We've been hearing about a replacement for the B1600 RSN. This might be it, but I think that there's still an Andy design in the works.
Not like Sun has anything to replace. I know of one B1600 that was sold in this city, whereas I can probably name a hundred of any other machine they've produced in the last five years. The B1600 was a sales disaster.
Sony can point fingers all they want. Who signed the contract? What were the terms? If what first4internet did is (a) within the terms of the contract they entered with Sony, and (b) subject to prosecution, then Sony will be on the hook as well--as they should be.
You can't hire a hitman and say "well I didn't know how he was going to stop the guy!"
That's nice for you. "Unfortunately," my home stereo is quite incapable of playing downloaded music in a lossy compression format. Nor are my eyes very good at reading electronic liner notes away from the computer.
Oh yes, and then there's the 70% of my music collection that isn't available online, legally or not.
Digital downloads shouldn't necessarily _replace_ CDs. They exist seperately, and serve different niches.
Nah. The first three (IV-VI) were great old space adventures. The second three (I-III) were pseudo-deep crap. Lucas deliberately stepped AWAY from the model of light space melodrama, and tried to make 'serious' movies. That's why people are still up in arms.
So it would be trivial to find flaws in the code, and yet impossible without releasing it to the community. Seems like a bit of a conundrum to me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that it should remain secret. It's just that I have yet to see a single case where the Open Source Software Community(tm) has demonstrably done a better job than a company, especially for small items like this. I have seen many cases where dedicated teams of programmers have released their own pet projects and it's turned out to be a work of geniuss, but that's a slightly different angle. Fundamentally, OSS isn't really a saviour here, or in many cases at all.
As an aside; I don't have any fantasies about how the US government decides on partners, but hell--even Haliburton and Diebold still have to pretend to have at least a _little_ bit of accountability.
"Because the accuracy of the machine can only be demonstrated with the test data that is available. While this should be very close to reality, we have no way of verifying that the test data chosen is relevant to the case of the person on trial. With the source code, we can verify the implementation, and make sure that that implementation will accurately reflect on the defendant."
Ah, so the machine isn't guaranteed to be without flaws, whereas code review is guaranteed to find these flaws. Fascinating! Maybe we should tell the computing industry about this "source code review" idea, and make bugs completely obsolete!
Test data and source code review are BOTH required for a reasonable assurance of accuracy. The thing is that both have been done already in order to get the device approved, and the one aspect that's going to drift over time (test results) gets recalibrated on a regular basis.
The real test is whether the accused in this case would accept a government-led code review without seeing the code himself.
Holy crap, where do you live? This is EXACTLY the opposite of my experiences with Sun over the last decade.
"CTOs get much more sleep at night on non SUN solutions."
Wow. I can't dispute your experience, but it certainly clashes with mine. Sun solutions have been the reason most of my colleagues sleep peacefully at night.
My sentiments exactly. If I were an FBI agent, I think I'd be willing to risk the red tape and disciplinary action involved in an 'accidental weapon discharge incident.'
This is all only the latest even in a long history of similar events.
Re:Slitting their own throats
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I hate to say it, but you're wrong.
The masses WILL roll over on this one--it's what they do best! The only way that the average joe will actually get upset about this is if the mass media tells them to. Collectively, people are sheep and will do whatever their perceived authorities tell them. Worse, once they've gotten used to a bad idea, they'll accept the next evolution of it with a minor whimper. (and the next, and the next...)
If the RIAA's behaviour hasn't led to rioting in the streets yet, this won't make it happen.
The desktop wars, KDE vs. Gnome, are only of the slightest importance whatsoever to the existing Linux community. It's not impeding the adaption of Linux in the rest of the world, because most of the rest of the world doesn't even know what they are!
I like bcrypt for such things for a number of reasons:
1) It uses blowfish encryption, which is Good Enough for most purposes.
2) It's command-line driven
3) It's tiny
4) It's self-contained
5) It's portable
I have binaries and libraries for bcrypt on my USB keychain that run on Linux, Windows, Solaris, and HP-UX. I should add OS-X on there one of these days too. It hardly takes up any space, so I still have most of that 512MB available for data.
I just wish it followed the same command syntax as Unix crypt. Ah well.
You're right of course, but part of the real question at hand is, "where does your attitude come from?" On those days when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, it's really bloody difficult to keep a positive attitude, even when you know you're being irrational. A few years back, I made a correlation between my sleep and my attitude--after a night of insufficient sleep, I'm almost invariably in a lousy mood, and the tiniest things PISS ME OFF!!!!!
The question is, why? What is it about sleep deprivation that makes me irritable? Why doesn't being exhausted make me happier? That's a question I'd be interested in seeing answered.
Others have said it, I'll say it again: you don't use clustering in place of FT hardware, or vice versa. You use them together!
Take a server: Hot-swappable mirrored OS disks, N+1 power supplies, dual NICs (which support failover), dual cards initiating separate paths to your storage (through independent switches, if fibre-attached), ECC RAM with on-system logic to take out a failing DIMM. Oh yeah, and multiple CPUs, again with logic to remove one from active use if need be. (chipkill sort of stuff.)
Now take another identical server (or two) and cluster them. By cluster, I mean add the heartbeat interconnects and software layer to monitor all of the mandated hardware and application resources, and fail over as necessary, or take other appropriate actions. Gluing a pile of machines together in a semi-aware grid is NOT a cluster, and does not properly address the same problem!
Now once you've got this environment in place, add the most crucial aspect: Highly competent sysadmins, and a strict change control system. The former will cost you a fair sum of money in salary, and the latter will likely necessitate duplicating your entire cluster for dev/test purposes, before rolling out changes.
That's the beginning of an HA environment. Still up for it?
I've never really dug too far into Google's architecture, but I always assumed it was some form of grid computing. Is this correct, because I've never really associated grids with clustering.
I'd agree with you on the Netscape/IE comparisons by version fairly accurately. Netscape 4.7 was finally what NS4.0 should have been, by which point they were far behind. However, I believe that Opera was out by then as well, and was a solid product. However, it was "different."
As for Media Player, I honestly liked MS's offering until I believe 7.x That was a very simple, streamlined, straightforward media player. After that, they redesigned it into a nightmare. The current one (10?) makes me shudder. I'm not a big fan of WinAmp either, though. The Core Media Player is very good for everything except that it doesn't know how to deal properly with CDs. QCD is excellent at all things audio, but fails to do well with most video. Doesn't seem like there's anything really ideal out there.
Yep. If I recall, 5.0 was a commercial product, and then was renamed 5.0a and given out with a license key. That's when Sun bought them, removed the keylock feature, and rereleased it as 5.1, a free product. They then got busy and fixed a bucketload of bugs which resulted in 5.2, at which point they realised that even a bug-free version of StarOffice 5 was a total disaster, and started the OpenOffice project.
I supported SO5.1 for a year or so. Worst product I ever had to provide help for.
What you're saying is really a universal truth: Something new and unknown is harder to use than something old and familiar. Or more succinctly, people are lazy. If you give people the option, they will virtually NEVER switch to something new, even if it has significant (but not compelling to them) advantages. That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life. Ditto for MS Media Player and Outbreak--both utter excrement.
My question: Does it actually need something proprietary about Sun Java, or does it need something in the (open) Java standard that no one else provides correctly? For instance, the reason that MS Java fails at so many things is that it violates the published, open, official standard. Is that Sun's fault?
So unless there's something that extends or violates the Java standard in Sun's Java (and is necessary for the install), then any whinging about 'closed source software' is flawed and irrelevant.
"Yah, I know, you can't always trust the public, we re-elected W, but NOT BY MUCH, and he's on a much shorter leash - see above Economist citation."
Do you honestly believe that? If so, there's no helping the USA at all.
Guantanamo Bay is shipping virtually NOBODY back to their home countries. It has become the embarassment of the western world to see the Geneva Convention essentially used as toilet paper by the USA. Ditto for all of the nuclear non-proliferation treaties that they've signed over the decades. (In fact, _any_ treaty or agreement or contract seems to mean nothing in the US--just ask the Canadians about softwood lumber for an example.)
If Bush is on a short leash, it's being held by Rumsfeld. There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY WHATSOEVER to the American people anymore.
"The administration might (will) do unethical things, but they will pay at election time. As long as the framework is open and transparent, there is reasonable protection afforded to the public."
In the USA, elections are decided by the media. The media tells people how to vote, and they vote accordingly. If that doesn't work, the government fixes the election. It sounds like tinfoil-hat territory, but how many dead people voted in the last US Federal election?
Heh. Linux isn't entirely hype. Neither is MacOS, for that matter. Windows is mostly hype, and what's left is a really poorly designed OS, although it has a huge market share.
Hosting Oracle is hardly what I'd consider a 'specialised application,' although that may be the industry I'm in - Oil and Gas runs on Oracle like nobody's business. We're a midsized company, and have close to a hundred large production databases.
As far as the company itself goes, I don't honestly think that Sun is a relic--I think that their marketing department are criminally insane, and are the biggest reason that they can't win in the markets they should own outright. (Note: Jonathan Schwartz is the second biggest reason.) The fact that Sun is "still" pushing Java is because it's slowly taking over at the interface and infracstructure level. The number of devices I deal with which have moved to a Java GUI is breathtaking, for better or worse.
Don't know if Sun is going to survive or not, but if they don't it'll be because they're incompetent at selling themselves, not because they're a relic.
Haven't you studied your own history? It doesn't matter. Either enforce, resign, or get fired. Worse, enforce or get ostracised, investigated, and publically humiliated. McCarthy would be blushing at what's been going on in the last fifteen years in the US, courtesy of the Republican party.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been hearing about a replacement for the B1600 RSN. This might be it, but I think that there's still an Andy design in the works.
Not like Sun has anything to replace. I know of one B1600 that was sold in this city, whereas I can probably name a hundred of any other machine they've produced in the last five years. The B1600 was a sales disaster.
Sony can point fingers all they want. Who signed the contract? What were the terms? If what first4internet did is (a) within the terms of the contract they entered with Sony, and (b) subject to prosecution, then Sony will be on the hook as well--as they should be.
You can't hire a hitman and say "well I didn't know how he was going to stop the guy!"
That's nice for you. "Unfortunately," my home stereo is quite incapable of playing downloaded music in a lossy compression format. Nor are my eyes very good at reading electronic liner notes away from the computer.
Oh yes, and then there's the 70% of my music collection that isn't available online, legally or not.
Digital downloads shouldn't necessarily _replace_ CDs. They exist seperately, and serve different niches.
Nah. The first three (IV-VI) were great old space adventures. The second three (I-III) were pseudo-deep crap. Lucas deliberately stepped AWAY from the model of light space melodrama, and tried to make 'serious' movies. That's why people are still up in arms.
"You know, as a joke article I think this could be really funny."
That's exactly what I thought. We used to write stuff like this all the time, but it was for the sake of stress relief and amusement.
So it would be trivial to find flaws in the code, and yet impossible without releasing it to the community. Seems like a bit of a conundrum to me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that it should remain secret. It's just that I have yet to see a single case where the Open Source Software Community(tm) has demonstrably done a better job than a company, especially for small items like this. I have seen many cases where dedicated teams of programmers have released their own pet projects and it's turned out to be a work of geniuss, but that's a slightly different angle. Fundamentally, OSS isn't really a saviour here, or in many cases at all.
As an aside; I don't have any fantasies about how the US government decides on partners, but hell--even Haliburton and Diebold still have to pretend to have at least a _little_ bit of accountability.
Seconded from Alberta. :-)
It's contemporary Darwinism in action, and you're losing.
"Because the accuracy of the machine can only be demonstrated with the test data that is available. While this should be very close to reality, we have no way of verifying that the test data chosen is relevant to the case of the person on trial. With the source code, we can verify the implementation, and make sure that that implementation will accurately reflect on the defendant."
Ah, so the machine isn't guaranteed to be without flaws, whereas code review is guaranteed to find these flaws. Fascinating! Maybe we should tell the computing industry about this "source code review" idea, and make bugs completely obsolete!
Test data and source code review are BOTH required for a reasonable assurance of accuracy. The thing is that both have been done already in order to get the device approved, and the one aspect that's going to drift over time (test results) gets recalibrated on a regular basis.
The real test is whether the accused in this case would accept a government-led code review without seeing the code himself.
Holy crap, where do you live? This is EXACTLY the opposite of my experiences with Sun over the last decade.
"CTOs get much more sleep at night on non SUN solutions."
Wow. I can't dispute your experience, but it certainly clashes with mine. Sun solutions have been the reason most of my colleagues sleep peacefully at night.
My sentiments exactly. If I were an FBI agent, I think I'd be willing to risk the red tape and disciplinary action involved in an 'accidental weapon discharge incident.'
Says who and why? Says the US government, repeatedly.
8 6
http://www.physorg.com/news6901.html
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/35546
This is all only the latest even in a long history of similar events.
I hate to say it, but you're wrong.
The masses WILL roll over on this one--it's what they do best! The only way that the average joe will actually get upset about this is if the mass media tells them to. Collectively, people are sheep and will do whatever their perceived authorities tell them. Worse, once they've gotten used to a bad idea, they'll accept the next evolution of it with a minor whimper. (and the next, and the next...)
If the RIAA's behaviour hasn't led to rioting in the streets yet, this won't make it happen.
The desktop wars, KDE vs. Gnome, are only of the slightest importance whatsoever to the existing Linux community. It's not impeding the adaption of Linux in the rest of the world, because most of the rest of the world doesn't even know what they are!
I like bcrypt for such things for a number of reasons:
1) It uses blowfish encryption, which is Good Enough for most purposes.
2) It's command-line driven
3) It's tiny
4) It's self-contained
5) It's portable
I have binaries and libraries for bcrypt on my USB keychain that run on Linux, Windows, Solaris, and HP-UX. I should add OS-X on there one of these days too. It hardly takes up any space, so I still have most of that 512MB available for data.
I just wish it followed the same command syntax as Unix crypt. Ah well.
You're right of course, but part of the real question at hand is, "where does your attitude come from?" On those days when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, it's really bloody difficult to keep a positive attitude, even when you know you're being irrational. A few years back, I made a correlation between my sleep and my attitude--after a night of insufficient sleep, I'm almost invariably in a lousy mood, and the tiniest things PISS ME OFF!!!!!
The question is, why? What is it about sleep deprivation that makes me irritable? Why doesn't being exhausted make me happier? That's a question I'd be interested in seeing answered.
Others have said it, I'll say it again: you don't use clustering in place of FT hardware, or vice versa. You use them together!
Take a server: Hot-swappable mirrored OS disks, N+1 power supplies, dual NICs (which support failover), dual cards initiating separate paths to your storage (through independent switches, if fibre-attached), ECC RAM with on-system logic to take out a failing DIMM. Oh yeah, and multiple CPUs, again with logic to remove one from active use if need be. (chipkill sort of stuff.)
Now take another identical server (or two) and cluster them. By cluster, I mean add the heartbeat interconnects and software layer to monitor all of the mandated hardware and application resources, and fail over as necessary, or take other appropriate actions. Gluing a pile of machines together in a semi-aware grid is NOT a cluster, and does not properly address the same problem!
Now once you've got this environment in place, add the most crucial aspect: Highly competent sysadmins, and a strict change control system. The former will cost you a fair sum of money in salary, and the latter will likely necessitate duplicating your entire cluster for dev/test purposes, before rolling out changes.
That's the beginning of an HA environment. Still up for it?
I've never really dug too far into Google's architecture, but I always assumed it was some form of grid computing. Is this correct, because I've never really associated grids with clustering.
I'd agree with you on the Netscape/IE comparisons by version fairly accurately. Netscape 4.7 was finally what NS4.0 should have been, by which point they were far behind. However, I believe that Opera was out by then as well, and was a solid product. However, it was "different."
As for Media Player, I honestly liked MS's offering until I believe 7.x That was a very simple, streamlined, straightforward media player. After that, they redesigned it into a nightmare. The current one (10?) makes me shudder. I'm not a big fan of WinAmp either, though. The Core Media Player is very good for everything except that it doesn't know how to deal properly with CDs. QCD is excellent at all things audio, but fails to do well with most video. Doesn't seem like there's anything really ideal out there.
Yep. If I recall, 5.0 was a commercial product, and then was renamed 5.0a and given out with a license key. That's when Sun bought them, removed the keylock feature, and rereleased it as 5.1, a free product. They then got busy and fixed a bucketload of bugs which resulted in 5.2, at which point they realised that even a bug-free version of StarOffice 5 was a total disaster, and started the OpenOffice project.
I supported SO5.1 for a year or so. Worst product I ever had to provide help for.
What you're saying is really a universal truth: Something new and unknown is harder to use than something old and familiar. Or more succinctly, people are lazy. If you give people the option, they will virtually NEVER switch to something new, even if it has significant (but not compelling to them) advantages. That's why MS won the browser wars by bundling IE into the OS, even though it's been a piece of shite most of its life. Ditto for MS Media Player and Outbreak--both utter excrement.
My question: Does it actually need something proprietary about Sun Java, or does it need something in the (open) Java standard that no one else provides correctly? For instance, the reason that MS Java fails at so many things is that it violates the published, open, official standard. Is that Sun's fault?
So unless there's something that extends or violates the Java standard in Sun's Java (and is necessary for the install), then any whinging about 'closed source software' is flawed and irrelevant.
"Yah, I know, you can't always trust the public, we re-elected W, but NOT BY MUCH, and he's on a much shorter leash - see above Economist citation."
Do you honestly believe that? If so, there's no helping the USA at all.
Guantanamo Bay is shipping virtually NOBODY back to their home countries. It has become the embarassment of the western world to see the Geneva Convention essentially used as toilet paper by the USA. Ditto for all of the nuclear non-proliferation treaties that they've signed over the decades. (In fact, _any_ treaty or agreement or contract seems to mean nothing in the US--just ask the Canadians about softwood lumber for an example.)
If Bush is on a short leash, it's being held by Rumsfeld. There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY WHATSOEVER to the American people anymore.
"The administration might (will) do unethical things, but they will pay at election time. As long as the framework is open and transparent, there is reasonable protection afforded to the public."
In the USA, elections are decided by the media. The media tells people how to vote, and they vote accordingly. If that doesn't work, the government fixes the election. It sounds like tinfoil-hat territory, but how many dead people voted in the last US Federal election?
Heh. Linux isn't entirely hype. Neither is MacOS, for that matter. Windows is mostly hype, and what's left is a really poorly designed OS, although it has a huge market share.
Hosting Oracle is hardly what I'd consider a 'specialised application,' although that may be the industry I'm in - Oil and Gas runs on Oracle like nobody's business. We're a midsized company, and have close to a hundred large production databases.
As far as the company itself goes, I don't honestly think that Sun is a relic--I think that their marketing department are criminally insane, and are the biggest reason that they can't win in the markets they should own outright. (Note: Jonathan Schwartz is the second biggest reason.) The fact that Sun is "still" pushing Java is because it's slowly taking over at the interface and infracstructure level. The number of devices I deal with which have moved to a Java GUI is breathtaking, for better or worse.
Don't know if Sun is going to survive or not, but if they don't it'll be because they're incompetent at selling themselves, not because they're a relic.
Haven't you studied your own history? It doesn't matter. Either enforce, resign, or get fired. Worse, enforce or get ostracised, investigated, and publically humiliated. McCarthy would be blushing at what's been going on in the last fifteen years in the US, courtesy of the Republican party.