When all is said and done, it would have been 39 years, 754 episodes from 6 series (including the Animated one), and 10 films. Literally about a month's worth of 24/7 viewing.
Alot of ups and downs and I'm sure there will be a 40th anniversary special for next year commemorating the franchise, as they have been doing something like that since the 20th anniversary first-time airing of the B & W version of "The Cage" in 1986.
But did you bother to read the links I posted? This latest issue has been researched for at least a year and was initially brought to light back in August when the loopholes were privately brought to SETI's attention.
The Netherlands has a population of 16,000,000. Roughly the population of Florida. So you actually believe that the highest producing 10 accounts alone on that single team (SETI@NL), some of whom suddenly became new members in October, are legitimately outproducing the ENTIRE combined daily output of the top 5 teams in SETI? So you do not find it unusual that those 10 mentioned produced 65,000 results in a single day? You do the math (there's alot of math done in those threads).
Even the poor SETI@NL Team founder has admitted that there is nothing he can do about them because Founders are given no admin privileges to kick suspicious accounts off a team and the SETI project leaders have never responded to his inquiries about the accounts.
The problem is not "bringing more machines to bear". A big issue has to do with those purposely re-submitting the same, already-processed results, over and over again, without ever having or needing to download a new WU.
Read this thread and this one and do try to follow the links to the graphs showing the suspicious results.
Curious that the screensaver version was used to do this study whereas most places doing benchmarking use the command line interface ("CLI" or text client).
Also one thing that seemed to be missing from this article was reference to Roelof Englebrecht's data, collected over some period of time and posted on his SetiSpy web site here:
http://pages.tca.net/roelof/setispy/
Roelof and TLC's Max, are both the keepers of the TLC benchmark database and Roelof checks each and every submission to ensure that the data isn't corrupted somehow due to an unstable overclock.
In addition, I currently run the text client in WINE on my Red Hat 6.2 as standard practice and have submitted data to the TLC page for it. It runs just fine and in fact runs the WU FASTER (whether using the -win95 switch or the -nt40 switch) than either native winblows version when run on the same system via dual boot.
Well...   since everyone is "outing" themselves... hee hee.. might as well join the club.
Yes, I'm a geek lady and one in a management position as well.   I think that the times, they are a-changing, and for those who aren't aware (although based on most of the comments here, people ARE aware), alot of those old "keypunch" operators and data-processing clerks (traditionally the "female" IT occupations) have made the leap to higher tech....
When I was going through college in the late '70s-early '80s, the Computer Science departments were just forming.   Most of the folks who I knew were interested in a career in computers, were electrical or mechanical engineers who might have taken some programming classes in COBOL or Fortran...   Otherwise, folks learned on the job.
Funny how times have changed....  for *everyone*!
You'll probably be able to find a EV56 machine for around $2000.
I recently purchased a DEC Alpha DPW 433au (EV56 21164a/Miata mobo) from egghead.com for US$1,199.   They recently had them avail. for US$1,049 (I just checked and I don't see it anymore... they only had 4 left and they may have been snapped up).
What is impossible to find is a place that will sell you just a motherboard or just an Alpha.
Amen!   Although I've seen more places that will sell the mobo and parts like E.L.I or other places that will sell you "inexpensive" (in quotes - although considering, the prices aren't too bad) systems, like DCG, but other than those, it has been a pain trying to find an upgrade processor for less than I paid for the whole system!
I still like my little alpha though...   heh heh.
Linux doesn't scale well enough, at least not yet.
Ummm...   is not a S/390 IBM mainframe running Linux a pretty damn big scale of an OS?   I patiently await the day MS runs an OS on a mainframe.
If you go here and do a search in the bottom frame, for "alpha", you'll see some of the $3000 models listed as being available!
I still want to actually build my own Alpha... as the Penguin-Ferrari article points out, we need diversity, and anyway I like messing with different stuff. Anybody know of more recent articles, or have personal experiences to offer?
I bought a refurbished Alpha Digital Alpha Workstation 433au (21164 version, either EV5 or EV56) from egghead.com for US$1,199 a couple of weeks ago.   It just came in last week and it's up and running Red Hat 6.2 for alpha, kernel 2.2.14-6.0.   The box (without monitor and keyboard) came with a 433Mhz alpha CPU, 128MB RAM, 2MB cache, an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller, 2.1GB Seagate SCSI drive, 12X CDROM, Intergraph video card (and something with Cirrus Logic video too), built-in EtherWorks ethernet, and built-in SB-compatible sound.   It also has 2 64-bit slots and 2, shared ISA/PCI slots.   It's one of the older boxes (circa '96-'97), but it's processing seti@home work units (non-optimized) at around the same speed as a PIII 450.   One of the main reasons why I bought it was because it is upgradeable to a 600Mhz 21164 processor (although I am finding that the CPU alone is exorbitant and I would do better buying a mobo w/CPU and memory!).
During my difficult search for any alpha info, including parts (I am realizing how little is written about alphas as compared to x86s), I stumbled upon this site that sells DEC Alpha hardware (and others like Sun), and they have a link here called "Build Your Own Alpha System", where they list the various parts you can purchase separately to put a system together.   There are a few other places out there too, but I don't have the links handy.
I would say go for it - I've seen prices for 500-600MHz alpha mobos, w/64MB RAM for like $1500.
All in all, this is my first non-intel (or non-intel compatible) machine and it's been a really decent learning experience dealing with the Penguin on the 'ole Ferrari!
Please mention the "Navy Ship Dead In The Water" stuff earlier in your comment, so those of us who know about that little canard can stop reading your uninformed BS right away and not be halfway through your little tome before we discover you're merely another zealot parroting folklore.
In the Star Trek universe, hasn't money been obsoleted on Earth, and can't people teleport to work? At which point all those San Francisco dotcoms become meaningless or don't need to locate anywhere in particular or both and all of a sudden there's a lot of available real estate there. : )
Yeah but that took some time to happen!   We gotta start building Star Fleet Academy by the bay and the UFP Headquarters in Paris now!   Then we'll discuss obsoleting the money (once we build the Daystrom institute so that we can work on transporters and replicators before WW III so that Zephrem Cochran can invent his warp drive and do a flight in April 2061 to catch the attention of the Vulcans)!   Hell... we got alot of work to do and those damn dot coms are in the way!
Yet again another attempt at anti-MS FUD from the rabid Linux zealots of/. I hear all of this anecdotal "evidence" of how Windows machines crash every half hour, yet in my experiance this is simply not true.
This is a true story.   I walked into my office this morning and discovered a PDC with the BSOD.   Fortunately a reboot "fixed" (in quotes) it.   A second machine within the same domain also had the BSOD.   That didn't fare as well and I had to waste my day reinstalling it and the backup software, blah.   This isn't some "anecdotal evidence".   This is a fact.
Yes, it can crash, but this generally occurs with poorly written software that doesn't conform to MS guidelines or when the OS has been setup incorrectly.
I can see "poorly written software" possibly causing problems but with all of the "undocumented features", how can a developer really code software using these so-called "Microsoft guidelines"?.   And what does "or when the OS has been setup incorrectly" mean?  If you go through the default install of NT 4.0, put on the latest service packs, keep ALL screen saver activity off the console, configure the video at the undocumented recommended resolution of 640x480 16 colors - WTF else is there to configure?
I think we've all seen enough on these/. pages from burnt-out sysadmins who are SICK of this crap.   Especially if you have a different OS on older hardware, sitting side by side with it, with all kinds of stuff loaded, and it can achieve uptimes in the hundreds of days!
We're not making this up to spit on MS.   The day they produce a product as stable as DOS 5.0 (which I had running on a 486/33 for 8 years WITHOUT having to reinstall it), then I will buy it.   Otherwise, I hope the judge sticks it to 'em!
(Has anyone confirmed that you can, in fact, get them there without the service being activated?)
A buddy of mine bought his at CC right around the time the first article came out and it just got delivered a little over a week ago.  No muss, no fuss, no activation fee.   If I'm not mistaken, i-openers bought from CC would need to be "manually" activated, ie., you call or dial in to sign up.
Actually, that might be true for the desktop PCs (strange integrated sound chips, winmodems etc.)
Not true!   I have *3* Compaq Presarios:
Presario 4508 running Red Hat 5.2
Presario 5070, running Mandrake 6.5
Presario 1267 notebook, running SuSE 6.3
I also have a Presario 5360 running NetBSD 1.4.1.   I might recommend you avoid the Deskpros (which are "more" proprietary) but the Presarios make great Linux boxen!   The sound on these babies are ESSs (either 1688/89s, 1868/69s, Solo-1), the videos are generally SiS 530s (notebook is a Neomagic 128XD).
I researched this (the hardware support) last summer, when I worked with installing Compaq Proliant servers in a pretty NT-only IT department. I wanted to know if there was a good technical reason why I couldn't put Linux on these nice machines. It turned out that there wasn't. It was just political...
It is political! -)   At work, I have a Compaq Proliant 6000, dual PII/200 w/256MB RAM and 5, 9.1GB hot swaps (2 in RAID0 and 3 in RAID5) running HAPPILY with a SmartArray SCSI controller on Red Hat 6.1 using the 2.2.12-20 SMP kernel (and SMP works just fine thank you)!
And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true!:)
And I was gonna point out NASA's Beowulf cluster but then you'd say... ohhhhh...   fsck it! -)
Actually want to make a point that hasn't been touched here yet and that is this:   Remember learning in U.S. History about what happened, oh...   around 1849 in San Fran?   A little thing called the "gold rush"?   Looks like we're seeing a repeat in history here some 150 years later...
And for those who are new to that area and/or are considering the latest dot com gold rush, remember that the last sortof big earthquake occurred when? In 1989?   And they're looonnngggg overdue.   I remember watching the World Series when Candlestick Park (OOPPPSSS!!!   WRONG NAME!   Ahem.   "3COM Park", I believe it was later called) was literally being shaken apart.   If you like San Andreas fault living, be my guest.   Zico and me will stick with the Linux-caused hurricaines and blizzards and tornadoes on the east coast!
And by the way, regarding the real estate there?   ALL that stuff has to go - the Presidio included.   I mean come on.   How the hell can they start building Star Fleet Academy with those damn dot coms in the way, huh?   Let's start moving to the REAL technology!
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
This is an interesting comment that is true.   Although where I work has gone for the "cheaper" 3COM router solution, most everywhere has forked up the $$$ to buy Cisco products.
It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
I think the issue alot of us (and Judge Jackson) had with Microsoft as a monopoly was not so much its marketshare (which it's had for some time on the desktop) but its business practices.   And this included forcing the "bundling" of their software on every PC sold (although for awhile, there wasn't much choice other than OS/2 or maybe Be or some of the smaller OSs), blah, blah, I think everyone by now knows the story.
If Cisco shows it has its marketshare based on a quality (albeit expensive) product and people buy it, then what can you say?
Nope. "One", i.e. Microsoft, didn't "port all the standard command line utilities to NT, clone one or two of the popular shells, set up the directory structure in the standard UNIX layout and call it Microsoft UNIX",
Heh heh.   I was wondering how long it would take before someone caught that.   Xenix came out way before NT.
time to face the facts. every media industry that has boomed thus far has only boomed because of advertising. without advertising things don't get noticed, or they loose all financial backing. before advertising came in the web was still crawling around in diapers but since avertising has came in the internet has boomed reaching more people then it could ever have on it's own.
I think this is a given.   In order to "get noticed" to sell a product or service, a company needs to advertise.   My complaint is not so much companies advertising, but doing a "me too" by making a big production out of being "dot com" companies as well - and this is in reference to many of your "traditional" companies who have been pressured to become a "dot com".   And the straw that breaks the camel's back is the media's obsessive reporting on the whole "dot com" phenomena.   So what you basically get is advertising + media reports == more (now free) advertising which means overkill.
Last night, I heard a "personal business" report on an all-news station which described some "ecommerce" (sigh... more "e"s) local shopping portal site and how they plan to expand to include more stores to choose from.   Now unless this particular web site (which is a commercial business) happened to have paid for the fact that they were featured in this brief report, what did they get?   Free advertising!   And from an all-news station that presented this thing as if it was some kind of "community affairs" or "for your information" type thing.   Previously, these kinds of things reported on non-profits and maybe what they were doing in the business world or they reported on market trends or gave advise on stocks or business ventures, etc.   But to feature a web site (again unless it was really a paid-for infomercial rather than a report) as a "report" is downright misleading!
oh and btw anyone ever think about the fact that the com in XXXXXX.com means commerce?
San Francisco is the hideous mega-capital of obnoxious real-world advertising. We have flatbed trucks with billboards mounted in the back, whose sole purpose is to drive around town showing a giant ad for some lame web "business".
We've got those and the barges in Philly too.   First time I saw one of those flatbed truck signs was a couple of years ago.   I thought it was just one company's unique way of advertising.   Then I kept seeing them and seeing them and cursed having to drive behind one too!   Please don't forget the small planes dragging a banner through the sky with some "dot com" on it and I've even seen some sky-writers spell out "dot com" companies as an ad! (true).
Alot of this sort of thing started when alot of cities started banning billboards in residential neighborhoods, so the advertisers "took their show on the road" so to speak.
One thing that's interesting is the massive increase in radio advertising for these "dot coms".   Probably 3/4 of the ads I hear on all-news stations are either for "computerjobs.com" or some other "tech-relatedindustry.com".
And I know that tech and businesses on the internet have brought an amazing amount of jobs and wealth but I'd like to see the field mature a bit, without all the hype.   Okay, it's here, so lets move on.   JMHO.
And to drive this point home, I just ran out to the store to pick up a few items and happened to glance at the 3/27 issue of Time magazine.   Guess what's on the front cover?   Stephen King, his face and upper torso as a picture on a computer monitor, with his hand reaching out of it to a keyboard directly in front.
Front cover title of this journalistic brilliance?   "'icandoit.com' and you can too".
I live in Philly - whoever has those "anti-dot com" materials that the article mentioned were going to be handed out here on the east coast - PLEASE GET THEM HERE FAST!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
All the fanboys have moved on to that new Battlestar Galactica.
You mean the sickos who have moved to that.
Linux!
Very true!
When all is said and done, it would have been 39 years, 754 episodes from 6 series (including the Animated one), and 10 films. Literally about a month's worth of 24/7 viewing.
Alot of ups and downs and I'm sure there will be a 40th anniversary special for next year commemorating the franchise, as they have been doing something like that since the 20th anniversary first-time airing of the B & W version of "The Cage" in 1986.
Time to warp off into the sunset...
ROTFLMAO!! I can't believe someone did a website of that! :-P
But did you bother to read the links I posted? This latest issue has been researched for at least a year and was initially brought to light back in August when the loopholes were privately brought to SETI's attention.
The Netherlands has a population of 16,000,000. Roughly the population of Florida. So you actually believe that the highest producing 10 accounts alone on that single team (SETI@NL), some of whom suddenly became new members in October, are legitimately outproducing the ENTIRE combined daily output of the top 5 teams in SETI? So you do not find it unusual that those 10 mentioned produced 65,000 results in a single day? You do the math (there's alot of math done in those threads).
Even the poor SETI@NL Team founder has admitted that there is nothing he can do about them because Founders are given no admin privileges to kick suspicious accounts off a team and the SETI project leaders have never responded to his inquiries about the accounts.
The problem is not "bringing more machines to bear". A big issue has to do with those purposely re-submitting the same, already-processed results, over and over again, without ever having or needing to download a new WU.
Read this thread and this one and do try to follow the links to the graphs showing the suspicious results.
And do sign the petition against cheating here.
You may sign here if you agree!
http://www.teamprimerib.com/seti/
Also one thing that seemed to be missing from this article was reference to Roelof Englebrecht's data, collected over some period of time and posted on his SetiSpy web site here:
http://pages.tca.net/roelof/setispy/
Roelof and TLC's Max, are both the keepers of the TLC benchmark database and Roelof checks each and every submission to ensure that the data isn't corrupted somehow due to an unstable overclock.
In addition, I currently run the text client in WINE on my Red Hat 6.2 as standard practice and have submitted data to the TLC page for it. It runs just fine and in fact runs the WU FASTER (whether using the -win95 switch or the -nt40 switch) than either native winblows version when run on the same system via dual boot.
Well...   since everyone is "outing" themselves... hee hee.. might as well join the club.
Yes, I'm a geek lady and one in a management position as well.   I think that the times, they are a-changing, and for those who aren't aware (although based on most of the comments here, people ARE aware), alot of those old "keypunch" operators and data-processing clerks (traditionally the "female" IT occupations) have made the leap to higher tech....
When I was going through college in the late '70s-early '80s, the Computer Science departments were just forming.   Most of the folks who I knew were interested in a career in computers, were electrical or mechanical engineers who might have taken some programming classes in COBOL or Fortran...   Otherwise, folks learned on the job.
Funny how times have changed....  for *everyone*!
You'll probably be able to find a EV56 machine for around $2000.
I recently purchased a DEC Alpha DPW 433au (EV56 21164a/Miata mobo) from egghead.com for US$1,199.   They recently had them avail. for US$1,049 (I just checked and I don't see it anymore... they only had 4 left and they may have been snapped up).
What is impossible to find is a place that will sell you just a motherboard or just an Alpha.
Amen!   Although I've seen more places that will sell the mobo and parts like E.L.I or other places that will sell you "inexpensive" (in quotes - although considering, the prices aren't too bad) systems, like DCG, but other than those, it has been a pain trying to find an upgrade processor for less than I paid for the whole system!
I still like my little alpha though...   heh heh.
Linux doesn't scale well enough, at least not yet.
Ummm...   is not a S/390 IBM mainframe running Linux a pretty damn big scale of an OS?   I patiently await the day MS runs an OS on a mainframe.
Cool! Where do I find the -$3500 deal? ;-)
;-)
If you go here and do a search in the bottom frame, for "alpha", you'll see some of the $3000 models listed as being available!
I still want to actually build my own Alpha... as the Penguin-Ferrari article points out, we need diversity, and anyway I like messing with different stuff. Anybody know of more recent articles, or have personal experiences to offer?
I bought a refurbished Alpha Digital Alpha Workstation 433au (21164 version, either EV5 or EV56) from egghead.com for US$1,199 a couple of weeks ago.   It just came in last week and it's up and running Red Hat 6.2 for alpha, kernel 2.2.14-6.0.   The box (without monitor and keyboard) came with a 433Mhz alpha CPU, 128MB RAM, 2MB cache, an Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller, 2.1GB Seagate SCSI drive, 12X CDROM, Intergraph video card (and something with Cirrus Logic video too), built-in EtherWorks ethernet, and built-in SB-compatible sound.   It also has 2 64-bit slots and 2, shared ISA/PCI slots.   It's one of the older boxes (circa '96-'97), but it's processing seti@home work units (non-optimized) at around the same speed as a PIII 450.   One of the main reasons why I bought it was because it is upgradeable to a 600Mhz 21164 processor (although I am finding that the CPU alone is exorbitant and I would do better buying a mobo w/CPU and memory!).
During my difficult search for any alpha info, including parts (I am realizing how little is written about alphas as compared to x86s), I stumbled upon this site that sells DEC Alpha hardware (and others like Sun), and they have a link here called "Build Your Own Alpha System", where they list the various parts you can purchase separately to put a system together.   There are a few other places out there too, but I don't have the links handy.
I would say go for it - I've seen prices for 500-600MHz alpha mobos, w/64MB RAM for like $1500.
All in all, this is my first non-intel (or non-intel compatible) machine and it's been a really decent learning experience dealing with the Penguin on the 'ole Ferrari!
Please mention the "Navy Ship Dead In The Water" stuff earlier in your comment, so those of us who know about that little canard can stop reading your uninformed BS right away and not be halfway through your little tome before we discover you're merely another zealot parroting folklore.
;-)
"Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water"
Read this article for yourself from the Government Computer News archives and decide the "folklore value" for yourself!
In the Star Trek universe, hasn't money been obsoleted on Earth, and can't people teleport to work? At which point all those San Francisco dotcoms become meaningless or don't need to locate anywhere in particular or both and all of a sudden there's a lot of available real estate there. : )
;-)
Yeah but that took some time to happen!   We gotta start building Star Fleet Academy by the bay and the UFP Headquarters in Paris now!   Then we'll discuss obsoleting the money (once we build the Daystrom institute so that we can work on transporters and replicators before WW III so that Zephrem Cochran can invent his warp drive and do a flight in April 2061 to catch the attention of the Vulcans)!   Hell... we got alot of work to do and those damn dot coms are in the way!
I guess I should post this at (Score:0 Offtopic)
Yet again another attempt at anti-MS FUD from the rabid Linux zealots of /. I hear all of this anecdotal "evidence" of how Windows machines crash every half hour, yet in my experiance this is simply not true.
/. pages from burnt-out sysadmins who are SICK of this crap.   Especially if you have a different OS on older hardware, sitting side by side with it, with all kinds of stuff loaded, and it can achieve uptimes in the hundreds of days!
This is a true story.   I walked into my office this morning and discovered a PDC with the BSOD.   Fortunately a reboot "fixed" (in quotes) it.   A second machine within the same domain also had the BSOD.   That didn't fare as well and I had to waste my day reinstalling it and the backup software, blah.   This isn't some "anecdotal evidence".   This is a fact.
Yes, it can crash, but this generally occurs with poorly written software that doesn't conform to MS guidelines or when the OS has been setup incorrectly.
I can see "poorly written software" possibly causing problems but with all of the "undocumented features", how can a developer really code software using these so-called "Microsoft guidelines"?.   And what does "or when the OS has been setup incorrectly" mean?  If you go through the default install of NT 4.0, put on the latest service packs, keep ALL screen saver activity off the console, configure the video at the undocumented recommended resolution of 640x480 16 colors - WTF else is there to configure?
I think we've all seen enough on these
We're not making this up to spit on MS.   The day they produce a product as stable as DOS 5.0 (which I had running on a 486/33 for 8 years WITHOUT having to reinstall it), then I will buy it.   Otherwise, I hope the judge sticks it to 'em!
JMHO.
(Has anyone confirmed that you can, in fact, get them there without the service being activated?)
A buddy of mine bought his at CC right around the time the first article came out and it just got delivered a little over a week ago.  No muss, no fuss, no activation fee.   If I'm not mistaken, i-openers bought from CC would need to be "manually" activated, ie., you call or dial in to sign up.
Not true!   I have *3* Compaq Presarios:
- Presario 4508 running Red Hat 5.2
- Presario 5070, running Mandrake 6.5
- Presario 1267 notebook, running SuSE 6.3
I also have a Presario 5360 running NetBSD 1.4.1.   I might recommend you avoid the Deskpros (which are "more" proprietary) but the Presarios make great Linux boxen!   The sound on these babies are ESSs (either 1688/89s, 1868/69s, Solo-1), the videos are generally SiS 530s (notebook is a Neomagic 128XD).I researched this (the hardware support) last summer, when I worked with installing Compaq Proliant servers in a pretty NT-only IT department. I wanted to know if there was a good technical reason why I couldn't put Linux on these nice machines. It turned out that there wasn't. It was just political...
It is political!  
Go for it folks - works fine.
And to JDax, since I didn't get a chance to reply last night: Hell, I wasn't going to blame Linux for bad weather forecasting, I was going to blame it for the bad weather itself! Global warming, the recent spate of droughts, floods, and natural disasters: all can be traced back to Torvalds and Cox. It's true! :)
;-)
;-)
And I was gonna point out NASA's Beowulf cluster but then you'd say... ohhhhh...   fsck it!  
Actually want to make a point that hasn't been touched here yet and that is this:   Remember learning in U.S. History about what happened, oh...   around 1849 in San Fran?   A little thing called the "gold rush"?   Looks like we're seeing a repeat in history here some 150 years later...
And for those who are new to that area and/or are considering the latest dot com gold rush, remember that the last sortof big earthquake occurred when? In 1989?   And they're looonnngggg overdue.   I remember watching the World Series when Candlestick Park (OOPPPSSS!!!   WRONG NAME!   Ahem.   "3COM Park", I believe it was later called) was literally being shaken apart.   If you like San Andreas fault living, be my guest.   Zico and me will stick with the Linux-caused hurricaines and blizzards and tornadoes on the east coast!
And by the way, regarding the real estate there?   ALL that stuff has to go - the Presidio included.   I mean come on.   How the hell can they start building Star Fleet Academy with those damn dot coms in the way, huh?   Let's start moving to the REAL technology!
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
This is an interesting comment that is true.   Although where I work has gone for the "cheaper" 3COM router solution, most everywhere has forked up the $$$ to buy Cisco products.
It is not obvious to me whether or not the monopoly is harmfull in this case. Cisco, I understand, actually makes good products. But is that any consolation when they can lock out competition, charge arbitrary prices, and in the future stop making good products because, like MS, they don't _need_ to make good products, just new ones. As of yet most of this hasn't come to pass, but it is a possibility as it is with any monopoly.
I think the issue alot of us (and Judge Jackson) had with Microsoft as a monopoly was not so much its marketshare (which it's had for some time on the desktop) but its business practices.   And this included forcing the "bundling" of their software on every PC sold (although for awhile, there wasn't much choice other than OS/2 or maybe Be or some of the smaller OSs), blah, blah, I think everyone by now knows the story.
If Cisco shows it has its marketshare based on a quality (albeit expensive) product and people buy it, then what can you say?
Nope. "One", i.e. Microsoft, didn't "port all the standard command line utilities to NT, clone one or two of the popular shells, set up the directory structure in the standard UNIX layout and call it Microsoft UNIX",
;-)
Heh heh.   I was wondering how long it would take before someone caught that.   Xenix came out way before NT.
time to face the facts. every media industry that has boomed thus far has only boomed because of advertising. without advertising things don't get noticed, or they loose all financial backing. before advertising came in the web was still crawling around in diapers but since avertising has came in the internet has boomed reaching more people then it could ever have on it's own.
;-)
I think this is a given.   In order to "get noticed" to sell a product or service, a company needs to advertise.   My complaint is not so much companies advertising, but doing a "me too" by making a big production out of being "dot com" companies as well - and this is in reference to many of your "traditional" companies who have been pressured to become a "dot com".   And the straw that breaks the camel's back is the media's obsessive reporting on the whole "dot com" phenomena.   So what you basically get is advertising + media reports == more (now free) advertising which means overkill.
Last night, I heard a "personal business" report on an all-news station which described some "ecommerce" (sigh... more "e"s) local shopping portal site and how they plan to expand to include more stores to choose from.   Now unless this particular web site (which is a commercial business) happened to have paid for the fact that they were featured in this brief report, what did they get?   Free advertising!   And from an all-news station that presented this thing as if it was some kind of "community affairs" or "for your information" type thing.   Previously, these kinds of things reported on non-profits and maybe what they were doing in the business world or they reported on market trends or gave advise on stocks or business ventures, etc.   But to feature a web site (again unless it was really a paid-for infomercial rather than a report) as a "report" is downright misleading!
oh and btw anyone ever think about the fact that the com in XXXXXX.com means commerce?
I thought it meant "commercial"...
San Francisco is the hideous mega-capital of obnoxious real-world advertising. We have flatbed trucks with billboards mounted in the back, whose sole purpose is to drive around town showing a giant ad for some lame web "business".
We've got those and the barges in Philly too.   First time I saw one of those flatbed truck signs was a couple of years ago.   I thought it was just one company's unique way of advertising.   Then I kept seeing them and seeing them and cursed having to drive behind one too!   Please don't forget the small planes dragging a banner through the sky with some "dot com" on it and I've even seen some sky-writers spell out "dot com" companies as an ad! (true).
Alot of this sort of thing started when alot of cities started banning billboards in residential neighborhoods, so the advertisers "took their show on the road" so to speak.
One thing that's interesting is the massive increase in radio advertising for these "dot coms".   Probably 3/4 of the ads I hear on all-news stations are either for "computerjobs.com" or some other "tech-relatedindustry.com".
And I know that tech and businesses on the internet have brought an amazing amount of jobs and wealth but I'd like to see the field mature a bit, without all the hype.   Okay, it's here, so lets move on.   JMHO.
andicantwaittillitsover.com
And to drive this point home, I just ran out to the store to pick up a few items and happened to glance at the 3/27 issue of Time magazine.   Guess what's on the front cover?   Stephen King, his face and upper torso as a picture on a computer monitor, with his hand reaching out of it to a keyboard directly in front.
Front cover title of this journalistic brilliance?   "'icandoit.com' and you can too".
I live in Philly - whoever has those "anti-dot com" materials that the article mentioned were going to be handed out here on the east coast - PLEASE GET THEM HERE FAST!!!!
andicantwaittillitsover.com