IBM and Red Hat can't pull that off because they make money selling support, not software licenses. When Microsoft "donates" licenses to schools it's generally just a huge quantity of OEM licenses and Active Directory seats with no support at all, so it costs Microsoft little to do so, and nothing if the school would not have had the money to purchase the software otherwise.
For IBM and Red Hat to donate their support services at a level that would effectively impact Microsoft's market share would cost them billions of dollars a year, particularly early on when all the admins, users, and teachers required constant hand-holding. In the long run it would only pay off if Linux took off in the consumer desktop market, because then the incoming staff and students would already be familiar with the OS. Since there are no indications that Linux will have an appreciable desktop market share any time soon, it's a pretty safe bet that IBM/Red Hat won't be giving their products to colleges any time soon.
"I got passed over for a job or two because I didn't know application 'X'. Sure, I know the theory..."
That used to happen to me all the time. I blew one job interview by knowing how to configure something in BIND that worked a little differently in whatever they were using, and another by not doing a BASH loop the way one of the interviewers liked to write his, and there were several other cases like it. The problem is that most IT managers are techies who get promoted to management instead of good managers who got into tech, so they don't have the management skills and knowledge to realize that giving someone to a week to figure out the ins-and-outs of your particular software choice and it's config files is a lot easier then spending weeks or months looking for that "perfect" candidate.
Every time I look back on stupid shit like that I remember why I got out of IT and went to art school.
IBM sells servers running AIX and Linux that run from single CPU boxes to massive supercomputer/mainframe systems. IBM also makes high-end database and web-server software. Exposure to those kinds of technology and the related essential skills is pretty important for a CS student.
RAM is dirt cheap, it's pretty safe to assume that with a gigabyte of RAM in a Windows system there is no need to use swap as long as the user doesn't try to run a large number of programs at once or use specialized software that requires some sort of scratch disk. I've been running a Windows box like this for over two years now, both 2k and XP, and the only time I ever needed swap it was to run Photoshop, which refuses to start without a swap partition active.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between Memtech and Samsung. Memtech makes expensive products for specialized high-end uses while Samsung churns out products in huge quanities, generally targeting middle-class consumers and business worldwide. That means that once Samsung gets this ball rolling, this technology is going to get inexpensive and refined very, very quickly.
I hope Bram makes a lot of money from that advertising, because he's about to incur tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and their international counterparts have spent two years searching for an excuse to sue him into a financial hole he'll never get out of, and he's about to hand it over to them in a gift wrapped box.
Even if by some crazy stroke of luck he actually manages to get free legal counsel, fight back, and win the suits, it will take him years and numerous court appearances to do so. At this point I'm seriously wonder if he's brave, crazy, or just plain stupid. I'm hoping that it's bravado with some kind of intellectual backing, because I've thought highly of him right up until today...
In the years since the AOL/TW merger/buyout the two companies have had numerous chances to unite their collective business models. How hard would it really be to turn AOL into a subcription service that provides access to a massive amount of content - magazines, books, music, television, movies - with tiered access options, one of which would include the old AOL ISP service? Success would be almost guaranteed, after all, the two companies had some of the best marketing departments in the world, given that they both made the majority of their money by convincing people to spend billions of dollars on overpriced entertainment.
This has to be the biggest missed opportunity of all time. If the shareholders were smart they would sieze this last chance to revolt, replace the board with people who have spines, and fire the entirety of the AOL/TW senior management, replacing them with some visionaries who actually deserve to handling a company with so many great possibilities, and not a bunch of worthless cowards afraid to transform the company into the world's first digital entertainment empire.
After the huge success Morrowind had on the Xbox, I think it's a safe bet we will see this one become an Xbox 360 exclusive, for exactly the reason you described - PC gamers are sick of playing this kind of game at a desk.
I doubt this will do much for schools - most of what students need to do doesn't need the power to justify the backend server, so any cheap PC would do. In the corporate world, OTOH, thin clients are still great technology.
The savings of thin clients come from reduced administrative headaches and the ability to handle a lot of processing on a capacity-on-demand backend server. This makes it great for big corporate environments where you need a solid, stable networked system where users are doing stuff like data entry. It's a great concept, but it has traditionally come from big Unix vendors like Sun, whose thin client setups cost more per user than PCs. If Microsoft pushes a cheap thin client architecture with serious support from Dell this could actually bring the whole concept back to the corporate world.
"Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?"
Given that right now top-end games only need a 256 meg card to run at the highest detail levels in high resolutions, the same could be said of 128 meg cards when the Radeon 9700 was king two years ago, and that right now the minimum for games is usually a 64-meg card, I'm guessing at least five years, possibly longer if developers start putting fewer details into the textures and doing more with the polygons and shader tricks.
Excess RAM isn't useless on professional cards , professionals are the people who need all that RAM. If you're doing a complex 3D scene and want to view the textures before you start rendering, a card with oodles of RAM is a must.
I agree - the micro is just too damned small to be comfortable for adults, and kids will never stop losing them. It reminds me of those thumb-sized phones Nokia used to make, which were eventually dropped because they were too small for mainstream consumers.
"I can tell you this much: Normal people do not like being associated with fanatics and lunatics. Once Linux gets the image as the OS for the criminally insane, it's a dead duck. Unless the community gets a handle on this, grows up, and rebukes the extremists, the trash heap of history is where this is all headed."
That's pretty much why I gave up on Linux. The last straw for me was when, in 2003, someone chewed me out for using the latest version of GCC, which he had come to despise because he insisted it was too bloated for people like him who still have perfectly good 233 mhz Pentium machines around. The person who went on that rant is a pretty eminent Linux/BSD software contributor who happens to be well-respected in the world of network security.
At that point I wrote off the majority of Linux developers as kooks and freaks following a few weirdos who would have been crazed hermits in the days before the internet. Now I do the majority of computing on OS X, haven't touched Linux at all in nearly a year, and couldn't be happier about it.
Those crazy effects will only cost a lot at first - shortly after people will create new tools that drastically lower the cost of implementing those effects. In other words, all three Lord of the Rings movies were made for less money than Terminator 2, and the effects look a lot better. Expect the same thing to happen with video games.
"Also much of the educational software is written for windows, not much point having a crap load of PC's with no ability to use the tools the teachers KNOW."
Apple leaned on that argument for years to keep itself the primary computer vendor to public schools in the US, but it only took a few large districts buying Dell and Compaq PCs to convince software vendors to port to Windows. Educational software is generally pretty simple stuff, about as far from the cutting edge as it gets, so porting it to a different OS is trivial.
Apple users aren't the kind of people who read security advisories. Most Apple users not only don't know what one is, they don't know where to go look for one. At best Apple could send email to registered users, but given how many hackers/phisers are sending out fake emails from ebay, paypal, banks, and Microsoft, there's no reason to expect anyone to trust emailed advisories.
The real problem here is not Apple's handling of the advisory. It's that Apple created a culture where users aren't supposed to worry about security, and then made an incredibly stupid design decision that has the potential to negatively affect users. It also makes one wonder who Apple's beta testers are - apparently there aren't any competent IT security firms doing testing, because if there were someone would have pointed it out a long time ago.
If this game were playable over Xbox live I might care about it. Instead we get another game with great potential and no internet multiplayer, because the guys at Namco took a pile of money from Sony to keep the game on a console that has never had a coherent online gaming strategy.
Excuse me while I go fire up some games made by companies with a clue on my Xbox instead of sitting around fighting the AI...
Actually, this isn't a good test case for the average IT guy, because IBM is far from an average corporate environment. IBM is a technical company specializing in high-end server hardware and enterprise network consulting, so it's a safe assumption that the majority of IBMs employees are much more computer literate than the average corporate worker.
A better test case would be an insurance company, human-resources outsourcing firm, or a large bank. In on of those the employees not likely to be very computer literate, but they are computer-dependent and likely to do a lot of work via a browser, interacting with remote systems via a web interface.
Has it occured to you that you can always keep your old consoles around to play the old games on? I'm not saying that backwards compatibility isn't a good thing, but it sure as hell isn't enough to make me pick the PS2 over being able to play fighting games on Xbox live.
I think that most of us are just tired of tech executives running off at the mouth and the media pretending it's a good story. I don't care if it's John Romero, Bill Gates, Fester Ballmer, Scott McNealy, or Hiroshi Yamauchi/Satoru Iwata; I'm just sick and tired of people expecting me to care what stupid shit the marketing department told these guys to spout to the press. It would be ok if I could just ignore it, but at least a couple of times a week for the last ten years some not-so-technical person wants me to express my feelings on the latest stupid tech, and then said individual looks at me like I'm crazy when I calmly point out that the speaker is full of shit, and has been billowing out garbage like this for decades.
Here's a tip to businesses trying to silence authors and journalists with legal threats: if you're going to make legal threats [i]personally[/i], and not actually have them sent by a lawyer, it makes it pretty clear that: 1. You're full of shit and have no intention of pursuing legal action, because if you really did, you would have run the situation past your attorney before sending the letter. 2. You're not even a decent businessman, because any businessman with a clue knows that legal matters are best left to attorneys.
Slashdot Mirror
The RIAA's crack anti-mp3 commando teams are rumored to be cutting a bloody swath through street markets and datacenters across the city.
"... uh ... grades?"
Bah, compared to running multiple Solaris/NT/AD/Linux environments single-handedly on tiny budgets, getting good grades is a cinch.
IBM and Red Hat can't pull that off because they make money selling support, not software licenses. When Microsoft "donates" licenses to schools it's generally just a huge quantity of OEM licenses and Active Directory seats with no support at all, so it costs Microsoft little to do so, and nothing if the school would not have had the money to purchase the software otherwise.
For IBM and Red Hat to donate their support services at a level that would effectively impact Microsoft's market share would cost them billions of dollars a year, particularly early on when all the admins, users, and teachers required constant hand-holding. In the long run it would only pay off if Linux took off in the consumer desktop market, because then the incoming staff and students would already be familiar with the OS. Since there are no indications that Linux will have an appreciable desktop market share any time soon, it's a pretty safe bet that IBM/Red Hat won't be giving their products to colleges any time soon.
"I got passed over for a job or two because I didn't know application 'X'. Sure, I know the theory..."
That used to happen to me all the time. I blew one job interview by knowing how to configure something in BIND that worked a little differently in whatever they were using, and another by not doing a BASH loop the way one of the interviewers liked to write his, and there were several other cases like it. The problem is that most IT managers are techies who get promoted to management instead of good managers who got into tech, so they don't have the management skills and knowledge to realize that giving someone to a week to figure out the ins-and-outs of your particular software choice and it's config files is a lot easier then spending weeks or months looking for that "perfect" candidate.
Every time I look back on stupid shit like that I remember why I got out of IT and went to art school.
IBM sells servers running AIX and Linux that run from single CPU boxes to massive supercomputer/mainframe systems. IBM also makes high-end database and web-server software. Exposure to those kinds of technology and the related essential skills is pretty important for a CS student.
RAM is dirt cheap, it's pretty safe to assume that with a gigabyte of RAM in a Windows system there is no need to use swap as long as the user doesn't try to run a large number of programs at once or use specialized software that requires some sort of scratch disk. I've been running a Windows box like this for over two years now, both 2k and XP, and the only time I ever needed swap it was to run Photoshop, which refuses to start without a swap partition active.
Yeah, but there's a big difference between Memtech and Samsung. Memtech makes expensive products for specialized high-end uses while Samsung churns out products in huge quanities, generally targeting middle-class consumers and business worldwide. That means that once Samsung gets this ball rolling, this technology is going to get inexpensive and refined very, very quickly.
It's not hard to be cheaper when you're last out the gate, especially since the Revolution is expected to have less horsepower than either one.
"AOL is nothing but a burden."
A burden with over twenty million customers. Not a bad way to start a new service.
I hope Bram makes a lot of money from that advertising, because he's about to incur tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and their international counterparts have spent two years searching for an excuse to sue him into a financial hole he'll never get out of, and he's about to hand it over to them in a gift wrapped box.
Even if by some crazy stroke of luck he actually manages to get free legal counsel, fight back, and win the suits, it will take him years and numerous court appearances to do so. At this point I'm seriously wonder if he's brave, crazy, or just plain stupid. I'm hoping that it's bravado with some kind of intellectual backing, because I've thought highly of him right up until today...
In the years since the AOL/TW merger/buyout the two companies have had numerous chances to unite their collective business models. How hard would it really be to turn AOL into a subcription service that provides access to a massive amount of content - magazines, books, music, television, movies - with tiered access options, one of which would include the old AOL ISP service? Success would be almost guaranteed, after all, the two companies had some of the best marketing departments in the world, given that they both made the majority of their money by convincing people to spend billions of dollars on overpriced entertainment.
This has to be the biggest missed opportunity of all time. If the shareholders were smart they would sieze this last chance to revolt, replace the board with people who have spines, and fire the entirety of the AOL/TW senior management, replacing them with some visionaries who actually deserve to handling a company with so many great possibilities, and not a bunch of worthless cowards afraid to transform the company into the world's first digital entertainment empire.
After the huge success Morrowind had on the Xbox, I think it's a safe bet we will see this one become an Xbox 360 exclusive, for exactly the reason you described - PC gamers are sick of playing this kind of game at a desk.
I doubt this will do much for schools - most of what students need to do doesn't need the power to justify the backend server, so any cheap PC would do. In the corporate world, OTOH, thin clients are still great technology.
The savings of thin clients come from reduced administrative headaches and the ability to handle a lot of processing on a capacity-on-demand backend server. This makes it great for big corporate environments where you need a solid, stable networked system where users are doing stuff like data entry. It's a great concept, but it has traditionally come from big Unix vendors like Sun, whose thin client setups cost more per user than PCs. If Microsoft pushes a cheap thin client architecture with serious support from Dell this could actually bring the whole concept back to the corporate world.
"Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?"
Given that right now top-end games only need a 256 meg card to run at the highest detail levels in high resolutions, the same could be said of 128 meg cards when the Radeon 9700 was king two years ago, and that right now the minimum for games is usually a 64-meg card, I'm guessing at least five years, possibly longer if developers start putting fewer details into the textures and doing more with the polygons and shader tricks.
Excess RAM isn't useless on professional cards , professionals are the people who need all that RAM. If you're doing a complex 3D scene and want to view the textures before you start rendering, a card with oodles of RAM is a must.
I agree - the micro is just too damned small to be comfortable for adults, and kids will never stop losing them. It reminds me of those thumb-sized phones Nokia used to make, which were eventually dropped because they were too small for mainstream consumers.
From Dvoark's essay:
"I can tell you this much: Normal people do not like being associated with fanatics and lunatics. Once Linux gets the image as the OS for the criminally insane, it's a dead duck. Unless the community gets a handle on this, grows up, and rebukes the extremists, the trash heap of history is where this is all headed."
That's pretty much why I gave up on Linux. The last straw for me was when, in 2003, someone chewed me out for using the latest version of GCC, which he had come to despise because he insisted it was too bloated for people like him who still have perfectly good 233 mhz Pentium machines around. The person who went on that rant is a pretty eminent Linux/BSD software contributor who happens to be well-respected in the world of network security.
At that point I wrote off the majority of Linux developers as kooks and freaks following a few weirdos who would have been crazed hermits in the days before the internet. Now I do the majority of computing on OS X, haven't touched Linux at all in nearly a year, and couldn't be happier about it.
Those crazy effects will only cost a lot at first - shortly after people will create new tools that drastically lower the cost of implementing those effects. In other words, all three Lord of the Rings movies were made for less money than Terminator 2, and the effects look a lot better. Expect the same thing to happen with video games.
"Also much of the educational software is written for windows, not much point having a crap load of PC's with no ability to use the tools the teachers KNOW."
Apple leaned on that argument for years to keep itself the primary computer vendor to public schools in the US, but it only took a few large districts buying Dell and Compaq PCs to convince software vendors to port to Windows. Educational software is generally pretty simple stuff, about as far from the cutting edge as it gets, so porting it to a different OS is trivial.
Apple users aren't the kind of people who read security advisories. Most Apple users not only don't know what one is, they don't know where to go look for one. At best Apple could send email to registered users, but given how many hackers/phisers are sending out fake emails from ebay, paypal, banks, and Microsoft, there's no reason to expect anyone to trust emailed advisories.
The real problem here is not Apple's handling of the advisory. It's that Apple created a culture where users aren't supposed to worry about security, and then made an incredibly stupid design decision that has the potential to negatively affect users. It also makes one wonder who Apple's beta testers are - apparently there aren't any competent IT security firms doing testing, because if there were someone would have pointed it out a long time ago.
If this game were playable over Xbox live I might care about it. Instead we get another game with great potential and no internet multiplayer, because the guys at Namco took a pile of money from Sony to keep the game on a console that has never had a coherent online gaming strategy.
Excuse me while I go fire up some games made by companies with a clue on my Xbox instead of sitting around fighting the AI...
Actually, this isn't a good test case for the average IT guy, because IBM is far from an average corporate environment. IBM is a technical company specializing in high-end server hardware and enterprise network consulting, so it's a safe assumption that the majority of IBMs employees are much more computer literate than the average corporate worker.
A better test case would be an insurance company, human-resources outsourcing firm, or a large bank. In on of those the employees not likely to be very computer literate, but they are computer-dependent and likely to do a lot of work via a browser, interacting with remote systems via a web interface.
Has it occured to you that you can always keep your old consoles around to play the old games on? I'm not saying that backwards compatibility isn't a good thing, but it sure as hell isn't enough to make me pick the PS2 over being able to play fighting games on Xbox live.
I think that most of us are just tired of tech executives running off at the mouth and the media pretending it's a good story. I don't care if it's John Romero, Bill Gates, Fester Ballmer, Scott McNealy, or Hiroshi Yamauchi/Satoru Iwata; I'm just sick and tired of people expecting me to care what stupid shit the marketing department told these guys to spout to the press. It would be ok if I could just ignore it, but at least a couple of times a week for the last ten years some not-so-technical person wants me to express my feelings on the latest stupid tech, and then said individual looks at me like I'm crazy when I calmly point out that the speaker is full of shit, and has been billowing out garbage like this for decades.
Here's a tip to businesses trying to silence authors and journalists with legal threats: if you're going to make legal threats [i]personally[/i], and not actually have them sent by a lawyer, it makes it pretty clear that:
1. You're full of shit and have no intention of pursuing legal action, because if you really did, you would have run the situation past your attorney before sending the letter.
2. You're not even a decent businessman, because any businessman with a clue knows that legal matters are best left to attorneys.