I tend to agree, especially when Schwartz starts talking (usually out of his ass).
In this case, however, I think he's at least partly right. The only reason for PCs existing at all is our irrational fear of wanting to BUY MY OWN BOX!!! There's no logical reason for a PC existing more than another three years, for most people. (actually, that point has already come for about 50% of the connected world).
Well, the current administration really formalised their plans to build a world-wide empire in 1997, when they founded the Project for a New American Century. Here's their policy statement:
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
If it sounds like a bunch of nutbars running the organisation, take a look at their founders and board of directors. I'm sure you'll find some familiar names.
" The thing is, I've bought a couple CD's with copy protection."
No you haven't.
If the thing isn't redbook complaint, it's not a CD. It's a small, round, shiny disk with copy protection and no official name that HAPPENS to behave similarly to a CD under most circumstances.
It is not a CD. It is not a Compact Disc. It is not CD-DA format. Switchfoot has NEVER RELEASED a CD of this album!
I've dealt with them three times, and they've screwed up three times. Toss in their shitty patents, and they're not a company I would ever do business with again.
Apparently you don't need proper english skills for an MCSE. Pity.
I know some people who got their MCSE in the early NT days--good admins, with good skills. Then the standards were lowered, and everyone got it. The best of those early adaptors got over it, the rest complained bitterly about it.
At the end of the day, what matters is that there are a lot of unskilled MCSEs out there, which negates the point of the cert.
Well actually, it will suck. But only for the first three years. Here's what I predict:
1) Intel sleeps with MS to develop a HTPC standard. They take over the market. 2) Everyone else tries to get in on the action. Lawsuits abound. 3) Other, genuinely better alternatives will become available, some of them open-source. Not all of them will be compatable. 4) MS, who has taken over the project from Intel in the interim, will drag their heels and still produce a sub-par product--but the functionality from the better products will eventually make their way down to the commercial items.
Eventually, we'll have good HTPCs. Not as fast as we'd like and not as good as we want, but they'll be better than if Intel hadn't done this.
Some years ago, I got an AGP 4x video card. I was going to plug it into my AGP 4x motherboard. It would run for about ten minutes of intense graphics before freezing up hard, and forcing a power cycle. I went back and forth with the store, who said, "oh yeah, those cards have problems with Asus motherboards."
Standards should be standards, and equipment that fails to meet the standard (or fails to work with equipment that meets it) should be considered defective. 200.3MHz is probably within the appropriate specification for the FSB (Maybe 200.0 +/- 0.5 MHz?), whereas 202MHz likely isn't.
"You'll just have to do your part and buy good quality memory."
There shouldn't BE any good quality memory! There should be memory of different speeds and latencies, but specifications should be designed so that brand isn't an issue. This is a real problem, and will continue to be as long as we let it (which from the history of the home PC, is going to be forever).
Good points, although there seems to be this prevaling (and incorrect) attitude on/. that Sun is out to destroy Linux.
Some things to think about:
"The large commercial/enterprise applications do of course run on Solaris/SPARC but have they all been ported to Solaris/x86?"
Not all of them, but many have and many more are in the process. Oracle 9i and 10i are both certified on Solaris 9 and 10, for both sparc and x86 platforms.
"Have stable and robust device drivers been written for all the popular x86 server devices that people will want Solaris to properly support?"
Nope. Generic hardware support is the biggest weakness of Sun's x86 offering, and a necessary symptom of only now becoming serious about the platform. The real key will be how quickly they can turn that around.
"The first important step into this business would be to properly GPL Solaris..."
For better or for worse, it can't be done. The GPL includes clauses that are strictly at odds with commercial contracts Sun has signed for parts of their OS. Besides, if you're a major corporation, getting software under CDDL makes FAR more sense than under the GPL. I suspect that this will be the beginning of a long license battle.
"the way forward would be for them to...re-invent them as a services organization"
They're doing this. They've been doing it slowly for about three years, and now they're going to take on their own service partners like wildcats. Sun has been laying the groundwork for the biggest sweep of hardware, software, support, and services we've seen in the computer industry for a long time (maybe since Dell took the top of the PC food chain), and it started about six months ago. Watch for their third quarter presentation.
As an aside, I don't think that the GPL/CDDL battle is particularly important--most of the perceived lack of cross-pollination between incompatible licenses is due to a handful of license zealots. There are too many good ideas in the Solaris 10 kernel that will be duplicated, recreated, or copied for a license to slow things down.
Sun has gone OUT of panic mode about Linux--and their business started improving the instant they did.
As for OSDL and carrier-grade Linux, I'm boggled. OSDL seems to primarily be a way to leverage the community to mimic what companies do for their bread-and-butter: Formally design, test, and build enterprise-class systems. Sun doesn't need OSDL because they're already doing that sort of thing! Which is why their systems have been in carriers and submarines for over a decade already.
And Linux may have arrived on the desktop for hardware detection and compatability, but the interfaces still suck badly for the average end-user. (Same story for Solaris, either CDE, KDE, Gnome, or other.) MS and Apple still have that sewn up.
First of all, let's not forget that this is not the official word from Sun--it's a user's personal opinion. Assuming hardware compatability, your P150/64MB would run Solaris just as well (or as poorly) as it would run Linux--quite possibly better.
Secondly, you seem to misunderstand the licensing issue. If you buy software for ANY platform which is license-locked, then well, it's license-locked. Lots of Linux software is like that too, and has exactly the same problem (we run some at work).
I know, I can hardly wait until the Q3 speech. I saw Bryan Cantrell speaking a few months ago, and he was beside himself with excitement over having Andy back, and designing systems.
For a start, the new Ultra20 is the nicest workstation I've seen come out of Sun for a while. It bodes well for the future.
Re:Easy Solution to Spam
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 1
"If your clients can't follow simple instructions on how to contact you then do you care if you keep them or not"
"So Bob wants us to pre-submit our email addresses, and continue to do so for each new employee contact. Jeff wants us to email him, and close the deal. Hmmm..."
Trust me. I've tried it in a corporate setting, and beyond a few dozen employees, blacklisting doesn't work. You can come up with endless reasons it _should_ work ('staff who are too stupid to maintain a whitelist shouldn't have email') but invariably--and I DO mean invariably, it doesn't (many people who don't deserve email access still require it).
Don't know anything about No Starch Press, but I've generally been finding that O'Reilly books need a FAR more critical eye before buying than they used to. I've seen too many lately that need heavy editing, if not a complete rewrite.
Re:This should really be entitled "Hiding Spam"
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 1
You're making a fundamental mistake here. Spam doesn't succeed because it drives business at 'x' percent. Nobody pays a spammer per hit or per sale anymore--they pay per # of messages sent, regardless of the return.
We've moved to a market where the product for sale is being sold through a number of venues, and spam is just one of them. Paying someone an extra $1000 to send out a few million emails is no more than insurance of maximum exposure. It might buy you a few sales or it might not--but it's so cheap that it's pointless to NOT do it, and potentially lose sales. Nobody has the stats to properly do the math on return vs. millions spammed, but it doesn't matter--determining whether or not it's a cost-effective way of advertising is more expensive than continuing to do it.
Re:Easy Solution to Spam
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 1
What an absolutely wonderful idea! I'm amazed that no one has though of this yet. Imagine how much benefit this would provide for companies once they had build a whitelist for all "X" thousand employees.
Seriously, blacklists work on the personal front, if you have a fairly static list of people you keep in touch with. In the business world, it doesn't fly--even if you put the onus for maintaining the list(s) on the users, rather than admins. Business contacts are far too fluid and losing a non-whitelisted message is FAR too hazardous to succeed.
Basically, white/blacklists don't scale. Greylists have potential in this regard, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who says that Sun is a relic doesn't know much about Sun.
Wake me up when Linux catches up to Solaris 2.5.1. That'll be the first step.
But the Ultra20 isn't a PC, it's a WORKSTATION!!! :-)
And seriously, they're pretty cool boxes for the price.
I tend to agree, especially when Schwartz starts talking (usually out of his ass).
In this case, however, I think he's at least partly right. The only reason for PCs existing at all is our irrational fear of wanting to BUY MY OWN BOX!!! There's no logical reason for a PC existing more than another three years, for most people. (actually, that point has already come for about 50% of the connected world).
"Look, W. I voted for you not once, but twice!"
And you're blaming him? Take a look in the mirror!
Well, the current administration really formalised their plans to build a world-wide empire in 1997, when they founded the Project for a New American Century. Here's their policy statement:
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
If it sounds like a bunch of nutbars running the organisation, take a look at their founders and board of directors. I'm sure you'll find some familiar names.
" The thing is, I've bought a couple CD's with copy protection."
No you haven't.
If the thing isn't redbook complaint, it's not a CD. It's a small, round, shiny disk with copy protection and no official name that HAPPENS to behave similarly to a CD under most circumstances.
It is not a CD. It is not a Compact Disc. It is not CD-DA format. Switchfoot has NEVER RELEASED a CD of this album!
Perhaps because...Amazon sucks!
I've dealt with them three times, and they've screwed up three times. Toss in their shitty patents, and they're not a company I would ever do business with again.
Apparently you don't need proper english skills for an MCSE. Pity.
I know some people who got their MCSE in the early NT days--good admins, with good skills. Then the standards were lowered, and everyone got it. The best of those early adaptors got over it, the rest complained bitterly about it.
At the end of the day, what matters is that there are a lot of unskilled MCSEs out there, which negates the point of the cert.
Well actually, it will suck. But only for the first three years. Here's what I predict:
1) Intel sleeps with MS to develop a HTPC standard. They take over the market.
2) Everyone else tries to get in on the action. Lawsuits abound.
3) Other, genuinely better alternatives will become available, some of them open-source. Not all of them will be compatable.
4) MS, who has taken over the project from Intel in the interim, will drag their heels and still produce a sub-par product--but the functionality from the better products will eventually make their way down to the commercial items.
Eventually, we'll have good HTPCs. Not as fast as we'd like and not as good as we want, but they'll be better than if Intel hadn't done this.
Dammit, wish I still had some moderator points to give out.
"virii" bugs the shit out of me. Linguistic inexactitude at its worst.
Honestly, making out between the bookshelves in the half-floors of the humanities library was one of the highlights of my University days.
"So, what are the players to do?"
Um...buy a football perhaps?
Some years ago, I got an AGP 4x video card. I was going to plug it into my AGP 4x motherboard. It would run for about ten minutes of intense graphics before freezing up hard, and forcing a power cycle. I went back and forth with the store, who said, "oh yeah, those cards have problems with Asus motherboards."
Standards should be standards, and equipment that fails to meet the standard (or fails to work with equipment that meets it) should be considered defective. 200.3MHz is probably within the appropriate specification for the FSB (Maybe 200.0 +/- 0.5 MHz?), whereas 202MHz likely isn't.
"You'll just have to do your part and buy good quality memory."
There shouldn't BE any good quality memory! There should be memory of different speeds and latencies, but specifications should be designed so that brand isn't an issue. This is a real problem, and will continue to be as long as we let it (which from the history of the home PC, is going to be forever).
Good points, although there seems to be this prevaling (and incorrect) attitude on /. that Sun is out to destroy Linux.
Some things to think about:
"The large commercial/enterprise applications do of course run on Solaris/SPARC but have they all been ported to Solaris/x86?"
Not all of them, but many have and many more are in the process. Oracle 9i and 10i are both certified on Solaris 9 and 10, for both sparc and x86 platforms.
"Have stable and robust device drivers been written for all the popular x86 server devices that people will want Solaris to properly support?"
Nope. Generic hardware support is the biggest weakness of Sun's x86 offering, and a necessary symptom of only now becoming serious about the platform. The real key will be how quickly they can turn that around.
"The first important step into this business would be to properly GPL Solaris..."
For better or for worse, it can't be done. The GPL includes clauses that are strictly at odds with commercial contracts Sun has signed for parts of their OS. Besides, if you're a major corporation, getting software under CDDL makes FAR more sense than under the GPL. I suspect that this will be the beginning of a long license battle.
"the way forward would be for them to...re-invent them as a services organization"
They're doing this. They've been doing it slowly for about three years, and now they're going to take on their own service partners like wildcats. Sun has been laying the groundwork for the biggest sweep of hardware, software, support, and services we've seen in the computer industry for a long time (maybe since Dell took the top of the PC food chain), and it started about six months ago. Watch for their third quarter presentation.
As an aside, I don't think that the GPL/CDDL battle is particularly important--most of the perceived lack of cross-pollination between incompatible licenses is due to a handful of license zealots. There are too many good ideas in the Solaris 10 kernel that will be duplicated, recreated, or copied for a license to slow things down.
Several points:
Sun has gone OUT of panic mode about Linux--and their business started improving the instant they did.
As for OSDL and carrier-grade Linux, I'm boggled. OSDL seems to primarily be a way to leverage the community to mimic what companies do for their bread-and-butter: Formally design, test, and build enterprise-class systems. Sun doesn't need OSDL because they're already doing that sort of thing! Which is why their systems have been in carriers and submarines for over a decade already.
And Linux may have arrived on the desktop for hardware detection and compatability, but the interfaces still suck badly for the average end-user. (Same story for Solaris, either CDE, KDE, Gnome, or other.) MS and Apple still have that sewn up.
First of all, let's not forget that this is not the official word from Sun--it's a user's personal opinion. Assuming hardware compatability, your P150/64MB would run Solaris just as well (or as poorly) as it would run Linux--quite possibly better.
Secondly, you seem to misunderstand the licensing issue. If you buy software for ANY platform which is license-locked, then well, it's license-locked. Lots of Linux software is like that too, and has exactly the same problem (we run some at work).
I know, I can hardly wait until the Q3 speech. I saw Bryan Cantrell speaking a few months ago, and he was beside himself with excitement over having Andy back, and designing systems.
For a start, the new Ultra20 is the nicest workstation I've seen come out of Sun for a while. It bodes well for the future.
So let's see. Sun has no chance of doing something they don't want to do. Therefore, Sun is doomed.
Great logic there.
...the Weekly World News of the grey suit set.
"If your clients can't follow simple instructions on how to contact you then do you care if you keep them or not"
"So Bob wants us to pre-submit our email addresses, and continue to do so for each new employee contact. Jeff wants us to email him, and close the deal. Hmmm..."
Trust me. I've tried it in a corporate setting, and beyond a few dozen employees, blacklisting doesn't work. You can come up with endless reasons it _should_ work ('staff who are too stupid to maintain a whitelist shouldn't have email') but invariably--and I DO mean invariably, it doesn't (many people who don't deserve email access still require it).
How do you explain this?
Darwin was a creationist.
Don't know anything about No Starch Press, but I've generally been finding that O'Reilly books need a FAR more critical eye before buying than they used to. I've seen too many lately that need heavy editing, if not a complete rewrite.
You're making a fundamental mistake here. Spam doesn't succeed because it drives business at 'x' percent. Nobody pays a spammer per hit or per sale anymore--they pay per # of messages sent, regardless of the return.
We've moved to a market where the product for sale is being sold through a number of venues, and spam is just one of them. Paying someone an extra $1000 to send out a few million emails is no more than insurance of maximum exposure. It might buy you a few sales or it might not--but it's so cheap that it's pointless to NOT do it, and potentially lose sales. Nobody has the stats to properly do the math on return vs. millions spammed, but it doesn't matter--determining whether or not it's a cost-effective way of advertising is more expensive than continuing to do it.
What an absolutely wonderful idea! I'm amazed that no one has though of this yet. Imagine how much benefit this would provide for companies once they had build a whitelist for all "X" thousand employees.
Seriously, blacklists work on the personal front, if you have a fairly static list of people you keep in touch with. In the business world, it doesn't fly--even if you put the onus for maintaining the list(s) on the users, rather than admins. Business contacts are far too fluid and losing a non-whitelisted message is FAR too hazardous to succeed.
Basically, white/blacklists don't scale. Greylists have potential in this regard, though.
System Shock 2.
Thief II and III.
Civilization II, III, and IV.