DVI connectors, cables, and designs still cost more than VGA -- both for the consumer and for the producer. On top of that, there's a chicken-and-egg problem where people need DVI to VGA converters for compatability with existing equipment.
If my video card and your video card have the same chipset, but you use VGA and I use DVI, my card'll cost a little more. If I include a DVI to VGA adapter, it'll cost even more. Since our cards have the same chips, most people will buy your card.
Q: What's the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a Van de Graaff generator? (You know, that doodad from high-school physics that makes kids' hair stand on end)
A: Not much.
Really, computers and vacuum cleaners should never mix. The static charge from the vaccuum cleaner can zap components or damage data. That's why people use those silly cans of compressed air.
Hi. I'm one of the support people at CMU. My specialty? Our linux distribution. Disclaimer: I'm speaking for me and me alone. I haven't cleared this with anyone. Don't assume that I'm speaking for CMU or Computing Services or anyone else.
There's no real secret about it. mwm is going away at long last. We'll be using fvwm2 in a configuration that is (hopefully) more novice-friendly without annoying power users too much (if you're interested in testing, drop me a note). For political reasons, we'll probably not change any existing accounts for a while, but we'll offer fvwm2 for new accounts.
Why are we still using mwm? We roll our own distribution. The Andrew Unix environment was conceived back in the 80s when a workstation cost $10k+ and a 100 megabyte disk drive was really quite large (and expensive). It was a way to have standard commands and hundreds of apps across whichever underlying unix flavor you had. Things like AFS came out of this project.
Since then, the goal has been standardization, not innovation. As new flavors of unix appeared, they were dissected and made to resemble the existing Andrew systems. mwm was hot stuff a decade ago, so we're still using it. Why? Mostly, it was money. Porting old stuff is easier (thus, cheaper) than testing, deploying, and supporting new stuff. Plus (and this really shouldn't be underestimated), some of the key decision-makers have been using the old system for a long time and they saw no reason to change it.
We've known that we needed a new WM for a while. Last year, we were mired in a huge and unproductive GNOME vs. KDE flame war. GNOME has awful documentation and changes a lot with each release. It's unsupportable without spending a lot more money. However, the Stallman-worshippers weren't going to tolerate KDE because it had been conceived with impure thoughts of not-sufficiently-free libraries (Guess which side of the debate I was on;). We were finally able to reach a compromise with fvwm2, so we're testing that now and hope to inflict it on people soon.
Now, management is finally starting to realize that 1) demand for Linux is going up and 2) the version that we offer is inadequate and has been for a while.
There'll be the usual vicious politics for a while, but I'm optimistic. We might finally have support from above to make our version of Linux suck less. Failing that, maybe we can start offering limited support for Red Hat or something else.
Actually, process patents are a new thing. Patents were intended to cover actual products. For a long time, patent law said that you couldn't patent anything except physical things.
I work for a medium-sized university, and we worked with Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) as a test customer when they were evaluating DSL. We decided to offer DSL to our users for pretty much the same rate that BA/Verizon was charging us (which is ultimately a loss after support and administrative costs are factored in). The assumption was that our users would appreciate a local hostname, and that BA would handle the hardware problems.
It has been a disaster. BA won't talk directly to the user, so we have to act as intermediaries. It took a long time for them to accept electronic problem reports, which turned out to be an email address where someone retypes the problems into their system (and usually omits most of our troubleshooting information). The rest of the time, we have to call their Broadband "Solutions" Center, where we wait on hold for a long time before talking to an operator who knows far less than we do. Problems can take months to be resolved. We complained enough that we have a person within BA to cut through red tape for us. I've had occasions where I had to put one of our networking people on the phone with them to explain to them how their network works (or doesn't).
Meanwhile, they've raised the monthly price that they charge us per-customer above the price that they offer their own end-users because after the service we've received, we're unwilling to sign a multi-year contract.
We're currently looking at ways of getting out of the DSL business as quickly as possible.
Priestess wrote: If taxpayers money is used by the DOD to make some ultra-safe encryption algo or whatever then shouldn't the tax-payers get access to that code?
If taxpayer money is used by the DOD to make nuclear missles, shouldn't taxpayers get access to the blueprints?
The government does some things that depend on secrecy. As much as we like to make the CIA, NSA, etc. look like boogiemen (and I do think that they deserve some criticism), there are others out there who are even worse, and we shouldn't give them our plans.
I've noticed both a drop off in postings and an increase in the quality of the postings since the new moderation was announced. I might just be imagining it, though. MolochHorridus suggests that people are afraid to post because they will be judged. I hope he's right.
The flamers and ACs are already judged by everyone who has to wade through their crap. It's like the old usenet rule: "Would you say it to a crowded auditorium?" Maybe the moderating is giving these people a clue: people are reading.
With 400 moderators, a good posting won't be obscure for long, and a "First Post" won't hold a postive score for more than a few minutes. The few tyrant moderators have too much competition from the good ones to keep anyone down for long. And, like Rob says, if you want to slug it out in the trenches, nobody will stop you.
Oooh - what if people were allowed to lower their own scores? i.e. "This is a stupid flame, but I have to get it off my chest." You post, but with a -1 or something, so that the moderators don't have to bother kicking it down.
I'm still wowed by this system. The Bazaar system of moderation. Whoda thunk it?
While I kind of like the idea of average scores, there's a downside: people mature.
Way back when, when I first discovered usenet, I was rather lacking in clues, and I'm sure that I'd be terribly embarassed at what dejanews could find. We were all newbies once.
As slashdot becomes one of the old, established places of the net, some of the "First Post!" losers may become productive, insightful posters, and it'd be a shame if they could never escape their past idiocy.
If you look more closely at how the RIAA phrased things, the 15-24 age group accounted for a smaller percentage of overall sales. This says nothing about how many total CDs were purchased by this age group, or how it compares to last year.
The RIAA press release brags that record buyers are increasingly older and female, as a general trend. Somehow, though, in one little bit of the greater trend, MP3 (their favorite scapegoat) is to blame.
For a corporate giant like IBM, even the existing license is incredibly risky and innovative. Yeah, a bunch of us have things that we don't like about the license, but if people start flaming them, they'll retreat into their shell, pull the products, and write off the open-source "experiment" as a failure. I don't want that to happen.
If you don't like the license, and (this is important) you're in a job where this license affects which products you use, join the IBM license discussion list, and suggest changes that would placate you while allowing the IBM suits to cover their backsides.
IBM isn't offering things like Jikes because they've found Stallman's religion. They're doing it because, hopefully, they'll impress the programmers and sysadmins out there, who'll decide that maybe they should take a closer look at IBM's commercial offerings. This is how reality works. Most people need real jobs where they make money. Most companies need to sell stuff like hardware and software. We can take advantage of this. If they think that giving out code makes them look good, and maybe, in some nebulous way, increases sales, we can get some great free code. If we can convince them that with some teeny little license changes, they'd look much cooler (and maybe that'd lead to more sales), they're more likely to do it.
Don't spook the suits. They're not as thick-skinned as the average/. geek.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what the T stands for.
My ideal scenario: the patent office throws out the Eolas patent AND throws out the trademark on Windows.
Microsoft lawyers alternate between high-fives and crying jags.
DVI connectors, cables, and designs still cost more than VGA -- both for the consumer and for the producer. On top of that, there's a chicken-and-egg problem where people need DVI to VGA converters for compatability with existing equipment.
If my video card and your video card have the same chipset, but you use VGA and I use DVI, my card'll cost a little more. If I include a DVI to VGA adapter, it'll cost even more. Since our cards have the same chips, most people will buy your card.
There's a good rebuttal of Scoble's post at Boing Boing.
It's.... FRANKENCAT!
Quick quiz:
Q: What's the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a Van de Graaff generator? (You know, that doodad from high-school physics that makes kids' hair stand on end)
A: Not much.
Really, computers and vacuum cleaners should never mix. The static charge from the vaccuum cleaner can zap components or damage data. That's why people use those silly cans of compressed air.
Hi. I'm one of the support people at CMU. My specialty? Our linux distribution. Disclaimer: I'm speaking for me and me alone. I haven't cleared this with anyone. Don't assume that I'm speaking for CMU or Computing Services or anyone else.
;). We were finally able to reach a compromise with fvwm2, so we're testing that now and hope to inflict it on people soon.
There's no real secret about it. mwm is going away at long last. We'll be using fvwm2 in a configuration that is (hopefully) more novice-friendly without annoying power users too much (if you're interested in testing, drop me a note). For political reasons, we'll probably not change any existing accounts for a while, but we'll offer fvwm2 for new accounts.
Why are we still using mwm? We roll our own distribution. The Andrew Unix environment was conceived back in the 80s when a workstation cost $10k+ and a 100 megabyte disk drive was really quite large (and expensive). It was a way to have standard commands and hundreds of apps across whichever underlying unix flavor you had. Things like AFS came out of this project.
Since then, the goal has been standardization, not innovation. As new flavors of unix appeared, they were dissected and made to resemble the existing Andrew systems. mwm was hot stuff a decade ago, so we're still using it. Why? Mostly, it was money. Porting old stuff is easier (thus, cheaper) than testing, deploying, and supporting new stuff. Plus (and this really shouldn't be underestimated), some of the key decision-makers have been using the old system for a long time and they saw no reason to change it.
We've known that we needed a new WM for a while. Last year, we were mired in a huge and unproductive GNOME vs. KDE flame war. GNOME has awful documentation and changes a lot with each release. It's unsupportable without spending a lot more money. However, the Stallman-worshippers weren't going to tolerate KDE because it had been conceived with impure thoughts of not-sufficiently-free libraries (Guess which side of the debate I was on
Now, management is finally starting to realize that 1) demand for Linux is going up and 2) the version that we offer is inadequate and has been for a while.
There'll be the usual vicious politics for a while, but I'm optimistic. We might finally have support from above to make our version of Linux suck less. Failing that, maybe we can start offering limited support for Red Hat or something else.
Actually, process patents are a new thing. Patents were intended to cover actual products. For a long time, patent law said that you couldn't patent anything except physical things.
Personally, I think it should still be that way.
It has been a disaster. BA won't talk directly to the user, so we have to act as intermediaries. It took a long time for them to accept electronic problem reports, which turned out to be an email address where someone retypes the problems into their system (and usually omits most of our troubleshooting information). The rest of the time, we have to call their Broadband "Solutions" Center, where we wait on hold for a long time before talking to an operator who knows far less than we do. Problems can take months to be resolved. We complained enough that we have a person within BA to cut through red tape for us. I've had occasions where I had to put one of our networking people on the phone with them to explain to them how their network works (or doesn't).
Meanwhile, they've raised the monthly price that they charge us per-customer above the price that they offer their own end-users because after the service we've received, we're unwilling to sign a multi-year contract.
We're currently looking at ways of getting out of the DSL business as quickly as possible.
Priestess wrote:
If taxpayers money is used by the DOD to make some ultra-safe encryption algo or whatever then shouldn't the tax-payers get access to that code?
If taxpayer money is used by the DOD to make nuclear missles, shouldn't taxpayers get access to the blueprints?
The government does some things that depend on secrecy. As much as we like to make the CIA, NSA, etc. look like boogiemen (and I do think that they deserve some criticism), there are others out there who are even worse, and we shouldn't give them our plans.
I've noticed both a drop off in postings and an increase in the quality of the postings since the new moderation was announced. I might just be imagining it, though. MolochHorridus suggests that people are afraid to post because they will be judged. I hope he's right.
The flamers and ACs are already judged by everyone who has to wade through their crap. It's like the old usenet rule: "Would you say it to a crowded auditorium?" Maybe the moderating is giving these people a clue: people are reading.
With 400 moderators, a good posting won't be obscure for long, and a "First Post" won't hold a postive score for more than a few minutes. The few tyrant moderators have too much competition from the good ones to keep anyone down for long. And, like Rob says, if you want to slug it out in the trenches, nobody will stop you.
Oooh - what if people were allowed to lower their own scores? i.e. "This is a stupid flame, but I have to get it off my chest." You post, but with a -1 or something, so that the moderators don't have to bother kicking it down.
I'm still wowed by this system. The Bazaar system of moderation. Whoda thunk it?
While I kind of like the idea of average scores, there's a downside: people mature.
Way back when, when I first discovered usenet, I was rather lacking in clues, and I'm sure that I'd be terribly embarassed at what dejanews could find. We were all newbies once.
As slashdot becomes one of the old, established places of the net, some of the "First Post!" losers may become productive, insightful posters, and it'd be a shame if they could never escape their past idiocy.
If you look more closely at how the RIAA phrased things, the 15-24 age group accounted for a smaller percentage of overall sales. This says nothing about how many total CDs were purchased by this age group, or how it compares to last year.
The RIAA press release brags that record buyers are increasingly older and female, as a general trend. Somehow, though, in one little bit of the greater trend, MP3 (their favorite scapegoat) is to blame.
For a corporate giant like IBM, even the existing license is incredibly risky and innovative. Yeah, a bunch of us have things that we don't like about the license, but if people start flaming them, they'll retreat into their shell, pull the products, and write off the open-source "experiment" as a failure. I don't want that to happen.
/. geek.
If you don't like the license, and (this is important) you're in a job where this license affects which products you use, join the IBM license discussion list, and suggest changes that would placate you while allowing the IBM suits to cover their backsides.
IBM isn't offering things like Jikes because they've found Stallman's religion. They're doing it because, hopefully, they'll impress the programmers and sysadmins out there, who'll decide that maybe they should take a closer look at IBM's commercial offerings. This is how reality works. Most people need real jobs where they make money. Most companies need to sell stuff like hardware and software. We can take advantage of this. If they think that giving out code makes them look good, and maybe, in some nebulous way, increases sales, we can get some great free code. If we can convince them that with some teeny little license changes, they'd look much cooler (and maybe that'd lead to more sales), they're more likely to do it.
Don't spook the suits. They're not as thick-skinned as the average