an 'outsider' got into the 'old way' of doing things, and turned it on it's ear.
I think you're right. Actually, there were lots of different influences, and our journey out of the dark ages has taken a long time. The torn jeans have been around for decades, but the pool table is new, and from what I gather, not every location has one.:)
Must be nice to expect to work in an office full of Nerf toys, free soda, 24 hour flex time...
Yes, it is. Good employers know how to retain good employees. Mine didn't blink when I told them that from now on I'd be dropping my son off at daycare at 10:00 and coming in "sometime after that".
Several months ago, they took a little-used demo area and converted it into a billiard room. The year before that they put in a foosball table.
And this isn't some flakey startup or M$. We were in the Dow 30 long before M$.
Do they do this just because we're a bunch of whiny brats who need toys to play with at work? No, they did this because we sometimes need a place to chill to get past the blind spots. Just last week, a half-hour at the pool table cleared my head enough that I solved a problem that I'd been stuck on for over a day.
We have security gates *and* long hair and torn jeans. We used to have drug testing until they saw how much of a waste that was. They give us a lot of leeway because we give them a lot of product.
what's wrong with Linux's lvm? From I can tell, It is just as good the HPUX one.
IIRC, UW uses Veritas's VxVM, which has features the HP-UX LVM doesn't have. But either way, any volume manager makes administering disk space much more flexible, because you no longer have to split your filesystems on partition or disk drive boundaries.
Plus, you can increase the size of a logical volume on the fly, and in many cases (including HP-UX) increase the size of the filesystem itself without having to rebuild it from scratch.
Yes, it adds a layer of complexity, but once you've gotten used to the capabilities it adds, trying to manage filesystems without it is like trying to type with your nose.
[ObTopic: Having worked at USL and Novell on UnixWare in the mid 90's, I'm sad to see it get kicked around yet again. I still think it's a great product. Plus, it's hard on the employees, who have to deal with a new employer every few years.]
Oh, the networking driver does rock.. It amounts to something like a 10,000T Ethernet card, shoved across the bus.
This got me to thinking. In a situation like this, where you have massive bandwidth with high reliability, wouldn't it make sense to cobble together some sort of networking that didn't have the overhead or complexity of a TCP/IP stack? Keep the socket API/ABI, but let the bits flow faster.
PCI hardware raid with 7 UW/SCSI drives will shoot enough data at a processor to keep it happy.
Hardly. At that point the PCI bus is the bottleneck. Think about it: 33MHz, or even 66MHz gives any CPU time to yawn. To really keep the CPU(s) busy you need several PCI buses feeding one or more higher-speed backplanes which in turn feed the CPUs.
In the US, it varies widely. As others have pointed out, many record stores have listening stations where you can hear CDs they're trying to promote. One of my favorite stores has a total of about 50 listenable CDs at any one time. The local Borders has several hundred, although the CD players fail a lot.
Another store I go to has a "club membership" for like $15/year. For that you get a $2-or-so discount on all CDs (which makes them reasonably priced, but not bargains, usually), plus you can listen to *any* CD, provided one of their five CD players is available. Non-club members can't do that.
Of course, all the good DJ record stores will let you listen to anything before buying, but at $10 per 12" single, they'd better.
As long as the bearings hold up it should be OK, at least if the large Seagate drives I have behave similarly to Maxtor drives. When the bearings go the drive makes that annoying constant buzz...
Woz's refreshing lack of concentration on matters financial shows that he is willing to sacrifice his personal pleasure in the name of his vision
I'd say that he is not willing to sacrifice "pleasure" for "vision", but rather that he makes them one and the same. For almost 20 years now, he's used his money to do nothing but what he wants to do. He made his bundle, and somehow knew what his idea of The Good Life would be, and he continues to live it.
That's such a happy contrast to the horror stories you hear about so many people who come into sudden wealth. I hope if I ever hit it really big, I'll know what to do with it as well as Woz does.
The only problem with this idea is that every time someone reverse-engineers something because the original is badly licensed (for whatever value of "bad"), you now have an additional version of the product, which may or may not operate identically to the original. Who wants to test all that? At its worst, this leads to several functionally similar, but not identical, products, which not only won't be drop-in replacements for each other, they may not even interoperate. Open is good, but how much more motif/lesstif or Unix/Linux/BSD fragmentation do we need?
Think GNUCash vs. Quicken or even Money and you'll see what I mean.
Someone around here, whom I wish I could have moderated to the moon and back, recently said something like, "My mother doesn't want to use the computer, she wants to read her email."
This was the best one-sentence summary I've ever seen of why Linux doesn't work for the general public. I have bunches of boxen running half a dozen OSes, but I have to have a Wintel or Mac machine to use as an appliance. I can program all day and all night, futz around with my Basement Area Network, and have all sorts of geeky fun, but at some point I have to balance my damn checkbook, and for that I need Quicken.
I need Quicken because the data is too critical. If the Gimp blammos a picture I'm working on, I might be tempted to take a deep breath and dive into the source. But Quicken is rock-stable, and I have to have that because it's information the IRS will hold me accountable for. Besides, part of why I balance my checkbook on the computer at all is to save time, which it does. I'm not going to save much time if every month's checkbook balancing might turn into an all-night debugging session.
So, should we be careful about what we post here, Usenet, or anywhere else? Especially if we post about our own companies?
Always! Eons ago, the new users' docs for Usenet used to come with the admonition that you shouldn't post anything you wouldn't want your current or future employers to read. With the explosion of the Internet in general, add your parents to that list as well.
And of course, now that just about everything is being archived somewhere, don't post anything that might come back to haunt you decades from now.
[In 2050 will I be jailed as a "future dissident" for moderating down a troll in 2000?]
The Freedom to Innovate Network is not itself innovative at all. MANY so-called "grass roots" organizations, when not obviously run by industries which stand to benefit from them, are started surreptitiously by those industries' public relations firms.
A good example is the "National Smokers' Alliance", which claims to be a grass-roots organization protecting the rights of smokers, when in fact it was created by Phillip Morris's PR firm (Hill & Knowlton, IIRC). There's another one run by the logging industry that calls itself something environmental-sounding, when they really advocate unrestricted clear-cutting.
The best indicator flag is when the name seems to indicate that anyone not of their group is evil. The opposite of "freedom to innovate" would be something fascist like "government prevention of innovation", and we wouldn't want that, would we? The idea behind that sort of naming is to give the appearance of a broader scope than the organization really has, in this case "freedom for M$ to innovate, but nobody else if we can help it".
Judging by the discussion here, looks like we're not falling for it.
Dunno about "we", but I'm not. When my parents adopted my sister, abortion was still illegal, and there were plenty of babies to go around. The situation is radically different now. Believe me, for a long time it looked like adoption was our only option.
These days (in the U.S. at least), you have three ways to adopt:
Domestic: You pay all the living and medical expenses of the birth mother, who may still back out at the last minute.
International: You adopt a child out of an orphanage. You have no way of knowing the child's background or medical condition, and you may have to cool your heels in the child's country for weeks while all the bribes go through. (Yes, it's very corrupt.)
Domestic special needs: You adopt an older child (who may have already been through endless foster homes), or one with disabilities. Depending on the disability, you may or may not be able to get training on how to take care of it.
If money is a problem, the first two are out, because the costs are generally US$15,000 to $30,000. In-vitro can be less expensive than that. For first-time parents, raising any child is diffcult enough, so most adoption counselors will recommend against adopting a special needs child the first time around.
My wife and I want another child, but remain undecided on whether we want to adopt or try to conceive again.
You are right--when we realized that we had fertility problems, we agonized for months over the adoption question. In the end, we did what we did not because we thought our genes were so fantastic that the world needed what they could produce, but we had to spend a lot of time in collective and individual introspection to make sure we were being honest with ourselves about that.
We were fortunate that our insurance did pay for the treatment (and was later approved for in-vitro although we didn't need it). Also, we couldn't afford the high costs of non-special-needs adoption, nor the emotional costs of the risks involved (we know too many people whose adoptions fell through at the eleventh hour), and we didn't think we were ready for special needs.
I'm revealing this much of a very private story to let people know that this is by no means a cut-and-dried issue. We knew that whatever we did, somebody's life would be profoundly affected by it, and we couldn't make our decision based on other people's opinions or bumper-sticker ideology. We're going to have to make that decision again, and it's not going to be any easier the second time around.
In the U.S., couples are applauded for bringing six, seven, even eight children into the world at once even though medical experts warn that such children face grave physical risks and emotional problems.
Maybe a few high-profile media figures will make a big show of high-order multiple births, but the rest of us in the infertility trenches see that as our worst nightmare. Most of us want a baby, not a litter.
The problem is that the number of babies (zygotes, actually) is much more easily controllable when more advanced techniques such as in-vitro fertilization are used, but most insurance won't pay for that, so couples have to either do without, or resort to garden-variety fertility drugs.
What's worse is that fertility clinics themselves vary widely in how aggressively they use these drugs, with the lower-cost clinics tending to be the most reckless.
When more states mandate infertility coverage (as Massachusetts, among others, now does), couples will be able to receive appropriate treatment and counseling, without having to deal with unscrupulous shoot-from-the-hip clinics who only want to keep their numbers high.
-Father of one baby, thanks to properly used fertility drugs
as long as people keep fighting against abuse of power
Sorry, making people wait to download ads when they're paying by the minute is not abuse of power, especially when it can be turned off. Obnoxious yes, but not abuse of power.
When you give your congresscritter a dirty look at a campaign stop, and the next day you get a note from the IRS saying that your last ten years' tax returns are being audited, that's abuse of power.
"Is it true you were one of the pioneer cyber squatters?"
I doubt it, because they didn't do it with the intent of holding the domain hostage. Around that time, Brian and his friends registered dozens of domains, many of which are still hosted on hyperreal.
Slightly offtopic, I know, but I was once reviewing a document for a serial-port driver or some such. As these things usually are, it was page after page of mind-numbing detail about hardware registers, state graphs, interrupt handlers and the like. About 3/4 of the way in, the author described yet another hardware register, which had three or four bit fields of varying length. One of them was called "EAD - Earn a Dollar".
Being the naive newbie engineer I was back then, I went in and asked him what that was, and he promptly handed me a dollar. He said he had put that in just to see if anyone would read that far.
Is it a trademark on the color, or the name of the color? I thought Coca-Cola was denied a trademark for its particular shade of red, but I might be wrong.
OTOH, Pantone is perfectly within their rights to get some sort of copyright or trademark protection for specifying that shade of blue HP uses in their new logos as "PMS 653".
The one thing that will keep me a landline customer for a long time to come is the fact that a simple conventional telephone is powered by the telco, not the electric company. For all we hate about The Phone Company, they're *extremely* reliable. They've done high availability longer than anyone.
We generally get at least one >24-hour power outage a year, but the phones never go down. After the batteries run out, if I can't power my cellphone some other way, it's useless.
[Still looking forward to the next huge advance in battery technology, and the day we kiss the power grid goodbye!]
why not Heinlein or Asimov whose books touch on things that might be important someday
OK, how about Starship Troopers: The Series. Since they won't be able to duplicate the coed shower scene on broadcast TV, they should go back to the book. Episodes can show us virtues like blind obedience, jingoism, militarism, and all the fun of being a gun-toting redneck ("Let's go shoot us some goo^H^H^Hbugs")!
If UPN won't carry it, pitch it to the Family Channel, but be warned, they might be reluctant to give up any of those wholesome cowboys-n-injuns westerns.
Ticketmaster would also like to become the sole legal source for all tickets to anywhere.
That's it right there. Ticketmaster does have a virtual monopoly on tickets to events it advertises. Since you have to go through them to get your tickets, they want to leverage that to force you down a clickstream that exposes you to as much paid advertising as possible.
OTOH, sites like Amazon, which don't have monopolies on the products they sell don't seem to be making any noise over this issue. Why? Because deep-linking gets you to buy from them instead of surfing your way to someplace else.
With Ticketmaster there is no someplace else, so that's no help to them.
To my astonishment the sources of basename, [...] were included as well! Ow boy! am I going to build an AT&T/Linux distro
Those commands were rewritten by the group Dave was in, in order to provide for themselves a set of utility commands they could use across a wide variety of platforms, working around the incompatibilities among all the Unixes.
So, you're not really getting the original AT&T code. If you want that, look for Sun or someone to open the source they originally got from AT&T.
-Ed
...who spent the early 90's beta-testing new ksh releases.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
an 'outsider' got into the 'old way' of doing things, and turned it on it's ear.
I think you're right. Actually, there were lots of different influences, and our journey out of the dark ages has taken a long time. The torn jeans have been around for decades, but the pool table is new, and from what I gather, not every location has one. :)
No, it's all about who knows you.
Yes, it is. Good employers know how to retain good employees. Mine didn't blink when I told them that from now on I'd be dropping my son off at daycare at 10:00 and coming in "sometime after that".
Several months ago, they took a little-used demo area and converted it into a billiard room. The year before that they put in a foosball table.
And this isn't some flakey startup or M$. We were in the Dow 30 long before M$.
Do they do this just because we're a bunch of whiny brats who need toys to play with at work? No, they did this because we sometimes need a place to chill to get past the blind spots. Just last week, a half-hour at the pool table cleared my head enough that I solved a problem that I'd been stuck on for over a day.
We have security gates *and* long hair and torn jeans. We used to have drug testing until they saw how much of a waste that was. They give us a lot of leeway because we give them a lot of product.
Sounds like a fair deal to me.
IIRC, UW uses Veritas's VxVM, which has features the HP-UX LVM doesn't have. But either way, any volume manager makes administering disk space much more flexible, because you no longer have to split your filesystems on partition or disk drive boundaries.
Plus, you can increase the size of a logical volume on the fly, and in many cases (including HP-UX) increase the size of the filesystem itself without having to rebuild it from scratch.
Yes, it adds a layer of complexity, but once you've gotten used to the capabilities it adds, trying to manage filesystems without it is like trying to type with your nose.
[ObTopic: Having worked at USL and Novell on UnixWare in the mid 90's, I'm sad to see it get kicked around yet again. I still think it's a great product. Plus, it's hard on the employees, who have to deal with a new employer every few years.]
This got me to thinking. In a situation like this, where you have massive bandwidth with high reliability, wouldn't it make sense to cobble together some sort of networking that didn't have the overhead or complexity of a TCP/IP stack? Keep the socket API/ABI, but let the bits flow faster.
Hardly. At that point the PCI bus is the bottleneck. Think about it: 33MHz, or even 66MHz gives any CPU time to yawn. To really keep the CPU(s) busy you need several PCI buses feeding one or more higher-speed backplanes which in turn feed the CPUs.
In the US, it varies widely. As others have pointed out, many record stores have listening stations where you can hear CDs they're trying to promote. One of my favorite stores has a total of about 50 listenable CDs at any one time. The local Borders has several hundred, although the CD players fail a lot.
Another store I go to has a "club membership" for like $15/year. For that you get a $2-or-so discount on all CDs (which makes them reasonably priced, but not bargains, usually), plus you can listen to *any* CD, provided one of their five CD players is available. Non-club members can't do that.
Of course, all the good DJ record stores will let you listen to anything before buying, but at $10 per 12" single, they'd better.
As long as the bearings hold up it should be OK, at least if the large Seagate drives I have behave similarly to Maxtor drives. When the bearings go the drive makes that annoying constant buzz...
I'd say that he is not willing to sacrifice "pleasure" for "vision", but rather that he makes them one and the same. For almost 20 years now, he's used his money to do nothing but what he wants to do. He made his bundle, and somehow knew what his idea of The Good Life would be, and he continues to live it.
That's such a happy contrast to the horror stories you hear about so many people who come into sudden wealth. I hope if I ever hit it really big, I'll know what to do with it as well as Woz does.
Bill Joy. Linus, eventually.
The only problem with this idea is that every time someone reverse-engineers something because the original is badly licensed (for whatever value of "bad"), you now have an additional version of the product, which may or may not operate identically to the original. Who wants to test all that? At its worst, this leads to several functionally similar, but not identical, products, which not only won't be drop-in replacements for each other, they may not even interoperate. Open is good, but how much more motif/lesstif or Unix/Linux/BSD fragmentation do we need?
Someone around here, whom I wish I could have moderated to the moon and back, recently said something like, "My mother doesn't want to use the computer, she wants to read her email."
This was the best one-sentence summary I've ever seen of why Linux doesn't work for the general public. I have bunches of boxen running half a dozen OSes, but I have to have a Wintel or Mac machine to use as an appliance. I can program all day and all night, futz around with my Basement Area Network, and have all sorts of geeky fun, but at some point I have to balance my damn checkbook, and for that I need Quicken.
I need Quicken because the data is too critical. If the Gimp blammos a picture I'm working on, I might be tempted to take a deep breath and dive into the source. But Quicken is rock-stable, and I have to have that because it's information the IRS will hold me accountable for. Besides, part of why I balance my checkbook on the computer at all is to save time, which it does. I'm not going to save much time if every month's checkbook balancing might turn into an all-night debugging session.
Always! Eons ago, the new users' docs for Usenet used to come with the admonition that you shouldn't post anything you wouldn't want your current or future employers to read. With the explosion of the Internet in general, add your parents to that list as well.
And of course, now that just about everything is being archived somewhere, don't post anything that might come back to haunt you decades from now.
[In 2050 will I be jailed as a "future dissident" for moderating down a troll in 2000?]
At least M$ is consistent.
The Freedom to Innovate Network is not itself innovative at all. MANY so-called "grass roots" organizations, when not obviously run by industries which stand to benefit from them, are started surreptitiously by those industries' public relations firms.
A good example is the "National Smokers' Alliance", which claims to be a grass-roots organization protecting the rights of smokers, when in fact it was created by Phillip Morris's PR firm (Hill & Knowlton, IIRC). There's another one run by the logging industry that calls itself something environmental-sounding, when they really advocate unrestricted clear-cutting.
The best indicator flag is when the name seems to indicate that anyone not of their group is evil. The opposite of "freedom to innovate" would be something fascist like "government prevention of innovation", and we wouldn't want that, would we? The idea behind that sort of naming is to give the appearance of a broader scope than the organization really has, in this case "freedom for M$ to innovate, but nobody else if we can help it".
Judging by the discussion here, looks like we're not falling for it.
These days (in the U.S. at least), you have three ways to adopt:
If money is a problem, the first two are out, because the costs are generally US$15,000 to $30,000. In-vitro can be less expensive than that. For first-time parents, raising any child is diffcult enough, so most adoption counselors will recommend against adopting a special needs child the first time around.
My wife and I want another child, but remain undecided on whether we want to adopt or try to conceive again.
You are right--when we realized that we had fertility problems, we agonized for months over the adoption question. In the end, we did what we did not because we thought our genes were so fantastic that the world needed what they could produce, but we had to spend a lot of time in collective and individual introspection to make sure we were being honest with ourselves about that.
We were fortunate that our insurance did pay for the treatment (and was later approved for in-vitro although we didn't need it). Also, we couldn't afford the high costs of non-special-needs adoption, nor the emotional costs of the risks involved (we know too many people whose adoptions fell through at the eleventh hour), and we didn't think we were ready for special needs.
I'm revealing this much of a very private story to let people know that this is by no means a cut-and-dried issue. We knew that whatever we did, somebody's life would be profoundly affected by it, and we couldn't make our decision based on other people's opinions or bumper-sticker ideology. We're going to have to make that decision again, and it's not going to be any easier the second time around.
Maybe a few high-profile media figures will make a big show of high-order multiple births, but the rest of us in the infertility trenches see that as our worst nightmare. Most of us want a baby, not a litter.
The problem is that the number of babies (zygotes, actually) is much more easily controllable when more advanced techniques such as in-vitro fertilization are used, but most insurance won't pay for that, so couples have to either do without, or resort to garden-variety fertility drugs.
What's worse is that fertility clinics themselves vary widely in how aggressively they use these drugs, with the lower-cost clinics tending to be the most reckless.
When more states mandate infertility coverage (as Massachusetts, among others, now does), couples will be able to receive appropriate treatment and counseling, without having to deal with unscrupulous shoot-from-the-hip clinics who only want to keep their numbers high.
-Father of one baby, thanks to properly used fertility drugs
Sorry, making people wait to download ads when they're paying by the minute is not abuse of power, especially when it can be turned off. Obnoxious yes, but not abuse of power.
When you give your congresscritter a dirty look at a campaign stop, and the next day you get a note from the IRS saying that your last ten years' tax returns are being audited, that's abuse of power.
Let's not forget the one application for impact printers that ink-jets and lasers will never fill: multipart forms.
"Copy 7 - Destroy"
I doubt it, because they didn't do it with the intent of holding the domain hostage. Around that time, Brian and his friends registered dozens of domains, many of which are still hosted on hyperreal.
Slightly offtopic, I know, but I was once reviewing a document for a serial-port driver or some such. As these things usually are, it was page after page of mind-numbing detail about hardware registers, state graphs, interrupt handlers and the like. About 3/4 of the way in, the author described yet another hardware register, which had three or four bit fields of varying length. One of them was called "EAD - Earn a Dollar".
Being the naive newbie engineer I was back then, I went in and asked him what that was, and he promptly handed me a dollar. He said he had put that in just to see if anyone would read that far.
OTOH, Pantone is perfectly within their rights to get some sort of copyright or trademark protection for specifying that shade of blue HP uses in their new logos as "PMS 653".
Didn't Weyerhauser once try to patent wood?
The one thing that will keep me a landline customer for a long time to come is the fact that a simple conventional telephone is powered by the telco, not the electric company. For all we hate about The Phone Company, they're *extremely* reliable. They've done high availability longer than anyone.
We generally get at least one >24-hour power outage a year, but the phones never go down. After the batteries run out, if I can't power my cellphone some other way, it's useless.
[Still looking forward to the next huge advance in battery technology, and the day we kiss the power grid goodbye!]
OK, how about Starship Troopers: The Series. Since they won't be able to duplicate the coed shower scene on broadcast TV, they should go back to the book. Episodes can show us virtues like blind obedience, jingoism, militarism, and all the fun of being a gun-toting redneck ("Let's go shoot us some goo^H^H^Hbugs")!
If UPN won't carry it, pitch it to the Family Channel, but be warned, they might be reluctant to give up any of those wholesome cowboys-n-injuns westerns.
Score 1: Yee-haw
That's it right there. Ticketmaster does have a virtual monopoly on tickets to events it advertises. Since you have to go through them to get your tickets, they want to leverage that to force you down a clickstream that exposes you to as much paid advertising as possible.
OTOH, sites like Amazon, which don't have monopolies on the products they sell don't seem to be making any noise over this issue. Why? Because deep-linking gets you to buy from them instead of surfing your way to someplace else.
With Ticketmaster there is no someplace else, so that's no help to them.
Those commands were rewritten by the group Dave was in, in order to provide for themselves a set of utility commands they could use across a wide variety of platforms, working around the incompatibilities among all the Unixes.
So, you're not really getting the original AT&T code. If you want that, look for Sun or someone to open the source they originally got from AT&T.
-Ed