They have been studying Linux extensively. Part of their study has been on how Linux has been able to maintain a high level of consistency in the kernel while groups around it maintain maximum flexibility,
The developers at Microsoft are quite capable of great things.
It's just that MSFT management decisions made to obscure things for competitors has created a Big Ball of Mud.
You know, Ballmer's song, "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run!"
In case of a word processor, I'd say that nothing the word processor will do makes a significant impact, even with Clippy;). All the work goes into forming the letter
I agree.
But don't forget the costs to the letter composer in initial training and learning of the application, as well as the time it actually takes to compose a letter.
I believe the single largest impediment to more widespread adoption of Open Office is fear of having to climb yet another learning curve.
that Windows programmers hurt their arms and wrists after clawing their way through one too many pull-down menus while Unix programmers hurt their pinky fingers after a heavy emacs session in the world of Control Meta.
As a result, Windows programmers have spastic arms from all this GUI action, looking like zombies from Night of the Living Dead, while UNIX programmers have hands curled up like Igor from Frankenstein's Lab.
Having seen 2 GB USB memory keys starting to become available, I have to wonder what the great advantage is of the microdrive.
I've heard the memory keys are limited by the number of erase/write cycles (to ~10,000) before they wear out, and also limited to data transfer speeds of about 1 MB/s (although I think USB 2.0 is supposed to be better).
Unforunately, I didn't see any specifications about the read/write speed for this drive, but if it's going to plug into a USB port then it has no practical advantage over the solid state memory device.
Is there any other reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state memory?
Photocopiers are available in most libraries, yet this doesn't seem to have created a huge problem with "piracy" of books.
Sure, there are warning posters above them telling people not to violate copyright; if this suffices for printed books and magazines, then why not for CD and DVD materials as well?
My support of Linux has left me with old distributions that I would love to donate to my local library. Probably I ought to do newbies a favor and only donate the newest releases instead of that old RedHat 4.2.
The Dean candidacy is likely to cause great damage to the party
A recent editorial echoed this sentiment.
Dean's well thought out wonderful progressive stances play intensely for not enough voters.
The idealism and hopes of Dean's supporters will suffer the same fate as those who supported McCarthy several decades earlier.
Dean won't win support from "NASCAR dads".
While I like Dean's positions immensely and hope they form the core of the next administration's policies, Wesley Clark is the Democratic Party's strongest potential challenger to GWB. Clark's military credentials give him leverage into the middle ground of voters that Dean cannot do.
Kerry's military experience counts some, but his later vehement anti-war stance and his Massachusetts roots will count against him in a a general election.
Near ubiquity has arguably moved Microsoft's products into the popular lexicon more rapidly than the brand names for other products.
Brand protection is important in a competitive marketplace to help distinguish products.
Most computer users think of "Word", "Outlook" and "Explorer" as basic ingredients of their computer. If pressed, they might remember the "MS" prefix that seems to prepend those application names. Many people are only vaguely aware of "Windows", considering it along the same lines as the hardware it's always bundled with, something dreary and essential like a utility. If you asked them what competing brand applications existed for each of Word, Explorer, Outlook, they'd have a hard time. Some of them might well come up with fictitious competitors like "Apple Word", "Netscape Explorer", prefixing a company name to something they regard as basic functionality. Only a small minority of people use carefully couched terms like "word processing" "WWW HTML browser" or "mail user agent". Arguably fewer people understand the correct generic terminology than the terminology based on Microsoft's branding.
The speed with which Microsoft gets its products into overwhelmingly dominant market positions is IMHO reason to speed the transition of those names into a less protection. New product names like.NET, etc. deserve strong protection so consumers aren't misled; misspelled plays on old products names like Lindows will only cause potential buyers to think someone is trying foist upon them a cheaper and shoddier Windows wannabee.
In some sense, existence of ersatz Windows elevates the brand value of Windows, as any consumers disappointed with Lindows will be sure to tell people to make sure and get the real thing.
OTOH, if Lindows quality is acceptable...then there could be a problem, just as if my Lercedes automobile line were to be reasonably well-built instead of like a Yugo.
However, any intelligent business will also have offsite backups.
This is the crux of the problem.
MyCorp is large enough to be blessed with a really fast network infrastructure (10-g), but only locally.
So a backup server somewhere on the network is an enticing option. Cheap, fast, convenient, less labor intensive that having techs rummage through boxes of tapes.
But the fast network doesn't extend out far enough away for the paranoid that fear the worse of site disasters.
"Let's see, we'll put our backupserver way down on the 20th floor of WTC 2. That way, if the sprinkler system goes off up here on the 70th floor we'll be good to go."
I certainly appreciated tags, M-x compile, M-x grep from within Emacs.
IDE's have always felt like customized sports cars designed to fit someone else (like the author of the IDE).
They're great if you like the fit, but if you find yourself fighting and cursing the design decisions that have been made for you too much of the time then it's time to climb out of the cockpit.
IMO, the constant signpost reminder of IDE deficiencies has always been the need to preserve Notepad on Windows.
Somewhere I read the optimal speed limit to set on a road is that at which 85% of the drivers will naturally not exceed.
My experience is that there are plenty of roads where the limit is set lower than the 85 percentile. In fact, I suspect they did the opposite and set the limit at the 15 percentile...
Perhaps these days more video cards can support high resolutions easily, but a couple of years ago I had to carefully look at the video cards to see if they could drive my Samsung 240T (1920x1200).
Intel, with whom it is also imperative to have good relations, will look askance.
"Hmmmmm...64 bit?!? We all know that 64 bit means Itanium, and I don't see you buying many Itanium chips..."
"Oh, quite right, Mister Intel, Sir! These are Cheap, Low End, Consumer breakable machines for low prices with no profit margin that Big Important Companies like your Excellency would be concerned. That's why we're using those crappy cheap AMD chips..(scuffling away before being interrogated about why they aren't buying more Celery chips..."
But it only works if you have that internal security guru that knows the nuts and bolts of what is being installed.
If you don't have a good expert that's willing to call `em as he sees `em, then choosing multiple contractors will provide a blame diffusion mechanism with the contractors pointing fingers at each other.
Consequently, more than a few government entities scarce on IT knowledge have little choice but pay premium prices for All-in-One services.
All of these security problems at Federal Agencies, with Blaster, Welchia, spam, "piracy" etc. are going into a big hopper, where they will be used as reasons to justify TCPA, aka the Death of My Computer.
In a nutshell,
"Since IT security is in a such a poor state right now, the solution is obviously to put greater power in fewer hands."
The purchase price of high performance RISC machines has always been O(US$10^4) and the acquisition cycle a period of several years.
While you can still get high performance RISC workstations for those prices, it doesn't make any sense when comparing price/performance.
In 1993, PC's significantly underperformed RISC machines, so paying 5-8 times the prices was worth it.
In 2003, PC's perform equitably to the best RISC workstations: you need a really good reason not get a really great Linux workstation for $6-8K instead of high-end RISC hardware for $20-100K.
I've also seen occassional infrequent problems like this with my TiVos (I have two: one 20+75GB, one 100+100GB).
One culprit can be bad weather - rain and snow affecting the reception of the satellite signal.
Another possibility was bad disk sectors. I think TiVo's MFS filesystem accomodates glitches on the disk or in the video input.
The reason I'm superstitious about bad disk sectors is that if I view a recording that is terribly hosed and then keep the recording just to occupy the bad space, that other recordings work fine. This all happened a couple of years ago and I haven't had problems since then.
Accordingly, current costs are minimized, deficit spending is OK, and future projections assume the rosiest of revenue growth and unprecedented steely-eyed disciplined spending, and are stopped just before 2008 when the consequence of current fiscal policy decisions hit the fan in a big way.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's why the big box is placed annoyingly and unavoidably right under the story post here at Slashdot.
BTW, I predict that widespread uptake of DVRs and the ability to fast forward through commercials will cause similar Innovations to occur.
Newscrawl style advertisements are coming.
They have been studying Linux extensively. Part of their study has been on how Linux has been able to maintain a high level of consistency in the kernel while groups around it maintain maximum flexibility,
The developers at Microsoft are quite capable of great things.
It's just that MSFT management decisions made to obscure things for competitors has created a Big Ball of Mud.
You know, Ballmer's song, "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run!"
In case of a word processor, I'd say that nothing the word processor will do makes a significant impact, even with Clippy
I agree.
But don't forget the costs to the letter composer in initial training and learning of the application, as well as the time it actually takes to compose a letter.
I believe the single largest impediment to more widespread adoption of Open Office is fear of having to climb yet another learning curve.
that Windows programmers hurt their arms and wrists after clawing their way through one too many pull-down menus while Unix programmers hurt their pinky fingers after a heavy emacs session in the world of Control Meta.
As a result, Windows programmers have spastic arms from all this GUI action, looking like zombies from Night of the Living Dead, while UNIX programmers have hands curled up like Igor from Frankenstein's Lab.
high density solid state storage devices
Having seen 2 GB USB memory keys starting to become available, I have to wonder what the great advantage is of the microdrive.
I've heard the memory keys are limited by the number of erase/write cycles (to ~10,000) before they wear out, and also limited to data transfer speeds of about 1 MB/s (although I think USB 2.0 is supposed to be better).
Unforunately, I didn't see any specifications about the read/write speed for this drive, but if it's going to plug into a USB port then it has no practical advantage over the solid state memory device.
Is there any other reason you'd want a mechanical device like this over solid state memory?
You'd have to disable copying
Photocopiers are available in most libraries, yet this doesn't seem to have created a huge problem with "piracy" of books.
Sure, there are warning posters above them telling people not to violate copyright; if this suffices for printed books and magazines, then why not for CD and DVD materials as well?
My support of Linux has left me with old distributions that I would love to donate to my local library. Probably I ought to do newbies a favor and only donate the newest releases instead of that old RedHat 4.2.
The Dean candidacy is likely to cause great damage to the party
A recent editorial echoed this sentiment.
Dean's well thought out wonderful progressive stances play intensely for not enough voters.
The idealism and hopes of Dean's supporters will suffer the same fate as those who supported McCarthy several decades earlier.
Dean won't win support from "NASCAR dads".
While I like Dean's positions immensely and hope they form the core of the next administration's policies, Wesley Clark is the Democratic Party's strongest potential challenger to GWB. Clark's military credentials give him leverage into the middle ground of voters that Dean cannot do.
Kerry's military experience counts some, but his later vehement anti-war stance and his Massachusetts roots will count against him in a a general election.
...something along the lines of a helmet with pushbroom decoration.
have become part of the American lexicon
Near ubiquity has arguably moved Microsoft's products into the popular lexicon more rapidly than the brand names for other products.
Brand protection is important in a competitive marketplace to help distinguish products.
Most computer users think of "Word", "Outlook" and "Explorer" as basic ingredients of their computer. If pressed, they might remember the "MS" prefix that seems to prepend those application names. Many people are only vaguely aware of "Windows", considering it along the same lines as the hardware it's always bundled with, something dreary and essential like a utility. If you asked them what competing brand applications existed for each of Word, Explorer, Outlook, they'd have a hard time. Some of them might well come up with fictitious competitors like "Apple Word", "Netscape Explorer", prefixing a company name to something they regard as basic functionality. Only a small minority of people use carefully couched terms like "word processing" "WWW HTML browser" or "mail user agent". Arguably fewer people understand the correct generic terminology than the terminology based on Microsoft's branding.
The speed with which Microsoft gets its products into overwhelmingly dominant market positions is IMHO reason to speed the transition of those names into a less protection. New product names like .NET, etc. deserve strong protection so consumers aren't misled; misspelled plays on old products names like Lindows will only cause potential buyers to think someone is trying foist upon them a cheaper and shoddier Windows wannabee.
In some sense, existence of ersatz Windows elevates the brand value of Windows, as any consumers disappointed with Lindows will be sure to tell people to make sure and get the real thing.
OTOH, if Lindows quality is acceptable...then there could be a problem, just as if my Lercedes automobile line were to be reasonably well-built instead of like a Yugo.
so that it doesn't need to be queried out of the database every single time somebody requests the page.
Agreed.
I've constantly remarked that my threshhold=-1 story grabs are so quick to come back.
However, any intelligent business will also have offsite backups.
This is the crux of the problem.
MyCorp is large enough to be blessed with a really fast network infrastructure (10-g), but only locally.
So a backup server somewhere on the network is an enticing option. Cheap, fast, convenient, less labor intensive that having techs rummage through boxes of tapes.
But the fast network doesn't extend out far enough away for the paranoid that fear the worse of site disasters.
"Let's see, we'll put our backupserver way down on the 20th floor of WTC 2. That way, if the sprinkler system goes off up here on the 70th floor we'll be good to go."
emacs was one of the first successful IDEs.
I certainly appreciated tags, M-x compile, M-x grep from within Emacs.
IDE's have always felt like customized sports cars designed to fit someone else (like the author of the IDE).
They're great if you like the fit, but if you find yourself fighting and cursing the design decisions that have been made for you too much of the time then it's time to climb out of the cockpit.
IMO, the constant signpost reminder of IDE deficiencies has always been the need to preserve Notepad on Windows.
How about
The entire script is just a copyright notice
Most assuredly.
But at least it's true :)
nd then we're not all doing 85
Somewhere I read the optimal speed limit to set on a road is that at which 85% of the drivers will naturally not exceed.
My experience is that there are plenty of roads where the limit is set lower than the 85 percentile. In fact, I suspect they did the opposite and set the limit at the 15 percentile...
How about if we trade MP3 players purchased in the US for prescription drugs purchased in Canada?
I don't understand how this is possible. With DVI, the graphics card should not affect the picture quality.
Don't forget that a DVI-I connector can piggyback a DVI-A, you know, analog signal that used to be a VGA.
The DVI-D digital part is what you want from your video card and being interpreted by your monitor.
That was one chunklet of information that I needed to learn in my migration to DVI.
The other important chunk of information was that The One Cool Number was no longer RAMDAC frequency. (I used to run a Viewsonic P815.)
Now you want a video card capable of high frequency TMDS to be able to drive high resolution digital monitors.
Perhaps these days more video cards can support high resolutions easily, but a couple of years ago I had to carefully look at the video cards to see if they could drive my Samsung 240T (1920x1200).
Forget MS.
Intel, with whom it is also imperative to have good relations, will look askance.
"Hmmmmm...64 bit?!? We all know that 64 bit means Itanium, and I don't see you buying many Itanium chips..."
"Oh, quite right, Mister Intel, Sir! These are Cheap, Low End, Consumer breakable machines for low prices with no profit margin that Big Important Companies like your Excellency would be concerned. That's why we're using those crappy cheap AMD chips..(scuffling away before being interrogated about why they aren't buying more Celery chips..."
seperate contractors.
That's more economical, to be sure.
But it only works if you have that internal security guru that knows the nuts and bolts of what is being installed.
If you don't have a good expert that's willing to call `em as he sees `em, then choosing multiple contractors will provide a blame diffusion mechanism with the contractors pointing fingers at each other.
Consequently, more than a few government entities scarce on IT knowledge have little choice but pay premium prices for All-in-One services.
It's a shame, but it happens.
All of these security problems at Federal Agencies, with Blaster, Welchia, spam, "piracy" etc. are going into a big hopper, where they will be used as reasons to justify TCPA, aka the Death of My Computer.
In a nutshell,
Yeah, right.knowledgable user would download your source code / binaries and compare the checksum to the checksum of the real code
Note the parent poster provided links to mozilla's main site for the md5 checksums.
If he were distributing corrupt binaries he would have to either:
- get binaries' checksums to match the old binaries' checksums (nigh on impossible, given how md5 hash works), or
- replace the md5 sums on mozilla's main site (and the binaries, for consistency), or
- hijack routers or DNS so "mozilla.org" isn't right.
You're right, though, to be developing a healthy paranoia....That's the key issue.
The purchase price of high performance RISC machines has always been O(US$10^4) and the acquisition cycle a period of several years.
While you can still get high performance RISC workstations for those prices, it doesn't make any sense when comparing price/performance.
In 1993, PC's significantly underperformed RISC machines, so paying 5-8 times the prices was worth it.
In 2003, PC's perform equitably to the best RISC workstations: you need a really good reason not get a really great Linux workstation for $6-8K instead of high-end RISC hardware for $20-100K.
I've also seen occassional infrequent problems like this with my TiVos (I have two: one 20+75GB, one 100+100GB).
One culprit can be bad weather - rain and snow affecting the reception of the satellite signal.
Another possibility was bad disk sectors. I think TiVo's MFS filesystem accomodates glitches on the disk or in the video input.
The reason I'm superstitious about bad disk sectors is that if I view a recording that is terribly hosed and then keep the recording just to occupy the bad space, that other recordings work fine. This all happened a couple of years ago and I haven't had problems since then.
You know that they deliberately misspell things in order to pass naive spam filters, right?
If the resume gets past the naive resume filters to a real live person, then they've succeeded.
As in, "I've always wanted to have 8 years experience C++, CCNA, 9 years project lead XML Web commerce developer..."
I wonder if any of those TCO papers discuss what it costs to upgrade in the next ten years
No, TCO is computed by the accountants at the Office of Management and Budget.
Accordingly, current costs are minimized, deficit spending is OK, and future projections assume the rosiest of revenue growth and unprecedented steely-eyed disciplined spending, and are stopped just before 2008 when the consequence of current fiscal policy decisions hit the fan in a big way.
he misspelled the names of the schools.
Let me guess: his previous position was writing copy for a spammer...
F R EE VI-AGRA 4 U !!!!