While I think your idea would be interesting to try, and would probably even be helpful on a mainstream political news site, I think moderating that way is a Bad Thing in disguise. Such a system would very powerfully promote groupthink, which is a phenomenon that occurs quite easily even without "affiliation moderation" / "bias moderation" (for want of better terms).
Consider Slashdot, for example. There are occasions when groupthink can be particularly bad - take any article critical of Linux. What generally happens is that the points of the article (or points that other people raise) are refuted (sometimes not systematically, but even one line rejoinders), then modded up. Then someone disputes the refutations, and will be either modded down troll/flamebait, left as they are, and occasionally modded up. Then you typically have another round of refutations that get auto-modded up and the cycle continues.
It's discussion, Jim, but not as we know it. Now, to be fair, this doesn't happen on every story here; and it has been getting better in recent years, though it can be variable. In fact, the discussion is primarily the reason I spend so much time on/. - despite the trolls, frist psots, and Soviet Russia posts, there will be a good deal of genuinely intelligent discourse.
To get back to the parent's moderation idea. I think it could be useful in a couple of cases:
Case 1: Generic Political News Site - delivers headlines and articles based on party affiliation. Mainly there as a story aggregator, with little / no discussion. Maybe spits out a custom RSS feed based on a combination of the moderation and your preferences.
Case 2: Political News Discussion Site - hybridise/.-style editorial selection with moderation. Most stories will be those that the group wants, but editors can most stories that are important despite making a group uncomfortable.
Admittedly those scenarios are fairly similar, but someone could take them and spin them into a service a good few folk would use. Of course it depends on your objective - do you want to provide a selection of interesting stories that folk can read over lunch (case 1), or do you want to provide stories while promoting discussion (case 2). I'm firmly in the discussion camp. In fact, here on/. I recently friended a former foe because a post of his made me realise that he was making posts that went against the groupthink, but had 'truthiness' and were valid counterpoints. Note that I don't agree with all of his opinions, but I do think his expressing them is important. I might even just try and find the post that made me foe him in the first place...
Quite correct; sildenafil causes NO to be released into the corpora cavernosa, triggering the release of GC (guanylate cyclase) which leads to vasodilation. Then you have an increased local bloodflow... and where you go from there is nobody else's business.
I never thought my relatively basic education in anatomy and pharmacology would be used in posts to/. though.
So what you're saying is that there is an insufficient # of weaknesses and problems in Linux to warrant mounting endless gobs of third party software to workaround those problems.
Nope.
What will happen in 3 years when MS executes on their plan to enter the security space in a major way? There won't be any financial opening for HW vendors to install demoware any longer. IT would appear that both Linux and MS will be on equal financial footing then. MS will all of its 'good' functions built in, and Linux with basic designs that don't require those workarounds.
If and when MS does enter the security space in a major way, there will still be plenty of opportunity for HW vendors to include demoware. Consider:
1) Given their history, MS is unlikely to get security software right the first time. If they did, security software such as antivirus would be moot as Windows itself would already be secure. Even with MS selling a product, the security companies would still compete, and arguably pay higher fees to the likes of Dell since they would need to promote themselves more.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
2) Even if the product is good, the current security vendors won't disappear overnight. Worthiness alone does not a successful product make. Marketing plays a big role - you can bet your buns the security vendors would up the ante with heavier marketing (ie more trial versions, ads, etc). MS would bundle it (a trial version) with Windows you say? The other companies would cry 'antitrust' as soon as bundling was so much as hinted at. Besides, the security companies could still pay the OEMs to include their trials and disable the MS one.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
3) Let's enter fairyland and say that MS fixes / provides an AV solution for ALL security problems ever. No need for Windows-based antivirus solutions. Right. But that isn't the only kind of software with trial versions. Subscription based web TV services, office products, accounting software - not great examples but they are just off the top of my head. Heck even the useless crap like virtual characters (eBuddies? eSomething anyway) would probably pay a couple bucks to have a trial on there. Of course, Dell still has to balance including this stuff for the revenue with not pissing the users off.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
What I would say is there isn't so much scope for including Linux demoware for anything, which is a good thing - for the end users. As you say, there are insufficient vulnerabilities known about for AV stuff. For other software there is generally a Free/Libre solution included with the distro. The other reason is that in the main the people creating the resource-hogging trials for Windows haven't targeted Linux - yet.
Anyway you seemed to miss the main thrust of that part of my argument (which is fair enough as I made quite a few points in the post), which went: providing GNU/Linux wouldn't save that much over providing Windows.
Now, I want Dell to sell (and not just sell, but promote)
Linux as much as the next Slashdotter, but I don't think this alone
will necessarily convince them to do it. There was an insightful comment
posted by compugeek on the suggestion in question:
This would be great, except that it really wouldn't be that much
cheaper. OEM copies of Windows are inexpensive already, and the
bloatware that helps Dell keep prices low is not necessarily compatible
with Linux.
Head of nail, meet hammer. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the
case that Dell made quite a tidy bit of cash from those preinstalled
trials. Symantec (or is it McAfee now>) especially - a lot of people
just let their 6 month subscription expire*, but many will pay for more.
Often you see comments about how Dell etcetera could knock $150 off the
price by offering a Window-less solution where this patently isn't
the case. Anyone care to point out how roughly much the OEM copy of
Windows actually costs Dell per PC? (I say roughly as there is
likely to be a special deal in effect for someone of Dell's
magnitude).
To make things worse, Dell would have to update their tech support
services to help Linux users as well as Windows users, which would be
especially tricky considering that there are still some people who
couldn't tell you which OS they were running even with step-by-step
instructions.
Again true, but less of an issue I think. Training for tech support will
be needed, of course; but after an initial cost, it shouldn't cost any
more than supporting Windows, and one could make the argument that a
Linux box is less likely to become infested with malware and hence less
support requests. There are other considerations of course, but I don't
see why there would be significantly more requests.
The comment about the user not being able to tell which OS will
generally have is a tad cynical. I know users are stupid yadda yadda,
but I would presume the OS's in question have obvious splash
screens (Ubuntu does, can't vouch for OpenSuse, and I think
Fedora does). A trivial matter in any case.
Dell would be a great company to help Linux gain ground, if they could
offer tested Linux-compatible configurations. People associate Dell with
easy, so if Dell could design a decent line of computers that came with
Kubuntu (for example) pre-installed, they could probably sell it.
Dell have it in them to create an install of Linux that does indeed
make it easy - if they did the legwork to make sure sound, video etc all
worked properly (eg my laptop doesn't multiplex sound correctly in all cases,
though this might be due to certain apps misbehaving; I don't have the
inclination to investigate) and out of the box, it would be a damn good
system for the email-and-browse-the-interweb crowd.
Of course, those 13 968 (at time of writing) won't all translate into
direct sales, so it still may not make financial sense for Dell to do
this. If they did though, the repercussions would be interesting. If it
started gaining traction, it would start alarm bells ringing (not to
mention chairs flying) in Redmond. You'd probably see more
competitive licensing from Microsoft, heavier promotion of Windows Vista
(or just the Windows brand in general), and possibly the strong-arm
tactics we've all come to know and (not) love. It would also send a
message to other OEMs that there was a viable market for Linux, so we
would probably see similar offers from other system builders. If it
really got going, it would also send an unmistakable message to
the hardware manufacturers. Interesting indeed.
All that said, sadly it probably won't happen.
----------
*A friend of mine (a smart guy) bought a Dell laptop. Included was a 6 month trial of Norton. I told him to remove it and install a better AV because of performance issues, and it would end up nagging him. He says it wouldn't bother him. Flash forward to 6 months later and he is complaining about it slowing the likes of Battlefield 2, it tabbing him out at inopportune times, and just being a pest in general. Still he keeps it. Why don't folk listen or learn?
"No it doesn't matter. While England doesn't spell out its free speech rights as absolutely as the US..."
Please, please, please. On behalf of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and all the UK dependent territories, I beg the following:
Repeat after me: England != UK
I'm not doing this to be pedantic - I know the US media sometimes uses them interchangeably. However, laws differ in the different countries of the UK. Examples: property law in Scotland has a different basis from England and Wales; criminal trials are handled differently, and so forth. IANAL.
MySQL, Linux, and other successful open source projects all have this in
common: a Linus Torvalds sort of figure, a benevolent dictator with the
humility to see the value in other people's work. [...] At Samba, founded in 1992 to provide file and print capabilities across Windows, Unix, and Linux, it's the diplomatic yet decisive Jeremy Allison.
I'd add that a good characteristic is that these 'benevolent dictators' have a good habit of speaking out on matters of importance. For LT, it is about GPL v3 - and although I may disagree with his conclusions, the debate is valuable. With JRA it was taking a principled stand against a deal that he saw as damaging the community, resigingin
protest from Novell (and was/is now being snapped up by Google?).
A project is more likely to succeed if they have an open-minded, forward thinking leader who doesn't shirk the big issues. Of course, picking battles is important - you probably won't hear ESR talking about maintaining biodiversity in freshwater lakes, or RMS warn people about the rapid spread of Lyme Disease any time soon. Still, being able to spot potential external troubles can be just as important as spotting potential internal ones.
Reading through the current comments, I see financial suggestions, 'organise your time' suggestions, 'clear out unwanted stuff' suggestions, and the obligatory 'don't waste time posting to/.' jokes. And in Soviet Russia, resolutions make you!
Well, I have four slightly different resolutions to what has been suggested. They have been on the cards for a while now, but I figured I'd bite the bullet and actually give them a shot in 2007. With no further prelude, here they are:
Stop procrastinating / wasting time.
At the moment I do waste *far* too much time on inconsequential diversions (hi,/. !). This is my attempt to curtail such wastes of time. It is tremendously helped by the fact I've nearly stopped playing games (besides the occasional online game with my buddies). I'm not sure quite how I'm going to ensure I stick to it, but I may try filling in a schedule at the start of each day and sticking to that (which I'm loathe to do as I enjoy flexibility). In all honesty this is probably the least important of my resolutions, and as long as I can keep down my 'wasted time' as far as possible I'll be happy.
Learn Spanish
I don't need to justify this (I have my own reasons for wanting to learn other languages), but I would strongly recommend taking up a foreign language. Barry Farber has a very good method for teaching yourself (and his words are quite motivating too) in a way that will meet your goals (eg mastery of a single language Vs casual chat in a few).
Learn a musical instrument (or two)
Again, I have my own reasons for learning to play music (guitar and keyboard); and I would similarly encourage people to try it - no matter what stage of life you are and no matter what experience you have.
In highlighting these resolutions my point is to suggest you do something that serves two purposes: 1) it should tax you - the brain loves a challenge (admittedly I might be preaching to the choir with that one); and 2) it should be quite different from what you do for a living. For example, if you are a software engineer / codemonkey by trade, I don't think you will gain much by making a resolution 'contribute more code to OSS projects' (though of course you should feel free to do so). Take up something more esoteric instead: painting, music, or a language.
Plus, from an environmental standpoint, each step in the food chain only retains something like 50% (I can't remember the actual number) of the sun's energy from the previous step.
I work in the NHS. I hope to one day practice clinically for the NHS. I usually like to espouse the benefits of a nationalised healthcare system, but fuckups of this magnitude piss me off. Aside from the fact that other organizations can do better with less (see NASA, etc), these kind of things normally come back to the same mistake: failure to plan (design) properly.
Even looking at some of the touted features in the summary, I can see bad decisions:
"...allow for the electronic storage and retrieval of patient medical records..."
We have this already. It doesn't work. Well, I can't speak for hospitals - the only IT system I've seen in use in hospitals is what looked like an old version of Unix. That said, it looked like it (mostly) worked. In the surgeries I work in, we use GPASS. It doesn't work. When it does, it runs like a dog. Case in point: yesterday, we had the server in our practice go down. ALL STAFF (clinical and clerical - doctors, nurses, admin staff, receptionists) were unable to use their computers until the server came back up. It takes 20 minutes for the server to come back up, so fortunately it happened towards the end of the day (and not during a busy 'flu clinic), so disruption wasn't as bad as it could have been.
So essentially what they want to do is replace a barely working decentralised solution with a nonfunctional centralised one. Can anyone say "single point of failure" ?
"...permit patients to set up appointments via their computers..."
Haha! All I can say is "yeah, right". We currently have a booking system designed to minimize defaulting an appointment, which has the result that the doctors have less time wasted, and therefore more time to see patients. And still we get complaints. A patient led system would be chaos. I can see the benefit for hospital referrals, which are usually made comparatively well in advance, although the departments normally send out appointments themselves.
"...and let doctors electronically transmit prescriptions to local pharmacies"
This doesn't help that much, since the physical copies still need to be sent for verification. Scripts can be phoned through, which is convenient enough. Perhaps this could be of more use to hospital doctors, although they don't normally act completely independent of GPs - care is normally shared (letters exchanged, phone calls if necessary, etc) anyway.
It all comes back to bad decisions - first the politicians make the bad decision to announce a new nationwide IT system that will bring the NHS into the 21st century. Then the managers make bad decisions on what features to implement to make it the 'ultimate IT upgrade'. Finally, some ill-concieved, vague spec is handed to the software engineers and those putting the hardware together. The result... well, doesn't work.
And all it cost was £12B. Or maybe double that...
Sorry for the rant, but I have to work with some systems which are pretty abysmal in some respects (mousewheel scrolling our appointment list causes errors, to pick one off the top of my head). I'd like some choice, like being able to use linux/*bsd/solaris/whatever on a *server* instead of windows. More importantly, I'd like a NHS IT project that actually worked for a reasonable sum.
If anyone working in the NHS has a more optimistic view than me, I'd really like to hear it. And if any of the GPASS devs read/. : get a new project manager!
Nethack was good fun, but I don't play it so often now for fear of losing months of my life. DoomRL (Wiki) is fun to play for a short while - a "coffee break" game, as they call it.
The fact that he is going through this for pointing out a flaw is pretty horrifying. That said, hopefully the justice system will 'do justice' to keep this guy out of prison. Even still at best he's going to be pretty shaken up by this for a while to come, and probably be out a fairly sizable chunk of money in legal defense; at worst, he's gonna have a pretty horrible time (can't check punishments as all but final 2 of the USC links The Fine Summary are 404s). All for pointing out what should be a fairly apparent flaw in a 'security' system. I guess the guys at the FBI just like arresting folk for things like that. Hell, why didn't they arrest Andy Bowers of Slate for his research / article too?
Also, can some pro-2nd amendment folk go and give him some "legal defence"? You know, protect people from the government and all that...;-)
Following these Spamhaus stories, I see a lot of comments from the/. denizens along the lines of "Spamhaus provides a list which is optional to use, so what is the big deal?". I agree with this sentiment, however e360insight's angle was that Spamhaus was denying them business by calling them a spammer. Of course, this entailed adding them to a list which administrators used to curb unwanted emails getting through. That's my reading (IANAL etc etc); if I'm wrong, please correct me.
Unfortunately it seems like Spamhaus went about defending this incorrectly ("I don't recognize the authority of this court, take it to the Federal court", "Okay", "I don't recognize the authority of the Federal court..."), which has complicated matters. I'd have liked to see how this would have turned out had it A) been defended correctly or B) no authority besides the UK courts recognized in the first place. Still, I think this has a little way to run before we see the end of this.
I know he may not bethe most favourite of people around here, but Steve Gibson was able to spy on the IRC command & control channel of a botnet a few years ago. It was precipitated by a DDoS on his site, which he investigated rather thoroughly.
Some of the article is quite interesting, some is obvious, some is ego-boosting self-congratulatory statements, and some of it is his "teh XP can create complete 'UNIX sockets' OH NOES!" propaganda. Still worth a read, even if it is a few years old.
Agreed. I was pretty miffed about the lack of S3 & K et al, but the Shining series was a bunch of great games. I spent countless hours playing and replaying the Sonic games and Shining Force 1 -- time unrivalled even by modern games (no I don't play WoW). I'll admit the rest of the games on offer aren't bad, but, as noted above and in other comments, there are some surprising omissions. Makes you wonder - did Sony/Sega listen to the community (or even common sense) when choosing the games for publication on this compilation? Or were they watching their bankroll for "Sega Genesis Collection Volume 2, for PSP, PS2 and PS3" ?
TFA doesn't seem to mention a 'developer' / porter / publisher, but I guess Sega would be a sound guess. You make a good point actually; in a sense, Sony is getting good PR from this both ways.
To Sega, they can say:"We're good guys. We are putting up roadblocks to try and halt homebrew development, and are keeping the average user away from Genesis emulators. You guys get to rerelease old games and we both make money!"
To users, they can say:"Hey, look! We have some classic Genesis games officially and easily (for a very reasonable fee) avaliable to play on the PSP! Just like you wanted! See, we're good guys! We told you it would be an innovative console (and you don't need to bother with those so-called 'homebrewers')."
I say (again): "We paid for it; we own it. Let us do what we damn well like with our hardware."
Sonic Mega Collection Plus (PS2) has both of the games you mentioned, plus many more
I appreciate the sentiment, but this announcement is newsworthy (to me) mainly because of the announcement of these games for the *PSP*. The PS2 is a neat system, but if I'm playing a fixed console, why don't I just fire up the games on my original Genesis (à la Mega Drive over here)? Better still, I can play them on my PC, and take advantage of save states and save state 'hacking' to make the game do interesting things. I can also take screenshots / recordings easier on the PC, and I can store my *entire* game collection in a fairly small space, and take it with me on a USB stick. Plus, I'e seen (though do correct me if I'm wrong) that you need to play game X for Y number of times before you can 'unlock' other games. Artificial restrictions suck. NB I came across this on GameFaqs for some Sonic-related + other classics game collection if you want to look before I'm refuted.
Now, playing on the PSP is a different matter. It's better than a USB stick since you can play *anywhere*, so long as you have power. I'm sure there are smart homebrew developers that were able to port all the handy features (eg savestates etc) of the PC emulator counterparts. That is exactly the kind of thing I want from my PSP, and part of my rationale for buying one when they came out.
I guess what irritated me about this collection was: 1) Sony wanting to say "Hey, we're into classic games too!" whilst trying frantically to lock out homebrew developers (wouldn't it be apropos to have a further lock-out firmware update included on the UMD with this collection, mandatory to play the games?) and 2) No Sonic 3 + K:'(
I'll admit, when I saw this I thought "Excellent, a chance to do what I really want: play the classic games I love, portably". Then I realised that Sony wasn't doing a Good Thing (TM) at all. The Good Thing would be to stop messing with the firmware with every damn update and let the homebrew developers in. Give me the ability to run a Genesis emulator without jumping through contrived hoops (which are really holes in Sony's attempted patching), and without a chance of bricking an expensive piece of kit. Hell, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount, say $5-10, to 'unlock' the PSP to do homebrew stuff. I don't think such a move would be morally right (and probably not financially right for Sony, what with support), but I *really* like the old Genesis games.
As for the game lineup itself... well, it's good, but they could've done better. Golden Axe is plain fun, and Phantasy Star will keep you entertained for quite a while. Sonic 1 and 2 are *excellent*, but they missed the best of the lot: Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles. I can't believe this is by accident. I smell a "Genesis Collection Vol II" in the works.
Will I buy this collection? Nah. true, it's the right sort of idea -- and multiplayer makes it *almost* worthwhile -- but I just don't agree with either the method or the game choice. So come on Sony, let us use our hardware the way we damn well please, and do what we will with emulators and other nice things.
(...and while you're at it, let us rip UMD games to memory sticks. Those things are sloooow. kthxbye)
Although in some ways the pervasion of Google as a verb might possibly be a Bad Thing (TM) for them (as reflected in earlier comments), they just appear petty to people by doing this. I would have thought such widespread use just reflects the strength of their brand.
Adobe also gets their knickers in a twist about the use of 'Photoshop' as a verb. Though I'm not totally sure it's not meant in a 'It's funny. Laugh' sense...
Yes. Battlefield 2 has quite low pings for me (reported as low as 14ms on some servers), although I have a feeling this is a misrepresentation. Even still, the point I made is that this card will almost certainly not help any 'lag' you are suffering from. A big component of 'lag' in BF2 (and other such games) is graphics processing (GPU/CPU/memory-bound), not network latency. Depsite what TFA(s) want you to believe with their OTT marketing, spending $280 on this card will not help! Upgrade or buy a new, different component instead.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think your idea would be interesting to try, and would probably even be helpful on a mainstream political news site, I think moderating that way is a Bad Thing in disguise. Such a system would very powerfully promote groupthink, which is a phenomenon that occurs quite easily even without "affiliation moderation" / "bias moderation" (for want of better terms).
Consider Slashdot, for example. There are occasions when groupthink can be particularly bad - take any article critical of Linux. What generally happens is that the points of the article (or points that other people raise) are refuted (sometimes not systematically, but even one line rejoinders), then modded up. Then someone disputes the refutations, and will be either modded down troll/flamebait, left as they are, and occasionally modded up. Then you typically have another round of refutations that get auto-modded up and the cycle continues.
It's discussion, Jim, but not as we know it. Now, to be fair, this doesn't happen on every story here; and it has been getting better in recent years, though it can be variable. In fact, the discussion is primarily the reason I spend so much time on /. - despite the trolls, frist psots, and Soviet Russia posts, there will be a good deal of genuinely intelligent discourse.
To get back to the parent's moderation idea. I think it could be useful in a couple of cases:
Case 1: Generic Political News Site - delivers headlines and articles based on party affiliation. Mainly there as a story aggregator, with little / no discussion. Maybe spits out a custom RSS feed based on a combination of the moderation and your preferences.
Case 2: Political News Discussion Site - hybridise /.-style editorial selection with moderation. Most stories will be those that the group wants, but editors can most stories that are important despite making a group uncomfortable.
Admittedly those scenarios are fairly similar, but someone could take them and spin them into a service a good few folk would use. Of course it depends on your objective - do you want to provide a selection of interesting stories that folk can read over lunch (case 1), or do you want to provide stories while promoting discussion (case 2). I'm firmly in the discussion camp. In fact, here on /. I recently friended a former foe because a post of his made me realise that he was making posts that went against the groupthink, but had 'truthiness' and were valid counterpoints. Note that I don't agree with all of his opinions, but I do think his expressing them is important. I might even just try and find the post that made me foe him in the first place...
Quite correct; sildenafil causes NO to be released into the corpora cavernosa, triggering the release of GC (guanylate cyclase) which leads to vasodilation. Then you have an increased local bloodflow... and where you go from there is nobody else's business.
I never thought my relatively basic education in anatomy and pharmacology would be used in posts to /. though.
Yeah, I hear they have pills you can take for that.
Nope.
If and when MS does enter the security space in a major way, there will still be plenty of opportunity for HW vendors to include demoware. Consider:
1) Given their history, MS is unlikely to get security software right the first time. If they did, security software such as antivirus would be moot as Windows itself would already be secure. Even with MS selling a product, the security companies would still compete, and arguably pay higher fees to the likes of Dell since they would need to promote themselves more.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
2) Even if the product is good, the current security vendors won't disappear overnight. Worthiness alone does not a successful product make. Marketing plays a big role - you can bet your buns the security vendors would up the ante with heavier marketing (ie more trial versions, ads, etc). MS would bundle it (a trial version) with Windows you say? The other companies would cry 'antitrust' as soon as bundling was so much as hinted at. Besides, the security companies could still pay the OEMs to include their trials and disable the MS one.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
3) Let's enter fairyland and say that MS fixes / provides an AV solution for ALL security problems ever. No need for Windows-based antivirus solutions. Right. But that isn't the only kind of software with trial versions. Subscription based web TV services, office products, accounting software - not great examples but they are just off the top of my head. Heck even the useless crap like virtual characters (eBuddies? eSomething anyway) would probably pay a couple bucks to have a trial on there. Of course, Dell still has to balance including this stuff for the revenue with not pissing the users off.
Still a financial opening to bundle demoware.
What I would say is there isn't so much scope for including Linux demoware for anything, which is a good thing - for the end users. As you say, there are insufficient vulnerabilities known about for AV stuff. For other software there is generally a Free/Libre solution included with the distro. The other reason is that in the main the people creating the resource-hogging trials for Windows haven't targeted Linux - yet.
Anyway you seemed to miss the main thrust of that part of my argument (which is fair enough as I made quite a few points in the post), which went: providing GNU/Linux wouldn't save that much over providing Windows .
Now, I want Dell to sell (and not just sell, but promote) Linux as much as the next Slashdotter, but I don't think this alone will necessarily convince them to do it. There was an insightful comment posted by compugeek on the suggestion in question:
Head of nail, meet hammer. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that Dell made quite a tidy bit of cash from those preinstalled trials. Symantec (or is it McAfee now>) especially - a lot of people just let their 6 month subscription expire*, but many will pay for more. Often you see comments about how Dell etcetera could knock $150 off the price by offering a Window-less solution where this patently isn't the case. Anyone care to point out how roughly much the OEM copy of Windows actually costs Dell per PC? (I say roughly as there is likely to be a special deal in effect for someone of Dell's magnitude).
Again true, but less of an issue I think. Training for tech support will be needed, of course; but after an initial cost, it shouldn't cost any more than supporting Windows, and one could make the argument that a Linux box is less likely to become infested with malware and hence less support requests. There are other considerations of course, but I don't see why there would be significantly more requests.
The comment about the user not being able to tell which OS will generally have is a tad cynical. I know users are stupid yadda yadda, but I would presume the OS's in question have obvious splash screens (Ubuntu does, can't vouch for OpenSuse, and I think Fedora does). A trivial matter in any case.
Dell have it in them to create an install of Linux that does indeed make it easy - if they did the legwork to make sure sound, video etc all worked properly (eg my laptop doesn't multiplex sound correctly in all cases, though this might be due to certain apps misbehaving; I don't have the inclination to investigate) and out of the box, it would be a damn good system for the email-and-browse-the-interweb crowd.
Of course, those 13 968 (at time of writing) won't all translate into direct sales, so it still may not make financial sense for Dell to do this. If they did though, the repercussions would be interesting. If it started gaining traction, it would start alarm bells ringing (not to mention chairs flying) in Redmond. You'd probably see more competitive licensing from Microsoft, heavier promotion of Windows Vista (or just the Windows brand in general), and possibly the strong-arm tactics we've all come to know and (not) love. It would also send a message to other OEMs that there was a viable market for Linux, so we would probably see similar offers from other system builders. If it really got going, it would also send an unmistakable message to the hardware manufacturers. Interesting indeed.
All that said, sadly it probably won't happen.
----------
*A friend of mine (a smart guy) bought a Dell laptop. Included was a 6 month trial of Norton. I told him to remove it and install a better AV because of performance issues, and it would end up nagging him. He says it wouldn't bother him. Flash forward to 6 months later and he is complaining about it slowing the likes of Battlefield 2, it tabbing him out at inopportune times, and just being a pest in general. Still he keeps it. Why don't folk listen or learn?
Next up: Steve Ballmer says he's going to "fucking kill" DRM.
Please, please, please. On behalf of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and all the UK dependent territories, I beg the following:
Repeat after me: England != UK
I'm not doing this to be pedantic - I know the US media sometimes uses them interchangeably. However, laws differ in the different countries of the UK. Examples: property law in Scotland has a different basis from England and Wales; criminal trials are handled differently, and so forth. IANAL.
FTFA:
I'd add that a good characteristic is that these 'benevolent dictators' have a good habit of speaking out on matters of importance. For LT, it is about GPL v3 - and although I may disagree with his conclusions, the debate is valuable. With JRA it was taking a principled stand against a deal that he saw as damaging the community, resiging in protest from Novell (and was/is now being snapped up by Google?).
A project is more likely to succeed if they have an open-minded, forward thinking leader who doesn't shirk the big issues. Of course, picking battles is important - you probably won't hear ESR talking about maintaining biodiversity in freshwater lakes, or RMS warn people about the rapid spread of Lyme Disease any time soon. Still, being able to spot potential external troubles can be just as important as spotting potential internal ones.
Reading through the current comments, I see financial suggestions, 'organise your time' suggestions, 'clear out unwanted stuff' suggestions, and the obligatory 'don't waste time posting to /.' jokes. And in Soviet Russia, resolutions make you!
Well, I have four slightly different resolutions to what has been suggested. They have been on the cards for a while now, but I figured I'd bite the bullet and actually give them a shot in 2007. With no further prelude, here they are:
At the moment I do waste *far* too much time on inconsequential diversions (hi,
I don't need to justify this (I have my own reasons for wanting to learn other languages), but I would strongly recommend taking up a foreign language. Barry Farber has a very good method for teaching yourself (and his words are quite motivating too) in a way that will meet your goals (eg mastery of a single language Vs casual chat in a few).
Again, I have my own reasons for learning to play music (guitar and keyboard); and I would similarly encourage people to try it - no matter what stage of life you are and no matter what experience you have.
In highlighting these resolutions my point is to suggest you do something that serves two purposes: 1) it should tax you - the brain loves a challenge (admittedly I might be preaching to the choir with that one); and 2) it should be quite different from what you do for a living. For example, if you are a software engineer / codemonkey by trade, I don't think you will gain much by making a resolution 'contribute more code to OSS projects' (though of course you should feel free to do so). Take up something more esoteric instead: painting, music, or a language.
Just my 2 bits
If it works. And if it couldn't have been done for less than $24B...
I work in the NHS. I hope to one day practice clinically for the NHS. I usually like to espouse the benefits of a nationalised healthcare system, but fuckups of this magnitude piss me off. Aside from the fact that other organizations can do better with less (see NASA, etc), these kind of things normally come back to the same mistake: failure to plan (design) properly.
Even looking at some of the touted features in the summary, I can see bad decisions:
"...allow for the electronic storage and retrieval of patient medical records..."
We have this already. It doesn't work. Well, I can't speak for hospitals - the only IT system I've seen in use in hospitals is what looked like an old version of Unix. That said, it looked like it (mostly) worked. In the surgeries I work in, we use GPASS. It doesn't work. When it does, it runs like a dog. Case in point: yesterday, we had the server in our practice go down. ALL STAFF (clinical and clerical - doctors, nurses, admin staff, receptionists) were unable to use their computers until the server came back up. It takes 20 minutes for the server to come back up, so fortunately it happened towards the end of the day (and not during a busy 'flu clinic), so disruption wasn't as bad as it could have been.
So essentially what they want to do is replace a barely working decentralised solution with a nonfunctional centralised one. Can anyone say "single point of failure" ?
"...permit patients to set up appointments via their computers..."
Haha! All I can say is "yeah, right". We currently have a booking system designed to minimize defaulting an appointment, which has the result that the doctors have less time wasted, and therefore more time to see patients. And still we get complaints. A patient led system would be chaos. I can see the benefit for hospital referrals, which are usually made comparatively well in advance, although the departments normally send out appointments themselves.
"...and let doctors electronically transmit prescriptions to local pharmacies"
This doesn't help that much, since the physical copies still need to be sent for verification. Scripts can be phoned through, which is convenient enough. Perhaps this could be of more use to hospital doctors, although they don't normally act completely independent of GPs - care is normally shared (letters exchanged, phone calls if necessary, etc) anyway.
It all comes back to bad decisions - first the politicians make the bad decision to announce a new nationwide IT system that will bring the NHS into the 21st century. Then the managers make bad decisions on what features to implement to make it the 'ultimate IT upgrade'. Finally, some ill-concieved, vague spec is handed to the software engineers and those putting the hardware together. The result... well, doesn't work.
And all it cost was £12B. Or maybe double that...
Sorry for the rant, but I have to work with some systems which are pretty abysmal in some respects (mousewheel scrolling our appointment list causes errors, to pick one off the top of my head). I'd like some choice, like being able to use linux/*bsd/solaris/whatever on a *server* instead of windows. More importantly, I'd like a NHS IT project that actually worked for a reasonable sum.
If anyone working in the NHS has a more optimistic view than me, I'd really like to hear it. And if any of the GPASS devs read /. : get a new project manager!
Actually, depending on who you talk to, Glaswegians might well be speaking a different language from you. Geordies still speak English though.
Nethack was good fun, but I don't play it so often now for fear of losing months of my life. DoomRL (Wiki) is fun to play for a short while - a "coffee break" game, as they call it.
The fact that he is going through this for pointing out a flaw is pretty horrifying. That said, hopefully the justice system will 'do justice' to keep this guy out of prison. Even still at best he's going to be pretty shaken up by this for a while to come, and probably be out a fairly sizable chunk of money in legal defense; at worst, he's gonna have a pretty horrible time (can't check punishments as all but final 2 of the USC links The Fine Summary are 404s). All for pointing out what should be a fairly apparent flaw in a 'security' system. I guess the guys at the FBI just like arresting folk for things like that. Hell, why didn't they arrest Andy Bowers of Slate for his research / article too?
Also, can some pro-2nd amendment folk go and give him some "legal defence"? You know, protect people from the government and all that... ;-)
Following these Spamhaus stories, I see a lot of comments from the /. denizens along the lines of "Spamhaus provides a list which is optional to use, so what is the big deal?". I agree with this sentiment, however e360insight's angle was that Spamhaus was denying them business by calling them a spammer. Of course, this entailed adding them to a list which administrators used to curb unwanted emails getting through. That's my reading (IANAL etc etc); if I'm wrong, please correct me.
Unfortunately it seems like Spamhaus went about defending this incorrectly ("I don't recognize the authority of this court, take it to the Federal court", "Okay", "I don't recognize the authority of the Federal court..."), which has complicated matters. I'd have liked to see how this would have turned out had it A) been defended correctly or B) no authority besides the UK courts recognized in the first place. Still, I think this has a little way to run before we see the end of this.
Well, come on, what's the ansi? Come on! WT^H^H UTF is the answer?
Because people don't know the correct tags. It should be:
> fud, !fud
Quoth the FAQ:
I know he may not be the most favourite of people around here, but Steve Gibson was able to spy on the IRC command & control channel of a botnet a few years ago. It was precipitated by a DDoS on his site, which he investigated rather thoroughly.
Link to the article (...long article warning)
Some of the article is quite interesting, some is obvious, some is ego-boosting self-congratulatory statements, and some of it is his "teh XP can create complete 'UNIX sockets' OH NOES!" propaganda. Still worth a read, even if it is a few years old.
Agreed. I was pretty miffed about the lack of S3 & K et al, but the Shining series was a bunch of great games. I spent countless hours playing and replaying the Sonic games and Shining Force 1 -- time unrivalled even by modern games (no I don't play WoW). I'll admit the rest of the games on offer aren't bad, but, as noted above and in other comments, there are some surprising omissions. Makes you wonder - did Sony/Sega listen to the community (or even common sense) when choosing the games for publication on this compilation? Or were they watching their bankroll for "Sega Genesis Collection Volume 2, for PSP, PS2 and PS3" ?
TFA doesn't seem to mention a 'developer' / porter / publisher, but I guess Sega would be a sound guess. You make a good point actually; in a sense, Sony is getting good PR from this both ways.
To Sega, they can say:"We're good guys. We are putting up roadblocks to try and halt homebrew development, and are keeping the average user away from Genesis emulators. You guys get to rerelease old games and we both make money!"
To users, they can say:"Hey, look! We have some classic Genesis games officially and easily (for a very reasonable fee) avaliable to play on the PSP! Just like you wanted! See, we're good guys! We told you it would be an innovative console (and you don't need to bother with those so-called 'homebrewers')."
I say (again): "We paid for it; we own it. Let us do what we damn well like with our hardware."
I appreciate the sentiment, but this announcement is newsworthy (to me) mainly because of the announcement of these games for the *PSP*. The PS2 is a neat system, but if I'm playing a fixed console, why don't I just fire up the games on my original Genesis (à la Mega Drive over here)? Better still, I can play them on my PC, and take advantage of save states and save state 'hacking' to make the game do interesting things. I can also take screenshots / recordings easier on the PC, and I can store my *entire* game collection in a fairly small space, and take it with me on a USB stick. Plus, I'e seen (though do correct me if I'm wrong) that you need to play game X for Y number of times before you can 'unlock' other games. Artificial restrictions suck. NB I came across this on GameFaqs for some Sonic-related + other classics game collection if you want to look before I'm refuted.
Now, playing on the PSP is a different matter. It's better than a USB stick since you can play *anywhere*, so long as you have power. I'm sure there are smart homebrew developers that were able to port all the handy features (eg savestates etc) of the PC emulator counterparts. That is exactly the kind of thing I want from my PSP, and part of my rationale for buying one when they came out.
I guess what irritated me about this collection was: 1) Sony wanting to say "Hey, we're into classic games too!" whilst trying frantically to lock out homebrew developers (wouldn't it be apropos to have a further lock-out firmware update included on the UMD with this collection, mandatory to play the games?) and 2) No Sonic 3 + K :'(
I'll admit, when I saw this I thought "Excellent, a chance to do what I really want: play the classic games I love, portably". Then I realised that Sony wasn't doing a Good Thing (TM) at all. The Good Thing would be to stop messing with the firmware with every damn update and let the homebrew developers in. Give me the ability to run a Genesis emulator without jumping through contrived hoops (which are really holes in Sony's attempted patching), and without a chance of bricking an expensive piece of kit. Hell, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable amount, say $5-10, to 'unlock' the PSP to do homebrew stuff. I don't think such a move would be morally right (and probably not financially right for Sony, what with support), but I *really* like the old Genesis games.
As for the game lineup itself... well, it's good, but they could've done better. Golden Axe is plain fun, and Phantasy Star will keep you entertained for quite a while. Sonic 1 and 2 are *excellent*, but they missed the best of the lot: Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles. I can't believe this is by accident. I smell a "Genesis Collection Vol II" in the works.
Will I buy this collection? Nah. true, it's the right sort of idea -- and multiplayer makes it *almost* worthwhile -- but I just don't agree with either the method or the game choice. So come on Sony, let us use our hardware the way we damn well please, and do what we will with emulators and other nice things.
(...and while you're at it, let us rip UMD games to memory sticks. Those things are sloooow. kthxbye)
Although in some ways the pervasion of Google as a verb might possibly be a Bad Thing (TM) for them (as reflected in earlier comments), they just appear petty to people by doing this. I would have thought such widespread use just reflects the strength of their brand.
Adobe also gets their knickers in a twist about the use of 'Photoshop' as a verb. Though I'm not totally sure it's not meant in a 'It's funny. Laugh' sense...