I'm the first to shy away from distro wars. I use all kinds of distros for different tasks and I see value in most. That being said...
Ubuntu is possibly the worst choice they could have made for endorsing their servers. Ubuntu is true and true a desktop distribution. It's NOT a very good server distro. Debian would have been a much better choice. IMO it would have been the best non-commercial choice. Obviously if they wanted to go the commercial route suse or red hat would have made good choices too. But Ubuntu is a very poor server distribution. Espically for the power of these new servers.
[Insert 50 comments of people using Ubuntu at home or work with success as a server]
Basically, I can run almost any distro as a server. Should you? Are there other's more well suited to the task? Those are the real questions. Not can you but should you.
Is the SCO issue still really an issue? I remember at one point it was hot button and there was genuine concern, but even the most die-hard of SCO apologists seem to agree SCO is going to lose. I get all these government computing b.s. magazines all the time and they were the ones reporting this garbage the most; and I seriously can't remember the last time I've read a SCO story in one of those. I understand that litigation is still going on, but they passed the point of grasping on straws a year ago.
Scaring Americans into giving up their privacy is really getting old. A large scale terrorism attack is still very much possible today. Mistake after mistake has shown this. It's a dog and pony show. The presentation has changed, but gaping holes still exist. Amercians somehow believe losing their rights is helping terrorism, but in reality its not. Before 9/11 terrorism was almost non-existant in America. After 9/11 it's almost non-existant. Looking at raw numbers, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of things you should be more worried about killing you than a terrorist. Statistically I'd be more worried about being killed by a shark in the US.
And I can't believe people are actually fooled into thinking somehow terrorism is a major threat. If you want to save the most amount of lives with the least amount of effort, fight obesity. It accounts for most of the top killers in America today.
But obesity isn't patriotic. You can't hang a flag outside your house supporting the war on fat.
Get a fucking clue people. Terrorism isn't a threat to your daily lives. If you actually think it is, then you've been emotionally manipulated by people who want your money and/or votes.
I had it for awhile. It was pretty cool. Worth it if you've got a decent pipe to download the bigger games. It's really cheap for how many games you get. If you play games more than a few times a month it's worth it. Sadly, I don't have time and was using it twice a month at most. Otherwise I'd have kept it.
I know this is a joke, but odd names are GREAT for search engines. It makes searching a billion times easier. Ever try searching for something C related? How about ubuntu or maemo? You tell me which gets you more accurate results.
My biggest question is, how efficient is this for forward motion of the car. A 1400+ horsepower engine that propels the car to 160 mph seems rather inefficient. A lot of production cars can reach this speed. A c6 corvette can easily achieve this speed. Hell, many cars with at least 300 horsepower and a reasonable weight can go this fast.
Many times just the presence of a degree at all is good enough to not get your application tossed right away. If you feel you are already qualified for the job, the best thing you can do is write a quality resume and cover letter. In your cover letter, try and connect somehow with the reader. For example, if you think your employer is looking for a 15 year employee, you can possibly make reference to settling down and wanting long term employement. Also, make it very clear you are not only _willing_ to be trained in new technology, but that it excites you and something you love. It's very rare a given employee is an exact fit, and you want to make it clear to the reader that any areas in which you are lacking you will learn.
If you need training as well, admin and tech positions are possibly the worst to train for. This is by far the most competitve market out there. Why? Because it mostly involves training and not that much critical thinking. Before anyone gets offended, I'm not saying admins are dumb. I do admin work all the time. I also do a million other things. I can tell you, being an admin is by far the most mindless part of my day. That, and tech work.
The part of the day that I have to think the most is by far programming. If you feel that's a path you can take, go for an acclerated AS degree at a community college. You'll pretty much be guaranteed work in the US as a programmer. It's not hip or sexy anymore and there's a severe shortage of good programmers in the states. If you want a middle ground, go for some sort of AS degree in networking. It's harder to configure a Cisco router than being a windows admin, but not as difficult as programming.
In college psych there are 3 things I still reference on a daily basis. One of the biggies was, correlation isn't causation. You are right, just because the average person with a cert might make less than those without does not mean certs cause you to make less.
During the last few years there have been many diploma mills out there. What these numbers lead me to believe are those with real skills didn't have any need to prove it with a 6 week class and a cert. However, this isn't always true. We get up to 5% a year bonus for certs at my job. So most people assume to take one or two a year for that reason.
Certs aren't inherently bad. They are just a symbol of aquired knowledge. By that line of reasoning they are no more fundamentally evil than a degree from a state university. However, in practice, these short term training programs became about who paid most for questions closest to the real test.
I could throw in a antecdotal story of someone having cert x and being dumb as a rock, but I don't really need to. We all know one. And if you don't know one, you probably are that person. 2-8 week cert programs were a fad that HR depts ate up like so much confection spread upon my naked body. It couldn't last forever. PHB's are starting to realize Microsoft certs are a dime a dozen, Novell certs are losing steam (they are changing markets too quick and their customers aren't keeping up with their training), and Cisco certs are still somewhat valueable. But what is valueable now (and will probably always be valueable in the long term) is experiance.
Just a side note... Has anyone seen those Vonage ads on slashdot pwning the fad technologies of the week? It's nice to see sed and awk are still in style 8-)
I'm sure a mod is going to -1 parent into oblivion... but it's damn true. I'm so sick and fucking tired of foreign tech support. I have NEVER solved a non-trivial issue with foreign tech support. It's funny, in the enterprise the big thing is always "support support support". We won't buy a product without support. But I've found that most enterprise support is absolute garbage and not worth the time (hardware not so much, but definatly software). I'd rather post to a mailing list and talk to someone who actually understands english (as opposed to just spitting out words).
We had an issue with the Windows firewall hanging rlogin connections. I talked to about 30 dingleberry chasers over the period of 2 weeks and eventually just told the users "when Microsoft hires decent support, you won't have to wait 30 seconds to login." The Windows firewall modifies the tcp/ip stack in a certain manner. For some reason, it would block a certain packet (if I remember correct, it would block the final rst in the login sequence. It would eventually timeout and login). I don't know how many times these ass-monger specials told me to open the port via an exception. I even tried to show them the packet sniff with the firewall on and off so they could see exactly what was happening, but those super intendant chalmer dry humpers didn't understand how to read it. Mind you I made it up to level 3 support.
99% of foreign tech support is utterly useless. I refuse to ever talk to them again. Certain companies will transfer you to an American (with a wait time), others will try and pin you as a racist.
As a side note, for side work I'll only consider support contracts with solely American companies. There are many left and are usually the smaller guys. But I can't deal with another 30 minute conversation explaining why a packet sniff isn't a violation of the TOS.
The rationale that "I can just get a used computer for the same price so this product shouldn't exist" is retarded and I'm so sick of reading it. Selling used uniform equipment would be difficult and wouldn't scale. Please tell me where I can get 10,000 500 mhz celerons, 15 GB hard drive, same brand of 128 MB of RAM, same NIC, etc etc, all used, all the exact same model, all in great condition.
I do sidework where we have to worry about these kinds of things. After we find a good deal on parts we ask ourselves "Can this company supply us enough units if this product takes off?", "Is this company going to be around in 3 years?", "Are they going to be able to supply this exact product for the next 3 years?", and so forth. Long term supply of uniform parts is a HUGE deal to companies. If you interchange your parts haphazardly you will run into issues. Issues that cost money. Any money you saved by doing so will be lost in support costs.
Building a PC for your grandma and building a PC for 10,000 customers are two different ballparks. Every screwup, every tiny cost, every little bit is multiplied 10,000 times. But I suspect many on here don't understand that.
I work in municipal government in Florida. We looked at free wifi and came to the conclusion it's too expensive to cover massive areas and has little gain. We are mostly done with covering city hall and the outlying buildings (the ones within about a 1/4 mile). I live in a pretty wealthy area and it's still just not worth it to cover the whole city. We are looking at expanding to some of the areas with coffee shops near the water (we don't have a downtown), but that will probably be it.
We are hoping to blanket the city with either WiMax or 802.11n and understand those technologies are a few years off. We see no point in covering the city with 802.11b ever. The range is just way to short. We'd need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to blanket it. And for what? Slow internet that drops all the time?
I personally think it's a huge waste of tax dollars. It isn't going to kill anyone to wait 4 years for wimax or 802.11n. These technologies are meant for this sort of thing. 802.11b never was and does a very poor job at it. I would be upset as a citizen in a city that wasted tax dollars on this sort of thing.
We have about 7 of those sitting in a cabinet here. They are pretty nice machines as basic web surfers, but at the same time useless. They have 64mb of ram and 1.5 ghz cpu's. We tried to find out how much ram upgrades for them would be. Most places don't sell it, and the few that still do... well... be prepared to pay more for your ram than a new computer costs.
I remember the whole rambus debacle. Intel pushed it as the next big thing in memory. That is when I built my first AMD based system. I saw no future in rambus and its price was outrageous. It was a HUGE deal when they finally bit the bullet and started producing ddr based machines.
While it's not the end of the world, it certainly is very annoying. A lot of closed source software installable on Linux does this crap. They'll do things like create their own/ApplicationX directory. I mean who are you to screw with my root filesysem!? Assume you've got a lot of libs. "Can not find shared library xxxxx...". I mean is a basic check for a lib in the setup script that hard? It's a lot easier for you to check than for me to track done libs parent packages. A reasonable init script anyone????? Our pure open source servers generally can have a few related things running on it and everything gets along nicely. Trying to do that with closed source applications generally causes a big mess. A lot of times the vendors won't even allow it. They come and install the OS. Generally a "full install" with 30 ports open. Turn off SELinux. Turn off the firewall. chmod -R 777/. The server will probably never see an update. Custom/etc/profile. Sometimes creating their own specialized filesystem. Everything must run as root. Weird things like special sleep times between init scripts. "Yes, we support red hat 9 and United Linux 1.0". "So you're going to have to go into the/sys filesystem and modify a few things before you can start the daemon."
It's almost as if a lot of these companies support linux as an afterthought and completely half ass it. Many times, it's LOAD's more work to install and configure properly. There are some exceptions, but in general, closed source on Linux seems half-assed and more like they are just jumping on the bandwagon.
First, biodiesel (diesel in general) is more efficient than current gasoline engines. It would behoove the world to have diesel engines.
Second doesn't need to be repeated as other posts have explained it.
Third, do you realize how many tens of thousands of pounds (maybe hundreds of thousands???) of food the US government buys from farmers and destroys each year to control food prices? The issue of the starving world isn't food. It's getting them the food. And much blood has been spilled trying to do it (remember Somalia?).
Reliance on bio-diesel would possibly be one of the best possible outcomes in the oil war we could have. Almost anyone can produce vegtables. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years to produce. There are only a few places with fossil fuels. If there were a reliance upon biodiesel, we'd see entire farms just for the purpose of producing biodiesel vegtables. The wealth would be back in the hands of farmers rather than oil tycoons. If for nothing else, no more blood would be spilled over oil.
I agree. I have one and hack on it all day. It's a fun little beast. It's basically the only device of its kind available in the states. It's a next gen Zaurus, except Nokia is sponsoring development of lot's of 3rd party apps. However, I wouldn't buy one for my mom right now. A lot of apps are still being ported and are buggy. I think the first generation of the 770 will probably fail. But once maemo has lot's of apps ported (actually, it already has a shitload, but not so much "business apps" and many aren't hildonized) and Nokia learns some lessons of the 770, it will be a success. The base install is VERY limited and that's what they review it based on. I think the potential for the 770 is in 3rd party support. How much fun is a windows install with no 3rd party apps? I'm working on porting my home automation app to the 770 (perfect example). It's a hell of a lot easier to port to the 770 than blackberry or symbian. There are some hardware issues to address (battery life, gprs, storage), but once Nokia starts including more software and has a second iteration of hardware, this line is going to be a beast. If you want an expensive lame windows box, buy an orgami. If you want another lame calendaring and email device, buy a blackberry. If you want something different all together, buy the 770.
I don't know the exact timeline of a lot of these features (whether IBM or not), but it seems their biggest selling points are for security, and for damage protection. It seems they are trying to produce models for the business market that needs a no/little frills laptop that needs to be secure and reliable. If you look at their "compare series details", there are 8 features listed. 3 are for damage protection and 2 are for security. Even by looking at their product advertisement material, it seems mostly geared toward that market. I think their goal is for a different market than you mention. I doubt we'll see the Alienware Thinkpad in the next 5 years.
I know these are fakes, but the 2nd video would be interesting to see in production. A laptop that shuts itself off when it detects it has gotten wet. Many times you will be able to save the data if you shut it off quick enough (and in some cases you can still save the laptop). Also, I'd like to see keyboards with like a plastic covering (we had them on our keyboards in high school). It basically rolls off spilled liquids. The ones we had in high school were cheap and sucked, but I'm sure quality ones could be integrated into laptop keyboards with a little vent so spilled liquids roll right off the keyboard and away from the laptop.
I bought a thinkpad a few months after the aquisiton. I basically bought it for two reasons. 1) A simple solid laptop that isn't as expensive as a toughbook. 2) Ease of assembly/disassembly, availability of parts, hardware documentation, etc etc. And so far its passed with flying colors.
My last laptop (averatec) was the biggest piece of shit ever. It had a notorious power issue and Averatec refused to fix it (or even admit its a common problem). There was no documentation for taking it apart or its layout, and even when I got it apart and found the part to be replaced, Averatec won't sell you parts. I set out to find the perfect simple laptop...
It feels very solid. You can handle it pretty well and it doesn't feel like it's going to break. Not toughbook strength, but still very good. IBM still hosts giant manuals on their site for taking them apart. This was extremely important to me. It seemed like an admission that it's actually ok to take apart your laptop and service it yourself. It's very extensive. I love how there are only 5 screw sizes on the whole laptop and they are all marked. It's such a simple gesture, yet it helps SO MUCH. With my Averatec, I was left with a pile of screws that got mixed up and was impossible to get back together.
As I said, I've got a Levano and not an IBM version. I would say the quality is still there. If you are a corporate buyer, keep buying them until they give you a reason not to. I've had enough problems with Dell's and HP's to know jumping ship to them on a whim isn't going to make things any better.
I wrote letters to my damn senators too. Neither one of them seemed to have any grasp what the bill was actually about. It was nice they responded, however the garbage in these emails was intolerable. Neither had any understanding of the implications. It's really sad.
That is 100% the reason gates is pissed. They didn't choose his OS as the primary OS. But it makes obsolutely no sense to do so!!!! Linux was an easy choice because of RedHat's early involvement and its freeness. However, if RedHat hadn't been involved, it could just as easily have been a BSD or even FreeDOS. I don't think they are too hung up on the OS as long as it's free and not obscure.
However, you still have the fact that tens of millions (dare I say hundreds of millions?) of people are going to be using Linux. This will take its share up from the low single digits to at least 25% in just a few short years. Long term it could push Bill out of the OS market. If most of the school children around the world are learning and using linux, what do you think they'll use when they grow up? So you could see the generation of college grads in 15 years push up linux use past 50%.
Think about how many people can use a calculator other than Texas Instruments' for advanced calculations. It's because it became the de-facto standard in schools. In fact, many high schools would require a TI series calculator. The 100 laptop is going to become the TI calculator of the next generation, and its OS will determine what millions of people know how to use.
Whether the above becomes a reality depends of a lot of factors. If MS and Intel didn't have their FUD machine rolling, it could easily become a reality. However, MS and Intel have a lot of friends and loud mouths. They basically have to sabotage it before it even gets rolling. If MS has a whole generation of school children learning on another OS, Windows is history.
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I'm the first to shy away from distro wars. I use all kinds of distros for different tasks and I see value in most. That being said...
Ubuntu is possibly the worst choice they could have made for endorsing their servers. Ubuntu is true and true a desktop distribution. It's NOT a very good server distro. Debian would have been a much better choice. IMO it would have been the best non-commercial choice. Obviously if they wanted to go the commercial route suse or red hat would have made good choices too. But Ubuntu is a very poor server distribution. Espically for the power of these new servers.
[Insert 50 comments of people using Ubuntu at home or work with success as a server]
Basically, I can run almost any distro as a server. Should you? Are there other's more well suited to the task? Those are the real questions. Not can you but should you.
Is the SCO issue still really an issue? I remember at one point it was hot button and there was genuine concern, but even the most die-hard of SCO apologists seem to agree SCO is going to lose. I get all these government computing b.s. magazines all the time and they were the ones reporting this garbage the most; and I seriously can't remember the last time I've read a SCO story in one of those. I understand that litigation is still going on, but they passed the point of grasping on straws a year ago.
Scaring Americans into giving up their privacy is really getting old. A large scale terrorism attack is still very much possible today. Mistake after mistake has shown this. It's a dog and pony show. The presentation has changed, but gaping holes still exist. Amercians somehow believe losing their rights is helping terrorism, but in reality its not. Before 9/11 terrorism was almost non-existant in America. After 9/11 it's almost non-existant. Looking at raw numbers, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of things you should be more worried about killing you than a terrorist. Statistically I'd be more worried about being killed by a shark in the US.
And I can't believe people are actually fooled into thinking somehow terrorism is a major threat. If you want to save the most amount of lives with the least amount of effort, fight obesity. It accounts for most of the top killers in America today.
But obesity isn't patriotic. You can't hang a flag outside your house supporting the war on fat.
Get a fucking clue people. Terrorism isn't a threat to your daily lives. If you actually think it is, then you've been emotionally manipulated by people who want your money and/or votes.
I had it for awhile. It was pretty cool. Worth it if you've got a decent pipe to download the bigger games. It's really cheap for how many games you get. If you play games more than a few times a month it's worth it. Sadly, I don't have time and was using it twice a month at most. Otherwise I'd have kept it.
I know this is a joke, but odd names are GREAT for search engines. It makes searching a billion times easier. Ever try searching for something C related? How about ubuntu or maemo? You tell me which gets you more accurate results.
My biggest question is, how efficient is this for forward motion of the car. A 1400+ horsepower engine that propels the car to 160 mph seems rather inefficient. A lot of production cars can reach this speed. A c6 corvette can easily achieve this speed. Hell, many cars with at least 300 horsepower and a reasonable weight can go this fast.
Many times just the presence of a degree at all is good enough to not get your application tossed right away. If you feel you are already qualified for the job, the best thing you can do is write a quality resume and cover letter. In your cover letter, try and connect somehow with the reader. For example, if you think your employer is looking for a 15 year employee, you can possibly make reference to settling down and wanting long term employement. Also, make it very clear you are not only _willing_ to be trained in new technology, but that it excites you and something you love. It's very rare a given employee is an exact fit, and you want to make it clear to the reader that any areas in which you are lacking you will learn.
If you need training as well, admin and tech positions are possibly the worst to train for. This is by far the most competitve market out there. Why? Because it mostly involves training and not that much critical thinking. Before anyone gets offended, I'm not saying admins are dumb. I do admin work all the time. I also do a million other things. I can tell you, being an admin is by far the most mindless part of my day. That, and tech work.
The part of the day that I have to think the most is by far programming. If you feel that's a path you can take, go for an acclerated AS degree at a community college. You'll pretty much be guaranteed work in the US as a programmer. It's not hip or sexy anymore and there's a severe shortage of good programmers in the states. If you want a middle ground, go for some sort of AS degree in networking. It's harder to configure a Cisco router than being a windows admin, but not as difficult as programming.
In college psych there are 3 things I still reference on a daily basis. One of the biggies was, correlation isn't causation. You are right, just because the average person with a cert might make less than those without does not mean certs cause you to make less.
During the last few years there have been many diploma mills out there. What these numbers lead me to believe are those with real skills didn't have any need to prove it with a 6 week class and a cert. However, this isn't always true. We get up to 5% a year bonus for certs at my job. So most people assume to take one or two a year for that reason.
Certs aren't inherently bad. They are just a symbol of aquired knowledge. By that line of reasoning they are no more fundamentally evil than a degree from a state university. However, in practice, these short term training programs became about who paid most for questions closest to the real test.
I could throw in a antecdotal story of someone having cert x and being dumb as a rock, but I don't really need to. We all know one. And if you don't know one, you probably are that person. 2-8 week cert programs were a fad that HR depts ate up like so much confection spread upon my naked body. It couldn't last forever. PHB's are starting to realize Microsoft certs are a dime a dozen, Novell certs are losing steam (they are changing markets too quick and their customers aren't keeping up with their training), and Cisco certs are still somewhat valueable. But what is valueable now (and will probably always be valueable in the long term) is experiance.
Just a side note... Has anyone seen those Vonage ads on slashdot pwning the fad technologies of the week? It's nice to see sed and awk are still in style 8-)
I thought the same thing, but there were some neutral generic jokes people got and felt comfortable laughing at that were heard pretty well.
I'm sure a mod is going to -1 parent into oblivion... but it's damn true. I'm so sick and fucking tired of foreign tech support. I have NEVER solved a non-trivial issue with foreign tech support. It's funny, in the enterprise the big thing is always "support support support". We won't buy a product without support. But I've found that most enterprise support is absolute garbage and not worth the time (hardware not so much, but definatly software). I'd rather post to a mailing list and talk to someone who actually understands english (as opposed to just spitting out words).
We had an issue with the Windows firewall hanging rlogin connections. I talked to about 30 dingleberry chasers over the period of 2 weeks and eventually just told the users "when Microsoft hires decent support, you won't have to wait 30 seconds to login." The Windows firewall modifies the tcp/ip stack in a certain manner. For some reason, it would block a certain packet (if I remember correct, it would block the final rst in the login sequence. It would eventually timeout and login). I don't know how many times these ass-monger specials told me to open the port via an exception. I even tried to show them the packet sniff with the firewall on and off so they could see exactly what was happening, but those super intendant chalmer dry humpers didn't understand how to read it. Mind you I made it up to level 3 support.
99% of foreign tech support is utterly useless. I refuse to ever talk to them again. Certain companies will transfer you to an American (with a wait time), others will try and pin you as a racist.
As a side note, for side work I'll only consider support contracts with solely American companies. There are many left and are usually the smaller guys. But I can't deal with another 30 minute conversation explaining why a packet sniff isn't a violation of the TOS.
The rationale that "I can just get a used computer for the same price so this product shouldn't exist" is retarded and I'm so sick of reading it. Selling used uniform equipment would be difficult and wouldn't scale. Please tell me where I can get 10,000 500 mhz celerons, 15 GB hard drive, same brand of 128 MB of RAM, same NIC, etc etc, all used, all the exact same model, all in great condition.
I do sidework where we have to worry about these kinds of things. After we find a good deal on parts we ask ourselves "Can this company supply us enough units if this product takes off?", "Is this company going to be around in 3 years?", "Are they going to be able to supply this exact product for the next 3 years?", and so forth. Long term supply of uniform parts is a HUGE deal to companies. If you interchange your parts haphazardly you will run into issues. Issues that cost money. Any money you saved by doing so will be lost in support costs.
Building a PC for your grandma and building a PC for 10,000 customers are two different ballparks. Every screwup, every tiny cost, every little bit is multiplied 10,000 times. But I suspect many on here don't understand that.
I work in municipal government in Florida. We looked at free wifi and came to the conclusion it's too expensive to cover massive areas and has little gain. We are mostly done with covering city hall and the outlying buildings (the ones within about a 1/4 mile). I live in a pretty wealthy area and it's still just not worth it to cover the whole city. We are looking at expanding to some of the areas with coffee shops near the water (we don't have a downtown), but that will probably be it.
We are hoping to blanket the city with either WiMax or 802.11n and understand those technologies are a few years off. We see no point in covering the city with 802.11b ever. The range is just way to short. We'd need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to blanket it. And for what? Slow internet that drops all the time?
I personally think it's a huge waste of tax dollars. It isn't going to kill anyone to wait 4 years for wimax or 802.11n. These technologies are meant for this sort of thing. 802.11b never was and does a very poor job at it. I would be upset as a citizen in a city that wasted tax dollars on this sort of thing.
We have about 7 of those sitting in a cabinet here. They are pretty nice machines as basic web surfers, but at the same time useless. They have 64mb of ram and 1.5 ghz cpu's. We tried to find out how much ram upgrades for them would be. Most places don't sell it, and the few that still do... well... be prepared to pay more for your ram than a new computer costs.
I remember the whole rambus debacle. Intel pushed it as the next big thing in memory. That is when I built my first AMD based system. I saw no future in rambus and its price was outrageous. It was a HUGE deal when they finally bit the bullet and started producing ddr based machines.
As usual, a bunch of apologisers...
/ApplicationX directory. I mean who are you to screw with my root filesysem!? Assume you've got a lot of libs. "Can not find shared library xxxxx...". I mean is a basic check for a lib in the setup script that hard? It's a lot easier for you to check than for me to track done libs parent packages. A reasonable init script anyone????? Our pure open source servers generally can have a few related things running on it and everything gets along nicely. Trying to do that with closed source applications generally causes a big mess. A lot of times the vendors won't even allow it. They come and install the OS. Generally a "full install" with 30 ports open. Turn off SELinux. Turn off the firewall. chmod -R 777 /. The server will probably never see an update. Custom /etc/profile. Sometimes creating their own specialized filesystem. Everything must run as root. Weird things like special sleep times between init scripts. "Yes, we support red hat 9 and United Linux 1.0". "So you're going to have to go into the /sys filesystem and modify a few things before you can start the daemon."
While it's not the end of the world, it certainly is very annoying. A lot of closed source software installable on Linux does this crap. They'll do things like create their own
It's almost as if a lot of these companies support linux as an afterthought and completely half ass it. Many times, it's LOAD's more work to install and configure properly. There are some exceptions, but in general, closed source on Linux seems half-assed and more like they are just jumping on the bandwagon.
First, biodiesel (diesel in general) is more efficient than current gasoline engines. It would behoove the world to have diesel engines.
Second doesn't need to be repeated as other posts have explained it.
Third, do you realize how many tens of thousands of pounds (maybe hundreds of thousands???) of food the US government buys from farmers and destroys each year to control food prices? The issue of the starving world isn't food. It's getting them the food. And much blood has been spilled trying to do it (remember Somalia?).
Reliance on bio-diesel would possibly be one of the best possible outcomes in the oil war we could have. Almost anyone can produce vegtables. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years to produce. There are only a few places with fossil fuels. If there were a reliance upon biodiesel, we'd see entire farms just for the purpose of producing biodiesel vegtables. The wealth would be back in the hands of farmers rather than oil tycoons. If for nothing else, no more blood would be spilled over oil.
I agree. I have one and hack on it all day. It's a fun little beast. It's basically the only device of its kind available in the states. It's a next gen Zaurus, except Nokia is sponsoring development of lot's of 3rd party apps. However, I wouldn't buy one for my mom right now. A lot of apps are still being ported and are buggy. I think the first generation of the 770 will probably fail. But once maemo has lot's of apps ported (actually, it already has a shitload, but not so much "business apps" and many aren't hildonized) and Nokia learns some lessons of the 770, it will be a success. The base install is VERY limited and that's what they review it based on. I think the potential for the 770 is in 3rd party support. How much fun is a windows install with no 3rd party apps? I'm working on porting my home automation app to the 770 (perfect example). It's a hell of a lot easier to port to the 770 than blackberry or symbian. There are some hardware issues to address (battery life, gprs, storage), but once Nokia starts including more software and has a second iteration of hardware, this line is going to be a beast. If you want an expensive lame windows box, buy an orgami. If you want another lame calendaring and email device, buy a blackberry. If you want something different all together, buy the 770.
I don't know the exact timeline of a lot of these features (whether IBM or not), but it seems their biggest selling points are for security, and for damage protection. It seems they are trying to produce models for the business market that needs a no/little frills laptop that needs to be secure and reliable. If you look at their "compare series details", there are 8 features listed. 3 are for damage protection and 2 are for security. Even by looking at their product advertisement material, it seems mostly geared toward that market. I think their goal is for a different market than you mention. I doubt we'll see the Alienware Thinkpad in the next 5 years.
I know these are fakes, but the 2nd video would be interesting to see in production. A laptop that shuts itself off when it detects it has gotten wet. Many times you will be able to save the data if you shut it off quick enough (and in some cases you can still save the laptop). Also, I'd like to see keyboards with like a plastic covering (we had them on our keyboards in high school). It basically rolls off spilled liquids. The ones we had in high school were cheap and sucked, but I'm sure quality ones could be integrated into laptop keyboards with a little vent so spilled liquids roll right off the keyboard and away from the laptop.
I bought a thinkpad a few months after the aquisiton. I basically bought it for two reasons. 1) A simple solid laptop that isn't as expensive as a toughbook. 2) Ease of assembly/disassembly, availability of parts, hardware documentation, etc etc. And so far its passed with flying colors.
My last laptop (averatec) was the biggest piece of shit ever. It had a notorious power issue and Averatec refused to fix it (or even admit its a common problem). There was no documentation for taking it apart or its layout, and even when I got it apart and found the part to be replaced, Averatec won't sell you parts. I set out to find the perfect simple laptop...
It feels very solid. You can handle it pretty well and it doesn't feel like it's going to break. Not toughbook strength, but still very good. IBM still hosts giant manuals on their site for taking them apart. This was extremely important to me. It seemed like an admission that it's actually ok to take apart your laptop and service it yourself. It's very extensive. I love how there are only 5 screw sizes on the whole laptop and they are all marked. It's such a simple gesture, yet it helps SO MUCH. With my Averatec, I was left with a pile of screws that got mixed up and was impossible to get back together.
As I said, I've got a Levano and not an IBM version. I would say the quality is still there. If you are a corporate buyer, keep buying them until they give you a reason not to. I've had enough problems with Dell's and HP's to know jumping ship to them on a whim isn't going to make things any better.
Sapphire? Perl? Ruby? Make sense now????
So do they write their drivers in perl, or in ruby?
I knew I should've bought a squirrel
I wrote letters to my damn senators too. Neither one of them seemed to have any grasp what the bill was actually about. It was nice they responded, however the garbage in these emails was intolerable. Neither had any understanding of the implications. It's really sad.
That is 100% the reason gates is pissed. They didn't choose his OS as the primary OS. But it makes obsolutely no sense to do so!!!! Linux was an easy choice because of RedHat's early involvement and its freeness. However, if RedHat hadn't been involved, it could just as easily have been a BSD or even FreeDOS. I don't think they are too hung up on the OS as long as it's free and not obscure.
However, you still have the fact that tens of millions (dare I say hundreds of millions?) of people are going to be using Linux. This will take its share up from the low single digits to at least 25% in just a few short years. Long term it could push Bill out of the OS market. If most of the school children around the world are learning and using linux, what do you think they'll use when they grow up? So you could see the generation of college grads in 15 years push up linux use past 50%.
Think about how many people can use a calculator other than Texas Instruments' for advanced calculations. It's because it became the de-facto standard in schools. In fact, many high schools would require a TI series calculator. The 100 laptop is going to become the TI calculator of the next generation, and its OS will determine what millions of people know how to use.
Whether the above becomes a reality depends of a lot of factors. If MS and Intel didn't have their FUD machine rolling, it could easily become a reality. However, MS and Intel have a lot of friends and loud mouths. They basically have to sabotage it before it even gets rolling. If MS has a whole generation of school children learning on another OS, Windows is history.
It's sad that Cisco isn't on the list...