run it, they might have saved it.
The irony was that in the end the customer never made any money out of their online shop!
they have no problem selling a customer crap software and drawn out services.
about 4 - 5 years ago I was working on a contract for a *major* UK company, and our preferred platform was BEA's weblogic commerce suite. IBM were their rival with websphere. The customer's platform was Sparc/Solaris. IBM won the deal to supply software. When the dev kit turned up, it was for Windows NT, and we were told Solaris wasn't quite finished, but at least we could get started!
a month later we had our new shiny Sun servers up and running, all ready for a fresh websphere install. IBM still said it wasn't ready... after a lot of pressure, they admitted that at the time of selling us their product, websphere had never actually been run on sparc/solaris, and they only started porting it for us a month ago.
our customer, after seeing if there was any hope of IBM actually having a fully tested solaris version in time for their launch date, cancelled the order and placed it with BEA.
Whilst many software companies sell stuff that's still in beta in the hope it will be finished by the time the deal is struck and shipped, in this case IBM basically lied outright about the existence of the software at all!
Also go get "Is It Bill Bailey", his stand-up show with a few sketches. Sometimes he misses the mark but mostly is quite funny and sometimes trouser-wettingly funny.
I 100% agree. I have an xbox, chipped: it's clearly audible across the room, so is far from ideal, so after initial enthusiasm, it's been relegated to playing DIVX's and the occasional game.
For music, when I want peace and quiet, without the hum, I built a cheapo media centre PC from spare bits:
Asus nforce1 integrated motherboard
Duron 1.2GHz
256MB ddr
40GB drive
The case was quite expensive as it was a very compact very low-profile uATX case, with fold-down front, so looked OK as a piece of hifi except it was battleship grey. I spray-painted the case with black pearlescent "BMW" paint, and it looked pretty good! The power supply wasn't bad, only 150W though, so I had to keep the load down, hence no DVD, no floppy, minimal hardware etc.
However, the case's cooling wasn't too good, the PSU ran hot, and the hard drive failed (Maxtor, at a time when Maxtor's were really bad) probably partly due to being cooked. It was quieter than the xbox, so I decided to rebuild it.
So I bought an Aopen quiet PC case, which was sadly a lot bigger, but has 300W PFC & near silent power supply for just £50. A Speeze vulturespin quiet CPU fan was £6. The new Seagate FDB 80GB drive rounded it off to £80 in total. I had by now a spare better video card, Asus geForce2MX deluxe, whose S-video out was much better and means I can easily monitor the machine on the TV, and has a TV Tuner (but I don't have a TV license so it's unused). I also got a S/PDIF adaptor for an old soundblaster live value card, which feeds the home cinema, and also means I can digitally capture from satellite radio or other sources.
I'm really pleased with it, the real cost to me was less than £250, yet it's very full featured, is pretty quiet, and zero hassle.
Sun have in the last ten years produced some crappy hardware - not very well built, not reliable enough for the extra cost.
However, they really pulled themselves up in the last five years and produced some much better kit. The SunFires are quite solid, the Opteron boxes are really nice.
Shame that Apple didn't at least tie-up with Sun to do OSX on their new Opteron boxes - how hard can it be, they've already ported to Intel/x86?
On the other hand, with both Apple and Sun moving to relatively commodity hardware, are they both acknowledging the failure to manage development of their preferred CPUs, and will they end up being just OS developers?
it will not prevent the creation of "zombie" DDOS networks, infection by spyware, or OS exploits.
Example: zonealarm controls access to the network based not just on protocol/port but on the application asking for access. This could prevent an unpriv'd user from doing nasty net things. The Windows firewall is comparatively crap.
Example: non-priv'd accounts could be set to not allow software to be installed, or, not allow executables to be set up. unix equivalent would be to disable "chmod" for unauthorized users. However, it's hard to use a windows machine without being "power user" or "admin". In WindowsXPhome there's no intermediate between zero privs and admin, so you're stuck with being admin if you want the machine to be useable. The flood of patches also means people get lazy and don't want a separate admin account into which they login to do updates; windows could make it easy to be low-priv user and run update but require admin password, but it doesn't. Where's the "su" or "sudo" equivalent? How about the equivalent of "xhost"?
So, yes, the problem is people running as admin, but this is usually caused by windows' security model in Xp home, or, crappy software that won't run otherwise. Add to it the weak protection between layers of the application libraries, the gui and the core OS, and you've got very little protection against Bad Things.
Is there a USB mp3 player that can be formatted and still be usable with some type of Linux file system? I need to buy one anyway so why not go with a model that doesn't require FAT/FAT32
as someone else said: yes, the iPod. Also, the Archos boxes are linux based, as are a number of others, so they could use ext2/ext3/jffs etc.
the snag is providing plug-and-play usb mass storage
What does that mean to companies that sell stuff like USB flash drives or CF cards?
Simple: don't sell them ready formatted, simply include instructions on how to format the devices!
You should have asked: "what does that mean to companies selling mp3 players with a filesystem?"
The answer is of course either to not supply the device formatted, or not to use Microsoft's fat FS. The latter is probably not trivial for most. Archos, who probably currently use fat for their portable media players, since they use linux as the OS, could switch to ext2; they could then make the device appear as a network disk using samba, and use usbnet (tcp/ip over usb) instead of usb mass storage.
agreed, fakes when items are not safety critical is not such an issue. however, when drugs are being faked, it's much worse, for example fake viagra.
I too have heard about fake brake-pads for cars which disintegrate under use. I am sure that oil and brake fluid have also been faked.
Jokes about hardened criminals stealing viagra aside, if the fake drug is manufactured badly then the dose could be wrong, or the drug contaminated in some way, or worse, not have any active chemical agent in it and lead to the death of the person buying it.
This is also a serious headache for the original drug manufacturer; imagine if vioxx was in fact perfectly safe but it was the knock-offs that had the problems.
funny... I can never seem to get 4 players on Mario Kart...
my nephew had one for Christmas and the wireless servers weren't amazing - slow and not enough players... I consoled (pun intended, sorry) him that the service was new and likely to be flooded with all the new consoles sold over xmas, and it would probably get better.
mind you, it probably didn't help that we were borrowing bandwidth off a neighbour's open access point (which half the street seems to be abusing from what kismet told me from the client list:-)
[yes, I did contact their ISP to tell them]
agreed about misleading description of "fast lenses". anything below f2.4 is medium, anything below f3.5 is slow
disagree about fast lenses/fast shutters. motion blur can make a sports scene more interesting - a totally sharp picture can render it bland. conversely, a shallow depth of field can also be useful.
computer animation people have invested a lot in making realistic movies: without infinite depth of field, with motion blur, with lens flare etc.
many people have never read a book on how to use a camera - which usually explain how to stand, how to breath, or even how to hold a camera. Simple tricks such as leaning against a wall or fence, using a bean bag (or an item of clothing) to rest it on are very easy!
the best thing I bought in the last year was a monopod - cheaper than a tripod, and because it's much more portable than a 3pod, I tend to use it far more, and it really helps when recording video (so much so that people comment on it).
finally, in an attempt at humour, people with parkinsons really ought to stick to 35mm film cameras with fast lenses and short shutter speeds!
So far, all the HUDs I've seen that are less than several 1000 US$ are only VGA or SVGA.
For movies, SVGA is adequate, but if you really want to be able to access complex data, you'll find 800x600 SVGA display lo-res and just on the limit of useability.
the old glasstrons and eye-treks had even lower res, but again, we designed for movies and not for text.
I think when HUDs and various virtual displays give the same performance as a 12" 1024x768 laptop display at 20" from the eye, then they might catch on. I would certainly be interested in a PDA with a HUD under such circumstances.
If you want a cross-platform GUI library for Python you should consider
PyQT which would allow you to run your python gui programs acrosss multiple platforms. QT licensing is not to everyone's taste as it seems to force you to either be totally GPL or buy a full commercial license.
Slashdot Mirror
Elderly couple, sitting in sofa, surrounded by smoking ruins of their house.
Man turns to woman: "I do with the gas company would stop giving us free samples"
he was called to a dig where an outside company were digging a trench across the grounds of the hospital. although they had permission to dig, the men had poor maps and despite being told they should exercise extreme care, took out the three-phase mains feed! Of course, the hospital had UPSs for operating theatres etc, and diesel generators, but it still tripped breakers in various places causing a mad rush to get things back up.
meanwhile, the trench diggers, thinking they'd gotten past the danger spot, carried on, and took out the water main within the hour!
my friend was home very late that night
it's not the backhoe, it's the morons operating them that are the problem!
Now, back to normal /. programming... lets pack up Microsoft and SCO and send them to China where maybe they can learn what freedom means and why people don't want central control/DRM of themselves and their data!
XP sp2 firewall? ha! get zonealarm instead, 10 times better.
I tried to respond to your post, but when I tried copying and pasting the text of your post to quote it, a copyright notice popped up, and an RIAA man knocked on my door and confiscated my computer and threatened to sue me for sharing your post with 65000 downloaders at US$10 per shot!
To give you an idea of the scale of the contact, we had GBP25K of servers (or US$17k). The BEA license cost about GBP100K (about US$65K), so I would guess the commission made the IBM man somewhat keen to win it no matter what!
The key fact was that when initially challenged why IBM sent the WinNT version, they lied about the solaris version being in final beta, whereas porting had barely started. Had they come clean up-front, and even done what they later suggested which was to loan us some unix boxes which would run it, they might have saved it.
The irony was that in the end the customer never made any money out of their online shop!
about 4 - 5 years ago I was working on a contract for a *major* UK company, and our preferred platform was BEA's weblogic commerce suite. IBM were their rival with websphere. The customer's platform was Sparc/Solaris. IBM won the deal to supply software. When the dev kit turned up, it was for Windows NT, and we were told Solaris wasn't quite finished, but at least we could get started!
a month later we had our new shiny Sun servers up and running, all ready for a fresh websphere install. IBM still said it wasn't ready... after a lot of pressure, they admitted that at the time of selling us their product, websphere had never actually been run on sparc/solaris, and they only started porting it for us a month ago.
our customer, after seeing if there was any hope of IBM actually having a fully tested solaris version in time for their launch date, cancelled the order and placed it with BEA.
Whilst many software companies sell stuff that's still in beta in the hope it will be finished by the time the deal is struck and shipped, in this case IBM basically lied outright about the existence of the software at all!
Also go get "Is It Bill Bailey", his stand-up show with a few sketches. Sometimes he misses the mark but mostly is quite funny and sometimes trouser-wettingly funny.
I 100% agree. I have an xbox, chipped: it's clearly audible across the room, so is far from ideal, so after initial enthusiasm, it's been relegated to playing DIVX's and the occasional game.
For music, when I want peace and quiet, without the hum, I built a cheapo media centre PC from spare bits:
- Asus nforce1 integrated motherboard
- Duron 1.2GHz
- 256MB ddr
- 40GB drive
The case was quite expensive as it was a very compact very low-profile uATX case, with fold-down front, so looked OK as a piece of hifi except it was battleship grey. I spray-painted the case with black pearlescent "BMW" paint, and it looked pretty good! The power supply wasn't bad, only 150W though, so I had to keep the load down, hence no DVD, no floppy, minimal hardware etc.However, the case's cooling wasn't too good, the PSU ran hot, and the hard drive failed (Maxtor, at a time when Maxtor's were really bad) probably partly due to being cooked. It was quieter than the xbox, so I decided to rebuild it.
So I bought an Aopen quiet PC case, which was sadly a lot bigger, but has 300W PFC & near silent power supply for just £50. A Speeze vulturespin quiet CPU fan was £6. The new Seagate FDB 80GB drive rounded it off to £80 in total. I had by now a spare better video card, Asus geForce2MX deluxe, whose S-video out was much better and means I can easily monitor the machine on the TV, and has a TV Tuner (but I don't have a TV license so it's unused). I also got a S/PDIF adaptor for an old soundblaster live value card, which feeds the home cinema, and also means I can digitally capture from satellite radio or other sources.
I'm really pleased with it, the real cost to me was less than £250, yet it's very full featured, is pretty quiet, and zero hassle.
good that you're honest enough to admit that you're a fashion victim rather than actually choosing an item for its functionality and quality :-)
However, they really pulled themselves up in the last five years and produced some much better kit. The SunFires are quite solid, the Opteron boxes are really nice.
Shame that Apple didn't at least tie-up with Sun to do OSX on their new Opteron boxes - how hard can it be, they've already ported to Intel/x86?
On the other hand, with both Apple and Sun moving to relatively commodity hardware, are they both acknowledging the failure to manage development of their preferred CPUs, and will they end up being just OS developers?
no, but the drivers are pretty trivial to install
Example: zonealarm controls access to the network based not just on protocol/port but on the application asking for access. This could prevent an unpriv'd user from doing nasty net things. The Windows firewall is comparatively crap.
Example: non-priv'd accounts could be set to not allow software to be installed, or, not allow executables to be set up. unix equivalent would be to disable "chmod" for unauthorized users. However, it's hard to use a windows machine without being "power user" or "admin". In WindowsXPhome there's no intermediate between zero privs and admin, so you're stuck with being admin if you want the machine to be useable. The flood of patches also means people get lazy and don't want a separate admin account into which they login to do updates; windows could make it easy to be low-priv user and run update but require admin password, but it doesn't. Where's the "su" or "sudo" equivalent? How about the equivalent of "xhost"?
So, yes, the problem is people running as admin, but this is usually caused by windows' security model in Xp home, or, crappy software that won't run otherwise. Add to it the weak protection between layers of the application libraries, the gui and the core OS, and you've got very little protection against Bad Things.
as someone else said: yes, the iPod. Also, the Archos boxes are linux based, as are a number of others, so they could use ext2/ext3/jffs etc.
the snag is providing plug-and-play usb mass storage
Simple: don't sell them ready formatted, simply include instructions on how to format the devices!
You should have asked: "what does that mean to companies selling mp3 players with a filesystem?"
The answer is of course either to not supply the device formatted, or not to use Microsoft's fat FS. The latter is probably not trivial for most. Archos, who probably currently use fat for their portable media players, since they use linux as the OS, could switch to ext2; they could then make the device appear as a network disk using samba, and use usbnet (tcp/ip over usb) instead of usb mass storage.
Jokes about hardened criminals stealing viagra aside, if the fake drug is manufactured badly then the dose could be wrong, or the drug contaminated in some way, or worse, not have any active chemical agent in it and lead to the death of the person buying it.
This is also a serious headache for the original drug manufacturer; imagine if vioxx was in fact perfectly safe but it was the knock-offs that had the problems.
my nephew had one for Christmas and the wireless servers weren't amazing - slow and not enough players... I consoled (pun intended, sorry) him that the service was new and likely to be flooded with all the new consoles sold over xmas, and it would probably get better.
mind you, it probably didn't help that we were borrowing bandwidth off a neighbour's open access point (which half the street seems to be abusing from what kismet told me from the client list :-)
[yes, I did contact their ISP to tell them]
you'd have to have reinforced pockets so that if you made any sudden turns, the phone wouldn't rip itself out of your jacket!
disagree about fast lenses/fast shutters. motion blur can make a sports scene more interesting - a totally sharp picture can render it bland. conversely, a shallow depth of field can also be useful.
computer animation people have invested a lot in making realistic movies: without infinite depth of field, with motion blur, with lens flare etc.
the best thing I bought in the last year was a monopod - cheaper than a tripod, and because it's much more portable than a 3pod, I tend to use it far more, and it really helps when recording video (so much so that people comment on it).
finally, in an attempt at humour, people with parkinsons really ought to stick to 35mm film cameras with fast lenses and short shutter speeds!
For movies, SVGA is adequate, but if you really want to be able to access complex data, you'll find 800x600 SVGA display lo-res and just on the limit of useability.
the old glasstrons and eye-treks had even lower res, but again, we designed for movies and not for text.
I think when HUDs and various virtual displays give the same performance as a 12" 1024x768 laptop display at 20" from the eye, then they might catch on. I would certainly be interested in a PDA with a HUD under such circumstances.
you're not a regular, male, slashdot reader then?
If you want a cross-platform GUI library for Python you should consider PyQT which would allow you to run your python gui programs acrosss multiple platforms. QT licensing is not to everyone's taste as it seems to force you to either be totally GPL or buy a full commercial license.
I for one will welcome our new genetic superbaby overlords.. if I don't get to be regenerated, Time-Lord like, and become one myself.
so, as long as we just tattoo a license plate across our children's foreheads and then run along a main road, we'll be able to track them?
sorry, just being facetious!