Actually, you can pretty much blame that on Java - it's a disaster on highly parallel gear. (We got Sun to eventually admit that, after a disastrous aborted rollout of Directory Server on T series machines.)
Still - The T machines are very much a niche market, and that niche is disappearing quickly. I suspect there will never be a T5 processor with any significant changes.
Good luck with the ProLiants. They ain't what they used to be, according to a friend recently ex- of HP.
Short answer, no. Not really. There is no UltraSPARC V. The 'traditional' SPARC architecture lives on in the M-series, which has SPARC64 CPUs by Fujitsu.
We are jumping from Solaris to RHEL as well. It's possible that we work for the same Canadian ISP, but it's more likely that our companies have made the same decision as dozens of others.
There's a lot of belief out there that Apothekar was the short-term CEO while they looked for a permanent replacement. In other words, this is probably it.
Besides which, HP is blowing up RIGHT NOW! The autopilot is broken, and the plane is headed towards the ground.
Let's be clear here. The headline could have been shortened to "Looks like it might be the beginning of the end (...) at HP."
They got nuthin'. Since they spun off Agilent, they've been sliding towards the cliff, and hiring Carly was the precise moment at which they went over.
I don't think there's a single thing that HP can do to recover at this point. Maybe they'll keep going as a printer division of another company when they're eventually bought out, but I'm not even sure that's going to be worthwhile for anyone to grab.
HP may be one of the last old-world tech companies to die, but they _will_ die, and I'd guess in about 3.5 years. (give or take - I'm not a market predictor)
Nah. In most data centres, dismembering a server with a roofing hammer would barely be heard. In some data centres, it would probably be routine procedure.
Interesting. I tend to forget that Reagan was actually considered a reformer--I always thought he was a relatively dim bulb who would be easily manipulated. I remember being absolutely disgusted that he got elected, but Carter didn't stand a chance of reelection.
So keep in mind that I'm speaking as an outsider looking in.
First of all, there was the fact that Bush's backers were mostly part of PNAC, and before he was elected, had publicly stated that their goal was to establish a permanent presence in several middle-eastern countries, waiting for a galvanizing event - "a new Pearl Harbor" was I believe what they called it.
And Bush himself was a slack-jawed blindly patriotic buffoon who didn't understand much of anything besides force and the Inherent Rightness of the USA. Much of the western world was hoping that he could get through four years without destroying the global economy too badly, and without causing much havok/destruction in the middle east. Then of course September 11th came along and became the perfect excuse to invade Afghanistan as a route to invading Iraq (exactly as described by PNAC in 1998.)
In other words, war doesn't have to be on the agenda to make someone a warmonger.
Sometimes you really do need it right now. More to the point, sometimes you need something that is guaranteed unaltered. Insurance adjusters have used instant cameras for decades, because they might have one chance to photograph a wrecked car or something like that. First of all, (unlike with traditional film) they can find out on-site if they got the picture they needed; and secondly (unlike with digital) they can pretty much enter it as claim evidence as a true representation of the subject.
Let's be clear here: Obama is not, and will not be remembered as the worst president ever - nor as the worst in recent history.
But dammit, he's probably the most _dissappointing_ president in recent history. Nobody expected Bush jr. to be anything but the incompetent warmongering buffoon he proved himself. Nobody expected great things of Clinton, but he wasn't really any worse than expected either. Hell, Bush Sr. was actually a pleasant surprise.
But Obama was the last great hope for the US, and he has turned into the worst sort of lying, deceitful, two-faced power monger. It's not that he's a dirtbag, it's that he actually came across as someone who gave a shit--until he got elected.
Carly put the company in a position to be profitable again--in the short term. She killed off R&D, she killed off the long-term projects and plans, and she turned the company into a "PC and printer" maker. That's all they do anymore. Nobody cares about the odd bit of HP-UX gear they sell (and would kill off, if the US government would let them), they spun off the scientific instrumentation into a new company (thank god!), and now they can't even enter the generic consumer product market anymore.
Fiorina destroyed the company, Hurd kept driving it towards the cliff.
Yeah, but that was an initial release. They FIXED most of those bugs, rather than releasing Win2000a, Win2000b, Win2001, Win2010, Win2057... all within the first three months.
Although it's not the way things _should_ be, early adopters can expect a bit of a rough ride. The problem with this model is that everyone is an early adopter, all the time.
It's so easy to be an environmentalist when you don't actually investigate the issues.
First of all, Gibson is not in trouble over illegal wood - they have documents showing that it was harvested and shipped in accordance with all international laws. They're in trouble over whether it was properly "finished" in India. This has nothing to do with environmentalism or sustainability, it's a political squabble between the US government and a company that stood up to them previously.
Secondly, 'Authorities need to have the right to say "Prove that it's old".' No, no they don't. That is called presumption of guilt. Don't know where you're posting from, but a good chunk of the world has a presumption of innocence, i.e. innocent until proven guilty.
Hey, why stop with proving that an instrument is old? Why not force the owner of an instrument to prove the source of the wood? Or that it's not ebony?
The bottom line is that there will be a small amount of corruption in the system--in ANY system. Tightening the laws unreasonably won't eliminate the corruption, it will only violate the rights of more innocent people.
I have finished more games than I care to remember, starting with Adventure and Zork I. I finished Psychonauts with a keyboard, and System Shock with its insane first attempt a 3D control system. I just didn't see any point in throwing myself into that last room to be slaughtered over and over again, and so I'm not a gamer. Right!
And yeah, the game definitely devolved in the last few levels.
Something that is skirted around in the discussion of grinding is the increasing difficulty of gameplay. This is one that bugs me - the Big Boss At The End Who Is Almost Impossible To Kill. It's a gaming tradition at least as old as Ultima, and it usually sucks. Yeah, it makes sense that you've beaten the minions, now you face the evil itself. Still, the skill requirements tend to increase linearly through the game up until that point, and then jump sky-high, making it insanely frustrating.
Some are done well: Shodan in System Shock was tough but beatable and the story drove you to that point. On the other hand, while I absolutely loved System Shock 2, I never finished it. I gave up after several nights of trying to get 30 seconds farther in the final Body of the Many fight. It ended up just being stupid. I don't care if winning the game causes Shodan to come out of my computer as a corporeal love slave - I can't be bothered trying to master that degree of twitch reflex, especially when it's completely out of line with the rest of the game.
Psychonauts? Finished it, despite the damned nets (and this on a PC with default key mappings!). I HAD to get the last chapter of the story!
So game developers, please: Don't say to me, "Oh you're 98% of the way through the game. Time to start throwing anvils!"
Agreed. I think back to 'the day', and while I had an Atari 400 and worked with both PETs and IBMs, the Apple ][+ was probably the watershed machine.
Half a decade in the future, the Commodore 64 sold more units but that's because computers were popular by that point. People WANTED them! Lots of people had been buying computers (usually horrible things - the Vic-20 or the TI-99/4A) because they were exposed to the Apple at work or at school, and when the C64 came along it pretty much wiped the floor with the others (even though it had its own issues), but as far as I'm concerned, it was the Apple ][ series that created the revolution.
The IBM was a business computer. Much better text, better computing power, pathetic sound, and nonexistent graphics. Oh, and an insane price tag--let's not forget that.
Agreed, except for "any risk." Sooner or later, companies will just stop trying to produce anything. The small private airplane market was a perfect example of this: The government assigned essentially indefinite liability to the manufacturer of an airplane, and after a while Cessna et al just quit making small planes.
Never is a long time. It wasn't that long ago when people said that cell phones were nice but they would never replace land lines.
I think that the key will be the interface and the functionality. There are some things which are better done with a (real!) keyboard, (good) monitor, and mouse. The box that controls them can be a traditional PC (hereafter referred to as the Grandpa Box), some mysterious server in the basement, or a tablet feeding the peripherals wirelessly. As we get more and more powerful systems, the need for the fastest and greatest will gradually wane. (It already has - people are more inclined to upgrade their PCs to get a clean OS build than to get faster hardware).
I actually think the comparison with tubes and records was accurate. Tubes and records are still around, but are a niche market now. They have their place, but have _mostly_ been replaced by other technologies.
I didn't say say anything about LibreOffice - I said they're killing OpenOffice. Their abuse of OO is what lead to the creation of LO as a fork, and when they saw that getting traction, they gave OO to Adobe, to develop. In short, they're going to force both forks into competition, and drive customers away.
It sounds like insane conspiracy theory stuff that is totally antithetical to how a company should be run, except that it's happening, and it's methodical.
Actually, no. No they're not. They're gutting _everything_, including the profit centres. They're actively discouraging the Sun customer base to look elsewhere. Our company is going to have spent about $15M by the time we've got off of ex-Sun products, and that's still going to be cheaper than the $18M _increase_ in costs over the same period we would have been faced with. Follow the Sun admin community, and you'll see the same thing everywhere: If there's a Sun/Oracle product, everyone is trying to get away from it.
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Actually, you can pretty much blame that on Java - it's a disaster on highly parallel gear. (We got Sun to eventually admit that, after a disastrous aborted rollout of Directory Server on T series machines.)
Still - The T machines are very much a niche market, and that niche is disappearing quickly. I suspect there will never be a T5 processor with any significant changes.
Good luck with the ProLiants. They ain't what they used to be, according to a friend recently ex- of HP.
Short answer, no. Not really. There is no UltraSPARC V. The 'traditional' SPARC architecture lives on in the M-series, which has SPARC64 CPUs by Fujitsu.
We are jumping from Solaris to RHEL as well. It's possible that we work for the same Canadian ISP, but it's more likely that our companies have made the same decision as dozens of others.
There's a lot of belief out there that Apothekar was the short-term CEO while they looked for a permanent replacement. In other words, this is probably it.
Besides which, HP is blowing up RIGHT NOW! The autopilot is broken, and the plane is headed towards the ground.
HP is doomed.
Let's be clear here. The headline could have been shortened to "Looks like it might be the beginning of the end (...) at HP."
They got nuthin'. Since they spun off Agilent, they've been sliding towards the cliff, and hiring Carly was the precise moment at which they went over.
I don't think there's a single thing that HP can do to recover at this point. Maybe they'll keep going as a printer division of another company when they're eventually bought out, but I'm not even sure that's going to be worthwhile for anyone to grab.
HP may be one of the last old-world tech companies to die, but they _will_ die, and I'd guess in about 3.5 years. (give or take - I'm not a market predictor)
Nah. In most data centres, dismembering a server with a roofing hammer would barely be heard. In some data centres, it would probably be routine procedure.
Interesting. I tend to forget that Reagan was actually considered a reformer--I always thought he was a relatively dim bulb who would be easily manipulated. I remember being absolutely disgusted that he got elected, but Carter didn't stand a chance of reelection.
So keep in mind that I'm speaking as an outsider looking in.
First of all, there was the fact that Bush's backers were mostly part of PNAC, and before he was elected, had publicly stated that their goal was to establish a permanent presence in several middle-eastern countries, waiting for a galvanizing event - "a new Pearl Harbor" was I believe what they called it.
And Bush himself was a slack-jawed blindly patriotic buffoon who didn't understand much of anything besides force and the Inherent Rightness of the USA. Much of the western world was hoping that he could get through four years without destroying the global economy too badly, and without causing much havok/destruction in the middle east. Then of course September 11th came along and became the perfect excuse to invade Afghanistan as a route to invading Iraq (exactly as described by PNAC in 1998.)
In other words, war doesn't have to be on the agenda to make someone a warmonger.
Sometimes you really do need it right now. More to the point, sometimes you need something that is guaranteed unaltered. Insurance adjusters have used instant cameras for decades, because they might have one chance to photograph a wrecked car or something like that. First of all, (unlike with traditional film) they can find out on-site if they got the picture they needed; and secondly (unlike with digital) they can pretty much enter it as claim evidence as a true representation of the subject.
Let's be clear here: Obama is not, and will not be remembered as the worst president ever - nor as the worst in recent history.
But dammit, he's probably the most _dissappointing_ president in recent history. Nobody expected Bush jr. to be anything but the incompetent warmongering buffoon he proved himself. Nobody expected great things of Clinton, but he wasn't really any worse than expected either. Hell, Bush Sr. was actually a pleasant surprise.
But Obama was the last great hope for the US, and he has turned into the worst sort of lying, deceitful, two-faced power monger. It's not that he's a dirtbag, it's that he actually came across as someone who gave a shit--until he got elected.
My US friends, I'm sorry for you. Really.
Forget it man, I go there first.
Hmm, in fact...
FIRST POST!!!
Dammit, I guess I've been around here long enough to see that become possible again.
After all, it certainly isn't on selling products!
No. Sorry, but no.
Carly put the company in a position to be profitable again--in the short term. She killed off R&D, she killed off the long-term projects and plans, and she turned the company into a "PC and printer" maker. That's all they do anymore. Nobody cares about the odd bit of HP-UX gear they sell (and would kill off, if the US government would let them), they spun off the scientific instrumentation into a new company (thank god!), and now they can't even enter the generic consumer product market anymore.
Fiorina destroyed the company, Hurd kept driving it towards the cliff.
Yeah, but that was an initial release. They FIXED most of those bugs, rather than releasing Win2000a, Win2000b, Win2001, Win2010, Win2057... all within the first three months.
Although it's not the way things _should_ be, early adopters can expect a bit of a rough ride. The problem with this model is that everyone is an early adopter, all the time.
It's so easy to be an environmentalist when you don't actually investigate the issues.
First of all, Gibson is not in trouble over illegal wood - they have documents showing that it was harvested and shipped in accordance with all international laws. They're in trouble over whether it was properly "finished" in India. This has nothing to do with environmentalism or sustainability, it's a political squabble between the US government and a company that stood up to them previously.
Secondly, 'Authorities need to have the right to say "Prove that it's old".' No, no they don't. That is called presumption of guilt. Don't know where you're posting from, but a good chunk of the world has a presumption of innocence, i.e. innocent until proven guilty.
Hey, why stop with proving that an instrument is old? Why not force the owner of an instrument to prove the source of the wood? Or that it's not ebony?
The bottom line is that there will be a small amount of corruption in the system--in ANY system. Tightening the laws unreasonably won't eliminate the corruption, it will only violate the rights of more innocent people.
Well...
Really, that's about it. Have a good time in the future. Do something totally amazing! Again!
(Aside: It's weird to feel like a newbie around here. I haven't seen so many 2-5 digit UIDs in years!)
Actually, I think you meant to say:
"Gone are the days of...any sense in FF."
Ignore the trolls.
I have finished more games than I care to remember, starting with Adventure and Zork I. I finished Psychonauts with a keyboard, and System Shock with its insane first attempt a 3D control system. I just didn't see any point in throwing myself into that last room to be slaughtered over and over again, and so I'm not a gamer. Right!
And yeah, the game definitely devolved in the last few levels.
Something that is skirted around in the discussion of grinding is the increasing difficulty of gameplay. This is one that bugs me - the Big Boss At The End Who Is Almost Impossible To Kill. It's a gaming tradition at least as old as Ultima, and it usually sucks. Yeah, it makes sense that you've beaten the minions, now you face the evil itself. Still, the skill requirements tend to increase linearly through the game up until that point, and then jump sky-high, making it insanely frustrating.
Some are done well: Shodan in System Shock was tough but beatable and the story drove you to that point. On the other hand, while I absolutely loved System Shock 2, I never finished it. I gave up after several nights of trying to get 30 seconds farther in the final Body of the Many fight. It ended up just being stupid. I don't care if winning the game causes Shodan to come out of my computer as a corporeal love slave - I can't be bothered trying to master that degree of twitch reflex, especially when it's completely out of line with the rest of the game.
Psychonauts? Finished it, despite the damned nets (and this on a PC with default key mappings!). I HAD to get the last chapter of the story!
So game developers, please: Don't say to me, "Oh you're 98% of the way through the game. Time to start throwing anvils!"
Quick, invent more 'stuff' to throw at it, so we don't have to fix the bugs we introduced in ff4!
Agreed. I think back to 'the day', and while I had an Atari 400 and worked with both PETs and IBMs, the Apple ][+ was probably the watershed machine.
Half a decade in the future, the Commodore 64 sold more units but that's because computers were popular by that point. People WANTED them! Lots of people had been buying computers (usually horrible things - the Vic-20 or the TI-99/4A) because they were exposed to the Apple at work or at school, and when the C64 came along it pretty much wiped the floor with the others (even though it had its own issues), but as far as I'm concerned, it was the Apple ][ series that created the revolution.
The IBM was a business computer. Much better text, better computing power, pathetic sound, and nonexistent graphics. Oh, and an insane price tag--let's not forget that.
Agreed, except for "any risk." Sooner or later, companies will just stop trying to produce anything. The small private airplane market was a perfect example of this: The government assigned essentially indefinite liability to the manufacturer of an airplane, and after a while Cessna et al just quit making small planes.
That barely made sense when you had World War I weapons and equipment.
Never is a long time. It wasn't that long ago when people said that cell phones were nice but they would never replace land lines.
I think that the key will be the interface and the functionality. There are some things which are better done with a (real!) keyboard, (good) monitor, and mouse. The box that controls them can be a traditional PC (hereafter referred to as the Grandpa Box), some mysterious server in the basement, or a tablet feeding the peripherals wirelessly. As we get more and more powerful systems, the need for the fastest and greatest will gradually wane. (It already has - people are more inclined to upgrade their PCs to get a clean OS build than to get faster hardware).
I actually think the comparison with tubes and records was accurate. Tubes and records are still around, but are a niche market now. They have their place, but have _mostly_ been replaced by other technologies.
I didn't say say anything about LibreOffice - I said they're killing OpenOffice. Their abuse of OO is what lead to the creation of LO as a fork, and when they saw that getting traction, they gave OO to Adobe, to develop. In short, they're going to force both forks into competition, and drive customers away.
It sounds like insane conspiracy theory stuff that is totally antithetical to how a company should be run, except that it's happening, and it's methodical.
Actually, no. No they're not. They're gutting _everything_, including the profit centres. They're actively discouraging the Sun customer base to look elsewhere. Our company is going to have spent about $15M by the time we've got off of ex-Sun products, and that's still going to be cheaper than the $18M _increase_ in costs over the same period we would have been faced with.
Follow the Sun admin community, and you'll see the same thing everywhere: If there's a Sun/Oracle product, everyone is trying to get away from it.