I have the full-sized lenovo UltraNav (with the numeric pad and touchpad) hooked up to my Linux workstation at work. Works great; although I haven't bothered to setup the scroll function for the third button - it is worth more to me as a "paste" function in X.
I have a Thinkpad T61 with both the pointing stick and touchpad and I find that I switch between both depending on the task.
The trackpoint scrolling functionality in Linux doesn't impede the middle-button's use for pasting.
If this leads to a $20 a month 5 GB at 1 Mbps plan I'd have it installed at my grandmother's house where there's no computer and no cell phone service in an instant for the family to use while we're visiting. Right now, the cheapest non-dialup plan is an $35 for 1 Mbps DSL that isn't worth it.
Well, that's the thing. Many people (especially here on Slashdot for some reason) seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of metered bandwidth because they think it will lead to plans where low-traffic customers like grandma will be able to get a high-speed, always-on connection for a few dollars a month because all she does is Facebook and email.
The reality is that all of the companies promoting metered bandwidth aren't about to hand 80% of their customers a lower monthly bill. They want to get more money out of their existing customer base, so when (not if, when) all of the major ISPs phase out their flat-rate bandwidth plans at the same time, we're going to see cell phone style billing where you pay $40-$60 just for the privilege of having service, a certain number of "anytime" gigabytes per month, and then exorbitant rates for going over what you were originally allotted.
Um, no. Net neutrality means, "don't filter, throttle, degrade, or otherwise muck with traffic based on its content or source." Customer billing, on its own, has nothing to do with net neutrality. The flat-rate versus metered argument is valid, but something else entirely.
When you can make money hand over fist doing nothing, a very bad thing has happened: work has ceased to become a rewarded function.
You think it isn't "work" to study how business, accounting, economics, and statistics work and then apply them to the real world? I've only had a glimpse of the financial world but to me, computer science looks like a cakewalk compared to it.
Instead, it's who you can screw over with dodgy investment strategies and exotic financial instruments that are not only worthless, but a liability.
There are bad actors looking to take advantage of someone else in every time period, culture, and occupation and it's not by any stretch limited to white-collar industries. I know far more people who have been screwed over by doctors, mechanics, and contractors than by accountants or investors.
It's time that we end the casino markets and return to investing in things that are actually part of the economy that creates jobs - manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology.
What do you think finances manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology?
Fund managers who literally do nothing but piss away money are making $1,000 an hour, and the people who educate our children are making less than $20 an hour. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
Fund managers who piss away money don't make $1,000 an hour for long.
Yes, teachers should be paid more, but there should be higher standards for teachers as well. There's no reason that teaching should be any less a noble profession (as determined by the general population, not Slashdotters) than being a doctor or professor.
'I don't see anything wrong with that as long as they're not playing first-person shooter games, violent games, games with a lot of sexual or drug content.
It is just the ordinary day to day deceptive business practices of any successful corporation. Well informed participants in the market is not good, because it is difficult to make big profits in an actually functioning free market. In fact, in a perfectly functioning free market it would be mostly impossible to make money beyond that to pay ordinary wages and initial investments, as any business area where more money could be made would be quickly swamped with competitors.
Incorrect. A business does not have to be deceptive, shady, or anticompetitive to be successful.
I worked for a web hosting business that set itself apart from the others by providing great customer service. When you call the toll-free number for help, a human in the U.S. answers in less than a minute. Technicians are required to stay with a ticket until its completely resolved to the customer's satisfaction, no matter what it takes. Their business strategy was not to control the marketplace, screw over customers, or undercut competitors. They made and continue to make oodles of money by playing fair and treating customers like people.
I currently work for a financial services company that took no TARP money, unlike most of our competitors. The recession was great for us, because we essentially gained all of the business that our competitors lost simply because we provided superior products and services. The annual marketing budget for over a decade has been exactly $0.00 and we exceed the standards for all federal and state regulations. (And I can tell you first hand they compensate their employees very well.)
I've been a customer to many companies that operate fairly and competitively and are doing great. I would be happy to list those for you too.
True, but I don't think its the same thing. There's only one "grid" and you get the same overall quality of service no matter who you make the check out to. Unless I'm missing something.
Also, my second 'electricity' should have been 'gas'.
One answer is a terminal server. There are a couple of drawbacks and its not a solution for every office, but the advantages are many:
- Workstation drivers/quirks are far less trouble or made moot altogether - You can set security policies, do application installs, and just generally manage things from one place - Backing up everyone's data is way easier - Users can login and gain access to their files from any workstation (even allow VPN in) - A dead workstation can simply be swapped out with another with no hours of restoring/customizing afterward
You mention that both Windows and Ubuntu are in use. If standardizing on one or the other is impossible, then have your terminal server run one of them virtualized. Virtualizing Windows is probably the better choice since then you won't have to bother with licensing/driver issues when you upgrade the server. There's very little virtualization overhead these days with modern hardware running KVM or Xen.
The drawbacks might be:
- Any graphics-intensive applications are not going to perform well (video playback is usually fine, though) - Access to local storage (usb keys, cd-rom, etc) *can* be problematic - Dunno if it's possible to run Windows dual-head while its virtualized *and* being run on a terminal server - The terminal server needs to be robust against hardware failure (RAID, redundant power supplies, etc) to lessen its impact as a single potential point of failure for the whole network
Bad analogies: You can't decouple the electricity, water, and electricity supplies from the infrastructure that supplies them. It is relatively easy to do with phone and data, however.
Talk with people around the world by bouncing signals off the moon
Or even off-world. There was (still is?) an astronaut on the ISS who would regularly engage earthbound hams. If getting to speak one-on-one to an astronaut while they're in space isn't a story for your grandchildren, I don't know what is.
I would be astounded if someone post a job description that says FOSS experience a plus.
You must be lucky enough to not have had to search for a job in the past few years. Almost every non-government IT department these days wants people with at least some Linux experience. Sure, most places still have loads of Windows machines for desktops and Exchange servers, but the really mission critical stuff (web servers, file servers, application servers) almost universally runs on some combination of AIX and Linux.
And if anecdotal evidence matters, all 3 of the jobs I've held in the last decade were offered to me specifically because of my deep familiarity with open source solutions. Morons who stack certification acronyms for proprietary tools after their name like degrees are a dime a dozen and absolutely never end up being a good investment for the company. Every employer that I've ever worked for liked that I spent my free time learning, using, and hacking open source software. It means they don't have to expend time and money training me to do the things that they hired me to do.
But another way to look at this quote is that Apple abandons machines too fast, leaving users with computer than refuse to run the latest software. EXAMPLE: I used to have a Mac but since it could not be upgraded higher than 10.3 (2003), it was unable to run the latest browsers. They wouldn't even install.
Not to pick at nits here, but doesn't this imply that the browsers you're trying to install are failing to support older Macs rather than the reverse?
50W is a little high but not altogether bad for a system with multiple spinning disks and fans. The Beagleboard is an embedded system. Even with the required peripherals it doesn't hold a candle performance-wise to an Atom/Nano-based server.
I think I understand what deduplication is, but... isn't it just an on-the-fly block or file system version of file-based compression? Why don't we just call it "compression" instead of bandying about new terminology?
(Not trying to be critical, just playing devil's advocate.:)
Almost every mission critical system these days is running in either a clustered or virtualized environment. I work in the financial services industry and there are many reasons we virtualize pretty much everything these days. These, however, are probably the biggies:
- Redundancy: If a physical machine dies, its virtual machines can be moved over to a spare, often with no interruption in service. - Isolation: Just because you can run multiple services on a box doesn't mean you should. It poses potential security problems (one compromised app can open the door to compromise another), makes managing users and resources more difficult, and the applications can interact or conflict in unexpected ways. Many vendors demand that their application be the only one running on a machine or they won't support it. - Portability: An OS configured for use on a virtual machine can be run on any platform which runs the virtual machine without modification.
If you're any kind of geek, you should try to attend one of these. Make Faires happen in various spots around the world multiple times each year. There are more Faires planned in the Bay Area, Detroit, and New York this year. Check out their site for info.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Thinkpad T61 with both the pointing stick and touchpad and I find that I switch between both depending on the task.
The trackpoint scrolling functionality in Linux doesn't impede the middle-button's use for pasting.
I'm willing to bet the companies that Microsoft contracts to do its marketing don't do their video editing on Windows...
Well, that's the thing. Many people (especially here on Slashdot for some reason) seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of metered bandwidth because they think it will lead to plans where low-traffic customers like grandma will be able to get a high-speed, always-on connection for a few dollars a month because all she does is Facebook and email.
The reality is that all of the companies promoting metered bandwidth aren't about to hand 80% of their customers a lower monthly bill. They want to get more money out of their existing customer base, so when (not if, when) all of the major ISPs phase out their flat-rate bandwidth plans at the same time, we're going to see cell phone style billing where you pay $40-$60 just for the privilege of having service, a certain number of "anytime" gigabytes per month, and then exorbitant rates for going over what you were originally allotted.
Um, no. Net neutrality means, "don't filter, throttle, degrade, or otherwise muck with traffic based on its content or source." Customer billing, on its own, has nothing to do with net neutrality. The flat-rate versus metered argument is valid, but something else entirely.
You think it isn't "work" to study how business, accounting, economics, and statistics work and then apply them to the real world? I've only had a glimpse of the financial world but to me, computer science looks like a cakewalk compared to it.
There are bad actors looking to take advantage of someone else in every time period, culture, and occupation and it's not by any stretch limited to white-collar industries. I know far more people who have been screwed over by doctors, mechanics, and contractors than by accountants or investors.
What do you think finances manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology?
Fund managers who piss away money don't make $1,000 an hour for long.
Yes, teachers should be paid more, but there should be higher standards for teachers as well. There's no reason that teaching should be any less a noble profession (as determined by the general population, not Slashdotters) than being a doctor or professor.
That *almost* makes up for all the damage done with the line: "This is where we broadcast our pirate signal and hack into The Matrix."
Those who do not learn vi are doomed to reimplement it. Poorly.
I guess that rules out Bastard Tetris.
Score +1 for unintentionally applicable sig
Incorrect. A business does not have to be deceptive, shady, or anticompetitive to be successful.
I worked for a web hosting business that set itself apart from the others by providing great customer service. When you call the toll-free number for help, a human in the U.S. answers in less than a minute. Technicians are required to stay with a ticket until its completely resolved to the customer's satisfaction, no matter what it takes. Their business strategy was not to control the marketplace, screw over customers, or undercut competitors. They made and continue to make oodles of money by playing fair and treating customers like people.
I currently work for a financial services company that took no TARP money, unlike most of our competitors. The recession was great for us, because we essentially gained all of the business that our competitors lost simply because we provided superior products and services. The annual marketing budget for over a decade has been exactly $0.00 and we exceed the standards for all federal and state regulations. (And I can tell you first hand they compensate their employees very well.)
I've been a customer to many companies that operate fairly and competitively and are doing great. I would be happy to list those for you too.
Prior to his illness, he thought he was immortal.
Now he knows he is.
True, but I don't think its the same thing. There's only one "grid" and you get the same overall quality of service no matter who you make the check out to. Unless I'm missing something.
Also, my second 'electricity' should have been 'gas'.
One answer is a terminal server. There are a couple of drawbacks and its not a solution for every office, but the advantages are many:
- Workstation drivers/quirks are far less trouble or made moot altogether
- You can set security policies, do application installs, and just generally manage things from one place
- Backing up everyone's data is way easier
- Users can login and gain access to their files from any workstation (even allow VPN in)
- A dead workstation can simply be swapped out with another with no hours of restoring/customizing afterward
You mention that both Windows and Ubuntu are in use. If standardizing on one or the other is impossible, then have your terminal server run one of them virtualized. Virtualizing Windows is probably the better choice since then you won't have to bother with licensing/driver issues when you upgrade the server. There's very little virtualization overhead these days with modern hardware running KVM or Xen.
The drawbacks might be:
- Any graphics-intensive applications are not going to perform well (video playback is usually fine, though)
- Access to local storage (usb keys, cd-rom, etc) *can* be problematic
- Dunno if it's possible to run Windows dual-head while its virtualized *and* being run on a terminal server
- The terminal server needs to be robust against hardware failure (RAID, redundant power supplies, etc) to lessen its impact as a single potential point of failure for the whole network
Bad analogies: You can't decouple the electricity, water, and electricity supplies from the infrastructure that supplies them. It is relatively easy to do with phone and data, however.
Seriously, Slashdot. The paper made its rounds in the security community months ago and this is no less than the third time it has hit the front page.
Or even off-world. There was (still is?) an astronaut on the ISS who would regularly engage earthbound hams. If getting to speak one-on-one to an astronaut while they're in space isn't a story for your grandchildren, I don't know what is.
You must be lucky enough to not have had to search for a job in the past few years. Almost every non-government IT department these days wants people with at least some Linux experience. Sure, most places still have loads of Windows machines for desktops and Exchange servers, but the really mission critical stuff (web servers, file servers, application servers) almost universally runs on some combination of AIX and Linux.
And if anecdotal evidence matters, all 3 of the jobs I've held in the last decade were offered to me specifically because of my deep familiarity with open source solutions. Morons who stack certification acronyms for proprietary tools after their name like degrees are a dime a dozen and absolutely never end up being a good investment for the company. Every employer that I've ever worked for liked that I spent my free time learning, using, and hacking open source software. It means they don't have to expend time and money training me to do the things that they hired me to do.
Not to pick at nits here, but doesn't this imply that the browsers you're trying to install are failing to support older Macs rather than the reverse?
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Holy hell!
Maybe call it a particle system?
50W is a little high but not altogether bad for a system with multiple spinning disks and fans. The Beagleboard is an embedded system. Even with the required peripherals it doesn't hold a candle performance-wise to an Atom/Nano-based server.
I think I understand what deduplication is, but... isn't it just an on-the-fly block or file system version of file-based compression? Why don't we just call it "compression" instead of bandying about new terminology?
(Not trying to be critical, just playing devil's advocate. :)
My condolences to you, sir.
Almost every mission critical system these days is running in either a clustered or virtualized environment. I work in the financial services industry and there are many reasons we virtualize pretty much everything these days. These, however, are probably the biggies:
- Redundancy: If a physical machine dies, its virtual machines can be moved over to a spare, often with no interruption in service.
- Isolation: Just because you can run multiple services on a box doesn't mean you should. It poses potential security problems (one compromised app can open the door to compromise another), makes managing users and resources more difficult, and the applications can interact or conflict in unexpected ways. Many vendors demand that their application be the only one running on a machine or they won't support it.
- Portability: An OS configured for use on a virtual machine can be run on any platform which runs the virtual machine without modification.
If you're any kind of geek, you should try to attend one of these. Make Faires happen in various spots around the world multiple times each year. There are more Faires planned in the Bay Area, Detroit, and New York this year. Check out their site for info.