MSNBC is in one of the best positions to criticize Micro$oft - since the US theoretically has a free press, M$ really can't censor their own (or perhaps I should say their 0wned) media outlet. If they did so, one of two things would happen: 1) A public outcry of monopolistic muscle, or 2) people would just slowly start recognizing other channels to have more unbiased news, and NBC, with or with the M$ attached, would fall from significance.
The net result is, M$ doesn't want to gamble that. It makes them look good if M$NBC criticizes them because it shows they're not using their money and power to censor the press. So their journalists get to express their views openly.
I work at a Big 10 University, and here counter-offers are the *only* way to get substantial pay raises. It's the recognized method of getting raises - you find a company that will offer you more money, then you show it the University, and they make a counter-offer to keep you.
All the professors who are anybody have done this multiple times, and professional non-academic staff do it as well. Go for it.
I'm surprised my original post has gotten three trolls - my only ever troll post didn't get any troll ratings.
My point is merely that there is a real dilemma for the/. crowd about the US wanting to take over ICANN, because most/.ers seem not to like ICANN, but at the same time there have been many concerns about privacy issues and the US government. This I think is a valid observation - neither trolling nor particularly insightful - just an observation.
Of course I guess using the phrase "authoritarian regime" is a bit controversial... but it does seem often to be the tenor of/. discussions about copyright and patent issues.
You'll notice I never mentioned parties here, just the Bush regime. Of course you're right - I've been very depressed at the attitude of the Democratic Party of late. I'm aware Hollings is a Democrat. I'm also aware that both parties are a little too keen on taking rights away from individuals. Your assumption that my argument is based on partisan politics is wrong.
The Dems and Republicans both are pretty eager to invade privacy right now; they're just both motivated by different goals. That's why the ACLU fights attacks on free speech no matter where they come from - all the laws you mention that have been struck down were struck down largely due to the work of ACLU lawyers.
We do risk getting off-topic mods at this point, but hopefully the moderators will be gentle...
You are of course right about Mr. al-Mujahir not even being imprisoned for 48 hours yet, but it still presents a dangerous precedent.
I would avoid arguing for precedent in decisions made during past US wars: remember that in WWII it was considered perfectly acceptable to put Japanese American citizens into concentration camps just because they were Japanese. Still, I take your point that from a purely legal (and I mean *legal* as opposed to *constitutional* because clearly much of the Constitution was ignored in WWII as well) standpoint, any precedent counts.
Finally, I give you The Daily Texan with a more thorough discussion of the breast fiasco. You must admit that considering what "Minnie Lou" symbolizes, the placement of a curtain in front of her bare breast does give a rather bad tone to Ashcroft's speeches.
Again, I think your points are valid and strong, but I think there are larger Constitutional issues that come before the law here.
Disclaimer: you may not agree with my leftist views.
A government that holds its own citizens indefinitely without charges on the brig of a ship in South Carolina because of a supposed plot to set off a "dirty bomb" in D.C., despite Constitutional requirements for due process, is what I call an authoritarian regime. A government whose Attorney General feels the need to cover the breast of Lady Justice because it makes him "uncomfortable" is not a group I want censoring my free speech.
Now, you may say that this evidence does not prove my claim. I say it does.
This is a real dilemma. Consider that all the claims the US government makes about ICANN are correct: they're unaccountable, monopolistic, and they certainly don't run things the way they were supposed to. Almost everybody in the/. community can agree that ICANN needs to be reined in.
The US government used to do this job, and back then, it was fine. But of course then the internet was a small space for researchers and academics to exchange ideas.
Our current administration is authoritarian and too concerned about what's moral, correct, and in the best interest of scaring the populace. Free speech == bad in the eyes of the Bush regime.
Add to that the fact that the internet is now worldwide, and the US shouldn't be patrolling the world (though they do it in physical space already - cyber space is a small leap), and it puts us all in a real dilemma.
I guess the real question is, with which stick would you rather be beaten?
I think I tried right the first time. I have friends, coworkers, and other contacts at Sun, and what I state is what they've all told me. I'm a Sun shareholder; I would not buy stock in a company that didn't trust its own systems.
Of course, exceptions can be made at all levels. But internally, Sun uses staroffice.
Finally, I use sunrays all over my house and at work, and they're certainly not something to shudder about - hot desking is very sexy, and for most tasks the small performance lag is acceptable. Obviously they're not for gaming but I know of no fps games that run on solaris anyway.
They do use staroffice for themselves. Not only that, McNealy has ordered that all the marketing, sales, and business people have to use sunrays running Solaris 8 and staroffice. They are absolutely NOT allowed to use anything M$.
The R&D and support people get whatever they want of course, but most of them use Ultra 60s or Ultra 80s, with Solaris and Staroffice. There are of course AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Linux, BSD, Mac, VMS, Windoze, and DOS boxen running in R&D, and in fact some of the support people even get trained on these products so they can accurately deal with interaction between Solaris and these other options.
Re:Discounts for multi-seat purchases?
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you've never bought sun software at the enterprise level, you wouldn't know...
Sun has a discount level associated with every product. The level is identified with a letter: A, D, and H for most hardware, B and P for most software, some other codes.
They negotiate discount levels with just about anybody - the bigger the institution, the steeper the discount. For example, a certain institution that I know of (I don't know if this is technically NDA so I won't mention names) has a 38% category A discount (with which we buy Sun Fire 3800s and up), a 20% category H discount (for netras and the like), and a 38% category B discount (for software like staroffice). So when we buy Solaris media with documentation, instead of $100 we pay $62.
Of course we have a site license for Solaris and StarOffice, so in reality we don't pay per seat. But when my boss got confused, we paid $62 for staroffice...
This is a standard discount with which we buy online. I know that another institution had a category A of only about 30% and a category H of about 15%... each group negotiates separately.
Support, Support, Support
on
StarOffice 6.0
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Three buzzwords for the business world and software: 1) Support 2) Support 3) Support
If you buy staroffice, you have support. If you download openoffice for your business, you have to contract in support, which is probably as much per seat as staroffice.
If no money exchanges hands, especially when it comes to the almighty GPL, there is absolutely NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER that the software works. Sun stakes its very life and reputation on the fact that StarOffice will work perfectly. True, the open source community produces good code, but there's no GUARANTEE of good code. Sun spent 8 months in semi-public beta of this baby (I've been using it since September).
Sun found that more companies would use StarOffice if they charged a bit for it than if it were free, for precisely this reason. Remember, the market for office suites is corporate, not personal, especially for Sun.
your point is fair enough. I think it added value for those of us interested in following the links, and that it really wouldn't be that distracting to ignore them. Still, I see what you're saying, especially since the links were added to direct quotes, something which I concede could have an adverse affect on the original message packard was trying to make. I tell my students never to alter quotes unless they make it quite clear that the alterations were by them and not part of the author's original message.
Packard runs an historic theater, and Packard's placard was put up in that theater. It is arguable that to some degree it in fact *was* a speech about movie history, at least as it relates to the context of the HP Way - his point is that HP had such a strong sense of connection with the cultural world around it (as of 1987) that it wanted to restore an historic theater that dated from approximately the time of its founding. Packard's point was to connect the company and its ideals with the cultural ideals of the Stanford Theater, and to show that these values are now dead in HPQ.
As such, I think the links to the movie information were relevant. It's not as though the poster were *forcing* you to follow the links; if you are not interested in cultural references outside the compu-tech world, don't follow them.
I'm not a physicist, so I take your word for it. Probably the vector between most of the midwest and the satellite crosses over Arizona so it's an easy simplification. It works for me though, I knew how to aim my dish.
If you live anywhere in what can be loosely called the "midwest" or the "east" you need a clear line of sight to the southwest. I've been told that the US satellites are both approximately over Arizona - my dish (in Minnesota) is just barely aimed above the horizon, but I have 97% signal strength and have only once lost the signal, and then briefly, during a thunderstorm. It's fine through Minnesota blizzards even. A professionally-aimed dish (or very carefully amateur-aimed) should never get lower than 80% signal strength - just watch out for trees.
Latency can be an issue if you need fast ping times - expect no better than 200ms, best-case. But of course for web-browsing, email, and file downloads, it's fine. I now just have dish for TV though, because I qualify for 1Mbit synch. DSL. But Dish would certainly be a good choice in a rural setting.
No. I'm peeved that just because I own thelindsays.org I got a chance to buy thelindsays.us before the rest of the country, and that, simultaneously, the people who own lindsay.com, lindsay.net and lindsay.org were offered (and one took) lindsay.us before it was available to the rest of the people.
I'm peeved that the system favors companies or groups that already own {name}.com|.org|.net to get the first crack at every new domain name, thus nullifying the entire reason for releasing new TLDs in the first place.
Though I may have an over-inflated sense of importance sometimes, that does not enter into this specific equation. My concern is not that I think that I should have precedence, but rather that nobody should have precedence over anybody else.
I'm not into flag-waving or patriotism; I saw.us as a possible chance to have more distribution of good domain names. Unfortunately, it's being sold merely as a way for current.com holders to make a flag-waving statement about how patriotic they are.
Despite all their statements, the.us distribution clearly favors big companies. The added bonus that the gov't has already claimed anything involving a municipality, state, county or region, makes it very difficult to get a good name. dot-us, which should have been a big deal for the US, has turned into a non-event. I was asked to bid on the.us version of my current domainname (thelindsays.org) about two months ago, and the name I'd really like, lindsay.us, was already taken more than a month before the public opening.
No thanks, I'd rather have a non-obvious.com or.org than a non-obvious.us.
It's a nice machine, with a PC motherboard modified only with a Sun northbridge and removed PS/2 connectors (the processor is even socket-370!). However, be careful with these because the normal advantage of Suns is their (1) scalability and (2) Tremendous I/O bandwidth. With only one CPU, it's obviously not scaled very far, and the I/O bandwidth just isn't there for the blade 100- it's essentially a PC's 32/33 I/O system, but it's further choked by the fact that the CPU is only 500MHz (or 600, if you buy from sun's ebay store). The usual advantages of USII architecture are lost on this system - the slow clock speed is not compensated by large cache, fast I/O, or tremendous scalability. The only reason to buy one (and this is why I own it) is if you are devloping for big Suns and you want binary compatibility with them on your desktop. Go instead for PC hardware with Linux, or if you really want, Solaris x86 (but don't expect binary compatibility with big suns). If you really want a non-pc desktop, shell out the cash for a single-CPU blade 1000 (starts at $6000, but if you're in any way connected with an academic institution you can get it for about $4000.) Otherwise, it's probably not worth it.
I have to admit I'm a newbie: I've been a Solaris System Administrator for just 3 years, but I've administered SunOS 4 (finally got rid of that this year), as well as all versions of Solaris 2 from 2.5.1 up.
I personally find Solaris 8 much easier to work with than Solaris 7 - though it does use up more system resources just to run, its install is easier, we've had better luck with drivers, and we've had much more success getting gcc-compiled programs to work with it.
Of course, we're predisposed to like Solaris 8 better because Solaris 7 won't run on our Fire 3800 or our Blades. So in the spirit of minimizing work (a sysadmin virtue) we're slowly trying to move everything to 8.
Finally, I hope Solaris x86 is continued because I like being able to develop outside on the patio in full sun, then run the code on the servers.
I have a Dell 8100 with the Nvidia GeForce2Go video card. With only about 30 minutes' work in the XFree86 configuration files (not too bad, but not for beginners either) I was able to get it to use an external monitor along with the built-in display. It works beautifully, with a few caveats: (1) The built-in display is the secondary display when an external one is connected, so you have to have two different XFree86 config files, one for multi-display and one for single display. (2) If the two are at different resolutions, then there is dead space around the display with the lower resolution; it's possible to lose the mouse or boxes in the dead space. (3) Nvidia are assholes and refuse to release the source for their drivers. So you have binary-only drivers and have to reinstall them every time you upgrade your kernel. Of course, this is a GeForce-wide problem and not limited to use of two monitors...
If you can cope with this, the TwinView solution works fine.
My cousin-in-law is from an Iowa farming family but has a knack for technology. The result is, he started working with an Iowa company to develop and deploy these a few years ago. They've been deploying these in the field (quite literally)for the last three years; he gave me an excellent demonstration at Christmas last year. They can tell everything about crop yields and, most significantly, remember the information and send it to a unit in the fertilizer spreaders to make sure the parts of the field with the lowest yield receive the most fertilizer. His father's farm, which has been doing this for three years, has already seen a more even distribution (and hence large overall production) across their 400 acres.
InfoSec's original post was not questioning whether water is required for any type of life. He was suggesting that for HUMANS (ie, carbon-based lifeforms from the third planet out from our sun) to colonize other planets, we need large quantities of readily available water. Of course the comment Ubi_NL has made may or may not be true (it's a valid theory, anyway), but it has nothing to do with the original post. Nobody can argue that humans will be unable to colononize space very effectively if we have to bring water with us. However, if the Universe is full of water, as Mars suggests, then it will be easy.
At the same time, presence of water on Mars does not really give us any clue as to whether or not there is water outside our solar system, since Mars and Earth both came from the same primordial mass...
For me, I've spent my whole life avoiding the inevitable.
I went to college for History and Music, and though I spent most of my free time with computers, I absolutely resisted the pull.
I went to Grad school for French Revolutionary History, a topic about as non-CS as it gets.
However, I needed funding so I took a part-time grad assistantship with a UNIX server cluster.
I'm now a full-time SysAdmin at the University and have not yet finished that Doctorate.
In answer to the questions: I have absolutely NO certification of any sort, and I have NEVER taken a computer science class. I am completely self-taught. It was all about being in the wrong place at the right time...
Some might say I'm completely unqualified, and they would be right. But then, I'm employed in a fairly high-paying job with a reasonably loose schedule at a University that has never laid off any of its tech staff, so I'm staying where I am.
Slashdot Mirror
MSNBC is in one of the best positions to criticize Micro$oft - since the US theoretically has a free press, M$ really can't censor their own (or perhaps I should say their 0wned) media outlet. If they did so, one of two things would happen: 1) A public outcry of monopolistic muscle, or 2) people would just slowly start recognizing other channels to have more unbiased news, and NBC, with or with the M$ attached, would fall from significance.
The net result is, M$ doesn't want to gamble that. It makes them look good if M$NBC criticizes them because it shows they're not using their money and power to censor the press. So their journalists get to express their views openly.
Actually, I read the "paycut" part as meaning that when he/she took the job, it was a pay cut from the previous job for a dot-bomb.
I work at a Big 10 University, and here counter-offers are the *only* way to get substantial pay raises. It's the recognized method of getting raises - you find a company that will offer you more money, then you show it the University, and they make a counter-offer to keep you.
All the professors who are anybody have done this multiple times, and professional non-academic staff do it as well. Go for it.
Why do you hate America so much?
/. crowd about the US wanting to take over ICANN, because most /.ers seem not to like ICANN, but at the same time there have been many concerns about privacy issues and the US government. This I think is a valid observation - neither trolling nor particularly insightful - just an observation.
/. discussions about copyright and patent issues.
I'm surprised my original post has gotten three trolls - my only ever troll post didn't get any troll ratings.
My point is merely that there is a real dilemma for the
Of course I guess using the phrase "authoritarian regime" is a bit controversial... but it does seem often to be the tenor of
Ah well, I've got an FBI file by now anyway.
You'll notice I never mentioned parties here, just the Bush regime. Of course you're right - I've been very depressed at the attitude of the Democratic Party of late. I'm aware Hollings is a Democrat. I'm also aware that both parties are a little too keen on taking rights away from individuals. Your assumption that my argument is based on partisan politics is wrong.
The Dems and Republicans both are pretty eager to invade privacy right now; they're just both motivated by different goals. That's why the ACLU fights attacks on free speech no matter where they come from - all the laws you mention that have been struck down were struck down largely due to the work of ACLU lawyers.
We do risk getting off-topic mods at this point, but hopefully the moderators will be gentle...
You are of course right about Mr. al-Mujahir not even being imprisoned for 48 hours yet, but it still presents a dangerous precedent.
I would avoid arguing for precedent in decisions made during past US wars: remember that in WWII it was considered perfectly acceptable to put Japanese American citizens into concentration camps just because they were Japanese. Still, I take your point that from a purely legal (and I mean *legal* as opposed to *constitutional* because clearly much of the Constitution was ignored in WWII as well) standpoint, any precedent counts.
Finally, I give you The Daily Texan with a more thorough discussion of the breast fiasco. You must admit that considering what "Minnie Lou" symbolizes, the placement of a curtain in front of her bare breast does give a rather bad tone to Ashcroft's speeches.
Again, I think your points are valid and strong, but I think there are larger Constitutional issues that come before the law here.
Disclaimer: you may not agree with my leftist views.
A government that holds its own citizens indefinitely without charges on the brig of a ship in South Carolina because of a supposed plot to set off a "dirty bomb" in D.C., despite Constitutional requirements for due process, is what I call an authoritarian regime. A government whose Attorney General feels the need to cover the breast of Lady Justice because it makes him "uncomfortable" is not a group I want censoring my free speech.
Now, you may say that this evidence does not prove my claim. I say it does.
This is a real dilemma. Consider that all the claims the US government makes about ICANN are correct: they're unaccountable, monopolistic, and they certainly don't run things the way they were supposed to. Almost everybody in the /. community can agree that ICANN needs to be reined in.
The US government used to do this job, and back then, it was fine. But of course then the internet was a small space for researchers and academics to exchange ideas.
Our current administration is authoritarian and too concerned about what's moral, correct, and in the best interest of scaring the populace. Free speech == bad in the eyes of the Bush regime.
Add to that the fact that the internet is now worldwide, and the US shouldn't be patrolling the world (though they do it in physical space already - cyber space is a small leap), and it puts us all in a real dilemma.
I guess the real question is, with which stick would you rather be beaten?
I think I tried right the first time. I have friends, coworkers, and other contacts at Sun, and what I state is what they've all told me. I'm a Sun shareholder; I would not buy stock in a company that didn't trust its own systems.
Of course, exceptions can be made at all levels. But internally, Sun uses staroffice.
Finally, I use sunrays all over my house and at work, and they're certainly not something to shudder about - hot desking is very sexy, and for most tasks the small performance lag is acceptable. Obviously they're not for gaming but I know of no fps games that run on solaris anyway.
They do use staroffice for themselves. Not only that, McNealy has ordered that all the marketing, sales, and business people have to use sunrays running Solaris 8 and staroffice. They are absolutely NOT allowed to use anything M$.
The R&D and support people get whatever they want of course, but most of them use Ultra 60s or Ultra 80s, with Solaris and Staroffice. There are of course AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Linux, BSD, Mac, VMS, Windoze, and DOS boxen running in R&D, and in fact some of the support people even get trained on these products so they can accurately deal with interaction between Solaris and these other options.
If you've never bought sun software at the enterprise level, you wouldn't know...
Sun has a discount level associated with every product. The level is identified with a letter: A, D, and H for most hardware, B and P for most software, some other codes.
They negotiate discount levels with just about anybody - the bigger the institution, the steeper the discount. For example, a certain institution that I know of (I don't know if this is technically NDA so I won't mention names) has a 38% category A discount (with which we buy Sun Fire 3800s and up), a 20% category H discount (for netras and the like), and a 38% category B discount (for software like staroffice). So when we buy Solaris media with documentation, instead of $100 we pay $62.
Of course we have a site license for Solaris and StarOffice, so in reality we don't pay per seat. But when my boss got confused, we paid $62 for staroffice...
This is a standard discount with which we buy online. I know that another institution had a category A of only about 30% and a category H of about 15%... each group negotiates separately.
Three buzzwords for the business world and software:
1) Support
2) Support
3) Support
If you buy staroffice, you have support. If you download openoffice for your business, you have to contract in support, which is probably as much per seat as staroffice.
If no money exchanges hands, especially when it comes to the almighty GPL, there is absolutely NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER that the software works. Sun stakes its very life and reputation on the fact that StarOffice will work perfectly. True, the open source community produces good code, but there's no GUARANTEE of good code. Sun spent 8 months in semi-public beta of this baby (I've been using it since September).
Sun found that more companies would use StarOffice if they charged a bit for it than if it were free, for precisely this reason. Remember, the market for office suites is corporate, not personal, especially for Sun.
your point is fair enough. I think it added value for those of us interested in following the links, and that it really wouldn't be that distracting to ignore them. Still, I see what you're saying, especially since the links were added to direct quotes, something which I concede could have an adverse affect on the original message packard was trying to make. I tell my students never to alter quotes unless they make it quite clear that the alterations were by them and not part of the author's original message.
Packard runs an historic theater, and Packard's placard was put up in that theater. It is arguable that to some degree it in fact *was* a speech about movie history, at least as it relates to the context of the HP Way - his point is that HP had such a strong sense of connection with the cultural world around it (as of 1987) that it wanted to restore an historic theater that dated from approximately the time of its founding. Packard's point was to connect the company and its ideals with the cultural ideals of the Stanford Theater, and to show that these values are now dead in HPQ.
As such, I think the links to the movie information were relevant. It's not as though the poster were *forcing* you to follow the links; if you are not interested in cultural references outside the compu-tech world, don't follow them.
BSD will no longer sing mellow christian rock favorites?
I'm not a physicist, so I take your word for it. Probably the vector between most of the midwest and the satellite crosses over Arizona so it's an easy simplification. It works for me though, I knew how to aim my dish.
If you live anywhere in what can be loosely called the "midwest" or the "east" you need a clear line of sight to the southwest. I've been told that the US satellites are both approximately over Arizona - my dish (in Minnesota) is just barely aimed above the horizon, but I have 97% signal strength and have only once lost the signal, and then briefly, during a thunderstorm. It's fine through Minnesota blizzards even. A professionally-aimed dish (or very carefully amateur-aimed) should never get lower than 80% signal strength - just watch out for trees.
Latency can be an issue if you need fast ping times - expect no better than 200ms, best-case. But of course for web-browsing, email, and file downloads, it's fine. I now just have dish for TV though, because I qualify for 1Mbit synch. DSL. But Dish would certainly be a good choice in a rural setting.
No. I'm peeved that just because I own thelindsays.org I got a chance to buy thelindsays.us before the rest of the country, and that, simultaneously, the people who own lindsay.com, lindsay.net and lindsay.org were offered (and one took) lindsay.us before it was available to the rest of the people.
.us as a possible chance to have more distribution of good domain names. Unfortunately, it's being sold merely as a way for current .com holders to make a flag-waving statement about how patriotic they are.
I'm peeved that the system favors companies or groups that already own {name}.com|.org|.net to get the first crack at every new domain name, thus nullifying the entire reason for releasing new TLDs in the first place.
Though I may have an over-inflated sense of importance sometimes, that does not enter into this specific equation. My concern is not that I think that I should have precedence, but rather that nobody should have precedence over anybody else.
I'm not into flag-waving or patriotism; I saw
Despite all their statements, the .us distribution clearly favors big companies. The added bonus that the gov't has already claimed anything involving a municipality, state, county or region, makes it very difficult to get a good name. dot-us, which should have been a big deal for the US, has turned into a non-event. I was asked to bid on the .us version of my current domainname (thelindsays.org) about two months ago, and the name I'd really like, lindsay.us, was already taken more than a month before the public opening.
.com or .org than a non-obvious .us.
No thanks, I'd rather have a non-obvious
It's a nice machine, with a PC motherboard modified only with a Sun northbridge and removed PS/2 connectors (the processor is even socket-370!).
However, be careful with these because the normal advantage of Suns is their (1) scalability and (2) Tremendous I/O bandwidth. With only one CPU, it's obviously not scaled very far, and the I/O bandwidth just isn't there for the blade 100- it's essentially a PC's 32/33 I/O system, but it's further choked by the fact that the CPU is only 500MHz (or 600, if you buy from sun's ebay store).
The usual advantages of USII architecture are lost on this system - the slow clock speed is not compensated by large cache, fast I/O, or tremendous scalability. The only reason to buy one (and this is why I own it) is if you are devloping for big Suns and you want binary compatibility with them on your desktop. Go instead for PC hardware with Linux, or if you really want, Solaris x86 (but don't expect binary compatibility with big suns). If you really want a non-pc desktop, shell out the cash for a single-CPU blade 1000 (starts at $6000, but if you're in any way connected with an academic institution you can get it for about $4000.) Otherwise, it's probably not worth it.
Good luck!
I have to admit I'm a newbie: I've been a Solaris System Administrator for just 3 years, but I've administered SunOS 4 (finally got rid of that this year), as well as all versions of Solaris 2 from 2.5.1 up.
I personally find Solaris 8 much easier to work with than Solaris 7 - though it does use up more system resources just to run, its install is easier, we've had better luck with drivers, and we've had much more success getting gcc-compiled programs to work with it.
Of course, we're predisposed to like Solaris 8 better because Solaris 7 won't run on our Fire 3800 or our Blades. So in the spirit of minimizing work (a sysadmin virtue) we're slowly trying to move everything to 8.
Finally, I hope Solaris x86 is continued because I like being able to develop outside on the patio in full sun, then run the code on the servers.
I have a Dell 8100 with the Nvidia GeForce2Go video card. With only about 30 minutes' work in the XFree86 configuration files (not too bad, but not for beginners either) I was able to get it to use an external monitor along with the built-in display. It works beautifully, with a few caveats:
(1) The built-in display is the secondary display when an external one is connected, so you have to have two different XFree86 config files, one for multi-display and one for single display.
(2) If the two are at different resolutions, then there is dead space around the display with the lower resolution; it's possible to lose the mouse or boxes in the dead space.
(3) Nvidia are assholes and refuse to release the source for their drivers. So you have binary-only drivers and have to reinstall them every time you upgrade your kernel. Of course, this is a GeForce-wide problem and not limited to use of two monitors...
If you can cope with this, the TwinView solution works fine.
Good Luck!
My cousin-in-law is from an Iowa farming family but has a knack for technology. The result is, he started working with an Iowa company to develop and deploy these a few years ago. They've been deploying these in the field (quite literally)for the last three years; he gave me an excellent demonstration at Christmas last year. They can tell everything about crop yields and, most significantly, remember the information and send it to a unit in the fertilizer spreaders to make sure the parts of the field with the lowest yield receive the most fertilizer. His father's farm, which has been doing this for three years, has already seen a more even distribution (and hence large overall production) across their 400 acres.
InfoSec's original post was not questioning whether water is required for any type of life. He was suggesting that for HUMANS (ie, carbon-based lifeforms from the third planet out from our sun) to colonize other planets, we need large quantities of readily available water. Of course the comment Ubi_NL has made may or may not be true (it's a valid theory, anyway), but it has nothing to do with the original post. Nobody can argue that humans will be unable to colononize space very effectively if we have to bring water with us. However, if the Universe is full of water, as Mars suggests, then it will be easy.
At the same time, presence of water on Mars does not really give us any clue as to whether or not there is water outside our solar system, since Mars and Earth both came from the same primordial mass...
For me, I've spent my whole life avoiding the inevitable.
I went to college for History and Music, and though I spent most of my free time with computers, I absolutely resisted the pull.
I went to Grad school for French Revolutionary History, a topic about as non-CS as it gets.
However, I needed funding so I took a part-time grad assistantship with a UNIX server cluster.
I'm now a full-time SysAdmin at the University and have not yet finished that Doctorate.
In answer to the questions: I have absolutely NO certification of any sort, and I have NEVER taken a computer science class. I am completely self-taught. It was all about being in the wrong place at the right time...
Some might say I'm completely unqualified, and they would be right. But then, I'm employed in a fairly high-paying job with a reasonably loose schedule at a University that has never laid off any of its tech staff, so I'm staying where I am.