The majority of PC users use Windows, those who don't have the ability to read most MS Office documents, and MS Office products have had the ability to save in earlier well documented formats not to mention RTF, CSV, etc. forever now.
If there's a semi-mythical complaint in desktop support for me, it has to be that "I can't open this proprietary document format" complaint. In over ten years I haven't gotten that once. The last time was a WordPerfect file in 1994 and the file was generated four years earlier.
Next thing you know, we'll hear whining and moaning aimed at Adobe for any nonstandard tchotchkes put into their PDF files. Why does it have to be up to the software vendors to correct the mistakes of those saving the files when they screw up by not saving in the most widely compatible format in the first place which they should have known to do since their very first PC using position?!
If you service machines for friends and family try this. Don't ask, just do what is good for them. After all they are putting their absolute trust in your computer knowledge, to do anything less is to fail them in.
THAT is a perfect example of the arrogance that relegates Linux to distant third place on the desktop. More of "the geek knows best". It is NOT your job to do what YOU THINK is best for them, but what you KNOW they asked you to do which is to FIX their WINDOWS machine. Doing otherwise is dishonest and if money or other compensation changes hand FRAUDULENT and should be punished at the very least by word being spread that you CANNOT be trusted to do as asked but insist on doing what you egotistically THINK should be done.
I swear, sometimes it amazes me that the common end-users haven't lynched more geeks in anger over the abuse that they suffer at the hands of know-it-all nerds. Assuming you know better than the end-user whose requirements you are there to fulfill is insane grandiose self-importance. THIS is the sort of thing that kicked off Microsoft's ongoing issues over reliability of Windows 95 with the arrogance of assuming user data loss was no big deal and nuke and pave an acceptable regular task. It goes right back to the 640K RAM joke that endlessly pops up. Or any of dozens of systemic flaws in Unix that to this day are being worked around because of the arrogance of assumption by techies that they knew best and that what they wanted to produce superceded what was expected of them.
If I was busy and farmed such repair work to someone who did this, and I paid so much as one penny compensation, there would be a lawsuit immediately for fraud if only to send a clear message. If plumbers did this, your toilet could end up in the kitchen; if electricians, you might get 312VDC service when you asked for 120VAC; and if general contractors did this, you might end up with your house being built facing another direction and on the wrong lot. All because someone thought they knew better than the customer. It is FIRST AND FOREMOST the job of the geek/nerd/techie to serve the end-users needs and desires and expectations, not defraud them out of pure unadulterated ego.
The problem became that it was all about every damn geek's and group of geeks' code. Everyone had their own idea of how Linux should be. Instead of a few flavors of Unix supported by their vendors, we had nine thousand flavors of Linux which may or may not be supported in any way by anyone at all.
That's clearly untenable and if Novell, Red Hat, IBM, and the rest finally got together and agreed on some interoperability, framework, and architectural standards, that would go far to help Linux as the roll your own distros would tend to follow them.
Put another way, I still have no faith in the Debian group, am wary of the Fedora group and only continuing because of the ongoing tie to Red Hat.
...Amazon patented a single-click insanity transmission and delivery system. Microsoft patented three sub-types of psychosis while four others were open sourced by Linux zealots. And the end-users of the world continued to ignore all of the above by inflicting it on support technicians because no one patented the delivery via phone due to a half century of prior art.
OSX is polished and has a singular top-down vision from Jobs and his unholy cult. There's no scattershot design by committee of blind idiots which is but ONE of the things hobbling Linux.
The biggest obstacle to Linux is that it is ruled, dominated, infested and infected with a "difficult is beautiful and better than easy or correct" mindset. There is active resistance to any sort of architectural framework promulgation beyond the kernel and even that is challenged by people second-guessing Linus. Never mind that easy to use GUI design is eschewed by Linux writers who seem to be inherently unable to grasp that what is easy for a techie geek is NOT the thing that the common end-users need or want.
The arrogany egocentric attitude of introvert geeks still rules: it should work the way I say and not the way those n00b lusers say. Microsoft doesn't work that way and look where they are today. Look where Linux is by comparison. EASE, not FREE or OPEN should be the buzzword of Linux.
Even with a quad proc dual core server and sixteen gigs of memory with gig-e you still can't resist the sheer might of the Slashdot effect. Linux wilts, Apache dies, the hard drive melts. I'm not sure if an IBM mainframe could withstand it.
...about carbon nitride? Sounds so very familiar... Except back then they were using Schrodinger's equation to extrapolate harder substances and then trying to make them so it revolved around that theory more than anything else.
I was under the impression that every geek east of the Atlantic Ocean had an instance of aMule/eMule/eDonkey on one machine or another as the biggest collection of pr0n, music, and warez has been availible there forever. That network has been the best and easiest to use since forever and within a few days I can generally find anything I need or want.
Bittorrent has never gotten me anything at any great speed and I get better results using a download accellerator with mirror search for distro downloads. Whole DVD ISOs in an hour not five or six days.
I don't see how this is news unless you're really estranged from the net.
I have a very hard time believing it is possible to encrypt something one way. It is only a matter of time before some genius figures out a way to reverse it.
You've obviously never seen what happens when the marketing department, accounting department, and human resources department intercept and edits the requirements report from senior executive management for new software before it gets to the programming department have you?
here is a Pravda article which says that NASA is preparing sandwiches which will still be edible after seven years.
My old school cafeteria managed it by 1965. Come to think of it, they were still serving their initial stock of experimental results in 1976. Edible seems to be a matter of perspective.
First, many certs are not easy to get if you don't have an incredible photographic memory. You can study until you are crazed and psychotic and thinking nothing but the subject matter till the moment of the test and blank. Then there's idiots who can memorize rote knowledge but can't use it.
Second, many certs are not germane to the job. No sense in having a BSD cert unless you're in a BSD/System V style shop. Better to have an RHCE even for SuSE than a BSD cert. Closer to the actual matter.
I expect we'll see more HR departments glomming onto this and expecting it as a prereq even for Windows desktop administration.
First, as is noted by a few sane souls, some of the software is OSS, and who cares?
Second, it's an electric car. Someone call Ed Begley, Jr. and wake me when they design and build one that is properly competitive with my SUV and cost effective.
Third, innovation does NOT come from the marketing people, they merely put a glitzy name to the innovation. Innovation in software comes from astute programmers who "get it" as to what the customer is not only wanting, but actually needing and lacking the descriptive powers to convey. The cry programmers should live for is not, "oooh, cool, open source..." but "EXACTLY! This is EXACTLY what I was needing! Damn, this is EXACTLY IT!"
And then the common know-nothing-about-the-behind-the-scenes people chalk it up to the sales and marketing people while the programmers go on to have post orgasmic depression, their having "gotten it" gone unappreciated. Such is the life of those doing the writing. Strangely, no one ascribes Stephen King's works to the marketing department of his publisher...
That's the problem with too many Americans (and yes, I am one myself, keep that in mind when you flame me): they think that waving their dicks around and threatening/bullying the rest of the world will make us safer, when in fact it does the opposite.
The predatory nature of the human species is well proven by its own history, its own accounting of same, and its various works of self-analysis and introspection. Show weakness, capitulate before threatening goons with a grudge, and they will never let you see the end up it until your are gone or you get some backbone and utterly wipe them out. We didn't stop at the outskirts of Germany, Italy, and Japan in WWII and say, "see, we can stop you". We kept on going until the enemy force was finished off as a coherent institution which could bring continuing immediate threat.
If we were bullying the rest of the world, we'd re-enact slavery, conquer half the world and wipe out the other half. I don't call treaty negotiations, pushing traditionally undemocratic nations to join the rest of modern humanity and enact participatory representative democracy, and stomping on recidivist terrorist fanatics who given a choice will bomb small children into chunky salsa over attacking regular military forces in stand-up battle the hallmarks of bullying.
Every Lexmark or Epson printer I've ever owned was like this and I was always careful not to allow virgins to drip blood into it or let it have any digitalis. A friend of mine who I was sure was still a virgin did cut himself on an HP once and after that the damn thing never did print correctly again. Ate every page consistantly and so the office people said, often belched a good satisfying one every evening.
...the US government declared every third week in June, July, and October in years ending in a prime number as Free Open Weapons Week encouraging defense contractor employees to work for free and deliver the bulk of their contracts during those time frames along with all engineering designs, blueprints, schematics, draftings, notes, e-mails, stickies, and copies of everything they ever doodled to the Pentagon as a measure of patriotism and national pride.
Yes, for the dense, that was sarcasm.
End users do not care if software source code is open to the winds or kept locked in a vault south southwest of Area 51. They care that it is cost effective, easy to use, and does what they want. That is all, that is it, cut and dried. This obsession with the words "free" and "open" is getting way past bizarre now and I think becoming raised to the level of religious fervor and dogma as a method of practicing psychological CYA in avoidance of "not getting it" as to why Windows and those who program on it continue to kick OSS ass consistantly.
It's more about avoiding taking responsibility for writing what is still for the average end-user crappy, hard to use, esoteric, inaccessible software which is what the OSS community would rather do than write things like the AOL client, Windows XP, etc. Point, click, it works, the horrors. Better to revel in our geek egos and write ten dozen different competing standards, take the "it's free so what do you want for support" attitude, and give away the source code freely and hype that.
I remember when I'd burn code that was less than what the other person expected out of me because it embarassed me. Now the Internet culture of saying more nothing in more ways has invaded coding and we write things, call them open, and give away the source as freely as we blog. If code is truly good and important, it doesn't matter if it is open or not. I don't use Xine, FC3, MTR, or a dozen other things because they are open. I'd pay like Windows software and not care if the code was open anyhow. I use them because I want them. Can't say that about the vast majority of code mucking up the world of (F)OSS.
...because what we really need is something that doesn't need gross bulk repairs but repairs itself at the microscopic level and only life does that. Our real goal should be techno-organics where the ship has more in common with plants and insects and heals itself. The bulk of such a thing would be shielding, structure, and so on all at once. Especially if the ship's water supply is also coursing through it as part of its "bloodstream" as it were.
I get the feeling we'll be also figuring out how to warp local spacetime as well right about the same time. Probably less than another forty years.
First, the obsession with wireless everything is beyond moronic as we don't know what our present electromagnetic soup does to our cell structures and synaptic interaction as it is and we want to fill the spectrum even more at higher power levels per unit volume and area? Yeah, that's a great idea. (
Second, what has made the present Internet great is not top down planning from standards committees and government agencies, but the interplay between them, users, content providers, carriers, corporations making products for it, etc. EVERYONE has had a part to play in making the Internet what it is today. I put the idea that any one group can make a new Internet under the same heading as people who claim to have special knowledge of how the universe really works (and that everyone else is an idiot; see the self-improvement section of the local bookstore) or how to make my life perfect. Unadulterated arrogance. There's a lot of parts to be played in some as organic and differentiated as the world of the Internet.
Third, anything which puts into place inherent breakpoints for snooping for whatever reason is a bad idea. It is an automatic invasion of privacy of citizens, organizations, and corporations whether the government uses them or not. There's no rationale that can justify the infringement and outweigh the long term negatives. The name of the game should be embracing of privacy and security of the Interenet's users. Say what you want about terrorism. There's been encryption of written communication going back to ancient times on stone tablets written in code. If we sacrifice freedoms for security we end up deserving neither.
The NSF would be spending its time a little more wisely on less grandiose things.
...had a psycho moment in the shower one morning, and doodled "Vi" in the steamed up mirror backwards. Good thing it wasn't Emacs or their next project could have been named something like "scame" which we'd all predictably call "scam-e".
Dead on absolutely correct. It isn't just that this is the way these creeps at the *AA have always behaved, it is that they and their abuse of the legal process only encourage it. I believe I once heard that there's a saying in South America that goes that corruption proceeds from the top down. Basically, the people learn to think it okay from the actions and examples of those above. Why shouldn't we sue when it has become a way of making money, a business method and tool, of major companies?
No wonder SCO thinks what they do is perfectly sane and rational.
IOW, running Windows through Virtual PC on MacOSX or through VMWare on Linux would be a better solution.
I'm sure a lot of people already knew this. I've been wishing MS and others would write their OSes this way for a long time. There needs to be a lowest possible software layer, just above the mobo firmware, that runs everything within it and controls its access. It would be possible with this paradigm to run multiple OSes simultaneously and switch between them on the fly. The most viruses would be able to do was destroy data within the sandbox not fark up things at large and pwn a machine.
You could probably do an absolute minimal stripped to the bones built just for it Linux build that on boot went to VMWare and then loaded the working Linux build with everything or Windows, or whatever.
Given the history of CF cards on my digital camera, I'm not going to rush out when this releases. Anyone got some good hard data on which rules for this sort of thing and not "well, Apple must have done their homework if they're doing it". I leave everything before Mac OSX as evidence that they ain't perfect.
with a MythTV running on a Beowulf cluster. It would take some work, but a small cadre of geeks who know their way around writing drivers and such would no doubt be able to create a central MythTV for an entire house of users that simultaneously recorded everything that fifteen people wanted on a RAID array. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's actually working on it or done it by now.
Then all we need is a well documented website showing us all how to do it complete with prepackaged ready to boot distro DVD. A home multimedia server without proprietary DRM and a jukebox dual-layer burner and CableCARD in a 19 inch rack cabinet would rock. Until then, I'll make do with my cable company PVR.
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of PC users use Windows, those who don't have the ability to read most MS Office documents, and MS Office products have had the ability to save in earlier well documented formats not to mention RTF, CSV, etc. forever now.
If there's a semi-mythical complaint in desktop support for me, it has to be that "I can't open this proprietary document format" complaint. In over ten years I haven't gotten that once. The last time was a WordPerfect file in 1994 and the file was generated four years earlier.
Next thing you know, we'll hear whining and moaning aimed at Adobe for any nonstandard tchotchkes put into their PDF files. Why does it have to be up to the software vendors to correct the mistakes of those saving the files when they screw up by not saving in the most widely compatible format in the first place which they should have known to do since their very first PC using position?!
If you service machines for friends and family try this. Don't ask, just do what is good for them. After all they are putting their absolute trust in your computer knowledge, to do anything less is to fail them in.
THAT is a perfect example of the arrogance that relegates Linux to distant third place on the desktop. More of "the geek knows best". It is NOT your job to do what YOU THINK is best for them, but what you KNOW they asked you to do which is to FIX their WINDOWS machine. Doing otherwise is dishonest and if money or other compensation changes hand FRAUDULENT and should be punished at the very least by word being spread that you CANNOT be trusted to do as asked but insist on doing what you egotistically THINK should be done.
I swear, sometimes it amazes me that the common end-users haven't lynched more geeks in anger over the abuse that they suffer at the hands of know-it-all nerds. Assuming you know better than the end-user whose requirements you are there to fulfill is insane grandiose self-importance. THIS is the sort of thing that kicked off Microsoft's ongoing issues over reliability of Windows 95 with the arrogance of assuming user data loss was no big deal and nuke and pave an acceptable regular task. It goes right back to the 640K RAM joke that endlessly pops up. Or any of dozens of systemic flaws in Unix that to this day are being worked around because of the arrogance of assumption by techies that they knew best and that what they wanted to produce superceded what was expected of them.
If I was busy and farmed such repair work to someone who did this, and I paid so much as one penny compensation, there would be a lawsuit immediately for fraud if only to send a clear message. If plumbers did this, your toilet could end up in the kitchen; if electricians, you might get 312VDC service when you asked for 120VAC; and if general contractors did this, you might end up with your house being built facing another direction and on the wrong lot. All because someone thought they knew better than the customer. It is FIRST AND FOREMOST the job of the geek/nerd/techie to serve the end-users needs and desires and expectations, not defraud them out of pure unadulterated ego.
The problem became that it was all about every damn geek's and group of geeks' code. Everyone had their own idea of how Linux should be. Instead of a few flavors of Unix supported by their vendors, we had nine thousand flavors of Linux which may or may not be supported in any way by anyone at all.
That's clearly untenable and if Novell, Red Hat, IBM, and the rest finally got together and agreed on some interoperability, framework, and architectural standards, that would go far to help Linux as the roll your own distros would tend to follow them.
Put another way, I still have no faith in the Debian group, am wary of the Fedora group and only continuing because of the ongoing tie to Red Hat.
where you will need to download the pdf and read Part I Chapter 7. I keep a copy of the book on my desk (next to my RHCE study book as a psychic counterweight) and often refer back to it whenever I've spent too much time with things like X configuration.
It's very funny, even more so when you know just a little bit of Unix and even more than that when you know too much which is to know any, really. ; )
...Amazon patented a single-click insanity transmission and delivery system. Microsoft patented three sub-types of psychosis while four others were open sourced by Linux zealots. And the end-users of the world continued to ignore all of the above by inflicting it on support technicians because no one patented the delivery via phone due to a half century of prior art.
OSX is polished and has a singular top-down vision from Jobs and his unholy cult. There's no scattershot design by committee of blind idiots which is but ONE of the things hobbling Linux.
The biggest obstacle to Linux is that it is ruled, dominated, infested and infected with a "difficult is beautiful and better than easy or correct" mindset. There is active resistance to any sort of architectural framework promulgation beyond the kernel and even that is challenged by people second-guessing Linus. Never mind that easy to use GUI design is eschewed by Linux writers who seem to be inherently unable to grasp that what is easy for a techie geek is NOT the thing that the common end-users need or want.
The arrogany egocentric attitude of introvert geeks still rules: it should work the way I say and not the way those n00b lusers say. Microsoft doesn't work that way and look where they are today. Look where Linux is by comparison. EASE, not FREE or OPEN should be the buzzword of Linux.
Slashdotting!
Even with a quad proc dual core server and sixteen gigs of memory with gig-e you still can't resist the sheer might of the Slashdot effect. Linux wilts, Apache dies, the hard drive melts. I'm not sure if an IBM mainframe could withstand it.
I guess I will have to rtfa later...
...about carbon nitride? Sounds so very familiar... Except back then they were using Schrodinger's equation to extrapolate harder substances and then trying to make them so it revolved around that theory more than anything else.
I was under the impression that every geek east of the Atlantic Ocean had an instance of aMule/eMule/eDonkey on one machine or another as the biggest collection of pr0n, music, and warez has been availible there forever. That network has been the best and easiest to use since forever and within a few days I can generally find anything I need or want.
Bittorrent has never gotten me anything at any great speed and I get better results using a download accellerator with mirror search for distro downloads. Whole DVD ISOs in an hour not five or six days.
I don't see how this is news unless you're really estranged from the net.
I have a very hard time believing it is possible to encrypt something one way. It is only a matter of time before some genius figures out a way to reverse it.
You've obviously never seen what happens when the marketing department, accounting department, and human resources department intercept and edits the requirements report from senior executive management for new software before it gets to the programming department have you?
The goal is to continue to reduce the risk of a back-end data exposure.
...if they start using your back-end for biometric identification and really, I don't want to go near that scanner after someone else has used it.
here is a Pravda article which says that NASA is preparing sandwiches which will still be edible after seven years.
My old school cafeteria managed it by 1965. Come to think of it, they were still serving their initial stock of experimental results in 1976. Edible seems to be a matter of perspective.
First, many certs are not easy to get if you don't have an incredible photographic memory. You can study until you are crazed and psychotic and thinking nothing but the subject matter till the moment of the test and blank. Then there's idiots who can memorize rote knowledge but can't use it.
Second, many certs are not germane to the job. No sense in having a BSD cert unless you're in a BSD/System V style shop. Better to have an RHCE even for SuSE than a BSD cert. Closer to the actual matter.
I expect we'll see more HR departments glomming onto this and expecting it as a prereq even for Windows desktop administration.
First, as is noted by a few sane souls, some of the software is OSS, and who cares?
Second, it's an electric car. Someone call Ed Begley, Jr. and wake me when they design and build one that is properly competitive with my SUV and cost effective.
Third, innovation does NOT come from the marketing people, they merely put a glitzy name to the innovation. Innovation in software comes from astute programmers who "get it" as to what the customer is not only wanting, but actually needing and lacking the descriptive powers to convey. The cry programmers should live for is not, "oooh, cool, open source..." but "EXACTLY! This is EXACTLY what I was needing! Damn, this is EXACTLY IT!"
And then the common know-nothing-about-the-behind-the-scenes people chalk it up to the sales and marketing people while the programmers go on to have post orgasmic depression, their having "gotten it" gone unappreciated. Such is the life of those doing the writing. Strangely, no one ascribes Stephen King's works to the marketing department of his publisher...
That's the problem with too many Americans (and yes, I am one myself, keep that in mind when you flame me): they think that waving their dicks around and threatening/bullying the rest of the world will make us safer, when in fact it does the opposite.
The predatory nature of the human species is well proven by its own history, its own accounting of same, and its various works of self-analysis and introspection. Show weakness, capitulate before threatening goons with a grudge, and they will never let you see the end up it until your are gone or you get some backbone and utterly wipe them out. We didn't stop at the outskirts of Germany, Italy, and Japan in WWII and say, "see, we can stop you". We kept on going until the enemy force was finished off as a coherent institution which could bring continuing immediate threat.
If we were bullying the rest of the world, we'd re-enact slavery, conquer half the world and wipe out the other half. I don't call treaty negotiations, pushing traditionally undemocratic nations to join the rest of modern humanity and enact participatory representative democracy, and stomping on recidivist terrorist fanatics who given a choice will bomb small children into chunky salsa over attacking regular military forces in stand-up battle the hallmarks of bullying.
Every Lexmark or Epson printer I've ever owned was like this and I was always careful not to allow virgins to drip blood into it or let it have any digitalis. A friend of mine who I was sure was still a virgin did cut himself on an HP once and after that the damn thing never did print correctly again. Ate every page consistantly and so the office people said, often belched a good satisfying one every evening.
...the US government declared every third week in June, July, and October in years ending in a prime number as Free Open Weapons Week encouraging defense contractor employees to work for free and deliver the bulk of their contracts during those time frames along with all engineering designs, blueprints, schematics, draftings, notes, e-mails, stickies, and copies of everything they ever doodled to the Pentagon as a measure of patriotism and national pride.
Yes, for the dense, that was sarcasm.
End users do not care if software source code is open to the winds or kept locked in a vault south southwest of Area 51. They care that it is cost effective, easy to use, and does what they want. That is all, that is it, cut and dried. This obsession with the words "free" and "open" is getting way past bizarre now and I think becoming raised to the level of religious fervor and dogma as a method of practicing psychological CYA in avoidance of "not getting it" as to why Windows and those who program on it continue to kick OSS ass consistantly.
It's more about avoiding taking responsibility for writing what is still for the average end-user crappy, hard to use, esoteric, inaccessible software which is what the OSS community would rather do than write things like the AOL client, Windows XP, etc. Point, click, it works, the horrors. Better to revel in our geek egos and write ten dozen different competing standards, take the "it's free so what do you want for support" attitude, and give away the source code freely and hype that.
I remember when I'd burn code that was less than what the other person expected out of me because it embarassed me. Now the Internet culture of saying more nothing in more ways has invaded coding and we write things, call them open, and give away the source as freely as we blog. If code is truly good and important, it doesn't matter if it is open or not. I don't use Xine, FC3, MTR, or a dozen other things because they are open. I'd pay like Windows software and not care if the code was open anyhow. I use them because I want them. Can't say that about the vast majority of code mucking up the world of (F)OSS.
...because what we really need is something that doesn't need gross bulk repairs but repairs itself at the microscopic level and only life does that. Our real goal should be techno-organics where the ship has more in common with plants and insects and heals itself. The bulk of such a thing would be shielding, structure, and so on all at once. Especially if the ship's water supply is also coursing through it as part of its "bloodstream" as it were.
I get the feeling we'll be also figuring out how to warp local spacetime as well right about the same time. Probably less than another forty years.
First, the obsession with wireless everything is beyond moronic as we don't know what our present electromagnetic soup does to our cell structures and synaptic interaction as it is and we want to fill the spectrum even more at higher power levels per unit volume and area? Yeah, that's a great idea. (
Second, what has made the present Internet great is not top down planning from standards committees and government agencies, but the interplay between them, users, content providers, carriers, corporations making products for it, etc. EVERYONE has had a part to play in making the Internet what it is today. I put the idea that any one group can make a new Internet under the same heading as people who claim to have special knowledge of how the universe really works (and that everyone else is an idiot; see the self-improvement section of the local bookstore) or how to make my life perfect. Unadulterated arrogance. There's a lot of parts to be played in some as organic and differentiated as the world of the Internet.
Third, anything which puts into place inherent breakpoints for snooping for whatever reason is a bad idea. It is an automatic invasion of privacy of citizens, organizations, and corporations whether the government uses them or not. There's no rationale that can justify the infringement and outweigh the long term negatives. The name of the game should be embracing of privacy and security of the Interenet's users. Say what you want about terrorism. There's been encryption of written communication going back to ancient times on stone tablets written in code. If we sacrifice freedoms for security we end up deserving neither.
The NSF would be spending its time a little more wisely on less grandiose things.
...had a psycho moment in the shower one morning, and doodled "Vi" in the steamed up mirror backwards. Good thing it wasn't Emacs or their next project could have been named something like "scame" which we'd all predictably call "scam-e".
Dead on absolutely correct. It isn't just that this is the way these creeps at the *AA have always behaved, it is that they and their abuse of the legal process only encourage it. I believe I once heard that there's a saying in South America that goes that corruption proceeds from the top down. Basically, the people learn to think it okay from the actions and examples of those above. Why shouldn't we sue when it has become a way of making money, a business method and tool, of major companies?
No wonder SCO thinks what they do is perfectly sane and rational.
IOW, running Windows through Virtual PC on MacOSX or through VMWare on Linux would be a better solution.
I'm sure a lot of people already knew this. I've been wishing MS and others would write their OSes this way for a long time. There needs to be a lowest possible software layer, just above the mobo firmware, that runs everything within it and controls its access. It would be possible with this paradigm to run multiple OSes simultaneously and switch between them on the fly. The most viruses would be able to do was destroy data within the sandbox not fark up things at large and pwn a machine.
You could probably do an absolute minimal stripped to the bones built just for it Linux build that on boot went to VMWare and then loaded the working Linux build with everything or Windows, or whatever.
...which has the best MTBF Vs. Cost? Flash or HD?
Given the history of CF cards on my digital camera, I'm not going to rush out when this releases. Anyone got some good hard data on which rules for this sort of thing and not "well, Apple must have done their homework if they're doing it". I leave everything before Mac OSX as evidence that they ain't perfect.
with a MythTV running on a Beowulf cluster. It would take some work, but a small cadre of geeks who know their way around writing drivers and such would no doubt be able to create a central MythTV for an entire house of users that simultaneously recorded everything that fifteen people wanted on a RAID array. I wouldn't be surprised if someone's actually working on it or done it by now.
Then all we need is a well documented website showing us all how to do it complete with prepackaged ready to boot distro DVD. A home multimedia server without proprietary DRM and a jukebox dual-layer burner and CableCARD in a 19 inch rack cabinet would rock. Until then, I'll make do with my cable company PVR.
(sorry, that should read "They're funny that way.") See the sig before you go spelling nazi.)