All processors are hot, especially ones with very high clock speeds. I didn't say in relation to what, and I honestly don't care one way between Intel and AMD. Twas a joke, and nothing more. Don't take things so seriously around here.
TCO studies are hardly if ever conclusive because in some situations, one product will have a lower TCO in the long run and in other situations a different product will have the lower TCO. I think the reason why companies keep going back to TCO is the fact that it is nearly impossible to prove right or wrong (one case or even a handful of them does not make a rule), they hope lazy managers will believe them on the subject without thinking it through, and they are run by weasels.
Indie films will start taking over once they start making more money than big budget films. Then, everyone will jump on the bandwagon and at some point moviegoers will get as tired of them as much as we are tired of epic flops now. Then, someone will take a chance on a big budget blockbuster that has an excellent story, good acting, and generally does everything right and it will make an exorbitant amount of money. Then, things will trend back to blockbusters. It's no different than any other copycat industry, like sports where general managers will try to remake their teams in the image of this year's champion every year.
Agreed. The Patriot Act isn't a simple cut-and-dry It's Good(TM) or It's Bad(TM) type of thing.
One thing the Patriot Act does is enable federal agents to pursue suspected terrorists using a lot of the same tools the government already uses to hunt down drug lords. This is a good part. It also allows for the searching of people's searches at libraries if the happen to search for the right ternms. Many would argue that this is one of the bad parts.
Looking at it from a cold and pragmatic standpoint, it's better to pass it flaws and all because while you can always restore liberties that might be temporarily infringed upon, terrorists cause permanent damage. If you look at it from an idealistic viewpoint, it should not be passed until we are sure that no rights are violated. For better or worse, practicality usually wins over idealism.
The Patriot Act will continue to be renewed as long as there is an Al Qaeda, but hopefully there will be some inquiries to pare it down to the essentials. It was probably an overreaction to 9/11, but at the time cooler heads were never going to prevail (even if they existed at that point). The perspective of time and hindsight should help lawmakers straighten everything out, but there's no guarantees in Washington.
Dear Crackers,
In anticipation of the Intel switch, we believe we have made our legal department 4-5X faster too. We're actively looking to test and confirm those benchmarks.
XOXO, Steve
Companies always are looking to buy up the smaller guys, especially the "hot" ones. Right now, open source is growing as a buzzword, but there have been plenty of other examples. Seven years ago, everyone thought Internet radio was The Future(TM) and that's how Mark Cuban made his billions (selling boradcast.com to Yahoo). I'm not saying that open source will tank like Internet radio did; I just think it's analogous right now.
That said, anytime there's a leadership change there's uncertainty. Will the new coporate overlords taking over formerly community-driven projects be like Iacocca taking over at Chrysler or Eisner at Disney? It's impossible to say just yet, though that's never stopped speculation like this before. It's a delicate balance for a company to manage these community things, as Red Hat and Novell found out. Their solutions were to spawn semi-independent community projects of Fedora and OpenSuSE to serve as feeder projects for the enterprise stuff. Will IBM and Oracle follow suit? We'll see.
You can already get prizes for Google searching through Blingo.com - and not only do you get a prize randomly, anyone who signs up as your friend gets the same prize you win (and vice versa). That's all there is to it, they don't even ask for anything beyond name, email and zip code when you sign up. Click my homepage link to join as my friend so we can win prizes together.
I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of computer users would not be willing to use a terminal-based email system. Most are afraid of using terminals period. I'm glad that you found something that works for you and can score you cool points on Slashdot, but I hope you weren't stating that as a recommendation. Links in email aren't necessarily A Bad Thing so rather than do away with them completely, it's better to fight the phishers instead of the links.
"However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is..."
Nightmarish grammar aside, the biggest clear indication that this is not final is the "Opera 9 Technology Preview 2" title on the linked page. Also, there is the fact that it is Opera labs, not the main site. Contrary to what the title would lead you to believe, this is just an open beta.
The big splash is the widgets. I am of the opinion though that the widget concept is being overdone completely. Now, you can have start.com widgets running in your Opera browser with widgets on your OS with widgets (either OS X Tiger's dashboard/Windows Vista Beta Sidebar or via third-party stuff a la Konfabulator/Superkaramba/Object Desktop). Enough alreay. How many different ways do I need to get my local weather forecast?
MLB wants to cash in on the growing, and lucrative, world of fantasy sports. Services now are supplying stats that Major League Baseball collects and disseminates itself for their fantasy leagues. I think part of it is that MLB would like to make some money off of it to pay their own statisticians for their work. I also know that Bud Selig is a money-hungry scumbag, so it's not all pure intentions.
This is not your average office worker running Linux from his workstation, as if he was like the vast majority of office workers in the world.
"It is a simple fact that most of our clients run Windows 2003 servers and that it's my job to administer those servers..."
It's cool that he could still do that incognito with Ubuntu, but how easy was it really? Let's find out:
On getting the monitors to work: "I had to install the restricted Nvidia drivers and read the official documentation to get both monitors working, but that wouldn't be too troublesome for anyone used to mucking around with their xorg.conf file." Yes, it is Nvidia's fault, but for the uninitiated, "mucking around" in an xorg.conf file sounds scary.
On networking: "So, not exactly a quick and painless set up, but having done it once it would probably only take five minutes or so to do it again... though I'm a little concerned about the practicality of rolling out a large number of Ubuntu clients in an enterprise environment."
On email: "Ubuntu's default e-mail client, Evolution, is supposed to play nice with Outlook. It actually turned out to be very simple to get Evolution to connect to our Exchange server... That's precisely when things started going wrong. Exchange support seemed to be rather buggy and crash prone, and because Evolution is integrated into parts of the desktop, my desktop was soon littered with the burnt, twisted corpses of panel applets and daemons." He had to change a setting on the Exchange server to get things to work correctly.
On remote administration: "There is a bug in pptp-linux that prevents it from negotiating a secure connection after Windows offers to allow an unencrypted connection, but this behavior is easily solved by configuring the RRAS service on Windows Server to only allow encrypted connections."
On the office suite: "It is tempting to treat 'Base', the database application, just like Access. However it is not Access, and lacks many of Access's features. I was particularly chagrined to find it is not possible to import data from a CSV file into a table... If you rely heavily on local database files, and the Form and Report functions of Access, Base probably won't cut it for you."
That's a lot of issues that could scare away, rather than encourage, Windows-based offices from adding Linux boxes to their networks. I would love to read that article and come away thinking that Linux is ready for business, but unless everything gets switched to *nix is appears to be a big hassle to add Linux to the mix. Whether that truly is right or not I don't know, since I'm not that experienced with Linux and because a lot of the problems are with Windows not playing nice and not Linux, but if a PHB reads this article he might swear Linux off entirely. Sure, the Base functionality loss can be fixed with Cedega + Access, but does a manager who's never heard of Linux know that? It looks like Linux is not yet ready for the client side of a business, but at least the atricle outlines where the work for making that happen needs to go.
So, regular Google is their search crawlers going out and indexing information, while Google Base is people submitting information to be indexed in categories that submitters assign themselves. Is that right? Or is there more to this? Is this like a subsection of the search engine, or an informal free webhosting service? I'm just not sure of what this is or why it's necessary.
8 click-through pages?!
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Here is a one-page, ad-free version of the article. Seriously, when articles are formatted like this, submitters should use the "printer friendly" version of the article as the submission.
I just wonder how the logic in the decision-making process went.
"Since CD sales have been falling, and it's cheaper to blame piracy than develop original artists, let's put a DRM rootkit on our CDs to prevent copying."
"But wait sir, what happens when people find it? Won't that motivate people to avoid buying CDs since they don't know if they can trust us anymore?"
"Don't worry. We'll hide it really really well so no one knows about it. Even though we have to run a firewall and antivirus software on our network to protect against vulnerabilities that no one even knows exist yet, we can safely assume that not a single soul on the entire earth will find our rootkit. And if we get sued, we'll can probably get off somehow by screaming DMCA. The lawyers are looking into it as we speak. Plus if no one finds it and sales go up, we all get bigger bonuses."
That's very true, and I probably should have made that as a disclaimer or something. I just used the drill analogy because my professor did. By being specific on the size, I was referring to how individual programs generally only serve one purpose, like Gaim with messaging, and the Gimp with graphics.
The part of what I have read so far that jumps out at me was this:
Is the greatest economic effect of Microsoft the fact that they have enabled a great many businesses - their customers - to do business more efficiently, and to have businesses that they could not operate at all without the software that enables them? Yes, that is the biggest economic impact of Microsoft.
Microsoft is a tool-maker, and the effect of the tool-maker on the economy is tiny next to the economic effect of all of the people who are enabled by the maker's tools.
It's like my marketing (shriek! yes, marketing) professor says: when people buy a 1/4 drill, they're not really buying a 1/4 inch drill, they're buying 1/4 inch holes. The product itself is not as important as what it does and how it benefits the consumers.
I think this is an area that open source could use some work on. It's not necessarily that the drill has to be shinier, fancier, or even more featureful than Microsoft's/Adobe's/any other propreitary software maker's drill, rather it must drill better holes more reliably at a lesser cost. Then, we can can worry about what kind of finish is used to make it gleam under lights.
Case in point: KDE and Gnome both put a lot of work into eye candy, and justifiably so, but neither can give me a list of all the wireless networks around my computer in just 2 clicks in a default setup - but Windows can. I'd imagine OS X probably could too. It's these kinds of things that I'm talking about. Supporting wifi isn't enough - that's a drill that leaves jagged stuff around the 1/4 inch hole instead of making it clean all the way through.
There are companies that sell bottled water... so there's got to be some way to make money stuff that is given away for free.
They give away water where you're from? Where I live it's part of my monthly utility bill;)
But seriously, the US economy has been converting over to a service economy over teh past century. It has been quite some time since GDP was more products than services. Products can be made anywhere, and with software the transportation cost is nearly $0. If you rely on software products then you had better be sure that you're the best or else because lower-cost software can be made in India and China.
Services can go either way. The call center may be in Bangalore, but if you need someone to come to your business in Topeka either for training or an on-site service call, there's definitely not going to be someone coming from New Delhi to do the job. Services are a great hedge against the future, which is probably why IBM is shifting focus away from solely producing their international business machines to providing consulting service. Plus, it's perfectly in line with where the US economy has been headed for decades.
"Byte of the Apple" - That's so clever! I never would have thought of replacing bite with the homonym byte when talking about computer-related things. It must be what, 1994 now? /sarcasm
But seriously, when about 50% of each iPod is profit, and they sell more of those than anything else, is it surprising? Dell is competing towards the bottom, it seems, with their mostly cut-rate PCs (XPS excluded) whereas Apple seems to be competing towards the top where the premium prices - and profits - are. Didn't they want to be the BMW of computers? Mission accomplished.
Slashdot Mirror
All processors are hot, especially ones with very high clock speeds. I didn't say in relation to what, and I honestly don't care one way between Intel and AMD. Twas a joke, and nothing more. Don't take things so seriously around here.
Ironic that a site reviewing a P4 Extreme Edition is called "Hot Hardware." Hot, indeed.
TCO studies are hardly if ever conclusive because in some situations, one product will have a lower TCO in the long run and in other situations a different product will have the lower TCO. I think the reason why companies keep going back to TCO is the fact that it is nearly impossible to prove right or wrong (one case or even a handful of them does not make a rule), they hope lazy managers will believe them on the subject without thinking it through, and they are run by weasels.
Indie films will start taking over once they start making more money than big budget films. Then, everyone will jump on the bandwagon and at some point moviegoers will get as tired of them as much as we are tired of epic flops now. Then, someone will take a chance on a big budget blockbuster that has an excellent story, good acting, and generally does everything right and it will make an exorbitant amount of money. Then, things will trend back to blockbusters. It's no different than any other copycat industry, like sports where general managers will try to remake their teams in the image of this year's champion every year.
Agreed. The Patriot Act isn't a simple cut-and-dry It's Good(TM) or It's Bad(TM) type of thing.
One thing the Patriot Act does is enable federal agents to pursue suspected terrorists using a lot of the same tools the government already uses to hunt down drug lords. This is a good part. It also allows for the searching of people's searches at libraries if the happen to search for the right ternms. Many would argue that this is one of the bad parts.
Looking at it from a cold and pragmatic standpoint, it's better to pass it flaws and all because while you can always restore liberties that might be temporarily infringed upon, terrorists cause permanent damage. If you look at it from an idealistic viewpoint, it should not be passed until we are sure that no rights are violated. For better or worse, practicality usually wins over idealism.
The Patriot Act will continue to be renewed as long as there is an Al Qaeda, but hopefully there will be some inquiries to pare it down to the essentials. It was probably an overreaction to 9/11, but at the time cooler heads were never going to prevail (even if they existed at that point). The perspective of time and hindsight should help lawmakers straighten everything out, but there's no guarantees in Washington.
Dear Crackers,
In anticipation of the Intel switch, we believe we have made our legal department 4-5X faster too. We're actively looking to test and confirm those benchmarks.
XOXO, Steve
Companies always are looking to buy up the smaller guys, especially the "hot" ones. Right now, open source is growing as a buzzword, but there have been plenty of other examples. Seven years ago, everyone thought Internet radio was The Future(TM) and that's how Mark Cuban made his billions (selling boradcast.com to Yahoo). I'm not saying that open source will tank like Internet radio did; I just think it's analogous right now.
That said, anytime there's a leadership change there's uncertainty. Will the new coporate overlords taking over formerly community-driven projects be like Iacocca taking over at Chrysler or Eisner at Disney? It's impossible to say just yet, though that's never stopped speculation like this before. It's a delicate balance for a company to manage these community things, as Red Hat and Novell found out. Their solutions were to spawn semi-independent community projects of Fedora and OpenSuSE to serve as feeder projects for the enterprise stuff. Will IBM and Oracle follow suit? We'll see.
But wait... I thought Paul was already dead!
You can already get prizes for Google searching through Blingo.com - and not only do you get a prize randomly, anyone who signs up as your friend gets the same prize you win (and vice versa). That's all there is to it, they don't even ask for anything beyond name, email and zip code when you sign up. Click my homepage link to join as my friend so we can win prizes together.
I hate html email and use pine as my mail client
I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of computer users would not be willing to use a terminal-based email system. Most are afraid of using terminals period. I'm glad that you found something that works for you and can score you cool points on Slashdot, but I hope you weren't stating that as a recommendation. Links in email aren't necessarily A Bad Thing so rather than do away with them completely, it's better to fight the phishers instead of the links.
"However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is..."
Nightmarish grammar aside, the biggest clear indication that this is not final is the "Opera 9 Technology Preview 2" title on the linked page. Also, there is the fact that it is Opera labs, not the main site. Contrary to what the title would lead you to believe, this is just an open beta.
The big splash is the widgets. I am of the opinion though that the widget concept is being overdone completely. Now, you can have start.com widgets running in your Opera browser with widgets on your OS with widgets (either OS X Tiger's dashboard/Windows Vista Beta Sidebar or via third-party stuff a la Konfabulator/Superkaramba/Object Desktop). Enough alreay. How many different ways do I need to get my local weather forecast?
For those of you unwilling to RTFA, "BPI" is the British Phonographic Industry.
PHB: A good manager is someone who hires people who are smarter than he is.
Wally: So... your boss is dumber than you?
Alice: And you boss's boss is dumber yet?
Dilbert: According to your theory, our CEO is the dumbest person in the company.
Wally: Unless all of you are bad managers.
Asok: Truly we are doomed either way.
PHB: This concludes the motivational part of the meeting.
Wally: I'd give you a high five but I don't like to move.
MLB wants to cash in on the growing, and lucrative, world of fantasy sports. Services now are supplying stats that Major League Baseball collects and disseminates itself for their fantasy leagues. I think part of it is that MLB would like to make some money off of it to pay their own statisticians for their work. I also know that Bud Selig is a money-hungry scumbag, so it's not all pure intentions.
This is not your average office worker running Linux from his workstation, as if he was like the vast majority of office workers in the world.
"It is a simple fact that most of our clients run Windows 2003 servers and that it's my job to administer those servers..."
It's cool that he could still do that incognito with Ubuntu, but how easy was it really? Let's find out:
On getting the monitors to work: "I had to install the restricted Nvidia drivers and read the official documentation to get both monitors working, but that wouldn't be too troublesome for anyone used to mucking around with their xorg.conf file." Yes, it is Nvidia's fault, but for the uninitiated, "mucking around" in an xorg.conf file sounds scary.
On networking: "So, not exactly a quick and painless set up, but having done it once it would probably only take five minutes or so to do it again... though I'm a little concerned about the practicality of rolling out a large number of Ubuntu clients in an enterprise environment."
On email: "Ubuntu's default e-mail client, Evolution, is supposed to play nice with Outlook. It actually turned out to be very simple to get Evolution to connect to our Exchange server... That's precisely when things started going wrong. Exchange support seemed to be rather buggy and crash prone, and because Evolution is integrated into parts of the desktop, my desktop was soon littered with the burnt, twisted corpses of panel applets and daemons." He had to change a setting on the Exchange server to get things to work correctly.
On remote administration: "There is a bug in pptp-linux that prevents it from negotiating a secure connection after Windows offers to allow an unencrypted connection, but this behavior is easily solved by configuring the RRAS service on Windows Server to only allow encrypted connections."
On the office suite: "It is tempting to treat 'Base', the database application, just like Access. However it is not Access, and lacks many of Access's features. I was particularly chagrined to find it is not possible to import data from a CSV file into a table... If you rely heavily on local database files, and the Form and Report functions of Access, Base probably won't cut it for you."
That's a lot of issues that could scare away, rather than encourage, Windows-based offices from adding Linux boxes to their networks. I would love to read that article and come away thinking that Linux is ready for business, but unless everything gets switched to *nix is appears to be a big hassle to add Linux to the mix. Whether that truly is right or not I don't know, since I'm not that experienced with Linux and because a lot of the problems are with Windows not playing nice and not Linux, but if a PHB reads this article he might swear Linux off entirely. Sure, the Base functionality loss can be fixed with Cedega + Access, but does a manager who's never heard of Linux know that? It looks like Linux is not yet ready for the client side of a business, but at least the atricle outlines where the work for making that happen needs to go.
Does it go up to 11?
So, regular Google is their search crawlers going out and indexing information, while Google Base is people submitting information to be indexed in categories that submitters assign themselves. Is that right? Or is there more to this? Is this like a subsection of the search engine, or an informal free webhosting service? I'm just not sure of what this is or why it's necessary.
Here is a one-page, ad-free version of the article. Seriously, when articles are formatted like this, submitters should use the "printer friendly" version of the article as the submission.
Careful what you say. In Kansas they already believe in jayhawks, so you never know what's next!
I just wonder how the logic in the decision-making process went.
"Since CD sales have been falling, and it's cheaper to blame piracy than develop original artists, let's put a DRM rootkit on our CDs to prevent copying."
"But wait sir, what happens when people find it? Won't that motivate people to avoid buying CDs since they don't know if they can trust us anymore?"
"Don't worry. We'll hide it really really well so no one knows about it. Even though we have to run a firewall and antivirus software on our network to protect against vulnerabilities that no one even knows exist yet, we can safely assume that not a single soul on the entire earth will find our rootkit. And if we get sued, we'll can probably get off somehow by screaming DMCA. The lawyers are looking into it as we speak. Plus if no one finds it and sales go up, we all get bigger bonuses."
"Apparently, I'm engulfed in evil."
With apologies to Dilbert for the last line.
That's very true, and I probably should have made that as a disclaimer or something. I just used the drill analogy because my professor did. By being specific on the size, I was referring to how individual programs generally only serve one purpose, like Gaim with messaging, and the Gimp with graphics.
The part of what I have read so far that jumps out at me was this:
Is the greatest economic effect of Microsoft the fact that they have enabled a great many businesses - their customers - to do business more efficiently, and to have businesses that they could not operate at all without the software that enables them? Yes, that is the biggest economic impact of Microsoft.
Microsoft is a tool-maker, and the effect of the tool-maker on the economy is tiny next to the economic effect of all of the people who are enabled by the maker's tools.
It's like my marketing (shriek! yes, marketing) professor says: when people buy a 1/4 drill, they're not really buying a 1/4 inch drill, they're buying 1/4 inch holes. The product itself is not as important as what it does and how it benefits the consumers.
I think this is an area that open source could use some work on. It's not necessarily that the drill has to be shinier, fancier, or even more featureful than Microsoft's/Adobe's/any other propreitary software maker's drill, rather it must drill better holes more reliably at a lesser cost. Then, we can can worry about what kind of finish is used to make it gleam under lights.
Case in point: KDE and Gnome both put a lot of work into eye candy, and justifiably so, but neither can give me a list of all the wireless networks around my computer in just 2 clicks in a default setup - but Windows can. I'd imagine OS X probably could too. It's these kinds of things that I'm talking about. Supporting wifi isn't enough - that's a drill that leaves jagged stuff around the 1/4 inch hole instead of making it clean all the way through.
There are companies that sell bottled water... so there's got to be some way to make money stuff that is given away for free.
;)
They give away water where you're from? Where I live it's part of my monthly utility bill
But seriously, the US economy has been converting over to a service economy over teh past century. It has been quite some time since GDP was more products than services. Products can be made anywhere, and with software the transportation cost is nearly $0. If you rely on software products then you had better be sure that you're the best or else because lower-cost software can be made in India and China.
Services can go either way. The call center may be in Bangalore, but if you need someone to come to your business in Topeka either for training or an on-site service call, there's definitely not going to be someone coming from New Delhi to do the job. Services are a great hedge against the future, which is probably why IBM is shifting focus away from solely producing their international business machines to providing consulting service. Plus, it's perfectly in line with where the US economy has been headed for decades.
"Byte of the Apple" - That's so clever! I never would have thought of replacing bite with the homonym byte when talking about computer-related things. It must be what, 1994 now?
/sarcasm
But seriously, when about 50% of each iPod is profit, and they sell more of those than anything else, is it surprising? Dell is competing towards the bottom, it seems, with their mostly cut-rate PCs (XPS excluded) whereas Apple seems to be competing towards the top where the premium prices - and profits - are. Didn't they want to be the BMW of computers? Mission accomplished.
Other members of the tech world are working on that problem, actually.