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Slashback: Tenacity, Freedomware, Lem
Honest, I'm not dead. Again. silvaran writes "A clarification on CNet News indicates that IBM will not stop supporting or selling OS/2 as mentioned previously. Says IBM spokesman Steve Eisenstadt, 'As long as our customers want OS/2, we will support them... We don't have plans to withdraw OS/2.' The withdrawal notice lists several hundred components or software packages that will no longer be available, but OS/2 itself will still be offered."
Like Marshall MacLuhan in Annie Hall. tree writes "The Boston Globe has a really interesting interview with Stanislaw Lem, author of the 1961 novel "Solaris": he is a bit baffled about the latest movie adaptation. In any event, it's a great read for fans of Lem."
They win, GNU Win, we all win. Shwag writes "Last week I downloaded TheOpenCD after it was on Slashdot. I learned about all kinds of great free (as in speech) software. I then searched for more and found out about GNU Win which is a win32 free software cd but it has way more software! Yay! This is a really great way to show people the benefits of free software and get them ready for transitioning to linux."
A platform built from an Acorn. An anonymous reader writes "The (London) Guardian's Online section reports today on the new Ionix PC earlier Slashdotted for being the first desktop to run Intel's XScale processor. The Guardian concentrates on how the new machine may revive the fading fortunes of the once-pioneering Risc OS, but also makes mention of the fact it is ditching old proprietary Acorn subsystems."
Woe to the boonie dwellers, until enough balloons are in place. Avenger writes "Another DSL provider is getting out of the market. Hughes Electronics has announced that they will no longer be providing high-speed Internet services. Over 160,000 users will be affected. As it stands right now, they still will be providing connectivity via DirecPC."
But it seemed like such a great do-it-yourself idea! adagioforstrings writes "You may recall last year Home Depot announced they were deploying Linux at 90,000 point-of-sale terminals across the nation. Well, time went by and no more was heard about it...until now, when Home Depot announced they would be upgrading their POS systems with technology from NCR Corp., and 360 Commerce Inc. and ... Microsoft Corp."
Did they turn invisible when they went to "the Dark Side" or something?
What happened to Home Depot and the Dark Side?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
They're buying some Microsoft systems for point of sale.
Home Depot used to be one of those Java poster children that they trotted out at JavaOne, but I never saw any of it show up in the stores. To this day their systems, except for the actual registers, are straight out of the 70's. I think they're terminals connected to an HP/UX box.
-rw-r--r-- 1 zdzichu users 825032208 gru 16 22:25 /tmp/solaris/CD1/vc-sol1.bin /tmp/solaris/CD1/vc-sol1.cue /tmp/solaris/CD2/vc-sol2.bin /tmp/solaris/CD2/vc-sol2.cue
-rw-r--r-- 1 zdzichu users 170 gru 16 22:25
-rw-r--r-- 1 zdzichu users 220958640 gru 16 22:26
-rw-r--r-- 1 zdzichu users 170 gru 16 22:26
watch it or delete it?
:wq
story
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
I think that you may have misinterpereted his "Almost dead" remark. I think it was referring to the recent /. article that IBM would be discontinuing OS/2. He wasn't trying to pick a fight with you.
From his offical website
Just an evil thought I had.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
This is an attempt by the /. editors to counter the recent run of duplicate articles by omitting some articles entirely.
paintball
In Soviet Russia, Dark Side turns to Home Depot!
They need to get the materials for their Imperial Starships and Death Stars somewhere, right?
paintball
"Why! I'M PAYING CASH!"
"My Supervisor told me that a "Crib Kitties" in the Maker? No, Servicer! Yea. He said that Norton would fix it and that he would give us a "lice update" when he was done. I think."
"Here, catch this hammer. Oops. Missed. Sorry.."
This could be a good use for P2P apps, to update drivers and make sure the lastest and bestest is on all machines....
I'm an ex-employee of Home Depot. I worked in the IT department.
Yes, the registers, and practically all of the store systems, are connected to one of many different types of HP-UX boxes, depending on how old the store is. I heard tales of SSC (store support center, the HD headquarters just outside of Atlanta, GA) IT employees opening up those boxes and finding them totally packed with dust. As in, no more dust could fit in the case of the HP-UX box. But it still worked!
When I worked there, Java was all the rage and HD had lots of employees churning out millions of lines of shitty Java code that did a whole lot of nothing. Much of the real work was still done on MVS (that the IBM mainframe) in JCL, assembly, and whatnot. The UNIX work was in HP-(S)UX in, of all things, Informix 4GL.
When I was leaving, HD was seriously flirting with Linux. They had lots of cool linux machines running in one of the labs. I felt bad about leaving, but not really, since I was leaving to go work at a Linux shop doing Perl. HD hated Perl, or anything else that was "unsupported."
HD IT managers actually did a purge of all rouge Linux machines they found on the network maybe about a year or so before I was hired.
In my opinion, any flirting that HD has done with MSFT is due to the new CEO, Bob Nardelli. Talking to my old HD friends has revealed that he's making all sorts of really stupid changes, such as trying to turn 50% of all store employees into part-timers. (What? How are you supposed to have SMEs with so many part-timers?)
But before anyone forms any real opinions about HD, remember: HD is a retail shop, not a technology shop. People in IT there were, every few months or so, demanded that they "prove their worth." As far as the head retailers were concerned, IT was nothing more than a "cost center." If you want to work in technology, don't choose retail. You're going to be disappointed.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This is a really great way to show people the benefits of free software and get them ready for transitioning to linux
Either that, or they will realise that it is not Linux that is providing this 'great software', but GNU, and it is also available on Windows. So why bother to switch when they can have the best of both worlds: Good GUI, and all the same free GNU software thats available under Linux.
I.O.U One Sig.
Well, now we have proof that the Slashdot editor's don't even read the damn articles.
The DirecTV deal has nothing to do with rural customers. Rural customers couldn't get DSL from them before they went out of business, either.
The DirecTV story does not apply to their satelite-based system (DirecWay/DirecPC). This is what the people in the boonies use. The article clearly states this.
While Solaris might be the most famous book from Lem, I much prefer "The Cyberiad". The book is a mixture of Douglas Adams and Monthy Python, but at a higher level. Science fiction meets Guildernstein and Rosencratz.
Here are a few quotes:
"Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way
Pastoral poem on love and tensor algebra (with a little topology and higher calculus):
"Come let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain."
"One day Trurl the constructor put together a machine that could create anything starting with n. When it was ready, he tried it out, ordering it to make needles, then nankeens and negligees, which it did, then nail the lot to narghiles filled with nepenthe and numerous other narcotics. The machine carried out his instructions to the letter. Still not completely sure of its ability, he had it produce, one after the other, nimbuses, noodles, nuclei, neutrons, naphtha, noses, nymphs, naiads and natrium. This last it could not do..."
I must confess, I believe the Gnuwin cd deserves a lot more accolades. I downloaded the Open-CD iso, but I realized that with the possible exception of OpenOffice, there really weren't any applications that the people I know might possibly interested in. The multiple compilers in one location would certainly create some interest, but the communication and games packages are the ones that make me want to give this CD to those who know very little about computing. Some will say this is good, some will say I'm inviting a wave of unclean, but if I can show my friends how easy it is to use free, open-source software, then they might avoid any purchases where they contribute to Microsoft, or any company that offers an inferior product to a free one. The fear of just trying something different kept me away from even considering Linux for a long time, and the knowledge and use of free programs like this removes a lot of the fear.
Sorry for rambling on like that.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
It used to be a no-brainer - Home Depot in Vancouver was open 24 hours, great selection, and a little bit closer to me than the nearest comparably sized Revy store.
Sure, a little bit of me didn't like shopping at a US firm when there was a Canadian firm, but at 2 AM, you don't have much choice, and for some reason I always seem to end up going and getting lumber and crap for things I'm working on at 2 AM.
Then one day, HD announced they were going stock only from 2 AM to 5 AM. Fine, I thought. No biggie. I'll just try to get there earlier.
Then it was midnight to six.
Then ten to six it was closed. Now it's the same hours as Revy.
Then they "expanded their aisles to make shopping better". Nice doublespeak for "we dropped twenty percent of our stock"!
Creature of habit that I am, I kept going there. I'm uncomfortably reminded of "how to boil a frog"... but one day, I wander into Revy on a quest for the holy rivet.
OK, not that holy. I just needed some damn copper rivets. HD had nothing. I go into Revy, and they have not just one or two but dozens of types of rivets. I realized then how bad I'd been getting it at HD. Never going back there again!
won't happen. too much of the code was shared with Microsoft and is held in joint copyright.
RMS dislikes the use of "win" to refer to the MS Windows platform because he regards using MS Windows as a loss, not a win. So in the GNU Emacs source code, all variables and functions in the MS Windows port that had been named win32-* were changed to w32-*.
Additionally, In the Emacs manual, "MS-DOG" is used to reference MS-DOS.
~PhillipHere we have an excellent example of somebody doing something because they were not sure about what they were talking about. Hence take the "safe" bet and use Windows.
The problem with the statement she makes is that they would have a lack of drivers if they went cross-platform. So that means they have all the drivers on the i386 platform. Hence right now they are locked into i386. So since they were "locked" they might as well get locked totally and use Windows. Why, because at least it is supported!
To Jill Taylor this logic makes sense. However, to people outside it makes little sense since either route would end up at the same destination. The problem with her logic is that she is associating Linux with cross-platform and failure to do so as a strike against the platform. In other words in her mind Linux 1 Windows 2, when in fact the score is Linux 2 Windows 2.
It is funny when I am on panels and I make these comments on the bad logic within corporations many people take a hissy fit. The reality is that most people decide on funny logic like this.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Stewey, I have to agree about OS/2 being a remarkable OS. As an ex-IBMer, I guess I'm biased, but I truly believe that the VDM in OS/2 was a better DOS than DOS. The fine tuning you could do on the behaviour of DOS apps was incredible.
An example of this would be an app written using Borland's Turbo Vision framework. These apps poll for keyboard input like no tomorrow. Under any flavour of Windows, you can get the CPU useage down to about 50%, but no better. On OS/2, you could get CPU useage down to 1% and still have a nice, snappy response.
I ran a 3-node DOS-based BBS package (RemoteAccess) for several years and enjoyed it most when running under OS/2. Most of my apps were DOS apps and running them there was a far better experience than using DOS and DESQview.
They're evil because they're cash registers run an OS I don't like!
</SARCASM>
What's that about freedom of choice again?
Here's a corporation that actually considered the alternative, and for whatever their reasons, right or wrong, decided it was inferior.
How about instead of condemning them, the community looks to the reasons that linux lost a fair fight and addresses them?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Much of the real work was still done on MVS (that the IBM mainframe) in JCL, assembly, and whatnot.
The other day, I had a look at a new looking terminal in the Lowes. It was some kind of IBM box, running X. The main aplication seemed to be .... a 3270 emulator. Ta-da! the sturdy old background process continues to run but they now have a reasonable desktop to add other applications if they feel like it. No hideous CompUSA adverts blaring, just a nice clean window manager. The terminal, by the way, looked to have all the expected IBM toughness. It was pleasing to see.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They have all their Windows cd key labels taped to the side of their PCs throughout their store for anyone to read or record.
On the labels it specifically tells them not to remove the label either.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
... Don't be stupid. Parent post recieved an overrated moderation for saying this:
"What happened to Home Depot and the Dark Side?"
Don't mod this guy Redundant or Off-topic. When the topic originally appeared it was missing that info. Don't burn his karma up just because he can't go back and update it now that the story is fixed.
Normally I wouldn't bother to post something like this, but I've been burned a couple of times recently over it. If you have karma to burn, mod up the funny posts or find people that really are trolling. Don't mod people down because an article was corrected after the fact. Its not like we can run back and edit our posts to coincide with the edit to the story.
"HD is a retail shop, not a technology shop. ...As far as the head retailers were concerned, IT was nothing more than a 'cost center.'"
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Home Depot will never be as big as Wal-Mart. Home Depot thinks of IT as a hole that the company is constantly pouring money into; Wal-Mart relentlessly uses IT to further its goals of getting the lowest cost from suppliers. (The definitive article on Wal-Mart and technology.)
Home Depot will never be a leader in the industry if it continues to view IT as an expense rather than an investment. Your post was an excellent example of how retailers tend to forget that technology, when used properly, can not only form the core of the business, but strengthen existing product lines. Home Depot's executive staff most likely looks at Wal-Mart and ask "How do they do that?" The answer lies in Wal-Mart's aggressive stance on technology adoption.
In fact, Wal-Mart and Home Depot are even compared here, where Wal-Mart's CIO is asked whether or not it will make a difference if competitors use RFID tags. (RFID tags are Wal-Mart's next big frontier.) "The challenge is to keep innovating faster than the competition can copy us," he says.
If what you're saying really is true of Home Depot, expect Wal-Mart to keep swallowing Home Depot's business. Wal-Mart has never labeled itself as "just a retail shop," as you label Home Depot. Home Depot doesn't have the competitive advantage, nor does it sound like they know where to spend to get that advantage. I expect that Wal-mart will remain a leader for some time to come in the retail space. This quote sums up what you're seeing nicely:
"'I think Wal-Mart views technology in a different light than most retailers,' says Peter Abell, retail research director at AMR Research. 'It's not only an integral part of the company, but it's where the leaders of the company can come from.'"
This is the direction in which Home Depot must go in order to become truly successful at lowering costs and increasing productivity. Unfortunately for Home Depot, Wal-Mart is already there, and getting further and further ahead...
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Another case when corporate HQ's "We're considering transitioning to Linux..." turns out to be biz-speak for "Gimme a discount, Ballmer!"
We'll know Linux has won this battle when the shoe's on the other foot and HQ mulls over "transitioning to Windows" until, I dunno, some widget-manufacturer agrees to release open-source drivers that work on the latest RedHat release... or something.
-renard
Yeah, I love this book. What I find most amazing about it is that it was originally written in Polish, and somehow all that poetry still comes out amazing. The one you quoted goes on for another 7 verses, and each damn one rhymes. Although that's probably a much of a tribute to the translator as is is to Lem himself.
I think my favorite story from that book is the one where Trurl creates the world's stupidest, most stubborn thinking machine that insists 2 + 2 = 7, and tries to kill Trurl when he won't agree that it's not 4.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
I'm not sure how far on or off topic this is, but I happen to work for Home Depot's biggest competitor, Lowe's. All of the POS registers in the stores built in the last few years are running Red Hat, and all of the ASCII terminals are being replaced with thin clients that - surprise! - are running Red Hat as well. All of the programs we use for special order sales, project design, and such are all being ported to the new thin clients. The basic trend is to move away from Windows (Design and Special Order tools) and AIX (POS and terminals throughout the store) to Linux.
Some of the other stories were published in English as the book Mortal Engines.
At the official Stanislaw Lem Web site, they have the entire statement made by Lem about the new movie version of Solaris , written on December 8th.
He seems to have a negative view of the typical Hollywood ending, saying that
How, exactly, is this is a troll? My guess is that the moderator didn't get the joke. So, for the cosmically clueless, here it is:
The parent poster misspelled "rogue" as "rouge." This misspelling actually resulted in a different word, properly spelled. "Rouge" is French (and other languages, including English meanings) for "red." Therefore, when Alomex commented on "rouge linux" being the standard distro in Soviet Russia, he was actually being quite witty: Red Linux is standard distro in Soviet Russia.
Sheesh. Give some clown mod points, he turns off his brain.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
One of the big problems with Lem's novels is that the characters tend to be cold, intellectual cardboard cutouts with no personalities. I can't motivate myself to read a 300-page novel about characters I can't even tell apart. The robots in the Cyberiad, ironically, are a lot more interesting as people.
Find free books.
Let's think about this for a moment. If you are deploying thousands of systems, you can set a standard and deploy a standard that is compliant with Linux. As for attached hardware, I guarantee you that any POS hardware shop would bend over backwards to make a massive sale to home depot. They are one of the 800 lb gorillas in retail so you'd think that they get a little flexibility from their vendors.
So now they get to pay licensing fees on all of those POS systems forever. What happens when Microsoft no longer supports the OS on your registers? Now you HAVE to upgrade, and outlay even more in support costs.
Good thinking... really...
In reality, I guarantee that this decision is the old, "nobody lost their job choosing microsoft", the more modern version of the same phrase that was applied to IBM originally. IF they went with Linux and it was a failure for whatever reason, the person who made the decision is SCREWED. IF they go with windows and it's a failure, they won't take the heat because they went with Microsoft.
Granted, if the Linux option succeeds they have the potential to look really good, but oh well...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Home Depot will never be a leader in the industry if it continues to view IT as an expense rather than an investment.
Agreed! To view IT as a cost center only is to blind oneself to the advances that we can make to "mere retail."
In fact, Wal-Mart and Home Depot are even compared here
You have no idea! The Home Depot concept IS the Wal-Mart concept (mostly). The common managerial question at HD upon considering a new idea was, "Has Wal-Mart done it?" The Home Depot cheer was a carbon copy of the Wal-Mart cheer. Giving stock to all company employees was an idea HD copied from Wal-Mart as well. So was the "Inverted Pyramid" idea (read: lie).
The differences between Home Depot and Wal-Mart are why HD will shrink and Wal-Mart will grow. 1. Home Depot has a service element which is much, much more difficult to quality and inventory control. 2. HD is much more limited in what they can sell than Wal-Mart is. Many Wal-Marts now have grocery stores.
If what you're saying really is true of Home Depot, expect Wal-Mart to keep swallowing Home Depot's business.
It's inevitable. Wal-Mart and Home Depot will eventually be competitors, and HD will lose that battle.
I expect that Wal-mart will remain a leader for some time to come in the retail space.
I expect that Wal-Mart will be the defining force behind retail until the retail concept becomes obsolete.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Some Strugatsky novels are online here:
http://lib.ru/TRANSLATION/
Prisoners of Power is a good one also.
Cthulhu loves you.
Someone has to nitpick... There is no "interview", it's just a nice short article on Stanislaw Lem, using the last movie as an excuse to call attention on an immensely underrated author.
The "interview" part consists of a single quote, taken from the public statement he published elsewhere about the criticisms to the North American version of Solaris.
The article is pretty good, though. I was unaware of some of the details of PKD's involvement in the SFWA debacle.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
As someone who used versions 2,3, and 4 of OS/2, I can say it sure would have been nice to see IBM put at least a little bit of energy into the OS. But, the fact is that OS/2 has never been as critical to IBM's success as Window's is to Microsoft. IBM is a much larger, much different kind of company than Mirosoft. OS/2 is just one of thousands of products, not by any means a core IBM product. It's easy to imagine an IBM without OS/2, but not a Microsoft without Windows.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
When you launch a Windows app in OS/2, it launches Windows inside a virtual DOS box, then runs your app. It's real Windows 3.1 code, not an emulation.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Now they really will be POS terminals!
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
yes, Lem doesn't have the incredibly well developed characters of someone like Dick, the silly alien interactions of Asimov, the wars and battles of Pournelle, or the geekness vindication of Stephensen or Gibson.
he doesn't try to make fantasy out of sci-fi, he doesn't try to give us a warm fuzzy about technology or society, or excite us with explosive plots. his books provide a mental challenge, paradoxes, psychology, and stark reality that most popular science fiction completely ignores. there are tons of people who used to say j.r.r. tolkien is boring. they don't anymore because JRRT is in the mainstream now, but c'mon, reading LOTR and the Silmarillion was a lot like reading history books with an occasional plot! (btw, i'm not knocking JRRT, i've always loved his work)
now, i'm a native Polish speaker (and reader) so of course i've read Lem in Polish and maybe a lot is lost in translation (actually, i think Solaris' translation isn't all that bad, i've read it in both Polish and English). give his other works a chance: Return from the Stars, Eden, Fiasco, the short stories of Ion Tichy (Star Diaries), the essays of One Human Minute...
read my epinions review of Lem for more, if you're interested.
frankly, i'm really disappointed that slashdotters would be so ignorant of Lem's amazing insights in the rest of his works...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through