Nobody who wants or needs the benefits of SCSI will bother with this halfway kludge. Seagate and the rest use their SCSI drives as their bread and butter. When Apple moved away from the SCSI world, there was no consumer market for SCSI, so the manufactures concentrated on making the best damned drives for the SCSI/Server market, while concentrating on making the biggest damned drives for the consumer marketplace.
I would never put one of these in a server, and I'd never buy a SCSI card to use one of these in a workstation. This isn't going to have even a slight ripple on the SCSI market.
If you actually have a need for 14TB of online storage, there is no WAY you're going to be screwing around with eBay-purchased PC parts, IDE drives, and junky little enclosures.
If you're going to do data on a scale like this, you'll do it right. SCSI or (more likely) FCal drives, real cabinetry, and dedicated/built-in RAID controllers.
If I had about $30K to blow on storage, I'd get a smaller, proper array. If I had a need for 14TB, I'd come up with the cash to buy it properly. And if I couldn't do either, I'd walk away from that startup company.
All of which isn't to say that it isn't a geeky idea...
I remember that ad. Even more impressive, they actually had a four-page fold-out version of it. I think I've still got it in a filing cabinet somewhere, along with stacks of Softside magazine.
EA tried to redefine games as an artistic venture, and were fairly successful at it. Then they redefined games as Big Business, and were dissappointingly successful at that. Sigh.
OK, I go to the site and I find that it's a 'distro' of assorted open source windows software.
That doesn't matter though. OSS is the only thing that matters. What it is, what it does, how well it does it, NONE of this seems to matter any more--the dividing lines between any two sides of the coin have all faded, and now we're left looking at exactly one question: Is it OpenSource(tm), or EvilProprietary?
Open source as a methodology and a scheme for distributing software is excellent. OpenSource as a cult is exactly as bad as any other cult, and that seems to be the way the OSS world is going--straight to cult status. "You're either with US, or you're with the TERR'RISTS!!!" "My 'puter is L33t--I don't have any proprietary software on it!!!"
Honestly, tell us about new software projects. Tell us how they're licensed. But don't base the QUALITY or VALIDITY of a project on its license, and whether it's OSS.
This is only to be expected, and I was actually expecting it to be announced about six months ago.
Carly Fiorina has made it clear that HP is no longer a technology company, but a sales company. They are no longer willing to take risks, they are no longer willing to develop new ideas and different architectures, and very ironcally, they are no longer willing to invent. If you need proof, just look at their nearly-dead calculator division.
The Alpha is dead. RPN is nearly dead. The spirits of Hewlett and Packard are dead, and Carly is going to make a very successful printer sales company by killing them. Unfortunately.
First of all, as much as I admire his work it must be said: Theo is an abrasive asshole. He is idealistic to the point of being utterly inflexible and insulting. He'd get farther if he behaved like a grown-up.
Secondly, to all the people who are accusing Sun of having no strategy, no plan, no policy, no hope, etc.. Just because YOU haven't bothered to find it out doesn't mean that it doesn't exist! There are a LOT of posts here that berate Sun for doing something that they clearly are not, or failing to explain something that they make perfectly plain. Go do your damned research!
Hmm. With the optional graphics libraries from Sun, I'm finding Gnome 2.0B3 surprisingly fast. Faster than any Gnome environment on Linux has been. However, it required having those libraries in place, the Beta3 installed (2 was slower, 1 was slooooooooowwwww!), and home directories on a local or fast network drive.
My problem with CDE is that it's been dated, inflexible, and restricted in its functionality since the day it was released. It was also horribly bloated at first, compared to OpenWin/olwm.
I certainly wouldn't call you a troll (did you get modded as one? Goofballs!), but I also think that you're being rather confrontational about Gnome. If you have a spare Sun box (No guarantees about Solaris/X86), put Solaris 9 on it with the Beta3 desktop, mlib libraries, and make sure your home directory isn't across a slow link. You might be surprised at where it's got to now.
Linux stability doesn't go _down_, but it doesn't scale _up_ very much, and its stability limit is lower than Win2k, and others in my experience.
The reasons behind this observation are multiple. On the one hand, there are often stability issues with the Linux kernel itself. I'll add here that I don't know what the current situation is, but not very long ago, a load average of >2/CPU on Linux could hang a system hard--to the point of needing a power cycle to recover. That was a known flaw in the kernel architecture. Another problem is that the Linux kernel has TONS of features in it, which means that bug fixes often require a kernel rebuild, which in turn means...downtime. Scheduled downtime to be sure, but downtime nonetheless. Win2k seems to be better at repairing its (many!) bugs through hotfixes.
And now that I think of it, this might actually cause the uptime numbers for Linux to decrease in the enterprise environment vs. the desktop, after all. My boxes at home have been up for ages, but they're also full of bugs that could potentially cause a crash. I don't care--I can reboot. I can't afford that sort of risk in a mission critical environment, which means...patching, kernel rebuilding, and outages.
It was a screwup. Plain and simple, a bug slipped into the 1.2 release candidate. It happens, and the whole Mozilla project has a better record than most at creating stable releases which actually are. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first release they've ever pulled. Any idea how many firmware and kernel patches Sun and HP have pulled on their OS?
Give them a break, and if you want stability, never download ANYTHING in the first week.
Hmm. I know (actually checked after posting this:-) that olwm is _included_ in everything up to Solaris 8, but I was under the impression that beyond Solaris 2.6, it was officially "unsupported legacy code." I know that they certainly deprecated it!
Then again, maybe I'm wrong on this. All I really remember was setting up and running mwm wherever I went.:-)
Oops! I stand corrected. I saw Sunview once. NeWS um...well we won't talk too much about that one. Someone also mentioned OpenStep, but if I remember correctly, Sun dabbled in it and then chucked the idea. Pity--I always liked NextStep.
I like to think that my point still stands--Sun isn't flopping madly about, switching desktops at random.
If you are running Win2k on certified (by Microsoft) hardware with appropriate patches/packages, Win2k uptime approaches that of Solaris or HP-UX, which is FAR higher than Linux in the enterprise environment.
On the desktop, the situation is reversed. Win2k is named after the number of times you have to reboot your desktop/laptop when running it for a year.
I'm no fan of Win2k, but in a properly controlled enterprise environment, Linux is still lagging.
Well I'll agree that CDE is pretty stable from patched Solaris 7 onwards. I made the switch from SunOS to Solaris at 2.3, and can tell you horror stories about CDE. Solaris 2.5.0...augh!!!
Compared to gnome, it's tiny, I'll agree. Gnome is far too bloated ALTHOUGH it can be configured to run as fast as CDE on a modern cheapo system (Blade 100/128MB RAM). CDE never could claim that vs. its older (and better) sibling, OpenWindows. For the functionality you get, CDE is a HUGE resource pig. (and that's even given that it's been getting slimmer over the years--early versions were worse)
In another post on this story, I wrote the following: "...(CDE) has never had the functionality or configurability (or usability!) required. Gnome has the potential to be whatever GUI you need it to be. That is a big win for selling Solaris to specific target markets."
That, I believe, is the key. CDE is just One Ugly Desktop. You can't do much to it, you can't do much with it. Adding an app launcher to the control panel is such an utter pain that I'd guess 95% of the people I know who use Solaris daily (I do contract Sun support, so that's a lot:-) don't know how to do it. Gnome is extensively and easily configurable. A company can set it up however necessary, and roll that environment onto their jumpstart server.
I won't say Gnome isn't without its faults (I hated 1.x, 2.0 I'm learning to love. Well, like), but the alternative would be to create something entirely different AGAIN, which nobody else had. We don't need that scene.
And for the record, Sun will probably include and support CDE at least into 2005.
Ignoring the Window Manager/desktop slip there, there always was a better desktop for Solaris. OpenWindows. Unfortunately, it's officially dead now, so we have to recreate one.
Solaris 8 (from 01/01, I think) and 9 have included Gnome 1.4 on the companion CD, and if you have a support contract, they'll support it.
Unfortunately, Gnome 1.4 on Solaris was/is such utter shite that you'd be crazy to even try using it. The 2.0 Beta1 was more stable than 1.4 release!
So how about a 2.0 final release pkg with support, but not integrated into the install CDs? I think we could see that happening either this month or next.
This 'announcement' (hardly even that) was regarding G2.0 becoming the _default_ desktop. No big deal.
OK first of all, the Blade 100/150 um...sucks. I've got one on my desktop at work, and I tend to use my dual Sparc20 for everything besides websurfing. Sad but true. (and once my Ultra-2 comes in, the blade will become my blow-up box)
And "Constant change of GUIs?" Hardly! This is the third GUI that Sun has had in their history. Also, OpenWin (a better environment than CDE from the start) has officially Not Been Supported for some time now. I think late Solaris7 releases ended support, and with Solaris8 Sun stopped shipping it. (Which isn't quite true, but don't let Sun hear me say that.)
Sun won't have more than two environments to support, and there's really nothing to support with CDE.
CDE was an attempt at GUI by committee, and just never worked well. It has finally become stable, but has never had the functionality or configurability (or usability!) required. Gnome has the potential to be whatever GUI you need it to be. That is a big win for selling Solaris to specific target markets.
And in nearly 15 years of SunOS/Solaris life, I've not yet met a single CDE zealot.:-)
My point is that this isn't indecision. It's a clear, planned progression to a modern desktop. In five years, they'll likely dump gnome for the next one, and be right in doing so. Things change.
CDE? Compact? Impossible to break??!!! Are you SURE you're using the same CDE as me?
It 'worked,' in that it did fairly well everything that it did. On the other hand, it ate up gobs of RAM disk space, and CPU compared to the far more functional OpenWindows with a window manager of your choice.
After roughly a decade of being in production across multiple platforms (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris), it's only now relatively bombproof, and is still as lousy to use as always.
I won't argue against your opinion of Gnome (I agree to a certain extent), but CDE was a huge step backwards from the beginning. It was NEVER a good desktop environment, compared to its predecessors, contemporaries, and now its successors.
Death to CDE!
Re:Before we all start siding with the underdog...
on
Phoenix To Change Name
·
· Score: 2
Agreed. Not only are both of these companies involved in the personal computer industry, but be it burned onto a chip or downloaded from the web, they both write software.
Given that they're close enough to consider trademark infringement, the biggest fear from Phoenix is this: People will download the Phoenix browser, and assume that the Phoenix bios company has branched out. The products are not the same, and no one would mistake that. However, it's conceivable that the names could lead to incorrect conclusions about the affiliation.
Honestly, it's good for both groups. This sort of thing happens all the time.
And as for Windows XP vs. Athlon XP, I think there might be a case (tough to bring forth, but not impossible I'd wager) IF both companies weren't entirely happy with increased sales from the other's name.
Since about 0.9.5, this has been my biggest objection to Mozilla.
A new version comes out. Download the whole package. Reinstall. Reset all of your preferences. Reinstall (or at least copy/move) your plugins. Uninstall the old version. Then a new version comes out. Repeat as necessary.
When are they going to add a patch upgrade procedure? This is a real annoyance, and one that they SHOULD be able to work around without much difficulty.
Aside from that, I use it for 99+% of my web life. There are only three sites I go to which don't support it.
Well, here's some mad scientists with a company: http://www.clonaid.com/
And while it's true that many disastrous inventions have been made through governments, where do the ideas come from in the first place? Commitees? More than likely, good mad scientists are smart enough to seek government funding.
Egotistical? Not a bit! I realise that there were probably a thousand people or more that complained, but I was one of them. If I didn't complain, then there's no telling that anyone else would have.
Put another way, if I'm apathetic then I can expect others to be so as well. If I'm active, then (hopefully) others are well. I'm a tiny part of the movement, but I _am_ part of the movement.
And at any rate, the point was to publicly commend Toyota Canada for changing as a result of consumer opinion. As someone else said, if we're going to criticise them for being wrong, we should praise them for getting it right.
Fascinating, scary, and thoughtful...
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Bill Joy's now (in)famous article about the terrors of unabated research into nanotech and its siblings is one of the most profound post-WWII articles written, and ranks up there with such brilliant works as Ursula Franklin's Massey Lecture series, "The Real World of Technology." [1],[2]
Unfortunately, Bill made the same mistake as Ursula. Technology cannot and will not be contained. If we all agreed to a worldwide ban on unabated nanotech research, human cloning, or whatever the topic of the day is, there would be someone willing to fund a mad scientist based on a privately owned island[3]. Unfortunately, mad scientists have a bad habit of eventually succeeding.
Curiously, Ray Kurzweil took exactly the anti-cautionary approach in his equally (in)famous article, which actually spawned Bill Joy's. Who is right? Should we proceed enthusiastically to greater and more fantastic worlds than we can imagine, or restrain ourselves from destroying humanity?
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we _try_ to do, because someone out there will push forward. We will have nanotech in the most futuristic sense, and we will have human clones, indistinguishable from the originals. When, where, how, and who are irrelevant. It will happen. Be it fugitive criminal scientists working for money and fame, or noble researchers working for the betterment of the race, it will happen. The only thing we can do at this point is ACCEPT, EXPECT, and PLAN. The alternative is to REACT which just doesn't work well.[4]
The very saddest part of this is that it means we should be putting forth the brightest and most creative minds as legislators and policy makers. Seems like an ignoble fate for them.
If this makes no sense to you, then maybe I should quit posting to slashdot after returning from a single malt tasting.
[1]Whew! Don't know when I've had so many capital letters in one sentence! [2]And I'm not just saying that because he created the One True Text Editor. [3]It's surprising in this day just how many privately owned islands there are. Just go and check! [4]I realise this sounds like a stupid slogan on an inspirational poster. Maybe I should write for those guys, despise them as I do.
When we were looking at buying a new car a few months ago, toyota.ca told me that my browser was too old, and I should use IE5 or 'better.' I wrote to 'em and complained, pointing out that people who shop carefully online for cars are likely to shop carefully for browsers as well.:-)
A month later, there was a page up saying they were redesigning for Mozilla/Netscape7/Opera compliance.
Today Mozilla works flawlessly, on their remarkably well designed site.
Score one for the good guys! And I'm off to make sure Toyota knows I appreciate their effort.
Well I agree quite a bit. My wife was a bit more forgiving, but fundamentally had the same complaints.
The first movie was so very hollywood (where are Hermione's buck teeth? How about Harry's wild hair?) and so sadly...unfun. The books were full of wonderment and silliness, and there's very little of that in the first movie. It was just so serious all the time. Ugh!
And now I hear that the second movie is even darker. Joy.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah.
Nobody who wants or needs the benefits of SCSI will bother with this halfway kludge. Seagate and the rest use their SCSI drives as their bread and butter. When Apple moved away from the SCSI world, there was no consumer market for SCSI, so the manufactures concentrated on making the best damned drives for the SCSI/Server market, while concentrating on making the biggest damned drives for the consumer marketplace.
I would never put one of these in a server, and I'd never buy a SCSI card to use one of these in a workstation. This isn't going to have even a slight ripple on the SCSI market.
OK, this is entertaining, but silly.
If you actually have a need for 14TB of online storage, there is no WAY you're going to be screwing around with eBay-purchased PC parts, IDE drives, and junky little enclosures.
If you're going to do data on a scale like this, you'll do it right. SCSI or (more likely) FCal drives, real cabinetry, and dedicated/built-in RAID controllers.
If I had about $30K to blow on storage, I'd get a smaller, proper array. If I had a need for 14TB, I'd come up with the cash to buy it properly. And if I couldn't do either, I'd walk away from that startup company.
All of which isn't to say that it isn't a geeky idea...
I remember that ad. Even more impressive, they actually had a four-page fold-out version of it. I think I've still got it in a filing cabinet somewhere, along with stacks of Softside magazine.
EA tried to redefine games as an artistic venture, and were fairly successful at it. Then they redefined games as Big Business, and were dissappointingly successful at that. Sigh.
OK, I go to the site and I find that it's a 'distro' of assorted open source windows software.
That doesn't matter though. OSS is the only thing that matters. What it is, what it does, how well it does it, NONE of this seems to matter any more--the dividing lines between any two sides of the coin have all faded, and now we're left looking at exactly one question: Is it OpenSource(tm), or EvilProprietary?
Open source as a methodology and a scheme for distributing software is excellent. OpenSource as a cult is exactly as bad as any other cult, and that seems to be the way the OSS world is going--straight to cult status. "You're either with US, or you're with the TERR'RISTS!!!" "My 'puter is L33t--I don't have any proprietary software on it!!!"
Honestly, tell us about new software projects. Tell us how they're licensed. But don't base the QUALITY or VALIDITY of a project on its license, and whether it's OSS.
This is only to be expected, and I was actually expecting it to be announced about six months ago.
Carly Fiorina has made it clear that HP is no longer a technology company, but a sales company. They are no longer willing to take risks, they are no longer willing to develop new ideas and different architectures, and very ironcally, they are no longer willing to invent. If you need proof, just look at their nearly-dead calculator division.
The Alpha is dead. RPN is nearly dead. The spirits of Hewlett and Packard are dead, and Carly is going to make a very successful printer sales company by killing them. Unfortunately.
First of all, as much as I admire his work it must be said: Theo is an abrasive asshole. He is idealistic to the point of being utterly inflexible and insulting. He'd get farther if he behaved like a grown-up.
Secondly, to all the people who are accusing Sun of having no strategy, no plan, no policy, no hope, etc.. Just because YOU haven't bothered to find it out doesn't mean that it doesn't exist! There are a LOT of posts here that berate Sun for doing something that they clearly are not, or failing to explain something that they make perfectly plain. Go do your damned research!
Hmm. With the optional graphics libraries from Sun, I'm finding Gnome 2.0B3 surprisingly fast. Faster than any Gnome environment on Linux has been. However, it required having those libraries in place, the Beta3 installed (2 was slower, 1 was slooooooooowwwww!), and home directories on a local or fast network drive.
My problem with CDE is that it's been dated, inflexible, and restricted in its functionality since the day it was released. It was also horribly bloated at first, compared to OpenWin/olwm.
I certainly wouldn't call you a troll (did you get modded as one? Goofballs!), but I also think that you're being rather confrontational about Gnome. If you have a spare Sun box (No guarantees about Solaris/X86), put Solaris 9 on it with the Beta3 desktop, mlib libraries, and make sure your home directory isn't across a slow link. You might be surprised at where it's got to now.
OK, perhaps I wasn't very clear there.
Linux stability doesn't go _down_, but it doesn't scale _up_ very much, and its stability limit is lower than Win2k, and others in my experience.
The reasons behind this observation are multiple. On the one hand, there are often stability issues with the Linux kernel itself. I'll add here that I don't know what the current situation is, but not very long ago, a load average of >2/CPU on Linux could hang a system hard--to the point of needing a power cycle to recover. That was a known flaw in the kernel architecture. Another problem is that the Linux kernel has TONS of features in it, which means that bug fixes often require a kernel rebuild, which in turn means...downtime. Scheduled downtime to be sure, but downtime nonetheless. Win2k seems to be better at repairing its (many!) bugs through hotfixes.
And now that I think of it, this might actually cause the uptime numbers for Linux to decrease in the enterprise environment vs. the desktop, after all. My boxes at home have been up for ages, but they're also full of bugs that could potentially cause a crash. I don't care--I can reboot. I can't afford that sort of risk in a mission critical environment, which means...patching, kernel rebuilding, and outages.
It was a screwup. Plain and simple, a bug slipped into the 1.2 release candidate. It happens, and the whole Mozilla project has a better record than most at creating stable releases which actually are. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first release they've ever pulled. Any idea how many firmware and kernel patches Sun and HP have pulled on their OS?
Give them a break, and if you want stability, never download ANYTHING in the first week.
Hmm. I know (actually checked after posting this :-) that olwm is _included_ in everything up to Solaris 8, but I was under the impression that beyond Solaris 2.6, it was officially "unsupported legacy code." I know that they certainly deprecated it!
:-)
Then again, maybe I'm wrong on this. All I really remember was setting up and running mwm wherever I went.
Oops! I stand corrected. I saw Sunview once. NeWS um...well we won't talk too much about that one. Someone also mentioned OpenStep, but if I remember correctly, Sun dabbled in it and then chucked the idea. Pity--I always liked NextStep.
I like to think that my point still stands--Sun isn't flopping madly about, switching desktops at random.
Bah! Sure it does.
If you are running Win2k on certified (by Microsoft) hardware with appropriate patches/packages, Win2k uptime approaches that of Solaris or HP-UX, which is FAR higher than Linux in the enterprise environment.
On the desktop, the situation is reversed. Win2k is named after the number of times you have to reboot your desktop/laptop when running it for a year.
I'm no fan of Win2k, but in a properly controlled enterprise environment, Linux is still lagging.
Well I'll agree that CDE is pretty stable from patched Solaris 7 onwards. I made the switch from SunOS to Solaris at 2.3, and can tell you horror stories about CDE. Solaris 2.5.0...augh!!!
:-) don't know how to do it. Gnome is extensively and easily configurable. A company can set it up however necessary, and roll that environment onto their jumpstart server.
Compared to gnome, it's tiny, I'll agree. Gnome is far too bloated ALTHOUGH it can be configured to run as fast as CDE on a modern cheapo system (Blade 100/128MB RAM). CDE never could claim that vs. its older (and better) sibling, OpenWindows. For the functionality you get, CDE is a HUGE resource pig. (and that's even given that it's been getting slimmer over the years--early versions were worse)
In another post on this story, I wrote the following:
"...(CDE) has never had the functionality or configurability (or usability!) required. Gnome has the potential to be whatever GUI you need it to be. That is a big win for selling Solaris to specific target markets."
That, I believe, is the key. CDE is just One Ugly Desktop. You can't do much to it, you can't do much with it. Adding an app launcher to the control panel is such an utter pain that I'd guess 95% of the people I know who use Solaris daily (I do contract Sun support, so that's a lot
I won't say Gnome isn't without its faults (I hated 1.x, 2.0 I'm learning to love. Well, like), but the alternative would be to create something entirely different AGAIN, which nobody else had. We don't need that scene.
And for the record, Sun will probably include and support CDE at least into 2005.
Ignoring the Window Manager/desktop slip there, there always was a better desktop for Solaris. OpenWindows. Unfortunately, it's officially dead now, so we have to recreate one.
Solaris 8 (from 01/01, I think) and 9 have included Gnome 1.4 on the companion CD, and if you have a support contract, they'll support it.
Unfortunately, Gnome 1.4 on Solaris was/is such utter shite that you'd be crazy to even try using it. The 2.0 Beta1 was more stable than 1.4 release!
So how about a 2.0 final release pkg with support, but not integrated into the install CDs? I think we could see that happening either this month or next.
This 'announcement' (hardly even that) was regarding G2.0 becoming the _default_ desktop. No big deal.
OK first of all, the Blade 100/150 um...sucks. I've got one on my desktop at work, and I tend to use my dual Sparc20 for everything besides websurfing. Sad but true. (and once my Ultra-2 comes in, the blade will become my blow-up box)
:-)
And "Constant change of GUIs?" Hardly! This is the third GUI that Sun has had in their history. Also, OpenWin (a better environment than CDE from the start) has officially Not Been Supported for some time now. I think late Solaris7 releases ended support, and with Solaris8 Sun stopped shipping it. (Which isn't quite true, but don't let Sun hear me say that.)
Sun won't have more than two environments to support, and there's really nothing to support with CDE.
CDE was an attempt at GUI by committee, and just never worked well. It has finally become stable, but has never had the functionality or configurability (or usability!) required. Gnome has the potential to be whatever GUI you need it to be. That is a big win for selling Solaris to specific target markets.
And in nearly 15 years of SunOS/Solaris life, I've not yet met a single CDE zealot.
My point is that this isn't indecision. It's a clear, planned progression to a modern desktop. In five years, they'll likely dump gnome for the next one, and be right in doing so. Things change.
CDE? Compact? Impossible to break??!!! Are you SURE you're using the same CDE as me?
It 'worked,' in that it did fairly well everything that it did. On the other hand, it ate up gobs of RAM disk space, and CPU compared to the far more functional OpenWindows with a window manager of your choice.
After roughly a decade of being in production across multiple platforms (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris), it's only now relatively bombproof, and is still as lousy to use as always.
I won't argue against your opinion of Gnome (I agree to a certain extent), but CDE was a huge step backwards from the beginning. It was NEVER a good desktop environment, compared to its predecessors, contemporaries, and now its successors.
Death to CDE!
Agreed. Not only are both of these companies involved in the personal computer industry, but be it burned onto a chip or downloaded from the web, they both write software.
Given that they're close enough to consider trademark infringement, the biggest fear from Phoenix is this: People will download the Phoenix browser, and assume that the Phoenix bios company has branched out. The products are not the same, and no one would mistake that. However, it's conceivable that the names could lead to incorrect conclusions about the affiliation.
Honestly, it's good for both groups. This sort of thing happens all the time.
And as for Windows XP vs. Athlon XP, I think there might be a case (tough to bring forth, but not impossible I'd wager) IF both companies weren't entirely happy with increased sales from the other's name.
Since about 0.9.5, this has been my biggest objection to Mozilla.
A new version comes out. Download the whole package. Reinstall. Reset all of your preferences. Reinstall (or at least copy/move) your plugins. Uninstall the old version. Then a new version comes out. Repeat as necessary.
When are they going to add a patch upgrade procedure? This is a real annoyance, and one that they SHOULD be able to work around without much difficulty.
Aside from that, I use it for 99+% of my web life. There are only three sites I go to which don't support it.
Oh man, how could I forget?
Bill Gates!
Well, here's some mad scientists with a company:
http://www.clonaid.com/
And while it's true that many disastrous inventions have been made through governments, where do the ideas come from in the first place? Commitees? More than likely, good mad scientists are smart enough to seek government funding.
Egotistical? Not a bit! I realise that there were probably a thousand people or more that complained, but I was one of them. If I didn't complain, then there's no telling that anyone else would have.
Put another way, if I'm apathetic then I can expect others to be so as well. If I'm active, then (hopefully) others are well. I'm a tiny part of the movement, but I _am_ part of the movement.
And at any rate, the point was to publicly commend Toyota Canada for changing as a result of consumer opinion. As someone else said, if we're going to criticise them for being wrong, we should praise them for getting it right.
Bill Joy's now (in)famous article about the terrors of unabated research into nanotech and its siblings is one of the most profound post-WWII articles written, and ranks up there with such brilliant works as Ursula Franklin's Massey Lecture series, "The Real World of Technology." [1],[2]
Unfortunately, Bill made the same mistake as Ursula. Technology cannot and will not be contained. If we all agreed to a worldwide ban on unabated nanotech research, human cloning, or whatever the topic of the day is, there would be someone willing to fund a mad scientist based on a privately owned island[3]. Unfortunately, mad scientists have a bad habit of eventually succeeding.
Curiously, Ray Kurzweil took exactly the anti-cautionary approach in his equally (in)famous article, which actually spawned Bill Joy's. Who is right? Should we proceed enthusiastically to greater and more fantastic worlds than we can imagine, or restrain ourselves from destroying humanity?
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we _try_ to do, because someone out there will push forward. We will have nanotech in the most futuristic sense, and we will have human clones, indistinguishable from the originals. When, where, how, and who are irrelevant. It will happen. Be it fugitive criminal scientists working for money and fame, or noble researchers working for the betterment of the race, it will happen. The only thing we can do at this point is ACCEPT, EXPECT, and PLAN. The alternative is to REACT which just doesn't work well.[4]
The very saddest part of this is that it means we should be putting forth the brightest and most creative minds as legislators and policy makers. Seems like an ignoble fate for them.
If this makes no sense to you, then maybe I should quit posting to slashdot after returning from a single malt tasting.
[1]Whew! Don't know when I've had so many capital letters in one sentence!
[2]And I'm not just saying that because he created the One True Text Editor.
[3]It's surprising in this day just how many privately owned islands there are. Just go and check!
[4]I realise this sounds like a stupid slogan on an inspirational poster. Maybe I should write for those guys, despise them as I do.
When we were looking at buying a new car a few months ago, toyota.ca told me that my browser was too old, and I should use IE5 or 'better.' I wrote to 'em and complained, pointing out that people who shop carefully online for cars are likely to shop carefully for browsers as well. :-)
A month later, there was a page up saying they were redesigning for Mozilla/Netscape7/Opera compliance.
Today Mozilla works flawlessly, on their remarkably well designed site.
Score one for the good guys! And I'm off to make sure Toyota knows I appreciate their effort.
Well I agree quite a bit. My wife was a bit more forgiving, but fundamentally had the same complaints.
The first movie was so very hollywood (where are Hermione's buck teeth? How about Harry's wild hair?) and so sadly...unfun. The books were full of wonderment and silliness, and there's very little of that in the first movie. It was just so serious all the time. Ugh!
And now I hear that the second movie is even darker. Joy.