You have a VERY skewed definition of what "geek" means. I guess that I'm a hopeless nongeek loser because I use the evil closed-source Solaris. Oh well, I can live with that.
I feel your pain. I know of one good mail client. Unfortunately, it exists only in Windows.
Pegasus Mail. If it weren't for Pegasus, I wouldn't believe that it was possible to come up with anything better than elm. I've bemoaned the lack of anything remotely as good as Pegasus for Linux for years. Sad.
Hmm. Primary evidence maybe, but not sole evidence.
The experts who investigate accidents can do a remarkable job of piecing together what happened before the collision, and also make a pretty accurate estimate of the speed of the vehicle(s) involved.
I don't think this box would be enough evidence to convict on, but in an accident there's NEVER only one piece of evidence.
As far as I'm concerned, the end of the oil age WILL happen when we run out of oil, and not before.
This article makes the point that there will be no significant inroads from alternate fuels for a decade or two. Even that might be optimistic. However, I'm not sure our oil reserves are going to last another 25 years, and certainly not the century required to move entirely away from being a petroleum-fueled world.
I fully expect to see in my lifetime, a crisis of epic proportions which will force the beginning of a real change in fuels. Nothing else will do it. (and even that's iffy)
Ah, but the carrot and the stick have switched places now.
Windows owns the business world, and nearly everyone with a desk job these days uses a computer for most of their day. Now the tide has turned so that people want at home what they use for six hours a day at work. Despite all of the stupid MS noise, they don't care if 20% (or 80%, for that matter) of the people with Office at home have stolen it from work, because it provides more lock-in for MS.
What you said may have been part of how Windows got into the office (although I might argue that), but now Windows in the office is driving the home market.
OK, I'd like one of these, especially if it has the solid-as-a-tank case with the clicky keys of the 1xC models.
But until they make something like that, is there a good RPN calculator I can download for my Palm Vx? A free 16c emulator would be ideal, but I'm not that picky.:-)
Read a report on this an hour ago. It seems that X10 has assets of $1-10M, and debts of $10-50M. The three brothers that won the settlement the other day are by far the biggest creditor, so I assume that they get first crack at any assets when X10 goes under. (My prediction there)
So they'll probably get everything that X10 has, and still be short on their settlement. Everyone else will get stiffed, punitive damages against X10 won't be assigned since there's nothing to assign them to, and because it was done under the umbrella of a corporation, the CEO and other execs will walk away with their salaries for the last several years, ready to enter another sleazy line of work.
The best thing about a corporation is that it protects individuals, encouraging risk-taking competitive capitalism. The worst thing about a corporation is that ir protects individuals, encouraging irresponsible and borderline-criminal behaviour.
I use openoffice. Everyone I know is moving to openoffice at home. Even the ones that use MS office don't pay for it.
But Bill Gates knows something that most people overlook: He knows that selling to home users is irrelevant! All he needs to do is come up with some reason to force companies to upgrade, and they will. DRM isn't a reason, it's just a lockdown "feature" to make everything else less viable. The real upgrade force push comes from two directions:
1) Lack of format compatability. Once someone starts using it and sending out files, everyone will need it or not be able to read the files. 2) The basic nature of companies is to upgrade and turn over equipment, over time.
Bill will win this one. And the next one. And the next one...
" I don't know a single technical person who is a) reasonably good at what he does, while b) being certified as such."
I do. Me.
Admittedly, I was doing senior sysadmin long before getting any certs. As it turns out, I work for a company that requires certification, and pays for it. It would be stupid of me NOT to get it, and I have to say that I've learned a bit along the way as well.
Certifications may or may not be an indicator of a given person's ability, but you seem to be falling into the same trap as far too many/.ers: That certification automatically means a person is useless.
Now your answer to their dilemma doesn't really solve anything. How do you measure the abilities of technical people? Hire some technical people to do it. How do you find technical people qualified to do the measuring? Hire some technical people to find them. And so it goes.
Nope, I mean the next step. Email servers that won't accept standard SMTP mail ("it's because of the spammers!"), nor send it. Take outlook running on from an exchange server, add 'features,' and then cut the compatability ties to the rest of the world.
"It's too hard to find things in e-mail." translation: "We're going to start the murmurings now for a proprietary database-backed email system, from back end to user interface."
By making comments like this now, Bill will have leverage against the DoJ when they bring up the spectre of the anti-trust settlement. "It's a necessary feature--we recognised that back in 2003."
While Linux is a Good and Noble thing, there's nobody who refuses code from crap coders, other than the kernel. There is some absolute shite code in the Linux environment, and those coders are still out there, still writing garbage, and still adding to the problem without worrying about their reputations.
My brain was non-functional this morning. You're exactly right.
It was a non-payment issue and also a claim of thievery, but you're right--no patent, no patent violation, nada. Since this is a technology that's in the public eye (albeit behind other windows), it's also not something that could be held as a trade secret.
There are many people here who are pointing out that this was a nonpayment/contractual violation issue, rather than a patent issue. Read more of the articles, and you'll find that it was both.
a) x10 reneged on their contract, and owed $564,000. That's pretty clear, and should be remedied.
b) x10 also "stole their technology and business model," and started using it on their own. This was also part of the lawsuit, and deserves to be laughed out of court.
"This is about an election, nothing - with the possible exception of the judicial system that may have to step in over this - is more important in our system of government."
The last US federal election made it clear that elections don't matter much. You can lose the election and still take control of the government.
I'm seeing more and more studies which indicate that CDROMs often start to decompose after 5-10 years. There's serious doubt about the longevity of the medium once proclaimed as "perfect audio forever."
So now they have these biodegradable disks which last twice as long. Bizarre.
Look, can we put the DoJ onto this NOW, rather than after MS releases it? Clearly sending proprietary format email violates the MS anti-trust settlement, and if we get someone working on it now, we won't have to deal with this piece of shite.
There is nothing here--NOTHING--that can't be done with existing protocols. PGP anyone (or GPG if you prefer)? I seem to recall that it had a 'read-don't-save' flag that you could set.
Furthermore, this won't help anyways. Hasn't anyone heard of screencaptures?
This new "feature" has no purpose other than to lock people into MS Office even further. It's a political trojan horse.
Oh, I work with SCSI daily. It's either SCSI, FCAL, or SAN storage at work, and SCSI at home.
As someone else pointed out, even Windows is starting to deal with multiple disk requests, which means that SCSI is becoming more useful on the PC desktop. For large-read throughput from a single drive though, the biggest factor is your cache. If you have an IDE drive that spins as fast and has as much cache (and, I should add, has a decent IDE controller--not like the shite Sun put in the blade100), then there's going to be a fairly small difference. Note that this is a pretty common gaming scenario. For office stuff (word processing, etc.) the amount of time spent on disk I/O is pretty miniscule, so SCSI won't help much there either.
Basically if you're looking at a storage system, then stay AWAY from IDE. If you're making a PC, you won't gain much. Theory and practice agree on that.
Single user, single machine, single disk, single transaction? IDE performs ~equal to SCSI, and at a fraction the price.
Multiple simultaneous transactions is where SCSI wins. Try comparing SCSI vs. IDE for something like an NFS server, and watch SCSI leave IDE in the dust.
The article missed out on the two absolutely essential items which are probably Sun's strongest points, and Linux's weakest.
1) Documentation. 2) Versionitis.
Sun's documentation is wonderful. In addition to man pages which are remarkably up to date (a far cry from the bad old days), there's docs.sun.com which has all of the man pages PLUS professionally written and reviewed manuals. Linux has a mishmash of docs which are often out-of-date, frequently poorly written, incomplete, and sometimes just plain wrong. (Exceptions exist of course--iptables is wonderful.)
Almost the only time specific versions of packages are required on Solaris is when you're doing something with third-party software. The Sun packages (and nearly all stuff from sunfreeware, for that matter) go in and Just Work. Every time I get a package for Linux, it seems like I need to update the version of something else.
Performance vs. stability? That's a minor issue compared to a lack of formal and complete documentation.
THAT's a hard-on for Solaris? Geez, I'd hate to see if he wasn't so 'biased.'
I don't know when the last time you installed or worked with Solaris was, but:
The installer is straightforward and works really well.
The patch system is ahead of anything on Linux.
The packaging is a small step behind dpkg, but is also much easier to use. Both of them are at least three orders of magnitude better than RPM.
Solaris is also likely slower overall than Linux on x86, more stable, less hardware-universal, and able to run fewer apps. Some good, some bad, some different. If you can't see that, then YOU are apparently stuck in 1997.
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You have a VERY skewed definition of what "geek" means. I guess that I'm a hopeless nongeek loser because I use the evil closed-source Solaris. Oh well, I can live with that.
I feel your pain. I know of one good mail client. Unfortunately, it exists only in Windows.
Pegasus Mail. If it weren't for Pegasus, I wouldn't believe that it was possible to come up with anything better than elm. I've bemoaned the lack of anything remotely as good as Pegasus for Linux for years. Sad.
Oh, the old Pet. I remember that--a single POKE statement, and the thing would enter a single-instruction loop until the processor melted.
Classic computers. They don't build 'em like that anymore.
Hmm. Primary evidence maybe, but not sole evidence.
The experts who investigate accidents can do a remarkable job of piecing together what happened before the collision, and also make a pretty accurate estimate of the speed of the vehicle(s) involved.
I don't think this box would be enough evidence to convict on, but in an accident there's NEVER only one piece of evidence.
As far as I'm concerned, the end of the oil age WILL happen when we run out of oil, and not before.
This article makes the point that there will be no significant inroads from alternate fuels for a decade or two. Even that might be optimistic. However, I'm not sure our oil reserves are going to last another 25 years, and certainly not the century required to move entirely away from being a petroleum-fueled world.
I fully expect to see in my lifetime, a crisis of epic proportions which will force the beginning of a real change in fuels. Nothing else will do it. (and even that's iffy)
Ah, but the carrot and the stick have switched places now.
Windows owns the business world, and nearly everyone with a desk job these days uses a computer for most of their day. Now the tide has turned so that people want at home what they use for six hours a day at work. Despite all of the stupid MS noise, they don't care if 20% (or 80%, for that matter) of the people with Office at home have stolen it from work, because it provides more lock-in for MS.
What you said may have been part of how Windows got into the office (although I might argue that), but now Windows in the office is driving the home market.
OK, I'd like one of these, especially if it has the solid-as-a-tank case with the clicky keys of the 1xC models.
:-)
But until they make something like that, is there a good RPN calculator I can download for my Palm Vx? A free 16c emulator would be ideal, but I'm not that picky.
Violating contracts and failure to pay. That's why they were taken to court, remember?
Read a report on this an hour ago. It seems that X10 has assets of $1-10M, and debts of $10-50M. The three brothers that won the settlement the other day are by far the biggest creditor, so I assume that they get first crack at any assets when X10 goes under. (My prediction there)
So they'll probably get everything that X10 has, and still be short on their settlement. Everyone else will get stiffed, punitive damages against X10 won't be assigned since there's nothing to assign them to, and because it was done under the umbrella of a corporation, the CEO and other execs will walk away with their salaries for the last several years, ready to enter another sleazy line of work.
The best thing about a corporation is that it protects individuals, encouraging risk-taking competitive capitalism. The worst thing about a corporation is that ir protects individuals, encouraging irresponsible and borderline-criminal behaviour.
I use openoffice. Everyone I know is moving to openoffice at home. Even the ones that use MS office don't pay for it.
But Bill Gates knows something that most people overlook: He knows that selling to home users is irrelevant! All he needs to do is come up with some reason to force companies to upgrade, and they will. DRM isn't a reason, it's just a lockdown "feature" to make everything else less viable. The real upgrade force push comes from two directions:
1) Lack of format compatability. Once someone starts using it and sending out files, everyone will need it or not be able to read the files.
2) The basic nature of companies is to upgrade and turn over equipment, over time.
Bill will win this one. And the next one. And the next one...
You forgot:
Open source zealot? Check.*
Never had a date? Check.
Never going to get a date? Check.
Lives in his parents basement? Check.
* Admittedly, this is just a broader combination of GNU/Linux and Patents are evil.
" I don't know a single technical person who is a) reasonably good at what he does, while b) being certified as such."
/.ers: That certification automatically means a person is useless.
I do. Me.
Admittedly, I was doing senior sysadmin long before getting any certs. As it turns out, I work for a company that requires certification, and pays for it. It would be stupid of me NOT to get it, and I have to say that I've learned a bit along the way as well.
Certifications may or may not be an indicator of a given person's ability, but you seem to be falling into the same trap as far too many
Now your answer to their dilemma doesn't really solve anything. How do you measure the abilities of technical people? Hire some technical people to do it. How do you find technical people qualified to do the measuring? Hire some technical people to find them. And so it goes.
Nope, I mean the next step. Email servers that won't accept standard SMTP mail ("it's because of the spammers!"), nor send it. Take outlook running on from an exchange server, add 'features,' and then cut the compatability ties to the rest of the world.
"It's too hard to find things in e-mail." translation: "We're going to start the murmurings now for a proprietary database-backed email system, from back end to user interface."
By making comments like this now, Bill will have leverage against the DoJ when they bring up the spectre of the anti-trust settlement. "It's a necessary feature--we recognised that back in 2003."
I disagree.
While Linux is a Good and Noble thing, there's nobody who refuses code from crap coders, other than the kernel. There is some absolute shite code in the Linux environment, and those coders are still out there, still writing garbage, and still adding to the problem without worrying about their reputations.
Shit shit shit shit shit!
My brain was non-functional this morning. You're exactly right.
It was a non-payment issue and also a claim of thievery, but you're right--no patent, no patent violation, nada. Since this is a technology that's in the public eye (albeit behind other windows), it's also not something that could be held as a trade secret.
Time to go back to sleep.
There are many people here who are pointing out that this was a nonpayment/contractual violation issue, rather than a patent issue. Read more of the articles, and you'll find that it was both.
a) x10 reneged on their contract, and owed $564,000. That's pretty clear, and should be remedied.
b) x10 also "stole their technology and business model," and started using it on their own. This was also part of the lawsuit, and deserves to be laughed out of court.
I disagree with you one one (and only one) point.
"This is about an election, nothing - with the possible exception of the judicial system that may have to step in over this - is more important in our system of government."
The last US federal election made it clear that elections don't matter much. You can lose the election and still take control of the government.
I'm seeing more and more studies which indicate that CDROMs often start to decompose after 5-10 years. There's serious doubt about the longevity of the medium once proclaimed as "perfect audio forever."
So now they have these biodegradable disks which last twice as long. Bizarre.
Look, can we put the DoJ onto this NOW, rather than after MS releases it? Clearly sending proprietary format email violates the MS anti-trust settlement, and if we get someone working on it now, we won't have to deal with this piece of shite.
There is nothing here--NOTHING--that can't be done with existing protocols. PGP anyone (or GPG if you prefer)? I seem to recall that it had a 'read-don't-save' flag that you could set.
Furthermore, this won't help anyways. Hasn't anyone heard of screencaptures?
This new "feature" has no purpose other than to lock people into MS Office even further. It's a political trojan horse.
Hey Donald, time for your feeding. Then you get to make another press release.
Oh, I work with SCSI daily. It's either SCSI, FCAL, or SAN storage at work, and SCSI at home.
As someone else pointed out, even Windows is starting to deal with multiple disk requests, which means that SCSI is becoming more useful on the PC desktop. For large-read throughput from a single drive though, the biggest factor is your cache. If you have an IDE drive that spins as fast and has as much cache (and, I should add, has a decent IDE controller--not like the shite Sun put in the blade100), then there's going to be a fairly small difference. Note that this is a pretty common gaming scenario. For office stuff (word processing, etc.) the amount of time spent on disk I/O is pretty miniscule, so SCSI won't help much there either.
Basically if you're looking at a storage system, then stay AWAY from IDE. If you're making a PC, you won't gain much. Theory and practice agree on that.
Single user, single machine, single disk, single transaction? IDE performs ~equal to SCSI, and at a fraction the price.
Multiple simultaneous transactions is where SCSI wins. Try comparing SCSI vs. IDE for something like an NFS server, and watch SCSI leave IDE in the dust.
The article missed out on the two absolutely essential items which are probably Sun's strongest points, and Linux's weakest.
1) Documentation.
2) Versionitis.
Sun's documentation is wonderful. In addition to man pages which are remarkably up to date (a far cry from the bad old days), there's docs.sun.com which has all of the man pages PLUS professionally written and reviewed manuals. Linux has a mishmash of docs which are often out-of-date, frequently poorly written, incomplete, and sometimes just plain wrong. (Exceptions exist of course--iptables is wonderful.)
Almost the only time specific versions of packages are required on Solaris is when you're doing something with third-party software. The Sun packages (and nearly all stuff from sunfreeware, for that matter) go in and Just Work. Every time I get a package for Linux, it seems like I need to update the version of something else.
Performance vs. stability? That's a minor issue compared to a lack of formal and complete documentation.
THAT's a hard-on for Solaris? Geez, I'd hate to see if he wasn't so 'biased.'
I don't know when the last time you installed or worked with Solaris was, but:
The installer is straightforward and works really well.
The patch system is ahead of anything on Linux.
The packaging is a small step behind dpkg, but is also much easier to use. Both of them are at least three orders of magnitude better than RPM.
Solaris is also likely slower overall than Linux on x86, more stable, less hardware-universal, and able to run fewer apps. Some good, some bad, some different. If you can't see that, then YOU are apparently stuck in 1997.