Just for the record, I (the originator of this sub-thread), do not own a TV. It's just like most of the web - the content is crap, and the ads are annoying!
No signature, no verbal promise, no handshake, no nothing.
Frankly, I hate the idea of "free" websites with ads. You want to espouse your views? Pay to do so. You can share a server with a bunch of folks for a pittance a month. Blogging can be had ad-free cheaply.
I wanted more than that, and I know what I'm doing, so I bought a used server and pay for rack space, and so far there are no ads. There probably will be at some point, but they'll be low key, and they won't pop up, pop under, grab, track, or anything else. They'll just sit there (like google ads do). That'll be to help cover costs on the public service site. Or I may just do a PayPal donation thing like some sites do; I have had folks send me money and gear in appreciation.
But my personal stuff? I pay for that. Why should someone else have to pay for my "right" to express myself? That's INSANE.
I pay for my internet connection. I pay for my server. I have *zero* obligation to allow myself to be annoyed by anyone else's choices.
When my wife and I got married, neither of us owned a TV (though each of us had a roomie with a TV prior to getting married). We decided we didn't need one. We've gotten along fine for 27+ years without one.
I have to confess, we did go to her mom's house to watch Dukes of Hazzard most weeks. And we certainly saw bis and pieces of things when visiting folks. But we pretty much ignored TV.
We do have a few DVDs of some of the old sitcoms. But we don't just crash and burn in front of the computer (where we play DVDs) like so many do with a TV.
We haven't missed it. Our kids survived without it. They enjoyed watching it at friends' houses, but never got addicted like so many do.
It's still fun to watch visitors at our house, as it suddenly dawns oin them they don't see a TV. They start looking all around, peering carefully at wooden panels on the wall, convinced we've just hidden it. Nope. Not there.
People ask how we survive without TV. I wonder how some of them function with TV. We read books, We listen to music. We hang out with friends. My wife works in the garden. I play guitar and build/repair guitar amps. We go to movies. Our kids go do stuff with their friends. We play with the dog. We take care of the house and cars. My wife cooks meals from scratch. We sit on the porch and watch the sunset (live! technicolor!) We spend time with teenagers.
We do't have *time* for TV. To make that time would (IMO) definitely dilute our "quality of life" by taking time from something more worthwhile.
Every once in a blue moon, I hear about something on TV that makes one of us wish we had one. But it's rare enough we haven't bothered to get one. Our daughter, 20, hasn't bought one, yet. Our son, 18, in the army, hasn't bought one yet. Either or both of them may, but it doesn't seem to be a priority.
Most of my friends have TVs. That's fine, I don't look down on them or think I'm superior. But I have found that the people I most enjoy spending time with turn out to be people who don't watch that much TV. We don't plan it that way or look for it, that's just how it turns out. Interesting, huh?
I'd say the people who put the site together are IT-illiterate. But I'm sure it works just fine on their local box on IE. Of course, that's only when they use a URL that starts out "file:\\\C:\"... [sarcasm=off]
This sort of heavy-handed stupidity is why I am currently refusing to buy music except from indies. If they're at all in bed with these morons, I just won't buy.
Yeah, it stinks. There are at least 20 CDs I would *love* to have bought since this crap started. And a dozen or so DVDs. Ah, well.
Boycott. Tell them what you're doing and why. Hit them in their pocketbook again.
For the record, I don't download music or vidoes illegally. I occasionally download free indie songs or other free music, but that's it.
I don't traffic with thugs any more than with spammers.
He should have to compensate folks. There's no easy way at this point to do fair repayment to everyone he harmed, but he could at least have his wages heavily garnished for a nice, long time, and use it for tax reduction. Or use it to pay for going after other spammers. Or buying spam firewalls for ISPs. Whatever. He should *pay*, and it he should pay *society* somehow. Not just be out of circulation.
As for rapists and murderers getting off easily, that needs to be dealt with as well. I'm not willing to just throw up my hands and watch every criminal walk. Send 'em all (with the spammers) to Austin. We apparently don't have enough money for new roads (all the tax abatements for new business, I guess). Put 'em to work building roads. Not enough money for guards? I bet I could come up with a set of volunteers to help with that...
I had profs who wanted you to regurgitate what they fed you; that was all you needed to get a good grade. I had others who reserved As for those who really *thought*, and could communicate those thoughts well. The trick was learning which type was which before the first essay.
I seriously doubt this sociology prof has developed a program that could recognize innovative thinking if it bit the computer on the I/O bus. So if it's Sociology 101 and they don't want thinking, just regurgitation, great. But it's still (I'd bet) useless for anything more than that.
It costs a small fortune to put a single fighter in the air from a carrier deck, fly it around, and recover it. The fighter can't get in close without being noticed. Unless it's a Harrier, the fighter can't hover or move slowly to track drift, etc. Unless it's a top notch 2 man fighter team, the fighter can't respond as quickly for very small angle changes. Etc.
You can put up a *lot* of these for the cost of a single fighter, they're a lot less prone to notice, and they can get camera angles a fighter pilot wouldn't want to consider (10 feet over the wavetopsm, flying 500 feet from a boat).
It's a different mission. It's acting as a supplement to the non-aircraft security eyeballs more than anything else. A carrier's reason for existence is air power, but there's a lot more to that existence than flying airplanes.
And most ships and boats don't even *have* aircraft, but they still have security needs.
Essentially the big S is pointing out that we're all evil racists, helping keep the poor, foolish third world countries (who can't afford a lawyer to explain the incomprehensible GPL to them) in servitude.
I had no idea. I really must thank Mr. Schwartz for enlightening us.
To atone for my guilt, I'll rush right out and buy a bunch of Solaris products I can neither afford nor need. I'm not sure just *how* this atones for my unthinking racism, but I can trust Mr. Schwartz; he's a big shot CEO. I just hope my children can forgive me for the debt I'm about to saddle them with.
This is part of the basis for their InfraStruxure (or however they spell it). It looks like a great idea, but since we're a startup without 1999 type funding, we'll have to wait a while on trying it.
I have no relationship with APC other than beinga very happy user of their UPSes, both at home and at work (everything from outlet protection to Symmetra 4KVA systems, looking forward to the day we can try the bigger stuff).
It's partially inertia as someone else noted, but there are other factors.
For one, it's a microcosm of the generalized AC distribution concept. If you want to run X watts through a wire, you can run it at low voltage and high current, which by ohms law insures a hefty voltage drop (WRT the supply voltage), or you can run it at high voltage and low current, which by ohms law means a lower voltage drop, which means it's essentially unchanged. Then you drop it back down at the distribution point (just like they do with substations and transformers near your home or business). This voltage transformation is trivial with AC, but much (perhaps insanely) more complex and expensive with DC.
Which brings up the cost issue. Partially this is also inertia-driven, because the infrastructure is there to produce and transform AC voltages, and to produce equipment that uses it. But there are hidden costs as well. The wires inside a computer to distribute +/-5VDC and +/-12VDC don't have to be that large, because they are short. But you'd either have to run a bunch of wires per computer, or run much thicker wires to distribution points, to handle all that current. Go read a power supply comparison with today's fast chips or high end disk drives to get an idea of the current requirements. A DC panel to run a 6 foot rack would be capable of starting a large, diesel truck or three!
Even at low voltages, high current DC carries its own set of dangers. You'd have to do a lot of education to get people to be careful around it; far too many people would think it's as safe as handling a battery. At least until they were hit in the face with molten metal as they accidentally arc-welded something.
Finally, someone in this thread stated that if you are running off AC and have to switch to batteries, it's not a UPS. You could make a case that, technically, this is true, but in fact, so long as the UPS switches faster than the computer power supllies run out of stored power, it's "uninterruptible enough". The real issue for most of us isn't whether the AC power is technically interrupted, but whether the computers keep running. If your servers' power supplies can't ride through a single, 50Hz or 60Hz cycle problem, you're running too close to the edge.
Bob was changing backup tapes when something caught his eye at his feet. Looking through te holes in the cooling tile in the raised floor, something was moving, like a bundle of shiny snakes. Looking closer, we had 1/2" of water down there!
We spent several hours with a tiny shop vac (we need a bigger one!) emptying the water and being thankful Bob had seen it before it got high enough to get into the power conduits.
An A/C unit drain pan had a clogged drain, so the sump pump couldn't carry the water away. Whoever had the units installed had purchased water alarms, but *they had never been hooked up*. Now *that* was a brilliant move.
We now have water alarms down there.
Meanwhile, the room stays about 70 degrees, and the servers stay comfy, as do we. I like it that way,
That's a really bizarre, if not outright absurd, question.
Google owes you NOTHING. Google is not your mama. Google is not your daddy. Google is not your debtor. Google is not Uncle Sugar's Handout Agency.
Just like you ought to be, google is an independent agency.
Their motto is something like "do no evil". They get to interpret that however they like, but so far, they're interpreting it quite well in most peoples minds.
Google *does* have the right not to be spammed, just as you or I do. It's just that in this case, they're in a much better position to do somthing about it.
There's no extortion involved. If anything, there was theft of services by WordPress. (Not that I believe such a case would have merit. IANAL, FWIW, ETC.)
It's easy enough to read data from 40 to 50 year old, 1/2" magnetic tape reels. Why should today's "newer, improved" technology be less useful for long term storage?
The emerging trend for dealing with this is apparently just to sigh whatever they hand you, work for a year, then sue them for not treating you like an employee, after which you retire.
I may be the last geek on the planet who hasn't paid attention to RSS, but oh, well. The OP claims that by now we've all played with it. I'm still not even sure what it is!
Almost everyone I knew in high tech at the time, contractor or otherwise, thought that the contractors suing MS was both stupid and, at best, unethical (if not an outright breach of contract).
At the time, I had very deep ties into the contractor community, being off and on one, myself, and the suit pissed me off as much as it did anyone. It was the opposite of the professional conduct we all strove for.
I agree. I never expected MS to open source Windows or Office; that would, indeed, make we propose an expedition to Hell with thermometers.
BUT... Why not open source VB6? And anything else they want to EOL. That would gain them a ton of (sometimes grudging) street cred in the OSS community.
And make a *lot* of people happy, including some who are rather unhappy today.
We're not as concerned as a company about whether Java is OSS or not, but we are concerned about ease of rollout. If I need a new JRE to run OO2, how does that impact the 250 or so Linux systems I have to roll it out to? What about my handful of Windows users I'm trying to migrate from Office? Will this version of Java play well with the versions of Linux we run? It's a potential nightmare.
Several years ago I was involved in putting a law firm on the internet, and helping install a LAN in their office here. They really wanted to go Linux as much as possible, even then, but their HQ IT weenie refused, because MS was all he knew.
There are several law firms in town now that rely almost exclusively on OSS; I met with a vendor today who set up one of the most recent ones. He walked in for a first meeting, and they asked, "What kind of open source solution can you provide us for [list of stuff]?" He will provide whatever meets the clients' needs and wants, but he is an OSS advocate, so he was a happy camper. Saved them a hunk of change, too.
Sorry I can't give more details at this point, but here in Texas, at least, it's doable.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for the record, I (the originator of this sub-thread), do not own a TV. It's just like most of the web - the content is crap, and the ads are annoying!
No signature, no verbal promise, no handshake, no nothing.
Frankly, I hate the idea of "free" websites with ads. You want to espouse your views? Pay to do so. You can share a server with a bunch of folks for a pittance a month. Blogging can be had ad-free cheaply.
I wanted more than that, and I know what I'm doing, so I bought a used server and pay for rack space, and so far there are no ads. There probably will be at some point, but they'll be low key, and they won't pop up, pop under, grab, track, or anything else. They'll just sit there (like google ads do). That'll be to help cover costs on the public service site. Or I may just do a PayPal donation thing like some sites do; I have had folks send me money and gear in appreciation.
But my personal stuff? I pay for that. Why should someone else have to pay for my "right" to express myself? That's INSANE.
I pay for my internet connection. I pay for my server. I have *zero* obligation to allow myself to be annoyed by anyone else's choices.
When my wife and I got married, neither of us owned a TV (though each of us had a roomie with a TV prior to getting married). We decided we didn't need one. We've gotten along fine for 27+ years without one.
I have to confess, we did go to her mom's house to watch Dukes of Hazzard most weeks. And we certainly saw bis and pieces of things when visiting folks. But we pretty much ignored TV.
We do have a few DVDs of some of the old sitcoms. But we don't just crash and burn in front of the computer (where we play DVDs) like so many do with a TV.
We haven't missed it. Our kids survived without it. They enjoyed watching it at friends' houses, but never got addicted like so many do.
It's still fun to watch visitors at our house, as it suddenly dawns oin them they don't see a TV. They start looking all around, peering carefully at wooden panels on the wall, convinced we've just hidden it. Nope. Not there.
People ask how we survive without TV. I wonder how some of them function with TV. We read books, We listen to music. We hang out with friends. My wife works in the garden. I play guitar and build/repair guitar amps. We go to movies. Our kids go do stuff with their friends. We play with the dog. We take care of the house and cars. My wife cooks meals from scratch. We sit on the porch and watch the sunset (live! technicolor!) We spend time with teenagers.
We do't have *time* for TV. To make that time would (IMO) definitely dilute our "quality of life" by taking time from something more worthwhile.
Every once in a blue moon, I hear about something on TV that makes one of us wish we had one. But it's rare enough we haven't bothered to get one. Our daughter, 20, hasn't bought one, yet. Our son, 18, in the army, hasn't bought one yet. Either or both of them may, but it doesn't seem to be a priority.
Most of my friends have TVs. That's fine, I don't look down on them or think I'm superior. But I have found that the people I most enjoy spending time with turn out to be people who don't watch that much TV. We don't plan it that way or look for it, that's just how it turns out. Interesting, huh?
They covered this in the FAQ. What? You didn't actually read it?
I'd say the people who put the site together are IT-illiterate. But I'm sure it works just fine on their local box on IE. Of course, that's only when they use a URL that starts out "file:\\\C:\" ...
[sarcasm=off]
A great summation of the issues.
This sort of heavy-handed stupidity is why I am currently refusing to buy music except from indies. If they're at all in bed with these morons, I just won't buy.
Yeah, it stinks. There are at least 20 CDs I would *love* to have bought since this crap started. And a dozen or so DVDs. Ah, well.
Boycott. Tell them what you're doing and why. Hit them in their pocketbook again.
For the record, I don't download music or vidoes illegally. I occasionally download free indie songs or other free music, but that's it.
I don't traffic with thugs any more than with spammers.
He should have to compensate folks. There's no easy way at this point to do fair repayment to everyone he harmed, but he could at least have his wages heavily garnished for a nice, long time, and use it for tax reduction. Or use it to pay for going after other spammers. Or buying spam firewalls for ISPs. Whatever. He should *pay*, and it he should pay *society* somehow. Not just be out of circulation.
As for rapists and murderers getting off easily, that needs to be dealt with as well. I'm not willing to just throw up my hands and watch every criminal walk. Send 'em all (with the spammers) to Austin. We apparently don't have enough money for new roads (all the tax abatements for new business, I guess). Put 'em to work building roads. Not enough money for guards? I bet I could come up with a set of volunteers to help with that...
I had profs who wanted you to regurgitate what they fed you; that was all you needed to get a good grade. I had others who reserved As for those who really *thought*, and could communicate those thoughts well. The trick was learning which type was which before the first essay.
I seriously doubt this sociology prof has developed a program that could recognize innovative thinking if it bit the computer on the I/O bus. So if it's Sociology 101 and they don't want thinking, just regurgitation, great. But it's still (I'd bet) useless for anything more than that.
It costs a small fortune to put a single fighter in the air from a carrier deck, fly it around, and recover it. The fighter can't get in close without being noticed. Unless it's a Harrier, the fighter can't hover or move slowly to track drift, etc. Unless it's a top notch 2 man fighter team, the fighter can't respond as quickly for very small angle changes. Etc.
You can put up a *lot* of these for the cost of a single fighter, they're a lot less prone to notice, and they can get camera angles a fighter pilot wouldn't want to consider (10 feet over the wavetopsm, flying 500 feet from a boat).
It's a different mission. It's acting as a supplement to the non-aircraft security eyeballs more than anything else. A carrier's reason for existence is air power, but there's a lot more to that existence than flying airplanes.
And most ships and boats don't even *have* aircraft, but they still have security needs.
Essentially the big S is pointing out that we're all evil racists, helping keep the poor, foolish third world countries (who can't afford a lawyer to explain the incomprehensible GPL to them) in servitude.
I had no idea. I really must thank Mr. Schwartz for enlightening us.
To atone for my guilt, I'll rush right out and buy a bunch of Solaris products I can neither afford nor need. I'm not sure just *how* this atones for my unthinking racism, but I can trust Mr. Schwartz; he's a big shot CEO. I just hope my children can forgive me for the debt I'm about to saddle them with.
This is part of the basis for their InfraStruxure (or however they spell it). It looks like a great idea, but since we're a startup without 1999 type funding, we'll have to wait a while on trying it.
I have no relationship with APC other than beinga very happy user of their UPSes, both at home and at work (everything from outlet protection to Symmetra 4KVA systems, looking forward to the day we can try the bigger stuff).
It's partially inertia as someone else noted, but there are other factors.
For one, it's a microcosm of the generalized AC distribution concept. If you want to run X watts through a wire, you can run it at low voltage and high current, which by ohms law insures a hefty voltage drop (WRT the supply voltage), or you can run it at high voltage and low current, which by ohms law means a lower voltage drop, which means it's essentially unchanged. Then you drop it back down at the distribution point (just like they do with substations and transformers near your home or business). This voltage transformation is trivial with AC, but much (perhaps insanely) more complex and expensive with DC.
Which brings up the cost issue. Partially this is also inertia-driven, because the infrastructure is there to produce and transform AC voltages, and to produce equipment that uses it. But there are hidden costs as well. The wires inside a computer to distribute +/-5VDC and +/-12VDC don't have to be that large, because they are short. But you'd either have to run a bunch of wires per computer, or run much thicker wires to distribution points, to handle all that current. Go read a power supply comparison with today's fast chips or high end disk drives to get an idea of the current requirements. A DC panel to run a 6 foot rack would be capable of starting a large, diesel truck or three!
Even at low voltages, high current DC carries its own set of dangers. You'd have to do a lot of education to get people to be careful around it; far too many people would think it's as safe as handling a battery. At least until they were hit in the face with molten metal as they accidentally arc-welded something.
Finally, someone in this thread stated that if you are running off AC and have to switch to batteries, it's not a UPS. You could make a case that, technically, this is true, but in fact, so long as the UPS switches faster than the computer power supllies run out of stored power, it's "uninterruptible enough". The real issue for most of us isn't whether the AC power is technically interrupted, but whether the computers keep running. If your servers' power supplies can't ride through a single, 50Hz or 60Hz cycle problem, you're running too close to the edge.
Bob was changing backup tapes when something caught his eye at his feet. Looking through te holes in the cooling tile in the raised floor, something was moving, like a bundle of shiny snakes. Looking closer, we had 1/2" of water down there!
We spent several hours with a tiny shop vac (we need a bigger one!) emptying the water and being thankful Bob had seen it before it got high enough to get into the power conduits.
An A/C unit drain pan had a clogged drain, so the sump pump couldn't carry the water away. Whoever had the units installed had purchased water alarms, but *they had never been hooked up*. Now *that* was a brilliant move.
We now have water alarms down there.
Meanwhile, the room stays about 70 degrees, and the servers stay comfy, as do we. I like it that way,
That's a really bizarre, if not outright absurd, question.
Google owes you NOTHING.
Google is not your mama.
Google is not your daddy.
Google is not your debtor.
Google is not Uncle Sugar's Handout Agency.
Just like you ought to be, google is an independent agency.
Their motto is something like "do no evil". They get to interpret that however they like, but so far, they're interpreting it quite well in most peoples minds.
Google *does* have the right not to be spammed, just as you or I do. It's just that in this case, they're in a much better position to do somthing about it.
There's no extortion involved. If anything, there was theft of services by WordPress. (Not that I believe such a case would have merit. IANAL, FWIW, ETC.)
As a ptentially humorless Republican moderator, I just want to say two things.
1) Yes, it was funny.
2) You really shouldn't dangle your chad like that in public.
It's easy enough to read data from 40 to 50 year old, 1/2" magnetic tape reels. Why should today's "newer, improved" technology be less useful for long term storage?
The emerging trend for dealing with this is apparently just to sigh whatever they hand you, work for a year, then sue them for not treating you like an employee, after which you retire.
I move we regulate Mr. Houlin Zhao.
Any seconds?
First we decide to do it, then we'll decide how.
Although I'm thinking a body suit with dozens of little cattle prods, all controllable via the internet.
I may be the last geek on the planet who hasn't paid attention to RSS, but oh, well. The OP claims that by now we've all played with it. I'm still not even sure what it is!
Almost everyone I knew in high tech at the time, contractor or otherwise, thought that the contractors suing MS was both stupid and, at best, unethical (if not an outright breach of contract).
At the time, I had very deep ties into the contractor community, being off and on one, myself, and the suit pissed me off as much as it did anyone. It was the opposite of the professional conduct we all strove for.
I agree. I never expected MS to open source Windows or Office; that would, indeed, make we propose an expedition to Hell with thermometers.
BUT... Why not open source VB6? And anything else they want to EOL. That would gain them a ton of (sometimes grudging) street cred in the OSS community.
And make a *lot* of people happy, including some who are rather unhappy today.
We're not as concerned as a company about whether Java is OSS or not, but we are concerned about ease of rollout. If I need a new JRE to run OO2, how does that impact the 250 or so Linux systems I have to roll it out to? What about my handful of Windows users I'm trying to migrate from Office? Will this version of Java play well with the versions of Linux we run? It's a potential nightmare.
Several years ago I was involved in putting a law firm on the internet, and helping install a LAN in their office here. They really wanted to go Linux as much as possible, even then, but their HQ IT weenie refused, because MS was all he knew.
There are several law firms in town now that rely almost exclusively on OSS; I met with a vendor today who set up one of the most recent ones. He walked in for a first meeting, and they asked, "What kind of open source solution can you provide us for [list of stuff]?" He will provide whatever meets the clients' needs and wants, but he is an OSS advocate, so he was a happy camper. Saved them a hunk of change, too.
Sorry I can't give more details at this point, but here in Texas, at least, it's doable.
PayPal doesn't play at all with many countries.
If you scale the whole thing up to about the size of the Buckhouse, you'll be fine.