Going for a walk in the woods is one of the few escapes from the intrusions of modern society still available.
Leave the control over information disclosure in the hands of the hiker. Let them take a cell phone, leave an itinerary with a friend, start a fire if they're in trouble. Besides, if you really need to find people you can get the police helicopter with IR sensors to comb the woods with your search and rescue team in an emergency.
I know you mean well, but this is where you ought to let people assume special risks and precious responsibilities - Don't take them away so lightly.
Rather, put your efforts into an education program for students. How to enjoy the woods, hike safely, avoid hypothermia, etc. Sponsor some hikes and let them get a feel for how wonderful it is to be in the wilderness away from civilization.
Have you ever faced a situation in which the choice between clean design/portability versus performance would change dramatically the whole system design?
Yes, I have.
What have you chosen?
Clean and portable.
Reasonable performance right now when you first write your code is good enough.
More important is to write maintainable (readable and understandable) and extendable code.
We have high performing applications written 10 years ago that sit on the scrap heap that few people know or love these days because they were tuned too tightly to getting performance in a very specific situation. But situations are always changing. Highly optimized applications are too specific and too fragile to be useful very long.
Meanwhile, an originally clean design that was of only adequate performance has been used and used and used. And it's become bloated and creeping with all kinds of ugly useful features simply because people could easily add them on. Once there was a rewrite to improve performance when resources were available because a lot of people were using the code.
Here's the irony: lots of surgical scars on old code is a testament to its successful conception and to its continued usefulness, as well as being a motivation for replacing it with the next generation code, which is what you usually hear about at the watercooler.
...everyone has their own set of preferences that don't necessarily align with anyone elses. Consequently, distributed preference implies distributed control.
[concern] We must have let one slip through!
Please return to your television for further instruction!
Furthermore, this creates a OSS project that now directly challeges Outlook
Not directly.
It needs to run under win32 to complete a transition pathway. Viz.,
web browser: Mozilla Firefox in place of IE on win32. check.
Word editor: OpenOffice.org in place of Word on win32. check.
email client: Evolution in place of Outlook on...uhhh...oops.
In many instances users can experiment with free alternatives on Windows and later, the underlying OS can be traded out for whatever works best as a "hardware manager and process handler" be it Win2K, WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc.
Even GPL software could dissapear into the system like this, since they would all be working under the umbrella of the U.S. Government and so therefore the work could be widely used in binary but never "distributed."
Is that really the case with the GPL?
I would have assumed that whenever a binary was distributed to anyone, anywhere that whatever changes were made to the corresponding GPL'd source would likewise have to be distributed.
It sets a dangerous precedent to allow "an organization" to remove GPL rights from individuals in the organization that receive binaries.
Next thing you know, some company will come out with a front "organization" to which you will agree to belong in order for them to distribute to you binaries that they derived from modified GPL code.
if you're intrested in mathematical analysis but you aren't prepared to spend an entire years budget on those nice yellow Springer books
...then you definitely owe it to yourself to check out Dover books.
They buy up and republish as paperbacks some classic old textbooks such as
Hydrodynamics, Lamb
Principles of Statistical Mechanics, Tolman
Ordinary Differential Equations, Ince
Theory of Brownian Movement, Einstein
Radiative Transfer, Chandrasekhar
for bargain prices, typically about US$10.
The only problem is that there are still a few fantastic great old books out there that would really benefit the community if they were re-published as inexpensive paperbacks, but the owners of the copyrights for these out-of-print classics and would-be republishers cannot seem to get together...
So at some point Linux will work on and with more old hardware than the newest versions of Windows.
And will be able to use Wine to run crusty old applications better than the newest versions of Windows. (Microsoft's biggest enemy to getting people to use its new products has for many years not been any other company but its own installed base.)
For people outside first world corporate IT departments that transition time when Linux appears more attractive will be sooner. How soon?
How do you expect the transition to desktop Linux to play out?
It allows for consumers to break digital encryption schemes in the pursuit of fair use.
Don't let the RIAA define your vocabulary namespace. It's good to use "consumers". Even better would be "American citizens". The word "break" has a bad connotation, even though in our antiseptic/. technical world it's equivalent to "decode" and "translate".
IMHO, it would be better to emphasize letting consumers view their legally-acquired copyrighted material in any fashion they see fit and not to be put in jail for exercising fair use rights.
Yes, continue to prosecute people who distribute material to which they do not possess copyright, but do not needlessly prosecute the home hobbyist for trying to view his legally-purchased DVD on his homemade computer.
[We're not trying to defend cheapskates that downloaded 10,000 MP3s they didn't buy. And do not let the *AA define the battlefield that way. Take the high ground. We're trying to defeat specific bad legislation, the DMCA.
My position is that existing copyright laws are sufficient for protecting the rights of copyright holders in any medium, that excessive and restrictive legislation embodied by the DMCA on new technology will squelch American innovation and push leading edge research and development offshore to a less-restrictive environment.
The complaints of the RIAA and MPAA may be adequately addressed by effective enforcement of existing laws.
[That offshore jobs button is kind of active these days.
[That the terms of copyrights and patents are too long, that they have become unrecognized distortions of their original intent, is another matter to be addressed at a later time.]
would be if video clips of professors at boards explaining concepts were made freely available.
In multiple languages.
Yes, students would still miss out on mutual interaction, but this would be a great way to increase access to higher education.
And not just engineering, despite its importance. But mathematics, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, 2nd languages, should be course offerings, too.
I can give you an XML file with a Base64 encoded blob of proprietary data. Just because it is XML does not make it Open.
Even more, a structured XML document doesn't have to include the schemas or other tools used to transform it into something on a printed page or a monitor screen.
By keeping the rendering rules inside Word instead of the .doc file, changing the rendering rules here and there based on platform, version, locale, printer driver, moon phase, etc., Microsoft keeps reverse engineer competitors at bay and makes their upgraded product the only reliable way of re-creating that document. Or, at least until the next upgrade.
Until, sometime late in the afternoon some day in 2005, somewhere in a small office outside Bangalore, someone will ask their colleague to put OpenOffice on their Windows computer to make sure that Office97 files print the same way that they do on the standard Linux box that the clients are getting.
The secret standards of old will be stolen away bit by bit...
I think this may just help Intel get some more umph into their line, before 64-bit hits critical mass.
Well, the delays in native Windows for 64 bit to the end of 2004 have certainly helped slow the 64-bit bandwagon. Probably long enough for Intel to recover from the mistake it made in betting heavily on the Itanium for 64 bit.
But today's price cuts on Opterons will undoubtably increase AMD's sales at a time when Intel only has the 64 bit Itanium that lacks high-performance IA32 emulation.
doing so for topics like this totally out of the blue is certainly suspicious activity.
It only looks suspicious just because of 9/11.
But, independent of 9/11, this is just some student who is intrigued by these underground tunnels (decades ago I wandered through such marvelous tunnels myself).
The problem is that the threshhold of suspicion has been lowered because of an environment of fear following 9/11.
Some fear is healthy, but other fear is just an emotion that can be exploited or used to further other aims. If you don't think fear and uncertainty can be exploited then you haven't seen the profit margins in extended warranties.
The FBI's action shows a wrong approach.
In particular, instead of using hard work, intelligence and making a strong effort to preserving the liberties of American citizens, a path has been laid for what I would term "lazy law enforcement". Put out a total dragnet. Give easy authority to get much more information than ever before.
I don't recall any careful logical study showing that each and every provision of the Patriot Act was needed precisely because it corrects critical and identifiable deficiencies that led to 9/11. As a matter of fact, only now is a commission investigating the root causes of 9/11 and their report won't be due for a couple of months.
Police state measures are cost efficient and easy to implement from a law enforcement perspective, but they carry longer term costs and risks. Most people in America aren't really familiar with police states and are therefore unfamiliar with the nature of these costs and risks.
The big risk is that all of the mechanisms for intrusive surveillance and enforcement can be operated just as well by an untrusted and unscrupulous authority as well as entrusted elected officials.
The other insidious danger is that by dropping a veil of secrecy over government operations (effectively reversing the FOIA) - justified as an advantage to law enforcement going after terrorist and not tipping them off prematurely and potentially compromising the investigation - has risks, too.
Pure simple incompetence will not be brought to light soon enough and therefore problems will fester and grow more ugly than if early harsh scrutiny caused a change in course. (Consider what a little more access by reporters and Red Cross/Red Crescent officials to Abu Graib might have prevented.)
A takeover of authority is easier because actions of an evil power-seeker may be kept under cover until it is too late to stop him.
Of course, freedom of information means nothing to the functioning of a healthy democratic republic unless reporters seek it out, publish it, and the public reads it.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Yes....
So then it's obviously the fault of the marketplace for not wanting to pay the price for RDRAM licenses that RAMBUS wanted. The nerve of those companies!
Next thing you know there'll be a whole raft of litigation surrounding the unwillingness of people to pay US$16.99 for a CD with one good song on it.
Of course it is true that owning and operating a Windows computer costs more because of the need to keep current with patches, to test them and to apply them in a timely manner. Every sysadmin knows this even if their cost-conscious boss doesn't see this big picture.
But, to be fair [and I'm no MS apologist - they need to be taken to task all over the place for lots of reasons], even if you run a MacOS X, Linux or even an OpenBSD system, there are implicit costs associated with maintaining those systems, too.
Since the software cost for FOSS is zero, the single most important cost is this installation and maintenance. As such, it ought to be quantified.
The advantage of doing this is that these kinds of costs are no longer swept under the rug and people can start asking more detailed questions about Windows maintenance costs in terms of sysadmin time- not just estimated costs of downtime on the business.
Then maybe, too, people will start to ask questions about what kinds of implicit future costs they incurred via early decisions to use some vendor's application that locks their valuable business data inside a proprietary format.
There is a widespread perception in the west that the Arab world is backwards in terms of technological knowhow
About 1000 years ago the Arabs and Persians were leading the way intellectually (inventing the concept of zero, etc.) while European Christian nations were mired firmly in the Dark Ages under a supposed theocracy.
It's been hyped since the mid-90's, but thin clients have never really caught on in the corporate environment.
At MyCorp we used X terminals for a few years in the early 1990s.
They were great from the standpoint of centralized administration. That's still a big advantage to thin clients even today.
But we had implemented them with the idea of putting only as much graphics display at the end of our networks that we could get away with and then using the extra money to buy huge servers. (Consider now all the desktops sitting around doing screensavers most of their lives.)
What was interesting was that as the price of CPU power and commodity PCs came down it became obvious that the clients could become thicker for essentially no cost.
Also, it was found early on that running some clients locally such as a window manager was - doh - a good idea. You can imagine the same thing for applications like clocks.
Also, there were still issues with things like OpenGL applications and whether the server had enough extensions to deal with that. And that for some graphically-rich applications you still needed to push lots of data down the skinny pipe.
The network transparency of X is a nice idea, but division of functionality between the client and server is kind of static (the pseudo X servers used by ssh are kind of an interesting twist here).
What would be even nicer is a way for the client server interface to negotiate where to put their boundary depending on the network BW and latency, the local hardware acceleration, congestion on the server, whatever.
Having a full workstation capable of running not just the X server but any of the X clients is a cheap and flexible way to go. It still doesn't automatically guarantee people will start clients in the right place to optimize their performance.
If some client needed tons of disk I/O on the server and displayed only a few lines of grep output on an xterm that didn't burden the network, then it made sense to run on the server rather than via NFS, for example.
What would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?
Video.
Encode, decode other streams, save lots and lots of HDTV shows. You'll need all those resources in your new PC^H^H PVR.
Because videos are noisy and quarters are typically cramped, I don't foresee video taking off as much in the workplace.
How many IT departments will feel any need to upgrade their hardware and software? Oh, well, I forgot, there's always the new Powerpoint email attachments from sales and marketing with new laptops that have to be decoded back at the salt mine...
The Sasser worm is 100% preventable if your system is properly patched and firewalled.
Sure it is.
But I would venture to guess that their IT admins are like the admins around here who find that the new security patches often break some other functionality that they're using.
So it's just a choice of being dead in the water one way (no functionality) or dead in the water another way (sploit puts Windows box into constant reboot)...
Some are seeking pure performance with Linux servers running AMD-64 natively, but even the broader market of Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode.
This will also be to make sure that DRM can succeed.
And the continuing raft of viruses and worms will be used to help usher in the DRM age.
But I have to question whether it will really succeed.
DRM is being driven not by demand from consumers but from owners of copyrights. That's not exactly a recipe for success. It sounds to me like it will be as much a rousing success as DAT and for the same reasons.
Despite a deployment of DRM with euphemisms that most consumers aren't expected to understand and possibly low introductory prices on DRM-protected content, I foresee a lot of folks annoyed with the restrictions more than they are joyed by the content.
I still advocate calling the technology for the dog it is Content Use Restriction or CUR. It's designed to bite the unwitting.
I learned the good ole USA way of
date +"%m/%d/%y" and was de-modularized when I encountered the European way of
date +"%d.%m.%y".
I immediately realized that I had to do something that was less ambiguous. The European way is at least monotonically endian, while the USA way is not. But I have to write stuff down for fellow Americans.
Thus,
date +"%Y/%m/%d"
so that USA folks recognize the last 2 parts and the UK folks think "Oh! Backwards!" upon seeing the 4 digit year.
Slashdot Mirror
Going for a walk in the woods is one of the few escapes from the intrusions of modern society still available.
Leave the control over information disclosure in the hands of the hiker. Let them take a cell phone, leave an itinerary with a friend, start a fire if they're in trouble. Besides, if you really need to find people you can get the police helicopter with IR sensors to comb the woods with your search and rescue team in an emergency.
I know you mean well, but this is where you ought to let people assume special risks and precious responsibilities - Don't take them away so lightly.
Rather, put your efforts into an education program for students. How to enjoy the woods, hike safely, avoid hypothermia, etc. Sponsor some hikes and let them get a feel for how wonderful it is to be in the wilderness away from civilization.
Have you ever faced a situation in which the choice between clean design/portability versus performance would change dramatically the whole system design?
Yes, I have.
What have you chosen?Clean and portable.
Reasonable performance right now when you first write your code is good enough.
More important is to write maintainable (readable and understandable) and extendable code.
We have high performing applications written 10 years ago that sit on the scrap heap that few people know or love these days because they were tuned too tightly to getting performance in a very specific situation. But situations are always changing. Highly optimized applications are too specific and too fragile to be useful very long.
Meanwhile, an originally clean design that was of only adequate performance has been used and used and used. And it's become bloated and creeping with all kinds of ugly useful features simply because people could easily add them on. Once there was a rewrite to improve performance when resources were available because a lot of people were using the code.
Here's the irony: lots of surgical scars on old code is a testament to its successful conception and to its continued usefulness, as well as being a motivation for replacing it with the next generation code, which is what you usually hear about at the watercooler.
[concern] We must have let one slip through!
Please return to your television for further instruction!
Open Office isn't really that much different.
Story:
Furthermore, this creates a OSS project that now directly challeges Outlook
Not directly.
It needs to run under win32 to complete a transition pathway. Viz.,
In many instances users can experiment with free alternatives on Windows and later, the underlying OS can be traded out for whatever works best as a "hardware manager and process handler" be it Win2K, WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc.
Even GPL software could dissapear into the system like this, since they would all be working under the umbrella of the U.S. Government and so therefore the work could be widely used in binary but never "distributed."
Is that really the case with the GPL?
I would have assumed that whenever a binary was distributed to anyone, anywhere that whatever changes were made to the corresponding GPL'd source would likewise have to be distributed.
It sets a dangerous precedent to allow "an organization" to remove GPL rights from individuals in the organization that receive binaries.
Next thing you know, some company will come out with a front "organization" to which you will agree to belong in order for them to distribute to you binaries that they derived from modified GPL code.
if you're intrested in mathematical analysis but you aren't prepared to spend an entire years budget on those nice yellow Springer books
...then you definitely owe it to yourself to check out Dover books.
They buy up and republish as paperbacks some classic old textbooks such as
- Hydrodynamics, Lamb
- Principles of Statistical Mechanics, Tolman
- Ordinary Differential Equations, Ince
- Theory of Brownian Movement, Einstein
- Radiative Transfer, Chandrasekhar
for bargain prices, typically about US$10.The only problem is that there are still a few fantastic great old books out there that would really benefit the community if they were re-published as inexpensive paperbacks, but the owners of the copyrights for these out-of-print classics and would-be republishers cannot seem to get together...
which could lead to things like a stasis drug for deep space missions.
Like for the workplace, right?
it is still shitty driver manufacturers (ATI) that cause a lot of stability problems.
It sure seems that, with autocratic control, MS could force manufacturers of add-on hardware to create drivers that are robust.
Why don't they?
So at some point Linux will work on and with more old hardware than the newest versions of Windows.
And will be able to use Wine to run crusty old applications better than the newest versions of Windows. (Microsoft's biggest enemy to getting people to use its new products has for many years not been any other company but its own installed base.)
For people outside first world corporate IT departments that transition time when Linux appears more attractive will be sooner. How soon?
How do you expect the transition to desktop Linux to play out?
It allows for consumers to break digital encryption schemes in the pursuit of fair use.
Don't let the RIAA define your vocabulary namespace. It's good to use "consumers". Even better would be "American citizens". The word "break" has a bad connotation, even though in our antiseptic /. technical world it's equivalent to "decode" and "translate".
IMHO, it would be better to emphasize letting consumers view their legally-acquired copyrighted material in any fashion they see fit and not to be put in jail for exercising fair use rights.
Yes, continue to prosecute people who distribute material to which they do not possess copyright, but do not needlessly prosecute the home hobbyist for trying to view his legally-purchased DVD on his homemade computer.
[We're not trying to defend cheapskates that downloaded 10,000 MP3s they didn't buy. And do not let the *AA define the battlefield that way. Take the high ground. We're trying to defeat specific bad legislation, the DMCA.
My position is that existing copyright laws are sufficient for protecting the rights of copyright holders in any medium, that excessive and restrictive legislation embodied by the DMCA on new technology will squelch American innovation and push leading edge research and development offshore to a less-restrictive environment. The complaints of the RIAA and MPAA may be adequately addressed by effective enforcement of existing laws.
[That offshore jobs button is kind of active these days.
[That the terms of copyrights and patents are too long, that they have become unrecognized distortions of their original intent, is another matter to be addressed at a later time.]
would be if video clips of professors at boards explaining concepts were made freely available.
In multiple languages.
Yes, students would still miss out on mutual interaction, but this would be a great way to increase access to higher education.
And not just engineering, despite its importance. But mathematics, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, 2nd languages, should be course offerings, too.
I can give you an XML file with a Base64 encoded blob of proprietary data. Just because it is XML does not make it Open.
Even more, a structured XML document doesn't have to include the schemas or other tools used to transform it into something on a printed page or a monitor screen.
By keeping the rendering rules inside Word instead of the .doc file, changing the rendering rules here and there based on platform, version, locale, printer driver, moon phase, etc., Microsoft keeps reverse engineer competitors at bay and makes their upgraded product the only reliable way of re-creating that document. Or, at least until the next upgrade.
Until, sometime late in the afternoon some day in 2005, somewhere in a small office outside Bangalore, someone will ask their colleague to put OpenOffice on their Windows computer to make sure that Office97 files print the same way that they do on the standard Linux box that the clients are getting.
The secret standards of old will be stolen away bit by bit...
I think this may just help Intel get some more umph into their line, before 64-bit hits critical mass.
Well, the delays in native Windows for 64 bit to the end of 2004 have certainly helped slow the 64-bit bandwagon. Probably long enough for Intel to recover from the mistake it made in betting heavily on the Itanium for 64 bit.
But today's price cuts on Opterons will undoubtably increase AMD's sales at a time when Intel only has the 64 bit Itanium that lacks high-performance IA32 emulation.
doing so for topics like this totally out of the blue is certainly suspicious activity.
It only looks suspicious just because of 9/11.
But, independent of 9/11, this is just some student who is intrigued by these underground tunnels (decades ago I wandered through such marvelous tunnels myself).
The problem is that the threshhold of suspicion has been lowered because of an environment of fear following 9/11.
Some fear is healthy, but other fear is just an emotion that can be exploited or used to further other aims. If you don't think fear and uncertainty can be exploited then you haven't seen the profit margins in extended warranties.
The FBI's action shows a wrong approach.
In particular, instead of using hard work, intelligence and making a strong effort to preserving the liberties of American citizens, a path has been laid for what I would term "lazy law enforcement". Put out a total dragnet. Give easy authority to get much more information than ever before.
I don't recall any careful logical study showing that each and every provision of the Patriot Act was needed precisely because it corrects critical and identifiable deficiencies that led to 9/11. As a matter of fact, only now is a commission investigating the root causes of 9/11 and their report won't be due for a couple of months.
Police state measures are cost efficient and easy to implement from a law enforcement perspective, but they carry longer term costs and risks. Most people in America aren't really familiar with police states and are therefore unfamiliar with the nature of these costs and risks.
The big risk is that all of the mechanisms for intrusive surveillance and enforcement can be operated just as well by an untrusted and unscrupulous authority as well as entrusted elected officials.
The other insidious danger is that by dropping a veil of secrecy over government operations (effectively reversing the FOIA) - justified as an advantage to law enforcement going after terrorist and not tipping them off prematurely and potentially compromising the investigation - has risks, too.
Of course, freedom of information means nothing to the functioning of a healthy democratic republic unless reporters seek it out, publish it, and the public reads it.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Yes....
So then it's obviously the fault of the marketplace for not wanting to pay the price for RDRAM licenses that RAMBUS wanted. The nerve of those companies!
Next thing you know there'll be a whole raft of litigation surrounding the unwillingness of people to pay US$16.99 for a CD with one good song on it.
Of course it is true that owning and operating a Windows computer costs more because of the need to keep current with patches, to test them and to apply them in a timely manner. Every sysadmin knows this even if their cost-conscious boss doesn't see this big picture.
But, to be fair [and I'm no MS apologist - they need to be taken to task all over the place for lots of reasons], even if you run a MacOS X, Linux or even an OpenBSD system, there are implicit costs associated with maintaining those systems, too.
Since the software cost for FOSS is zero, the single most important cost is this installation and maintenance. As such, it ought to be quantified.
The advantage of doing this is that these kinds of costs are no longer swept under the rug and people can start asking more detailed questions about Windows maintenance costs in terms of sysadmin time- not just estimated costs of downtime on the business.
Then maybe, too, people will start to ask questions about what kinds of implicit future costs they incurred via early decisions to use some vendor's application that locks their valuable business data inside a proprietary format.
There is a widespread perception in the west that the Arab world is backwards in terms of technological knowhow
About 1000 years ago the Arabs and Persians were leading the way intellectually (inventing the concept of zero, etc.) while European Christian nations were mired firmly in the Dark Ages under a supposed theocracy.
It's been hyped since the mid-90's, but thin clients have never really caught on in the corporate environment.
At MyCorp we used X terminals for a few years in the early 1990s.
They were great from the standpoint of centralized administration. That's still a big advantage to thin clients even today.
But we had implemented them with the idea of putting only as much graphics display at the end of our networks that we could get away with and then using the extra money to buy huge servers. (Consider now all the desktops sitting around doing screensavers most of their lives.)
What was interesting was that as the price of CPU power and commodity PCs came down it became obvious that the clients could become thicker for essentially no cost.
Also, it was found early on that running some clients locally such as a window manager was - doh - a good idea. You can imagine the same thing for applications like clocks.
Also, there were still issues with things like OpenGL applications and whether the server had enough extensions to deal with that. And that for some graphically-rich applications you still needed to push lots of data down the skinny pipe.
The network transparency of X is a nice idea, but division of functionality between the client and server is kind of static (the pseudo X servers used by ssh are kind of an interesting twist here).
What would be even nicer is a way for the client server interface to negotiate where to put their boundary depending on the network BW and latency, the local hardware acceleration, congestion on the server, whatever.
Having a full workstation capable of running not just the X server but any of the X clients is a cheap and flexible way to go. It still doesn't automatically guarantee people will start clients in the right place to optimize their performance.
If some client needed tons of disk I/O on the server and displayed only a few lines of grep output on an xterm that didn't burden the network, then it made sense to run on the server rather than via NFS, for example.
What would you do with a 6GigHz CPU, a gig or two of RAM, and a terabyte or two of storage?
Video.
Encode, decode other streams, save lots and lots of HDTV shows. You'll need all those resources in your new PC^H^H PVR.
Because videos are noisy and quarters are typically cramped, I don't foresee video taking off as much in the workplace.
How many IT departments will feel any need to upgrade their hardware and software? Oh, well, I forgot, there's always the new Powerpoint email attachments from sales and marketing with new laptops that have to be decoded back at the salt mine...
The Sasser worm is 100% preventable if your system is properly patched and firewalled.
Sure it is.
But I would venture to guess that their IT admins are like the admins around here who find that the new security patches often break some other functionality that they're using.
So it's just a choice of being dead in the water one way (no functionality) or dead in the water another way (sploit puts Windows box into constant reboot)...
If it's true and if it's not some fluke.
Even more so if you could consider that native Windows for [i]AMD-64 won't be available until Q4 according to His Billness at WinHEC.
Some are seeking pure performance with Linux servers running AMD-64 natively, but even the broader market of Windows users for server and desktop seems to find AMD price/performance compelling even if they're restricted to running full time in 32 bit compatability mode.
This will also be to make sure that DRM can succeed.
And the continuing raft of viruses and worms will be used to help usher in the DRM age.
But I have to question whether it will really succeed.
DRM is being driven not by demand from consumers but from owners of copyrights. That's not exactly a recipe for success. It sounds to me like it will be as much a rousing success as DAT and for the same reasons.
Despite a deployment of DRM with euphemisms that most consumers aren't expected to understand and possibly low introductory prices on DRM-protected content, I foresee a lot of folks annoyed with the restrictions more than they are joyed by the content.
I still advocate calling the technology for the dog it is Content Use Restriction or CUR. It's designed to bite the unwitting.
Got that right.
I learned the good ole USA way of date +"%m/%d/%y" and was de-modularized when I encountered the European way of date +"%d.%m.%y" .
I immediately realized that I had to do something that was less ambiguous. The European way is at least monotonically endian, while the USA way is not. But I have to write stuff down for fellow Americans.
Thus, date +"%Y/%m/%d" so that USA folks recognize the last 2 parts and the UK folks think "Oh! Backwards!" upon seeing the 4 digit year.
They just want to have it both ways.
Basically, Linux is ready for the desktop as long as various conditions are met.
If people complain that their Excel Access application broke going to Linux, well, then Linux is not ready for the desktop.
If people don't complain as their secretaries crank out letters using OO.o, then Linux is ready for the desktop.
Just covering both bases.
Actually, I think MacOS pushes the hardest to make truth in advertising claims for their desktop. Of course they do charge some for that...
Windows: Hey, any color you want as long as it's black...