Stop sniffing the emmissions from the tailpipe man.
I realize that I am definitely getting trolled here, but... My previous car was an '86 Mercury Lynx. Basically a Ford Escort with Air-Conditioning and intermittent wipers.
Having navigated it through Center City Philadelphia, parking garages, Lincoln Drive, and rush hour traffic, it did NOT handle like a barge. And unlike my Isuzu Impulse, er Chevy Spectrum, it's suspension did not snap like a twig in normal driving. Another fun car with shitty suspensions are VW's. Just about every friend of mine who owned a VW needed to get some part of the suspension replaced.
I have yet to here of a compact car actually rolling over, beyond some idiot trying to turn 90 degrees at 50+ mph.
The braking distance and parts fallign off are improper maintenance or simple trash talking.
Alas I traded it in for my new war wagon, a 2000 Ford Focus. (Woo hoo, 6 more months of payments...)
Quite well. We want a house, but Philadelphia real
estate is priced out of the stratosphere. Until
it actually gets cheaper to buy than rent,
we are staying put. (We've done the math, $800/month
is a lot cheaper than $1600/month for 30 years with
taxes and TLC on top of that.)
Well I have 3 month salary in the bank, I rent, my wife and I haven't had kids yet, the car will be paid off in a few months, and I have a cushy job running a network at a science museum.
I was formerly a high credit-card balanced college dropout working contract jobs for Dotcom companies.
Let that be a filter of credibility for my input into the situation.
Add to that the fact that in virtually every case this is a sign of a company going under. You can quit early, or be laid off later (often not paid for
the bookoo hours you poured in.) You gain nothing
by staying.
Kudos to caring more about your company than your livelyhood.
Job security means implementing proprietary systems.
No, I replaced a guy like that. My job security is
in being cooperative and low maintenance. Think of it as the "Tai Chi" approach to career building.
They can replace me at any time. I know that. They
know that. When you live in a world of realistic
expectations, you find it a much friendlier place.
If you make it so they want to get rid of you,
no matter how bad an idea it may be in the big
picture, they generally will. Consultants are
very cheap these days.
Branding is SO the way to go for open source. Half
the reason the powers that be let me run RedHat is because I can get support for it.
(Or rather, they can get support for it if I ever
leave, get laid off, or get creamed by a bus.)
I can use MySQL because its getting to be a recognized name, and because I can always fall back
to the sleepycat license for projects that require
the dark side of the force.
Most of your turf wars (Debian v RedHat v Suse,
MySQL v PostGres, etc) are all about branding. There are very few functional differences that
any corporate user would notice.
I thought the whole idea of patent law was to get
new ideas to market by providing a temporary
monopoly to the creator.
It seems like we have the cart leading the horse. Inventors are now embedding their ideas into standards, waiting until adoption, and then enforcing their monopoly.
First - there is no product from Microsoft that is in direct competition. There will be
no product for the forseeable future.
Second - The NSA would require the source code
for whatever system in deploys. It would have
to component test all of the subsystems, and ensure that no new bugs are introduced with new
features.
This flies in the face of
the Upgrade Early, Upgrade Often mentalility an M$. (NASA users 486's in the space program, not
to be cheap, but because they are a known quantity.)
Third - What the government produces, all competitors share equally. What microsoft produces, it keeps to itself.
Now of course, within a week of release there
would be a slashdot post describing how to a
5kb patch applied to the fuel injector computer
turns a standard 150HP Focus into the 450HP model.
Well, I'm using a pair of IBM thinkpads to
run a web-based database at a folk festival this
weekend. They are sweet, even running mozilla they
can chew through the complex pages like a
any modern computer.
Of course, that would be because I'm using them
as X-windows thin-clients to a modern computer...
My top secret information sources are
Intel's website. You see, they publish what the
sucker looks like so people like me can design
applications (hardware and software) for it. Like:
Using that information I determined the architecture is ill suited for consumer applications. It has too many redundent parts
that consume mad power. Those parts are sped
up by speculative lookahead routines, and a
pipeline that makes the one in Alaska look short
in comparison.
I can neither confirm nor deny your other
allogation about my access to secret information.
I can however tell you that the matter is
handled by the State Department, not the NSA.
I used to be able to scratchbuild a system
for US$200. Since they redesigned all of the
motherboards and memory systems to "accomodate"
the new processor all of the cost advantages
of churning components out like sausage are lost.
Can you find a K6 anywhere? How about a Socket-7
motherboard. Sure they weren't the fastest. But
man, were they cheap!
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that I am definitely getting trolled here, but... My previous car was an '86 Mercury Lynx. Basically a Ford Escort with Air-Conditioning and intermittent wipers.
Having navigated it through Center City Philadelphia, parking garages, Lincoln Drive, and rush hour traffic, it did NOT handle like a barge. And unlike my Isuzu Impulse, er Chevy Spectrum, it's suspension did not snap like a twig in normal driving. Another fun car with shitty suspensions are VW's. Just about every friend of mine who owned a VW needed to get some part of the suspension replaced.
I have yet to here of a compact car actually rolling over, beyond some idiot trying to turn 90 degrees at 50+ mph.
The braking distance and parts fallign off are improper maintenance or simple trash talking.
Alas I traded it in for my new war wagon, a 2000 Ford Focus. (Woo hoo, 6 more months of payments...)
Quite well. We want a house, but Philadelphia real estate is priced out of the stratosphere. Until it actually gets cheaper to buy than rent, we are staying put. (We've done the math, $800/month is a lot cheaper than $1600/month for 30 years with taxes and TLC on top of that.)
My lazy ass is going to be a case study in immortality then.
I was formerly a high credit-card balanced college dropout working contract jobs for Dotcom companies.
Let that be a filter of credibility for my input into the situation.
Why is there a bullet hole in my foot?
RUN
2 good friends of mine programmed for a local game firm. They worked manditory overtime and were laid off at the end of the project.
Don't walk away from this situation, run.
Hey what if the fat bastard tripping over the action figures was my hero!
Job security means implementing proprietary systems.
No, I replaced a guy like that. My job security is in being cooperative and low maintenance. Think of it as the "Tai Chi" approach to career building.
They can replace me at any time. I know that. They know that. When you live in a world of realistic expectations, you find it a much friendlier place. If you make it so they want to get rid of you, no matter how bad an idea it may be in the big picture, they generally will. Consultants are very cheap these days.
I can use MySQL because its getting to be a recognized name, and because I can always fall back to the sleepycat license for projects that require the dark side of the force.
Most of your turf wars (Debian v RedHat v Suse, MySQL v PostGres, etc) are all about branding. There are very few functional differences that any corporate user would notice.
My US0.02
It seems like we have the cart leading the horse. Inventors are now embedding their ideas into standards, waiting until adoption, and then enforcing their monopoly.
This is dirty pool, and I hope it doesn't last.
Of course the Bush administration would rather we pick up the bad package... But hey, we just need to behave like Real Men.
For years the NT folks have never let us live down that their OS is certified and Linux was not.
This is really positive stuff.
If this were steel or wheet, MS would be under FTC sanctions for dumping.
First - there is no product from Microsoft that is in direct competition. There will be no product for the forseeable future.
Second - The NSA would require the source code for whatever system in deploys. It would have to component test all of the subsystems, and ensure that no new bugs are introduced with new features. This flies in the face of the Upgrade Early, Upgrade Often mentalility an M$. (NASA users 486's in the space program, not to be cheap, but because they are a known quantity.)
Third - What the government produces, all competitors share equally. What microsoft produces, it keeps to itself.
We have Microsoft telling the NSA what to do. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Or maybe it's one of Bill's minions I hear breathing over the phone line?
Now of course, within a week of release there would be a slashdot post describing how to a 5kb patch applied to the fuel injector computer turns a standard 150HP Focus into the 450HP model.
Of course, that would be because I'm using them as X-windows thin-clients to a modern computer...
Or just shit it out raw to the line printer daemon and look at in in dead tree format.
Explaination of the punchline:
Unix and the C programming language were mutually developed for each other by Bell Labs.
The frontal impact example was meant in the most absolute of smugness. Actually the numbers for SUV's in general suck.
Don't forget about displacement, and the fact the Viper has a boatload more emissions equipment that a comperable truck.
My top secret information sources are Intel's website. You see, they publish what the sucker looks like so people like me can design applications (hardware and software) for it. Like:
here for instance.
Using that information I determined the architecture is ill suited for consumer applications. It has too many redundent parts that consume mad power. Those parts are sped up by speculative lookahead routines, and a pipeline that makes the one in Alaska look short in comparison.
I can neither confirm nor deny your other allogation about my access to secret information. I can however tell you that the matter is handled by the State Department, not the NSA.
No honey, scrap our plans for tonight. Some guy on slashdot said I have no life. I have to go sulk in my pity corner.
...
Yeah, I know the folk festival is this weekend. Maybe if I can get my shit straightend out by then we can go
...
I used to be able to scratchbuild a system for US$200. Since they redesigned all of the motherboards and memory systems to "accomodate" the new processor all of the cost advantages of churning components out like sausage are lost.
Can you find a K6 anywhere? How about a Socket-7 motherboard. Sure they weren't the fastest. But man, were they cheap!