Whoa! But what about the management's belief that "firewalls will protect our sensitive data!"? Surely you can't just walk out the door with data and not be caught red-handed by said firewalls!?! Say it ain't so, Bob & Joanne!
What are these Intranets you speak of? I hand deliver 80GB+ of iPod movies and TV Shows right to my friend's cubes on flash, hard drive, or burnt DVD files. Sneakernet, get to know it. Encode once, share many. RIAA/MPAA? Never heard of them. Do they make any good movies or TV Shows? HA!
Confirmed. An ex girlfriend on mine used to work at Wells Fargo Bank. The CO$ has literally dozens, if not hundreds, of individual accounts with more than several million deposited in each. I'll bet this is not their only back either. They have a shitload of cash for lawyering up.
Must be nice to be able to lie to stupid people, in the name of an imagined deity, to confiscate their savings. I have a conscious and can't imagine the worthless people who can pull that off. All religions suck, especially the fake ones.
I think they are a close second evil to M$. And this is just another fuck up in a long line of them from the once favored Crapple. *This* is why I only purchased the iPod Touch, instead of the iPhone; I didn't understand how badly they were going to botch the App environment for this "could-have-been-great" product. I see that they will never learn. Long live the iPod OS; your source for uninspiring games and a wealth of tip calculators, all safe and sane for the unwashed masses. Good luck with that.
The more you tighten your grip, crApple, the more customers will slip through your fingers.
I've already decided on Android. Fuck the closed iPod OS. If this happens on my McCurry desktops, then I'm only going to run Linux and Solaris at home, instead of the good three; McOS, Ubuntu, Solaris. Go ahead, crApple, make another closed product. I'll be sure to ignore it, just like the over-hyped iPhone. Why did people stand in lines to get screwed over by a device you can't put anything you want on?
Agreed! The fact is that if this were two oil companies they would have merged by now. Yes, our government is filled with useless, money grubbing, assholes who don't understand anything unless it's fed to them by someone with a large $$ check.
More to the point; IBM is not "tearing apart Sun". IBM's offerings with their overpriced hardward, ancient lineage and tired AIX (how about a free x86 version, IBM? no, then fuck off!) are yesterday's news. Their role as a supercomputer designer is well played, as is their service offerings with their IBM/GS groups. Not that I would ever want to work for that outfit ever again. I digress. After that, I have a hard time figuring out why anyone would favor IBM's LPARs over the much more efficient, and easier to manager Solaris 10 Zone offering. One that works equally well in the SPARC or x86 version of Solaris 10. No one else comes close to that. Don't get me started on HP... Sun Solaris is a great OS and will be here for quite some time, Oracle, HP or otherwise. Ever heard of ZFS or DTrace? Thought so. Anyone would do well to get to know the Solaris 10 Zones and Solaris 10 in general.
I will disclose that I am a three-time ex-Sun employee/contractor who has also seen inside the belly of IBM. Solaris will bury AIX. And you can take *that* to the SAN and store it!
Hear hear! Using the expensive, slow cell network is just what Verizon/AT&T/scummy_cell_carriers want you to do; be happy with a shitty device, that is the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, and use our crap networks where we can charge you up the ass for bits we could give you for free, if we wern't such greedy assholes. From text messaging to streaming media, the cell carriers are just ripping you off left and right. Stop buying into the Swiss Army Phone bullshit. How good is that camera/phone? The camera is shit and the phone is not of the highest quality. Every single multiple purpose device suffers from the shitty quality that comes from trying to shoehorn in features we don't really need, but stupid people want anyway. Camera? Browsing device? Videos & games? How about making a phone that doesn't suck so hard at being just a phone? Or are the ignorant masses not ready for a phone that's just good a phone? Can you hear me now? Good, go fuck yourself, Verizon, Apple & AT&T. Your networks are shit and your walled garden is filled with weeds and useless crapware. Try again.
Not to belittle the mighty Swiss Army Knives. I love those things, but let's face it; the blades don't lock, the scissors are iffy, the toothpick is great, unless someone else uses it first, and the tweezers, like the rest of the knife, will do in a pinch but on their own are not the greatest. I'd rather bring five good tools with me than a 5-in-one tool in which all the features are crap.
Or borrow it from your friends, then rip and enjoy, then give it to your other friends. I just share all my content now and barely purchase anything. Never used P2P either. Just sneakernet. Gotta love those cheap 1TB drives! Eat me MPAA, I give away movies and you can't stop shit. Sue me! I'm a fucking pirate. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm still here, and I'm still giving away movies, assholes. 80GB of MP3s and 100+ iPod ready movies and counting... my friends disks are so fucking full!!1! What's a Blue Rae?
>I find it hard to believe that people actually pay $13/mo for radio:)
10: It's not just a radio. It's entertainment without commercials and it's the only (legal) place to listen to Howard Stern each day. You can't get that on radio (anymore, and in the case of the former; ever), and I have to do some early morning mp3 work to attach Howard to my iPod for the day's show. iPod is a helper here, not a competitor. I'd pay double for this service, it's that much better than any alternative. Never heard of FStream, does this somehow work on my in-car radio, over many miles of roads? I doubt it. What I don't doubt is that this item smells of NAB sour grapes for spending $400M+ on lobbyists to try and keep the XM/Sirius merger from even happening in the first place. While HUGE oil and wireless companies merged in a fraction of the time. This is just another example of our misguided government and their weakness for some cash for influence. Over a year it took before the merger was approved, that hurts the two companies by not allowing them to shift to a better business strategy, or offer other combined services, during a critical time in their development, nor does it help me as a subscriber. It's not a free market when your competitors have to bribe officials to help protect their ailing, old-fashioned business. Radio stations are worthless to me and most investor and station owners too. Face it, XM/Sirius has a great product, they have over 18 million subscribers combined, and they aren't going anywhere except in my new car next year.
Tell me this, genius. Do you subscribe to a cable or satellite TV service, or just get your shows over DVD(not free), youtube, bittorrent, appleTV(not free), and the rabbit ears? Thought so. Like I said, this service is worth double to me *because* of the lack of commercials, the permanence of the stations at any location, and the variety. I'm a happy subscriber of two Sirius receivers, and I shut off my DirecTV two years ago, and I don't miss it. Sirius(or XM now), and DVDs, that's all I need. What else do I need? Some shitty commercials on a higher bandwidth, pay for, radio? HD radio is what will fail. That and anything else that does not deliver the goods (no commercials, high quality audio, variety, signal ubiquity). The NAB got their asses handed to them. If radio is so fucking good, go buy a station yourself. You can get one AWFUL cheap now! Wanna know why? goto line 10!
The radio in your car is good for one thing; being a host for a satellite radio receiver, iPod or other MP3 player, when there is no AUX jack. HA! Stick THAT in your drive and boot it.
Those two guys above this are spot on, and I'll add that ZFS administration is beyond easy and effective. Growing file systems on the fly is also a piece of cake. We've been using ZFS in our DC for about two years now and it is almost *criminal* how easy it is to take care of! Did I mention that our Solaris 10 zones cost around $2500 each on SPARC h/w, while our Windows pals are offering individual VMware virtual instances for about $4000/ea? I love it!!!1!
Personally, I think my Unix group is about to enter the x86 business... if I were a Windows admin at my shop, I'd be worried. Fear my virtual instances that are about half the cost, kids!
I use the Solaris 10 JDS everyday at work and also run Ubuntu and Solaris 10 x86 at home, with zones on it. Basically the "apt-get" you're looking for is called "pkg-get" and is available from blastwave.org.
The future of Solaris on the desktop is not as exciting as that of Ubuntu, or any other wildly popular Linux distro. The enterprise future of Solaris is way more exciting IMO. The reason is this; Solaris 10 Zones are ready for primetime enterprise whereas Linux is still being pondered and in most cases not being taken seriously due to the open source nature of the beast and the sheer number of different distros, many of which lack and enterprise level support. We had a Red Hat box in our DC and we retired it. Meanwhile we're approaching 400+ Solaris 10 zones and we're coming in at *HALF* the price of the VMware solution that the Windows side of the house provides. Guess who's growing faster? Even with more expensive boxen our solution is a better value and provides a very solid framework for many, many environments.
As an OSS advocate and 20+ year SunOS/Solaris admin I will welcome both operating systems in my home and data center. Like the man said above, you know one, you practically know the other. It's all *nix in the end.
"Proprietary software has paid my mortgage for many years. I am skeptical that open source would generate the same standard of living for me."
You should start thinking about it. Open systems pays for mine, also for many years. I don't do Windows at work, or at home, only open systems with lots of open source and even some Proprietary software in there in the form of Oracle and IBM, but lots of open source too, and every one of the closed software products can be replace with decent open source apps, IMO. I've been running a Nagios monitoring system for the past two years while my company searched and searched for *anyone* to admin HP OpenView, which was purchased shortly after we built out Nagios(without any paid support, mind you). I refused to admin Ov, because I cannot comprehend why an organization would pay tons of money for a crap solution because it has a big company name attached to it, when a free one is doing the same job, with less hassle. Nagios is STILL in use today and provides a faster and more reliable monitoring solution over the "competing Proprietary software product." And *anyone* can admin it. That is how open systems and open source software pay my bills. Still, the amount of hand-holding that people need for commercial software installs, development and maintenance boggles my mind. Good thing the have support, huh?;) Lots of money to be made holding people's hands. I prefer to manage many large open systems rather than selling/installing/supporting shitware or holding people's hands. Just a personal preference. The knowledge of how to do things pays my bills and I prefer those things to not be a waste of good money. Even if that money is not my own.
Proprietary software is not better software. The article is a high praise of MS Office from someone who does not get what open source is, or is about, and is quite clearly trying to make a name for himself to get some work from Redmond. Weak on any substance, I would expect more from a Stanford MBA Professor, even if that is just the summary. Still, that's the beauty of it. Stanford MBAs will not be able to do anything about open source, unless they fight it. And with what? Their MBA diplomas? How about a big stick? Better yet, crack a book and start coding. Good luck with that! Perhaps they can throw lots of money at the situation and hope they can hire someone to help code their super secret, Proprietary software killer app!?
I am forced to use bits of proprietary software each day, in the form of a cheap laptop with shitty windows running on it with the aforementioned Office product and quite frankly, it sucks ass. Which is why I just do most every task on Sun's JDS with a Gnome facelift. Add some Citrix and I can open any crapware that runs on Windows. Windows XP, Office. Both crapware. Very popular and big selling, yes. But crap.
Proprietary software is a dinosaur. Look at Vista... LOOK AT IT! Proprietary software at its' finest. Advantage; Open Source.
I'll second that! I'll never need this info personally, but feel this is for a greater good. The voice of NYCL is a breath of fresh air compared to the hostile assholes who are waging a war on potential customers and anyone who gets in their way. To bring some fairness to the people who are getting railroaded by the RIAA and their draconian tactics is a very, very good thing. Doing something helpful for someone you may never meet is commendable.
Good analogy and exactly the point I was going to make (about M$ paying enough lobbyists to make a stink about this issue, who the hell else cares that much and has the $$ to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hinfluence our elected officials for this non-issue?). That merger got held up while many made the fast-track; Exxon Mobile anyone? There's two hurting companies that needed to get together for some synergy. From wikipedia: "In 1998, Exxon and Mobil signed a US$73.7 billion definitive agreement to merge and form a new company called Exxon Mobil Corporation, the largest company on the planet. After shareholder and regulatory approvals, the merger was completed on November 30, 1999. The merger of Exxon and Mobil was unique in American history because it reunited the two largest companies of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey/Exxon and Standard Oil Company of New York/Mobil, which had been forcibly separated by government order nearly a century earlier. This reunion resulted in the largest merger in US corporate history."
How about AT&T Cingluar? The list goes on, and the corruption moves ahead full steam while companies that don't play the "pay for influence game" get sidelined; like XM/Sirius now sitting in FCC limbo.
No, this is M$ dollars at work to influence your tax dollars. Happy voting.
That's funny, after I shed 160 pounds of unsightly fat (divorce) I got started collection all the classic Star Wars LEGO sets and purchased many off ebay. I got contacted by the US Postal Service about a year later because one of the sellers I frequented was up to shenanigans. Not sure what happened but the sets are all sealed and legit and the USPS stated they were not looking to get them back. I do have some cheap LEGO keychain knock offs that some sellers passed off as genuine LEGO, but they were clearly SW figures with screwed in keychains. Lots of goings on with LEGOs on ebay, and not all fun and games.
For my money, you can't beat the first party shopping for the hard to find sets. Plus they have some killer summer sales. $100 off a couple of the GIANT sets and other bargains.
WRONG. At it's peak it hit #3 on the top500.org chart and at the time (Nov 03) was the cheapest of the top 10 by several orders of magnitude: http://www.top500.org/site/history/2024
I love a good CF comment section on today's hot issues!
"The differences between Obama and McCain are more about style than substance."
Here's one thing they have in common that will not change for the better anytime soon; they both fill up their pockets with the monies from Special Interest Groups just like the congress critters do. Our votes don't mean shit anymore. The electoral college will see to that, and whichever of the two asshats who make it to the oval office can continue the tradition of calling bribery by another name. The corporations with the most lobbyists and money runs this country. Don't fool yourself into thinking either of the two major candidates is going to rock the boat and make any real changes for the better in our New Corrupt World Order. Not unless some lobbyist pays them to think that way.
Good luck, DARPA! Seriously. The only kind of talent you're going to attract is the kind that loves to sit and surf all day on big brother's dime. Anyone with any real skills is not going to waste their time on shitty government work when they can consult for way more, or they are incredibly lazy and have a lot of surfing to do. Just get the Big Book Of Super-Duper Hacks and figure China out on your own!
Okay, you busted me, I myself am now surfing... but my new servers cluster nodes are all built and running without issue. So, surf I may!
Well, I'll bite. I must be fucking King of the Fanboys and a spoiler to the anti-fans, because I've worked for Apple Computer, Inc. twice. Once as a contractor in the '80s and another time as a real employee (#17xxx) during the early '90s. This was near the start of my career, so my pay was pretty low to begin with, but not bad for starters. This was during the time of John Sculley and I worked in all the engineering departments as I was primarily a network guy at that point. This brought me in contact with *everyone* who was *anyone*. I got to work for and meet several of the folks who came over from Xerox PARC in the original Macintosh design days. I have many early rev motherboards and one from Employee #4 (who's name I forget now, I think it was Bill Atkinson, but I'm probably wrong, might be Chris Espinosa too) when he vacated his Mariani One cube. I've personally met John Sculley, Jean Louis Gassee, Larry Tesler and many of the engineers and software folks responsible for the original PowerBook. They designed and built it just upstairs from my cube and I got to see many of the early prototypes. So, I might have a clue about how working at Apple is more than just a pay check. For those that would think that, just skip along to the next silly "Macs are too expensive" comments you poor bastard. Working at Apple can be best described as *AWESOME*!!!1! It's still on my list of best jobs ever and here are some of the perks: loan-to-own hardware (a new system for about 50% off retail), good discounts on all the latest hardware that's been in the channel long enough for the employees to finally get one, TONS of free T-shirts, all access pass to the site licensed software archive! (how did I get PhotoShop for free?), great parties, really nice people to work with (just don't expect them to make it thru the parking lot without blocking the way while having a conversation. must be an engineer thing), did I mention TONS of free T-shirts?, all the Apple IIs and Mac Pluses you can eat!, more T-shirts, more free software, lots of people who helped start the computer industry just right there for you to talk to. Even during my time there the name of Steve Jobs would come up in conversation and many of the engineers I talked to were just hoping that he would come back and correct the company's direction and failing product lines. Like the old ugly beige boxes. That crap that looks like what Dell spits out now and calls a computer is what Apple did wrong in the early '90s and made up for, almost too much, with the colorful iMacs. It's been fun to watch Apple come back big with the iMac, and again with the iPod and Intel Macs. The prestige of working for the company that sets the standard in high-end design and computing is nothing to scoff at. As a child growing up in Silicon Valley it was my dream to someday work at Apple, and I did it. It's a great place to work, if you want to work for the best and brightest. Just don't expect to become a millionaire like many of the early employees did. You have to be an "early adopter", a visionary, or just plain lucky to get in on the ground floor of something that became more than just another computer company in the valley.
Yeah, there was a ton of boasting about trying to bring CNN dot com down. Yet, it's still there. Just block all their IPs and be done with them already. Do not want *.cn
Also, to you/.ers making the South Park American Penis jokes, very funny, but those came from an episode where they went to Japan, not China. You frickin' idiots! Get some jokes from the episode where they have the South Park volleyball team in the world championships in China. The announcers from the game were priceless! Use those for reference. Thanks!
Oh, come on now people. Who modded this off-topic? It's completely on-topic. Think little, skinny, cookies made from Mars soil by a robotic travler? What's next? Mod down a Shake and Bake joke? NASA got that bot down, safe on the ground and their making sweet, soil cookies! What's not to love and laugh about?
You'll also be able to create a pool of drives that acts as a single drive, like you can with the RAID setup now, but far faster to setup. Growing your pools is a breeze and if they can tie TimeMachine into the zfs snapshots, my god, what can't we do?! Seriously, this will be a nice advanced file system for Mac OSX. We've been using it on Solaris for a year now for zone root/usr file systems, and zfs is AWESOME!!! Except that even Sun is not recommending we use it for zone root file systems until they hit update 6 of Solaris 10. Whoops! That's in November, so we're just sitting tight until they support Solaris root/OS zfs file systems. Then we upgrade. Then ? Then we profit!
Ob. Apple Joke referencing earlier/. artice: Of course, the delay for the consumer OSX support of zfs will have to wait until they code in skipping backups of your iTunes library!;)
Before you get modded Off-Topic, I'll say the links are funny and clever. Glad you weren't fooled by them too!;) I used to pull that stunt all the time in an old vBull forum I haunted. Just build a cool looking, dare-you-not-to-click-me front end to the logout link. Simple *and* funny. It's worth it just to have one stupid person accidentally log out. Imagine a world like that...
Agreed! Plus, I tend to avoid all the sites that look like ***world.com, because they are mostly pages framed in ads and other garbage that makes for a crappy read of their usually low-tech articles.
On the topic, sort of: I'm glad HP is branching out in new directions away from gouging the shit out of everyone with their overpriced inkjet inks. Bastards. Plus, just between you and me, part of our shop uses these hunks of shit they call the SuperDomes, and they all blow. Nothing sucks harder than having to admin a huge box that crashes and has problems *consistently* enough that our official HP technicians are getting vocally tired of having to come out weekly to fix their crap hardware. So, I say:
Dear HP,
Go ask Sun or IBM how to make better, cost-effective Unix products or just stick to the printers and, well that's about the only good product you make. Go figure. I'd tell this to you right to the faces of your sales droids, but they'd probably not understand it or take it seriously. Then again, how can I take your company, which schmoozes harder than their products work, seriously? There's a reason we call it the SuperDown. You're a very special company with a long history in calculators and printers and I'd hate to see you go the way of Gateway and Compa, scratch that last one. If you can at all manage it, try making an x86 version of HP/UX and releasing it for free before that part of your business (the UX part) becomes a tired, joke of the industry. Or, just switch to Linux like IBM did, rather than port AIX to x86 directly. If you want to be as relevant as a mainframe running hundreds of virtualized apache servers, keep staying the course.
Bingo! That's more correct than most IT managers would ever realize. Outsourcing is just that; too expensive and even more work than to keep it in-house. I've personally seen two, local, big corp data centers get sucked into the "let's let do this and save on our expensive in-house help!" Worked out great in both situations. One company scared off any good talent and got a name around the area as a lame data center to work for, plus they're paying through the nose for their administration now! They were not much to begin with anyway. The other Big Retail Co. got a sad and unpleasant shock when the "solutions provider" couldn't live up to their marketing hype; "we can build you a cluster of servers in about a hour" turned out to be "well, when you give us a month's notice and take the bundled software we provide at the revisions only we approve and support, then after that it's about an hour. Oh, and you can't upgrade any software to what you need." They did a big about face in just two year's time and recently hired back one of their admins at about a 150% salary! He just bailed for an even greener pasture. Now they're on Dice searching and hoping. It does not pay to outsource, then decide against it and hope you can find some hungry admins of high quality who don't already know what kind of crap your management pulls. Good luck with that. Seriously.
Also, I might add that outsourcing critical data is *NOT*, repeat *NOT*, going into the cloud, or over to India. There are huge obstacles to having your (health care or SOX-type, or government contract with employee info, etc.) data stored in someplace other than in your own, well-protected, data center her in the USA. It's not going to happen as there are several federal regulations that make it impossible, or really really not worth it for a number of legal reasons. That's not changing in the next four years.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa! But what about the management's belief that "firewalls will protect our sensitive data!"? Surely you can't just walk out the door with data and not be caught red-handed by said firewalls!?! Say it ain't so, Bob & Joanne!
What are these Intranets you speak of? I hand deliver 80GB+ of iPod movies and TV Shows right to my friend's cubes on flash, hard drive, or burnt DVD files. Sneakernet, get to know it. Encode once, share many. RIAA/MPAA? Never heard of them. Do they make any good movies or TV Shows? HA!
Confirmed. An ex girlfriend on mine used to work at Wells Fargo Bank. The CO$ has literally dozens, if not hundreds, of individual accounts with more than several million deposited in each. I'll bet this is not their only back either. They have a shitload of cash for lawyering up.
Must be nice to be able to lie to stupid people, in the name of an imagined deity, to confiscate their savings. I have a conscious and can't imagine the worthless people who can pull that off. All religions suck, especially the fake ones.
But will it run A/UX?
I think they are a close second evil to M$. And this is just another fuck up in a long line of them from the once favored Crapple. *This* is why I only purchased the iPod Touch, instead of the iPhone; I didn't understand how badly they were going to botch the App environment for this "could-have-been-great" product. I see that they will never learn. Long live the iPod OS; your source for uninspiring games and a wealth of tip calculators, all safe and sane for the unwashed masses. Good luck with that.
The more you tighten your grip, crApple, the more customers will slip through your fingers.
I've already decided on Android. Fuck the closed iPod OS. If this happens on my McCurry desktops, then I'm only going to run Linux and Solaris at home, instead of the good three; McOS, Ubuntu, Solaris. Go ahead, crApple, make another closed product. I'll be sure to ignore it, just like the over-hyped iPhone. Why did people stand in lines to get screwed over by a device you can't put anything you want on?
Android and Chrome, here I come!
Agreed! The fact is that if this were two oil companies they would have merged by now. Yes, our government is filled with useless, money grubbing, assholes who don't understand anything unless it's fed to them by someone with a large $$ check.
More to the point; IBM is not "tearing apart Sun". IBM's offerings with their overpriced hardward, ancient lineage and tired AIX (how about a free x86 version, IBM? no, then fuck off!) are yesterday's news. Their role as a supercomputer designer is well played, as is their service offerings with their IBM/GS groups. Not that I would ever want to work for that outfit ever again. I digress. After that, I have a hard time figuring out why anyone would favor IBM's LPARs over the much more efficient, and easier to manager Solaris 10 Zone offering. One that works equally well in the SPARC or x86 version of Solaris 10. No one else comes close to that. Don't get me started on HP... Sun Solaris is a great OS and will be here for quite some time, Oracle, HP or otherwise. Ever heard of ZFS or DTrace? Thought so. Anyone would do well to get to know the Solaris 10 Zones and Solaris 10 in general.
I will disclose that I am a three-time ex-Sun employee/contractor who has also seen inside the belly of IBM. Solaris will bury AIX. And you can take *that* to the SAN and store it!
Hear hear! Using the expensive, slow cell network is just what Verizon/AT&T/scummy_cell_carriers want you to do; be happy with a shitty device, that is the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, and use our crap networks where we can charge you up the ass for bits we could give you for free, if we wern't such greedy assholes. From text messaging to streaming media, the cell carriers are just ripping you off left and right. Stop buying into the Swiss Army Phone bullshit. How good is that camera/phone? The camera is shit and the phone is not of the highest quality. Every single multiple purpose device suffers from the shitty quality that comes from trying to shoehorn in features we don't really need, but stupid people want anyway. Camera? Browsing device? Videos & games? How about making a phone that doesn't suck so hard at being just a phone? Or are the ignorant masses not ready for a phone that's just good a phone? Can you hear me now? Good, go fuck yourself, Verizon, Apple & AT&T. Your networks are shit and your walled garden is filled with weeds and useless crapware. Try again.
Not to belittle the mighty Swiss Army Knives. I love those things, but let's face it; the blades don't lock, the scissors are iffy, the toothpick is great, unless someone else uses it first, and the tweezers, like the rest of the knife, will do in a pinch but on their own are not the greatest. I'd rather bring five good tools with me than a 5-in-one tool in which all the features are crap.
Or borrow it from your friends, then rip and enjoy, then give it to your other friends. I just share all my content now and barely purchase anything. Never used P2P either. Just sneakernet. Gotta love those cheap 1TB drives! Eat me MPAA, I give away movies and you can't stop shit. Sue me! I'm a fucking pirate. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm still here, and I'm still giving away movies, assholes. 80GB of MP3s and 100+ iPod ready movies and counting... my friends disks are so fucking full!!1! What's a Blue Rae?
>I find it hard to believe that people actually pay $13/mo for radio :)
10: It's not just a radio. It's entertainment without commercials and it's the only (legal) place to listen to Howard Stern each day. You can't get that on radio (anymore, and in the case of the former; ever), and I have to do some early morning mp3 work to attach Howard to my iPod for the day's show. iPod is a helper here, not a competitor. I'd pay double for this service, it's that much better than any alternative. Never heard of FStream, does this somehow work on my in-car radio, over many miles of roads? I doubt it. What I don't doubt is that this item smells of NAB sour grapes for spending $400M+ on lobbyists to try and keep the XM/Sirius merger from even happening in the first place. While HUGE oil and wireless companies merged in a fraction of the time. This is just another example of our misguided government and their weakness for some cash for influence. Over a year it took before the merger was approved, that hurts the two companies by not allowing them to shift to a better business strategy, or offer other combined services, during a critical time in their development, nor does it help me as a subscriber. It's not a free market when your competitors have to bribe officials to help protect their ailing, old-fashioned business. Radio stations are worthless to me and most investor and station owners too. Face it, XM/Sirius has a great product, they have over 18 million subscribers combined, and they aren't going anywhere except in my new car next year.
Tell me this, genius. Do you subscribe to a cable or satellite TV service, or just get your shows over DVD(not free), youtube, bittorrent, appleTV(not free), and the rabbit ears? Thought so. Like I said, this service is worth double to me *because* of the lack of commercials, the permanence of the stations at any location, and the variety. I'm a happy subscriber of two Sirius receivers, and I shut off my DirecTV two years ago, and I don't miss it. Sirius(or XM now), and DVDs, that's all I need. What else do I need? Some shitty commercials on a higher bandwidth, pay for, radio? HD radio is what will fail. That and anything else that does not deliver the goods (no commercials, high quality audio, variety, signal ubiquity). The NAB got their asses handed to them. If radio is so fucking good, go buy a station yourself. You can get one AWFUL cheap now! Wanna know why? goto line 10!
The radio in your car is good for one thing; being a host for a satellite radio receiver, iPod or other MP3 player, when there is no AUX jack. HA! Stick THAT in your drive and boot it.
Those two guys above this are spot on, and I'll add that ZFS administration is beyond easy and effective. Growing file systems on the fly is also a piece of cake. We've been using ZFS in our DC for about two years now and it is almost *criminal* how easy it is to take care of! Did I mention that our Solaris 10 zones cost around $2500 each on SPARC h/w, while our Windows pals are offering individual VMware virtual instances for about $4000/ea? I love it!!!1!
Personally, I think my Unix group is about to enter the x86 business... if I were a Windows admin at my shop, I'd be worried. Fear my virtual instances that are about half the cost, kids!
I use the Solaris 10 JDS everyday at work and also run Ubuntu and Solaris 10 x86 at home, with zones on it. Basically the "apt-get" you're looking for is called "pkg-get" and is available from blastwave.org.
The future of Solaris on the desktop is not as exciting as that of Ubuntu, or any other wildly popular Linux distro. The enterprise future of Solaris is way more exciting IMO. The reason is this; Solaris 10 Zones are ready for primetime enterprise whereas Linux is still being pondered and in most cases not being taken seriously due to the open source nature of the beast and the sheer number of different distros, many of which lack and enterprise level support. We had a Red Hat box in our DC and we retired it. Meanwhile we're approaching 400+ Solaris 10 zones and we're coming in at *HALF* the price of the VMware solution that the Windows side of the house provides. Guess who's growing faster? Even with more expensive boxen our solution is a better value and provides a very solid framework for many, many environments.
As an OSS advocate and 20+ year SunOS/Solaris admin I will welcome both operating systems in my home and data center. Like the man said above, you know one, you practically know the other. It's all *nix in the end.
"Proprietary software has paid my mortgage for many years. I am skeptical that open source would generate the same standard of living for me."
You should start thinking about it. Open systems pays for mine, also for many years. I don't do Windows at work, or at home, only open systems with lots of open source and even some Proprietary software in there in the form of Oracle and IBM, but lots of open source too, and every one of the closed software products can be replace with decent open source apps, IMO. I've been running a Nagios monitoring system for the past two years while my company searched and searched for *anyone* to admin HP OpenView, which was purchased shortly after we built out Nagios(without any paid support, mind you). I refused to admin Ov, because I cannot comprehend why an organization would pay tons of money for a crap solution because it has a big company name attached to it, when a free one is doing the same job, with less hassle. Nagios is STILL in use today and provides a faster and more reliable monitoring solution over the "competing Proprietary software product." And *anyone* can admin it. That is how open systems and open source software pay my bills. Still, the amount of hand-holding that people need for commercial software installs, development and maintenance boggles my mind. Good thing the have support, huh? ;) Lots of money to be made holding people's hands. I prefer to manage many large open systems rather than selling/installing/supporting shitware or holding people's hands. Just a personal preference. The knowledge of how to do things pays my bills and I prefer those things to not be a waste of good money. Even if that money is not my own.
Proprietary software is not better software. The article is a high praise of MS Office from someone who does not get what open source is, or is about, and is quite clearly trying to make a name for himself to get some work from Redmond. Weak on any substance, I would expect more from a Stanford MBA Professor, even if that is just the summary. Still, that's the beauty of it. Stanford MBAs will not be able to do anything about open source, unless they fight it. And with what? Their MBA diplomas? How about a big stick? Better yet, crack a book and start coding. Good luck with that! Perhaps they can throw lots of money at the situation and hope they can hire someone to help code their super secret, Proprietary software killer app!?
I am forced to use bits of proprietary software each day, in the form of a cheap laptop with shitty windows running on it with the aforementioned Office product and quite frankly, it sucks ass. Which is why I just do most every task on Sun's JDS with a Gnome facelift. Add some Citrix and I can open any crapware that runs on Windows. Windows XP, Office. Both crapware. Very popular and big selling, yes. But crap.
Proprietary software is a dinosaur. Look at Vista... LOOK AT IT! Proprietary software at its' finest. Advantage; Open Source.
I'll second that! I'll never need this info personally, but feel this is for a greater good. The voice of NYCL is a breath of fresh air compared to the hostile assholes who are waging a war on potential customers and anyone who gets in their way. To bring some fairness to the people who are getting railroaded by the RIAA and their draconian tactics is a very, very good thing. Doing something helpful for someone you may never meet is commendable.
Good analogy and exactly the point I was going to make (about M$ paying enough lobbyists to make a stink about this issue, who the hell else cares that much and has the $$ to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hinfluence our elected officials for this non-issue?). That merger got held up while many made the fast-track; Exxon Mobile anyone? There's two hurting companies that needed to get together for some synergy. From wikipedia:
"In 1998, Exxon and Mobil signed a US$73.7 billion definitive agreement to merge and form a new company called Exxon Mobil Corporation, the largest company on the planet. After shareholder and regulatory approvals, the merger was completed on November 30, 1999. The merger of Exxon and Mobil was unique in American history because it reunited the two largest companies of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey/Exxon and Standard Oil Company of New York/Mobil, which had been forcibly separated by government order nearly a century earlier. This reunion resulted in the largest merger in US corporate history."
How about AT&T Cingluar? The list goes on, and the corruption moves ahead full steam while companies that don't play the "pay for influence game" get sidelined; like XM/Sirius now sitting in FCC limbo.
No, this is M$ dollars at work to influence your tax dollars. Happy voting.
That's funny, after I shed 160 pounds of unsightly fat (divorce) I got started collection all the classic Star Wars LEGO sets and purchased many off ebay. I got contacted by the US Postal Service about a year later because one of the sellers I frequented was up to shenanigans. Not sure what happened but the sets are all sealed and legit and the USPS stated they were not looking to get them back. I do have some cheap LEGO keychain knock offs that some sellers passed off as genuine LEGO, but they were clearly SW figures with screwed in keychains. Lots of goings on with LEGOs on ebay, and not all fun and games.
For my money, you can't beat the first party shopping for the hard to find sets. Plus they have some killer summer sales. $100 off a couple of the GIANT sets and other bargains.
WRONG. At it's peak it hit #3 on the top500.org chart and at the time (Nov 03) was the cheapest of the top 10 by several orders of magnitude:
http://www.top500.org/site/history/2024
I love a good CF comment section on today's hot issues!
"The differences between Obama and McCain are more about style than substance."
Here's one thing they have in common that will not change for the better anytime soon; they both fill up their pockets with the monies from Special Interest Groups just like the congress critters do. Our votes don't mean shit anymore. The electoral college will see to that, and whichever of the two asshats who make it to the oval office can continue the tradition of calling bribery by another name. The corporations with the most lobbyists and money runs this country. Don't fool yourself into thinking either of the two major candidates is going to rock the boat and make any real changes for the better in our New Corrupt World Order. Not unless some lobbyist pays them to think that way.
Good luck, DARPA! Seriously. The only kind of talent you're going to attract is the kind that loves to sit and surf all day on big brother's dime. Anyone with any real skills is not going to waste their time on shitty government work when they can consult for way more, or they are incredibly lazy and have a lot of surfing to do.
Just get the Big Book Of Super-Duper Hacks and figure China out on your own!
Okay, you busted me, I myself am now surfing... but my new servers cluster nodes are all built and running without issue. So, surf I may!
Well, I'll bite. I must be fucking King of the Fanboys and a spoiler to the anti-fans, because I've worked for Apple Computer, Inc. twice. Once as a contractor in the '80s and another time as a real employee (#17xxx) during the early '90s. This was near the start of my career, so my pay was pretty low to begin with, but not bad for starters. This was during the time of John Sculley and I worked in all the engineering departments as I was primarily a network guy at that point. This brought me in contact with *everyone* who was *anyone*. I got to work for and meet several of the folks who came over from Xerox PARC in the original Macintosh design days. I have many early rev motherboards and one from Employee #4 (who's name I forget now, I think it was Bill Atkinson, but I'm probably wrong, might be Chris Espinosa too) when he vacated his Mariani One cube. I've personally met John Sculley, Jean Louis Gassee, Larry Tesler and many of the engineers and software folks responsible for the original PowerBook. They designed and built it just upstairs from my cube and I got to see many of the early prototypes. So, I might have a clue about how working at Apple is more than just a pay check. For those that would think that, just skip along to the next silly "Macs are too expensive" comments you poor bastard. Working at Apple can be best described as *AWESOME*!!!1! It's still on my list of best jobs ever and here are some of the perks: loan-to-own hardware (a new system for about 50% off retail), good discounts on all the latest hardware that's been in the channel long enough for the employees to finally get one, TONS of free T-shirts, all access pass to the site licensed software archive! (how did I get PhotoShop for free?), great parties, really nice people to work with (just don't expect them to make it thru the parking lot without blocking the way while having a conversation. must be an engineer thing), did I mention TONS of free T-shirts?, all the Apple IIs and Mac Pluses you can eat!, more T-shirts, more free software, lots of people who helped start the computer industry just right there for you to talk to. Even during my time there the name of Steve Jobs would come up in conversation and many of the engineers I talked to were just hoping that he would come back and correct the company's direction and failing product lines. Like the old ugly beige boxes. That crap that looks like what Dell spits out now and calls a computer is what Apple did wrong in the early '90s and made up for, almost too much, with the colorful iMacs. It's been fun to watch Apple come back big with the iMac, and again with the iPod and Intel Macs. The prestige of working for the company that sets the standard in high-end design and computing is nothing to scoff at. As a child growing up in Silicon Valley it was my dream to someday work at Apple, and I did it. It's a great place to work, if you want to work for the best and brightest. Just don't expect to become a millionaire like many of the early employees did. You have to be an "early adopter", a visionary, or just plain lucky to get in on the ground floor of something that became more than just another computer company in the valley.
Second that! How is secure text == to DRM? Weird. Oh, here's my ob. on-topic blob:
I once looked at the future, but it was so bright that I had to put on shades.
Yeah, there was a ton of boasting about trying to bring CNN dot com down. Yet, it's still there. Just block all their IPs and be done with them already. Do not want *.cn
/.ers making the South Park American Penis jokes, very funny, but those came from an episode where they went to Japan, not China. You frickin' idiots! Get some jokes from the episode where they have the South Park volleyball team in the world championships in China. The announcers from the game were priceless! Use those for reference. Thanks!
Also, to you
Oh, come on now people. Who modded this off-topic? It's completely on-topic. Think little, skinny, cookies made from Mars soil by a robotic travler? What's next? Mod down a Shake and Bake joke? NASA got that bot down, safe on the ground and their making sweet, soil cookies! What's not to love and laugh about?
You'll also be able to create a pool of drives that acts as a single drive, like you can with the RAID setup now, but far faster to setup. Growing your pools is a breeze and if they can tie TimeMachine into the zfs snapshots, my god, what can't we do?! Seriously, this will be a nice advanced file system for Mac OSX. We've been using it on Solaris for a year now for zone root/usr file systems, and zfs is AWESOME!!! Except that even Sun is not recommending we use it for zone root file systems until they hit update 6 of Solaris 10. Whoops! That's in November, so we're just sitting tight until they support Solaris root/OS zfs file systems. Then we upgrade. Then ? Then we profit!
/. artice: ;)
Ob. Apple Joke referencing earlier
Of course, the delay for the consumer OSX support of zfs will have to wait until they code in skipping backups of your iTunes library!
Before you get modded Off-Topic, I'll say the links are funny and clever. Glad you weren't fooled by them too! ;) I used to pull that stunt all the time in an old vBull forum I haunted. Just build a cool looking, dare-you-not-to-click-me front end to the logout link. Simple *and* funny. It's worth it just to have one stupid person accidentally log out. Imagine a world like that...
And to be on-topic:
Three words: giant oven mitts!
Agreed! Plus, I tend to avoid all the sites that look like ***world.com, because they are mostly pages framed in ads and other garbage that makes for a crappy read of their usually low-tech articles.
On the topic, sort of: I'm glad HP is branching out in new directions away from gouging the shit out of everyone with their overpriced inkjet inks. Bastards. Plus, just between you and me, part of our shop uses these hunks of shit they call the SuperDomes, and they all blow. Nothing sucks harder than having to admin a huge box that crashes and has problems *consistently* enough that our official HP technicians are getting vocally tired of having to come out weekly to fix their crap hardware. So, I say:
Dear HP,
Go ask Sun or IBM how to make better, cost-effective Unix products or just stick to the printers and, well that's about the only good product you make. Go figure. I'd tell this to you right to the faces of your sales droids, but they'd probably not understand it or take it seriously. Then again, how can I take your company, which schmoozes harder than their products work, seriously? There's a reason we call it the SuperDown. You're a very special company with a long history in calculators and printers and I'd hate to see you go the way of Gateway and Compa, scratch that last one. If you can at all manage it, try making an x86 version of HP/UX and releasing it for free before that part of your business (the UX part) becomes a tired, joke of the industry. Or, just switch to Linux like IBM did, rather than port AIX to x86 directly. If you want to be as relevant as a mainframe running hundreds of virtualized apache servers, keep staying the course.
Thanks,
-A Unix Admin who likes SAM, but it's no smit
Bingo! That's more correct than most IT managers would ever realize. Outsourcing is just that; too expensive and even more work than to keep it in-house. I've personally seen two, local, big corp data centers get sucked into the "let's let do this and save on our expensive in-house help!" Worked out great in both situations. One company scared off any good talent and got a name around the area as a lame data center to work for, plus they're paying through the nose for their administration now! They were not much to begin with anyway. The other Big Retail Co. got a sad and unpleasant shock when the "solutions provider" couldn't live up to their marketing hype; "we can build you a cluster of servers in about a hour" turned out to be "well, when you give us a month's notice and take the bundled software we provide at the revisions only we approve and support, then after that it's about an hour. Oh, and you can't upgrade any software to what you need." They did a big about face in just two year's time and recently hired back one of their admins at about a 150% salary! He just bailed for an even greener pasture. Now they're on Dice searching and hoping. It does not pay to outsource, then decide against it and hope you can find some hungry admins of high quality who don't already know what kind of crap your management pulls. Good luck with that. Seriously.
Also, I might add that outsourcing critical data is *NOT*, repeat *NOT*, going into the cloud, or over to India. There are huge obstacles to having your (health care or SOX-type, or government contract with employee info, etc.) data stored in someplace other than in your own, well-protected, data center her in the USA. It's not going to happen as there are several federal regulations that make it impossible, or really really not worth it for a number of legal reasons. That's not changing in the next four years.