OK, I go to mozilla.org, and am presented with a link to firebird 0.7, which leads to a funky page where I could download the browser for Solaris. If the page worked, which it doesn't. (timeouts--might just be overloaded)
HOWEVER, If I click on the logo in firebird 0.6 (which I'm using right now), it takes me to an entirely different page on texturizer.net (??!), with the latest known version being 0.6.1. Furthermore, going to the downloads brings up a blank page. Great.
Someone needs to tell the entire mozilla project and its direct offshoots that friendly user interfaces aren't only necessary in the application itself. Version names, numbers, and websites are an utter mess right now.
So three years ago OpenOffice.org was founded from the released ashes of StarOffice5.2.
Now three years later, with OO1.1/SO7.0, we have the first broadly acceptable product fit for the general public. It feels like three years of hell, but really that's pretty impressive.
I was a member of EACH (Edmonton Atari Computer Hobbiests) back when we got an Atari 400. I loved that machine and everything else I worked with around then, and have occasionally thought about digging it out of my parents' basement to get it running again (and maybe even moving some of the tapes/floppies onto something that could be read by an emulator) for the sake of nostalgia. However, actually use the thing? No thanks! AtariWriter was brilliant in its day, but looking up every font-changing code on a reference sheet is something I won't do anymore.
Heh. I've been around both life and/. to be unyielding on everything.
Someone else also mentioned nearline storage as a use for these drives, which is a perfect niche for them. As a result, I'm eating more of my words.:-)
OK, that was a bad troll. You're right on the copyright on the song, but where is there any indication--even a HINT--that he sang the song in public? There isn't.
Ah, the Pet. My dad used to bring home a PET on the weekends, borrowed from the chemistry department's electronics shop. (Actually, we went through the gamut of the CBM 4004, 8008, 2000, and finally the PET-1, or whatever they were all called).
I learned to program BASIC and touched assembler on those machines. With a friend, we wrote an entire adventure game, or so we thought--an endless stream of questions delivered in an entirely linear fashion.
Typing in stuff from SoftSide magazine got us hooked. Eventually I talked my parents into buying the latest, (second) greatest, and coolest computer on the market--the Atari400. (the 800 was the greatest, for the record). This was a few years before the C-64 came out--before that abomination called the Vic-20 for that matter--and probably drove me into computing more effectively than anything else I did. (Albeit, with a few detours: I spend half a decade making good on my degree--in chemistry!)
Occasionally I look at my "obsolete" Palm Vx, and am utterly blown away by the concept of 8MB in that tiny thing. Amazing.
OK, I was not only around back then but I was actually talking agressively with IBM on the issue.
First let's lay the scene: Microsoft has a "huge" lock on the market with about 70% of the desktops out there. Apple owned the graphics and education markets, but they were small and specialised. Also, MacOS was painful--it had never actually evolved beyond the ground-breaking first generation product it was. AMD and Cyrix were bit players, not even playing in the same game as the others.
Microsoft announced Win4.0 would be coming out "soon," as a replacement for Win3.1. It would run on Intel, of course.
Then came IBM's OS/2 2.1, and the Motorola/Apple/IBM joint venture to come up with a replacement for the aging 68000 series CPUs.
The chip came out: The PowerPC. Apple would make their systems based on it. IBM would release legacy-free commodity PCs (i.e. no 5.25" floppy, no stupid IDE drives, no IRQ setup hell) running OS/2. Suddenly the first generation Pentium (formerly 80586, until Intel discovered they can't copyright a number) CPUs hit their infamous floating point error, and Microsoft was frantically delaying the release of Win4.0, because they had to battle OS/2, which was a robust and native 32-bit OS instead of a 16-bit shell on top of DOS.
If IBM had released OS/2 for the PowerPC according to their plans, they could have stormed the market, driving up their market share and pulling Apple along, based on the strength of the vastly superior PPC chip. Instead, IBM pissed around with things, refusing to release the OS until it was perfect, and finally mothballing the project once Win95/x86 came out.
IBM shot themselves in the foot (nothing new there), and in doing so, destroyed the PPC as anything more than a niche processor. Furthermore, they are to credit/blame as much as anyone for pushing Microsoft to the current complete dominance of the consumer computer market.
How about if I said that no company which has storage demands beyond a 'consumer' level (i.e. they need something more hefty and significant than buddy at home, downloading MP3s) would use this drive? It's simply not a good solution for most things. It IS state-of-the-art in terms of density, but that was what I was getting at--in situations where density is actually important, other things are more important.
The mentoring program worked. The execs learned stuff, got their green or black belt certifications, and got a raise. The underlings as usual got FUCK ALL for their efforts.
GE is a model company in many ways, but treatment of their employees is absolutely NOT one of them.
Definitely a 'consumer' point of view. Perfectly reasonable, since this is a consumer drive.
Massive amounts of data are easy to store, and easy to make behave MUCH faster than a single drive. There's not a company that would waste their time on a drive like this. In fact, there aren't many people at home who _should_ waste their time on a drive like this so early, but they will, driving the price down.
I have been known to go on long pointed rants against the horrors of the current US administration and their criminal attitudes towards...well, most things. However, even i can't find fault with this, having read the article. Boil it down to its essence, and all they're saying is that terrorist organisations can't use the web as a loophole to do the things that they already can't do other ways. (collect funds, etc.) Big deal.
How the US defines a terrorist organisation may be up for discussion, as might their attempts at quashing freedom of speech; but those issues have nothing to do with this latest policy.
Count the number of Israelis dead vs. the number of Palestinians.
For that matter, count the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the US since their invasion, vs. the number who died in the world trade center destruction. There have been well over twice as many Iraqi civilians killed, according to independent observers.
The US may well be opposed to all terrorists, but only if they define a terrorist as anyone who disagrees with their world view.
Furthermore, the US backed Israel when the were defending (by killing) against Palestinians who were literally throwing rocks. The only thing that's really changed in the middle east is that the Palestinians have got better arms than they did before, and the US is throwing its weight around to achieve its own ends.
Latin is an ideal language, because it's universally dead. Laugh if you will, but picking english names or russian or french or yiddish, is obnoxious to the segment of the world that doesn't speak the language.
Perhaps if you can't deal with names like this (or the transition metals--rhodium, iridium, etc.) you really did deserve that c.
As long as spammers are allowed to send stuff, they'll waste bandwidth and server space. If they have to, they'll start forging spam to come from your friends. They'll steal keys if they have to, as they get more desparate. Or alternatively, they'll spam to MORE people, and only get the ones without whitelists.
Greylisting has great potential, because it forces up the cost of spamming. This latest 'tactic' of the spammers is wonderful news, because it's a serious enough crime to get some of them thrown in jail.
Geez, don't get your shorts in a knot. The parent post was pointing out quite politely that US money is the oddball in international circles, but was quite willing to conceded that oddness is a function of familiarity. None of this changes the fact that US bills are much more difficult to distinguish from each other than other countries' currency.
Of course, you had to pipe up with the knee-jerk, redneck "Piss off and leave us alone--we LIKE being difficult and unpleasant!"
Simple question, that isn't really answered in the review. How much of this book is generic Unix/Unixlike information, how much is specific to a single vendor OS, and how much is specific to Linux?
I'd like to think that most of this stuff is fairly transportable, but when I hear about "bash scripts," I wonder if it's the reviewer or the book that's pushing Linux-centricisms. (and yes, I know that bash is available everywhere, blah blah blah. It still doesn't make it a valid replacement for/sbin/sh, for admin scripting)
You're absolutely right, anot not just with regards to technical books. I've long since found that the 2-4 ratings are usually the ones worth reading.
Personally when I reviewd books on Amazon and other places (before you needed to register with them to do so), I almost never gave a book either extreme. A one star book, as you say, must be dishonest, lying, and possibly dangerous. A five star book, well I can think of a few that I've given: Slaughterhouse V, Deathbird Stories, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Persistence of Vision may be the only 20th century stories I've read which qualify as Great Literature. In computer books, the only two have been Unix in a Nutshell, and the Unix Sysadmin Handbook (Nemeth et. al.). Everything else has been flawed, even the truly excellent ones; and likewise, nearly every really awful book has _some_ redeeming features.
The problem is that if people have a strong opinion, they start to lose their rationality; and if people don't have a strong opinion, they don't bother reviewing something.
Regardless of whether or not this is a visible artefact in movies, it boils down to the same story that we've seen a thousand times:
1) People will see movies if they're well marketed. 2) People will _pay_ to see movies if (a) they have no choice, or (b) the movies are worthwhile.
Trying to use technology to force people to pay for movies after the cat is out of the bag is pointless. People know that movies can be ripped, screeners can be made, etc. Unless a movie is truly worthy of dropping $25/person (parking, food, tickets), people will download it regularly.
The movie industry, and the recording industry for that matter, have to realise that they no longer hold a monopoly, and that the alternative has every advantage except legality and moral high-ground. (things which never sell too well.) If they make products that are WORTH supporting, then (and only then) will people support them.
As an aside, we had a film festival here last week. My wife and I paid $9 per ticket to see five movies. Add popcorn, drinks, and gas, and you've got a fairly hefty bill--all for movies I'd pay to see again. (especially The Barbarian Invasion. Whew!)
Maybe I'm being thick here. It seems to me that what we need for VOIP is a peer-to-peer protocol, and network cards/stacks that have a guarantee of service, where in this case, the service is time-based. Now if I'm not mistaken, the Linux 2.4 kernel has 'quality of service' flags for network traffic (including IPv4), and IPv6 has it built into the actual model! Now if this is the case, there should be no need for VOIP "providers," other than ISPs that don't explicitly deny a particular traffic type. Now this is all theoretical for real-time conversations, but in practice it's much easier--people use things like teamspeak all the time!
Can someone please tell me why we are looking to a centralised (and billable, taxable) VOIP strategy, instead of a direct peered (or even client/server) model? I honestly don't get it!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I go to mozilla.org, and am presented with a link to firebird 0.7, which leads to a funky page where I could download the browser for Solaris. If the page worked, which it doesn't. (timeouts--might just be overloaded)
HOWEVER, If I click on the logo in firebird 0.6 (which I'm using right now), it takes me to an entirely different page on texturizer.net (??!), with the latest known version being 0.6.1. Furthermore, going to the downloads brings up a blank page. Great.
Someone needs to tell the entire mozilla project and its direct offshoots that friendly user interfaces aren't only necessary in the application itself. Version names, numbers, and websites are an utter mess right now.
Sun has little on their agenda that's higher in importance than hurting Microsoft. I don't think you'll see this happen.
So three years ago OpenOffice.org was founded from the released ashes of StarOffice5.2.
Now three years later, with OO1.1/SO7.0, we have the first broadly acceptable product fit for the general public. It feels like three years of hell, but really that's pretty impressive.
Congrats OO, and keep moving forward!
Oh man, that is sad.
I was a member of EACH (Edmonton Atari Computer Hobbiests) back when we got an Atari 400. I loved that machine and everything else I worked with around then, and have occasionally thought about digging it out of my parents' basement to get it running again (and maybe even moving some of the tapes/floppies onto something that could be read by an emulator) for the sake of nostalgia. However, actually use the thing? No thanks! AtariWriter was brilliant in its day, but looking up every font-changing code on a reference sheet is something I won't do anymore.
Heh. I've been around both life and /. to be unyielding on everything.
:-)
Someone else also mentioned nearline storage as a use for these drives, which is a perfect niche for them. As a result, I'm eating more of my words.
OK, that was a bad troll. You're right on the copyright on the song, but where is there any indication--even a HINT--that he sang the song in public? There isn't.
Ah, the Pet. My dad used to bring home a PET on the weekends, borrowed from the chemistry department's electronics shop. (Actually, we went through the gamut of the CBM 4004, 8008, 2000, and finally the PET-1, or whatever they were all called).
I learned to program BASIC and touched assembler on those machines. With a friend, we wrote an entire adventure game, or so we thought--an endless stream of questions delivered in an entirely linear fashion.
Typing in stuff from SoftSide magazine got us hooked. Eventually I talked my parents into buying the latest, (second) greatest, and coolest computer on the market--the Atari400. (the 800 was the greatest, for the record). This was a few years before the C-64 came out--before that abomination called the Vic-20 for that matter--and probably drove me into computing more effectively than anything else I did. (Albeit, with a few detours: I spend half a decade making good on my degree--in chemistry!)
Occasionally I look at my "obsolete" Palm Vx, and am utterly blown away by the concept of 8MB in that tiny thing. Amazing.
'"" I had a Vic-20..."
I'm sorry. Truly I am.
Ah, now THAT makes sense! We're about to buy a near-line storage unit to act as remote backup and DR for our expensive and high-speed storage system.
near-line storage strikes me more than anything, as an evolution of HSM. The difference is that this works well in most situations.
I have to agree then. Near-line is the ideal introduction place for large, slow, cheap disks. Cool to see that Maxtor is playing in that market.
OK, I was not only around back then but I was actually talking agressively with IBM on the issue.
First let's lay the scene: Microsoft has a "huge" lock on the market with about 70% of the desktops out there. Apple owned the graphics and education markets, but they were small and specialised. Also, MacOS was painful--it had never actually evolved beyond the ground-breaking first generation product it was. AMD and Cyrix were bit players, not even playing in the same game as the others.
Microsoft announced Win4.0 would be coming out "soon," as a replacement for Win3.1. It would run on Intel, of course.
Then came IBM's OS/2 2.1, and the Motorola/Apple/IBM joint venture to come up with a replacement for the aging 68000 series CPUs.
The chip came out: The PowerPC. Apple would make their systems based on it. IBM would release legacy-free commodity PCs (i.e. no 5.25" floppy, no stupid IDE drives, no IRQ setup hell) running OS/2. Suddenly the first generation Pentium (formerly 80586, until Intel discovered they can't copyright a number) CPUs hit their infamous floating point error, and Microsoft was frantically delaying the release of Win4.0, because they had to battle OS/2, which was a robust and native 32-bit OS instead of a 16-bit shell on top of DOS.
If IBM had released OS/2 for the PowerPC according to their plans, they could have stormed the market, driving up their market share and pulling Apple along, based on the strength of the vastly superior PPC chip. Instead, IBM pissed around with things, refusing to release the OS until it was perfect, and finally mothballing the project once Win95/x86 came out.
IBM shot themselves in the foot (nothing new there), and in doing so, destroyed the PPC as anything more than a niche processor. Furthermore, they are to credit/blame as much as anyone for pushing Microsoft to the current complete dominance of the consumer computer market.
So John Scully, don't blame yourself; blame IBM.
Sigh. You're right. I overspoke.
How about if I said that no company which has storage demands beyond a 'consumer' level (i.e. they need something more hefty and significant than buddy at home, downloading MP3s) would use this drive? It's simply not a good solution for most things. It IS state-of-the-art in terms of density, but that was what I was getting at--in situations where density is actually important, other things are more important.
As a GE employee, I can comment on this.
The mentoring program worked. The execs learned stuff, got their green or black belt certifications, and got a raise. The underlings as usual got FUCK ALL for their efforts.
GE is a model company in many ways, but treatment of their employees is absolutely NOT one of them.
Laws which already require jail time for spammers already exist.
They're called anti-fraud measures. The problem is that the government isn't really interested in enforcing them.
Definitely a 'consumer' point of view. Perfectly reasonable, since this is a consumer drive.
Massive amounts of data are easy to store, and easy to make behave MUCH faster than a single drive. There's not a company that would waste their time on a drive like this. In fact, there aren't many people at home who _should_ waste their time on a drive like this so early, but they will, driving the price down.
Hmm.
Bush jr.
Rumsfeld
Cheney
Ashcroft
And the rest of the administration involved with or supported by the Project for a New American Century.
Yeah, that's a good list to start with.
Damn straight!
I have been known to go on long pointed rants against the horrors of the current US administration and their criminal attitudes towards...well, most things. However, even i can't find fault with this, having read the article. Boil it down to its essence, and all they're saying is that terrorist organisations can't use the web as a loophole to do the things that they already can't do other ways. (collect funds, etc.) Big deal.
How the US defines a terrorist organisation may be up for discussion, as might their attempts at quashing freedom of speech; but those issues have nothing to do with this latest policy.
Um no, not really.
Count the number of Israelis dead vs. the number of Palestinians.
For that matter, count the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the US since their invasion, vs. the number who died in the world trade center destruction. There have been well over twice as many Iraqi civilians killed, according to independent observers.
The US may well be opposed to all terrorists, but only if they define a terrorist as anyone who disagrees with their world view.
Furthermore, the US backed Israel when the were defending (by killing) against Palestinians who were literally throwing rocks. The only thing that's really changed in the middle east is that the Palestinians have got better arms than they did before, and the US is throwing its weight around to achieve its own ends.
"Hydrogen, Xeon, Silver, Darmstadtium..."
:-)
You're right, and it's Xeon. Intel has been chewing on your brain a bit too much, I guess.
Man, the whole world just seems out to get you.
Latin is an ideal language, because it's universally dead. Laugh if you will, but picking english names or russian or french or yiddish, is obnoxious to the segment of the world that doesn't speak the language.
Perhaps if you can't deal with names like this (or the transition metals--rhodium, iridium, etc.) you really did deserve that c.
Blacklists don't work. They simply escalate.
Whitelists don't work. They simply escalate.
As long as spammers are allowed to send stuff, they'll waste bandwidth and server space. If they have to, they'll start forging spam to come from your friends. They'll steal keys if they have to, as they get more desparate. Or alternatively, they'll spam to MORE people, and only get the ones without whitelists.
Greylisting has great potential, because it forces up the cost of spamming. This latest 'tactic' of the spammers is wonderful news, because it's a serious enough crime to get some of them thrown in jail.
Geez, don't get your shorts in a knot. The parent post was pointing out quite politely that US money is the oddball in international circles, but was quite willing to conceded that oddness is a function of familiarity. None of this changes the fact that US bills are much more difficult to distinguish from each other than other countries' currency.
Of course, you had to pipe up with the knee-jerk, redneck "Piss off and leave us alone--we LIKE being difficult and unpleasant!"
Simple question, that isn't really answered in the review. How much of this book is generic Unix/Unixlike information, how much is specific to a single vendor OS, and how much is specific to Linux?
/sbin/sh, for admin scripting)
I'd like to think that most of this stuff is fairly transportable, but when I hear about "bash scripts," I wonder if it's the reviewer or the book that's pushing Linux-centricisms. (and yes, I know that bash is available everywhere, blah blah blah. It still doesn't make it a valid replacement for
You're absolutely right, anot not just with regards to technical books. I've long since found that the 2-4 ratings are usually the ones worth reading.
Personally when I reviewd books on Amazon and other places (before you needed to register with them to do so), I almost never gave a book either extreme. A one star book, as you say, must be dishonest, lying, and possibly dangerous. A five star book, well I can think of a few that I've given: Slaughterhouse V, Deathbird Stories, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Persistence of Vision may be the only 20th century stories I've read which qualify as Great Literature. In computer books, the only two have been Unix in a Nutshell, and the Unix Sysadmin Handbook (Nemeth et. al.). Everything else has been flawed, even the truly excellent ones; and likewise, nearly every really awful book has _some_ redeeming features.
The problem is that if people have a strong opinion, they start to lose their rationality; and if people don't have a strong opinion, they don't bother reviewing something.
Regardless of whether or not this is a visible artefact in movies, it boils down to the same story that we've seen a thousand times:
1) People will see movies if they're well marketed.
2) People will _pay_ to see movies if (a) they have no choice, or (b) the movies are worthwhile.
Trying to use technology to force people to pay for movies after the cat is out of the bag is pointless. People know that movies can be ripped, screeners can be made, etc. Unless a movie is truly worthy of dropping $25/person (parking, food, tickets), people will download it regularly.
The movie industry, and the recording industry for that matter, have to realise that they no longer hold a monopoly, and that the alternative has every advantage except legality and moral high-ground. (things which never sell too well.) If they make products that are WORTH supporting, then (and only then) will people support them.
As an aside, we had a film festival here last week. My wife and I paid $9 per ticket to see five movies. Add popcorn, drinks, and gas, and you've got a fairly hefty bill--all for movies I'd pay to see again. (especially The Barbarian Invasion. Whew!)
I've asked this before, I'll ask it again.
Maybe I'm being thick here. It seems to me that what we need for VOIP is a peer-to-peer protocol, and network cards/stacks that have a guarantee of service, where in this case, the service is time-based. Now if I'm not mistaken, the Linux 2.4 kernel has 'quality of service' flags for network traffic (including IPv4), and IPv6 has it built into the actual model! Now if this is the case, there should be no need for VOIP "providers," other than ISPs that don't explicitly deny a particular traffic type. Now this is all theoretical for real-time conversations, but in practice it's much easier--people use things like teamspeak all the time!
Can someone please tell me why we are looking to a centralised (and billable, taxable) VOIP strategy, instead of a direct peered (or even client/server) model? I honestly don't get it!