The anonymous contributor can perhaps be forgiven for making the error, but the editors should know better. Perhaps the editors need to first count to ten (or a hundred) the next time they want to post a "Microsoft is lame" article?
Yes, you would think that self-proclaimed "nerds" would be able to tell the difference between a terminal and a workstation (to use Unix terminology) wouldn't you? This article is as if some reviewer back in the early 80s couldn't understand why you needed a VAX to actually run the software you used on a VT100!
The fact is that tablet PCs are actually pretty nice. The fundamental problem with PCs is that a stylus is a very naturally expressive tool whereas a keyboard/mouse aren't, apart from for fairly limited uses. For example, I can type for longer and at greater speed than I can handwrite, but I can draw a diagram far faster with a pen than I can with a mouse, and it will look how I want it to, not how the developers of Visio or whatever thought it should look. Graphics users have known this for years, and use Wacom tablets for their Macs. Drawing freehand with a mouse is just clumsy.
If you do need to work with large blocks of text, a tablet PC can easily be used with a keyboard (with a docking station) but for most workers, a PC is not really an input device so much as it is a retrieval device, with input limited to small blocks of text (like email messages), or annotation to larger documents that are stored on a server somewhere. That is where the tablet really shines. If you don't have fancy collaboration technology like shared whiteboards, being able to jot down a diagram with a few notes and send it while you're in a phone conversation is amazing, it makes communication so much easier. Tablets are a fantastic idea, and it is interesting to note that the Open Source community couldn't have come up with a working implementation - where would they get the money to actually build hardware devices and market them to volume buyers? Sometimes, what's really needed is just a huge pile of cash and an established brand name.
And they wonder why it's so hard to get people to pay money to subscribe to Slashdot...
How does IBM run Linux on their mainframes if Linux can't support more than 4 processors? Did they modify it? Is this what the recent dispute with SCO was about?
Linux is run as a guest of z/OS - z/OS sees all the processors and creates a number of single-processor virtual machines on which Linux kernels run. This is both good and bad; good because individual services can be completely isolated from one another, leading to ease of management for security and QoS (Solaris 9 Resource Manager can also do this), but bad because you are still locked into the proprietary vendor because you need z/OS, and now you have two OSs to look after.
"Who would have thought that France and Germany could work together in 1945?"
Look up words like "Vichy" and "Petain" in a history book. You'll find that the French and Germans had no difficulty working together almost from the moment that German tanks rolled across the border. A leopard never changes its spots.
As far as costs are concerned, even an enormous sum like $100 billion over 10 years is $10 billion a year which comes to $30 per inhabitant of the US
You are right, the risks of not going and not only that but first, are simply too great.
That is a damn good idea. I'm not sure whether Mars is the right destination just yet though. An ore rich asteroid would be much more profitable.
The thing with Mars is, you can land on it. It has predictable motion, a well-photographed surface, and gravity. It has enough of an atmosphere and a magnetic field to shield you from radiation if you want to stay a while. You can very easily manufacture rocket fuel from the atmosphere itself, so you don't have to cart enough for a return trip with you (Zubrin IIRC suggests sending an automated fuel factory, then waiting 'til you were sure it worked before sending a manned mission). If you are willing to invest a little energy, Mars has plenty of ice that you can melt into water. If you have energy and water, you have oxygen. With water and various readily-available nitrogen compounds, you might even be able to grow plants in a greenhouse in Martian soil. Glass and steel will both be very simple to manufacture on Mars, the raw materials are abundant, you can "mine" them on the surface with a shovel! In short, Mars is a pretty good place, and if you were planning to establish a colony it would be a lot easier to do so on Mars than it would be on the moon.
Asteroid mining isn't remotely feasible at the moment. You would have to arrive at an asteroid, which may be interacting with other nearby objects in hard-to-predict ways, then land on it and start drilling, or stand off from it and break it up with explosives then collect the pieces, then you have to ship it all the way back to Earth. Asteroid mining won't be feasible until there's a self-sustaining colony on Mars to act as an ore processing station, and refuelling and repairing (and most likely construction) facility for mining vehicles. Colonizing Mars in the 21st century is going to be like colonizing Antarctica in the 19th - but with the bonus that you will actually be allowed to extract minerals, which changes the game radically, both for construction/manufacturing on Mars itself, and for getting funding from Earth. There is no technological reason (as Zubrin demonstrates in The Case For Mars) tha there couldn't be a fully self-sustaining colony on Mars within 50-100 years.
According to the article, "between now and 2010, for every new member added to the workforce there will be 2.6 new jobs created."
That's like saying a new car is made every time a ton of steel is produced. A job isn't "created" until someone is hired, just as a car isn't made until that steel is worked. It is merely the potential for a job to exist, a virtual job. And just as there can be more steel than cars, there can be more virtual jobs than actual jobs. Virtual jobs only matter in that they distort salaries upwards in the short term (because people think demand is higher than it is) but as soon as an attempt is made to convert these potential jobs into actual jobs, the market collapses. It's basic common sense, you can never have more people employed than there are people to employ, so saying there is more than one job created for each employee is just silly.
Yeah, but are you making $30k - $40k a year, or are they paying you a real salary?
Sorry, but $30-40k for a fresh graduate is pretty reasonable. The problem is that people experienced the late 90s job market as it was how things always were, but in fact it was an abberation. A recent graduate should be looking for experience right now, only start worrying about salary once you are established. The first 3 years of everyone's career will usually suck in pay terms. 5 years in, and you'll be glad you went for the experience rather than the quick score.
I've seen many tech ads looking for "highly qualified, senior level positions, 10+ years experience, blah blah blah" that only pay $36k a year.
They're only shooting themselves in the foot, because you can guarantee that that employee will bail at the first opportunity. A decent company pays decent salaries, because it wants to only hire good people and it wants to keep them. That isn't sentimentality - it's just good business sense.
I don't know much about Solaris, so I'd like to ask you guys out there. What makes Linux less capable? What does Solaris do that Linux can't do (at least well enough)? Just wondering.
Well, scalability is one major thing. Linux struggles with more than 4 CPUs and more than 4G of memory; Solaris handles hundreds of CPUs and a terabyte of RAM. Linux lacks the manageability of system resources offered by Solaris 9, which allows system resources to be prioritized for different tasks, with a guaranteed minimum available. And even if Linux could do this, it doesn't run on hardware than can be dynamically partitioned, unless it runs as a guest on z/OS, and in that case it's z/OS doing the work. Tight integration with the underlying hardware is another advantage for Sun; they know precisely every component in every system that Solaris runs on, because they designed and built it, so there are never compatibility issues. Solaris' high-performance, high-reliability filesystems are proven, not just betas (yes XFS is also proven, but in IRIX not Linux). Speaking of filesystems, Solaris has ACLs, whereas Linux just has the relatively crude user-group model. Linux doesn't have remote shared memory or IP multipathing (IIRC).
Though the GSVs are REALLY fucking big if I remember correctly
Yeah, the GSVs are big, fast, smart and can manufacture any reinforcements they need. Starfleet, the Imperial Fleet, it doesn't matter - the Culture would beat them all, hands down.
Odd are good the poor guys computer is now drooling on the floor. That will teach him for doing something geeky and not using the appropriate bandwidth.
Nah, even an ordinary PC can easily saturate the amount of bandwidth ADSL offers. If anything's smoking, it's the router just upstream from him.
Wow, the number of people who have difficulty seperating the actor from the character is scary. Do you keep a lookout for Terminators on your way to Walmart, too?
Well, I've never met Will so I've no idea what he's like, but he must bear some degree of responsibility for Wesley. He's at least as responsible as Jamie Oliver is for his onscreen persona. And for that he has a lot of bad karma to work off.
We used to joke that there was one guy, who'd get drunk at a restaurant and spout out movie ideas (it changes as things go in and out of style -- in the 80s it was Spago, in the 90s I think it was the Viper Room. I have no idea what it is now, as I attempt to claw my way back up to the "b" list.) The joke went that there were execs from all the major studios, and they'd only hear flashes of the conversation, like ". . . asteroid . . . earth . . . big summer movie . .." and we get two or three movies that are exactly the same
Yeah, some executive overheard "obnoxious... boy... genius... in space" and we got Wesley Crusher:-P
Just to pick nits, but the jump was from Solaris 2.6 to 7, not 8.
True, I should have spotted that. Solaris 7 was a bit of a funny one - very short lived, while Sun and Veritas argued over what exactly should be bundled and what should be paid for, and Solaris 8 was released as soon as they came to an arrangement. I've never come across Solaris 7 "in the wild" but I think I have CDs for it somewhere.
Um, hello? That's exactly why this version number is 6.0. It's because it's not just a pretty sound when you say it, it is because it is meant to convey the concept that this IM product is meant to integrate with the SunONE platform, which, coincidentaly, has a version 6 label. Wild, isn't it?
So what you're saying is, the version number of a product should be the same as the version number of its platform? Well, MS do that (Office 2000, SQL 2000 and so on) but they do write the whole lot, after all. By that argument, since it runs on Solaris 8, maybe they should have called it "Messaging 8.0"?
It's 1.0, and there's a good reason that people shy away from version 1.0 of products. Sun are just trying to pretend that it's already as mature as some of their other products. It's a marketing scam, nothng more.
the first part of its new enterprise collaboration platform to compete with Exchange and Domino. Dubbed 'Sun ONE InstantMessaging 6.0
First the abrupt jump from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 8, and now the first version of a new product is dubbed 6.0! Someone needs to smack the marketroids at Sun upside the head with the news that version numbers aren't just there because they make a pretty sound when you say them, they're meant to convey information to the customer. Sun's engineers seem immune to this, Solaris 8 still reports itself internally as SunOS 5.8, which kinda makes sense. Microsoft are Sybase are also guilty of doing it.
I can imagine the meeting now:
Marketer: Version 2 is better than 1 right? Engineer: Sure Marketer: And version 3 is better than 2? Engineer: Umm, usually. Marketer: Great! So the higher the number, the better the product!
Ah, I remember the good old days when Sun competed on technology, not hype. Most people I know are still running 2.6 in production, there's simply not enough new stuff in 8 to justify anything more than calling it 2.8, but while it's easy to get sign-off on a minor version patch, major versions need a lot more regression (on paper at least) and who's got the time for that?
People have always been greedy, this just let them be greedying is a slighly more sucessful manner.
The phrase "greed is good" is always taken out of context to portray Gekko and his kind as soulless moneygrabbers, but what he actually said was (from memory):
Greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning organization, the United States of America.
Greed is good means the same as ambition is good, or progress is good, or scientific research is good, or any one of a dozen things that no-one in their right mind would consider unreasonable.
igh roaming costs: happens when there is not enough competition between telcos (or worse, secret agreements to keep prices high). This is a matter of antitrust authorities.
The problem isn't roaming per se. In a given European country, all telcos operating within the country will have (almost) complete coverage. Roaming only happens when you are in another country, and even that is going away (pretty much everywhere has a Vodafone-owned operator now, for example). I can't remember when I last had to even think about roaming, it's all very transparent, and doesn't even cost that much if your operator is set up for it.
The issue is calling a phone on a network operated by another company. The precedent for this is the difference in cost between calling locally and nationally. Now the distance isn't so much physical as it is topological. Calling someone on your own network is like a local call, routing it to another operator is like a national call. It is fair that this costs more (but not much more), because the telco (or rather, the telco's equipment) has to do more work to connect a cross-network call. It's like peering arrangements between ISPs, it will almost always be cheaper (in bytes per day per dollar) to move data around within your own network than to route it via a peering point.
I believe the answer to this lies in the price point.
Not quite, it lies in the contract. If you're hired as a contract programmer or a sysadmin, then program and administer whatever you're told to do and submit an invoice at the end of the week for hours worked. The client is a responsible adult (legally, if not in practice) and if he wants you to do something, he's paying for your time, so do it. If that means spending 6 months doing something that you could do by another technique in 6 weeks, that's not your problem - in this contract, you're just a "grunt".
If however you're hired as a management or technology consultant, then you are being paid for your considered opinions and advice. These contracts are usually different, rather than hours worked, you will bid a fixed fee for a piece of work, which might not even be code, but just a report or an evaluation. These types of contracts are supposed to decouple the result from the work, so if your advice is ignored and the project is a disaster you still get paid, and also you have no incentive to inflate the work, so you can be objective.
It depends on your priorities. If you want steady but dull work, go for the former type of contract, if you want intellectual challenge but a lot less predictability of where your next cheque is coming from, go for the latter.
Management of a data set and a database server are two totally different things! The people who manage the data set need not have any technical skills, they use easy-to-use applications, but they do need to understand the data, which might be anything from a catalogue of a library to the results of a geophysical survey. And a manager of a database server doesn't need to know anything about the data, he just has to be able to tune the system to run queries efficiently.
Apprentice - Your average precocious kid, or computer dude in the lab.
Guru - Has been active in the Computer community for at least 5 years
In any other field, you might be approaching "guru" status in 25 years. 5 years is about as much experience as you need to even be a junior practitioner in law, medicine, architecture or engineering. 5 years is nothing. Let me guess, you're still an undergrad? The real world will be a surprise for you, my friend. Anyone under 30 with the word "senior" in their title is almost by definition a poser.
The basic problem is that computer people have an overblown idea of their own capabilities and importance. "Computer caretaker" is the most suitable title for any type of "administrator".
and maybe theo will finally get the sparc docs he needs.
Y'know, IBM have (or at least used to have) a deal with the US govt. that means that the govt. gets priority on orders. If there are N mainframes left in the warehouse, and the govt. needs N, then they get 'em and commercial customers wait. I read about this in a book about Oracle, funnily enough. They were doing some government work (the original Oracle was a project for the CIA to store data on magnetized strips of mylar) and so could get an IBM mainframe. Everyone saw they had a mainframe, thus must be a successful company (this was before they were actually making money) and that made it easier for them to hire staff and buy stuff!
Anyway, I know Sun do a lot of work with with both the govt. and the military, so if Theo wants the docs, a quick phone call to DARPA should be all it takes.
As long as the helium released is made of stable isotopes, it will have little to no effect. The Earth has insufficient gravity to retain either hydrogen or helium in significant quantities. The helium will basically waft away into space. If helium could be retained in the atmosphere Earth would be a gas giant.
All that free helium could lead to a renaissance of the Zeppelin industry. The disaster at Hindenberg only happened because the Zeppelin was full of hydrogen, but helium does not burn. Electrically powered Zeppelins, with batteries charged from fusion generators on the ground, are a much cleaner and more efficient way to travel than kerosene turbofans. Plus the cabin can me made much larger and less aerodynamic because it travels at lower speeds and altitudes. Perhaps it could even be open in parts, with balconies. I would love to spend a few days crossing the Atlantic in a well-appointed Zeppelin liner a few hundred feet over the sea than rushing across in jet. Travel should be about fun, not just convenience!
will explain a bit more slowly: it doesn't matter all that much if we do develop fusion power b/c it will be completely under the control of CorpGovMedia. Why should they offer fusion power cheaper than its primary competitor, oil?
Can you name me any technology that hasn't gotten cheaper over time? CD players? Microwave ovens? Cars? Cell phones? Wristwatches? Calculators? Even electricity itself is getting cheaper and cheaper every year, allowing for inflation.
I'm afraid it is you who needs the slow explanation. New technologies always supplant old, and there's nothing that anyone can do about it. I can imagine people like you trying to explain that the car would never replace the horse, or that airliners would never replace steam trains.
THis is because we have no control over CorpGovMedia....
You are correct, people like you with no understanding of technology or economics have no control over anything. Fortunately for the rest of us, you don't matter.
Ultimately though, computers are going to continue to shrink and converge with such devices as mobile phones. Data transfer and communications are going to be fundamental to such devices.
Question: was there a bubble in CAT5 cable producers back in the 80s? No? Then why should there be one for wireless producers now?
"First-borns tend to have strong world domination tendencies" says Dr. Oliver Knapthf, one of the contributors to the book, "they are frequently deceptive geniuses who should be watched closely and never trusted."
I think this says more about the good Doctor than it says about firstborns. Clearly the man has some "issues" and needs to talk to a therapist about them. What's the betting that's he's third-born and had to wear an older brother's hand-me-downs and has been nursing resentment of that his whole life?
Slashdot Mirror
The anonymous contributor can perhaps be forgiven for making the error, but the editors should know better. Perhaps the editors need to first count to ten (or a hundred) the next time they want to post a "Microsoft is lame" article?
Yes, you would think that self-proclaimed "nerds" would be able to tell the difference between a terminal and a workstation (to use Unix terminology) wouldn't you? This article is as if some reviewer back in the early 80s couldn't understand why you needed a VAX to actually run the software you used on a VT100!
The fact is that tablet PCs are actually pretty nice. The fundamental problem with PCs is that a stylus is a very naturally expressive tool whereas a keyboard/mouse aren't, apart from for fairly limited uses. For example, I can type for longer and at greater speed than I can handwrite, but I can draw a diagram far faster with a pen than I can with a mouse, and it will look how I want it to, not how the developers of Visio or whatever thought it should look. Graphics users have known this for years, and use Wacom tablets for their Macs. Drawing freehand with a mouse is just clumsy.
If you do need to work with large blocks of text, a tablet PC can easily be used with a keyboard (with a docking station) but for most workers, a PC is not really an input device so much as it is a retrieval device, with input limited to small blocks of text (like email messages), or annotation to larger documents that are stored on a server somewhere. That is where the tablet really shines. If you don't have fancy collaboration technology like shared whiteboards, being able to jot down a diagram with a few notes and send it while you're in a phone conversation is amazing, it makes communication so much easier. Tablets are a fantastic idea, and it is interesting to note that the Open Source community couldn't have come up with a working implementation - where would they get the money to actually build hardware devices and market them to volume buyers? Sometimes, what's really needed is just a huge pile of cash and an established brand name.
And they wonder why it's so hard to get people to pay money to subscribe to Slashdot...
How does IBM run Linux on their mainframes if Linux can't support more than 4 processors? Did they modify it? Is this what the recent dispute with SCO was about?
Linux is run as a guest of z/OS - z/OS sees all the processors and creates a number of single-processor virtual machines on which Linux kernels run. This is both good and bad; good because individual services can be completely isolated from one another, leading to ease of management for security and QoS (Solaris 9 Resource Manager can also do this), but bad because you are still locked into the proprietary vendor because you need z/OS, and now you have two OSs to look after.
"Who would have thought that France and Germany could work together in 1945?"
Look up words like "Vichy" and "Petain" in a history book. You'll find that the French and Germans had no difficulty working together almost from the moment that German tanks rolled across the border. A leopard never changes its spots.
As far as costs are concerned, even an enormous sum like $100 billion over 10 years is $10 billion a year which comes to $30 per inhabitant of the US
You are right, the risks of not going and not only that but first, are simply too great.
That is a damn good idea. I'm not sure whether Mars is the right destination just yet though. An ore rich asteroid would be much more profitable.
The thing with Mars is, you can land on it. It has predictable motion, a well-photographed surface, and gravity. It has enough of an atmosphere and a magnetic field to shield you from radiation if you want to stay a while. You can very easily manufacture rocket fuel from the atmosphere itself, so you don't have to cart enough for a return trip with you (Zubrin IIRC suggests sending an automated fuel factory, then waiting 'til you were sure it worked before sending a manned mission). If you are willing to invest a little energy, Mars has plenty of ice that you can melt into water. If you have energy and water, you have oxygen. With water and various readily-available nitrogen compounds, you might even be able to grow plants in a greenhouse in Martian soil. Glass and steel will both be very simple to manufacture on Mars, the raw materials are abundant, you can "mine" them on the surface with a shovel! In short, Mars is a pretty good place, and if you were planning to establish a colony it would be a lot easier to do so on Mars than it would be on the moon.
Asteroid mining isn't remotely feasible at the moment. You would have to arrive at an asteroid, which may be interacting with other nearby objects in hard-to-predict ways, then land on it and start drilling, or stand off from it and break it up with explosives then collect the pieces, then you have to ship it all the way back to Earth. Asteroid mining won't be feasible until there's a self-sustaining colony on Mars to act as an ore processing station, and refuelling and repairing (and most likely construction) facility for mining vehicles. Colonizing Mars in the 21st century is going to be like colonizing Antarctica in the 19th - but with the bonus that you will actually be allowed to extract minerals, which changes the game radically, both for construction/manufacturing on Mars itself, and for getting funding from Earth. There is no technological reason (as Zubrin demonstrates in The Case For Mars) tha there couldn't be a fully self-sustaining colony on Mars within 50-100 years.
According to the article, "between now and 2010, for every new member added to the workforce there will be 2.6 new jobs created."
That's like saying a new car is made every time a ton of steel is produced. A job isn't "created" until someone is hired, just as a car isn't made until that steel is worked. It is merely the potential for a job to exist, a virtual job. And just as there can be more steel than cars, there can be more virtual jobs than actual jobs. Virtual jobs only matter in that they distort salaries upwards in the short term (because people think demand is higher than it is) but as soon as an attempt is made to convert these potential jobs into actual jobs, the market collapses. It's basic common sense, you can never have more people employed than there are people to employ, so saying there is more than one job created for each employee is just silly.
Yeah, but are you making $30k - $40k a year, or are they paying you a real salary?
Sorry, but $30-40k for a fresh graduate is pretty reasonable. The problem is that people experienced the late 90s job market as it was how things always were, but in fact it was an abberation. A recent graduate should be looking for experience right now, only start worrying about salary once you are established. The first 3 years of everyone's career will usually suck in pay terms. 5 years in, and you'll be glad you went for the experience rather than the quick score.
I've seen many tech ads looking for "highly qualified, senior level positions, 10+ years experience, blah blah blah" that only pay $36k a year.
They're only shooting themselves in the foot, because you can guarantee that that employee will bail at the first opportunity. A decent company pays decent salaries, because it wants to only hire good people and it wants to keep them. That isn't sentimentality - it's just good business sense.
I don't know much about Solaris, so I'd like to ask you guys out there. What makes Linux less capable? What does Solaris do that Linux can't do (at least well enough)? Just wondering.
Well, scalability is one major thing. Linux struggles with more than 4 CPUs and more than 4G of memory; Solaris handles hundreds of CPUs and a terabyte of RAM. Linux lacks the manageability of system resources offered by Solaris 9, which allows system resources to be prioritized for different tasks, with a guaranteed minimum available. And even if Linux could do this, it doesn't run on hardware than can be dynamically partitioned, unless it runs as a guest on z/OS, and in that case it's z/OS doing the work. Tight integration with the underlying hardware is another advantage for Sun; they know precisely every component in every system that Solaris runs on, because they designed and built it, so there are never compatibility issues. Solaris' high-performance, high-reliability filesystems are proven, not just betas (yes XFS is also proven, but in IRIX not Linux). Speaking of filesystems, Solaris has ACLs, whereas Linux just has the relatively crude user-group model. Linux doesn't have remote shared memory or IP multipathing (IIRC).
Though the GSVs are REALLY fucking big if I remember correctly
Yeah, the GSVs are big, fast, smart and can manufacture any reinforcements they need. Starfleet, the Imperial Fleet, it doesn't matter - the Culture would beat them all, hands down.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: V'Ger (Voyager VI)
Blah blah blah... we all know that any of these ships - including the Super Star Destroyer - would get its butt thoroughly kicked by a Culture GSV.
Odd are good the poor guys computer is now drooling on the floor. That will teach him for doing something geeky and not using the appropriate bandwidth.
Nah, even an ordinary PC can easily saturate the amount of bandwidth ADSL offers. If anything's smoking, it's the router just upstream from him.
Wow, the number of people who have difficulty seperating the actor from the character is scary. Do you keep a lookout for Terminators on your way to Walmart, too?
Well, I've never met Will so I've no idea what he's like, but he must bear some degree of responsibility for Wesley. He's at least as responsible as Jamie Oliver is for his onscreen persona. And for that he has a lot of bad karma to work off.
We used to joke that there was one guy, who'd get drunk at a restaurant and spout out movie ideas (it changes as things go in and out of style -- in the 80s it was Spago, in the 90s I think it was the Viper Room. I have no idea what it is now, as I attempt to claw my way back up to the "b" list.) The joke went that there were execs from all the major studios, and they'd only hear flashes of the conversation, like ". . . asteroid . . . earth . . . big summer movie . . ." and we get two or three movies that are exactly the same
:-P
Yeah, some executive overheard "obnoxious... boy... genius... in space" and we got Wesley Crusher
Just to pick nits, but the jump was from Solaris 2.6 to 7, not 8.
True, I should have spotted that. Solaris 7 was a bit of a funny one - very short lived, while Sun and Veritas argued over what exactly should be bundled and what should be paid for, and Solaris 8 was released as soon as they came to an arrangement. I've never come across Solaris 7 "in the wild" but I think I have CDs for it somewhere.
Um, hello? That's exactly why this version number is 6.0. It's because it's not just a pretty sound when you say it, it is because it is meant to convey the concept that this IM product is meant to integrate with the SunONE platform, which, coincidentaly, has a version 6 label. Wild, isn't it?
So what you're saying is, the version number of a product should be the same as the version number of its platform? Well, MS do that (Office 2000, SQL 2000 and so on) but they do write the whole lot, after all. By that argument, since it runs on Solaris 8, maybe they should have called it "Messaging 8.0"?
It's 1.0, and there's a good reason that people shy away from version 1.0 of products. Sun are just trying to pretend that it's already as mature as some of their other products. It's a marketing scam, nothng more.
the first part of its new enterprise collaboration platform to compete with Exchange and Domino. Dubbed 'Sun ONE InstantMessaging 6.0
First the abrupt jump from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 8, and now the first version of a new product is dubbed 6.0! Someone needs to smack the marketroids at Sun upside the head with the news that version numbers aren't just there because they make a pretty sound when you say them, they're meant to convey information to the customer. Sun's engineers seem immune to this, Solaris 8 still reports itself internally as SunOS 5.8, which kinda makes sense. Microsoft are Sybase are also guilty of doing it.
I can imagine the meeting now:
Marketer: Version 2 is better than 1 right?
Engineer: Sure
Marketer: And version 3 is better than 2?
Engineer: Umm, usually.
Marketer: Great! So the higher the number, the better the product!
Ah, I remember the good old days when Sun competed on technology, not hype. Most people I know are still running 2.6 in production, there's simply not enough new stuff in 8 to justify anything more than calling it 2.8, but while it's easy to get sign-off on a minor version patch, major versions need a lot more regression (on paper at least) and who's got the time for that?
The phrase "greed is good" is always taken out of context to portray Gekko and his kind as soulless moneygrabbers, but what he actually said was (from memory):
Greed is good means the same as ambition is good, or progress is good, or scientific research is good, or any one of a dozen things that no-one in their right mind would consider unreasonable.
igh roaming costs: happens when there is not enough competition between telcos (or worse, secret agreements to keep prices high). This is a matter of antitrust authorities.
The problem isn't roaming per se. In a given European country, all telcos operating within the country will have (almost) complete coverage. Roaming only happens when you are in another country, and even that is going away (pretty much everywhere has a Vodafone-owned operator now, for example). I can't remember when I last had to even think about roaming, it's all very transparent, and doesn't even cost that much if your operator is set up for it.
The issue is calling a phone on a network operated by another company. The precedent for this is the difference in cost between calling locally and nationally. Now the distance isn't so much physical as it is topological. Calling someone on your own network is like a local call, routing it to another operator is like a national call. It is fair that this costs more (but not much more), because the telco (or rather, the telco's equipment) has to do more work to connect a cross-network call. It's like peering arrangements between ISPs, it will almost always be cheaper (in bytes per day per dollar) to move data around within your own network than to route it via a peering point.
I believe the answer to this lies in the price point.
Not quite, it lies in the contract. If you're hired as a contract programmer or a sysadmin, then program and administer whatever you're told to do and submit an invoice at the end of the week for hours worked. The client is a responsible adult (legally, if not in practice) and if he wants you to do something, he's paying for your time, so do it. If that means spending 6 months doing something that you could do by another technique in 6 weeks, that's not your problem - in this contract, you're just a "grunt".
If however you're hired as a management or technology consultant, then you are being paid for your considered opinions and advice. These contracts are usually different, rather than hours worked, you will bid a fixed fee for a piece of work, which might not even be code, but just a report or an evaluation. These types of contracts are supposed to decouple the result from the work, so if your advice is ignored and the project is a disaster you still get paid, and also you have no incentive to inflate the work, so you can be objective.
It depends on your priorities. If you want steady but dull work, go for the former type of contract, if you want intellectual challenge but a lot less predictability of where your next cheque is coming from, go for the latter.
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will support AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. Beta releases can be expected in the middle of this year.
A slashdot story where Microsoft are the good guys! What have you done with the real Timothy?! Taco! Help, Taco!!
Database - Management of a data set
Management of a data set and a database server are two totally different things! The people who manage the data set need not have any technical skills, they use easy-to-use applications, but they do need to understand the data, which might be anything from a catalogue of a library to the results of a geophysical survey. And a manager of a database server doesn't need to know anything about the data, he just has to be able to tune the system to run queries efficiently.
Apprentice - Your average precocious kid, or computer dude in the lab.
Guru - Has been active in the Computer community for at least 5 years
In any other field, you might be approaching "guru" status in 25 years. 5 years is about as much experience as you need to even be a junior practitioner in law, medicine, architecture or engineering. 5 years is nothing. Let me guess, you're still an undergrad? The real world will be a surprise for you, my friend. Anyone under 30 with the word "senior" in their title is almost by definition a poser.
The basic problem is that computer people have an overblown idea of their own capabilities and importance. "Computer caretaker" is the most suitable title for any type of "administrator".
and maybe theo will finally get the sparc docs he needs.
Y'know, IBM have (or at least used to have) a deal with the US govt. that means that the govt. gets priority on orders. If there are N mainframes left in the warehouse, and the govt. needs N, then they get 'em and commercial customers wait. I read about this in a book about Oracle, funnily enough. They were doing some government work (the original Oracle was a project for the CIA to store data on magnetized strips of mylar) and so could get an IBM mainframe. Everyone saw they had a mainframe, thus must be a successful company (this was before they were actually making money) and that made it easier for them to hire staff and buy stuff!
Anyway, I know Sun do a lot of work with with both the govt. and the military, so if Theo wants the docs, a quick phone call to DARPA should be all it takes.
As long as the helium released is made of stable isotopes, it will have little to no effect. The Earth has insufficient gravity to retain either hydrogen or helium in significant quantities. The helium will basically waft away into space. If helium could be retained in the atmosphere Earth would be a gas giant.
All that free helium could lead to a renaissance of the Zeppelin industry. The disaster at Hindenberg only happened because the Zeppelin was full of hydrogen, but helium does not burn. Electrically powered Zeppelins, with batteries charged from fusion generators on the ground, are a much cleaner and more efficient way to travel than kerosene turbofans. Plus the cabin can me made much larger and less aerodynamic because it travels at lower speeds and altitudes. Perhaps it could even be open in parts, with balconies. I would love to spend a few days crossing the Atlantic in a well-appointed Zeppelin liner a few hundred feet over the sea than rushing across in jet. Travel should be about fun, not just convenience!
will explain a bit more slowly: it doesn't matter all that much if we do develop fusion power b/c it will be completely under the control of CorpGovMedia. Why should they offer fusion power cheaper than its primary competitor, oil?
Can you name me any technology that hasn't gotten cheaper over time? CD players? Microwave ovens? Cars? Cell phones? Wristwatches? Calculators? Even electricity itself is getting cheaper and cheaper every year, allowing for inflation.
I'm afraid it is you who needs the slow explanation. New technologies always supplant old, and there's nothing that anyone can do about it. I can imagine people like you trying to explain that the car would never replace the horse, or that airliners would never replace steam trains.
THis is because we have no control over CorpGovMedia....
You are correct, people like you with no understanding of technology or economics have no control over anything. Fortunately for the rest of us, you don't matter.
Ultimately though, computers are going to continue to shrink and converge with such devices as mobile phones. Data transfer and communications are going to be fundamental to such devices.
Question: was there a bubble in CAT5 cable producers back in the 80s? No? Then why should there be one for wireless producers now?
"First-borns tend to have strong world domination tendencies" says Dr. Oliver Knapthf, one of the contributors to the book, "they are frequently deceptive geniuses who should be watched closely and never trusted."
I think this says more about the good Doctor than it says about firstborns. Clearly the man has some "issues" and needs to talk to a therapist about them. What's the betting that's he's third-born and had to wear an older brother's hand-me-downs and has been nursing resentment of that his whole life?