VB is fine for business type applications - networks, disk, number-crunching. You can play videos, using the built-in graphics and sound emulation. However I have run into a brick wall trying to get USB peripherals such as cameras, scanners, printers and a USB sound card to work to a guest. The latency is just too high.
As for games or intensive work, forget it - keep this on the host.
Show me the killer app. Make it worth my while to upgrade from XP and I'll do so. However it's got to be worth the pain of beefing up my hardware, possibly renewing my applications and changing any incompatible components. In short, I'll have to toss all my existing stuff and start from scratch, whatever comes next will have to be pretty dam' good (and I don't mean with more restrictions, spped bumps and changed ways of doing the same things) for it to be worth the hassle.
In other words, narrow margins in one market do not cause higher prices in another market. In each market, the software should be priced so as to maximize profits in that market.
Yes, I get what you're saying. However the cold, hard fact is that american suppliers do employ cartel-like practises, such as appointing single distributors in each country and enforcing a no-compete clause with them. While they permit distributors in different (american) states to compete, thus forcing down prices (and you can't say that the whole USA is a single market, with the same demand curve, Compare California with Mississippi for instance.), they do not allow these same distributors to ship to europe. They wouldn't do that if it didn't affect their profits and it is anti-competitive.
No, it's not that europeans are willing to pay more - it's that they have no option. If we were prepared to pay more, then you'd see sales volumes being the same as in the US - they aren't. The higher prices mean reduced volumes - which in turn means low or no volume discounts. This suits the manufacturers very nicely as it means they claw back some of the reduced margin from american resellers who are in a better position to pressure for higher discounts.
The UK isn't known as "Rip-off Britain" for nothing.
American suppliers often appoint a single distributor for each european country and then ban them from shipping into other disti's territory. This effectively creates a monopoly in each country with the main importer able to set prices locally - and cut off supply to any sellers in their sector who discount too much.
This practice has been going on for years. In the UK the rate has often been a 1 UK Point == 1 US dollar (although the rate is about £2 - $1) In the rest of europe it is often even worse.
This is nothing to do with taxes (although VAT - sales tax does add 10-20% and import duty maybe a few percent more). And is certainly has little to do with transport costs - drop shipping from China is the same cost to Europe and the USA and the carriage costs on a DVD is a pittance. The simple fact is that where vendors in the US have to compete and therefore put pressure on their suppliers to lower margins, in Europe they don't. This makes a nice fat margin for american suppliers and they're in no hurry to change this.
just one sentence, eh?
on
The Pragmatic CSO
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well thanks for letting the cat out of the bag. If that's the best sentence in the book I think I'll pass.
Everybody who's worked/working in business (as opposed to academia, where your success is really just the weight of papers you put out - right?) for any length of time and isn't still doing the job they started with knows this implicitly. None of IT is about anything except the business - it's merely a means to an end, or a necessary evil depending on how good your IT organisation is.
He's just this guy, you know.
on
Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Let's face it, At some point SJ will no longer be running Apple. When that happens, just like when any visionary leader leaves a company, the stock will take a hit. However, providing he's not the only, single source of talent within the company, things will recover - maybe even be better without insiders having to deal with the cult of personality, as well as technical issues.
For those who think Steve is Apple, that is a pretty insulting thing to think about the dozens of other good people in the company.
The interesting thing here is what difference it would make. If SJ did decide to take a lesser role (whether or not for health reasons), why should that make any difference to the fate of the company?
Is Apple's commercial value due to one talented leader and millions of drones?
He said it was MySQL. the almost universal approah is to provide discrete databases (i.e. files) for each database instance. It's therefore very unlikely that the database itself is shared. Although I agree, the hardware and resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth etc.) will be shared.
While you can discuss the ethics or morality of having strangers accessing (or worse, changing or "accidentally" destroying it - ooops, there goes another database), the fact is that once it's off your site, it's out of your control.
Wasn't there a case recently of some politician who got their records "snooped" by an outsourced operation - consider yourself lucky that all they're doing is looking. It's not impossible to think that they could take any code you written, or sell off credit card details from your database.
Second law of outsourcing: you're tacitly admitting that someone else can run your operation better/cheaper than you can.
I'm sure that with top 'o the line hardware and huge amounts of resources (CPU speed, memory, disk space) then Vista will run very nicely.
However, I don't feel the need to go through a huge upheaval: replacing pretty much every component of my machine and learning a different set of "stuff" just to run the same old applications that I use daily.
The machine I have runs very nicely with XP on 512MB and a modest 1.2GHz processor. I've been running it like this for years with no complaints, problems or compatability issues and until a new, killer app. comes along that only runs on Vista then I plan stick with this for the next several years. When I do get to the point of upgrading, I plan to keep this setup in a virtual environment, probably with a Linux host.
Your ISP has the right to terminate your contract anytime they like. So long as they abide by the terms and give you proper notice, they can just tell you they don't want you as a customer anymore.
That's far simpler from their point of view than sending letters and/or getting hit by the record industry. I don't know what the margin is on a single ADSL account, but I doubt that they'd have to cut off more than (say) 10,000 customers to reduce the "problem" to irrelevant proportions. Even if they made £100 per customer per year - I'm sure the music companies would be prepared to pony-up £1Mil. to make the problem go away.
They haven't specified the screen size. While the designers go into detail for the amount of memory, SSD, number and type of ports - they are too shy to talk about this one attribute that will make or break the design.
We know PDA-sized screens are no good for web-browsing (especially when the mocked-up picture implies showing print-sized text). So it follows that the screen will have to be at least the size of a paperback and preferably the size of an A4 sheet to get any kind of mass market take-up (with, of course the battery capacity to match). If you plan to do this for $200, you must know something that the rest of the world has missed.
Even the book readers that appeared last year didn't manage that - and they seem to have sunk without trace. Without this, the project is nothing more than pie in the sky.
I'll keep an eye out for the end product, but I won't hold my breath waiting for it.
This is nothing new. there have been reduction in the job market before - they've always come to an end and been followed by new investment, more jobs and sexy new technologies.
The same thing will happen again. If there is going to be a tough time (and we're certainly talking ourselves into it) then all it means is that new stuff will be delayed a bit. However, during that time we'll be able to filter out all the froth and hype, leaving us to get on with the good stuff when the money returns.
Given that development teams are prone to infighting, politics and code-forking if they disagree with the direction a project is taking, a project leader has to be very careful not to offend the immature and unprofessional elements in the team - otherwise they may simply go off in a sulk.
The only people how can affect the quality of Linux is the distro makers: by including or excluding packages. However, those who feel snubbed can just go and produce their own distro. While that is their right, it doesn't help weed-out the software that is either poorly written, badly designed or is similar to something else (how many CD-burners does one operating system need?). You find that software is propagated by those with time, rathe rthan talent.
If there was some way to inject commercial realities into the linux work - not necessarily by charging/profiting, I feel the quality of the end product would rise, due to the competition and differentiation that would come about. Though how you do this, I have no idea.
Most places I've worked that have emploted coding standard require the code to be "eyeballed" in order to enforce them. While this is adequate when a project starts out and there are o time pressures, the standards tend to lapse as deadlines approach. No manager is his/her right mind wants to be the person who delays a project and certainly not because the code isn't indented properly.
If you're going to have standards, they need to be enforced. the best way to do that is to have any style elements created by software, so the coders can write in their own way, but the house style is what's delivered to the client. This includes file headers, disclaimers and copyright statements.
Of course the one place where coding standards never seem to apply is after the code is written, when the patches and bug-fixes are added.
when "they" make abusive language a punishable offence and trawl up posts like this one.
Funny thing about the internet, it's not just other people's bad judgement that lives on forever but yours too. I wonder what your kids will think when they read this - after you been lecturing them on their behaviour.
So what we have is a guy who was known for drinking alcoholic beverages, now drinks non-alcoholic Red Bull instead. Any lawyer worth his or her fee, would've pointed out this evidenced change in behaviour as a sign that the subject no longer drank, and therefore should have a reduced sentence.
Depending on the "purity" of the groundside donors, NASA could end up in a situation where they design this toilet/treatment system based soley on the input from their drug-addled staff.
I'm not sure if I would be amused or scared if they subsequently found out (in orbit?) that the system seized up with untainted product and they therefore either had to feed their astronauts dope, to get the right formula for the urine plant - or add another chemical (on top of the particle de-clogger) to simulate the drugs.
Not so much terrorism, as "normal" criminal activity.
Ultimately you can't prevent one person abusing their privileges and causing damage - that's just simple vandalism: whether it's done through a computer or by trashing an office. However, you can minimise the damage, by not permitting one single individual access to the whole mess.
Yes, you lose something in flexibility and it may take a little longer to co-ordinate the efforts of multiple people, but you gain in security and reliability (what if that one person is off sick?)
Banks and other financial institutions have long implemented such systems - with greater or lesser success (the obvious example of failure being the french guy who worked around his bank's safeguards and lost them billions).
maybe the people who should be punished for this are the security assessors and managers who permitted this vulnerability in the first place?
you'll find that also gets "owned" in less than 5 minutes, in any city in the world.
Solution: don't do it.
The point is not that there are bad people, or 'bots, about, it's that there are still a few individuals who are either too lazy or haven't been educated in the hazards of leaving their PCs unguarded. In time they will learn the hard way - or be taught (or possibly punished, as this weakness affects not just the person who's PC it is) that they will take a loss if they don't or "forget" to take the proper precautions. You can build better security into an O/S, but it still requires the people to actually use it: the problem is more an educational issue than a technical one.
At the end of last year (just before christmas) I reconfigured an old laptop with W2k/SP4 for use receiving weather satellite pix and acting as a weather station. Since it only has a 150MHz processor and 96MB memory I decided not to include any anti-virus or spam filtering on the box itself. It does sit behind my Netgear DG834GT, which only lets through selected ports - mainly for the benefit of the other machines I run.
While the laptop itself has very little internet presence (just downloading patches, drivers and s/w updates) I've occasionally remote-mounted it's disk to another box that runs Norton. I've never detected any spam, viruses, trojans or other nasties.
My conclusion is that with some basic precautions and common-sense (plus no email and only visiting "well known" websites) it's quite feasible to run a windows box for dedicated applications 24*7 without the overheads of virus protection.
Slashdot Mirror
VB is fine for business type applications - networks, disk, number-crunching. You can play videos, using the built-in graphics and sound emulation. However I have run into a brick wall trying to get USB peripherals such as cameras, scanners, printers and a USB sound card to work to a guest. The latency is just too high.
As for games or intensive work, forget it - keep this on the host.
> a royal pain to set up bridged-mode networking on Linux hosts
/etc/networking/interfaces file
Not much of a pain, here's a copy of my
---
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
# set up bridge for Virtualbox "host interface networking"
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
up ifconfig eth1 0 0 0 0 up
down ifconfig eth1 down
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth1
----
Apropos 64 bit. I'm successfully running Ubuntu AMD64 as my host with 32 bit Linux & Windows guests
With reservations.
You can't have snapshots of RAW disk images. it's also widely acknowledged (see the VB forums) that snapshot management is a weak point.
If you need snapshots, wait a few months/years until it works solidly
Show me the killer app. Make it worth my while to upgrade from XP and I'll do so. However it's got to be worth the pain of beefing up my hardware, possibly renewing my applications and changing any incompatible components. In short, I'll have to toss all my existing stuff and start from scratch, whatever comes next will have to be pretty dam' good (and I don't mean with more restrictions, spped bumps and changed ways of doing the same things) for it to be worth the hassle.
Yes, I get what you're saying. However the cold, hard fact is that american suppliers do employ cartel-like practises, such as appointing single distributors in each country and enforcing a no-compete clause with them. While they permit distributors in different (american) states to compete, thus forcing down prices (and you can't say that the whole USA is a single market, with the same demand curve, Compare California with Mississippi for instance.), they do not allow these same distributors to ship to europe. They wouldn't do that if it didn't affect their profits and it is anti-competitive.
The UK isn't known as "Rip-off Britain" for nothing.
This practice has been going on for years. In the UK the rate has often been a 1 UK Point == 1 US dollar (although the rate is about £2 - $1) In the rest of europe it is often even worse.
This is nothing to do with taxes (although VAT - sales tax does add 10-20% and import duty maybe a few percent more). And is certainly has little to do with transport costs - drop shipping from China is the same cost to Europe and the USA and the carriage costs on a DVD is a pittance. The simple fact is that where vendors in the US have to compete and therefore put pressure on their suppliers to lower margins, in Europe they don't. This makes a nice fat margin for american suppliers and they're in no hurry to change this.
Everybody who's worked/working in business (as opposed to academia, where your success is really just the weight of papers you put out - right?) for any length of time and isn't still doing the job they started with knows this implicitly. None of IT is about anything except the business - it's merely a means to an end, or a necessary evil depending on how good your IT organisation is.
For those who think Steve is Apple, that is a pretty insulting thing to think about the dozens of other good people in the company.
Is Apple's commercial value due to one talented leader and millions of drones?
He said it was MySQL. the almost universal approah is to provide discrete databases (i.e. files) for each database instance. It's therefore very unlikely that the database itself is shared. Although I agree, the hardware and resources (CPU, memory, bandwidth etc.) will be shared.
While you can discuss the ethics or morality of having strangers accessing (or worse, changing or "accidentally" destroying it - ooops, there goes another database), the fact is that once it's off your site, it's out of your control.
Wasn't there a case recently of some politician who got their records "snooped" by an outsourced operation - consider yourself lucky that all they're doing is looking. It's not impossible to think that they could take any code you written, or sell off credit card details from your database.
Second law of outsourcing: you're tacitly admitting that someone else can run your operation better/cheaper than you can.
However, I don't feel the need to go through a huge upheaval: replacing pretty much every component of my machine and learning a different set of "stuff" just to run the same old applications that I use daily.
The machine I have runs very nicely with XP on 512MB and a modest 1.2GHz processor. I've been running it like this for years with no complaints, problems or compatability issues and until a new, killer app. comes along that only runs on Vista then I plan stick with this for the next several years. When I do get to the point of upgrading, I plan to keep this setup in a virtual environment, probably with a Linux host.
It's the wrong kind of snow/sun/rain/wind
After that comes excuses like insufficient funding, "aggressive timescale", "thousand year" flood/drought/temperatures,
But never, ever could it be our fault.
That's far simpler from their point of view than sending letters and/or getting hit by the record industry. I don't know what the margin is on a single ADSL account, but I doubt that they'd have to cut off more than (say) 10,000 customers to reduce the "problem" to irrelevant proportions. Even if they made £100 per customer per year - I'm sure the music companies would be prepared to pony-up £1Mil. to make the problem go away.
We know PDA-sized screens are no good for web-browsing (especially when the mocked-up picture implies showing print-sized text). So it follows that the screen will have to be at least the size of a paperback and preferably the size of an A4 sheet to get any kind of mass market take-up (with, of course the battery capacity to match). If you plan to do this for $200, you must know something that the rest of the world has missed.
Even the book readers that appeared last year didn't manage that - and they seem to have sunk without trace. Without this, the project is nothing more than pie in the sky.
I'll keep an eye out for the end product, but I won't hold my breath waiting for it.
The same thing will happen again. If there is going to be a tough time (and we're certainly talking ourselves into it) then all it means is that new stuff will be delayed a bit. However, during that time we'll be able to filter out all the froth and hype, leaving us to get on with the good stuff when the money returns.
It's not the end of the world, just be patient.
The only people how can affect the quality of Linux is the distro makers: by including or excluding packages. However, those who feel snubbed can just go and produce their own distro. While that is their right, it doesn't help weed-out the software that is either poorly written, badly designed or is similar to something else (how many CD-burners does one operating system need?). You find that software is propagated by those with time, rathe rthan talent.
If there was some way to inject commercial realities into the linux work - not necessarily by charging/profiting, I feel the quality of the end product would rise, due to the competition and differentiation that would come about. Though how you do this, I have no idea.
If you're going to have standards, they need to be enforced. the best way to do that is to have any style elements created by software, so the coders can write in their own way, but the house style is what's delivered to the client. This includes file headers, disclaimers and copyright statements.
Of course the one place where coding standards never seem to apply is after the code is written, when the patches and bug-fixes are added.
Funny thing about the internet, it's not just other people's bad judgement that lives on forever but yours too. I wonder what your kids will think when they read this - after you been lecturing them on their behaviour.
So what we have is a guy who was known for drinking alcoholic beverages, now drinks non-alcoholic Red Bull instead. Any lawyer worth his or her fee, would've pointed out this evidenced change in behaviour as a sign that the subject no longer drank, and therefore should have a reduced sentence.
It's all down to the interpretation.
I'm not sure if I would be amused or scared if they subsequently found out (in orbit?) that the system seized up with untainted product and they therefore either had to feed their astronauts dope, to get the right formula for the urine plant - or add another chemical (on top of the particle de-clogger) to simulate the drugs.
Hmmm.
Yes, you lose something in flexibility and it may take a little longer to co-ordinate the efforts of multiple people, but you gain in security and reliability (what if that one person is off sick?)
Banks and other financial institutions have long implemented such systems - with greater or lesser success (the obvious example of failure being the french guy who worked around his bank's safeguards and lost them billions).
maybe the people who should be punished for this are the security assessors and managers who permitted this vulnerability in the first place?
Solution: don't do it.
The point is not that there are bad people, or 'bots, about, it's that there are still a few individuals who are either too lazy or haven't been educated in the hazards of leaving their PCs unguarded. In time they will learn the hard way - or be taught (or possibly punished, as this weakness affects not just the person who's PC it is) that they will take a loss if they don't or "forget" to take the proper precautions. You can build better security into an O/S, but it still requires the people to actually use it: the problem is more an educational issue than a technical one.
While the laptop itself has very little internet presence (just downloading patches, drivers and s/w updates) I've occasionally remote-mounted it's disk to another box that runs Norton. I've never detected any spam, viruses, trojans or other nasties.
My conclusion is that with some basic precautions and common-sense (plus no email and only visiting "well known" websites) it's quite feasible to run a windows box for dedicated applications 24*7 without the overheads of virus protection.