Your link is a sad, funny rant. Hopefully, you won't reward child-like behavior from adults by linking to their pablum again.
Hmm, wouldn't an OEM copy of Windows be cheaper?
Define cheaper. Cheaper how? If money, then yes, it's cheaper.
1. You paid too much for your copy of Windows when you bought your computer. You also paid much more for your laptop than you would Microsoft did not control the operating system market. Did you pay $100 extra? Yes, at least. Can you buy an HP printer for $100 or less? Yes.
Don't argue the costs mentioned until you fully grasp what a price maker is and the effect monopolies have on the quantity of products sold.
2. If that's too complicated for you, how much is that anti-virus/firewall/Office app/other nasty hacks required to use Windows? Freerider? Well, then you still paid too much when you bought the computer.
Finally, please do not shift your argument, or abuse other arguments.
2. How does the consumer benefit? Will my entertainment costs be lower? Communication costs get lower? Doubtful. This is before RIAA members either torpedo it, or use it to raise entertainment costs.
Your comment conveniently ignores his role in the project. It seems like he doesn't really work at the nuts-and-bolts level of driver development. His comments lately lead one to believe he's pretty satisfied with the overall status of the kernel such that issues like this are important to him.
I know you and the moderators are not satisfied with some aspects of the project, but you would be barking up the wrong tree.
I'm intrigued by the carefully constructed character assassination that went into this article. I am disappointed others did not see how the information in this article was delivered in such a way as to shift all of the blame to the employee.
There is no doubt the employee did lots of wrong things that deserved dismissal. I am not arguing for his position at all.
Note carefully, that while the guy has the admin password, it's the source of the story that has shifted the blame entirely to the employee. By adding "we're afraid he's going to bring an IT Armageddon to the city of San Francisco!" to a very poorly managed situation, management is off the hook.
The story *should* be a cautionary tale. Where are the management procedures to prevent this kind of event? Don't ever discuss fragile IT systems, that are running mostly on blind faith. How about management's total incompetence in this episode?
Nope. Instead the blame conveniently shifts away from the OTHER responsible party in this story.
Let this be a cautionary tale for those with company IT "by the balls." Hopefully, you won't do some of the horrible things purportedly done by this fellow. You deserve to be fired if you make those kinds of bad choices.
Note how ridiculously easy it is for Management to publicly discredit you and bring your IT career to a swift end using anecdotal evidence. As this story so elegantly exemplifies, it is very common, and people would really do that to you and not lose a minute of sleep. You would have no forum with which to air your side of the story either...
My approach to bringing some balance to the situation is to make my IT role as transparent as possible. Which, means basically, lots of documentation.
Instead of listing things that will never get done, let's discuss a general framework. (that will never get done....)
An OS that prioritizes consumer wants/needs BEFORE the media rights holders. How about sticking to the Doctrine of Fair Use as a start?
An OS with a simplified security scheme. I'm not talking about their blame-shifting "security" mechanism to which they are clearly committed.
They probably can't get back all of the developers they lost when they abandoned VB, but they need another VB for Schmoes to write their quick and dirty hacks.
Ebay isn't especially suited as a micropayment system. At best, they are about average as far as transaction processing goes.
I'd be *very* interested in knowing how many of their transactions are 100% in-network value transfers. For the payment technology ignorant, that means a transaction where the source funds (buyer's payment) is stored in the PayPal system.
My guess is it's *very* low compared to their Visa/MC processing.
You may want to consider the move roughly equivalent to unleashing a swarm of bees at a picnic. Google can't possibly keep up with every specialized search engine possibility.
Alone, none of the specialized search engines could possibly defeat Google, but if enough of them fragment Google's base, then Yahoo comes out way ahead.
If I had the time, I'd get started today writing a couple of specialized search engines after I checked out the license terms.
These companies are so large the basic research dies sometime after the researcher gives his presentation to Marketing/Product Management.
Marketing may, actually come up with some good ideas, and send them into some Managerial circle jerk with Sales Management. After a couple of comments, the good ideas die in a perpetual Gordian knot.
The knot presents itself as:
1. No customers for new idea. 2. No budget for some new idea. 3. No "proven" market for new idea. 4. No one is willing to risk their status taking a chance at a new product.
Which leads to a tremendous waste of resources "catching up" to upstarts at a later date.
Aperture and whatever Adobe calls theirs, are acquisition and cataloging tools for digital photos. Do not confuse those tasks with editing.
Check out digikam. It was omitted from the review for unknown reasons. It's excellent! It'll give you a good idea of why one would want to separate acquisition from editing.
1. Gimp 2.4 color manages very nicely thank you. 2. The KDE desktop has monitor profile and gamma adjustment support. GNOME? Dunno.
Applications worth noting: xcalib
liblcms (excellent) argyle (for you color geeks) scribus digikam
You will find most commercial profile generators place restrictive covenants on the icc profiles created by their software. I don't know if it is legal to redistribute sRGB or AdobeRGB profiles, but I doubt it.
It's also worth noting that Aperture's sole purpose is rapid acquisition and cataloging. Do not concatenate acquisition/cataloging with editing.
Best case scenario will be January, 2009 for the end of Ubuntu on the shelf.
The title alone will probably get modded down, but please read before modding.
Best Buy's retailing model is high/low. Name branded stuff is high-priced with no-name brands with similar features lower-priced. Ubuntu fills that niche versus Microsoft's product.
*If* he expects this strategy to be an income stream that he can use to grow his business, then he's in for a rude awakening. I've worked in small companies who landed big accounts and the routine is the same. The sales figures look good for about a month and then the hidden costs of mega-retailing gut the big sales numbers.
If he defies the odds that all small companies face in mega-retailers, he's got the rest of the year at Best Buy to see if customers buy it and his costs of being in Best Buy don't overwhelm the company.
Does anyone else remember seeing suSe on the shelf at Worst Buy for about $50?
The last time I checked, Adobe Systems is about as hostile to open source as possible. They are the seldom acknowledged masters of the "first hit on the crack pipe is free" scheme.
1. Multicore ready. Erlang will use them. Write your application in Erlang and it's done for you.
2. Scales well. As an example, http://yaws.hyber.org/ scales very nicely when loads increase. Your basic LAMP/LYMP setup runs much better on vanilla hardware.
3. Designed for telecom The architects designed the language to run in a telecom environment so things like upgrades can be done while the application is running.
Yaws in particular needs your help. Failover clustering inside the yaws server would be wonderful. Right now, it uses CGI to process other languages. It does it flawlessly, but a more direct solution might be a nice project.
It's a little different but everyone on/. who runs kde3.x will figure it out in a day. Our office just "upgraded" to office 200X with the new gui and waste far more time sorting out some features on the new ribbon gui.
It's not rock-stable, but functional. A mix of 3.5 and 4.0 apps work pretty well. The newer Kontact isn't done and kmail works fine for me. YMMV.
I'm easily running a mixed testing/experimental environment with no issues. If you are running Debian testing, just add new repos with experimental instead of testing, I defined the pinning such that testing is preferred, but it pulls experimental packages as needed. I would copy -R.kde kde-3.x to be sure you don't lose anything valuable.
When someone from some esteemed institution of higher learning discovers this, then maybe the "identity theft" groupthink will end.
#1. Banks make money when your identity is stolen The profit comes in the form of transaction penalties when you start reversing the charges and possibly the bank's "identity theft services."
#2. No one seems to have any interest at all in shedding some light on the credit process. Why isn't it quite transparent to all consumers?
The entire "identity theft" scheme works is overwhelmingly favors the banking industry and it's no one's fault but ours.
The problem really is when either function gets too much control. Marketing tends to get capricious about features and blows huge sums on "research" and end up with a Ford Fiero.
Engineering, well... I've seen low-level greatness that couldn't translate elegantly into customer-level value. I've seen projects never finish too.
The problem is probably management-level. *Someone* needs to crack a few heads together to get people back into reality. A good anecdote about the organizational problem was on/. a couple of days ago when the mighty Bill Gates was supposedly pissed about some feature/application/thing. He cracked heads near his level. One level below it turned into a managerial quagmire.
1. volume controls, 2. mac keys... 3. position of the USB ports...
This isn't the keyboard for you. Taco and users like him just aren't the target audience.
It IS the keyboard for you IF: 1. you like the feel of the old-style key strike. 2. Don't use/need multimedia keys 3. Don't hang usb peripherals off your keyboard 4. Windows/Linux/BSD user
I would argue that the ordinary person has turned away from Science in particular and Reason in general and allow for Faith to fill in where Reason once ruled. Therefore science is not of interest. At all.
I'm not anti-religion. For many, it provides a structure they thrive in, general health and welfare benefits are well known.
Calling it a "dark age" would be too simplistic. Maybe a "gray age" would be better?
Microsoft just threw to resellers and OEM's. It forces what little cash a reseller has *now* to all flow to Microsoft for product used for the next six months including Christmas.
Last purchase of XP: June 30. Can distribute XP: January 2009
1. Basically, any cash-strapped reseller stands a much greater chance of being run out of business. 2. It will certainly shift the cost of financing the license pre-buy onto consumers in the form of higher product prices.
Slashdot Mirror
Your link is a sad, funny rant. Hopefully, you won't reward child-like behavior from adults by linking to their pablum again.
Hmm, wouldn't an OEM copy of Windows be cheaper?
Define cheaper. Cheaper how? If money, then yes, it's cheaper.
1. You paid too much for your copy of Windows when you bought your computer. You also paid much more for your laptop than you would Microsoft did not control the operating system market. Did you pay $100 extra? Yes, at least. Can you buy an HP printer for $100 or less? Yes.
Don't argue the costs mentioned until you fully grasp what a price maker is and the effect monopolies have on the quantity of products sold.
2. If that's too complicated for you, how much is that anti-virus/firewall/Office app/other nasty hacks required to use Windows? Freerider? Well, then you still paid too much when you bought the computer.
Finally, please do not shift your argument, or abuse other arguments.
1. This article is very thin on facts.
2. How does the consumer benefit? Will my entertainment costs be lower? Communication costs get lower? Doubtful. This is before RIAA members either torpedo it, or use it to raise entertainment costs.
Your comment conveniently ignores his role in the project. It seems like he doesn't really work at the nuts-and-bolts level of driver development. His comments lately lead one to believe he's pretty satisfied with the overall status of the kernel such that issues like this are important to him.
I know you and the moderators are not satisfied with some aspects of the project, but you would be barking up the wrong tree.
1. Posting AC with a comment like that displays very poor judgement.
2. Why are you using a printer manufacturer that refuses to make available either a driver of their own creation or the documentation to write one?
3. Don't be cheap. Buy a new (or used office-class) HP and enjoy!
As an FYI, here's a quick run-down of recommended printer manufacturers.
1. HP Drivers compile on ARM and x86 and works beutifully. I assume then, it would compile on PPC too. Distro packages are widely available.
2. Epson has x86-only binary blobs inside a source code base that is tough to build on Debian. RPM's supported.
3. (Dead Last) Canon has been quite hostile to Linux not quite as much as Brother, but both should be avoided.
I'm intrigued by the carefully constructed character assassination that went into this article. I am disappointed others did not see how the information in this article was delivered in such a way as to shift all of the blame to the employee.
There is no doubt the employee did lots of wrong things that deserved dismissal. I am not arguing for his position at all.
Note carefully, that while the guy has the admin password, it's the source of the story that has shifted the blame entirely to the employee. By adding "we're afraid he's going to bring an IT Armageddon to the city of San Francisco!" to a very poorly managed situation, management is off the hook.
The story *should* be a cautionary tale. Where are the management procedures to prevent this kind of event? Don't ever discuss fragile IT systems, that are running mostly on blind faith. How about management's total incompetence in this episode?
Nope. Instead the blame conveniently shifts away from the OTHER responsible party in this story.
Let this be a cautionary tale for those with company IT "by the balls." Hopefully, you won't do some of the horrible things purportedly done by this fellow. You deserve to be fired if you make those kinds of bad choices.
Note how ridiculously easy it is for Management to publicly discredit you and bring your IT career to a swift end using anecdotal evidence. As this story so elegantly exemplifies, it is very common, and people would really do that to you and not lose a minute of sleep. You would have no forum with which to air your side of the story either...
My approach to bringing some balance to the situation is to make my IT role as transparent as possible. Which, means basically, lots of documentation.
Instead of listing things that will never get done, let's discuss a general framework. (that will never get done....)
An OS that prioritizes consumer wants/needs BEFORE the media rights holders. How about sticking to the Doctrine of Fair Use as a start?
An OS with a simplified security scheme. I'm not talking about their blame-shifting "security" mechanism to which they are clearly committed.
They probably can't get back all of the developers they lost when they abandoned VB, but they need another VB for Schmoes to write their quick and dirty hacks.
Ebay isn't especially suited as a micropayment system. At best, they are about average as far as transaction processing goes.
I'd be *very* interested in knowing how many of their transactions are 100% in-network value transfers. For the payment technology ignorant, that means a transaction where the source funds (buyer's payment) is stored in the PayPal system.
My guess is it's *very* low compared to their Visa/MC processing.
All of that research ends up in academia but not in their products.
The supposed point behind R&D is enhancing the company's future prospects, not enrich the academic community.
You haven't dis-proven (is that a word?) my argument that the R&D rarely, if ever, makes it into new things from the same company.
to figure out they have to have *something* to release for the all-important fourth quarter.
Launch it any other time of year and you won't get the same sales bounce out of a new release.
You may want to consider the move roughly equivalent to unleashing a swarm of bees at a picnic. Google can't possibly keep up with every specialized search engine possibility.
Alone, none of the specialized search engines could possibly defeat Google, but if enough of them fragment Google's base, then Yahoo comes out way ahead.
If I had the time, I'd get started today writing a couple of specialized search engines after I checked out the license terms.
Seriously,
These companies are so large the basic research dies sometime after the researcher gives his presentation to Marketing/Product Management.
Marketing may, actually come up with some good ideas, and send them into some Managerial circle jerk with Sales Management. After a couple of comments, the good ideas die in a perpetual Gordian knot.
The knot presents itself as:
1. No customers for new idea.
2. No budget for some new idea.
3. No "proven" market for new idea.
4. No one is willing to risk their status taking a chance at a new product.
Which leads to a tremendous waste of resources "catching up" to upstarts at a later date.
Aperture and whatever Adobe calls theirs, are acquisition and cataloging tools for digital photos. Do not confuse those tasks with editing.
Check out digikam. It was omitted from the review for unknown reasons. It's excellent! It'll give you a good idea of why one would want to separate acquisition from editing.
1. Gimp 2.4 color manages very nicely thank you.
2. The KDE desktop has monitor profile and gamma adjustment support. GNOME? Dunno.
Applications worth noting:
liblcms (excellent)xcalib
argyle (for you color geeks)
scribus
digikam
You will find most commercial profile generators place restrictive covenants on the icc profiles created by their software. I don't know if it is legal to redistribute sRGB or AdobeRGB profiles, but I doubt it.
It's also worth noting that Aperture's sole purpose is rapid acquisition and cataloging. Do not concatenate acquisition/cataloging with editing.
Lastly, Digikam works very nicely for me.
Best case scenario will be January, 2009 for the end of Ubuntu on the shelf.
The title alone will probably get modded down, but please read before modding.
Best Buy's retailing model is high/low. Name branded stuff is high-priced with no-name brands with similar features lower-priced. Ubuntu fills that niche versus Microsoft's product.
*If* he expects this strategy to be an income stream that he can use to grow his business, then he's in for a rude awakening. I've worked in small companies who landed big accounts and the routine is the same. The sales figures look good for about a month and then the hidden costs of mega-retailing gut the big sales numbers.
If he defies the odds that all small companies face in mega-retailers, he's got the rest of the year at Best Buy to see if customers buy it and his costs of being in Best Buy don't overwhelm the company.
Does anyone else remember seeing suSe on the shelf at Worst Buy for about $50?
The last time I checked, Adobe Systems is about as hostile to open source as possible. They are the seldom acknowledged masters of the "first hit on the crack pipe is free" scheme.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/air.html
Multiple helper libraries licensed under the MPL doesn't change the fact they are promoting another information silo.
1. Multicore ready.
Erlang will use them. Write your application in Erlang and it's done for you.
2. Scales well.
As an example, http://yaws.hyber.org/ scales very nicely when loads increase. Your basic LAMP/LYMP setup runs much better on vanilla hardware.
3. Designed for telecom
The architects designed the language to run in a telecom environment so things like upgrades can be done while the application is running.
Yaws in particular needs your help. Failover clustering inside the yaws server would be wonderful. Right now, it uses CGI to process other languages. It does it flawlessly, but a more direct solution might be a nice project.
It's a little different but everyone on /. who runs kde3.x will figure it out in a day. Our office just "upgraded" to office 200X with the new gui and waste far more time sorting out some features on the new ribbon gui.
It's not rock-stable, but functional. A mix of 3.5 and 4.0 apps work pretty well. The newer Kontact isn't done and kmail works fine for me. YMMV.
I'm easily running a mixed testing/experimental environment with no issues. If you are running Debian testing, just add new repos with experimental instead of testing, I defined the pinning such that testing is preferred, but it pulls experimental packages as needed. I would copy -R .kde kde-3.x to be sure you don't lose anything valuable.
That's exactly what IE7 is. Why is this one going to be different?
made purchases using debits
And the merchant is on the hook for those transactions. They paid penalties for taking the bad card, plus the balance, plus the lost merchandise.
Debit/credit is pretty much the same from the average retailer's perspective, just another cost of doing business.
I think maybe you are viewing my post as a consumer, rather than as a merchant.
The credit process is easier and more transparent today than it has ever been.
Oh really? How is your score calculated? Where do the data points come from to calculate my score? How were they collected?
Nevermind that fraud prevention and detection is the #1 security-related cost for any bank
Anyone high-enough in the banking industry food chain would tell you otherwise.
When someone from some esteemed institution of higher learning discovers this, then maybe the "identity theft" groupthink will end.
#1. Banks make money when your identity is stolen The profit comes in the form of transaction penalties when you start reversing the charges and possibly the bank's "identity theft services."
#2. No one seems to have any interest at all in shedding some light on the credit process. Why isn't it quite transparent to all consumers?
The entire "identity theft" scheme works is overwhelmingly favors the banking industry and it's no one's fault but ours.
The problem really is when either function gets too much control. Marketing tends to get capricious about features and blows huge sums on "research" and end up with a Ford Fiero.
Engineering, well... I've seen low-level greatness that couldn't translate elegantly into customer-level value. I've seen projects never finish too.
The problem is probably management-level. *Someone* needs to crack a few heads together to get people back into reality. A good anecdote about the organizational problem was on /. a couple of days ago when the mighty Bill Gates was supposedly pissed about some feature/application/thing. He cracked heads near his level. One level below it turned into a managerial quagmire.
Consumers expecting:
1. volume controls,
2. mac keys...
3. position of the USB ports...
This isn't the keyboard for you. Taco and users like him just aren't the target audience.
It IS the keyboard for you IF:
1. you like the feel of the old-style key strike.
2. Don't use/need multimedia keys
3. Don't hang usb peripherals off your keyboard
4. Windows/Linux/BSD user
That's quite a few users, Taco excluded.
it still isn't diffusing into popular culture."
I would argue that the ordinary person has turned away from Science in particular and Reason in general and allow for Faith to fill in where Reason once ruled. Therefore science is not of interest. At all.
I'm not anti-religion. For many, it provides a structure they thrive in, general health and welfare benefits are well known.
Calling it a "dark age" would be too simplistic. Maybe a "gray age" would be better?
Microsoft just threw to resellers and OEM's. It forces what little cash a reseller has *now* to all flow to Microsoft for product used for the next six months including Christmas.
Last purchase of XP: June 30.
Can distribute XP: January 2009
1. Basically, any cash-strapped reseller stands a much greater chance of being run out of business.
2. It will certainly shift the cost of financing the license pre-buy onto consumers in the form of higher product prices.
Wow.