...but I worked with a fellow back in the '80s who built, for his MSEE thesis, a stripline antenna out of pieces of a Coke can for a GPS receiver. As I recall, his thesis included photos of the antenna that showed enough of the Coca Cola logo that everyone could see what it was made out of. It was fun conducting tours of the labs and telling high school kids that ``this project here is tracking satellites with an antenna made from a Coke can''. Loved the look on their faces. (Wonder where Sam is now...)
...why, with so many other, more important things to be worrying about, the customs officials are watching for serial cables? Ever hear of priorities, Mr. Customs Man?
...was easily the most nauseating thing I've read since I gave up visiting osOpinion. It's a shame it didn't have a huge banner at the top of the proclaiming it for what it was: a thinly veiled Microsoft PR piece.
Of course, Salon doesn't care since all they seem to be interested in lately is page hits so their advertising revenues increase. I only wish that they'd restricted this.Net article to their premium content subscribers.
``...made a small cut in her foot(?) and drank some of her blood...but didn't go far enough to be charged with 'rape'. The lawyers for the prosecution managed to get him charged with "robbery" - he stole some of her blood.''
I'm surprised they didn't charge him with practicing medicine without a license. My personal favorite is the case where prison escapees successfully sued a state over the mental anguish they suffered after having been allowed to escape the prison and live on the lam for a number of weeks.
From my ``favorite quotes'' file:
``With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.''
(attributed to Robert Jackson while FDR's attorney general and, later, a Supreme Court Justice.)
It seems to be getting worse, doesn't it? Now it's not just the law books but patents as well. (BTW, if anyone knows if the above quote is accurate and can point me to the original source, I'd love to read that book.)
``They only search existing patents. they [sic] time it would take to search all data in the world would be to long and costly.''
That's a convenient excuse for the USPTO. ``Gosh... it'd be too hard to really do our job of verifying that this claim is original. So we'll let the courts sort it out.'' Or do they honestly believe that the prior art has to exist in a patent description?
If there wasn't a good reason for the technical competence of the people doling out patents to be dramatically increased then I don't know what would be. Plus the emphasis on pushing a large number of applications through, and rewarding employees on meeting these numbers, is a major problem. It's better to get a lot of things done poorly than it is to have gotten a fewer amount done well.
Anyone know of any studies done on the retarding effect of frivolously issued patents on the technology segment of the economy? I'm betting that there is a demonstrable effect.
...after they're done with Prodigy? Individuals who have web sites or the ISPs that host them?
Since the US patent expires in 2006 and it'll probably be some time after that broadband becomes widely available in the U.S., I guess that most of us that have ever thought about hosting their own web sites will be safe, eh?
BT has been a pain in the keister for a long time. I had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with them about ten years ago when my employer was setting up EDI. They were a pain then and, apparently, haven't gotten any better. Geez, the arrogant comments made by the BT CEO would make me want to switch from them as a supplier even if their service didn't rank near dead last.
Let's hope that what ever judge hears this case, is astute enough to recognize prior art when s/he sees the Englebart tape. And if s/he does, I'd just love to hear the exchange between the judge and the BT lawyers as they try to wangle a case for the originality of their patent claim. Can Prodigy load the gallery with people to snicker and roll their eyes when BT laywers present their arguments?
``Nowadays, we rewrite the letter many, many times, changing fonts, format etc. We are no better off in terms of letters produced.''
has been true since the earliest days of the PC. It's only gotten worse since everything's WYSIWYG. I recall reading a study -- got to be ten years ago -- that secretaries (it was OK to call them that back then) were spending a lot more time on each memo that they produced than they did when they were cranking them out with typewriters.
It certainly hasn't freed people up to do more important work, either. So many folks are hung up on the eye-candy that word processors can generate that they lose sight of why the paper's being written in the first place. I always thought it about conveying imformation. But, now, it's pretty much a contest to see who can cram the most features into a single document. (Don't even get me started on emails with animated Powerpoint attachments announcing the monthly employee meeting -- complete with sliding and rotating titles. Ugh!)
Heck back in the mid/late '80s I used to get in arguments with people over the format of reports (and theses) that people were submitting. Policy stated that computer generated output was acceptable. Even line printed output was acceptable (though not common). What was used to burn some people (myself included) was that some reviewers would give a nicely formatted, pretty font-filled report with, basically, fluff as content a higher mark than one that had excellent content but not as ``pretty'' a format. Form over content even back then. The Web is lousy with that nowadays but the problem has its roots from nearly twenty years ago.
It's amazing how some vendors don't understand this. Years ago, back when I was deeply immersed in VMSclusters, DEC hired some survey firm to call users up and find out what we thought of online documentation. Q: ``Would you still purchase hardcopy documentation if it were also available on CD-ROM?'' My answer was: ``Yes, at least one copy of the hardcopy.'' ``You would??!!'' (The woman on the other end of the line thought I was from Mars or something.)
And the reason you mentioned was only one of my reasons. We also still had a significant number of VT terminals floating about. Pretty difficult to read documentation that required a GUI when all you had available was a terminal. (X terminals were expensive in those days and X on a PC was a joke.) Plus there were days when I'd gather up whatever manuals I needed and go off to some quiet place so I could read up on some features of the OS that I needed to learn about. (Funny thing about most workstations: they always seem to have a damned telephone sitting next to them. And there's no easier way to make the phone ring than to begin doing something that requires a high degree of concentration.)
Compaq finally killed off printed documentation though. (Maybe DEC did before they got bought out; can't remember) For a while, you could download PostScript files for the DEC UNIX manuals but I think those are long gone. At least they dumped online docs in DECbook format and went to HTML.
Easier to read. At least it sure seems easier on my eyes.
Lots more portable.
You never need to worry about there being power available.
If you're not averse to it, you can highlight text, write in the margins, etc.
It still seems to be easier to have multiple paper books open to important pages than it is to be clicking through multiple windows open to online documents.
Electronic formats are okay when you need to provide documentation to a whole bunch of people but most people I know still like having a paper copy and cite the reasons above as why.
If memory serves me (hey, it is Friday after all and both brain cells are pretty tired) we looked into something like what the poster was asking about years ago. In those days, we were running some simulations on a PDP-11/70 that took 7-10 days to complete. In the event of a general power failure we wouldn't have been able to run on backup power for very long. DEC's RSX had a feature whereby a task could be checkpointed to disk. Then, presumably, it could be reloaded and resumed at the same state it was in at the time of the checkpoint. We never did implement it since it would have introduced too much delay into the project schedule (adding it to the simulation, testing, etc.) but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be useful in current day OSs. Anyone know of any general purpose operating systems today that have this feature? I haven't heard of any and wonder (not too seriously, mind you) if anyone sells core memory for a PC architecture computer. Of course, it wouldn't be very fast but you'd worry a lot less about power failures that are longer than the UPS's ability to provide power.
Are you really surprised that someone might still have been running Win3.11? I used to work for a (small, privately held) company that I'd be willing to bet still has some PCs around that are running 3.11. If fact, I'd bet that the only PCs that they have that are running Win95 or higher are those that had it preinstalled when they bought the box. Some companies are so tight with their money that they'd never see the benefit of buying upgrades (and keeping BillG happy by using only the latest Windows OS) because the app they're using is still working fine with the old OS.
...between this subscription model and one where you have to renew your license annually else the software stop working? Well, IMHO, beyond being potentially more ``fine-grained'', not much. We were using a software package that required that we receive new license keys from the vendor each year. The package was expensive and any delays on the vendor's side in processing your paid invoice and getting the keys out to the customer were not considered to be their problem. I've worked at companies that were held hostage by vendors like this. In one case we were able to tell them ``No thanks'' when it came time to renew since their software wasn't Y2K compliant and the version that was would have required a whole lot of other software to be upgraded. And there were a whole lot of reasons why this wasn't possible. (As it turned out, this vendor's software could be replaced with a Perl script that provided the 99% of the functionality that people actually used.)
Businesses are going to look damned hard at any model that potentially halts their ability to function because of billing problems, communications delays, etc. It's one thing to have to subscribe to a support service so that configuration issues, bug fixes, etc. can be solved. But having to open up the check book just to be able to continue writing documents, doing spreadsheets, etc. just isn't going to be popular. And especially if it requires that proprietary business data actually have to reside on someone else's computers.
``Well if you like Wendy Carlos or Journey, it is a great nastalgia blast. I loved the former at that time, but loathed the latter.''
Was Wendy still Walter at the time of Tron? I can't remember when the ``change'' occurred, Though I still remember when a friend of mine showed me the Playboy interview -- which was the first I'd heard about the Walter-to-Wendy transformation -- I can't seem to place the time of that interview in relation to the movie's release. And I mostly agree with you about the Journey comment. Except, that is, for the first album that I thought was, more or less, a solo album by Greg Rollie (sp? former Santana keyboardist) as he did most of the vocals on it as I recall. Unfortunately, it was cuts from their later releases that mainstream radio felt a need to play all day-ee-ay. Ugh!
``Wish all DVDs had a copy of the music soundtrack too.''
We'll have to hope that there's a ``music-only'' audio option on the DVD, eh? God knows that most of the dialogue in the movie wasn't all that great.
...a judge that didn't get snowed by Microsoft legal sharpies and PR flaks. I'm surprised that MS's laywers didn't drag out a ``we're doing this for the children'' argument. Heck, donating to schools was only a step away from that. And the judge didn't fall for it. There may yet be hope...
I think I'm gonna have a few beers in celebration tonight.
Yah, but I haven't seen on Philips any of the ``boy bands'' that most RIAA member companies like to sell. Philips is mostly a classical label isn't it? (I'd guess that about 1/3 of the classical CDs I have are on Philips.)
I, for one, would certainly welcome being able to filter out ``broken'' CDs by looking for a label stating that it meets the CD standard.
I'm concerned, though, as to whether the lifetime of some CD-related patent (or several of them) is coming up which would allow major music companies to figure they can make their own without having to meet the standard and tell Philips to take their logo and shove it (leaving the consumer without sufficient information to make an informed choice and avoid purchasing a defective (IMHO) product. Anyone up to date on the patents that cover the CD technologies?
Of course, this all supposes that the major music publishers that are leaning toward selling broken CDs have anything that's really worth purchasing anyway. Personally, I find that the material that's put out by the indie labels is immeasurably better than the drek that the major labels are spewing out. I can't imagine finding much on a major label that worth pirating much less shelling out money for. I may be in a minority (but I doubt it) when I ask the mega music distributors: ``Why would I invest even the paltry US$0.5 for a blank CD (and the 30 minutes of unattended computer time it takes to copy) to pirate something that I wouldn't even listen to once?''
I'd go for LaTeX. Granted you have to get a little used to it. But I found that I could be more productive using emacs/latex/xdvi as an acceptable documentation generation toolset as I could be if I were lashed to a chair and forced to use some Windows word processor.
Years ago, back when I could recite pages from the VMS docset and could make my own grant bus cards, we used VAX DOCUMENT for documentation. As it I discovered one night, it was nothing more than an SGML (or SGML-like) front-end to TeX. We used it for project documentation sometimes cranking out manuals of several hundred pages. While I'm sure that some DOS/Windows WYSIWYG word processor might have done the job, it would (I'm positive) have been much, much more painful.
Sadly, the choice of tool that you use might depend on how long this documentation has to live. If you ever leave, will your employer know to look for a candidate that has experience in whatever tools you decide to use. It's unfortunate but your boss might force you to ``dumb it down''. Of course, we can all smile to ourselves over all those corporate documents that won't be readable in a few years when Microsoft decides to change the.doc format again. Happily, I have TeX/LaTeX files that are over ten years old that are still useful so you might point that out to your boss if s/he decides that you should go the MS route.
``Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster
for everyone else.''
Heh. From what I've seen of failed companies or read about their failures, not that many failed as a result of poor software (or any other product). Rather some spectacular administrative screwup, boneheaded marketing decisions, or just bad timing seems to have been more at fault.
Heck, if bad software could sink a company, Microsoft would have been history over a decade ago.
IMHO, turning over the software assets of failed companies to some site that would make them available to all-comers for inspection and cannibalization would be great. Sort of a farewell gift:
``Hey! We couldn't figure out how to make a go of it with this software. But, we still think it's great and maybe someone else can find a way to get it into users' hands. Enjoy!''
(My pessimistic side senses that this'll never happen as some lawyers will find a way to make it impossible.)
``You can lose yourself in Linux for hours, tweaking here, updating there.''
I see so-o-o many Windows users doing exactly the same thing. Tweaking fonts, adjusting colors, downloading more screensavers than you can shake a stick at. It's not just a Linux phenomena and I see more UNIX users grow out of this more than I see Windows users getting tired of this tweaking. (I wonder why...)
Remember the Apple ad with the two guys futzing with the PC for hours/days on end when the secretary asks when is that thing going to be ready to use. Their response ``We're tweaking it.'' followed by ``To make it easier to use.'' still cracks me up and is as applicable today as it was then.
I have to wonder whether (first of all) why in the heck anyone would need to have 100GB of disk space on a home system. But then I have five systems networked together and have more storage than I would have thought sane a few years a go though I have a bit of a ways to go before I will run into the poster's backup problem. It wasn't too long ago that, if you could afford 100GB, you could probably afford a SCSI array controller that would let you do a lot of RAID, hot swapping, automatic drive replacement, etc. With today's cheap disk prices you don't have to be wealthy to have an ocean of disk space. (I can remember the days when we thought having 900MB on a MicroVAX II was extravagant.)
You could always do it the traditional way and get some tape drives. Unfortunately, they're much more expensive than you might think when you have to backup that much disk space. You certainly wouldn't want to go cheap and be feeding 90m DAT cartridges into a drive all night (it'll start feeling like you're backing up to floppies before long). A good high capacity tape drive can get, what, 20GB onto a single cartridge? Not bad. And I think that at this point in time, tape is more cost effective than DVD-R. (Something tells me that the MPAA, and maybe the RIAA, will try to keep it that way too.)
Mirroring disks can be helpful. Hard disks are getting cheaper and cheaper. Heck it's almost scary mow much disk space you get in a typical PC sold at Best Buy nowadays (and without a backup device; it's almost criminal). If you're running mirrored disks you'll forestall the inevitable disk crash that takes all your data with it. Question for the Linux folks using the `md' driver: Does it allow adding a third member to a mirrorset? And, if so, can it be done while the system is `live'? (The third member gets removed and taken offsite in case there's a disaster.)
One final thought: The poster wasn't actually running a 100GB filesystem were they? I'm thinking that a power glitch could cause a world record to be set for the longest fsck-on-reboot run. Plus I'd think that backing up such a beast would be a challenge. I tend to keep my filesystem sizes no larger than what I can fit on a single tape cartridge... just to make life simple. (I'm used to having to pipe `df' commands through `more' at work so I don't mind lots of mount points.:-) )
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I thought Scotty gave the process for transparent aluminum to a Bay Area company.
...but I worked with a fellow back in the '80s who built, for his MSEE thesis, a stripline antenna out of pieces of a Coke can for a GPS receiver. As I recall, his thesis included photos of the antenna that showed enough of the Coca Cola logo that everyone could see what it was made out of. It was fun conducting tours of the labs and telling high school kids that ``this project here is tracking satellites with an antenna made from a Coke can''. Loved the look on their faces. (Wonder where Sam is now...)
...why, with so many other, more important things to be worrying about, the customs officials are watching for serial cables? Ever hear of priorities, Mr. Customs Man?
Jeez...
...was easily the most nauseating thing I've read since I gave up visiting osOpinion. It's a shame it didn't have a huge banner at the top of the proclaiming it for what it was: a thinly veiled Microsoft PR piece.
Of course, Salon doesn't care since all they seem to be interested in lately is page hits so their advertising revenues increase. I only wish that they'd restricted this .Net article to their premium content subscribers.
I'm surprised they didn't charge him with practicing medicine without a license. My personal favorite is the case where prison escapees successfully sued a state over the mental anguish they suffered after having been allowed to escape the prison and live on the lam for a number of weeks.
From my ``favorite quotes'' file:
It seems to be getting worse, doesn't it? Now it's not just the law books but patents as well. (BTW, if anyone knows if the above quote is accurate and can point me to the original source, I'd love to read that book.)
That's a convenient excuse for the USPTO. ``Gosh... it'd be too hard to really do our job of verifying that this claim is original. So we'll let the courts sort it out.'' Or do they honestly believe that the prior art has to exist in a patent description?
If there wasn't a good reason for the technical competence of the people doling out patents to be dramatically increased then I don't know what would be. Plus the emphasis on pushing a large number of applications through, and rewarding employees on meeting these numbers, is a major problem. It's better to get a lot of things done poorly than it is to have gotten a fewer amount done well.
Anyone know of any studies done on the retarding effect of frivolously issued patents on the technology segment of the economy? I'm betting that there is a demonstrable effect.
Why mess around with around with FidoNet? Why not just go back to using uucp and start an underground Usenet. Might be fun.
...after they're done with Prodigy? Individuals who have web sites or the ISPs that host them?
Since the US patent expires in 2006 and it'll probably be some time after that broadband becomes widely available in the U.S., I guess that most of us that have ever thought about hosting their own web sites will be safe, eh?
BT has been a pain in the keister for a long time. I had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with them about ten years ago when my employer was setting up EDI. They were a pain then and, apparently, haven't gotten any better. Geez, the arrogant comments made by the BT CEO would make me want to switch from them as a supplier even if their service didn't rank near dead last.
Let's hope that what ever judge hears this case, is astute enough to recognize prior art when s/he sees the Englebart tape. And if s/he does, I'd just love to hear the exchange between the judge and the BT lawyers as they try to wangle a case for the originality of their patent claim. Can Prodigy load the gallery with people to snicker and roll their eyes when BT laywers present their arguments?
The lines:
has been true since the earliest days of the PC. It's only gotten worse since everything's WYSIWYG. I recall reading a study -- got to be ten years ago -- that secretaries (it was OK to call them that back then) were spending a lot more time on each memo that they produced than they did when they were cranking them out with typewriters.
It certainly hasn't freed people up to do more important work, either. So many folks are hung up on the eye-candy that word processors can generate that they lose sight of why the paper's being written in the first place. I always thought it about conveying imformation. But, now, it's pretty much a contest to see who can cram the most features into a single document. (Don't even get me started on emails with animated Powerpoint attachments announcing the monthly employee meeting -- complete with sliding and rotating titles. Ugh!)
Heck back in the mid/late '80s I used to get in arguments with people over the format of reports (and theses) that people were submitting. Policy stated that computer generated output was acceptable. Even line printed output was acceptable (though not common). What was used to burn some people (myself included) was that some reviewers would give a nicely formatted, pretty font-filled report with, basically, fluff as content a higher mark than one that had excellent content but not as ``pretty'' a format. Form over content even back then. The Web is lousy with that nowadays but the problem has its roots from nearly twenty years ago.
...and spoil it. I'm going to see Copenhagen tommorow.
It's amazing how some vendors don't understand this. Years ago, back when I was deeply immersed in VMSclusters, DEC hired some survey firm to call users up and find out what we thought of online documentation. Q: ``Would you still purchase hardcopy documentation if it were also available on CD-ROM?'' My answer was: ``Yes, at least one copy of the hardcopy.'' ``You would??!!'' (The woman on the other end of the line thought I was from Mars or something.)
And the reason you mentioned was only one of my reasons. We also still had a significant number of VT terminals floating about. Pretty difficult to read documentation that required a GUI when all you had available was a terminal. (X terminals were expensive in those days and X on a PC was a joke.) Plus there were days when I'd gather up whatever manuals I needed and go off to some quiet place so I could read up on some features of the OS that I needed to learn about. (Funny thing about most workstations: they always seem to have a damned telephone sitting next to them. And there's no easier way to make the phone ring than to begin doing something that requires a high degree of concentration.)
Compaq finally killed off printed documentation though. (Maybe DEC did before they got bought out; can't remember) For a while, you could download PostScript files for the DEC UNIX manuals but I think those are long gone. At least they dumped online docs in DECbook format and went to HTML.
Sigh...
Hear! Hear! Paper is:
Electronic formats are okay when you need to provide documentation to a whole bunch of people but most people I know still like having a paper copy and cite the reasons above as why.
You missed the subject ot the post you replied to. The ``Good Old Days'' for users of Microsoft products ended a lo-o-ong time ago.
If memory serves me (hey, it is Friday after all and both brain cells are pretty tired) we looked into something like what the poster was asking about years ago. In those days, we were running some simulations on a PDP-11/70 that took 7-10 days to complete. In the event of a general power failure we wouldn't have been able to run on backup power for very long. DEC's RSX had a feature whereby a task could be checkpointed to disk. Then, presumably, it could be reloaded and resumed at the same state it was in at the time of the checkpoint. We never did implement it since it would have introduced too much delay into the project schedule (adding it to the simulation, testing, etc.) but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be useful in current day OSs. Anyone know of any general purpose operating systems today that have this feature? I haven't heard of any and wonder (not too seriously, mind you) if anyone sells core memory for a PC architecture computer. Of course, it wouldn't be very fast but you'd worry a lot less about power failures that are longer than the UPS's ability to provide power.
Are you really surprised that someone might still have been running Win3.11? I used to work for a (small, privately held) company that I'd be willing to bet still has some PCs around that are running 3.11. If fact, I'd bet that the only PCs that they have that are running Win95 or higher are those that had it preinstalled when they bought the box. Some companies are so tight with their money that they'd never see the benefit of buying upgrades (and keeping BillG happy by using only the latest Windows OS) because the app they're using is still working fine with the old OS.
...between this subscription model and one where you have to renew your license annually else the software stop working? Well, IMHO, beyond being potentially more ``fine-grained'', not much. We were using a software package that required that we receive new license keys from the vendor each year. The package was expensive and any delays on the vendor's side in processing your paid invoice and getting the keys out to the customer were not considered to be their problem. I've worked at companies that were held hostage by vendors like this. In one case we were able to tell them ``No thanks'' when it came time to renew since their software wasn't Y2K compliant and the version that was would have required a whole lot of other software to be upgraded. And there were a whole lot of reasons why this wasn't possible. (As it turned out, this vendor's software could be replaced with a Perl script that provided the 99% of the functionality that people actually used.)
Businesses are going to look damned hard at any model that potentially halts their ability to function because of billing problems, communications delays, etc. It's one thing to have to subscribe to a support service so that configuration issues, bug fixes, etc. can be solved. But having to open up the check book just to be able to continue writing documents, doing spreadsheets, etc. just isn't going to be popular. And especially if it requires that proprietary business data actually have to reside on someone else's computers.
Just my US$0.02...
Was Wendy still Walter at the time of Tron? I can't remember when the ``change'' occurred, Though I still remember when a friend of mine showed me the Playboy interview -- which was the first I'd heard about the Walter-to-Wendy transformation -- I can't seem to place the time of that interview in relation to the movie's release. And I mostly agree with you about the Journey comment. Except, that is, for the first album that I thought was, more or less, a solo album by Greg Rollie (sp? former Santana keyboardist) as he did most of the vocals on it as I recall. Unfortunately, it was cuts from their later releases that mainstream radio felt a need to play all day-ee-ay. Ugh!
We'll have to hope that there's a ``music-only'' audio option on the DVD, eh? God knows that most of the dialogue in the movie wasn't all that great.
...a judge that didn't get snowed by Microsoft legal sharpies and PR flaks. I'm surprised that MS's laywers didn't drag out a ``we're doing this for the children'' argument. Heck, donating to schools was only a step away from that. And the judge didn't fall for it. There may yet be hope...
I think I'm gonna have a few beers in celebration tonight.
Yah, but I haven't seen on Philips any of the ``boy bands'' that most RIAA member companies like to sell. Philips is mostly a classical label isn't it? (I'd guess that about 1/3 of the classical CDs I have are on Philips.)
I, for one, would certainly welcome being able to filter out ``broken'' CDs by looking for a label stating that it meets the CD standard.
I'm concerned, though, as to whether the lifetime of some CD-related patent (or several of them) is coming up which would allow major music companies to figure they can make their own without having to meet the standard and tell Philips to take their logo and shove it (leaving the consumer without sufficient information to make an informed choice and avoid purchasing a defective (IMHO) product. Anyone up to date on the patents that cover the CD technologies?
Of course, this all supposes that the major music publishers that are leaning toward selling broken CDs have anything that's really worth purchasing anyway. Personally, I find that the material that's put out by the indie labels is immeasurably better than the drek that the major labels are spewing out. I can't imagine finding much on a major label that worth pirating much less shelling out money for. I may be in a minority (but I doubt it) when I ask the mega music distributors: ``Why would I invest even the paltry US$0.5 for a blank CD (and the 30 minutes of unattended computer time it takes to copy) to pirate something that I wouldn't even listen to once?''
I'd go for LaTeX. Granted you have to get a little used to it. But I found that I could be more productive using emacs/latex/xdvi as an acceptable documentation generation toolset as I could be if I were lashed to a chair and forced to use some Windows word processor.
Years ago, back when I could recite pages from the VMS docset and could make my own grant bus cards, we used VAX DOCUMENT for documentation. As it I discovered one night, it was nothing more than an SGML (or SGML-like) front-end to TeX. We used it for project documentation sometimes cranking out manuals of several hundred pages. While I'm sure that some DOS/Windows WYSIWYG word processor might have done the job, it would (I'm positive) have been much, much more painful.
Sadly, the choice of tool that you use might depend on how long this documentation has to live. If you ever leave, will your employer know to look for a candidate that has experience in whatever tools you decide to use. It's unfortunate but your boss might force you to ``dumb it down''. Of course, we can all smile to ourselves over all those corporate documents that won't be readable in a few years when Microsoft decides to change the .doc format again. Happily, I have TeX/LaTeX files that are over ten years old that are still useful so you might point that out to your boss if s/he decides that you should go the MS route.
Heh. From what I've seen of failed companies or read about their failures, not that many failed as a result of poor software (or any other product). Rather some spectacular administrative screwup, boneheaded marketing decisions, or just bad timing seems to have been more at fault.
Heck, if bad software could sink a company, Microsoft would have been history over a decade ago.
IMHO, turning over the software assets of failed companies to some site that would make them available to all-comers for inspection and cannibalization would be great. Sort of a farewell gift:
(My pessimistic side senses that this'll never happen as some lawyers will find a way to make it impossible.)
I had to laugh when I read the remark:
I see so-o-o many Windows users doing exactly the same thing. Tweaking fonts, adjusting colors, downloading more screensavers than you can shake a stick at. It's not just a Linux phenomena and I see more UNIX users grow out of this more than I see Windows users getting tired of this tweaking. (I wonder why...)
Remember the Apple ad with the two guys futzing with the PC for hours/days on end when the secretary asks when is that thing going to be ready to use. Their response ``We're tweaking it.'' followed by ``To make it easier to use.'' still cracks me up and is as applicable today as it was then.
I must need more sugar and/or caffiene in my system. It took me a while to undo the big/little-endian translation before I got the joke.
I have to wonder whether (first of all) why in the heck anyone would need to have 100GB of disk space on a home system. But then I have five systems networked together and have more storage than I would have thought sane a few years a go though I have a bit of a ways to go before I will run into the poster's backup problem. It wasn't too long ago that, if you could afford 100GB, you could probably afford a SCSI array controller that would let you do a lot of RAID, hot swapping, automatic drive replacement, etc. With today's cheap disk prices you don't have to be wealthy to have an ocean of disk space. (I can remember the days when we thought having 900MB on a MicroVAX II was extravagant.)
You could always do it the traditional way and get some tape drives. Unfortunately, they're much more expensive than you might think when you have to backup that much disk space. You certainly wouldn't want to go cheap and be feeding 90m DAT cartridges into a drive all night (it'll start feeling like you're backing up to floppies before long). A good high capacity tape drive can get, what, 20GB onto a single cartridge? Not bad. And I think that at this point in time, tape is more cost effective than DVD-R. (Something tells me that the MPAA, and maybe the RIAA, will try to keep it that way too.)
Mirroring disks can be helpful. Hard disks are getting cheaper and cheaper. Heck it's almost scary mow much disk space you get in a typical PC sold at Best Buy nowadays (and without a backup device; it's almost criminal). If you're running mirrored disks you'll forestall the inevitable disk crash that takes all your data with it. Question for the Linux folks using the `md' driver: Does it allow adding a third member to a mirrorset? And, if so, can it be done while the system is `live'? (The third member gets removed and taken offsite in case there's a disaster.)
One final thought: The poster wasn't actually running a 100GB filesystem were they? I'm thinking that a power glitch could cause a world record to be set for the longest fsck-on-reboot run. Plus I'd think that backing up such a beast would be a challenge. I tend to keep my filesystem sizes no larger than what I can fit on a single tape cartridge... just to make life simple. (I'm used to having to pipe `df' commands through `more' at work so I don't mind lots of mount points. :-) )