It's already been solved. It's called "paper". It's been used for 1000's of years, and if you take care of it properly, it can last a LONG time, always be readable, and is more open source than any of the FUD the OSS camp spews out. Paper. Written records. Hasn't been beat yet. Kinda' like all of the people thinking that they were re-inventing the wheel with e-books. We've all seen how well that has gone.
You can hate big business as much as you want, but the problem with saying that they're big and nasty and bad is that they're still private (or public) property. As soon as you start asking the government to regulate private property, then you either have to accept those same limitations on business of ALL sizes to be fair, or you pick some arbitary point at which business needs more regulation, and you start sliding down the slippery slope, AND you take away incentive to grow.
Why do you care if nobody is making PDA's any more? You have one, already. How many more do you need? Will yours stop working if companies stop making them?
I think that first, schools should start by working on making kids literate. No offense intended, but your grammatically incorrect post supports my point.
This article is so incredibly wrong, I just want to rant about a couple of the worst points:
* All developers are created equal
Wrong, wrong wrong. A kid fresh out of college IS NOT equal to somebody who has been working for 20 years. NOT EQUAL. I'm sorry if that hurts somebody's feelings, but that's life. To assume that "all developers are created equal" is completely and utterly wrong. I don't know how better to explain it; this is kind of a common sense thing.
* The fastest way through the project is to do it right
Huh? No it isn't. The fastest is often to slap together something crude that works. It's all about ROI. If I hire a developer to write a quick and dirty DB interface that only I use, and he takes 6 weeks to do it, because he's sharing and holding hands, and documenting, and using source control, etc., then that developer will be fired.
I get the impression that the authors of this article have never held down a paying programming job. The nonsense that they're spouting is so utterly far from reality that it's funny.
WTF is Firewire used for? Is Firewire required to write papers or check email? WXGA vs. XGA? C'mon... I don't know a lot of college freshmen that are rendering Hollywood movies. My sisters got by (only a few year ago) with a Brother typewriter/word processor that you put diskettes into, and had an LED screen. They both got pretty damn good grades, without a color screen ! Are these things for entertainment, or learning stuff?
If an extra pound bothers you, then lay off the twinkies. Half the RAM? How much RAM do you need to write papers and check email? We're talking about POOR, COLLEGE STUDENTS going to a PUBLIC UNIVERSITY.
Visual Basic, anyone? Visual J++? Those are just two I thought of while typing.
You're right. Those are dead. However, I just finished a brand new app with VB 6.0 yesterday. Amazingly, it still worked! From what you're saying, I was expecting somebody from Microsoft to show up at my office and uninstall the program from my machines at gunpoint.
Good point there, talking about how 'hard' it is to do something with OSS, when it is literally impossible, both legally without the copyright and technologically without the original source, to do it with closed programs.
Theoretical != Reality. If one of my mission critical apps goes belly up, and the manufacturer is all gone, and I have the choice of hiring some random person at $150/hour to fix it, or just buying new software, I'm going to buy the new software every single time. Again, only massivly large corporations have the money and manpower to hire coders to fix something as complicated and important as mission-critical software.
They're the students' laptops, and I don't really see why it's the school's responsibility to support the students' computes.
If the university is requiring them, then it IS their job to support them. Also, I know that at least at my school (UNC-CH), we supported everything that students or faculty had (within reason). If all of a sudden we had to start supporting a lot of Linux boxes, we just couldn't do it (with the manpower and budget). Apple was a stretch, but we had a few Apple people that could tackle those, and luckily there weren't too many students with those (public school with lots of students who could barely afford a PC, never mind an Apple).
That's very nice that your Stinkpads need help to do that. My Powerbook does automatically it without any help.
Jesus, talk about smug. That's great if you, as a college freshman, could afford an overpriced Apple. Maybe you should have some pity on us poor, working class people. Hell, I've been out of school for 10 years, and I still can't afford an Apple.
but neither should you be forcing your beliefs upon theirs
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Creationism is a "Belief". There are no facts behind it, and it is a fictional story. Evolution and natural selection aren't "Beliefs". They're as close to scientific fact as we're going to get. I think that the state SHOULD force children to learn scientific FACTS. It's irrelevant that some inbred religious nuts wants to call them "Beliefs".
The shutdown of companies or their abandonment of products is a real problem in the closed source world.
I hear this all of the time, but I've never heard of it actually happening. Does software suddenly stop working once the company that made it closes down? I have a few pieces of software that were made by now non-existent companies, but it still works fine (DVD Shrink, for one). Also, how about unsupported OSS? I'd be willing to bet that there are a LOT more OSS products out there with no company behind them any more (because most have shut down due to the whole "profit" problem), so the only option is to hire a team of engineers to fix/upgrade it anyway, if need be. I can't imagine this being feasible or practical, except for Fortune 500 companies.
I couldn't agree more. Even mentioning Creationism gives it some kind of credibility. True scientists (people who observe facts as opposed to fairy tales) should just ignore the ignorant masses. A paper/article/whatever talking about evolution, that mentions Creation, is like a biology textbook explaining seed germination, and contrasting it to the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. Creationism has nothing to do with evolution, natural selection, or any kind of facts, and thus should not be treated as such.
If the iPod thingies have a 1/8" standard headphone output, can't you plug the damned thing into ANYTHING? If I owned an iPod, why would I want to pay even more for some custom amp? Radio Shack sells these 1/8" nifty wires that let you plug ANY audio device into, well, pretty much any other audio device.
You're kidding, right? Problems:
1. Nobody wants other people poking around their machine. That's a security hole that makes the SLAMMER worm look like a good idea, by comparison. You want to give some Indian guy at Dell your root password?
2. Liability. Not even Lloyd's would give Dell insurance if they're poking around on other people's hard drives.
3. What happens if they can't get the goddamned thing to boot, or get online? Then it's reading pages of cryptic commands & error messages back and forth for a few hours.
One thing is for sure...network administrators will have an interesting time trying to reconcile the conflicting TLDs.com and.net.
Not for this admin. We blackhole every block of Chinese IP's that we come across (and we blackhole as big of a subnet as we can without blocking other non-hostile countries). It does *wonders* for spam. I don't understand why sysadmins of relevant networks don't do the same (ours is too tiny to impact anybody but us).
Hell, while I'm at it, does anybody have an accurate list of IP blocks that come out of China?
Look, regardless of how good their support is, support costs money. It costs money to hire somebody, pay them, pay to train them, pay for the telephones, pay rent on the call center, pay for the power, pay for the toll-free call, etc. When I was a phone jockey at IBM, I remember being told at some point that a single call to IBM for support (on their Craptiva or Thinkpad lines) cost something along the lines of $100+. If somebody called in twice, IBM lost money on that particular machine. How difficult is it to understand that Linux is going to generate, what?, 2?, 3?, 10? times the number of support calls that Windows will, if they sold Linux to average people?
Provide server space on one of their boxes for an official but community-run wiki, and keep it well fed with PDFs and specs and other raw data. Place a nice prominent link to RedHat/SuSE/whichever on the front page.
I buy a nice, new machine. I have problems. I'm sure as hell not going to spend my time going to some silly wiki. I'm calling the company, and speaking to a real person.
They don't need to explain the prices, because anybody with have a brain knows that there's more to the price than the physical cost of the components. Had you though before you posted, you would have realized that SUPPORT is a cost for them, and that SUPPORT would cost much, much more with every Linux based system that they sell. Jeez, I know that most of you computer dorks aren't business people, but isn't this just common sense?
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You're absolutely right. At least with OSS... oh wait... I still have to take a developer's word for it. Hmmm
It's already been solved. It's called "paper". It's been used for 1000's of years, and if you take care of it properly, it can last a LONG time, always be readable, and is more open source than any of the FUD the OSS camp spews out. Paper. Written records. Hasn't been beat yet. Kinda' like all of the people thinking that they were re-inventing the wheel with e-books. We've all seen how well that has gone.
You can hate big business as much as you want, but the problem with saying that they're big and nasty and bad is that they're still private (or public) property. As soon as you start asking the government to regulate private property, then you either have to accept those same limitations on business of ALL sizes to be fair, or you pick some arbitary point at which business needs more regulation, and you start sliding down the slippery slope, AND you take away incentive to grow.
Why do you care if nobody is making PDA's any more? You have one, already. How many more do you need? Will yours stop working if companies stop making them?
I think that first, schools should start by working on making kids literate. No offense intended, but your grammatically incorrect post supports my point.
This article is so incredibly wrong, I just want to rant about a couple of the worst points:
* All developers are created equal
Wrong, wrong wrong. A kid fresh out of college IS NOT equal to somebody who has been working for 20 years. NOT EQUAL. I'm sorry if that hurts somebody's feelings, but that's life. To assume that "all developers are created equal" is completely and utterly wrong. I don't know how better to explain it; this is kind of a common sense thing.
* The fastest way through the project is to do it right Huh? No it isn't. The fastest is often to slap together something crude that works. It's all about ROI. If I hire a developer to write a quick and dirty DB interface that only I use, and he takes 6 weeks to do it, because he's sharing and holding hands, and documenting, and using source control, etc., then that developer will be fired.
I get the impression that the authors of this article have never held down a paying programming job. The nonsense that they're spouting is so utterly far from reality that it's funny.
Hey, jerkoff... getting a paycheck is mission critical. So please, go fuck yourself.
WTF is Firewire used for? Is Firewire required to write papers or check email? WXGA vs. XGA? C'mon... I don't know a lot of college freshmen that are rendering Hollywood movies. My sisters got by (only a few year ago) with a Brother typewriter/word processor that you put diskettes into, and had an LED screen. They both got pretty damn good grades, without a color screen ! Are these things for entertainment, or learning stuff?
If an extra pound bothers you, then lay off the twinkies. Half the RAM? How much RAM do you need to write papers and check email? We're talking about POOR, COLLEGE STUDENTS going to a PUBLIC UNIVERSITY.
Visual Basic, anyone? Visual J++? Those are just two I thought of while typing.
You're right. Those are dead. However, I just finished a brand new app with VB 6.0 yesterday. Amazingly, it still worked! From what you're saying, I was expecting somebody from Microsoft to show up at my office and uninstall the program from my machines at gunpoint.
Good point there, talking about how 'hard' it is to do something with OSS, when it is literally impossible, both legally without the copyright and technologically without the original source, to do it with closed programs.
Theoretical != Reality. If one of my mission critical apps goes belly up, and the manufacturer is all gone, and I have the choice of hiring some random person at $150/hour to fix it, or just buying new software, I'm going to buy the new software every single time. Again, only massivly large corporations have the money and manpower to hire coders to fix something as complicated and important as mission-critical software.
Because you think Thinkpads are cheap? What world do you live in?
Cheapest Thinkpad: $750
Cheapest Powerbook: $1750
That's $1000. Go away.
They're the students' laptops, and I don't really see why it's the school's responsibility to support the students' computes.
If the university is requiring them, then it IS their job to support them. Also, I know that at least at my school (UNC-CH), we supported everything that students or faculty had (within reason). If all of a sudden we had to start supporting a lot of Linux boxes, we just couldn't do it (with the manpower and budget). Apple was a stretch, but we had a few Apple people that could tackle those, and luckily there weren't too many students with those (public school with lots of students who could barely afford a PC, never mind an Apple).
That's very nice that your Stinkpads need help to do that. My Powerbook does automatically it without any help.
Jesus, talk about smug. That's great if you, as a college freshman, could afford an overpriced Apple. Maybe you should have some pity on us poor, working class people. Hell, I've been out of school for 10 years, and I still can't afford an Apple.
but neither should you be forcing your beliefs upon theirs
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Creationism is a "Belief". There are no facts behind it, and it is a fictional story. Evolution and natural selection aren't "Beliefs". They're as close to scientific fact as we're going to get. I think that the state SHOULD force children to learn scientific FACTS. It's irrelevant that some inbred religious nuts wants to call them "Beliefs".
The shutdown of companies or their abandonment of products is a real problem in the closed source world.
I hear this all of the time, but I've never heard of it actually happening. Does software suddenly stop working once the company that made it closes down? I have a few pieces of software that were made by now non-existent companies, but it still works fine (DVD Shrink, for one). Also, how about unsupported OSS? I'd be willing to bet that there are a LOT more OSS products out there with no company behind them any more (because most have shut down due to the whole "profit" problem), so the only option is to hire a team of engineers to fix/upgrade it anyway, if need be. I can't imagine this being feasible or practical, except for Fortune 500 companies.
unless they go out of their way to push their beliefs on others through legislations or in the schools.
And once they do that, it's time to start rounding them up, and making soylent green!
I couldn't agree more. Even mentioning Creationism gives it some kind of credibility. True scientists (people who observe facts as opposed to fairy tales) should just ignore the ignorant masses. A paper/article/whatever talking about evolution, that mentions Creation, is like a biology textbook explaining seed germination, and contrasting it to the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. Creationism has nothing to do with evolution, natural selection, or any kind of facts, and thus should not be treated as such.
If the iPod thingies have a 1/8" standard headphone output, can't you plug the damned thing into ANYTHING? If I owned an iPod, why would I want to pay even more for some custom amp? Radio Shack sells these 1/8" nifty wires that let you plug ANY audio device into, well, pretty much any other audio device.
You're kidding, right? Problems:
1. Nobody wants other people poking around their machine. That's a security hole that makes the SLAMMER worm look like a good idea, by comparison. You want to give some Indian guy at Dell your root password?
2. Liability. Not even Lloyd's would give Dell insurance if they're poking around on other people's hard drives.
3. What happens if they can't get the goddamned thing to boot, or get online? Then it's reading pages of cryptic commands & error messages back and forth for a few hours.
One thing is for sure...network administrators will have an interesting time trying to reconcile the conflicting TLDs .com and .net.
Not for this admin. We blackhole every block of Chinese IP's that we come across (and we blackhole as big of a subnet as we can without blocking other non-hostile countries). It does *wonders* for spam. I don't understand why sysadmins of relevant networks don't do the same (ours is too tiny to impact anybody but us).
Hell, while I'm at it, does anybody have an accurate list of IP blocks that come out of China?
Proof? Since when does common sense need to be proved? What color is the sky on your planet?
I can't tell you when it will happen, but when it does, MS won't know what hit them.
You're right. The most successful company in US history, run by the most successful person in US history will be totally surprised by it. Sure.
Look, regardless of how good their support is, support costs money. It costs money to hire somebody, pay them, pay to train them, pay for the telephones, pay rent on the call center, pay for the power, pay for the toll-free call, etc. When I was a phone jockey at IBM, I remember being told at some point that a single call to IBM for support (on their Craptiva or Thinkpad lines) cost something along the lines of $100+. If somebody called in twice, IBM lost money on that particular machine. How difficult is it to understand that Linux is going to generate, what?, 2?, 3?, 10? times the number of support calls that Windows will, if they sold Linux to average people?
Provide server space on one of their boxes for an official but community-run wiki, and keep it well fed with PDFs and specs and other raw data. Place a nice prominent link to RedHat/SuSE/whichever on the front page.
I buy a nice, new machine. I have problems. I'm sure as hell not going to spend my time going to some silly wiki. I'm calling the company, and speaking to a real person.
They don't need to explain the prices, because anybody with have a brain knows that there's more to the price than the physical cost of the components. Had you though before you posted, you would have realized that SUPPORT is a cost for them, and that SUPPORT would cost much, much more with every Linux based system that they sell. Jeez, I know that most of you computer dorks aren't business people, but isn't this just common sense?