They've been doing that for corporate customers for some time. I can get onto licensing.microsoft.com and download the install files (either ISOs or a compressed copy of the setup files) for pretty much all Microsoft's current products.
We had a similar thing at Uni. The printers were free but were nailed to double-sided, economy mode.
Fortunately, the admins were nice enough to leave it setup so that it respected the lp -o raw command. Produce a postscript file of your printout and send it straight there, comes out exactly as you intended.
The people buying SCSI drives are going to be attaching them as part of a honking great array. The biggest concern is speed, and you get that by spreading the data across as many drives as you can.
73GB doesn't sound so bad when you multiply it by 12 for the number of disks you plan to use.
Don't get too excited. They're being sold in relatively small capacities of 36 and 73GB. The reason for this is that any large business wants maximum throughput from the disks - and the way you do this is by spreading the data across as many disks as you can, usually in a RAID5. Who cares if you've only got 73GB/disk capacity when you'll probably stick a dozen of them in a server and get 730GB capacity (losing one as parity and reserving one as a hotspare)?
The upshot of this is it's quite reasonable to expect a large server room to have hundreds of disks. 182 years MTBF and 360 disks means you can expect about two failures per year.
GPS is only accurate to within a few metres for position. It's MUCH more accurate for speed.
So? The point of my original post was that "a few metres for position" is inadequate in a built up area. I don't care how fast it thinks I'm going.
My exact words: one simple misreading of the location and suddenly my car drops from 65mph to 30 in 65mph traffic
And your first sentence suggests that such a case is indeed possible. The GPS gets my location to "within a few metres", decides I'm doing 65mph on a road which has a 30mph limit (I'm not, the road is 65mph but I'm only a few metres from a road with a 30mph limit) and limits the car accordingly. Ten seconds later, I'm dead.
Don't know about you, but I live in a very densely populated area with a lot of very close roads. One in particular is a 65mph limit which intersections (and for a few miles, runs parallel to) 30mph roads.
GPS is only accurate to within a few metres. Sure, it might be possible to increase this accuracy but you're talking major cash there. Assuming you don't, one simple misreading of the location and suddenly my car drops from 65mph to 30 in 65mph traffic. Your "built in GPS speed limiter" would probably kill me.
And if your bank has the good sense to block you from being allowed to access telephone banking after a small number of attempts, then suddenly it becomes much less of an issue.
Once they loose this battle, they are gone for good; they are aware of that, and so they are squeezing every penny out of the established customer base.
They seemed fairly sure of this back when they were arguing the Sony/Betamax case.
Until recently. Okay, they hired some people with ideas which seem a bit at odds with Free software (cf. Mono), but I didn't see any great problem with Novell until they made their deal with Microsoft.
Everyone has their price, and the media industry and Microsoft between them have deep pockets.
Had it been any other sort of technology, filing a patent for it and then refusing to license it, thus crippling adoption of that technology, would be considered a terrible thing on/. But in the case of DRM and RedHat, I think most would make an exception.
But I'm still not that excited. Most on/. thought Novell was a fine upstanding company until recently.
Only because computers and telephony as we know them now didn't exist at the time, so instead he pictured a whole army of people employed by the government to go through the information.
Maybe in the US it is, but in the UK we have data protection legislation so the only agencies that have access to everything are law enforcement (and even the police need to jump through hoops for some bits of that).
Y'know, if you add every government department up, the public sector is one of the biggest single employers in almost any first-world country. Much bigger than any one company. Given the typical government approach to security (one password and you're in to everything), do you really want your neighbour who works as a receptionist in the doctor's surgery to be able - even in theory - to view your tax records?
We already have an equivalent of the US social security number - the National Insurance number. Your doctor has it, the taxman has it, the benefits office have it. Why can't they just tie that up with an address? That way everyone knows about a change of address, but the taxman still doesn't have to know about that nasty rash you had last year.
Funny, all the equipment I have with 4-hour contracts with Dell, 4 hours means 4 hours. Not "when we feel like it". And my previous employer used IBM servers and again, 4 hours was 4 hours.
Granted, that doesn't extend to desktop PCs, but desktop PCs are cheap enough that it's not too hard to keep a spare or two. (Though of course, schools don't tend to keep lots of spare kit hanging around...)
I've worked in a school myself. The school had been burned by RM in the past - though only for a handful of PCs, not an entire infrastructure - and it was a private school so they weren't afraid to go elsewhere. Didn't stop them from digging up some abysmal companies to buy IT-related products and services from though.
Tell me, do RM still operate a policy whereby they reserve the right to take "refusal to support" as far as "refusal to support you ever again for ANYTHING as soon as you admit to plugging in something which isn't RM".
By which I mean "We can't replace the power supply that's just exploded in your server in building B because you installed a non-approved printer in building A on an unrelated desktop PC and that might have affected it"?
No different to Ghost in principle, except with Ghost you can create a bootable floppy which will burn to CD - so you don't have to do any of this "remove hard disk and plug into USB" stuff.
Which I'd love to do (and as I've said elsewhere, it's my plan B), but my main concern is that I don't have uniform hardware and I have about 5 different user profiles. The nature of the business means I can't really rationalise that.
You missed out "refusal to support you as soon as you buy anything which isn't RM".
And it's not just RM, so don't for one minute think they're the only culprits. There are two ways to run an IT business in the UK - the first is to provide good products & support at a fair price.
The second is to hire a bunch of chimpanzees and produce flyers which say "We're specialists in education!" then send these flyers to every school you can think of. I have so many horror stories coming out of my ears from working for just one year in a UK school. While Windows '9x is thankfully long dead and buried, I don't doubt for one minute that the various companies providing services to education within the UK are able to make IT techs lives miserable in all sorts of other ways.
The old adage about the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king is so true in education. In this case, however, the one-eyed man has a horrific cataract and is advised by the most crooked bunch you've ever met.
Slashdot Mirror
The new version of minesweeper rocks! Don't have that on you Mac, do you?
No, because my mac allows me to get on with things rather than fighting a constant battle with the OS.
They've been doing that for corporate customers for some time. I can get onto licensing.microsoft.com and download the install files (either ISOs or a compressed copy of the setup files) for pretty much all Microsoft's current products.
according to a guy in a RIAA jacket who spoke to a FOX reporter on camera after the raid, copyright infringers usually carry drugs and weapons.
Wonderful. How long before an 80-year old granny is arrested at gunpoint for letting her grandson use the computer to download music?
We had a similar thing at Uni. The printers were free but were nailed to double-sided, economy mode.
Fortunately, the admins were nice enough to leave it setup so that it respected the lp -o raw command. Produce a postscript file of your printout and send it straight there, comes out exactly as you intended.
Yet those same people give me funny looks when I ask them what their salary is and why they're wearing clothes.
All hardware sucks.
All software sucks.
If you haven't yet learned this, you've not spent enough time in IT.
The people buying SCSI drives are going to be attaching them as part of a honking great array. The biggest concern is speed, and you get that by spreading the data across as many drives as you can.
73GB doesn't sound so bad when you multiply it by 12 for the number of disks you plan to use.
Don't get too excited. They're being sold in relatively small capacities of 36 and 73GB. The reason for this is that any large business wants maximum throughput from the disks - and the way you do this is by spreading the data across as many disks as you can, usually in a RAID5. Who cares if you've only got 73GB/disk capacity when you'll probably stick a dozen of them in a server and get 730GB capacity (losing one as parity and reserving one as a hotspare)?
The upshot of this is it's quite reasonable to expect a large server room to have hundreds of disks. 182 years MTBF and 360 disks means you can expect about two failures per year.
GPS is only accurate to within a few metres for position. It's MUCH more accurate for speed.
So? The point of my original post was that "a few metres for position" is inadequate in a built up area. I don't care how fast it thinks I'm going.
My exact words: one simple misreading of the location and suddenly my car drops from 65mph to 30 in 65mph traffic
And your first sentence suggests that such a case is indeed possible. The GPS gets my location to "within a few metres", decides I'm doing 65mph on a road which has a 30mph limit (I'm not, the road is 65mph but I'm only a few metres from a road with a 30mph limit) and limits the car accordingly. Ten seconds later, I'm dead.
Don't know about you, but I live in a very densely populated area with a lot of very close roads. One in particular is a 65mph limit which intersections (and for a few miles, runs parallel to) 30mph roads.
GPS is only accurate to within a few metres. Sure, it might be possible to increase this accuracy but you're talking major cash there. Assuming you don't, one simple misreading of the location and suddenly my car drops from 65mph to 30 in 65mph traffic. Your "built in GPS speed limiter" would probably kill me.
Wasn't something very similar true of the Dreamcast?
And if your bank has the good sense to block you from being allowed to access telephone banking after a small number of attempts, then suddenly it becomes much less of an issue.
Once they loose this battle, they are gone for good; they are aware of that, and so they are squeezing every penny out of the established customer base.
They seemed fairly sure of this back when they were arguing the Sony/Betamax case.
True, but the set of people who work for the tax department's a lot smaller, and thus easier to police for abuse.
Until recently. Okay, they hired some people with ideas which seem a bit at odds with Free software (cf. Mono), but I didn't see any great problem with Novell until they made their deal with Microsoft.
Everyone has their price, and the media industry and Microsoft between them have deep pockets.
Had it been any other sort of technology, filing a patent for it and then refusing to license it, thus crippling adoption of that technology, would be considered a terrible thing on /. But in the case of DRM and RedHat, I think most would make an exception.
/. thought Novell was a fine upstanding company until recently.
But I'm still not that excited. Most on
Only because computers and telephony as we know them now didn't exist at the time, so instead he pictured a whole army of people employed by the government to go through the information.
Maybe in the US it is, but in the UK we have data protection legislation so the only agencies that have access to everything are law enforcement (and even the police need to jump through hoops for some bits of that).
Y'know, if you add every government department up, the public sector is one of the biggest single employers in almost any first-world country. Much bigger than any one company. Given the typical government approach to security (one password and you're in to everything), do you really want your neighbour who works as a receptionist in the doctor's surgery to be able - even in theory - to view your tax records?
It's not an obviously silly objection.
We already have an equivalent of the US social security number - the National Insurance number. Your doctor has it, the taxman has it, the benefits office have it. Why can't they just tie that up with an address? That way everyone knows about a change of address, but the taxman still doesn't have to know about that nasty rash you had last year.
It's already happened:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0312004/
Funny, all the equipment I have with 4-hour contracts with Dell, 4 hours means 4 hours. Not "when we feel like it". And my previous employer used IBM servers and again, 4 hours was 4 hours.
Granted, that doesn't extend to desktop PCs, but desktop PCs are cheap enough that it's not too hard to keep a spare or two. (Though of course, schools don't tend to keep lots of spare kit hanging around...)
I've worked in a school myself. The school had been burned by RM in the past - though only for a handful of PCs, not an entire infrastructure - and it was a private school so they weren't afraid to go elsewhere. Didn't stop them from digging up some abysmal companies to buy IT-related products and services from though.
Tell me, do RM still operate a policy whereby they reserve the right to take "refusal to support" as far as "refusal to support you ever again for ANYTHING as soon as you admit to plugging in something which isn't RM".
By which I mean "We can't replace the power supply that's just exploded in your server in building B because you installed a non-approved printer in building A on an unrelated desktop PC and that might have affected it"?
No different to Ghost in principle, except with Ghost you can create a bootable floppy which will burn to CD - so you don't have to do any of this "remove hard disk and plug into USB" stuff.
Which I'd love to do (and as I've said elsewhere, it's my plan B), but my main concern is that I don't have uniform hardware and I have about 5 different user profiles. The nature of the business means I can't really rationalise that.
You missed out "refusal to support you as soon as you buy anything which isn't RM".
And it's not just RM, so don't for one minute think they're the only culprits. There are two ways to run an IT business in the UK - the first is to provide good products & support at a fair price.
The second is to hire a bunch of chimpanzees and produce flyers which say "We're specialists in education!" then send these flyers to every school you can think of. I have so many horror stories coming out of my ears from working for just one year in a UK school. While Windows '9x is thankfully long dead and buried, I don't doubt for one minute that the various companies providing services to education within the UK are able to make IT techs lives miserable in all sorts of other ways.
The old adage about the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king is so true in education. In this case, however, the one-eyed man has a horrific cataract and is advised by the most crooked bunch you've ever met.
Is this the same Becta who was criticised for excluding providers of Open Source software in November last year?
c urement_criticised/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/29/becta_pro
I think we should be told.