Banyan Vines is a piece of history, one that should have been long migrated to something more recent and currently supported. I saw the same at Elections Canada and it sure made my eye pop "Wow you guys are old-school!", to which the single on-site tech replied "Huh?".
Novell itself is OKAY I guess. I mean it's a file and print server, and Groupwise email is good in the sense that it's immune to most mail viruses that mostly target Outlook. I still think it would all be better handled by a nice Linux cluster but oh well.
The main thing holding Gov't back is that they're all using old sucky software that is do tightly bound to certain OS/Server combinations that it's easier (on paper) to just leave things broken than upgrade everyone and fix all the mistakes of the past. My mother actually had two PC's on her desk with a KVM switch, one with Win2000 and one with NT4, because the custom app she used for the majority of her work didn't work on anything else. Now, NT4 has been dead for how many years ? Wouldn't it be more efficient to update the app to work on ALL platforms, rather than have hundreds of staff with redundant hardware (and the support nightmare when a part needs to be replaced with something that is old enough to have drivers in NT). Problem is that they don't have the code.
Here's one better: I worked at the Passport Office, and we have this humongous app that basically handles all passport-related data. Well this app has been in development for over 12 years and still has huge idiotic problems and incomplete functionality. They even had to buy back the source code from the previous developers ?! Methinks when you blow 15 million on building an app (that I could probably assemble successfully alone in a year or less), you should have access to the code. Oh, this app also breaks if it doesn't like your hardware, or whatever OS patches, or just about anything that's not identical to the dev machine. In this case, they keep beating this dead horse because they don't want the bad press of abandoning a multi-million $$ project.
Politics politics politics, and not a shred of intelligence or business sense to be found.
Okay we're talking about smart, competent I.T. staff. Many smaller gov't branches just don't have those. We have ignorant protectionist old-fart techies who still can't get Novell dir permissions right after 15 years of experience, and we have brilliant young hirelings that have learned to keep their mind and mouth shut for fear of being fired under the "don't talk back" mob rule.
Gov't I.T. in Canada means either you're doing the cutting-edge development as an outside firm under contract, or you're on the inside doing more damage control and politics than actual tech work. Took me 2.5 years to figure it out, by that time I was happy to get the boot and get back to some REAL development work on my own.
How about legislating it then ? I know I know, laws are taboo on/., but it's illegal for youngsters to purchase alcohol, maybe it should be illegal for them to purchase mature games as well.
Of course there is no IF or MAYBE about booze, whereas a game's rating is, well, a rating. It is a moral judgement of the content and it's potential negative effect on the audience.
economic theory would seem to suggest that lower paying jobs moving to where they are more efficiently tasked would free labor here for more specialized higher paying jobs
Yes, in theory. Offering the mindless "jobs-that-can't-go-wrong" would be efficient. Outsourcing what normally requires a few years experience and a college degree, to some dude who learned how to operate Windows in 3 days and is willing to do what used to be a 125K job for 15K.. well.. no. You get what you pay for, and I have a feeling the outsourcers will find that out the hard way sooner or later. I sincerely hope something really nasty backhands these companies upside the head, because they are crippling the economy.
Sending jobs overseas means sending money overseas. That money isn't being spent at home, therefore it's not paying taxes, or buying goods from a local distributor.. just not making OUR economy flourish at all. For the treacherous corporation, it's a win. For everyone else it's just robbery on a different level.
Trolling aside, you can interview 9 out of 10 business in Canada and they will chant Linux till the cops beat them up. But the missing #10 is the most important: Government. Canada is really just a big awkward government with a nice back yard, and Gov't is dead scared of free software, for several reasons that were hammered into my skull the hard way:
1. It's built by "evil hackers"
2. Since it's free, Mr CIO can't farm it out as a big money contract to one of his mates, or one-up that and hire them all under his wings as 'consultants'.
3. Since it's free, there is no one being paid to answer the phone when stuff breaks.
4. Billco likes Linux, and Gov't doesn't like Billco; therefore Gov't doesn't like Linux.
Ok so I pulled #4 out of my ass. The other 3 are still quite true. I'm not taking stabs at the PM either, even though he's in deep dog-poo for doing #2 (and getting caught), but like anything it's far too easy to spend other people's money irresponsibly.
Your supposition is dead wrong. It got WORSE after 486, because they just kept tacking new crap on. Okay okay, SSE is actually kinda cool once you get the swing of it, but take a look at PPC asm, or my beloved ARM, and you'll develop what's known at Wintelitis, which causes spontaneous explosive nausea whenever you peek at X86 code.
But since I have buckets of experience in x86 asm I just carry Gravol wherever I code:)
So really RH Enterprise Linux is just a guaranteed "stable" branch, kind of like Debian Woody, as compared to the less-stable near-bleeding-edge stuff one would typically use on a home desktop PC, which would be Fedora (in my case, Deb Sarge/Sid). They just know how to turn an uninteresting word like "branch" into a crackload of money.
No matter what they try, some crazy ass is going to beat the information out of you to impersonate you on the UnterNet, then he's going to "borrow" your lawnmower, sit his ugly ass on the porch and giggle as the men in black suits come to take you away.
Isn't it a bit early to kill off RHL9 ? I haven't really been paying attention since I'm a Debian whore (and Debian releases are few, far-between and far-too-few-things-changed), but it seems it's a rather fresh release.
Or is this being done to give their commercial offerings a little more real estate ? Fedora may be the "new" Redhat Linux, but some of the more idiotic corporate users they won't have the synaptic ability to Google that correlation, and will be led to believe that RHL is no longer a "Free" "Hacker" "Distribution" but rather a "mature" "enterprise" "solution".
Linspire was good in the sense that every other ignorant moron had heard of "Lindows" which was going to "Kick Windows' Ass". These are the same people who think Microsoft built their computer because it says "Windows" when you turn it on. They also don't understand how I can build a "Windows" computer from spare parts.
These people would have bought "Lindows" PC's from Walmart or Best Buy. They would then have called their favorite geek up asking why their games were "broken" and to come fix it immediately.
Trust me, having unwashed fools on Linux is a bad idea. Apple has played an excellent balancing act in hiding OS-X's BSD roots from those who fear the black terminal window, but they are probably the only ones who can pull off such mastery.
What ever happened to FLAC, Monkey Audio, and all the other lossless audio compression formats ? Why couldn't apple use one of those rather than reinvent the wheel yet again ?
I actually dislike Zero a little, it doesn't "feel" right in my hands. The animation is too speedy and as such it is somewhat difficult to properly land jumps n'stuff. In contrast the true original metroid was slow as molasses, enough that I used to speed up Nesticle just a touch, to make it more bearable.
Another thing I kind of miss was the simplicity of the original NES version. It was an entirely novel game to try and exploit the glitches. There is this one trick where you could short-cut to the Mother Brain level by luring a flying critter into the "bridge room" and freezing it as a stepping stone so you didnt' need to fight the other two bosses. Beating Mother Brain's defense system without a full equipment was a challenge in itself.
I had nearly forgotten that.. but oh now I remember it so clearly. Empty rooms leave you wondering "Why aren't there any critters in here ?".. was there a secret item hidden somewhere ? or perhaps a huge boss was waiting just ahead.. the temporary absence of danger only suggested that there was a truly monstrous thing just around the corner.
I wish I could design a HERF gun that disable blanket statements.
Subwoofers existed well before rap was born. We just didn't call them subwoofers back then, we called them ground pounders. Ask any classic rock fan and you will be shown 15 and 18-inch woofers that can turn Keith Moon's drumming into a deadly sonic weapon.
I use a subwoofer right at my feet as part of my home studio/stereo. It is tuned very low so that it admirably completes my near-field monitors' frequency spectrum almost transparently. You can hardly tell it's there, you're just led to believe my monitors have exceptional sub-bass (which they definitely don't).
Now in the car I do have roughly a kilowatt of sound, about 3/4 of it being subs. It's not nearly as obnoxious as a Honda with rattling license plate and no high-range, but it is certainly "loud enough". Most importantly, it's FUN! Play any music in there and it sounds great, whether it's Finger Eleven with the kick drum shaking your rib cage, or Diana Krall's bassist lulling you into a mellow jazzy groove.
Well it certainly does use a tiny bit of CPU, and some PCI traffic to transmit the image over to the main graphics card, but it's negligible, considering I have done this since my Pentium-60 days.
So maybe the original SIDs are out of stock, but wouldn't it be possible to produce a faithful clone ? Heck, there are tons of SID emulators out there for Winamp etc.. one could probably code a SID emu on a PIC for pennies.
The only thing being 'stolen' in KCEasy's situation is the FastTrack p2p protocol. There is no network ownership, unlike the bank's ATM system which is owned and maintained by the banks themselves.
As an aside, there is no such a thing as an "unauthenticated client". Everyone who wants to get on the bank's network needs to provide credentials, generally in the form of the ATM's unit ID which is linked to your corporate account in the bank's database. If you somehow defeat this system by exploiting a flaw in the authentication protocol, then it is akin to trespassing on someone else's property "because the door wasn't locked". You're still in trouble.
In the case of Sharman Networks, their only property is their own user database and their intellectual property. As long as you don't touch either of those, the network itself is fair game.
Why exactly are we wasting efforts trying to find one guy in a sand dune somewhere in the middle east, when the same resources could be used to spank this grossly uncivilized government into playing fair with their own citizens ?
Around here, if a certain group of individuals isolate themselves in such fashion and severely restrict their knowledge and mindset, it's called a religious sect, definitely a bad thing. Over there it's called government, it's called a country. It's called legalized disregard for basic human rights. It's called a bunch of pricks thinking they're better than the rest.
If a country has to "protect" its citizens from the bad bad rest of the world, isn't it because they know damn well that what's on the outside is much nicer than the inside ? That's how a state prison is intended to work (in theory), we lock you up in a boring little box so you learn to better appreciate and respect the outside world.
All this terrotorial stupidity is making a racist out of me.
As a jobless genius, I no longer find any use for hand-held calculators whatsoever. If I find the need to do a detailed numerical computation while working, I simply wake from my dream and remember I'm still just a jobless genius living in a basement, and besides, I don't even HAVE a calculator anymore.
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Banyan Vines is a piece of history, one that should have been long migrated to something more recent and currently supported. I saw the same at Elections Canada and it sure made my eye pop "Wow you guys are old-school!", to which the single on-site tech replied "Huh?".
Novell itself is OKAY I guess. I mean it's a file and print server, and Groupwise email is good in the sense that it's immune to most mail viruses that mostly target Outlook. I still think it would all be better handled by a nice Linux cluster but oh well.
The main thing holding Gov't back is that they're all using old sucky software that is do tightly bound to certain OS/Server combinations that it's easier (on paper) to just leave things broken than upgrade everyone and fix all the mistakes of the past. My mother actually had two PC's on her desk with a KVM switch, one with Win2000 and one with NT4, because the custom app she used for the majority of her work didn't work on anything else. Now, NT4 has been dead for how many years ? Wouldn't it be more efficient to update the app to work on ALL platforms, rather than have hundreds of staff with redundant hardware (and the support nightmare when a part needs to be replaced with something that is old enough to have drivers in NT). Problem is that they don't have the code.
Here's one better: I worked at the Passport Office, and we have this humongous app that basically handles all passport-related data. Well this app has been in development for over 12 years and still has huge idiotic problems and incomplete functionality. They even had to buy back the source code from the previous developers ?! Methinks when you blow 15 million on building an app (that I could probably assemble successfully alone in a year or less), you should have access to the code. Oh, this app also breaks if it doesn't like your hardware, or whatever OS patches, or just about anything that's not identical to the dev machine. In this case, they keep beating this dead horse because they don't want the bad press of abandoning a multi-million $$ project.
Politics politics politics, and not a shred of intelligence or business sense to be found.
Okay we're talking about smart, competent I.T. staff. Many smaller gov't branches just don't have those. We have ignorant protectionist old-fart techies who still can't get Novell dir permissions right after 15 years of experience, and we have brilliant young hirelings that have learned to keep their mind and mouth shut for fear of being fired under the "don't talk back" mob rule.
Gov't I.T. in Canada means either you're doing the cutting-edge development as an outside firm under contract, or you're on the inside doing more damage control and politics than actual tech work. Took me 2.5 years to figure it out, by that time I was happy to get the boot and get back to some REAL development work on my own.
How about legislating it then ? I know I know, laws are taboo on /., but it's illegal for youngsters to purchase alcohol, maybe it should be illegal for them to purchase mature games as well.
Of course there is no IF or MAYBE about booze, whereas a game's rating is, well, a rating. It is a moral judgement of the content and it's potential negative effect on the audience.
I have alot of stupid friends so I know a little about running for president.
That was a looooooooong post, but I applaud you for putting into precise words what my mind's been thinking for years. Government is the ultimate mob.
Yes, in theory. Offering the mindless "jobs-that-can't-go-wrong" would be efficient. Outsourcing what normally requires a few years experience and a college degree, to some dude who learned how to operate Windows in 3 days and is willing to do what used to be a 125K job for 15K.. well.. no. You get what you pay for, and I have a feeling the outsourcers will find that out the hard way sooner or later. I sincerely hope something really nasty backhands these companies upside the head, because they are crippling the economy.
Sending jobs overseas means sending money overseas. That money isn't being spent at home, therefore it's not paying taxes, or buying goods from a local distributor.. just not making OUR economy flourish at all. For the treacherous corporation, it's a win. For everyone else it's just robbery on a different level.
Trolling aside, you can interview 9 out of 10 business in Canada and they will chant Linux till the cops beat them up. But the missing #10 is the most important: Government. Canada is really just a big awkward government with a nice back yard, and Gov't is dead scared of free software, for several reasons that were hammered into my skull the hard way:
1. It's built by "evil hackers"
2. Since it's free, Mr CIO can't farm it out as a big money contract to one of his mates, or one-up that and hire them all under his wings as 'consultants'.
3. Since it's free, there is no one being paid to answer the phone when stuff breaks.
4. Billco likes Linux, and Gov't doesn't like Billco; therefore Gov't doesn't like Linux.
Ok so I pulled #4 out of my ass. The other 3 are still quite true. I'm not taking stabs at the PM either, even though he's in deep dog-poo for doing #2 (and getting caught), but like anything it's far too easy to spend other people's money irresponsibly.
Your supposition is dead wrong. It got WORSE after 486, because they just kept tacking new crap on. Okay okay, SSE is actually kinda cool once you get the swing of it, but take a look at PPC asm, or my beloved ARM, and you'll develop what's known at Wintelitis, which causes spontaneous explosive nausea whenever you peek at X86 code.
:)
But since I have buckets of experience in x86 asm I just carry Gravol wherever I code
So really RH Enterprise Linux is just a guaranteed "stable" branch, kind of like Debian Woody, as compared to the less-stable near-bleeding-edge stuff one would typically use on a home desktop PC, which would be Fedora (in my case, Deb Sarge/Sid). They just know how to turn an uninteresting word like "branch" into a crackload of money.
No matter what they try, some crazy ass is going to beat the information out of you to impersonate you on the UnterNet, then he's going to "borrow" your lawnmower, sit his ugly ass on the porch and giggle as the men in black suits come to take you away.
Then he keeps your mower.
Isn't it a bit early to kill off RHL9 ? I haven't really been paying attention since I'm a Debian whore (and Debian releases are few, far-between and far-too-few-things-changed), but it seems it's a rather fresh release.
Or is this being done to give their commercial offerings a little more real estate ? Fedora may be the "new" Redhat Linux, but some of the more idiotic corporate users they won't have the synaptic ability to Google that correlation, and will be led to believe that RHL is no longer a "Free" "Hacker" "Distribution" but rather a "mature" "enterprise" "solution".
Aww heck it's a theory.
Linspire was good in the sense that every other ignorant moron had heard of "Lindows" which was going to "Kick Windows' Ass". These are the same people who think Microsoft built their computer because it says "Windows" when you turn it on. They also don't understand how I can build a "Windows" computer from spare parts.
These people would have bought "Lindows" PC's from Walmart or Best Buy. They would then have called their favorite geek up asking why their games were "broken" and to come fix it immediately.
Trust me, having unwashed fools on Linux is a bad idea. Apple has played an excellent balancing act in hiding OS-X's BSD roots from those who fear the black terminal window, but they are probably the only ones who can pull off such mastery.
What ever happened to FLAC, Monkey Audio, and all the other lossless audio compression formats ? Why couldn't apple use one of those rather than reinvent the wheel yet again ?
They are acting more and more like Microsoft.
I actually dislike Zero a little, it doesn't "feel" right in my hands. The animation is too speedy and as such it is somewhat difficult to properly land jumps n'stuff. In contrast the true original metroid was slow as molasses, enough that I used to speed up Nesticle just a touch, to make it more bearable.
Another thing I kind of miss was the simplicity of the original NES version. It was an entirely novel game to try and exploit the glitches. There is this one trick where you could short-cut to the Mother Brain level by luring a flying critter into the "bridge room" and freezing it as a stepping stone so you didnt' need to fight the other two bosses. Beating Mother Brain's defense system without a full equipment was a challenge in itself.
Well okay, but the original premise of MySQL was that it would be small and fast.
Now it's turning into a monstosity, trying to yank away Postgres' share of the free world (so they can sell support contracts).
Ahh screw you all, I'm going back to DBF format!
I had nearly forgotten that.. but oh now I remember it so clearly. Empty rooms leave you wondering "Why aren't there any critters in here ?".. was there a secret item hidden somewhere ? or perhaps a huge boss was waiting just ahead.. the temporary absence of danger only suggested that there was a truly monstrous thing just around the corner.
I wish I could design a HERF gun that disable blanket statements.
Subwoofers existed well before rap was born. We just didn't call them subwoofers back then, we called them ground pounders. Ask any classic rock fan and you will be shown 15 and 18-inch woofers that can turn Keith Moon's drumming into a deadly sonic weapon.
I use a subwoofer right at my feet as part of my home studio/stereo. It is tuned very low so that it admirably completes my near-field monitors' frequency spectrum almost transparently. You can hardly tell it's there, you're just led to believe my monitors have exceptional sub-bass (which they definitely don't).
Now in the car I do have roughly a kilowatt of sound, about 3/4 of it being subs. It's not nearly as obnoxious as a Honda with rattling license plate and no high-range, but it is certainly "loud enough". Most importantly, it's FUN! Play any music in there and it sounds great, whether it's Finger Eleven with the kick drum shaking your rib cage, or Diana Krall's bassist lulling you into a mellow jazzy groove.
Well it certainly does use a tiny bit of CPU, and some PCI traffic to transmit the image over to the main graphics card, but it's negligible, considering I have done this since my Pentium-60 days.
So maybe the original SIDs are out of stock, but wouldn't it be possible to produce a faithful clone ? Heck, there are tons of SID emulators out there for Winamp etc.. one could probably code a SID emu on a PIC for pennies.
If 6 carriage returns means six lines of code, then if all the code is in one long burst without carriage return, is it a 0-line program ?
They already do know who's running the software: your IP traffic, as sheepishly turned over by the ISP as soon as a legal threat walks thru the door.
The only thing being 'stolen' in KCEasy's situation is the FastTrack p2p protocol. There is no network ownership, unlike the bank's ATM system which is owned and maintained by the banks themselves.
As an aside, there is no such a thing as an "unauthenticated client". Everyone who wants to get on the bank's network needs to provide credentials, generally in the form of the ATM's unit ID which is linked to your corporate account in the bank's database. If you somehow defeat this system by exploiting a flaw in the authentication protocol, then it is akin to trespassing on someone else's property "because the door wasn't locked". You're still in trouble.
In the case of Sharman Networks, their only property is their own user database and their intellectual property. As long as you don't touch either of those, the network itself is fair game.
Why exactly are we wasting efforts trying to find one guy in a sand dune somewhere in the middle east, when the same resources could be used to spank this grossly uncivilized government into playing fair with their own citizens ?
Around here, if a certain group of individuals isolate themselves in such fashion and severely restrict their knowledge and mindset, it's called a religious sect, definitely a bad thing. Over there it's called government, it's called a country. It's called legalized disregard for basic human rights. It's called a bunch of pricks thinking they're better than the rest.
If a country has to "protect" its citizens from the bad bad rest of the world, isn't it because they know damn well that what's on the outside is much nicer than the inside ? That's how a state prison is intended to work (in theory), we lock you up in a boring little box so you learn to better appreciate and respect the outside world.
All this terrotorial stupidity is making a racist out of me.
Yes, but built from a hacker's point of view. And free... hello ?
As a jobless genius, I no longer find any use for hand-held calculators whatsoever. If I find the need to do a detailed numerical computation while working, I simply wake from my dream and remember I'm still just a jobless genius living in a basement, and besides, I don't even HAVE a calculator anymore.