Pre- Service Pack 2, it was horrible, dropped connections and all that stuff. But since SP2, I really haven't seen a whole lot of problems. Not to mention, I've installed SP2 and had that action fix wireless problems.
I know that FF3 US is FF6 Japan. And I have played hacked translations of several of the japanese ones. It's been a while. I liked the idea of the job system.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to piss you off... but, compared to FF3/6, FF7's plot is just... bad. I mean, there were a lot of things about that game that just sucked. Aris? thank god she died. Save the world? Not before evil destroys an entire city and everyone you know. There were plot holes, anachronisms, too many guns, and too many useless characters. Plus, once you got Knights of the Round, you could beat the end in one hit.
Compared to others on that platform - FF VIII was pretty good (love the card system), but FFIX was just awesome. I dunno - seven just seemed kind of thrown together to me.
No offense, but how old are you? I'm guessing you're 21. And it's not your fault, it really isn't. The reason I'm saying this is that there's a really narrow range of age groups who profess to love FF VII, and almost universally, they're people who's first console was a Playstation; or at least, who didn't play a final fantasy game on Super Nintendo.
I was really ready to rush out and get a copy of this game, but now that I've heard someone compare it to FF VII, I'm going to have to second-think it.
In the mean time, go to your local game recycler and pick up an SNES and a copy of Final Fantasy III, or at least get a Rom of it. If you can find Chrono Trigger, pick that up too. Find out what a true, genious console RPG is made out of. Hint: it's not plot holes, confusing endings, and useless characters.
You joke, but at one point, Microsoft did release a LOT of products for "other" platforms. There was an IE version for Solaris at one point, just as Microsoft also released a binary of Apache with Front Page Extentions for SVR4 (Solaris) at one point.
on the other hand, I still see the occasional hit by Netscape 4.x in the logs...
Try working for a university Comptuer Science department.
Our faculty are an odd mix of "Stuck in the 80's/90's" (some of them "only" still use netscape 4.7, others are still wondering where their VMS went), and "So far ahead it's obscure" (as in, using a browser you haven't even heard of, because they sort of wrote it last week). Our server logs for our internal website are interesting.
One of the worst offenders is freaking OEM's who feel the need to bundle their own wireless / 802.11x detection and attachment application. I mean, really. I love Linksys, but even they are guilty of providing this crap with their wireless add-in cards. But OEM laptops are the WORST. Whether it's intel's centrino or whoever, those apps are universally stupid. The Wireless zero configuration utility that's included with WinXPSP2 is excellent, stable, and integrated.
Just brings me to another problem - Provide me with a goddamn driver. I want a DLL file which interfaces the API given to the OS and applications with the commands make the hardware function. That's IT. I'm looking at you, HP. I don't want a freaking systray app for NVidia, my onboard audio's "control deck", my printer (for ink management?), my wireless card, and every other goddamn thing in the computer - I don't want to know about it, I just want it to work!
There are HP Drivers which are no joking 300MB downloads. What?!? 300MB? That's an OS, that's not a driver!
Thank you. The job situation in this country sucks. Yes, net jobs are being created, but at a lower pay rate. And I don't have hard numbers - I have personal experience. The real-estate boom has hurt us all, except wealthy land-owners (house owners, now, but sounds familiar doesn't it). Jobs don't pay enough to live where the jobs are, places you can afford to live there aren't any jobs, and gas is too expensive to commute between the two. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and (speaking as someone who has a wife and kid and is struggling to break into middle class and home ownership) there is no class mobility.
I'd go one further, and say that, with the exception of DMB and Green Day, and nevermind Kenny Chesney, all those acts are 20 years old, and pushing 30+. Green Day isn't far from it, either - they've been around for... I think 17 or 18 years anyway, if you count starting from "39 smooth" and not from "Dookie".
like me, they have grammer than the average slashdotter.
Re:There's also the itsy bitsy license change...
on
Nessus 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
For starters, my datacenter is my office. Not everyone has a multi-million dollar facility with voiceprint ID and retina scan for their servers. Second, if I'm the sysadmin (and I am, one of 4), no one would question me hooking up a computer to the network. A third party provides our ethernet ports and transit; but that's all they do, and we're responsible for our own security. Third, we do have machines that aren't currently in use (either because they've been phased out and are awaiting their final fate, or just because they're in limbo, or what ever). Any one of these would be an excellent candidate for a small linux box. Well, any except maybe the gateway 2000 desktops from circa 1996, or the DEC Alphas. Fourth, and most obviously - if you don't have access to your data center, just run a scan from outside! Tell your co-workers I'm going to scan the netblock from my DSL line at home to see if someone could get in, give them the IP so you don't tripwire yourself, and then go do it. I mean, if it's difficult for *you* to get access to your datacenter, and you work there and have a legit reason, it's going to be unlikely some would-be cybercriminal will find a way to sneak a laptop into the datacenter.
~W
Re:There's also the itsy bitsy license change...
on
Nessus 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
*sigh*
Just get a $200 e-machine computer from best buy, wipe it, install ubuntu or whatever, and run the new nessus under x86 / linux. If you're worried about security or conformity of machines on your network, leave it turned off when not scanning. Or, boot off of a ubuntu or knoppix live cd and install nessus 3.0, configure it, and run it - save the config file to a thumbdrive for future runs - if you don't want to dedicate a computer to the task.
While I agree that it would be nice to be able to run it under solaris natively, x86 computers are essentially commodity hardware now. I'd imagine in the time it took you to type this post on slashdot, you probably could have walked around the office and found a computer that wasn't being used for anything - I know I could have.
See, you're interpreting the current state of office productivity software as free market, when it's not.
I agree - if it were a free market, the cost would drive people to competing products. The difference here is Microsoft used to sell office for a reasonable price (it was cheaper overall; and you didn't have to buy access and powerpoint, when all you wanted was word and outlook). They gained a foothold in the market place by building a product that was cheap and easy to use; the product became ubiquitious with office software.
Then, when there was no other office software (Lotus, Word Perfect, Corel, appleworks, whoever), they raised their prices. Now office is very expensive, but people just assume they have to have it because it's the only format you can guarantee everyone else has. To break the monopoly would require 1.) a comparable product, and 2.) everyone to shift at the same time to the same product. Until that happens, people will continue to pay $400 for office because they know that their business associates expect everything to be passed back and forth in.doc or.xls or.ppt format.
~W
Re:Something like this happened to me once
on
Webhost Sues Google
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I've had bad luck with some things that Google tells you for advertising, too. For example, when you sign up for the ads, you what keywords you want to advertise in relation to, and they tell you based on your keywords what position you can expect (i.e. on the 3rd page, or the 10th page, or whatever when you search for those keywords), and about how much they estimate the cost.
The thing is, once we signed up for some ad words, and we were told we'd be on the 2nd page. Well, doing about 100 searches later, we still hadn't seen our ad - on any of the first 5 pages.
Another time, we signed up for an adword that we thought would be particularly inexpensive, and found out a week later that it was costing us per day what they had estimated it to cost per MONTH. We cancelled that one immediately, too.
Yeah, I've actually looked at that website. But I've never used their software. Do you have personal experience? It's basically just that I'm reluctant to try something that I found on Google without a reccomendation - there's often little visible difference between "random app A that works really well" and "random app B that had a great looking website and is spyware-supported".
Do the writers of the software have a right to make money?
Yes.
Should a piece of software which has been largely untouched since Office97 cost upwards of $400? In this case, I say no.
This isn't CAD software. It isn't digital video composition software. It's just office productivity software. And there are free versions that are just as good to use (in a vaccuum; when you don't count interoperability with MS), yet everyone buys Office, and every year it's more expensive for the same thing.
Everyone feels they have to buy office for all the computers in their workplace, or for their kids to do homework, or whatever, simply because "it's what everyone else has". And free alternatives don't interpolate well because of un- or poorly-documented API's and changing standards - that is Microsoft leveraging their previous place in the market in order to lock people into dependence on their software and raise the price.
I do think the programmers at Microsoft should eat; I just don't think the CEO's need to eat Steak and Lobster every day.
expensive commercial software was impossible to pirate
Does not compute.
This is what they fail to realize. There is no software that's not crackable, short of things who's dependance on the internet will wreck their functionality if taken away (WoW).
There will always be a way to decompile, step through, and find the part of the software that says "Authenticity Check returns(good)" and pass that to any part of the program that asks for it.
I agree; I think in Tiawan and Russia and other piracy centers, software piracy is more of the effect of the economic situation, not the cause of it.
It doesn't matter what the laws are; between buying legit software and eating, people will choose to eat. If you take away the option for getting software for free, they just will not have software.
It's getting to the point now in my life where I'm financially stable and can afford to buy the odd game. But, even as such, I usually try before I buy, and that means piracy. For example: I just played through F.E.A.R. It took me about 8 hours to beat it. And, upon starting up again, I've realized that it has no replay value whatsoever. $55 for 8 hours? Thanks, but no; I'm glad I didn't buy it. It's uninstalled. On the other hand, Age of Empires III I downloaded, played, and liked; and I'm going to go buy it.
I origionally pirated my copy of Neverwinter Nights; but because I enjoyed it so much, I ended up buying the retail version, both expansion packs, and paying for all the downloadable premium modules. And I'm talking as they became available; not years later in the ultra-mega-pack for $40. I probably have close to $180 invested in Neverwinter Nights.
Every time I feel guilty about this policy, I end up buying a game and being pissed off about it. The latest example was Doom III - I bought it, and played it, and it too has lackluster multiplayer and no replay value.
It basically boils down to if you make good games, I'll buy. But, if you put out crap, I won't.
However, it should be noted that this only goes for 1.) Games and 2.) MS Office. Now that I work for tech support in the CS department of a university, I have access to the MSDN Academic Alliance copy of Office, so that's now legal, but I used to pirate it. However, I also used to feel bad about it; since I knew that the only reason I was pirating it was because I needed to be able to create word documents for specific purposes (resume comes to mind), and it's what everyone else uses; I'd have been technologically happy with Open Office. But it's to the point where I've found free programs to replace all the little things I used to pirate.
For example; CuteFTP - now I use FileZilla. Eudora - now Thunderbird. Nero - now I use burnatonce; though I'm still looking for a free (beer; possibly speech too) CD Burner that doesn't suck - burn at once burns images, and does it well, but doesn't do anything else. Photoshop - Gimp. Norton Corporate AV - now AVG Free. I don't even remember what I used before Exact Audio Copy. And I want to know where VLC has been my whole life.
I've also stopped downloading TV programs and Movies. Movies basically because I never go to the movies anyway (baby) and anything that's good, I'll buy when it's on DVD (I'd rather sit at home comfortable and be able to pause). TV - now that I have Tivo, I don't miss anything; and I've sort of gotten over the need to archive everything; but should I want to archive, I can always use TiVo desktop, a program to strip the DRM from the files, and re-encode the MPEG2.
So, basically, I'm pretty much proof of "if it's reasonably priced, I'd just as soon buy it". I'm also proof of "If you put out crap, and claim that piracy is hurting your sales, you're wrong: it's either too expensive, or it just sucks".
Upon further examination, on WoW she actually is a Troll. And she's blue. But, she does have big boobs. On Wow.
Me: "Hey, aren't you an undead?" Wife: "No, I'm a troll." Me: "...but, do you have big boobs?" Wife: "...um... [pulls up character sheet, does a 360] Yeah, pretty much." Me: "Ok." Wife: "Why do you ask?" Me: "... No reason; just some stupid thread on slashdot."
Yeah, dude. Come to Virginia Tech. We're expanding our CS program, and we just moved from the College of Arts and Sciences to the College of Engineering, where we get better backing and more funding. We'll take care of you.
Plus, we're a drinking town with a football program. There are 17 bars within 5 minute walking distance of campus.
Bundle up if you're from New Oreleans, though. There's about 2 inches of ice that's accumulated this evening.
I followed your wiki link to the article on SIPRNet. It mentions that the network is for the transmission of classified documents, including (SECRET//NOFORN) documents. Not being a conspiracy theorist, I wondered what NOFORN meant.
I googled it, and this is the first page that comes up.
I'm wondering when the feds are coming to knock down my door now... I mean... I wonder how much stuff like this is on teh intarwebs? When you go to the root website, it pops a javascript clickyesbox telling you in no uncertain terms that if you're reading this, you shouldn't be.
Yeah, not to mention... where do you go if you want to buy heavy hardware? If you need 86 processors in one machine? You can build a cluster, but you're probably going to spend what Sun would charge you for a sunfire 15k, by the time you spent the time on a consultant, rewrote and tested your hardware, bought your myrianet or whatever high-speed transport, and got it all running.
Not to mention - there's still a need for machines with 8 or 12 procs, and not to many companies selling them. Certainly none with the reputation for reliability sun has.
Yes, it's expensive and not for everyone... but some people really need it, so they sell it.
Slashdot Mirror
Pre- Service Pack 2, it was horrible, dropped connections and all that stuff. But since SP2, I really haven't seen a whole lot of problems. Not to mention, I've installed SP2 and had that action fix wireless problems.
YMMV of course.
I know that FF3 US is FF6 Japan. And I have played hacked translations of several of the japanese ones. It's been a while. I liked the idea of the job system.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to piss you off... but, compared to FF3/6, FF7's plot is just... bad. I mean, there were a lot of things about that game that just sucked. Aris? thank god she died. Save the world? Not before evil destroys an entire city and everyone you know. There were plot holes, anachronisms, too many guns, and too many useless characters. Plus, once you got Knights of the Round, you could beat the end in one hit.
Compared to others on that platform - FF VIII was pretty good (love the card system), but FFIX was just awesome. I dunno - seven just seemed kind of thrown together to me.
~W
Only 20 levels in Dragon Warrior.
And we used to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways, too.
~Will
Ugh.
No offense, but how old are you? I'm guessing you're 21. And it's not your fault, it really isn't. The reason I'm saying this is that there's a really narrow range of age groups who profess to love FF VII, and almost universally, they're people who's first console was a Playstation; or at least, who didn't play a final fantasy game on Super Nintendo.
I was really ready to rush out and get a copy of this game, but now that I've heard someone compare it to FF VII, I'm going to have to second-think it.
In the mean time, go to your local game recycler and pick up an SNES and a copy of Final Fantasy III, or at least get a Rom of it. If you can find Chrono Trigger, pick that up too. Find out what a true, genious console RPG is made out of. Hint: it's not plot holes, confusing endings, and useless characters.
~Will
You joke, but at one point, Microsoft did release a LOT of products for "other" platforms. There was an IE version for Solaris at one point, just as Microsoft also released a binary of Apache with Front Page Extentions for SVR4 (Solaris) at one point.
~Will
on the other hand, I still see the occasional hit by Netscape 4.x in the logs...
Try working for a university Comptuer Science department.
Our faculty are an odd mix of "Stuck in the 80's/90's" (some of them "only" still use netscape 4.7, others are still wondering where their VMS went), and "So far ahead it's obscure" (as in, using a browser you haven't even heard of, because they sort of wrote it last week). Our server logs for our internal website are interesting.
~Will
One of the worst offenders is freaking OEM's who feel the need to bundle their own wireless / 802.11x detection and attachment application. I mean, really. I love Linksys, but even they are guilty of providing this crap with their wireless add-in cards. But OEM laptops are the WORST. Whether it's intel's centrino or whoever, those apps are universally stupid. The Wireless zero configuration utility that's included with WinXPSP2 is excellent, stable, and integrated.
Just brings me to another problem - Provide me with a goddamn driver. I want a DLL file which interfaces the API given to the OS and applications with the commands make the hardware function. That's IT. I'm looking at you, HP. I don't want a freaking systray app for NVidia, my onboard audio's "control deck", my printer (for ink management?), my wireless card, and every other goddamn thing in the computer - I don't want to know about it, I just want it to work!
There are HP Drivers which are no joking 300MB downloads. What?!? 300MB? That's an OS, that's not a driver!
~Will
The first thought to my mind: an (athiest)
"Amen".
Thank you. The job situation in this country sucks. Yes, net jobs are being created, but at a lower pay rate. And I don't have hard numbers - I have personal experience. The real-estate boom has hurt us all, except wealthy land-owners (house owners, now, but sounds familiar doesn't it). Jobs don't pay enough to live where the jobs are, places you can afford to live there aren't any jobs, and gas is too expensive to commute between the two. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and (speaking as someone who has a wife and kid and is struggling to break into middle class and home ownership) there is no class mobility.
~Will
I'd go one further, and say that, with the exception of DMB and Green Day, and nevermind Kenny Chesney, all those acts are 20 years old, and pushing 30+. Green Day isn't far from it, either - they've been around for... I think 17 or 18 years anyway, if you count starting from "39 smooth" and not from "Dookie".
For starters, my datacenter is my office. Not everyone has a multi-million dollar facility with voiceprint ID and retina scan for their servers.
Second, if I'm the sysadmin (and I am, one of 4), no one would question me hooking up a computer to the network. A third party provides our ethernet ports and transit; but that's all they do, and we're responsible for our own security.
Third, we do have machines that aren't currently in use (either because they've been phased out and are awaiting their final fate, or just because they're in limbo, or what ever). Any one of these would be an excellent candidate for a small linux box. Well, any except maybe the gateway 2000 desktops from circa 1996, or the DEC Alphas.
Fourth, and most obviously - if you don't have access to your data center, just run a scan from outside! Tell your co-workers I'm going to scan the netblock from my DSL line at home to see if someone could get in, give them the IP so you don't tripwire yourself, and then go do it. I mean, if it's difficult for *you* to get access to your datacenter, and you work there and have a legit reason, it's going to be unlikely some would-be cybercriminal will find a way to sneak a laptop into the datacenter.
~W
*sigh*
Just get a $200 e-machine computer from best buy, wipe it, install ubuntu or whatever, and run the new nessus under x86 / linux. If you're worried about security or conformity of machines on your network, leave it turned off when not scanning. Or, boot off of a ubuntu or knoppix live cd and install nessus 3.0, configure it, and run it - save the config file to a thumbdrive for future runs - if you don't want to dedicate a computer to the task.
While I agree that it would be nice to be able to run it under solaris natively, x86 computers are essentially commodity hardware now. I'd imagine in the time it took you to type this post on slashdot, you probably could have walked around the office and found a computer that wasn't being used for anything - I know I could have.
~W
See, you're interpreting the current state of office productivity software as free market, when it's not.
I agree - if it were a free market, the cost would drive people to competing products. The difference here is Microsoft used to sell office for a reasonable price (it was cheaper overall; and you didn't have to buy access and powerpoint, when all you wanted was word and outlook). They gained a foothold in the market place by building a product that was cheap and easy to use; the product became ubiquitious with office software.
Then, when there was no other office software (Lotus, Word Perfect, Corel, appleworks, whoever), they raised their prices. Now office is very expensive, but people just assume they have to have it because it's the only format you can guarantee everyone else has. To break the monopoly would require 1.) a comparable product, and 2.) everyone to shift at the same time to the same product. Until that happens, people will continue to pay $400 for office because they know that their business associates expect everything to be passed back and forth in
~W
Yeah, I've had bad luck with some things that Google tells you for advertising, too. For example, when you sign up for the ads, you what keywords you want to advertise in relation to, and they tell you based on your keywords what position you can expect (i.e. on the 3rd page, or the 10th page, or whatever when you search for those keywords), and about how much they estimate the cost.
The thing is, once we signed up for some ad words, and we were told we'd be on the 2nd page. Well, doing about 100 searches later, we still hadn't seen our ad - on any of the first 5 pages.
Another time, we signed up for an adword that we thought would be particularly inexpensive, and found out a week later that it was costing us per day what they had estimated it to cost per MONTH. We cancelled that one immediately, too.
~W
Yeah, I've actually looked at that website. But I've never used their software. Do you have personal experience? It's basically just that I'm reluctant to try something that I found on Google without a reccomendation - there's often little visible difference between "random app A that works really well" and "random app B that had a great looking website and is spyware-supported".
~W
Do the writers of the software have a right to make money?
Yes.
Should a piece of software which has been largely untouched since Office97 cost upwards of $400? In this case, I say no.
This isn't CAD software. It isn't digital video composition software. It's just office productivity software. And there are free versions that are just as good to use (in a vaccuum; when you don't count interoperability with MS), yet everyone buys Office, and every year it's more expensive for the same thing.
Everyone feels they have to buy office for all the computers in their workplace, or for their kids to do homework, or whatever, simply because "it's what everyone else has". And free alternatives don't interpolate well because of un- or poorly-documented API's and changing standards - that is Microsoft leveraging their previous place in the market in order to lock people into dependence on their software and raise the price.
I do think the programmers at Microsoft should eat; I just don't think the CEO's need to eat Steak and Lobster every day.
expensive commercial software was impossible to pirate
Does not compute.
This is what they fail to realize. There is no software that's not crackable, short of things who's dependance on the internet will wreck their functionality if taken away (WoW).
There will always be a way to decompile, step through, and find the part of the software that says "Authenticity Check returns(good)" and pass that to any part of the program that asks for it.
~W
I agree; I think in Tiawan and Russia and other piracy centers, software piracy is more of the effect of the economic situation, not the cause of it.
It doesn't matter what the laws are; between buying legit software and eating, people will choose to eat. If you take away the option for getting software for free, they just will not have software.
~W
It's getting to the point now in my life where I'm financially stable and can afford to buy the odd game. But, even as such, I usually try before I buy, and that means piracy. For example: I just played through F.E.A.R. It took me about 8 hours to beat it. And, upon starting up again, I've realized that it has no replay value whatsoever. $55 for 8 hours? Thanks, but no; I'm glad I didn't buy it. It's uninstalled. On the other hand, Age of Empires III I downloaded, played, and liked; and I'm going to go buy it.
I origionally pirated my copy of Neverwinter Nights; but because I enjoyed it so much, I ended up buying the retail version, both expansion packs, and paying for all the downloadable premium modules. And I'm talking as they became available; not years later in the ultra-mega-pack for $40. I probably have close to $180 invested in Neverwinter Nights.
Every time I feel guilty about this policy, I end up buying a game and being pissed off about it. The latest example was Doom III - I bought it, and played it, and it too has lackluster multiplayer and no replay value.
It basically boils down to if you make good games, I'll buy. But, if you put out crap, I won't.
However, it should be noted that this only goes for 1.) Games and 2.) MS Office. Now that I work for tech support in the CS department of a university, I have access to the MSDN Academic Alliance copy of Office, so that's now legal, but I used to pirate it. However, I also used to feel bad about it; since I knew that the only reason I was pirating it was because I needed to be able to create word documents for specific purposes (resume comes to mind), and it's what everyone else uses; I'd have been technologically happy with Open Office. But it's to the point where I've found free programs to replace all the little things I used to pirate.
For example; CuteFTP - now I use FileZilla. Eudora - now Thunderbird. Nero - now I use burnatonce; though I'm still looking for a free (beer; possibly speech too) CD Burner that doesn't suck - burn at once burns images, and does it well, but doesn't do anything else. Photoshop - Gimp. Norton Corporate AV - now AVG Free. I don't even remember what I used before Exact Audio Copy. And I want to know where VLC has been my whole life.
I've also stopped downloading TV programs and Movies. Movies basically because I never go to the movies anyway (baby) and anything that's good, I'll buy when it's on DVD (I'd rather sit at home comfortable and be able to pause). TV - now that I have Tivo, I don't miss anything; and I've sort of gotten over the need to archive everything; but should I want to archive, I can always use TiVo desktop, a program to strip the DRM from the files, and re-encode the MPEG2.
So, basically, I'm pretty much proof of "if it's reasonably priced, I'd just as soon buy it". I'm also proof of "If you put out crap, and claim that piracy is hurting your sales, you're wrong: it's either too expensive, or it just sucks".
~W
Upon further examination, on WoW she actually is a Troll. And she's blue. But, she does have big boobs. On Wow.
Me: "Hey, aren't you an undead?"
Wife: "No, I'm a troll."
Me: "...but, do you have big boobs?"
Wife: "...um... [pulls up character sheet, does a 360] Yeah, pretty much."
Me: "Ok."
Wife: "Why do you ask?"
Me: "... No reason; just some stupid thread on slashdot."
~Will
Or, to rephrase:
The female form is beautiful. It's curves and moves and hints left unsaid are equally attractive to both sexes.
And, yes, my wife does play a large breasted undead in WoW, and yes IRL, IBTC.
~W
Yeah, dude. Come to Virginia Tech. We're expanding our CS program, and we just moved from the College of Arts and Sciences to the College of Engineering, where we get better backing and more funding. We'll take care of you.
Plus, we're a drinking town with a football program. There are 17 bars within 5 minute walking distance of campus.
Bundle up if you're from New Oreleans, though. There's about 2 inches of ice that's accumulated this evening.
//sysadmin, technical staff, CS department, VT.
~W
I followed your wiki link to the article on SIPRNet. It mentions that the network is for the transmission of classified documents, including (SECRET//NOFORN) documents. Not being a conspiracy theorist, I wondered what NOFORN meant.
I googled it, and this is the first page that comes up.
I'm wondering when the feds are coming to knock down my door now... I mean... I wonder how much stuff like this is on teh intarwebs? When you go to the root website, it pops a javascript clickyesbox telling you in no uncertain terms that if you're reading this, you shouldn't be.
I'm Super, thanks for asking!
Yeah, not to mention... where do you go if you want to buy heavy hardware? If you need 86 processors in one machine? You can build a cluster, but you're probably going to spend what Sun would charge you for a sunfire 15k, by the time you spent the time on a consultant, rewrote and tested your hardware, bought your myrianet or whatever high-speed transport, and got it all running.
Not to mention - there's still a need for machines with 8 or 12 procs, and not to many companies selling them. Certainly none with the reputation for reliability sun has.
Yes, it's expensive and not for everyone... but some people really need it, so they sell it.
~W