How has the advances and use of computer graphics impacted and change the nature of your business with the film producers ? I would guess that the type of effects or work you are asked to perform has changed somewhat because of advancement of computer graphics technology.
true true... it is a matter of semantics after all.
Strictly applied to today's definition of what is a bug, the original "bug" was not a bug at all ! 8-)
I might not have remembered the power outage of Aug 14 if were not for the fact that it was my 1st day on a new contract as a sys admin. I had been on the job barely six hours when the lights went out literally. While the servers did stay up because they were on generators we had our own local "bug" in the fact that someone had not considered wiring in the environmentals into the generators. We went from 68 degrees F in the raised floor area to 102 in a little over an hour.
Yea they missed a big one. Aug 14 2003 the worst power outage in years was due to a software bug in the controller relays produced by GE. The bug in the GE Energy's XA/21 did not alarm during the systems failure in Ohio. 50 million people lost power in 8 states. I would put this one pretty much at the top of the list.
But I would argue the bug that deserves to be at the top of the list would be the Y2k "bug". This bug was allowed to persist in industry for years.
I was hoping that perhaps IBM would have included release of the OS/2 code in their settlement terms.I think by this time M$oft would probably have agreed to the request just to get this litigation over with.
Seems like the argument would suggest there is no reason not to release the code as an opensource project.
I had heard that the reason why OS/2 has not been GPL'd is there is proprietary code that M$oft wrote and still holds the rights to those lines of code in OS/2. (Another SCO Novell type squabble)
I think it would be very interesting to see many of the GPL'd apps out there ported to OS/2. OpenOffice, GIMP, Apache.
While it has been 15+ yrs I remember OS/2 as having a very nice desktop and would be another excellent Windbloze alternative.
To follow the rise and fall of M$oft simply watch and follow the rise and fall of the PC itself.
As computer technology leaves the ubiquitous desktop PC behind for computerized devices that provide you the same functionality of a PC or laptop, but in a different form factor, so shall M$oft's footprint fade too. Virtually every venture outside the PC arena has been a miserable failure for the Beast.
I don't know why anyone is surprised or complaining. Doesn't the public pay for virus protection ? All the same arguments apply. Except M$oft doesn't own a virus protection company (or do they ?)
Wind turbines are probably best suited for applications where transmitting power over great distances is not require.
I guess where this is leading is that if homes and businesses were retrofitted to store locally produced DC power and our electronic devices used this local source of DC then turbines would be a better solution. We now have high output high LEDs which can be used for illumination and use far less juice than traditional light bulbs. Most but not all of the electronics we use are DC powered so with local DC power electronics don't need their power conversion units (read power supplies).
If a home had local storage devices (read batteries) in place then other alternate methods (solar ?) of generating local juice could be deployed and utilized as the technology matures.
I believe it would be prudent to realize that the delivery method(s) for electrical power and basic design of the electronic devices we use were designed almost 100 years ago when transportation by horse was still a viable form of transporation. Converting AC to DC is very inefficient and a terrible waste of what has become a precious resource.
I think a hybrid home with DC capabilities for most services and AC for the other services such as AC/heating along with driving cars that get 30+ miles/gallon would allow us as a country in a matter of a few years to become indedpendent of foreign oil and make the world as a whole a much happier place.
Wood is an interesting choice, being from Texas we don't worry as much about heating in the winter.
However a couple of years ago I spent some time in a fairly rural area of North Carolina where wood burning stoves were the primary form of winter heating. High efficiency stoves were a regular topic of conversation between the locals.
I felt that we as a country should have responded to 9/11 in a more intelligent way in the beginning if only symbolically by individual acts of energy conservation. As you may remember in the first Gulf War many people tied yellow ribbons around trees as a symbolic gesture of support. I thought it would be great if Joe Urban homeowner had setup a solar powered clothes dryer (read clothesline) in his backyard. Perhaps paint the poles at each end red white and blue. Hang your laundry out to dry and save a few watts.
Or perhaps small wind turbines mounted in our backyards to generate small amounts of juice to be pushed onto the grid. The logistical problem there is ramping up the voltage efficiently so it is compatitble with the grid.
While in the 1st few years this (backyard wind turbines) would be probably mostly a symbolic gesture, and the amount of power generated would be a fraction of a %. I feel that in a matter of a few years there would be a tinkerer in his/her garage that would come up with a better method of generating power locally or perhaps storing it for local use.
Hence we are reducing our need for foreign oil, thereby reducing our political interest in a parts of the world where our politics are not welcomed.
The net effect is we pull ourselves out of this quagmire with our ingenuity not military might.
I didn't see the show, however I have thought for a while that the problem lies in part with the power delivery system itself. While AC is great for tramitting power over great distances, there is still the process of converting it back to DC power which is used in most of our electronic devices in the house. This conversion process itself is very inefficient.
If our systems were geared towards generating and storing DC in smaller amounts at the point of use then using that to drive electronic devices without AC power supplies which essentially convert AC back to DC. We would need less juice to drive more efficient devices. Use of high output energy efficient LEDs instead of tungsten filament light bulbs which are engineered to burn out on a regular basis (water % in the inert gas of the bulb causes tungsten to migrate from the filament to the interior glass wall of the bulb)
Some devices would need to be re evaluated, things that burn large amounts of juice such as hot water heaters, and heating/AC plants that are driven solely by electricity might have to be revamped.
There is also our country's national security to be considered also. The national energy grid is a likely terrorist target. The repercussions of taking down a portion of the national grid is huge and the effects immediate. Anyone who has experienced a power outage of several days due to hurricanes or ice storms will realize how quickly we as a culture return to a primitive species without the benefit of electrical power. If at least some of our power was not tied to the national grid we are not as vunerable. Lets remember decentralizing the lines of communication between bunkers in the event of a national castastrophe was the reason why ARPA funded the Internet project in the beginning and the same principle could be tied to the electrical grid.
I am not suggesting that we do without a national grid, simply that our homes and businesses need a hybrid system very similar in principal to the new hybrid cars we see on the road.
Then again I could be all messed up and just wrong ! 8-)
I think the brokerage houses are really upset about Google cutting them out of the big commissions they usually charge for bringing an IPO to market. They fear other companies may start doing the same thing. They face the potential lost of billions in revenue over the next few years.
It is in their best interests to shovel as much dirt on this IPO as possible. Hence all the bad press recently about employee stock options, Playboy interviews and this grousing about a fairly small first day advance. This article is just a product of the sour grapes from Wall Street.
These brokers have always used initial public offerings prices as a form of corporate bribery to their best clients. No small investor got a chance to purchase Netscape at its original offer (~25.00 ??). If memory serves me right you were lucky to touch it for 100.00.
Google has attempted to leveled the playing field for everyone wanting to take advantage of their good fortune. I do not believe that for one moment there was any malice or greed associated with Google's executives and their actions in the IPO.
I am not saying the Dutch auction method is perfect or it can't be exploited, but it is certainly far more fair than the treatment Joe Average investor gets with IPOs from any brokerage house.
Who would want a PVR from a company that can't even manage their own network http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/01/0 8/techweb.microsoft.outage1/index.html
Is it just me or is this guy babbling a lot of double talk?
In the first part of the article he states "operating systems are lapsing into senile irrelevance"
then in the last half of the article he defends their choice of one OS over another !!
Granted this may be the next jump in information organization. and perhaps they have a "univeral framework", but please the biggest/best reason a 3rd party developer has for choosing Windoze over Linux or FreeBSD is $$$ ! Who is he trying to fool ?
The rest of his dribble about:
"We built our system on Microsoft Windows because Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced"
and even more pathetic
"But Windows is the marketplace victor and has now won a decisive legal imprimatur. There is no technical reason for us to move to Linux; why should we switch".
Perhaps Bill can get him for a Windows spot that mimics the Apple commercials (M$oft has always been good at mimicing the innovation of others).
All in all I do hope their app works great, Redmond will copy the technology claim it as their own and decimate their competition ! Meanwhile the open source legions preview it in KDE 5.0 !
When is corporate America going to wise up and realize that M$oft Outhouse is simply a threat to revenue and must be abandoned for something less prone to attacks ?
It is analogous to a one sided snowball fight. Virus writers vs. corporate IT. The virus writers keep hurling snowballs in the direction of corporate IT. Many of them miss others score a direct hit.
You would think sooner or later corporate decision makers would wise up and learn to DUCK !. Implement a policy that M$oft Outhouse is NOT to be used. Until such actions are taken by corporate IT Redmond will never get the hint.
Slashdot Mirror
Love your show !
How has the advances and use of computer graphics impacted and change the nature of your business with the film producers ? I would guess that the type of effects or work you are asked to perform has changed somewhat because of advancement of computer graphics technology.
true true ... it is a matter of semantics after all.
Strictly applied to today's definition of what is a bug, the original "bug" was not a bug at all ! 8-)
I might not have remembered the power outage of Aug 14 if were not for the fact that it was my 1st day on a new contract as a sys admin. I had been on the job barely six hours when the lights went out literally. While the servers did stay up because they were on generators we had our own local "bug" in the fact that someone had not considered wiring in the environmentals into the generators. We went from 68 degrees F in the raised floor area to 102 in a little over an hour.
Yea they missed a big one. Aug 14 2003 the worst power outage in years was due to a software bug in the controller relays produced by GE. The bug in the GE Energy's XA/21 did not alarm during the systems failure in Ohio. 50 million people lost power in 8 states. I would put this one pretty much at the top of the list.
But I would argue the bug that deserves to be at the top of the list would be the Y2k "bug". This bug was allowed to persist in industry for years.
True, true,
I was hoping that perhaps IBM would have included release of the OS/2 code in their settlement terms.I think by this time M$oft would probably have agreed to the request just to get this litigation over with.
Guess we couldn't get that lucky.
Seems like the argument would suggest there is no reason not to release the code as an opensource project.
I had heard that the reason why OS/2 has not been GPL'd is there is proprietary code that M$oft wrote and still holds the rights to those lines of code in OS/2. (Another SCO Novell type squabble)
I think it would be very interesting to see many of the GPL'd apps out there ported to OS/2. OpenOffice, GIMP, Apache.
While it has been 15+ yrs I remember OS/2 as having a very nice desktop and would be another excellent Windbloze alternative.
Does the resolution of the OS/2 dispute mean that IBM is free to release OS/2 under a GPL license without fear of M$oft legal action ?
I would guess you must of been bottle fed 8-) !
Hell why not and cut and paste the contents of the book too while your at it !!
To follow the rise and fall of M$oft simply watch and follow the rise and fall of the PC itself.
.... 8-)
As computer technology leaves the ubiquitous desktop PC behind for computerized devices that provide you the same functionality of a PC or laptop, but in a different form factor, so shall M$oft's footprint fade too. Virtually every venture outside the PC arena has been a miserable failure for the Beast.
But then again
The "premium" I refuse to pay is the Micro$oft tax that is imposed on almost every retail computer sold in the USA today (except apple).
I was comtemplating buying a Linspire laptop from Wal-Mart after the 1st of the year, however they are not listed on their website anymore.
Mac is great, but I hate paying top dollar for an asset that will depreciate almost 50% in two years.
I guess I need to change my account name to "cheapass" 8-)
-mike
I don't know why anyone is surprised or complaining. Doesn't the public pay for virus protection ? All the same arguments apply. Except M$oft doesn't own a virus protection company (or do they ?)
gukin has a very good point
Wind turbines are probably best suited for applications where transmitting power over great distances is not require.
I guess where this is leading is that if homes and businesses were retrofitted to store locally produced DC power and our electronic devices used this local source of DC then turbines would be a better solution. We now have high output high LEDs which can be used for illumination and use far less juice than traditional light bulbs. Most but not all of the electronics we use are DC powered so with local DC power electronics don't need their power conversion units (read power supplies).
If a home had local storage devices (read batteries) in place then other alternate methods (solar ?) of generating local juice could be deployed and utilized as the technology matures.
I believe it would be prudent to realize that the delivery method(s) for electrical power and basic design of the electronic devices we use were designed almost 100 years ago when transportation by horse was still a viable form of transporation. Converting AC to DC is very inefficient and a terrible waste of what has become a precious resource.
I think a hybrid home with DC capabilities for most services and AC for the other services such as AC/heating along with driving cars that get 30+ miles/gallon would allow us as a country in a matter of a few years to become indedpendent of foreign oil and make the world as a whole a much happier place.
And then again if bullfrogs had wings !! 8-)
Wood is an interesting choice, being from Texas we don't worry as much about heating in the winter.
However a couple of years ago I spent some time in a fairly rural area of North Carolina where wood burning stoves were the primary form of winter heating. High efficiency stoves were a regular topic of conversation between the locals.
I felt that we as a country should have responded to 9/11 in a more intelligent way in the beginning if only symbolically by individual acts of energy conservation. As you may remember in the first Gulf War many people tied yellow ribbons around trees as a symbolic gesture of support. I thought it would be great if Joe Urban homeowner had setup a solar powered clothes dryer (read clothesline) in his backyard. Perhaps paint the poles at each end red white and blue. Hang your laundry out to dry and save a few watts.
Or perhaps small wind turbines mounted in our backyards to generate small amounts of juice to be pushed onto the grid. The logistical problem there is ramping up the voltage efficiently so it is compatitble with the grid.
While in the 1st few years this (backyard wind turbines) would be probably mostly a symbolic gesture, and the amount of power generated would be a fraction of a %. I feel that in a matter of a few years there would be a tinkerer in his/her garage that would come up with a better method of generating power locally or perhaps storing it for local use.
Hence we are reducing our need for foreign oil, thereby reducing our political interest in a parts of the world where our politics are not welcomed.
The net effect is we pull ourselves out of this quagmire with our ingenuity not military might.
And then again if bullfrogs had wings !!
I didn't see the show, however I have thought for a while that the problem lies in part with the power delivery system itself. While AC is great for tramitting power over great distances, there is still the process of converting it back to DC power which is used in most of our electronic devices in the house. This conversion process itself is very inefficient.
If our systems were geared towards generating and storing DC in smaller amounts at the point of use then using that to drive electronic devices without AC power supplies which essentially convert AC back to DC. We would need less juice to drive more efficient devices. Use of high output energy efficient LEDs instead of tungsten filament light bulbs which are engineered to burn out on a regular basis (water % in the inert gas of the bulb causes tungsten to migrate from the filament to the interior glass wall of the bulb)
Some devices would need to be re evaluated, things that burn large amounts of juice such as hot water heaters, and heating/AC plants that are driven solely by electricity might have to be revamped.
There is also our country's national security to be considered also. The national energy grid is a likely terrorist target. The repercussions of taking down a portion of the national grid is huge and the effects immediate. Anyone who has experienced a power outage of several days due to hurricanes or ice storms will realize how quickly we as a culture return to a primitive species without the benefit of electrical power. If at least some of our power was not tied to the national grid we are not as vunerable. Lets remember decentralizing the lines of communication between bunkers in the event of a national castastrophe was the reason why ARPA funded the Internet project in the beginning and the same principle could be tied to the electrical grid.
I am not suggesting that we do without a national grid, simply that our homes and businesses need a hybrid system very similar in principal to the new hybrid cars we see on the road.
Then again I could be all messed up and just wrong ! 8-)
I think the brokerage houses are really upset about Google cutting them out of the big commissions they usually charge for bringing an IPO to market. They fear other companies may start doing the same thing. They face the potential lost of billions in revenue over the next few years.
It is in their best interests to shovel as much dirt on this IPO as possible. Hence all the bad press recently about employee stock options, Playboy interviews and this grousing about a fairly small first day advance. This article is just a product of the sour grapes from Wall Street.
These brokers have always used initial public offerings prices as a form of corporate bribery to their best clients. No small investor got a chance to purchase Netscape at its original offer (~25.00 ??). If memory serves me right you were lucky to touch it for 100.00.
Google has attempted to leveled the playing field for everyone wanting to take advantage of their good fortune. I do not believe that for one moment there was any malice or greed associated with Google's executives and their actions in the IPO.
I am not saying the Dutch auction method is perfect or it can't be exploited, but it is certainly far more fair than the treatment Joe Average investor gets with IPOs from any brokerage house.
Who would want a PVR from a company that can't even manage their own network0 8/techweb .microsoft.outage1/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/01/
Must be Winbloze IIS
http://www.scopeware.com/
No web site is configured at this address.
Is it just me or is this guy babbling a lot of double talk?
In the first part of the article he states "operating systems are lapsing into senile irrelevance"
then in the last half of the article he defends their choice of one OS over another !!
Granted this may be the next jump in information organization. and perhaps they have a "univeral framework", but please the biggest/best reason a 3rd party developer has for choosing Windoze over Linux or FreeBSD is $$$ ! Who is he trying to fool ?
The rest of his dribble about:
"We built our system on Microsoft Windows because Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced"
and even more pathetic
"But Windows is the marketplace victor and has now won a decisive legal imprimatur. There is no technical reason for us to move to Linux; why should we switch".
Perhaps Bill can get him for a Windows spot that mimics the Apple commercials (M$oft has always been good at mimicing the innovation of others).
All in all I do hope their app works great, Redmond will copy the technology claim it as their own and decimate their competition !
Meanwhile the open source legions preview it in KDE 5.0 !
When is corporate America going to wise up and realize that M$oft Outhouse is simply a threat to revenue and must be abandoned for something less prone to attacks ?
It is analogous to a one sided snowball fight. Virus writers vs. corporate IT. The virus writers keep hurling snowballs in the direction of corporate IT. Many of them miss others score a direct hit.
You would think sooner or later corporate decision makers would wise up and learn to DUCK !. Implement a policy that M$oft Outhouse is NOT to be used. Until such actions are taken by corporate IT Redmond will never get the hint.