Absolutely false. I use MSFT office, even though I am aware of the alternatives. I use MSFT SQL Server and MSFT Visual Studio, even though there are alternatives. Most of their products have significant competition... and only a few are the lone serious competitors in the market.
They will survive! Maybe not in the same form, but they will survive as long as they make good products (just because you disagree doesn't mean that everybody else does).
um... me. There are still several programs that my system won't run (many digital video editing programs have difficulty running on Win2K), and many devices that refuse to work under Win2k (think anything made by HP, those bastards).
Also, I won't be upgrading from Win2k for stabilty because as you said, stability is still good... but Win9X/Me users will.
Tell all the programmers you know to make their Win32 code Win2k compatible!
The problems is not that they don't know. The problem is that they don't care. Most of the codebase that refuses to work with Win2k is either (1) dependant on unsafe, or buggy features that Microsoft is dropping for good reason or (2) depend on methods that are extremely non-standard and only work under Win98 with a lot of prodding (ATI Rage MAXX comes to mind).
The biggest problem is if a program is tied to a specific driver, the drivers must all be re-written -- thankfully developers are starting to realize that there is a large Win2k market, and soon to be a large Whistler market.
If they publish the details of their calculation (algorithms, hardware, etc), in theory one could look at what they did and say, "yeah, that should be okay".
Of course, if the processor or hardware bugged out for some random reason (Intel Pentium FDIV error comes to mind) there really would be no way to check without running the whole thing again... and even then there is still a 25% of repeating the error if the hardware spits out random numbers at some point.
I have written a program which is designed to keep track of where and when various untrusted entities obtain email addresses. It does this by encrypting information in the actual email address, in a form that is not trivial to forge.
Well, I use a similar, but more simple system. I use a distinct email address for each server, instead of an encrypted name I just use the regular site name (slashdot@mydomain.com, yahoo@mydomain.com, etc). If they start spamming (or if their mailing list is stolen by a spammer, or whatever) I can easily block the address. Sure, people could still "forge" an email address, but why would anyone want to? In any case, its both reliable and simple.. works for me.
Long before everybody and their mother used the Internet there were neo-pagan and occult ftp-archives and newsgroups
There is a good reason for that. I remember when I was in high school, and I was quite interested in the concept of Libertarianism, which I had only ready about in books. Growing up in a small town in Canada, there were no other people with similar beliefs... which frustrated me a lot. Then I discovered Usenet... where thousands of people discussed and argued the things I thought about, instead of pop artists and movie stars and football players.
Now, I can imagine someone interested in the occult, or some other somewhat obscure concept, that would have a great attraction to the net for the same reason. I don't think that there is any natural disposition to the occult... it's just a result of the disparate locations of uncommon beliefs.
OK now... I'm convinced that the "default password" is a design flaw... but the media HAS reported on this, I remember reading about it months ago on MSNBC. Check out the article where they say: "Not only were the sites storing the credit cards in plain text in a database connected to the Web -- the databases were using the default user name and in some cases, no password. [CLIP] It included about 20 Web sites which either had no password protection at all on their database servers -- in each case, they were running Microsoft's SQL Server software "
So maybe it's not a technical article... but the media has reported on this vulnerability of SQL Server... and the criticism is from Microsoft-sponsored MSNBC, no less.
power a paradigm shift to "open" community-based traffic laws?
Actually, that might be a good idea -- let the community decide what a "safe" speed of driving is in an area. Instead of having the cops set the speed, in what is often a blatant attempt to collect speeding fines.
As many, many people have already pointed out the concept of "an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented" is quite silly.
Except in the case where a IT staffer tweaks the OS to make an application work better. Say the company needs a "neato" new feature that the OS does not support. With Windows or any other closed-source OS, they are out of luck... but with Linux they can create a patch to the distro to allow it to work.
Normally, this is a great feature of Linux, but if the IT staff does not get the patch into the official distro, and does not document it properly, it will become exceedingly diffucult to maintain the OS as the eventually upgrades are needed.
And of course, as many people here have already mentioned... just make sure that you don't write undocumented code. Simple?
... do I need to bother mentioning it? Napster was created for the distribution of illegal music copies, and its primary function is to distribute illegal music copies. Yes, it has other uses, but they are minor and nearly irrelavent.
Ziploc was created to package food products, and its primary function is to package food products. Yes, it has other uses, but they are minor and nearly irrelavent.
Steal your music, for all I care... but don't pretend that it's the same as using Ziploc bags.
I know the malignant carbon rod has merits... but what about the "inanimate carbon rod" from the Simpsons (in the "Homer in Space" episode), that made the cover of Time Magazine, and had its own parade.
Don't forget that ALGORE is also the son of his father, Al Gore Sr., a prominent senator from Tennessee ( link)
Besides, the Kennedy's have been a political dynasty for decades. The only thing that seemed to have stopped it was the unlikely plane crash that killed JFK Jr., who would have probably run for office eventually.
Unfortunately, I'm not a American history expert... but I would be willing to bet that there are many more out there! And you'll notice the trend continuing... it will be tougher and tougher for non "name-brand" politicians to break into the fold. So you'll see more actors, and "son-of"'s, and sports figures...
It would have depended on the copyright license... If it was released under the GPL, AOL could not demand a recall for previously released source code.
hmmm.... this "duel-booting" sounds interesting... don't tell microsoft or else Windows 2001 might start "duelling" with your linux partition. Better warn Linus!
(I usually don't make of mis-typing... but I just found that a very striking image!)
I know Crutcher already responded, and I'm not speaking for him, but...
If you don't think it is, I ask you to explain how perfect strangers sit together on the bus without attacking each other or running away.
This is all done (with or without our concious knowledge) to "maximize their scarce resource allocation and genetic proliferation". Put it this way: You aren't going to do very well in life, finacially or reproductivly, if you are constantly attacking other people or constantly running away from people on a bus.
Our co-operative civilization has evolved because it has worked so well... democratic-style systems have constantly outperformed despotic-style systems -- at "maximiz[ing] their scarce resource allocation and genetic proliferation "
The biggest reason why subscriptions don't work on the net is that there is no way to try them out to know if you are really getting what you want. Me, I was a regular reader of Slate, and actually was one of the few that paid a subscription for it. But I completely understand how hard it would be for anybody else to plunk down their money without ever reading the magazine.
Now micropayments, on the other hand, are less of a problem. Would I pay $0.01 per day for/. ?? Most certainly yes. Even for content I was unsure of I would spring a few cents for. Once! Of course, the micropayments would have to flow through a trusted source...
then allows the reviewers to share the sample product for their reviews.
And there lies the problem. Who wants to read a review of the product two weeks later? Reviews take time, shipping takes time, and everybody wants to have a review on launch day. If some of the people would wait for that to happen, then they would quickly fall behind the times. "Why is site X reviewing that now? I already read that on site Y two weeks ago..." reminds me of people whining about the/. submission queue.
I think that Intel's biggest problem right now is that they took their arbitrary "Moore's Law" as gospel and have organized the company around it.
According to this article, Moore's law suggests that processors should be shipping at 800 MHz now... the fastest speed that Intel is currently shipping in volume. Intel seems to be stuck in their monopolistic mode of thought, which dictated that they could determine that clockspeeds would be set by Moore's Law.
AMD has no such hallucinations... and benefit from a new point of view.
-rt-
Re:200MHz FSB...Everything is going according to p
on
Intel Reacts to AMD
·
· Score: 2
The road map for AMD will be two things: The "Mustang" processor will be released before the end of the year. This processor should do pretty good against Willamette. I have a feeling that Intel delayed Willamette because they found that AMD was a bit behind with the Mustang and could afford to go to 0.13 micron and still not be behind. If they can actually make 'em =)
What else? Obviously SMP support will be nice... Anand (not to mention myself) is expecting them to be out before the end of the year.
Hmmm... one last thing of course (save the best to last). DDR support. If DDR can manage to be less pricy than RDRAM (which it should) then Athlons will blow the pants off Intel. According to this conference call summary AMD's "next gen" supports DDR... whether that means Mustang or the current crop I really don't know. The Anandtech article suggests that it will be for Mustang.
So what's next for AMD? They are about to show Intel just how wrong they have been. We will see a DDR SMP Mustang compete with Intel. Let's see how they like that???
According to the ingredient list from the fine folks at Red Bull... one can has about as much as a cup of coffee. So from the list given by the Caffeine Vault... 115-175mg. I've read elsewhere that it's around 130mg, but don't have a link for that handy.
Are they allowed to sell Red Bull in the US? They sure aren't here in Canada... we can't even get caffinated Mountain Dew here.
Yup, I buy Red Bull by the caseload in the States all the time, and bring it into Canada. The customs people don't care, I don't have to pay any duty, and I get Red Bull for a month or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely false. I use MSFT office, even though I am aware of the alternatives. I use MSFT SQL Server and MSFT Visual Studio, even though there are alternatives. Most of their products have significant competition... and only a few are the lone serious competitors in the market.
They will survive! Maybe not in the same form, but they will survive as long as they make good products (just because you disagree doesn't mean that everybody else does).
-rt-
Gee, such biting sarcasm. We know MSIE never crashes!
actually... it rarely does... on a Win2K box? over four months of solid use without a single crash. NS6 crashed twice when I was checking it out...
-rt-
Who's actually going to want "whistler"?
um... me. There are still several programs that my system won't run (many digital video editing programs have difficulty running on Win2K), and many devices that refuse to work under Win2k (think anything made by HP, those bastards).
Also, I won't be upgrading from Win2k for stabilty because as you said, stability is still good... but Win9X/Me users will.
-rt-
Tell all the programmers you know to make their Win32 code Win2k compatible! The problems is not that they don't know. The problem is that they don't care. Most of the codebase that refuses to work with Win2k is either (1) dependant on unsafe, or buggy features that Microsoft is dropping for good reason or (2) depend on methods that are extremely non-standard and only work under Win98 with a lot of prodding (ATI Rage MAXX comes to mind). The biggest problem is if a program is tied to a specific driver, the drivers must all be re-written -- thankfully developers are starting to realize that there is a large Win2k market, and soon to be a large Whistler market.
-rt-
If you follow the link provided in the article... it takes you to a page that says "The source code is available in the downloa d section"
-rt-
If they publish the details of their calculation (algorithms, hardware, etc), in theory one could look at what they did and say, "yeah, that should be okay".
Of course, if the processor or hardware bugged out for some random reason (Intel Pentium FDIV error comes to mind) there really would be no way to check without running the whole thing again... and even then there is still a 25% of repeating the error if the hardware spits out random numbers at some point.
-rt-
I have written a program which is designed to keep track of where and when various untrusted entities obtain email addresses. It does this by encrypting information in the actual email address, in a form that is not trivial to forge.
Well, I use a similar, but more simple system. I use a distinct email address for each server, instead of an encrypted name I just use the regular site name (slashdot@mydomain.com, yahoo@mydomain.com, etc). If they start spamming (or if their mailing list is stolen by a spammer, or whatever) I can easily block the address. Sure, people could still "forge" an email address, but why would anyone want to? In any case, its both reliable and simple.. works for me.
-rt-
Long before everybody and their mother used the Internet there were neo-pagan and occult ftp-archives and newsgroups
There is a good reason for that. I remember when I was in high school, and I was quite interested in the concept of Libertarianism, which I had only ready about in books. Growing up in a small town in Canada, there were no other people with similar beliefs... which frustrated me a lot. Then I discovered Usenet... where thousands of people discussed and argued the things I thought about, instead of pop artists and movie stars and football players.
Now, I can imagine someone interested in the occult, or some other somewhat obscure concept, that would have a great attraction to the net for the same reason. I don't think that there is any natural disposition to the occult... it's just a result of the disparate locations of uncommon beliefs.
-rt-
OK now... I'm convinced that the "default password" is a design flaw... but the media HAS reported on this, I remember reading about it months ago on MSNBC. Check out the article where they say: "Not only were the sites storing the credit cards in plain text in a database connected to the Web -- the databases were using the default user name and in some cases, no password. [CLIP] It included about 20 Web sites which either had no password protection at all on their database servers -- in each case, they were running Microsoft's SQL Server software "
So maybe it's not a technical article... but the media has reported on this vulnerability of SQL Server... and the criticism is from Microsoft-sponsored MSNBC, no less.
-rt-
power a paradigm shift to "open" community-based traffic laws?
Actually, that might be a good idea -- let the community decide what a "safe" speed of driving is in an area. Instead of having the cops set the speed, in what is often a blatant attempt to collect speeding fines.
-rt-
As many, many people have already pointed out the concept of "an IT staffer may make changes that no one else knows about, and that probably go undocumented" is quite silly.
Except in the case where a IT staffer tweaks the OS to make an application work better. Say the company needs a "neato" new feature that the OS does not support. With Windows or any other closed-source OS, they are out of luck... but with Linux they can create a patch to the distro to allow it to work.
Normally, this is a great feature of Linux, but if the IT staff does not get the patch into the official distro, and does not document it properly, it will become exceedingly diffucult to maintain the OS as the eventually upgrades are needed.
And of course, as many people here have already mentioned... just make sure that you don't write undocumented code. Simple?
-rt-
... do I need to bother mentioning it? Napster was created for the distribution of illegal music copies, and its primary function is to distribute illegal music copies. Yes, it has other uses, but they are minor and nearly irrelavent.
Ziploc was created to package food products, and its primary function is to package food products. Yes, it has other uses, but they are minor and nearly irrelavent.
Steal your music, for all I care... but don't pretend that it's the same as using Ziploc bags.
-rt-
apparantly... some people don't have a sense of humor at /., maybe I should have put "THIS IS A JOKE" in bold somewhere so it wouldn't get modded down!
-rt-
I know the malignant carbon rod has merits... but what about the "inanimate carbon rod" from the Simpsons (in the "Homer in Space" episode), that made the cover of Time Magazine, and had its own parade.
Now that's a carbon rod I would vote for!
-rt-
Don't forget that ALGORE is also the son of his father, Al Gore Sr., a prominent senator from Tennessee ( link)
Besides, the Kennedy's have been a political dynasty for decades. The only thing that seemed to have stopped it was the unlikely plane crash that killed JFK Jr., who would have probably run for office eventually.
Unfortunately, I'm not a American history expert... but I would be willing to bet that there are many more out there! And you'll notice the trend continuing... it will be tougher and tougher for non "name-brand" politicians to break into the fold. So you'll see more actors, and "son-of"'s, and sports figures...
-rt-
It would have depended on the copyright license... If it was released under the GPL, AOL could not demand a recall for previously released source code.
-rt-
hmmm.... this "duel-booting" sounds interesting... don't tell microsoft or else Windows 2001 might start "duelling" with your linux partition. Better warn Linus!
(I usually don't make of mis-typing... but I just found that a very striking image!)
-rt-
I know Crutcher already responded, and I'm not speaking for him, but... If you don't think it is, I ask you to explain how perfect strangers sit together on the bus without attacking each other or running away. This is all done (with or without our concious knowledge) to "maximize their scarce resource allocation and genetic proliferation". Put it this way: You aren't going to do very well in life, finacially or reproductivly, if you are constantly attacking other people or constantly running away from people on a bus.
Our co-operative civilization has evolved because it has worked so well... democratic-style systems have constantly outperformed despotic-style systems -- at "maximiz[ing] their scarce resource allocation and genetic proliferation "
-rt-
The biggest reason why subscriptions don't work on the net is that there is no way to try them out to know if you are really getting what you want. Me, I was a regular reader of Slate, and actually was one of the few that paid a subscription for it. But I completely understand how hard it would be for anybody else to plunk down their money without ever reading the magazine.
/. ?? Most certainly yes. Even for content I was unsure of I would spring a few cents for. Once! Of course, the micropayments would have to flow through a trusted source...
Now micropayments, on the other hand, are less of a problem. Would I pay $0.01 per day for
-rt-
then allows the reviewers to share the sample product for their reviews.
/. submission queue.
And there lies the problem. Who wants to read a review of the product two weeks later? Reviews take time, shipping takes time, and everybody wants to have a review on launch day. If some of the people would wait for that to happen, then they would quickly fall behind the times. "Why is site X reviewing that now? I already read that on site Y two weeks ago..." reminds me of people whining about the
-rt-
I think that Intel's biggest problem right now is that they took their arbitrary "Moore's Law" as gospel and have organized the company around it.
According to this article, Moore's law suggests that processors should be shipping at 800 MHz now... the fastest speed that Intel is currently shipping in volume. Intel seems to be stuck in their monopolistic mode of thought, which dictated that they could determine that clockspeeds would be set by Moore's Law.
AMD has no such hallucinations... and benefit from a new point of view.
-rt-
The road map for AMD will be two things: The "Mustang" processor will be released before the end of the year. This processor should do pretty good against Willamette. I have a feeling that Intel delayed Willamette because they found that AMD was a bit behind with the Mustang and could afford to go to 0.13 micron and still not be behind. If they can actually make 'em =)
What else? Obviously SMP support will be nice... Anand (not to mention myself) is expecting them to be out before the end of the year.
Hmmm... one last thing of course (save the best to last). DDR support. If DDR can manage to be less pricy than RDRAM (which it should) then Athlons will blow the pants off Intel. According to this conference call summary AMD's "next gen" supports DDR... whether that means Mustang or the current crop I really don't know. The Anandtech article suggests that it will be for Mustang.
So what's next for AMD? They are about to show Intel just how wrong they have been. We will see a DDR SMP Mustang compete with Intel. Let's see how they like that???
-rt-
According to the ingredient list from the fine folks at Red Bull... one can has about as much as a cup of coffee. So from the list given by the Caffeine Vault... 115-175mg. I've read elsewhere that it's around 130mg, but don't have a link for that handy.
-rt-
Are they allowed to sell Red Bull in the US? They sure aren't here in Canada... we can't even get caffinated Mountain Dew here.
Yup, I buy Red Bull by the caseload in the States all the time, and bring it into Canada. The customs people don't care, I don't have to pay any duty, and I get Red Bull for a month or so.
Before I found Red Bull I used to sleep...
-rt-
yes.
People WILL overdose unless you test the upper bound limits. For ANYTHING, including caffeine.
-rt-