First, thank you very much to Slashdot for being one of the few news sources last year that had the bandwidth to be useful during a crisis.
Second, I wrote a rant earlier today that I think everyone should think about very carefully (though the slashdot crowd is less guilty than most):
Today is September 11th (911 is a phone number people!). Remember last year? Osama bin Laden and his buddies destroyed the World Trade Center ("ground zero" is the technical term for the center of a large distructive event, such as a nuke or an earthquake, etc. It's not the name of a place.) and messed up the Pentagon pretty good. They killed what-- about 5,000 people? That really sucks. Does anyone know why? "They are crazy" is not a good answer. The tragedy is that all those people died, and most Americans completely missed the point.
Third. Speaking of missing the point. Rather than trying to understand WHY people find it necessary to blow up our shit, the American people and their politicians are having a deplorable reaction. I won't repeat the lists of freedoms taken away, or the liberty/safety quotes. You all know the story by now.
Fourth, if you want to make a difference, let your representatives in government know that your freedom is more important to you than anything else. Remember, us mp3 "pirates" could be considered terrorists before too long. I'm serious.
Fifth, I'm not asking you to give up your SUV. But support alternatives to petroleum. Mention that to your representative. Petroleum products send a lot of money to people I'm really not interested in -- if we want to buy stuff from them it doesn't bother me... but with that money goes Western culture and ideals. That's why they want to blow up our shit. If someone told me I couldn't drink or date, I might start blowing up their shit. That doesn't make it right, but it's better to think of things in terms of cause and effect rather than effect and reaction.
But Strunk & White's timeless classic "Elements of Style" will teach you that "a lot" is two words. Master the easy stuff, and then move on to physics.
Once there, you can go to the local book store or even the library and pick up a high school text on physics. They're mostly awful, but if you're bright, you can probably extract the basic theory from them.
--brian
It seems to me...
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That if you don't like Google... then you shouldn't use Google. Duh. Why the holy crusade? If you think Altavista or hell, Netscape Search meets your needs, then use it. Why do people find it necessary to attack everything instead of being constructive. Humbug.
Right now, I'm paying $50 a month, basically so I can watch Daria, South Park, NBA and NFL games. And my roommate has ESPN on continuously with ads for stuff we want to see advertised.
Seriously, I watch two shows... and they both happen to be on during the SAME TIME SLOT!
I'd pay $2 an episode to be able to watch any half hour or hour show, any time I want. Oh, I feel like seeing Star Trek. Oh, I haven't seen MacGuyver for a hundred years.
PPV is around $5 for a movie, but the selection is relatively limited -- I've never ordered Pay Per View because of that. When I can get any movie I want in Dolby 5.1, and have it start when it's convenient for me, then I'll pay $5 for a movie.
Good lord, I pay to have 900 channels of crap pumped in, because I don't have much of a choice. I'd pay to get ONLY what I want. And then let me subscribe to the sports channels and music channels.
And yet, Slashdot, the site that posted this news, is still using Times New Roman.. ironic
Actually, I would imagine that Slashdot is one of the very few sites that doesn't suck, and uses what ever fonts your browser specifies. Of course, since I have fonts disabled, I only see Times New Roman and Courier New in my browser anyway.
<RANT>
Do any of you adults out there remember when Tim Berners Lee came up with this stuff, and how HTML was just supposed to be a recommendation on how to present the data, and not a formal definition of what it's supposed to look like? Hmmm? If you develop a site and you want it to look a specific way (then you're... nm), then use flash or pdf or postscript. But if you give me HTML, I'm going to render it the way I want to see it rendered.
I don't know too much about valuation -- I'm just a software engineer. What I do know, is that I'm vastly underpaid for my position, even in today's economy. I also know that while most of my colleagues use lots of worthless IDEs that cost $400 a pop and run them on machines that cost $4000 or so. I'm sitting over here working twice as fast on the same PII366 that they issued to me back in 1999 LONG before the bubble burst, and y'know, I've never needed an upgrade because vi and jdb just aren't that intensive.
I've noticed that as my colleages machines have been upgraded, their code has gotten slower and slower. Maybe your admin assistent needs a GHz machine to run your finance spread sheet, but I know a good developer doesn't need the $4000 machine to hack code. I also know that our new enterprise Solaris box isn't as fast as the old duel processor Linux box that we used to use.
Okay, now that I'm going to lose my job for whining about corporate decision making... everyone have a nice day.
Here here! I don't care how efficient the Toyota Echo is... ick! Now, drop an RX-7 body on it, and I don't care if it has peddles, I'll buy one.
-brian
What a silly thing to say.
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 2
This guy apparently doesn't get it. As Linus has said time and time again, he's not interested in "dominating the market" or "replacing Windows". He is interested in creating a viable operating system that does what he needs it to. As long as there are people who need (or want) a free alternative to Unix, Linux will thrive.
I have been running Linux almost exclusively for over five years. Sure it's not quite as streamlined on the desktop as MS, but it'll get there when Linux users decide that's what they want. I don't even run X, so I could not care less.
In another 30 years, when people are still saying "Linux is Dead", people still won't get it. But it'll be there and it'll be thriving. And you can tell your kids about what it was like when you were a kid and there was an OS monopoly.
First, it's not a tiger, it's a marsupial with stripes (hence the Tiger moniker), related to the Tasmanian Devil.
Second, the article talks about using a Tasmanian Devil as a potential host animal, after stripping out the genes specific to the Tasmanian Devil from the egg cell.
It doesn't talk about gene pools or population sizes, however there are several of the animals completely preserved, and that's a LOT of genetic material to work with.
Okay, everyone's ripping on Lucas, and perhaps rightfully so. On the other hand, maybe he does realize that he messed up.
Either way... I'm going to see Clones. It'd have to be really bad for me not to go back two or three times.
How about the rest of you? Vocal though you are, I doubt you will stay away. It doesn't matter how bad the dialogue is... guys with lightsabers are just too cool.
Oh no! I'm afraid I'm going to have to miss it this time. I have to watch Ally McBeal, and I haven't figured out how to record one channel while watching another...
Unlike the MPAA and the RIAA, porn companies don't care about online trading, because they realize that IT DOESNT HURT THEIR SALES.
Half the porn you see out there are free samples distributed just to get you to go to the pay sites. There's more "pirated" porn around than "pirated" hollywood movies, and the porn industry is booming.
They actually get the Internet. The MPAA and RIAA should follow their lead. The porn industry may be reprehensible and icky, but they certainly know how to run a business and how to treat the consumer.
You know you've had a rough week as a software engineer and you see "Buses and Interconnects" and you start thinking about advances in mass transit and wondering if "interconnect" is a British term. TGIF.
Since the link in the article got/.'d, you can waste your time by going to 100 Inch TV. And it REALLY WORKS!! I wonder if it comes with Anna Kournikova photos and will earn me $10,000 a month?
The embedded system was clocked at 0.8 seconds from system power-on to transfer of control
to LILO. This was on an Intel SOYO motherboard (440BX chipset)
running a PIII 400
Two comments:
Doesn't Soyo mean "gentle" in Japanese?
And, if you really need "7 nines" uptime, you shouldn't be relying on a single processor -- you should be relying on a processor farm that supports hot-swappable processors, so you can lose one or two or fifty and only lose a fraction of performance for as long as it takes to replace those processors.
On a high availability machine, there should never be any reason to reboot until you must upgrade the kernel, and I'm sure there are ways to do that without requiring a hard reboot. IBM has had farms like this for years.
--brian
Cartoon? Just what we need...
on
The New Zelda
·
· Score: 1
Yuck. Those screen shots don't look too good. I miss the original legend of Zelda -- the graphics were good, considering that all of the sprites were the same size.
If they really wanted to have a "cartoon" look, they should have gone for an Anime motif, rather than a South Park paper-cut-out motif. I dunno... maybe it looks better in motion, but I'm always skeptical: The more toys the developers get, the more the story line and playability seems to suffer.
For your information, RM3 million is about $780,000, cheap by any standards. The revenue stream is to be had by charging corporate customers for service on a transaction basis.
This is a model I've been long awaiting... charge the businesses, provide it to individual consumers for free.
This is also the only model that has any prayer of competing with traditional telco -- it's too expensive to lay competing cable or to try to have your government convince your telcos to "share" (Bell cough cough).
They're switching from Applixware to StarOffice for their Unix systems. It's not a big deal (for the rest of us). If they were dumping Microsoft Office, that would be a big deal. This is just another business decision that shuffles marketshare within our own community.
Slashdot Mirror
Enjoy...
-brian
First, thank you very much to Slashdot for being one of the few news sources last year that had the bandwidth to be useful during a crisis.
Second, I wrote a rant earlier today that I think everyone should think about very carefully (though the slashdot crowd is less guilty than most):
Third. Speaking of missing the point. Rather than trying to understand WHY people find it necessary to blow up our shit, the American people and their politicians are having a deplorable reaction. I won't repeat the lists of freedoms taken away, or the liberty/safety quotes. You all know the story by now.
Fourth, if you want to make a difference, let your representatives in government know that your freedom is more important to you than anything else. Remember, us mp3 "pirates" could be considered terrorists before too long. I'm serious.
Fifth, I'm not asking you to give up your SUV. But support alternatives to petroleum. Mention that to your representative. Petroleum products send a lot of money to people I'm really not interested in -- if we want to buy stuff from them it doesn't bother me... but with that money goes Western culture and ideals. That's why they want to blow up our shit. If someone told me I couldn't drink or date, I might start blowing up their shit. That doesn't make it right, but it's better to think of things in terms of cause and effect rather than effect and reaction.
-brian
Enterprise Web Services
-brian
Once there, you can go to the local book store or even the library and pick up a high school text on physics. They're mostly awful, but if you're bright, you can probably extract the basic theory from them.
--brian
-brian
Seriously, I watch two shows... and they both happen to be on during the SAME TIME SLOT!
I'd pay $2 an episode to be able to watch any half hour or hour show, any time I want. Oh, I feel like seeing Star Trek. Oh, I haven't seen MacGuyver for a hundred years.
PPV is around $5 for a movie, but the selection is relatively limited -- I've never ordered Pay Per View because of that. When I can get any movie I want in Dolby 5.1, and have it start when it's convenient for me, then I'll pay $5 for a movie.
Good lord, I pay to have 900 channels of crap pumped in, because I don't have much of a choice. I'd pay to get ONLY what I want. And then let me subscribe to the sports channels and music channels.
--brian
Actually, I would imagine that Slashdot is one of the very few sites that doesn't suck, and uses what ever fonts your browser specifies. Of course, since I have fonts disabled, I only see Times New Roman and Courier New in my browser anyway.
<RANT>
Do any of you adults out there remember when Tim Berners Lee came up with this stuff, and how HTML was just supposed to be a recommendation on how to present the data, and not a formal definition of what it's supposed to look like? Hmmm? If you develop a site and you want it to look a specific way (then you're... nm), then use flash or pdf or postscript. But if you give me HTML, I'm going to render it the way I want to see it rendered.
</RANT>
-brian
I've noticed that as my colleages machines have been upgraded, their code has gotten slower and slower. Maybe your admin assistent needs a GHz machine to run your finance spread sheet, but I know a good developer doesn't need the $4000 machine to hack code. I also know that our new enterprise Solaris box isn't as fast as the old duel processor Linux box that we used to use.
Okay, now that I'm going to lose my job for whining about corporate decision making... everyone have a nice day.
-brian
Otherwise, you want to have another choice -- build your own damn machines and save a grand for each machine.
Okay, so you want Linux and enterprise support... I hear IBM does the Linux thing. Why don't you give them a call.
If Dell wants to cave to Microsoft, then consumers who really care will take their money to IBM or one of the independent vendors.
In the meantime, does the Department of Justice read the newspaper? What are they thinking??!!
-brian
-brian
I have been running Linux almost exclusively for over five years. Sure it's not quite as streamlined on the desktop as MS, but it'll get there when Linux users decide that's what they want. I don't even run X, so I could not care less.
In another 30 years, when people are still saying "Linux is Dead", people still won't get it. But it'll be there and it'll be thriving. And you can tell your kids about what it was like when you were a kid and there was an OS monopoly.
First, it's not a tiger, it's a marsupial with stripes (hence the Tiger moniker), related to the Tasmanian Devil.
Second, the article talks about using a Tasmanian Devil as a potential host animal, after stripping out the genes specific to the Tasmanian Devil from the egg cell.
It doesn't talk about gene pools or population sizes, however there are several of the animals completely preserved, and that's a LOT of genetic material to work with.
--brian
Either way... I'm going to see Clones. It'd have to be really bad for me not to go back two or three times.
How about the rest of you? Vocal though you are, I doubt you will stay away. It doesn't matter how bad the dialogue is... guys with lightsabers are just too cool.
A quick review of the past week indicates that CmdrTaco should read Slashdot more, or at least talk to Hemos once in a while.
Oh no! I'm afraid I'm going to have to miss it this time. I have to watch Ally McBeal, and I haven't figured out how to record one channel while watching another...
Half the porn you see out there are free samples distributed just to get you to go to the pay sites. There's more "pirated" porn around than "pirated" hollywood movies, and the porn industry is booming.
They actually get the Internet. The MPAA and RIAA should follow their lead. The porn industry may be reprehensible and icky, but they certainly know how to run a business and how to treat the consumer.
Warm wishes and best of luck to you Rob and Kathleen!
Sincerely, Brian
--brian
--brian
I like it... I can't wait for the Linguistics curriculum to go up.
--brian
Two comments:
Doesn't Soyo mean "gentle" in Japanese?
And, if you really need "7 nines" uptime, you shouldn't be relying on a single processor -- you should be relying on a processor farm that supports hot-swappable processors, so you can lose one or two or fifty and only lose a fraction of performance for as long as it takes to replace those processors.
On a high availability machine, there should never be any reason to reboot until you must upgrade the kernel, and I'm sure there are ways to do that without requiring a hard reboot. IBM has had farms like this for years.
--brian
If they really wanted to have a "cartoon" look, they should have gone for an Anime motif, rather than a South Park paper-cut-out motif. I dunno... maybe it looks better in motion, but I'm always skeptical: The more toys the developers get, the more the story line and playability seems to suffer.
--brian
This is a model I've been long awaiting... charge the businesses, provide it to individual consumers for free.
This is also the only model that has any prayer of competing with traditional telco -- it's too expensive to lay competing cable or to try to have your government convince your telcos to "share" (Bell cough cough).
I want this pizza place in North America.
--brian
This has to be the BEST image search engine I've ever seen! A search for CmdrTaco returns SIXTEEN images!
--brian