But if you're speccing up a web application that you can be fairly certain will be used by hundreds of people simultaneously, then it's useful to know.
Of course, if you're speccing up the system that this web app is going to run under and you don't test performance before you go live, you'll come unstuck sooner or later anyhow.
the problem is in mass adoption and making it nearly thoughtless to do so that is the difficulty.
I think you possibly underestimate how big a problem that is.
In the days of snail mail, it was pretty uncommon for you to receive a letter purporting to be from someone it wasn't. Certainly not, say, a letter from your bank saying "We've accidentally gone and deleted all your verification information, please reply within 7 working days to the address above enclosing your full name, account number and signature" - partly because it would have been cost-prohibitive, partly because it would have been found out as soon as the first person contacted the real bank and then all they need to do to catch you is hang around outside the PO Box you've set up and wait for you to collect your mail.
Today, of course, that's very different. But the perception is much the same - relatively few people outside of the sort of techies you see on/. (and probably their immediate families) are aware that it's trivially easy to make an email look convincingly like it came from someone else.
I'm not too bothered about an email I send to a friend chatting about nothing in particular being intercepted. What I am bothered about is communication which I consider sensitive - mainly, it has direct impact on my finances or concerns something I don't want a particular person getting at (for instance, I might not want my partner to know I'm humping Ellie the Sheep - but in that case it's too much to ask Ellie to understand encryption - far easier to just setup a hotmail account for that).
This means digital signing and encryption is only really interesting where I need to communicate with someone and a disposable hotmail account is not appropriate - mostly, banks. But they've always accepted a certain degree of fraud, and are used to working with law enforcement. Unless and until they're financially liable for every penny of it, and the amount of fraud going on goes over what they consider "acceptable", they won't be demanding that their customers use signed email anytime soon. Most of them have found an alternative option anyway: send the actual content of messages through a web-based interface and all they email you is a note saying "log into your bank account, there's a message for you there".
To which you respond by asking what they would think if the company had installed windows on all of these boxes without paying for a single license.
Technically correct. But it's the person citing it as a "danger" of using Linux who winds up with a nice long op-ed piece written up on every single ZDNet-owned news site. The people saying "what if you used Windows without paying for a license?" are simply repeating that on Slashdot - not the kind of place that's generally accepted as a source when the CTO asks what all the fuss was about.
Besides, the "danger" of having to release your precious IP is often perceived to be much worse than the danger of having to pay a few million to Microsoft, particularly in an economy which is increasingly based around IP.
How can this be insightful? This is a reworking of an old troll, which originally went like this:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
the bookstore or shoestore could lower their prices and compete with amazon if you paid $20 dollars at the door just to get into the store. There'd be no incentive to buy online as the price in the store would be the same.
Yes there would. I wouldn't be charged $20 just for the privilege of browsing Amazon's website.
So in theory, you could have a brain transplant from a sheep and it would work fine, except your vocabulary would be little more than "Baaa" and you'd do nothing but eat grass all day?
However, when the barrier to entry for a given market is unusually high, I'd expect that a cartel situation could continue more or less indefinitely - or at least until such time as the barrier drops.
The record industry - that one that/. so loves to hate - is a classic example here. It's been operated by a cartel for years, and while the barrier to "getting music properly recorded so it doesn't sound appalling" has plummeted, the barrier to "getting music mass marketed so it actually gets some people buying it and gets people interested in going to see the artists perform live" is still very high. It's looking like the Internet can erode that substantially though, so perhaps within 5 years the cartel will fall apart.
I once upgraded the system for her and accidentally made GNOME the default display manager, and she said to me that GNOME was much easier to use. That came as a bit of a surprise to me.
Each to their own. One thing Gnome does have over KDE is it doesn't present you 100 options for every little thing. For a lot of people, "not being inundated with options which I don't really understand or care about" is a big plus.
Not a waste of space if the OS gets hosed, as it was in the case I cited.
IBM also supply an application to make recovery CDs using the data in the recovery partition, and when I had to get a disk replaced under warranty (and explained that I didn't have recovery CDs) they were nice enough to send those out gratis as well.
I know this wont help when windows wont boot out of the box (what are the odds though, also could be a sign of tampering/tin-foil hat) but that's what you bought the warranty for. You did buy the warranty didn't you?
No. I live in a country where if something doesn't work from the moment you get it out of the box, you're perfectly entitled to demand a refund or replacement and there's nothing the supplier can do about it unless you were warned of this possibility before you made the purchase (ie. it was sold "as seen").
Vista did not manage to recover from the aborted install process the previous day and got lost in an infinite loop of reboots. (I wonder what people do with a power outage during install as there was no such thing as a Vista-CD delivered...)
And I've noticed that some OEMs aren't setting up a "recovery" partition (basically, a second partition which can be booted directly from the BIOS which reinstalls the OS) any more. Not good at all. Heck, I took delivery of a PC only last week where there was no hardware fault from the factory, but there was something wrong with the OEM Windows install and it was stuck in a reboot loop. Didn't bother me as we've got a Windows site license so I could rebuild from our own media anyway, but that's not really the point.
Infringing on States' rights are perfectly acceptable.
There would be little point in having a federal government if it didn't have the power under some set of circumstances to tell the individual states that they will do as they are damn well told.
at Microsoft or they're hiring stand-up comedians.
This is the company that wanted to decommoditize standards and protocols, yet they come out with the line "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards"
IANAL but I don't think the judge should rule for anyone if either plaintiff or defendant is outside the judges jurisdiction. And as Spamhaus isn't US based, they're outside of the judges jurisdiction.
The only thing they can't sensibly do now is set up business on US soil, but why would they need to do that?
I don't know about you guys in the US, but here in the UK I trust the average phone company about as far as I can throw them, their telephone exchange and all the fat arseholes who run the place.
Most of what I've seen so far says "This will make them easy targets". Yet the only way I can make sense of this is as follows:
1. Every computer has an identical OS build on it (most enterprises have something like this already in place - nobody in their right mind wants to support 100 slightly different builds).
2. That build is locked down thoroughly, so only necessary services run. (Most enterprises probably don't go quite that far, but in an environment where you're very concerned about security you might).
2a. This probably applies to local functions as well as remote services. So things like ActiveX configuration is probably nailed down as well.
3. Applications which require admin rights are verboten. (Not always very feasible in the real world right now, but high time someone put their foot down and said "if you want to sell us software, it must run as a restricted user". Certainly the assumption on/. that everyone out there has admin rights to their work PC "because they have to" is complete rubbish - I don't think I've ever seen that).
I don't see how this is any different to a policy of demanding that anything which goes directly on the Internet has all unnecessary services turned off, no unnecessary software installed and ensuring that which you do have to run is secured as much as possible - and that's generally considered best practise. What's the problem?
I don't have a problem with a record industry in principle, provided it can produce records I want to buy without suing the hell out of everyone. I'd dearly love to be able to walk into a record shop and have a strong chance of finding something that's worth parting with my money for. This used to happen fairly regularly in when I was in my teens, but I had substantially less money then so a lot of the time I didn't buy the CD.
Now it's 10 years later, I've got a full-time job and some real disposable income, and even if I can find something half-decent (unlikely), I feel bad about buying it and in the process supporting an industry which seems to think that the way forward is to issue press releases about how it is proudly suing people in their formative years who could otherwise grow up to be some of their best customers.
Am I the only one who thinks this reads like advert in an attempt to get more capital?
Every other sentence was "Analysts think...". Which can be loosely translated into English as "At a wild guess, we reckon...."
They don't give a concrete release date for the product or any price more detailed than "less than $300". There's no point in producing this piece right now for the benefit of potential customers because all a potential customer can do is gawp at the video. They can't buy the product, they can't even see it for themselves at a local computer store. Similarly, seeing as there's obviously an intent to commercialise the product, there's no sense in this piece existing purely for the benefit of researchers (and besides, it hardly looks like a research paper).
they would have to explain how a 100 million year old organism fits into a world of only 6 thousand years old.
Dead easy. Nobody's been around for 100 million years to observe this organism, so you just say that the scientists clearly don't have a reliable means of measuring age because they keep discovering things which are older than the universe itself.
True, but it wouldn't be entirely out of character for RedHat to buy out another company which has almost done it through reverse engineering, and complete the process with the documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel is no longer leading as they have in yeas past
Did they ever? Maybe for desktop PCs, but not for chips in general. The DEC Alpha chip was way ahead of anything Intel had at the time.
Quick! Make sure anyone making a bomb doesn't festoon it with flashing LEDs!
True in some businesses.
But if you're speccing up a web application that you can be fairly certain will be used by hundreds of people simultaneously, then it's useful to know.
Of course, if you're speccing up the system that this web app is going to run under and you don't test performance before you go live, you'll come unstuck sooner or later anyhow.
the problem is in mass adoption and making it nearly thoughtless to do so that is the difficulty.
/. (and probably their immediate families) are aware that it's trivially easy to make an email look convincingly like it came from someone else.
I think you possibly underestimate how big a problem that is.
In the days of snail mail, it was pretty uncommon for you to receive a letter purporting to be from someone it wasn't. Certainly not, say, a letter from your bank saying "We've accidentally gone and deleted all your verification information, please reply within 7 working days to the address above enclosing your full name, account number and signature" - partly because it would have been cost-prohibitive, partly because it would have been found out as soon as the first person contacted the real bank and then all they need to do to catch you is hang around outside the PO Box you've set up and wait for you to collect your mail.
Today, of course, that's very different. But the perception is much the same - relatively few people outside of the sort of techies you see on
I'm not too bothered about an email I send to a friend chatting about nothing in particular being intercepted. What I am bothered about is communication which I consider sensitive - mainly, it has direct impact on my finances or concerns something I don't want a particular person getting at (for instance, I might not want my partner to know I'm humping Ellie the Sheep - but in that case it's too much to ask Ellie to understand encryption - far easier to just setup a hotmail account for that).
This means digital signing and encryption is only really interesting where I need to communicate with someone and a disposable hotmail account is not appropriate - mostly, banks. But they've always accepted a certain degree of fraud, and are used to working with law enforcement. Unless and until they're financially liable for every penny of it, and the amount of fraud going on goes over what they consider "acceptable", they won't be demanding that their customers use signed email anytime soon. Most of them have found an alternative option anyway: send the actual content of messages through a web-based interface and all they email you is a note saying "log into your bank account, there's a message for you there".
To which you respond by asking what they would think if the company had installed windows on all of these boxes without paying for a single license.
Technically correct. But it's the person citing it as a "danger" of using Linux who winds up with a nice long op-ed piece written up on every single ZDNet-owned news site. The people saying "what if you used Windows without paying for a license?" are simply repeating that on Slashdot - not the kind of place that's generally accepted as a source when the CTO asks what all the fuss was about.
Besides, the "danger" of having to release your precious IP is often perceived to be much worse than the danger of having to pay a few million to Microsoft, particularly in an economy which is increasingly based around IP.
Why is the parent modded +5 Funny?
Because it's a rework of an old joke about Macs.
How can this be insightful? This is a reworking of an old troll, which originally went like this:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
the bookstore or shoestore could lower their prices and compete with amazon if you paid $20 dollars at the door just to get into the store. There'd be no incentive to buy online as the price in the store would be the same.
Yes there would. I wouldn't be charged $20 just for the privilege of browsing Amazon's website.
So in theory, you could have a brain transplant from a sheep and it would work fine, except your vocabulary would be little more than "Baaa" and you'd do nothing but eat grass all day?
However, when the barrier to entry for a given market is unusually high, I'd expect that a cartel situation could continue more or less indefinitely - or at least until such time as the barrier drops.
/. so loves to hate - is a classic example here. It's been operated by a cartel for years, and while the barrier to "getting music properly recorded so it doesn't sound appalling" has plummeted, the barrier to "getting music mass marketed so it actually gets some people buying it and gets people interested in going to see the artists perform live" is still very high. It's looking like the Internet can erode that substantially though, so perhaps within 5 years the cartel will fall apart.
The record industry - that one that
I once upgraded the system for her and accidentally made GNOME the default display manager, and she said to me that GNOME was much easier to use. That came as a bit of a surprise to me.
Each to their own. One thing Gnome does have over KDE is it doesn't present you 100 options for every little thing. For a lot of people, "not being inundated with options which I don't really understand or care about" is a big plus.
Not a waste of space if the OS gets hosed, as it was in the case I cited.
IBM also supply an application to make recovery CDs using the data in the recovery partition, and when I had to get a disk replaced under warranty (and explained that I didn't have recovery CDs) they were nice enough to send those out gratis as well.
I know this wont help when windows wont boot out of the box (what are the odds though, also could be a sign of tampering /tin-foil hat) but that's what you bought the warranty for. You did buy the warranty didn't you?
No. I live in a country where if something doesn't work from the moment you get it out of the box, you're perfectly entitled to demand a refund or replacement and there's nothing the supplier can do about it unless you were warned of this possibility before you made the purchase (ie. it was sold "as seen").
Note the following line:
Vista did not manage to recover from the aborted install process the previous day and got lost in an infinite loop of reboots. (I wonder what people do with a power outage during install as there was no such thing as a Vista-CD delivered...)
And I've noticed that some OEMs aren't setting up a "recovery" partition (basically, a second partition which can be booted directly from the BIOS which reinstalls the OS) any more. Not good at all. Heck, I took delivery of a PC only last week where there was no hardware fault from the factory, but there was something wrong with the OEM Windows install and it was stuck in a reboot loop. Didn't bother me as we've got a Windows site license so I could rebuild from our own media anyway, but that's not really the point.
Infringing on States' rights are perfectly acceptable.
There would be little point in having a federal government if it didn't have the power under some set of circumstances to tell the individual states that they will do as they are damn well told.
at Microsoft or they're hiring stand-up comedians.
This is the company that wanted to decommoditize standards and protocols, yet they come out with the line "The Web is built on open standards and we at Microsoft believe that we have to enable those open standards"
IANAL but I don't think the judge should rule for anyone if either plaintiff or defendant is outside the judges jurisdiction. And as Spamhaus isn't US based, they're outside of the judges jurisdiction.
The only thing they can't sensibly do now is set up business on US soil, but why would they need to do that?
otherwise the telephone industry may lose trust.
MAY lose trust?
I don't know about you guys in the US, but here in the UK I trust the average phone company about as far as I can throw them, their telephone exchange and all the fat arseholes who run the place.
Most of what I've seen so far says "This will make them easy targets". Yet the only way I can make sense of this is as follows:
/. that everyone out there has admin rights to their work PC "because they have to" is complete rubbish - I don't think I've ever seen that).
1. Every computer has an identical OS build on it (most enterprises have something like this already in place - nobody in their right mind wants to support 100 slightly different builds).
2. That build is locked down thoroughly, so only necessary services run. (Most enterprises probably don't go quite that far, but in an environment where you're very concerned about security you might).
2a. This probably applies to local functions as well as remote services. So things like ActiveX configuration is probably nailed down as well.
3. Applications which require admin rights are verboten. (Not always very feasible in the real world right now, but high time someone put their foot down and said "if you want to sell us software, it must run as a restricted user". Certainly the assumption on
I don't see how this is any different to a policy of demanding that anything which goes directly on the Internet has all unnecessary services turned off, no unnecessary software installed and ensuring that which you do have to run is secured as much as possible - and that's generally considered best practise. What's the problem?
I don't have a problem with a record industry in principle, provided it can produce records I want to buy without suing the hell out of everyone. I'd dearly love to be able to walk into a record shop and have a strong chance of finding something that's worth parting with my money for. This used to happen fairly regularly in when I was in my teens, but I had substantially less money then so a lot of the time I didn't buy the CD.
Now it's 10 years later, I've got a full-time job and some real disposable income, and even if I can find something half-decent (unlikely), I feel bad about buying it and in the process supporting an industry which seems to think that the way forward is to issue press releases about how it is proudly suing people in their formative years who could otherwise grow up to be some of their best customers.
True, but it seems to be only in the last 6-8 years where "sell bubble gum tripe" has been to the almost total exclusion of everything else.
Am I the only one who thinks this reads like advert in an attempt to get more capital?
Every other sentence was "Analysts think...". Which can be loosely translated into English as "At a wild guess, we reckon...."
They don't give a concrete release date for the product or any price more detailed than "less than $300". There's no point in producing this piece right now for the benefit of potential customers because all a potential customer can do is gawp at the video. They can't buy the product, they can't even see it for themselves at a local computer store. Similarly, seeing as there's obviously an intent to commercialise the product, there's no sense in this piece existing purely for the benefit of researchers (and besides, it hardly looks like a research paper).
I think someone's venture capital is running out.
Tennants are people who live in a building owned by someone else.
That's Tenants you're thinking of.
Tennants is an auctioneer in Yorkshire, UK.
Not to be confused with Tennents, which is a popular lager in Scotland (and Tennents Super, which is popular with tramps).
Dead easy. Nobody's been around for 100 million years to observe this organism, so you just say that the scientists clearly don't have a reliable means of measuring age because they keep discovering things which are older than the universe itself.
True, but it wouldn't be entirely out of character for RedHat to buy out another company which has almost done it through reverse engineering, and complete the process with the documentation.