>> Even worse, most modern traffic lights use energy efficient LEDs, and therefore don't use nearly as much electricity as they used to.
No. The majority of LED aspects for traffic lights are much LESS efficient than the halogen lamps usually fitted - LEDs are only used because they require (in theory) less maintenance.
>>I don't know how many light installations one of these is supposed to power, but the only easy way to power more than one would be to hook it directly into the grid. So basically they're taking the amount of energy being produced by these things and subtracting it off the city-wide electricity bill.
You're overlooking some of the problems with traffic light installation (I know, because I do it for a living!) - one of the major problems is provision of power. In rural areas, this can be the most expensive part of the job! If you can generate locally, the initial cost of the equipment may be similar to the installation of miles of power cable.
>> If Salt Lake ever starts looking at these, I'll be looking over the city charter, trying to figure out where it requires the city to generate electricity at all, much less in the most inefficient and annoying way possible.
You will probably welcome the addition of these generators if you actually look at the benefits. The losses incurred by passing vehicles will be insignificant!
Maybe if you only installed them on downhill slopes...
>>My computer is not Sony's medium to do with as they please - it's MINE - I paid for it, and I licensed the software.
Nope. Examine the license for your "operating system" - it pretty much allows for anyone to install anything they like on your machine. This is how Microsoft avoid being perpetually sued. There is probably also a "license" invoked when you remove the shrink-wrap from the Sony product.
Exchange keeps rising in market share because its: (just to name a few) 1. A solid product that is easy to manage. 2. Lot of different software solutions integrate with it. 3. Its one of Microsofts main server platform.. therefore it gets alot of attention and money. 4. Outlook is a solid easy to use email client, that has been around for years. 5. Works nicely with Windows Mobile 6. Part of Small Business server... This helps small businesses to get a Enterprise class email server. Just at the feature enhancements since Exchange 5.5 to 2003... There is no reason why it should have grown in market share.
Can I have a few pints of whatever you're drinking? 1. Exchange is in NO WAY stable - mean time to crash is measured in minutes rather than hours. 2. Possibly true, but ALL the applications are as abysmal as Exchange. 3. That it's MS's "main server paltform" should be a source of real shame for the company. 4. Outlook (all versions) is just a total disaster - it's unstable, full of security holes and actually makes an already poor "operating system" almost unusable. 5. Who wants "Windows Mobile"? - there are NO Windows Mobile devices that actually work properly! 6. Anyone who tries to use Small Business Server is wasting their time. It simply doesn't work: it's unstable and insecure. Anyone trusting their business data to it really doesn't see any real future in their business.
> Microsoft makes a lot of good software.
No. Microsoft have *never* released *any* program that works as it's meant to - everything they've ever released has been faulty. This is obviously now so part of their "business strategy" that they can't stop releasing defective rubbish. I'm sick of "it'll be fixed in the next release", and "the upgrade fixes all the problems".
Right back to their earliest days, *no* Microsoft product has ever worked properly.
>> FWIW, Symantec has never created an original product; everything they offer was acquired.
What have Microsoft ever written themselves? The original "MS" Q&D DOS was an obvious bootleg of Digital Research's 8086 DOS! If they couldn't steal the code, they'd "buy" the company that originally wrote it. This has been Gates' strategy since the 1970's.
> Windows XP SP2 now has a perfectly fine firewall blocking almost all services, with some very sane defaults for a home network. Better late than never.
Nope - regardless of the "firewall" and "anti-virus" applications wasting resources on the average Windows machine, it's still trivially easy to remotely abuse ANY Windows machine, WITHOUT the intervention of the average stupid Windows user. The MS "security model" is fundamentally flawed, and MS are not interested in doing anything to properly address the problems. It is NOT possible to secure ANY of the current versions of Windows, and it doesn't look like the next versions will be any better.
>The Nokia 770 will be a totally crappy product. It will flop.
That's VERY unlikely - the ones I've seen are superb, and the Windoze-heads with me complained for a moment that it seemed "different" to use, but were won over by the sheer quality of the product. All said that it was (by far) the best handwriting recognition they'd seen.
>For exemple, you actually have to configure networking on this thing (e.g. you must know what DHCP is and stuff like that and it won't seamlessly find new SSIDs and stuff like that) while a general-release product would require something closer to MacOS X-like networking (auto discovery, find-whatever-network-is-available-and-connect-to- it-damnit).
There are two possible answers to this: firsly, if you can't be bothered to learn the rudimentary principles of networking, you DESERVE to be unconnected from the rest of the world! Secondly, the 770's we saw did automatic networking detection and configuration - easier than ANY of the Windoze methods.
>A few years back Nokia ignored the flip phone trend and as such I can't even buy a Nokia from Cingular, the largest retailer of phones in North America.
>Then Nokia tried making a gaming system (NGAGE) and that failed miserably.
>Now they're trying to make a Linux-based tablet computer. It will fail.
>What's the deal? Are they TRYING to self-destruct?
Nokia are the biggest selling mobile phone manufacturer (outside the United States of Amnesia), and probably don't care much about selling anything into the USA. The Americans have a "not invented here" mentality, that largely cripples their collective critical faculties!
Get over it, Yanks - the USA is largely irrelevant in today's world.
>+ Microsoft's greatest strength (Windows/Office Monopoly) is actually their greatest weakness. No really. They have a direct channel to push technology into stuff that everyone buys and uses, but it will ultimately fail because they can't sell "Ad-Words" or something.
The most compelling reasons for users to migrate from Windows & Office to Linux (usually Suse) & Open Office are Licencing Fees and Stability. The costs involved with using the Microsoft options are already so high and rising that they're pricing themselves out of the market. The lack of real stability and the need for perpetual patches, fixes, "anti-virus" tools and other nonsense also make the Windows option a poor choice for business.
>+ 10 years from now, Microsoft will be in trouble. They might make two trillion dollars in that period of time, but I will eventually be proven right.
MS have always been in some kind of trouble ever since they started. However, with a combination of marketing skill and bribery (sue me Bill - you know it's true), they've climbed to the top of the dungpile. MS have always been in trouble because their products have never matched up to their marketing. They have panic-bought technologies that they couldn't develop themselves, and have tried to "integrate" them into that muddle that is Windows. MS have enough money to ride roughshod over all objectors and to tough out any lawsuits or other claims against them. Eventually the general public will wake up to the fact that they've been sold snakeoil for all these years, and look for something better. We'd all better be ready!
>Ultimately these sorts of posts sprout directly from the melancholy and frustration you see in the Linux Advocacy world as reality has sunk in. Linux has not been competitive in any meaningful sense on the desktop.
Reality is that the number of Linux-based business systems (servers, desktops, networked) that I'm installing outweigh the Windows-based ones by a factor of 30 to 1 - it seems that us Europeans have woken up to the real alternatives to MS Windows. My business emphasises that we are a "Microsoft Authorised" dealership, but it's now getting difficult to GIVE away MS stuff!
> Microsoft does not have any huge immediate structural problems that would cause them to collapse (as boldly predicted by ESR and others in the late 90s). In other words, there's no real end in sight. At least not one you can count on.
MS only real problems are a lack of clear direction, a lack of effective programmers (all the good ones left years ago), and a business policy and pricing structure that's little short of criminal. As usual, they'll buy themselves out of trouble.
Remember - it doesn't matter how good you are, or who you are, it just matters how much money you can lay your hands on!
4000 coders * 18 months, We could rewrite the program that runs this solar system!
No. Some coders could write an operating system in 18 months - the ones MS employ probably couldn't! The guys at MS have had the creativity (and their innate abilities) knocked out of them by the corporate machiine. The typical productivity of an MS coder is less than one tenth of that on the "outside".
Re:New Tech?
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Quote: Other than VCR/DVD/Internet (video in general), what other technologies has Porno driven?
If you go back about a century or so, it drove the development of photography and cine film. If you go back a few more centuries, you find that printing itself was driven by a desire for salacious material!
A proper operating system doesn't allow the ravages of viruses, trojans and spyware. The end user shouldn't have to deal with security issues like these - they should be dealt with automatically. MS have tried to do this, but it simply doesn't work, and simply cannot work due to the underlying structure of Windows.
If you have really never suffered any security issues or had repeated crashes, you are either entirely unique or have a special version of Windows issued only to "friends of Bill".
We just tried this "at home" on our internal network. It's trivial to forge "signatures" - there are going to be some fun M$ auto-updates in the near future!
MS were part of the original Immersion claim, and settled "out of court" about 2 years ago. The "settlement" was probably based on Bill Gates buying someone a nice house (that's how it's done over here in the UK).
For crying out loud!!! You've *ALL* missed the obvious. There are *NO* "anti-virus" products that actually work (or could work) - they can only work against known threats. It is the work of minutes for anyone with a modicum of knowledge to throw something together unique to infect Windows machines - this is *the* fundamental Windows problem. Your unique virus won't be found by ANY of the "anti-virus" programs, until it's infected a lot of machines. By then it's too late. It's harder (virtually impossible) to do the same with proper operating systems (unix and its' derivatives).
The "anti-virus" industry is entirely bogus, and would disappear overnight if Microsoft woke up and realised that it isn't intelligent to give all users administrative rights by default, that Active X is a security disaster, and that mail clients shouldn't allow automatic execution of attachments. There are many other failings of their "operating systems", but these are the ones that immediately spring to mind.
You've all really missed the point - Apple make several hundred percent profit on each player sold (no matter what version). In fact, they're so cheap to manufacture, that as long as the users are paying for downloaded music, they could actually give the players away!
The current British "Government" hasn't implemented ANY successful IT project, partly because of their insistence on use of M$ products and partly because of the inept "consultants" they hire.
Tony Blair was "bought" by Bill Gates a couple of years ago - who's paid for Blair's £3.5m new house? It's one of the most blatant examples of corruption in our current "Government".
It's radically different: Red Hat vulnerabilities are usually preemptively dealt with and don't result in crashes or data loss. MS vulnerabilities are usually catastrophic, knock the system over and lead to more security holes, with loss of service and the risk of corrupted or lost data.
The differences are fundamental in the structure of the OS's.
I'd back the RH boxen I maintain against anything MS have ever (or could ever) release, for stability, availability, speed, reliability, or any parameter you'd care to measure (with the exception of cost - MS costs much more than anything else!).
MS Exchange is fundamentally broken (as is EVERY other MS product). MS claim that every problem that's pointed out to them will be fixed "in the next release". It's always been that way and won't ever change. It actually isn't in Microsoft's interest to release properly working products - their sales would dry up if they ever did.....
The OSS world sees a problem, and it gets fixed within days (not months or years). Proprietary, closed-source software simply isn't the way to go.
This is exactly what NASA have been doing for years - there are continual planetary analyses of earth. This data is then used for local analysis and for comparison with extra-terrestrial data
Nitrogenation of the water table is killing lakes all over Europe, particularly in Ireland. The first (and most obvious) symptoms are huge algal blooms in the water.
Roundup is thus just as bad as any other herbicide!
Re:Currect track record
on
Latest SP2 News
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Win 95 - nearly achieved the same level of usability that Apple did five years earlier.
Win 98 - OS starting to grow - makes greater demands on hardware, requiring upgrades.
Win 98SE - nearly right - fixed many of the flaws in the original, and at least they had the guts to admit the first edition was a disaster.
Win ME - best forgotten - too many flaws to list, obviously rushed to market.
Win 2000 - NT4 with knobs on. Pretty OKish, but too insecure for serious use, and had many driver issues.
Win XP - nearly works out of the box. Too many security flaws to list, and inherently unstable. Might be OK for the casual home user, but the business user needs something more reliable.
XPSP2 - broke both my standard XP Pro installs to the point of no return. Now deleted!
Server 2003 - don't go there. The subject of much litigation from disgruntled MS clients. Insecure, unstable, overpriced, not scalable.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Even worse, most modern traffic lights use energy efficient LEDs, and therefore don't use nearly as much electricity as they used to.
No. The majority of LED aspects for traffic lights are much LESS efficient than the halogen lamps usually fitted - LEDs are only used because they require (in theory) less maintenance.
>>I don't know how many light installations one of these is supposed to power, but the only easy way to power more than one would be to hook it directly into the grid. So basically they're taking the amount of energy being produced by these things and subtracting it off the city-wide electricity bill.
You're overlooking some of the problems with traffic light installation (I know, because I do it for a living!) - one of the major problems is provision of power. In rural areas, this can be the most expensive part of the job! If you can generate locally, the initial cost of the equipment may be similar to the installation of miles of power cable.
>> If Salt Lake ever starts looking at these, I'll be looking over the city charter, trying to figure out where it requires the city to generate electricity at all, much less in the most inefficient and annoying way possible.
You will probably welcome the addition of these generators if you actually look at the benefits. The losses incurred by passing vehicles will be insignificant!
Maybe if you only installed them on downhill slopes...
Doesn't make much difference - see above!
>>My computer is not Sony's medium to do with as they please - it's MINE - I paid for it, and I licensed the software.
Nope. Examine the license for your "operating system" - it pretty much allows for anyone to install anything they like on your machine. This is how Microsoft avoid being perpetually sued. There is probably also a "license" invoked when you remove the shrink-wrap from the Sony product.
Exchange keeps rising in market share because its: (just to name a few) 1. A solid product that is easy to manage. 2. Lot of different software solutions integrate with it. 3. Its one of Microsofts main server platform.. therefore it gets alot of attention and money. 4. Outlook is a solid easy to use email client, that has been around for years. 5. Works nicely with Windows Mobile 6. Part of Small Business server... This helps small businesses to get a Enterprise class email server. Just at the feature enhancements since Exchange 5.5 to 2003... There is no reason why it should have grown in market share.
Can I have a few pints of whatever you're drinking? 1. Exchange is in NO WAY stable - mean time to crash is measured in minutes rather than hours. 2. Possibly true, but ALL the applications are as abysmal as Exchange. 3. That it's MS's "main server paltform" should be a source of real shame for the company. 4. Outlook (all versions) is just a total disaster - it's unstable, full of security holes and actually makes an already poor "operating system" almost unusable. 5. Who wants "Windows Mobile"? - there are NO Windows Mobile devices that actually work properly! 6. Anyone who tries to use Small Business Server is wasting their time. It simply doesn't work: it's unstable and insecure. Anyone trusting their business data to it really doesn't see any real future in their business.
> Microsoft makes a lot of good software. No. Microsoft have *never* released *any* program that works as it's meant to - everything they've ever released has been faulty. This is obviously now so part of their "business strategy" that they can't stop releasing defective rubbish. I'm sick of "it'll be fixed in the next release", and "the upgrade fixes all the problems". Right back to their earliest days, *no* Microsoft product has ever worked properly.
>> FWIW, Symantec has never created an original product; everything they offer was acquired.
What have Microsoft ever written themselves? The original "MS" Q&D DOS was an obvious bootleg of Digital Research's 8086 DOS! If they couldn't steal the code, they'd "buy" the company that originally wrote it. This has been Gates' strategy since the 1970's.
> Windows XP SP2 now has a perfectly fine firewall blocking almost all services, with some very sane defaults for a home network. Better late than never.
Nope - regardless of the "firewall" and "anti-virus" applications wasting resources on the average Windows machine, it's still trivially easy to remotely abuse ANY Windows machine, WITHOUT the intervention of the average stupid Windows user. The MS "security model" is fundamentally flawed, and MS are not interested in doing anything to properly address the problems. It is NOT possible to secure ANY of the current versions of Windows, and it doesn't look like the next versions will be any better.
>The Nokia 770 will be a totally crappy product. It will flop.
- it-damnit).
That's VERY unlikely - the ones I've seen are superb, and the Windoze-heads with me complained for a moment that it seemed "different" to use, but were won over by the sheer quality of the product. All said that it was (by far) the best handwriting recognition they'd seen.
>For exemple, you actually have to configure networking on this thing (e.g. you must know what DHCP is and stuff like that and it won't seamlessly find new SSIDs and stuff like that) while a general-release product would require something closer to MacOS X-like networking (auto discovery, find-whatever-network-is-available-and-connect-to
There are two possible answers to this: firsly, if you can't be bothered to learn the rudimentary principles of networking, you DESERVE to be unconnected from the rest of the world! Secondly, the 770's we saw did automatic networking detection and configuration - easier than ANY of the Windoze methods.
>A few years back Nokia ignored the flip phone trend and as such I can't even buy a Nokia from Cingular, the largest retailer of phones in North America.
>Then Nokia tried making a gaming system (NGAGE) and that failed miserably.
>Now they're trying to make a Linux-based tablet computer. It will fail.
>What's the deal? Are they TRYING to self-destruct?
Nokia are the biggest selling mobile phone manufacturer (outside the United States of Amnesia), and probably don't care much about selling anything into the USA. The Americans have a "not invented here" mentality, that largely cripples their collective critical faculties!
Get over it, Yanks - the USA is largely irrelevant in today's world.
Looking at these prognostications:
>+ Microsoft's greatest strength (Windows/Office Monopoly) is actually their greatest weakness. No really. They have a direct channel to push technology into stuff that everyone buys and uses, but it will ultimately fail because they can't sell "Ad-Words" or something.
The most compelling reasons for users to migrate from Windows & Office to Linux (usually Suse) & Open Office are Licencing Fees and Stability. The costs involved with using the Microsoft options are already so high and rising that they're pricing themselves out of the market. The lack of real stability and the need for perpetual patches, fixes, "anti-virus" tools and other nonsense also make the Windows option a poor choice for business.
>+ 10 years from now, Microsoft will be in trouble. They might make two trillion dollars in that period of time, but I will eventually be proven right.
MS have always been in some kind of trouble ever since they started. However, with a combination of marketing skill and bribery (sue me Bill - you know it's true), they've climbed to the top of the dungpile. MS have always been in trouble because their products have never matched up to their marketing. They have panic-bought technologies that they couldn't develop themselves, and have tried to "integrate" them into that muddle that is Windows. MS have enough money to ride roughshod over all objectors and to tough out any lawsuits or other claims against them. Eventually the general public will wake up to the fact that they've been sold snakeoil for all these years, and look for something better. We'd all better be ready!
>Ultimately these sorts of posts sprout directly from the melancholy and frustration you see in the Linux Advocacy world as reality has sunk in. Linux has not been competitive in any meaningful sense on the desktop.
Reality is that the number of Linux-based business systems (servers, desktops, networked) that I'm installing outweigh the Windows-based ones by a factor of 30 to 1 - it seems that us Europeans have woken up to the real alternatives to MS Windows. My business emphasises that we are a "Microsoft Authorised" dealership, but it's now getting difficult to GIVE away MS stuff!
> Microsoft does not have any huge immediate structural problems that would cause them to collapse (as boldly predicted by ESR and others in the late 90s). In other words, there's no real end in sight. At least not one you can count on.
MS only real problems are a lack of clear direction, a lack of effective programmers (all the good ones left years ago), and a business policy and pricing structure that's little short of criminal. As usual, they'll buy themselves out of trouble.
Remember - it doesn't matter how good you are, or who you are, it just matters how much money you can lay your hands on!
Chris
4000 coders * 18 months, We could rewrite the program that runs this solar system!
No. Some coders could write an operating system in 18 months - the ones MS employ probably couldn't! The guys at MS have had the creativity (and their innate abilities) knocked out of them by the corporate machiine. The typical productivity of an MS coder is less than one tenth of that on the "outside".
Quote: Other than VCR/DVD/Internet (video in general), what other technologies has Porno driven?
If you go back about a century or so, it drove the development of photography and cine film. If you go back a few more centuries, you find that printing itself was driven by a desire for salacious material!
A proper operating system doesn't allow the ravages of viruses, trojans and spyware. The end user shouldn't have to deal with security issues like these - they should be dealt with automatically. MS have tried to do this, but it simply doesn't work, and simply cannot work due to the underlying structure of Windows. If you have really never suffered any security issues or had repeated crashes, you are either entirely unique or have a special version of Windows issued only to "friends of Bill".
We just tried this "at home" on our internal network. It's trivial to forge "signatures" - there are going to be some fun M$ auto-updates in the near future!
MS were part of the original Immersion claim, and settled "out of court" about 2 years ago. The "settlement" was probably based on Bill Gates buying someone a nice house (that's how it's done over here in the UK).
For crying out loud!!! You've *ALL* missed the obvious. There are *NO* "anti-virus" products that actually work (or could work) - they can only work against known threats. It is the work of minutes for anyone with a modicum of knowledge to throw something together unique to infect Windows machines - this is *the* fundamental Windows problem. Your unique virus won't be found by ANY of the "anti-virus" programs, until it's infected a lot of machines. By then it's too late. It's harder (virtually impossible) to do the same with proper operating systems (unix and its' derivatives).
The "anti-virus" industry is entirely bogus, and would disappear overnight if Microsoft woke up and realised that it isn't intelligent to give all users administrative rights by default, that Active X is a security disaster, and that mail clients shouldn't allow automatic execution of attachments. There are many other failings of their "operating systems", but these are the ones that immediately spring to mind.
You've all really missed the point - Apple make several hundred percent profit on each player sold (no matter what version). In fact, they're so cheap to manufacture, that as long as the users are paying for downloaded music, they could actually give the players away!
> As long as you have enough money you are above the > law?
It was ever thus!
Your tax is already being spent with Microsoft.
The current British "Government" hasn't implemented ANY successful IT project, partly because of their insistence on use of M$ products and partly because of the inept "consultants" they hire.
Tony Blair was "bought" by Bill Gates a couple of years ago - who's paid for Blair's £3.5m new house? It's one of the most blatant examples of corruption in our current "Government".
It's radically different: Red Hat vulnerabilities are usually preemptively dealt with and don't result in crashes or data loss. MS vulnerabilities are usually catastrophic, knock the system over and lead to more security holes, with loss of service and the risk of corrupted or lost data.
The differences are fundamental in the structure of the OS's.
I'd back the RH boxen I maintain against anything MS have ever (or could ever) release, for stability, availability, speed, reliability, or any parameter you'd care to measure (with the exception of cost - MS costs much more than anything else!).
MS Exchange is fundamentally broken (as is EVERY other MS product). MS claim that every problem that's pointed out to them will be fixed "in the next release". It's always been that way and won't ever change. It actually isn't in Microsoft's interest to release properly working products - their sales would dry up if they ever did.....
The OSS world sees a problem, and it gets fixed within days (not months or years). Proprietary, closed-source software simply isn't the way to go.
This is exactly what NASA have been doing for years - there are continual planetary analyses of earth. This data is then used for local analysis and for comparison with extra-terrestrial data
Nitrogenation of the water table is killing lakes all over Europe, particularly in Ireland. The first (and most obvious) symptoms are huge algal blooms in the water. Roundup is thus just as bad as any other herbicide!
Win 95 - nearly achieved the same level of usability that Apple did five years earlier.
Win 98 - OS starting to grow - makes greater demands on hardware, requiring upgrades.
Win 98SE - nearly right - fixed many of the flaws in the original, and at least they had the guts to admit the first edition was a disaster.
Win ME - best forgotten - too many flaws to list, obviously rushed to market.
Win 2000 - NT4 with knobs on. Pretty OKish, but too insecure for serious use, and had many driver issues.
Win XP - nearly works out of the box. Too many security flaws to list, and inherently unstable. Might be OK for the casual home user, but the business user needs something more reliable.
XPSP2 - broke both my standard XP Pro installs to the point of no return. Now deleted!
Server 2003 - don't go there. The subject of much litigation from disgruntled MS clients. Insecure, unstable, overpriced, not scalable.
THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY......