I was at the last winter conference in Orlando. I would guess the median age of the attendees was somewhere around 40. There's a LOT of Linux going on in the mainframe world (and COBOL has nothing to do with it). The biggest mistake IBM is currently making IMO is they've gotten into bed with Suse. There was a large group from Suse (Germany) in Orlando last February. Again IMO, Suse is an awful Linux distro. Yast is an abomination to work with on a daily basis. I think Redhat missed the boat there even though their Enterprise Linux distribution has support for System 390 hardware. Anyway, the point is that Linux is alive and well and thriving on big iron.
In addition, one of the primary draws of Orlando is Disney World and the other nearby theme parks. The (oops, almost wrote "Teh" there) February conference was held IN Disney at the Coronado Springs (stay in the Cabanas section if you ever go there, for any reason). SHARE members vote on where to hold their meetings. If a majority of those folks were over 60 I doubt they'd continue returning to Orlando every few years.
If you're not familiar with where and how mainframes are being used today then I suggest that YOU are the one who's out of touch with a significant sector of the computing world. Business' needs don't all revolve around iphones, ajax and youtube. Or payroll and accounting, for that matter.
I have Flashblock installed with FF on my XP machine and after several years can count the number of "exceptional sites" - where Flash is allowed to load - on one hand. If a site requires Flash to present their content, find another site.
Personally, I care way more about fonts than Flash. On my Fedora 8 install if I run "rpm -qa | grep -i font" I see a lot of packages installed. Too many, considering I still think the fonts I see on my OOB Fedora 8 installation look like crap. And yes, I have done a fair amount of tweaking. They still look like shit. Especially on Firefox.
We've gone from hardmac to softmac to ieee80211 to DeviceScape. The situation is still in too much flux for my liking. Progress is being made, no doubt, but who's to say the current approach will end up better than any of the other ones? The top-echelon of Linux wireless developers is like a revolving-door scenario. John Linville gets his cracks now, after Jouni and Jean had their turns. Dan Williams' NetworkManager has still not lived up to its hype.
I hope I don't see another wifi project leader in 4 years who moves the goalposts yet again.
Hardware vendors bear a large share of the blame for the slow pace of development. I'm looking at you, Broadcom. RaLink, Realtek and Intel have been much more friendly towards Linux, but every time a team needs to reverse-engineer another Broadcom chip it sucks valuable resources away from other efforts.
The Ares replacement rocket isn't going to be ready until 2014 according to NASA, which means it won't really be ready until 2018 or so. I predict the space shuttle will fly until at least 2015 once we get a new president - Obama or McCain - who will undo Bush's decision to end the program by 2010. Congress will need to get on board and re-order NASA's marching orders, because funds to keep the shuttle flying will have to be taken, in part, from the Ares/Orion/Constellation program itself, possibly pushing it even further out until the 2020 - 2025 timeframe.
The shuttle is old, expensive, and not as safe as everyone thought it was going to be, but it does its job well and there's literally nothing quite like it. You can debate whether the costs of manned spaceflight are worth the return we get, but there's no way on Earth that the Congress and a real President are going to keep America grounded for half a decade or more while the Russians, the Japanese, the Europeans and possibly even the Chinese, continue to send men and women into space.
Asus? Abit? Gigabyte? Intel, of course. Competition is good and I have enjoyed VIA's participation in the market indirectly. Even though I never bought a mobo with a VIA or nVidia chipset on it, they provided competition for Intel and helped to keep prices down.
This is bad news even for someone like me who wouldn't even think about buying a mobo with anything other than an Intel chipset on it. Intel gets to relax a little now. More and more it's getting that innovation no longer drives the mobo market. It's driven by who can get the best deal on cheap labor in China.
I haven't watched any of the TV coverage so far outside of a couple of minutes during the opening ceremony when they did that human-LED display on the floor of the stadium. I was long gone by the time there were any fireworks.
To me the olympic spirit has been usurped over the last 40 years to the point now where it's all about the money. This latest revelation says to me that I am on the right track with my "who gives a fuck?" attitude. They - NBC, Chinese communists, advertisers, the corrupt IOC - they certainly don't give a fuck about me. So fuck them all. I feel bad that the athletes work so hard for their own glory and, in the end, are just exploited like any other commodity. That doesn't change my opinion of the entire olympic farce.
The average moron doesn't think there's a difference between "widescreen" and "HD". One step above that - the informed consumer - might realize there's a difference but has a hard time telling the difference in quality between an anamorphic-widescreen NTSC SD picture and a true 1080i one. Above that, there is an even more technically inclined bunch of folks who couldn't tell 1080i from 1080p if their lives depended on it. At the very top you have the uper-videophiles who know what they're doing and what they're seeing, and can tell the difference. This elite group is like "the gamer" in the PC market. They know what they want and will pay to get it. Everyone else is happy with Intel's onboard graphics.
Add in the compression that some distributors put their signal through, and the difference between anamorphic widescreen and "real HD" becomes hard to distinguish even if you are able to discriminate between them.
I like what the survey results reveal. It tells me BR players and recorders will be coming down in price a lot faster than the manufacturers had hoped.
I stopped reading there. While it might strike the geeks as a potential gut-buster, to me it's just insane to put anything that launches smoke bombs on a wheeled contraption you intend to use in public. Remember what happened to those marketing people in Boston last year when they caused Authority-Figure-Panic by sticking little boxes with flashing lights on them all over the place?
The IOC is corrupt to the core. They routinely award the games to whoever comes up with the biggest bag of money. It is one of the most corrupt organizations in the modern era.
I laugh at the paranoids in the US who see "one world government" as a threat at every turn. The United Nations IMO is one of the great achievments of the 20th century, imperfect as it may be. The International Olympics Committee, on the other hand, should not be a model for anything. It should be called what it is: a greedy self-serving bunch of criminals.
I support NASA and most of their programs. It was very exciting when Phoenix touched down softly on Mars, the first craft to do so in a long time. This overall mission, however, has been a failure IMO. They will try to put lipstick on this pig until the cows come home, but the failure of the geologists on the program to adequately anticipate the mechanical properties of the soil they would find there looms large.
Leave it to JPL investigators to forget about MUD. NASA
Phoenix hasn't been a total failure. There was undoubtedly some good science that came out of the mission. But the centerpiece experiment has not lived up to expectations and whoever is responsible needs to be held accountable. If it was a committee then they are all responsible.
That's been a showstopper standing between us and vmware forever. Maybe it is finally supported, but I RTFA, then I even went and RTFWS and I couldn't find any mention of Firewire or IEEE 1394 (a or b).
Employers generally don't trust their employees working at home. They think that without a tyrant-boss to keep an eye on them, most people will slack off. If these cameras were a regular part of telecommuting, more companies would support it.
Eventually you get to the point where the government asks nicely if they can watch. Then they tell the companies that they WILL watch. Then they insist cameras be put in place if telecommuting is even a remote possibility for an employee. Then they eventually get around to passing laws to make it legal. So it won't conflict with the Constitution.
The Wall Street Journal? Hah! Don't make me laugh. Since it was bought by Rupert Murdoch I think you can stick a fork in it. It will shortly be a thinly disguised rag pushing the radical agenda of the far right. Not that the zombies in suits will ever notice.
I like its boldness. Outside of a host of technical problems and issues, however, I don't think it's going to be possible.
As the largest debtor nation on earth, the US has been insolvent for quite some time. I believe that high energy costs will usher in a new era of financial turmoil for the US and any such project, as much as I'd like to see it happen, just isn't going to happen. When the dust settles I'd be surprised to see NASA survive.
It doesn't matter what the users try to "tell them" to do. There are meetings going on now to get a worldwide consensus on piracy issues. One outcome will be the stripping away of all anonymity at sites where registration is required. The US will pressure.europe to go along and eventually they will cave, privacy laws be damned. ISPs and online services won't have to worry about anonymizing their logs or even storing them once the government sets up central logging servers that will be fed directly by the providers. Hell, the government will probably make it illegal for them to retain any log information themselves.
There are plenty of ex AOL users infesting the net. Some of them are too young, actually, to have ever been AOL users, but the mindset is still there. I guess most of them are using Macs.
In the NYC area there's a company that advertises frequently on local radio. International Star Registry will actually name a star after someone and actually register the name in book form at the US Copyright Office. All for only $50. Makes a great gift.
I hope Adopt-A-Star is prepared to compete with the likes of this sham business that preys on the gullible. They must be making money because their ads are frequent around the holidays and they've been on for years. It's disgusting that real science goes wanting for lack of funds but sleazebags make money hand over fist.
Not really. Harald is up to his eyeballs already with the number of complaints he receives. I don't think he has the resources to deal with more than about 10% of the violations reported. He has had some notable successes. It's like pissing into the wind with some of these outlaws.
Leaks and are something a politician understands. The rest they rely on their lackeys to explain to them. I'm sure if someone were to take aside some of the more religious conservative elected officials in Washington and show them what a few choice words and mouse clicks can dredge up in the way of pr0n - no age 13 nonsense blocking the way - I'm sure the internet would be shut down in less than a week.
But leaks they definitely understand and posting leaked info online is simply poking the Happy Fun Ball repeatedly with a sharp stick.
The only people who were deeply affected by that movie were either impressionable young people or those truly clueless about technology because the movie itself wasn't that good or believable, even for 1983. If you think most people know squat about computers today you should have seen how it was in 1983. Everybody knows the way you fry a computer's brain is to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit.
I read this story last night and it seems that even though the judge ruled against Dell, he ruled FOR basically nobody other than the AG's ego. This was a hollow victory at best. Dell doesn't even have to give $5-off-your-next-order coupons to everyone in New York. The citizens affected by the charges against Dell are unknown. They're going to have to find them - I guess I'm one of them - and the damages awarded could amount to a hill of beans.
Say what you will about New York ex-gov Elliot Spitzer's faults, but as AG he did a damn fine job of protecting consumers in this state. Cuomo, the son of former gov Mario Cuomo, is grandstanding. If he really wanted to stick it to Dell - and lord knows they deserve it - he would have solicited input from consumers who had been given the shaft from Dell. After all, he only filed the lawsuit after enough people complained to the AG's office in the first place. I was one of them. But now we get pretty much bupkus while he gets the publicity. Frakking politicians.
Take DNA samples, too. Add cameras EVERYWHERE. Why pretend that isn't the goal, or that the majority of people are against it? One day, it might help the children by catching ch1ld pr0n predatr0s. Or catch that mafia guy down at the loan store who talked me into that loan I can't afford. Or the creep that sold me that gas guzzler last year.
Here's something I would really like to see: Drug tests for every elected office holder, every day. Make the results public as soon as they're available. No exceptions. Another would be to implement transparency on all elected office holders' bank accounts. Let the sun shine in.
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I was at the last winter conference in Orlando. I would guess the median age of the attendees was somewhere around 40. There's a LOT of Linux going on in the mainframe world (and COBOL has nothing to do with it). The biggest mistake IBM is currently making IMO is they've gotten into bed with Suse. There was a large group from Suse (Germany) in Orlando last February. Again IMO, Suse is an awful Linux distro. Yast is an abomination to work with on a daily basis. I think Redhat missed the boat there even though their Enterprise Linux distribution has support for System 390 hardware. Anyway, the point is that Linux is alive and well and thriving on big iron.
In addition, one of the primary draws of Orlando is Disney World and the other nearby theme parks. The (oops, almost wrote "Teh" there) February conference was held IN Disney at the Coronado Springs (stay in the Cabanas section if you ever go there, for any reason). SHARE members vote on where to hold their meetings. If a majority of those folks were over 60 I doubt they'd continue returning to Orlando every few years.
If you're not familiar with where and how mainframes are being used today then I suggest that YOU are the one who's out of touch with a significant sector of the computing world. Business' needs don't all revolve around iphones, ajax and youtube. Or payroll and accounting, for that matter.
I have Flashblock installed with FF on my XP machine and after several years can count the number of "exceptional sites" - where Flash is allowed to load - on one hand. If a site requires Flash to present their content, find another site.
Personally, I care way more about fonts than Flash. On my Fedora 8 install if I run "rpm -qa | grep -i font" I see a lot of packages installed. Too many, considering I still think the fonts I see on my OOB Fedora 8 installation look like crap. And yes, I have done a fair amount of tweaking. They still look like shit. Especially on Firefox.
We've gone from hardmac to softmac to ieee80211 to DeviceScape. The situation is still in too much flux for my liking. Progress is being made, no doubt, but who's to say the current approach will end up better than any of the other ones? The top-echelon of Linux wireless developers is like a revolving-door scenario. John Linville gets his cracks now, after Jouni and Jean had their turns. Dan Williams' NetworkManager has still not lived up to its hype.
I hope I don't see another wifi project leader in 4 years who moves the goalposts yet again.
Hardware vendors bear a large share of the blame for the slow pace of development. I'm looking at you, Broadcom. RaLink, Realtek and Intel have been much more friendly towards Linux, but every time a team needs to reverse-engineer another Broadcom chip it sucks valuable resources away from other efforts.
The Ares replacement rocket isn't going to be ready until 2014 according to NASA, which means it won't really be ready until 2018 or so. I predict the space shuttle will fly until at least 2015 once we get a new president - Obama or McCain - who will undo Bush's decision to end the program by 2010. Congress will need to get on board and re-order NASA's marching orders, because funds to keep the shuttle flying will have to be taken, in part, from the Ares/Orion/Constellation program itself, possibly pushing it even further out until the 2020 - 2025 timeframe.
The shuttle is old, expensive, and not as safe as everyone thought it was going to be, but it does its job well and there's literally nothing quite like it. You can debate whether the costs of manned spaceflight are worth the return we get, but there's no way on Earth that the Congress and a real President are going to keep America grounded for half a decade or more while the Russians, the Japanese, the Europeans and possibly even the Chinese, continue to send men and women into space.
Asus? Abit? Gigabyte? Intel, of course. Competition is good and I have enjoyed VIA's participation in the market indirectly. Even though I never bought a mobo with a VIA or nVidia chipset on it, they provided competition for Intel and helped to keep prices down.
This is bad news even for someone like me who wouldn't even think about buying a mobo with anything other than an Intel chipset on it. Intel gets to relax a little now. More and more it's getting that innovation no longer drives the mobo market. It's driven by who can get the best deal on cheap labor in China.
I haven't watched any of the TV coverage so far outside of a couple of minutes during the opening ceremony when they did that human-LED display on the floor of the stadium. I was long gone by the time there were any fireworks.
To me the olympic spirit has been usurped over the last 40 years to the point now where it's all about the money. This latest revelation says to me that I am on the right track with my "who gives a fuck?" attitude. They - NBC, Chinese communists, advertisers, the corrupt IOC - they certainly don't give a fuck about me. So fuck them all. I feel bad that the athletes work so hard for their own glory and, in the end, are just exploited like any other commodity. That doesn't change my opinion of the entire olympic farce.
The average moron doesn't think there's a difference between "widescreen" and "HD". One step above that - the informed consumer - might realize there's a difference but has a hard time telling the difference in quality between an anamorphic-widescreen NTSC SD picture and a true 1080i one. Above that, there is an even more technically inclined bunch of folks who couldn't tell 1080i from 1080p if their lives depended on it. At the very top you have the uper-videophiles who know what they're doing and what they're seeing, and can tell the difference. This elite group is like "the gamer" in the PC market. They know what they want and will pay to get it. Everyone else is happy with Intel's onboard graphics.
Add in the compression that some distributors put their signal through, and the difference between anamorphic widescreen and "real HD" becomes hard to distinguish even if you are able to discriminate between them.
I like what the survey results reveal. It tells me BR players and recorders will be coming down in price a lot faster than the manufacturers had hoped.
I stopped reading there. While it might strike the geeks as a potential gut-buster, to me it's just insane to put anything that launches smoke bombs on a wheeled contraption you intend to use in public. Remember what happened to those marketing people in Boston last year when they caused Authority-Figure-Panic by sticking little boxes with flashing lights on them all over the place?
The talking heads on the right will try to spin the issue in a favorable light: they'll blame his suicide on Clinton.
The IOC is corrupt to the core. They routinely award the games to whoever comes up with the biggest bag of money. It is one of the most corrupt organizations in the modern era.
I laugh at the paranoids in the US who see "one world government" as a threat at every turn. The United Nations IMO is one of the great achievments of the 20th century, imperfect as it may be. The International Olympics Committee, on the other hand, should not be a model for anything. It should be called what it is: a greedy self-serving bunch of criminals.
I support NASA and most of their programs. It was very exciting when Phoenix touched down softly on Mars, the first craft to do so in a long time. This overall mission, however, has been a failure IMO. They will try to put lipstick on this pig until the cows come home, but the failure of the geologists on the program to adequately anticipate the mechanical properties of the soil they would find there looms large.
Leave it to JPL investigators to forget about MUD. NASA
Phoenix hasn't been a total failure. There was undoubtedly some good science that came out of the mission. But the centerpiece experiment has not lived up to expectations and whoever is responsible needs to be held accountable. If it was a committee then they are all responsible.
That's been a showstopper standing between us and vmware forever. Maybe it is finally supported, but I RTFA, then I even went and RTFWS and I couldn't find any mention of Firewire or IEEE 1394 (a or b).
Employers generally don't trust their employees working at home. They think that without a tyrant-boss to keep an eye on them, most people will slack off. If these cameras were a regular part of telecommuting, more companies would support it.
Eventually you get to the point where the government asks nicely if they can watch. Then they tell the companies that they WILL watch. Then they insist cameras be put in place if telecommuting is even a remote possibility for an employee. Then they eventually get around to passing laws to make it legal. So it won't conflict with the Constitution.
The rantings of a lunatic, who opposes the capitalization of all letters, frighten me almost as much as the Ronnie Paulies.
The Wall Street Journal? Hah! Don't make me laugh. Since it was bought by Rupert Murdoch I think you can stick a fork in it. It will shortly be a thinly disguised rag pushing the radical agenda of the far right. Not that the zombies in suits will ever notice.
I like its boldness. Outside of a host of technical problems and issues, however, I don't think it's going to be possible.
As the largest debtor nation on earth, the US has been insolvent for quite some time. I believe that high energy costs will usher in a new era of financial turmoil for the US and any such project, as much as I'd like to see it happen, just isn't going to happen. When the dust settles I'd be surprised to see NASA survive.
It doesn't matter what the users try to "tell them" to do. There are meetings going on now to get a worldwide consensus on piracy issues. One outcome will be the stripping away of all anonymity at sites where registration is required. The US will pressure .europe to go along and eventually they will cave, privacy laws be damned. ISPs and online services won't have to worry about anonymizing their logs or even storing them once the government sets up central logging servers that will be fed directly by the providers. Hell, the government will probably make it illegal for them to retain any log information themselves.
There are plenty of ex AOL users infesting the net. Some of them are too young, actually, to have ever been AOL users, but the mindset is still there. I guess most of them are using Macs.
In the NYC area there's a company that advertises frequently on local radio. International Star Registry will actually name a star after someone and actually register the name in book form at the US Copyright Office. All for only $50. Makes a great gift.
I hope Adopt-A-Star is prepared to compete with the likes of this sham business that preys on the gullible. They must be making money because their ads are frequent around the holidays and they've been on for years. It's disgusting that real science goes wanting for lack of funds but sleazebags make money hand over fist.
Not really. Harald is up to his eyeballs already with the number of complaints he receives. I don't think he has the resources to deal with more than about 10% of the violations reported. He has had some notable successes. It's like pissing into the wind with some of these outlaws.
Fuck you, asshole.
Leaks and are something a politician understands. The rest they rely on their lackeys to explain to them. I'm sure if someone were to take aside some of the more religious conservative elected officials in Washington and show them what a few choice words and mouse clicks can dredge up in the way of pr0n - no age 13 nonsense blocking the way - I'm sure the internet would be shut down in less than a week.
But leaks they definitely understand and posting leaked info online is simply poking the Happy Fun Ball repeatedly with a sharp stick.
The only people who were deeply affected by that movie were either impressionable young people or those truly clueless about technology because the movie itself wasn't that good or believable, even for 1983. If you think most people know squat about computers today you should have seen how it was in 1983. Everybody knows the way you fry a computer's brain is to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit.
I read this story last night and it seems that even though the judge ruled against Dell, he ruled FOR basically nobody other than the AG's ego. This was a hollow victory at best. Dell doesn't even have to give $5-off-your-next-order coupons to everyone in New York. The citizens affected by the charges against Dell are unknown. They're going to have to find them - I guess I'm one of them - and the damages awarded could amount to a hill of beans.
Say what you will about New York ex-gov Elliot Spitzer's faults, but as AG he did a damn fine job of protecting consumers in this state. Cuomo, the son of former gov Mario Cuomo, is grandstanding. If he really wanted to stick it to Dell - and lord knows they deserve it - he would have solicited input from consumers who had been given the shaft from Dell. After all, he only filed the lawsuit after enough people complained to the AG's office in the first place. I was one of them. But now we get pretty much bupkus while he gets the publicity. Frakking politicians.
Take DNA samples, too. Add cameras EVERYWHERE. Why pretend that isn't the goal, or that the majority of people are against it? One day, it might help the children by catching ch1ld pr0n predatr0s. Or catch that mafia guy down at the loan store who talked me into that loan I can't afford. Or the creep that sold me that gas guzzler last year.
Here's something I would really like to see: Drug tests for every elected office holder, every day. Make the results public as soon as they're available. No exceptions. Another would be to implement transparency on all elected office holders' bank accounts. Let the sun shine in.