I'm looking at OLTP, because that's a worldwide non-Microsoft venture that could seriously dent Microsoft revenue in growing markets...
Bologna. As OLTP has progressed, it begins to look more and more like an inexpensive laptop with a price that continues to rise near what is already available in that class of machine. The concept is admirable, but such machine already or will soon exist at that price-point that more resemble "real" computers.
One Laptop Per Child (which runs Linux but does not run Windows)
And speaking of the OLTP, what's this about not being able to run Windows? What if the user wants to run Windows? I thought Open Source was (in part) about choice? Cheap laptops that will run whatever the user wants to run already exist.
I'd say it's more likely that most users don't know the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office
This is a commonly voiced anecdote among the FOSS crowd, but in reality it's almost complete self-serving bullshit. It's part of the Open Source mantra that assumes most "users" are complete idiots. And, since in most cases users must pay several hundred dollars in addition to their computer that came pre-installed with Windows, it would be had to miss that the Office Suite is not a part of the OS.
don't know there are alternatives, and assume that "free" means cheap and worthless.
It's difficult for most FOSS evangelists (fan boys) to understand that most people are happy with MS Office because it does what it does very well, even "power users" are happy with its various application components. If it didn't meet or exceed user expectations, people wouldn't pay several hundred dollars for it. While there are other office application suites, most of them fall short of the integrated functionality of MS Office. Excel is a great example where as much as the OpenOffice sheep my bleat, "Calc" simply falls short. FOSS like to go on and on and on about file compatibility issues, but most people don't consider an incompatibility with FOSS applications that very few of their peers use to be an issue.
The problem with most news papers isn't that they publish yesterday's news today
Most people are not like those that frequent Slashdot, they are not tied to the Internet by an IV, don't have Fox / CNN / Local News on the telly 24/7 droning away in the background. Yesterday's news this morning is quite adequate and timely for most people, who still enjoy the physical stimulation of turning the pages of a printed newspaper.
We've been hearing for years that the printed word is dead, books should have been gone long ago according to these blathering disemboweled heads. Words on paper are still around and will be probably forever.
Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run."
Is this really an issue? I mean, isn't XP Pro the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft made? Why would they run Vista at all? Why would they want to?
One cannot conclude from the small sample size that 50% of all small, low-budget hosting companies are not security-conscious.
I would have thought the opposite: The big monoliths would have out-sourced unmotivated help desks that might do this. Smaller companies, I thought, where actually run by real people with a connection to their customers... Am I wrong?
There is no question that this is pap for the consumer because most people, even the "noobs", are not breaking down doors to buy or use Vista. In the "corporate" community, there is no din of feet wearing the floor tiles out to install Vista. XP Pro is still the "standard".
This probably has less to do with Microsoft's guide sucking as it has to do with Comcast already having an on-screen guide software suite.
Perhaps, but what I think is interesting is that Comcast was the last (hell, maybe it was the only>/i>) US cable company to use it. I'm just surprised that Microsoft, with all its cashola, couldn't muster better numbers in its home country. And strong in South America? What's with that?
Well, they're not necessarily making money on OSS so much as the support they offer for it. I mean, you can obtain and use Solaris, RHL or Suse for free
You can get some of the source for RHEL4 and 5 for free, but that's not how most companies get it. I assume the other software companies sell their products in addition to service contracts, as well. There are in fact many companies making money selling Open Source applications (not just the service).
The owners of these projects should make a deal with Microsoft to give them 30% of the revenue from the open source code in return for licensing the patents. 30% of 0 is still 0.
That will be news to quote a few companies producing Open Source projects that they are making money on. Sun, Red Hat, Novell... All the big names and quite a few small names most people have never heard of. All making money on Open Source.
The FOSS devs are mainly interested in writing software people want to use.
Really? You must not hang around too many FOSS project forums. FOSS developers develop for themselves, and if you the tiny little "user" dare suggest am improvment to functionality or the UI, it's almost always "shut the fuck up and contribute some code, leach!" or "write the patch yourself if you want it that bad". That doesn't sound at all to me like they are developing software people want.
Now, a lot of the time what they develop is what people want, but that's not the same thing.
What I'd like to know is... If I submit an article, does it have a better chance of being accepted if it's from som obscure or international news source like www.bangkokpost.com?
Simple: because that would skew the sample towards mileage of people who either pay to have their oil changed or have it changed more regularly.
We're talking new cars here. Most "new" car owners have their oil done at the dealership or a dealership authorized chain. Most car owners (period) don't changer their own oil anymore. Note I said "most", so if you are the one car geek in 1000 that changers your own oil, adjusts your own belts, gaps your own plugs, YOU ARE NOT THE NORM.
Because it is wiki, any initial story that is written in too esoteric terms can be further edited by people less in the know and more able to eloquently explain.
Sure, someone else can come along and edit / revise an article for better readability. But it's actually not true in a practical sense that "anyone" can edit, because more often than not the Editor Nazi that has decided that he / she / it "owns" the article will simply revert the edit and make some pithy and slightly insulting comment about "discussion" on the Talk Page. And it will be "discussed" to death, until the Editor Nazi gets his / her / its way.
From Operation Clambake: http://www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/
------------
Who is Xenu?
I'm going to tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Right, then I'll begin.
Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.
Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were over-populated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.
Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).
These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.
The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.
That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.
Well what did you think of that story?
What? You thought it was a stupid story?
Well so do we. Unfortunately this stupid story is the core belief in the religion known as Scientology.* If people knew about this story then most people would never get involved in it. This story is told to you when you reach one of their secret levels called OT III. After that you are supposed to telepathically communicate with these body thetans to make them go away. You have to pay a lot of money to get to this level and do this (or you have to work very hard for the organisation on extremely low pay for many years).
We are telling you this story as a warning. If you become involved with Scientology then we would like you to do so with your eyes open and fully aware of the sort of material it contains.
Most of the Scientologists that work in their Dianetics* centres and so called "Churches" of Scientology do not know this story since they are not allowed to hear it until they reach the secret "upper" levels of Scientology. It may take them many years be
Here there is a strong culture that once you've served your punishment, the case is settled. There's no "felons can't vote", there's no public registers, it really is buried unless you stand before the court again, then your past criminal record is brought up again.
This is a problem here (USA). In a very real way, once you fuck up, you're screwed for life. It's really not much of an incentive to stay clean/legit/legal.
do members of the public have access to police records?
Generally yes, they are a matter of public record. More often than not, you have to pay for them, but they can be had quite legally. Police are, after all, in the public employ.
If you see the coppers responding to some domestic or whatever in your apartment complex, or the house accross the street, you are quite free and able to run right down to the Cop Shop and request a copy of the report. No problems.
Can I just phone the police in the States and pretend to be a landlord/prospective employer etc and find out every time you've been pulled over for having a faulty brake light?
Why pretend? They don't care, it's a public record. You can have it (sometimes for a price).
Slashdot Mirror
Bologna. As OLTP has progressed, it begins to look more and more like an inexpensive laptop with a price that continues to rise near what is already available in that class of machine. The concept is admirable, but such machine already or will soon exist at that price-point that more resemble "real" computers.
And speaking of the OLTP, what's this about not being able to run Windows? What if the user wants to run Windows? I thought Open Source was (in part) about choice? Cheap laptops that will run whatever the user wants to run already exist.I don't think this is their primary goal. The people they want to scare are their current and potential customers. Follow the money.
This is a commonly voiced anecdote among the FOSS crowd, but in reality it's almost complete self-serving bullshit. It's part of the Open Source mantra that assumes most "users" are complete idiots. And, since in most cases users must pay several hundred dollars in addition to their computer that came pre-installed with Windows, it would be had to miss that the Office Suite is not a part of the OS.
It's difficult for most FOSS evangelists (fan boys) to understand that most people are happy with MS Office because it does what it does very well, even "power users" are happy with its various application components. If it didn't meet or exceed user expectations, people wouldn't pay several hundred dollars for it. While there are other office application suites, most of them fall short of the integrated functionality of MS Office. Excel is a great example where as much as the OpenOffice sheep my bleat, "Calc" simply falls short. FOSS like to go on and on and on about file compatibility issues, but most people don't consider an incompatibility with FOSS applications that very few of their peers use to be an issue.
Prediction: I see AOL in Mozilla Corp's future...
IN LEGOS!
Most people are not like those that frequent Slashdot, they are not tied to the Internet by an IV, don't have Fox / CNN / Local News on the telly 24/7 droning away in the background. Yesterday's news this morning is quite adequate and timely for most people, who still enjoy the physical stimulation of turning the pages of a printed newspaper.
We've been hearing for years that the printed word is dead, books should have been gone long ago according to these blathering disemboweled heads. Words on paper are still around and will be probably forever.
Is this really an issue? I mean, isn't XP Pro the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft made? Why would they run Vista at all? Why would they want to?
This is all we need. Look out, PETA will soon be describing fly strips as insect murder...
I would have thought the opposite: The big monoliths would have out-sourced unmotivated help desks that might do this. Smaller companies, I thought, where actually run by real people with a connection to their customers... Am I wrong?
There is no question that this is pap for the consumer because most people, even the "noobs", are not breaking down doors to buy or use Vista. In the "corporate" community, there is no din of feet wearing the floor tiles out to install Vista. XP Pro is still the "standard".
Perhaps, but what I think is interesting is that Comcast was the last (hell, maybe it was the only>/i>) US cable company to use it. I'm just surprised that Microsoft, with all its cashola, couldn't muster better numbers in its home country. And strong in South America? What's with that?
Really? You must not hang around too many FOSS project forums. FOSS developers develop for themselves, and if you the tiny little "user" dare suggest am improvment to functionality or the UI, it's almost always "shut the fuck up and contribute some code, leach!" or "write the patch yourself if you want it that bad". That doesn't sound at all to me like they are developing software people want.
Now, a lot of the time what they develop is what people want, but that's not the same thing.
What I'd like to know is... If I submit an article, does it have a better chance of being accepted if it's from som obscure or international news source like www.bangkokpost.com?
We're talking new cars here. Most "new" car owners have their oil done at the dealership or a dealership authorized chain. Most car owners (period) don't changer their own oil anymore. Note I said "most", so if you are the one car geek in 1000 that changers your own oil, adjusts your own belts, gaps your own plugs, YOU ARE NOT THE NORM.
Sure, someone else can come along and edit / revise an article for better readability. But it's actually not true in a practical sense that "anyone" can edit, because more often than not the Editor Nazi that has decided that he / she / it "owns" the article will simply revert the edit and make some pithy and slightly insulting comment about "discussion" on the Talk Page. And it will be "discussed" to death, until the Editor Nazi gets his / her / its way.
I thought so...
From Operation Clambake: http://www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/ ------------ Who is Xenu? I'm going to tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Right, then I'll begin. Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack. Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were over-populated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan. Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers). These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed. The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper). After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting". When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies. As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today. That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago. Well what did you think of that story? What? You thought it was a stupid story? Well so do we. Unfortunately this stupid story is the core belief in the religion known as Scientology.* If people knew about this story then most people would never get involved in it. This story is told to you when you reach one of their secret levels called OT III. After that you are supposed to telepathically communicate with these body thetans to make them go away. You have to pay a lot of money to get to this level and do this (or you have to work very hard for the organisation on extremely low pay for many years). We are telling you this story as a warning. If you become involved with Scientology then we would like you to do so with your eyes open and fully aware of the sort of material it contains. Most of the Scientologists that work in their Dianetics* centres and so called "Churches" of Scientology do not know this story since they are not allowed to hear it until they reach the secret "upper" levels of Scientology. It may take them many years be
Are you French? No really. Because you SOUND French.
This is a problem here (USA). In a very real way, once you fuck up, you're screwed for life. It's really not much of an incentive to stay clean/legit/legal.
Generally yes, they are a matter of public record. More often than not, you have to pay for them, but they can be had quite legally. Police are, after all, in the public employ.
If you see the coppers responding to some domestic or whatever in your apartment complex, or the house accross the street, you are quite free and able to run right down to the Cop Shop and request a copy of the report. No problems.
Why pretend? They don't care, it's a public record. You can have it (sometimes for a price).
Check out the Big List.
Riiiiiiiight...