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User: walt-sjc

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  1. Re:Insane on Ballmer Says Google's Growth Is 'Insane' · · Score: 4, Insightful

    True.

    Balmer: "I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value."

    Microsoft's Arno Edlemann: "Usually Microsoft doesn't develop products, we buy products."

    It's pretty clear that MS doesn't really understand what "Innovation" really is, and how to do it. In the long term, this will bite them in the ass. Continuing their abusive and illegal behavior to maintain their de facto monopoly is their only hope of long-term survival, and they know it.

  2. Re:Best Feature Evar on Exec Confirms Google Phone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If I'm on the go and in the mood for Pizza, it would be cool to not only find a pizza place and order (like Jobs with the iphone / starbucks demo), but if google displayed a couple ads from the nearest pizza place that showed the specials, or offered me a 10% discount, then it would be worth it.

    IMHO, I would like to see some kind of WiMAX / VoIP phone come to market. The traditional cell phone market / technology sucks. For metropolitan areas, this should be viable. If I'm in the middle of nowhere, I can always use one of the prepaid phones, and setup my voip service to forward to it if my gPhone is not reachable (or maybe the gPhone falls back to old-GSM mode...)

  3. Re:Just wait.. on Enormous Amount of Frozen Water Found on Mars · · Score: 1

    Haven't you heard? Total Recall is a real documentary of the future. We just need to Send Arnold in to activate the alien device which will melt all that ice and we can all be breathing on Mars within minutes!!!

  4. Re:Now if only on Dresses Made from Wine · · Score: 1

    Well, obviously it's a zombie cavewoman dude from the deep. Duh!

  5. Re:It Won't Go Anywhere on Dresses Made from Wine · · Score: 1

    Actually, you send the good stuff too. Australian wine has become very good, and frequently ends up being much better than a lot of the wine coming out of California, for a LOT less. I just say Kudos, and keep it up :-)

  6. Re:Screenshots, who cares? on First Look at RHEL 5 - From the New, More Open Red Hat · · Score: 1

    Um, most of us in this situation ssh -Y into the machine and use the X server on our desktops... You don't run your servers headless????

  7. Re:Screenshots, who cares? on First Look at RHEL 5 - From the New, More Open Red Hat · · Score: 1

    Why? Having trouble with an extremely simplistic regex? If you can't handle a simple regex, then you better stick to Excel macros Bill, because just about every single language uses them now.

    Sheesh.

  8. Re:Any reason to switch? on First Look at RHEL 5 - From the New, More Open Red Hat · · Score: 1

    The downside is that RHEL tends to get stale quickly, much like old versions of Debian. RHEL4 has very old php, perl, python, mysql, etc. If you install modern web applications, RHEL frequently does not meet the minimum requirements. What RHEL really works well for is installing applications that just run and run, that don't need updating frequently. Unfortunately, we live in a world where you you usually NEED to upgrade applications due to vulnerabilities that have been found in old versions of software. RH takes care of core code, but if you are running a third party app, you may find that the "fixed" version no longer supports ancient libraries in RHEL. It can makes things difficult if you are not prepared to deal with it...

  9. Re:Unlimited "Broadband"? on Unlimited Wireless Plans Coming · · Score: 1

    In the US, anything faster than a 56K modem is referred to as "broadband". A tragedy, I know...

  10. Re:Hopefully Cingular will follow on Unlimited Wireless Plans Coming · · Score: 1

    I know people who send summaries of their email to their phones as text messages. It's EASY to exceed 65 / day that way. Stupid I know, but... Way back when, I used to use a Motorola SkyWriter two-way pager for this. Today it would make a LOT more sense to use a smartphone with data plan. Great for "on call" techs.

  11. Re:I pay on Unlimited Wireless Plans Coming · · Score: 1

    Sweden is roughly the size of Montana and has 10 times the population. The problem in the US is that it is large, with sparse population except for a small number of large cities. In the large cities, there are a plethora of Cellphone companies and you can get pretty inexpensive plans. If you travel and want a national plan, you are screwed. That, and broadband service is limited to major metro areas at best. This probably won't change anytime soon.

  12. Re:and how many people will wreck their finances t on Unlimited Wireless Plans Coming · · Score: 1

    You guys have this all wrong. Have work pay for it. Problem solved...

  13. Re:Wow! on Is Computer Science Dead? · · Score: 1

    According to several dictionaries, you are wrong. Sorry.

  14. Re:Please: on Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube for $1 Billion · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The dollar amount means NOTHING. They could have said $50,000,000 or $500,000,000,000 - the end result will be exactly the same, which will probably be that Google and Viacom will come to an agreement that google will do more to keep individuals from posting Viacom's crap, and Viacom gets to upload their crap to YouTube and stick advertising in it or offer it for sale (ala iTMS).

  15. Re:Please: on Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube for $1 Billion · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This move by Viacom is just a negotiating tactic, much like Cisco's against Apple over the iPhone name. Nothing to see here... Move Along...

  16. Re:Maybe not.. on International URLs Pass First Test · · Score: 1

    Considering a lot of email is text, the inability to handle a character set may make it impossible for some people to email you if you have non-ascii characters in your address. Even people in your own country may have trouble. Not everyone uses the Outlook / Exchange combo...

  17. Re:Wow! on Is Computer Science Dead? · · Score: 1

    What you said is so true. When "programmers" do research in order to find new and better ways of doing things, or solving problems that have not been solved, it's "science." It may not by physics or chemistry, but it's still science. I would bet that most programmers are doing a little bit of science every day. Sometimes, it's a lot.

    All in all, the FA is silly. All the problems in the world have not been solved, and may of the tools currently in use - suck.

    While modern applications and operating systems are better in many ways than they were 10 - 20 years ago, they have a HUGE opportunity for improvement. That's not going to go away, and as the electronics behind the applications get better and more capable, we can solve problems in different ways. In other words, it is HIGHLY doubtful that computer science as a profession will go away anytime soon.

    Maybe one of the reasons that there is a drop in students is because the basic curriculum out there in most universities today is BORING and outdated. Give the students REAL WORLD problems to solve for a change - make the core classes more interesting. It's hard to hire CS grads today because they are not being taught what businesses need, meaning YEARS of additional on the job training is required (which translates to crappy starting wages.)

  18. Re:Is this like satellite internet? on TV Airwaves To Deliver Internet? · · Score: 1

    As I understand it (and I may be wrong) it's different in the frequencies used, and the fact that it automatically uses a wide band of frequencies, detecting which frequencies are already in use by television stations so that it doesn't interfere with them. TV frequencies are great as the lower frequency signal goes through obstacles better than high-frequency bands (walls, trees, etc.)

  19. Re:Is it worth it? on Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It? · · Score: 2, Informative

    The "lost productivity" line is nebulous at best - his activity was redirected from other projects, for sure, but the deadlines on those projects remained the same. If those projects were important and had tight deadlines, Bill would have not been moved to DST work, and the people impacted would have been warned to update their clocks manually...

    I think you underestimate just how large / bad the problem was/is. In larger companies it is a huge effort. You seem to think that deadlines for other projects were not changed, or that "Bill" simply has to work more hours. Nothing can be further from the truth. Maybe in your company where management doesn't track what their employees are doing and the status of their projects, but not here.

    It wasn't just OS patches, but many many applications, network devices / appliances, etc. had to be patched too. Some legacy systems were worse as their as were no patches, so systems had to be updated manually. Some are just plain broken and there is no workaround. In larger companies, this usually means that many teams from many departments were involved. It wasn't just a "oh yeah, gotta change the time early" thing, it was a coordinated, planned effort, with testing, documentation, etc.

  20. Re:Is it worth it? on Is Daylight Saving Shift Really Worth It? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unofficial estimates claim that costs due to the DST change well exceed a billion dollars TODAY which is more than the theoretical energy savings added up over 10 years. The cost is real and immediately incurred. The savings is nebulous and not guaranteed. Even 5 year old kid math can figure this one out. Imagine if we spent that billion dollars on alternative energy research, or energy conservation efforts - we would end up saving a LOT more money and energy than any fucking stupid DST change could have. The DST change cost my company alone well over $100K in direct costs and lost productivity. Considering what our company went through, I hate to think of what fortune 1000 companies spent - I would assume that it would be in the millions for a good number of them.

  21. Re:Samba is cool, but a NetApp is better... on Samba Success in the Enterprise? · · Score: 1

    Netapps today are far beyond where they were 5 and 10 years ago. It's truly enterprise class storage, with enterprise features and performance. You don't get those features with a Linux box and a big RAID array attached acting as a file server.

  22. Re:Samba is cool, but a NetApp is better... on Samba Success in the Enterprise? · · Score: 1

    I have to "Ditto" the NetApp's.

    Everyone else's "snapshot" solutions are total crap compared to NetApp's. EMC? Way more expensive, slower, more complicated for no reason, and snapshots suck (we have both EMC and NetApp.)

    But yeah, they are expensive. Samba works great too, and is used by hundreds of Windows clients to access 15T of data on the EMC. The only downtime is to install security patches. Samba is WAY less expensive than EMC's NAS, and way easier to configure.

  23. Re:Accountable? on Audit Finds FBI Abused Patriot Act · · Score: 1

    I'm all for giving people a second chance to redeem themselves, and everyone makes mistakes, but our civil liberties are at stake here. I would rather see him and everyone else involved go.

  24. Re:What are the chances... on Audit Finds FBI Abused Patriot Act · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The difference is "intent". Intent plays a large part in many of the criminal laws. For example - did you lose control over your car and accidentally kill a pedestrian on the sidewalk or did you intend to mow them down in a fit of rage...

    Of course intent isn't everything, and being ignorant of laws doesn't always protect you from the consequences either.

    If anything at all comes out of this, it will be limited to discussion and that's about it. MAYBE it will get a few congressmen hot under the collar and debate the merits and abuses of the unPatriotic Act. I seriously doubt any repealing or scaling back will happen however.

  25. Re:Let the phone die already on What are the Best Cell Phone Services in the US? · · Score: 1

    It would be nice if people figured out that you don't to yell into your phone in order for people to hear you.