Agreed. I set up up, customized, and played with FC6 running cygwin on my underpowered XP laptop. Once that was setup, all I had to do was copy it over to my Linux server and turn on/off a couple of services that I needed on my server but not on my laptop. I mean *literally* just copied the root partition. It then ran perfectly with all my user and/etc configurations intact.
When I wanted to set up another machine, I used the same root image and only had to edit a small handfull of files to change the machine name/IP address and to change a couple of passswords.
When I upgrade to another machine, all I will need to do is copy (or even just physically move) my hard-disks.
With Windoze, because of the dang registry, you can't just copy or move disks without corrupting everything. Also, since customization is done through menus and stored in obscure parts of the registry, you can't just copy over and/or edit individual config files. Instead, you need to reinstall each application individually and then individually run the program and customize the options by going through endless menus.
I prefer to save my hydrogen as "hydrogen dioxide".
PROS: 1. Safe (even known to be drinkable when pure) 2. Non-flammable 3. Liquid at room temperature but easy to convert to solid or gas 4. Better than 9% storage efficiency (2/18= ~11%)
Still working on the thermodynamics of reversability... but that should be only a minor barrier given all the above advantages...
BTW, I'm looking for investors to help me commercialize this form of hydrogen storage
You are missing the point. Microsoft PAYS THEM to include MS Office trial-ware and they probably get the watered-down Works for free as part of the bundle.
If they start including free OO, MS will (actually understandably) pay them LESS since FEWER people will either buy now or later upgrade to MS Office.
Right now the combination of Works (if you don't want to pay) plus MSOffice (if you don't mind paying) probably satisfies MOST people and brings Dell MORE profit.
Dell may be a lot of things but they generally are not stupid -- if they thought that the profits they would gain from selling more PCs or increasing long-term customer loyalty with free OO would outweigh the lost revenue from MS (direct + indirect), then they would do it.
Dell already has the advantage in consumer brand recognition and appeal as the "safe choice" -- other companies are more likely to add OO as a way of differentiating themselves and trying to capture a (small) niche that Dell is missing.
Finally, if the masses really wanted OO, then believe me they would be downloading it. Look at how many non-techies learn how to set up bittorent to save a few bucks on a video or cd -- clearly, if they wanted to, they could certainly learn how to click on their browser to download OO to save $200+
I've never understood why more people don't pony up $5-10/year for their own domain name. GoDaddy includes 100 free email forwarding accounts. That way you get to pick your own personal domain name and email address and never have to change it. If you want to switch from hotmail to gmail or to some other ISP just change over the forwarding. If you don't like your domain name provider, then just transfer the domain name to another one.
I guess even this is either too complicated or too much of a hassle for the vast majority of people out there...
It's obvious -- Dell makes more money *selling* MS Office then *giving* away OpenOffice.
Even when the customer doesn't buy MS Office up front, you can be sure that MS pays Dell for every "60-day trial" version which comes installed on most PCs nowadays. Even if MS didn't unfairly retaliate, giving away OO would take away from subscribers buying or upgrading to paid MS Office so Dell would inevitably get less of a commission back from MS.
On the other hand adding a preloaded OO is unlikely to shift share to Dell so not much upside -- particularly, since the relatively small minority of users who consider this as a factor could easily download it themselves.
Plus supporting OO would add support costs.
So, while I would love personally to see more OO, I don't see the business case from Dell's perspective
As I read the story, the only word that kept coming to mind is "LOSERS" -- or as my kids would do put the double-L hand symbol up over their head.
Re:Emacs invented the inferior lisp moniker
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1
I think you are missing the WHOLE POINT about emacs. The reason that I LOVE emacs is that I NEVER need to slow down, take my fingers off the keyboard and fidget with a mouse. Commands are sooooooo much faster.
In fact SSH is one of the best reasons to use emacs. I lose absolutely no speed in my editing and manipulation running emacs over a dsl line to my home server. There is no way I could do anything close to that with a graphical editor.
In fact, my hands and mind are so "at one" with the emacs commands that I often find myself trying to type C-a, C-e, C-v, C-s, C-r etc. in other programs until I remember that I am using some eye-candy nice but inefficient WYSWIG interface that requires me to constantly take my fingers off the keyboard to find and move the mouse. In fact, for me the best non-Emacs apps are the ones like Mozilla that at least have some subset of the emacs bindings.
Interestingly, back in the day, I once wrote macros and changed the key bindings in M$ Word to mimic emacs (including C-a, C-e, C-v, Esp-v, C-s, C-r, C-k, C-w, etc). For the first time, I felt really productive in Word. I ended up stopping only because I often had to use other peoples' machines and I found it even worse to be back on a regular version of Word without all the emacs shortcuts.
Finally, while the learning curve is steep, you only have to learn it once. I first started using emacs back in June 2004, before the first public release. I got really good at it during my phd and the joke was that instead of working on writing our theses, we were spending all our time writing functions in elisp that ultimately would result in the one uber-functioncalled "make-thesis".
In my current career which is purely business, I still use emacs for mail (vm), news (gnus) and any complex editing/sorting/file manipulation that I can't do in more traditional business apps like Word or Excel. You would be surprised at the time I have saved by using emacs hacks to sort or find/change/replace things that I could never do in Word/Excel. While I don't use elisp as much and probably have forgotten some of the fancier bindings, I still use the core and I know that the rest is only a C-h (info) or C-hb (key bindings) away. And every once in a while, when I need a new feature in vm or some way of automating a boring task, I still can hack up a simple elisp function in a short time... Try that with Outlook/Word/Excel etc!
I think you are the one doing the misunderstanding (and hence if I were to follow you ad-hominem tact, that would make you illiterate:)
The original point of this thread was that some people object to United States Citizens defining themselves Americans since by their (IMHO wrong) reasoning every resident of North & South America is an American.
No one ever said that people can't call themselves whatever they want -- you can call yourself a Martian if you want:) The only point is that when talking about citizenship or national origin, the term American (when used without other modifiers or without other obvious context) uniquely refers to citizens of America. Just like the term Indian when used without other modifiers and within the context of the Indian subcontinent (and when not referring to American Indians:) refers to citizens of the country of India, not to citizens of Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Again, for those who are having trouble following the thread, people can call themselves whatever they want. My only point is that American is the unique and proper term reserved for citizens of the United States of America.
So are you saying that just because some academics call North and South America a supercontinent called "America", that the people of the not insignificant country called the "United States of AMERICA" are not allowed to call their nationality Americans?
Are Indians allowed to call themselves Indians even though Pakistanis and Bangladeshis also live on the Indian subcontinent? (which by the way is more commonly used terminology than the term America for a supposed supercontinent)
Perhaps we should call them "Republicans" since their country is officially the "Republic of India"?
I think that your distinction between South African and southern African is at best specious. By your reasoning, a person from southeast Asia would be called a "southeastern Asian" rather than a "Southeast Asian".
Moreover, if you are quibbling with South African vs. southern African then surely you recognize the difference between North America, Central America, and South America which are the name of continents/sub-continents and the name America which refers uniquely to the United States of America.
If you want to refer generically to the two new world continents, then they are properly called "The Americas" (plural) referring to the combination of North and South America. Then in line with your pedantic difference between South African and southern American, a person who is generically from the New World would perhaps be called an Americasan.
Of course, a person from Latin America is properly a Latin American just as a person from North America is a North American.
The proper name of my country is the United States of American and its citizens are Americans. This is no different from the people of the Federal Republic of Germany being called Germans not Federalans, not Republicans, and not FRans.
No other country has America as the keyword in its name so no other country citizens are properly called Americans.
If you don't like it, then tough -- we don't tell you what to call the citizens of your stinky country and we don't expect you to dictate what we call ourselves.
All of this smacks of just more jeolousy over the political, intellectual, military, and economic power of the US relative to the rest of the world's has-beens and wannabees...
Yes and by that logic we shouldn't call people from the country of South Africa, "South Africans" because clearly people in other countries in the lower half of Africa may be confused/offended since they too are from South (as opposed to) North Africa.
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the historical connection between Siebel and Oracle.
The epynomous Tom Siebel headed up sales at Oracle from 1984 to 1990 until he clashed with Ellison over the wisdom of starting a SFA (sales force automation) product line.
Tom Siebel was known to be a hard-charging sales person, just like his former mentor Larry Ellison.
So the fact that both Oracle and Siebel became winning companies more for their aggressive sales and marketing than for their technology is perhaps not a coincidence.
All we really have now is a reunion of two technology-sales leaders after a 15 year separation.
Well, in this way, perhaps IBM is guilty of dumping. They use their profits from their "protected" commercial software businesses to finance the development of "free" software.
In fact, while I am a 100% supporter of open software, I do believe that big companies like IBM are not supporting Linux out of the goodness of their heart.
In part, they support Linux because it drives the sale of their own hardware and software. But at least as strong a motivation is to undercut the business model of their arch-competitors, like Microsoft.
In that sense, it can be argued that IBM's support of OSS is quite analogous to dumping. They are encouraging the propagation of an artificially lower priced (i.e. free) product to hurt the sales of their direct competitors. IBM is obviously pricing its product below the cost of development (though they may or may not make it back in service fees).
I think it would be a lot harder if not impossible to argue that private individuals or not-for-profits such as universities are guilty of anything here.
That being said, it still seems like the lawsuit will be laughed out of court...
Interesting that my house (and surrounding neighborhood) is *significantly* lower resolution than the Pentagon.
What is the conspiracy theory behind that! hmmm
This might be positive for techie groups where some people prize a certain measure of exlcusivity that keeps the level of discussion up and the newbies out.
However, some of my favorite groups now are non-technical advice groups such as alt.home.repair which relies on a large number of experts in home repair. These people are by their nature more likely to be aol people than techno geeks. Since the usefullness of the group depends to a large extent on the number of experienced home repair people reading the group, the loss of AOL will decrease the richness of answers.
We need to remember that Usenet serves as a base of answers to more than just lite techie questions. In fact, if anything Usenet is less important for me for tech answers since there are many other places to get the info, such as listservs. But for things like home repair or other hobbies, there are not as many other discussion forum options or listservs.
I have long had the same problem intermittently with Mozilla 1.7 (and other versions) under XP.
It amazes me that a website known for its pro OpenSource/anti-M$ bias and specifically for its pro-Mozilla/anti-IE opinions( all of which are IMHO *good* things) screws up on rendering its home page under Mozilla or Firefox.
Why does a techie site like Slashdot fail where even the most lame commercial or private website has no such problems? Seems pretty pathetic to me.
Thanks though for the Ctl+/Ctl- hack -- works fine for me and is definitely better than my previous approach to continually reload the page.
BTW, does this hack also work when things are so f'd up that only the menu frames are rendered without any of the article texts?
Everyone who has ever worked in tech support knows that all businesses lose millions of dollars a second every time anything related to their Internet service goes down.
Millions of dollars a second??? A bit of an exxageration... Actually losses are always less than the hype since you need to think about losses in net contribution dollars (not gross revenues) and also consider only true lost (vs. deferred sales).
Outages both planned and unplanned are an unfortunate fact of life. One tries to minimize them when at all possible but the losses are typically manageable and are for better or worse part of the cost of doing business on the Internet.
I think you are the "boneheaded" one here:)
The parent poster said nothing about heterogeneity within a single business. Rather, I think he was referring to the overall benefits of having multiple OS's out there in the broader world so that no single vulnerability would bring down too large a share of the world's systems. This is not security by obscurity; rather, it is security by redundancy (here at the OS design level) which is a well-established principle of security.
At the same time there are certainly cases where the benefits of security and reduncancy would outweigh the costs and complexity of heterogeneity -- the cost of "business interruption" often outweighs the cost of redundancy. Taking your thinking to its logical conclusion, no business would ever have a redundant data center, no house would have double locks on the doors, no person would ever waste time thinking of contingencies or backup plans, etc. Obviously, the right answer involves weighing the costs, benefits, and risks of investing in hardware/software redundancy and diversity.
Evolutionary diversity is a good thing in the natural world and is also a good think in the computer systems world. Without evolutionary diversity, one (biological) virus could wipe out an entire species. In fact, the original space shuttle had two completely different computer hardware systems with separately written computer code to ensure against a single hardware problem or software bug from taking down the shuttle.
The fact that Windoze is a closed system and that Micro$oft as a publicly-traded company is driven primarily by profits only aggravates the situation. The (near) monopoly position of Micro$oft further reduces the overall incentive to innovate and improve security/reliability. Borrowing from another biological principal, "survival of the fittest" doesn't exert much evolutionary pressure if there are no competitors and no threats to survival!
While this protects against current search engine caches, it does nothing to protect against historical snapshorts or intenet archives, such as the Wayback machine http://www.archive.org/
> 1) The ability to highlight the area of a graph > and paste it into a spreadsheet and having it > show up as real data, not graphics.
BFD! That is a trivial coding problem. This sounds like just another semi-pretty OLAP program. In fact, I have seen many, many infinitely more sophisticated graphical data mining tools that actually try to pull out the complex correlations in one or more dimensions rather than just colorizing some otherwise standard graphs.
Yes, I looked at their examples -- not much more than some simple charts -- could easily be included in the next version of Excel without making a dent in the already bloated size of the program.
That being said, for large companies, even a small increase in usability and insight can be worth paying $1000 for a couple of seats. Maybe also for some large research labs. But we are talking at most several thousand customers buying a handful of licenses yielding one time revenues (plus maybe some upgrades) of a couple of million dollars. A far, far cry from Googles ubiquity.
The only thing that they and Google founders have in common is that they got their PhD's at Stamford (along with thousands of others each year)
How the heck did a lame-ass article like this ever make it to the/. homepage? This is nothing more than an undisguised press-release for a ho-hum startup company!
Not sure what you are referring to as "simply not true". But if you are referring to using OO as a disaster recovery tool for M$ Word then you are incorrect.
At work one evening after hours, one of the corporate lawyers came to me frantic saying that he was unable to open the contract that he had been working on for days (and of course he had no recent backups:). The document was in the most recent version of Word.
I simply just asked him to email me the doc, ssh'd into my home Linux machine, opened it *without* difficulty in OO, resaved it in M$ Word format, and mailed it back.
To this day, he still thanks me and thinks of me as some kind of saviour/miracle worker.
SCO has a market cap of $61.8M and cash on hand of $61.35M which means that investors are valuing the business itself (software plus the shakedown racket) at only about $500K.
In reality, they may have spent a bit more cash since last 10Q report, but still the point is that the company is given little value beyond its cash holdings.
The great news is that they are burning cash pretty fast so that at the current pace they will be bankrupt in a couple of years without any other residual value:)
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I set up up, customized, and played with FC6 running cygwin on my underpowered XP laptop. /etc configurations intact.
Once that was setup, all I had to do was copy it over to my Linux server and turn on/off a couple of services that I needed on my server but not on my laptop. I mean *literally* just copied the root partition.
It then ran perfectly with all my user and
When I wanted to set up another machine, I used the same root image and only had to edit a small handfull of files to change the machine name/IP address and to change a couple of passswords.
When I upgrade to another machine, all I will need to do is copy (or even just physically move) my hard-disks.
With Windoze, because of the dang registry, you can't just copy or move disks without corrupting everything. Also, since customization is done through menus and stored in obscure parts of the registry, you can't just copy over and/or edit individual config files. Instead, you need to reinstall each application individually and then individually run the program and customize the options by going through endless menus.
I prefer to save my hydrogen as "hydrogen dioxide".
PROS:
1. Safe (even known to be drinkable when pure)
2. Non-flammable
3. Liquid at room temperature but easy to convert to solid or gas
4. Better than 9% storage efficiency (2/18= ~11%)
Still working on the thermodynamics of reversability... but that should be only a minor barrier given all the above advantages...
BTW, I'm looking for investors to help me commercialize this form of hydrogen storage
You are missing the point. Microsoft PAYS THEM to include MS Office trial-ware and they probably get the watered-down Works for free as part of the bundle.
If they start including free OO, MS will (actually understandably) pay them LESS since FEWER people will either buy now or later upgrade to MS Office.
Right now the combination of Works (if you don't want to pay) plus MSOffice (if you don't mind paying) probably satisfies MOST people and brings Dell MORE profit.
Dell may be a lot of things but they generally are not stupid -- if they thought that the profits they would gain from selling more PCs or increasing long-term customer loyalty with free OO would outweigh the lost revenue from MS (direct + indirect), then they would do it.
Dell already has the advantage in consumer brand recognition and appeal as the "safe choice" -- other companies are more likely to add OO as a way of differentiating themselves and trying to capture a (small) niche that Dell is missing.
Finally, if the masses really wanted OO, then believe me they would be downloading it. Look at how many non-techies learn how to set up bittorent to save a few bucks on a video or cd -- clearly, if they wanted to, they could certainly learn how to click on their browser to download OO to save $200+
I've never understood why more people don't pony up $5-10/year for their own domain name. GoDaddy includes 100 free email forwarding accounts. That way you get to pick your own personal domain name and email address and never have to change it. If you want to switch from hotmail to gmail or to some other ISP just change over the forwarding. If you don't like your domain name provider, then just transfer the domain name to another one.
I guess even this is either too complicated or too much of a hassle for the vast majority of people out there...
It's obvious -- Dell makes more money *selling* MS Office then *giving* away OpenOffice.
Even when the customer doesn't buy MS Office up front, you can be sure that MS pays Dell for every "60-day trial" version which comes installed on most PCs nowadays. Even if MS didn't unfairly retaliate, giving away OO would take away from subscribers buying or upgrading to paid MS Office so Dell would inevitably get less of a commission back from MS.
On the other hand adding a preloaded OO is unlikely to shift share to Dell so not much upside -- particularly, since the relatively small minority of users who consider this as a factor could easily download it themselves.
Plus supporting OO would add support costs.
So, while I would love personally to see more OO, I don't see the business case from Dell's perspective
LMAO - that was my first thought too when I read the name of the Nobel prize winner...
As I read the story, the only word that kept coming to mind is "LOSERS" -- or as my kids would do put the double-L hand symbol up over their head.
I think you are missing the WHOLE POINT about emacs. The reason that I LOVE emacs is that I NEVER need to slow down, take my fingers off the keyboard and fidget with a mouse. Commands are sooooooo much faster.
In fact SSH is one of the best reasons to use emacs. I lose absolutely no speed in my editing and manipulation running emacs over a dsl line to my home server. There is no way I could do anything close to that with a graphical editor.
In fact, my hands and mind are so "at one" with the emacs commands that I often find myself trying to type C-a, C-e, C-v, C-s, C-r etc. in other programs until I remember that I am using some eye-candy nice but inefficient WYSWIG interface that requires me to constantly take my fingers off the keyboard to find and move the mouse. In fact, for me the best non-Emacs apps are the ones like Mozilla that at least have some subset of the emacs bindings.
Interestingly, back in the day, I once wrote macros and changed the key bindings in M$ Word to mimic emacs (including C-a, C-e, C-v, Esp-v, C-s, C-r, C-k, C-w, etc). For the first time, I felt really productive in Word. I ended up stopping only because I often had to use other peoples' machines and I found it even worse to be back on a regular version of Word without all the emacs shortcuts.
Finally, while the learning curve is steep, you only have to learn it once. I first started using emacs back in June 2004, before the first public release. I got really good at it during my phd and the joke was that instead of working on writing our theses, we were spending all our time writing functions in elisp that ultimately would result in the one uber-functioncalled "make-thesis".
In my current career which is purely business, I still use emacs for mail (vm), news (gnus) and any complex editing/sorting/file manipulation that I can't do in more traditional business apps like Word or Excel. You would be surprised at the time I have saved by using emacs hacks to sort or find/change/replace things that I could never do in Word/Excel. While I don't use elisp as much and probably have forgotten some of the fancier bindings, I still use the core and I know that the rest is only a C-h (info) or C-hb (key bindings) away. And every once in a while, when I need a new feature in vm or some way of automating a boring task, I still can hack up a simple elisp function in a short time... Try that with Outlook/Word/Excel etc!
I agree that a lot of Mexicans want to be called American -- that is why they (illegally) swim across our borders every day :)
I think you are the one doing the misunderstanding (and hence if I were to follow you ad-hominem tact, that would make you illiterate :)
:) The only point is that when talking about citizenship or national origin, the term American (when used without other modifiers or without other obvious context) uniquely refers to citizens of America. Just like the term Indian when used without other modifiers and within the context of the Indian subcontinent (and when not referring to American Indians :) refers to citizens of the country of India, not to citizens of Pakistan or Bangladesh.
The original point of this thread was that some people object to United States Citizens defining themselves Americans since by their (IMHO wrong) reasoning every resident of North & South America is an American.
No one ever said that people can't call themselves whatever they want -- you can call yourself a Martian if you want
Again, for those who are having trouble following the thread, people can call themselves whatever they want. My only point is that American is the unique and proper term reserved for citizens of the United States of America.
So are you saying that just because some academics call North and South America a supercontinent called "America", that the people of the not insignificant country called the "United States of AMERICA" are not allowed to call their nationality Americans?
Are Indians allowed to call themselves Indians even though Pakistanis and Bangladeshis also live on the Indian subcontinent? (which by the way is more commonly used terminology than the term America for a supposed supercontinent)
Perhaps we should call them "Republicans" since their country is officially the "Republic of India"?
I think that your distinction between South African and southern African is at best specious. By your reasoning, a person from southeast Asia would be called a "southeastern Asian" rather than a "Southeast Asian".
Moreover, if you are quibbling with South African vs. southern African then surely you recognize the difference between North America, Central America, and South America which are the name of continents/sub-continents and the name America which refers uniquely to the United States of America.
If you want to refer generically to the two new world continents, then they are properly called "The Americas" (plural) referring to the combination of North and South America. Then in line with your pedantic difference between South African and southern American, a person who is generically from the New World would perhaps be called an Americasan.
Of course, a person from Latin America is properly a Latin American just as a person from North America is a North American.
The proper name of my country is the United States of American and its citizens are Americans. This is no different from the people of the Federal Republic of Germany being called Germans not Federalans, not Republicans, and not FRans.
No other country has America as the keyword in its name so no other country citizens are properly called Americans.
If you don't like it, then tough -- we don't tell you what to call the citizens of your stinky country and we don't expect you to dictate what we call ourselves.
All of this smacks of just more jeolousy over the political, intellectual, military, and economic power of the US relative to the rest of the world's has-beens and wannabees...
Yes and by that logic we shouldn't call people from the country of South Africa, "South Africans" because clearly people in other countries in the lower half of Africa may be confused/offended since they too are from South (as opposed to) North Africa.
Canadians are North Americans, not Americans.
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the historical connection between Siebel and Oracle.
The epynomous Tom Siebel headed up sales at Oracle from 1984 to 1990 until he clashed with Ellison over the wisdom of starting a SFA (sales force automation) product line.
Tom Siebel was known to be a hard-charging sales person, just like his former mentor Larry Ellison.
So the fact that both Oracle and Siebel became winning companies more for their aggressive sales and marketing than for their technology is perhaps not a coincidence.
All we really have now is a reunion of two technology-sales leaders after a 15 year separation.
Well, in this way, perhaps IBM is guilty of dumping. They use their profits from their "protected" commercial software businesses to finance the development of "free" software.
In fact, while I am a 100% supporter of open software, I do believe that big companies like IBM are not supporting Linux out of the goodness of their heart.
In part, they support Linux because it drives the sale of their own hardware and software. But at least as strong a motivation is to undercut the business model of their arch-competitors, like Microsoft.
In that sense, it can be argued that IBM's support of OSS is quite analogous to dumping. They are encouraging the propagation of an artificially lower priced (i.e. free) product to hurt the sales of their direct competitors. IBM is obviously pricing its product below the cost of development (though they may or may not make it back in service fees).
I think it would be a lot harder if not impossible to argue that private individuals or not-for-profits such as universities are guilty of anything here.
That being said, it still seems like the lawsuit will be laughed out of court...
Interesting that my house (and surrounding neighborhood) is *significantly* lower resolution than the Pentagon. What is the conspiracy theory behind that! hmmm
This might be positive for techie groups where some people prize a certain measure of exlcusivity that keeps the level of discussion up and the newbies out. However, some of my favorite groups now are non-technical advice groups such as alt.home.repair which relies on a large number of experts in home repair. These people are by their nature more likely to be aol people than techno geeks. Since the usefullness of the group depends to a large extent on the number of experienced home repair people reading the group, the loss of AOL will decrease the richness of answers. We need to remember that Usenet serves as a base of answers to more than just lite techie questions. In fact, if anything Usenet is less important for me for tech answers since there are many other places to get the info, such as listservs. But for things like home repair or other hobbies, there are not as many other discussion forum options or listservs.
I have long had the same problem intermittently with Mozilla 1.7 (and other versions) under XP.
It amazes me that a website known for its pro OpenSource/anti-M$ bias and specifically for its pro-Mozilla/anti-IE opinions( all of which are IMHO *good* things) screws up on rendering its home page under Mozilla or Firefox.
Why does a techie site like Slashdot fail where even the most lame commercial or private website has no such problems? Seems pretty pathetic to me.
Thanks though for the Ctl+/Ctl- hack -- works fine for me and is definitely better than my previous approach to continually reload the page.
BTW, does this hack also work when things are so f'd up that only the menu frames are rendered without any of the article texts?
Everyone who has ever worked in tech support knows that all businesses lose millions of dollars a second every time anything related to their Internet service goes down. Millions of dollars a second??? A bit of an exxageration... Actually losses are always less than the hype since you need to think about losses in net contribution dollars (not gross revenues) and also consider only true lost (vs. deferred sales). Outages both planned and unplanned are an unfortunate fact of life. One tries to minimize them when at all possible but the losses are typically manageable and are for better or worse part of the cost of doing business on the Internet.
I think you are the "boneheaded" one here :)
The parent poster said nothing about heterogeneity within a single business. Rather, I think he was referring to the overall benefits of having multiple OS's out there in the broader world so that no single vulnerability would bring down too large a share of the world's systems. This is not security by obscurity; rather, it is security by redundancy (here at the OS design level) which is a well-established principle of security.
At the same time there are certainly cases where the benefits of security and reduncancy would outweigh the costs and complexity of heterogeneity -- the cost of "business interruption" often outweighs the cost of redundancy. Taking your thinking to its logical conclusion, no business would ever have a redundant data center, no house would have double locks on the doors, no person would ever waste time thinking of contingencies or backup plans, etc. Obviously, the right answer involves weighing the costs, benefits, and risks of investing in hardware/software redundancy and diversity.
Evolutionary diversity is a good thing in the natural world and is also a good think in the computer systems world. Without evolutionary diversity, one (biological) virus could wipe out an entire species. In fact, the original space shuttle had two completely different computer hardware systems with separately written computer code to ensure against a single hardware problem or software bug from taking down the shuttle.
The fact that Windoze is a closed system and that Micro$oft as a publicly-traded company is driven primarily by profits only aggravates the situation. The (near) monopoly position of Micro$oft further reduces the overall incentive to innovate and improve security/reliability. Borrowing from another biological principal, "survival of the fittest" doesn't exert much evolutionary pressure if there are no competitors and no threats to survival!
While this protects against current search engine caches, it does nothing to protect against historical snapshorts or intenet archives, such as the Wayback machine http://www.archive.org/
> 1) The ability to highlight the area of a graph
/. homepage? This is nothing more than an undisguised press-release for a ho-hum startup company!
> and paste it into a spreadsheet and having it
> show up as real data, not graphics.
BFD! That is a trivial coding problem. This sounds like just another semi-pretty OLAP program. In fact, I have seen many, many infinitely more sophisticated graphical data mining tools that actually try to pull out the complex correlations in one or more dimensions rather than just colorizing some otherwise standard graphs.
Yes, I looked at their examples -- not much more than some simple charts -- could easily be included in the next version of Excel without making a dent in the already bloated size of the program.
That being said, for large companies, even a small increase in usability and insight can be worth paying $1000 for a couple of seats. Maybe also for some large research labs. But we are talking at most several thousand customers buying a handful of licenses yielding one time revenues (plus maybe some upgrades) of a couple of million dollars. A far, far cry from Googles ubiquity.
The only thing that they and Google founders have in common is that they got their PhD's at Stamford (along with thousands of others each year)
How the heck did a lame-ass article like this ever make it to the
Not sure what you are referring to as "simply not true". But if you are referring to using OO as a disaster recovery tool for M$ Word then you are incorrect.
:). The document was in the most recent version of Word.
At work one evening after hours, one of the corporate lawyers came to me frantic saying that he was unable to open the contract that he had been working on for days (and of course he had no recent backups
I simply just asked him to email me the doc, ssh'd into my home Linux machine, opened it *without* difficulty in OO, resaved it in M$ Word format, and mailed it back.
To this day, he still thanks me and thinks of me as some kind of saviour/miracle worker.
SCO has a market cap of $61.8M and cash on hand of $61.35M which means that investors are valuing the business itself (software plus the shakedown racket) at only about $500K. In reality, they may have spent a bit more cash since last 10Q report, but still the point is that the company is given little value beyond its cash holdings. The great news is that they are burning cash pretty fast so that at the current pace they will be bankrupt in a couple of years without any other residual value :)
Not true. Hotsynch requires admin rights or the workaround described above...