I was surprised to see my email address on the list. Looking through my password manager, it looks like they have a simple password I stupidly re-used on eharmony and gigasize more than 3 years ago. (In fairness to those sites, I probably used the password elsewhere too, so they aren't necessarily the leak source.) I just hope a Russian hacker doesn't steal my soul mate on eharmony. (Unlikely?)
It allows one computer with multiple displays to have multiple X sessions. Unfortunately it doesn't ship with the latest release. And I don't think it supports sliding an application window from one session to another.
Maybe a bit OT, but BSD can create problems for a company's legal department because it is really just a template for a license. Every variation on BSD has to be vetted individually as a new license. If you use MIT or Apache instead it's much simpler for the lawyers. MIT in particular seems to be the least suspicious to lawyer types. (I think they recognize the name.) The GPL is probably not as well understood as it should be, but once the lawyers have encountered it, they don't have to repeat their work again.
The problem is that the economics of computer repairs don't make sense. It costs money to diagnose the problem. It costs money for the labour. It costs money for the parts. Those costs add up really fast. If your computer dies and you don't know how to diagnose or fix it yourself why take it in for repair if it's out of warranty? Why spend nearly the cost of a new computer to fix something that's probably three years old anyway. Buy a new one and get the store techie to see if he can add your old hard drive as a secondary. Same price, better result. So where's the incentive for stores to keep a well trained repair team? It's the same with everything. When was the last time you brought a t.v. to a t.v. repairman? Either the warranty covers taking it back or you put it at the curb. People just don't get things fixed anymore.
Won't this pose a great big temptation to fork Linux if Solaris goes GPL 3 and Linus wants keep his kernel GPL 2? As I understand the GPL, anyone can take Linux and fork it to a newer GPL license. It's not inconceivable that Debian or some other distro might do it in order to get the right to use Solaris code.
I'm on Rogers and downloading a torrent right now, no problem. I must say, however, that if I use any client other than Azureus, my Interenet connection will mysteriously die about three hours after starting a torrent. Is the packet encryption for Azureus different in some way from what uTorrent uses? I had set both clients not to make any un-encrypted connections, in or out.
Although nothing comes close to Windows XP (76.1%), the numbers clearly show that Linux (3.5%) is nearly as popular as Apple Mac (3.8%). Well, Apple is certainly giving Dell a run for their money in hardware sales with that 3.8%. The market is there and Dell would be stupid to ignore it.
I'm guessing this is the comparable box in the USA with Windows XP installed:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx /cto_dimenc521?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
The cheapest Chinese model is $512.43 USD and the most expensive is $768.70 USD
The cheapest American model is $359 and the most expensive model is $859.
That's without add-ons.
I don't know Chinese, so I can't really say how the advertised features compare. Perhaps someone who does speak Chinese could say how much money Linux users are (or aren't) saving with a Dell box.
This service is definitely geared towards attracting sellers rather than buyers, and that's where the income will come from. In the near future, you will see so many google checkout logos on sellers' websites that as a buyer you will end up using this almost by default.
Compare that with paypal. Many buyers have accounts but can't find many places to spend other than with ebay sellers. Not many non-ebay sellers seem to find it attractive.
Why would a seller want to turn over a portion of website sales over to paypal when google checkout is practically giving it away?
PCs are general use, BUT they might as well be end-to-end packages like Macs because the average user (as opposed to us/. geeks) never cracks it open or takes advantage of its modularity. They just go and buy a Gateway, a Dell or an HP as their pocket-book permits and that's that. What's really surprising is that PC manufacturers like Dell haven't started mass producing small form factor end-to-end machines like Apple. They average user would be only to happy to have it all in one box.
If I can go off topic for a moment, there is a bit of Internet trivia I see journalists use all the time and it bugs me. Example: "According to google there are 20,000 pages for X, but only 18,000 for Y." or "An Internet search for X results in in 200,000 hits." Really? There's 200,000 pages completely relevant to your search??? And you can go to the 20,000th page of the google search to find more links that aren't spam, porn and porn-blog-spam??? Everyone knows that that number of hits found counter is mostly bull and that very little of relevance exist beyond the first two or three pages. Everytime I see a reporter cite the hit count as evidence of something I cringe.
It's Microsoft's modus operandi to enter markets that someone else has trailblazed. Copy Netscape. Swallow Hotmail. Assimilate everything.
The only odd thing with Norton is how long they have been able to hang on to the beast without getting eaten or squashed. My theory is that Norton AV occupied Microsoft's blindspot. The company just never wanted to acknowledge that it had a problem with viruses. To copy or buy-out Norton would have been to concentrate attention where Microsoft refused to look itself.
What has changed in recent years, however, is that Norton has been so successful in marketing viruses as a threat that comes from the Internet rather than from an insecure OS that most Microsoft users now regard a CPU cycle eating realtime virus scanner as a fact of life rather than a stop-gap patch job. Five years ago the inherent irony of a company selling a product that protects against failures of their own product would have been obvious. Now the average user see the threat as external. Microsoft can now enter the market without ever acknowledging its blindspot.
Remember, consumers buy millions if not not billions of dollars of useless cold remedies every year for an infection that could have been prevented by 20 seconds of handwashing.
I just got an instant message over gaim from gmail.com saying: "The broken link has been fixed. Thanks for being our first users!"
I went to talk.google.com and it was up. You can download the client (windows only) now. It also has instructions for using it with linux and mac using other clients like gaim. It looks like only windows users will be able to use VOIP because it needs the google talk client.
I've only recently started using linux and I'm already getting mad at google for their windows first policy. I guess that's what pays the bills.
I don't know why I got excited about this and when I think about it, I don't know why the media will go all crazy about it tomorrow. IM and VOIP clients have been around for ages and many of them exist in great OSS forms. Technologically there is nothing new here.
Slashdot Mirror
I was surprised to see my email address on the list. Looking through my password manager, it looks like they have a simple password I stupidly re-used on eharmony and gigasize more than 3 years ago. (In fairness to those sites, I probably used the password elsewhere too, so they aren't necessarily the leak source.) I just hope a Russian hacker doesn't steal my soul mate on eharmony. (Unlikely?)
Nightlies are NOT betas. These are two different things.
Beta releases are milestone releases that represent the closing of bugs. Nightlies are buggy as all hell experiments that change, well, every night.
Here are the nightlies:
http://nightly.mozilla.org/
Here are the betas:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
The closest thing I can think of is Fedora's multi-seat project:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Multiseat
It allows one computer with multiple displays to have multiple X sessions. Unfortunately it doesn't ship with the latest release. And I don't think it supports sliding an application window from one session to another.
Maybe a bit OT, but BSD can create problems for a company's legal department because it is really just a template for a license. Every variation on BSD has to be vetted individually as a new license. If you use MIT or Apache instead it's much simpler for the lawyers. MIT in particular seems to be the least suspicious to lawyer types. (I think they recognize the name.) The GPL is probably not as well understood as it should be, but once the lawyers have encountered it, they don't have to repeat their work again.
The problem is that the economics of computer repairs don't make sense. It costs money to diagnose the problem. It costs money for the labour. It costs money for the parts. Those costs add up really fast. If your computer dies and you don't know how to diagnose or fix it yourself why take it in for repair if it's out of warranty? Why spend nearly the cost of a new computer to fix something that's probably three years old anyway. Buy a new one and get the store techie to see if he can add your old hard drive as a secondary. Same price, better result. So where's the incentive for stores to keep a well trained repair team? It's the same with everything. When was the last time you brought a t.v. to a t.v. repairman? Either the warranty covers taking it back or you put it at the curb. People just don't get things fixed anymore.
Could Viking 1 be returned to service if a signal reached the antenna?
Won't this pose a great big temptation to fork Linux if Solaris goes GPL 3 and Linus wants keep his kernel GPL 2? As I understand the GPL, anyone can take Linux and fork it to a newer GPL license. It's not inconceivable that Debian or some other distro might do it in order to get the right to use Solaris code.
I'm on Rogers and downloading a torrent right now, no problem. I must say, however, that if I use any client other than Azureus, my Interenet connection will mysteriously die about three hours after starting a torrent. Is the packet encryption for Azureus different in some way from what uTorrent uses? I had set both clients not to make any un-encrypted connections, in or out.
Check out these statistics that show how many people are using Linux when web browsing:a sp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
Although nothing comes close to Windows XP (76.1%), the numbers clearly show that Linux (3.5%) is nearly as popular as Apple Mac (3.8%). Well, Apple is certainly giving Dell a run for their money in hardware sales with that 3.8%. The market is there and Dell would be stupid to ignore it.
I'm guessing this is the comparable box in the USA with Windows XP installed: http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx /cto_dimenc521?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
The cheapest Chinese model is $512.43 USD and the most expensive is $768.70 USD
The cheapest American model is $359 and the most expensive model is $859.
That's without add-ons.
I don't know Chinese, so I can't really say how the advertised features compare. Perhaps someone who does speak Chinese could say how much money Linux users are (or aren't) saving with a Dell box.
Linux fans might want to check out this online OS:
http://www.workspot.com/
It's a full version of RedHat 8 that you can access through a Java applet!
Here's an impressive list of sellers that are already using this:
http://www.google.com/buy/m.html
This service is definitely geared towards attracting sellers rather than buyers, and that's where the income will come from. In the near future, you will see so many google checkout logos on sellers' websites that as a buyer you will end up using this almost by default.
Compare that with paypal. Many buyers have accounts but can't find many places to spend other than with ebay sellers. Not many non-ebay sellers seem to find it attractive.
Why would a seller want to turn over a portion of website sales over to paypal when google checkout is practically giving it away?
PCs are general use, BUT they might as well be end-to-end packages like Macs because the average user (as opposed to us /. geeks) never cracks it open or takes advantage of its modularity. They just go and buy a Gateway, a Dell or an HP as their pocket-book permits and that's that. What's really surprising is that PC manufacturers like Dell haven't started mass producing small form factor end-to-end machines like Apple. They average user would be only to happy to have it all in one box.
If I can go off topic for a moment, there is a bit of Internet trivia I see journalists use all the time and it bugs me. Example: "According to google there are 20,000 pages for X, but only 18,000 for Y." or "An Internet search for X results in in 200,000 hits." Really? There's 200,000 pages completely relevant to your search??? And you can go to the 20,000th page of the google search to find more links that aren't spam, porn and porn-blog-spam??? Everyone knows that that number of hits found counter is mostly bull and that very little of relevance exist beyond the first two or three pages. Everytime I see a reporter cite the hit count as evidence of something I cringe.
The only odd thing with Norton is how long they have been able to hang on to the beast without getting eaten or squashed. My theory is that Norton AV occupied Microsoft's blindspot. The company just never wanted to acknowledge that it had a problem with viruses. To copy or buy-out Norton would have been to concentrate attention where Microsoft refused to look itself.
What has changed in recent years, however, is that Norton has been so successful in marketing viruses as a threat that comes from the Internet rather than from an insecure OS that most Microsoft users now regard a CPU cycle eating realtime virus scanner as a fact of life rather than a stop-gap patch job. Five years ago the inherent irony of a company selling a product that protects against failures of their own product would have been obvious. Now the average user see the threat as external. Microsoft can now enter the market without ever acknowledging its blindspot.
Remember, consumers buy millions if not not billions of dollars of useless cold remedies every year for an infection that could have been prevented by 20 seconds of handwashing.
I just got an instant message over gaim from gmail.com saying: "The broken link has been fixed. Thanks for being our first users!" I went to talk.google.com and it was up. You can download the client (windows only) now. It also has instructions for using it with linux and mac using other clients like gaim. It looks like only windows users will be able to use VOIP because it needs the google talk client. I've only recently started using linux and I'm already getting mad at google for their windows first policy. I guess that's what pays the bills. I don't know why I got excited about this and when I think about it, I don't know why the media will go all crazy about it tomorrow. IM and VOIP clients have been around for ages and many of them exist in great OSS forms. Technologically there is nothing new here.