Alas, this is only a good thing. Microsoft isn't wholly evil, they have just become something along those lines due to their position in the marketplace. Some competition capable of putting the fear of God into them will do nothing but improve things for everyone
Is anybody here on/. old enough to remember when the "Evil Empire" in computing was IBM? The subject of a massive and ultimately fruitless anti-trust suit by the DOJ? Just a question.
The funny thing is, that those who tried to do what IBM was doing just for lower cost and as a second source, they're nowhere (i.e. Amdahl) Market dominance ended when the game changed. IBM trying to out-MS MS won't work for the same reasons. They tried to do it with OS/2 and got their ass handed to them.
"Our business types are full of suggestions for supposedly excellent and well suited systems, however they all have in common that they require Windows on the client. If we choose one of those systems our OSS policy is pretty much moot..."
So what? Your OSS policy isn't business-critical. You're not looking to run an open source company, you're looking to run a VoIP company. If the "business types" want to run the books on a copy-protected closed-source system, let them. Why is this your decision to make?
One thing I've learned in nearly 20 years in a variety of IT support and management positions is that what I think is cool or morally superior doesn't matter. If the customer wants XYZ, then that's what he wants, and my job is to give it to him as quickly and efficiently as I can, and keep it running as well as possible. Jeez, you know, I'd have the best system in the world if it wasn't for those damned customers...
Trying to keep this post on topic, as opposed to 98% of the rest of the replies.
I've spent some time lloking at the Open Courseware stuff. And although my MIT degree is from many years ago, I do have one.
What you see in the Open Courseware looks like a sampling of handouts ("lecture notes"). You'd have as much chance learning engineering from this material as you would learning surgery by reading a textbook. The missing element in both, of course, is interaction with a teacher who can tell you how to really do it, or who can explain how things work in real life. The Open Courseware is a simulacrum of education.
And with the job market in CS being so tight (not just programming, which most posters are talking about, but the engineering, design, etc. branches) any prospective employer will want a real degree from a real university, not a study-at-home substitute.
Imagine this turned around. Imagine I said I'm looking for a career change, and I've always liked biology, I've read some Robin Cook novels, I've looked at the standard medical textbooks and feel pretty comfortable with all that, how do I go about becoming a physician. The standard answer would be "go to medical school."
the principles Walt Disney used in running the company
What principle? Exploiting the workers? What's little-known is that in the "golden age" of 1940's and 1950's hand-drawn animation, the overwhelming majority of the work was done by Walt (and his managers) slave-driving minimum-wage immigrants, largely post-WWII European displaced persons, who were lucky just to have a job and a roof. If Walt were alive today, he'd fill the studios with Guatemalans and pay them just as little as legally possible.
Cox's limits are actually clear and easy to find. One may agree or disagree with their policies in general, their bandwidth limits or anything else, but at least they're explicit about them. Bandwidth limits are found here. They range up to 50 gig/mo.
All you geeks would love an old Coppola movie starring Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who hears something he's not supposed to; it's called "The Conversation". I'm sure you can rent it if you hunt around.
The movie holds up well, even though it's technologically dated with all the analog tape recorders and stuff.
Nobody except Cisco will know the cert expired, and the only time it'll matter is if you want to work for a Cisco partner/reseller. Put it on the resume and don't put any dates. The HR people you have to get past in the first place don't know what expires when (or even if it does at all.) Concentrate on the soft skills (look good, speak clearly, write well) and getting a job, any job. Sooner or later you'll probably get to where your employer will pay for the retesting, and you can recert then.
The only kind of cert that is worth keeping current is something like the CISSP, where you have to submit regular CEU's and that sort of thing, but don't have to re-test. The CISSP is a worthwhile one to get at any rate, as it's vendor-neutral and "security" is the buzzword du jour.
I've got a whole bunch of certifications, but all employer-paid, and my job is reasonably secure.
>If they beam RF into my home, can't I receive it and -- purely for experimental purposes, say -- try to do something with it?
No.
Can you give me reference to the relevant US Code? This is not a troll, I am genuinely curious. I know that manufacturers of reasonably full-spectrum RF receivers have to block the ability to receive in the 800MHz cell range for units sold in the US, but you can buy the receivers elsewhere in the world, so technically even receiving those signals is not illegal in the US. So how (exactly, please) is receiving the SatTV signal illegal?
So I actually RTFA, and I'm wondering about the legal basis for the "illegal interception of satellite signals" part. I can see where copyright infringement is illegal, and I can see where duplicating the SatTV smart cards is illegal, but what, exactly, is "illegal interception"? If they beam RF into my home, can't I receive it and -- purely for experimental purposes, say -- try to do something with it? The RF spectrum is licensed for transmitting on, but I thought I had a legal right to receive whatever I wanted. Now whether I can decrypt the data I receive is another question entirely.
Not just nice, but a great teacher as well. I took the strobe photography lab, and even though he was semi-retired he always hung around and would offer helpful but non-judgemental advice to anyone.
But what I thought was far cooler than the bullet-through-object photos, which were so easy you did them in the first few weeks, was the pictures of an exploding firecracker. Since it generates its own light, you can't use the darkened-room-with-fast-flash approach, but have to use far more sophisticated photo equipment with rotating slit shutters and stuff (you can't move the film stock quickly enough because it'll disintegrate.)
What rights do you have in a modern casino, exactly, other than the right to have them take your money from you? Cameras everywhere, those "bonus cards" or whatever they're called, plain-clothes security staff everywhere, your every move is watched fourteen different ways.
I manage to avoid the surveillance problem and keep all my money by the simple expedient of not entering their establishment.
Those are mutually contradictory terms. The people who seriously record live music events, whether from "taper-friendly" bands such as The Dead or Phish, or those who engage in "stealth" recording are adamantly opposed to any lossy encoding. Record in full bitrate, please, and share them that way. That's why SHN and FLAC are used as compression schemes, and why shared recordings almost invariably bear the admonition "do not encode to MP3".
Why would anyone buy an iPod too small to hold their entire collection
I'd submit that if an iPod can hold it, it's not that much of a "collection". I "count" my audio CD's with a tape measure, and estimate I have over 800. Ripping them to some halfway-decent sounding format would take how long? And would leave me with what, two TB?
Just trying to put the word "collection" in proper context. Serious music collectors have far more music than I do.
Investors probably won't be as dumb this time as they were last time
Sure they will. That's one thing you can be absolutely positively sure of. It's happened so many times, always the same, back to the tulip mania in 1636.
Don't you remember all the things people were saying in 1999-2000? How P/E ratios don't matter? How earnings themselves don't matter? How this new Internet economy is different, and different rules apply? Last time was different, right. This time will be different. BS -- they're the same every time.
..has the author of that column started? His beef is people who complain about hardware rather than building, but he just complains about people who complain. Where's that in the food chain?
The author of that paper is incredibly vague in his paper
"Incredibly vague"? 72 footnotes, including specific historical references back to the 17th century? Did we read the same paper?
I know I'll sound like a hopeless fanboy, but before going to UMN, Odlyzko was one of the most creative thinkers and most cogent writers I've seen employed by a major corp.
(*) IMHO, this is likely to remain the case for a very long time. It requires an above-average amount of foolish short-sightedness for a person to be willing to buy in a lossy format
I think foolish short-sightedness is in abundant supply, as is ignorance of what real music sounds like. After all, you can transcode the hyper-produced Britney-etc "pop" among all the lossy formats you want and not subtract anything meaningful from it. How much fidelity does the average portable-music-player user need anyway? They're listening to it through the world's crappiest transducers ($3 earphones) in a high-ambient-noise environment (jogging, walking down the street, riding the subway).
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one here old enough to remember when AT&T was a "large phone company"?
Is anybody here on /. old enough to remember when the "Evil Empire" in computing was IBM? The subject of a massive and ultimately fruitless anti-trust suit by the DOJ? Just a question.
The funny thing is, that those who tried to do what IBM was doing just for lower cost and as a second source, they're nowhere (i.e. Amdahl) Market dominance ended when the game changed. IBM trying to out-MS MS won't work for the same reasons. They tried to do it with OS/2 and got their ass handed to them.
So what? Your OSS policy isn't business-critical. You're not looking to run an open source company, you're looking to run a VoIP company. If the "business types" want to run the books on a copy-protected closed-source system, let them. Why is this your decision to make?
One thing I've learned in nearly 20 years in a variety of IT support and management positions is that what I think is cool or morally superior doesn't matter. If the customer wants XYZ, then that's what he wants, and my job is to give it to him as quickly and efficiently as I can, and keep it running as well as possible. Jeez, you know, I'd have the best system in the world if it wasn't for those damned customers...
I've spent some time lloking at the Open Courseware stuff. And although my MIT degree is from many years ago, I do have one.
What you see in the Open Courseware looks like a sampling of handouts ("lecture notes"). You'd have as much chance learning engineering from this material as you would learning surgery by reading a textbook. The missing element in both, of course, is interaction with a teacher who can tell you how to really do it, or who can explain how things work in real life. The Open Courseware is a simulacrum of education.
And with the job market in CS being so tight (not just programming, which most posters are talking about, but the engineering, design, etc. branches) any prospective employer will want a real degree from a real university, not a study-at-home substitute.
Imagine this turned around. Imagine I said I'm looking for a career change, and I've always liked biology, I've read some Robin Cook novels, I've looked at the standard medical textbooks and feel pretty comfortable with all that, how do I go about becoming a physician. The standard answer would be "go to medical school."
What principle? Exploiting the workers? What's little-known is that in the "golden age" of 1940's and 1950's hand-drawn animation, the overwhelming majority of the work was done by Walt (and his managers) slave-driving minimum-wage immigrants, largely post-WWII European displaced persons, who were lucky just to have a job and a roof. If Walt were alive today, he'd fill the studios with Guatemalans and pay them just as little as legally possible.
Roy is Walt's nephew. Walt didn't have any sons.
ZIP is free. RAR isn't. Big difference.
Cox cable does. Look here.
Cox's limits are actually clear and easy to find. One may agree or disagree with their policies in general, their bandwidth limits or anything else, but at least they're explicit about them. Bandwidth limits are found here. They range up to 50 gig/mo.
The movie holds up well, even though it's technologically dated with all the analog tape recorders and stuff.
The only kind of cert that is worth keeping current is something like the CISSP, where you have to submit regular CEU's and that sort of thing, but don't have to re-test. The CISSP is a worthwhile one to get at any rate, as it's vendor-neutral and "security" is the buzzword du jour.
I've got a whole bunch of certifications, but all employer-paid, and my job is reasonably secure.
Under what statute, please? Be specific.
No.
Can you give me reference to the relevant US Code? This is not a troll, I am genuinely curious. I know that manufacturers of reasonably full-spectrum RF receivers have to block the ability to receive in the 800MHz cell range for units sold in the US, but you can buy the receivers elsewhere in the world, so technically even receiving those signals is not illegal in the US. So how (exactly, please) is receiving the SatTV signal illegal?
So I actually RTFA, and I'm wondering about the legal basis for the "illegal interception of satellite signals" part. I can see where copyright infringement is illegal, and I can see where duplicating the SatTV smart cards is illegal, but what, exactly, is "illegal interception"? If they beam RF into my home, can't I receive it and -- purely for experimental purposes, say -- try to do something with it? The RF spectrum is licensed for transmitting on, but I thought I had a legal right to receive whatever I wanted. Now whether I can decrypt the data I receive is another question entirely.
Not just nice, but a great teacher as well. I took the strobe photography lab, and even though he was semi-retired he always hung around and would offer helpful but non-judgemental advice to anyone.
But what I thought was far cooler than the bullet-through-object photos, which were so easy you did them in the first few weeks, was the pictures of an exploding firecracker. Since it generates its own light, you can't use the darkened-room-with-fast-flash approach, but have to use far more sophisticated photo equipment with rotating slit shutters and stuff (you can't move the film stock quickly enough because it'll disintegrate.)
Man, I had a great time in that class.
The answer is "A". And the tense is wrong -- it already has become.
Funny, though, even to hear this question from Rolling Stone, which hasn't been about subverting corporate control for at least 20 years now.
I manage to avoid the surveillance problem and keep all my money by the simple expedient of not entering their establishment.
"News for Nerds"? "Stuff that matters"? What did I miss?
Those are mutually contradictory terms. The people who seriously record live music events, whether from "taper-friendly" bands such as The Dead or Phish, or those who engage in "stealth" recording are adamantly opposed to any lossy encoding. Record in full bitrate, please, and share them that way. That's why SHN and FLAC are used as compression schemes, and why shared recordings almost invariably bear the admonition "do not encode to MP3".
I'd submit that if an iPod can hold it, it's not that much of a "collection". I "count" my audio CD's with a tape measure, and estimate I have over 800. Ripping them to some halfway-decent sounding format would take how long? And would leave me with what, two TB?
Just trying to put the word "collection" in proper context. Serious music collectors have far more music than I do.
Sure they will. That's one thing you can be absolutely positively sure of. It's happened so many times, always the same, back to the tulip mania in 1636.
Don't you remember all the things people were saying in 1999-2000? How P/E ratios don't matter? How earnings themselves don't matter? How this new Internet economy is different, and different rules apply? Last time was different, right. This time will be different. BS -- they're the same every time.
..has the author of that column started? His beef is people who complain about hardware rather than building, but he just complains about people who complain. Where's that in the food chain?
"Incredibly vague"? 72 footnotes, including specific historical references back to the 17th century? Did we read the same paper?
I know I'll sound like a hopeless fanboy, but before going to UMN, Odlyzko was one of the most creative thinkers and most cogent writers I've seen employed by a major corp.
I have a wife, three kids, three cats and a dog. What is this 'personal time' concept?
I think foolish short-sightedness is in abundant supply, as is ignorance of what real music sounds like. After all, you can transcode the hyper-produced Britney-etc "pop" among all the lossy formats you want and not subtract anything meaningful from it. How much fidelity does the average portable-music-player user need anyway? They're listening to it through the world's crappiest transducers ($3 earphones) in a high-ambient-noise environment (jogging, walking down the street, riding the subway).