So who decides who gets to query the roots for NS queries? My ISP is kind of small, only a few thousand customers -- should they be configuring THEIR name servers to foward to nameservers at their upstreams? Since their upstreams are major Tier 1 providers like UUNet, Qwest and Sprint, presumably my ISPs nameservers are the cause of untold THOUSANDS of unncessary queries against the root nameservers that could easily be satisfied by the caches at UUNet, Qwest and Sprint.
I don't plan on changing my config, thanks. I don't have reason to believe my ISPs DNS is more reliable or more secure against poisoning than my server is, nor do I particularly buy into the idea this is wasteful or expensive; the root servers are THERE to provide NS records for finishing queries.
Umm, I'm not asking the roots for recursive queries (ie, requesting an A record for www.google.com). I ask *my* DNS server for that, it gets the NS for google.com from the root servers, and then it asks ns.google.com for the A record for www.google.com, and then returns it to me. The roots just provide references to the NS records for.com and.net 2nd level domains, which, as I said previously is how its supposed to work.
Querying my ISPs DNS would accomplish the same thing in the same way, except they may have cached responses for some common domains, eliminating one or two trips to the root servers. But, since my local DNS caches as well, at most its eliminating literally a handful of queries every couple of days, so I'm not crushing the root servers with my queries.
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that wonders why we get such innane commentary along with our story intros, but did CowboyNeal ever stop to think that maybe 20 years ago -- or even *30* years ago -- children played with Legos! One Christmas I got one of those plastic portable "parts bins" and proceeded to ensure all my Legos (from a half-dozen different sets) were all organized and sorted by size and color.
We didn't have mindstorms in the 70s (in fact I don't think even the Tech set that let you build the car with the moving cylinders was around), but we had huge lego sets and a MOTOR set that came with a chunky power chasis and various snap-in wheels and tank tracks. With some creativity you could build powered machines with it, although I found that some of my "old" legos had lost their gripping power and under torque from the motor would sometimes break my contraptions, but hey, ya gotta learn about engineering limitations some day.
Anyway, pull your head out and open your eyes. Its not like you were the first generation to play with mechanical toys, and I can remember seeing family photos from much older kids who had built even cooler stuff with Erector sets and other pre-lego toys.
"Also, companies that have incorrectly formatted their DNS servers to get information directly from the DNS root servers maintained by VeriSign will stop receiving updates on Feb. 9, leaving those servers and the Internet users who rely on them out of step with the rest of the Internet, he said."
I so seldom read even the tech press because of this kind of statement. What does it mean? AFAIK the root servers just have NS records pointing to the 2nd level domains, but querying the root servers is how you find them and this is essentially how DNS is *supposed* to work. There was no further context in the story to indicate what they're talking about.
Are there other queryable DNS servers maintained just by verisign for.com and.net for distribution to the usual root servers? Or have I been running DNS wrong all along?
Those are the ones that are above board. There was a time when the NSA could tap virtually any conversation they wanted, as they had intercepts between almost all microwave relays. Read "The Puzzle Palace" and be prepared for some interesting stuff.
Elites group together..this is news?
on
When Geeks Go Camping
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Elites have been grouping together in these kinds of retreats forever. Bohemian Grove is one of the older ones, although it tends to attract more of an "old money" crowd and I believe is all male as well. Then there's that one out east that Clinton made somewhat well known during his tenure.
All in all, I don't really see why its news. That VCs were there just explains its about figuring out new business schemes under the guise of fun. I guess Tim O'Reilly's presence there somehow adds a sheen of approval over all of it.
As far as camping goes, the most advanced thing I take with is a gas stove. Why the fuck you'd want Wifi or any of the other trappings of city life in the peaceful woods is beyond me.
Plus DLP screens are far less of a maintenance nightmare: the only thing you will ever have to replace is the bulb, and that only once every 3 or 4 years. Plasma screens, on the other hand, are not expected to have a total lifetime of much longer than that.
Bahh, you haven't been paying very much attention. Samsung has had a ton of lamping problems with their DLP sets, and rumor has it they are even replacing the bulbs in them with a new design, requiring a retrofit. (Source: AVSForum).
Furthermore, Sony's newest line of LCD rear projection sets, the Grand Wega IIIs, have had their own spate of lamping problems. There have been widespread failures of the lamping systems (which are compact arc lamps), and Sony's still not 100% sure what the issue is. My first GWIII failed after a week, and there are several others on the AVS Forum who have had theirs fixed and still they don't work right.
I bnought the GWIII because the DLPs were rather harsh with SD content, and the image was overall a little too pixelish -- it FELT like a computer driven display, while the GWIII felt a little more film like to my eyes.
As far as long term reliability once you get past the lamping systems and replacing a couple of $200 bulbs in them, nobody REALLY knows. DLP uses micromirrors, and we don't really know how long those will last. LCD panels won't last forever, either.
As for plasmas longevity, we don't really know what that's like in terms of ordinary TV usage. They feel too fragile for my tastes, but we have two at work used for displaying PowerPoint, and despite the marketing people's use of a solid color logo in the same corner of every page for hours on end, I don't notice any evidence of burn in on them, and they're over 2 years old. The AVS Forum plasma posters seemed to indicate that the anti-plasma noise is much overstated, none noticing any evidence of burn in or other problems.
Anyway, there are no perfect technologies. You just accept the tradeoffs you think are worth it, and hope that spending $3k+ on a TV doesn't make you a fool in 4 years.
You didn't help your parents that much
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CES 2004 Coverage
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· Score: 2, Informative
You didn't help that much. Sony doesn't make DLPs, and they don't make their signature Grand Wega LCD rear projection sets in 41". Closest is 42". But it is still not a DLP.
Current DirecTivos directly record the satellite stream to hard disk. They don't have to do any of the "heavy lifting" required to encode the streams, and decoding is handled by the decoder already part of the DirecTivo box used for watching live TV.
A standalone HD Tivo would require component inputs (for broadest compatibility, perhaps an optional DVI connector as well), and require a lot more heavy lifting to encode those streams onto HD. This would in effect require a better computer than they're using now in any standalone HD Tivo. IIRC there aren't any high-volume low-cost HD compression chipsets out there like there are for standard def MPEG2.
If they're around long enough, the new rules requiring access to digital cable in consumer boxes like TVs, VCRs, etc, will enable Tivo to provide a standalone that works as a digital cable capable box. This will enable them to do the same direct stream recording that they do on DirecTivos now, and probably make it possible to do multiple tuner standalones as well.
The issue, though, is time, as I don't expect to see the new digital cable capable devices until 2005 at the earliest, as I think there's some cable head-end compatibility integration, meaning your cable company can drag its feet until 2006 or so.
Yeah, that's right, capitalism is great and protectionism is bad. Unless its bad for business, in which case, we'll call it something else like "protecting intellectual property" or "national security" or even give it a *good* economic/management buzzword like "differential pricing" and conclude thats how markets most efficiently operate, and only terrorists and zealots and pirates and other people that aren't willing to go along with capitalism would disagree.
Well, I disagree. I think some protectionism IS worth it. I like my way of life, and I'm not willing to sacrifice it so the capitalist elite can get bigger bonuses or the pedantic economists can proclaim "more efficient markets".
"More efficient markets" sound great, but that perfect efficiency risks turning us all into faceless cogs of some huge machine, having to justify our every move and every need on the basis of its economic efficiency and benefit to the markets. Yuck.
About 5 years ago one of our Canon color copiers had this restriction built in. IIRC that model would actually generate a page, but the rectangle represented by the currency was all black. Needless to say we wasted a bunch of toner trying various denominations of currency.
Unfortunately we didn't get smart enough to try masking the bills to see which *region* triggered the detection.
The warning printed on the copier mentions securities as well, although nobody had any stock or bond cerftificates to try it with.
When I was a warez kiddie in the 80s, the "state of the art" for Apple ][ computers was an Apple-Cat modem, which in addition to 45.5 Baudot encoding (the TDD standard), also would do asynchronous 1200 baud, and "normal" 1200 baud if you bought an upgrade daughter card.
Nobody I knew had the upgrade card, and virtually no BBS in the early 80s supported 1200 baud anyway (I think a Hayes or Racal 1200 baud modem was like $600 at the time).
The Bell 202 asynchronous 1200 baud mode seemed largely moot until someone figured out how to use it to send entire Apple ][ disks (a whopping 120k)! A program called "DiskFer" or something similar would send an entire floppy disk (sector-copied, useful for full-disk games) over the phone.
Anyway, you kids and your 2400 baud modems sure had it good. Before diskfer or whatever it was called, the only other thing was to go to peoples houses and bring your floppy drive for faster copying action, which seems kind of queer now.
Some companies fail because they have a stupid business model (or none at all), and no amount of business savvy can save them. But some fail because their management is in collective denial about their situation and management strategy.
A hostage negotiator is largely a psychologist, and psychologists are fairly good with people in denial. Get management to snap out of it, realize that their strategy is in need of correction, and in some cases you can save a company that has at least a good idea.
IBM is a corporation whose main reason for existence is to make money and maximize shareholder value. Things like these have absolutely nothing to do with their "support" of free software.
A human's main reason for existence is reproduction and survival. Does that mean that all humans are alike, or is it OK to support some of them (eg, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, $altruistic_leader) and not support others (Hitler, Stalin, $murderous_dictators)?
I think its still OK to support IBM in this endeavor, even if in reality its about a group of powerful rich guys figuring out how to get more rich and powerful; the byproduct of that activity (a good, business-friendly linux desktop) is likely to be of some benefit to everyone given the structure and nature of Linux, particularly based on the way IBM has support Linux to this point.
It's not 100% get IBM shareholders rich and fuck everyone else, it's 100% get IBM shareholders rich and put some of the IBM code back to the community. It's a meaningful distinction.
If this announcement came out of nowhere, people would be saying "huh, a tiny 4Gig MP3 player for $250. That's a pretty good deal."
No, they wouldn't, they'd still be realizing that another $50 buys you a lot more storage.
When I saw the initial Slashdot headline today, I was fully prepared to preorder a mini iPod until I saw the price. $250 puts it in the same price ballpark as the $300 model, and I won't buy one of those because it's just too much money relative to how much use I'd get out of it.
Aren't UNIX jobs historically higher paying than Windows jobs? Even pre-bust, I could get a mildly experienced "windows admin" for $30-40k who could essentially click through the Windows GUI and do basic Windows admin tasks. I wouldn't trust them to do any more than that, but they could do it.
UNIX jobs went for much more 50-60k easily for small installations, and although you had to be careful not to get a piker, they were far more intelligent -- could do scripting, perhaps some basic perl scripts, and often had some basic experience with networking kit.
I'm not sure how the "new economy" has effected unix salaries, but I'd wager the fact that any idiot could and did get an MCSE and would work for $30k is why the staffing costs are so low.
Note to frothing MCSEs: I admin a mixed FreeBSD and Windows environment, and I think there are probably some really smart Windows admins, particularly in large enterprise-class situations. But I do think that most of the low-end smaller office environments have your commodity MCSEs.
Do you know if the calling party info provided with incoming calls on an ISDN PRI is always accurate or right? I've never seen an incoming call on our RAS setup from a blocked or unavailable number -- there is ALWAYS something in that field.
I wonder if "Caller ID block" is something that applies to PRIs, or if its only applies to analog caller ID.
I just wish they'd give us enough money to upgrade our voice switch to use PRI. I'd love to get incoming FAX spam numbers for revenge calls.
It's too big to be functionally portable as a music player. I think even the iPod is on the edge of the sweet spot for size. The MS player is portable in the same way that a 9" color TV is portable. Sure, I can pick it up and move it, but I can't slip it into my pocket for a walk around the lake.
It's too expensive. $700? If I don't care about portability, $700 buys a reasonable used laptop that will play DVDs on a screen that does them some justice (on the airplane at least), has a lot of storage, and is a computer,too. If I'm looking for more portability, I can buy a cheapie portable DVD player *and* an iPod and get better media support and less DRM.
I also don't think video support on portable devices is all that great. Either you sacrifice display size for portability and battery life, making viewing anything painfully annoying, or you end up with a big screen and poor portability and battery life.
Portable video will be great when they get the whole video goggle thing worked out better. I don't know if there is that great of a solution (retinal projection?) really, but when they DO get it worked out there will be a huge jump in demand for portable video.
Really? Why faxes compared to any other phone call with caller id blocked?
Our dialup networking PRI at work always reports a calling party number for inbound calls. In some instances its bogus as it represents an outbound trunk number or some other number you might not immediately associate with the calling party. However, there's a number associated with every incoming call on the PRI, so, depending on what kind of incoming line you have you may get a number whether the calling party tries to hide it or not.
And then there's the phone company, who, if sufficiently motivated, will provide that information for you. I think that even caller-ID masked (ie, anonymous) calls are only anonymous when the phone switch that terminates them to the recipient masks the calling party number. The calling party number is available and tracable by the phone company, I'm guessing its a necessity of operating a phone network.
Where it would get tricky, though, is if the phone lines were paid for by company X, who leased space to company Y, who leased computers and modems to company Z, who did work for company A, and you can never get your hands on the people doing the actual naughty deeds.
I think "running Linux" is an activity, not a state of being.
Of course BSD users have to buildworld from time to time, but it seems like since I switched from Linux a few years ago, I spend less time on the OS and more time actually solving the problem the box was supposed to solve in the first place.
It's probably only a matter of time before remote piloted drones replace a lot of piloted craft. I can see them loading a couple of dozen drones into a B-52 flying high and out of harm's reach. As needed by ground troops, the drones could be dropped and remotely piloted into combat areas faster and a lot less expensively than having to maintain an entire fleet of piloted planes in a combat area.
Innovation isn't key anymore, it's pure market dominance that's the business goal any more. First you lock in your customers to make it difficult to switch vendors, and then you eliminate your competitors so that switching isn't even an option any more. Lock-in and market dominance make it impossible for any new competition to enter the market. Once you've established dominance, just start increasing prices, lowering quality and limiting chocies. Pretty soon you make the smallest number of products at the highest possible price and they HAVE to buy from you.
This is the new goal of business. It used to be "how can I come up with better new products and get them to market", now it's all about manipulating the market itself. I wouldn't be at all surprised it there was an MBA course entry somplace like this:
"Submissive Competition: Maintaining the impression of a competitive market by allowing small competitors. In today's intensely Government regulated business environment, market dominance is often seen as an illegal monopoly. This course will teach you how to control small competitors to keep them from threatening your dominance yet convincing regulators your market space has healthy competition and freeing your business from potentially damaging litigation and regulation."
I wouldn't buy a glass tube HDTV, primarily because you're still viewing interlaced content. They all seem to convert everything to 1080i, although I think some can display 480p. Plus, they're heavy as hell and I think not well made.
In terms of image quality, the Sony LCD rear projections are real winners -- much better picture than anything else, outside of plasma.
I think the "downsides" to plasma and LCD are oversold, too. I don't think under normal viewing conditions plasma is excessively prone to burn in, although there are some questions about longevity that aren't answered by current plasma technology simply because of its newness.
LCD stuck pixels are rarely an issue for sets with multiple panels (R-G-B) at normal viewing distances. You'll find them if you stand 6" away and look for them; at normal viewing distances they're not visible to most people. Backlighting is more easily replaced than you might think for direct view sets, although the lamping issues for RP LCD and DLP sets is still a pretty primitive technology IMHO.
Waiting 2 years if you can might not be a bad strategy, particularly if Intel's push into LCoS actually produces price/performance gains.
I bought a Sony Grand Wega III LCD Rear Projection television this fall. Within a week it had failed, and as I learned on the AVS Forum ("GWIII buzz" thread, still active), many other people have had the same problem.
At the current time nobody knows what's REALLY wrong with these sets, since Sony isn't saying -- their customer service people continue to deny problems and offer the typical scripted responses about unplugging, resetting or "normal" behavior (like degaussing, which an LCD set would never do...).
At this point, there's a service bulletin but at least to forum participants have had the "fix" NOT fix their TVs, and there's a strong (but, of course, unverifiable through Sony) rumor that they have gotten so many returns on this set that they have actually halted production in order to figure out what's wrong.
What's appalling about this is that it's not a $89 VCR or DVD player, but televisions costing as much as $8000 that are failing! It's apparent that the design engineering and reliability testing is nonexistant or is the equivilent of selling the sets as betas to unsuspecting customers in order to figure out what's REALLY going to break on them.
Of course this hasn't prevented them from still selling the sets from production runs known to be rife with problems, denying the problem to customers and failing to inform people about multu-thousand dollar televisions which are like ticking time bombs.
I have a 12 year old Sony Trinitron that still looks as good as the day I got it as an open-box showroom special. I replaced the power supply last summer when it blew out as I knew that I'd never buy another set as well made as this for even 3 times the cost of repair.
Sony used to mean quality, now it seems like its been infected by the crappy US manufacturing standards and business leadership we all know and loathe.
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So who decides who gets to query the roots for NS queries? My ISP is kind of small, only a few thousand customers -- should they be configuring THEIR name servers to foward to nameservers at their upstreams? Since their upstreams are major Tier 1 providers like UUNet, Qwest and Sprint, presumably my ISPs nameservers are the cause of untold THOUSANDS of unncessary queries against the root nameservers that could easily be satisfied by the caches at UUNet, Qwest and Sprint.
I don't plan on changing my config, thanks. I don't have reason to believe my ISPs DNS is more reliable or more secure against poisoning than my server is, nor do I particularly buy into the idea this is wasteful or expensive; the root servers are THERE to provide NS records for finishing queries.
Umm, I'm not asking the roots for recursive queries (ie, requesting an A record for www.google.com). I ask *my* DNS server for that, it gets the NS for google.com from the root servers, and then it asks ns.google.com for the A record for www.google.com, and then returns it to me. The roots just provide references to the NS records for .com and .net 2nd level domains, which, as I said previously is how its supposed to work.
Querying my ISPs DNS would accomplish the same thing in the same way, except they may have cached responses for some common domains, eliminating one or two trips to the root servers. But, since my local DNS caches as well, at most its eliminating literally a handful of queries every couple of days, so I'm not crushing the root servers with my queries.
If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that wonders why we get such innane commentary along with our story intros, but did CowboyNeal ever stop to think that maybe 20 years ago -- or even *30* years ago -- children played with Legos! One Christmas I got one of those plastic portable "parts bins" and proceeded to ensure all my Legos (from a half-dozen different sets) were all organized and sorted by size and color.
We didn't have mindstorms in the 70s (in fact I don't think even the Tech set that let you build the car with the moving cylinders was around), but we had huge lego sets and a MOTOR set that came with a chunky power chasis and various snap-in wheels and tank tracks. With some creativity you could build powered machines with it, although I found that some of my "old" legos had lost their gripping power and under torque from the motor would sometimes break my contraptions, but hey, ya gotta learn about engineering limitations some day.
Anyway, pull your head out and open your eyes. Its not like you were the first generation to play with mechanical toys, and I can remember seeing family photos from much older kids who had built even cooler stuff with Erector sets and other pre-lego toys.
Are there other queryable DNS servers maintained just by verisign for
Those are the ones that are above board. There was a time when the NSA could tap virtually any conversation they wanted, as they had intercepts between almost all microwave relays. Read "The Puzzle Palace" and be prepared for some interesting stuff.
Elites have been grouping together in these kinds of retreats forever. Bohemian Grove is one of the older ones, although it tends to attract more of an "old money" crowd and I believe is all male as well. Then there's that one out east that Clinton made somewhat well known during his tenure.
All in all, I don't really see why its news. That VCs were there just explains its about figuring out new business schemes under the guise of fun. I guess Tim O'Reilly's presence there somehow adds a sheen of approval over all of it.
As far as camping goes, the most advanced thing I take with is a gas stove. Why the fuck you'd want Wifi or any of the other trappings of city life in the peaceful woods is beyond me.
Plus DLP screens are far less of a maintenance nightmare: the only thing you will ever have to replace is the bulb, and that only once every 3 or 4 years. Plasma screens, on the other hand, are not expected to have a total lifetime of much longer than that.
Bahh, you haven't been paying very much attention. Samsung has had a ton of lamping problems with their DLP sets, and rumor has it they are even replacing the bulbs in them with a new design, requiring a retrofit. (Source: AVSForum).
Furthermore, Sony's newest line of LCD rear projection sets, the Grand Wega IIIs, have had their own spate of lamping problems. There have been widespread failures of the lamping systems (which are compact arc lamps), and Sony's still not 100% sure what the issue is. My first GWIII failed after a week, and there are several others on the AVS Forum who have had theirs fixed and still they don't work right.
I bnought the GWIII because the DLPs were rather harsh with SD content, and the image was overall a little too pixelish -- it FELT like a computer driven display, while the GWIII felt a little more film like to my eyes.
As far as long term reliability once you get past the lamping systems and replacing a couple of $200 bulbs in them, nobody REALLY knows. DLP uses micromirrors, and we don't really know how long those will last. LCD panels won't last forever, either.
As for plasmas longevity, we don't really know what that's like in terms of ordinary TV usage. They feel too fragile for my tastes, but we have two at work used for displaying PowerPoint, and despite the marketing people's use of a solid color logo in the same corner of every page for hours on end, I don't notice any evidence of burn in on them, and they're over 2 years old. The AVS Forum plasma posters seemed to indicate that the anti-plasma noise is much overstated, none noticing any evidence of burn in or other problems.
Anyway, there are no perfect technologies. You just accept the tradeoffs you think are worth it, and hope that spending $3k+ on a TV doesn't make you a fool in 4 years.
You didn't help that much. Sony doesn't make DLPs, and they don't make their signature Grand Wega LCD rear projection sets in 41". Closest is 42". But it is still not a DLP.
That's a good book, even if the structure is a little gimmicky. It kind of reminds me of the movie "Memento" for some reason.
Current DirecTivos directly record the satellite stream to hard disk. They don't have to do any of the "heavy lifting" required to encode the streams, and decoding is handled by the decoder already part of the DirecTivo box used for watching live TV.
A standalone HD Tivo would require component inputs (for broadest compatibility, perhaps an optional DVI connector as well), and require a lot more heavy lifting to encode those streams onto HD. This would in effect require a better computer than they're using now in any standalone HD Tivo. IIRC there aren't any high-volume low-cost HD compression chipsets out there like there are for standard def MPEG2.
If they're around long enough, the new rules requiring access to digital cable in consumer boxes like TVs, VCRs, etc, will enable Tivo to provide a standalone that works as a digital cable capable box. This will enable them to do the same direct stream recording that they do on DirecTivos now, and probably make it possible to do multiple tuner standalones as well.
The issue, though, is time, as I don't expect to see the new digital cable capable devices until 2005 at the earliest, as I think there's some cable head-end compatibility integration, meaning your cable company can drag its feet until 2006 or so.
Yeah, that's right, capitalism is great and protectionism is bad. Unless its bad for business, in which case, we'll call it something else like "protecting intellectual property" or "national security" or even give it a *good* economic/management buzzword like "differential pricing" and conclude thats how markets most efficiently operate, and only terrorists and zealots and pirates and other people that aren't willing to go along with capitalism would disagree.
Well, I disagree. I think some protectionism IS worth it. I like my way of life, and I'm not willing to sacrifice it so the capitalist elite can get bigger bonuses or the pedantic economists can proclaim "more efficient markets".
"More efficient markets" sound great, but that perfect efficiency risks turning us all into faceless cogs of some huge machine, having to justify our every move and every need on the basis of its economic efficiency and benefit to the markets. Yuck.
About 5 years ago one of our Canon color copiers had this restriction built in. IIRC that model would actually generate a page, but the rectangle represented by the currency was all black. Needless to say we wasted a bunch of toner trying various denominations of currency.
Unfortunately we didn't get smart enough to try masking the bills to see which *region* triggered the detection.
The warning printed on the copier mentions securities as well, although nobody had any stock or bond cerftificates to try it with.
When I was a warez kiddie in the 80s, the "state of the art" for Apple ][ computers was an Apple-Cat modem, which in addition to 45.5 Baudot encoding (the TDD standard), also would do asynchronous 1200 baud, and "normal" 1200 baud if you bought an upgrade daughter card.
Nobody I knew had the upgrade card, and virtually no BBS in the early 80s supported 1200 baud anyway (I think a Hayes or Racal 1200 baud modem was like $600 at the time).
The Bell 202 asynchronous 1200 baud mode seemed largely moot until someone figured out how to use it to send entire Apple ][ disks (a whopping 120k)! A program called "DiskFer" or something similar would send an entire floppy disk (sector-copied, useful for full-disk games) over the phone.
Anyway, you kids and your 2400 baud modems sure had it good. Before diskfer or whatever it was called, the only other thing was to go to peoples houses and bring your floppy drive for faster copying action, which seems kind of queer now.
Some companies fail because they have a stupid business model (or none at all), and no amount of business savvy can save them. But some fail because their management is in collective denial about their situation and management strategy.
A hostage negotiator is largely a psychologist, and psychologists are fairly good with people in denial. Get management to snap out of it, realize that their strategy is in need of correction, and in some cases you can save a company that has at least a good idea.
IBM is a corporation whose main reason for existence is to make money and maximize shareholder value. Things like these have absolutely nothing to do with their "support" of free software.
A human's main reason for existence is reproduction and survival. Does that mean that all humans are alike, or is it OK to support some of them (eg, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, $altruistic_leader) and not support others (Hitler, Stalin, $murderous_dictators)?
I think its still OK to support IBM in this endeavor, even if in reality its about a group of powerful rich guys figuring out how to get more rich and powerful; the byproduct of that activity (a good, business-friendly linux desktop) is likely to be of some benefit to everyone given the structure and nature of Linux, particularly based on the way IBM has support Linux to this point.
It's not 100% get IBM shareholders rich and fuck everyone else, it's 100% get IBM shareholders rich and put some of the IBM code back to the community. It's a meaningful distinction.
If this announcement came out of nowhere, people would be saying "huh, a tiny 4Gig MP3 player for $250. That's a pretty good deal."
No, they wouldn't, they'd still be realizing that another $50 buys you a lot more storage.
When I saw the initial Slashdot headline today, I was fully prepared to preorder a mini iPod until I saw the price. $250 puts it in the same price ballpark as the $300 model, and I won't buy one of those because it's just too much money relative to how much use I'd get out of it.
Aren't UNIX jobs historically higher paying than Windows jobs? Even pre-bust, I could get a mildly experienced "windows admin" for $30-40k who could essentially click through the Windows GUI and do basic Windows admin tasks. I wouldn't trust them to do any more than that, but they could do it.
UNIX jobs went for much more 50-60k easily for small installations, and although you had to be careful not to get a piker, they were far more intelligent -- could do scripting, perhaps some basic perl scripts, and often had some basic experience with networking kit.
I'm not sure how the "new economy" has effected unix salaries, but I'd wager the fact that any idiot could and did get an MCSE and would work for $30k is why the staffing costs are so low.
Note to frothing MCSEs: I admin a mixed FreeBSD and Windows environment, and I think there are probably some really smart Windows admins, particularly in large enterprise-class situations. But I do think that most of the low-end smaller office environments have your commodity MCSEs.
Do you know if the calling party info provided with incoming calls on an ISDN PRI is always accurate or right? I've never seen an incoming call on our RAS setup from a blocked or unavailable number -- there is ALWAYS something in that field.
I wonder if "Caller ID block" is something that applies to PRIs, or if its only applies to analog caller ID.
I just wish they'd give us enough money to upgrade our voice switch to use PRI. I'd love to get incoming FAX spam numbers for revenge calls.
It's too big to be functionally portable as a music player. I think even the iPod is on the edge of the sweet spot for size. The MS player is portable in the same way that a 9" color TV is portable. Sure, I can pick it up and move it, but I can't slip it into my pocket for a walk around the lake.
It's too expensive. $700? If I don't care about portability, $700 buys a reasonable used laptop that will play DVDs on a screen that does them some justice (on the airplane at least), has a lot of storage, and is a computer,too. If I'm looking for more portability, I can buy a cheapie portable DVD player *and* an iPod and get better media support and less DRM.
I also don't think video support on portable devices is all that great. Either you sacrifice display size for portability and battery life, making viewing anything painfully annoying, or you end up with a big screen and poor portability and battery life.
Portable video will be great when they get the whole video goggle thing worked out better. I don't know if there is that great of a solution (retinal projection?) really, but when they DO get it worked out there will be a huge jump in demand for portable video.
Really? Why faxes compared to any other phone call with caller id blocked?
Our dialup networking PRI at work always reports a calling party number for inbound calls. In some instances its bogus as it represents an outbound trunk number or some other number you might not immediately associate with the calling party. However, there's a number associated with every incoming call on the PRI, so, depending on what kind of incoming line you have you may get a number whether the calling party tries to hide it or not.
And then there's the phone company, who, if sufficiently motivated, will provide that information for you. I think that even caller-ID masked (ie, anonymous) calls are only anonymous when the phone switch that terminates them to the recipient masks the calling party number. The calling party number is available and tracable by the phone company, I'm guessing its a necessity of operating a phone network.
Where it would get tricky, though, is if the phone lines were paid for by company X, who leased space to company Y, who leased computers and modems to company Z, who did work for company A, and you can never get your hands on the people doing the actual naughty deeds.
I think "running Linux" is an activity, not a state of being.
Of course BSD users have to buildworld from time to time, but it seems like since I switched from Linux a few years ago, I spend less time on the OS and more time actually solving the problem the box was supposed to solve in the first place.
It's probably only a matter of time before remote piloted drones replace a lot of piloted craft. I can see them loading a couple of dozen drones into a B-52 flying high and out of harm's reach. As needed by ground troops, the drones could be dropped and remotely piloted into combat areas faster and a lot less expensively than having to maintain an entire fleet of piloted planes in a combat area.
Innovation isn't key anymore, it's pure market dominance that's the business goal any more. First you lock in your customers to make it difficult to switch vendors, and then you eliminate your competitors so that switching isn't even an option any more. Lock-in and market dominance make it impossible for any new competition to enter the market. Once you've established dominance, just start increasing prices, lowering quality and limiting chocies. Pretty soon you make the smallest number of products at the highest possible price and they HAVE to buy from you.
This is the new goal of business. It used to be "how can I come up with better new products and get them to market", now it's all about manipulating the market itself. I wouldn't be at all surprised it there was an MBA course entry somplace like this:
"Submissive Competition: Maintaining the impression of a competitive market by allowing small competitors. In today's intensely Government regulated business environment, market dominance is often seen as an illegal monopoly. This course will teach you how to control small competitors to keep them from threatening your dominance yet convincing regulators your market space has healthy competition and freeing your business from potentially damaging litigation and regulation."
I wouldn't buy a glass tube HDTV, primarily because you're still viewing interlaced content. They all seem to convert everything to 1080i, although I think some can display 480p. Plus, they're heavy as hell and I think not well made.
In terms of image quality, the Sony LCD rear projections are real winners -- much better picture than anything else, outside of plasma.
I think the "downsides" to plasma and LCD are oversold, too. I don't think under normal viewing conditions plasma is excessively prone to burn in, although there are some questions about longevity that aren't answered by current plasma technology simply because of its newness.
LCD stuck pixels are rarely an issue for sets with multiple panels (R-G-B) at normal viewing distances. You'll find them if you stand 6" away and look for them; at normal viewing distances they're not visible to most people. Backlighting is more easily replaced than you might think for direct view sets, although the lamping issues for RP LCD and DLP sets is still a pretty primitive technology IMHO.
Waiting 2 years if you can might not be a bad strategy, particularly if Intel's push into LCoS actually produces price/performance gains.
I bought a Sony Grand Wega III LCD Rear Projection television this fall. Within a week it had failed, and as I learned on the AVS Forum ("GWIII buzz" thread, still active), many other people have had the same problem.
At the current time nobody knows what's REALLY wrong with these sets, since Sony isn't saying -- their customer service people continue to deny problems and offer the typical scripted responses about unplugging, resetting or "normal" behavior (like degaussing, which an LCD set would never do...).
At this point, there's a service bulletin but at least to forum participants have had the "fix" NOT fix their TVs, and there's a strong (but, of course, unverifiable through Sony) rumor that they have gotten so many returns on this set that they have actually halted production in order to figure out what's wrong.
What's appalling about this is that it's not a $89 VCR or DVD player, but televisions costing as much as $8000 that are failing! It's apparent that the design engineering and reliability testing is nonexistant or is the equivilent of selling the sets as betas to unsuspecting customers in order to figure out what's REALLY going to break on them.
Of course this hasn't prevented them from still selling the sets from production runs known to be rife with problems, denying the problem to customers and failing to inform people about multu-thousand dollar televisions which are like ticking time bombs.
I have a 12 year old Sony Trinitron that still looks as good as the day I got it as an open-box showroom special. I replaced the power supply last summer when it blew out as I knew that I'd never buy another set as well made as this for even 3 times the cost of repair.
Sony used to mean quality, now it seems like its been infected by the crappy US manufacturing standards and business leadership we all know and loathe.