I've got a fairly standard Sun Ultra2 Creator3D workstation. Solaris 9 was a complete horror show... I've got many years experience noodling around with Solaris, from it's old SunOS 4 days as "Solaris 1" right up to Solaris 7 (2.7, for those on the inside.) I know what the hell I'm doing, but I was completely baffled and defeated by Solaris 9. Nothing worked, from the installer to the administration utilities (command line and GUI) to the SunScreen firewall software. I spent a week trying to get this basic web server/NAT firewall up and running. It's lack of attention to basic detail is inexcuseable, and goes a long way toward explainging why Sun has lost so much market share in the past two years. IBM's a PITA to work with, but it's well documented and works out of the box with only a bit of tinkering.
For grins, I popped out the extra processor, and loaded, configured and deployed OpenBSD in all of three hours, NAT and Apache and DJBDNS and all.
I tried an earlier build of Solaris 10, and it didn't go at all well. I'll try this one (which purportedly has a Sun-comissioned version of IPfilter), and if I can't get it to do what I want in an afternoon, I'll slap SuSe on it instead. Or Gentoo... Gentoo might be fun, even if does take forever to compile.
By the later generations of the Newton, the handwriting issue had ironed itself out, and the solution that Palm used had first seen the light of day as an add-on to the Newton.
The price issue wasn't a killer, either, because the eBook was in the $800 range, and shrinking the package down to Palm (or even Psion) size would have halved the price (no keyboard or large touch screen.) The guts weren't too far different from the Psion, which was in a nice price point.
The Palm was not a step forward, and the fact that even today that it relies on glyphic shorthand alphabets rather than true handwriting recognition, even though it has access to more horsepower than even the Newton 2100, is telling.
Progress isn't guaranteed. Innovation, once it hits the marketplace, is not destined to take root. The Newton was the first PDA platform, and going on six years after its demise, it's still the best. It had, essentially, one deficiency, and that was in its size. This was easily rectifiable, especially with the technology of the day. It's death was the result of ego rather than sound business, and perhaps the largest mistake Jobs made in turning Apple around.
Now, even though we have machines who's hardware is more than equal to the old newton, none have its ease of use, utility or ease of development enjoyed by the Newton. It's utility as an everyday computer in the modern age is a testament to Apple's software engineers, who Got It Right the first time out, and a condemnation of Palm, Microsoft, Symbian and Sharp, who still can't approach it so many years after its demise.
I don't know of any Sun developer or admin that knows their way around Unix who doesn't use Gnome or KDE, or even just a different wm, in place of CDE. CDE is slow, ugly, buggy as all hell and a giant, gaping security hole. It should have been put out to pasture in the last century.
I spent the better part of yesterday installing this thing on an old Ultra2 system. It's obvious why HP and IBM are eating Sun's lunch... you spend the better part of four hours installing the OS from the fancy new installer, cramming 3 CD's worth of stuff onto your system, only to reboot and find nothing was configured right, the drivers you need aren't installed, and none of the sexy stuff, like the Gnome 2.0 desktop, is anywhere to be found.
I toss the 10 installer CD, and slap in the "disk one" CD, which brings up the old installer program, an interactive text console straight from the '80s. Configure all my network interfaces, select the packages I want, and boom. An hour later, everything is properly installed and configured.
Also, Sun's GUI administration tool, smc, is broken out of the box. Couldn't get it to run for love or money. Admintool, the old GUI, was simply worthless, and remains so to this very day. As I was indoctrinated on the old SunOS 4.x, and spent many years administrating OpenBSD boxen, I'm used to vi anbd know my way around/etc and/var.
Still, it's a long way from HP's SAM. And nothing HP puts in their install is broken. Except patch management, but I'm sure the mad sadists responsible for the system don't consider it broken, per se...
I will assmeble the ultimate real-life superhero team to Save the Universe! It will be called the Ultimate Super Hero International Team! The roster is carefully chosen to represent the most gifted and talented real-life adventurers from across the globe!
On it will be the daring leader and Weapons Expert, Angle Grinder Man! (Linked to above.) Also...
They can save a lot of money on trained vocalist actors by getting regular actors to lip-synch to studio recorded vocal tracks, too. So Le Mis becomes, essentially, a Milli Vanilla concert.
It's going to be real interesting when access points start to internetwork and route through each other rather than going through a land line intermediary. The effective cost of bandwidth will drop to the cost of wireless equipment... essentially nothing.
Make no mistake. The problem isn't the "technophobes", or those who can't or won't become adept and intimate with information technology. The problem is the failure of system designers and coders to acknowlege the existance of such users... and the fact that they represent the majority of people using software.
It's completely unfair to equip a user with software that will ruin their entire system when used in a normal way... such as an email client that disguises and autoexecutes virii. There's no damn reason for it, and it is NOT the user's fault they're not savvy enough to grok a virii from a clever screensaver.
While it's true that any foolproof system isn't, technologists can go a looooong way to make sure that sophistication is seamless, and complexity is revleatory rather than immersive. What I mean by that is that while programs should be flexible, configurable and powerfull, users should only be exposed to the parts they are comfortable using, and the parts essential for getting the software to go should be simple for the novice, yet reveal more and more to the user who knows what they're looking for, using drill-down icons, tabs or submenus.
Empowering the user means creating software that a novice can do useful work with the second they launch it as well as offering enhanced options for the power user. Too often, programmers and designers focus on the feature list. Here's a hint, bright boys: usability is a feature, and perhaps the single most important one.
First off, I'll spare you my thoughts on the quality of the piece, as it's irrelevant to the larger issue.*
The author notes that the cycle to new employment paradigms lasted 80 years from agrarian to industrial, and 40 years from industrial to knowlege working, and only 20 to whatever's next (hint: "Would you like fries with that?")
Well, India's about to see their golden egg crack apart in 10.
Free software changes everything... new development tools and paradigms make it easy for a small, loosely affiliated group of hobbyists to make software that can compete with huge, heavily funded projects. What's more, open source software is big into making tools and frameworks. You don't need a hundred Indian or Ukrainian programmers to put together an application suite. You need three or four in-house guys to plug the pieces together.
The author makes another good point in noting that India's coder culture is about toeing the line... adehering to the specifications rather than comming up with something wild and new. We're rapidly approaching the point where a five man team can change the industry with tools they can download for free. There are no shortage of American and European maverick geeks.
The biggest problem is business savvy. The dotcom geeks depended on baby-boomer, old-economy business management, and got burned and burned bad by their get-rich-quick scams. If you want to make money slinging code, you have got to, got to, got to grok how to run a business. You will be cheated and thrown out of work if you let someone else do it for you. It's boring gruntwork, but then so's writing a man page. Do it anyway. Better yet, write a program that will do it for you and open source it. Companies will pay you to tailor it to their own needs, and you can write code for money again. That's how it's going to work in less than 5 years. That's how it's working right now.
SoupIsGood Food
* Ok, so I won't spare you. The article is propagandist bullshit from a blindly libertarian wingnut. I can only stand to have so much smoke blown up my ass in one sitting before wanting to choke the everloving shit out of someone who clearly hasn't had to wear a security guard uniform after their job went to India only to have free-market absolutists blame him for being too lazy to see the Next Big Thing.
I will be cheating... there is a company in S&T who sells finished off-axis mirror sets. The 12" is within my budget, and I plan on building the telescope around it, most likely a truss-style dobsonian in cherrywood using my own plans.
Flatness measurements, often represented as fractions of the height of a lightwave, smaller fractions are better) for hand-figured mirrors from amateur telescope makers are about as reliable as performance gains claimed by enthusiastic overclockers. Large doses of salt required unless verified by a reputable third party.
As homebrew telescopes go, this one isn't terribly refined. It uses a unique optical arrangement, but not all that unique. Check out this folded refractor, or this set of 22-inch newtonian binoculars for some real jaw-droppers. (Also check out that last guy's all-metal 14-1/2" Alt-Az telescope... truly a beautiful instrument, even if it's a conventional design.)
There are a ton of exotic telescope designs out there being crafted by enthusiastic hobbyists, many of them on-par with deleriously expensive research-grade instruments. Most of them aren't made out of cheap plywood and bed rails. (I plan on building a 12" off-axis newtonian this summer.)
It's a matter of matching the software to the hardware. If you run commodity software designed for commodity systems, you're going to get better results from the dual x86 box. If you run a software environment designed for Solaris and UltraSPARCIII, you're going to see significant speed advantages... and you're already seeing a 3x speed bump in your application on a platform it's not optimized for.
Still, if that's not enough extra oomph, look into Fujitsu's SPARC clones. They can outpace Itanium and Alpha systems, and are less money than Sun-branded boxes. Sun's contracted with Fujitsu for future SPARC development, so the performance gap will be widening. The systems will still be ludicrously expensive. Whether the investment in bigger iron will be worth it depends on how parallelizable your code is. Sometimes two big CPUs trump a bunch of teensy ones (Amdahl's law and all that)... sometimes a grid application running on a hundred different systems in the office as a screen saver will do the trick.
This is a common misunderstanding... the same formula didn't work out too well for the Brazillians. Matter of fact, it didn't work out too well for us... the deep south, haven to slavery and the grossest theft of Native American lands was as close to a third-world backwater as you could find in the industrialized world until the past few decades.
And, if you take a closer look at it, Germany, which didn't have any colonies until really late in the game and couldn't figure out how to exploit them, dominated Europe economically until the first world war, and was probably more than a match for the US on its own. It had no slaves or child labor, but an educated and well compensated working class.
After the Unions took on the Gov't and corporate America to improve working conditions and wages across the board, productivity skyrocketed... we literally buried the fascist societies of the second world war with war materiel, and did so with a sorely depleted workforce as men were mustered to war.
But apart and aside from that, your notion of ethics is peculiar. If it was wrong and evil for "our fathers" (even those of us whose fathers immigrated a generation or so ago) to get ahead using evil means, why is it now acceptable for others to do the same? If you don't find those tactics reprehensible, why bother complaining about them?
We recognize what was done was wrong, and we now wish to make sure other people aren't victimized in the same way. This is not hypocracy, this is a coherent and rational ethical reaction completely consistent with our beliefs. Unless you believe that you should be punished for your father's crimes, which is unethical and hypocritical in and of itself.
Cringley makes one of the classic tech-punditry blunders, which is to confuse Linux with an operating system while simultaneously confusing it with a religious movment and/or trade association.
It's none of the above, of course. It's a free software kernal, rolled into many operating systems like Red Hat and Debian, but still just a kernel. Pretty much useless by itself, unlike Free, Net and OpenBSD, which are top-to-bottom OS projects, with a central organizational structure that takes care of everything a user could want or need in their Unix system.
Free Software/Open Source has not one, but two religious movment/trade associations, complete with Famous and Glamorous grand high pooh-bah charismatic heads. Richard Stallman on the one side, and Bruce Perens on the other. Both men and their organizations are pretty much ignored by everyone involved with Linux, save to incorporate their software into the Linux-based OS projects or to toss obscene amounts of cash at them to help them kick Microsoft out of the datacenter. Overall, they're mostly just good for really entertaining flame wars.
Linux will continue to grow unchecked because there is no organizational structure. People are free to take and use the kernel however they see fit, so long as they share the source code to any modifications, so it will wind up in spacecraft microcontrollers and kilo-processor supercomputers, wrapped in the software needed to get the job done.
Linux-based desktop operating systems will put in more effort to be interoperable with each other, though it's unlikely they'll all get together and decide to have someone be their collective boss. That's not neccesarily a bad thing, and coprorate customers will be more comfortable knowing that the organizational structure in charge of their Linux-based OS is "IBM" or "Red Hat" rather than a nebulous organization of hippies and geeks... gives 'em someone to sue if it all goes wrong.
When I was a field engineer, I'd run through at least one laptop bag every six months. They'd usually be the "standard" style laptop + bunchajunk case that seems to be the industry standard. Not cheap stuff, either... Targus bags in particular were prone to busting zippers. They'd all leak like mad in heavy rain, too, so I'd have to wrap my junk in little plastic shopping bags before putting it in the case when the weather looked bad.
I got a Kensington Saddlebag in '98, and I've still got it today. It's ballistic nylon with thick suede re-inforcement, and it has a buckled flap rather than a zipper over all the inside compartments. Completely indestructable, mostly weatherproof, and not that expensive. It works well either as a shoulder bag or backpack (with hide-away straps included), or can be toted around like a briefcase. It's taller than it is wide (you slip the notebook into it sidewise), and this makes it more maneuverable than courier-style bags.
Your friendly neighborhood Apple Store will have a black-on-black model with an embossed Apple logo in black on the flap. CompUSA will have the more prosaic models... I have the black-and-tan, but my next one will be the black-and-grey.
I've got a hyuuuge Targus backpack that's been holding up well, but it's overkill unless I'm carying around all my Java books, and the zippers leak in the rain. The belt strap is a nice touch if you're walking long distances with a ton o' junk, tho.
As both of my favorite entertainment acronyms that begin with "N" are on Sirius (namely, NPR and NFL), I'm all about Sirius. My car stereo is due for an update, and Sirius compatibility is topping then list.
I live in a part of the world where I can't tune in the insanely ecclectic interviews and call-in panels on The Connection, or Click and Clack's "Car Talk." I can burn CD's for music, but not for NPR or NFL game play-by-plays. (I heard the Patriots make their goal-line stand on a staticky, faint AM station. I was honking my horn like a madman.)
XM has some really corporate news stuff (read: fluff), and some right-wing talk radio masturbation festivals, but Sirius has that =and= NPR. (Liberal-leaning hosts and commentators, usually, but a stringently centrist editorial policy. PRI and Pacifica are public radio left-wingnuts, but NPR makes damn sure all sides of a story are given their say.)
Most unions are generally geared to represent the laborer, the grind-it-out worker with no special skills, where it makes sense that seniority rules. Those who do show exemplary skill and promise over the long term are usually promoted to management by management... foremen, shift supervisors and the like. But this model isn't the only one.
There are unions for skilled workers... Government employees are usually members. (Don't laugh. Government employees include NASA and Ames and Los Alamos and the like, most of whose researchers are Union.) Boeing engineers have a Union of their own, too.
Even freelance photographers have a Trade Association, which negotiates and sets baseline rates for photo publication and re-use for its members... which is going to be a great deal higher than a solo freelancer is going to get.
The Teamsters or the UAW is not a good model for a technologist union... but such unions and trade organizations exist, and balance skill level, seniority and intra-organizational mobility very well. The days of the hired gunslinger are over... no-one is going to give you a six figure contract for a years worth of bug squashing, no matter how skilled you are. Instead, you'll see your salary rise and fall with the economy, and zero job stability. This is a great thing for management, but it suck rocks over the course of a career... provided you're able to maintain a career, as one long layoff can sideline you for good. (Over 50, with a BS in engineering or comp sci? Try getting a job, any job, that doesn't involve bagging grocieries or wearing a rent-a-cop uniform. Good luck.)
Unions smooth out the bumps... it can be depressing that salaries are lower than non-union workers, but the benefits are better and cheaper, and job security makes up for the loss of the "gunslinger" myth, especially if you have a mortgage and kids.
35mm film has a very, very narrow edge over digital. That edge will disappear in 2-3 years, and is already gone at the high end. Kodak, Canon and Leica's flagship DSLRs easily exceed film in resolution and color, provided you don't mind paying eight grand for a body.
Bearing in mind the future is digital, buy into a system you can bring over to digital. Pentax, Nikon and Canon all have DSLRs that use their old lens mounts. (Leica R and Contax N, too, but $200 gets you a used lenscap and a product brochure.)
Some systems that have great optics and nice bodies, but aren't ever going to see a digital body, are systems you should avoid. These include Minolta, Olympus, Canon and Contax manual focus systems. Minolta's AF line doesn't have a digital body, but it's just a matter of time.
For $200, look into used Pentax gear. Manual focus K-mount bodies are available everywhere for $50-100, and the Pentax lenses are sharp. Multi-coated Takumars are sharp and cheap, especially the 80-200mm zoom, but the Takumars sold in the '90s are rubbish. Avoid no-name lenses, and stick with Pentax or Takumar glass. Some Tamron, Tokina and Sigma lenses may be OK, but do your homework on them before you buy. You should be sticking with the primes, anyway if you're starting out.
For $200, you should be able to assemble a 28mm 2.8, a 50mm f/2, and a 135mm f/2.8 or 80-200 f/4 zoom and a cheap flash, alongside a nice manual body like a used ZX-M, K-1000, or even one of the non-Pentax K-mount bodies, like Phoenix.
Another option is to get a used medium format TLR, like a Yaschicamat, Mamiya or Seagull, and a light meter. If you can find one, a used Koni-Omega or Mamiya "Press camera" rangefinders offer great lenses inexpensively.
I'm a little touchy on this topic, because I used to be an admin in a cross-platform Unix shop. I was let go when the money got tight, under the exspectation that the developers would take over my position in their spare time.
Three months after I left, they had to hire two admins to replace me. (One for Sun, HP and Linux, and another who could handle AIX, AS/400 and the mainframe development system.)
Administrators do a lot more than sit on their ass cruising slashdot. Capacity planning, filling out purchase requests for everything from extra ethernet cords to $85,000 Sun Ultra Enterprise mainframes. When that stuff shows up at the front door, it's the admin who plugs in the patch cables, and OS's, configures and installs in the datacenter the Sun. This is all time developers could be coding.
What's worse, many of them just didn't have the skill set or the mindset needed to be an admin. Rotating the backup tapes of the NFS server is second nature to an admin, like getting that first cup of coffee in the morning. Yet it wasn't done after I left... not one of those 50 programmers thought to do it. So they lost a month's worth of work. (They also didn't offsite the backups.)
It took one guy a week to figure out how to change the network configuration on an AIX box... a week he could have used to work on revenue-building product. (He didn't even know about SMIT, but wrote a half-assed startup script using IBM's wonky AIX system commands.)
This was in a tiny developer... maybe 50-60 coders and QA'ers. The picture changes even more dramatically when you are trying to write software to fit into a huge IT infrastructure.
The reason why there are so many different kinds of administrators is because there's simply too much for one guy to do. Most developers don't have the mindset or the skillset to manage a 24/7 computing environment, and they sure as hell don't have the time.
There are =some= developers who can install DB2 on a Windows box and keep it concurrent and compatible with DB2 on the mainframe... or even realize there are serious differences between tthe versions of DB2... the author isn't one of them. Even if it's developed on the PC, it will probably be deployed on Big Iron if the project takes off. Understanding that requires experience and an understanding of how all these marvellous toys are going to be deployed in the enterprise.
Basically, the problem the author has with his development environment is that it's bog-standard corporate... Microsoft products on personal computers and workgroup servers, and big boxen in the back room running Java.
While it would be nice if the company would buy you a PC and a database server, gave you a network connection and said "Go to it!", that environment wouldn't produce software that works with everything else in the system, or worse, would introduce instability and dataloss.
Virii are a problem if you use a microsoft platform, whether you're a 1337 coder god or Larry in Accounting. If you need exceptions to standard corporate practice, that's something your manager should be dealing with the IT staff with. (And the IT staff, admins and their managers, all the way up to the CIO, should plan on and quickly implement exceptions to policy when needed. But that's another rant.)
My biggest gripe is with the on-line web demos. After playing them, my girlfriend seems awfully interested in developing Java GUI's all of a sudden... she keeps playing them over and over again, with a dreamy look on her face. I shouldn't have to feel jealous of my IDE documentation...
(What is that voice-over guy, anyway? French? Spanish? Gypsie? He will single-handedly increase the ratio of male to female programmers to parity... not that they'd be interested in any of us after that.)
Bah. Everything in information technology is a metaphor, an illusion to trick the human mind into coping with the machine. Where do you think the term "channel" came from? It's a metaphor, using a nautical term to boil down an overbearingly complex technical description into a concept non-technicians can understand when trying to get their television to show them Gilligan's Island.
Saying the command line is "closer" to the way a computer "really operates" is preposterous. The command line itself is a metaphor, an abstraction that simulates lingual conversation, where a GUI is an abstraction that simulates tactile space.
Most programming languages are based around the lingual metaphor... but not all of them. Prograph was a language based around manipulating shapes in a super-flow chart, and Helix is a relational database language based around the same concept, only in a declarative rather than procedural programming context.
Computers aren't even remotely human... they aren't even remotely alive or self-aware. These are just anthropomorphizations people assign to the system, because they don't understand that the command line, the C++ language, the GUI, are simply anthropomorphic metaphors, conceptual hacks that empower the user.
The very first Hollerith machine used on Ellis Island was very close to a GUI system. You plugged in the card, and turned clearly marked dials to indicate nationality, age, etc, which were punched into a card (stored im memory.) Information was read from memory by putting the cards in a reader, where the appropriate option was lit up on a menu of possible options listed in plain english, corrsponding to the nationality, age, etc, as it was stored on the card. It depended on tactile metaphor to store and visual metaphor to retrieve data, rather than an answer-response metaphor like a CLI. The only way to get closer to the metal is to put the bits into memory by hand with a hole punch.
What's needed are better, newer, more empowering metaphors. GUI's engage the part of the brain that deals with tactile, pattern and spatial relationships, so they're a better metaphor than a command line in most instances. We need to transcend the GUI with a more involving illusion, not just swap it for an older illusion that doesn't take as much advantage of human neurology and psychology... like the command line, or job control language, or patch panels.
Eh. Sun's beendown this road once or twice before. The writing always seems on the wall for Sparc, Solaris, or both, and like dutiful tech sheep... err... visionaries, the upper management tries something silly with "commodity" (NOT open, Sparc is an open standard, x86 with 64bit extensions is not) processors.
Like in the past, they'll find their customers don't want cheap x86 processors. They want Sparc processors that will run all of their existing apps and tools without having to port it. If they want super high performance, they buy an Enterprise system and keep throwing processors and disk at it until it's fast enough, and they'll get super high performance. At the low end, blowing 15 grand on a quad V440 is chicken feed compared to the cost of switching platforms up and down the enterprise.
What the V60 x86 series servers do is offer an option to the customers who may be looking at linux for small projects, and keepsIBM, Dell and HP the hell out of the Unix server room. I seriously doubt it's going to replace, or even seriously threaten, their SPARC/Solaris business. Now that Sun's teamed up with Fujitsu, performance isn't going to be an issue. Fujitsu's SPARC chips can hold their own against Merced and Opteron for not much more money.
I used to carry around a PDA for taking notes and jotting down poetry on the go... a sleek Handspring Edge, equipped with Wordsmith anodized blue. It was a royal pain inputting text in graphitti, and the folding keyboard was a little too much geek to use while sitting at the bar. I still use the combo for rough drafts on-the-go, when I don't wanna lug around the Powerbook... in the winter they fit into my jacket pockets, and in the summer, they fit into a small backpack or briefcase. But they don't go everywhere with me.
What goes everywhere with me is a Moleskine notebook... a tiny, leatherbound notebook with a zillion pages and a ribbon bookmark. I use a tiny Filcao Forever fountain pen to write whatever I would in it. Since it's all rough drafts and need to be re-written anyway, entering the worthwhile stuff it into the computer isn't much of a chore.
On word processing:
As a slam poet, quasi-professional technology pundit and wannabe fiction author, my writing tools are very, very important to me.
I was brought up in the ways of Quick Brown Fox for the Commodore 64, and then moved to MS Works for DOS. These programs sucked mightily, as did the weenie word processor that came with the Tandy 1000HX.
Then I got my Mac. A used Mac Portable "luggable", three years obsolete, with a pirated copy of MS Word 5.0.1. It was like going from a WWI Biplane to an X-Wing fighter.
Then I tried Write Now, a now defunt word processor from a small company, and it quickly became my tool of choice. It did all the things a Mac should do well: wysiwyg editing and formatting on the fly, easily configured stylesheets and headers/footers, and absolutely no clutter. You had a window to type in, with a little toolbar at the top you could easily turn on and off with one click, and that's it. Everything else was in easily navigated menus and dialog boxes.
When they went out of business, I switched to Mariner Write, but wasn't very happy with it. Then I discovered Nissus, a Mac-only Word Processor, and it was heaven. All the power of Word, with none of the bullshit.
Now I use MacOS X's "Textedit" and use InDesign to format stuff that isn't going to be published on the web. This is starting to cramp my style a little bit, so I'm going back to Nissus, now that it's OS X native.
They still are, most notably to run the "community bulletein board" software on the public access channels in between highschool football games and Trekkies griping about the state of the Sci-Fi channel in someone's basement. Every now and again, the hard drive will crash, and the Amiga screen will pop up on the TV and demand that you mount a volume or stick a floppy into Drive A. I think the "previews" channel runs the same program, as I've seen the ugly-as-sin Amiga UI whining that it needs a drive on those channels, too.
They knew how to make computers that last in the '80s...
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a fairly standard Sun Ultra2 Creator3D workstation. Solaris 9 was a complete horror show... I've got many years experience noodling around with Solaris, from it's old SunOS 4 days as "Solaris 1" right up to Solaris 7 (2.7, for those on the inside.) I know what the hell I'm doing, but I was completely baffled and defeated by Solaris 9. Nothing worked, from the installer to the administration utilities (command line and GUI) to the SunScreen firewall software. I spent a week trying to get this basic web server/NAT firewall up and running. It's lack of attention to basic detail is inexcuseable, and goes a long way toward explainging why Sun has lost so much market share in the past two years. IBM's a PITA to work with, but it's well documented and works out of the box with only a bit of tinkering.
For grins, I popped out the extra processor, and loaded, configured and deployed OpenBSD in all of three hours, NAT and Apache and DJBDNS and all.
I tried an earlier build of Solaris 10, and it didn't go at all well. I'll try this one (which purportedly has a Sun-comissioned version of IPfilter), and if I can't get it to do what I want in an afternoon, I'll slap SuSe on it instead. Or Gentoo... Gentoo might be fun, even if does take forever to compile.
SoupIsGood Food
By the later generations of the Newton, the handwriting issue had ironed itself out, and the solution that Palm used had first seen the light of day as an add-on to the Newton.
The price issue wasn't a killer, either, because the eBook was in the $800 range, and shrinking the package down to Palm (or even Psion) size would have halved the price (no keyboard or large touch screen.) The guts weren't too far different from the Psion, which was in a nice price point.
The Palm was not a step forward, and the fact that even today that it relies on glyphic shorthand alphabets rather than true handwriting recognition, even though it has access to more horsepower than even the Newton 2100, is telling.
SoupIsGood Food
Progress isn't guaranteed. Innovation, once it hits the marketplace, is not destined to take root. The Newton was the first PDA platform, and going on six years after its demise, it's still the best. It had, essentially, one deficiency, and that was in its size. This was easily rectifiable, especially with the technology of the day. It's death was the result of ego rather than sound business, and perhaps the largest mistake Jobs made in turning Apple around.
Now, even though we have machines who's hardware is more than equal to the old newton, none have its ease of use, utility or ease of development enjoyed by the Newton. It's utility as an everyday computer in the modern age is a testament to Apple's software engineers, who Got It Right the first time out, and a condemnation of Palm, Microsoft, Symbian and Sharp, who still can't approach it so many years after its demise.
SoupIsGood Food
I don't know of any Sun developer or admin that knows their way around Unix who doesn't use Gnome or KDE, or even just a different wm, in place of CDE. CDE is slow, ugly, buggy as all hell and a giant, gaping security hole. It should have been put out to pasture in the last century.
SoupIsGood Food
I spent the better part of yesterday installing this thing on an old Ultra2 system. It's obvious why HP and IBM are eating Sun's lunch... you spend the better part of four hours installing the OS from the fancy new installer, cramming 3 CD's worth of stuff onto your system, only to reboot and find nothing was configured right, the drivers you need aren't installed, and none of the sexy stuff, like the Gnome 2.0 desktop, is anywhere to be found.
/etc and /var.
I toss the 10 installer CD, and slap in the "disk one" CD, which brings up the old installer program, an interactive text console straight from the '80s. Configure all my network interfaces, select the packages I want, and boom. An hour later, everything is properly installed and configured.
Also, Sun's GUI administration tool, smc, is broken out of the box. Couldn't get it to run for love or money. Admintool, the old GUI, was simply worthless, and remains so to this very day. As I was indoctrinated on the old SunOS 4.x, and spent many years administrating OpenBSD boxen, I'm used to vi anbd know my way around
Still, it's a long way from HP's SAM. And nothing HP puts in their install is broken. Except patch management, but I'm sure the mad sadists responsible for the system don't consider it broken, per se...
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I will assmeble the ultimate real-life superhero team to Save the Universe! It will be called the Ultimate Super Hero International Team! The roster is carefully chosen to represent the most gifted and talented real-life adventurers from across the globe!
On it will be the daring leader and Weapons Expert, Angle Grinder Man! (Linked to above.) Also...
Aerospace Expert: Lawn Chair Larry!
Science and Technology Expert: Troy Hurtubise, inventor of the famous Bear Proof Suit! (Tested by real bikers! And bears! It's bear and biker proof!)
Matter Eating Expert: Sonya Thomas, the Black Widow!
Sneaking Across the Country Naked Expert: Steven Gough!
With these mighty heroes, the Ultimate Super Hero International Team, the Universe shall be Saved!
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They can save a lot of money on trained vocalist actors by getting regular actors to lip-synch to studio recorded vocal tracks, too. So Le Mis becomes, essentially, a Milli Vanilla concert.
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It's going to be real interesting when access points start to internetwork and route through each other rather than going through a land line intermediary. The effective cost of bandwidth will drop to the cost of wireless equipment... essentially nothing.
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Make no mistake. The problem isn't the "technophobes", or those who can't or won't become adept and intimate with information technology. The problem is the failure of system designers and coders to acknowlege the existance of such users... and the fact that they represent the majority of people using software.
It's completely unfair to equip a user with software that will ruin their entire system when used in a normal way... such as an email client that disguises and autoexecutes virii. There's no damn reason for it, and it is NOT the user's fault they're not savvy enough to grok a virii from a clever screensaver.
While it's true that any foolproof system isn't, technologists can go a looooong way to make sure that sophistication is seamless, and complexity is revleatory rather than immersive. What I mean by that is that while programs should be flexible, configurable and powerfull, users should only be exposed to the parts they are comfortable using, and the parts essential for getting the software to go should be simple for the novice, yet reveal more and more to the user who knows what they're looking for, using drill-down icons, tabs or submenus.
Empowering the user means creating software that a novice can do useful work with the second they launch it as well as offering enhanced options for the power user. Too often, programmers and designers focus on the feature list. Here's a hint, bright boys: usability is a feature, and perhaps the single most important one.
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First off, I'll spare you my thoughts on the quality of the piece, as it's irrelevant to the larger issue.*
The author notes that the cycle to new employment paradigms lasted 80 years from agrarian to industrial, and 40 years from industrial to knowlege working, and only 20 to whatever's next (hint: "Would you like fries with that?")
Well, India's about to see their golden egg crack apart in 10.
Free software changes everything... new development tools and paradigms make it easy for a small, loosely affiliated group of hobbyists to make software that can compete with huge, heavily funded projects. What's more, open source software is big into making tools and frameworks. You don't need a hundred Indian or Ukrainian programmers to put together an application suite. You need three or four in-house guys to plug the pieces together.
The author makes another good point in noting that India's coder culture is about toeing the line... adehering to the specifications rather than comming up with something wild and new. We're rapidly approaching the point where a five man team can change the industry with tools they can download for free. There are no shortage of American and European maverick geeks.
The biggest problem is business savvy. The dotcom geeks depended on baby-boomer, old-economy business management, and got burned and burned bad by their get-rich-quick scams. If you want to make money slinging code, you have got to, got to, got to grok how to run a business. You will be cheated and thrown out of work if you let someone else do it for you. It's boring gruntwork, but then so's writing a man page. Do it anyway. Better yet, write a program that will do it for you and open source it. Companies will pay you to tailor it to their own needs, and you can write code for money again. That's how it's going to work in less than 5 years. That's how it's working right now.
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* Ok, so I won't spare you. The article is propagandist bullshit from a blindly libertarian wingnut. I can only stand to have so much smoke blown up my ass in one sitting before wanting to choke the everloving shit out of someone who clearly hasn't had to wear a security guard uniform after their job went to India only to have free-market absolutists blame him for being too lazy to see the Next Big Thing.
I will be cheating... there is a company in S&T who sells finished off-axis mirror sets. The 12" is within my budget, and I plan on building the telescope around it, most likely a truss-style dobsonian in cherrywood using my own plans.
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Flatness measurements, often represented as fractions of the height of a lightwave, smaller fractions are better) for hand-figured mirrors from amateur telescope makers are about as reliable as performance gains claimed by enthusiastic overclockers. Large doses of salt required unless verified by a reputable third party.
As homebrew telescopes go, this one isn't terribly refined. It uses a unique optical arrangement, but not all that unique. Check out this folded refractor, or this set of 22-inch newtonian binoculars for some real jaw-droppers. (Also check out that last guy's all-metal 14-1/2" Alt-Az telescope... truly a beautiful instrument, even if it's a conventional design.)
There are a ton of exotic telescope designs out there being crafted by enthusiastic hobbyists, many of them on-par with deleriously expensive research-grade instruments. Most of them aren't made out of cheap plywood and bed rails. (I plan on building a 12" off-axis newtonian this summer.)
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It's a matter of matching the software to the hardware. If you run commodity software designed for commodity systems, you're going to get better results from the dual x86 box. If you run a software environment designed for Solaris and UltraSPARCIII, you're going to see significant speed advantages... and you're already seeing a 3x speed bump in your application on a platform it's not optimized for.
Still, if that's not enough extra oomph, look into Fujitsu's SPARC clones. They can outpace Itanium and Alpha systems, and are less money than Sun-branded boxes. Sun's contracted with Fujitsu for future SPARC development, so the performance gap will be widening. The systems will still be ludicrously expensive. Whether the investment in bigger iron will be worth it depends on how parallelizable your code is. Sometimes two big CPUs trump a bunch of teensy ones (Amdahl's law and all that)... sometimes a grid application running on a hundred different systems in the office as a screen saver will do the trick.
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This is a common misunderstanding... the same formula didn't work out too well for the Brazillians. Matter of fact, it didn't work out too well for us... the deep south, haven to slavery and the grossest theft of Native American lands was as close to a third-world backwater as you could find in the industrialized world until the past few decades.
And, if you take a closer look at it, Germany, which didn't have any colonies until really late in the game and couldn't figure out how to exploit them, dominated Europe economically until the first world war, and was probably more than a match for the US on its own. It had no slaves or child labor, but an educated and well compensated working class.
After the Unions took on the Gov't and corporate America to improve working conditions and wages across the board, productivity skyrocketed... we literally buried the fascist societies of the second world war with war materiel, and did so with a sorely depleted workforce as men were mustered to war.
But apart and aside from that, your notion of ethics is peculiar. If it was wrong and evil for "our fathers" (even those of us whose fathers immigrated a generation or so ago) to get ahead using evil means, why is it now acceptable for others to do the same? If you don't find those tactics reprehensible, why bother complaining about them?
We recognize what was done was wrong, and we now wish to make sure other people aren't victimized in the same way. This is not hypocracy, this is a coherent and rational ethical reaction completely consistent with our beliefs. Unless you believe that you should be punished for your father's crimes, which is unethical and hypocritical in and of itself.
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Cringley makes one of the classic tech-punditry blunders, which is to confuse Linux with an operating system while simultaneously confusing it with a religious movment and/or trade association.
It's none of the above, of course. It's a free software kernal, rolled into many operating systems like Red Hat and Debian, but still just a kernel. Pretty much useless by itself, unlike Free, Net and OpenBSD, which are top-to-bottom OS projects, with a central organizational structure that takes care of everything a user could want or need in their Unix system.
Free Software/Open Source has not one, but two religious movment/trade associations, complete with Famous and Glamorous grand high pooh-bah charismatic heads. Richard Stallman on the one side, and Bruce Perens on the other. Both men and their organizations are pretty much ignored by everyone involved with Linux, save to incorporate their software into the Linux-based OS projects or to toss obscene amounts of cash at them to help them kick Microsoft out of the datacenter. Overall, they're mostly just good for really entertaining flame wars.
Linux will continue to grow unchecked because there is no organizational structure. People are free to take and use the kernel however they see fit, so long as they share the source code to any modifications, so it will wind up in spacecraft microcontrollers and kilo-processor supercomputers, wrapped in the software needed to get the job done.
Linux-based desktop operating systems will put in more effort to be interoperable with each other, though it's unlikely they'll all get together and decide to have someone be their collective boss. That's not neccesarily a bad thing, and coprorate customers will be more comfortable knowing that the organizational structure in charge of their Linux-based OS is "IBM" or "Red Hat" rather than a nebulous organization of hippies and geeks... gives 'em someone to sue if it all goes wrong.
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When I was a field engineer, I'd run through at least one laptop bag every six months. They'd usually be the "standard" style laptop + bunchajunk case that seems to be the industry standard. Not cheap stuff, either... Targus bags in particular were prone to busting zippers. They'd all leak like mad in heavy rain, too, so I'd have to wrap my junk in little plastic shopping bags before putting it in the case when the weather looked bad.
I got a Kensington Saddlebag in '98, and I've still got it today. It's ballistic nylon with thick suede re-inforcement, and it has a buckled flap rather than a zipper over all the inside compartments. Completely indestructable, mostly weatherproof, and not that expensive. It works well either as a shoulder bag or backpack (with hide-away straps included), or can be toted around like a briefcase. It's taller than it is wide (you slip the notebook into it sidewise), and this makes it more maneuverable than courier-style bags.
Your friendly neighborhood Apple Store will have a black-on-black model with an embossed Apple logo in black on the flap. CompUSA will have the more prosaic models... I have the black-and-tan, but my next one will be the black-and-grey.
I've got a hyuuuge Targus backpack that's been holding up well, but it's overkill unless I'm carying around all my Java books, and the zippers leak in the rain. The belt strap is a nice touch if you're walking long distances with a ton o' junk, tho.
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As both of my favorite entertainment acronyms that begin with "N" are on Sirius (namely, NPR and NFL), I'm all about Sirius. My car stereo is due for an update, and Sirius compatibility is topping then list.
I live in a part of the world where I can't tune in the insanely ecclectic interviews and call-in panels on The Connection, or Click and Clack's "Car Talk." I can burn CD's for music, but not for NPR or NFL game play-by-plays. (I heard the Patriots make their goal-line stand on a staticky, faint AM station. I was honking my horn like a madman.)
XM has some really corporate news stuff (read: fluff), and some right-wing talk radio masturbation festivals, but Sirius has that =and= NPR. (Liberal-leaning hosts and commentators, usually, but a stringently centrist editorial policy. PRI and Pacifica are public radio left-wingnuts, but NPR makes damn sure all sides of a story are given their say.)
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Most unions are generally geared to represent the laborer, the grind-it-out worker with no special skills, where it makes sense that seniority rules. Those who do show exemplary skill and promise over the long term are usually promoted to management by management... foremen, shift supervisors and the like. But this model isn't the only one.
There are unions for skilled workers... Government employees are usually members. (Don't laugh. Government employees include NASA and Ames and Los Alamos and the like, most of whose researchers are Union.) Boeing engineers have a Union of their own, too.
Even freelance photographers have a Trade Association, which negotiates and sets baseline rates for photo publication and re-use for its members... which is going to be a great deal higher than a solo freelancer is going to get.
The Teamsters or the UAW is not a good model for a technologist union... but such unions and trade organizations exist, and balance skill level, seniority and intra-organizational mobility very well. The days of the hired gunslinger are over... no-one is going to give you a six figure contract for a years worth of bug squashing, no matter how skilled you are. Instead, you'll see your salary rise and fall with the economy, and zero job stability. This is a great thing for management, but it suck rocks over the course of a career... provided you're able to maintain a career, as one long layoff can sideline you for good. (Over 50, with a BS in engineering or comp sci? Try getting a job, any job, that doesn't involve bagging grocieries or wearing a rent-a-cop uniform. Good luck.)
Unions smooth out the bumps... it can be depressing that salaries are lower than non-union workers, but the benefits are better and cheaper, and job security makes up for the loss of the "gunslinger" myth, especially if you have a mortgage and kids.
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35mm film has a very, very narrow edge over digital. That edge will disappear in 2-3 years, and is already gone at the high end. Kodak, Canon and Leica's flagship DSLRs easily exceed film in resolution and color, provided you don't mind paying eight grand for a body.
Bearing in mind the future is digital, buy into a system you can bring over to digital. Pentax, Nikon and Canon all have DSLRs that use their old lens mounts. (Leica R and Contax N, too, but $200 gets you a used lenscap and a product brochure.)
Some systems that have great optics and nice bodies, but aren't ever going to see a digital body, are systems you should avoid. These include Minolta, Olympus, Canon and Contax manual focus systems. Minolta's AF line doesn't have a digital body, but it's just a matter of time.
For $200, look into used Pentax gear. Manual focus K-mount bodies are available everywhere for $50-100, and the Pentax lenses are sharp. Multi-coated Takumars are sharp and cheap, especially the 80-200mm zoom, but the Takumars sold in the '90s are rubbish. Avoid no-name lenses, and stick with Pentax or Takumar glass. Some Tamron, Tokina and Sigma lenses may be OK, but do your homework on them before you buy. You should be sticking with the primes, anyway if you're starting out.
For $200, you should be able to assemble a 28mm 2.8, a 50mm f/2, and a 135mm f/2.8 or 80-200 f/4 zoom and a cheap flash, alongside a nice manual body like a used ZX-M, K-1000, or even one of the non-Pentax K-mount bodies, like Phoenix.
Another option is to get a used medium format TLR, like a Yaschicamat, Mamiya or Seagull, and a light meter. If you can find one, a used Koni-Omega or Mamiya "Press camera" rangefinders offer great lenses inexpensively.
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I'm a little touchy on this topic, because I used to be an admin in a cross-platform Unix shop. I was let go when the money got tight, under the exspectation that the developers would take over my position in their spare time.
Three months after I left, they had to hire two admins to replace me. (One for Sun, HP and Linux, and another who could handle AIX, AS/400 and the mainframe development system.)
Administrators do a lot more than sit on their ass cruising slashdot. Capacity planning, filling out purchase requests for everything from extra ethernet cords to $85,000 Sun Ultra Enterprise mainframes. When that stuff shows up at the front door, it's the admin who plugs in the patch cables, and OS's, configures and installs in the datacenter the Sun. This is all time developers could be coding.
What's worse, many of them just didn't have the skill set or the mindset needed to be an admin. Rotating the backup tapes of the NFS server is second nature to an admin, like getting that first cup of coffee in the morning. Yet it wasn't done after I left... not one of those 50 programmers thought to do it. So they lost a month's worth of work. (They also didn't offsite the backups.)
It took one guy a week to figure out how to change the network configuration on an AIX box... a week he could have used to work on revenue-building product. (He didn't even know about SMIT, but wrote a half-assed startup script using IBM's wonky AIX system commands.)
This was in a tiny developer... maybe 50-60 coders and QA'ers. The picture changes even more dramatically when you are trying to write software to fit into a huge IT infrastructure.
The reason why there are so many different kinds of administrators is because there's simply too much for one guy to do. Most developers don't have the mindset or the skillset to manage a 24/7 computing environment, and they sure as hell don't have the time.
There are =some= developers who can install DB2 on a Windows box and keep it concurrent and compatible with DB2 on the mainframe... or even realize there are serious differences between tthe versions of DB2... the author isn't one of them. Even if it's developed on the PC, it will probably be deployed on Big Iron if the project takes off. Understanding that requires experience and an understanding of how all these marvellous toys are going to be deployed in the enterprise.
Basically, the problem the author has with his development environment is that it's bog-standard corporate... Microsoft products on personal computers and workgroup servers, and big boxen in the back room running Java.
While it would be nice if the company would buy you a PC and a database server, gave you a network connection and said "Go to it!", that environment wouldn't produce software that works with everything else in the system, or worse, would introduce instability and dataloss.
Virii are a problem if you use a microsoft platform, whether you're a 1337 coder god or Larry in Accounting. If you need exceptions to standard corporate practice, that's something your manager should be dealing with the IT staff with. (And the IT staff, admins and their managers, all the way up to the CIO, should plan on and quickly implement exceptions to policy when needed. But that's another rant.)
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My biggest gripe is with the on-line web demos. After playing them, my girlfriend seems awfully interested in developing Java GUI's all of a sudden... she keeps playing them over and over again, with a dreamy look on her face. I shouldn't have to feel jealous of my IDE documentation...
(What is that voice-over guy, anyway? French? Spanish? Gypsie? He will single-handedly increase the ratio of male to female programmers to parity... not that they'd be interested in any of us after that.)
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Bah. Everything in information technology is a metaphor, an illusion to trick the human mind into coping with the machine. Where do you think the term "channel" came from? It's a metaphor, using a nautical term to boil down an overbearingly complex technical description into a concept non-technicians can understand when trying to get their television to show them Gilligan's Island.
Saying the command line is "closer" to the way a computer "really operates" is preposterous. The command line itself is a metaphor, an abstraction that simulates lingual conversation, where a GUI is an abstraction that simulates tactile space.
Most programming languages are based around the lingual metaphor... but not all of them. Prograph was a language based around manipulating shapes in a super-flow chart, and Helix is a relational database language based around the same concept, only in a declarative rather than procedural programming context.
Computers aren't even remotely human... they aren't even remotely alive or self-aware. These are just anthropomorphizations people assign to the system, because they don't understand that the command line, the C++ language, the GUI, are simply anthropomorphic metaphors, conceptual hacks that empower the user.
The very first Hollerith machine used on Ellis Island was very close to a GUI system. You plugged in the card, and turned clearly marked dials to indicate nationality, age, etc, which were punched into a card (stored im memory.) Information was read from memory by putting the cards in a reader, where the appropriate option was lit up on a menu of possible options listed in plain english, corrsponding to the nationality, age, etc, as it was stored on the card. It depended on tactile metaphor to store and visual metaphor to retrieve data, rather than an answer-response metaphor like a CLI. The only way to get closer to the metal is to put the bits into memory by hand with a hole punch.
What's needed are better, newer, more empowering metaphors. GUI's engage the part of the brain that deals with tactile, pattern and spatial relationships, so they're a better metaphor than a command line in most instances. We need to transcend the GUI with a more involving illusion, not just swap it for an older illusion that doesn't take as much advantage of human neurology and psychology... like the command line, or job control language, or patch panels.
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Eh. Sun's beendown this road once or twice before. The writing always seems on the wall for Sparc, Solaris, or both, and like dutiful tech sheep... err... visionaries, the upper management tries something silly with "commodity" (NOT open, Sparc is an open standard, x86 with 64bit extensions is not) processors.
Like in the past, they'll find their customers don't want cheap x86 processors. They want Sparc processors that will run all of their existing apps and tools without having to port it. If they want super high performance, they buy an Enterprise system and keep throwing processors and disk at it until it's fast enough, and they'll get super high performance. At the low end, blowing 15 grand on a quad V440 is chicken feed compared to the cost of switching platforms up and down the enterprise.
What the V60 x86 series servers do is offer an option to the customers who may be looking at linux for small projects, and keepsIBM, Dell and HP the hell out of the Unix server room. I seriously doubt it's going to replace, or even seriously threaten, their SPARC/Solaris business. Now that Sun's teamed up with Fujitsu, performance isn't going to be an issue. Fujitsu's SPARC chips can hold their own against Merced and Opteron for not much more money.
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I used to carry around a PDA for taking notes and jotting down poetry on the go... a sleek Handspring Edge, equipped with Wordsmith anodized blue. It was a royal pain inputting text in graphitti, and the folding keyboard was a little too much geek to use while sitting at the bar. I still use the combo for rough drafts on-the-go, when I don't wanna lug around the Powerbook... in the winter they fit into my jacket pockets, and in the summer, they fit into a small backpack or briefcase. But they don't go everywhere with me.
What goes everywhere with me is a Moleskine notebook... a tiny, leatherbound notebook with a zillion pages and a ribbon bookmark. I use a tiny Filcao Forever fountain pen to write whatever I would in it. Since it's all rough drafts and need to be re-written anyway, entering the worthwhile stuff it into the computer isn't much of a chore.
On word processing:
As a slam poet, quasi-professional technology pundit and wannabe fiction author, my writing tools are very, very important to me.
I was brought up in the ways of Quick Brown Fox for the Commodore 64, and then moved to MS Works for DOS. These programs sucked mightily, as did the weenie word processor that came with the Tandy 1000HX.
Then I got my Mac. A used Mac Portable "luggable", three years obsolete, with a pirated copy of MS Word 5.0.1. It was like going from a WWI Biplane to an X-Wing fighter.
Then I tried Write Now, a now defunt word processor from a small company, and it quickly became my tool of choice. It did all the things a Mac should do well: wysiwyg editing and formatting on the fly, easily configured stylesheets and headers/footers, and absolutely no clutter. You had a window to type in, with a little toolbar at the top you could easily turn on and off with one click, and that's it. Everything else was in easily navigated menus and dialog boxes.
When they went out of business, I switched to Mariner Write, but wasn't very happy with it. Then I discovered Nissus, a Mac-only Word Processor, and it was heaven. All the power of Word, with none of the bullshit.
Now I use MacOS X's "Textedit" and use InDesign to format stuff that isn't going to be published on the web. This is starting to cramp my style a little bit, so I'm going back to Nissus, now that it's OS X native.
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They still are, most notably to run the "community bulletein board" software on the public access channels in between highschool football games and Trekkies griping about the state of the Sci-Fi channel in someone's basement. Every now and again, the hard drive will crash, and the Amiga screen will pop up on the TV and demand that you mount a volume or stick a floppy into Drive A. I think the "previews" channel runs the same program, as I've seen the ugly-as-sin Amiga UI whining that it needs a drive on those channels, too.
They knew how to make computers that last in the '80s...
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