What did the C-Net article say? That the response was ``exactly the sort of discussion that Craig was trying to foster'' (or something like that, anyway; damn my short-term memory problem!). I, for one, quite seriously doubt that Microsoft is interested in any discussions about OSS at all. They have to be wishing that it'll all just go away if they bad mouth it enough.
``Should we show these companies how easy it is to get in, and try to win them over as a client? Or just walk away? I've read some heated debates about this - if you break in, even as a demonstration, you're a criminal. But how do you show people they're in danger? Alert the current webmasters? In this particular case it did no good - we were accused of being sore losers!''
... is pretty much what you've done: point out the insecure setup. If they don't tighten things up they'll be the sore losers... when some customers or former employees sue their sorry butts for allowing that information to be divulged. Wouldn't it be fun to be called to testify against them? ``Yes. We informed XYZ, Inc. about the flaws in their security but they just laughed at us and called us sore losers.''
Wouldn't immediately help your problem in gaining new clients but it would be helpful if you could say that you have testified in court as a security expert.
The problem with the companies you've encountered is that you have to convince these people who know only Windows as an environment. I refer to this as the ``fly in the vinegar bottle'' syndrome. They like what they know and reject anything else. It's almost as though they'd rather be out of a job than switch from their comfortable little realm.
``It's amazing how few people have hooked up an Oscilloscope, or even a plain voltmeter, to their computer's power supply rails to assess it's quality.''
Perhaps that's because:
amazingly few people have access to an oscilloscope. I take it you think that spiky power was the person's problem. If not, that's an awfully expensive method of measuring DC voltages.
dampening in any analog voltmeter or the display updates in the digital variety, using a ``plain voltmeter'' is likely only going to be useful for indicating that the 12V supply is really only 11.9V. I wonder what else in the computer would be adversely affected if that were the case. (It just might spot a flaky power connector from the PS, though.)
Thanks for the chuckles... --
Re:I hope they don't make fridge magnets
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 2
``If you ever have a hard drive go bad, you should get yourself a set of tiny torx drivers and disassemble it. You will find a pair of insanely strong magnets around the head positioning coil.''
In olden time, when a drive went bad, the kind that had removable cartridges, and you didn't spend the $$$ to get it fixed, there were several magnets that you could remove. First there were the magnets that held the cartridge to the spindle which were easily removed with a small screwdriver. These can be used to hold cardboard to the fridge. Then you could remove the covers and remove the solenoid magnet which was strong to troll for cars in the local lake. Screwdrivers placed on the solenoid magnet were magnetized such that they could darned near attract screws from across the table (which meant we had keep them out of the computer technician areas lest they clobber data on a floppy disk or a tape). But since these monsters weighed so much, they weren't terribly useful.
As Oliver Hardy would have said: ``Well, isn't this a revolting development.''. Compaq and HP are now in the position of being sued because they didn't check that their magnet suppliers weren't violating someone's patent?
Since when did it become illegal to buy raw materials without doing Magnequench's work for them. Does this mean that just about anybody could be named in a patent lawsuit for buying a product that's in violation of some (possibly bogus) patent. My Compaq workstation's cursor is blinking. Does that mean I'm in trouble for violating that asinine XOR patent?
Seems to me that Magnequench should be going after Compaq's and HP's magnet suppliers.
``The open source world can't even come close to providing real corporate applications such as CAD and structural analysis, and slews of other engineering apps.''
I take it that by ``corporate applications'' you mean those that you spend too much money on or those that come in glossy boxes. You've, obviously, never heard of the NASA's COSMIC software library that used to be administered by the University of Georgia. For the cost of distribution, like the FSF, you could obtain applications of the sort you listed... with source code. UofG doesn't do the distribution any more but it's been taken over by Open Channel Software and can be found at http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/cosmic/. You can even ``adopt'' an application and get involved in the development of enhancements. Another potential source is the DECUS software archive (now called `Encompass'); there's a slew of software available. A lot of it's systems management related utilities but the semi-annual symposium collections used to contain a bunch of gems that we found useful. And I sure hope you know about the FTP archives on ibiblio. Of course, if what one's really looking for in a ``corporate application'' is someone to sue, I suppose these won't fit their needs.
I will agree with you that many commercial packages for UNIX cost more than they should. But to say imply that there aren't more cost effective solutions, and are open source to boot (no pun intended), is just naive.
At a former employer, we used to use a couple of products that originally came from Digital but the package was sold to CA (during the Palmer fire sale regime). One package had it license fees shoot up by nearly 500%. We stopped using that package and a homegrown replacement found its way into use (wasn't as ``pretty'' though.) Another went to an annual license fee. Well, Y2K hit and the version we were running wasn't Y2K compliant. That was the excuse I needed to stop using that package too. After doing a little investigation it seems I could emulate the features that we actually used using a Perl script that took all of about 20 minutes to write. When will these companies learn that we're not in business to send them money; make a better product and we'll buy it.
Where does Microsoft obtain all the guns it uses to shoot itself in the foot? And aren't their feet starting to look like Swiss cheese by now? Keep it up and you'll have the sort of customer loyalty that CA earned. (What did that old magazine review say about it? Oh yah: ``Dead last... with a bullet''.)
--
... was helped along by basing hiring on silly little quizes like how to move a flock of sheep between two moving icebergs. Unless that's what the business does or the candiate claims to have experience in that area what benefit does that question really have to the interviewer? The company doesn't have people on staff that know squat about producing products but they sure know the answers to those trivia questions!
Oh, sure, there's something about them that shows that a candidate can think on their feet but, personally, I could care less about these arcane and, IMHO, useless questions. I'm beginning to think that most of them are asked merely to place the interviewer in a superior position so that the candidate won't be in a position to bargain effectively. Or it could be that the interviewer is so unsure of their own skills that they have to toss one of these questions out so they can feel like they know more than the candidate (there's that superiority thing again). Next time you get one of these questions, just remember: That's why your new boss is making the big bucks; he knows how to move a flock of sheep between moving icebergs.
Just remember: Before you go to your next interview, be sure and research the company, rehearse your little spiel about your work history, and, for god's sake, don't forget to memorize the Interviewer's Big Book of Stupid Interview Questions (coming soon to a bookstore near you!).
``I can only think of one real Democrat left... James Traficant... and no one listens to him because he's so different.''
Man, he sure is that. I moved out of Ohio when Howard Metzenbaum was a senator from there. No, he's not why I moved (heh heh) but he embarassed me every time he opened his mouth (at least I didn't vote for him). Now, Traficant is the kind of guy you gotta love. Even if he does come off as severely paranoid at times.
``Because you know, hearing about, or seeing depictions of anything remotely related to violence apparently is the ONE AND ONLY reason kids commit horrible crimes these days...or that's what I gather from listening to Joe Lieberman.''
Who was it (Dick Cavett?) that made a comment once that went something like: ``We've had comedy on television for decades and it hasn't resulted in an increase in people's sense of humor.'' Is there, indeed, reliable evidence that violence on the tube has lead to recent Columbine-like incidents? Has anyone ever shown conclusively that watching violence on television was why some people brought their personal arsenals to the office and wiped out their former co-workers? Didn't think so.
OK. That's enough topic drift for today, thank you.
...you could build one heck of a Google-like site as the portal. Since you are the Feds, I'm sure you see the advantages of setting this network of servers up over a wide geographically dispersed area. And building it using proprietary should be grounds for immediate dismissal. And what's with ``www.firstgov.gov''? A leading candidate for one of the dumbest sites names I've ever heard.
Oh, and ``Hey TechWeb! Your link's broken! The protocol is `http', not `htto'.'' (OK, I can cut spme slack; I spmetimes hit the wrpng keys, tpp.)
``Yeah, if you like being compaired to truckdrivers and trashmen.''
Well, that doesn't seem to bother airline pilots, physicians in some areas of the U.S., and even college faculty The common denominator seems to be that the unions pop up in support of vocations where managements feels that need to attempt to coerce employees to do more and more work without the proper compensation.
I'd bet that many of the bad feelings that many people have regarding unions have to do with the pressures by their locals to vote as a block in elections, not-so-subtle suggestions that the members make campaign contributions to candidates that the members don't support, and other forms of corruption. If those could be avoided (fat chance, though, IMHO), I'd bet that more people would favor union membership. (And lest you think I'm some bleeding heart liberal, the preceding comments come from an avowed anti-unionist.)
``This may be a dumb question, but wouldn't it be more fair of management to switch you to a salaried pay rate rather than an hourly?''
It'd sure make sense for management to offer this. Since doing so usually takes away the possiblilty of overtime pay. Then compensating for after-hours support calls is likely to not happen. It usually sounds like this: ``After all, you understood that there'd be occasional after hours support required...'' Yah, right. But please define ``occasional''. I got that line several jobs ago. In those days ``occasional'' meant just about every night since some developer could always get some xylocephalic vice president to OK putting something into production without adequate testing. Can't tell you how many times I was dialed-in at midnight fixing problems and required to be in the office by 7:30 the next morning. And don't ask: ``But what about comp time?'' The typical response was: ``I can't let you do that. We're running a business around here, you know.'' Like I said, this was several jobs ago.
...one of these things is going to look like in a few months. Ever notice just how much crap gets sucked into your computer case? Geez, I get out the vacuum cleaner every time I do any work inside the case just to try to keep the accumulated dust down. (a layer of dust inhibits the ability of chips to be cooled by the airflow.) After a while, one of these transparent PC cases is going to look like ``The Visible Shop-Vac''. And that's not going to be very pretty at all.
``The RFI generated once there's a fast motherboard running inside of an unshielded case will preclude them being allowed to sell a full system.''
Ain't that the truth. Plus, once the person who buys one of these realizes that they can't leave the PC on if they try to listen to the radio or watch TV they wish they had their old aluminum case back. Heck, I can tell immediately if I've left the side panel open on my old system and it's only running at 200MHz. Imagine what it's going to be like when I upgrade to that 1GHz dual Athlon motherboard (It's coming, I just know it is.:-) )
``I haven't heard of the FCC out chasing after RFI in ages.''
Just wait'll some kid buys one of these cases and interferes with the radio and TV reception of everyone in his apartment building. The FCC will respond if enough people complain.
Did the FCC raid actually tag those machines as non-compliant? Or did they just have to relabel them as `business' machines? (That's sort of how I remember it, anyway.)
There was no such thing as a Stratus/88. there was a System/88 that IBM sold that was a re-labeled Stratus system that they hung 3270-style CRTs off of.
Actually pretty cool systems but the cost... Whew!. I was admin on a couple of them back in the very early '90s. Unfortunately, they ran VOS and not the Stratus UNIX implementation (whose name escapes me at the moment). It was very impressive to be able to pull a memory board on a heavily loaded system and not have anyone so much as notice. At the time, disk drives were sold as redundant pairs (this was before hot-swappable disks and RAID subsystems became popular and readily available) and cost something like US$20K for 600MB (not GB!) of storage.
The system required a dial-up line to Stratus's field service group and the systems actually reported failed components to FS. It was always disconcerting to have FS show up to replace a board you hadn't noticed had failed.
Geez. Wonder if they're still in business. They were changing the processor chips on almost an annual basis: 680x0 to Intel to MIPS (IIRC). Does anyone know if they finally made up their mind?
``I should think it's safer and considerably cheaper to use a system that has been tested in the real world for a while, has been debugged already and has a reputation for uptime, than to write your own code and have to do all the debugging from scratch.''
That only makes sense if you choose an operating system that's been tested by the public and has actually had the bugs fixed.:-)
There was a bit of news a couple of years ago about some weenie at NASA who issued an edict that only Windows systems should be used. Of course, all of those tried-and-true applications that were successfully running on Macintosh, UNIX, and other systems were destined for the trash can after that order was issued. Looks like our space program is now beginning to see the fruits of that wise decision.
``Nobody ever said the thing had to have 500GB as one logical volume.''
Well, Joe Consumer buys his PC with a single 40GB disk in it -- and a backup device is always, always, an expensive option that consumers rarely buy. The mentality is ``I need a bigger disk'' and not ``I need a second disk''. Geez, I mention to frinds that they can add another hard disk to their PC and the reaction is similar to what you'd expect when showing fire to a cave man. I can't imagine the consumer electronics industry developing something like this that'll deal with multiple disks. Heck, I doubt that they'll even have a good solution for dealing with a single big disk.
``Water cooling solves the lion's share of PC-loudness problems, unless you're overfond of high-rpm SCSI disks, and is getting less expensive (hardocp reviewed a commercially available $200 water-cooled chassis about a week ago).''
Well, as a matter of fact, I am fond of those fast SCSI drives.:-) Personally, I'd have real strong reservations about anything that brings water and computer equipment together in the same box and only costs $200. What was the URL of that review again?
``I live in an area near a major US city (Chicago). I can't get a 33.6 modem connection, let alone broadband.''
That's the city I was talking about. (I'm up near the Ill/Wis border but I may as well live in a third world country as far as Internet access is concerned.) I really couldn't care less about downloading music and, especially, movies. I just want to get Internet access, dammitall, and access that doesn't assume that all I want to do is connect via AOL so I can insert smileys into my chat sessions using a drop-down menu.
All in all, though, I see these borg boxes as being the same thing as the combination fax/printer/modem/etc units that are popular with some home office users. I just am not looking for a piece of equipment that, when one component dies, I can't do anything. Just like I'll keep my computer and entertainment systems separate, thank you.
--
This box sounds like a product in search of a market (or perhaps it's just looking for suckers).
Maybe it's just me, but I have trouble believing that Joe Consumer is going to be terribly happy when he loses 500 GB of movies on his Borg box when the hard disk goes bad (as it eventually will). Unless they do something like RAID5 and make it easy for Joe to locate and change out the failed disk and for RAID reconstruction to begin automagically, I doubt that such a box is going to fly. If they do do RAID, what's this thing going to sound like when it's sitting on top of your TV? Anyone who's stuffed a half dozen disks in a PC and put it under their desk knows that the noise isn't something you want to listen to while you're watching TV. If they don't do RAID, how are they going to convince Joe that he's suppose to buy a carton of DLT tapes and a $2K tape drive to back up his Borg box on a regular basis? (Oh, right. Once it takes off, all these costs will come down. Har har har.)
Like I said, maybe it's just me, but I can't see this as a successful product until the vendors provide some means of ensuring the integrity of the stuff you place on all that disk storage. And the solution can't force the consumer to become a data center manager. What's all that inconvenient about CDs/DVDs anyway? (Besides the cool factor of downloading, that is.) And where's the bandwidth to allow all this downloading to happen? Heck, I've been trying for the better part of two years to get broadband where I live -- near one of the largest cities in the U.S. -- and if it can't get done here, how's it going to be available to a wide enough extent to make this borg box worthwhile?
Geez, I've been reading Dvorak since he had a column in one of the early PC magazines. Even back then folks were slamming him. I used to give him the benefit of the doubt since it seemed his column usually had at least one sensible idea (OK. So it was sort of like one grain of wheat in the bushel of chaff, but...). Recently, however, I've given up on him and am beginning to suspect that I was wrong all this time and that everything that people were saying about Dvorak all these years was true after all.
``The founders wanted to put your copyright into the public domain at your death, then it was 20 years, now 75. What use do you have for your IP when you are dead?''
If I'm not mistaken, one of the biggest lobbyists for extending the copyright period was Disney. You see, Mickey Mouse was about to go into the public domain. Just how would Michael Eisner continue to receive $500M/year in salary/etc. if Disney Corp. didn't have the exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse? Of course Walt Disney didn't have much use for the MM copyright but the leaches that run Disney nowadays did and bought an extension to the copyright laws to make sure that the gravy train didn't dry up during their lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
What did the C-Net article say? That the response was ``exactly the sort of discussion that Craig was trying to foster'' (or something like that, anyway; damn my short-term memory problem!). I, for one, quite seriously doubt that Microsoft is interested in any discussions about OSS at all. They have to be wishing that it'll all just go away if they bad mouth it enough.
--
(in response to:)
... is pretty much what you've done: point out the insecure setup. If they don't tighten things up they'll be the sore losers... when some customers or former employees sue their sorry butts for allowing that information to be divulged. Wouldn't it be fun to be called to testify against them? ``Yes. We informed XYZ, Inc. about the flaws in their security but they just laughed at us and called us sore losers.''
Wouldn't immediately help your problem in gaining new clients but it would be helpful if you could say that you have testified in court as a security expert.
The problem with the companies you've encountered is that you have to convince these people who know only Windows as an environment. I refer to this as the ``fly in the vinegar bottle'' syndrome. They like what they know and reject anything else. It's almost as though they'd rather be out of a job than switch from their comfortable little realm.
--
Perhaps that's because:
Thanks for the chuckles...
--
In olden time, when a drive went bad, the kind that had removable cartridges, and you didn't spend the $$$ to get it fixed, there were several magnets that you could remove. First there were the magnets that held the cartridge to the spindle which were easily removed with a small screwdriver. These can be used to hold cardboard to the fridge. Then you could remove the covers and remove the solenoid magnet which was strong to troll for cars in the local lake. Screwdrivers placed on the solenoid magnet were magnetized such that they could darned near attract screws from across the table (which meant we had keep them out of the computer technician areas lest they clobber data on a floppy disk or a tape). But since these monsters weighed so much, they weren't terribly useful.
--
As Oliver Hardy would have said: ``Well, isn't this a revolting development.''. Compaq and HP are now in the position of being sued because they didn't check that their magnet suppliers weren't violating someone's patent?
Since when did it become illegal to buy raw materials without doing Magnequench's work for them. Does this mean that just about anybody could be named in a patent lawsuit for buying a product that's in violation of some (possibly bogus) patent. My Compaq workstation's cursor is blinking. Does that mean I'm in trouble for violating that asinine XOR patent?
Seems to me that Magnequench should be going after Compaq's and HP's magnet suppliers.
--
I take it that by ``corporate applications'' you mean those that you spend too much money on or those that come in glossy boxes. You've, obviously, never heard of the NASA's COSMIC software library that used to be administered by the University of Georgia. For the cost of distribution, like the FSF, you could obtain applications of the sort you listed... with source code. UofG doesn't do the distribution any more but it's been taken over by Open Channel Software and can be found at http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/cosmic/. You can even ``adopt'' an application and get involved in the development of enhancements. Another potential source is the DECUS software archive (now called `Encompass'); there's a slew of software available. A lot of it's systems management related utilities but the semi-annual symposium collections used to contain a bunch of gems that we found useful. And I sure hope you know about the FTP archives on ibiblio. Of course, if what one's really looking for in a ``corporate application'' is someone to sue, I suppose these won't fit their needs.
I will agree with you that many commercial packages for UNIX cost more than they should. But to say imply that there aren't more cost effective solutions, and are open source to boot (no pun intended), is just naive.
--
It worked out well for CA as well.
At a former employer, we used to use a couple of products that originally came from Digital but the package was sold to CA (during the Palmer fire sale regime). One package had it license fees shoot up by nearly 500%. We stopped using that package and a homegrown replacement found its way into use (wasn't as ``pretty'' though.) Another went to an annual license fee. Well, Y2K hit and the version we were running wasn't Y2K compliant. That was the excuse I needed to stop using that package too. After doing a little investigation it seems I could emulate the features that we actually used using a Perl script that took all of about 20 minutes to write. When will these companies learn that we're not in business to send them money; make a better product and we'll buy it.
Where does Microsoft obtain all the guns it uses to shoot itself in the foot? And aren't their feet starting to look like Swiss cheese by now? Keep it up and you'll have the sort of customer loyalty that CA earned. (What did that old magazine review say about it? Oh yah: ``Dead last... with a bullet''.)
--
Me, too. Another Rick has owed me $0.75 since the second grade! Hey maybe it's the same one! (Once a dead-beat, always...)
--
... was helped along by basing hiring on silly little quizes like how to move a flock of sheep between two moving icebergs. Unless that's what the business does or the candiate claims to have experience in that area what benefit does that question really have to the interviewer? The company doesn't have people on staff that know squat about producing products but they sure know the answers to those trivia questions!
Oh, sure, there's something about them that shows that a candidate can think on their feet but, personally, I could care less about these arcane and, IMHO, useless questions. I'm beginning to think that most of them are asked merely to place the interviewer in a superior position so that the candidate won't be in a position to bargain effectively. Or it could be that the interviewer is so unsure of their own skills that they have to toss one of these questions out so they can feel like they know more than the candidate (there's that superiority thing again). Next time you get one of these questions, just remember: That's why your new boss is making the big bucks; he knows how to move a flock of sheep between moving icebergs.
Just remember: Before you go to your next interview, be sure and research the company, rehearse your little spiel about your work history, and, for god's sake, don't forget to memorize the Interviewer's Big Book of Stupid Interview Questions (coming soon to a bookstore near you!).
--
...Hillary Rosen woke up this morning and said to herself: ``There's something rotten in the state of Denmark!''
--
Man, he sure is that. I moved out of Ohio when Howard Metzenbaum was a senator from there. No, he's not why I moved (heh heh) but he embarassed me every time he opened his mouth (at least I didn't vote for him). Now, Traficant is the kind of guy you gotta love. Even if he does come off as severely paranoid at times.
--
Who was it (Dick Cavett?) that made a comment once that went something like: ``We've had comedy on television for decades and it hasn't resulted in an increase in people's sense of humor.'' Is there, indeed, reliable evidence that violence on the tube has lead to recent Columbine-like incidents? Has anyone ever shown conclusively that watching violence on television was why some people brought their personal arsenals to the office and wiped out their former co-workers? Didn't think so.
OK. That's enough topic drift for today, thank you.
--
...you could build one heck of a Google-like site as the portal. Since you are the Feds, I'm sure you see the advantages of setting this network of servers up over a wide geographically dispersed area. And building it using proprietary should be grounds for immediate dismissal. And what's with ``www.firstgov.gov''? A leading candidate for one of the dumbest sites names I've ever heard.
Oh, and ``Hey TechWeb! Your link's broken! The protocol is ` http ', not ` htto '.'' (OK, I can cut spme slack; I spmetimes hit the wrpng keys, tpp.)
--
Well, that doesn't seem to bother airline pilots, physicians in some areas of the U.S., and even college faculty The common denominator seems to be that the unions pop up in support of vocations where managements feels that need to attempt to coerce employees to do more and more work without the proper compensation.
I'd bet that many of the bad feelings that many people have regarding unions have to do with the pressures by their locals to vote as a block in elections, not-so-subtle suggestions that the members make campaign contributions to candidates that the members don't support, and other forms of corruption. If those could be avoided (fat chance, though, IMHO), I'd bet that more people would favor union membership. (And lest you think I'm some bleeding heart liberal, the preceding comments come from an avowed anti-unionist.)
--
It'd sure make sense for management to offer this. Since doing so usually takes away the possiblilty of overtime pay. Then compensating for after-hours support calls is likely to not happen. It usually sounds like this: ``After all, you understood that there'd be occasional after hours support required...'' Yah, right. But please define ``occasional''. I got that line several jobs ago. In those days ``occasional'' meant just about every night since some developer could always get some xylocephalic vice president to OK putting something into production without adequate testing. Can't tell you how many times I was dialed-in at midnight fixing problems and required to be in the office by 7:30 the next morning. And don't ask: ``But what about comp time?'' The typical response was: ``I can't let you do that. We're running a business around here, you know.'' Like I said, this was several jobs ago.
--
...one of these things is going to look like in a few months. Ever notice just how much crap gets sucked into your computer case? Geez, I get out the vacuum cleaner every time I do any work inside the case just to try to keep the accumulated dust down. (a layer of dust inhibits the ability of chips to be cooled by the airflow.) After a while, one of these transparent PC cases is going to look like ``The Visible Shop-Vac''. And that's not going to be very pretty at all.
--
Ain't that the truth. Plus, once the person who buys one of these realizes that they can't leave the PC on if they try to listen to the radio or watch TV they wish they had their old aluminum case back. Heck, I can tell immediately if I've left the side panel open on my old system and it's only running at 200MHz. Imagine what it's going to be like when I upgrade to that 1GHz dual Athlon motherboard (It's coming, I just know it is. :-) )
Just wait'll some kid buys one of these cases and interferes with the radio and TV reception of everyone in his apartment building. The FCC will respond if enough people complain.
Did the FCC raid actually tag those machines as non-compliant? Or did they just have to relabel them as `business' machines? (That's sort of how I remember it, anyway.)
--
There was no such thing as a Stratus/88. there was a System/88 that IBM sold that was a re-labeled Stratus system that they hung 3270-style CRTs off of.
Actually pretty cool systems but the cost... Whew!. I was admin on a couple of them back in the very early '90s. Unfortunately, they ran VOS and not the Stratus UNIX implementation (whose name escapes me at the moment). It was very impressive to be able to pull a memory board on a heavily loaded system and not have anyone so much as notice. At the time, disk drives were sold as redundant pairs (this was before hot-swappable disks and RAID subsystems became popular and readily available) and cost something like US$20K for 600MB (not GB!) of storage.
The system required a dial-up line to Stratus's field service group and the systems actually reported failed components to FS. It was always disconcerting to have FS show up to replace a board you hadn't noticed had failed.
Geez. Wonder if they're still in business. They were changing the processor chips on almost an annual basis: 680x0 to Intel to MIPS (IIRC). Does anyone know if they finally made up their mind?
--
But I'll have to dig out my tape of ``The Day The Earth Stood Still'' to be absolutely sure. (I am positive about ``Klaatu'', though.)
--
That only makes sense if you choose an operating system that's been tested by the public and has actually had the bugs fixed. :-)
--
There was a bit of news a couple of years ago about some weenie at NASA who issued an edict that only Windows systems should be used. Of course, all of those tried-and-true applications that were successfully running on Macintosh, UNIX, and other systems were destined for the trash can after that order was issued. Looks like our space program is now beginning to see the fruits of that wise decision.
--
Well, Joe Consumer buys his PC with a single 40GB disk in it -- and a backup device is always, always, an expensive option that consumers rarely buy. The mentality is ``I need a bigger disk'' and not ``I need a second disk''. Geez, I mention to frinds that they can add another hard disk to their PC and the reaction is similar to what you'd expect when showing fire to a cave man. I can't imagine the consumer electronics industry developing something like this that'll deal with multiple disks. Heck, I doubt that they'll even have a good solution for dealing with a single big disk.
Well, as a matter of fact, I am fond of those fast SCSI drives. :-) Personally, I'd have real strong reservations about anything that brings water and computer equipment together in the same box and only costs $200. What was the URL of that review again?
That's the city I was talking about. (I'm up near the Ill/Wis border but I may as well live in a third world country as far as Internet access is concerned.) I really couldn't care less about downloading music and, especially, movies. I just want to get Internet access, dammitall, and access that doesn't assume that all I want to do is connect via AOL so I can insert smileys into my chat sessions using a drop-down menu.
All in all, though, I see these borg boxes as being the same thing as the combination fax/printer/modem/etc units that are popular with some home office users. I just am not looking for a piece of equipment that, when one component dies, I can't do anything. Just like I'll keep my computer and entertainment systems separate, thank you.
--
This box sounds like a product in search of a market (or perhaps it's just looking for suckers).
Maybe it's just me, but I have trouble believing that Joe Consumer is going to be terribly happy when he loses 500 GB of movies on his Borg box when the hard disk goes bad (as it eventually will). Unless they do something like RAID5 and make it easy for Joe to locate and change out the failed disk and for RAID reconstruction to begin automagically, I doubt that such a box is going to fly. If they do do RAID, what's this thing going to sound like when it's sitting on top of your TV? Anyone who's stuffed a half dozen disks in a PC and put it under their desk knows that the noise isn't something you want to listen to while you're watching TV. If they don't do RAID, how are they going to convince Joe that he's suppose to buy a carton of DLT tapes and a $2K tape drive to back up his Borg box on a regular basis? (Oh, right. Once it takes off, all these costs will come down. Har har har.)
Like I said, maybe it's just me, but I can't see this as a successful product until the vendors provide some means of ensuring the integrity of the stuff you place on all that disk storage. And the solution can't force the consumer to become a data center manager. What's all that inconvenient about CDs/DVDs anyway? (Besides the cool factor of downloading, that is.) And where's the bandwidth to allow all this downloading to happen? Heck, I've been trying for the better part of two years to get broadband where I live -- near one of the largest cities in the U.S. -- and if it can't get done here, how's it going to be available to a wide enough extent to make this borg box worthwhile?
--
Geez, I've been reading Dvorak since he had a column in one of the early PC magazines. Even back then folks were slamming him. I used to give him the benefit of the doubt since it seemed his column usually had at least one sensible idea (OK. So it was sort of like one grain of wheat in the bushel of chaff, but...). Recently, however, I've given up on him and am beginning to suspect that I was wrong all this time and that everything that people were saying about Dvorak all these years was true after all.
--
If I'm not mistaken, one of the biggest lobbyists for extending the copyright period was Disney. You see, Mickey Mouse was about to go into the public domain. Just how would Michael Eisner continue to receive $500M/year in salary/etc. if Disney Corp. didn't have the exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse? Of course Walt Disney didn't have much use for the MM copyright but the leaches that run Disney nowadays did and bought an extension to the copyright laws to make sure that the gravy train didn't dry up during their lifetime.
--