Recall the path that SGI took a few years back. They started selling Intel-based hardware and got into Linux in a big way. While I'm thankful for their XFS every day, on hindsight it looks like the flailings of a drowning company. As an ex-SGI-stockholder, I followed their decline with interest.
Sun appears to be going down the same path. I think it is only a matter of time before Sun becomes a shell of its former self, consigned to a slow death by their overpriced hardware.
Think of it like the last stages of a star. Sun's now in the red-giant stage. I hope the irony of the company's name in this analogy is not lost.
(how's that for moderating my own comments?:-)
Just FYI: SpaceImaging is the world's biggest supplier of hi-res satellite imagery. It would surprise many on this forum to know that 4 of the 7 satellites SpaceImaging uses are Indian (the IRS series of satellites are Indian satellites).
India has a decent history (20+ years) of building and launching satellites. They have been helped along the way by the Russians to some extent, because the US refuses to sell them some of the advanced propulsion technology (like Cryo engines), which then they have to develop on their own.
XFS has a file size limit of 32TB (or so, I think), with a _filesystem_ limit in the EBs. But, I've heard that the Linux VFS layer has a max file size limit of 1TB. Is it possible to create files > 1TB on a Linux+XFS box ? Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to try it out just yet...:-)
My AV center (receiver, CD player, tapedeck, turntable(!), amp, DVD player, VCR, TV) has a veritable rats nest of cables behind it. I'm afraid to reach in to get the dust bunnies out. With low-power UWB devices, we won't have to mess with cables all these cables! This, along with UPNP (or UDDI or whatever the hell they'll come up with to corner the market), and I won't even have to configure anything!
Schools have cable TV ayways, with shows (note: I said "shows", not "news") like CNN. Don't you think NerdTV will be at least as good as one of these shows, if not significantly better? I'd watch Cringely over Zahn any day (speaking about the news content, of course!)
This does not appear to be ruggedized for outdoor installation, so I wonder how useful it'll be for bridging the 'last mile'.
I have been looking for a WiFi bridge to help a friend get cablemodem access: the cable company will not lay the cable to his house (cost > $1K), and it is about 300' from the road. One possibility I am considering is to use a pair of WiFi APs to bridge the gap. But they need to be rugged, to withstand temperatures from -30F to +100F, and rain/snow. None of the cheapo units comes in a weatherproof enclosure. Anyone know of any? I've looked around. Of course, the cost can't be more than $200 or so (each); the.com days are gone.:-(
You are probably trolling, but I'll respond anyways.
These sorts of things are not taught in any school. They are learnt by asking around. At this level of storage (several TB) companies (like EMC, Hitachi, IBM) have high-power sales people who will try to bamboozle and schmooze their way into the sale. Often, you need impartial advice from different sources to make sense of the marketing-speak. This is where the expertise of some of the people (not like you, of course) here at/. can be helpful.
It is no secret that margins are pretty high with such "enterprise-class" storage solutions. The sales people from each of the companies have done their homework well, and know what the competitors products cost, and are sure to charge you as much as they can (it is called collusion, and most vendors do it, thats why noone complains). Therefore, if you are quoted $20M for the whole solution, and you read here at/. that Jane Geek somewhere paid $12M for a similar solution from Hitachi Lightning with options XYZ, you can take that information to the vendors and knock them down a little.
The alternative is to use the services of a professional "shopping" company, like GAPCON (I don't have anything to do with GAPCON, I just heard about them recently, thats all).
The story's barely out on/. and its already slashdotted.
/. story submission page should have a checkbox: "Please mirror the contents of this page (including graphics, which Google doesn't cache) before posting the story".
You forfeit your citizenship when you take up arms against the US.
Of course you do. Bowever, shouldn't it be proved first in a court of law??. Why did they try Timohy McVeigh, then? Why didn't they just hang him from the nearest post, or (as you suggest) just take away his citizenship and throw him in a military brig for 300 years? Tim McVeigh, who blew up 168 men, women and children had more rights than this Padilla character! I'm not saying he's innocent; but if he is guilty, try the bastard and hang him for all I care! But try him in a court of law first before you presume his guilt!
BabelFish: "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
WorldLingo: (using Computer, Data Processing as the subject) "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
And whats the difference between these two, again?
Have you ever tried taking a chunk of meat away from a tiger?
CFR could be a solution, but until the voters get some sense to not be blindly swayed by slick ads, nothing will change. With the First Amendment around, you won't be able to stop the slick ones from doing an endrun around CFR.
What we really need is a grassroots awareness of the issues. Democracy works fine if the people are aware of the issues and make sensible decisions.
Now, obviously you can't wave a magic wand and make everyone more aware. But what you can do is "get out the vote". Make noises; talk about issues and convince more people to pay attention. The last thing a typical politician wants is a voter who's paying attention to whats going on. Once the awareness comes, these turds will listen.
The privacy-rights groups should band together, identify half-a-dozen politickians who voted against the bill and are running tight races, and go after them real hard.
The reason the 2 from SF voted for the bill is because they know that their voting record will be an issue in the upcoming election. Also, once the politickians know that a bill will be defeated, some of them will vote for it if it looks good to their sheep^H^H^H^H^Hvoters, as long as their vote doesn't tip the balance.
Please define "third world". Do India, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. count as "Third World"? If so, then your assumption on their inability to read english is incorrect.
Lets consider the original idea (I'm not for it, BTW, but its satursday and I've nothing better to do). $7/hour works out to about Rupees 350/hour in India (we'll take India as an example). This works out to, assuming a 6-hour day(hey, long lunch breaks are necessary after reading all that crap!), about Rupees 2000/day. Assuming a 5-day work week, thats about Rupees 40000/month. This will put the earner smack in the middle of the 'middle class' in India. Heck, even college teachers don't make that much money in India!
So, $0.01 per spam read is pretty good money in some parts of the world, even where people can read/write excellent English.
See, in this case, the nice part about commercial software is that you have someone to blame, and you at least stand a chance in court (IANAL, but it would be under contract law), so you have an opportunity to recoup your losses.
When was the last time you heard of NASA suing someone successfully to recoup losses due to contractor/vendor negligence?
It costs 10K now, but once the p0rn industry gets into the market, we'll all, errr.. I mean, you'll all be able to buy it for under $1K with economies of scale.
Too good, in fact. Am I the only one who was reminded of the recenty story about 'stealth advertising', with paid "actors" using cool gadgets as if they were normal users, to create a buzz? This review, with its liberal dosage of "I was skeptical of... but was pleasantly surprised to find... " reminds of just such marketing efforts.
Well, why don't you? This project is not finished, as you said so yourself. Just go to the Jhai Foundation's webpage and start asking questions and volunteer! Thats the best part about this line of work: unless you're working on the hardware, you can work from basically any corner of the world!
Sorry, MSFT's cash reserves were $5,116,000,000 as of 03/31/02. But, keeping cash reserves around is like keeping money in your mattress; they have invested most of it. If you count that too, their cash on hand is actually close to $40 Billion. So, you'll have to buy 260 million XBoxes, or, about 1 for every living human in the USA.
However, issuing a public apology and taking steps to keep the offending illustration from further distribution are enough.
I'm not so sure. Why haven't we heard from Prof Thomas's daughter, the purported plagiarist? I can tell you one thing for sure: had I been in place of his daughter, my dad would have made a public example out of me.
I know, people will ask: why drag the daughter into this? The fact is, it was the daughter who plagiarised and the father who accepted it. The father has apologised; I'd like to hear his daughter's apology too. Since her work has been attributed to her and published in USA Today (and myriad other places), she is into this whether she likes it or not.
When you occupy high places (and it doesn't get much higher than a Professor who occupies an endowed chair at MIT with 30 years of research experience), you should be held to a higher standard.
My interest in this "case" is not because I think Radix was overly wronged, but because as an academic institution, MIT should (a) have known better, and (b) now know that their handling of this case will have far-reaching consequences for their student body.
You're not being graded on your artistic skills, but your coding skills; their proposal was not being evaluated on the quality of their illustrations, but on the quality of their proposed research.
I agree. But take a look at the USA Today article: MIT's releasing the illustration to them indicates (to me, at least) that this illustration somehow "captures" the essence of what this project is all about, at least for the lay person. As such, they are touting it (the illustration) as a lay representation of the project. Hence, this illustration now occupies a more central role in the publicity, than just the role of a forgotten sidebar in a proposal. MIT's continuing to use the illustration for publicity purposes is where Radix's case lies. But I'm not interested in that. Money, after all, is just some commodity that will/may be exchanged and the two parties will move on.
Like you I'm at a university too, and I have had to take action against plagiarism in class. Tomorrow, if a student turns in an assignment where s/he clearly lifted a picture or two, and claims that her/his son threw that in, will it be OK? Maybe this analogy isn't right, but the point is: shouldn't somebody be held accountable, just like my students are held accountable? Will this case weaken MIT faculty's sermons in classes about plagiarism? Shouldn't MIT be held to a higher standard, since it is indeed a place of higher learning ?
Instead of just buying what the MIT lawyer says, check this URL first, and tell us what you see in the article. For the real lazy (like me): MIT released this "composite" picture to USA Today. That is not distributing just 25 copies; more like 250000, I'd say!
So, for an assignment, if an MIT student took someone else's code and just used that (instead of implementing it myself), would MIT be OK with that? Even if the snippet of code was just a small part of a huge assignment, but it could be proven with almost certainty that the code was swiped?
Here's a snippet from a random course handout at MIT's site (STS001,
The History of Technology in America):
As in any historical report, you are expected to footnote all of your sources (for text, images, sounds, and anything else you use - copyright and plagiarism laws do apply to the web).
It would be interesting to see what other faculty at MIT, especially those who teach courses like Intro to Ethics, think about this affair.
In any case, I think this episode has taken the glitter off of some of the shine at MIT. Lets see whether MIT values the $50M more than ethics and honesty. The only honorable thing to do would be for MIT to fire the offending researcher.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun appears to be going down the same path. I think it is only a matter of time before Sun becomes a shell of its former self, consigned to a slow death by their overpriced hardware.
Think of it like the last stages of a star. Sun's now in the red-giant stage. I hope the irony of the company's name in this analogy is not lost.
Just FYI: SpaceImaging is the world's biggest supplier of hi-res satellite imagery. It would surprise many on this forum to know that 4 of the 7 satellites SpaceImaging uses are Indian (the IRS series of satellites are Indian satellites).
India has a decent history (20+ years) of building and launching satellites. They have been helped along the way by the Russians to some extent, because the US refuses to sell them some of the advanced propulsion technology (like Cryo engines), which then they have to develop on their own.
All in all, more competition is good, I say.
XFS has a file size limit of 32TB (or so, I think), with a _filesystem_ limit in the EBs. But, I've heard that the Linux VFS layer has a max file size limit of 1TB. Is it possible to create files > 1TB on a Linux+XFS box ? Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to try it out just yet... :-)
I wonder what they did with LPs ?
My AV center (receiver, CD player, tapedeck, turntable(!), amp, DVD player, VCR, TV) has a veritable rats nest of cables behind it. I'm afraid to reach in to get the dust bunnies out. With low-power UWB devices, we won't have to mess with cables all these cables! This, along with UPNP (or UDDI or whatever the hell they'll come up with to corner the market), and I won't even have to configure anything!
Schools have cable TV ayways, with shows (note: I said "shows", not "news") like CNN. Don't you think NerdTV will be at least as good as one of these shows, if not significantly better? I'd watch Cringely over Zahn any day (speaking about the news content, of course!)
Have you ever seen how much a tiger has to bust his ass to get a meal? If s/he becomes fat, no more meals and its slim city for El Tigre.
I have been looking for a WiFi bridge to help a friend get cablemodem access: the cable company will not lay the cable to his house (cost > $1K), and it is about 300' from the road. One possibility I am considering is to use a pair of WiFi APs to bridge the gap. But they need to be rugged, to withstand temperatures from -30F to +100F, and rain/snow. None of the cheapo units comes in a weatherproof enclosure. Anyone know of any? I've looked around. Of course, the cost can't be more than $200 or so (each); the .com days are gone. :-(
These sorts of things are not taught in any school. They are learnt by asking around. At this level of storage (several TB) companies (like EMC, Hitachi, IBM) have high-power sales people who will try to bamboozle and schmooze their way into the sale. Often, you need impartial advice from different sources to make sense of the marketing-speak. This is where the expertise of some of the people (not like you, of course) here at /. can be helpful.
It is no secret that margins are pretty high with such "enterprise-class" storage solutions. The sales people from each of the companies have done their homework well, and know what the competitors products cost, and are sure to charge you as much as they can (it is called collusion, and most vendors do it, thats why noone complains). Therefore, if you are quoted $20M for the whole solution, and you read here at /. that Jane Geek somewhere paid $12M for a similar solution from Hitachi Lightning with options XYZ, you can take that information to the vendors and knock them down a little.
The alternative is to use the services of a professional "shopping" company, like GAPCON (I don't have anything to do with GAPCON, I just heard about them recently, thats all).
Of course you do. Bowever, shouldn't it be proved first in a court of law??. Why did they try Timohy McVeigh, then? Why didn't they just hang him from the nearest post, or (as you suggest) just take away his citizenship and throw him in a military brig for 300 years? Tim McVeigh, who blew up 168 men, women and children had more rights than this Padilla character! I'm not saying he's innocent; but if he is guilty, try the bastard and hang him for all I care! But try him in a court of law first before you presume his guilt!
WorldLingo: (using Computer, Data Processing as the subject) "RealAudio Surround, the fire-new Windows Media 9 beta"
And whats the difference between these two, again?
Have you ever tried taking a chunk of meat away from a tiger?
CFR could be a solution, but until the voters get some sense to not be blindly swayed by slick ads, nothing will change. With the First Amendment around, you won't be able to stop the slick ones from doing an endrun around CFR.
What we really need is a grassroots awareness of the issues. Democracy works fine if the people are aware of the issues and make sensible decisions.Now, obviously you can't wave a magic wand and make everyone more aware. But what you can do is "get out the vote". Make noises; talk about issues and convince more people to pay attention. The last thing a typical politician wants is a voter who's paying attention to whats going on. Once the awareness comes, these turds will listen.
The reason the 2 from SF voted for the bill is because they know that their voting record will be an issue in the upcoming election. Also, once the politickians know that a bill will be defeated, some of them will vote for it if it looks good to their sheep^H^H^H^H^Hvoters, as long as their vote doesn't tip the balance.
Lets consider the original idea (I'm not for it, BTW, but its satursday and I've nothing better to do). $7/hour works out to about Rupees 350/hour in India (we'll take India as an example). This works out to, assuming a 6-hour day(hey, long lunch breaks are necessary after reading all that crap!), about Rupees 2000/day. Assuming a 5-day work week, thats about Rupees 40000/month. This will put the earner smack in the middle of the 'middle class' in India. Heck, even college teachers don't make that much money in India!
So, $0.01 per spam read is pretty good money in some parts of the world, even where people can read/write excellent English.
There's a name for such "mechanical difficulties": friction. Get used to it.
When was the last time you heard of NASA suing someone successfully to recoup losses due to contractor/vendor negligence?
It costs 10K now, but once the p0rn industry gets into the market, we'll all, errr.. I mean, you'll all be able to buy it for under $1K with economies of scale.
Well, why don't you? This project is not finished, as you said so yourself. Just go to the Jhai Foundation's webpage and start asking questions and volunteer! Thats the best part about this line of work: unless you're working on the hardware, you can work from basically any corner of the world!
Sorry, MSFT's cash reserves were $5,116,000,000 as of 03/31/02. But, keeping cash reserves around is like keeping money in your mattress; they have invested most of it. If you count that too, their cash on hand is actually close to $40 Billion. So, you'll have to buy 260 million XBoxes, or, about 1 for every living human in the USA.
I'm not so sure. Why haven't we heard from Prof Thomas's daughter, the purported plagiarist? I can tell you one thing for sure: had I been in place of his daughter, my dad would have made a public example out of me.
I know, people will ask: why drag the daughter into this? The fact is, it was the daughter who plagiarised and the father who accepted it. The father has apologised; I'd like to hear his daughter's apology too. Since her work has been attributed to her and published in USA Today (and myriad other places), she is into this whether she likes it or not.
When you occupy high places (and it doesn't get much higher than a Professor who occupies an endowed chair at MIT with 30 years of research experience), you should be held to a higher standard.
I agree. But take a look at the USA Today article: MIT's releasing the illustration to them indicates (to me, at least) that this illustration somehow "captures" the essence of what this project is all about, at least for the lay person. As such, they are touting it (the illustration) as a lay representation of the project. Hence, this illustration now occupies a more central role in the publicity, than just the role of a forgotten sidebar in a proposal. MIT's continuing to use the illustration for publicity purposes is where Radix's case lies. But I'm not interested in that. Money, after all, is just some commodity that will/may be exchanged and the two parties will move on.
Like you I'm at a university too, and I have had to take action against plagiarism in class. Tomorrow, if a student turns in an assignment where s/he clearly lifted a picture or two, and claims that her/his son threw that in, will it be OK? Maybe this analogy isn't right, but the point is: shouldn't somebody be held accountable, just like my students are held accountable? Will this case weaken MIT faculty's sermons in classes about plagiarism? Shouldn't MIT be held to a higher standard, since it is indeed a place of higher learning ?
Instead of just buying what the MIT lawyer says, check this URL first, and tell us what you see in the article. For the real lazy (like me): MIT released this "composite" picture to USA Today. That is not distributing just 25 copies; more like 250000, I'd say!
According to the MIT Policy for Academic Dishonesty, the VP for Research is supposed to investigate reports of dishonesty.
Here's a snippet from a random course handout at MIT's site (STS001, The History of Technology in America):
As in any historical report, you are expected to footnote all of your sources (for text, images, sounds, and anything else you use - copyright and plagiarism laws do apply to the web).
It would be interesting to see what other faculty at MIT, especially those who teach courses like Intro to Ethics, think about this affair.
In any case, I think this episode has taken the glitter off of some of the shine at MIT. Lets see whether MIT values the $50M more than ethics and honesty. The only honorable thing to do would be for MIT to fire the offending researcher.