I always told my team that if we (the admins) do our job right, nobody knows we are here.
Kind of a two edged sword when budget time comes around. That's why it is always good to have a network traffic generator connected to the network that can be switched on and off easily.:)
What kind of crap is that? If you can not get the same answer twice for a question then what good is it? Must be something that Microsoft is cooking up. They must have expanded the scope of the calculator error they introduced in the early versions of windows and thought that would be a good thing.
I don't want to fly in any airplane that is designed using such a system. Can see it now, pilot checks distance to destination and checks on board fuel supplies and is told by the system that he has enough. Half way to the destination he checks again and finds that the system says there is not enough fuel to complete the flight. Opps, lost another plane full of pesky humans.
True, but the big companies are exporting this stuff to Europe and other countries. Take the software patent stuff. It was great that the EU appears to have blocked it temporarly but they will keep trying until it passes. The same will happen with this other stuff. Microsoft is figuring out how to get everyone in India to buy a copy of Windows. They will get it wrong the first few times but the market is just to big for them to ignore. And if they can't get the consumer on the hook by them selves they will enlist the governments to force it on the populations.
So now that icons can preview my documents does this mean a whole new class of icon viruses?
And how much of the document does it preview? Could this present a HIPPA violation by having patients files exposed on the desktops at the doctors office?
Just what we need, the OS actually accessing the contents of your documents to generate pretty pictures just smacks of potential exploits and security holes.
Won't this depend on the laws that get passed? Microsoft saw the error of their ways during the anti-trust suits. Most likely they now own more congress critters than anyone else. As they slowly push the grand plan forward laws will be passed making it illegal to sell systems that don't have various hooks in them that requier some proprietary protocol or key to make the system boot. And if it costs the government more to buy such systems they will see it as an economic recovery program, spending lots of money to jump start the economy.
The government will just tax us more pay for such changes. Rarely if ever does the over all tax rate go down. And if it does it is for a short period of time.
Time to stock up on BIOS based systems. Once they get this change pushed through all new systems will be forced to ship with EFI. And the bets are running toward them incorporating some kind of DRM which will prevent alternative OSes from running on these new systems.
20 years from now there will be a huge market for "free" computers that don't have EFI/DRM built into the system. Of course by then it will be illegal to connect a non EFI/DRM system to the Internet. But a persitant group of hackers will devise numerous methods to mask "free" computers from the corporate Internet police (CIP) which routinely scan all systems connected to the Internet looking for non-compliant systems. And in further efforts to eliminate the hacker menace the new EFI standards will be designed to scan a computers hard drives looking for signs of any activity deemed illegal by the CIP. This of course leads to several people having their doors knocked down and flash bangs thrown through the windows as the CIP confiscates their systems when they find more than a few dozen mp3 files on the users computer systems which don't have proper DRM tags.
Many more people will have their systems confiscated and accounts frozen when their computers report back that they used certain terms in IM sessions and email such as "she was the bomb last night!"
Of course the system will omit everything but the term "bomb".
Let's start a campaign to do away with daylight savings time entirely. It serves no purpose. If people want to get up later or earlier then they can do that. Setting clocks ahead and back is silly.
This is what passes for news on slashdot now? A group of people don't follow basic email practices and cause a minor flurry of emails in their own group and you think this is news?
Can't wait for the dupes to show up in a few days.
Re:Threw my Amiga 1000 and Amiga 2000 away last ye
on
Happy Birthday, Amiga
·
· Score: 1
It took me a few years to work up to throwing them out. But I kept having to move them around in the closet and finally got tired of that and realized I would never start them up again.
I would like to know how much the other person that replied would pay for those systems. A quick check on ebay and A1000's are apparently going for less than $50.00. I don't call that real money.:)
Not even worth the trouble to post it to ebay.
Threw my Amiga 1000 and Amiga 2000 away last year
on
Happy Birthday, Amiga
·
· Score: 1
I finally ended up throwing my A1000 and A2000 away last year. Had been sitting in the closet for many years. Thought about trying to find another home for them but figured no one would know what to do with them. And I did not want to put them in a garage sale and have to answer the question "Does it come with Windows" every time someone looked at them.
I opened up the A1000 to look at the signatures on the inside of the case one more time. Then set it out on the curb along with the A2000. Got many years of work out of both systems. Ran UUCP and was pulling a partial USENET feed during much of that time.
I still laugh at times thinking that back then we had a system that could do full multitasking with a fantastic winowed operating system in as little as 256K of memory. And the system was stable, ran them 24x7.
Don't just change it, get rid of it!
If it is beneficial for people to start work an hour earlier or later then change the start time to 7 or 9am, don't change the clocks. Who said people have to start work at 8am?
Does XP ship with SP2? I think the problem is that most people have to load an XP system which does not have SP2 on it. To get SP2 they have to connect to the Internet and download it. If they get scanned and attacked prior to getting SP2 installed the game is over.:)
The answer to why is simple. The patent office has allowed think tanks and companies to get patents for almost everything. Not that they actually plan to do anything with the patent, it just gets added to a portfolio that they can then sue over to make money for their shareholders.
The ability to inovate has become more difficult because of this.
VCRs will start to go away once DVD recorders are widely available and DVD media (dual layer) is at or below $2.00 a disk.
As for the reasons VCRs are still in wide use, it is still difficult or impossible to put 6 hours of recordings on a disc. Tapes have their place at the moment because of this. Once DVDs can be burned with that capacity easily by the casual end user then VCRs will start to be replaced.
Personally I recently built a Mythtv box. It has pretty much eliminated the need for a VCR for recording TV. The Mythtv box also has the added benefit of being able to mark and automatically jump over most commercials. I have pretty much stopped watching so called live TV, prefering instead to record the show and watch it later.
At the moment I have no need to save recordings beyond the time needed to watch them. An easy way to copy shows to DVD may be available but I have not spent the time to sort out this process yet.:)
End users that don't have a terrabyte of disk in their DVR may need some way easy way to record those shows to DVD for later viewing. Until that is available VCRs will still have a place.
One of the disconnects was in the original series the impression given was that the empire was extremely old. But after the latest series of movies it is obvious the empire only lasted at best about 20 years, the time it takes Luke to grow up.
Obi Wan apparently aged a lot in those 20 years, I guess hiding from the Empire wears you down.:)
So where do we find dilithium crytals for the next step in this experiment? This is obviously where this is going. They are currently using the wrong crystals to get to break even and positive energy return.
Why would an advanced civilization die out? Assuming of course they avoid the self extermination period (which we are still in) and have successfully expanded into their own solar system or even to a few nearby star systems? If they simply get to the point of establishing perminent space colonies in orbit around various planets in their own solar system, again assuming they are past the point of self extermination, about the only thing that may wipe them out is if their sun goes nova.
Once you get self sustaining colonies on other planets, near or far, many dooms day scenerios are eliminated, such as comet or astroid strikes. Assuming they are intelligent and can continue to solve problems as they come up there is not reason to believe that such a civilization would not continue forever. Kind of likes Newton's law of motion, unless a civilization is contacted by an outside force it should continue on forever. The idea that civilizations fall just because they must is a fallacy. Ancient civilizations here on earth fell due to external pressures, primarly due to other civilizations or barbarians forcing their way into new territory.
Hopefully we are almost out of that phase. Assuming we don't kill our selves off and we solve the problems needed to establish colonies on the Moon, Mars, Jupiters's moons, and farther out there is no reason to believe that we as a species won't survive virtually forever.
And the question was is there intelligent life out there. The answer is yes there is. The better question is would we recognize it and is it close enough for us or them to make contact? At the present time we don't have the technology yet to reach very far out and as such contact is unlikely. The lack of contact or current ability to make contact does not mean intelligent life is not out there.:)
I don't really agree with the bad timing argument. I assume you state that as the reason we have not been visited or have other evidence of intelligent life out there.
The simplest reason is simply the distances involved. The size of the universe and the number of planets where life may exist is huge. Per Drake's equation the number of planets that develop intelligent life will be a subset of the total that have life. Even so the numbers are huge so there must be intelligent life out there somewhere.
We have no evidence of that since we have only explored portions of this solar system and the distances involved are so huge as to make it very difficult for anyone to travel between systems. True, you will most likely not find the density of diverse intelleginces shown in Star Wars. But with all the opportunities out there it must exist. And even if they could travel here what reason would they have to make such a trip? Most likely there are resources closer to home that are available rather than coming here.
And any suitably advanced civilization would move out from their home planet to secure new resources. We have an abundance of resources here in this solar system. Once we start tapping into those resources we won't have to go any farther for hundreds or possibly thousands of years if we don't want to.
Drake's equation calculates just that. And with the most conservative values assigned it is almost certain that there are other intelligent life forms out there somewhere.
Now as to the question of if they have visited us or even know we are here. The answer is almost certainly no. People have used alien visitation to try to explain things they don't understand. And it is a handy insurance write off for the cattle ranchers when one of their cows dies.
Of course I'm not convinced that there is intelligent life here on Earth. Just watch the nightly news for evidence that there is no intelligent life here.
How about we prove there is intelligent life here on earth?
Drake's equation even with very conservative values assigned pretty much guarntees there is intelligent life some where out there in the universe. I just think it a little conceited of anyone thinking that we may represent the only intelligent life in the universe.
Obviously those that think that failed to understand basic math and the concept of really large numbers.:)
I stated a similar opinion early last year just after Microsoft announced they were issuing a huge one time dividend. Microsoft is figuring out how to extract as much money as they can before their stock starts the long decline.
Expect to see Microsoft making similar disbursments over the next few years. This will do two things, it will keep a lot of their share holders holding the stock and allow them to stuff their pockets with cash.
It is funny that in the last few weeks we learned that AT&T is being bought up by SBC. AT&T used to be the huge monopoly everyone hated. Their slide started about 6 or 7 years ago. It should have been obvious to most people when they sold off NCR, cable operations, wireless, and the other stuff. AT&T became unfocused on what they were and in order to show profits they started selling portions of themselves instead of stepping into the broadband consumer market and taking over. Maybe they were afraid of being a monopoly in that market and getting broken up again. Of course the most telling indication is when Armstrong duped a good share of the employees into investing in Wireless and then dropping the bomb three days later.
It will take many years for Microsoft to decline. The next telling item will be how long it take longhorn to come out and just how the business world takes to it. I suspect if Microsoft keeps the licensing the way they changed it (yearly lease of the OS and packages) that many companies will opt to try a different OS for their servers and workstations. Linux is good enough on the server end to display Microsoft and arguably good enough for the desktop now. Another year and Linux may become the default standard on the desktop, finally breaking Microsofts stangle hold. At that point the decline will accelarate. Microsoft will thrash around trying to invent the next BIG thing that everyone must have. And each time they will miss the mark, by just enough that others will swoop in and take that market. Look at the tablet PC and thier attempt at the handheld markets. X-box is another example. They only have about 27% of the market running third behind Sony and Nintendo. Will be interesting to see how that develops over the next few years. Of course I hardly think Microsoft can survive at its present scale as just another game box company.
Expect Microsoft to try to "re-invent" themselves several times over the next 10 years. Each time they slip a little further down the spiral just like AT&T did.
Like most companies you restrict travel, hold invoices for extended periods, drop maintenance plans, put off upgrades, and the best option is to fire most of the staff. That last one really looks good on the bottom line, at least the first year.
Slashdot Mirror
I always told my team that if we (the admins) do our job right, nobody knows we are here.
:)
Kind of a two edged sword when budget time comes around. That's why it is always good to have a network traffic generator connected to the network that can be switched on and off easily.
What kind of crap is that? If you can not get the same answer twice for a question then what good is it? Must be something that Microsoft is cooking up. They must have expanded the scope of the calculator error they introduced in the early versions of windows and thought that would be a good thing.
I don't want to fly in any airplane that is designed using such a system. Can see it now, pilot checks distance to destination and checks on board fuel supplies and is told by the system that he has enough. Half way to the destination he checks again and finds that the system says there is not enough fuel to complete the flight. Opps, lost another plane full of pesky humans.
Computers 185 humans 0.
True, but the big companies are exporting this stuff to Europe and other countries. Take the software patent stuff. It was great that the EU appears to have blocked it temporarly but they will keep trying until it passes. The same will happen with this other stuff. Microsoft is figuring out how to get everyone in India to buy a copy of Windows. They will get it wrong the first few times but the market is just to big for them to ignore. And if they can't get the consumer on the hook by them selves they will enlist the governments to force it on the populations.
So now that icons can preview my documents does this mean a whole new class of icon viruses?
And how much of the document does it preview? Could this present a HIPPA violation by having patients files exposed on the desktops at the doctors office?
Just what we need, the OS actually accessing the contents of your documents to generate pretty pictures just smacks of potential exploits and security holes.
Actually I'm hoping for a series of movies depicting how this unfolds over the next few decades.
:)
The series will be called "Free Hack".
Won't this depend on the laws that get passed? Microsoft saw the error of their ways during the anti-trust suits. Most likely they now own more congress critters than anyone else. As they slowly push the grand plan forward laws will be passed making it illegal to sell systems that don't have various hooks in them that requier some proprietary protocol or key to make the system boot. And if it costs the government more to buy such systems they will see it as an economic recovery program, spending lots of money to jump start the economy.
The government will just tax us more pay for such changes. Rarely if ever does the over all tax rate go down. And if it does it is for a short period of time.
Time to stock up on BIOS based systems. Once they get this change pushed through all new systems will be forced to ship with EFI. And the bets are running toward them incorporating some kind of DRM which will prevent alternative OSes from running on these new systems.
20 years from now there will be a huge market for "free" computers that don't have EFI/DRM built into the system. Of course by then it will be illegal to connect a non EFI/DRM system to the Internet. But a persitant group of hackers will devise numerous methods to mask "free" computers from the corporate Internet police (CIP) which routinely scan all systems connected to the Internet looking for non-compliant systems. And in further efforts to eliminate the hacker menace the new EFI standards will be designed to scan a computers hard drives looking for signs of any activity deemed illegal by the CIP. This of course leads to several people having their doors knocked down and flash bangs thrown through the windows as the CIP confiscates their systems when they find more than a few dozen mp3 files on the users computer systems which don't have proper DRM tags.
Many more people will have their systems confiscated and accounts frozen when their computers report back that they used certain terms in IM sessions and email such as "she was the bomb last night!"
Of course the system will omit everything but the term "bomb".
Is there a way to moderate the story that is posted? Not the comments, the actual stories?
This one should be moded down in some harsh way. Next thing you know they will post a story about gas prices going up or down or something.
Let's start a campaign to do away with daylight savings time entirely. It serves no purpose. If people want to get up later or earlier then they can do that. Setting clocks ahead and back is silly.
Will anyone listen?
This is what passes for news on slashdot now? A group of people don't follow basic email practices and cause a minor flurry of emails in their own group and you think this is news?
Can't wait for the dupes to show up in a few days.
It took me a few years to work up to throwing them out. But I kept having to move them around in the closet and finally got tired of that and realized I would never start them up again.
:)
I would like to know how much the other person that replied would pay for those systems. A quick check on ebay and A1000's are apparently going for less than $50.00. I don't call that real money.
Not even worth the trouble to post it to ebay.
I finally ended up throwing my A1000 and A2000 away last year. Had been sitting in the closet for many years. Thought about trying to find another home for them but figured no one would know what to do with them. And I did not want to put them in a garage sale and have to answer the question "Does it come with Windows" every time someone looked at them.
I opened up the A1000 to look at the signatures on the inside of the case one more time. Then set it out on the curb along with the A2000. Got many years of work out of both systems. Ran UUCP and was pulling a partial USENET feed during much of that time.
I still laugh at times thinking that back then we had a system that could do full multitasking with a fantastic winowed operating system in as little as 256K of memory. And the system was stable, ran them 24x7.
Don't just change it, get rid of it! If it is beneficial for people to start work an hour earlier or later then change the start time to 7 or 9am, don't change the clocks. Who said people have to start work at 8am?
Seriously, DST is of no use anymore.
Does XP ship with SP2? I think the problem is that most people have to load an XP system which does not have SP2 on it. To get SP2 they have to connect to the Internet and download it. If they get scanned and attacked prior to getting SP2 installed the game is over. :)
The answer to why is simple. The patent office has allowed think tanks and companies to get patents for almost everything. Not that they actually plan to do anything with the patent, it just gets added to a portfolio that they can then sue over to make money for their shareholders. The ability to inovate has become more difficult because of this.
VCRs will start to go away once DVD recorders are widely available and DVD media (dual layer) is at or below $2.00 a disk.
:)
As for the reasons VCRs are still in wide use, it is still difficult or impossible to put 6 hours of recordings on a disc. Tapes have their place at the moment because of this. Once DVDs can be burned with that capacity easily by the casual end user then VCRs will start to be replaced.
Personally I recently built a Mythtv box. It has pretty much eliminated the need for a VCR for recording TV. The Mythtv box also has the added benefit of being able to mark and automatically jump over most commercials. I have pretty much stopped watching so called live TV, prefering instead to record the show and watch it later.
At the moment I have no need to save recordings beyond the time needed to watch them. An easy way to copy shows to DVD may be available but I have not spent the time to sort out this process yet.
End users that don't have a terrabyte of disk in their DVR may need some way easy way to record those shows to DVD for later viewing. Until that is available VCRs will still have a place.
One of the disconnects was in the original series the impression given was that the empire was extremely old. But after the latest series of movies it is obvious the empire only lasted at best about 20 years, the time it takes Luke to grow up.
:)
Obi Wan apparently aged a lot in those 20 years, I guess hiding from the Empire wears you down.
So where do we find dilithium crytals for the next step in this experiment? This is obviously where this is going. They are currently using the wrong crystals to get to break even and positive energy return.
:)
Why would an advanced civilization die out? Assuming of course they avoid the self extermination period (which we are still in) and have successfully expanded into their own solar system or even to a few nearby star systems? If they simply get to the point of establishing perminent space colonies in orbit around various planets in their own solar system, again assuming they are past the point of self extermination, about the only thing that may wipe them out is if their sun goes nova.
:)
Once you get self sustaining colonies on other planets, near or far, many dooms day scenerios are eliminated, such as comet or astroid strikes. Assuming they are intelligent and can continue to solve problems as they come up there is not reason to believe that such a civilization would not continue forever. Kind of likes Newton's law of motion, unless a civilization is contacted by an outside force it should continue on forever. The idea that civilizations fall just because they must is a fallacy. Ancient civilizations here on earth fell due to external pressures, primarly due to other civilizations or barbarians forcing their way into new territory.
Hopefully we are almost out of that phase. Assuming we don't kill our selves off and we solve the problems needed to establish colonies on the Moon, Mars, Jupiters's moons, and farther out there is no reason to believe that we as a species won't survive virtually forever.
And the question was is there intelligent life out there. The answer is yes there is. The better question is would we recognize it and is it close enough for us or them to make contact? At the present time we don't have the technology yet to reach very far out and as such contact is unlikely. The lack of contact or current ability to make contact does not mean intelligent life is not out there.
I don't really agree with the bad timing argument. I assume you state that as the reason we have not been visited or have other evidence of intelligent life out there.
The simplest reason is simply the distances involved. The size of the universe and the number of planets where life may exist is huge. Per Drake's equation the number of planets that develop intelligent life will be a subset of the total that have life. Even so the numbers are huge so there must be intelligent life out there somewhere.
We have no evidence of that since we have only explored portions of this solar system and the distances involved are so huge as to make it very difficult for anyone to travel between systems. True, you will most likely not find the density of diverse intelleginces shown in Star Wars. But with all the opportunities out there it must exist. And even if they could travel here what reason would they have to make such a trip? Most likely there are resources closer to home that are available rather than coming here.
And any suitably advanced civilization would move out from their home planet to secure new resources. We have an abundance of resources here in this solar system. Once we start tapping into those resources we won't have to go any farther for hundreds or possibly thousands of years if we don't want to.
Drake's equation calculates just that. And with the most conservative values assigned it is almost certain that there are other intelligent life forms out there somewhere.
Now as to the question of if they have visited us or even know we are here. The answer is almost certainly no. People have used alien visitation to try to explain things they don't understand. And it is a handy insurance write off for the cattle ranchers when one of their cows dies.
Of course I'm not convinced that there is intelligent life here on Earth. Just watch the nightly news for evidence that there is no intelligent life here.
And all that does is lend credibility to the idea that there is no intelligent life here on Earth. :)
How about we prove there is intelligent life here on earth?
:)
Drake's equation even with very conservative values assigned pretty much guarntees there is intelligent life some where out there in the universe. I just think it a little conceited of anyone thinking that we may represent the only intelligent life in the universe.
Obviously those that think that failed to understand basic math and the concept of really large numbers.
I stated a similar opinion early last year just after Microsoft announced they were issuing a huge one time dividend. Microsoft is figuring out how to extract as much money as they can before their stock starts the long decline.
Expect to see Microsoft making similar disbursments over the next few years. This will do two things, it will keep a lot of their share holders holding the stock and allow them to stuff their pockets with cash.
It is funny that in the last few weeks we learned that AT&T is being bought up by SBC. AT&T used to be the huge monopoly everyone hated. Their slide started about 6 or 7 years ago. It should have been obvious to most people when they sold off NCR, cable operations, wireless, and the other stuff. AT&T became unfocused on what they were and in order to show profits they started selling portions of themselves instead of stepping into the broadband consumer market and taking over. Maybe they were afraid of being a monopoly in that market and getting broken up again. Of course the most telling indication is when Armstrong duped a good share of the employees into investing in Wireless and then dropping the bomb three days later.
It will take many years for Microsoft to decline. The next telling item will be how long it take longhorn to come out and just how the business world takes to it. I suspect if Microsoft keeps the licensing the way they changed it (yearly lease of the OS and packages) that many companies will opt to try a different OS for their servers and workstations. Linux is good enough on the server end to display Microsoft and arguably good enough for the desktop now. Another year and Linux may become the default standard on the desktop, finally breaking Microsofts stangle hold. At that point the decline will accelarate. Microsoft will thrash around trying to invent the next BIG thing that everyone must have. And each time they will miss the mark, by just enough that others will swoop in and take that market. Look at the tablet PC and thier attempt at the handheld markets. X-box is another example. They only have about 27% of the market running third behind Sony and Nintendo. Will be interesting to see how that develops over the next few years. Of course I hardly think Microsoft can survive at its present scale as just another game box company.
Expect Microsoft to try to "re-invent" themselves several times over the next 10 years. Each time they slip a little further down the spiral just like AT&T did.
Like most companies you restrict travel, hold invoices for extended periods, drop maintenance plans, put off upgrades, and the best option is to fire most of the staff. That last one really looks good on the bottom line, at least the first year.