I have just spend some time with Ubuntu. IMHO This is the first distro that really gets it and has the potential to be a desktop killer. The install is very simple (timezone, name, password), and after install you have a very simple well thought out interface.
You dont have 50 different text editors and 12 different cd writers. Just one. Not necessarily the best, but it makes for a great distro to put on a novices desktop.
The menus are well though out too. None of this 'system tools' and 'system' and crap from FC. The menus go across the top a la the Mac.
You hack it, then you have to tell MS what you did, and keep quiet. This will give them time to quietly fix the bugs.
The box will get hacked with all current known exploits (lets say there are 2000 different exploits, just for arguments sake). MS will get told in great detail about each of them.
The cost to MS is (say) $200 (xbox) * 2000 (#hacks) = $400K. Chickenfeed.
The upside is credibility. They will be able to point to this box (eventually) and report how uncompromisable it is. Hackers can't break it.
You have to keep in mind whats at stake - the gartner report that recommended dumping IIS really hurt MS because Gartner has credibility in the corporate space. MS are trying to regain their cred, and you have to take your hat off to them for making this move.
Google say they will do no evil. Great, and I trust that.
But what I also trust is that they will open their doors and computers very wide to the first FBI agent with a supboena, especially with the full weight of ThePatriotAct.
Judges are handing wiretapping orders out like confetti,
so you need to consider that any information held by any company belongs to the government at any time. All your base belong to us. And what's even scarier is that no-one is allowed to talk about it - all requests for info come with gag orders.
I'd be willing to bet that Google have already been approached for information.
What i'd like to know is what sort of data mining expertise the FBI is gathering in preparation for getting their hands on all googles files.
I'm not sure which side of the fence you are on here, but lets just look a little more closely at what NVidia are saying you need to do during the install...
STEP 1: Review the NVIDIA Software License.
You will need to accept this license prior to downloading any files.
STEP 2: Download the Driver File
Download - NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7174-pkg1.run
SuSE users: please read the SuSE NVIDIA Installer HOWTO before downloading the driver.
STEP 3: Install
Type "sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7174-pkg1.run" to install the driver, then edit your X config file as appropriate. See the text README for more detailed instructions.
The readme file is several hundred lines long and includes a bevy of options. The X config file needs to be changed "as appropriate" (and what the hell does *that* mean). SuSE users are referred to another document to read first...
I agree that there are at least two wins for MS here:
First, linux requires you to deal with source code. Fine for you techheads out there. Bad for consumers unless it is *invisible* (i.e. just part of the install process that they dont see), and right now it just aint - at least not on all distros.
Second, (and this one's just going to eat at Open source people) - many companies dont want to release their source code. It was hard to write, and often they had to invest millions to create it. Why should they release it for free?
I'm not going to start a flame war by arguing that this is right or wrong. It just is.
I need to be able to create a single binary and installer that I can release to the linux world and expect it to work across (at least) most distros and recent versions. Thats commercial reality.
MS have got it right only because they have a slow moving platform and no fragmentation. You wrote a driver in 2000 for windows 2000. In 2001 you needed to update it for XP. The linux world is very fast moving - here we are preparing to take on the 12th release of the 2.6 tree - and that has created issues for driver manufacturers.
What does it take to get a story rejected around here?
I'm sure to get modded down/censored, but I really want to know? A story about a machine for pouring juice?!?!?! I mean come on... Stuff for nerds, stuff that snores.
Hows about we just pop over to see what Computerworld has on the boil...
New N1 grid s/w from Sun
Virtualization code directly added to windows
"A Pragmatic Approach to Implementing ITIL Using ProactiveNet" - jeeze, I'm not really sure what *thats* about, but it sure does sound more interesting that mixing juice.
Nope - I'm a loyal slashdotter, and I think I'll stick around to see if soommmethinggggg goooooooodzzzzz zzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzz zzzZZZZZZZzzzZZ ZZZzzZZZZzzZZZZzzzZZZZ
Moreover, they still make about 3.5 times more revenue per year than Apple - without a strong hardware business.
Hardware is usually a pretty low margin business (even for apple). S/w is where the high gross margins live - do dev work then sell it unlimited times. Cost of sales = a CD. Admittedly the dev work is pretty expensive.
I bought an external version of the Seagate 400G for my PVR, which sits in the lounge. The PVR is nicely silent and small, but the type of activity performed by this drive seems to make it noisy.
When recording a program, or playing a video from the drive, we see periodic bursts of writing - which I guess makes sense - loop: fill a buffer, empty it, goto loop.
The problem is that while the drive is pretty quiet, every write creates quiet a loud 'click', which is ( I assume) seek noise. So I get a noticable click every second. ick.
I know we hate to say it, but Windows and lookOut are pretty dominant. A modern phone will be limited to the fans unless it integrates with outlook (and preferably other PMSs too) *as well as* linux. And I didn't see that out of the box.
Hang on, lets establish some standards here...
on
Snails Edge Out ADSL
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The problem is that they were comparing snails travelling over very short distances (cms) to pigeons travelling 100km. To take that to its illogical conclusion, a photon (carrying, say, 8 bits of color information) travels 1um in 1/3x10^14 secs. Therefore this is carrying 3x10^14 bytes/sec or about 300Tbytes/sec. That rivals the 747 carrying DVDs.
I think if we are going to establish bandwidth records we need to establish distance too. I suggest 100kms is probably a pretty good minimum measure to make sense.
If you are talking about the shuttle, then
we are currently running at 14 deaths from about 100 shuttle launches (rounding for simplicity), or over 100,000 per million shuttle launches. The shuttles are running a bit behind.
If you are talking about satellites, then I don't know what the numbers are, but they blowupallthetime.
The fact that they achieve 30 deaths per million launches is because they are unmanned and usually launched over the sea, not because of any inherant safety record.
It wont be a point source of radiation, should be there an explosion (especially a high altitude one) - it will be a widely dispersed contamination of radioactive material.
And I am actually worried about nuclear submarines - not because of their current state, but when they degrade and release their material.
To paraphrase: pick a simple phrase that is silly, such as "green fruit stink" or "toadies are easy". Further "...a longer passphrase of a limited character set is stronger than a shorter passphrase of a larger character set...".
Its secure, easy to remember and robust against dictionary attacks. Just takes a little longer to type. And if you are using old LM on NT where only the first 8 letters are used and this is useless, you deserve everything you get.
I can jump straight to the menu when a DVD starts.
Combine that with automatic ad-skipping of TV programs (good but not quite perfect), and the magic fwd-30, back-5 buttons on the remote, my tv and video experience is very satisfying. Signal to noise ratio is approaching infinity:-)
You know, there actually may be a positive side to this. The SSN is a primary key for commerce, banking and government interaction. But its a darn stupid one - they are easily stolen, copied and misued.
The offshoot of nearly everyone's SSN becoming well known could force the government to mandate alternate identification methods - one that are less prone to hacking.
Of course, it will probably take a senator's ID being stolen for this to actually gain steam.
You are missing the point of MP3s - a compressed storage that sounds great, plays anywhere and will be around for a long long time. Its the format best matching these conditions.
If any of these reasons doesn't work for you, choose another format:
If you want perfect reproducability from your CD original (or recordings), use AIFF, FLAC or WAV.
If you want more compression while keeping good sound, and dont mind if it wont play anywhere, try OGG or WMA.
The RIAA / MPAA strategy is to outspend their opponents into submission. Their strategy worked with Napster, Scour and countless others
Actually, Napster had pretty deep pockets. What took them down was the judge (patel) who decided that their product was solely focused on the illegal distribution of music, with central control.
If, on the other hand, you have a decentralised, p2p network where the developer is not controlling content, and it has legitimate uses, then the product is likely to win the case.
Slashdot Mirror
I have just spend some time with Ubuntu. IMHO This is the first distro that really gets it and has the potential to be a desktop killer. The install is very simple (timezone, name, password), and after install you have a very simple well thought out interface.
You dont have 50 different text editors and 12 different cd writers. Just one. Not necessarily the best, but it makes for a great distro to put on a novices desktop.
The menus are well though out too. None of this 'system tools' and 'system' and crap from FC. The menus go across the top a la the Mac.
Just brilliant.
HP have made a smart move.
A smart move in response to something they didn't really want to do in the first place.
Further, they are not eroding their margins in the place that counts - 'proper' desktop PCs.
You hack it, then you have to tell MS what you did, and keep quiet. This will give them time to quietly fix the bugs.
The box will get hacked with all current known exploits (lets say there are 2000 different exploits, just for arguments sake). MS will get told in great detail about each of them.
The cost to MS is (say) $200 (xbox) * 2000 (#hacks) = $400K. Chickenfeed.
The upside is credibility. They will be able to point to this box (eventually) and report how uncompromisable it is. Hackers can't break it.
You have to keep in mind whats at stake - the gartner report that recommended dumping IIS really hurt MS because Gartner has credibility in the corporate space. MS are trying to regain their cred, and you have to take your hat off to them for making this move.
But what I also trust is that they will open their doors and computers very wide to the first FBI agent with a supboena, especially with the full weight of The Patriot Act.
Judges are handing wiretapping orders out like confetti, so you need to consider that any information held by any company belongs to the government at any time. All your base belong to us. And what's even scarier is that no-one is allowed to talk about it - all requests for info come with gag orders.
I'd be willing to bet that Google have already been approached for information.
What i'd like to know is what sort of data mining expertise the FBI is gathering in preparation for getting their hands on all googles files.
The readme file is several hundred lines long and includes a bevy of options. The X config file needs to be changed "as appropriate" (and what the hell does *that* mean). SuSE users are referred to another document to read first...
I admit that they do a good job of:
- distributing code but keeping IP
- Creating an installer thats relatively usable
But it still proves my point.First, linux requires you to deal with source code. Fine for you techheads out there. Bad for consumers unless it is *invisible* (i.e. just part of the install process that they dont see), and right now it just aint - at least not on all distros.
Second, (and this one's just going to eat at Open source people) - many companies dont want to release their source code. It was hard to write, and often they had to invest millions to create it. Why should they release it for free?
I'm not going to start a flame war by arguing that this is right or wrong. It just is. I need to be able to create a single binary and installer that I can release to the linux world and expect it to work across (at least) most distros and recent versions. Thats commercial reality.
MS have got it right only because they have a slow moving platform and no fragmentation. You wrote a driver in 2000 for windows 2000. In 2001 you needed to update it for XP. The linux world is very fast moving - here we are preparing to take on the 12th release of the 2.6 tree - and that has created issues for driver manufacturers.
I'm sure to get modded down/censored, but I really want to know? A story about a machine for pouring juice?!?!?! I mean come on... Stuff for nerds, stuff that snores.
Hows about we just pop over to see what Computerworld has on the boil...
- New N1 grid s/w from Sun
- Virtualization code directly added to windows
- "A Pragmatic Approach to Implementing ITIL Using ProactiveNet" - jeeze, I'm not really sure what *thats* about, but it sure does sound more interesting that mixing juice.
And what about google news Sci/Tech?- Astronaut comments on NASA delaying flight
- Life on mars
- Tiger
Nope - I'm a loyal slashdotter, and I think I'll stick around to see if soommmethinggggg goooooooodzzzzz zzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzz zzzZZZZZZZzzzZZ ZZZzzZZZZzzZZZZzzzZZZZMythtv already automatically detects and removes ads. Its pretty reliable too. Yes, its a neat trick.
The problem is that for all of these, there are concessions:
- The PDA does not integrate well with lookOut (despite all your groans, thats what the business community use by and large).
- The music player is klunky and not yet big enough, and doesn't integrate with iTunes
- The phone has miniscule buttons
On the plus side - the camera is probably good enough and has enough storage, and the Nokia GUI has always been excellent.I'm starting to get a little excited because with this phone, Nokia is *almost* there.
Also 1/(3x10^14).
BillG: a 640K snail should be enough for anyone
When recording a program, or playing a video from the drive, we see periodic bursts of writing - which I guess makes sense - loop: fill a buffer, empty it, goto loop.
The problem is that while the drive is pretty quiet, every write creates quiet a loud 'click', which is ( I assume) seek noise. So I get a noticable click every second. ick.
I know we hate to say it, but Windows and lookOut are pretty dominant. A modern phone will be limited to the fans unless it integrates with outlook (and preferably other PMSs too) *as well as* linux. And I didn't see that out of the box.
I think if we are going to establish bandwidth records we need to establish distance too. I suggest 100kms is probably a pretty good minimum measure to make sense.
If you are talking about the shuttle, then we are currently running at 14 deaths from about 100 shuttle launches (rounding for simplicity), or over 100,000 per million shuttle launches. The shuttles are running a bit behind.
If you are talking about satellites, then I don't know what the numbers are, but they blow up all the time. The fact that they achieve 30 deaths per million launches is because they are unmanned and usually launched over the sea, not because of any inherant safety record.
Ok - I am feeling somewhat mollified by the comments. Thanks.
And I am actually worried about nuclear submarines - not because of their current state, but when they degrade and release their material.
Its one thing to have a nuclear reactor down the road with a million to one chance against blowing up...
Its another to be lobbing one up into space where, during launch, there is a 100 to one chance of it blowing up.
Risk = chance of happening x consequences
Here the consequences are catastrophic. Can anyone enlighten me on how this is a good thing?
Same goes for s/w. Windows doesn't have to be easy to use. Just easier than linux. And it is because thats what most people are used to.
Ease of use is subjective - what you really mean is easy to use for me. And windows is.
To paraphrase: pick a simple phrase that is silly, such as "green fruit stink" or "toadies are easy". Further "...a longer passphrase of a limited character set is stronger than a shorter passphrase of a larger character set...".
Its secure, easy to remember and robust against dictionary attacks. Just takes a little longer to type. And if you are using old LM on NT where only the first 8 letters are used and this is useless, you deserve everything you get.
I can jump straight to the menu when a DVD starts.
Combine that with automatic ad-skipping of TV programs (good but not quite perfect), and the magic fwd-30, back-5 buttons on the remote, my tv and video experience is very satisfying. Signal to noise ratio is approaching infinity :-)
The offshoot of nearly everyone's SSN becoming well known could force the government to mandate alternate identification methods - one that are less prone to hacking.
Of course, it will probably take a senator's ID being stolen for this to actually gain steam.
If any of these reasons doesn't work for you, choose another format:
If, on the other hand, you have a decentralised, p2p network where the developer is not controlling content, and it has legitimate uses, then the product is likely to win the case.
On this point, hes full of it.