True- but that's the joy of backward compatibility and the -book standards. The CD needs to play in a car or older CD player or nobody will buy it. My older (5 years) car is still feisty with recordable CDs.
So what does all this mean? If you don't run Windows and allow the CD makers to autorun.inf your computer, then your old tools work just fine. Nothing quite like Linux and a good ripping/MP3 program (and when DRM ends up in those, just use older versions).
As much as they say they want _YOU_, they'll never get you. Instead they'll get the 'average' computer user (the consumer) rather than the geek. And it'll give us another thing to do when we go to our parents house for holiday dinner... "Can you remove these viruses, spryware, AND the DRM software".
Aren't standards great? I'm surprised they're not trying to phase them out so that you can't buy standard CD players...
Ever tried unmounting a mounted CD when an application is using it? Ever tried removing a Jazz Drive or zip disk when it is in use?
Even in XP I get a 'please insert disc with volume label ______' and when I click cancel, It pops up again. Do this about 60 times and it eventually gives up and usually crashes the program so that Dr Watson can come up (will that thing ever go away).
So no- Microsoft doesn't let you do anything. Microsoft in fact lets you do pretty much nothing without bugging the crap out of you.
Linux is quality. By having publicly available code, we can all make sure it's up to our standards. If it's not, then you are welcome to (a) not use it, or (b) fix it. So why the concern? Contribute to the community and all is well. There's no barrier to helping (such as improving a country).
But seriously, Linux has proven itself worthy of being quite stable and for the most part secure (problems are bound to happen in such a large block of code, but responsible repair is key). Same with the core applications within it. The UNIX model is tried tested and true over and over again. It's still used so commonly BECAUSE it just makes sense... Try that in a windows world (click here, then here, then here... no wait- we moved that feature elsewhere in the latest 'security patch').
-M
Trackballs are king. Super precision. And why use your whole arm to move the mouse when you can use your finger. The precision of my finger is much that of my clunky arm [who needs them?].
Anyone who seriously does CAD, Graphics, or pretty much anything uses trackball or trackpoint (the eraser-point on laptops). Sadly most vendors find people like their touchbads despite horrible acuracy and poor tracking... which is why Dell has almost phased out the trackpoint.
-M
A great venture back about 4-5 years ago was ICraveTV.com (now a dead link). See http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,33093,00.ht ml for an article on it. This was a Canadian company which started broadcasting real TV over the Internet. Of course, there were some legal issues which they failed to work out, and got shut down for it.
Nonetheless, this brought legitimate TV with its ads to people around the world.
Ultimately, the more circulation of these things the better, as popularity grows through word of mouth. I TiVO a lot of my programs nowdays (HD PVR) but every once in a while can miss a good episode of something that happens to be online (also good for university students without TVs).
Viewers are wasting their own bandwidth downloading/uploading, just find a player that inserts ads as you suggest and we'll be set.
http://english.aliant.net/home.jsp offers TVonMyPC over their DSL lines, which just rebroadcasts about 20 TV channels into Windows Media and lets local users of their DSL network to subscribe and watch it. Now just to bridge the gap between this and time-shifting and we won't need downloads...
-M
I'm not saying it is wrong to bring it into a coding environment, however the choice of language means that the systems it runs on is not as simple (be it due to having to compile new programs or what not), nor is the understanding of the code itself.
By all means, I _HOPE_ it takes off, but would you install a new language for one program? Maybe a library but not really a language. Plus making it harder to get a good audit of the code and figure out what is going on to make modifications.
It's not mainstream and I'd love to see it happen, however I was stating that it just may have more trouble because of the choice of language not being as accessable, providing a higher initial implementation curve.
Also, not being a up-front native language for many means that people have more trouble contributing. Linux was built upon existing C, C++, and even interpreted languages that people knew on other platforms. The development team for this project will always be limited in some way.
I did read the article, however I do DISAGREE with that comment in the article. People won't learn a language for one program, and there is not a large enough body who know the language to really truly UNDERSTAND the program and enough about it to make modifications and additions to it.
Compare that to a bunch of C/C++/Java/Perl developers with a massive community body, it's a lot easier to get people to contribute.
-M
While "Darcs is written in a Haskell, a functional language that is relatively unknown compared to C or Perl", this really does hurt it's common use. Not being able to get a larger group of developers such as C, C++, or even some interpreted projects means that it becomes one or a few developers working on this project which means fewer patches and additions.
A community project will ultimately be the versioning system for community projects.
-M
Precisely. First it gets users and businesses who are concerned to actually look at their licenses and assess them (PR and potentially purchases). It them cuts off piracy at the source, before it reaches hundreds or thousands of computers a year that it is being distributed on. That's some efficient piracy stopping.
-M
It seems that it will eventually be on their web site (or maybe one day Bittorrent). So another http://www.slashdot.org/ article and they'll get every geek imagineable... at least the ones that care about OSS.
"Go_Open will be broadcast on the South African television channel SABC 2 every Saturday at 5:30 p.m., but will soon be available for viewing on the Web site accompanying the series."
And this is directed at teenagers? What makes you _POSSIBLY_ think that any one of those teens will go "ya know- I'd love to see some kid sing rather than some hardcore American arse"...
Try adding a few words like "gay porn" and maybe you'd loose a lot of those teenagers... or gain them... who knows.
-M
Point taken.
Linux has a great community backing, but Sun seems to hope that being in the open source will make it a key player with such a backing... of course they need a large enough community body willing to support the cause for that to happen.
The hardware topic I agree on.
In a way, they go after very different target markets. Solaris is more for the enterprise, Linux is more at a server or workstation for personal or small business.
Taking up the rear end of Linux is simply a following attempt to take some hype away... but you just can't UNDO all of the Linux hype that exists. Every manager or everyone who reads the paper sees Linux and everyone is talking about it. It's a buzz word- like it or not. Solaris has been around for forever and isn't a buzz word. There's usually a reason for that. Linux was built by the community and guided by a select few. Solaris would be GPL'd but would still be owned.
Linux has expanded greatly on x86 architecture to include all the latest hardware support. USB, software and hardware RAID, graphics and audio boards, etc. If you can name it, Linux can probably at least do _something_ with it.
If Solaris wants to do this, they have a LOT of catching up to do.
-M
Chep Pallets Re:Systemic Problems
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is very similar to Chep pallets. You (as a company who ships stuff) simply reports who you shipped pallets to, and in the end, Chep has a good idea of what everyone has (also noting what breaks). In the end, you get a higher quality pallet than a standard wood one.
Similarly, you 'subscribe' to the service, they always know which battery you have and what the life is on it (X charges), and you pay for each 'fill up'. At the end of the month, you get a bill for the number of swaps you made.
Include some fancy monitoring gadgets on the top that measure their effeciency of their last few runs and you can easily see what you should expect out of this run (and even calibrate a fuel guage acurately).
Think about it:)
What we really need is better battery cell technology that doesn't have these issues.
Unless they can hone in on your IP (as a seed) and download an entire file from you, they can't really get you for sending/distributing the files as far as I can tell (though they can do this, they'd have to wait in the queue to download XXXMB from you and you alone... or claim they did). On the other hand, being able to send them bits and pieces means that you probably are in posession of the full copy, making you a pretty big target:)
Wouldn't it be wiser to change their business model to harness these technologies rather than fight them? These technologies are here to stay.
http://www.deloitte.com/us/bullfighter
Deloitte & Touche have a program called 'bullfighter' which has dictionaries of buzz words to tell you how full of it your marketing letter is (It's a word/powerpoint add-on).
'world class' is in there, as well as most of the other buzz they used in their article.
Control Panel | System | Advanced (tab) | Data Execution Provention (tab).
Note the line at the bottom of a standard P4: Your hardware does not have DEP, however Windows will use software to protect you.
Interesting... so not having advanced pre-production processors means that it does _software_ checks on every memory write. Fantastic! That's in addition to buffer checks, it is checking to ensure that the data area and other stack frames are read only!
MMM.... slow-tastic!
You want a mini-ITX machine
http://www.mini-itx.com/
Or any of the boards from here:
http://www.soekris.com/
which can hold a flash card (for ultra-low power/noise/heat) which are now 256-1024MB for cheap. Otherwise, they can hold a hard drive.
Also, see http://m0n0.ch/wall/ to save yourself some time in building that router.... fine product.
Only a few more and we'll have one big company claiming they are not a monopoly because of the few independants owning a mere few per-cent of the market share.
Ahhh that'll be the day... It's not like the movies coming out now are worth watching anyway. There's a few a year... and the rest are... well...
Here's what people tend to overlook- if you get the same quality software for free, why are people paying $200-$350 for WindowsXP? The saying 'you get what you pay for' doesn't appear to hold true in software.
When I make software for other companies as a part of my line of work, every check possible is done to ensure that the software is secure is possible. There are tens of thousands of dollars on the line, and customers demand quality coding and care taken to ensure that their data is safe.
With open source, there is no incentive- nobody to answer to when you screw up. Many projects seem to stem out of the 'I made a utility for my own purposes that...' and grows from there.
Now back millions of copies of XP with hundreds of dollars a piece. People are paying you for a reason- to take care of security and usability and hardware support for them! Can't even do that right.
So I'm going to pay you to build me a kitchen, but you can't seem to put my shelves in straight... yes it works as a shelf- just as long as nothing rolls. You should be coming back to fix my shelf post-haste, as it never should be like that in the first place.
Actually, there was an article a few weeks ago in the local newspaper stating that it costs no more than the regular A/C energy costs in the short run, and (I believe) ~30% less in the long run energy costs. Also factored in there is the excessive cost of maintaining large A/C units which must be serviced quite regularly, as well as cleaned. The reason for the short run increase would be the equipment costs of course. But when you have a very large sky-scraper which this is used for, the cost of A/C is quite large.
Overall, if the numbers didn't work out, there's no incentive to using it... and they have a lot of buildings at present and more in the plan.
Slashdot Mirror
640K ought to be enough for anyone!
:)
I seem to have 380MB in use with just XP and this Mozilla Window... I wonder if Bill Gates' computer just has really good compression
-M
True- but that's the joy of backward compatibility and the -book standards. The CD needs to play in a car or older CD player or nobody will buy it. My older (5 years) car is still feisty with recordable CDs.
So what does all this mean? If you don't run Windows and allow the CD makers to autorun.inf your computer, then your old tools work just fine. Nothing quite like Linux and a good ripping/MP3 program (and when DRM ends up in those, just use older versions).
As much as they say they want _YOU_, they'll never get you. Instead they'll get the 'average' computer user (the consumer) rather than the geek. And it'll give us another thing to do when we go to our parents house for holiday dinner... "Can you remove these viruses, spryware, AND the DRM software".
Aren't standards great? I'm surprised they're not trying to phase them out so that you can't buy standard CD players...
-M
Drive not ready: (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail.
Ever tried unmounting a mounted CD when an application is using it? Ever tried removing a Jazz Drive or zip disk when it is in use?
Even in XP I get a 'please insert disc with volume label ______' and when I click cancel, It pops up again. Do this about 60 times and it eventually gives up and usually crashes the program so that Dr Watson can come up (will that thing ever go away).
So no- Microsoft doesn't let you do anything. Microsoft in fact lets you do pretty much nothing without bugging the crap out of you.
-M
Linux is quality. By having publicly available code, we can all make sure it's up to our standards. If it's not, then you are welcome to (a) not use it, or (b) fix it. So why the concern? Contribute to the community and all is well. There's no barrier to helping (such as improving a country). But seriously, Linux has proven itself worthy of being quite stable and for the most part secure (problems are bound to happen in such a large block of code, but responsible repair is key). Same with the core applications within it. The UNIX model is tried tested and true over and over again. It's still used so commonly BECAUSE it just makes sense... Try that in a windows world (click here, then here, then here... no wait- we moved that feature elsewhere in the latest 'security patch'). -M
Normally you have to pay extra for the BSODs, but Microsoft wanted to be nice and threw them in absolutely free in their limited time offer.
Just one of the many features they offer.
-M
Trackballs are king. Super precision. And why use your whole arm to move the mouse when you can use your finger. The precision of my finger is much that of my clunky arm [who needs them?]. Anyone who seriously does CAD, Graphics, or pretty much anything uses trackball or trackpoint (the eraser-point on laptops). Sadly most vendors find people like their touchbads despite horrible acuracy and poor tracking... which is why Dell has almost phased out the trackpoint. -M
A great venture back about 4-5 years ago was ICraveTV.com (now a dead link). See http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,33093,00.ht ml for an article on it. This was a Canadian company which started broadcasting real TV over the Internet. Of course, there were some legal issues which they failed to work out, and got shut down for it.
Nonetheless, this brought legitimate TV with its ads to people around the world.
Ultimately, the more circulation of these things the better, as popularity grows through word of mouth. I TiVO a lot of my programs nowdays (HD PVR) but every once in a while can miss a good episode of something that happens to be online (also good for university students without TVs).
Viewers are wasting their own bandwidth downloading/uploading, just find a player that inserts ads as you suggest and we'll be set.
http://english.aliant.net/home.jsp offers TVonMyPC over their DSL lines, which just rebroadcasts about 20 TV channels into Windows Media and lets local users of their DSL network to subscribe and watch it. Now just to bridge the gap between this and time-shifting and we won't need downloads...
-M
I'm not saying it is wrong to bring it into a coding environment, however the choice of language means that the systems it runs on is not as simple (be it due to having to compile new programs or what not), nor is the understanding of the code itself. By all means, I _HOPE_ it takes off, but would you install a new language for one program? Maybe a library but not really a language. Plus making it harder to get a good audit of the code and figure out what is going on to make modifications. It's not mainstream and I'd love to see it happen, however I was stating that it just may have more trouble because of the choice of language not being as accessable, providing a higher initial implementation curve. Also, not being a up-front native language for many means that people have more trouble contributing. Linux was built upon existing C, C++, and even interpreted languages that people knew on other platforms. The development team for this project will always be limited in some way.
I did read the article, however I do DISAGREE with that comment in the article. People won't learn a language for one program, and there is not a large enough body who know the language to really truly UNDERSTAND the program and enough about it to make modifications and additions to it. Compare that to a bunch of C/C++/Java/Perl developers with a massive community body, it's a lot easier to get people to contribute. -M
While "Darcs is written in a Haskell, a functional language that is relatively unknown compared to C or Perl", this really does hurt it's common use. Not being able to get a larger group of developers such as C, C++, or even some interpreted projects means that it becomes one or a few developers working on this project which means fewer patches and additions. A community project will ultimately be the versioning system for community projects. -M
Precisely. First it gets users and businesses who are concerned to actually look at their licenses and assess them (PR and potentially purchases). It them cuts off piracy at the source, before it reaches hundreds or thousands of computers a year that it is being distributed on. That's some efficient piracy stopping. -M
It seems that it will eventually be on their web site (or maybe one day Bittorrent). So another http://www.slashdot.org/ article and they'll get every geek imagineable... at least the ones that care about OSS. "Go_Open will be broadcast on the South African television channel SABC 2 every Saturday at 5:30 p.m., but will soon be available for viewing on the Web site accompanying the series."
And this is directed at teenagers? What makes you _POSSIBLY_ think that any one of those teens will go "ya know- I'd love to see some kid sing rather than some hardcore American arse"... Try adding a few words like "gay porn" and maybe you'd loose a lot of those teenagers... or gain them... who knows. -M
Point taken. Linux has a great community backing, but Sun seems to hope that being in the open source will make it a key player with such a backing... of course they need a large enough community body willing to support the cause for that to happen. The hardware topic I agree on.
In a way, they go after very different target markets. Solaris is more for the enterprise, Linux is more at a server or workstation for personal or small business. Taking up the rear end of Linux is simply a following attempt to take some hype away... but you just can't UNDO all of the Linux hype that exists. Every manager or everyone who reads the paper sees Linux and everyone is talking about it. It's a buzz word- like it or not. Solaris has been around for forever and isn't a buzz word. There's usually a reason for that. Linux was built by the community and guided by a select few. Solaris would be GPL'd but would still be owned. Linux has expanded greatly on x86 architecture to include all the latest hardware support. USB, software and hardware RAID, graphics and audio boards, etc. If you can name it, Linux can probably at least do _something_ with it. If Solaris wants to do this, they have a LOT of catching up to do. -M
This is very similar to Chep pallets. You (as a company who ships stuff) simply reports who you shipped pallets to, and in the end, Chep has a good idea of what everyone has (also noting what breaks). In the end, you get a higher quality pallet than a standard wood one. Similarly, you 'subscribe' to the service, they always know which battery you have and what the life is on it (X charges), and you pay for each 'fill up'. At the end of the month, you get a bill for the number of swaps you made. Include some fancy monitoring gadgets on the top that measure their effeciency of their last few runs and you can easily see what you should expect out of this run (and even calibrate a fuel guage acurately). Think about it :)
What we really need is better battery cell technology that doesn't have these issues.
Unless they can hone in on your IP (as a seed) and download an entire file from you, they can't really get you for sending/distributing the files as far as I can tell (though they can do this, they'd have to wait in the queue to download XXXMB from you and you alone... or claim they did). On the other hand, being able to send them bits and pieces means that you probably are in posession of the full copy, making you a pretty big target :)
Wouldn't it be wiser to change their business model to harness these technologies rather than fight them? These technologies are here to stay.
http://www.deloitte.com/us/bullfighter Deloitte & Touche have a program called 'bullfighter' which has dictionaries of buzz words to tell you how full of it your marketing letter is (It's a word/powerpoint add-on). 'world class' is in there, as well as most of the other buzz they used in their article.
Some True points, However, all system libraries in SP2 were built with this switch, and hence are slowed.
Control Panel | System | Advanced (tab) | Data Execution Provention (tab). Note the line at the bottom of a standard P4: Your hardware does not have DEP, however Windows will use software to protect you. Interesting... so not having advanced pre-production processors means that it does _software_ checks on every memory write. Fantastic! That's in addition to buffer checks, it is checking to ensure that the data area and other stack frames are read only! MMM.... slow-tastic!
You want a mini-ITX machine http://www.mini-itx.com/ Or any of the boards from here: http://www.soekris.com/ which can hold a flash card (for ultra-low power/noise/heat) which are now 256-1024MB for cheap. Otherwise, they can hold a hard drive. Also, see http://m0n0.ch/wall/ to save yourself some time in building that router.... fine product.
So MGM bought UA, Time bought WB, Sony buys MGM.
Only a few more and we'll have one big company claiming they are not a monopoly because of the few independants owning a mere few per-cent of the market share.
Ahhh that'll be the day... It's not like the movies coming out now are worth watching anyway. There's a few a year... and the rest are... well...
Here's what people tend to overlook- if you get the same quality software for free, why are people paying $200-$350 for WindowsXP? The saying 'you get what you pay for' doesn't appear to hold true in software.
When I make software for other companies as a part of my line of work, every check possible is done to ensure that the software is secure is possible. There are tens of thousands of dollars on the line, and customers demand quality coding and care taken to ensure that their data is safe.
With open source, there is no incentive- nobody to answer to when you screw up. Many projects seem to stem out of the 'I made a utility for my own purposes that...' and grows from there.
Now back millions of copies of XP with hundreds of dollars a piece. People are paying you for a reason- to take care of security and usability and hardware support for them! Can't even do that right.
So I'm going to pay you to build me a kitchen, but you can't seem to put my shelves in straight... yes it works as a shelf- just as long as nothing rolls. You should be coming back to fix my shelf post-haste, as it never should be like that in the first place.
Actually, there was an article a few weeks ago in the local newspaper stating that it costs no more than the regular A/C energy costs in the short run, and (I believe) ~30% less in the long run energy costs. Also factored in there is the excessive cost of maintaining large A/C units which must be serviced quite regularly, as well as cleaned. The reason for the short run increase would be the equipment costs of course. But when you have a very large sky-scraper which this is used for, the cost of A/C is quite large.
Overall, if the numbers didn't work out, there's no incentive to using it... and they have a lot of buildings at present and more in the plan.