Mac OS X, Solaris 10, and the 2.6 Linux kernels + Mac OS X, Sun JDS3, and the many good Linux desktops = Microsoft ain't got no business plan
There are two evolving camps in IT, right now. One is open standards being adopted by every single one of Microsoft's competitors. The other is Microsoft.
Oh, and the open standard approaches are cheaper.:-)
I'm running Windows XP Home Edition N^M! Oh, almost forgot, I need to update Firefox in the Windows/usr/local directory. Microsoft thinks of everything, these handy directories for my stuff are awesome.
14 RPGs/year = ~1400 hours of gameplay/year = ~58 days spent on gaming/year.
If a gamer also works a total of about 83 days/year, sleeps another 121 day/year, and spends 20 days watching TV, then there are 365 - 58 - 83 - 121 - 20 = 83 days left for experiencing real life. Unfortunately, another 40 of those days are spent in the bathroom or eating, leaving only 43 days to do the laundry, yardwork, house cleaning, errands, and finances. Oops, I forgot to mention the family!
Besides what they are giving, they are getting in return and 10X as much.
The $500,000,000+ worth of R&D being open sourced in June (OpenSolaris) will help balance things out a little. OpenOffice.org is something like 7.5 million lines of code, too.
Are these the same lovely daytraders who keep posting nonsense and spam to every Yahoo! Finance message board rendering them completely useless for anything but cheap entertainment?
If JDS3 is any indication, Sun has done quite a bit to polish GNOME. The first time I installed Solaris 10, I got a little bit giddy thinking about how well it compares to Windows XP. It is basically as easy to install, too, which is mostly due to Sun getting rid of their "Install CD" vs. "1 of 2" dillema (long-time Solaris users can appreciate this). There are tons of places where Windows licensing can get tossed in favor of GNOME on Solaris or Linux, IMO.
It is a matter of what it looks like from the distribution-maker's point of view. GNOME feels like it is made up of 12,000 interdependent modules, which is easily contrasted with the handful of files required to build KDE.
The key to enjoying GNOME, IMO, is to never build it from source but to let someone else deal with it.
Ubuntu is a name I've heard only recently, and then there's all the Red Hat spinoffs (Whitebox, e.g.), and Gentoo has come around in the last few years. Is there really a measured consolodation?
Note that in their test, they had to zoom in really tight to see any difference between the Monster svideo cable and the generic svideo cable. The larger pictures in the article showed no discernible difference between Monster and generic, meaning you might never see the difference that extra $30 makes.
I bet this thing will be broken, too, in six months after a student spills soda all over the mechanism, or someone knocks it off of the table while roughhousing. Schools shouldn't have anything that costs $100,000, unless it is a whole building.
The open question in my mind is whether task effectiveness or overall organizational efficiency has improved.
This reminds me of those stories about Skunk Works designing an entire airframe in months back in the 50s/60s era, or companies doing the same in WWII. I'm sure they weren't perfect designs, but the thought of designing something like that so fast is just baffling to me.
I've also heard that NCLB creates more incentives for lower-grade teachers to push through students for better statistics so that upper-grade teachers get left holding the ball. I think it would really suck to be at the top of that pile, and if all this is true, NCLB will really backfire in a big way in about a decade, once all the underperforming kids near graduation.
In the unlikely situation where a teacher uses harsh words with a student, said teacher will probably find themselves unemployed and in court. Bah! Bring back corporal punishment!
I'm not sure that real physical punishment is needed, but one thing is that parents don't know how to be very firm with their often-stubborn children. Parents are generally really really weak-willed, and the kids end up winning by default. Essentially, the authority structure has been turned upside down.
It creates a list of websites that are not 'safe for children' and forces ISPs to block these sites for those who request it.
That list must be like 99% of DNS...could an ISP really have the resources to run a filter that big for every packet going to or from specific customers?
Consider that the figureheads in the Open Source and FSF world are also intelligent, fundmentalists in their own right, and often voice their beliefs without worrying about what other people think, why do people single out OSC?
When it comes to the potential impact on other people of actually carrying out those beliefs, what is the difference between Mormon fundamentalism, purist Libertarian philosophy, and the idea that there should be no commercial software at all?
There is way too much of a double-standard at Slashdot. The people iconized at Slashdot are "eccentric" or "admirably consistent", but in other disciplines it is okay to cast people in a spectrum of black and white judgements?
Yeah, me too. Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow might be too good for a movie studio to make money off of it. Perhaps it could be better as an independent film, where the risk of actually depicting young prodigies in battle and the annialation of an entire race are less risky towards the bottom line?
I also remember that 8086-based PCs were as good at solving basic differential equations with a DOS-based math program as modern PCs are with 2GHz CPUs, Windows XP, and MathCAD/Maple/Mathematica. The difference, now, is that the modern PCs allow people to change the color of the plot and get lost in a user's manual that might as well be the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
While most posts here are "the problem is..." I'll add to it and say that part of the problem is that schools don't think low complexity is a good thing. The computers have to be modern whiz-bang gizmos from Dell that look good in the newspaper article titled "School Buys Best Computers for Student Learning" with nice photos of the superintendent in the new classrooms.
Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X, Solaris 10, and the 2.6 Linux kernels + Mac OS X, Sun JDS3, and the many good Linux desktops = Microsoft ain't got no business plan
There are two evolving camps in IT, right now. One is open standards being adopted by every single one of Microsoft's competitors. The other is Microsoft.
Oh, and the open standard approaches are cheaper.
I'm running Windows XP Home Edition N^M! Oh, almost forgot, I need to update Firefox in the Windows
14 RPGs/year = ~1400 hours of gameplay/year = ~58 days spent on gaming/year.
If a gamer also works a total of about 83 days/year, sleeps another 121 day/year, and spends 20 days watching TV, then there are 365 - 58 - 83 - 121 - 20 = 83 days left for experiencing real life. Unfortunately, another 40 of those days are spent in the bathroom or eating, leaving only 43 days to do the laundry, yardwork, house cleaning, errands, and finances. Oops, I forgot to mention the family!
If gamers use games as their main source of entertainment, $700 isn't so bad. It is easy to spend that much just on a cable TV subscription.
Of course, it would be better to spend a little less and save that money, but, hey, Social Security will still be there...right?
Besides what they are giving, they are getting in return and 10X as much.
The $500,000,000+ worth of R&D being open sourced in June (OpenSolaris) will help balance things out a little. OpenOffice.org is something like 7.5 million lines of code, too.
They should have used .NET, ironically, since it's much more free than Java is.
.NET is 100% proprietary outside of the meaningless ECMA standards. Is this some sort of troll that completely tricked the moderators?
No freakin' way.
For what it's worth, Sun will be the largest contributor of OSS code in the world this Summer, if they aren't already.
I saw a mention of OpenOffice.org + GCJ in another forum. If this is true, doesn't this make the whole debate moot?
Yahoo! Finance message board regulars
Are these the same lovely daytraders who keep posting nonsense and spam to every Yahoo! Finance message board rendering them completely useless for anything but cheap entertainment?
If JDS3 is any indication, Sun has done quite a bit to polish GNOME. The first time I installed Solaris 10, I got a little bit giddy thinking about how well it compares to Windows XP. It is basically as easy to install, too, which is mostly due to Sun getting rid of their "Install CD" vs. "1 of 2" dillema (long-time Solaris users can appreciate this). There are tons of places where Windows licensing can get tossed in favor of GNOME on Solaris or Linux, IMO.
It is a matter of what it looks like from the distribution-maker's point of view. GNOME feels like it is made up of 12,000 interdependent modules, which is easily contrasted with the handful of files required to build KDE.
The key to enjoying GNOME, IMO, is to never build it from source but to let someone else deal with it.
In this case, it should read: "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to both incompetence and malice."
Who do I make the royalty check out to for my Solaris and OpenBSD installs that have had IPv6 capability for years?
Ubuntu is a name I've heard only recently, and then there's all the Red Hat spinoffs (Whitebox, e.g.), and Gentoo has come around in the last few years. Is there really a measured consolodation?
Once she threatened to crush her opposition under the weight of her massive ego, they caved in seconds.
I think its time for a one way visit to the vet.
Vets do the annoying pet owners, too? That's the best thing I've heard all week!
Note that in their test, they had to zoom in really tight to see any difference between the Monster svideo cable and the generic svideo cable. The larger pictures in the article showed no discernible difference between Monster and generic, meaning you might never see the difference that extra $30 makes.
...and a $100,000 3D printer.
I bet this thing will be broken, too, in six months after a student spills soda all over the mechanism, or someone knocks it off of the table while roughhousing. Schools shouldn't have anything that costs $100,000, unless it is a whole building.
The open question in my mind is whether task effectiveness or overall organizational efficiency has improved.
This reminds me of those stories about Skunk Works designing an entire airframe in months back in the 50s/60s era, or companies doing the same in WWII. I'm sure they weren't perfect designs, but the thought of designing something like that so fast is just baffling to me.
What would be the consequences of:
#unset DEITY
???
Man, this is pretty scary stuff!
I've also heard that NCLB creates more incentives for lower-grade teachers to push through students for better statistics so that upper-grade teachers get left holding the ball. I think it would really suck to be at the top of that pile, and if all this is true, NCLB will really backfire in a big way in about a decade, once all the underperforming kids near graduation.
In the unlikely situation where a teacher uses harsh words with a student, said teacher will probably find themselves unemployed and in court. Bah! Bring back corporal punishment!
I'm not sure that real physical punishment is needed, but one thing is that parents don't know how to be very firm with their often-stubborn children. Parents are generally really really weak-willed, and the kids end up winning by default. Essentially, the authority structure has been turned upside down.
It creates a list of websites that are not 'safe for children' and forces ISPs to block these sites for those who request it.
That list must be like 99% of DNS...could an ISP really have the resources to run a filter that big for every packet going to or from specific customers?
Consider that the figureheads in the Open Source and FSF world are also intelligent, fundmentalists in their own right, and often voice their beliefs without worrying about what other people think, why do people single out OSC?
When it comes to the potential impact on other people of actually carrying out those beliefs, what is the difference between Mormon fundamentalism, purist Libertarian philosophy, and the idea that there should be no commercial software at all?
There is way too much of a double-standard at Slashdot. The people iconized at Slashdot are "eccentric" or "admirably consistent", but in other disciplines it is okay to cast people in a spectrum of black and white judgements?
Yeah, me too. Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow might be too good for a movie studio to make money off of it. Perhaps it could be better as an independent film, where the risk of actually depicting young prodigies in battle and the annialation of an entire race are less risky towards the bottom line?
I also remember that 8086-based PCs were as good at solving basic differential equations with a DOS-based math program as modern PCs are with 2GHz CPUs, Windows XP, and MathCAD/Maple/Mathematica. The difference, now, is that the modern PCs allow people to change the color of the plot and get lost in a user's manual that might as well be the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
While most posts here are "the problem is..." I'll add to it and say that part of the problem is that schools don't think low complexity is a good thing. The computers have to be modern whiz-bang gizmos from Dell that look good in the newspaper article titled "School Buys Best Computers for Student Learning" with nice photos of the superintendent in the new classrooms.