Your math assumes that by commuting, they spend absolutely no money on room and board.
I suppose a few of the students will be living with their parents, but they'll still have to pay for gas and vehicle maintenance.
For the rest of them, have you thought that maybe $5000-$1000(laptop) is *less* than what they'd pay if they're commuting? $4000 is a pretty good deal (to a lot of people) for room, board, not having to pay nearly as much for gas, and negligible vehicle maintenance costs.
Lindows' success is the result of it's CEO's address large book really a bad for Linux because it's just an attempt to provide a *very badly designed* system that looks as closely as possible to Windows.
Just to be sure that people don't think the above post is a troll, I'd like to say that this is my observation as well. Having talked to Michael (Lindows' CEO), I know that the only thing he brings to the Linux desktop is a large rolodex, and a used-car-salesman attitude.
I also spoke to Cliff Beshers, their technical lead, and I was even less impressed. At least Michael knows what he brings to the party - we may not thing it's the right thing, but at least it's honest about it - but Cliff shouldn't have the word "technical" in his title anywhere.
This guy's posts are always angry. I think he needs to chill out a little bit. Geez.
I'm flattered you track my posts;)
That being said, they aren't all angry. But yeah, the majority of them are. *shrug* - why would I bother posting if I didn't care about something? If I'm not angry, and I care about something, all I'd be doing by posting is cheerleading. And I've never been a cheerleader;)
Seriously, he is resigning because he thinks others aren't putting enough time in. One could assume that he was most likely putting a good amount of time in. Now he is resigning, accomplishling what? Even less time being put in.
I understand what he is trying to do, but maybe its not the best of going about it, good luck to him though.
I wouldn't immediately label this as a troll, to be honest - at least, the question deserves to be asked;)
There are some internal problems with SPI (touched upon in the article), and if you really care about something, and try to make it better, there comes a point when you're just too frustrated and have to say, "well, this is it. I've done everything and anything I can - it's not getting any better. Let's see if, maybe, I can accomplish something on the way out..."
(Now, if you are however suggesting that regardless of any personal hardships, he should do what we tell him, damnit, then yeah, I'd say you were a troll.:)
I mean, the VP resigns because he feels the other high ranking officials aren't "dedicated" enough? In whose opinion? And why not appoint other functionaries to do the jobs that need doing?
No, resignations like this (especially the sort where you have "either they all resign or I do...") are almost always personally motivated out of a feeling to "show someone" how much in the wrong they are.
And it almost never helps. This is a lose-lose situation. Imagine if the rest of the board had resigned... credibility would fly out the window.
Like I said, it is always saddening when a good organization has problems because of people not getting along. While I don't know a lot about SPI, it seems they do, uhm open source stuff (:P their website is kinda hard to understand in that it is very very generalized. Slashdot could have the same mission statement as them and not change significantly).
I'm one of the head honchos of one of the projects that are under SPI's umbrella, and I think I speak for all of them when I say:
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
How dare you personally attack Martin? He is one of the most dedicated people I know - not only to SPI, but also to Debian. And those are just the projects I'm part of, the ones where I acutally know what the hell I'm talking about. (Hint.)
SPI board meetings are a joke. They're poorly attended, and they... well, I won't go any further than that.
It really makes me sad that Martin's leaving (or trying to), but if he manages to accomplish some change on the way out (and I fully believe this is what he's trying to do - there are times when you've done absolutely everything you could do, and it's just time to say "okay, I've done my best, and it just isn't happening... but let's see if I can finally accomplish something on my way out"), then DAMNED FUCKING RIGHT.
I read "The Register" like I read "The Weekly World News." It's a tabloid in every sense.
See, that's the problem.
In almost every instance, The Register has been right. Yeah, it may still be irresponsible journalism - but as individuals, and as a company, these guys know what the hell they're doing. They check their stuff, even if it won't hold up to normal journalistic integrity checks.
It's kind of like the difference between talking to a judge and talking to a jury. When you're talking to a jury, you can still be telling the truth, but you don't need to present *nearly* so much hard evidence as you need were you trying to convince a judge.
Not that you couldn't present evidence everybody on the planet considers "hard", but courtrooms have their own standards (think about all the cases that were overturned because some extremely incriminating piece of evidence was thrown out of court on some technicality).
They did. The reason why they refuse to revoke this control is that many sites hard-code the object ID, thus they would stop working.
While I commend them for suggesting a fairly complete solution (including not trusting Microsoft-signed controls any more), I piss on them for not being willing to revoke the old control simply because some sites would not work.
Were they to do this, there's no doubt that administrators and programmers everywhere would TRULY understand the issue, and fix their code to not use the hardcoded value. Instead, Microsoft is coddling them, and now we have another hundred thousand zombied machines in DDoS attack-networks.
You just have to love this article. Describes a somewhat-interesting new tech (I'm actually interested in it primarily because of the price - I don't give two shits about "Tablet PC" gimmicks, but having a wireless web browser in this form is a great idea), but THEY DON'T GIVE A BLOODY URL.
The company is actually taking orders - you would guess they just _might_ have a web site, given who they're targetting this at. If they do, then these article writers should be SHOT for not including the URL. God damnit.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I *have* spent many hours studying CANDU nuclear reactors.
So, the answer to the question in the post? Yes, I would(!!) feel comfortable walking around with what these guys are talking about in my pocket.
The fact is, you get more radiation from a digital watch than you do living as near a CANDU reactor as you're allowed to live (about a kilometer). These people don't screw around. In the current global climate of anti-nuclear-anything, they'd be idiots to even contemplate cutting a corner. And, hell, most of these people are good people - the sorrow they'd feel at anybody having died because of their designs would be real, and it would be deep. As far as the companies are concerned, you can't have a plant meltdown and then just rebuild it. Chances are, you have to build an entirely new facility somewhere else, since the original area is waaay too contaminated.
I fully expect that the people working on these batteries have the same mind set - they just don't dick around. (And from the papers I've read, that does seem to be the case.)
Re:Not just better playback
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 2
This is a fork. Duh:)
It's not like the GIMP is extremely well-suited to video editing. However, large parts of the code _were_ suitable for processing frames of video.
This is the ENTIRE point of Open Source/Free Software - the ability to take something and make it work for *you*.
If the vast majority of the changes between GIMP 1.2.x and GIMP 2.x are unsuitable for this FilmGIMP, I pray that they don't try to integrate them just for the sake of integration (as your comment seems to suggest).
It's not a downside that it's based on an older code base. It's not an upside either. It's a non-point, it shouldn't even be mentioned.
People using source for security who are in category 1 or 2 are just fooling themselves.
You know that. I know that. Try telling THEM:) (Where "THEM" includes my boss, who makes me compile everything from source [and for Christ's sake, I maintain packages in the Debian archive!], but won't pay me or anybody else to actually *audit* the source, god-damnit.)
Speaking of, does this not seem to you like the chicken and the egg: Expensive per kilobyte/megabyte rates for 3G phone data downloads won't change until more people sign up... but more people won't sign up until the service gets cheaper! Grrrr.
You seem to misunderstand. There's not some "magic" number that they need. What they do is saturate that price point. Right now they're charging lots, and obviously few people will sign up. But most of those people will sign up for 4+ year contracts.
Once they've gotten as many people for that price as they're going to get, they'll take the price down a notch. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There's a difference between common sense OS security (closing unneeded ports, cutting down buffer overflows, doing intelligent rights/process management) and doing "extra" security that *should* be more $$$ like virus scanners or personal firewall software; things that shouldn't be totally integrated into the installed OS to begin with.
That's so wrong-headed it's not funny. I'll go through it as best I can, but let's start with the basic premise that including a lot on the CD you get is a bad thing:
Why, exactly, is this bad? Because Microsoft wants to do this? That's why they were convicted of being an illegal monopoly, right? WRONG. They were convicted for unfair business practices. They included IE in Windows installations, and IE sucked. Vendors wanted to offer Netscape as well as or instead of IE, and Microsoft clamped down on them and said "do it and die". This is what they did wrong - not for trying to offer their customers more bang for the buck, but for disallowing their customers CHOICE.
People want things to be included. Look at any Linux vendor - everything is available and packaged. Debian is a great example - there's very little software that isn't available as part of Debian.
Okay, next let's move on to the other part of your statement; that is, specifically that it should be allright to charge for virus scanners and personal firewall stuff.
What more do I have to say, you ask? Haven't I already covered this? Well, yes, actually, I have:) But that you specifically mention these things, as if it's what MS wanted to charge more for, is telling in and of itself. The article NEVER mentions virus scanners or personal firewalls. Did you read it?
Read the article. SMT sounds nicer, but "hyperthreading" is actually an improvement on something that's existed for ages in some traditional Unix environments: "superthreading". What should they have called it? "Superduperthreading"?
In the historical context, the name is perfectly fitting.
I'm not saying they should be an "open source news site". That'd be silly.
No, I'm saying they're doing reviews while completely ignoring a HUGE part of the market they're doing these reviews for.
Tell me, when you want an office suite, and you're looking for reviews, won't it seem a _tad_ odd when the only ones you can find reviews for are ones that charge money?
Perhaps a better example would be, what the heck, Unix-based desktops. How would _you_ feel about a site that reviewed software from a little-known newcomer while completely ignoring software from vendors that has been proven and established?
Seriously. I've been seeing this more and more. NewsForge and linux.com, in particular, are pretty bad for this.
You see a review, and it says something like: "the big players in the Linux "purely-desktop market" are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX and the much awaited Xandros".
Good god! Mandrake, anybody? What they really mean is "the big players who may actually give us money to review their products are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX, and Xandros".
Absolutely pitiful. I see gobs and gobs of sites reviewing commerical *nix software these days, COMPLETELY IGNORING the more stable, mature, full-featured, robust, and easier-to-use open source/free software alternatives.
OSNews hasn't been as bad for this, in my experience, but I'm going to be watching very closely from now on.
You already have fraud insurance. As has been pointed out at least two dozen times, it's require by law in almost every country.
The rest of it is pretty silly. Credit cards are useful because you can use them lots of places. Banks simply can _not_ audit everybody's software. That's impossible. If they tried it, you'd pay way much higher interest than you do already on your credit card - as if it wasn't bad enough.
It works fine as it stands. Somebody steals your credit card number, you don't pay a dime, the credit card company nails the company that was the root of the problem (the one with the security hole), and that's the end of it.
So it represents no one company, and when it does something it will do it with industry backing.
Erm. Hit the nail on the head:) It represents companies and industries. Not typically not-for-profit organisations (hence....org:).
There can and will be not-for-profit organisations which will threaten income models. If you don't think they'll bail each other out... Well, pfft. Go out in the real world for a wee little while.
I've long wanted Debian to run its own IRC servers, for instance. I really think it's smart:)
On OFTC we've talked about what we'll do when we have too many IRC users to manage effectively (given the flat namespace and all)... I suggested, "split":) As in seperate into two networks, managed seperately (but still abiding by rules and the constitution).
Despite OFTC being very IRC-centric right now, we do want to offer SourceForge-like services. It's in our.plan, so to speak.
That's where I see many projects using our IRC services; projects that don't yet run ther own FTP/HTTP/SMTP/DNS/etc servers... if we're going to offer all that, they may as well use IRC too, if they want. *shrug*:)
Just my two cents.
(Disclaimer: my statements are my own, though I am part of OFTC staff.)
Slashdot Mirror
Your math assumes that by commuting, they spend absolutely no money on room and board.
I suppose a few of the students will be living with their parents, but they'll still have to pay for gas and vehicle maintenance.
For the rest of them, have you thought that maybe $5000-$1000(laptop) is *less* than what they'd pay if they're commuting? $4000 is a pretty good deal (to a lot of people) for room, board, not having to pay nearly as much for gas, and negligible vehicle maintenance costs.
Just to be sure that people don't think the above post is a troll, I'd like to say that this is my observation as well. Having talked to Michael (Lindows' CEO), I know that the only thing he brings to the Linux desktop is a large rolodex, and a used-car-salesman attitude.
I also spoke to Cliff Beshers, their technical lead, and I was even less impressed. At least Michael knows what he brings to the party - we may not thing it's the right thing, but at least it's honest about it - but Cliff shouldn't have the word "technical" in his title anywhere.
I disagree. :)
I'm flattered you track my posts ;)
That being said, they aren't all angry. But yeah, the majority of them are. *shrug* - why would I bother posting if I didn't care about something? If I'm not angry, and I care about something, all I'd be doing by posting is cheerleading. And I've never been a cheerleader ;)
I wouldn't immediately label this as a troll, to be honest - at least, the question deserves to be asked ;)
There are some internal problems with SPI (touched upon in the article), and if you really care about something, and try to make it better, there comes a point when you're just too frustrated and have to say, "well, this is it. I've done everything and anything I can - it's not getting any better. Let's see if, maybe, I can accomplish something on the way out..."
(Now, if you are however suggesting that regardless of any personal hardships, he should do what we tell him, damnit, then yeah, I'd say you were a troll. :)
SHUT THE FUCK UP.
How dare you personally attack Martin? He is one of the most dedicated people I know - not only to SPI, but also to Debian. And those are just the projects I'm part of, the ones where I acutally know what the hell I'm talking about. (Hint.)SPI board meetings are a joke. They're poorly attended, and they ... well, I won't go any further than that.
It really makes me sad that Martin's leaving (or trying to), but if he manages to accomplish some change on the way out (and I fully believe this is what he's trying to do - there are times when you've done absolutely everything you could do, and it's just time to say "okay, I've done my best, and it just isn't happeningSee, that's the problem.
In almost every instance, The Register has been right. Yeah, it may still be irresponsible journalism - but as individuals, and as a company, these guys know what the hell they're doing. They check their stuff, even if it won't hold up to normal journalistic integrity checks.
It's kind of like the difference between talking to a judge and talking to a jury. When you're talking to a jury, you can still be telling the truth, but you don't need to present *nearly* so much hard evidence as you need were you trying to convince a judge.
Not that you couldn't present evidence everybody on the planet considers "hard", but courtrooms have their own standards (think about all the cases that were overturned because some extremely incriminating piece of evidence was thrown out of court on some technicality).
They did. The reason why they refuse to revoke this control is that many sites hard-code the object ID, thus they would stop working.
While I commend them for suggesting a fairly complete solution (including not trusting Microsoft-signed controls any more), I piss on them for not being willing to revoke the old control simply because some sites would not work.
Were they to do this, there's no doubt that administrators and programmers everywhere would TRULY understand the issue, and fix their code to not use the hardcoded value. Instead, Microsoft is coddling them, and now we have another hundred thousand zombied machines in DDoS attack-networks.
You just have to love this article. Describes a somewhat-interesting new tech (I'm actually interested in it primarily because of the price - I don't give two shits about "Tablet PC" gimmicks, but having a wireless web browser in this form is a great idea), but THEY DON'T GIVE A BLOODY URL.
The company is actually taking orders - you would guess they just _might_ have a web site, given who they're targetting this at. If they do, then these article writers should be SHOT for not including the URL. God damnit.
True, true - I didn't mean to imply that NOBODY could screw this up ;)
Just meant to say that, in the case of CANDU reactors and what I can learn about this stuff, they aren't screwing it up, and won't take any chances.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I *have* spent many hours studying CANDU nuclear reactors.
So, the answer to the question in the post? Yes, I would(!!) feel comfortable walking around with what these guys are talking about in my pocket.
The fact is, you get more radiation from a digital watch than you do living as near a CANDU reactor as you're allowed to live (about a kilometer). These people don't screw around. In the current global climate of anti-nuclear-anything, they'd be idiots to even contemplate cutting a corner. And, hell, most of these people are good people - the sorrow they'd feel at anybody having died because of their designs would be real, and it would be deep. As far as the companies are concerned, you can't have a plant meltdown and then just rebuild it. Chances are, you have to build an entirely new facility somewhere else, since the original area is waaay too contaminated.
I fully expect that the people working on these batteries have the same mind set - they just don't dick around. (And from the papers I've read, that does seem to be the case.)
This is a fork. Duh :)
It's not like the GIMP is extremely well-suited to video editing. However, large parts of the code _were_ suitable for processing frames of video.
This is the ENTIRE point of Open Source/Free Software - the ability to take something and make it work for *you*.
If the vast majority of the changes between GIMP 1.2.x and GIMP 2.x are unsuitable for this FilmGIMP, I pray that they don't try to integrate them just for the sake of integration (as your comment seems to suggest).
It's not a downside that it's based on an older code base. It's not an upside either. It's a non-point, it shouldn't even be mentioned.
Speaking of, does this not seem to you like the chicken and the egg: Expensive per kilobyte/megabyte rates for 3G phone data downloads won't change until more people sign up... but more people won't sign up until the service gets cheaper! Grrrr.
You seem to misunderstand. There's not some "magic" number that they need. What they do is saturate that price point. Right now they're charging lots, and obviously few people will sign up. But most of those people will sign up for 4+ year contracts.
Once they've gotten as many people for that price as they're going to get, they'll take the price down a notch. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's so wrong-headed it's not funny. I'll go through it as best I can, but let's start with the basic premise that including a lot on the CD you get is a bad thing:
Why, exactly, is this bad? Because Microsoft wants to do this? That's why they were convicted of being an illegal monopoly, right? WRONG. They were convicted for unfair business practices. They included IE in Windows installations, and IE sucked. Vendors wanted to offer Netscape as well as or instead of IE, and Microsoft clamped down on them and said "do it and die". This is what they did wrong - not for trying to offer their customers more bang for the buck, but for disallowing their customers CHOICE.
People want things to be included. Look at any Linux vendor - everything is available and packaged. Debian is a great example - there's very little software that isn't available as part of Debian.
Okay, next let's move on to the other part of your statement; that is, specifically that it should be allright to charge for virus scanners and personal firewall stuff.
What more do I have to say, you ask? Haven't I already covered this? Well, yes, actually, I have :) But that you specifically mention these things, as if it's what MS wanted to charge more for, is telling in and of itself. The article NEVER mentions virus scanners or personal firewalls. Did you read it?
Am I a rapist, that you must know where I am at all times?
Am I a burglar, that I must explain my reasons for being in a particular place at a particular time?
Am I a murderer, that I may not move about freely of my own accord?
Most people do understand the difference between tabs and Opera's "workspace" approach.
:)
They're both MDI, though - "multiple document interface". They just accomplish the same goal in different ways
That being said, most people absolutely abhor window-in-window MDI.
Read the article. SMT sounds nicer, but "hyperthreading" is actually an improvement on something that's existed for ages in some traditional Unix environments: "superthreading". What should they have called it? "Superduperthreading"?
In the historical context, the name is perfectly fitting.
Lindows et al also provide daemons.
They just don't focus on them. Like Mandrake.
Xandros et al do provide typical Unix daemons. "server software" in other words. They just don't focus on it.
Say, like, Mandrake.
I'm not saying they should be an "open source news site". That'd be silly.
No, I'm saying they're doing reviews while completely ignoring a HUGE part of the market they're doing these reviews for.
Tell me, when you want an office suite, and you're looking for reviews, won't it seem a _tad_ odd when the only ones you can find reviews for are ones that charge money?
Perhaps a better example would be, what the heck, Unix-based desktops. How would _you_ feel about a site that reviewed software from a little-known newcomer while completely ignoring software from vendors that has been proven and established?
Seriously. I've been seeing this more and more. NewsForge and linux.com, in particular, are pretty bad for this.
You see a review, and it says something like: "the big players in the Linux "purely-desktop market" are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX and the much awaited Xandros".
Good god! Mandrake, anybody? What they really mean is "the big players who may actually give us money to review their products are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX, and Xandros".
Absolutely pitiful. I see gobs and gobs of sites reviewing commerical *nix software these days, COMPLETELY IGNORING the more stable, mature, full-featured, robust, and easier-to-use open source/free software alternatives.
OSNews hasn't been as bad for this, in my experience, but I'm going to be watching very closely from now on.
You already have fraud insurance. As has been pointed out at least two dozen times, it's require by law in almost every country.
The rest of it is pretty silly. Credit cards are useful because you can use them lots of places. Banks simply can _not_ audit everybody's software. That's impossible. If they tried it, you'd pay way much higher interest than you do already on your credit card - as if it wasn't bad enough.
It works fine as it stands. Somebody steals your credit card number, you don't pay a dime, the credit card company nails the company that was the root of the problem (the one with the security hole), and that's the end of it.
There can and will be not-for-profit organisations which will threaten income models. If you don't think they'll bail each other out
I'd just like to throw in my here.
:)
... I suggested, "split" :) As in seperate into two networks, managed seperately (but still abiding by rules and the constitution).
.plan, so to speak.
... if we're going to offer all that, they may as well use IRC too, if they want. *shrug* :)
I've long wanted Debian to run its own IRC servers, for instance. I really think it's smart
On OFTC we've talked about what we'll do when we have too many IRC users to manage effectively (given the flat namespace and all)
Despite OFTC being very IRC-centric right now, we do want to offer SourceForge-like services. It's in our
That's where I see many projects using our IRC services; projects that don't yet run ther own FTP/HTTP/SMTP/DNS/etc servers
Just my two cents.
(Disclaimer: my statements are my own, though I am part of OFTC staff.)