See, it does pull an IP via DHCP. If you have a DHCP server it can see. Trouble is, you have no way of knowing what that IP is. The actual Sun recommended procedure is to nmap your subnet! IT wouldn't have been happy with that at all, as it happens.
We got a new Sun T5120 Niagara box the other week. New build server. (32 threads in 4 cores, yeah we bought the little one.) Initial setup procedure *requires* serial to the service processor. The IT guy was already upset enough that the KVM he'd arranged had no use on a SPARC box and had to grovel around for a USB serial adapter.
Serial is all-but-dead in desktop PC land and deader than it should be in server PC land. (Sun x86 servers always have serial.) Everything else, serial is standard and thank fuck. RS232 9600 8-N-1, usually to an RJ-45 rather than DB-9 these days. But it remains standard and indispensable. The more back doors you have into your own server, the happier you are when shit breaks.
Acrobat is cross-platform, but this only affects Windows users in practice - because Mac users use Preview, and Unix users use something Xpdf/GhostScript-derived.
In the wake of massive Buzz privacy problems, Google has announced that its slogan "Don't Be Evil" will be extended for the 2010s with "But Do Be Stupid."
"I don't see how people could ever have thought it wasn't perfect," said Google marketing marketer Todd Jackson. "We tested it in-house for ages, and our test group of white male engineers all working inside a single corporation thought it was the best thing ever! So of course we didn't see the need for any user testing or opt-in."
Gmail users have been up in arms at their frequent email contacts and private addresses that forward to Gmail being publicly revealed, their precise GPS location being automatically posted with updates from their mobile phone and that switching off Buzz doesn't actually switch it off.
"We have heard of the case of the woman whose violent stalker could track her through the Buzz function she didn't actually switch on," said Bishop. "But should she actually be killed, we will of course apologise for her poor product experience. Though it's obvious it's her own fault for not having first found the function hidden behind three panels to untick 'KEEP MY STALKER UPDATED ON MY EVERY MOVE.' Some people just shouldn't be let near computers."
Jackson emphasised the non-evil nature of Google. "We are most definitely not evil. But if, y'know, evil just sorta happens, well. We just send the rockets up. It's not our job to think about where they land."
Microsoft is phasing out support for Netscape 4, in retaliation for Google declaring Internet Explorer 6 a "pustulent syphilitic drunken crack whore with no mates. And bad breath. Who smells funny."
Google has given up bothering to support IE6 on its sites, directing the doubtless hideously virus-infected users of the browser to download another browser. Any other browser. "Lynx will give you a vastly superior YouTube experience. Now it will, anyway."
"The Mozilla Foundation has completely failed to fix problems in Netscape 4 that have been around for years," said Microsoft marketing marketer Jonathan Ness. "Furthermore, Firefox gets just as many hacks as Internet Explorer, and pay no attention to my lengthening nose."
In December, Chinese hackers exploited a weak spot in IE6 that Microsoft had only known about since September. Following this, governments worldwide told people to get the hell off IE6, except Britain, which relies on IE6 to leak data when there are insufficient funds for USB sticks or train journeys for civil servants.
Web designers around the world welcomed Google's move, but have not given up their Bill Gates dartboards just yet. "'That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.' Steve Ballmer said that, you know."
Facebook has outraged thousands of obsessive shirkplace F5-pressers by changing its layout from the layout it changed to after the layout before that.
The change has met a storm of protest from users going so far as to click "Join This Group," with nearly two million people with, apparently, nothing whatsoever to do that they're actually being paid to stepping forward to demand that Facebook switch back to the layout before the last one, or the one before that.
"This new format makes absolutely no sense at all," said aggrieved office administrator Brenda Busybody, 43 (IQ), who had said the same thing each of the last three times it changed. "There's, like, all this stuff all over the place. It's not like the old one at all... ooh, that's interesting, I hadn't seen that before."
The users vowed to continue their campaign assiduously for at least a day or two, in between working on their imaginary farm or joining "I Bet I Can Find A Million People Who Believe In Facebook Petitions Before June" or observably not giving two hoots about handing their personal details, fingerprints, DNA and probably first-born to Facebook's advertisers if it meant they could get thirty coins on Petville.
Facebook engineer Jing Chen explained on the company blog how the changes had been extensively tested on the 599.5 million Facebook users who hadn't joined such groups, and that he hoped everyone who wasn't a whiny little bitch would appreciate the new experience. "There's really nothing quite like the complaints of someone getting something for free that what they're getting for free just isn't perfect enough. It's what makes Monday Monday."
HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know.
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window. "Just think," said Berkin, "anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
Thirty-four film companies representing the Australian and US film industries today expressed their disappointment that the Federal Court found that iiNet was not using orbital mind control lasers to encourage copyright infringements by its customers on its network.
Despite findings of copyright infringement by iiNet customers, pirate flags in their front yards and downloaded cars in their driveways, iiNet did not authorise the acts of its customers, merely sitting back and watching the tens of dollars rolling in to feather their own nests at the expense of the poor beleaguered major record companies and film studios.
Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft executive director, Neil Gane, said he was disappointed by the Court’s decision. "Today’s decision is a setback for the 50,000 Australians employed in the film industry, who work hard to send money to America as fast as possible. But we believe there's something not quoite roight about this ruling — it was based on a mere technical loophole centred on the court's interpretation of what the law technically says in actual words and original intention, rather than what it should say.
"We are confident that the government does not intend a policy outcome where zombie hordes of drooling open source copyright terrorists led by the evil genius Michael Malone are allowed to continue feasting upon the flesh of the living via the iiNet network.
"We will now take the time to review the decision before seeing if we can bribe enough federal politicians to get a law more to our liking."
Microsoft is phasing out support for Netscape 4, in retaliation for Google declaring Internet Explorer 6 a "pustulent syphilitic drunken crack whore with no mates. And bad breath. Who smells funny."
Google has given up bothering to support IE6 on its sites, directing the doubtless hideously virus-infected users of the browser to download another browser. Any other browser. "Lynx will give you a vastly superior YouTube experience. Now it will, anyway."
"The Mozilla Foundation has completely failed to fix problems in Netscape 4 that have been around for years," said Microsoft marketing marketer Jonathan Ness. "Furthermore, Firefox gets just as many hacks as Internet Explorer, and pay no attention to my lengthening nose."
In December, Chinese hackers exploited a weak spot in IE6 that Microsoft had only known about since September. Following this, governments worldwide told people to get the hell off IE6, except Britain, which relies on IE6 to leak data when there are insufficient funds for USB sticks or train journeys for civil servants.
Web designers around the world welcomed Google's move, but have not given up their Bill Gates dartboards just yet. "'That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.' Steve Ballmer said that, you know."
Nothing except writing them and learning how to do parallel programming without a nightmare of interacting bugs. Programmers appear on average not to be very good at this one.
The killer app for the Niagaras is Java, lots of Java. That's CPU-hungry but of course you can run a separate Java app (in the JVM) on each of your 96 threads. Makes a Niagara server well worth the money in our experience.
The Niagara boxes are really all that and more. One chip, 12 cores, 96 threads in a 1U server. My work serves a pile of Java servlet based websites, so these are just the thing for the job. They spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs and barely breaking a sweat - the previous generation is three V240s that are running flat-out. Yeah, we've got capacity for a while. We're about to get a Niagara-based build server as well, to replace the present V210 - only a 32-thread model, but that should still make stuff finish in roughly the blink of an eye.
Sun x86 is pretty good too - price-competitive with equivalent Dells, service about as good IME. Always good to keep a mix of vendors in the server room for the field engineers to see.
Mind you, with nine years' Solaris on my CV, it's just as well I've been brushing up my Linux. Not that I don't trust you implicitly, Mr Ellison.
The iPad has a 9.7in full-colour touchpad and wings. According to the box, you can watch movies, surf the internet, listen to music, view photos, read electronic books and go horseback riding, swimming, cycling, mountain-climbing and roller-skating. It also comes with iWork, which lets you do interesting and productive things at the office in between screaming at everyone for being such annoying and thoughtless idiots.
Apple has also launched an app store for the iPad which will allow users to purchase chocolate, whisky and heavy objects for when some fucker crosses you, dares look at you funny or is the sort of clueless arsehole who thinks the explanation of how pissed off you are at his behaviour is always PMT. Look, even if it might be, that's not the point.
For those who find pads too bulky, a special fluffy version of the iPod Shuffle is available, on a string.
Microsoft, who have attempted to sell increasingly bulky folded bath towels for the past decade, were not available for comment. Linux users and the Free Software Foundation were still pushing mooncups, but no-one paid them any attention.
"In conclusion," said Mr Jobs, "please, please don't kill me, darling. I love you more than anyone, honestly. Uhm... flowers?"
The Large Hardon Collider, to be turned on tomorrow, is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. "It's nothing that cosmic rays don't do all the time all over the place," reassured a particularly buff scientist. "It's perfectly right and natural."
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. "They're the same polarity!" said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch in May, but this has been delayed. "I'm so sorry," stammered a scientist, "this has never happened to us before."
Remarks by US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton on the occasion of the massive hacker attack on US companies by an unspecified national entity. Translated for your convenience.
On Monday, a seven-year-old girl in Port-au-Prince was pulled from the rubble after they sent a text message calling for help. The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.
Amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights. Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns, or nuclear power can energize a city or destroy it, the same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al-Qaida to ruthlessly copy American songs and movies in “M-P-Three” format.
Freedom of expression is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. No — they must be able to give their full name and credit card number and put them on the Internet as well. A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity — one cell phone in a remote community can enable people previously unavailable access to Monsanto seeds.
On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress — but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas, paid for at 99 cents — I’m sorry, $1.29 — a song. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.
Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence or copyright violation, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, downloading songs at a furious rate, and setting their sights on cracking the patriotic protection of Blu-Ray discs. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities.
States, terrorists, downloaders and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks. Those who disrupt the free flow of paid information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government, our civil society and our economy.
Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions. The most recent situation involving Google has attracted a great deal of interest. And we look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results to be China signing the ACTA treaty like our campaign donors want them to.
The internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it is fabulous. There are so many people in China now online. But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users to be protected from being able to download any song ever released, any time, anywhere, risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.
So let me close by asking you to remember the little girl who was pulled from the rubble on Monday in Port-au-Prince. She’s alive, she was reunited with her family, she will have the chance to grow up and pay the going rate for a licence not a sale see end user license agreement of a song in a given format on a given device. We cannot stand by while people are separated from the iTunes store by walls of censorship.
Having worked as a Solaris-with-a-bit-of-Linux admin for the past decade, I will happily accept the description of Solaris-land as Bizarro World.
My last job had a mix of Solaris 10 and CentOS. Mostly running on Sun x86 kit, which is now quite price-competitive with Dell. (We had Dells running Solaris 10 as well, as and when it made sense.)
Current job is Sun on mostly SPARC. Lots of fat Niagara web servers. HOLY SHIT THOSE THINGS ARE POWERFUL. Hopefully taking delivery of new 32-thread Niagara build server shortly to replace single-core V210. We'd actually rather Solaris on x86 than SPARC, but of course there's Just This One Bit of Proprietary Stuff we keep it for. And we're basically a Java shop anyway.
I do get to run Ubuntu on my work machine, though.
Usual reason for Linux over Solaris is open source software that barely compiles on Linux, let alone anything else. But someone's developed something that uses libcrufthaxx0r.
In 2010, Linux runs your television, microwave, toaster, car, camera, phone, garage door opener and dildo, but geeks still fail to comprehend why you want a Macintosh for the computer you actually use in front of you.
Slashdot Mirror
And the IT department in question is indeed incompetent, as my initial comment strongly implied.
The MAC isn't printed on the hardware in question. Unlike you, I've actually done this rather than masturbating on Slashdot about it.
Dude. This is the T5120 installation manual.
See, it does pull an IP via DHCP. If you have a DHCP server it can see. Trouble is, you have no way of knowing what that IP is. The actual Sun recommended procedure is to nmap your subnet! IT wouldn't have been happy with that at all, as it happens.
We got a new Sun T5120 Niagara box the other week. New build server. (32 threads in 4 cores, yeah we bought the little one.) Initial setup procedure *requires* serial to the service processor. The IT guy was already upset enough that the KVM he'd arranged had no use on a SPARC box and had to grovel around for a USB serial adapter.
Serial is all-but-dead in desktop PC land and deader than it should be in server PC land. (Sun x86 servers always have serial.) Everything else, serial is standard and thank fuck. RS232 9600 8-N-1, usually to an RJ-45 rather than DB-9 these days. But it remains standard and indispensable. The more back doors you have into your own server, the happier you are when shit breaks.
I can't recall the last time I saw a serial port that wouldn't accept 9600 8-N-1. Not in a couple of decades.
Acrobat is cross-platform, but this only affects Windows users in practice - because Mac users use Preview, and Unix users use something Xpdf/GhostScript-derived.
Solution: FoxitPro. Now.
Go double-check. A lotta people clicked "HELL NO" and still got opted-in.
In the wake of massive Buzz privacy problems, Google has announced that its slogan "Don't Be Evil" will be extended for the 2010s with "But Do Be Stupid."
"I don't see how people could ever have thought it wasn't perfect," said Google marketing marketer Todd Jackson. "We tested it in-house for ages, and our test group of white male engineers all working inside a single corporation thought it was the best thing ever! So of course we didn't see the need for any user testing or opt-in."
Gmail users have been up in arms at their frequent email contacts and private addresses that forward to Gmail being publicly revealed, their precise GPS location being automatically posted with updates from their mobile phone and that switching off Buzz doesn't actually switch it off.
"We have heard of the case of the woman whose violent stalker could track her through the Buzz function she didn't actually switch on," said Bishop. "But should she actually be killed, we will of course apologise for her poor product experience. Though it's obvious it's her own fault for not having first found the function hidden behind three panels to untick 'KEEP MY STALKER UPDATED ON MY EVERY MOVE.' Some people just shouldn't be let near computers."
Jackson emphasised the non-evil nature of Google. "We are most definitely not evil. But if, y'know, evil just sorta happens, well. We just send the rockets up. It's not our job to think about where they land."
Microsoft is phasing out support for Netscape 4, in retaliation for Google declaring Internet Explorer 6 a "pustulent syphilitic drunken crack whore with no mates. And bad breath. Who smells funny."
Google has given up bothering to support IE6 on its sites, directing the doubtless hideously virus-infected users of the browser to download another browser. Any other browser. "Lynx will give you a vastly superior YouTube experience. Now it will, anyway."
"The Mozilla Foundation has completely failed to fix problems in Netscape 4 that have been around for years," said Microsoft marketing marketer Jonathan Ness. "Furthermore, Firefox gets just as many hacks as Internet Explorer, and pay no attention to my lengthening nose."
In December, Chinese hackers exploited a weak spot in IE6 that Microsoft had only known about since September. Following this, governments worldwide told people to get the hell off IE6, except Britain, which relies on IE6 to leak data when there are insufficient funds for USB sticks or train journeys for civil servants.
Web designers around the world welcomed Google's move, but have not given up their Bill Gates dartboards just yet. "'That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.' Steve Ballmer said that, you know."
Facebook has outraged thousands of obsessive shirkplace F5-pressers by changing its layout from the layout it changed to after the layout before that.
The change has met a storm of protest from users going so far as to click "Join This Group," with nearly two million people with, apparently, nothing whatsoever to do that they're actually being paid to stepping forward to demand that Facebook switch back to the layout before the last one, or the one before that.
"This new format makes absolutely no sense at all," said aggrieved office administrator Brenda Busybody, 43 (IQ), who had said the same thing each of the last three times it changed. "There's, like, all this stuff all over the place. It's not like the old one at all ... ooh, that's interesting, I hadn't seen that before."
The users vowed to continue their campaign assiduously for at least a day or two, in between working on their imaginary farm or joining "I Bet I Can Find A Million People Who Believe In Facebook Petitions Before June" or observably not giving two hoots about handing their personal details, fingerprints, DNA and probably first-born to Facebook's advertisers if it meant they could get thirty coins on Petville.
Facebook engineer Jing Chen explained on the company blog how the changes had been extensively tested on the 599.5 million Facebook users who hadn't joined such groups, and that he hoped everyone who wasn't a whiny little bitch would appreciate the new experience. "There's really nothing quite like the complaints of someone getting something for free that what they're getting for free just isn't perfect enough. It's what makes Monday Monday."
HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know.
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window. "Just think," said Berkin, "anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
I think they're counting video shop assistants there.
Thirty-four film companies representing the Australian and US film industries today expressed their disappointment that the Federal Court found that iiNet was not using orbital mind control lasers to encourage copyright infringements by its customers on its network.
Despite findings of copyright infringement by iiNet customers, pirate flags in their front yards and downloaded cars in their driveways, iiNet did not authorise the acts of its customers, merely sitting back and watching the tens of dollars rolling in to feather their own nests at the expense of the poor beleaguered major record companies and film studios.
Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft executive director, Neil Gane, said he was disappointed by the Court’s decision. "Today’s decision is a setback for the 50,000 Australians employed in the film industry, who work hard to send money to America as fast as possible. But we believe there's something not quoite roight about this ruling — it was based on a mere technical loophole centred on the court's interpretation of what the law technically says in actual words and original intention, rather than what it should say.
"We are confident that the government does not intend a policy outcome where zombie hordes of drooling open source copyright terrorists led by the evil genius Michael Malone are allowed to continue feasting upon the flesh of the living via the iiNet network.
"We will now take the time to review the decision before seeing if we can bribe enough federal politicians to get a law more to our liking."
Microsoft is phasing out support for Netscape 4, in retaliation for Google declaring Internet Explorer 6 a "pustulent syphilitic drunken crack whore with no mates. And bad breath. Who smells funny."
Google has given up bothering to support IE6 on its sites, directing the doubtless hideously virus-infected users of the browser to download another browser. Any other browser. "Lynx will give you a vastly superior YouTube experience. Now it will, anyway."
"The Mozilla Foundation has completely failed to fix problems in Netscape 4 that have been around for years," said Microsoft marketing marketer Jonathan Ness. "Furthermore, Firefox gets just as many hacks as Internet Explorer, and pay no attention to my lengthening nose."
In December, Chinese hackers exploited a weak spot in IE6 that Microsoft had only known about since September. Following this, governments worldwide told people to get the hell off IE6, except Britain, which relies on IE6 to leak data when there are insufficient funds for USB sticks or train journeys for civil servants.
Web designers around the world welcomed Google's move, but have not given up their Bill Gates dartboards just yet. "'That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.' Steve Ballmer said that, you know."
Nothing except writing them and learning how to do parallel programming without a nightmare of interacting bugs. Programmers appear on average not to be very good at this one.
The killer app for the Niagaras is Java, lots of Java. That's CPU-hungry but of course you can run a separate Java app (in the JVM) on each of your 96 threads. Makes a Niagara server well worth the money in our experience.
I can't see Ellison resisting the opportunity to really fuck Microsoft over with OOo.
The Niagara boxes are really all that and more. One chip, 12 cores, 96 threads in a 1U server. My work serves a pile of Java servlet based websites, so these are just the thing for the job. They spend most of their time twiddling their thumbs and barely breaking a sweat - the previous generation is three V240s that are running flat-out. Yeah, we've got capacity for a while. We're about to get a Niagara-based build server as well, to replace the present V210 - only a 32-thread model, but that should still make stuff finish in roughly the blink of an eye.
Sun x86 is pretty good too - price-competitive with equivalent Dells, service about as good IME. Always good to keep a mix of vendors in the server room for the field engineers to see.
Mind you, with nine years' Solaris on my CV, it's just as well I've been brushing up my Linux. Not that I don't trust you implicitly, Mr Ellison.
Cult leader Steve Jobs has announced the iPad, a "revolutionary" advance in stylish personal hygiene with elegant design.
The iPad has a 9.7in full-colour touchpad and wings. According to the box, you can watch movies, surf the internet, listen to music, view photos, read electronic books and go horseback riding, swimming, cycling, mountain-climbing and roller-skating. It also comes with iWork, which lets you do interesting and productive things at the office in between screaming at everyone for being such annoying and thoughtless idiots.
Apple has also launched an app store for the iPad which will allow users to purchase chocolate, whisky and heavy objects for when some fucker crosses you, dares look at you funny or is the sort of clueless arsehole who thinks the explanation of how pissed off you are at his behaviour is always PMT. Look, even if it might be, that's not the point.
For those who find pads too bulky, a special fluffy version of the iPod Shuffle is available, on a string.
Microsoft, who have attempted to sell increasingly bulky folded bath towels for the past decade, were not available for comment. Linux users and the Free Software Foundation were still pushing mooncups, but no-one paid them any attention.
"In conclusion," said Mr Jobs, "please, please don't kill me, darling. I love you more than anyone, honestly. Uhm ... flowers?"
The Large Hardon Collider, to be turned on tomorrow, is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. "It's nothing that cosmic rays don't do all the time all over the place," reassured a particularly buff scientist. "It's perfectly right and natural."
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. "They're the same polarity!" said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch in May, but this has been delayed. "I'm so sorry," stammered a scientist, "this has never happened to us before."
Remarks by US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton on the occasion of the massive hacker attack on US companies by an unspecified national entity. Translated for your convenience.
On Monday, a seven-year-old girl in Port-au-Prince was pulled from the rubble after they sent a text message calling for help. The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.
Amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights. Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns, or nuclear power can energize a city or destroy it, the same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al-Qaida to ruthlessly copy American songs and movies in “M-P-Three” format.
Freedom of expression is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. No — they must be able to give their full name and credit card number and put them on the Internet as well. A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity — one cell phone in a remote community can enable people previously unavailable access to Monsanto seeds.
On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress — but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas, paid for at 99 cents — I’m sorry, $1.29 — a song. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.
Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence or copyright violation, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, downloading songs at a furious rate, and setting their sights on cracking the patriotic protection of Blu-Ray discs. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities.
States, terrorists, downloaders and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks. Those who disrupt the free flow of paid information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government, our civil society and our economy.
Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions. The most recent situation involving Google has attracted a great deal of interest. And we look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results to be China signing the ACTA treaty like our campaign donors want them to.
The internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it is fabulous. There are so many people in China now online. But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users to be protected from being able to download any song ever released, any time, anywhere, risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.
So let me close by asking you to remember the little girl who was pulled from the rubble on Monday in Port-au-Prince. She’s alive, she was reunited with her family, she will have the chance to grow up and pay the going rate for a licence not a sale see end user license agreement of a song in a given format on a given device. We cannot stand by while people are separated from the iTunes store by walls of censorship.
Having worked as a Solaris-with-a-bit-of-Linux admin for the past decade, I will happily accept the description of Solaris-land as Bizarro World.
My last job had a mix of Solaris 10 and CentOS. Mostly running on Sun x86 kit, which is now quite price-competitive with Dell. (We had Dells running Solaris 10 as well, as and when it made sense.)
Current job is Sun on mostly SPARC. Lots of fat Niagara web servers. HOLY SHIT THOSE THINGS ARE POWERFUL. Hopefully taking delivery of new 32-thread Niagara build server shortly to replace single-core V210. We'd actually rather Solaris on x86 than SPARC, but of course there's Just This One Bit of Proprietary Stuff we keep it for. And we're basically a Java shop anyway.
I do get to run Ubuntu on my work machine, though.
Usual reason for Linux over Solaris is open source software that barely compiles on Linux, let alone anything else. But someone's developed something that uses libcrufthaxx0r.
In 2010, Linux runs your television, microwave, toaster, car, camera, phone, garage door opener and dildo, but geeks still fail to comprehend why you want a Macintosh for the computer you actually use in front of you.
"Has anyone really been as far as decided to use even want to go look more like?"