I remember the first time I had a real hardware error on a Dell system running Linux. Straightforward enough, called out DIMM1. So I called Dell. They said "Oh, that doesn't necessarily mean a memory error. The way the PCI bus works that error could be on the bus itself, in the memory, or in the card in the first PCI slot. There's no way to tell".
Seriously? No way to tell what "Error in DIMM 1" means? That's what the guy insisted. His solution? Turn the computer off and reboot. If it crashes again, call him back.
This was on a Production database. No way was I going to just power off/on and wait for a follow up crash. I was used to sending Sun explorers and getting exact part numbers back for failures. If Dell couldn't do that, why were were playing this game?
Dell finally agreed to send a technician with all three parts so he could diagnose and we could solve it with one downtime instead of several. But as a long time Solaris guy, I was totally disgusted.
Sure, for edge servers, startups, small things, you can get away with that. But for business critical in Enterprise? I want better support from my vendor than "reboot and let us know if crashes again".
I just put a 55" UHD TV in my home office, to replace an aging 50" DLP. That's not your normal viewing space as the typical viewing distance is only about 4 feet away (my living room has a projector and a 120" screen). Hooked it up, got some 4k content and my nephew literally exclaimed "WOW" and when his wife came to get him, I believe her exact words were "Holy crap!". Within seconds both of them could see it was better.
I want a 4k projector for the 120" screen, but those are still in the $20k range, so no time soon for that. In the meantime, "Breaking Bad" never looked better than in UHD.
I thought that the reason physical keyboards were going away was obvious... with a software keyboard you can make one part and sell it in every country in the world. The software keyboard is infinitely flexible and can be changed to represent any language. A physical keyboard can't, and so a phone manufacturer has to make a different physical keyboard for each market, complicating inventory management and increasing price overall since they can't amortize chinese keyboards with US phones.
The cost of giving it to you isn't the cost of making it for you, it's the cost of not being able to sell your phone in all the other countries, and THAT is the truly "high" cost that you can't afford to pay to get them to make one for you.
SMF didn't replace init. Init is still there. It will still run legacy rc.d scripts, just like always.
SMF incorporated the existing common rc.d scripts and gave them dependencies, so that, say, Apache doesn't start if networking is down. It also gives you the ability to bring up the entire stack by simply starting something at the top, and it's aware of what beneath it needs to be enabled to work. It also gives you a log of everything starting up, so you can track down the problem (though, granted, often the log is not particularly useful - "restarting too often" doesn't tell you as much as I'd like).
I don't know what problems you are having debugging networking problems in Solaris, but I do it all the time, from the command line. I don't know any serious Solaris admins who use that god-awful SMC gui tool. We all use the command line. And Solaris maintains backwards compatibility, so we still have ifconfig, and snoop and all the same tools you've had since Solaris 2.5 available to you.
SMF is all XML, if you want to read the configuration or make your own, you can.
To follow up on this.. I actually had an employer plan once that had a maximum annual payout of $1500. Not MY out-of-pocket maximum, the Insurers out-of-pocket maximum. I took one test for Sleep Apnea and I was done. They refused to pay for anything else the rest of the year. When I confronted my employer about it, they said "Well, it's cheap, and contractors don't tend to care about health insurance". That particular employer didn't offer any other plans. Oh, and my payment for this plan? About $1500 a year.
Some health plans really NEEDED to be eliminated, as they were little more than fraud.
My mother had cancer. While visiting in my home, she had a stroke, which put her into a coma about an hour later. We called 911, went to the hospital where we were told she would never awaken from that coma. She had a "no extraordinary measures" clause in her living will. The hospital honored it, and so did my father and my sister and myself. We knew within minutes of arriving at the hospital that my mother would never leave the hospital alive. She would never again open her eyes. She would never say any more words. In fact, when I asked the doctor if there was any chance she would awaken, he informed me that they were giving her medication to ensure she didn't, because her organs were shutting down and she'd be in terrible pain if she were to awaken.
So, all of that, guaranteed that this was her end, she was going to die, right then and there, and we still had to sit there and listen to her moan for 18 HOURS. 18 hours of watching, waiting for her final breath, and there wasn't anything we could do to ease her passing.
This wasn't "terminal illness, you'll die in six months", this was "you'll die sometime in the next few hours" and it was STILL illegal to make her passing easier, not only for her, but for her family.
My 18 hours is nothing compared to what Scott Adams had to deal with, and it didn't cost us $8,000/month, but the feeling is the same. When my dog had kidney failure I took him in, we gave him a shot, and he passed quickly and mostly painlessly. Why couldn't we have done the same for my mother? Why did she have to endure 18 hours of waiting for her organs to fail? Why did we have to watch, unable to help?
I understand the law is there to prevent people from dying when they've just been diagnosed, but there comes a point where the only thing left is to die, and we should be able to make it easier on the dying, and on their loved ones. It is a crime against humanity that we cannot.
As a former Naval Aircrewman, and an all around "flying is awesome" kind of geek (I knew I wanted to fly when I was 3), I have to say I understand the reticence. Flying is awesome. It's hard to give up something you love doing.
At the same time, the cost-benefit analysis is swinging/has swung towards unmanned craft. They can have performance envelopes that won't allow a human inside. They can have significant cost savings in not having to protect the human inside.
Situational Awareness is big, but we do that with the Electronic Battlefield now. Some years ago I was very much in the "you'll never replace a pilot in the cockpit" side of the argument. Now.. I think the F-35, a fighter I so desperately wanted, should be eliminated, and replaced with drones. Times change. Technology changes. We all love the Sopwith Camel and the P-51, but you wouldn't use either one in a modern war.
It's going to be a difficult political move, but it's the right move, long term. And it took me many years before I could say that without gritting my teeth first.:)
Re:Makes up for all the things lacking in iPad1?
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Hands On With Apple IPad 2
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Except, of course, that they aren't.
The FAA recently certified iPads for pilots to use for charts. There's never been a netbook that even attempted that task.
A tablet is not a netbook any more than a shrimp is a clam.
Considering that Unix is STILL dominant in the Datacenter I think your argument that "The window for Unix closed when the 386 processorr[sic], Windows NT and the client-server model enabled developers to do similar things with a PC that could only be done with a minicomputer or Unix box before" is totally flawed.
You are probably unaware that major commercial vendors made their products for desktop Unix for many years. WordPerfect, for example, which at the time was the most dominant word processor on the planet, made versions for many Unixes, including SCO, and several other x86 Unix products that existed at the time. These major vendors left the market because of fragmentation.
No less than John Carmack has complained about the problems developing for Android vs the ease of developing for iOS. Feel free to ignore history, but having lived through it, I see it playing out again.
There has been a lot of discussion of late comparing the Apple iOS market and the Android market to the battle between Windows and MacOS many years ago. I think this comparison is misleading, and I think people looking at todays "OS Wars" would do well to remember the "OS Wars" of yesterday.
The comparison goes like this: Apple makes a proprietary device, with their own OS on it, and you can only get it from them. Google makes an OS (Android) that they license to multiple vendors, and you can get it on a large variety of hardware. This makes Google Android the Microsoft Windows of this battle.
Except that what a lot of people don't remember is that when Windows rose to dominance, Apple wasn't their only competitor. The truly entrenched product was Unix. And Unix owned the Datacenter. Unix people couldn't imagine Microsoft Windows ever being inside their Datacenter. It was inconceivable. And so the Unix vendors engaged in what we now call the "Unix Wars".
In the Unix Wars, there were a lot of vendors selling variants of AT&Ts UNIX. Now, in theory, these would all be compatible with one another, because they all came from AT&T (or Berkeley) as a starting point. But the vendors all wanted to make their product better than the competition so they all added different things, so theirs would stand out. And Developers quickly found that they couldn't make one version of their application, but had to make multiple versions, one for each of the major UNIX products out there. They might have different graphical interfaces, or they might have different hardware capabilities. And so, the application market was splintered.
Microsoft, on the other hand, while allowing their product to run on absolutely anybodies hardware, was very controlling over how Windows looked and acted. You could buy Windows from CompaQ or from IBM but what you got was the same. You had the exact same interface, you had the exact same applications, you had the exact same programming libraries available, so developers could make one copy of their application and it would run everywhere Windows did. Microsoft controlled EXACTLY how Windows looked, what was on the desktop, what was on the menu bar, no matter who you bought it from.
It is Apple, not Google, who is following this model. Sure, iPhones are only available from AT&T in this country, but they are available in a lot of other countries, from a lot of other vendors. And you can run your app on any of them, they'll all look and work the same. And when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and you can get an iPhone on other carriers, it will still look and act exactly like an iPhone.
Google, on the other hand, lets the carrier modify their OS how they see fit, and we are seeing a repeat of the "Unix Wars" all over again. Each carrier tries to make their version better, put a better front end on it, change how the hardware works, make theirs just a tiny bit shinier so people will buy it instead of the identical version from their competitor. And the Developers have to deal with that difference, and the Android market is fractured, at least a little bit, because of it.
iOS vs Android isn't MacOS vs Windows. It's Windows vs Unix. And Apple is playing the role of Microsoft this time.
Re:Not Solaris - SunOS
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Tron: Legacy
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And it was on a sun4m system, which would have been the old Sparc prior to Ultrasparc (sun4u now). I also noticed that Sam used Linux commands (cat/proc/meminfo, for example) and got errors, because EncomOS 12 was newer than SolarOS 4.:)
Rackspace has no requirement to have anybody as a customer. They are a business. The customer violates the terms of service. They have every right to refuse to service that customer.
I was once faced with a similar situation many years ago when I was one of two employees in a very tiny ISP here in Jacksonville. Sondra London was one of our customers and had collected writings of the convicted Gainesville murderer Danny Rolling. She was hosting her site at America Online, when a Senator complained and AOL shut her down. She came to us to see if we would host the book, which was essentially "How to become a serial killer". She has every right to publish that book, but we did not have a requirement to publish it for her. I spent a lot of time thinking about the First Amendment issue there. I am an ardent Free Speech supporter, but I had to choose to not be her distribution point for what was clearly "bad speech". She found a much larger distribution point, and went elsewhere.
Math education in America is pathetic. I went through my nephews High School textbook and there wasn't any MATH in it. There were lots of pictures of butterflies and "Why are we learning this?" columns and the whole thing looked like it was designed to be entertaining, rather than educational. The math was an afterthought, with hardly any problems, no explanations of those problems or how to solve them, and no answers. I was stunned, especially when I learned it was written by four math professors.
There is some argument, of course, that this is on purpose, and that we fail our duties to educate our children because an educated populace would be a danger to those in power. I'm not prepared to accept that, but I do think we've completely failed in our duty, and the uneducated masses of today is evidence enough of that.
My father has a saying, "There's no teaching if there's no learning. Until there is learning, you aren't a teacher, you are simply a presenter". I think we have far too many presenters, and not anywhere near enough teachers.
Re:Unix, a blackhole of incompetence and conservat
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Unix Turns 40
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Microsoft told the Court that removing Explorer was impossible. They lied, but that's not the point. There's an attitude difference.
Microsoft doesn't want you changing their OS. It's theirs, they are the only ones who get to decide what is good and what is bad.
In Unix the choice is given to the user. Change shells by simply typing the name of any of the half-dozen provided to you. If you don't like the ones that are there, write your own and distribute it.
Forking is GOOD. When someone has a better idea in Unix, they release their better idea and people get to see it, to use it, to decide if it really is a better idea, and if it is, it will win out, and the old idea will be replaced. To do that in the Windows world, you have to hope Microsoft decides its a better idea and incorporates it for you. The eco-system is completely different.
And if you think Unix prevents software from advancing, I'd like you to take a look at the World Wide Web, almost all of which was developed by that same open model you denounce. Not just TCP/IP and the web browser itself, but PHP, Ruby, all the new tools doing things that were never done before, come from those places you claim will never advance software.
Sounds to me like you have your own reality distortion field.
(Sigh). After the Falklands War, that was the cry. The Argentinans fired an Exocet, the British lost a ship. Seemed like simple math. A $3000 missile can take out a multi-million dollar ship.
Alas, it's based on flawed data. The British don't armor their ships. America does. Several years later, the USS Stark took TWO Exocet missiles and came home. Yes, there was a loss of life (minimal though it was), but the ship didn't sink. She navigated across the Atlantic and returned to Jacksonville, FL for repairs.
The reason ASW is so poor is that we stopped doing it after the Cold War. The Soviets left their subs home and nobody else had any of note. Those of us who knew how to chase submarines (and I'm a former AW, from VP-16) got out or retired and the guys flying today are doing reconnaissance missions, not ASW.
If you don't practice, you don't remain skilled. Many of my friends have been crying for years that the Navy was going to lose all their ASW expertise and that some day it would bite them in the butt. But everyone kept crying "peace dividend" and we stopped doing ASW.
We never learn. We repeat this mistake after every war. We stand down the military and let all the people who have the necessary skills leave, and then when the next one starts, we have to start from scratch to reinvent the wheel. ASW is, alas, no exception.
Re:$10/month from the cable company and you're don
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The Trouble With TiVo
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I just moved to a new area and so went ahead and got Time Warners DVR to test. It's horrible. I don't want to use it.
Simple things that you take for granted on TiVo are missing. For instance, the installer wanted to show me how simple it was to set up a recording, so he asked for a show and I said "Lost". He replied "ok, when is it on and what channel?" Heck. I don't know. I have a TiVo. I just ask it to record it for me. I haven't paid attention to what time or channel a show is on in years. In a TiVo I go to Find Programs and enter the name, one letter at a time, and the TiVo will let me record it and even follow it if it moves (say, the network moves it from Tuesday to Wednesday, or whatever).
So we didn't know when it was on and since I just moved here I don't even know what channels I get, so we went to search by name. Ok, you can put in "L" but that's it. You can't put in a second letter. You have to scroll through EVERY SHOW THAT STARTS WITH "L"! Eventually you find it and set up the recording.
And, yeah, it records just fine. But the User Experience is frustrating.
TiVo is easier, and better. Part of it is stuff that TiVo patented, so other DVRs can't use it (like auto-correct when you fast forward so that it backs up exactly enough to be where you really wanted to stop fast forwarding), and part of it is that, apparently no cable company can hire a UI designer who knows how to make a User Interface that isn't painful to use.
(Having said that, I also have a BeyondTV box and their UI is superior to the cableco DVR as well. But since Congress made it so I can't buy a Cablecard for a home computer that I built myself, I can't get HDTV into the box, except OTA, and my new house is too far from the antenna farm to get anything OTA without a mast, which my HOA prohibits).
No, you miss the point that allowing you to run whatever software you want on their box opens TiVo up to lawsuits from the MPAA, the RIAA and everybody else who thinks you might possibly be stealing their intellectual property.
As a company I can certainly understand why TiVo doesn't want people running software that will get them sued on their boxes. (Whether it's rational for the MPAA to sue TiVo over something you did with their box against their wishes is another story. It's reality that they WILL, even if you and I agree that it's idiotic that they would).
Perhaps, but you don't have to get that directly from TiVo. You already have demographics for each show. The networks provide that. So if you know that (for example) 70% of viewers of Battlestar Galactica skipped your ad, and you know that Battlestar Galactica is mostly viewed by White Males 18-25, you can do the math yourself.
TiVo will be releasing the Series 3 later this year and it's cablecard capable. It will record 2 digital streams simultaneously.
I'm unclear from the article if this bill would affect TiVo as much as it would affect your ability to buy a PCI card to put in your computer and do the same job.
This would imply that you've never written anything worthy of being copied.
Credit where credit is due is the core underpinning of the Hacker Culture. If you create something, and someone else passes it off as their own, without giving you credit, you have every right to be upset. A clever bit of writing is as worthy of credit as a clever bit of coding. It's just as wrong to pass off someone elses joke or short story as your own as it would be to pass of their script or program as your own.
Other forms of advertising get paid entirely to the medium in which the ad appears (radio, television, newspapers, billboard, etc). In none of those scenarios does the consumer get paid for reading the ad.
The consumer benefits because the medium costs less than it would without the ad. This is true for Google as well. All of Googles services are free to the consumer. They are paid for by the ads, just as NBC lets you watch TV shows that are paid for by the ads.
Do you expect NBC to start paying you if you buy something you saw a commercial for?
While I'm not well-known here, I've been using "Ereth" since the late 1970s, on the mainframe in college, and online starting with Q-Link and GEnie (CompuServe was using numbers for accounts at the time), and later FidoNet. If someone I knew from one of those services were to run across my name here, or over at the TiVo Forum where I'm more vocal, they'd know who I am.
I've had people from my past find me because of the consistency of my online name, and that's more than comforting, it's useful.
To have to give up your name, online, where your name is really all you have, is quite painful. In an environment where your graphical representation changes regularly, you can't expect others to recognize you based on your appearance. And so it is very much like giving up your entire Identity.
Which bites. This is one of those areas that MMORPGs are horrible at. They need to have a better system of identifying "Bad names" at character creation time, rather than randomly running across them once a character is long established and well-known. These stories happen in all MMORPGs and they will continue to do so until such a system is implemented (perhaps a review before you make Level 10 or something. I know it'll be hard to do, but there has to be some way to deal with the "bad name" situation long before a character gets to be high level).
I have played both a DVD-R and a DVD+RW in my PS2 within the last week. The +RW was Meritline no-name disks, and the -R was from a sampler, I don't even know what brand it was. Both played perfectly.
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I remember the first time I had a real hardware error on a Dell system running Linux. Straightforward enough, called out DIMM1. So I called Dell. They said "Oh, that doesn't necessarily mean a memory error. The way the PCI bus works that error could be on the bus itself, in the memory, or in the card in the first PCI slot. There's no way to tell".
Seriously? No way to tell what "Error in DIMM 1" means? That's what the guy insisted. His solution? Turn the computer off and reboot. If it crashes again, call him back.
This was on a Production database. No way was I going to just power off/on and wait for a follow up crash. I was used to sending Sun explorers and getting exact part numbers back for failures. If Dell couldn't do that, why were were playing this game?
Dell finally agreed to send a technician with all three parts so he could diagnose and we could solve it with one downtime instead of several. But as a long time Solaris guy, I was totally disgusted.
Sure, for edge servers, startups, small things, you can get away with that. But for business critical in Enterprise? I want better support from my vendor than "reboot and let us know if crashes again".
You apparently need smarter friends.
I just put a 55" UHD TV in my home office, to replace an aging 50" DLP. That's not your normal viewing space as the typical viewing distance is only about 4 feet away (my living room has a projector and a 120" screen). Hooked it up, got some 4k content and my nephew literally exclaimed "WOW" and when his wife came to get him, I believe her exact words were "Holy crap!". Within seconds both of them could see it was better.
I want a 4k projector for the 120" screen, but those are still in the $20k range, so no time soon for that. In the meantime, "Breaking Bad" never looked better than in UHD.
I thought that the reason physical keyboards were going away was obvious... with a software keyboard you can make one part and sell it in every country in the world. The software keyboard is infinitely flexible and can be changed to represent any language. A physical keyboard can't, and so a phone manufacturer has to make a different physical keyboard for each market, complicating inventory management and increasing price overall since they can't amortize chinese keyboards with US phones.
The cost of giving it to you isn't the cost of making it for you, it's the cost of not being able to sell your phone in all the other countries, and THAT is the truly "high" cost that you can't afford to pay to get them to make one for you.
SMF didn't replace init. Init is still there. It will still run legacy rc.d scripts, just like always.
SMF incorporated the existing common rc.d scripts and gave them dependencies, so that, say, Apache doesn't start if networking is down. It also gives you the ability to bring up the entire stack by simply starting something at the top, and it's aware of what beneath it needs to be enabled to work. It also gives you a log of everything starting up, so you can track down the problem (though, granted, often the log is not particularly useful - "restarting too often" doesn't tell you as much as I'd like).
I don't know what problems you are having debugging networking problems in Solaris, but I do it all the time, from the command line. I don't know any serious Solaris admins who use that god-awful SMC gui tool. We all use the command line. And Solaris maintains backwards compatibility, so we still have ifconfig, and snoop and all the same tools you've had since Solaris 2.5 available to you.
SMF is all XML, if you want to read the configuration or make your own, you can.
To follow up on this.. I actually had an employer plan once that had a maximum annual payout of $1500. Not MY out-of-pocket maximum, the Insurers out-of-pocket maximum. I took one test for Sleep Apnea and I was done. They refused to pay for anything else the rest of the year. When I confronted my employer about it, they said "Well, it's cheap, and contractors don't tend to care about health insurance". That particular employer didn't offer any other plans. Oh, and my payment for this plan? About $1500 a year.
Some health plans really NEEDED to be eliminated, as they were little more than fraud.
My mother had cancer. While visiting in my home, she had a stroke, which put her into a coma about an hour later. We called 911, went to the hospital where we were told she would never awaken from that coma. She had a "no extraordinary measures" clause in her living will. The hospital honored it, and so did my father and my sister and myself. We knew within minutes of arriving at the hospital that my mother would never leave the hospital alive. She would never again open her eyes. She would never say any more words. In fact, when I asked the doctor if there was any chance she would awaken, he informed me that they were giving her medication to ensure she didn't, because her organs were shutting down and she'd be in terrible pain if she were to awaken.
So, all of that, guaranteed that this was her end, she was going to die, right then and there, and we still had to sit there and listen to her moan for 18 HOURS. 18 hours of watching, waiting for her final breath, and there wasn't anything we could do to ease her passing.
This wasn't "terminal illness, you'll die in six months", this was "you'll die sometime in the next few hours" and it was STILL illegal to make her passing easier, not only for her, but for her family.
My 18 hours is nothing compared to what Scott Adams had to deal with, and it didn't cost us $8,000/month, but the feeling is the same. When my dog had kidney failure I took him in, we gave him a shot, and he passed quickly and mostly painlessly. Why couldn't we have done the same for my mother? Why did she have to endure 18 hours of waiting for her organs to fail? Why did we have to watch, unable to help?
I understand the law is there to prevent people from dying when they've just been diagnosed, but there comes a point where the only thing left is to die, and we should be able to make it easier on the dying, and on their loved ones. It is a crime against humanity that we cannot.
As a former Naval Aircrewman, and an all around "flying is awesome" kind of geek (I knew I wanted to fly when I was 3), I have to say I understand the reticence. Flying is awesome. It's hard to give up something you love doing.
At the same time, the cost-benefit analysis is swinging/has swung towards unmanned craft. They can have performance envelopes that won't allow a human inside. They can have significant cost savings in not having to protect the human inside.
Situational Awareness is big, but we do that with the Electronic Battlefield now. Some years ago I was very much in the "you'll never replace a pilot in the cockpit" side of the argument. Now.. I think the F-35, a fighter I so desperately wanted, should be eliminated, and replaced with drones. Times change. Technology changes. We all love the Sopwith Camel and the P-51, but you wouldn't use either one in a modern war.
It's going to be a difficult political move, but it's the right move, long term. And it took me many years before I could say that without gritting my teeth first. :)
Except, of course, that they aren't.
The FAA recently certified iPads for pilots to use for charts. There's never been a netbook that even attempted that task.
A tablet is not a netbook any more than a shrimp is a clam.
The Daily Show is a COMEDY Show. Jon Stewart doesn't pretend otherwise. His job is to skewer the news.
Beck (and Fox) pretend otherwise.
Considering that Unix is STILL dominant in the Datacenter I think your argument that "The window for Unix closed when the 386 processorr[sic], Windows NT and the client-server model enabled developers to do similar things with a PC that could only be done with a minicomputer or Unix box before" is totally flawed.
You are probably unaware that major commercial vendors made their products for desktop Unix for many years. WordPerfect, for example, which at the time was the most dominant word processor on the planet, made versions for many Unixes, including SCO, and several other x86 Unix products that existed at the time. These major vendors left the market because of fragmentation.
No less than John Carmack has complained about the problems developing for Android vs the ease of developing for iOS. Feel free to ignore history, but having lived through it, I see it playing out again.
There has been a lot of discussion of late comparing the Apple iOS market and the Android market to the battle between Windows and MacOS many years ago. I think this comparison is misleading, and I think people looking at todays "OS Wars" would do well to remember the "OS Wars" of yesterday.
The comparison goes like this: Apple makes a proprietary device, with their own OS on it, and you can only get it from them. Google makes an OS (Android) that they license to multiple vendors, and you can get it on a large variety of hardware. This makes Google Android the Microsoft Windows of this battle.
Except that what a lot of people don't remember is that when Windows rose to dominance, Apple wasn't their only competitor. The truly entrenched product was Unix. And Unix owned the Datacenter. Unix people couldn't imagine Microsoft Windows ever being inside their Datacenter. It was inconceivable. And so the Unix vendors engaged in what we now call the "Unix Wars".
In the Unix Wars, there were a lot of vendors selling variants of AT&Ts UNIX. Now, in theory, these would all be compatible with one another, because they all came from AT&T (or Berkeley) as a starting point. But the vendors all wanted to make their product better than the competition so they all added different things, so theirs would stand out. And Developers quickly found that they couldn't make one version of their application, but had to make multiple versions, one for each of the major UNIX products out there. They might have different graphical interfaces, or they might have different hardware capabilities. And so, the application market was splintered.
Microsoft, on the other hand, while allowing their product to run on absolutely anybodies hardware, was very controlling over how Windows looked and acted. You could buy Windows from CompaQ or from IBM but what you got was the same. You had the exact same interface, you had the exact same applications, you had the exact same programming libraries available, so developers could make one copy of their application and it would run everywhere Windows did. Microsoft controlled EXACTLY how Windows looked, what was on the desktop, what was on the menu bar, no matter who you bought it from.
It is Apple, not Google, who is following this model. Sure, iPhones are only available from AT&T in this country, but they are available in a lot of other countries, from a lot of other vendors. And you can run your app on any of them, they'll all look and work the same. And when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and you can get an iPhone on other carriers, it will still look and act exactly like an iPhone.
Google, on the other hand, lets the carrier modify their OS how they see fit, and we are seeing a repeat of the "Unix Wars" all over again. Each carrier tries to make their version better, put a better front end on it, change how the hardware works, make theirs just a tiny bit shinier so people will buy it instead of the identical version from their competitor. And the Developers have to deal with that difference, and the Android market is fractured, at least a little bit, because of it.
iOS vs Android isn't MacOS vs Windows. It's Windows vs Unix. And Apple is playing the role of Microsoft this time.
And it was on a sun4m system, which would have been the old Sparc prior to Ultrasparc (sun4u now). I also noticed that Sam used Linux commands (cat /proc/meminfo, for example) and got errors, because EncomOS 12 was newer than SolarOS 4. :)
Rackspace has no requirement to have anybody as a customer. They are a business. The customer violates the terms of service. They have every right to refuse to service that customer.
I was once faced with a similar situation many years ago when I was one of two employees in a very tiny ISP here in Jacksonville. Sondra London was one of our customers and had collected writings of the convicted Gainesville murderer Danny Rolling. She was hosting her site at America Online, when a Senator complained and AOL shut her down. She came to us to see if we would host the book, which was essentially "How to become a serial killer". She has every right to publish that book, but we did not have a requirement to publish it for her. I spent a lot of time thinking about the First Amendment issue there. I am an ardent Free Speech supporter, but I had to choose to not be her distribution point for what was clearly "bad speech". She found a much larger distribution point, and went elsewhere.
Math education in America is pathetic. I went through my nephews High School textbook and there wasn't any MATH in it. There were lots of pictures of butterflies and "Why are we learning this?" columns and the whole thing looked like it was designed to be entertaining, rather than educational. The math was an afterthought, with hardly any problems, no explanations of those problems or how to solve them, and no answers. I was stunned, especially when I learned it was written by four math professors.
There is some argument, of course, that this is on purpose, and that we fail our duties to educate our children because an educated populace would be a danger to those in power. I'm not prepared to accept that, but I do think we've completely failed in our duty, and the uneducated masses of today is evidence enough of that.
My father has a saying, "There's no teaching if there's no learning. Until there is learning, you aren't a teacher, you are simply a presenter". I think we have far too many presenters, and not anywhere near enough teachers.
Microsoft told the Court that removing Explorer was impossible. They lied, but that's not the point. There's an attitude difference.
Microsoft doesn't want you changing their OS. It's theirs, they are the only ones who get to decide what is good and what is bad.
In Unix the choice is given to the user. Change shells by simply typing the name of any of the half-dozen provided to you. If you don't like the ones that are there, write your own and distribute it.
Forking is GOOD. When someone has a better idea in Unix, they release their better idea and people get to see it, to use it, to decide if it really is a better idea, and if it is, it will win out, and the old idea will be replaced. To do that in the Windows world, you have to hope Microsoft decides its a better idea and incorporates it for you. The eco-system is completely different.
And if you think Unix prevents software from advancing, I'd like you to take a look at the World Wide Web, almost all of which was developed by that same open model you denounce. Not just TCP/IP and the web browser itself, but PHP, Ruby, all the new tools doing things that were never done before, come from those places you claim will never advance software.
Sounds to me like you have your own reality distortion field.
(Sigh). After the Falklands War, that was the cry. The Argentinans fired an Exocet, the British lost a ship. Seemed like simple math. A $3000 missile can take out a multi-million dollar ship.
Alas, it's based on flawed data. The British don't armor their ships. America does. Several years later, the USS Stark took TWO Exocet missiles and came home. Yes, there was a loss of life (minimal though it was), but the ship didn't sink. She navigated across the Atlantic and returned to Jacksonville, FL for repairs.
The reason ASW is so poor is that we stopped doing it after the Cold War. The Soviets left their subs home and nobody else had any of note. Those of us who knew how to chase submarines (and I'm a former AW, from VP-16) got out or retired and the guys flying today are doing reconnaissance missions, not ASW.
If you don't practice, you don't remain skilled. Many of my friends have been crying for years that the Navy was going to lose all their ASW expertise and that some day it would bite them in the butt. But everyone kept crying "peace dividend" and we stopped doing ASW.
We never learn. We repeat this mistake after every war. We stand down the military and let all the people who have the necessary skills leave, and then when the next one starts, we have to start from scratch to reinvent the wheel. ASW is, alas, no exception.
I just moved to a new area and so went ahead and got Time Warners DVR to test. It's horrible. I don't want to use it.
Simple things that you take for granted on TiVo are missing. For instance, the installer wanted to show me how simple it was to set up a recording, so he asked for a show and I said "Lost". He replied "ok, when is it on and what channel?" Heck. I don't know. I have a TiVo. I just ask it to record it for me. I haven't paid attention to what time or channel a show is on in years. In a TiVo I go to Find Programs and enter the name, one letter at a time, and the TiVo will let me record it and even follow it if it moves (say, the network moves it from Tuesday to Wednesday, or whatever).
So we didn't know when it was on and since I just moved here I don't even know what channels I get, so we went to search by name. Ok, you can put in "L" but that's it. You can't put in a second letter. You have to scroll through EVERY SHOW THAT STARTS WITH "L"! Eventually you find it and set up the recording.
And, yeah, it records just fine. But the User Experience is frustrating.
TiVo is easier, and better. Part of it is stuff that TiVo patented, so other DVRs can't use it (like auto-correct when you fast forward so that it backs up exactly enough to be where you really wanted to stop fast forwarding), and part of it is that, apparently no cable company can hire a UI designer who knows how to make a User Interface that isn't painful to use.
(Having said that, I also have a BeyondTV box and their UI is superior to the cableco DVR as well. But since Congress made it so I can't buy a Cablecard for a home computer that I built myself, I can't get HDTV into the box, except OTA, and my new house is too far from the antenna farm to get anything OTA without a mast, which my HOA prohibits).
Correction: VHS had STEREO a year earlier. Beta had HiFi before VHS had HiFi.
Beta also went to SuperBeta a year before VHS, and with better results.
No, you miss the point that allowing you to run whatever software you want on their box opens TiVo up to lawsuits from the MPAA, the RIAA and everybody else who thinks you might possibly be stealing their intellectual property.
As a company I can certainly understand why TiVo doesn't want people running software that will get them sued on their boxes. (Whether it's rational for the MPAA to sue TiVo over something you did with their box against their wishes is another story. It's reality that they WILL, even if you and I agree that it's idiotic that they would).
Perhaps, but you don't have to get that directly from TiVo. You already have demographics for each show. The networks provide that. So if you know that (for example) 70% of viewers of Battlestar Galactica skipped your ad, and you know that Battlestar Galactica is mostly viewed by White Males 18-25, you can do the math yourself.
TiVo will be releasing the Series 3 later this year and it's cablecard capable. It will record 2 digital streams simultaneously.
I'm unclear from the article if this bill would affect TiVo as much as it would affect your ability to buy a PCI card to put in your computer and do the same job.
This would imply that you've never written anything worthy of being copied.
Credit where credit is due is the core underpinning of the Hacker Culture. If you create something, and someone else passes it off as their own, without giving you credit, you have every right to be upset. A clever bit of writing is as worthy of credit as a clever bit of coding. It's just as wrong to pass off someone elses joke or short story as your own as it would be to pass of their script or program as your own.
I don't understand your point.
Other forms of advertising get paid entirely to the medium in which the ad appears (radio, television, newspapers, billboard, etc). In none of those scenarios does the consumer get paid for reading the ad.
The consumer benefits because the medium costs less than it would without the ad. This is true for Google as well. All of Googles services are free to the consumer. They are paid for by the ads, just as NBC lets you watch TV shows that are paid for by the ads.
Do you expect NBC to start paying you if you buy something you saw a commercial for?
While I'm not well-known here, I've been using "Ereth" since the late 1970s, on the mainframe in college, and online starting with Q-Link and GEnie (CompuServe was using numbers for accounts at the time), and later FidoNet. If someone I knew from one of those services were to run across my name here, or over at the TiVo Forum where I'm more vocal, they'd know who I am.
I've had people from my past find me because of the consistency of my online name, and that's more than comforting, it's useful.
To have to give up your name, online, where your name is really all you have, is quite painful. In an environment where your graphical representation changes regularly, you can't expect others to recognize you based on your appearance. And so it is very much like giving up your entire Identity.
Which bites. This is one of those areas that MMORPGs are horrible at. They need to have a better system of identifying "Bad names" at character creation time, rather than randomly running across them once a character is long established and well-known. These stories happen in all MMORPGs and they will continue to do so until such a system is implemented (perhaps a review before you make Level 10 or something. I know it'll be hard to do, but there has to be some way to deal with the "bad name" situation long before a character gets to be high level).
I have played both a DVD-R and a DVD+RW in my PS2 within the last week. The +RW was Meritline no-name disks, and the -R was from a sampler, I don't even know what brand it was. Both played perfectly.