Does Yahoo even understand where spam comes from? To whoever at Yahoo thought this joke up: It isn't coming from people sending email to random email addresses. It comes from peoples' PCs that have been...
Oh I give up. Now I think I know why Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo. MS wanted their super smart anti-spam team.
Now we finally see the real reason Sun and HP (and probably others by now) have been coming up with those "data-center-in-a-trailer" products. To allow cloud providers to push for tax breaks. If the local politicians don't give you what you want, just fire up the trucks and tow the data center to some other city or state that'll give you what you want. Heck, all it would most likely take for the pols to fall all over themselves offering up more tax breaks would be the appearance of trucks at the data center site; you probably wouldn't even have to back 'em up to the trailers.
And the customers' data? I'm thinking that every time some cloud provider decides to relocate their data centers, a lot of customer data will be at risk or being lost.
... that she failed to notice that the country is in the midst of a (oh what's that word again... oh yeah) recession. Nobody's having an easy time finding a job. Methinks that someone right out of school, likely with little to no work history of any kind let alone in IT, would be in about as in demand as, say, someone looking to manage large scale COBOL projects.
Filing a lawsuit after only three months of a job search doesn't seem like a great marketing tool either.
Everyone I know already refers to them as "Radio Trash" (and has been since the '80s) and it's way too late to break that habit.
(Having said that, I have to admit that I still have a couple of RS products that have served me well over the years: a little Realistic STA-12 AM/FM receiver and a pair of those excellent Minimus-7 speakers. I may dump the receiver one day but the speakers will probably still be around for years.)
``In the '80s, why didn't Microsoft care about whether their definition of "open" matched the GPL?''
Whoa... Nothing I wrote even implied that Microsoft's ridiculous claim had anything to do with the GPL. My point was that their claim had little to do with the concept of openness.
At that time, when one talked about "open" in the context of computer systems, one was generally talking about "open systems" (mostly whether a system was POSIX compliant) or the Open Group (a group of computer and OS vendors who sold hardware + operating systems that were POSIX compliant). These were not necessarily UNIX. IIRC, VMS was the first OS to be fully POSIX compliant. (Maybe the only non-UNIX OS to do that though some odd OS like Pick might have pulled it off.)
The Open Group would have had little to nothing to do with the GPL. The OSes they were selling were as closed source as could be and I'd wager that few if any members of the Open Group would have given more than a nanosecond's consideration to making their OSes available under the GPL. (Anyone know when the Open Group disbanded? I'm sure they still had a few members when the GPL was born even though I still can't imagine them wanting to give the GPL a serious look.)
Developing for an open system in those days was rather like writing software meant to be installed from sources today. Of course, it would have been all done in-house and only the binaries sold. If a vendor had enough inquiries about whether their nifty software ran on hardware X running POSIX-compliant OS Y, a vendor merely had to invest in the hardware needed to compile the software and build packages for sale. At least that was the theory. The death of the proprietary hardware/OS vendor had already begun in the face of the onslaught of the PC and the dream of that sort of "open system" was doomed.
"Windows NT was available for Alpha, PPC and MIPS as well as Intel chips."
The article I was referring to was prior to NT's birth. If memory serves it may have even predated Windows 3.x. I distinctly remember NT when it was running at some trade show on the latest (at the time) MIPS chip and I actually got rather interested in it at the time. Probably because it was supposedly based on VMS ideas Cutler brought to MS from DEC. Didn't take long for MS to screw those up, though, and my interest waned rather quickly.
Sometime back in the late '80s, Digital Review (or a similar industry newletter) ran an article in which Bill Gates was quoted as saying something to the effect that Microsoft's operating system was an "open system" because you could buy a computer from a large number of vendors that it would run on. (So long as you were talking about computers based on Intel chips, I suppose he could could sort of get away with saying that, as self-serving as it was.) Claiming that whatever that Microsoft does is in any way "open" is sort of old hat with those guys.
Their fixation on only promoting the latest musucians and music. Found any older music in the stores lately? I doubt it. And I'm talking about CDs from an artist released perhaps a year or two ago. More and more one walks into a Borders or Best Buy (or whoever) -- both of which used to have good and sometimes great selections from most artists catalogs -- and find virtually nothing. Nowdays, it's only the latest CD or two from an artist. Anything older than that and you're lucky to find it at all. Some artists's older music can only be found on compilations, greatest hits CDs, or, lately, remastered versions of older CDs (at a higher price, or course). It's truly pathetic. Customers wanting to find anything from a band's back catalog are just out of luck. (Unless you're lucky enough to find a band that sells their older releases on the band's own web site.) Mom and Pop and Indie music stores that used to cater to the real music fans have all gone out of business. Folks that want to buy actual, physical CDs are just being ignored.
Call me old fashioned but I have no real desire to entrust my music collection to being a nothing but a bunch of bits on a hard disk. How many music customers out there already have lost their entire music collections to a failed hard drive or MP3 player or a decision by some company to cease authenticating DRM-encumbered songs. (Or someone who has a music collection they amassed while they were a Windows user but have switched to Linux?) I'm looking for honest-to-goodness CDs dammit and not a download that can be lost due to an freak power failure crashing a hard drive.
"Will those savings offset the new infrastructure the state government will have to build for compliance and auditing of the third parties?"
Oh the fun it'll be as a cloud provider having to respond to 50 different state governments, thousands of municipal governments, and innumerable corporations each with their own requirements for data retention, disaster recovery, privacy, etc., etc.
Think the cloud is going to be inexpensive when all the people needed to comply with these customers' varying requirements are on the cloud providers' payrolls?
... to explain the recent flurry of stories about US Senators that can't seem to keep their pants zipped when in the company of women they're not married to?
... where we paid a textbook fee and essentially, rented the textbooks for the academic year. You picked them up at the beginning of the year and turned them in at the end. If you beat them up too much, you got charged extra.
Of course, that was quite a few years ago. Long before the publishers began the practice of demanding the absolutely ridiculous prices they charge for textbooks nowadays. The last time I went back to my alma mater, I took a trip through the college bookstore. There were a few textbooks that cost as much as what I recall paying for the entire set of texts I needed for a semester. But... even back then, the publishers were doing everything they could to suck every last dime from college students. A non-university book store -- featuring mostly used textbooks (they paid the students more for used texts than the university store) -- opened up just off campus and went through hell to get themselves established. Publishers fought with them at every turn. (The University wasn't all that happy about their opening either.) Why the University couldn't have negotiated with the publishers to do get better pricing for texts was often asked. (And never answered.) One of these leasing deals would have been welcome, too. While I was able to use many of my textbooks for one than one semester (esp. the Calc and some of the engineering texts) I got stuck with a few that I needed for elective classes that were not accepted to be sold back to the campus book at any price since the text for the next scheduled time that class was going to be offered was going to be different. It sure would have been nice to lease those books.
I would have thought that even an Associate degree for something like that would be a stretch. I guess colleges and universities really have become nothing more than expensive trade schools.
If I was unwilling to pay Microsoft $50 to buy a product that detected and fixed problems with their other products, what makes you think I'd find it any more palatable to be buying a similar product from you folks?
Don't bother answering, guys. Your response would only make me laugh. You see my desktop hasn't needed any of your products for a good number of years now. In fact, the only Microsoft product loaded on any of our computers is a semi-broken version of XP that now wants to be re-authorized because I added an old SCSI controller to the system. Like that's ever going to happen. (When I get the time, another 80GB of disk space will be available for my daughters to use on Linux.)
When we moved into our current house, the kids were amazed at how many stars they could see. Then the new school that was built a couple of blocks away decided that lights were needed to ensure that the school and the surrounding parking areas would be illuminated twenty-four hours a day, every single day. When I brought up the subject and suggested putting in motion-controlled sensors on the lights so they wouldn't need to be all all night long you'd have thought I suggested roasting the students on a spit. And this is a school district that is laying off a number of staff and faculty and shutting down programs because their budget is being hit. Morons.
My neighbor didn't check before he started digging in his yard. (In Illinois we'd say someone didn't "call JULIE". "JULIE" = Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators in case you're wondering.)
I have a system down in the basement that is running a few old SCSI drives that date back to the early '90s. (Cannibalized from StorageWorks bricks.) The darned things have been running continuously for well over a decade.
The keyboard that I'm using to type this was made in March 1993. The KVM in the basement has one made in 10/92. (Yes, they're both Modem Ms.) I have an old ALR/386 with an ATA VGAWonder graphics card and the original NEC Multisync monitor that I bought back in the late '80s that I use (very occasionally) for an ancient DOS game. The oldest modem I have that I know still works is a Viva 2400 baud. I guess I could use it in case of an emergency though I have other, much faster modems I'd probably use if the need ever arose.
The GPS ephemerides data stream includes parameters to model clock drift. A similar set of corrections could be included to provide a correction for the change in pulsar frequency.
Something tells me though, that this is a small problem compared to being able to detect the pulsar signals in the first place. Unless adding an Arecibo-sized dish to your cellphone or pocket-sized locator gizmo is an option.
...the thief was interested in the SS numbers of White House visitors. ("Score! The social security numbers of all the NCAA and World Series champions of the '90s!") Much more likely is that someone saw the drive on the shelf and said to themselves: "Whoa! A terabyte?! That'll hold all of my pr0n collection with some room left over for more."
It'd be interesting to see what the average and top mileage cars have been getting over the past 20-30 years or so. Up until 1990, I had a car with a small displacement 6-cylinder (instead of a 4-cyl, cuz I wanted air conditioning), manual 5-speed transmission, and cruise control that routinely got me above 40 mpg on the highway. If the weather cooperated and I wasn't driving into a headwind the entire way, more often than not I was able to make a trip from S. Ohio home to Chicago on a single tank of gas. Then, for some reason, it was almost impossible to find a car that got better than the low 30s. Once SUVs became popular, availability of high mileage cars dropped even further. If one were to plot mileage over the years, I'd bet that we'll finally be getting back to what should have been commonplace in the mid/late '90s. Fifteen years or more of progress totally wasted. Pity. And the managers of American auto makers wonder why their companies are in the toilet.
``Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like,' Ward said.''
That assumes they'll ever enjoy Windows 7 doesn't it? If they didn't buy into Vista what does this Ward fellow think Windows 7 will have that'll make folks like it? Less expensive hardware requirements? Dream on. Better security? (If it hasn't already been said by someone from Microsoft, I can almost guarantee that you'll soon be hearing that "Windows 7 is the most secure version of Windows to date".) Don't count on that. (I give it less than a month before a major virus/worm makes the rounds of the new Windows 7 systems.) Lower support costs? You're kidding, right?
Seems like some of these analysts already know that Windows 7 is going to be a turkey.
The report did come from Faux News, after all. They're not exactly known for their impartiality. When was the last time they reported anything positive about a Democrat? (Other than a story about a Democrat that disagrees with the majority of other Democrats.)
I like the left side of my browser window uncluttered with "navigation" stuff. I suspect that a great many browser users do as well. (Most web sites already include a ton of navigation links on the left of the page anyway. Adding another column of these will be confusing.) Now it seems we need a Windows Explorer-type interface using up screen real estate? It's bad enough already that way too many web sites design their pages to make almost necessary that you run the browser in full-screen mode; eating up the left side of the this idea will most likely make that mandatory in order to avoid horizontal scrolling. Tab groups? Unless they're going to manage themselves, this seems like a useless feture for the vast majority of browser users. Tell ya what guys... why not throw in a ribbon-style menu as well since you're hell bent on making everything look like a Windows application. Those pundits that criticize Linux developers as doing nothing more than copying Windows ideas may not be that wrong after all. Instead of mucking around with the user interface, why not make the browser work faster by taking advantage of the multi-core chips that are the norm these days. (And make the damned Javascript interpretter work better so we can dump plug-ins like NoScript.)
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Does Yahoo even understand where spam comes from? To whoever at Yahoo thought this joke up: It isn't coming from people sending email to random email addresses. It comes from peoples' PCs that have been ...
Oh I give up. Now I think I know why Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo. MS wanted their super smart anti-spam team.
Now we finally see the real reason Sun and HP (and probably others by now) have been coming up with those "data-center-in-a-trailer" products. To allow cloud providers to push for tax breaks. If the local politicians don't give you what you want, just fire up the trucks and tow the data center to some other city or state that'll give you what you want. Heck, all it would most likely take for the pols to fall all over themselves offering up more tax breaks would be the appearance of trucks at the data center site; you probably wouldn't even have to back 'em up to the trailers.
And the customers' data? I'm thinking that every time some cloud provider decides to relocate their data centers, a lot of customer data will be at risk or being lost.
... that she failed to notice that the country is in the midst of a (oh what's that word again... oh yeah) recession. Nobody's having an easy time finding a job. Methinks that someone right out of school, likely with little to no work history of any kind let alone in IT, would be in about as in demand as, say, someone looking to manage large scale COBOL projects.
Filing a lawsuit after only three months of a job search doesn't seem like a great marketing tool either.
Everyone I know already refers to them as "Radio Trash" (and has been since the '80s) and it's way too late to break that habit.
(Having said that, I have to admit that I still have a couple of RS products that have served me well over the years: a little Realistic STA-12 AM/FM receiver and a pair of those excellent Minimus-7 speakers. I may dump the receiver one day but the speakers will probably still be around for years.)
Whoa... Nothing I wrote even implied that Microsoft's ridiculous claim had anything to do with the GPL. My point was that their claim had little to do with the concept of openness.
At that time, when one talked about "open" in the context of computer systems, one was generally talking about "open systems" (mostly whether a system was POSIX compliant) or the Open Group (a group of computer and OS vendors who sold hardware + operating systems that were POSIX compliant). These were not necessarily UNIX. IIRC, VMS was the first OS to be fully POSIX compliant. (Maybe the only non-UNIX OS to do that though some odd OS like Pick might have pulled it off.)
The Open Group would have had little to nothing to do with the GPL. The OSes they were selling were as closed source as could be and I'd wager that few if any members of the Open Group would have given more than a nanosecond's consideration to making their OSes available under the GPL. (Anyone know when the Open Group disbanded? I'm sure they still had a few members when the GPL was born even though I still can't imagine them wanting to give the GPL a serious look.)
Developing for an open system in those days was rather like writing software meant to be installed from sources today. Of course, it would have been all done in-house and only the binaries sold. If a vendor had enough inquiries about whether their nifty software ran on hardware X running POSIX-compliant OS Y, a vendor merely had to invest in the hardware needed to compile the software and build packages for sale. At least that was the theory. The death of the proprietary hardware/OS vendor had already begun in the face of the onslaught of the PC and the dream of that sort of "open system" was doomed.
The article I was referring to was prior to NT's birth. If memory serves it may have even predated Windows 3.x. I distinctly remember NT when it was running at some trade show on the latest (at the time) MIPS chip and I actually got rather interested in it at the time. Probably because it was supposedly based on VMS ideas Cutler brought to MS from DEC. Didn't take long for MS to screw those up, though, and my interest waned rather quickly.
Sometime back in the late '80s, Digital Review (or a similar industry newletter) ran an article in which Bill Gates was quoted as saying something to the effect that Microsoft's operating system was an "open system" because you could buy a computer from a large number of vendors that it would run on. (So long as you were talking about computers based on Intel chips, I suppose he could could sort of get away with saying that, as self-serving as it was.) Claiming that whatever that Microsoft does is in any way "open" is sort of old hat with those guys.
Their fixation on only promoting the latest musucians and music. Found any older music in the stores lately? I doubt it. And I'm talking about CDs from an artist released perhaps a year or two ago. More and more one walks into a Borders or Best Buy (or whoever) -- both of which used to have good and sometimes great selections from most artists catalogs -- and find virtually nothing. Nowdays, it's only the latest CD or two from an artist. Anything older than that and you're lucky to find it at all. Some artists's older music can only be found on compilations, greatest hits CDs, or, lately, remastered versions of older CDs (at a higher price, or course). It's truly pathetic. Customers wanting to find anything from a band's back catalog are just out of luck. (Unless you're lucky enough to find a band that sells their older releases on the band's own web site.) Mom and Pop and Indie music stores that used to cater to the real music fans have all gone out of business. Folks that want to buy actual, physical CDs are just being ignored.
Call me old fashioned but I have no real desire to entrust my music collection to being a nothing but a bunch of bits on a hard disk. How many music customers out there already have lost their entire music collections to a failed hard drive or MP3 player or a decision by some company to cease authenticating DRM-encumbered songs. (Or someone who has a music collection they amassed while they were a Windows user but have switched to Linux?) I'm looking for honest-to-goodness CDs dammit and not a download that can be lost due to an freak power failure crashing a hard drive.
Oh the fun it'll be as a cloud provider having to respond to 50 different state governments, thousands of municipal governments, and innumerable corporations each with their own requirements for data retention, disaster recovery, privacy, etc., etc.
Think the cloud is going to be inexpensive when all the people needed to comply with these customers' varying requirements are on the cloud providers' payrolls?
"One size fits all" you say? Yeah... right.
... to explain the recent flurry of stories about US Senators that can't seem to keep their pants zipped when in the company of women they're not married to?
Yep. "One tenth the cost?" "Oh my! That sounds like a fraction!" And you know how hard fractions are.
What frustrates me even more is that it appears to have been taken from a quote by one of the researchers.
... where we paid a textbook fee and essentially, rented the textbooks for the academic year. You picked them up at the beginning of the year and turned them in at the end. If you beat them up too much, you got charged extra.
Of course, that was quite a few years ago. Long before the publishers began the practice of demanding the absolutely ridiculous prices they charge for textbooks nowadays. The last time I went back to my alma mater, I took a trip through the college bookstore. There were a few textbooks that cost as much as what I recall paying for the entire set of texts I needed for a semester. But... even back then, the publishers were doing everything they could to suck every last dime from college students. A non-university book store -- featuring mostly used textbooks (they paid the students more for used texts than the university store) -- opened up just off campus and went through hell to get themselves established. Publishers fought with them at every turn. (The University wasn't all that happy about their opening either.) Why the University couldn't have negotiated with the publishers to do get better pricing for texts was often asked. (And never answered.) One of these leasing deals would have been welcome, too. While I was able to use many of my textbooks for one than one semester (esp. the Calc and some of the engineering texts) I got stuck with a few that I needed for elective classes that were not accepted to be sold back to the campus book at any price since the text for the next scheduled time that class was going to be offered was going to be different. It sure would have been nice to lease those books.
... degree in web development?
I would have thought that even an Associate degree for something like that would be a stretch. I guess colleges and universities really have become nothing more than expensive trade schools.
If I was unwilling to pay Microsoft $50 to buy a product that detected and fixed problems with their other products, what makes you think I'd find it any more palatable to be buying a similar product from you folks?
Don't bother answering, guys. Your response would only make me laugh. You see my desktop hasn't needed any of your products for a good number of years now. In fact, the only Microsoft product loaded on any of our computers is a semi-broken version of XP that now wants to be re-authorized because I added an old SCSI controller to the system. Like that's ever going to happen. (When I get the time, another 80GB of disk space will be available for my daughters to use on Linux.)
When we moved into our current house, the kids were amazed at how many stars they could see. Then the new school that was built a couple of blocks away decided that lights were needed to ensure that the school and the surrounding parking areas would be illuminated twenty-four hours a day, every single day. When I brought up the subject and suggested putting in motion-controlled sensors on the lights so they wouldn't need to be all all night long you'd have thought I suggested roasting the students on a spit. And this is a school district that is laying off a number of staff and faculty and shutting down programs because their budget is being hit. Morons.
My neighbor didn't check before he started digging in his yard. (In Illinois we'd say someone didn't "call JULIE". "JULIE" = Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators in case you're wondering.)
The DoS ate my homework.
I have a system down in the basement that is running a few old SCSI drives that date back to the early '90s. (Cannibalized from StorageWorks bricks.) The darned things have been running continuously for well over a decade.
The keyboard that I'm using to type this was made in March 1993. The KVM in the basement has one made in 10/92. (Yes, they're both Modem Ms.) I have an old ALR/386 with an ATA VGAWonder graphics card and the original NEC Multisync monitor that I bought back in the late '80s that I use (very occasionally) for an ancient DOS game. The oldest modem I have that I know still works is a Viva 2400 baud. I guess I could use it in case of an emergency though I have other, much faster modems I'd probably use if the need ever arose.
The GPS ephemerides data stream includes parameters to model clock drift. A similar set of corrections could be included to provide a correction for the change in pulsar frequency.
Something tells me though, that this is a small problem compared to being able to detect the pulsar signals in the first place. Unless adding an Arecibo-sized dish to your cellphone or pocket-sized locator gizmo is an option.
...should be prohibited, surgically, if necessary, from breeding.
...the thief was interested in the SS numbers of White House visitors. ("Score! The social security numbers of all the NCAA and World Series champions of the '90s!") Much more likely is that someone saw the drive on the shelf and said to themselves: "Whoa! A terabyte?! That'll hold all of my pr0n collection with some room left over for more."
It'd be interesting to see what the average and top mileage cars have been getting over the past 20-30 years or so. Up until 1990, I had a car with a small displacement 6-cylinder (instead of a 4-cyl, cuz I wanted air conditioning), manual 5-speed transmission, and cruise control that routinely got me above 40 mpg on the highway. If the weather cooperated and I wasn't driving into a headwind the entire way, more often than not I was able to make a trip from S. Ohio home to Chicago on a single tank of gas. Then, for some reason, it was almost impossible to find a car that got better than the low 30s. Once SUVs became popular, availability of high mileage cars dropped even further. If one were to plot mileage over the years, I'd bet that we'll finally be getting back to what should have been commonplace in the mid/late '90s. Fifteen years or more of progress totally wasted. Pity. And the managers of American auto makers wonder why their companies are in the toilet.
That assumes they'll ever enjoy Windows 7 doesn't it? If they didn't buy into Vista what does this Ward fellow think Windows 7 will have that'll make folks like it? Less expensive hardware requirements? Dream on. Better security? (If it hasn't already been said by someone from Microsoft, I can almost guarantee that you'll soon be hearing that "Windows 7 is the most secure version of Windows to date".) Don't count on that. (I give it less than a month before a major virus/worm makes the rounds of the new Windows 7 systems.) Lower support costs? You're kidding, right?
Seems like some of these analysts already know that Windows 7 is going to be a turkey.
The report did come from Faux News, after all. They're not exactly known for their impartiality. When was the last time they reported anything positive about a Democrat? (Other than a story about a Democrat that disagrees with the majority of other Democrats.)
I like the left side of my browser window uncluttered with "navigation" stuff. I suspect that a great many browser users do as well. (Most web sites already include a ton of navigation links on the left of the page anyway. Adding another column of these will be confusing.) Now it seems we need a Windows Explorer-type interface using up screen real estate? It's bad enough already that way too many web sites design their pages to make almost necessary that you run the browser in full-screen mode; eating up the left side of the this idea will most likely make that mandatory in order to avoid horizontal scrolling. Tab groups? Unless they're going to manage themselves, this seems like a useless feture for the vast majority of browser users. Tell ya what guys... why not throw in a ribbon-style menu as well since you're hell bent on making everything look like a Windows application. Those pundits that criticize Linux developers as doing nothing more than copying Windows ideas may not be that wrong after all. Instead of mucking around with the user interface, why not make the browser work faster by taking advantage of the multi-core chips that are the norm these days. (And make the damned Javascript interpretter work better so we can dump plug-ins like NoScript.)