When presidents of companies that have ties to most of the politicians in the federal government horde money and rip off the people that work for them, costing billions, it's look at as an unfortunate mistake.
When overworked programmers make a few mistakes because they've been up all night working on something for an unreasonable deadline their manager demands, it's a horrible thing that the government feels it's necessary to look into?
I bet if there were some sort of programmers PAC that invited Dick Cheney out for a round of golf once and then a report like this one wouldn't have seen the light of day.
Seriously, does the stripped down PC also avoid the Microsoft tax? I would think not but I could be wrong. Besides, who wants to buy hardware from someone with such an annoying mascot? I would think that kid represents AOL better than Dell.
CDs, DVDs, and the various forms of discs have proven themselves to be fairly unreliable under bad conditions. You can't throw a CD onto the ground, step on it, squish it into the ground grinding against rocks, and expect it to work.
However, with things like the USB keychains you can do this. I think we should try to get away from formats like CDs and look at expanding on things that are more self-contained. I think that is the way of the future. I await my 50GB USB (or even firewire!) keychain.
I'm amused by submitting articles like that to K5. In fact, I am the one who submitted the "Why do you hate Jesus" article, as well as the one this morning that mentioned punching Rusty in the face.
Of course, K5 would have voted this story up, and has voted this author's stories up before. In fact, I believe he was the author of a fairly big successful cross-posted article about Microsoft.Net or some other technology.
The author of this story actually works for Microsoft. I believe he just had his first article published in whatever the MSDN publication is as well.
I find it ironic that so many people here bash Microsoft when one of their employees has been one of the best contributors of original content to Slashdot. Of course, the moment Bill Gates gets a story posted here is the moment I delete/. from my bookmarks.
Most linux distributions are to be compared to Windows NT/2K Pro/XP Pro installations. Those OSes are a little more difficult than Windows 98. While there is a lot of clicking next, you will have to type a few things in like the hostname and such. It's still a lot easier than installing linux used to be, and Mandrake actually autodetected all of my hardware correctly so there was no time wasted with that.
Have you tried Mandrake? As far as the installation from the CDs go, it's about as easy as you can get. It's still not on par with the ease of use for installing other software that Windows has, but it's not a whole lot harder either.
Also, I believe Gentoo is meant for advanced users. I'm not sure that there are any advantages to running this on the desktop, but for a server it would be excellent due to speed constraints and issues with bloated software. It seems to be very lean and trim compared to other linux distros, since you have to do most of the installing yourself.
SunBlades have served better as terminals in the past. I don't really know if this newer offering is going to be any good or not. While the specs do look impressive, there may be smaller things that keep the SGI workstations on top. Solaris does make a great desktop unix OS though. I loved it when I had a SPARCstation.
If you go to some of the sites like computerjobs.com, monster.com, etc. they list plenty of government jobs through various contractors, but the requirements almost always say, "Current Top Secret w/ Lifestyle Polygraph required" before they will accept you. One of the reasons for this is that it's impossible to get one without already working for a contractor like this. If they did have to get one for you, it could take months at least before you have it, meanwhile they are paying you to sit around and surf the internet all day. It's not very economically sound while in a recession, so that's why they are taking anyone off the street that has security clearance.
20 feet sounds practical enough to me. I may even be able to get further with it. I have a Palm III (actually an IBM WorkPad) that I have used to control a TV from about 20 feet away. The only thing that annoys me is there is no free remote control software out there, and OmniRemote is not good enough to be worth $20 in my opinion.
This sort of information has been going around for a while, and it is still incorrect.
While I won't attempt to make the estimates myself, I will suggest a few things to take into consideration
Learning curves. In the school and corporate environments, people don't want to waste time learning unix or linux. They don't work the same as Windows, which is the standard desktop practically everywhere. A normal situation would be that only some of the I.T. staff and power users know unix. If you can teach the blonde bimbo that blows your boss and makes memos in MS Powerpoint to send via Outlook the advantages of being able to compile your own kernel, I'll shut up about that, but it's not realistic to assume that people can easily learn a new OS. After all, most of them don't even understand how to use Windows correctly.
Interaction with others outside your office. Since Windows is the standard in the corporate world, you have to be able to communicate effectively with Windows. Samba is not easy for the average user to use like network neighborhood is. OpenOffice isn't able to work with MS Office as well as people tell you. It can read some old versions of word documents, but it doesn't work with Office XP. Microsoft will most likely make a conversion tool for Windows users who are using Office 2k or older, but not for unix. Unfortunately, until you have everyone agree to use unix it will never be a good office tool for people that communicate with those outside your office.
Support costs. Corporate support is a very important thing. Anyone that works with big companies to maintain their server hardware and software knows that if you have a critical problem and you're paying $200k a year in support, they will have a patch out for you by COB the next day. (Perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but they are still very quick to solve problems.) The problem is that Windows support is generally cheaper than Unix support. I wouldn't even consider linux in an office environment though, because those that support it are not the same group that developers the software.
There are others that I could mention but those are the main three things that seemed to be left out. It's hard us normal people to quantify the amount of money those things cost but most corporations have a team of people dedicated to that sort of stuff. I think that for how greedy most corporations are, if they honestly thought they could save money by not using Windows, they would switch in a heartbeat. However, after careful and detailed evaluation, much better than the one in this article, they decide to stick with Windows or migrate their stuff to it. They have to be saving money with Microsoft somehow, and I think those three categories are some of the major ways they justify it.
Could their scripts be set up to run from a website? I remember the Netscape "Brown Orifice" crack that turned a browser into a trojan. Internet Explorer is already a laughingstock because of all the security flaws, would this make Mozilla just as bad?
Congress is not using the terrorist attack as a "blank check" to do whatever they want. It is obvious that within the many speeches the president and others have given, that we can't allow the terrorist acts to change America. This includes restricting our freedoms, or letting us live in fear. I have faith that our governmental representatives are going to do what is right to ensure our safety, and do it within the confines of the system of checks and balances that have always existed within the government.
We all know that encryption is hardly used except by criminals and the paranoid. I am not trying to flame people, but it's the honest truth. Personally, I don't use it nor does anyone I know. However, I think it's ok if someone needs to send an email with some information that needs to be protected. The problem is that criminals are abusing these encryption systems to commit crimes. It's not like it will hurt Joe Linuxbob to send an unencrypted email to his friend Don Window. The ones it will hurt are the ones that are comitting crimes against the people of this country, and those who are escaping law enforcement. We hire these people to protect us, we pay them taxes, yet you don't want to allow them to do their jobs? Why? Why do you hate your fellow Americans so much that you would permit criminals to contact each other in private and murder thousands, as evidenced on the 11th.
It is your duty as an American to protect your country and love your fellow Americans. In order to protect all of us, we might have to allow the government, under strict, controlled circumstances, to view our email once in a while. Which would you rather have happen? Would you prefer to be ran into a building at 600+ mph and burn in a fiery inferno along with thousands of others, or perhaps be inconvenienced of the government seeing you send porn to your geek friends at school?
True freedom requires security of those freedoms. To be secure, you might have to give up some of your liberties.
If you go to this link You will see that he posted to kuro5hin already. Basically, he didn't read the contract very well (everyone I know that uses telocity seems to remember the $500 fee if you don't return it) and is whining about it.
I'm not really suprised this story got posted, he sounds very convincing but he's just trying to bash Telocity, who have provided me with excellent service in the Atlanta area. I am hesitant to see how they are now that they have become DirecTV DSL but we'll see if the quality decreases or stays good. I just see this article as FUD.
I didn't mean that they don't get billed for it, but that it is the responsibility of some schools to provide that level of support. They write the EULAs themselves. I used to work at a university that did offer that much coverage, and if you were faculty or staff you didn't have to pay if you did stupid crap like that. Ultimately the students pick up the bill for everything so it's not a big deal really. The IBM EZ-Serv would get paid for fixing the laptop, the helpdesk and tech staff would get paid, and the student could be irresponsible as long as mommy and daddy's money paid for them. Everyone was happy.
Many colleges hand out laptops that are paid for with the student's tuition, and require that these computers are used for various classes, as well as some services the staff requires students to use.
The thing is that in these situations, the IT staff are required to support the machines, whether they spill coke on the keyboard, bake it in an oven, or accidentally get subseven on it, the staff is required to fix it. At good, more advanced colleges using the network is mandatory, not a choice. And what if your professor accidentally sends you a Word macro virus? If you are required to use Outlook by the university and email for class, that isn't your fault and you shouldn't have to fix it.
Not all colleges abide by the standards of technical schools so it does no good to try to bury your head in the sand, instead students should be given help with the technology the school makes them use.
This guy is one of my favorite authors. I hope he is more successful than Stephen King's online book experience was. I personally don't know if I'd pay for this though. I like to read books and not stare at a monitor then. I've tried reading on my palm pilot, but it's too small. The only real option I would have with this is to download and print out the text, but even that isn't in a nice book form. I've already bought the Otherland series, as well as that book about Tailchaser the cat. I think he does a good job, and hopefully he finds a way to make money from his work combined with technology other than just offering text on the internet.
Remember those little cardboard things you probably had as a kid that had a piece of plastic covering a drawing of a face, and you had to use a magentized pen to draw hair on the face with little bits of metal? That's your prior art. If the magnet company doesn't like that, I'll make the picture like their president, with little iron devil horns and a moustach with handlebars.
Thanks! I will be in Jalisco and Guanajuato so if there's anything interesting I'll post it on k5 later on. I'll have access to computers when I am in Guadalajara at least, but I doubt I will use them much other than to pop an email to my mom. We'll see.
I will have all the same technology at my hand that I do here when I am in Guadalajara...however, I will spend the first part of my trip in another city called Guanajuato which I have never been to before and it's supposed to be very old fashioned so I don't know if there's a cyber cafe.
In any case I plan to take pictures, also when I go to the mummy museum to see lots of dead people (sick, but fascinating.)
I think 90% of the comments on here are people complaining about not being able to view kuro5hin. I find this terribly amusing even though I am not happy with that myself. Perhaps rusty should check the referrer and set up a perl script to redirect them to goatse.cx (no, I'm not going to post the actual URL.)
Slashdot Mirror
When overworked programmers make a few mistakes because they've been up all night working on something for an unreasonable deadline their manager demands, it's a horrible thing that the government feels it's necessary to look into?
I bet if there were some sort of programmers PAC that invited Dick Cheney out for a round of golf once and then a report like this one wouldn't have seen the light of day.
Why do you people support such a lame OS? Shouldn't you be putting a BSD on your servers instead?
Seriously, does the stripped down PC also avoid the Microsoft tax? I would think not but I could be wrong. Besides, who wants to buy hardware from someone with such an annoying mascot? I would think that kid represents AOL better than Dell.
However, with things like the USB keychains you can do this. I think we should try to get away from formats like CDs and look at expanding on things that are more self-contained. I think that is the way of the future. I await my 50GB USB (or even firewire!) keychain.
Of course, K5 would have voted this story up, and has voted this author's stories up before. In fact, I believe he was the author of a fairly big successful cross-posted article about Microsoft .Net or some other technology.
I find it ironic that so many people here bash Microsoft when one of their employees has been one of the best contributors of original content to Slashdot. Of course, the moment Bill Gates gets a story posted here is the moment I delete /. from my bookmarks.
Most linux distributions are to be compared to Windows NT/2K Pro/XP Pro installations. Those OSes are a little more difficult than Windows 98. While there is a lot of clicking next, you will have to type a few things in like the hostname and such. It's still a lot easier than installing linux used to be, and Mandrake actually autodetected all of my hardware correctly so there was no time wasted with that.
Have you tried Mandrake? As far as the installation from the CDs go, it's about as easy as you can get. It's still not on par with the ease of use for installing other software that Windows has, but it's not a whole lot harder either.
Also, I believe Gentoo is meant for advanced users. I'm not sure that there are any advantages to running this on the desktop, but for a server it would be excellent due to speed constraints and issues with bloated software. It seems to be very lean and trim compared to other linux distros, since you have to do most of the installing yourself.
The reason K5 has been down most of the day is because Rusty followed the advice of this article and installed Gentoo Linux on it.
SunBlades have served better as terminals in the past. I don't really know if this newer offering is going to be any good or not. While the specs do look impressive, there may be smaller things that keep the SGI workstations on top. Solaris does make a great desktop unix OS though. I loved it when I had a SPARCstation.
If you go to some of the sites like computerjobs.com, monster.com, etc. they list plenty of government jobs through various contractors, but the requirements almost always say, "Current Top Secret w/ Lifestyle Polygraph required" before they will accept you. One of the reasons for this is that it's impossible to get one without already working for a contractor like this. If they did have to get one for you, it could take months at least before you have it, meanwhile they are paying you to sit around and surf the internet all day. It's not very economically sound while in a recession, so that's why they are taking anyone off the street that has security clearance.
It works fine. My cousin bought a Clie and I sent him about 30 programs over the IR port from my IBM Workpad (Palm III)
20 feet sounds practical enough to me. I may even be able to get further with it. I have a Palm III (actually an IBM WorkPad) that I have used to control a TV from about 20 feet away. The only thing that annoys me is there is no free remote control software out there, and OmniRemote is not good enough to be worth $20 in my opinion.
While I won't attempt to make the estimates myself, I will suggest a few things to take into consideration
- Learning curves. In the school and corporate environments, people don't want to waste time learning unix or linux. They don't work the same as Windows, which is the standard desktop practically everywhere. A normal situation would be that only some of the I.T. staff and power users know unix. If you can teach the blonde bimbo that blows your boss and makes memos in MS Powerpoint to send via Outlook the advantages of being able to compile your own kernel, I'll shut up about that, but it's not realistic to assume that people can easily learn a new OS. After all, most of them don't even understand how to use Windows correctly.
- Interaction with others outside your office. Since Windows is the standard in the corporate world, you have to be able to communicate effectively with Windows. Samba is not easy for the average user to use like network neighborhood is. OpenOffice isn't able to work with MS Office as well as people tell you. It can read some old versions of word documents, but it doesn't work with Office XP. Microsoft will most likely make a conversion tool for Windows users who are using Office 2k or older, but not for unix. Unfortunately, until you have everyone agree to use unix it will never be a good office tool for people that communicate with those outside your office.
- Support costs. Corporate support is a very important thing. Anyone that works with big companies to maintain their server hardware and software knows that if you have a critical problem and you're paying $200k a year in support, they will have a patch out for you by COB the next day. (Perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but they are still very quick to solve problems.) The problem is that Windows support is generally cheaper than Unix support. I wouldn't even consider linux in an office environment though, because those that support it are not the same group that developers the software.
There are others that I could mention but those are the main three things that seemed to be left out. It's hard us normal people to quantify the amount of money those things cost but most corporations have a team of people dedicated to that sort of stuff. I think that for how greedy most corporations are, if they honestly thought they could save money by not using Windows, they would switch in a heartbeat. However, after careful and detailed evaluation, much better than the one in this article, they decide to stick with Windows or migrate their stuff to it. They have to be saving money with Microsoft somehow, and I think those three categories are some of the major ways they justify it.Could their scripts be set up to run from a website? I remember the Netscape "Brown Orifice" crack that turned a browser into a trojan. Internet Explorer is already a laughingstock because of all the security flaws, would this make Mozilla just as bad?
We all know that encryption is hardly used except by criminals and the paranoid. I am not trying to flame people, but it's the honest truth. Personally, I don't use it nor does anyone I know. However, I think it's ok if someone needs to send an email with some information that needs to be protected. The problem is that criminals are abusing these encryption systems to commit crimes. It's not like it will hurt Joe Linuxbob to send an unencrypted email to his friend Don Window. The ones it will hurt are the ones that are comitting crimes against the people of this country, and those who are escaping law enforcement. We hire these people to protect us, we pay them taxes, yet you don't want to allow them to do their jobs? Why? Why do you hate your fellow Americans so much that you would permit criminals to contact each other in private and murder thousands, as evidenced on the 11th.
It is your duty as an American to protect your country and love your fellow Americans. In order to protect all of us, we might have to allow the government, under strict, controlled circumstances, to view our email once in a while. Which would you rather have happen? Would you prefer to be ran into a building at 600+ mph and burn in a fiery inferno along with thousands of others, or perhaps be inconvenienced of the government seeing you send porn to your geek friends at school?
True freedom requires security of those freedoms. To be secure, you might have to give up some of your liberties.
What's next, are they going to port the BSOD to be some daemon that runs and randomly crashes the system to be more compatible with Windows?
I'm not really suprised this story got posted, he sounds very convincing but he's just trying to bash Telocity, who have provided me with excellent service in the Atlanta area. I am hesitant to see how they are now that they have become DirecTV DSL but we'll see if the quality decreases or stays good. I just see this article as FUD.
I didn't mean that they don't get billed for it, but that it is the responsibility of some schools to provide that level of support. They write the EULAs themselves. I used to work at a university that did offer that much coverage, and if you were faculty or staff you didn't have to pay if you did stupid crap like that. Ultimately the students pick up the bill for everything so it's not a big deal really. The IBM EZ-Serv would get paid for fixing the laptop, the helpdesk and tech staff would get paid, and the student could be irresponsible as long as mommy and daddy's money paid for them. Everyone was happy.
The thing is that in these situations, the IT staff are required to support the machines, whether they spill coke on the keyboard, bake it in an oven, or accidentally get subseven on it, the staff is required to fix it. At good, more advanced colleges using the network is mandatory, not a choice. And what if your professor accidentally sends you a Word macro virus? If you are required to use Outlook by the university and email for class, that isn't your fault and you shouldn't have to fix it.
Not all colleges abide by the standards of technical schools so it does no good to try to bury your head in the sand, instead students should be given help with the technology the school makes them use.
This guy is one of my favorite authors. I hope he is more successful than Stephen King's online book experience was. I personally don't know if I'd pay for this though. I like to read books and not stare at a monitor then. I've tried reading on my palm pilot, but it's too small. The only real option I would have with this is to download and print out the text, but even that isn't in a nice book form. I've already bought the Otherland series, as well as that book about Tailchaser the cat. I think he does a good job, and hopefully he finds a way to make money from his work combined with technology other than just offering text on the internet.
Remember those little cardboard things you probably had as a kid that had a piece of plastic covering a drawing of a face, and you had to use a magentized pen to draw hair on the face with little bits of metal? That's your prior art. If the magnet company doesn't like that, I'll make the picture like their president, with little iron devil horns and a moustach with handlebars.
Thanks! I will be in Jalisco and Guanajuato so if there's anything interesting I'll post it on k5 later on. I'll have access to computers when I am in Guadalajara at least, but I doubt I will use them much other than to pop an email to my mom. We'll see.
In any case I plan to take pictures, also when I go to the mummy museum to see lots of dead people (sick, but fascinating.)
I think 90% of the comments on here are people complaining about not being able to view kuro5hin. I find this terribly amusing even though I am not happy with that myself. Perhaps rusty should check the referrer and set up a perl script to redirect them to goatse.cx (no, I'm not going to post the actual URL.)