Except that using Lynx tells the authorities that you are a malicious h4x0r...apparently, using a "non-standard" browser will cause the SWAT team to descend on you in true Terry GilliamBrazil style.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Google Groups and various web-based fora do not allow you to use a killfile to filter undesireable posts. This is the whole reason I love usenet
One word: killfiles. The anarchic structure of usenet makes self-help and self-protection against trolls both possible and downright enjoyable. Don't like what joe@bloggs.net is posting on alt.foo.bar? add him to your killfile, and you'll never have to hear from him again. Thread topic annoy you? Killfile it.
In contrast, on most web fora, you are at the mercy of the moderators. There are never enough moderators, and you have no way of selectively filtering only those topics you want to read about. You are forever wading through the same arguments offered by the same trolls...with no way to avoid them. It's tiresome. Likewise, accessing usenet over the web via googlegroups deprives you of similar killfile protection, making usenet seem even less useful for the casual visitor.
Once you've gotten your newsreader's scorefile set up more or less the way you want it, usenet is a stunningly efficient way to communicate.
The official line at my workplace (an all Windows 2000 shop) is no unauthorized installations, period.
I understand that this greatly simplifies the IT department's user-support tasks, and it certainly helps their security. Too many clueless users adding malware/spyware around here, anyway.
That said, I do run a number of "unauthorized" apps on my desktop:
Firefox, so I can actually be productive while using the 'net for work. Having one window with lots of tabs is easier than being compelled to use IE (the only "authorized" choice)
GAIM, for IM. No ads or spyware on GAIM, no worries there.
PuTTY, so I can ssh to my home computer (handy)
GIMP, for when I have to clean up drawings
. I think I've been fairly responsible with my choice of software. All are probably more secure than their "authorized" counterparts, and all make me more productive. Some--notably GIMP--I installed without asking anyone because it let me get the job done quickly, on time, and with a minimum of fuss.
I draw the line at installing Linux without permission, though. I'd have to defragment, repartition, install, set up shares and whatnot....it's a hassle, and too much to do undetectably. Never mind the fact that this office uses several proprietary apps that I can't run in Linux, anyway.
I don't think anyone is trying to fool himself that after 24 hours of study he can be an expert in UNIX, or anything else for that matter. What these books do offer, however, is a kind of boot camp for autodidacts. The "24 Hours" are more a measurement of the minimum time that one would have to devote to study in order to get even the most elementary concepts.
Once you've gotten your head around the basics, the hope is that you can go on to more complicated and satisfying tasks. But the main thing is to ensure that, after 24 hours of study, you are not going to go and utterly trash stuff.
wait, WiMAX was alive in the first place? Either I'm actually living under a rock, or I haven't seen any significant real deployments of the technology outside of pilot programs. So from where I sit, WiMAX can't be killed, because it's not alive.
How long until these thinkpads are labeled Lenovo? As far as I'm concerned, there is no IBM Thinkpad any more....doesn't make Lenovo any better/worse; I'd just rather call a spade a spade.
TFA is distressingly vague about exactly what was being run on those servers, I'll grant. However, the one example they do cite is instructive:
After the five-month migration, PWC's servers are now equally split between Windows and OpenBSD.
"Microsoft just happens to be one of our clients and Checkpoint is our standard firewall," Uemura said. "Checkpoint on Windows was unmanageable but after a few months of using OpenBSD we were told to put Checkpoint back."
Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service.
"So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said. "We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager. And because of the savings we get more productivity out of old hardware."
What it looks like to me is the IT manager trying to use the best OS for the specific application--in that case, firewall--and treating OpenBSD as just another tool at his disposal. That it's cheap (as in free) can't (and didn't) hurt, either.
So the short answer is: the article doesn't really tell us how the migration really affected the client side. It does seem to reinforce what many already seem to know, which is that free software can perform well-defined tasks on the server.
Ok, so we learn to use windows properly, and deploy an appropriate number of redundant servers to keep everything humming smoothly.
Can we talk about software licensing costs now? How many redundant servers did you want to run, again, and how is the software on each licensed?
The administrator in question was given a job to do, and told--in no uncertain terms--that he would receive no additional funds to do it with. Is it so hard to accept that he looked over his situation, decided that he was more comfortable with BSD, migrated, and saved his firm (at minimum) the licence costs of all that shiny new Microsoftware?
In the words of Comrade Deng Xiaoping: "Black cat, white cat--what does it matter, as long as it catches mice?"
If one's choice of hardware and operating system play such a key role in determining their journalistic bias, then it might usefully be argued that journalists and newsrooms that use Microsoft software running on Intel hardware would find it impossible to view Apple software & hardware in a positive light.
If this is so, then it might also explain the second-banannadom that Apple has suffered over the years. Mod me down if you like, O Macolytes, but part of the fervency of your devotion is that, for many years, you have gotten short shrift in the press, in the form of constant ruminations of Apple's imminent collapse. At best, Apple was damned with faint praise.
Personally, I think the present fuss has more to do with Apple's absolutely killer marketing and branding, which far surpass anything that the competition has yet been able to muster up. Their Stalinist level of control over everything--software, hardware, accessories, look, feel, heft, etc--has given their products a very consistent look across all lines. Even the name "Apple," is technical, nonthreatening, and cuddly.
If I'm having breakfast anywhere with other people, they are usually far more interesting to watch than any canned broadcast I can bring with me. Often, they're as interesting to listen to, as well.
A similar program was used to great success in the Philippines during the communist insurgency of the Hukbalahap between 1945 and 1952. Then-Secretary of Defense Ramon Magsaysay made it known that anyone could send a telegram to his office, free of charge, for almost any reason--to report military misconduct, corruption, rebel activity, etc.
Thousands of telegrams came flooding in from rural stations. In one way, the program served as an extension of his famous random inspections of military units in the field--a move that increased effectiveness and readiness among those units. More importantly, it was a tremendous propaganda tool, giving even the most lowly peasant the chance to appeal to the very highest levels of the government--undercutting the mass base of the insurgents.
This sort of policy, then, would be a great way of keeping a lid on corporate unhappiness, if combined with enlightened & effective management. Well we can dream, right?
Utility Patents are still subject to maintenance fees: 3.5 years after issuance, and again at 7.5, and once more at 11.5.
As regards "the little guy" that everybody seems to be talking about here, the USPTO maintains a separate fee schedule for "small entities," which makes it far more affordable for individual inventors and small firms to pursue a patent or trademark.
The fact is that it isn't really all that cheap to have a patent portfolio. You're constantly having to pay out maintenance.
1. Learn about new ways to plant and compost.
2. Get weather reports.
3. Get commodity prices.
All three functions can be performed much better with cheaper, established technology.
1. and 2. are most easily achieved by radio. Transistor radios are almost laughably cheap now, and it is possible to get shortwave sets to broadcast to very remote areas. Radio has two additional benefits: localization is very easy (simply ensure that the person speaking into the microphone speaks the language you want) and it does not require literacy. If your main priority is getting information out, then it is probably better to do it by speaking to the people who need it most in the language that they can understand (even if it's over the air). Handing them a notebook that they might not be able to use because they can't read the symbols on the screen is stupid.
3. is already happening through the use of mobile phones. GSM phones are cheap to buy and cheap to use, even for those with very limited means. In third-world markets, it is possible to buy a few minutes or even seconds of mobile phone time.
It's heretical to be anti-shiny on/. but we really have to think about how better to use the tools at hand, rather than trying to leapfrog from the Flintstones to the Jetstones with one laptop
What you're describing is something like what happened in my university library.... It was particularly amusing to watch years of accumulated marginalia on those books--people were actually arguing with each other across the years about specific passages.
And if you're really serious, a downgrade back to vellum might be in order, if you're concerned about data integrity and archival storage...
Don't underestimate the data integrity of vellum [parchment made from sheepskins]...I have handled and read 13th century missals which are in much better shape today (after much harder lives!) than books printed only 40 years ago.
No more need for paperback books (you can keep all the latest on your pocket reader)
No more cheap paperbacks, either, as publishers DRM their books to "expire" after a certain amount of time or number of readings.
This will put me in the vanishingly-small number of paper lovers here on/. but for me, nothing--nothing has yet replaced the serendipity of actually browsing through bins of books or records...that's how I found a lot of my favorites. There's also something very personally touching when you find a volume of poetry, say, that had been someone's schoolbook before you were born--and find, written in the margins and fly-papers, the sonnets of some unknown schoolboy Petrarch to his Laura...now that's power to hold.
The standard argument is that a good grounding in Latin improves a student's performance on the verbal section of the SAT...the hard logic of the grammar is supposed to aid one's verbal reasoning in English.
The downer of this kind of approach is that Latin becomes a kind of adjunct to SAT prep in some places--so instead of reading Caesar, kids end up doing derivatives for (English) vocabulary building.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that using Lynx tells the authorities that you are a malicious h4x0r...apparently, using a "non-standard" browser will cause the SWAT team to descend on you in true Terry GilliamBrazil style.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Google Groups and various web-based fora do not allow you to use a killfile to filter undesireable posts. This is the whole reason I love usenet
That would seem to accurately describe a nursing home or a hospice, as well.
Usenet is attracting few new real users, which is a shame. The problem is that most users don't even know usenet is there.
One word: killfiles. The anarchic structure of usenet makes self-help and self-protection against trolls both possible and downright enjoyable. Don't like what joe@bloggs.net is posting on alt.foo.bar? add him to your killfile, and you'll never have to hear from him again. Thread topic annoy you? Killfile it.
In contrast, on most web fora, you are at the mercy of the moderators. There are never enough moderators, and you have no way of selectively filtering only those topics you want to read about. You are forever wading through the same arguments offered by the same trolls...with no way to avoid them. It's tiresome. Likewise, accessing usenet over the web via googlegroups deprives you of similar killfile protection, making usenet seem even less useful for the casual visitor.
Once you've gotten your newsreader's scorefile set up more or less the way you want it, usenet is a stunningly efficient way to communicate.
The official line at my workplace (an all Windows 2000 shop) is no unauthorized installations, period.
I understand that this greatly simplifies the IT department's user-support tasks, and it certainly helps their security. Too many clueless users adding malware/spyware around here, anyway.
That said, I do run a number of "unauthorized" apps on my desktop:
- Firefox, so I can actually be productive while using the 'net for work. Having one window with lots of tabs is easier than being compelled to use IE (the only "authorized" choice)
- GAIM, for IM. No ads or spyware on GAIM, no worries there.
- PuTTY, so I can ssh to my home computer (handy)
- GIMP, for when I have to clean up drawings
. I think I've been fairly responsible with my choice of software. All are probably more secure than their "authorized" counterparts, and all make me more productive. Some--notably GIMP--I installed without asking anyone because it let me get the job done quickly, on time, and with a minimum of fuss.I draw the line at installing Linux without permission, though. I'd have to defragment, repartition, install, set up shares and whatnot....it's a hassle, and too much to do undetectably. Never mind the fact that this office uses several proprietary apps that I can't run in Linux, anyway.
I don't think anyone is trying to fool himself that after 24 hours of study he can be an expert in UNIX, or anything else for that matter. What these books do offer, however, is a kind of boot camp for autodidacts. The "24 Hours" are more a measurement of the minimum time that one would have to devote to study in order to get even the most elementary concepts.
Once you've gotten your head around the basics, the hope is that you can go on to more complicated and satisfying tasks. But the main thing is to ensure that, after 24 hours of study, you are not going to go and utterly trash stuff.
wait, WiMAX was alive in the first place? Either I'm actually living under a rock, or I haven't seen any significant real deployments of the technology outside of pilot programs. So from where I sit, WiMAX can't be killed, because it's not alive.
How long until these thinkpads are labeled Lenovo? As far as I'm concerned, there is no IBM Thinkpad any more....doesn't make Lenovo any better/worse; I'd just rather call a spade a spade.
Life and Death convinced me that I couldn't be a surgeon. Surgery with only the keyboard and EGA graphics is....challenging!
A patent's claims may be rejected as "unspecific" under the first paragraph of 35 USC Sec. 112.
It is not as easy to get a patent as many people here on /. seem to think.
If you use the distro you need to begin with, why bother?
TFA is distressingly vague about exactly what was being run on those servers, I'll grant. However, the one example they do cite is instructive:
What it looks like to me is the IT manager trying to use the best OS for the specific application--in that case, firewall--and treating OpenBSD as just another tool at his disposal. That it's cheap (as in free) can't (and didn't) hurt, either.
So the short answer is: the article doesn't really tell us how the migration really affected the client side. It does seem to reinforce what many already seem to know, which is that free software can perform well-defined tasks on the server.
Ok, so we learn to use windows properly, and deploy an appropriate number of redundant servers to keep everything humming smoothly.
Can we talk about software licensing costs now? How many redundant servers did you want to run, again, and how is the software on each licensed?
The administrator in question was given a job to do, and told--in no uncertain terms--that he would receive no additional funds to do it with. Is it so hard to accept that he looked over his situation, decided that he was more comfortable with BSD, migrated, and saved his firm (at minimum) the licence costs of all that shiny new Microsoftware?
In the words of Comrade Deng Xiaoping: "Black cat, white cat--what does it matter, as long as it catches mice?"
If one's choice of hardware and operating system play such a key role in determining their journalistic bias, then it might usefully be argued that journalists and newsrooms that use Microsoft software running on Intel hardware would find it impossible to view Apple software & hardware in a positive light.
If this is so, then it might also explain the second-banannadom that Apple has suffered over the years. Mod me down if you like, O Macolytes, but part of the fervency of your devotion is that, for many years, you have gotten short shrift in the press, in the form of constant ruminations of Apple's imminent collapse. At best, Apple was damned with faint praise.
Personally, I think the present fuss has more to do with Apple's absolutely killer marketing and branding, which far surpass anything that the competition has yet been able to muster up. Their Stalinist level of control over everything--software, hardware, accessories, look, feel, heft, etc--has given their products a very consistent look across all lines. Even the name "Apple," is technical, nonthreatening, and cuddly.
Yeah, Firefox seems a bit bloated to me, these days, as well.
I've been using epiphany over Firefox as my browser of choice lately on my machine at home (Ubuntu Breezy). It seems lighter to me.
If I'm having breakfast anywhere with other people, they are usually far more interesting to watch than any canned broadcast I can bring with me. Often, they're as interesting to listen to, as well.
they reaffirmed their commitment to constantly split infinitives...
A similar program was used to great success in the Philippines during the communist insurgency of the Hukbalahap between 1945 and 1952. Then-Secretary of Defense Ramon Magsaysay made it known that anyone could send a telegram to his office, free of charge, for almost any reason--to report military misconduct, corruption, rebel activity, etc.
Thousands of telegrams came flooding in from rural stations. In one way, the program served as an extension of his famous random inspections of military units in the field--a move that increased effectiveness and readiness among those units. More importantly, it was a tremendous propaganda tool, giving even the most lowly peasant the chance to appeal to the very highest levels of the government--undercutting the mass base of the insurgents.
This sort of policy, then, would be a great way of keeping a lid on corporate unhappiness, if combined with enlightened & effective management. Well we can dream, right?
Utility Patents are still subject to maintenance fees: 3.5 years after issuance, and again at 7.5, and once more at 11.5.
As regards "the little guy" that everybody seems to be talking about here, the USPTO maintains a separate fee schedule for "small entities," which makes it far more affordable for individual inventors and small firms to pursue a patent or trademark.
The fact is that it isn't really all that cheap to have a patent portfolio. You're constantly having to pay out maintenance.
All three functions can be performed much better with cheaper, established technology.
1. and 2. are most easily achieved by radio. Transistor radios are almost laughably cheap now, and it is possible to get shortwave sets to broadcast to very remote areas. Radio has two additional benefits: localization is very easy (simply ensure that the person speaking into the microphone speaks the language you want) and it does not require literacy. If your main priority is getting information out, then it is probably better to do it by speaking to the people who need it most in the language that they can understand (even if it's over the air). Handing them a notebook that they might not be able to use because they can't read the symbols on the screen is stupid.
3. is already happening through the use of mobile phones. GSM phones are cheap to buy and cheap to use, even for those with very limited means. In third-world markets, it is possible to buy a few minutes or even seconds of mobile phone time.
It's heretical to be anti-shiny on /. but we really have to think about how better to use the tools at hand, rather than trying to leapfrog from the Flintstones to the Jetstones with one laptop
What you're describing is something like what happened in my university library.... It was particularly amusing to watch years of accumulated marginalia on those books--people were actually arguing with each other across the years about specific passages.
And if you're really serious, a downgrade back to vellum might be in order, if you're concerned about data integrity and archival storage...
Don't underestimate the data integrity of vellum [parchment made from sheepskins]...I have handled and read 13th century missals which are in much better shape today (after much harder lives!) than books printed only 40 years ago.
No more cheap paperbacks, either, as publishers DRM their books to "expire" after a certain amount of time or number of readings.
This will put me in the vanishingly-small number of paper lovers here on /. but for me, nothing--nothing has yet replaced the serendipity of actually browsing through bins of books or records...that's how I found a lot of my favorites. There's also something very personally touching when you find a volume of poetry, say, that had been someone's schoolbook before you were born--and find, written in the margins and fly-papers, the sonnets of some unknown schoolboy Petrarch to his Laura...now that's power to hold.
The standard argument is that a good grounding in Latin improves a student's performance on the verbal section of the SAT...the hard logic of the grammar is supposed to aid one's verbal reasoning in English.
The downer of this kind of approach is that Latin becomes a kind of adjunct to SAT prep in some places--so instead of reading Caesar, kids end up doing derivatives for (English) vocabulary building.
The devil is in the details. If the regulation's wording changes slightly, then it may be allowable.