This proposal came up a few years ago when the Y2K problem started getting media attention.
Certification is great if:
Employers don't mind paying a lot more programming talent. Certification isn't a one-shot deal. It would require periodic (annual?) renewal and keeping current in a field such as IT would require (IMHO) a lot more class time than, say, your average doctor or CPA requires to keep certified. And those classes aren't free.
Consumers don't mind paying a lot more for their software. Again, certification (and keeping current) costs and those costs are going to be passed on to the end-user.
I wonder: Do the nuts that keep bringing this up have the public's best interest at heart or just the legal community that will end up making the most money out of it?
I pay for a driver's license every so often and I can accept that since someone needs to keep track of who's licensed, etc. But... I have to buy license plates for my car each year. If I don't, I lose my license. Do those license plates make me a safer or more responsible driver?
A person goes to college for four years (or two years, hell, does it take four years to learn to use VB:-) ) and spends a ton of money on earning their degree. Let's assume that the University didn't let this person slip by without learning something. Are they going to be a better programmer because the State administers some test and, more importantly (in the State's view), collects their annual fee?
We don't, at least in the state where I live, have recertification of teachers after they earn their degree. In my mind, an incompentant teacher or one that's let their skills slip have the potential to do more damage than a programmer that hasn't kept up with new technologies. The programmer will eventually get fired, the teacher almost has to murder someone to get fired.
This is about money. Not creating better software.
OK. So this judge thinks that I'm going to be confused if I see a site come up in my Altavista search because it has someone else's brand name in the META tag. Hmm. Why else would I use a search engine if I didn't want to find all the sites that have some reference to the brand name. Just think of the uselessness of the WWW if, when I do a search on my favorite search engine, I type in "Compaq" and all it returns is "www.compaq.com".
The judge likens this META tag use to putting another company's brand name or logo in a store window. Guess Nike will want to sue all those shoe stores that have the Nike swoosh in the window. Consumers might accidently think they're walking into Nike headquarters. Or perhaps Budweiser should be sueing all those taverns that have the "Bud" and "Busch" neon lights in the window. You certaintly wouldn't want any poor consumers thinking that they were actually entering the Anheiser Busch company now would you.
And let's not forget the card catalogs in the thousands of libraries around the world. Imagine how many violations of this new legal finding are hiding in the keyword listings on all those card in the catalog.
This ruling is only beneficial to lawyers looking for someone to sue. They can now just fire up a search engine and get a list of people they can threaten with lawsuits. Wonder if Yahoo, AltaVista, et. al., are looking for someone to appeal this.
...assuming that your audience had at least the IQ of a pencil.
``... 1 GHz (1,000 MHz or one billion cycles per second)...''
I've always wondered about that. Thanks for clearing that up.
``Al Quick, Chairman and CEO of KryoTech. "Working together, we have produced the Super-G, a true next-generation computer system. With performance measured in gigahertz instead of megahertz,..."''
Yikes! Where do I begin?! ``Performance measured in gigahertz instead of megahertz,'' OK. I ``measured'' the performance of my old Columbia Data Product XT-clone in megahertz. Guess I can drag it un from the basement and re-``measure'' the performance by saying the CPU clock is running at 0.00477 Gigahertz (BTW, it's not ``gigahertz''). When was the last time someone actually spouted crap about performance based on clock speeds? About 1985? Thought we knew better than that by now. Of course, the CEO was talking at a shareholders meeting so I guess he had to dumb it down just a tad, eh?
All the technical usage errors aside, I want one of these! Of course, that'll be after I install a screen room at home to run this computer in so I can keep the FCC at bay.
``I have to agree with your statement that the US is has become everything that it has fought against this century, the US was jsut as bad as the Nazis and with their asian relocation camps, and now some of the brightest thinkers and the people who have the most potential to do well in the future arre now being persicuted (sp?). sounds very similar to Nazi Germany.''
Huh? While the relocation camps were one of the dumbest things that the U.S. government has ever done, I can't see how you could possibly equate them with Nazi concentration camps. Are you trying to say that the U.S. was onvolved in the use of the internees as slave labor or that they were incinerated in ovens? If that's the case then I'd have to congratulate the government for pulling off one of the greatest PR snow jobs in history.
If this is what's currently being taught in high schools nowadays then I'm certaintly glad to be out of the educational profession as the history rewriters appear to have won.
Can I sue American Research Group when it sends me about a dozen unsolicited ads for IT training to my home address. I mean, my trash can is a limited resource and if I need to toss more stuff out than the city deems as appropriate, I have to pay extra for it.
On Intel:
For a high technology company, they seem to go to the courts pretty damned quick in cases where a simple technology-based fix might be far easier and cheaper to implement. One wonders what the ex-employees are saying that's making them so nervous...
``...involved one Compaq (yeah, yeah, I know... wasn't *my* choice) server, and SCO kept rebooting in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, also, in a so-called "server" edition, you had to buy the TCP/IP stack.... separately??!!?!?! How the hell am I supposed to run a "server" with no networking, huh?''
One word: Digiboard.
Of course, that's not exactly a ``server'' as we know it today.
We had an SCO system at a remote clinic that, from time to time, I had to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes in order to fix a simple problem that could have been done in five minutes had it been possible to hang it off our Ethernet. The pisser was that the clinic was on our network. Each of the clinician's PCs had an Ethernet card hanging off our network and an asynch connection to the Digiboard in the SCO system. Dumb terminal emulation was required to get into the SCO-based application. Stupid huh? Don't forget that SCO made a bunch of money selling inexpensive systems like this back in the days when LANs were quite expensive.
The fact that SCO was selling the IP stack separately was not unreasonable ten years ago. I doubt that they do that now, though. If they do, then SCO is dumber than I thought and it's no wonder the OSS/Intel/*nixes are eating their lunch. ("How dare those punks screw up our pricing schedule!!")
I was very disturbed by Mr. Michel's comments in this article (and the previous blustery article) where he states that OSS is just free R-and-D and that "Hey! It's free software! We can take what we like!".
I wouldn't put it past SCO to find OSS software copied directly into SCO releases and sold as their own after hearing comments like that.
Should we be worrying about commercial ventures taking OSS code and selling it as their own in non-OSS products?
Are there any lawyers out there, or do any Slashdotters out there know of a lawyer, that would be willing to work (pro bono?) on lawsuits in this area should it come to that.
``The problem here is legal issues for a company that has a lot invested in IP and how does it keep from contaminating GPL or proprietary code with code from the other?''
Interesting point...
I was going to suggest that a ``clean room'' environment could be created but that would make changing positions within the company very difficult, if not impossible, without getting into problems. You'd need to institute something like a ``non-compete'' clause but for positions within the same company. Which, IMHO, would suck big time.
Anybody know of companies that might be doing this sort of thing now?
I'm sure Fermi knows how to do this. They've been running several RS/6000 CPU farms for a few years. The smallest one I saw (about five years ago or so) was 128 CPUs. The cabling didn't look that bad. Although scaling it up by a factor of 20 might make things a tad hairier.
Yah! I smiled at this one. Doesn't Microsoft pride itself on the casual "campus" environment up in Redmond?
I also found it hilarious that Linux is only good for word processing and spreadsheets. According to the what I read in the trade press, Microsoft's revenues would be significantly lower without MS Office9x. I doubt that Visual BASIC is what's paying for Bill Gates' new house.
Maybe it's just me (having spent some years working for a University) but:
``The Ivory Tower's blindness''
and
``It's bad enough when academics use assumptions, but they could at least do the research right''
seemed inappropriate comments in relation to the Capital Research article. I've always liked to think that the ``ivory tower'' was where the real ``academics'' (i.e., University professors and other real researchers) worked. Not where independently funded political hacks spouted whatever their funders wanted said. I doubt that a lot of ``research'' went into the anti-OSS diatribe in the article.
The Capital Research author lost me when he had to use ``left'' or ``leftist'' and ``nonprofit'' three, four, or five times in the article. Was this guy paranoid or something? Reminds me of the old film clips of the McCarthy hearings. (``Oh! Look at this guys! This Linus Torvalds fellow is from Finland and that's right next door to them God-less communists! This Linux stuff must be some sort of pinko plot to destroy our economy!'')
And I knew that there wasn't going to be much of substance in the remainder of the article when he attempted to trash John Barlow because he once wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. (``These Linux anarchists are all hippies! John Barlow opposes our beloved Internet decency regulations! Lock up your daughters!'')
I'm guessing that the funding for this group comes from the same software vendors that lobbied against stronger consumer protection in software products.
``a lot of the legal mumbo jumbo in licenses and agreements simply doesn't hold up in court''
And how many companies are willing to even spend the money to take a vendor to court? Damned few as far as I can tell. I've never seen one case get any significant exposure in the press that dealt with software of the type that we'd buy at the local computer store. In fact, the only case that I recall concerned Arthur Andersen who was being sued by a fairly good sized firm over a custom software implementation (and the only reason, I suspect, that I saw that in the news was that it was a local, i.e. Chicago-based, company).
Q: Why did the software industry recently spend so much time and effort lobbying Congress to remove the few teeth that shrinkwrapped licenses had if they weren't going to stand up in court?
A: Um... They didn't want us to have any teeth?
``and more important, manufacturers simply are afraid to lose their larger clients and will go to great lenghts to keep their customers happy.''
Really great if you happen to be one of their larger clients. I have worked for companies large and small and don't have memories of a vendor that really cared if they lost our business or not. Just how big to you have to be in order for a company the size of Microsoft to care about losing your business?
BTW, I am currently working for a large, industry-leading, multinational, multi-$G healthcare company that cannot get any cooperation from one of the leading database vendors. What actions do I see from them or some company like MS that would make me believe that they really gave a whit about us as customer? Would I expect MS to bend over backwards if we decided to abandon MS Office? Perhaps, but the cynic in me thinks that'd happen only after word of it got into the trade press. And then, it wouldn't be because they were worried that we through the SW was buggy; it'd be because some regional manager was worried he'd be out the door if he lost the customer (more likely the customer's $$$).
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for making money. I expect I'll be getting that business started on the side in the next year and I won't be doing it to lose money. My feeling is: If a large company can't get satisfaction when dealing with software vendors, what makes you think that mine or the other hundreds of thousands of small businesses are going to get anywhere?
``Why can a company get a fine for something that you or I would get 20 in the pokey for?''
I think, under certain circumstances, the officers of a corporation can go to jail when the corporation loses a court case. Maybe they have to be explicitly named in a suit for this to happen.
At my last employer, my boss was named the new V.P. of IT and specifically declined to be made CIO. He was worried that the company could get sued (there was already at least one lawsuit in progress against it) and he could get named as a co-defendent and be made officially liable for something.
Personally, I'd like to see more corporate officers behave more those in Japan and take more personal responsibility for the actions of the company; after all, they are the ones setting corporate policy. When their (Japanese) company screws up big time, they resign... publicly... at a big new conference... and in tears.
Sorry about that. Seems my "threshold" was not set to the proper setting in order to see ALL the messages (someting I find odd since I would assume that the DEFAULT would be to see everything). Looks like Slashdot is becoming about as intuitive as Windows (OK, maybe that's not fair but...).
...get a job working in any type of support capacity or become a developer that has to work with any end-users. With the attitude he's got, he'll be lucky to hold a given job for more than a few months before other employees or customers begin asking for his head on a platter. If I had someone working for me that took that attitude with another employee or customer they'd better have their resume up to date. Perhaps it was just the writing style but the author came across as impossibly pompous and condescending.
This is off-topic but having been a Linux user for some years now (originally w/ Slackware but currently RedHat) I fail to see the usefullness of the Holy War of the Distributions that seems to have developed. Each has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Besides, what I see as a strength, you might think of as a weakness; and vice versa. For example, Slackware was a great introduction to Linux. As a long-time UNIX user/admin it was just complicated enough; for a new user it might be too much. I switched to RedHat not because it was any easier to use (it was, at the time, only a little bit easier to install) but because of its being easier to apply upgrades with RPM. Upgrading Slackware was more accurately, and maybe still is, described as a reinstallation and too time consuming and my time is worth something (or at least my family seems to think so). Another Linux user might not mind doing upgrades that way but, IMHO, time not spent performing upgrades to Linux is more time to use Linux. I say let's just congratulate yourselves on using the best damned software that money can't buy (unless you want to) and expend out energies in making it better. Fighting over distributions makes the Linux community appear like a bunch of assinine teenagers arguing over which heavy metal band "rules". Grow up! Please! Quit making us look like idiots!
Damn! I just reread what I wrote above and I seem to be in a much better mood than the Trucluster snafu I'm working through at work should justify.
``I don't know how old it is, but it is way older than MS' SMS. You can basically push packages to other systems by using the rdist facility. This can be exactly used for that purposes you refer to.''
I was thinking of rsync when I read this. I believe it predates SMS as well.
It's great that equipment like this is still available.
I remember using a similar product back in the mid-80s made by a company called AMPRO (I think). They had a low-power PC-on-a-card system that we used. It had 1MB of RAM, a built-in video controller (sort of a super CGA - whoopee!!), a pair of serial ports, parallel port, and SCSI controller. The card was the same size as a 5-1/4 inch disc drive controller board. With a small case, a 1.2 MB floppy drive, small SCSI drive, the whole thing couldn't have weighed even 10 pounds.
Since it weighed so little and didn't draw much power, I used to use one for data collection onboard small aircraft. The most expensive thing in the whole setup, in terms of cost as well as power consumption, was the SCSI drive (most PCs that used SCSI drives were Macs and the prices were pretty high; I think we spent $600 for a 20MB drive). Still it was pretty cheap compared to the custom data collection equipment we had been using and having nearly 20MB available for data collection was great. (No... while we did have Windows installed (2.11), we did not use it during flight operations -- DOS+assembler all the way!)
Wasn't one of the points that Larry Ellison trying to make that Microsoft was effectively prohibiting end-users from performing this type of benchmark that would ultimately show the MS product in a bad light. (Did the EULA claim that such a benchmark constitute some sort of reverse-engineering or something?) I seem to recall some discussion that whoever might claim the $1M might find themselves in legal trouble with MS.
When will these ludicrous lawsuits end. Maybe I'm just clueless but was Intel supposed to have headhunters calling McDonald's to see if any chip designers wanted to change jobs.
Seems Motorola has a problem keeping key people and their solution to the problem is to sue any company that has the gaul to offer their people better jobs.
Marin County supposedly has the highest per capita income in the U.S. and the highest proportion of citizens who are undergoing psychiatric thereapy. (I read that somewhere recently.)
``...buy money can't buy me love... Can't buy me l-o-o-o-v-e...''
Slashdot Mirror
This proposal came up a few years ago when the Y2K problem started getting media attention.
Certification is great if:
I wonder: Do the nuts that keep bringing this up have the public's best interest at heart or just the legal community that will end up making the most money out of it?
I pay for a driver's license every so often and I can accept that since someone needs to keep track of who's licensed, etc. But... I have to buy license plates for my car each year. If I don't, I lose my license. Do those license plates make me a safer or more responsible driver?
A person goes to college for four years (or two years, hell, does it take four years to learn to use VB :-) ) and spends a ton of money on earning their degree. Let's assume that the University didn't let this person slip by without learning something. Are they going to be a better programmer because the State administers some test and, more importantly (in the State's view), collects their annual fee?
We don't, at least in the state where I live, have recertification of teachers after they earn their degree. In my mind, an incompentant teacher or one that's let their skills slip have the potential to do more damage than a programmer that hasn't kept up with new technologies. The programmer will eventually get fired, the teacher almost has to murder someone to get fired.
This is about money. Not creating better software.
OK. So this judge thinks that I'm going to be confused if I see a site come up in my Altavista search because it has someone else's brand name in the META tag. Hmm. Why else would I use a search engine if I didn't want to find all the sites that have some reference to the brand name. Just think of the uselessness of the WWW if, when I do a search on my favorite search engine, I type in "Compaq" and all it returns is "www.compaq.com".
The judge likens this META tag use to putting another company's brand name or logo in a store window. Guess Nike will want to sue all those shoe stores that have the Nike swoosh in the window. Consumers might accidently think they're walking into Nike headquarters. Or perhaps Budweiser should be sueing all those taverns that have the "Bud" and "Busch" neon lights in the window. You certaintly wouldn't want any poor consumers thinking that they were actually entering the Anheiser Busch company now would you.
And let's not forget the card catalogs in the thousands of libraries around the world. Imagine how many violations of this new legal finding are hiding in the keyword listings on all those card in the catalog.
This ruling is only beneficial to lawyers looking for someone to sue. They can now just fire up a search engine and get a list of people they can threaten with lawsuits. Wonder if Yahoo, AltaVista, et. al., are looking for someone to appeal this.
...assuming that your audience had at least the IQ of a pencil.
I've always wondered about that. Thanks for clearing that up.
Yikes! Where do I begin?! ``Performance measured in gigahertz instead of megahertz,'' OK. I ``measured'' the performance of my old Columbia Data Product XT-clone in megahertz. Guess I can drag it un from the basement and re-``measure'' the performance by saying the CPU clock is running at 0.00477 Gigahertz (BTW, it's not ``gigahertz''). When was the last time someone actually spouted crap about performance based on clock speeds? About 1985? Thought we knew better than that by now. Of course, the CEO was talking at a shareholders meeting so I guess he had to dumb it down just a tad, eh?
All the technical usage errors aside, I want one of these! Of course, that'll be after I install a screen room at home to run this computer in so I can keep the FCC at bay.
Huh? While the relocation camps were one of the dumbest things that the U.S. government has ever done, I can't see how you could possibly equate them with Nazi concentration camps. Are you trying to say that the U.S. was onvolved in the use of the internees as slave labor or that they were incinerated in ovens? If that's the case then I'd have to congratulate the government for pulling off one of the greatest PR snow jobs in history.
If this is what's currently being taught in high schools nowadays then I'm certaintly glad to be out of the educational profession as the history rewriters appear to have won.
Can I sue American Research Group when it sends me about a dozen unsolicited ads for IT training to my home address. I mean, my trash can is a limited resource and if I need to toss more stuff out than the city deems as appropriate, I have to pay extra for it.
On Intel:
For a high technology company, they seem to go to the courts pretty damned quick in cases where a simple technology-based fix might be far easier and cheaper to implement. One wonders what the ex-employees are saying that's making them so nervous...
One word: Digiboard.
Of course, that's not exactly a ``server'' as we know it today.
We had an SCO system at a remote clinic that, from time to time, I had to get in the car and drive for 45 minutes in order to fix a simple problem that could have been done in five minutes had it been possible to hang it off our Ethernet. The pisser was that the clinic was on our network. Each of the clinician's PCs had an Ethernet card hanging off our network and an asynch connection to the Digiboard in the SCO system. Dumb terminal emulation was required to get into the SCO-based application. Stupid huh? Don't forget that SCO made a bunch of money selling inexpensive systems like this back in the days when LANs were quite expensive.
The fact that SCO was selling the IP stack separately was not unreasonable ten years ago. I doubt that they do that now, though. If they do, then SCO is dumber than I thought and it's no wonder the OSS/Intel/*nixes are eating their lunch. ("How dare those punks screw up our pricing schedule!!")
Now that ought to get some attention...
I was very disturbed by Mr. Michel's comments in this article (and the previous blustery article) where he states that OSS is just free R-and-D and that "Hey! It's free software! We can take what we like!".
I wouldn't put it past SCO to find OSS software copied directly into SCO releases and sold as their own after hearing comments like that.
Should we be worrying about commercial ventures taking OSS code and selling it as their own in non-OSS products?
Are there any lawyers out there, or do any Slashdotters out there know of a lawyer, that would be willing to work (pro bono?) on lawsuits in this area should it come to that.
Is anyone else bothered by Michels' comments?
Interesting point...
I was going to suggest that a ``clean room'' environment could be created but that would make changing positions within the company very difficult, if not impossible, without getting into problems. You'd need to institute something like a ``non-compete'' clause but for positions within the same company. Which, IMHO, would suck big time.
Anybody know of companies that might be doing this sort of thing now?
I'm sure Fermi knows how to do this. They've been running several RS/6000 CPU farms for a few years. The smallest one I saw (about five years ago or so) was 128 CPUs. The cabling didn't look that bad. Although scaling it up by a factor of 20 might make things a tad hairier.
If Bill Gates is talking about AfterStep, Gnome, et al, then, IMHO he's just another guy who doesn't understand X Windows.
Someone please ``whup him upside the haid'' and explain the difference between a windowing system and a window manager to him.
Yah! I smiled at this one. Doesn't Microsoft pride itself on the casual "campus" environment up in Redmond?
I also found it hilarious that Linux is only good for word processing and spreadsheets. According to the what I read in the trade press, Microsoft's revenues would be significantly lower without MS Office9x. I doubt that Visual BASIC is what's paying for Bill Gates' new house.
I think you're right here. I'm embarassed by all this.
It seems to me that Bruce Perens has been involved in more than his share of debacles recently.
Now boys... Take a deep breath...
Maybe it's just me (having spent some years working for a University) but:
and
seemed inappropriate comments in relation to the Capital Research article. I've always liked to think that the ``ivory tower'' was where the real ``academics'' (i.e., University professors and other real researchers) worked. Not where independently funded political hacks spouted whatever their funders wanted said. I doubt that a lot of ``research'' went into the anti-OSS diatribe in the article.
The Capital Research author lost me when he had to use ``left'' or ``leftist'' and ``nonprofit'' three, four, or five times in the article. Was this guy paranoid or something? Reminds me of the old film clips of the McCarthy hearings. (``Oh! Look at this guys! This Linus Torvalds fellow is from Finland and that's right next door to them God-less communists! This Linux stuff must be some sort of pinko plot to destroy our economy!'')
And I knew that there wasn't going to be much of substance in the remainder of the article when he attempted to trash John Barlow because he once wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. (``These Linux anarchists are all hippies! John Barlow opposes our beloved Internet decency regulations! Lock up your daughters!'')
I'm guessing that the funding for this group comes from the same software vendors that lobbied against stronger consumer protection in software products.
And how many companies are willing to even spend the money to take a vendor to court? Damned few as far as I can tell. I've never seen one case get any significant exposure in the press that dealt with software of the type that we'd buy at the local computer store. In fact, the only case that I recall concerned Arthur Andersen who was being sued by a fairly good sized firm over a custom software implementation (and the only reason, I suspect, that I saw that in the news was that it was a local, i.e. Chicago-based, company).
Q: Why did the software industry recently spend so much time and effort lobbying Congress to remove the few teeth that shrinkwrapped licenses had if they weren't going to stand up in court?
A: Um... They didn't want us to have any teeth?
Really great if you happen to be one of their larger clients. I have worked for companies large and small and don't have memories of a vendor that really cared if they lost our business or not. Just how big to you have to be in order for a company the size of Microsoft to care about losing your business?
BTW, I am currently working for a large, industry-leading, multinational, multi-$G healthcare company that cannot get any cooperation from one of the leading database vendors. What actions do I see from them or some company like MS that would make me believe that they really gave a whit about us as customer? Would I expect MS to bend over backwards if we decided to abandon MS Office? Perhaps, but the cynic in me thinks that'd happen only after word of it got into the trade press. And then, it wouldn't be because they were worried that we through the SW was buggy; it'd be because some regional manager was worried he'd be out the door if he lost the customer (more likely the customer's $$$).
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for making money. I expect I'll be getting that business started on the side in the next year and I won't be doing it to lose money. My feeling is: If a large company can't get satisfaction when dealing with software vendors, what makes you think that mine or the other hundreds of thousands of small businesses are going to get anywhere?
I think, under certain circumstances, the officers of a corporation can go to jail when the corporation loses a court case. Maybe they have to be explicitly named in a suit for this to happen.
At my last employer, my boss was named the new V.P. of IT and specifically declined to be made CIO. He was worried that the company could get sued (there was already at least one lawsuit in progress against it) and he could get named as a co-defendent and be made officially liable for something.
Personally, I'd like to see more corporate officers behave more those in Japan and take more personal responsibility for the actions of the company; after all, they are the ones setting corporate policy. When their (Japanese) company screws up big time, they resign... publicly... at a big new conference... and in tears.
...irrelevent except to those script-kiddies who worship him and who he inspires.
Sorry about that. Seems my "threshold" was not set to the proper setting in order to see ALL the messages (someting I find odd since I would assume that the DEFAULT would be to see everything). Looks like Slashdot is becoming about as intuitive as Windows (OK, maybe that's not fair but...).
OK! OK! Shouldn't do this test but I'm seriously PO'd having carefully thought out replies to Slashdot disappearing into thin air.
What the devil's wrong with the new software? It's acting like it still alpha code.
Sorry for venting.
...get a job working in any type of support capacity or become a developer that has to work with any end-users. With the attitude he's got, he'll be lucky to hold a given job for more than a few months before other employees or customers begin asking for his head on a platter. If I had someone working for me that took that attitude with another employee or customer they'd better have their resume up to date. Perhaps it was just the writing style but the author came across as impossibly pompous and condescending.
This is off-topic but having been a Linux user for some years now (originally w/ Slackware but currently RedHat) I fail to see the usefullness of the Holy War of the Distributions that seems to have developed. Each has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Besides, what I see as a strength, you might think of as a weakness; and vice versa. For example, Slackware was a great introduction to Linux. As a long-time UNIX user/admin it was just complicated enough; for a new user it might be too much. I switched to RedHat not because it was any easier to use (it was, at the time, only a little bit easier to install) but because of its being easier to apply upgrades with RPM. Upgrading Slackware was more accurately, and maybe still is, described as a reinstallation and too time consuming and my time is worth something (or at least my family seems to think so). Another Linux user might not mind doing upgrades that way but, IMHO, time not spent performing upgrades to Linux is more time to use Linux. I say let's just congratulate yourselves on using the best damned software that money can't buy (unless you want to) and expend out energies in making it better. Fighting over distributions makes the Linux community appear like a bunch of assinine teenagers arguing over which heavy metal band "rules". Grow up! Please! Quit making us look like idiots!
Damn! I just reread what I wrote above and I seem to be in a much better mood than the Trucluster snafu I'm working through at work should justify.
I was thinking of rsync when I read this. I believe it predates SMS as well.
It's great that equipment like this is still available.
I remember using a similar product back in the mid-80s made by a company called AMPRO (I think). They had a low-power PC-on-a-card system that we used. It had 1MB of RAM, a built-in video controller (sort of a super CGA - whoopee!!), a pair of serial ports, parallel port, and SCSI controller. The card was the same size as a 5-1/4 inch disc drive controller board. With a small case, a 1.2 MB floppy drive, small SCSI drive, the whole thing couldn't have weighed even 10 pounds.
Since it weighed so little and didn't draw much power, I used to use one for data collection onboard small aircraft. The most expensive thing in the whole setup, in terms of cost as well as power consumption, was the SCSI drive (most PCs that used SCSI drives were Macs and the prices were pretty high; I think we spent $600 for a 20MB drive). Still it was pretty cheap compared to the custom data collection equipment we had been using and having nearly 20MB available for data collection was great. (No... while we did have Windows installed (2.11), we did not use it during flight operations -- DOS+assembler all the way!)
...that finally met the challenge.
Wasn't one of the points that Larry Ellison trying to make that Microsoft was effectively prohibiting end-users from performing this type of benchmark that would ultimately show the MS product in a bad light. (Did the EULA claim that such a benchmark constitute some sort of reverse-engineering or something?) I seem to recall some discussion that whoever might claim the $1M might find themselves in legal trouble with MS.
A buncha times :-)
When will these ludicrous lawsuits end. Maybe I'm just clueless but was Intel supposed to have headhunters calling McDonald's to see if any chip designers wanted to change jobs.
Seems Motorola has a problem keeping key people and their solution to the problem is to sue any company that has the gaul to offer their people better jobs.
Marin County supposedly has the highest per capita income in the U.S. and the highest proportion of citizens who are undergoing psychiatric thereapy. (I read that somewhere recently.)