No sensible Finance department will like a move to this kind of model.
If I buy a copy of Office, it is an Asset I have acquired. (I know, this is slashdot, so some of you will say its a liability, but I'm talking accountancy speak now) So it goes on that side of the books.
However, if I rent a copy of Office, then that's an expense I am committing to with no gain in the value of the company. It goes on the other side of the books.
Now, suppose I need to buy 5000 copies of office. That is one hell of a lot of money to move from Asset to Expense. The suits will say "woah!"
And what benefits does it offer me? Companies rent stuff because:
They can't afford to buy it outright (e.g. office space)
They aren't really renting, just outsourcing the whole operation (e.g. company cars)
Neither of these applys to office software, does it?
Perhaps this would be useful for strat-ups, or small special projects, or where you wish to bill everything associated with a project to the customer...
It's called Occams razor. When faced with a number of different explanations for a phenomenon, and you cannot determine which is corect, you take the one that requires the fewest extra assumtpions.
Certainly in, e.g. Counterstrike, cheating is considerably widespread. A recent comment on one of the communities bulletins pointed out that this became the case when the number of players blossomed a while back...Now each new version of CS that is released has fresh anti-cheating modifications.
It's a pain. Not least becasue:
If you play very well then you are instantly labeled a cheat by some.
Some anti-cheating measures detract from gameplay.
For excample, one cheat in CS was "voodoo" dolls. A user replaces the player models with custom ones that have huge spikes sticking out of them. So, while you are hiding behind a wall, the spikes show through the wall and the cheater cans ee where you are. Now, one apporach to blocking this is to prevent users changing the models; but doning that removes the possibility of changing models to customize your game, by for example replacing the hostages by nude women. Allegedly.
In conclusion, then, I'd like to say that cheaters suck.
All it is is a box firewall without a PSU or a case, really. How much cheaper is that going to make it? And if you really want cheap, I imagine that with a little work a 486, a copy of Linux or BSD, and a couple of cheap ethernet cards is just as well. OK, that involves work, but if the end user is leery about that won't they be leery about poping the case? Non-techie end users like appliances.
If I were working at home I think I'd prefer a stand-alone box. What if you have multiple machines? If you take the machine with the firewall down then bang goes everything else.
Disclaimer: It occurs to me that technically my company now makes boxed firewalls, so you might think my arguments biased. On the other hand, if they really were biased, I'd have described how building a BSD+Ethernet+oldPC solution can cause testicular cancer. So thats all right then.
A general election is called when the Monarch dissolves Parliament.
She essentially does this because (and when) the Prime Minister tells her to. Theroetically she could do this at any time against his will; effecitvely "firing" him; this is a safeguard against a corrupt Prime Minister clinging to power. We are unsure of how it would work if we ever had to do it.
The ruling party then can choose when to have an election at any time up to five years after gaining power. And choose they do, planning the vote to happen at the best possible time for them.
This does make us a little suceptible to being bribed before elections.;-)
The idea is that all our power is supposed to be formally invested in the Crown, and officially in Parlaiment, so Parliament decides when to hold an election.
At the moment though Tony Blair seems to be moving more power to the Government and away from Parliament. Not good.
We have 2 majors who exchang epower occasionally, a third party that is unlikely to gain power but could in principle form a coalition with one of the 2 main parties, and various regional parties that score highly in their locations.
Re:Heh.. my old Timex-Sinclar 1000
on
Keyless Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
Pah, I got one of those kits where you disassembled it and put it into a real keyboard.
Nice machine the ZX81 (as we called it in the UK) - got me into this crazy mixed up world of IT Thanks Dad!
The enxt model up (color! moving keys! sound! 64K RAM as standard!) was the ZX Spectrum - what was that called in the U.S? Anyhow, that is the best example of Moores Law you could ask for; because I can run a spectrum in (perfect) emulation on my PDA.
Lately I've been getting into Linux a lot more than previously; and one aspect of it that I don't seem to see much advocacy discussion about is the fact that it is so modular compared to other OS's, so the functionality upgrade path is more flexible.
For example, I am not likely to get any functionality upgrades to Windows Explorer on my Win2K box until Whistler or whatever. But yesterday I upgraded my Linux box with the latest Gnome & Nautilus. Spot the difference.
This applies to the Kernel too of course. Say this was MS Winux;-) and was released as a Whole OS, then a few service packs for the bug fixes, then another whole OS, . Then we'd have been either:
waiting for the 2.4 Kernel before any of the 7.0's came out - so no-one would have the latest Gnome, XFree86 v4, etc.
or getting the kernel work rushed to make a market-driven release date.
This modular system I think is a great strength of Linux.
And of course, another point is that people are actually running real systems with 2.4 development kernels. Again - impossible in a closed source monolithic OS.
Interesting. My gf has an altavista a/c which she uses to send e-mail to precisely 2 people. So only 3 people in the world know the address, never been posted anywhere, nothing. But it gets spammed all to hell.
Come to think of it my own spam has been a lot more intense lately - perhaps my own altavista a/c is having the same trouble.
It's all very worrying.
On the "material" pictures you can see a big grille on the bottom - any ideas what that might be?
Surely it can't be a fan port? I mean, I know it has the handle to rake the keyboard but not everyone's going to use that are they?
Isn't this the reason why computers are nifty? That they are [b]such[/b] general purpose devices that you can take a games machine and use it as a sewing machine controller.
As you get cheaper and cheaper computing devices they'll become more and more ubiquitous.
We're gonna see such wonderful things....
Yeah, but I've had more people interested in my reading a book on a Palm than reading a paper book.
"Is that a game-boy?"
"No, it's a book."
"Wow."
Hmmm.... well, I am a geek, so social interaction is not a forte.
BTW, I recommend all slashdot readers to buy business at the speed of thought, cross out all of billg's words, write in something open-source (DeCSS, anyone?), and then demand your money back.
Release Candidate should mean "well, I think it's ready to go, but just to make sure"
It should have had feature freeze and most of the bad bugs fixed.
Can somone more knowledgable than I (can't be hard) post a summary of "why you should upgrade?"
Better still, as I'm currently a Gnome user, why should/shouldn't I switch? (Not an RFF - request for flames - but a genuine query!)
Well, it varies from license to license, but usually a license is transferable.
If it's OEM stuff you might as well transfer it as you can only run it on the machine it was bought with.
But if you're giving some-one hardware, shouldn't you, as a slashdot reader, install Linux on it as a matter of course?;-)
Slightly off/topic, I just started to browse at 2, and discovered only 1 message. "Can't be right" I thought. "2 must be too high". So I switched to -1 and guess what: 2 isn't too high!
Well, I am on neither side of the debate and have no axe to grind; but I'd just say that I don't see anything *that* bad/unreasonable in RMS's article.
I would summarise it as so:
"
The QT license has changed, this is great. Blah blah, explanation of why Gnome was created.
However, looking at it very closely, that is not *quite* enough to make all of KDE under the GPL, which is the point of all this argument.
The GPL sez that linking GPL'd code into something that is not GPL'd requires specific explicit permission from the original author, which is not always there.
Technically speaking then, before KDE is 101% squeaky clean, we need to be sure that each of those developers has given such permission (or "forgiven" KDE for the violation).
Let me start the ball rolling by giving such permission/foreiveness for everything I ever did.
By the way, once KDE is GPL that does not mean Gnome should whither and die as it is no longer needed. Gnome is viable in it's own right - good for it.
"
Now, sure, it's nick-picking but isn't this whole debate pointless if you aren't going to nit pick? If people were happy to be vague about licenses then the problem wouldn't exist!
But since the licenses are what make free sw free, then I don't think it is unreasonable for people like RMS to err on the side of pedantry.
Atleast the GPL doesn't tell you not to run your OS on a nuclear device like certain other OS's;-)
Not just local drives. It also works on any network drive mappings you have. Ah, the joy of being a sysadmin in the UK and having to run cleans on the mail system in the US while their sysadmins sleep happy sleep...
We had similar issues with SH888s but now we use the I888 (virtually identical but with a flip to protect the keys and pseudo triple band) which seem not to have these problems. It works *superbly* with my Psion 5mx PDA - in fact Ericsson sell a rebadged Psion to go with them. By pseudo triple band I mean the frequencies they support. A lot of European phone now are dual band so they can be used with both European GSM frequencies. A few are Triple band, meaning they aslo work in North America as they do that frequency too. The I888 is pseudo-triple, it odes on European and one American.
On the subject of GSM, you can rent (as opposed to buy) US capable handsets... I wouldn't recommend it though as 9600 is really two slow for generalised use. Or you could change your UK handset to a Triple band like the Ericsson I888 or the Motorola Timeport, so it's not a case of buying an handset, using it for the trip, then throwing it out. Another idea would be to find a huge ISP who would have loads of access numbers everywhere or sharing agreements with others. This is actually a common requirement in business, if you have people moving about a lot then it can be cheaper to provide remote access to your corporate network via VPNs and lots of local ISPs. Usually though these services are not aimed at "home" users. First on-topic post, does that count?;-)
The primary aim seems to be to get a larger user base so that developers will develop for it, as you say any-one serious about developing for Be would be likely to accept paying. Still, an included compiler won't hurt either.
What I'm seeing is the dot-coms launched with the idea "I can undercut the big traditional firms because the net frees me from traditional overheads". They get money for old rope for this - because it's at heart a good idea. But...
...lots of them promptly go bust because they haven't the business sense they need - they understand the web, not business methods. Selling on the net doesn't free you of all the traditional problems of business - and it introduces it's own sets of problems.
Now we see the bricks and mortar companies moving into this space. They've seen it can work from some of the examples, they've learnt as their dot-com competitors implode, and now they are ready.
Xmas 1999 - the biggest on-line toy retailer in the UK was e-toys. Xmas 2000 - it was Toys'R'Us.
At heart - if a dotcom thinks it can use the net to undercut the big boys - well the big boys can do it too. And they can sunbsides ther adventures in the web, and they don't ned adverts in the superbowl beause their brand is already there.
Question for the slashdot readers - one aspect of dotcommery was the way 'Net companies became powerful enough to merge on near-equal terms with trad companies. e.g. Time Warner AOL merger. Will the dot-com collapses affect these companies?
We had an office that used Greek Gods... one box called Mercury had to be urgently renamed after our WINS database crapped itself (thanks Bill!) so we switched to Hermes... one advantage of using Greek Gods.
I used to work at Oxford University, called my servers Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Bud, Lou etc. But the best was the department that studied disease etc. theirs were called Typhoid, Cholera, Plague etc!
Slashdot Mirror
If I buy a copy of Office, it is an Asset I have acquired. (I know, this is slashdot, so some of you will say its a liability, but I'm talking accountancy speak now) So it goes on that side of the books.
However, if I rent a copy of Office, then that's an expense I am committing to with no gain in the value of the company. It goes on the other side of the books.
Now, suppose I need to buy 5000 copies of office. That is one hell of a lot of money to move from Asset to Expense. The suits will say "woah!"
And what benefits does it offer me? Companies rent stuff because:
They can't afford to buy it outright (e.g. office space)
They aren't really renting, just outsourcing the whole operation (e.g. company cars)
Neither of these applys to office software, does it?
Perhaps this would be useful for strat-ups, or small special projects, or where you wish to bill everything associated with a project to the customer...
It's called Occams razor. When faced with a number of different explanations for a phenomenon, and you cannot determine which is corect, you take the one that requires the fewest extra assumtpions.
It's a pain. Not least becasue:
- If you play very well then you are instantly labeled a cheat by some.
- Some anti-cheating measures detract from gameplay.
For excample, one cheat in CS was "voodoo" dolls. A user replaces the player models with custom ones that have huge spikes sticking out of them. So, while you are hiding behind a wall, the spikes show through the wall and the cheater cans ee where you are. Now, one apporach to blocking this is to prevent users changing the models; but doning that removes the possibility of changing models to customize your game, by for example replacing the hostages by nude women. Allegedly.In conclusion, then, I'd like to say that cheaters suck.
All it is is a box firewall without a PSU or a case, really. How much cheaper is that going to make it? And if you really want cheap, I imagine that with a little work a 486, a copy of Linux or BSD, and a couple of cheap ethernet cards is just as well. OK, that involves work, but if the end user is leery about that won't they be leery about poping the case? Non-techie end users like appliances. If I were working at home I think I'd prefer a stand-alone box. What if you have multiple machines? If you take the machine with the firewall down then bang goes everything else. Disclaimer: It occurs to me that technically my company now makes boxed firewalls, so you might think my arguments biased. On the other hand, if they really were biased, I'd have described how building a BSD+Ethernet+oldPC solution can cause testicular cancer. So thats all right then.
A general election is called when the Monarch dissolves Parliament.
She essentially does this because (and when) the Prime Minister tells her to. Theroetically she could do this at any time against his will; effecitvely "firing" him; this is a safeguard against a corrupt Prime Minister clinging to power. We are unsure of how it would work if we ever had to do it.
The ruling party then can choose when to have an election at any time up to five years after gaining power. And choose they do, planning the vote to happen at the best possible time for them. This does make us a little suceptible to being bribed before elections. ;-)
The idea is that all our power is supposed to be formally invested in the Crown, and officially in Parlaiment, so Parliament decides when to hold an election.
At the moment though Tony Blair seems to be moving more power to the Government and away from Parliament. Not good.
We have 2 majors who exchang epower occasionally, a third party that is unlikely to gain power but could in principle form a coalition with one of the 2 main parties, and various regional parties that score highly in their locations.
Nice machine the ZX81 (as we called it in the UK) - got me into this crazy mixed up world of IT Thanks Dad!
The enxt model up (color! moving keys! sound! 64K RAM as standard!) was the ZX Spectrum - what was that called in the U.S? Anyhow, that is the best example of Moores Law you could ask for; because I can run a spectrum in (perfect) emulation on my PDA.
Lately I've been getting into Linux a lot more than previously; and one aspect of it that I don't seem to see much advocacy discussion about is the fact that it is so modular compared to other OS's, so the functionality upgrade path is more flexible. For example, I am not likely to get any functionality upgrades to Windows Explorer on my Win2K box until Whistler or whatever. But yesterday I upgraded my Linux box with the latest Gnome & Nautilus. Spot the difference. This applies to the Kernel too of course. Say this was MS Winux ;-) and was released as a Whole OS, then a few service packs for the bug fixes, then another whole OS, . Then we'd have been either:
waiting for the 2.4 Kernel before any of the 7.0's came out - so no-one would have the latest Gnome, XFree86 v4, etc.
or getting the kernel work rushed to make a market-driven release date.
This modular system I think is a great strength of Linux.
And of course, another point is that people are actually running real systems with 2.4 development kernels. Again - impossible in a closed source monolithic OS.
Interesting. My gf has an altavista a/c which she uses to send e-mail to precisely 2 people. So only 3 people in the world know the address, never been posted anywhere, nothing. But it gets spammed all to hell. Come to think of it my own spam has been a lot more intense lately - perhaps my own altavista a/c is having the same trouble. It's all very worrying.
They're characters from Toy Story.
On the "material" pictures you can see a big grille on the bottom - any ideas what that might be? Surely it can't be a fan port? I mean, I know it has the handle to rake the keyboard but not everyone's going to use that are they?
Isn't this the reason why computers are nifty? That they are [b]such[/b] general purpose devices that you can take a games machine and use it as a sewing machine controller. As you get cheaper and cheaper computing devices they'll become more and more ubiquitous. We're gonna see such wonderful things....
Yeah, but I've had more people interested in my reading a book on a Palm than reading a paper book. "Is that a game-boy?" "No, it's a book." "Wow." Hmmm.... well, I am a geek, so social interaction is not a forte. BTW, I recommend all slashdot readers to buy business at the speed of thought, cross out all of billg's words, write in something open-source (DeCSS, anyone?), and then demand your money back.
Release Candidate should mean "well, I think it's ready to go, but just to make sure" It should have had feature freeze and most of the bad bugs fixed. Can somone more knowledgable than I (can't be hard) post a summary of "why you should upgrade?" Better still, as I'm currently a Gnome user, why should/shouldn't I switch? (Not an RFF - request for flames - but a genuine query!)
Well, it varies from license to license, but usually a license is transferable. If it's OEM stuff you might as well transfer it as you can only run it on the machine it was bought with. But if you're giving some-one hardware, shouldn't you, as a slashdot reader, install Linux on it as a matter of course? ;-)
Slightly off/topic, I just started to browse at 2, and discovered only 1 message. "Can't be right" I thought. "2 must be too high". So I switched to -1 and guess what: 2 isn't too high!
MS currently interpret the OEM license to be attached to the CPU rather than any other bit.
Nope. Proof? My home page is on my intranet and so MS can't possibly redirect me to it as they can't see it.
Well, I am on neither side of the debate and have no axe to grind; but I'd just say that I don't see anything *that* bad/unreasonable in RMS's article. I would summarise it as so: " The QT license has changed, this is great. Blah blah, explanation of why Gnome was created. However, looking at it very closely, that is not *quite* enough to make all of KDE under the GPL, which is the point of all this argument. The GPL sez that linking GPL'd code into something that is not GPL'd requires specific explicit permission from the original author, which is not always there. Technically speaking then, before KDE is 101% squeaky clean, we need to be sure that each of those developers has given such permission (or "forgiven" KDE for the violation). Let me start the ball rolling by giving such permission/foreiveness for everything I ever did. By the way, once KDE is GPL that does not mean Gnome should whither and die as it is no longer needed. Gnome is viable in it's own right - good for it. " Now, sure, it's nick-picking but isn't this whole debate pointless if you aren't going to nit pick? If people were happy to be vague about licenses then the problem wouldn't exist! But since the licenses are what make free sw free, then I don't think it is unreasonable for people like RMS to err on the side of pedantry. Atleast the GPL doesn't tell you not to run your OS on a nuclear device like certain other OS's ;-)
You can talk all you like about sites being slashdotted, but just try connecting to http://www.skyinet.net/ ;-)
Not just local drives. It also works on any network drive mappings you have. Ah, the joy of being a sysadmin in the UK and having to run cleans on the mail system in the US while their sysadmins sleep happy sleep...
We had similar issues with SH888s but now we use the I888 (virtually identical but with a flip to protect the keys and pseudo triple band) which seem not to have these problems. It works *superbly* with my Psion 5mx PDA - in fact Ericsson sell a rebadged Psion to go with them. By pseudo triple band I mean the frequencies they support. A lot of European phone now are dual band so they can be used with both European GSM frequencies. A few are Triple band, meaning they aslo work in North America as they do that frequency too. The I888 is pseudo-triple, it odes on European and one American.
On the subject of GSM, you can rent (as opposed to buy) US capable handsets... I wouldn't recommend it though as 9600 is really two slow for generalised use. Or you could change your UK handset to a Triple band like the Ericsson I888 or the Motorola Timeport, so it's not a case of buying an handset, using it for the trip, then throwing it out. Another idea would be to find a huge ISP who would have loads of access numbers everywhere or sharing agreements with others. This is actually a common requirement in business, if you have people moving about a lot then it can be cheaper to provide remote access to your corporate network via VPNs and lots of local ISPs. Usually though these services are not aimed at "home" users. First on-topic post, does that count? ;-)
The primary aim seems to be to get a larger user base so that developers will develop for it, as you say any-one serious about developing for Be would be likely to accept paying. Still, an included compiler won't hurt either.
Now we see the bricks and mortar companies moving into this space. They've seen it can work from some of the examples, they've learnt as their dot-com competitors implode, and now they are ready.
Xmas 1999 - the biggest on-line toy retailer in the UK was e-toys. Xmas 2000 - it was Toys'R'Us.
At heart - if a dotcom thinks it can use the net to undercut the big boys - well the big boys can do it too. And they can sunbsides ther adventures in the web, and they don't ned adverts in the superbowl beause their brand is already there.
Question for the slashdot readers - one aspect of dotcommery was the way 'Net companies became powerful enough to merge on near-equal terms with trad companies. e.g. Time Warner AOL merger. Will the dot-com collapses affect these companies?
We had an office that used Greek Gods... one box called Mercury had to be urgently renamed after our WINS database crapped itself (thanks Bill!) so we switched to Hermes... one advantage of using Greek Gods.
I used to work at Oxford University, called my servers Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Bud, Lou etc. But the best was the department that studied disease etc. theirs were called Typhoid, Cholera, Plague etc!