I recently installed Debian on a small web server that took a while to set up properly (had to deal with a small learning curve). Since then, I've installed Linux Mint 6 and Ubuntu 9.04. I'm impressed with both, but Ubuntu 9.04 reminded me of Mac OS X - everything just works, works well, and is simple to use. I was blown away at how far it's come since I tried a beta several years back.
With that said, I'm a volunteer IT guy for a small non-profit (6 computers, 0 servers) Microsoft shop. The only reason we didn't migrate to Linux is that we have several documents, spreadsheets, and Publisher files that Linux simply does not have an adequate equivalent. OpenOffice is just not there yet, and Scribus neither is Scribus. Not to mention the pain in migrating the data from one platform to another.
I copied a Microsoft Word file to a test Linux 8.04 box, opened it in OpenOffice, and printed it to the local printer. The layout, font, and overall look and feel of the printed document was very different than the same file printed from Word. As far as I'm concerned, as long as Office suites aren't as robust as MS Office, users will continue to use Windows.
There is no reason the Korean community can't develop a plug-in for other systems. Contrary to what this article is trying to say, there simply is no reason to develop a plug-in for other systems.
You need to understand the Korean mentality. It wouldn't have mattered if the government made Active-X the standard, or if they outlawed it completely. Hell, it wouldn't have mattered if the government didn't do anything. This would've happened regardless. The reason is that unlike in America where it's cool to be different and unique, the Korean mentality is to be as homogeneous as possible. Anybody "weird" is singled out and alienated. This mindset is embedded in their society, culture, personal and professional lives, and everything else they do.
The mere fact MS bundles IE with XP pretty much ENSURED that IE would be used by the vast majority of users in Korea.
Even if standards were opened to allow Firefox, Safari, or Opera access to everything online, I will bet that IE will still have 99.9% of the market. Simply because it's what everybody else is using.
They're the Yahoo of Korea. I didn't link them so you can understand Korean, but to see how bandwidth-intensive Korean websites are over American websites.
Being Korean and known as somebody who's good with computers, a lot of my friends and family members ask me to look at their computer because "it's running too slow". At first I was more than happy to, but now I dread looking at a Korean computer because:
1. it's running Windows with IE and at least 3 extraneous toolbars
2. it hasn't been defragmented since the computer was first built
3. EVERY website HAS to install software to make it run properly
4. EVERY website the user has bookmarked has at least 5 megabytes of flash (and they're all advertisements)
Everybody in Korea signs up for everything, not knowing how useless the service is, how dangerous it is on their computer, and how much traffic it eats up. Just go to www.daum.net or www.naver.co.kr, the two most popular media portals in Korea. What's worse is that Koreans prefer that kind of interface over Google.
I'm not trying to bash Koreans, Windows, or Internet Explorer at all. It's just that when you put the three together, bad things are bound to happen.
Gigantic hard drives are great and all, but I'm especially wary of anything Seagate releases that's new.
My first large hard drive was a Seagate 120GB 7200.7 that still works to this day. It's one of my favorite drives and has never let me down.
I needed more space so I buy the then top-of-the-line Seagate 300GB 7200.8. I believe this was the first to use Perpendicular Recording Technology. I backed up all of my precious data on there and went about my business, only to realize that after 8 short months, the drive had completely crashed and took with it all of my data. Slaving the drive did not work, no program I used to recover lost files could detect the hard drive... it simply disappeared from Windows and was never seen again.
There are lots of similar stories if you just do some online searching. Since this isn't just a localized case, I'm justifiably wary of any new technology that Seagate releases. Everytime Seagate implements a new technology in their hard drives, I make sure to wait a few generations before buying it. This way, the price is lower, bugs are fixed, and hopefully I'll be able to keep my data for longer than a few months.
The most vulnerable aspect of security are the people working. The best security consulting firms focus on this the most, and provide training to employees to be wary of people who might be unauthorized. Stuff like giving out passwords over the phone or over e-mail, to even confronting somebody who might not be who they say they are (like a copier repairman). I know some security firms have their consultants dress up as a UPS or Fedex man making a delivery to gain physical access to the building.
in 100,000 years, humans will have found a way to genetically engineer the bad traits out of the gene pool
that, or we will all be cavern trolls with 3 eyes and 7 arms due to all the radiation from WW3
Yes. That is a no-brainer.
This action by the upper-level management of the company affects their press and maybe HP as a company, but it certainly won't affect my daily routine at HP if I worked there. My pay would be the same, my benefits, my project, my manager, my co-workers. It'd just be the thing to talk about for a week.
I won't stand up and voice my rejections when doing so would mean my kids would starve and I can't pay the bills.
If I had numerous job offers to choose from and all the freedom in the world, then your question would hold more clout.
The thing is, there will always be people who will do anything the company wants them to do. The assurance of a paycheck every other week is what they base their lives around, and if that goes away, then so does their comfort zone.
Investors don't really care about the employees or the customers. All they care about is money.
Kudos to you for having the balls to leave a company based on that. I don't exactly agree with a lot of the red-tape beaureaucracy that goes on at my company, but I still need money to live.
Technology has been changing the way business has been conducted forever. People can run their business in pajamas while doing laundry at home. I think it all evens out, though. Avant garde companies hire people who are passionate about their work while old-school companies hire good businesspeople. In both instances, the person being hired is probably a very hard worker, or else they won't last long.
If data is stored as magnetic bits, wouldn't a very small magnet corrupt all this data?
Computer users are warned to keep magnets away from your hard drive due to data loss, but it seems this would magnify (get it?) that problem tenfold.
I believe the key to human survival is to actively seek and explore solutions that benefit humanity as a whole. All this political talk with North Korea seeking attention doesn't really do anything to help the world. KJI wants more money, more power, and more global attention. How will we benefit if he succeeds?
I also believe politics is doing more harm than good in the long run. People side with Democratic issues simply because they are Democratic. Abortion, gun control, etc. They are issues that humans are dealing with right now, but deciding whether or not people can abort their babies is not really a step forward in human evolution.
I am for genetic modification/engineering, space pioneering, and spending incredible amounts of money on aeronautics. Pretty much everything that hippies are against. Imagine a world where humans are immune to every disease, mosquito bites don't itch, deformities are "fixed" while still in the womb (not by killing the baby, but by modifying its genetic structure). All of these people who are against genetic manipulation will only prevent a race of humans that are superior in every way. I'm not talking about choosing certain physical traits of your children, but fixing real and debilitating problems that arise because of crappy genes.
Genetically enhanced food is also key to human survival. Why would I spend more on "organic" food that doesn't taste as good, has seeds, and is less healthy for me? I'd rather spend less on food that is modified to be large, tasty, and nutritious. Do people really think that in 10,000 years when humans are flying around in Starships that they'll be raising "organic" food on the ship because it's healthier?
I also believe modifying our planet is in our best interests. It's playing with Nature, but who says we can't? Find a way to control the weather so farmers can get rain 300 days of the year, prevent tsunamis that kill half a million people, stop earthquakes that demolish centuries of architecture.
Another thing that is key to our survival is something that Dr. Hawking has already mentioned: finding ways to live on other planets. Terraforming other planets to be habitable is something that we need to start doing within the next 100 years. I don't think humans were meant to live on earth until their extinction. We might kill ourselves within the next 100 years due to some political differences that cause a nuclear war, but I truly believe that if we can come together as one species of human instead of focusing on our differences, we can make life a whole helluva lot better for everybody.
I think the future of desktop computing lies not in performance and speed, but size and heat output. This goes for about 95% of computer users; obviously, gamers want ultimate performance, but my parents (and the majority of computer users) would rather sacrifice the speed for silence.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently installed Debian on a small web server that took a while to set up properly (had to deal with a small learning curve). Since then, I've installed Linux Mint 6 and Ubuntu 9.04. I'm impressed with both, but Ubuntu 9.04 reminded me of Mac OS X - everything just works, works well, and is simple to use. I was blown away at how far it's come since I tried a beta several years back. With that said, I'm a volunteer IT guy for a small non-profit (6 computers, 0 servers) Microsoft shop. The only reason we didn't migrate to Linux is that we have several documents, spreadsheets, and Publisher files that Linux simply does not have an adequate equivalent. OpenOffice is just not there yet, and Scribus neither is Scribus. Not to mention the pain in migrating the data from one platform to another. I copied a Microsoft Word file to a test Linux 8.04 box, opened it in OpenOffice, and printed it to the local printer. The layout, font, and overall look and feel of the printed document was very different than the same file printed from Word. As far as I'm concerned, as long as Office suites aren't as robust as MS Office, users will continue to use Windows.
North Koreans are shackled to windows too, but in the literal sense.
You need to understand the Korean mentality. It wouldn't have mattered if the government made Active-X the standard, or if they outlawed it completely. Hell, it wouldn't have mattered if the government didn't do anything. This would've happened regardless. The reason is that unlike in America where it's cool to be different and unique, the Korean mentality is to be as homogeneous as possible. Anybody "weird" is singled out and alienated. This mindset is embedded in their society, culture, personal and professional lives, and everything else they do.
The mere fact MS bundles IE with XP pretty much ENSURED that IE would be used by the vast majority of users in Korea.
Even if standards were opened to allow Firefox, Safari, or Opera access to everything online, I will bet that IE will still have 99.9% of the market. Simply because it's what everybody else is using.
They're the Yahoo of Korea. I didn't link them so you can understand Korean, but to see how bandwidth-intensive Korean websites are over American websites.
Being Korean and known as somebody who's good with computers, a lot of my friends and family members ask me to look at their computer because "it's running too slow". At first I was more than happy to, but now I dread looking at a Korean computer because:
1. it's running Windows with IE and at least 3 extraneous toolbars
2. it hasn't been defragmented since the computer was first built
3. EVERY website HAS to install software to make it run properly
4. EVERY website the user has bookmarked has at least 5 megabytes of flash (and they're all advertisements)
Everybody in Korea signs up for everything, not knowing how useless the service is, how dangerous it is on their computer, and how much traffic it eats up. Just go to www.daum.net or www.naver.co.kr, the two most popular media portals in Korea. What's worse is that Koreans prefer that kind of interface over Google.
I'm not trying to bash Koreans, Windows, or Internet Explorer at all. It's just that when you put the three together, bad things are bound to happen.
Gigantic hard drives are great and all, but I'm especially wary of anything Seagate releases that's new.
My first large hard drive was a Seagate 120GB 7200.7 that still works to this day. It's one of my favorite drives and has never let me down.
I needed more space so I buy the then top-of-the-line Seagate 300GB 7200.8. I believe this was the first to use Perpendicular Recording Technology. I backed up all of my precious data on there and went about my business, only to realize that after 8 short months, the drive had completely crashed and took with it all of my data. Slaving the drive did not work, no program I used to recover lost files could detect the hard drive... it simply disappeared from Windows and was never seen again.
There are lots of similar stories if you just do some online searching. Since this isn't just a localized case, I'm justifiably wary of any new technology that Seagate releases. Everytime Seagate implements a new technology in their hard drives, I make sure to wait a few generations before buying it. This way, the price is lower, bugs are fixed, and hopefully I'll be able to keep my data for longer than a few months.
Chris Kemp works for NASA in Business Development.
Maybe now NASA will have the budget to do some really cool stuff!
The most vulnerable aspect of security are the people working. The best security consulting firms focus on this the most, and provide training to employees to be wary of people who might be unauthorized. Stuff like giving out passwords over the phone or over e-mail, to even confronting somebody who might not be who they say they are (like a copier repairman). I know some security firms have their consultants dress up as a UPS or Fedex man making a delivery to gain physical access to the building.
I will agree with your post for the most part, but from what I've experienced, Yahoo! Finance is the flagship financial website.
not that that makes any difference to this discussion
in 100,000 years, humans will have found a way to genetically engineer the bad traits out of the gene pool that, or we will all be cavern trolls with 3 eyes and 7 arms due to all the radiation from WW3
many of us IT junkies do live on chips...
potato chips, that is!
But this begs the question, how do you know if you're a pirate? I guess you just ARRRRRRe
Yes. That is a no-brainer. This action by the upper-level management of the company affects their press and maybe HP as a company, but it certainly won't affect my daily routine at HP if I worked there. My pay would be the same, my benefits, my project, my manager, my co-workers. It'd just be the thing to talk about for a week. I won't stand up and voice my rejections when doing so would mean my kids would starve and I can't pay the bills. If I had numerous job offers to choose from and all the freedom in the world, then your question would hold more clout.
The future would revolve around bacteria shit.
The thing is, there will always be people who will do anything the company wants them to do. The assurance of a paycheck every other week is what they base their lives around, and if that goes away, then so does their comfort zone.
Investors don't really care about the employees or the customers. All they care about is money. Kudos to you for having the balls to leave a company based on that. I don't exactly agree with a lot of the red-tape beaureaucracy that goes on at my company, but I still need money to live.
Technology has been changing the way business has been conducted forever. People can run their business in pajamas while doing laundry at home. I think it all evens out, though. Avant garde companies hire people who are passionate about their work while old-school companies hire good businesspeople. In both instances, the person being hired is probably a very hard worker, or else they won't last long.
If data is stored as magnetic bits, wouldn't a very small magnet corrupt all this data? Computer users are warned to keep magnets away from your hard drive due to data loss, but it seems this would magnify (get it?) that problem tenfold.
I believe the key to human survival is to actively seek and explore solutions that benefit humanity as a whole. All this political talk with North Korea seeking attention doesn't really do anything to help the world. KJI wants more money, more power, and more global attention. How will we benefit if he succeeds?
I also believe politics is doing more harm than good in the long run. People side with Democratic issues simply because they are Democratic. Abortion, gun control, etc. They are issues that humans are dealing with right now, but deciding whether or not people can abort their babies is not really a step forward in human evolution.
I am for genetic modification/engineering, space pioneering, and spending incredible amounts of money on aeronautics. Pretty much everything that hippies are against. Imagine a world where humans are immune to every disease, mosquito bites don't itch, deformities are "fixed" while still in the womb (not by killing the baby, but by modifying its genetic structure). All of these people who are against genetic manipulation will only prevent a race of humans that are superior in every way. I'm not talking about choosing certain physical traits of your children, but fixing real and debilitating problems that arise because of crappy genes.
Genetically enhanced food is also key to human survival. Why would I spend more on "organic" food that doesn't taste as good, has seeds, and is less healthy for me? I'd rather spend less on food that is modified to be large, tasty, and nutritious. Do people really think that in 10,000 years when humans are flying around in Starships that they'll be raising "organic" food on the ship because it's healthier?
I also believe modifying our planet is in our best interests. It's playing with Nature, but who says we can't? Find a way to control the weather so farmers can get rain 300 days of the year, prevent tsunamis that kill half a million people, stop earthquakes that demolish centuries of architecture.
Another thing that is key to our survival is something that Dr. Hawking has already mentioned: finding ways to live on other planets. Terraforming other planets to be habitable is something that we need to start doing within the next 100 years. I don't think humans were meant to live on earth until their extinction. We might kill ourselves within the next 100 years due to some political differences that cause a nuclear war, but I truly believe that if we can come together as one species of human instead of focusing on our differences, we can make life a whole helluva lot better for everybody.
isn't the US Government not allowed to have any IP rights?
IP = Intellectual Property
I think the future of desktop computing lies not in performance and speed, but size and heat output. This goes for about 95% of computer users; obviously, gamers want ultimate performance, but my parents (and the majority of computer users) would rather sacrifice the speed for silence.