Re:Fritz Hollings out as commerce committee chair!
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No matter what your party affiliation is, you have to be encouraged by the growing possibility of Republicans taking back control of the Senate.
Maybe for you, but not for me. That means projects like the missile defense system will likely get millions or billions of dollars in funding, regardless of the fact that the experimental results behind the system prove that it isn't going to work as promised and the science to get around the problems raised in testing still isn't up to the task.
I factor a whole bunch more into my votes than "geek" issues (i.e military, the environment, taxes, education, and government R&D funding, just to name a few). I hope you do the same.
That would mean our favorite Hollywood apologist, Senator Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., would no longer set the agenda for the commerce committee.
Not really, it just means the money Hollywood paid him to take those positions would be put in his republican replacement's coffers or in another Senators from a different state.
Isn't he the only reason anyone even knows or cares about Transmeta?;) Don't worry about Linus. He won't have to worry about landing a new job when Transmeta bites the dust.
Back when the G4 was designed, things were looking bad for Apple, so Motorola retrenched into the embedded market.
True, but not completely the reason. Don't discount the effect of Steve Jobs' killing of the Mac clone market, which shrank Motorola's market for selling its non-embedded PowerPCs to one vendor. This angered the company far more than the press would have you believe, since Steve Jobs single handedly kicked Motorola out of a market and left them with a huge stock of unsold systems.
If Motorola were really worried about the non-embedded PPC market, they would've allocated additional resources to the project long ago. There are plenty of smart people working there.
Here's an example: "The Diamond Age", one of my favorite NS books. It had a terrible ending. NS spent nearly the entire book everything up in intricate detail, then he threw it away with an ending that was something like 15 pages long. It was as if he had completely run out of energy/money/will/etc. and had to stop writing that instant. It was such a diservice to the rest of the book, which was pretty cool and rather interesting.
I'll admit the email sounds bad, but this is Slashdot and anyone who trusts a small email excerpt posted here without delving further into the issue is asking for trouble. Until we see the FAQ and hear about RH systems from Dell, including the "unbreakable" Oracle/RH/Dell server, I'm going to reserve judgement.
Seeing how Red Hat and Dell have a good partnership in place, and Dell is going to be featured at Red Hat's booth during LinuxWorld, I would imagine Dell is going to provide a separate line-up of Linux systems that gets around this MS requirement. Dell has a history of supplying only what customers will buy, and since there is a lot of customer interest in Red Hat Linux, I think they are working to satisfy that demand.
I think the point was Linux allowed them to upgrade to servers using commodity components instead of RISC based proprietary servers running Unix. The performance of commodity servers has really caught up with most RISC servers, except at the high end. Also, while the comparison is uneven, it is a real world situation. Most companies go from the stone age systems to bleeding edge, then repeat the cycle many years later.
I'm sure they know it. If you can say one thing about the semiconductor biz, it's a small world.
Good luck to Intel. Had they not created such a huge die size for Itanium 2, I seriously doubt they would've gone to 300mm so soon especially when you consider how bad the recent semiconductor recession has been.
Hah, competitors hardly need to "catch up." Seimconductor companies almost never want to be the first to build a fab supporting the largest wafer size, unless your design a chip that no one is buying and have to dedicate 420+ mm2 per die just to get decent performance.;) Being first sounds good on paper, but it also means you get to debug all of the new tools from vendors. If you thought beta software builds were costly, try running your expensive wafers though a $4M+ Endura from Applied Materials and having the robot shatter them. Not only have you lost your test vehicles, you wasted expensive chemicals and have to clean up the vacuum chamber. Not fun or cheap by any means.
The running joke in the biz is that every company wants to be in second place in the race.
There isn't a demand for their product. Transmeta is technology searching for a market, instead of the other way around. That's always a bad place to be.
Intel is able to produce products that satisfy the low power x86 market. If consumers *really* demanded lower power chips than those already on the market, Intel could easily exert more resources on creating those products and win on reputation/control of the arch/pricing/deals/you name it. For instances where a product didn't need an x86 chip, One could simply get an appropriately spec'd microcontroller from Motorola and be done with it.
Re:Thanks a lot, Sematech, for ruining Austin
on
Sili-Hudson Valley?
·
· Score: 2
You must not have lived in Austin long because you've already forgotten the deeply embedded myth: ruined the city and it sucks and it'll never be the same. If would just leave, things would be way cooler.
The fact is, no matter when you got here, it was always better before you did.
If he's running such a legitamite business, why does he have to hide who he is when he's conducting business? The last time I got an advertising flyer from Ford, it didn't have Car Sellers, Inc. or Max Cohen Motors as the return address...
Yup. UnitedLinux just got the kiss of death. While UL was Ransom's baby all along, his role at Caldera kinda gave off a thin impression that he would just be another figure head in the total UL organization. Now that veil has been lifted and he's the head guy at UL, I expect him to apply his usual ideas of using the proprietary software model for open source software and drive UL into a tiny niche market. Poor Ransom, he just doesn't get it, does he? I've never seen one man make the same business mistakes so many times...
It's also nice to deal with a human being instead of some crappy voice mail system that runs you through five layers of menus before you get to someone who can actually solve your problem.
Exactly! I'd also like to point out the relationship you build with your local computer shop is incredibly important. YOu can't put a price on the benefit of an established, trusting relationship between you and a local computer shop run by hard working, decent folks. In my case, when I get a part that doesn't work, I just take it back to my local shop and tell them. They hand me a replacement, apologize for my inconvienience, and I'm out the door. Try that with a Dell or HP.
"Sir, I need you to restore the software to the same state it was in when you receieved your PC from us..."
The local shop knows me, I know them, and we both know that each other knows what they're doing. That's why I buy locally and build my own. This relationship is something you can't put a price on.
Depends how brutal the head butt appears on screen. If it's anything like the punches in the final battle scene of Spider-man (which were loud and kinda gory), I can see why it would make a difference.
I know you're making a joke, but seven top execs quitting in one week is by no means "normal employee churn." Something is happening behind the scenes at Sun...
Something is brewing at Sun...seven top execs leaving in a short time isn't "normal employee churn" by any strech. Hopefully some of the folks working there can shed some light on this so those of us running predominantly Sun based networks can get a grip on it all.
I think everyone who is watching can see that Linux is eating up Sun. Sun will be fine on the high end in the short term, but the low and medium Solaris arenas are in trouble. There is little incentive to use Solaris in those areas, regardless of its superiority, because of cheap x86 hardware and the decent to very good performance of Linux. It's getting harder and harder to justify buying SPARC based products in those areas.
So what can Sun do?
Get with the program. They need to stop fighting the future and instead embrace it. Vertically integrated, proprietary computer companies always fall by the wayside. Apple, DEC, SGI--once at the top of their game, now nothing more than niche players. Sun will end up the same way unless they do something about it, and I know there are enough smart people working there that realize this as well. I suggest Sun start leaveraging their incredible Unix experience and aggresively move to Linux. Strike up a partnership with AMD to use the Hammer family for a complete lineup of Sun brand Linux servers. Start agressively bringing features from Solaris onto Linux. Put out their own Linux distro. Offer support service for Linux and Solaris. I know a bunch of these efforts are underway, but I don't think Sun moving fast enough on them.
Also, Sun needs to stop talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to Linux. One day they like it, the next day they don't. Sun had better figure out soon that not only do they like Linux, but that they love it and cherish it and that it is the future of Unix. Otherwise they'll be just another marginalized computer company.
I'll bet the NVidia/AMD issue wouldn't have lasted a week (hell maybe not even a day)
IIRC, the Athlon/AGP issue isn't just related to Nvidia products, it happens on ATI products as well. Since Nvidia wrote their own driver, they may have made some error which causes the problem to occur more often.
Re:Didn't stop here long
on
Revolution OS
·
· Score: 2
You should've gone solo--it's a good film. I went the night before ALG's field trip and the theater was about 75% full. Not bad for a Wednesday night. One of the interesting things I noticed while I was there were the three or four guys who showed up in official Microsoft denim shirts. On the way into the theater there was a table covered with photocopied documents, flyers for Linux support companies and free Redmond Linux CDs, but on the way out there was a stack of official Microsoft.Net promo CDs next to all the Linux stuff. I wonder where that.Net stuff came from...
But it also seems unlikely that people would purchase higher priced new books when the lower-priced used book link is right there.
Not necessarily. What if the used book is in horrible condition? It's really hard to determine that through a link, and lots of avid readers (like myself) won't buy used books whose condition is questionable. I don't want a book with a broken spine, dog-eared pages, writing, etc. Also, what if the used books is out of stock? Used, new releases are hard to find, especially if the book is good or in demand. Amazon probably sells many new books when customers find the used copies aren't in stock.
All I suggested was maybe Amazon could have the decency to say "Hey.. this book is new.. let's give the publisher/author a chance to make some decent sales numbers out of it before we start trying to pull in the used book trade."
Why? You can go to your local used bookstore and they'll might have the latest and greatest books too, and they don't feel a need to hold the books behind the counter until some period of time passes. They put them out as they get them, and customers buy them when they see the titles they want at a price they like. Why should the online bookstores be at a disadvantage?
My guess is this is only the first step to start an unsuccessful fight against the used book market. Authors and publishers should be excited that used books are sold. How many people buy a $25 book from an author that they haven't even heard of? Not many. And what if you want a book that is out of print, still in demand, but the publisher doesn't want to print anymore? (i.e. "The Silicon Man" by Charles Platt). Used books to the rescue. I'll bet 75% of my book collection was inspired or influenced from used purchases.
I'm not sure what you can do about (B), but (A) could be solved by adding this line (with the default font size & types you prefer) to your prefs.js file:
The Alamo Drafthouse North theater in Austin, TX will also be showing the film. It opens on March 22. Those of us who saw it last year at SXSW can now see it again on the big screen, almost exactly one year later!:)
Didn't he also say NT 5.0 would be DOA because of it's bloat and tardiness? I really wish ESR would stop making so many "predictions." It'd be a good move for his reputation and everyone else in the OSS community that feels the effects of the blanket associations with his comments.
My point is that none of these people are good candidates for getting a techie job.
Software development is NOT the only filed you can consider "techie"! Try semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, optics, MEMS, etc. All very skilled, high end stuff whose industries often send their employees on a economic roller coaster ride. The article was about people in technology fields taking jobs that were far below their skill set, not just about laid off software developers.
Nortel makes telecommunications equipment. That requires software AND hardware, and producing hardware uses the skills of a mechanical engineer.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter what your party affiliation is, you have to be encouraged by the growing possibility of Republicans taking back control of the Senate.
Maybe for you, but not for me. That means projects like the missile defense system will likely get millions or billions of dollars in funding, regardless of the fact that the experimental results behind the system prove that it isn't going to work as promised and the science to get around the problems raised in testing still isn't up to the task.
I factor a whole bunch more into my votes than "geek" issues (i.e military, the environment, taxes, education, and government R&D funding, just to name a few). I hope you do the same.
That would mean our favorite Hollywood apologist, Senator Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., would no longer set the agenda for the commerce committee.
Not really, it just means the money Hollywood paid him to take those positions would be put in his republican replacement's coffers or in another Senators from a different state.
Isn't he the only reason anyone even knows or cares about Transmeta? ;) Don't worry about Linus. He won't have to worry about landing a new job when Transmeta bites the dust.
Back when the G4 was designed, things were looking bad for Apple, so Motorola retrenched into the embedded market.
True, but not completely the reason. Don't discount the effect of Steve Jobs' killing of the Mac clone market, which shrank Motorola's market for selling its non-embedded PowerPCs to one vendor. This angered the company far more than the press would have you believe, since Steve Jobs single handedly kicked Motorola out of a market and left them with a huge stock of unsold systems.
If Motorola were really worried about the non-embedded PPC market, they would've allocated additional resources to the project long ago. There are plenty of smart people working there.
Here's an example: "The Diamond Age", one of my favorite NS books. It had a terrible ending. NS spent nearly the entire book everything up in intricate detail, then he threw it away with an ending that was something like 15 pages long. It was as if he had completely run out of energy/money/will/etc. and had to stop writing that instant. It was such a diservice to the rest of the book, which was pretty cool and rather interesting.
I'll admit the email sounds bad, but this is Slashdot and anyone who trusts a small email excerpt posted here without delving further into the issue is asking for trouble. Until we see the FAQ and hear about RH systems from Dell, including the "unbreakable" Oracle/RH/Dell server, I'm going to reserve judgement.
Seeing how Red Hat and Dell have a good partnership in place, and Dell is going to be featured at Red Hat's booth during LinuxWorld, I would imagine Dell is going to provide a separate line-up of Linux systems that gets around this MS requirement. Dell has a history of supplying only what customers will buy, and since there is a lot of customer interest in Red Hat Linux, I think they are working to satisfy that demand.
I think the point was Linux allowed them to upgrade to servers using commodity components instead of RISC based proprietary servers running Unix. The performance of commodity servers has really caught up with most RISC servers, except at the high end. Also, while the comparison is uneven, it is a real world situation. Most companies go from the stone age systems to bleeding edge, then repeat the cycle many years later.
I'm sure they know it. If you can say one thing about the semiconductor biz, it's a small world.
Good luck to Intel. Had they not created such a huge die size for Itanium 2, I seriously doubt they would've gone to 300mm so soon especially when you consider how bad the recent semiconductor recession has been.
Hah, competitors hardly need to "catch up." Seimconductor companies almost never want to be the first to build a fab supporting the largest wafer size, unless your design a chip that no one is buying and have to dedicate 420+ mm2 per die just to get decent performance. ;) Being first sounds good on paper, but it also means you get to debug all of the new tools from vendors. If you thought beta software builds were costly, try running your expensive wafers though a $4M+ Endura from Applied Materials and having the robot shatter them. Not only have you lost your test vehicles, you wasted expensive chemicals and have to clean up the vacuum chamber. Not fun or cheap by any means.
The running joke in the biz is that every company wants to be in second place in the race.
There isn't a demand for their product. Transmeta is technology searching for a market, instead of the other way around. That's always a bad place to be.
Intel is able to produce products that satisfy the low power x86 market. If consumers *really* demanded lower power chips than those already on the market, Intel could easily exert more resources on creating those products and win on reputation/control of the arch/pricing/deals/you name it. For instances where a product didn't need an x86 chip, One could simply get an appropriately spec'd microcontroller from Motorola and be done with it.
You must not have lived in Austin long because you've already forgotten the deeply embedded myth: ruined the city and it sucks and it'll never be the same. If would just leave, things would be way cooler.
The fact is, no matter when you got here, it was always better before you did.
If he's running such a legitamite business, why does he have to hide who he is when he's conducting business? The last time I got an advertising flyer from Ford, it didn't have Car Sellers, Inc. or Max Cohen Motors as the return address...
Yup. UnitedLinux just got the kiss of death. While UL was Ransom's baby all along, his role at Caldera kinda gave off a thin impression that he would just be another figure head in the total UL organization. Now that veil has been lifted and he's the head guy at UL, I expect him to apply his usual ideas of using the proprietary software model for open source software and drive UL into a tiny niche market. Poor Ransom, he just doesn't get it, does he? I've never seen one man make the same business mistakes so many times...
It's also nice to deal with a human being instead of some crappy voice mail system that runs you through five layers of menus before you get to someone who can actually solve your problem.
Exactly! I'd also like to point out the relationship you build with your local computer shop is incredibly important. YOu can't put a price on the benefit of an established, trusting relationship between you and a local computer shop run by hard working, decent folks. In my case, when I get a part that doesn't work, I just take it back to my local shop and tell them. They hand me a replacement, apologize for my inconvienience, and I'm out the door. Try that with a Dell or HP.
"Sir, I need you to restore the software to the same state it was in when you receieved your PC from us..."
The local shop knows me, I know them, and we both know that each other knows what they're doing. That's why I buy locally and build my own. This relationship is something you can't put a price on.
Depends how brutal the head butt appears on screen. If it's anything like the punches in the final battle scene of Spider-man (which were loud and kinda gory), I can see why it would make a difference.
I know you're making a joke, but seven top execs quitting in one week is by no means "normal employee churn." Something is happening behind the scenes at Sun...
Something is brewing at Sun...seven top execs leaving in a short time isn't "normal employee churn" by any strech. Hopefully some of the folks working there can shed some light on this so those of us running predominantly Sun based networks can get a grip on it all.
I think everyone who is watching can see that Linux is eating up Sun. Sun will be fine on the high end in the short term, but the low and medium Solaris arenas are in trouble. There is little incentive to use Solaris in those areas, regardless of its superiority, because of cheap x86 hardware and the decent to very good performance of Linux. It's getting harder and harder to justify buying SPARC based products in those areas.
So what can Sun do?
Get with the program. They need to stop fighting the future and instead embrace it. Vertically integrated, proprietary computer companies always fall by the wayside. Apple, DEC, SGI--once at the top of their game, now nothing more than niche players. Sun will end up the same way unless they do something about it, and I know there are enough smart people working there that realize this as well. I suggest Sun start leaveraging their incredible Unix experience and aggresively move to Linux. Strike up a partnership with AMD to use the Hammer family for a complete lineup of Sun brand Linux servers. Start agressively bringing features from Solaris onto Linux. Put out their own Linux distro. Offer support service for Linux and Solaris. I know a bunch of these efforts are underway, but I don't think Sun moving fast enough on them.
Also, Sun needs to stop talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to Linux. One day they like it, the next day they don't. Sun had better figure out soon that not only do they like Linux, but that they love it and cherish it and that it is the future of Unix. Otherwise they'll be just another marginalized computer company.
I'll bet the NVidia/AMD issue wouldn't have lasted a week (hell maybe not even a day)
IIRC, the Athlon/AGP issue isn't just related to Nvidia products, it happens on ATI products as well. Since Nvidia wrote their own driver, they may have made some error which causes the problem to occur more often.
You should've gone solo--it's a good film. I went the night before ALG's field trip and the theater was about 75% full. Not bad for a Wednesday night. One of the interesting things I noticed while I was there were the three or four guys who showed up in official Microsoft denim shirts. On the way into the theater there was a table covered with photocopied documents, flyers for Linux support companies and free Redmond Linux CDs, but on the way out there was a stack of official Microsoft .Net promo CDs next to all the Linux stuff. I wonder where that .Net stuff came from...
Not necessarily. What if the used book is in horrible condition? It's really hard to determine that through a link, and lots of avid readers (like myself) won't buy used books whose condition is questionable. I don't want a book with a broken spine, dog-eared pages, writing, etc. Also, what if the used books is out of stock? Used, new releases are hard to find, especially if the book is good or in demand. Amazon probably sells many new books when customers find the used copies aren't in stock.
All I suggested was maybe Amazon could have the decency to say "Hey.. this book is new.. let's give the publisher/author a chance to make some decent sales numbers out of it before we start trying to pull in the used book trade."
Why? You can go to your local used bookstore and they'll might have the latest and greatest books too, and they don't feel a need to hold the books behind the counter until some period of time passes. They put them out as they get them, and customers buy them when they see the titles they want at a price they like. Why should the online bookstores be at a disadvantage?
My guess is this is only the first step to start an unsuccessful fight against the used book market. Authors and publishers should be excited that used books are sold. How many people buy a $25 book from an author that they haven't even heard of? Not many. And what if you want a book that is out of print, still in demand, but the publisher doesn't want to print anymore? (i.e. "The Silicon Man" by Charles Platt). Used books to the rescue. I'll bet 75% of my book collection was inspired or influenced from used purchases.
Which chipset are you using?
user_pref("font.minimum-size.fixed", 14);
user_pref("font.minimum-size.variable", 14);
The Alamo Drafthouse North theater in Austin, TX will also be showing the film. It opens on March 22. Those of us who saw it last year at SXSW can now see it again on the big screen, almost exactly one year later! :)
Didn't he also say NT 5.0 would be DOA because of it's bloat and tardiness? I really wish ESR would stop making so many "predictions." It'd be a good move for his reputation and everyone else in the OSS community that feels the effects of the blanket associations with his comments.
Software development is NOT the only filed you can consider "techie"! Try semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, optics, MEMS, etc. All very skilled, high end stuff whose industries often send their employees on a economic roller coaster ride. The article was about people in technology fields taking jobs that were far below their skill set, not just about laid off software developers.
Nortel makes telecommunications equipment. That requires software AND hardware, and producing hardware uses the skills of a mechanical engineer.