Uhh, no. I have extended basic cable, and have all analog. They are going to move it to digital at some point (unrelated to the OTA digital, but IMHO they're using the confusion as a reason for switching). Actually, I have two Tivos that can use cable cards, so I guess technically I have a "digital converter box", but it's not being used for that.
(We can get 'free' boxes that will convert the equivalent of extended basic channels -- but that doesn't help S3 Tivos.)
If you have cable (analogue or digital) you don't have to worry about a converter box since your TV acts as a monitor. If you have a HDTV with a digital or HD tuner you don't have to worry about a converter box. The same is true if you have a HDD DVD/BD recorder with a digial or HD tuner and again your TV acts as a monitor. The only time you do need a converter box is when your TV has a analogue tuner connected to a TV antenna. One thing many people don't realise is they may have to change their TV antenna as well to pick-up digital signals properly.
Nearly all TV's from the 1970's on (some much earlier) have at the very least composite (ie. AV or that yellow plug) video in. In fact most modern TV's have in addition component (red, blue, green and L/R audio), SCART (mainly European) and possibly HDMI inputs. By using any of these a TV becomes a monitor. Of course what ever is supplying video to the TV must be able to pick up a Digital TV (SD or HD) signal.
But people will die without tornado information, among other things.
Yes, radio is an option. When dealing with people, however, sometimes a graphical representation is just much more useful.
There are not many states were tornado's occur. From what I have seen not being an American there are tornado warning systems set up in all towns and cities where there is a possibility of a tornado.
What about the hearing impaired? Well you could argue that TV can help but lets be honest here how many people, hearing impaired or not remained glued to their TV in the off chance they may be warned of a pending disaster, most watch TV for entertainment. As for graphical representations most people don't know how to understand them. Radio, police, national guard and friendly neighbours do more to help in early warnings of pending disasters than TV can.
That's totally on topic. They're spending money on coupons to make money selling off the freed up frequencies.
I doubt it, although to be fair you need to calculate the cost of the whole exercise compared to the money the government gets back through the sale of the freed up frequency spectrum. Call me pessimistic if you like but it looks like a politician's smoke and mirrors exercise.
I too would want a PS3, but I won't buy one and wouldn't be able to afford the games so I would need to have it cracked. (Which is probably one huge reason they sell less.)
If you have a Wii or Xbox360 how do you afford the games since they nearly all the same price as an equivalent PS3 game. By saying "I need to have it cracked" sort of puts you in the pirate category;-)
If sony didn't want their console associated with shoddy games then they certainly failed, just go to gamespot, IGN, etc and see how many crappy games are on the platform (like all consoles have).
You only have to take a look at the games over the last year for the four consoles (I am including the PS2 as well) and there are a few good games and a lot of IMHO crappy games of which the Wii takes the grand prize for shovel ware and PS2 ports. What makes you single the PS3 out all the consoles to have this issue?
I can understand if one of the Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony game studios brought out a bad game then the blame would be on the company game studio but blaming the console maker for a crappy game from a third party developer is just silly, you should put the blame on the game studio.
A simple example is "Alone in the Dark" (Atari and Eden Studios) which did not come out for the PS3 for quite a few months. Basically the game was awful to ok, however when the game was finally ported to the PS3 it wasn't stellar but it was a huge improvement over the PS2, Wii and Xbox360 versions. Who are you going to blame here?
Basically a bad game is the fault of the gaming studio which in some respects is not overly fair since it depends on what the buying public perceive as a good or bad game and unfortunately many game studios are taking the easy route (after all they are in the business of making money) when they find they have made a profitable game they do have a tendency to produce a part 2 then 3 then... well, you get the picture instead of trying something a bit more innovative which may bomb.
You are right about the fun factor but what looks good on a small SDTV can look awful or at best mediocre on a larger HDTV's thereby reducing the so called fun factor. A combination of detailed graphics and fun can make a game exceptional, SD graphics and a fun make an a good game however a non fun game and high or low resolution graphics still makes a game that sucks.
As for "minuscule improvements in 3d graphics" I assume you are talking about comparing SD to HD. If you live in the USA your SD display (NTSC) is 720Ã--480 compared to PAL 720Ã--576. Now compare this to HD 1280Ã--720 and 1920Ã--1080 which are significantly better than what SD resolution offers and if you cannot see the difference I suggest a good Optometrist:-)
The success of the Wii is has only benefited Nintendo and a few third party players with many games being shovel ware or PS2 ports. Most third party gaming houses are still programming for the Xbox360 and the PS3 and will continue to do so since that market is where they can make money. Personally I have yet to see many games on the Wii that make me want to buy the machine which is rather strange of me to say since I have had every single Nintendo machine from the NES.
I'd say Microsoft's only real worry for their next generation console is their media format- do they swallow their pride and go Bluray or go for a custom format? DVD isn't going to cut it next time round.
Microsoft have been saying for sometime that downloads are the way of the future however many people still like physical media and that is going to be a hard sell to wean people off CD. DVD and Blu-ray and purchase content via downloading. I personally don't think this is going to happen any time soon since even downloading a DVD via torrent can take many hours depending on your bandwidth.
Some people may have internet connections that can operate over 10Mbps and have unlimited uncapped bandwidth but the majority of people world wide don't have that or cannot afford it, so even though downloads may be the way of the future world wide we are no were near this goal. As games and media capacity gets larger downloading is becoming longer and less cost effective and that is not going to change any time soon.
Surprisingly Sony is doing quite well with people downloading content, however the media size of the downloads are relatively small as is the cost.
TV is much better than radio for dealing with severe weather, because being able to see the weather maps and storm tracks gives you a much better idea of what's going on. Going into tornado season in Oklahoma (where I grew up) without TV would make me a little uncomfortable.
Lets be honest here, how many people can read a weather map? In addition I think you will find that more people listen to the radio when they are driving or on some sort of transport than watch any form of TV. Yes TV can be informative (although many would say it is entertainment now) but usually when people are watching it.
The easiest and most efficient way of getting emergency information to the public particularly during daylight hours is radio. Forget about showing weather maps or trends a simple repeated verbal warning usually suffices. Even taking the hearing impaired into account a TV wont help that much unless they are watching it. After all only people who are in harms way are important not the person who is viewing the potential disaster thousands of kilometres or miles away.
A single distro has millions of lines of code that no one person has ever read, thus you're placing your trust in others that all of that code is doing what you think it's doing. Maybe it is. And maybe it's not
To a certain extent true but at least with Open Source Linux/Unix you can see the source and even modify if you can program or hire someone to do it. You can even replace it with a different distribution if you are not happy with the one you have and if you do it yourself he total cost to you is $0.00 and it is perfectly legal to do so.
Placing your trust in others is no more different than driving a car. You hope it's reliable, you hope it's fuel won't destroy the engine, you hope that the road you are on has been properly maintained and you wish that slow driver in front of you would get out of your way:)
The only thing they will respond to is a mass boycott. And considering this is Windows, which is pretty much locked into most large scale networks as it is, not to mention end users' homes, good luck.
It seems to have worked with Vista.
If Microsoft's largest customers (IT departments) reject this version of windows over it's anti-piracy measures just like they rejected last version of windows over it's performance issues, you'll get your wish.
Mass boycott of Vista? That may have worked for the people who wanted to upgrade and decided that it was not worth it when XP was "good enough", however for many people Vista was not an option when purchasing a new PC. As far as the corporate was concerned many businesses had contracts in place and had already payed for their Vista upgrade whether they liked it or not. Unfortunately I don't see the adoption of MS Windows 7 being any different.
The only way this will change is when Government sectors insist of having Linux on their desktops and except for a few countries this is not happening very quickly.
But seriously, most of Australia was fooled by this tourist. Personally I saw the crap that our (Labour) state governments were doing and thought, FUCK THAT! So I stuck with the Libs.
The problem was we were only given a "one horse race" what with Howard stating he was not going to complete his term no wonder the majority voted Labour. Having seen what the Labour party had done in NSW I was not going to vote Labour, however the dilemma was who to really vote for.
As for the TV shows how about adding "Home and Away" as well. I usually find that I can find plenty of things to do rather than watching those shows:)
One of the problems with Labour IMHO is they seem to listen to many of these "Holier than thou" Christian lobby groups.
Fast boot times are fine if you have a home PC however differences of one to two minutes don't mean all that much in the server market where reliability and uptime are much more important.
I use Fedora 10 on my laptop and boot times are in the order of one minute and login to the KDE or Gnome session managers takes approx 30 seconds (login via command line takes about two seconds). The thing is I rarely log out, switch the machine off or even reboot unless I get a new kernel. Once I have logged in access time via a locked screen is two or three seconds. This equally applies to any member of my family where we have separate accounts but can switch between those accounts rapidly.
Yes having a fast boot time gives a certain flag waving right however you have to take everything in content and at the moment this "new" OS has a long way to go since it has to get a lot of community of support before it could be considered mainstream. This is not to say that no one will support this, personally I think there will be many who will and IMHO that is a good thing.
What you have said I fully agree with however put yourself in the role of the IT manager who has to explain this to a non technical Manager. Patching of any OS is very difficult to discuss with non technical people since you have to get all interested parties to understand why you are doing an upgrade and then to agree to a date and time that a set of updates are going to be applied.
With Linux you can easy provide a list of all packages that are on the system (rpm -qa) and then provide all interested parties with a explanation of what they actually are. If you use a package manger such as "yum", "apt-get", "yast",... you should be able to provide a list of all packages that will be updated without actually doing an update. In larger Linux environments it is usually a good idea to build a repository server which allows for the control of updates.
Getting technical is great with collogues but will confuse the non technical department heads so keep any explanation within their comfort zone. It is always a good idea to show managers how updates work with a hands on demonstration. I have found that the command line is much better for this. Believe me they love this since it is not highly technical and many do get a good understanding on what is going on. You can even put the data into a spreadsheet which really looks good.
In a commercial or government computing environment it does not matter if you have a Linux, Microsoft, Unix or any other OS you don't apply patches until you have tested them in a test environment. Even though a patch may work perfectly with the OS it may cause problems with certain applications and I would not like to be the one who has to go before management trying to explain why a so called innocuous patch just brought down the company database.
Any IT department should have a "Change Request" process in place and all concerned parties must authorise any changes and the date/time they can be implemented. I can now hear the excuses such as:
We are only a small company and can't afford this type of complexity.
This is unneeded paperwork.
This is going to cost.
I am quite sure that the simple list of excuses can easily be added to. The initial counter to all is "What do you perceive is the value your data?". Surprisingly a good Change Request process does not have to be complex or expensive although I have seen some that come close to driving people insane.
As far as the FUD coming from Microsoft centric people you are going to have a hard time with the Managers since most have little if any clue with regard to IT and just parrot phrase what they hear. The easiest way is not to get flustered and if you don't know say so but definitely find out from reliable sources. Under no circumstances attack Microsoft even though you are tempted since that is bringing yourself down to their level. A cool professional approach will always win over all but the most hardened Microsoft centric manager and even these people can be sidelined but take extreme care if you do this.
like the OSS crowd, i'm sure they merely sourced their data to fit their own agenda.
Yes like FUD.
OSS lacks QA - show me a OSS project that government is likely to use that has any quality assurances.
Really I guess you have not looked at Redhat or Novel support.
OSS takes control away from the customer as to who supplies their patches
Now that trolling. If you don't like the software then you can always write your own. Of course if you like the software you can post bug reports or even fix it yourself and if you don't have the expertise you can hire someone to do that. Try doing that with closed source or proprietary software. As for the people who supply patches all you need to do is look at the "Help" or even the source to get the name of the people who are maintaining the package.
these are merely the security concerns. yes there is the usual stupid argument of being able to see the source code - but here is a clue for you - that's hellish expensive and blows the OSS is cheap myth out of the water.
Sigh! If you have done a cost benefit analysis then you would clearly see that a "supported" open source operating system is much more cheaper and reliable than a proprietary solution. You honestly don't think that just because you install a Linux distribution that everything is going to work forever, you need an administrator and depending on how much you value your data you will need some level of vendor support which is normally much cheaper than a proprietary solution.
The grammar Nazi in me states you should always start a sentence with a capital letter as is a stand alone "I". After all that is very basic English.
I think you will find that this Bill allows the politicians to go to the people who have their signal cut off early and say "Well we wanted the switch off delayed but the (inset derogatory terms) TV stations went early". "It's not our fault".
Yes a nice "get out of jail card free" for the politicians;-)
Actually in Australia the switch off year is in 2013, however DTV has been available since 2001 and the take-up rate has been significant however there will still be many who won't make the switch until the standard TV broadcast is finally switched off.
What they need to do is limit all users to not be administrators.
I do this now but with Linux. Many tasks can easily be accomplished without being root. On my laptop (Fedora 10) no one but myself has access to the root password, however I work as a normal user. If I need private software I can still install without privilege (MS Windows can do this as well) although shared software does need to be installed by root.
The problem for MS Window users is many have been brought up to expect having system admin privileges as a right and it is very hard for Microsoft to convince them that they should change. Basically this is a failing on Microsoft's part.
Uhm...
Microsoft has had Windows setup to not require administrative privileges for many, many, many years.
I blame software developers who abused the fact that people did.
You are right and some companies do actually force this on all their corporate desktops. In the majority of cases this is not done and most people especially home computer owners don't do this. As for blaming developers well you could lay some of the blame at them but that is really unfair since it was Microsoft who made it so easy for people to give themselves administer privileges.
Looking at Linux/Unix security. Basically from inception a normal user only had limited privileges and to do anything as a system admin required knowing the root password or being a member of a sudo (1980's) group that had particular privileges. This was instilled in Unix and now Linux users from the time they started using the system. This is not to say that some users are stupid enough to work as root, however those that do this, especially in the corporate world are usually brought to task very quickly. The same has never been true with Microsoft OS's.
When a vendor writes software for Unix/Linux they should know and if not are usually told in no uncertain terms that requiring root access for their particular product requires a "please explain" because most applications don't require root privilege although there are exceptions. Even installation especially if the software is being tested is normally set up in what is called a "sand-box". Again Microsoft fails on enforcing this (Vista was an attempt).
Well it's not costing anything to people who aren't in the USA. It is however providing a great source of insight and amusement into the working of the US Government, however before people outside the US think this attitude of "Well it did not work this time around, why not try again but with different wording" does not apply to their government I suggest "think again" after all they are politicians.
From the article
About 6.5 million households are not ready for the transition, according to the latest data from Nielsen Ratings.
IMHO even if you waited 10 years you would most likely find that over 10 million households were not ready and the cycle repeats.
I live in Australia and the government here has mandated 2013 as the switch over. Why so long? Well your guess is as good as mine, however Digital TV is already available here for over two years and many people are using it. Come 2013 I would not be surprised if we don't see some politicians lobby for an Analogue TV extension because of the above.
It does not matter what researchers come up with you will always have people who agree and disagree. Running a so called brain training program on a computer, game machine and comparing the results to "pencil and paper" or just memory training is IMHO a lesson in futility since the researcher needs to capture all information otherwise the results are going to be flawed.
I personally think that before you present a subject with a test you need to ask the following:
Are the exercises challenging?
Are the exercises fun? This is going to be subjective.
Is the person going to be motivated to take all the exercises?
There are so many more factors and I am quite sure many could add to the above list. In the case of the Nintendo DS Brain/Eye training programs you may find that many older people will find the tests annoying or just not appropriate to their life values. In some respects you can compare the people who like these programs to people who like crosswords or Sudoku or any other so called brain training exercises.
As for "Wii fit", you will get people who will use the tool to get fit although again this is subjective but there are many who will start and just get bored and give up.
It definitely worked for me. As a kid I used to breeze through simple maths, but as an adult I started losing that touch, frequently needing calculators to do simple math. But when I started using Brain Age everyday, I've gone back to my maths skill level as a kid.
That is great however you really have to ask the question, what did I really learn? Many years ago I learnt a method of rapidly calculating basic arithmetic such that I could easily multiply or divide six digit or more numbers in a few seconds without a calculator which totally confounded the people who were testing me at the time. Was that useful? - well yes at the time but today I mainly use abstract methodology to arrive at solutions and in many cases there is no mathematical answer.
Red Hat, on the other hand, primarily sells a service. Their products, including an extended open-source operating system that they didn't spend that much on development for (relatively), are really just vehicles to get support contracts.
Yes Redhat sells a service however you need to qualify what that service involves. If you purchase a service from Redhat you get normally pick from three types, 1) Web Based 2 day response (the cheapest), 2) 12x5 telephone support and 3) 24x7 telephone support. See the following prices.
What this means is Redhat must provide professionally trained service personnel who provide support over the phone by diagnosing and solving quite complex problems on all supported versions of the Rehat OS's. This type of service does not come cheap particularly when you consider that Redhat is a world wide organisation and they have to deal with customers from all over the world some who don't even speak English.
I don't know if you have ever attended any of the Redhat courses, if you have you will know they are not easy so you can't get anyone off the street to provide Redhat support.
Writing a mutating worm or virus is quite simple especially if your virus checker is looking for a signature. You can put your writeable areas in your binary which will make it harder for a checker to find. All that the virus/worm needs to do is add a random set of characters each time it infects it's host. This is not to say this can't be done in Linux/Unix, it can, however if the person using the Linux/Unix OS has any smarts they won't work as root but as themselves and do regular backups. A good and tested Disaster Recovery plan is also great to have.
If the computers you manage do get worms or viruses the quickest way to recover is have a good and quick disaster recovery process handy and a very good excuse or a good CV if you have to explain to all the managers (we all know they never get viruses or worms) of the firm you work for, why all or some of your MS Windows boxes got infected:-)
In Linux/Unix it rather difficult to hide a so-called root kit since all you have to do is type "ls -a" or "ls -la". Of course you really need to know what you are looking for such as files or directories called ". " (ie "." and a space) or something like that. Even an inocuous "." file or directory may be hiding some mallware however a little knowledge on this goes a long way. To make things easier there are some good root kit finders that you can download and run.
If you have any Linux/Unix experience especially with the command line root kits are so easy to find (pun intended). Cleaning off a root kit in Linux/Unix is also easy and you don't need to become root, however if you work as root (ie. the Microsoft approach) then I have no sympathy for you since if you find a root kit you most likely have been "rooted" and I would strongly advise a re-installation of your OS and a good kick up the rear end;-)
On a more interesting note. Because Sony is using Linux then they have to provide the source. Hiding something in the kernel is not a good idea since if you are found out then the company that does this will find that the GPL has really sharp teeth.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh, no. I have extended basic cable, and have all analog. They are going to move it to digital at some point (unrelated to the OTA digital, but IMHO they're using the confusion as a reason for switching). Actually, I have two Tivos that can use cable cards, so I guess technically I have a "digital converter box", but it's not being used for that.
(We can get 'free' boxes that will convert the equivalent of extended basic channels -- but that doesn't help S3 Tivos.)
If you have cable (analogue or digital) you don't have to worry about a converter box since your TV acts as a monitor. If you have a HDTV with a digital or HD tuner you don't have to worry about a converter box. The same is true if you have a HDD DVD/BD recorder with a digial or HD tuner and again your TV acts as a monitor. The only time you do need a converter box is when your TV has a analogue tuner connected to a TV antenna. One thing many people don't realise is they may have to change their TV antenna as well to pick-up digital signals properly.
Nearly all TV's from the 1970's on (some much earlier) have at the very least composite (ie. AV or that yellow plug) video in. In fact most modern TV's have in addition component (red, blue, green and L/R audio), SCART (mainly European) and possibly HDMI inputs. By using any of these a TV becomes a monitor. Of course what ever is supplying video to the TV must be able to pick up a Digital TV (SD or HD) signal.
But people will die without tornado information, among other things. Yes, radio is an option. When dealing with people, however, sometimes a graphical representation is just much more useful.
There are not many states were tornado's occur. From what I have seen not being an American there are tornado warning systems set up in all towns and cities where there is a possibility of a tornado.
What about the hearing impaired? Well you could argue that TV can help but lets be honest here how many people, hearing impaired or not remained glued to their TV in the off chance they may be warned of a pending disaster, most watch TV for entertainment. As for graphical representations most people don't know how to understand them. Radio, police, national guard and friendly neighbours do more to help in early warnings of pending disasters than TV can.
That's totally on topic. They're spending money on coupons to make money selling off the freed up frequencies.
I doubt it, although to be fair you need to calculate the cost of the whole exercise compared to the money the government gets back through the sale of the freed up frequency spectrum. Call me pessimistic if you like but it looks like a politician's smoke and mirrors exercise.
I too would want a PS3, but I won't buy one and wouldn't be able to afford the games so I would need to have it cracked. (Which is probably one huge reason they sell less.)
If you have a Wii or Xbox360 how do you afford the games since they nearly all the same price as an equivalent PS3 game. By saying "I need to have it cracked" sort of puts you in the pirate category ;-)
If sony didn't want their console associated with shoddy games then they certainly failed, just go to gamespot, IGN, etc and see how many crappy games are on the platform (like all consoles have).
You only have to take a look at the games over the last year for the four consoles (I am including the PS2 as well) and there are a few good games and a lot of IMHO crappy games of which the Wii takes the grand prize for shovel ware and PS2 ports. What makes you single the PS3 out all the consoles to have this issue?
... well, you get the picture instead of trying something a bit more innovative which may bomb.
I can understand if one of the Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony game studios brought out a bad game then the blame would be on the company game studio but blaming the console maker for a crappy game from a third party developer is just silly, you should put the blame on the game studio.
A simple example is "Alone in the Dark" (Atari and Eden Studios) which did not come out for the PS3 for quite a few months. Basically the game was awful to ok, however when the game was finally ported to the PS3 it wasn't stellar but it was a huge improvement over the PS2, Wii and Xbox360 versions. Who are you going to blame here?
Basically a bad game is the fault of the gaming studio which in some respects is not overly fair since it depends on what the buying public perceive as a good or bad game and unfortunately many game studios are taking the easy route (after all they are in the business of making money) when they find they have made a profitable game they do have a tendency to produce a part 2 then 3 then
You are right about the fun factor but what looks good on a small SDTV can look awful or at best mediocre on a larger HDTV's thereby reducing the so called fun factor. A combination of detailed graphics and fun can make a game exceptional, SD graphics and a fun make an a good game however a non fun game and high or low resolution graphics still makes a game that sucks.
:-)
As for "minuscule improvements in 3d graphics" I assume you are talking about comparing SD to HD. If you live in the USA your SD display (NTSC) is 720Ã--480 compared to PAL 720Ã--576. Now compare this to HD 1280Ã--720 and 1920Ã--1080 which are significantly better than what SD resolution offers and if you cannot see the difference I suggest a good Optometrist
The success of the Wii is has only benefited Nintendo and a few third party players with many games being shovel ware or PS2 ports. Most third party gaming houses are still programming for the Xbox360 and the PS3 and will continue to do so since that market is where they can make money. Personally I have yet to see many games on the Wii that make me want to buy the machine which is rather strange of me to say since I have had every single Nintendo machine from the NES.
I'd say Microsoft's only real worry for their next generation console is their media format- do they swallow their pride and go Bluray or go for a custom format? DVD isn't going to cut it next time round.
Microsoft have been saying for sometime that downloads are the way of the future however many people still like physical media and that is going to be a hard sell to wean people off CD. DVD and Blu-ray and purchase content via downloading. I personally don't think this is going to happen any time soon since even downloading a DVD via torrent can take many hours depending on your bandwidth.
Some people may have internet connections that can operate over 10Mbps and have unlimited uncapped bandwidth but the majority of people world wide don't have that or cannot afford it, so even though downloads may be the way of the future world wide we are no were near this goal. As games and media capacity gets larger downloading is becoming longer and less cost effective and that is not going to change any time soon.
Surprisingly Sony is doing quite well with people downloading content, however the media size of the downloads are relatively small as is the cost.
TV is much better than radio for dealing with severe weather, because being able to see the weather maps and storm tracks gives you a much better idea of what's going on. Going into tornado season in Oklahoma (where I grew up) without TV would make me a little uncomfortable.
Lets be honest here, how many people can read a weather map? In addition I think you will find that more people listen to the radio when they are driving or on some sort of transport than watch any form of TV. Yes TV can be informative (although many would say it is entertainment now) but usually when people are watching it.
The easiest and most efficient way of getting emergency information to the public particularly during daylight hours is radio. Forget about showing weather maps or trends a simple repeated verbal warning usually suffices. Even taking the hearing impaired into account a TV wont help that much unless they are watching it. After all only people who are in harms way are important not the person who is viewing the potential disaster thousands of kilometres or miles away.
A single distro has millions of lines of code that no one person has ever read, thus you're placing your trust in others that all of that code is doing what you think it's doing. Maybe it is. And maybe it's not
To a certain extent true but at least with Open Source Linux/Unix you can see the source and even modify if you can program or hire someone to do it. You can even replace it with a different distribution if you are not happy with the one you have and if you do it yourself he total cost to you is $0.00 and it is perfectly legal to do so.
:)
Placing your trust in others is no more different than driving a car. You hope it's reliable, you hope it's fuel won't destroy the engine, you hope that the road you are on has been properly maintained and you wish that slow driver in front of you would get out of your way
The only thing they will respond to is a mass boycott. And considering this is Windows, which is pretty much locked into most large scale networks as it is, not to mention end users' homes, good luck.
It seems to have worked with Vista.
If Microsoft's largest customers (IT departments) reject this version of windows over it's anti-piracy measures just like they rejected last version of windows over it's performance issues, you'll get your wish.
Mass boycott of Vista? That may have worked for the people who wanted to upgrade and decided that it was not worth it when XP was "good enough", however for many people Vista was not an option when purchasing a new PC. As far as the corporate was concerned many businesses had contracts in place and had already payed for their Vista upgrade whether they liked it or not. Unfortunately I don't see the adoption of MS Windows 7 being any different.
The only way this will change is when Government sectors insist of having Linux on their desktops and except for a few countries this is not happening very quickly.
But seriously, most of Australia was fooled by this tourist. Personally I saw the crap that our (Labour) state governments were doing and thought, FUCK THAT! So I stuck with the Libs.
The problem was we were only given a "one horse race" what with Howard stating he was not going to complete his term no wonder the majority voted Labour. Having seen what the Labour party had done in NSW I was not going to vote Labour, however the dilemma was who to really vote for.
:)
As for the TV shows how about adding "Home and Away" as well. I usually find that I can find plenty of things to do rather than watching those shows
One of the problems with Labour IMHO is they seem to listen to many of these "Holier than thou" Christian lobby groups.
Well it is open source and it does provide another OS alternative which IMHO is a good thing.
Fast boot times are fine if you have a home PC however differences of one to two minutes don't mean all that much in the server market where reliability and uptime are much more important.
I use Fedora 10 on my laptop and boot times are in the order of one minute and login to the KDE or Gnome session managers takes approx 30 seconds (login via command line takes about two seconds). The thing is I rarely log out, switch the machine off or even reboot unless I get a new kernel. Once I have logged in access time via a locked screen is two or three seconds. This equally applies to any member of my family where we have separate accounts but can switch between those accounts rapidly.
Yes having a fast boot time gives a certain flag waving right however you have to take everything in content and at the moment this "new" OS has a long way to go since it has to get a lot of community of support before it could be considered mainstream. This is not to say that no one will support this, personally I think there will be many who will and IMHO that is a good thing.
What you have said I fully agree with however put yourself in the role of the IT manager who has to explain this to a non technical Manager. Patching of any OS is very difficult to discuss with non technical people since you have to get all interested parties to understand why you are doing an upgrade and then to agree to a date and time that a set of updates are going to be applied.
... you should be able to provide a list of all packages that will be updated without actually doing an update. In larger Linux environments it is usually a good idea to build a repository server which allows for the control of updates.
With Linux you can easy provide a list of all packages that are on the system (rpm -qa) and then provide all interested parties with a explanation of what they actually are. If you use a package manger such as "yum", "apt-get", "yast",
Getting technical is great with collogues but will confuse the non technical department heads so keep any explanation within their comfort zone. It is always a good idea to show managers how updates work with a hands on demonstration. I have found that the command line is much better for this. Believe me they love this since it is not highly technical and many do get a good understanding on what is going on. You can even put the data into a spreadsheet which really looks good.
Any IT department should have a "Change Request" process in place and all concerned parties must authorise any changes and the date/time they can be implemented. I can now hear the excuses such as:
I am quite sure that the simple list of excuses can easily be added to. The initial counter to all is "What do you perceive is the value your data?". Surprisingly a good Change Request process does not have to be complex or expensive although I have seen some that come close to driving people insane.
As far as the FUD coming from Microsoft centric people you are going to have a hard time with the Managers since most have little if any clue with regard to IT and just parrot phrase what they hear. The easiest way is not to get flustered and if you don't know say so but definitely find out from reliable sources. Under no circumstances attack Microsoft even though you are tempted since that is bringing yourself down to their level. A cool professional approach will always win over all but the most hardened Microsoft centric manager and even these people can be sidelined but take extreme care if you do this.
like the OSS crowd, i'm sure they merely sourced their data to fit their own agenda.
Yes like FUD.
OSS lacks QA - show me a OSS project that government is likely to use that has any quality assurances.
Really I guess you have not looked at Redhat or Novel support.
OSS takes control away from the customer as to who supplies their patches
Now that trolling. If you don't like the software then you can always write your own. Of course if you like the software you can post bug reports or even fix it yourself and if you don't have the expertise you can hire someone to do that. Try doing that with closed source or proprietary software. As for the people who supply patches all you need to do is look at the "Help" or even the source to get the name of the people who are maintaining the package.
these are merely the security concerns. yes there is the usual stupid argument of being able to see the source code - but here is a clue for you - that's hellish expensive and blows the OSS is cheap myth out of the water.
Sigh! If you have done a cost benefit analysis then you would clearly see that a "supported" open source operating system is much more cheaper and reliable than a proprietary solution. You honestly don't think that just because you install a Linux distribution that everything is going to work forever, you need an administrator and depending on how much you value your data you will need some level of vendor support which is normally much cheaper than a proprietary solution.
The grammar Nazi in me states you should always start a sentence with a capital letter as is a stand alone "I". After all that is very basic English.
I think you will find that this Bill allows the politicians to go to the people who have their signal cut off early and say "Well we wanted the switch off delayed but the (inset derogatory terms) TV stations went early". "It's not our fault".
;-)
Yes a nice "get out of jail card free" for the politicians
The final date will be December 21, 2012.
Actually in Australia the switch off year is in 2013, however DTV has been available since 2001 and the take-up rate has been significant however there will still be many who won't make the switch until the standard TV broadcast is finally switched off.
What they need to do is limit all users to not be administrators.
I do this now but with Linux. Many tasks can easily be accomplished without being root. On my laptop (Fedora 10) no one but myself has access to the root password, however I work as a normal user. If I need private software I can still install without privilege (MS Windows can do this as well) although shared software does need to be installed by root.
The problem for MS Window users is many have been brought up to expect having system admin privileges as a right and it is very hard for Microsoft to convince them that they should change. Basically this is a failing on Microsoft's part.
Uhm... Microsoft has had Windows setup to not require administrative privileges for many, many, many years. I blame software developers who abused the fact that people did.
You are right and some companies do actually force this on all their corporate desktops. In the majority of cases this is not done and most people especially home computer owners don't do this. As for blaming developers well you could lay some of the blame at them but that is really unfair since it was Microsoft who made it so easy for people to give themselves administer privileges.
Looking at Linux/Unix security. Basically from inception a normal user only had limited privileges and to do anything as a system admin required knowing the root password or being a member of a sudo (1980's) group that had particular privileges. This was instilled in Unix and now Linux users from the time they started using the system. This is not to say that some users are stupid enough to work as root, however those that do this, especially in the corporate world are usually brought to task very quickly. The same has never been true with Microsoft OS's.
When a vendor writes software for Unix/Linux they should know and if not are usually told in no uncertain terms that requiring root access for their particular product requires a "please explain" because most applications don't require root privilege although there are exceptions. Even installation especially if the software is being tested is normally set up in what is called a "sand-box". Again Microsoft fails on enforcing this (Vista was an attempt).
From the article
About 6.5 million households are not ready for the transition, according to the latest data from Nielsen Ratings.
IMHO even if you waited 10 years you would most likely find that over 10 million households were not ready and the cycle repeats.
I live in Australia and the government here has mandated 2013 as the switch over. Why so long? Well your guess is as good as mine, however Digital TV is already available here for over two years and many people are using it. Come 2013 I would not be surprised if we don't see some politicians lobby for an Analogue TV extension because of the above.
I personally think that before you present a subject with a test you need to ask the following:
There are so many more factors and I am quite sure many could add to the above list. In the case of the Nintendo DS Brain/Eye training programs you may find that many older people will find the tests annoying or just not appropriate to their life values. In some respects you can compare the people who like these programs to people who like crosswords or Sudoku or any other so called brain training exercises.
As for "Wii fit", you will get people who will use the tool to get fit although again this is subjective but there are many who will start and just get bored and give up.
It definitely worked for me. As a kid I used to breeze through simple maths, but as an adult I started losing that touch, frequently needing calculators to do simple math. But when I started using Brain Age everyday, I've gone back to my maths skill level as a kid.
That is great however you really have to ask the question, what did I really learn? Many years ago I learnt a method of rapidly calculating basic arithmetic such that I could easily multiply or divide six digit or more numbers in a few seconds without a calculator which totally confounded the people who were testing me at the time. Was that useful? - well yes at the time but today I mainly use abstract methodology to arrive at solutions and in many cases there is no mathematical answer.
Red Hat, on the other hand, primarily sells a service. Their products, including an extended open-source operating system that they didn't spend that much on development for (relatively), are really just vehicles to get support contracts.
Yes Redhat sells a service however you need to qualify what that service involves. If you purchase a service from Redhat you get normally pick from three types, 1) Web Based 2 day response (the cheapest), 2) 12x5 telephone support and 3) 24x7 telephone support. See the following prices .
What this means is Redhat must provide professionally trained service personnel who provide support over the phone by diagnosing and solving quite complex problems on all supported versions of the Rehat OS's. This type of service does not come cheap particularly when you consider that Redhat is a world wide organisation and they have to deal with customers from all over the world some who don't even speak English.
I don't know if you have ever attended any of the Redhat courses, if you have you will know they are not easy so you can't get anyone off the street to provide Redhat support.
Writing a mutating worm or virus is quite simple especially if your virus checker is looking for a signature. You can put your writeable areas in your binary which will make it harder for a checker to find. All that the virus/worm needs to do is add a random set of characters each time it infects it's host. This is not to say this can't be done in Linux/Unix, it can, however if the person using the Linux/Unix OS has any smarts they won't work as root but as themselves and do regular backups. A good and tested Disaster Recovery plan is also great to have.
:-)
If the computers you manage do get worms or viruses the quickest way to recover is have a good and quick disaster recovery process handy and a very good excuse or a good CV if you have to explain to all the managers (we all know they never get viruses or worms) of the firm you work for, why all or some of your MS Windows boxes got infected
In Linux/Unix it rather difficult to hide a so-called root kit since all you have to do is type "ls -a" or "ls -la". Of course you really need to know what you are looking for such as files or directories called ". " (ie "." and a space) or something like that. Even an inocuous "." file or directory may be hiding some mallware however a little knowledge on this goes a long way. To make things easier there are some good root kit finders that you can download and run.
;-)
If you have any Linux/Unix experience especially with the command line root kits are so easy to find (pun intended). Cleaning off a root kit in Linux/Unix is also easy and you don't need to become root, however if you work as root (ie. the Microsoft approach) then I have no sympathy for you since if you find a root kit you most likely have been "rooted" and I would strongly advise a re-installation of your OS and a good kick up the rear end
On a more interesting note. Because Sony is using Linux then they have to provide the source. Hiding something in the kernel is not a good idea since if you are found out then the company that does this will find that the GPL has really sharp teeth.