I did read the article. That was an excellent example of the Economist's gently ironic style. For the irony impaired, that expression was meant as humour.
I'll have to resubscribe again one of these days, although $110 a year is a bit much, even for a weekly:-(.
If you can stand the limited hardware support, try the BeOS. It has a very nice device manager. Also, if you like imaginative software created by tiny companies, BeOS is heaven. Try it before it all gets overrun by the big guys.
I knew that fellow, many many years ago. He was a good friend of mine when he was actively working on it, but I haven't heard from him in an age. The site is certainly very clever and is definitely worth a look.
I don't think he's done any changes to the site in years. I think it's set up for Netscape 2.0, so if you happen to have a copy of it lying around somewhere it would probably work.
As far as I can tell, this is a lot like "IBM buys Compaq" - it's a merger, and mergers have a nasty tendancy of reducing competition and producing all sorts of ugly growing pains in both companies.
What's good about this news? What it means to me is fewer options and less consumer choice.
Of course I might just be bummed by the fact that I wanted to recommend a VA Research system to a client, but they wanted a far lower-end machine than VA provides. What happened to their $ 1,300 machine? It was all this small company really needed.
Let's back off from a moment. I was a geek, I was tortured in high school, and despite now being a high-paid professional with an office full of computers, the scars still show. But that's true of most of the respondents, I'm sure.
What I'm curious about is root causes.
What's so good about conforming? Why do people in school want the whole world to be mirrors of themselves? Would that not create a horribly boring world? Why torture people because they are different?
Anyone know? I think if we understood that, we would understand many of the world's problems.
y2kwomen struck me as a site designed to scare the heck out of vunerable individuals. If it scared you, even a little, I recommend Lizard's take as a much-needed antidote.
I really wasn't going to comment on it - everyone else has done a fine job slashing it [uninteded pun?] to ribbons. But...
Certainly I don't think most of us would want to lose the "click on the email link in the browser and up pops an email window" feature.
And, of course, once you do that... you'd might as well put email in. And, since the basic email interface is similar to NNTP, here comes NNTP, too.
I have to say, though, that I liked Netscape 3's user interface for such things much better than 4's. They really messed up 4. If I didn't need dynamic HTML, I would have never upgraded.
I haven't seen many truly rabid Windows users - most people I know of who have used Windows use it for strictly pragmatic reasons. Even then, I often hear that they don't particulary like it; it's just there, and it would be too much trouble to figure out the alternatives.
I think support for Windows is "a mile wide and an inch deep" - everyone uses Windows, but I see precious few people who love it. In the long run, I think this will be a significant disadvantage.
D
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Nobody outside of the Linux community cares?
on
Linux Advocacy Hurts
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· Score: 1
Does this mean zdnet is a member of the Linux community in good standing?
ZDNET picked up on the problems and did a good job reporting them. No need to slam them, eh?
If my memory serves, TCPD gives you control over what hosts are allowed access to your site, so you can selectively lock out certain hosts.
Why would you want to use that on a web server, which is almost invariably a public service? Certainly nobody's going to run a restricted web server on a Quad Pentium Xeon system!
I would certainly think that Apache can deal with security problems without any external additions. After all, the thing has web millenia of people banging on it, and I'd say that at least 999 out of 1000 web servers using Apache are not using Inetd.
There was no question in my mind when setting up my Apache server that using inetd was not even worth considering.
D ----
Wnat a workstation? SGI's the coolest.
on
Script Kiddy HOWTO
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· Score: 1
I just bought a SGI Indigo2 with 128mb RAM, a 20" monitor and a 2 GB hard disk for $ 1,150. Nice little system. I think you can be a hacker in that, if you want to be a bit more creative. Seems to me that gives you a big more bang for the buck than a SPARC, at least nowadays.
The reseller told me that even high school students are buying them now -- but mainly to look impressive. I think he enjoyed selling to someone who knew what he was buying for a change:-).
Amusingly enough, I bought it instead of a PC running Linux in part because a first class PC would have been a lot more expensive! How the mighty have fallen:-(.
They contract with companies that already exist to provide this information.
As for how they get it, I think they survey the companies involved. I think how it works is that this information is then used as a package meant to help judge the quality of company credit. Since most businesses need/want credit, it's not hard for them to get the information.
How accurate it is, of course, is anybody's guess. Getting data for public companies is pretty easy, but I think all they can do for private firms is ask.
D
First post on my new (well, used, well, ancient, well, 200mhz R4400) Indigo2. Nice to be back to SGI again. Irix(tm) is a weakness of mine.. ----
As a former SGI user who's probably going to take the plunge again and get an Indigo2 or two now that prices are so far down, I want to join the consensus: Keep the old logo.
I do understand the point behind the renaming - they want us to know they do stuff other than 3D graphics. But I think it could have been done in a sleeker way. They owe us SGI fans a more interesting logo than that.
He says the Recording Industry folks will fail in their new format, and in suppressing MP3. Then he says the MP3 format is inferior to CDs, and will eventually be replaced by something better. "Don't be fixated on a file format" is a rough paraphrase of his argument.
As far as I can tell, few to no slashdotters would disagree with these points.
I will say, though, that I found his Excel example ridiculous. He claims people buy Excel because of its features, not because XLS is a universal format. I would say this is most definitely false; the reason people standardize on Microsoft Office is because everyone else uses it, not because it's good or bad. That makes me think MP3s are going to be around forever... just like cassettes. It takes a real quantum leap to totally replace a format. Hey, there are even some people who cling to vinyl records.
It makes me a little worried about making a mail order purchase when, even with a high-rated company that's very good at satsifying customers, you have 27 people returning merchandise out of 63 total respondants (see Transcend Technologies ratings).
Just wondering. Incidentally, I don't mean to pick on Transcend - pretty much all the highly-rated companies have similar stories to tell.
My message got mangled somehow - probably because I was trying to post from the NetPositive browser on the BeOS. NP doesn't seem to like the posting mechanism. Anyway, my point was that it was a dual-processor capable system with just one processor, and that fact was not clearly explained. Sleazy.
However, I have a question to IntlHarvester - what is it about IDE that makes it use up the CPU? I hear people bad-mouthing IDE all the time, but it's worked fine on my Mac G3, even for high-speed video captures. What's wrong with IDE?
for someone who's not looking carefully is that this is a dual-processor system with two processors. The company is not actually lying to its customers, but I would consider this type of marketing to be remarkably Clintonesque.
A roughly equivalent system from Penguin Computing is $2,495 (dual-capable system with a single Pentium/500 CPU), but at least you know what you're getting. I didn't check VA Research because all their dual processor systems are SCSI and thus not price-competitive.
Overall, I think I'd stay away from this company. Dishonest marketing material, even merely by implication, is a giant red flag for me.
Seems like the nice folks here are being a bit overly critical of your plan to use Linux. I think they felt you were trying to be politically correct by playing to the audience.
But I would assume practical reasons for using Linux - certainly you don't want to go off rebooting your computer all the time, especially since the whole idea behind the wearable is more cinema verte [sp?] than anything else. So I, for one, hope your adoption of Linux is successful.
Finally, a lot of people seem to be unfairly criticising you for merely creating a wearable computer. I think th marketing aspects of this - the sale of the idea to the media lab - show real promise. I've certainly never heard of someone wanting to do live broadcasts from high school, as you filter through corridors and what-not. I'm not sure how many people want to see them, but at least it's a creative idea.
While fighting to expand Internet access, he has led the Administration's efforts to give parents, schools, and communities effective tools to protect children from inappropriate content on-line.
This would appear to imply support of the CDA on his part.
On the other hand, his much-derided Information Superhighway comment was what got me back on the Internet. (I had been on the ArpaNet as a teen in the late 70s). I figured that, if a politician was aware of the net, it was probably at a takeoff point. Although I personally didn't make quite the right moves to benefit from that fact, it did get me here on time to grab the domain amazing.com before anyone else:-)
I seem to remember reading about a patch on Sun's web site. You might want to search a bit more before giving up.
Do you know what components of the system actually fail in the year 2000? I thought Sun, as well as every other Unix in existance, had the year 2038 problem to contend with, but was 2000-safe.
Finally, to put this in some perspective, you've gotten a lot of life out of that old Sun. I have a 1994 Sun SPARC with SunOS that's still running strong. Fortunately, I can upgrade to the free Solaris because it's a personal box. If I were you, I'd probably do the same. If my experience is any guide, Sun won't care.
My experience? I ran a free download of the Netscape Commerce Server (back when it was a $ 5,000 product) for over a year for my personal web site. Nobody at Netscape ever asked me for a dime. They probably took one look at the site, realized there was no way in heck this guy was going to come up with $ 5,000, and left me alone. I strongly suspect that would apply to a small business as well; they'd rather have you run the product illegally than stop using Sun hardware.
Still, you should buy a new Sun anyway. I probably would, at their new prices, but I love the SGI Irix operating system, and used SGIs are so cheap nowadays...
There's one available for tours in Long Beach; it's pretty interesting. I should really unearth the pictures I took of it.
Unfortunately, if it's anything like the (non-nuclear) sub I saw, there's no way you could "plush it up" - all the wood, leather and glass in the world couldn't make that thing an appealing living environment. There's just not enough space, and too many akwardly-located controls. I also think it would take too many people to run - the type of person who would want to escape wouldn't want so many people around constantly.
Used R4400 Indigo2 High Impacts are going for ~$2k nowadays. I'm thinking seriously of getting one and returning to the SGI world. Bit of an antidote for the boring PC.:-)
Linux is cool, but there's nothing quite like SGI. I feel very sad they're going to NT; I feel it's an enormous loss -- and I was responsible for the purchase of several new SGI systems a couple of years back.
Oh, and I agree with the folks who say the new logo looks lousy.
Slashdot Mirror
I did read the article. That was an excellent example of the Economist's gently ironic style. For the irony impaired, that expression was meant as humour.
:-(.
I'll have to resubscribe again one of these days, although $110 a year is a bit much, even for a weekly
D
----
If you can stand the limited hardware support, try the BeOS. It has a very nice device manager. Also, if you like imaginative software created by tiny companies, BeOS is heaven. Try it before it all gets overrun by the big guys.
D
----
I knew that fellow, many many years ago. He was a good friend of mine when he was actively working on it, but I haven't heard from him in an age. The site is certainly very clever and is definitely worth a look.
I don't think he's done any changes to the site in years. I think it's set up for Netscape 2.0, so if you happen to have a copy of it lying around somewhere it would probably work.
D
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As it happens, this is exactly what I did. :-)
D
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As far as I can tell, this is a lot like "IBM buys Compaq" - it's a merger, and mergers have a nasty tendancy of reducing competition and producing all sorts of ugly growing pains in both companies.
What's good about this news? What it means to me is fewer options and less consumer choice.
Of course I might just be bummed by the fact that I wanted to recommend a VA Research system to a client, but they wanted a far lower-end machine than VA provides. What happened to their $ 1,300 machine? It was all this small company really needed.
D
----
Let's back off from a moment. I was a geek, I was tortured in high school, and despite now being a high-paid professional with an office full of computers, the scars still show. But that's true of most of the respondents, I'm sure.
What I'm curious about is root causes.
What's so good about conforming? Why do people in school want the whole world to be mirrors of themselves? Would that not create a horribly boring world? Why torture people because they are different?
Anyone know? I think if we understood that, we would understand many of the world's problems.
D
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Didn't we have that less than a month ago? And wasn't the answer something like 95% male?
Sigh.
D
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I really wasn't going to comment on it - everyone else has done a fine job slashing it [uninteded pun?] to ribbons. But ...
I found this to be a bit too much.
D
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Certainly I don't think most of us would want to lose the "click on the email link in the browser and up pops an email window" feature.
... you'd might as well put email in. And, since the basic email interface is similar to NNTP, here comes NNTP, too.
And, of course, once you do that
I have to say, though, that I liked Netscape 3's user interface for such things much better than 4's. They really messed up 4. If I didn't need dynamic HTML, I would have never upgraded.
D
----
I haven't seen many truly rabid Windows users - most people I know of who have used Windows use it for strictly pragmatic reasons. Even then, I often hear that they don't particulary like it; it's just there, and it would be too much trouble to figure out the alternatives.
I think support for Windows is "a mile wide and an inch deep" - everyone uses Windows, but I see precious few people who love it. In the long run, I think this will be a significant disadvantage.
D
----
Does this mean zdnet is a member of the Linux community in good standing?
ZDNET picked up on the problems and did a good job reporting them. No need to slam them, eh?
D
----
If my memory serves, TCPD gives you control over what hosts are allowed access to your site, so you can selectively lock out certain hosts.
Why would you want to use that on a web server, which is almost invariably a public service? Certainly nobody's going to run a restricted web server on a Quad Pentium Xeon system!
I would certainly think that Apache can deal with security problems without any external additions. After all, the thing has web millenia of people banging on it, and I'd say that at least 999 out of 1000 web servers using Apache are not using Inetd.
There was no question in my mind when setting up my Apache server that using inetd was not even worth considering.
D
----
I just bought a SGI Indigo2 with 128mb RAM, a 20" monitor and a 2 GB hard disk for $ 1,150. Nice little system. I think you can be a hacker in that, if you want to be a bit more creative. Seems to me that gives you a big more bang for the buck than a SPARC, at least nowadays.
:-).
:-(.
The reseller told me that even high school students are buying them now -- but mainly to look impressive. I think he enjoyed selling to someone who knew what he was buying for a change
Amusingly enough, I bought it instead of a PC running Linux in part because a first class PC would have been a lot more expensive! How the mighty have fallen
D
----
They contract with companies that already exist to provide this information.
As for how they get it, I think they survey the companies involved. I think how it works is that this information is then used as a package meant to help judge the quality of company credit. Since most businesses need/want credit, it's not hard for them to get the information.
How accurate it is, of course, is anybody's guess. Getting data for public companies is pretty easy, but I think all they can do for private firms is ask.
D
First post on my new (well, used, well, ancient, well, 200mhz R4400) Indigo2. Nice to be back to SGI again. Irix(tm) is a weakness of mine..
----
As a former SGI user who's probably going to take the plunge again and get an Indigo2 or two now that prices are so far down, I want to join the consensus: Keep the old logo.
I do understand the point behind the renaming - they want us to know they do stuff other than 3D graphics. But I think it could have been done in a sleeker way. They owe us SGI fans a more interesting logo than that.
D
----
He says the Recording Industry folks will fail in their new format, and in suppressing MP3. Then he says the MP3 format is inferior to CDs, and will eventually be replaced by something better. "Don't be fixated on a file format" is a rough paraphrase of his argument.
... just like cassettes. It takes a real quantum leap to totally replace a format. Hey, there are even some people who cling to vinyl records.
As far as I can tell, few to no slashdotters would disagree with these points.
I will say, though, that I found his Excel example ridiculous. He claims people buy Excel because of its features, not because XLS is a universal format. I would say this is most definitely false; the reason people standardize on Microsoft Office is because everyone else uses it, not because it's good or bad. That makes me think MP3s are going to be around forever
D
----
It makes me a little worried about making a mail order purchase when, even with a high-rated company that's very good at satsifying customers, you have 27 people returning merchandise out of 63 total respondants (see Transcend Technologies ratings).
Just wondering. Incidentally, I don't mean to pick on Transcend - pretty much all the highly-rated companies have similar stories to tell.
D
----
My message got mangled somehow - probably because I was trying to post from the NetPositive browser on the BeOS. NP doesn't seem to like the posting mechanism. Anyway, my point was that it was a dual-processor capable system with just one processor, and that fact was not clearly explained. Sleazy.
However, I have a question to IntlHarvester - what is it about IDE that makes it use up the CPU? I hear people bad-mouthing IDE all the time, but it's worked fine on my Mac G3, even for high-speed video captures. What's wrong with IDE?
D
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I don't know if the public has gotten smarter - but I do think it's gotten more angry at malfunctioning computers.
...
At least when IBM ruled the roost, their systems stayed up
D
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for someone who's not looking carefully is that this is a dual-processor system with two processors. The company is not actually lying to its customers, but I would consider this type of marketing to be remarkably Clintonesque.
A roughly equivalent system from Penguin Computing is $2,495 (dual-capable system with a single Pentium/500 CPU), but at least you know what you're getting. I didn't check VA Research because all their dual processor systems are SCSI and thus not price-competitive.
Overall, I think I'd stay away from this company. Dishonest marketing material, even merely by implication, is a giant red flag for me.
D
----
Seems like the nice folks here are being a bit overly critical of your plan to use Linux. I think they felt you were trying to be politically correct by playing to the audience.
But I would assume practical reasons for using Linux - certainly you don't want to go off rebooting your computer all the time, especially since the whole idea behind the wearable is more cinema verte [sp?] than anything else. So I, for one, hope your adoption of Linux is successful.
Finally, a lot of people seem to be unfairly criticising you for merely creating a wearable computer. I think th marketing aspects of this - the sale of the idea to the media lab - show real promise. I've certainly never heard of someone wanting to do live broadcasts from high school, as you filter through corridors and what-not. I'm not sure how many people want to see them, but at least it's a creative idea.
I, for one, hope it will be the first of many.
D
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http://www.algore2000.com/issues/technolo.html
This would appear to imply support of the CDA on his part.On the other hand, his much-derided Information Superhighway comment was what got me back on the Internet. (I had been on the ArpaNet as a teen in the late 70s). I figured that, if a politician was aware of the net, it was probably at a takeoff point. Although I personally didn't make quite the right moves to benefit from that fact, it did get me here on time to grab the domain amazing.com before anyone else :-)
----
I seem to remember reading about a patch on Sun's web site. You might want to search a bit more before giving up.
...
Do you know what components of the system actually fail in the year 2000? I thought Sun, as well as every other Unix in existance, had the year 2038 problem to contend with, but was 2000-safe.
Finally, to put this in some perspective, you've gotten a lot of life out of that old Sun. I have a 1994 Sun SPARC with SunOS that's still running strong. Fortunately, I can upgrade to the free Solaris because it's a personal box. If I were you, I'd probably do the same. If my experience is any guide, Sun won't care.
My experience? I ran a free download of the Netscape Commerce Server (back when it was a $ 5,000 product) for over a year for my personal web site. Nobody at Netscape ever asked me for a dime. They probably took one look at the site, realized there was no way in heck this guy was going to come up with $ 5,000, and left me alone. I strongly suspect that would apply to a small business as well; they'd rather have you run the product illegally than stop using Sun hardware.
Still, you should buy a new Sun anyway. I probably would, at their new prices, but I love the SGI Irix operating system, and used SGIs are so cheap nowadays
D
----
There's one available for tours in Long Beach; it's pretty interesting. I should really unearth the pictures I took of it.
Unfortunately, if it's anything like the (non-nuclear) sub I saw, there's no way you could "plush it up" - all the wood, leather and glass in the world couldn't make that thing an appealing living environment. There's just not enough space, and too many akwardly-located controls. I also think it would take too many people to run - the type of person who would want to escape wouldn't want so many people around constantly.
D
----
Used R4400 Indigo2 High Impacts are going for ~$2k nowadays. I'm thinking seriously of getting one and returning to the SGI world. Bit of an antidote for the boring PC. :-)
Linux is cool, but there's nothing quite like SGI. I feel very sad they're going to NT; I feel it's an enormous loss -- and I was responsible for the purchase of several new SGI systems a couple of years back.
Oh, and I agree with the folks who say the new logo looks lousy.
D
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