Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.

Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.

This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.

All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.

In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.

Nope. Some GM crops have the restriction built in at the genetic level. Kind of like a crop based DRM. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology

If I was Monsanto (and hence only cared about profits) I would make damn sure that I didn't have to rely on the Indian courts to uphold any copyright or patent related stuff after their stances on generic drugs so it stands to reason they would build the legal restriction into the actual product.

Maybe I should have included a link to that page in my original reply. I thought it would mention that many GM crops produce sterile seeds on the main GM crops page I linked but I guess it relies on you to click on the "GM controversies" link. I didn't read all the page as most of what I typed was based on memory as I have been following the GM arguments for years.

Start your post with an insult, nice way to show your own arrogance.

Wrong. The main GM plant that people moan about is GM Soya made by Monsanto. They created GM soya as normal soya was killed if you used roundup weed killer on it. So Monsanto create a GM crop to increase their weedkiller sales.

Ok, you could argue that there is a difference between a pesticide and a weed killer but that is just being pedantic. The truth is the parent poster kind of had a point, they just screwed up by saying "Pesticide" when they should have said "WeedKiller". Interestingly wikipedia has the following to say about pesticides:

"A pesticide is generally a chemical or biological agent (such as a virus, bacterium, antimicrobial or disinfectant) that through its effect deters, incapacitates, kills or otherwise discourages pests. Target pests can include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, mollusks, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, cause nuisance, spread disease or are vectors for disease. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, some also have drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals. According to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 9 of the 12 most dangerous and persistent organic chemicals are pesticides."

So many people seem to consider it fair enough to call something a "pesticide" when the actual pest being killed is a weed. I know the correct term would be herbicide but hey, who am I to argue with wikipedia :)

You might want to read the following, paying particular attention to the section on Glyphosphate resistant crops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops

That is also arguable. That might be the norm in the intensive farming in the developed world but it is not the case everywhere.

I think he was referring to the spate of farmers suicides in India where using seeds from a previous harvest is more common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_India. This was actually blamed on them not knowing they were buying seeds where the crops would produce sterile seeds so that a year after the bought the crop they planted a load of duds that did not grow.

I am not entirely sure why a bunch of farmers started killing themselves in far away country, but keeping some of your seeds from a previous harvest is still common in the case of third world subsistence farming it seems.

Personally I am not sure I agree with all of the anti GM lobby or not, but you were an insulting twat when it was not warranted as some of what he was saying actually had a basis in fact. You could have more politely corrected him without calling him a fool, especially since your post was very light on factual content and evidence itself. I am being deliberately insulting to let you know how it feels, but have tried to include more references to some of my assertions.

Lol. Of course I understood that x11 display server only sent stuff over the network if it was actually talking to a remote client.

What I was saying was the separation of the X11 into two parts is completely unneeded if you are only ever intending your OS to run on single user devices like phones and desktop computers. It might be a nice to have as far as us geeks are concerned, but he is obviously trying to target Ubuntu at having the same OS running on both Phones and Desktops / Laptops. For that market you can throw the client-server stuff away and very few users will care (even if those people who do care shout loudly about how great it was to make up form them being a small minority).

As to running Ubuntu on servers do they actually care about that market either? Personally where I work we use Red Hat (actual paid for RedHat, not Centos) and Debian for all the Linux servers so have no idea how friendly they are as a company to people running Ubuntu as a server OS. My gut feeling says they are probably not friendly at all but I am happy to be corrected in this.

I have been using Linux for a few years and remember playing with getting the X11 client to talk to a different X11 server in the past. I have only ever done this as a bit of fun though on two machines that were right next to each other. I have never actually used this or needed it in the 10 years I have been working as a software developer and system admin.

The first thing I do on a linux server is dive into inittab and change the default run level to something where there is no GUI running unless I start it. On most of the linux servers I build X is not even installed since they are just forming part of a LAMP stack and I do everything via the command line and reckon any system admin worth his salt who replaces / works with me should be able to do the same.

My point is that very few people installing Linux on stand alone devices give two shits about this though. So why not get rid of it in the quest for better performance.

By X11 you must actually mean X.org. The original version of X11 that Linux used to ship with was Xfree86 but that ended when they got hissy and tried to change the licence to one that may (I am not a layer so have no idea if this is actually true or not, the important thing was that the community thought it might have been) have been incompatible with the GPL. This caused no end of crap and resulted in everyone moving to x.org.

The problem is that X.org is pretty much a dead project now. Ok, Ubuntu could have single handedly kept the project going but why should they if X11 is not ideal anyway (believe me, it wasn't). The X11 Window system was created almost 30 years ago and things have moved on along way since then. Sometimes you just need to look at old software in an objective way and decide to take a clean break from it.

At a rough guess I would say that the main reason for throwing X11 in the bin is the idea of the client - server separation. This might have made sense when you had to support dumb terminals and multiple users with different desktops on the same server but it makes no sense now. Nowadays every device (even phones!!!) have a dedicated CPU and Graphics Chip that the display manager can talk to directly without going over a possibly insecure network. Now you want to be able to give applications a direct pipeline to the graphics hardware to make it feel as responsive as possible if they need it.

This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be taught at university as an integral module to most degrees preparing you for a career as a software developer. Even people doing system type stuff should know this too.

I know a myriad of students will bitch and complain that they are not learning real development and are just learning business stuff, but screw them. In my experience students bitch and moan about everything anyway, they need to learn faster that in the real world (ie: paid work) people do not care, they just want you to shut up and get on with what you are told to do or I will fire you and pay someone who does. Once you have worked somewhere a few years you generally get some input into things but initially (ie, for most of the period you work there equivalent to your time at uni if on a 3 year degree as is the norm here in the UK) you just need to knuckle down and prove you can do the job.

I had to learn how to give realistic timescale estimates on the job and it is one of the hardest things I found initially. The fact is that most geeks (I know I did) find learning to actually create code or tinker with servers fun so will do it in their own time anyway. They crap they won't do for fun is the really dull stuff like learning how to scope projects, produce decent project plans but this is exactly what you need to be able to do in order to work as a techie.

What is the business case for the FOSS bit? Surely it makes loads more sense to keep the software closed source so someone cannot take you software then undercut you on the support as they do not have to support a development team keeping the software up to date.

Open Source works in the some markets where you can rely on lots of unpaid developers helping out with code contributions. This will not be the case with niche software as the only way to get a community of developers working on an open source product is if you have an even larger community of developers who want to USE that software.

There are a great many markets for software when open source simply does not work as only a paid developer would spend time working on that software. In this case you receive no benefit from making it open source unless you know few other companies who will contribute paid man hours to the project and even then, why not make contributing minimum number of developer hours a condition of getting access to the source code. (This is difficult, I know).

People who think the open source, paid support based model is suitable for every market for software applications are living in cloud cuckoo land.

I doubt it, that would make it far more expensive. The reality is that software development costs money.

Once you compar that $10K to the cost of something like Photoshop while also taking into account size of the respective markets it doesn't seem that expensive after all. I bet the market for Photoshop is at least 10 times the size of the market for specialist opticians software so of course the price will be at least 10 times as much (thats called an economy of scale).

Then there is the fact that if the people develop the opticians sofware know there are very few other players in the market then they whack in another hefty hike since they can.

The trick to making a fortune in the software development wass to find a niche market then develop a successful product for it using insider knowledge from the industry. Chances are some optician got someone to develop them some software that made their job easier because they knew a software developer who would work on the cheap. Since then the two of them have partnered up, formed a company and are laughing all the way to the bank as they sell the software to other opticians.

This is much harder to do nowadays though as most of these niche markets have been sown up by small companies who did this. Many of these small companies are still going though as they reward for developing a competing product from scratch does not justify the cost, especially when you need to hire an expert consultant from within the field in question.

Good luck with that

It was passed unanimously which means some republicans voted for it too. This is especially true since they controlled the senate and the house of representatives in 1996 when it passed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Revolution

If the GOP gave two shits about the DMCA they have had ample opportunities to change it since. They haven't because they don't give a shit. Maybe the only reason for the vast payments to the Democratic party that year is simply because they needed more buying off, the republicans were on side already.

You are clearly an evil capitalist or a sock puppet for MPAA / RIAA / some other content conglomerate. There are no real people who believe in copyright law being applied to bits and bytes, especially not people who develop software since we are all communist hippies who think everything should be free.

Of course I actually agree with you though even though you may well be a troll :)

Nice!!! Was wondering if anyone would mention Dr Strangelove.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove

Yup, just noticed this myself. Seems like slashdot needs a new admin as this is a bit of schoolboy error. If I made this sort of screwup at work I would get a right bollocking.

This is especially crap as it prevents us from logging in without trusting an insecure cert. Those of us who are subscribers and bookmarked the secure page are particularly inconvenienced as we cannot even rely on being logged in already to view the site.