Lets assume you are a new startup, little funding, and a few good techie friends. You want to make a solid productive and efficient company. You could buy M$ products, deal with licensing problems and the extra overhead of fixxing their buggy OS. But this would allow you to hire cheap M$ users that don't need to know anything about how computers work. They'll still break their computers as usual, because they don't know how they work. But these people don't usually cost a lot, depending on their job.
Or you could decide from the get go to be a linux shop, hire people with the requirement that they either know linux or are willing to learn. Tell your users what OSs work, what tools work for their needs. And if they don't exist that's what a tools department is for. Build the tools you need and build them on open standards using xml/html web frontends to databases using perl as the glue, etc. There are very easy and efficient means of solving almost any problem with unix and the right people. The hard part is finding the right people so you will need to be a bit more picky and go through a longer interrogation process.
In the end you won't have to worry about licenses, but you will face a higher cost at educating your people. The benefit is you will have smarter, more competent people. A more tightly integrated software package built on open software that you KNOW you can fix any problems that arrise. Problems will happen less often relieving IT stress and time (maybe your IT staff could be part time tools developers as well). And maybe you will save money when you find out your only costs are your employees and hardware. Then if are you a caring manager/CEO and really want to make a difference, what about paying everyone a little above market value with generous raises and cut your own salery down to theirs, so everyone gets a nice slice of the pie they build.
But please don't listen to me if you're a manager or already know what you're doing. I will do this when I start my company, but I don't want a lot of competition.;)
Citizen Kane is an excellent movie! And your right, both sound and video at the same time. You'd have to do some multiplexxing to get that to work on a PC.:)
The interface isn't the freakin' computer... that's why Linux is around. Linux is the freakin' computer. UNIX is the freakin' computer. A computer is a process scheduler. Each process works on its data and does whatever we want it to do, hopefully. But in the world of Macs and Wintendoze M$ and Apple would like you to believe that the interface is the computer. That the OS isn't capable of doing anything more than the stupid gui shit they promote.
That simply ain't true. You don't even need a gui to work on 90% of the data you want to process everyday. You are just too lazy to learn how the real system works. You can process graphics faster without a GUI, cuz the system doesn't have to keep you informed with neat little graphics and can instead work entirely on the dataset, moving that between disk and memory and back 'til its done. Understand?
Linux is taking its time creating a user interface that fully supports EVERY feature of the computer instead of telling you "these are the features, anything else doesn't exist" as M$ and Apple are doing. It all comes down to what do you want. If you don't understand computers, fine, buy your OS. If you do understand computers and know what they can do, Linux does that and its free, enjoy.
How the hell do you get moderated to the top being the rude little bitch you are. Jon Katz is an excellent writer and I enjoy reading every article he writes. Occationally he doesn't fully understand the technical details, but he is one of the only columnists that takes a step back from the details to look at the larger picture and asks, "What does all this mean?"
If you don't like his comments don't read them. Go back to trolling like I am here and get off my bandwidth!
But I still seem to have some problems getting NFS to work on OSX. Maybe its just me, but if you end up breaking the traditional UNIX functionality when you are bring UNIX to the common man (similar to what RedHat does) then maybe you shouldn't stop calling it UNIX.
Linux at least gives me the choice to have EVERYTHING I want for free for any OS. OSX... well, go buy a mac and spend a few thousand dollars and we'll talk about it.
Good point. The average CNN/AOL or MSNBC/M$ crowds don't question whether their sources for journalism are biased. They blindly believe whatever they are told like good little sheep.
Anyway, you're both right and wrong. Yes flaming never helps win a debate, but it does keep the debate running hot. And I think we all like to read a good flame occationally. But my reason for posting this was to comment on M$'s hardware.
"Microsofts hardware though is glorious. It's all beautifully engineered, and works as advertised."
I don't know about you but the only hardware I've used from M$ is a mouse. Although a mouse is a truely revolutionary idea it is hardly as complex as a DVD drive, or a whole computer. Now I don't doubt that M$ will make a good gaming system free of hardware bugs, but don't quote me on it.
Microsoft is a marketting company. They aren't a software company or a hardware company. If they were they'd be improving (QAing) their software product instead of adding features and bugs to attract only the most masochistic consumers. Instead they focus more on market trends and use their foresight, and dominant position in the computer industry as a whole, to place themselves between you (the consumer) and about half the software out there (their competition, GPL excluded of course).
They first did this with their wintendoze and M$-DOS OSs. You can hardly call them OSs, but they did keep almost all the other software companies at bay while they placed themselves in as the proprietary standard in both the operating system and most document formats. If it weren't for HTML we'd all be reading this from M$ Word or Explorer.
Now Microsoft has their eye on new ground. The gaming market. They've designed a computer that can run games. Almost like a wintendoze box, but slightly different. This one is going to require you to purchase the X-Box before you can buy the coolest games, since M$ has already bought the companies behind Halo and who knows what else. They will most likely use NDAs or some other legal tools to push their weight around and keep other game companies from releasing their products for the PC until after they push out an X-Box release first, etc. So I guess I'm just gonna have to play tf2 or spend more time writing code and ripping movies.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for M$ and other monopolistic corporations. Give them all the money you want, buy their products, deal with their legal restrictions. But DON'T EVER COMPLAIN about what you get. Cuz just remember, you deserve it.
Because those criminals are smart people! Think about it. It might even be fun. Very few people will possess the ability to hack into these large corporations, destroy years of data collected on them, and be ghosts among the conformist sheep.
All I know is this will not affect the software I buy and use. This only will affect those stupid lusers out there that don't read their software linceses before agreeing to them, or buy software from companies that are less than reputable. If this passes in my home state I'll stop buying commercial software, period. I'll only use GPL software or software I've already purchased and continue to be happy. Live and let die.
I think its great that parents can finally control, er no I mean censor, the content their children are exposed to. In this day and age, thanks to Microsoft, the only monopoly that truely cares as much or more about your children than you do, you now have a choice to disable graphic detail or content from games. We all know our children need to play games and need to watch TV. So now you can let them veg in peace. I just have a few recommendations to parents.
First, create a room to put your child in. They need to be sealed from the graphic content of reality as much as possible because that could potentially make them a free thinker, capable of independant thought, immune to the effects of pop culture. That would be bad! This room should have all the candy, snacks and food a child needs devlivered to them via an automatic despenser on a timely basis to avoid starvation.
Then the child will need something to do with their time, else they may decide to interrupt their parents, god forbid, so you should give them an X-Box, TV with digital cable, stereo, a DVD player and a computer/net connection with your favorite version of child protection/censorship software. A warning about the computer, censorship software can be bypassed, so it would be best to have a third party install a firewall like device on your network using their own proprietary black list that is dynamicly updated over the internet. That way any connection to any systems on the net containing information that is controversial in nature, such as breast cancer, can be blocked from ever enterring your child's room.
Finally you will need a bed and toilet so the child can live a full and happy life in their cage.
I suspect the initial startup cost of this is around $10,000. But if you act now we'll send you all this plus a free child for only $133 a month. That's like the cost of a pizza a week. Now anyone can afford to have a kid. Don't wait, call now! Supplies are limitted.
OpenAndSecureRemoteShell
sterm #it does X redirection/port forwarding
snet #kinda like telnet, only better
osh #an open/secure remote shell
osrsh
srsh
ossh
remember we can always make symbolic links, at least until the courts (upholding justice, heh, yeah right...) rule that symbolic links are a distiction without a difference, violating trademark/copyright/patent/corporate law
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
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· Score: 1
I used to work for SGI and Sun and have a good background in PC, Mac RS6k, and most all unix hardware from desktop systems to supercomputers. Apple has good hardware, but I wouldn't compare it to IBM RS6000s if I were you. I unboxxed 2 RS6000s, $50k machines, and found the the freakin' floppy drive just laying inside the case, not screwed in. One didn't even have the harddrive cable plugged in. In order to have good hardware you must have good QA, and this simply isn't acceptable, even if these systems were $3000 PCs.
And if that wasn't enough you have to run AIX on them. RS6ks may run forever, but in my opinion they suck ass!
My professional opinion for system and server hardware is to use cheap PC hardware, because let's face it, all computer hardware breaks eventually, often sooner than you think. And run load balanced/fault tolerant software across many systems. In the end you will have better uptime and lower costs with a slight increase in system maintenance and time required to plan out your net. Its definitely worth it!
But back to Apple. I bet they'd make more money off of OS sales than they would off of hardware sales. If they can get their OS running on 50% of the market they could also target other software, and think about it. Software costs you nothing to produce and distribute, compared to hardware. OSX will win hands down over the look and feel of any other OS.
Transmeta has better technology than Intel but lacks the support of their customers. Without using Linus and the open source model to gain the respect and support of the hardcore Linux/UNIX techs they will be facing a price/performance war with Intel that will be impossible to win.
Had Transmeta released information on their code morphing advantage and allowed the open source community to port the chip to natively support other instructions sets, like Sun/Ultrasparc, MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/Tru64, etc. They would have easily won the support of other sys admins like myself and have a firm backing by users. Now they have to hope that people buy them for their price, assuming Intel doesn't simply squeeze them out of that market.
Its sad to see another.com example of death by bad management.
Of course Linus is not killing Linux. It is doubtful he would have spent the last decade building an operating system and bury it 6 feet under today. Can you honestly say it doesn't look like Linus is creating a kernel that can be run in a production environment? Look at the changes between 2.2 and 2.4, better SMP, higher memory accessibility, much better support for harddrive controllers, and the list goes on.
Every release of Linux not only fixxes old problems but adds new functionality to allow it to maintain its dominance in the market as the only OS that can run on nearly every CPU enabled device you can find, from video game consoles to mainframes and highly scalable multiprocessor supercomputers (used to work for SGI).
I can't believe slashdot would write an article like this, if anything you should be a Linux advocate. Bad slashdot! *whack you with a stick*
No one know what the right signals are to look for since we haven't found anything yet!
Maybe your follow-up article should state how superstring theory isn't using the right equations because they can't be proved, come on edittors, you can be a little more creative than that.
Yes, but why do you think RMS would write such an article, and how do you think it could possibly be moderated to be of any relevant status? Wouldn't such an article, written by RMS or anyone, be discarded by the general public. Better than RMS being on some governing board overseeing which articles get published in this thing. Unless of course the only people using and moderating this encyclopedia are techies.
Its hard not to put words into Richard M. Stallman's mouth. I have to make sure these are my own opinions, although he is a very opinionated person, almost as much as me. But I think he understands the concept of freedom of information and what is required to keep information free from proprietary restrictions set by third parties.
If you take a look at the content provided by universities, the movie or music industries or most software companies you will notice that most content is licensed under very strict terms that do not promote the freedom of information, but instead promote their own financial benefit at the cost of their customer's rights. Even today you will notice how the music and movie industries are working diligently to remove our rights to fair use of their content through the use of encryption, macrovision and other proprietary standards.
There should be NO proprietary standards... This is an opinion I share with many techies. Joe user probably doesn't come in conflict with proprietary standards, but network and system engineers often have trouble getting various systems to communicate effectively because they only support their own set of protocols. Proprietary software and licenses are fine, but when something becomes mainstream enough to be considerred a standard, it should be open, no exception! Closed software leads to corruption via internal corporate politics. And I think we all know how much political bullshit happens on the upper management levels of corporations. These people have let the power of their position go to their head, much the same way government officials do, but at least the government is kept partially in check by the people. Who watches the corporations. Its almost illegal to write something bad about corporations today. What will it be like in 10, 20 years when more and more of your rights are stripped away by the standards you helped put in place? You don't ever have to agree with RMS, but I strongly agree after what I've seen in the valley in the last 3 years. I've watched people be bought and sold by corporations without ever asking what the people wanted, etc. We are nothing to these entities.
So from what I've seen and what is happening now, no matter what we think. All proprietary software is conciderred the enemy of open source software based on its licensing restrictions and WILL be replaced by an open source solution. Since that is already happening if you have money you get a choice. Those who don't only get free solutions. My money is going to programmers, not lawyers and management.
So RMS may be saying that all proprietary software is bad. And maybe he would like laws to give a little money back to the people... that's how I see open source software anyway. I feel like I own my copy of linux I burned at home for less than $2 more than I own my copy of windows I paid $50 for. I certainly can't browse the windows source code in my leisure. But the question the is it wrong to dislike proprietary software?
But honestly I'd work on a farm, for free, and give away everything I didn't need. I'm not a very good farmer, yet, but I know I can learn. And I know there are many people out there who feel the same way. Not everyone has to be a farmer or rancher. I think I'd rather be a rancher anyway...
But my point is, if they need to make money to pay taxxes on the land they work and pay for supplies they can't make themselves, they can't possibly give away anything they work on. At least not on a large scale. But with web content we can... I am currently a Sr. UNIX admin, I started moving sand bags, but this makes me 10x what moving sand bags did. If I could afford to live moving those sand bags I'd still be doing that to this day. I know I felt a hell of a lot better after a day in the hot sun sweating and getting a good workout than I do sitting browsing the web all day. Its not hard labor that is the problem its the current pay scale and cost of living.
Now maybe YOU would never do an honest days work if you didn't get paid. But for me work is work and I like to work. Helping people with computer problems is simple. I go to work at noon and leave early half the time, excellent benefits, excellent pay, etc, etc. But I'm not happy about this. I would much rather be living on my own ranch or farm. All I would ask is for a good net connection, supplies, seed, etc. and I'd still give everything I didn't need for myself away.
PS. True I have never put in the amount of work a farmer does, but I current do a job that no farmer could. So what does that mean? We gotta give the farmers everything they want and hope they see things this way... or else you'll always be paying for your food. Hope you have enough money when the price of food increases, I know I will!
Okay, so what I'm getting out of this is that "free" software is not free because the license is too restrictive. And RMS somehow requires all developers and content producers to write "free" software. I don't know why this seems to be the general idea spread by the slashdot crowd, but it has no factual basis.
Open source is similar to technology and technophiles in that they all sidestep mainstream corporate, political and popular interrests, and instead do their own thing. People, companies and the government later catches on to the growing support and does everything they can to get in the way of this driving force and use the creative energy to profit until they find that open sourcing everything has made it nearly unprofitable. Thus making it relatively free of corruption through greed (a sin, for those christians out there). As with the censorship of the internet, freenet and open source software will allow us to keep the net free reguardless of the current structure of laws in your region. Similarly I believe that RMS is trying to create an open, unbiased collection of information that was not created to make any one nation, ideology or race the dominant viewpoint, but instead to offer more than one viewpoint for any topic. This is almost a requirement for the reader to find any truth in any subject. One source can never tell the complete truth no matter how hard they try.
You can write whatever kind of software you want and license it however you want, but if you want to call it "free" then it best be under an open source license that is similar to the LGPL at the very least. The GPL just keeps corporations from stealing your code and selling their modifications without giving away their secrets.
At one time I thought the slashdot crowd was more open minded than this. Instead they seem to just want to bitch about how open and free content and software is too restrictive. It requires people to follow rules that keep it free and open, oh my god! What an aweful thing to do. Maybe you should stop using linux and GPLed software and boycott the movement if you feel so strongly against it.
It has never been about me, its only about everyone else. And if developers and artists can't understand that, good, sell your stuff to the highest bidder, and I wish you well, but I will always give you everything I make, no exception. GPL is a way of life.
Oh and what about money? I have a job. I hope you do too, cuz in this world you need one. Unfortunately no one will give you free food on the street, yet. The ONLY way you will ever see anyone giving you free food is if you gave the farmers everything they need to live, so they didn't need money. What's a farmer going to do with a lot of money anyway?
The only way to give a farmer everything they need is to start giving the little things we can today, such as content and code. These things can be easily distributed at nearly no cost, or a small enough cost that I can afford to give a little without it impacting my financial situation. Eventually we won't need to spend any money to get the enjoyable content we seek out on the net or on TV and we won't be bombarded with commercialism (one of the prices we currently pay for content today, along with copyright and licensing restrictions).
That, I think, is the future RMS is fighting for. And that is the future I want to live in. I don't like capitalism and the constant rude interruption brought on by those greedy people seeking my money. But I respect if you do, so please go support your local corporate interrests and leave RMS, open source, and me alone.
In addition to the damage HP caused to Tek, look at Xerox these days. Earlier today I was talking with some co-workers about how much better HP copiers and printers are than Xerox. HP is a truely evolutionary company and its sad to see Mr. Packard leave us. But more importantly let's celebrate his legacy.
100MB for a connection that supports 40,000 users doesn't seem like much of a problem. Also most spam is the user's own fault. They give out their information (email address) without reading privacy policies. They ask to be spammed by the very businesses they support and then complain about it.
Just as ignorance is no excuse from the law it is not much of an arguement against spammers. And just to throw a little flame into the fire most sys admins I know wouldn't spend their time reading logs, but instead write scripts to do that for them. Its a lot easier to stop spam if you create whitelists for those reputable consumer spam houses such as Digital Impact and blacklist anything that tries to send more than a set threshold of emails within a given time frame to your company.
And don't you find it ironic that AOL is suing porn spammers? Afterall, its almost like they are suing their competition.
When you think of a racist what is the first image that comes to mind? A mean ugly middle aged white man, right? You hardly think of a black, indian or korean racist when you think of racism, specially in the workplace. Its always the bad white suit/manager that only promotes his white boys and enslaves the rest of the employees. That is sad. That image is a prime example of exactly what racism is today. And I am a racist. And so are you!
Racism has changed shape. Today it would be hard to find a white man that hated all african americans or asians. Almost as hard as it would be to find a black man that hated all whites. What percentage of black men alive today were enslaved? Does that justify old school racism? I don't know... I've never been enslaved. But I can understand their point of view.
Old school racism, as I called it, is the immediate judging and sentencing of people, or categorizing them in your head and hating them for being who they were born as, not hating them for how they act. Today racism has changed. Even racism in prison is no longer based on hatred, but more on self defense and protection via gangs. We treat people differently based on how they act and a little what they look like, no longer the color of their skin but probably more how they dress.
Why do we judge people and categorize them? Does it really matter? You don't have to like everyone. You don't have to talk to everyone or be friendly to everyone. If you think someone is racist ignore them. They won't hurt you or say bad things to you or about you. They are probably just scared of you. But don't call them racist, because in doing that you are being hypocritical. How would you know if they are racist. Maybe they just don't like YOU!
Linux, like most unix OSs, was designed for functionality, not ease of use. Why does the average Joe User continue to complain endlessly that they don't understand or can't use the awesome functional capabilities of Linux when all of the freakin' documentation is installed by default for every distribution I have encounterred in/usr/doc and/usr/src/linux/Documentation.
The average Joe User is lazy and pathetic and should not flock to the popular OS without learning a bit about it before hand. Linux was written by the people, for the people. If you can't make it work for you, then you are plain stupid!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, most of you may not be paranoid, or may not believe that the ICANN has too much control, but that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
Lets assume you are a new startup, little funding, and a few good techie friends. You want to make a solid productive and efficient company. You could buy M$ products, deal with licensing problems and the extra overhead of fixxing their buggy OS. But this would allow you to hire cheap M$ users that don't need to know anything about how computers work. They'll still break their computers as usual, because they don't know how they work. But these people don't usually cost a lot, depending on their job.
;)
Or you could decide from the get go to be a linux shop, hire people with the requirement that they either know linux or are willing to learn. Tell your users what OSs work, what tools work for their needs. And if they don't exist that's what a tools department is for. Build the tools you need and build them on open standards using xml/html web frontends to databases using perl as the glue, etc. There are very easy and efficient means of solving almost any problem with unix and the right people. The hard part is finding the right people so you will need to be a bit more picky and go through a longer interrogation process.
In the end you won't have to worry about licenses, but you will face a higher cost at educating your people. The benefit is you will have smarter, more competent people. A more tightly integrated software package built on open software that you KNOW you can fix any problems that arrise. Problems will happen less often relieving IT stress and time (maybe your IT staff could be part time tools developers as well). And maybe you will save money when you find out your only costs are your employees and hardware. Then if are you a caring manager/CEO and really want to make a difference, what about paying everyone a little above market value with generous raises and cut your own salery down to theirs, so everyone gets a nice slice of the pie they build.
But please don't listen to me if you're a manager or already know what you're doing. I will do this when I start my company, but I don't want a lot of competition.
Citizen Kane is an excellent movie! And your right, both sound and video at the same time. You'd have to do some multiplexxing to get that to work on a PC. :)
That comment is hillarious, moderate it up, please! :)
No, no, NO!
The interface isn't the freakin' computer... that's why Linux is around. Linux is the freakin' computer. UNIX is the freakin' computer. A computer is a process scheduler. Each process works on its data and does whatever we want it to do, hopefully. But in the world of Macs and Wintendoze M$ and Apple would like you to believe that the interface is the computer. That the OS isn't capable of doing anything more than the stupid gui shit they promote.
That simply ain't true. You don't even need a gui to work on 90% of the data you want to process everyday. You are just too lazy to learn how the real system works. You can process graphics faster without a GUI, cuz the system doesn't have to keep you informed with neat little graphics and can instead work entirely on the dataset, moving that between disk and memory and back 'til its done. Understand?
Linux is taking its time creating a user interface that fully supports EVERY feature of the computer instead of telling you "these are the features, anything else doesn't exist" as M$ and Apple are doing. It all comes down to what do you want. If you don't understand computers, fine, buy your OS. If you do understand computers and know what they can do, Linux does that and its free, enjoy.
That's all I got to say!
You are a fucking asshole!
How the hell do you get moderated to the top being the rude little bitch you are. Jon Katz is an excellent writer and I enjoy reading every article he writes. Occationally he doesn't fully understand the technical details, but he is one of the only columnists that takes a step back from the details to look at the larger picture and asks, "What does all this mean?"
If you don't like his comments don't read them. Go back to trolling like I am here and get off my bandwidth!
But I still seem to have some problems getting NFS to work on OSX. Maybe its just me, but if you end up breaking the traditional UNIX functionality when you are bring UNIX to the common man (similar to what RedHat does) then maybe you shouldn't stop calling it UNIX.
Linux at least gives me the choice to have EVERYTHING I want for free for any OS. OSX... well, go buy a mac and spend a few thousand dollars and we'll talk about it.
Good point. The average CNN/AOL or MSNBC/M$ crowds don't question whether their sources for journalism are biased. They blindly believe whatever they are told like good little sheep.
Anyway, you're both right and wrong. Yes flaming never helps win a debate, but it does keep the debate running hot. And I think we all like to read a good flame occationally. But my reason for posting this was to comment on M$'s hardware.
"Microsofts hardware though is glorious. It's all beautifully engineered, and works as advertised."
I don't know about you but the only hardware I've used from M$ is a mouse. Although a mouse is a truely revolutionary idea it is hardly as complex as a DVD drive, or a whole computer. Now I don't doubt that M$ will make a good gaming system free of hardware bugs, but don't quote me on it.
Microsoft is a marketting company. They aren't a software company or a hardware company. If they were they'd be improving (QAing) their software product instead of adding features and bugs to attract only the most masochistic consumers. Instead they focus more on market trends and use their foresight, and dominant position in the computer industry as a whole, to place themselves between you (the consumer) and about half the software out there (their competition, GPL excluded of course).
They first did this with their wintendoze and M$-DOS OSs. You can hardly call them OSs, but they did keep almost all the other software companies at bay while they placed themselves in as the proprietary standard in both the operating system and most document formats. If it weren't for HTML we'd all be reading this from M$ Word or Explorer.
Now Microsoft has their eye on new ground. The gaming market. They've designed a computer that can run games. Almost like a wintendoze box, but slightly different. This one is going to require you to purchase the X-Box before you can buy the coolest games, since M$ has already bought the companies behind Halo and who knows what else. They will most likely use NDAs or some other legal tools to push their weight around and keep other game companies from releasing their products for the PC until after they push out an X-Box release first, etc. So I guess I'm just gonna have to play tf2 or spend more time writing code and ripping movies.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for M$ and other monopolistic corporations. Give them all the money you want, buy their products, deal with their legal restrictions. But DON'T EVER COMPLAIN about what you get. Cuz just remember, you deserve it.
Because those criminals are smart people! Think about it. It might even be fun. Very few people will possess the ability to hack into these large corporations, destroy years of data collected on them, and be ghosts among the conformist sheep.
All I know is this will not affect the software I buy and use. This only will affect those stupid lusers out there that don't read their software linceses before agreeing to them, or buy software from companies that are less than reputable. If this passes in my home state I'll stop buying commercial software, period. I'll only use GPL software or software I've already purchased and continue to be happy. Live and let die.
I think its great that parents can finally control, er no I mean censor, the content their children are exposed to. In this day and age, thanks to Microsoft, the only monopoly that truely cares as much or more about your children than you do, you now have a choice to disable graphic detail or content from games. We all know our children need to play games and need to watch TV. So now you can let them veg in peace. I just have a few recommendations to parents.
First, create a room to put your child in. They need to be sealed from the graphic content of reality as much as possible because that could potentially make them a free thinker, capable of independant thought, immune to the effects of pop culture. That would be bad! This room should have all the candy, snacks and food a child needs devlivered to them via an automatic despenser on a timely basis to avoid starvation.
Then the child will need something to do with their time, else they may decide to interrupt their parents, god forbid, so you should give them an X-Box, TV with digital cable, stereo, a DVD player and a computer/net connection with your favorite version of child protection/censorship software. A warning about the computer, censorship software can be bypassed, so it would be best to have a third party install a firewall like device on your network using their own proprietary black list that is dynamicly updated over the internet. That way any connection to any systems on the net containing information that is controversial in nature, such as breast cancer, can be blocked from ever enterring your child's room.
Finally you will need a bed and toilet so the child can live a full and happy life in their cage.
I suspect the initial startup cost of this is around $10,000. But if you act now we'll send you all this plus a free child for only $133 a month. That's like the cost of a pizza a week. Now anyone can afford to have a kid. Don't wait, call now! Supplies are limitted.
what about:
OpenAndSecureRemoteShell
sterm #it does X redirection/port forwarding
snet #kinda like telnet, only better
osh #an open/secure remote shell
osrsh
srsh
ossh
remember we can always make symbolic links, at least until the courts (upholding justice, heh, yeah right...) rule that symbolic links are a distiction without a difference, violating trademark/copyright/patent/corporate law
I used to work for SGI and Sun and have a good background in PC, Mac RS6k, and most all unix hardware from desktop systems to supercomputers. Apple has good hardware, but I wouldn't compare it to IBM RS6000s if I were you. I unboxxed 2 RS6000s, $50k machines, and found the the freakin' floppy drive just laying inside the case, not screwed in. One didn't even have the harddrive cable plugged in. In order to have good hardware you must have good QA, and this simply isn't acceptable, even if these systems were $3000 PCs.
And if that wasn't enough you have to run AIX on them. RS6ks may run forever, but in my opinion they suck ass!
My professional opinion for system and server hardware is to use cheap PC hardware, because let's face it, all computer hardware breaks eventually, often sooner than you think. And run load balanced/fault tolerant software across many systems. In the end you will have better uptime and lower costs with a slight increase in system maintenance and time required to plan out your net. Its definitely worth it!
But back to Apple. I bet they'd make more money off of OS sales than they would off of hardware sales. If they can get their OS running on 50% of the market they could also target other software, and think about it. Software costs you nothing to produce and distribute, compared to hardware. OSX will win hands down over the look and feel of any other OS.
Transmeta has better technology than Intel but lacks the support of their customers. Without using Linus and the open source model to gain the respect and support of the hardcore Linux/UNIX techs they will be facing a price/performance war with Intel that will be impossible to win.
Had Transmeta released information on their code morphing advantage and allowed the open source community to port the chip to natively support other instructions sets, like Sun/Ultrasparc, MIPS/IRIX, Alpha/Tru64, etc. They would have easily won the support of other sys admins like myself and have a firm backing by users. Now they have to hope that people buy them for their price, assuming Intel doesn't simply squeeze them out of that market.
Its sad to see another
You got to figure out how to kill people silently and quickly, drag bodies, change clothes, sneak around, etc. Mucho strategy!
Every release of Linux not only fixxes old problems but adds new functionality to allow it to maintain its dominance in the market as the only OS that can run on nearly every CPU enabled device you can find, from video game consoles to mainframes and highly scalable multiprocessor supercomputers (used to work for SGI).
I can't believe slashdot would write an article like this, if anything you should be a Linux advocate. Bad slashdot! *whack you with a stick*
Maybe your follow-up article should state how superstring theory isn't using the right equations because they can't be proved, come on edittors, you can be a little more creative than that.
Yes, but why do you think RMS would write such an article, and how do you think it could possibly be moderated to be of any relevant status? Wouldn't such an article, written by RMS or anyone, be discarded by the general public. Better than RMS being on some governing board overseeing which articles get published in this thing. Unless of course the only people using and moderating this encyclopedia are techies.
If you take a look at the content provided by universities, the movie or music industries or most software companies you will notice that most content is licensed under very strict terms that do not promote the freedom of information, but instead promote their own financial benefit at the cost of their customer's rights. Even today you will notice how the music and movie industries are working diligently to remove our rights to fair use of their content through the use of encryption, macrovision and other proprietary standards.
There should be NO proprietary standards... This is an opinion I share with many techies. Joe user probably doesn't come in conflict with proprietary standards, but network and system engineers often have trouble getting various systems to communicate effectively because they only support their own set of protocols. Proprietary software and licenses are fine, but when something becomes mainstream enough to be considerred a standard, it should be open, no exception! Closed software leads to corruption via internal corporate politics. And I think we all know how much political bullshit happens on the upper management levels of corporations. These people have let the power of their position go to their head, much the same way government officials do, but at least the government is kept partially in check by the people. Who watches the corporations. Its almost illegal to write something bad about corporations today. What will it be like in 10, 20 years when more and more of your rights are stripped away by the standards you helped put in place? You don't ever have to agree with RMS, but I strongly agree after what I've seen in the valley in the last 3 years. I've watched people be bought and sold by corporations without ever asking what the people wanted, etc. We are nothing to these entities.
So from what I've seen and what is happening now, no matter what we think. All proprietary software is conciderred the enemy of open source software based on its licensing restrictions and WILL be replaced by an open source solution. Since that is already happening if you have money you get a choice. Those who don't only get free solutions. My money is going to programmers, not lawyers and management.
So RMS may be saying that all proprietary software is bad. And maybe he would like laws to give a little money back to the people... that's how I see open source software anyway. I feel like I own my copy of linux I burned at home for less than $2 more than I own my copy of windows I paid $50 for. I certainly can't browse the windows source code in my leisure. But the question the is it wrong to dislike proprietary software?
But honestly I'd work on a farm, for free, and give away everything I didn't need. I'm not a very good farmer, yet, but I know I can learn. And I know there are many people out there who feel the same way. Not everyone has to be a farmer or rancher. I think I'd rather be a rancher anyway...
But my point is, if they need to make money to pay taxxes on the land they work and pay for supplies they can't make themselves, they can't possibly give away anything they work on. At least not on a large scale. But with web content we can... I am currently a Sr. UNIX admin, I started moving sand bags, but this makes me 10x what moving sand bags did. If I could afford to live moving those sand bags I'd still be doing that to this day. I know I felt a hell of a lot better after a day in the hot sun sweating and getting a good workout than I do sitting browsing the web all day. Its not hard labor that is the problem its the current pay scale and cost of living.
Now maybe YOU would never do an honest days work if you didn't get paid. But for me work is work and I like to work. Helping people with computer problems is simple. I go to work at noon and leave early half the time, excellent benefits, excellent pay, etc, etc. But I'm not happy about this. I would much rather be living on my own ranch or farm. All I would ask is for a good net connection, supplies, seed, etc. and I'd still give everything I didn't need for myself away.
PS. True I have never put in the amount of work a farmer does, but I current do a job that no farmer could. So what does that mean? We gotta give the farmers everything they want and hope they see things this way... or else you'll always be paying for your food. Hope you have enough money when the price of food increases, I know I will!
Open source is similar to technology and technophiles in that they all sidestep mainstream corporate, political and popular interrests, and instead do their own thing. People, companies and the government later catches on to the growing support and does everything they can to get in the way of this driving force and use the creative energy to profit until they find that open sourcing everything has made it nearly unprofitable. Thus making it relatively free of corruption through greed (a sin, for those christians out there). As with the censorship of the internet, freenet and open source software will allow us to keep the net free reguardless of the current structure of laws in your region. Similarly I believe that RMS is trying to create an open, unbiased collection of information that was not created to make any one nation, ideology or race the dominant viewpoint, but instead to offer more than one viewpoint for any topic. This is almost a requirement for the reader to find any truth in any subject. One source can never tell the complete truth no matter how hard they try.
You can write whatever kind of software you want and license it however you want, but if you want to call it "free" then it best be under an open source license that is similar to the LGPL at the very least. The GPL just keeps corporations from stealing your code and selling their modifications without giving away their secrets.
At one time I thought the slashdot crowd was more open minded than this. Instead they seem to just want to bitch about how open and free content and software is too restrictive. It requires people to follow rules that keep it free and open, oh my god! What an aweful thing to do. Maybe you should stop using linux and GPLed software and boycott the movement if you feel so strongly against it.
It has never been about me, its only about everyone else. And if developers and artists can't understand that, good, sell your stuff to the highest bidder, and I wish you well, but I will always give you everything I make, no exception. GPL is a way of life.
Oh and what about money? I have a job. I hope you do too, cuz in this world you need one. Unfortunately no one will give you free food on the street, yet. The ONLY way you will ever see anyone giving you free food is if you gave the farmers everything they need to live, so they didn't need money. What's a farmer going to do with a lot of money anyway?
The only way to give a farmer everything they need is to start giving the little things we can today, such as content and code. These things can be easily distributed at nearly no cost, or a small enough cost that I can afford to give a little without it impacting my financial situation. Eventually we won't need to spend any money to get the enjoyable content we seek out on the net or on TV and we won't be bombarded with commercialism (one of the prices we currently pay for content today, along with copyright and licensing restrictions).
That, I think, is the future RMS is fighting for. And that is the future I want to live in. I don't like capitalism and the constant rude interruption brought on by those greedy people seeking my money. But I respect if you do, so please go support your local corporate interrests and leave RMS, open source, and me alone.
Oh, and quit your bitchin'!
In addition to the damage HP caused to Tek, look at Xerox these days. Earlier today I was talking with some co-workers about how much better HP copiers and printers are than Xerox. HP is a truely evolutionary company and its sad to see Mr. Packard leave us. But more importantly let's celebrate his legacy.
100MB for a connection that supports 40,000 users doesn't seem like much of a problem. Also most spam is the user's own fault. They give out their information (email address) without reading privacy policies. They ask to be spammed by the very businesses they support and then complain about it.
Just as ignorance is no excuse from the law it is not much of an arguement against spammers. And just to throw a little flame into the fire most sys admins I know wouldn't spend their time reading logs, but instead write scripts to do that for them. Its a lot easier to stop spam if you create whitelists for those reputable consumer spam houses such as Digital Impact and blacklist anything that tries to send more than a set threshold of emails within a given time frame to your company.
And don't you find it ironic that AOL is suing porn spammers? Afterall, its almost like they are suing their competition.
When you think of a racist what is the first image that comes to mind? A mean ugly middle aged white man, right? You hardly think of a black, indian or korean racist when you think of racism, specially in the workplace. Its always the bad white suit/manager that only promotes his white boys and enslaves the rest of the employees. That is sad. That image is a prime example of exactly what racism is today. And I am a racist. And so are you!
Racism has changed shape. Today it would be hard to find a white man that hated all african americans or asians. Almost as hard as it would be to find a black man that hated all whites. What percentage of black men alive today were enslaved? Does that justify old school racism? I don't know... I've never been enslaved. But I can understand their point of view.
Old school racism, as I called it, is the immediate judging and sentencing of people, or categorizing them in your head and hating them for being who they were born as, not hating them for how they act. Today racism has changed. Even racism in prison is no longer based on hatred, but more on self defense and protection via gangs. We treat people differently based on how they act and a little what they look like, no longer the color of their skin but probably more how they dress.
Why do we judge people and categorize them? Does it really matter? You don't have to like everyone. You don't have to talk to everyone or be friendly to everyone. If you think someone is racist ignore them. They won't hurt you or say bad things to you or about you. They are probably just scared of you. But don't call them racist, because in doing that you are being hypocritical. How would you know if they are racist. Maybe they just don't like YOU!
just a thought.
Linux, like most unix OSs, was designed for functionality, not ease of use. Why does the average Joe User continue to complain endlessly that they don't understand or can't use the awesome functional capabilities of Linux when all of the freakin' documentation is installed by default for every distribution I have encounterred in
The average Joe User is lazy and pathetic and should not flock to the popular OS without learning a bit about it before hand. Linux was written by the people, for the people. If you can't make it work for you, then you are plain stupid!
Just my rant...