I'll pay as much for this as I do for cable TV now: nothing. I strongly doubt that there's going to be more than 5% of this that's worth listening too, and I can get about 95% of that from my own music, our two good broadcast stations (CBC and CKUA), and the odd moments of silence that are quite enjoyable when they happen.
5% new of 5% worthwhile isn't enough to justify paying any money at all for.
Hey, check out our provincial public radio, CKUA. After living in the US for a few years, I definitely find that it's a significant improvement over NPR, and webcast to boot.
Just wait for six months. This is the first beast in a series of pseudo-clustered Sunfires. This is roughly a stack of 6800's, and there's going to be a MUCH larger machine released very soon.
OK, I won't argue that. I'd be surprised if XP really _is_ as stable as Linux, or something substantially better (Solaris), but I won't deny it since I've not seen XP running, or worked with it.
The thing that worries me most about this latest behemoth is the marketing (Oops! I mean licensing) model. As I understand it you will be _forced_ to deal with online registration and all that it entails.
No making fun here--this is something that should be "discussed" from the mountain peaks at the top of our voices.
Notwithstanding that, all of the points you make are dead on.
Unfortunately, it won't work. People are going to get this FREE promo CD, find that it doesn't work, and chuck the damned thing away. Probably less than 1/10th as many people would complain to the company as if they'd paid for it.
There are lots of fun tech jobs out there. I have one, at least most days. However, only last week I was talking to my dad about troubleshooting hardware, and we got off on a tangent. It seems that in his department at the University, the electronics shop guys have been feeling the changing times. Ten (20, 30, 40) years ago they were given hand-made, one-off controller cards to design, prototype, and build for all sorts of bizarre instruments. Then of course, they had to repair them when they broke, as well as maintaining the instruments themselves.
Now they're a crack team of highly experienced, low-level electronics guys who are reduced to swapping power supplies in PCs, and _maybe_ replacing filter capacitors in them. They're all looking forward to retirement because the fun has gone out of their jobs. About the only place advanced electronics will get you an interesting job now is in chip design.
The point? Fun moves around. (Note here that I'm talking about the fun that's inherent in the work itself) In 20 years, my SA job may be utterly dull, and reduced to clicking buttons. My hard-fought skills will be almost useless, except perhaps in OS/device development environments. That's the sad way it often goes.
In many ways, this is Yet Another Thin Client Model (YATCM). Five years from now, we'll move away from it again, and then five years after that we'll be back to the thin client du jour/.
I can see it now: "Microsoft: The fattest thin client ever created!"
So the evil goons at the evil company are trying to extend their evil methods to innocent computers.
But wait--are they? The question that comes to mind for me is WHY are they experimenting here? On the one hand, there's the standard MS approach--anything to make a buck, and gain market share. The Borg approach, in other words: Rewrite the definition of the OS or the internet, until you own it all.
But then you see this statement:
"We do not harbor the conceit that it will be possible to be fully successful in such an endeavor, but we do feel that the time is right for radical experimentation." The first part sounds like honest programmers, and the second part sounds like geeks. Could it be that (gasp!) MS has some good people working for them? Some people who really _do_ want to push the envelope a bit, regardless of the corporation's intent?
At any rate, I find it interesting and slightly ironic that this is coming from the company who first made >90% of the population aware of (or care about) what their OS actually was.
Technical site? Supposedly technical site? Not THIS slashdot!
/. is "News for Nerds." Playing with kids toys is very nerdy, or at least very geeky. Just look at Lego Mindstorms sales figures for the first two years. (Summary: They sold ~10 times as many sets as they expected, and the largest purchasing demographic was 20-35 year old men, NOT 10-15 year old kids)
Apparently this matters quite a bit to the average/. reader. If you don't like it, then don't read the bloody article!
An interesting point. They own the company, they own the data, end of story, right?
My objection here is that many (most? all?) of these people did business with Egghead when it wasn't owned by Fry's. My personal information is not something I want bought and sold with company takeovers. Maybe I don't like Fry's, and maybe I don't want them to know anything about me.
The problem is that ultimately the information you divulge to a very select few companies of your choosing will become common knowledge to the marketing departments of _all_ companies. A buys B who reformulates it into D, and then branches off E to F, who is bought by G. Suddenly A, D, E, and G are the four major companies out there, and they ALL have YOUR information, just because you dealt with A at one point.
Don't worry. As a non-programmer, I have threatened to pummel all of the coders who say, "well I don't want it like that, so go write it yourself."
I haven't played with Mozilla mail since 0.8.1, but it was such an ugly outlookalike (hah!:-) then that I'm not interested in seeing if they've got it functional now. (which it wasn't then)
I'm looking at Mahogany right now. A friend who found that Eudora and Pegasus didn't have all of the features she needed is loving The Bat right now. Check those ones out.
In Windows, I'd say Pegasus or Eudora, although there are other nice ones two. I'm looking at Unix clients now, and am moderately displeased, but Mahogany is looking promising.
My point on the 82000 (!) messages is _why_ do you need access to them all? Dump the whole directory tree to a CD or six, along with a copy of Netscape 4.7 (just so you can read them in the future), and then ignore them. I can't imagine needing ready access to many messages that old, even for a company that needs to keep seven years of records.
I don't know where my mind was. I said crash, and I meant hang. However, it does hang hard.
Playing about with running some CPU intensive processes in parellel, I managed to get the load average up to about 12 on a single CPU system. When it hit 13, the system would lock up tight. Nothing would get through--wouldn't respond to pings, wouldn't respond to interrupt codes on the console port, nothing.
Left the machine for four days (!!!) and it was still locked up. The only solution was a physical power cycle. My experience is that this is very predictable behaviour with Linux. (2.2.5 through 2.4.2)
These are web browsers. If your email is so important to you that you can't just archive (or trash) your 8200 messages and pick a new platform, why are you using a web browser for mail services in the first place? Here's a hint: They're not very good at it!
Now that's an interesting point! My experience has been that when overloaded...
1) mainframes and real Unix servers (Sun, HP, etc.) slow down instead of crashing.
2) Linux (and NT) crashes hard.
So the question is, does the OS crash on a given platform because of the hardware, the software, or a combination of the two? What will Linux on a Mainframe do when hit with an enormous load?
Unless the kernel has been rewritten extensively to deal with the hardware, I suspect it would crash just as effectively on an S/390 as on a stack of Pentiums. I'd love to find out for sure, though.
"I find it shameful that so many interesting machines are conscripted into doing nothing but boring tasks."
Why exactly is this shameful?
Our lives consist primarily of "boring tasks." Many of them are required, at least within the constraints of how we choose to live. (Is your job boring? If it's too boring, then you change jobs.) The ability to do the same old boring tasks in a new and (possibly) better way is nothing to be bothered by. A letter typed out on a wordprocessor will be professional and polished as compared to one on a typewriter (proportional fonts? Try auto-kerning!), and can make someone pleased with the results. (as well as being faster)
But the key is this: there are more interesting machines than there are interesting tasks. At least, the interesting tasks aren't getting neglected because the "boring" ones are hogging all of the resources.
When the original B2.0 article was mentioned the other day, I called it stupid sensationalist drivel. Now Lego has confirmed this--the don't intend to sue, they are happy to see Mindstorms hacked, and they're willing to go to impressive lengths to settle trademark infringement.
In other words, Business 2.0 is full of shit, and can be safely ignored.
That's right, I said none! Well, I guess Tetris qualifies, but there are _hardly_ any.
Nearly every non-kiddie game available has some tie to violence. Grim Fandango, one of the finest games written (not just coded--written) is set in the Mexican Day of the Dead, and still manages to involve violence and death. So does Zork. So does Myst, for that matter. So do all of the other suggestions I've seen, including Lode Runner.
The question is, where does violence become encouraging and gratuitous? This is, of course, different for different people. (hence the problem with games inciting copycat behaviour in some people and not others; the problems with ratings; and so forth.) In a correctional facility or that sort of thing, you definitely want to be erring on the side of caution, but literature and drama might balance the books against violence in a game which has them all.
The truly interesting thing is that the same argument goes for nearly every form of entertainment, education, and diversion ever created. Go figure!
This is the first article I've read in Buisness 2.0. I hope they're not all this bad.
Lego isn't walking some 'fine line' between two extremes. They know full well that hackers messing about with Mindstorms will help their sales and market penetration, and are hence doing nothing about it. End of story. The trademark infringement issue is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SUBJECT, and there's no reason for tying the two together, except for the sake of sensationalism.
Then there's the writing style.
"Using it, a propellerhead of moderate nerdulence could build a tic-tac-toe-playing robot..."
Ye Gods, I'd be embarassed to sign my name to such an ugly phrase. There are others just as bad.
So a badly written article that tries to create a tempest in a teapot. Whee! I did notice that most of the articles in the magazine are titled: ": To sue or not to sue." All of these things make very unanxious to read any more B2.0 articles.
I don't know what HP servers you're using. The PA/RISC servers are beautiful boxes--bulletproof and elegant. I've never seen a Compaq (and I've seen a lot of Compaqs) that came anywhere near the same quality.
OK, PGP is good software, it's a revolution, blah blah blah. All true. No questions.
It's also true that the US government investigated Phil Zimmerman quite extensively, and considered what to do about him. This went on several years.
However unless things have changed since I last got up to speed on things, Zimmerman was never prosecuted. No charges were laid, no time was served, no record was created. Phil is and always has been a free man without a criminal record (at least as a result of PGP). Is this wrong? Have things changed?
I'm not saying that he didn't go through a nasty few years, and that it was all stupid, but he shouldn't be treated like a saint. For that matter, neither should his side of the story be taken entirely at face value. Remember, there _is_ another side, even if the government won't/can't talk about it.
"As I was expecting -- another invalid comparison I've seen bandied about in this thread... because obviously I wouldn't have been applying to be a jogging instructor in the first place, I'd be looking for a job that fit well with my skills AND disability. There is a key difference which a pat one-liner like this ignores...
OK, that's fair--it was a cheap shot on my part. However, you also refer to her problem as an injury, which implies (in my mind) that something happened at some particular point to cause it. Dropping an axe on your foot is an injury. What she has is a degenerative disfunction. Furthermore, it was bad enough that she first raised it as a legal issue in 1994, seven years ago! When it got that bad, she should have started looking forward towards the day when her career would be at an end, and she'd have to find something else to do.
As you say, we're both dealing with our interpretations of a thin article (which drives me equally nuts). It definitely sounds to me, though, that this woman has been using the law and the courts to avoid taking any responsibilty for her own health and life. I'm living on the ragged edge of low-grade RSI, and am starting to make plans already for the time when I can't type and have to do something else. Why didn't she spend those seven years doing something like that?
You're right, but what do you suggest? The bottom line is that this woman is incapable of doing her job anymore. Furthermore, her employer has made every reasonable (and from the sounds of it, some exceptional) attempt to keep her healthy and able to work.
If she can't do her job, then the company shouldn't be forced to keep her on. She received long term disability, she received worker's compensation, and now she's claiming discrimination because they won't pay her to not do her job. In this particular case, what I think she deserves a big smack on the head.
Does she have an injury? Most definitely. Is it a permanent disability? With regards to her job, yes--but that shouldn't make her automatically entitled to keep that job. Get out! Deal with the fact that you've worked yourself out of this particular career path, and find something else to do!
Or put another way, you mention that you use a walker. Would you file a discrimination suit if you got turned down for a job as a jogging instructor?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll pay as much for this as I do for cable TV now: nothing. I strongly doubt that there's going to be more than 5% of this that's worth listening too, and I can get about 95% of that from my own music, our two good broadcast stations (CBC and CKUA), and the odd moments of silence that are quite enjoyable when they happen.
5% new of 5% worthwhile isn't enough to justify paying any money at all for.
Hey, check out our provincial public radio, CKUA. After living in the US for a few years, I definitely find that it's a significant improvement over NPR, and webcast to boot.
Just wait for six months. This is the first beast in a series of pseudo-clustered Sunfires. This is roughly a stack of 6800's, and there's going to be a MUCH larger machine released very soon.
OK, I won't argue that. I'd be surprised if XP really _is_ as stable as Linux, or something substantially better (Solaris), but I won't deny it since I've not seen XP running, or worked with it.
The thing that worries me most about this latest behemoth is the marketing (Oops! I mean licensing) model. As I understand it you will be _forced_ to deal with online registration and all that it entails.
No making fun here--this is something that should be "discussed" from the mountain peaks at the top of our voices.
Notwithstanding that, all of the points you make are dead on.
Unfortunately, it won't work. People are going to get this FREE promo CD, find that it doesn't work, and chuck the damned thing away. Probably less than 1/10th as many people would complain to the company as if they'd paid for it.
There are lots of fun tech jobs out there. I have one, at least most days. However, only last week I was talking to my dad about troubleshooting hardware, and we got off on a tangent. It seems that in his department at the University, the electronics shop guys have been feeling the changing times. Ten (20, 30, 40) years ago they were given hand-made, one-off controller cards to design, prototype, and build for all sorts of bizarre instruments. Then of course, they had to repair them when they broke, as well as maintaining the instruments themselves.
Now they're a crack team of highly experienced, low-level electronics guys who are reduced to swapping power supplies in PCs, and _maybe_ replacing filter capacitors in them. They're all looking forward to retirement because the fun has gone out of their jobs. About the only place advanced electronics will get you an interesting job now is in chip design.
The point? Fun moves around. (Note here that I'm talking about the fun that's inherent in the work itself) In 20 years, my SA job may be utterly dull, and reduced to clicking buttons. My hard-fought skills will be almost useless, except perhaps in OS/device development environments. That's the sad way it often goes.
In many ways, this is Yet Another Thin Client Model (YATCM). Five years from now, we'll move away from it again, and then five years after that we'll be back to the thin client du jour/.
I can see it now: "Microsoft: The fattest thin client ever created!"
So the evil goons at the evil company are trying to extend their evil methods to innocent computers.
But wait--are they? The question that comes to mind for me is WHY are they experimenting here? On the one hand, there's the standard MS approach--anything to make a buck, and gain market share. The Borg approach, in other words: Rewrite the definition of the OS or the internet, until you own it all.
But then you see this statement:
"We do not harbor the conceit that it will be possible to be fully successful in such an endeavor, but we do feel that the time is right for radical experimentation."
The first part sounds like honest programmers, and the second part sounds like geeks. Could it be that (gasp!) MS has some good people working for them? Some people who really _do_ want to push the envelope a bit, regardless of the corporation's intent?
At any rate, I find it interesting and slightly ironic that this is coming from the company who first made >90% of the population aware of (or care about) what their OS actually was.
Technical site? Supposedly technical site? Not THIS slashdot!
/. reader. If you don't like it, then don't read the bloody article!
/. is "News for Nerds." Playing with kids toys is very nerdy, or at least very geeky. Just look at Lego Mindstorms sales figures for the first two years. (Summary: They sold ~10 times as many sets as they expected, and the largest purchasing demographic was 20-35 year old men, NOT 10-15 year old kids)
Apparently this matters quite a bit to the average
An interesting point. They own the company, they own the data, end of story, right?
My objection here is that many (most? all?) of these people did business with Egghead when it wasn't owned by Fry's. My personal information is not something I want bought and sold with company takeovers. Maybe I don't like Fry's, and maybe I don't want them to know anything about me.
The problem is that ultimately the information you divulge to a very select few companies of your choosing will become common knowledge to the marketing departments of _all_ companies. A buys B who reformulates it into D, and then branches off E to F, who is bought by G. Suddenly A, D, E, and G are the four major companies out there, and they ALL have YOUR information, just because you dealt with A at one point.
Don't worry. As a non-programmer, I have threatened to pummel all of the coders who say, "well I don't want it like that, so go write it yourself."
:-) then that I'm not interested in seeing if they've got it functional now. (which it wasn't then)
I haven't played with Mozilla mail since 0.8.1, but it was such an ugly outlookalike (hah!
I'm looking at Mahogany right now. A friend who found that Eudora and Pegasus didn't have all of the features she needed is loving The Bat right now. Check those ones out.
In Windows, I'd say Pegasus or Eudora, although there are other nice ones two. I'm looking at Unix clients now, and am moderately displeased, but Mahogany is looking promising.
My point on the 82000 (!) messages is _why_ do you need access to them all? Dump the whole directory tree to a CD or six, along with a copy of Netscape 4.7 (just so you can read them in the future), and then ignore them. I can't imagine needing ready access to many messages that old, even for a company that needs to keep seven years of records.
I don't know where my mind was. I said crash, and I meant hang. However, it does hang hard.
Playing about with running some CPU intensive processes in parellel, I managed to get the load average up to about 12 on a single CPU system. When it hit 13, the system would lock up tight. Nothing would get through--wouldn't respond to pings, wouldn't respond to interrupt codes on the console port, nothing.
Left the machine for four days (!!!) and it was still locked up. The only solution was a physical power cycle. My experience is that this is very predictable behaviour with Linux. (2.2.5 through 2.4.2)
Mozilla???
Netscape?????
These are web browsers. If your email is so important to you that you can't just archive (or trash) your 8200 messages and pick a new platform, why are you using a web browser for mail services in the first place? Here's a hint: They're not very good at it!
Now that's an interesting point! My experience has been that when overloaded...
1) mainframes and real Unix servers (Sun, HP, etc.) slow down instead of crashing.
2) Linux (and NT) crashes hard.
So the question is, does the OS crash on a given platform because of the hardware, the software, or a combination of the two? What will Linux on a Mainframe do when hit with an enormous load?
Unless the kernel has been rewritten extensively to deal with the hardware, I suspect it would crash just as effectively on an S/390 as on a stack of Pentiums. I'd love to find out for sure, though.
"I find it shameful that so many interesting machines are conscripted into doing nothing but boring tasks."
Why exactly is this shameful?
Our lives consist primarily of "boring tasks." Many of them are required, at least within the constraints of how we choose to live. (Is your job boring? If it's too boring, then you change jobs.) The ability to do the same old boring tasks in a new and (possibly) better way is nothing to be bothered by. A letter typed out on a wordprocessor will be professional and polished as compared to one on a typewriter (proportional fonts? Try auto-kerning!), and can make someone pleased with the results. (as well as being faster)
But the key is this: there are more interesting machines than there are interesting tasks. At least, the interesting tasks aren't getting neglected because the "boring" ones are hogging all of the resources.
Two words:
Yay Lego!!!
When the original B2.0 article was mentioned the other day, I called it stupid sensationalist drivel. Now Lego has confirmed this--the don't intend to sue, they are happy to see Mindstorms hacked, and they're willing to go to impressive lengths to settle trademark infringement.
In other words, Business 2.0 is full of shit, and can be safely ignored.
My stomach broke as a result of the 1-billion second turnover. Of course, I _did_ celebrate with lots (and lots) of Thai curry...
That's right, I said none! Well, I guess Tetris qualifies, but there are _hardly_ any.
Nearly every non-kiddie game available has some tie to violence. Grim Fandango, one of the finest games written (not just coded--written) is set in the Mexican Day of the Dead, and still manages to involve violence and death. So does Zork. So does Myst, for that matter. So do all of the other suggestions I've seen, including Lode Runner.
The question is, where does violence become encouraging and gratuitous? This is, of course, different for different people. (hence the problem with games inciting copycat behaviour in some people and not others; the problems with ratings; and so forth.) In a correctional facility or that sort of thing, you definitely want to be erring on the side of caution, but literature and drama might balance the books against violence in a game which has them all.
The truly interesting thing is that the same argument goes for nearly every form of entertainment, education, and diversion ever created. Go figure!
This is the first article I've read in Buisness 2.0. I hope they're not all this bad.
..."
Lego isn't walking some 'fine line' between two extremes. They know full well that hackers messing about with Mindstorms will help their sales and market penetration, and are hence doing nothing about it. End of story. The trademark infringement issue is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SUBJECT, and there's no reason for tying the two together, except for the sake of sensationalism.
Then there's the writing style.
"Using it, a propellerhead of moderate nerdulence could build a tic-tac-toe-playing robot
Ye Gods, I'd be embarassed to sign my name to such an ugly phrase. There are others just as bad.
So a badly written article that tries to create a tempest in a teapot. Whee! I did notice that most of the articles in the magazine are titled: ": To sue or not to sue." All of these things make very unanxious to read any more B2.0 articles.
I don't know what HP servers you're using. The PA/RISC servers are beautiful boxes--bulletproof and elegant. I've never seen a Compaq (and I've seen a lot of Compaqs) that came anywhere near the same quality.
"If you don't use AOL or MSN, one's current ISP is always a good recipient of distrust."
What the hell does this mean? Are we supposed to have a certain amount of distrust that MUST be assigned to someone or something?
If I didn't trust my ISP I wouldn't be using them.
OK, PGP is good software, it's a revolution, blah blah blah. All true. No questions.
It's also true that the US government investigated Phil Zimmerman quite extensively, and considered what to do about him. This went on several years.
However unless things have changed since I last got up to speed on things, Zimmerman was never prosecuted. No charges were laid, no time was served, no record was created. Phil is and always has been a free man without a criminal record (at least as a result of PGP). Is this wrong? Have things changed?
I'm not saying that he didn't go through a nasty few years, and that it was all stupid, but he shouldn't be treated like a saint. For that matter, neither should his side of the story be taken entirely at face value. Remember, there _is_ another side, even if the government won't/can't talk about it.
"As I was expecting -- another invalid comparison I've seen bandied about in this thread... because obviously I wouldn't have been applying to be a jogging instructor in the first place, I'd be looking for a job that fit well with my skills AND disability. There is a key difference which a pat one-liner like this ignores...
OK, that's fair--it was a cheap shot on my part. However, you also refer to her problem as an injury, which implies (in my mind) that something happened at some particular point to cause it. Dropping an axe on your foot is an injury. What she has is a degenerative disfunction. Furthermore, it was bad enough that she first raised it as a legal issue in 1994, seven years ago! When it got that bad, she should have started looking forward towards the day when her career would be at an end, and she'd have to find something else to do.
As you say, we're both dealing with our interpretations of a thin article (which drives me equally nuts). It definitely sounds to me, though, that this woman has been using the law and the courts to avoid taking any responsibilty for her own health and life. I'm living on the ragged edge of low-grade RSI, and am starting to make plans already for the time when I can't type and have to do something else. Why didn't she spend those seven years doing something like that?
You're right, but what do you suggest? The bottom line is that this woman is incapable of doing her job anymore. Furthermore, her employer has made every reasonable (and from the sounds of it, some exceptional) attempt to keep her healthy and able to work.
If she can't do her job, then the company shouldn't be forced to keep her on. She received long term disability, she received worker's compensation, and now she's claiming discrimination because they won't pay her to not do her job. In this particular case, what I think she deserves a big smack on the head.
Does she have an injury? Most definitely. Is it a permanent disability? With regards to her job, yes--but that shouldn't make her automatically entitled to keep that job. Get out! Deal with the fact that you've worked yourself out of this particular career path, and find something else to do!
Or put another way, you mention that you use a walker. Would you file a discrimination suit if you got turned down for a job as a jogging instructor?