How about designing a portable version? I would gladly pony up a pile on cash for an orb that fits in my pocket, allowing me to track money, family, friends, and the health of my networks just by looking at the colors!
This thing this where cool tech should be going. Make it small and wireless and you have a killer app.
That corporate suits are starting to see the upsides of OSS great, but are they willing to contribute? For example, say a company realizes that they can save ten million dollars over ten years by using open source software. Will they be willing to spend one million of that by hiring a programmer to "give back" to the open-source community over those same ten years? PERL is a great start, many companies have donated to PERL development because of the money PERL saves them, but what about just bringing on full-time OSS programmers? I want to see large organizations bringing programmers on board to kick some of those savings back, and keep OSS thriving- especially now that Microsoft is trying to kill OSS in the grad school world where so many projects were started.
OSS developers and users are a great community- with a little bit of money thrown in, big OSS users can make it better.
Things like this make me glad to be an American. Europeans can bitch about us all they want, but even OUR government has not gone this far yet. Take your socialist stupidity and shove it, I'm staying in a nation where I can host Nazi web sites, buy blank CDs for a quarter, and get a dirt-cheap computer without extra taxes.
Given the current cost of massive hard disks, why are programs still putting DLLs anywhere outside of...\Program Files\Foo\dlls? I think most people would be happier losing some extra space per program due to DLL redundancy than to keep dealing with shared libraries!
"...how could it be competitive running at 500mhz?"
Intel thought the same thing about AMD for a long time. Then the K6-2/450 was released, it sold like crazy, and AMD actually beat intel in sales for one quarter. After that intel startking kicking their R&D's ass to get better CPUs out quicker, because competion had kicked in. It might take a while, but the Chinese have plenty of resources, and they WILL get to a point where their CPUs are competitive with American CPUs.
"Of course, I assume you're using the DRM buzzword to describe TCPA, which is something different entirely."
I meant DRM in general. Palladium, TCPA, or just processor ID numbers.
"But how would a chinese chip with no DRM be any different from an Intel chip with DRM disabled?"
It's the slippery-slope theory. intel chips might allow you to disable DRM at first, and then just make it mandatory at some point. Buying from a manufacturer that leaves it out entirely means that other companies always have to keep that competitor in mind.
"Why would someone committing computer-related illegal activities store anything on their ISP's servers?"
You assume too much. Some of the sleazier warez groups and many child porn groups share hacked servers. If someone at the ISP was involved in such activities, raiding the criminals first may have lead to destruction of evidence by the bad guy on site. By raiding the ISPs directly, the authorities get the servers, secure the hard disks, and then arrest the bad guys later.
Yeah, heaven forbid the kids should have a UNIX system with vendor supported hardware drivers, Microsoft Office, a free IDE, etc.. Good luck getting THAT with Linux or Windows.
I just want to thank the/. editor's for continuing to promote products of companys that are working to make DRM mandatory in all of our computers! Who needs freedom when you can have free anime?
Because allowing prosecutors to appeal gives the government a way to harass opponents with years of trials and the massive legal fees associated with said trials. Some governments might even keep a defendent imprisoned until appeals are exhausted.
The government is going to use someone's code one way or the other. If the government is using crappy proprietary code that has not been through the open-source peer review, military systems are at a greater risk of failure. Failures when lives are on the line mean that even MORE people die. At least if some quality open-source is used, there is a smaller chance of bugs causing more death on both sides.
1- This is not Sun changing the pricing for Solaris. Nowhere is it stated that Sun will stop issuing/honoring the Solaris RTU for systems with less than four CPUs.
2- Orion will not just be selling Solaris, it will "build all of Sun's software into the Solaris OS and offer a yearly subscription for Solaris, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said at the vendor's Worldwide Analyst Conference here."
That means no more licensing headaches for people using Sun's software for Solaris. Just one subscription for the directory tools, the management tools, etc.. Orion will make business with Sun easy for companies with money to burn and no time to spend dealing with it, and Sun has plenty of customers like that.
Since about 15 people have brought this up, I may as well answer...
Try doing that with hundreds of pages of documents. Try doing it in a secure location where people check up on each other. Now try doing it for dozens or even hundreds of such documents. It isn't that easy when documents get big and there are piles of them. Andersen has been accused of shredding multiple office building floors worth of staged documents. With DRM, the documents can be locked down on one server, printing, copying, etc. can be blocked. If the files need to be destroyed, there are no copies to track down, no printouts to shred, just a few hard disks and backup tapes to degauss.
Strong DRM in a well-structured environment is worth all the money and effort it requires, and Microsoft is going to keep the Office money flowing in by selling DRM.
Actually, the DRM in Office idea makes a lot of sense. It will allow governments and corporations strong control over who can read electronic versions of documents, preventing information leaks. After Office 11 there might never be another "Pentagon Papers" type scandal because the government could just cut printing rights to sensitive documents. Companys will no longer have to worry about internal memos ending up on FuckedCompany.
DRM is probably the killer app Microsoft needed to get all those companies still running Office 97 and Office 2000 to upgrade, and once they buy it, they will have to upgrade to keep the DRM working. This is way cool stuff.
1. Stay away from girls. All teenage girls can do is sap your time and energy. Wait until you're older and the women have their shit together.
2. Don't question authority. Teenagers, especially when in school, are rarely taken seriously and will just get into trouble when questioning authority. It isn't worth the bother, and will just waste time you could spend on something fun. Save the protests for when you are older, wiser, and can afford a lawyer.
3. Stay as far away from drugs as possible.
4. Learn your math. All of the other stuff you can learn in school is easy to pick up at any time in life. Getting the fundamentals of mathematics down when you are young and have the time will make learning many other things much, much easier.
5. Don't get a job. Teenagers will only be exploited at work. Live cheap, beg rides from friends, and use your time wisely. Don't waste your youth slaving away for a retail salary.
6. Get into a private school. Beg family, get scholarships, do whatever it takes, get yourself out of public schools and into a good one. Get a useful education, not the standardized crap the state provides.
Yes. And if Linux gamers rally around SDL, providing SDL with the funding, support, and evangelism that MSFT gives to DirectX, SDL could be a solution.
"Wrong. Why are you so Windows-centric?"
I'm not being Windows-centric, just practical. I give money to Transgaming so that I can play games on Linux. Maybe it isn't the perfect solution, but it works.
Open-Source/Free games for Linux will not solve the lack of games for Linux. The only way to get game developers to come to Linux is to develop a Direct-X like API that makes it easy to develop Linux-native games. Until that happens, Linux gaming will continue to revolve around WineX, id Software, Epic, and begging game companies to release Linux executables.
Given how unlikely it is that the Open-Source/Free software community could ever come together to make a decent cross-distro API, your best bet is to just subscribe to WineX.
I agree. Capitalism should have no problem eliminating overzealous, opressive DRM. There will be other companies producing hardware without Palladium. There will be software that does not use Palladium's DRM. There will be audio and video that is not tied down by Palladium.
All we have to do is accept that, and stop giving money to the rest. Unfortunately, the leaders in the movement against DRM are hypocrites like the Slashdot editors, men who attack companies like AOL/TW, Microsoft, Blizzard, Disney, etc, and then purchase and promote these companie's products with their next breath. These men have plenty of talk but no moxie. Until these idiots can stop buying a copy of Windows XP to play Warcraft III on while watching a "Fellowship of the Rings" DVD, they are just supporting the technologies they complain about, and doing NOTHING to stop the problem.
I agree wholeheartedly. I love my ibook, and as much as I critcise Apple for their pricing, my biggest regret from buying it was not spending more money to get a really nice one. Apple laptops rock, because they just WORK. No freaky crashes, no weird laptop driver issues, they just work. OS X gives me all the UNIX stuff and all the slick GUI and supported hardware goodness I ever need.
Now if they were just affordable to the masses....
" I wouldn't want people I was managing screwing around with p2p software at work."
I totally agree. I get SO pissed when my EFnet chats get lagged because the office warez monkeys are maxing out the T1 just to get mp3s and isos! People need to get cable!
GNU Solaris
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have been looking at Sun's slow burnout for a while now, and realized that one of the biggest things hold ing Sun back is the cost of Solaris. Sure the OS is free on smaller Sun systems, but administration costs are getting insane. Solaris is a heinous kludge of BSD and System V. The OS has multiple versions of important programs running out of/usr/bin,/usr/sbin/, and/usr/local/bin. Documentation is a mess, because many of the Solaris man pages are just too complicated to comprehend in a hurry, especially for junior admins. Sun's native administrative tool, admin tool, has been wacked in favor of the Sun Management Console; an beastly java version of admintool that runs slowly and has a heinous interface. Learning to work with all of this stuff takes a very long time, and a lot of employer-financed education. Salaries for Solaris admins are always rising, and unappreciated/undercompensated sysadmins are a favorite target of headhunters. Running a Solaris shop is terribly expensive, and that has been hurting Sun for a while.
But Sun has an easy way around this problem- free software. Solaris 10 needs to abandon all of the old stuff, and rework Solaris around the GNU/Free Software tools that many Solaris admins and plenty of Linux geeks already use to run their systems. Dump Sun's X for XFree86- configuration is easier. Dump old versions of vi and grep for vim and GNU grep. Kick out SMC and bring in Webmin. With some serious work, Solaris could come out as easy to administer as OS X or Mandrake Linux - drastically reducing the TCO of Solaris systems. Combining the lower cost of Sun's x86 workstations with the lower cost of a Solaris designed for sysadmins would do wonders for Sun, and be a great start in turning things around.
Slashdot Mirror
How about designing a portable version? I would gladly pony up a pile on cash for an orb that fits in my pocket, allowing me to track money, family, friends, and the health of my networks just by looking at the colors!
This thing this where cool tech should be going. Make it small and wireless and you have a killer app.
That corporate suits are starting to see the upsides of OSS great, but are they willing to contribute? For example, say a company realizes that they can save ten million dollars over ten years by using open source software. Will they be willing to spend one million of that by hiring a programmer to "give back" to the open-source community over those same ten years? PERL is a great start, many companies have donated to PERL development because of the money PERL saves them, but what about just bringing on full-time OSS programmers? I want to see large organizations bringing programmers on board to kick some of those savings back, and keep OSS thriving- especially now that Microsoft is trying to kill OSS in the grad school world where so many projects were started.
OSS developers and users are a great community- with a little bit of money thrown in, big OSS users can make it better.
Things like this make me glad to be an American. Europeans can bitch about us all they want, but even OUR government has not gone this far yet. Take your socialist stupidity and shove it, I'm staying in a nation where I can host Nazi web sites, buy blank CDs for a quarter, and get a dirt-cheap computer without extra taxes.
U.S.A. 0\\/nZ j00 4||!
Given the current cost of massive hard disks, why are programs still putting DLLs anywhere outside of ...\Program Files\Foo\dlls? I think most people would be happier losing some extra space per program due to DLL redundancy than to keep dealing with shared libraries!
"How are Intel and/or AMD chips "crippled"?"
They will be when DRM becomes mandatory.
"...how could it be competitive running at 500mhz?"
Intel thought the same thing about AMD for a long time. Then the K6-2/450 was released, it sold like crazy, and AMD actually beat intel in sales for one quarter. After that intel startking kicking their R&D's ass to get better CPUs out quicker, because competion had kicked in. It might take a while, but the Chinese have plenty of resources, and they WILL get to a point where their CPUs are competitive with American CPUs.
"Of course, I assume you're using the DRM buzzword to describe TCPA, which is something different entirely."
I meant DRM in general. Palladium, TCPA, or just processor ID numbers.
"But how would a chinese chip with no DRM be any different from an Intel chip with DRM disabled?"
It's the slippery-slope theory. intel chips might allow you to disable DRM at first, and then just make it mandatory at some point. Buying from a manufacturer that leaves it out entirely means that other companies always have to keep that competitor in mind.
Hopefully the Chinese will leave DRM out of their chips and give people looking for a "free" CPU a competitive option to the crippled intel/AMD CPUs.
"Those SSNs that matched selected individuals in a UT database were captured..."
Does anyone else wonder what the attacker's selection criteria were?
"Why would someone committing computer-related illegal activities store anything on their ISP's servers?"
You assume too much. Some of the sleazier warez groups and many child porn groups share hacked servers. If someone at the ISP was involved in such activities, raiding the criminals first may have lead to destruction of evidence by the bad guy on site. By raiding the ISPs directly, the authorities get the servers, secure the hard disks, and then arrest the bad guys later.
Yeah, heaven forbid the kids should have a UNIX system with vendor supported hardware drivers, Microsoft Office, a free IDE, etc.. Good luck getting THAT with Linux or Windows.
I just want to thank the /. editor's for continuing to promote products of companys that are working to make DRM mandatory in all of our computers! Who needs freedom when you can have free anime?
I would LOVE to see StileProject promoting Dr. Pepper.
Too bad the Goatse man is dead...
Because allowing prosecutors to appeal gives the government a way to harass opponents with years of trials and the massive legal fees associated with said trials. Some governments might even keep a defendent imprisoned until appeals are exhausted.
The government is going to use someone's code one way or the other. If the government is using crappy proprietary code that has not been through the open-source peer review, military systems are at a greater risk of failure. Failures when lives are on the line mean that even MORE people die. At least if some quality open-source is used, there is a smaller chance of bugs causing more death on both sides.
1- This is not Sun changing the pricing for Solaris. Nowhere is it stated that Sun will stop issuing/honoring the Solaris RTU for systems with less than four CPUs.
2- Orion will not just be selling Solaris, it will "build all of Sun's software into the Solaris OS and offer a yearly subscription for Solaris, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software, said at the vendor's Worldwide Analyst Conference here."
That means no more licensing headaches for people using Sun's software for Solaris. Just one subscription for the directory tools, the management tools, etc.. Orion will make business with Sun easy for companies with money to burn and no time to spend dealing with it, and Sun has plenty of customers like that.
Since about 15 people have brought this up, I may as well answer...
Try doing that with hundreds of pages of documents. Try doing it in a secure location where people check up on each other. Now try doing it for dozens or even hundreds of such documents. It isn't that easy when documents get big and there are piles of them. Andersen has been accused of shredding multiple office building floors worth of staged documents. With DRM, the documents can be locked down on one server, printing, copying, etc. can be blocked. If the files need to be destroyed, there are no copies to track down, no printouts to shred, just a few hard disks and backup tapes to degauss.
Strong DRM in a well-structured environment is worth all the money and effort it requires, and Microsoft is going to keep the Office money flowing in by selling DRM.
Actually, the DRM in Office idea makes a lot of sense. It will allow governments and corporations strong control over who can read electronic versions of documents, preventing information leaks. After Office 11 there might never be another "Pentagon Papers" type scandal because the government could just cut printing rights to sensitive documents. Companys will no longer have to worry about internal memos ending up on FuckedCompany.
DRM is probably the killer app Microsoft needed to get all those companies still running Office 97 and Office 2000 to upgrade, and once they buy it, they will have to upgrade to keep the DRM working. This is way cool stuff.
1. Stay away from girls. All teenage girls can do is sap your time and energy. Wait until you're older and the women have their shit together.
2. Don't question authority. Teenagers, especially when in school, are rarely taken seriously and will just get into trouble when questioning authority. It isn't worth the bother, and will just waste time you could spend on something fun. Save the protests for when you are older, wiser, and can afford a lawyer.
3. Stay as far away from drugs as possible.
4. Learn your math. All of the other stuff you can learn in school is easy to pick up at any time in life. Getting the fundamentals of mathematics down when you are young and have the time will make learning many other things much, much easier.
5. Don't get a job. Teenagers will only be exploited at work. Live cheap, beg rides from friends, and use your time wisely. Don't waste your youth slaving away for a retail salary.
6. Get into a private school. Beg family, get scholarships, do whatever it takes, get yourself out of public schools and into a good one. Get a useful education, not the standardized crap the state provides.
"Ever heard of SDL?"
Yes. And if Linux gamers rally around SDL, providing SDL with the funding, support, and evangelism that MSFT gives to DirectX, SDL could be a solution.
"Wrong. Why are you so Windows-centric?"
I'm not being Windows-centric, just practical. I give money to Transgaming so that I can play games on Linux. Maybe it isn't the perfect solution, but it works.
Open-Source/Free games for Linux will not solve the lack of games for Linux. The only way to get game developers to come to Linux is to develop a Direct-X like API that makes it easy to develop Linux-native games. Until that happens, Linux gaming will continue to revolve around WineX, id Software, Epic, and begging game companies to release Linux executables.
Given how unlikely it is that the Open-Source/Free software community could ever come together to make a decent cross-distro API, your best bet is to just subscribe to WineX.
Any want to bet that there will be a rush on Postgres/SQL and MYSQL books within hours?
I agree. Capitalism should have no problem eliminating overzealous, opressive DRM. There will be other companies producing hardware without Palladium. There will be software that does not use Palladium's DRM. There will be audio and video that is not tied down by Palladium.
All we have to do is accept that, and stop giving money to the rest. Unfortunately, the leaders in the movement against DRM are hypocrites like the Slashdot editors, men who attack companies like AOL/TW, Microsoft, Blizzard, Disney, etc, and then purchase and promote these companie's products with their next breath. These men have plenty of talk but no moxie. Until these idiots can stop buying a copy of Windows XP to play Warcraft III on while watching a "Fellowship of the Rings" DVD, they are just supporting the technologies they complain about, and doing NOTHING to stop the problem.
I agree wholeheartedly. I love my ibook, and as much as I critcise Apple for their pricing, my biggest regret from buying it was not spending more money to get a really nice one. Apple laptops rock, because they just WORK. No freaky crashes, no weird laptop driver issues, they just work. OS X gives me all the UNIX stuff and all the slick GUI and supported hardware goodness I ever need.
Now if they were just affordable to the masses....
" I wouldn't want people I was managing screwing around with p2p software at work."
I totally agree. I get SO pissed when my EFnet chats get lagged because the office warez monkeys are maxing out the T1 just to get mp3s and isos! People need to get cable!
I have been looking at Sun's slow burnout for a while now, and realized that one of the biggest things hold ing Sun back is the cost of Solaris. Sure the OS is free on smaller Sun systems, but administration costs are getting insane. Solaris is a heinous kludge of BSD and System V. The OS has multiple versions of important programs running out of /usr/bin, /usr/sbin/, and /usr/local/bin. Documentation is a mess, because many of the Solaris man pages are just too complicated to comprehend in a hurry, especially for junior admins. Sun's native administrative tool, admin tool, has been wacked in favor of the Sun Management Console; an beastly java version of admintool that runs slowly and has a heinous interface. Learning to work with all of this stuff takes a very long time, and a lot of employer-financed education. Salaries for Solaris admins are always rising, and unappreciated/undercompensated sysadmins are a favorite target of headhunters. Running a Solaris shop is terribly expensive, and that has been hurting Sun for a while.
But Sun has an easy way around this problem- free software. Solaris 10 needs to abandon all of the old stuff, and rework Solaris around the GNU/Free Software tools that many Solaris admins and plenty of Linux geeks already use to run their systems. Dump Sun's X for XFree86- configuration is easier. Dump old versions of vi and grep for vim and GNU grep. Kick out SMC and bring in Webmin. With some serious work, Solaris could come out as easy to administer as OS X or Mandrake Linux - drastically reducing the TCO of Solaris systems. Combining the lower cost of Sun's x86 workstations with the lower cost of a Solaris designed for sysadmins would do wonders for Sun, and be a great start in turning things around.