Okay, what IS it about folks taking an old junk computer, spending more money on parts than they would on a NEW computer, cramming the stuff into the old case and making the news?!? When's the last time you heard of someone gutting a transistor radio so they could fill it with the innards of a new Denon 5.1 system? Or perhaps disassembling grandma's old Underwood typewriter and jiggering an IBM Electromatic into the shell?
Not often...
Why? Because it's cooler to keep them around! How many of you have old Commodore 64's or ColecoVisions that still work? Would you gut it to get a Pentium III crammed in there? Heck no! It's more froody to show it off in working condition during dinner parties...
... or at least do something even more sheik and turn it into a fishtank, or perhaps rig that floppy drive that made the "ZZZzzzzzz-cla-click!" noise to dispense Post-It notes.
My point is, the whole reason this is cool and noteworthy is that the old Mac-in-the-boxes were classics. You could turn it into a two-bottle beer cooler using some copper tubing and an air conditioner pump and people would still stand up and take notice because it's nostalgic.
So, let's all Here-Here! for the Mac-in-the-boxes. But, can we perhaps stop throwing a party everytime someone jams something inside that doesn't belong there?
Let's play devil's advocate for a second... Flame-free zones are implemented. Then, in order to keep them flame free, there needs to be some sort of enforcement. Enforcement means penalties. Penalties mean that a new breed of Internet criminals branded for their hateful statements gets nicely identified, classified, and packaged up into a sterotype that we can all look down our noses at.
The raw fact is that this is what happens in the "real world." And the problem is that what is and is not appropriate is a function over time, and not a matter of common agreement. The end result is a band of self-named Morality Police that decide what is appropriate, and force their views on others, thus effectively creating a new criminal class out of people who don't share their views.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again... The First Amendment guarantees you the right to free speech. It in NO WAY guarantees you the right to be listened to! Taking a wild guess, 9 out of 10 kids that flame their peers are doing it entirely for the reason of gaining attention. If we ignore them, they'll go away. The other 1 out of 10 is a more serious problem, but the whole point of this, I believe, is to avoid letting the Internet go down the road that RL society did/is.
Face it, sad though it may be, we're never going to get rid of malice and hate. The question is, are we going to classify it and subject it to arbitrary penalization based on ever-changing standards, ignore it until it escalates under already-existing criminal behaviors, or take another approach.
Don't ask me what that approach is, I'm not a deity, but I can say that letting the Internet mirror society even closer than it already does, is probably not it.
Ignoring things until they go away is seldom a real solution for real problems, but on the Net, it's roughly the equivalent of a group cold-stare.
Please bear in mind that the 1st Amendment guarantees you the right to free speech. It does NOT under ANY circumstances guarantee you the right that anyone will listen to what you have to say. The beauty of the Internet is that nobody is backing you into a corner and screaming their vile views at you, like they can in real life. The concept of "Internet Harassment" is grossly over done, especially in light of neato tools like procmail...
People take things too seriously! There is a time and a place to prosecute inappropriate or dangerous behavior, but the publicity and fear-mongering that the Net intimidates people and everyone has an angry streak and is out for blood is part of the reason why there's a stigma attached to getting involved! If you don't like what people have to say, you have NO obligation to listen. Exercise THAT right, why don't we?
(Oops... sorry. Did I sound too angry when I said that?;)
High speed net access is great! The only problem with doing it in an academic setting is that "Academic System" does not equal "Production System." Why is that important? Well, when you're so wired that people integrate it into their academic lives and it becomes required for them to complete homework, get course notes, and even register and receive grades, its stability is vitally important! Let's face it, you can browse the web all you want with lightning speed, but at a University, it should be a reliable, stable, teaching and research tool.
I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers by mentioning this in a non-CWRU (Case Western Reserve University) forum, but so be it...
CWRU installed an ATM network long before their technology was stable, and as a result, the network was down a significant portion of the time, and you could count on it going down at the times when it was utilized and important (such as before finals.) That decision was made not with the best student interests in mind, but with publicity-oriented politics handed down from on high. As a result partially of that, CWRU was voted Yahoo!'s Most Wired Campus in 1999, but was less of a testament to it's fantastic high speed network, and more of a Bill Clinton-style Legacy Building attempt by the out-going CIO. Much of the information cited in that award, such as 90% of facilities availble around the clock and 25MB of free web space, were not really true, and the topic of much controversy at CWRU for months thereafter. The University made lots of excuses of how that really was policy despite the fact that nobody knew about it, and the U didn't have the resources to back it up even if they wanted to.
My point: High speed net access is great, but many Universities use it as a selling point rather than a resource. When it becomes a political marketing tool, it's reliability suffers, and the students are the ones left out in the cold. As a student, there are MANY times I would have much rather had a 33.6 modem and a simple network that worked, than a space-age technological marvel that swallowed my code and locked up my homework the night before it was due...
Truthfully, I expect to see a full 50% or better of recent.coms and service vendors to tank. Every market has room for competition, but many of the ones hitting the books right now are focused not on an industry, which grows over time, but on a specific technology or concept, which is eventually outdated. Also, stocks like the consumer market are a psychological game as much as anything else, and once brand loyalty truly sets in, anyone not under that umbrella is in for tough times.
There is, unfortunately, not enough room in this pool for everyone. That's because the pool keeps having the water sucked out the bottom in response to fresh, new water being poured on top. Eventually, any company that gets too close to the bottom will be sucked right out of the market by the inexorable march of progress. And simple logic tells us that somebody always has to be on the bottom, or else there would be no top.
Micro$quish is still a viable stock, but look at what they've done to themselves by tying the whole farm to OS's. Unless changed, eventually they too will be sucked under in this market by that mentality, not their failure to buy into Open Source or any of their other "sins."
First off, let me just say that while I probably won't put as much into this as I did the RedHat IPO, I'm almost certain to buy a few shares, and probably sell them when they look close to the initial peak, just like I did RedHat.
Now, the question: WHY?!?!? I've been at this a decently long time, and while techs are the sweetie of the stock market right now, we're starting to reach a glut of tech stocks where NONE of them are profitable. Look at Caldera's figures... unless there's some catastrophic correction event, the IPO will likely skyrocket like the others in the first few days. But, c'mon here... Revenue was $3.1M, loss was $9.4M with strikingly similar behavior in the previous two years.
The stock market is not a zero-sum game, but neither is it the Great Inverter, destined to sweep all chronically red companies into the black. Eventually, something has to give, and I don't see that time being too far off at this point... tech stocks have a trial by fire in the next 2 years, or I'll eat my sock.
So, buy buy buy. I'll just be watching for the revolution, 'cause I don't care to be first against the wall when it does come... Hear the gunshots yet?;)
Having just escaped from college with a BS/MS in Computer Engineering, this doesn't frighten me in terms of secretly bolstering some three-letter-agency. This frightens me by exactly what it will do to the competency of the people actually combatting the real threats to our military, operational, and communications electronic systems.
I don't hesitate at all to say that many, possibly bordering on most, computer science graduates from prominent Universities could benefit from a few years at DeVry to learn actual skills complimenting their theoretical skills memorized from 4 years of generally shoddy teaching and textbooks with concepts and methods that were old 5 years ago... This isn't a knock on students/teachers in general, just a personal observation based on the type of work I had to do on class projects, and the number of times us top students had to cover for less-motivated/less-skilled students in our groups, who were in the majority.
So, let Clinton spend his $91M. Just playing the odds, the vast majority of takers he'll get will be people qualified to work Help Desk, write script widgies, or just generally be in significant need of more training before they'll be useful. The top students who know they can make more money in the private sector, can get more money in scholarships anyhow, and cringe at the thought of working for the Fed, probably won't be any more likely to take this than they would the already existing ROTC money that promises the same type of work after college in the military.
... and let's face it, most of them will end up in one way or another with their fingers in military/defense projects anyhow, so why not just stick with ROTC? Sounds to me like just one more bit of presidential hype. Just my $.02.
Um.... why does this fail to make me feel better? You'll note in the original newsfeed that the AFL-CIO and others had jumped on the bandwagon stating that they agreed with the interpretation and how wonderful it was that the big bad employers were now legally liable for protecting their poor overworked employees who slave from home. Sorry if I sound cynical, but being involved in a startup whose production facility was shut down for 2 weeks because the mirrors on our upstairs bathroom were 2" too high for handicap regulations (the upstairs wasn't handicap accessible anyway!), has taught me a healthy disrespect for OSHA.
Don't think for one second that this is over. When the Supreme Court issues a ruling on this, or Congress starts passing bills protecting privacy including home inspecions by employers, then I'll start feeling better about it. OSHA has made a habit of micro-regulating all unsafe behavior, and since everything from eating too much candy to using a soldering iron while wearing a T-shirt is unsafe, my take is: "Give them time." Left unchecked, they will attempt to regulate it.
Born & raised a Pittsburgher, I left for reasons mostly financial... CMU's a great school, but there are other great schools out here that wave a whole hell of a lot more cash around...
I _STAYED_ away this long for much different reasons. I will thus attempt to define one view of the Lifestyle of the Geek.
Geeks like living in places where they can be both plugged-in, close to the heart of it all, and yet hide away from society for hours/days/months without being harassed every 5 minutes. After reaching a certain "success point," many geeks move to the suburbs where there's readily available cheap eats, less expensive DSL service, movie theaters, drive-through beer joints, and a better chance of picking up cute girls/guys.
Pittsburgh's (and many other city's) suburbs are still, and for a likely long time will be, run by old Steel-era codgers who think that computers are for playing Pong, and word processors are cheap knockoffs of an Underwood manual typewriter. Unions control the city/local governments (ever been to Clairton?), taxes are far too high (Allegheny County's RAD tax), there is practically NO nightlife in ANY of the south hills suburbs, and Bell Atlantic has such a stranglehold on the market that it takes over 2 months just to get T1's installed.
Geeks like controlling at least a portion of their own destiny. In Pittsburgh, more so than many other places I've been, it is difficult bordering on impossible to get any sort of representation or advance any cause that isn't popular with big labor or the old folks.
We geeks need a city built from scratch with geeks in government, geeks in utilities, and geeks in Public Planning. Since we might as well try to move to the Land of Oz, or some other pipe dream, I think we'll just have to wait...
Does anyone know what scheduler / load balancer / etc etc etc that they're using? As of roughly 6 months ago, getting a Beowulf to be tuned enough to actually show significant performance increases compared to manually firing off independent processes on each machine was extraordinarily difficult. I never actually managed it.
We had a small cluster of Alpha PC164's and a much larger of Pentiums. We "upgraded" from a Beowulf-style system to a Mosix system, and performance shot straight through the roof. Unfortunately, Mosix doesn't run on Alphas (yet), so we bit the bullet on 'em and have a bunch of glorified paperweights.
I'd love to get back on the Linux train with the Alphas, but Beowulf seemed to have too many if's and require far more effort than it returned benefits. Has this changed, and how?
Slashdot Mirror
Not often...
Why? Because it's cooler to keep them around! How many of you have old Commodore 64's or ColecoVisions that still work? Would you gut it to get a Pentium III crammed in there? Heck no! It's more froody to show it off in working condition during dinner parties...
My point is, the whole reason this is cool and noteworthy is that the old Mac-in-the-boxes were classics. You could turn it into a two-bottle beer cooler using some copper tubing and an air conditioner pump and people would still stand up and take notice because it's nostalgic.
So, let's all Here-Here! for the Mac-in-the-boxes. But, can we perhaps stop throwing a party everytime someone jams something inside that doesn't belong there?
The raw fact is that this is what happens in the "real world." And the problem is that what is and is not appropriate is a function over time, and not a matter of common agreement. The end result is a band of self-named Morality Police that decide what is appropriate, and force their views on others, thus effectively creating a new criminal class out of people who don't share their views.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again... The First Amendment guarantees you the right to free speech. It in NO WAY guarantees you the right to be listened to! Taking a wild guess, 9 out of 10 kids that flame their peers are doing it entirely for the reason of gaining attention. If we ignore them, they'll go away. The other 1 out of 10 is a more serious problem, but the whole point of this, I believe, is to avoid letting the Internet go down the road that RL society did/is.
Face it, sad though it may be, we're never going to get rid of malice and hate. The question is, are we going to classify it and subject it to arbitrary penalization based on ever-changing standards, ignore it until it escalates under already-existing criminal behaviors, or take another approach.
Don't ask me what that approach is, I'm not a deity, but I can say that letting the Internet mirror society even closer than it already does, is probably not it.
Please bear in mind that the 1st Amendment guarantees you the right to free speech. It does NOT under ANY circumstances guarantee you the right that anyone will listen to what you have to say. The beauty of the Internet is that nobody is backing you into a corner and screaming their vile views at you, like they can in real life. The concept of "Internet Harassment" is grossly over done, especially in light of neato tools like procmail...
People take things too seriously! There is a time and a place to prosecute inappropriate or dangerous behavior, but the publicity and fear-mongering that the Net intimidates people and everyone has an angry streak and is out for blood is part of the reason why there's a stigma attached to getting involved! If you don't like what people have to say, you have NO obligation to listen. Exercise THAT right, why don't we?
(Oops... sorry. Did I sound too angry when I said that? ;)
I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers by mentioning this in a non-CWRU (Case Western Reserve University) forum, but so be it...
CWRU installed an ATM network long before their technology was stable, and as a result, the network was down a significant portion of the time, and you could count on it going down at the times when it was utilized and important (such as before finals.) That decision was made not with the best student interests in mind, but with publicity-oriented politics handed down from on high. As a result partially of that, CWRU was voted Yahoo!'s Most Wired Campus in 1999, but was less of a testament to it's fantastic high speed network, and more of a Bill Clinton-style Legacy Building attempt by the out-going CIO. Much of the information cited in that award, such as 90% of facilities availble around the clock and 25MB of free web space, were not really true, and the topic of much controversy at CWRU for months thereafter. The University made lots of excuses of how that really was policy despite the fact that nobody knew about it, and the U didn't have the resources to back it up even if they wanted to.
My point: High speed net access is great, but many Universities use it as a selling point rather than a resource. When it becomes a political marketing tool, it's reliability suffers, and the students are the ones left out in the cold. As a student, there are MANY times I would have much rather had a 33.6 modem and a simple network that worked, than a space-age technological marvel that swallowed my code and locked up my homework the night before it was due...
There is, unfortunately, not enough room in this pool for everyone. That's because the pool keeps having the water sucked out the bottom in response to fresh, new water being poured on top. Eventually, any company that gets too close to the bottom will be sucked right out of the market by the inexorable march of progress. And simple logic tells us that somebody always has to be on the bottom, or else there would be no top.
Micro$quish is still a viable stock, but look at what they've done to themselves by tying the whole farm to OS's. Unless changed, eventually they too will be sucked under in this market by that mentality, not their failure to buy into Open Source or any of their other "sins."
Now, the question:
WHY?!?!? I've been at this a decently long time, and while techs are the sweetie of the stock market right now, we're starting to reach a glut of tech stocks where NONE of them are profitable. Look at Caldera's figures... unless there's some catastrophic correction event, the IPO will likely skyrocket like the others in the first few days. But, c'mon here... Revenue was $3.1M, loss was $9.4M with strikingly similar behavior in the previous two years.
The stock market is not a zero-sum game, but neither is it the Great Inverter, destined to sweep all chronically red companies into the black. Eventually, something has to give, and I don't see that time being too far off at this point... tech stocks have a trial by fire in the next 2 years, or I'll eat my sock.
So, buy buy buy. I'll just be watching for the revolution, 'cause I don't care to be first against the wall when it does come... Hear the gunshots yet? ;)
I don't hesitate at all to say that many, possibly bordering on most, computer science graduates from prominent Universities could benefit from a few years at DeVry to learn actual skills complimenting their theoretical skills memorized from 4 years of generally shoddy teaching and textbooks with concepts and methods that were old 5 years ago... This isn't a knock on students/teachers in general, just a personal observation based on the type of work I had to do on class projects, and the number of times us top students had to cover for less-motivated/less-skilled students in our groups, who were in the majority.
So, let Clinton spend his $91M. Just playing the odds, the vast majority of takers he'll get will be people qualified to work Help Desk, write script widgies, or just generally be in significant need of more training before they'll be useful. The top students who know they can make more money in the private sector, can get more money in scholarships anyhow, and cringe at the thought of working for the Fed, probably won't be any more likely to take this than they would the already existing ROTC money that promises the same type of work after college in the military.
Don't think for one second that this is over. When the Supreme Court issues a ruling on this, or Congress starts passing bills protecting privacy including home inspecions by employers, then I'll start feeling better about it. OSHA has made a habit of micro-regulating all unsafe behavior, and since everything from eating too much candy to using a soldering iron while wearing a T-shirt is unsafe, my take is: "Give them time." Left unchecked, they will attempt to regulate it.
Good luck to all of us telecommuters!
I _STAYED_ away this long for much different reasons. I will thus attempt to define one view of the Lifestyle of the Geek.
Geeks like living in places where they can be both plugged-in, close to the heart of it all, and yet hide away from society for hours/days/months without being harassed every 5 minutes. After reaching a certain "success point," many geeks move to the suburbs where there's readily available cheap eats, less expensive DSL service, movie theaters, drive-through beer joints, and a better chance of picking up cute girls/guys.
Pittsburgh's (and many other city's) suburbs are still, and for a likely long time will be, run by old Steel-era codgers who think that computers are for playing Pong, and word processors are cheap knockoffs of an Underwood manual typewriter. Unions control the city/local governments (ever been to Clairton?), taxes are far too high (Allegheny County's RAD tax), there is practically NO nightlife in ANY of the south hills suburbs, and Bell Atlantic has such a stranglehold on the market that it takes over 2 months just to get T1's installed.
Geeks like controlling at least a portion of their own destiny. In Pittsburgh, more so than many other places I've been, it is difficult bordering on impossible to get any sort of representation or advance any cause that isn't popular with big labor or the old folks.
We geeks need a city built from scratch with geeks in government, geeks in utilities, and geeks in Public Planning. Since we might as well try to move to the Land of Oz, or some other pipe dream, I think we'll just have to wait...
My $.02
We had a small cluster of Alpha PC164's and a much larger of Pentiums. We "upgraded" from a Beowulf-style system to a Mosix system, and performance shot straight through the roof. Unfortunately, Mosix doesn't run on Alphas (yet), so we bit the bullet on 'em and have a bunch of glorified paperweights.
I'd love to get back on the Linux train with the Alphas, but Beowulf seemed to have too many if's and require far more effort than it returned benefits. Has this changed, and how?