I've also got a couple of scoped rifles I enjoy doing some target practice with sometimes. Even with the bipod extended and laying prone, I can't hit consistently within a foot at 100 yards. Mind you, I have some eyesight problems.
Boy, I guess! I'm not much of a shot compared to my friends, but even I can maintain a 1 inch group at a 100 yards with a scoped.30-06. Bench rest, no bipod. Standing, I can maintain a 6 inch group with no problems.
I think that based upon your personal experience you're asking to give up too much accuracy in a game.
I call bullshit on this. AM Stereo is a lousy option compared to FM for several reasons.
It's been a while since I was responsible for radio communications installations and repair, so I apologize for any minor mistakes that I might make. However, I'm 90% sure of my facts without going back to my old tech manuals.
1) The narrow spectrum allotted to AM stations means that the actual listening experience is crap.
1.a) So increase the slot! you say. Well, if you're going to do that, you'll have to dramatically reduce the power output so you don't end up stepping all over the other AM stations out there sharing neighboring slots.
1.b) But AM's biggest advantage over FM is its range! you say. True, but that's a combination of the power output allowed and the fact that AM's lower frequencies are much more likely to remain coherent as they bounce off the ionosphere and return to earth. If you don't reduce the strength of the AM signal and increase the slot dedicated to individual stations, you automatically eliminate the number of AM stations that can effectively broadcast. You'd probably need somewhere between 40 and 50 KHz dedicated to each station instead of the 10 KHz now alloted. You really want to eliminate 75% to 80% of the AM stations just to get AM stereo?
2) The other major reason, and probably the REAL reason that AM stereo never took off, is that Amplitude Modulation is far more sensitive to changes in its environment than Frequency Modulation. Lightning storms, tornados, and other kinds of severe weather raise holy hell with AM stations.
My personal experience bears this out. I grew up in northern Minnesota back when FM was still pretty rare. The old cars that teenagers like myself were driving still didn't have AM/FM radios as standard equipment. On clear nights in the winter we could pull in WLS out of Chicago about 500 miles away like it was right next door. When the ionosphere was higher during the summer (also known as tornado season here in the Midwest), we could sometimes get this faint, crackly, lightning bursted version of it.
Obviously, we had closer stations. Even my little town of 8,000 had an AM station that served everyone within a 40 or 50 mile radius with a pretty boring selection of oldies. Still does, btw. Now it competes with 5 local FM stations serving the same area running everything from Minnesota Public Radio to country to acid rock to Top 40. Even that little AM station would be subject to massive interference from a thunderstorm, though. Listening to any AM station during a thunderstorm while your favorite makeout song was on was an exercise in frustration. You had to hope your date was partial to bangs, skips, and cracks!:-)
Nope, I think the FCC made the right choice back in the 1950s. AM Stereo was and remains a bad, Bad, BAD idea for anyone who actually wants to listen to music.
The first time my boss told me to stay late on such short notice for such a stupid reason, I told him I had family commitments that I refused to put aside. He said, "OK."
The second time that he told me to stay late on such short notice for such a stupid reason, I told him, "No. I stay late plenty and work a lot of weekends, too. I'm here for the true emergencies and for the longterm installation issues. I won't stay late unless it's important."
He said, "OK." He stayed late to do it himself. As he was actually a techie who recently converted to management, this wasn't the scary thing it sounds like.:)
The best part was that he never told me to stay late on such short notice again. He learned to ASK. Sometimes, you just need to learn that managing up is more important than managing down.:)
What I find amazing is that people call RMS egotistical and yet, here's Linus, naming an OS after himself and a God complex to boot.
Do some research, willya? Linus didn't name Linux. The guy who first put his work up on an FTP site did.
As for the God complex crack, well, it's his project, dammit. He can run it any way he likes. As long as other developers are willing to sign up to contribute, his project will continue to move forward.
Don't like the way he runs things? Fork the codebase and start a competing project! Start all the work to pull developers to your project. That's exactly what's going to happen to what's left of the core XFree86 folks, after all.
You do realize that you don't actually own that copy of Windows XP, don't you? You do realize that if you bought that copy from a retailer 2 years ago, you have about a year to go before it just quits working because you only bought a 3 year license to USE it?
You purchased a rental agreement. Not a copy of the software.
BTW, go read your EULA some time. Then read what's posted on Microsoft's web site now. Nice how things have changed for the worse in the past couple of years, eh? Not that it was a customer friendly EULA to begin with.
Other posters have it right. You missed the point. It's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
We got screwed by the West. We are only beginning to get properly screwed by the West.
My family background includes strong Serbian ties. Many of my 3rd and 4th cousins live in areas that were our ancestors' homes for 400+ years. Those areas, btw, were and are Serbian enclaves in what is now Croatia.
My great-grandfather deserted in 1902 from the Prussian Army (a Serbian regiment on loan from the Austro-Hungarian Empire) after his firstborn son starved to death. (He was a draftee with a 25 year commitment, btw.) He made his way to the coast and found passage to the US. He left behind his wife and unborn daughter until he could send for them a year later.
At that time, his relatives were all, almost without exception, peasants. Hardworking illiterate farmers and blacksmiths. The most well off one that I know about owned a small shop in one of the villages.
The American branch of the family recently celebrated the centennial of our arrival in Chishom, Minnesota. At that gathering were mechanics, carpenters, engineers, teachers, salespeople, a couple of IT geeks, and at least one retired senior VP of an American corporation.
During WWI my family lost overseas relatives to the pogroms. During WWII it was the Ustache. We lost people during the last 6 cornered war, too. In most cases the dead were innocent civilians murdered by thugs in uniform.
Meanwhile, the surviving overseas branch (hampered as they are by the political mess that is the Balkans) have still managed to thrive. A century after my great-grandfather left I now have relatives over there who are microbiologists, psychiatrists, professors, business owners, and at least one lawyer that I know of. We still have some dirt poor farmers for relatives, too, and at least one family that I know is still in a refugee camp.
The thing is, they don't blame the West for all the deaths that they have suffered. They don't blame the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Moslems, or the Albanians. Heck, they don't even blame the rest of the Serbs who supposedly kicked off the war to 'save' them from the bloodthirsty Croatians. They know the difference between a thug in uniform and the guy down the street who grew up Roman Catholic instead of Serbian Orthodox.
Like every generation before them, they have mourned and buried their dead, picked themselves up, and got back to work building a better life for themselves and their children.
If they can do it, so can you. Don't blame others for your situation. Deal with things as they are. Work with your neighbors, your friends, and your relatives to better each other.
You are correct in saying that SOME (still most?) game companies won't do Linux development. However, one of the most influential game companies around showed the way with its generic code base. Their release of Quake3 Linux binaries on their Web site was a start. Then we had the company responsible for Neverwinter Nights delivering MacOSX and Linux binaries, UT2003 coming out with Linux binaries in the box, Call of Duty, America's Army (free DL from the US Army based on the UT2003 engine), and some others.
The specific ones that I named are all from reputable companies; companies with a longstanding repuation for innovation. Things are definitely improving on the Linux gaming front. W00t!:)
I think you're approaching science fiction from the wrong direction. The whole point of the genre is to ask, "What if..." and then see what happens. The best, most long lasting authors do this extremely well.
The one characteristic that separates science fiction from its close cousin fantasy is that the science involved must be at least plausible. This is what makes the Wheel of Time series fantasy, NOT science fiction.
(Disclaimer and aside: I'm a long time fan of both science fiction and fantasy. I also like long stories as long as they finally conclude. Some stories just take that long to tell. I liked the WOT series immensely when I read the first few books. I was willing to cut Jordan some slack until his last book came out. No serious plot development in how many pages? Gawd.)
Do you want a good selection of stories to read in the genre? Simple, really. Do what you would do if you were looking for a good mystery, or book of poetry, or a how-to book on building bridges.
Walk into a bookstore with a large selection of science fiction and look for the authors whose work is still being published 50 years after they wrote it. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague De Camp, etc. should all be there. This will give you a reasonable selection of really good books to choose from.
BTW, it's been my observation that people who complain about character development in science fiction seem to be looking for a different set of clues than those of us who are familiar with the genre look for. Remember, the important point of the genre is setting up a situation and imagining how people would react to it. People's backgrounds are frequently only sketchily done. Their interactions with each other outside the direct impact of the situation are also frequently limited in scope.
IMO this is not necessarily a fault of the genre. However, I can see how it would put some people off because they are looking for a different experience.
It's also most definitely NOT a fault of the person reading the material. If you don't like it, don't worry about it. Not everyone has to. I promise we won't take away your membership in the Geek Scouts.:)
I would ask that when you approach science fiction, judge it by its rules. To be good literature it has to meet some basic tenets. To be good science fiction it has to meet some other basic tenets. The best examples of science fiction do both. But then, that's true of all literature regardless of genre, isn't it?
Look, the fact is that the GPL is so solid that no sane lawyer has dared challenge it. Linux isn't vulnerable. Heck, it's on some of the most solid legal ground ever devised. I'm personally convinced that RMS must have been Hammurabi or King Solomon in one of his past lives. No way a mere mortal could come up with such a brilliant document without divine inspiration.
Thanks to both of you. I knew it was going to be one of those 'slopey headed forehead' moments. You know, so obvious as soon as you hear it you slap yourself in the forehead so hard it hurts and say, "I KNEW I should have known that!":)
Nothing in the world changes the fact that people are signing over their hard work for no compensation.
Funny, where I come from this is called "charitable works" and is highly regarded. I've been told that those of us in the 'frozen wasteland' should drop the idea that "Minnesota Nice" has a place in the real world. Still, it's nice to see so many people around the world still understand that when you give back, sometimes you get more.:)
It's worse than that. People don't put Linux on a Z series box to act as a departmental file server. They put Linux on a Z series box to act as an ENTERPRISE file server. For 10s of thousands of people. So, how many cheap PC servers do you need again to support the same load?
Actually, people don't really use Z series boxes for file servers very often. They're far more likely to put huge databases or Web servers with extremely high concurrent user counts and/or extremely high transaction counts on them. You know, when you start measuring data storage requirements in terabytes, concurrent user counts in 10s of thousands, and transactions per second in thousands.
How many cheap Intel servers do you need for that kind of load again? How many MSCEs do you need to support that environment? Now, how many mainframe specialists do you need for IBM's world?
Betcha an honest TCO would see at least a 10:1 advantage for the IBM solution if we were dealing with workloads the Z series is designed for.
Considering that they were sucking down some ale at the same time, why does everyone immediately jump to the conclusion that they were high? I figured they'd been drinking a bit too much.:)
It has come to mean good things (not trying to reinvent the wheel, but building a car around it), and bad things (trying to force down the use of the de facto microsoft-owned standards incompatible with de jure ones), but it's the key idea in Microsoft's business decisions.
It is the best bet given that 95% of PCs run MS software...
...but if your aim is to teach IT skills, then surely using the most widely-used and widely-available software is best for the student as they will have some useful skills when they leave.
They are the global leader in software and as I mention above near every PC runs their software...
I know it's hard to believe but Microsoft developers (and other staff) are also 'the people the government protects'. MS is a very American company...
Your first statement is probably true. The trend, however, is for Mac OSX and Linux combined to reach 10% penetration worldwide in a year or two. Server growth has been nothing short of spectacular. They've already reached that mark for servers. Merrill Lynch estimated that revenue for Linux server installations grew by 46% to $817 million. Not exactly pocket change.:
Your second statement is sort of valid. However, IT skills that are limited to a single computing environment are a serious mistake. Education at most institutions should be geared towards teaching you the basics and giving you the tools to learn the advanced stuff wherever you end up. This is true for all education, not just IT.
Your third statement is misleading. I will stipulate that Microsoft is the world leader in installations. I must disagree, however, if you mean that they are the leaders in technical innovation. Microsoft has been sort of successful in borrowing and stealing ideas from others. They've never really done much in the way of truly unique R&D. In fact, I can't think of a thing off hand that they came up with first. They didn't even invent customer lock in through technology. AT&T did that.
Finally, IMO Microsoft does not even come close to being a 'good' American company. By that I mean that they show no loyalty to the principles that this nation was founded upon. Intead, Microsoft represents some of the worst of America's flaws. Bill Gates is comparable to J. D. Rockefeller, a man who destroyed every competitor he had by illegal, immoral, and unethical means. The government should be treating Bill like Al Capone, not Albert Schweitzer.
Funny, LSVI got this right with their CMF (Consolidated Maintenance Facility) package about 10 years ago. We're currently using it to keep 30,000 desktops and up to date.
Remember Nimda and Code Red? It took us only a week to completely clean and reinstall our entire base. Most of the delay was figuring out what was going on.
We've gotten faster since then. SoBig took us only 2 days to clean.
BTW, CMF is will work for anything you want to put on a PC, not just Microsoft's stuff. We were using it for OS/2 OS and apps 7 years ago, fer pity's sake! Wonderful code. I HIGHLY recommend it.
I remember that dry spell quite well. Between the original Star Trek and Star Wars period to the first Star Trek movie, there was very little in the way of good SF on film or TV in the US. The best of the lot was a series of low budget British shows that you could find on late night PBS; UFO, Blake's 7, Dr. Who, and The Prisoner are the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. I would stack up any of those 4 against BG in a head to head match. I swear, they may have looked like they were made on a budget consisting of 5 pounds and a case of Newcastle Ale, but the writing and acting was far better.
Nahh, as SF the original BG was a great live action cartoon. It was passable at best.
Because the smart thing to do in any litigation is to keep quiet until you get in front of the judge and/or jury. There, tell your story and back it up with facts. Spouting off to the press is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do until the case is settled one way or the other.
You ever wonder why Palmisano isn't making any public statements? Because he knows this, and his lawyers know this.
By contrast, SCO must be saddled with the dumbest, most incompetent lawyers on the planet. Otherwise they'd have hired 8 or 9 gorillas to sit on McBride, Stowell, and Co. until the case was actually settled.
Regarding SCO and their assertion that the "GPL is trying to override copyright law and is therefore invalid":
I think most of the discussion here on slashdot about this issue is without the proper context. Most people seem to interpret SCOs actions as saying "The GPL is completely and totally invalid and cannot possibly be legitimate." However, their assertion is in the context of their claim that IBM released something that they did not have the right to release. In other words, SCO is saying "The GPL cannot be used to magically make code free. You have to be the legitmate copyright holder of a piece of code in order to dictate its use under the GPL."
Actually, this is EXACTLY what SCO's lawyers claimed in one of the documents that they filed in Utah's Federal court. They had the gall to stand up and say that the GPL was unconstitutional because it violated copyright law.
As many others have urged, check out groklaw.net. GREAT source for accurate reporting of all the goings on.
Slashdot Mirror
Boy, I guess! I'm not much of a shot compared to my friends, but even I can maintain a 1 inch group at a 100 yards with a scoped
I think that based upon your personal experience you're asking to give up too much accuracy in a game.
I call bullshit on this. AM Stereo is a lousy option compared to FM for several reasons.
:-)
It's been a while since I was responsible for radio communications installations and repair, so I apologize for any minor mistakes that I might make. However, I'm 90% sure of my facts without going back to my old tech manuals.
1) The narrow spectrum allotted to AM stations means that the actual listening experience is crap.
1.a) So increase the slot! you say. Well, if you're going to do that, you'll have to dramatically reduce the power output so you don't end up stepping all over the other AM stations out there sharing neighboring slots.
1.b) But AM's biggest advantage over FM is its range! you say. True, but that's a combination of the power output allowed and the fact that AM's lower frequencies are much more likely to remain coherent as they bounce off the ionosphere and return to earth. If you don't reduce the strength of the AM signal and increase the slot dedicated to individual stations, you automatically eliminate the number of AM stations that can effectively broadcast. You'd probably need somewhere between 40 and 50 KHz dedicated to each station instead of the 10 KHz now alloted. You really want to eliminate 75% to 80% of the AM stations just to get AM stereo?
2) The other major reason, and probably the REAL reason that AM stereo never took off, is that Amplitude Modulation is far more sensitive to changes in its environment than Frequency Modulation. Lightning storms, tornados, and other kinds of severe weather raise holy hell with AM stations.
My personal experience bears this out. I grew up in northern Minnesota back when FM was still pretty rare. The old cars that teenagers like myself were driving still didn't have AM/FM radios as standard equipment. On clear nights in the winter we could pull in WLS out of Chicago about 500 miles away like it was right next door. When the ionosphere was higher during the summer (also known as tornado season here in the Midwest), we could sometimes get this faint, crackly, lightning bursted version of it.
Obviously, we had closer stations. Even my little town of 8,000 had an AM station that served everyone within a 40 or 50 mile radius with a pretty boring selection of oldies. Still does, btw. Now it competes with 5 local FM stations serving the same area running everything from Minnesota Public Radio to country to acid rock to Top 40. Even that little AM station would be subject to massive interference from a thunderstorm, though. Listening to any AM station during a thunderstorm while your favorite makeout song was on was an exercise in frustration. You had to hope your date was partial to bangs, skips, and cracks!
Nope, I think the FCC made the right choice back in the 1950s. AM Stereo was and remains a bad, Bad, BAD idea for anyone who actually wants to listen to music.
The first time my boss told me to stay late on such short notice for such a stupid reason, I told him I had family commitments that I refused to put aside. He said, "OK."
:)
:)
The second time that he told me to stay late on such short notice for such a stupid reason, I told him, "No. I stay late plenty and work a lot of weekends, too. I'm here for the true emergencies and for the longterm installation issues. I won't stay late unless it's important."
He said, "OK." He stayed late to do it himself. As he was actually a techie who recently converted to management, this wasn't the scary thing it sounds like.
The best part was that he never told me to stay late on such short notice again. He learned to ASK. Sometimes, you just need to learn that managing up is more important than managing down.
Semi-obligatory User Friendly reference:
Dust Puppy singing the 12 Days of Christmas:
"5 Token Rings!"
Enter Gollum, stage right: "Precious?"
Erwin: "Wrong Tolkien. Go home!"
Do some research, willya? Linus didn't name Linux. The guy who first put his work up on an FTP site did.
As for the God complex crack, well, it's his project, dammit. He can run it any way he likes. As long as other developers are willing to sign up to contribute, his project will continue to move forward.
Don't like the way he runs things? Fork the codebase and start a competing project! Start all the work to pull developers to your project. That's exactly what's going to happen to what's left of the core XFree86 folks, after all.
If your premise is correct, how come IE is slowly losing market share anyhow?
Hoping to get slashdotID 1,000,000?
You do realize that you don't actually own that copy of Windows XP, don't you? You do realize that if you bought that copy from a retailer 2 years ago, you have about a year to go before it just quits working because you only bought a 3 year license to USE it?
You purchased a rental agreement. Not a copy of the software.
BTW, go read your EULA some time. Then read what's posted on Microsoft's web site now. Nice how things have changed for the worse in the past couple of years, eh? Not that it was a customer friendly EULA to begin with.
Other posters have it right. You missed the point. It's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
My family background includes strong Serbian ties. Many of my 3rd and 4th cousins live in areas that were our ancestors' homes for 400+ years. Those areas, btw, were and are Serbian enclaves in what is now Croatia.
My great-grandfather deserted in 1902 from the Prussian Army (a Serbian regiment on loan from the Austro-Hungarian Empire) after his firstborn son starved to death. (He was a draftee with a 25 year commitment, btw.) He made his way to the coast and found passage to the US. He left behind his wife and unborn daughter until he could send for them a year later.
At that time, his relatives were all, almost without exception, peasants. Hardworking illiterate farmers and blacksmiths. The most well off one that I know about owned a small shop in one of the villages.
The American branch of the family recently celebrated the centennial of our arrival in Chishom, Minnesota. At that gathering were mechanics, carpenters, engineers, teachers, salespeople, a couple of IT geeks, and at least one retired senior VP of an American corporation.
During WWI my family lost overseas relatives to the pogroms. During WWII it was the Ustache. We lost people during the last 6 cornered war, too. In most cases the dead were innocent civilians murdered by thugs in uniform.
Meanwhile, the surviving overseas branch (hampered as they are by the political mess that is the Balkans) have still managed to thrive. A century after my great-grandfather left I now have relatives over there who are microbiologists, psychiatrists, professors, business owners, and at least one lawyer that I know of. We still have some dirt poor farmers for relatives, too, and at least one family that I know is still in a refugee camp.
The thing is, they don't blame the West for all the deaths that they have suffered. They don't blame the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Moslems, or the Albanians. Heck, they don't even blame the rest of the Serbs who supposedly kicked off the war to 'save' them from the bloodthirsty Croatians. They know the difference between a thug in uniform and the guy down the street who grew up Roman Catholic instead of Serbian Orthodox.
Like every generation before them, they have mourned and buried their dead, picked themselves up, and got back to work building a better life for themselves and their children.
If they can do it, so can you. Don't blame others for your situation. Deal with things as they are. Work with your neighbors, your friends, and your relatives to better each other.
You are correct in saying that SOME (still most?) game companies won't do Linux development. However, one of the most influential game companies around showed the way with its generic code base. Their release of Quake3 Linux binaries on their Web site was a start. Then we had the company responsible for Neverwinter Nights delivering MacOSX and Linux binaries, UT2003 coming out with Linux binaries in the box, Call of Duty, America's Army (free DL from the US Army based on the UT2003 engine), and some others.
:)
The specific ones that I named are all from reputable companies; companies with a longstanding repuation for innovation. Things are definitely improving on the Linux gaming front. W00t!
I think you're approaching science fiction from the wrong direction. The whole point of the genre is to ask, "What if..." and then see what happens. The best, most long lasting authors do this extremely well.
:)
The one characteristic that separates science fiction from its close cousin fantasy is that the science involved must be at least plausible. This is what makes the Wheel of Time series fantasy, NOT science fiction.
(Disclaimer and aside: I'm a long time fan of both science fiction and fantasy. I also like long stories as long as they finally conclude. Some stories just take that long to tell. I liked the WOT series immensely when I read the first few books. I was willing to cut Jordan some slack until his last book came out. No serious plot development in how many pages? Gawd.)
Do you want a good selection of stories to read in the genre? Simple, really. Do what you would do if you were looking for a good mystery, or book of poetry, or a how-to book on building bridges.
Walk into a bookstore with a large selection of science fiction and look for the authors whose work is still being published 50 years after they wrote it. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague De Camp, etc. should all be there. This will give you a reasonable selection of really good books to choose from.
BTW, it's been my observation that people who complain about character development in science fiction seem to be looking for a different set of clues than those of us who are familiar with the genre look for. Remember, the important point of the genre is setting up a situation and imagining how people would react to it. People's backgrounds are frequently only sketchily done. Their interactions with each other outside the direct impact of the situation are also frequently limited in scope.
IMO this is not necessarily a fault of the genre. However, I can see how it would put some people off because they are looking for a different experience.
It's also most definitely NOT a fault of the person reading the material. If you don't like it, don't worry about it. Not everyone has to. I promise we won't take away your membership in the Geek Scouts.
I would ask that when you approach science fiction, judge it by its rules. To be good literature it has to meet some basic tenets. To be good science fiction it has to meet some other basic tenets. The best examples of science fiction do both. But then, that's true of all literature regardless of genre, isn't it?
Look, the fact is that the GPL is so solid that no sane lawyer has dared challenge it. Linux isn't vulnerable. Heck, it's on some of the most solid legal ground ever devised. I'm personally convinced that RMS must have been Hammurabi or King Solomon in one of his past lives. No way a mere mortal could come up with such a brilliant document without divine inspiration.
Don't believe me? How about an entire site filled with lawyers? Or how about a law professor at Columbia Law School?
Thanks to both of you. I knew it was going to be one of those 'slopey headed forehead' moments. You know, so obvious as soon as you hear it you slap yourself in the forehead so hard it hurts and say, "I KNEW I should have known that!" :)
I've managed to figure out almost every UseNet acronym I've ever seen with just a bit of contextual hint. This one, however, has baffled me for years.
Just what is HTH?
Thx from a puzzled geek who really should know better.
Funny, where I come from this is called "charitable works" and is highly regarded. I've been told that those of us in the 'frozen wasteland' should drop the idea that "Minnesota Nice" has a place in the real world. Still, it's nice to see so many people around the world still understand that when you give back, sometimes you get more.
It's worse than that. People don't put Linux on a Z series box to act as a departmental file server. They put Linux on a Z series box to act as an ENTERPRISE file server. For 10s of thousands of people. So, how many cheap PC servers do you need again to support the same load?
Actually, people don't really use Z series boxes for file servers very often. They're far more likely to put huge databases or Web servers with extremely high concurrent user counts and/or extremely high transaction counts on them. You know, when you start measuring data storage requirements in terabytes, concurrent user counts in 10s of thousands, and transactions per second in thousands.
How many cheap Intel servers do you need for that kind of load again? How many MSCEs do you need to support that environment? Now, how many mainframe specialists do you need for IBM's world?
Betcha an honest TCO would see at least a 10:1 advantage for the IBM solution if we were dealing with workloads the Z series is designed for.
Jon Postel. 'nuff said, eh?
Considering that they were sucking down some ale at the same time, why does everyone immediately jump to the conclusion that they were high? I figured they'd been drinking a bit too much. :)
You forgot to complete the original phrase:
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish"
Your first statement is probably true. The trend, however, is for Mac OSX and Linux combined to reach 10% penetration worldwide in a year or two. Server growth has been nothing short of spectacular. They've already reached that mark for servers. Merrill Lynch estimated that revenue for Linux server installations grew by 46% to $817 million. Not exactly pocket change.
Your second statement is sort of valid. However, IT skills that are limited to a single computing environment are a serious mistake. Education at most institutions should be geared towards teaching you the basics and giving you the tools to learn the advanced stuff wherever you end up. This is true for all education, not just IT.
Your third statement is misleading. I will stipulate that Microsoft is the world leader in installations. I must disagree, however, if you mean that they are the leaders in technical innovation. Microsoft has been sort of successful in borrowing and stealing ideas from others. They've never really done much in the way of truly unique R&D. In fact, I can't think of a thing off hand that they came up with first. They didn't even invent customer lock in through technology. AT&T did that.
Finally, IMO Microsoft does not even come close to being a 'good' American company. By that I mean that they show no loyalty to the principles that this nation was founded upon. Intead, Microsoft represents some of the worst of America's flaws. Bill Gates is comparable to J. D. Rockefeller, a man who destroyed every competitor he had by illegal, immoral, and unethical means. The government should be treating Bill like Al Capone, not Albert Schweitzer.
Funny, LSVI got this right with their CMF (Consolidated Maintenance Facility) package about 10 years ago. We're currently using it to keep 30,000 desktops and up to date.
Remember Nimda and Code Red? It took us only a week to completely clean and reinstall our entire base. Most of the delay was figuring out what was going on.
We've gotten faster since then. SoBig took us only 2 days to clean.
BTW, CMF is will work for anything you want to put on a PC, not just Microsoft's stuff. We were using it for OS/2 OS and apps 7 years ago, fer pity's sake! Wonderful code. I HIGHLY recommend it.
Oh, no way was BG a worthwhile stand-in!
I remember that dry spell quite well. Between the original Star Trek and Star Wars period to the first Star Trek movie, there was very little in the way of good SF on film or TV in the US. The best of the lot was a series of low budget British shows that you could find on late night PBS; UFO, Blake's 7, Dr. Who, and The Prisoner are the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. I would stack up any of those 4 against BG in a head to head match. I swear, they may have looked like they were made on a budget consisting of 5 pounds and a case of Newcastle Ale, but the writing and acting was far better.
Nahh, as SF the original BG was a great live action cartoon. It was passable at best.
I think you're on to something here. Have you looked at the autopackage project? Is this in line with what you're thinking of?
Because the smart thing to do in any litigation is to keep quiet until you get in front of the judge and/or jury. There, tell your story and back it up with facts. Spouting off to the press is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do until the case is settled one way or the other.
You ever wonder why Palmisano isn't making any public statements? Because he knows this, and his lawyers know this.
By contrast, SCO must be saddled with the dumbest, most incompetent lawyers on the planet. Otherwise they'd have hired 8 or 9 gorillas to sit on McBride, Stowell, and Co. until the case was actually settled.
Actually, this is EXACTLY what SCO's lawyers claimed in one of the documents that they filed in Utah's Federal court. They had the gall to stand up and say that the GPL was unconstitutional because it violated copyright law.
As many others have urged, check out groklaw.net. GREAT source for accurate reporting of all the goings on.