I've been actively fighting against this since day zero. Unfortunately, my MP is Jim "lying backstabbing hypocrite" Prentice. He no longer even replies to my letters to his office.
A large company shouldn't have one person with this much authority but no repercussions. If it's really that bad, and the person is really that idiotic, it's not worth staying there.
Remember that during your working years, you spend a quarter of your entire life working! Make sure you enjoy it.
China never claimed that they were suddenly open. The Olympic organisation didn't seem to be claiming it either. Seems like it's only the rabble of "editors" who retroactively damn the country with this failure.
I wouldn't say that being stuck in time doesn't mean they don't hold up well. Bloom County, like Doonesbury and Pogo before that, were satire and sociopolitical commentary. They don't have much choice but to become dated when politicians retire, events are forgotten, and society moves on. It's a different style, that's all. Social cartoons become dated. Their counterpart (Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts) don't.
Definitely do so. I've never been a big fan of Opus. There wasn't much story, there wasn't much continuity, and there just wasn't much fun. Same thing with Outland. However, the original Bloom County was something I waited breathlessly for every day.
Get a collection, and make sure it's full of dailies, not just the "Sunday Colours."
OK folks, it's time to put this rumour to bed. Monty hasn't resigned. Over a month ago, a bloody GOSSIP COLUMNIST claimed he had an 'exclusive tip' about Monty. Nothing came of it. It was just gossip. (Although I have to ask if the idiot who originally published the claim had gone short in Sun stock.)
Two years ago, my computer wouldn't run any of the latest games. Now I have a new computer, and there are a few games from two years ago which I'd still like to play, so I head to the store in hopes of finding these now-obsolete titles being sold at a discount.
But no, it's not to be. Instead, there's the "Game of the year edition", containing the same game in a bigger box, for the same amount of money. Or the "Gold edition." Or the "Platinum Edition." Or the super-mega-multipack edition, with every low-cost add-on which came out after the game (which to be fair, at least includes some extra content).
How about selling two-year-old games for $20? Or is that too radical?
"If it's some sort of camaraderie you could get that from other games, flight sims, FPS, hell Second Life even. "
Or even, in fact, from...REAL LIFE!
(I know, I'm talking crazy again. Forgot my meds this morning.)
However, your point is well taken. "Why waste the money monthly in support of a product you think is mindless?"
I've never understood that either. I ground my way to the highest tier of armourcrafter in Dark Age of Camelot, the hard way. I didn't mind, although it was very slow. A coworker bought a cheat much like this one because it was too painful for him to level/craft without cheating. "WHY ARE YOU PLAYING THE #$(&# GAME THEN???" Even moreso, why are you creating a crafter character by cheating, when that's a completely optional trait? I eventually quit because the admins refused to deal with him.
Ah, RealNetworks and MPAA, battling for years in court, spending tens or hundreds of million dollars.
It does my heart good. It really does. I'd be hard pressed to come up with two groups who deserve each other more than them. In an ideal world, Real would win, leaving the MPAA dead on the floor. They'd stagger a few steps, and before getting a chance to celebrate their victory, drop dead themselves.
In reality, it'll hopefully at least hurt them both a bit.
So you came up with a different list than the wikipedia entry, and somehow yours is more authoritative? Also, is it any less morally reprehensible to comment on the surprisingly large number of female programmers on your list without digging deeper?
So let me do some digging into your list, or your methodology. You took Bill Gates and Paul Allen off, because they're famous for their business rather than their programming. Maybe so, but Bill at least _was_ arguably famous as a programmer before Microsoft made him a household name. (MS-Basic was the de-facto standard on many platforms.) Also, based on that criterion, I'd yank Eric Raymond off the list--is he really that well known for fetchmail, or for being an open-source gun-nut self-important greaseball zealot?
Also, Bill Joy is off of your list, which I find odd. Bill is not just known for writing vi (yes, and Java), but is more tightly associated with this project than almost anyone on the list. K&R=C. R&T=Unix. Linus Torvalds=Linux. Bill Joy=vi. For everyone else, the connection is somewhat more vague, even if they're recognised. (OK, maybe Phil Zimmerman=pgp is a tight connection, but how many people who recognise Don Knuth's name instantly tie him to TeX? Not more than half, I'll bet.)
None of which addresses women in computing of course, but does point out that I can claim that your list is every bit as questionable as the Wikipedia one. (Both of which are missing Jay Miner and Kathleen O'Brian, incidentally.)
I think the real mistake here is to seriously consider an article that plays fast-and-loose with statistics applied to an arbitrary and unvetted list.
Don't know about that. Haven't seen a lot of interesting stuff in Linux for ages, except for UI stuff and fast hardware adoption.
Solaris has added dtrace, persistent services, zfs, zones, branded zones, and more. dtrace and zfs are completely new paradigms in the Unix world. Persistent services are similar to cluster services, and in fact Solaris 10 has been called a single-node cluster OS. Behind the scenes, there was a complete rewrite of the network stack which cut CPU usage by an order of magnitude. (Remember 1x400MHz per GB interface? Not any more by a looooong shot.) More stuff coming down the pipe is a (long overdue) patching/packaging/requisite model, which promises to be quite interesting.
Solaris and MacOS seem to be where interesting stuff is happening, in my eyes. Linux is gradually growing up, but really isn't offering anything NEW or DIFFERENT. HP-UX used to be cutting edge, but got shot through the brain about 7.3 seconds after Carly Fiorina took over the company. AIX quit development on anything "new" after dynamic LPARs. To be fair, one could say that there's not a lot that needed to be done after that point. If Unix itself dies, then it'll be because traditional enterprise computers are no longer needed. Instead, we'll have enterprise-like environments made with junk hardware and mediocre OSes, but massively redundant. At any rate, the 'nifty' parts of Unix will get carried onto other OSes, either MacOS or BSD, or even Linux if the GPL zealots can get over themselves.
Broomfield Campus. Isn't that the place where they (a) constantly muck around with systems for training, (b) experiment with cutting-edge builds, and (c) don't have any strict uptime requirements?
Most of Broomfield was not designed to be highly reliable, because it doesn't have to be. You design your whole environment--hardware and OS included--around the sort of reliability you need. Banks, for instance, architect their Solaris environments differently.
First of all, what you say is true--as far as it goes.
SecureROM also disables ANY virtual disk software, such as Daemon Tools or Alcohol. Forget about using emulated disks for the game, I won't be able to use them for anything (and there are a lot of legitimate uses for such things).
It also calls home to activate the game, and will only let you activate it three times. That means you can install it on three computers, period. Seems like a lot, but reinstalling an OS or in some cases cases even upgrading the hardware on an existing computer will use up one of your installs. Oh, and if the authentication servers get taken offline, your game is useless. When EA stops supporting it, you will no longer be able to install the game anywhere.
How does it do all of this? By installing itself with administrator privileges, even when the game installation is invoked with user privileges. That's where some of the claims of 'rootkit' have come in.
Finally, let us not forget that historically SecureROM has been written _badly_, and caused even more damage to systems than it was designed to do. People have, on occasion, had to reinstall their OS after SecureROM.
Hmm. I'd allow one renewal period maximum. 75 years? Insane. 50 years is nearly as insane, but a _bit_ more palatable--but at any rate, it could only go ten years past the death of an individual copyright owner. In fact, on the death of an individual copyright holder, having an automatic ten-year expiry date might be a good plan.
Also, renewals (by a Natural Person) would have to be filed by the original owner of the copyright. No spouses or kids or grandkids living off of someone else's copyright.
Furthermore, copyright could not be sold. Ever. If a company dies, then its copyright material becomes public property.
Don't know if you'll read this days later or not, but now I'm curious. What would a good name be? What's bad about pc-bsd? Why are functional names bad? What are the alternatives to either functional or sassy? I guess "meaningless" is an option (Vista) too.
Cray is just barely more relevant to modern HPC than Silicon Graphics. Whether they're making a PC that runs Linux or a PC that runs Windows, it's still a PC. Yes, a massively parallel one, but it's a PC. The XMT series is the only really innovative thing that distinguishes Cray from the next guy down the street.
Computing has come to the point where commodity hardware can be almost endlessly strung together with commodity equipment to achieve the computing level necessary for most purposes. Furthermore, in the rare cases where it's necessary to go beyond this level, the cost of building a custom machine that outperforms commodity equipment is roughly one to two orders of magnitude more. Bottom line, it's just not cost effective for almost anyone to buy the cool high-end non-commodity gear anymore.
Which means that Cray will be reduced to a company that makes interconnects, like SGI is. Neat engineering, but the interconnects are now becoming commodity gear as well, which means that these companies won't be able to make enough profit to keep engineering as the focus of the company. They'll be forced into being a support/service company of their commodity hardware sold at a meagre 5% profit margin.
The one escape is gone as well--pushing Linux and Windows and the primary (or only) OSes means that they won't have anything special to offer. If, for instance, SGI had aggressively driven Irix, things might have been different for them.
The last front for development in current computing is in the labs of Intel and AMD, working on commodity gear. The days of boutique computing are dying.
Tons of people have already pointed out the silliness of having the control system on a publicly accessible computer. With some decent counterarguments, I can still clearly state that they're doing it wrong!"
Also, those stupid ad sites which grab any string and claim to have the lowest prices on . (i.e. bizrate.com)
Forget about affecting other people's results--I just want to filter mine. Automatic penalty for some sites, Absolute banning of some sites, and I'd be a happy camper again.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. The OP was correct--you seem to be looking at Harper's riding. Check out this page instead.
I've been actively fighting against this since day zero. Unfortunately, my MP is Jim "lying backstabbing hypocrite" Prentice. He no longer even replies to my letters to his office.
A large company shouldn't have one person with this much authority but no repercussions. If it's really that bad, and the person is really that idiotic, it's not worth staying there.
Remember that during your working years, you spend a quarter of your entire life working! Make sure you enjoy it.
Funny, that's exactly what I was thinking.
China never claimed that they were suddenly open. The Olympic organisation didn't seem to be claiming it either. Seems like it's only the rabble of "editors" who retroactively damn the country with this failure.
I wouldn't say that being stuck in time doesn't mean they don't hold up well. Bloom County, like Doonesbury and Pogo before that, were satire and sociopolitical commentary. They don't have much choice but to become dated when politicians retire, events are forgotten, and society moves on. It's a different style, that's all. Social cartoons become dated. Their counterpart (Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts) don't.
Definitely do so. I've never been a big fan of Opus. There wasn't much story, there wasn't much continuity, and there just wasn't much fun. Same thing with Outland. However, the original Bloom County was something I waited breathlessly for every day.
Get a collection, and make sure it's full of dailies, not just the "Sunday Colours."
OK folks, it's time to put this rumour to bed. Monty hasn't resigned. Over a month ago, a bloody GOSSIP COLUMNIST claimed he had an 'exclusive tip' about Monty. Nothing came of it. It was just gossip. (Although I have to ask if the idiot who originally published the claim had gone short in Sun stock.)
In short, nothing to see here. Move along.
Two years ago, my computer wouldn't run any of the latest games. Now I have a new computer, and there are a few games from two years ago which I'd still like to play, so I head to the store in hopes of finding these now-obsolete titles being sold at a discount.
But no, it's not to be. Instead, there's the "Game of the year edition", containing the same game in a bigger box, for the same amount of money. Or the "Gold edition." Or the "Platinum Edition." Or the super-mega-multipack edition, with every low-cost add-on which came out after the game (which to be fair, at least includes some extra content).
How about selling two-year-old games for $20? Or is that too radical?
"This keeps the system from wasting time swapping when it doesn't need to."
Um...no. That's not how it works. Thanks for playing, though.
Folks, quit lambasting the IOC. They didn't do this. VANOC did. Go after them if you want.
Advice to a lynch mob: Get your facts straight before lighting the torches.
"If it's some sort of camaraderie you could get that from other games, flight sims, FPS, hell Second Life even. "
Or even, in fact, from...REAL LIFE!
(I know, I'm talking crazy again. Forgot my meds this morning.)
However, your point is well taken.
"Why waste the money monthly in support of a product you think is mindless?"
I've never understood that either. I ground my way to the highest tier of armourcrafter in Dark Age of Camelot, the hard way. I didn't mind, although it was very slow. A coworker bought a cheat much like this one because it was too painful for him to level/craft without cheating. "WHY ARE YOU PLAYING THE #$(&# GAME THEN???" Even moreso, why are you creating a crafter character by cheating, when that's a completely optional trait? I eventually quit because the admins refused to deal with him.
Ah, RealNetworks and MPAA, battling for years in court, spending tens or hundreds of million dollars.
It does my heart good. It really does. I'd be hard pressed to come up with two groups who deserve each other more than them. In an ideal world, Real would win, leaving the MPAA dead on the floor. They'd stagger a few steps, and before getting a chance to celebrate their victory, drop dead themselves.
In reality, it'll hopefully at least hurt them both a bit.
Come out west, and you've also got Shaw, which is quite good (!).
I've also heard that MTS is pretty solid, if you live in Manitoba.
So you came up with a different list than the wikipedia entry, and somehow yours is more authoritative? Also, is it any less morally reprehensible to comment on the surprisingly large number of female programmers on your list without digging deeper?
So let me do some digging into your list, or your methodology. You took Bill Gates and Paul Allen off, because they're famous for their business rather than their programming. Maybe so, but Bill at least _was_ arguably famous as a programmer before Microsoft made him a household name. (MS-Basic was the de-facto standard on many platforms.) Also, based on that criterion, I'd yank Eric Raymond off the list--is he really that well known for fetchmail, or for being an open-source gun-nut self-important greaseball zealot?
Also, Bill Joy is off of your list, which I find odd. Bill is not just known for writing vi (yes, and Java), but is more tightly associated with this project than almost anyone on the list. K&R=C. R&T=Unix. Linus Torvalds=Linux. Bill Joy=vi. For everyone else, the connection is somewhat more vague, even if they're recognised. (OK, maybe Phil Zimmerman=pgp is a tight connection, but how many people who recognise Don Knuth's name instantly tie him to TeX? Not more than half, I'll bet.)
None of which addresses women in computing of course, but does point out that I can claim that your list is every bit as questionable as the Wikipedia one. (Both of which are missing Jay Miner and Kathleen O'Brian, incidentally.)
I think the real mistake here is to seriously consider an article that plays fast-and-loose with statistics applied to an arbitrary and unvetted list.
Don't know about that. Haven't seen a lot of interesting stuff in Linux for ages, except for UI stuff and fast hardware adoption.
Solaris has added dtrace, persistent services, zfs, zones, branded zones, and more. dtrace and zfs are completely new paradigms in the Unix world. Persistent services are similar to cluster services, and in fact Solaris 10 has been called a single-node cluster OS. Behind the scenes, there was a complete rewrite of the network stack which cut CPU usage by an order of magnitude. (Remember 1x400MHz per GB interface? Not any more by a looooong shot.) More stuff coming down the pipe is a (long overdue) patching/packaging/requisite model, which promises to be quite interesting.
Solaris and MacOS seem to be where interesting stuff is happening, in my eyes. Linux is gradually growing up, but really isn't offering anything NEW or DIFFERENT. HP-UX used to be cutting edge, but got shot through the brain about 7.3 seconds after Carly Fiorina took over the company. AIX quit development on anything "new" after dynamic LPARs. To be fair, one could say that there's not a lot that needed to be done after that point. If Unix itself dies, then it'll be because traditional enterprise computers are no longer needed. Instead, we'll have enterprise-like environments made with junk hardware and mediocre OSes, but massively redundant. At any rate, the 'nifty' parts of Unix will get carried onto other OSes, either MacOS or BSD, or even Linux if the GPL zealots can get over themselves.
Broomfield Campus. Isn't that the place where they (a) constantly muck around with systems for training, (b) experiment with cutting-edge builds, and (c) don't have any strict uptime requirements?
Most of Broomfield was not designed to be highly reliable, because it doesn't have to be. You design your whole environment--hardware and OS included--around the sort of reliability you need. Banks, for instance, architect their Solaris environments differently.
First of all, what you say is true--as far as it goes.
SecureROM also disables ANY virtual disk software, such as Daemon Tools or Alcohol. Forget about using emulated disks for the game, I won't be able to use them for anything (and there are a lot of legitimate uses for such things).
It also calls home to activate the game, and will only let you activate it three times. That means you can install it on three computers, period. Seems like a lot, but reinstalling an OS or in some cases cases even upgrading the hardware on an existing computer will use up one of your installs. Oh, and if the authentication servers get taken offline, your game is useless. When EA stops supporting it, you will no longer be able to install the game anywhere.
How does it do all of this? By installing itself with administrator privileges, even when the game installation is invoked with user privileges. That's where some of the claims of 'rootkit' have come in.
Finally, let us not forget that historically SecureROM has been written _badly_, and caused even more damage to systems than it was designed to do. People have, on occasion, had to reinstall their OS after SecureROM.
Hmm. I'd allow one renewal period maximum. 75 years? Insane. 50 years is nearly as insane, but a _bit_ more palatable--but at any rate, it could only go ten years past the death of an individual copyright owner. In fact, on the death of an individual copyright holder, having an automatic ten-year expiry date might be a good plan.
Also, renewals (by a Natural Person) would have to be filed by the original owner of the copyright. No spouses or kids or grandkids living off of someone else's copyright.
Furthermore, copyright could not be sold. Ever. If a company dies, then its copyright material becomes public property.
Hmm. Now we're getting somewhere.
Don't know if you'll read this days later or not, but now I'm curious. What would a good name be? What's bad about pc-bsd? Why are functional names bad? What are the alternatives to either functional or sassy? I guess "meaningless" is an option (Vista) too.
"...about two years before the bid was launched..."
Case closed. Everyone go home.
Well, that's how it would work in my fantasy universe at least.
"...can a city (or any business or Web property) stop people from posting a link to its site?"
Sure. Take down the website.
Otherwise, don't go to the effort of making a public site and then suing people for pointing to it. Seriously, how many brain cells does it take?
What, you would prefer Pornographic Puma?
Or perhaps Vomiting Vole?
Infectious Iguanadon? (presumably obsolete before release)
Twisted Tapir?
Yeah, these are MUCH better. For certain definitions of "better."
Cray is just barely more relevant to modern HPC than Silicon Graphics. Whether they're making a PC that runs Linux or a PC that runs Windows, it's still a PC. Yes, a massively parallel one, but it's a PC. The XMT series is the only really innovative thing that distinguishes Cray from the next guy down the street.
Computing has come to the point where commodity hardware can be almost endlessly strung together with commodity equipment to achieve the computing level necessary for most purposes. Furthermore, in the rare cases where it's necessary to go beyond this level, the cost of building a custom machine that outperforms commodity equipment is roughly one to two orders of magnitude more. Bottom line, it's just not cost effective for almost anyone to buy the cool high-end non-commodity gear anymore.
Which means that Cray will be reduced to a company that makes interconnects, like SGI is. Neat engineering, but the interconnects are now becoming commodity gear as well, which means that these companies won't be able to make enough profit to keep engineering as the focus of the company. They'll be forced into being a support/service company of their commodity hardware sold at a meagre 5% profit margin.
The one escape is gone as well--pushing Linux and Windows and the primary (or only) OSes means that they won't have anything special to offer. If, for instance, SGI had aggressively driven Irix, things might have been different for them.
The last front for development in current computing is in the labs of Intel and AMD, working on commodity gear. The days of boutique computing are dying.
Tons of people have already pointed out the silliness of having the control system on a publicly accessible computer. With some decent counterarguments, I can still clearly state that they're doing it wrong!"
In a heartbeat!
Also, those stupid ad sites which grab any string and claim to have the lowest prices on . (i.e. bizrate.com)
Forget about affecting other people's results--I just want to filter mine. Automatic penalty for some sites, Absolute banning of some sites, and I'd be a happy camper again.