> I do NOT trust the government. ANY nation's government. I also don't trust scammers. So we are stuck on this one. The good news is he doesn't seem to have tried to immediately sell the photos, that's a good sign.
You realize, of course, that World Net Daily is the National Inquirer of paranoid fundie whackos?
> It was retelling of Wrath of Khan without the great characters.
And I was bored shirtless with Wrath of Khan.
If they are going to make movies that only appeal to trekkies, they shouldn't expect the movies to do any better than the TV series. Voyager verily sucked, and I hear that Enterprise was even worse. Why did they expect a Trek movie to be a hit in the current environment?
> You guys are suckers. He's not feeling *any* competition from open source. He now has to pretend he's got competition in order to keep the government off his back.
> This comment doesn't mean MS thinks there is a threat, but tat their attornies think that they could be sued if they don't say this, or if thjey takes steps to beat open source and those steps have any impact on earnings.
Which might even be harder on them. Micorsoft has always been as much a stock pyramid as a software company. If this warning makes people think the pyramid is caving in, they're AOL bait.
> Here's my scenario: Microsoft reduce the price of windows by 60%. The 90% of linux users who use it only because they don't have to pay for it decide they may as well use windows. Sales of office increase
Unless times have changed, the group of people you are describing run warez rather than Linux.
> Ain't OpenSource great? This kind of reminds me of the old power struggles in the U.S.S.R, when Krushchev was outed and the only official word was his obiturary 20 years later. (the obit simply said a pensioner named Krushchev died.).
Yes, this is very different from the proprietary development model, where you can at least expect a pink slip to show for 20 years of dedicated service.
> The identity of 'C. M.,' who dated his letter from Renfrew, has not been established beyond a doubt. There is a tradition of a clever man living in Renfrew at that time
Clearly then, "C.M." stands for "clever man".
Re: The brain thinks only what the tounge can say
on
Kishotenketsu Programming?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> The idea was that we our brain uses the first language (urdu in my case), and so our thoughts are limited by the expressions we can come up with using the language.
Funny, most of my highest-order thoughts are done without any language at all. The language-based running stream of thought is merely the chat room of the intellect, not the substance.
> If corporations are really interested in protecting themselves, they should stop slashing IT budgets and downsizing engineers.
They think draconian laws will make it stop happening, and they think the laws are cheaper than sysadmins because they already had to buy a legislator anyway.
> We have completed our preliminary analysis of the spread of the Sapphire/Slammer SQL worm. This worm required roughly 10 minutes to spread worldwide making it by far the fastest worm to date. In the early stages the worm was doubling in size every 8.5 seconds. At its peak, achieved approximately 3 minutes after it was released, Sapphire scanned the net at over 55 million IP addresses per second.
My local television news visited a local network monitoring company to talk about it, and their network traffic load plots shot straight up when the worm started. If the y-axis was plotted from zero, it must have peaked at a load of 10-20 times the ordinary load.
> > And if he was speaking about 15 years ago, 2 MB might have been a very generous disk quota. I know of UNIX shops where you feel lucky to get 100MB even today.
> Which just reinforces the parent rant. On a PC, that 100MB would cost ten cents.
Actually, there was a study about a decade ago that showed that the average PC cost a company $15,000-$20,000 per year to own and operate: $5,000 for the official costs and another $10,000-$15,000 for the run-down-the-hall-and-bother-an-expert cost.
Some companies might reasonably conclude that it's a better bargain to give you less disk space on a server. Especially if your work doesn't require a lot of space in your personal directory.
> OpenVMS's clustering is the reason why most VMS users think that it's so cool. Think about it - 15 years of uptime. That's insane.
Yeah... especially running your cluster on 15 year old CPUs. For the "every 18 months" version of Moore's Law, that's processors 1/1024 as fast as you can get these days.
Another post said VMS supported on-line upgrades. I wonder if it supports hot CPU swaps?
> Diskquotas weren't even enabled by default when I was using VMS. You *could* enable them (and obviously your silly sysadmins both enabled them and put very low limits on you), but you never had to.
And if he was speaking about 15 years ago, 2 MB might have been a very generous disk quota. I know of UNIX shops where you feel lucky to get 100MB even today.
> Finally VAX/VMS virtual memory worked better than any other such system I've seen. You could actually let things page and they didn't slow down much, since the paging was so intelligent.
Yes, they had separate "page" and "swap" files. IIRC, "swap" was for dumping entire processes and "page" was for dumping individual pages from a running process. Also, there were something like a dozen system parameters for tuning the paging behavior to your specific needs. When I last worked with it they were fixing Autogen so that it would benchmark your users' actual memory usage and then suggest values for tuning the sytem the next time you used Autogen. I remember spending days reading and re-reading the Orange Books and later the Gray Books, to see what all that paging stuff was about.
> Simply providing evidence to back up their utterly unsubstantiated claims that they destroyed tons of chemical weapons -- AFTER resolutions stipulating that destruction should be positively verifiable -- would help. But making such claims, without bothering to provide so much as a videotape, does not help their cause.
I wonder what all that newsfeed of weapons being destroyed during the '90s was all about?
IIRC, most of their WMD arsenal had already been destroyed before the inspectors were pulled out in '98. Bush is stirring up a tempest over the crumbs, which may not even exist. (The USA has been singularly incapable of telling the inspectors where to look.)
But some of the other stuff isn't really bad luck:
> First, the election is a disaster by any measure, putting the results in doubt and casting a negative light on the Presidency already.
If he hadn't fought the re-counts in court he could have seized the moral high ground, eliminated most doubts about the outcome, and probably won anyway. (I would rather lose than go down in history as the guy who fought a recount; there's always a next time. But maybe that's why I'm not a politician.)
> Second, the economy begins a downward cycle right before he takes office. His father, by most accounts, lost because of the economy - now the son inherits a crappy economy...
The economy traditionally falters during the run-up to an election, due to uncertainty about the future. Whether it recovers or not is mostly a matter of who gets elected. Consumer spending accounts for 2/3 of the US economy, so consumer confidence is everything. It's not mere bad luck that made the Clinton years an economic Golden Age between the Reagan/Bush I and Bush II eras. Remember the extended Asian economic crisis? The USA weathered it because consumers had confidence and kept spending. What's wrong with the economy now? Consumers are scared shitless.
Notice that the above isn't a comment on the two parties' economic policies; it's about common folks' perceptions of those policies.
Slashdot Mirror
Having finished that research, they are now trying to determine the cause of slashdotting.
OK, now we know what fuligin is made of.
> Tis nothing that a little duct tape can't fix.
I put little boxing gloves on mine, and the problem went right away.
> what other devices use these suspect capacitors? aircraft? cars?
Sigh. There goes another 10 years before our flying cars get here.
> I do NOT trust the government. ANY nation's government. I also don't trust scammers. So we are stuck on this one. The good news is he doesn't seem to have tried to immediately sell the photos, that's a good sign.
You realize, of course, that World Net Daily is the National Inquirer of paranoid fundie whackos?
> It was retelling of Wrath of Khan without the great characters.
And I was bored shirtless with Wrath of Khan.
If they are going to make movies that only appeal to trekkies, they shouldn't expect the movies to do any better than the TV series. Voyager verily sucked, and I hear that Enterprise was even worse. Why did they expect a Trek movie to be a hit in the current environment?
> Why does anyone want to see Microsoft go down the tubes?
Because if they last much longer they'll fix it where you can't run anything else even if you want to.
Other than that I'd be happy to just ignore them.
> You guys are suckers. He's not feeling *any* competition from open source. He now has to pretend he's got competition in order to keep the government off his back.
Not before the next election.
> This comment doesn't mean MS thinks there is a threat, but tat their attornies think that they could be sued if they don't say this, or if thjey takes steps to beat open source and those steps have any impact on earnings.
Which might even be harder on them. Micorsoft has always been as much a stock pyramid as a software company. If this warning makes people think the pyramid is caving in, they're AOL bait.
> At my university (www.unbsj.ca) there are posters everywhere that advertise MS products for 90% off of the 'estimated retail price'.
"The first fix is fr^H^H 90% off this week, kid."
> Here's my scenario: Microsoft reduce the price of windows by 60%. The 90% of linux users who use it only because they don't have to pay for it decide they may as well use windows. Sales of office increase
Unless times have changed, the group of people you are describing run warez rather than Linux.
> So this means that Microsoft will be reducing their margin, not becoming unprofitable.
Yep, and they're <Smaug>sitting on one hell of a piggybank</Smaug>.
Still, it's kind of expensive to subsidize a loss-leader game console and buy off wayward governments. Price cuts are going to bite.
> Ain't OpenSource great? This kind of reminds me of the old power struggles in the U.S.S.R, when Krushchev was outed and the only official word was his obiturary 20 years later. (the obit simply said a pensioner named Krushchev died.).
Yes, this is very different from the proprietary development model, where you can at least expect a pink slip to show for 20 years of dedicated service.
> The way current IP laws are heading the guy would STILL have the patent on it!
Inspired by this thread, I have applied for a patent on a one-click telegraph system.
> The identity of 'C. M.,' who dated his letter from Renfrew, has not been established beyond a doubt. There is a tradition of a clever man living in Renfrew at that time
Clearly then, "C.M." stands for "clever man".
> The idea was that we our brain uses the first language (urdu in my case), and so our thoughts are limited by the expressions we can come up with using the language.
Funny, most of my highest-order thoughts are done without any language at all. The language-based running stream of thought is merely the chat room of the intellect, not the substance.
> If corporations are really interested in protecting themselves, they should stop slashing IT budgets and downsizing engineers.
They think draconian laws will make it stop happening, and they think the laws are cheaper than sysadmins because they already had to buy a legislator anyway.
> and should have been home all snug and cozy in their beds, sleeping the sleep of the righteous.
IMO, the righteous should be getting laid and the wicked should be getting the good night's sleep.
> We have completed our preliminary analysis of the spread of the Sapphire/Slammer SQL worm. This worm required roughly 10 minutes to spread worldwide making it by far the fastest worm to date. In the early stages the worm was doubling in size every 8.5 seconds. At its peak, achieved approximately 3 minutes after it was released, Sapphire scanned the net at over 55 million IP addresses per second.
My local television news visited a local network monitoring company to talk about it, and their network traffic load plots shot straight up when the worm started. If the y-axis was plotted from zero, it must have peaked at a load of 10-20 times the ordinary load.
> > And if he was speaking about 15 years ago, 2 MB might have been a very generous disk quota. I know of UNIX shops where you feel lucky to get 100MB even today.
> Which just reinforces the parent rant. On a PC, that 100MB would cost ten cents.
Actually, there was a study about a decade ago that showed that the average PC cost a company $15,000-$20,000 per year to own and operate: $5,000 for the official costs and another $10,000-$15,000 for the run-down-the-hall-and-bother-an-expert cost.
Some companies might reasonably conclude that it's a better bargain to give you less disk space on a server. Especially if your work doesn't require a lot of space in your personal directory.
> OpenVMS's clustering is the reason why most VMS users think that it's so cool. Think about it - 15 years of uptime. That's insane.
Yeah... especially running your cluster on 15 year old CPUs. For the "every 18 months" version of Moore's Law, that's processors 1/1024 as fast as you can get these days.
Another post said VMS supported on-line upgrades. I wonder if it supports hot CPU swaps?
> Diskquotas weren't even enabled by default when I was using VMS. You *could* enable them (and obviously your silly sysadmins both enabled them and put very low limits on you), but you never had to.
And if he was speaking about 15 years ago, 2 MB might have been a very generous disk quota. I know of UNIX shops where you feel lucky to get 100MB even today.
> Finally VAX/VMS virtual memory worked better than any other such system I've seen. You could actually let things page and they didn't slow down much, since the paging was so intelligent.
Yes, they had separate "page" and "swap" files. IIRC, "swap" was for dumping entire processes and "page" was for dumping individual pages from a running process. Also, there were something like a dozen system parameters for tuning the paging behavior to your specific needs. When I last worked with it they were fixing Autogen so that it would benchmark your users' actual memory usage and then suggest values for tuning the sytem the next time you used Autogen. I remember spending days reading and re-reading the Orange Books and later the Gray Books, to see what all that paging stuff was about.
> Simply providing evidence to back up their utterly unsubstantiated claims that they destroyed tons of chemical weapons -- AFTER resolutions stipulating that destruction should be positively verifiable -- would help. But making such claims, without bothering to provide so much as a videotape, does not help their cause.
I wonder what all that newsfeed of weapons being destroyed during the '90s was all about?
IIRC, most of their WMD arsenal had already been destroyed before the inspectors were pulled out in '98. Bush is stirring up a tempest over the crumbs, which may not even exist. (The USA has been singularly incapable of telling the inspectors where to look.)
> I wouldn't be so quick to say something like that with a massive American fleet off my coast.
Why not, when you expect the Americans to use the fleet regardless of what you do?
And while we're on the topic... If you want to modify someone's behavior you should leave them a face-saving way out.
> What else could go wrong???
He could get re-elected.
But some of the other stuff isn't really bad luck:
> First, the election is a disaster by any measure, putting the results in doubt and casting a negative light on the Presidency already.
If he hadn't fought the re-counts in court he could have seized the moral high ground, eliminated most doubts about the outcome, and probably won anyway. (I would rather lose than go down in history as the guy who fought a recount; there's always a next time. But maybe that's why I'm not a politician.)
> Second, the economy begins a downward cycle right before he takes office. His father, by most accounts, lost because of the economy - now the son inherits a crappy economy...
The economy traditionally falters during the run-up to an election, due to uncertainty about the future. Whether it recovers or not is mostly a matter of who gets elected. Consumer spending accounts for 2/3 of the US economy, so consumer confidence is everything. It's not mere bad luck that made the Clinton years an economic Golden Age between the Reagan/Bush I and Bush II eras. Remember the extended Asian economic crisis? The USA weathered it because consumers had confidence and kept spending. What's wrong with the economy now? Consumers are scared shitless.
Notice that the above isn't a comment on the two parties' economic policies; it's about common folks' perceptions of those policies.