Time is money. Lots of it and as any person who has done any hiring (especially in small to mid size businesses) will tell you, personnel costs are among the largest financial obligations you will have bar none.
A sound business principle, in general -- and one some of my former employers didn't pay enough attention too. On the other hand, suppose you're running a small business, either alone or with a few partners. And suppose you're just starting up, so you (and maybe those partners) are your technical staff. Then time is just about the only resource you don't have to pay for.
Of course, lots of people take the roll-your-own approach just because that's the only way they know. The last regular job I had was for an internet services company that had started out in the owner's garage ten years earlier. For our virtual web host business, we still used the RYO server management software the owner had written back in that garage! And even though we were now managing a data center with thousands of systems, everything in sight -- the phone system, the customer support database, the procedures we used to checkin hands-on customers, even the tests used to screen potential employees -- everything was very do-it-yourself. Not the most cost-effective way to run a business, but the owner simply knew no other way to get things done.
After all we wouldn't be techies if we didn't enjoy playing with technology.
OK, I totally disagree with this post, but the moderators who labelled it "flamebait" are total idiots. The author is spouting a certain party line, but then so is everybody else around here. An honest opinion isn't flamebait just because you disagree with it.
I'm sorry, wrong. You say "32K" now, and it sounds like nothing. But in 1981, there were a lot of decent OSs that were quite happy in that environment. When I first heard MS-DOS compared to other OSs, it was in that same year, and all the competition had the same small-scale environment. The standard of the microcomputer world at the time was CP/M, which mostly ran on exactly that kind of system. And CP/M was always way ahead of MS-DOS, in performance, features, and reliability. Hell, Bill Gates himself recommended CP/M to IBM over all the competition. Its only when Digital Research balked at IBM's nondisclosure agreements that he held his nose and offered them a cheap CP/M clone that he had just acquired.
One guy I talked to refused to even concede that MS-DOS was an actual OS, since it didn't have most of the services that an operating system is supposed to provide. He characterized it as a "program loader".
What I would like to know is, is the Microsoft version finding the same spyware in diffrent locations or finding diffrent types of spyware in the same locations? The reason I bring this up is for Microsoft to beat evreyone else by a factor of two just doesn't sound right. Not that it can't be done just that is was done.
I'd already cleaned off the exisitng spyware using Ad-Aware and Spybot. So this was new stuff.
It shouldn't suprise anybody that Spybot and AdAware miss a lot of stuff. There's a lot of crap out there -- I've heard reports of people having thousands of infections. The big problem is keeping those databases up to date. Since Spybot is basically some guy's hobby, and Lavasoft has never put a lot of effort into maintaining AdAware (a product that was given to them by its original author, on the condition that they always provide a free version), naturally their databases have lagged. It was inevitable that somebody with deep pockets would invest the time and money to do a better job.
... but when you go on the political rant by saying "you'll always be sorry the Democrats didn't stay in power long enough to break Microsoft up" - you lose me.
I think you need to have more than a passing reference to a particular political party before it counts as a "political rant". And it's not as if I'm a big fan of the Demos anyway. But that's a secondary issue. Let me refresh your memory: back in 2000, MS was defending itself in antitrust court, and doing a really poor job of it. At one point they actually got caught fabricating evidence. Then the Demos left office, and a new pro-business AG simply dropped the case.
Whether you think the anti-trust case was a good idea or a bad one, you have to concede that Microsoft might well have been broken up by now if Al Gore had won the election. Pointing out that fact doesn't make me a partisan.
Why can't people get it through their heads that Microsoft's problems are part of the natural course of free-market economics? They didn't start out a huge business, placing their OS on everyone's computer. They *earned* that position through superior marketing and business deals.
Again, your memory needs refreshing. MS's dominance of the OS market is pretty much an accident. That actually got into the business against their own will. They wanted to sell development tools for the new IBM PC, but that meant that IBM had to adopt an OS those tools would run on. Which is why they steered IBM to CP/M. When that fell through, they hurriedly licensed a CP/M clone from Seattle Computer Products, which became the basis for MS-DOS.
MS-DOS is one of the biggest abortions since the rise of modern technologies (find me a single OS expert who will give it high marks). Yet its very flaws created such a high level of lockin with the PC platform itself -- which was also pretty flawed. Since compatibility soon became the name of the game, clone computers had to reproduce all of IBMs mistakes. And since their biggest mistake was choosing MS-DOS, computer makers ended up paying a tithe to Bill for every box they sold.
But even if you were correct, and Bill achieved his success by technical brilliance and plain good business -- so what? He got his reward when he became the richest dude on the planet. He did not earn the right to destroy the very marketplace that made him rich. Microsoft's role in the current marketplace is bad for all of us -- including Microsoft. Calling me ideological names isn't going to change that.
You can always kill the agent. The don't provide a simple way to do this (of course), but it's easy enough to terminate it and then eliminate it from your startup sequence. Then you only have to remember to kill it after each scan.
I haven't examined the agent in detail, but the one effect I've noticed is typically lame. If you run a.BAT file, the agent reminds you that scripts are dangerous and asks you if you want to flag this particular script as safe. Which is totally useless: if you know enough to answer the question, you already know that you're running a script. Contrariwise, if you're a typical user who doesn't even know what a script is, you have no idea what to do.
Still, I'll probably end up using this product. It caught a lot of stuff on my machine that AdAware and Spybot missed. At least, I'll continue to use it until Microsoft screws it up beyond use.
You got modded up as funny. You deserve the upmod, but I think you make a serious point. Microsoft products don't always start out as total crap. Sometimes they buy a decent product from somebody, or invent something with a good basic design (their old Multiplan product was the first spreadsheet I didn't consider a total kludge), or invent some idea that could be really useful if it's implemented right. But then they throw their bureaucracy, their intense intracompany rivalies, their focus groups, their love of feature bloat, and (most of all) their compulsive tweaking at the product. Before you know it, you have some monstrosity that only runs on the latest hardware and that's a total pain to use.
That's why I'll always be sorry the Democrats didn't stay in power long enough to break Microsoft up. If Microsoft developers were forced to operate in a competitive environment where mistakes actually hurt them, we'd all be better off -- including the former Microsofters.
Yeah, they've been working on the GNU's Not Unix OS since 1983. (How many Slashdotters are older than that?) What's particularly pathetic is that everything except the kernel has been in place for something like 10 years. How long does it take to write a kernel? You can buy a poster with every line of source code for the Linux kernel. But of course, that's old old-fashioned macrokernel, only microkernels are cool...
No, what's really pathetic is that the HURD kernel has been in "final stages" since 2000 or so. How can we expect the industry to take "Free Software" seriously when the founder of the movement can't even complete such a simple project?
Compared to that, a video game that's six years behind schedule is nothing.
Re:Hertz don't put you in no drivers seat
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Another beef is why they still have parallel, RS-232 and PS2 ports on monther boards. USB has finaly reached its potential, lets do away with all the legacy crap, there's lots of adapters on the market for people wanting to use their old stuff.
I think designers had the same idea a couple of years ago: you saw a lot of "legacy-free" systems with an emphasis on cheapness and tiny form factor.
But they didn't catch on for one simple reason: motherboards are a commodity. The pressure on price is enormous, so the only way you can turn a profit making them is to make a lot of identical motherboards, so you don't spend a lot of money on multiple assembly lines, or on retooling the lines you have between runs. So your cheap motherboards are a one-size-fits-all design -- and that means legacy ports.
What I find interesting is that supercomputer makers like SGI have been lagging on the hertz wars for years. They seem to find it more productive to focus on increasing their ability to do parallelism than on making individual processors faster.
Another example of why processor speed isn't everything: my home system is a 1.1 gigahertz monster, designed as a server. Not the fastest system around, but close enough. But it doesn't really play AM's Alice very well, and if I want to run GTA3 at all, I'd need to spend a few bucks on a better video card. I'd sort of like to play Sims 2, but the necessary video card would cost more than I spent for the whole system. I'll never want to play it that badly.
As long as I can remember, people have obsessed about processor speed, not realizing how little effect this has on most apps. (The big bottleneck most people face is RAM; retail economics result in most systems being shipped without enough.) Nowadays, nobody needs more than a couple hundred megahertz, unless they're running something really graphics intensive. And even there, the specialized hardware between your monitor and the rest of the system does most of the work -- I doubt that Sims 2 would run any better on your hypothetical 10 gighertz system.
That works because those are open formats. But most streams are not in open formats, precisely because the people who own the streams don't want them recorded.
I've used that one. It works very well, though the user interface is a little klunky. The interesting thing is that if you tell it to direct the recorded stream to disk without also playing it back, Real Player will start playing back the stream as fast as it can get it off the net. Doesn't make any different with a live stream, but if the server is pulling up a recording for you, it speeds up too. So if you, for example, record an old 30-minute NPR interview, the recording will only take about 20 minutes.
Of course that brings up a nasty issue. NPR presumably makes a lot of money from the downloadable material on audible.com. If a lot of people started downloading that same material for free from the NPR web site, I suspect a lot of that material would cease to be available.
Profit from domination of OS market. Build huge piles of cash so you can make lots of mistakes without going out of business.
Realize there's this thing called the World Wide Web that's all the rage, and you don't have any support for it.
Meanwhile, more profit from your OS and application business.
Hurriedly buy license for Mosaic web browser, relabel it Internet Explorer. Add a few lame features, then start giving away the product to destroy all competing browsers.
Meanwhile lots more profit. You have to pay out a lot of money in lawsuits and antitrust cases, but it doesn't even make a dent in your cash flow. In fact, all that unspent cash is beginning to be a problem...
Add tons and tons of features to your web browser, because, like all geeks, you love features, and because it helps you look like you're actually doing innovative tech.
More profit, as people give up using anything but Windows on their desktop. This trend was well underway before you got into the browser business, but now that your mutated forms of HTML and your proprietary scripting and "active object" tech has become de-facto web standards, people move to your platfrom even faster than before.
Spyware and adware authors start exploiting all the security holes you left while you were going feature happy. You start issuing security patches, but many of these patches have their own holes and bugs.
More profit, even though more and more people are mad at you. Despite constant complaints about your screwups, nobody knows how to retool their infrastructure to do without your products.
Your patches on patches on patches situation reaches critical mass. You start slowing down the patch process to get it under control, but that only makes people more antsy, as they face problems with no official fixes.
More profit. By now your cash reserves are so out of control that you have to resort to the obsolete practice of paying your stockholders dividends.
Your release a megapatch months behind schedule, only to find that lots of people can't even install it. You innocently suggest that they just buy new computers, but too many people find that joke in bad taste.
More profit. Further explanations are pointless. It's just a law of nature.
You dip into petty cash and buy an anti-spyware company. You give away their product as a "beta" (even though the product went gold long ago) hoping that the freebie will save what's left of your reputation.
To record a stream directly, you need software that translates the data from the stream into the format you want to save. Now, that's not very hard technically, assuming you're good at reverse-engineering and the stream you're trying to read isn't encrypted. But people who manage to do that always run into one major problem: as soon as they release their product, the owners of the streaming format are on them, telling them they're in deep legal dodo until they stop selling tools for "pirating" their customers' data.
You can argue all you want about how legal or fair this is. But no developer has found it worthwhile to bankrupt him or herself in order to fight this kind of legal action. In any case, what's really needed is the political will to change the laws that favor IP hoarding.
The only way around this problem is to record the sounds after it's been translated by authorized software. The simple way is just to plug a patch cord into your sound card. Or you can get better fidelity by using a special sound driver that copies the audio stream to disk. But either way, you can't avoid tying up your sound card, since you have to con the authorized software into giving you a stream that's supposedly going directly to your speakers.
If you need real-time access to the recorded data, get two computers and a network.
Well, they certainly have more topless females than any newspaper in the U.S.!
But even if they were the worst newspaper in the world (I believe that's actually the Palo Alto Times Tribune, which once printed a Burger King press release as if it were wire copy), it'd be beside the point. You read that article, and you see a reasonably competent bit of journalism. Sneering at it because its missing a fact Slashdotters might have thought to look for is hypocritical, given our own sloppy record with keeping our facts straight.
A problem I have with a lot of Ask Slashdots is that even though a simple straightforward question is asked, readers are not satisfied to simply either answer the question that was asked, or not post a reply, but instead insist on a either answering a different question...
There are plenty of places people can go with simple technical questions: Usenet, discussion web sites, Yahoo groups. Slashdot pretends to be more than that, with editors who are supposed to filter out the low-interest items and promote discussions that are interesting to a lot of people, not just a few people who want a specific technical question answered.
... or berating the person who asked the question.
I wasn't berating the person who asked the question. I was berating the editor who couldn't be bothered to work with the submitter to put the question in a form that would promote a useful and interesting discussion. I'm also irritated by some of the purely lame newbie questions I see in Ask Slashdot -- but again, that's not the fault of the submitter, that's the fault of the editor, who's supposed to exercise some kind of judgment as to the stories he accepts.
Not if the hardware he's trying to use comes in PCI and not Cardbus. In that case, it doesn't help him that Cardbus is a kind of PCI. Still, it would help if we knew why he needed PCI in the first place.
That's the problem with a lot of Ask Slashdots: people focus on the technology they want to use, rather than the task they're trying to use it for. Cliff really ought to bounce back stories like this with the request that they fill in such details.
Sure, newspapers should be held to a higher standard that the rest of us. But how did that reporter fail to meet any reasonable standard? Even somebody with a technical background might have overlooked the possibility that a data cartridge wasn't actually made by the company shown on the label -- never mind somebody who wasn't familiar with the industry.
Yeah, you can't expect non-reporters to do all the fact checking that pro are supposed to do. But I see Slashdotters routinely pass off their personal prejudices and fourth-hand info as objective fact. That, in its way, is much worse than a journalist not digging quite deep enough.
I do get pissed when I see some technical ignoramus passing themselves off as a "high-tech journalist". But that's false advertising. The Sun reporter never pretended to be anything but an ordinary person reporting the facts to the best of his ability. (It might have helped if Disney had returned his phone calls.) We geeks know more about technology than 99% of humanity. But that's our obsession, not a kind of moral superiority.
That speaks to the big issue I used to have with Sun's IS department. The IS people were all competent and intelligent (which is more than can be said for a lot of IS departments), but as a unit they seemed unable to keep up with the changing needs of the people they were supporting.
This became an issue my very first day of work, when I couldn't access web sites outside the Sun firewall. Netscape was preconfigured with a script to identify and use the correct gateway -- but the script was way out of date and nonfunctional. I had to call IS and get the correct settings. OK, a small incident. But multiply it by the cost of answering that call for every new hire.
We had problems with overburdened networks and unreliable servers. Everybody who could ran all their software locally, even though this was against policy, because they couldn't trust the network to be available. But most of us couldn't do this, because there was a recent ban on handing out superuser passwords. (If you had a CD-ROM, you could get around this by re-installing Solaris -- but new people didn't have CD-ROMs!) I finally managed to get my superuser password, because my automounter kept crashing, and IS got tired of coming by to restart it for me. Without that password, I couldn't have installed my own browser, or done a lot of other stuff that made a lot of difference to my productivity.
The ultimate irony was the constant shortage of disk space. Ironic not just because we worked for a company that made file servers. But also because there terabytes of unused disk space on the workstations. You weren't supposed to keep data locally, because there was no backup for workstation data. Sun sells distributed backup software, but IS seemed to have no interest in deploying it internally.
Both our "everything on the server" and your Sunray setup are a result of a decision to centralize resources. There are good reasons to do it this way -- but it's not gonna work if you don't provide the resources to make it work.
Nowadays, I'm a diehard Firefox user -- but only because they've finally taken the lead on Internet Explorer in security and reliability. For years, I used IE, giving Mozilla or Netscape a chance every six months or so, and always going away disgusted with its bugginess and slugishness.
Back in 1998, I was working for the Java division of Sun, where we relied on the "Intranet" long before it was a word. Most documents, both internal, and external, were in HTML. Which makes a really good web browser really important. And yet we were stuck with the Solaris port of Netscape 4.7. Buggy, sluggish, screwed up my X-Windows palette, crashed once an hour -- and it didn't provide headers and footers for printouts! I was working as a tech writer, reading and producing a lot of documents, so this was a major crimp in my productivity. I finally broke the No Microsoft Rule and installed IE for Solaris on my workstation.
That's all the brand loyalty you can expect from techies -- give them something that works, or they're gone.
Since we don't have P3 Girls on our side of the Atlantic, I took the liberty of providing this link. In digging this up, I discovered that The Sun is published by Rupert Murdoch, who also gave us Fox News. So I guess it must pretty sleazy...
Why should the reporter have guessed? Is he an expert on computer games? Does he even have a technical background? Probably not.
It's not an impressive bit of journalism, and I gather that the Sun is not a top-rank newspaper. But this seems to be an honest mistake -- whereas most misinformation I see on Slashdot comes from plain old intellectual laziness. We're in no position to sneer.
The Sun published the article without researching the fact that this was a pirate cartridge based off of the cracked version of this game released. Oops!
Yeah, everybody on Slashdot always checks their facts before making a post!
Many years ago, I stumbled onto an unattended demo at Fry's. It was a very simple device that seem to measure some simple biological parameter (skin resistance?) when you put your hand on a metal plate. I don't recall all the things it was supposed to be good for, but the function they were demoing was very suprising: a simple steering control. You looked at the monitor, which was running a downhill skiing sim, and thought about the direction you wanted to go. It actually worked!
I was in a hurry, and left, thinking I'd hear more about this product later. But I never did. Anybody know WTF this was?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, lots of people take the roll-your-own approach just because that's the only way they know. The last regular job I had was for an internet services company that had started out in the owner's garage ten years earlier. For our virtual web host business, we still used the RYO server management software the owner had written back in that garage! And even though we were now managing a data center with thousands of systems, everything in sight -- the phone system, the customer support database, the procedures we used to checkin hands-on customers, even the tests used to screen potential employees -- everything was very do-it-yourself. Not the most cost-effective way to run a business, but the owner simply knew no other way to get things done.
After all we wouldn't be techies if we didn't enjoy playing with technology.
OK, I totally disagree with this post, but the moderators who labelled it "flamebait" are total idiots. The author is spouting a certain party line, but then so is everybody else around here. An honest opinion isn't flamebait just because you disagree with it.
One guy I talked to refused to even concede that MS-DOS was an actual OS, since it didn't have most of the services that an operating system is supposed to provide. He characterized it as a "program loader".
It shouldn't suprise anybody that Spybot and AdAware miss a lot of stuff. There's a lot of crap out there -- I've heard reports of people having thousands of infections. The big problem is keeping those databases up to date. Since Spybot is basically some guy's hobby, and Lavasoft has never put a lot of effort into maintaining AdAware (a product that was given to them by its original author, on the condition that they always provide a free version), naturally their databases have lagged. It was inevitable that somebody with deep pockets would invest the time and money to do a better job.
Whether you think the anti-trust case was a good idea or a bad one, you have to concede that Microsoft might well have been broken up by now if Al Gore had won the election. Pointing out that fact doesn't make me a partisan.
Again, your memory needs refreshing. MS's dominance of the OS market is pretty much an accident. That actually got into the business against their own will. They wanted to sell development tools for the new IBM PC, but that meant that IBM had to adopt an OS those tools would run on. Which is why they steered IBM to CP/M. When that fell through, they hurriedly licensed a CP/M clone from Seattle Computer Products, which became the basis for MS-DOS.MS-DOS is one of the biggest abortions since the rise of modern technologies (find me a single OS expert who will give it high marks). Yet its very flaws created such a high level of lockin with the PC platform itself -- which was also pretty flawed. Since compatibility soon became the name of the game, clone computers had to reproduce all of IBMs mistakes. And since their biggest mistake was choosing MS-DOS, computer makers ended up paying a tithe to Bill for every box they sold.
But even if you were correct, and Bill achieved his success by technical brilliance and plain good business -- so what? He got his reward when he became the richest dude on the planet. He did not earn the right to destroy the very marketplace that made him rich. Microsoft's role in the current marketplace is bad for all of us -- including Microsoft. Calling me ideological names isn't going to change that.
I haven't examined the agent in detail, but the one effect I've noticed is typically lame. If you run a .BAT file, the agent reminds you that scripts are dangerous and asks you if you want to flag this particular script as safe. Which is totally useless: if you know enough to answer the question, you already know that you're running a script. Contrariwise, if you're a typical user who doesn't even know what a script is, you have no idea what to do.
Still, I'll probably end up using this product. It caught a lot of stuff on my machine that AdAware and Spybot missed. At least, I'll continue to use it until Microsoft screws it up beyond use.
That's why I'll always be sorry the Democrats didn't stay in power long enough to break Microsoft up. If Microsoft developers were forced to operate in a competitive environment where mistakes actually hurt them, we'd all be better off -- including the former Microsofters.
It was for Linus Thorvalds.
No, what's really pathetic is that the HURD kernel has been in "final stages" since 2000 or so. How can we expect the industry to take "Free Software" seriously when the founder of the movement can't even complete such a simple project?
Compared to that, a video game that's six years behind schedule is nothing.
But they didn't catch on for one simple reason: motherboards are a commodity. The pressure on price is enormous, so the only way you can turn a profit making them is to make a lot of identical motherboards, so you don't spend a lot of money on multiple assembly lines, or on retooling the lines you have between runs. So your cheap motherboards are a one-size-fits-all design -- and that means legacy ports.
Another example of why processor speed isn't everything: my home system is a 1.1 gigahertz monster, designed as a server. Not the fastest system around, but close enough. But it doesn't really play AM's Alice very well, and if I want to run GTA3 at all, I'd need to spend a few bucks on a better video card. I'd sort of like to play Sims 2, but the necessary video card would cost more than I spent for the whole system. I'll never want to play it that badly.
As long as I can remember, people have obsessed about processor speed, not realizing how little effect this has on most apps. (The big bottleneck most people face is RAM; retail economics result in most systems being shipped without enough.) Nowadays, nobody needs more than a couple hundred megahertz, unless they're running something really graphics intensive. And even there, the specialized hardware between your monitor and the rest of the system does most of the work -- I doubt that Sims 2 would run any better on your hypothetical 10 gighertz system.
That works because those are open formats. But most streams are not in open formats, precisely because the people who own the streams don't want them recorded.
Of course that brings up a nasty issue. NPR presumably makes a lot of money from the downloadable material on audible.com. If a lot of people started downloading that same material for free from the NPR web site, I suspect a lot of that material would cease to be available.
- Profit from domination of OS market. Build huge piles of cash so you can make lots of mistakes without going out of business.
- Realize there's this thing called the World Wide Web that's all the rage, and you don't have any support for it.
- Meanwhile, more profit from your OS and application business.
- Hurriedly buy license for Mosaic web browser, relabel it Internet Explorer. Add a few lame features, then start giving away the product to destroy all competing browsers.
- Meanwhile lots more profit. You have to pay out a lot of money in lawsuits and antitrust cases, but it doesn't even make a dent in your cash flow. In fact, all that unspent cash is beginning to be a problem...
- Add tons and tons of features to your web browser, because, like all geeks, you love features, and because it helps you look like you're actually doing innovative tech.
- More profit, as people give up using anything but Windows on their desktop. This trend was well underway before you got into the browser business, but now that your mutated forms of HTML and your proprietary scripting and "active object" tech has become de-facto web standards, people move to your platfrom even faster than before.
- Spyware and adware authors start exploiting all the security holes you left while you were going feature happy. You start issuing security patches, but many of these patches have their own holes and bugs.
- More profit, even though more and more people are mad at you. Despite constant complaints about your screwups, nobody knows how to retool their infrastructure to do without your products.
- Your patches on patches on patches situation reaches critical mass. You start slowing down the patch process to get it under control, but that only makes people more antsy, as they face problems with no official fixes.
- More profit. By now your cash reserves are so out of control that you have to resort to the obsolete practice of paying your stockholders dividends.
- Your release a megapatch months behind schedule, only to find that lots of people can't even install it. You innocently suggest that they just buy new computers, but too many people find that joke in bad taste.
- More profit. Further explanations are pointless. It's just a law of nature.
- You dip into petty cash and buy an anti-spyware company. You give away their product as a "beta" (even though the product went gold long ago) hoping that the freebie will save what's left of your reputation.
- ....
- Profit!
- ....
- Profit!
You get the idea.You can argue all you want about how legal or fair this is. But no developer has found it worthwhile to bankrupt him or herself in order to fight this kind of legal action. In any case, what's really needed is the political will to change the laws that favor IP hoarding.
The only way around this problem is to record the sounds after it's been translated by authorized software. The simple way is just to plug a patch cord into your sound card. Or you can get better fidelity by using a special sound driver that copies the audio stream to disk. But either way, you can't avoid tying up your sound card, since you have to con the authorized software into giving you a stream that's supposedly going directly to your speakers.
If you need real-time access to the recorded data, get two computers and a network.
But even if they were the worst newspaper in the world (I believe that's actually the Palo Alto Times Tribune, which once printed a Burger King press release as if it were wire copy), it'd be beside the point. You read that article, and you see a reasonably competent bit of journalism. Sneering at it because its missing a fact Slashdotters might have thought to look for is hypocritical, given our own sloppy record with keeping our facts straight.
That's the problem with a lot of Ask Slashdots: people focus on the technology they want to use, rather than the task they're trying to use it for. Cliff really ought to bounce back stories like this with the request that they fill in such details.
Yeah, you can't expect non-reporters to do all the fact checking that pro are supposed to do. But I see Slashdotters routinely pass off their personal prejudices and fourth-hand info as objective fact. That, in its way, is much worse than a journalist not digging quite deep enough.
I do get pissed when I see some technical ignoramus passing themselves off as a "high-tech journalist". But that's false advertising. The Sun reporter never pretended to be anything but an ordinary person reporting the facts to the best of his ability. (It might have helped if Disney had returned his phone calls.) We geeks know more about technology than 99% of humanity. But that's our obsession, not a kind of moral superiority.
This became an issue my very first day of work, when I couldn't access web sites outside the Sun firewall. Netscape was preconfigured with a script to identify and use the correct gateway -- but the script was way out of date and nonfunctional. I had to call IS and get the correct settings. OK, a small incident. But multiply it by the cost of answering that call for every new hire.
We had problems with overburdened networks and unreliable servers. Everybody who could ran all their software locally, even though this was against policy, because they couldn't trust the network to be available. But most of us couldn't do this, because there was a recent ban on handing out superuser passwords. (If you had a CD-ROM, you could get around this by re-installing Solaris -- but new people didn't have CD-ROMs!) I finally managed to get my superuser password, because my automounter kept crashing, and IS got tired of coming by to restart it for me. Without that password, I couldn't have installed my own browser, or done a lot of other stuff that made a lot of difference to my productivity.
The ultimate irony was the constant shortage of disk space. Ironic not just because we worked for a company that made file servers. But also because there terabytes of unused disk space on the workstations. You weren't supposed to keep data locally, because there was no backup for workstation data. Sun sells distributed backup software, but IS seemed to have no interest in deploying it internally.
Both our "everything on the server" and your Sunray setup are a result of a decision to centralize resources. There are good reasons to do it this way -- but it's not gonna work if you don't provide the resources to make it work.
Back in 1998, I was working for the Java division of Sun, where we relied on the "Intranet" long before it was a word. Most documents, both internal, and external, were in HTML. Which makes a really good web browser really important. And yet we were stuck with the Solaris port of Netscape 4.7. Buggy, sluggish, screwed up my X-Windows palette, crashed once an hour -- and it didn't provide headers and footers for printouts! I was working as a tech writer, reading and producing a lot of documents, so this was a major crimp in my productivity. I finally broke the No Microsoft Rule and installed IE for Solaris on my workstation.
That's all the brand loyalty you can expect from techies -- give them something that works, or they're gone.
Since we don't have P3 Girls on our side of the Atlantic, I took the liberty of providing this link. In digging this up, I discovered that The Sun is published by Rupert Murdoch, who also gave us Fox News. So I guess it must pretty sleazy...
It's not an impressive bit of journalism, and I gather that the Sun is not a top-rank newspaper. But this seems to be an honest mistake -- whereas most misinformation I see on Slashdot comes from plain old intellectual laziness. We're in no position to sneer.
I was in a hurry, and left, thinking I'd hear more about this product later. But I never did. Anybody know WTF this was?