Right. I mean, campus networks are for educational purposes, not for the mere entertainment of students. It is a little unfair to expect a university to pay to tripple their bandwidth to handle the movie and music swapping of students, which is against the law anyway. For the same reason, I'm guessing most university libraries still don't stock porn mags in the periodicals section.
Personally, I think dial up is fine for students. The whole time I was at a state university (95-97) we had to deal with a pool of 30 modems, some of which didn't work. The connection was so damned slow that browsing for porn would have been a lost cause. Students having broadband in their dorm rooms is a bit much. Their Internet access should match the quality of their accomodations and food they are fed.
So true, and I've guessed users passwords a few times when needed because I knew the names of their kids, etc.
Of course, I can understand how this happens. I'm well aware of how many passwords I have and I've had to implement a similar functioning but more secure solution to the post-it note passwords. I use Spash ID on my Palm device that stores but encrypts my passwords.
Folks just have SO many web sites that use different passwords, and to make it worse, most of the sites don't have the same username. Either the site won't let you pick your own username, or mine was already taken, or I created an account but lost a credit card so the username can't be used again, etc. Its a total mess. Makes me wonder how much value some of these web sites add. Maybe it was good enough paying my bills with a check every month and waiting for my paper bank statements to come every month, etc.
1) I have high-speed at work for anything serious.
2) When at home, I really don't want to spend time on the Internet. I get to read, garden a little, talk to my wife, generally behave like a non-geek.
3) When I had high-speed internet, I would always be on. It's addicting.
I use similar logic for no longer having cable TV. However, I felt cable TV was something that draws you in and demands a strong time commitment. Broadband, on the other hand, makes it easier to download software, upload 4 megapixel photos to Ofoto.com for printing (try that over dial up- ye gads!), or a host of other things that an IT geek might do at home when he's just being a normal person yet not totally glued to the PC. If you are a geek at home too, there is a host of other reasons. But, if you can live without it, more power to you! And enjoy the looks on peoples faces when you tell them. It is the same look I get when they realize I get 3 channels on my TV.
Sometimes they raise the price a bit, I think. Like when they went from G3's to G4's in the iBook series. But, I was happy about that option. Couple hundred bucks bought a faster processor, combo drive, double the RAM, included 10.3 (brand new at the time), etc.
But, I get your point. Seems like people pick a baseline market price and build the technology to match the price.
Re:Yeah, right positioning against Java...
on
A Taste of Qt 4
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· Score: 1
They do say that imitation is the higest form of flattery...
(Just don't imitate so much that it lands you in jail)
You're right, and I don't know this is always the knee-jerk reaction in the tech industry. A slightly greater cost up front can save SO MUCH downstream that is isn't even funny.
I think this is one of the big issues with Linux on the desktop. Not all IT managers are dumb. They realize if they have a few thousand operations employees, a switch to Linux is going to involve training, countless hours of help desk support, on site PC support, etc. So what, you save a hundred bucks a head or something by not having to buy XP. The cost per head to have a good tech employed with benefits and by the time you factor in paying workers comp, the employers part of FICA, etc.... well- he only has to sit at someones desk a couple hours before the "savings" of $100 is totally negated. If these guys are willing to ship jobs overseas to save money, don't you think they would make a simple switch of desktop software if it was really that simple to save the money?
A while back I remember putting in a request to buy an application icon set for a couple hundred bucks- included hundreds of high quality app icons in all different states. A coworker at first thought I was an idiot. His comment was that "we can just draw our own." Uh, yeah. Spend weeks drawing our own icons at senior software engineer salaries (probably a few thousand bucks). Or, pay $200.
Time is money in the IT world, and in an incredibly big way.
How about the lack of Soviet tanks rumbling down your street?
I think you misunderstand me. There are two components to ROI- the initial investment and the return. I'm very happy with the return of freedom our military provides, but I think money is often wasted on the investment side. When corporations get big, they use their size to negotiate better prices, volume discounts, etc. When government gets big, it seems like they quit caring about getting a good deal. After all, who do they have to answer to? Citizens who are more concerned with Britney Spears. Coporations on the other hand have to answer to the stock holders and the market.
Well, what if we spend the tax money on a $20,000 toilet seat for the shitter of some government employees involved with the improvement of the local and regional communications infrastructure?
Or maybe I could interest you in a $1000 hammer? I've yet to see a good ROI for my tax money. Based on that, I'd say the less taxes/less forced goverment services, the better.
Well, think of it this way. The potential damage from someone copying a film that cost $200,000,000 to make is enormous.
Maybe the impact is less from using a camcorder. But what about this- say Paramount stole a film (say they got a copy as an inside job) from New Line and took it to theaters and starting showing it. As far as the law goes, the guy using the camcorder is doing the same thing. How would you differentiate the two? Based on the quality of the copy? I think this stuff has the potential to be a lot more serious. It is like aiming a gun and shooting at someone and your defense is that you are a bad shot and it wasn't attempted murder because there is no way you could ever have actually hit the person.
Slashdot posts these stories every couple of days. Does anybody really care? I never read the articles. Why bother? I've got better things to talk about at the water cooler or at lunch than the latest security hole in Windows. Maybe if I were a security expert, I'd find this kind of thing interesting. I don't. Do you?
His Tomcat server doesn't have a mime type configured for type "GIF". He probably has "gif" but for some reason not "GIF". IE doesn't care because it guesses the Mime type, but Gecko based browsers won't display the image because in this case they work more strictly off of the Mime type.
Probably one of the worst ways to be introduced to a new system is through emulation. Its going to make the emulated system look bad due to the very nature of emulation- visual/performance/etc.
This project is pretty damn close to being a complete waste of time for everyone involved. Unlike something like Virtual PC that actually serves a purpose. I'm convinced that Mac OSX along with Virtual PC is the easiest and only way for the majority of the users in the world today to ditch a dedicated Windows XP box. Of course, why try so hard to ditch something like XP that works pretty well to begin with. There is a time and place in this world when it is appropriate to spend large amounts of time trying to make "a point" of some sort. But this ain't one of them.
If you want to root for the little guy... Burt over at Scaled Composites is your guy. He's credible. These guys just aren't. No more need to worry about what will happen if they pull it off, than, if I were to tell you that I'll be teleporting to Venus next year. The burden of proof is on the party that asserts the positive.
On the other hand, we can ask whats gonna happen when SpaceShipOne hits 60 miles up later this year.
Oh, well, then, HELL! Why don't you just glue a 4 GB CompactFlash card to an LCD screen, toss a scrollwheel on, and beat Apple at the iPod game?
Pretty funny sir. Pretty funny indeed. I needed a good laugh.
Re:The only way for the RIAA to die is by suicide
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess I may be dumb (probably not even up for discussion) but I have never really understood the need for the RIAA in the first place. Artist records music... record company produces CD... product is distributed... consumer purchases music. Why do we need a big monolithic organization involved that messes up everything for everybody?
If it were impossible to do this stuff without the RIAA, there wouldn't be lots of "independent" deals where there is no RIAA to be found. Somehow artists and independent record companies found some way to accomplish all this stuff on their own.
Anyway, somehow I think the term "Vaporware" now applies to music too. I mean, you've got idiots like Britney Spears all over everything and she's basically "vapor-ware"... prototyped, mocked up boobs, artifical, pre-recorded singing voice, and clearly just a glamorized screenshot- she's not even a functioning prototype. I think somehow the need for the RIAA has to do with having this Britney Vaporware in our faces 24x7 and in our ears at least once an hour on every radio station.
I tell ya what... at the right price point even the existing Apple servers could sell like hotcakes. Lots of small to very small shops are doing Linux on Intel/PC Servers now. The time savings in running a Mac OS X based server would be absolutely incredible over any of the standard Linux distros. Folks in small shops have to wear too many hats already. The server admin is also the network guy and the PC support guy and the DBA and the developer. I would love to swap out all our Intel servers (Linux and Win32) for Apples. I would absolutely love to. Unfortunately it is a price thing... communicating to management the savings on time, etc.
Blockbuster Video also sells Snickers Bars but I hardly think of them as competing in the same market space as the local candy store. In the corporate IT world, Sun is far and away known as an enterprise server vendor. Of course, I'm talking about mid size to large organizations- regional and national banks, national railroads, larger web retailers, etc. Undoubtably the places where Sun gets most of its revenue from.
Well, I don't know that Sun is in the same marketspace as AMD/64. Personally I'm still wondering what will fill the gap in every corporate data center I've visited recently. There is a strong trend that I see.... everybody has their "x86" room- it is usually PC Servers running Win32 or maybe Linux. But here is the real trick- the "x86" room is always intranet type apps and *maybe* the rare external web site that gets lower volumes.
The rest of the datacenter might be things like Sun 6500's, 10Ks, or holy shit, a 15K or two. What fills the gap here? I'm starting to see more and more large IBM servers moving in. I guess IBM is really going to capitalize?
Also, BTW, a lot of shops now only have a "token" mainframe as I call it. A 390 box that sits at the back of the datacenter happily running whatever few legacy servicing systems might be left that will undoubtably be maintained for years to come. The IT guys still attached to these boxes as admins or programmers are an interesting breed. Talk about skittish folks.
Is there any way Microsoft could give software away to anybody and not have you make these accusations? So if Outback Steakhouse donates steaks to poor hungry bums, they're still evil because they are doing it to hook people on their steaks? At some point does it/should it matter to the liberals and altruists? Do they HAVE to have some form of self-sacrafice behind helping others? Because I really thought what they were after was making sure the poor got their food and computers. By the same token if someone only gives a donation for the tax break, does it matter? You're after helping people, right? I will maintain that whenever you're asking or expecting someone to "donate" or "give something away" you better damned well take what you get and not worry about the how's or why's as long as everything is legal. Don't take stolen property or drug money but don't be a critic if the purpose is something like a tax break and you don't agree with it.
1. A movie will have made money at the box office; DVD sales are just gravy on top of that. Music isn't sold to you twice this way, you buy it on CD and that's it.
Thank you. That is the only thing on this whole thread that is accurate. For example, the first LOR cost 90 million to produce and add another 50 mil for marketing. Worldwide box office gross was $867,683,093. Nobody would ever produce a movie with the hopes of paying for it after the fact with DVD sales. If they don't think they'll make a profit at the box office, they won't make the movie. Of course, some times they are wrong about what will be a success, but that is another story.
So the DVD you buy is incredibly subsidized. Same thing goes for concert DVDs. Guess who paid for that? The morons who paid $100 a ticket to see the latest one-hit-wonder. All this being said, DVDs ARE a great value to the consumer. But like you said people need to understand why.
Something is getting ready to happen real soon. Days after an FAA launch permit, a second powered test all the way to over 100K feet. The burning question is, how many more test launches before they go the distance? Surely, the history of test piloting experimental aircraft can yield a little input? What are the things left to verify and confirm before going the full 300K+ feet? I'm guessing not a whole lot if performance was good on the spacecraft and the engine burn went well. Is the cabin of SpaceShipOne fully pressurized, or do they depend exclusively on the pilot wearing a pressure suit?
This is very exciting to watch. I wish these guys all the luck and safety in the world.
I agree about the running stores- some here in FL actually video you on a treadmill so they can check your pronation and prescribe the right shoe. And heck, what is 100 bucks for a pair of shoes when that is literally *all you need* to run? Try saying the same thing about most other sports.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. I mean, campus networks are for educational purposes, not for the mere entertainment of students. It is a little unfair to expect a university to pay to tripple their bandwidth to handle the movie and music swapping of students, which is against the law anyway. For the same reason, I'm guessing most university libraries still don't stock porn mags in the periodicals section.
Personally, I think dial up is fine for students. The whole time I was at a state university (95-97) we had to deal with a pool of 30 modems, some of which didn't work. The connection was so damned slow that browsing for porn would have been a lost cause. Students having broadband in their dorm rooms is a bit much. Their Internet access should match the quality of their accomodations and food they are fed.
So true, and I've guessed users passwords a few times when needed because I knew the names of their kids, etc. Of course, I can understand how this happens. I'm well aware of how many passwords I have and I've had to implement a similar functioning but more secure solution to the post-it note passwords. I use Spash ID on my Palm device that stores but encrypts my passwords. Folks just have SO many web sites that use different passwords, and to make it worse, most of the sites don't have the same username. Either the site won't let you pick your own username, or mine was already taken, or I created an account but lost a credit card so the username can't be used again, etc. Its a total mess. Makes me wonder how much value some of these web sites add. Maybe it was good enough paying my bills with a check every month and waiting for my paper bank statements to come every month, etc.
1) I have high-speed at work for anything serious.
2) When at home, I really don't want to spend time on the Internet. I get to read, garden a little, talk to my wife, generally behave like a non-geek.
3) When I had high-speed internet, I would always be on. It's addicting.
I use similar logic for no longer having cable TV. However, I felt cable TV was something that draws you in and demands a strong time commitment. Broadband, on the other hand, makes it easier to download software, upload 4 megapixel photos to Ofoto.com for printing (try that over dial up- ye gads!), or a host of other things that an IT geek might do at home when he's just being a normal person yet not totally glued to the PC. If you are a geek at home too, there is a host of other reasons. But, if you can live without it, more power to you! And enjoy the looks on peoples faces when you tell them. It is the same look I get when they realize I get 3 channels on my TV.
When can we expect the "Sun is dead" threads to reach the frequency of the "Apple is dead" threads? I await that day with great anticipation.
Sometimes they raise the price a bit, I think. Like when they went from G3's to G4's in the iBook series. But, I was happy about that option. Couple hundred bucks bought a faster processor, combo drive, double the RAM, included 10.3 (brand new at the time), etc.
But, I get your point. Seems like people pick a baseline market price and build the technology to match the price.
They do say that imitation is the higest form of flattery...
(Just don't imitate so much that it lands you in jail)
You thought that was bad. I'm a java programmer who owns a Mac! I might as well be writing cobol on a 390.
You're right, and I don't know this is always the knee-jerk reaction in the tech industry. A slightly greater cost up front can save SO MUCH downstream that is isn't even funny.
I think this is one of the big issues with Linux on the desktop. Not all IT managers are dumb. They realize if they have a few thousand operations employees, a switch to Linux is going to involve training, countless hours of help desk support, on site PC support, etc. So what, you save a hundred bucks a head or something by not having to buy XP. The cost per head to have a good tech employed with benefits and by the time you factor in paying workers comp, the employers part of FICA, etc.... well- he only has to sit at someones desk a couple hours before the "savings" of $100 is totally negated. If these guys are willing to ship jobs overseas to save money, don't you think they would make a simple switch of desktop software if it was really that simple to save the money?
A while back I remember putting in a request to buy an application icon set for a couple hundred bucks- included hundreds of high quality app icons in all different states. A coworker at first thought I was an idiot. His comment was that "we can just draw our own." Uh, yeah. Spend weeks drawing our own icons at senior software engineer salaries (probably a few thousand bucks). Or, pay $200.
Time is money in the IT world, and in an incredibly big way.
How about the lack of Soviet tanks rumbling down your street?
I think you misunderstand me. There are two components to ROI- the initial investment and the return. I'm very happy with the return of freedom our military provides, but I think money is often wasted on the investment side. When corporations get big, they use their size to negotiate better prices, volume discounts, etc. When government gets big, it seems like they quit caring about getting a good deal. After all, who do they have to answer to? Citizens who are more concerned with Britney Spears. Coporations on the other hand have to answer to the stock holders and the market.
Well, what if we spend the tax money on a $20,000 toilet seat for the shitter of some government employees involved with the improvement of the local and regional communications infrastructure?
Or maybe I could interest you in a $1000 hammer? I've yet to see a good ROI for my tax money. Based on that, I'd say the less taxes/less forced goverment services, the better.
Well, think of it this way. The potential damage from someone copying a film that cost $200,000,000 to make is enormous.
Maybe the impact is less from using a camcorder. But what about this- say Paramount stole a film (say they got a copy as an inside job) from New Line and took it to theaters and starting showing it. As far as the law goes, the guy using the camcorder is doing the same thing. How would you differentiate the two? Based on the quality of the copy? I think this stuff has the potential to be a lot more serious. It is like aiming a gun and shooting at someone and your defense is that you are a bad shot and it wasn't attempted murder because there is no way you could ever have actually hit the person.
Slashdot posts these stories every couple of days. Does anybody really care? I never read the articles. Why bother? I've got better things to talk about at the water cooler or at lunch than the latest security hole in Windows. Maybe if I were a security expert, I'd find this kind of thing interesting. I don't. Do you?
His Tomcat server doesn't have a mime type configured for type "GIF". He probably has "gif" but for some reason not "GIF". IE doesn't care because it guesses the Mime type, but Gecko based browsers won't display the image because in this case they work more strictly off of the Mime type.
Probably one of the worst ways to be introduced to a new system is through emulation. Its going to make the emulated system look bad due to the very nature of emulation- visual/performance/etc.
This project is pretty damn close to being a complete waste of time for everyone involved. Unlike something like Virtual PC that actually serves a purpose. I'm convinced that Mac OSX along with Virtual PC is the easiest and only way for the majority of the users in the world today to ditch a dedicated Windows XP box. Of course, why try so hard to ditch something like XP that works pretty well to begin with. There is a time and place in this world when it is appropriate to spend large amounts of time trying to make "a point" of some sort. But this ain't one of them.
If you want to root for the little guy... Burt over at Scaled Composites is your guy. He's credible. These guys just aren't. No more need to worry about what will happen if they pull it off, than, if I were to tell you that I'll be teleporting to Venus next year. The burden of proof is on the party that asserts the positive.
On the other hand, we can ask whats gonna happen when SpaceShipOne hits 60 miles up later this year.
Oh, well, then, HELL! Why don't you just glue a 4 GB CompactFlash card to an LCD screen, toss a scrollwheel on, and beat Apple at the iPod game?
Pretty funny sir. Pretty funny indeed. I needed a good laugh.
I guess I may be dumb (probably not even up for discussion) but I have never really understood the need for the RIAA in the first place. Artist records music... record company produces CD... product is distributed... consumer purchases music. Why do we need a big monolithic organization involved that messes up everything for everybody?
If it were impossible to do this stuff without the RIAA, there wouldn't be lots of "independent" deals where there is no RIAA to be found. Somehow artists and independent record companies found some way to accomplish all this stuff on their own.
Anyway, somehow I think the term "Vaporware" now applies to music too. I mean, you've got idiots like Britney Spears all over everything and she's basically "vapor-ware"... prototyped, mocked up boobs, artifical, pre-recorded singing voice, and clearly just a glamorized screenshot- she's not even a functioning prototype. I think somehow the need for the RIAA has to do with having this Britney Vaporware in our faces 24x7 and in our ears at least once an hour on every radio station.
I tell ya what... at the right price point even the existing Apple servers could sell like hotcakes. Lots of small to very small shops are doing Linux on Intel/PC Servers now. The time savings in running a Mac OS X based server would be absolutely incredible over any of the standard Linux distros. Folks in small shops have to wear too many hats already. The server admin is also the network guy and the PC support guy and the DBA and the developer. I would love to swap out all our Intel servers (Linux and Win32) for Apples. I would absolutely love to. Unfortunately it is a price thing... communicating to management the savings on time, etc.
Blockbuster Video also sells Snickers Bars but I hardly think of them as competing in the same market space as the local candy store. In the corporate IT world, Sun is far and away known as an enterprise server vendor. Of course, I'm talking about mid size to large organizations- regional and national banks, national railroads, larger web retailers, etc. Undoubtably the places where Sun gets most of its revenue from.
Sun cannot compete with Linux/AMD64
Well, I don't know that Sun is in the same marketspace as AMD/64. Personally I'm still wondering what will fill the gap in every corporate data center I've visited recently. There is a strong trend that I see.... everybody has their "x86" room- it is usually PC Servers running Win32 or maybe Linux. But here is the real trick- the "x86" room is always intranet type apps and *maybe* the rare external web site that gets lower volumes.
The rest of the datacenter might be things like Sun 6500's, 10Ks, or holy shit, a 15K or two. What fills the gap here? I'm starting to see more and more large IBM servers moving in. I guess IBM is really going to capitalize?
Also, BTW, a lot of shops now only have a "token" mainframe as I call it. A 390 box that sits at the back of the datacenter happily running whatever few legacy servicing systems might be left that will undoubtably be maintained for years to come. The IT guys still attached to these boxes as admins or programmers are an interesting breed. Talk about skittish folks.
Is there any way Microsoft could give software away to anybody and not have you make these accusations? So if Outback Steakhouse donates steaks to poor hungry bums, they're still evil because they are doing it to hook people on their steaks? At some point does it/should it matter to the liberals and altruists? Do they HAVE to have some form of self-sacrafice behind helping others? Because I really thought what they were after was making sure the poor got their food and computers. By the same token if someone only gives a donation for the tax break, does it matter? You're after helping people, right? I will maintain that whenever you're asking or expecting someone to "donate" or "give something away" you better damned well take what you get and not worry about the how's or why's as long as everything is legal. Don't take stolen property or drug money but don't be a critic if the purpose is something like a tax break and you don't agree with it.
Its not good enough until its free right? GIVE ME A BREAK!
Apparently it isn't good enough until you and I refer to each other as "Comrade." So what you have done for the Proletariat today, Comrade Beatbyte?
1. A movie will have made money at the box office; DVD sales are just gravy on top of that. Music isn't sold to you twice this way, you buy it on CD and that's it.
Thank you. That is the only thing on this whole thread that is accurate. For example, the first LOR cost 90 million to produce and add another 50 mil for marketing. Worldwide box office gross was $867,683,093. Nobody would ever produce a movie with the hopes of paying for it after the fact with DVD sales. If they don't think they'll make a profit at the box office, they won't make the movie. Of course, some times they are wrong about what will be a success, but that is another story.
So the DVD you buy is incredibly subsidized. Same thing goes for concert DVDs. Guess who paid for that? The morons who paid $100 a ticket to see the latest one-hit-wonder. All this being said, DVDs ARE a great value to the consumer. But like you said people need to understand why.
Something is getting ready to happen real soon. Days after an FAA launch permit, a second powered test all the way to over 100K feet. The burning question is, how many more test launches before they go the distance? Surely, the history of test piloting experimental aircraft can yield a little input? What are the things left to verify and confirm before going the full 300K+ feet? I'm guessing not a whole lot if performance was good on the spacecraft and the engine burn went well. Is the cabin of SpaceShipOne fully pressurized, or do they depend exclusively on the pilot wearing a pressure suit?
This is very exciting to watch. I wish these guys all the luck and safety in the world.
I agree about the running stores- some here in FL actually video you on a treadmill so they can check your pronation and prescribe the right shoe. And heck, what is 100 bucks for a pair of shoes when that is literally *all you need* to run? Try saying the same thing about most other sports.