Working at GTE Enterprise Solutions, in Vancouver BC (division now closed), we had large multi-node IBM servers running AIX.
The machine was purchased for $1 million, to handle a large commercial database for the mortgage industry.
To make a long story short, the drive array (very expensive - fibre optic channel, and huge storage for the time) arrived with half of the case crushed inwards. No one claimed responsibility, but it looks like it had happened in the warehouse of the courier.
Not that interesting a story, but it was pretty stunning to see how carelessly equipment worth 6-digits was handled. Thank god for insurance.
in small towns. But I bet no other small-town-woes have received the attention they'll be getting now.
Knowng that I had 6 months of typing data into PCs would make me want to quit. Know that those PCs had were more vulnerable to crashing and losing the data again would nudge me over the edge.
You would think that small towns with geographic proximity would band together and set up a WAN, or at least pool their resources to keep the human-resources, software and maintenance costs down (as buying in bulk, even for software, can often net significant savings).
Just check out Grand Theft Auto 3 or any of the other hundreds of other games.
I don't think any course of action that's been tried to date (castration, drugs to kill the libido, and negative re-inforcement) have had any significant effect on pedophiles.
Yes, but the CD has that little symbol on it that indicates it conforms to the blue/red book standard. My CD player on my computer has the same symbol.
The CD that Sony has released is no longer compatible.
Stereo shemrio. Married doesn't make you rich, or an audiophile.
If I own a CD, I can make a tape of it for personal use.
If I own a bunch of CDs, I have the right to rip and burn tracks from all CDs onto a compilation disk.
Moreover, a computer is a valid choice as an audio player. My wife and I don't own a stereo - we use a computer with speakers.
Sony is a large (music, games, computer hardware, audio-video, cameras, toys) corporation that frequently employees proprietary standards to gain market share. They shouldn't be rewarded for this.
Sony is horrible for implementing proprietary standards. Once you have their mp3 player with the memory stick, then you need a Vaio (some of which have a slot for the memory stick), their digital camera and MP3 player.
Some companies think it's slick marketing. But only Sony could get away with it. IBM couldn't with their Microchannel Architecture.
Open standards (like XML and other markup languages), like Open Source, should be high on the list for most/. readers.
They should start with species-at-risk
on
Every Species on Earth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They might not be around in 25 years.
Any animal that competes with human beings, is a threat to human beings, or requires undisturbed access large pieces of land in areas close to human habitation should be done first. Elephants, tigers, grizzly bears, etc.
Also, better look at any plant or animal that has a high degree of integration with their ecosphere (global warming will change their ecosphere faster than they can adapt).
Oh, anything at either poles - human-based pollutants seem to gravitate to these areas.
Better get everything in the ocean as well - over fishing and other human activities is disrupting the food chain.
Any animal or plant that lives in any forest that is accessible by the logging companies probably should be classified early, as well.
Finally, any animal that has "trophy" value or is poached for body parts to be made into aphrodisiacs won't be around for long.
No, the origins of the terms First, Second and Third World actually originated in 1952, created by a French guy named Alfred Sauvy, and relate more to pre-industrial France than the world after WW2.
He actually called them estates, and drew a parallel to the demographics of France before and during the French Revolution. The first and second estate are the nobles and priests. The third estate are the unwashed masses that want to be something, and are exploited by the first and second estate.
Yes, it was drafted during the cold war (though the cold war officially started in the late 40's, and this was 1952). But the concept of have-and-have-nots has been around since antiquity.
Anyway, it's a crappy analogy. Now we have agrarian, industrial, and information based economies (and everything in-between). We also have democracies, autocracies, monarchies, totalitarian-states, military-based govenments and dictatorships. Way too complicated to sum up in three broad, misunderstood categories.
"There are still millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN. And you can still develop in ADA, LISP, Scheme, etc."
Where did I say that Ada was dead? I implied that Cobol/Fortran were dead (but only implied). I think my statement, at most, implies that Ada, LISP and Scheme are lesser-used languages. And they are - C, C++, Java, PERL, etc are more widely used. Ada I believe was originally a military-language, and not widely used outside the US military.
You don't run Quake 2 on a Sun E4500. True, Tom and Anand don't benchmark with Linux/Apache, Win2k/Oracle, Solaris/Netscape, but they should have.
Our database is Oracle with dual P3 933s with 2 gig RAM. A E7500 with up to 16 gig of RAM would take our CPU usage on one of our database machines from 40% to about 20%.
Why do people keep talking about Quake benchmarks, kernal compiles, etc?
My Family and Wife's Family is Military
on
The Future of MREs
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· Score: 2
Mine, Canadian Army, hers, American Navy. Cousin who is a marine, another a helicopter pilot, and a third a technician.
The cousin who is a marine is also a vegan. Yah - hilarious - the vegan marine. She is in Afghanistan right now - wonder what the hell she eats. No dairy, no eggs, no seafood, no poultry, and no meat.
I was a vegan for a few years - pretty tough to find food in a supermarket that has no dairy. Imagine what it's like when your food comes in a grey plastic bag.
I know - Win2k is the corporate standard, and last I tried Mozilla, it screwed up my registry associations; I prefer Konqueror. IE sucks the crusty ass of a dead donkey, but until the Oralce->PostgresQL database switch happens, I'm stuck with this OS.
It must be a really slow news night...
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 1, Troll
if this is what passes for a/. story.
I mean, really. Who cares?
If you have nothing interesting to post, it's best to post nothing.
At the bottom of the article, his wife mentions that she found evidence that he had been gambling over the Internet, and may have gone into debt as a result.
What's funny is that when I closed the window to the story, there was one of those ubiquitous popup-adds for an on-line casino.
I find it amusing is that people shell out good money for those tacky little figurines. I find it not so amusing that some people may have lost upwards of $20,000.
Not really evolution - just freeing humans up from menial and dangerous tasks.
As for equality, will the the people of Afghanistan have robots to fight their battles as well? Of course not - they have a difficult time with the basics. Thus, it will widen the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots", which is not equality. Maybe you're talking about equality only for those in the US? I don't know - give humans too much time, and suddenly you have exponential growth in drug/alcohol/television addiction. Not exactly a positive outcome.
Read Joe Haldeman's The Forever Peace - follows along the lines of the rich, technology-advanced countries beating on the 3rd world.
And pick the language that best supports the most important criteria.
- "intuitive and easy to use IDE" - this depends on the industry around the language. Java has more than most languages - NetBeans (based on Forte, which is Sun), Eclipse (Open Source, by IBM), Intellij, Visual Cafe (Symantec, I believe), JDeveloper (Oracle/Borland), Visual Age (IBM) - all by big companies
- "simplified GUI design and event handling" - Java has clean event handling and GUI design, and implements most of the design patterns that the software gurus talk about
- "advanced error handling" - Java has great exception handling
- "advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection" - Java has all that except multiple inheritance (Gosling considered it, but found that it was under-used, and was evil); there are work-arounds for multiple inheritance
- "full support for operator and function overloading" - Function overloading, sure, but not operator overloading. There is talk of this in an upcoming version (via templates)
- "portable (at compile-time) across various platforms" - Java's bread and butter. We use compile once, run anywhere - we build in Linux, push to Solaris and Windows 2K. I build.jar files under windows 2k that go to Linux. We use most if not all of the features of Java (JSPs, EJBs, Servlets, standard Java, and have yet to have a problem).
You should also add to your list - good networking support (Java has it), good server-side and client side (Java is better at the server side), good web-based support (Java is OK - I don't like JSPs or PHP, etc - CURL is the best IMHO).
Where does Java fall down? It doesn't tie in to the host OS with enough depth. Also, because you require a JVM, you are saddled with your bugs, plus the bugs that exist in the Virtual Machine.
Still, my choice of a language if you don't need to squeek the most out of every CPU cycle (and most don't).
I read the same article. Rogers complained that 70% of the network capacity is being used by 10% of the users.
When you are downloading 10 gig a month, your broadband is effectively becoming a music store, a Blockbuster, and probably a porn theatre.
I have friends on Rogers/Shaw, and it's a constant stream of complains during peak hours, most likely due to bandwidth hogs.
Most commercial Internet providers for business charge by the gigabyte. Why shouldn't your consumer broadband provider?
But to be hypocritical, I download about 10 gig a month with Telus DSL. Fortunately, they have no plans to put this sort of cap it (it's in the rules, but not enforced). Probably to woo customers to their service.
Pretty sure our phone lines here are not that much better, and DSL is about a 2 hour operation to get installed (home installation and installation at the switch).
Broadband is exploding like crazy in Canada. I've had my DSL for almost 4 years now, and it's not the PPoE, and the cost is very cheap ($45 CDN, $25 US) and gives 1.5 megabits per second down, and 640 kilobits up.
Sounds more like a cop-out to say, "Phone lines are not up to it..." and that doesn't explain the death of @Home
I've been thinking about broadband (here in Canada - I'm Canadian). What most Americans don't know is that Canada's Confederation (in 1867) was based on the promise of a coast to coast railroad (that is, the Atlantic and Pacific coast).
In a country as large, unpopulated, and diverse (geographically, lingusitically, and culturally) that connection is very important. Recently, the Canadian government started rolling out a very fast fibre optic network that was put in the ground along the (surprise surprise) railroad.
Broadband is a tool to further our national identity.
In addition, thanks to near monopolies in telephone and cable, we have homogenous suppliers of DSL and Cable broadband. And, despite what most people think about monopolies, my DSL costs $25 US a month for 1.5 megabits, and my phone line costs $30 US a month for basic access and voice mail.
It almost seems that the extra competition in the US has ultimately led to the failure of broadband.
I'm an experience Java developer (since the language first came out, and professionally for 6 or so years).
I've used Kawa (which I liked, but Windows only), Visual Age, Visual Cafe, and IntelliJ. IntelliJ is the best out there, but since it is so expensive, I decided to try Eclipse.
The GUI is amazing - clean, crisp and fast under Windows 2000 (corporate standard). It seems to have all the bells and whistles of IntelliJ (code completion, refactoring, CVS and ANT support, code-formatting support) but looks like you could plug a bunch more stuff into it.
I found it less than intuitive in some things. To set the classpath, you had to be in the Java view, right click the project (the head of the tree), and select Properties. Took forever to figure that out.
Second, it insists on putting the compiled code within the project (you can't export it to, say, weblogic/classes, which is not inside your project).
Third, it moves everything... text file, xml, properties files; I don't need all that moved. I tried to set it use just the key folders in my project, but it seemed to ignore them.
Fourth, I find all the views confusing. I want just a nice simple view. Yes, the flexibility and number of views is great if you are using it for multiple languages and projects, but I am not.
I'd love to use this, and I'd love to hear that it runs quickly on Linux (other posts I've read says it's very slow). But there is some weirdness there.
Unfortunately, the documentation is thin, and the FAQ doesn't answer many frequently answered questions (like how to set the classpath). I think better documentation would help a whole bunc, and some more flexibility on the weirdness of the project directory and build path would nice.
If you can refute some of my statements, would like to hear it, because I'd like to use this tool, but I can't spend a week figuring it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Working at GTE Enterprise Solutions, in Vancouver BC (division now closed), we had large multi-node IBM servers running AIX.
The machine was purchased for $1 million, to handle a large commercial database for the mortgage industry.
To make a long story short, the drive array (very expensive - fibre optic channel, and huge storage for the time) arrived with half of the case crushed inwards. No one claimed responsibility, but it looks like it had happened in the warehouse of the courier.
Not that interesting a story, but it was pretty stunning to see how carelessly equipment worth 6-digits was handled. Thank god for insurance.
in small towns. But I bet no other small-town-woes have received the attention they'll be getting now.
Knowng that I had 6 months of typing data into PCs would make me want to quit. Know that those PCs had were more vulnerable to crashing and losing the data again would nudge me over the edge.
You would think that small towns with geographic proximity would band together and set up a WAN, or at least pool their resources to keep the human-resources, software and maintenance costs down (as buying in bulk, even for software, can often net significant savings).
and that made me think... $100 for a watch is pretty steep.
And then I read the article - holy crap - who has that sort of money to waste.. er.. spend on a watch.
I'd rather get a new 19" monitor, scanner and new DVD player.
Just check out Grand Theft Auto 3 or any of the other hundreds of other games.
I don't think any course of action that's been tried to date (castration, drugs to kill the libido, and negative re-inforcement) have had any significant effect on pedophiles.
As long as no one is hurt, live and let live.
Yes, but the CD has that little symbol on it that indicates it conforms to the blue/red book standard. My CD player on my computer has the same symbol.
The CD that Sony has released is no longer compatible.
Stereo shemrio. Married doesn't make you rich, or an audiophile.
If I own a CD, I can make a tape of it for personal use.
If I own a bunch of CDs, I have the right to rip and burn tracks from all CDs onto a compilation disk.
Moreover, a computer is a valid choice as an audio player. My wife and I don't own a stereo - we use a computer with speakers.
Sony is a large (music, games, computer hardware, audio-video, cameras, toys) corporation that frequently employees proprietary standards to gain market share. They shouldn't be rewarded for this.
Personal note - buy nothing from Sony.
Sony is horrible for implementing proprietary standards. Once you have their mp3 player with the memory stick, then you need a Vaio (some of which have a slot for the memory stick), their digital camera and MP3 player.
/. readers.
Some companies think it's slick marketing. But only Sony could get away with it. IBM couldn't with their Microchannel Architecture.
Open standards (like XML and other markup languages), like Open Source, should be high on the list for most
They might not be around in 25 years.
Any animal that competes with human beings, is a threat to human beings, or requires undisturbed access large pieces of land in areas close to human habitation should be done first. Elephants, tigers, grizzly bears, etc.
Also, better look at any plant or animal that has a high degree of integration with their ecosphere (global warming will change their ecosphere faster than they can adapt).
Oh, anything at either poles - human-based pollutants seem to gravitate to these areas.
Better get everything in the ocean as well - over fishing and other human activities is disrupting the food chain.
Any animal or plant that lives in any forest that is accessible by the logging companies probably should be classified early, as well.
Finally, any animal that has "trophy" value or is poached for body parts to be made into aphrodisiacs won't be around for long.
No, the origins of the terms First, Second and Third World actually originated in 1952, created by a French guy named Alfred Sauvy, and relate more to pre-industrial France than the world after WW2.
He actually called them estates, and drew a parallel to the demographics of France before and during the French Revolution. The first and second estate are the nobles and priests. The third estate are the unwashed masses that want to be something, and are exploited by the first and second estate.
Yes, it was drafted during the cold war (though the cold war officially started in the late 40's, and this was 1952). But the concept of have-and-have-nots has been around since antiquity.
Anyway, it's a crappy analogy. Now we have agrarian, industrial, and information based economies (and everything in-between). We also have democracies, autocracies, monarchies, totalitarian-states, military-based govenments and dictatorships. Way too complicated to sum up in three broad, misunderstood categories.
Regardless, the French are crazy.
Heck, you are the only first-world nation that doesn't use metric, and that's easy to figure out.
Yup, a ball and chain slowing down progress....
"There are still millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN. And you can still develop in ADA, LISP, Scheme, etc."
Where did I say that Ada was dead? I implied that Cobol/Fortran were dead (but only implied). I think my statement, at most, implies that Ada, LISP and Scheme are lesser-used languages. And they are - C, C++, Java, PERL, etc are more widely used. Ada I believe was originally a military-language, and not widely used outside the US military.
There are still millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN. And you can still develop in ADA, LISP, Scheme, etc. Compilers exist.
Sure - Java, Pythol, C# are pretty similar. But what about Lua? PERL? Or CURL?
Sounds like a case of the "good ol' days".
These are for databases, web servers, etc.
You don't run Quake 2 on a Sun E4500. True, Tom and Anand don't benchmark with Linux/Apache, Win2k/Oracle, Solaris/Netscape, but they should have.
Our database is Oracle with dual P3 933s with 2 gig RAM. A E7500 with up to 16 gig of RAM would take our CPU usage on one of our database machines from 40% to about 20%.
Why do people keep talking about Quake benchmarks, kernal compiles, etc?
Mine, Canadian Army, hers, American Navy. Cousin who is a marine, another a helicopter pilot, and a third a technician.
The cousin who is a marine is also a vegan. Yah - hilarious - the vegan marine. She is in Afghanistan right now - wonder what the hell she eats. No dairy, no eggs, no seafood, no poultry, and no meat.
I was a vegan for a few years - pretty tough to find food in a supermarket that has no dairy. Imagine what it's like when your food comes in a grey plastic bag.
I know - Win2k is the corporate standard, and last I tried Mozilla, it screwed up my registry associations; I prefer Konqueror. IE sucks the crusty ass of a dead donkey, but until the Oralce->PostgresQL database switch happens, I'm stuck with this OS.
if this is what passes for a /. story.
I mean, really. Who cares?
If you have nothing interesting to post, it's best to post nothing.
At the bottom of the article, his wife mentions that she found evidence that he had been gambling over the Internet, and may have gone into debt as a result.
What's funny is that when I closed the window to the story, there was one of those ubiquitous popup-adds for an on-line casino.
I find it amusing is that people shell out good money for those tacky little figurines. I find it not so amusing that some people may have lost upwards of $20,000.
Not really evolution - just freeing humans up from menial and dangerous tasks.
As for equality, will the the people of Afghanistan have robots to fight their battles as well? Of course not - they have a difficult time with the basics. Thus, it will widen the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots", which is not equality. Maybe you're talking about equality only for those in the US? I don't know - give humans too much time, and suddenly you have exponential growth in drug/alcohol/television addiction. Not exactly a positive outcome.
Read Joe Haldeman's The Forever Peace - follows along the lines of the rich, technology-advanced countries beating on the 3rd world.
Make someone else pick the language, and be sure to work like a dog on it.
You won't get blamed if the project ends up in the dumpster, but you will be recognized for trying to make it work.
If the project goes well, then you'll be remembered for you contribution but the person who picked the language will be forgotten.
Cynical, yah, but what do you expect when most managers have pointy-hair.
And pick the language that best supports the most important criteria.
.jar files under windows 2k that go to Linux. We use most if not all of the features of Java (JSPs, EJBs, Servlets, standard Java, and have yet to have a problem).
- "intuitive and easy to use IDE" - this depends on the industry around the language. Java has more than most languages - NetBeans (based on Forte, which is Sun), Eclipse (Open Source, by IBM), Intellij, Visual Cafe (Symantec, I believe), JDeveloper (Oracle/Borland), Visual Age (IBM) - all by big companies
- "simplified GUI design and event handling" - Java has clean event handling and GUI design, and implements most of the design patterns that the software gurus talk about
- "advanced error handling" - Java has great exception handling
- "advanced object oriented design including multiple inheritance, abstract classes, and garbage collection" - Java has all that except multiple inheritance (Gosling considered it, but found that it was under-used, and was evil); there are work-arounds for multiple inheritance
- "full support for operator and function overloading" - Function overloading, sure, but not operator overloading. There is talk of this in an upcoming version (via templates)
- "portable (at compile-time) across various platforms" - Java's bread and butter. We use compile once, run anywhere - we build in Linux, push to Solaris and Windows 2K. I build
You should also add to your list - good networking support (Java has it), good server-side and client side (Java is better at the server side), good web-based support (Java is OK - I don't like JSPs or PHP, etc - CURL is the best IMHO).
Where does Java fall down? It doesn't tie in to the host OS with enough depth. Also, because you require a JVM, you are saddled with your bugs, plus the bugs that exist in the Virtual Machine.
Still, my choice of a language if you don't need to squeek the most out of every CPU cycle (and most don't).
That's $80 Canadian, my friend.
At the current exchange rate, that's about $50 US. Currently, cable/DSL in Canada goes for about half that.
I read the same article. Rogers complained that 70% of the network capacity is being used by 10% of the users.
When you are downloading 10 gig a month, your broadband is effectively becoming a music store, a Blockbuster, and probably a porn theatre.
I have friends on Rogers/Shaw, and it's a constant stream of complains during peak hours, most likely due to bandwidth hogs.
Most commercial Internet providers for business charge by the gigabyte. Why shouldn't your consumer broadband provider?
But to be hypocritical, I download about 10 gig a month with Telus DSL. Fortunately, they have no plans to put this sort of cap it (it's in the rules, but not enforced). Probably to woo customers to their service.
Pretty sure our phone lines here are not that much better, and DSL is about a 2 hour operation to get installed (home installation and installation at the switch).
Broadband is exploding like crazy in Canada. I've had my DSL for almost 4 years now, and it's not the PPoE, and the cost is very cheap ($45 CDN, $25 US) and gives 1.5 megabits per second down, and 640 kilobits up.
Sounds more like a cop-out to say, "Phone lines are not up to it..." and that doesn't explain the death of @Home
I've been thinking about broadband (here in Canada - I'm Canadian). What most Americans don't know is that Canada's Confederation (in 1867) was based on the promise of a coast to coast railroad (that is, the Atlantic and Pacific coast).
In a country as large, unpopulated, and diverse (geographically, lingusitically, and culturally) that connection is very important. Recently, the Canadian government started rolling out a very fast fibre optic network that was put in the ground along the (surprise surprise) railroad.
Broadband is a tool to further our national identity.
In addition, thanks to near monopolies in telephone and cable, we have homogenous suppliers of DSL and Cable broadband. And, despite what most people think about monopolies, my DSL costs $25 US a month for 1.5 megabits, and my phone line costs $30 US a month for basic access and voice mail.
It almost seems that the extra competition in the US has ultimately led to the failure of broadband.
I'm an experience Java developer (since the language first came out, and professionally for 6 or so years).
I've used Kawa (which I liked, but Windows only), Visual Age, Visual Cafe, and IntelliJ. IntelliJ is the best out there, but since it is so expensive, I decided to try Eclipse.
The GUI is amazing - clean, crisp and fast under Windows 2000 (corporate standard). It seems to have all the bells and whistles of IntelliJ (code completion, refactoring, CVS and ANT support, code-formatting support) but looks like you could plug a bunch more stuff into it.
I found it less than intuitive in some things. To set the classpath, you had to be in the Java view, right click the project (the head of the tree), and select Properties. Took forever to figure that out.
Second, it insists on putting the compiled code within the project (you can't export it to, say, weblogic/classes, which is not inside your project).
Third, it moves everything... text file, xml, properties files; I don't need all that moved. I tried to set it use just the key folders in my project, but it seemed to ignore them.
Fourth, I find all the views confusing. I want just a nice simple view. Yes, the flexibility and number of views is great if you are using it for multiple languages and projects, but I am not.
I'd love to use this, and I'd love to hear that it runs quickly on Linux (other posts I've read says it's very slow). But there is some weirdness there.
Unfortunately, the documentation is thin, and the FAQ doesn't answer many frequently answered questions (like how to set the classpath). I think better documentation would help a whole bunc, and some more flexibility on the weirdness of the project directory and build path would nice.
If you can refute some of my statements, would like to hear it, because I'd like to use this tool, but I can't spend a week figuring it out.