Why do you assume using Microsoft software makes you positively disposed towards the same?
I'm only trying to say that there is an opportunity for conflict of interest, that's all. If someone has already made a large investment , there is at least an incentive to preserve that investment (if only due to self-preservation). Microsoft knows this, and some of their marketing is brilliant to this end (i.e., helping in the short term, as you mentioned).
Rule #1 of investing: Don't tell a half-million other people what your stock strategy is.
Okay, we need to reset things a bit... What about solid-state storage, that'll be sure to put the hard drive manufacturers' feet to the fire! Oh, and holographic storage just might be the wave of the future! I've always thought that large arrays of hampster wheels were underrated for mass storage...invest now!!!
With respect to software, I would expect that it is very hard to remain 100% impartial. So many people, including judges, investigators, etc. use computers, and so many of those computers run Microsoft software, there is a huge opportunity for conflict of interest to arise. Even if only subconsciously, if a person had spent some good money on a computer, would they want to work towards limiting its lifetime?
On one front we need to have faith that judges are better than that, but, elsewhere, there will always be a role for grass-roots advocacy. For Linux advocates, it doesn't hurt that IBM, Sun, and Novell are on the bandwagon, too. IBM and Sun, especially, have at least a marketing presence around any big government contract. My bet is that the software market will right itself on its own eventually, which is probably better than a legal solution, anyway.
It was because of Quake that [commodity] 3d accelleration made it to the big time.
UNIX workstation vendors have been pushing full 3d-accelerated hardware for many years for things like CAD-CAM. The difference is that a traditional full-blown OpenGL card is at least $1500, while the typical ATI or NVidia card is less than $500. It can be said without a doubt that Quake reduced the cost for us all. Now, the top cards for UNIX workstations have obscene gobs of RAM and GPU power...a glimpse into the future for PCs.
Suppose you made a grill for the bottom of the mower deck similar to that which covers the blades of an electric razor.
I suspect that if this worked, lawnmower manufacturers would have already done it for liability reasons. One thing about a grill is that it would probably clog for any non-trivial amount of wet grass.
ATSC set-top boxes can be had for as little as $150. That's what I paid for mine two days ago. Granted, it was a discontinued demo unit; but that $600 figure is strangely outdated. A variety of new models are available at $300.
This is encouraging. If I can get a $39 digital HDTV receiver one day, then I just may upgrade. Even if the picture resolution isn't as high, due to my old analog TV, at least I could continue watching the few shows I like. I think they have to reach the $50 threshold before the FCC deadline, though, because analog TV is "good enough" for a lot of purposes and forced upgrades don't bode well for many people.
The best office environment was a small company where we had around 3 to 4 people per room with a full corner desk each.
Well, YMMV. I had an office like this during a summer job, and pretty much everything breaks down when someone decides to eat lunch at their desk (crinkle crinkle smack slurp). I guess a rule against eating at one's desk might help, but rules like this tend to lower morale, as well. Group offices work well, if and only if, the people in that office are already conscientious enough to be polite about things like eating.
When you have something as large and as diverse as "Open Source", including all projects and all the different licensing schemes, finding 12 things to complain about is like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Microsoft funding these think tanks is really no different than a politician funding TV commercials against his opponents--they'll say pretty much anything to further their own interests.
Everything you said is true, but when will the burden of upgrading to DTV be less than $200? Everyone has a limit where moving to new technology for the sake of it is simply too expensive. My limit right now is very low, especially considering all the other technologies competing for my money, such as cell phones, PDAs, portable MP3 players, various subscriptions, etc. Exactly how much disposable income to broadcasters think I will put towards their digital TV project?
Unless a nominally low cost for a new digital TV is reached, I will keep my analog TV going until it dies of old age. If my analog TV stops working due to a mandatory switch to all-digital broadcasting, and digital TV is still too expensive, then I will very likely simply do without a TV at all. It isn't like I have magic money trees for spending on all the new technology. I really hope the businesses aren't betting on people abusing their credit cards forever, which is currently the source for a lot of their income, right now.
Last night, PBS had another one of those "digital TV is the future" specials ironically mentioning how long and expensive the upgrade has been for them...but how affordable it will be for us all. Now, some choice quotes: "digital HTDV-capable TVs can be had for as little as $700" (!) or "set-top boxes for analog TVs can be had for as little as $600" (!). They are hoping for 85% household penetration within a few years.
I am still baffled, somewhat, by the digital TV "revolution." I have seen digital cable and its compression artifacts. My luck with DirecTV has been a bit better, with only dropouts during very heavy rain. Regardless, I do not own a digital TV, no longer have DirecTV (it's $400/year, you know), and now have a regular broadcast antenna. The news available on the WWW is better than most TV news and The News Hour on PBS is better than all cable news, which leaves me wondering why I should ever invest in digital TV at all (missing only The News Hour and a very small number of other shows), when I can bypass all of it in favor of getting a better Internet connection and keep using my VCR/DVD player for rented/purchased movies.
it'll certainly be no worse than having bottles of ammonia and bleach.
I'm not sure what it is, but mixing bleach with stuff like ammonia or chlorine-free bleach makes some pretty nasty stuff. Also, if methanol were so dangerous, would I be able to spray copious amounts of the stuff on my car's windshield just by pressing a button?
"Have any Slashdot readers ever actually used the backwards compatibility on their PlayStation 2?"
The fact that the PS2 plays PS2 games plus PS1 games plus DVDs plus CDs made buying the PS2 a no-brainer. There really are some very good PS1 games out there, and I'm pretty sure I have almost as many PS1 games as PS2 games in my collection.
She's good at handling admin details and remembering things like birthdays, knows how to shop for things like hotel and airline deals and is good at setting up events, and would never let the place run out of vital supplies or let the timesheets get behind.
This is why, IMO, the "web based" "revolution" still has not obseleted the age-old profession of secretary/office assistant/company clerk. There are just too many details to fit into any reasonable sotware requirements specification, and the attempts I've seen so far (as in my above post) to create secretary work-arounds have really made things worse than better.
Also, I like the "office mom" analogy. Good secretaries/assistants/clerks really are good at raising morale though simply making the office a comfortable place to go to. It really is all those details that make the difference.
The key thing that a boss over engineers needs to do is clear the administrative hassles...
This reminds me of a few things one of my previous employers did that generally lowered morale:
1) Move to cumbersome and over-engineered "web based" electronic timesheet system, where previously our quite competent secretary would handle most of the data entry and phone-tag games.
2) Move to a cumbersome and over-engineered "web based" expense reporting system, where previously we simply handed all our receipts to our quite competent secretary who would handle most of the data entry and phone-tag games.
3) Move to a cumbersome and over-engineered "web based" training records system, where previously our quite competent secretary blah blah blah.
4) They laid off our quite competent secretary.
5) Now all the engineers were on their own, and the administrative burdens really got in the way of getting work done.
6) Cynicism ensues as efficiency drops and money spent on technology skyrockets.
7) Eventually, I left on my own accord to pursue other things.
Yea, because all those things like algorithms, O notation, principles of optimization, etc, have all changed completely and totally in the past 12 years!
In IT, Computer Science is only half the battle. Keeping up with all the new acronyms and buzzwords, even if only enough to know vaguely which ones might be appropriate for a given problem, is very very tiring. For example, I graduated in 1999, enjoyed Computer Science, etc., but the boom in everthing XML/Java/.NET just left me wanting to go back to C programming, CGI, and simpler times. If only C had garbage collection...that would be nice.
Except those flourescent bulbs put out painfully ugly light.
This isn't true anymore. Those $6 GE "soft" white flourescent bulbs do just fine. I did make the mistake of buying a cheap bulb from a Big Lots clearance once...that one went into the garage.
Also, everytime a flourescent vs. LED discussion comes up on Slashdot, it always ends up concluding that LEDs are less efficient for area lighting than flourescent, but LEDs are better for niche or accent lighting. LEDs are also great for lighting photo labs, because they can emit only one frequency without the spillover that incandescents have.
Did they understand that laptop replacement batteries are >>$100? I figured that my 17" CRT and workstation use perhaps $75 of electricity per year--if laptops save $50 in energy but lose $25-$50 in replacement parts, on average, then any savings probably won't materialize.
It probably would have been smarter to specify low-power desktops with LCDs for those who don't travel and only use the Thinkpads for people who really need them. With Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, Transmeta, Via, etc. all selling decent low power CPUs lately, a good low-power desktop would be pretty easy to put together. However, some engineers and designers should still get the all-out powerhouse workstations, because their time is worth more than electricity.
The sad truth is that Linux is not taken seriously for audio work at the moment, even though the ALSA system is quite excellent and the latency of 1.x is lower than both Windows and OSX.
ALSA and the other audio software for Linux still lack good documentation and are difficult to get working from scratch. A few months ago, I wanted to see if I could get MIDI working natively under Debian 3.0, but the best I was able to attain after quite a bit of effort was sound playback via ALSA. There probably is a way, but I resigned to using software-based players like Fluidsynth, TiMidity, or Java's built-in software MIDI. Also, trying to figure out just how JACK, arts, NAS, esound, ALSA, OSS, etc. are related or not related just doesn't help at all.
Sound isn't to the point of other things like 3D graphics, where I pretty much know to go to OpenGL/Mesa, or packet filtering, where I pretty much know to go to OpenBSD, etc. A best-of-breed option hasn't made itself apparent and implanted itself into our collective consciousness, yet. Usually these things coalesce into two mainstream options eventually (UNIX/Windows, KDE/GNOME, IE/Mozilla, etc), so I hope it's just a matter of time before sound catches up.
I wonder why copyright law can't be simple, like: individual works become public domain upon death and corporate works become public domain after X years, where X isn't longer than a person's life expectancy. It seems current copyright law implies that our children/future executives should be able to get rich off of our creative work doing little for themselves, rather than just get our inheritence/assets and leave it at that.
Mainly, they are opinions, and everyone's opinions vary because their needs vary and their outlooks on life vary. Also, needs and outlooks change with age.
In the Linux realm, it isn't uncommon for someone to cut their teeth with distros like Red Hat or Mandrake and then move on to other distros as their needs and knowledge evolve. For example, I started with Red Hat back in the 5.0 days, stayed with Red Hat through 6.2, but, by then, began finding Red Hat too inflexible for my needs. I began finding their installation tools somewhat rigid and RPM too complex. That's about when I started using Slackware and, later, Debian and OpenBSD.
The simplicity, logical arrangements, different approaches, and, frequently, better documentation, behind Slackware, Debian, and the *BSDs are really quite refreshing for an experienced person. For example, Debian's installer allows dropping to a shell at any time, it does not care whether/cdrom is actually a CD-ROM drive nor does it care what/target is. By replacing the installer's Linux kernel with an NFS-enabled one, I can have/cdrom be a share from another computer and/target be yet another share somewhere else. This makes installing Debian on a computer without a CD-ROM drive or a floppy drive possible (a SunPCi II Pro co-processor card is exactly this kind of computer), and Debian really hits the spot in this application and in workstation use, in general.
For server use, I would not hesitate to use Slackware or OpenBSD, as they really are easier to administer and are less complex than other distros. With them, I don't have to navigate the "Enterprise Buzzword" maze of newbie-oriented installation tools or baroque configuration tools to just get things working. They tend to keep/etc in/etc and/var/log in/var/log, they tend to actually have up-to-date manual pages, they are more conservative in what software they package together, etc. All these things make people like these distros over all the others.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you assume using Microsoft software makes you positively disposed towards the same?
I'm only trying to say that there is an opportunity for conflict of interest, that's all. If someone has already made a large investment , there is at least an incentive to preserve that investment (if only due to self-preservation). Microsoft knows this, and some of their marketing is brilliant to this end (i.e., helping in the short term, as you mentioned).
Rule #1 of investing: Don't tell a half-million other people what your stock strategy is.
Okay, we need to reset things a bit... What about solid-state storage, that'll be sure to put the hard drive manufacturers' feet to the fire! Oh, and holographic storage just might be the wave of the future! I've always thought that large arrays of hampster wheels were underrated for mass storage...invest now!!!
The judicirary is supposed to be impartial.
With respect to software, I would expect that it is very hard to remain 100% impartial. So many people, including judges, investigators, etc. use computers, and so many of those computers run Microsoft software, there is a huge opportunity for conflict of interest to arise. Even if only subconsciously, if a person had spent some good money on a computer, would they want to work towards limiting its lifetime?
On one front we need to have faith that judges are better than that, but, elsewhere, there will always be a role for grass-roots advocacy. For Linux advocates, it doesn't hurt that IBM, Sun, and Novell are on the bandwagon, too. IBM and Sun, especially, have at least a marketing presence around any big government contract. My bet is that the software market will right itself on its own eventually, which is probably better than a legal solution, anyway.
It was because of Quake that [commodity] 3d accelleration made it to the big time.
UNIX workstation vendors have been pushing full 3d-accelerated hardware for many years for things like CAD-CAM. The difference is that a traditional full-blown OpenGL card is at least $1500, while the typical ATI or NVidia card is less than $500. It can be said without a doubt that Quake reduced the cost for us all. Now, the top cards for UNIX workstations have obscene gobs of RAM and GPU power...a glimpse into the future for PCs.
Suppose you made a grill for the bottom of the mower deck similar to that which covers the blades of an electric razor.
I suspect that if this worked, lawnmower manufacturers would have already done it for liability reasons. One thing about a grill is that it would probably clog for any non-trivial amount of wet grass.
ATSC set-top boxes can be had for as little as $150. That's what I paid for mine two days ago. Granted, it was a discontinued demo unit; but that $600 figure is strangely outdated. A variety of new models are available at $300.
This is encouraging. If I can get a $39 digital HDTV receiver one day, then I just may upgrade. Even if the picture resolution isn't as high, due to my old analog TV, at least I could continue watching the few shows I like. I think they have to reach the $50 threshold before the FCC deadline, though, because analog TV is "good enough" for a lot of purposes and forced upgrades don't bode well for many people.
The best office environment was a small company where we had around 3 to 4 people per room with a full corner desk each.
Well, YMMV. I had an office like this during a summer job, and pretty much everything breaks down when someone decides to eat lunch at their desk (crinkle crinkle smack slurp). I guess a rule against eating at one's desk might help, but rules like this tend to lower morale, as well. Group offices work well, if and only if, the people in that office are already conscientious enough to be polite about things like eating.
When you have something as large and as diverse as "Open Source", including all projects and all the different licensing schemes, finding 12 things to complain about is like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Microsoft funding these think tanks is really no different than a politician funding TV commercials against his opponents--they'll say pretty much anything to further their own interests.
Everything you said is true, but when will the burden of upgrading to DTV be less than $200? Everyone has a limit where moving to new technology for the sake of it is simply too expensive. My limit right now is very low, especially considering all the other technologies competing for my money, such as cell phones, PDAs, portable MP3 players, various subscriptions, etc. Exactly how much disposable income to broadcasters think I will put towards their digital TV project?
Unless a nominally low cost for a new digital TV is reached, I will keep my analog TV going until it dies of old age. If my analog TV stops working due to a mandatory switch to all-digital broadcasting, and digital TV is still too expensive, then I will very likely simply do without a TV at all. It isn't like I have magic money trees for spending on all the new technology. I really hope the businesses aren't betting on people abusing their credit cards forever, which is currently the source for a lot of their income, right now.
Last night, PBS had another one of those "digital TV is the future" specials ironically mentioning how long and expensive the upgrade has been for them...but how affordable it will be for us all. Now, some choice quotes: "digital HTDV-capable TVs can be had for as little as $700" (!) or "set-top boxes for analog TVs can be had for as little as $600" (!). They are hoping for 85% household penetration within a few years.
I am still baffled, somewhat, by the digital TV "revolution." I have seen digital cable and its compression artifacts. My luck with DirecTV has been a bit better, with only dropouts during very heavy rain. Regardless, I do not own a digital TV, no longer have DirecTV (it's $400/year, you know), and now have a regular broadcast antenna. The news available on the WWW is better than most TV news and The News Hour on PBS is better than all cable news, which leaves me wondering why I should ever invest in digital TV at all (missing only The News Hour and a very small number of other shows), when I can bypass all of it in favor of getting a better Internet connection and keep using my VCR/DVD player for rented/purchased movies.
100 notes
At least it beats a piano.
1566 is probably evenly divisible by however many racks they have alloted for the cluster.
it'll certainly be no worse than having bottles of ammonia and bleach.
I'm not sure what it is, but mixing bleach with stuff like ammonia or chlorine-free bleach makes some pretty nasty stuff. Also, if methanol were so dangerous, would I be able to spray copious amounts of the stuff on my car's windshield just by pressing a button?
"Have any Slashdot readers ever actually used the backwards compatibility on their PlayStation 2?"
The fact that the PS2 plays PS2 games plus PS1 games plus DVDs plus CDs made buying the PS2 a no-brainer. There really are some very good PS1 games out there, and I'm pretty sure I have almost as many PS1 games as PS2 games in my collection.
She's good at handling admin details and remembering things like birthdays, knows how to shop for things like hotel and airline deals and is good at setting up events, and would never let the place run out of vital supplies or let the timesheets get behind.
This is why, IMO, the "web based" "revolution" still has not obseleted the age-old profession of secretary/office assistant/company clerk. There are just too many details to fit into any reasonable sotware requirements specification, and the attempts I've seen so far (as in my above post) to create secretary work-arounds have really made things worse than better.
Also, I like the "office mom" analogy. Good secretaries/assistants/clerks really are good at raising morale though simply making the office a comfortable place to go to. It really is all those details that make the difference.
The key thing that a boss over engineers needs to do is clear the administrative hassles...
This reminds me of a few things one of my previous employers did that generally lowered morale:
1) Move to cumbersome and over-engineered "web based" electronic timesheet system, where previously our quite competent secretary would handle most of the data entry and phone-tag games.
2) Move to a cumbersome and over-engineered "web based" expense reporting system, where previously we simply handed all our receipts to our quite competent secretary who would handle most of the data entry and phone-tag games.
3) Move to a cumbersome and over-engineered "web based" training records system, where previously our quite competent secretary blah blah blah.
4) They laid off our quite competent secretary.
5) Now all the engineers were on their own, and the administrative burdens really got in the way of getting work done.
6) Cynicism ensues as efficiency drops and money spent on technology skyrockets.
7) Eventually, I left on my own accord to pursue other things.
Yea, because all those things like algorithms, O notation, principles of optimization, etc, have all changed completely and totally in the past 12 years!
In IT, Computer Science is only half the battle. Keeping up with all the new acronyms and buzzwords, even if only enough to know vaguely which ones might be appropriate for a given problem, is very very tiring. For example, I graduated in 1999, enjoyed Computer Science, etc., but the boom in everthing XML/Java/.NET just left me wanting to go back to C programming, CGI, and simpler times. If only C had garbage collection...that would be nice.
But if I were offered a job in Massachusetts, I doubt that questions of personal safety would even enter my mind.
Have you driven in Massachusetts?
True, but if the laptop is replacing a desktop and will never leave the desk, simply pop the battery out before you deliver it to the user.
:/
Then, the user has a low-power desktop computer, but gets to enjoy a cramped keyboard, no built-in UPS (the battery), and a slow 2.5" hard drive
Except those flourescent bulbs put out painfully ugly light.
This isn't true anymore. Those $6 GE "soft" white flourescent bulbs do just fine. I did make the mistake of buying a cheap bulb from a Big Lots clearance once...that one went into the garage.
Also, everytime a flourescent vs. LED discussion comes up on Slashdot, it always ends up concluding that LEDs are less efficient for area lighting than flourescent, but LEDs are better for niche or accent lighting. LEDs are also great for lighting photo labs, because they can emit only one frequency without the spillover that incandescents have.
They switched us all to thinkpads.
Did they understand that laptop replacement batteries are >>$100? I figured that my 17" CRT and workstation use perhaps $75 of electricity per year--if laptops save $50 in energy but lose $25-$50 in replacement parts, on average, then any savings probably won't materialize.
It probably would have been smarter to specify low-power desktops with LCDs for those who don't travel and only use the Thinkpads for people who really need them. With Intel, AMD, IBM, Sun, Transmeta, Via, etc. all selling decent low power CPUs lately, a good low-power desktop would be pretty easy to put together. However, some engineers and designers should still get the all-out powerhouse workstations, because their time is worth more than electricity.
The sad truth is that Linux is not taken seriously for audio work at the moment, even though the ALSA system is quite excellent and the latency of 1.x is lower than both Windows and OSX.
ALSA and the other audio software for Linux still lack good documentation and are difficult to get working from scratch. A few months ago, I wanted to see if I could get MIDI working natively under Debian 3.0, but the best I was able to attain after quite a bit of effort was sound playback via ALSA. There probably is a way, but I resigned to using software-based players like Fluidsynth, TiMidity, or Java's built-in software MIDI. Also, trying to figure out just how JACK, arts, NAS, esound, ALSA, OSS, etc. are related or not related just doesn't help at all.
Sound isn't to the point of other things like 3D graphics, where I pretty much know to go to OpenGL/Mesa, or packet filtering, where I pretty much know to go to OpenBSD, etc. A best-of-breed option hasn't made itself apparent and implanted itself into our collective consciousness, yet. Usually these things coalesce into two mainstream options eventually (UNIX/Windows, KDE/GNOME, IE/Mozilla, etc), so I hope it's just a matter of time before sound catches up.
I wonder why copyright law can't be simple, like: individual works become public domain upon death and corporate works become public domain after X years, where X isn't longer than a person's life expectancy. It seems current copyright law implies that our children/future executives should be able to get rich off of our creative work doing little for themselves, rather than just get our inheritence/assets and leave it at that.
Why is that?
/cdrom is actually a CD-ROM drive nor does it care what /target is. By replacing the installer's Linux kernel with an NFS-enabled one, I can have /cdrom be a share from another computer and /target be yet another share somewhere else. This makes installing Debian on a computer without a CD-ROM drive or a floppy drive possible (a SunPCi II Pro co-processor card is exactly this kind of computer), and Debian really hits the spot in this application and in workstation use, in general.
/etc in /etc and /var/log in /var/log, they tend to actually have up-to-date manual pages, they are more conservative in what software they package together, etc. All these things make people like these distros over all the others.
Mainly, they are opinions, and everyone's opinions vary because their needs vary and their outlooks on life vary. Also, needs and outlooks change with age.
In the Linux realm, it isn't uncommon for someone to cut their teeth with distros like Red Hat or Mandrake and then move on to other distros as their needs and knowledge evolve. For example, I started with Red Hat back in the 5.0 days, stayed with Red Hat through 6.2, but, by then, began finding Red Hat too inflexible for my needs. I began finding their installation tools somewhat rigid and RPM too complex. That's about when I started using Slackware and, later, Debian and OpenBSD.
The simplicity, logical arrangements, different approaches, and, frequently, better documentation, behind Slackware, Debian, and the *BSDs are really quite refreshing for an experienced person. For example, Debian's installer allows dropping to a shell at any time, it does not care whether
For server use, I would not hesitate to use Slackware or OpenBSD, as they really are easier to administer and are less complex than other distros. With them, I don't have to navigate the "Enterprise Buzzword" maze of newbie-oriented installation tools or baroque configuration tools to just get things working. They tend to keep