such as transparent hardware disk encryption combined with software encryption at boot. If the RPV goes down, the software encryption only can be unlocked and the OS running when the password is entered. Of course, the hardware key needs to be present for the hardware system to even get to the software login. If the plane goes down and they can signal a destruct, that key wrapped in a little bit of explosives gets blown to technoconfetti, and the encryption controller card as well for good measure. Now how is anyone going to DOUBLE decrypt the harddrive? By the time China or anyone else did, it would be a couple of centuries later and irrellevant. The point of information security is to play keep away long enough for it to no longer be of any value and superceeded by newer more imporant information.
Why? Read the linked page? Says it all. Violates most any Python code of any complexity out there. So if it doesn't convert Python code from the real world, what is it for? Making Python coders learn enough about C++ to remember the limitations and write/rewrite Python code to use it?
What the Python C/C++ interested people REALLY need is a book written by a group of Python AND C/C++ masters which teaches the two simultaneously showing complimentary methods of doing any given thing working from beginner to advanced and I DON'T mean "How to turn your n00b Python code into C/C++ hotness" sort of viewpoint. I mean both taught simultaneously in synch showing how they can interchange and compliment.
Software tricks for converting? Ultimately worse than not having them because it leads to horrible obfuscation because we don't know exactly what is going on when 13,412 lines of Python is turned into C++ because WE DIDN'T WRITE IT AND WE NEVER LEARNED C/C++. "Say Mike, that's great but you're the company code cowboy and you don't do C++ natively and I sure as hell don't read it being management so exactly what happens if this needs to be fixed? We've gone from importing open source code you couldn't read to writing our own open source code you can't read."
Earth has been warm, Earth has been cold. It was doing this long before we arrived. It will keep doing it long after we are gone.
First, Earth's construction contains a large amount of radioactive materials which during Earth's formation became largely concentrated at the Earth's core where they provide a good amount of energy to keep the core warm. So we generate our own heat.
Second, Earth has a moon which orbits and causes tidal forces to stretch and squash the Earth and provide more energy input.
Third, the construction of the Earth is rocky crust on gooey molten lava over a solid core. It moves this way and that, the crust carried along in directions ruled by convection currents, gravitation, and inertia just to name three. In some places crust goes back down and melts and others new crust pops up. Some of it is above the sea...
Fourth, Earth is covered in oceans. These take warmth from the Earth and even more so warmth from the sun, and convey it this way and that, flowing around the crust that sticks up above the waters. Once, Antarctica received warm waters from up north at the equator, but finally broke free from its connection and once encircled by the ocean on all sides, was cut off from the warmth and is now indefinitely cold.
Fifth, the Earth teeters this way and that with varying eccentricity of orbit, inclincation, and even magnetic field. Sometimes one hemisphere is at maximum summer exposure when the planet hits closest approach to the sun. Sometimes it is winter at farthest reach.
Sixth, the construction of Earth allows for all sorts of chemicals to be tossed about by the natural forces of the world, such as methane, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and so on. Rocks absorb some compounds, oceans others, other times things are released. Some are greenhouse gases, some aren't.
Sometimes it gets cold, the oceans lower as water locks up and former sea beds become swamp become grasslands become forests become grasslands become swamp become sea beds again as the warmth comes back.
Sometimes it gets very warm to the point that much life dies off.
It's been doing this since long before us and will do it long after. It is the height of anthrocentrism to assume that Earth inherently is at our mercy. More the other way really. Sooner or later volcanos will explode wiping out whole continents, continents will shift and Japan will go squish between North America and East Asia as the Pacific narrows, other places will open up rifts and flood by ocean. The *still ongoing* ice age will bound out of the interglacial into a glacial period, then an interglacial, and some day when the continents are aligned just right the ice age will end altogether and Earth will be warm.
Earth is going to do whatever Earth is going to do. There's been pasts of violent weather enough to make right now look like a calm spring afternoon and other quiescent times of endless calm spring afternoons.
But that doesn't sell books and movie tickets does it? Doesn't get people elected. Stupid does though. Stupid gets books and movies sold and gets politicians elected. Thank goodness for them it is the second most common element after hydrogen. Pity for us that Earth was cursed with so damn much of it.
This idea of a million eyes making it better is hogwash. How many people are actually aquainted enough with coding of ANY kind enough to help? How many in C? How many in C++? How many in assembly?
Even if Linux had a user bad of one billion it wouldn't matter. I'm pretty damn sure than better than 99.999% of all Linux users NEVER read source code. It doesn't matter that they could, it only matters if they do and if they understand what they are reading. If not, then they are no different than Windows users, waiting for some tech people somewhere else to fix it for them.
Reality trumps this claim of the OSS community that it is inherently better because the source is availible. If no one uses it, no one can read it, it is about as useful as stereo instructions in Sweden printed in pre-dynastic Egyptian to the entire enterprise and in the end self-defeating because when people realize that they have to learn how programming works to make use of the source, they will get resentful because they didn't choose Linux to become C/C++ programmers. That being the case, that they are relying on nebulous others either way, cuts a lot of the sparkle down and makes Windows a much closer choice.
"Hon? Yeah, me here. Hospital waiting room actually. I think I really screwed up the instructions with that new cell phone. Well, Janie tried to call her friend Jennifer, and the toaster exploded in Sean's face. I tried to call 911 and had to sit through Eyes Wide Shut 2, then listen to Basil Poledouris ring tones for ten minutes and answer three web surveys. The doctors think they can reattach most of Sean's scalp and one of his eyes. Janie is fine though. She grabbed the phone, screamed 'nervouse breakdown voice command' into it and it tranquilized her. Do you know if it can make Shirley Temples? Hello? Oh, I'm sorry... I thought you were my husband... International Space Station you say? Could you connect me with 555-"
My cable company delivers 15Mbps service on existing cable and some cable operators are experimenting with speeds as high as 50Mbps. The cable operators don't have to rebuild whole areas to do this in most cases whereas fiber pushes need massive investment to do. I wonder where that money comes from?
Oh yeah, the near-monopoly highway robbery pricing structures the Bells enjoy and the monies they expect to reap if net neutrality fails.
Silly me, I forgot they're going to rape the public to do it.
I think this also plays into the wet dreams of rightist freaks and liberal loons alike: total informational omniscience. The only way to prevent incessant violations of privacy will be to use distributed random chained proxies with multiple layers of encryption. The government will likely respond by attempting to bully providers out of existance until the courts rule that despite having nothing to hide, that nothing still belongs to the people and not the government.
By then, new encryption and spread-out transmission techniques will be in place and we will be in endless escalation of hiding simple emails full of soup recipees under 16384 bit quadruple key encryption systems.
The multi-tiered net will be left to carry a minor amount of non-encrypted old style traffic and most people will migrate to the encrypted side and the providers can either go out of business as new providers step up to accept and serve the public's desires or they can change their outlook and un-throttle the traffic they can't tell the origin or destination or content of, but suspect is such they should be able to charge more for.
ISPs will pop up who exist just to exchange information with others of their kind which is simply middle-men to mix up the traffic and keep anyone but the sender and receiver from knowing whether it is a text message or a video or music. No one will have any idea where anything is going.
If this is what the government and the telcos want, an endlessly escalating war of encryption and deception, us against them, we will give it to them. We the people will not be denied our websurfing, emailing, video watching and music listening, nor allow ourselves to be farked over and financially raped to fill their pockets or satiate their greed for power and ego.
Red Hat is dead on the money with this. Unless Sun goes OSS for Java 100%, then it is still attached to the closed-source world and that causes certain problems.
More to the point, why do so many people have their hats on so tight that they can't think straight when it comes to Sun? Like Netscape and Oracle, people are willing to overlook a huge number of idiocies in certain companies in the name of united hate towards Microsoft as if Microsoft was the only closed source software publisher. In the end, THAT is what this about because even if every byte of Java's code was naked to the world, it isn't going to be any less slow or bloated. Fixing Java and spreading it is NOT what this is about.
Sun has plenty of baggage but positioned Java as if they could have their cake and eat it too: uber-cross-platform but closed source. Everyone should buy into it as if it came from the masses organically instead of top-down from Sun, as if it was open when it wasn't, and adopt it while shouting crap at Microsoft about Visual Basic, and so forth.
So now the OSS community which has so many coders so deeply psychologically invested in Java and the potential future, despite that future to date falling abysmally short of any of the initial propaganda, finds that they can't ignore the chickens who came home to roost and are laying eggs all over the sofa and desk.
Time to get with it and either pressure Sun or let the issue drop and come up with a totally OSS cross-platform language. Oh, I forgot. We have them but we still hold this childish fascination with the legend of Sun as competition for Microsoft when they are demonstrably not and their flagship OS Solaris is being kicked aside for SuSE, Ubuntu, and Fedora Core here, there, and everywhere. If the OSS community wants to continue this idiot face-off with Microsoft, the it needs to stop clinging to the apron-strings of companies that are in the end not one bit different.
Whichever way Sun goes on this, the OSS community can't let that be an influence or controlling factor in anything. Life must go on, Java or not. Not as though I use it for more than KoLMafia anyhow. Give me something that is fast, open, and cross platform that lives and dies by its own credentials and value. NOT something crappy being clung to for psycho-political reasons.
Being a support tech pretty much makes believing people are 99.999% morons an inevitability. When MCSE (Must Call Someone Else) and CCNA (Can't Configure Network Appliances) people are sitting there telling you their $40 Linksys router (WTF?) is fine and your line is the issue, and you're in the $1500 T1 router watching an empty arp table and error counters that aren't incrementing one bit, how much better will the common callers do? None at all. 99.999% of my callers are without a doubt unable to grasp the most basic concepts, and above all else, too cheap to so much as check out Geek Squad or buy one Dummies book before trying to con the ISP into doing LAN support that their contract explicitly makes clear is not the ISP's job.
My best callers are fellow support techs without paper certs and with years of experience at the desktop, on the phone, in the home, and in the business. Field people are my greatest callers because they've been there and are generally smart enough to bother using more than a few brain cells before calling.
But most callers are just plain braindead. Remember kids, stupid is intellectual laziness and hence a choice. Like using Spin to tell you what is cool to listen to.
If you invent a fictional person and begin to believe in their existance, and then conspire to murder that non-existant person, are you guilty of conspiracy to commit murder? No? Then why do people who attempt to hook up for sex with non-existant teens on the net get nailed?
Forget consensual things like pot smoking. Now we create people who never existed and charge you with crimes against them as if they did.
In this kind of world nothing really surprises anymore. In the name of anger, fear, self-righteousness, and above all not taking responsibility for ourselves, we will continue to do this till it all falls apart.
After all, people can't be expected to watch what their kids do on the net, can't be expected to control what game software gets installed on their machines, can't be expected to control what TV their kids watch. That's not the job of parents. No sir. We have a government to do that.
Welcome to the worst of all worlds, where the left and the right unite in control freakery and opportunistic advantage taking of the public's apathy and laziness.
3. In order to succeed (in their words) Vonage needs their competitors to *not* come up with products as good as or better than Vonage's own product. [While this seems intuitive, just think how long it will be - if digital phone takes off (#2 above) - before the cable companies offer equivalent or better offerings with guaranteed QoS for their digital phone service]
Not happening for VoIP, especially because people insist on putting dial-up modems to it for credit card machines, atm machines, and dial-up internet (yeah, dial-up on a voip line coming across a 384K frac T1 WITH an eth if for chrissakes). This is digital --> analog tones --> lossy digitization --> packet loss and latency --> lossy reconstruction to analog --> lossy analog systems --> analog receiver at far end --> conversion back to digital info. The VoIP part is tcp/udp/other over ip over docsis/frame/atm over t1/sdsl/idsl/adsl/cable to the other side of the first mile and then whatever over whatever until the end of the data side.
For existing HFC telephony, you're not likely to get better than 33.6 on a dial-up but it will be stable and the voice clear. I've been a cable telephone customer for years and couldn't be happier unless the cost came down, but it is still less than SNET/SBC/ATT/whoever-they-are-next-week.
Outlook and Outlook Express are perfectly safe if you have a clue what you're doing. So are chainsaws and sawmills. It's when you're a fool that they aren't safe. I never got one virus or spyware on either that wasn't due to me specifically running an executable when I knew better, both times because I was trying to test several AV apps.
If Linux had point and click simplicity, it would work the same. The only secure machine is one that is unplugged, and the only safe user is one that is tied up. With power and loose hands, all manner of unsafe stuff happens. Price we pay for free will I understand.
Since I tried ditching Windows for day to day workstation use over a year ago, I've been using Gnome and Nautilus as defaults on FC. FC3 and now FC5. After reading of just a few things I could do, and the answer to some questions on other things that weren't as cool but totally necessary to getting things done, I found Nautilus was more than useful.
KDE on the other hand was unstable no matter what until recently (at which point xcompmgr also became stable and so did transparency and shadow effects for some bizarro reason), Kicker kept dying on login, and Konqueror kept doing anything other than what I wanted or crashing. Documentation was much worse and the help files looked like they were written by people for whom two sentence memos count as tl/dr.
I go with Nautilus by default and couldn't be happier with it. People who prefer command prompts are welcome to use them. Nautilus isn't a command prompt system and if you're going to compare apples and oranges then at least compare mc, emacs, and so on with ALL gui managers. Just so you know my take, in an age where keyboard skills are lacking more and more, using text to give people a chance to fat finger rm and other things is just stupid. GUIs exist for many reasons, and that is one of them.
I or my family have been a customer of Cox Cable for something like thirty years now. I've seen their complete range of stupid. I've seen their complete range of brilliance. I prefer the brilliance.
Stupid: letting installers user RG-59, refusing to do simple maintenance of the plant, etc.
Smart: upgrading to 15x2Mbps DOCSIS2, PVR, high-def, VoD, more channels than Dish or Direct, etc.
Stupid-to-be: changing to Tivo, going along with ending net neutraility and throttling of traffic at whim, etc.
Smart-to-be: upgrading to 20+Mbps both ways on cable modem, more VoD channels, even more digital channels, etc.
I want smart, not stupid. Given that I pay for the top video and modem packages and one phone line with two dvrs and two standard digital boxes at a rate of almost $200 a month (well worth it compared to dish, I know, I performed many hundreds of installations of each DBS service), I think smart is something they owe me for putting up with thirty years of mixed in stupid.
So if ANYONE at Cox Corp is paying attention: NO F'ING WAY DO I WANT TIVO. STICK TO THE MOTOROLA DVRS USED IN MY SYSTEM. THEY ROCK LIKE NO TOMORROW.
Yup. We all know how wonderfully successful the *nix world has been at making useable desktop operating systems. I can hardly find a Windows machine what with all the Solaris workstations all over the place.
That sums up my take on this. It's like an Object Desktop version of Windows ME. Glitzy to start, but under the hood... (insert blood curdling newbie scream here...)
I really don't see people who use this only because of nebulous dissatisfaction with Windows XP who don't even know what DOS and Windows 3.11 were (or even ME) learning to get under the hood and tinker and learn Linux. CNR sounds nice, but ultimately the bag of hammers Unix lineage cannot be avoided and will hit them in the face like a 2x4. Back to Windows.
I think it is nice that they want to do this. I also think it is a sign of desperation. And an admission of how far Linux has to go before any sort of real desktop adoption. It took Apple to get a *nix OS on the desktop, not insignifigant backing. It's going to take the same sort of chutzpah and power and polish and support to get Linux out there. I don't see these people bringing that, Red Hat and Novell are rabidly corporate, and who's left to address the desktop?
just when i thought american politicians couln't sink any lower... guys, how on earth can you put up with such a bunch of lying scheming bastards controlling your country? using 'terrorism' as an excuse to do how they please makes me absolutely sick to the bone
All countries are run by "lying scheming bastards". This is one of the many short definitions of the words ruler(s), politician(s), and so on.
I agree. Most free software can also be run just fine on Windows, so it would be a good idea for any organisation switching to slowly replace each server with free software before migrating to Linux. Once everything is running free software on top of Windows, switching to Linux should be fairly painless.
Not likely. Most Windows administrators don't know Vi, grub, parted, etc. from Adam. There's a good steep learning curve. The ideas of partitions, databases, etc. are the same, but the implementations totally different as well as the tools to make them happen.
No amount of open source software on a Windows server is going to be used to do serious blood and guts administration compared to what comes preloaded, and all of it is GUI based. A good barometer is if a Windows admin finds CACLS incomprehenisble and can only use the GUI tools, he/she likely won't be able to make sense of chmod either.
Remember, Windows is a very different architecture from *nix. Open source apps ported to it are often very different in very meaningful ways due to that. Skills on one side are not necessarily or even very likely easily applicable to the other.
Thanky you for insulting the millions of people who work honest jobs, have investments for the future to provide for their retirement and families, and contribute to the world every day. Good going.
...as the huggy-touchy-feely Ubuntu people make a ring holding hands around Larry Ellison's ego. Once they tackle that Bud Light hands across America thing this should be the next goal up the difficulty chart. They might need the entire western hemisphere and the population of western Europe, but it might be doable.
Slashdot Mirror
such as transparent hardware disk encryption combined with software encryption at boot. If the RPV goes down, the software encryption only can be unlocked and the OS running when the password is entered. Of course, the hardware key needs to be present for the hardware system to even get to the software login. If the plane goes down and they can signal a destruct, that key wrapped in a little bit of explosives gets blown to technoconfetti, and the encryption controller card as well for good measure. Now how is anyone going to DOUBLE decrypt the harddrive? By the time China or anyone else did, it would be a couple of centuries later and irrellevant. The point of information security is to play keep away long enough for it to no longer be of any value and superceeded by newer more imporant information.
Why? Read the linked page? Says it all. Violates most any Python code of any complexity out there. So if it doesn't convert Python code from the real world, what is it for? Making Python coders learn enough about C++ to remember the limitations and write/rewrite Python code to use it?
What the Python C/C++ interested people REALLY need is a book written by a group of Python AND C/C++ masters which teaches the two simultaneously showing complimentary methods of doing any given thing working from beginner to advanced and I DON'T mean "How to turn your n00b Python code into C/C++ hotness" sort of viewpoint. I mean both taught simultaneously in synch showing how they can interchange and compliment.
Software tricks for converting? Ultimately worse than not having them because it leads to horrible obfuscation because we don't know exactly what is going on when 13,412 lines of Python is turned into C++ because WE DIDN'T WRITE IT AND WE NEVER LEARNED C/C++. "Say Mike, that's great but you're the company code cowboy and you don't do C++ natively and I sure as hell don't read it being management so exactly what happens if this needs to be fixed? We've gone from importing open source code you couldn't read to writing our own open source code you can't read."
Earth has been warm, Earth has been cold. It was doing this long before we arrived. It will keep doing it long after we are gone.
First, Earth's construction contains a large amount of radioactive materials which during Earth's formation became largely concentrated at the Earth's core where they provide a good amount of energy to keep the core warm. So we generate our own heat.
Second, Earth has a moon which orbits and causes tidal forces to stretch and squash the Earth and provide more energy input.
Third, the construction of the Earth is rocky crust on gooey molten lava over a solid core. It moves this way and that, the crust carried along in directions ruled by convection currents, gravitation, and inertia just to name three. In some places crust goes back down and melts and others new crust pops up. Some of it is above the sea...
Fourth, Earth is covered in oceans. These take warmth from the Earth and even more so warmth from the sun, and convey it this way and that, flowing around the crust that sticks up above the waters. Once, Antarctica received warm waters from up north at the equator, but finally broke free from its connection and once encircled by the ocean on all sides, was cut off from the warmth and is now indefinitely cold.
Fifth, the Earth teeters this way and that with varying eccentricity of orbit, inclincation, and even magnetic field. Sometimes one hemisphere is at maximum summer exposure when the planet hits closest approach to the sun. Sometimes it is winter at farthest reach.
Sixth, the construction of Earth allows for all sorts of chemicals to be tossed about by the natural forces of the world, such as methane, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and so on. Rocks absorb some compounds, oceans others, other times things are released. Some are greenhouse gases, some aren't.
Sometimes it gets cold, the oceans lower as water locks up and former sea beds become swamp become grasslands become forests become grasslands become swamp become sea beds again as the warmth comes back.
Sometimes it gets very warm to the point that much life dies off.
It's been doing this since long before us and will do it long after. It is the height of anthrocentrism to assume that Earth inherently is at our mercy. More the other way really. Sooner or later volcanos will explode wiping out whole continents, continents will shift and Japan will go squish between North America and East Asia as the Pacific narrows, other places will open up rifts and flood by ocean. The *still ongoing* ice age will bound out of the interglacial into a glacial period, then an interglacial, and some day when the continents are aligned just right the ice age will end altogether and Earth will be warm.
Earth is going to do whatever Earth is going to do. There's been pasts of violent weather enough to make right now look like a calm spring afternoon and other quiescent times of endless calm spring afternoons.
But that doesn't sell books and movie tickets does it? Doesn't get people elected. Stupid does though. Stupid gets books and movies sold and gets politicians elected. Thank goodness for them it is the second most common element after hydrogen. Pity for us that Earth was cursed with so damn much of it.
This idea of a million eyes making it better is hogwash. How many people are actually aquainted enough with coding of ANY kind enough to help? How many in C? How many in C++? How many in assembly?
Even if Linux had a user bad of one billion it wouldn't matter. I'm pretty damn sure than better than 99.999% of all Linux users NEVER read source code. It doesn't matter that they could, it only matters if they do and if they understand what they are reading. If not, then they are no different than Windows users, waiting for some tech people somewhere else to fix it for them.
Reality trumps this claim of the OSS community that it is inherently better because the source is availible. If no one uses it, no one can read it, it is about as useful as stereo instructions in Sweden printed in pre-dynastic Egyptian to the entire enterprise and in the end self-defeating because when people realize that they have to learn how programming works to make use of the source, they will get resentful because they didn't choose Linux to become C/C++ programmers. That being the case, that they are relying on nebulous others either way, cuts a lot of the sparkle down and makes Windows a much closer choice.
Sometime in 2013...
"Hon? Yeah, me here. Hospital waiting room actually. I think I really screwed up the instructions with that new cell phone. Well, Janie tried to call her friend Jennifer, and the toaster exploded in Sean's face. I tried to call 911 and had to sit through Eyes Wide Shut 2, then listen to Basil Poledouris ring tones for ten minutes and answer three web surveys. The doctors think they can reattach most of Sean's scalp and one of his eyes. Janie is fine though. She grabbed the phone, screamed 'nervouse breakdown voice command' into it and it tranquilized her. Do you know if it can make Shirley Temples? Hello? Oh, I'm sorry... I thought you were my husband... International Space Station you say? Could you connect me with 555-"
My cable company delivers 15Mbps service on existing cable and some cable operators are experimenting with speeds as high as 50Mbps. The cable operators don't have to rebuild whole areas to do this in most cases whereas fiber pushes need massive investment to do. I wonder where that money comes from?
Oh yeah, the near-monopoly highway robbery pricing structures the Bells enjoy and the monies they expect to reap if net neutrality fails.
Silly me, I forgot they're going to rape the public to do it.
...with the old GI Joe cartoon theme immediately popping into my head?
I think this also plays into the wet dreams of rightist freaks and liberal loons alike: total informational omniscience. The only way to prevent incessant violations of privacy will be to use distributed random chained proxies with multiple layers of encryption. The government will likely respond by attempting to bully providers out of existance until the courts rule that despite having nothing to hide, that nothing still belongs to the people and not the government.
By then, new encryption and spread-out transmission techniques will be in place and we will be in endless escalation of hiding simple emails full of soup recipees under 16384 bit quadruple key encryption systems.
The multi-tiered net will be left to carry a minor amount of non-encrypted old style traffic and most people will migrate to the encrypted side and the providers can either go out of business as new providers step up to accept and serve the public's desires or they can change their outlook and un-throttle the traffic they can't tell the origin or destination or content of, but suspect is such they should be able to charge more for.
ISPs will pop up who exist just to exchange information with others of their kind which is simply middle-men to mix up the traffic and keep anyone but the sender and receiver from knowing whether it is a text message or a video or music. No one will have any idea where anything is going.
If this is what the government and the telcos want, an endlessly escalating war of encryption and deception, us against them, we will give it to them. We the people will not be denied our websurfing, emailing, video watching and music listening, nor allow ourselves to be farked over and financially raped to fill their pockets or satiate their greed for power and ego.
Red Hat is dead on the money with this. Unless Sun goes OSS for Java 100%, then it is still attached to the closed-source world and that causes certain problems.
More to the point, why do so many people have their hats on so tight that they can't think straight when it comes to Sun? Like Netscape and Oracle, people are willing to overlook a huge number of idiocies in certain companies in the name of united hate towards Microsoft as if Microsoft was the only closed source software publisher. In the end, THAT is what this about because even if every byte of Java's code was naked to the world, it isn't going to be any less slow or bloated. Fixing Java and spreading it is NOT what this is about.
Sun has plenty of baggage but positioned Java as if they could have their cake and eat it too: uber-cross-platform but closed source. Everyone should buy into it as if it came from the masses organically instead of top-down from Sun, as if it was open when it wasn't, and adopt it while shouting crap at Microsoft about Visual Basic, and so forth.
So now the OSS community which has so many coders so deeply psychologically invested in Java and the potential future, despite that future to date falling abysmally short of any of the initial propaganda, finds that they can't ignore the chickens who came home to roost and are laying eggs all over the sofa and desk.
Time to get with it and either pressure Sun or let the issue drop and come up with a totally OSS cross-platform language. Oh, I forgot. We have them but we still hold this childish fascination with the legend of Sun as competition for Microsoft when they are demonstrably not and their flagship OS Solaris is being kicked aside for SuSE, Ubuntu, and Fedora Core here, there, and everywhere. If the OSS community wants to continue this idiot face-off with Microsoft, the it needs to stop clinging to the apron-strings of companies that are in the end not one bit different.
Whichever way Sun goes on this, the OSS community can't let that be an influence or controlling factor in anything. Life must go on, Java or not. Not as though I use it for more than KoLMafia anyhow. Give me something that is fast, open, and cross platform that lives and dies by its own credentials and value. NOT something crappy being clung to for psycho-political reasons.
Is it just me, or is having stringent hardware requirements for the OPERATING SYSTEM kind of ridiculous?
As opposed to needing an actual Macintosh to run OSX on?
Being a support tech pretty much makes believing people are 99.999% morons an inevitability. When MCSE (Must Call Someone Else) and CCNA (Can't Configure Network Appliances) people are sitting there telling you their $40 Linksys router (WTF?) is fine and your line is the issue, and you're in the $1500 T1 router watching an empty arp table and error counters that aren't incrementing one bit, how much better will the common callers do? None at all. 99.999% of my callers are without a doubt unable to grasp the most basic concepts, and above all else, too cheap to so much as check out Geek Squad or buy one Dummies book before trying to con the ISP into doing LAN support that their contract explicitly makes clear is not the ISP's job.
My best callers are fellow support techs without paper certs and with years of experience at the desktop, on the phone, in the home, and in the business. Field people are my greatest callers because they've been there and are generally smart enough to bother using more than a few brain cells before calling.
But most callers are just plain braindead. Remember kids, stupid is intellectual laziness and hence a choice. Like using Spin to tell you what is cool to listen to.
'...and prevents the 'promotion of a dispirited or negative view of life'.
Everyone knows this is the job of the government.
If you invent a fictional person and begin to believe in their existance, and then conspire to murder that non-existant person, are you guilty of conspiracy to commit murder? No? Then why do people who attempt to hook up for sex with non-existant teens on the net get nailed?
Forget consensual things like pot smoking. Now we create people who never existed and charge you with crimes against them as if they did.
In this kind of world nothing really surprises anymore. In the name of anger, fear, self-righteousness, and above all not taking responsibility for ourselves, we will continue to do this till it all falls apart.
After all, people can't be expected to watch what their kids do on the net, can't be expected to control what game software gets installed on their machines, can't be expected to control what TV their kids watch. That's not the job of parents. No sir. We have a government to do that.
Welcome to the worst of all worlds, where the left and the right unite in control freakery and opportunistic advantage taking of the public's apathy and laziness.
3. In order to succeed (in their words) Vonage needs their competitors to *not* come up with products as good as or better than Vonage's own product. [While this seems intuitive, just think how long it will be - if digital phone takes off (#2 above) - before the cable companies offer equivalent or better offerings with guaranteed QoS for their digital phone service]
Not happening for VoIP, especially because people insist on putting dial-up modems to it for credit card machines, atm machines, and dial-up internet (yeah, dial-up on a voip line coming across a 384K frac T1 WITH an eth if for chrissakes). This is digital --> analog tones --> lossy digitization --> packet loss and latency --> lossy reconstruction to analog --> lossy analog systems --> analog receiver at far end --> conversion back to digital info. The VoIP part is tcp/udp/other over ip over docsis/frame/atm over t1/sdsl/idsl/adsl/cable to the other side of the first mile and then whatever over whatever until the end of the data side.
For existing HFC telephony, you're not likely to get better than 33.6 on a dial-up but it will be stable and the voice clear. I've been a cable telephone customer for years and couldn't be happier unless the cost came down, but it is still less than SNET/SBC/ATT/whoever-they-are-next-week.
Outlook and Outlook Express are perfectly safe if you have a clue what you're doing. So are chainsaws and sawmills. It's when you're a fool that they aren't safe. I never got one virus or spyware on either that wasn't due to me specifically running an executable when I knew better, both times because I was trying to test several AV apps.
If Linux had point and click simplicity, it would work the same. The only secure machine is one that is unplugged, and the only safe user is one that is tied up. With power and loose hands, all manner of unsafe stuff happens. Price we pay for free will I understand.
Since I tried ditching Windows for day to day workstation use over a year ago, I've been using Gnome and Nautilus as defaults on FC. FC3 and now FC5. After reading of just a few things I could do, and the answer to some questions on other things that weren't as cool but totally necessary to getting things done, I found Nautilus was more than useful.
KDE on the other hand was unstable no matter what until recently (at which point xcompmgr also became stable and so did transparency and shadow effects for some bizarro reason), Kicker kept dying on login, and Konqueror kept doing anything other than what I wanted or crashing. Documentation was much worse and the help files looked like they were written by people for whom two sentence memos count as tl/dr.
I go with Nautilus by default and couldn't be happier with it. People who prefer command prompts are welcome to use them. Nautilus isn't a command prompt system and if you're going to compare apples and oranges then at least compare mc, emacs, and so on with ALL gui managers. Just so you know my take, in an age where keyboard skills are lacking more and more, using text to give people a chance to fat finger rm and other things is just stupid. GUIs exist for many reasons, and that is one of them.
I or my family have been a customer of Cox Cable for something like thirty years now. I've seen their complete range of stupid. I've seen their complete range of brilliance. I prefer the brilliance.
Stupid: letting installers user RG-59, refusing to do simple maintenance of the plant, etc.
Smart: upgrading to 15x2Mbps DOCSIS2, PVR, high-def, VoD, more channels than Dish or Direct, etc.
Stupid-to-be: changing to Tivo, going along with ending net neutraility and throttling of traffic at whim, etc.
Smart-to-be: upgrading to 20+Mbps both ways on cable modem, more VoD channels, even more digital channels, etc.
I want smart, not stupid. Given that I pay for the top video and modem packages and one phone line with two dvrs and two standard digital boxes at a rate of almost $200 a month (well worth it compared to dish, I know, I performed many hundreds of installations of each DBS service), I think smart is something they owe me for putting up with thirty years of mixed in stupid.
So if ANYONE at Cox Corp is paying attention: NO F'ING WAY DO I WANT TIVO. STICK TO THE MOTOROLA DVRS USED IN MY SYSTEM. THEY ROCK LIKE NO TOMORROW.
KDE is broken in the latest Fedora release, which doesn't really surprise me given the fact that Red Hat has always had abyssmal support for KDE.
Odd. In the last couple updates, xcompmgr started working perfectly with KDE on FC5. I take that as a very high water mark of... "non-brokenness".
It wasn't as though they had Slashdot during the flood season.
Yup. We all know how wonderfully successful the *nix world has been at making useable desktop operating systems. I can hardly find a Windows machine what with all the Solaris workstations all over the place.
(insert rolling eyes emoticon here)
That sums up my take on this. It's like an Object Desktop version of Windows ME. Glitzy to start, but under the hood... (insert blood curdling newbie scream here...)
I really don't see people who use this only because of nebulous dissatisfaction with Windows XP who don't even know what DOS and Windows 3.11 were (or even ME) learning to get under the hood and tinker and learn Linux. CNR sounds nice, but ultimately the bag of hammers Unix lineage cannot be avoided and will hit them in the face like a 2x4. Back to Windows.
I think it is nice that they want to do this. I also think it is a sign of desperation. And an admission of how far Linux has to go before any sort of real desktop adoption. It took Apple to get a *nix OS on the desktop, not insignifigant backing. It's going to take the same sort of chutzpah and power and polish and support to get Linux out there. I don't see these people bringing that, Red Hat and Novell are rabidly corporate, and who's left to address the desktop?
just when i thought american politicians couln't sink any lower... guys, how on earth can you put up with such a bunch of lying scheming bastards controlling your country? using 'terrorism' as an excuse to do how they please makes me absolutely sick to the bone
All countries are run by "lying scheming bastards". This is one of the many short definitions of the words ruler(s), politician(s), and so on.
Weren't you paying attention in school?
I agree. Most free software can also be run just fine on Windows, so it would be a good idea for any organisation switching to slowly replace each server with free software before migrating to Linux. Once everything is running free software on top of Windows, switching to Linux should be fairly painless.
Not likely. Most Windows administrators don't know Vi, grub, parted, etc. from Adam. There's a good steep learning curve. The ideas of partitions, databases, etc. are the same, but the implementations totally different as well as the tools to make them happen.
No amount of open source software on a Windows server is going to be used to do serious blood and guts administration compared to what comes preloaded, and all of it is GUI based. A good barometer is if a Windows admin finds CACLS incomprehenisble and can only use the GUI tools, he/she likely won't be able to make sense of chmod either.
Remember, Windows is a very different architecture from *nix. Open source apps ported to it are often very different in very meaningful ways due to that. Skills on one side are not necessarily or even very likely easily applicable to the other.
Thanky you for insulting the millions of people who work honest jobs, have investments for the future to provide for their retirement and families, and contribute to the world every day. Good going.
...as the huggy-touchy-feely Ubuntu people make a ring holding hands around Larry Ellison's ego. Once they tackle that Bud Light hands across America thing this should be the next goal up the difficulty chart. They might need the entire western hemisphere and the population of western Europe, but it might be doable.