Just tell it like it is: Sweden's "space program" involves waiting in line for space (ha ha) in the cargo bays of the spacecraft of more advanced nations.
for us Canadians, eh? In the past, people made fun of us for our tiny weanises, but now Canada is the first country in space! I mean, the second -- um, er, three, four, five, six -- oh, bloody hell. Well I can say with confidence that we'll get to space before China!
Whot? When? I don't believe you! Argh, well Canada is still the world leader in man-moose sexual relations, and you can take that to the bank! With maple syrup, eh?
Anyhoo, we're catching up to you Statesmen right fast! You may have the PenisBird and PenisFish, but beware! for Canada is now armed with the one and only PenisTimothy, running OpenBSD! Eh!
My sister lives in New Jersey, and racial profiling by the state police is the main reason why she refuses to get a drivers license.
Interesting... I've never been in NJ, but a friend of mine from NY often compares the NJ state police uniforms to those worn by the Waffen SS (Nazi stormtroopers).
After reading your post, I used The Power of the Internet to find some pictures.
Holy shit, look at the guy third from the left in the NJSP picture. Goddamned scary if you ask me... perhaps your sister would get a kick out of seeing that.
Yeah, a job in the "Chair Farce" entails sitting in an air-conditioned office all day. These offices are outfitted with plenty of large desks to hide under whenever Marines show up. (It has been scientifically proven that one US Marine can kick the asses of about 42 airmen single-handedly, and will, given the chance.) It's a pity that the Marines have better pilots, because the Chair Farce gets all the cool toys. (F-22, F-117A, et cetera.)
2 to 3 pounds may sound like a lot, but it gets more reasonable when you consider that it means not carrying a conventional battery or an AC adapter around.
It may sound like a lot to a geek, but these guys are trained to jog in +30-pound backpacks, so I wouldn't forsee problems with a battery that weighs as much as a large can of beans.
You'd be better off spending all the extra money on RAM.:)
True, true... and since DDR memory has pushed SDRAM prices down to almost laughable prices (you can now get 256MB of certified name-brand 133MHz SDRAM for about $90!!), there's no reason why every schmoe with a 1GHz P3 shouldn't have less than 256MB. But if your CPU is less than a year old and you have plenty of RAM, I still feel that SCSI-3 is a great investment. Even with recent IDE advances such as ATA/66 and ATA/100, the bus bandwidth is still much, much less than any flavor of SCSI-3. (see note** at bottom) (And bandwidth matters just as much, if not more, than burst rotation speed. Bandwidth is why Athlons always beat the pants off of similarly-clocked Intel chips.)
I don't believe that the average user is incapable of telling the speed difference between an IDE and SCSI disks. Unless the machine is dreadfully outdated, the user will not be able to tell the difference when he is typing in MS Word. He will, however, notice the difference when the Word is first loading, and this is when most users will experience frustration, BUT, as you said, once the application is loaded into memory, assuming that the machine has plenty of RAM, it won't start thrashing.
This again calls attention to the imbalance in most OEM PCs, which often include an 800MHz+ CPU and only 128MB RAM. Your average PC user would be much happier (although thanks to Intel's marketing, he doesn't know it) with half as many MHz and twice as much RAM. So I agree, RAM needs should be taken care of before looking at disk upgrades.
** Unfortunately, IDE is just so much cheaper that SCSI may be on the way out for high-end workstations. For instance, note how new Sun workstations have IDE drives, while in the past it was unheard of to have a UNIX workstation with IDE. (Hell, even the before-mentioned SPARCstation 5 has SCSI-2.) Apparently Sun has decided that unless the machine is destined for server-use and the associated barrage of disk access, it isn't worth the more expensive disk and much more expensive controller.
Neon Genesis Evangelion (or, properly, Shinseiki Evangelion) is a near-future sci-fi Japanese animation about children who pilot giant bio-robots to fight an alien armageddon. It's from from the early nineties. It's one of the more popular series in the US, thanks to the "We like Pokemon and now we're ANIME EXPERTS and will gorge ourselves upon five-year-old English dubs" crowd, which Taco is a part of. Regardless, it's a wonderful series and if you're into sci-fi at all I recommend at least watching the first three or four episodes to get a taste for what real anime (as opposed to Pokemon, Dragonball Z, et cetera) is like.
I've read a lot comments in this article, and I don't agree with most of them. Many of you envision some sort of conspiracy between software and hardware vendors to sell Pentium IIIs by writing bloated code. I don't think this is the case at all.
MS Word is often used as an example of bloatware. Yes, it is a fairly large program, but I don't hold its size against it, because it allows the non-computer savvy to create nice looking documents very quickly, with very little work. But MS Word is not what is pushing sales of 1GHz Pentiums. The truth is that nothing is pushing the sale of 1GHz CPUs. Intel and AMD make them, and the big OEMs sell them without question. Ever ask yourself why you it's difficult to find new OEM 500MHz machines on the market today? It's because the big OEMs know that consumers expect to spend $1500-2000 on a new machine, and aren't going to dissuade them if possible.
I'm also going to note that this hardware manufacturer/vendor conspiracy seems limited only to CPUs. Look at what Dell and IBM are trying to sell consumers, and you'll notice how incredibly unbalanced these systems are. A 1GHz CPU with a fucking IDE disk? The disk was the bottleneck 700MHz ago, and it is now... just get yourself a 500MHz CPU for $80 and spend the money you saved on SCSI-3 hardware. But, as mentioned before, you can't buy a measly 500MHz CPU from the big OEMs anymore, so balanced PCs are now only available to relative "geeks".
My dad is VP of Engineering in a large company whose name (a household name, I might add) I won't mention, and he does all of his work, including use of MS Office 2000, on a 133MHz ThinkPad. Doesn't sound like MS Office is selling new systems to me.
The only software industry that sells new systems is the gaming industry. Even when the next generation of games doesn't require a new video card, many of us will go buy one just to make our old games even better. My primary workstation, which I upgrade about twice per year, currently has an 800MHz Thunderbird, 512MB of 133MHz Crucial SDRAM, and an ELSA GeForce 2 Ultra. In addition to gaming, I use this box for my development work, but you can bet your ass that I didn't buy a $400 video card for writing C++ (yes, Carmack might, but I don't develop games). I bought the card because, as a gamer, playing Tribes 2 (just picked it up yesterday, actually) smoothly at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color just r0X0rs.
Incidentally, my firewall is a 170MHz SPARCstation 5, but I'm not going to be playing TFC on that anytime soon.
I believe that the WWW is the real "killer app", and only revolutionary Internet client and server software will really push hardware sales noticably. (If IE5, Apache httpd, or Napster required a 1GHz CPU, hardware sales would be exponentially greater.)
Thanks for posting; I give your flame a rating of "4". (All flames are rated on a scale of 1 to 10.) You seem to have the necessary faux-anger, but your lack of originality keeps you from "standing out in the crowd". Perhaps you should reevalutate your strategy and try again.
Once again, thanks... remember: each reply gives me points towards my Troll Merit Badge! (And the Scoutmaster will never fuck me if I don't get the badge. Timothy got the badge by posting his inane Slashcrap, and the Scoutmaster immediately cored his asshole like a rotten apple. All of the We-blows were jealous.) At any rate, the crapflooders are already making good use of my link, so I'm sure to get the badge... your flames are just bonus points.
If your potential buyers are IT execs who read NewsForge for Open Source-specific news . ..
If you think that "IT executives" read your crappy OSDN NewsForge site, you're fucking kidding yourself. If you think that "Open Source" technology is the concern of any CTO with over $100,000 yearly budget, you're really hitting the old crack pipe. The CTO at my company has bought $10 million worth of hardware in the last year, and I can guarantee you that trolling the Internet looking for so-called Open-Source news (such as "Linux finally gets USB support, five years too late!" and "Linux: It sucks slightly less than yesterday.") is not a part of his business strategy.
This is his impression of Linux: can it power our cluster of RS/6000s better than AIX? No? Than we don't care if you're paying us to use it -- no fucking deal. No one here understands that BUSINESS IS ABOUT MAKING MONEY. It is not about encouraging RMS' Marxist agenda or Linus' crappy broken UNIX-wannabe kernel. (Inidentally, I feel that RMS would have a very different attitude if he had ever held a real engineer's position. He's spent his whole life hiding in universities, sucking on the public teat with milk dripping into his filthy bum's beard, and therefore his opinions are of no value to anyone but graduate students.) Most of the time, a businessman is willing to pay for a quality product as an investment for his business' future rather than use a crappy freeware alternative just to save a few bucks today.
We use Oracle. Let's pretend that we were evaluating (snicker) MySQL. It doesn't support transactions, rollback, views, foreign keys, or stored procedures. It doesn't fully implement SQL92. It doesn't come with a search engine, or an XML parser, or half of the tools (schema browsers, database managers and such) that Oracle does. It doesn't scale (at least not to our multi-terabyte needs), and there aren't a lot of MySQL experts in the DBA market. It's not supported by our application server. Therefore, the facts that it is free and open-source are irrelevant. End of story. Yes, the sad fact is that even fucking SQL Server is more fit than MySQL to be an enterprise database.
Stop: and realize that the only people reading OSDN are bored college kids who like MP3s and think they're l337 because they can install Red Hat. Stop: and realize that the noxious odours your precious OSS mentality haven't permeated past the lobby, let alone to the development war-room or executive suites. Stop: and realize that IBM's and Sun's "support" of Linux is a PR move. And finally, stop, and realize that nothing on OSDN, including Slashdot, has ever been a legitimate news site. Slashdot and NewsForge just post links to real journalists, and press releases. You're just part of a little online boy's club which is neither known by or cared about by real IT folks.
I know you're just a lousy crapflooder, but I was with you right up until the Win2k Advanced Server part! (If you need more than NT5 Server, you need Solaris. 'Nuff said.) However, it is ironic that businesses using Oracle lose substantial amounts of money anyway -- it says so on the contract and the invoice.:-)
Then again, I like alot of pointless things that unnecessarily devour system resources.
Like GNU/Linux?
Seriously, though, has anyone else heard the legend that Clippy is so unpopular, that contractors working in the MS Office division are required to sign an NDA stating that they will not divulge the true identity of his creator?
Also of interest is the way Malaysia is investing hugely into a diesel mixture which consists of diesel and replaceble palm oil!
Hell yes, palm oil! Naturally produced by all males over the age of 13, this milky substance can be manufactured by applying minimal mechanical motion to pornography. The only by-product is chafing. (Although reduction of visual acuity and hirsutism in the producer have been attributed as such, these symptoms have not been reproduced in in my extensive laboratory testing.)
You are clearly not a ninja. We do teleport all the time, afterall... I agree complete with Mr.Portugese AC, and my language in English. Then again, I speak 32 languages fluently, and maybe those languages rub off on my judgement and interpetation of English, and I may be drugged, so anything I say cannot be trusted.
I find, as a Ninja, that this holographic "teleportation" would not be very useful. As Ninja, we are in the business of not being seen. I would perhaps invest in such technology if it allowed my image to be transported several thousand miles and then not be seen, but I would not pay more than $20,000 for that level of usefulness.
This is a moot point, however, because we Ninja have never had problems with transportation. We can climb trees, summon magical dragons, and when all else fails, obtain first-class plane tickets by threatening the counter-girls with our forboding Ninja garb and deadly-keen ninja-to.
This is not to imply that Ninjas never have a use for real teleportation... I would refer anyone who disputes this to Ninja Gaiden 2, in which I believe the Art of Teleportation is demonstrated quite clearly, along with the Art of Magic Shuriken and the Art of Flaming Balls of Death.
However, teleportation is an art which Ninja rarely bother with, because of the intense mathematical calulations involved to avoid teleporting into walls, the ground, the moon, or dog feces. (I'll tell you, it sure is embarassing to use your mystical Ninja powers of teleportation, only to discover that you are standing in dog feces! You must return to the dojo in shame, and endure the jibes of your Ninja brethen, which are as sharp as the shuriken! "Hey, brother Ninja! Is it me, or do I smell the odor of dog feces! Oh! It is you, who has stepped in dog feces! Ha! ha!" Oh, it is so frustrating!)
At this point, you may be wondering what the preferred method of Ninja transportation is. Well, I'll tell you. It is, obviously, the Kawasaki Ninja.
But whatever method of transportations used, a Ninja will not rest until he has completed his mission. The Ninja's mission is simple: to obtain and enjoy as many delicious pancakes as possible. Pancakes covered with syrup and sometimes blueberries are the soul of the Ninja clan and must be obtained and enjoyed at any cost, lest the ancestors set upon us with their firey ancestral wrath. Yes, we shall obtain and enjoy all pancakes that exist, and only then, when all pancakes have been obtained and enjoyed, shall we rest.
Slashdot Mirror
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Whot? When? I don't believe you! Argh, well Canada is still the world leader in man-moose sexual relations, and you can take that to the bank! With maple syrup, eh?
Anyhoo, we're catching up to you Statesmen right fast! You may have the PenisBird and PenisFish, but beware! for Canada is now armed with the one and only PenisTimothy, running OpenBSD! Eh!
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After reading your post, I used The Power of the Internet to find some pictures.
- Here is a picture of the Nazi SS, circa 1934.
- Here is a NJSP photo, circa 1920s.
Holy shit, look at the guy third from the left in the NJSP picture. Goddamned scary if you ask me... perhaps your sister would get a kick out of seeing that.--
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I don't believe that the average user is incapable of telling the speed difference between an IDE and SCSI disks. Unless the machine is dreadfully outdated, the user will not be able to tell the difference when he is typing in MS Word. He will, however, notice the difference when the Word is first loading, and this is when most users will experience frustration, BUT, as you said, once the application is loaded into memory, assuming that the machine has plenty of RAM, it won't start thrashing.
This again calls attention to the imbalance in most OEM PCs, which often include an 800MHz+ CPU and only 128MB RAM. Your average PC user would be much happier (although thanks to Intel's marketing, he doesn't know it) with half as many MHz and twice as much RAM. So I agree, RAM needs should be taken care of before looking at disk upgrades.
** Unfortunately, IDE is just so much cheaper that SCSI may be on the way out for high-end workstations. For instance, note how new Sun workstations have IDE drives, while in the past it was unheard of to have a UNIX workstation with IDE. (Hell, even the before-mentioned SPARCstation 5 has SCSI-2.) Apparently Sun has decided that unless the machine is destined for server-use and the associated barrage of disk access, it isn't worth the more expensive disk and much more expensive controller.
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MS Word is often used as an example of bloatware. Yes, it is a fairly large program, but I don't hold its size against it, because it allows the non-computer savvy to create nice looking documents very quickly, with very little work. But MS Word is not what is pushing sales of 1GHz Pentiums. The truth is that nothing is pushing the sale of 1GHz CPUs. Intel and AMD make them, and the big OEMs sell them without question. Ever ask yourself why you it's difficult to find new OEM 500MHz machines on the market today? It's because the big OEMs know that consumers expect to spend $1500-2000 on a new machine, and aren't going to dissuade them if possible.
I'm also going to note that this hardware manufacturer/vendor conspiracy seems limited only to CPUs. Look at what Dell and IBM are trying to sell consumers, and you'll notice how incredibly unbalanced these systems are. A 1GHz CPU with a fucking IDE disk? The disk was the bottleneck 700MHz ago, and it is now... just get yourself a 500MHz CPU for $80 and spend the money you saved on SCSI-3 hardware. But, as mentioned before, you can't buy a measly 500MHz CPU from the big OEMs anymore, so balanced PCs are now only available to relative "geeks".
My dad is VP of Engineering in a large company whose name (a household name, I might add) I won't mention, and he does all of his work, including use of MS Office 2000, on a 133MHz ThinkPad. Doesn't sound like MS Office is selling new systems to me.
The only software industry that sells new systems is the gaming industry. Even when the next generation of games doesn't require a new video card, many of us will go buy one just to make our old games even better. My primary workstation, which I upgrade about twice per year, currently has an 800MHz Thunderbird, 512MB of 133MHz Crucial SDRAM, and an ELSA GeForce 2 Ultra. In addition to gaming, I use this box for my development work, but you can bet your ass that I didn't buy a $400 video card for writing C++ (yes, Carmack might, but I don't develop games). I bought the card because, as a gamer, playing Tribes 2 (just picked it up yesterday, actually) smoothly at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color just r0X0rs.
Incidentally, my firewall is a 170MHz SPARCstation 5, but I'm not going to be playing TFC on that anytime soon.
I believe that the WWW is the real "killer app", and only revolutionary Internet client and server software will really push hardware sales noticably. (If IE5, Apache httpd, or Napster required a 1GHz CPU, hardware sales would be exponentially greater.)
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Once again, thanks... remember: each reply gives me points towards my Troll Merit Badge! (And the Scoutmaster will never fuck me if I don't get the badge. Timothy got the badge by posting his inane Slashcrap, and the Scoutmaster immediately cored his asshole like a rotten apple. All of the We-blows were jealous.) At any rate, the crapflooders are already making good use of my link, so I'm sure to get the badge... your flames are just bonus points.
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This is his impression of Linux: can it power our cluster of RS/6000s better than AIX? No? Than we don't care if you're paying us to use it -- no fucking deal. No one here understands that BUSINESS IS ABOUT MAKING MONEY. It is not about encouraging RMS' Marxist agenda or Linus' crappy broken UNIX-wannabe kernel. (Inidentally, I feel that RMS would have a very different attitude if he had ever held a real engineer's position. He's spent his whole life hiding in universities, sucking on the public teat with milk dripping into his filthy bum's beard, and therefore his opinions are of no value to anyone but graduate students.) Most of the time, a businessman is willing to pay for a quality product as an investment for his business' future rather than use a crappy freeware alternative just to save a few bucks today.
We use Oracle. Let's pretend that we were evaluating (snicker) MySQL. It doesn't support transactions, rollback, views, foreign keys, or stored procedures. It doesn't fully implement SQL92. It doesn't come with a search engine, or an XML parser, or half of the tools (schema browsers, database managers and such) that Oracle does. It doesn't scale (at least not to our multi-terabyte needs), and there aren't a lot of MySQL experts in the DBA market. It's not supported by our application server. Therefore, the facts that it is free and open-source are irrelevant. End of story. Yes, the sad fact is that even fucking SQL Server is more fit than MySQL to be an enterprise database.
Stop: and realize that the only people reading OSDN are bored college kids who like MP3s and think they're l337 because they can install Red Hat. Stop: and realize that the noxious odours your precious OSS mentality haven't permeated past the lobby, let alone to the development war-room or executive suites. Stop: and realize that IBM's and Sun's "support" of Linux is a PR move. And finally, stop, and realize that nothing on OSDN, including Slashdot, has ever been a legitimate news site. Slashdot and NewsForge just post links to real journalists, and press releases. You're just part of a little online boy's club which is neither known by or cared about by real IT folks.
Thanks for posting, fucko!
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Seriously, though, has anyone else heard the legend that Clippy is so unpopular, that contractors working in the MS Office division are required to sign an NDA stating that they will not divulge the true identity of his creator?
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Palm oil! Wonderful plan, old bean!
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This is a moot point, however, because we Ninja have never had problems with transportation. We can climb trees, summon magical dragons, and when all else fails, obtain first-class plane tickets by threatening the counter-girls with our forboding Ninja garb and deadly-keen ninja-to.
This is not to imply that Ninjas never have a use for real teleportation... I would refer anyone who disputes this to Ninja Gaiden 2, in which I believe the Art of Teleportation is demonstrated quite clearly, along with the Art of Magic Shuriken and the Art of Flaming Balls of Death.
However, teleportation is an art which Ninja rarely bother with, because of the intense mathematical calulations involved to avoid teleporting into walls, the ground, the moon, or dog feces. (I'll tell you, it sure is embarassing to use your mystical Ninja powers of teleportation, only to discover that you are standing in dog feces! You must return to the dojo in shame, and endure the jibes of your Ninja brethen, which are as sharp as the shuriken! "Hey, brother Ninja! Is it me, or do I smell the odor of dog feces! Oh! It is you, who has stepped in dog feces! Ha! ha!" Oh, it is so frustrating!)
At this point, you may be wondering what the preferred method of Ninja transportation is. Well, I'll tell you. It is, obviously, the Kawasaki Ninja.
But whatever method of transportations used, a Ninja will not rest until he has completed his mission. The Ninja's mission is simple: to obtain and enjoy as many delicious pancakes as possible. Pancakes covered with syrup and sometimes blueberries are the soul of the Ninja clan and must be obtained and enjoyed at any cost, lest the ancestors set upon us with their firey ancestral wrath. Yes, we shall obtain and enjoy all pancakes that exist, and only then, when all pancakes have been obtained and enjoyed, shall we rest.
Rest? Did I say rest? I meant commit seppuku.
Arigatou gozaimasu,
The_Ninja_Messenger
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