I recently went shopping for a new notebook to use for the "standard" office laptop for about 20 people. HP/Compaq seemed to have the best features for the price. I've also tried to avoid Sony since having several run-ins with "difficult" Vaio computers.
Let's ignore the illegality issue for a moment. Let's say you could download a magic file and have OSX on your PC tomorrow. Would you do it?
When I can, I run Linux (in the form of CentOS) on my desktop. However, there are a number of occasions when I need to use a piece of software that won't run under Linux (or wine). Those same programs also do not run on OSX. So am I going to punt my existing "necessary evil" Windows machines so I can get some eye candy for my desktop and STILL have to maintain a Windows machine for compatability? Personally, I don't think I would, but maybe there are some folks out there that would do it "because they can."
Since the collusion was to keep prices artificially low to "squeeze out" Rambus (if that's what it turns out to be), then this is one of those cases where the consumer benefitted from oligopolist collusion.
Rambus deserves to die. They are the SCO of the RAM business.
Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but it used to be expected that if you paid for a software product that the vendor would maintain it and fix bugs for a reasonable amount of time (usually several years) as part of the original purchase price.
That morphed into a "forced march" of periodic new version releases for features that many users didn't want or need and requiring additional fees.
And NOW, they want to morph again into "you don't actually own anything, but we'll allow you to use the software you need to create and later use/access your business data for an annual fee."
This is great news for OpenOffice and other open source applications that are poised to serve customers that balk at this new "pricing model."
OK, so this machine is going to simulate nuclear explosions. Based on other posts, it seems it will be able to do the same work as its predecessor in 1% of the time. Rather than run 100X the number of nuclear simulations in a given timeframe, maybe (just maybe?) the government could use our taxpayer funded supercomputer to do medical research? It seems there is now plenty of horsepower to go around unless they've been stockpiling unused simulation data for decades.
Cheers,
The Internet was developed in the US and for many years was supported by the largesse of the US Defense Department and Universities. Now that other governments think that the net is "useful" they think the US should share.
I have no love for Verisign or any of the other monopolists, but ICANN has shown that international stewardship of the net is rather poor as well. Given a choice between those who would run the net for profit (which tends to encourage efficiency) and the net run buy an international do-nothing agency, I'd prefer to retain the status quo.
India and Brasil come to mind. There isn't a whole lot the drug company can do about it. That is the soft underbelly of patent law. If a foreign government chooses to allow a domestic company to ignore the patent for distribution within that country, there isn't a whole lot the patent holder can do about it.
Whenever I get my daily phish attempt for JP Morgan Chase, I usually report it since I'm a customer. I generally check to see if the phony link is still alive (it almost always is) and then send a short note to their security and customer service contacts. I have done this nearly every day for the past couple of months and with the exception of an automated reply from their customer service department, I've never ever gotten a response from a real human to investigate the issue further. In a number of cases, the naughty phisher site was up for a week or more after the initial spam hit my inbox and I notified Chase.
So there doesn't seem to be any real (outwardly visible) priority given to these rather brazen attempts to dupe customers. I also feel that the financial institutions should be 100% liable for fraudulent activity. That would certainly ratchet up their lackluster attitude towards prevention.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For some of our "mission critical" servers, we run RHEL for the paid support. On all other machines, we run CentOS, which is a free "clone" of RHEL.
I'm mostly just the digital plumber in my firm, but about a year and a half ago we were in a situation where it was time to migrate our production servers off of SQL Server 7 to "something else." The "something else" needed to be Linux friendly since we were phasing out M$ in our production environment in general. So we hired 2 former Oracle employees and expected them to tell us that Oracle was the answer. After about a month of nosing through our existing code, we were given a menu of options with their preference being postgresql. Mysql didn't make the cut because it lacked "important features" and wasn't "sql compliant", lacked "triggers", and something about "locking" which escapes me at the moment. I don't know a database from a hole in the ground, but that was our experience. We've been using Postgresql with RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 without incident. Very good for us...not so good for Mr. Ellison and Mr. Gates.
Cheers,
Indeed. Hate to piss karma points away, but one can't help but wonder how much this author paid to have this "story"/advertisement posted on Slashdot. C'mon....
because your labour is going to be your most valuable contribution. It's easy to give money and materiel, but they need "boots on the ground" to physically help with clearing out the damage and to rebuild. I wish you luck and God speed on a noble effort.
Regards,
Unless Microsoft wants to get in on the portable music business, Apple isn't really a credible threat. They've got a vanishingly small portion of both desktop and server markets and that doesn't show any signs of changing soon. It remains to be seen if Apple will use the opportunity afforded to them by joining the ix86 party to change that, but given their past pricing/positioning, that doesn't seem likely.
Google? Yep, I'd be keeping a pretty close eye on them if I was Gates.
Cheers,
We have the technology today to blanket the sunny side of the moon with solar panels and beam "free" energy back to Earth. The problem is that nobody wants to foot the several hundred billion required to make it happen. But just think how different all our lives would be if energy was practically free....
It's all those gas guzzling Martian SUVs melting the ice caps. We need to convince them all to switch to Insight and Prius cars and all will be hunky dory. If anyone's going to melt that us, it had better be US, dammit!
Slashdot Mirror
I recently went shopping for a new notebook to use for the "standard" office laptop for about 20 people. HP/Compaq seemed to have the best features for the price. I've also tried to avoid Sony since having several run-ins with "difficult" Vaio computers.
Let's ignore the illegality issue for a moment. Let's say you could download a magic file and have OSX on your PC tomorrow. Would you do it? When I can, I run Linux (in the form of CentOS) on my desktop. However, there are a number of occasions when I need to use a piece of software that won't run under Linux (or wine). Those same programs also do not run on OSX. So am I going to punt my existing "necessary evil" Windows machines so I can get some eye candy for my desktop and STILL have to maintain a Windows machine for compatability? Personally, I don't think I would, but maybe there are some folks out there that would do it "because they can."
It's all Stallman's fault.
Since the collusion was to keep prices artificially low to "squeeze out" Rambus (if that's what it turns out to be), then this is one of those cases where the consumer benefitted from oligopolist collusion. Rambus deserves to die. They are the SCO of the RAM business.
Why should they "let" Amazon use their pipes or any other Internet business for that matter?
:-)
The Internet should only exist to line the pockets of ISPs, dammit! 1/2
If a site isn't phone-broswer friendly, people will not return. No need to inject a layer of "regulation" (whatever that means) into the mix.
How to convince my mother-in-law to stop swimming. 8-)
Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but it used to be expected that if you paid for a software product that the vendor would maintain it and fix bugs for a reasonable amount of time (usually several years) as part of the original purchase price.
That morphed into a "forced march" of periodic new version releases for features that many users didn't want or need and requiring additional fees.
And NOW, they want to morph again into "you don't actually own anything, but we'll allow you to use the software you need to create and later use/access your business data for an annual fee."
This is great news for OpenOffice and other open source applications that are poised to serve customers that balk at this new "pricing model."
OK, so this machine is going to simulate nuclear explosions. Based on other posts, it seems it will be able to do the same work as its predecessor in 1% of the time. Rather than run 100X the number of nuclear simulations in a given timeframe, maybe (just maybe?) the government could use our taxpayer funded supercomputer to do medical research? It seems there is now plenty of horsepower to go around unless they've been stockpiling unused simulation data for decades. Cheers,
The Internet was developed in the US and for many years was supported by the largesse of the US Defense Department and Universities. Now that other governments think that the net is "useful" they think the US should share. I have no love for Verisign or any of the other monopolists, but ICANN has shown that international stewardship of the net is rather poor as well. Given a choice between those who would run the net for profit (which tends to encourage efficiency) and the net run buy an international do-nothing agency, I'd prefer to retain the status quo.
God forbid we should run the Internet in a way that displeases such an open and information-friendly group of countries.
India and Brasil come to mind. There isn't a whole lot the drug company can do about it. That is the soft underbelly of patent law. If a foreign government chooses to allow a domestic company to ignore the patent for distribution within that country, there isn't a whole lot the patent holder can do about it.
I bet your average college student when "exposed" to cannaboids will be ten times more likely to remember where the Fritos are.
Here's the archived video, but it seems to be slashdotted...probably not a good thing if you're in the video broadcasting business...
g 2005.mov&proto=rtsp
http://play.rbn.com/?url=ignobel/ignobel/demand/i
Whenever I get my daily phish attempt for JP Morgan Chase, I usually report it since I'm a customer. I generally check to see if the phony link is still alive (it almost always is) and then send a short note to their security and customer service contacts. I have done this nearly every day for the past couple of months and with the exception of an automated reply from their customer service department, I've never ever gotten a response from a real human to investigate the issue further. In a number of cases, the naughty phisher site was up for a week or more after the initial spam hit my inbox and I notified Chase.
So there doesn't seem to be any real (outwardly visible) priority given to these rather brazen attempts to dupe customers. I also feel that the financial institutions should be 100% liable for fraudulent activity. That would certainly ratchet up their lackluster attitude towards prevention.
No idea. Our (former Oracle) DBA guys deal with that stuff. I just put the network together, secure the machines, and deal with ongoing patching.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For some of our "mission critical" servers, we run RHEL for the paid support. On all other machines, we run CentOS, which is a free "clone" of RHEL.
Cheers,
I'm mostly just the digital plumber in my firm, but about a year and a half ago we were in a situation where it was time to migrate our production servers off of SQL Server 7 to "something else." The "something else" needed to be Linux friendly since we were phasing out M$ in our production environment in general. So we hired 2 former Oracle employees and expected them to tell us that Oracle was the answer. After about a month of nosing through our existing code, we were given a menu of options with their preference being postgresql. Mysql didn't make the cut because it lacked "important features" and wasn't "sql compliant", lacked "triggers", and something about "locking" which escapes me at the moment. I don't know a database from a hole in the ground, but that was our experience. We've been using Postgresql with RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 without incident. Very good for us...not so good for Mr. Ellison and Mr. Gates. Cheers,
"You searched for 18 - 99 year old females.
No matching profiles."
8-)
Indeed. Hate to piss karma points away, but one can't help but wonder how much this author paid to have this "story"/advertisement posted on Slashdot. C'mon....
because your labour is going to be your most valuable contribution. It's easy to give money and materiel, but they need "boots on the ground" to physically help with clearing out the damage and to rebuild. I wish you luck and God speed on a noble effort. Regards,
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5179038412 705987877
Unless Microsoft wants to get in on the portable music business, Apple isn't really a credible threat. They've got a vanishingly small portion of both desktop and server markets and that doesn't show any signs of changing soon. It remains to be seen if Apple will use the opportunity afforded to them by joining the ix86 party to change that, but given their past pricing/positioning, that doesn't seem likely. Google? Yep, I'd be keeping a pretty close eye on them if I was Gates. Cheers,
We have the technology today to blanket the sunny side of the moon with solar panels and beam "free" energy back to Earth. The problem is that nobody wants to foot the several hundred billion required to make it happen. But just think how different all our lives would be if energy was practically free....
It's all those gas guzzling Martian SUVs melting the ice caps. We need to convince them all to switch to Insight and Prius cars and all will be hunky dory. If anyone's going to melt that us, it had better be US, dammit!