Sounds about right for a really decent UPS to have its batteries run dry. It would have helped had the alarms gone off, and started the backup generator.
(probably not the true scenario, but still stupid enough to be possible)
On a slightly more serious level, I've had cable for several years, and other than obnoxious TOS am reasonably happy with it.
But sometimes it goes down, and sometimes I travel out of towm.
I'd really like to have dialup capability for travel and emergencies, but have NO desire to pay a monthly fee for it. (My cable ISP has dialup, but that's separate from the cable access.)
Anyone have a reccomendation for a pay-as-you use dialup that has decent access even in the Economic Backwater (and usually like it that way) of Vermont?
I'd argue that a major source of America's power has been its technological innovation, and that has been the root of its economic and military power. That doesn't just mean 20th century electronics. it goes back to the birth of the nation and the guilds that stifled innovation in Europe, while it flourished in America.
It's worth noting the growing movement in the USA today to stifle innovation. This time it's not by guilds trying to protect their knowledge base. This time it's classical 'publishers' trying to retain exclusive rights to their data in the face of essentially zero incremental cost of electronic publication.
They may well win in the USA, they may partly win in Europe and South America. They may even win with respect to *their* rights in Asia and the Far East.
But I expect two side-effects if they have their way:
First, the USA will lose its technological edge. One engine of our economy will be gone. Rather than regain that edge, I expect the legislative approach will be to try harder to protect our "entertainment engine", or the powers that cost us our technological engine.
Second, the technological barriers and hassles of consuming American entertainment will help drive the rise of entertainment industries in Asia and the Far East. I expect MPAA protection policies to be the best friends Bollywood ever had. On another note, Bollywood may well be better poised to sell into the Chinese market. They may not be terribly close culturally, but they're probably closer than the USA, and have enough USA in them that they can market to 'Western desires' in China. In essence, information protection policies destroy a second engine of the US economy.
Jobs have been outsourced, beginning with the easy-to-fill, lower qualification ones, and moving up the chain. Some companies are now moving R&D overseas, too. At about this point, there's little left of some American companies except a corporate headquarters and a bunch of executives drawing down huge salaries.
Meanwhile, the folks overseas have learned the business - the whole business.
Before long, they'll realize that they don't need the American execs any more.
It won't be an overnight thing. The first step will be to do direct business with parts of the world that the American company doesn't want to bother with because the revenue is too low. But without American executive overhead, the foreign company can profitably take on those markets.
Then work their way up the customer chain.
When I say the big biz guys know money, but not their business, I'll point to/. favorites like MPAA and RIAA. It appears to me (I'll grant that that's an out.) that the former is no longer run by 'movie men' and the latter by 'music men'. That's a decent explanation to me why we're in comic book and sequel H3ll and why it seems like very little great music is being made any more.
Those business *should* be run on artistry - with an eye to the bottom line. Instead they're being run on the bottom line - with an eye to artistry.
There is no knob called "profit", no matter how much we'd like to think there is, and no matter how much the one called "cost" sometimes resembles it.
Someday somebody will figure out that many American execs are super-paid and don't really know their own business. (They know MONEY, not the products their companies make.)
Then since the executives do the outsourcing, they won't outsource themselves, the places they've outsourced to will go into business for themselves, and drive the American companies under.
Years back, IBM had an advertisement in Scientific American. It showed a stop-motion picture of a hammer smashing a watch, and pieces flying out. The text said something to the effect of, "Imaging learning how a watch works by smashing it and examining the pieces as they fly out. That's how we do subatomic physics." The gist of the ad was that IBM computers helped in that daunting process.
Some of us don't have a cable or dsl choice. At 40,000 feet to the CO, cable is the only choice, and my cable ISP has a not-tightly-enforced 'no servers of any kind' policy. Seems stupidly written, because responding to a ping could be taken to be a server. I've never asked about gaming. It's the 'of any kind' that rankles me. Though as I said, they don't enforce it, and I've had no trouble with SSH and IMAPS. I've also got point-to-point firewall rules so the ports aren't generally visible.
But to see their point for a moment, an open SMTP relay is a DISASTER, and how to they know you're competent to run an SMTP server?
In all likelihood, perhaps there SHOULD be a license of some sort to run a server.
We (the West in general, USA in specific) are not a worshipful society. In fact, we've pretty much lost track of what 'worship' really means. We pretty much pin the term on going to church on Sunday, and grace and prayer other times during the week.
But isn't 'worship' really more about how you run your life, and where your priorties are?
So in that context, isn't running just about *everything* by the 'bottom line' functionally equivalent to worshiping money?
It also makes it more than a little ironic that these days, those who espouse religion the loudest also seem to have quite a bit of money.
Was this kind of like the briefings Clinton gave to GWB during transition, about how he had to keep his eye on Al Quaeda, and how that one issue would chew up more of his time than he would ever imagine?
That was before US State policy turned away from the Middle East and began focusing on ballistic missile defense.
Which was before US State policy got forcibly re-focused on the Middle East
Re:Bad for users of alternative browsers?
on
IE To Block Pop-Ups
·
· Score: 1, Troll
One thing about Microsoft - when handed a bag of lemons, they generally manage to make lemonade.
In this case, you may well have hit the nail right on the head, and shown up the good old 'law of unintended consequences'. It goes like this:
1: Microsoft begins popup blocking, just like Mozilla, Opera, et al. 2: With its 90% market share, advertisers notice, and begin writing ads in sparkle, as you say. 3: Through some odd quirk, purely accidental, of course, pages with sparkle won't work in non-IE browsers. Perhaps by MS insisting that some critical page content be in sparkle, as well as ads. 4: Only MS pages can show ads, and only on IE. No doubt MS will have sparkle guidelines to keep ads from becoming too intrusive. No doubt they'll also sell advertisers on how much more 'effective' the more subtle sparkle ads are, especially when combined with sparkle content on the same page. (Read: IE-only)
5: Ad revenue dries up on non-IE-only web sites, and most non-IE ad-sustained sites wither.
6: Profit!!
... regards a brand new VM subsystem as "stable".
on
IE To Block Pop-Ups
·
· Score: 1
Whoaaaaa.
What a perspective.
The amazing thing is that an industry that insists on heavy metrics of stability out of everyone and everything else simply accepts Microsoft's brand new "stable" thingies.
Now that IE will have popup blocking next year, I wonder when they will 'legitimize' tabbed browsing?
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."
wrt Win-kiosks, especially that last.
(I should probably attribute the quote, just to make sure it remains fair-use. Blade Runner, as if anyone needed telling that.)
I agree with your goals, but I don't believe that trashing NASA is the right way to get where we want to be. Simply trashing NASA, especially in the current political climate, is probably the route to shutting down civilian US manned space entirely, leaving it to the military.
Unfortunately I can't suggest a better route, but continued trashing will simply lead to even more micromanagement. Perhaps a Congressional panel needs to begin by stripping and replacing the top echelons, and the new guys need to clean house, and attract new technical leadership.
Part of me wishes our company would do it the right way. But then again, I'm sure PuTTY wouldn't be on their standard preload, and then how the heck would it interoperate when I brought the thing home? (No ftp or telnet daemons on my LAN.)
Funny, my corporate deployed laptop, following standard practice, set ME up as admin. I understand this is standard practice for WinNT-family (mine is Win2k) deployments, in general.
With that ONE practice, the single greatest/easiest chunk of security - separation of user from admin, is gone.
From what I understand, quite a bit of Windows software actually depends on this practice, and can't run without admin priviledges. So regardless of who takes the blame, Microsoft or the Windows Culture that has grown up around their products, there's an architectural-level problem, here.
You've mistaken my motivations. I wasn't endorsing or condemning any of the points I was bringing up.
I was condemning the fact that there are various camps bringing up all of these points in their favor, and each attacking the rest.
In the end, nothing is left.
For my part, I fear I must favor a pragmatic approach.
The ISS is up there, but we're doing a fair-to-poor job of it. At the moment, I suspect that the only true failure of ISS is it's politically-inclined orbit that wreaks havoc with payload capacity, for both us and the USSR. As for the rest of the problems, we've got to learn our way through them before we try anything more sophisticated, so we may as well dig in our heels and learn. Unfortunately part of that learning is a viable CRV so we can get the full crew up there, and that's where we're really failing.
Beyond that, I would go for anything that gets necessary payload into orbit cheaply, but we need to find a way to let out contracts that favors reducing costs. SSTO sounds great, but I'm not blind to expendables, either.
I'm not particularly in favor of Mars Direct, because it's a one-off, and nothing's left when it's done, except knowledge. I'd like to see some permanent infrastructure.
I beg to differ, but I don't feel like getting into a battle-thread with you.
I will say that by the time you're into a server, you're out of vanilla chipsets. In the real server business, companies either roll their own or go to server-class chipsets. (Server Works used to be a biggie, but I believe they were taken over in the last year.)
I will also agree with you about quality components, but add that 'cooling design' is non-trivial.
As for "system balance": How many DMA channels do you want? What's your main memory bandwidth? How do you arbitrate main memory bandwidth? Is your L3 shared or dedicated, what's your associativity, and how do you maintain coherence? For that matter, how does your L3 stand up to various strides? Where are your ECC boundaries, and how robust is your code?
These questions are largely either irrelevant or ignored by 'a couple of pre-fab chipsets' but are critical to someone like Sun.
First off, it's not Apple's PPC, they just use it. The PPC is IBM's, and Motorola (and perhaps others, I don't really know) have full rights to use the architecture.
X86 is a nebulous thing to define. At various points in the past, both IBM and AMD have had full second-source rights to the processor, though that all ended with the 486. Since then, AMD, Cyrix->Via, Transmeta, et al have been re-implementing, and Intel has thrown numerous patent roadblocks in their way.
Why do you think we had the SuperSocketSeven mess and incompatible buses? It was because Intel patented the Slot1 architecture to lay a roadblock for the others. Newer instructions like SSE are patented, which was part of why we got 'the other one' (name slips me at the moment) that AMD put on K6. I guess in the K7 era they had something Intel wanted enough to cross-license SSE2 for K8.
To be fair and honest, I have no idea what roadblocks there would be if someone tried to clone PPC, but at least there is a second fully-enabled source (Motorola) who is also able to evolve (Altivec?) the design.
80% of the market doesn't mean it's not proprietary. Hasn't Windows taught us that?
Exactly my point. Intel has cross-licensing agreements with other companies, a game of tit-for-tat all the technology firms play.
THAT's the nefarious thing about IA-64 IP being held by a separate company. Nobody but Intel and HP get ANY rights to IA-64, and none of the rights have 'leaked out' through any cross-licensing agreements.
If Sun puts their systems-level experience and design behind an Opteron, it will be very impressive, indeed.
The CPU is a minor part of the issue. As you say, desktop components will die quickly in a server. But put an Opteron in a server with server-quality fans, cooling design, power supply, and all the rest, and you've got a decent server.
Sparc would still likely be more reliable, because there are things you do can inside the CPU, but a well-designed box around an Opteron would still be very good.
There's so much more to system level than the base technologies. I had an opportunity years back to work closely with a systems shop, selling/supporting my chip design. I learned a lot about system-level performance and reliablity in that year-or-two, and realize that those folks had forgotten more than your garden-variety PC folks had ever learned.
Individual components and pieces of performance (CPU clock and IPC, for instance) are only part of the issue. System balance is important, and only learned with experience and sophisticated tools. True reliability is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds about right for a really decent UPS to have its batteries run dry. It would have helped had the alarms gone off, and started the backup generator.
(probably not the true scenario, but still stupid enough to be possible)
On a slightly more serious level, I've had cable for several years, and other than obnoxious TOS am reasonably happy with it.
But sometimes it goes down, and sometimes I travel out of towm.
I'd really like to have dialup capability for travel and emergencies, but have NO desire to pay a monthly fee for it. (My cable ISP has dialup, but that's separate from the cable access.)
Anyone have a reccomendation for a pay-as-you use dialup that has decent access even in the Economic Backwater (and usually like it that way) of Vermont?
I'd argue that a major source of America's power has been its technological innovation, and that has been the root of its economic and military power. That doesn't just mean 20th century electronics. it goes back to the birth of the nation and the guilds that stifled innovation in Europe, while it flourished in America.
It's worth noting the growing movement in the USA today to stifle innovation. This time it's not by guilds trying to protect their knowledge base. This time it's classical 'publishers' trying to retain exclusive rights to their data in the face of essentially zero incremental cost of electronic publication.
They may well win in the USA, they may partly win in Europe and South America. They may even win with respect to *their* rights in Asia and the Far East.
But I expect two side-effects if they have their way:
First, the USA will lose its technological edge. One engine of our economy will be gone. Rather than regain that edge, I expect the legislative approach will be to try harder to protect our "entertainment engine", or the powers that cost us our technological engine.
Second, the technological barriers and hassles of consuming American entertainment will help drive the rise of entertainment industries in Asia and the Far East. I expect MPAA protection policies to be the best friends Bollywood ever had. On another note, Bollywood may well be better poised to sell into the Chinese market. They may not be terribly close culturally, but they're probably closer than the USA, and have enough USA in them that they can market to 'Western desires' in China. In essence, information protection policies destroy a second engine of the US economy.
Jobs have been outsourced, beginning with the easy-to-fill, lower qualification ones, and moving up the chain. Some companies are now moving R&D overseas, too. At about this point, there's little left of some American companies except a corporate headquarters and a bunch of executives drawing down huge salaries.
/. favorites like MPAA and RIAA. It appears to me (I'll grant that that's an out.) that the former is no longer run by 'movie men' and the latter by 'music men'. That's a decent explanation to me why we're in comic book and sequel H3ll and why it seems like very little great music is being made any more.
Meanwhile, the folks overseas have learned the business - the whole business.
Before long, they'll realize that they don't need the American execs any more.
It won't be an overnight thing. The first step will be to do direct business with parts of the world that the American company doesn't want to bother with because the revenue is too low. But without American executive overhead, the foreign company can profitably take on those markets.
Then work their way up the customer chain.
When I say the big biz guys know money, but not their business, I'll point to
Those business *should* be run on artistry - with an eye to the bottom line. Instead they're being run on the bottom line - with an eye to artistry.
There is no knob called "profit", no matter how much we'd like to think there is, and no matter how much the one called "cost" sometimes resembles it.
Someday somebody will figure out that many American execs are super-paid and don't really know their own business. (They know MONEY, not the products their companies make.)
Then since the executives do the outsourcing, they won't outsource themselves, the places they've outsourced to will go into business for themselves, and drive the American companies under.
Are you trying to tell us you've seen the quark on Cindy Crawford's bottom?
Years back, IBM had an advertisement in Scientific American. It showed a stop-motion picture of a hammer smashing a watch, and pieces flying out. The text said something to the effect of, "Imaging learning how a watch works by smashing it and examining the pieces as they fly out. That's how we do subatomic physics." The gist of the ad was that IBM computers helped in that daunting process.
Some of us don't have a cable or dsl choice. At 40,000 feet to the CO, cable is the only choice, and my cable ISP has a not-tightly-enforced 'no servers of any kind' policy. Seems stupidly written, because responding to a ping could be taken to be a server. I've never asked about gaming. It's the 'of any kind' that rankles me. Though as I said, they don't enforce it, and I've had no trouble with SSH and IMAPS. I've also got point-to-point firewall rules so the ports aren't generally visible.
But to see their point for a moment, an open SMTP relay is a DISASTER, and how to they know you're competent to run an SMTP server?
In all likelihood, perhaps there SHOULD be a license of some sort to run a server.
We (the West in general, USA in specific) are not a worshipful society. In fact, we've pretty much lost track of what 'worship' really means. We pretty much pin the term on going to church on Sunday, and grace and prayer other times during the week.
But isn't 'worship' really more about how you run your life, and where your priorties are?
So in that context, isn't running just about *everything* by the 'bottom line' functionally equivalent to worshiping money?
It also makes it more than a little ironic that these days, those who espouse religion the loudest also seem to have quite a bit of money.
Was this kind of like the briefings Clinton gave to GWB during transition, about how he had to keep his eye on Al Quaeda, and how that one issue would chew up more of his time than he would ever imagine?
That was before US State policy turned away from the Middle East and began focusing on ballistic missile defense.
Which was before US State policy got forcibly re-focused on the Middle East
One thing about Microsoft - when handed a bag of lemons, they generally manage to make lemonade.
In this case, you may well have hit the nail right on the head, and shown up the good old 'law of unintended consequences'. It goes like this:
1: Microsoft begins popup blocking, just like Mozilla, Opera, et al.
2: With its 90% market share, advertisers notice, and begin writing ads in sparkle, as you say.
3: Through some odd quirk, purely accidental, of course, pages with sparkle won't work in non-IE browsers. Perhaps by MS insisting that some critical page content be in sparkle, as well as ads.
4: Only MS pages can show ads, and only on IE. No doubt MS will have sparkle guidelines to keep ads from becoming too intrusive. No doubt they'll also sell advertisers on how much more 'effective' the more subtle sparkle ads are, especially when combined with sparkle content on the same page. (Read: IE-only)
5: Ad revenue dries up on non-IE-only web sites, and most non-IE ad-sustained sites wither.
6: Profit!!
Whoaaaaa.
What a perspective.
The amazing thing is that an industry that insists on heavy metrics of stability out of everyone and everything else simply accepts Microsoft's brand new "stable" thingies.
Now that IE will have popup blocking next year, I wonder when they will 'legitimize' tabbed browsing?
Parent post seems on topic, to me.
Think microwave oven. Their frequency is set to excite the chemical bonds in water.
It was worth the loss. To be honest, I don't even really remember the line from seeing the movie, only from being quoted.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die."
wrt Win-kiosks, especially that last.
(I should probably attribute the quote, just to make sure it remains fair-use. Blade Runner, as if anyone needed telling that.)
I agree with your goals, but I don't believe that trashing NASA is the right way to get where we want to be. Simply trashing NASA, especially in the current political climate, is probably the route to shutting down civilian US manned space entirely, leaving it to the military.
Unfortunately I can't suggest a better route, but continued trashing will simply lead to even more micromanagement. Perhaps a Congressional panel needs to begin by stripping and replacing the top echelons, and the new guys need to clean house, and attract new technical leadership.
Part of me wishes our company would do it the right way. But then again, I'm sure PuTTY wouldn't be on their standard preload, and then how the heck would it interoperate when I brought the thing home? (No ftp or telnet daemons on my LAN.)
Funny, my corporate deployed laptop, following standard practice, set ME up as admin. I understand this is standard practice for WinNT-family (mine is Win2k) deployments, in general.
With that ONE practice, the single greatest/easiest chunk of security - separation of user from admin, is gone.
From what I understand, quite a bit of Windows software actually depends on this practice, and can't run without admin priviledges. So regardless of who takes the blame, Microsoft or the Windows Culture that has grown up around their products, there's an architectural-level problem, here.
You've mistaken my motivations. I wasn't endorsing or condemning any of the points I was bringing up.
I was condemning the fact that there are various camps bringing up all of these points in their favor, and each attacking the rest.
In the end, nothing is left.
For my part, I fear I must favor a pragmatic approach.
The ISS is up there, but we're doing a fair-to-poor job of it. At the moment, I suspect that the only true failure of ISS is it's politically-inclined orbit that wreaks havoc with payload capacity, for both us and the USSR. As for the rest of the problems, we've got to learn our way through them before we try anything more sophisticated, so we may as well dig in our heels and learn. Unfortunately part of that learning is a viable CRV so we can get the full crew up there, and that's where we're really failing.
Beyond that, I would go for anything that gets necessary payload into orbit cheaply, but we need to find a way to let out contracts that favors reducing costs. SSTO sounds great, but I'm not blind to expendables, either.
I'm not particularly in favor of Mars Direct, because it's a one-off, and nothing's left when it's done, except knowledge. I'd like to see some permanent infrastructure.
I beg to differ, but I don't feel like getting into a battle-thread with you.
I will say that by the time you're into a server, you're out of vanilla chipsets. In the real server business, companies either roll their own or go to server-class chipsets. (Server Works used to be a biggie, but I believe they were taken over in the last year.)
I will also agree with you about quality components, but add that 'cooling design' is non-trivial.
As for "system balance":
How many DMA channels do you want?
What's your main memory bandwidth?
How do you arbitrate main memory bandwidth?
Is your L3 shared or dedicated, what's your associativity, and how do you maintain coherence?
For that matter, how does your L3 stand up to various strides?
Where are your ECC boundaries, and how robust is your code?
These questions are largely either irrelevant or ignored by 'a couple of pre-fab chipsets' but are critical to someone like Sun.
Yes, clearly for IA64, questionably for X86.
First off, it's not Apple's PPC, they just use it. The PPC is IBM's, and Motorola (and perhaps others, I don't really know) have full rights to use the architecture.
X86 is a nebulous thing to define. At various points in the past, both IBM and AMD have had full second-source rights to the processor, though that all ended with the 486. Since then, AMD, Cyrix->Via, Transmeta, et al have been re-implementing, and Intel has thrown numerous patent roadblocks in their way.
Why do you think we had the SuperSocketSeven mess and incompatible buses? It was because Intel patented the Slot1 architecture to lay a roadblock for the others. Newer instructions like SSE are patented, which was part of why we got 'the other one' (name slips me at the moment) that AMD put on K6. I guess in the K7 era they had something Intel wanted enough to cross-license SSE2 for K8.
To be fair and honest, I have no idea what roadblocks there would be if someone tried to clone PPC, but at least there is a second fully-enabled source (Motorola) who is also able to evolve (Altivec?) the design.
80% of the market doesn't mean it's not proprietary.
Hasn't Windows taught us that?
Exactly my point. Intel has cross-licensing agreements with other companies, a game of tit-for-tat all the technology firms play.
THAT's the nefarious thing about IA-64 IP being held by a separate company. Nobody but Intel and HP get ANY rights to IA-64, and none of the rights have 'leaked out' through any cross-licensing agreements.
If Sun puts their systems-level experience and design behind an Opteron, it will be very impressive, indeed.
The CPU is a minor part of the issue. As you say, desktop components will die quickly in a server. But put an Opteron in a server with server-quality fans, cooling design, power supply, and all the rest, and you've got a decent server.
Sparc would still likely be more reliable, because there are things you do can inside the CPU, but a well-designed box around an Opteron would still be very good.
There's so much more to system level than the base technologies. I had an opportunity years back to work closely with a systems shop, selling/supporting my chip design. I learned a lot about system-level performance and reliablity in that year-or-two, and realize that those folks had forgotten more than your garden-variety PC folks had ever learned.
Individual components and pieces of performance (CPU clock and IPC, for instance) are only part of the issue. System balance is important, and only learned with experience and sophisticated tools. True reliability is the same.